Michelle: A single, medium-sized movie theater popcorn. Sounds harmless, right? A classic movie snack. Mark: Absolutely. It’s practically a health food. It’s mostly air. Michelle: (Laughs) Well, what if I told you it contained more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings… combined? Mark: Come on, that can't be real. That’s my entire weekend diet in one cardboard bucket. You’re making that up. Michelle: I am not. And the story of how that single, shocking fact changed an entire industry is our starting point today. It’s the perfect entry into the book we’re discussing: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. Mark: Ah, a classic. I feel like this book is on every marketer’s and manager’s shelf. Michelle: It is, and for good reason. What’s fascinating is that it was written by two brothers. Chip is a Stanford professor who spent a decade researching why bad ideas and urban legends spread, while his brother Dan was a practitioner who wanted to know how to make good, important ideas spread. That blend of academic rigor and real-world practicality is what made it a massive bestseller. Mark: So one brother studied the disease, the other tried to find the cure. Michelle: Exactly. And the book starts by asking that central question: why is a story like that popcorn fact so incredibly memorable, while other, equally important ideas, just vanish into thin air?

Mark: Okay, what do you mean, vanish? Give me an example of an idea that vanishes. Michelle: I’ll give you a perfect one, straight from the book. This is a real quote from a nonprofit’s strategy paper. Brace yourself. "Comprehensive community building naturally lends itself to a return-on-investment rationale that can be modeled, drawing on existing practice." Mark: (Groans) My soul just left my body. I think I fell asleep mid-sentence. It’s like corporate word soup. Michelle: Precisely. It’s technically English, but it communicates nothing. It has zero stickiness. Now, compare that to another idea. An idea with no budget, no marketing team, no celebrity endorsements. An idea that is, for all intents and purposes, a complete lie. Mark: I’m intrigued. Michelle: It’s the urban legend of the Kidney Heist. You’ve probably heard a version of it. A business traveler, let’s call him Dave, is in a new city for a conference. He has a few hours to kill before his flight, so he goes to a hotel bar. Mark: A classic setup for a bad decision. Michelle: An attractive woman approaches him, they chat, and she offers to buy him a drink. He accepts. He takes one sip, and the next thing he knows, he’s waking up, groggy and disoriented… in a bathtub full of ice. Mark: Whoa. Okay, that is a very specific and terrifying detail. The ice. Michelle: He’s confused, his lower back hurts, and he sees a note taped to the wall. It’s written in lipstick. It says, "DON'T MOVE. CALL 911." He finds his cell phone and shakily dials. The 911 operator sounds grim. She says, "Sir, I want you to reach behind you, slowly and carefully. Is there a tube coming out of your lower back?" He reaches back, and his heart stops. Yes, there is. Mark: Oh, no. I know where this is going. Michelle: The operator says, "Sir, don't panic, but you've been targeted by an organ-harvesting ring. They've taken one of your kidneys. Paramedics are on their way. Lie still until they arrive." Mark: That is horrifying. And I will now never accept a drink from a stranger again. But it’s a total lie, right? This never actually happened. Michelle: Correct. It’s a classic urban legend. But here’s the million-dollar question the Heath brothers pose: Why does that story, a complete fabrication, stick in our minds forever, while the nonprofit’s "return-on-investment rationale" is forgotten before you even finish reading it? The lie spreads like wildfire, while the truth dies in a committee meeting. Mark: That’s a fantastic question. The lie has a story, it has characters, it has… the bathtub of ice. The nonprofit has jargon. It feels like one is designed for the human brain and the other is designed for a grant application robot. Michelle: You’ve just nailed the core of the book. It’s not about truth versus falsehood. It’s about the design of the message. The Kidney Heist story is perfectly designed to be sticky. The nonprofit’s message is perfectly designed to be forgotten.

Mark: So how do you design for stickiness? Is there a formula? Michelle: There is. And that’s the genius of this book. The Heath brothers analyzed hundreds of sticky ideas—from urban legends to successful ad campaigns to proverbs—and they reverse-engineered the formula. They decoded the structure into a brilliant framework, a checklist. It’s an acronym: S-U-C-C-E-S-s. Mark: SUCCESs. With two C's and two S's. Catchy. Michelle: Let’s just break down the first few, because they are so powerful. The 'S' stands for Simple. This doesn’t mean dumbed-down. It means finding the absolute core of your idea. If you say three things, you say nothing. The Kidney Heist is simple: organ thieves. The nonprofit quote… what was its core? Who knows? Mark: It had a core? I thought it was just a collection of syllables. Michelle: (Laughs) Exactly. The 'U' is for Unexpected. Our brains are pattern-matching machines. The only way to get attention is to break a pattern. Waking up in a bathtub of ice is… unexpected. It shatters your schema of what happens after having a drink at a bar. Mark: Understatement of the year. Michelle: And the first 'C' is for Concrete. This is maybe the most important one. Abstraction is the enemy of stickiness. We’re wired to remember concrete things. A bathtub full of ice. A tube in your back. A note in lipstick. These are sensory details. Compare that to "comprehensive community building." You can’t picture that. It’s abstract fog. Mark: Okay, Simple, Unexpected, Concrete. I can see how the Kidney Heist nails all three. But how does this apply to real, truthful ideas? How do you make a fact sticky? Michelle: Perfect question. Let’s go back to our popcorn. In the early 90s, a public health group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, or CSPI, discovered that movie theater popcorn was shockingly unhealthy because it was popped in coconut oil. A medium bag had 37 grams of saturated fat. Mark: 37 grams. That means absolutely nothing to me. It’s just a number. It’s not concrete. Michelle: Exactly. It’s an un-sticky fact. The researcher, Art Silverman, knew that just releasing the number would have zero impact. So he and his team used the SUCCESs principles, even before the book was written. They had to make it Simple, Unexpected, and Concrete. Mark: So how did they do it? Michelle: They didn't lead with the number. They didn't talk about grams or percentages. They held a press conference and this was their core message, their concrete story: "A medium-sized 'butter' popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings—combined!" Mark: Wow. Now that I can picture. A greasy, disgusting, glorious picture. That’s the hook you opened with. Michelle: It is. It’s Simple: "This one snack = a whole day of junk food." It’s Unexpected: "My 'harmless' popcorn is worse than a Big Mac?!" And it’s incredibly Concrete: you can visualize every single one of those food items on a plate. The story was a sensation. It was on every major news network. People were horrified. Popcorn sales plummeted. And within months, nearly every major theater chain in the U.S. had stopped using coconut oil. Mark: That’s incredible. They didn't just present data. They painted a picture. A story. They took an abstract number and made it something you could feel in your gut. It wasn't about the 37 grams; it was about the story of the 37 grams. Michelle: You got it. They translated a fact into an idea that sticks.

Mark: This all seems so obvious in retrospect. Why don’t we all do this? Why do we default to the boring, abstract, jargon-filled way of communicating? Michelle: Ah, now we get to the single greatest villain in this book. The authors argue that the main reason we fail to create sticky ideas is a cognitive bias they call The Curse of Knowledge. Mark: The Curse of Knowledge. Sounds dramatic. Michelle: It is. And it’s a profound insight. The curse is this: once we know something, we find it almost impossible to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us. We can’t recreate the state of mind of our audience, who doesn't have the same information. Mark: Wait, so it’s like when I try to explain a new board game to my friends? In my head, all the rules are connected and make perfect sense. But when I explain it, I can see their eyes glazing over. They look at me like I have three heads. Michelle: That is the Curse of Knowledge in action! You can’t un-know the rules, so you can’t explain them from the perspective of a true beginner. The book has the most brilliant experiment to illustrate this. It was done by a Stanford PhD student in 1990. It’s called the "Tappers and Listeners" experiment. Mark: Tappers and Listeners. Okay, I’m in. Michelle: It’s simple. You divide people into two groups. The "tappers" are given a list of 25 very well-known songs, like "Happy Birthday" or the national anthem. Their job is to pick a song and tap out the rhythm on a table. The "listener's" job is to guess the song. Mark: Okay, seems straightforward. Michelle: Before they start, the tappers are asked to predict what percentage of the time the listeners will guess correctly. What would you guess? Mark: Hmm. The songs are super famous. I’d say… maybe 50 percent? It’s just a rhythm, so it’s hard, but not impossible. Michelle: That’s exactly what the tappers predicted. 50 percent. Now, here’s the result. Out of 120 songs tapped out… how many do you think the listeners guessed correctly? Mark: If you’re asking me like this, it’s going to be a shockingly low number. I’ll say… 20? Michelle: Three. Mark: Three? Out of 120? That’s… 2.5 percent. Michelle: Yes. The tappers predicted 50%, but the reality was 2.5%. And the tappers were flabbergasted. They couldn't believe how dense the listeners were. They’d be tapping "Happy Birthday"—(taps rhythm on table)—and the listener would be guessing the theme from Star Wars. The tappers would get frustrated, thinking, "How can you not hear that?!" Mark: Oh my god, that’s me! That’s me trying to explain a movie plot or a new software at work! I can hear the whole symphony in my head—the melody, the instruments, the lyrics—and all they hear is… random, context-free tapping. It’s so frustrating! Michelle: That is the Curse of Knowledge. The tapper can’t un-hear the melody in their head. The CEO can’t un-know their company’s five-year strategic plan. The scientist can’t un-know the molecular structure of a protein. And so they communicate by just "tapping"—by giving abstract summaries and data points—and they’re shocked when the audience hears nothing but noise.

Mark: Wow. That one experiment just explained about 90% of the bad presentations I’ve ever sat through. The speaker is hearing a symphony, and the audience is just hearing taps. Michelle: And that’s how it all comes together. We fail to communicate effectively not because our ideas are bad, or because we’re bad speakers. We fail because we are cursed by our own knowledge. The SUCCESs framework—Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories—isn't just a clever checklist for marketers. It's the antidote to that curse. Mark: It’s a translation tool. Michelle: It’s the ultimate translation tool! It forces you to take the complex symphony playing in your head and translate it into a simple, concrete, unexpected melody that someone else’s brain can actually process and remember. It forces you to think not about what you want to say, but what your audience needs to hear. Mark: So the big takeaway for everyone listening is this: the next time you have an important idea to share—at work, at home, anywhere—stop and recognize that you are cursed. You know too much. Michelle: Acknowledge the curse! Mark: Acknowledge the curse. And then, don't just present your data or your plan. Find the core message. Make it unexpected. And above all, make it concrete. Tell a story. Think less like an expert tapper, and more like the person who came up with the Kidney Heist. Michelle: We’d love to hear your own examples of sticky—or hilariously un-sticky—ideas. What's a message that's stuck with you for years, for better or for worse? Find us on our social channels and share your story. We read every one. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.