Who Gets to Frame the Story?

**How much of the story you believe comes from what happened — and how much comes from how it was framed?**

Jeremy Sauter has spent decades marketing movies and figuring out one deceptively difficult problem: how do you take a two-hour story and communicate enough of it in 30 seconds to make someone care?

In this episode of *100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project*, Jeremy and Paige Williams explore what movie marketing can teach us about the stories we encounter — and the stories we construct ourselves.

They talk about:

• The difference between the story a filmmaker intends and the story an audience experiences

• How marketing creates a third version of the story

• Why audience reactions often matter more than expert opinions

• The responsibility that comes with deciding what gets amplified, simplified, or left out

• Why Jeremy believes you should never sell a movie for what it isn’t

• AI, algorithms, human curation, and the value of surprise

• The battle for our attention

• Why humans are natural storytellers but may be less skilled at recognizing the stories shaping their own lives

• Jeremy’s definition of Narrative Intelligence as the ability to turn scattered information and experience into a coherent understanding of the world

Jeremy describes storytelling as a human “superpower”: our ability to take fragments of experience and create something coherent enough to guide us.

But that ability comes with a question: when does meaning-making help us understand reality — and when does a partial interpretation start feeling like the whole truth?

**100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project**

Hosted by Paige Williams

How malleable are the stories we live by — and what does it take to change one?

More on Jeremy: https://www.jeremysauter.com/#explore

https://www.paigewilliams.co/