Steve didn’t just read a script for the presentation. He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it. Every time he’d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he’d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished.

He talked for a while about regular mobile phones and smartphones and the problems of each before he dove into the features of the new iPhone. He used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It’s a way to get into people’s heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again. If you can infect them with the virus of doubt—“maybe my experience isn’t as good as I thought, maybe it could be better”—then you prime them for your solution. You get them angry about how it works now so they can get excited about a new way of doing things.

when I say “story,” I don’t just mean words. Your product’s story is its design, its features, images and videos, quotes from customers, tips from reviewers, conversations with support agents. It’s the sum of what people see and feel about this thing that you’ve created.

When you get wrapped up in the “what,” you get ahead of people. You think everyone can see what you see. But they don’t. They haven’t been working on it for weeks, months, years. So you need to pause and clearly articulate the “why” before you can convince anyone to care about the “what.”

That’s the case no matter what you make—even if you sell B2B payments software. Even if you build deep-tech solutions for customers who don’t exist yet. Even if you sell lubricants to a factory that’s been buying the same thing for twenty years.

If your competitors are telling better stories than you, if they’re playing the game and you’re not, then it doesn’t matter if their product is worse. They will get the attention. To any customers, investors, partners, or talent doing a cursory search, they will appear to be the leaders in the category. The more people talk about them, the greater their mind share, and the more people will talk about them.

A good story is an act of empathy. It recognizes the needs of its audience. And it blends facts and feelings so the customer gets enough of both. First you need enough instincts and concrete information that your argument doesn’t feel too floaty and insubstantial. It doesn’t have to be definitive data, but there has to be enough to feel meaty, to convince people that you’re anchored in real facts. But you can overdo it—if your story is only informational, then it’s entirely possible that people will agree with you but decide it’s not compelling enough to act on just yet. Maybe next month. Maybe next year.

So you have to appeal to their emotions—connect with something they care about. Their worries, their fears. Or show them a compelling vision of the future: give a human example. Walk through how a real person will experience this product—their day, their family, their work, the change they’ll experience. Just don’t lean so far into the emotional connection that what you’re arguing for feels novel, but not necessary.

And always remember that your customers’ brains don’t always work like yours. Sometimes your rational argument will make an emotional connection. Sometimes your emotional story will give people the rational ammunition to buy your product. Certain Nest customers looked at the beautiful thermostat that we lovingly crafted to appeal to their heart and soul and said, “Sure, okay. It’s pretty” and then had a thrilled, emotional reaction to the potential of saving twenty-three dollars on their energy bill.

everyone will read your story differently. That’s why analogies can be such a useful tool in storytelling. They create a shorthand for complicated concepts—a bridge directly to a common experience.

That’s another thing I learned from Steve Jobs. He’d always say that analogies give customers superpowers. A great analogy allows a customer to instantly grasp a difficult feature and then describe that feature to others. That’s why “1,000 songs in your pocket” was so powerful. Everyone had CDs and tapes in bulky players that only let you listen to 10-15 songs, one album at a time. So “1,000 songs in your pocket” was an incredible contrast—it let people visualize this intangible thing—all the music they loved all together in one place, easy to find, easy to hold—and gave them a way to tell their friends and family why this new iPod thing was so cool.

Because to truly understand many of the features of our products, you’d need a deep well of knowledge about HVAC systems and power grids and the way smoke refracts through a laser to detect fire—knowledge almost nobody had. So we cheated. We didn’t try to explain everything. We just used an analogy. I remember there was one complex feature that was designed to lighten the load on power plants on the hottest or coldest days of the year when everyone cranked up the heat or AC at once. It usually came down to just a few hours in the afternoon, a few days a year—one or more coal power plants would be brought on line to avoid blackouts. So we designed a feature that predicted when these moments would come, then the Nest Thermostat would crank the AC or heat up extra before the crucial peak hours and turn it down when everyone else was turning it up. Anyone who signed up for the program got a credit on their energy bill. As more and more people joined the program, the result was a win-win—people stayed comfortable, they saved money, and the energy companies didn’t have to turn on their dirtiest plants. And that is all well and good, but it just took me 150 word to explain. So after countless hours of thinking about it and trying all the possible solutions, we settled on doing it in three: Rush Hour Rewards.

Everyone understands the concept of rush hour—the moment when way too many people get on the road together and traffic slows to a creep. Same thing happens with energy. We didn’t need to explain much more than that—rush hours are a problem, but when there’s an energy rush hour, you can get something out of it. You can get a reward. You can actually save money rather than getting stuck with everyone else.

Quick stories are easy to remember. And, more importantly, easy to repeat. Someone else telling your story will always reach more people and do more to convince them to buy your product than any amount of talking you do about yourself on your own platforms. You should always be striving to tell a story so good that it stops being yours—so your customer learns it, loves it, internalizes it, owns it. And tells it to everyone they know.

A good product story has three elements: It appeals to people’s rational and emotional sides. It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple. It reminds people of the problem that’s being solved—it focuses on the “why.”

Guadagnino reminded me that as we come of age, we decide for ourselves what informs us, and spoke to the first time he read Burroughs. “You enter into the language of Burroughs and you understand, at 17 years old, that there are ways we can express ourselves that are so wide, sophisticated, complicated, and that you never have to adapt to a logic that is preordained.”

Burroughs in fact traveled there in 1952; The Yage Letters chronicles his experiments in his letters to Ginsberg. He was obsessed with the idea that yage could enhance telepathy. In the hallucinatory new scenes, the connection between Lee and Allerton goes to places the earthbound book could never take it.

When the screenplay is his own, firmly in Guadagnino’s hands, it’s actually fabulous — and a relief after the earlier conflict between the director and his material. At the same time, it makes no sense. That’s the most Burroughsian nod in this film: the sheer randomness and trippy outrageousness of the end. It’s very Naked Lunch — both the book and David Cronenberg’s 1991 film inspired by Burroughs, which was clearly on Guadagnino’s mind.

It’s paying more of a tribute to an adaptation of a different Burroughs book, a film that feels genuinely Burroughsian but has less of a basis in the underlying text than his own. Something is off, the essential is missing, and this may be why I didn’t feel Burroughs’s spirit.

still, I wept through scenes of Guadagnino’s film — including a hallucinatory reference to Joan’s death in which Lee does the same failed William Tell routine with Allerton — but it wasn’t for Joan or Burroughs; it was for James’s lover Michael Emerton, who  killed himself with a   gun. I wept as this beautifully designed movie, with gorgeous men in well-cut suits, gave me time to think about the karmic connections that both blessed and cursed me. I wept for Billy Jr., whose mother Burroughs had killed. Then I wept for Burroughs, and I wept for Joan.

I wept for the portrayal of transactional sex that was the “romance” the director referred to. I wept as I questioned notions of intent and integrity in transactional relationships: mine with younger, troubled men who lived on the fringes of gay culture; Burroughs’s with James; and James’s with me. Those relationships, for better or worse, follow the karmic path laid down for me 40-plus years ago. That karma, at least for me, as I flew through the past making sense of it, was neutralized by the acceptance of its very existence, its painful impact on me and those affected by it, and, finally, by releasing it. That was Guadagnino’s gift to me.

Most poignantly, I wept for James, who lives alone, unable to walk, with a brain injury that was inflicted during a gay bashing and made worse by his falls at home and sustaining further concussions. But there has been some nice news for him, as a double LP of his work as a singer-songwriter is being released on Lotuspool Records. And he told me he liked Guadagnino’s Queer — though he quibbled with the casting and look of Allerton — and that’s even better news. Guadagnino liked hearing that

On the Zoom with Guadagnino and Anderson, I wanted to ask about legacy. Are there responsibilities we who make art or work in the arts have to our elders, to the radical spirits who pushed open the doors? I mentioned the affluent gay men, usually heteronormatively married, who “rent a womb” and maybe buy an egg to drop in it so their children have their genes — all of which seems to me to be the furthest thing from queer. In response, some signifiers were mentioned. Anderson speaks to the look of the film, citing George Platt Lynes’s influence; they both chimed in about Powell and Pressburger (the Archers), of The Red Shoes; I mentioned Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s adaptation of Jean Genet’s Querelle, which Guadagnino said, indeed, influenced him. The point has been missed, and the clock is ticking. I move on, disappointed.

Will this film ignite a radical spark in younger viewers — be they queer or not? That’s what Burroughs did for me and for many, many of his readers

The craftsmanship of the film is sterling on many levels. But it is not the book I know by the writer I knew so well. It is stylish in the modality of fashion — having a “look”; it is beautiful in its entirety as a complete visual construction. It is, essentially, a gay location film. It is romantic, something of a travelogue — you might want to go where it is set, eat at the restaurants, while wearing the clothing, certainly in the company of some of the flawless boys cast. But it is not the world that the book conjures for most readers, certainly not me. This is the work of the director — as any film should be.

Still, a bad match of director and material renders confusion at best, emptiness at worst; I worried that this film could potentially misconstrue the importance of Burroughs’s role as a visionary queer writer for future generations. I was incapable of explaining this to Guadagnino and Anderson, in our 20-minute Zoom, not to mention it might have stopped the interview. But I tried.

It wasn’t just the peculiar casting of a beefy daddy like Daniel Craig as the Burroughs character, William Lee, or pretty Drew Starkey as the aloof, younger love interest, Eugene Allerton, who spends the film looking great in fabulous knitwear by Jonathan Anderson, Guadagnino’s friend and the film’s costume designer, but nothing like the image of the character I had in my head.

As for a Hall of Shame thing? That would be the slow but steady encroachment of single-window applications in MacOS, especially via Catalyst and Electron. The reason I gravitated toward MacOS in the first place is the same reason I continue to use it: it fits my mental model of how an operating system ought to work.

“It was one of the wildest, most intense experiences of my life,” said the actress Riley Keough, while her co-star Rosie Huntington-Whiteley added, “You could have made another movie on the making of it.” As for Hardy? “It left me irrevocably changed,” he said.

COLIN GIBSON (production designer) I was in Namibia in 2003 when I got the call to stop spending money. I don’t know whether [the studio] decided to reroute their money back to the Iraq war, or if it was the email I got from Mel Gibson’s wife asking me how many Muslims there may or may not be in Namibia and, therefore, how interested she may or may not be in the whole family coming to visit.

MILLER I had the same feeling about Tom that I had when Mel Gibson first walked into the room: There was a kind of edgy charm, the charisma of animals. You don’t know what’s going on in their inner depths, and yet they’re enormously attractive.

KRAVITZ When they cast me, I was brought to a room that I wasn’t allowed to leave, and I sat there and read the script. It was one of the strangest scripts I’d ever seen, because it was like a really long comic book. JOHN SEALE (cinematographer) I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, so I gave up. I thought, “They’ve been in preproduction for 10 years, let’s just go make it.”

KRAVITZ We would do exercises like writing letters to our captor, really interesting stuff that created deep empathy. I’m glad we had that, because it was such a crazy experience — so long and chaotic — that it would be easy to forget what we were doing if we didn’t have this really great foundation that we could return to. KEOUGH I thought it was amazing that George cared so much. It could have just been like, “This is a big Hollywood movie, now put on your bathing suits and get outside.”

THERON The biggest thing that was driving that entire production was fear. I was incredibly scared, because I’d never done anything like it. I think the hardest thing between me and George is that he had the movie in his head and I was so desperate to understand it. SIXEL It was very difficult for the actors, because there’s no master shot, no blocked-out scenes. Their performances were made of these tiny little moments.

HUNTINGTON-WHITELEY There was a lot of tension, and a lot of different personalities and clashes at times. It was definitely interesting to sit in a truck for four months with Tom and Charlize, who have completely different approaches to their craft. HARDY Because of how much detail we were having to process and how little control one had in each new situation, and how fast the takes were — tiny snippets of story moments were needed to make the final cut work — we moved fast, and it was at times overwhelming. One had to trust that the bigger picture was being held together

THERON In retrospect, I didn’t have enough empathy to really, truly understand what he must have felt like to step into Mel Gibson’s shoes. That is frightening! And I think because of my own fear, we were putting up walls to protect ourselves instead of saying to each other, “This is scary for you, and it’s scary for me, too. Let’s be nice to each other.” In a weird way, we were functioning like our characters: Everything was about survival. HARDY I would agree. I think in hindsight, I was in over my head in many ways. The pressure on both of us was overwhelming at times. What she needed was a better, perhaps more experienced, partner in me. That’s something that can’t be faked. I’d like to think that now that I’m older and uglier, I could rise to that occasion.

KRAVITZ We were behind schedule, and we heard the studio was freaking out about how we were over budget. SEALE The president of Warner Bros. flew to Namibia and had a gold-plated fit. MILLER Jeff was in a bake-off with Kevin Tsujihara about who was going to head the studio, and he had to assert himself to show his superiors that he was in command and a strong executive. I knew what he was going through, but it wasn’t going to do anybody any good at all. [Robinov could not be reached for comment.] MITCHELL He said, “The camera will stop on Dec. 8, no matter what you’ve got, and that’s the end of it.” We hadn’t shot any of the scenes in the Citadel yet, where the opening and closing book ends of the film are set, and we had to go into postproduction without them. It was almost incomprehensible.

SIXEL When we actually finished the film and it was a success, that was the best year we ever had. We’d repeat the stories of making the film to each other over and over again: How did we get to the other side? We still kind of marvel at it.

MILLER Not for a moment did we think “Fury Road” would be anything like an Oscar movie. SIXEL Half the time, I thought I was going to get fired off the film, and then I win an Oscar! How about that? We were just disappointed that George didn’t win, but basically, they were all his Oscars in a way.

MILLER When the ideas that you start off with are then comprehended by an audience at large out there, that’s ultimately what redeems the process for you. The Swahili storytellers have this quote: “The story has been told. If it was bad, it was my fault, because I am the storyteller. But if it was good, it belongs to everybody.” And that feeling of the story belonging to everybody is really the reward