Matt Dicks tells the spoon-of-power story to an audience for the fourteenth time. He's not improvising. He's not panicking. He has a constant background-process running in his head while he speaks: Do I have stakes? Is there suspense? Am I preparing for a surprise? Is there a place where I can drop in some humor?1 Four questions on a rolling loop. Every sentence checked against the four. He calls them the Mount Rushmore of storytelling: stakes, suspense, surprise, and humor — those are sort of the four Mount Rushmore ways to maintain interest, regardless of what you're doing.2 Four faces carved into the mountain. Everything else is decoration.
The point of naming exactly four is that the four are the complete set — every other engagement technique is either a sub-variant of one of these or a structural property that supports them rather than an engagement engine in itself. The Mount Rushmore is a taxonomy claim. It says: if you cannot identify which of these four is currently doing the attention-earning work in any given sentence of your piece, that sentence is slack, and the audience will use it as a moment to leave.
The four are not stylistic preferences. They are the operating mechanisms by which the brain decides whether to continue paying attention to a speaker. Each one corresponds to a specific cognitive process — anticipation (stakes), withheld-information curiosity (suspense), pattern-violation reward (surprise), and incongruity-resolution pleasure (humor). Dicks did not invent these. What he did was give the working storyteller a deployable list small enough to monitor in real time. Four. Easy to remember. Hard to argue with.
The Mount Rushmore is a four-engine taxonomy of audience-attention mechanisms. Each engine is operationally distinct from the others and produces a different cognitive effect in the listener:
Stakes. The audience has to be wondering or worried about something. We have to know what the storyteller wants. And the audience either has to be rooting for the storyteller or not rooting for the storyteller.3 Stakes are the engine of emotional investment. They establish a direction the audience is hoping the story will go (or hoping it won't), which is what makes the audience care whether the next sentence delivers on or violates that hope. Without stakes, the audience may be intellectually following the events but is not emotionally invested in them. Stakes have to be established early — they got to come early in a story so an audience jumps right in and gets emotionally attached.4
Suspense. The strategic exclusion of information alongside the strategic inclusion of information. I'm going to tell you some of it but not all of it.5 Suspense is the engine of withheld-knowledge curiosity. The cinematographer metaphor is operational: start with the narrowest lens possible and expand it over time, so that what you have not yet told the audience is the thing they are leaning forward to hear. Suspense increases as more information is provided rather than less — because the listener is closer to resolution, and the closer they are, the more they want to close the gap. Crosswords work this way. Wordle works this way. So does storytelling.
Surprise. A pattern-violation that, in retrospect, feels inevitable. The best surprises in the world are the ones that surprise you, but then instantly feel inevitable. Like, of course, you know, if you watch The Sixth Sense and you discover at the end that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time, the moment you realize he's dead, it's one of the most astounding moments in cinema. But then you think to yourself, of course, he's dead.6 Surprise is the engine of pattern-completion reward. A good surprise rewards the audience twice: first with the violation (the unexpected reveal), then with the recognition (the realization that the violation was set up all along). Cheap surprise only delivers the first half. Engineered surprise — which is what Dicks teaches — delivers both.
Humor. Incongruity, timing, specificity. Dicks treats humor as one of the four load-bearing engines rather than as decoration. Humor changes brain chemistry in really meaningful ways. You know, causes you to feel closer to me, causes you to perceive me as intelligent even if I'm not intelligent, makes you feel better about the world, actually improves your cognition. All of those chemicals get released due to humor, which primes your brain and gets you ready to hear me better.7 Humor is also the engine that does opening reassurance work — if you make someone laugh in the first 30 to 60 seconds of a story, you now feel at ease because an audience always has that concern, this concern that this is going to get awkward for us because you're not going to do a good job.8
The four engines are not mutually exclusive in any given sentence — a well-crafted sentence can do multiple at once. But the minimum-attention requirement is that at least one engine is running at all times. A sentence with zero engines running is slack; consecutive slack sentences dissipate energy; dissipated energy is audience-loss.
The reason Dicks treats these four as the complete set rather than as a partial list is that they map onto the four major attention-direction mechanisms in cognition: emotional investment (stakes), curiosity (suspense), pattern-completion (surprise), and reward-affect (humor). Other commonly-named engagement techniques — novelty, vividness, relatability, vulnerability, specificity — turn out, on inspection, to be sub-variants or amplifiers of one of the four. Novelty is a surprise sub-variant. Vividness amplifies suspense and stakes by making the withheld information feel more worth waiting for. Relatability amplifies stakes by deepening the emotional investment. Vulnerability amplifies stakes by tying the emotional investment to a sense of risk the storyteller is taking. Specificity amplifies humor.
The completeness claim matters operationally because it bounds the monitoring loop. A storyteller in delivery cannot monitor twelve attention-mechanisms in real time. They can monitor four. The four-engine taxonomy is calibrated for live performance — small enough to hold in working memory while speaking, comprehensive enough to cover the full attention-mechanism space.
Dicks's deployment-logic for the four is prioritized by ease and reliability:
Surprise and humor are really complicated, but stakes and suspense aren't. So I say lean in on those two at least to begin.9
Stakes and suspense are the floor — they should be running across nearly every sentence, with stakes carrying the emotional through-line and suspense managing the moment-by-moment information-revelation. Surprise is event-scale — it lands at specific climactic moments rather than running continuously, because too-frequent surprise becomes predictable (and therefore stops being surprise). Humor is opportunistic — it lands when the material affords it, primarily for opening reassurance, mood-modulation across heavy material, and the laugh-laugh-laugh-cry contrast architecture.
The four engines also have different failure modes. Stakes can be too low (audience doesn't care) or too high (audience is overwhelmed and emotionally withdraws). Suspense can be too thin (no information being withheld) or too withholding (audience gives up trying to track). Surprise can be unprepared (feels arbitrary) or pre-telegraphed (lands flat). Humor can be misjudged (lands as inappropriate) or overused (story becomes standup, no longer story). Each engine has to be calibrated to the specific piece, the specific audience, and the specific moment.
The Mount Rushmore is the engagement-engine toolkit deployed in Step 3 of the Big Three — Master the Middle. The four engines do most of their work in the middle of a piece because that is where audience attention is most at risk of dissipating. They also have specific roles at the structural extremes:
At the beginning. Stakes and humor do most of the opening work. Stakes establish what the audience is supposed to care about — without them the audience hasn't been given a reason to stay. Humor does the opening reassurance work — laughing in the first 30-60 seconds tells the audience the storyteller knows what they're doing and they can relax.
In the middle. All four engines deploy continuously, with stakes carrying emotional through-line, suspense managing information-revelation, surprise punctuating climactic moments, and humor painting over necessarily-boring parts (data demos, technical explanations) and creating the laugh-then-cry contrast architecture.
At the end. Surprise lands its final payoff if the piece has been set up for it. Stakes resolve (or are deliberately left unresolved per the frayed-endings principle). Suspense closes (the withheld information is revealed). Humor often pulls back, allowing the heart-landing of the end-with-heart principle.
For boring parts. Dicks names humor, suspense, and novelty as the three primary tools for painting over boring parts. When you must deliver necessary but unentertaining content (data, technical explanation, exposition), the four-engine taxonomy is your toolkit for keeping the audience present through material they would otherwise leave during.
The cleanest illustration of the four-engine architecture is to walk through Dicks's spoon-of-power story and identify which engines are running at each beat.10
"I'm standing behind my school where I teach. I'm a fifth grade teacher. I'm standing in front of this enormous pile of fall leaves and they're quivering. There's a little boy inside the leaves and his hand emerges and he's got a metal object in his hand." — Stakes (initial elephant: a metal object, possibly threatening — knife? gun? — the audience is wondering). Suspense (lens is narrow: "metal object" not "spoon"). Both running from sentence one.
"He looks at me, his head pops out. His name is Jamie. He says, 'Look what I found,' and he's shaking this metal object. And I say, 'Wow, look at it.' And he says, 'Yeah, it's a spoon.'" — Suspense releases (it's a spoon, not a weapon). New stake establishes (what's interesting about a spoon?). Suspense rebuilds (Matt is going to make this matter somehow, but we don't know how).
"I tell Jamie, I say, 'That's not just a spoon, Jamie. That's the spoon of power.'" — Stakes pivot (now there's a story-internal stake: Matt wants the spoon). Surprise prepared (the audience can sense escalation but doesn't know where).
"He doesn't say a word. He just sprints. Because he knows his crazy teacher will now chase him down for the spoon. And he's not wrong. I'm responsible for like a hundred kids. I have to keep them safe, keep them secure. I don't care about any of them anymore. It's a redheaded boy and a spoon that I must now have." — Humor (the absurd escalation, the "I don't care about any of them anymore"). Stakes escalating (this has become a contest). Suspense (will Matt get the spoon?).
"For 18 minutes over the course of this recess, I hunt this boy down. I chase him across a field, up a slide, down the other slide, through the woods. 18 minutes later, he still has the spoon in his hand. I can't believe it. I legitimately tried to catch a 10-year-old and I could not." — Surprise lands (Matt fails to catch a 10-year-old; deflation of the chase stake). Humor (the absurdity of a grown teacher unable to catch a kid). New stake forming (the spoon now has cultural weight in the classroom).
The middle of the story (math class standoff, McKenzie's test, David's grandfather) runs primarily on stakes (will McKenzie pass? will David's grief lift?) and suspense (where will the spoon go next?), with humor punctuating (the "had he ever been this focused in his life he'd like cure cancer" line, the "she's like 'leave us alone we're trying to get our work done'").
The end (Jamie giving the spoon back; the pandemic year) runs on a major surprise (the spoon's transformation from object-of-conflict to object-of-shared-care) followed by stakes resolution (the pandemic was the hardest year, and the spoon carried the classroom through). The humor pulls back. The heart lands. The piece closes.
What this analysis reveals is that at no point in the 6-minute piece is no engine running. There is no slack. Every sentence is doing one or more of the four. That density is what makes the piece travel — Dicks has told the spoon story hundreds of times to thousands of audiences and gets the same gasp at the "it's not there" moment because the engine-architecture is robust enough to land for any audience that grants it the opening 30 seconds. Mount Rushmore in action.
You have a story drafted. The Big Three is locked: end found, beginning set, middle skeletoned. Now you do the four-engine sweep.
You print the draft. Not screen — paper, because you need to mark it up by hand. You sit at the kitchen table with four colored pens. Red for stakes. Blue for suspense. Yellow for surprise. Green for humor.
You read the first sentence aloud. You underline it in whichever color(s) correspond to the engine(s) running. You move to the next sentence. Underline. Next. Underline. You do this through the entire draft.
When you finish, you look at the page. Sentences with no underline are slack. They are doing nothing. You either restructure them so they pick up an engine, or you cut them. Sentences with one underline are running on a single engine; check whether the engine is the right one for the position in the piece (stakes early, humor at opening, surprise at climax, all four available in the middle). Sentences with multiple underlines are dense; they're load-bearing and probably good.
Look at the color distribution across the whole draft. If red (stakes) is patchy or absent from the middle, the audience is not emotionally invested through the middle and will drift. If blue (suspense) is missing from the front half, the audience has no withheld-information curiosity pulling them through. If yellow (surprise) is bunched at the end without any preparation in the middle, the surprise will feel arbitrary rather than inevitable. If green (humor) is missing from the opening, the audience never gets the reassurance signal and stays tense rather than leaning in.
Now you revise. Each fix is small. A sentence rewritten to include a stake-cue. A paragraph restructured to introduce withheld information at the start instead of revealing it immediately. A surprise that's currently sitting unprepared in scene seven gets a quiet breadcrumb planted in scene three. An opening sentence gets a small, true comedic detail added so the audience laughs once and relaxes. None of the changes are big. The cumulative effect is that the piece tightens significantly and the audience-attrition curve flattens.
The sweep takes about an hour per 5-minute piece. You do it after every major draft revision. After three or four pieces you stop needing the colored pens because the diagnostic has become internalized — you can run the four-engine check in real time while drafting, the way Dicks does it during live delivery. That internalization is the goal. The colored-pen practice is the scaffolding that builds it.
Your story works on energy but you can't say why. This is the Beginner's Luck failure — the piece happens to have all four engines running by intuition, but the storyteller doesn't know which engine is doing which work. The danger is that the next piece will lack one or more engines and the storyteller won't know how to diagnose it. The fix is the colored-pen sweep until the engines become consciously trackable.
You think humor and storytelling are different things. A common amateur mistake is treating humor as "comic relief" — something added between the real story-work. The Mount Rushmore reframes humor as one of the four primary engines. If you're treating humor as a garnish, you're underweighting it and losing the brain-chemistry, reassurance, and contrast-architecture functions it can perform.
You bunch surprises at the end. If your piece has all its surprises in the final 60 seconds, you violated the prepare-the-surprise discipline. Engineered surprise requires breadcrumb-planting earlier in the piece so that the reveal feels inevitable in retrospect. Unprepared surprise lands as arbitrary plot-twist and fails the Sixth-Sense test (of course this is what happened).
Your stakes are vague or systemic rather than personal. The company needed to grow. That's a systemic stake, not a personal one. The Mount Rushmore stakes-engine runs on rooting-for-or-against-a-protagonist. If the protagonist (you, or someone in your story) doesn't have a personal stake that the audience can root for, the engine isn't running. The fix is to translate systemic stakes into personal ones — Tuesday morning I walked into the office and Jenny stopped me at the door and said the customer wants their money back. Personal. Specific. Audience can root.
You confuse suspense with mystery. Mystery is what is the answer to this question. Suspense is what happens next. Mystery is intellectual; suspense is emotional. A piece can have mystery without suspense (we are wondering what happened but not feeling the unfolding of it). The Mount Rushmore suspense-engine requires the unfolding feeling, not just the question.
You're trying to run all four engines maximally on every sentence. Overloading produces breathless, exhausting prose that the audience experiences as manipulative. The four engines are a coverage taxonomy (at least one running at all times) not a maximization taxonomy (all four maximally always). Calibration is the craft. Dicks's spoon-of-power has stretches where stakes and suspense are doing most of the work and surprise/humor are quiet — those stretches are not failures, they're calibrated rest before the next escalation.
The Mount Rushmore taxonomy is named explicitly in the Knowledge Project interview11 and reappears as the four-engine framework in the Calum Johnson interview.12 It is consistent across both transcripts and is the primary engagement-architecture in Dicks's published methodology.
A real tension exists with the Nine Rasas as Newsletter Architecture (Pashupati): Sanskrit aesthetic theory names nine rasas (Śṛṅgāra / Hāsya / Karuṇa / Raudra / Vīra / Bhayānaka / Bībhatsa / Adbhuta / Śānta) where Dicks names four engagement-engines. The taxonomies are not directly comparable — rasas are aesthetic affect-categories while Dicks's engines are attention-direction mechanisms — but they overlap. Hāsya maps roughly to humor; Adbhuta (wonder) maps roughly to surprise; Bhayānaka (fear) and Vīra (heroic) map roughly to stakes; Karuṇa (compassion) is closer to vulnerability-amplified stakes. Read against the rasa list, Dicks's four-engine taxonomy may under-articulate the aesthetic-affect space — there may be engagement-mechanisms (wonder distinct from surprise, compassion distinct from stakes) that Dicks's taxonomy collapses. What both traditions agree on is that the set is finite and enumerable; they differ on the size and granularity.
A subtler tension exists with Macfarlane's relational nature-writing: Macfarlane's pieces work primarily through sustained attentive presence rather than through Dicks-style engine-engineering. The Mount Rushmore would diagnose Macfarlane's pieces as low-stakes, low-suspense, low-surprise, and low-humor — which would predict audience attrition. But Macfarlane's audience does not attrite; the pieces succeed. The implication: there may be a fifth engagement mechanism (sustained-attentive-presence, or atmosphere) that operates in long-form nature writing and that Dicks's taxonomy doesn't name because it doesn't operate at Dicks's medium-scale (5-minute oral). Open.
Open question: how does the Mount Rushmore taxonomy apply to non-narrative speaking — to lectures, panels, conference talks? Dicks's framework assumes a story-shaped piece. Lectures and talks often don't have story-shape. Can the four engines be applied to non-story speech, or do they require the story-shape to operate? Dicks's John-scientist case (a 5-minute apple-store anecdote replacing scientific data) suggests the four engines can substitute for non-narrative content entirely — but the substitution is to narrative, not the engines applied to non-narrative.
Dicks and Hari converge on the information-revelation as engagement engine claim, which corresponds most closely to the suspense engine. Hari's lyricism earned by story principle treats narrative-as-engagement-engine: the reader endures lyrical or analytical passages only after a story has earned their willingness to endure. The convergence: both writers treat audience-attention as something earned through specific structural moves, not granted through subject-matter importance. Where they diverge: Hari operates at the scale of a 70,000-word book (where engines deploy across chapters), Dicks at the scale of a 5-minute piece (where engines deploy across sentences). Same engagement-mechanism, four orders of magnitude apart in scale.
Dicks and Tucker Max converge on humor-as-load-bearing-engine, but for different reasons. Tucker's humor as distance from emotion frames comedy as the technique that creates enough psychological distance for the reader to access painful material. Dicks's humor-as-engagement-engine frames comedy as one of four mechanisms maintaining audience attention regardless of subject. Both writers reject the humor-as-decoration mistake. Working writers and storytellers across forms treat humor as structural rather than ornamental — the specific structural function depending on the medium (emotional-distance for memoir; attention-maintenance for oral).
Dicks and Bilton split on the primary engagement vector. Bilton's cliffhanger architecture for narrative non-fiction puts suspense (specifically chapter-end cliffhangers) as the dominant engagement engine. Dicks's Mount Rushmore is engine-equal — none of the four is structurally primary, and the deployment depends on the piece. Two different medium-optimized engineering philosophies. Bilton optimizes for the print-form where the reader can put the book down between chapters (cliffhangers prevent that). Dicks optimizes for the oral-form where the listener is in the room and cannot leave between sentences (cliffhangers aren't medium-appropriate at sentence-scale).
The Mount Rushmore is a finite, enumerable taxonomy of audience-attention mechanisms. That kind of taxonomy has direct analogues in behavioral mechanics, contemplative aesthetics, and influence theory.
Behavioral mechanics: Six-Minute X-Ray six-cluster framework (Hughes) — Hughes names six clusters of behavioral indicators (needs / pronouns / language / context / paralanguage / observational). The Hughes taxonomy is structurally analogous to Dicks's Mount Rushmore: a finite enumerable list of operating-mechanisms small enough to monitor in real-time, exhaustive enough to cover the working space. What neither domain produces alone: Dicks teaches the speaker a four-engine deployment taxonomy for earning attention; Hughes teaches the elicitor a six-cluster diagnostic taxonomy for reading targets. Put them next to each other and you see that finite-enumerable-real-time-deployable taxonomy is the structural form professional craft-frameworks take across orientations. The taxonomies have to be small enough to hold in working memory during live performance and big enough to cover the mechanism-space without missing categories. Four to six items is the sweet spot. This is a cross-craft convergence on cognitive-load constraints, not a coincidence.
Eastern spirituality: The Nine Rasas as Newsletter Architecture — Sanskrit aesthetic theory's nine-rasa taxonomy is the more articulated, older version of the same enumeration-of-aesthetic-mechanisms project. Where Dicks names four engines optimized for live oral delivery, the rasa tradition names nine optimized for sustained aesthetic experience (theater, poetry, sculpture, painting). What neither domain produces alone: the rasa tradition supplies the philosophical and aesthetic depth — millennia of articulation of the affect-categories that make art work; Dicks supplies the operational-pragmatic compression — a four-item list that a working storyteller can run on a real-time loop. Combined, the storyteller gets both the deep articulation (what each engine actually is at the affective level) and the operational shortlist (which four to monitor in the moment). The handshake also reveals that Dicks's engagement-engine concept and the rasa-tradition's aesthetic-affect concept are the same theoretical object viewed from operational vs philosophical sides — and that working storytelling craft and classical Sanskrit aesthetic theory have been independently developing the same taxonomy for the same reason.
Behavioral mechanics: BOM Entrainment 13-element compliance ladder — the BOM tradition names 13 elements of behavioral entrainment for compliance work. The list is longer than Dicks's because the compliance-context allows more elaborated tooling than live storytelling (you can monitor 13 elements across a multi-hour engagement; you cannot monitor 13 in real-time delivery). What that comparison shows is an inverse relationship between taxonomy size and real-time monitoring requirement: shorter taxonomies for moments-of-delivery, longer taxonomies for sustained-engagement-design. Dicks's four is calibrated to one constraint; BOM's thirteen is calibrated to another. Working practitioners across orientations seem to converge on this scaling principle.
The Sharpest Implication The Mount Rushmore implies that attention is engineered, not deserved. Most people who give talks or write content operate on a tacit assumption that their subject matter is interesting and the audience's job is to find it so. The four-engine taxonomy says the audience's job is the opposite — the audience's job is to not pay attention unless the piece earns continued attention sentence by sentence. The storyteller's job is to engineer attention through specific named mechanisms. There is no subject-matter so important that it earns audience attention by default. There is no audience so generous that they will stay through engineless content. The implication is uncomfortable for academics, executives, and subject-matter experts whose professional identity is built on the value of their content rather than on the craft of its delivery. If the Mount Rushmore is right, content-value without delivery-craft is not just suboptimal — it actively forfeits the audience the content was supposed to reach.
Generative Questions