Modern Wisdom - #944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

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Why are stories so persuasive? Well, stories are persuasive because, um, humans think in stories, uh, our brains remix reality and turn that reality into a narrative, you know, with ourselves. At the center. So, you know, storytelling is sense-making for the human brain. We haven't evolved to think in data algorithm. We've evolved to process reality in the form of stories. A story is always going to be the most persuasive technology out there.

A story is also always going to be the thing that persuades people most of all. Is it kind of ironic that in the modern world, a lot of the time we're told to take great heed of rationality and data and statistics and stuff like that. But you've got to disregard all of that personification and narrative and archetypes and religion and mythology, you know, that's sort of, that's very unsophisticated. It doesn't really meet the criteria by which we judge what's happening in the modern world. So you're asking people to get rid of the stuff which to them feels most real and is persuasive, which is story and archetype and mythology and

personification and blah, blah, uh, and to start to believe in the thing, which is the most sterile and, and, and novel and sort of, uh, uh, alien to us. Absolutely. And I think there's a huge naivety out there that, that, that, you know, especially in, you know, what you mightety out there that, you know, especially in, you know, what you might call our world of, you know, we like to think of ourselves as rational people, atheistic people, people who are interested in data and science, and as amongst our people, there's a very naive idea that we are

the ones who are led by data. I mean, I remember earlier in my career as a journalist interviewing a famous skeptic, Stephen Novella, who used to present a podcast called The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. And he very confidently told me that skeptics were kind of immune to irrationality because they were kind of tuned to be automatically skeptical about crazy beliefs. I just think that's sort of deeply naive. Like what you'll find, especially you see all the time in the era of social media is that even scientists, not even scientists as much as anybody else, they start with a

story and then they find the data to back up their story. So you can find academics who know way more than you or both of us put together about human biology, who believe in that kind of woke idea of biology, gender biology, and why are men better than women at certain things. They could find all the data in the world to tell you that that's not true, even though we believe that it is true. You can take someone like Jordan Peterson on the one hand and Adam Rutherford on the other hand, two very smart men, two very opinionated men, two men who I respect, you know, equally, I would say, but two men who are very angry and very lost in the story. They're both lost in the story. So, you know, I love Adam and I love Jordan. I can never imagine being in the same room together. I was about to say, yeah, I wonder what happens over that dinner table.

But equally with the greatest respect to both of them, I wouldn't trust either of them to talk to me about the science of gender, talk to me certainly about what's going on in Israel, Palestine. Dispassionately. Yeah, dispassionately. Not because they're dishonest, not because there is anything wrong with them, but because they're lost in the story. They're utterly lost in their particular story of the world and the data that they cite, the data that they choose to believe is subservient to the story. Even with people like Adam and Jordan, two brilliant minds, the story comes first as

far as I'm concerned. I think that's inarguable. Have you come across knowingness? Do you know what that is? No, this is new, new to me. Cool ideas. So this is from Brian class who wrote fluke, uh, outstanding book, nearly as good as yours.

And he, uh, talks about, he talks about, um, the, the problem of knowingness. A lot of people in the modern world think that the biggest issue is misinformation. It's people being given poor quality information. He contends that a much bigger issue is knowingness. Knowingness is a belief that you already have the answer to the question before the question has been posed. It's a reverse intellectual curiosity. So I know, no, no, no, no, no, no.

The science is settled on climate change. Humans are not having any impact or whatever it is. And the interesting insight he's got here is if the issue is simply misinformation, and that is true, let's just imagine for a moment that misinformation was the biggest problem, all that you would need to do in order to counteract that would be to provide better, more compelling information. But it's not. It's knowingness, which is this kind of Faraday's cage insulation where people don't, it doesn't

matter about the information because they're not open to any new information, regardless of whether it's miss or real or dis or mal, whatever, pre-bunked malinformation. And he makes this really great point that when you're thinking about the problems of the modern world, talking about misinformation, talking about you needing better facts, we need to deliver more information,

if you can't get past the problem of knowingness, if you can't get past the issue that knowingness, if you can't get past the issue that people feel like they already know the answer, and this is, this is kind of similar to the, um, every religion believes that it's the right one, but by definition, that can't be true. Like only one of them can be right, given that they don't all agree. Uh, he has this great line where he says, everybody act as if the facts are already settled whilst no one can agree on what the facts actually are.

Yeah. I mean, knowing it sounds like implicit belief. It's the beliefs that are just implicit and you believe with such kind of ferocity that you can't see that they're beliefs. They just feel like reality to you. And when I talk about the story world, that we all live in this story world, I think that speaks to that idea that we all live in this narrative. And one of the kind of moments in my career as a writer that always sticks with me was when I was in my 20s. My very first book was about ghosts and I went around the

world trying to figure out if ghosts existed. It was good fun. And one of the guys that I met was called Morris Gross. And he was this old guy who lived up in Muswell Hill and he'd been a ghost hunter all his life. And he was famous for investigating the Enfield Poltergeist case. He's kind of a legend, Morris Gross. And so I managed to get an interview with him and I went to his house. And as I was leaving his house, he said, you know, Will, he said, if you're looking for evidence of the supernatural, you're going to find it.

And it's always stuck with me because I did find evidence for the supernatural. Even though I don't believe in the supernatural. And it's always stuck with me because I think the great, the brain is this amazing evidence finding machine. If you've got a belief, the brain will find evidence to back up your belief. What, no matter what you believe about gender or Israel-Palestine or whatever it might be, your brain is going to find multitudinous evidence to back up what you believe. You're going to see it everywhere. That's one of the tricks of the storytelling brain. We live in this story world. We live in this narrative.

The brain's not interested in what's the truth. The brain's not really interested in you having this kind of perfectly clear understanding of reality. The brain wants you to succeed in your life as a human. And what that means is we have to achieve connection with a group. And once we've achieved connection with a group or a tribe, we kind of earn status within it. And so to earn connection to that group, you've got to believe their story. Every group has a story it tells of the world, a political, you know, whether it's a political

organization or a cult or a religion, or, you know, you know, me and you are in the kind of same kind of cultural group. We believe roughly the same things. We have a shared reality. We have a shared idea of who are the heroes, who are the villains, what are the good beliefs, what are the bad beliefs, what is status? You know, so me and you share a story and a lot of your, we will share a story with most of your viewers and it's reassuring, you know, we see evidence for it everywhere. So, so, so, so that's kind of how, you know, all this is working. The brain isn't motivated to tell it, to, to, to discover the truth.

The brain is motivated, motivated to make us want to collect with like-minded people and then status from those people. And that means believing their stories. So is it right to say that story is the language of the brain then? Absolutely. That's exactly right. And as I write about it in the story is a deal.

The big idea that kind of made me excited about this book was this idea that, you know, what is story originally for? Well, story is what enables us to be these highly cooperative apes. You know, as you know, humans are an ape, we're one of five existing species of great ape. But we are a weird, obviously an unusual kind of ape. And that weirdness is that we are also a bit like ants in that we're highly collective. You know, other apes overcome the obstacles of their existence individually. They live in troops, but they find food individually. They pursue goals individually, you know, broadly speaking. But we don't.

Humans are like ants that we form into these super organisms, these problem solving super organisms in which every kind of individual human plays their part. And that's how we're amazing. That's how we've taken the best of the ape and the best of the ant, and we've taken over the world. But that poses a problem. You've got all these apes, once upon a time, how do you connect all those individualistic

ape brains together? How do you get all those brains firing in the form of this highly collected superorganism? Well, you do it with story. Story is a device for fusing brains together. Under the power of story, we're all facing in the same direction, pursuing the same goals, overcoming the same obstacles. We all have a shared idea of who you are, what your role is, what you should be doing.

That's what story is doing. It's fusing individual human brains together and getting them to experience the same reality. You can see that effect happening when you go to the movies, when you go to the cinema. We go into the cinema as this crowd of individuals and if the film is any good, we're transported into it and for that 90 minutes, we forget our own reality. We forget our own consciousness. We're all sucked into that consciousness of the film, experiencing the lives of the people up on

the screen. We leave that cinema connected as one, having had that mad experience. You often have that weird, almost trippy experience coming out of the cinema where for a few moments you feel like the hero of the movie. You feel like Luke Skywalker for a moment. Everything goes a bit weird. You snap out of it. That's story doing what story is supposed to do, which is entering our brains and getting

us all to experience this kind of collective reality of the story. So it's kind of like a coordination mechanism to get everybody onto a similar page. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and it still works, of course. Maga people have a particular story of the world that they tell each other. You know, anti-vax people do, pro-vax people do, climate change people do. You know, like that's how it works. We still collect into these groups that are defined by the stories they tell of the world.

And those stories infect us, they influence us, they cause us to believe certain things and to behave in certain ways. Is this just that evolutionarily, if all you've got is the spoken word, humans needed to… The most obvious way to explain the world is to do it through personification, narrative, roles, characters, motivation. This is why the goddess that is the moon and the god that is the sun rises and the thunder and Thor. Is this just, before you've got written word and before you can do statistical analysis, the

statistical analysis, the most obvious, most common, most sort of close to our experience of reality way to communicate information was to personify it into a sort of a narrative? Is that we're just the progeny of storytellers that told stories to pass down wisdom to tell stories to pass down wisdom? Well, I mean, the current leading theory is that language evolved in the first place to tell stories that enabled us to operate as these highly cooperative groups, these super organisms as I call them. One early form of storytelling is gossip. Gossip is a universal human behavior. We all do it. Why do we do it? Gossip teaches us who we ought to be in the super organism. It teaches us what are the good behaviors,

what are the bad behaviors. It motivates us to behave in a kind of way that serves the superorganism because then we're rewarded with status. And it also incentivizes in the other way that if you're being gossiped about and the gossip is negative, you're going to get punished. So that's one form of early storytelling. The other kind of storytelling is about the future. You know, we tell stories about the future. There's a very brilliant, you know, visionary biologist called Michael Tomasello that says, you know, that it's impossible to imagine two

chimpanzees picking up a log and carrying it together to take it somewhere else. Like even that basic level of coordination, cooperation, even chimpanzees can't do our closest relative. And storytelling enables us to do that. If we move that log over here, that can be a foundation for our next camp. All right, dude, we're going to do it. So that's a form of storytelling. We're telling stories about the future. And that's why stories are always about obstacles and goals. Every functional story fundamentally is about obstacles and goals because that's what story evolved to do. It's purpose is to pull us into a group and the purpose of that group is to

overcome obstacles in pursuit of goals. What role does social identity and mimicry play here? Um, huge, huge roles. I mean, you know, social identity is your identity within the group. I mean, who are you in the group? You know, basic concept might be a football team, you're in a football team, but you're playing in a particular position, that comes with certain expectations. You've got certain roles to perform and you're judged, your status goes higher

or lower depending on how well you perform those roles. And that's the same in every, you know, your social identity in the football team is striker, defender, goalkeeper, whatever it might be, referee even. And that's the same in every human group, you know, with every group we join, we have what we call a social identity and what a human identity is in part a collection of these various social identities that we have. Right. Yeah.

I wonder what was that Apple ad, the Lemmings thing? Yeah. So in the story, I tell the story of, well, I'll sort of pose a question really about like one of the most famous ads that was ever made was Apple's 1984 ad, which kind of played on the George Orwell's novel and showed this horrendous kind of totalitarian hellscape. All these kind of bald, gray, middle-aged men, God forbid, you know, drone-like automatons and this kind of like barking patriarchal face.

And this Technicolor woman with an Apple t-shirt on runs down the middle of it, throws a hammer, smashes the face. And then it comes up saying, you know, in January, 1984, you're going to find out why, you know, I forget the actual words, but because of Apple, 1984 won't be like 1984. So basically 1984 is freedom, it's power, it's creativity, it's progress. Hugely successful, massively successful ad campaign. I mean, they sold, today's money would be hundreds of millions of dollars worth of computers when they were launched after that ad.

So enormously successful. And then the next year, people know about the 1984 ad because it is seen as one of the most successful ads in history, but the next year they tried to repeat it. They did the same thing, it was the same advertising agency, Chat Day. They used a Hollywood film director and what this ad was called lemmings and it was just horrendous like dark dark thing where you go all these like automaton. I'm sad sack business man a bit like the pc guys in the nineteen nineties or two thousand as i'm a mac a pc. or early 2000s ads, I'm a Mac, I'm a PC, kind of marching with briefcases, marching off this cliff to their deaths, the sound of a nightmarishly slowed down version of, hey ho, hey ho, it's off to work we go.

Basically saying that all these business computer users were a bunch of lemmings, implying if they knew what they were doing, they'd be buying Apple computers. It was a massive disaster. It wasn't just, it wasn't even like a null effect where everyone just ignored it. The day after it was launched on the Superbowl, Apple's headquarters were getting updated with phone calls from people saying, there were business people saying they were never going to buy an Apple computer again. And you know, and one of the things I'm arguing in the book is that one of the

reasons, one of the things I didn't understand was that,'t understand was that 1984 ad was offering the Apple user status. It was saying fundamentally that if you buy an Apple computer, you're on the side of progress, creativity, smashing the man, which isn't a big thing in the 80s. It's not going to be 1994, you know, so it's a very optimistic, high status, fashionable story they were telling. But the other ad, it took status away. So it was an absolute disaster. It was basically telling people that there were these bunch of brain dead lemmings and

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Uh, this sort of mimesis mimicry thing that I want to feel like I belong. And that this is, is, is that all wrapped together at all? Yeah, a little bit. So, so, so to understand what one of the reasons that 1984 was so successful, you have to really understand the story of computers that was being told in the 1980s. So when the advert was broadcast, the boiling water up, this wasn't the age of Silicon Valley, you know, Facebook, Google, and all the friendly corporate brands that we know today. Computers were still feared. They were seen as these kind

of machines that were going to introduce a future of conformity and totalitarianism. It was just the year before 1984 was broadcast, there was a massive film called War Games, which I just about remember from my childhood, which was all about this computer that did War Games with the Soviet Union. It goes crazy and actually starts a brand new nuclear war. A computer then that was this huge kind of flashing mainframe thing operated by inscrutable men in white lab coats. So that was, that was, that was what people fear. People feared computers.

Weirdly that, that fear is re re reawakening at the moment in the age of AI. People are starting to have those fears again, but they went away. Um, uh, and, and, you know, really largely one of the reasons they went away is because of that ad it was, it was saying that, no, you know, this is not what purchasing personal computers are all about. Personal computers are about freedom. They're about individuality. They're about progress.

So people would love that story. They massively identified with that story and it ended up being an incredibly powerful, powerfully persuasive piece of story setting for Apple. I mean, like all the ads I talk about in the book, it had no information in it about the actual product. It had no price, no technical details. It didn't even have a picture of the damn thing. It was pure storytelling and incredibly successful. And then one scholar in marketing that I read and I agree, argues that that 1904 didn't just tell a brand new story about Apple computers. It told a brand new story about Silicon Valley, about computers in general. That story about computers being the tools for creativity and changing the world and

freedom, that became the story of computers going on for decades. Is it right to say that stories are identity manipulation in that way then? Manipulation is a strong word. Curation. Curation. I don't think their ads are manipulating our identity, strictly speaking. I think they are manipulating us by appealing to our identity. So, you know, humans, you know, we live in these two worlds at once.

We live in the physical world like other animals. In that physical world, we care about our survival. We care about food and shelter and procreation and the inner and importantly, the safety of our children who are going to then move our genes forwards. So in that respect, we're no different from a dog or an elephant. But humans live in this other kind of crazy world, this story world, where we care about other things. And in the story world, we aren't a flesh and blood machine.

We're an identity with this collection of ideas. That's what we are. And this identity means more to us than our lives. To the average human being, their identity is the most precious thing they'll ever own. Our children's aren't our possessions, but our identity is. You can see people throughout human history have chosen identity over their own lives. When we go to war, that's what we do. When we fly planes into the World Trade Center, that's what we do. When we kill ourselves, that's what we do. You know, most cases of suicide are what I call identity failure.

It's not because, you know, they can't physically live anymore because they're sick or because they're poor or something. I mean, of course people do often kill themselves because they're sick or because they're poor or something. I mean, of course, people do often kill themselves because they're ill, but very often they don't. Very often they kill themselves because they feel like failures, because their identity is failed, because they're lacking in connection. No one loves me, no one likes me, nobody hates me. They're lacking in status, I'm useless, I'm pathetic. And crucially, they're also trapped.

They feel there's no way they can rescue their identity. And the pain of their identity failing becomes so acute that they choose death over the pain of having their identity fall to pieces. And so it says that that's the power of identity. And so the most powerful ads appeal to identity. And again, that's what Apple did with their other really famous and successful ad campaigns, Think Different, which is a bunch of black identity. And again, that's what Apple did with their other really famous and successful campaign, Think Different. Just a bunch of black and white pictures of people like Gandhi and Mother

Teresa and John Lennon. And this is you, Think Different. So basically, people who identify with those characters changed the world, became another absolute cliché in Silicon Valley. And it began really with Think Different, when it became popularized that idea and that's an appeal to identity. Now there's another really great example which I found which I'd never heard of and if you're not Canadian you won't know about it but it's Molson beer. So back in the year 2000 Molson beer were in trouble they were the number one and then they were slipping and so the ad agency were tasked with rescuing the reputation of Molson beer and the ad agency were tasked with rescuing the reputation of Moulson Beer.

And the guy who, the ad agency was Canadian and knew that one of the things that annoys Canadians is when Americans basically say, you're just Americans. You know, there's no difference between Canadians and Americans. It's something that really winds Canadians up, as you can imagine. So he came up with this ad campaign called I am Canadian. And all it is, is this ordinary guy in a plaid shirt and jeans on a stage, listing things that are Canadian. Like it's Z not Z, for example.

We don't say a boot, we say about. It's just a list of things, but it was massively successful. It went instantly viral at the time. Kids began shouting it on the streets. The value of Molson Beer rockers it, I forget the exact number, but tens of millions of the value of the company through the roof. One really incredibly smart thing they did was they debuted that ad in the ad break of the Oscars just after the South Park film Blame Canada had been performed.

Then they had this very patriotic Iron Canadian thing. Just after the South Park film Blame Canada had been performed. And then they had this very patriotic I am Canadian thing. What's fascinating about I am Canadian is, and it became known as the rant in Canada, it's very famous in Canada. And what's fascinating about it, again, just like the Apple ad, there's nothing in there about the beer, about its tastiness or whatever, you know, what are the causes of this beer, why should we be buying it? Nothing. It's literally an appeal to identity.

It's saying, it's holding a mirror up to their market, their audience saying, this is who you are. And we're so in love with our identity. We go, yes, that's me. And we flock to the product. That's, and it's the same as what Apple did with Think Different. They just said, here you are. We see you.

You're amazing. You're fantastic. And this is who you are. You are this person. And you know, so that's how it's manipulating us for our identity. Like the very best, most persuasive ads. That's how they do it. Does that mean from a story perspective, stories overall, adverts too, but just generally stories,

that they can, they're a way that tribal preferences can be used, can be manipulated in group, out group, the people like us meme. Absolutely right. This is another concept that really came home to me when I was doing my research for a story is a deal. It really made me feel like as a society, we are still at the foothills of maturity in talking about issues like race. We fundamentally hate this idea, but it's an inarguably true idea. The idea is that people like them, we collect into groups of like-minded people. So we're always looking out for people who are a bit like us to identify with.

And so, you know, that's why, you know, race becomes a problem because white people naturally tend to flock towards white people, black people naturally tend to flock towards black people. And at its core, it isn't racism, it's human nature. And until we've sort of really grasped that, we're not going to make any progress in these sort of very difficult problems. So that's what we're kind of constantly doing. And again, it's human nature because we're always looking for people with similar identities to us that we can cooperate with. It's that super organism programming again. Nature is

constantly wanting us to gather into groups of like-minded people and repel people who we think aren't like-minded. The most persuasive storytelling understands that. One of the most recent examples was from the Trump election, the one just gone, which I thought was extraordinary, where there's a concept in the book I call atomic statements, which are tiny little phrases that are absolutely packed with meaning and they're atomic because they're tiny little things that explode on contact with the human brain. They're so packed with meaning. You can see lines of movie dialogue like, we need a bigger boat is an atomic statement because it's

the entire movie packed into a line. Houston, we have a problem. It's an atomic statement. These are the lines that we love and we repeat and become iconic because they're atomic, they're packed full of meaning. And the best advertising lines are like that. Just do it is packed full of meaning. It's a story about what Nike stands for. Just do it. You know, it's fantastic. And politicians use these to great effect too.

You know, in the book I write about project fear and take back control, which are very successful for the Brexit leave campaign. But after the book was finished, there was this other incredible atomic statement that came out of the Trump campaign, which was, Kamala is for they, them, Trump is for you. Which, you know, even the people that came up with it were staggered by how successful it was. Now Kamala's own research team figured, worked out that it had created a

2.7% shift in the election race, just that line alone. So, you know, that created a 2.7% shift in the election race, just that line alone. That's a story and it's a story that millions of Americans immediately understood, a certain kind of American who were incredibly frustrated and fed up with the kind of era of wokeism. That was another example of incredibly powerful persuasive storytelling that appeals to identity. Does that mean that misaligned messages and misaligned stories can threaten identity then if you get it wrong on the other way? Yeah, exactly. So you look at the Gillette ad campaign where they were trying to appeal

to men by calling men abusers and harassers. It's like lemmings all over again. You're not going to make people happy by removing their status by telling them the story that they don't want to believe. It's the Bud Light campaign, giving a transgender woman Bud Light to drink. That's a story. We know that this person stands for wokeism and wokeism is at its core. You know, if we're honest about what wokeism is at its core, one of the things

that it is, is a movement against straight white men. So, you know, straight white men were there with a market for, for, for Bud Light. So that, that was a ridiculous thing to do and it exploded in their faces. And also Tesla, you know, you know, Tesla, you know, Tesla's stock prices collapsed. It's partly because of the tariffs, but their sales have dropped massively in, you know, across Europe, which isn't because of the tariffs. And that's because the story that Tesla stands for has been polluted by Elon Musk's behavior in the last 18 months and his

alignment with the Trump government. It's vicious, isn't it? The power that stories have, because much of this, if you were to say reality, you said there's two things, we sort of live in the world and we live in stories. Tesla's cars from, I don't know when they launched, a decade ago, something like that until now, have just linearly got better and cheaper and faster and more convenient with improved build quality. But largely are the same thing, right? So my point is that they haven't changed, but the story around them has. And that's made way more of an impact on the stock price and on

their sales and on the way that people see them, then the incremental improvement month on month, year on year over a decade to their full self-driving capacity. So in this way, the story is more real than reality is. It is more real than reality. That's exactly right. And to understand why you've got to go back to that concept of the story world, that human beings are these two things, we're a bag of bones and blood in the survival realm. But in the story realm, we're nothing more than a collection of ideas that we collect. We are the things that we love.

We are the art that we like. We are the podcast that we listen to. We are, it makes me laugh when I'm watching, you know, travel podcasters who go around the world and they all do, they all copy Baldwin bankrupt's body language. You know, he does this weird thing where he looks behind him all the time. And you see him, especially at the beginning, they do it there. I think subconsciously aping his body language, like because they're, you

know, they're part of, he's part of their identity and that's also true of the things that we owe, the things that we own are part of our identity. So if you're somebody that stands against Trump and you're in a Tesla, it becomes toxic to you because it's like your very self has become polluted with this alien kind of element. You know, you want to cut it out of you. It's a radically bad thing to happen to you. So you're going to reject it.

It's like being forced as a middle-aged man to walk down the road with a, I don't know, with a skin tight Taylor Swift t-shirt on. Like it just makes you deeply uncomfortable. You know, so because the self is nothing more than a collection of ideas in that story realm. What does the Theranos story tell us about group psychology and how that works? Well, I love the Theranos story because it really speaks to all this stuff. You know, as we know, Elizabeth Holmes came along and said she had this

incredible device that she called the Edison. And the Edison was revolutionary because he used to take a couple of vials of blood to do all these huge battery of blood tests and she could do it with a pinprick of blood in your finger. Amazing, revolutionary, fantastic. And as we know now, it was fantasy. It didn't work.

There was no machine. And so what's incredible about the Edison is that she managed to get huge amount of backing from people on her board, including Henry Kissinger, the former director of the Centers of Disease Control. Very, very high status smart men. They were all men on the board, not a single woman. And that's important for reasons that will become apparent in a second. So all these guys gambled their reputation on her telling the truth.

And then incredibly smart, successful guys and girls invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in Theranus. Rupert Murdoch, it was the most amount of money he's ever invested in any company outside of his own family of companies. And the incredible thing about this is most of these people did no due diligence. So Rupert Murdoch did no due diligence. So they didn't even bother to find out whether she was telling the truth. Like it's extraordinary. Some people did.

So somebody from Google Ventures who who were interested in investing, went down to Walmart where Theranos were doing their tests for a blood test. They took two massive vials of blood out of his arm. He's just like, hang on a minute, we are not investing in this. So some people didn't fall for the story, but Rupert Murdoch did and Henry Kissinger did and the Walmart family did. Me and other commentators too, this is not just me who's come up with this. It, I convinced it was the story that she stood for. You know, this was, this was at a time, we're still in that time.

We're in the girl boss era. People were and remain desperate for a female Steve Jobs. You know, people very talk very disparaging about tech bros. You know, the masculinity of the tech world is a problem for the, you know, for the good people of our culture today. So people were desperate for a female Steve Jobs, and she became a female Steve Jobs, even down to the turtleneck. You know, it was extraordinary, the kind of cosplaying that she did. And so, you know, people like Rupert Murdoch and Henry Kissinger, by buying into Theranos, they're making it that part of their identity. So her heroic story becomes their own heroic story.

Rupert Murdoch becomes somebody that has backed this female billionaire genius founder. So that's how important the story is. And as I say in the book, I mean, the device didn't exist. The device was worth nothing, but the story was worth $9 billion. That's what Theranos was valued at at that peak, $9 billion. So that's the power of storytelling to kind of be dazzle the minds of even our greatest smartest wealthiest people. In other news you might have heard me say that whole luggage is a Psi-Op meant to keep you poor and late and while that's true it turns out that when a brand puts hundreds of hours into

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You can get a 20% discount, see everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. Do you, do you think that we overestimate logic because we sort of underestimate identity in this way? Yeah, we do. I, there's something in the brain that tells us that, that, that we are something very powerful that tells us that we are not under the influence of story, that we are under the influence of rationality.

You know, it's actually quite easy to,'s actually quite easy to figure out why that is. Like you have to believe in the story of your group in order for that group to function. Like obviously you do. Because if you don't believe you can't be a part of the group. Yeah, because you're not part of that group's mission, you're de-identified with the group. And also, you know, one of the fundamental things that you want from that group is, well, of the fundamental things that you want from that group is, well, the two fundamental things that you want

is connection and status. So you only really connect with the group if you believe in their story. So if you believe that Jesus was a real guy and that He died and resurrected on the third day, you're a Christian now. That's what you are, you know, you're a Christian. It's as simple as that that Jordan, by the way. And so

now you're connected into that Christian world. But in order to earn status in that Christian world, you have to allow that belief to kind of fill you up. I call it this process, active belief. You have to, that belief has to act on you like a parasite controlling your behavior. So you go out in the world and you start acting out the values and the story of the Christian set of beliefs. You can't do that if you don't believe in Christianity. It won't make any sense to you. And also you can't earn the status. You know, like one of the things that, that, that Muslims do, they call it the hafiz, where they, some, some Muslims will earn the Quran

by heart, so every, every, every word of the Quran, it takes sometimes two to three years is a massive thing. And if you manage to pull this stunt off, you get a huge amount of status. I think it's called hafiz, but you get a certain title and a certain status. Now you have to believe in the story of Islam to go through that trial of two to three years of earning it by heart. Because otherwise you're not going to be motivated to do it. And also more importantly, the status will mean nothing.

It doesn't mean anything. So if you don't believe in the story, to you and me, it's a waste of time learning that book for work. Why would you bother? But if you believe in the story, it has massive meaning. So yeah, we have to believe that the stories that aren't just stories, that they're actual truth, they're reality. And we believe it so much, you know, look at through human history,

people all the time fight and die on behalf of the beliefs of their groups. Yeah, I had this conversation with Andrew Schultz a couple of months ago. Ben Shapiro's famous tweet about facts don't care about your feelings, but in reality, feelings don't care about your facts. And that's a much better way to put it. So I get this sense that facts are kind of, in some ways they do become obsolete in a story- driven world. Yeah.

Yeah. I saw that too. And I was jealous. I was like, damn, I wish I, I wish I'd come up with that, but yeah, it's absolutely not too late to add it to the book. I was like, there's a pretty, it's only a pre-print. Yeah. Yeah.

So, so yeah, I think that's absolutely right. That that's the right way to think about it. And again, I'll just go back to, you know, poor Adam Rutherford and Jordan Peterson, who I would emphasize, they're going to be smart guys who have nothing but respect for, but they have their stories of the world. They believe thoroughly and nobody, no set of facts is going to change their minds on their beliefs.

That seems pretty clear from the tenor of their conversation on social media. Okay. So connection, identity, but also status. So how do we use story to gain status? Yeah. As I said, it's like, once we believe the story of the group, what we want then is to earn status within the group. So nobody wants to be at the bottom rung of a group, liked, but seen as kind of

useless, we kind of want to rise up the group, that's human nature. And you do that by developing a reputation of somebody that's valuable to the group in some way. So, yeah, so as I said, you know, if you're a Christian, you just become a better Christian, you start acting like a Christian. If you're an anti-vaxxer, you don't get vaccinated. You might go protesting. You might start doing some blogging.

You might have an argument with your GP about how vaccines are shit. And then you'll tell all your friends and go, oh, you're amazing. You know, so that's what I call that kind of active belief. We allow, you know, again, we allow that story to take us over. And again, this is why stories are so incredibly persuasive. You see it all the time. Stories take over the minds of people and they start behaving in ways dictated by the story. And it's most extreme, it's a cult. I mean, that's the most extreme form of, you know, what I call a status game where people have one identity, one story, one status game,

and that's it. I mean, that's why people in cults are usually encouraged to not even contact family and friends anymore because they cannot be allowed to have any other source of, any other story, any other identity, any other source of status. And, you know, a religion is just a slightly weaker form of a cult. A political party is a weaker form of a cult and you know, Karen going down and down, the line, you know, all groups are kind of loose or tight and the tightest is the cult. Is there a difference between high and low status influence and storytelling?

Yeah, so you've mentioned Mimesis a couple of times and so, you know, the copying instinct and how that tends to work in the, you know, in human groups is that we are unconsciously constantly on the lookout for people like us, so people that we identify with, who are higher status than us. And when we identify like a high status version of ourselves, we tend to automatically start copying them. That's when the mimesis kicks in. So, we will want to get copying them. That's when the mimesis kicks in. So we will want

to get near them. So that might be by flattering them. If they're a celebrity, it might be by buying their products, joining their social media feeds, going to their concerts. We might start mimicking their patterns of behavior, the way they talk, the way they dress, their artistic tastes. We will automatically, yeah. And I'm constantly, that's because our brain has gone, well, this is a person like me who's got high status. I want high status. So the more I can make myself like this person, the more likely I am to rise up that status

game. Hmm. What about virtue signaling? That's a very specific type of status and probably an involved story. Yeah, well, there are lots of different kinds of status, but there are three main kinds of ways that we can earn status in human groups. The first way is dominance. So that's the much more animalistic way, the much more ancient way. So dominance is violence, the threat of violence, also the threat of social violence, ostracization, cancel culture, all that would come under dominance.

And then there's the other two kind of forms which are based on our reputation, our identity. And so the first one is competence. So we've become good at stuff. So we've become valuable to our group by becoming an excellent hunter or an excellent honeyfinder or an excellent storyteller or an excellent sorcerer. And so people respond to us by rewarding us with status. And in all human groups, the more status you get, the better everything else becomes.

You become safer, better-fed, you get greater access to choice of mates. In the modern world, you get richer. It's always worked like that. It always will work. But the other way of earning status is by virtue. We also award status to people who we perceive as virtuous. The role of virtue in human groups is about rules. It's about knowing the rules, knowing the stories, but it's also enforcing the rules. Again, we have this very naive view that virtue is obviously good, but virtue is 50% good, 50% evil because, you know, packed in with virtue is that instinct to enforce the rules and to punish people who don't share our story world. Michelle Obama, you might call her a

virtue superstar because she's known for her perceived moral goodness by her people. The Pope, the Dalai Lama, these are virtue superstars, these are people who are incredibly high status, Greta Thunberg on the basis of the perception that they are high in levels of virtue. But also during the cultural revolution, the Red Guards were playing virtue-based status games. People doing council culture, it's dominance virtue. They're not interested in competence, they're not interested in success, They're not interested in success. They're interested in, I'm going to punish you for not following the rules and for not believing the sacred stories of my group. Hmm.

How do, it sounds a lot like rivalry. How did the mechanics of rivalry play out in stories, storytelling? Rivalry is interesting. So, um, within a group, um, rivalry can be very, um, productive. So, but rivalry tends to be classified as a one-on-one thing. So if you are a rival with one individual and, you know, what, one of the tests of rivalry, you know, people who are rivals are usually quite similar. They're playing a, they're playing a same status game and they, and they have a history of near wins and close matches. So that's the recipe for a rivalry.

And that kind of rivalry can be amazing. You can drive people to incredible feats. It's the Leonard McCartney thing. In the status game, I told the story of, the true origin story of the iPhone, which is that when Steve Jobs went to a barbecue that his wife organized with some twat from Microsoft who was sort of going, oh, Microsoft has solved computing. You've got this touch device with a stylus. It's going to blow you out of the water. And then Jobs came in to work on the Monday and was furious, livid, and instructed his team to

figure out a way of blowing Microsoft out the water. It wasn't going to be a start, it was going to be with a finger. That's rivalry. Rivalry made the iPhone. It began as the iPad and then reemerged into the iPhone. That tends to be good for us. It's obviously exhausting, but we've all been in that situation where we become obsessed with the rival. It drives you forward. What's less healthy is competition. So if rivalry is one-on-one, one person versus one person, one group versus one group, competition is kind of all against all and competition in that kind of

technical sense is often less productive. It's kind of exhausting. It's kind of toxic. People kind of, people in organizations, high in, you know, very high in competition, um, experienced lots of burnout. They, they, they experienced kind of a kind of a toxic culture in which everybody's kind of hoarding the status for themselves, taking all the credit, um, pushing all the blame away.

So yeah, you've got to be careful in organizations how you're engineering your teams so there's not too much competition, but there is plenty of healthy rivalry. Yeah, well, you need people to be able to capture the upside from doing a really great job whilst not detracting from the positive sum gains that you get by working in a team. And the tension between connection and capturing, I suppose, self capturing of this status. Like I need to show that I'm contributing to the group, but I actually want to capture as much, if not maybe even a little bit more than I actually contributed, but I can't do too much because if I do too much, then people are going to know that I'm a freeloader.

So, you know, I need to have a conspicuous productivity to the point where people will allow, I remember this is so funny. I haven't thought about this for forever. So, uh, during my degree at Newcastle, we had a, uh, uh, consultancy project. This was so fucked up. I can't believe I haven't thought about this in ages. We did a consultancy project for a company. There's a marketing consultancy project.

And we were chosen. I think it was the British fly fishing association. And we, I remember we went down to Stoke on Trent. We all drove down as a group and it was a group of five or six, I don't want to say six, group of six. And me and my business partner were in there. So obviously we were a super, super tight group and real competent. We, you know, we were doing this professionally ourselves.

We knew how everything was going. Uh, went down, we did this consultation project and then we presented it to the lecturer. Now, one of the ways that your grades were mediated was that everybody in the group had to give a relative rating that they thought about the contribution of everybody else in the group, which just, it was

immediately going to allow us to get into coalitional bullshit. Uh, and, and, and sure enough, there was a couple of people who hadn't contributed all that much. And I think, you know, we got the ranking correct, but we fucking twisted the knife for sure, because we were like, and it just became a coordination problem.

And given that me and my business partner were club promoters, all that we do is coordinate people into social groups. That was, I was a professional social coordination manipulator. Uh, we were always, I was never going to, I like, I got that, I think I got some like absurdly high, you know, I got like a, a 1.5 X multiplier on whatever the, the, the group score was for me and my business partner because of how much we'd contribute and we convinced everybody else to give us

this grade, which again, I stand by the fact that we deserved it, but yeah, it just, you know, perverse incentives. So another thing on the, on the rivalry point, have you looked at venting much like the specific act of venting? No, I haven't. I'm fascinated. Fucking awesome. So this is a little bit of Christina Durante, a little bit of Tanya Reynolds,

a little bit of Corey Clark, some evolutionary psychology ladies, super smart people. And venting is a unique type of gossip. You mentioned gossip earlier on. Yeah. It's a, it's a very unique type. Venting allows the gossiper to couch their gossip under the pretext of empathetic concern for the victim.

Ah, yeah. So I mean, you, me and you having a conversation and I say, well, you know, I'm just, I'm really worried about John because, you know, he's sleeping with all these girls and I'm just really worried that he's going to get hurt. Cause I, you know, I care about him so much. And, and I, I'm just really can say he just keeps on sleeping around all the time.

And like, I really think that, you know, he's worth more than that and he doesn't really understand that he's worth more than that. Okay. So what, what, what communication have I communicated during that? Well, I've told you that he's worth more than that. Okay. So what, what, what communicate information have I communicated during that? Well, I've told you that John's being a man whore, right? Uh, but I've done it. I, I, John, I'm just so worried. I didn't say, I didn't say anything bad about you. I just care

about you so much as a friend. Yeah. It's coming from a good place. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I've, I've positioned me as the sort of person that morally would, well, I mean, if I'm pointing this out, I can't be behaving, engaging in the same behavior. Me, like John, I would never, I would never behave in the same way that John behaves. I mean, this is, I mean, just I care about him so much. So you've got all of this stuff. It's a very unique form of gossip, venting. Yeah.

Read it, a novel vector of attack that it's specifically done amongst women, which is why all of the people that I mentioned that did the research were female researchers. Well, I hate to bring it up, but I am thinking about Love Island as your, because you're just- Yay, there it is. It is. Coalitional warfare.

Exactly. That's why I remain a fan. You see that all the time amongst the women in Love Island. The other kind of gossip which I've detected in Love Island is you see that, what you call venting, which is that kind of naked status of warfare. But you also see what they call it co-rumination. And what I, what they call it co-rumination and what, why I found, especially recent, recent series of love item, when they, when the guys have a problem, it's so interesting. The guys get together and try and solve the problem.

Um, and, um, that, that, that often hold each other a bit accountable and that might get a bit RC, um, but they, but, but they often will, um, and. So sometimes they'll try to build each other up and you can do it, mate. You can do it. You just need to do this. So the kind of, the kind of coalitional care amongst the men is focused around problem solving and accountability a bit. But the female, when the females get together, they do the venting, but they

also do this co-rumination. So rather than, so when the woman says, oh, I've got this problem with Bob, rather than trying to figure out and solve the problem, it's this pile of, yeah, he's an asshole. He's a bastard. Oh, you're quite right. I feel so sorry for you. And again, it's similar to the venting thing because it feels like they're being sisterly and supportive. What they're actually doing is driving that person even further into the ground. Away from a solution. They're exaggerating the problem.

They're demonizing the man and turning his behavior into this horrendous thing. You know, there's usually tears and then a big fucking argument after it. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a holy kind of toxic and kind of devious form of inadvertent commerce help because it makes everything worse for that individual. And like with venting, the women who are doing it are made to feel superior, like they're being helpful and supportive, but actually they're not. It's performative empathy in that regard.

It looks like a caring approach from the outside and probably feels like it from the inside. I mean, this is, you know, the best way to deceive others is to believe the deception yourself. And, you know, very few people that are venting are thinking this is some 5D chess way for me to gain status or stand on the shoulders of this other person's rumor or whatever it might be. or stand on the shoulders of this other person's rumor or whatever it might be. But yeah, the sort of bare-facedness of revealing somebody else's shortcomings. There's this phenomenal Bill Burr bit where he's talking about body positivity in the WNBA. He says, ladies, if you could only support the WNBA, the way that you support a fat chick who's

ate herself out of her dress size and is no longer a threat to you, they'd be making more money than the NBA. Dude, I wrote an entire essay about it because it's such an accurate insight. I think that the body positivity movement in many ways is women encouraging their attractive, but slightly chubby girlfriends to not diet themselves down into their mating competition pool. It's no darling.

You look, you look great at any size. Like you don't need to lose weight. No, you're a queen. Like if they, if he can't see that, if he's not able to work out, he doesn't deserve you. Like you're better than him. Meanwhile, like rules for thee, but not for me. It's a luxury belief as, as, as Robert Henderson would say, um, that if you're a bigger girl with a bigger girlfriend, her, uh, dieting down or her, you know,

hitting the gym and making herself more physically attractive, is you now no longer being able to keep up with her. And if you are a more in shape girl, that is a huge threat to you. It's one of the reasons why I believe that people who are in shape, BMI, are more threatened by your Zempik than people who are plus size, because the people that are plus size, even though ostensibly they are the ones whose identity is being threatened, they don't have anything to lose in the same way.

Because my competition pool is my competition pool. Maybe there's even fewer people at this size now. So perhaps I can access the people more easily. But if you're in shape and you see that someone's able to get there easily, unfairly, hey, fuck you. Stay where you don't deserve this. This is not how our latest game is played. Yeah, absolutely.

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Yeah, so so it's interesting. Sub stack. Substack, they're obviously kind of a new kind of social media player. And they've been sort of figuring out how to kind of employ status game psychology into their platform, I think a little bit. I've got to be careful because my wife works for Substack. I've got none of this from her. What I've written in the book, I got from something that Chris Best, one of the founders, wrote. He wrote a really interesting essay about state of psychology in Substack. It was initially, I think, that they kind of made this mistake where they were putting writers into some kind of chart that could easily be gamed. So what that meant was that writers were then getting bots to like their essays, so they were gaming the thing. And so they changed it to, we are now going to reward writers who make the most money.

Because that's the status game of Substack. Our purpose on this earth is to allow creators, especially writers, to make a living from their work. So that's our game. So from now on, we're going to reward you. We're going to reward the writers who earn the most money. And then it kind of fixed itself. They got their incentives correct and the game started to be being played correctly.

Did you look at how stories play out in the role of reputational crises? We're in the era of take down and break down and accusation and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, there are a few ways of sort of tackling that. I mean, you know, one of the ways is to kind of think, you know, go back to that idea of female aggression is that we're just talking about with defending and the co-rumination. And I feel, you know, I feel that the whole woke thing, the reputation destruction thing, it just feels like a very kind of female heavy

movement. It kind of feels like a female style movement. Male aggression tends to be one on one out in the open. You could talk about toxic masculinity as being a guy walking into the room, being very intimidating to people and pushing people around and bullying people. Female aggression tends to be coalitional. It's the group against the one. There's a lot of behind the scenes gossip and it's about not physical destruction, but reputation destruction.

And so, you know, you can see the success of feminism, the incredible rise in the power of women in society and culture kind of goes hand in hand with this new way that we're playing status games in the world, Wokism and cancel culture being one of them. So that's one way that I kind of think about this. Kind of more technically, there are a few things that are right about in the story as a deal about how to kind of manage times of reputation destruction and what is a good apology. One of the things that's really interesting from evolutionary

psychology is just how incredibly toxic the state of selfishness is. So because we're this tribal animal, we are this, you know, coalitional loving ape, you know, we form into these super organisms. What the story is always wanting us to do is to be selfless, is to put the group's interests before our own interests. So when you look in storytelling, generally, a hero is always somebody that puts the group before themselves, but somebody else before themselves. So selflessness is the essence of heroism universally. So, you know, courage in the face of crisis for the group, you know, whatever it is. So selflessness is ineffably heroic.

And its opposite is selfishness. So, you know, villains in stories are always selfish in some way. They want to keep all the rewards for themselves. They want to keep their own interests. Selflessness is ineffably heroic and its opposite is selfishness. So villains in stories are always selfish in some way. They want to keep all the rewards for themselves. They want to keep the girl for them, whatever it is. They want to hoard resources. So one of the things that leaders need to avoid massively doing in times of crisis is to have

the appearance of selfishness. And that's one of the things that Tony Hayward did, the CEO of BP when there was the huge Gulf oil spill, you know, he didn't handle it very well at the beginning, he tried to kind of push blame away, but he eventually accepted full blame and enacted the most expensive cleanup operation in all of history, just an enormous, you know, deliberation pay for by BP. And then he did a TV interview and at the end of the TV interview, he said, believe me, no one wants to get this over more than I do.

I'd like my life back. And that moment just destroyed him. Not only did it destroy him, it became international news. You know, Barack Obama, who was president at the time, even started talking about it. And of course he got, you know, his 25 year career at BP was kind of over in a flash. So that's really important that in times of trouble, you've got to appear selfless, because selflessness is the essence of the hero in the human story world. And there was another thing which I thought was very interesting. There's a guy called Christopher Booker who wrote an epic book called The

Seven Basic Plots, and he defined the heroes having these four qualities of feeling, order, strength, and agency. And so heroes in stories kind of tend to show those kind of four qualities. And when you look at really good apology videos from people, they tend to embody those four. Feeling, order, strength and agency. Yeah. They tend to embody those kind of four qualities in a really perfect way. What's a good apology video and what's a horrible apology video? Well, the apology video I really like is from way back in history and it's a guy

called, well, way back in history, I believe it was 20 years ago. No, it was 2007, it's very early days of YouTube. And it's Patrick Doyle who took over Domino's and kind of, Patrick Doyle is an amazing CEO. He really turned Domino's around. He turned it from being, you know, from down there to up there. He was a kind of revolutionary guy. But he just, he just begun Domino's. And it was the early days of YouTube and these two idiots in a local Domino's decided to

make a video themselves picking their noses and rubbing it on a pizza and farting on a pizza and setting the pizza out. And they put the video on YouTube and nobody really knew what YouTube was at the time. And so this thing went on YouTube on the Monday and Domino's was like, oh, nobody's going to see this. Then the next day, hundreds of thousands of people see it. And then by the Wednesday, when you typed in Domino's into Google, it was

the top thing on Google. So Domino's actually opened their first Twitter account in order to put this video on there. And Patrick Doyle did this kind of off, seemingly sort of pretty off the cuff apology video. You can still find it on YouTube. And he really embodies all of those. I mean, broadly speaking, it's the kind of masculine and the feminine. You've got strength and order, feeling and sorry, strength and order, feeling and understanding, not feeling an agency, strength and order, feeling and understanding. And he does all, he hits all of those kind of four buttons in the apology video. You can tell he's furious. You know, he's angry. We've called the police, they've

been arrested. We've shut down the branch of dominoes. We've completely, you know, he tells you all the things they've done, which is the, you know, the tough guy stuff. But then he adds in, look, we're a franchise business. All these dominoes around the country, they're owned by moms and dads that, you know, like, and they're all suffering and the people who own this dominoes franchise are suffering too. And we, you know, we feel really bad for them. So you've got that feeling and understanding stuff in there too.

And it worked. I mean, so, you know, when you talk about this whole Domino's scandal with the, with the snot and the farts, no one's ever heard of it. It went away. You know, it went away. So it was a really successful apology video. And I think it's because it, you know, he does come across as this, you know, he's a, he's a lumpy CEO.

He doesn't look particularly heroic, but he, but he's embodying all the courses of the classic narrative hero in that video. Have you seen any bad ones? Do any science of storytelling suboptimal? Oh yeah, I forget the name of the platform now, but it's in the book. There's a guy, there was some website he owned, I think. And he had to lay off like two people.

Um, and, and when he had to lay off two people, he put a video of his self up on LinkedIn with a tear, like a genuine, like a tear coming down his face. Um, uh, talking about, I wish, I wish I was the kind of CEO that could just lay people off and not care, but I care so much. And of course, you know, it's back to the selfishness thing. He's just thinking about himself. It was entirely self-defeating.

The comments under the LinkedIn video were hilarious. It became a big Daily Mail story. It became this massively hated figure for a few days in the media generally. The LinkedIn tier guys is, I think, the worst one I've ever seen. Okay. So getting practical, what do most people get wrong about good stories, good storytelling? What do most people get wrong about good storytelling? I think, there's so much, but do you mean when they're trying to create kind of persuasive stories?

Yeah, okay. Well, I think people still feel that the best way to sell a product is with facts about the product. I mean, there might be cases in which that's true. Certainly you can list lots of business to business cases in which that's true. If you're wanting to order a part for your car, your rocket, you just want to know how good the part is. That's fine. But if we're not talking business to business, it generally is the best way to appeal to people's identities.

It's much more powerful than appealing to the quality of your product. That general idea of identification is just a massively important thing, not just in persuasive storytelling, but in all storytelling. In the stories that we love, we sit down and the film begins or the novel begins and we meet a character that we identify with. There's a very ridiculous idea in storytelling still that people want to write characters that we like.

Likeability is the thing. But likeability isn't the thing. Identification is the thing. You know, if we identify with somebody, if part of our brain goes, that person on the screen, that's me, then we're going to love that story. You know, that's why the girl boss here in Hollywood has been so unbelievably toxic. In the Indiana Jones, the Star Wars, and in the UK, the Doctor Who, where they've not just removed all the straight white male characters, but humiliated them.

They've killed them and humiliated them and replaced them with mostly cardboard cutout girlbosses. So these story franchises were broadly made for young men. There were stories for young men, but they've been, you know, disidentified with these stories, which are a part of their identity, like a big part of their lives. And that's why they respond with such fury. It's not because they're misogynist or racist or anything stupid like that.

It's because, you know, in a very real sense, if you're humiliating and degrading Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones and Doctor Who, you're humiliating and degrading they themselves who are watching it. So, so, so, so, so that identification is just a massively important thing. If it was just, I like Luke Skywalker, he is likable. You've made him unlikable. So what? But I identify with Luke Skywalker, he is likable. You've made him unlikable. So what, but I identify with Luke Skywalker. I see me in him and he's now being mocked or castigated or whatever.

That makes me feel mocked and castigated. Absolutely right. So, absolutely. So, so when we identify with anything, we make it a part of ourselves. You know, we make the music, the art we love a part of ourselves. We make the cars we buy a part of ourselves. You know, we make the music with the art we love a part of ourselves. We make the cars we buy part of ourselves. You know, we are a collection of ideas and you know, what, you know, one of the most important facets of our identity and the people, the stories that we love,

and the characters that we grew up with. You know, Luke Skywalker at the beginning of the first Star Wars film is this orphan. He, he, he, he works on a moisture farm. His solo status, his nickname amongst his school friends was Wormy, that's what they called him, Wormy. He overcomes his fears and becomes this incredible hero and people love Luke Skywalker. But in the latter period of Star Wars, they've reintroduced him as just the sort of thing with Indiana Jones, they do it time and time again. They reintroduced these amazing straight white male heroes and make them miserable, sexist, disillusioned.

They had him sort of chugging this kind of weird teat milk off her. I mean, he was humiliated. He wasn't just- I mean, you saw this with Chris Hemsworth as Thor, right? And you've done that across a much shorter timeline. I think the first Thor probably came out less than 15 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, something like that. And the, you know, across the span of maybe only four Thor movies, maybe

like eight that he was involved in to do with the Avengers, he's gone from being slightly childish, but lovingly heroic god guy to person that does Jean-Claude Van Damme splits over flying dragons and is kind of always out of touch and the butt of every joke and totally unself aware and yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if someone was like, I see a little bit of that, you know, heroic energy, but kind of adult-manchild thing in Thor. I think they would feel put out in a way. So how important are heroes then? Is that a crucial element of most stories?

Yeah. Archetypal storytelling I'm talking about. I'm not talking about modernist novels that exist to break the rules. That's the whole point of them. In archetypal storytelling, protagonists are really important because my book is called A Story is a Deal. What I mean by that is that a story subconsciously says, if you behave like the hero does, you're going to be rewarded with these incredibly precious social resources of connection and

status. That's what all heroes in archetypal stories win. They win connections and and status. That's what all heroes and archetypal stories win. They win connection and or status. So that's what happens with, obviously, with Luke Skywalker. In Star Wars, he begins as Wormien, ends up with a big medal around his chest surrounded by people who love him. That's what we all want. That's a human universal. That's what drives everyone. Three things, survival, connection and status. Those are the three things that all humans want. Those are the three things that are the subject of all archetypal storytelling. All stories are about survival, connection or status. The best stories, the stories that last through

the ages that we can watch again and again and again are about all three. If you think about a movie like The Revenant, that's about survival. A movie like standby means that connection movie like barbie or what lashes about status but the godfather. That's about survival and connection and status in about equal measure so is remia juliet so star wars and these epic amazing stories feel so rich and full and drenched in meaning because they're about. and full and drenched in meaning because they're about, you know, all three of the things that matter most to humans. And we learn about them through the hero. How does the hero survive? How does the hero earn connection? How does the hero earn status? We absorb those, you know, messages subconsciously. You know, they teach us who to be in the world. And that's why they're so incredibly important. And when we're a teenager and we, you know, we kind of make Luke Skywalker part of our identity, and then he's, you know,

humiliated and degraded and replaced in this way, it's, you know, it's painful. And the bitter irony is we've got this kind of moral panic in the UK at the moment about this ridiculous show, Adolescence on Netflix, which is another kind of, as far as I could see, straightforward piece of anti-strait white male propaganda, pating us as misogynist see, straightforward piece of anti-straight white male propaganda and painting us as misogynist woman killers who can't even take an insult without picking up a knife and committing murder. And now there's all these stories saying, oh, men just don't have any role models anymore.

And it's, yeah, because you replaced us all. You replaced us all with girl bosses. You humiliated us and wrote us out of your scripts. And now you're worrying and panicking. Yeah, no, you're right. We don't anymore because, because the men that we see on our screens these days, as you said, tend to be the butt of jokes. They tend to be disempowered.

Um, women are always running in rings about them, humiliating them, knocking them down with one punch. I mean, you see it again and again and again and again and again, and it's been going on for over a decade now. Will Barron Well, if you create a vacuum in terms of story, in terms of archetype, and you, yeah, retcon, replace role models for any group, any group at all, and you know, for a good while, maybe the archetypal boss bitch woman who did want to be focused on their career, who did want to feel like they were high achieving and they had agency. Maybe that was an issue and maybe many women were left cut adrift and felt lonely

because I don't really see women with the drive that I have in 1960s cinema. What's that rule? Somebody's law about whether or not a woman talks to another woman in a movie and not about a man? I mean, do you know this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true. I mean, you know, it's a totally fair criticism. But I think they're always happy, but I think, you know, I think you're right. There weren't enough well-written female heroes with agency, you know, but you did get Princess Leia, you did get, you know, Sigourney Weaver in Alien.

I mean, growing up, I loved Prime Suspect, Helen Mirren's character in Prime Suspect. I loved all that stuff. I mean, so it's not as though these characters didn't exist, but I think we've got to a crazy place now where in order to find a kind of straight white man in a hero role, you've got to watch some terrible Guy Ritchie movie. Like largely speaking, they just don't really exist anymore. And interestingly, I think a lot of people are now, like you are, thriving on the internet because the internet is a meritocracy and isn't...

There's no gatekeepers anymore. There's no gatekeepers. So the internet's kind of the only place now where straight white male creators can survive and make a living. Well, you also certainly end up with a situation if there is a vacuum, you know, there was a vacuum for the women role model and that got filled, got filled by a variety of better and worse examples of that. And then it, you know, the novelty has been taken to complete parody with saturation. And then

if you create a vacuum around men, you will have Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson and, and Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson and, and, uh, bodybuild rich Piana. Like pick your, pick your alpha male guy or whatever, like even beta male guy of choice, pick your, whoever role model it is that you want from the left, from the right, libertarian, authoritarian, whatever. Um, if there aren't any that are supplied, that creates a gap in the market. There's no coffee shop for three mile radius around this particular neighborhood. Guess what? There's going to be a fucking coffee shop.

Yeah. Well, that's, that's the thing. And I think early period Jordan Peterson, why he was so electrically exciting because all he was doing was sticking up for men. That's what he was doing. And he became this lightning rod. He became, you know, you either loved him or you hated him. And all he was doing was sticking up for us.

You know, we were so desperate for somebody to stand up and go, there's actually nothing wrong with being a straight white man and this is how you ought to do it. And you should hold your head up and clean your room and all that stuff. It was kind of a legifying. But then on the other side, you do have your Andrew Tates. If young men, if the culture keeps on telling straight white men that they're bad and they're useless and they're the butt of every joke and they're going to be girlboss

to hell in every drama they see and they're going to be in adolescence and shown stabbing them into death, then they're going to go to the people that says, no, I respect you. I've got your back. Of course they are because they want status like we all do. I mean, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a kind of, I think people underestimate kind of how, how, how pervasive all of this stuff is really. I mean, and I, and I kind of think we're at the foothills of a, of a new era here. And I see it very, I see it very, um, um, starkly in my world, which is books. Given that you've been involved in the writing and publishing here and I see it very starkly in my world, which is books.

Given that you've been involved in the writing and publishing industry for a long time, I can see that this is a point of passion for you. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because I mean, I've kind of all right in a sense because I'm in there now and I have a readership and so that's fine, but I know, I'm pretty sure that if I was starting out now, I'll be finding it extremely hard to get a book deal. And I've also seen the change in the way my books are received since all this happened, you know, like when Selfie was published, I think 2017, it was reviewed across all the newspapers, I was on the television, I was on Newsnight, I was on

radio one, two, three, four and five. You know, like there was loads of publicity, it was fantastic. And then when all this started happening, I found it extremely hard now to get any publicity. Like a story's a deal, a book just published, we got one review, one review and we could reach in the times, that's it. So paradoxically, the more successful I've become as an author, my last two books have been by far and away by most successful. The harder it is to get any coverage in the mainstream media,

to get support from the bookshops, and to get slots at book festivals. I used to be at the Edinburgh Festival every year. Now, there's no way I get into the Edinburgh Festival anymore. Despite the fact that you're selling more books than you ever did. Yeah. The. Yeah. And, you know, and, and the fact is that the only reason I'm still going is because of the, because of the podcast fit. Like the, you know, it was the podcast guys that supported the status game.

Like, you know, the status game has done really well now because it was embraced by people like you and. Well, because it was brilliant. Right. Well, thank you, Chris. But like, but, but, but when it was published, again, we got one review week of release, we couldn't get anyone to talk about it. It was crazy.

Oh, the day I was published, I looked on Amazon and it was at number something like six, six, and it was 6,500 in the best solution. Honestly, I was devastated. I was like, what is going on? But it's because it got no publicity, but it's ended up being successful because of the podcast, because the podcast.? But it's because you've got no publicity, but it's ended up being successful because of the podcast. Because podcast is important. You shoved it down everybody's throats.

Well, you know, for now, the podcast sphere is still male dominated. And we'll see between, unless you're Mel Robbins or Alex Cooper. Yeah. I think it's, you know, the top, whatever. But you see, I don't think that's a coincidence because I think people like you and, you know, a lot of the other sort of big podcast guys in the previous generation, you'd be on television, but there's no place in mainstream media for, for, for, for, for straight white guys anymore.

So they're doing podcasts. And so I think that's why. That's a little bit of a meme. I actually did a, uh, recorded a live tour video going on tour in the US and Canada back end of this year. And the entire crux of the joke is that I'm in prison. I've been detained by ICE in America and I'm in prison because America's getting rid of all surplus white podcasters.

So the meme keeps on memeing. Just on the practical point around the stories, you mentioned atomic statements before. Yeah. How do you make stories more sticky? It's all well and good. You tell someone a story. For you, as the person that's written it or put it together, you believe that it's important, but it needs to grab someone.

It needs to sort of get its teeth into their brains. It needs to stay with them. What, what are the things that determine whether a story is sticky or not? Well, one thing is that atomic nature, it's got to be have brevity and clarity. So, so, so he's got to have his maximum meaning in minimal space. So you know, that, that, that, so that's a tweet, that's a meme, that's a, that's an aphorism, you know, so, so it's got. So it's got to have maximum meaning in minimal space. It's got to appeal to somebody's identity.

So people got to identify with what you're saying. And it's got to tell them a story that they want to hear, that reaffirms the story of their identity. So going back to that example of, Kamala is for they, them, Trump is for you. That's a perfect example of a, it's a perfect example of a, you know, it's a perfect kind of atomic statement sticky because it's, it's easy to understand, easy to memorize, easy to share, you know, you're going to tell it to each other. It appeals to identity and it tells a story that people really want to hear.

It reaffirms their perception of the world. Are there fundamental questions that everyone's trying to answer with a story? Or are they so varied that there's no such thing as a unifying thread? The most fundamental question that humans ask really is, who do I have to be in this place in order to earn connection and status? That's fundamentally what brains are always asking. When we come out of the womb, we have these, what they're called, experienced expectant brains.

They're half-wired up and the rest of the wiring comes up during our childhood. And culture is kind of forming itself in our brains. We're figuring out our identity. Who do I have to be in order to earn connection and status? And of course, adolescents and early 20s is a peak time for, for really thinking about this stuff and identity formation. But we never stop asking those questions. We never stop. We never stop changing who we are, you know, people talk about audience capture. That's, that's why audience capture is so dangerous. You know, even the smartest people, um, some of the who we mentioned tonight,

um, started off, you know, in my estimation as sort of rational, smart, really interesting people. And they've gone on a journey and the journey has been to kind of take their identity to a place that feels like it's much more about telling their audience what they want to hear and telling a story of heroes and villains and we're great and they're terrible. So that to me the, these are the most fundamental questions that everybody asks and, and, and, and we turn ourselves into the answer, you know, we turn ourselves into the people we have to be in order to earn connection and status from our groups. Interestingly, there was a, an article by Ethan Cross.

I must bring this up fucking once a week. It's phenomenal. Uh, it's called, uh, criticism capture is more dangerous than audience capture. And what he talks about with audience capture being predicting what it is that the audience wants and allowing yourself to be puppeted by their desires. You feed red meat to the audience. You become increasingly predictable over time. Um, is that sort of regression to the mean of what your audience wants

kind of would be a way to put it. sort of regression to the mean of what your audience wants kind of would be a way to put it. Criticism capture is his belief that criticisms are much more warping than compliments are enthusing. So people who make content online, they start to compensate in a variety of different ways. They become firebrands, you know, they become very defensive or very aggressive about their position. They begin to create in a manner that pushes back or tries to sort of counter what it is that their perceived critics or their genuine critics say about them. And I, at least in my experience, if you look at a lot of the, the sort of internet uh, personalities and the ways that people have conducted themselves. And also I can see this in myself too.

Um, I get way more warped by criticism than I do by compliments. Uh, you know, I start to, uh, caveat more aggressively or I couch things or I steer clear of particular topic or there's a temptation to do all of these, you know, in my braver, more equanimous moments, I'm like, no, fuck it, like, just say what you mean. But pain is much more painful than pleasure is pleasurable. And that simple sort of fact about the way that we experience the world, it plays out too in the way that people respond to you.

You know, if you were to in the way that, uh, people respond to you, you know, If you, uh, were learning to do salsa dancing and you salsa danced and someone gave you a high five, five, five classes in a row and said, oh man, that was cool. But then on the sixth class, someone went, dude, you fucking suck. Why are you going salsa dancing? Like you're going to, that one's going to stay with you and then maybe you're not going to show up anymore. And maybe you're going to salsa dance more slowly or quietly, or maybe you're

going to come in and you're going to say, I and then maybe you're not going to show up anymore. Or maybe you're going to salsa dance more slowly or quietly, or maybe you're going to come in and you're going to say, I'm the best salsa dancer in this entire play. You know, there's loads of ways that you get warped by criticism. Well, as an author, you always remember, you never remember the good reviews. You only remember the bad reviews. It's just a cliche, but it's absolutely true. You know, yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. I'm sure.

And there's also an evolutionary kind of angle to that because, you know, criticism is a form of gossip. And you know, back in the days when our brains were evolving in the hunter gatherer tribe, if you are the subject of negative gossip, it was life threatening. You know, literally you could be kicked out of the tribe, you could be killed, you know, and sometimes even eaten. So in the back of our minds, we've always got that. You know, that program is still inside us.

Social criticism is dangerous, but potentially life-threatening. So you must attend to it very carefully and adapt your behavior. So I've no doubt, it's a smart take from you, think twice, absolutely. Yeah, I've no doubt that criticism capture is far more important than audience capture. Yeah. What was that smoker discussed thing? The story about changing habits around smoking. Oh yeah. This is one of my stories I really like because it really shows you how people

care about identity far more than they care about their own lives. And it's just an argument that you can't understand why humans smoke without understanding our need for status and needs to have this kind of a higher status identity. You know, I used to smoke, you know, and start smoking in the, in the, in the nineties and you know, we knew back then that smoking was going to kill you. We knew it was addictive and it was going to make you, um, you know, to your breath stink, your clothes stink. It's going to cost you a fortune.

And yet we still did it. Why did we do it? Well, we did it because it makes you perhaps 8% cooler when you're at the gig. You know, that's why we did it. You know, it's ridiculous. It's crazy. And, you know, that's kind of what they found in the book. I tell the story of how, you know, when cigarettes kind of, um, were became

popular after the, the, the war, because they packed tobacco into the, into their Russian packs in the first world war and the second world war, so all these veterans, these soldiers came back smoking, cigarettes, smoking took on this very masculine, um, rebellious identity. Like if you've been to war and walked out of it, you smoked, you know, that kind of thing, so it's very masculine thing to do. And then there's this brilliant genius, Sigmund Freud's nephew was hired by, it was a great company to try and get women smoking.

And this was in the twenties when, you know, feminism was just becoming this big, massively powerful kind of cultural force. And so he said that, so he paid lots of like debutantes and Vogue models to appear at some big sort of flashy events in New York or smoking cigarettes. And they were photographed and, you know, it was shown everywhere. So you know, it's a high status thing. And he ran his ad campaign saying the cigarettes were, yes, they're rebellious, but that's why feminists

should smoke because feminists, you call them torches of freedom. They're torches of freedom. And it was massively, massively successful, and again, an appeal to identity. And so that traveled across to the UK in cinema. So in Hollywood, heroines like started smoking cigarettes, Marlon Dietrich and people like that. And so women in the UK started smoking cigarettes, you know, Marlon Dietrich and people like that. And so women in the UK started smoking too. So the whole story of smoking is all about status. It's all about identity.

And that's how it fades out as well. It faded out accidentally for generations, well, generations, I don't know, for a long time, governments in the UK, America and elsewhere was always a pill to survive or to stop smoking. It's going to give you cancer. Here's a picture of a lung, all that, you know, these are the warnings, America and elsewhere, it was always a pill to survive or to stop smoking. It's going to give you cancer. Here's a picture of a lung, all that, you know, these are the warnings. No one gave a shit, had no impact whatsoever. What made it stop was when there was a moral panic about secondhand smoke.

You know, why should I be in a restaurant and breathe in somebody else's smoke? So starting in California, I think it was in 2007, they banned smoking in restaurants and then it became workplaces. And then it spreads throughout America, spread to the UK. And then suddenly you couldn't look 8% cooler anymore if you're smoking a cigarette because the smokers weren't inside, but at the restaurant or at the bar, at the gig, they were shuffling outside in the rain to have a quick fang by the bins and shuffling back in again.

And very quickly smoking began to kind of fall out of fashion because it became low status rather than high status. And you know, that reflects my own story. I desperately tried to get out of smoking because I started coughing up literally, I was chained to chain smoke when I was drinking and I was used to drinking, I used to be an alcoholic basically. And I would cough up brown jelly in the sink in the morning. It was freaking me out.

But even that didn't stop me smoking. I tried twice and failed. What got me to stop was I was a journalist on a magazine called Loaded. It was just a kind of a men's magazine and there were lots of women in Loaded. And one time I was assigned to go, I can't remember if it was a model or it was a Hollywood actress. It was one of the two. And if you've ever been on one of these shoots, they have these false

polystyrene walls behind which they do the dressing. So they're doing the hair and the makeup and the styling. So I knocked on the wall and went in to introduce myself and said, I'm here. I'll be waiting out here and sat behind the, sat behind the polystyrene wall. And then I heard the stylist say to the Hollywood actress, did you see his fingers, those yellow stains of them? That's disgusting. I was like, Oh my God.

Like, so it was the status. It was the having the two pretty women call me disgusting. That was what pushed me over the edge. And you know, and what was true for me is true for people in general. I mean, I know we've got the vaping issue now as a new issue, but smoking cigarettes is, you know, it fell off. It became low status and that's what stopped it. And then do you think binge drinking, the decline in binge drinking now is,

where do you think that's come from? Yeah, I suspect there is some truth in the argument that you hear a lot that it's to do with social media, that, I mean, God, you know, when I was binge drinking, when I was a teenager, there's no, I mean, you wake up in the morning, you want to forget everything that ever happened, the idea that it's going to be filmed on TikTok is just horrendous. But I also think there's a bigger story to that that I don't fully understand.

I mean, there certainly has been this kind of lurch towards puritanism in the Gen Z generation, the generation of my nieces, because it's not just about binge drinking, it's about sex, it's about drug use, it's about the moral purity. Are they the first generation to be more morally pure than their parents? I mean, maybe. It's of a weird thing that's happened to Gen Z's that encompasses binge drinking is just part of it. Yeah. I think, you know, an increasing focus on health. I ran nightclubs for forever.

So I saw this firsthand, that the arc of probably the peak of Larry British drinking, especially young people drinking culture and contributed to it. And, and I profited from it in many ways. And, um, yeah, the advent of the smartphone, the fact that this can just detect whatever it is that's going on. Um, we were used to run this bark roll called carnage and there was tasks on the back that you had to tick off with a marker pen, like pulled a pig, got off with three random, swapped shoes with somebody.

And there's just no, there's this fucking, um, surveillance state run by gullible volunteers. That is the smartphone in your pocket and the subsequent Like info that gets put up on the internet afterward. It's like a panopticon, right? It's just that there is nothing you can do. There is no amount of embarrassment that can be forgotten about. Like you could deny it. You could say that someone misremembered it.

You could say that they were lying, but if there's video evidence, you're fucked and there's video evidence of ever everything now. Yeah. I'm sure that's got a lot to do with it. I'm sure you're absolutely right. I mean, you know, because again, it goes back to what do we want? We want connection and status. And, you know, when you're sort of binge drinking, it's hard to maintain that status in the eyes of people.

And Jesus, if it's recorded indebtedly and perhaps uploaded to YouTube by somebody, there's no way. Not good, especially not if it's reacted to by the Domino's fucking CEO. That would be a bad beginning. Will, let's bring this one home, mate. I love you, I love your work. I think that the things that you write are phenomenal. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the shit that's going on.

My sub stack, willstore.subst stack.com is called you are a story. We've got weekly essays on that. Well, everything we've been talking about today really, and more. So yeah, I'd love to see you there. And you've got a book. Oh yeah. My book, a story is a deal in trouble. I get told off.

Yeah. Stories of deal. My new book on storytelling and persuasion. So if you're interested in, in, in the science of storytelling and how it, how it's, how it's used to persuade people and change belief and change behavior, you will find it in a story is a deal. Heck yeah. Well, I appreciate you. Thank you, mate. Thanks, Chris. That was amazing. Thank you.