#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling
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Why are stories so persuasive? Well, stories are persuasive because humans think in stories. Our brains remix reality and turn that reality into a narrative with ourselves at the center. So 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, you know, technology out there. Story's 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 is

feels most real and is persuasive, which is story and archetype and mythology and personification and blah, blah. And to start to believe in the thing, which is the most sterile and novel and sort of alien to us.

Absolutely. And I think there's a huge naivety out there, especially in what you might call our world. We like to think of ourselves as rational people, atheistic people, people who are interested in data and science. And 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.

Steven 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, you know, automatically skeptical about crazy beliefs. I just think that's sort of deeply naive, you know, like what you'll find, especially, you know, you see all the time in the era of social media is that, you know, even

scientists you know not even scientists as much as anybody else they start with the story and then they find the data to back up their story so you can find you know academics who know way more than you or are both of us put together about human biology who believe in that kind of woke idea of uh you know um biology you know biology gender biology and you know you know why are men men

better than women at certain things, you know, 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. So, you know, you can take something 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 of this, you know, so, so, 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

you know, gender, uh, talks to me, but certainly about what's going on in Israel, Palestine. Dispassionately. Yeah. Dispassionately because, because, because not because they're dishonest, not because there, um, is anything wrong with them, but because they're lost in the story. They're utterly lost in the, in their particular story of the world and the data that they cite, the data that they choose to believe, um, is subservient to the story. So even with people like Adam and Jordan, you know, two brilliant minds, um, 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 to me. Cool idea. So this is from Brian Klass, who wrote Fluke, an outstanding book, nearly as good as yours. And he talks about 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...

He contends that a much bigger issue is knowingness. And knowingness is a belief that you already have the answer to the question before the question has been posed. It's a kind of reverse intellectual curiosity. So I know, 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 was simply misinformation, he

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 people feel like they already know the answer, and this is kind of similar to the 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. He has this great line where he says,

everybody acts as if the facts are already settled whilst no one can agree on what the facts actually are. Yeah, I mean, knowing this 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 the idea that we all

you know, we all live in this narrative. And, you know, one of the kind of moments in my career as a writer that always sticks with me was when I was in my twenties. I wrote my very first book was about ghosts and 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, you know, 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, Maurice 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, 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 brain is this amazing evidence-finding machine. If you've got a belief, the brain will find evidence to back up your belief. No matter what you believe about gender or Israel-Palestine or whatever it might be, your brain is going to find evidence

multitudinous evidence to back up what you believe. You're going to see it everywhere. And that's one of the tricks of the kind of storytelling brain. We live in this story world. We live in this narrative. And 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, we've got to believe their story. Every group has a story it tells of the world, 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 we share a story with most of your viewers and it's reassuring. You know, we see evidence for it everywhere.

So that's kind of how all this is working. The brain isn't motivated to discover the truth. The brain is motivated to make us want to collect with like-minded people and then state us 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 in A Story's a Deal, the big thing

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, 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

a problem. You've got all these apes, you know, once upon a time. How do you connect all those individualistic ape brains together? How do you get all those brains firing all

in the form of this highly collected super organism. Well, you do it with story. Story is a device of fusing brains together. You know, under the power of story, we're all facing in the same direction, pursuing the same goals, overcoming the same obstacles. We'll have a shared idea of who you are, who you are, what your role is, what you should be doing. So that's what story is doing. It's, it's, it's,

It's fusing individual human brains together and getting them to experience the same reality. And you can see that effect happening when you go to the movies, when you go to the cinema, you know, we go into the cinema as this crowd of individuals. And if the, 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, of the film experience in the lives of the people up on the screen. And we kind of leave that cinema and,

as one, having had that mad experience. And you often have that weird, kind of 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 kind of snap out of it. Well, that's story doing what story's 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

mechanism to get everybody onto a similar page. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, and it still works like that, of course, you know, 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. Why 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...

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.

you know what you know one one early form of storytelling is gossip you know gossip is a universal human behavior we all do it what you know why do we do it well gossip teaches us who we ought to be in the superorganism it teaches it teaches us what are the good behaviors what are the bad behaviors it motivates us to behave in a in a kind of way that serves the superorganism because then we're rewarded with status uh and it you know also incentivizes in the other way that if you're

being gossiped about in the gospel is negative, you're going to get punished. You know, so that's, so that's one form of early storytelling. I mean, the other story, the other kind of storytelling is about the future. You know, we tell stories about the future. There's a, there's a, there's a very brilliant, you know, evolutionary biologist called Michael Tomasello that says, you know, that it's, it's impossible to imagine two chimpanzees, a

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. You know, okay, you know, if we move that log over here, that can be a foundation for our next camp. All right, dude, you know, we're going to do it. So that's a form of storytelling. You know, 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 is.

evolve to do. Its 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?

Huge, huge roles. I mean, you know, social identity is your identity within the group. You know, who are you in the group? You know, basic concept might be a football team. 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 role.

you know, your, your, your social identity in the football team is striker, defender, goalkeeper, whatever it might be, right. It'd be referee even. Um, and that's the same in every human group, you know, in it, with every group we join, we have what we call a social identity and, and what, you know, a human identity is in part a collection of these various social identities that we have. Right. Yeah. I wonder what was that? Um, what was that? Apple ad, the lemmings thing. Yeah.

Yeah, so in A Story's a Deal, I tell the story of... Well, I sort of pose a question, really, about 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...

and showed this horrendous kind of totalitarian hellscape, all these kind of bald, grey, 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

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, in today's money, would be hundreds of millions of dollars worth of computers when that happened.

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, Chateau. They used a Hollywood film director. And what this ad was, it's called Lemmings. And it's...

It was just the most horrendous, like dark, dark thing where you've got all these like automaton sad sack businessmen, a bit like the PC guys in their 1990s or early 2000s as I'm a Mac, I'm a PC. I'm kind of marching, you know, 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.

And basically saying that all these business computer users were a bunch of lemmings. And if they, you know, implying if they knew what they were doing, they'd be buying Apple computers. And it was just, 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 um uh launched on the super bowl uh apple headquarters were inundated 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 the book is that what you know one of the reasons one of the things i didn't understand was that um you know that 1984 ad was offering the apple user status it was just saying you know fundamentally that if you buy an apple computer you're on the side of progress um you know

creativity, smashing the man, which is a big thing in the 80s. It's not going to be 1994. 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 they were going to fall to their death due to their own stupidity.

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Is that role of desire for this is where I am within the group, this is my social identity, this sort of mimesis, mimicry thing that I want to feel like I belong and that this is, is that all wrapped together at all?

Yeah, a little bit. So to understand, 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 boarding mall stood up. This wasn't the age of Silicon Valley, you know, Facebook, Google and all the friendly companies.

you know, brands that we know today. Computers were still feared. They were seen as these kind of machines that were going to like, yeah, going to introduce a future of conformity and, you know, totalitarianism. It was just a year before 1984 was broadcast. There was a massive film called War Games and,

which I just about remember from my childhood, which was all about this computer that did war games with the Soviet Union, kind of goes crazy and actually starts and almost starts a brand new nuclear war. And a computer then was this huge kind of flashing mainframe thing operated by inscrutable men in white lab coats. So that was what people feared. People feared computers. Weirdly, that fear is reawakening at the moment in the age of AI. People are starting to have those fears again, but they went away.

And, you know, really, largely, one of the reasons they went away is because of that ad. It was saying that, no, you know, this is not what personal computers are all about. Personal computers are about freedom. They're about individuality. They're about progress. So people would love that story. You know, they massively identified with that story and it ended up being an incredibly powerful, powerfully persuasive piece of storytelling for Apple. I mean, you know, 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, you know, one scholar in marketing that I read, and I agree, you know, 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

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. And in that physical world, we care about our survival. We care about food and shelter and procreation and, importantly, the environment.

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 of

means more to us than our lives. You know, like to the average human being, their identity is the most precious thing they'll ever own. I mean, you know, our children's aren't our possessions, but our identity is. So, you know, 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 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 ill, but very often they don't. Very often they kill themselves because they feel like failures, because their identity has failed, because they're lacking in connection. No one loves me. No one likes me. Everybody 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...

you know, 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, you know, appeal to, to identity. And, and, and again, that's what, you know, Apple did with their, with their other really famous and successful campaign. Think different. She's a bunch of black and white pictures of people like Gandhi and mother Teresa and John Lennon and

And this is you think different, you know, so if you're, if you know, so basically people who identify with those characters, you know, change the world became another absolute cliche in Silicon Valley. And it began really with think different as when it became popularized the idea. And, and, and that's an appeal to identity. Now there's another, 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 in trouble, they were the number one and then they were slipping.

And so, um, the, the, the, the, the ads agency were tasked with rescuing the, the, the reputation of Molson beer and what, and, and, 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 that, so he came up with this ad campaign, um, um,

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 Zed, not Zee, for example. We don't say about, 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, you know, rockers it, I forget the exact number, but you know, tens of millions of the value of the company through the roof. One really, what the 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. So they watched Blame Canada 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 qualities of this beer, why should we be buying it? Nothing.

It's literally an appeal to identity. 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. 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. 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. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so, I mean, and this is, this is, this is, you know, this is another concept that really came home to me when I was doing my research for a story as a deal. And it really made me feel like as a, as a society, we are still at the foothills of maturity in talking about issues like race, because at,

you know we fundamentally hate this idea but but but it's an inarguably true idea and the idea is that people like people like them you know we collect into groups of like-minded people so we're always looking out for people who are a bit like us uh to uh to identify with and so 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

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

you know, repel people who we think aren't like-minded. And the most persuasive storytelling, you know, understands that. Like one of the most recent examples was from the Trump election, the one just gone, which I thought was extraordinary, where, you know, there's a concept in the book I call atomic statements, which are kind of,

you know, tiny little phrases that are, you know, that are absolutely packed with meaning and they're atomic because they're, they're tiny little things, but they explode on contact with the human brain. They're so packed with meaning. And you can see like lines of movie dialogue, like we're going to need, we need a bigger boat is an atomic statement because it's the entire movie packed into a,

To 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. It's packed full of meaning. It's a story about what Nike stands for. Just do it. It's fantastic. And politicians use these to great effect too. In the book, I write about Project Fear and

take back control which were 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 was staggered by how successful it was you know kamala's own um research team um figured worked out that it had created a 2.7 shift in the election race just that line alone

So, you know, that's a story and it's a story that, that, that, that millions of Americans immediately understood, um,

a certain kind of American who were incredibly frustrated and fed up with the kind of era of wokeism. And so, yeah, 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...

um, trying to appeal to men by calling men abusers and, you know, harassers. It's like lemmings all over again. Like you're not going to, 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 bad light campaign, you know, giving a,

you know, transgender woman, I'd like to drink, you know, that, that, that's a story. You know, we, we know that this person stands for wokeism and wokeism is at its core. Um, you know, if we're honest about what wokeism is at its core, one of the things it is, is a movement against straight white men. So, you know, straight white men were the, were the market for, for, for Bud Light. So that, that was a ridiculous thing to do. And, and it exploded in their faces. And also Tesla, you know, you know, the, you know, Tesla's,

stock prices collapsed. And that's partly because of the tariffs, but their sales have dropped massively 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 than the incremental improvement month on month, year on year over a decade to their full self-driving growth

So, you know, 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 who are 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. You know, we are the things that we love. We are the art that we like. We are the podcast that we listen to. You know, we are, it makes me,

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, I think subconsciously aping his body language 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 own. The things that we own are part of our identity. So if you're somebody that stands against Trump and you own a Tesla, it becomes toxic to you because it's like your very self has become polluted with this identity.

alien kind of element you know you want to cut it out of you it's it's it's it's a it's a radically bad thing to happen to you so you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna reject it it's like being forced as a middle-aged man to walk down the road um you know um 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 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, it's, you know, I love the Theranos story because it really speaks to all this stuff. You know, as we know, Elizabeth Holmes, you know, came along and said she had this incredible device that she called the Edison. And the Edison was revolutionary because you used to take

couple of vials of blood to do all this huge battery of blood tests and she could do it with a pinprick of blood in your finger. Amazing, revolutionarily 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 uh from people on her board including henry kissinger uh you know you know that the former director of the centers of disease control you know like very very high status smart men they were all men on the board not a single not a single woman um and that's important for reasons will become apparent in a second um so so so 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 Theranos. 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.

diligence. So they didn't even bother to find out whether she was telling the truth. Like it's extraordinary. Some people did. So, so somebody from Google ventures, um, uh, who were interested in investing went down to a Walmart where Theranos were doing their tests for a, for a blood test. And they took two massive vials of blood out of his arm. He's just like, hang on a minute. This is, 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. And it's,

you know, I, I, I, me and other commentators too. This is not just me who's come up with this. 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. Big,

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's extraordinary the kind of cosplaying that she did um and and and so so 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 is 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 their peak, $9 billion. So that's the power of storytelling to kind of

bedazzle the minds of even our greatest, smartest, wealthiest people.

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in this way? Yeah, we do. There's something in the brain that tells us 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. It's actually quite easy to figure out why that is. You have to believe in the story of your group in order for that group to function. 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, one 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're a Christian.

It's as simple as 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 is 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 controlling

out the values and the story of the Christian set of beliefs. You know, 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 Muslims do, they call it the Hafiz, where some Muslims will earn the Quran by

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 a 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, 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, you're,

To you and me, it's a waste of time learning that book word for word. Why would you bother? But if you believe in the story, it has massive meaning. So yeah, we have to believe that the stories aren't just stories, that they're actual truth, they're reality. And we believe it so much, 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'd come up with that. But yeah, it's absolutely... Not too late to add it to the book. It's only a preprint. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I think that's absolutely right. That's the right way to think about it. And again, I'll just go back to poor Adam Rutherford and Jordan Peterson, who, as I said, would emphasize that they're incredibly smart guys who have nothing but respect for. But they're...

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 for the tenor of their conversation on social media. Okay. So connection, identity, but also status. So how do we use story to gain status?

As I said, 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 go, 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 they go, oh, you're amazing. You know, so that's what I call that kind of active belief. 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 at its most extreme it's a cult i mean that's the most extreme form of you know what i call a status game where you where people have one identity one story one status game and 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 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, um, uh, 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, we will, we will, we will, um, 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, you know,

social media feeds, you know, 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 unconsciously 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.

What about virtue signaling? That's a very specific type of status and probably an involved story. Yeah, well, there's 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.

cancel culture, all that would come under the, come under dominance. Um,

And then there's the other two kind of forms which are based on our reputation or identity. And so the first one is competence. So we become good at stuff. So we become valuable to our group by becoming an excellent hunter or an excellent honey finder or an excellent storyteller or an excellent sorcerer. And so people respond to us by rewarding us with status. And, you know, 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.

And 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. So 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. So, you know,

Michelle Obama, you might call her a virtue superstar because she's, she, she, she, she's, um, you know, known for her perceived moral goodness by, by her people, the Pope, the Dalai Lama. These are virtue superstars. These are, these are people who are incredibly high status, you know, Greta Thunberg on the basis of the perception that they are high in, uh, you know, levels of virtue, but also, um, uh,

you know, during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards were playing virtue-based status games. People doing cancel culture, you know, it's dominance virtue. You know, they're not interested in competence. 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. How do, it sounds a lot like rivalry. How did the mechanics of rivalry play out in stories, storytelling?

Rivalry is interesting. So within a group, rivalry can be very productive. But rivalry tends to be classified as a one-on-one thing. So if you are rivalrous with one individual and one of the tests of rivalry, people who are rivals are usually quite similar. They're playing the same status game and they have a history of near wins in close matches.

So that's the recipe for a rivalry. And that kind of rivalry can be amazing. You can drive people to, you know, incredible feats. It's the Leonard McCartney thing. You know, in the status game, I told the story of, you know, the true origin story of the iPhone.

which is that when Steve Jobs went to a barbecue, his wife, that his wife organized with some twat from Microsoft, who was sort of going, Oh, Microsoft has solved computer. You've got this touch device with a stylus. It's going to blow you out the water. And then jobs came in to work on the Monday and wouldn't let,

furious, livid, and instructed his team to figure out a way of blowing Microsoft out of the water. And it wasn't going to be a start. It was going to be with a finger. So, you know, that's rivalry. I mean, rivalry made the iPhone. It began as the iPad and then reemerged as the iPhone. So that tends to be good for us. It's obviously exhausting, but it's, you know, but, you know, we've all been in that situation where we become obsessed with a 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 in organizations high in

you know, very high in competition, experience lots of burnout. They experience kind of a kind of a toxic culture in which everybody's kind of hoarding the status for themselves, taking all the credit, pushing all the blame away. So yeah, you've got to be careful in organizations, how you're engineering your,

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 this, you know, the tension between connection and

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 during my degree at Newcastle,

we had a consultancy project. This is so fucked up. I can't believe I haven't thought about this in ages. We did a consultancy project for a company. It was a marketing consultancy project. And we were chosen, I think it was the British Fly Fishing Association. And 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 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 were doing this professionally ourselves. We knew how everything was going. Went down, we did this consultation project and then we present 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. 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. Yeah.

I was never going to... I got some absurdly high... I got a 1.5x multiplier on whatever the group score was for me and my business partner because of how much we'd contributed. And we convinced everybody else to give us this grade.

um which i again i stand by the fact that we deserved it but uh yeah 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 geranti a little bit of tanya reynolds a little bit of cory clark some evolutionary psychology lady super smart people and um

Venting is a unique type of gossip. You mentioned gossip earlier on. 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 me and you are having a conversation and I say, Will, 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 because, you know, I care about him so much. 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, what community information have I communicated during that? Well, I've told you that John's being a manhole, right? Uh, but I've done it. I, I,

John, I'm just so worried. 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, yeah. 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 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, I just care about him so much. So you've got all of this stuff. It's a very unique form of gossip.

it venting yeah yeah read it a novel um vector of attack that um it's specifically done amongst women which is why all of the people that i mentioned that did the research were female researchers um well i had to bring it up but i am thinking about love island as you're just because there it is it's coalitional warfare exactly that's that's why i remain a fan like you see that all the time amongst the women in um

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 warfare. But you also see what they call it co-rumination.

And what I found, especially in recent series of Love Island, when the guys have a problem, it's so interesting. The guys get together and try and solve the problem. And they'll often hold each other a bit accountable and that might get a bit arsey, but they often will. And 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 they're kind of...

the kind of coalitional care amongst the men is, is, is focused around problem solving and accountability a bit. But the female, the females get together, they did 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, um,

rather than trying to figure out and solve the problem, it's this pile of, yeah, he's an arsehole. 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 it's a it's a it's a wholly kind of toxic and kind of devious form of inadvertent commerce help because it just it because it makes everything worse for that individual individual and like with fencing that the women who are doing it are made to feel superior like they're being helpful and supportive but actually they're not yeah 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 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. But yeah, the sort of barefacedness of revealing...

somebody else's shortcomings. There's this phenomenal Bill Burr bit where he's talking about body positivity in the WNBA and 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. And dude, I wrote an entire essay about it because it's such an accurate insight. And 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. Yeah.

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 and if you can't see that if he can't 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 robert henderson would say um that

If you're a bigger girl with a bigger girlfriend, her dieting down or her 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 ozempic 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 uh

hey fuck you get back stay where you don't deserve this um so yeah yeah this is not how our status game is played no yeah absolutely yeah that's absolutely right this episode is brought to you by a

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Yeah, so it's interesting, Substack. They're obviously kind of a new 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. But 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. And he wrote a really interesting essay about status psychology and Substack. And it was initially, I think, that they kind of made this mistake where they were putting...

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 takedown and breakdown and accusation and stuff like that.

Yeah, I mean, so 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 as we're just talking about with the venting and the co-rumination. And I feel, you know, I feel that the whole woke thing, the reputation destruction thing is...

it just feels like a very kind of female heavy movement. It kind of, it feels like a female style movement, you know, male aggression tends to be one-on-one, um, out in the open, um,

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, in society and culture kind of goes hand in hand with this new way that we're playing status games in the world. Um, uh, you know, wokeism and cancel culture being, um, one of them. So, so, so that's, that, that, that's one way that I kind of think about this kind of more technically. Um, you know, there, there, there are a few things that are about in the stories, a deal about, um, uh, about how to kind of manage, um,

times of reputation destruction, you know, 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 first.

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, um, crisis for the, for the group. Um,

you know, whatever it is. So, so, so selflessness is, is, 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, all the rewards for themselves. They want to keep the girl, you know, whatever it is. Um, they want to, um, um, you know, hoard resources. So, so, 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, you know, 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 corrective

the most expensive cleanup operation in all of history, just an enormous, um, you know, deliberation paid for, um, by P by BP. And then, then he did a TV interview. And at the end of the TV interview, he said, um,

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 crisis,

times of trouble you've got to appear selfless because selflessness is the essence of the hero in the in the human story world and there was there was another thing which i which i thought was very interesting this guy called christopher booker who's who wrote an epic book called the seven basic plots um and he defined the heroes having these four qualities of um um feeling order strength and agency and and so um

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 yeah yeah they tend to um embody those kind of four qualities in a really perfect way what's a 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, it's what, way back in history, was it 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 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 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 of themselves picking their noses and rubbing 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 could see it. And then by the Wednesday, when you typed in Domino's into Google, it was the top thing on Google.

So, so, 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, you know, broadly speaking, it's the kind of masculine and the feminine. You've got strength and order.

feeling in and sorry, which is strength, order, feeling and understanding, not feeling an agency, strength, order, feeling and understanding. And he does all, he hits all of those kind of four, four, um, buttons in the apology video. You can tell he's furious. You know, he's, he's angry. He's we've called the police. They've been arrested. We've shut down the branch of dominoes. Um, we've, we've, we've completely, you know, he tells you all the things they've done, which is that, you know, the tough guy stuff, but then he adds in, look, we're a franchise business, all these, um,

dominoes around the country they're owned by mums 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 dominoes scandal with

with the snot and the farts. No one's ever heard of it. It went away. You know, it went away. So it was, it was a really successful apology video. And I think it's because it, you know, he, he does come across as this, you know, he's a, he's a lumpy CEO. He doesn't look particularly heroic, but,

But he's embodying all the causes 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, um, he had to lay off like two people. Um, and, and when he had to lay off two people, he put a video of himself up on LinkedIn with a tear, like a genuine, like a tear coming down his face. Um,

talking about, 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. And, you know, it was entirely self-defeating. The comments under the LinkedIn video were hilarious. It became a big Daily Mail story. It became this kind of massively hated story.

figure for a few days in the media generally so so yeah the the 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 score good stories good storytelling what do most people get wrong with good storytelling well i i think um oh there's so much but but like i like i i i

What 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, you're 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 ways to appeal to people's identities. It's much more powerful than...

you know, appealing to the quality of your product. And that general kind of idea of identification is just a massively important thing, not just in persuasive storytelling, but in all storytelling. You know, 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. You know, there's a very ridiculous kind of 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. 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. That's why the girl boss era in Hollywood has been so unbelievably toxic. 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 cut, you know, cardboard cutout girl bosses. Um, so, so, so, you know, so, you know, these, these story franchises were broadly made for young men that, that, you know, like there, there, there were stories for young men, but they've been, you know, um,

are disidentified with these stories which are a part of their identity like a big part of their lives and 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 that identification is just a massively important thing. Because if it was just, I like 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...

or castigated or whatever. That makes me feel mocked and castigated. Absolutely right. So, absolutely. 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 are a collection of ideas. And, you know, one of the most important things

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, um, orphan. He, he, he, he works on a moisture farm. Um, he's solo status. His nickname amongst his school friends was wormy. That's what they called him wormy. And he, you know, he overcomes his, um, fears, uh,

um, and becomes this incredible hero. And, and people love Luke Skywalker, but in the latter period of, of Star Wars, they've reintroduced him as just as they did with Indiana Jones. And, or, you know, they, they do it time and time again. They reintroduce these amazing straight white male heroes and make them miserable, sexist, um, disillusioned. They had him sort of chugging this kind of weird teat milk off. I mean, he, he was humiliated.

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 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 to

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 unselfaware and um yeah it wouldn't surprise me if someone was like i i see a little bit of that you know heroic energy but kind of adult man child thing in thor uh they 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, yeah, protagonists are really important because my book is called A Story is a Deal. And 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 proprietary

precious social resources of connection and status. That's what all heroes in our historical stories win. They win connection and or status. So that's what happens with, obviously with Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. He begins as wormy ends up with a big medal around his chest, surrounded by people who love him. You know, that's what we all want. That's that, that's a, that's a human universal. That's that, that's what drives everyone.

well, three things, survival, connection, and status. Those are the three things that all humans want. And those are the three things that are the subject of all archetypal storytelling. All stories are about survival, connection, or status. And the best stories, the stories that last through the ages that we can watch again and again and again are about all three. So if you think about a movie like

The Revenant, that's about survival. A movie like Stand By Me is about connection. A movie like Barbie or Whiplash is about status. But The Godfather, that's about survival and connection and status in about equal measure. So is Romeo and Juliet. So is Star Wars. You know, these epic, amazing stories are...

us feel so rich and full and drenched in meaning because they're, they're, 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, um, you know, messages subconsciously, you know, they, they, they, 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, we, we kind of make Luke Skywalker part of our identity, um,

And then he's humiliated and degraded and replaced in this way. 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 can see, podcast.

straightforward piece of anti-straight white male propaganda and painting us as misogynist woman, you know, 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, 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, you know, and, 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. Women are always writhing 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. If you create a vacuum in terms of story, in terms of archetype, and you retcon, replace,

role models for any group any group at all and you know for a good while maybe uh 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 and maybe many women were uh uh left cut adrift and felt lonely because well i don't really see women with the sort of drive that

I have in 1960s cinema. They're all, 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, it's, it's fair. It was a totally fair criticism, but, but, but, but, but I think there always have, but I think, you know, I think you're right. There weren't enough well-written female, um,

heroes with agency you know but you did get Princess Leia you did get um 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 um in order to find a kind of straight white male inherent role you've got to work

watch some terrible Guy Ritchie movie or like, like, like, like in, in, you know, like, like largely speaking, they just don't really exist anymore. And interestingly, I think a lot of, a lot, a lot of people are now like you are thriving on the internet because the internet is a, 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. It got filled by a variety of better and worse examples of that and then 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, uh, bodybuild rich piano, like pick your, pick your alpha male guy or whatever, like even beat a 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. 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,

So, you know, 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. You know, it was kind of a ledger fight. But then on the other side, you do have your Andrew Tate's. You know, 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 girl boss to hell in every drama they see and they're going to be in adolescence and shown stabbing her 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 kind of, I think people underestimate kind of how

How pervasive all of this stuff is, really. And I kind of think we're at the foothills of a new era 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, you know, 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 if I was starting out now, I'll be finding extremely hard to get. 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 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. 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, book just published. We got one review, one review, and we could reason the times. That's it. So paradoxically, the more successful I've become as an author, you know, my last two books have been by far and away my most successful books.

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 to the Edinburgh Festival anymore. Despite the fact that you're selling more books than you ever did. Yeah, yeah. And the fact is that the only reason I'm still going is because of the podcast fit. 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, it was a brilliant book. Thank you, Chris. But like, but, but, but when it was published, again, we got one review, we give 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 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 is successful. You shoved it down everybody's throats. Yeah. Well, you know, for now, the podcast sphere is still male dominated. And we'll see between, unless you're Mel Robbins or

uh 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 um 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 the 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 i recorded a live tour

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, you know, the meme keeps on memeing. Just on the prequels,

The practical point around the stories, you mentioned atomic statements before. Yeah. How do you make stories more sticky? You know, 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. Yeah.

But it needs to grab someone. It needs to sort of get its teeth into their brains. It needs to stay with them. What are the things that determine whether a story's sticky or not? Well, I mean, you know...

One thing is that atomic nature. It's got to have brevity and clarity. So it's got to have its maximum meaning in minimal space. So that's a tweet. That's a meme. That's an aphorism. So it's got to have maximum meaning in minimal space. It's got to appeal to somebody's identity. So people have got to identify with what you're saying. And it's got to tell them a story that they want to hear that reaffirms their identity.

the story of their identity. So, you know, going back to that example of, um, Kamala is for they, them Trump is for you. You know, that'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, you're going to tell it 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, the story 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 questions.

what they're called experienced expectant brains. They're half-wired up and the rest of the wiring comes up during our childhood and a 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, we...

adolescence and early twenties 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 why audience capture is so dangerous. You know, even the smartest people, some of the, who we mentioned tonight started off, you know, in my estimation is sort of rational, smart, really interesting people. And they've, they've gone on a journey and the journey has been to,

kind of take their identity to a much to to to to a place that 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 so so that to me is 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 an article by Ethan Cross. I must bring this up fucking once a week. It's phenomenal. It's called 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. Yeah.

is that 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. Um, they become firebrands, uh, you know, they become very defensive or very aggressive, uh, about their position. Um, they begin to create in a manner that pushes back or tries to sort of, um,

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 sort of internet personalities and the ways that people have conducted themselves, and also I can see this in myself too, I get way more warped by critics

criticism than I do by compliments. You know, I start to caveat more aggressively or I couch things or I steer clear of particular topic. All right. 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 yeah, that,

that simple sort of fact about the way that we experience the world, um, it plays out to in the way that, uh, people respond to you, you know,

If you were learning to do salsa dancing and you salsa danced and someone gave you a high 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 doing salsa dancing? That one's going to stay with you 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 place. 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 it's absolutely true you know yeah yeah that that's absolutely right i'm sure and there's also an evil evolutionary kind of angle to that because you know criticism is a form of gossip um 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

you know, and sometimes even eaten. So, so in the back of our minds, we've always got that, you know, that, that, that program is programming is still inside us. Social criticism is, 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 me. Absolutely. Yeah. I've no doubt that, that, that criticism capture is far more important than audience capture. Yeah. What was that?

smoker disgust thing the the story about um 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 it's just an argument that you can't understand why humans smoke without understanding our need for status and and need to have this kind of a kind of higher status identity you know i used to smoke you know it started smoking in the in the in the 90s 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 your breath stink your clothes stink it's going to cost you a fortune and yet we still did it well you know like why did we do it well we did it because it you know makes you perhaps eight percent look eight percent cooler when you're at the at the gig you know like that's why we did it you know it's ridiculous it's crazy and um and you know that's that's that that's that's kind of um what they found and you know 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 ration 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, um, genius, Sigmund Freud's, um, nephew, um, was hired by, um,

cigarette company to try and get women smoking and this was in the 20s when you know feminism was just becoming this big massively powerful kind of cultural force and so he he said that so he paid lots of um like debutantes and vogue models to appear at um uh some big sort of flashy events in new york or smoking cigarettes and and they were photographed and you know um um

it was shown everywhere. So, you know, arguably this is a high status thing. And he ran these ad campaigns 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, you know, massively successful, you know, and again, an appeal to identity. And, and so,

That traveled across to the UK in cinema. So, you know, in Hollywood, heroines like 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, it was always appealed to survival 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. It had no impact whatsoever. And what made it stop was...

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 spread throughout America, spread to the UK. And then suddenly you couldn't look 80% 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 fag 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 chain smoke when I was drinking. And I used to drink, 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 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 polystyrene wall. And then I heard the stylist say to the Hollywood actress, did you see his fingers? Those yellow stains on 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 is a new issue but smoking cigarettes is is you know it fell out 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. 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's certainly this, it 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

it's about drug use, it's about, you know, the moral purity, which, you know, like, are they the first generation to be more kind of morally pure than their parents? I mean, maybe. Like, it's definitely a kind of a weird thing that's happened to, you know,

to to to to gen z's that that encompasses um binge drinking is just part of it yeah i think you know an increasing uh focus on health uh 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. We used to run this bar crawl 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, this fucking 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 are sort of binge drinking, it's hard to maintain that sense of status in the eyes of people. And Jesus, if it's recorded indelibly and perhaps uploaded to YouTube by somebody, there's no way. Not good, especially not if it's reacted to by the dominoes.

fucking CEO that would be a bad beginning well 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 will store dot sub stack dot com it's called you are a story we've got weekly essays on 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. I get in trouble, I get told off. Yeah, A Story is a Deal, my new book on storytelling and persuasion. So if you're interested in the science of storytelling and 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.

I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life-changing reads that I've ever found. And there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free. And you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.