A Storytelling Masterclass with Will Storr (NBI Vault)

I'm Rufus Griscom.

And I'm Caleb Bissinger.

And this is The Next Big Idea.

Today, everything you'll ever need to know about the art and science of storytelling.

Story is what we do. Story is who we are. Story is human life itself. This is no exaggeration.

That's a line from a new book, a fantastic new book by Will Storr.

We just love Will Storr here at The Next Big Idea. We had him on the show a few years ago to discuss his last book, The Status Game. It was a conversation that I keep coming back to that, that fundamentally shifted how I think about humans, about what makes us tick.

Yes, totally resonated for me as well. And this new book expands on a couple of those themes.

It's called A Story Is a Deal. It comes out today. It helped me both more deeply understand human behavior and get better at one of life's most important skills, learning how to tell a great story.

And unlike traditional storytelling guides that just obsess over mechanics, you know, rising action, falling action, save the cat, return with the elixir, Will drills down to something more fundamental. He exposes the science behind why stories are so effective, what they do to our brains on an individual level, collectively. Because if you don't understand that, it turns out You don't actually understand story at all.

To put it another way, for Will, quote, the original and greatest storyteller is the human brain. So if you wanna master the art of storytelling, you need to first understand the science of how our brains engage with stories, the social psychology, the neuroscience, and the evolutionary biology behind every good yarn.

So today we'll explore what stories are, And where they come from.

How they unlock our species' singular talent for collaboration, enabling, well, pretty much everything that we've accomplished collectively.

And how you can use stories to lead, motivate, and persuade.

And perhaps even be a better hero of your own story.

Today's episode is brought to you by Granola, Life at the Speed of Play, Northwest Registered Agent, and Sequencing. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way that real people actually meet. Try it totally free for 3 months at granola.ai/idea. Life at the Speed of Play is a new book by renowned serial entrepreneur Mark Pincus. It also happens to be one of Rufus's all-time favorite business books. And if you purchase one copy at getmarksbook.com/next, Mark will send you 2. Northwest Registered Agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the United States. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/nbifree to start building today. Sequencing makes genetic testing kits and DNA reports for health and wellness, and they're offering Next Big Idea listeners up to 10% off a full genome test plus free shipping when you go to sequencing.com and use promo code IDEA for 10% off. Will Storr, welcome back to The Next Big Idea.

Thanks, Clay. It's great to be here. I'm happy to be here again.

We are so excited about your new book, A Story Is a Deal, that for the first time in Next Big Idea history, We're gonna host this interview together. Rufus and I are both gonna be on mic because we just— both of us have a ton of questions for you.

Fantastic.

I wish you could have heard this behind the scenes. We basically fought over you.

We did.

You know, Caleb was grabbing you by the arm, I was grabbing you by the leg, and we thought, you know what? Let's stop fighting. We'll both interview Will.

Yeah, you are like the cute girl in the high school class that we both had a crush on.

What a scary thought.

Yeah, yes, particularly now that we have seen about your high school outfits.

Yeah.

Yeah, we'll come on to that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, Will, new book, A Story Is a Deal. As with all of your work, you cover so much ground. I mean, there's evolution in here, there's psychology, there's neuroscience. You get into the nuts and bolts of storytelling. But, you know, since this is the beginning of our conversation, let's just take a minute and talk about beginnings. And you say, and I'm quoting you here, successful stories begin with a moment of change that incites surprise and curiosity. Right? We want to have an opening that just grabs our attention. It taunts us, to use your word, right? Our brains are suddenly desperate to figure out what's going to happen next. And so, I thought maybe we could see if your new book follows its own advice. So, let's go to page 1, sentence 1. The book begins, Fuck you, Carrie Yu.

That's right.

Okay, my attention has been grabbed. I'm surprised. I'm curious. I think listeners are feeling the same way. What happens next, Will?

Yeah, this is the way I'm beginning the story of Theranos, the Elizabeth Holmes startup, which famously all kind of crashed and burned. And the Carrie Yu that they're saying fuck you to is the journalist that kind of blew up their story. And I use her as a great example of somebody who was this naturally born, gifted storyteller, Elizabeth Holmes. I mean, you know, she dreamed this device into reality, which didn't exist, which you could take one drop of blood and do this myriad of things. which you usually need a few vials of blood to do. And she was so convincing in her storytelling that she persuaded some of the most powerful and wealthy people in the world to invest, to sit on her board of directors, including Rupert Murdoch, who— it was his biggest investment ever outside of his own family of companies, the Walmart family. And what was really amazing to me about this story was that these people didn't do any due process. They were so swept up in this story of Elizabeth Holmes, this genius female tech founder, that they just went along with it. threw money at her and threw reputation at her. And at the peak of her powers, the company was valued at $9 billion, even though it didn't exist. It was all a story. So, I just thought it was a really good way of showing the incredible power of story to persuade even the most cynical, successful, powerful people in the world.

We don't want to be Elizabeth Holmes in that we don't want to perpetrate fraud, but we do want to create really potent stories, stories that draw people in, stories that we inhabit and that people then cohabitate with us Right? Is that kind of the thrust? Yeah.

You know, story is how we humans experience the world. The human brain takes reality and turns it into a story, and that's how it works. So, we're constantly being persuaded by the stories of other people. We're constantly telling ourselves stories to motivate ourselves and get ourselves through the day. So, you know, what I wanted to do with The Story Is Ideal is to just really sort of pick apart how that works and why it works in the way that it does.

And the bigger point you make, Will, is that Elizabeth Holmes didn't just tell a potent story, she lived it. And I think that's crucial, isn't it? You call this story being. Why is this important?

Yeah, this is one of the big breakthroughs for me. There's so many books on storytelling and how persuasive storytelling— and it always sticks with the storytelling, which is the communication of story in narrative form, be it a a TV ad or a movie or a speech. But the breakthrough for me is that we are a story. We experience our lives as a story.

Yes.

We are the hero of our own unfolding narrative. So at least as important, actually even more important, is understanding this concept of story being, which is that we are characters in other people's stories. We're showing up as archetypal characters. Are we an ally? Are we a villain? Are we a teacher? Are we a betrayer? Are we a jester? What, you know, so, so that, that, that art of story being, is what really successful persuaders do. It's certainly what Elizabeth Holmes did. I mean, she was a great storyteller. She had this story about wanting to save the world and reduce suffering and this, that, and the other. But much more impressive was the story being— I mean, she was basically cosplaying Steve Jobs.

Yeah.

Quite famously, to the extent where she would even wear his polo neck jumpers and have the thermostat in the offices turned down. So even on hot days, she could still wear the polo neck. You know, she dropped the octaves of her voice down. She would stare at you with his eyes. And so she was performing this great female tech genius. And it was the story being, I think, more than anything, that persuaded these people. You know, she walked into the room, and she performed a character in a story. And it was the performance of that story, which was the most important thing in terms of getting people swept away in her narrative.

I feel like she was cosplaying Steve Jobs to her audience, but also to herself. Like, I remember reading this detail that, like, she had heard that Steve Jobs never got a license plate for his cars, 'cause he would lease a car for 6 months, you'd get temporary license plates, and then by the time the real plate would show up, he'd get a new car. And she copied that. That. Like, that is not a— that's not a signal that anyone else in the world understands. But for her, for that internal story that she's constructing, she's like, I am Steve Jobs. I also get new cars every 6 months.

I mean, that's a really, actually a really profound point, Caleb. You know, that's really important. I mean, and it's one of the things that really makes you think again about, you know, your existence as a human being is that this story that we weave about who we are, Yes, it's for other people, but we also believe that story ourselves. I mean, we believe the stories we tell ourselves, and that's how we get ourselves into such trouble sometimes in life. That's how we can delude ourselves and end up doing crazy things, believing crazy things, putting ourselves in danger, upsetting people, because we tell ourselves a story which is often only partly true, sometimes completely not true.

Yes.

We're programmed to believe our own Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because stories are lies in some sense. I mean, this is part of the complexity of the power of storytelling is that stories are powerful. We need them, we rely upon them, but they're also distortions in which we participate.

Absolutely. Stories are never true. At the very best, they're simplifications. They're one-eyed. They're telling you one side of the story. when you take a step back from the feverish war that is going on between the left and the right in the countries of the West, what you see is 2 sides who have just a different story about how the world works.

Yeah.

And I think for me, most of the time, what's true is that both sides are right. The left tell a story that we need to take care of marginalized groups and people that suffer, people who are underprivileged. That's true. We need to regulate banking and business. That's true. Otherwise, if you don't regulate them, they're psychopaths. They'll take us all. But the right tell a story about how we've got to protect the the engines of growth. We've got to protect these billionaires and millionaires who create jobs and create the economy. That's also all true, but we find it very hard to believe both of those stories at once because we're this storytelling animal. So yeah, the stories are never true. They're always distorted. And at the very least, they tend to be partial. They're kind of one-eyed, one-sided.

I feel like before we get too much further, we should just zoom out and define story. Like, what is your definition, Will, of story?

In its most technical sense, a story is a unit of information that tells of the overcoming of an obstacle in pursuit of a goal. That's the basic elements of a story. If you don't have somebody, something overcoming an obstacle in pursuit of a goal, you don't have a story. You've got something else. You've got a scientific paper or a poem or something. So in order to have a story, it's got to have the obstacle, it's got to have the goal.

And you say that all stories lead to 3 themes, right? These archetypal underpinnings of all great stories. What are those 3 things?

Yeah. So I think to understand that, you've got to kind of understand the human being and this kind of weird animal, storytelling animal that we are. We're an ape. We're not like an ape. We are an ape. We're one of 5 species of ape. But obviously, we're very different from the other apes. We're not like the chimpanzee and the orangutan anymore. And the difference is that we We tell stories. We tell stories that enable us to be highly collaborative, highly cooperative. So unlike the other apes, we don't pursue our goals and overcome obstacles as individuals. We do it as groups, as teams, with everybody sort of playing their part. And it's that teamwork, that cooperation that's enabled us to take over the planet. And it's story that allows us to do that. So story is this device for fusing human brains together. Under the power of a story, we all face the same direction. We all have the same idea about who are the heroes, Who are the villains? What are the obstacles? What are our goals? What does our happy ending look like? So it fuses these brains together and gets us all thinking as one, this one kind of groupish kind of superorganism. So that's why I argue that story has always got to be about obstacles and goals, because story is about getting a group of individual people to overcome obstacles in pursuit of goals as if they're one, as if they're a hive of ants. And what are the big obstacles and goals? Well, for humans, You know, on one level, we're like every other animal. We want survival, so we want food and water and shelter, and we want our kids to survive and want to procreate. But we're also— because we're this groupish animal, we have these other 2 instincts which compel us to be successful members of this, you know, the group, the human superorganism. The first one is that we are driven to seek connection. So we want to be accepted by other humans, whether that's romantic partners, our family, our friends, our colleagues. We all want to seek connection, and we all fear and dread ostracization, social rejection. That's a human universal.

Yeah.

And then once we're in that superorganism, we are driven to want status. So status is just the feeling of, I am valued by my group. I am offering it value. I'm respected. There is something about what I'm doing which is benefiting the group. So those are the 3 things: survival, connection, and status. And then when you understand that story is obstacles and goals, and human goals are survival and connection and status, you can see that these are the 3 themes of all archetypal stories. Like in the world of films, film like The Revenant is about A film like Brokeback Mountain is about connection. A film like Barbie or Whiplash is about status.

Mm-hmm.

And the movies, the stories that we feel are timeless and are so rich with meaning that we can see them again and again and again, whether it's The Godfather or Star Wars or Romeo and Juliet, these are about survival and connection and status in kind of equal proportions. They're about all the great themes of life. And I think that's why they're so rich and timeless, those stories.

This explanation of what story does is even simpler and more primal and earlier in our evolution than, say, the Joseph Campbell hero's journey. And it's a huge claim, and it really resonates for me. And I think this is part of why we fought over and are so delighted to be engaging with you, because all of your books, Will, go deep into this question of who are we as a species? Why do we do what we do? You know, you say at one point, story is what we do. Story is who we are. Story is human life itself. This is Not an exaggeration, you say. And, and so effectively, I mean, the, the claim here, just to kind of go, go deeper on, on this point you're making, is, is that yes, we're the most collaborative intelligent species on the planet. We have an instinct to collaborate with the people around us. But as Harari, who we've had on the show a few times, said, said in Sapiens and other— and, and I think referencing other people's work, there's a limit to how many— there's a Dunbar number. We existed in tribes of 20, 30, 150 people. There's only so many people we can interact with. But through story, we're able to collaborate with larger groups of people at much larger scales, which makes us far more effective at collectively achieving our objectives. And this is a superpower. And this arguably goes back to our ancestral environment, to our evolutionary process, hundreds of thousands, millions of years in the making.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. So, you know, I bring it right back to the beginning of the evolution of humans when we came down from the trees. Like, it's currently believe that the reason that we evolved language in the first place is to swap gossip.

Wait, wait, let's just like really underline that. The reason that language evolved is to tell stories, is to gossip with each other? Like, that's nutty to me.

That's amazing.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it was— I think it was assumed it was about like coordination in terms of hunting. But, you know, wolves hunt as packs. They don't need sophisticated language to do that. What you need sophisticated language for is to tell stories. And that, you know, the earliest form of storytelling was thought to be gossip, because gossip is stories that's keeping the tribe working together. So gossip is, who is a good person? Who is a bad person? And then gossip creates this feeling of moral outrage, which motivates us to punish transgressors. But also, there's positive gossip, which is, this person did a heroic thing. They were amazing in the battle today with the rival tribe. We're going to celebrate them. And of course, once you've got gossip, you've got this, you know, what I call a special effect with morality, which is humans don't experience their fellow animals as just fellow animals. They're morally drenched characters, you know, and we see them as heroes and villains and allies. And the human world is painted over with this special effect of morality, which is a big part of how we experience our lives as a story. You know, it's morally inflected, it's morally drenched. And that begins with storytelling at the very dawn of human life itself.

Morally drenched. I love that. And it's— and there's a rehabilitation of gossip here, which I think a lot of people listening may appreciate, you know, which is this notion that really, what is gossip at its core? But stories of who can be trusted and cannot be trusted as collaborators. And this is true of most all stories. Like, what are stories? They are the sharing of information or examples of what a good collaborator looks like and a bad collaborator looks like. A hero is a great collaborator. A villain is a bad collaborator.

Selfish.

And if we are going to successfully, as Homo sapiens, collaborate and do extraordinary things together and overcome obstacles, we need to constantly be making these distinctions between good collaborators and bad collaborators. And in the process, of course, through these stories, we're punishing the bad collaborators, which is how Homo sapiens were able to collaborate without police forces for hundreds of thousands of years.

Exactly. And you don't get there without storytelling. You don't get there without the kind of storytelling instinct. And it isn't only gossip. I mean, you also needed to tell a story about the future in a way that other animals just cannot do.

Yes.

So if we work together to carry these logs over here, we can build a hut and then we can all live in this hut. The evolutionary biologist Michael Tomasello has famously observed, it's impossible to imagine 2 chimpanzees helping each other to carry a log somewhere. It just wouldn't happen. Like even on that very basic level of collaboration, it doesn't exist in our cousins. So, you know, we're telling stories about each other, morally urgent stories. We're telling stories about the future. If we work together and do this thing, we can achieve this thing. And also we're telling Stories about who we are and where we came from, great tribal myths and you know stories about heroes of the past, and then becomes stories about you know gods and demons, and it's all doing the same thing, which is encouraging us to collaborate and work together in the form of this kind of the human superorganism, which are the human groups which foment all the change in in in the world.

Will, I learned a new word from your book, which was umwelt, which means the narrow band of experience an organism can detect, which is. This is so cool, right? So, so you say a catfish's umwelt is dominated by flavor, which apparently they absorb through their skin. The umwelt of insects like treehoppers and katydids is musical. For mole rats and sea turtles, it's the Earth's magnetic field. Birds, you say, experience unimaginable galaxies of light. They see perhaps 100 times as many colors as we do. I, I did not know this. But meanwhile, you say the umwelt of humans is both, obviously, our sentient experiences of the world. We have exceptional vision and decent hearing and smell, but we exist simultaneously in a realm that's undetectable to every other creature. The human Umwelt is story. It's almost like a whole imaginary world that we are constantly navigating. And I mean, we've been talking so far about stories that we're telling consciously, right? We're consciously gossiping and going to the movies and telling each other stories. But there's But there's also a story world, you claim, that we maybe not always fully consciously are inhabiting, and we're jockeying for our identity and role inside of all of these stories in the story world that we inhabit. Am I getting that right?

Yeah, that's right. So, the story world, you know, that I call it, emerges when human brains become connected and start telling stories together. So, if you think when we're born, we're born with these semi-finished brains, and the whole point of the human childhood is to kind of tune our brains into our local story world. You know, we're literally told stories by our parents, but there's the story being too. So, as children, we're continually being told off when we're bad people, when we're poor collaborators. And when we're doing good collaborator stuff, we're celebrated and rewarded and applauded, we hope. So, it's all about understanding that the brain tunes itself into this human story world over our very long childhoods. And a huge part of that is understanding what does a good person want? How does a good person behave? What does a good life look like? You know, like the human brain's always asking, this question, which is, who do I have to be in this time and place to become a hero?

Yeah.

You know, because a hero in a story earns connection and status. They're loved and they're valued. And that's what all humans want, to be loved and valued. Because if you're loved and valued, you're safe, you procreate, you've got food. So, so we're always trying to turn ourselves into a hero. But what is a hero? You know, if you, if you go— if you move around in culture, the definition of a hero changes. If you move around in time, the definition of a hero changes. You know, so we live in these cultural story worlds that are very unique and individual to our time and place. So our childhood is about tuning into that local story world of finding out what does it mean to be a hero amongst my people?

Tell me if I'm getting this right. Okay, so stories allow us to collaborate, to find people like us, and commit with them to overcome obstacles, achieve goals that we couldn't achieve on our own. This is a superpower. But at the same time, out of necessity, stories are oversimplifications. They're lies, we might even say. And meanwhile, we have this instinct to agree on common stories, to converge in our beliefs to a degree that's almost unsettling. I mean, there's kind of good news here about, like, we're so powerfully collaborative. We want to connect with each other, and we want to help each other overcome obstacles. But there's also some— a slightly sort of dark underbelly to this, which is our ability to be deceived and deceive ourselves. in this process is powerful.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, you know, the brain is not a calculator of fact and truth. The brain's not interested particularly in the truth. The brain's interested in the story. As I said before, that idea of who do I have to be in this time and place in order to become a hero? And every group has its own story, is its own little micro story world. You go to work for an organization, they've got their own story about what it means to be a good member of this team. You know, if you identify with that story, you're going to turn yourself into that kind of person. So we're constantly Shapeshifting. You know, we live in multiple story worlds at once in a way. You know, like in— maybe we'll go to church, maybe we go and play soccer, maybe we're gonna go and volunteer for this organization, maybe we're gonna be a family man, maybe we're gonna be, you know, a lover. All these different identities we have, these roles we play, each one is a kind of different version of ourselves. Each one represents a different kind of story world that we're existing in at any one time. And they're all forms of collaboration, all of those things I've mentioned. You know, in order to be a good collaborative partner for this soccer team, or in this marriage, or in this church, I've gotta be a slightly different person. So, we become a slightly different version of ourselves, and our beliefs can change under the power of story, as study after study has shown.

You used the word shapeshifting and beliefs, and in the book, you used the word magic, that there's something sort of— it feels almost like magic, this way that we adjust our identities and merge with other people. I mean, I have to say, occasionally, it almost sounds kind of woo-woo, like, oh, it's magic. We're shapeshifting. So, ground this. You just mentioned there are studies that back this up over and over again. Ground this a little bit for us in the science. that shows this identification with people like us, this merging, this shape-shifting, is actually a scientific fact.

Yeah, it's been found time and time and time again in lots and lots of different contexts that we are in the act of story being. When we join a story world, we change. We change who we are in order to fit in and become a better collaborator with that story world. One example which I like is about architects and architecture. You might have looked out into the world, you know, over the last few years, the last 100 years and seen that modern buildings tend to look a certain way. They're rectangular, they're shiny, you know, there's lots of grid patterns. They're kind of boring. They have flat roofs. You don't see pitched roofs anymore. I used to think that was because that's just a cheap way to make buildings. But that turns out not to be true. The reason that modern architecture looks like modern architecture is because architects think it's beautiful. And so what's interesting about that is that when you do surveys, no matter where you go in the world, architects think think big shiny rectangles are beautiful. Yeah, but most other people don't. Most other people like curves. They like detail. They like a building that shows a sense of its geographical location.

Give me a gargoyle, please.

Exactly. So, so, so, so, so, so, you know, there are places in Russia, in Asia, in South America, in Europe, they all look the same. There's no sense of place. So that begs the question, how is it that the people building our buildings have this different aesthetic to the rest of the world? And how does that come about? So there was a psychologist over here who studied that. and they studied the preferences of young architects as they went through the process of going to university. First, they tested their sense of aesthetics generally with the general public. So they said, here are some pictures of some people, tell us who you think are beautiful and tell us who you think are not beautiful, you know, rate them out of 10 in that way that people sometimes do. So they did that and they found that there was no difference, like in terms of human beauty between the general public and the young architects, there was no difference. Buildings, there was a small difference, but not much difference. They kind of liked the same buildings. But then they kept assessing them as they went through the long process of being educated in architecture. And they found that the longer they've been being educated to be an architect, the more they like straight lines, squares, grid patterns, flat roofs, all the things that we associate with ugly, boring, modern architecture. And what's really interesting about that for me is that you can't argue that it's because architects have got this amazing, sophisticated— they all go on these crazy esoteric journeys where they discover their own version of beauty. They're not. They're completely conformist. They all like the same bloody buildings. They're so rigid. So you've got this weird situation where our modern worlds are being built by people who have a completely different sense of what's beautiful to the rest of us. And it's all about the stories. Their tastes are transformed as they go to university. They meet high-status architects, people they're impressed with, and they absorb their aesthetic tastes.

Yes.

So that's the problem. We're constantly changing who we are, changing what we think is beautiful, changing our political beliefs, changing our personalities. But we've got this storytelling brain that tells us, no, no, no, no, No, you decided that. They call it confabulation. We confabulate this deciding character in our brains that's making these decisions. And actually, it's all subconscious. Well, no, that's too much. It's not all subconscious. A lot of it is subconscious. We're being pulled around by our subconscious. When I say it's like magic, it is a bit like magic. It's this sort of dark magic that's controlling us beneath the level of conscious awareness.

Another example of this attraction we all have to to find people like us and to connect with a tribe that you, uh, share in the book that really resonated for me is, is you say at one point that we each emit, quote, a dense cloud of social information that transmits clues about who we are and how we perceive the external world.

I can see, I can see clouds floating off of both of you right now.

That's right. But that, but that, but that same it. You know, like, like, so as you say there, Rufus, you know, we're all desperately interested in connecting successfully and earning status, but not with anybody, with people like us, with people that our subconscious mind single out and think, that's somebody that I can collaborate with. That's somebody that can be a collaborative partner and help. And we could work together overcoming the obstacles of life. So we're constantly seeking out these people. But part of that means we're constantly driven to broadcast to other people, who am I?

Yeah.

So, you know, so that simple fact is, you know, explains Hundreds of billions of dollars of the global economy we spend on dressing ourselves a certain way, buying certain books, doing our hair in a certain way. So much of the money we spend is about our identity, broadcasting who we are. And we do that in order to attract people like us to our lives, and also to repel people not like us. Like even now, Rufus, like we don't, you know, we've done podcasts before, but look, we've got very similar hair. We've got very similar shirts. You guys do have very similar hair. We're even similar weights. You know, I've got books in the background. you've got this cool brick thing. Like, you know, there's all this subconscious stuff in our backgrounds which is saying we have things deeply in common.

So wait, Will, are you saying we don't have anything in common?

You're a bit young, Caleb, you know. But no, we do. I mean, you can just tell. I mean, you can just tell all 3 of us, you know, we've even— yeah, so it's, it's a really sort of powerful thing that's sort of changed the way I see human beings, is that we're so concerned with broadcasting our identity to other people. And that's because we're looking for collaborative partners.

I can assure you that Caleb is also emitting a dense cloud right now. Perhaps of social information. But what you're saying metaphorically with this notion that we're all emitting dense clouds of social information signals in how we speak, how we dress, how we move, how we pronounce words, You write at one point in the book, I'm quoting you here, when we become preoccupied with the tiniest stain on our trouser leg and rub at it distractedly with a wet fingernail, it's our subconscious understanding of the critical importance of this information cloud. And I felt like you'd been surveilling me there, Will, because I totally catch myself doing this. I could be— I can be a little clumsy with a sandwich at lunch, drop a dollop of mayo on my pant leg, and then a few hours later, I'm in an elevator going to a parent cocktail gathering or something, and I— and then I look down and I think, that stain on my leg, it's a deal killer. These people are gonna see it and think he's not people like us, and then the tribe will reject me and I might starve to death.

That's right. I mean, I have that experience too. It's always yogurt on the— on exactly the wrong place of your trouser, and I've got a white stain on my crotch. Yeah, no, it's like, it's mortifying. You don't see other animals behaving like this with something obsessive care about their appearance.

Certainly, you and I are broadcasting very important information with our hair. Well, Caleb needs a little more volume and some gray streaks to catch up with the program.

Yeah.

I'd love Caleb's color, I have to say.

Yeah. So it's enviable. Envyable.

Yeah.

Let's take a quick break. Coming up, we're going to take the concepts we've been describing— identification, obstacle, goal, survival, connection, status, We're gonna take those and apply them to some real-world examples.

This ad redefined the story of what personal computers were. Like, you know, we're still telling versions of that story today in the post, you know, internet revolution.

We'll be right back.

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I want to tell you about Granola. No, not the breakfast food. I'm talking about the AI-powered note-taker that's become my constant companion as I bounce from one Zoom call to the next. I honestly don't know how I did it before Granola. Granola securely transcribes all of my meetings. There's also a place in the app where I can just jot down my rough notes, and then it turns everything into a clean, structured, super useful document as soon as the meeting And the best part is that it works with my computer's audio, so it's painless to set up and there are none of those awkward bots on the calls. The thing I love the most about Granola is that I now have an archive of every meeting I've attended for, I don't know, like 2 years at this point. I can go into the app and ask questions about those meetings, right? So I can go in and say, when did Rufus first suggest such and such idea to me? Or what was that really good insight Michael had in our jam session last week? If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free for three months. Just head to granola.ai/idea. That's granola.ai/idea to get your time back. Get three months free at granola.ai/idea. So far, we've been talking about the ele Elements of story in a pretty high-level way. So let's take these big ideas and ground them. Let's see how they work in practice in a business context. How do you sell a product? How does identification lead to persuasion? How do you convince people that what you're offering is good? Which is to say, show them that it will enhance their sense of connection or elevate their status.

Simple.

You tell a story, or you try to. In A Story Is a Deal, Will compares 2 Apple ads that came out in the mid-'80s. One was a smashing success. The other, dumpster fire. Let's start with that one. And when I say dumpster fire, I mean, this was an ad so ineffective, it helped tank an entire product line. It's 1983, and Apple has made this ad to announce their new computer, It's dawn. A guy in a blue Oxford shirt is out for a bike ride. His dog runs alongside him. Oh my God, it's Kevin Costner.

The way some business people spend their time has very little to do with a clock.

He arrives at the office, only one there, sits down at his desk. Powers up his Apple computer.

At Apple, we understand that business as usual isn't anymore. That's why we make the most advanced personal computers in the world. And why soon there'll be just 2 kinds of people.

Hi.

Those who use computers. Yeah, I'll be home for breakfast.

And those who use apples.

So that ad was made in 1983 by Chiat/Day. It was, as you said, it starred Kevin Costner. It was directed by a Hollywood guy, Adrian Lyne, who did Flashdance and Fatal Attraction. So, you know, big budget. They thought they were telling a story, but they weren't telling a story, you know, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because, you know, I said before, a story is a unit of information that describes the overcoming of an obstacle in pursuit of a goal. And there was no obstacle and no goal there. It's just a guy going to work being a bit smug, and then saying he's gonna be home for breakfast. Like, this is boring. It doesn't stick in the mind. More importantly, it doesn't make you emotional. Like, obstacles and goals make you emotional. That's partly why they work as a story. And there's no emotion in this. It's just nothing. The other thing is that we don't identify with this guy at all. Like, when the makers of the ad were boasting about its genius quality, they were saying, yeah, he's got a dog, so he's the kind of guy you're gonna relate to. And it's like, that's not gonna do it. You know, that's not enough. You know? So, it kind of fails on every count, really. And it fails as a piece of advertising. I mean, the product was a failure, and the marketing around it was a failure too. That was an advert for the Lisa computer, the predecessor of the Mac.

If you had been at Chiat/Day in 1983, like, what would you have been saying in the strategy meetings about, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Here's how we need to change this ad to make it work.

Well, firstly, you need an obstacle and a goal. Something needs to happen. You know, the guy's got to want something. Something's got to get in his way, and then the computer has got to solve his problem somehow. And also, I think he's just It's just a very vague character.

Yeah.

Vagueness is the enemy of storytelling. Great stories are specific. There is a specific character telling a specific story, giving a specific message. And it's just a very vague, bland— like in all kinds of storytelling, whether it's marketing, or whether it's a novel, or whether it's a TV show, you often see this, is that you get an author who is so desperate that their character is accepted and liked, they make them likable in all ways. So they're good-looking, and they've got no rough edges. And they're, you know, and actually, that's a disaster because you end up— in real life, no one's like that. It's not a realistic person. And also, we're looking for specifics because we want to see, is this character people like me? Are they someone like me? Is there somebody that I identify with? And if they've got no real characteristics, then you can't— it's impossible to identify with them. And certainly just giving someone a dog, yeah, it's not gonna— it's not enough.

Let's now listen to this other Apple ad. This came out a year after the one we just heard. And this, I think, is anything but vague. I'm just gonna play a little clip from the very end just to give listeners a taste, Will, and then I'll ask you to sort of explain what the ad is.

On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh, and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.

So, that was the end of 1984, which is still considered by some to be the greatest commercial ever made. So, it was the same agency, had the same idea, which was to get a Hollywood director, in this case, Ridley Scott, to tell a story. But this time, they did. They told a story. And what the story is, is you've got these kind of ranks of gray, bald-headed drones in this kind of cult-like totalitarian state being lectured by this grim leader type, cult leader type. And through the middle of all these people comes this very beautiful, full-color, empowered woman with an Apple logo on her tank top and a sledgehammer, and she smashes through the ranks. the screen, and it destroys the face of this totalitarian leader. To understand why that was so successful, you've got to understand the story world as it was in the 1980s. And back in the 1980s, this was pre-tech internet revolution. This was a time when people genuinely believed that 1984 might happen. The Cold War was still on. There was a fear that computers were not our friends, that they were going to be the tool of these totalitarian people, that the future was going to be to be one of control, control by the machines. And what Apple was saying was like, we hear you, we understand your concerns. But this is not Apple. Apple are standing against this. Apple are about individuality, creativity, freedom. And all these values absolutely resonated with the audience of boomer Americans which were watching that ad. And they responded just enormously. So in the 100 days after that ad was shown, they bought nearly $180 million worth of Macs, which are over half a billion dollars worth today. And the then product manager said, we could have sold 200,000 Macs if we could have built them. So it just had an extraordinary result. And I think that one of the amazing things about that ad was when they were making the ad, Steve Jobs and his team still hadn't figured out what the Mac was going to be. So they had no information. So that ad is telling you nothing whatsoever about the computer.

That's right.

Yeah. It doesn't even show the computer because it wasn't finished yet. So despite not telling you anything at all about what the computer computer was. It was extraordinarily successful because it was doing all of those things. It was showing an obstacle and a goal and somebody struggling over that obstacle. But it was also, you know, people strongly identified with its message. You know, you're right to fear computers.

Yeah.

You're right to fear IBM and the domination of the machines. But that's why you need to buy an Apple because Apple are the opposite of that. And, you know, and people that, you know, talk about this ad, and I think they're right, they say that this advert didn't only redefine the story of Apple, this ad redefined the story of what personal computers were. Like, you know, we're still telling versions of that story today in the post, you know, internet revolution about technology being about liberation and creativity and freedom and self-expression. All of that was invented in that 1984 ad.

And then, of course, if you buy an Apple, now all of a sudden, I've bought into the identification of that story, and now I'm emitting in my cloud of social signification, I am that person. I am the person who is creative. I am the person who stands up to the big, bad IBM, right? So it's just like self-reinforcing.

Absolutely. And that's why they buy it. Because, again, as I said before, we're all driven to broadcast information about who we are. And we'll spend lots of money in order to successfully broadcast that information. Steve Jobs, in particular, always had an amazing instinct for this stuff. And I felt a bit cheesy talking about Apple because everyone talks about Apple. But it's like talking about story, not talking about Shakespeare.

Yeah.

Apple, under Steve Jobs, were the masters at using storytelling to sell product and to redefine people's perception of what an Apple product was.

And what's astounding about this is that it's now 30 years later, and you cite in the book a recent survey that showed that one of the most cherished social identities for students today is whether they're an Apple person or a PC person. And when it comes to laptops, or even smartphones for that matter, they're really not that different. It's a very, very similar product. So the idea that for college students today, whether they're an Apple person or a PC person is for many the most important single social signifier is just astounding. And we've seen Apple use this to great effect in, you know, there's been a lot of controversy over if you're using an Android phone, your chats and messaging show up as green rather than blue. And this is such a status signifier, right, that it's resulted in bullying in schools. And Apple, at least in the US, has has massive dominance. I mean, the iPhone has overwhelming dominance among teenagers, and probably a lot of it has to do with that social signal.

Absolutely. I mean, yeah, we don't have it quite so much outside of the US where Android phones are much more common and we use WhatsApp. Everybody uses WhatsApp in Europe and Asia pretty much. But in the US, of course, iMessage is dominant, the iPhone is dominant. And because iPhones are mostly more expensive than Android phones, it goes hand in hand. If you've got an Android phone, it means that you're not as wealthy, so you're lower status. And so they deliberately, I mean, for a while, for a long time, Apple deliberately downgraded the communications from Android users in iMessage. So the video would be pixelated and you couldn't use the same kind of emojis. They held onto that idea for a long time and they resisted changing it and making the experience the same for the Android user. But even when they were kind of forced to do that, I mean, some people say it was the EU that forced them, some people say it was China, but they were kind of forced into changing their protocols so it was equal for everybody. But even when they did that, they kept the green bubbles for Android because green bubbles were now a symbol of low status. So it's a very powerful marketing device for Apple.

I don't know if I should admit this, but my wife's former boss was so annoyed that people on her team had Androids and green bubbles that she bought them all iPhones because she just couldn't stomach the green bubbles. Green bubbles.

That just shows you the power of this stuff. I mean, in fact, when I talked about this to my editor, she sent me a message saying, good. Oh, Android phones give me the ick. And it's like, I'm texting you from my Pixel phone. I've got a folder. It's like, guys, you got to catch up, you iPhone people. The folding phones are incredible.

Oh, okay. Look at you. Look at you. Well, meanwhile, Will, I can't resist telling you that Caleb informed me very politely in the last couple of weeks that the black t-shirts I was sometimes wearing for podcast interviews looked a little ratty. I think I may have interviewed Bill Gates in a black t-shirt, and you'll notice I'm now wearing a nice collared shirt here for you. I'm taking it up a notch. But I think that the message I was getting, oh, so subtly, was that maybe I was taking down the collective status with my choice of shirt.

Well, we had a scandal in my local gym where I go to my exercise classes where a group message was sent out by a tutor saying, keep it fresh. make sure that when you come, you shower and you use deodorant, 'cause there's been some incidents. And they were saying everybody suddenly got really paranoid. And yeah, everybody was convinced, is it me?

Is it me?

Is it me? It kind of set this kind of wildfire of fear and anxiety through all the members of the gym. And one poor guy was pulled aside and said, look, dude, can you just— you're coming straight from the building site or whatever. Can you just use a bit of deodorant? And he went ballistic.

Oh, gosh.

He kicked off, and it was a big disaster.

Yeah, so it's a similar thing.

You do, you feel it's an attack on your sense of status. And I thought it was interesting about how my immediate thought was, shit, is it me? Are they talking about me? And I think that's probably 99% of people when they saw that message. Shit, is it me? Are they talking about me? Like, we all absolutely fear being the person that is not part of the group in some, in any particular way.

Now, I think it's worth clarifying here what we mean by status, because of course you wrote a whole book, Status Games, which listeners after hearing this episode will wanna listen to. to our conversation about status games. It's among our favorites. We'll have a link in the episode notes. But the way that I think psychologists would describe status and the way that you describe it is a more general sense of being valued by our community, of having some kind of importance. And I think you'd say that people of higher status in hundreds of hunter-gatherer communities that have been studied have more access to food, mates, resources, versus connection. That remains true for us today. And even though there's a lot of silliness in the ways that some people choose to display status, and we can disagree about what status symbols mean or which ones are worth chasing, status was clearly in our ancestral environment a positive force because it was a pressure to, to contribute, to add value to the community. And that's why it's so central for us. Is that— am I saying that right?

Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, we've been pursuing status since before we were human. But as humans, we started pursuing it in this— you know, we talked about how we exist in a story world. We exist in the survival world and in the story world. And in the story world, we play for status in 2 ways, with acts of virtue. So that's one way of being valuable to our group. So we're somebody that is selfless, generous. We help the people who are sick and the elderly. But we're also courageous in battle. We're somebody that understands the rules, the moral rules of the groups, and follows the rules and enforces the rules. So that's virtue. virtue. And then the other way that we earn status is with acts of competence. So we're good at stuff. Yes. So we can contribute to being a good hunter, a good storyteller, a good sorcerer, a good finder of sweet potatoes, whatever it might be. And so that's still true today. We play status games all through life with virtue and with acts of competence. So I call them virtue games and success games. These are the 2 ways. And as you say, I think people get kind of crazy about this sense about status because when I say that we all crave status, what people hear is we all want to be rich, we all want to be pop stars, we want to be Kim Kardashian or whatever. And that's not it. There are certain people, of course, who are very, very, very interested in status, and they become CEOs and celebrities and popes. But for most of us, we simply want the feeling that we are respected. So it's different from being loved.

Yes.

It's being respected. And we're respected for the value that we bring. Either we're a good person or we're a competent person. So most people don't want to be at the top because with the top comes too much attention and too much responsibility. Most people are just happy going through their lives with a feeling that, yeah, I impress people today. People value me.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And local status is in some respects the healthier kind. Like, part of what's made our world complex is that all too many of us are competing for a sense of feeling high status in a community of 350 million people or 8 billion people, which is impossible to achieve. Whereas a sense of feeling valued locally for our contributions That's the kind of status seeking that we evolved to have that is arguably a healthier form.

Yeah, that's right. So we play local status games. So if we're playing for our local soccer team, we're not competing with someone who plays for Manchester United in terms of how good at football we are. We're competing with our teammates. And that's true for all of life. We're not all trying to compete with Michelle Obama and the King of Thailand, because if we did, we'd have a nervous breakdown. We'd never measure up. The really important thing to people is that the people that we share our the people that we play our status games with, whether it's at work or in our hobby life or in this organization we're volunteering for, wherever it might be, that we are respected by those people. And we like to feel like we're above the average of those people. We like to feel that we are a plus member of the team.

And that's kind of empowering too, right? Because it's— of course, status games can be ugly, but to remind yourself that you're playing on a different field than you may think. As a podcaster, you know, Rufus is not necessarily competing with Joe Rogan, you know?

Not successfully anyway.

I think that's sort of healthy and helpful to realize that, like, the status games we're playing are actually more narrow than we may think, and that we therefore have a greater chance of success or achieving more status.

That's right. And I think not falling into the trap that success is number one and number two is first loser. Like, that's just not how it works. I mean, it might be how it works in a 100-meter sprint, yeah, sure, fair enough. But for the rest of life, that's not how it works. You have an audience, you offer value to people. That's good. That's a success. That's literally a success.

Well, we're very happy to hear that, Will, because we are doing our best over here at The Next Big Idea Club to build community, to build value. And I think both Caleb and I were inspired, frankly, by your book on this front. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think the thing that's great about this book is, like, it's not just about how to make a memorable Apple commercial. It's really about how to harness the power of story to build and run businesses, to build teams, to be a leader. And yeah, as Rufus alluded to, I mean, we've been working on, we've been building this company, The Next Big Idea Club, for— when did you start? Rufus started it 7 years ago?

Caleb, like Elizabeth Taylor, we prefer not to talk about our age. But the podcast has just turned 5, and our Next Big Idea app is 4 years old. Our daily Substack's been around for about 6 months. So I think of us as kind of a whippersnapper.

Yeah, we're not graybeards. But I think, Will, like, one of the reasons, as Riffa said, we found this book so inspiring is something we have struggled with as a team is what is the story that we're telling with this organization? And so we thought maybe you could help us, be our story editor, help us out a little bit, figure out what is the story of this organization? we're building.

Are you game, Will?

Yeah, I'm game.

Okay, let's do it.

I'll give you the brief, uh, uh, pitch here. Our mission is to curate the very best books and ideas out of the tens of thousands published every year, right? So we partner with authors to deliver them to you in daily book summaries by the authors themselves, delivered by email and podcast, weekly podcast conversations with heavyweights like Will Storr right now, uh, And for our highest level subscribers, we deliver what our legendary curators consider to be the best 8 books of the year delivered to your door or via ebook or soon audiobook, along with direct conversations with the authors. So we've had a number of different taglines over the years. Like, um, what do we have, Caleb? We got, uh, read faster, live smarter was one. Live brighter, a double entendre there.

I've always been partial to read stuff, learn things, live boldly.

Ooh, I like that.

Yeah.

But reading your book, Will, it's clear to me that we can do a better job of connecting to the identity of our community, making it clear that we are people like you, helping our customers elevate their status, reinforce their identities. What questions should we be asking ourselves, Will, in this process?

Well, it feels to me like really it's a promise of status. It should be a status There are ways that sort of by using your app, by following the Next Big Idea Club, that you can increase the status of your users somehow. You can make them feel like— I think you're on the right track with a brighter thing. But is there a more specific way? Like, what's the way that you are increasing the status of your listenership and your users of your app? Like, A, how do they measure status? How do they use their knowledge in their daily life to make themselves more valuable? Because, you know, valuable to them in terms of how they pursue their goals, how they live their lives, how they understand themselves. That's the benefit that you're offering. And so what's the way that you can communicate that in a kind of a pithy, meaningful one-liner that will connect with these kinds of intelligent people?

Right. You're right. Because that is what we're trying to get to with Live Brighter, or the double entendre there, live more intelligently and more vibrantly. effectively, right? But I've always loved the Fran Lebowitz line, read before you think, think before you speak. Right.

Yeah.

So there's sort of an implication there that, like, everybody wants to be perceived to be smart and full of interesting, late-breaking insight into the world.

Yeah.

And we're gonna help you get there. The other piece is that we're like, who are the Next Big Idea subscribers? They're deeply curious people. This occurred to me when I was reading the book yesterday. Next Big Idea Club for the Curiously Curious. We could do a series like—

That's good.

Like, have you ever Googled, do fish ever get thirsty? Next Big Idea Club for the Curiously Curious, or, you know, whatever. But I'm not sure that delivers on the status promise, right? That's more of an identification.

Yeah, that's a good— that works as an identification thing. But I think my instinct is there's something more powerful in the status thing. It's like the promise really is that you're going to be the smartest person in any room you go into if you listen to the Big Ideas Club, because every week, or, you know, you're going to have another amazing idea that you can share, that you can go into a room and talk about as if it's your idea. You know, that's the great thing about this stuff.

Yeah.

My instinct is that that I like the idea, like the identification thing about the curiously curious, but it does feel a bit bland. I think that there's a promise there that you can turn someone into the smartest person in any room they go into. That's what I think people who are interested in these kinds of things—

Yeah.

That's the way that they measure their status. Like, if they can go into a conversation and have everybody attend to them and go, wow, that's amazing, because they've got all these big ideas bumping around in their heads. They've got 12 they can pick out and produce at any That's status. That's amazing. So my gut feeling is that pursuing that idea, trying to distill that into a 6 or 7-word kind of tagline, if you could do that, then you'd be onto something.

I feel like, Rufus, didn't we used to talk about sound smarter at your next cocktail party? Or like, be the most interesting person at your next cocktail party?

Yeah. If we could come at it in a way that was humorous, right? That simultaneously poked fun at sort of the game, Yeah, but that's the identification thing.

It's like if you say cocktail party, you're going to— might put people—

anybody—

because you're going to think, oh, that sounds very '80s. So you've got to be really careful about the identification thing. And I think he's right about maybe poking fun because people don't like to think— they're pompous and they take themselves really seriously. So that's why I always say it's so important to drill in, to really know the story world of your audience. Because are they the kind of people that are going to feel good about themselves being in a cocktail party? Probably not. Like, I think cocktail party is the wrong thing.

Yeah, that's a good point.

There is a risk with this promise that they're going to— you're saying you're going to be a pompous show-off. Like, they don't want to feel like a pompous show-off. So it's got to have the right kind of humor to it, maybe slightly self-deprecating in a way.

And that's such a good point, Will, that you make in the book, that we want high status, but we never want to admit that we want high status, right?

That's right.

We never want to say to people, yes, I am the smartest person in this room. We just want to casually toss out facts, you know? And so I think you're, you're pointing to that, that like again and again in research, right, doesn't it show that as much as we secretly desperately want to be the highest status people around, we never want to broadcast that?

Absolutely. And, and, and that's because status is a resource. It's a social resource. And so just like nobody wants to come off as greedy— I want all the food, I want all the water— you don't want all the status. So that's partly it. And it's partly also because status is relative. So it's this imagined thing. It doesn't really exist in the real world. It only exists in the story world status. So in a group, the more status one person has, the more diminished the people around that person feel. So it's confronting when somebody comes in. But most importantly, the way that the status game of human groups has evolved to function is that these kinds of status, the prestige forms of status, are offered. They're not demanded. So somebody is in a group, they offer value to the group, and as a reward for offering value to the group, the group gives them status. So it has to be kind of volunteered. So there are all kinds of reasons why we are kind of allergic to even admitting to ourselves that we want status.

Yeah.

We don't like to think of ourselves that way because it immediately makes people suspicious of us. And indeed, in the kind of groups we evolved in, that kind of big man archetype that would go in and demand status would often be savagely dealt with and sometimes even executed if they didn't sort themselves out. It was an absolute no-no. And that's why those groups are sometimes thought of as egalitarian. It's not that they didn't care about status, it's that they cared about status so much that there's constant policing going on to make sure that nobody grabs more than they're actually due. So that's a kind of universally mobile hunter-gatherer groups. And that's why you see that there's this thing of— this comical thing of one-downmanship.

Yes.

You see especially high-status people compete to, oh no, oh no, oh no. And there was that viral clip of Um, I don't know if it went viral in the US, but over here it went viral of the Beckhams. Victoria Beckham was being interviewed about her childhood, and she was, um, she was saying that she was brought up in a very working-class family. And then David Beckham— if you've seen this clip— puts his head around the corner and says, be honest. I, I am being honest. I am being honest. What color did your dad drive you to school in? So my dad— No, one answer. My dad What car was it? All right, it's not a simple answer because— What car did you get your dad to drive you to school in? It depends. No, no, no, no, no. Okay, in the '80s, my dad had a Rolls-Royce. She used to get driven to school in a Rolls-Royce. So, so, you know, and I think the reason that was— that that clip went viral is because we, we are, you know, we see something fundamentally human in it. It was, it was this one-downmanship, this, this, this competition we have to go, oh no, no, I'm not the high-status person. Oh God, not me. You know, that, that's human nature. That's, that's who we've evolved to be. Yeah.

I mean, you say we never want to be the overdog. We want to be the underdog.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think some combination of expressing status and one-downsmanship humor could work here. You know, be the smartest person in the mosh pit, the smartest person in the laundromat, the smartest person— I don't know what it is.

Yeah, that's right.

Maybe there's a direction there.

I like the laundromat. Smartest person in the laundromat.

Yeah, because that's quite good. I can imagine a series of still adverts where you've got a picture of somebody entertaining somebody in a laundromat. And then, you know, yeah, all these different— by the school gates, Yeah, yeah.

Totally. Or everyone else is just sort of there looking miserable 'cause they're in a laundromat, and one guy's just sitting there with his earbuds in, sort of smiling contentedly to himself.

Yeah.

Be the smartest person in the laundromat.

Another thing you say that I love, Will, is that you should hire for identification with the story rather than credentials. And I think that's actually something we've done well, which helps explain how Caleb slipped under the rope here.

Yeah. No credentials whatsoever.

Yeah. So, I think, you know, when you look at what actually motivates people, people want to be a hero in the storyworld of the organization. So they want to feel connected to the organization, and they want to earn status within the organization. But there's a big if. It's only if they identify with the mission of the organization. So if somebody identifies with the organization's mission, they're going to go to work every day, or hopefully most days, feeling inspired and motivated, and they're going to want to kind of pull together. And so it's that sense of identification with the group's mission, then they're going to be motivated from their own interior in order to do a good job. This old-fashioned idea we have that the way you motivate people with money is actually really wrong. I think money is good in the short term, but in the long term, it does nothing. Study after study bears this out. And we've all had pay rises in the past. You feel really pleased for about 3 days, then you forget about the pay rise and you think, oh, well, I deserve the pay rise.

And then you're ready for your next pay rise. You're like, well, ask me about that.

Yeah, for the next pay rise. Exactly. Yeah. So really it's about if you identify with the— if you're a person that identifies with the group's mission and you're kind of basically competent, then you're a potentially good hire for that organization because you're just going to go there and go, okay guys, tell me what to do. Here I am, tell me what to do. And you're going to get a buzz and a thrill out of working for that organization if it's a functional one. If the organization gives you those rewards of feeling connected and feeling valued, then you're going to be relatively happy at work.

So we're kind of moving here from how you market and broadcast and tell the story of your organization, of your product, to how you create a great story world within your organization where everyone thrives. And so you're talking about hiring. Maybe we could talk just for a second about leadership. So, you know, Rufus is my boss.

Yeah.

We're friends, we're collaborators, but he's my leader. He's my light figure, is a word that you use, a phrase that you use, which is this Obi-Wan Kenobi, wise elder who's helping the young underdog hero achieve his goals. I don't know why I sounded very sinister, like I was using a very sinister voice when I told that. And, you know, look, sometimes as that young underdog hero, I need to be motivated. So, as a great leader, like, what should Rufus be doing to motivate me?

Well, a couple of things. So, firstly, you know, a great leader is prototypical. So, you know, Rufus should embody the values of being curiously curious, that the organization stands for. You know, so I think the old-fashioned model of leadership, whereas a leader is somebody that stands atop the mountain, distant from the group, issuing orders and punishments and rewards like that, it doesn't work.

Yeah.

You know, you lead from the middle. You are prototypical. You are the ideal self. You know, we've been talking a lot about how every story world's got its ideal hero. You've got to— it's that story being thing again. You've got to be that hero. You've got to be that ideal self, and you've got to walk it, and you've got to talk it. And that is It even sort of manifests in how you're talking about the organization. So there are interesting studies that show, that look about whether we use I or we. If you say I a lot, you're not so identified with the group. If you say we, you are. So politicians who say we more get more votes.

This is astounding data, right? I mean, it's highly correlated. Yeah.

There's also studies that looked at insider language. And if you stop using insider language, you're 4 times more likely to be fired. can predict who's going to be let go from the group simply by looking at how they use language. And language signals how identified we are with the group. So if you've got a leader or a team member that says I a lot rather than we a lot, it might be a red flag they're not happy.

Yeah. And actually the fact, Will, that Caleb referred to me as his light figure is perhaps a cause for concern, right? Because the role of the leader is not to be the light figure as I understand it, but it is to be Not the wise advisor from the side, but it's to be in the center of the story, as you say, exemplifying the people like us.

So by calling you a light figure, Caleb has positioned himself as the hero. But that's actually correct because— but that's true because we're all the hero of our own stories. And every employee would look at their boss ideally as a light figure, as an Obi-Wan Kenobi character or Dumbledore character who is there to help that person become more heroic. And you do that by offering them the rewards of connection and status. So you say, here's who you've got to be in order to feel connected to this group. And here's what you've got to do in order to rise up the status game with this group and become more celebrated and more valued.

Yeah. And when it's working, people actually don't need motivating. And I would say that though our business is far from perfect, I think the culture is working in the sense that, in fact, despite what Caleb said a few beats earlier, he doesn't need any motivation at all. Extremely, uh, you know, like driven and, uh, and productive, uh, member of the team.

Well, I do feel, and I think to your credit, Rufus, not that this should just become a mutual appreciation fest, but one of the things you talk about in the book, Will, is this idea of creating a competent space for your employees, creating a space where they can demonstrate their competence, and even doing something that you call like putting them on a rapid results team, giving people a seemingly insurmountable task and saying, go and do it. And I feel like making the show every week, I'm in a competence space and on a rapid results team because it always feels like, how are we going to get the episode done? How are we going to edit it? How are we going to make it better than the show last week? And that's thrilling. And I feel a lot of agency and autonomy in that experience.

Well, that's great. Yeah, then that's right. So, yes, a competence space is this idea that in order to actually get a sense of status from our jobs, we need the space to make our own decisions. So, a job that is completely tightly policed and you've got to do exactly this, like a production line job.

Right.

No one's going to be happy doing that because they haven't got competence space. They haven't got the freedom to make their own decisions, to assert their own competence, to impress people, to impress themselves. And so every job, no matter how lowly, you need to have competence space in there. Otherwise, I guarantee you, you're going to have a miserable workforce if you don't give people the space to exercise their own intelligence, their own worth, their own competence in that job. And yeah, and one of the things highly effective are rapid results teams. It's a very popular way of making change in the NGO space because budgets are often very tight. So yeah, you get a small group with a shallow hierarchy and you give them an impossible task to do. And what people find is that they're incredibly effective because that maximizes the capacity for people to feel like heroes.

Right.

Jesus, guys, we've got to do this thing. We've all agreed to do it. How are we going to do it? And so you enter this kind of frenzied feverish state of mind, this story world in which you're all coming together and battling great odds in order to have this incredible happy ending. I mean, go back to Steve Jobs. That's how he motivated the Mac team. They famously launched the pirate flag above their laboratory, didn't they? And they pitched themselves, it's us against the— I think it was the Lisa team.

Mm-hmm.

We're this band of pirates. That's a rapid results team. And I think it should be sort of more widely known in the corporate space, this idea that if you've got a very difficult problem to solve, get 5 amazing people, put them in a room, go do it. You've got, you know, 3 weeks and see what happens. And very often they achieve miracles or, you know, borderline miracles.

Yeah. I mean, we had Seth Godin on the show a few weeks ago, and he was talking about effectively the rapid results team that they created at Netflix to build the streaming platform, right? That Netflix's whole business was sending DVDs in the mail, and they got a certain number of employees together. No one from the DVD team was allowed to be in this room, and And they said, come up with how we do something no one else in the world has done yet, which is make it possible to stream movies and TV online. And they did it.

Fantastic. I didn't know that. So I'm going to write that down and look into that. That's great.

Yeah.

And this, and this also dovetails with the innovator's dilemma and this argument that it's very rare for businesses to disrupt themselves. Yeah. It can only happen when you create discrete units that have total autonomy, effectively rapid response teams. And there's a whole lot of, a lot of research on this. When Mark Pincus came on this podcast, I told him that the 4 best business books I've ever read are Good to Great by Jim Collins, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, Build by Tony Fidel, and Marc's new book, Life at the Speed of Play. What I love about Marc's book is that it isn't just a business book. It's part memoir, part business playbook, and part instruction manual for how to live a rich, innovative, ferocious life. Marc is the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur behind Zynga and one of the most prolific idea generators around. One of the central ideas in the book is that ideas are Easy. The hard part is figuring out which ones are actually worth pursuing. He gives you a battle-tested framework for rapidly testing ideas, separating the promising ones from the terrible ones, and killing the losers before they waste years of your life. It's an instant national bestseller. It's only about 170 pages, and it reads less like a business book than like you're sitting at Mark's kitchen table, getting 30 years of hard-won. And Mark has a great offer right now for Next Big Idea listeners. Go to getmarksbook.com/next, buy one copy, and Mark will personally pay to send you a second copy for free. That's getmarksbook.com/next.

Okay, so the book ends with some real kind of nuts-and-bolts advice on how to tell great stories. And we don't have time to go through all of it here. There's so much of it, and I encourage readers or listeners to go out and get a copy. But I've picked out sort of 5 tips that I think are great, and I'd love to just quickly talk through. So, the first one, we spoke about this a little bit at the top, but it's beginnings. How to tackle the blank page.

Yeah.

How do you start a good story, Will?

You start a good story usually in one of two ways. You either describe a moment of unexpected change, or you incite curiosity. And you do that because the brain— you know, the brain is this natural storyteller. And the brain's constantly in the business of predicting what's going to happen next in the story of our life. We kind of experience what the brain predicts that we experience. So, the now that you're experiencing now, everything you're seeing and hearing, hearing is really your brain's prediction of what it should be seeing and hearing. And our senses and our faces, you know, all this machinery we have in our heads is coded to pick up on things that challenge its predictions. So anything unexpected in the environment. So if you're walking down the street, minding your own business, you pause a mile away and you hear a bang, you know, you stop in your tracks, you turn this great machinery for detecting change in its direction, and you ask the question, you know, what's that? So that's what you do at the beginning of a story too. You grab grab attention, because that's what you're doing. You're grabbing someone's attention by describing a moment of unexpected change, or you're inciting curiosity. The brain, as I said, is this prediction engine. It's always wanting to predict what's going to happen next in the story of our life. So if you suggest to the brain there's something about the world that you don't know, there's a mystery, again, you're going to hack that attention system. You're going to turn that brain towards you. And storytellers know this really well. It doesn't matter if the thing is fictional and the brain knows it's we're still interested. The brain is really obsessed with knowing everything, understanding. It doesn't like the idea of the unknown. So curiosity is a way of kind of taunting it into giving your story the attention it deserves.

Fuck you, curio.

Yeah.

Yes, exactly.

Okay, so first, we gotta taunt our listener, our reader, our viewer. Second skill we need to master is causation. You say that great stories are runaway trains of causality. And to support your argument here, you talk about Trey Parker, I think his name is. He's the creator of South Park. And here's something he said about causality in storytelling. Let's listen to this clip.

We found out this really simple rule that maybe you guys have all heard before, but it took us a long time to learn it. But we can take these beats, which are which are basically the beats of your outline. And if the words and then belong between those beats, you're fucked. You got something pretty boring. What should happen between every beat that you've written down is either the word therefore or but.

Okay, therefore or but. What's he— what's he talking about?

So, cause and effect. Your story begins with a moment of change, and that's how it should continue to. So, every beat, every scene of your story should be another moment of change, but those are causally connected. So, one change triggers the next, which triggers the next, the next, which triggers the next, which triggers the next, ideally in a story. And that's because, again, you're using the brain's own storytelling language. So the human brain uniquely experiences the world in a causal way. So one experiment where they compared human children with young chimpanzees, because obviously they're one of our closest relatives. And what they did was they gave the chimps and the babies a reward, a little prize, if they managed to stack these wooden wooden blocks up. And in one of the wooden blocks, they secreted a lead weight, which meant the block kept falling down. And the chimpanzees just kept trying again to stack the block and it just kept trying, kept trying, kept trying. But the human babies looked at the block as if to say, what's causing this? How can I fix this?

Interesting.

So we're constantly asking that question, what caused that and what's going to happen next? And that's part of— when I talk about how humans are storytellers, that's part of our storytelling condition. We see causes and effects even when there are none. If you put somebody in front of a computer screen and show them randomly moving dots, they're going to start telling a story in which this dot is chasing that one and it's— this is now hiding. So there's no causality there, it's random, but we can't help but impute causes and effects on stuff. So that's what a good story should be too. It should be this thing leads to this thing leads to this thing, and if that happens, then we're effortlessly immersed into it. But if it's not, if it's a very literary piece and it's, and then, so suddenly we're in ancient Greece and then we're in the present And then we're in a car crash. Like, the reason that we call those stories hard work is because we're having to do the work of thinking, how does whack relate to that? It's not natural. It's not how the storytelling brain works. So in mass market storytelling, in persuasive storytelling, that causality is really important because it makes the story effortless. It makes it easy to understand. It allows us to sink into it, immerse ourselves into it.

Okay, 3rd key piece of storytelling advice: simplicity. And you say that when you work with a lot of beginner storytellers, they sort of understand their mission as trying to share everything they know about their story, and about their world, and about their subject. And you say that's a fatal mistake. Why is that?

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean this in the corporate sphere, but also, I work as a ghostwriter. So, sometimes I've written the life story of people. And of course, when you sit down with somebody and you go, well, I'm gonna write my life story, That means everything that I know is going to be in this book. Like, that's a disaster. Like, that's a Wikipedia entry that never ends. Like, that's not a story. Like, a good story, for me, it's about one thing. You know, there's a famous line by Bill Clinton's communications advisor, Carville, where he said, if you say 3 things, you don't say anything.

Yeah.

Which I think is brilliant. That's absolutely correct. If you say 3 things, you don't say anything. Like, a story needs to be about, you know, one thing, and then it's going to be this— like The Godfather. It's about this guy who was convinced he wasn't going to be a gangster, and he's pulled into that world. That's what it's about, all 3.5 hours of it. And then the next one, and then the next one. And it's especially true with persuasive stories. People have limited attention. They've got a million things to be thinking about, and you've got to work hard to earn their attention and earn the maintenance of their attention.

Yeah.

And so simplicity is absolutely key to that. The best stories for me, they're simple stories simply told Yes. They're the most powerful ones because they're the easiest ones to immerse into. They're the easiest ones to become transported into. And that's what we want to be doing as storytellers, whether we're marketeers or novelists. We want people to be transported into the story world that we've created.

Yeah. And one form of story is a pitch deck for a business when you're raising money for a company. And I've always thought that the investors, the venture capitalists are like children that you have on your knee. And you're telling them the simplest possible story, turning each page, only 8 slides. It's going to be a very simple story that has overwhelming— as soon as you try to— but the world's not like that, right? I mean, the actual story of building any business is never the simple story. You have to simplify it in order to engage.

That's right. And sometimes they make it up completely. eBay used to tell a story that it started off as a way of selling Pez dispensers. That is completely made up. It's just not true. But that's what everybody believed for a while because what eBay, I guess their publicist, they come up with this story, this cute story about it started off as a Pez dispenser thing. And yeah, yeah. So yeah, I mean, it's, you know, what can I say? These stories work.

Well, I think the Pez dispenser is a good reference point here because I think it leads us to this 4th tip that I think we should double-click on, which is that we want to tell simple stories, but we don't want to skimp on details. Detail is really important in our storytelling. And to demonstrate this in the book, You quote from a commencement address that Nora Ephron, the great screenwriter and director, gave at her alma mater, Wellesley College, in 1996. Let's just listen to a clip of that commencement address.

When we came to Wellesley, it was so long ago that we had curfews. It was so long ago that if you had a boy in your room, you had to leave the door open 6 inches exactly. And if you closed the door, you had to put a sock on the doorknob. It was so long ago that among the things I honestly cannot conceive of life without that had not yet been invented— we didn't have pantyhose, lattes, Advil.

Pasta.

Pasta. There was no pasta then. There was only spaghetti and macaroni. and lasagna. I sit here writing a speech on a computer next to a touch-tone phone with an answering machine and a Rolodex. There's a bottle of Snapple on my desk I couldn't live without. Well, you get the point. It was a long time ago.

A bottle of Snapple. So what do you like about that, about that example?

Well, it's the richness of the detail. So what we're trying to do as storytellers is you're trying to have your audience watch your story in their minds as if it's a movie. That's what you're trying to do, you know? And you do that by adding lots and lots of specific detail. This is a mistake that is made so much by storytellers, including novelists. Like, so many times I'm reading novels where it's just— the language is just vague, and the things they're saying are just vague. So, like, the bottle of Snapple's a perfect case in point. When Nora Ephron sat at her desk, she doesn't see a drink. She sees a bottle of Snapple. That's what she sees. And that's true of attention. You know, human attention is narrow but highly detailed. A human being never sees a shoe. What they see is a shoe with a certain color, with the laces a certain thread, and in a certain way, and that has a certain state of wear. That's what we see. We never see a shoe. So, don't ever tell me he put on his shoe if the shoe has any importance. Like, I always want to see that specific detail. 'Cause it's that specific detail that adds up A, it makes the story come alive, you know, in a kind of neuro way. We see it in our brains. And B, it helps us suspend that disbelief. There's something about the description of specific detail which makes us think, this is real. This really happened.

Yeah.

Like, when I was a journalist, I was a journalist for 20 years, and I used to make copious notes when I was out in the field and come back. And I always used to sort of realize that when I was making these notes, I was just thinking, why are you making these notes? Like, why are you saying what color the curtains were? This is not interesting. But I always did it because I knew that when I got back, and I put that stuff in the piece, it was magic. It was gold. And I never could quite understand why. I just did it because I knew it worked. But now, understanding a bit about the storytelling brain, I understand the reason it works is because it just triggers— it helplessly triggers the brain to imagine your story. And if they're imagining your story, you're halfway there.

Yeah.

You've halfway solved your problem. They're in it just by telling you what the curtains look like and telling you the color of the light or this amazing, unexpected, specific piece of detail that you wrote down in your notepad.

Let's button up this section and let's talk about one last storytelling tip. Good stories need to have a moral. I know that feels almost juvenile to us, but good stories need to have a moral, don't they? Why is that?

Well, I mean, again, going back to the beginning of the conversation, the original purpose of story is to persuade. It's to persuade people to be a part of the superorganism, to absorb the values and goals of the superorganism. So story always has a persuasive element, and you can see that most clearly in children's stories. There are moral instructions that teach children to be fair or to be generous or to be courageous or to believe in themselves or whatever it might be. There's a clear moral message in children's stories. And there's a clear moral message in all archetypal stories. More literary stories are more nuanced because they're more realistic and they might ask questions that trigger you to try and figure out some moral stuff. What does it mean to be a good person? That's really high-quality literature that makes you question and think, but it's still triggering you to think in that kind of moral space. And so there's always that takeaway of the story. There's always that lesson of the story, the moral of the story. One of the things that I found was so interesting was when I started as an experiment to look at in Amazon Kindles, you can look at the most popular highlights. So I started looking for the most popular highlights of very literary authors.

Interesting.

And what happens is that is that because it's great because it's a democracy of readers deciding this is the stuff I want to remember.

Yeah.

And when you look at the most popular highlights, what you find is it's lessons in life. It's like these little profound nuggets that help people sort of navigate their lives. So even in that very literary storytelling, it's very nuanced. It isn't like Goldilocks with a very obvious moral at the end. People are still using it for— to learn about life, to learn how stuff works. So, and that's also, of course, true of marketing, except the takeaway message is buy this product. It's not be courageous, it's buy the Mac, you know, because if you buy the Mac, that means you're this kind of person. You know, you don't really get a successful story without some message coming out of it, because if there's no message coming out of it, it's had no effect on you. It's not made you think. It's not made you feel anything. Yeah.

One of the stories, Will, that interests Caleb and me is the story of Will Storr.

Oh.

And there are breadcrumbs of the story of Will Storr sprinkled throughout this book, tantalizing details, as you say. We learn that when you were 13, you tried to grow your hair long, but ended up with a mullet. For some inexplicable reason, you wore 2 belts at the same time. Oh my gosh, this whole section I love, by the way, Will. You have your— you say your social identity, if it was a conscious choice, it was a catastrophic one. T-shirts with skulls, crucifixes, and hairy men with their tongues sticking out were under your school uniform. I do hope you have photos of this stage of your life for your kids to enjoy.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, we learned that in your spare time you volunteer at a phone line for people in crisis. We learned that you have, quote, recklessly gambled thousands of pounds on shares, commodities, and currencies in a gamified trading platform called eToro. How would you tell the story of Will Storr following your own advice that great stories have an obstacle, struggle, Well, that's a big question for the last 9 minutes of the interview.

I mean, I suppose the big thing is that I was a total failure at school. I failed all my exams. I didn't go to university because I didn't have the qualifications to go to university. I used to drink too much. I used to take drugs. I used to get in trouble with the police. So that's my underdog story. And so my adult life has been partly about learning how to be that valuable member of the human family that I definitely wasn't when I was that age. And it's also been about, um, trying to— I don't know, how would you describe it— almost like, um, re-engineer my brain so I'm not fucking insane anymore. I think that's been the mission of my life. Like, I, I, I, I, I wasn't very sane when I was in my, in my teenage years. I mean, probably now I'd be diagnosed as neurodivergent. I don't even want to go down that route. I feel too old and too jaded to get that diagnosis.

Yeah.

But I probably could get an ADHD diagnosis in about 10 minutes if the NHS worked. But anyway, that's not part of my identity whatsoever. So it's been a case of trying to find a sense of stability and sanity, which I think at the age of 50, I have done now. But it's been a very atypical journey. I think most people assume I've been to university. Lots of people assume I studied science, but as I said, I failed. All my friends were at uni. I was working in a record shop.

That's a legit underdog story. And you've written these brilliant, beautifully written books. And of course, so much of what motivates we humans, I think, tends to be compensatory, like compensating for maybe a perceived weakness or— so that backstory is fantastic and so interesting. And, you know, it— all of this kind of dovetails with conversations, I'm realizing, Caleb, that we've had on the show with other people. Like, you know, Michael Lewis, some would say the greatest storyteller of our generation. Wow.

Yeah.

Hero. We had a wonderful conversation with him a few months ago. And he's always said that interesting things happen to people who know how to tell the story of their lives in interesting ways. And we had a wonderful conversation with David Brooks, Hmm. ...about the observation that therapists are effectively story editors. They help us rewrite our stories. And that figuring out how to tell the stories of our lives and retell the stories of our lives and edit those stories and transform those stories is empowering. And I think that's part of what, to me, your book accomplishes for me as a reader, is that there's empowerment in recognizing that these are stories, right?

I mean, that—

that Yes, the Umwelt of stories is the world in which we live and there's no getting out of it, but it also means that we can rewrite our stories or transform them, that there's some plasticity there. Does that resonate for you?

Yeah, absolutely. That's absolutely right. And in fact, the book I've just started writing, my next book is going to be called You Are a Story, and it's very much about that. It's about how we can use these insights from the storytelling brain to make ourselves happier, make ourselves more stable, reduce the suffering that comes along with having a storytelling brain, the anxieties. In the stories I do, I talk about these concepts of identity stress, when we feel that our connection status is under threat. So yeah, that's very much where I'm thinking at the moment, is that understanding the storytelling brain in this way is a way of hopefully helping us live more stable, happier, less scared lives. And then trying to figure out, as I am at the moment, how that might work.

You also have a note in the book that you spent time volunteering for a crisis hotline, and you talk about people choosing to end their lives because of identity crisis. That people feel that the character they play in the story of their lives has failed, and they're trapped in their which was so powerful for me. And this notion, you know, we hear all these stories about people who go bankrupt and end their lives, and you can't help but wonder, my gosh, couldn't they have found opportunities to live other lives? Couldn't they have discovered other stories? But somehow, they felt so subsumed into the story that was their life that they couldn't see beyond it, right? So, it does feel like there's something potentially deeply empowering. And I guess this is what your next book is about. Exactly.

It is, yeah.

Just recognizing that we may have more possibility to rewrite our stories than we think.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's absolutely right. I mean, we talked at the beginning about how humans are the only animal with this storytelling capacity. I think it's not a coincidence we're also the only animal that chooses to end our lives. And that's no coincidence. And it's because Often when I'm speaking to people at the Samaritans, which is the name of the organization, there are kind of 3 main reasons really people suffer from suicidal ideation. Firstly, chronic pain is a big one. Recent bereavement is a big one. But the main one, by far the most common one, is this what I call identity failure.

Yeah.

So those 2 things that we seek, connection and status, they don't have them. They haven't had them for a long time. And essentially they feel stuck. They feel there's no way out. So what you hear again and again and again is, I'm a failure. I'm useless. I'm pathetic. I'm rubbish. That's the status. No one loves me. I'm lonely. Sometimes it's just one. It's a status thing. Sometimes it's just a connection thing. More often, it's both. And when it's both, and when they feel stuck, they think there's no way out, they're in real difficulty. And the pain of that, the absolute agony of the idea that you have failed as a hero in your own story—

Yeah.

enough to drive most people to wanting to escape it by, unfortunately, ending their lives.

Yeah. Well, I'm glad that we live, at least, in a world where Will Storr is out there trying to help some of those people who are really struggling with their own stories to maybe serve as their story editor and maybe help them rethink. And I'm glad that you are here, Will, to help us understand the stories of our lives, story being, storytelling, story worlds. And we can't wait to have you back on when the next book Cool.

Thank you, guys. Thanks, Rufus. Thanks, Caleb. It's been amazing. Thank you so much for the conversation.

Well, if you can make it through a mullet and 2 belts and the— we're going to need more detail to summon more detail from the—

Belt thing, I don't— that's— sorry, we'll come to that next time.

And academic failure to sell millions of copies of really insightful books. around the world. That's an inspiring story that I think people can take— can learn from. Thanks so much, Will. Wonderful to have you back and look forward to continuing the conversation.

It's been a huge pleasure. Yeah, I can't wait to come back. Thanks, guys.

Will Storr's new book, A Story Is a Deal, is out now. Get yourself a copy. You'll find all sorts of material in the book that we did not have a chance to cover.

If you enjoyed this episode, we'd be really grateful if you'd take a minute and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. I know a million podcasters are asking you to do this, and I know it's kind of annoying, but here's the thing. There is a weird quirk in the Apple Podcasts algorithm that means when you leave a review, it helps other people discover the show, and we'd be so grateful.

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That's me.

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