How To Tell Stories That Move People - Will Storr

Why are stories so persuasive?

Well, stories are persuasive because humans think in stories. Our brains remix reality and turn that reality into a narrative with ourselves at the center. So storytelling is sensemaking for the human brain. We haven't evolved to think in data algorithm. We've evolved to process reality in the form of stories. A story is always going to be the most persuasive technology out there. Story's also always going to be the thing that persuades people most of all.

Is it kind of ironic that in the modern world, a lot of the time we're told to take great heed of rationality and data and statistics and stuff like that, but you've got to disregard all of that personification and narrative and archetypes and religion and mythology? That's sort of That's very unsophisticated. It doesn't really meet the criteria by which we judge what's happening in the modern world. So you're asking people to get rid of the stuff which to them feels most real and is persuasive, which is story and archetype and mythology and personification and blah, blah, and to start to believe in the thing which is the most sterile and novel and sort of alien to us.

Absolutely. And I think there's a huge naivety out there that especially in what you might call our world of, we like to think of ourselves as rational people, atheistic people, people who are interested in data and science. And amongst our people, there's a very naive idea that we are the ones who are led by data. I mean, I remember earlier in my career as a journalist interviewing a famous skeptic, Steven Novella, who used to present a podcast called The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. And he very confidently told me that skeptics were kind of immune to irrationality because they were kind of tuned to be automatically skeptical about crazy beliefs. I just think that's sort of deeply naive. What you'll find, especially, you see it all the time in the era of social media, is that even scientists, not even scientists as much as anybody else, they start with the story and then they find the data to back up their story. So you can find academics who know way more than you or I, both of us put together, about human biology, who believe in that kind of woke idea of, you know, biology, gender biology, and, you know, why are men better than women at certain things? You know, they could find all the data in the world to tell you that that's not true, even though we believe that it is true. So, you know, you can take someone like Jordan Peterson on the one hand and Adam Rutherford on the other hand, 2 very smart men, 2 very opinionated men, 2 men who I respect, you know, equally, I would say. But 2 men who are very angry and very lost in the story. They're both lost in the story at this, you know, so, so, you know, I love Adam and I love Jordan. I can never imagine them being in the same room together.

I was about to say, yeah, I wonder what happens over that dinner table.

But equally, with the greatest respect to both of them, I wouldn't trust either of them to talk to me about the science of, you know, gender, talk to me certainly about what's going on in Israel-Palestine.

Dispassionately.

Yeah, dispassionately. Not because they're dishonest, not because there is anything wrong with them, but because they're lost in the story. They're utterly lost in their particular story of the world and the data that they cite, the data that they choose to believe is subservient to the story. So even with people like Adam and Jordan, 2 brilliant minds, the story comes first as far as I'm concerned. I think that's inarguable.

Have you come across knowingness? Do you know what that is?

No, this is new to me.

Cool idea. So this is from Brian Klaas, who wrote Fluke, outstanding book, nearly as good as yours. And he talks about the problem of knowingness. A lot of people in the modern world think that the biggest issue is misinformation. It's people being given poor quality information. He contends that a much bigger issue is knowingness. And knowingness is a belief that you already have the answer to the question before the question has been posed. It's a kind of reverse intellectual curiosity. So I know, no, no, no, no, no, the science is settled on climate change.

Yeah.

Humans are not having any impact or whatever it is. And the interesting insight he's got here is if the issue was simply misinformation, And that is true. Let's just imagine for a moment that misinformation was the biggest problem. All that you would need to do in order to counteract that would be to provide better, more compelling information. But it's not. It's knowingness, which is this kind of Faraday's cage insulation where people don't— it doesn't matter about the information because they're not open to any new information, regardless of whether it's mis- or real- or dis- or mal- whatever, pre-bunked malinformation. And he makes this really great point that when you're thinking about the problems of the modern world, talking about misinformation, talking about you needing better facts, we need to deliver more information. If you can't get past the problem of knowingness, if you can't get past the issue that people feel like they already know the answer, and this is kind of similar to the every religion believes that it's the right one, but but by definition, that can't be true. Only one of them can be right, given that they don't all agree. He has this great line where he says, everybody acts as if the facts are already settled whilst no one can agree on what the facts actually are.

Yeah. I mean, knowingness sounds like implicit belief. It's the beliefs that are just implicit, and you believe them with such ferocity that you can't see that they're beliefs. They just feel like reality to you. And when I talk about the story world, that we all live in this story world, I think that speaks to that idea that we all live in this narrative. One of the moments in my career as a writer that always sticks with me was when I was in my 20s. My very first book was about ghosts, and I went around the world trying to figure out if ghosts existed. It was good fun. One of the guys that I met was called Maurice Grosse, and he was this old guy who lived up in Muswell Hill, and he'd been a ghost hunter all his life. He was famous for investigating the Enfield Poltergeist case. He's bit of a legend, Maurice Grosse. And so I managed to get an interview with him and I went to his house. And as I was leaving his house, he said, you know, you know, Will, he said, if you're looking for evidence of the supernatural, you're going to find it. And it's always stuck with me because I did find evidence for the supernatural, even though I don't believe in the supernatural. And it's always stuck with me because I think the brain is this amazing evidence-finding machine. If you've got a belief, the brain will find evidence to back up your belief, no matter what you believe about gender or Israel-Palestine or whatever it might be. Your brain is going to find multitudinous evidence to back up what you believe. You're going to see it everywhere. And that's one of the tricks of the storytelling brain. We live in this story world, we live in this narrative, and the brain's not interested in what's the truth. The brain's not really interested in you having this perfectly clear understanding of reality. The brain wants you to succeed in your life as a human. And what that means is we have to achieve connection with a group. And once we've achieved connection with a group or a tribe, we kind of earn status within it. And so to earn connection to that group, you've got to believe their story. Every group has a story it tells of the world, whether it's a political organization or a cult or a religion. Or me and you are in the same kind of cultural group. We believe roughly the same things. We have a shared reality. We have a shared idea of who are the heroes, who are the villains, what are the good beliefs, what are the bad beliefs, what is status. So me and you share a story, and we probably share a story with most of your viewers, and it's reassuring. We see evidence for it everywhere. So that's kind of how all this is working. The brain isn't motivated to discover the truth. The brain is motivated to make us want to connect with like-minded people and earn status from those people. And that means believing their stories.

So is it right to say that story is the language of the brain then?

Absolutely. That's exactly right. And what we know, and as I write about in A Story Is a Deal, I think that the big idea that kind of made me excited about this book was this idea that what is story originally for? Well, story is what enables us to be these highly cooperative apes. As you know, humans are an ape. We're one of 5 existing species of great ape, but we are a weird, obviously an unusual kind of ape. And that weirdness is that we are also a bit like ants in that we're highly collective. Other apes overcome the obstacles of their existence individually. They live in troops, but they find food individually. They pursue goals individually, broadly speaking, but we don't. Humans are like ants that we form into these superorganisms, these problem-solving superorganisms in which every kind of individual human plays their part. And that's how we're amazing. That's how we've We've taken the best of the ape and the best of the ant and we've taken over the world. But that poses a problem. You've got all these apes once upon a time. How do you connect all those individualistic ape brains together? How do you get all those brains firing in the form of this highly collective superorganism? Well, you do it with story. Story is a device for fusing brains together. Under the power of story, we are all facing in the same direction, pursuing the same goals, overcoming the same obstacles. We'll have a shared idea of who you are, who you are, what your role is, what you should be doing. So that's what story's doing. It's fusing individual human brains together and getting them to experience the same reality. And you can see that effect happening when you go to the movies, when you go to the cinema. We go into the cinema as this crowd of individuals, and if the film is any good, we're transported into it. And for that 90 minutes, We forget our own reality, we forget our own consciousness. We're all sucked into that consciousness of the film, experiencing the lives of the people up on the screen. And we kind of leave that cinema connected as one, having had that mad experience. And you often have that weird, kind of almost trippy experience coming out of the cinema where for a few moments you feel like the hero of the movie. You feel like Luke Skywalker for a moment. Everything goes a bit weird. You kind of snap out of it. Well, that's story doing what story's supposed to do, which is entering our brains and getting us all to experience this kind of collective reality of the story.

So it's kind of like a coordination mechanism to get everybody onto a similar page.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, that's— and it still works like that, of course. You know, MAGA people have a particular story of the world that they tell each other. You know, anti-vax people do. Provax people do, climate change people do. That's how it works. We still collect into these groups that are defined by the stories they tell of the world, and those stories infect us. They influence us. They cause us to believe certain things and to behave in certain ways.

Why is this just that evolutionarily, if all you've got is the spoken word, Humans needed to— the most obvious way to explain the world is to do it through personification, narrative, roles, characters, motivation. This is why the goddess that is the moon and the god that is the sun rises and the thunder and Thor. And, you know, is this just before you've got written word and before you can do statistical analysis? the most obvious, most common, most sort of close to our experience of reality way to communicate information was to personify it into a sort of a narrative? Is that we're just the progeny of storytellers that told stories to pass down wisdom, to tell stories to pass down wisdom?

Well, I mean, the current leading theory is that language evolved in the first place to tell stories that enabled us to operate as these highly cooperative groups, these superorganisms as I call them. One early form of storytelling is gossip. Gossip is a universal human behavior. We all do it. Why do we do it? Well, gossip teaches us who we ought to be in this superorganism. It teaches us what are the good behaviors, what are the bad behaviors. It motivates us to behave in a kind of way that serves the superorganism because then we're rewarded with status. And it also incentivizes in the other way that if you're being gossiped about and the gossip is negative, you're going to get punished. So that's one form of early storytelling. I mean, the other kind of storytelling is about the future. We tell stories about the future. There's a very brilliant evolutionary biologist called Michael Tomasello that says that it's impossible to imagine 2 chimpanzees picking up a log and carrying it together to take it somewhere else. Even that basic level of coordination, cooperation, even chimpanzees can't do, our closest relative. And storytelling enables us to do that. Okay, if we move that log over here, that can be a foundation for our next camp. All right, dude, we're going to do it. So that's a form of storytelling. We're telling stories about the future. And that's why stories are always about obstacles and goals. Every functional story fundamentally is about obstacles and goals because that's what story evolved to do. Its purpose is to pull us into a group and the purpose of that group is to overcome obstacles in pursuit of goals.

What role does social identity and mimicry play here?

Huge, huge roles. I mean, social identity is your identity within the group. Who are you in the group? Basic idea might— basic concept might be a football team. Who are you in a football team? You're playing in a particular position that comes with certain expectations. You've got certain roles to perform and you're judged. Your status goes higher or lower depending on how well you perform those roles. And that's the same in every— your social identity in the football team is striker, defender, goalkeeper, whatever it might be, referee even. And that's the same in every human group. With every group we join, we have what we call a social identity. And a human identity is in part a collection of these various social identities that we have.

Right. Yeah. I wonder, what was that What was that Apple ad, the lemmings thing?

Yeah. So in A Story Is a Deal, I tell the story of, well, I sort of pose a question really about one of the most famous ads that was ever made was Apple's 1984 ad, which kind of played on the George Orwell novel and showed this horrendous kind of totalitarian hellscape, all these kind of bald, gray, middle-aged men, God forbid, drone-like automatons, and this kind of barking patriarchal face. And this technicolor woman with an Apple t-shirt on runs down the middle of it, throws a hammer, smashes the face, and then it comes up saying, in January 1984, you're going to find out why— I forget the actual words— because of Apple, 1984 won't be like 1984. So basically, 1984 is freedom, it's power, it's Creativity is progress. Hugely successful, massively successful ad campaign. I mean, they sold, in today's money, would be hundreds of millions of dollars worth of computers when they were launched after that ad. So enormously successful. And then the next year, people know about the 1984 ad because it is seen as one of the most successful ads in history. But the next year, they tried to repeat it. They did the same thing. It was the same advertising agency, Chiat/Day. They used a Hollywood film director. And what this ad was called, it's called Lemmings. And it was just the most horrendous, dark, dark thing where you've got all these automaton sad sack businessmen, a bit like the PC guys in their 1990s or early 2000s ads, I'm a Mac, I'm a PC, kind of marching with briefcases, marching off this cliff to their deaths, the sound of a nightmarishly slowed-down version of Hey Ho, Hey Ho, It's Off to Work We Go, basically saying that all these business computer users were a bunch of lemmings, implying if they knew what they were doing, they'd be buying Apple computers. And it was a massive disaster. It wasn't even like a null effect where everyone just ignored it. The day after it was launched on the Super Bowl, Apple's headquarters were inundated with phone calls from people saying, business people saying they were never going to buy an Apple computer again. And one of the things I'm arguing in the book is that one of the reasons, one of the things I didn't understand was that that 1984 ad was offering the Apple user status. It was just saying fundamentally that if you buy an Apple computer, you're on the side of progress, creativity, smashing the man, which is a big thing in the '80s. It's not going to be 1984. So it's a very optimistic, high-status, fashionable story they were telling. But the other ad, it took status away. So it was an absolute disaster. It was basically telling people that they were these bunch of brain-dead lemmings and they were going to fall to their death due to their own stupidity.

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

Yeah, a little bit. So to understand one of the reasons that 1984 was so successful, you have to really understand the story of computers that was being told in the 1980s. So when the advert was broadcast, the Berlin Wall stood up. This wasn't the age of Silicon Valley, Facebook, Google, and all the friendly corporate brands that we know today. Computers were still feared. They were seen as these kind of machines that were going to introduce a future of conformity and totalitarianism. It was just a year before 1984 was broadcast, there was a massive film called WarGames, which I just about remember from my childhood, which was all about this computer that did war games with the Soviet Union, kind of goes crazy and actually starts and almost starts a brand new nuclear war. And a computer then was this huge kind of flashing mainframe thing operated by inscrutable men in white lab coats. So that was what people feared. People feared computers. Weirdly, that fear is reawakening at the moment in the age of AI. People are starting to have those fears again, but they went away. And really, largely, one of the reasons they went away is because of that ad. It was saying, no, this is not what personal computers are all about. Personal computers are about freedom. They're about individuality. They're about progress. So people loved that story. They massively identified with that story, and it ended up being an incredibly powerful powerfully persuasive piece of storytelling for Apple. I mean, like all the ads I talk about in the book, it had no information in it about the actual product. It had no price, no technical details. It didn't even have a picture of the damn thing. It was pure storytelling and incredibly successful. And then one scholar in marketing that I read, and I agree, argues that that 1984 didn't just tell a brand new story about Apple computers, it told a brand new story about Silicon Valley, about computers in general. That story about computers being the tools for creativity and changing the world and freedom, that became the story of computers going on for decades.

Is it right to say that stories are identity manipulation in that way then?

Manipulation is a strong word.

Curation.

Curation. I don't think their ads are manipulating our identity, strictly speaking. I think they are manipulating us by appealing to our identity. So humans, we live in these 2 worlds at once. We live in the physical world like other animals, and in that physical world, we care about our survival. We care about food and shelter and procreation and importantly, safety of our children who are going to then move our genes forwards. So in that respect, we're no different from a dog or an elephant. But humans live in this other kind of crazy world, this story world where we care about other things. And in the story world, we aren't a flesh and blood machine. We're an identity. We're this collection of ideas. That's what we are. And this identity means more to us than our lives. To the average human being, their identity is the most precious thing they'll ever own. I mean, our children aren't our possessions, but our identity is. So you can see people throughout human history have chosen identity over their own lives. When we go to war, that's what we do. When we fly planes into the World Trade Center, that's what we do. When we kill ourselves, that's what we do. Most cases of suicide are what I call identity failure. It's not because they can't physically live anymore because they're sick or because they're poor or something. I mean, of course, people do often kill themselves because they're ill, but very often they don't. Very often they kill themselves because they feel like failures, because their identity has failed, because they're lacking in connection. No one loves me. No one likes me. Everybody hates me. They're lacking in status. I'm useless. I'm pathetic. And crucially, they're also trapped. They feel there's no way they can rescue their identity. And the pain of their identity failing becomes so acute that they choose death over the pain of having their identity fall to pieces. And so that's the power of identity. And so the most powerful ads appeal to identity. And again, that's what Apple did with their other really famous and successful ad campaign, Think different. Just a bunch of black and white pictures of people like Gandhi and Mother Teresa and John Lennon. And this is you, think different. So basically people who identify with those characters changed the world became another absolute cliché in Silicon Valley. And it began really with think different when it became popularized, that idea. And that's an appeal to identity. There's another really great example which I found, which I'd never heard of. And if you're not Canadian, you won't know about it, but it's Molson Beer. So back in the year 2000, Molson Beer were in trouble. They were the number one and then they were slipping. And so the ad agency were tasked with rescuing the reputation of Molson Beer. And the guy at the ad agency was Canadian and knew that one of the things that annoys Canadians is when Americans basically say, you are just Americans. There's no difference between Canadians and Americans. It's something that really winds Canadians up, as you can imagine. So he came up with this ad campaign called I Am Canadian, and all it is, is this ordinary guy, in a plaid shirt and jeans on a stage listing things that are Canadian, like it's Zed, not Zee, for example. We don't say a boot, we say about. It's just a list of things, but it was massively successful. It went instantly viral at the time. Kids began shouting it on the streets. The value of Molson Beer rocketed. I forget the exact number, but tens of millions of the value of the company through the roof. The incredibly smart thing they did was they debuted that ad in the ad break of the Oscars, just after the South Park film Blame Canada had been performed.

Right.

So they watched Blame Canada and then they had this very patriotic I Am Canadian thing. But what's fascinating about I Am Canadian is, and it became known as the rant in Canada, it's very famous in Canada. And what's fascinating about it, again, just like the Apple ad, there's nothing in there about the beer, about its tastiness or whatever. What are the qualities of this beer? Why should we be buying it? Nothing. It's literally an appeal to identity. It's holding a mirror up to their market, their audience, saying, this is who you are. And we're so in love with our identity, we go, yes, that's me. And we flock to the product. And it's the same as what Apple did with Think Different. They just said, here you are, we see you, you're amazing, you're fantastic, and this is who you are. You are this person. And so that's how it's manipulating us for our identity, like the very best, most persuasive ads. That's how they do it.

Does that mean from a story perspective, stories overall, adverts too, but just generally stories that they can, they're a way that tribal preferences can be used, can be manipulated, in-group, out-group, the people like us meme?

Absolutely right. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, and this is another concept that really came home to me when I was doing my research for A Story Is a Deal. And it really made me feel like as a society, we are still at the foothills of maturity in talking about issues like race because we fundamentally hate this idea, but it's an inarguably true idea. And the idea is that people like people like them. We collect into groups of like-minded people. So we're always looking out for people who are a bit like us. to identify with. And so that's why race becomes a problem, because white people naturally tend to flock towards white people. Black people naturally tend to flock towards black people. And at its core, it isn't racism, it's human nature. And until we've really grasped that, we're not going to make any progress in these very difficult problems. So that's what we're constantly doing. And again, it's human nature because we're always looking for people with similar identities to us that we can cooperate with. It's that superorganism programming again, that nature is constantly wanting us to gather into groups of like-minded people and repel people who we think aren't like-minded. And the most persuasive storytelling understands that. One of the most recent examples was from the Trump election, the one just gone, which I thought was extraordinary, where there's a concept in the book I call atomic statements, which are kind of Tiny little phrases that are absolutely packed with meaning, and they're atomic because they're tiny little things, but they explode on contact with the human brain. They're so packed with meaning. And you can see lines of movie dialogue like, we're going to need a bigger boat, is an atomic statement because it's the entire movie packed into a line. Houston, we have a problem, is an atomic statement. These are the lines that we love and we repeat and become iconic because they're atomic. They're packed full of meaning. And the best advertising lines are like that. Just do it is packed full of meaning. It's a story about what Nike stands for. Just do it. It's fantastic. And politicians use these to great effect too. In the book, I write about Project Fear and Take Back Control, which were very successful for the Brexit Leave campaign. But after the book was finished, there was this other incredible atomic statement that came out of the Trump campaign, which was, Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you, which even the people that came up with it were staggered by how successful it was. Kamala's own research team, worked out that it had created a 2.7% shift in the election race, just that line alone. So that's a story, and it's a story that millions of Americans immediately understood, a certain kind of American who were incredibly frustrated and fed up with the era of wokeism. And so yeah, that was another example of incredibly powerful persuasive storytelling that appeals to identity.

Does that mean that misaligned messages and misaligned stories can threaten identity then if you get it wrong on the other way?

Yeah, exactly. So you look at the Gillette ad campaign where they were trying to appeal to men by calling men abusers and harassers. It's like Lemmings all over again. You're not going to make people happy by removing their status, by telling them a story that they don't want to believe. It's the Bud Light campaign. giving a transgender woman Bud Light to drink. That's a story. We know that this person stands for wokeism and wokeism is at its core, if we're honest about what wokeism is, at its core, one of the things it is, is a movement against straight white men. So straight white men were the market for Bud Light. So that was a ridiculous thing to do and it exploded in their faces. And also Tesla, Tesla's stock price has collapsed, and that's partly because of the tariffs, but their sales have dropped massively across Europe, which isn't because of the tariffs. And that's because the story that Tesla stands for has been polluted by Elon Musk's behavior in the last 18 months and his alignment with the Trump government.

It's vicious, isn't it? The power that stories have, because much of this If you were to say reality, you said there's 2 things. We sort of live in the world and we live in stories. Tesla's cars from, I don't know when they launched, a decade ago, something like that until now, have just linearly got better and cheaper and faster and more convenient with improved build quality, but largely are the same thing, right? So my point is that they haven't changed, but the story around them has. And that's made way more of an impact on the stock price and on their sales and on the way that people see them than the incremental improvement month on month, year on year over a decade to their full self-driving capacity. So in this way, the story is more real than reality is.

It is more real than reality. That's exactly right. And to understand why, you've got to go back to that concept of the story world. that human beings are these 2 things. We're a bag of bones and blood in the survival realm, but in the story realm, we're nothing more than a collection of ideas that we collect. We are the things that we love. We are the art that we like. We are the podcasts that we listen to. It makes me laugh when I'm watching travel podcasters who go around the world and they all copy Bored and Bankrupt's body language. He does this weird thing where he looks behind him all the time, and you see him, especially at the beginning, they do it. I think subconsciously aping his body language because he's part of their identity. And that's also true of the things that we own. The things that we own are part of our identity. So if you're somebody that stands against Trump and you own a Tesla, it becomes toxic to you because it's like your very self has become polluted with this alien kind of element. You want to cut it out of you. It's a radically bad thing to happen to you. So you're going to reject it. It's like being forced as a middle-aged man to walk down the road, um, you know, um, with a, I don't know, with a big skin-tight Taylor Swift t-shirt on. Like, it just makes you feel deeply uncomfortable, you know. So, so, so, because the self is nothing more than a collection of ideas in that story realm.

What does the Theranos story, uh, tell us about group psychology and how that works?

Well, it's, it, you know, I, I love the Theranos story because it, it, it really speaks to all this stuff, you know. As we know, Elizabeth Holmes came along and said she had this incredible device that she called Edison. And Edison was revolutionary because you used to take a couple of vials of blood to do all this huge battery of blood tests, and she could do it with a pinprick of blood in your finger. Amazing, revolutionary, fantastic. And as we know now, it was fantasy. It didn't work. There was no machine. And so what's incredible about Edison is that she managed to get huge amount of backing from people on her board, including Henry Kissinger, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control. Very, very high-status smart men. They were all men on her board, not a single woman. And that's important for reasons that will become apparent in a second. So all these guys gambled their reputation on her telling the truth. And then Incredibly smart, successful guys and girls invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in Theranos. Rupert Murdoch, it was the most amount of money he's ever invested in any company outside of his own family of companies. And the incredible thing about this is most of these people did no due diligence. So Rupert Murdoch did no due diligence. So they didn't even bother to find out whether she was telling the truth. Like it's extraordinary. Some people did. So so somebody from Google Ventures, who were interested in investing, went down to a Walmart where Theranos were doing their tests for a for a blood test, and they took two massive vials of blood out of his arm. He's just like, "Hang on a minute! This is we are not investing in this." So some people didn't fall for the story, but Rupert Murdoch did, and Henry Kissinger did, and the Walmart family did. And you know, I I I me and other commentators too. This is not just me who's come up with this. are convinced it was the story that she stood for. This was— we're still in that time. We're in the girl boss era. People were and remain desperate for a female Steve Jobs. People talk very disparagingly about tech bros. The masculinity of the tech world is a problem for the good people of our culture today. So people were desperate for a female Steve Jobs, and she became a female Steve Jobs, even down to the turtleneck. It was extraordinary, the kind of cosplaying that she did. And so people like Rupert Murdoch and Henry Kissinger, by buying into Theranos, they're making that part of their identity. So her heroic story becomes their own heroic story. Rupert Murdoch becomes somebody that has backed this female billionaire genius founder. So that's how important the story is. And as I say in the book, I mean, the device didn't exist. The device was worth nothing, but the story was worth $9 billion. That's what Theranos was valued at, at their peak, $9 billion dollars. So that's the power of storytelling to kind of bedazzle the minds of even our greatest, smartest, wealthiest people.

Do you think that we overestimate logic because we sort of underestimate identity in this way?

Yeah, we do. There's something in the brain that tells us that we are— something very powerful that tells us that we are not under the influence of story, that we are under the influence of rationality. Well, it's actually quite easy to figure out why that it is. You have to believe in the story of your group in order for that group to function. Obviously you do.

Because if you don't believe, you can't be a part of the group.

Yeah, because you're not part of that group's mission. You're de-identified with the group. Also, one of the fundamental things that you want from that group is— well, the 2 fundamental things that you want is connection and status. You only really connect with the group if you believe in their story. If you believe that Jesus was a real guy, and that he died and resurrected on the 3rd day, you're a Christian now. That's what you are. You're a Christian. It's as simple as that, Jordan, by the way. And so now you're connected into that Christian world. But in order to earn status in that Christian world, you have to allow that belief to kind of fill you up. I call this process active belief. You have to that belief has to act on you like a parasite controlling your behavior. So you go out in the world and you start acting out the values and the story of the Christian set of beliefs. You can't do that if you don't believe in Christianity. It wouldn't make any sense to you. And also, you can't earn the status. One of the things that Muslims do, they call it the Hafiz, where some Muslims will learn the Quran by heart. So every word of the Quran takes sometimes 2 to 3 years. It's a massive thing. And if you manage to pull this stunt off, you get a huge amount of status. I think it's called a Hafiz, but you get a certain title and a certain status. Now, you have to believe in the story of Islam to go through that trial of 2 to 3 years of earning it by heart, because otherwise you're not going to be motivated to do it. And also, more importantly, the status will mean nothing. It doesn't mean anything. So if you don't believe in the story, To you and me, it's a waste of time learning that book word for word. Why would you bother? But if you believe in the story, it has massive meaning. So yeah, we have to believe that the stories aren't just stories, that they're actual truth, they're reality. And we believe it so much. Look at through human history, people all the time fight and die on behalf of the beliefs of their groups.

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

Yeah, yeah. I saw that too, and I was jealous. I was like, damn, I wish I'd come up with that. But yeah, it's absolutely—

It's not too late to add it to the book. It's only a preprint.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. That's the right way to think about it. And again, I'll just go back to poor Adam Rutherford and Jordan Peterson, who I emphasize, they're incredibly smart guys who I have nothing but respect for, but they have their stories of the world that they believe thoroughly, and nobody, no set of facts is going to change their minds on their beliefs. That seems pretty clear from the tenor of their conversation on social media. Yeah.

Okay, so connection, identity, but also status. So how do we use story to gain status?

Yeah, as I said, it's like once we believe the story of the group, what we want then is to earn status within the group. So nobody wants to be at the bottom rung of a group, liked but seen as kind of useless. We kind of want to rise up the group. That's human nature. And you do that by developing a reputation of somebody that's valuable to the group in some way. So, as I said, if you're a Christian, you just become a better Christian. You start acting like a Christian. If you're an anti-vaxxer, you don't get vaccinated. You might go protesting, you might start doing some blogging, you might have an argument with your GP about how vaccines are shit, and then you'll tell all your friends and they'll go, oh, you're amazing. So that's what I call that kind of active belief. Again, we allow that story to take us over. And again, this is why stories are so incredibly persuasive. You see it all the time. Stories take over the minds of people and they start behaving in ways dictated by the story. At its most extreme, it's a cult. I mean, that's the most extreme form of what I call a status game, where people have one identity, one story, one status game, and that's it. I mean, that's why people in cults are usually encouraged to not even contact family and friends anymore because they cannot be allowed to have any other source of any other story, any other identity, any other source of status. And a religion is just a slightly weaker form of a cult. A political party is a weaker form of a cult, and you can carry on going down and down the line. All groups are kind of loose or tight, and the tightest is the cult.

Is there a difference between high and low status influence and storytelling?

Yeah. So you've mentioned mimesis a couple of times, the copying instinct, and how that tends to work in human groups is that we are unconsciously constantly on the lookout for people like us, so people that we identify with, who are higher status than us. And when we identify a higher status version of ourselves, we tend to automatically start copying them. That's when the mimesis kicks in. So we will want to get near them. So that might be by flattering them if they're a celebrity, might be by buying their products, joining their social media feeds, going to their concerts. We might start mimicking their patterns of behavior, the way they talk, the way they dress, their artistic tastes. We will automatically, yeah. So it's unconsciously, that's because our brain has gone, well, this is a person like me who's got high status. I want high status. So the more I can make myself like this person, the more likely I am to rise up that status game.

What about virtue signaling? That's a very specific type of status and probably involves story.

Yeah. Well, there are kind of, well, there's lots of different kinds of status, but there are 3 main kinds of ways that we can earn status in human groups. The first way is dominance. So that's the much more animalistic way, the much more ancient way. So dominance is violence, the threat of violence, also the threat of social violence, ostracization, cancel culture, all that would come under dominance. And then there's the other 2 kind of forms which are based on our reputation, our identity. And so the first one is competence. So we become good at stuff, so we become valuable to our group, by becoming an excellent hunter or an excellent honey finder or an excellent storyteller or an excellent sorcerer. And so people respond to us by rewarding us with status. And in all human groups, the more status you get, the better everything else becomes. You become safer, better fed, you get greater access to choice of mates. In the modern world, you get richer. It's always worked like that. It always will work. But the other way of earning status is by virtue. We also award status to people who we perceive as virtuous. And the role of virtue in human groups is about rules. It's about knowing the rules, knowing the stories, but it's also enforcing the rules. So again, we have this very naive view that virtue is obviously good, but virtue is 50% good, 50% evil because packed in with virtue is that instinct to enforce the rules and to punish people who don't share our story world. So Michelle Obama, you might call her a virtue superstar because she's known for her perceived moral goodness by her people. The Pope, the Dalai Lama, these are virtue superstars. These are people who are incredibly high status. Greta Thunberg, on the basis of the perception that they are high in levels of virtue. But also during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards were playing virtue-based status games. People doing cancel culture, it's dominance virtue. They're not interested in competence. They're not interested in success. They're interested in, I'm going to punish you for not following the rules and for not believing the sacred stories of my group.

How do— it sounds a lot like rivalry. How do the mechanics of rivalry play out in stories, storytelling?

Rivalry is interesting. So within a group, rivalry can be very productive. So, but rivalry tends to be classified as a one-on-one thing. So if you are rivalrous with one individual and, you know, one of the tests of rivalry, you know, people who are rivals are usually quite similar. They're playing the same status game and they have a history of near wins in close matches. So that's the recipe for a rivalry. And that kind of rivalry can be amazing. It can drive people to incredible feats. It's the Lennon-McCartney thing. In The Status Game, I told the true origin story of the iPhone, which is that when Steve Jobs went to a barbecue that his wife organized with some twat from Microsoft who was sort going, oh, Microsoft has solved computers. We've got this touch device with a stylus. It's going to blow you out of the water. And then Jobs came in to work on the Monday and went furious, livid, and instructed his team to figure out a way of blowing Microsoft out of the water. And it wasn't going to be a stylus. It was going to be with a finger. So that's rivalry. I mean, rivalry made the iPhone. It began as the iPad and then reemerged as the iPhone. So that tends to be good for us. It's obviously exhausting, but we've all been in that situation where we become obsessed with the rival. It drives you forward. What's less healthy is competition. So if rivalry is one-on-one, one person versus one person, one group versus one group, competition is kind of all against all. And competition in that kind of technical sense is often less productive. It's kind of exhausting. It's kind of toxic. People in organizations very high in competition experience lots of burnout. They experience kind of a toxic culture in which everybody's kind of hoarding the status for themselves, taking all the credit, pushing all the blame away. So yeah, you've got to be careful in organizations how you are engineering your teams so there's not too much competition, but there is plenty of healthy rivalry.

Yeah. Well, you need people to be able to capture the upside from doing a really great job whilst not detracting from the positive-sum gains that you get by working in a team. And this, the tension between connection and capturing, I suppose, self-capturing of this status. Like, I need to show that I'm contributing to the group, but I actually want to capture as much, if not maybe even a little bit more than I actually contributed. But I can't do too much because if I do too much, then people are going to know that I'm a freeloader. So I need to have conspicuous productivity to the point where people will— I remember, this is so funny. I haven't thought about this forever. So, uh, during my degree at Newcastle, we had a, uh, a consultancy project. This is so fucked up. I can't believe I haven't thought about this in ages. We did a consultancy project for a, a company. It was a marketing consultancy project, and we were chosen. I think it was the British Fly Fishing Association. Uh, and we— I remember we went down to Stoke-on-Trent. We all drove down as a group, and it was a group of 5 or 6, I want to say 6, group of 6. And me and my business partner were in there. So obviously we were a super, super tight group and real competent. We were doing this professionally ourselves. We knew how everything was going. Went down, we did this consultation project, and then we present it to the lecturer. Now, one of the ways that your grades were mediated was that everybody in the group had to give a relative rating that they thought about the contribution of everybody else in the group. Which just— it was immediately going to allow us to get into coalitional bullshit.

Oh, yeah.

And sure enough, there was a couple of people who hadn't contributed all that much. And I think, you know, we got the ranking correct, but we fucking twisted the knife for sure because we were like— and it just became a coordination problem. And given that me and my business partner were club promoters, all that we do is coordinate people into social groups. That was— I was a professional social coordination manipulator. I was never going to— I think I got some absurdly high mark. I got a 1.5x multiplier on whatever the group score was for me and my business partner because of how much we'd contributed. And we convinced everybody else to give us this grade, which again, I stand by the fact that we deserved it, but it's just perverse incentives. So another thing on the rivalry point, have you looked at venting much, like the specific act of venting?

No, I haven't. I'm fascinated.

Fucking awesome. So this is a little bit of Christina Gerante, a little bit of Tanya Reynolds, a little bit of Corey Clark, some evolutionary psychology ladies, super smart people. And venting is a unique type of gossip. And you mentioned gossip earlier on.

Yeah.

It's a very unique type. Venting allows the gossiper to couch their gossip under the pretext of empathetic concern for the victim.

Ah, yeah.

So, me and you are having a conversation and I say, Will, you know, I'm just, I'm really worried about John because, you know, he's sleeping with all these girls and I'm just really worried that he's going to get hurt because I, you know, I care about him. so much. And, and I, I'm just really concerned. He just keeps on sleeping around all the time. And like, I really think that, you know, he's worth more than that, and he doesn't really understand that he's worth more than that. Okay, so what, what, what information have I communicated during that? Well, I've told you that John's being a man-whore, right? Uh, but I've done it. I, I— John, I, I'm just so worried. I, I didn't say— I didn't say anything bad about you. I just care about you so much as a friend.

Yeah, it's coming from a good place. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

Yeah, yeah.

Really, it's a novel vector of attack that it's specifically done amongst women, which is why all of the people that I mentioned that did the research were female researchers.

Well, I hate to bring it up, but I am thinking about Love Island as you're—

Hey, there it is!

There it is.

Coalition warfare.

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

Mm-hmm.

And sometimes they'll try to build each other up and, you can do it, mate. You can do it. You just need to do this. So the kind of coalitional care amongst the men is focused around problem solving and accountability a bit. But the female—

Mm-hmm.

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

Away from a solution.

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

Yeah, it's performative empathy in that regard. It looks like a caring approach from the outside and probably feels like it from the inside. I mean, this is—

Yeah.

The best way to deceive others is to believe the deception yourself. And very few people that are venting are thinking, this is some 5D chess way for me to gain status or stand on the shoulders of this other person's rumor or whatever it might be. But yeah, The sort of barefacedness of revealing somebody else's shortcomings. There's this phenomenal Bill Burr bit where he's talking about body positivity in the WNBA, and he says, ladies, if you could only support the WNBA the way that you support a fat chick who's ate herself out of her dress size and is no longer a threat to you, They'd be making more money than the NBA. And it— dude, I wrote, I wrote an entire essay about it because it's such an accurate insight. And I think that the body positivity movement in many ways is women encouraging their attractive but slightly chubby girlfriends to not diet themselves down into their mating competition pool.

Yeah.

It's, no, darling, you look, you look great at any size. Like, you don't need to lose weight. No, you're a queen. Like, if they don't—

And if he can't see that, that's his problem.

If he's not able to work out, he doesn't deserve you. Like, you're better than him. Meanwhile, like, rules for thee but not for me. It's a luxury belief, as Robert Henderson would say, that if you're a bigger girl with a bigger girlfriend, her dieting down or her, you know, hitting the gym and making herself more physically attractive is you now no longer being able to keep up with her. And if you are a more in-shape girl, that is a huge threat to you. It's one of the reasons why I believe that people who are in shape, BMI, are more threatened by Ozempic than people who are plus size.

Yeah.

Because the people that are plus size, even though ostensibly they are the ones whose identity is being threatened, They don't have anything to lose in the same way because my competition pool is my competition pool. Maybe there's even fewer people at this size now, so perhaps I can access the people more easily. But if you're in shape and you see that someone's able to get there easily, unfairly, uh, hey, fuck you. Get back. Stay where you— you don't deserve this. Um, so yeah, yeah.

This is not how our status game is played. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that, that's absolutely right.

What about Substack badges? I saw that you looked at that.

Yeah, so it's interesting. Substack, they're obviously kind of a new kind of social media player, and they've been sort of figuring out how to kind of employ status game psychology into their platform, I think, a little bit. I've got to be careful because my wife works for Substack.

No.

But I've got none of this from her. What I've written in the book, I got from something that Chris Best, one of the founders, wrote. And he wrote a really interesting essay about status psychology and Substack. And it was initially, I think, that they kind of made this mistake where they were putting writers into some kind of chart that could easily be gamed. So what that meant was that writers were then getting bots to like their essays, so they were gaming the thing. And so they changed it to, we are now going to reward writers who make the most money because that's the status game of Substack. Our purpose on this earth is to allow creators, especially writers, to make a living from their work. So that's our game. So from now on, we're going to reward you. We're going to reward the writers who earn the most money. And then it kind of fixed itself. They got their incentives correct and the game started to be being played correctly.

Did you look at how stories play out in the role of reputational crises? We're in the era of Takedown and breakdown and accusation and stuff like that.

Yeah. I mean, so there are a few ways of sort of tackling that. I mean, one of the ways is to kind of think, go back to that idea of female aggression as we were just talking about with the venting and the co-rumination. And I feel that the whole woke thing, the reputation destruction thing, it just feels like a very kind of female-heavy movement. It feels like a female-style movement. Male aggression tends to be one-on-one, out in the open. You could talk about toxic masculinity as being a guy walking into the room, being very intimidating to people and pushing people around and bullying people.

Mm-hmm.

Female aggression tends to be coalitional. It's the group against the one. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes gossip, and it's about not physical, destruction, but reputation destruction. And so you can see the success of feminism, the incredible rise in the power of women in society and culture, kind of goes hand in hand with this new way that we are playing status games in the world. Wokeism and cancel culture being One of them. So that's one way that I kind of think about this. Kind of more technically, there are a few things I write about in The Story Is the Deal about how to kind of manage times of reputational destruction. What is a good apology? One of the things that's really interesting from evolutionary psychology is just how incredibly toxic the state of selfishness is. So because we're this tribal animal, we are this coalitional loving ape, we form into these superorganisms. What the story's always wanting us to do is to be selfless, is to put the group's interests before our own interests. So when you look in storytelling, generally a hero is always somebody that puts the group before themselves or puts somebody else before themselves. So selflessness is the essence of heroism. universally. So courage in the face of crisis for the group, whatever it is. So selflessness is ineffably heroic, and its opposite is selfishness. Villains in stories are always selfish in some way. They want to keep all the rewards for themselves. They want to keep the girl for themselves, whatever it is. They want to hoard resources. So One of the things that leaders need to avoid massively doing in times of crisis is to have the appearance of selfishness. And that's one of the things that Tony Hayward did, the CEO of BP, when there was the huge Gulf oil spill. He didn't handle it very well at the beginning. He tried to kind of push blame away, but he eventually accepted full blame and enacted the most expensive cleanup operation in all of history, just an enormous deliberation paid for by BP. And then he did a TV interview and at the end of the TV interview he said, believe me, no one wants to get this over more than I do. I'd like my life back. And that moment just destroyed him. Not only did it destroy him, it became international news. Barack Obama, who was president at the time, even started talking about it. And of course his 25-year career at BP was kind of over in a flash. So that's really important. bottom, that in times of trouble, you've got to appear selfless because selflessness is the essence of the hero in the human story world. And there was another thing which I thought was very interesting. This guy called Christopher Booker, who wrote an epic book called The 7 Basic Plots, and he defined the heroes having these 4 qualities of feeling, order, strength, and agency. And so heroes in stories tend to show those kind of 4 qualities. And when you look at really good apology videos from people, they tend to embody those 4.

Feeling, order, strength, and agency.

Yeah. They tend to embody those kind of 4 qualities in a really perfect way.

What's a good apology video and what's a horrible apology video?

Well, the apology video that I really like is from way back in history. And it's a guy called— it's what, way back in history? 20 years ago. No, it was 2007. It was very early days of YouTube. And it was Patrick Doyle who took over Domino's. And Patrick Doyle is an amazing CEO. He really turned Domino's around. He turned it from being from down there to up there. He was a revolutionary guy. But he'd just begun Domino's. And it was the early days of YouTube. And these 2 idiots in a local Domino's decided to make a video of themselves picking their noses and rubbing it on a pizza. And farting on a pizza and setting the pizza out. And they put the video on YouTube and nobody really knew what YouTube was at the time. And so this thing went on YouTube on the Monday and Domino's was like, oh, nobody's going to see this. Then the next day, hundreds of thousands of people could see it. And then by the Wednesday, when you typed in Domino's into Google, it was the top thing on Google. So Domino's actually opened their first Twitter account in order to put this video on there. And Patrick Doyle did this, kind of, kind of off— it was seemingly sort of pretty off-the-cuff apology video. You can still find it on YouTube. Um, uh, and, and he really embodies all of those. I mean, you know, broadly speaking, it's the kind of masculine and the feminine. You've got strength and order, feeling and— sorry, strength, order, feeling, and understanding, not feeling and agency. Strength, order, feeling, and understanding. And he does all— he hits all of those kind of 4, 4, um, buttons in the apology video. You can tell he's furious, you know, he's angry. He's— we've called the police. They've been arrested. We've shut down the branch of Domino's. He tells you all the things they've done, which is the tough guy stuff. But then he adds in, look, we're a franchise business. All these Domino's around the country, they're owned by moms and dads, and they're all suffering. And the people who own this Domino's franchise are suffering too. And we feel really bad for them. So you've got that feeling and understanding stuff in there too. And it worked. I mean, so when you talk about this whole Domino's scandal with with the snot and the farts. No one's ever heard of it. It went away. It went away. So it was a really successful apology video. And I think it's because he does come across as this— he's a lumpy CEO. He doesn't look particularly heroic, but he's embodying all the qualities of the classic narrative hero in that video.

Have you seen any bad ones? Do any science of storytelling Suboptimal.

Oh yeah. I forget the name of the platform now, but it's in the book. There's a guy, there was some website he owned, I think. And he had to lay off 2 people. And when he had to lay off 2 people, he put a video of himself up on LinkedIn with a tear, like a genuine tear coming down his face, talking about, I wish I was the kind of CEO that could just lay people off and not care, but I care so much. And of course, it's back to the selfishness thing. He's just thinking about himself. And it was entirely self-defeating. The comments under the LinkedIn video were hilarious. It became a big Daily Mail story. He became this kind of massively hated figure for a few days in the media generally. So yeah, the LinkedIn tear, guys, is I think the worst one I've ever seen.

Okay. So getting practical, what do most people get wrong about good stories, good storytelling?

What do most people get wrong about good storytelling? Well, I think there's so much, but like, do you mean when they're trying to create kind of persuasive stories? Yeah. Okay. Well, I think people still feel that the best way to sell a product is with facts about the product. I mean, there might be cases in which that's true. Certainly, you can list lots of business-to-business cases in which that's true. If you are wanting to order a part for your car or your rocket, you just want to know how good the part is, that's fine. But if we are not talking business-to-business, it generally is the best ways to appeal to people's identities. It's much more powerful than appealing to the qualities of your product. And that general kind of idea of identification is just a massively important thing, not just in persuasive storytelling, but in all storytelling. In the stories that we love, we sit down and the film begins or the novel begins, and we meet a character that we identify with. There's a very ridiculous kind of idea in storytelling still that people want to write characters that we like. Likability is the thing, but likability isn't the thing. Identification is the thing. If we identify with somebody, if part of our brain goes, that person on the screen, that's me, then we're going to love that story. That's why the girl boss era in Hollywood has been so unbelievably toxic. The Indiana Jones, the Star Wars, and in the UK, the Doctor Who, where they've not just removed all the straight white male characters, but humiliated them. They've killed them and humiliated them and replaced them with Mostly cardboard cutout girl bosses. So these story franchises were broadly made for young men. They were stories for young men, but they've been disidentified with these stories, which are a part of their identity, a big part of their lives. And that's why they respond with such fury. It's not because they're misogynist or racist or anything stupid like that. It's because, you know, in a very real sense, if you're humiliating and degrading Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones and Doctor Who, you're humiliating and degrading they themselves who are watching it. So that identification is just a massively important thing.

Because if it was just, I like Luke Skywalker, he is likable, You've made him unlikable, so what? But I identify with Luke Skywalker. I see me in him, and he's now being mocked or castigated or whatever. That makes me feel mocked and castigated.

Absolutely right. So, absolutely. So, so when we identify with anything, we make it a part of ourselves. You know, we make the music, the art we love a part of ourselves. We make the cars we buy part of ourselves. You know, we are a collection of ideas. And one of the most important facets of our identity are the people, the stories that we love, and the characters that we grew up with. Luke Skywalker at the beginning of the first Star Wars film is this orphan. He works on a moisture farm. His solo status, his nickname amongst his school friends was Wormy. That's what they called him, Wormy. And he overcomes his fears and becomes this incredible hero. And people love Luke Skywalker.

Yeah.

But in the latter period of Star Wars, they've reintroduced him, just as they did with Indiana Jones, and they do it time and time again. They reintroduce these amazing straight white male heroes and make them miserable, sexist, disillusioned. They had him sort of chugging this kind of weird teat milk off her. I mean, he was humiliated.

I mean, you saw this with Chris Hemsworth as Thor, right? And you've done that across a much shorter timeline. I think the first Thor probably came out less than 15 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, something like that. And across the span of maybe only 4 Thor movies, maybe like 8 that he was involved in to do with the Avengers, he's gone from being slightly childish but lovingly heroic god guy to person that does Jean-Claude Van Damme splits over flying dragons and is kind of always out of touch and the butt of every joke and totally unself-aware. And, um, yeah, it, it wouldn't surprise me if someone was like, I, I see a little bit of that, you know, heroic energy but kind of adult man-child thing in Thor. Uh, they— I think they would feel, um, put out in a way. So how—

Yeah.

How important are heroes? Then is that a crucial element of most stories?

Yeah. Archetypal storytelling, I'm talking about. I'm not talking about modernist novels that exist to break the rules. That's the whole point of them. In archetypal storytelling, yeah, protagonists are really important because my book is called A Story Is a Deal. And what I mean by that is that a story subconsciously says, if you behave like the hero does, you are going to be rewarded with these incredibly precious social resources of connection and status. That's what all heroes in archetypal stories win. They win connections and/or status. So that's what happens with, obviously, with Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. He begins as a wormy and ends up with a big medal around his chest surrounded by people who love him. That's what we all want. That's a human universal. That's what drives everyone is, well, 3 things: survival, connection, and status. Those are the 3 things that all humans want. And those are the 3 things that are the subject of all archetypal storytelling. All stories are about survival, connection, or status. And the best stories, the stories that last through the ages that we can watch again and again and again, are about all 3. So if you think about a movie like The Revenant, that's about survival. A movie like Stand By Me is about connection. A movie like Barbie or Whiplash is about status. But The Godfather, that's about survival and connection and status in about equal measure. So is Romeo and Juliet. So is Star Wars. These epic, amazing stories. feel so rich and full and drenched in meaning because they're about all 3 of the things that matter most to humans. And we learn about them through the hero. How does the hero survive? How does the hero earn connection? How does the hero earn status? We absorb those messages subconsciously. They teach us who to be in the world. And that's why they're so incredibly important. And when we're a teenager and we make Luke Skywalker part of our identity, and then he's humiliated and degraded and replaced in this way. It's painful. And the bitter irony is we've got this kind of moral panic in the UK at the moment about this ridiculous show, Adolescence, on Netflix, which is another kind of, as far as I could see, straightforward piece of anti-straight white male propaganda, painting us as misogynist woman killers who can't even take an insult without picking up a knife and committing murder. And now there's all these stories saying, oh, men just don't have any role models anymore. Yeah, because you replaced us all. You replaced us all with girl bosses. You humiliated us and wrote us out of your scripts, and now you're worrying and panicking. Yeah, no, you're right. We don't anymore because the men that we see on our screens these days, as you said, tend to be the butt of jokes. They tend to be disempowered. Women are always running rings about them, humiliating them, Knocking them down with one punch. I mean, you see it again and again and again and again and again, and it's been going on for over a decade now.

Well, if you create a vacuum in terms of story, in terms of archetype, and you retcon, replace role models for any group, any group at all, and for a good while, maybe the archetypal boss bitch woman who did want to be focused on their career, who did want to feel like they were high achieving and they had agency, Maybe that was an issue. And maybe many women were left cut adrift and felt lonely because, well, I don't really see women with the sort of drive that I have in 1960s cinema. They're all— what's that rule? Somebody's law about whether or not a woman talks to another woman in a movie and not about a man? Do you know this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's true. I mean, you know, it's It's, it's fair. It is a totally fair criticism. But, but, but, but, but I think they always have— but I think, you know, I think you're right. There weren't enough well-written female, um, heroes with agency, you know. But you did get Princess Leia. You did get, um, you know, Sigourney Weaver in, in, in, um, in Alien. I mean, I, I, growing up, I loved Prime Suspect, Helen Mirren's character in Prime Suspect. I mean, I loved all that stuff. I mean, so, so it's not as though these characters didn't exist, but I think We've got to a crazy place now where in order to find a kind of straight white male in a heroic role, you've got to watch some terrible Guy Ritchie movie. Or like, largely speaking, they just don't really exist anymore. And interestingly, I think a lot of people are now, like you are, thriving on the internet because the internet is a meritocracy and isn't—

There's no gatekeeper anymore.

There's no gatekeeper. So the internet's kind of the only place now where straight white male creators can survive and make a living.

Well, you also certainly end up with a situation if there is a vacuum. There was a vacuum for the women role model and that got filled. It got filled by a variety of better and worse examples of that. And then the novelty has been taken to complete parody with saturation. And then if you create a vacuum around men, You will have Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson and, and, uh, bodybuilder Rich Piana. Like, pick your, pick your alpha male guy or whatever, like even beta male guy of choice. Pick your whoever role model it is that you want from the left, from the right, libertarian, authoritarian, whatever. Um, if there aren't any that are supplied, that creates a gap in the market. There's no coffee shop for 3-mile radius around this particular neighborhood. Guess what? There's gonna be a fucking coffee shop there.

Yeah, well, that's, that's the thing. And I think early period, Jordan Peterson, why he was so electrically exciting, because all he was doing was sticking up for men. That's what he was doing. And he became this lightning rod. You either loved him or you hated him. And all he was doing was sticking up for us. We were so desperate for somebody to stand up and go, there's actually nothing wrong with being a straight white man, and this is how you ought to do it, and you should hold your head up and clean your room and all that stuff. It was kind of electrifying. But then on the other So you do have your Andrew Tates. If young men, if the culture keeps on telling straight white men that they're bad and they're useless and they're the butt of every joke and they're going to be girlbossed to hell in every drama they see and they're going to be in adolescence and shown stabbing women to death, then they're going to go to the people that says, no, I respect you. I've got your back. Of course they are, because they want status like we all do. I mean, I think people underestimate how pervasive all of this stuff is, really. And I kind of think we're at the foothills of a new era here, and I see it very starkly in my world, which is books.

Given that you've been involved in the writing and publishing industry for a long time, I can see that this is a point of passion for you.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because I mean, you know, I've kind of all right in a sense because I'm in there now and I have a readership and so that's fine. But I know, I'm pretty sure that if I was starting out now, I'll be finding it extremely hard to get a book deal. And I've also seen the change in the way my books are received since all this happened. You know, like when Selfie was published, I think 2017. It was reviewed across all the newspapers. I was on the television, I was on Newsnight, I was on Radio 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. You know, like there was loads of publicity. It was fantastic. And then when all this started happening, I found it extremely hard now to get any publicity. Like A Story Is a Deal book just published. We got one review, one review on Week of Reason, The Times. That's it. So paradoxically, the more successful I've become as an author, you know, my last 2 books have been by far and away my most successful. the harder it is to get any coverage in the mainstream media, to get support from the bookshops, and to get slots at book festivals. I used to be at the Edinburgh Festival every year. Now there's no way I get into the Edinburgh Festival anymore.

Despite the fact that you're selling more books than you ever did.

Yeah. And the fact is that the only reason I'm still going is because of the podcast sphere. It was the podcast guys that supported The Status Game. The Status Game's done really well now because it was embraced by people like you and—

Well, because it was brilliant, right? Well, it was a brilliant book.

Thank you, Chris. But when it was published, again, we got one review week of release. We couldn't get anyone to talk about it.

It was crazy.

The day it was published, I looked on Amazon and it was at number something like 6,500 in the bestsellers. Honestly, I devastated. I was like, what is going on? But it's because it got no publicity, but it's ended up being successful because of the podcast.

Because you shoved it down everybody's throats. Yeah. Well, you know, for now the podcast sphere is still male dominated, uh, and we'll see between— unless you're Mel Robbins or, uh, Alex Cooper. Yeah, I think it's, you know, the top whatever.

But you see, I don't think that's a coincidence because I think people like you and, um, you know, a lot of the other sort of big podcast guys in the previous generation, you'd be on television, but there's no place in mainstream media for straight white guys anymore. So they're doing podcasts. And so I think that's why.

That is a little bit of a meme. I actually did a— I recorded a live tour video going on tour in the US and Canada back end of this year. And the entire crux of the joke is that I'm in prison. I've been detained by ICE in America, and I'm in prison because America's getting rid of all surplus white podcasters. So, you know, the meme keeps on memeing. Just on the practical point around the stories, you mentioned atomic statements before.

Yeah.

How do you make stories more sticky? You know, it's all well and good. You tell someone a story, it's for you as the person that's written it or put it together. You believe that it's important, but it needs to grab someone, you know, it needs to sort get its teeth into their brains. It needs to stay with them. What are the things that determine whether a story's sticky or not?

Well, I mean, one thing is that atomic nature. It's got to have brevity and clarity. So it's got to have its maximum meaning in minimal space. So that's a tweet, that's a meme, that's an aphorism. So it's got to have maximum meaning in minimal space. It's got to appeal to somebody's identity. So people got to identify with what you're saying, and it's got to tell them a story that they want to hear, that reaffirms the story of their identity. So going back to that example of Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you, that's a perfect example of a— it's a perfect kind of atomic statement, sticky, because it's easy to understand, easy to memorize, easy to share. You're going to tell it to each other. It appeals to identity. And it tells a story that people really want to hear. It reaffirms their perception of the world, their story of the world.

Are there fundamental questions that everyone's trying to answer with a story, or are they so varied that there's no such thing as a unifying thread?

The most fundamental question that humans ask really is, who do I have to be in this place in order to earn connection and status? That's fundamentally what brains are always asking. When we come out of the womb, we have these, what they call experience-expectant brains. They're half wired up and the rest of the wiring comes up during our childhood. And our culture is forming itself in our brains. We're figuring out our identity. Who do I have to be in order to earn connection and status? And of course, adolescence and early 20s is a peak time for really thinking about this stuff and identity formation. But we never stop asking those questions. We never stop job changing who we are. People talk about audience capture. That's why audience capture is so dangerous. Even the smartest people, some of them who we've mentioned tonight, started off, in my estimation, as rational, smart, really interesting people. And they've gone on a journey, and the journey has been to take their identity to a place that feels like it's much more about telling their audience what they want to hear and telling a story of heroes and villains and we're great and they're terrible. So that to me is the— these are the most fundamental questions that everybody asks. And we turn ourselves into the answer. We turn ourselves into the people we have to be in order to earn connection and status from our groups.

Interestingly, there was an article by Ethan Kross. I must bring this up fucking once a week. It's phenomenal. It's called Criticism Capture Is More Dangerous Than Audience Capture. And What he talks about with audience capture being predicting what it is that the audience wants and allowing yourself to be puppeted by their desires. You feed red meat to the audience, you become increasingly predictable over time. It's that sort of regression to the mean of what your audience wants kind of would be a way to put it. Criticism capture is his belief that criticisms are much more warping than compliments are enthusing. So people who make content online, they start to compensate in a variety of different ways. They become firebrands. They become very defensive or very aggressive about their position. They begin to create in a manner that pushes back or tries to counter what it is that their perceived critics or their genuine critics say about them. And I At least in my experience, if you look at a lot of the internet personalities and the ways that people have conducted themselves, and also I can see this in myself too, I get way more warped by criticism than I do by compliments. I start to caveat more aggressively or I couch things or I steer clear of particular topics. There's a temptation to do all of these. In my braver, more equanimous moments, I'm like, no, fuck it. Just say what you mean. But pain is much more painful than pleasure is pleasurable. And that simple sort of fact about the way that we experience the world, it plays out too in the way that people respond to you. If you were learning to do salsa dancing and you salsa danced and someone gave you a high five, 5 classes in a row and said, oh man, that was cool. But then on the 6th class, someone went, dude, you fucking suck. Why are you doing salsa dancing? Like, you're gonna— that one's gonna stay with you. And then maybe you're not gonna show up anymore, or maybe you're gonna salsa dance more slowly or quietly, or maybe you're gonna come in and you're gonna say, I'm the best salsa dancer in this entire place. You know, there's loads of ways that you get warped by criticism.

Well, as an author, you always remember— you never remember the good reviews. You only remember the bad reviews. It's just a cliché, but it's absolutely true. You know, yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. I'm sure. And there's also an evolutionary kind of angle to that. that because criticism is a form of gossip. And back in the days when our brains were evolving in the hunter-gatherer tribe, if you are the subject of negative gossip, it was life-threatening. Literally, you could be kicked out of the tribe, you could be killed, and sometimes even eaten. So in the back of our minds, we've always got that. That programming is still inside us. Social criticism is dangerous. potentially life-threatening. So you must attend to it very carefully and adapt your behavior. So I've no doubt, it's a smart take from Ethan Kross. Absolutely. Yeah. I have no doubt that criticism capture is far more important than audience capture. Yeah.

What was that smoker disgust thing? The story about changing habits around smoking?

Oh yeah. This is one of my stories I really like because it really shows you how People care about identity far more than they care about their own lives. And it's just an argument that you can't understand why humans smoke without understanding our need for status and a need to have this kind of higher status identity. I used to smoke. I started smoking in the '90s and we knew back then that smoking was going to kill you. We knew it was addictive and it was going to make your breath stink, your clothes stink. It's going to cost you a fortune. And yet we still did it. Why did we do it? Well, we did it because it makes you perhaps look 8% cooler when you're at the gig. That's why we did it. It's ridiculous. It's crazy. And that's kind of what they found. And in the book, I tell the story of how when cigarettes became popular after the war because they packed tobacco into ration packs in the First World War and the Second World War. So all these veterans, these soldiers came back smoking, addicted to cigarettes. Smoking took on this very masculine, rebellious identity. If you've been to war and walked out of it, you smoked, that kind of thing. So it's a very masculine thing to do. And then there's this brilliant genius, Sigmund Freud's nephew, was hired by a cigarette company to try and get women smoking. And this was in the '20s when feminism was just becoming this massively powerful kind of cultural force. And so he paid lots of debutantes and Vogue models to appear at some big sort of flashy events in New York, all smoking cigarettes, and they were photographed and it was shown everywhere. So arguably, this is a high-status thing. And he ran these ad campaigns saying that cigarettes were, yes, they're rebellious, but that's why feminists should smoke because feminists, he called them torches of freedom, they're torches of freedom. And it was massively successful. successful. And again, an appeal to identity. And so that traveled across to the UK in cinema. So in Hollywood, heroines started smoking cigarettes, Marlene Dietrich and people like that. And so women in the UK started smoking too. So the whole story of smoking is all about status. It's all about identity. And that's how it fades out as well. It faded out accidentally for generations. Well, generations, I don't know, for a long time, Governments in the UK, America, and elsewhere, it was always appeal to survival to stop smoking. It's going to give you cancer. Here's a picture of a lung, all that. Here's the warnings. No one gave a shit, had no impact whatsoever. And what made it stop was when there was a moral panic about secondhand smoke. Why should I be in a restaurant and breathe in somebody else's smoke? So starting in California, I think it was in 2007, they banned smoking in restaurants and then it became workplaces. And then it spread throughout America, spread to the UK, and then suddenly you couldn't look 8% cooler anymore if you're smoking a cigarette because the smokers weren't inside, but at the restaurant, at the bar, at the gig, they were shuffling outside in the rain to have a quick fag by the bins and shuffling back in again. And very quickly smoking began to kind of fall out of fashion because it became low status rather than high status. And that reflects my own story. I desperately tried to give up smoking because I started coughing up literally. I was— I used to chain smoke when I was drinking, and I used to drink. I used to be an alcoholic, basically. And, um, and I would cough up brown jelly in the sink in the morning. It was freaking me out. But even that didn't stop me smoking. I tried twice and failed. What got me to stop was, um, I was a journalist on a magazine called Loaded. I don't know if you've seen it. It was just a kind of a men's magazine, and there were lots of women, um, in Loaded. And one time I was assigned to go, and I can't remember if it was a model or it was a Hollywood actress. It was one of the two. And if you've ever been on one of these shoots, they have these false polystyrene walls behind which they do the dressing. So they're doing the hair and the makeup and the styling. So I knocked on the wall and went in to introduce myself and said, I'm here. I'll be waiting out here, and sat behind the polystyrene wall. And then I heard the stylist say to the Hollywood actress, ugh, did you see his fingers? Are those yellow stains on them? That's disgusting.

Mm-hmm.

I was like, oh my God. So it was the status. It was having the 2 pretty women call me disgusting. That was what pushed me over the edge. And what was true for me is true for people in general. I mean, I know we've got the vaping issue now, it's a new issue, but smoking cigarettes, it fell out of— it became low status and that's what stopped it.

And then do you think binge drinking, the decline in binge drinking now, where do you think that's come from?

Yeah, I suspect there is some truth in the argument that you hear a lot that it's to do with social media. I mean, God, when I was binge drinking when I was a teenager, there's no— I mean, you wake up in the morning, you want to forget everything that ever happened. The idea that it's going to be filmed and put on TikTok is just horrendous. But I also think there's a bigger story to that that I don't fully understand. I mean, there's certainly this— it has been this kind of lurch towards Puritanism in the Gen Z generation, the generation of my nieces. Because it's not just about binge drinking, it's about sex, it's about drug use, it's about the moral purity, which are they the first generation to be more morally pure than their parents? I mean, maybe. It's definitely a weird thing that's happened to Gen Zs that encompasses binge drinking is just part of it.

Yeah, I think an increasing focus on health. I ran nightclubs for forever, so I saw this firsthand, that the arc of probably the peak of Larry British drinking, especially young people drinking culture, and contributed to it and profited from it in many ways. And yeah, the advent of the smartphone, the fact that that this can just detect whatever it is that's going on. We used to run this bark roll called Carnage, and there was tasks on the back that you had to tick off with a marker pen, like pulled a pig, got off with 3 randoms, swapped shoes with somebody.

Wow.

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

Yeah, I'm sure that's got a lot to do with it. I'm sure you're absolutely right. I mean, you know, because again, it goes back to what do we want? We want connection and status. And, you know, when you are sort of binge drinking, it's hard to maintain that sense of status in the eyes of people. And Jesus, if it's recorded indelibly and perhaps uploaded to YouTube by somebody, there's no way.

Not good. Especially not if it's reacted to by the Domino's fucking CEO. That would be a bad beginning. Will, let's bring this one home, mate. I love you. I love your work. I think that the things that you write are phenomenal. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all of the shit that's going on?

My Substack, willstorr.substack.com. It's called You Are a Story. We've got weekly essays on Everything we've been talking about today really and more. So yeah, I'd love to see you there.

And you've got a book.

Oh yeah, my book, A Story Is a Deal. I'll get in trouble. I'll get told off. Yeah, A Story Is a Deal, my new book on storytelling and persuasion. So if you're interested in the science of storytelling and how it's used to persuade people and change belief and change behavior, you will find it in A Story Is a Deal.

Heck yeah. Will, I appreciate you. Thank you, mate.

Thanks, Chris. That was amazing. Thank you.

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