The Science of Storytelling: Interview with Will Storr

Hello everyone, welcome to episode 12 of the Book Talk Today podcast, where today we'll be joined by award-winning writer and journalist Will Storr, critically acclaimed 5 books including Selfie, The Heretics, and The Science of Storytelling. Really excited to have Will on, big fan of his work, and thanks for joining us, Will.

Yeah, thanks for inviting me, that's great.

Yeah, you're welcome, you're welcome. So one of the questions I wanted to start with is the story behind your most recent book, The Science of Storytelling, and your experience as a journalist and a writer, and how you feel— why you felt inspired to write this specific book at this specific time.

Well, it came out of— so 2 or 3 books ago was The Heretics. 3 books ago? I've lost count. And that was about the psychology of belief. So it was about, you know, why— how is it that clever people can end up believing crazy things? Because, you know, you think when people believe crazy things, oh, they're stupid. But, you know, as a journalist, I found time and time again that they're not stupid. They're quite smart people. They end up believing mad things. So that was the sort of question I sought to answer. And the answer in a nutshell turned out to be, at least my kind of analysis of the answer, was that the brain is a storyteller. And that the reason that we're vulnerable to believing crazy things is because the brain's telling a kind of semi-fictional story about reality in which we're at this— we're this kind of heroic character. Assuming that we're mentally healthy, we're here, this heroic character, at the, you know, in the center of this unfolding plot of our lives. And at the same time, I was working on my novel, and I think for years I'd done that kind of young writer thing of, um, kind of dismissing all the books about how to tell stories and thinking, oh, I'm an artist, you know, I don't need to be told, it's pure, you know, creation. And that's obviously rubbish, you learn that after a while.

Yeah.

And, um, and, uh, so I bought all the books on, you know, I finally buckled and bought all the books on how to tell stories. And, um, I found that the, the, some of the things the storytellers were saying about how to tell stories were the same things as the psychologists and the neuroscientists were saying about how the brain works. So I kind of pieced them together, and part of that ended up being in The Heretics. But then I kind of continued the— continued kind of researching it, partly because I wanted to improve my own writing, and partly because I was, um, I was by then doing a teaching at The Guardian newspaper, teaching, um, storytelling, but specifically how to use science. So that was kind of forcing me to keep looking into it, and then that ended up being the book.

Yeah, the thing that came to me when I was reading that book is, in the book you reference heavily the Joseph Campbell model of the hero storyteller.

Yeah.

And the thing that came to me is I always, always had that interpretation when I was studying at university and when I was writing in particular, that I thought it does come out of some sort of ethereal view of, you know, someone just gets a story and then they're able to write about it. It's almost like they sit there and meditate and the story comes within them. But the thing that became evident reading your book was that there is a specific practice to writing a good story. The characters, and for instance, the thing that came to me was that flawed self, that you can't find all the aspects of a good story is the imperfect self and the flawed self and how that character and how the development of that character becomes the real emphasis of a good story.

That's right, because I think the problem with the Joseph Campbell kind of approach is that before we knew quite so much about how mind and brain works, that was the only way we had of analyzing story. It was you just compared all the stories, worked out what they had in common, and then said, well, this is what a story is. And that's what Joseph Campbell did and Aristotle did and Rorty did, because there's no other way of doing it. But now, but now that we, you know, now we're at a stage where we can have this kind of new approach, and I think it is a radical approach. It radically changes what their model— because it, it takes, it kind of takes 2 components of storytelling apart. There's the plot and there's the character, and they're separate things. And when you look at the Joseph Campbell model and Robert McKee model, they're kind of smooshed in together into this kind of sequence of events that has to happen. But you need to separate them. There's the plot and there's who it's happening to. And, and so I think that was one of the big breakthroughs for me And one of the reasons that it's like that, and one of the reasons that we become fascinated in particular stories, is that they're often about really interesting, flawed people. And we are, as animals, kind of programmed to be obsessively interested in other people, obsessively interested in what's going on behind their— in their heads, what they're hiding from us, what they're getting wrong about the world, and what are the things they're getting wrong about the world? What can they teach me about how the world works and how I can, you know, live life more successfully? Because we are— psychologists call it domestic, you know, that we're a domesticated animal. We're domesticated in the same way that a dog is domesticated. You know, we have these big eyes. You know, we're much more peaceful than our kind of primate ancestors. And we are— we've evolved to survive in groups, in cooperative groups. And so, you know, for us, ordinary life isn't about fighting and tearing each other to bits and, you know, ripping up a carcass. It's about negotiating. It's about manipulating other people's minds. That's what we do. That's, that's our MO as an animal. And that's why storytelling, you know, is often so brilliant and so fascinating, because we are thrown behind the eyes of this weird, flawed, fucked-up individual who's in this weird situation. And oh my God, that's just, you know, fascinating to see because we're, we are, you know, programmed to be, as I say, fascinated by other people's minds. And, and, and that's when storytelling is working really well. But when storytelling kind of fails, I think often it's when people are following those old-fashioned rules of it's a sequence of events, this recipe, and they're forgetting about the character. So often when I teach fiction, very often the number one thing that happens is people come to the course and then they say— I say, tell me about your story, what you've been working on. And they go, oh well, I'll tell you about my story. And then they give this long sequence of events. And then they go, well, tell me about your character then. And then it all gets a bit vague and weird. They don't really know, you know, my character's this and they're this and they're this and they're this. And it usually turns out the characters are kind of versions of who they are. They're just them, you know, they're the writer.

It's copied and pasted into the story.

And, and so then the question is, what— so if you don't know your character really unbelievably well, how do you know this happens and then this happens and then this happens? Because that's not how people work. The things that we do, the problems that we get ourselves into, the goals that we seek, the plots that we make of our lives are all a product of our individual flawed messed up self. You know, we express our individuality and our character in the things that we do, in the goals that we seek. So you have to Have plot coming out of character. It can't be separated.

Yeah, or you can't have one driving the other, because if the character's not driving the storyline, then it seems— I mean, I've read some fiction books where sometimes the event is so chronological and it's just one event after the other that the character doesn't become part of the story anymore. It's sort of just events unfolding. It's more like history rather than an actual story.

Well, that's it. It's not even like history really, because history is actually happening through people being completely insane, you know, being characteristic individuals with all their flaws and Fascinating kind of edges. So yeah, that's right. And you see that so many times in drama that's actually made, that has millions of dollars spent on it. It is just— they followed that formula, and it is just a sequence of dramatic events. So it's like watching a computer game, it has that dead feeling.

When did that moment click for you in that research then for this book where you felt like it was deeply psychological storytelling from a human behavior point of view?

Um, it was really when I was writing The Heretics, you know, it was, it was really when I was writing The Heretics and I was thinking about my novel which is The Hunger and the Howling of, um, Cillian Lone and, um, it was like, so, so that novel, uh, which, um, it's about— the idea for the novel was I'd heard, I'd heard somebody, I don't know if it was true or not, but a story about somebody who'd inherited a farm in Wales and it was an ancient farm in Wales and it used to belong to a king. And in the farm were these herbs that had been lost to history, and she discovered all these. And that set my imagination going. I was like, oh wow, what if they had magical powers, you know, magical properties? And I thought, that's a good idea for a novel. But then because I've been doing the heretic stuff, it was like, well, I can't just— I'm not going to— I can't just write the novel about somebody that discovers— somebody that discovers magic herbs that has magical properties. Who is the best person for that to happen to? Who does that need to happen to? And I ended up coming up with this story about somebody that was, um, kind of young and insecure and desperately ambitious, uh, and, uh, to be a kind of famous chef in the 1980s. So, so, so, so, so that was the— that, that was when I kind of started working out that's how it works, isn't it? It is. You've got to find the perfect character for the stories to happen to, and then that character's got to drive the story. And I didn't really nail it with that novel because I was still kind of feeling it out and working it out. Um, I, I would love to go back and do it again, having written the book.

Part 2. Yeah, yeah, but I don't think that's It's interesting when, you know, because I think you're in a privileged position where I think you're one of those writers that not only are you a journalist, but you write in the fiction and the nonfiction space. Usually most either choose one or the other. Do you feel like you're at some sort of advantage when you have sort of your foot in one and the other in your storytelling ability? Because—

No, I don't actually, because there's a weird thing about human nature, and it's not just about writers, it's about anything. It's like if you do if you do one thing, people like it, but if you do more than one thing, they get suspicious. Like if you're Bryan Adams the singer and you become a photographer, he's never going to be taken seriously as a photographer because he's Bryan Adams. They're going to go, you know, and I think it's the same thing with fiction. And it's quite hard. It's not that— it's not as hard as Bryan Adams, but it's quite hard for a journalist to then— is it hard, or am I just making excuses for myself? Maybe it's not that hard because lots of journalists go and do it. Maybe I'm wrong about that. But the other thing is that it's a very different skill. I think I underestimate, and lots of people underestimate, how different fiction writing is to nonfiction. And I've spent my life writing nonfiction. I consider myself still not much more than an amateur fiction writer, really. I was trying to write some more recently, and I remembered this is really hard because it's such a different way of thinking. And it's the, it's the thing about, you know, long-form journalism is kind of show and tell. You get to do both. Whereas fiction, you're mostly showing, and that's, that's a very, very difficult thing to do. So I find fiction much more difficult.

Okay, and when it comes to developing a story or your approach to developing a story, how did you find that change before The Heretics and after The Heretics in your analysis of the storytelling? When you were doing all that research and you were finding out about how stories are told and looking into works about how others were telling stories, how did your approach to storytelling change, and what were some of the, the books or some of the pieces of literature that you read that really explored storytelling to a different degree?

How did it change? So I guess some of the big lessons— okay, so the hardest thing for me to learn— 2 things really. The first one was overwriting. Like, when I used to be a terrible overwriter, and Like when I was a young writer, you know, you'd read— I don't know, you kind of get this— you'd read A.A. Gill and you think, well, good writers have all this amazing prose, it's like poetry, so you try and do that. And what you miss is that you can't just have that. You've got to be, you know, the actual skill of being a good writer is finding something to say. You've got to have something to say. Then if you can like frill it out with some clever language, that's also great, do that, and then that's going to be good. But you can't just have the clever language, you've got to have something to say. And of course, as a 20-something writer, you haven't got much to say anyway, apart from, well, you haven't really got much to say. So, so, so that was things. So I'm not as bad an overwriter as I used to be, you know. Um, so that was one of the things. And one of the major ones is really brevity. Um, I, I, I was, as a young journalist, I was very heavily influenced by Jon Ronson. And I, as a journalist, got to interview Jon Ronson, uh, when he published his book The Men Who Stare at Goats. I was very thrilled. I got my book signed, and as I was leaving his house, I said, oh, John, you know, have you got any advice, you know, as a young writer? And he said, yes, I've got some advice— brevity. And I remember thinking, oh, that's shit advice. It was the best advice. Like, I wish I'd listened to him, because I think it took me up until The Science of Storytelling to learn that there's such a— the discipline of cutting every single word that doesn't need to be there and every single kind of tangent that doesn't need to be there is really important. And I think, I think the books before that, perhaps in places, you know, I always just became fascinated by the subject, so I'd fill the book full of all the things that fascinated me. And you've got to remember that like 90% of people are nowhere near as fascinated as you are about these things. So I think that's the other thing. I think, you know, that's— it's a you know, experienced writers know it. It's that really good writing is being able to say things simply and in as short a space as possible. It's kind of simplicity packed with meaning. That's the gold, you know. So, you know, I think—

Yeah, definitely when it comes to nonfiction writing, because sometimes, for instance, I read quite a few nonfiction books, and I'd say majority of the books that I read are nonfiction books. You know, sometimes I delve deeply into fiction books, but it's very rare. I'm currently reading Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky. But that one's like, it's more psychological and it's more protagonist is living out his life and it's very deep psychological work. And the thing I like about that one is that it's etched in history. So if you know what's happening during that time in the early 1900s in Russia, you get a glimpse about why someone is actually acting in such a way and it's feeling in such a way. But sometimes with nonfiction books, especially when you're reading, let's say, a journalistic piece on science, and it can become like an elongated scientific journal. Like, I recently read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, and sometimes you feel like you just took it— taken it straight out of the library, and you're reading it, and you're like, how can I apply this? How can I find meaning in it as the reader? When you're writing your nonfiction books, how do you go about cutting that out and trying to make it specifically for the reader?

And that's a really good question, because I obviously have to read a lot of those science books as part of my job. I'm not a scientist, so, you know, I, I, I, I, it starts to me with those same books that, you know, the books that, that get— that, that you read. And, um, and I sometimes find them really hard work, you know. I didn't enjoy being at school, and I never enjoyed being a student. I didn't go to university, I hated it. So it's often those books just make me feel like I'm back at university, you know, or not back in university, but, you know, back at school. It's just like, oh God, this is, you know— So what I try and do with my books is try and apply the science in a way that makes it more meaningful to people's lives. And, you know, there are other kind of various things that I do. Again, I think the brevity really helps. You know, in earlier books, I might have felt the need to describe the whole study and detail and what happened and the dates it happened and all this stuff. And now I just try and do it in 2 sentences, and if you're interested in any more, it's in the notes, look it up, you know.

Yeah, exactly.

To move it along. So there's that, and there's also things like cutting out the jargon, you know, like I don't have in my books— I don't really refer to the areas of the brain where things happen, you know. So there are lots of things in science books where they— because they're nerds, these science writers, they're scientists, they're total nerds, so they nerd out on their jargon and their, you know, and I really try hard to strip all that out now these days. Like, I'm currently doing a kind of second draft of my next book, and it's like The Science of Storytelling. I'm just trying to strip out a lot of the— all of the jargon, a lot of the detail. And my editors come back and go, you need to add in some more data, like the statistics. I'm like, no, I'm not going to. They can look it up, it's in the notes, you know, because it's more important that you I think, you know, I think there's loads of readers like you because I'm one of them. I don't want to read all that stuff. I trust it. I trust the author, you know, and if I'm worried about it, I can look it up in the back and I can nerd out on Google and look at the paper. That's fine. But I think it's more important to keep the story going, keep the narrative going, keep that cause and effect going, keep people interested.

I think central to that is the actual— if we're going to go deep into the actual storytelling part of it— is that idea. I know we've just talked about it, but that factor, the invisible actor at the center of the world, the actual individual being the driving force of a story. In the book, you talk specifically about the way that some, like for instance Shakespeare, was writing and using the central characters and how they were forming that in sort of tragedy and drama. When you were having a look at that, how did you feel that some writers in the past were able to use that dramatic factor to their degree? Because I think us as humans, we look at drama. For instance, if something happens on the street and we see something happening, whether it's a noise or whatever, and we see drama, we almost sort of— we're stuck to it and we drive ourselves towards that drama. How have you seen drama used in the past, and how do you feel like we can use it more in our storytelling ability? Because we're all storytellers in our own way, you know, whether it's seeing ourselves or whether it's seeing others.

Um, uh, I'm not, uh, I'm not quite sure I followed the question.

Oh, okay, apologies. When it comes to actually finding out individuals who were able to use the drama to, to their, to their, to their storytelling ability, who did, who in your opinion was able to use that to the best of their abilities?

Oh, right, okay. Um, to the— that's a really difficult question. Because it just reduces to my personal kind of tastes and what I like, I suppose. So drama, and, you know, I think Shakespeare is a really interesting example. I'm by no means a Shakespeare expert, but I'm friends with the man who is. He actually wrote the screenplay for Romeo and Juliet, the Baz Luhrmann—

Okay, nice.

He's talked to me a lot about Shakespeare, and his name is Craig Pearce. He's a very talented screenwriter, and Craig always says that what people don't get about Shakespeare is that it is complete blockbuster stuff, blockbuster, you know, storytelling. It's non-stop, it's funny, it's action-packed, and yes, he's got profound lines and quotable lines, but, but it's, it's the Hollywood of its time. So I would absolutely tend to agree with that because it's because it's very old-fashioned language, it feels very high culture and it's seen as very high culture, but it's pop culture. Shakespeare is really pop culture. It's just done, you know, back in the day. So, so he's an obvious kind of example. Um, but, but, but I think, yeah, but I, I think all of those things tend to be kind of more kind of subjective because I guess this— the drama that appeals to me is the drama that, um, you know, resonates with, with who, who I am and, and, and, and what kind of person I am and how I see the world. Like, I think one of the things about, um, all art, not just fiction but music, any art, any art, is that, is that, is that it's, you know, we're stuck inside our brains. We see the world in a very unique way, in a very unique way, um, kind of emotionally and, um, uh, uh, kind of in every, in every sense, you know. I think, I think people underestimate how very different our people we are from each other. And the artists that people like, I think, tend to be people that see the world in a kind of fundamentally, kind of profoundly similar way to them. And so, you know, I love, you know, books like— I love Blake Morrison's When You Last Saw Your Father. I love— I've always loved John Fante. I've been a huge kind of fan of John Fante, who was, you know, he wrote books in his 20s about being, you you know, riven with Catholic guilt, having problems with women and trying to be a writer. I mean, it's, you know, it was exactly who I was. I loved John Fante, you know. So there's a musician that I kind of— I'm kind of obsessed with called Mark Kozlik, who used to, used to, used to be in this kind of very, to my mind, kind of average mediocre kind of indie band, but has now kind of had this sort of artistic nervous breakdown and he's making this incredible music. He always gets that 1-star reviews. I love it because he's fusing storytelling with music. He's talking about his life, the mundanities of his life, and over the course of 20-minute songs. And he's a very similar— I can tell he's a very similar individual to me. He's a bit lonely, he likes walking around, he's a bit grumpy, you know, he hasn't got any kids, you know, he's basically me but a musician based in San Francisco. So I think, I think that's the answer. I mean, I mean, I think, I think we are kind of naturally drawn to artists that experience the world as we do because it's comforting. You know, you're comforted to know that you're not alone.

How do you deal with that subjectivity as a creator and as an artist and as like yourself when you're a writer and you're dealing with— obviously you don't know who's gonna get their hands on your pieces of work and you don't know who's gonna read them, you don't know their backgrounds. How do you go about writing it? Do you write it for like an ideal person? Or do you just write and sort of answering your own questions?

Yeah, no, I don't write for an ideal person. I think if you start writing for a kind of a general audience, you risk becoming a bit, a bit kind of bland, really. Yeah, you know, I try and write for— I guess you just try and write for yourself. You try and write the kind of book that you, that I myself would enjoy. I think that's that's the answer. And it's a bit of a tension because I'm writing these kind of science books and my editors are always taking all the swearing out and stuff. It's like, this is not appropriate for this kind of book. And I'm never quite sure. But yeah, I guess you're writing for yourself.

Yeah, it seems that way. The good nonfiction books I read tend to be done in such a way that you almost feel like you're learning about the ideas as the author is expressing them. Because you're following the author's exploration of the ideas as you're reading it. So it's like a gradual progress, and as you're reading it, you're finding out information as the author is actually telling it.

Yeah, that was— that's actually one of the things that Jon Ronson told me years ago. He wouldn't tell me, I was asking him, similar to how you're asking me, and he said that when he— when he told me that when he went on stories, he would sometimes deliberately not research anything about the person or the story for that exact reason. He wanted it to be a surprise, so it was a surprise to him, and then when you're reading it, he's finding out stuff and going, oh my God, and he's reacting in the moment. And, and I— and that was definitely something that I used to do and, you know, continued doing. You know, I was kind of reassured when he said that. I thought, well, that's good, because that's why— because sometimes you feel a bit lazy turning up not knowing. I wanted to turn up to South Sudan in the middle of a war, and I remember saying, who's in charge? What's going on? And they were kind of looking at me going, what? You don't even— what? And it was, you know— but, but that, that moment of me saying, what's going on? Who's in charge? They told me in a very succinct way, and then that was perfect material for the piece. So yeah, I think it works really well. I think it's one of those kind of little tricks, it works really well.

Yeah, I know Malcolm Gladwell does the same when he writes. I know he doesn't do that much research. What he does is he has like a basic outline of a book, and then as he's going through the book, he researches it more and more. So he actually finds out about the ideas because he feels like it becomes more expressive And it becomes more like a journey through his actual writing process. Because I've actually had a look at his— I know you yourself, you do workshops and you do writing workshops, but he has one on MasterClass, and he says that one of the things that he does is he doesn't research heavily before starting a book because he feels like it becomes— it doesn't become enjoyable for him because he really enjoys the actual research process and writing at the same time, rather than extensive research and then writing it. Is that how you do it? Do you do extensive research, or do you start off with a basic premise that you take to the publisher and then you map out as you're learning and researching?

It's actually kind of changed, really. I didn't do— so The Heretics was basically journalism that I was kind of pursuing, this kind of journey, this idea through journalism. So it was kind of necessarily— it wasn't all— I was definitely finding it out as I went along because it could— because I didn't know in the proposal, I didn't have the answer. Selfie was similar. I was also finding stuff out as I went along very much. But in the book, but in The Science of Storytelling, it was a bit different because I had done— I've been teaching it for a few years. So the book is a lot of the stuff that I would say, you know, it's just a transcription of some of those lessons. And the book I'm writing at the moment I did do a huge amount of research before I started writing, and I have actually found the process a bit more difficult this time, I think because there's just so much. I've done so much research, it's too— it's almost like too much and I can't handle it. And so I found, I found the process of this book that I'm working at the moment really quite difficult because there's just so much to wrangle, you know, so much information. So, so, so, so, so yeah, it's been, it's been a bit, been a bit of a less sort of joyful process. So I'm hoping that doesn't reflect in the book. We'll have to wait and see when it comes out, but yeah.

Yeah, definitely. One thing I did want to ask you is, you've got a unique, obviously, experience from being a journalist and then sort of transitioning and becoming a non-fiction writer. How do you feel like your experiences in journalism shaped you as a writer?

Oh, hugely, yeah, hugely. So my first job as a writer was at a magazine called Loaded, which you might be too young to remember, but it was a big It was a big magazine in the '90s. I joined the staff in 2000, when it was in its decline. And Loaded was— it has a reputation of being a bit of a soft porn mag, which it was in its dying days, but it wasn't when it was good. And it was very much in the spirit of kind of gonzo journalism, Hunter S. Thompson.

Okay.

So, you know, in one story, they literally sent a guy around the world to find the meaning of life. And, you know, like, he— we spent 6 months traveling the world.

Okay, like taking mushrooms?

Yeah. And another one, they sent the guy to, um, sent the guy to Israel to track down, um, Jesus's foreskin. And they would just end up getting in all sorts of adventures, taking cocaine, and just, you know. So that was— I used to love reading that when I was a teenager. It was just my— it was just brilliant because, because you wouldn't know from one issue to the next what the hell are these idiots going to be up to. No, it was, it was an insane publication. And, and, and, you know, they were all— I mean, they were all bored, they were insane people really. Um, and then I got to work there, so I was really— it was, it was like getting to be a Blue Peter presenter. So that was my first job, and that was really what, you know, um, that was really what taught me how to write, because the, the, the culture at Loaded was very much a bully boy. It wasn't particularly pleasant. Um, it was very male and very aggressive, and the way that you, the way that you kind of fought in Loaded was to be the best writer. That was, that was the thing, and, and they would judge how good you were on, on the complexity of your structure, how good your intro was, how good your first sentence was. So that's how you lived and died socially at Loaded, was, was in how good a writer you were. So it was tough. I mean, I don't I'm glad I went through it. It was like being at a tough boarding school or going to the army, you know. I'm glad I went through it. But that was really where, you know, so if you read my work now, it still in parts reads like a Loaded article, you know, because that's where I learned to write. So it's hugely formative. I mean, I think John Ronson even wrote a couple of pieces for them back in the day. I remember one in particular where he went on Concorde. And he was right about being on Concorde. So yeah, that was— it was massively formative, just how I write dialogue, the kind of the tone. Probably a bit to my detriment as I get a bit older, you know, I get a bit— it can come across a bit flippant. I have to watch it. But yeah, I think those formative years are so important.

Definitely. And something that I think became apparent when I was reading The Science of Storytelling and Selfie sort of back to back So I read The Science of Storytelling, and then I want to say early this year, it was actually one of my favorite books that I've read this year. And then I was reading Selfie because it was recommended to me highly by one of my friends. And it was interesting reading that book because it felt very formative for the position that we're in at the moment. Because I feel like in that book, Selfie, you talk about how we've all become individualistic as a society and the change from cultures and the rise in neoliberalism and how that has become sort of formative in our society. And it was very interesting for me when I was reading that, because in The Science of Storytelling, you talk about the rise of obviously how the character is the central part of the plot, and how in Selfie, it's how us as the individual sees ourselves playing out in a story. And the way that we see the world is very much our own interpretation, and this interpreter in our mind is playing out and seeing ourselves. Do you find a lot of similarities between those two stories and how each individual is living out their own story in their own mind.

Yeah, so Selfie was really— yeah, that's right. It was about— it's about the self, thus selfie, you know. It's about how the self works. And I think one of the big things that really— one of the big ideas that really kind of obsessed me in that book was this idea that we are very much kind of puppets of our culture, we're puppets of our time and place, that we feel like individuals, we feel like we have free will over our beliefs and our choices and, you know, how we behave and how we think. But we, you know, we really don't. We're riding on rails of our culture. And, you know, when we're born, we have these kind of semi-formed brains that the scientists, they say it's experience expectant. And then that's what childhood is. We are absorbing the rules and the kind of symbols of our time and place, and it's creating who we are. And so, you know, one of the most— the clearest examples of this is neoliberalism, the rise of neoliberalism. And so neoliberalism is that— is kind of— is what happened in the '80s where Thatcher and Reagan especially got rid of— basically wanted to increase competition as much as possible. So they got rid of all these laws about looking after each other and welfare state, and it's got rid of all the unions as much as they could. They privatized all the industries, and it was like compete, compete, compete, compete. So suddenly we were in this new world of maximum competition. And so, you know, everyone knows that story, but what's really interesting is the effect it had on our cultural self. It's just extraordinary. You know, before neoliberalism, when the economy was much more collective, when the tax rate in America was as high as 90%, percent, and when we were members of unions, you know, we were hippies, generally speaking. We were anti-materialistic, fuck the man, smoking pot. And then along comes the '80s. Within a few years, we're twanging our red braces on Wall Street going on about greed is good. And I know these are massive generalizations, but that's— but when you're talking about cultural changes, you're always talking about generalizations.

Yes.

But, but that's what happened, and it happened quick, you know. And I think that's, that, that's amazing to me because it's like There's this great quote that I read once, and I love that. I'm quoting in every book. I'm seeing the next book too. It's— I think it's Robert Hogan, is a psychologist— says the humans are driven by these 2 instincts: to get along and get ahead. That's what we want to do. We want to get along with other people, and we want to get ahead of them. We want status. And so that's what brains want to know. Who do I have to be? Tell me who I have to be in order to get along and get ahead, and I'll become that person. I'll dress like them. I'll talk like them, I'll believe the things that they believe, I'll do the things that they do. Just tell me, and, and then, and then, you know, that's who I'll become. And, and you see that with neoliberalism. And in my next book, um, The Status Game, I'm kind of, I'm refining that and talking about this idea that, that we all— what we're all existing— that, that manifests in groups, in, in games. So you can play a lawyer game or a social justice game, or, you know, you're kind of local to your groups.

Yes.

And so, so, so we are kind of the sum of the games that we play in, in the world. And, and, but, but we are just these kind of, you know, in a way, just these, you know, we just absorb, we absorb the, the signals from our surroundings that tell us who we have to be, and we become those people.

It was interesting reading that as well and finding the dichotomy between the East and the West when it comes to how you see the self, because I feel like somewhat in a sort of semi-privileged place, because my, sort of, I'm third-generation immigrant. So my grandparents grew up in India, and then I moved, they moved here in sort of the '70s and the '80s. And I grew up here, but it was very family orientated. And I sometimes see, whether it's my friends or just society in general, especially in the UK, and it's got a very different view on the family or the culture. And it was interesting reading Selfie, because you talk about in sort of like the Confucian way of seeing life, and it's very much based on the collective, and the collective is the most important thing, not the individual. And comparing that to the West where the individual is the driving force, you have to be the person at the front. And for me, it was interesting reading because I'm like, yes, that's what I've been— that's what I've been thinking for so long when, when reading these books. Because I thought to myself I'm living in this one world where, you know, from a religious point of view, because I'm Muslim, so the collective is very important. You know, you go to communities and you obviously go to the mosque and it's all about the community. But then you're living in this other world where you have to strive to be the personality that's the driving force.

Yeah.

How interesting was that for you when you were researching it?

Yeah, it's fascinating you talk about that. And I was just thinking about that today, really. I mean, because it's interesting, isn't it, that we play these different games? You know, You were talking about playing the game of being a Muslim, but at the same time, Western individualist, and sometimes they clash, and sometimes they're uncomfortable.

They definitely clash.

Yeah, so we are all this kind of uncomfortable collection of different versions of ourselves depending on where we are, what we're doing, and who we're with. You know, we kind of morph and change depending on kind of who we're with. So yeah, that's what I've been sort of thinking about and writing about recently. It's, um, I just think it's it's just sort of really interesting. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, for me, the big one really is— well, the big one in itself is the economy. It's the economy that has this huge effect. It's this huge kind of tectonic kind of thing that goes on, which seems to have a huge effect on the personality of a people.

Yeah, definitely. And I think the 2008 crisis sort of brought to light that sort of the rise in the 1980s when it came to the individual, and then 2008 was sort of like a crash in that sense, because it was a crash in the two senses of the economy, but also in that idea of what is neoliberalism, or what is the downsides of neoliberalism. Because I felt like before that, it was very much, you know, greed, greed, greed, the individual, you have to strive, strive, strive. And that was like, oh, this is actually the downsides of it. This is what potentially can happen if it becomes out of control.

Absolutely. I mean, and, you know, in the deregulation that was part of the neoliberal project on the left and the right, part of that was deregulating the banks, and that directly led to the financial crisis. And, you know, I can't prove this, but I'm personally convinced that the current— a lot of the current problems that we're seeing politically are part of that, you know, have come off the back of that kind of global financial crisis, partly anyway. I mean, it's had a huge effect on especially the younger generation's quality of life, but not just their quality of life. It's kind of like this sense that they are doing less well than their parents, that it's harder to get on the property ladder. They're surrounded by other graduates who are all now struggling to find a place in the world, struggling to get great jobs. They're less wealthy than their parents were at the same age. And so that's— I think people underestimate the power of that, the power of, the game isn't working now. I'm not getting what I deserve. I'm doing everything I've been told to do, and yet here I am, and I haven't got it. There's no way I'm ever going to afford any property. And I've got to earn all these— I'm working all these sort of extra hours and so on and so forth. So I think that that has caused this kind of huge— that's caused a lot of the kind of problems that we're seeing on the left at the moment, which is— which it's become more kind of extreme in its leftishness.

Hmm.

I think the right, the problems on the right are more to do with the globalization kind of project of the neoliberals. I mean, the kind of the big neoliberal dream is to have the whole planet as one big— One big— Perfect market with no barriers and, you know, cheap labor coming in and coming out. And that's all very well and good for, you know, us in the middle class, but for working-class people, they found it really tough. And a lot of the racist kind of attitudes and what would you call it, kind of Brexit and Trump, not racist perhaps, but kind of quasi— I don't know, tribal. Yeah, tribal and kind of in the hinterlands of that kind of thinking, let's call it. I think that comes from, you know, that also has its roots in neoliberalism in a different way, I think. And now they're kind of clashing.

Yeah, because they're both fighting their own battle. Yeah, they're fighting that battle in the sense of sort of from an economic point of view, saying that the game's not winning and there's an issue, and the right saying, well, we need to sort of close borders and make sure that people aren't coming in and doing certain things.

Well, they're both saying the game isn't winning, as far as I can see. On the right, the white working class in America, in the UK, their quality of life is also on the decline, and they blame immigration. You know, the economics of that are really complicated, and it's one of those things where depending on if you're left or right, you've got a different set of economists with different set of meta-analyses telling you, or, you know, I don't know what the truth is. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, and I think that's the root of a lot of, a lot of the racism that you see in a lot of, you know, I'm not, I'm not saying that every Trump voter and every Brexit voter is a racist by any means, but, but, but that's where those kinds of thinking, people who think see the world that way tend to collect, just like people equally are abusive and prejudicial on the left, on the extremes. But I think that's why immigration becomes the big touchpoint, because they blame immigration for the game failing, and on the left they blame kind of rich white men for their game failing.

The patriarchy.

Yeah, the patriarchy.

Whatever that is.

Yes.

The immeasurable patriarchy.

Yes. Yeah.

Interestingly enough, how do you feel like the analysis of human behavior relates to that sort of dichotomy between the left and the right? Because I feel like the right are saying, and I don't want this to get to political discussion, but it's the thing that comes to my mind is it's a perspective game. A lot of the time they don't understand the other person. And Selfie, you talk like we were discussing the differences between sort of seeing culture as the name of the game rather than the individual. And the reason why there's that retraction is because the West don't understand how the East live. Like, I remember reading an article saying that the West is never gonna understand China because they don't understand their cultural practices. It's not just from a purely economic point of view, is they don't actually understand how they think.

Yeah.

They inflate and they see society as a collective rather than the individual, whereas in the West, we see the individual Yeah, I think that's right.

I think one of the sort of major kind of traps of thinking that— I can't remember which book I wrote about it, I think it was in Selfie— was this idea that we just assume that every other mind is like ours.

Yes.

And we have to, because, you know, to be alive, to have a human brain, is to think that you're having this kind of clear and unvarnished view of reality. You're just experiencing reality as it obviously is. And so you can't experience other people's realities, so you think yours is obviously reality, but it isn't obviously reality. It's a very partial kind of remix of reality that's kind of— it has all your kind of biases and prejudices and fears and loathings and memories stitched into it. So, you know, one of the things that I always go back to with selfies, if you're thinking about the differences between cultures, is that experiment where they put Easterners and Westerners and East Asians and they made them watch a video of a fish tank, an animation of a fish tank, and they had these special glasses on that monitored the micro movements of their pupils to see how it was analyzing the scene. And the individualist Westerners were focusing on this big flashy orange fish at the front, you know, and mostly looking at that, whereas the East Asian people, who are much more about context, were constantly looking between the fish and the context. And when you took them out of the lab and you asked them afterwards, what did you see? The Westerners went, well, I saw a fish. It was a fish, big orange fish. And the East Asians would say, whoa, I saw a fish tank and there were these rocks and there was a fish in the middle. So they'd be much more aware of what's going on around them. And then you take it to one kind of level of analysis further and you say, so tell me, what did you think of that fish? What did you— tell me what you thought about the fish. And the Westerners would go, oh, that fish was the leader. I love that fish. The fish was the boss. It was a big flashy big fish in the middle. And the East Asianers would say, well, I felt sorry for that fish because it was away from the other fish. That must mean it was lonely and excluded from the group. So you see how completely differently people start seeing the world. And it begins with microscopic movements called— it's the fastest movement in the human body, it's called the saccades. We do 4 to 5 saccades every second. You know, our cultural conditioning even controls the kind of subconscious movement of our pupils. As they're scanning the environment. So that's how different people are. That's how— that's the extent to which we people experience the world differently. And you don't even need kind of the big cultural changes between East and West to see that. I mean, as a journalist, you know, it would never cease to amaze me how different people of the same culture can be. I mean, people are— there's far more difference between you know, a bunch of people living in an English town who might all have the same skin color than there are between different skin colors. You know, this is, you know, people have wildly different senses of how the world works. And I, you know, I think personality is a much bigger, much bigger kind of separator of people than these sort of big cultural differences, potentially. I mean, somebody's very disagreeable, they're going to see the world as negative and threatening, and they're going to become threatening and negative themselves, and somebody is, you know, optimistic and happy, they have a completely different experience of the world than you do, and they would have a completely different life than you do.

Yeah, definitely, definitely they do. And one of the things that actually came to my mind, and when I was reading the book in specific when it came to selfie and finding out sort of that individual aspect of it, one thing that came to mind to me was very interesting, and I thought to myself, hmm, I wonder whether this would happen, was there's a retraction to the individual. But then what we're seeing is that with that, people are then becoming more collective in their way of thinking, because it's very much group identity politics when it comes to, you know, this is who we are. And people, for instance, on the left are very much saying that, you know, you have these social justice warriors and you have these people that are very much saying, this is our group. And the individual is going so down to the individual that it's actually becoming part of the collective. And people are moving into more group-centric, saying, oh, this is us and then this is you, and they're putting each other into groups.

Yeah, I don't think it's a kind of— I think it's a retraction from individualism, the social justice left, the identitarian left. I think what happens is when groups feel under threat or when they see that there are kind of— so when groups feel under threat, they become more groupish, they become much more about the identity of the group. And that's true of the left and the right, that's true of the identitarian left who say all white people are racist, and that's true of the racist right who say all black people are whatever, you know.

Yeah.

That's just what happens. But I think it's underappreciated that that can also happen when there are rewards on offer. We become more groupish, I think, when we are kind of in offensive mode as well as defensive mode. So whenever there's this kind of a, you know, a there's a war, there's a culture war on at the moment, and that's just triggering people to become much more groupish. And for me, that's a retraction from individualism, that's a retraction from what I would say is, you know, for me, it's one of the great revolutions and one of the great innovations of human thinking— individualism. This idea that you and your individual character is more important than the group. It's arguably the genius idea, you know, it's amazing. And it's certainly, I think, retracting under certain— in a kind of certain minority part of the population at the moment. It's interesting though, because when you see polls, it is a minority.

Right.

It's 12 or 15% of people would identify themselves as being on that identitarian left, but they seem to be dominating the culture at the moment.

Are they just the loudest?

Yeah, but they also strike the most fear. You know, people are scared of them. I'm scared of them. You know, they can kill your career, they can kill your reputation, they can cause you serious, serious harm just Just, I mean, I'm sure there's stuff I've said to you today that somebody could read wrongly. And, you know, I'm not— I don't think I'm important enough for them to go after. But yeah, you know, like, they're scary people. And I think it's the fear that— I think it's the fear that gives them the kind of power.

Yeah, I mean, you've— I've been seeing it quite a lot recently is you know, then pulling up tweets of people like 8 years ago and calling them out for it. And I think to myself, one, that was 8 years ago. Two, they're completely different people. You evolve as a person even on a daily basis. Yeah, yourself, the way you see self, as in yourself and your experiences, changes over time. And I feel like it's very unjustified to be pulling out— I mean, I wouldn't want people to pull out some of the things that I've said in the past. Yeah, it's not even what I think in the past.

Yeah, it's not just— it's not just even that you yourself evolve. Of course that's true, but culture evolves. And as everyone bloody knows, since 2008, culture has evolved hugely. It's become, you know, it's become— yes, especially after MeToo and Black Lives Matter, you know, we're all behaving differently now. So then to go back before this era and go, oh, look, he wasn't doing 2020. Look, in 2008, he wasn't doing 2020. Oh my God, this guy, you know, he's just— he's completely disingenuous. US. It's disgraceful behavior because they must know that it's just disgraceful, aggressive, bullyish behavior. I think it's appalling.

It is interesting to see where it's gonna go though, because I feel like when it comes to— as a millennial myself, I feel like you should be striving as the individual to be doing the best that you can, whether it's, you know, whether it's your business. And I actually think especially at the moment, I think with what's happening with COVID-19, I'm finding out a lot of my peers who were told to sort of get a graduate job are very much moving into the sense of having your own business and being independent of the system.

Yeah.

Because I feel like a lot of people are feeling like they can't get ahead if they were actually to be working with someone else, and they feel like some independence when it comes to running their own lives or having control of their own lives. And I think there is something interesting going on at the moment with the framework of trust in the system. I feel like there's not that much trust, and I can feel that as someone who is part of that generation of millennials, of the sort of mid-millennial, when it comes to that, when it comes to control of their own lives. And it's very interesting to see that being played out in society.

Yeah, I think one of the big things that neoliberalism brought— it's a very interesting subject, neoliberalism, because it's, because it's, because, you know, some people love it, some people hate it, but it's one of these it's such a complex thing. It's not good or bad. It's had— it's had lots of amazing effects. It's lifted, you know, poverty, you know. Millions of people out of poverty in developing countries. I mean, it's been— it's done an incalculable good. It's raised quality of life for people in the West mostly too. So, you know, it has done amazing things, but it's also, you know, causing damage, global financial crisis being one of them.

Wealth gap.

Yeah, the wealth, exactly, the wealth gap being being another one. But sorry, I've just forgotten, lost the thread now.

No, it's all right. We were just talking about the idea that—

Oh yes, sorry, yeah, so what I was gonna say was that one of the things that's changed is this idea of the job for life, you know. So that was how the system used to work, you know, all the way from working class up, you would leave university or leave technical school or whatever, you'd get a job, and usually it would be a job for life. And if something went really badly wrong, it'd be a job for life, and you'd retire with a pension, and you'd be looked after. The system would look after you. And, you know, that's kind of, you know, from our kind of very highly competitive, cut-and-thrust world we live in today, it seems kind of quaint and a bit dull and a bit dreary, but that's the system worked. That's, you know, that's kind of how it was, whether you were kind of in you know, working in a dockyard or working for an insurance company, it was a job for life. And so that's what— nobody has a job for life anymore. Who has a job for life anymore?

It was interesting because I saw it when I started my first job for the civil service. So I was on their grad scheme and I went into my first job. I'm obviously not going to name the organization, but I mean, the average of people being there was 15, 20 years. There were some people that had been there 35 years. It's, I mean, it's a while. And not even in the government, just in that one department and in that one organization. And I thought to myself, we encouraged to move every 3 years. And it's amazing, that change in sort of the job for life. And I even saw it with my grandparents, because they always thought to myself, oh, you're changing job already?

Yes. It struck me when I, when in the selfie, when I went to visit Silicon Valley, and I kind of went to stay in a hacker hostel with all these people that were working for Airbnb, and I forget what the other ones were. I mean, all the ones, all the apps. And, you know, that was their dream. Their dream was to flip from job to— because the project wasn't, I'm gonna do a job. The project was me. I'm gonna become the best possible version of me. And that means getting some experience at Google, getting some experience at Apple, getting some experience at Spotify or whatever it is.

Yeah.

And that was seen as the ideal. The idea wasn't the job for life. And I think I wrote that in Selfie, that it's all well and good when you're 20, 25, but when you're kind of 51, it's not so good, you know, because you're knackered. Nobody wants to look at you because you're gray and you're a bit fat, a bit grumpy. You don't want to move, you just want to, you know. So it's a young person's It's a young person's culture. I mean, that's one of the things about individualism. It's doing some of the historical research for my next book. It's interesting how they talk about the kind of pre-Industrial Revolution world was very much backwards looking. They'd look to the past for the ideal world. It would be very much looking for, you know, worshipping sacred texts and kings and golden ages. And I know there's still a bit of that on the right, but since the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Western individualism, or the resurgence of Western individualism. We're very much forward-thinking, future-thinking, and I think part of that package comes with idolizing youth, because youth are the model of the future. Then, you know, it's rather than worshipping the elders, we worship the young. And I think that's very evident in our culture, and it's evident in the way we treat old people. You know, it's— the state of our care homes is a future horrific scandal, you know, it's just terrible, but nobody really gives a crap. When I was living in Australia, I did it— one of my stories that I did was, it was a feature about the world's— it was the largest cemetery in the southern hemisphere. It's called the Good— is it called Goodwood? I can't remember. Anyway, massive cemetery, and all of the— it's all divided around the different religions. Yeah.

You know, all the different ones, Buddhist Christians, they can't get along even though they're dead.

Yeah, well, and I asked them who's the worst, who just doesn't give a shit, and they went, the Christians. And he said, I'm a Christian, I hate to say it, but the Christians, they bury them, they never come back. Whereas all the other religions, they come back. Some of them come on every birthday, they have like drinks around the graves and the cemetery, you know. But the Christians are terrible, they don't care, you know. The Christian cemeteries are full of weeds. And, you know, and I think that's very— that to me if I was to sort of pin that down, it would be that's, that's because it's, you know, it's that we Christians predominantly come from that individualistic part of the world, and that's very much a future thinking, not a past looking.

Interesting you say that. Yeah, it's very interesting you say that because I always found that very interesting because like we are encouraged in Islam to, for instance, we're actually supposed to go to the cemetery every single Thursday.

Really?

Yeah. So, and we're supposed to sort of go and, and pay our respects to the dead and Wow. And death is very much at the forefront of our belief system. So you should always have death as the forefront because then that determines how you act in the world and how you act today. And, you know, your moral and ethical frameworks is very much in tune with acting very much because death is inevitable for everyone. And it was interesting to me because I would be speaking with my friends and they would say to me, you know, when was the last time you visited your grandparents? And I'd be like, like yesterday. Like, they live like 5 miles down the road and they haven't seen their grandparents in maybe 5, 10 years. And I thought to myself, oh, I have like a— I treat my grandparents as they would like their friends. Like, my grandfather is like, he's like my number one supporter, and we like chat every few days.

Wow.

And it was very interesting to me because I felt like when I was reading Selfie, I thought to myself, That's why. Like, that's why they act that way. Because I never, I never realized why. I thought it was them just being disrespectful to their grandparents. But then I thought, no, it's actually sort of culturally appropriate to act that way towards elders. I had this switch in my mind. I thought, hmm, that's that. Those are the cultural differences.

That's how they play out. That's how they play out. that worship of progress that there is in the West. It's about progress, it's about the future, it's about pushing forwards into the future. And, um, and, you know, like, like, in exactly the same way neoliberalism has really good effects and really bad effects, Mm-hmm. individualism too is, is, is amazing for progress, amazing for inspiring people to kind of go out there and win, but it's also kind of a heartless ideology. So it's, it's it's kind of brutal because as I write in Selfie, there's that big lie at the heart of neoliberal culture, which is you can achieve your dreams, you can do it, just put your mind to it, you can do anything.

Oh my God. I don't know if you've seen, because there's so many, I call them entrepreneurs out there, that are selling this ideal on the fact that just get my £5 or £10 course, and I can sort of change your life through the power of the subconscious mind. And I'm like, you are selling snake oil here because you can't. Like, I wish I could be LeBron James, but I'm not 6'7 and I don't have the athletic power. Just because I believe it to be true is not the case. And I feel like that it's a very dangerous road to go down. And I know in that book, sorry to interrupt you, but in that Selfie, you talk about the self-esteem and that incredible story of those doctors and the lie that they were being told. I thought to myself, that is incredible how And that's the ramifications of lies. That's what I thought to myself, because, you know, not to compare him to Hitler, but what Hitler was saying was a lie. And the ramifications of lying is destructive. Like, you don't know the power of that.

Yeah, that was extraordinary, that whole business with John Vasconcelos, his name. Yeah, he believed that self-esteem was the magic bullet that was going to cure the world of all ills and make us more competitive and better, you know, players in the old neoliberal game. And when the science came in saying he was wrong, likely wrong, he just covered it up. And then it was hugely consequential, you know, self-esteem became the big kind of craze, the big cultural belief of the late '80s and '90s. Yeah, and we all believed that we could do anything and be anyone. And then you see rates of narcissism in the children of Gen Xs rise. Yeah, so massively consequential as far as I can see.

Yeah, and I felt like related to that was the idea of— because I feel like at the moment the ramifications of that are the level of expectations. Because I feel like there's a high level of expectation in society at the moment where people feel entitlement for things that, for instance, they haven't earned, but because they were getting sold on ideas or sold on the fact that just participating means that you're sort of entitled to something. Yeah, that has played out since, that self-esteem. Because I've seen it when I was growing up even, is like you would, for instance, if we were having like a cricket club, we'd be having awards and you'd get an award just for turning up or being up.

Which—

And I thought to myself Well, I won other awards, but I'm like, I got another one just for being here? Like, I thought, because I felt like that demonized my achievement, because I'm like, they're getting a trophy for being here, but I've performed well, but they're still getting a trophy. Yeah, that's not fair.

It's communism.

Yeah, exactly. It's communism. It's a retraction to early 1900s.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. I do think that the spirit of the self-esteem movement is still very much with us. I mean, we know when I was talking about Selfie a lot when it came out a couple of years ago, I think people were still very surprised, as I was when I found out that self-esteem— it wasn't true that self-esteem was a good thing to have. It was— it's often a very bad thing to have this idea that I am, I am entitled, I am special, because you're not special, you know. And yeah, so it is, and I think that is very apparent in our culture. There's a sense that people, people want that award just for showing up and get quite upset and quite cross when they, you know, when they don't get it. And I think also it kind of manifests a lot in the kind of some of the online, some of the unpleasant online behaviour with the, you must respect my beliefs, if you don't respect my beliefs I'm going to go after you. You know, is that— it's that sense that my beliefs are precious. It's almost like a narcissism on behalf of your set of beliefs. You know, my beliefs are precious, and if you ever even come across like you're disrespecting my beliefs, then, you know, we're gonna get you. You know, I think there's a— there's a deep narcissism in that. I think there's an absolute lack of humility and lack of humanity in that worldview.

Yeah, because it's sort of everyone's opinion is correct In that respect.

Yeah.

And it's, you should respect my opinion for being right, even though every single person's opinion is right. That's why I see something like flat earth theory, and, and I see that, and those people are so convinced that that's true, but they're like, well, how can— like, I believe it to be true, therefore it's true. So everyone has their own truth, even though it's obviously scientifically inaccurate, but they, they still stand out there. And I feel like that is sometimes the downside of— like, I don't see— so there's a lot of people who sort of down— who blame social media for a lot of the rise in, for instance, narcissism or these kind of things. But the way I see it personally, as someone who's on social media all the time, it's one— it's how you use it as the individual. That's how you use it. It's a tool at the end of the day, and humans will behave that way regardless of what it is.

Totally, 100%. So in Selfie, you know, I wrote that it wasn't the technology companies that forced us to make— to take photographs of each other. All they did was they put a camera on the front of a phone, and what we decided to do with it was to just take pictures of ourselves and upload them. You know, that's what happened when Apple launched the selfie camera. It was launched as the front-facing camera, that's what they called it. And the idea was that you're gonna Skype your nan, you know, FaceTime your nan. That's what they thought you were gonna do with it.

Yeah.

That's not what we did with it. Yeah, so, you know, so I think people have this kind of topsy-turvy idea of how kind of power works sometimes. And I know from a journalist working with editors in the media, people sort of tend to believe the media are kind of controlling people and telling people what to believe. But what editors are always doing is desperately trying to second-guess what their readers believe and give them what they want. You know, it's actually other way around. I think it's the same with tech companies. They're not forcing anything on us. They're forcing us away from the headphone jack, which still annoys me. But apart from that, you know, they're not forcing us to be narcissistic. And it's the same with the, you know, with our current, you know, narcissism and selfie count. Selfies are less of an issue, I would say, now than this kind of unpleasant intolerance that you see online. And that also, I don't think that's the fault of the— they're not helping the tech companies, you know, that they're encouraging the kind of gamification of people kind of using their beliefs as kind of weapons that, you know, but they didn't make us do that. That's what people do. That's how people behave. When you connect millions of people together, they're gonna start arguing and they're gonna go tribal. It's not Jack's or Twitter's fault that that happens. That's always gonna happen.

Yeah, that's always going to happen. So, um, before we end, because this has been a great conversation, so thank you very much for your time. Um, a lot of, a lot of my listeners obviously are readers and they're avid readers. What are sort of— I want to say like your 5 favorite books, but what are some of the books that have really influenced you in your ability to, to storytell or helped you shape as a writer? I know you, you talked about some of the books that helped you, because a lot of my listeners are also avid readers, but they, they're actually prospective writers. A lot of them, they want to start writing themselves. What are some of the books that you would recommend people to, to read and really get a better grasp of becoming a storyteller?

That is a really good question, and again, it ends up reducing to what are your favorite books, really, because obviously my favorite books are the ones that I— I think my favorite stories, my favorite books, are the ones that manage to balance that great plot and great character with kind of profundity. So, you know, there's a spectrum. You get, you know, you go from kind of Hollywood to, I don't know, sort of Don DeLillo perhaps on the extreme other end. Or, and so I like kind of in the middle, you know. So I love the book, the novel Perfume by Patricia Suskind. I just think it's just brilliant storytelling. John Fante, as I mentioned before, I just think he does that kind of fantastically well. can't stop turning the page, but it's still very moving and very interesting. Um, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. I can't believe he wrote that book on acid. It just boggles my mind. It's so technically good as well. I can't believe he was actually on acid when he was doing it. So that's something in terms of, in terms of fiction. Um, nonfiction, um, you know, I've mentioned Jon Ronson. Them was, was a very kind of formative book for me. Um, uh, What else? I love— there's a guy called Gordon Burns who wrote a book about Fred and Rose West called— the name's escaped me— Happy Like Murderers, which is, you know, again, it's, um, it's about Fred and Rose West, so it's almost a tabloid story, but it's written with such literary talent, you know, he takes it to another place. It's unbelievably horrific to read, There's another journalist that I'm a fan of, Andrew Hankinson, who wrote a book on Raoul Mote called You Could Do Anything with Your Life, which is really interesting, written in the present tense. And it's all— it's a fascinating book because what he's done is he's written it all from documents. So he's got this kind of trove of documents that Raoul Mote left behind, and he's constructed constructed the book from out of these kind of documents.

Okay.

It's brilliantly done. And a book I've read recently which I thought was exceptional was a book called the— I forget the name of the author, but it's The People Who Eat Darkness, which is another great story about a kind of a psychopath in Japan. But again, nonfiction. And the guy is Richard Parry something. He's the Times's He stays your correspondent. It's just an absolutely— it's absolutely, again, it's absolutely brilliant mix of gripping story but told with real intelligence and kind of power.

Amazing. I haven't read any of them, so you've added to my reading list. You've added to my reading list. Anyway, Will, thank you very much for your time. It was amazing to have you on. Where can people Where can people find you if they need to?

Twitter is @wstorr, S-T-O-R-R, and my website is willstorr.com.

Perfect. And definitely recommend everyone go read your books, The Heretics, Science of Storytelling, and Selfie as well, as well as the other ones that you mentioned previously. And Will will be on our cover of our Book Talk Today magazine as well for December, which I'm really excited about. So thank you for agreeing to do that as well. And I look forward to the new book. When is it gonna be out?

I think it keeps going back, but it's currently scheduled for June next year.

Okay.

Yeah, it's called The Status Game.

Status Game, nice. Can you give like a brief introduction of what it's about?

Yeah, it's about our fundamental desire for status and how our kind of crazed desire for social status kind of creates history and culture. And also, you know, it's kind of— I'm writing quite a lot about the kind of culture wars and how a lot of what we're seeing online and offline has its roots in people's desire for social status.

Both online. Online status, all those likes and followers. Anyway, thanks very much, Will. It was a pleasure. Cheers.