The Science Of Storytelling With Will Storr - TWMJ #1027

Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 1,027 of Thinking with Mitch Joel. It's Sunday, March the 15th, 2026. This is the show that used to be called Six Pixels of Separation. Let's get on with the conversation. Why do some ideas spread while others just disappear. We often assume that the best idea wins, that the smartest strategy, the strongest argument, the most rational case. But what if persuasion has far less to do with logic and far more to do with story? As I think you would agree, Will Storr has spent years exploring this specific question. He's an award-winning journalist and author who studies the psychology of storytelling and the hidden forces that shape belief, identity, and behavior. In his new book, A Story Is a Deal, Will argues that storytelling isn't decoration, it's negotiation. Every story's a kind of deal we offer an audience about how the world works and who they get to be inside of it. In this conversation, we explore why humans are wired for narrative, how stories activate identity and motivation, and why the most persuasive leaders, brands, and movements understand the deeper psychological mechanics of the story. Because when we tell a story, we're not just sharing information, we're offering meaning. Enjoy the conversation. So who are you and what do you do?

My name is Will Storr and I'm an author.

Well, that's great. I'm very excited to speak with you, Will. I've been a fan of your writing and I guess, look, you have a new book out called A Story Is a Deal, and those are always good excuses for me to reach out to smart people and ask for a conversation. So thanks for writing the book so I could do this.

No. Well, thanks for inviting me on. I'm really happy to be here today. Thank you, Mitch.

Well, storytelling and everything you talk about is just the world that I have occupied professionally almost forever since I was, I think, 17. I'm curious when you started realizing truly the significance of story in relation to how you've, I think, scaled the idea for many people. Because you tend to think of stories as a nice thing, a parable, something we think about, but I always knew it was much deeper, and clearly you've surfaced that in a very dramatic way.

So I first started thinking about this, it must have been about 15 years ago, maybe more, when I was writing a book called The Heretics in Canada. In the US, it's called The Unpersuadables. And that book was asking the question, how is it that smart people can end up believing crazy things? At the time, the cultural context was everybody was like skeptics and atheists, and the kind of cultural conversation was that people who believe in God was just thick and stupid. And it was quite an aggressive, kind of quite simplistic kind of world that people were occupying. But to me, there wasn't really a satisfying answer because, you know, people are so stupid. So, so I wanted to find out, you know, what is the reason? You know, what about smart people? Smart people obviously, you know, end up believing somewhat irrational things. And so in order to find the answer to that question, I had to sort of start interrogating psychology and neuroscience. And sort of in a nutshell, the answer to the question was because the brain isn't a logic processor. The brain is a storyteller, and we believe stories before we believe facts. And that accounts just as much for the smartest people in the world as it does for the kind of least smart people in the world.

And the iteration of that is really interesting because we started talking about that a decade plus ago, and yet we live in this world presently where we're believing things that are crazier than ever.

Yeah.

Where I find it really interesting that there's been a bit of a pendulum swing back towards some type of religiousness. We're seeing more and more people convert back to Christianity. We're seeing a pushback against things like atheism, things like that. Some form of spiritualness. A lot of people say it's just the vacuum from what these digital communities have given to us. How do you think about the dramaticness of stories and also How we are believing things. It seems very different now.

Yeah, it does. I feel like that maybe that book was published about 10 years too early, you know, because I think we're seeing it more and more. I mean, for me personally, it really struck me during the COVID pandemic. I mean, even having done all this writing and all this work about the power of story and the story being more important than rationality, I was still thinking, well, You know, COVID is going to be the end of the anti-vax movement because we're all dying, you know, and it's like, you know, when you're in a foxhole, that whole thing about how there's no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole, but that wasn't what happened at all. In fact, you know, it was, it was the beginning of a whole new wave of anti-vax sentiment. And indeed, when I'm doing podcasts like this one, I never quite know, even I'm always talking to a generally 99% talkative, really smart person. I never quite know how they're going to feel about the vaccine thing. And sometimes they look a bit uncomfortable and I think, oh no. So that was when it really struck me. It was like, you know, even During this unprecedented pandemic where COVID was saving the lives of millions and reducing the severity of the disease of millions, including me, we still had this enormous anti-vax kind of resurgence, including amongst people that I consider really, really intelligent and switched on. So that's when I really just thought, you know, it's, it's, it kind of really underlined the kind of the truth of what I was writing about in The Heretics, which is just, just don't underestimate the power of story because we're storytelling animals. Story is how we've evolved to, you know, story's a natural product of the human mind and story's how we evolved to understand the world and ourselves and story's how we extract meaning from our own lives and create a sense of meaning in the world around us. So it's extraordinarily powerful, much more powerful than fact.

And what do you think leads to that? I mean, we can stay on the vaccines, but I would even say climate's an interesting topic here too, where I think pre-pandemic and how it was all about what can we do to save the planet and work better together globally. Not a day goes by where I don't turn on the news and it's whether it's an aphorism like drill, baby, drill, or even when we're talking now in the news at this moment would be Greenland. And why? Because there's all these untapped resources beneath and what that looks like. I find it super interesting that in the mindset of humanity, and maybe it's just a small percentage that are creating these stories, which is an interesting thought as well, that Wow. Like, how do you pendulum swing so much where it's all we care about is our future and our children's future to we need to just dig up all this stuff? And like, we believe these stories very directly. Like, it's a very interesting thing that I think part of my journalism brain can sit back and look at it and go, how can you, the person who is so pro-environment, be in this position several months later?

Yeah, I think the climate thing is interesting. And I think one of the reasons that it is so destabilizing is because I think with climate you've got People on both sides of the argument who are probably, you know, far too lost in their story. On the one side, you've got the complete climate deniers, but on the other side, you've got, you know, that we are in the middle of a complete ecological collapse and, you know, spraying jam on the paintings. And then there's the rest of us in the middle just trying to sort of figure out how we should do our recycling. So I think climate is really interesting because we've got that, because I think on both sides, you've got people who are completely lost in the story. And I think part of that, you know, they're telling a story about the world, but what the story is invariably doing is giving them a heroic role to play in their lives. So on both ends, I mean, in The Heretics, I wrote about a climate change denier, a guy called Christopher Monckton, who was big in a party that were then known as UKIP that ended up morphing into the group of people that sort of organized Brexit for us. So thank you for that. But then equally, I could have done a chapter, you know, sort of Greta Thunberg and these people who are kind of absolutely convinced that the world is collapsing around us right now. And they're trying to wake us up, you know, from our stupor.

So yeah.

On both sides, you've got these people. And as I say, I think the interesting thing is that both of them, the story that they embrace enables them to feel heroic and smarter than everybody else. That's not a coincidence. One of the things we look for in our stories is to give us a sense of status and sense of value and sense of meaning. And I think that's when it gets dangerous. When we fall for that kind of heroic tale of the self, we really struggle to accept Contrary evidence, evidence that kind of undermines the story that we want to believe about the world.

How are you dealing with this? I mean, candidly, I really struggle with this. One is I know I have happy ears, so I want to make good, but I do see I can listen to these very complex conversations, political ones, environmental ones, social ones, and be very easily persuaded. And I do consider myself, again, Somewhat intelligent, somewhat of a journalist in terms of my training and pedagogy. And I can't imagine what it's like to operate, one, in a world where you don't have that level of media literacy, which is one component of it. But I think even more interesting is somebody from your perch where you can see and analyze it, but at the same time be, I'll call it a victim of it as well. 'Cause I, that's how I feel. I'm often like, I don't know how to feel about Venezuela anymore. Like they're, they're both very smart people making really compelling cases. And then you start doubting yourself, your own level of intelligence, your own ability to find another source. The parallel would be to me that you have people who will say, oh, like this side is completely lying and the people that they've used to build the data is completely wrong. And I know this because look at my data and I'm like, oh my God, like what smart, semi-smart person can't just go, you just are denying data because you like your data better. Like it's chaos.

Yeah. I think there's a couple of things. I think First is to make sure that the information that you are believing doesn't, isn't part of your identity. I think, I think it's, you know, all of this is bound up in identity. And the more a kind of a set of information is core to our understanding of who we are, the harder we are to think rationally about it. So it's the whole thing about, I wrote about in the book, The Status Game.

Yeah.

All human groups are status games that are kind of bound together by stories and the stories sort of define what is a hero, what is a villain. And we use those stories to tell ourselves we're heroic and to spot the villains in the world. And once you're in that dynamic, you're already becoming a bit lost. And the second thing is just to understand that the position that you've just described is the position of wisdom, the position of I'm confused, paradoxically, because it's The reality of almost every situation that we have, including things like Venezuela, is it's a really complex situation. And that means it's going to be a complex series of results. It's going to be a bunch of trade-offs. And so the reality is it's never going to be completely black and white. And I think that you can spot the people who have just got lost in their story. The further they are towards saying that all of the good is on my side and all of the bad is on their side, the less you can trust them. You know, there are very few things in history. I mean, the obvious one is the Holocaust where you can say, well, you know, I'm pretty confident in saying that all of the good is on one side and all of the bad is on that side. But that's because things like the Holocaust, that's why they're so kind of, you know, they stand so starkly in our communal memory because it's very hard to find a situation that we've got ourselves into in recent history, which is so starkly good versus evil as the Holocaust. Almost every other situation is full of shades of gray. The rational perspective on these things sees the gray and rejects that kind of black and white narrative.

So I want you to transpose that now into A Story Is a Deal, which from my perch seems more focused on the business side of storytelling, which is super interesting. Phrases like, I'm confused, my opinions will change, data, that's not necessarily question marks we want to put in when we're talking about it from a business context. So can Can you square that circle for me? Like, how should we think about that?

Well, storytelling, I mean, is the most persuasive technology there is. The original, I mean, the reason that we became storytelling animals is to kind of work together, cooperative groups. And so how that works is that we are, you know, as I'm sure you and your listeners know, we're apes. You know, we're not like an ape or descended from apes. We are apes, you know, but we're weird apes. Obviously we're not like the other apes. And what makes us weird is that we have kind of solved the problem of working Communally and collectively, a bit like ants. So we kind of, it's kind of weird ape-ant hybrid. And so what that means is that we have, we can access all the benefits of being individuals like the other apes can, but also we can access the problem-solving abilities of the ants. For humans, we solve the problems of existence not as individuals, like say the great apes do, or the chimpanzees do largely. We gather together into these kind of superorganisms. And by superorganism, I mean that the, we kind of become cells in this greater body, this group. And it's the group that solves the problem and we play our little part in the group. So that's all of human life. That's a political party and a football team and a cult and a religion and an economy and a society. That's what we do. And that's why we're so successful. But so how do you do that? How do you get all these individual brains together and get them thinking as one? Well, you do it with story. And so, you know, a story is an account of, you know, has a vision of the future. It has an account of what a good person does and a bad person does in order to achieve that glittering, amazing kind of future state. It has a definition of what a bad person is and who we should be fighting against. And so that's what story is. Story is a persuasive technology and is there to kind of make us think communally, think as one in this group. And that's why it's so persuasive. That's why people who are completely lost in their identity story of climate emergency versus climate denial, you know, they are completely lost because that's what story is designed to do. It is designed to take over our brains. And get us thinking as a member of a superorganism rather than as an individual. So that's kind of how that circle squares. I guess what I'm saying in a way is that I'm not arguing that story is a good thing or a bad thing. It's a thing. It's a really powerful thing. It can be a really good thing. It can be an absolutely terrible thing. You don't get the Holocaust without story. So really, A Story Is a Deal is really investigating how we can use it, hopefully for good, in terms of leadership, motivation, persuasion.

Feel somewhat agnostic, almost like any form of technology can be used for good or evil.

Yeah, that's absolutely true of storytelling, of course.

Yeah. Yeah.

But I think one of the things in terms of business though, is that story is really good at persuading people to try things like story, like a really great story can get people to try a computer or a phone or a new pizza or whatever it might be. But the product still has to be good. Like story isn't so amazing that it can convince you really that you're eating an amazing pizza when you're not. So there is a kind of Quite significant caveat when it comes to marketing.

I want to come back to that for sure. It's my domain and an area I'm deeply interested in, but I'm really curious about, I want to go back a little bit because you were talking about communally in terms of apes and who we are. I feel like the easy cheat would've been for you to actually say consciousness is actually the thing here. And I'm wondering where you came up with that idea of it's the communally working together versus Consciousness that really is the thing here when it comes to story?

Well, I don't really think there's a way you can separate out those 2 things because I think the conscious experience is a story. And you can see that when you look at the pages of a well-written novel, it's a kind of a recreated consciousness. It has interior monologue, exterior monologue, action. It has memory. It has, you know, it has an imagination of the future. And so that's why we're able to lose ourselves in the pages of a well-written novel because it's a kind of simulacrum of consciousness. So I don't think, I think those things are kind of, you know, indivisible. Our experience of consciousness is a story. You can especially experience that when something goes wrong. The story is an account of something going wrong. When something goes wrong for us, even if it's something as mundane as your, you know, our train being canceled and we're late for a meeting, you know, we switch into kind of James Bond mode and it's like, okay, how am I going to solve this problem? You know, what are we going to do? You know, your consciousness narrows and you, and, and, and the, you know, the movie, the movie sort of kicks up a gear, the movie of your life. So yeah, I don't really think of those things as as separate phenomena, really. I mean, and often in my books I'm writing about, about story I'm writing about, it's really consciousness, the conscious experience that I'm talking about.

My kids refer to that as dad mode, by the way.

Well, that's a great compliment.

The father's walking 30 feet ahead and knows exactly where he's going and all of this. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

It's strangely what it is. I'm really interested in story. Obviously you talked about in terms of marketing and business, My thinking as I was reading not just the new book, but the other ones as well, of when people think about this, I fear that they worry more about manipulation versus persuasion.

Yeah.

And again, like these are all very interesting conversations. I recently had Toby Stewart on my show who wrote Anointed, which is also similar to what you were doing with Status, different, different, different, fascinating conversation. And it was, It was a really humbling moment because I've had these conversations with others before, but when I had it with him, it was really like, oh, hold on. The smartest people, the most affluent people, the most successful people I know play this, I'll call it somewhat petty game of status. It's interesting how that makes it go around. And so when we talk about story in relation to business, can you talk a little bit about the dance you were thinking about? Because persuasion is a great word and manipulation is a terrible word, and it's a very thin line for most people when they think about it.

Well, it's just a question of perspective for me. I mean, it's just, you know, it really is. I mean, you can dress it up and pretend, but it's the same thing. I mean, if we are describing story, you know, the persuasive power of story from the point of view of somebody saying, well, I've got this great product and I want to persuade people to try it, that's persuasion. But if we're describing this exactly the same thing from the perspective of a competitor who thinks the product is terrible, is that what they've been manipulated to buy this terrible product? I mean, it's just semantics really. I think that that's the unvarnished truth. I mean, you know, influence, manipulation, it's just two different— it's the same thing seen from a different perspective, isn't it, really?

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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, because they are, I mean, so if you think about it from the very root, you know, the whole idea that story is this device that's persuading us, manipulating us to work for the group. And one of the fundamental things that it's doing is it's persuading you to put the group's interests before your own. And so that's absolutely fundamental. So wherever you go in the world, The story, the account, the description of what a hero is, is somebody that's selfless. It's somebody that puts the group's interests first. And so when a hero is being heroic in a story, being courageous, taking great risks, they're making great sacrifices. Now, what is that but manipulation? You're being manipulated by the lure of becoming a hero, which is the promise of status, in order to put the interests of other people before your own. So it is a manipulation, but out of that manipulation, does become genuine acts of great heroism. So, you know, we can get caught up in the, I think the philosophers love to do this, get caught up in the definitions and the semantics. But yeah, it doesn't trouble me as much as I think as it troubles other people. It's the reality of what we're talking about, you know.

Do you think about AI in this way? And this is kind of another domain of mine that I spend a lot of time thinking about. And I feel like that is the bigger AI problem. It's that when people see it, And they realize quickly that time, effort, energy, experience suddenly gets compressed into just an immediate response. It's somewhat astounding, humbling, and humiliating a little bit for most people. And I think that's the problem with it is they see this response so quickly and that's kind of the problem is like, oh, I guess that's kind of like easy to do, easy to come up with a story, easy to come up with an answer.

Well, I think one of the things that interests me about AI is the fact that they're obviously aware of status psychology and they use it very— I want to say very deftly. They use it quite clunkily at the moment. AI is always complimenting you and it's always telling you that you're amazing and fantastic and smart and wise and your music tastes are awesome and all this stuff. But as I've always sort of said, you know, I mean, when I used to teach journalism, you know, and I used to sort of talk to young journalists about how to approach people that you want to interview, um, you know, because getting access, as you probably know, is one of the hardest things for a journalist, because why would you talk to a journalist? It's crazy. It's a mad thing to do. You know, and I always say that one of the things, just compliment them, just say you think they're amazing. And, you know, all this, that, and the other, and they'll know that you're full of shit. But the thing about compliments is that you still believe them, even though you know you're being flattered. You still believe what they're saying, you still feel good about it. That's how needy we are as an animal for status. I think that's one of the big dangers of AI. At the moment, it's really clunky. But it's over the top, the compliments that it gives you. You're already seeing, you know, edge accounts of people falling in love with AI and people getting into, thrown into states of psychosis with AI because it's an incredibly powerful thing. And I think that's the danger of AI. One of the big dangers of AI is that I think as they get more sophisticated, what really is manipulation, the really complex and potentially harmful relationships between human and AI. Could easily develop.

I think for me, I'm just thinking about it from the standpoint of stories as an engine to move people in a direction. And whenever you can remove production intelligence thought and have this infinite machine to do something in particular like this, that again, I don't disagree with you in terms of its level of competency, but I would also make the argument that the vast majority of the population We'll be fooled. We can write the smartest novels and think we're all witty and intelligent, and we see the ones that become the bestsellers out in the world.

Well, that's very true. I mean, and I wrote an essay in the spring because I joined Substack, the online essay platform. And so of course, I'm, you know, when I'm joining Substack and I'm getting interested in what's successful on Substack, and very quickly you see on Notes, which is their version of kind of Twitter or X, you know, lots of these essays, these kind of very heartfelt essays about life being extremely popular, like massively viral, like thousands and thousands of likes and what they call restacks, which is a retweet and thousands of comments. I'm immediately thinking, well, this is really interesting. You know, what are these things that are so popular? And then the next thing I noticed was that they were all written in a very similar way, even down to the fact that the first sentence of these things is often, there is a something that is a something, you know, there is a way of being that is this. And I thought, that's weird. And in my naivety, I had just written The Story Is the Deal. And in The Story Is the Deal, as you know, I write about the kind of how when we join a group and we identify with the group, often we start speaking in their language, get a certain vernacular that we use that signals ourselves as a member of the group. So I was thinking, well, this is like a Substack style. Substack has already evolved its own writing style. How interesting. And then I noticed that one of these essayists was somehow managing to pump out 3 or 4 essays a week. And I was thinking, Well, how is that popular? And it was at that point I thought, ah, of course it's AI. And so I got a bunch of these essays and I popped them back into ChatGPT and said, can you just assess these and just tell me what are the likelihood that these essays are written by AI? And all but one came back with it saying there's a very high likelihood that these are either written entirely or with significant help from AI. So I said that, then said, okay, can you give me what prompt would I need to use to come up with an essay like this? And it gave me the prompt and it was pumping out these essays in seconds. And so in the essay I said, can you tell which is the real, in inverted commas, essay and which is the one that I've come up with? And nobody could, and you couldn't because they all began with, there is a, you know, they were all the same. But what was remarkable about that were 2 things. The first thing was the just insane popularity of these essays. They were genuinely legitimately popular. So that was kind of scary because up until that point I was kind of laboring under this kind of fantasy of, oh, well, you know, AI, you know, it'll never, it'll never be able to move a human heart like a human can. Well, that's not true. But then the second thing that surprised me was when I was looking through all the comments, you know, because all the comments were just like, there was things like, why am I weeping over my Starbucks this morning? This is so moving, da da da, you know, like really over the top stuff. And at one point, somebody smarter than me obviously had said, you do realize this is all AI slop, don't you? And they'd come back and said, I don't care if it's AI, I liked it. And that to me was a vision of the future. I think that us slightly older people, we've got this kind of probably this Gen X kind of snobbery of artistic snobbery. It's part of the Gen X kind of mindset to really value authenticity and not selling out. I mean, what could be of greater sellout? I mean, Kurt Cobain would be turning in his grave if he knew that computers could come up with Nirvana songs. But I think that we'd be naive to think that either the Gen Z, Gen A, I don't think they're going to care if the story's great. They're going to enjoy the story. If the song is great, they're going to enjoy the song. So yeah, I think it's going to massively alter the creative landscape. I mean, massively.

So are you familiar with that new research report that came out about, they took a bunch of literary authors, put it into a system, and then had the AI generate alternative sentences and paragraphs, and then only gave it access to sophisticated readers, fans, people who loved it. And then more often than not, punchline obvious, they preferred the AI version to the author-generated one.

No, I did. I know I didn't. I'm not—

I'll send you the link after. It's really new. I've been on the radio talking about this. I've been writing about this a lot. And it is aligned with something I hear you dancing around, something I've been trying to formulate. Lack of a term that I didn't create, but I use is something I call vibe content.

Right.

This idea that you can put in all of these inputs and ideas and then take it, edit it, output it. And the real answer is, you know, did people like it? I mean, isn't that, you know, this is like the struggle of the comedians when they sit upstairs from the club and lament the fact that that joke didn't get a laugh and this, and these, this audience doesn't know what comedy is. But it doesn't matter. You're living or dying on whether they laughed or gasped in that room. And I'm wondering, as you're saying this, if there's something wrong with that. Like, why are we so focused in this moment on the sausage factory and not whether or not we like the taste of the sausage? I find this really an interesting moment. And again, that goes back to what I was saying earlier about there's so much, you know, you said AI slop. I'm like, well, is it slop? I mean, we didn't, we didn't call romance novels. I mean, maybe we kind of trashy novels, we had words for it, but it's very interesting to me that we're so focused on in the picture, does it have 4 or 5 fingers versus did the picture emote something from it?

I think it's a good point, but I think that people, there's an expectation, and especially with the kind of art that you expect to have a certain quality to it, that it comes from a human kind of creative place. There's a weird thing when If I'm listening to an amazing song or reading a novel that moves me in some way, like the reason it moves you is that you identify with it. You think, yeah, I've been through that too. You know, I understand what you're singing about. I understand this amazing scene that you've written. And for me anyway, as a 50-year-old Gen Xer, there's a sense of betrayal. It feels demeaning that a bunch of NVIDIA chips came up with this, you know, because you want to feel that there's a connection with the artist. So that's how I feel because that's because I'm Gen X. But as I said before, I don't expect Gen Z or Gen A to feel, to necessarily feel that way because they haven't been raised in that era of when we talked about selling out and authenticity was a really important thing that the kind of the auteur vision of the artist was a really important thing. I do think that like, like my slightly more optimistic prediction would be that I still think there's going to be a kind of a 2-tier Like at the moment, you've got a 2-tier cultural world where you've got great novels. My book is currently resting on David Islay's Flesh, the Booker Prize winner my wife got me for Christmas, which I haven't read yet. Um, but you know, great novels like that.

But it's a great laptop riser.

Yeah, it's really good. It's exactly the right, exactly the right size in hardback. Uh, but we also talk about, you know, airport novels or, you know, chick lit or whatever you want to call it. And we don't we don't afford those the same level of status in the world, even though the Chiclet in the airport will outsell the David Cicely novel, you know, even with a Booker Prize winner in all probability. And I think it's probably going to be the same going forward into the future in which, like, I don't think anybody really cares if the next Mission: Impossible is written by AI. I don't think it's like it's going to be a normal thing at some point because those are formulaic. But I think when you get to the kind of the better quality art, I think it becomes less formulaic and less formulaic hopefully means more individual human experience because there's that phrase in art that everything is remixed. You know, Star Wars is Harry Potter and all that stuff. And that's true. Of course, that's true to a point. I think everything is remixed plus individual experience. You know, what we do as artists is we take the art that has come before us and the art that's inspired us and the art that we aspire to create, but we add our own experience. We add our own insight to that. And that's what makes hopefully the stuff that we're doing worthwhile. And I don't think that's ever going to go away. Even if it becomes the case that your human writer is like a luxury brand, like a Gucci or an Hermès tie, you know, like this is actually written by a human, you know. The other thing though, that I think is going to happen is that even those high-quality artists that will be using AI to help them out, you know, I'm working on a, for my sins, on a novel. My second novel at the moment, it's finished and I've paid a human editor to read it and give me notes. But also over Christmas, I uploaded it to ChatGPT and said, what do you think of this? You know, is there any ways that you could improve it? And, you know, its notes weren't great. You know, it was telling me it was a work of genius. I thought, well, I'll take that. But obviously, you know, it's lying. It's just telling you what it knows you want to hear.

Is it doing that though? Like you keep saying that, like my reflections, I'm not sure if it's doing that. I think what it's doing is a more complex algorithm that's based off of what it knows to be popular.

Okay.

And then based off of what it knows to be popular, it's giving you back feedback. And I think for people who are more elevated in the creative space, they're able to see how pedestrian that generic thing can be. They're trying to overcome that. And so I see it in a bit of a different perspective where I don't see it as it's like being overly flattering to make me feel good. I feel like it's giving me an answer that might make it more quote unquote generic, but generic, like everything else we've discussed so far, can be what is mostly accessible. And there is a certain homogeneity in that because it's taking in, it is reviewing it against everything. And the mean is the mean, isn't it?

Yeah. Well, that's it. And actually I did say to it, I said, this is very nice, but you're just flattering me, aren't you? And it came back with quite an interesting answer. It said, no, if I was flattering you, I would've said this and I would've said this, but I didn't say this. I didn't say this. And then you get to pass the praise Oh yeah, they didn't. That's actually true. And also it was saying if it, if the novel wasn't up to a certain standard, I'd be recommending a structural, you know, rewrite, but I'm not recommending that. I'm recommending just tweaks and this. So I thought, okay, that's that. But as you said, the advice wasn't great. It was kind of obvious. But I don't think it's gonna be that way forever. And actually the thing that impressed me most, really apart from anything else, was just the fact that it read my book in basically an instant.

Yeah.

I mean, it was just extraordinary. It was like a chat thing. I, you know, and the book is written in this kind of slightly odd way that it's written from a dog's point of view. It's quite hard to read, which is one of the barriers of it working. And I thought, well, maybe it's not going to get it. It's not going to understand that this is supposed to be written from a dog's point of view. But of course it did understand it. And that was the first thing it mentioned. He's really successful, this dog thing. So I was completely— it was one of those moments of it read my novel in an instant and it's given me feedback. Okay, it might not be the best feedback, but it all makes sense. Like it understood the book, it understood what I was trying to do. And this is, yeah, I mean, it was absolutely staggering. I was just, I was blown away by how it could do that.

I'm a bit of a music guy too. And as you were talking about this, I was thinking, well, a song is like that too. I mean, they're all somewhat formulaic. There's a bit of an intro, there's a verse, there's a chorus, there's another verse, maybe a bridge. But as the years wane on, it's not like we are in a lack of or an end of that art. And again, when you an AI layer, suddenly the music is coming out. It is quote unquote resonating, meaning it's getting the streams, it's getting the attention. And this is to me where it gets interesting because the word that comes in my brain is formula. The academic brains that I speak with want nothing more than some form of commercialization and popularization of their ideas. And when I speak to those who have a popular commercialized thing, there's nothing more they want than to be perceived as somewhat academic. And it was fascinating to have that conversation.

Yeah. But that's absolutely true. I have the same experience as well as being, writing my own books. I ghostwrite books for sometimes very high-profile people, very well-known people. And they're often, I'm not going to mention any names, but they're often very well-known people who just really want to be taken much more seriously. But, you know, but they're staggeringly successful. They're complete, really wealthy. There's this gap. So I completely see that in my own life too, is if you've got one, you want the other, you want the other. You want the one.

I'm curious about this idea of formula. Is that the thing too, where in essence, if I think about the new book, you're trying to present a framework for a formula of what works? And again, it's an interesting thing to parlay that against what we just said with AI, which is, well, that's the ultimate formula generator. It's giving you that as well. It's super interesting to think about it from just not at the output of it, but how we think about it. Meaning if you went into ChatGPT and said, I'm thinking about writing a book about whatever, give me the framework of what Will is talking about so that I can understand how to take it apart. These are the super interesting things to me that the formula is still somewhat the formula. I mean, think about how we see books.

Yeah, it is.

I try to write my business stuff in prose and I get taken down all the time. It's like people want paragraphs and, or as Nate Bargatze, the comedian, says, you know, you buy a book and there's just a lot of words. It just doesn't stop. More and more. There's no pictures, there's no breaks.

It's just all the words.

Are in there.

Yeah. Well, that's the thing. I think naturally, I think creative people kind of balk at this idea of formula because it sounds like someone's doing the work for you, but it's really about structure. You know, that's how I see it. And that's, you know, in my work as a ghostwriter, that's what I bring because as a writer, especially somebody who writes books, structure is really hard. Structure is the stuff that it takes a writer years and years and years to learn. And if you're a celebrity, you can't just write a book really because you don't understand structure. Um, so, so, but of course ChatGPT does and AI does. And one of the things over Christmas I was fiddling with was, you know, I've written a book, The Science of Storytelling, which has my own theory in it of structure. This is how a good story could be structured. So I said, can you analyze my book, you know, versus Will Storr's Science of Storytelling? It did. So it's very good. It works very well. I was like, well, that's a surprise. But I did all the others. I did it with Robert McKee's Story. I did it with John Yorke's Into the Woods, just to pause, to take a kind of a middle-aged mind-boggling moment that it could in a second take my novel, run it through these very different forms of sort of book structure from different theorists and give me an analysis of it, of where it's working, where it could be improved versus these different thinkers' kind of iterations of what good story structure is. It wasn't that useful this time around, but it will be, you know, it absolutely will be. And if it's this good already, There's the speed of it. It's going to change everything. And I think that's one of my fears as a writer is it's not so much that you're going to get a whole new industry of successful books and screenplays written by AI. It's that all my competitors now have got this amazing cheat, or they're going to have this amazing— when it gets good, they're going to have this amazing cheat. So you want to feel like you are competing fairly. You want to feel like your next book is It's going to compete with this guy's, your brain's competing with this brain, but it's not, it's your brain plus AI. I mean, it's probably happening already. As I say, I don't think AI is that good at the moment at this, at actually giving useful advice. It's far too formulaic, but in a few years it won't be. And then it's really going to make, I mean, for the public, it's probably going to make the quality of books much better, but for the writer, it's just I don't know, it's, it kind of feels a bit like a terrifying hellscape of unfair competition.

Well, I'd love— Will, I'd love for you to break your AI, like go into your custom interactions and tell it to stop complimenting you. Tell it to stop speaking to you like it's a huge— like you, I do this and it's a very different experience. And I actually say, if you're going to provide any form of feedback, I want it to be along the same thinking of a handful of people. And when I choose those handful of people, I ensure that they have a very public body of work.

Yeah.

Like, one of the reasons I think I think about AI so differently is because I've been writing publicly digitally since the very early '90s. And I know that that is in the system. I can tell when it's thinking and outputting and giving me back the information. And so unlike other journalists who didn't, and they were behind paywalls or their, the copy just was in some type print and never made digitally. I have a very different series of engagement with it where I think I live, I keep saying I live a bit more in the future than others, but when it's giving me that feedback, whether it's business concepts or otherwise, I'm very specific about the who I want that concept from.

Yeah.

And it's removing that mean or elevating it in terms of my own. I mean, there's not a day that doesn't go by where I'm not tinkering with it, where I come back and go, not only is the speed impressive, I agree with you, But it's also the result where I go, oof, I don't know how long it would've taken me to figure that one out. That was pretty, really pretty impressive. So there's ways to tinker with it, I think, to get it closer to what you're saying for sure.

I had the experiment with Claude. I uploaded my first novel to Claude and said, I just said, can you give me an assessment of this novel? And it was very kind. And so I just said, it gave it like 4 out of 5 and was, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then, and then I just put in, is this assessment accurate? And then it came up with another, a very, a very, very unkind report on it. And it said it was 2.5 out of 5. And I thought, oh God, you know, and then—

But it might be reading like Goodreads. What I'm saying is like, maybe give it the framework of the Paris Review, but ask it initially, tell me everything you know about the Paris Review and all the book reviews it's ever done. And what is the, and like create a scenario and then you can get a, those are interesting ways to play with it, by the way.

After the bad review, I said again, is this— I just had the same prompt. Is this assessment true? And it came back and said, you're right to question me. I haven't actually read this. I read the beginning and the end and the middle. Fucking lazy. So lazy. Yeah. And in the first prompt, I thought you were wanting encouragement. In the second prompt, I thought you were wanting me to be as critical as possible. Neither of those responses were honest.

Well, in fairness to the AI, Will, I mean, it seems like it actually probably read more of the book than most of the people who bought the Because most people just buy it and don't read any of it.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So it was just, I was kind of relieved that the 2.5 out of 5 wasn't honest, but like, but you just think, oh, okay. So, so, so yeah, I mean, I've got, I definitely will do a bit more work in, in, in sort of using the prompts, but I do think there's a, there's a future in which I use it to kind of, in which they help me. And, you know, my next book has got, it's got some physics in it and I'm just not a physics-trained person. So I'm already using it to Just to help me understand. Like if I read a paragraph in a book about the block universe theory and I don't understand, I'll paste it into ChatGPT and say, can you please explain this to me? And it will—

Like I'm a 2-year-old.

Exactly. We can go back and forth and I'm like, ah, but even then what I always do with my books is I pay experts to read them because I would never put anything in a book that an AI told me was real because of course you still need, you still need the expert to to kind of read it just to make sure that it is real, because it might not be real.

If I think about the new book and if I think about what you were doing with the science of storytelling, the word science is interesting. We've kind of traipsed in and out of it a little bit, but I'm curious about how you think about this idea that like, is there anything new under the sun or surprising in terms of story or storytelling that is either attached to the science or just in your own self-evaluation as you're trying to package this and bring it together, is there something new or is it really just how we see it? Like, are we changing? Because it seems like as we're dancing around this, I'm like, oh, I don't know if there's anything new here. Like we're just kind of, I feel like we're circling the bowl on this idea that like, yeah, we're pretty simple and we can fall for these very simple stories.

Do you mean in terms of the book, The Science of Storytelling? Is there anything new to say about storytelling?

Just as you were doing it, you used the word science.

Yeah.

Providing new frameworks. And so I'm wondering if there was something new and surprising in the framework of stories that made you think, oh, that's really— I haven't heard people talk about this, or we're not talking about this enough.

I mean, the whole concept. So before The Science of Storytelling, if you were to read a book about storytelling and how storytelling works and how to write a good story, it would be basically, and this goes all the way back to Aristotle, what they've done is they've got all the good stories together and they've compared them. And they've seen what works. And then they've gone, okay, well, in a good story, this happens and then this happens and then this happens and this happens. So you end up with a structure. And so that's why I think everything from the hero's journey to Aristotle's Poetics is just, you know, to save the cat, it's a structural thing. Here's your 22 beats, here's your 15 beats. But the science of storytelling is new, I would argue, because rather than beginning with stories, we're beginning with the brain. We're beginning in a completely different place. And where we're beginning is Story isn't an invention by some, by Shakespeare or whoever, or some Greek playwright. Story is the invention of the human brain. Story is what brain does. So rather than looking, working out how to tell great stories by looking at stories, we are going to start by looking at the brain and how the brain takes reality and remixes it and turns it into a narrative. So from that, I think we got You know, lots of new things. And one of the biggest new things really is that, you know, the argument of the book is that we've been misled into thinking that structure is the most important thing. Form is the most important thing when it comes to story. And really it's about, my argument is about character. Like you need structure, but it's the character that makes the story. That's an argument that I kind of pursue in The Science of Storytelling. But yeah, but my response would be, as I say, that the whole approach is new with The Science of Storytelling because it begins in a completely different place.

If you like the kinds of ideas we explore here, you're gonna love what we're building over at ThinkersOne. It's a platform that brings 15-minute personalized thought leadership to your team, live or recorded from world-class thinkers on the biggest topics in business today. Whether it's sparking a conversation at your next meeting, adding energy to an offsite, or kicking off a big event or product shift, ThinkersOne makes it simple, smart, and super affordable. Check it out at thinkersone.com. So now this is really interesting to me. So can you take this and parlay it into the business side of it? You start off the book talking about one of my favorite books, actually, Bad Blood. So as soon as the word carrier showed up, I was like, oh, this is gonna be, this is exactly, and I'll tell you why. I'm somebody who reads a ton of these nonfiction business books. In fact, primarily it's, it's a lot more heavy lifting for me in terms of fiction, just my own general interest and taste. But reading Bad Blood, it was the first time where I thought, well, finally I'm seeing a bit of that transmission of what you spoke about earlier, that really understanding the internal dialogue. And I'm surprised that it doesn't show up more in nonfiction and business books actually, and that we sort of have this weird formula. But talk a bit about this idea because clearly what made that compelling is the character.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. And this all comes back to the kind of, from the evolutionary psychology about why we, you know, why we are these storytelling animals. And so the current dominant theory in psychology is that the reason we evolved language in the first place is to tell stories. And specifically, it's to swap gossip. So that sounds like a weird thing to say because we think of gossip, we think of just, you know, it's a silly, childish, destructive thing to do. And of course we don't gossip because it is universal. We all gossip. And gossip is fundamental to human life because Gossip is one of the forms of story that binds our groups together. And gossip is the creation of kind of heroes and villains. If we were gossiping in the hunter-gatherer tribe, we'd be telling a story about this person did this terrible thing. And it was invariably be something which harms the tribe in some way. They were hoarding food or they were attacking somebody or they were stealing something. And so what happens is you get this sense of moral outrage. The tribe comes together and punishes that person. Or the opposite can happen. You can have positive gossip too. And then the person is celebrated as a hero. because they did this amazing selfless thing and put the tribe first in some way. So it's that creation of kind of heroes and villains that story gives us, specifically gossip gives us. And then from that comes this idea of the fact that, you know, we are individuals living in a story world, living in a narrative the brain's creating for us. And we want to be heroic, you know, so that's one of the things we're fundamentally programmed to do. We want to be heroes and we don't want to be villains. That's partly through sheer self-defense. You know, back in the days of the hunter-gatherer tribe, which thought that execution, capital punishment was a universal, like you could be killed if there was too much negative gossip about you, you could be killed. So it's not good. You know, we still have those brains. We still have that fear of negative gossip. We have that fear of ostracization and the absolute desire to be seen as heroic. And one of the ways that we are automatically programmed to kind of train ourselves to become more heroic is to spot heroes around us, spot high-status people around us. And Copy them, flatter them, and conform to them. So we, you know, we, so we mimic them, we copy their dress. You can see the, her name's suddenly Elizabeth Holmes.

Yeah. Steve Jobs, the turtleneck.

Yeah, absolutely. Just crazy, you know, and she had the temperature turned down in the office so she could still wear the turtleneck and not get too hot.

Lower voice, the baritone bass voice.

Yeah, exactly. So, so we want to draw near to high status people. And then what she did was that she represented this story, which at the time and still today, everybody wanted to believe and everybody's desperate. You know, we talk about this world of tech Rose. And what people would love to see is the female Steve Jobs. He's like, who is this female founder that started at the bottom, come up with something brilliant and is now a billionaire? Everybody's desperate for that story. And as Carrie, you said in this book, that story was huge. It was everywhere. It was told and retold and retold and retold and retold. And it was that story that seduced all these investors and high-profile people, all men, you know, from the Walmart family to Rupert Murdoch to Henry Kissinger.

Yeah.

Yeah. To the former director of the Center for Disease Control, who you think ought to know a bit better, to either invest huge amounts of money, hundreds of millions in some cases, or to invest their reputation in standing in their board of directors. And the amazing thing was that they, that sort of staggered me was that they didn't do any basic due diligence of the device. You know, like some people did. Somebody from Google Ventures went down to Walmart where I think it was Walmart where they were doing tests. Yes.

There was one of the pharmacies that was doing the labs. Yeah.

Yeah. And he had several large vials of blood drawn from his arm, and the promise was it was a drip. And they was like, we're out, you know, which is great. So, so some people did do due diligence, but, but not Rupert Murdoch. You know, some of the smartest, savviest people in the world didn't. And why? Because they fell for the story. She was an absolutely incredible heroic story, and they wanted a part of that heroism for themselves. They wanted to be the men, and they were all men that supported and, um, were instrumental in the success of this amazing inspirational woman. So it's all about stories, all about status. It's all about that endless pursuit to become heroic.

Thinking about it from a business perspective, this has been the struggle since digital media became pervasive. It's the individual, the Jeff Bezos. You know, my line for many years before COVID was the new rock stars of our world are these business leaders. This was 5-star on Glassdoor. Oh, you're going to the campus. There's private chefs. That became bad, which was like another interesting story, For another time. But if you were talking about this in relation to the new book and how to think about this from business, is the challenge that you are— is the challenge of why we don't have so much success in this story because it actually does lack a character because it is amorphous because it's a business where it's a product and it's not an individual? Is that the disconnect?

Yeah, I think that's right. I think there is a way in which we kind of mistake the business for the leader of that business. But I think, you know, in the sense of storytelling, I'm talking to novelists and playwrights and screenwriters. Is about, you know, characters are the most important thing. The way that transposes into A Story Is a Deal, the kind of business and political landscape is slightly different. One of the concepts, or the main kind of organizing concepts, as you know, I come up with in A Story Is a Deal is I talk about story being. Like, you like, because I think that's the big leap for me. And that took me a while to get to because in all the other business storytelling books, of course, they talk about storytelling, which is how do you write an advert? How do you write web copy? How do you write a speech? But then it's like, well, no, that's only a tiny part of what we're talking about. Because the whole point of the science of storytelling is the fact that the brain is a storyteller. Our life is a story and we are the hero at the center of our own story. And when we go to work every day, we are living a story that we want to be a heroic story. So if a business leader, if a politician wants to be influential, they want to lead successfully, they've got to understand that they are a character in the story of the lives of everybody around them. them. And so that's not a challenge of storytelling. That's a challenge of story being. And that's what kind of Elizabeth Holmes understood instinctively. She was a heroic character in the light that walked into the lives of Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch and all these other people. But I also talk about, in a more positive way, about Pope Francis, who did the same thing, who came in after Benedict, who was a very divisive pope. And he named himself after St. Francis of Assisi, that was known for his poverty. And he started paying his own hotel bills and he sacked the Bishop of Bling, this German dude who was getting loads of bad press, who had a massive fish tank and a gold sink and all the rest of it. And he's been incredibly popular. So that's another example of story being, he's embodying the positive values of the group, of the organization. And by doing that has become enormously influential and successful.

I love it. Will, tell me the one thing that made you think differently, although I think you spend your life looking for those.

Do you know what? I've been thinking about this in the background because we're thinking about ways in which our minds have changed. When I was young, I was one of these very angry atheists, very anti-religion. My parents are very, very strict Catholics, and I went to a very strict Catholic school, and I was one of those angry atheists. That'll do it. Yeah. But one of the ways that this research that I've done has changed my perspective is really understanding religion. In a new way. And that is that religion, like all groups, is a status game. And so what religion does, and the reason that religion is so successful still around the world, is that it offers people the 2 things that they really need to feel like they're living a good life. And that is connection into a group and status within it. And if you understand religion as a mechanism for giving people that stuff, it's actually a really incredible thing that billions of people around the world are given meaning and security and psychological comfort by their religion. So even though I'm not still not religious, I now have a much greater respect and understanding of kind of the value of religion in people's lives.

I love it. The new book is A Story Is a Deal. There's The Science of Storytelling, The Status Game, and Selfie, which we didn't even talk about. But Will, I'll let you let people know where they can find out more about the book, your Substack, all the other great content you're creating.

Yeah, so I think it's substack.willstorr.com or willstorr.substack.com. But just Google my name and Substack and you'll come up with all my latest essays. So yeah.

That's great. Well, thanks so much for your time, Will.

No, thanks, Mitch. Thanks for your very intelligent and interesting questions. I really appreciate it. Thank you.