The Status Game Running Your Work Life with Will Storr

What makes people follow a leader? It's not salary, it's not strategy. And according to my guest today, many leaders completely misunderstand what actually motivates people.

Connection and status dominate our internal monologue.

That's Will Storr, author of The Status Game, The Science of Storytelling, and A Story Is a Deal. In this conversation, we break down how great leaders create loyalty, rally people behind their mission, and communicate in a way that makes people want to follow them.

It's story that binds the group together. And it's part of a leader's job to communicate that story and even embody that story.

My name is Oliver Haust. I've helped over 300 founders and CEOs become top 1% communicators. And this is Speak Like a CEO, where I help you master communications as a leader. Let's get into it. Humans live in 2 worlds at once. So what are these worlds?

So like all animals, we live in a world of survival. You know, we want to have food, oxygen, shelter, procreation. So in that sense, we're no different from any other. creature. But humans uniquely live in this other world, which is this story world, and indeed that's where we spend most of our kind of psychological time. We experience our lives as this great unfolding narrative which we're at the center of. We're on constant quests, you know, which are the plots of our lives. We're surrounded by this cast of characters who are not just other humans, but they're heroes and villains and teachers and allies and all these other things. So it's this story world which is really The main focus of our conscious lives.

Right, I think that's not easy to get your head around, right? Because we assume we live in reality, we think about the world as it is rather than the story world in our heads.

That's right, but every animal has a completely different— they call it an Umwelt, you know, perception of what reality is. Like a dog lives in a world of smell and a knife fish lives in a world of electricity and a blood-sucking tick lives in a world where they're just sitting on top of a blade of grass waiting to jump onto something to suck its blood, and all they can do is smell and feel temperature. But humans, you know, are about a story. So we have evolved uniquely to experience the world as this story, and it's that that's the secret of our success.

What's the evolutionary reason for us to live in a story world?

Well, the way that I see it is that there have been 3 great kind of technological leaps, as it were, in evolutionary history.

Right.

The first one, if you track our family tree back 3.8 billion years, at the root of our family tree collectively, there's a single-celled bacteria. That's the earliest form of life on Earth. And, um, the single-celled bacteria is this machine for overcoming obstacles in pursuit of goals. But it's a very simple machine in the sense that it just— it's like an algorithm. So it can sense what's happening outside it, it can sense what's happening inside it, and it has these kind of you know, XY decisions. If this is the situation, I'm gonna do this. So that's, you know, it's very successful in its way. But it's not very good at dealing with unpredictable environments. And of course, what is life on Earth if it isn't unpredictable? So then evolution comes up with this brand new technology for overcoming obstacles in pursuit of goals. And that technology is the feeling system. And the feeling system is amazing because it doesn't instruct its owner what to do, it advises. So if you're a mouse and you're hungry and you see some toast crusts over there by the bin. You think, I'm gonna get the toast crusts, but then you see a cat, and so you feel a new feeling, which is fear. And so you can make a rational calculation based on those feelings. Do I go for the crust, or do I wait till the cat's gone? So feelings are an incredible, incredible invention for overcoming obstacles in pursuit of goals, and were the most successful technology on Earth for millions and millions of years. But then, you know, somewhere around 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, evolution discovered this brand new thing, which was story. And we are the only animal on Earth that has this capacity. And story is a fantastic technology for overcoming obstacles in pursuit of goals, because it allows us to do it collectively. We can share information about how to do that, we can store it in culture. Story fuses human brains together, so we're all directed on the same obstacles and the same goals, and we're all— So story allows us to behave not like individual apes, which is what we were, but as this kind of collective superorganism.

That is so fascinating. And does it apply to all of us? Because, you know, I work with engineers, I work with, you know, financially minded CEOs and so on, and I'm sure you do too. So they often push back and say, yeah, most people, but not me.

Of course, like all these things, there's a, you know, some of us are more than others. But yeah, absolutely, we all experience our lives as story. I mean, In the lives of those, you know, usually very successful people that you're dealing with, they experience their lives as being absolutely drenched in meaning, that the mission of their life, whether it's to build this company or to solve this engineering problem, is of immense importance to them, you know. And that's part of the storytelling brain. There'll be heroes on their team and people that they suspect are villains on their team. There are great rivals in other companies that they're trying to compete against. And so it's all story stuff. It's all Tolkien. It's all, you know, it's all the great mission that we're all on to, you know, achieve our quests and arrive at our imagined happy endings.

I mean, we all have our own stories, of course, but are there archetypes of stories that people tell themselves?

One of the basic sort of archetypes which I think is universal is the underdog. So the underdog is an immensely popular and successful character in story, and the most successful characters in global storytelling are underdogs. I mean, everything from Luke Skywalker back when I was a kid to Squid Game, you know, the character in the center of Squid Game is a classic underdog. They spend the first 20 minutes, half an hour of that show showing you all the ways in which he's this total loser, you know, and is surrounded by all these problems. And so, I mean, I think it's part of the storytelling brain that we continually feel like the underdog. Even the most successful people in the world feel like the underdog because that's life. Life is immense obstacles and amazing goals and the feeling of struggling a lot. You know, our wins are temporary, they're fleeting. The struggle is eternal. And part of the evolutionary purpose of storytelling is to say, you can do it. It's an inherent part of the underdog that they're optimistic despite all their challenges. They still go on and they still push on and still push on. And it's that, you know, that's the kind of propagandic role of storytelling, to encourage us to make ourselves feel like these underdogs. No matter how bad things get, you've got to keep pushing, you've got to keep pushing. And that's universal. So in every culture in the world, you find underdog stories.

Yeah, I love that. And yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense that we all see ourselves as sort of the plucky underdog that overcomes And it's interesting that you chose the word underdog rather than hero, because the hero obviously also starts from a sort of disadvantaged position and then has to grow to become the hero. You're not born a hero, you become the hero in the course of your quest.

That's right, yeah. So, in archetypal hero stories, the hero is never the hero on page 1, in Act 1. They're an underdog. So, they're struggling, they're low status, and they're often flawed. And the way that the protagonist becomes heroic is by overcoming those flaws. overcoming their flaws. And by overcoming their flaws, they solve their problems, they achieve their goals. And then when they do, in Act 3, then they're the hero and they're celebrated and they're rewarded with the great social rewards of connection, tribal connection. So everybody's applauding them and loves them, and status. So they're, you know, they're heroes, they're highly valued in their community. And that's what we all want as humans. That's basic in the basic wiring of the storytelling cognition, is that we all crave connection and the feeling of being loved, and we all crave status, the feeling of being valued.

Right. I think that's such a central insight, right? Once our survival is secured, which is not a given, obviously, in this world, of course, but let's say survival is secured, it's connection and it's status that we're looking for. And connection, people like us or any person?

Yeah, I mean, so connection is kind of local. We've evolved to be this highly cooperative, collaborative ape, you know, so we're part ape, part ant, essentially. And that's our superpower. That's what makes us amazing. But what that means is we're We're continually looking out into the world for people who are suitable for us to collaborate with. I mean, that's not going to be everybody. That's just going to be people who are a bit like us, who experience the world in the same way, have similar values, come from similar backgrounds.

You said something, we are part ape and part ant. I'd love to double-click on that, so please say more.

Scientists refer to an ant's nest as a superorganism, in that it's made up of individual ants, you know, millions of individual ants, but each ant plays their particular role. And so they're almost like cells in a greater body. And you can see human groups as a superorganism too. You know, I mean, ants communicate with pheromones, with smell. We communicate with stories. And so, you know, an organization is a kind of ant's nest where everybody's playing their particular role in the superorganism in order to achieve the goals of the organization. A company tells a story about the world, about what our values are, about what our goals are, about what our problems are, about who our rivals are, about the ways we ought to be in order to overcome our obstacles in pursuit of growth or whatever, or beating our rivals. And it's that story that fuses the brains of all those employees together and gets them all thinking as one, gets them all working as this incredible superorganism, which is, again, it's our superpower. It's the thing that has enabled us to take over the world.

Yeah, absolutely. But pushback could be that, okay, ants don't have free will. Don't we have free will, or at least free choice?

We do have free choice. But I don't think we have as much free choice as we might like to think. You know, we're compelled by a very powerful subconscious. And that very powerful subconscious is really what's in control of our behavior and what's in control of our choices. And how the brain works is that we tell stories about our choices. And those stories tend to be, I chose that out of my own free will. But often we don't. I mean, they call it confabulation. We tell these stories.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, there's a very famous study where— a very simple study where scientists got these people, these women, and got them to flick through some— I don't know if they were bikinis or underwear or something— and asked them to choose their favorite item from the rack. It's just a known rule that you tend to like best the last thing that you've seen.

Mm-hmm.

So most of the people just chose the last thing that they'd seen. When they asked the women, why did you choose this? They'd come up with all these flowery descriptions and explanations about why they chose this thing. When it was suggested to them, well, actually, maybe you chose Or is it just because this is the last thing you'd seen? You know, they said they looked at the experimenter like they were mad, like, what are you talking about? You're insane!

Yeah.

And so that's the story-setting brain, and it kind of shows you, you know, the extent to which we are mostly subconscious. And that subconscious wants these 2 things: it wants us to be a good member of the superorganism, so it wants to seek out and attract us to people like us. So we're constantly looking out for people who are like us. And that's why we spend so much time on our appearance, and we fuss about our hair, and I've got my books in the background. Everything we do is broadcasting out to the human world, who am I? What are my values? What are my roles? You know, and it's trying to both attract other people like us to me so we can work together, but also repel people not like us who are not going to be useful to me. And the other second thing that we all want is status. So we're constantly fussing about these people like us. Do they value me? Have I pleased them? Am I being useful to them? So that's also a huge subconscious motivator.

Yeah, for sure. And what does that mean for business? Let's start sort of internally within the company. And obviously, let's assume there's leadership and there are people who work in the company. How relevant is storytelling within such an organization, maybe a superorganism, maybe a big business or big organization is also a superorganism?

Well, it's massively important. It's hugely important. And I think its importance is under stated, even in today's world where people talk about— have been talking about storytelling for a long time. It's story that binds the group together, and it's part of a leader's job to communicate that story and even embody that story. We still have this kind of Industrial Revolution mindset that money is how you motivate people, and actually, money motivates you in the short term. We've all had a pay rise before. We're really pleased for about 4 days, then we forget about the pay rise. We go, yeah, well, I deserved it. It's Sure. That's not really what motivates people. What motivates people is this connection and status, is that feeling that I feel connected to this group, I identify with its mission, what the group wants I personally want. So everything that I'm going to do now is for the group and for our mission, and that's part of me. So when the group wins, I win. When the group says to me, well done, you've done amazing, I feel fantastic and I go home feeling that my life has meaning and purpose. an organization can live or die by the power of the storytelling that organizes the organization and that the leader communicates down through the organization.

Yeah, and I think, to me, there's a bit of a crisis in leadership communications that you alluded to. You talked about the Industrial Revolution mindset, and in a way, we are still a little bit stuck in that, I feel. When you look at the ancients and medieval ages and so on, leaders told stories. That's how they motivated people to follow them. That's how they organized society, whether it's kings or priests or aristocracy. And then the Industrial Age came and it all became this sort of conveyor belt about the numbers, and we forgot about that a little bit. It's coming back thanks to people like yourself, but would you agree that there is a bit of a, you know, just a historical dip in the ability and understanding of storytelling?

Yes, and I think that is because we're in this, you know, post-Industrial Revolution age which values money very highly, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with money, you know, we're all capitalists here. But I guess that's not the thing that fundamentally motivates people. And, you know, you pushed back a little before about saying we're not like ants, we have free will. And I think one of the ways that we're not— one of the mistakes that organisations often make is they think we are like ants. And in the book, as you know, I compare the capitalists of the 20th century and beyond to the communists, because they all made the same mistake. They thought we were ants. They thought— the communists thought that Um, uh, a good person is somebody that works for the revolution, not for themselves, and that should make them happy. That should be enough for them. But of course it isn't enough. It isn't enough for people.

Yeah.

And, and also, you know, toxic corporations also think the same. They think, well, I'm paying you a wage, that should be enough for you. Everything you now do should be for the organisation, and your, your personal identity should be completely subsumed into the organisation. And, and, and that's not true either. Like, status is this— we seek status in 2 different ways. One, yeah, group status is important. We identify with the group. When our football team wins, we feel like we've won. Like, it's a weird thing about humans, is that group status does impact us. But, but when we're at work, um, we also need individual status. We need to feel that our—

Our—

Our individual contribution to the mission is recognized, is seen, and is celebrated. Um, uh, so, so that's also important. And, and I think, you know, psychologists are, are just sort of waking up to this idea relatively recently, that it's— that this individual status is a Is it an absolutely crucial thing in terms of motivating people?

Yeah. And I think especially now with the introduction of AI systems across organizations, I think there's a huge risk there that people will be treated like ants once again under the headline of digital transformation. Because if you take people's agency away, which could— is one possible outcome of AI introductions, then they will feel demotivated. They will feel that their agency is lost, that mastery is no longer achievable because they're essentially cogs in the machine.

Yeah, that's right. And I think, you know, agencies, you know, it's so important. In the book, I talk about this idea that I call competence space. It's that every employee, no matter where they sit in the hierarchy, they need to be given space to show their competence. So, any job which is this conveyor belt job, where you're told exactly what to do at exactly what time, it's gonna be soul-destroying, because you're not given the space to prove your worth, to prove your value individually.

So, that competence space, I think, is absolutely important for every 90% of presentations are forgotten within a day, and even the best ideas get ignored. Over the last 20 years, I've helped hundreds of leaders prepare for stages like TED and South by Southwest, and the difference is always the same. Top 1% communicators, they use a system, and this system is called the Perfect Presentation Planner. Download it now, it's free. Link in the description. So we talked about the organization internally, leadership, employees, um, What about customers? I mean, advertising, social media, all of that is essentially storytelling, and sometimes it works, sometimes it really doesn't.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the most successful advertising appeals to our identity. You know, it appeals to people like us. It says that we are like you and you are like us, and we have the same values. And that kind of has a magnetic effect on people. It draws people. people to, um, you know, these brands. I mean, in the book I tell a story about Adidas, um, who back in the '80s were completely screwed. Like, in America they had a 3% share of the market, being dominated by Reebok, dominated by Nike, who had— who just were making all these sponsorship deals with, um, athletes. And, uh, but then it all changed when Run-DMC, this, you know, the— this pioneering hip-hop band, um, representatives of this new genre of music, released the song My Adidas. And, you know, they would wave their Adidas in the air at concerts. And so Adidas became this symbol of the hip-hop movement. And, you know, to their credit, Adidas, this very conservative German company, embraced this African-American art form and did a massive deal with Run-DMC, the first ever sponsorship deal with a musician. And it was enormously successful, turned their fortunes around. You know why? Because logically, it doesn't make any sense. That marketing campaign or that marketing exercise was nothing to do with the quality of the shoe. It wasn't to do with its comfort, how fast it helped you run, or whatever, you know, its longevity, whatever that might be. It was all about identity. It was like, if you're going to be a fan of hip-hop, you have to wear Adidas shoes. And people responded in their millions to that.

And it's still true, right? Because my neighbor, he grew up in '80s New York. He still wears Adidas. He's still in that sort of, people like me wear Adidas, right? So one collaboration with a band 40 years ago is still selling shoes today. I mean, that is just incredible.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, in the book, as I was writing it, I remembered why I wear boxer shorts. And that's because back in the '80s, when I was at the beginning of my adolescence, there was the very famous advert for Levi's 501s where Nick came and walks in and he's all— all the girls fancy him.

Oh yeah, I remember.

He takes his jeans off and he's got boxer shorts. And that had the weird effect that of— it rocketed sales of Levi's, but it also rocketed sales of boxer shorts. And I'm 50 now, I'm still wearing boxer shorts because of that ad that I saw when I was probably 8 years old. I mean, it's just extraordinary. Like, the idea of wearing pants, like underpants, ugh, you know? Like, it's crazy, it's irrational. But, but, but so it's, so it's still— that's part of my identity, you know, even though nobody else knows about this but my wife and everybody who reads my book now. Like, it's, it's a— it feels irrational, but it's not. It's all about— this relentless quest we're on to, you know, tell stories about who we are in order that we attract other people like us.

Yeah. And there's some famous examples as well where companies misjudged their audience, right? And the story world they live in.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, the most recent, most catastrophic example would be the Bud Light campaign, where, you know, drinkers of Bud Light in America, they're white, often working-class dudes. But for some reason, the marketing department of Budweiser felt this somehow solid to them, and they wanted to open a brand new market. And of course, it backfired on them massively because they almost sought out and found deliberately the opposite people like us to their constituent market, and it blew up in their faces. I mean, a good marketeer understands the story world that their audience lives in and experiences and reflects that back to them.

Yeah.

do the opposite. So yeah, I think that's the trap that people often fall into, is that they experience their own story world and they think that's reality, but it's not. It's just their reality. And in order to be a successful marketeer, you have to understand the story world of your audience. Like, it's a non-negotiable.

How do you do that, though?

You listen to them. You listen to their stories. You listen to their— you observe how they transmit through their clothes and their gestures and their language, especially their language. who they are to each other. You find out who are their heroes and why. You know, what qualities do their heroes have that make them heroic to them? And likewise, who are their villains? Who is it that they don't want to be? You know, some successful campaigns that have been successful in changing behavior play with that idea of if you don't do this, you're gonna be rejected from your group. So in the book, I tell the very famous story of the Don't Mess with Texas anti-littering campaigns, which were hugely successful in stopping young men throwing their beer cans out of their car windows and littering the freeways by saying, look, you're messing with Texas. This is an unpatriotic, anti-Texas act. And it was massively successful.

Yeah.

But in order to do that, the guys who came up with that ad campaign, one of them was Texan. He understood the Texas mindset. And he understood it deeply. And so he understood instinctively that if we want to stop that, we've got to appeal to the story that Texans tell about themselves and say, look, if you do this, you're not really a Texan, you're messing with Texas.

The same is true for the Brexit campaign, isn't it? That the Leave campaign listened to focus groups and essentially picked up certain phrases from them that they then used and basically played back at them. Yes.

Yeah, I mean, in the book, I talk about this idea that I call atomic statements. Which is just very, very powerful short statements, um, uh, that were really the original form of storytelling. You know, back when the early religions were evolving and spreading around the world, people couldn't read. They had no access to books. You couldn't read the Bible or the, you know, the collected works of Aristotle, you know. So, so, so, so how did these stories spread? Well, they spread in aphorisms originally. So, you know, Jesus said, no prophet is accepted in his own village. Seneca said, In ancient Greece, said sometimes it is an act of bravery even to live. And so we so so we still use these you know atomic statements today. They they manifest in the form of memes, tweets, if we still call them tweets, you know, and also kind of you know advertising slogans. And I think you know when you look at the Brexit campaign, that was part of Dominic Cummings' genius. He discovered that people were the number one thing people were interested in were was immigration, and they would constantly come up to the phrase we need to take back control of our borders. we've lost control of our borders. And number 2, that they blame the EU for this. So Take Back Control was this dog whistle to people who are worried about immigration and upset about immigration. But it's an atomic statement, it's an incredibly powerful statement.

I was thinking recently, talking to a friend about why certain, let's say, podcast guests or social media personalities cut through when others don't, who may say the same thing essentially, have the same sort of background. And we settled on essentially the idea of atomic statement, even though we didn't have the term. So thanks to you and the new book, that term is out there. I think this captures it beautifully. I was also thinking about being a host and sometimes a guest. What does it mean in terms of the atomic statements? And I think social media trains you to do that as well. If it's X or like me on LinkedIn, you only have a few words to ideally convey an atomic statement. But that's beautiful. How do we then tell a story, right? So, I think there's a lot of storytelling advice out there. And, you know, I'm guilty of that as well. I use certain structures, use certain formulas. I like to collect them. And in your book, you point out, let's start maybe there, what isn't working. You said, for instance, that Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the hero's journey, those are outdated concepts from the 1940s. So, maybe let's start there and then work our way towards what is actually working today.

Yeah, that's right. So, I mean, when I'm consulting and going in to talk to organizations, it always fills me with gloom that they're still trying to get the hero's journey to work.

Yeah.

Because the hero's journey, I mean, it's amazing. Joseph Campbell was a genius. But as you said, this was written in the 1940s, this book. One of the big things that we know is that we have a huge revolution in evolutionary psychology. So this understanding of actually what we want. actually, you know, what motivates us. And again, this also goes into Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Um, it's actually much simpler. You know, we're a tribal animal, and that means that we have evolved to, um, existing cooperative groups. It's survival, connection, and status. Those are the 3 things that humans want. We want to survive, we want to connect, and we want to be valued. So thinking about who loves me, who doesn't love me, you're worrying about a relationship that you've had, or you're thinking about your status. Yeah, obstacles like, um, uh, what went wrong for me today? What went right for me today? What can I do tomorrow in order to push me closer to this goal? So, you know, connection and status dominate our internal monologue.

So you propose in the book, um, a clear 3-act structure that we can follow. And just to clarify, the book is not a, you know, methodology of ABC, do this and you, you close the deal kind of thing. It's so much more and goes so much deeper. But I appreciate you also giving us A path to tell a compelling story. So could you walk us through the 3 acts again?

Yeah, so this is kind of adapted from traditional storytelling, crisis, struggle, resolution. So it's similar to that where at the beginning of the story you've got somebody who has a problem, they meet an obstacle, and then they struggle over that obstacle, and then in the third act they achieve their goal. And in overcoming the obstacle and achieving their goal, they learn something. And that thing that you learn is your takeaway message. So those are the basic building blocks of any story. And I think fundamental to that is the idea of obstacles and goals. If you don't have an obstacle and a goal in a story, you're confused, you're lost. And often even very experienced storytellers forget this.

Yeah.

You can find yourself reading a novel, watching a film, and you're confused, you're You don't know, you're bored. And often, very often, that's because it's not clear who wants what and what's standing in the way of getting that thing. You know, that's basically what a story has to be. And, you know, you see ads that are trying to be stories that aren't actually stories because there's no obstacle and there's no goal.

And no transformation, right? Yeah, no transformation. It may just be an anecdote or, you know, a series of events. But for me, the story, in addition to what you mentioned, is it needs that transformation in order to Show the growth that has happened as a result of overcoming the obstacles.

Yes, and that transformation tells you something, and that's the takeaway message. It's that, that's the important kind of thing that the story is transmitting. It's like, look, this person had a problem and they overcome it and they changed, and this is what they learned.

Yeah. Do we need to just distinguish between, let's say, the traditional storytelling we may find in movies and, and books or, you know, novels and persuasive storytelling we use in business? Is there a structural difference?

Well, I mean, in The Science of Storytelling, when I'm talking to novelists and screenwriters and playwrights, I use a 5-act structure there, which is similar, but it's just broken down into more acts. And that really— that 5-act structure really emphasises more the character transformation. Because in a story that you're writing for a novel or a film, You're not quite so much interested in the takeaway message, because that's really important for persuaders, is that takeaway message is clear. It's much more about what the character's learning about what it is to be a human, much more profound lessons. It's not about buy this Apple product or buy this trainer or vote for this party. It's like, what does it mean to be human?

Yeah.

I don't think there's any fundamental difference. I mean, it's a story, it's an account of a character or characters overcoming an obstacle in pursuit of a goal. And learning something. That's fundamentally what all storytelling is, archetypal storytelling is. Of course, there's modernist versions of story which play with that.

Yeah, that's great advice. And I think you put your finger on something important there, that in business storytelling, there's usually a next step, right? I want my team to do something. I want the customer to buy my product. You know, we need to take certain actions, whereas in the— let's say I'm watching a movie, there's no action. I watch the movie, and as long as I'm entertained, You know, the creators are probably happy that, you know, paid a few bucks at the box office.

That's right. But even in those kinds of films, there's often a subconscious bit of persuasion going on. And when psychologists study the effect of storytelling, when we're transported into a film or a movie, our values align with the hero, with the protagonist, and the things that we learn, the things the protagonist learns, we also learn with them. And that's the story doing its evolutionary job of teaching us who to be and teaching us how to be and teaching us to be more cooperative. Like, it's no coincidence that heroes at the end of a story are more cooperative than they were at the beginning of the story. They're more celebrated, they offer more value to their groups. And that's what— that's the propaganda that story is constantly playing on us subconsciously. It's always wanting us to become a more cooperative member of the group by saying, this is what a hero is, this is what a hero does. And in that way, it's no different from a marketing campaign or a, you know, a get-out-and-vote campaign.

Also in a crisis, right? In a crisis situation, storytelling is incredibly important. I often say in trainings that a crisis is an evolving story, and you now have to make sure you're not the villain.

That's right. And I think one of the most fundamental sort of insights that comes from the science of storytelling is the importance of this binary of selfless versus selfish. So, when researchers look at morality, what is morality, you know, why are we moral creatures uniquely, we have this moral sense. So, wherever you go in the world, immoral behavior is basically selfish behavior. And what selfish behavior is, is like, I'm gonna put my own interests before that of the superorganism, that of the group. And so one of the big insights in crisis communication is that you've got to absolutely avoid any sense of selfishness, 'cause selfishness is cancer, like it's a toxin. People are highly attuned to it because of our tribal nature. And, you know, the classic example of that is the BP Tony Hayward thing, where, you know, spending billions and billions of dollars— Toxic.

spill.

And he said, you know, nobody wants this over more than I do. I'd like my life back. Which on a human level is completely understandable. This is the worst time of his life, you know. But it killed him. You know, he even had President Obama commenting about what an evil villain he was.

Well, thank you so much. This is always my last question. What's your best piece of communications advice?

My best piece of communications advice would be, yeah, just to completely understand Understand the people that you're trying to communicate with, and not just understand them, understand their story world. What do they want? Why do they want it? Who are their heroes? Who are their villains? How do they talk? Really inhabit their perception of the story world, and you'll be able to appeal to them.

That's such good advice. Will Storr, thank you so much.

Thanks so much, Oliver.

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