How To Tell Stories That People Love - Will Storr

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

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

Absolutely. And I think there's a huge naiveté out there, especially in what you might call our world. We like to think of ourselves as rational people, atheistic people, people interested in data and science. Amongst our people, there's a very naive idea that we are the ones who are led by data.

I remember earlier in my career as a journalist interviewing a famous skeptic, Steven Novella, who presented a podcast called "The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe." He very confidently told me that skeptics were kind of immune to irrationality because they were tuned to be automatically skeptical about crazy beliefs. I just think that's deeply naive. What you'll find, especially in the era of social media, is that even scientists—or maybe not even scientists as much as anybody else—they start with the story and then they find the data to back up their story.

So you can find academics who know way more than you or I about human biology who believe in the woke idea of biology and gender biology. They could find all the data in the world to tell you that something isn't true even though we believe it is true. So you can take someone like Jordan Peterson on the one hand and Adam Rutherford on the other hand. Two very smart men, two very opinionated men. Two men who I respect equally, I would say. But two men who are very angry and very lost in the story. They're both lost in the story.

So I love Adam and I love Jordan. I can never imagine them being in the same room together. But with the greatest respect to both of them, I wouldn't trust either of them to talk to me about the science of gender or what's going on in Israel-Palestine dispassionately. Not because they're dishonest or because there's anything wrong with them, but because they're lost in the story. They're utterly lost in their particular story of the world, and the data they cite, the data they choose to believe, is subservient to the story. So even with people like Adam and Jordan, two brilliant minds, the story comes first, as far as I'm concerned. I think that's inarguable.

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

No, this is new to me.

Cool idea. So this is from Brian Klaas who wrote *Fluke*. Outstanding book, nearly as good as yours. He talks about the problem of knowingness. A lot of people in the modern world think that the biggest issue is misinformation—people being given poor quality information. He contends that a much bigger issue is knowingness. Knowingness is a belief that you already have the answer to the question before the question has been posed. It's a kind of reverse intellectual curiosity. I know the science is settled on climate change, humans aren't having any impact, or whatever it is.

The interesting insight he has is that if the issue was simply misinformation, all that you would need to do to counteract that would be to provide better, more compelling information. But it's not. It's knowingness, which is this kind of Faraday's cage insulation where people don't care about the information because they're not open to any new information, regardless of whether it's miss, real, disc, mal, or pre-bunked malinformation. He makes this great point that when you're thinking about the problems of the modern world, talking about misinformation, talking about needing better facts, we need to deliver more information. If you can't get past the problem of knowingness, if you can't get past the issue that people feel like they already know the answer, this is similar to every religion believing that it's the right one, but by definition, that can't be true. Only one of them can be right, given that they don't all agree. He has this great line where he says everybody acts as if the facts are already settled, whilst no one can agree on what the facts actually are.

Yeah. Knowingness sounds like implicit belief—the beliefs that are implicit, and you believe with such ferocity that you can't see that they're beliefs. They just feel like reality to you. When I talk about the story world that we all live in, I think that speaks to that idea that we all live in this narrative.

One of the moments in my career as a writer that always sticks with me was when I was in my twenties. I wrote my very first book about ghosts, and I went around the world trying to figure out if ghosts existed. It was good fun. One of the guys I met was called Morris Gross. He was this old guy who lived up in Muswell Hill, and he'd been a ghost hunter all his life. He was famous for investigating the Enfield poltergeist case; he's kind of a legend, Morris Gross. So I managed to get an interview with him, and I went to his house. As I was leaving his house, he said, "If you're looking for evidence of the supernatural, you're going to find it." It's always stuck with me because I did find evidence for the supernatural, even though I don't believe in the supernatural. It's always stuck with me because I think the brain is this amazing evidence-finding machine. If you've got a belief, the brain will find evidence to back up your belief.

No matter what you believe about gender or Israel-Palestine or whatever it might be, your brain is going to find multitudinous evidence to back up what you believe. You're going to see it everywhere. That's one of the tricks of the storytelling brain. We live in this story world. We live in this narrative. The brain isn't interested in what's the truth. The brain isn't really interested in you having this perfectly clear understanding of reality. The brain wants you to succeed in your life as a human. What that means is we have to achieve connection with a group. Once we achieve connection with a group or a tribe, we earn status within it. To earn connection to that group, we've got to believe their story. Every group has a story it tells of the world—a political organization, a cult, a religion, or me and you. We believe roughly the same things because we have a shared reality. We have a shared idea of who are the heroes, who are the villains, what are the good beliefs, what are the bad beliefs, what is status. Me and you share a story, and we probably share a story with most of your viewers, and it's reassuring. We see evidence for it everywhere. So that's kind of how all this is working. The brain isn't motivated to discover the truth. The brain is motivated to make us want to connect with like-minded people and earn status from those people, and that means believing their stories.

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

Absolutely. That's exactly right. And as I write about in *Story is a Deal*, the big idea that made me excited about this book was this idea: What is story originally for? Well, story is what enables us to be these highly cooperative apes. Humans are an ape, one of five existing species of great ape. But we are a weird, unusual kind of ape, and that weirdness is that we are also a bit like ants in that we're highly collective. Other apes overcome the obstacles of their existence individually. They live in troops, but they find food individually. They pursue goals individually, broadly speaking. But we don't. Humans are like ants; we form into these superorganisms, these problem-solving superorganisms in which every individual human plays their part. That's how we're amazing. That's how we've taken over the world. But that poses a problem. You've got all these apes. How do you connect all those individualistic ape brains together? How do you get all those brains firing in the form of this highly collected superorganism? Well, you do it with story. Story is a device for fusing brains together. Under the power of story, we're all facing in the same direction, pursuing the same goals, overcoming the same obstacles. We all have a shared idea of who we are, what our role is, what we should be doing. So that's what story is doing. It's fusing individual human brains together and getting them to experience the same reality. You can see that effect happening when you go to the movies. We go into the cinema as this crowd of individuals, and if the film is any good, we're transported into it, and for that 90 minutes, we forget our own reality. We forget our own consciousness. We're all sucked into the consciousness of the film, experiencing the lives of the people up on the screen, and we leave that cinema connected as one, having had that mad experience. You often have that weird, almost trippy experience coming out of the cinema where for a few moments you feel like the hero of the movie. You feel like Luke Skywalker for a moment; everything goes a bit weird; you kind of snap out of it. Without story doing what story is supposed to do, which is entering our brains and getting us all to experience this collective reality of the story.

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

Yeah, absolutely. MAGA people have a particular story of the world that they tell each other. Anti-vax people do. Pro-vax people do. Climate change people do. That's how it works. We collect into these groups defined by the stories they tell of the world, and those stories infect us. They influence us. They cause us to believe certain things and to behave in certain ways.

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

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

What role does social identity and mimicry play here?

Huge roles. Social identity is your identity within the group. Who are you in the group? A basic concept might be a football team. You're playing in a particular position that comes with certain expectations. You've got certain roles to perform, and you're judged. Your status goes higher or lower depending on how well you perform those roles. And that's the same in every human group. In every group we join, we have what we call a social identity, and a human identity is in part a collection of these various social identities that we have.

I wonder what that Apple ad, the lemmings thing, was.

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

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

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

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

Manipulation is a strong word. Curation. I don't think ads are manipulating our identity. Strictly speaking, I think they are manipulating us by appealing to our identity. Humans live in these two worlds at once. We live in the physical world like other animals, and in that physical world, we care about our survival. We care about food and shelter and procreation and the safety of our children who are going to move our genes forward. In that respect, we're no different from a dog or an elephant. But humans live in this other crazy world, this story world, where we care about other things. In the story world, we aren't a flesh-and-blood machine; we're an identity. We're this collection of ideas. That's what we are. This identity means more to us than our lives. To the average human being, their identity is the most precious thing they'll ever own. Our children aren't our possessions, but our identity is. You can see people throughout human history have chosen identity over their own lives. When we go to war, that's what we do. When we fly planes into the World Trade Center, that's what we do. When we kill ourselves, that's what we do. Most cases of suicide are what I call identity failure. It's not because they can't physically live anymore because they're sick or because they're poor. Of course, people do often…

People kill themselves because they're ill. Um, but but very often they don't. Very often they kill themselves because they feel like failures, because their identity has failed, because they're lacking in connection. No one loves me. No one likes me. Everybody hates me. They're lacking in status. I'm useless. I'm pathetic. And and crucially, they're also trapped. They feel there's no way they can rescue their identity, and the pain of their identity failing becomes so acute that they choose death over um, o you know, o o over the the pain of having their identity fall to pieces. And so so that that's the power of identity, and so the most powerful ads, you know, appeal to to identity, and and and again that's what, you know, Apple did with their with their other really um famous and successful ad campaign.

Think different is a bunch of black and white pictures of people like Gandhi and Mother Theresa and John Lennon, and this is you think different, you know. So if you're if you know so so basically people who identify with those characters, you know, changed the world, became another absolute cliche in Silicon Valley, and it began really with think different when it became popularized that idea, and and and that's an appeal to identity. You know, there's there's another really great example which I found which I'd never heard of, and if you're not Canadian you won't know about it, but it's Molson beer. So back in the year 2000, Molson beer were in trouble; they were number one, and then they were slipping. And so um they the the ads agency were tasked with rescuing the the the reputation of Molson beer, and what and and and the guy who at the ad agency was Canadian and knew that that one of the things that annoys Canadians is when Americans basically say you're just Americans, you know, there's no difference between Canadians and Americans. It's something really winds Canadians up, as you can imagine.

So, so he came out this ad campaign um um called I am Canadian. And all it is is this ordinary guy in a plaid shirt and jeans on a stage listing things that are Canadian. Like it's Zed, not Z, for example. We don't say a boot, we say about. It's just a list of things. But it was massively successful and it went instantly, you know, um viral viral at the time. Um, you know, kids began, you know, shouting it on the streets. Um, the value of Molson beer, you know, rocketed. I forget the exact number, but you know tens of millions um of the value of the company through the roof. Uh, one really what incredibly smart thing they did was they debuted that ad in the ad break of the Oscars just after the South Park film Blame Canada had been performed, Blame Canada, and then they had this very patriotic I am Canadian thing. But what's fascinating about I am Canadian is it became known as the rant in Canada. It's very famous in Canada. And what's fascinating about it, again, just like the Apple ad, there's nothing in there about the beer, about its tastiness or whatever, you know, what are the qualities of this beer? Why should we be buying it? Nothing. It's it's literally an appeal to identity. It's saying it's it's holding a mirror up to their market, their audience, saying, "This is who you are." And we're so in love with our identity, we go, "Yes, that's me." And we we we we flock to the product. That's And it's the same as what Apple did with Think Different. They just said, "Here you are. We see you. You're amazing. You're fantastic. And and and and this is who you are. You are this person, and you know so so that's how it's man manipulating us for our identity, like the very best most persuasive ads; that's how they do it.

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

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

It's vicious, isn't it? The the power that stories have because, you know, much of this I if you were to say reality, you said there's two things. We sort of live in the world and we live in stories. Tesla's cars from I don't know when they launched, a decade ago, something like that, until now have just linearly got better and cheaper and faster and more convenient with improved build quality. Uh, but largely are the same thing. Right? My point is that they haven't changed, but the story around them has. And that's made way more of an impact on the stock price and on their sales and on the way that people see them than the incremental improvement month on month, year on year over a decade to their full self-driving capacity. So, you know, in this way, the the story is more real than reality is more real than reality. That's that's exactly right. And and to understand why you've got to go back to that concept of the story world that human beings are these two things. We're a bag of bones and blood in on in the survival realm. But in the story realm, we're nothing more than a collection of ideas that that we that we collect. You know, we you know, we are the things that we love. We are the art that we like. We are um the podcasts that we listen to. uh you know we are um amaz it makes me laugh when I'm watching you know travel podcasters who go around the world and they all do they all copy Bourdain's body language; he does this weird thing where he looks behind him all the time, and you see him especially at the beginning of this they're doing I think subconsciously aping his body language like because they you know they're part of he's part of their identity, and that's also true of the things that we own; the things that we own are part of our identity, so if you're somebody that stands against Trump and you're in Tesla, there be it becomes toxic to you because because it's like it's it's like you've become your very self has become polluted with this alien kind of element. You know, you want to cut it out of you. It's it's a it's a it's a radically bad thing to happen to you. So, you're going to you're going to you're going to reject it. It's like being forced as a middle-age man to walk down the road um you know um with a I don't know with a big skintight Taylor Swift t-shirt on. Like it just makes you deeply uncomfortable, you know. So, so, so, so because the self is nothing more than a collection of ideas in that story realm.

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

Do you do you think that we overestimate logic because we sort of underestimate identity in this way? Yeah, we do. I I there's something in the brain that tells us that that that we are something very powerful that tells us that we are not under the influence of story that we are under the influence of rationality. You know, it's actually quite easy to to to figure out why why that is like you you have to believe in the story of your group in order for that group to function. Like obviously you do. Um because if you don't believe you can't be a part of the group. Yeah. Because because you're not part of that group's mission. You're you're deidentified with the group. And also, you know, one of the fundamental things that you want from that group is well, the two fundamental things that you want is connection and status. So, so, so you only really connect with the group if you believe in in their story. So, if you believe in that that Jesus was a real guy and that he died and and resurrected on the third day, you're you're a Christian now. Like, that's what you are, you know? Um, you're you're a Christian. It's as simple as that, Jordan, by the way. Um and um and so so so now you're connected into that Christian world. Uh but in order to um uh earn status in that Christian world, uh you have to allow that belief to to to to kind of fill you up. I call it this is active belief. You have you have to that belief has to act on you like a parasite controlling your behavior. So you go out in the world and you you you you you start acting out the values and the story of the Christian set of beliefs. You know, you can't do that if you if you don't believe in Christianity. It wouldn't make any sense to you. And also you can't earn the status, you know, like like like it one of the things that that that Muslims do, they call it the hist where they some some Muslims will earn the Quran by heart. So every every every word of the Quran, you know, takes sometimes two to three years is a massive thing. And if you manage to pull this stunt off, you get a huge amount of status. I think it's called Havies, but you you get a certain title and a certain status. Now, you have to believe in the story of Islam to go through that trial of two to three years of earning it by heart because because otherwise you're not going to be motivated to do it. And and and also more importantly, the status will mean nothing. It doesn't mean anything. So, if you don't believe in the story to you and me, it's a waste of time learning that book work for work. Why would you bother? But if you believe in the story, it has it has massive meaning, you know. So, so yeah, we we we have to believe that that that the stories that aren't just stories that they're actual their actual truth, their reality. And we believe it so much, you know, look at through human history. People all the time fight and die on behalf of the beliefs of their groups. Yeah. I had this conversation with Andrew Schultz a couple of months ago. uh Ben Shapiro's famous tweet about facts don't care about your feelings, but in reality feelings don't care about your facts. And that's a much a much better way to put it. I So I get I get this sense that facts are kind of in some ways they do become obsolete in a story-driven world. Yeah. Yeah. I saw that too and I was jealous. I was like, "Damn, I wish I' I wish I'd come up with that." But yeah, it's absolutely not too late to add it to the book. There's a It's only a pre-print. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, I think that's absolutely right. That that's the right way to think about it. And again, I'll just go back to, you know, poor Adam Rather and Jordan Peterson who I emphasize they're incredibly smart guys who have nothing but respect for, but they're but but but but they they have their stories of the world that they believe thoroughly and nobody no set of facts is going to is is going to change their minds on on on their beliefs. That seems pretty clear for the tenor of their conversation on social media.

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

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

What about virtue signaling? That's a very specific type of status and probably involves story. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there there are kind of well there's lots of different kinds of status, but there are there are three main kinds of ways that we can earn status in human groups. The the first way is dominance. So that's the the much more animalistic way, the much more ancient way. So dominance is violence, the threat of violence, also the threat of social violence, ostracization, cancel culture, all that would come under the come under dominance. Um and then and then there's the other two kind of forms which are based on our reputation, our identity. And so the first one is um competence. So um we become good at stuff. So we we become valuable to our group by um becoming an excellent hunter or a excellent honeyfinder or um an excellent storyteller or an excellent sorcerer. And so people respond to us by rewarding us with status. And you know in all human groups the more status you get the better everything else becomes. You become safer, better fed, you get greater access to choice of mates. You know, in in the modern world, you get richer. That you know, it's always worked like that. It always will work. But the other way of earning status is by virtue. You know, we also award status to people who we perceive as virtuous. And and the role of virtue in human groups is about rules. It's about knowing the rules, knowing the stories, uh but it's also enforcing the rules. So again, we have this very naive view that virtue is obviously good, but virtue is um is 50% good, 50% evil because because you know packed in with virtue is that is that um instinct to enforce the rules and to um punish people who don't share our story world. So, um, you know, Michelle Obama, you might call her a virtue superstar because she's she she's, um, you know, known for her perceived moral goodness by by her people, the Pope, the Dalai Lama, these are virtue superstars. These are these are people who are incredibly high status. You know, Greta Thunberg on the basis of the perception that they are high in uh, you know, levels of virtue. But also um uh you know the the the the during the cultural revolution the

Red guards were playing virtue-based status games. People doing council culture, you know, it's dominance virtue. You know, they they're not interested in competence. They're not interested in success. They're interested in, "I'm going to punish you, uh, for not following the rules and for not believing the sacred stories of my group." How do—it sounds a lot like rivalry. How do the mechanics of rivalry play out in stories, storytelling?

Rivalry is interesting. So, um, within a group, um, rivalry can be very um productive. So, but rivalry it tends to be classified as a one-on-one thing. So, if you are rivalous with one individual, and you know, one of the tests of rivalry, you know, people who are rivals are usually quite similar. They're playing a they're playing a same status game, and and they and they have a a history of near wins and close matches. So that's the recipe for a rivalry, and that kind of rivalry can be amazing. It can drive people to, you know, incredible feats. It's it's the Lennon-McCartney thing. Um, you know, in in the status game, I told the story of, you know, the true origin story of the iPhone, which is that when Steve Jobs went to a barbecue that his wife that his wife organized with some [ __ ] from Microsoft who was sort of going, "Oh, Microsoft, a solved computer, you've got this touch device with a stylus, it's going to blow you out the water." And then Jobs came in um to work on the Monday and was like furious, livid, and instructed his team to to figure out a way of um blowing Microsoft out the water, and it wasn't going to be a start. It was going to be with a finger. So, you know, that's rivalry. I mean, rivalry made the iPhone. It began as the iPad and then reemerged as the iPhone.

So, um, so so that tends to be good for us. It's obviously exhausting, but it's you know, but but you know, we've all been in that situation where where we become obsessed with arrival. It drives you forward. Um, what's less um um healthy is competition. So, if rivalry is one-on-one, one person versus one person, one group versus one group, competition is kind of all against all. And competition in in that kind of technical sense um is is often less productive. It's kind of exhausting. It's kind of toxic. People kind of people in organizations high in, you know, very high in competition um experience lots of burnout. They they they experience kind of a kind of a toxic culture in which everybody's kind of hoarding the status for themselves, taking all the credit, um pushing all the blame away. So, yeah, you've got to be careful in organizations how you're engineering your teams so there's not too much competition, but there is plenty of healthy rivalry.

Yeah, you well, you need people to be able to capture the upside from doing a really great job whilst not detracting from the positive sum gains that you get by working in a team. And this, you know, the tension between connection uh and uh capturing, I suppose, self-capturing of of this status, like, "I need to show that I'm contributing to the group, but I actually want to capture as much, if not maybe even a little bit more than I actually contributed, but I can't do too much because if I do too much then people are going to know that I'm a freeloader," so you know, I need to have a conspicuous productivity uh to the point where people will allow—I remember this is so funny, I haven't thought about this for forever. So, uh, during my, uh, degree at Newcastle, we had a, uh, a consultancy project. This is so [ __ ] up. I can't believe I haven't thought about this in ages. We did a consultancy project for a, a company. It was a marketing consultancy project. And we were chosen, I think it was the British Fly Fishing Association. Uh, and we I remember we went down to Stoke on Trent. We all drove down as a group, and it was a group of five or six. I don't want to say six. Group of six. And uh, me and my business partner were in there. So, obviously, we were super super tight group and um real competent. We, you know, we were doing this professionally ourselves. We knew how everything was going. Uh, went down, we did this consultation project, and then we present it to the uh to the lecturer. Now, one of the ways that your that your grades were mediated was that everybody in the group had to give a relative rating that they thought about the contribution of everybody else in the group, which just it was immediately going to allow us to get into coalitional [ __ ]. Uh, and and and sure enough, there was a couple of people who hadn't contributed all that much, and I think, you know, we got the ranking correct, but we [ __ ] twisted the knife for sure because we were like, and it just became a coordination problem. And given that me and my business partner were club promoters, all that we do is coordinate people into social groups. That was I was a professional social coordination manipulator. Uh, I we were always I was never going to I like I got the I think I got some like absurdly high mark, you know, I got like a a 1.5x multiplier on whatever the the the group score was for me and my business partner because of how much we'd contributed, and we convinced everybody else to give us this grade. Um, which again, I stand by the fact that we deserved it, but uh, yeah, it just, you know, perverse incentives.

So, another thing on the on the rivalry point, have you looked at venting much? Like the specific act of venting? No, I haven't. I'm fascinated. [ __ ] awesome. So, this is a little bit of Christina Duranti, a little bit of Tanya Reynolds, a little bit of Corey Clark, some evolutionary psychology lady, super smart people. And um venting is a unique type of gossip. And you mentioned gossip earlier on. Yeah. Uh, it's a it's a very unique type. Venting allows the gossiper to couch their gossip under the pretext of empathetic concern for the victim. Ah, yeah. So, me and you me and you are having a conversation, and I say, "Will, you know, I'm just I'm really worried about John because, you know, he's sleeping with all these girls, and I'm just really worried that he's going to get hurt cuz I, you know, I care about him so much, and and I I'm just really can say he just keeps on sleeping around all the time and like I really think that, you know, he's worth more than that and he doesn't really understand that he's worth more than that." Okay. So, what what what communication have I communicated during that? Well, I've told you that John's being a manhole, right? Uh, but I've done it. I I John I'm just so wor—I didn't say I didn't say anything bad about John. I just care about him so much as a friend. Yeah. It's coming from a good place. Uh, I've I've positioned me as the sort of person that morally would—Well, I mean, if I'm pointing this out, I can't be behave engaging in the same behavior. Me like John—I would never I would never behave in the same way that John behaves. I mean, this is I mean just I care about him so much. So, you got all of this stuff. It's a very unique form of gossip, venting really. It's a a novel um uh vector of attack that um it's specifically done amongst women, which is why all of the people that that I mentioned that did the research were female researchers. Um, well, I hate to bring it up, but I am thinking about Love Island as your—There it is. Is coalitional warfare. Exactly. That's that's why I'm I remain a fan. Like, you see that all the time amongst the women in um in Love Island. Um, the the other kind of gossip which I which I which I've sort of detected in Love Island is you see that what you call venting, which is which is that kind of yeah, that kind of that naked kind of status warfare, but you either see you also see what what what they call some—they call it co-rumination. And what what I found especially recent recent series of Love Island, when the when the guys have a problem, it's so interesting, the guys get together and try and solve the problem um and um they'll often hold each other a bit accountable, and that might get a bit arsy um but they but but but they often will um and sometimes they'll try to build each other up, and "You can do it, mate, you can do it, you just need to do this." So so so the kind of the the kind of coalitional care amongst the men is is is focused around problem-solving and accountability a bit, but the female the fe—when the females get together, they do the venting, but they also do this co-rumination. So, rather than so so when the woman says, "Oh, I've got this problem with Bob." Um, rather than trying to figure out and solve the problem, it's this pile of, "Yeah, he's an [ __ ]. He's a bastard. Oh, you're quite right. I feel so sorry for you." And again, it's similar to the venting thing because it feels like they're being um sisterly and supportive, but what they're actually doing is driving that person even further into the ground. Exaggerating the problem. They're demonizing the the man and turning his behavior into this horrendous thing. Um, you know, there's usually tears and then a big [ __ ] argument after it. You know, it's a it's a it's a wholly kind of toxic and kind of devious form of inverted commerce hell because it just it because it makes everything worse for that individ individual. And like with venting, that the the women who are doing it are made to feel superior, like they're being helpful and supportive, but actually they're not. Yeah. It's performative empathy in that regard. It looks like a caring approach from the outside and probably feels like it from the inside. Right? I mean, this is, you know, the the best way to deceive others is to believe the deception yourself. And uh, you know, very few people that are venting are thinking, "This is some 5D chess way for me to gain status or stand on the shoulders of of this other person's rumor or whatever it might be." Uh, but yeah, the the sort of barefacedness of um revealing somebody else's uh shortcomings is this phenomenal Bill Burr bit where he's talking about um the W—he's talking about body positivity in the WNBA, and he says, "Ladies, if you could only support the WNBA the way that you support a fat chick who's ate herself out of her dress size and is no longer a threat to you, they'd be making more money than the NBA." And it, dude, I wrote I wrote an entire essay about it because it's such an accurate insight. And I think that the body positivity movement in many ways is women encouraging their attractive but slightly chubby girlfriends to not diet themselves down into their mating competition pool. It's, "No, darling, you look you look great at any size. Like, you don't need to lose weight. No, you're a queen. Like, if they can't see that—if he can't—if he's not able to work out, he doesn't deserve you, like you're better than him." Meanwhile, like, rules for thee but not for me. It's a luxury belief as as as Robert Henderson would say. Um, that if you're a bigger girl with a bigger girlfriend, her uh dieting down or her her you know, hitting the gym and and making herself more physically attractive uh is uh you now no longer being able to keep up with her. And if you are a a more in-shape girl, that is a huge threat to you. It's one of the reasons why I believe that um people who are in shape, BMI uh are more threatened by Ozempic than people who are plus-size because the people that are plus-size, even though ostensibly they are the ones whose identity is being threatened, they don't have anything to lose in the same way because my competition pool is my competition pool. Maybe there's even fewer people at this size now. So, perhaps I can access the people more easily. But if you're in shape and you see that someone's able to get there easily unfairly, uh, hey, [ __ ] you. Get back. Stay where you—you don't deserve this. Um, so yeah. Yeah, this is not how our status game is played. No. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that that's absolutely right. Uh, what about Substack badges? I saw that you uh looked at that.

Yeah. So So it's interesting. um, Substack. Um, they yeah, they they're obviously kind of a new kind of social media player. Um, and they they've been sort of figuring out how to um kind of employ status game psychology into their platform, I think, a little bit. Um, I've got to be careful because my wife works for Substack, like um um so but but I've got none of this from her. I've got this—what I've written in the book I got from something that Chris Best, one of the founders um wrote, and and he wrote a really interesting essay about about status psychology and Substack, and a and it was initially I think that they they kind of made this mistake where they were putting writers into um some kind of chart that could easily be gained. So, what what what that meant was that writers were then getting bots to you know, like and you know, like um uh their their essay. So so they were gaming the thing, and so they changed it to, "We we are now going to reward writers who make the most money because that's the status game of Substack. Our purpose on this earth is to allow creators, especially writers, to make a living from their work. So that's our game. So, from now on, we're going to reward you. We're going to reward the writers who earn the most money," and then then it kind of fixed itself. They got their incentives correct, and and and and the game started to be being played um correctly.

Did you look at how stories play out in the role of reputational crisis? We're in the era of takedown and breakdown and and and accusation and stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, so so there are a few ways of sort of tackling that. I mean, you know, one of the ways is to kind of think, you know, go back to that idea of female aggression as that we were just talking about with the venting and the co-rumination, and and I feel um, you know, I I feel that the whole woke thing, the reputation destruction thing, it just feels like a very kind of female-heavy movement. It kind of, it feels like a female style movement. You know, male aggression tends to be one-on-one um out in the open. You could talk about toxic masculinity as being bit being a guy walking into the room being very intimidating to people and pushing people around and bullying people. Female aggression tends to be coalitional. It's the it's the group against the one. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes gossip, and it's about not physical um destruction but reputation destruction. And so so so so you know, you can see the the the success of feminism, the incredible rise in the power of women in in society and culture kind of goes hand in hand with this new way that we're playing status games in the world. Um uh you know, wokism and cancel culture being um one of them. So, so, so, so that's that that that that's one way that I kind of think about this kind of more technically. Um, you know, there there are a few things I write about in the story is a deal about um about how to kind of manage um times of reputation, destruction. You know, what is a good apology? Um, one of the things that's really interesting from evolutionary psychology is just how incredibly toxic um the the the state of selfishness is. So, because we're are this tribal animal, we are this, you know, coalitional loving ape, you know, we we we we we form into these super organisms. Um, what the story is always wanting us to do is to be selfless, is to put the group's interests before our own interests. So, when you look in storytelling, generally a hero is always somebody that puts the group before themselves, but somebody else before themselves. So, selflessness is the essence of heroism universally. So, you know, courage in the face of um crisis for the for the group um you know, whatever it is. So so so selflessness is is is ineffably heroic, and its opposite is selfishness. So, you know, villains in stories are always selfish in some way. They want to keep all the all the rewards for themselves. They want to keep the girl for you know, whatever it is. Um, they want to um uh um you know, hoard resources. So, so, so one of the things that leaders need to avoid massively doing in times of crisis is to um uh have the appearance of selfishness. And that's one of the things that Tony Hayward did, the you know, the CEO of BP when there was the huge um Gulf oil spill. Um, you know, he he didn't handle it very well at the beginning. He tried to kind of push blame away, but he eventually accepted full blame and enacted the the most expensive cleanup operation in all of history. Just an enormous um you know, deliberation paid for um by BP by BP. And then then he um did a TV interview, and at the end of the TV interview he said, "Believe me, no one wants to get this over more than I do. I'd like my life back." And that moment just destroyed him. Not only did it destroy him, it became international news. You know, Barack Obama, who is president at the time, even started talking about it. And of course, he got, you know, his 25-year career at BP was was kind of over in a flash. So, so, so that's really important that that that in times of times of trouble, you've got to appear selfless because selflessness is the essence of the hero in the in the human story world.

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

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

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

Been, you know, um, disidentified with these stories, which are a part of their identity, like a big part of their lives, and and that's why they respond with such fury. It's not because they're misogynist or racist or anything stupid like that. It's because, you know, in a in a very real sense, if you're humiliating and degrading Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones and Doctor Who, you're humiliating and degrading they themselves who are watching it. So, so, so that identification is just a massively because if it was just I like Luke Skywalker, he is likable. You you've made him unlikable. So what? But I identify with Luke Skywalker. I see me in him, and he's now being mocked or castigated or whatever; that makes me feel mocked and castigated. Absolutely right. So absolutely. So so when we ident when we identify with anything, we make it a part of ourselves, you know; we we make the music, the art we love a part of ourselves. We make the cars we buy a part of ourselves. You know, we are a collection of ideas, and you know what you know one of the most important facets of our identity are the people that the stories that we love, you the characters that we grew up with.

You know, Luke Skywalker at the beginning of the first Star Wars film is this um orphan. He he he he works on a moisture farm. Um, his solo status, his nickname amongst his school friends was Wormy. That's what they called him, Wormy. And and he, you know, he overcomes his um fears um and becomes this incredible hero, and and people love Luke Skywalker, but in the latter period of of Star Wars, they've reintroduced him as just as they did with Indiana Jones and all, you know, they they do it time and time again. And they reintroduce these amazing straight white male heroes and make them miserable, sexist, um, disillusioned. They had him sort of chugging this kind of weird teat milk off a I mean, he he was humiliated. I mean, you saw this with uh Chris Hemsworth as Thor, right? And you've done that across a much shorter timeline. I think the first Thor probably came out less than 15 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, something like that. And the, you know, across the span of maybe only four Thor movies, maybe like eight that he was involved in to do with the Avengers, he's gone from being slightly childish but lovingly heroic god guy to person that does Jean-Claude Van Damme splits over flying dragons and is kind of always out of touch and the butt of every joke and totally unself-aware and um yeah, I it it it wouldn't surprise me if someone was like I I see a little bit of that, you know, heroic energy but kind of adult manchild thing in Thor. Uh, they I think they would feel um put out in a way.

So how how important are heroes then? Is it is that a a crucial element of most stories? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Archetypal storytelling; I'm talking about. I'm not talking about modernist novels that kind of that exist to break the rules. That's the kind of whole point of them; in archetypal storytelling. Yeah. Protagonists are really important because um you know my book is called *A Story is a Deal*. And what I mean by that is that a story subconsciously says if you behave like the hero does, you're going to be rewarded with these incredibly pre precious social resources of connection and status. That's what all heroes in archisttole stories win. They win connection and or status. So that's what happens with um obviously with Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. He begins as worm. He ends up with a big medal around his chest surrounded by people who love him. You know, that's what we all want. That's that that's a that's a human universal. That's that that's what drives everyone is well three things: survival, connection, and status. Those are the three things that all humans want. And that's those are the three things that all that that are the subject of all archetypal storytelling. All stories are about survival, connection or or status. And and the best stories, the stories that last through the ages that we can watch again and again and again are about all three.

So, if you think about a movie like uh *The Revenant*, that's about survival. A movie like *Stand by Me* is about connection. A movie like *Barbie* or *Whiplash* is about status. But *The Godfather*, that's about survival and connection and status in about equal measure. So is *Romeo and Juliet*. So is *Star Wars*. You know, these epic amazing stories are feel so rich and full and drenched in meaning because they're they're about, you know, all three of the things that matter most to humans. And we learn about them through the hero. How does the hero survive? How does the hero earn connection? How does the hero earn status? We absorb those um you know messages subconsciously. You know, they they they they teach us who to be in the world. And that's why they're so incredibly important. And when we're a teenager and we you know, we we we kind of make Luke Skywalker part of our identity. Um and then he's, you know, humiliated and degraded and replaced in this way. It's, you know, it's painful.

And and and the bitter irony is we've got this kind of moral panic in the UK at the moment about this ridiculous show *Adolescence* on Netflix, which is another kind of as far as I can see um straightforward piece of anti-straight white male propaganda and painting us as misogynist woman, you know, woman killers who who who can't even take an insult without picking up a knife and committing murder. Um and and now there's all these stories saying, "Oh, men men just don't have any role models anymore." Yeah, because you replaced us all. You have replaced us all with girl bosses. You humiliated us, you know, and and and wrote us out of your script and now you're worrying and panicking. Yeah. No, you're right. We don't anymore because because the the the men that we see on our screens these days, as you said, tend to be the butt of jokes. They tend to be disempowered. Um women are always running rings about them, humiliating them, knocking them down with one punch. I mean, you see it again and again and again and again and again, and it's been going on for over a decade now.

Well, if you if you create a vacuum uh in terms of story, in terms of archetype uh and you yeah retcon replace role models for any group, any group at all. And you know for a good while maybe uh the archetypal boss [ __ ] woman who did want to be focused on their career who did want to feel like they were high achieving and they had agency maybe that was an issue and and maybe many women were uh uh left cut adrift and felt lonely because well I don't really see women with the sort of drive that I have in 1960s cinema. They're all What's that rule? Somebody's law about whether or not a woman talks to another woman in a movie and not about a man. I mean, do you know this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. I mean, you know, it's it's it's fair. It was a totally fair criticism. But but but but there but I think there always hope but I think, you know, I think you're right. There there weren't enough well-written female um heroes with agency, you know, but you did get Princess Leia, you did get um you know, we in in um in *Alien*. I mean, I I growing up, I love *Prime Suspect*, Helen Mirren's character in *Prime Suspect*. I mean, I loved all that stuff. I mean, so so it's not as though these characters didn't exist, but I think we've got to a crazy place now where um in order to find a kind of straight white male in a hero role, you've got to watch some terrible Guy Ritchie movie or like like in, you know, like like largely speaking, they just don't really exist anymore.

And interestingly, I think a lot of a lot a lot of people are now like you are thriving on the internet because the internet is a is a meritocracy and isn't is there's no gate there's no gatekeepers. There's no gatekeepers. So, so, so the internet's kind of the only place now where straight white male creators can survive and make a living. Well, you also certainly end up with uh a situation if there is a vacuum. You know, there was a vacuum for the women role model and that got filled got filled by a variety of better and worse examples of that. And then it, you know, the novelty has been taken to complete parody with saturation. And then if you create a vacuum around men, you will have Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson and and bodybuilder Rich Piana. Like pick your pick your alpha male guy or whatever. Like even beta male guy of choice. Pick your whoever role model it is that you want from the left, from the right, libertarian, authoritarian, whatever. Um if there aren't any that are supplied, that creates a gap in the market. You. There's no coffee shop for three-mile radius around this particular neighborhood. Guess what? There's gonna be a [ __ ] coffee shop. That's Yeah.

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

Given that you've been involved in the writing and publishing industry for a long time, I can see that this is a uh a point of passion for you. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because I mean, you know, I've kind of all right in a sense because I'm in there now and I and I and I and I have a readership and so that's fine, but I know I'm pretty sure if I was starting out now, I would be finding extremely hard to get a deal. And I've also seen the change in in the way my books are received since all this happened. You know like when like *Selfie* was published I think 2017 it was reviewed across all the newspapers. I was on the television. I was on News Night. I was on radio 1 2 3 4 and 5, you know like there was loads of publicity. It was fantastic. And then when all this started happening I found it extremely hard now to get any publicity. Like *A Story is a Deal* book just published. It got we got one review. One review on week of release in the *Times*. That's it. So, so paradoxically, the more successful I've become as an author, you know, my last two books have been by far and away my most successful um the harder it is for the to get any coverage in the mainstream media, to get support from the bookshops and to get slots at um book festivals. I used to be at the Edinburgh Festival every year. Uh now there's no way I get to the Edinburgh Festival anymore despite the fact that you're selling more books than you ever did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And you know and and the fact is that the the the only reason I'm still going is because of the because of the podcast sphere like the you know it was the podcast guys that supported the *Status Game* like you know the *Status Game* has done really well now because it was embraced by people like you and well because it was brilliant, right? it was a brilliant book. Thank you, Chris. But like but but but when it was published it again we got one review week of release. We couldn't get anyone to talk about it. It was the day it was published, I looked on Amazon and it was at number something like six six I think it was 6,500 in the best honestly I was devastated. I was like what is going on? But it's because it got no publicistic but it's ended up being successful because of the podcast because shoved it down everybody's throats. Well, you know, for now the podcast sphere is still male dominated. Uh, and we'll see between unless you're Mel Robbins or uh Alex Cooper, I think it's, you know, the top whatever. But you see, I don't think that's a coincidence because I think people like you and um, you know, a lot of the other sort of big podcast guys in the previous generation, you'd be on television, but there's no place in mainstream media for for the for for straight white guys anymore. So, they're doing podcasts. And so, I think that's why that's that is a little bit of a meme. I actually did a I recorded a live tour video going on tour in the US and Canada back end of this year. And the entire crux of the joke is that I'm in prison. I've been uh detained by ICE in America and I'm I'm in prison because America's getting rid of all surplus white podcasters. Uh so, you know, the meme the meme keeps on memeing.

Uh just uh on the the practical point around the stories, you mentioned atomic statements before. Yeah. How do you make stories more sticky? You know, this it's all well and good. You tell someone a story. It's for you as the the person that's written it or put it together. Um you believe that it's important, but it needs to it needs to grab someone. You know, it needs to sort of get its teeth into their brains. It needs to stay with them. What What are the things that determine whether a story's sticky or not? Well, I mean, you know, one thing is that atomic nature. It's got to be have brevity and clarity. So, so, so it's got to have maximum meaning in minimal space. So, you know, that that that so that's a tweet, that's a meme, that's a that's a an apherism, you know. So, so, so it's got to it's got to have maximum meaning in minimal space. It's got to appeal to somebody's identity. So, so say so people got to identify with what you're saying, and it's got to tell them a story that they want to hear that that that reaffirms their the story of their identity. So, you know, going back to that example of um Camela is for they them Trump is for you. You know that that's a perfect example of a you know it's a perfect atomic statement sticky because it's it's easy to understand, easy to memorize, easy to share. You know, you're going to tell it to tell it to each other. It appeals to identity and it tells a story that people really want to hear. It reaffirms their perception of the world.

Are there story of the world? Are there fundamental questions that everyone's trying to answer with a story or are they so varied that that there's no such thing as a unifying thread? The the the most fundamental question that humans ask really is who do I have to be in this place in order to earn connection and status. That's fundamentally what brains are always asking. You know, when we come out of the womb, we have these what they call experience expectant brains. They're half wired up, and the rest of the worrying comes up during our childhood and and and a culture is is is kind of forming itself in our brains. We're figuring out our identity. Who do I have to be in order to earn connection and status? And of course, we we we you know, we we we adolescence and early 20s is a peak time for for really thinking about this stuff and identity formation. But we never stop asking those questions. We never stop we never stop changing who we are. You know, people talk about audience capture. That's that's why audience capture is so dangerous. You know, even the smartest people um some of them who we've mentioned tonight started off, you know, in my estimation as sort of rational, smart, really interesting, um uh uh people, and they've they've gone on a journey, and the journey has been to kind of take their identity to a much to to to a place that that feels like it's much more about telling their audience what they want to hear and and telling a story of heroes and villains and we're great and they're terrible. So, so, so, so that to me is the these are the most fundamental questions that everybody asks and and and and we turn ourselves into that answer. You know, we turn ourselves into the people we have to be in order to earn connection and status from our groups.

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

Well, as an author, you always remember you never remember the good reviews. You only remember the bad reviews. It's just a cliche, but it's it's absolutely true, you know. Yeah. Yeah. That that that's absolutely right, I'm sure. And there's also an evolutionary kind of angle to that because, you know, criticism is a form of gossip. Um and you know, back in the days when our brains were evolving in the hunter-gatherer tribe, if you are the subject of negative gossip, it was life-threatening. You know, literally, you could be kicked out of the tribe, you could be killed, you know, and sometimes even eaten. So, so in the back of our minds, we've always got that that, you know, that that program is programming is still inside us. Social criticism is is dangerous, but potentially life-threatening. So, you must attend to it very carefully and adapt your behavior. So I've no doubt it's a smart take from music Chris. Absolutely. Yeah. Have no doubt that that the criticism capture it is far more important than audience capture. Yeah. What was that smoker discussed thing the the story about um changing habits around smoking?

Oh yeah. Well, this is one of my the stories I really like because it really shows you how people care about identity far more than they care about their own lives. And and it's just just an argument that you can't understand why humans smoke without understanding our need for status and and and need to have this kind of kind of higher status identity. You know, I used to smoke, you know, and started smoking in the in the in the '90s. And, you know, we knew back then that smoking was going to kill you. We knew it was addictive and it was going to make your um you know, te your breath stink, your clothes stink, it's going to cost you a fortune. And yet we still did it. Why? Like why did we do it? Well, we did it because it, you know, m makes you perhaps 8% look 8% cooler when you're at the at the gig, you know, like that's why we did it. You know, it's ridiculous. It's crazy. And um a and you know, that's that's that that's that's kind of um what they found. And in the book, I tell the story of how, you know, when cigarettes kind of um were became popular after the the the war because they packed tobacco into the into their ration packs in the first world war and the second world war, all these like veterans, these soldiers came back smoking the cigarettes. So, smoking took on this very masculine um rebellious identity like if you've been to war and walked out of it, you smoked, you know, that kind of thing. So, it's very masculine thing to do. And then there's this brilliant um genius Sigmund Freud's um nephew um was hired by um a cigarette company to try and get women smoking. And this was in the 20s when you know feminism was just becoming this big massively powerful kind of cultural force. And so he he said that so he he paid lots of um like debutantes and Vogue models to appear at um uh some big sort of flashy events in New York all smoking cigarettes and and and they were photographed and you know um um it was shown everywhere. So you know, arguable high status thing and and he he ran these ad ad campaigns saying that cigarettes were yes they're rebellious but that's why feminists should smoke because feminists he call them torches of freedom. They're talked as a freedom and it was massively, you know, massively um successful, you know, and again an appeal to identity. Um and and so that traveled across to the UK in in cinema. So so so you know in Hollywood um heroines like um started smoking cigarettes, you know, Marlene Dietrich and people like that and and and so women in the UK started smoking too. So so the whole story of smoking is all about status. It's all about identity and and and that's how it fades out as well. It faded out accidentally for generations. Well, generations, I don't know. For a long time, governments in the UK, America, and elsewhere was always appeal to survival to stop smoking. It's going to give you cancer. Here's a picture of a lung. All that, you know, here's the warnings. No one gave a [ __ ] Had no impact whatsoever. And what made it stop was when they there was a moral panic about secondhand smoke. You know, why should I be in a restaurant and breathe in somebody else's smoke? So starting in California, I think it was in 2007, they banned smoking in restaurants and then it became workplaces and then it spread throughout America, spread to the UK and then suddenly you couldn't look 8% cooler anymore if you're smoking a cigarette because the smokers weren't inside but at the restaurant, at the bar, at the gig, they were shuffling outside.

In the rain, having a quick [ __ ] by the bins and shuffling back in again.

And very quickly, smoking began to kind of fall out of fashion because it became low status rather than high status. And you know, that that reflects my own story, that I I desperately tried to get out of smoking because I started coughing up literally I was I was a chain smoker when I was drinking, and I was used to drink I used to was alcoholic basically, and um and I would cough up brown jelly in the in the sink in the morning. It was freaking me out. But even that didn't stop me smoking. I tried twice and failed.

What got me to stop was um I was a I was a journalist on a magazine called Loaded. Don't let you interrupt, but it was just a kind of a men's magazine, and there were lots of women um in Loaded, and one time I was assigned to go and I can't remember if it was a model or it was a Hollywood actress. It was one of the two. And if you've ever been on one of these um shoots, they have these false polyarene walls behind which they do the dressing. So, they're doing the hair and the makeup and the styling. So, I knocked on the wall and went in to introduce myself and said, "I'm here. I'll be waiting out here." And sat behind the sat behind the polyarene wall. And then I heard the stylist say to the Hollywood actress, "Did you see his fingers? Those yellow stains on them? That's disgusting." I was like, "Oh my god." Like, so it was the status. It was the having the two pretty women call me disgusting. That was what pushed me over the edge. And you know, and what was true for me is true for people in general. I mean, I know we've got the the vaping issue now, is a new issue, but smoking cigarettes is is, you know, it fell out of it became low status, and that's what stopped it.

M and then do you think binge drinking, the decline in binge drinking now is how where do you think that's come from?

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

Yeah, I think you know an increasing uh focus on health. Uh, I ran nightclubs for forever. So, I saw this firsthand, that the arc of probably the peak of Larry British drinking, especially young people drinking culture, and contributed to it and and had profited from it in many ways. And um, yeah, the advent of the smartphone, the fact that this can just detect whatever it is that's going on. Um, we used to run this bar crawl called Carnage, and and there was tasks on the back that you had to tick off with a marker pen, like pulled a pig, got off with three randoms, swapped shoes with somebody, and uh there's just no this [ __ ] um surveillance state run by gullible volunteers that is the smartphone in your pocket and the subsequent like info that gets put up on the internet afterward. It it's like a panopticon, right? It's just there is nothing you can do. There is no amount of embarrassment that can be forgotten about. Like you could deny it. You could say that someone misremembered it. You could say that they were lying. But if there's video evidence, you're [ __ ]. And there's video evidence of everything now.

Yeah, I'm I'm sure that's I'm sure that's got a lot to do with it. I'm sure you're absolutely right. I mean, you know, because again, it goes back to what do we want? We want connection and status. And and you know when you're when you are sort of binge drinking, it's hard to maintain that sense of status in the in the eyes of people, and Jesus, if it's recorded indelibly and perhaps uploaded to YouTube by somebody, there's no way, especially not if it's uh reacted to by the Domino's uh [ __ ] CEO. That would be a bad beginning.

Will, let's bring this one home, mate. I I I love you. I love your work. I think that the things that you write are phenomenal. Uh where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the [ __ ] that's going on.

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

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

Heck yeah. Well, I appreciate you.

Thank you, mate.

Thanks, Chris. That was amazing. Thank you. Congratulations. You made it to the end of the episode. And if you want more, well, why don't you press right here? Come on.