#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling

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, you know, with ourselves at the center.

So, you know, storytelling is sense making for the human brain.

We haven't evolved to think in data, algorithm.

We've evolved to process reality in the form of stories.

A story is always going to be the most persuasive, you know, 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, a lot of the time we're told to take great heed of rationality and

data and statistics and stuff like that?

But you've got to disregard all of that personification and narrative and archetypes and religion and mythology.

You know, that's sort of that's very unsophisticated.

It doesn't really meet the the criteria by which we judge what's happening in the modern world.

So you're asking people to get rid of the stuff which to them feels most real and is persuasive, which is story and archetype and mythology and personification and blah, blah,

and to start to believe in the thing which is the most sterile and

novel and sort of

alien to us.

Absolutely.

And I think there's a huge naivety out there that,

you know, especially in, you know, what you might call our world of, you know, we like to think of ourselves as rational people, atheistic people, people who are interested in data in science.

And

amongst our people, there's a very naive idea that

we are the ones who are led by data.

I mean, I remember earlier in my career as a journalist interviewing a famous skeptic, Stephen Novella, who used to present a podcast called The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

And he very confidently told me that skeptics were kind of immune to irrationality because they were kind of tuned to be, you know, automatically skeptical about crazy beliefs.

I just think that's sort of deeply naive.

What you'll find, especially, you see it all the time in the era of social media, is that

even scientists,

not even scientists as much as anybody else, they start with the story and then they find the data to back up their story.

So you can find

academics who know way more than you or I, both of us put together about human biology, who believe in that kind of woke idea of

biology, gender biology, and know, why are men better than women at certain things?

You know,

they could find all the data in the world to tell you that that's not true, even though we believe that it is true.

So,

you know, you can take some 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, you know, equally, I would say, but two men who are very angry

and very lost in the story.

They're both lost in the story at this,

you know, so, you know, I love Adam and I love Jordan.

I can never imagine them being in the same room together.

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

But equally with the

greatest respect to both of them, I wouldn't trust either of them to talk to me about the science of

gender, talk to me certainly about what's going on in Israel-Palestine.

Dispassionately.

Yeah, dispassionately.

Not because they're dishonest, not 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 the world.

And the data that they cite, the data that they choose to believe, is subservient to the story.

So even with people like Adam and Jordan, you know, 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 Klass, who wrote Fluke,

outstanding book, nearly as good as yours.

And he

talks about, he talks about

the problem of knowingness.

A lot of people in the modern world think that the biggest issue is misinformation.

It's people being given poor quality information.

He contends that a much bigger issue is knowingness.

And knowingness is a belief that you already have the answer to the question before the question has been posed.

It's a kind of reverse intellectual curiosity.

So I know, no, no, no, no, no.

The science is settled on climate change.

Humans are not having any impact, whatever it is.

And the interesting insight he's got here is if the issue was simply misinformation, and that is true, let's just imagine for a moment that misinformation was the biggest problem, all that you would need to do in order to counteract that would be to provide better, more compelling information.

But it's not.

It's knowingness, which is this kind of Faraday's cage insulation where people don't, it doesn't matter about the information because they're not open to any new information, regardless of whether it's miss or real or dis or mal, whatever, pre-bunked malinformation.

And he makes this really great point that when you're thinking about the problems of the modern world, talking about misinformation, talking about you needing better facts, we need to deliver more information.

If you can't get past the problem of knowingness, if you can't get past the issue that people feel like they already know the answer, and

this is kind of similar to the

every religion believes that it's the right one, but by definition, that can't be true.

Like only one of them can be right, given that they don't all agree.

He has this great line where he says,

everybody acts as if the facts are already settled whilst no one can agree on what the facts actually are.

Yeah, I mean, knowing it sounds like implicit belief.

It's the beliefs that are just implicit

and you believe them with such kind of ferocity that you can't can't see that they're beliefs they just feel like reality to you and you know when i talk about the story world that we all live in this story world you know i think that speaks to that idea that that we all um

you know we we all live in this narrative and you know one of one of the kind of moments in my career as a writer that always sticks with me was when i was in my 20s i wrote my very first book was about ghosts and i went around the world trying to figure out uh if ghosts existed it was it was good fun and one of the guys that i met was called morris gross and he was this um you know this old guy who lived up in Moswell Hill.

And he'd been a ghost hunter all his life.

And he was famous for investigating the Enfield Poltergeist case.

He's kind of a legend, Maurice Gross.

And so I managed to get an interview with him.

And I went to his house.

And as I was leaving his house, he said, you know, you know, Will, he said, if you're looking for evidence of the supernatural, you're going to find it.

And it's always stuck with me because I did find evidence for the supernatural, even though I don't believe in the supernatural.

And it's always stuck with me because I think the brain is this amazing evidence-finding machine.

If you've got a belief, the brain will find evidence to back up your belief.

No matter what you believe about gender or Israel, Palestine, or whatever it might be, your brain is going to find multitudinous evidence to back up what you believe.

You're going to see it everywhere.

And that's one of the tricks of the kind of storytelling brain.

We live in this story world, we live in this narrative, and

the brain's not interested in what's the truth.

The brain's not really interested in

you having this kind of perfectly clear understanding of reality.

The brain wants you

to succeed in your life as a human.

And what that means is we have to achieve connection with a group.

And once we've achieved connection with a group or a tribe, we kind of earn status within it.

And so to earn connection to that group, you've got to believe their story.

Every group has a story it tells of the world, a political, you know, whether it's a political organization or a cult or a religion or, you know,

you know, me and you are in the kind of same kind of cultural group.

We believe roughly the same things.

We have a shared reality.

We have a shared idea of who are the heroes, who are the villains, what are the good beliefs, what are the bad beliefs, what is status.

You know, so me and you share a story and

we probably share a story with most of your viewers and it's reassuring.

You know, 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 collect 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.

You know, and what we know, and as I write about End of Story is the Deal, I think the

big idea that kind of made me excited about this book was this idea that,

you know, what is story originally for?

Well, story is what enables us to be these highly cooperative apes.

You know, as you know, humans are an ape, we're one of five existing species of great ape.

But we are a weird, obviously an unusual kind of ape.

And that weirdness is that we are also a bit like ants in that we're highly collective.

You know, other apes overcome the obstacles of their existence individually.

They live in troops, but they find food individually.

They pursue goals individually, you know, broadly speaking.

But we don't.

Humans are like ants, that we form into these super organisms, these problem-solving super organisms in which every kind of individual human plays their part.

And that's how we're amazing.

That's how we've, you know, we've taken the best of the ape and the best of the ant, and we've taken over the world.

But that poses a problem.

You know, you've got all these apes you know once upon a time how do you connect all those individualistic ape brains together how do you get all those those brains firing in the form of this highly collected super organism well you do it with story story is a device of fusing brains together you know under the power of story we're all facing in the same direction um uh pursuing the same goals overcoming the same obstacles we'll have a shared idea of who you are who you are what your role is what you should be doing so that's what story is doing it's it it it it it's um it's fusing individual human brains together and getting them to experience the same reality and you can see that effect happening when you go to the movies when you go to the cinema you know we go into the cinema as this crowd of individuals and if the if the film is any good we're transported into it and and for that 90 minutes we forget our own reality we forget our own consciousness we're all sucked into that consciousness of the

of the film experiencing the lives of the people up on the screen and we kind of leave that cinema connected as one having having had that you know mad experience and and you know you often have that weird kind of almost trippy experience coming out of the cinema where for a few moments you feel like the hero of the movie you know you feel like lick skywalker for a moment it's all everything goes a bit weird you kind of you kind of snap out of it without story doing what a story is supposed to do which is entering our brains and getting us all to experience this kind of collective reality of the story so it's kind of like a coordination mechanism to get everybody onto a similar page.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, you know, that's,

and it still works for that, of course.

You know, MAGA people have a particular story of the world that they tell each other.

You know, anti-vax people do.

Pro-vax people do.

Climate change people do.

You know, like that, that's how it works.

We still collect into these groups that are defined by the stories they tell of the world.

And those stories infect us, they influence us,

they cause us to believe certain things and to behave in certain ways.

Why

is this just that evolutionarily if all you've got is the spoken word uh humans needed to

the the most obvious way to explain the world is to do it through personification narrative roles characters motivation this is why the goddess that is the moon and the god that is the sun rises and the thunder and thor and you know um is this just before you've got written word and before you can do statistical analysis, the

most obvious, most common, most sort of close to our experience of reality way to communicate information was to personify it into a sort of a narrative.

Is that we're just the progeny of storytellers that told stories to pass down wisdom to tell stories to pass down wisdom?

Well, I mean, the current leading theory

is that language evolved in the first place to tell stories that enabled us to operate as these highly cooperative groups, these super organisms, as I call them.

You know,

one early form of storytelling is gossip.

You know, gossip is a universal human behavior.

We all do it.

Why do we do it?

Well, gossip teaches us who we ought to be in the super organism.

It teaches us what are the good behaviors, what are the bad behaviors.

It motivates us to behave in a kind of way that serves the super organism because then we're rewarded with status.

And it also incentivizes in the other way that if you're being gossiped about and the gossip is negative, you're going to get punished.

so that's, so, so that's one form of early storytelling.

I mean, the other story, the other kind of storytelling is about the future.

You know, we tell stories about the future.

There's a very brilliant evolutionary biologist called Michael Tomasello that says that it's impossible to imagine two chimpanzees picking up a log and carrying it together to take it somewhere else.

Like even that.

basic level of coordination, cooperation, even chimpanzees can't do our closest relative.

And storytelling enables us to do that.

Okay,

if we move that log log over here, that can be a foundation for our next can.

But all right, dude, you know, we're going to do it.

So that's a form of storytelling.

You know, we're telling stories about the future.

And that's why stories are always about obstacles and goals.

Every functional story fundamentally is about obstacles and goals because that's what a story evolved to do.

Its purpose

is to...

pull us into a group

and the purpose of that group is to overcome obstacles in pursuit of goals.

What role does social identity and mimicry play here?

Huge, huge roles.

I mean, you know, social identity is your identity within the group.

You know, who are you in the group?

You know, the basic idea might, you know, basic concept might be a football team.

Who are you in a football team?

You're playing in a particular position, like under 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,

you know, your social identity in the football team is striker, defender, goalkeeper whatever it might be

referee even

um

and that's the same in every human group you know in it with every group we join we have what we call a social identity and and what a you know a human identity is in part a collection of these various social identities that we have

right

yeah i wonder what was that um

what was that apple ad the lemmings thing

Yeah, so

yeah, in the story of the deal, I tell the story of, well, I sort of pose a question, really, like,

about like

one of the most famous ads that was ever made was Apple's 1984 ad, which, which, which kind of played on the George Orwells novel and

showed this

horrendous kind of totalitarian hellscape.

All these kind of bald, grey, middle-aged men, God forbid, you know, drone-like automatons,

and this kind of like barking, patriarchal face, and this technicolor woman with an Apple t-shirt on runs down the middle of it, throws a hammer, smashes the face, and then it comes up saying, you know, in January 1984, you're going to find out

why, you know, I forget the actual words, but because of Apple, 1984 won't be like 1984.

So basically, basically, 1984 is freedom, it's power, it's creativity, it's progress.

Hugely successful, massively successful ad campaign.

I mean, they sold

in today's money, it would be, you know, hundreds of millions dollars worth of of computers

when they were launched after that ad.

So enormously successful.

And then the next year,

people know about the 1984 ad because it is seen as one of the most successful ads in history.

But the next year,

they tried to repeat it.

They did the same thing.

It was the same advertising agency, Chat Day.

They used a Hollywood

film director.

And what this ad was, it was called Lemmings.

And it was just the most horrendous, like dark, dark thing where you've got all these like automaton sad sack businessmen, a bit like the PC guys in their 1990s or early 2000s ads.

I'm a Mac on my PC, kind of marching, you know, with briefcases, 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.

And basically saying that all these

business computer users were a bunch of lemmings.

And if they, they, you know, implying if they knew what they were doing, they'd be buying Apple computers.

And it was just

a massive disaster.

It wasn't just, it wasn't even like 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

business people saying they were never going to buy an Apple computer again.

And, you know, and one of the things I'm arguing in the book is that one of the reasons, one of the things they didn't understand was that

that 1984 ad was offering the Apple user status.

It was just saying, you know, fundamentally that if you buy an Apple computer, you're on the side of progress,

creativity, smashing the man, which is a big thing in the 80s.

It's not going to be 1984.

So it's a very optimistic, high-status, fashionable

story they were telling.

But the other ad, it took status away.

So it was an absolute disaster.

It was basically telling people that there were these bunch of brain-dead lemmings and they were going to fall to their death due to their own stupidity.

A quick aside, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for years now, and it just got even better.

AG-1 Next Gen keeps the same simplicity, one scoop, once a day, but now comes with four clinical trials backing it.

In those trials, AG1 Next Gen was clinically shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels within three months, and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times even in healthy adults.

Basically, they've upgraded the formula with better probiotics, more bioavailable nutrients, and clinical validation.

And it's still NSF certified for sport, so you know that the quality is legit.

AG1 genuinely care about holistic health, which is why I've got my mum to take it, my dad to take it, and tons of my friends too, and why I put it inside of my body every single day.

And if I found something better, I would switch, but I haven't, which is why I still use it.

And if you're still unsure, they've got a 90-day money-back guarantee.

So you can buy it and try it for three months.

And if you don't like it, I'll just give you your money back.

Right now, you can get a US free supply of vitamin D3, K2, and five free AG1 travel packs, plus that 90-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com/slash modern wisdom.

That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom.

Right.

And is that

role of

desire for this is where I am within the group, this is my social identity,

this sort of mimesis mimicry thing that I want to feel like I belong and that this is, is that all wrapped together at all?

Yeah, a little bit.

So to understand one of the reasons that 1984 was so successful, you have to really understand the story of computers that was being told in the 1980s.

So when the advert was broadcast, the Boarding Moore stood up.

This wasn't the age of Silicon Valley, Facebook, Google, and all the friendly

corporate

brands that we know today.

Computers were still feared.

They were seen as these kind of machines that were going to like, yeah, going to introduce a future of conformity and, you know, totalitarianism.

It was just the year before 1974 was broadcast, there was a massive film called War Games, which I just about remember from my childhood, you know, which was all about this computer that was, that did,

that did war games

with the Soviet Union, kind of goes crazy and actually starts and almost starts a brand new nuclear war.

And a computer then was this huge kind of flashing mainframe thing operated by inscrutable men in white lab coats.

So that was, that was, that was what people feared.

People feared computers.

Weirdly, that fear is reawakening at the moment in the age of AI.

People are starting to have those fears again, but they went away.

And, you know, really, largely, one of the reasons they went away is because of that ad.

It was saying that, no, this is not what personal computers are all about.

Personal computers are about freedom.

They're about individuality.

They're about progress.

So people loved that story.

They massively identified with that story

and it ended up being an incredibly powerful,

powerfully persuasive piece of storytelling for Apple.

I mean, you know, 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 pitch for the damn thing.

It was pure storytelling and incredibly successful.

And then, you know, one scholar in marketing that I read, and I agree,

argues that 904 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,

yeah, computers being the tools for creativity and changing the world and freedom, that became the story of computers going on for decades.

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

Manipulation is a strong word.

Curation.

Curation.

I don't think their

ads are manipulating our identity, strictly speaking.

I think they are manipulating us by appealing to our identity.

So, you know, humans, you know, we 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 inner, and importantly, the safety of our children who are going to then move our genes forwards.

So in that respect, we're no different from a dog or an elephant.

But humans live in this other kind of crazy world, this story world, where we care about other things.

And in the story world, we aren't a flesh and blood machine.

We're an identity with this collection of ideas.

That's what we are.

And this identity means more to us than our lives.

You know, like

to the average human being, their identity is the most precious thing they'll ever own.

I mean, you know, our children's aren't our possessions, but our identity is.

So, you know, 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.

You know,

most cases of suicide are what I call identity failure.

It's not because, you know,

they can't physically live anymore because they're sick or because they're

poor or something.

I mean, of course, people do often kill themselves because they're ill, but very often they don't.

Very often they kill themselves because they feel like failures, because their identity has failed, because they're lacking in connection.

No one loves me.

No one likes me.

Everybody hates me.

They're lacking in status.

I'm useless.

I'm pathetic.

And crucially, they're also trapped.

They feel there's no way they can rescue their identity.

And the pain of their identity failing becomes so acute that they choose death over

the pain of...

having their identity fall to pieces.

And so that's the power of identity.

And so the most powerful ads, you know, appeal to identity.

And again, that's what Apple did with their other really famous and successful ad campaigns, Think Different, which is a bunch of black and white pictures of people like Gandhi and Mother Teresa and John Lennon.

And this is you, Think Different.

So basically, people who identify with those characters, you know, changed the world, became another absolute cliche in Silicon Valley.

And it began really with Think Different

when it began to popularize that idea.

And that's an appeal to identity.

You know, there's another really great example which I found, which I'd never heard of.

And if you're not Canadian, you won't know about it.

But it's Molson Beer.

So back in the year 2000, Molson Beer were in trouble.

They were the number one and then they were slipping.

And so

the ads agency were tasked with rescuing

the reputation of Molson Beer.

And the guy at the ad agency was Canadian and knew that one of the things that annoys Canadians is when Americans basically say, you're just Americans.

There's no difference between Canadians and Americans.

It's something that really winds Canadians up, as you can imagine.

So he came up with this ad campaign

called I Am Canadian.

And all he is, is this ordinary guy in a plaid shirt and jeans on a stage listing things that are Canadian, like it's Z, 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.

It went instantly, you know,

viral at the time.

You know, kids began, you know,

shouting it on the streets.

The value of Molson Beer, you know, rocketed.

I forget the exact number, but, you know, tens of millions of the value of the company through the roof.

One really, what the incredibly smart thing they did was they debuted that ad in the ad break of the Oscars just after the South Park film Blame Canada had been performed.

And then they had this very patriotic I'm Canadian thing.

What's fascinating about I'm 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 qualities of this beer?

Why should we buy it?

Nothing.

It's literally an appeal to identity.

It's saying

it's holding a mirror up to their market, their audience, saying, This is who you are.

And we're so in love with our identity, we go, yes, that's me.

And

we flock to the product.

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

this is who you are.

You are this person.

And, you know, so

that's how it's manipulating us for our identity, like the very best, most persuasive ads.

That's how they do it.

Does that mean, from a story perspective, stories overall, adverts too, but just generally stories, that they can

they're a way that tribal preferences can be used, can be manipulated in-group, out-group, the people like us meme?

Absolutely right.

Yeah, yeah.

So, 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,

as a society, we are still at the foothills of maturity in talking about issues like race.

Because,

you know, we fundamentally hate this idea,

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

to identify with.

And so, you know, that's why, you know, race 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.

So that's what we're kind of constantly doing.

And again, it's human nature because

we're always looking for people with similar identities to us that we can cooperate with.

It's that super organism, you know, programming again.

So that nature is constantly wanting us to 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 of the most recent examples was from the trump election the one just gone which i thought was extraordinary where um you know there's there's a concept in the book i call atomic statements which which are kind of you know tiny little phrases uh 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've They're so packed with meaning.

And you can see like lines of movie dialogue, like we're going to need to need a bigger boat, is an atomic statement because it's the entire movie packed into

a line.

Houston, we have a problem, is an atomic statement.

These are the lines that we love and we repeat and become iconic because they're atomic.

They're packed full of meaning.

And the best advertising lines are like that.

Just do it is packed full of meaning.

It's a story about what Nike stands for.

Just do it.

It's fantastic.

And politicians use these to great effect too.

In the book, I write about Project Fear and Take Back Control, which were very successful for the Brexit Leave campaign.

But after the book was finished, there was this other incredible atomic statement that came out of the Trump campaign, which was, Camela 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, Camela's own research team

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 it's a story that

millions of Americans immediately understood.

A certain kind of American

who were incredibly frustrated and fed up with the kind of, you know,

with the kind of era of wokeism.

And so,

yeah,

that was another example of incredibly powerful persuasive storytelling that appeals to identity.

Does that mean that misaligned messages and misaligned stories can threaten identity then

if you get it wrong and the other way?

Yeah, exactly.

So you look at the Gillette ad campaign where

were trying to appeal to men by calling men abusers and harassers.

It's like lemmings all over again.

You're not going to make people happy by removing their status, by telling them a story that they don't want to believe.

It's the Bud Light campaign,

giving a

transgender woman I'd like to drink.

That's a story.

We know that this person stands for wokeism and wokeism is at its core.

If we're honest about what wokeism is, at its core, one of the things it is, is a movement against straight white men.

So straight white men were the market for bad lights.

So that was a ridiculous thing to do and it exploded in their faces.

And also Tesla,

Tesla's stock prices collapsed.

And that's partly because of the tariffs,

but their sales have dropped massively across Europe, which isn't because of the tariffs.

And that's because the story that Tesla stands for has been polluted by Elon Musk's behavior in the last 18 months and his alignment with the Trump government.

It's vicious, isn't it?

The power that stories have because

much of this,

if you were to say reality, you said there's 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,

but largely are the same thing, right?

So my point is that they haven't changed, but the story around them has.

And that's made way more of an impact on the stock price and on their sales and on the way that people see them than the incremental improvement month on month, year on year over a decade to their full self-driving capacity.

So, you know, in this way, the story is more real than reality is.

It is more real than reality.

That's exactly right.

And to understand why, you've got to go back to that concept of the story world, that human beings are these two things who are a bag of bones and blood in the survival realm.

But in the story realm, we're nothing more than a collection of ideas that we collect.

We are the things that we love.

We are the art that we like.

We are the podcasts that we listen to.

It makes me laugh when I'm watching travel podcasters who go around the world and

they all copy Border Bankrupt's body language.

You know, he does this weird thing where he looks behind him all the time.

And you see him, especially at the beginning, they do it.

I think subconsciously aping is body language, like because they're, 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 own a Tesla,

it becomes toxic to you because

it's like

your very self has become polluted with this alien kind of element.

You know, you want to cut it out of you.

It's a radically bad thing to happen to you.

So

you're going to reject it.

It's like being forced as a middle-aged man to walk down the road

with a, I don't know, with a big skin-tight Taylor Swift t-shirt on.

It just makes you feel deeply uncomfortable.

So because the self is nothing more than a collection of ideas in that story realm.

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

Well,

I love the the Theranoff story because

it really speaks to all this stuff.

As we know, Elizabeth Holmes

came along and said she had this incredible device that she called the Edison.

And the Edison was revolutionary because it used to take a couple of vials of blood to do all this huge battery of blood tests.

And she could do it

with a...

pinprick of blood in your finger.

Amazing, revolutionary, fantastic.

And as we know now,

it was fantasied.

It didn't work.

There was no machine.

And so, what's incredible about the Edison is that she managed to get a huge amount of backing from

people on her board, including Henry Kissinger,

the former director of the Centers of Disease Control.

Very, very high status, smart men.

They were all men on her board,

not a single woman.

And that's important for reasons that will become apparent in a second.

So all these guys

gambled their reputation on her, telling the truth.

And then incredibly smart, successful guys and girls invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in Theroness.

Rupert Murdoch,

it was the most amount of money he's ever invested in any company outside of his own family of companies.

And the incredible thing about this is most of these people did no due diligence.

So Rupert Murdoch did no due diligence.

So they didn't even bother to find out whether she was telling the truth.

Like it's extraordinary.

Some people did.

So, so somebody from Google Ventures

who were interested in investing went down to a Walmart where Theranos were doing their tests for

a blood test, and they took two massive vials of blood out of his arm.

And it's just like, hang on a minute.

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,

me and other commentators too, this is not just me who's come up with this.

I'm convinced it was the story that she stood for.

You know, this was always stood in that time.

We're in the girl boss era.

People were and remain desperate for a female Steve Jobs.

You know, people 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, it was extraordinary the kind of cosplay that she did.

And 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 comes somebody that has backed this female billionaire genius founder.

So, that's how important the story is.

And as I say in the book, I mean, the device didn't exist.

The device was worth nothing, but the story was worth $9 billion.

That's what Theranos was valued at at their peak, $9 billion.

So, that's the power of storytelling to kind of bedazzle the minds of even our greatest, smartest, wealthiest people.

In other news, you might have heard me say that hold luggage is a psyop meant to keep you poor and late.

And while that's true, it turns out that when a brand puts hundreds of hours into design and organization and durability, suddenly checking a bag doesn't feel quite so much like a trap.

It actually feels like an upgrade, which is what Nomatic's done with their new method check-in luggage.

It's been designed from the wheels up to be lighter, stronger, and hold more.

It's got best-in-class materials, 360-degree silent glide wheels, patent pending micro welding technology, and integrated TSA locks.

Basically, you can pack for between one and two weeks of clothes.

It's got a full perimeter expansion for even more space and it's lighter.

So no more panic attacks every time that you wear your bag.

And their new carry-on can hold up to 20% more than other carry-ons, which means you can fit nearly a week's worth of clothing without checking your bag.

And they'll last you a lifetime with a lifetime guarantee.

Plus, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee.

So you can buy your new luggage, try it out for a month.

If you don't like it, they'll give you your money back.

Right now, you can get a 20% discount.

See everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic.com slash modern wisdom.

That's nomatic.com slash modern wisdom.

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

Yeah, we do.

There's something in the brain that tells us that

something very powerful that tells us that we we are not under the influence of story that we are under the influence of rationality well you know it's actually quite easy to 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 big because you're not part of that group's mission you're you're you're de-identified with the group and also you know what 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 their story.

So, if you believe that Jesus was a real guy and that he died and resurrected on the third day, you're a Christian now.

That's what you are.

You know,

you're a Christian.

It's as simple as that, Jordan, by the way.

And so,

so now you're connected into that Christian world.

But in order to

earn status in that Christian world, you have to allow that belief

to kind of fill you up.

I call it this process active belief.

That belief has to act on you like a parasite controlling your behavior.

So you go out in the world and

you start acting out the values and the story of the Christian set of beliefs.

You 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

one of the things that Muslims do, they call it the Hafiz,

some Muslims will learn learn the Quran by heart.

So

every word of the Quran takes sometimes two to three years.

It's a massive thing.

And if you manage to pull this stunt off, you get a huge amount of status.

I think it's called a hafiz, but you get a certain title and a certain status.

Now, you have to believe in the story of Islam to go through that trial of two to three years of earning it by heart,

because otherwise you're not going to be motivated to do it.

And also, more importantly, the status will mean nothing.

It doesn't mean anything.

So if you don't believe in the story, to you and me, it's a waste of time learning that book word for work.

Why would you bother?

But if you believe in the story,

it has massive meaning.

So, yeah, we have to believe that the stories aren't just stories, that

they're actual truth, they're reality.

And we believe it so much, 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, Ben Shapiro's famous tweet about facts don't care about your feelings, but in reality, feelings don't care about your facts.

And that's

a much better way to put it.

So I get this sense that facts are kind of,

in some ways, they do become obsolete in a story-driven world.

Yeah, yeah, I saw that too, and I was jealous.

I was like, damn, I wish I'd come up with that.

But yeah, it's absolutely.

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

It's only a preprint.

Yeah, so yeah, I think that's absolutely right.

That's the right way to think about it.

And again, I'll just go back to

poor Adam Rutherford and John Peterson, who I would emphasise that they've got to be smart guys who have nothing but respect for, but they're but

they have their stories of the world, they believe thoroughly, and nobody, no, no set of facts is gonna is gonna change their minds 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,

once we believe the story of the group, what we want then is to earn status within the group.

So nobody wants to be at the bottom rung of a group, liked, but seen as kind of useless.

We kind of want to rise up the group.

That's human nature.

And you do that by developing the reputation of somebody that's valuable to the group in some way.

So,

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-vaxxer, 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 shit, and then you'll tell all your friends and they go, oh, you're amazing.

You know, so that's what I call 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 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, what I call a status game where

people have one identity, one story, one status game, and that's it.

I mean, that's why people in cults are usually encouraged to not even contact family and friends anymore, because they cannot be allowed to have any other source of any other story, any other identity, any other source of status.

And, you know, a religion is just a slightly weaker form of a cult.

A political party

is a weaker form of a cult.

And you can, you know, Karen going down and down

the line, you know,

all groups are kind of loose or tight, and the tightest is the cult.

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

Yeah, so you've mentioned mimesis a couple of times.

And 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 we will we will we will um want to get near them so that might be by flattering them if they're a celebrity might be by buying their products joining their you know social media feeds,

going to their concerts.

We might start mimicking their patterns of behavior, the way they talk, the way they dress, their artistic tastes.

We will automatically, yeah, so it's and unconsciously 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

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 an involved story.

Yeah, well,

there are kind of, well, well, there's lots of different kinds of status, but there are three main kinds of ways that we can earn status in human groups.

The first way is dominance.

So that's the much more animalistic way, the much more ancient way.

So dominance is violence, the threat of violence, also the threat of social violence, ostracization, cancel culture, all that would come under dominance.

And then there's the other two kind of forms, which are based on our reputation or identity.

And so the first one is competence.

So

we become good at stuff.

So we become valuable to our group by

becoming an excellent hunter or an excellent honeyfinder or 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 the modern world, you get richer.

That, you know, it's always worked like that.

It always will work.

But the other way of editing status is by virtue.

You know, we also award status to people who we perceive as virtuous.

And the role of virtue in human groups is about rules.

It's about knowing the rules, knowing the stories, but it's also enforcing the rules.

So again, we have this very naive view that virtue is obviously good, but virtue

is 50% good, 50% evil, because

packed in with virtue is that

instinct to enforce the rules and to 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 she 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 tunberg on the basis of the perception that they are high in uh you know levels of virtue.

But also,

during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards were playing virtue-based status games.

People doing council culture, it's dominance, virtue.

They're not interested in competence.

They're not interested in success.

They're interested in, I'm going to punish you for not following the rules and for not believing the sacred stories of my group.

How do it sounds a lot like rivalry?

How do the mechanics of rivalry play out in

storytelling?

Rivalry is interesting.

So

within a group,

rivalry can be very productive.

But rivalry tends to be classified as a one-on-one thing.

So if you are rivalrous with one individual and one of the tests of rivalry, people who are rivals are usually quite similar.

They're playing the same status game

and they have a history of near wins and close matches.

So that's the recipe for a rivalry.

And that kind of rivalry can be amazing.

You can drive people to incredible feats.

It's the Leonard McCartney thing.

In the status game, I told the story of the true origin story of the iPhone, which is that when

Steve Jobs went to a barbecue that

his wife organized with some twat from Microsoft who was sort of going, oh, Microsoft has solved computer.

We've got this touch device with a stylus.

It's going to blow you out of the water.

And then Jobs came in to work on the Monday and went furious, livid, and instructed his team to figure out a way of blowing Microsoft out of the water.

And it wasn't going to be a stylus.

It was going to be with a finger.

So, you know, that's rivalry.

I mean, rivalry made the iPhone.

It began with the iPad and then re-emerged to the iPhone.

So

that tends to be good for us.

It's obviously exhausting, but it's, you know, but you know, we've all been in that situation where we become obsessed with a rival.

It drives you forward.

What's less

healthy is competition.

So if rivalry is one-on-one, one person versus one person, one group versus one group, competition is kind of all against all.

And competition, in that kind of technical sense, um, 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 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, 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

and

capturing, I suppose, self-capturing of this status.

Like I need to show that I'm contributing to the group, but I actually want to capture as much, if not maybe even a little bit more than I actually contributed.

But I can't do too much because if I do too much, then people are going to know that I'm a freeloader.

So, you know, I need to have a conspicuous productivity to the point where people will, I remember, this is so funny.

I haven't thought about this for forever.

So during my degree at Newcastle,

we had a

consultancy project.

This is so fucked up.

I can't believe I haven't thought about this in ages.

We did a consultancy project for

a company.

It was a marketing consultancy project.

And we were chosen, I think it was the British Fly Fishing Association.

And 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 me and my business partner were in there.

So obviously we were a super, super tight group and real competent.

We were doing this professionally ourselves.

We knew how everything was going.

Went down, we did this consultation project and then we present it to

the lecturer.

Now, one of the ways that your grades were mediated was that everybody in the group had to give a relative rating that they thought about the contribution of everybody else in the group, which just

was immediately going to allow us to get into coalitional bullshit.

And sure enough, there was a couple of people who hadn't contributed all that much.

And I think, you know, we got the ranking correct, but we fucking twisted the knife for sure because we were like, and it just became a coordination problem.

And given that me and my business partner were club promoters, all that we do is coordinate people into social groups.

That was, I was a professional social coordination manipulator.

We were always, I was never going to, like, I got that.

I think I got some like absurdly high, you know, I got like a 1.5x multiplier on whatever the, the, the group score was for me and my business partner because of how much we'd contribute.

And we convinced everybody else to give us this grade,

which, again, I stand by the fact that we deserved it, but yeah, it just, you know, perverse incentives.

So, another thing on the rivalry point, have you looked at venting much, like the specific act of venting?

No, I haven't.

I'm fascinated.

Fucking awesome.

So, this is a little bit of Christina Geranti, a little bit of Tanya Reynolds, a little bit of Corey Clark, some evolutionary psychology lady, super smart people.

And

venting is a unique type of gossip.

And you mentioned gossip earlier on.

Yeah.

It's a very unique type.

Venting allows the gossiper

to couch their gossip under the pretext of empathetic concern for the victim.

Ah, yeah.

So

me and you're having a conversation and I say, Will,

you know, I'm just, I'm really worried about John because, you know, he's sleeping with all these girls and I'm just really worried that he's going to get hurt because I, you know, I care about him so much, and 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, what community information have I communicated during that?

Well, I've told you that John's being a man whore, right?

But I've done it.

I, I, John, I, I'm just so worried.

I didn't say, I didn't say anything bad about you.

I just care about you so much as a friend.

Yeah, it's coming from a good place.

Yeah.

I've positioned me as the sort of person that morally would, well, I mean, if I'm pointing this out, I can't 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, like, just, I care about him so much.

So you got all of this up.

It's a very unique form of gossip, venting.

Yeah, yeah.

Reading

a novel

vector of attack that

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

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

it's 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

Love Island.

Um, 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 that kind of, yeah, that kind of that naked kind of status

warfare.

but you you want to see you also see what what what they call it sometimes they call it corumination and what i found especially recent recent series of love island when they when the guys have a problem it's so interesting the guys get together and try and solve the problem um and um that they'll often hold each other a bit accountable and that might get a bit arcy

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 so so the kind of

the kind of coalitional care amongst the men is is is focused around problem solving and accountability a bit but the female the fee 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 that it's this pile of yeah he's an arsehole he's a bastard oh you're quite right i feel so sorry for you and again it's similar to the venting thing because it feels like they're being sisterly and supportive, but what they're actually doing is driving that person even further into the ground.

Away from exaggerating the problem, they're demonizing the man and turning his behavior into this horrendous thing.

You know, there's usually tears and then a big fucking argument after it.

You know,

it's a wholly kind of toxic and kind of devious form of invertis commerce help because it just it because it makes everything worse for that individual individual.

And like with venting, the women who are doing it are made to feel superior, like they're being helpful and supportive, but actually they're not.

Yeah, it's performative empathy in that regard.

It looks like a caring approach from the outside and probably feels like it from the inside.

I mean, this is, you know,

the best way to deceive others is to believe the deception yourself.

And, 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 this other person's rumor or whatever it might be.

But yeah,

the sort of barefacedness

of

revealing somebody else's shortcomings.

There's this phenomenal Bill Burr bit where he's talking about

the WNBA.

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

dude, 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 great at any size.

Like, you don't need to lose weight.

No, you're a queen.

Like, if they're not.

And if you can't see that,

if he's not able to work out, he doesn't deserve you.

Like, you're better than him.

Meanwhile, like, rules for thee, but not for me.

It's a luxury belief, as Robert Henderson would say,

that if you're a bigger girl with a bigger girlfriend,

her

dieting down or her, you know, hitting the gym and making herself more physically attractive

is

you now no longer being being able to keep up with her.

And if you are a

more in-shape girl, that is a huge threat to you.

It's one of the reasons why I believe that

people who are in shape, BMI, are more threatened by Ozempic than people who are plus size, 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,

hey, fuck you.

Stay where you don't deserve this.

So yeah, yeah.

This is not how our status game is played.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, that's absolutely right.

This episode is brought to you by 8 sleep.

Sleep isn't just about how long you rest, but how well your body stays in its optimal temperature range throughout the night.

And this is where 8 sleep comes in.

It automatically cools down or warms up each side of your bed up to 20 degrees.

Plus, it's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time, your sleep phases, your HRV, your snoring, your heart rate, all with 99% accuracy.

It even starts cooling or heating your bed an hour before you get into it, which is why 8-Sleep has been clinically proven to increase total sleep by up to one hour.

every night.

Best of all, they've got a 30-night sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights.

And if you don't like it, they'll give you your money back.

Plus, they ship internationally.

So, head to the link in the description below: eight sleep.com/slash modern wisdom, using the code modern wisdom.

A checkout.

That's e-i-g-h-t-sleep.com/slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom.

A checkout.

What about substack badges?

I saw that you looked at that.

Yeah, so

it's interesting.

Substack,

they

yeah,

they're obviously kind of a new kind of social media player,

and

they've been sort of figuring out how to

kind of employ status game psychology into their platform, I think, a little bit.

I've got to be careful because my wife works for Substack sometimes.

But I've got none of this from her.

What I've written in the book, I got from something that Chris Best, one of the founders,

wrote.

And he wrote a really interesting essay about status psychology and substack and and it was initially i think that they that they kind of made this mistake where they were putting writers into

um

some kind of chart that could easily be gamed 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 that so they were gaming the thing and so they changed it to we are now going to reward writers who make the most money because that's the status game of Substack.

Our purpose on this earth is to allow creators, especially writers, to make a living from their work.

So that's our game.

So from now on, we're going to reward you.

We're going to reward the writers who earn the most money.

And then it kind of fixed itself.

They got their incentives correct and

the game started to be being played correctly.

Did you look at how stories play out in the role of reputational crises?

We're in the era of

takedown and breakdown and and

accusation and stuff like that.

Yeah, I mean, 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 that we were just talking about with the venting and the co-rumination.

And I feel,

you know, I feel that the whole woke thing,

the reputation destruction thing,

it just feels like a very kind of female heavy movement.

It feels like a female style movement.

You know, know, male aggression tends to be one-on-one,

out in the open.

You could talk about toxic masculinity as being

a guy walking into the room, being very intimidating to people and pushing people around and bullying people.

Female aggression tends to be coalitional.

It's the group against the one.

There's a lot of behind-the-scenes gossip, and it's about not physical

destruction, but reputation destruction.

And so,

so, so you know,

you can see

the success of feminism, the incredible rise in the power of women in society and culture kind of goes hand in hand with this new way that we're playing status games in the world,

you know, wokeism and cancel culture being one of them.

So

that's one way that I kind of think about this.

Kind of more technically, you know, there are a few things I write about in the stories a deal about

how to kind of manage

times of reputation and destruction.

You know, what is a good apology?

One of the things that's really interesting from evolutionary psychology is just how incredibly toxic

the state of selfishness is.

So because we're this tribal animal, we are this, you know, coalitional loving ape, you know,

we form into these super organisms.

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 crisis for the group,

you know, whatever it is.

So, selflessness 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 rewards for themselves.

They want to keep the girl from themselves, you know, whatever it is.

They want to,

you know, hoard resources.

So

one of the things that leaders need to avoid massively doing in times of crisis is to

have the appearance of selfishness.

And that's one of the things that Tony Hayward did, you know, the CE of BP when there was the huge Gulf oil spill.

You know, he didn't handle it very well at the beginning.

He tried to kind of push blame away, but he eventually accepted full blame and enacted the most expensive cleanup operation in all of history, just an enormous, you know, deliberation paid for by

BP.

And then he did a TV interview.

And at the end of the TV interview, he said, believe me, no one wants to get this over more than I do.

I'd like my life back.

And that moment just destroyed him.

Not only did it destroy him, it became international news.

You know, Barack Obama, who was president at the time, even started talking about it.

And, of course, he got, you you know, his 25-year career at BP was kind of over in a flash.

So, so, so, that's really important that

in times of trouble, you've got to appear selfless because selflessness is the essence of the hero in the human story world.

And there was another thing which I thought was very interesting.

This guy called Christopher Booker, who wrote an epic book called The Seven Basic Plots.

And he defined the hero as having these four qualities:

feeling, order, strength, and

agency.

And

so

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.

Feeling, order, strength, and agency.

Yeah, yeah.

They tend to embody those kind of four qualities 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 that I really like is from way back in in history and it's a guy called it what way back in history 20 years ago before no it's about it was 2007 it's very early days of youtube and um it's patrick doyle who took over dominoes and and kind of patrick dole is an amazing ceo he really turned dominoes around it was he he turned it from being

you know from from down there to up there he was a kind of revolutionary guy but he just uh he just begun um

dominoes and it was the early days of youtube and these two idiots in in in a local uh dominoes uh decided to to make a video of themselves picking their noses and rubbing it 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 like ah nobody's gonna see this then the next day hundreds of thousands of people

and then by the Wednesday when you typed in dominoes into Google it was the top thing you know on Google so so so dominoes actually opened their first Twitter account in order to put this video on there.

And Patrick Dole did 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 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 in, and sorry, which is strength, order, feeling, and understanding, not feeling an agency, strength, order, feeling, and understanding.

And he does all, he hits all of those kind of four

buttons in the apology video.

You can tell he's furious, you know, he's angry.

We've called the police, they've been arrested, we've shut down the branch of Domino's.

We've completely, you know, he tells you all the things they've done, which is the, you know, the tough guy stuff.

But then he adds in, look, we're a franchise business.

All these dominoes around the country, they're owned by mums and dads.

They're, you know, like, and they're all suffering.

And the people who own this dominoes franchise are suffering too.

And we, you know, we feel really bad for them.

So you've got that feeling and understanding stuff in there too.

And

it worked.

I mean, so, you know, when you talk about this whole dominoes scandal with the, with the snot and the farts, no one's ever heard of it.

It went away.

You know, it went away.

So it was a really successful apology video.

And I think it's because

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 qualities of the classic narrative hero in that video.

Have you seen any bad ones?

Do any

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 had to lay off like two people.

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

talking about,

I wish I was the kind of CEO.

that could just lay people off and not care, but I care so much.

And of course, you know, it's back to the selfishness thing.

He's just thinking about himself.

And, you know, it was entirely self-defeating.

The comments under the LinkedIn video were hilarious.

It became a big daily mail story, he became this kind of massively hated figure for a few days in the media generally.

So, so yeah,

the LinkedIn tier guys is, I think, the worst one I've ever seen.

Okay, so

getting

practical, what do most people get wrong about good score, good stories, good storytelling?

What do most people get wrong with good storytelling?

Well, I think

there's so much, but like

what do you mean when they're trying to create kind of persuasive stories?

Yeah, okay, well, I think people still feel that the best way to sell a product is with facts about the product.

I mean, there might be cases in which that's true.

Certainly, you can list lots of business to business cases in which that's true.

If you're wanting to order a part for your car or your rocket, you just want to know how good

the part is.

It's fine.

But if you'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 the qualities of qualities of your product and that and 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 people want to write characters that we like.

Likeability 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,

then we're going to love that story.

You know, that's why the girl boss era in Hollywood has been so unbelievably toxic.

You know, the Indiana Jones, the Star Wars, and in the UK, the Doctor Who, where they've

not just removed all the straight white male characters, but humiliated them.

They've killed them and humiliated them and replaced them with mostly

you know cardboard cut out girl bosses um so so so you know so

you know these store these story franchises were broadly made for young men that you know like they were 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 and that's why they respond with such fury it's not because they're misogynist or racist or anything stupid like that.

It's because,

you know,

in a very real sense, if you're humiliating and degrading Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones and Doctor Who, you're humiliating and degrading they themselves who are watching it.

So that identification is just a massively

if it was just I like Luke Skywalker, he is likable,

you've made him unlikable, so what?

But I identify with Luke Skywalker, I see me in him.

And he's now being mocked or castigated or whatever.

That makes me feel mocked and castigated.

Absolutely right.

So, absolutely.

So, so when we identify, when we identify with anything, we make it a part of ourselves.

You know, we make the music, the art we love a part of ourselves.

We make the cars we buy part of ourselves.

You know, we are a collection of ideas.

And, you know,

one of the most important facets of our identity are the people, the stories that we love, the characters that we grew up with.

You know, Luke Skywalker at the beginning of the first Star Wars film is this orphan.

He works on a moisture farm.

His solo status, his nickname amongst his school friends, was Wormy.

That's what they called him, Wormy.

And

he overcomes his fears.

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 or you know they do it time and time again they reintroduce these amazing straight white male heroes and make them miserable sexist

disillusioned.

They had him sort of chugging this kind of weird teat milk offer.

I mean, he was humiliated.

He wasn't.

I mean, you saw this with Chris Hemsworth as Thor, right?

And you've done that across a much shorter timeline.

I think the first Thor probably came out less than 15 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, something like that.

And, 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

yeah,

it wouldn't surprise me if someone was like,

I see a little bit of that, you know, heroic energy, but kind of adult man-child thing in Thor.

I think they would feel

put out in a way.

So,

how important are heroes then?

Is that a crucial element of most stories?

Yeah,

archetypal storytelling I'm talking about.

I'm not talking about modernist novels that kind of exist to break the rules.

That's the kind of whole point of them.

In archetypal storytelling, yeah, protagonists are really important because,

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 precious social resources of connection and status that's what all heroes and archetypal stories win they win connection and or status so that's what happens with obviously with Luke Skywalker in Star Wars he begins as wormy 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 status.

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 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 feel so rich and and full and drenched in meaning because

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,

you know, messages subconsciously.

You know, 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 kind of make Luke Skywalk a part of our identity, and then he's, you know, humiliated and degraded and replaced in this way it's you know it's painful 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 could see um

straightforward piece of anti-straight white male propaganda um painting us as misogynist woman you know woman killers 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 and is yeah because you replaced us all you replaced us all with girl bosses you humiliated us you know and and and wrote us out of your scripts 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 in 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.

If you create a vacuum in terms of story, in terms of archetype,

and you,

yeah, retcon, replace

role models for any group, any group at all.

And, you know, for a good while, maybe

the archetypal boss bitch woman who did want to be focused on their career, who did want to feel like they were high-achieving and they had agency, maybe that was an issue.

And maybe many women were

left cut adrift and felt lonely because, well, I don't really see women with the sort of drive that I have in 1960s cinema.

They're all

what's that rule?

Somebody's law about whether or not a woman talks to another woman in a movie and not about a man.

I mean, do you know that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's true.

I mean, you know,

it's it's it's fair, it is a totally fair criticism, but but but but there, but I think there always have, but I think, you know, I think you're right.

There weren't enough well-written female heroes with agency, you know, but you did get Princess Leah, you did get um you know

security weaver in in in um in alien i mean i i growing up i loved prime suspect helen mirren's character in prime suspect i mean i loved all that stuff i mean so so it's not as though these characters didn't exist but i think we've got to a crazy place now where um in order to find a kind of straight white male and hero at role you've got to watch some terrible guy ritchie movie or like like they'd like it like in 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

there's no gatekeepers.

There's no gatekeepers.

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

a situation if if there is a vacuum, you know, there was a vacuum for the women role model and that got filled.

It got filled by a variety of better and worse examples of that.

And then, 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

bodybuilder, Rich Piano.

Like, 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.

If there aren't any that are supplied, that that creates a gap in the market.

There's no coffee shop for three mile radius around this particular neighborhood.

Guess what?

There's going to be a fucking coffee shop there soon.

Yeah, well, that's the thing.

And I think early period, Jordan Peterson, well, he was so electrically exciting because all he was doing was sticking up for men.

That's what he was doing and he became this lightning rod.

You know, you either loved him or you hated him.

And all he was doing was sticking up for us.

We were so desperate for somebody to stand up and go, you know, there's actually nothing wrong with being a 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 kind of allergy.

But then on the other side, you do have your Andrew Tates.

You know, if young men,

if the culture keeps on telling straight white men that they're bad and they're useless and they're the butt of every joke and they're going to be girl boss to hell in every drama they see and they're going to be in adolescence and um and shown stabbing them 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 kind of, I think people underestimate kind of how

pervasive all of this stuff is, really.

I mean, and I kind of think we're at the foothills of

a new era here.

And

I see it very

starkly in my world, which is books.

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

point of passion for you.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, because I mean, you know, I've kind of all right in a sense because I'm in there now and

I have a readership.

And so that's fine.

But I know, I'm pretty sure if I was starting out now, I'll be finding it extremely hard to get a good deal.

And I've also seen the change in the way my books are received since all this happened.

You know, like when Selfie was published, I think 2017, it was reviewed across across all the newspapers.

I was on the television.

I was on Newsnight.

I was on radio one, two, three, four, and five.

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's a deal, a book just published.

We got one review, one review on Week of Reason 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 far and away my most successful,

the harder it is to get any coverage in the mainstream media, to get support from the bookshops, and to get slots at book festivals.

I used to be at the Edinburgh Festival every year.

Now there's no way I can get into the Edinburgh Festival.

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

yeah, and you know, and the fact is that the only reason I'm still going is

because of the podcast sphere.

Like, 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.

because it was brilliant, right?

Well, it was a brilliant book.

Thank you, Chris.

But like, but but but when it was published,

again, we got one review week of release.

We couldn't get anyone to talk about it.

It was crazy.

The day it was published, I looked on Amazon and it was at number something like six, six, and it was 6,500 in the best edition.

Honestly, I was devastated.

I was like, what is going on?

But it's because it got no problem with it, but it's ended up being successful because of the podcast.

Shoved it down everybody's throats.

Well, you know, for now, the podcast sphere is still male-dominated.

And we'll see.

Between, unless you're Mel Robbins or

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, you know, a lot of the other sort of big podcast guys, in the previous generation, you'd be on television.

But there's no place in mainstream media for

straight white guys anymore.

So they're doing podcasts.

And so I think that's why.

That is a little bit of a meme.

I actually did

recorded a live tour video going on tour in the US and Canada back end of this year.

And the entire crux of the joke is that I'm in prison.

I've been detained by ICE in America.

And I'm in prison because America's getting rid of all surplus white podcasters.

So, you know, the meme, the meme keeps on meming.

Just on the practical point around the stories, you mentioned atomic statements before.

Yeah.

How do you make stories more sticky?

You know, it's all well and and good.

You tell someone a story.

It's for you, as the person that's written it or put it together,

you believe that it's important, but it needs to 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 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 he's got to have his maximum meaning in minimal space.

So, you know, that, that, that, so that's a tweet, tweet, that's a meme, that's an aphorism.

So it's got to have maximum meaning in minimal space.

It's got to appeal to somebody's identity.

So people have got to identify with what you're saying.

And it's got to tell them a story that they want to hear, that reaffirms the story of their identity.

So

going back to that example of

Kamala is for they, them, Trump is for you.

You know, that's a perfect example of a, you know, it's a perfect kind of atomic statement, sticky, because it's easy to understand, easy to memorize, easy to share.

You know,

you're going to tell it to each other.

It appeals to identity and it tells a story that people really want to hear.

It reaffirms their perception of the world.

The story of the world.

Are there fundamental questions that everyone's trying to answer with a story?

Or are they so varied that there's no such thing as a unifying thread?

The most fundamental question that humans ask really is, who do I have to be in this place in order to earn connection and status?

That's fundamentally what brains are always asking.

You know, when we come out of the womb, we have these, what they're called, experience expectant brains.

They're half wired up and the rest of the wiring comes up during our childhood

and a culture

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...

adolescence and early 20s is a peak time for really thinking about this stuff and identity formation.

But we never stop asking those questions.

We never stop changing who we are.

You know, people talk about audience capture.

That's why audience capture is so dangerous.

You know, even the smartest people, some of them who we mentioned tonight, started off, you know, in my estimation as sort of rational, smart, really interesting

people.

And

they've gone on a journey.

And the journey has been to...

kind of take their identity to a much to

a place that feels like it's much more about telling their audience what they want to hear and telling a story of heroes and villains and we're great and they're terrible.

So

that to me is these are the most fundamental questions that everybody asks.

And we turn ourselves into the answer.

We turn ourselves into the people we have to be in order to earn connection and status from our groups.

Interestingly, there was an article by Ethan Cross.

I must bring this up fucking once a week.

It's phenomenal.

It's called Criticism Capture is More Dangerous Than Audience Capture.

And what he talks about with audience capture being predicting what it is that the audience wants and allowing yourself to be puppeted by their desires, you feed red meat to the audience, you become increasingly predictable over time.

It's that sort of regression to the mean of what your audience wants, kind of would be a way to put it.

Criticism capture is

his belief that

criticisms are much more warping than compliments are enthusing.

So people who make content online, they start to compensate in a variety of different ways.

They become firebrands.

You know, they become very defensive or very aggressive about their position.

They begin to create in a manner that pushes back or tries to sort of counter what it is that their perceived critics or their genuine critics say about them.

And I, at least in my experience, if you look at a lot of the

sort of internet personalities and the ways that people have conducted themselves, and also I can see this in myself too.

I get way more warped by criticism than I do by compliments.

You know, I start to caveat more aggressively or I couch things or I steer clear of particular topic.

All right, there's a temptation to do all of these.

You know, in my braver, more equanimous moments, I'm like, no, fuck it.

Like, just say what you mean.

But

pain is much more painful than pleasure is pleasurable.

And

that

simple sort of fact about the way that we experience the world

plays out too in the way that people respond to you.

You know, if you were learning to do salsa dancing and you salsa danced and someone gave you a high five five classes in a row and said, Oh man, that was cool.

But then on the sixth class, someone went, Dude, you fucking suck.

Why are you doing salsa dancing?

Like, you're gonna, that one's gonna stay with you, and then maybe you're not gonna show up anymore.

And maybe you're gonna salsa dance more slowly or quietly, or maybe you're gonna come in and you're gonna say, I'm the best salsa dancer in this entire place.

You know, there's loads of ways that you get warped by criticism.

Well, as an author, you always remember, you never remember the good reviews.

You only remember the bad reviews.

It's just a cliche, but it's absolutely true.

You know, yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right.

I'm sure.

And there's also an evolutionary kind of angle to that because, you know, criticism is a form of gossip.

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 program is programming is still inside us.

Social criticism 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 Ethan Christ.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I've no doubt that criticism capture is far more important than audience capture.

Yeah.

What was that smoker discussed thing,

the story about

changing habits around smoking.

Oh, yeah.

This is one of my stories I really like because it really shows you how people care about identity far more than they care about their own lives.

And it's just

an argument that you can't understand why humans smoke without understanding our need for status and need to have this kind of a kind of higher status identity.

You know, I used to smoke, you know, I started smoking in the 90s.

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, you know,

breath stink, your clothes stink, it's going to cost you a fortune, and yet we still did it.

Like, why did we do it?

Well, we did it because it, you know, makes you perhaps 8% look eight percent cooler when you're at the gig.

You know, like that's why we did it.

You know, it's ridiculous, it's crazy, and um,

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 war, because they packed tobacco into their ration packs in the First World War and the Second World War.

So all these veterans, these soldiers came back smoking, addicted to cigarettes.

So smoking took on this very masculine,

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 a very masculine thing to do.

And then there's this brilliant genius, Sigmund Freud's nephew, was hired by

a cigarette company to try and get women smoking.

And this was in the 20s when, you know, feminism was just becoming its big, massively powerful kind of cultural force.

And so he, he said that, so he paid lots of

debutantes and Vogue models to appear at

some big sort of flashy event in New York or smoking cigarettes.

And they were photographed and

it was shown everywhere.

So, you know, arguably this is a high status thing.

And he ran his ad campaign saying the cigarettes were, yes, they're rebellious, but that's why feminists should smoke because feminists, you call them torches of freedom.

They're tortures of freedom.

And it was massively, you know, massively successful, you know, and again, an appeal to identity.

And so that traveled across to the UK in cinema.

So, you know, in Hollywood,

heroines like started smoking cigarettes, you know, Marlon Dietrich and people like that.

And so women in the UK started smoking too.

So the whole story of smoking is all about status.

It's all about identity.

And that's how it fades out as well.

It faded out accidentally.

For generations, well, generations, I don't know, for a long time governments in the UK America and elsewhere was always appealed to survival to stop smoking it's going to give you cancer here's a picture of a lung all that you know there's the warnings no one gave a shit 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 breathing 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 80% cooler anymore if you're smoking a cigarette because the smokers weren't inside at the restaurant, at the bar, at the gig.

They were shuffling outside in the rain to have a quick fag by the bins and shuffling back in again.

And very quickly, smoking began to kind of fall out of fashion because it became low status rather than high status.

And, you know, that reflects my own story.

I desperately tried to get out of smoking because I started coughing up literally.

I was, I was chased to chain smoke when I was drinking.

And I was used to drinking, I used to be an alcoholic, basically.

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 I was a rep I was a journalist on a magazine called loaded

but it was a kind of a men's magazine and there were lots of women um in loaded and one time I was assigned to go and I can't remember if it was a model or it was a Hollywood actress it was one of the two and if you've ever been on one of these

shoots they have these false polystyrene walls behind which they do the dressing so they're doing the hair and the makeup and the styling.

So I knocked on the wall and went into introduce myself and said, I'm here.

I'll be waiting out here and

sat behind the polystyrene wall.

And then I heard the stylist say to the Hollywood actress, Ugh, did you see his fingers?

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 vaping issue now as a new issue, but smoking cigarettes is, you know, it fell out of, it became low status, and that's what stopped it.

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

Yeah,

I suspect there is some truth in the argument that you hear a lot that it's to do with social media.

I mean, God, you know, when I was binge drinking, when I was a teenager, there's no way, 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.

But I also think there's a bigger story to that that I don't fully understand.

I mean, there's certainly

been this kind of lurch towards puritanism in the, in the gen, in the Gen Z generation, the generation of my nieces,

because it's not just about binge drinking, it's about sex, it's about drug use, it's about the moral purity, which

you know, like

are they the first generation to be more kind of morally pure than their parents?

I mean, maybe.

Like, it's definitely a kind of a weird thing that's happened to

Gen Zs that encompasses

binge drinking as just part of it.

Yeah, I think

an increasing focus on health.

I ran nightclubs for forever.

So I saw this firsthand.

arc of probably the peak of Larry British drinking, especially young people drinking culture and contributed to it and

profited from it in many ways.

And

yeah,

the advent of the smartphone, the fact that this can just detect whatever it is that's going on.

We used to run this bar crawl called Carnage, and there were tasks on the back that you had to tick off with a marker pen, like pulled a pig, got off with three random, swapped shoes with somebody.

And

there's just no,

this fucking

surveillance state run by gullible volunteers that is the smartphone in your pocket and the subsequent

info that gets put up on the internet afterward.

It's like a panopticon, right?

It's just that there is nothing you can do.

There is no amount of embarrassment that can be forgotten about.

You could deny it.

You could say that someone misremembered it.

You could say that they were lying.

But if there's video evidence, you're fucked.

And there's video evidence of everything now.

Yeah,

I'm sure that's got a lot to do with it.

I'm sure you're absolutely right.

I I mean, you know, because again, it goes back to what do we want?

We want connection and status.

And, you know, when you're, when you are sort of binge drinking, it's hard to maintain that sense of status in the eyes of people.

And Jesus, if it's recorded indelibly and perhaps uploaded to YouTube by somebody,

there's no way.

Okay, especially not if it's reacted to by the Domino's

CEO.

That would be a bad beginning.

Will, let's bring this one home, mate.

I love you.

I love your work.

I think that the things that you write are phenomenal.

Where should people go?

They want to keep up to to date with all of the shit that's going on.

My substack, willstore.substack.com.

It's called You Are A Story.

We've got weekly essays on everything we've been talking about today, really, and more.

So, yeah, I'd love to see you there.

And you've got a book.

Oh, yeah, my book.

A Story is a Deal.

I'll get told off.

Yeah, A Story is a Deal.

My new book on storytelling and persuasion.

So if you're interested in the science of storytelling and

how it's used to persuade people and

change belief and change behavior, You will find it in a story, it is a deal.

Heck yeah.

Well, I appreciate you.

Thank you, mate.

Thanks, Chris.

That was amazing.

Thank you.