How To Tell Stories That Move People - Will Storr

Will Storr is an author, journalist, and former photographer. Stories mould who we are, from our character to our cultural identity. They drive us to act out our dreams and ambitions, and shape our politics and beliefs. Some of the world’s greatest contributors are those who have learned to master storytelling. Is storytelling something we can learn? Is there a science to storytelling? Expect to learn how we use stories to gain status, why stories are key to how we process reality, what most people get wrong about great storytelling, the fundamental questions great storytellers answer, what the best stories in recent history are, and much more… 00:00 Why Are Stories So Persuasive? 03:45 The Problem of Knowingness 08:29 Stories Are the Language of the Brain 13:55 The Link Between Stories & Social Identity 25:22 How Stories Engineer Tribal Preferences 39:05 How We Use Stories to Gain Status 44:31 Rivalry in Storytelling 57:36 Storytelling in Cancel Culture 1:05:32 What People Get Wrong About Good Storytelling 1:10:19 The Importance of Heroes in Stories 1:20:07 How to Make Stories Stick More 1:26:09 The Story Around Smoking Cigarettes 1:33:41 Where to Find Will - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Why are stories so persuasive?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Well, stories are persuasive because humans think in stories. Our brains remix reality and turn that reality into a narrative with ourselves at the centre. So 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 technology out there. Stories are also always going to be the thing that persuades people most of all.

• 0:36Chris Williamson?

  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. That's very unsophisticated. It doesn't really meet the criteria by which we judge what's happening in the modern world. So you're asking people to get rid of the stuff which to them feels most real and 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 it's sort of alien to us.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think there's a huge naivety out there, especially in what you might call our world of, we like to think of ourselves as rational people, atheistic people, people who are interested in data and 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 automatically skeptical about crazy beliefs. I just think that's deeply naive. What you'll find, especially you see it all the time in the era of social media, is

• 2:06Speaker 01

  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, you know, academics who know way more than you or are, both of us put together about human biology, who believe in that kind of woke idea of, you know, biology, gender biology, and, you know, you 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, so, you know, you can take someone like Jordan Peterson on the one hand, and Adam Rutherford on the other hand, two very smart men, two very opinionated men, two men who I respect, you know, equally, I would

• 2:49Speaker 01

  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, so, you know, I love Adam and I love Jordan. I can never imagine being in the same room together.

• 3:03Chris Williamson?

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

• 3:07Speaker 01

  But equally, with the greatest space, greatest respect to both of them, I wouldn't trust either of them to talk to me about the science of, you know, gender, talk to me certainly about what's going on in Israel, Palestine.

• 3:18Chris Williamson?

  Dispassionately.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, dispassionately, because, because, not because they're dishonest, not because there is anything wrong with them, but because they're lost in the story. They're utterly lost in their particular story of the world and the data 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.

• 3:43Chris Williamson?

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

• 3:46Speaker 01

  No, this is new to me.

• 3:48Chris Williamson?

  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, 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

• 4:31Chris Williamson?

  having any impact, or 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

• 5:14Chris Williamson?

  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, 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."

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, knowingness, it sounds like implicit belief, it's the beliefs that are just implicit, and you believe with such kind of ferocity that you can't see that they're beliefs, they just feel like reality to you. And when I talk about the story world, that we all live in this story world, I think that speaks to that idea that we all, you know, we all live in this narrative. And, you know, one of the kind of moments in my career as a writer that always sticks with me was when I was in my twenties, I wrote my very first book was about ghosts, and I went around the world trying to figure out if ghosts existed. It was, it was good fun. And one of the guys that I met was called Maurice Gross, and he was this, you know, this old guy who lived up in Muswell Hill, and he'd been a ghost hunter all his life.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  And he was, 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 great, 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, you know, what you believe. You're going to see it everywhere. And that's one of the tricks of the kind of storytelling brain, you know, we live in this

• 7:17Speaker 01

  story world, we live in this narrative, and the brain's, you know, 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 connections to that group, we'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

• 8:01Speaker 01

  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, you know, all this is working. The brain isn't motivated to tell, to discover the truth. The brain is motivated, 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, 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 in the story's a deal, the big, the big idea that kind of made me excited about this book was this idea that

• 8:44Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  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 collective super organism? Well, you do it with story. Story is a device for fusing brains together. You know, under the power of story, we're all facing in the same direction, pursuing the same goals, overcoming the same obstacles. We'll have a shared idea of who you are, who you're, what your role is, what you should be doing. So that's what story's doing. It's, it's, 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.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  And if the, if the film is any good, we're transported into it. And for that 90 minutes, we forget our own reality. We forget our own consciousness. We're all sucked into 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 Luke Skywalker for a moment. It's all, everything goes a bit weird. You're gonna, you're gonna snap out of it. Well, that's story doing what story's supposed to do, which is entering our brains and getting us all to experience this kind of collective reality of the story.

• 10:51Chris Williamson?

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

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, and it still works like 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, we, you know, we, 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, they, they cause us to believe certain things and to behave in certain ways.

• 11:27Chris Williamson?

  Why, is this just that evolutionarily, if all you've got is the spoken word, 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, 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

• 12:10Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the, the, the current leading theory is that, is that, is that language evolved in the first place to tell stories that enabled us to operate as these highly cooperative groups, these superorganisms, as I call them. You know, what, you know, one, one early form of storytelling is gossip. You know, gossip is a universal human behavior. We all do it. What, you know, why do we do it? Well, gossip teaches us who we ought to be in the superorganism. It teaches, it teaches us what are the good behaviors, what are the bad behaviors. It motivates us to behave in a, in a kind of way that serves the superorganism because then we're rewarded with status. And, and, you know, 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. You know, so that's, so that's one form of early storytelling. I mean, the other story, the, the other kind of storytelling is about the future. You

• 13:05Speaker 01

  know, we tell stories about the future. There's, there's a, there's a very brilliant, you know, evolutionary biologist called Michael Tommasello that says, you know, 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, that even chimpanzees can't do, our closest relative. And storytelling enables us to do that, you know. Okay, you know, if we if we move that log over here, that can be a foundation for our next camp. All right, dude, you know, we're gonna do it. So so 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 story evolved to do.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  It's it's purpose is to is to pull us into a group and and and the and the purpose of that group is to overcome obstacles in pursuit of goals.

• 13:55Chris Williamson?

  What role does social identity and mimicry play here?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Huge, huge roles. I mean, you know, social identity is is is your identity within the group. I mean, who who are you in the group? You know, the basic idea might, you know, basic concept might be a football team. Who are in the football team? You've got a position, you're playing in a particular position. That comes with certain expectations. You've got certain roles to perform and you're judged, your status is goes higher or lower, depending on how well you perform those roles. And and and and that's the same in every, you know, you, your, your, your social identity in the football team is striker, defender, goalkeeper, whatever it might be, referee even.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  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 what, you know, a human identity is in part a collection of these various social identities that we have.

• 14:45Chris Williamson?

  Right. Yeah, I wonder, what was that? What was that Apple ad, the lemmings thing?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so so so yeah, in a story as a 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 nineteen eighty four ad, which which which kind of played on the George Orwell's novel and showed.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  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 the face. And then it comes up saying, you know, in January nineteen eighty four, you're going to find out what why, you know, I forget the actual words, because of Apple, nineteen eighty four won't be like nineteen eighty four. So basically, basically, nineteen eighty four is freedom, it's power, it's creativity, it's progress, hugely successful, massively

• 15:53Speaker 01

  successful ad campaign. I mean, they sold in today's money would be, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of computers when that, when they were launched after that ad. So enormously successful. And then the next year, people know about the nineteen eighty four ad because it is seen as one of the most successful ads in in history. But the next year, they tried to repeat it. They did the same thing with the same advertising agency, Chat Day. They used a Hollywood film director. And what this ad was, it's called Lemmings. And it was this most horrendous, like, dark, dark thing where you've got all

• 16:33Speaker 01

  these like automaton sad sack businessmen, a bit like the PC guys in their nineteen nineties or early two thousands ads, I'm a Mac, I'm a PC, kind of march, you know, with briefcases, marching off this cliff to their deaths, the sound of a nightmarish, he 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, you know, implying if they knew what they were doing, they'd be buying Apple computers. And it was just, it was a massive disaster. It wasn't just, it wasn't even like a null effect, where everyone just ignored it. The day after it was launched on the Super Bowl, Apple's headquarters were inundated with phone calls from people saying there were business people saying

• 17:17Speaker 01

  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 what, you know, One of the reasons, one of the things I didn't understand was that, you know, 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. You know, creativity, smashing the man, which is a big thing in the eighties. It's not going to be 1994, you know, so it's a very optimistic, high status, fashionable.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:02Chris Williamson?

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

• 18:44Chris Williamson?

  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. If you don't like it, I'll just give you your money back. Right now, you can get a year's 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/modernwisdom. That's drinkag1.com/modernwisdom. Right. And is that, 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?

• 19:26Speaker 01

  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 board emerged up. This wasn't the age of Silicon Valley, you know, Facebook, Google and all the, you know, friendly.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Corporate, you know, 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 totalitarianism. It was just a year before 94 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 what 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.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Weirdly, that 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, and, you know, really largely one of the reasons they went away is because of that ad. It was, it was saying that, no, you know, this is not what personal computers are all about. Personal computers are about freedom. They're about individuality. They're about progress. So people would love that story, you know, that they massively identified with that story and, and, and it ended up being an incredibly powerful, powerfully persuasive piece of storytelling for Apple. I mean, you know, like, like all the ads I talk about in the book, it had no information in it about the actual product. It had no price, no technical details. It didn't even have a picture of the damn thing. It was pure storytelling and incredibly successful.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  And then, you know, one scholar in marketing that I read and I agrees, you know, argues that that 94 didn't just tell a brand new story about Apple computers. It told a brand new story about Silicon Valley, about computers in general. Now, that story about, yeah, computers being the tool for tools for creativity and changing the world and freedom, that became the story of computers going on for decades.

• 21:37Chris Williamson?

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

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Manipulation is a strong word. Curation. Curation. I don't think. 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, 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.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  You know, most cases of suicide are what I call identity failure. That it's not because, you know, that 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.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  You know, over the the pain of having their identity fall to pieces. And so it says that that's the power of identity. And so the most powerful ads, you know, appeal to to identity. And and again, that's what, you know, Apple did with their with their other really famous and successful ad campaigns, I know, Think Different. Just a bunch of black white pictures of people like Gandhi and Mother Teresa and John Lennon. And this is you, think different, you know. So if you're, if you know, so so basically, people who identify with those characters, you know, changed the world, became another absolute cliche in Silicon Valley. And it began really with Think Different, as when it began popularized that idea. And and and that's an appeal to identity. Now, there's another, there's another really great example, which I found, which I'd never heard of. But 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.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  They were the number one, and then they were slipping. And so the the the ad agency were tasked with rescuing the the the reputation of Molson Beer. And what and and and the guy who the ad agency was Canadian and knew that that one of the things that annoys Canadians is when Americans basically say, you're just Americans. You know, there's no difference between Canadians and Americans. It's something that really winds Canadians up, as you can imagine. So that so he came up with this ad campaign called I Am Canadian. And all it is, is this ordinary guy in a plaid shirt and jeans on a stage, listing things that are Canadian, like it's Zed, not Z, for example. We don't say a boot, we say about. It's just a list of things. But it was massively successful.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  It went instantly, you know, viral viral at the time. You know, kids began, you know, shouting it on the streets. And 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.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  They always play Canada and then they had this very patriotic I'm Canadian thing. What's fascinating about I'm Canadian is and it became known as the rant in Canada. It's very famous in Canada. And what's fascinating about it, again, just like the Apple ad, there's nothing in there about the beer, about its tastiness or whatever, you know, what are the qualities of this beer? Why should we be buying it? Nothing. It's it's literally an appeal to identity. It's saying it's it's holding a mirror up to their market, their audience, saying this is who you are. And we're so in love with our identity. We go, yes, that's me. And we we we we flock to the product. That's and it's the same as what Apple did with Think Different. They just said, here you are. We see you. You're amazing. You're fantastic and and and this is who you are. You are this person. And, you know, so so so that's how it's manipulating us for our for our identity, like the very best, most persuasive ads. That's how they do it.

• 26:31Chris Williamson?

  Does that mean from a story perspective, stories overall, adverts too, but just generally stories that they can, there are way that tribal preferences can be used, can be manipulated in group, out group, that people like us meme?

• 26:49Speaker 01

  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 as a deal. And it really made me feel like as a 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 but but it's an inarguably true idea. And the idea is that people like people like them, you know, we collect into groups of like minded people. So we're always looking out for people who are a bit like us to to to identify with. And so so, you know, that's why, you know, race becomes a problem because white people naturally tend to flock towards white people.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  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 so so that's what we're kind of constantly doing. And and again, it's human nature because it's in our, it's in, we're always looking for people with similar identities to us that we can cooperate with. It's that super organism. You know, programming again, so that nature is constantly wanting us to gather into groups of like minded people and repel, you know, repel people who we think aren't like minded. And and the most persuasive storytelling, you know, understands that. Like, 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 a concept in the book

• 28:16Speaker 01

  I call atomic statements, which which are kind of, you know, tiny little phrases that are, you know, that are absolutely packed with meaning and and they're atomic because they're they're tiny little things that explode on contact with the human brain. They're they're so packed with meaning. And you can see like lines of movie dialogue, like, we're gonna need, we need a bigger boat is an atomic statement because it's the entire movie packed into a to a line. Houston, we have a problem is an atomic statement, you know, the these are the lines that we love and we repeat and become iconic because they're atomic, they're packed full of meaning. And the best advertising lines are like that. Just do it is packed full of meaning. It's a story about what Nike stands for. Just do it, you know, it's fantastic. And politicians use these to great effect, too. You know, in the book I write about Project Fear and Take Back Control, which are very

• 29:00Speaker 01

  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 Kamala is for they, them, Trump is for you, which, you know, even the people that came up with it were staggered by how successful it was. You know, Kamala's own research team figured worked out that it had created a 2.7% shift in the election race, just that line alone. So, you know, that's a story and it's a story that that that millions of Americans immediately understood, um, a certain kind of American who who were incredibly frustrated and fed up with the kind of, you know, with the with the kind of era of wokeism.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  And so, so, yeah, that that that was a another example of incredibly powerful persuasive storytelling that appeals to identity.

• 29:47Chris Williamson?

  Does that mean that misaligned messages and misaligned stories can threaten identity then if you get it if you get it wrong on the other way?

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So so you look at the Gillette ad campaign where they were trying to appeal to men by calling men.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Abusers and harassers, it's like lemmings all over again. Like you're not gonna, you're not gonna make people happy by removing their status by telling them the story that they don't want to believe. It's the Bud Light campaign, you know, giving a transgender woman Bud Light to drink. You know, that's a story, you know, we know that this person stands for wokeism and wokeism is at its core. You know, 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, you know, but the straight white men were the market for Bud Light. So that was a ridiculous thing to do and it exploded in their faces. And also Tesla, you know, you know, Tesla's stock price has collapsed.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  And that's partly because of the tariffs, but their sales have dropped massively in, you know, across Europe, which isn't because of the tariffs. And that's because the story that Tesla stands for has been polluted by Elon Musk's behaviour in the last, you know, 18 months and his alignment with the Trump government.

• 31:06Chris Williamson?

  It's vicious, isn't it, the power that stories have because, you know, much of this, i- if you were to say reality, you said there's two things, we sort of live in the world and we live in stories. Tesla's cars from, I don't know when they launched, a decade ago, something like that until now, have just linearly got better and cheaper and faster and more convenient with improved build quality. 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

• 31:43Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  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. The 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 that we collect. You know, we are the things that we love. We are the art that we like. We are the podcast that we listen to. You know, we are, it makes me laugh when I'm watching, you know, travel podcasters who go around the world and they all do. They all copy board on bankrupt's body language. 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 his body language, like because they're, you know, they're part of, he's part of their identity.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  And that's also true of the things that we own. The things that we own are part of our identity. So if you're somebody that stands against Trump and you're in a Tesla, it becomes toxic to you. Because it's like, 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 gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna reject it. It's like being forced as a middle aged man to walk down the road, you know. With a, I don't know, with a big skin tight Taylor Swift T shirt on, like it just makes you feel deeply uncomfortable. You know, so because the self is nothing more than a collection of ideas in that story realm.

• 33:22Chris Williamson?

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

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I love the Theranos story because it really speaks to all this stuff. You know, as we know, Elizabeth Holmes, you know, came along and said she had this incredible device that she called Edison. And Edison was revolutionary because he used to take a couple of vials of blood to do all this huge battery of blood tests. And like she could do it with a, with a, with a pin prick of blood in your finger. Amazing, revolutionary, fantastic. And as we know now, that it was fantasy. It didn't, it didn't work. There was no machine. And so what's incredible about the Edison is that, is that she managed to get huge amount of backing from, from people on her board.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Including Henry Kissinger, you know, the former director of the Centers of Disease Control, you know, like very, very high status, smart men. They were all men on the board, not a single, not a single woman. And that's important for reasons that will become apparent in a second. So, so, so, so all these guys.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  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 Theranos. 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 somebody from Google Ventures, who were interested in investing, went down to a Walmart where Theranos were doing their tests for a blood test.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  And they took two massive vials of blood out of his arm. And he'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, are convinced it was the story that she stood for. You know, this was, we're still in that time, we're in the girl boss era. People were and remain desperate for a female Steve Jobs. You know, people 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.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  You know, it was extraordinary, the kind of cosplaying that she did. And so, you know, people like Rupert Murdoch and Henry Kissinger, by buying into Theranos, they're making that part of their identity. So her heroic story becomes their own heroic story. Rupert Murdoch becomes somebody that has backed this female billionaire genius founder. So 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.

• 36:32Chris Williamson?

  In other news, you might have heard me say that hold luggage is a psy-op 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 organisation and durability, suddenly checking a bag doesn't feel quite so much like a trap, it actually feels like an upgrade, which is what Nomadic'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

• 37:13Chris Williamson?

  weigh 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 a 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 nomadic.com/modernwisdom. That's nomadic.com/modernwisdom. Do you, do you think that we overestimate logic because we sort of underestimate identity in this way?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do. There's something in the brain that tells us that, that we are, something very powerful that tells us that we are not under the influence of story, that we are under the influence of rationality. You know, it's actually quite easy to figure out why that is. Like, you have to believe in the story of your group in order for that group to function. Like, obviously you do.

• 38:14Chris Williamson?

  Because if you don't believe, you can't be a part of the group.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, because, because you're not part of that group's mission. You're de-identified with the group. And also, you know, one of the fundamental things that you want from that group is, well, the two fundamental things that you want is connection and status. So, so you only really connect with the group if you believe in their story. So if you believe in 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.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  And 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 is active belief. You have to, that belief has to act on you like a parasite, controlling your behaviour. So you go out in the world and you, you, you, you start acting out the values and the story of the Christian set of beliefs. You know, you can't do that if you, if you don't believe in Christianity. It won't make any sense to you. And also you can't earn the status. You know, like, like, like it, one of the things that Muslims do, they call it the Hafiz, where they, some Muslims will learn the Quran by heart.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  So every, every, every word of the Quran, it 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, because otherwise you're not going to be motivated to do it. And, and, and also, more importantly, the status will mean nothing. It doesn't mean anything. So if you don't believe in the story, to you and me, it's a waste of time learning that book word for word. Why would you bother? But if you believe in the story, it has, it has massive meaning, you know. So, so, so, yeah, we, we, we have to believe that, that, that the stories, that aren't just stories, that they're actual, they're actual truth, they're reality.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:23Chris Williamson?

  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, a much better way to put it. So I get, I get this sense that facts are kind of.

• 40:42Chris Williamson?

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

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I saw that too, and I was jealous. I was like, damn, I wish I'd, I wish I'd come up with that. But yeah, it's absolutely.

• 40:50Chris Williamson?

  Not too late to add it to the book. There's a, it's only a pre-print.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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, you know, poor Adam Rutherford and Jordan Peterson, who I emphasize, they're going to be smart guys who have nothing but respectful, but they're, but, but, but

• 41:10Speaker 01

  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, on, on, on, on, on their beliefs. That seems pretty clear for the tenor of their conversation on social media.

• 41:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so connection, identity, but also status. So how do we use story to gain status?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, as I said, it's like, you know, what, you know, what, what, once we believe the story of the group, what we want then is to earn status within the group. So nobody wants to be at the bottom rung of a group, liked, but seen as kind of useless. We, we kind of want to rise up the group. That's, that, that, that's human nature. And, and you do that by developing a reputation of somebody that's valuable to the group in some way. So, so, um, yeah, so, so, so as I said, you know, if you're a Christian, you just become a better Christian. You start acting like a Christian. If you're a 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 like, oh, you're amazing.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  You know, so, so that's what I call that, that kind of active belief. We, you know, again, we allow that story to take us over. And again, this is why stories are so incredibly persuasive. You see it all the time. Stories take over the minds of people and they start behaving in ways dictated by the story. At its most extreme, it's a cult. I mean, that's the most extreme form of, you know, I call a status game, where you, where, where people have one identity, one story, one status game, and, and that's it. I mean, that's why people in cults are usually encouraged to not even contact family and friends anymore, because they, they cannot be allowed to have any other source of, any other story, any other identity, any other source of status. And, you know, a, a religion is just a slightly weaker form of a, of a cult.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  A political party is, is, is, is, is a weaker form of a cult, and you know, Karen going down and down the line, you know, all, you know, all groups are kind of. Loose or tight and the tightest is the cult.

• 43:10Chris Williamson?

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

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you've mentioned mimesis a couple of times and so 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, who are higher status than us. And when we identify like a high status version of ourselves, we tend to automatically start copying them. That's when the mimesis kicks in. So we will, we will, we will want to get near them. So that might be by flattering them. If they're a celebrity, it might be by buying their products, joining their, you know, social media feeds, you know, going to their concerts. We might start mimicking their patterns of behaviour, the way they

• 44:01Speaker 01

  talk, the way they dress, their artistic tastes. We will automatically, yeah, so 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.

• 44:20Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What about virtue signalling? That's a very specific type of status and probably can involve story.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there are kind of, well, there's lots of different kinds of status, but there are, there are three main kinds of ways that we can earn status in human groups. The 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, ostracisation, cancel culture, all that would come under the, come under dominance. And then, and then there's the other two kind of forms which are based on our reputation, our identity. And so the first one is competence. So we become good at stuff. So we become valuable to our group by becoming an excellent hunter or an excellent honey finder or an excellent

• 45:11Speaker 01

  storyteller or an excellent sorcerer. And so people respond to us by. Ruling 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 earning 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. The virtue is fifty percent good, fifty percent evil. Because, because you know, packed

• 45:55Speaker 01

  in with virtue is that, is that instinct to enforce the rules and to punish people who don't share our story world. So, you know, Michelle Obama, you might call her a virtue superstar because she's, she's, you know, known for her perceived moral goodness by her people. The Pope, the Dalai Lama, these are virtue superstars. These are, these are people who are incredibly high status. You know, Greta Thunberg, on the basis of the perception that they are high in, you know, levels of virtue. But also, you know, during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards were playing virtue-based status games. People

• 46:38Speaker 01

  doing cancel culture, you know, it's dominance virtue. You know, 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.

• 46:51Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. How do, it sounds a lot like rivalry. How do the mechanics of rivalry play out in stories, storytelling?

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Rivalry is interesting. So, within a group, rivalry can be very productive. So, but rivalry tends to be classified as a one-on-one thing. So if you are rivalrous with one individual, and you know, one of the tests of rivalry, you know, people who are rivals are usually quite similar. They're playing, they're playing a 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. It can drive people to, you know, incredible feats. It's the Lennon McCartney thing. You know, in the, in the, in the status game, I told the story of, you know, the true origin story of the iPhone, which is that when

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Steve Jobs went to a barbecue that his wife that his wife organised with some tweet from Microsoft who was sort of going, oh, Microsoft has solved computers. You'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 was furious, livid, and instructed his team to 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 reemerged with the iPhone. So, um, so, so, so that tends to be good for us. It's obviously exhausting, but it's, you know, but, but, but, you know, we've all been in that situation where, where we become obsessed with the rival. It drives you forward. Um, what's less, um, um, healthy is competition.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  So if rivalry is one on one, one person versus one person, one group versus one group, competition is kind of all against all. And competition in, in that kind of technical sense, um, is, is often less productive. It's kind of exhausting. It's kind of toxic. People kind of, people in organisations high in, you know, very high in competition, um, experience lots of burnout. They, they, they experience kind of a kind of a toxic culture in which everybody's kind of hoarding the status for themselves, taking all the credit, um, pushing all the blame away. So, yeah, you've got to be careful in organisations, how you're engineering your teams. So there's not too much competition, but there is plenty of healthy rivalry.

• 49:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you, well, you need people to be able to capture the upside from doing a really great job whilst not detracting from the positive some gains that you get by working in a team. And this, you know, the tension between connection, uh, and, uh, capturing, I suppose, self capturing of, of, of this status. Like, I need to show that I'm contributing to the group, but I actually want to capture as much, if not maybe even a little bit more than I actually contributed. But I can't do too much because if I do too much, then people are going to know that I'm a freeloader. So, you know, I need to have a conspicuous productivity, uh, to the point where people will allow. I remember this is so funny. I haven't thought about this for forever.

• 49:46Chris Williamson?

  So, uh, during my degree at Newcastle, we had a, uh, 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, a, 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 wanted 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, you know, 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.

• 50:30Chris Williamson?

  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, it 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.

• 51:13Chris Williamson?

  We were always, I was never gonna, I like, I got the, I think I got some like absurdly high, you know, I got like a 1.5x multiplier on whatever the group score was for me and my business partner because of how much we'd contributed. And we convinced everybody else to give us this grade, 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.

• 51:54Chris Williamson?

  Venting is a unique type of gossip. You mentioned gossip earlier on.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:58Chris Williamson?

  It's a, it's a very unique type. Venting allows the gossiper to couch their gossip under the pretext of empathetic concern for the victim.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah.

• 52:13Chris Williamson?

  So, I mean, you, me and you are having a conversation and I say, Will, you know, I'm just, I'm really worried about John because, you know, he's sleeping with all these girls and I'm just really worried that he's gonna get hurt. Cause I, you know, I care about him so much and, and I, I'm just really, can say he just keeps on sleeping around all the time. And like, I really think that, you know, he's worth more than that and he doesn't really understand that he's worth more than that. Okay. So what, what, what, what communication, information have I communicated during that? Well, I've told you that John's being a man whore, right? Uh, but I've done it. I, I, John, I, I'm just so worried. I, I didn't say, I didn't say anything bad about you. I just care about you so much as a friend.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's coming from a good place. Yeah.

• 53:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And I've, I've positioned me as the sort of person that morally would, well, I mean, if I'm pointing this out, I can't be behave, engaging in the same behavior. Uh, 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've got all of this stuff. It's a very unique form of gossip, venting.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:21Chris Williamson?

  Really, it's a, a, a novel, um, uh, vector of attack that, um, it's specifically done amongst women, which is why all of the people that I mentioned that did the research were female researchers.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Well, I had to bring it up, but I am thinking about Love Island as your, just cause.

• 53:37Chris Williamson?

  Hey, there it is. Coalition warfare.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's, that's why I'm, I remain a fan. Like you see that all the time amongst the women in, um. In Love Island, the other kind of gossip which I've 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 also see what they call it, some of this, they call it co-rumination. And what I found, especially recent, recent series of Love Island, when the guys have a problem, it's so interesting, the guys get together and try and solve the problem. And they'll often hold each other a bit accountable, and that might get a bit arsey. But they often will. And sometimes they'll try to build each other up, and you

• 54:26Speaker 01

  can do it, mate, you can do it, you just need to do this. So the kind of, the kind of coalitional care amongst the men is focused around problem solving and accountability a bit. But the female, when the females get together, they do the venting, but they also do this co-rumination. So rather than, so when the woman says, oh, I've got this problem with Bob, rather than trying to figure out and solve the problem, it's this pile of, yeah, he's an asshole, 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. They're exaggerating the problem, they're demonizing the man and

• 55:11Speaker 01

  turning his behaviour 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, in inverted commas, help, because it makes everything worse for that 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.

• 55:37Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 55:57Chris Williamson?

  Way for me to gain status or stand on the shoulders of of this other person's rumor or whatever it might be. But yeah, the the sort of bare facedness of revealing somebody else's shortcomings. There's this phenomenal Bill Burr bit where he's talking about the W. He's talking about body positivity in the WNBA and he says, ladies, if you could only support the WNBA, the way that you support a fat chick who's ate herself out of her dress size and is no longer a threat to you, they'd be making more money than the NBA. And it dude,

• 56:39Chris Williamson?

  I wrote, I wrote an entire essay about it because it's such an accurate insight. And I think that the body positivity movement in many ways is women encouraging their attractive, but slightly chubby girlfriends to not diet themselves down into their mating competition pool. It's no darling, you look, you look great at any size. Like you don't need to lose weight. No, you're a queen. Like if they And if you can't see that, that's this problem. Can't. If he's not able to work out, he doesn't deserve you. Like you're better than him. Meanwhile, like rules for thee, but not for me. It's a luxury belief, as, as, as Robert Henderson would say, that if you're a bigger girl with a bigger girlfriend, her dieting down or her,

• 57:22Chris Williamson?

  you know, hitting the gym and making herself more physically attractive is you now no longer 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

• 58:02Chris Williamson?

  easily. But if you're in shape and you see that someone's able to get there easily unfairly. Hey, fuck you. Get back, stay where you, you don't deserve this. Um, so yeah. Yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  This is not how our status game is played.

• 58:16Chris Williamson?

  Nope.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that, that's absolutely right.

• 58:19Chris Williamson?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight 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 Eight 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 Eight 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,

• 59:02Chris Williamson?

  eightsleep.com/moderndwism, using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T-sleep.com/moderndwism and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Uh, what about Substack badges? I saw that you, uh, looked at that.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so it is interesting, um, Substack, um,

• 59:24Speaker 01

  they,

• 59:27Speaker 01

  yeah, they're, they're, they're obviously kind of a new kind of social media player. Um, and they, they, they've been sort of figuring out how to,

• 59:37Speaker 01

  um, 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, so I don't, like, um, so I'm, but, but I've got none of this from her. I've got this, what I've written the book, I got from something that Chris Best, one of the founders, um, wrote. And, and he wrote a really interesting essay about, about status psychology and Substack. And, and it was initially, I think, that they, that they, they kind of made this mistake where they were putting writers into, um,

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Some kind of chart that could easily be gamed. So what that meant was that writers were then getting bots to liken their essays. 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.

• 1:00:50Chris Williamson?

  Did you look at how stories play out in the role of reputational crises? We're in the era of takedown and breakdown and accusation and stuff like that?

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  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 as we're 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, 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

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  the one. There's a lot of behind the scenes gossip and it's about not physical destruction, but reputation destruction. And 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.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Times of reputation 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.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  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, 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 CEO of BP, when there was the huge Gulf oil spill. You know, he didn't handle it very well at the beginning.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  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 know, his 25 year career at BP was was kind of over in a flash. 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.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  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 heroes having these four qualities of feeling, order, strength and...

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:13Chris Williamson?

  Feeling, order, strength and agency.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they tend to embody those kind of four qualities in a really perfect way.

• 1:05:22Chris Williamson?

  What's a, what's a good apology video and what's a horrible apology video?

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Well, the apology video I really like is from way back in history and it's a guy called, well, way back in history, twenty years ago. No, it's about, it was two thousand and seven, it's very early days of YouTube. And it's Patrick Doyle who took over Domino's and, and kind of Patrick Doyle is an amazing CEO. He really turned Domino's around. He turned it from being, you know, from, from down there to up there. He was a kind of revolutionary guy, but he just, he just begun Domino's. And it was the early days of YouTube and these two idiots in, in, in a local Domino's decided to make a video themselves, picking their noses and rubbing it on a pizza and farting on a pizza and setting the pizza out. And they put the video on YouTube and nobody really knew what YouTube was at the time.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  And so this thing went on YouTube on the Monday and Domino's was like, oh, nobody's gonna see this. Then the next day, hundreds of thousands of people see it. And then by the Wednesday, when you typed in Domino's into Google, it was the top thing on Google. So, so, so Domino's actually opened their first Twitter account in order to put this video on there. And Patrick Doyle 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. And, and he really embodies all of those. I mean, broadly speaking, it's the kind of masculine and the feminine. You've got strength and order, feeling and, and sorry, it's strength, order, feeling and understanding, not feeling and agency. Strength and order, feeling and understanding. And he does all, he hits all of those kind of four, four buttons in the apology video.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  You can tell he's furious, you know, he's, he's angry, he's, we've called the police, they've been arrested. We've shut down the, the branch of Domino's. We've, we've, 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 Domino's. Around the country, they're owned by mums and dads that, you know, like, and they're all suffering. And the people who own this Domino's franchise are suffering too. And we, you know, we feel, we feel really bad for them. So you've got that feeling, feeling and understanding stuff in there too. And, and, and, and, and it worked. I mean, so, you know, when you talk about this whole Domino's scandal with the, with the snot and the farts, no one's ever heard of it. It went away, you know, it went away. So it was, it was a really successful apology video.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  And I think it's because it, you know, he, he does come across as this, you know, he's a, he's a lumpy CEO. He doesn't look particularly heroic, but he, but he's embodying all the causes of the classic narrative hero in that video.

• 1:07:46Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen any bad ones? Do any, uh, scientific, science of storytelling, uh, suboptimal?

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I forget the name of the platform now, but there was, it's in the book. There's a guy, what's the, there was some website he owned, I think. And he, um, he had to lay off like two people. Um, and, and when he had to lay off two people, he put a video of himself up on LinkedIn with a tear, like a genuine, like a tear coming down his face. Um, uh, talking about, I wish, 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, it was entirely, um, self-defeating. The comments under the LinkedIn video were hilarious. It became a big Daily Mail story. It became this kind of massively hated figure for a few days in, in the media generally.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  So, so, yeah, the, the, the, the LinkedIn tier guy is, is, I think the worst one I've ever seen.

• 1:08:44Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Okay. So getting practical, what do most people get wrong about good score, good stories, good storytelling?

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  What do most people get wrong about good storytelling? Well, I, I think, um, ah, there's so much, but, but like, like, I, I, I, I, what, what do you mean? When they're trying to create kind of persuasive stories? Yeah. Okay. Well, I, I, I think people still feel that the best way to sell a product is with facts about the product. I mean, there, there might be cases in which that's true. Certainly you can, you can list lots of business to business cases in which that's true. If you're wanting to order a part for your car, your rocket, you just want to know how good the cut, the, the, the part is, that, you know, it's fine. But, but, but, but if we're not talking business to business. It generally is the best ways to appeal to people's identities. It's much more powerful than, you know, appealing to the qualities of your product.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  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 the film begins or the novel begins. And we meet a character that we identify with. You know, there's a very ridiculous kind of idea in storytelling still that people want to write characters that we like. Likability is the thing. But likability isn't the thing. Identification is the thing. You know, if we identify with somebody, if part of our brain goes, that person on the screen, that's me, 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

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  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 cutout girl bosses. So, you know, so

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  you know, these story franchises were broadly made for young men. You know, like there were stories for young men, but they've been, you know, disidentified with these stories, which are a part of their identity, like a big part of their lives. 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 important thing.

• 1:11:18Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely right. So absolutely. So 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 a part of ourselves. You know, we are a collection of ideas. And, you know, one of the most important Facets of our identity and the people, the stories that we love and the characters that we grew up with, you know, Luke Skywalker at the beginning of the first Star Wars film is this orphan, he, he, he, 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, you know, he overcomes his fears 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

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  did with Indiana Jones and, or, you know, they, 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 off a, I mean, he, he was humiliated.

• 1:12:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, 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 the, you know, across the span of maybe only four Thor movies, maybe like eight that he was involved in to do with the Avengers, he's gone from being slightly childish but lovingly heroic god guy to person that does Jean-Claude Van Damme splits over flying dragons and is kind of always out of touch and the butt of every joke and totally unself aware. And, um, yeah, it, it, it wouldn't surprise me if someone was like, I, I see a little

• 1:13:20Chris Williamson?

  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, yeah, how important are heroes then? Is it, is that a crucial element of most stories?

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, yeah, we, archetypal storytelling I'm talking about, I'm not talking about modernist novels that kind of, that, that exist to break the rules, that's the kind of whole point of them. In archetypal storytelling, yeah, protagonists are really important because, um, you know, my book is called A Story is a Deal. And what I mean by that is that a story subconsciously says, if you behave like the hero does, you're going to be rewarded with these incredibly 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 and ends up with a big medal around his chest, surrounded by people who love him.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  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 that. Those are the three things that all that that are the subject of all archetypal storytelling. All stories are about survival, connection or or status. And and the best stories, the stories that last to 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

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  are feel so rich and full and drenched in meaning because they're they're they're about, you know, all three of the things that matter most to humans. And we learn about them through the hero. How does the hero survive? How does the hero earn connection? How does the hero earn status? We absorb those you know, messages subconsciously, you know, they they they teach us who to be in the world. And that's why they're so incredibly important. And when we're a teenager and we, you know, we we we kind of make Luke Skywalker part of our identity. And then he's, you know, humiliated and degraded and replaced in this way. It's, you know, it's painful. And the 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,

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  straightforward piece of anti straight white male propaganda, painting us as misogynist woman, you know, woman killers who who who can't even take an insult without picking up a knife and committing murder. And and now there's all these stories saying, oh, men, men just don't have any role models anymore. Is he? 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 script. And now you're worrying and panicking. Yeah, no, you're right. We don't anymore because because. 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. Women are always wringing 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.

• 1:16:26Chris Williamson?

  If you, 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, 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?

• 1:17:11Chris Williamson?

  I mean, do you know this?

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true. I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's fair, it was a totally fair criticism. But, but, but, but I think they're 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 Leia, you did get, you know, Sigourney Weaver in, in, in Alien. I mean, I, growing up, I loved Prime Suspect, Helen Mirren's character in Prime Suspect. 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 in order to find a kind of straight white male inherent role, you've got to watch some terrible Guy Ritchie movie. Or like, like, like, in, you know, like, like largely speaking, they just don't really exist anymore.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:18:07Chris Williamson?

  There's no gatekeepers anymore.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  There's no gatekeepers. So the internet's kind of the only place now where straight white male creators can survive and make a living.

• 1:18:16Chris Williamson?

  Well, you also certainly end up with a situation if there is a vacuum, you know, there was a vacuum for the women role model and that got filled, got filled by a variety of better and worse examples of that. And then, you know, the novelty has been taken to complete parody with saturation. And then if you create a vacuum around men, you will have Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson and, and a bodybuilder, Rich Piana, like pick your, pick your alpha male guy or whatever, like even beta male guy of choice, pick your whoever role model it is that you want from the left, from the right, libertarian, authoritarian,

• 1:18:56Chris Williamson?

  whatever. If there aren't any that are supplied, 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.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's, that's the thing. And I think early period, Jordan Peterson, why he was so electrically exciting because all he was doing was sticking up for men. That's what he was doing. And he became this lightning rod. He became, you know, you either loved him or you hated him. And all he was doing was sticking up for us. You know, we were so desperate for somebody to stand up and go, you know, there's actually nothing wrong with being a straight white man. And this is how you ought to do it. And you should hold your head up and clean your room and all that stuff. You know, it was, it was, it was kind of electrifying. But then, but then on the other side, you do have your Andrew Tates. You know, if, if, if young men, if, if, 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

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  going to be girl boss to hell in every drama they see and they're going to be in adolescence and, and shown stabbing them to death, then they're going to go to the people that says, no, I respect you. I've got your back. Of course they are because they want status like we all do. I mean, you know, it's a, it's a kind of, I think people underestimate kind of how.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  How pervasive all of this stuff is really, I mean, and I kind of think we're at the foothills of a of a new era here. And I see it very, I see it very starkly in my world, which is books.

• 1:20:25Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because I mean, you know, I've kind of all right in a sense because I'm in there now and I and I and I 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 book deal. And I've also seen the change in the way my books are received since all this happened. You know, like when that Selfie was published, I think 2017, it was reviewed across all the newspapers. I was on the television. I was on Newsnight, I was on Radio 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. You know, like, there was loads of publicity. It was fantastic. And then when all this started happening, I found it extremely hard now to get any publicity. Like a story is a deal, book just published, we got one review, one review and we

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  could release in the Times, that's it. So, so paradoxically, the more successful I've become as an author, you know, my last two books have been by far and away my most successful, the harder it is for that 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 get to the Edinburgh Festival anymore.

• 1:21:38Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and the fact is that the only reason I'm still going is because of the podcast fit. 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 and

• 1:22:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, because it was brilliant, right?

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  Well,

• 1:22:02Chris Williamson?

  It was a brilliant book.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  Thank you, Chris. But like, but, but, but when it was published, again, we got one review, we give release, we couldn't get anyone to talk about it. It was

• 1:22:10Chris Williamson?

  That's crazy.

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  The day it was published, I looked on Amazon and it was number something like six, I think it was 6,500 in the bestseller. Honestly, I was devastated. I was like, what is going on?

• 1:22:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  But it's because it got no publicity. But it's ended up being successful because Of the podcast. Because.

• 1:22:27Chris Williamson?

  Shoved it 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.

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:40Chris Williamson?

  I think it's, you know, the top, whatever.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  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, for, for, for, for straight white guys anymore. So they're doing podcasts. And so I think that's why.

• 1:22:56Chris Williamson?

  That is a little bit of a meme. I actually did a, I recorded a live tour video going on tour in the US and Canada back end of this year. And the entire crux of the joke is that I'm in prison. I've been detained by ICE in America. And I'm, I'm in prison because America's getting rid of all surplus white podcasters. So, you know, the meme, the meme keeps on memeing. Just on the, the practical point around the stories, you mentioned atomic statements before.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:25Chris Williamson?

  How do you make stories more sticky? You know, this, it's all well and good. You tell someone a story. It's for you as the, the person that's written it or put it together. You believe that it's important, but it needs to, it needs to grab someone, you know, it needs to sort of get its teeth into their brains. It needs to stay with them. What, what are the things that determine whether a story's sticky or not?

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, you know, one thing is that atomic nature, it's got to be have brevity and clarity. So, so, so it's got to have as maximum meaning in minimal space. So, you know, that, that, so that's a tweet, that's a meme, that's a, that's a, an aphorism, you know, so, so it's got to, it's got to have maximum meaning in minimal space. It's got to appeal to somebody's identity. So it's, so it's, so people got to identify with what you're saying. And it's got to tell them a story that they want to hear, that, that reaffirms their, the story of their identity. So, you know, 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, it's easy to understand.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  Easy to memorize, easy to share, you know, you're going to, you're going to tell it to, tell it to each other. It appeals to identity and it tells a story that people really want to hear. It reaffirms their perception of the world.

• 1:24:43Chris Williamson?

  Are there

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  The story of the world.

• 1:24:44Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  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 are called experienced expectant brains. They're half wired up and the rest of the worrying 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, you know, we adolescence and early twenties is a peak time for really thinking about this stuff and identity formation. But we never stop asking those questions. We never stop, we never stop changing who we are. You know, people talk about audience capture. That's, that's why audience capture is so dangerous.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  Even the smartest people, some of them who we mentioned tonight, started off, you know, in my estimation is sort of rational, smart, really interesting people. And they've, they've gone on a journey and the journey has been to kind of take their identity to a much, to, to, to, to, 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, so, so, so that to me is, these are the most fundamental questions that everybody asks. And, and, and, and we turn ourselves into the answer. You know, we turn ourselves into the people we have to be in order to earn connection and status from our groups.

• 1:26:14Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:26:39Chris Williamson?

  Is 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.

• 1:26:49Chris Williamson?

  Criticisms are much more warping than compliments are infusing. So people who make content online, they start to compensate in a variety of different ways. 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, the sort of internet personalities and the ways that people have conducted themselves, and also I can see this in myself too.

• 1:27:32Chris Williamson?

  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, that simple sort of fact about the way that we experience the world, it 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, five classes in a row and said, oh man, that was cool.

• 1:28:14Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  Well, as an author, you always remember, you never remember the good reviews. You only remember the bad reviews. It's just a cliche, but it's, it's absolutely true. You know, yeah, yeah, that, that'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 and the hunter gatherer tribe, if you are the subject of negative gossip, it was life threatening. You know, literally you could be kicked out of the tribe, you could be. Killed, you know, and sometimes even eaten. So, so in the back of our minds, we've always got that, that, you know, that, that program is, programming is still i- inside us. Social criticism is, is dangerous, but potentially life threatening. So you must attend to it very carefully and adapt your behaviour. So I've no doubt, it's, it's a smart take

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  from me, Saint Cross, absolutely. Yeah, I've no doubt that, that, that criticism capture is far more important than audience capture. Yeah.

• 1:29:21Chris Williamson?

  What was that smoker disgust thing, the, the story about changing habits around smoking?

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, 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, and it's just, just an argument that you can't understand why humans smoke without understanding our need for status and, 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, in the, in the nineties. And, you know, we knew back then that smoking was going to kill you. We knew it was addictive and it was going to make you, you know, your, your breath stink, your clothes stink. It's going to cost you a fortune. And yet we still did it. Well, you know, like, why did we do it? Well, we did it because it, you know, ma- makes you perhaps eight percent, look eight percent cooler when you're at the, at the gig, you

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  know, like, that's why we did it. You know, it's ridiculous. It's crazy. And, um, a, a, and, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's kind of what they found. And in, in the book, I tell the story of how, you know, when cigarettes kind of were, became popular after the, the war, because they packed tobacco into the, into their ration packs in the First World War and the Second World War. So all these like veterans, these soldiers came back smoking the cigarettes, the 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 very masculine thing to do. And then there's this brilliant, um, genius, Sigmund Freud's nephew was hired by, um,

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  As a great company to try and get women smoking. And this was in the twenties when feminism was just becoming this big massively powerful kind of cultural force. And so he said that, so he paid lots of like debutantes and Vogue models to appear at some big sort of flashy events in New York all smoking cigarettes. And they were photographed and, you know, it was shown everywhere. So, you know, arguably it's a high status thing. And he ran his ad campaigns saying that cigarettes were, yes, they're rebellious, but that's why feminists should smoke, because feminists, he called them torches of freedom, they're torches of freedom. And it was massively, you know, massively successful, you know, and again, an appeal to identity. And, and so that travelled across to the UK in cinema.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  So, so, you know, in Hollywood, heroines like started smoking cigarettes, you know, Marlon Dietrich and people like that. And, and so women in the UK started smoking too. So, so the whole story of smoking is all about status. It's all about identity. And, and, and that's how it fades out as well. It faded out accidentally for generations, well, generations, I don't know, for a long time, governments in the UK, America and elsewhere was always appealed to survival to stop smoking. It's going to give you cancer. Here's a picture of a lung, all that, you know, these are the warnings. No one gave a shit, had no, no impact whatsoever. And what made it stop was when there was a moral panic about secondhand smoke, you know, why should I be in a restaurant and breathe in somebody else's smoke?

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  So, starting in California, I think it was in 2007, they banned smoking in restaurants. And then it became workplaces. And then it spread throughout America, spread to the UK. And then suddenly you couldn't look 8% cooler anymore if you're smoking a cigarette because the smokers weren't inside by the restaurant or at the bar, at the gig. They were shuffling outside in the rain to have a quick fang by the bins and shuffling back in again. And very quickly, smoking began to kind of fall out of fashion because it became low status rather than high status. And, you know, that, that reflects my own story. I desperately tried to get out of smoking because I started coughing up, literally, I was, I used to chain smoke when I was drinking and I was used to drink, I was alcoholic, basically. And, 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.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  I tried twice and failed. What got me to stop was um I was a I was a journalist on a magazine called Loaded. I don't know, you might be tuned up, it was just a kind of a men's magazine. And there were lots of women um in Loaded. And one time I was assigned to go in. I can't remember if it was a model or it was a Hollywood actress, it was one of the two. And if you've ever been on one of these um shoots, they have these false 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 in to introduce myself, I said, I'm here, I'll be waiting out here and sat behind the sat behind the polystyrene wall. And then I heard the stylist say to the Hollywood actress, oh, 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.

• 1:33:50Speaker 01

  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 is a new issue. But smoking cigarettes is, you know, it it fell out, it became low status and that's what stopped it.

• 1:34:06Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

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

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  I mean, maybe, like it like like it's definitely a kind of a weird thing that's happened to um. To Gen Zs that encompasses binge drinking is just part of it.

• 1:35:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think, you know, an increasing focus on health. I ran nightclubs for forever. So I saw this firsthand that the arc of probably the peak of Larry British drinking, especially young people drinking culture and contributed to it. And I profited from it in many ways. And, um, yeah, the advent of the smartphone, the fact that this can just detect whatever it is that's going on.

• 1:35:44Chris Williamson?

  We used to run this bar crawl called Carnage and there was tasks on the back that you had to tick off with a marker pen, like pulled a pig, got off with three 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 like 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. Like you could deny it, you could say that someone misremembered it, you could say that they were lying, but if there's video evidence, you're fucked. And there's video evidence of ever everything now.

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure that's, I'm sure that's got a lot to do with it. I'm sure you're absolutely right. I mean, you know, because again, it goes back to what do we want? We want connection and status. And, and, you know, when you're, when you are sort of binge drinking, it's hard to maintain that sense of status in the, in the eyes of people. And Jesus, if it's recorded indefinitely and perhaps uploaded to YouTube by somebody, there's no way.

• 1:36:47Chris Williamson?

  Not good, especially not if it's reacted to by the Domino's fucking CEO. That would be a bad beginning. Will, let's bring this one home, mate. I, I, I love you, I love your work. I think that the things that you write are phenomenal. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the shit that's going on.

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:37:12Chris Williamson?

  And you've got a book.

• 1:37:13Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, my book, A Story Is A Deal. Get in trouble, I'll get told off. Yeah, A Story Is A Deal, my new book on storytelling and persuasion. So if you're interested in, in the science of storytelling and how it's used to persuade people and change belief and change behaviour.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  You will find it in a story is a deal. Heck yeah. Well, I appreciate you. Thank you, mate. Thanks, Chris. That was amazing. Thank you.

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  If you've got an insurance question, you could talk to your nana, but she'd probably just tell you how she insured her couch from stains by covering it with plastic. Or you could talk to your local GEICO agent. They'll give you a different kind of warm and fuzzy with personalized assistance for all your insurance needs, like how you could be saving on your policies. So let your nana cover her couch in plastic and let a local GEICO agent help cover you, but not in plastic. To find a GEICO agent near you, visit geico.com slash local.