#944 - Will Storr - A Masterclass In Storytelling

28:41These 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, it's packed full of meaning. It's a story about what Nike stands for, just do it. It's fantastic. And politicians used to do great effect too. In the book, I write about Project Fear and Take Back Control, which was very successful for the Brexit leave campaign. But after the book was finished, there was this other incredible atomic statement that came out of the Trump campaign, which was, Kamala is for they, then, Trump is for you.

29:11Which even the people that came up with it was staggered by how successful it was. Now, Camel's own research team worked out that it created a 2 .7 % shift in the election race, just that line alone. So that's a story. And it's a story that millions of Americans immediately understood, a certain kind of American who were incredibly frustrated and fed up with the kind of era of wokeism. And so, yeah, that was another example of incredibly powerful persuasive storytelling that appeals to identity. Does that mean that misaligned messages and misaligned stories can threaten identity then if you get it wrong on the other way?

29:56Yeah, exactly. So you look at the Gillette ad campaign where they are trying to appeal to men by calling men abuses and harasses. It's like lemmings all over again. and you're not going to make people happy by removing their status by telling the story that they don't want to believe. It's the Bud Light campaign, giving a transgender woman Bud Light to drink. That's a story. We know that this person stands for Wokeism and Wokeism is at its core. If we're honest about what Wokeism is, at its core, one of the things it is a movement against straight white men. So straight white men, whether with a market for bad lights.

30:40So that was a ridiculous thing to do and it exploded in their faces. And also Tesla, you know, you know, Tesla's stock prices collapsed. And that's partly because of the tariffs, but their sales have dropped massively across Europe, which isn't because of the tariffs. And that's because the story that Tesla stands for has been polluted by Elon Musk's behaviour in the last 18 months and his alignment with the Trump government. It's vicious, isn't it? The power that stories have because much of this, if you were to say reality, you said there's two things, we sort of live in the world and we live in stories.

31:18Tesla's cars from, I don't know when they launched decade ago, something like that, until now have just linearly got better and cheaper and faster and more convenient with improved build quality. But largely are the same thing, right? So my point is that they haven't changed. But the story around them has, and that's made way more of an impact on the stock price and on their sales and on the way that people see them, than the incremental improvement month on month, year and year over a decade, to their full self -driving capacity. So in this way, the story is more real than reality is. It is more real than reality.

31:58That's exactly right. And to understand why you've got to go back to that concept of the story world. The human beings of these two things are a bag of bones and blood on inner survival realm. But in the story realm, we're nothing more than a collection of ideas 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 broadcasters who go around the world and they all do, they all copy board on bankrupt's body language. You know, it's just really really looks behind the water time and you see especially at the beginning, they do it that I think subconsciously aping is body language like because they're, you know, they're part of he's part of their identity and that's also true of the things that we own, the things that we own are part of our identity.

32:45So if you're somebody that stands against Trump and you're in a Tesla, it becomes toxic to you because it's like you're very selfless, become polluted with this alien kind of element. You want to cut it out of you. It's a radically bad thing to happen to you. So you're going to reject it. It's like being forced as a middle aged man to walk down the rows with a skin type a T -shirt, like it just makes you're deeply uncomfortable. You know, so because the self is nothing more than a collection of ideas in that story, real. What does the Theranos story tell us about group psychology and how that works?

33:28Well, 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, the medicine. And the medicine was revolutionary because he used to take a couple of vials of blood to do all these huge battery of blood tests and make a sugar do it with a pin prick of blood in your finger. Amazing, revolutionary, fantastic. And as we know now that it was fantasy, it didn't work, there was no machine. And so what's incredible about the medicine is that she managed to get huge amount of backing from people on her board, including Henry Kissinger, the former director of the Centers of Disease Control, very, very high status smart men.

34:15They were all men on the board, not single men, and that's important for reasons that will become apparent in a second. So all these guys gambled their reputation on her turn the truth. And then incredibly smart, successful guys and girls invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in in in Theraness. Rupert Murdoch it was the bit 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.

34:58Like it's extraordinary. Some people did. So So somebody from Google Ventures who were interested in investing went down to a Walmart where Theranos were doing their tests for a blood test. They took two massive hours of blood out of his arm. He's just like, hang on a minute. We are not investing in this. So some people didn't fall for the story, but Rubin Murdoch did and Henry Kissinger did and the Walmart family did. And you know, me and other commentators too, this is not just me who's come up with this. I convinced it was the story that she stood for. You know, this was a type of wasted in that time.

35:33We're in the girl boss era. People were and remained desperate for a female Steve Jobs. You know, people very talk very disparaging about tech grows, you know, the masculinity of the tech world is a problem 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 turtle neck. You know, it was extraordinary, the kind of cosplay that she did. And so people like Rupert Murdoch and Henry Kissinger by buying into Theranos, they're making it that part of their identity. So her heroic story becomes their own heroic story.

36:07Rupert Murdoch comes somebody that has backed this female billionaire genius founder. So that's how important the story is. And as I said in the book, the device didn't exist. The device was a birth nothing. But the story was worth $9 billion. That's what Theranos was valued at. peak 9 billion dollars. So that's the power of story -setting, so kind of... big dazzle the minds of even our greatest smartest, wealthiest people. In other news, you might have heard me say that hold luggage is a siop meant to keep you poor and late. And while that's true, it turns out that when a brand puts hundreds of hours into design and organization and durability, suddenly checking a bag doesn't feel quite so much like a trap, it actually feels like an upgrade, which is what nomatics done with their new method check -in luggage.

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37:27So you can buy your new luggage, try it out for a month, if you don't like it, but give 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, are heading to nomatic .com slash modernwiston. That's nomatic .com slash modernwiston. Do you think that we overestimate logic because we sort of underestimate identity in this way? Yeah, we do. There's something in the brain that tells us that 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.

38:04It's actually quite easy to figure out why that is. You have to believe in the story of your group in order for that group to function. Like obviously you do. Because you don't believe you can't be a part of the group. Yeah, because you're not part of that group's mission, you're de -identified with the group. And also, 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 you only really connect with the group if you believe in their story. So if you believe that Jesus was a real guy and that he died and resurrected on the third day, you're a Christian now.

38:39That's what you are. You're a Christian. It's as simple as that Jordan, by the way. 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 fill you up. I call it this president active belief. You have to, that belief has to act on you like a parasite, controlling your behaviors. So you go out in the world and you start acting out the values and the story of the Christian set of beliefs. You can't do that if you don't believe in Christianity. It won't make any sense to you. And also you can't earn the status. Like one of the things that Muslims do, they call it the Hafiz, where some Muslims will earn the Quran by heart.

39:31Every word of the Quran takes sometimes two to three years. It's a massive thing. And if you manage to pull this stunt off, you get huge about the status. I think it's got a half -east, but you get a certain title and a certain status. Now, you have to believe in the story of Islam to go through that trial of two to three years of earning it by heart, because otherwise, you're not going to be motivated to do it. And also, more importantly, the status will mean nothing. It doesn't mean any things. If you don't believe in the story, to you and me, it's a waste of time learning that book for work.

40:02Well, I would you bother, but if you believe in the story, it has massive meaning. So yeah, we have to believe that the stories, the aren't just stories, that they're actual truth, they're reality. And we believe it so much. Look at through human history, people all the time, fight and die on behalf of the beliefs of their groups. Yeah, I had this conversation with Andrew Schultz a couple of months ago. Ben Shapiro's famous tweet about facts don't care about your feelings. but in reality, feelings don't care about your facts. And that's a much better way to put it. So I get this sense that facts are kind of, in some ways they do become obsolete in a story -driven world.

40:46Yeah, I saw that too when I was jealous. I was like, damn, I wish I'd come up with that. But yeah, it's absolutely, I think that's... Not too late to add it to the book. There's only a pre -print. 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, rather than Jordan Peterson, who I, as they were doing, emphasize, they're going to be smart guys who have nothing but respect for, but they have their stories of the world, they believe thoroughly, and nobody, no set of facts is going to, he's going to change their minds on their beliefs.

41:20That seems pretty clear for the tenor of their conversation on social media. Okay, so connection, identity, but also status. So how do we use story to gain status? Yeah, as I said, it's like, you know, what, 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 run of a group, like to put seniors kind of useless. We kind of want to rise up the group. That's, that's human nature. And you do that by developing a reputation of somebody that's valuable to the group in some way. So, yeah, so as I said, if you're a Christian, you just become a better Christian.

42:03You start acting like a Christian. If you're an anti -factor, you don't get vaccinated, you might go protesting, you might start doing some blocking, you might have an argument with your GP about how vaccines are shit, and then you'll tell all your friends, you're amazing. So that's what I'll call that kind of active belief. 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, I call a status game, where people have one identity, one story, one status game, and that's it.

42:42I mean, that's why people in culture are usually encouraged to not even contact family and friends anymore because they cannot be allowed to have any other source of any other story, any other identity, any other source of status. And a religion is just a slightly weaker form of a cult. A political party is a weaker form of a cult and you know, Karen going down and down. The line, you know, all groups are kind of loose or tight and the tightest is the cult. Is there a difference between high and low status influence and storytelling? Yeah, so you've mentioned a me since a couple of times and so the copying instinct and how that tends to work in the human groups is that we are unconsciously constantly on the look out for people like us, some people that we identify with, who are high status than us.

43:36And 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 want to get near them. So that might be by flattering them if there is celebrity, might be by buying their products, joining their social media feeds, going to their concerts. We might start mimicking their patterns of behavior, the way they talk, the way they dress, their artistic tastes. We will automatically, yeah. So it's an unconscious that's that's because our brain has gone well. This is a person like me who's got high status I want high status So it the more I can make myself like this person the more likely I am to rise up that status game What about virtue signaling that's a very specific type of status and probably an involved story Yeah, well, they're there are kind of well, there's lots of different kinds of status But there are three main kinds of ways that we can earn status in human groups.

44:35The first way is dominance. So that's the much more animalistic way, the much more ancient way. So dominance is violence, the threat of violence, also the threat of social violence, ostracization, cancel culture, all that would come under dominance. And then there's the other two forms which are based on our reputation or identity. And so the first one is competence. So we become good at stuff. So we become valuable to our group by becoming an excellent hunter or a excellent honey finder or an excellent storyteller or an excellent sorcerer. And so people respond to us by rewarding us with status.

45:17And 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. in the modern world to get richer, that's always work like that, it always will work. But the other way of voting status is by virtue. 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 50 % good, 50 % evil.

45:54Because, you know, The packaging with virtue is that instinct to enforce the rules and to punish people who don't share our story world.

46:09Michelle Obama might call her a virtue superstar because she's known for her perceived moral goodness by her people, the Pope, the Dalai Lama, these are virtue superstars, these are people who are incredibly high status, Greta Tumberg, on the basis of the perception that they are high in levels of virtue. But also during the culture revolution, the red guards were playing virtue -based status games. People doing cancel culture, it's dominance virtue. They're not interested in competence, they're not interested in success, they're interested in, I'm going to punish you for not following the rules and for not believing in the sacred stories of my group.

46:52How do it sounds a lot like rivalry? How do the mechanics of rivalry play out in stories, storytelling? Rivalry is interesting. So within a group, rivalry can be very productive. But rivalry tends to be classified as a one -on -one thing. So if you are rivalrous with one individual, and one of the tests of rivalry, people who are arrivals are usually quite similar. They're playing a same status game and they have a history of near wins in close matches. So that's the recipe for a rivalry and that kind of rivalry can be amazing. You can drive people to incredible feats. It's the Lenin McCartney thing.

47:38In the status game I told the story of the true origin story of the iPhone, which is that when Steve Jobs went to a barbeque that is wife, that is wife organized with some Twitter from Microsoft who was sort of going, oh Microsoft has solved computer, you've got this touch device with a stylus, it's going to blow you out the water. And then Jobs came in to work on the Monday and were not furious, livid, and instructed his team to figure out a way of blowing Microsoft out the water. And it wasn't going to be a start, it was going to be with a finger. So you know, that's rivalry. I mean, rivalry made the iPhone, you've So that tends to be good for us.

48:16It's obviously exhausting, but we've all been in that situation where we become obsessed with arrival. It drives you forward. What's less healthy is competition. So if rivalry is one -on -one, one person versus one person, one group versus one group, competition is kind of all against all. And competition in that kind of technical sense is often less productive. It's kind of exhausting, it's kind of toxic. people, people in organizations, high in, you know, very high in competition, experience lots of burnout, their experience kind of a toxic culture in which everybody's kind of hoarding the status for themselves, taking all the credit, pushing all the blame away.

48:56So yeah, you've got to be careful in organizations, how you're engineering your teams. So there's not too much competition, but there is plenty of healthy rivalry. Yeah, well, you need people to be able to capture the upside from doing a really great job whilst not detracting from the positive some gains that you get by working in a team. And this, you know, the tension between connection and capturing, I suppose, self -capturing of this status. Like, I need to show that I'm contributing to the group, but I actually want to capture as much, if not maybe even a little bit more, than I actually contributed, but I can't do too much, If I do too much, then people are going to know that I'm a free loader.

49:37So, you know, I need to have a conspicuous productivity to the point where people will... I remember this is so funny. I haven't thought about this for forever. So during my degree at Newcastle, we had a consultancy project. This is so fucked up. I can't believe I haven't thought about this in ages. We did a consultancy project for a company. There's 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, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

50:14A 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. We went down, we did this consultation project, and then we presented to the, to the lecturer. Now, one of the ways that your grades were mediated was that everybody in the group had to give a relative rating that they thought about the contribution of everybody else in the group, which just, it was immediately going to allow us to get into co -illitional 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.

50:57because 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 a professional social coordination manipulator. We were always, I was never gonna, I like, I got that, I got some like absurdly high -multi, you know, I got like a 1 .5x multiplier and whatever the group score was for me and my business partner because of how much we'd contribute and we convinced everybody else to give us this grade. which, again, I stand by the fact that we deserved it, but yeah, it just perverse incentives.

51:34So 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 Duranty, a little bit of Tanya Reynolds, a little bit of Corey Clark, some evolutionary psychology, ladies, super smart people. And venting is a unique type of gossip. You mentioned gossip earlier on. It's a very unique type. Venting allows the gossiper to couch their gossip under the pretext of empathetic concern for the victim. So I mean, you have an conversation and I say, well, I'm just, I'm really worried about John because he's sleeping with all these girls.

52:26And I'm just really worried that he's gonna get hurt, because I care about him so much. And I'm just really, can say he keeps on sleeping around all the time. And like I really think that he's worth more than that. And he doesn't really understand that he's worth more than that. Okay, so what communication if I communicated doing that? Well, I've told you that John's being a manhole, right? but I've done it. John, I didn't say anything bad about you. I just care about you so much as a phrase. Yeah, it's coming from a good place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've positioned me as the sort of person that morally would, well, I mean, if I'm pointing this out, I can't be behaving, engaging in the same behavior.

53:09Me, like, John, I would never. I would never behave in the same way that John behaves. I mean, this is, I mean, just care about him so much. So you've got all of this up. It's a very unique form of gossip, venting, really. A novel vector of attack that it's specifically done amongst women, which is why all of the people that I mentioned that did the research were female researchers. Well, I had to bring it out, but I am thinking about love Islanders, because that's what it is. There it is. It's co -illitional warfare. Yeah, exactly. That's why I remain a fan. Like you see that all the time amongst the women in love island.

53:49The other kind of gossip, which I've detected in love island, is you see that, what you call venting, which is that kind of naked, kind of status, kind of warfare. But you also see what, some of the, they call it co -rumination. And what I've 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 RC but they often will. And Tom's also try to build each other up and you can do it mate, you can do it, you just need to do this.

54:28So the kind of co -eitional care amongst the men is focused around problem solving and accountability a bit. But the females get together. They do the venting, but they also do this co -rumination. So rather than, so when the women say, I've got this problem with Bob, rather than trying to figure out the problem, it's this part 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. What they're actually doing is driving that person even further into the ground.

55:07A way from a point of view. It's not erasing the problem. They're demonizing the man and turning his behavior into this horrendous thing. You know, there's usually tears and then a big fucking argument after it. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a holy kind of toxic and kind of devious form of, in a furtious commerce hell because it just, it, it, it, it, because it makes everything worse for that individual, and like with Vending, the, the, the women who are doing it are are made to feel superior, like they're being helpful and supportive, but actually they're not. It's a performative empathy in that regard.

55:40It looks like a caring approach from the outside and probably feels like it from the inside. I mean, this is, you know, the best way to deceive others is to believe the deception yourself. And, you know, very few people that are venting are thinking this is some 5D chess way for me to gain status or stand on the shoulders of this other person's rumor or whatever it might be. But yeah, the bare face of revealing somebody else's shortcomings. This is phenomenal Bill Burr bit where he's talking about the 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.

56:38And dude, I wrote an entire essay about it because it's such an accurate insight. And I think that the body positivity movement in many ways is women encouraging their attractive but slightly chubby girlfriends to not die at themselves down into their mating competition pool. Yeah. 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, if you can't see that, that's the only thing. If he's not able to work out, he doesn't deserve you. Like you're better than him. Meanwhile, like rules for the, but not for me. It's a luxury belief as Roba Henderson would say.

57:16That if you're a bigger girl with a bigger girl friend, her dieting down or her, 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 a Zempic 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, and they don't have anything to lose in the same way because my competition pool is my competition pool.

57:58Maybe there's even fewer people at this size now, so perhaps I can access the people more easily. But if you're in shape and you see that someone's able to get there easily, unfairly, hey, fuck you, get back, stay away, you don't deserve this. So yeah, yeah. This is not how I just game is played. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's absolutely right. 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 8 sleep comes in. It automatically cools down or warms up each side of your bed up to 20 degrees, plus it's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time, your sleep phases, your HRV, your snoring, your heart rate, all with 99 % accuracy.

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59:15I saw that you looked at that. Yeah, so it is interesting. Substack.

59:27Yeah, they're obviously kind of a new social media player. And they've been figuring out how to that kind of employee status game psychology into their platform, I think, a little bit. I've got to be kind of, because my wife works for substacks. I was like, so I've got none of this from her. I've got, what I've written the book, I got from something the Chris Bess from the Founders wrote. And he wrote a really interesting essay about a status psychology and substack. And it was initially, I think, they kind of made this mistake where they were putting writers into some kind of chart that could easily be gained.

1:00:13So what that meant was that writers were then getting bots to, you know, like 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 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 kind of fix itself. They got their incentives correct. And the game started to be being played correctly. Did you look at how stories play out in the role of reputational crises?

1:00:55We're in the era of take down and break down and accusation and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, so there are a few ways of tackling that. I mean, one of the ways is to kind of think, you know, go back to that idea of female aggression and that we're just talking about with diventing 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. and it feels like a female style movement. You know, male aggression tends to be one on one, out on the open. You could talk about toxic masculinity as being, as being a guy walking into the room, being very intimidating to people and pushing people and bullying people.

1:01:42Female aggression tends to be co -eitional. It's the group against the one. There's a lot of back behind the scenes gossip and it's about not physical destruction, but reputation destruction. And so, so you know, you can see the success of feminism, the incredible rise in the power of women in society and culture, kind of goes hand in hand with this new way that we're playing status games in the world, you know, Wokey's with the encounter culture being, one of them. So that's one way that I kind of think about this. Kind of more technically, there are a few things that are right about in the stories of deal about how to kind of manage times of representation destruction.

1:02:34You 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 at this tribal animal, We are this, you know, co -alitional, 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 performs themselves. So selflessness is the essence of errorism universally.

1:03:13So, you know, courage in the face of crisis for the group. you know, whatever it is. So selflessness is inevitably heroic and it's opposite as 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, we know whatever it is. They want to, you know, hoard resources. So one of the things that leaders need to avoid massively doing in terms of crisis is to have the appearance of selfishness. And that's one of the things that Tony Hayward did, the CEO of BP, when there was the huge Gulf oil spill. You know, he didn't handle it very well at the beginning.

1:03:58He tried to kind of push flavor away, but he eventually accepted full blame and enacted the most expensive clean -up operation in all of history, just an enormous, you know, deliberation pay 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 me getting international news, you know, a Barack Obama who is present at the time, he even started talking about it. And of course he got, you know, he's 25 -year career, a BP was kind of over in a flash.

1:04:33So that's really important that in times of trouble you've got to appear selfless because selflessness is the essence of the hero in the human story world And there was there was another thing which I thought was very interesting this guck was to the book who's a nepic book or the seven basic plots And he defined the heroes having these four qualities of feeling order strength and Agency and and so heroes and stories kind of tend to show those kind of four qualities and when you look at really good apology videos from people they tend to embody those four Feeling order strength and data. Yeah.

1:05:16Yeah. Yeah. They tend to embody those kind of four qualities in a really perfect way. What's a What's a good apology video and what's a horrible apology video? Well the apology video are you like it's from way back in history and it's like I've got what way back in 20 years ago No, it was 2007, it's very early days of YouTube. And it's Patrick Doyle who took over Dominoes. And kind of Patrick Doyle is an amazing CEO. He really turned Dominoes around. He turned it from being, you know, from down there to up there. He was a kind of revolutionary guy. But he just began Dominoes. And it was the early days of YouTube and these two idiots in a local Dominoes decided to make a video themselves picking their noses and rubbing it on a pizza and fighting 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 and so this thing went on YouTube on the Monday and Domino's like, ah, I'm never going to see this.

1:06:13Then the next day hundreds of thousands of people see it. And then by the Wednesday when you talked in Domino's into Google it was the top thing, you know, on Google. So so Domino's actually opened their first Twitter account in order to put this video on there and Patrick Dole did this, kind of off, seemingly pretty off the cuff apology video. You can still find it on YouTube. 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, sorry, strength, order, feeling and understanding, not feeling an agency.

1:06:46Strength, order, feeling and understanding. And he does all, he hits all of those kind of for buttons in the apology video. You can tell he's furious, you know, he's angry. We've called the police, they've been arrested, we've shut down the branch of dominoes, we've completely, you know, he tells you all the things they've done, which is the tough guy stuff. But then he adds in, look, we're a franchise business, all these dominoes around the country, they're owned by mums and dads, they're all suffering and the people who own this dominoes franchise are suffering too. And we feel really bad for them.

1:07:18So you've got that feeling and understanding stuff in there too. And it worked. I mean, so when you talk about this whole domino scandal with the snot and the fart, no one's ever heard of it. It went away. It went away. It was a really successful apology video. And I think it's because he does come across as this. He's a lumpy CEO. He doesn't look particularly heroic. But he's embodying all the causes of the classic narrative hero in that video. Have you seen any bad ones? Do any scientific, I think it's the science of storytelling suboptimal. Oh yeah, I forget the name of the platform now, but it's in the book, there's a guy, what's the, there was some website he owned, I think.

1:08:03And he had to lay off like two people. And when he had to lay off two people, he put a video of himself on LinkedIn with a tier, like a genuinely, like a tier coming down his face. Talking about I wish, I wish I was the kind of CEO, know, the good just lay people off and not care, but I care so much. And of course, you know, it's back to the selfishness thing. He's just thinking about himself. And you know, it was entirely self -defeating. The comments under the LinkedIn video were hilarious. It became a big daily male story. It became this kind of massively hated figure for a few days in the media generally.

1:08:38So, so yeah, the LinkedIn tear guys is I think the worst one I've ever seen. Okay. So, getting practical, what do most people get wrong about good stories, good storytelling? What do most people get wrong with storytelling? I think there's so much, but what do you mean when they're trying to create kind of persuasive stories? Yeah. Okay. Well, I think people still feel that the best way to sell a product is with facts about the product. I mean, there might be cases in which that's true. Certainly, you can list lots of business to business cases in which that's true. If you're wanting to order a part for your car, your rocket, you just want to know how good the car, the part is that you know, it's fine.

1:09:24But if we're not talking business to business, generally is the best way to appeal to people's identities. It's much more powerful than, you know, appealing to the qualities of your product. 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. Likeability is the thing.

1:10:02But likeability 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 girlboss here in Hollywood has been so unbelievably toxic in the Indiana Jones, the Star Wars, and in the UK, the Doctor Who, where they've not just removed or the straight white male characters, but humiliated them. They've killed them and humiliated them and replaced them with mostly, you know, carpal cutout girlbosses. So, so, you know, So, you know, these story franchises were broadly made for young men.

1:10:43You 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, because in a very real sense, if you're humiliating and degrading Luke Skywalker and in the end of Jones and Dr. Who, you're humiliating and degrading, they themselves who are watching it. So that identification is just a massively important thing. If it was just I like Luke Skywalker, he is likable.

1:11:23You've made him unlikable. So what? But I identify with Luke Skywalker. I see me in him and he's now being Marked or casted or whatever that makes me feel marked in castigate. Absolutely right So absolutely so so when we identify with anything we make it a part of ourselves You know, we make the music with the art we love for part of ourselves who make the cars we buy part of ourselves You know, we are a collection of ideas and you know what what you know one of the most important facets of identity and the people, the stories that we love, and the characters that we grew up with. Luke Skywalker at the beginning of the first Star Wars film is this orphan.

1:12:00He works on a moisture farm. He's solo status, his nickname amongst his school friends was Wormy. That's what they call it, Wormy. And he overcomes his fears and becomes this incredible hero. And people love Luke Skywalker, but in the latter period of Star Wars, they've reintroduced him as just the sort of thing with Indiana Jones and, you know, they do it time and time again. They reintroduced these amazing, straight white male heroes and make them miserable, sexist, disillusioned. They had him sort of chugging this kind of weird teet milk offer. I mean, he was humiliated. He was just sort of this with Chris Hemsworth's Thor, right?

1:12:40And you've done that across a much shorter timeline. I think the first Thor probably came out less than 15 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, something like that. And, you know, across the span of maybe only four, four 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 Damne splits over flying dragons and is kind of always out of touch and the butt of every joke and totally unself aware. And yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if someone was like, I see a little bit of that heroic energy, but kind of adult manchild thing in Thor.

1:13:27I think they would feel put out in a way. So, how important are heroes? Then is that a crucial element of most stories? Yeah, we're archetypal stories telling 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, protagonist is 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 gonna be rewarded with these incredibly precious social resources of connection and status That's what all heroes and archetypal stories win.

1:14:03They win connections and or status So that's what happens with obviously with Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. He begins his wormy ends up with the middle round his chest surrounded by people who love him. You know, that's what we all want. That's a human universal. That's what drives everyone is well three things survival connection status. Those are the three things that all humans want. And that's that those are the three things that all the subject of all like a tuple storytelling. All stories are about survival connection or status and the best story is the stories that But last of the ages that we can watch again and again and again are about all three.

1:14:38So 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. Now these epic, amazing stories feel so rich and full and drenched in meaning because because they're about 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 messages subconsciously.

1:15:16They 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 make Luke Skywalker part of our identity, and then he's humiliated and degraded and replaced in this way, it's painful. 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 Straightforward piece of anti -strait what I'm a propaganda and painting us as misogynist woman, you know woman killers Who you can't even take an insult without picking up a knife and committing murder?

1:15:53And now there's all these stories saying oh men men just don't have any role models anymore And so yeah, because you replaced us all, you replaced us all with girlbosses, you humiliated us, you know, and wrote us out of your scripts and now you're worrying about panicking. You know, you're right, we don't anymore, 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 always running rings about them, humiliating them, knocking them down with one punch. I mean, you see it again and again and again and again and again and again and it's going on for over a decade now.

1:16:26Now, 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 that career, who did want to feel like they were high achieving and they had agency, maybe that was an issue, And maybe many women were less cut a drift and felt lonely because, well, I don't really see women with the sort of drive that I have in 1960's cinema. That 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.

1:17:11Do you know that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true. I mean, yeah, it's a totally fair criticism. them. But I think they were always happy, but I think you're right. There were enough well -written female heroes with agency, but you did get Princess Leia, you did get, you know, it's a goodie weaver in Alien. I mean, I love, I love Prumb Suspect Helen Mirrens, Carriage and Prumb Suspect. I love all that stuff. I mean, 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 man in here at Rory, you've got to watch some terrible guy Richie movie or like it like it like it you know like like largely speaking they just don't really exist anymore.

1:17:56And interestingly I think a lot of a lot a lot of people have now thought like you are thriving on the internet because the internet is a is a meritocracy and isn't isn't a gatekeeper is not gatekeeper so so so the internet is kind of the only place now where straight white now creators can survive and make a living. Well, you also certainly end up with a situation. If there is a vacuum, there was a vacuum for the women role model, and that got filled. It got filled by a variety of better and worse examples of that. And then 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.

1:18:42and a bodybuild rich piano, pick your alpha male guy or whatever, like a beta male guy of choice. Pick your whoever role model it is that you want from the left, from the right, Libertarian, authoritarian, whatever. If there aren't any that are supplied, that creates a gap in the market. There's no coffee shop for three mile radius around this particular neighborhood. Guess what, there's gonna be a fucking coffee shop that's the thing. And I think early period, you know, and 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.

1:19:20You either loved him or you hated him and all he was doing was sticking up for us. We were so desperate for somebody to stand up and go, there's actually nothing wrong with being a straight white man and this is how you ought to do it and you should hold you head up and clean your room and all that stuff. It was kind of a ledger fine but then on the other side you do have your Andrew Tates. you know, if young men, if the culture keeps on telling straight white men that they're bad and they're useless and that the butt of every joke and they're going to be girlboster hell in every drama they see and they're going to be in adolescence and show them stabbing or into death, then they're going to go to the people that say, no, I respect you, I've got you back.

1:20:01Of course they are because they want status like we all do. I mean, you know, it's a kind of, I think people underestimate kind of how pervasive all of this stuff is, really. And I kind of think we're at the foothills of a new era here. And I see it very starkly in my world, which is books. Given that you've been involved in the writing and publishing industry for a long time, I see that this is a point of passion for you. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because I've kind of all right in a sense, because I'm in there now, and I have a readership, and so that's fine. But I know, I'm pretty sure that if I was starting out now, I'll be finding it extremely hard to get.

1:20:49And I've also seen the change in the way my books are received since all this happened. You know, like when Selfie was published, I think 2017, It was reviewed across all the newspapers. I was on the television. I was on newsnight. I was on radio. One, two, three, four, and five. You know, like it 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 store is a deal, but just published. We got one review, one review and we could reach in the time. That's it. So paradoxically, the more successful I've become as an author, you know, my last two books have been before I'm away, when most successful.

1:21:26The harder it is for the to get any coverage in the mainstream media to get support from the bookshops and to get slots at book festivals I used to be at the Edinburgh festival every year. Now there's no way I can't get to the Edinburgh festival anymore. Despite the fact that you're selling more books than you ever do. Yeah, yeah. And the fact is that the only reason I'm still going is because of the podcast sphere. Like, it was the podcast guys that supported the status game. Like, you know, the status games don't really well now because it was embraced by people like you and... Well, because it was brilliant, right?

1:22:01Well, it was a brilliant book. Thank you, Chris. But like, but when it was published, again, we got one review week of release, we couldn't get anyone to talk about it. It was crazy. Or the day was published, I looked on Amazon and it was at number something like six, and it was 6 ,500 in the message. Honestly, I was devastated. I was like, what is going on? But it's because you've got an everlasting, but it's ended up being successful because... Of the podcast. Because the podcast... She doesn't have to. ...shuff it down, everybody's throwing. Well, you know, for now, the podcast sphere is still male -dominated.

1:22:33And we'll see, unless you're male -robbins or Alex Cooper, I think it's the top, whatever. You see, I don't think that's a coincidence because I think people like you and, you know, a lot of the other sort of big podcast guys. In the previous generation, you'd be on television, but there's no place in mainstream media for straight white guys anymore. So they're doing podcasts. And so I think that's why. That's why. That is a little bit of a meme. I actually did a recorded a live tour video going on tour in the US and Canada back into this year. And the entire crux of the joke is that I'm in prison.

1:23:08I've been detained by ICE in America. And I'm in prison because America's is getting rid of all surplus white podcasters. So, the meme keeps on meaming. Just on the practical point around the stories, you mentioned atomic statements before. Yeah. How do you make stories more sticky? It's all well and good. You tell someone a story. For you, as the person that's written it, or put it together, you believe that it's important, but 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?

1:23:50Well, I mean, you know, one thing is that atomic nature. It's got to be have brevity and clarity. So it's so it's so it's got to have as maximum meaning in minimal space. So you know that that that so that's a tweet. That's a meme. That's a that's an aphorism. You know, so it's 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 people got to identify with what you're saying. And it's got to tell them a story that they want to hear, that reaffirms their story of their identity. So, again, back to that example of Kamala, is for they, then, Trump is for you.

1:24:23That's a perfect example of a perfect, kind of a atomic statement sticky, because it's easy to understand, easy to memorize, easy to share, you're going to tell it to each other. It appeals to identity and it tells a story that people really want to hear It reaffirms their perception of the world other story of the world are there fundamental questions that everyone's trying to answer with a story Or are they so varied that there's no such thing as a unifying thread? The most fundamental question that humans ask really is who do I have to be in this place in order to earn connection and status That's fundamentally what brains are always asking When we come out of the womb, we have these, what they call, experienced, expectant brains.

1:25:08They're half -wired up. And the rest of the wiring comes up during our childhood. And our culture is forming itself in our brains. We're figuring out our identity. Who do I have to be in order to earn connection status? And of course, we add lessons in early twenties as a peak time for really thinking about this stuff and identity formation. But we never stop asking those questions. We never stop changing who we are. People talk about audience capture. That's why audience capture is so dangerous. Even the smartest people, some of whom we mentioned tonight, started off in my estimation as a rational, smart, really interesting people.

1:25:46And they've gone on a journey. And the journey has been to take their identity 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 great and they're terrible. So that's a me. These are the most fundamental questions that everybody asks. We turn ourselves into the answer. We turn ourselves into the people we have to be in order to earn connection to status from our groups. Interestingly, there was an article by Ethan Cross. I must bring this up fucking once a week. It's phenomenal. It's called criticism capture is more dangerous to an audience capture.

1:26:27And 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, your feed red meat to the audience, you become increasingly predictable over time. 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 that criticisms are much more warping than compliments are infusing. So people who make content online, they start to compensate in a variety of different ways. They become firebrands, they become very defensive or very aggressive about their position.

1:27:07They begin to create in a manner that pushes back or tries to counter what it is that they perceive critics so they're 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. 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 brave and more equanimous moments, I'm like, no, fuck it, like just say what you mean.

1:27:49But pain is much more painful than pleasure is pleasurable. And yeah, that that simple sort of fact about the way that we experience the world, it plays out to in the way that people respond to you. You know, if you were learning to do salsa dancing and you salsa dance and someone gave you a high five five five classes in a row and said, oh man, that was cool. But then on the sixth class, someone went, dude, you fucking suck. Why are you going salsa dancing? That one's going to stay with you and then maybe you're not going to show up anymore. Maybe you're going to salsa dance more slowly or quietly or maybe you're going to come in and you're going to say, I'm the best salsa dancer in this entire play.

1:28:28You know, there's loads of ways that you get warped by criticism. Well, there's an author you always remember. You never remember the good reviews. You only remember the boundary views. It's just a cliche, but it's absolutely true. Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely I'm sure. And there's also an evolutionary kind of angle to that because criticism is a form of gossip. And back in the days when our brains were evolving and the hunter gather a tribe, if you are the subject of negative gossip, it was life threatening. Literally, you could be kicked out of the tribe, you could be killed, and sometimes even eaten.

1:28:59So in the back of our minds, we've always got that. That program is still inside us. Social criticism is dangerous, but potentially life threatening. So you must attend to it very carefully and adapt your behavior. So I've no doubt, there's a smart take from me, think of it as absolutely. Yeah, I've no doubt that criticism capture. It is far more important than audience capture, yeah. What was that smoker -discussed thing, the story about changing habits around smoking? Oh yeah. Well, this is one of my stories I really like because it really shows you how people people care about identity far more than they care about their own lives.

1:29:38And it's just an argument that you can't understand why human smoke without understanding our need for status and need to have this kind of a higher status identity. You know, I smoke, you know, it starts smoking in the 90s. And you know, we knew back then that smoking was going to kill you. We knew it was addictive and it was going to make you, you know, to your breath stink, your close stink. It's going to cost you a fortune. And yet we still did it. Well, I know why did we do it? Well, we did it because it makes you perhaps 8 % look 8 % cooler when you're at the gig. You know, like that's probably did it.

1:30:14You know, it's ridiculous. So it's crazy. And you know, that's kind of what they found. And in the book I tell the story of how, you know, when cigarettes kind of became popular after the war because they packed tobacco into their ration packs in the first world war. and the Second World War. So all these veterans, his soldiers came back smoking, to cigarette, to smoke, to go 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 sort of genius, Sigmund Freud's nephew was hired by as a great company to try and get women smoking.

1:30:55And this was in the 20s when, you know, feminism was just becoming this big massively powerful kind of cultural force. And so he said So he paid lots of like debut haunts and Vogue models to appear at some big sort of flashy event in New York or smoking cigarettes and they were photographed and you know it was shown everywhere so you know this is a high status thing and he ran his ad campaign saying the cigarettes were yes they're rebellious but that's why feminists should smoke because feminists 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.

1:31:34And so that traveled across to the UK in cinema. So in Hollywood, heroines like I'm started smoking cigarettes, you know, I'm not minding deep -tripped when people are that. And so women in the UK started smoking too. So the whole story of smoking is all about status. It's all about identity. And that's how it fades out as well. It faded out accidentally. For generations, well, governments in the UK, America and elsewhere, was always a pill to survive or to stop smoking. It's going to give you cancer. He's a picture of a lung, all that, you know, these are the warnings. No, I gave a shit, I had no impact whatsoever.

1:32:12And what made it stop was when there was a moral panic about second hand smoke, you know, why should I be in a restaurant and breathe in somebody else's smoke. So starting in California, I think it was in 2007, they banned smoking in restaurants, and then it became workplaces, and then it spread throughout America, spread to the UK. And then suddenly you couldn't look 8 % cooler anymore if you're smoking a cigarette because the smokers weren't inside by the restaurant or the bar, the gig. They were shuffling outside in the rain and having a quick fan 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.

1:32:47And you know, that reflects my own story. I desperately tried to get out of smoking because I started coughing up literally. I was changed to chain smoke when I was drinking and I was used to drink ice. was alcoholic basically and I would cough up brown jelly in the sink in the morning, it was freaking me out. But even that didn't stop me smoking, I tried twice and failed. Well got me to stop was I was a journalist on a magazine called Lodi, don't know, you know, I'm saying Trump, we're just a kind of a men's magazine and there were lots of women in Lodi and one time I was assigned to go and I kind of if it was a model or it was a Hollywood actress it was one of the two and if you have been on one of these shoots they have these false polystyrene walls behind which they do the dressing, so they do the hair in the makeup and the styling.

1:33:31So I knocked on the wall and went into introduce myself and said, I'm here, I'll be waiting out here and sat behind the polystyrene wall. And then I heard the stylist say to the Hollywood actress, oh, did you see his fingers? They're yellow stains of them. That's disgusting. I was like, oh my God. Like, so it was the status. It was the having the two pretty women called me disgusting. That was what I pushed me over of the edge. And you know, and what was true for me is true for people in general. I mean, I know we've got the vaping issue now as a new issue, but smoking cigarettes is, you know, it fell out.

1:34:03It became low status and that's what stopped it. And then do you think binge drinking, the decline in binge drinking now is, where do you think that's come from? Yeah, I suspect there is some truth in the argument that you hear a lot that it's to do with social media that I mean, God, you know, when I was binge drinking, when I was 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. But I also think there's a bigger story to that that I don't fully understand. I mean, there's certainly this, it has been this kind of lurched towards puritanism in the gen Z generation, the generation of my nieces, because it's not just about binge drinking, it's about sex, it's about drug use, it's about the moral purity, which are they, with the first generation, to be more morally pure than their parents?

1:34:59I mean, maybe. Like it's definitely a weird thing that's happened to Gen Z's that encompasses being a drinking issue part of it. Yeah, I think an increasing focus on health. I run nightclubs for forever. So I saw this first time that the arc of probably the peak of Larry British drinking, especially young people drinking culture, and contributed to it, and I'd profited from it in many ways. And yeah, the advent of the smartphone, the fact that this can just detect whatever it is that's going on.

1:35:44We used to run this barcroll called Carnage and there was tasks on the back that you had to take off with the market pen, like pulled a pig, got off with three random, swapped shoes with somebody. And now there's just no, this fucking surveillance state run by gullible volunteers that is the smartphone in your pocket and the subsequent info that gets put up on the internet afterward. But 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 everything now.

1:36:26Yeah, I'm sure that's got a lot to do with it. I'm sure you're absolutely right. Because again, it goes back to, what do we want, we want connection and status. And when you're sort of binge drinking, it's hard to maintain that status in the eyes of people and Jesus if it's recorded and deadly and perhaps uploaded to YouTube by somebody. Not good. No way. Okay, especially not if it's reacted to by the Domino's black and CEO that we're at the beginning. Well, let's bring this one home mate. I love you. I love your work. I think that the things that you write are phenomenal. Where should people go?

1:36:59They want to keep up to date with all of the shit that's going on. My substack willstore .substack .com is called You Are a Story. We've got weekly essays on that way, everything we've been talking about today really and more. So yeah, I'd love to see you there. And you've got a book. Oh yeah, my book. Story's a deal. I get told off. Yeah, Story's a deal. My new book on storytelling, persuasion. So if you interested in the sense of storytelling and how it's used to persuade people and change belief and change behavior, you will find it in a story is a deal. Pat Kear. Well, I appreciate you. Thank you, mate.

1:37:35Thanks Chris, that was amazing. Thank you.