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, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why are stories so persuasive?
Why are stories so persuasive? Well, stories are persuasive because humans think in stories. Our brains remix reality and turn that reality into a narrative with ourselves at the center. 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, you know, technology out there. Story's also always going to be the thing that persuades people most of all.
Is it kind of ironic that in the modern world, a lot of the time we're told to take great heed of rationality and data and statistics and stuff like that, but you've got to disregard all of that personification and narrative and archetypes and religion and mythology. 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 sort of alien to us.
Absolutely. And I think there's a huge naivety out there that, you know, especially in, you know, what you might call our world of, you know, we like to think of ourselves as rational people, atheistic people, people who are interested in data 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, you know, automatically skeptical about crazy beliefs.
I just think that's sort of deeply naive, you know, like what you'll find, especially, you know, you see all the time in the era of social media is that, you know, even, you scientists, you know, 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 I, both of us put together about human biology who believe in that kind of woke idea of biology, gender biology, and why are men better than women at certain things? They could find all the data in the world to tell you that that's not true, even though we believe that it is true. So you can take something like Jordan Peterson,
on the one hand, and Adam Rutherford, on the other hand, two very smart men, two very opinionated men, two men who I respect, you know, equally, I would say, but two men who are very angry and very lost in the story. They're both lost in the story. So, you know, I love Adam and I love Jordan. I can never imagine being in the same room together.
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Chapter 2: Is storytelling a science we can learn?
They cause us to believe certain things and to behave in certain ways.
Why? Is this just that evolutionarily, if all you've got is the spoken word, humans needed to... 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...
um is this just before you've got written word and before you can do statistical analysis the most obvious most common most sort of close to our experience of reality way to communicate information was to personify it into a sort of a narrative is that we're just the progeny of storytellers that told stories to pass down wisdom to tell stories to pass down wisdom um
Well, I mean, the current leading theory is that language evolved in the first place to tell stories that enabled us to operate as these highly cooperative groups, these super organisms, as I call them. One early form of storytelling is gossip. Gossip is a universal human behavior. We all do it. Why do we do it? Gossip teaches us... who we ought to be in the super organism.
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 super organism because then we're rewarded with status. Uh, and it, 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. So that's one form of early storytelling.
The other kind of storytelling is about the future. We tell stories about the future. There's a very brilliant evolutionary biologist called Michael Tomasello that says that it's impossible to imagine
two chimpanzees picking up a log and carrying it together to take it somewhere else like even that basic level of coordination cooperation like even chimpanzees can't do our closest um 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 going to do it.
So that's a form of storytelling. You know, we're telling stories about the future. And that's why stories are always about obstacles and goals. Every functional story fundamentally is about obstacles and goals, because that's what story evolved to do. Its purpose is to pull us into a group. And the purpose of that group is to overcome obstacles in pursuit of goals.
What role does social identity and mimicry play here?
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Chapter 3: What role does knowingness play in modern storytelling?
and becomes this incredible hero. And people love Luke Skywalker. But in the latter period of Star Wars, they've reintroduced him just as they did with Indiana Jones. 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 her. I mean, he was humiliated.
I mean, you saw this with Chris Hemsworth as Thor, right? And you've done that across a much shorter timeline. I think the first Thor probably came out less than 15 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, something like that.
And, you know, across the span of maybe only four Thor movies, maybe like eight that he was involved in to do with the Avengers, he's gone from being slightly childish but lovingly heroic... god guy to person that does Jean-Claude Van Damme splits over flying dragons and is kind of always out of touch and the butt of every joke and totally unselfaware.
And yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if someone was like, I see a little bit of that heroic energy, but kind of adult man-child thing in Thor. I think they would feel...
um put out in a way so how yeah how important are heroes then is it is that a crucial element of most stories yeah yeah archetypal storytelling i'm talking about i'm not talking about modernist novels that kind of that exist to break the rules that's the kind of whole point of them in archetypal storytelling yeah protagonists are really important because um you know my book is called a story is a deal and what i mean by that is that a story subconsciously says if you behave like the hero does
you're going to be rewarded with these incredibly precious social resources of connection and status. That's what all heroes in 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. You know, that's what we all want.
That's a human universal. That's what drives us. Everyone is... Well, three things. Survival, connection, and status. Those are the three things that all humans want. And those are the three things that are the subject of all archetypal storytelling. All stories are about survival, connection, or status.
And the best stories, the stories that last through the ages that we can watch again and again and again are about all three. So if you think about... A movie like The Revenant, that's about survival. A movie like Stand By Me is about connection. A movie like Barbie or Whiplash is about status. But The Godfather, that's about survival and connection and status in about equal measure.
So is Romeo and Juliet. So is Star Wars. You know, these epic, amazing stories. feel so rich and full and drenched in meaning 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 you know, messages subconsciously.
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