A Masterclass In Storytelling - Will Storr - #944

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Why are stories so persuasive?

**Will Storr** (0:03)
Well, stories are persuasive because human's thinking 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. So story is always going to be the most persuasive, you know, technology out there. Story is also always going to be the thing that persuades people most of all.

**Chris Williamson** (0:36)
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.

**Will Storr** (1:21)
Absolutely. I think there's a huge naivety out there that 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 naïve 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, Steven Novella, who used to present a podcast called The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. He very confidently told me that skeptics were kind of immune to irrationality because they were kind of tuned to be automatically skeptical about crazy beliefs. I just think that's sort of deeply naïve.
What you'll find, especially you see all the time in the era of social media is that even scientists, not even scientists as much as anybody else, they start with the story and then they find the data to back up their story. So you can find academics who know way more than you or 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 can 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 someone like Jordan Peterson on the one hand, and Adam Rutherford on the other hand, two very smart men, two very opinionated men, two men who I respect equally, I would say, but two men who are very angry and very lost in the story. They're both lost in the story. So I love Adam and I love Jordan. I can never imagine being in the same room together.

**Chris Williamson** (3:03)
I was about to say, I wonder what happens over that dinner table.

**Will Storr** (3:07)
But equally, with the greatest respect to both of them, I wouldn't trust either of them to talk to me about the science of gender, talk to me certainly about what's going on in Israel, Palestine.

**Chris Williamson** (3:18)
Dispassionately.

**Will Storr** (3:19)
Yeah, dispassionately. 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.

**Chris Williamson** (3:43)
Have you come across knowingness? Do you know what that is?

**Will Storr** (3:47)
No, this is new to me.

**Chris Williamson** (3:48)
Cool idea. So this is from Brian Class, who wrote Fluke, outstanding book, nearly as good as yours. And he talks about the problem of knowingness. A lot of people in the modern world think that the biggest issue is misinformation. It's people being given poor quality information. He contends that a much bigger issue is knowingness. And knowingness is a belief that you already have the answer to the question before the question has been posed. It's a kind of reverse intellectual curiosity. So I know, no, no, no, no, no, no, the science is settled on climate change. Humans are not 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.