Six months before ChatGPT arrived, I sat down for two and a half hours with the only West Point graduate ever to become a professional storyteller.

Dr. Kendall Haven also holds a doctorate in oceanography and spent eight years as a senior research scientist at the Department of Energy. Then he walked away to chase what he calls a very different kind of truth.

His bottom line stopped me cold:

“Story is not theoretical anymore. It’s not hyperbole. Story is woven into our DNA. We are story. That’s now science.”

In 2022, that sounded like a storyteller defending his craft. Today, with machines built entirely out of human language, it sounds like something else.

Kendall argues that your brain story-processes information before it ever reaches your conscious mind. Which is why throwing more #data at people almost never changes their behavior. You have to reframe the story instead. And the most effective change stories, he says, are not about change at all. They’re about preservation.

We also got into why great stories work like famous chess games, the problem with how we read scientific reports, whether #storytelling deserves its bad reputation, and the danger of story becoming a universal hammer for every nail. I’m still chewing on that last one.

If the #AI age turns out to be a contest of narratives rather than a contest of models, who gets to write the human story?

Watch or listen to the full conversation with Kendall Haven here: [ https://snglrty.co/3QWfVzb](https://snglrty.co/3QWfVzb)

Kendall Haven is a West Point graduate with Ph. D. in oceanography and a professional storyteller. His ‘Story Proof’ pioneered the science behind story.