In January 2022, ten months before ChatGPT arrived, I spent two and a half hours with Lisa Cron trying to answer a question that had stalled my book: what is story, really, and why does it have such a grip on us?

I was stuck. So I went looking for people who understood #storytelling better than I did. Lisa was the first.

She wrote Wired for Story and Story or Die, worked as a literary agent and Hollywood story analyst, and has taught at UCLA since 2006. I expected craft advice. I got biology.

Her claim that the brain uses story as a kind of virtual reality simulator stayed with me long after we stopped recording. If that’s true, what happens when machines can produce stories endlessly, cheaply, and tuned to each of us? Whoever writes the story ends up shaping the simulation.

We also got into why more evidence can push people further away, the one real way to step into someone else’s shoes, the cure and the poison of story, and whether social media had already hacked our narrative wiring before #AI showed up to scale it.

I asked these questions in 2022. They read differently in 2026.

Full video and audio of my conversation with Lisa Cron: [ https://snglrty.co/3ZzdHLI](https://snglrty.co/3ZzdHLI)

Lisa Cron on why we are wired for story, why story is the only way to change people’s minds and why our current dilemma is ‘story or die.’