“We’re not gods, we’re just storytelling animals.”

Will Storr said that to me in March 2022. ChatGPT launched eight months later.

Since then we’ve built machines that do one thing astonishingly well: tell us stories. Fluent ones. Confident ones. Stories in which we are, conveniently, the hero.

That should worry us more than it does.

Will’s argument in The Science of Storytelling is that the human brain is not a truth engine. It’s a hero maker. It quietly edits reality so we come out looking right, good, and justified. Now pair that brain with an #AI trained on billions of our stories and tuned to keep us engaged.

Who’s writing whom?

We spent two hours on what a story actually is, why status drives far more of our behavior than we admit, where science, religion, and technology fit as competing narratives, and whether we’re still free to choose our own.

I also put Yuval Harari’s claim to him, that humanity is converging rather than diversifying. I phrased it badly. Listen to how he handles it.

Recorded before the generative AI boom, this conversation reads differently now. If you care about #storytelling, #futurism, or what it means to stay human when machines can out-narrate us, it’s worth your time.

Full 2-hour video and audio with Will Storr on the science of storytelling, the brain as hero maker, and why story may matter more than technology for our future: [ https://snglrty.co/3B3Unfn](https://snglrty.co/3B3Unfn)

Will Storr on why we should care about story, why the brain is a storyteller and hero maker in the status game we all play.