The hard skill of story (and why AI doesn't scare me)

For much of the last year, Paul and I have been blissfully unaware of anything new on TV/streaming. We’ve been so busy winding down one startup, containing the surging growth of our bookstore, dealing with a household of tweens, and so much else in life to think about what to watch.?

We get through our days and to that point after dinner and after bedtime, when we are barely still awake and we watch one of the following: An Agatha Christie, a Murder She Wrote, a Columbo. . . or equivalent.

When he’s not around, I’ve been binging every season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, which I missed during my haze of babies and startups and divorces and the “life” that was then.

But this week, encouraged by the New York Times and other word of mouth, we started to watch “The Traitors”, which is such old news it’s on season 2. But compared to the rest of our viewing, it’s a new release.?

For anyone else too busy to have caught it, it’s basically a game of Werewolf. Three of the contestants are “traitors” who secretly meet at night to murder one of the “faithful” and the “faithful” have to try to banish the people they think are “traitors” before they kill again. (Shed a tear for the poor makers of Werewolf who seem to get no credit. Meanwhile Mattel is making a movie off of Uno??)

I’m sure a lot has already been written about the show itself and why it works. But here’s what struck me last night on episode five or six of season 1: Despite one of The Traitors being one of the most irritating people on the show, I have found myself full-on-high-stakes rooting for the Traitors each week. Like heart-in-my-throat, edge-of-my-seat NEEDING them to get away with it another week. Even though they are lying and cheating the rest of the cast.?

They should be the bad guys.?I don't even like them that much. So why am I rooting for them so intensely?

Because we obsess about nothing but story tactics, I paused it and asked Paul how they pulled that off.?

“I wonder how Lisa Cron would explain this?” I asked.?

Lisa Cron is the absolute goddess of story, why we are universally powerless to turn away from it when it’s done well, but why it’s surprisingly so hard to do well. She’s one of the most sought after coaches when it comes to the neuroscience behind story, to superstar filmmakers and authors alike.

Our former company, ChairmanMe, used to offer a course by her, and she’s Paul’s book coach, so we have spent a lot of time going through Lisa’s Bible of story, which works if you are novelist, a marketer, a political candidate or raising money.?

He shrugged and left the room and then came back with the answer and it was so obvious and brilliant at once: “We are on their side, because we know their secret. Because we know their secret, we feel like we are also traitors and so we take their side. And because we know something the faithfuls don’t, we have a latent contempt for them.”

I love to find reasons to disagree with Paul (it's irritating to live with former journalists) but this was exactly right.

I suddenly thought how the episode we were watching would feel if we didn’t know who the Traitors were. At the end of each banishment, when the person goes in the circle of truth and tells everyone what they are, I would scream along with the contestants in anguish if they person wasn’t revealed to be a Traitor.?

He was exactly right. That one programming decision utterly changed how we experience the show. You cannot not root for the Traitors.?

I spend most of my day obsessed with storytelling. The hard science of it. The hard skill of it. Both hard and hard. We lump it in with "soft skills" but I owe my whole career and net worth to it.

I obsess over when it falls flat, and when we find ourselves powerless to resist it. And how that magic trick is pulled off, or. . . completely flubbed.?

I think about it when it comes to the books we sell. Why a “guilty pleasure” with clumsy writing can be impossible to put down. When a book loses me, why did it lose me??

I think about it with my own writing, should I ever write a book again (which who TFK...)

And I think about it in my other job: Growth marketing and story consulting for a few high end clients in Silicon Valley.?

I think about it when I write a six word note card recommendation for a book or a marketing email or a fundraising deck.?

I think about it when I’m trying to convince my kids to stop putting off homework. Or convince my elderly father not to drive anymore.?

I think about it constantly because Lisa has sold me that it’s really our universal processing language as human beings and always has been. It's our warning system. Our dreaming engine. It's our humanity.

Lately, I’ve started to see Silicon Valley even tacitly acknowledge that story is actually everything.?

I was recently reading a newsletter about industry standards for testing pricing. And atop a long, detailed, technical article about the various methodologies was a point at the top acknowledging that all of these strategies are actually useless without nailing the story of why your product is worth that amount of money.?

Think of various pieces of cloth, plastic, metal and the wild swings in what you might pay for them. People say it’s about “brand” but brand is just well executed story. It’s story that sounds more grown up and professional, but it’s still story.?

Also recently, I was tagged on a post by Jim Louderback talking about the impressive AI tools around video, and how those with technical video skills would be soon obsolete and that more than anything the human part of video would be distilling the story.?

There’s a certain amount AI can do. As a marketer, I like to play with AI tools, especially when they boast they can write a better subject line. They can’t, so far. Because my subject lines are not best practice cookie cutter formulas. They are weird. They are attuned to my audience and what I am trying to sell, authentically and weirdly as my own weird self.?

When we used to sell courses at ChairmanMe, we first had to know who our customer was, what they were struggling with, the language they use on Reddit threads and with their friends to describe that problem, and what we called "The Red Slipper moment". How our product would give them the transformation, the moment when they realized they had the tools all along and we just unlocked it for them. The "aha" moment.

To do that, I needed a lot of tools and know how, and market research. But I also needed nearly 50 years of life experience as that customer. It's not a surprise so many successful companies come from a founder trying to solve their own problem. They have internalized the story.

If you are a middling marketer, AI can probably do better. Right now, if you are great marketer, it can't.

It may be naive, but this is why I don’t personally worry about AI coming for me. I think story is innately human, and at the end of the day, everything I’m doing is tapping into that power and science of story. That’s how I’ve beat every odd in my career.?

I think story is what we'll be left with.

Ever wondered why the women who tend to break out of that 2% of venture capital fundraising box tend to be media people not technical people? Despite the industry saying they prefer technical founders, I believe it’s those of us who can use story who gets the industry over its biases.?

Not only is it innately human, but it’s innately individual and universal at the same time. Think of how many books are really about the same thing: love, loss, adventure, coming of age, hubris. . .Think of just one example: “The Illiad” and how many times it has been written and re-written and re-written again. Always new, always compelling. Because each time it’s washed through a new person’s consciousness it changes, as much as the themes stay universal.?

Paul would add: The power of novels, why they are so terrifying to people throughout centuries who have wanted to ban books more than weapons, isn’t just that human to human connection through story, it’s the fact that we know it’s coming from another human. It’s that vulnerability.?It's why reality TV works in the first place.

And it’s hard enough for humans to do that well, let alone machines.