Hello Everyone,
I’m thrilled to share episode two of The Balcony View Podcast with Alexander Beiner, available on Spotify, Apple, Pocketcasts, TuneIn, Stitcher and more. For all you audio readers out there, you’ll be happy to hear that all of TBV's audio articles will be shared directly to the podcast feed too. And for those of you who enjoy reading interviews the old-fashioned way, you’ll find a full transcript of the episode below.
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Katie x
In this episode, I speak with Alexander Beiner about the power of storytelling. Across the conversation, we discuss how to use storytelling to make sense of complicated concepts and ideas, using storytelling to weave together seemingly unrelated disciplines, story as a bridge between different systems, the darker side of storytelling, and much more.
Alexander Beiner is a writer, podcaster, and facilitator with a love for making sense of culture, hosting transformative experiences, and exploring how we can evolve and thrive in the chaotic times we live in. He is one of the founders of Rebel Wisdom, a popular alternative media platform that ran from 2017-2022 and explored cutting-edge systems change and cultural sensemaking. As well as publishing regular essays and articles on his Substack, The Bigger Picture, he is also an executive director of Breaking Convention, Europe's longest-running conference on psychedelic medicine and culture, and also co-created and co-facilitated a legal psilocybin retreat called Regenerative Stewardship. He is the author of 'The Bigger Picture: How psychedelics can help us make sense of the world,' which was released this month and is available on Audible, Amazon, and more. I would highly recommend picking up a copy- everything Ali writes is hugely thought-provoking and has me questioning my worldview.
This was a fascinating deep dive into storytelling and how it helps us make sense of the world. Enjoy!
Episode 2: We’re Wired for Story with Alexander Beiner
Key
KC- Katie Churchman
AB- Alexander Beiner
KC: Ali. Welcome to the Balcony View Podcast. Delighted to have you on the show.
AB: Delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.
KC: I'm very excited about this discussion today, and I want to start by talking about the fact that you use a range of different mediums and platforms. So you write, you podcast, you create videos, and across all of these, I've noticed a theme around storytelling. And so, I want to start by asking you why storytelling is so integral to your work and what you do.
AB: Yeah, well, I mean, the first thing to say is that I love it, and I think many of us love a story. I have really vivid memories of sitting in school at the age of like six or seven for story time. A teacher will read, or my mum and dad actually used to read to me as well. And there's just something magical about it, I think. But aside from that quality of it, there are a few reasons I think storytelling is so important. One of them is that if we want to communicate ideas to each other, we generally do it through stories. And there’s actually a lot of neuroscience to back this up, that we learn much more through stories rather than just facts.
KC: Right.
AB: Which is, of course, why the news isn't just, this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened. And here are the statistics. We, of course, tell stories around stuff. In fact, we're just kind of completely immersed and wrapped up in stories everywhere. Our own stories, the people we're connected to, the stories we tell about our culture. So, the world is, in some way, the social sphere is made of stories. And so, if we want to communicate or make sense of it or hopefully change aspects of it, we have to do that. Not exclusively, but definitely a huge part of it is through storytelling. There's another aspect of stories which is that they are one of the most inclusive ways to communicate because it's cross-cultural; every culture has stories. It's part of how we're wired; we’re kind of like storytelling animals, in a way. And also, the stories that we tell have something more going on in them than just entertainment or even lessons. A Jungian view on storytelling would say that really what's happening in stories is that it's an external communication of a deep internal world that we all share and a kind of collective unconscious that we share as well. So people might be familiar with Joseph Campbell, who was a famous mythologist. He wrote a book called The Hero With a Thousand Faces, amongst others, and his argument was that there's a monomyth and really every story is, even though it looks like it's got different characters and different settings, it's really a way of exploring and explaining the process. We go on as human beings to grow and mature and go from a limited state of awareness and ability to a more expanded state of awareness and maturity. And Campbell’s view of it was actually fairly masculine. It was very much outward-facing adventuring. And it's criticised for that as well, I think, partly rightly because it is somewhat limited. And I did a piece during the pandemic, it was around myth and the importance of understanding, looking at the pandemic through a mythic lens. And one of the people I interviewed for it was a writer called Charlotte Du Cann. And she pointed out that there's a female initiation myth as well, which is just as prevalent all around the world. But it's almost inverted where often a character might start as a princess and then go through a process where she has to come down to the earth and a kind of connection with the ground of reality. And she said, in nature, you can be beautiful, but you can't be a princess. It's something about coming into the natural humility of being a human being and being interconnected with things, and from there, learning. And I think both men and women go through the different aspects of these types of stories that we're living in our own lives. Sometimes we are on a quest to achieve something, and our culture really values that. For example, starting a business or do this or do that. But sometimes, we have to come deep into ourselves and make a connection with the people around us, and that's our transformation. So, I think that it's really on both sides, and it's really not one or the other. That's one of the reasons I think storytelling is so important because some variation of those myths is across culture. And it's almost like as soon as you start to try and tell a story… the idea- if you buy into the monomyth- is that you are inevitably going to repeat this pattern, this deeply encoded pattern of the way we understand ourselves in the world. And so that's really beautiful because there are very few things that are that universal as a way of making sense of our lives. And so that's one of the most important aspects of storytelling.
KC: That's fascinating. And then I wonder, there are certain subjects that feel quite starved of storytelling, and so what does that do in terms of how we make sense of complicated concepts and ideas?
AB: Yeah, that's a really good point. Well, I think what you just said is part of the reason why some people have made a really great career out of writing, like popular science books or books about history. (History is a bit easier because history is kind of a story. Right, ‘story’ is in the word.) But I think what it does is it sort of alienates if we can't tell it in the form of a story. Like, I just read a book about quantum gravity, which is really out there, quantum physics, and is really confusing. But it was interesting because a big chunk of the book was… it's by Carl Rovelli… I think that’s his name.
KC: Oh, yes, I love his work.
AB: He's great. And so a big chunk of the book was really, I mean…it was a very good book. I'd say the first 80% of it was the history of physics up until where we are now. And it was like a story, and it was fascinating, and it was easy to follow and understand what had been going on and why certain theories built on other theories and what was missing and what gaps are being filled. And it also has all these characters like Einstein, these kinds of brilliant people who are different personalities. And then when he got onto the quantum gravity bit, I was also driving, so I was listening to it on Audible, but I got really lost, and I was like, “Oh God, now I'm confused”. And he does say, “You're going to get confused now because we don't really understand this either.” But it was a really striking example of what you're talking about, where he couldn't really story tell around it. He's great at using metaphors, and he’s a really great communicator of science, but really getting into the weeds of it, if you're not an expert in that area, you're inevitably going to struggle with it. And that's true of anything. And that's true of a lot of the worlds I'm in like the systems change world and the psychedelic world, there are particular aspects of those that are very nitty-gritty.
KC: Right.
AB: And it's very difficult to get people interested in that if you're not willing to set aside the nitty gritty and tell a story that's authentic and true but sacrifices some of the details because those details are just going to get people confused. And then, if they are interested, then it's like an invitation that they could go and really delve in and do their own research, et cetera.
KC: It's almost like how language can isolate and alienate. If we don't connect a story, we don't seem to connect to those wider systems. It sort of stays within that network. I have quite a lot of engineering clients, and they'll say, “Yeah, but you just won't understand this.” And I think, but what about the clients that you're working with? How do you want them to understand this? And maybe story is that bridge for us that helps us to create connections with those other systems outside of our expertise.
AB: Yeah, that's really nice. I like that idea a lot, that there's a kind of it's like translation between different systems, which is really essential because everything should or can inform everything else. And I think that really drives innovation. If the engineering world can speak to the abstract art world in a particular way where they can understand each other, then it can really improve both worlds.
KC: I love that you brought in Carlo Rovelli. I was so struck by his work because, suddenly, it was so relational, and I never thought about relationships and physics being in any way related. I think he brings into play so many disciplines (we go to university to study one or two things), and suddenly, they're so connected, and there's interdependence. And you seem to do that in your work. You seem to weave together seemingly unrelated topics, and I wonder how you do that with Story because it's not an easy task to bring together, say, psychology and philosophy.
AB: Yeah, I mean, a lot of the time, it just sort of happens rather than an intentional bringing together. I’m actually a big believer in this idea called Strategic Intuition, which is coined by William Duggan, who was at Columbia Business School. And in my early twenties, I read a review of his book that really blew my mind because his argument is that creativity or innovation has this four-part process. So part one is examples from history, so your brain, and he's drawing a lot of neuroscience in it as well. So, the idea is that your brain is basically like this gigantic library, lots of it is in your unconscious, but you have to fill that library with information. So, for example, Napoleon had read every single accounting of a military battle that he could get his hands on in military academy. So, he'd be in the library constantly. He'd read about, like, a battle from Hannibal to this to that. So he had this huge library in his head. And during his first battle- he wasn't very high-ranking- but he urgently said they had to move the cannons up to the top of the cliff. And his superiors were like, that's madness. We're not going to do that. But then they lost the battle, and then everyone realised, well, had they done what Napoleon has said, they absolutely would have won. And for him, what happened, and this is Duggan's argument, is that you have all these examples from history, and then you have a presence of mind, so you stop trying to find a solution, and you just stay receptive and open and basically mindful. And the reason it really struck me when I read it was because I was training as a mindfulness teacher, and I thought, that's mindfulness, basically. And then, from the presence of mind, you have what he calls a coup d'œil. It's a strike of the eye in French, like a eureka moment. So you have this boom, eureka moment that shoots into your conscious mind, and it's just an idea. For example, “I've got to move the cannons.” Or, in the case of Google, it was, “Why don't we combine the AltaVista database with academic citations?” So you have these two existing elements that the founders of Google knew about. They had all of AltaVista because the Internet was much smaller. So they had it all downloaded, and they had the algorithm of academic citations, which basically says the most cited thing is number one, and the least cited thing is at the bottom. They combined the two, and that was Google. That's like the best search engine. He also uses this example of Picasso. So Picasso was a fairly run-of-the-mill impressionist artist. Talented, but nothing that innovative. And then, as the story goes, he went for lunch with Matisse. And Matisse's daughter, or niece, had this African mask with her because it was a colonial France, and it was really square and angular. And Picasso apparently just had this eureka moment because what he had was impressionism, plus that kind of shape, a kind of rigid shape. And then this brand-new thing, Cubism. And then the final stage of that is that you have to have the courage to bring your idea into the world. Because, like Napoleon, or probably Picasso, early people are like, what is that? That's mad. And you have to really be committed to your own vision and your own intuition, your own strategic intuition, to be like, “No, this is the way to do it.” But you have to have those examples from history for any of it to work. And so you have to ideally not just know about the particular field you're focused on but have horizontal or lateral information as well. So, for example, if you are trying to sell computers. Instead of just knowing everything about the computer world, you might also look at retail in other areas, and you might also then look at market stalls or even the history of marketplaces or the history of trade in Southeast Asia or whatever. It might be anything tangentially linked that can be incredibly useful. And then so, coming back to your original question, usually what happens with me is that I'm interested in a few different things and with an overall sort of direction of trying to make sense of pop culture, but just also bigger social issues and political issues. And somewhere, a new combination of existing things will click together. And then the storytelling is basically the exercise of expressing to people why this makes sense and isn't just bonkers, right? Because, at the outset, it could seem kind of bonkers to combine particular things together. But if you have a sense- like a kind of pull- of there is a really interesting frame here that this gives us an interesting new perspective on a particular issue if we look at it through the lens of whatever it might be.
KC: It feels like you take a balcony view in your work, which obviously is the name of this podcast, and I think it's very easy to get stuck in our positions. For example, I might have trained in this field my entire life. So then, how does one step out of that and see with that wider lens that allows for all those different disciplines to come into play? Because we might start just telling the story from one lens, the engineering lens or the English literature lens and not see the bigger picture.
AB: Yeah, I think there are lots of different ways we can do it. I think a few practical ones are task switching (which is in the study of creativity and the neuroscience around it) which has generally been shown to be quite effective in helping us kind of get that moment of stepping back. So task switching is just going from one particular task to doing something completely different. Like the guys who make South Park, they did this documentary of how they make an episode which is absolutely brilliant, and it's made in a week. They're really topical, so they write the episode in about a week, and they sometimes are handing in the DVD to the studio 3 hours before it goes up. And in that, I can't remember if it's Matt Still or Trey Parker, but he's writing the episode, and he's stuck on something, and then he just goes and starts building some Lego, and he's got Lego all over his office, and they're really big, like the Lego Death Star and big pieces. And his explanation of it was that he's going from a mode where he has to figure out all the answers himself and has to write the story to one where he has instructions that are telling him what to do, and he doesn't have to think about it all. It's also a different task. It's like tactile, and you kind of mix stuff together, and that's a great example of task switching. So having the same attitude that we get when we switch tasks, but trying to almost embody that day-to-day, I think, could be really helpful because it means we don't get too zoomed in on a particular thing. And there's usually a feeling where we're too zoomed into a particular topic or even in our own field or world, which is a little bit like, for me, at least, constrained and a bit like everything feels a bit harder, and it's a bit dull, and I'm getting bored and frustrated by it. So that's a great opportunity, I think, to do something completely different, focus on something different, go for a run, whatever it might be, and then that also applies to the things you're reading and watching. To be honest, I mainly read Sci-Fi fantasy books. I also read nonfiction as well, but I just love those genres, and I'll often be reading that. But there's a lot in fiction that can really inform ideas, even- as in my case- writing nonfiction fiction, which helps tremendously with that because it's imagination, it's playing with ideas, it's speculative. So, yeah, I think it can help to be eclectic with your interests and just kind of challenge yourself. And I'd like to do it more, in fact. The Quantum Gravity book was partly due to a piece I was writing, but also, I was just kind of curious. I read a couple of things about quantum physics a few years ago, and I thought I’ll give it a shot. And I often find that's the things that really get me excited and interested, and it's really refreshing, and I think that kind of cognitive refreshment is good.
KC: And I love those refreshing narratives that you're bringing up, like the Picasso example and Napoleon. They sort of saw it differently. I wonder, though, do you think many of us get stuck in certain narratives that we're sold, or we inherit or and we're socialised to believe? For example, we have to do a graduate scheme, have a house and be married and have a certain number of kids by a certain age. It feels like some of us get stuck in these limiting narratives.
AB: Yeah, I mean, I would say we all do by nature of being human beings, right? In some way, we're all, I guess, in a tension between clarity and self-deception, which is something that John Vervaeke, who's a cognitive scientist and a really brilliant thinker, he speaks a lot of the philosophical practises and people like Socrates, what they were teaching were ways to become less foolish. And the same applies to mindfulness and Buddhism. A lot of these traditions are looking at how do we get over the problem of our own self-deception. Which is that you cannot be a human being and not have self-deception. So part of that self-deception comes from, of course, the stories and ways of doing things that we've received, but also, we need some kind of basic right to function, and we can't be completely untethered from our cultural and social backdrop. Right? And often, when we try... some of the baby boomers in the 60s are a great example of this. They really tried to really drop out, like Timothy Leary, drop out of society, live on a commune, and do it differently. And what they realised, almost every single commune failed. And it was because they were just recreating the same dynamics. They were trying to escape from it, just on a much smaller scale. And whilst a few of them survived. It’s really rare. And then a lot of the baby boomers became our parents (if you're in your thirties) and became much more mainstream and became the mainstream after a while. So it's not to say that doing things differently isn't possible. I guess it's harder than it looks. I just read an article earlier today, and it was about creativity and the author said, basically, you need a box to be able to think outside the box.
KC: Right.
AB: You can't just completely be like, right, we're scrapping all our social stuff, we're going to have completely change what the family looks like, completely change what work looks like completely. I love the impulse for it, and I'm really big into new ways of doing things, but I've also become increasingly-not disillusioned- but certainly cautious because it's not that easy to scrap things.
KC: Well, it makes me think of the improviser mindset. You have to know the rules of improvisation in order to improvise. Yeah, that's fascinating…that we need a box to think outside the box. And I'm curious right now about the impact of the internet on stories because, in some ways, I love that we're empowered to be the owner of our story and the narrator, and I wonder if there's a danger in that. Because are we then disconnected, perhaps, from what's really going on? And are we maybe not aware of what's really emerging in the wider stories and the social systems that we're a part of?
AB: Yeah, that's a really important question. I would say the technology itself is built from a particular belief about what it’s like to be human and what humans should strive for. And it comes from, of course, very individualist cultures originally. And it really lends itself, especially social media, to individual expression. Of course, there are sort of social movements that happen online often, quite good social movements that kind of shift the needle, but they then very quickly become a part of the individual level, they become something like a kind of identity badge that people can use, and they can become very shallow. So, any real systemic change becomes sort of like, oh yeah, but I changed my Facebook or my Instagram profile pick, and that's my contribution. But then what these deeper systemic issues- like Me Too or Black Lives Matter- are pointing to, get sort of swept away in this kind of corporatization. But now we're like, “Look, we're acting on it,” but it's kind of surface level. I mean, Starbucks is the example I always use because Starbucks are this outwardly extremely progressive company that really celebrates that and really prides itself on that. And there's a whole unionisation movement going on with Starbucks baristas in America, and Starbucks is kind of crashing down on it and closing shops that have union members. And Howard Schultz, the CEO, has said, I'll never allow a union at Starbucks. I think it's a really kind of disturbing but good example of the way in which workers are doing the actual thing which these movements are pointing to, which is a redistribution of power and wealth…and I'm fully for unions on the whole. And I think that kind of thing; it's a really healthy pushback to corporate power. But it's very interesting when a corporation really prides itself on, “Yeah, we're the most progressive ones out there,” when push comes to shove, and it actually comes to solving systemic issues, not only do they not do anything, but they actively try and work against it. And I think that often happens with, like, what you were saying. There's almost like a smokescreen around the stories we're telling about systems on the Internet and the real, deep, uncomfortable complexity of changing those systems. And it's not black and white. Obviously, they inform each other, and the social world does change. I’m not sure if you've seen Woodstock 99, the documentary on Netflix; it’s really worth checking out. It’s about when they tried to redo Woodstock in 1999, but it was a complete catastrophe, and they tried to corporate and gouge everyone for money. Like, water was $12, and they also booked Limb Biscuit and Korn and all like they didn't even know who they were. They were like, “Oh, yeah, the kids love these bands.” So it was a very dark, hardcore energy. It all went crazy. But what's really interesting about that is the oh, I've now gotten so distracted thinking about the particular scene in that I can't remember why I brought it up. It'll swing back to me. But yeah, just to wrap that point up, it's basically there's this kind of web of inauthenticity that runs through social media in particular that I think is driven by personal storytelling because that's what the medium asks you to do. And it's not really built for systems-level, deep, complex sense-making. It's not designed for that. And so, if the game doesn't allow you to do that, like Monopoly doesn't allow you to be like, “I’m going to give away my houses.” You can't. It's not part of the rules. Social media networks don't really allow you to tackle and get to the root of these deeper issues very often.
KC: There's a lot of window dressing, I think, across particularly social media. And I think from that, we're playing that virtue status game where we're sort of acting like, “Oh, yeah, I support Black Lives Matter. I put a black square up on my Instagram.” That means I'm doing something, but I’m not really willing to look in the mirror and interrogate my own biases, perhaps, or be an ally or an advocate in another space. You spoke about how power and money can potentially be redistributed into other ways of working. Are the Internet and algorithms on the Internet keeping us trapped within certain narratives that order our current social system?
AB: Yeah, that's a deep question. I think largely, yes. But I think they keep us trapped because they like Tristan Harris, who runs the Centre for Humane Technology, and there's also in the there's a Netflix documentary called The Social Dilemma. He's sort of the main person in it. And as he points out, they keep us trapped in what he calls a race at the bottom of the brainstem. So, they're kind of designed to keep us outraged, so they're not necessarily pushing a particular idea. Although it has been revealed that, certainly, social media companies aren't above being politically motivated in different ways. But it's not that necessarily algorithms, I don't think, are keeping us trapped in particular ideas that are designed. It's more like whatever gets us outraged and spending longer on the platforms gets selected, for it's like a natural selection process. And so, we get stuck… possibly also in generally the way things are right now, that doesn't get to shift because we're just arguing with each other very often. I think it's a tricky one because also, it's a big open question: how much are the algorithms and the actual social networks to blame? And how much is it our fault for being the kinds of human beings we are collectively?
KC: Yeah.
AB: And it's a tricky one. Certainly, a lot of commentators on our relationship with technology would point out that it's definitely made things worse. It's made us more polarised. It's made our mental health worse. There have been surveys where people express, “I wish it had just never been invented”. Quite large numbers of people say, “I just wish it wasn't there because it's kind of addictive and traps you, and it becomes difficult to avoid”. And so, yes, what to do about it and how to sort of inject something into social networks that does allow us to imagine new possibilities, new ways of connecting with each other. Generally, what I've noticed, and what I noticed through Rebel Wisdom, is that those conversations are happening in smaller groups on small Zoom calls, where there's much more of a live interaction. So, if you think about social media, it's not in real time. Something is posted, and there's a time delay before you see it and respond. You also don't have a human-to-human connection, I'm not suggesting Zoom is necessarily a human-to-human connection, but it's closer. So the medium…I think it was Marshall McLuhan who said that the medium is the message. And this is a pretty simple idea, but really true. It's like Twitter, Twitterfies conversation. Instagram, Instagrams connection, right? They do the thing that they're designed to do, and you can't really separate the two out from each other. Whereas I do think Zoom and small discussion groups or inquiry groups happening on Zoom are more human. And I know first hand lead to much deeper, richer conversations, even around contentious political topics.
KC: And I'm curious about the impact on the individual and then what that looks
like in society. I came off Instagram and Facebook about two years ago, and I wasn't heavily addicted. I maybe posted once every six weeks. But it was fascinating seeing the shift in my lens afterwards because you take a photo, and before it was, “Oh, this might look nice…oh, actually, that wasn’t so good.” I just don't look at the world quite through that lens anymore. And even as someone who wasn't so present and active, it still was shaping the way I saw myself and then how I curated my story, even in my own mind. Whether I shared it or not, it didn't matter. And because you've recently stepped into Instagram, I’m wondering how you're finding it so far in terms of creating your narrative.
AB: Yeah, difficult. And I've really held off; I was really reluctant for months. I've not done it, but okay, I have to for the book promotion, and I'm trying to find a way that is authentic to what I want to put out, which is mainly based on giving people something useful or entertaining. Something that's of value, rather than just, here's a picture of what I'm eating or what you should feel walking down the street. So yeah, it is difficult. And I certainly feel there's a kind of impossibility, that it feels impossible to be fully myself. Like, I can certainly be myself and bring my perspective. I find it much easier to post work, like articles I've written or post something about Breaking Convention because it’s like, “Ah, this is professional”; it's like LinkedIn but on Instagram, and with nicer images. I find that easier. But, yeah, I'm not hugely enjoying it. It's really early days, but I feel like it's kind of a necessary evil. So, I'm just in the process right now because I also want to do stuff on TikTok, and I'm working with a guy to do some TikTok videos, and that also that feels a little bit better because I don't know anyone on TikTok, so no one I know is going to see it. But I want to do something good. Like I'm trying to find, okay, how can I do something that I can stand by, that I really like? But still, TikTok has this very particular, punchy style. And the style is really not something I love. But if I can get the content I want in there, useful, educational, interesting content, then that's the sweet spot. So that's what they're trying to figure out at the moment.
KC: It's interesting you mentioned LinkedIn as well because LinkedIn is becoming weird. It's more like Facebook for professionals these days. You mentioned this, I think, in your Christmas wrap-up article- about how you're feeling a bit meh about all the stories, whether it's in the movies or on Netflix. And I really feel the same. There's just a lot of the same. And for me, what I've noticed is just a lot of focus on money. It feels like every other programme on TV is obsessed with insane amounts of wealth. I mean, firstly, I'm bored of these stories, but also, are they keeping us small and trapped in, again, a certain system and way of showing up in the world?
AB: Yeah, that's a good point. Just firstly, on that ‘meh’ feeling. I still definitely feel that, and I think a lot of people are because, for example, Disney is churning out loads of Star Wars stuff and aside from Andor, which was phenomenal in my view, was just all really crap. Even hardened Star Wars or Marvel fans agree. And looking at those kinds of franchises, which were like the biggest ones, they're the biggest stories that we tell, and we’re feeling like there's no magic in it. Right? And all of Disney's remakes, like The Lion King and The Little Mermaid…well, The Little Mermaid hasn't come out yet. I mean, it could be a big hit…but they've just redone Peter Pan, and it doesn't have a kind of edge or challenge in it. And I think that's what keeps us trapped. I think if our stories don't challenge us and make us uncomfortable like Joker was with Joaquin Phoenix a few years ago, that was probably the last film I saw- except maybe for Everything Everywhere All at Once- that was really amazing.
KC: I loved that.
AB: Fantastic film. So, I know that there are those films; I just probably haven't caught them because I watch more TV shows now than films. But there's something about art that has been very safe, certainly since 2016 or so, because of the deep fear of social justice backlash, that’s one aspect of it. So people are kind of playing it safe and then also just a change in a change in corporate culture as well. And so, everything just starts to feel sort of safe. Right? And it's like, this isn't really going to make me uncomfortable or challenge me. And in my view, art, not that it has to, but I think art should, ideally, make us feel something that we haven't felt before in some way, even if it's a variation on something we’ve felt. So that ambiguity and complexity of, like, wow, I don't quite know what to make of that. The end of The Last of US, which was just on HBO, and I was a big fan of the game, that has that ambiguity, which is really one of the best endings to something I've ever seen, where it's not quite as well done in the TV show as it was in the game. But a sense of that stays with you. And I think great art and great stories, they stay with us, and they kind of act like travel does, right? Or a psychedelic experience where we're different afterwards. Even just a little bit like you were speaking to before. You get that balcony view because you see something totally different when you go to a different culture, and you realise, oh, wow, the way I do things is just a way of doing things. And the people who live here have a completely different way of doing things, and it's equally valid, and they get on with it. And that means that you can then expand your learning, like learning another language. Then you also get a new frame to see the world. So, a lot of it comes down, I think, also to flexibility, being able to move between those different frames.
KC: Yeah, because you made me think about the idea that the story imitates life, and that terrifies me if that's true. Because I always hope that story elevates who we are and who we can be, and it gives us maybe a sense of what's possible beyond our frame. But right now, at least if you look on Netflix, it does feel like it's off imitating the values that are prevailing, which feels a bit sad. Actually, that's where our focus is primarily, and also what young people are inheriting from us.
AB: Yes, definitely. At the same time, I do think art finds a way. And what then ends up happening is that there'll be a backlash. And from that backlash on the edge of what's acceptable, on the edge of what's considered good art, you get new movements coming through, and I think that's just inevitably what happens. So, you get this when the mainstream becomes stale, then you get, like, punk…it's usually a reaction against something, new movements are kind of a reaction. And something I love about art and storytelling is that there's a pressure build-up, and then someone does something or puts out a movie or writes something or does a totally new art form, which could now be AI art, for example, as a medium, and just blows everyone away. And it's like, wow, that's crazy. We didn't even think that was possible. And then that becomes something new. I do have hope, and I think the worst was probably around, like, maybe, 2018 or so. I mean, now it just feels stale. Right now, there's a wider recognition of, oh, this is quite crap. There's so much content, but it's so hard to find something of a certain level of quality. Yeah, there is stuff. I mean, there is a lot of high-quality stuff out there as well. There is just more of everything. But there is a kind of growing recognition from many people who are scrolling Netflix or another streaming service. So, I think then that means something new will come up. Yeah, let's be hopeful.
KC: Yes. And when you said about travel and how it gives us perspective, it made me wonder because your writing holds a lot of paradox, and you deal with some quite edgy topics. How do you feel storytelling helps us to find alignment, even if we can't necessarily agree across some of these divides? Because right now, we are very divided in many different ways, and it seems like we just can't even have a conversation about that topic.
AB: Yeah, that's something I'm really interested in, is that question, how do we do that? And I'll speak to some of the ways I found useful in a moment. But when you read a novel, for example, you can read a character and be in their world right, which is different to TV and movies. So you can be in someone's world, but there's a different quality where you're almost in the mind of a character in a novel, and the character can do awful things and be terrible in some ways, but you can empathise with them because you understand why they did what they did. You might not agree with them, but you can at least empathise with them and understand in the context of their story why they did what they did. So, I think that's very powerful if we can tap into that kind of storytelling with one another and just give enough space to understand why, from another person’s perspective, why they are doing what they're doing. It doesn't mean condoning it; it doesn't mean not having boundaries to this bad behaviour, for example. But it does mean that we go, “Oh, okay, interesting, this suddenly makes sense.” It humanises us. We're like, okay, if I were them, then I might do the same thing. So that's one aspect of it I think is really important. There's the empathy, then there's also, just practically sometimes having a difficult conversation about, say, an intense topic like vaccine or no vaccine, right? Which is obviously raging less now but was raging very intensely during COVID. The story is actually not at the level where it’s going to be helpful to go into the content, the experience. Rather it helps to go deeper into an embodied sense of what you're feeling, what you're both feeling. And my friend Sarah Ness, or friends Sarah Ness and Jeff Crumb, we’re now running a course together called The Art of Difficult Conversations. And Sarah developed this model, which I love, called Content, Context and Concern, which is basically for any conflict conversation, or just any conversation. It can be really helpful to check in with, “Okay, what's the content? Which is the story, the stuff that the person is actually saying.” So they might be like, “Oh, the government's done this, and I don't trust this”. And whatever it might be. Or they might be saying, “I really don't trust it…Why haven't you gotten vaccinated?” Whatever it might be, all these are different aspects of the story. And then there's the context of the conversation, which is, well, what is this conversation? Are we having a debate, or are we having an argument? Are we trying to reach the truth together? Are we just venting? Right? That's lots of different contexts. And then there's a concern which is: what is this person, or what am I, concerned about? And that's usually the deeper emotional aspect of it. “I'm afraid about being controlled by a government. I'm afraid of not being safe because not enough people are vaccinated.” It's going to be different for each person. And the level of concern is often the place where you get to when you really delve into what's really going on in the conversation. It's not that the other stuff isn't going on, but speaking to that deeper emotional reality is much more effective than trying to argue at the level of the story where we can be like, “No, your story is wrong. My story is more right than yours because of this.” It just doesn't work. And in fact, it often has the opposite effect, something called the backlash effect, which is that if you give people information that contradicts factual information that contradicts their position, they often double down on their position and believe it more. And there are lots of ongoing studies to see when is it true? When isn't that true? Et cetera. But what it does seem to be is that it's more true when you care deeply about the topic. And it doesn't really stand you were like, “Oh, olive oil was invented in Italy”, and I was like, “Oh, actually, no. It was discovered in Greece”. Unless you really cared about olive oil, you would likely be like, “Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that.” But if it's something really close to your heart, like a political issue, then we have a kind of pushback. So it just doesn't work. So kind of getting to that deeper level is key, and in a way, that means acknowledging but not getting caught in the story.
KC: Yeah, the story can get in the way sometimes and keep us trapped in our positions. It makes me think about one of my colleagues, Jeffrey Wotherspoon, who does a lot of work in DEI, and he talks about the fact that a lot of DEI work is failing because people get stuck in their positions.
AB: What is DEI?
KC: Diversity, equity and inclusion.
AB: Okay.
KC: He criticises it, saying that, actually, a lot of the people who are delivering this work can be quite self-righteous. And his view is that no one changes through shame. No one changes through shame. And I think with the model you mentioned, it gets beyond the story, and we can connect to the human elements around it like, I'm scared/I'm worried/I'm concerned, and owning that, as opposed to, you're making me scared, you're making me worried. And I think that's huge. Just suddenly having that emotional intelligence to step into your position, I think, can shift things.
AB: Absolutely. Yeah. And there’s a lot of stuff in the personal growth world and inner work space that is kind of taken for granted, like speaking from the ‘I’, owning what's yours to own. It's very complicated, though, because it's also very easy to hijack those techniques. So if someone gets sophisticated at it, you can kind of hijack that language to get your needs met or get your point across as well. So this is one of the reasons I love difficult conversations is that it's so difficult. It's really hard, but it definitely requires exactly what you're talking about, a certain baseline level of emotional awareness that everyone can cultivate and then also a sort of a languaging around it and an understanding of, simultaneously, our own individuality agency and how deeply interconnected we are. So there's a lot to be simultaneously aware of in difficult conversations.
KC: I'm with you. I really think we need to support difficult conversations. I was working with a team the other day, and it got very edgy around gender equity. And what made it safe was that we designed beforehand how do we want to be together, and things like respect and lightness had come up. And all of that helps to create that box that you mentioned, within which then we can start to be outside of the box. But you realise that so many conversations are happening on Twitter without any kind of box, there are no rules for engagement, and then suddenly everyone's getting offended and holding their ground.
AB: Yeah, absolutely. That's a great example there. And, yeah, I think that's so well said because it really makes a difference when we've had a prior agreement on the rules for engagement. It also creates safety, which is absolutely key to it. It's a weird one because, in a way, we do want to feel uncomfortable, but once we feel unsafe, then we naturally go into defensive mode. But often, those two things get confused. I think, especially in a lot of the conversations around cultural issues. Feeling safe doesn't mean you're not feeling uncomfortable; it means you're feeling able to be uncomfortable. You feel safe enough to be uncomfortable. And that's really the kind of space that's conducive to a difficult conversation. But if we can't ever feel uncomfortable, then everything just goes into the shadows. Or to your point about shame earlier as well. It becomes like, “Oh, it's shameful to express what I want to express; therefore, I'm not going to express it.” But it doesn't mean you're not feeling it. And then the conversations just go underground, with people talking to each other privately about issues that could be talked about collectively. But no one feels safe to do so.
KC: Yeah, there's this model I use. I love it. It comes from CRR Global, and it's a really simple model for change. Essentially there's a triangle. On one side, you've got the primary; on the other side is the secondary, and then you've got this edge. The primary is where we are now. The secondary is everything in the future. So, you could think about it in terms of your primary identity and then a secondary identity that you want to bring more of to your life. Or your primary location, and then secondary because you’re moving house. And we're always crossing these edges. But it's such useful language, I find, because when you're working with a client, and things get edgy, suddenly it's a different kind of way of holding it. It doesn't mean it's bad; it doesn't mean it's wrong. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of the way we're working right now is trying to sweep things under the rug and make things nice. And I don't think we're actually getting to the grittiness that we need.
AB: Yeah, I love that model. That sounds really useful. I love the simplicity of it as well. It just strikes me as you're talking that it's very difficult to bring this kind of stuff into workplaces because that container already has a very clear goal, which is to make as much money as possible. Right? Even if it's explicitly not saying so unless it's perhaps a charity. But everything is in a particular system that is growth-focused. And so, if those conversations might threaten growth, then the system itself can't tolerate them. And then I think it gets in this tension because it's like we have to talk about these issues, but we don't want to talk about them so much that it actually affects our bottom line. So that means that it's like a family system where something just cannot be discussed. And so it's very, very tricky. Some workplaces do it better than others, definitely, and some teams do it better than others. But there is a philosopher called C Thi Nguyen. (I hope I pronounced his name right. I had to read it when I did the audiobook for the Bigger Picture. I quoted him a few times, and we kept having to stop, and I kept having to ask the engineer to read it back to me, playing the YouTube pronunciation many times!) But he's brilliant, and he's written a book called Agency as Art, I believe it's called. It's about games. And his idea is that games are an art form where we get to practise different types of agency. Whereas painting, we get to play with sight, and music, we get to play with sound. Games are like, who do you want to pretend to be, basically? And he points out that with different games… he sees social media as basically a kind of game, Twitter is a game… it's like you win by getting likes or retweets, and you do that by saying the things that are controversial or things that your audience like, so you just get trapped in. So basically, he calls that value capture. So, the values of the game you're playing, like the values of your company or whatever it might be, capture your own individual values. And so, you might have an individual value in a workplace, for example, if I really want to have a really honest, uncomfortable conversation about equity and inclusion, and I want to be able to do that completely unfettered in a way that could really have a big impact on perhaps what we do as a company right now. You might have that value, but the value of the system and of the company is like, no, we're going to keep selling widgets and digits, and we recognise that, yes, part of the game has now become, we have to have these conversations. But the values of the company will capture your values because you are just one person, and you're an individual. So that makes it very, very difficult to enact change in any system. It could be a family, but it's even harder with an embedded institution like a company. And I see people coming up against that. All of us come up against that tension. Academics have it with publisher perish. You, as an academic, might want to spend five years deeply diving into something, but what the system is asking you to do is publish as much as possible, as frequently as possible. And that's how you get status, and that's how the institution gets status and gets more funding. So, you then have this pressure captured by the system, and that happens to all of us. Perhaps one of the biggest problems that we face right now, and perhaps always.
KC: And the bigger the system, the slower the change. I often talk about this. I've worked with couples, but I work mostly with teams now, and couples are like dinghies; they do move pretty fast, whereas a team is more like a cruise liner. It takes longer to turn. And so that is something I think we're working against. It's that tension. We are very fast. Our pace is moving quicker and quicker, and so I don't know how our stories can hold that, that need to go slow in order to really enact change.
AB: Yeah, it's a lovely metaphor. I love that. The cruise ship and the dinghy, or the big ship and the dinghy. I've also just remembered why I brought up Woodstock 99. That is related to the game part. (It's a shout-out, a call-back!) Watching that, which is obviously 1999, part of what they talk about in the documentary is the social beliefs and the misogyny that was just normal at that time. So, there was a lot of sexual assault, a lot of groping, and there were very American frat boy vibes. And that was the year American Pie came out. I was like 13 at the time in 1999, and when I was watching, I was like, oh, my God. These are the kind of values that I was picking up as a teenager. And the world has changed for the better since then. And that's a really short amount of time. Right? Certainly, there's still lots, lots more work to be done. For example, equity and gender, but compared to 1999, where this kind of rapid misogyny was just like, “Oh, yeah, what a dude.” It's really, really different. And so I remember being struck by, oh, stuff does change on a social level. A positive aspect of social media is how rapidly things change, and it's chaotic and mad, but perhaps there's a kind of supercharged order to it as well. It's an evolutionary process. But equally, some things, I think, do have to change slowly, and we do find it really, really difficult to do that because, well, I mean, it's competition, right? So, one organisation or group might want to have that real slow change, but then their competitors are going to sacrifice that depth for speed. And so, then you're in this multipolar trap where you either have to lose and get out of the game, or you have to play the game. Unless people can start showing that a slow, deliberate kind of process is valuable, which it is, for sure. It makes people more resilient. But maybe it's partly just a mindset shift of timescales as well.
KC: Because there's just a lot of broad-brush stroke storytelling around, particularly some of these bigger issues. And one of my clients mentioned his company gave every woman in the company a pay rise, and some of the women were like, well, “Michelle definitely doesn't deserve a pay rise; she's rubbish”. And going back to that term window dressing, it's lazy storytelling. It's not really dealing with it.
AB: How is that even legal? I mean, that's mad. I love how blasé and insensitive that is. It's mad. It's like, “Oh, here's an issue. No time. Not going to actually get into the concern; just make it go away.” Yeah. Wow.
KC: And we want to appeal to people to pretend like we're actually doing something because we want to create that retention, but we're not really going to do the thing. And I think many of us are at fault in that we're not willing to do the work. We just do the surface-level stuff, and we show it on our Instagram or whatever and I wonder how we get that depth into ourselves through our stories again.
AB: Yeah, well, I mean, one of the things I am interested in and talk about in the book is the need for understanding the difference between something that's complex and something that's complicated. Daniel Schmachtenberger is a mathematician and systems theorist. He has talked about this quite a lot. And a big part of the issue when we're trying to change things anywhere is that we confuse complex problems with complicated problems. So, a complicated system is like a car engine where everything is connected to each other. It doesn't interact with anything around it. It's wrapped up in a hood, and if something goes wrong, you just have to figure out which bit went wrong. So this company, in the example you gave, they were looking at the problem as a complicated problem. They were like, “Oh, what's wrong? Women don't earn as much money as men for doing the same job. Okay, well, we'll just give all the women more money. That should solve the problem.” But actually, they're dealing with a complex system, and the complex system has many different individual parts that interact but then create something more than the sum of its parts and also is constantly shifting and changing. So actually, there's so much depth and movement and change in those bigger questions, like equity questions, and there are so many moving parts that, in a way, if we can embody complexity, then we're much better positioned to start solving those complex problems and interact with them in a really different way. And storytelling-wise, I think that also means telling stories that honour complexity. And often, like a lot of good stories do, there's no good guy or bad guy. Someone's motivations are complex. Where they're coming from, you have these real characters, and the way the story moves isn't a linear kind of progression. It's got a direction; it's fluid and shifting, and that feels real and authentic.
KC: Yeah. I mean, I crave that kind of storytelling. I think we need more of it, but also for paradox, like the fact there's not a right or wrong or good or bad, and I think we've got too much of that. In terms of complex stories. What are you most interested in right now? What are you curious about?
AB: Well, I'm watching Succession at the moment, which I think is really great.
KC: How is it? Everyone's told me I need to watch it, so I’m curious.
AB: Until about a month ago, I had only watched a few episodes, and I caught up on it, and I'm writing a piece on it, so I really delved in. It’s very, very good. And I think it has that complexity to it, which is one of the reasons I think it's been so successful. And what else? Just on a personal level, I'm really interested in creative nonfiction. Basically, trying to really explain- not explain complexity, but it hasn't really been possible to do- but trying to, let's say, honour a complexity and trying and find different ways of going as deep as possible into particular topics and trying to find new ways to see them while at the same time keeping it accessible and interesting. And trying to hone that craft more and more. That, for me, is a lot of fun and something that I find personally, professionally, deeply meaningful. I've sort of become, I guess, an accidental essay writer, an essayist, when I was writing novels- or trying to write novels- for a long time. And so, I'm embracing that more and more, and now I'm really fascinated about, okay, well, that as an art form rather than just a way of explaining ideas, where could I, or anyone else who's writing essays, really push the medium? I've tried new ways so that really excites me as well.
KC: Well, thank you so much for this glorious conversation today, Ali. It's fascinating. Thank you again.
Ep.2 We’re Wired for Story with Alexander Beiner