Frank Rose on Internet Narratives
Dec 13 2021

2021/12/Se-We-Swim-In.jpg Once it was The Shadow radio show; now it's the podcast Serial. Is every old storytelling medium new again? Frank Rose, author of The Sea We Swim In, concedes that some things remain sacred--from the power of a great hook to the hope that great stories never end. But he also thinks the Internet has led to new kinds of stories, ones that are not just entertaining, but immersive, and whose worlds are more richly imaginative than ever--even as they leave increasingly little to our imagination.

RELATED EPISODE
Leamer on Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories
Ed Leamer, of UCLA and author of Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how we should use patterns in macroeconomic data and stories about those patterns to improve our understanding of the economy. Leamer argues...
EXPLORE MORE
Related EPISODE
Eric Jacobus on the Art and Science of Violence
Stuntman and action designer Eric Jacobus joins EconTalk host Russ Roberts for a no-holds-barred discussion of the biological basis for violence and how to avoid the worst of it, the value of violence as spectator sport, and the vast superiority...
EXPLORE MORE
Explore audio transcript, further reading that will help you delve deeper into this week’s episode, and vigorous conversations in the form of our comments section below.

READER COMMENTS

Shalom Freedman
Dec 14 2021 at 6:35am

This was for me a remarkably interesting conversation which has led me to re-think my conception of significant storytelling. For me real storytelling has been above all literary story-telling and the highest form of this the great classics of the short-story and the novel. Much of what is referenced in the conversation is outside my realm of knowledge and interest. As an ancient snob I have thought of every day real-life human story-telling and non-print media storytelling as of lower value than what great writers have done.
I cannot possibly comment on all the interesting things said here. But one point made towards the end of the conversation by Russ Roberts seems to me overwhelmingly important. The fact that the Internet and the latest technologies have made participation in creation open to all those interested in engaging in it. This means many of us may be living with the illusion of hoped importance but it does also give meaning to our lives.

Gregg
Dec 24 2021 at 4:01pm

The idea that people don’t want stories to end and that’s why they drag them on doesn’t hold up to reality. Japanese and Korean dramas always end. They are designed / written as 10-30 episode series and then they’re finished. In Japan, every April and September the new series start so you see ads every where.

It’s far more likely the reason shows are dragged out in the USA is because of either (a) tradition,we’ve always done it that way or, (2) corporate greed – let’s milk this popular thing as long as possible rather than risk the next thing might be less popular.

Frank Rose
Jan 7 2022 at 6:28am

Gregg, I’m afraid I may not have explained my point well enough. It’s one thing to say that people don’t want stories to end—the handful of stories they’re deeply engaged or immersed in, that is—and another thing to say that that’s why American television networks let them drag on long after the juice is gone. The latter is where, as you say, corporate greed comes in—let’s milk this hit for all it’s worth. But in the case of Lost, as I reported in The Art of Immersion, the network wanted an open-ended hit while the show runners insisted on having a conclusion. It’s just that the conclusion they came up with left a lot of people unhappy.

There are plenty of shows today that are designed from the start to end after a few seasons or a few episodes. One example is Sharp Objects, the eight-episode HBO series I discuss in The Sea We Swim In. Another is the Norwegian climate-change thriller Occupied (Okkupert in Norwegian), which played out over three seasons—24 episodes in all. It could have gone on forever as far as I was concerned, but the producers wisely decided to wrap it up. The only really viable alternative is a franchise like Sherlock Holmes or Star Wars in which a whole series of stories is presented, each of them taking place in the same “world” and often with the same main characters.

Comments are closed.


DELVE DEEPER

Watch this podcast episode on YouTube:

This week's guest:

This week's focus:

Additional ideas and people mentioned in this podcast episode:

A few more readings and background resources:

A few more EconTalk podcast episodes:


* As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases.


AUDIO TRANSCRIPT
TimePodcast Episode Highlights
0:37

Intro. [Recording date: November 23, 2021.]

Russ Roberts: Today is November 23rd, 2021, and my guest is author, Frank Rose. He's Faculty Director of Columbia University's Executive Education Seminar Strategic Storytelling, and heads the Digital Dozen Awards Program at Columbia's Digital Storytelling Lab. This is Frank's second appearance on the program. He was here in October of 2011--long time ago--discussing his book, The Art of Immersion.

Our topic for today is his new book, The Sea We Swim In. Frank, welcome back to EconTalk.

Frank Rose: Thank you, Russ. Great to be here.

1:09

Russ Roberts: What is the sea we swim in, and why is that the title of your book?

Frank Rose: Well, the sea we swim in, in this case, is stories. And, I was--the title was inspired by a quote from Jerome Bruner, the psychologist who was one of the most influential people in his field in the 20th century. He was a leader of the revolt against behaviorism in the 1950s. He's one of the founders of cognitive psychology. And, in the mid-1980s, he started getting more and more interested in stories.

And, he wrote a book which was called Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, which was largely about the idea that stories constitutes a distinct line of thought, a distinct mode of thought, and one that is so ubiquitous, that surrounds us so much, that we don't even see it. As he said, 'As the fish in the proverb doesn't understand what water is, so we don't understand that we live in a sea of stories.'

Russ Roberts: I very much think that's true. In fact, I believe that much of our reality is the stories we tell ourselves. They're not bedtime stories and they're not necessarily the plots of movies, but they are stories, nonetheless. Narrative is a crucial part of our human experience. But, it's interesting to me: I didn't notice it until I thought about immersion, your first book, The Art of Immersion. Both of them have a water motif. Is that deliberate or coincidence?

Frank Rose: No, that's entirely coincidence. In fact, I'm not sure I even quite recognized it until just now.

Russ Roberts: Okay.

3:12

Russ Roberts: Let's start off talking about Internet storytelling, because your first book was really about how the Internet opened up a whole new form of narrative for people. How much has changed since that first book, in your view? It's been 10 years, which is like a century of Internet time. How has the narrative--use of the internet for narrative purposes--changed?

Frank Rose: Well, a key point of the book was that every time there's a new communications medium that comes along, it takes people 20, 30, 40 years--however long--to figure out what to do with it, to develop a form of narrative that is native to that medium. You saw it with movies: The motion picture camera was invented around 1890 and it was nonetheless the mid-19-teens before you regularly had feature-length films with stars that used all of the techniques that we now associate with the grammar of cinema--like cuts, pan, stage and so forth.

Of course, another decade after that, before you had sound.

What's happening with the Internet is analogous, except it's more complicated because the technology keeps rushing ahead. When I wrote The Art of Immersion, at that point, Virtual Reality [VR] was still something that was remembered from the early 1990s when Jaron Lanier had his lab and everybody got excited about that. Just a couple of years after it came out, VR became a whole big thing again in an entirely new form with the launch of Oculus and so forth.

So, there are multiple kinds of storytelling that have been emerging. For example, podcasts. Podcasts were--I think they were around in 2011, but they certainly weren't, you know, as ubiquitous as they are today.

So, I think what's happening is that we are continuing to find new means of storytelling, that--means that are native to the Internet. And, it's going to be quite a while before we really, you know, settle down into a, you know, regular format.

Number one, I don't think there will be just one format. And number two, we'll have to see what the proverbial metaverse does for us. Not at all clear at this point.

6:07

Russ Roberts: I was talking to someone recently about the radio program The Shadow, which I knew from my childhood--my dad had told me about it. On some late night drives, even as an adult, I would find The Shadow being replayed over AM radio [amplitude modulation radio] as I was going 'cross country.

Now, going 'cross country, of course, a lot of people listen to podcasts, they also listen to books on tape--clearly a mistake when you could listen to a podcast. But--I'm kidding. But, what's interesting, I didn't think about it, the rise of the long-form multiple-episode podcast, like Serial, which I think was one of the first crime, lengthy, multiple-episode series. It's kind of just going back to The Shadow, except that you could listen to it when you wanted to.

They're always looking for sound effects and other ways to make it more than just listening. When they call a guest, they interview someone, you'll hear the phone ringing. Podcasts do those kind of things. Those are primitive shoutouts to the early days of radio; and of course, podcasting is just really radio with different delivery [system?]. It's just audio, which is what radio is. Anyway, I hadn't thought about that.

Frank Rose: Yeah, no, exactly. One thing that fascinates me about podcasts and VR is that, throughout the last, say, 150 years, at least, the tendency with technology has been to create forms of storytelling--or give rise to, I should say--forms of storytelling that provide more and more detail and leave less and less to the imagination.

Obviously, in the early 19th century, you had novels, and before that, even. Then you had cycloramas in the post-Civil war period in the United States, where people would go to see dramatic reconstructions, almost, of Civil War battles and even the crucifixion. And then you had movies. Suddenly, with the rise of movies, the emergence of movies, cycloramas looked kind of tawdry and cheap, and they were completely abandoned. And then, of course, you had radio, and then you had television.

And, what is happening with VR seems to be kind of the ultimate extension of that, providing more and more detail, leaving less and less to the imagination of the audience. And yet, podcasting is exactly the opposite. So, I think I'm fascinated by the fact--and when you think about it, I'm not terribly surprised by the fact that these two things are happening at the same time.

Russ Roberts: Well, the rise of visual media--movies, the bingeable miniseries on Netflix or Amazon Prime--there is a certain laziness to that, compared to a book--and even to an audio--because you're seeing it all. In theory, there's nothing left to the imagination.

But, of course, there are ways to use imagination in visual storytelling. I remember, I think it's in M, Peter Lorre does something horrific to somebody; and it's off camera, and it's left to the imagination. That was an early way that people did that.

But, you could argue that in modern times, people just--they want it easy. They don't want to have to work at trying to figure out what's going on. As you point out in your book, a number of modern storytelling--Pulp Fiction, the movie, Christopher Nolan's movies--they're often so convoluted in the narrative style that the viewer has plenty to do.

They invite multiple--just like as books do, and sometimes podcasts--they invite multiple listening because you want to think about it some more or try to figure out something that you didn't notice the first time. So, it's--I think it's this question about how much work you have to do, it's a feature and a bug for different people at different times. Sometimes you just want to lay back and be entertained, and other times, you want to be immersed in something that's very thought provoking. So, I think it makes sense that they're both happening at the same time.

Frank Rose: Yeah, I agree.

10:59

Russ Roberts: Now, a lot of your book--a chunk of your book is about advertising and the way that companies tell their story in the 21st century. I've been intrigued by this for a while, maybe even talked about it on EconTalk. Some of the best storytellers in the world today are ad agencies that are telling stories in very modern lengths--60 seconds. Sometimes you get a trailer, actually--of a movie, it's a story in and of itself. Sometimes you don't need to see the movie after you've watched the trailer. But, it's a two-and-a-half minute exposition.

How has--why has narrative become so ubiquitous in advertising? My father would say, 'I don't get that ad.' And of course, sometimes you're not supposed to: It's just a story sometimes. Or, it's a story where the product is embedded.

But, it's clear to me that what you identified back in 2011 and what you talk about in this new book is a very, very powerful theme in advertising, especially storytelling is memorable, can create an emotional connection. What's happening there, and how is it changing advertising?

Frank Rose: Well, as you say, storytelling is memorable. And in one of his books, Roger Schank, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, writes that 'Human memory is story-based.' That's because, I think, stories give us a sort of emotional hook. You know--that's how we remember things. That's what prompts us to remember things. We can memorize the state capitals, but it's not going to stay with us very long.

And that's, I think, the problem with data and the challenge of using data to tell stories.

In terms of advertising--I mean, it's a great question, and there are several things that are happening here. One is: The demise of interruptive advertising. People just don't want it. They never did want it. But, until fairly recently they didn't have any choice. You had to, you know, sit back and watch TV [television], through the ads, even though everybody knew that you weren't actually sitting back and watching the ads. You were going to the refrigerator; you were going to the bathroom; whatever.

This was an open secret, but never acknowledged by the industry.

Firstly, the emergence of the remote for TVs--this began to change. Then, you had--in the early Internet era--you had the rise of services that--you know, streaming services and so forth that enabled you, at least theoretically, to jump through the ads. You know, network executives went nuts. I'm talking obviously about TiVo and things like that. Network executives went nuts even as they themselves were using these devices.

And, so, you know--as I say, a couple of things are happening here. One of them is that if you need to--you know, if you're in a battle for attention, one of the best ways to get somebody's attention is to hook them with a story. And, it's well-known that we are in a battle for attention that's been increasingly hard for, you know, decades. Herbert Simon, at the end of the 1960s, wrote about this--wrote about or spoke, I should say, spoke about what's now considered or called the 'attention economy'. But, it's only gotten worse, much worse since his time.

And, so, there's that.

The other thing is, of course, stories are entertaining. So, if you want somebody to, like, pay attention to you, one thing you have to do is entertain them.

And another thing is: there's been a growing realization, because of a lot of work in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, that when we tell people to buy something, you know, it doesn't work. You know, it just doesn't. You know: this has been derided, and by people at the Advertising Research Foundation, as the input/output model of advertising. You know, like: You pour some facts into the viewer's head or the listener's head, and that comes out as a purchase.

It's ridiculous. And, I mean, this is a philosophy that goes back to the very early 1960s, late 1950s with Rosser Reeves, who was the head of the Ted Bates Advertising Agency at that time and wrote a book called Reality in Advertising, in which he argued for the Unique Selling Proposition, the USP--the idea that every product had to have some reason to buy it.

And you had to--as an advertiser, your job was to find out what that reason was and shout it out to the world.

He made merciless fun of brands like Coca-Cola for not, you know, doing this. As it happens, Coke was doing fine at time and has continued to do so. You know. So, it really comes down, I think, to entertainment and to memory--hooking people with an emotional memory, an emotional delivery that sticks in their minds.

17:17

Russ Roberts: And, you say in your book--you don't say both these things at the same time--but you effectively say what Ed Leamer has said on this program, and in his book on Macroeconomics: 'Man is a storytelling, pattern-seeking animal.' And pattern-seeking--storytelling is a form of pattern seeking. It's trying to make coherent in your mind a set of events that may or may not go together. When they do, though, it becomes, as you say, much easier to remember. And it's more compelling.

I like to argue--with no facts whatsoever--that our brain is probably designed for listening to stories. It's certainly not designed for watching movies. It could be coincidentally good at it, but if anything, we evolved to hear stories around the campfire and at the bedside. It's the nature of most of human history. It would not be unsurprising [surprising?] if our brains were wired that way.

Let's talk about some brands that you talk about in the book. I'm a little bit perplexed by this, but there's a rise of products, where the story is not so much, let's say--Coca Cola is a very good storytelling brand. Budweiser is a very good storytelling brand, as you point out in the book, I'm sure it sells product, but it certainly does remind people that the ad exists, if nothing else.

But, a lot of these new products that are out, that are basically internet-marketed, are stories about the founders, and their narrative of how they got interested in changing, say, the shaving business, or the shirt business, or the you-name-it business. And I find that fascinating. I personally am not a millennial, as everyone knows who listens to this program, but the implication of your book is that there are a lot of millennials who relate to this more than, say, my generation: that they want to know what the founders had in mind and their journey.

And the founders use that. I get emails from some products that I buy from the founders as if we have a personal relationship. They really 'appreciate that I bought their shirt.' And, they're not just the corporate appreciation, but the founder, the director of marketing: he only uses his first name. What's going on there?

Frank Rose: Yeah. That's a fascinating development. Well, you know, it was over 10 years ago that Simon Sinek had a bestseller that was called, Start with Why. The point of which was--

Russ Roberts: Start with 'Why?'--the question.

Frank Rose: Yes, Start with Why. The point that he was trying to make was that people don't care quite so much of what you do as why you do it. That's what differentiates you from everybody else. And, I thought that was a really major insight.

It's certainly in line with what you're talking about here. I think that millennials in particular, and I'm certainly not one either, but it seems pretty apparent that they are not, and younger people in general are not so much interested in going to advertising or any form of corporate communication to find out information about the products. If you want to find out information about a dishwasher, a car, a vacuum cleaner, whatever, there's no end of it available online. You can Google it and you'll have hundreds of thousands of results in a fraction of a second.

So, what is interesting to people is: Who is behind this and why are they doing it? I think that's really what's at issue here.

I think a contributing factor is that these are all direct-to-consumer brands. Direct-to-consumer really wasn't possible until around 2010, 2011. Suddenly, it's not only possible but has become ubiquitous. When you have a direct-to-consumer brand, it means, of course, there's no middleman, which is great. But also, there's no shelf space: there's no way to reach people except through videos online, that sort of thing, through your website, through the packaging on your products.

The fact that, I think people are increasingly--I'm not sure if 'suspicious' is exactly the word, but not taken with corporate lingo, corporate communication. They'd much rather have it from--at least, appear to come from an individual.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. That 'why' part--you use the example of Warby Parker, the eye glass chain--not chain, brand--something of a chain now. You know: the struggle of the founders to enter this giant marketplace where they're just a little David to the Goliath of the existing competitors, or Harry's Shave Club, which--neither of which, by the way, are sponsors of EconTalk. We take no money from them. I'm just mentioning it. They're taking on Gillette. It's interesting that--I just care if they shave well, or if the glasses are attractive, but you're suggesting that people actually care about the journey of how the founders came into the experience.

Frank Rose: Yeah. Clearly they do. That certainly seems to be what's happening. One of the reasons for this, I think, is that, certainly in the case of Warby Parker and Harry's, a key selling point of these products is that they're inexpensive by comparison with what you would get if you walked into a regular eyeglasses store, or if you bought Gillette razor blades and razors and so forth.

Therefore, it becomes kind of imperative to explain why they're inexpensive and why they can be inexpensive and yet as good or better than the products that you're used to. So, a big part of the origin story, certainly for these two brands, is about just that.

In the case of Warby Parker, it was: One of the four founders--these were four guys at Wharton at the time--one of them was getting off an airplane in Chiang Mai in Thailand, and realized that he'd left his $700 pair of Prada sunglasses in the seatback in front of him. By then it was too late to go get it back. And, so, the more they studied the situation, the more they realized that the entire eyeglasses industry was dominated by this Italian company, Luxottica, which controlled pretty much every aspect of the business and therefore was able to charge quite inflated prices for things. So, that became a key part of their origin story. It wasn't just about them, it was also about Luxottica.

Sort of the same with Harry's and Gillette.

So, there's a sense in which all of these origin stories, they tie, in a more or less subtle way, to the basic sales proposition, which is: This is what we have to offer, and this is why it's cheap.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's: 'We don't have a warehouse,' or 'we don't have a display lot,' and 'we pass the savings on to you.'

Frank Rose: Exactly.

Russ Roberts: Could be true, but sometimes it's not, it's just, as you say, it's a way to try to justify what they hope is an attractive product at a reasonable price.

26:24

Russ Roberts: I want to talk about movie franchises for a minute. You write about in the book Star Wars, Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings, of course, began as a book franchise, not as a movie, became a movie.

You point out in a rather lovely way, that long before those two iconic names, there was Sherlock Holmes; and that Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill them off and failed because people were so eager for the next episode.

So, just talk about that generally. I think, the long-form story of which Sherlock Holmes is an example: They were short stories, but we were always eager as the reader to hear the next one, if you were a contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle at the time.

There are so many TV miniseries where you feel that, 'Okay, after the second or third season, they're done; and now I'm in a soap opera: they're going to jerk me around as a viewer, and they've run out of new ideas.' And I usually bail at that point. But, people like that: they like to know that there's another episode coming eventually.

They run, many times, I think, for longer than they should, if they wanted to be a well-rounded story. A lot of the times they just don't care. They're just going to keep entertaining you for a while. And we'll talk about endings in a minute. But, just talk about that phenomenon, generally, and the idea of this episodic, long-form story--Chapter X of Star Wars or the next Marvel movie--they're all this ongoing franchise.

Frank Rose: Yes. Again, a couple of things going on there, and I think this is really a fascinating development. Part of it is that we like to immerse ourselves in stories. I wrote about that, of course, in The Art of Immersion. But, I look at it in a bit more detail, actually, in this book, in The Sea We Swim In. What's happening is, again, it's something that we've always wanted to do--to throw ourselves into the world of the story, if it's a story that matters to us, if it's a story that really appeals to us or speaks to us in some relatively deep fashion.

And so, given that, why would you want the story to end? Also, when you have stories that do come to an end, after a very long period--Lost, being a classic example, another example being Game of Thrones--it's all too easy to screw up.

You can screw up the ending apparently very, very easily. And, both of those franchises--both of those television series--did, in a way that left a lot of their fans pretty unhappy. So, in a way, it's almost better if you can avoid coming to an end or at least coming to a final end. It's like the Star Wars franchise, each of the movies tells its own story, but then there's an ongoing story with that.

This has to do also with the rise of what's called the story world. It used to be the setting. We just had a setting for a story, and that was fine, and we watched or read or whatever. We imagined ourselves in this place, but nobody thought too much about it.

But, with the rise of neuroscience and the gradual understanding--or seeming understanding, at least--that we process stories by literally imagining ourselves within the world where the story is happening by identifying with one of the main characters, by imaginatively projecting ourself into the story, this idea of the setting doesn't really satisfy anymore. It's more than a setting: It's a whole world that people want to throw themselves into, if your story is going to be successful.

Although this has become more prevalent in the digital era, certainly, as you say, with Sherlock Holmes, there's nothing all that new about it. Sherlock Holmes was an extreme example, but even after Conan Doyle died in, I think, 1930 or so, there arose these clubs in London and New York and elsewhere, which promoted the fiction that these stories were true: that Sherlock Holmes actually existed, and that Arthur Conan Doyle was merely his literary agent.

Everybody knew that this was not the case, but they proceeded anyway, with sort of a wink. And, this is the birth of a really obsessive kind of fandom, which we now see all around us. But, with Sherlock Holmes, it was still new.

Russ Roberts: And of course, you can always tell a new Sherlock Holmes story--maybe not legally: I don't know who owns the rights to it. But, what's interesting about what you're saying--I never thought about it--is that these characters, they do exist. They're fictional, but they exist. And they're immortal, many of them. Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman's series, Sherlock, is a magnificent bit of visual storytelling using a modern version with some modern overlay, visual overlay, of Sherlock's genius on-screen. And it's just lovely. It's very, very well done.

But, I think what's interesting is that--I didn't watch Friends. I don't think I've ever seen a whole episode of it. And I wasn't a Seinfeld fan. But, these TV series, which are sort of the predecessors of, say, the Netflix series that are so high end--you know, they're your friends. They're the people you hang out with on Tuesday night or whatever it was on.

And, the reason they're compelling is that we know their character. Right? We know--there's a lot of things that make them interesting, but their distinctiveness is part of what makes it compelling. We expect certain things from certain of the characters, and when they surprise us--which they sometimes do for different reasons, in terms of enhancing the plot or the intrigue--it's just like one of our regular friends doing it.

But, I want to talk about it. So, we hang out with them, and we miss them. And, when the show goes off the air, we watch the reruns. And I'm on my second or third time through Shtisel. The characters there I thought were so well done, I don't mind hearing again what they said. I don't remember them that well. It's kind of like when you have a reunion with a friend you haven't seen in a few years: they tell you a story that they told you before, but you don't remember it that well, and you like them, so you don't mind hearing them again. It's kind of comforting. It's like bedtime stories that we hear over and over again.

34:00

Russ Roberts: But, I want to talk about endings. I had Paul Bloom on the program recently, and he talked about how endings are different than beginnings. That, a period of suffering that is redeemed at the end by exuberant joy, say, is very different than a lot of joy that ends in suffering. We like the ending typically to be a good ending. There's a redemptive piece to that. And it's part of our mind organizing around stories. We can't just say, 'Well, it was half--half of it was good, half of it was bad.' We want the half that's good to be at the end. We don't want it to be at the beginning. We care about the narrative arc of life and in stories as well.

I'm fascinated by this idea that these franchises--that were extraordinary, like Lost or Game of Thrones, neither, which I saw, by the way: I think I saw the first episode of Lost--that people feel like, 'How'd you do that to--why did you end it so badly?' In contrast to a show like The Americans, that you mention, which ends magnificently, in my mind, as a story that's very powerful.

You know, part of the reason we want to watch these ongoing ones, is not just we want to hang with our friends, we want to know how it turns out. We have this curiosity. And I think that's part of the reason that endings are so important. I am bewildered that shows struggle to end. Do they just run out of ideas? Are they bored, the writers? It's such a huge opportunity. For me, the ending of a book is enormously important. Why would you not savor and try to perfect the ending of your series? What's going on there?

Frank Rose: Yeah. That's a very good question, and frankly, I don't know. I don't think the show-runners do either, which is probably why the ending wasn't successful. But--

Russ Roberts: Good one.

Frank Rose: With Lost, you can see the problem. You've--

Russ Roberts: Well, that's true. No spoilers here, but there's a mystery at the heart of it that doesn't maybe hold together so well, so it kind of stuck.

Frank Rose: Yeah, exactly. And with Game of Thrones--I don't know. That one really--it surprised me that it was not more successful.

I don't know. I think that ending a story may be even harder than beginning it, and beginning a story is pretty hard. As somebody who has spent a lot of time as a journalist and written a few narrative nonfiction books, I can tell you. At least with journalism, you have an ending that nobody can really argue with. But, with fictional stories--

Russ Roberts: You mean the truth.

Frank Rose: Yes.

Russ Roberts: Whatever it is.

Frank Rose: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Russ Roberts: Even more importantly, if the ending is not good, you just don't write that story. Ehhh. You can pick a better one.

Frank Rose: Right, exactly. But, people do expect some kind of redemptive quality at the end.

Russ Roberts: For closure.

Frank Rose: Yeah. Although, why anybody would expect that with Game of Thrones is sort of beyond me. This is a series that violated all the rules, starting with the fact that your main characters were killed off in the first episodes. So, of course it's not going to have a redemptive ending.

But, in any case, yes. This brings to mind what's called the peak-end rule, which I believe was discovered, at least in part, by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky: the idea that what we remember about a story after it's over, or an experience or anything that we've gone through, is the peak moment in the end. That's all that we remember.

And to demonstrate this, there have been lots of experiments where people are, in some minor way, tortured for several minutes by, for example, having their hand in a bowl of ice water. And if the final part of that experience is a little bit better than the earlier part, when asked to repeat it and given a couple of options, they'll opt for the longer, painful experience just because the ending is better. This is kind of extraordinary, but I think it's a fairly--

Russ Roberts: It is extraordinary. And it may not be true, but okay. Keep going.

Frank Rose: Okay. You know, it seems to be true, but I'm open to--but it does suggest why we are so kind of devoted to having, not necessarily a happy ending, but at least a satisfying ending to a story.

Russ Roberts: Well, I have a number of books I've read where the ending ruined the book for me. I don't know if I should mention them or not. I think I won't. But, it's a book that--you're totally immersed in it. Actually, both of them, they kill off the main character in the last 20 pages. I've got 20 pages to go and I'm going, 'Come on, you're not going--are you--you are? Oh, come on.'

They do, they kill them off in an unsatisfying way. There are satisfying ways for a character to die at the end of a book. These were just sort of like, 'I can't think of a way to end the book, I guess I'll kill off the character.' Or, 'If I don't kill off the character, I'll be accused of having a sort of it's too cheery,' or whatever.

Anyway, I think endings are incredibly important. I don't want to totally disagree with that research finding, but I do think beginnings are important. The only things that are important were the beginning, the middle, and the end. I'm being a little bit facetious there; I apologize.

40:26

Russ Roberts: I want to talk about immersion and some of the--in today's world, there's so many immersive aspects to storytelling. I want to talk about some non-immersive storytelling and see what your thoughts are on this. I just saw the movie Belfast, the Kenneth Branagh film that's just come out. I saw it in a movie theater, very interesting. I told people, it's the best movie I've seen in two years, but of course, it's the only movie I've seen in two years, since COVID.

I loved it. You may not, listeners, but I loved it. And, when it was over, I thought about it for a lot. I'm still thinking about it. I saw it about a week ago, and I'm still thinking about it. And there are a couple of scenes that I loved. And so, one thing I did is I went back and I played--there's a scene with "Everlasting Love," a nice song, nice pop song--and I've listened to that a few times because it reminds me of the movie. I found an interview with the two stars of the movie, and it's fun to see them with their imperfect, much less Irish accents in real life than they have in the movie, and to see what they look like in different makeup and clothing and see them chit chat.

That was fun. But that's kind of it. I'm kind of done. I can't immerse myself anymore in that story than--Van Morrison, the soundtrack's all Van Morrison songs. So, I like Van Morrison. I might listen to the soundtrack. You can do that with a movie. But, after that, with most movies until recently, that's all you got. Are those forms of entertainment in trouble, and is that one of the reasons that these large franchises are so effective for movie houses, because you have all the tie-in with merchandising and other--you can have reunions with--you can have, I don't know what they do, get-togethers with Star Trek fans--all kinds of stuff like that, which, not going to happen with a one shot movie like this. Are they in trouble? Is that one of the reasons they're in trouble? They're rare.

Frank Rose: Yeah, they're certainly rare as movies. I think one thing that's happened is that in the last 40 years or so, television and movies have switched places. It used to be that movies were the prestige medium and you got to tell--as a director, you got to tell great stories. As an actor, you got meaty roles, and that was great. Whereas, with television, it was obviously, the lowest common denominator medium, it had to appeal to everybody. And if it didn't, you were in trouble.

With the rise of digital, with the rise of cable and satellite, with the proliferation of channels and now streaming services, that's obviously no longer the case. In fact, you can make a very strong argument that the more different your characters are and your story is, the more distinct it is and original, the better off you're going to be. Because what you're really looking for is a strong niche audience. Whereas--

Russ Roberts: A passionate fan base, that's going to do all the other stuff.

Frank Rose: Exactly. Whereas with movies what's happened is, with the rise of international, which, 20, 30 years ago was a complete afterthought, but now with the building of multiplexes and cities around the world, it's the international box office out-draws, in most cases, the domestic box office, considerably. The problem, of course, being language. Especially with comedy--comedy notoriously doesn't translate.

So, with all of that, it's really movies that are becoming, or have become, you could argue, the lowest common-denominator medium.

And, the other thing is that movies cost so much to make, especially movies that rely on a great deal of computer-generated imagery, which is most movies today, whether they're science fiction or not--so expensive to make that you have to have preexisting characters. You have to have characters that people already know about and want to go. Or at least that's the theory in Hollywood. That's the theory at the studios. So, I think that's what's really happening there.

45:25

Russ Roberts: It's a fantastic point about the way the international market has caused it to be much more of a common-denominator medium. Of course[?], the other factor in terms of TV--I've talked about it before--is that when the price of televisions became low enough in real terms, that you could have multiple ones throughout the house. Different people could watch in their own rooms different stuff, which allowed for that niche that otherwise it would be vetoed in a majority rule or whatever system people were using to decide what to watch that night--it would have to appeal more or less to everybody in the house. Once you could watch your own TV, you got much more interesting and customized products.

I can't help but think, as you were talking about that, about Broadway shows, which--they've changed hardly at all. Some of the special effects are more ambitious now than they used to be. But, just one thing which I think is underappreciated about Broadway, and I've never understood this--why it's not more appreciated--is: after a Broadway show, there is a tradition that the stars of the show come out on the street and hang out with the audience.

It is one of the most remarkable things. Right? I'm sitting there watching a three-minute, not-so-interesting conversation between the two stars of Belfast. You know, their banter is not that high quality when it's unscripted. But I can talk to Norm Lewis, who's like a giant, and thank him. I can thank the stars that I've just seen that have poured their heart out for me in my presence.

There's usually like 30 people hanging around, I guess they have better things to do, or it's cold out at night in New York. But, I do think that's a wonderful, immersive part of Broadway shows that it is undervalued or under--maybe it's not known. Maybe most people don't know. But, you can.

Frank Rose: That's fascinating. I love that. I think it also goes to show--well, it's a different way of immersing yourself in the story. You obviously know it's a fiction, you know these are actors, and so forth. Yet, you get to learn more, you get to meet them, it's great.

You know, a lot of my thinking in the last 10 or 12 years has been influenced by this interview that I did with James Cameron. As you probably know, I was at Wired Magazine--I was a writer there for 10 years from 1999 to 2009. In 2006, I was doing a piece on 3D [3 dimensions]. Cameron, of course, had, after Titanic, had gone off and invented the stereoscopic camera system with a guy named Vince Pace. In 2006, he was in Montreal on the sound stage of where they were shooting a film: Another director was shooting a film that would be the first feature film using the stereoscopic camera system that Pace had invented, Pace and Cameron.

The film, by the way, was called Journey 3D. It was a take on Journey to the Center of the Earth, a remake in 3D. And, so Cameron was there just to see what was happening, see how the camera system worked, and so forth. He didn't really have much to do. So, I got a lot of time to talk with him. One of the things, of course, that I asked him about was Avatar, which at that point has been in development for a decade or so, which was widely expected to be his next film, but had not yet been green-lit by Fox.

So, I asked him about this and he said, 'Well--.' He didn't want to talk about it very much. But, he would say that, he saw it as sort of an Edgar Rice Burroughs-style action/adventure film that happens to take place on another planet. Edgar Rice Burroughs, of course, being the author of Tarzan.

Russ Roberts: But, he did have a few other books that took place on [?]--I was a big Edgar Rice Burroughs fan in my youth.

Frank Rose: Right. Of course. So anyway, he went on to say that for him, the best way to tell such a story was to create an almost fractal experience, where if you were a casual fan, you could just watch the movie, and that would be fine--that would be enough. But, if you were a more committed fan, you could go deeper and deeper and the pattern would still hold.

And that's what I think is going on right now with this idea of immersion. You're quite right: the stage door is a great example of this, and an example that there's nothing ultimately new about it--certainly nothing new about the audience's desire for it.

There are lots of movies, lots of TV shows where you can just be a casual fan; and Broadway plays, too, for that matter. You can just be a casual fan and that's enough. But, if you really care about the story that's being told, if it really speaks to you, if you very much identify with one of the lead characters, then you're going to want to go deeper, you're going to want to learn more.

The other night, I watched a film on TV called The Dig that was produced by Netflix. It was the true story, more or less--a couple of things happened that didn't actually--but a true story about the discovery in a remote part of coastal England on the verge of World War II--like, literally in the summer of 1939--when a local landowner had these mounds that had been on her property and wanted to find out what they were about.

And so, she hired a self-taught local archeologist to dig. What he found ultimately was what's been billed as--not by the people who made the movie--what's been billed as the greatest archeological funerary find in Europe to date. It was a ship, an Anglo-Saxon ship, from the early seventh century--so, around 620, 630 AD--in which was buried some great man. The ship had disintegrated, but there was a ghost of it in the ground. There was a huge treasure surrounding the person who had been buried. The person had long since disintegrated as well--the body--but the gold and silver and the elaborate things that were buried with him were still there.

And so, this was totally fascinating. I wanted to know more about the characters; I wanted to know--I spent the next two or three hours on Wikipedia and other such resources, sussing out the details of the story.

Russ Roberts: I thought you were going to say: And she had these two mounds, and she hired this local archeologist and they dug and they didn't find anything--just a bunch of some dirt. And that's not much of a story.

Frank Rose: Yeah. Right.

Russ Roberts: There's a lot of excitement, but if the ending is not interesting--you got a pretty good ending there, shipwreck from the seventh century. I was hoping it was going to be: they found the pieces of an airplane that had been lost in a TV show called Lost, but can't have everything, I guess--could resolve two shows.

53:39

Russ Roberts: I'm curious--I don't want to sound too judgmental about this--but, is there something unusual or interesting about the fact that people want to go deeper? I understand--or maybe they're just the same thing--that you might want to find out how much this story was true. You get on Wikipedia, you find out more than they had time to share in the article, in the movie. But, going deeper into a fictional character, isn't that a little bit--and I get it,right? There are these webpages now with every detail about every character that's ever appeared on a particular show, like Game of Thrones.

And--presumably like Sherlock--you could continue to have the character evolve after the show ends. Right? You could imagine different things that weren't true. Well, they wouldn't be true because it's fictional. But, it's just an interesting thing that human beings--we have these imaginary friends that are the characters in our novels, the characters in our movies; we care about them. We just did a show that's airing this week on EconTalk about our mirror neurons.

Right? Our emotions are triggered by these things, even when we know they're not real. We cry when they die. We're happy for them when they succeed in the program. It's a fascinating thing.

Frank Rose: Yeah. No, it's totally fascinating. And, you know, there's long been, I think--lots of people have wondered: Why do we tell ourselves stories that we know are not true? Right? The birth of the novel in the 17th and 18th century--the novel was considered--well, first off, the reason it was called 'novel' was because it was so new. It was a new form of storytelling that was native to the printing press and movable type.

But, at the same time, it was considered a branch of history, but it had the distinct disadvantage of not being true. So, it was a false branch of history.

By the 19th century and the rise of people like Dickens and so forth, this attitude fell away.

But, there has been a lot of--I think a lot of people have been interested in this subject and have wanted to go deeper and try to understand it.

One of them is Brian Boyd, who is one of my favorite authors. He's probably the world's leading authority on Nabokov. He wrote a two-volume biography. He's written books about various Nabokov novels, and so forth. He's a professor of English at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. And, some years ago, I think around 2009, he published a book called On the Origin of Stories, which is essentially a literary Darwinist look at storytelling--and fiction, in particular.

He concluded--if I can wrap this up very succinctly and probably oversimplify--but he concluded that we care about these stories because they're essentially teaching us things. They're teaching us how to behave in the world. What works and what doesn't. Furthermore, when you have kids who want to hear the same story or watch the same story over and over and over again, every night, that kind of immersion is coming at that age, at such a young age, when they're first coming to grips with the world and trying to understand this crazy world that they've been born into.

I think that's a really a key understanding, I think, of why fiction matters to us.

Another thing that I find really interesting: There is a woman named Melanie Green. She's now a professor of, I believe, psychology, at the University of Buffalo in New York State. And, in the 1990s, she did a remarkable piece of research. She was then a grad student at Ohio State. What she wanted to know was: Would stories be more likely to change our attitudes about whatever the subject of the story was, if we were more immersed in the story or less immersed in the story?

And, I won't go into the details of how she found out, but it's pretty interesting. Essentially, she found out that: Yes, the more immersed we are in a story, the more likely we are to come away with beliefs that are consonant with the story, that the story might reinforce.

So, almost as, like, a side-question to this, she wanted to know if it mattered if the story was true or not. And, very interestingly, she gave people a short story to read, and she formatted the story in two different ways. One group of people got it as a short story--as a piece of fiction that was reprinted from a literary magazine. Another group of people got the exact same story, formatted as a newspaper article. So, one was fiction, putatively, and one was truth.

And, what she found there was that it made no difference whatsoever. Where the people were told the story was true or false, the only thing that mattered, in terms of the story changing their attitudes, was how immersed they were in the story.

Russ Roberts: Well, it's interesting. I guess immersion is an example of authenticity, something else you write about. And I think a great book is credible if the characters seem real. When I think about the comic book revolution that Marvel started, the real thing that they did--that Stan Lee and his team did--was to create characters with flaws. You know: Spiderman had to deal with the death of his parents. He had to deal with his own insecurities. He made jokes. He made jokes, right?

I read Spiderman when I was probably 13, and it had a big impact on my sense of humor, Marvel comics. They were ironic, and they were self-referential, and they were--they're very modern. I think it's an underappreciated phenomenon that Marvel, I think, had an enormous impact on humor, not just the superhero genre. But, they humanized the superhero, I think, was what was clever about it. And that made them more authentic.

I think a great novel is data. It's like you say: you learn something about the world, it's one data point; but if the person isn't realistic, doesn't strike you as credible, doesn't live by the human principles you expect, then you don't take it seriously. But, if they do, then you can immerse yourself in it and then it can be a source of understanding for you. I think that's very important.

1:01:44

Russ Roberts: I want to close with something I just realized, which is this quote that I had earlier, that you have as well, that--you know, I put it together, but you say both these things--that human beings are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals. Now, I don't actually hear what those words are because I always think of it as people like to listen to stories, when I say that: that people like to hear stories. But, it's storytelling, not story-listening.

And, one of the observations you make in the book--and it's an observation by chance I also heard over the last week or so--is that there are more people making movies than watching them. There are more people writing than reading. What Twitter and social media and TikTok and YouTube have done is really--we think of it as the attention question, which you have a lot of things to say about, we're not going to get to, but I enjoyed them. It's really the maker revolution. It's the chance for people who normally would be unable to tell stories, to tell them.

They're not that interesting, sometimes. They might be 30 seconds long or three minutes long. But it's what we want right now. And, the technology has liberated the human spirit. I'm going to wax rhapsodical for a minute, perhaps inappropriately given how some of these things are also destructive, as we know. But, it has really liberated human beings to be much more creative and to tell stories, not just watch them, not just listen to them. Just react to that.

Frank Rose: That's a totally fascinating phenomenon. You know, I think that--well, one measure of this is fan fiction. I'm sort of a great believer in the idea that technology doesn't really change us: it just makes possible aspects of our personalities or our desires that weren't made possible before. And what you're talking about here is a great example of that, because there's been a lot written about the democratization of the technology of communications.

Anybody can make a video now. Anybody can write something and post it. And, sure, that's true. But, it happened before; it just wasn't obvious. It wasn't apparent. I mean, fan fiction being the perfect example. There's nothing new about fan fiction. It's just that before the Internet, it was underground--by necessity because there was no real way for it to surface.

Russ Roberts: What do you mean by fan fiction?

Frank Rose: Good question. Fan fiction, being fiction that's written by fans of a certain story, a certain franchise, that, you know, sort of takes the characters and puts them in new situations.

So, and, you know, there's now no end of fan fiction available. And some of it has become hugely, hugely popular.

And, you know, what I think people are starting to realize is that there's no--you know, intellectual property, including stories of any sort, is fundamentally different from physical property, and it actually benefits from being shared. And it took people a long time to come to this realization. But, I think increasingly, a lot of, movie studios, television networks, and so forth have come to this--have come to this--realization.

But, the other thing I like to keep in mind is, what I call narrative thinking. Narrative thinking is essentially being aware of the sea we swim in, being aware that we live in this constant sea of stories and that we--whether as story tellers or as story listeners, viewers, whatever--we are using this to make sense of the world. The brain is a pattern-seeking organ. It will see patterns in all kinds of stuff, whether they make sense or not.

There are no end of places where people have seen cloud formations that look like the Virgin Mary, or condensation on a glass or a window. And, you know, so this is just pattern recognition. There doesn't actually have to be, even necessarily, a real pattern there, just something that suggests a pattern. And it does have to do with our making sense of the world. Stories are really key to that.

And I think that's sort of the underlying reality behind the very first question of you asked--about advertising. We use stories to make sense of the world, and a smart advertiser will recognize this and play to it. So, that's, I think, what's really going on here, this idea of narrative thinking, that we have to be a aware of the role of stories in our lives. And the role of stories being largely to provide us with patterns that show us, in some way or another, what's going on.

Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Frank Rose. His book is The Sea We Swim In. Frank, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

Frank Rose: Thanks, Russ. Great to be here.