Why you don't think when you hear a good story

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Video adapted from a talk I gave about RAG AI systems
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Why a great story beats great

You're a sucker for a good story. As a matter of fact, when you hear the right story you become a cowgirl, drinking whiskey, lassoing cows and shooting guns in the air. Not just you... but all of us. It's human nature. We ignore facts in the face of a good story. We think we are masters of the mind, but but we are actually servants to the real ... the monkey brain.

I'm going to tell you why you should learn to cater to that brain in others, and more importantly how you can develop the skills to do this for good!

How do fraudsters get away with it? They tell tales that appease the monkey minds of prodigious people. They lulled these brains to sleep with their hypnotic stories about the future and outsized returns on investment.

These highly sophisticated hucksters, suckered smart people in with their salacious and scintillating stories. Fortunately this isn't mastered only by the malicious. Steve Jobs, Sara Blakely, and Oprah Winfrey also sold stories. Jobs, told of 1000 songs in your pocket. Blakely that your clothes are confidence. And Winfrey that everyone deserves respect.

Here's why it works.

Our monkey brain has a three operating modes; ignore, intrigue, and danger. By default, everyone (except accountants who are immune to boredom) ignore everything that isn't dangerous or intriguing. We decide if a situation is intriguing, or dangerous within the first few seconds of exposure. We only continue to work with it, if it is intriguing, then we allow our analytical side to be exposed to it.

Think about it. Would you have read so far, had I not questioned your ability to make a decision? Let me answer that for you... probably not. That is because I challenged you in a non threatening way, early on. That is intriguing. I also created a pleasant challenge for you, to prove my assessment of your thought process wrong. Then I added another layer of intrigue called the monkey brain.

While I've provided no concrete data, I've demonstrated the concepts I'm talking about. And that makes you believe it. I could go into all of the neuroscience and how humans are just monkeys optimised for communication. How the only thing that makes us the dominant species on this earth is the ability to exchange information. Or how stories are remembered up to 22 times more than facts alone.

However, it's not what you're going to remember.