Narrative in the Time of Chaos | Greg Bresnitz - Optimism

Hey folks, uh for our last talk of the day, um we saved the most timely topic for right now. Um here from optimism to speak about narrative in the time of chaos is Greg Breznes. Thank you. Amazing. Hi.

Apologies for my voice. Um, I live below sea level in New Orleans and so I always dry out here. Uh, my name is Greg Breznitz. Uh, I lead narrative and strategy for optimism. Uh, formerly I was the CEO of FWB and also the co-founder of FWVFest.

Today I'm going to talk to you about narrative and mythmaking. Uh, some context and then a simple like how-to guide. Also, I'm not a designer and I feel like these slides are very unhinged. So anyway, bear with me. Let's go.

So, we are living in a golden age of content and a dark age of meaning. AI can now produce blog posts, social threads, ads. Your competitors all have the same tools. You do. The feed is endless and yet most of it expires on contact.

Nobody remembers it. Nobody shares it and nobody joins it. Why? Well, I think it's because people aren't are starving for more content. They're actually starving for something to believe in.

Roland Bar, this handsome gentleman out here, was a French intellect, chain smoker, and he wrote a whole book on analyzing wrestling and laundry detergent. I highly recommend you check it out. He nailed this concept in 1957. Stories actually compete for competition, for attention. Myths command belief.

Here's a line that changed how I think about this work. Myths are humanity's oldest and most powerful technology for creating a shared reality. not describing reality, just actually constructing it. Scholars who study this stuff, well, they reached a conclusion that sounds dramatic but actually holds up. Humans cannot function without myths.

And periods when myths collapse are the most psychologically dangerous and politically consequential moments as society faces. Look around us just right now. Old narratives are fracturing. institutions that used to provide meaning, religion, nations, careers, American dream, uh, they just don't hold the same weight that they used to. People are drowning information and starving for meaning.

And this just isn't soft stuff. This is the game, the game that we're all actually playing in. Companies and movements that are winning right now aren't the ones with the best features or the most content. They're the ones providing something to actually believe in. And here's the thing that research makes clear.

mythic thinking. It's not a bug in human con cognition. It's a feature. We are actually actively wired for this. And so the question isn't whether your audience will attach to myths.

They will. We see it all the time. The question is whether they'll actually attach to yours. So how do myths actually work? Pascal Buer, cognitive scientist, discovered that most successful ideas violates exactly one uh expectation while keeping everything else familiar.

So if you look up there, that's just one thing. A talking bush memorable, a bush that talks, flies, turns invisible, reads minds, really confusing. Researchers also tested this on folktales. Rapunzel, Snow White, they all survived centuries because they hit a sweet spot. Strange enough to be memorable, familiar enough to feel true.

All the tales that have extinct or we don't even know these days, they violated too many intuitions or too few. The second piece of science is the illusionary truth effect. Neuroscience shows that repeated information feels more true, not because it evaluates itself more carefully, but because our brains mistake processing fluency for accuracy. Tell a story enough times and the brain starts treating it as fact. This is how myths gain authority not through argument but actually through repetition.

And third, and this one is my favorite and kind of wild is that myths think themselves. Claude Levi Strauss, the anthropologist, introduces concepts called bricklage. The mythic mind creatively recombining available cultural elements. Organic myths emerge through uncons unconscious processes. A compelling incident, real or imagined, gets repeated past person to person, changed with each retelling as the mind sharpens dramatic tensions and smooths away all the irrelevant details.

This is how King Arthur went from a fifth century general that no one really knew about to a guy with a magic sword and a wizard. The myths that survive aren't necessarily the truest. They're the ones calibrated to how human brains actually work. So, if you want to build a myth that lasts, here's the formula. The elements that make myths sticky parallel almost exactly the Chip and Dean Hell success framework from the book Made to Stick.

Myths are simple. Good versus evil, departure and return. Unexpected, violations of intuition, concrete, specific characters, objects, places, credible, anchored in authority and tradition, emotional, engaging primal fears and hopes, and inherently, they're all storybased. The Heath essentially rediscovered in a business context what mythmaking have understood for millennia. Now, with this success framework, here's how to apply it.

The formula for creating myths actually just boils down to four elements. First, a founding moment. Not a mission statement, a moment. Something broke and you, your company, your brand, you emerged to fix it. The world was broken in a specific way, and we emerged to fix this.

Effective myths require a founding moment that's specific, vivid, and concrete. Patagonia realized that their climbing gear was actually damaging the rock that they loved, Bitcoin. The 2008 financial crisis proved you couldn't trust banks. Satoshi actually embedded a newspaper headline about this and the bank bailouts in the genesis block. If you can't fill those blanks with something that makes people feel something, you don't have a myth yet.

You just have a mission statement. Second, who's the hero? And this is actually where most people get this wrong. Most companies feel that they are the hero. They are the protagonist.

They make themselves the center of the story. In a real myth, the audience is the hero. You, your company, your brand. You're Obi-Wan, not Luke. You're the guide, not the protagonist.

Carl Young identified archetypes. The hero, the rebel, the creator, the sage. They are not characters in your stories. They're roles your audience gets to inhibit by joining it. Signal the company.

Users become with become people with nothing to hide and nothing to give away. notion their users become system thinkers or awareers become optimizers. If your answer is someone who uses our project, you don't have a myth. You just have a basic transaction. Third, what are you against?

Every myth needs an enemy. There has to be a genuine ad uh advers adversity to overcome, not manufactured conflict, but real tension. Figma is against working alone. Substack is against the algorithm. Zoom is against distance.

The enemy doesn't have to be a competitor. It can be a condition. Complexity, extraction, gatekeeping, the status quo. In blockchain, the enemy isn't other technology. It's extraction.

The 3% on every transaction. The platform that changes in terms overnights. The companies winning right now aren't selling features. They're selling freedom. And finally, how do you make this real?

A myth that is in practice is just a slogan. Victor Turner studied how rituals create communities, that bond that you feel when you're part of something together. Katherine Bell showed that ritualized action doesn't just express beliefs, it produces them. Apple has product launches as a secular religious service. CrossFit has WOD.

Salesforce has Dreamforce. 40,000 people every year show up on a pilgrimage for enterprise software. That's insane. Burning Man has the burn. So, what's yours?

not a campaign, not a one-time event, a practice, something that happens regularly and embodies your values and action. The deeper lesson from all of this research is that distinction between authentic and fabricated. Those myths are less useful about the distinction between them, but the communities that serve and the communities that are exploited by them. Patagonia's origin story is stylized and selective, but it actually aligns with their actual behavior. The Silicon Valley garage myth was deliberately constructed to make entrepreneurship seem democratic, totally obsicating an elite network and VC money that made it actually function.

Both are constructed narratives. Both are myths. One invites you in, the other keeps you out while pretending the door is open. In conclusion, here's what I want to leave you with. You do not choose whether you make myths.

You only choose which myths to make and whether to make them consciously or unconsciously. Every company today that is here and around the world is already generating myth mythic narratives through its founding stories, its rituals, its heroes, and its silences. The question is whether you're shaping it or letting it shape itself without you. In a time of chaos, when AI can generate infinite content, when people are drowning in information and starving for meaning, the myth makers don't just win, they are the only ones who get remembered. Thank you.

I have time for two questions or none. Will Mercer economic freedom. I think that one still rings true. Even even in a bare market, I think you're still seeing signs of that permeating. And I think that one will be very I think that'll be if if this industry dies, that will be the last one to die.

How would I define it besides the presentation I just gave?

Oh, yeah. I mean, to go back to the point, it's mostly true except for one thing that is fantastical. So, I think it's like my favorite type of sci-fi is like everything's the same and then there's just zombies, right? You're like, "Oh, that's the world." So think about building a world in which like everything remains true but you've just changed this one thing.

And so people it feels if it feels unfamiliar to people then they're going to not feel like that it's real. But if everything looks real and then there's just like this one thing that you shift that is how people can find their entry point. And also it's so different they remember it. And again the idea about this is like being remembered right it's how many companies are here? How many are kind of promoting the same thing?

Who has the single differentiation that brings in brings in the hook. One minute. Anybody else? Okay, thanks