What Came First: Stories or Language? Kevin Ashton on the Story of Stories

[00:00:00] Andrew Keen: Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen on America, the daily interview show about the United States.

[00:00:15] Andrew Keen: Hello everybody. Technology is very good at telling stories about itself, or at least the technology community is good about telling stories about itself, establishing narratives. We all know about Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0—apparently now there's even a 4.0. One of the best stories—I'm not sure if there was any truth to it—was something called the "Internet of Things." And it was invented by our guest, or at least the term was invented by my guest today, Kevin Ashton, who is a prominent technologist and writer. He has a new book out appropriately called The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art. Kevin is joining us from Austin, Texas. Kevin, congratulations on the new book. When it comes to storytelling, of course, South by Southwest is just round the corner, isn't it?

[00:01:10] Kevin Ashton: Yes. In fact, it might have already started; there's an education event just before the main event, but the main event starts on Thursday. I will be speaking there, so I know.

[00:01:21] Andrew Keen: Are you going to be telling some stories?

[00:01:23] Kevin Ashton: I'm going to be telling some stories.

[00:01:24] Andrew Keen: Kevin, in all seriousness, I'm on the West Coast in San Francisco, and usually when people talk about humans' ability to tell stories, I switch off because it's such a truism. But you're a noted writer and thinker. What are you saying about this human ability to tell stories that hasn't been told before?

[00:01:46] Kevin Ashton: I think the foundation of the book is a lot of new science that points to the fact that the origin of language post-dates storytelling. In fact, storytelling around the first night fires and the desire to talk about things not present is almost certainly what forced the evolution of language. So, I think the common misunderstanding about storytelling is that it's something we do with language—that language somehow existed first and one of the things we do with language is tell stories, when in fact the reverse is true. Language is kind of the first purpose of story, and story is really how we organize our thinking.

[00:02:30] Andrew Keen: So you're really turning everything on its head. You're suggesting that we humans invented language to tell stories. So where does the storytelling come from within us if it isn't in language? Is there something more innate in our brain?

[00:02:44] Kevin Ashton: Yeah, it seems to be the organizing principle of most of our, certainly conscious, thought. So, the backstory here is about a million years ago, some early humans learned to control and light fires, which meant they could hang around after dark. And the sort of normal social grooming behavior—stroking, picking out nits, whatever—or gesturing was not possible around the fire because it was too dark. So, the other way of communicating or grooming that was available was repurposing the vocal sounds of mating cries and warning calls and so on and using that to socialize around the night fire. The problem with that is that those kind of cries and calls are really about things that are immediately in front of you, things you can point to. So, around a fire, there's really nothing you can point to, so there's a repurposing that starts to happen over a long period of time, and those cries and calls evolve into a way to talk about things not present: things in the past, things in the future, things imagined, things remembered. And the way we do that is really the same in every single language. There are about 7,000 languages in the world right now, and all of them have the same components in a standard sentence, which is a subject, a verb, and an object. Not necessarily in that order, but the subject-verb-object structure is kind of the Lego brick of storytelling. Something happened to somebody; somebody did something to something. And you sort of start to string those together chronologically, and ideally, to satisfy your audience, there's some consequence, some conclusion. And that's a story. And when we look really closely, most human conversation is story, particularly after dark. And we all crave stories—it's why we use the internet, for example. We tell stories, we tell each other stories—just "how was your day," "tell me more about yourself," whatever. And we start to see that, one, story is innate; two, it's the organizing principle of our thinking; and three, it's just all around us all the time.

[00:04:47] Andrew Keen: So it's sort of like—if we're fish, it's like our water. So how do you tell, Kevin, The Story of Stories? If stories are ubiquitous, if they're what drives us, defines us, if we invented language to tell stories as you're arguing, how do you get outside those stories? How does one establish the perch, the place where one can tell, so to speak, to quote your book, The Story of Stories? Isn't it just another story?

[00:05:14] Kevin Ashton: It is just another story. I mean, I would argue that it's very difficult for us to communicate or think in other terms. There's a couple other things we do with language; one is kind of pleasantries, the "hello, how are you," to which you're supposed to say "I'm fine" because it's not really an inquiry about how you are, it's kind of a greeting. And then there's the sort of the "look out" imperatives. But even if you end up with things like algebra or somebody else's shopping list, the mind starts to sort of see a story there. So, I would argue you really can't step outside of storytelling, and certainly not if you want to convey something that's truthful, that's emotional, that's memorable, that's meaningful. You're really going to be working in this basic framework of character, chronology, consequence, which is the sort of the universal aspect of a story. So, you know, The Story of Stories is a story. It's a series of stories. There's a big picture about humans did this, humans did that, humans invented this, but then really to illustrate that and make it more real and meaningful, the book contains lots of short stories about real people, some famous, some not, that were impacted by storytelling and storytelling technology.

[00:06:40] Andrew Keen: Yeah, I want to get to that, and of course the subject of the Bible and Homer and Socrates and Plato and Gutenberg and all the other characters who we normally associate with the narrative of stories, particularly when it comes to technology. But the more I listen to you, Kevin, the more I think that you're essentially a hyper-realist. Is there a kind of a foundational—I'm not sure if that's a contradiction in terms—a foundational hyper-realism to your theory in The Story of Stories?

[00:07:07] Kevin Ashton: I don't know what hyper-realism is.

[00:07:11] Andrew Keen: You've used the term, though, don't you? I mean you write about Baudrillard, who's one of the inventors of the concept of hyper-realism. This sort of essential postmodern condition—and again I'm quoting from the AI overview of Google—describes a postmodern condition where the distinction between reality and its simulation blurs, causing fabricated representations, but for you everything's a story, so a fabricated representation is essentially a story. It's what other people call reality.

[00:07:42] Kevin Ashton: Yeah. So, yeah, there is a section in the book called "The Hyper-Real Thing," but that's not because I knew about that theory. I think there's a lot in the book about reality, though, and the fact of the matter is, reality is the graphic user interface our brain gives us to understand the world. It's actually very difficult to think about an objective reality because we interpret the physics of the world in a certain way. There are some things we can sense and some things we can't, and the things we can sense are represented to us in our mind in a certain way. One of the examples in the book is if you have a dog, your dog's sense of reality is very different to yours because the dog has a different nervous system. Some of the things you sense, it can sense; a lot of the things it can sense, you can't sense, and the other way around. But nobody's reality is more or less real. So we all kind of have an angle on the universe which ultimately is conjured up in our brains to help us survive and reproduce. So, optical illusions, seasickness, various other things are examples of when that fails to function, when it glitches. But it's—yeah, I guess that the reason I use the word hyper-reality is just like ultra-realistic, it's kind of how I'm thinking about it.

[00:09:05] Andrew Keen: And you said, maybe I'll use this as the title of this conversation: "Nobody's reality is real." So is the word "real" for you in this Story of Stories just a story, or is it a worthless word? I mean, if we did indeed, Kevin, if your theory is right and we invented language to tell stories, why did we invent the word "real"?

[00:09:27] Kevin Ashton: Well, I mean, so there's two ways of looking at the word "real." I think there's kind of the colloquial way that we use it...

[00:09:34] Andrew Keen: And this is R-E-A-L, not R-E-E-L.

[00:09:37] Kevin Ashton: Yeah. There's a colloquial way we use it, which is whether something seems realistic, right? And that would be a situation where—does a story, and it's nearly always a story that we use this term about, and I, you know, I think of paintings and things as storytelling devices as well...

[00:09:55] Andrew Keen: Well, you think of everything as a story.

[00:09:57] Kevin Ashton: Pretty much.

[00:09:58] Andrew Keen: Is there anything that you don't think is a story in the human realm?

[00:10:01] Kevin Ashton: Greetings, imperatives, algebra is a borderline case because the person producing it may not think in terms of a story, but a lot of people seeing it may—you know, 2 + 3 sounds a little bit chronological—and then lists is a really interesting one. I think when we write a list, we don't think of ourselves as telling a story, but if somebody else reads a list, particularly someone who doesn't know us, they will probably start to tell a little bit of story about who we are. They'll start to make assumptions in a story-based format. So, you know, most things one way or another are storytelling because that's just how our mind works. But back to the real point...

[00:10:43] Andrew Keen: On reality at least.

[00:10:44] Kevin Ashton: There's the colloquial sort of sense of real, which is how much does this representation correlate to our experience of the world? Okay, so that's one idea of real, something is realistic or not realistic, right? And then there's a kind of a more philosophical understanding of real, which is how much does our representation and experience of the world—our mental representation of the world—actually correspond to some objective a-sensory truth. So, you know, a nice example is a rainbow. First of all, I can paint a picture of a rainbow that can look very crude, maybe like the pride flag, very graphic; we wouldn't call that a realistic rainbow. If I were some master artist, I could perhaps do something with watercolor or something that was almost as if you were looking at a rainbow through a window. So there's different degrees of that colloquial realism. But then there's the philosophical realism, which is what is a rainbow actually? And what a rainbow actually is, these waves slash particles of electromagnetic radiation in a frequency we call light, at various subfrequencies within that frequency, but our brain perceives as color. So color is an artifact of the brain; a rainbow is the artifact of the brain. It doesn't exist in an objective sense, and one way to demonstrate that would be that if your dog looks at a rainbow, it doesn't see the same colors that you see. So whose rainbow is real? I mean, the answer is both of them are equally real, or neither of them are real. So, realistic, I guess, and I sort of do this in the book a little bit, and I think it's clear from context: there's a colloquial understanding and there's a more philosophical understanding, and we have to know which we mean.

[00:12:35] Andrew Keen: Kevin, you've—and correct me if I'm wrong—you've connected our need to invent language and tell stories with some sort of survival impulse, which often obviously brings to mind Darwin and his theory of evolution. We've told, or us moderns have told, our story and the story of the universe in this sort of Darwinian, or perhaps sometimes Einsteinian, narrative. Are you suggesting in this Story of Stories that science itself is just another story, and that Darwin told one story, Einstein told another, and there'll no doubt be some 21st-century scientist who will come along to present an alternative story?

[00:13:17] Kevin Ashton: Of course. And we have to be careful here because, you know, I think again, there's a colloquial understanding of story in the sense of "it's just a story," i.e., that's kind of doesn't bear any notion to reality. But if you look at science, science is a way of telling stories that have predictive value, right? So the quality of a scientific story, or a hypothesis or a theory, is how well does it predict and explain things. And that's true of all stories. You know, one of the examples in the book is all the people who believed the stories about COVID vaccines being deadly and containing microchips and various other nonsense, who then decided not to take the vaccine and died, right? That is a bad story because the story enables predictions which are false, which leads to behavior which is dangerous. So, you know, to say science is a story is not in any way to denigrate it, but that is the format: we talk about characters and chronology and consequence in science, and the value of that scientific story is how well does it predict things.

[00:14:32] Andrew Keen: All over the internet, there are podcasts about something that people describe as "true stories," which I'm always slightly skeptical of. Is that a useful term, Kevin, or does that reveal again our own preoccupation or addiction with storytelling or our own ability to separate ourselves from the story? I mean, is there such a thing as an untrue story if indeed storytelling is the thing in itself in the human condition? Then there can't be an untrue story, can there?

[00:15:00] Kevin Ashton: Well, you know, "true" is another one of those words that kind of does double duty, right? In the sense of, you know, true crime type stuff...

[00:15:08] Andrew Keen: We're obsessed these days with true crime as opposed, I guess, to fiction.

[00:15:11] Kevin Ashton: That sense of true, you know, the story is representing itself on a spectrum of more or less imagined. So true in that sense means allegedly less imagined, right? Based on evidence. You know, the interesting thing is that any story that really succeeds—and we also have to distinguish between kind of good successful public stories told by professional storytellers versus the, you know, what your kid tells you about what happened at school today—they're all stories but they're different. The really good stories, if you look at Shakespeare or Frank Herbert or whatever story speaks to you, they contain truth even though the events are wholly imagined. So I think the answer to that is that all stories are somewhat true: the imagined ones have to speak truth to be effective and have to feel true in some way, and the less imagined ones are selecting evidence and then using that as a basis for telling a story. You know, and the interesting thing is, I don't know, like, let's take O.J. Simpson as a really interesting case of like true crime allegedly. The prosecution tells one story, the defense tells another story; they are very, very different stories, but they both have to fit the same agreed-upon facts. So the thing we can't lose sight of in a true story is it's still going to have a point of view, it's still going to have a perspective, and to really fit well into the format of story, you know, it has to be suspenseful, there has to be a villain and a hero. The consequences that the villain or the hero receives ideally has to appear to be a result of their actions and their character. So, yeah, a true crime story is arguably less imagined than a Sherlock Holmes story or something, but both contain a degree of truth and both contain a degree of imagination and fabrication.

[00:17:15] Andrew Keen: The Story of Stories, of course, is often considered to be the Bible, which spawned all sorts of other Bibles and theisms and monotheisms and all the rest of it. What does the Bible tell us in your theory of The Story of Stories? What is God then? Is God an invention, that necessary piece of the narrative to give coherence to the story? Why is the Bible, Kevin, so inspirational to so many different cultures? Why has it survived?

[00:17:42] Kevin Ashton: I mean, there's a couple interesting answers to that, and I make no comment about people's faith. I can sort of answer that question without making any judgments about religious faith. One thing we see that the Bible has and that all the world's major religions have is, again, this format of character, chronology, and consequence. And, you know, one thing that is universal in storytelling, as far as I can see, is that the principal character or characters in a story are always human beings. Even when they are—or very human-like, let's say—even when they are supposed to be rabbits or robots or aliens or whatever, they have incredibly human characteristics, and that's really because we're only really interested in stories that speak to us as human beings. So, you know, if you look at concepts of God, I think every religion that I'm aware of, God is human-like, or gods are human-like depending on whether it's got one God or many gods. You don't really have a God that's a sort of a-morphous blob with no eyes and mouth that behaves in a way that...

[00:18:55] Andrew Keen: Well, isn't that the Buddhist notion of something else?

[00:18:58] Kevin Ashton: Yes, but then look at the name of Buddhism, right? It's a story about a guy, at the end of the day. It's a story about a historical figure, Buddha. And a lot of the stories in the sutras are about human beings doing things. You know, the Chinese Buddhist Apocalypse is very human-centered, for example. So, that's one thing. And I think, you know, these are the stories that have survived, and they've survived for a reason and they're inspiring for a reason—because they tell us things about ourselves. They have characters that are human-like that we can sort of relate to or identify with in some ways, that we can aspire to be like. So that's one reason. And the other thing that's really interesting, and I talk about a lot in the book, is one of the earlier technologies of storytelling was writing. And it's really no coincidence that the world's great religions have their roots in the time when writing first happened. If you look at the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, the Quran, the Buddhist sutras, all of these things took advantage of writing very early to spread their word around the world. And, you know, writing made these ideas portable and these stories portable in a profoundly important way. And we—the distribution of the world's great religions today is basically the one that the original writing took, whichever direction the Hebrew Bible went in, or the Christian Bible, or the Quran, or the Buddhist sutras went in. That's where those religions are still the most popular religions today. So, you know, there's a—you can't separate the spread of religion from the spread of writing because those two things went hand in hand. And if you look at all the world's major religious texts, they glorify writing. You know, the Bible is just a word for book, for example. Scripture is a word for writing. So, I think the other thing I'd say about the Bible and other similar religious texts is it's an early demonstration of the power of writing: first of all, to be portable, but also to provide somewhat homogeneous or consistent messaging around the world. Because again, Christianity is an example—it's the one you raised—while most Christian teaching is oral, you have a pastor giving a sermon, for example, it is founded in and rooted in the text, the written text. You know, the pastor does not stray far from the written text at any point, and so here you see writing unifying a philosophy, a religion, globally.

[00:21:49] Andrew Keen: Although that, of course, was also very divisive; the Reformation was about the role of writing. We'll come to Gutenberg in a minute, who in many ways contributed to that civil war within religion. You're a technologist ultimately, Kevin, you're in Austin, the heart of Texan technology. How does technology play in terms of the telling of stories? You mentioned this shift to writing and the famous Platonic dialogue in which Socrates defends speech in contrast to the written word; it's a familiar conversation that we're having today in different technological forms. Do stories—are stories affected by their technologies? In other words, were the kind of stories that Socrates told in the, supposedly, in Athens in the square, are they different from the kind of stories that Plato wrote down?

[00:22:45] Kevin Ashton: Well, I mean, the first answer to that is, of course, we don't know. But to step back from the Socrates-Plato point and be more general, I think the thing technology changes the most in storytelling is the distribution of stories. You know, the arc of the story of stories in the book is, you know, one person telling stories to a few people around a campfire as kind of the limit of storytelling—one person can talk to a few people—all the way through to where we are today in the world with 90 percent of the world's population has a smartphone now, which means that everybody can tell stories to everybody. So that's the journey of the story of stories over the last million years: one to a few, everybody to everybody. And each major technology along the way—writing, printing, radio, television, the internet, and so on—has increased the number of people who could tell stories and the number of people to whom they could tell stories.

[00:23:49] Andrew Keen: Yeah, you invented the term, as I said at the beginning, "Internet of Things." You probably should have come up with the "Internet of Stories," that would be more accurate.

[00:23:58] Kevin Ashton: Yeah, well, I mean, the internet is just one storytelling technology, right? And I think we can get very focused on the differences: "oh, smartphones tell stories differently to hardback books" or something. And there's obviously some truth to that. But we can miss the fact that 95 percent of storytelling is the same because our storytelling brains are the same storytelling brains we've had for hundreds of thousands of years, our story-receiving brains are the same story-receiving brains we've had for hundreds of thousands of years. So, you know, this consistent pattern of character, chronology, and consequence, for example, carries through all storytelling technologies. So, the differences that I think people get hung up on with, "oh, you know, TikTok versus reading a book" or something, are actually—they're real, but they're marginal. A lot of the stuff is universal and consistent, and the really interesting change from my point of view is actually the distribution and the power dynamics around storytelling changing again and again as major new storytelling technologies are invented.

[00:25:05] Andrew Keen: And I want to come to AI at the end of the conversation, and I know you write about it and you have some interesting ideas on that. But Kevin, why does some cultures seem to tell stories—I don't know, better—certainly in a more lasting way than other? There's a new movie coming out this summer, a Hollywood movie, The Odyssey, based of course on Homer's story. It's been enormously influential—whether or not there was someone called Homer, we don't quite know. But would it be fair to say—or am I wrong, is that an old Western civilization delusion—that the Greeks, for example, told stories if not better, certainly more effectively or more long-lastingly than other cultures?

[00:25:51] Kevin Ashton: Oh yeah, that's nonsense. To be real simple about it. I mean, and there are lots of ways to demonstrate that. Homer may or may not have existed; may have been a man, may have been a woman. Probably didn't—the same person probably didn't author both of the famous texts. And, you know, Greece was the first European country to get writing, but Europe was the last continent to get writing, and Europe is the only continent that didn't independently invent writing, right? Greece inherited the alphabet from the Phoenicians, and that was based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. And so when they did inherit the alphabet—like most cultures, the first stories they used writing for... writing wasn't really a storytelling technology at first, it was mainly an accounting technology. But gradually it got used for storytelling. You write down the stories that are in your oral tradition, and that's, you know, where Homer comes in: these are oral stories that probably evolved over centuries of retelling that got somewhat frozen when writing came along to record them, document them. What happens later, much later, like in the 1700-1800s, about the time of Darwin—not coincidentally—is, you know, the white people of sort of Northwest Europe, the British in particular, start to get nervous because their story about them being the most important race, most civilized race, the non-savages and so on, is being threatened by archaeological discoveries in Africa and Asia. And so you end up with this centering of Greece and Rome as these ultimate civilizations, these much better civilizations, and that's really, you know, the British in particular trying to claim some sort of shred of intellectual dignity for the white person. There's a lot of irony in that, partly because, you know, you can debate how white Greek people are—they're on the Mediterranean coast and what do they really have in common with someone in Victorian London. But yeah, the other counter to that is probably the oldest story in the world that is most common, and that exists in I think all the major Abrahamic religions—yes, it does, it's in the Quran, the Hebrew Bible, and the Christian Bible—is the story of Noah. Well, that comes from Sumer, which is now Southern Iraq. You know, that's one of the oldest stories in the world and it's so successful that it got retold again and again in every culture. So, the story of the deluge is, as I say, probably the most successful single story in the world, and it has nothing to do with Europe.

[00:28:49] Andrew Keen: Who's your favorite storyteller, Kevin?

[00:28:51] Kevin Ashton: Oh, crikey. I mean, I'm a bit of a Thomas Pynchon guy, I like Cormac McCarthy, but I also like the stories told in video games. I'm playing a video game called Dead Space right now, which has a fantastic story about, you know, zombies on a spaceship. So, I always find it hard to pick a favorite anything because it kind of depends on, you know, the day, but those are some examples.

[00:29:16] Andrew Keen: So video games are, again, another kind of story, another form of narrative.

[00:29:21] Kevin Ashton: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's also in the book a little bit. There's always a debate among game designers about—they call it sort of narrative versus ludology, like how much of the game is kind of playing the game and how much is the game telling a story. But I don't think there's any argument that you can have one without the other, right? And a nice example of this is chess, which probably originated from the old game Go, which just uses stones on a checkerboard. But, you know, chess starts carving those stones into characters: into a king and a queen and a bishop and pawns, foot soldiers and so on. And so while chess at its heart is a very mechanical, mathematical, probabilistic game, there's still a story being told there: it's a battle between two armies; the armies are each trying to assassinate the ruler of the other country. So, yeah, games and storytelling are very intricately linked. And I think that's another example of the story-shaped brain and our bias for stories. You know, if you look at board games, for example, they're all telling stories. The Settlers of Catan is a very popular board game—again, underlying it is mechanical, mathematical, probability, those kind of things, but the skin, the surface on top, is a story.

[00:30:43] Andrew Keen: It's interesting you bring up chess and Go, of course they were games that have been, shall we say, early—they've been colonized relatively early by AI. DeepMind, Google's AI division, of course made major breakthroughs on the Go front, or at least their AI defeated the world's best Go player. Is AI, Kevin, just another way for us to tell stories?

[00:31:07] Kevin Ashton: I mean, yes and no. I'm an old man of AI, you know, I started my research at MIT in the late 90s. The AI lab was right next to us. They were sort of struggling with things like machine vision at the time, and AI was kind of in a doldrums of sorts for various reasons. The term was invented in the 50s; there hadn't really been, you know, any fulfillment of any of the promise yet. So, you know, I understand artificial intelligence, I guess, in an old-fashioned way, which is it's a field of study, it contains various technological branches, one of which is called reinforcement learning, which is the technology that Google acquired and that was used to, you know, play Go better than any human being. The artificial intelligence technology people are talking about today when they say AI tends to be large language models and diffusion-based image generation, which are two other branches in that field. And so, you know, the short answer is some AI like large language models can be used for something that looks like storytelling, and other ones like support vector machines really can't. But large language models in particular, they kind of give the lie to the term "artificial intelligence," which is kind of a story in itself. We hear that word and we've seen so many movies where the artificial intelligence goes wrong and tries to take over the world, that it's become a very resonant term. But the reality is a large language model is not artificially intelligent, it's an automated information system. It's a way to interact with a database, basically, that simulates natural language. But in terms of intelligence, it's no more intelligent than a toaster. It's just a machine, it's a more complicated toaster. It doesn't understand meaning; in fact, the idea of a machine understanding anything is just—it's a ridiculous concept. So there's an element of simulation, and it's fairly anthropomorphic, but no, I mean, it's not intelligent, it's not storytelling. You know, when I was a kid, people used to give their cars names, and their cars had personalities to them. And so it's again comes back to our storytelling brains—we tend to sort of turn everything into a human being. Anything that we possibly can turn into a human being, we do. And artificial intelligence large language models really play to that bias in a meaningful way. So it can be confusing.

[00:34:04] Andrew Keen: It's very confusing, and that confusion of course has driven a lot of science fiction—Blade Runner comes to mind, the narrative about us finding it harder and harder to distinguish between humans who tell stories and machines that tell stories. Is a machine in Blade Runner, in the science fiction that inspired Blade Runner, is that a storyteller, Kevin? I mean, it seems...

[00:34:26] Kevin Ashton: Yeah, but it's also a human being. I mean, one of the things you get with the Blade Runner is an interesting example—the more kind of philosophical science fiction around AI is really asking a different question, which is sort of around theory of mind and what is it to be human, and if something talks like a human and walks like a human, is it a human, how can we tell the difference. And that's a philosophical question quite separate from any technology. And you can ask—you can ask a large language model to tell you a story today, and it will tell you a fairly flat, fairly bad story, but it will have the pattern of character, chronology, and consequence because it's learned that by digesting a whole bunch of other stories. So, the question is less can it tell a story—can it tell something that fits the format of a story—and the answer is yes, of course. Can it tell a meaningful story, an insightful story, or anything like that? Of course not. Machines are inherently meaningless. It can simulate that.

[00:35:43] Andrew Keen: Well, it can simulate meaning. Finally, Kevin, convince me that you're not a machine. Your story is very unusual. You were born—at least according to Wikipedia and another teller of stories—you were born in Birmingham in England, you read of all things Scandinavian Studies at university, then you invented the Internet of Things as a term, now you're an author. Your book How to Fly a Horse did very well, this new book is a very interesting book, The Story of Stories. What's your story, finally, Kevin? Convince me that you're not a bot, that you're able to tell the story of Kevin Ashton in an interesting way.

[00:36:20] Kevin Ashton: Well, I mean, the interesting thing is I can't, right? You know, we only experience ourselves at the end of the day, and everything else we experience is represented in our minds. So, I can't convince you that I'm not a bot. I would say the best evidence is how much I've aged since that photo you keep putting on the screen. I don't know if—if people watching, Kevin has a shorter beard and—well you still have a little bit of hair, you don't have... My beard is a lot grayer and I have a lot less hair. Actually, I have proof, Kevin, that you're not a bot, because this is the third time we've tried to do this interview, the first two times you forgot. So I don't think bots forget, do they? The most human-like thing about me is my error-proneness. Yeah, so my story is doesn't work well as a story, I guess in the classic sense, because I just muddled through and one thing led to another. I didn't want to go to university when I was 18, which is the age you're supposed to go to university in the UK where I was born. I had a side gig that I'd had since I was 14 working as a DJ; I enjoyed that. Someone offered me the chance to be a DJ in a ski resort in France; that sounded great to 18-year-old me. I did that and then someone offered me the chance to sort of tour around Norway DJing in night clubs in Norway, and I didn't even know where Norway was but I said yes to that. Spent some time in Denmark as well doing that. In Norway, I sort of discovered Ibsen, learned to speak some Norwegian, got really into Ibsen. At the age of 21 decided it was time to, you know, settle down and actually go to school again. Found out I could study Ibsen at the University of London and literally called the Scandinavian Studies department and said I wanted to do it. And they said why, and I talked about Ibsen, and they said well do you speak Norwegian? And I said yes, so immediately the conversation switched to Norwegian. What I didn't know was I was talking to one of the world's foremost Ibsen scholars, Marie Wells. So my sales pitch was very convincing because telling someone who loves Ibsen that you love Ibsen and then demonstrating you could speak Norwegian as a non-Norwegian is coincidentally quite impressive. And so I was accepted onto that course. I spent four years there. I had an idea that I was going to do journalism. I edited the student newspaper. Procter & Gamble advertised in the student newspaper for recruiting. They invited me to apply, they offered me a job, I said no several times, eventually they had a very compelling offer which I accepted. I became an assistant brand manager marketing Procter & Gamble's... Of all places, were you marketing toilet paper, Kevin? Color cosmetics: lipsticks, mascaras, eyeshadows, foundations. Another thing that, you know, I knew nothing about but learned very quickly. My party trick used to be I could tell people what mascara they were wearing, which scared the heck out of everyone. Especially the men, right? Yeah, especially the men. And but what I discovered was that we were having trouble keeping our products on the shelves in stores; there were supply chain problems that annoyed me. I investigated, I realized it was an information problem. I had this idea to put little radio microchips, which were very new technology at the time, into lipsticks and things and connect them to the internet, which was also very new at the time. Eventually Procter & Gamble thought this was a good idea. I'd got to know some people at MIT as I was doing the research. MIT offered me a job. I accepted. Procter & Gamble said well hang on a minute, why don't we loan you to MIT, we'll keep paying you but you can work for MIT, which was a win for all concerned. So I went to MIT, did my research, got the title of visiting engineer, which is weird because I have no engineering training. And that kind of got me into the Internet of Things, which got me into the startup world, which made me some money... You've convinced me, Kevin, you are not a bot. There is no programmer at all. Well, I think humans accept the accidental nature of stories. Kevin Ashton, what a fun conversation. That's what stories are, of course, conversations, the best ones with guys like Kevin Ashton who think in a very creative way. Kevin, congratulations on the new book. It's out and right now, The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art. Thank you so much.

[00:41:25] Kevin Ashton: Thank you very much, Andrew.

[00:41:27] Andrew Keen: Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening to or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We're on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms. And I'm be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again.