#208 – The case that TV shows, movies, and novels can improve the world (Elizabeth Cox on The 80,000 Hours Podcast)

We just published an interview: Elizabeth Cox on the case that TV shows, movies, and novels can improve the world. Listen on Spotify or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.

Episode summary

In today’s episode, Keiran Harris speaks with Elizabeth Cox — founder of the independent production company Should We Studio — about the case that storytelling can improve the world.

They cover:

• How TV shows and movies compare to novels, short stories, and creative nonfiction if you’re trying to do good.
• The existing empirical evidence for the impact of storytelling.
• Their competing takes on the merits of thinking carefully about target audiences.
• Whether stories can really change minds on deeply entrenched issues, or whether writers need to have more modest goals.
• Whether humans will stay relevant as creative writers with the rise of powerful AI models.
• Whether you can do more good with an overtly educational show vs other approaches.
• Elizabeth’s experience with making her new five-part animated show Ada — including why she chose the topics of civilisational collapse, kidney donations, artificial wombs, AI, and gene drives.
• The pros and cons of animation as a medium.
• Career advice for creative writers.
• Keiran’s idea for a longtermist Christmas movie.
• And plenty more.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Content editing: Luisa Rodriguez, Katy Moore, and Keiran Harris
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

Highlights

Empirical evidence of the impact of storytelling

Elizabeth Cox: So there are a couple psychological phenomena that are kind of relevant to this. I think one that’s especially helpful is this idea, it’s called the mere-exposure effect, which is basically that repeated exposures to certain portrayals make people positively inclined towards them, even if they’re completely novel things and ideas.

This is something that’s so old and so extensively studied that most of the recent studies on it are like little pieces of it. But for example, showing stalking and other kinds of emotionally abusive behaviours negatively in films makes people more inclined to view them negatively in real life and not romantic or whatever. And similarly, depictions of mental illness that are accurate, but not scary or fear mongering, and sort of humanising have a similar effect where they shift people’s perceptions on that.

So there’s a lot of examples like that. And I think there’s enough that we can be pretty confident that this idea of “deweirding” is credible. Which is good. We’ve got to start somewhere.

Looking at climate change and environmentalism and some of the history there I think are some of the best examples. There’s kind of no example bigger than An Inconvenient Truth, right? So there are a bunch of studies done to try to assess the impact of An Inconvenient Truth, and a couple that are kind of interesting. Again, there’s problems with all of these, but they’re decent.

One was looking at carbon offsets in the US in ZIP codes within 10 miles of a theatre that was screening An Inconvenient Truth — the control group was ones further away — and whether that increased. They found that it did. And of course, you can think of a lot of things that are confounding there, but a lot of them are actually still related to the impact of the film. So it’s pretty good.

Then another one that I think is kind of interesting and helpful — and maybe more useful to people who are trying to assess the impact of their own media and stories and things — was to analyse mentions of An Inconvenient Truth as sort of a proxy for impact, for how much it got into the public consciousness and zeitgeist.

Basically, what the study did is it was an analysis of the Climate Change Threat Index, which is basically assessing the overall perception of climate change in the US. And they took mentions of An Inconvenient Truth in The New York Times as sort of a way of measuring the zeitgeist — not just like, “It’s released, it’s out in the world,” but it’s still getting awards, it’s still getting talked about, it’s still getting debated — and actually found that it was the third most significant predictor of change in the Climate Change Threat Index from 2002 to 2010. Which is kind of crazy, but very cool, I thought.

And I think that idea of choosing something like mentions in The New York Times — adjust as needed for your thing — to use when you either don’t have data like views or retention, or you’re trying to assess something beyond what that information can tell you, is kind of cool and useful and helpful.

The hits-based approach to storytelling

Keiran Harris: So there’s the storytelling impact path of An Inconvenient Truth — where you just get into the public consciousness, and you have this very small impact on so many people that you end up having a big impact — and then kind of the opposite of that, which I think has also been true at least a couple of times, is having a big impact with just the right person or small group of people.

The one that stands out to me is apparently President Reagan, having watched The Day After — this TV movie on nuclear war that had a crazy amount of viewers in the ’80s — was so horrified that he completely updated on this topic of how important it was, in a way that I’m sure the people who were making it did not have this as an ambition. They were probably seeing it being more like An Inconvenient Truth of like, we just need to update everyone’s public consciousness a bit. But then you end up getting to the president of the United States and have this crazy impact.

Elizabeth Cox: One really similar one is with Nixon and The Andromeda Strain — which is a novel by Michael Crichton, who also wrote Jurassic Park — just totally updating his views on bioweapons as a threat worth taking seriously based on reading that book.

I’m always a tiny bit sceptical of when people are pointing to the things that most influence them, because did they really? But I think there are so many examples of tech leaders pointing to specific works of science fiction. I think a lot of them go as far as they gave them the idea for whatever thing they ended up inventing. But again, I treat that with a little bit of scepticism. I think Steve Jobs said that about Asimov’s work. I think Elon Musk said it about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is a little bit harder for me to wrap my head around.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. I was gonna say that because it’s very hard to predict — Hitchhikers is a good example, where maybe they wouldn’t expect this — maybe if you’re writing stories like that, you can almost think of yourself as being part of a portfolio of other science fiction writers. In this case, “I’m just going to contribute to this medium, and then one of the 1,000 of us doing work in this area is maybe going to influence the right people. And it probably won’t be me, but I’m still, in a sense, contributing — because I’m expanding the space of possible things people could run into.”

Elizabeth Cox: I think that’s a great way to think about it. And also, because of the need for repeated exposures to out-there ideas, that’s also sort of related to that: you might not be moving the needle entirely by yourself. And I actually don’t think that’s entirely different from people in most industries trying to have a positive impact on the world. I mean, it can feel more speculative and hand-wavy with works of fiction or other forms of storytelling, but I’m not actually sure that it is.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. It’s a great point, because if you are someone who starts a maternal health charity in sub-Saharan Africa, you may think you only have a 20% chance of this working out and having a big impact, but you should do it anyway. Because if you get enough people who are willing to make these bets, then eventually ones will pay off. And collectively, the thing that really should matter, at least, is just good being done in the universe — and the more we can get past this thing of, it needs to be me being the one having the impact, I think the world’s going to be better for that.

And I think it’s fair to apply that to storytelling, actually. Maybe there’s only one in 100 of these stories that have this big impact, but if the impact of that hundredth story is big enough, then it can kind of pay for the rest of us, in a way. It’s kind of like a VC firm who invests in 100 different companies. It’s like the successful ones sort of pay for the other ones.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, it’s definitely going to be a bit hits-based.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, exactly. It could just be that storytelling is a hits-based thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s not high impact in expectation.

Debating the merits of thinking about target audiences

Elizabeth Cox: When I’m starting with an idea and arriving at the treatment for it, I don’t actually think it’s helpful to think super specifically about a target audience. For me, I am always trying to find the closest thing to a universal truth, or I guess trying to set an ambitious goal of, “If I were to do this as well as it could possibly be done, anyone would be able to relate to it.” Obviously, that’s a very ambitious goal that we’re never going to meet, but I do think that should be the starting point goal of anything. That’s how you find what’s important and meaningful, and will make people feel that the subject matter is connected, is important, or will make them feel connected to it.

When you look at the ways people consume content, kids love stuff that’s intended for adults, or ostensibly intended for adults, all the time; and adults love stuff that’s intended for kids all the time. So I really do think that these ideas of target audience that we have, or that are setting the mandate at broadcasters or commissioners or whatever, don’t super correspond to how people actually enjoy stories. So I am fairly resistant to that.

I also think, especially for less experienced people, you can fall into a trap of defining too narrow a target audience…I also think it’s just really hard to make something while thinking about the audience. I think it just kind of doesn’t work. It breaks the magic… So basically, I think that thinking too much about the target audience makes you think both too much and too little about pleasing people — and the results are bad.

Keiran Harris: So I want to push back on this, because that was my one dominating concern as I was watching all the episodes of Ada: I just kept asking myself who the target audience was. Which makes a lot more sense now.

I’ll outline why this would concern me with two extremes. One would be that you went into the final script of Ada and you were like, “I intend this to be for people who have a bachelor’s degree at least in some kind of scientific discipline,” or something like that. Right? Fairly high level of knowledge going in. And in that case, it would mean that that audience would be kind of bored if you held their hands too much, so you would have to be comfortable with a bit of jargon and moving at quite a fast pace.

But on the other end, you could aim for people who, either they’re in high school, or they just went to a different profession, or really have no scientific background — in which case, you really have to define basically everything for them to be able to follow the story. And so I noticed within Ada there were times when it felt like it was flipping between this sort of audience, where there’s a tone where I thought, “This is for younger people. Ada’s 22. Maybe it’s for people who are a bit younger than her, introducing that topic.”

But then something would happen, like there’s an episode with gene drives: I mean, you only have 10 minutes, but it was like a one-sentence explanation of gene drives and casually mentioned CRISPR. And I couldn’t help but thinking, “There is no way teenagers or people in their early 20s without experience will be able to know what this is. They don’t know what CRISPR is.”

So I just kept getting caught between thinking if we knew we were aiming for people under 20 without much of a background, I would want to go through the script and put a big red line under every piece of jargon and term and try to define it. On the other end, if you were like, “No, this is for people who understand all that stuff,” then you can move faster.

But I felt like without having a clear target audience, you can get into this thing where the tone is for one group, but then that group might not be able to follow the concepts. And if you lose them on the concepts, then they don’t get to follow the narrative arc.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. Definitely the gene drives episode was, you are correct, the most difficult one to balance this stuff in. And part of that is, I think it would come up with any target audience if you’re trying to focus on the ethics of emerging technologies or technologies that don’t exist yet. Because we’re not focusing on the technical, the “how does this work” side. We’re not focusing on that; we’re focusing on the implications. But there is some amount of the “how does it work” that you have to explain. … I think some of the tensions you point out are definitely there. But I am not sure that I would attach them to not having a focused-enough target audience.

Ada vs other approaches to impact-focused storytelling

Keiran Harris: I recorded an 80,000 Hours Podcast episode with A.J. Jacobs a few years ago. In that episode I said to him that I thought the best approach to making a high-impact TV show by our lights was probably something like: you make something like a Mad Men — same level of writing, directing, and acting and everything — but instead of it being set in Madison Avenue in the ’50s through ’70s, it’s like an Open Philanthropy-like org, so a premier grantmaking organisation, maybe in a world where effective altruism didn’t exist.

Or another idea would be you make something like a Breaking Bad, but instead of Walter White making this money for his family, he’s earning to give, planning to donate all this money to effective charities. Although I realise that a lot of listeners will think that now sounds like a much worse idea in the wake of the FTX implosion. But anyway, stay with me.

So during COVID I wrote a pilot and a 10-episode series outline for a show that I called Bequest. I ended up trying to combine elements of both of these ideas, in that the characters about halfway through the show start an Open Phil-like org, and also it’s pretty dark and violent. I’ll put up links for my script and the series outline in the show notes for anyone that is listening who would rather check out both Ada and Bequest before listening to this section.

Basically, my overall thinking was that you try to make a show that’s popular independent of the message, and then if folks are super engaged, they’ll kind of helplessly learn about a lot of EA stuff. You almost can’t help but be able to pass a simple quiz on Madison Avenue in the ’60s if you’re a Mad Men fan.
But in big red letters in my mind, I thought it would be good to try and avoid, as much as you can, coming across as being preachy or overtly educational, because I felt like you’d lose a lot of people. So I’m just very curious, what do you think of that broad approach?

Elizabeth Cox: I think being preachy and being overtly educational, I wouldn’t say they’re the same thing.

Keiran Harris: No, I meant those being different things, actually. I meant: one thing is to avoid being preachy and then there’s another thing of [being educational].

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. So I think overtly educational is fine, as long as you’re not making it seem like you’re trying not to be educational, right? You have to be open about it. Actually, I think there’s more examples of this in literature and fiction than in TV and films — in part because the exposition of making things educational is a little bit easier to work in. But I think a really good example of something that’s narrative but overtly educational and intended for an adult audience is The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s a great example of something that has been overtly educational, but also the point of it is fiction. So I think I agree with you on “definitely don’t be preachy.” I don’t think I agree on “don’t be educational.”

Keiran Harris: I was curious in your take on having both these things exist. So you have things like Ada, and then you have things more in this realm that I’m talking about.

Elizabeth Cox: I don’t think I really see impact downsides between these two approaches. For me, the big risks for impact-oriented media projects, like the big failure modes, are not getting made and not getting released. The “not getting made” thing can happen at lots of phases, right? It can happen when the script isn’t made into a pilot, the pilot isn’t made into a series, the series is cancelled quickly if we’re talking about TV shows.

But also — and this has never happened to me, fortunately, so far — but a lot of my team who worked on Ada, I think almost all of them, had this experience at some time or other, that you make the movie or the show, it’s completely finished, and then it doesn’t get released because the network, or whoever owns the IP, whoever’s funding it, decides for whatever reason not to do that.

I think the risks of those things happening increase with bigger budget, prestige drama-type things, because the kind of money it takes to make these things means you’re going to be almost certainly — as the creator and the person whose incentive is impact as opposed to making money — going to be relinquishing control over the IP completely. So you don’t really have control. Many sort of perverse forces can prevent your thing from getting out into the world, even if it’s great. So I think that is the main drawback I see.

Why animation?

Elizabeth Cox: Well, first of all, we’re making stuff about the future and worlds that don’t exist yet. Animation is a medium that lets you invent a world completely from scratch, every single thing in it, which I find super exciting and I think lends itself really well to work about the future or alternative futures or imagination.

My personal attachment to animation: my whole career so far, pretty much, has been in animation. And the reason for that is that I came to it through a fine art background, drawing and painting, as opposed to through a film background. So the artistry was always the thing that got me most excited.

I think with still drawings and paintings, I eventually realised that the thing that was most compelling to me about visual art was the opportunity to tell a story. And the amount of story you can tell in a single painting is kind of limited. Art historians are going to come for me, but I think it’s true.

So that was how I found my way to animation. Just the variety and diversity of looks and techniques within animation are super exciting. I’m just also really drawn to sort of wacky stuff, to weirdness and joy and cheekiness, and I think it lends itself really well to that as a medium.

There are also reasons it’s good for educational stuff specifically. If you’re trying to be explanatory, it’s easy to add a layer of information density without it feeling more dense to the viewer.

I also think that at its best, educational animated stuff is not doing what we call “show and say,” which is the visuals exactly repeat what’s in the words. You’re using visual humour and visual metaphors to sort of complement the words. And I’ve always been sort of drawn to visual puns. I’m outing myself as a giant nerd here, but the ancient Egyptians used to do hieroglyphic puns, using the shape of the hieroglyphs to make little jokes. And same with illuminated manuscripts: there’s all this subtext annotated into them that’s just hilarious. It’s a whole other story. So that kind of humour is very exciting to me.

Keiran Harris: Have you come across any major drawbacks to animation as a medium, especially if your ultimate goal is impact?

Elizabeth Cox: It’s slow, so I don’t think it’s the best medium for breaking news. I see that as the biggest drawback: it’s hard to react quickly to things.

It’s also expensive, but it’s interesting because it’s expensive for a super low-budget indie. But if you’re trying to make really beautiful sci-fi fantasy second world stuff, it is much cheaper or much more feasible on an indie budget than it would be to do that live action and have all those visual effects. So that is both a pro and a con.

And also prejudice: I think definitely some people still see animation as for kids, even though that has never been the case. And I think for even some distributors and commissioners, an animated project has to fit into the bucket of for kids or the raunchy, shock humour, adult cartoons type of thing: it has to be one or the other. But really, animation’s a medium; it’s not a genre. It can be applied to any genre equally effectively.

So that’s a frustration. I don’t think it’s a drawback of animation, but it is a drawback of trying to sell animation, so maybe to try to create impact through animation.

How long will humans stay relevant as creative writers, given AI advances?

Keiran Harris: It feels to me like the prospects for writers are a bit worse than for visual artists, because there is definitely something to be said that people want to go to a museum or an art gallery, and it does seem like they have this strong preference for it them to be able to say that a human made that thing.

But I wonder if, once GPT-7 or whatever can write at the level of someone who’s writing a show for Netflix… Because it’s so hidden already, and it’s not like screenwriters are typically celebrities either. It’s a bit different in the theatre: if you’re a playwright in the theatre, you really are kind of the main person. But for TV shows and films, fans want to know who the screenwriter is, but it’s a little bit more hidden.

And obviously it’s just pure speculation, but I wonder if that’s the kind of thing that might not hang around much beyond the point where you can just objectively say, “The best script written last year was written by an AI rather than a human.”

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, I think that’s probably a more productive way of thinking about it, rather than trying to make a judgement on whether AI has better written or visual capabilities now…

I think your point about people’s strong preference for something to be made by humans is a good one, but I do think there’s a chance it’ll apply to some forms of written craft. When you think about the fact that people really love having books as physical objects in their houses, even though we can read all the books on our phones now…

Keiran Harris: Does this come up for you when you’re thinking about your long-term career?

Elizabeth Cox: I mean, emotionally, definitely what I feel is I’ve got to execute all my best ideas as quickly as possible while it still matters that I’m the person doing them. And that I hope AI doesn’t replace people in creative things. But I don’t think that’s necessarily rational, or even in my self-interest: you know, if AI is going well and making things great, that would be good for me. Would I rather keep writing novels or have every disease be cured? Well, emotionally I would rather keep writing novels.

Keiran Harris: No, it’s very human of you to think that. And maybe this is easier for me to think about because currently my job is running this podcast, not doing creative writing. For me, if you told me that in a year, GPT-5 is just going to be the best podcast producer and manager and whatever the hell I do every day, it’s better at everything, then I could actually be like, “Great, I get to just write then.”

And maybe it’s better at writing novels, and maybe it’s better at writing movies too, but I just love writing. So it doesn’t actually feel too scary to me.

Elizabeth Cox: I think two sources of motivation for me that are maybe slightly impure, but I think they’re the same for a lot of creative people, are: first of all, the drive to make the next thing better, and put what you’ve learned and the new ideas you have into use; and this idea that you could make something that is novel and just really good. That’s very motivating.

And also, for me, what art is in any form — whether it’s written, visual, or whatever — is universal things expressed through unique specifics that right now comes from the person who’s making it. So obviously I have a pretty strong attachment to my own weird little worldview in that way…

I will say I think there’s a lot of elements of writing that are not putting words on a page or digital page, like the “management of story” process. And it’s interesting to think about what that might look like in a world where all of the actual writing can be done just as well by AI.

Keiran Harris: That’s really interesting, because I think it’s the case that already people are obsessed with doing the Wordle or the Spelling Bee puzzles that they do every day, which is not their jobs.

And to me, writing is the best example of that. The funnest part for me is sort of painting yourself into these boxes and being like, well, this thing has to have a good reason for happening. How does this land? How do these things come together?

Not to get too writing advice-y or something, but you don’t want to have a story that’s like, “This happened, and then another thing happened, and then also this thing happened.” You need everything to be tight, like, “This happened, therefore this happened. And because this happened, this happens.” And it all has to be interconnected. I find it to be a very compelling puzzle, where I would rather do that than do the Wordle or something.

So yeah, I don’t know. I think there is a more positive framing potentially, where it’s like: OK, AIs are the best at everything. However, boy, it would be nice to write these stories, solve these puzzles, play instruments that you never would have otherwise had a chance to because you were working as like the junior vice president at Pepsi, and that was your entire life. And now you get to do things that are more fun.