Next week we will launch our 15th Story Circle (at University of Maryland) making 75 scientists and communications staff participating in individual Story Circles, with 510 taking part in Demo Days. Some circles have finished but have gotten into narrative analysis so deep they haven’t wanted to quit. It’s effective, however there is one casualty: students and postdocs. Sorry.

THIS WEEK’S UPDATE: This is our weekly update showing circles that are meeting and what’s ahead.

FOUR HOTSPOTS

Story Circles is right on track to where we had hoped to be by the end of the year. Last year we developed the training through four prototypes with NIH, USDA and Hendrix University. Now we’re spreading the training.

In particular, we’ve developed four major hot spots — USDA, USFWS, USGS and Genentech. These are the places that have hosted multiple Demo Days and Story Circles with plans for broadening ahead. National Park Service is set to join the group in January with two Demo Days.

Best of all is watching circles finish their 10 one hour sessions and ask to keep going because they are so deeply connected with the process. Story Circles teaches a whole new narrative language that takes a while to fully grasp, but once you do becomes very powerful.

Right now we’re in the thick of a 20 minute video about Story Circles we’re producing with AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) that will be released early next year.

THE ONE CASUALTY SO FAR: STUDENTS

Sorry. We had hoped, along with many others, that Story Circles would be an effective training program not just for professionals, but for students as well. At this point we’re having to conclude it isn’t.

There just doesn’t seem to be the “need or want” when it comes to students. Professionals tend to have a lot of experience with projects that have suffered from poor communication, creating a feeling of need for the training. Or they’ve been hearing for years “you need to do a better job of telling your story.”

But when it comes to students, they seem to be more concerned with “is this gonna be on the exam?” or “are we gonna get credit for this?” or they’re too busy and over-committed. There just isn’t the depth of connection, and without that burning desire that is needed to light up the narrative part of your brain, the training just doesn’t amount to much.  I’m afraid it doesn’t work to shout, “You need to know this for your future!”  Apparently that doesn’t activate the narrative part of the brain..

They also have a tendency to say, “yep, three words: and, but, therefore — we got it, all done, thanks.” Several students have verbatim said that — “we got the three words, we’re all set.” If only it were that simple!

Here’s a great example of the ABT in action as well as the ABT/AAA overall structure.  It’s Bob Dylan’s 1966 song, “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”?  It’s built of repeating ABT verses with an over-arching AAA structure.  Give that man a Nobel Prize (if he wants it).

To be stuck inside of Oslo with the Nobel blues again.

OH, MAMA

As he decides whether or not to make a showing at his Nobel Prize ceremony (some of the hosts are already so pissed at him!) let’s take a look at the ABT dynamic at work in one of his greatest songs.

The song consists of 9 versus, all with the same basic ABT structure of agreement, contradiction, resolution.  The words themselves are not that clearly ABT in structure, but the basic inflection/chord sequence clearly follows the ABT pattern.

Each verse begins with a bunch of statements that all have the And, And, And feel.  Some of them, like the first verse, even start with “But” but they’re still just statements of exposition.

Then the chord goes minor with “Oh, Mama …” and you can feel the contradiction of the flow.  In fact, you could drop in the word BUT to make it, “But, oh, Mama …” and it would work just fine.

The last line would be a little clunky if you added THEREFORE, making it, “Therefore to be stuck inside of Mobile …”  But … you can hear the tone of consequence in the music — i.e. you can feel the tension being released.  In fact, you could make it, “So I guess I’m stuck inside of Mobile …” and that would work fine.

Same thing, over and over, nine times.

The first three versus of “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” showing the repeating And, But, Therefore (ABT) structure.

ABT/AAA

Overall, the songs shows the standard recipe for what we might call “engaging boredom.”  So many TV shows, movies, plays, personal stories, events … pretty much everything … commonly show this pattern.  Each verse is really engaging and pulls you in, but overall, the song doesn’t build to anything.  It kind of just “is.”

Which is cool, and is a perfect showcase for strong character work.  But, that said, the character side of the material had better be strong or it’s going to lose us.  Lots of nature documentaries are like this — made up of really cool, engaging little vignettes which hold your interest, but in the end leave you without much for a deeper experience.

That’s where the over-arching ABT comes into play.  It’s what great stories are made of.  It’s not obligatory, but it makes the difference between “a sundry list of facts” (as Dobzhansky so eloquently put it) and deep connection.

And that, is what narrative is all about.  To be stuck inside of AAA structure with the ABT blues again.

Not sure what kind of drugs I was hopped up on a couple nights ago (maybe still recovering from the election) when a poor innocent woman named Erin Rodgers from Toronto politely asked me to answer at least three of her ten questions.  Turned out they were all good questions so I answered them all, sounding like a lunatic, but so what, the new President has instilled this in me.  We can no longer afford to bore or confuse.

RIBIT.

Ten good questions, ten blunt, repetitive answers, all of which arise from “Houston, We Have A Narrative.”

“Mars Attacks” was a movie that was exactly 20 years ahead of it’s time.  The entire movie is ABT structured — “The Martians land AND they seem to have come in peace, BUT then they start slaughtering everyone THEREFORE basically beware of the Greeks and their damn wooden horse gifts.”  The ABT is the fundamental template of narrative and consists of three forces — agreement, contradiction, consequence.  Last week Trump was pure agreement in meeting with Obama.  Do you kinda think there might be some contradiction coming soon?  Better start getting ready because I don’t think the consequence that will follow is gonna be pretty.

TIME FOR A LITTLE BIPARTISAN EFFORT!

LET THE ABT BE YOUR GUIDE IN THESE DELICATE TIMES

Hate to be a skeptic, but all I could see last week was Trump’s deep, deep narrative intuition at work as he sat there with his new buddy President Obama.  That day will come to be known as the AND phase of Trump’s post-election process.  I would expect nothing other than that from the man given his deep narrative intuition.

But I also know what’s coming — the BUT phase (contradiction).  Which will then be followed by the THEREFORE (consequence).  It’s coming.  You can see it play out in a movie from 20 years ago, “Mars Attacks,” which was all I kept thinking about last week as the post-election olive branches came out.

Trump has narrative intuition.  I did this podcast the morning after the election with my buddy Park Howell for his Business of Story series.  To put it in terms of the Dobzhansky Template (see my last book for details), it’s like this:  Nothing in our near future is going to make sense except in the light of Donald Trump’s deep narrative intuition.

My advice:  Keep your eye on the narrative.

MY PODCAST THE DAY AFTER THE ELECTION WITH PARK HOWELL, APPLYING NARRATIVE ANALYSIS TO WHAT HAPPENED.

Of all the exercises we did in film school, this one was the best.

JAKE GITTES KNEW THE POWER OF SIMPLICITY.

OVER-THINKING “CHINATOWN”

As much fun as I had in film school at USC, I was a little disappointed at times with some of the faculty who put little effort into their teaching.  Many of them pretty much said to go shoot a film and they would critique it — not much more than that.

But we did do one very simple and memorable exercise in our first semester production class. They broke us into groups of four, gave us one page of the screenplay for the movie “Chinatown,” and told us to come up with a shot list for everything on the page.

My group broke it down into 17 shots.  It was the scene where Jack Nicholson is watching through binoculars as a young boy on a donkey rides slowly through the empty creek bed.  We had a crane shot, a few dolly shots, close-ups of the boy and dolly, close-ups of Jack as he talks to him.

Everyone put their shot lists up on the board.  The other groups were in the same range — between about 15 and 20 shots.  And then they showed us the scene.  We were all stunned.

It was 3 simple shots.

That’s all.  No fancy camera moves, no cutting back and forth, just simple storytelling, first and foremost.

SIMPLICITY IS THE ULTIMATE SOPHISTICATION

This exercise came to mind this week because a young filmmaker showed me a one minute video he had just shot.  It was packed with text and twists and turns and quick cuts and … it was a tangled up mess.  This happens a lot.

People get excited about filmmaking and think it’s all about impressing your audience with the complexities of what you can pull off.  A truly great filmmaker has the experience and intuition to solve the challenge of telling the story in the fewest and simplest number of steps.   Just like an elegant mathematical proof.

The way you get to this point of being able to see the simplicity in the story is through lots and lots and lots of experience.  No real short cuts.  You just have to get to work gathering experience and seeking the ultimate goal which is narrative intuition.

THE ABT OF THIS LITTLE TALE

And just to show you the eternal ubiquity of the ABT, here’s the story I just told you.  “We made our shot lists AND we thought we nailed it, BUT then they showed us we were making it 5 times more complicated than needed, THEREFORE we were humbled.”

Get to know the ABT, it’s your ticket to narrative intuition.

An important distinction.  The “singular” narrative is part of narrative structure.  The “single” narrative refers to limited exposure.

THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY.   Which is not the same as the importance of “a singular narrative.”  Let’s get clear on this.

SINGULAR VS SINGLE (NOT THE SAME)

Last month I was caught out by a grad student at our Demo Day at Yale Forestry School.  I was talking about the power and importance of “the singular narrative.”  He said, “But haven’t you seen that TED Talk about the dangers of the single narrative?”  I had not seen the presentation he was talking about (though should have).  I was left with little more of an answer than the standard Rick Perry, “duh, nope … whoops?”

I found the TED Talk. It’s very good. But it’s not about “the singular narrative.” It’s about “the single story.” The distinction is important.

THE SINGULAR NARRATIVE

This is a fundamental piece of “classical design” or archplot as I have presented in my books, citing Robert McKee’s landmark 1997 work, “Story.” It refers to the shape of the ideal form of narrative structure for the masses. He lists 8 characteristics, one of which is “the single protagonist.” This extends to the basic idea of presenting just a single central narrative. Not two.

Nicholas Kristof does a wonderful job of presenting this dynamic in the real world with his classic short, simple essay in Outside Magazine in November, 2009 titled, “Nicholas Kristof’s Advice for Saving the World.”  He cites the work of psychology professor Paul Slovic who shows how “storytelling needs to focus on one individual, not a group.” Not two individuals. Just one. That is the power of the singular narrative.

I read a very intellectual blogger last year saying, “I’d like to think people can keep two thoughts in their mind at once.” You’re welcome to wish for that, but it just doesn’t work that well for the masses. They prefer the singular narrative.

But there’s also a dark side which is the public’s insatiable desire for singular narratives. Last week there was a prime example of this reported in the NY Times as they told of how the story of the infamous “Patient Zero,” (who supposedly spread the AIDS epidemic throughout the United States in the 1980’s) actually wasn’t that clear, simple or singular of a story. There were earlier patients, but mentioning them dilutes the strength of the story, leaving you with the usual choice of story or truth.

THE SINGLE NARRATIVE

In her wonderful TED Talk, Nigerian speaker Chimamanda Adichie tells of growing up in a culture where the only stories they were told were of affluent white explorers from Europe. In hearing only this “single story” she naturally grew to believe that was all there was to storytelling — it always had to be about these people. She eventually realized it was possible to tell stories about her own people.  Her talk is about the dangers of being raised this way.

It’s a great talk and very culturally important, but it’s not at all about narrative structure. Very important to see the distinction. And very important to understand that you don’t have to tell only singular narratives, but failing to do so comes at the expense of size of audience. This is a fundamental narrative principle, as old as Gilgamesh (and Enkidu!) himself.

The Narrative Index reveals two modes for Donald Trump’s communications.  We know from last spring he scores high when he is speaking off the cuff with his solo unscripted voice.  But when he is scripted and less impulsive he scores much lower.   Last week he gave an unfunny, unappealing, flat and unclever speech at the Al Smith dinner.  If his Narrative Index for it was low, it would suggest it was written by his staff.  If high, it was probably written by him.  The actual score was 38, suggesting the madman created the whole mess by himself.

TRUMP HAS TWO MODES as reflected by the Narrative Index (But/And ratio). On his own, he has high narrative content. When others get involved, it drops. But look at the mess that was his Al Smith Dinner speech last week. It suggests he did all himself.

WATCH ME NOW

The patterns that emerge from the Narrative Index data are not necessarily causative — just correlative.  But they do continue to show a lot of consistency.

First off, we know that debate performances in general, being unscripted, tend to score higher than speeches.  This has been consistently true all year.  You can see it once again for the three Presidential debates.  Both Trump and Clinton score above 20 for all of their debate performances. They also showed no overlap in their scores (Trump: 28, 30, 30; Clinton: 20, 21, 21).

Trump continues to flounder with his speeches.  Once upon a time he shot from the hip and always scored above 20.  But ever since his victory in the primaries and his decision to go with a teleprompter for his speeches (seeking the advice of “veteran strategists”), his scores have been as low or lower than Hillary.

The implication is that other people put their hands into his prepared speeches, as he tries to speak diplomatically, causing the Narrative Index to plummet. The debates have allowed him to return to old form, producing higher scores.

If this really is a valid pattern, then we can use it to ask the question of who the hell wrote his unfunny, off-putting, crap speech last week at the Al Smith dinner?

Look at his score — a 38.  Kinda suggests little old Donald wrote it all by himself, thinking he would unleash his brilliance and charisma on the crowd who eventually booed him.  The speech sounded like nobody else had a hand in it.

Just imagine the guy as President.  Yikes.

This is important.  Very important.  In one of our Story Circles Narrative Training sessions recently a scientist was presenting his ABT about herbivory in rain forests starting off with basically, “The climate is changing and in rain forests we are seeing …”  This is one of the fundamental communications mistakes being made by the science and environmental community — the assumption that climate change is “the new normal” — that everybody knows about it now.  No, they don’t.  My advice: think through what the “ordinary world” means, realize most of the public is still grasping what climate change means, then start your narrative in the pre-climate change world.  Climate change is the central “problem” now.  To assume everyone has already advanced to that stage runs the risk of losing a lot of people, as well as coming off as aloof.

WHAT MAKES A HERO? This is from Matthew Winkler’s excellent TED ED video of 2012 that everyone should watch a few million times. Yes, it may feel like it’s “too Hollywood” if you’re a scientist, but make no mistake, your entire life is about problem/solution which involves the journey from the “ordinary world” (you have no problem) to the “special world” (you are seeking a solution) then back to the ordinary world when you’ve solved the problem. A crucial aspect of this for communication is to be sure you’re starting in the right ordinary world.

TIPS ARE FOR TURKEYS

As a rule, I’m hesitant to get involved in offering up “tips for communication” because it reinforces this sad notion many people have of thinking they can get great at communication without ever investing the time to engage in an actual training regime such as Story Circles.  The bane of what we do with Story Circles are the short attention span folks who say, “Great, three words — and, but, therefore — I’m all set, thanks, all done.”

It’s not that simple.  I don’t care if you pride yourself on being “a quick study.”  You’re missing the point — it’s about building narrative intuition, which takes time.

But for the sake of discussion and because this is a fairly profound element, I’m going to share this one bit that we’ve encountered in Story Circles.

WHAT IS THE ORDINARY WORLD?

This is a question that my buddy Mike Strauss, head of the Office of Scientific Quality Review for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) has locked onto a lot in our training.  He has now overseen 5 Story Circles at USDA, including the prototype that produced the effusive testimony of participants a year later that I told of in July.

He has taken to stopping a lot of people as they are working on their narratives and asking them to think through and clearly define the “ordinary world” of their project.  If you’re not familiar with this term you can get a good first introduction with Matthew Winkler’s excellent TED ED film.  This is the whole dynamic you get with Story Circles — other people poking and prodding your narrative, helping you develop it as clearly and strongly as possible, ideally before you even start writing much of anything.

Everyone should stop and ask themselves this question for any project — what is the ordinary world — the conditions before the problem is identified.  Describing the ordinary world is where you lay out elements of agreement — things that everyone in your audience knows.

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION TAKES TIME

And this is where a lot of climate communication is making a mistake.  I moderated a panel on climate change for the Malibu Public Library Speaker Series last month.  We had 3 climate experts and 200 audience members, almost none of whom had any background in climate science.  Most didn’t have the first clue of what climate change really means.

But even for the people who are climate experts.  It doesn’t hurt to open with a tiny bit of historical review — that once upon a time our climate wasn’t changing this rapidly.  We can all agree on that, and agreement is where you want to begin.

This is a tough dynamic because so many people want to begin by impressing you with how much they know.  It often takes a true expert to feel comfortable enough starting slowly, but it’s essential for communication to work well.

And in the meanwhile, Story Circles is so amazing — we learn something new with every circle we launch — like the one we started this week at Tufts University with five faculty members.  It is our 12th circle so far. Lots more to come.

It’s called “the singular narrative.”  It’s what the masses demand.  It’s a narrative principle that goes back at least 4,000 years — to the story of Gilgamesh — as Hollywood screenwriters know.  This morning we finally see behind the scenes of an epic tragedy.  Just as I began saying in January on this blog, Hillary Clinton has lacked a clear singular narrative/theme/slogan/message from the start.  This spring I communicated all this for three months with a Hillary campaign staffer who tried to pitch my thoughts to the campaign but hit a brick wall.  The tragedy is that from the start Hillary had a clear singular narrative and one word theme of EQUALITY.  It was there in the opening 250 words of her candidacy announcement on June 13, 2015 as she talked about “No ceilings” and said it VERBATIM with “what it takes to build a strong and prosperous America: “Equality of opportunity…”  But she eventually stumbled upon the shallow slogan of “Stronger Together” which says nothing about equality.  She could have used this singular equality narrative in the spring to join forces with Bernie Sanders who had the same theme at the core of his campaign.  They could have united under a single historically powerful word.  But the hacked emails now show the truth of what happened — utter narrative chaos.  She ended up with only one direction to go — attack Trump’s stronger singular narrative.

THE ONE THING (THAT THE CAMPAIGN HAS LACKED): These days I open my talks with a 30 second clip from the 1990’s movie, “City Slickers” that has come to be called “The Curly Moment.” Jack Palance as the cowboy-wise Curly tells Billy Crystal he needs only one thing in life. Billy Crystal asks what that one thing is. Curly replies “You gotta figure that out for yourself.” As the hacked emails of Hillary’s Campaign Director John Podesta now show, her campaign never did figure that out.

DIRECTIONLESS:  HILLARY

In August of last year I heard NY Times columnist and three times Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman talk on “Meet the Press” about how Hillary Clinton’s campaign lacks a message.  I sent him an email agreeing with everything he said, he wrote back a nice, albeit sad, reply of basically “yep.”  By the fall, as my book, “Houston, We Have A Narrative,” was coming out from University of Chicago Press and I was living and breathing narrative principles as I became inescapably aware that her campaign was suffering from complete narrative chaos.

Last month The Guardian ran an editorial with the title of, “Hillary Needs A Slogan.”  I forwarded it to Friedman, he wrote back, “Yep, thanks for reminding me.”  It’s been a very sad thing to watch.

DIRECTIONAL:  TRUMP

At the same time, Donald Trump showed deep narrative intuition from the very start by launching his campaign with a single, narratively powerful slogan, “Make America Great Again,” from which he has not veered one inch since that day.  Less than a quarter of the way into his announcement speech he first mentioned it in reference to the existing system “… they will never make America great again.”  Since then he has repeatedly circled back to that singular, narratively structured message endlessly, including two nights ago in the latest debate.

In my book I present the ABT Narrative Template, which I have termed “the DNA of story.”  It is the template of “and, but, therefore.”  Trump knows this template at a deeply intuitive level.  His slogan has been, “America is a great AND mighty nation, BUT we’ve slipped in the world, THEREFORE we need to make American great again.”  This has been the DNA of his campaign from which, despite all his incompetence and ineptitude with gaffes and anger, he has not veered at all. It is probably the central element that keeps his disastrous campaign still alive and enabled him to score respectable marks in this last debate.

“A STRUGGLE TO DEFINE WHAT SHE STOOD FOR” (NY TIMES)

That was how two NY Times writers put it this morning in their article about the hacked emails of Hillary’s campaign director John Podesta.  These words are no surprise to me.  In March I managed to contact James Carville with my thoughts about the absence of a clear narrative to her campaign.  In an effort to be of assistance, I pointed to the narrative tools I present in my recent book.  I do this stuff for a living these days.  I’m not a crackpot — I currently work with five government agencies including NASA, National Park Service and USDA, and a variety of other science and environmental organizations as I have for over a decade.

He very kindly referred me to Hillary’s campaign, a staffer contacted me in April, we spent three months with me offering up my specific analytical suggestions, and he valiantly trying to generate some interest.  Ultimately, as the hacked emails reflect, the cacophony of voices in her campaign made it hopeless for any outside voice — even if the person has authored three books on narrative.

“VEEP” WARS (HBO)

The hopelessness of my plight was spotted early on by one of my Hollywood buddies who pointed me to the episode of HBO’s “Veep” where the campaign speech writers have a big cork board covered with different Post-it notes representing the contributions of each of the competing speech writers.  He warned that in a situation like that the chances of an outside voice being heard were zero.  The hacked emails now confirm those comic scenes are a direct representation of what really has gone on.

The NY Times writers were alluding to exactly this when they said, “the exchanges among her aides are sometimes less “House of Cards” than “Veep,” HBO’s scabrous comedy dissecting the vanity and phoniness of Washington.”

THE MISSED “NO CEILINGS” THEME (HER STAFF)

The text of what the NY Times has written is painful to read for any Hillary supporter such as myself.  They talk about how the hacked emails show, “ …the campaign’s extreme caution and difficulty in identifying a core rationale for her candidacy, and the noisy world of advisers, friends and family members trying to exert influence.”

If not EQUALITY, she at least had the potential theme of “NO CEILINGS!”  She mentioned this at the start of her announcement speech, then a year later gave her primaries victory speech in a building in Brooklyn for which in her second sentence she noted, “we are all standing under a glass ceiling right now. But don’t worry, we’re not smashing this one. ”

She could have had the crowd shouting “NO CEILINGS!  NO CEILINGS!  NO CEILINGS!” all night long.  And as one political veteran friend of mine has noted, that would at least be “aspirational” in the same way as “… GREAT AGAIN!” is.  But instead they ended up with the narratively empty “Stronger Together.”

DEAFNESS OF TONE  (HER STAFF)

How could her campaign committee have been so totally tone deaf to the need for the singular narrative?  “No Ceilings” could have been the war cry for millions of people across the land.

Here’s a final sad quote from the NY Times writers that sums it all up, “  The private discussions among her advisers about policy — on trade, on the Black Lives Matter movement, on Wall Street regulation — often revolved around the political advantages and pitfalls of different positions, while there was little or no discussion about what Mrs. Clinton actually believed.”

ONE LAST THING:  IT’S NOT TOO LATE

There’s a month left.  She’s gaining momentum.  Just start shouting it out — EQUALITY!  NO CEILINGS! Something, anything that has clear, singular narrative dynamics (Stronger Together doesn’t).

It’s there in the Declaration of Independence — “all men are created equal” — that’s the slogan, with of course the one minor gender updating needed now.  Shout it out and bring this train into the station.

Good debate moderators usually score all the way up to the 50’s for their Narrative Index (BUT/AND ratio). Their job is to “advance the narrative” which results in them squaring off the candidates by using the word “but” frequently — as in “Your opponent says this, BUT you say …” Lester Holt’s reviews were so-so for his job as moderator of the first debate. His Narrative Index was a meager 17. Kind of figures.

Nice guy, but …

GOOD MODERATORS INTERROGATE: For the Democrat debates last spring, every group of moderators scored 25 or higher, putting Lester Holt at a level below them.

MODERATORS NEED TO “ADVANCE THE NARRATIVE”

One of the interesting things that emerges with the Narrative Index is the role of good moderators. It’s their job to “advance the narrative” — to not just sit there letting the candidates go on and on, but to push them into positions of conflict. They do much of this using the word “but.”

A good moderator repeatedly points out “you said this BUT your opponent says this — THEREFORE?” The result is good moderators end up with a high Narrative Index score (BUTs to ANDs).

You could see this in the third Democrat debate last spring with major veterans Martha Raddatz and John Muir. Together they scored a 56. Here are some representative questions from them, all structured around the word of contradiction, “but.”

RADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, the Department of Health and Human Services says more than 17 million Americans who are not insured now have health coverage because of Obamacare. BUT for Americans who already had health insurance the cost has gone up 27 percent in the last five years while deductibles are up 67 percent, health care costs are rising faster than many Americans can manage. What’s broken in Obamacare that needs to be fixed right now?

MUIR: You have said it’s your goal not to raise taxes on families making under $200,000 a year a goal. BUT can you say that’s a promise as you stand here tonight?

RADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, first ladies, as you well know, have used their position to work on important causes like literacy and drug abuse. BUT they also supervise the menus, the flowers, the holiday ornaments and White House decor. I know you think you know where I’m going here.

MUIR: As I pointed out the CEO pay, 200 percent of their time — for that family of just 2 percent. You’ve all said, “you would raise the minimum wage.” BUT Senator Sanders what else – speak to that household tonight. 20 years, just a 2 percent raise, how as president would you get them a raise right away?

Lester Holt, as moderator of the first Presidential Debate last week received mixed reviews (that was actually the headline in People Magazine). Aside from allowing Trump to run wild, he just didn’t do much advancing of the narrative. And so, not surprisingly, his Narrative Index was a mere 17.

By the way, if you’re wondering about the two candidates — Trump scored a 25, Hillary a 20. Both of those values were about average. Which is how most people felt about their performances. Neither of them delivered a blazing, inspired vision for the nation. They both just jabbed and defended in a fairly directionless way.

They actually started off in the normal fashion with Hillary launching a barrage of “and, and, and” statements as Trump presented the singular narrative of how China and other countries are having their way with us. But the divide quickly vanished as Trump lost his composure and Hillary got feisty.