The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and

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00:00:48.080 the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Welcome to the JBP podcast, season four,

00:00:57.140 episode 62. This episode was recorded on September 7th, 2021. In this episode, Dad was joined by Angus

00:01:06.120 Fletcher, professor of story science at the world's leading think tank on narrative theory,

00:01:12.100 appropriately called Project Narrative. Dad and Professor Fletcher covered topics like creativity,

00:01:18.080 the link between literature and resilience, what makes certain stories so compelling, and the

00:01:23.580 two main types of stories. Before we start the episode, I wanted to remind you guys that Dad's

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00:04:09.040 The wonder of being on this earth is that there is this possibility to tell our own story and beyond

00:04:16.380 that to build stories that we can hand on to other people to empower them to tell their own stories.

00:04:23.500 And it all goes back to this sense of dynamism that you're talking about and also these emotions that

00:04:29.440 you're talking about. And to unite us in a collective story so that we can work cooperating

00:04:34.880 together towards the same ends, right? So that we all come under the same banner in some sense.

00:04:39.840 And that's that shared intentionality that's very specifically human. You don't see that much

00:04:45.180 manifest itself much in other animals. Even the higher apes have a hard time with it compared to us.

00:04:50.440 Absolutely. Yes. And, you know, what's a big, what's really important about that is that it's

00:04:54.840 ultimately voluntary.

00:04:55.960 Hello, everyone. I'm pleased to have with me today, Dr. Angus Fletcher, who wrote Wonderworks,

00:05:24.120 which is a study of the psychology of stories, the psychology of narrative.

00:05:31.440 I'm going to read you Dr. Fletcher's bio from the back cover.

00:05:35.560 Dr. Angus Fletcher is a professor at Ohio State University's Project Narrative,

00:05:41.900 the world's leading academic think tank for the study of stories.

00:05:45.560 He has dual degrees in neuroscience and literature, received his PhD from Yale,

00:05:50.900 taught Shakespeare at Stanford, and has published two books and dozens of peer-reviewed academic

00:05:56.820 articles on the scientific workings of novels, poetry, film, and theatre. His research has been

00:06:04.900 supported by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts

00:06:10.420 and Sciences. He's done story consulting for projects for Sony, Disney, the BBC, Amazon, PBS,

00:06:17.920 and NBC Universal, and is the author-presenter of the Audible slash Great Courses Guide to Screenwriting.

00:06:28.160 So, Dr. Fletcher, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today, and

00:06:31.740 I'm looking forward to this conversation greatly.

00:06:35.840 So, let's start a bit with this project narrative at Ohio State. I hadn't heard of that previously,

00:06:41.740 and so tell me how you got interested in that, and then maybe how you got interested in the

00:06:46.660 psychology of stories more broadly. Well, thanks for being, thanks for letting me be here, Jordan.

00:06:52.380 I'm thrilled too. Project Narrative is best known as a rogue outpost of literary studies. We do literary

00:07:01.860 studies completely differently from everyone else in the modern academy. Basically, there was a split

00:07:08.460 in the 1920s that started with new criticism, and new criticism went on to develop what is essentially

00:07:14.540 the modern literary studies, and new criticism is based on the same method that was used in the Middle Ages

00:07:21.420 to interpret the Bible. That's the same method that's used really across the academy, even though new criticism

00:07:26.700 has itself fallen out of favor. And in Project Narrative, we take a different approach, and in my case,

00:07:33.240 it's a scientific approach. We're interested in studying how stories work in the brain. And the

00:07:41.800 particular focus of my research is the belief that stories are the most powerful things that humans have

00:07:51.240 ever invented. They're the most powerful tool we possess. And the simple reason for that is that the human

00:07:58.200 brain is the most powerful thing on earth, for good or for bad. I mean, you look around the

00:08:03.800 extraordinary achievements of our mind, the cultures we have created, the science we have created, the

00:08:09.480 technology we have created, the art we have created, but also the fact that we have the power in us to

00:08:14.760 wipe out this planet, to destroy everything. And when you realize that stories have the power

00:08:21.640 to change how our mind works, to troubleshoot it, to make it more resilient, to make it more creative,

00:08:32.120 to make it more scientific, to do all these things, you realize that when you couple the power of stories

00:08:37.320 with the human brain, you throw open the doors to anything. So that's sort of my focus. And that's

00:08:46.120 sort of what we do at Project Narrative is we study stories, how they work scientifically,

00:08:51.160 what they do. And because of that, we're considered somewhat heretical, somewhat maverick,

00:08:58.680 and definitely on the fringes. Although I should say, I did get my PhD at Yale.

00:09:03.720 So all of us are reputable and well-respected scholars.

00:09:09.400 So are you on the fringes among psychologists or among literary critics?

00:09:15.160 No, not among psychologists. So, I mean, one of the extraordinary things about my career

00:09:21.560 is that my work is backed by some of the biggest neuroscientists and psychologists in the world.

00:09:27.880 Doctors, nurses, social workers, big businesses, the U.S. Army, special operations community,

00:09:36.520 the Air Force. I mean, there's an enormous amount of backing from my work among people who are

00:09:43.880 pragmatic and empirically based and are interested in science. But the way that literary studies has

00:09:53.640 become, I mean, what has happened in literary studies is because everyone is using this method,

00:09:58.120 which is really from the Middle Ages. The same thing is happening in literary studies now that happened

00:10:02.360 in the Middle Ages. People read the same book, they come up with conflicting interpretations of them,

00:10:08.200 those interpretations reflect their ideal ideologies, and then they argue about them. And so we just have

00:10:13.800 these sort of endless combustions that don't go anywhere, just like the Protestants and the Catholics

00:10:20.360 in the Middle Ages. And so, you know, what my work basically says is, what if we just back out of that,

00:10:25.400 and what if we just do the same thing that science has done, and we focus on the way that stories can

00:10:31.080 empower us, the story, the way the stories can improve our human performance? Because that's

00:10:37.960 really why they were created by our ancestors. Our ancestors came to be in a tragic world where they

00:10:42.280 realized their own frailty and insufficiency. They said, how do I cope with this life? How do I find

00:10:48.680 strength in the face of my own mortality? How do I lift myself up when I see so much frailty within

00:10:55.480 myself? I see so much frailty in terms of my capacity for anger, for hate, and also my ability

00:11:03.800 to be damaged, my ability to suffer grief and trauma and loneliness. How do I lift myself up?

00:11:09.400 What tool could help me do that? And so the beginning of that literature with early scriptures,

00:11:14.520 there's a ton of technologies, as I talk about in my work, that we can actually trace their effects in

00:11:18.760 the brain. And then going beyond that healing work into actually making us into our better selves,

00:11:24.600 empowering us with joy, with creativity, with resilience, with the power to lift up others,

00:11:31.480 and perhaps most importantly, the power to grow, to not stay still, to take on damage and turn that

00:11:39.800 damage around into a source of strength. And so what my work does is my work focuses on how literature does

00:11:45.640 all those things, which all of us know intuitively. All of us have read a book at some time, have read

00:11:51.400 a novel at some time, or watched a movie at some time, or read a poem at some time, and felt healed,

00:11:56.200 or uplifted, or strengthened. If you have a favorite musician, a favorite artist, a favorite rapper,

00:12:01.480 you know, you'll listen to their lyrics and feel the same thing. But the question has always been,

00:12:05.000 how? How is it doing that? And so my work goes into that, but also more powerfully, my work breaks

00:12:11.000 down the technology of literature. So you can identify the specific nuts and bolts, the specific

00:12:16.040 blueprints that are having those specific effects. And so that's the work that I do at Project

00:12:20.440 Narrative. So in, in Wonderworks, in this, in this book, which I referred to earlier, you list out what

00:12:28.280 you consider 25 inventions, and they basically constitute the chapter structure of the book. And so

00:12:34.360 you examine the manner in which stories do such things as rally courage, or stoke romance, or

00:12:42.600 help control anger, or transcend hurt, or excite curiosity. I'm not going to go through all of them, but

00:12:49.080 to dispense with pessimism, and banish despair, and heal from grief, and decide more wisely. And so,

00:12:58.440 in some sense, it's a listing of existential concerns. And so you've broken down narrative

00:13:05.000 in this, in these 25 ways in this book to discuss the major sources of existential concern that plague

00:13:11.320 mankind, and then have put forward the notion that we have stories that surround each of these fundamental

00:13:18.680 concerns that help us understand, verbalize, communicate about, and maybe see a pathway through

00:13:29.480 each of these, that in the case of the terrible emotions, each of the terrible emotions are to

00:13:33.880 foster and develop the ones that are more positive.

00:13:37.720 I mean, that's exactly right. And, and even more than that. So, I mean, part of what stories do is they,

00:13:43.400 is they give us a plot, a roadmap, out of some of these negative emotions into positive emotions.

00:13:48.280 But even more powerfully, they can actually shape our emotions once we understand how to use them.

00:13:53.960 Certain stories can just build optimism, or resilience, or courage. So to take the first

00:13:58.840 chapter of the book, which is about courage, Homer's Iliad. It's extraordinary work.

00:14:05.240 When you read the Iliad, it makes you feel braver. It makes you feel stronger. And it can do that even

00:14:12.440 when it's not talking about courage. Even if, even when it has no message about courage. Even when it's

00:14:17.640 talking about, oh, well, how does it do that? Well, Homer, he probably didn't invent this technology,

00:14:23.560 but we don't know who, who, who did it before him. So we give Homer credit. Homer realized that

00:14:28.760 when he saw soldiers marching into war, they sang songs. And those songs made them feel braver.

00:14:36.520 Why did those songs make them feel braver? Well, those songs made them feel part of a larger voice.

00:14:41.000 They felt they were bigger than themselves. And on a deep psychological level, they could feel that

00:14:46.440 strength because they knew that even if their individual body died, the voice would carry on.

00:14:52.200 And that's a, that's a, that's a scientific power of song. We know that to be the case that when people

00:14:56.520 sing together in choirs, they feel braver, they feel more courageous. And so what Homer did is he said,

00:15:01.800 well, what if I could give you that power of singing without you actually singing? What if I

00:15:07.240 could create a technology, a way of writing so that it tricked your brain into thinking that you were

00:15:12.760 singing as part of a choir. And that's of course, what the Iliad does. It makes you believe that you

00:15:18.920 are listening to the song of a God, sing goddess of the anger. That's how it begins. And it uses all

00:15:25.960 these tricks and techniques, which I go through in the book, into making your brain believe that you

00:15:32.360 are singing as part of this larger chorus. And so when you simply read the book, it makes you feel

00:15:37.720 braver. And that technology, that idea that you had there, that it, that, that group singing unites you

00:15:45.480 with the central voice whose existence transcends death. I mean, there's a very deep religious like

00:15:51.000 idea in there. That's, that's implicit, right? That there is a voice and there are words that unite and

00:15:57.400 transcend and that supersede death. And so that's some, that's part of that heroic pattern, I suppose, that

00:16:04.760 Homer is referring to, that you can step into as an, what would you say, an active agent in, in engaging in

00:16:12.520 this literature. Just like when you walk into a movie and you, you embody the heroes or the, or the

00:16:19.560 anti-heroes sometimes that you see on the screen and experience the emotions that they experience

00:16:26.280 for better or for worse, as a, as I suppose, as a form of practice.

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00:19:35.480 That's exactly right. One of the things that is distinct about the Homeric gods is they're large

00:19:40.440 humans. Homeric gods, unlike an extreme Gnostic version of God as the via negativa or something

00:19:48.760 that is completely non-human and that we can't access, these Homeric gods are essentially heroes

00:19:54.440 in the sense of just being bigger versions of us. They're gripped with all the same problems that we

00:19:59.000 have, all the same frailties that we have, jealousy, rage, insufficiency, and so when you join with

00:20:06.040 them in this bigger voice, just as you would in a hero in a movie, you feel that you are becoming

00:20:14.440 yourself only greater. You don't feel like you're losing yourself, but you're joining this bigger

00:20:19.640 thing that is yourself, that makes you bigger, that makes you more powerful, and that's where the

00:20:22.360 spiritual experience comes from. Absolutely, one of the basic primordial experiences of literature,

00:20:26.760 which is so basic, I don't even include it as one of the technologies in the book, I just talk about

00:20:31.320 it in the introduction, is spiritual experience. We can actually detect you having deactivation in

00:20:38.760 your parietal lobe, as you have what's known as a self-transcendent experience in which you feel the

00:20:44.120 boundaries of yourself and the world dissolving, between yourself and the world dissolving, and

00:20:49.160 that's associated with increased life purpose, increased generosity and kindness, because you no longer have

00:20:55.320 the same sense of ego, you feel connected to others, and that sense of spiritual, I mean, the word

00:21:00.360 literature and the word scripture are synonyms. They mean that which is writ, and so if there's one

00:21:07.480 fundamental thing, more fundamental even than any of the technologies I talk about, to get from

00:21:11.560 literature, it simply is that sense of spiritual experience, and I do think that that is the basic

00:21:16.040 and most powerful experience that any of us can have in this world, because it makes us not only

00:21:19.960 stronger and more purposeful in ourselves, but kinder to others, and really that's ethics,

00:21:26.360 to be stronger in yourself and kinder to others. Right, to be more effective and more useful,

00:21:32.040 socially, broadly. So, okay, I want to ask you a couple of things. I've done a lot of thinking about

00:21:39.720 narrative. When I read this book back in the 1980s, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety by Jeffrey Gray,

00:21:47.720 and that book had a tremendous impact in the field of psychology, although it took about 20 years

00:21:53.480 before people, I suppose, incorporated at least some of what Gray had proposed, and he got a lot

00:22:00.520 of his ideas, although I didn't know it at the time, from Norbert Weiner, I don't know how to say his name,

00:22:07.160 but a brilliant cybernetician who worked on establishing what might be the basis of intelligent abstraction,

00:22:18.760 and so that it could be mechanized. And so I read Gray at the same time, and learned about his association

00:22:28.360 with Weiner and cybernetics, and at the same time that I was reading a lot of analytical psychology,

00:22:34.680 mostly by Jung and his students. And I started to understand that the basic cybernetic mechanisms

00:22:44.680 that Gray was discussing as characteristic of cognitive processing seemed to me to be the same

00:22:51.960 thing as the fundamental elements of the story. So let me run this by you, and you tell me what you

00:22:56.360 think about this, okay? We'll see how our thinking is meshing, perhaps, and differing.

00:23:02.120 So I thought that there are basically two types of stories in a functional sense. There's a simple

00:23:11.320 story, and there's a story about how stories transform. And a story itself is actually the

00:23:18.600 frame of reference that we use to perceive the world and act within. So I don't think we have a

00:23:26.440 I don't think we think, and then we think in stories as a subset of thinking. I think that

00:23:32.280 the story is the frame for our thought. And that frame is actually what produces our motivation

00:23:37.960 and our emotions. And so a lot of this is, again, influenced by this cybernetic work that was developed

00:23:43.400 by Gray. His tremendous knowledge of animal behavior and cognition, because he was an absolute genius. I think

00:23:49.800 he cited 2,000 papers in the neuropsychology of anxiety. It took me like six months to read that

00:23:55.880 book and understand it. It was really dense. So imagine that in the simple story, you mentioned

00:24:03.480 literature as a story as a map. And I think that's the fundamental issue. So we're always somewhere.

00:24:09.720 That's our starting point. And we're always moving somewhere else because we're active creatures.

00:24:15.000 And so we have an image of the destination in mind. And so we segregate up time and space

00:24:24.520 into a functional unit that defines the geographical and temporal bounds of our current operations.

00:24:31.960 And we specify a target. And even when our imagination is free-floating, partly what we're

00:24:41.080 doing is playing with different spatial temporal frames of reference. So we might be playing with

00:24:46.840 10 minutes. We might be playing with an hour. We might be playing with a day. We might be playing

00:24:51.800 with two weeks. We can expand and contract that more or less at will. But so the map covers a spatial temporal

00:25:00.760 domain. Okay. And then the goal is specified. And then we feel positive emotion when we see any

00:25:13.480 indication from the environment, environmental feedback, that our actions are moving us towards

00:25:18.680 the goal. And we feel, and that's technically positive affect because it's associated with forward

00:25:25.560 movement, left hemisphere activation, dopaminergically mediated. So we can, we can, we can conceptualize

00:25:33.080 the goal abstractly, interestingly enough. And we have to do that because we can play with these

00:25:37.960 spatial temporal frames of reference. And then we, if we see a pathway to the goal,

00:25:44.600 a clear pathway that we can implement behaviorally, then that fills us with positive emotion.

00:25:50.280 If we see obstacles in the way, then that induces negative emotion and stops us. And when we stop,

00:25:58.120 we'll play around with the spatial temporal framing, making it smaller. Maybe we have to deal with the

00:26:03.960 next minute or larger, trying to reconceptualize the territory so that we can continue our movement forward.

00:26:10.920 Okay. So that's, that's story number one, simple story. I was here.

00:26:15.480 I went there. Um, and here's how I got there. And you might want to listen to that because maybe you're there

00:26:21.400 and you want to get to the goal and you need directions. Okay. The next story is different. It's, it's the

00:26:29.080 transformation of stories. And so it's the typical fall or paradise, fall paradise, rekindled story.

00:26:37.240 So you have a frame of reference. You're moving towards a goal. Something that isn't modeled within

00:26:47.160 that frame of reference occurs. It's like an alien invader in some sense. It doesn't make sense from

00:26:54.680 within that current frame of reference. It blows the frame of reference into pieces. There are,

00:27:00.440 you enter a land of, in some sense of narrative fragments. That's the underworld in mythology.

00:27:07.080 You have to sort those narrative fragments up and rebuild them, remap the territory. And then,

00:27:12.360 then you build another story. So that's a meta story. It's a story about how a story can decompose,

00:27:18.360 collapse into catastrophe and rekindle itself. And it seemed to me that there isn't anything more

00:27:25.960 basic to our abstract thinking than that sort of nesting inside of stories.

00:27:33.400 First of all, I completely agree on the overall point. So, I mean, I actually have a book coming

00:27:37.240 out next year on Columbia University Press, and the title is story thinking, because basically my belief

00:27:44.040 is that human cognition is largely narrative. And that actually we process the world narratively

00:27:50.840 in this exact way. And this is actually what makes our brain function different from computers and AI.

00:27:57.480 Whether or not computers and humans can do the same tasks, we do them differently. Computers think

00:28:04.840 in these kinds of logical correlational sequences. And humans, to your point, think in plots and plans

00:28:11.400 and narratives and goals. And those plots and plans are then associated with emotions. Because a computer

00:28:17.320 exists in the mathematical present tense, so it cannot have desire. There's nothing missing to

00:28:21.960 a computer because it's always in the same place all the time. It's always the equal side of the

00:28:26.040 mathematical present tense. But we as humans are able, through plotting and planning, to imagine a

00:28:30.200 future that is distinct from the present, which creates desire or fear or hope or all these other

00:28:35.240 emotions. And so narrative and emotion just go together completely in human experience. And that's why

00:28:41.640 emotions are both shaped through narrative, but narratives are also shaped through emotion.

00:28:45.880 So, you know, the kind of simple thing is to say, well, you know, we can use narratives to influence

00:28:53.080 people's emotions. I mean, this is the sort of thing that, you know, is somewhat, sometimes positive,

00:28:57.080 but often a kind of cheap political trick. Right, right, exactly.

00:29:00.040 To scare people or manipulate them into doing things and whatnot. But the real power here is to say,

00:29:05.480 first of all, how can I shape my own emotions with narrative? What emotions? In other words,

00:29:10.680 I'm not trying to shape your emotions. I'm trying to shape my own emotions. I'm trying to

00:29:13.640 control my own anger or increase my own hope. How do I do that by retelling my own stories in my own

00:29:19.080 head? And then the second factor of that is, how can my emotions come into play and enable my

00:29:24.760 narratives? How can I develop the emotional resilience to be more likely to carry on my own

00:29:29.720 story? How can I complete my story, even though I have these obstacles in front of me? And to me,

00:29:36.040 the function of literature. So literature is related to stories, but slightly different in the fact that

00:29:41.720 literature is really the kind of experimental zone where you're pushing the envelope.

00:29:45.560 I mean, you know, literary writers are people who are somewhat dissatisfied to kind of, you know,

00:29:52.120 talk, you know, to think about how you're talking about stories breaking. They're dissatisfied with

00:29:56.040 the stories they have, you know, they're not working, you know, and they say, how can I take these

00:29:59.960 stories and somehow make them new? How can I innovate them? How can I go beyond the stories that I've

00:30:03.720 inherited? You know, how can I push that envelope? And so really what I do in the book is say,

00:30:08.120 you know, here's 25 examples of how stories were broken and then put back together again,

00:30:13.880 and how this technology, just like, you know, any technology that humans have developed,

00:30:17.960 has been expanded and innovated over time to go beyond that simple, I just have to get to this

00:30:23.080 goal story, which I agree with you, is that, I mean, that's a fundamental story, beginning,

00:30:28.040 end, you know, the most basic unit, you know, beginning, end, and I find myself in the middle.

00:30:32.040 But, you know, the wonder of being on this earth is that there is this possibility to tell our own

00:30:39.320 story, and beyond that, to build stories that we can hand on to other people to empower them

00:30:46.200 to tell their own stories. And it all goes back to this sense of dynamism that you're talking about,

00:30:52.360 and also these emotions that you're talking about.

00:30:54.360 And to unite us, and to unite us in a collective story so that we can work cooperating together

00:30:59.800 towards the same ends, right, so that we all come under the same banner in some sense. And that's

00:31:04.600 that shared intentionality that's, that's very specifically human. You don't see that much

00:31:09.640 manifest itself much in other animals, even the higher apes have a hard time with it, compared to us.

00:31:14.840 Absolutely, yes. And you know, what's a big, what's really important about that is that it's

00:31:19.320 ultimately voluntary. Because I mean, again, if we brainwash people to have the same story as us,

00:31:23.640 you know, that's, to me, a biological no go, it's not particularly effective, and it's unethical.

00:31:29.240 But if we find a story that's so compelling, that when we share it with someone else,

00:31:32.360 it empowers them, and they join our story. So let's talk about that compelling issue,

00:31:36.920 because that's something that's really phenomenally interesting. So you can get gripped by a story,

00:31:47.320 right? And that's sort of extra rational. And what I mean by that, because, and that makes sense,

00:31:52.520 if it's if the story is the frame within which rationality takes place, this being gripped by a

00:31:59.160 story would be extra rational. And so you can see that when you walk into a movie theater,

00:32:03.240 and you get engaged, maybe even despite yourself, you might be thinking, I didn't want to go to this

00:32:08.920 stupid movie, my girlfriend just dragged me there. And then, you know, it's, it's, it's too farfetched for

00:32:16.680 me to suspend disbelief, as if you suspend disbelief voluntarily, because you really

00:32:22.280 don't, the story grips you. And so you're in there, and you're gripped. And then, you know,

00:32:27.400 someone taps you on the shoulder and says, you know, this isn't real. And you say, shut the hell

00:32:31.160 up, because I'm, I'm watching the story, right? So, so the question then is, from a psychological

00:32:36.840 perspective is, what is that mechanism of grip? And what might its biological roots be? And my sense

00:32:44.420 is, you know, if you watch little kids, you watch a three year old, a three year old will be enthralled

00:32:52.680 by a three and a half year old or a four year old. Now, they're not enthralled to the same degree by a

00:32:58.280 14 year old. I mean, and the reason for that, you didn't criticize this, okay, because I want your

00:33:05.800 perspective on it. So, Vygotsky talked about the zone of proximal development. And Vygotsky pointed

00:33:16.220 out that, I believe it was Vygotsky, but it's been established by other psychologists, in any case,

00:33:21.800 that parents use language automatically in the presence of children who are developing their

00:33:29.380 linguistic skills, that is somewhat more complex than the child can currently understand.

00:33:34.760 So, they communicate with them, but at the same time they're communicating with them, they're

00:33:39.880 teaching them how to communicate better by stretching their limits. So, that's like that stretch you talk

00:33:45.180 about in, in Wonderworks. Okay, so, I'm going somewhere with this. So, now you got your three

00:33:50.320 year old, and your three year old is enthralled by a four year old. And the reason that they're

00:33:54.800 enthralled is because the four year old is a stretch for them, but almost within their grip.

00:33:59.960 So, what the enthrallment does, I don't know if that's a word, being enthralled is a manifestation

00:34:07.700 of the instinct that specifies the zone of proximal development and facilitates imitation.

00:34:14.600 So, we're unbelievably imitative, right? And what we're moving back and forth are units of behavior

00:34:19.600 or units of perception. And when we find one that our intuition senses is in the zone of proximal

00:34:26.860 development, then we're gripped despite ourself by the power of the story. And that's, and the

00:34:33.880 biological basis of that, I believe, is the instinct for mimicry. And that's what's operating

00:34:40.200 in literature as well. It's abstract mimicry. Any of that seem implausible?

00:34:48.060 Well, so, first of all, to your first point, I completely agree that we seek out growth

00:34:55.400 spaces. I would use the term growth. In other words, the sense that we're always looking for

00:34:59.600 that threshold where we can pull ourselves forward and become more actualized and enter

00:35:06.340 that space where, you know, we become, you know, more of the self we can be and want to

00:35:13.660 be. So, and absolutely, that, again, goes down to plot. I mean, plot is always about the next step.

00:35:18.740 The reason that plot and narrative are so powerful is, again, unlike logic, which is eternal,

00:35:23.220 plot is always about the next step. Where are you going? And where are you growing? And so,

00:35:29.040 plot naturally plugs into that. Because, I mean, the first thing that happens to us,

00:35:32.460 even when we watch a bad movie, is we want to know where is this going? I mean, if you watch a

00:35:36.660 movie for even just 30 seconds, that's usually your first, where are these characters going?

00:35:39.720 What's happening here? You know? This isn't going anywhere. Right, right. And then I got to walk

00:35:44.860 out of it, you know? So just, but then what makes the movie emotionally gripping to your point is the

00:35:49.980 sense that it's taking me somewhere where I want to go. Or in other words, where my psychology wants

00:35:54.960 to grow. It's pulling me and growing me and developing me. So I agree with all that completely

00:36:01.040 100%. What I think is interesting is, you know, again, and this is sort of the work that we do,

00:36:06.120 is that different people, we just noticed, are drawn in by different aspects of stories.

00:36:13.580 And different stories draw people in differently. So this all goes back to biology. So I'll just give

00:36:18.600 you a few quick top lines. You tell me if you buy any of this, or you want me to go deeper. So we

00:36:23.480 just know that the thing the human brain is most interested in is other people. The human brain is

00:36:27.200 just most interested in other people. And that's because other people, inevitably, are both our

00:36:34.140 greatest opportunities in life and our greatest obstacles in life. You know, in other people,

00:36:37.780 we see our friends, our mates, you know, our potential partners, our children, whatever,

00:36:41.800 our legacies. But we also see our adversaries, our critics. And so humans just notice other humans

00:36:46.640 very, very quickly and prioritize them incredibly quickly. And that's why characters are so important

00:36:50.160 in stories. We identify characters, and we develop these relationships with those characters,

00:36:56.020 which can be imitative in a heroic story. But we have other relationships with characters,

00:37:00.660 too. We can have crushes on characters. You know, we can feel protective of characters. There's

00:37:05.240 also these relationships you can have. So the first thing that will often get us to grip is just the

00:37:09.020 characters in the story, because they're a human. The second thing that humans notice immediately is

00:37:13.880 the world. I mean, the human brain evolved in this incredibly dynamic landscape. We're constantly

00:37:18.540 having to shift where we're living. We're constantly having to move into new terrains. We're constantly

00:37:23.480 having to be brave. And so we have this huge ability to immediately sense, what is this new

00:37:29.760 environment? How is it working? What are the different rules that operate here? And we get

00:37:34.360 this in modern society all the time whenever you enter into, you know, a different person's home

00:37:37.620 or a different business space or whatever. You immediately sense, okay, the rules of operation

00:37:41.420 here are a little bit different. And you pick them up and you modulate your own behavior.

00:37:45.280 And in films, this is the most obvious effect of like a sci-fi world or a fantasy world. You

00:37:51.560 immediately feel like, okay, here's a space I'm going into where I can pull out parts of myself and

00:37:56.260 explore them. But you can also feel that in a very realistic story. If you just feel that that human

00:38:01.660 environment is somehow different from your own and the possibilities for human action in that space.

00:38:05.460 And that's very exciting and empowering for us as well. So that's the second major thing. And the

00:38:10.520 third thing is the story itself. If the story itself is taking you on a journey that you recognize

00:38:16.400 on some level as a journey you could take and might want to take, but haven't taken yet,

00:38:22.640 then you say to yourself, this is a growth space for me because by going on this journey,

00:38:27.240 by continuing this plot, I can go to places and most importantly, not just external places,

00:38:31.780 but internal places. I can find out who I become when I go on this journey, which I haven't gone on

00:38:39.120 before. Okay. Let me ask you, let me ask you a question. Yeah. Okay. Let me ask you a question

00:38:43.540 about that. Cause that's kind of a mystery. So how is it? So you have the three-year-old who's watching

00:38:50.760 the three and a half year old and the three-year-old figures out that, or is gripped by

00:38:54.780 the three and a half year old because he or she can almost do that. And then you see the same thing

00:39:01.940 in adults. You're talking about this growth opportunity. How the hell do you think we

00:39:06.440 conceptualize what we could be so that we can see that instinctively when we don't know what we could

00:39:12.780 be because we aren't that yet? You know what I mean is we got some conception of what constitutes

00:39:17.900 the horizon, even though we're not there. And, and so. Well, I do. Well, so first of all, I don't want

00:39:24.820 to pretend to have the final answer to this. And, you know, one of the reasons I wrote the book and

00:39:27.500 one of the reasons I think story is so wonderful is we just need to do more research on it. And I

00:39:30.580 would love anyone out there to dedicate their lives, to delve more into these mysteries. I just

00:39:34.840 want to put that out there that, you know, I mean, this is a huge mystery and it might be the

00:39:38.640 most important mystery, but one of the things I can say is that one of the things we know about

00:39:43.620 the origins of story in the human brain is it goes below consciousness. A lot of what goes through

00:39:49.540 our consciousness is just simply tiny parts of the story machinery of our deep brain. And that's one

00:39:57.440 of the reasons why opportunities for action ideas just seem to just pop fully formed into our

00:40:01.960 consciousness. If you work as a writer ever, I mean, I've done a ton of work in Hollywood. All of a sudden,

00:40:07.520 these ideas just pop in your head. Where do they come from? Well, there's a huge amount of

00:40:10.620 unconscious machinery in there. And another way of saying that is there's this huge processing

00:40:15.100 system, this operating system that's constantly hypothesizing like a little scientist. Here's

00:40:20.860 what could happen. Here's what could happen. Here's what could happen. And when all of a sudden

00:40:23.840 your conscious brain gets an opportunity with one of the possibilities your unconscious brain has,

00:40:28.560 click, it says, let's go. And the main point here is that the human brain, the flip side of anxiety

00:40:36.980 is creativity. They're both about restless energy. They're both about restless imagining. They're both

00:40:43.540 about restlessly thinking what could be. And anxiety manifests itself as the nervous side of that,

00:40:52.040 the fearful side of that, you know, the more negative affect side of that. But creativity

00:40:55.940 manifests as the more hopeful side of that. And our brain evolved to be constantly trying to grow

00:41:03.920 because otherwise it was dead. I mean, in the kind of primordial culture in which we evolved,

00:41:08.340 you could not sit still. You would get eaten. And so the whole pressure on you biologically was,

00:41:15.720 can you get to that next step? We don't know what it is yet. And it can't be preordained because life

00:41:21.380 around you is evolving. So, and humans around you are evolving. And so to a certain extent,

00:41:27.140 there has to be this open-endedness to the process where you're both piggybacking on other people,

00:41:31.000 also leaping in a direction that they might not go. Okay. So here, so I've got, I've got some

00:41:37.540 comments about that, that the unconscious aspect of that. So I was imagining a way while you were

00:41:43.220 talking and, and, and thinking about the structure of that unconscious. And so this is part of the

00:41:53.860 reasons why dreams are pre-cognitive in some sense. This is how I think it works. So imagine that

00:42:00.740 we're watching people act all the time, all the time in small groups and large groups as individuals

00:42:09.660 in fiction, all the time. And then, so we have this vast knowledge of, of embodied action.

00:42:20.560 Now that's not propositionalized. It's imagistic. It's like the movie that runs in your head. It's like

00:42:27.920 a dream. And we can't propositionalize all that. That's partly what a great storyteller does, is take

00:42:33.600 a great set of images that reflect a compelling pattern of behavior and turn it into verbalized

00:42:40.980 propositions. And that, that insight you described. So imagine you have these images of behavior and

00:42:49.800 in those images, there are patterns. But we don't know what the patterns are because they're extremely

00:42:54.880 sophisticated and we're not intelligent enough to fully understand them, which is only to say that

00:42:59.680 human behavior at the individual and the social level supersedes our, um, our, our explicit grasp.

00:43:08.240 No one would dispute that. That's why you have to learn about yourself, which is kind of a strange

00:43:13.220 thing, right? You're you, but you don't know who you are. And so we have these patterns of behavior

00:43:19.960 behavior at hand. And then we abstract out images of those patterns of behavior. And that's at least

00:43:26.140 in part, the source of dreams. It's the abstract representation of the patterns, not of the actual

00:43:33.120 behaviors themselves, but of the commonalities or something like that, the commonalities between

00:43:37.060 behaviors. So imagine this, you talked about the Greek gods as being superhumans.

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00:47:47.860 There's patterns of behavior that strike us as admirable. Those are in our zone of proximal

00:47:53.460 development, otherwise we don't understand them. We collect, we, our brain, and maybe this is a right

00:47:59.220 hemisphere function. Our brain makes associations between these patterns of admirable behavior based

00:48:04.560 on their emotional commonality. Then it abstracts out a pattern that constitutes that set of admirable

00:48:11.200 behaviors. Okay, that's a super stimulus that's a hero, or perhaps someone who's successful at romance.

00:48:18.140 So, and it's the same thing in some sense that, I'll go back to childhood. I was struck when my

00:48:23.560 children were young about their fantasy play. I was very, very interested in fantasy play as a

00:48:29.040 psychological phenomenon. Now, one of the things that's very interesting about watching children

00:48:33.480 pretend play is that we tend to say that what they're doing is imitating. So, say they're playing

00:48:39.540 father when they play house. But they're not actually imitating because they never do exactly what

00:48:45.160 they saw their father do. What they do is they watch their father across multiple manifestations of

00:48:51.280 father behavior. And they combine that with fathers in books and fathers in movies, and, and they're

00:48:57.680 pulling out a pattern of the father. And that's made out of all these representations of these behavioral

00:49:03.400 patterns. And then the fantasy is trying to represent that abstractly in images to draw out the central

00:49:09.340 spirit. And the spirit is the thing that's imitated, and that's what drives the fantasy play. And I also

00:49:16.140 think, I'll jump one more place here, that's the source of the abstraction of religious

00:49:20.680 conceptions. Right? Imagine that you extract out the father as such. It's not characteristic of any

00:49:29.480 one human being. It's that ideal spirit that transcends the individual, that's immortal in some sense,

00:49:35.780 because it manifests itself in body after body throughout time. See, Jung talked about this space

00:49:42.680 where these transcendent spirits existed. This is something almost no one knows about his work.

00:49:46.800 He called that the pleroma. And the pleroma was the space that abstracted figures of imagination exist

00:49:56.320 above temporality and death. It's a very, it's a very weird way of thinking about it, right? You can imagine

00:50:04.620 there's this space that's composed of the collective imagination. And in that collective imagination,

00:50:11.020 there are beings. And those beings outlast all of us. Now, I'm not making a case that that place is

00:50:21.840 material the same way that we think of materiality, but it's a space that's composed of,

00:50:28.860 it's very difficult. All the, all the human nervous systems are constituent elements of that space,

00:50:34.780 and those characters inhabit that. It doesn't matter if one person dies. The spirit continues.

00:50:40.300 You can think about the spirit of evil that way. And you can think about our attempts to represent it.

00:50:45.500 Here's another interesting thought. You know, my, my brother-in-law is a computer chip designer.

00:50:50.940 He's one of the best computer chip designers in the world. And I've had very interesting conversations

00:50:56.020 with him about computation and artificial intelligence. You know, interestingly enough,

00:51:01.060 and this is to your point about the importance of stories. Much of what drives the demand for higher

00:51:09.000 and higher in computational resources is the economic viability of producing artificial realities

00:51:17.000 for fantasy simulation to play out scenarios like the eternal battle between good and evil.

00:51:25.480 You know, those movies, the Marvel movies, for example, the superhero movies cost

00:51:30.840 hundreds of millions of dollars. They're unbelievably technologically sophisticated.

00:51:34.900 They gather huge audiences. And so, and that's part of that rep, part of the representation of

00:51:41.400 that pleroma, so to speak. So, sorry, that's a lot of ideas to throw out at once, but-

00:51:46.340 No, no, no. No. Well, so to start with the, so to start with the artificial intelligence component,

00:51:51.720 I should, I should say that I'm, I'm working with Eric Larson on a, on a, on a project for DARPA

00:51:57.960 on artificial intelligence. That's also involving certain elements of the, of the, of the military.

00:52:03.640 And it's important that the human brain has computational powers, which is also more than

00:52:11.440 a computer. And computers abstract everything. I mean, that's the power of a computer. And that's

00:52:16.960 the power of logic is to think of everything in terms of symbols. But humans have this interesting

00:52:23.200 interplay between the two, because there needs to be this productive tension, at least in biological

00:52:27.860 life, between the abstract and the particular. If you get too far into the abstract, then you end up

00:52:33.960 in, well, you know, a world in which everything is identical on some level, or, or this sort of

00:52:39.560 identity is there and we should all be acting the same. And that to me is, is essentially the idea of

00:52:45.280 Marxism or communism, the idea that, that there are these ultimate, you know, we can abstract truth

00:52:52.160 out of enough data. I mean, AI leads us towards a world in which there's no volition, no choice,

00:52:56.640 no individuality, because the answers become clear through abstractions of enough data. You know,

00:53:02.000 and this is sort of Marx's view of science. My view of science is that life is different from that,

00:53:07.280 because our world is constantly changing. And so we need to both be able to abstract and to

00:53:15.680 particularize. And that the abstraction process is incredibly helpful for us at finding these patterns

00:53:22.240 that you're talking about, these kind of deeper action scripts, deeper characters. But then we have

00:53:26.880 the challenge of applying it to our own life, and then finding out how we can tell it into our own story.

00:53:32.800 And so a computer is always going to exist on the level of the universal human. I mean, computers are

00:53:39.120 always going to try to go to that point where it can take all of humanity and find the kind of

00:53:43.760 essential unity in our psyche. And as humans, we resist that, because we say, actually, we are

00:53:50.720 different. And that difference is meaningful. And, you know, and life also verifies that. I mean,

00:53:56.880 the reason that I'm opposed to communism and Marxism is not on ideological grounds,

00:54:03.280 it's on practical grounds. It didn't work. And I, for the same reason, think that AI doesn't work.

00:54:07.520 Okay, let me throw. So when I was thinking about computation, I was thinking more about the fact that

00:54:12.800 the economic demand that drives the necessity for more and more potent computational power

00:54:20.720 is because people want us to render fictional universes with more and more sophistication.

00:54:26.080 And that's very interesting that that's what's driving that immense technological transformation.

00:54:31.200 And then this idea of the absolute and the particular. So I think that that is a fundamental problem.

00:54:40.960 And one of the interesting, that's a story that I don't know how to exactly frame this properly.

00:54:50.320 That problem is addressed in Christian religious doctrine. And so let me tell you,

00:54:59.120 tell me what you think about this idea in light of what you just said. So we talked already about

00:55:06.560 the set of all admirable behaviors. And then we could think about the set of all behaviors that

00:55:12.240 are the opposite of that. And in some sense, that's good and evil. And, and as, as embodied,

00:55:20.320 like not as abstract ideas, the abstractions there, but as embodiment. So, you know, you'll see,

00:55:25.840 you go to a party and someone will do something, they'll, they'll do something disgusting,

00:55:29.200 and you're turned off by that. It's like, so that goes into the collection of vile actions. And

00:55:39.040 societies generate characters of vile action. So, and those are abstracted, they can be abstracted

00:55:46.240 ultimately. So in Christianity, they're abstracted up into Christ and Satan, for example. And so those

00:55:50.960 are, those are abstractions that haven't completely lost their particularization, because they're still

00:55:55.680 embodied. Okay. So, but Christianity, interestingly enough, takes that idea one step further. This is

00:56:01.920 quite fascinating, I think, is because people, so there's this, there's this idea that's extraordinarily

00:56:07.520 abstract of Christ as the hero of heroes. And I'm speaking technically here from a literary

00:56:13.680 perspective. So if you amalgamated all the heroes across 10,000 years and abstracted out the central

00:56:20.960 figure, and this is a Jungian notion in some sense, for all intents and purposes, that would be,

00:56:26.320 that's the ideal man. And if you encapsulate that within the confines of Western civilization,

00:56:32.560 let's say you come up with the figure of Christ. It has nothing to do with the religious conception

00:56:36.960 in some sense. It's, I'm purely speaking psychologically. But then there's the problem

00:56:42.000 of the abstraction. It's too abstract. And so the way Christianity solved that in this weird

00:56:47.600 narrative way is to make this abstraction exist in a particular time and place, right? 2,000 years

00:56:54.320 ago. Why 2,000 years ago? Why a carpenter? Why in this little godforsaken town that no one even wanted

00:57:01.120 to visit? And the answer is because the absolute has to meet the particular. That's the psychological

00:57:07.040 answer. And it, I believe it's, it's, it's an answer that, because obviously Christianity is a

00:57:12.560 narrative, whatever else it might be. It's the central narrative of Western culture, for better,

00:57:17.040 for worse. And so, and then you could, you can see this abstraction particularity issue play out

00:57:23.360 really interesting, too, in, in the, the difference in similarity between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.

00:57:29.600 Because Nietzsche abstracted out all these philosophical principles, and Dostoevsky did, extracted out

00:57:35.680 almost exactly the same principles, but they were all embodied in characters. And it's so interesting to

00:57:40.640 read them in conjunction. Because Dostoevsky's characters act out Nietzsche's philosophy, and

00:57:47.840 they're more accessible in some sense. And they're, they're also broader and more significant, even

00:57:52.560 though they're not as propositionalized. So there's untold wisdom in Shakespeare, right? We haven't

00:57:58.960 particularized all that. We haven't propositionalized all of it. So, yeah. Okay, so that's the absolute and the

00:58:05.280 particular. So, yes. So, so, so your point about Christianity, I mean, I mean, I take your reading

00:58:10.560 of Christianity to be, for example, compatible with Star Wars, in the sense that Luke Skywalker

00:58:16.240 is a very quirky, odd guy, you know, in the middle of this random planet. Of course. I mean, just as

00:58:23.120 weird and odd as a carpenter in Galilee, right? You know, and yet he is the embodiment of this kind

00:58:28.400 of eternal spiritual thing, you know? And that's, and that's, and that's where you get that,

00:58:31.840 that kind of melding together. Right. In Star Wars, we should just look at it. Historically,

00:58:36.960 Star Wars, George Lucas, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, because all of Campbell's thinking was,

00:58:45.200 was Jungian thinking, all of it. And The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a great book, especially as an

00:58:50.160 introduction to that kind of literature. But yes, Star Wars is Christianity for atheist nerds.

00:58:55.920 Yes. Yes. Fundamentally. Yeah. And you can't get rid of that. There's no getting rid of that,

00:59:00.560 right? If you throw it out in one direction, it comes back in another. And that's something we

00:59:04.960 should talk about too. Well, it's a very powerful story. Yeah, no, absolutely. The one thing I would

00:59:10.000 want to say though, is that our, we are most happy when we do not perceive ourselves as inheriting an

00:59:17.360 archetypal story from somebody else. If I were to say to you, you know, here's the archetypal story,

00:59:22.800 you're going to end up back there. You know, that would be disinteresting to us emotionally. You know,

00:59:28.640 we, we want to tell our own stories. We want to be particular in ourselves. I would also say that

00:59:33.760 even though human psychology has remained relatively constant for at least 300,000 years

00:59:37.760 and parts of it for over a million, our world is changing and has changed. And there are real

00:59:43.840 differences between the way the world works now, the kinds of actions and behaviors that are going

00:59:46.960 to function now than there was even 500 years ago. And so there is this need for flexibility in

00:59:53.760 narrative. So even as what you're talking about, I think Jordan is this fundamental spiritual component

00:59:58.640 of narrative, the way in which narrative can connect us with the eternal, a sense of things

01:00:03.040 bigger than ourselves. And that transcendent sense of purpose is what lifts us. But narrative also has

01:00:08.720 this flexibility outside the spiritual in the material world to say, okay, how do I navigate this

01:00:14.480 challenge? I'm not going to navigate this challenge as Luke Skywalker or Christ because Luke Skywalker

01:00:18.880 Christ didn't encounter it. Okay. I don't, I don't think it's okay. I don't think it's abstracted

01:00:24.560 outside of the spiritual. I think this relates to the issue of the relationship between the conscious

01:00:29.760 propositions and the unconscious under structure. So I think that we think in stories, we frame the world

01:00:37.120 in stories, we see in stories. And this is partly why, for example, our eyes are adapted with the whites of

01:00:43.680 our eyes so that other people can see our eyes. It's really important for us to see other people's

01:00:49.040 eyes because we can see where they're pointing their eyes. And if we can see where they're pointing

01:00:52.880 their eyes, we can see what they're interested in. We can see what they value and we can instantly infer

01:00:58.320 their motivation. And that makes them predictable. And so, so, and it's so important that every,

01:01:04.240 all of our ancestors whose eyes weren't that visible, either didn't mate or got killed.

01:01:10.880 It's really important. Okay. So, so we have now this shared narrative. So imagine this is part,

01:01:17.600 this perhaps relates to the particular, the absolute, as you specify the narrative for small

01:01:23.200 scale actions, and those would be particularized the, the connection with the absolute, the larger

01:01:29.600 absolute in some sense falls away, but it's nested. So you could say if you're an integrated person,

01:01:36.560 it's nested. It's so like, right now you're talking to, you're listening to me and sometimes

01:01:41.840 you're talking to me. Okay. So, and the story there is, well, we want to have an engaging

01:01:46.800 conversation and, and why? Well, there's a bigger story outside of that because we want to further

01:01:52.160 our knowledge about narrative and we want to share that with other people. And then there's a story

01:01:56.320 outside of that, which is, well, why? Well, because we're both, we're both educators and public

01:02:01.280 communicators. Well, why bother with that? Well, because we think education, rationality,

01:02:06.720 and narrative are important for the proper functioning of human beings. Well, why is that

01:02:11.680 relevant? Because we care about the emotional, uh, experience of people and we want to further

01:02:18.240 their growth because we want things to be better. And what's outside of that? Well, the idea that,

01:02:23.440 well, it's something like the idea that truthful and engaged exploration is a, is a high value.

01:02:31.760 And then outside of that, well, at some point you get to the ultimate abstraction, right? Which is the

01:02:36.420 ultimate good. And if you're an integrated person, the particular of your action is associated with

01:02:42.820 that broad scale abstraction, but you don't have to refer to it in the moment. And thank God for that.

01:02:47.920 I, it, because it would be overwhelming. It would be overwhelming. I, here's something I'll throw out

01:02:55.280 just sort of sideways. I think what happens when people take psychedelic substances that blow apart

01:03:01.360 their latent inhibition is that they start to become cognizant of those underlying nested structures.

01:03:08.880 Like they, they start to invade the current reality and that's what makes it saturated with meaning and

01:03:14.000 pregnant with meaning. And also sometimes produces that catastrophically terrible experience because

01:03:20.720 if that nesting is fragmented, so maybe there's part of you that's motivated by bitterness and

01:03:27.040 despair and jealousy. There's a war at the broader narrative levels and you're a disintegrated character.

01:03:35.520 And that's extraordinarily stressful physiologically, partly because you can't act out the contradictions,

01:03:40.640 you know, without running into trouble. So, but see, part of what you're doing in psychotherapy all

01:03:46.960 the time, and this is like an integration of cognitive behavioral and analytic psychology is

01:03:52.560 you're trying to hammer the person's narrative into a single non-contradictory functional unit at all

01:03:59.200 levels of apprehension simultaneously. The stories can help with that. So, yeah, no, absolutely. So there's

01:04:06.000 actually a chapter in the book where I talk about how literature can give you the positives of psychedelics

01:04:10.320 without the negatives. And there's a lot of evidence that literature, particularly certain

01:04:14.720 types of poetry, can deeply stimulate the visual cortex and create these feelings of awe and pop

01:04:20.080 that sort of allow you to open your mind and start to put together some of the different narratives,

01:04:24.640 different stories you have. And yeah. So is that more effective? Is that more effective when the

01:04:29.280 lyrics are set to music? Yes. So is it, is that being demonstrated neurologically? Do you know?

01:04:36.240 Well, I don't know. I don't know about, I don't know a specific test that has set the, the, the poems

01:04:41.680 that I've talked about to music, but yes, absolutely. Music has the same, can have the same convergent

01:04:48.320 function. Absolutely. Yeah. And as far as the therapeutics go, I mean, I mean, a lot of the work

01:04:53.440 that I do, I mean, I do a lot of work with veterans, a lot of work with trauma survivors. There's no question. I mean,

01:04:58.720 the origins of Greek tragedy are therapeutic. It was written largely, I mean, initially by veterans,

01:05:06.800 performed largely for veterans in ancient Athens. And when you take out the story components of Oedipus

01:05:13.200 and you use them in modern military settings, they continue to have these cathartic effects because

01:05:18.740 they continue to allow soldiers to access these deep and dangerous parts of themselves and of the

01:05:26.780 world. I mean, the thing that happens in war is you get tragic knowledge, tragic knowledge of the

01:05:32.320 world and of yourself. Sometimes malevolent knowledge, which is even worse. Like the people

01:05:37.940 I've seen who were traumatized were not so much traumatized by tragedy as they were traumatized by

01:05:44.600 malevolence because that's the voluntary imposition of tragedy. And there's something about, and so one of

01:05:50.520 the things you see with soldiers is that often when they get traumatized, it's not because something

01:05:55.240 terrible happened to them. It's because they watched themselves do something so terrible,

01:05:59.600 they can't imagine being human and having done that. And so one of the things Jung pointed out,

01:06:07.100 for example, when he was dealing with people who were extraordinarily traumatized, was that

01:06:11.020 helping people understand the battle between good and evil, let's say, so that's a narrative at the

01:06:17.580 highest level of abstraction, is to understand that, because imagine what would happen if you in some

01:06:23.980 sense had to take personal responsibility for your own malevolence. And you got a glimpse of that,

01:06:29.840 right? A glimpse of that murderous malevolence that you're capable of. And you have nothing,

01:06:33.920 no place to put it. Well, if you can put it in a universal narrative, you can say, well,

01:06:38.340 these powerful forces of good and evil are always operating beneath the surface. And that's been the

01:06:43.440 case for the entire corpus of human history. And God only knows what it means in the final analysis.

01:06:47.980 But it's possible for an individual to be caught up in that. And that's not an excuse, right? But you,

01:06:54.680 man, if you've done something terrible, you, and you need to recover, you need a story to put that in,

01:06:59.700 because otherwise it just hangs, it's like the sword of Damocles over your head all the time.

01:07:03.920 Who the hell am I? Who, I'm capable of that sort of thing. Who the hell am I? And you can't live

01:07:10.520 without an answer to that question. No, and I think also, I will say, to move the conversation

01:07:15.580 not just veterans. I think all of us do things in our lives that we're ashamed of. And then we

01:07:19.660 wonder where that comes from. And then we have to square with our own experience.

01:07:23.960 Yes, definitely. I mean, one thing I'll say is at the bottom of my worldview is Darwin,

01:07:28.980 not Jung. So I myself don't subscribe. I'm an agnostic. I don't subscribe to strict good and evil.

01:07:36.480 I mean, I subscribe to pain and joy or something like that. And so a lot of what I-

01:07:42.580 That's at the propositional level, but you still admire Star Wars.

01:07:48.400 But, but so a lot of what I think, a lot of trauma processing is actually subconscious. I mean,

01:07:57.240 you know, your conscious brain, it helps to have a narrative and a story, you know, and, and to,

01:08:01.200 that's empowering to say, this is my life. I am to some extent engaging and authoring it. And there's

01:08:06.020 no question that the more you can perceive yourself as authoring your own life. But I mean, also a lot of

01:08:09.980 it is simply just in the memorial circuits of our brain, the amygdala, and a lot of it just is

01:08:16.540 crashing around in there and causing flashbacks and other forms of, of, of symptoms, because it

01:08:22.660 hasn't been processed.

01:08:23.820 Okay. So let's talk about that hasn't been processed. Okay. So now you're driving somewhere

01:08:30.340 that, ah, I'll give you an example. I was at the Orpheum Theater in LA. I think it was the Orpheum

01:08:37.240 downtown and I hadn't been in downtown LA. I was with my wife and we went for a walk. I think we

01:08:42.740 camped in some trailer outside the Orpheum. When I was on this tour, I camped with my wife in these

01:08:48.880 mobile homes, outside theaters in downtowns of cities, which was really weird. But anyways,

01:08:53.520 we went for a walk in LA and we walked about two blocks and all of a sudden we're, we were somewhere

01:09:00.320 where we absolutely shouldn't have been. It was not a good neighborhood. It was a seriously,

01:09:04.720 seriously bad neighborhood. And so we didn't have a map for that neighborhood.

01:09:10.800 We didn't know how to act in that neighborhood. And so any territory that you cannot perceive

01:09:17.200 through the overlaid projection of a narrative map is traumatizing. And so, and so those fragments

01:09:26.420 that reemerge, those are, those are territories that have not been mapped with a narrative. And the reason

01:09:35.260 that they reemerge is because the anxiety systems, so the amygdala in concert with the hippocampus,

01:09:41.260 and, and this is probably a right hemisphere function, it collects unmapped territory representations,

01:09:50.280 right? And then it amalgamates them and it attempts to find commonalities between them.

01:09:57.160 That's part of the process of unconscious mapping that leads to the ability to produce a narrative.

01:10:02.760 And that's partly what dreams do. So you, you can see if you deal with people who are traumatized

01:10:08.940 and you do dream analysis, you can see the dreams producing fragmentary representations of the,

01:10:15.360 of the, of the unmapped territory that they've wandered into. And part of what dream analysis

01:10:22.120 can do is further that process by making the new mapping explicit. So, so, I mean, a big part,

01:10:29.480 so first of all, the fact that that experience happened to you in Los Angeles is not surprising

01:10:32.700 to me as someone who spent a lot of time in Los Angeles. I mean, the city itself literally tries

01:10:36.880 to be anarchic. I think actually for the reason that you're talking about, because it, it sees that

01:10:41.240 as generative narratively. I mean, there's almost this way in which the city itself has

01:10:44.980 emerged to be unmapped spaces or spaces in collision with each other as a way of, of generating this

01:10:54.300 sense of constant storytelling, constant story thinking, constant narration. I mean, other cities

01:11:00.640 are not as fertile in that regard. If you look at Shakespeare in England, same thing. I mean,

01:11:05.620 it was a very chaotic city. It was not at all like Napoleon's Paris. It was not laid out in a kind

01:11:12.920 of geometric shape. And that's why, I mean, I think it enabled and created an audience for

01:11:19.460 Shakespearean plays, which at their root are about these collisions, are about stories coming

01:11:25.180 together, breaking apart. I mean, Lear seems to me the sort of epicenter of that kind of narrative

01:11:30.460 experience, where you have everyone in the story having their mind break down, but in a different

01:11:35.300 way, because they're in different unmatched spaces or different moments of collision. And then at the

01:11:42.500 end of the play, the play basically turns to you and says, are you going to be able to make coherence

01:11:47.120 of this? You know, and that is both the terror, but the opportunity of Lear. And that's why Lear

01:11:54.020 inspired Steve Jobs. I mean, that's why Lear inspired Van Gogh. I mean, it's a play that if you put your mind

01:12:02.780 into it, it will blow your mind apart. But if you can put your mind back together again, you will have

01:12:08.840 something that changes your reality, and possibly everyone else's reality too.

01:12:17.140 So one of the things I've always been struck by in that academic psychological community is,

01:12:23.660 you mentioned that at the bottom of your supposition network, say, is Darwin and not Jung.

01:12:29.380 I mean, there is a tremendous resistance among academic psychologists to take a look at analytical

01:12:38.720 psychology. And it's a huge mistake. It's a huge mistake, especially for people who are interested

01:12:44.660 in narrative. And, you know, it's a hill I've been trying to climb for a very long time, trying to

01:12:50.700 convince people of this, because Jung has a bad name as a mystic, let's say, which is

01:12:55.500 unwarranted accusation, given what he was attempting to analyze. If you're interested in the story,

01:13:03.460 I mean, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, there's three versions of that book. There's The Hero with

01:13:10.220 a Thousand Faces. There's The Origins and History of Consciousness by Eric Neumann.

01:13:17.140 And there's Psychological Transformations. I hope I've got that right. It's Jung's book.

01:13:25.520 And they're all the same book. They're just written by different people.

01:13:29.160 The Origins and History of Consciousness was written by Eric Neumann, and he was Jung's most

01:13:34.040 outstanding student. Jung wrote the prologue to that and said that was the book that he wished he

01:13:39.720 would have written when he wrote. He said, Psychological Transformations. I hope I've got that right.

01:13:45.120 The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a narrative analysis of the super stimuli that you described

01:13:54.560 in Wonderworks. But all of that's taken from this underlying investigation that was conducted by Jung.

01:14:01.260 And it's summarized best in Eric Neumann's book, The Origins and History of Consciousness.

01:14:06.560 And that book isn't widely known among academics, and it's a big mistake. Now, I talked to Camille

01:14:12.000 Paglia about this. And Paglia is more in the field of the literary criticism that you're

01:14:19.860 differentiating yourself from. But she told me, and this was with no prompting from me, that

01:14:25.740 the cultural split that we see now is predicated in part upon literary critics following the guidelines

01:14:34.000 of Foucault and Derrida. Paglia believed, it's Paglia actually, believed that we should have turned to

01:14:41.360 The Origins and History of Consciousness by Eric Neumann, because he got the story of narrative right.

01:14:47.560 And I believe that that's true. If you're looking for a single book that takes you into this vast

01:14:52.940 corpus of analytical thought about the symbolism of literature, that is by far the most valid entry point.

01:15:00.420 And it's really something for someone like Jung to say, this is the book that I tried my whole life

01:15:06.000 to write but couldn't. Well, so I will be honest again, I mean, I like Jung a lot. I admire him

01:15:13.300 as a thinker. And I think that he is himself a magician with story. I am, however, not of the view

01:15:21.000 that there is one master story out there in that kind of Jungian way. I mean, the, the, the, and you

01:15:30.680 can feel free, and I know you will, to demolish this. But so let me just start with the Darwinian

01:15:34.920 view of life. I mean, in a Darwinian view of life, to have a Jungian view, you'd have to have this idea

01:15:40.120 that over time there evolved the story, if you're Darwinian, that just worked all the time. And it kind

01:15:46.880 of got embedded in our brain, and we could go back to it over and over again. On the view that I hold,

01:15:53.100 life, because it's unstable and changing, requires us to adapt. And therefore narrative is flexible.

01:16:00.420 Narrative allows us to adapt. Narrative is another word for plot, is another word for plan. We can be

01:16:05.360 flexible. We can shift. That's not to say that certain stories don't have deep emotional and

01:16:11.660 spiritual power over our brain. Those stories do. But that's one category of stories. I mean,

01:16:17.480 the idea of the book is to say, there's a ton of stuff that stories can do for our brain.

01:16:24.800 Let's go to the stories. Let's see what makes each story different from every other story,

01:16:29.760 as opposed to archetypal. I mean, let's, let's go into the particularity. So again, I'm not saying this

01:16:33.780 is the only approach. I'm just saying that my approach is basically the opposite of Jung's.

01:16:37.680 So maybe we're yin and yang. No, so no, that's a, that's a, that's a perfectly reasonable

01:16:42.760 objection. And in some sense, and I think it's very tightly associated with this discussion that

01:16:49.340 we engaged in a little bit about the particular versus the absolute. And so, you know, your objection

01:16:56.560 is, and it's the Mircea Eliade, great historian of religion, great storyteller. He talked about

01:17:06.800 deus abscondes. So we have this idea from Nietzsche, let's say, of the death of God. Now, Eliade,

01:17:15.480 and he isn't saying this in reference to Nietzsche, said that one of the problems that religious

01:17:22.420 systems across time faced was deus abscondes, the disappearing God. And his proposition was,

01:17:30.900 as you move towards a universal absolute, the absolute gets so de-particularized that no one

01:17:39.120 knows how to embody it, and it loses all emotional connection. The Catholics solve this problem to

01:17:43.820 some degree with the saints, right? Because they're quasi-deities in some sense that, that,

01:17:49.820 and, and they're very diverse in their behaviors. But this deus abscondes problem, according to

01:17:55.040 Iliade, has plagued humanity forever. We, we abstract out these universal ideals, but they

01:17:59.720 become so abstract that they no longer have any grip, right? They lose their narrative grip.

01:18:05.560 And so your, your objection, and forgive me if I've got this wrong, is that you have to be careful

01:18:12.520 about stressing the absolute to too great a degree, because you miss the advantages of the

01:18:18.880 particular. But we could say, I think the way to solve that is to go back to the idea of,

01:18:23.560 of this nesting of stories, right? Is that you want to rely on the particular, because it provides

01:18:31.480 you with specific instructions about how to act here and now. But when it fails, you refer to a

01:18:37.000 level below that, that's more abstract, to, to drop a new set of particulars. And so the Jungians are

01:18:42.880 investigating the base, which it would be. Now, see, because I would say an objection to your

01:18:48.460 objection is, no, we have this problem of particularity, because we have our individual

01:18:55.080 personalities, and there are particular problems we have to solve. But we have to unify our behavior

01:19:01.260 under some set of abstractions, because otherwise we can't exist socially and cooperatively,

01:19:07.280 right, without a standard set of values and mores, and we're disintegrated internally.

01:19:11.980 So we need to solve the problem of particularity and universality simultaneously. And so I wouldn't

01:19:20.720 throw out the universality end of it, because it isn't in contradiction to that. It's, the nesting

01:19:26.780 solves that problem. Well, I agree. So first of all, anyone who knows me will tell, will tell you

01:19:32.260 that yes, I'm the most rigorously unified person in my own behaviors. And it's possible that part of my

01:19:37.420 obsession with particularity comes from the fact that I am unified already. And so I'm drawn in a

01:19:43.140 way to find the specific. But I agree with that completely. I mean, I think that there needs to be

01:19:47.900 a balance of the two. It's just that my own career, my own expertise is in the specific. And I have

01:19:52.300 gotten a huge amount of grip in that area, because no one has really looked for that before. And a big

01:19:57.580 part of my research is to say, what's actually different, not just about Shakespeare and Homer,

01:20:03.520 but what's different about Hamlet and Lear? What's different about Hamlet and Henry V? What different

01:20:08.820 story mechanisms are in them? If we push those forward, can we actually track different mental

01:20:14.120 effects of those? Yes, we can. And so that's, to your point, that's not at all to abnegate the general,

01:20:19.100 nor to say that the future of humanity lies in some sort of diasporic condition, in which we're all

01:20:24.500 just reading single text. But it is to say that, you know, there's clearly more for us to learn. And the

01:20:30.520 danger of generalities and abstractions is always the belief that somehow we know more than we do,

01:20:35.480 because we will say, oh, you know, I've seen that before, or I know that already, you know?

01:20:40.660 And, you know, one of the problems I think with Hollywood nowadays is that the impact of Star Wars

01:20:44.660 was, which is a tremendous movie. I mean, the original Star Wars, I love. But the problem is,

01:20:49.480 everyone said, oh, that solved the problem of movies. We're just going to keep telling that same

01:20:52.480 movie over and over and over and over and over again. And that's not enough. That's not enough.

01:20:58.620 I mean, you don't want to make this mistake of having a great breakthrough and then thinking

01:21:03.240 that's all there is. And so the purpose of the book is basically going through 25 things

01:21:07.440 that are incredibly focused, but each of them has this effect. You know, I mean, I talk about,

01:21:13.220 for example, how Socrates develops this technology for allowing you to float above Hertz. Or I talk

01:21:19.540 about how Hamlet has the technology for helping you grieve, or how the Godfather makes you less

01:21:24.300 lonely. Or maybe even more importantly, how their technologies can make you more creative,

01:21:30.160 more imaginative, more emotionally resilient. I mean, that's the work that I'm doing now with

01:21:34.780 the military and the special operations community.

01:21:38.740 Right. So you're opening up multiple areas of research by engaging in that analysis of

01:21:44.420 particularity, right? How can stories make us more courageous? How can they make us more satisfied

01:21:50.420 lovers? How can they make us happier? Yeah. So that particularization is very good

01:21:55.000 because you need very, very specific hypothesis to pursue research.

01:22:00.300 That's exactly right. And that's the difference between, say, philosophy and empirical science.

01:22:04.700 I mean, in philosophy, you want that unity. And you want that kind of logical coherence.

01:22:12.080 In empirical science, you want to say, what is the most specific thing that I can test that I can

01:22:16.220 falsify? And this is the reason, honestly, why I am unpopular with literary critics. As you should

01:22:21.980 know, there's many ways to be unpopular with contemporary literary critics. I think you and

01:22:26.360 I have discovered different ways. Yes, I've embodied some of them.

01:22:28.640 Yes. You and I have discovered different ways of being considered heretics. But my particular way

01:22:33.280 is to say, literature can be incredibly useful. Literature can build emotional and intellectual

01:22:40.480 resilience. And the fact that this has been uptaken. So, you know, for example, at the Army's

01:22:46.760 Command and General Staff College, there are faculty there, such as Kenneth Long and Richard McConnell,

01:22:57.180 who have adopted this literature work and have put it into the curriculum where it's now training

01:23:03.800 hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of majors who will go on to become colonels, who will go on to become

01:23:08.200 generals. Tell me more about that. I'd like to know that. I'd like to know the particularities

01:23:13.040 of that. So first of all, how did how did they become convinced that this was useful? Because

01:23:18.480 that sounds like something very, very difficult to manage. And then how is that actually taught

01:23:23.740 day to day in some practical manner? Yeah, so this is the extraordinary breakthrough of my career

01:23:29.140 and the sort of surreal reality break moment that I had in a miniature of what you've had,

01:23:33.140 you know, because you've obviously ascended to kind of global celebrity, and I've ascended to sort

01:23:36.480 of minor celebrity. That's probably a good place to stay, I would say. I'm gonna do my best. My

01:23:42.980 family certainly likes it better this way. But yeah, so basically, so, you know, after I published

01:23:46.860 the book, I got a call from the University of Chicago's business school, actually, a professor

01:23:51.880 there, Greg Bunch, who was like, have you ever thought of applying this to business folk? And if

01:23:57.380 you were to say that to your average literary critic, they would immediately just hang up the phone.

01:24:00.080 They'd say, oh, that's disgusting. You know, I don't want to have anything to do with practical

01:24:03.680 application. Or with business faculties, you know, because God, you know, they're not

01:24:08.200 trustworthy. Yeah. Well, I mean, because honestly, yeah, I mean, modern literature has become gripped

01:24:14.940 with a culture of moralism. Essentially, this idea that there is right and wrong, and we know

01:24:19.040 what's right and wrong. And our job is to judge people when they when they shift outside. Yeah,

01:24:23.020 we're gonna go back to that. I want you to go through. We want to go back to that. All right,

01:24:26.940 we'll come back to that. Yeah, because I have a very different view of things. Yeah. But anyway,

01:24:30.600 so you know, I said, I said, Yes, I said, I'd be very happy to work with with with business students.

01:24:35.700 And we started applying this, we have since applied it to numerous fortune 50 companies and

01:24:39.880 C suites and, and Greg Bunch, who's a wonderful teacher will charge you $45,000 a day for

01:24:44.660 operationalizing the stuff in the book. And at some point, he said to me, Angus, he said, I have a

01:24:50.920 friend in the army, would you like to talk to him? And so I said, absolutely, be happy to talk with

01:24:54.960 someone in the army. And so we ended up talking with no wonder you're a heretic. That's well,

01:24:59.780 that's exactly God. And I just want to say, I mean, I think, if you if you want to be inspired,

01:25:07.020 talk to somebody in the army, talk to somebody in the US. I mean, I talked. Yeah. And if you,

01:25:11.340 if you want to be safe in your bloody university, you should thank God that you're surrounded by a

01:25:15.800 ring of soldiers, who you could look down on for their immorality while they protect you.

01:25:21.200 Yeah, and who have the courage of self sacrifice, who are willing to die for you. I mean,

01:25:25.740 this is the thing I just say is, is what is that? I mean, that is the ultimate heroism to give up your

01:25:30.800 be willing to give up your life for somebody else. And they make no money. I mean, this is the other

01:25:35.700 shocking thing. You go through the army, everyone always says with the, you know, the military takes

01:25:39.320 all this money, and so on and so forth. And it's certainly true that there are a small number of

01:25:42.480 incredibly expensive machines that the military has. But the actual personnel in the army and in the

01:25:47.980 military make almost nothing. And you know, their compensation pay for being under fire is

01:25:52.760 something like a couple hundred extra dollars a month. I mean, think about that. Would you take

01:25:56.100 a couple hundred bucks a month for somebody to shoot at you? It's real courage, real heroism.

01:26:01.100 I work a lot with the nurse corps. The nurse corps is so beyond what I could even describe. I mean,

01:26:07.340 I met a nurse the other day, her job is to fly in these helicopters, to frontline casualties,

01:26:13.220 jump out of the helicopters at basically 200 feet, and do triage on these wounded individuals,

01:26:19.320 many of whom are civilians, and then bring them back so their lives can be saved. And what's even

01:26:23.940 more exceptional about that to me, as I discovered, she's afraid of flying. She can't get on a plane.

01:26:30.220 But she has that much courage that she gets on these helicopters and does this thing. And that's

01:26:36.000 me, just everyone I've met in the military has just had that courage, that self-sacrifice. So anyway,

01:26:40.980 I get a call, and they say to me, and this is another thing that's typical of the military,

01:26:45.140 is they're always examining themselves. How many people can you say in your ordinary life,

01:26:49.320 go around examining themselves in a critical manner, and then say, how do I improve myself?

01:26:54.560 And this is just a constant process in the Army. So I get this call, and they say to me, you know,

01:26:58.600 Angus, we have this concern in the Army. We just think we're just not creative enough.

01:27:03.440 We just feel like, you know, I mean, you know, we do these things, and then they work,

01:27:07.880 and then we just kind of replicate them. But how can we become more adaptive? How can we go into

01:27:13.220 these situations? And I said, well, look, another word for being adaptive is to be emotionally

01:27:17.940 and intellectually resilient. It's to me that when you go into a situation, to be open to the

01:27:22.700 situation to the point that it can scare you, and that it can break your plans. And then to see that

01:27:28.820 moment of breaking as an opportunity to become more than yourself, rather than shirking away from that

01:27:34.200 or trying to impose yourself on the situation, being open, but being resilient. And so what we have done

01:27:39.160 in these classes, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to reveal the course number, but maybe I am,

01:27:43.860 at C-122 at Command and General Staff College, is we have started to implement this new creativity

01:27:50.840 training. And from there, it attracted interest from special operations community. And we have gone

01:27:57.600 in and done train the trainer. And we've also initiated pilot programs with the Air Force and

01:28:02.640 the Space Force. And we have supporters in the Navy as well.

01:28:05.740 Just out of curiosity, speaking from a psychological perspective, do you, and I don't know how much

01:28:14.360 research you're doing while you're doing this, but obviously, and this is something that is a wide

01:28:20.380 open field of investigation as well. I mean, creativity is associated with trait openness and resilience

01:28:26.020 with low trait neuroticism. I mean, is it like, would it be useful to pre-select people on the

01:28:33.220 basis of their personality proclivity for creativity training? It's hard because if you have someone

01:28:39.420 who's low in openness, and that's often characteristic of people in the military, because they tend to be

01:28:43.920 more conservative, which means higher in conscientiousness, but lower in openness.

01:28:48.880 So you're totally right. And this is Jonathan Hayes' work, another work, and absolutely yes. And this is

01:28:54.060 true. Each of us has our kind of own individual boundedness. We're not blank slates where all of a

01:28:58.160 sudden we can become anybody we want to be, and that's completely correct. What I just say to people

01:29:02.240 is, we're here to maximize your potential to be creative. And that's all we can do in this situation,

01:29:08.940 and we're going to trust that that's enough. But I agree with you that the military could benefit from

01:29:14.240 bringing on board more creatives. The other thing is, though, is creativity is not taught in schools.

01:29:20.840 I mean, our educational infrastructure in this country is not helping to access so much of our

01:29:29.580 human potential. It's hard to grade creativity. That's part of the problem, is that creative people,

01:29:37.600 because they're doing something new, it's very hard to lay an evaluation system on them.

01:29:42.160 So they're always breaking out of the mold. And so it's very difficult to build administrative

01:29:47.220 structures around that. It is, but we think we've cracked that problem. Well, not about

01:29:51.340 administrative structures. I should be honest with you. I mean, one thing that you and I, I think,

01:29:53.980 have in common is I don't get too high into structural reform. You know, I get very nervous

01:29:59.720 about, but I'm all about empowering individuals. And I just trust that the more you empower individuals

01:30:06.180 to be themselves, the more that the organic kind of community will kind of grow up and around that.

01:30:11.640 But yes, absolutely. We have ways of testing creativity. We're doing them in conjunction

01:30:15.820 with Antonio Damasio's lab at the Brain and Creativity Institute. My partner there is

01:30:19.920 Professor John Monterosso. And basically, what we do without going too deep into the secret sauce

01:30:26.080 is we bring in experts and ask them, how confident are you that this idea is going to work?

01:30:33.140 So we don't ask them how creative it is, because we discover that you get a lot of expert bias when

01:30:36.720 you ask experts about whether somebody's creative, because experts will often decide, well,

01:30:40.440 if it's not something that I came up with, or it doesn't fit with my own plans, then it can't be

01:30:44.800 creative or it can't work. But if you ask them how uncertain it is that it's going to work,

01:30:48.600 it immediately pushes them outside of their expertise range. And what we're starting to

01:30:52.340 identify there is therefore it must be new, because even an expert hasn't seen something

01:30:56.660 like that. So if an expert thinks it probably won't work, but they're still uncertain, that's still

01:31:01.100 probably creative. And if they think it will work, but they're uncertain, that's probably creative

01:31:04.100 too. And what we do is we have panels of experts who come in, we can kind of systematize the

01:31:08.680 process. And to answer your earlier question, it's all research. That's why we're doing this

01:31:13.000 with the military is the military is actively interested, I would love to do this research

01:31:17.180 in the academy, but the academy is less interested in doing the research to the military is, and less

01:31:21.520 interested in the business community. So it's the business community and the military that has

01:31:24.740 opened their doors. And so even though you said yes, which is an interesting personality

01:31:29.640 characteristic. And I said yes, because I'm open. And I'm right, right. Yeah, no, I have my openness,

01:31:34.260 as you've probably deduced. Not always to my own benefit.

01:31:39.580 But it tends to fragment, that's the problem with openness, right, is you get scattered.

01:31:44.280 That is 100% my problem. But yeah, so I'm not getting paid. I mean, a lot of people around me,

01:31:49.020 I mean, a lot of people who are using the techniques that I've developed are making a lot of money off

01:31:53.000 them, but I haven't made any money off them, because I'm interested in doing the research. And so that's

01:31:58.160 why I have kind of gone into all these spaces. And, you know, my hope overall is that I believe

01:32:04.780 deeply in public service. I believe deeply in the ethos of the military, we can debate and have a

01:32:12.860 debate about whether or not we agree with the ways in which the military is applied, and the uses to

01:32:16.600 which it's put and all those kinds of things. But the idea of having a group of people whose job it is

01:32:21.120 to put down their lives to secure our safety seems fundamental to me.

01:32:27.980 Well, you already made your moral stance clear about that. You said that your fundamental

01:32:32.280 supposition is that the best way to make better societies is by concentrating on making better

01:32:37.960 individuals. And so hopefully you're contributing to that. And, you know, if someone criticizes you,

01:32:43.460 you could always ask them, well, how are they contributing to that? Exactly.

01:32:46.880 Well, here's the thing, Jordan, is I discovered in life, you can sound smarter faster by being

01:32:53.200 negative about someone else's idea than by having your own idea. So a lot of people just like to

01:32:57.920 kind of be smart by attacking me, as opposed to coming up with their own ideas. So I don't usually

01:33:01.840 ask them for their own, because I assume that they don't have them. But yeah, no, I mean, I think to

01:33:06.840 your point, yes, the way forward for human society, I'm going to ask you a weird question. So

01:33:12.260 some of that money might be real useful for you. You're a very creative person. And you said,

01:33:21.280 you know, lots of people are making money applying your ideas. And so I think, well, you know,

01:33:25.780 you had these ideas, God only knows what you might be able to do if you had your position and some

01:33:30.380 money. So, so this is this is something that people have brought up with me before, they say,

01:33:37.280 Angus, they say, if you had more money, you would have more power. And if you have more power,

01:33:40.960 you could do more of the things you want to do. And I actually, and this is perhaps erroneous,

01:33:45.680 and you might want to put me on the couch and just abuse me of this notion. I have the view that

01:33:49.760 I'm actually more existentially free by not worrying about money at all. Because the more you fixate on

01:33:54.360 money, at least in my experience, the more you end up doing things you don't want to do. And in my

01:33:57.940 life, the more I've said no to money, the more I've been like, this is really fun. And I'm enjoying

01:34:01.640 myself. And also, I'm empowering the people around me. I just have to be honest, Ohio State pays me a ton

01:34:06.920 of money. I mean, I make a ton of money as a professor. And I get a lot of, I get invited

01:34:14.180 up to give speeches for 50 grand a pop, you know, and you do a couple of those a year. I mean,

01:34:19.740 that's a really good answer to that. I'm thoroughly retracting my suggestion.

01:34:25.640 I make enough money. And you know, there's plenty of studies that show that if you make more than,

01:34:29.300 you know, 80 100 grand a year, you're not really substantially more happy. I have had the

01:34:34.920 experience of my life to see a couple billionaires up close. And, you know, I won't deny that it would

01:34:40.300 be fun to be a billionaire for a day, you know, and just be able to have your own private island

01:34:44.800 and your own planes, those kinds of things. But very rapidly, I mean, one of them said to me once,

01:34:49.080 pretty famously, Angus, there's only so many waterfalls you can see. And I think that goes

01:34:53.260 down to the point that ultimately, you know, life is about finding our self. And we find ourself

01:35:00.260 through conflict and through struggle. And if you have money to remove all the resistance from

01:35:05.400 everything around you, it's actually much harder to grow. And I don't mind the challenges, I don't

01:35:10.760 mind the difficulty, and I don't mind the friction and the fog of life, because to me, that builds me

01:35:16.060 up. And so I think a little bit of money is good and necessary, because you need a safe space for

01:35:21.340 yourself, you know, you need to protect the area where you can preserve your sanity, and kind of have

01:35:25.540 kooky ideas and whatnot. But if you have too much money, I mean, you know, this goes down to kind

01:35:31.840 of my general diagnosis of kind of what's wrong with America at the moment. I mean, and I should

01:35:35.620 say I'm an immigrant. People often don't know this about me. And so I have a very kind of quirky view

01:35:40.340 of America, I chose to become an American, I was not born an American. And so I think like a lot of

01:35:45.820 immigrants in America, I almost love America more than most Americans, because, you know, I have given

01:35:50.860 myself to it, you know. But I mean, I think the American dream in America has kind of gone in

01:35:55.880 these two ultimately uninteresting directions. One is the idea that the American dream is basically

01:36:01.000 having as much money as you can get, you know, and that's the kind of like the capitalist kind

01:36:05.320 of conservative side. And then the other side is, oh, America's here to provide me with security.

01:36:10.380 And that's the kind of this kind of like socialist kind of left wing thing, which America's here to

01:36:13.500 protect me. And America's not about that at all. America's about freedom. America is about

01:36:19.020 freedom. I came here and I was more free. I've had more opportunity in America than I would have

01:36:24.560 had before. And that's not to say I have perfect opportunity, or everyone in America has perfect

01:36:29.160 opportunity, or we can't get up every day and give other people more opportunities. But that's the

01:36:33.660 point of America is to increase freedom to increase opportunity, not to make yourself richer, or to be

01:36:39.440 safer. And if you want to be more free, a big part of that comes from being free of fear,

01:36:45.480 taking risks, being free from yourself, being free from your own anxieties and your own fears.

01:36:52.680 And so a huge part of what I just try and do every day is push myself to where I'm lightly

01:36:57.640 uncomfortable. And, you know, obviously I'm lightly uncomfortable being on this, on this podcast,

01:37:02.800 because it's scary to be honest about your thoughts when a lot of people are listening,

01:37:08.540 because you might say something dumb, or you might say something that you regret.

01:37:11.700 But I want that because I want to get up tomorrow morning and say, you know what, I should have said

01:37:16.180 this other thing, or I wish I hadn't said that other thing, because in terms of my plan, my path,

01:37:22.580 that will help me. And so that's one of the reasons I'm so honored to be here, honestly, is because

01:37:26.720 I just don't have a chance to have very frank, open conversations like this as much as I would like.

01:37:31.600 Yes, it's a, it's a, it's a privilege to have that possibility manifest itself. It's been quite

01:37:40.840 exciting for me to be able to call people who I'm interested in and say, well, you want to talk for

01:37:45.760 an hour and a half? And they say yes. And I think, well, isn't that something I can ask them all sorts

01:37:50.540 of questions, and I can learn all sorts of things. And I can share that with like 500,000 people. And

01:37:56.040 like, what a deal that is. I mean, it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And that's the real freedom,

01:38:01.560 because I think when people look outside, you know, people sometimes look at me and say, oh,

01:38:05.000 you know, money or wealth or celebrity. And I'm sure people look at that same thing with you. And

01:38:08.500 they say, oh, money, celebrity, isn't that the really wonderful thing? And it's actually like, no,

01:38:11.980 that's not the one. It's a chance to meet people. It's the removing of friction. So I can call people

01:38:17.500 and they take me seriously. I mean, that's the real joy of my current position, you know, that you can

01:38:22.100 suddenly start to just talk to almost anyone you want and share those ideas.

01:38:26.040 And experience that personal growth. And that building of community.

01:38:31.320 Yeah, well, it's such a privilege to to be in a position to be able to bring discussions like this,

01:38:36.660 for no cost to, like, literally hundreds of 1000s of people, you know, it's it's an educator's dream.

01:38:43.680 So this is a good place to stop, Angus, you know, we've been going pretty hard for an hour and a half. And

01:38:49.620 I like the way this just closed. And we covered a lot of territory. I would probably

01:38:59.800 like to talk to you again at some point, there's more things that we could discuss. I'm, I have no

01:39:06.120 doubt. We'll see how people respond to this and what else they might want to hear about.

01:39:09.900 You got anything else you want to bring up mention or?

01:39:14.200 No, this has been perfect. And I'm going to go back and read some of the works that you suggested.

01:39:18.640 And if you want to have me on again, I would be honored and excited to participate, especially if

01:39:23.460 your audience would like to hear more of us kind of go back and forth.

01:39:27.180 Yeah, well, that those that Neumann, Eric Neumann, he's a name worth knowing. He wrote the origins and

01:39:32.820 history of consciousness. And that's a great book. It's a tough one. It's, it's, it's the,

01:39:40.360 it's the, it's the much deeper version of a hero with a thousand faces. And he also wrote one called

01:39:45.800 The Great Mother, which is an analysis of representations of the feminine narrative

01:39:51.500 representations, dramatic representations of the feminine across history, which is also a great

01:39:57.620 book, especially if you're interested in neuroscience and instincts, because the archetypes are tied to

01:40:04.260 instincts in a profound manner. And so it's a representations, imaginative representations of the

01:40:10.200 maternal across time. That's The Great Mother. It's a great book.

01:40:14.220 I will read it. And then hopefully next time I can come back, maybe things with special operations

01:40:18.540 will have advanced a little bit. Some of the work I'm doing with anti-fragile AI, maybe some of that

01:40:23.520 will have advanced a little bit. Great. And we can, we can get into that.

01:40:26.520 I'd love that. All right. Thanks very much. It's a pleasure talking to you and good luck with your

01:40:32.560 work and your writing and, and you're educating all of that and the work you're doing with the

01:40:36.840 military. Thank you. Thank you.

01:40:56.520 Thank you.

01:41:02.560 Thank you.

01:41:04.560 Thank you.

205. The Uniting Power of Story ｜ Angus Fletcher

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