519 - Access Imagination and Intuition that Ai Can’t Touch with Angus Fletcher PhD

25:10It's just a different tool, you know, and forks are great. And that's wonderful. You can do a lot of stuff with them, but you know, try eating soup with a fork. It's not going to work. And so you need a human brain. You need a human brain. You need a human brain to eat soup. Yeah. Computer, have you ever seen an AI eat soup? I haven't. No, totally not. Um, but anyway, so yeah, So they basically called me in. And so, you know, there's this initial period where I didn't really trust or understand them. I actually thought that the army was recruiting me to be a spy because I have no contact with the army.

25:40And I'm also I'm an immigrant. And so, you know, whenever I get in contact with the federal government, my first thought is, what are they going to do? Are they going to throw me out of the country? Like what's happening? You know? Yeah. So I had all these anxieties about that. And plus, I'm working with these classified units who basically either can't reveal anything to me about what they do or essentially have these kind of cover stories. You know, so I mean, that boosted a lot of my paranoid. Meanwhile, you know, they're going back to their bosses and their boss is like, who is this random person?

26:07Nobody agrees with this guy. He seems nuts. Like, why are you investing all these resources in this? But what happened is it started to work. And I can tell you much more about that story if you're interested. But the short of it is it started to work and it worked really well and it worked really fast. And it worked not just in these classified units, but then when we took it out of these units, we put it in the regular army. It worked in the regular army. then the regular army is like, hey, you can go try it in schools. You start doing it in schools. It worked in schools. And it's not like rocket science.

26:33It's just story. It's just shifting away from logic, which is what computers are amazing at, which is a data-intensive process, which is about finding patterns and optimizing and repeating them, and going into story, which is a low-information process, which is about imagination and innovation and creating the future. And your brain just does it naturally. once you kind of unleash it from the shackles that have been placed on it by school and by using, frankly, too much technology, which does kind of scramble your brain, all of a sudden you get these powers back and it's amazing. That's the second problem that I think that it really tackles the book is that the world has equated intelligence with IQ, with logic that they are.

27:18I mean, And I think a lot of people would, if I said, are they synonymous? They would say, yeah, those are, that's what intelligence is. And this primal intelligence is this different type of intelligence. And the secret is kind of that it's story thinking that we think in story that, right? That's exactly right. Yeah. And so basically when you talk to people, they'll basically say one of two things. They'll say intelligence is computational. Although say intelligence is magic. It's magic, right? You know, it's something that we can't explain. It's consciousness, right? It's something that is totally ineffable, right?

27:52You know what I mean? And so I make everybody angry because I'm like, no, no. This is what I love about what you do. Genuinely, this is what I love about what you do is that you hold this tension that's really aligned with, I don't know if I would say my values, but the way that I feel about the world, which is I've actually thought when I interview people, especially experts, people that have a large set of intelligence on something. something what's the thing you know that feels like magic like what is it what that you know is real it's as concrete as anything else but it feels like woo woo magic um because i know that though that space is so interesting and i love how you you hold this space so kind of furiously like you're very like serious about it and i and i just i love it that the space between it's not logic.

28:49It's not magic. It, you know, it's this, it's this other thing. And between the science and the story is that kind of space. Yeah. I mean, it's not logical. It's biological. Right. And, you know, the human brain can, can still be made up all of, of all these mechanisms and whatnot that we can study. And by the way, that doesn't eliminate the existence of magic. Right. I'm not saying that there isn't magic. I'm just saying that there are ways to get better at being imaginative that are practical and that we can actually study how these processes work in the brain. And maybe there's more than that.

29:19And I'm totally open to that. You know, I mean, I think science ultimately has its limits and I think any scientist should be humble and focus on their area of expertise. And I think a lot of the problem, frankly, with the computer science community right now is way overreached, way overreached. So I'm not against magic. All I'm saying is that there's a lot of human intelligence, which we can understand in a practical way better and put that into schools and make kids happier, improve their thriving. We can, we can start to revalue art and we can also start to, you know, demystify art in a healthy way.

29:52You were talking about earlier, how you feel like your talent is, you know, kind of this machine you find in the forest. You don't understand what's going on. I think a lot of artists feel alienated from their own creative process a lot. It's like, I don't know what's going on. And that's why I think a lot of, in my experience, a lot of the creative people I work with, you know, there can be a tendency to use substances in unhealthy ways and whatnot. You know what I mean? Cause there's this thing. So I do the, like, am I going to be able to do it again? Is it even me that's doing it? You know, Do I have to like somehow summon, you know, get in this place, whatever?

30:15And it's like, no, I work all the time with creative people who can find that groove and get into it and get better. And, and we all, I mean, you know, the example that I always use, of course, is Shakespeare. I mean, Shakespeare is someone who just cranked out plays. He like figured it out, right? You know, he had a method, but there's lots of other creatives you can, you can kind of figure out. The last year of Van Gogh's life, you know, he was cranking out art because he figured out the method. He wasn't hesitating. And I think every artist just wants to get in that space, which is what we would in science call flow.

30:41yeah which is where you know you know what you're doing but you're also growing every second and so it's totally absorbing it's totally interesting um but there's no like anxiety or panic or stress or or need to kind of use substances right and that that you know i've been doing this show for 10 years large portion of them are uh solo episodes and it's literally the point of it is to head that way it's like how can we demystify it without losing what feels like magic like i don't want to lose that. I'm in love with art as much as anybody else. I'm in love with the process as much as anybody else.

31:16I don't want to lose that flavor because I think it feels sacred to me, but I want to understand it as well as I can. And the more that I have, the more I have command of it and I'm able to kind of access it on purpose. So that's what it's all about. You mentioned Van Gogh. I wondered if you could use the story from the book about him to explain a little bit how our story thinking does something that computers can't do. If I understand it correctly, it's something about this, not seeing patterns, but seeing the break in the pattern, right? That's right. Yeah. So this all starts with this kind of like totally fascinating paradox, which is that we're taught nowadays because of people like Daniel Kahneman, who's, you know, recently deceased, very famous Nobel laureate, and by the AI community that there's This is the slow thinking, fast thinking.

32:11Yeah, thinking slow, thinking fast, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That intuition is pattern matching. Right. Which is basically, you know, detecting non-exceptions is something we would say. You know, everything that fits together in an algorithmic way. And computers do this great. So this would suggest that computers have incredible intuition. You know, they actually don't. They have dreadful intuition. Meanwhile, children have very, very high intuition and are very bad at pattern matching. So this explanation can't be right. And so I've often wondered this because I mean, every artist has had this where they suddenly realized, oh, like this is really promising.

32:47I'm seeing something new here, which is really interesting, right? Your intuition sparks out. And it's not a pattern match because it's new. It in some ways goes beyond all the patterns you've seen. It doesn't fit, you know, what is going on there. And so I've always been fascinated by this. And then to my total surprise, the US Army has a term for this. And the term for this is what they call exceptional information, which is a typical army term because like only the army would take something really interesting like intuition and call it exceptional information, which is so boring, right? Yeah.

33:15You know? It sounds like it could be classified. That's right. No, it does. It does. Yeah. But the point is, is that exceptional information is an exception to a rule. So there's a rule, right, that, you know, things should be done this way. And then all of a sudden your brain spots an exception. And then from that exception, it imagines a whole new reality. It's like, oh, things don't have to be that way. So almost all kind of huge breakthroughs in art, science, and technology come from spotting these exceptions. A famous one in science is Marie Curie, who at the time that she was working, the rule was that all energy came from between atoms.

33:53So anytime energy was released, it was coming from between atoms. And she was like, wait a minute. It was actually energy coming from inside the atom, right? That's the beginning of radioactivity. it's also the beginning of the discovery of electron and electronics and everything else and modern physics. Everyone thinks that Einstein invented modern physics. It's actually Marie Kreek and she spots that exception. In the case of Van Gogh, this one's a little more complicated, but I think I can explain it. You do a great job in the book. Maybe it's a little bit bigger than we can go fully into, but maybe you could - Yeah, I'll give it a shot.

34:22I'll give it a shot. So basically the first thing you notice when you see Van Gogh is the color. I mean, that's just the most astonishing thing. There's other astonished things about Van Gogh. I don't want to reduce them to color. But I think everyone's primordial experience of seeing Van Gogh is, whoa, you know, that is burning its way into my brain. And so, for example, something like Starry Night, you're just like, whoa, you know, the color, you know. As, you know, clients that give feedback on designers, they would say it really pops. It pops. Yeah, Van Gogh, the original pop. So anyway, so Van Gogh was obsessed with color.

34:54And so he spent a lot of time studying color theory. And in the 19th century, they had this mathematical theory of color, which was that certain colors heightened each other. These were known as contrasting colors or paired colors. It's also just kind of words for them. But the mathematical theory was that the color contrasts were pairing green with red, pairing blue with orange. And there are a couple other ones, but those are the kind of the two ones that most people remember. So for example, Freddy Krueger's sweater Friday the 13th is red and green because somebody read one of these color books.

35:30It was like, oh, that's the biggest color clash. Yeah. Van Gogh suddenly noticed, wait a minute. There's actually an exception to this. He noticed this when he was looking at a painting by Charles DelFoy. He suddenly noticed, oh my goodness, actually, it's not blue and orange. It's blue and yellow. Yeah. When I put blue and yellow next to each other, that makes the blue bluer and the yellow more yellow. And he used this to totally reconstruct the color wheel. And a previous logical color wheel had been the red, yellow, blue color wheel. And he created the RGB color wheel, red, green, blue color wheel, out of this single discovery.

36:11And it led him to all these incredible color combinations that no one had used before. It led to the discovery of aquamarine as being actually the most powerful color you can use because it contrasts with red. And red, there's more kind of visual receptors for red in the human eye than any other color. So if you look at some of Banco's portraits where he has a red beard but a kind of aquamarine background, it just blows your mind out. And so he spotted an exception to the preceding rule of color, which was that you use these two colors together. It's like, no, actually, I spot this. And that discovery, it beats science to the discovery by 100 years because he had that.

36:45He had that, you know. And that's why his artwork is so powerful. And everyone has had that experience of just noticing something that other people haven't noticed that contradicts what they said. I mean, in a way, my entire theory of the brain is an example of exceptional information because, you know, I was like, I really think this is the case. No one's like, it's nuts. Nobody thinks this, right, you know. And so one of the main things that I really try and emphasize in the book is that a lot of times, if you're one of those people who has high intuition, and this particularly is the case with children.

37:13We know that children, by the time you're an adult, you're spotting maybe only about 10 % or even less of the exceptional information you're spotting as a child for various reasons that we can talk about. But if you're a child, you're often seeing really interesting things that adults are telling you are unimportant or ridiculous. You know, if adults all had their way, we'd still be listening to the music that was produced, right, in like the third century or something. Because they'd be like, this new music is terrible, right? You know, stick with the old music. The old music is better, right?

37:38But as a young person, you're like, no, actually, this is the new band. This is the new fashion. This is the new thing. This is cool in a way that doesn't happen before. And so one of the things I just want to say in the book is that we're losing that in our computer culture. We're losing that in our computer culture because we're being taught the opposite. We're being taught, do things that feed the algorithm. The algorithm notices patterns, which is what most people are doing. And so we're essentially deleting the entire source of art, of creativity, of innovation. You know, if Van Gogh had spent as much time as we spend on these computers, he never would have made the breakthrough that created modern art.

38:09And so that's kind of the point of exceptional information. Yeah, I love that example, too, of with Van Gogh seeing this clash in another painting. It reminds me of both from my own experience and then reading about like how my heroes have evolved. One thing I've noticed is there's a pattern where an artist will be consuming their favorite artist stuff. stuff and i feel like a lot of musicians have this experience where they're they have an album that they love of this artist but there's this one little experiment that they did maybe it's like one little track or one little bit of a song and they're like do the whole album like that what why aren't you doing that and i i talk about like uh you know dumpster diving um your heroes work Like what is the stuff that that was just a throwaway thing, but you're like, there's something there.

39:06And him noticing that little color clash and this thing, thinking that's a whole thing. That's a whole body of work right there. And then, or, and just noticing the pattern break and being like, I have to explain, I have to explore what that is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really, and I just want to point out that we're so habituated into thinking patterns that you just refer to that as a pattern. You said that's a pattern you see an artist, right? Because we've, this has become part of our, our, our common parlance. And we just refer to it that way. There's actually, this is not from the book.

39:33This is actually from Rick Rubin. But Rick Rubin has this story about how Tom Petty was basically creatively burnt out, but he owned, he owed some songs to his record label in order to break his contract. And so he called up Rick Rubin. He's like, I just have all these, you know, sort of half finished songs. Maybe you can find one of them. And he sent them all these cassette tapes. And basically Rick Rubin listened to the whole thing. He's like, these are all dreadful. But there was a moment when Tom Petty was turning on his guitar and just tuning it, basically, and he strummed it in a certain way.

39:59It's like that strum is your next song. And that became Mary Jane's last dance sort of, I think. And that kind of, you know, became his like. So, but to your point, that's exactly right. Is you're listening to these moments in your heroes where they're discovering something, but then they're retreating from it. Right. Yes. And they're going back into whatever it was that their original method was. And you're like, oh, wait, you know, what happens if I double down on that thing? And that's the way the story works. So how does story work in the brain? Story works in the brain because it notices an exception.

40:32So an exception is something that's in conflict with the rules of the world, which is to say the exception is a hero. A hero is in conflict with the rules of the world. The hero does something different. And then what does the hero do? Does the hero give up? Does the hero conform? You know? No, the hero doubles down. Yeah. And so this is where it all comes from is story is all about spotting exceptions and then pushing them forward and saying, where does it go? And that is the kind of primordial experience of human creativity that computers just can't do because they're just essentially mix and matching and, you know, randomly vomiting out stuff and then splattering patterns on it, as opposed to what we can do, which is spot the one thing that is different and then make the whole world like that.

41:19Yeah. Yeah, it also, when you were describing it, this idea of like breaking of the pattern, it also reminded me of how stories tend to work where, and I've heard people at Pixar talk about this, but you also just notice this in most stories, most books, most movies, is there is a thing of every day this happened until one day this different thing happened. And then that's the story. That's where the whole thing comes from. and I thought that is kind of what this is getting at is that those stories start and your brain really gets into that zone when you're like wait this isn't the same thing that happened yesterday yeah yeah because a change is an event that's what the definition of an event is it's a change and this is also fascinating to the human brain because the human brain evolved to notice change yeah and the reason it did it evolved to notice change is because that's the most important thing in its life is to be like oh my goodness things are changing that means either I'm in real trouble right now and I've got to respond or, oh, there's something exciting and new happening.

42:23Let me be the first person to grab the opportunity. And what that reveals is the more fundamental thing about story, which is that story does not work beginning, middle, end, which is what we're taught in school. It works middle, beginning, end, which is to say, anytime your brain notices something surprising, anytime it notices a change, anytime it notices something interesting, it's like, whoa. And then it realizes I've arrived in the middle of the story. Where did this begin? right? And then it tries to imagine or find where the beginning of the story is. And this is the basis of science. Anytime you notice anything interesting, like what's the fundamental wall beneath it?

42:53And artists practice science all the time. I mean, this is what Van Gogh was doing when he created color theory, you know? So science isn't just for scientists. Science is for everybody who's interested in finding the rules about how their environment works. And then once you've got, you've gone from the middle to the beginning and you've been like, okay, now I think I know why it's happening. You then jump forward into the future and say, where could this go? And you tell the end of the story. And this fact that story goes middle, beginning, end is, of course, why every Pixar movie starts in the middle, you know, with a flash forward.

43:40you mentioned this last time i chatted with you and i've been thinking of it since i've been thinking about this act two act one act three kind of thing and i've realized like oh superhero movies that do it really well, especially origin stories do this really well because you don't want to start with act one where it's like, how did this happen? And it's real slow and all that. You want to be like, boom, this stuff's happening. This is wild. Now you're in, now we can get into, let's go back to what happened or why this matters. And so, yeah, I've been thinking a lot about that. Because it makes you curious.

44:11Yes. You become curious. It stimulates your, it's, it's, and, and, you know, this is another example of why school is so bad nowadays. Right. Because school thinks that the job is to tell you the first principles and then elaborate what those means. So school thinks, I tell you the beginning and then I tell you the middle and I tell you the end. Kids, nobody learns like that. You want to be amazed. You want to be like, whoa, how did that happen? And then the teacher's like, oh, I'll explain this to you. And that's why, you know, going out for a walk in nature is a great way to start to learn because you're like, where did this tree come from?

44:38What is going on? You know, or, you know, I mean, I had this chemistry teacher when I was young who used to do these like zany experiments to start class. Like you'd like blow something up or whatever, something would turn colors. And of course you're like, what is going on? How is that happening? And he's like, okay, now I'm going to explain it to you. And you paid attention because you were actually kind of interested to understand where it came from as opposed to, right. You know, that, uh, I don't want to be, I don't want to tease it too much and it'd be annoying to listeners here, but, uh, the next book that I'm making with my wife, it's focusing on mystery and wonder.

45:08And the reason why is because I feel like school right now feels like you're learning chords on a guitar, but you've never heard any songs before. And so you're literally like, why are we doing this? Why would I care about this? You know, if you go, if I went to go learn guitar, the first thing I would want to know is which song am I playing that I love? I want to know like what is this about and that I feel like it took me until I was 17 18 I started reading like popular quantum physics ideas sci-fi kind of ideas that were also based in reality and I was like this is amazing like all of a sudden now I'm like interested uh in learning and I that's the next book that's kind of the aim is it's a picture book to try to get kids to be like, look, this is an incredible space and learning isn't a way to know the answers.

46:05It's a way to like engage in questions and get into this really juicy stuff. So yeah, I love that you said that. I know. I love that. I love that. And first of all, one of the things that's fascinating about the difference between human and computer brains is computers don't know when they don't know. So in a computer, everything that's inside it, it thinks is reality. And so it can't have curiosity. It just assumes that that's the way that things are, right? Whereas as a human, because you think in these narrative terms, you can immediately know when you don't know. And that's what sparks curiosity.

46:34And the problem is, is that school now is taught as though kids are computers to be programmed with information because we've made this equation, equation between the human brain and the computer. So we think we have to fill with lots of data so that it acts intelligently. You see this all the time in the modern world, right? But anytime something happens that other people don't like, they're like, oh, that person was uninformed, they had misinformation you know what i mean they didn't have the right data in their head we've got to put them back in school and put more information in their head you know and that is suffocating for children it's it's it's it's not the way that they learn it's it's you know to your point the way that a computer learns and instead like how awesome would it be and this is actually to now plug myself not my books or anything but just to plug my teaching the way i teach is i tell my students bring in your favorite stories in the class i've never seen them before but i want to see them and then we're going to break them down and you're going to realize what's going on in those stories.

47:25And that's how I think school should really almost always operate is you should start with a question that the student has and then demonstrate that you can answer that question. And then that builds confidence that this is a process because, you know, the one good thing I'll say about generative AI, because, you know, I'm a big hater of generative AI, but the one thing that's good about it is it is destroying the current school system. Why? Because the current school system is set up to treat everything like a computer, right? You know, I just went to my kids curriculum night that I will say there are things about public school that I like.

47:56I'm not saying that the system's right, but there are things about it that I appreciate in terms of society. But his English teacher said that, and, and they were really like compelling people to be teaching this seventh grade English class. It was, I was really inspired by them. And they were saying that they're going to focus heavy on voice, creative voice in this writing class because AI, because AI can do the perfect paper. It can do everything technical. And that's going to just matter less and less. And I thought, man, that is, that's a leap for this person doing that. And also a lot of foresight.

48:38I love that. But, you know, the problem with the school system is not the teachers or the students or the administrators. They're all great. Like if you go into almost any public school in America, the teachers are there for all the right reasons. They're great teachers. The kids are great. You know, I mean, the administrators are great. They just have these insane curriculum that they're forced to teach because these standardized tests, which is how everyone gets their funding. And, you know, that's how you're evaluated and how you're ranked. And I think what's finally going to happen is the realization we can just have AI take all these standardized tests.

49:04Yeah. And then we can get them done. They'll get them done. We're going to someone else and let the teachers teach. And, you know, teaching voice, that's the most powerful thing you have as an artist. I absolutely agree. And speaking of this idea of having this top-down kind of, this is the curriculum, this is the standardization, all that kind of thing, it reminds me of the Nelson's touch that you get into. We have all these brilliant teachers, brilliant kids on all these different places. They have ways of leading things, like you said, with the questions and kind of giving some room for them to have power.

49:44I wanted to throw this at you and then see if you could use it to explain Nelson's touch. Honestly, I could talk to you about 500 other things. There's so many things. I'm like watching the time and I'm thinking, oh, no, that's another thing I can't talk to you about. But the last bit, I want to just focus in on some of the planning stuff because it gets at one of the most central ideas of this podcast and an obsession of mine. But, okay, I want to throw this at you. So James Gunn, who just took over the DCU and made his first film there, Superman, I heard him in an interview say that his plan as CEO is to have a vision for it.

50:34But then in all these individual movies, let writers have kind of their own space to take it where they want to go, because that's really how you're going to get the best stuff. And that was kind of his critique of Marvel having worked there. And so it really brought to mind this Nelson's touch thing. So I thought maybe you could explain a little bit about what that is, if it's fresh in your brain, and then we can get into why it's powerful. Yeah, no. So this is fabulous. And I do agree with Gunn on that point. So, I mean, so part of the thing that I found fascinating about the operators is that no matter what happens in their environment.

51:17So, you know, if you're a special operator, what happens is, you know, you're told, you know, rescue this hostage or do this thing or do that thing or do this other thing. And then the moment they jump out of the helicopter or do whatever, chaos ensues. Yeah. You know, it's a total semester, right? You know what I mean? Yes. And, and then, you know, what most people do in that situation is, is give up their objective, you know, get disorganized by the chaos, you know, whatever, retreat into the back of the helicopter and leave. Instead, what the operators do is they leverage the chaos to create a new plan that gets them on a different path to their original goal.

51:50And I was like, whoa, that's like the secret to life, right? You know, and you know, it's like, you, you've got somewhere you want to go. Everything is going wrong. And so, but instead of getting stressed, you just, you know, you ride all the different anarchic energy that's, that's flooding around you to, to, to take a different path to the place you wanted to go. And also as an artist, um, you know, a lot of times as an artist, you have like this general idea of the artwork you want to make, but if you just go in a straight line there, it's not very interesting, you know, and you actually want to create chaos and mess and whatnot to kind of like feed your process, but then you don't want the chaos and the mess to overtake where you're going.

52:25Right. It's that, it's that delicate thing. And so I was like, what is going on here, you know, in terms of what's happening? And so basically what it turns out is that these operators have this method, which they call defined strategy, unlimited tactics. Yeah. And what that basically means is you identify whatever mountain you want to climb. You say, I'm climbing that mountain. But then you say, I can take any path up that mountain. I can find a million paths up that mountain, no matter what happens, right? I'm still going to go to the top of that mountain, but I'm just going to find a different route.

52:58When I first heard this, I was like, oh, of course, that's obvious. That makes total sense. I'm sure everybody other than me must do that. It turns out basically 0 % of people actually do this. In fact, almost everybody does the exact opposite, which is they try and do many things, and they try and do them all the same way. They actually have undefined strategy and limited tactics. It's like I'm good at this one thing, and I keep repeating it to try and succeed in all these different areas of my life. And so what you're talking about in terms of Nelson's touch is Nelson's touch realized that the best, so Nelson, Admiral Nelson, he's in charge of the sort of British Navy and he's fighting Napoleon and whatnot.

53:36And, you know, up to that point, you know, I'm not an expert on sort of, you know, like, you know, the history of the Navy. But what I can tell you is that most - They're not listening to this. Okay, that's good. Okay, that's good. But what I can tell you with some authority is that most of the people who were sailors did not want to be sailors. Like they were essentially either like so poor they were forced to be sailors on these boats, but they were literally kidnapped. So tons and tons of these sailors who were on these ships were basically kidnapped from various ports, forced into service.

54:06You know, they were caught away. They were drunk at a tavern. So you basically have this crew of people who are trapped on this boat and they can't get off the boat, right? And so for years, the Navy functioned by basically just flogging all of these people and screaming at them and telling them how to behave and coercing them. And so the entire idea was that a Navy can only work if the person at the top has an iron rule, an iron fist, and punishes the slightest deviation. You will walk the plank if you do anything that you're not told to do. This is the whole idea. And Nelson totally changed this.

54:40He said, actually, what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell everybody what the goal is. I'm going to define the strategy. I'm going to say, this is where we're going. And then I'm going to empower every individual boat captain and every individual member of that boat to get there the way that they think is best. And what this does is it just kind of unleashes this swarm where you have all of these different people going all these different ways, but all converging at the last moment on this target. And it's devastating. And to your point about having a kind of artistic franchise that works this way, what's amazing about it is you get unlimited creativity because every individual artist can kind of jam, do their own thing, take their own path up the mountain, so on and so forth.

55:21But then all these projects together start to converge on the same point. And as an audience member, it's the definition. This is actually literally the scientific definition of the sublime. The sublime is something that coheres, but is too big for your brain to process. You're like, how is this happening. And in general, in general, so like NCU is the opposite of that. Like an NCO, it all fits together, but you kind of get it right. You know what I mean? So it's never really sublime. It's kind of satisfying or interesting at moments or it's epic would be another term you would use for it, you know, but there's nothing more amazing in life than when all of a sudden, all these different parts, all of a sudden slowly start to converge.

55:59And all of a sudden you realize, wait, what? They're all the same thing. What is happening now? And, you know, science can do that Because science basically takes all these different life forms. It's like, I'm going to reveal how they're actually all kind of coming together. But, you know, very rarely do you get sort of industrial scale art doing that. Right. And to your point about what Gunn is doing, brilliant. Because what's going to happen is each of those movies is going to be different, but then also somehow kind of move you, move you, move you. And then when you get to the top of the mountain, you're going to see all the paths.

56:31You're going to see all these different things going all over the place and ending in the, hopefully ending in the same objective. You know, a couple things I want to respond to that with. One was to this idea of finding this radio and kind of fumbling my way through it through experience and also like observing other creators, how they do stuff. I have two ways that this one objective many paths thing has manifested as kind of core practice for me. And I've talked about them over and over to the point where when you tell that mountain story, if in any of the longtime listeners hear you say that, they're going to be like, oh, my gosh.

57:13Because this podcast started with a story exactly like that. uh before i go there i just want to say real quick um the other way that the other one that i talk about all the time to the point where people probably hate it is um i feel like one of the brilliant the brilliances of curb your enthusiasm is that they make stuff this way they have a plot they do plotting and pantsing they have a plot this is kind of where it's going and no script so they don't know how they're getting there and there's just this thing of They're improv-ing these scenes. They know it needs to go that way. And there's just this pendulum kind of swing that's just magic.

57:56Totally agree. That's exactly right. Yeah. No, that's exactly right. And actually, one of the things that I found fascinating when I talked to the operators is like, so the example of Nelson comes up in the book, because when they tell me to find strategy, unlimited tactics, I'm like, oh, because I'd been given all this kind of military training. I was like, oh, you know, Nelson is the person you learned this from. And one of the operators goes, no, actually, we learned it from Beethoven. And I was like, wait, what? Right. And because Beethoven does this, Beethoven has these kinds of, you know, these, these kind of master arcs and then huge amounts of improvisation.

58:24And that's, again, what produces this sublime sense. And I do think that Curb Your Enthusiasm does have this kind of sublimity about it when it works. Yeah. Because you're like, what is happening? And then all of a sudden it like hits the ending. It just sticks the landing and you're like, what? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the absurd becomes like manifest in something that is not, in fact, absurd, but it's almost like godlike. Like it's prescience, you know, people have that reaction to Larry David of like, this guy's a maestro. What is he doing? And I think, I think it's amazing. Back to that story.

58:56I'm not going to tell the long version of it. I'm going to tell the shortest version possible. But the reason I started this show was literally, I did a talk. It was a small kind of community thing over 10 years ago. And I was telling the story as a metaphor of when I was in England, that's when I started running. I lived in the North of England for five years and I started to, uh, in my running, I would see this giant tower in the distance. And it, I know now that it's the tallest freestanding structure in the UK. It's called Emily Moore Mast. And, um, I didn't know any of that, but I would run and I would see it.

59:32I'd be like, man, that's huge. And I would think about maybe I should run there. And so for the longest time, I wasn't running long enough to think I could do it. And I also didn't know why I thought I could do that or whatever. But then one day I was just like, I'm going to do it. And I didn't tell anybody I was going to do it. I didn't have my phone, nothing like that. But I'm like, okay, here's my plan. That's so tall. No matter where you are, you will be able to see how to get there. So if this road is pointing towards it and then veers away, I'll just take the next right road that's pointing towards that.

1:00:04And then I'll just make it up until I get there. And so I did. And I ran, I don't know if it was seven to somewhere between seven and 10 miles. Most I've probably ever run. But, and I got to the tower because that worked. I had this one objective and I took a bunch of different paths to get there and it all kind of worked out. And the reason it really hit for me and it stuck with me is because when I got to the tower, I realized this plan was flawless, except for the fact that my house was not a tower that I could see from anywhere else. And I got super lost. And to the point where my dad didn't know where I was and ended up calling the police.

1:00:42And like, I was lost for a long time. But they found me eventually. And so go ahead. Wait, that is because, okay, first of all, that creative process is how I think that every musician makes every album. First of all, right? You know where you're going and you're like, we're not going to be able to get there, but let's just focus on these chords or this thing. And then all of a sudden the song comes together and then another song comes together, you know, and you're kind of finding your way, you're kind of, you're finding your way, you're kind of finding your way, you're trying to, one of my favorite movies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

1:01:07Exactly. This process is basically a series of sketches that come together, you know, and it's, you know, but the point is, is you get to the end and you are lost because you're born again. Right. I mean, like literally, right? Like you're, you're like, I don't need to go back. Like I just got here and I need the next mountain. Now, of course, you know, in the real world, to your point, you know, people want you to come home and so on and so forth. But I think as an artistic metaphor, it's perfect because you actually want to lose yourself because you were reinvented, you know, and that's the kind of profundity of it is, is you actually, you actually are able through all these, these, and you know, going back to gun.

1:01:38I mean, if he succeeds, he is going to fundamentally reinvent the DC universe. It's not going to be the same thing. There's going to be some kind of core shift in what it is, which is going to be extraordinary. And you're not going to be able to go back. And there's a, there's a piece in the book that I think explains. So I've told that story 10 times on the show and it's a metaphor I've used about. most creative people I know, they find, you know, in writing, they call it plotting or pantsing. So you either have a plot and you see the big picture and you kind of work your way there, or it's, you fly by the seat of your pants and you just kind of make up your story as you go along.

1:02:19Most creative people I know get stuck in pantsing. That's, that's just, that's what comes natural. They kind of, they think that the only definition of creativity is you start without knowing where you're going and you want to get surprised. Now, I think they're both valid. what I had found was I had started planning. I'd started plotting. I'd learned some structure stuff. And I knew this is powerful. This is starting with the end in mind. It's doing something for me. The thing that I feel like I was missing until this book was I don't think I understood why the planning was so powerful because the getting lost is such a huge part of I wasn't trying to get them to just plan so that they got to their destination.

1:03:10So will you explain this idea of making planners instead of planning, instead of plans? Yeah, 100%. I'll do that. Just to riff off just what you just said, but then I'll get to that. I mean, what you're basically saying is the best art is created by pancers to make a plan. Yes, that's exactly right. Because it's like they've got all this enormous creativity. And there's so much really bad art out there by people who are planners. because they sit down and they're like, I'm going to do a hero's journey and it's going to have all the parts. And you're like, this is inert. It's like, you know, you know, and the problem is for most pancers is that, you know, they never actually finish.

1:03:47Right. They just do a whole bunch of stuff and then they give up because you don't know where it's going. They get demoralized, whatever. I mean, Catch-22, which is a great novel. I don't know if people have read Catch-22. I don't know. I think I started it, but didn't finish it. Well, there you go. Okay, right, right. But it's the ultimate pancer novel. It doesn't actually go anywhere. He just keeps repeating the same thing over and over and over again. It's good enough that you love it, but he has no plan. But the point is that that's what happens to a lot of people is they get caught in that stage.

1:04:10But if you can actually make the plan, then all of a sudden, right, then all of that individual ingenuity and brilliance starts to build and build and build and build and build and build. And then you get the awe effect, you know, where every little piece is special, but the whole thing holds together. just before you get to the planning versus planner thing, uh, this is exactly how I've explained to people. The only way I've learned to interview anybody is I, for the longest time, I was like, okay, I may, when I first started, I was like, all right, I'll, I'll plan this interview. I'll do the questions.

1:04:48Okay. I'm going to go into it. And then I do the interview and it would go well, but we didn't use any of the questions. And I'd be like, okay, I don't need to plan these questions. Then the next one, I'd be like, I'm not going to do, but I'm just going to make it up because that's what works. And then it'd go terribly. And I'd be like, what the heck is going on here? And so, yeah, that perfectly explains, I think, what's happening with that. Yeah. Because what you're doing by making all those plans for you to make that plan for the interview is you're developing your ability to plan the interview.

1:05:18And so when the interview starts happening, you're able to plan it on the fly because you You practice planning the interview already, right? Whereas if you just go in with no plan whatsoever, then all of a sudden you're like, wait, I haven't practiced planning this interview and so on. When I'm in the middle, I don't know how to make a plan for it. So this is this thing which the military has. And the thing, I would just encourage people to spend a little more time studying the U.S. Army because I honestly thought the U.S. Army was really dumb before I got involved in this project. Part of that is because, you know, I sort of, you know, when my family immigrated to this country, we came to New Jersey and New Jersey has a very dim view of the Army.

1:05:47It's basically what happens to you if you fail out of high school or can't get a job. It's like, oh my God, you go to the army. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I was basically raised to think of the army is not, you know, and, and, um, but it turns out there's all this wisdom in the army. And I discovered this because I myself, so people who have never heard me before might think that I'm coming on here as some kind of expert, some kind of like genius who does everything right. And I'm just like kind of giving you my, my, my, my, you know, my wisdom from on high. But the reason I got involved in this project is because I'm terrible at most of the stuff in the book.

1:06:16You know, like I'm a creature of an academic environment where, you know, I can't actually make plans effectively. You know, I have a very kind of stable world. The moment anything goes wrong, I panic. You know, I won't tell this full story, but, you know, as an example, you know, I mean, my mom was coming to visit us a couple weeks ago. And my young daughter wanted to put on an earring that my mother had given her. and then somehow while trying to put it on, dropped it into the sink. And I was like, oh my gosh, we have to take apart the entire sink. Right. You know what I mean? And so I basically started just like taking apart the entire sink.

1:06:56And my wife was like, what are you even, that is, you know, and she basically, you know, got a vacuum cleaner, pulled the thing out in like two seconds and, you know, and then I had to rebuild the entire sink. But my point is, is that I'm incompetent at life. Anything goes wrong. If I can't find a parking space for an event, I just give up, you know? And so I was just fascinated. I was like, how is it these guys are so good at making plans? Like, what is, what is going on? And so it turns out that there's a famous general, Dwight Eisenhower, went on to become the United States president. And he had this saying, which is that you make plans relentlessly for, for whatever thing that you're doing.

1:07:28You, you, you plan, you plan, you plan for every contingency, you imagine everything could happen. You write out all the plans. And then the moment the event happens, you throw out all the plans, You junk them immediately. Why? Well, because what you're training is the ability to plan. The purpose of it is to develop the planner, not the plan. And most people fail this for one of two reasons. Either they make a plan and they think I've got to stick to the plan. And the more that the world changes, the more that they panic and try and force the world to conform to their plan. And they start getting stressed and yelling at other people and so on and so forth, right?

1:07:59Then other people will never make a plan in the first place. And when things start to change, right, it's just they add to this organization. whereas really successful people do what you do for the interview which is they plan plan plan plan plan plan and they just totally let it go and they've trained up those muscles in their brain and the technical name for those muscles in your brain are your imagination which is your ability to come up with a plan which is a plot which is a story so that's really the the the secret to all of it is just kind of practice imagining the story of your day all the different ways the story of your day could go except it's not going to go that way right you know just like your improv routine isn't going to go the way you imagined it, but by doing all those practice sessions, you're prepared for whatever occurs.

1:08:36Yeah. Uh, I was actually, that was the next thing I was going to ask you about, because I think that's such a surprising element in the book is this idea that imagination is planning that that's what it is. I don't think anybody would most 99 out of a hundred people would not have jumped there. Absolutely not. I didn't think so. Yeah. No, no, I mean, so, so, I mean, this comes to this, we're now in chapter two of the book. So chapter one of the book was about intuition and exceptional information. We're now in chapter two, which is about imagination. There's eight more chapters, so we're not gonna get through all of them, obviously.

1:09:08But basically the imagination chapter, it starts out by pointing out that we fundamentally misunderstand story, essentially. And, you know, we understand story as a tool for communicating. And the basic idea is that like really, really smart people think in math and stupid people, you know, don't understand math. So we create a story to explain the math for them or something like that. You know what I mean? That's funny. But it turns out that actually story goes back. It's how the brain actually thinks. It goes back hundreds of millions of years, you know, crows think in story. And, you know, there's a lot of amazing research done largely by these female educators, which has been totally ignored because they're not computer scientists.

1:09:46They point out that children think in story and all this kind of stuff. And so what we're often taught is that imagination creates stories. So the more imaginative you are, the more stories you can come up with. It turns out in the brain, it's the opposite. It turns out your stories, your ability to think in stories, what creates imagination. And I discovered this because I was watching all these incredibly imaginative special operators coming up with all these, you know, plans on the fly and doing all this kind of stuff. And so I talked to one of the cadre. The cadre is the person who kind of trains them all.

1:10:18So they're like these like really kind of like these 70 year old guys with like beards down to their feet, really kind of like these kind of like scarecrow type of people, like, like, like, you know, like scarecrow woodsman kind of thing. I don't even know how to describe them. They're like something out of like, you know, like a benevolent deliverance or something, I guess is what I would describe them as, you know what I mean? So he's kind of like, you know, West Virginia wizards. So anyway, so I was like, I was like, how do you, because the other thing is, is these operators who are so good at planning don't come in good at planning.

1:10:49And because they come out of the American school system. And so they get there and they, they're terrible at it. And so these gurus have to train them up at all this stuff. And so I was like, you know, where's their imagination coming from? Where's their imagination coming from? And, uh, and the guru is like, imagination is just planning. It's just planning. It's just planning. It's just planning. It's just planning. And I was like, how does, how does that make any sense? He's like, well, think about it. Why do plans fail? And this was an interesting thing that he said to me, because normally people say, why do plans succeed?

1:11:17And then they say data or something like that, right? He's like, he did the opposite. He didn't say, why did plants succeed? He said, why did plants fail? And I was like, I don't know why plants fail. I mean, you know, he's like, because they didn't imagine enough possibilities. They weren't creative enough. And this, you know, you can read more about it in the book, but this basically is imagination is story. Story is plot. Plot is plan. Imagination is planning. The brain evolved imagination in order to make plans. we don't use our imagination in this way as much as we should, which is why we experience so much anxiety and anger, anxiety and anger.

1:11:51What are those? Those are threat responses. That is our brain saying, I don't know how to deal with this situation. When we don't know how to deal with the situation, what does our brain want? It wants a plan. It wants us to activate our imagination. Instead, what do most of us do? We panic, you know, we meditate or, you know, we ask someone for help, right? There's all these things that we do. We don't learn to activate our imagination. When you look at really little kids, kids don't have a lot of anxiety, young kids, and they don't have a lot of anger either because when they have a threat response, they imagine something, you know, they just imagine something and we lose that.

1:12:18And so the kind of whole part of that second part of that second chapter of the book is like, how do operators actually train up their imagination by making plans, by doing plan or not the plan, like Eisenhower said, so you can kind of fast summon it when you need it. Whenever you start feeling stressed, your day isn't going the way that you want it to go. Yeah. I could go a bunch of different places there, but I recommend people do get the book and just dive into all that because there's, there's so much more there. but even that I think is really useful and, and very unique too. Like this is just stuff that I don't think is, it's just not, like you say, it's not what we've been taught.

1:12:51So it's, it is an unlearning of going back to how we are primal and our basic intelligence, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, when you, people read the book first of all, they usually have one of two responses, which is this author is completely crazy. It's one response because nothing in the book is like anything you've read in any of those books that's been published in the last 30, 40 years. It's totally different. I almost started by saying this feels like a Plato's cave thing. That's how much, that's why I was overwhelmed by planning questions. Cause I was like, I don't even know where to start.

1:13:24It's so it's, it's a complete, it's a paradigm shift. And, and you know, so people are either like, this guy is crazy or they're like, Oh my goodness, this actually explains how my brain works. And this is the first time I've read a book in a long time. That kind of explains, cause a lot of books out there are like, there's something wrong with you, you've got to do it different. Whereas this book is basically like, actually, you're probably okay. There's something right with you that you're not even doing. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Just stop listening to all the advice you're getting from outside and just kind of go back a little bit to what you were doing before you got all the advice, you know?

1:13:52Yeah. I love it. Okay. I wanted to ask you about, you do this activity with salespeople, which is trying to activate some primal intelligence. And it reminded me, they do this activity where they're doing a Q &A with each other. And it reminded me of another thing that I think a lot about when I do interviews, which is Alex Bloomberg, who started Gimlet Media, was from Planet Money and This American Life. He has a class on doing interviews that I took. I was like consuming so much about how to interview people because I started doing it. And this was, you know, eight years ago, nine years ago.

1:14:31And I was like, I don't know how to do this. This is an art. This is way harder than I thought it was. And so I just started taking in all this information. One of the things that stuck with me, not a ton did, but this thing has stuck with me. And he said, really try to avoid asking people why. And I wanted to see if you could get into a little bit about that exercise and, and maybe why, as you're getting to know somebody, as you're exploring something, why not to ask why? Yeah, exactly. You had to break the rule. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, you are an incredible interviewer, I have to say. Thank you.

1:15:06Thanks. I mean, this has just evaporated this time. So this is another one of these weird things that came about with the Army because I actually was meeting this secret unit. And the job of the secret unit was essentially to kind of learn everything about me. They were basically essentially interviewing me, but it was more kind of close to being an interrogation because I had to surface literally everything about me. And the reason that they had to do it is they had to make sure that I could be trusted. Yeah. And so, you know, they just went through this whole kind of gauntlet of doing this stuff.

1:15:33And it was incredible because I, in answering these questions, learned so much about myself. It was like maybe the most amazing therapy session of all time where you actually discover what is going on in your brain, you know, and you're like, whoa, like this is, you know, and and so this was happening. And so we got to the end of of the thing. I was like, how did you do that? Like, you know, what what was it? And they were like, oh, they're like, you know, what we did, it was really complicated. It was really, really complicated. Really, really complicated. We asked who, what, when, where, how, and never why.

1:16:08We never asked you why. And so like anytime they ask me a question about something, they'd be like, you know, who did you do it with? When was the first time you did that thing? Where was it? All this kind of stuff. They never asked why. And the reason for that is the moment you ask why you service a judgment, you service an explanation. you surface an origin story essentially. Right. And that's where this, that's as far back as you can go into the person. You've just lost your ability to go deeper into who they are. And you said, this is where the story starts. And that why will often come up from the person themselves and make a snap judgment in that moment.

1:16:38But a lot of times also, when you're having a conversation with someone, you'll notice that you stop asking them genuine questions because your brain has already arrived at a why. You're like, Oh, I understand who this person is. I understand why they do what they do. Right. That's when you kind of figured it all out. I know. I've met 50 of this guy. Exactly. A hundred percent, you know? And what the interviewer said to me is the moment we start to feel like we've got it, we've got it figured out. We start really leaning into new who, what, when questions to try and surprise ourselves. Because the moment we find a surprise, we're like, we actually don't know why.

1:17:05They've got to chase that. And so we started doing this. This is super weird. But after I, you know, got tight into the special operations community, they called me over one day and they're like, Angus, do you ever do marriage counseling? And I was like, what? Marriage counseling? No, I was like, that's what marriage counselors do. I'm not a marriage counselor. But the weird thing about special operations is they don't trust anyone. So they like, they don't like literally don't trust it. So once they trust you, they want you to do everything for them. They would probably ask me to like fix their cars, right?

1:17:34If they could, right. You're like, yeah, I guess you, are you a repairman? So I was like, no, I was like, I don't, I don't do, you know, my wife, but she heard this. It was hilarious. She was like, Oh, you're a, you're a perfect husband. You're exactly the kind of person you should get marriage counseling. So I like, I basically, without understanding what was happening, I got led to a field one day, this is true, where there were a hundred special operations couples. So a hundred operators with their spouses, right? You know what I mean? Yeah. And they were like, we're all on the verge of divorce.

1:18:02Yeah. I was like, what? And they were like, you know, the divorce rates in our community are like 90%. And, you know, you know, and they're like, and we need you, Angus, to help us. I feel like this whole thing with the special ops is you're in, you're starring in a fish out of water scenario just non-stop being thrown into these circumstances yeah yeah no and a lot of times when i tell these stories people are like this can't even be true if you don't think it's true just google camp home front and you'll see video of me standing in front of all these these couples basically you know so anyway so i'm so i'm up there and i'm like oh my goodness what do i do because you know like you like you're talking about like trying to figure out how to do an interview right so you're straight so i was like reading all this marriage counseling stuff you know and i was like i can't do this stuff like i don't even understand it like what is happening So instead I was like, you know what?

1:18:46I think the problem with most relationships is that we think we know the other person better than we do. You know, we have all these judgments about them. And the moment that something starts to happen, we're like, I know why that's happening. I know what you're doing right now. You know what I mean? I've got to like go on the attack or the defensive or something else. We don't say to ourselves, you know what? This person, there's actually something here more that I don't understand. And so basically what I just decided to do in this moment of total panic was turn their own method back against them.

1:19:13And I was like, I want you guys to do this. Who, what, when, where, how exercise without asking why. And I want you to start writing down the things you find that surprise you about the other person, you know, and just kind of go at it. And what was incredible about this was I thought this was going to go for like a couple minutes, you know, and then they were going to kind of report back to me because I literally had no plan for this. I was like, you know, in this field concerned for my own life, frankly. They talked for hours. And you just didn't stop talking because they were able to do this discovery.

1:19:45And since then, I've actually used it to improve my own marriage, you know, by asking these questions. It's kind of improved my relationship with my kids, you know. And I was just surprised to realize how quickly, once I became aware of this, I was leaping to judgments without even thinking that I was doing it. Like, I like to flatter myself and think I'm like a really open-minded person. You know, I'm a scientist. I'm really curious, you know, da-da-da-da-da. It's like, no, you're not curious at all, man. Your head is full of all these judgments. You think you are so much smarter than everybody around you, right?

1:20:11And then you start to do this and you're like, whoa, I don't understand why this is happening, why that's happening. And you just learn so much more about other people. And then the really magic part is they learn more about themselves. Yeah. And that's actually what deepens the relationship is they're starting to discover things about themselves that they can't explain. You're discovering stuff about yourself that you can't explain. And then together you're kind of like on this journey. And again, that is your favorite movie. Yeah. Your favorite movie is two people who meet each other and start to learn more about each other.

1:20:38And then you realize they don't know where it's going and you don't know where it's going. and it's a real romance. And so much of the, so many stories. I mean, the way I tend to think about it is this hero. This is something I feel like every, whenever, if I write a story and I give it to somebody and they're not thinking of it as like, oh, I'm going into a movie. This is a finished thing. They're thinking critically of it, right? They're not suspending their disbelief. One thing that happens is they'll criticize the beginning as oh like the the hero this thing they're doing i it's wrong i know it from the beginning like what there's tension here like they and i'm like that's the that's the tension that is what it is it's literally the hero is has an unconscious motivator they're going they don't know why they're doing what they're doing and it's causing them all of this havoc and so like you said like movies that you love.

1:21:35They're these, they're, this is coming from unconscious behavior and they're getting to know each other. They're getting to know what's going on in there. Yeah. Yeah. And what you're talking about is that we're actually through things like TikTok training people to not be able to interact with movies anymore. Right. Right. Cause you're like, I didn't understand this in two seconds. It must be terrible. You know what I mean? I can't listen to this song. Cause it doesn't have a hook in the first eight seconds. It must be a bad, this person doesn't know what they're doing. And it's like, it's the other way around, man.

1:22:01Like it's good. hang in there, you know? If it's got you confused at the start, if it's got you like bothered, that's the point. That's how it feels. That is the point. And, you know, this is one of actually the real challenges writing this book. Cause I mean, this book will confuse people from the outset. And, you know, I mean, a lot of, you know, the, the sort of early drafts, a lot of the feedback I was getting is like, people are not going to read this book, Angus, because it's just too different. But what I found is that. I don't think that's true. One of the things that I found difficult about planning wasn't that I didn't understand it, but that I, it was just dramatic, like it's written very well.

1:22:36It makes sense. Every piece makes sense. It, but it, it kind of unpicks what you think. Yeah. Yeah. Where it gets. There's a cognitive overload that takes place. There's kind of like a whoa. Yeah. What is happening? Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I think that's disconcerting for people now in a way that it wouldn't have been 20, 30, 40 years ago. You People are really used to feeling like they understand things. Anytime the news comes up, you know immediately what to think. Who's the villain? I know who the villain is. This is the problem. This is the reason why things are bad. And we've conditioned ourselves to this kind of snap judgments where we always feel like we're the authority all the time.

1:23:14And that's actually the inverse of how democracy is supposed to work. Democracy is really supposed to work with humility. The idea is everyone else around me has the answers. That's why I'm part of a democracy. Not I'm so smart, therefore everyone should listen to me, which is the basis of autocracy. I don't want to go super far into this, but one of the things that it brings up is having learned a lot about story. That's everything I do is like based on it's kind of allegory metaphor. That kind of stuff is what I'm really into. And the when I would go to make short form stuff as like little bits of content that lead to the podcast or the stories I'm telling there lead to this book or whatever.

1:23:51I realized like, oh, whatever this short form thing is, it's not story. It isn't story. It's something else. I don't fully understand what it is because it's giving something that on some biological level people want. It doesn't maybe satisfy or make them feel good, but it doesn't feel like story to me. It's something else. It's not, like you say, it doesn't start with, Anyway, and maybe it is, and I don't, and I'm missing some piece of it, but I think there's some, it's almost something different. Does it stimulate, like what is, what is the effect of it when people encounter it? You know, the, the best analogy that I've heard that I don't think answers that question, but gets towards something is Cal Newport.

1:24:36I'm a fan of this guy. He wrote the book, Deep Work and Slow Productivity. And I really like him. uh he talks about it like junk food being this hyper palatable food-like substance and that it's something like that that it's like the doritos of story it's like he didn't say that that but that's how i'm thinking of it it's like there's food which is story and that you know actual whole food that satisfies that gives you all of these things that you need and why you're compelled to eat, but the Dorito version is getting you hooked to eat it because it's designed that way, but it's not actually giving you any of the stuff that you're looking for.

1:25:22Something in that zone. No, I totally understand it. So it's triggering this kind of hedonic response in you, right? It's short-circuiting, you know, like your brain evolved to, you know, like salt because there wasn't a lot of salt in the wild. And now it's like, oh, well, you know, we're going to give you all the salt kind of right now. Yeah. And so it's tapping right into those kinds of, you know, pleasure centers. It's not giving you what's powerful about story. No, because the whole point about story is discovering something else. And the whole thing that hooks people most immediately is feeling validated.

1:25:50Yeah, right. True. Yeah. That is the thing that drives me nuts about, this is literally as someone who, this is one of the reasons I love your stuff. I find it's very relatable to me in that you're trying to say something that's not being said. and what i've found is what drives me nuts about social media is the stuff that performs well is the stuff that's been said a thousand times and i can't you know i've said this on the show before but as an adhd person i have i'm so novelty seeking at home i barely this is going to sound ridiculous it's be very hard to explain i barely and my wife drives her insane i barely say real words.

1:26:35I'm making up new words for things all the time. I'm just like, like they know what I mean. And I can say almost nonsense because I'm so novelty driven. So being on the internet, watching like everything that's said, the things that blow up, these are things that have been said 8 million times. And you know what? They have no impact. Right. And nobody ever remembers them. So, I mean, that's true. So this is the thing. I mean, do you want to be the person who's constantly blowing up and actually having no effect? Right. Yeah. Or do you want to be the person who starts to establish these deep moments of connection that really has this impact on individual lives and over time starts to become momentum and a movement.

1:27:12And that still happens a lot. So, I mean, I would say to people, yeah, it feels very gratifying to be someone who gets, you know, 60 ,000 likes in your tweet or something like tweets online, but then you'll spend the rest of your life chasing that feeling because it's evanescent and it actually doesn't lead anywhere. Whereas if you get one real follower who actually really digs your stuff, I could say this because I've got like maybe three followers on Instagram and they love me. You know what I mean? They're with me for life. They're total writer dies, you know? Um, but those people will be with you forever.

1:27:40And then as you start to, you know, get out of the clubs and into the stadium, right? They're going to follow you, right? And you're going to build the big music and it really is going to be good music and not just kind of like, you know, disappear like some eighties, uh, you know, one hit. I, uh, I love that. I think, um, we're in a time in creativity that I think a lot of working artists assume that if it's really good, the better it is, the more likely it will be viral. And one of the things I always, which I I'm not saying as I say it, I feel like everyone would say that's not true. I'm saying that's an unconscious thought.

1:28:21That's the thing that I feel like a lot of people walk around assuming is true. If I can just make this good enough, it's going to go like wildfire. And I tried to tell people, think of the art that changed you, that the thing that this is your favorite song, your favorite movie, your favorite book. Is there anything about that that could have gone viral and almost never? Those are different qualities. They're completely different qualities. I mean, famously, we talked about Van Gogh earlier. He sold, I think, one work of art in his lifetime, and he died in a field because he was in a state of total despair.

1:28:57I mean, he's a famous example. But I think in general, that's actually what happens is if you feel it and you know that it's new and you're living in the future, it takes a long time for other people to catch up with you. And you just have to have gratitude that you were in the future faster. You were in the future first. And I have had this joy in my career, and I know you've had this joy in your career, too, is that when I followed those intuitions and that imagination, and I've got to the future faster. It has been lonely initially and you do kind of doubt yourself, but then slowly people start to join you there and it'll be a totally unique experience.

1:29:28And they'll be really grateful because you've given them something they're never going to have had otherwise. And I think that really is real creativity, real success, because that is going to live on into the next generation and not just dissipate. I completely agree. And like I said, I'm a creative practitioner. I didn't get into it art for art's sake, even though I am a huge art fan. So I am always constantly figuring out how do you strike this balance between not being ending up in a Van Gogh situation, but also following those intuitions. And I think there is a way, maybe not to do it perfectly.

1:30:00You might never blow up. Hey, man. Shakespeare. Right. Shakespeare. Shakespeare blew up. And every time he had a play, people were like, what? I mean, like when King Lear came out, people were like, did you miswrite this? This is so bad. He's like, no, I didn't miswrite this. It's awesome. And they're like, wait, it kind of is. you know? So you definitely can do both. I don't want to make it seem like you can't do both at the same time, but it usually takes you to do the first part, right? The lonely part first, right? You do need to kind of be in the wilderness for a little bit. And then when you hit your stride and everyone kind of catches up with you, you can get that peak period of everyone kind of jamming along.

1:30:32And my, my biggest book started as a daily drawing project 10 years before that no one cared about. Nobody cared about me. And so I totally can attest to that in my own tiny way. The last thing I want to do is I wanted to – you didn't get to this part, but in that exercise that you had the couples do where you're having them ask the who, what, where, how, not why, it ended with a game where after asking all those questions, they would try to guess the why. That's right. And so I thought after I interviewed you with all these questions, I did ask you a couple of why questions. But after all that, I would try to guess why you wrote this book.

1:31:19Now, I know you get one point if I'm right, one point if I surprise you. I don't know if I'm going to get any points. Okay. But this is my guess. I think that you believe that story thinking is a dramatic world shift for most people, but they think they know story. They think that they understand what it is. They think of it as probably entertainment or they have all these other theories. It's old information to them. And I think primal intelligence wanted to frame it in a different way and write about it in a different way so that it seemed like what you call exceptional information. Do you think it's something in that zone?

1:32:08Well, I'm going to give you two points. The reason I'm going to give you two points is because, first of all, you're correct. You're totally correct. And the other reason I'm going to give you two points is I didn't realize that I was doing that when I was writing the book. You know, I've since kind of realized that through having conversations like the conversation we're having, you know, where people were tolerant enough to listen to me like yammer on about the book for a while. Right. But if you'd been the first person who read the book, we had a conversation with you would have been the first person who realized that because it took me a lot of conversations afterwards to realize that.

1:32:34And I think that's the same with a lot of creatives. It's like, you know, that there's a reason that you're doing it. You can't figure it out. And then your first audience experiences it. And you have that conversation and you're like, now I understand why I did it. And it's like part of your brain was moving faster than, than, than your conscious mind. Yeah, I love it. And I got two points. I'm happy. Major success. I really recommend everybody goes and gets the book. There's, there's a, so much in there that I think is just super powerful that even the, even just the planning stuff alone, this idea of having a one, one objective, many paths, there's so much application to that.

1:33:12in your creative career and in your creativity. Thanks for writing it. And I hope that, I hope it blows up, honestly, because I think, I think it's really brilliant. I appreciate that a lot. And look, thanks for just coming on and talking about this. And I do feel if it doesn't blow up, you and I at least are on the journey together, right? And then 10 years from now, right, we'll be like, we were there for the first album, man. We were there. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks again. Thank you, man.

1:33:59Okay. I hope that you enjoyed that as much as I did. This was my all-time favorite episodes. No joke. Stop what you're doing. Go get the book. I lied to you. There is a CTA, a call to adventure. It's get the book Primal Intelligence by Angus Fletcher. There'll be a link in the show notes. It's wherever books are sold. Go get it from your local bookstore, order it from them or wherever you get your books. And you're not going to be disappointed. I meant every word that I said. I think this is a really important, powerful book for everybody, especially for creative people. And if you like this show, there are so many things in this book that explain stuff we talk about on this show every week in a totally different way.

1:34:52And I think you're going to love it. So go check it out. Thanks everybody for checking out the videos on YouTube. We've got some momentum over there. It's really cool. I'm excited about being over there. Also, to all of you that just listen on audio, I mostly listen to podcasts on audio. Some podcasts I do, some YouTube from time to time. I mostly switch back and forth. But hope you love the episode. Thanks to Sophie Miller, my wife, who is an editor and producer on the show. Thanks to Connor Jones of Pending Beautiful for audio edits, video edits, animation, sound design. He's just a talented person who, you know, I like you.

1:35:33and I know you're gonna hear that. And thanks to Yoni Wolf and the band Y for our theme music and soundtrack, who I also love and love all of your creativity. And thanks to all of you for listening. I love your creativity. Thanks for being part of this community. I'm just loving it. I'm 10 years into this thing. I'm still pepped. And you know what you gotta do, stay pepped. Stay pepped up, that's what I'm supposed to say. All right, stay pepped up.

1:36:21Okay, the podcast is over, so I don't know why you're still listening, but I am glad that you enjoyed it enough to stick to the end. I have one more thing for you. If you're in a place where you're feeling a lack of clarity and you want to figure out your industry market and niche and find the perfect strategic side project to do next, go sign up to our newsletter at andyjpizza.substack.com and you will get a confirmation email that will give you the download of our Creative Career Path hand booklet and the whole process is in there. and you might also get a few bonuses in there depending on when you sign up.

1:37:04But again, thanks for listening. Glad you enjoyed the episode and stay pepped up, y 'all. Hello, this is Jack Wilson, the host of the History of Literature podcast. For the past 10 years, I've been talking to novelists, biographers, and scholars about the greatest books in the history of the world and the men and women who wrote them. Like our recent episodes on Dante and Love, a starter pack of 10 Indian classics, the pop culture that influenced Sylvia Plath, and a talk with scientist and novelist Alan Lightman about the wonders of nature. Join us at the History of Literature podcast wherever you get your podcasts.