Angus Fletcher

22:58You've got to save the kingdom or something like that. But there are a lot of different paths to get there. And if it's a good game, every team will take their own path. Tell me the story of the obstacle race. So this is from Robin Sage. And they have these obstacle courses that if you've ever been in a military environment, These are sort of the basis of how you prove your fitness and your ability to navigate a combat zone. And so they have all these pine logs. You've got to clamber over and ropes and various things. You've got to contort yourself around. And so this was in the early days of special forces when they were sort of trying to figure out how to set up Robin Sage.

23:42And they'd set up this obstacle course. And they put all these recruits there. And they said, OK, at the far end of this obstacle course is this bell. You've got to go ring this bell. Any questions? Okay, no, go. And so the recruits would start going through the obstacle course, going through the obstacle course, going through the obstacle course. And they would all be getting there and ringing the bell. They'd be getting these good times, good times, good times. And this one recruit, he's like standing at the back. And he realized that there was no way he was going to get through this obstacle course in anything like the time that the other recruits were doing it.

24:13He just couldn't do it. And he was getting closer and closer to the front of the line. They were running through the obstacles, running through the obstacles, running through the obstacles. And then it gets to him. They blow the whistle. and he runs around the entire obstacle course and rings the bell on a record time. Avoiding the obstacle course. He avoids all the obstacles. And everyone looks at him and in a traditional military setting, you would be thrown off the course. It's cheating. Exactly, it's cheating. And instead they were like, that's blind. Because he did the objective. He did the objective.

24:43He found the beautiful, right? He found the target. He found it his own way. And so even now when you go there now, Now, the entire course as it is, all the course, whether it's the object course or not, is designed as you've got to get to this point. But how you get there is up to you. You can walk in a straight line there. You could steal a boat and sail there. Whatever you want to do, you can get there your own way, but you just got to get there. And that's the difference between a special forces psychology is it tells you where but not how. Whereas I think the way that a lot of other organizations go wrong is they tell you where and how.

25:21They say, this is how you make the hamburger. Do it this way, as opposed to make a hamburger. Tell me how Special Forces were inspired by Beethoven. So Special Forces has this idea about how the imagination works. And their idea about the imagination is you've got to be able to set a single target for yourself, but be completely fluid in how you get there. And what they say is that this is the opposite of how most kids grow up today. Because most kids grow up today wanting to do 800 things so they don't have like a clear objective. And they're always trying to do the same thing to get to all these different goals.

26:01So Special Forces says, no, no, no, no. What you've got to do is you've got to figure out that one thing you're doing and then be infinitely flexible on the way there. And so I was just fascinated. I said, well, where did you get this from? And one of the guys there, he said to me, music. I said, oh, music. I said, what kind of music? He said, all kinds of music. He said, but Beethoven. Beethoven. I said, what? What does Beethoven have to do with special forces? And he says, well, because Beethoven always knew exactly where he was going. But every time he went there, he went there in a different way.

26:37And the extraordinary thing about listening to Beethoven's music is the improvisational nature of every moment of it, but it has a consistent purpose. So you always feel like you're going somewhere that is spontaneous. And that's the magic of real creativity, is it is purposeful, but totally in the moment. Yeah, jazz works that way as well. Yeah. What are the questions that lead to exceptional information? Yeah, so exceptional information is this totally bizarre army term. It's a military term. It means the exception to a rule. And so the idea is you're always looking for that outlier, that anomaly, that is the leading edge of reality.

27:26that if you can hook onto it faster than the other person, you can make tomorrow more quickly than they can. And so the questions that lead you to that are the questions you've never asked before. And those questions tend to be spontaneous in the moment. So when you're having a conversation with someone, there are going to be moments in that conversation when you ask them a question you've never asked anyone before. Because something in that conversation has sparked a new question that didn't even occur to you, you could ask. And that's when you start realizing that you're on the trail to exceptional information, is when your mind starts asking questions that it hasn't asked before, you start having conversations with people, these questions are coming up.

28:10Because we are so used to technology in the world, most of the time that we encounter a new question, we go to Google or what have you to answer it. And what you're doing there is you're putting an old answer into a new question and you're breaking the question. Whereas actually what you want to do is you want to lean into the question that you've never asked before and be really rigorous in not accepting an old answer for a new question. How could there be an old answer for a new question? If somebody knows the answer to your question already, that's not the answer. That's how you start to realize it is that you're asking a question that no one's asked before.

28:46What's an SOP? An SOP is a military standard operating procedure. And so what's really interesting is the question of when to be creative and when not to be creative. And you see this all the time with creatives, is when they're not in the studio or they're not doing their creative work, they're making their life harder than it needs to be because they're constantly being creative in moments where you shouldn't be being creative. And so there's this thing that the military likes to refer to, which is common sense. and common sense is basically matching the newness of your action to the newness of the times.

29:22Tell me more about that. So anytime you're in a situation that's changing rapidly, what that's telling you is that you don't want to use an old playbook. That's right. Because there's new questions that are being asked. And so the old answers won't work. And so what you've got to do is you've got to start to up your creativity to match the speed of situational change. However, if you're in a familiar environment, you should use a familiar answer. And what we find with a lot of people who are creatives is they insist on being creative all the time, even in the familiar environments. Just wear regular clothes, man.

29:54You know, no, no, no, no. I've got to figure out a totally new outfit to wear to this thing. No, no, no, it's just fine. Just say, look, no, no, no, I've got to. And they've always got to be doing new things. And as a result, a lot of creatives make their lives much harder for themselves than they need to be. Because instead of focusing their creativity on the moments, real opportunity. It's necessary. That's right, yeah. And so a standard operating procedure is something that you do in a situation that you've encountered before that worked last time. And this is why I think special forces units, like hypothetically Delta Force, if it exists, are brilliant, is because they have these special operating procedures that they use immediately.

30:30But then the moment the situation is unfamiliar, they switch out of them and do something new. You see this also with astronauts. astronauts, astronauts are incredible at this, particularly like the old school astronauts who are the fighter pilots who came up with the Gemini program and whatnot, is they fly the plane or the spaceship by the book when everything is normal. And then the moment that uncertainty happens, they invent an entirely new way of flying the plane that no one else has ever seen before. And so standard operating procedures are actually important for creativity because what they're doing is they're allowing you not to be creative in all the moments where you don't need to be creative.

31:09And then you're therefore getting closer to the nature of creativity, which is to meet the moment, as opposed to your own ego, which is saying, I've got to somehow make everything new because if I don't make everything new, it's not me. No, no, no. You don't have to make it new for the sake of it being new. You need to make it new because it's what's required in this particular situation. That's exactly right.

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33:00What is a first step plan? A first step plan is how you get yourself out of your fight or flight response when you're in a very new situation. And the reason this evolved is in combat situations. The first time anyone gets into combat, no matter how much they thought about it ahead of time, no matter how brave and courageous they are, they always panic. and one of the main reasons particularly with modern combat that people panic is because when guns start firing you actually can't know where they're from you can't actually to immediately thrown into kind of like a chaos environment and your brain is like get out of here so you experience immediate panic and the way that your brain works is that when you have a plan you have a sense of where you're going, you're not panicking because you have that momentum.

33:54You have a task. You have a task. Once your operational environment shatters your plan because it becomes so new, you don't have a plan anymore, your brain goes into fear. And fear is essentially either run away or take a plan from somebody else. Because if somebody else next to me is functioning in this environment, maybe their plan works. And so that's responsible for what we call herd behavior. So when you see crowds panic and then they all start going in the same direction, that's because their brain is taking a plan from somebody else. They think someone else must know. They think someone else must know.

34:26And of course, no. Nobody knows. Nobody knows. And actually what you've got to do in that situation, you've got to make your own plan. So the question is like, how do you do that? How do you make your own plan? I got a chance to work with this guy who won the Medal of Honor who was a Green Beret. And he was talking about his first combat experience and how basically he'd been assigned to sit at the top of this truck and just keep a watch out. And the moment that bullets started coming, he panicked, ducked inside the turret and was so frightened that he actually started to bend the metal of the gun that he was supposed to be holding.

35:00And the guy in the truck who was driving it, who's more experienced, called up to him. The base was like, hey, how many trucks sure they're ahead of us. When the guy up in the tarp was panicking, you know, took a deep breath and looked forward. And he said, there's six trucks behind us. And he went down and I said, how many trucks are there behind us? And he looked up, went back. And the more he started giving these little tasks, the more he started to get his momentum back. And he said, that taught me that whenever you see someone in a panicking situation, you walk over to them calmly and basically like, what's the first step that you can take in a direction?

35:34And if you can't find that stuff yourself, I'm going to give you a little bit of a nudge and then I'm going to back off and let you find your next step. And I'm going to keep coming back to you and giving you your first step. And what we find is that once you start to get into that momentum of taking that first step, your brain starts to get back its ability to plan, to imagine, to have intuition, and starts to take those next steps. And this is a skill we try and teach now to young people, because young people exist in almost a permanent state of fight or flight. They're almost always panicking.

36:01And that the way that they're coping with that panic is they're allowing someone in their environment to tell them what to do. So they're always taking a plan from somebody else. What are my parents telling me to do? Especially if you start to get towards graduating college, graduating high school, these kinds of things. And so we just sit them down and we say, no, what's the first step that can come from within? What is that first step? And people immediately be like, well, you know, it doesn't have to be a big step. It doesn't have to solve the problem. It can be in the wrong direction, but that first step has to come from you.

36:32Or the second step is never going to emerge. You're putting yourself into action. And by being an action, the next step will become more apparent instead of being frozen. Yes. Because what is a series of actions? So one action leads to another action leads to another action. That is a plan. That is a story. So in order for your brain to tell the story of your future, you've got to tell the beginning of the story. Yeah. And so constantly getting that story process in motion. And what's important about that is each of us has our own first step. And when you're in a moment of fear because you have this herd instincts, you're constantly thinking like, what's the safe step?

37:11Another word for the safe step is what's the right step? There is no safe step in uncertainty. There's just your step. Take your step. And you see people who have the ability to do that. And a lot of folks in communities I work with, because they doubt themselves, they can only take those steps if they are using substances or something else. Because they're basically saying, I don't trust myself enough to do that. And it's really important to know that you can do that. And even if you had the assistance of a substance before, it wasn't the substance that made the first step. That was just allowing you to calm down enough to trust yourself and do it.

37:49So just trust yourself and do it next time. it's interesting so many of these things that come from the military are all applicable in everyday life for everybody yeah because life is a war but in a good way it's a war that we have the opportunity to fight for the things that we care about i mean there was something really idyllic about the early world where everything was just able to exist together but you also didn't have a purpose in that world because there wasn't anything for you to fight for and now the opportunity of life is for you to create that story and you've got to fight for space for that story and over time i think we've built these wonderful artistic communities in which we don't literally have to damage other people's stories you know because the stories we create can exist in these other spaces the space of arts technology whatever but you always have to remember that on some level you have to fight for it i mean and that's the obligation that you have as a creative is because if you don't fight for it, and I think that's why when you look at real change that happens in the world, it always comes from creatives.

38:51Because creatives know how to fight for what matters. And everyone in the society can look around and say, this is wrong, but no one will fight for it. But it's always the creatives who step forward and say, we'll fight for it. Because that's the kind of primordial thing that gets you moving. Tell me about how an arms race allows innovation not possible otherwise. A great example of this would be during the 1960s. So basically what's happening during the 1960s is you're getting the onset of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. And one of the ways in which that's manifesting itself is a race for missile technology.

39:27So both the Soviets and the Americans are trying to build bigger missiles and build more of them. And so we get into this arms race in the 1960s in which the Soviets are turning all their industrial capacity to just making essentially more and more and more nukes. And the United States is feeling drawn into that. We've got to make more missiles to keep up with the Soviets. But at a certain point, someone comes along and goes, this is nuts, right? They're making more missiles. We're making more missiles. We're spending all of our industrial capacity on missiles. Let's think more imaginatively here.

40:02What would show the Soviets that we've beaten them that doesn't involve building more missiles? Like, what's the way to show to them you can't defeat the United States that isn't just having a stockpile of 100 ,000 nukes? So they sat around and thought about this for a while. And they said, you know what it would be? It would be showing that our missiles are so powerful that we can put a missile anywhere that we want. And so we don't need a lot of missiles. Because even just with one missile, we can put it anywhere. And so I said, oh, yeah, that's a good idea. Well, how do we prove that? How do we prove that?

40:36And they sat around and thought a little bit more. And they said, well, what is the most incredible place you could put a missile that would show the Soviets that we could literally put a missile anywhere? and they said, the moon. And that was the birth of the space program. Wow. And they said, you know what? If we build a missile that goes to the moon, what that shows the Soviets is that we have the best missile technology. And so actually this tremendous act of science and exploration and hope and discovery ended up being the thing that ended the arms race, but it was powered initially from that conflict.

41:12And so really what that tells you on some core level is not that the world started out at peace and we've created war, but the world started out at war and then you create peace. And you create peace by figuring out the way to win the war without fighting the war. And I think the space program, to me, I mean, I've always, when I look at the magic of the Apollo program and the spaceship itself is so bizarre. It flies up into space and then it ejects part of itself, which like turns around and then flies backwards to the moon and then like drops a pod on the moon that then stays there. But ejects a tiny capsule that goes back up to this thing that's circling the moon.

41:51It's like so bonkers, but beautiful. And seems impossible. It seems impossible. It's certainly improbable. What do you know about PSYOPs? I know a lot about PSYOPs. So PSYOPs is Psychological Operations. and PSYOPs is a branch of U.S. Army special operations that evolved during the Cold War and the idea at the time was that the way to win the war is to tell the enemy the story that they can't win and so we've got to create this story we've got to create fear and despair in the enemy and this is something that PSYOPs took essentially from autocratic totalitarian regimes because what a totalitarian regime is always doing is it's always trying to tell you, you can't do anything, you'll die.

42:35And by doing that, it's taking away your ability to make your own story and therefore to innovate, change society. So PSYOPs started out with this fairly negative mission. And when I started to engage with them, what I started to realize is that even though that had been the predominant emphasis of PSYOPs, and so if you go to almost any kind of PSYOPs operation, if you look at almost any of the stuff that they've developed, it's very fear-based. It's very ISIS, you can't win. What's something really is actually what's much more powerful for a democratic society to tell is the true story of democracy.

43:11Rather than telling the other guy why they're bad and they can't win the war because we've got these missiles, why don't you tell them some of the most extraordinary things that have happened in democracy? And why don't you let them experience? And then if they question those stories, have them come and look and realize, no, actually that did happen. There was a Rosa Parks. And what we started to find is that those stories, even though they seemed initially to be more fragile, were far more powerful. Because what they did is they unlocked possibility as opposed to fear. And the idea behind the fear was to control the enemy.

43:44Whereas the idea behind the possibility was to turn the enemy into you, into a democracy. And so Cyprus is this very fascinating organization that exists in the shadows, that I think a lot of times is really distrusted and is seen as a tool of control and has been used as a tool of control in a lot of cases. But ultimately, in a way, is like Hollywood. Because what is Hollywood? Hollywood is this great thing that America exported to the world, which essentially makes everyone in the world think, I can do anything. And I want to be an American because the power of being an American is to be able to create your own life story.

44:16and to come in in a hard place and make yourself into a beautiful place. And so I have always felt like on a core level that Hollywood is the ultimate psyops, even though, of course, it doesn't brand itself that way. And that Hollywood fails as it often fails in the present when it's trying to lecture people, try to tell them what to think. Nobody wants to be told what to think. Nobody wants to be told what to think. No. No. But Hollywood succeeds when you go in there and you're like, wow, I didn't think that was possible, but it happened. Tell me about specific objectives versus general objectives.

44:47A specific objective would be something like, put a man on the moon. That's something you can very clearly see. A general objective would be something like, let's increase our stock price by 50%. And a general objective is the way that almost everybody thinks in business now. It's very abstract. It's not at all clear how you take a first step towards that. Whereas the specific objective is something you could explain to a child and they could write a storybook about. And we've lost our specificity when we think about the future. So if you take any basic creative writing class, the first thing I'll tell you is you should write your own story because you're more specific about it because specificity is what makes a story work.

45:29If you've ever read a story that you like, what you like about it is the details. You're like, wow, that's weird. That's interesting. That's specific. Specifics are what makes creativity work. But so much of our society is now being planned by people who think in generalities. And then I think it's because so much of our society has become dominated by ideology. So, you know, we have these political lefts and right. This is how we should do things. This is how we should do things. It's all very abstract, based on old rules. And people immediately see that and have no idea how to get there. Whereas if you say to somebody, well, you know, we need to build a healthcare system.

46:01Okay, that's a specific objective. Okay, what does that mean? Well, we know. What it means is we need to have two nurses for every 25 people. Oh, okay. And one of the things that we notice with children is children are incredibly good at thinking specifically. And school beats that out of them because school says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You've got to think more conceptually. And I think that's where a lot of us get trained out of thinking in store. Tell me about the fear box. The fear box is what hits you in combat. A kind of more common name for the fear box would be tunnel vision. But basically what happens is if you get into a combat situation, you start seeing about two inches in front of you.

46:44And this is literal. You can't actually see. Distance becomes totally out of focus? Yes. You can only see right in front of you. Myopic. Yes. And if you don't want to go into combat, but you want to experience this, you can do something like parachuting for the first time or something like that. And when you parachute for the first time, you have to look at your altimeter, your height gauge. and you'll struggle to find it because you'll be unable to see anything that's more than just in front of your nose. So this is what happens when the brain gets into this extreme moment of terrors. It goes into the box.

47:16And that's when you become very susceptible to being programmed, to losing your creativity. But the way you get out of the fear box in a combat situation is you push your eyes towards your objective. So if you have a specific objective, like we were talking about, like that hill over there, get to that hill, you push your gaze forward to that hill, and you get out of the box. If you have a general or abstract objective, like raise your quarterly profits by 25%, that doesn't exist on earth, right? Where do I look for that, right? So you stay in the fear box. And the more you push your gaze forward out of the fear box, the more your brain is able to take a first step.

47:54Because your brain starts to see, oh, that is the way. And then I can start to take that step. And your brain takes over for you because essentially 95 % of your brain is non-conscious. it's governing your body. And once your conscious brain does its work of saying, go over there, the rest of your brain is like, all right, I'll figure that out. I can figure out how to move my arms. And then all of that other intelligence starts to come online. What's a singleton? Literally a singleton is just a lone operative. So it just means a single operative who's dropped by a parachute into a jungle or something.

48:28How often does that happen? All the time. Really? It does happen all the time. I'm not allowed to comment on current world events. But are people experts at that? Yes. Yes. There's two sort of very fascinating ways in which they both select and develop singletons. So the first example of the selection process, hypothetically, if there were a group called Delta Force, they would hypothetically have a selection exercise known as the long walk. and what happens in the long walk is you are told to go to an objective on a map but you're not told how to get there and also more importantly you're never told how you're doing so when you get to that objective they'll say you got there in 10 minutes so you got there in two hours or whatever but they'll never say whether that was a fast time or a slow time they'll never say whether that was acceptable or not acceptable and they'll just give you another objective and you've got to go on to the next one and go on to the next one.

49:24What's the purpose of not telling you how you're doing? Because you've got to learn to do your best internally. I see. And what's remarkable about this is that almost everybody quits because they don't get the feedback. And if you're living a creative life, you're not going to get feedback because you're the first person doing it. Yeah. So no can tell you whether you're doing it right or not. And that's why almost everybody quits. And there are some people who are really good at it? There are some people who are really good at it. The way that these units work is they have exercises like that, which force you to kind of self-assess.

49:58And that process of self-assessing is what allows you to start to operate as a singleton. Then the next thing we discovered just through our research is that singletons have very high emotional intelligence. And what that means is they're able to read their emotions as signals to tell them what their life narrative looks like. Your ideal life narrative, if you want to have something called antifragility. So antifragility is basically the ability to grow from negative experiences. And that means that no matter how much the world resists your beauty, you're able to find an even more beautiful version of your beauty.

50:31If you have an antifragile life narrative, that means your past is integrated and your future is branching. So it looks a little bit like a trident. You've got this long stick for your past and you've got all these different possible paths you can take for your future. And the reason that that's so powerful is because it's your past that gives you your momentum. And because there are multiple paths, if any path gets X'd out, it doesn't slow you down at all. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Yeah, so you can think of it almost like river running down a mountain. That river gets its momentum from the length that it's been running.

51:06And if it hits a boulder, it can just go around that boulder, but then it'll go right back on its original course because it has all that momentum behind it. And so when your past is integrated, that means you can look back on your previous life and say that it was all for one purpose. And many people struggle to do that. And they think, oh, there are these different people that I was in my past, or these things didn't go anywhere. And they can't integrate all these different parts of their past into themselves. This particularly happens when you have a traumatic event. You'll break that traumatic event into a different narrative.

51:35And you'll pretend somehow like it didn't happen as a way of going forward in the future. And the two most common forms of traumatic event are grief and shame. So if the world does something to you, which you can't comprehend, you have grief. And you start living in two worlds. Essentially, the world in which that happened and then the world that you pretend you're living in, you're like, oh, that couldn't have actually happened. And you have to learn to integrate the two and be like, no, that did happen. Shame is the other major one. You do something that causes you terrible embarrassment and you think, I couldn't be that person.

52:03I'm gonna suppress that memory. And then you exist essentially as these two people. No, you've gotta go back and say, I have gratitude for the shame. Just like I have gratitude for the grief that's teaching me something. about the world, you then integrate it. When your past is not integrated, when it's fractured, you have no momentum. So you're unable to leave an impact on the world and you just kind of go all over the place. But when you're able to learn from grief and shame and integrate them, you become the most powerful thing on earth. So as a singleton, you've got to learn to process grief and shame rapidly.

52:34You've got to understand what they mean. And then looking forward, branching, how do you know that your future is no longer branching? When you start to get angry. Anger is the sign that your future is narrowing. Because what anger is saying is there's only one way. And I've got to act that way with violence or else it's not going to work. And a lot of people, when they get challenged on the thing they want to do, become immediately irritable, short-tempered, aggressive. No, I've got to do it this way. And you know someone is a fully functioning creative when you challenge them and there's no anger because they immediately see another path.

53:08And you challenge them again and they immediately see another path. And so the key for the singleton is to develop that emotional ability to say, am I getting angry right now? So then I've got to activate my creative force. Am I feeling flashbacks or grief and shame, in which case I'm losing my mission? I'm losing my purpose. I've got to go back. And so a lot of times you get abandoned alone on a mission, something horrible will happen. Someone might die. You might see something. You might totally screw up. You might lose a key piece of equipment. then you get lost in that moment that's fracturing your purpose you've got to go back and have gratitude for losing equipment you know what that was meant to happen that was meant to happen you got to have gratitude for the other horrible events that was meant to happen and then once you start to develop that as a singleton you become unstoppable because the more negative events that occur to you the more you turn those in that are into imagination of growth

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55:38You redefined EQ, emotional intelligence, in a new way. That's right. Tell me about that. So the old version of EQ was developed out of something called IQ. And so IQ comes about in the early 20th century because people say, we want to define intelligence. And we want to understand what general intelligence is. We want to have a universal standard that allows us to give people tests so we can determine whether or not they're really smart or not. And so all these IQ tests came out of that. And over time, people started to notice that the higher you performed on an IQ test did not necessarily translate to success in life.

56:14In fact, a lot of people would get very, very high scores in these IQ tests and be totally inept at life. And as then people started to wrestle with this problem, they started to say, well, there must be another form of intelligence out there. What could that other form of intelligence be? And then really around the 70s and 80s, people started to come together over this idea of emotional intelligence. I said, well, you know, if it's not just about IQ, which is logic, then there's this other thing called emotion. So that's got to be the key. It's got to be its emotional intelligence. And what they came up with was really a focus on what we would now call empathy.

56:45And the idea being that people who have high emotional intelligence are able to read other people's emotions very effectively and make good decisions off the basis of that. But there are two problems with EQ as an explanation. First of all, it doesn't actually work. It's been tested a lot and it doesn't work. And because something doesn't work scientifically, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's wrong. Maybe we haven't figured out how to test it. So there's always that caveat you've got to have. But we've been totally unable to validate it. And the other reason it doesn't really work is because it would require you to be psychic.

57:16Because it would suggest that somehow I have to understand your emotions. And then in order to explain how I could understand your emotions, what EQ says is, well, you understand your own emotions. and by understanding your own emotions, that allows you to read other people's emotions. But the problem with that is that we're not different anymore. And this is also the fundamental paradox of EQ is it's an attempt to get away from logic, but it is itself a logical operation because it's looking for identity. It's looking to say, I'm the same as you. And identity and equation, that's how computers think.

57:51Those are logic processes. So what we said instead is that, no, first of all, Actually, what allows you to be really good at understanding other people is not empathy and emotion. It's intuition. And it's your ability to spot what's unique about that person. Not what they have in common with you, but what's different about them. It's what you can see. Yes. And then we started to say, okay, well, if emotion isn't about me understanding you, and by the way, it would be really bizarre if our emotions had evolved to understand other people, right? It's a very counterintuitive way for things to have evolved.

58:22When we don't even understand ourselves. Yes, that's exactly right. Right. Yes, exactly. And so what we sort of say is, well, no, actually, let's think about how emotions work. When do you feel strong emotions? Well, one place you feel strong emotions is when you're experiencing a story. So if you go and watch a movie, that will trigger strong feelings in you. If you go read a book, that'll often, the story will trigger strong feelings in you. You'll get concern for the main character. Or you'll start to feel a sense of joy when they get what it is they want. So there's clearly a connection between narrative and emotion.

58:51Well, why would there be a connection between narrative and emotion? Because our emotions clearly didn't evolve so that other people could manipulate our emotions with stories. So actually our emotions must have evolved to help us monitor our own inner narrative. And what your emotions are telling you is the state of your inner narrative. So we've already talked about anger. Anger is telling you, oh, your path is narrowing. Learn when you get angry, not to get angry, but to get imaginative. or if you start to feel fear, that's your brain telling you you've lost your narrative entirely. Take a first step.

59:24And so what we did is we shifted away from this idea that emotional intelligence or EQ was a logic process that allows you to understand other people and instead into saying it's your most profound way of understanding yourself. In general, is logic too small? Yes, absolutely. Well, because how does logic work? The whole idea behind logic. It's a formula. It's a formula, yes. It's a formula. And in order to come up with a formula, you have to come up with a huge amount of data. And then that data has to be frozen in time because a formula can only work if nothing changes. And so logic is amazing and incredible in environments that are stable and transparent.

1:00:08And nothing is that. And nothing is that, yes. Well, I would say that. A data scientist would say, well, there've got to be some things. But yeah, I mean, nothing living is that. Let's put it that way. Tell me about dedicating yourself to dumb choices. One of the things we've been talking about is how important it is for you as an artist, as a creative, to find your own path. To find the way that only you can live. And so no one can tell you that. And the more you start to go out on your own path, the more you start to get self-conscious and insecure about it. And the more that starts to kind of pull you back.

1:00:44And so you've got to sort of say, well, okay, what is guiding me in those formative moments? What does it allow me to step ahead? And what we noticed with a lot of creatives is they have this thing called dumb pride. And dumb pride is when you do something that everybody else thinks is really stupid. And they're like, why did you do that? And you look back at it and you're like, I'm kind of proud that I did that. And then people say to you, well, what if it had gone totally wrong? And you're like, I still think I would have. Yes, it didn't go wrong. That's right. But I think I still would have done it, right?

1:01:18Because on some level, it wasn't about the consequence. It was about the action. It was about the process. It was about, that was authentic to me. Yeah, you were doing the right thing for yourself in that moment. That's exactly right. And so the story I can tell about this in terms of my own life is when I was a little kid, I'd just come to this country and we were all taken out to the school bus to go on this school trip together. And we got on the bus and there were no seatbelts on the bus. and as a young child, I felt very strongly that there should always be a seatbelt. And so I told them I wasn't going to sit down without a seatbelt.

1:01:47And they said to me, no, no, no, no, no, it's fine. It's fine. Don't worry, don't worry. The bus driver's like, I'm not going to crash the bus. I'm not going to crash the bus. It'll be totally fine. It'll be totally fine. I was like, well, that may be the case, but I still want a seatbelt. And the bus driver goes, okay. And he goes and he gets the teacher on. The teacher comes and tells me, it'll be fine. Please just take your seat. We're going to go. And I refused to sit down. So you refused to sit down because there was no seatbelt. There was no seatbelt. Yeah, yeah. And again, I mean, as an adult, that's not a choice I would have made.

1:02:10I would have just sat down. I've sat down on plenty of buses without seatbelts as an adult. But as a child, that felt like I needed the seatbelt. Yeah, it was a line you weren't willing to cross. That's right, yeah. I understood. Yeah. Eventually, they brought the principal out. The principal came out and was like, you've got to sit down. You're delaying all the other kids. And how would you feel if I called your parents and they heard what a nuisance you were being, how disruptive you were being? And I just stood there. I was like four years old and I just kept standing there. And eventually they took me off the bus and they put me in the principal's office and I had to sit there for the rest of the day until, you know, the bus came back and my parents took me out.

1:02:45And even now, as I think back on that moment, I know how proud I am of that kid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I know that like, that's not what I would do now as an adult normally. I would sit down and then I remind myself. I guess it depends on the situation. You can't know. You can't know. That's true. Yes. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I do know that I need to be reminded of that child at moments to be reminded of who I really am. And when I think back on that child, I think the thing I'm most proud about is that that child was standing up to a school. Yes. That was essentially saying, we have a system here and you as a student are interrupting the system.

1:03:18And as opposed to doing what a school should have done, which is, okay, you as a student are uncomfortable. Let's figure out a way to make you comfortable. They were like, let's force you into the system. Even now, that's what I spend so much of my time thinking about, is how do we actually make school change as opposed to have school damage to kids? So that's an example of dumb pride. And everyone, particularly if you don't have one you can think of in your last five years of life, if you just go back to when you were three, four, five, six years old, you will have those moments where you did those things that everyone else thinks was silly.

1:03:51Well, you know, Rick, I have to be honest. You made my childhood possible. I didn't tell this part of the story. I mean, this maybe isn't something you want to include. I mean. So I come here from England and had an accent. It was a very sort of funny English child. And my mom hated America and always wanted us to return. And so I was raised in this slightly odd environment in which all my friends were older girls and went back all the time to England and was trained to think of myself as English and so on and so forth. And as a result, once I started going to school in America, I was totally alienated.

1:04:25from all of my classmates. You know, I'd grown up with books and older girls, all this kind of stuff. I didn't know that football existed, like American football, any of these kinds of things. And so I was just like this constant outsider the whole time. And then I discovered rap music. The first album I ever bought was Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions. Amazing. Yeah, no, and it totally changed my life. And I suddenly, really for the first time, felt it was okay to be different. And the amount of emotional support that I took from those albums. And I have these crazy memories. I ended up doing high school in Philadelphia.

1:05:00And so I was 13 years old. And there was this old club there called the Trocadero. And I remember reading that Public Enemy was going to be there. And of course, like I had to go. My parents were like, what is this music? What are you talking about? None of my friends like that kind of music. And so I just got on the train, went downtown, walked with Trocadero. So, and I'm like, I mean, first of all, I'm pretty sure I was the only 13-year-old there, period. But I was also, of course, the only white kid there. I was standing in line, and they frisked you all when you went in. And I remember I got in front of the line, and the guy was like, you can go in.

1:05:35You don't need to be frisked. And I was like, oh, okay, great. And I just remember how welcoming people were. Because I was really scared, and especially when we were getting frisked for the weapons. I was like, come on, God, what is this going to be like in there? No, it was just incredible. Because you knew the right place to be. I was always accepted in places where I didn't look like I belonged because I was there for the same reason everybody else was. I loved what was happening. There was a camaraderie in that world. Everyone there was an outsider. In the early days of hip-hop, it was hated.

1:06:06Yeah. I mean, I remember one of the things that I used to just love is because I just memorized all the lyrics almost immediately. And I used to just say these lyrics all the time. And then I was always constantly having them in my head. but then you would go to the concert and then you would actually get a chance to you realize like everyone around you it's kind of like rapping along too and just a sense of community from that those songs it was a hopeful anger yeah that's really what i felt about it and that really connected with where i was at that time in my life so that's another way of saying that a lot of these things we're talking about now were really launched on an almost emotional level yeah by the sense that i was like you can do something interesting with your life How did you become who you are?

1:06:43I think probably when my sister died. How old were you? I was about 10 years old. Yeah, and up to that point, I'd always been a really quiet, thoughtful person who felt very connected to life. When my sister died, I was very close to her. She was four years old, and it totally broke apart my family. Was that your first experience of any death? Yeah, and I actually have very vivid memories of the morning it happened. My bedroom was next to hers. We had this really weird old house that my dad, my dad is a really charming, fascinating guy, but totally out of touch with reality. When we moved into town, he just wanted to buy the biggest house he could afford.

1:07:25And so we bought this house. It was just like totally collapsing. And I was at like one wing of the house with my sister and my parents were like the other wing of the house. You know, basically what happened that morning is, you know, I woke up and I was always woke up first and I went into my sister's room and, you know, she was lying in bed and she was dead. And I just, I couldn't like, I couldn't process it. And then I heard my parents coming down the hall to kind of wake us up and I panicked because in my mind I thought they would think that maybe I was responsible. You know, it's like a totally crazy thing.

1:07:56I ran back into my room and I hid and then I just, the next day I heard my mother scream and all the rest of it. And anyway, out of that, what happened is I developed a kind of a tragic relationship to life. And I started to sort of struggle with that for a long time. And then I sort of rediscovered the beauty again. But it was a kind of a beauty that I discovered in the tragedy. And ever since then, I've just always been fascinated. Because to me, creatives are people who appreciate the reality of life on a fundamental level. And to appreciate the reality of life, you have to understand that there's terrible darkness in that.

1:08:28You know, there's things we don't understand that are beyond us, that are beyond the human, that kind of shatter you. But then you take that and you make that into beauty. And you have to be open to both sides of that. And so that was sort of when I started on this journey to hang out with people that are more creative than me. Would you say fear of death was a big issue after that? Fear of other people dying. So I don't have any fear of my own death. And one of the things that, like, if you look over my career, it's really weird. So I'm a very uncoordinated person. I have, like, very limited physical ability.

1:08:54But I'm always, like, jumping off waterfalls or jumping out of helicopters. and it's always because I'm hanging out with people who are jumping off of portfalls and helicopters, so I just follow them off. So I have no fear of my own death, but I'm always terrified of harm happening to other people and it made it very hard for me to become a parent and still is very hard for me to be a parent.

1:09:15There's a long tradition of reading sacred text slowly, allowing each word to settle, echo, and reveal meaning over time. Rather than rushing to conclusions, this practice invites reflection, listening, and attention. For centuries, this repetition has been used to stay close to wisdom, not by studying words as information, but by receiving them as something lived and experienced over and over again. This tradition is known as Lectio Divina. Emerging in early monastic life, it engages scripture through four gentle movements, reading, reflection, repetition, and rest. A short passage is read, a single phrase is held.

1:10:16Silence becomes part of the practice, creating space for insight to surface naturally. Lectio 365 brings that ancient rhythm into the present moment. Designed for modern life, it offers brief, guided, scriptural reflections throughout the day to begin with intention, pause at midday, and wind down at night. The readings are less about information gathering and more for returning to wisdom again and again, letting familiar words meet new moments. A modern way to keep biblical wisdom close, quietly present, steady, and alive within everyday life. Lectio 365 is a free resource. Find inspiration there, now and always.

1:11:15Learn more at lectio365.com.

1:11:29What is a naturalist? A naturalist is the original biologist. it used to be that the way people who studied life studied life is they would just sit for a long time and watch for things observe nature they would observe nature and they would see things that surprise them and then they would say well where is that going and they would start to learn the story of these individual life forms and the most famous naturalist really is charles Darwin. I mean, Charles Darwin goes around the world, sees all these interesting birds on the Galapagos, various finches, and sees other things, and, you know, comes up with these new ideas about how the world could work.

1:12:15What happens in the 20th century is that nationalism gets wiped out by basically industrial science. What's industrial science? So industrial science is basically what happens when scientists get rewarded for publishing more papers. So it starts to become, oh, like, how do we manufacture more science? How do we do it faster? And then what they start to think is, well, the way we do it faster is instead of spending a long time observing individual interesting things, we start to use statistics. We start to develop this mathematical approach of vacuuming up data and then using a calculator to tell us what the average is.

1:12:59And when you use math, you're using logic. You don't have to learn the story of each individual place you're going to. You don't have to treat it with curiosity and care. You instead say, everything in the world operates on math. So as long as I understand math, I can just plug all the data into it, and that'll tell me the truth. So stars operate on math. Emotions operate on math. Fish operate on math. And so you get the rise of this industrial science really starting in the later 20th century. And what has happened now is there's been this spectacular explosion of scientific articles. And there are literally millions of scientific articles.

1:13:35And we don't understand the world any better than we did before this stuff happened. Maybe less well. Maybe less well. Yeah, exactly. And so what I started to wonder is if it was possible to go back to be a natural historian and to just spend a lot of time dwelling and just observing things that interest you. And that's how I got my start. I've had the chance to basically hang out and just study creatives. And a lot of times I'll just sit there. And then, of course, they get uncomfortable initially. Like, what are you doing? Your next book could be How Math Destroyed Science. I would love to write that book.

1:14:07I would love to read that book. Yes, I will write that book. Yeah. Do you think of the natural world as existing and math is an overlay explanation of what exists? Or is it the other way around? Is there math and the world follows its rules? No. The first way of saying it was correct. Yeah. Yeah, math is a way we have of explaining something. And it can be a very useful tool. So math is a great way of explaining gravity, for example. And that just helps make things simpler. If you're building a bridge, it's simpler if you have a bunch of mathematical rules to help you know that the bridge isn't going to fall over.

1:14:42And so math is a tool. It's a very useful thing. But the moment you start to confuse it with reality, math is equations. Things that are equations exist at the same time as each other. What cannot exist at the same time as another thing? A cause and an effect. Cause has to come before an effect. So causes and effects are narratives. They're the basic way the world works. What math does is math says, no, no, no, everything has to exist at the same time. Frozen in time. Frozen in time. So it eliminates your ability to think in causes and effects. And as a result, it stops you from gaining a deeper understanding of what's under the surface.

1:15:18It's all just correlations and patterns and surfaces. And what's important about the exploration of life is you're always chasing a cause you can never find. Like, this is how life works. There's always a deeper story beneath the story, but you have to go for the story. And so bad science hooks onto a cause and says this is the cause for all time. But good science is always chasing deeper and deeper causes. And math doesn't chase causes at all. You talk about reading differently in the book, how you were taught to read versus how you choose to read. Yeah. So what we're taught to do in school is interpret literature.

1:15:56So this is the word that always comes up. How do you interpret? Interpret is another logic function. It was defined back in a text called the Organon by this guy Aristotle, who's the founder of symbolic logic. Aristotle invented the three functions and or not that run all computing. So all computer chips, including the Apollo guidance computer and all AI, run essentially on either NOR or NAND circuit architecture. And that is what Aristotle defined more than 2 ,000 years ago. A branch of that is known as hermeneutics or interpretation. So computers can interpret texts. Another way of thinking about interpretation is it's translating from one language to another.

1:16:33So translating from binary into ASCII or something like that. Ever since the early 20th century, we were taught to apply interpretation to books. And we were taught is that books are made of words. Those words have meanings. You interpret those meanings to develop themes. The person who developed this, his name is I.A. Richards, who was a professor at Cambridge, not at Harvard. He developed something called close reading. So if you ever took a class, you spent a lot of time staring at a poem and were told to come up with like the symbolic structure of it or something like that. So that's how we're taught to read, and that's how a computer reads.

1:17:09And when you read that way, first of all, you're always anxious because you think that there's got to be a right answer that you're missing, and the teacher's going to tell you that you're doing it wrong, and so on and so forth. Because anytime you're in a logical system, there's always a true answer. That's how logic works. And I.A. Richards famously said that this will finally solve the problem of what literature means. Well, we'll develop this, and there will be no more discussions. But when you're a child, how do you read literature? You read it imaginatively. You put yourself in the place of the character.

1:17:35You explore the world. Even after the book is closed, you continue exploring the world. You role-play the character. You say, what would that character do in my life? What would I do in that character's life? These are all these narrative processes. These are the things that happen when any kid goes and watches Star Wars for the first time. They don't interpret Star Wars. They say, oh, I want to use a lightsaber. What would I do with a lightsaber? You know, what would it be if I was Darth Vader? So they engage in all these totally natural processes that are wiped out in a school. And if you even say something basic in a literature class, like, oh, I liked this character, you'll get mocked.

1:18:09You don't like the character. You have to interpret what the character is saying. How is this character teaching us to critique structures of power? You know, all this kind of stuff that happens in school, as opposed to using your imagination and saying, what story would I write with this character? The origin of all Shakespeare's writing, I mean, Shakespeare, one of the great writers, it's all fan fiction. He read the Greeks, the Romans, and then he wrote all of his early plays, like Comedy of Errors and Titus Andronica, so what not. These are all fan fiction riffs on his favorite authors. What we should be doing is we should be having everyone in school read their favorite poems and write a poem.

1:18:45Read a story, write a story. And then teachers will say, well, you can't do that because you can't grade the story. And of course, the purpose of school is to grade everybody and tell them what their numerical value is. And then you have to say to them, it's because it can't be graded that it matters. And ultimately, the person who grades it most is the student, because you know you've got the student if they write something for you and turn in and they come back to you five minutes and say, I can make it better. That's when you know you've got them. If they turn in to you and they don't care, you haven't got them.

1:19:15Tell me about hacking the test to get into your PhD program. Okay. So I was working in this neuroscience lab. I become convinced that the human brain thought in story. I'd seen that all these people I admired had read Shakespeare and I became convinced that I'd got to get into the Yale English Department to study Shakespeare because they were the experts at Shakespeare. And this is going to be the next path of my story. And I confronted a lot of obstacles on this plan. But one of the major obstacles that I confronted was this thing called the GRE, which is this test you have to take to prove that you have the requisite knowledge in order to succeed in graduate school.

1:19:54And I really, you know, never taken any literature classes in undergrad. You know, I'd taken a few like everybody had and whatnot, but I hadn't seriously studied. And I just took a glance at the GRE and I realized it covered every work of literature apparently written ever in English. And I thought to myself, oh my goodness, like, what do I do here? And because I've been trained in science and because one of the reasons that I've been successful as a young person is because I did think like a computer and I was very good at standardized tests and I was very good at math, is I immediately approached the GRE, which was itself a standardized test, as a logic puzzle.

1:20:30And so I got all of the existing copies of the GRE, and I didn't read any of them, but I looked at the answers for all the questions. And then I took those answers and I broke them out, and I memorized plot summaries of all of those works. And then I went into the actual GRE, and I got basically a perfect score. Wow. And it actually was kind of a wow, because I remember when I got to Yale, they sat me down and they said, we know you must be a genius because no one has ever done so well on that test. And I said, oh, thank you very much. And then I got into my first literature class and I was completely incompetent because of course I'd hack the test.

1:21:05So you were good at taking tests. You weren't good at literature. That's right. That's right. That's right. And in general, that's actually the story of my life is I've always been very good at taking tests and I've always been very bad at life. We talked earlier about being anxious. Usually people who are anxious don't do well on tests? I think for me, tests have always been more of like a game. So it actually makes me anxious of things that I take seriously. And for me, tests have always been this way of pleasing power and authority. It's a little bit like a ritual, you know? And so I don't get stressed about them because I don't feel like I'm personally invested in them.

1:21:36But what I get anxious about is so when I have a conversation with someone, the reason I'm socially anxious or the reason that I have a hard time, I have to do a lot of public speaking now and it gives me terrible panic, is because I think there's nothing more sacred than another person. And I really feel like a real sense of using that person's time well, and that it's a gift that they've given me their time and you're engaging this moment to talk. And that puts an enormous amount of psychological pressure on me because I really think to myself, like, what if I'm not being interested because I'm trying to give you my best self and trying to do my best.

1:22:06So for me, tests and things like that have never caused me that much anxiety because they're fake, they're artificial, but things that really matter to me caused me terrible stress. Tell me the story of Renaissance from the book. After Aristotle wrote his big book on symbolic logic, which would eventually become modern AI, that book was essentially forgotten or marginalized in Western Europe for really about 1 ,500 years until the early 12th century. And then it was rediscovered by these monks because these monks were running all the schools in the Middle Ages. And the monks rediscovered Aristotle and his symbolic logic, his computer thinking, and they thought to themselves, this is the mind of God because it's pure reason.

1:22:59And they thought to themselves, if we could master symbolic logic and we could use it to interpret the Bible, then we would ourselves be saved. And so essentially what they wanted to do is they wanted to build a computer trained on the data of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. And so that became the project of the Middle Ages, was to develop that system of logic, that truth system. And the individuals who did this became known as the Scholastics. And Thomas Aquinas might be one of the sort of most famous individuals. And famously, that system totally collapsed. And it collapsed in the same way that in the 20th century, we've had things like postmodernism and poststructuralism.

1:23:44These all grew out of these logic systems that were essentially turned against themselves because logic failed to produce truth. And so then logic was used to break logic. In the case of the 16th and 17th century, there were these skeptics. There were both the academic skeptics and the Pyranists. And you don't need to know too much about the difference between them. But basically, the academic skeptics went around just pointing out that stuff didn't make sense, you know, in terms of logic. And the Pyrenists were much more rigorous, and they actually used logic to break itself. And so basically, logic started to collapse in this period of time.

1:24:13And this is when you get the Reformation. Martin Luther comes along, and the whole system starts to collapse. And what happens in these moments is there's both a sense of terror, but a sense of possibility. The possibility is coming because the old system is breaking down, which is really exciting. But the terror is coming because people have spent their whole lives only thinking in logic. And in fact, they've only freed themselves from the old system by using logic against itself. They haven't developed a new way. And we're in that moment right now where we've all been trained on logic. We see that it's not working, but what's the new way?

1:24:49And back then, the new way turned out to be the Renaissance. And what happened in the Renaissance is you had individuals like Shakespeare, but also like Da Vinci, Michelangelo, all these individuals, Machiavelli, who got back in touch with intuition and imagination and thinking a story. And they said, actually, that's the way that you live and create a beautiful world. Not by trying to build a computer that knows the mind of God, but instead by making new possibilities. And so that's why art became the driving force of the Renaissance, because it was artists who first rediscovered that creative power.

1:25:25And then that creative power in the Renaissance then went on to drive science, which is where you get the scientific revolution. And then also went on to drive engineering. We get the Industrial Revolution and, of course, business, which is why we get the Mercantile Revolution and wealth and all these kinds of things that ended up kind of essentially sustaining the United States through its early years. And all that came about by rejecting logic for imagination. And then what happened later, we've got something called the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment went back to logic. If you ever go back and look at Enlightenment art, it's very boring because it's all very geometric and everything has to be in the right place.

1:25:57And according to the Enlightenment, all stories have to occur in exactly the same time that they're performed. You get these very bad, very tedious plays. And then the romantics came back again. The romantics shattered the Enlightenment. They said, no, actually what matters is emotion and spontaneity in the individual. And so there's always been a seesawing back and forth. And the important thing to always remember is not that logic is bad or wrong. Because I think a lot of people, when they start to see the limits of logic, they start to think, oh, got to get rid of it. No, no. Logic is a beautiful thing when it's handled by a romantic.

1:26:27It's a tool. Yes, exactly. And now we're in this moment where AI is destroying the school system, totally destroying it because AI can answer the test better than any human. But AI isn't going to replace intelligence. And so what we've got to do is we've got to take this moment to understand this is a call for creativity to come back and imagination to come back and for our own new renaissance. But it's challenging for people because people can only think in the old logical way. And when it doesn't work, they despair. Tell me how story is used in the Bible. On the most profound level, story is used to help us explore the origin of life.

1:27:11And what you're always trying to do with the story is both go forwards and go backwards. And so when you're reading the Bible, what you're always doing is you're throwing your mind forward to the apocalypse, to heaven, but you're also throwing your mind backward to Genesis. Creation. To creation. And what's fascinating when you read the Bible, and this created a lot of problems when people started to realize this in the late 19th century, is that there are actually multiple stories of creation in the Bible. The world essentially gets created twice. Adam and Eve get created twice. So in the first story of creation, Adam and Eve are created together.

1:27:52And the second story, Eve is created out of Adam. And those are both in the Old Testament. Yes. Those are both in, literally if you go back and you can go read the first book of Genesis, you'll read both of those stories. And you can always tell someone who, in my opinion, is a fraudulent priest, because they'll tell you, no, no, no, no, those stories are actually the same story. They're the same story. And actually, you know, the second story is just maybe adding and details to the first story? No, they're actually totally different stories. They're completely different. They have completely different understandings of how the world works.

1:28:21There's also different stories of the flood in there. The ark is built twice. And you can go back in time, just like the Greek myths were retold multiple times. These stories were told multiple times over time. And we can go back actually before the Hebrew Bible and find those stories in Babylon, in Acadia, in the Sumerian past. When this was discovered in the late 19th century, it created a crisis. Because at that time, the Christian church, all its various branches, had based itself on the Hebrew Bible. And it said, this is the beginning of time. Well, if it turns out the Hebrew Bible is itself based on earlier stories, what happens to our stories?

1:29:01Now, the answer you could say is, well, it just shows, right, that we're getting deeper and deeper and deeper into the story, right? There's no problem here. But instead they panicked and they said, no, no, no, we've got to figure out how to shore this up. We've got to figure out how to explain this. And out of that came something known as comparative mythology. And comparative mythology is the idea. It was pioneered by someone, Dr. Fraser, who's a Scottish writer. He wrote something called The Golden Bough. And he said, actually, all stories that all cultures tell are the same story. It's a story of an individual sacrificing themselves so that the world can live.

1:29:36He said, this is a story of Christ, and this is also the story of the Fisher King, and this is a story of everything. So he said, actually, really, we don't have to worry about this because all stories are the same. And so even though it seems like there are these older stories which are different, and then the Hebrew Bible is also different, no, no, no, no, they're actually all the same story. And out of that came Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey and the idea that there's a monomyth. The hero's journey is a very powerful story, and we should, of course, tell it to the extent that it is powerful and that it's useful, but it was created as an attempt essentially to shore up the discovery that if you read the Bible correctly, what it's inviting you to do is to keep going back, not to try and find the true story, but to realize there are more stories of the beginning.

1:30:21And the more you trace those stories back, the closer you get to God. And there are more stories to be told in the future. And this is the kind of thing I think which people miss about, say, for example, science, or something like that. People often think that science has to be true or religion has to be true, or they think that science is debunking the Bible and so on and so forth. What science is, is it's the attempt to establish everything that can be known so that we can more fully embrace the mystery. And there's a lot of people who, because of their faith or their beliefs, find science inconvenient and they deny it.

1:30:57They're actually denying faith. They're denying mystery. because actually faith occurs when you've extinguished all the things that can be explained. And instead of existing in a fake state of mystery, where you pretend that something hasn't been explained, you exist in a true state of mystery, where you're like, oh, we actually do have an answer for that, but we don't have an answer for a thing before that. And I think that's really the invitation of the Bible, is when you read Genesis, not to say, well, which of these two stories is correct or how do we synthesize them into a single story but no what's the mystery before it's great how'd you come to write the new book i wrote primal intelligence because of this experience with special forces and i had asked the army when we started doing the research if it was okay for me to start to share the information and being the army they said well of course they said we're a public institution.

1:31:55Feel free to share any of the information you want unless insofar as it compromises our mission. And they were very generous. I didn't have a security clearance. And technically, there were also things I could put in the book that I didn't put in the book that I just kind of tried to restrain myself on. And then began this really long journey for me to try and explain to people who hadn't gone through this process this totally different way of understanding their mind. And part of what's weird about the book is that it's trying to put you back in touch with the way you already knew your mind was.

1:32:25So your mind started out this way, and it knows that it's this way, but it's - Got trained out of you. It's got trained out of you, yeah. And to go back, you have to start trusting yourself over trusting the system. You have to stop looking at what you're being told and instead be like, no, but actually based on my own primary experience, this is how my brain works. It's interesting that the government is teaching people that. Yes. Well, the paradox of our government and the paradox of the United States Army is it's going in both directions at the same time. I mean, it's incredibly systems driven, but at the core of both the army and I think the US government is a realization that we can only survive with the individual.

1:33:02And so almost out of self-preservation, they're constantly going back and recycling that because war to win requires you to unleash ingenuity. So as much as the army always wants to program soldiers, it has to create space for individuals. how did you find all of the tangential examples in the book to support the theories yeah when people read the book they'll see it's like vincent vanco and like einstein and clauswitz all these kinds of things are in there those are actually not the evidence for any of the claims that i'm making i mean the evidence they're examples they're examples yeah but they're great examples because they help us understand the theories well that's what i hope yeah but i don't i don't want people to think that i'm an expert in einstein or an expert in murray career or anything like that.

1:33:46All these theories are basically built out of my understanding of the brain and special forces. But what I started to do is I started to say to myself, I got into this project because I realized that Shakespeare was really powerful. I bet if I start paying close attention to other folks who have really read Shakespeare, that I'm going to start to find all these really interesting examples. And it turned out, in fact, that was what happened, is that all these folks had read Shakespeare, they'd had their intuition and imagination strengthened. And so once I started to follow that particular historical track, it became very easy to find examples for the book.

1:34:17And the twist at the end of the book is that you've been reading this whole book, which is full of all these apparently different examples, but they're all really just Shakespeare. Tell me about Benjamin Graham and what he did differently to what the experts believed in the time. Benjamin Graham is part of a whole tradition of investing. And one of the things that I started to get fascinated with in the book is how investors work in volatile markets. Because I'm very bad with money. I'm the last person you want to trust with any money that you have. But there are people out there who are really good at making financial decisions in markets.

1:34:54And that's a real test of your common sense. If you're someone who's always able to know when to buy and when to sell a stock, what essentially is happening is you're being able to gauge volatility appropriately. And so I started to go back through the history of investing to figure out, well, who are the folks that figured this out? The first person to figure it out was this guy, Benjamin Grant, who ended up becoming a mentor of Warren Buffett. And what Grant decided is that people were going wrong when they were trying to predict the future. So if you talk to many people who are just casual investors, they're trying to predict whether a stock will go up or a stock will go down.

1:35:30And the thing about the future is you can't predict it. I mean, the future is only predictable if today is the same as yesterday, in which case you're not predicting the future, right? You're just existing at the same time. So there's actually literally no way to predict. Modern economic theory is a total hoax. There should not be a Nobel Prize given out for modern economics because it's based on this fallacy that somehow you can predict how markets are going to work. And markets are inherently contested spaces driven by innovation, so there's no way to predict them. But we have all these economic theories that are essentially trying to tell governments how to invest in the future, how to run their economies and so forth, which are all based on a total fundamentalist misunderstanding of how life works.

1:36:08They're based on the idea that life is logical, not biological. What did Benjamin Graham do differently? What Benjamin Graham did differently is that he said, well, you can't predict the future, but what you can do is you can determine how valuable something is. So actually what I'm going to do is I'm going to go around to companies and I'm going to figure out which companies have a certain value. But according to the stock market, they're undervalued. They're undervalued. Yeah. So I'm going to start buying things that I think are undervalued. And then I'm just going to hold on to them for a long period of time.

1:36:34Because over time, no matter whether things go up or down, eventually, that value is going to be realized. And so he developed that method of investing. And he passed that on to Warren Buffett. And Warren Buffett, of course, makes a lot of money off of that. But Warren Buffett also innovated that in various ways. And one of the ways that Warren Buffett innovated it, which I think was fascinating, is he said, you know, I'm not just investing in a company's value. I'm investing in the people in the company. And I want to go talk to those people. And in particular, I want to see if they have common sense.

1:37:01Because if the people who are running the company have a high degree of common sense, then I know that no matter what happens in the future, they're going to make smart decisions. And so Warren Buffett would invest in companies. And he had no idea whatsoever about anything they were making. But he sat down. He would ask them simple questions. So for example, he would say to them, what would happen if this radical change happens in six months? What are you going to do? You know, what if all the satellites fall out of the sky? What if there's a war with Taiwan, whatever? And if they said, oh, that's okay.

1:37:29We've got a contingency plan for that. He would say, you're fired. Because how could you possibly have a contingency plan for something new, right? Whereas if they would pause and say, you know what? I hadn't thought about that. But here's something that we could do. He would say, that's great. You've got high common sense. I trust you. So he would do little things like that. Test them and see how good they were at essentially activating story thinking. And he would invest in story thinkers, people who had common sense, because that was the real value. That was the value investment. Do we know how Shakespeare changed from ordinary to extraordinary?

1:38:01It was a period of time where he was an ordinary writer, unsuccessful. Yeah. What changed? So I got to be honest with you, this is my theory of how he changed. So if you get a different Shakespeare scholar. Well, you're saying it's your theory. So what we do know for certain is that Shakespeare started out a very ordinary writer. So you go back and read Shakespeare's early plays like Henry VI or Titus Andronicus or what have you. They are incredibly formulaic. They're pretty much like most of the other plays that are occurring at the time. They don't have any of the sort of distinctive or interesting things that occur in his later plays.

1:38:36There's nothing particularly special or exceptional about them. And then suddenly, when he writes a play called Richard III, everything changes. and Richard III, we think, was originally another one of his rip-offs. And in particular, he was ripping off someone called Christopher Marlowe. And Christopher Marlowe is really one of those undiscovered geniuses. I mean, there are folks who know about him, but you don't really talk about him in high school. Christopher Marlowe pioneered the idea of the innovator on stage. And so Christopher Marlowe read Machiavelli and he said, wouldn't it be extraordinary?

1:39:15if we put an innovator on stage. So instead of the plays that existed in the Middle Ages, which were morality plays, and in a morality play, if someone does something good, they get rewarded. If somebody does something bad, they get punished. Marlo said, what if I have a hero who isn't punished or rewarded, but who makes a new future? And so the first example he did of this is Tamerlane. And Tamerlane is an example of someone who's born into poverty and then essentially makes an empire. And in the original version of the telling of this story, whenever it was told in the Middle Ages, they would say, Tamerlane became great, but because he was a bad person, he died in a horrible manner.

1:39:55And so they would tell in this tragic structure. Marlon just tells the part to the rise and he ends the play. And so you just have this moment of Tamerlane being like, I am the greatest. And then he did a series of other plays that were like this, that were just incredibly, so they were themselves innovative and that they broke from the earlier stories that had been told, but they were focused around innovators. And so Shakespeare looked at this and Shakespeare, of course, being a terrible plagiarist early in his career, not having terribly many ideas of his own, said to himself, I'm going to steal this idea about being an innovator and I'm going to write a play about someone who kind of breaks all the rules.

1:40:27And that person he chose was Richard III. And in order to be an innovator, what you essentially have to be is someone who makes new plots. Because a plot is a plan. You've got to be a plotter. You've got to be a schemer. And so Shakespeare had to inhabit the mind of this character, Richard III, as he overthrew the existing government. And he came up with all of these schemes to suppress the rebels who were rising against him. And he summoned this kind of diabolical imagination to create a path through life that no human had ever stepped before. And in the process of fighting this character, Shakespeare unlocked his own ability to be a plotter.

1:41:06He essentially became Richard III. He said to himself, wait a minute, I can do the same thing. I can create a new story for myself. I can create new stories for my audiences. And so you see from that moment on it's this radical shift in Shakespeare. Some of those plays that he writes later, like Henry V, are essentially about innovators. Henry V goes on to become the model, of course, of Die Hard. And sort of all of these grug stories that we now like to tell ourselves because Henry V is - Anti-heroes. Anti-heroes, exactly. He goes on to invent the modern romantic comedy in Much Ado About Nothing, where you've got like these feisty female characters.

1:41:41He goes on to write, create existential tragedy in places like King Lear. Of course, Hamlet is essentially the beginning of the modern novel. But that was the moment when he had to get into the mind of a plotter and think of what it was like to be someone who's changing the world. That's where it seemed to click for him. I wrote down a line from the book, mastering arcane formulas that have no power outside of the classroom.

1:42:08Tell me about that line. Yeah, that line came from when I got to college and was totally disillusioned. And so basically, college gives you the illusion of power because you're taught by all these professors who, in the context of college, are incredibly powerful because they're engaged in these ritual acts that have no actual magical function, but they take them very seriously. And so, you know, the longer you stay in school, the longer you learn to sort of ape and mimic these professors doing these things. But then the more time you spend in school, the more incompetent you become at life. At a certain point, you start to realize this is happening and you face this like weird choice.

1:42:43You say, well, do I go all in on the system? And do I basically say that I'm gonna try and get myself a job as like a banker or something where I keep engaging in the role play, but I get alienated and alienated from my true self? Or am I gonna do the courageous thing and essentially drop out and do my own school? And the pressure against that is so tremendous. Kids today, unlike previous generations, I don't think dropping out of college is such a big deal for previous generations because they're not going to go to college. But now it's almost become the sign that you have intelligence. It's the fact you have a college degree.

1:43:15And so I think a way to think about university is it's fake magic. You know, it's a Hogwarts that doesn't work. You know, it's all these professors engaged in these elaborate incantations, word stuff. It's cosplay. It's cosplay, yeah. And you know that on a deep level, but you're too scared to be the person who calls it out because you don't believe that you have the ability to find the real magic, but you do. Yeah, I like that you called it out in the book. Thank you. Tell me about stories.

1:43:52I started out working in a neurophysiology lab, like the science lab, basically. And we were like studying the brain and how it works. And I was just totally fascinated by the brain because I was fascinated by other people's brains and how brilliant they were and just the history of how creative people were able to imagine art and science and technology that never existed before and then somehow make it real. And I just kind of wanted to understand that power in the human brain. And so I went into the science. How did you end up in science? Was that a lifelong passion? No. So what's weird about that is that my dad came here actually because he couldn't make a living in England.

1:44:25And so we ended up having this kind of like very sort of like itinerant lifestyle when we first got here. And like all immigrants, what are you going to be if you're the child of an immigrant, you're going to be a doctor. And so I was like very talented in school at science and math and stuff like that. And so I was fast-tracked to do that, even though I didn't find it that interesting. Anyway, I got to university and started working in a science lab. And it just seems like you would think that's the fast-track to understanding the brain, just to like pull out a brain and then look at it. But it turns out, of course, you learn nothing from looking at a brain.

1:44:52It's totally easy. It's like all the biological sciences are less, teachers less than artists do. But anyway, I was in that lab and I was like, we have this theory of the brain that it's like a computer and that it like has all this information and it's processing all this information. I was like, that's not how my brain works at all. Like my brain thinks in stories. And I thought a lot back to when I was a child and how the most fascinating moments of my life have been when I encountered a new story. And then I realized that I always wanted this power myself to be able to create a story. And I always thought that was like the real gift.

1:45:20And I sort of wanted to understand that. And what I started slowly starting to realize is that the human brain thinks in story and the unique power of the human brain, which is kind of a gift, is the ability to come up with a story that's never been told before. And all of us have that, that power and that possibility. And that comes to us from life. If you look out in life, if you go into a forest, no two trees are the same, right? Everything branches. Same thing with stories, no two stories are the same, they all branch. And so I wanted to understand that. And that's the opposite of how most academics think about story.

1:45:48They think about stories being archetypes and eternal and formulas and whatnot. And so I sort of came at it from the other direction, which is I wanted to understand what makes every story unique and where it is that each storyteller gets their unique story from. Where did you start to look at that? Yeah, that's right. This is a great question, yeah. Well, and I think, again, it's important to say that I myself like a very limited in my own creative faculties. And so this is a lot of times, this is me sort of like going around trying to understand something that is a bit alien to me. And so I often do it in a very idiosyncratic way.

1:46:19But basically, who's the greatest storyteller of all time? It's Shakespeare. I should go get a PhD in Shakespeare because obviously people who study Shakespeare for a living must really understand story. and then I got to the literature department at Yale and discovered none of them had any idea how stories work, how Shakespeare works, how anything works. And so I just spent a few years. The great thing about being a graduate student is you can be locked in a room by yourself and just be left alone. And so I spent all this time just like reading Shakespeare, rereading Shakespeare, rereading Shakespeare and didn't understand a word of it, didn't understand any of it.

1:46:46Talked to actors. I understood that they understood Shakespeare, but I didn't understand it. And then eventually I got my first job at Sanford and I got connected to Pixar. I've noticed myself like, these are people who not only understand story, but they understand how to create new stories. And that started to fascinate me because what I started to realize is if you can create new stories on command, you can change everything because a story is the future. Create a new story of tomorrow, tomorrow changes. And so I wanted to go in there and actually just hang out with the folks at Pixar and understand how they were creating these new stories.

1:47:16And when I went in there, I discovered they had a method and they were very open about the method. And they explained their method exactly to me. And I realized that that was exactly the method that Shakespeare must have used. And that was the moment where I started to understand stories for the first time. Tell me how stories connect us. Every story is an opportunity for us to create a story together. That's really what it is. And for a story to work between the two of us, I always have to be listening to you to be ensuring that you're on board with the story. And I also have to be open to you to engage with the story and take it to the next place.

1:47:50And that's why theater is the kind of primary origin for storytelling. Because what happens in a theater is, first of all, of course, the writer gives his story over to the actors, and the actors each take part of the story and so on and so forth. And so it becomes that kind of a creative activity. But also when you watch an actor on stage, they have to forget the future parts of the story and discover them from the other actors in the moment. Otherwise, it doesn't work as a play. It just seems like a formula. But if the actors are good and they're able in the moment to discover the story and then discover of the story and the other characters, then they build the story together.

1:48:25Because what a story is, is it's essentially a single direction. When you come together in a story, you combine in an act of beauty, in a going in a direction. And bad stories are my attempt to convince you that my story is correct and force you into my direction. But good stories are us co-creating that path together. What did they teach you about stories in school that was not correct? So we had a big book. I remember when I was a kid, 12 years old or so, the book that I love was the book of myths. And they tell you that there are these authoritative myths. And so they say, this is the story of Helen and Troy, or this is the story of Medusa or whatever.

1:49:08And you're like, oh, this is what everyone in the ancient world thought. And then if you pull another book of myths off the shelf at your library, you realize that the myths are different and they tell a different story of Medusa. Wait, how is that possible? Like, how are there two stories in Medusa? And what they try and convince you of in school is that there's a single version of the story, when in fact, these stories were oral. And every time they were performed, they were recreated. And the thing about story that I think people fundamentally don't understand is they think that story comes entirely from the storyteller, but story actually comes from the interaction between the storyteller and the audience.

1:49:43And that's actually what produces the story. And you'll notice this when you work with a good storyteller is they're always looking for the audience response. When they're new at it, they're often looking for it explicitly, but the better they get, the more they can just feel that a story is interesting or not. And when they feel that a story is interesting, they start to lean into the details that the audience likes. And then the story grows in the space between the two of them. And so once you realize that story is actually a living thing and that it grows and becomes new as a result of this interaction, you then start to realize, well, of course there were never any eternal myths because the point was to come together and create something new.

1:50:15The point was to engage in that primordial act of life, which is to kind of make something like the gods did. And so when you're in school, you're taught the opposite. When writing was invented, stories got fixed, and then they got put down, and then it became the authoritative version of the story. And then all these scholars had nothing to do, so they said, let's analyze the story, and let's see what it means. And then, of course, they come up with these idea of themes. So there's no themes. Themes are made up. This is something that scholars came up with, and they argue about what does it mean?

1:50:44There's no meaning either. Stories don't have a meaning. Stories are much more profound than meaning. They connect with you in the way that your brain thinks. And your brain doesn't think in terms of meaning. Your brain thinks in terms of life. And what does life do? Life is action. Life is doing things. It's experiencing things. And stories tap in on that primordial level. I think another way of saying this is like what happens in schools, what biologists do is they see a butterfly and to study the butterfly, they kill it and put it on a pen. And then they try and analyze it if they're going to understand.

1:51:14The corpse. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And this is always how scientists work because they love something and then they murder it and then try and understand what it was. Is there a relationship between corpse and corpus? Yes. It's exactly the same word. It means body. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. And that's actually brilliant. You might be the first person in history to have realized that actually what literary scholars have done is they've turned literature into a corpus, which is a corpse. That's exactly right. It's like a dead thing. Tell me about unseeing old rules. What we do when we live is we try and control our environment as a way of feeling like, okay, I know what's going to happen to me in the morning.

1:51:53I know how I'm going to survive. And so we start to create these rules for ourselves. But also we start to think that, oh, these rules I've discovered actually apply to the world. and then we start to think oh the world has to behave this way and if it doesn't behave this way somehow something has gone wrong it's been a problem or a tragedy and so what happens in those cases essentially is we're fixing a story because really what a rule is it's telling you how something should do something so it's telling you what an action is and the story is just a series of things that are happening so rules are stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and about the world when we do that we forget that the point of a story is to be created as supposed to be followed.

1:52:33And so actually the key to having a joyful life is to embrace the act of making rules that you then don't follow. But in the moment of making the rule, you're following the rule, but you then move on beyond the rule. And so that's what I think unseeing old rules is. And we also have this thing where we grow up in this thing known as culture, and culture is basically stories. And the way that the keepers of culture think of themselves is it's their job to make each new generation follow the stories that they followed. So this idea essentially that I'm going to program you. You're going to read these books, you're going to read these sacred texts.

1:53:17And once you read these sacred texts, I'm going to explain to you exactly what the rules of the sacred texts are so there's no confusion. But each generation has to make its own way. And so the other thing is you as an individual constantly have to keep reinventing your rules, but we also have to create a culture in which each group that goes after us unsees the rules that we have given them and makes their own. Seems like it's the only way that anything new ever happens is when you accept that the old rule wasn't actually true. Up until the time of the Wright brothers, flying was impossible. But then as soon as someone can fly, now flying is possible.

1:53:55That's right. And it seems like that's the case with everything. It is the case with everything. And that's the difference between human imagination and, say, the way that a computer operates. So, I mean, one of the things that I'm most obsessed with is the fact that human intelligence is different from artificial intelligence. And the Wright brothers is a great example of that. Because the Wright brothers, they fly in 1903. The previous year, Lord Kelvin, the world's smartest man, had proven mathematically that it was impossible to fly. And the reason he'd done this is because he'd gone over all of the previous examples of flights.

1:54:25He'd analyzed all the probabilities, all the numbers, and he'd established this ironclad rule, which is that there will never be human flight. And of course, what did the right brothers do? Is they broke that. How did they break that? Well, because their dad allowed them to skip school and stay home and read storybooks. And as a result of reading those storybooks, they spark that thing that humans have, which is possibility. So computers think of probability, humans think of possibility. What's the difference? Probability is based on things that have happened before. That's how you calculate it.

1:54:54What is possibility? it's something that's never happened before. And that's the kernel of story. Every story essentially is, how do I do the possible? And when you're working with someone who's a real storyteller, their brain is rejecting all the stories they've heard before and reaching for that space that's outside those rules, but somehow still works. I mean, that's the extraordinary thing about the plane on the Wright Brothers, it actually flew. And the extraordinary thing about a story that works is it flies, but it's never been done before. Are there any rules of story that are helpful in writing stories?

1:55:33What's helpful is when you make rules for yourself as the writer and become enough of a master of those rules to remember why you created them and therefore why you can get rid of it. So when you work with a young writer, they have a very hard time disciplining themselves because their head is full of noise, all these other people's stories. And the thing about all these different stories that you've inherited is they all follow different rules. And so they confuse your brain and scatter your intention. What are the two things that your brain needs to be creative? It needs wonder and it needs beauty.

1:56:15And wonder is the openness to life and the realization that there's just this vast untapped possibility. Wonder includes what we don't understand. Yes. That's a key component. That is exactly right. Yes. That's why wonder often turns into awe because awe is just a sense of being so overwhelmed. So there's this fascinating duality in wonder where there's both passive and active wonder. And so passive wonder is when you're like, wow. And you're so overwhelmed that it pauses you. But active wonder is when you're like, I wonder why that happened. And then you start to kind of dig into it. And if wonder is so strong that it stops you from asking why, that it stops you from turning it into something active, then it suspends you potentially forever in a state of awe.

1:57:06So that's exactly right. That's what wonder is. It's that sense of something that's bigger than me, the mystery, the miracle, why I am alive on some level, you know, the thing that is bigger than me. But at the same time, as an artist, you can't just have that. You also have to have beauty. Because beauty is your judgment. Beauty is the thing that you are like, that's right for me. And the challenge as a creative is to shift between those two modes because you have to be totally open in wonder. But then in beauty, you have to be totally ruthless, you know, and you have to say that might be right for somebody else, but it's not right for me.

1:57:39And the problem for young storytellers is they've been barred with other people's stories. And they've existed as consumers. And as a consumer, you don't understand that actually you have to be very precise and specific and say, this is what is better. That's your job as an artist is to say, these two things are both good, but this thing is better. Whereas your job as consumers, you just appreciate everything because you're being bombarded with it. And another artist might say, this other thing is better, and that's right for them. And that's right for them. Exactly. Yeah. There's not one answer.

1:58:10There is not one answer, but every artist has their own answer. I would say both young artists and sort of artists who are kind of late in their career have a potential to get disorganized. And early in their career, they're getting disorganized because they have so many different influences and they haven't really found their voice yet. And a huge part of what you have to do is you have to sit with them and pull away all the stuff that isn't them and then hone on the thing that is them. And then they're very fragile about that thing because it's not fully developed yet, because it's what's unique to them.

1:58:41And so anytime you have something genuinely new, it always comes out half formed, but you as a person who created it think, oh, it's deformed. And actually what you have to do as a person who's kind of enabling that process is just know more of that, more of that. And so then as a young writer, you start to find your voice by identifying what's unique about your sense of beauty. And it's a very scary process because it's never happened before. And the thing that you find beautiful doesn't exist. And so you feel both this overwhelming sense of excitement and also terror because you're like, well, this is my true self.

1:59:10But what if I get judged? And then everyone else is like, this is terrible. Then as an artist in a later stage of your career, what's happened is you've had success, like deep success. But then you have to change. You have to grow. Like you can't stay in the thing that made you successful. Like your sense of beauty has to evolve. And you know that, but you don't know how to find it again. And so you become very susceptible to outside voices and whatever's happening in the moment right now. And you're like, oh, I should go and do that thing. And I should go and do this other thing. And so you then lose yourself again.

1:59:40You get disorganized. And the key is always to help the artists in that position clarify their sense of beauty. And then once they have it totally clear, they can then open themselves up to awe. And the awe powers the beauty. But a lot of times when writers get lost, they open themselves to awe too fast. And then they get overwhelmed and it's like their mind is blown out. What is primal intelligence? Primal intelligence is the ability to be smart with very little information. And this is how the brain evolved. So the neuron, the thing that's kicking in our heads, over 500 million years old, half a billion years old, it emerged at this moment known as the Cambrian Explosion, which is when all this animal life started proliferating across the planet.

2:00:29And what's totally fascinating about this moment of life is up to that point, there had been so little life that it could just exist and so it just bobbed across the ocean it was just in this state of perfect tranquility but then as more and more life starts to happen it starts to be thrown into contact with other life and there's less resources than it needs and so the life has to start to figure out okay how do i start to become more active like i can't just sit here and soak in the sun and, you know, grow, I actually have to start to fight for life. And this is sort of the beginning of when what's, what's primarily the artist.

2:01:09I got to, I got to fight for my vision. I got to fight for my story. So the fight starts there and two forms of intelligence kind of emerged simultaneously to help in the fight. The first was vision and vision allowed you to see food. So instead of just kind of bobbing around, you'd be like, oh, okay, the food's there. And so you would go to the food. And vision is a huge computational process. It involves sort of inducting data. It's very high information. It's how computers still run today. That's why all of AI runs essentially on these circuit boards, which were invented for graphics. And it can't see.

2:01:42Interesting two sides. That is right. Yeah, that is totally right. Yeah. Well, what's fascinating though about the way the computers work is that even though they can't see, they still think in symbols. And so we as humans can almost see for them, but language is symbolic. And so computers, even though they're not aware, right, visually, are thinking in symbols, and that's their whole consciousness. The other kind of intelligence evolved because if you're in a sea full of creatures who can see, one of the things they're seeing, it's you. And so they're going to try and eat you. And so you have to figure out how to, I don't know, I could eat.

2:02:17And that's this moment where you have to do something which breaks vision. And because vision is logical, it's based on symbolic logic, the thing that computers do, this other part of intelligence emerged, which was, how do I do something that logic cannot anticipate? And so logic anticipates probability. I have to take in possibility. And so that's where this huge engine of essentially creativity comes from, and this is the other part of the brain. What can I do that's not the obvious thing? That's exactly right. And that part of the brain, that possibility thinking, that's primal intelligence.

2:02:50And out of that grows things like intuition. So intuition is your ability to spot something that is totally new. Because life is always changing. And what that means is there's always a leading edge of change. There's always the first moment where change happens. And can you spot that? And that's your intuition. And then imagination picks up on that and says, where could that go? For a long time, we were taught that intuition was a pattern match. So I don't know if you've ever read Daniel Kahneman or anything. And that's how computers think. So computers have a version of intuition, which is essentially a pattern match.

2:03:21But what's unique about human intelligence is our intuition works the opposite. It's seeing the exception to the pattern. We need a different word. We do. Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to coin it? No. Okay. Maybe it'll happen. But it feels like when the same word means two different things, two different systems. Yes. It's a problem of the language. Yes. Yeah. No, I totally agree with you. Well, I'll put that on my to-do list. Yeah, think about it. Yeah. Unfortunately, I'm not a creative. See, I only work with creatives. I don't actually create things myself. But do you think of what you do as creative?

2:03:49No. Really? No. I'm surprised. No, no, I don't think of it at all. No, no. Because in a way, if I was creative, it would make me incapable of doing my job because my job is to see things that are creative, you know? And if I was myself creative, I'd always be focused on what I was doing as opposed to being able to be open and experience. And I think actually one of the reasons I've been the first person to do a lot lot of things that I've done, you know, why I'm the first person in history to do some of these things is because I'm moving outside of my own zone of competence, you know? Creatives tend to hang out with other people that are creative and people who are like me who are not creative tend to hang out with people who are not creative.

2:04:24And it's very rare that one person moves, but creatives are very accepting of people who are not creative. Do you remember how it became clear to you that we think in stories? I worked at the University of Michigan Medical School. I was building mutant neurons. What's that? The way we're taught to think about the brain now is psychology. And the way that psychology works is basically a bunch of people get into a room together and they say, what would be a logical way for the brain to think? And then they make all these things. And then they run an experiment on a thousand people. And then they take the statistical average of how those people think.

2:05:01And they're like, that's how people think. And so that's how almost all the stuff you look in a textbook is based on these statistical derivations of the mean, the average person. I worked in this lab that did totally the opposite. This lab said, no, no, no, no, no. We're not going to study thousands and thousands of brains. We're going to study a single neuron. We're going to look at one brain cell. And then what we're going to do is we're going to go in there and change one tiny thing about that neuron and see how it affects how it works. And so I was in this crazy lab where they'd started out, in order to do this research at the beginning, they'd had to find a neuron that was large enough for them to experiment.

2:05:39on. So they started working on giant squids. And so they'd gone to like Hawaii and gotten these huge enormous neurons and they're working on them. One of the things that people don't realize about science is how nuts it is. And I think there aren't enough crazy people going into science anymore. Like science has become like very bureaucratic and you've got to get your grant funding. And how do you get your grant funding? And you've got to like, you know, write something that appeals to all these other people who are reading the grants. But the really amazing scientific breakthroughs always come from folks who just seem like complete lunatics.

2:06:09I mean, And Einstein, you know, is working at like a patent office. You know, Marie Kreech is like working in a shed. Darwin's working in his clean house. You know, total lunatic. So anyway, I was very lucky. I ended up, it was almost like a magical experience that I ended up in this lab. It was one of these moments in life where you're like, oh, maybe this is actually meant to happen. So I got to college. And I'd spent all of high school hating school. Did you enjoy high school? Were you like someone who liked school? No. So I hated it. Totally hated it. Hated, you know. Total waste of time. Yeah, it's a total, complete waste of time.

2:06:38And there's also so much like, I just felt so degraded the entire time, you know, because I felt like I was either doing things that I didn't want to do and then being affirmed for them. And then I felt like I was being alienated for myself, you know, or I was like fighting against the system and being shamed and told that I was needed. You know, I totally hated it. But everyone kept saying, Angus, Angus, just hang in there, hang in there. I'll get to college. It'll be great. And I got to college. And I was like, wait, this is like high school. Same thing. Like the same thing, you know. And I was basically about to drop out after a week.

2:07:06And I remember I called my mom on the phone. I called her. I was like, mom, I was like, I'm going to drop out. She's like, what? What are you talking about? And I think she wanted to basically yell at me, you know, and just be like, whatever. But instead, she said this really smart thing to me, which she was like, hey, she's like, do you think there's like one person on that campus that you can learn something from? And I was like, yeah, probably. And she goes, go find them. And then she hung up. Smart mom. Yeah, really smart mom, right? So that's when I was like, what is that I want to learn?

2:07:34I want to understand, you know, the brain, whatever. So I went like walking around campus, like trying to get into a basically a brain lab, you know, just to like talk to somebody and like teach them about the brain. And I walked further and further. I was like wandering further and further because, of course, all the labs are secured and locked. And this is before they allowed undergraduates into the labs. Now it's kind of a thing. But back then they didn't. And I finally ended up at the medical school. And the medical school was not only locked, but it's a secure facility because they do animal experiments.

2:07:59So you're like not allowed into the building. They have chimps and all kinds of things in there. But just as I was walking up to the medical school, this guy was walking out of the medical school, and he just opened the door, and he held it for me, and I just walked right in. And I just walked up to the top floor and just walked into this lab, and they assumed that since I was there, I must have had permission to be there, but no. And so I ended up as a 17-year-old working in this lab just through serendipity and my mom kind of poking me. And yeah, and I get in there, and they're like, yeah, we make mutant neurons.

2:08:27And I remember my first day, they were like, go get this animal and execute it. And I was like, what? you know and that experience actually turned me into a vegetarian you know but i continued to work on animals because i felt like you know we were doing something that was important whether we were we weren't i don't know but to go back to your question is we were researching how these animals thought and we had this idea that the neuron was like a transistor and it was like on or it was off and this was kind of how everything was working and i was like the neuron is so much more complicated and beautiful and interesting about a transistor and part of what's powerful about a transistor is its simplicity and its elegance.

2:09:04And when you study the history of the transistor, you realize like all these brilliant minds kept making it simpler and simpler and simpler and simpler. And as it got simpler and simpler and simpler, it got more and more powerful because it's scale. Whereas with the human brain, we developed the power, that power of a transistor hundreds of millions of years ago, and the brain got more complicated. Well, why? Was it stupid? No, because it needed to do more than a transistor. And I started to realize there's like there's like more going on here, you know? And it's not just about that. And then I just start to think to myself, like, how is it that I think?

2:09:33Were you the only one thinking this? Yeah. Not only was the only one thinking this, when I shared my thoughts with people, they genuinely thought I was totally nuts. Yeah. A lot of times if you're a smart kid, people are both encouraging, but they're also a little bit like, don't be too smart because like, you're going to go in a weird direction. Got to keep you on the tracks, you know? And I've spent, and really until the last five years of my life, almost everyone who mentioned me was disappointed in me because they're like, you're so smart and you've totally wasted it doing this crazy stuff, you know?

2:10:00So anyway, I was in the lab and I was like, how do I think? I think it's stories because what's the first thing I do when I meet someone is I ask them who they are and where they came from and so on and so forth. And, you know, when I get up in the morning, what's the first thing I do is I think about what I'm going to do that day. And what is that? That's a plan. What's another word for plan? It's a plot. What's another word for plot? It's story, right? So I'm thinking story all the time. And then I sort of realized, well, you know, the thing about stories is that they're really low information.

2:10:22And in fact, if you do have a lot of information, it's like too much. If you watch a bad movie, it has too many plot lines in it, too much happening. You're like, whoa, keep it simple. So I was like, oh, I think maybe that's the key because the human brain evolved in these environments where there was not a lot of information. How do you be smart with not a lot of information? Well, you have story because story can be really powerful with not a lot of information. Unlike a computer, it needs a ton of data to be smart. And story also, unlike a computer, which is taking all that data, synthesizing it, and finding the truth, story is saying, well, what could happen?

2:10:55And that's really the power of it. And that's why it's so effective with little information is it's not trying to predict the future, which is what a computer does. It's trying to make the future. And what it's trying to say is what is possible that hasn't been done before? And then how do I act faster than everybody else around me to make that happen? So this is kind of what I started thinking in the lab. What we did is we, in order to do these experiments, is we worked with radioactivity and we also worked with various kinds of weird toxins and other kinds of things. So I had, in my one hand, I had this scorpion venom.

2:11:25And the whole thing about the scorpion venom is it's instantly lethal, immediately just freezes the neuron. And so, you know, the lab director was like, whatever you do, don't inject yourself. The scorpion venom, like, okay, you know. Does it kill you? Yeah. It kills you. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it immediately stops that neuron from functioning. I see. Yeah. And the thing about the lab stuff is it's very purified. Now, I have to be honest and say that, you know, they had a crash medical team there in the basement. So maybe they could have saved you. I don't know. But like the point was, try not to inject yourself with scorpion venom, you know?

2:11:55So it's like a reasonable request. It's like a reasonable thing, right? So I had that in one hand. I had the scorpion venom. And then on the other hand, I had radioactive tracer. Because that's how you see what the neuron is doing is you inject this radioactive tracer and that allows you to follow the thing. So I had these two pipettes and I was sitting there at this lab desk and it was like 11 o 'clock at night, basically. And I was like, don't inject yourself with the scorpion venom. Don't inject yourself with the scorpion venom. Don't inject yourself with the scorpion venom. And so of course, what do I do?

2:12:22I inject myself with the radioactivity, right? So I could have become Spider-Man. But instead what happened is I inject myself with the radioactivity. I'm like, oh my God, like what? And so they have this like emergency, like giant metal triangle thing on the wall. He's up to this ceiling. You're in case of emergency. So I ran over to that and I pulled that. And then all these sirens go off. Because it's late at night. I'm basically the only person in the lab. And then a couple of folks run in and they're wearing these basically hazmat suits. Like, what's happening? Like, I injected myself with radioactivity.

2:12:52Like, oh, my God. And they basically, they took off my jeans and a couple other articles of clothing that were flaring up. Because I basically injected myself with my thigh. And they've done some scans of me and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, okay. They're like, you know, go through this bath, this hot wash, da-da-da-da-da, went through all these things. and they say okay you're clear to go home i'm like well can i get my jeans back and they're like no you can't get your jeans back we're destroying your jeans they're radioactive and i was like well how am i getting home like well you've got some shoes and you know you've got a shirt on you can go home so i was walking home that night basically just thinking myself oh my god like this is like you know like the dumbest thing the dumbest thing the dumbest thing and i was thinking to myself but you know what it will make a great story and it's when i thought that that i was like huh maybe that's what the brain is doing maybe what the brain is constantly doing is it's constantly taking negative experiences and then finding possibilities in them because that's the basis of almost right your best stories is in the middle of like you plan something and it goes to hell right and you're like but good story in it you know and that was not so cool maybe on an even more fundamental level right if a story is a plot is a plan then maybe every time things go bad bad what the brain is doing is instead of being like oh it's over the brain is being like no what's the possibility here what's the story what can i do and so that was what i thought on that night home from the lab and i came back in the next day and they're like you really have injected yourself radio that's totally nuts i was like no i think there might be something in this and so for years i just kept coming back to this again and again and again and everyone was like it's totally nuts so like the brain is a transistor it's a computer just not thinking stories Why do you think they want to dumb it down so much like that?

2:14:38I think that a lot of people go into science because they want the answer as opposed to they want the mystery. And I think, first of all, they want the answer because they have that impatience in them and they don't really realize the joy is the process. But they also want the answer because that's power in science. If you're the person who has the answer, if you're the person who can say this is the truth, then you get put at the top of the pyramid. If you're the person who your claim becomes the truth, if they claim that it's the truth, then you get the Nobel Prize. So actually the paradox of science is you have all these people who really aren't interested in what science really is, which is the all, which is the mystery, which is the confrontation with the unknown.

2:15:23So you have people who are trying to get as fast as possible to an answer. And there really is no answer. So I think that was it. And I think also it was such a weird idea for them because story, really for most of the 20th century, story has been synonymous with bias. So if you talk to like an economist or someone like that, like, oh, story, got to get rid of story. It causes emotions. You know, and emotions are dangerous. No, no, what you want is reason. You want facts, you want data. And so I think that the idea that somehow the human brain would be thinking in story was threatening to them on an almost existential level because it was saying to them, you're never going to be intelligent.

2:16:03Because what is story? Story is myth. Story is made up. And that's true. That's how the world works. Yes. Turns out. That's right. That's how the world works. And that's actually why humans are brilliant. And why every child is a genius. Because a child is thinking in story. And they don't have to have the answer. It said that fiction has to make sense so it's less radical than the real world. Because in the real world, most things don't make sense. Whereas in fiction, the story has to make sense. That's right. To be believable. That's right. Truth is stranger than fiction. Yeah. Yeah, right. This is one of the things I learned from reading Shakespeare.

2:16:39And I remember I was reading Richard III, which is one of his early plays. And this was the play where he really discovered his voice and he became incredible. and there's a moment in the middle of the play where this archbishop goes off to get strawberries from his garden and i'm like what is an archbishop doing with strawberries like it and i actually had this moment was like was there even strawberries i guess i must have been but it was like the most bizarre moment and i was like what is that about and i went and i looked and it turned out there's a historical chronicle and that actually happens and of all the people who had told the story before Shakespeare, none of them have put that detail in because they're like, it's too weird.

2:17:16It doesn't belong on the stage. And actually what Shakespeare started doing is he started going through all these history books and picking up the things that were weird and putting those in the plays. I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. That's what's great about Shakespeare is it's full of the unique and the extraordinary and the exceptional. And then once he started doing that with his, because he broke out in the history place, once he started out with the history place, he started doing that with real life. He would look at the people around him and be like, what about that person who's stranger than fiction?

2:17:43And then I'm going to tell a story where you start to understand why that thing that seems so improbable is actually life. And so classic example is Hamlet begins with this ghost. And then in any other play, it would be like, okay, let's explain where did the ghost come from? You know, how do ghosts work? What's the magic system of ghosts, right? Instead, the character Hamlet shows up and all his friends like, oh, what's this ghost? What's this ghost? And Hamlet's line is, as a stranger, give it welcome. In other words, because it's weird, embrace it. And that's life, you know? And the entire play is a doubling down on that.

2:18:24And I remember when I was in school, the reason I hated that play is because I didn't understand it, because the teachers kept trying to explain the play to you. They could be like, well, this is why Hamlet does it. And then they would say, well, let's have a debate about whether Hamlet is insane or not insane. And of course, the reality of the conversation about insanity because insanity implies a normal. And the point of the play is there isn't. That was Shakespeare's genius. And that ended up being why I studied Shakespeare's. I had this moment, that's another one of these moments where depending on how you think about me, you either think, oh, that was clever or that was totally insane.

2:18:54But I had this moment where I was like, all the people that I like and admire in history who did amazing things read Shakespeare. Like Vincent van Gogh is reading Shakespeare. Marie Cree is reading Shakespeare. Darwin is reading Shakespeare. Lincoln is reading Shakespeare. Tesla, the original Tesla, he's reading Shakespeare. All these people are reading Shakespeare and they're predating him. Must have some secret. Yes, exactly, right? There must be something there. Yeah. Yeah. And I said, I want to know that. And that really is the secret is that he understood story and he understood the story comes from a thing that is stranger than fiction.

2:19:24And it comes from taking that thing and then telling what happens next. Because from the point of view of the audience, the audience isn't sitting there analyzing it. So what an academic does is they pull out a fact and they analyze to death, whereas the audience wants to see something move. And so if you take something that's totally weird, they've never seen before, and then you move it, they're fascinated. Because like, oh, well, of course it can work because it is working. It's moving. And then where does it move next? And the whole gift of every story is to start with something that the audience has never heard before that's weird, that's anomalous, and then make it move.

2:19:59So it's all about change. It is about change. And a lot of stories are also about a particular kind of change, I think, which I would call growth, because change on its own can just be chaos. So if you think about what happens in the mind of a computer, for example, computer creativity is very different from human creativity. One of the reasons it's different is because computers are random. So as a computer, you can generate all sorts of just kind of random things, which are constantly changing, constantly changing. Whereas what growth is, is it's something becoming more itself over time. So it's a very specific kind of change.

2:20:32And if you think about like the most basic kind of story, what's the most basic kind of story? It starts out with the hero. What is the hero? The hero is the weirdo. The hero is the person who is unlike her society. She's different. She's an anomaly. Does she change? Does she get forced to be like society? No. She doubles down on what's unique about herself. And so she grows into herself. And that's the kind of primordial story, that story of growth, of like the weird thing that gets weirder. Yeah. And in getting weirder, becomes beautiful. And the computer doesn't grow into itself. No, no, no.

2:21:08So computers are fascinating and computers are very smart, but basically, you know, computers take this one tiny aspect of human intelligence and they scale it. And so I think there's a kind of awe that you as a human have in interacting with a computer because you see a part of yourself in it that's so much more than yourself, you know? Yeah. It's kind of amazing, but it's not yourself. So essentially the computer is invented in 1943 and it's funded by the United States Army. And the first computer is something called ENIAC. It's this huge thing. It's built in downtown Philadelphia. And kicking around the Army at this time was this guy.

2:21:39His name is J.P. Guilford. And he had been tasked with the Army to crack the secret of creativity. Why did the Army do it? Well, the Army did it because at that time, the Army had just launched the Air Force. So it was called the Army Air Force at the time. The Army actually, they purchased the first Wright Brothers plane, and they were the leaders in flight. And the Army is always the leading edge, and they invented Silicon Valley. The Army did all this kind of stuff. The Army, they've got these planes, and they start to notice, hey, some of our pilots are doing better than other pilots. Like, what's that about?

2:22:10And of course, the Army being the Army, their initial theory was the pilots doing better must be following the rule book. So to your point about old rules, right? Let's drill in all the rules. And so they drilled all the young pilots in the rules. And of course what happens is you get shot down much faster when you're following the rules because then the other guy knows what you're going to do. And actually the key to being a pilot is to invent a new story. It's to invent a new flight path. It's to be able to see a way to move your plane through space that no one else has seen before. And so then all of a sudden the army is like, wait a minute.

2:22:38Being a good pilot is the opposite of being programmed. It's being creative. We need to crack the code of creativity so that we can beat the Germans and finish this war. So they called this colonel, J.P. Guilford. They said to him, Colonel Guilford, your job is to crack the secret of creativity. You know what his background was? Yeah. So he was a psychologist at the University of Southern California, actually. And, you know, the amazing thing about World War II is that everybody joined the army. This one moment, they were like, whatever you did, the army needs you. And so he was pulled out of his lab.

2:23:09He interacted with ENIAC and his mind was blown. Because this is the first computer. And he was like, oh my goodness, this is so smart. This is so intelligent. And he became convinced that all intelligence at some point be reduced to computer thinking. So he was kind of at the leading edge of this idea. And so he said, creativity must be a computer protocol. And he came up with this idea that creativity is these two processes. One's called diversion thinking. One's called conversion thinking. And what are those? So diversion thinking is randomly associating things. and so the way the computer does this is the computer thinks in sets so you have a set of colors and a set of animals and you just randomly mix and match them so you can have like you know like yellow dolphin and blue turtle or whatever it's kind of stuff so that's creating this huge cloud of random possibilities and then convergent thinking is identifying high probability options in the random space you've just created and so if you've ever been in a business meeting they do this thing called brainstorming, these brainstorming sessions.

2:24:10I've heard of it. Yeah. So they get out a whiteboard and they say to everyone, say something random, right? And then everyone writes all these random ideas on the - Is that how it works? Yes, that's how it works. They're business people, so it's not that random, but they're as random as they can be. And then they say, okay, now we're going to draw a line through everything that we can't do. And so the idea then is you knock out all of the low probability things that you've just created and you do convergent thinking. And of course, when you draw a line through all the things that you can't do, you, of of course, eliminate all the interesting ideas, which is why brainstorming sessions don't really work and why business is so boring.

2:24:42But that's the idea. You have this huge cloud of random possibilities, diverge, and then converge. You find the high probability ones and so on. And this is how generative AI works. This process is called ideation. And it's different from how we imagine usually because we use imagination, which is a narrative process as opposed to this process. Yes. So computers have this infinite ability to be random, but it doesn't lead to genuine creativity, because as a human, you have to be able to see where it's going. You have to be able to see the growth. The point of view. The point of view. Exactly. Yeah.

2:25:18In the same way that a synthesizer can be incredibly powerful in the hand of a musician, AI can be incredibly powerful in the hand of a creative. But if you're expecting it to be creative for you... It doesn't do that. It doesn't do that. So what will humans always be better at than computers? A lot of things. But anytime you need to do anything that doesn't involve a lot of information. So anytime you talk to a human and they talk about like gut instinct or something like that, I mean, or common sense, these are all kind of low information processes. But I think the key one from an artistic point of view is beauty.

2:25:51So beauty has to be both new and specific. and computers think in lists. So they're unable to identify a single top priority. That's why if you challenge a computer, it'll change its mind. Whereas if you challenge an artist, they won't. You know, like artists will go to their grave basically being like, it's gotta be this way, you know? And so as a human, your ability to say that specific thing is more beautiful than anything else. And I would die for that. That's what creates art. And, you know, outside of art, it's also what creates, you know, real science, any kind of social movement. It's people being like, that's the way the world has to be.

2:26:34How do you think we come to know what's beautiful? I think each of us is born with a different sense of beauty. And we have to learn to cultivate that. And I think the way you learn to cultivate that is you go through the world, particularly as a young person, very open, and you start to pull your influences towards you. And you start to realize that some things are influencing you more than others. And you start to realize, okay, like, I actually kind of like this thing a little bit more than that thing. I like them both, but I like this thing more. And you go into the thing that you like, and you start to develop that discrimination even more powerfully.

2:27:06You start to say, these are the things that I really like. So if I like a particular musician, this is the song that I like the most. And this is the part of the song that I like the most. Like, that's the thing that I like. And no one could tell you you're wrong for thinking that. No one can tell you you're wrong because you're right. Yeah. And you start to develop that very, very powerfully. And then the next step is once you develop that ability to discriminate based on the things that other people are doing, you start to realize, hey, you know what? I like that thing that person did, but it's still missing something.

2:27:34I've got to find the thing that it's missing. And then you start to create around that. And it's not random. You're growing. In the same way that a tree is stretching out branches that are all connected, you're branching. And then some of those branches, you're like, those are more right than others. Those are more what I'm thinking. and you start to prove in the ones that don't work and double down on the ones that are growing. And that's when you start to be able to find your way as an artist. And I think the challenge for people now is because we have such a consumer-driven culture, they don't want you to choose, right?

2:28:05Like the people who are feeding you, you know, the big studios or whatever, they don't want you to choose because they want you to like everything that they produce. And they're trying to basically eliminate yourself. And it works, just the opposite happens. Exactly. We don't like hardly any of it. That's right, that's right. That's exactly right, that's exactly right. But we lose contact with our ability to discriminate because we're being bombarded with mid-stuff, mid-level stuff. And what we need to do for kids is start to create these spaces for them where they get to choose, where they get to be active.

2:28:31And then as an artist, you become really ruthless and rigorous with yourself. And you start to be like, I can do better. Like, that's actually bad. And everyone around you is like, no, that's good. You're like, no, like, it's bad. I need to do better. And so that's when you really start to realize, like, I own the beauty because I'm the only person who really sees it. That's kind of your sacred quest as a person, I think. And I believe, I mean, and I know you do too, that everyone is fundamentally creative in, not in the sense that they can be an artist, but that you create your own life. And you have to be able to say to yourself, this is the right life for me.

2:29:05And that life has to be totally unique. And you have to be inhabiting it and be like, this is perfect for me. And I don't have to justify or defend it to anybody else. But most people in the world today are looking for somebody else to tell them what to do because they're lost. Because we have a consumer culture where people are scrambled. And they try and find the answer by reading self-help books or what have you or being inspired by other people's lives. And they try and copy. They just get more lost. Whereas developing that ability to discriminate, finding your beauty, being ruthless and rigorous in pursuit of it.

2:29:38I agree with what you're saying. And it doesn't sound like an easy thing to change. change it doesn't sound like our culture supports what you're describing no and so one of the one of the weird things i've done recently is i started working a lot in schools and one of the reasons i started working in schools is because we've known for almost four decades now that school is making kids less creative yeah it's annihilating their creativity yes and it's obvious the reason that it's doing it is because what do you learn in school you learn in school that there's an answer and the teacher has it and the more that you believe that there's a right answer the less like you ought to come up with a new answer.

2:30:12And so you become part of this system, which is constantly telling you, do it this way. And then you're basically forced into a dependence on the system to be validated by the system. You lose your sense that I'm an artist and I actually choose and decide what is right. So the entire system is trying to socialize that out of you. And it's so weird because systems are suspicious of individuals, right? That's why they try and beat it out. But the whole point of America on some level, so I'm an immigrant, so I feel like I can say this. Pope One of America is a whole bunch of people who are too weird to fit in anywhere else.

2:30:44And they're like, let's come here and create a society where everyone can be weird. Freedom. Freedom. Yes. Yes. Yes. And we've created the school system, which is annihilating it. Yeah. And it would be one thing if it was annihilating it and making everyone happy and successful. But it's not. It's annihilating it. There's no jobs. People don't know themselves. Young folks today, I mean, I work with so many college kids today, completely lost. and we need to go back to this creative practice and start to encourage young people to understand no you have your own inner sense of beauty and i here as the institution i'm here to facilitate that but really my job as the institution is to turn you into your own critic so you start to develop that rigorous practice in yourself and you start to say no it can be better and i as a teacher i'm saying no it's already good enough and you're like no no no no no no no had this beautiful experience the other day where I was talking to a guy who went back to school to get his PhD.

2:31:38He's a special operator. He's a special forces guy who went back to get his PhD. And they signed off on his PhD and they gave it to him. And he returned it to them because he realized that he'd been wrong and he wanted to resubmit his PhD with the changes. And they said, we don't do that here at our university. And he said, well, then this PhD is worthless. Why is your instinct to go into a school and try to change it versus burning it down? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I have spent a lot of time recently actually working at the American Camp Association, which is the burn it down approach almost, which is like, let's build an alternate space to do things.

2:32:13I think the problem for me is that I think a lot of teachers are really good. I think there's a lot of human potential in the school system. I think the system itself is bad. And so maybe this is a real sign of my limitations as a thinker. It's that I'm always drawn to people. And so as long as there's someone in a place that I believe in, I'm always trying to help make that place. You could recruit them for the new structure. We could. Well, if you're interested in this, we're trying to start some of these alternate processes here in L.A. and also in Ohio where I live now. How did you end up in Ohio?

2:32:48I was a professor at USC. And I had this crazy idea after I'd been working at Pixar that I would come and explain to folks. And what was your job at Pixar? So I did have a job at Pixar. I was a professor at Stanford. Yeah. I was basically giving the Shakespeare lectures. That was my job. So it's very boring when you get hired to university. As they say, we've been teaching this class for 5 million years. Your job is now to teach the class. So they handed me the Shakespeare lectures. And I got up in front of the students and I realized I didn't understand Shakespeare at all. And I was not an expert in what was going on here.

2:33:14To solve that problem, I reached out to Pixar, started chatting with them, got inside their creative process, started to understand how they were doing things. That was when I had this insight that they were doing things differently than Hollywood. And I was like, Hollywood would be a lot better if they did it the Pixar way. And so in my stupidity, I thought I would go to Hollywood and explain to people in Hollywood how they could be making movies better. And of course, not only were they not interested in that, the fact that I was a professor made them even less likely to want to listen to me.

2:33:38So I was at the University of Southern California doing this for a while. And then I got a phone call from a place called Project Narrative, which is an institute at Ohio State University. How long has it existed? Since the 1970s. And they were the reason, so they're the leading institute for studying story. And the reason that they're a leading institute is because they had this breakthrough in the 70s, which is you and I were talking about earlier, is that stories are the result of the audience. And so every place else they tried to study story had gone to LA or New York and studied the creators.

2:34:06Whereas what Project Narrative did is they went to the heartland and they said, this is ground zero for the American public. It's a test market. Let's see how they're operating. And so they built up this entire institute that was based on just working with ordinary folks. Sounds amazing. I had never heard of it. Yeah. Well, you know, it used to be amazing. And I can say this. I don't want to besmirch my employer. Ohio State has totally screwed it up because they've let pretty much all of us leave. And so when I went there, I think there were 11 of us. And then there's basically two, really, of us that do it.

2:34:37Ohio State just hasn't valued because it's too different. You know, it's too weird. But when I went there, it was like the golden age. Yeah. As an example, one of the things we had, we had a folklorist there. She was totally brilliant. And she would just go off to, you know, Romania or wherever and just hang out at people's kitchen stables. Learn the old stories. Learn the old stories, yeah. And she would learn them through generations. So she'd start out by bringing the kids into the room. They'd be like, you know, tell me the stories. And they'd tell them the stories. And then she'd go back a generation.

2:35:06Mom, tell me the stories. And then grandma and then great-grandma. And then she'd learn how the stories had kind of evolved over time. And then she'd go back the next year. And then the stories had changed again, even among the same tellers. Totally brilliant. And so that was the kind of stuff that we were doing. It was kind of like, I would say, almost like a hippie vibe. You know, just kind of like, you know, we're just going to go out and just do this research that no one else is doing. How did you find out about it? They found out about me. How? Well, I think they found out about me because I had sort of established this weird reputation, having been at Pixar, of having this theory that every story was different.

2:35:40And that there were no archetypes. And I've been saying this a lot. And do you believe there are no archetypes or that's just not the whole story? Well, I believe that there can be archetypes and you can use them. Yeah. Well, I think Carl Jung was a genius. Carl Jung sort of, you know, the ground zero of this. But I think the problem is that people treat those archetypes as though they're permanent and they are the reality. And somehow if I make a story that follows that archetype. It's back to the corpus idea. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Joseph Campbell created the hero's journey and it worked for Joseph Campbell.

2:36:07George Lucas figured out a way to create Star Wars as a hero's journey. But if you go back and try and write a script as a hero's journey, what is that? It's inert, right? It's dead. Anyway, I'd kind of got this reputation. They called me up and they said, hey, you want to come out to Ohio? I said, absolutely not. What's happening in Ohio? Anyway, they brought me out there and it was amazing. So I got a chance to work for there. And that was when I published this book, Wonderworks, where I went through all the different inventions and the history of stories. And the purpose of that book was to go through thousands of years of human history and point out again and again and again how humans had invented new stories and how those stories had created new possibilities.

2:36:43And so there are stories out there that were written thousands of years ago that can help with post-traumatic stress. And in fact, poets discovered thousands of years ago that there are two types of post-traumatic stress, which is something psychologists have only realized in the last two decades. And so if you work, for example, with folks who have been in a war zone, they'll have these uncontrollable flashbacks whereas if you work with kids who are in an abusive home they're the opposite they're numb they can't feel anything and why is that well that's because essentially pts is the result post-traumatic stress is the result of these two parts of your brain one of them is your prefrontal cortex which is kind of your the brake like on your car which is tapping down in your emotions and then there's the center of your brain which has things like the amygdala which is pumping out the emotions and in the first kind of post-traumatic stress, what happens is the break breaks.

2:37:33And so that emotion just keeps exploding for the brain. That's what creates those flashbacks. Replaying scary stories. Exactly. Again and again and again, you're reliving the trauma over and over again. What happens in the second kind of post-traumatic stress is that that break locks on and it stops you from feeling anything. And it says, you know what? Feeling is so bad that we're not going to even feel any good feelings. Yeah, like armored. Exactly. And you get dissociated. And so these are these two types sort of trauma, but they're fundamentally different. They have fundamentally different processes in the human brain.

2:38:03Poets realize this. If you go back to Greek tragedy, there's two types of Greek tragedy. One of them treats PTS-1, the other treats PTS-2. It was developed by combat veterans. And so this is the kind of wisdom that exists in the literature. And I wanted to share this. And I wrote the book. And I remember after I wrote the book, all people that wanted to talk about it is like, oh, you've cracked the code. This is how stories should work. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. The point of the book is that people invented these things, and we should keep inventing more things. And so I kept getting brought into all these companies being like, how do we use these formulas that you've discovered to program customers to buy our toothpaste?

2:38:37You know, this kind of thing. So that was kind of my seminal experience there. And then that led to the big twist of my life, which is the U.S. Army read the book, and they were the only ones who understood the book. And then they brought me in to work with special operations. What is now plus one? So now plus one is the technique for tuning your anxiety. And so anxiety is something that's been really vilified in the modern world. And they think that the moment you feel anxious, something is wrong. And you've got to distract yourself or whatever to get rid of the anxiety or it's going to become overwhelming.

2:39:11Anxiety is your brain's way of measuring how fast your environment is changing. It's how your brain measures unknown unknowns. It's the measure of mystery. And so the more you're in an environment that's changing fast, the more your anxiety is going to go up, which is healthy because your brain is saying to you, you've got to change. And essentially what anxiety is, is it's all these different imaginative paths in your mind colliding. So that's why when you're anxious, your brain gets really restless. You start imagining all these different things you could do. So the story line is coming online for you to be able to meet the speed of the future.

2:39:44But you need your anxiety to be appropriate to the environment. And we know a lot of people today are struggling because they're way too anxious for their environment. And so we need to teach them a practice for how to maintain your anxiety at a healthy level without letting it get out of control so you can't function anymore. And so what we do is a special operations technique, which is called now plus one, which is to focus on the next step in front of you. And then that appropriately tells you what is in your story. And that allows your anxiety to dial itself down to the right level for that moment.

2:40:25Because the thing is, the further you look into the future, the more anxious you'll get. Why? Because the future is an unknown unknown. And so by definition, if you're a healthy, normal person, the more you think, what am I going to be doing tomorrow? What am I going to be doing in five weeks? What's going to happen? Your anxiety will start to spike. So the key to that is not to get rid of anxiety, but instead to shorten the amount of time you're dealing with. And you can't ever just deal with the now as a narrative person because then you can't take a step. Because if you're just in the now, that's where computers exist.

2:40:53They exist in the mathematical present. But the shortest distance of time you can inhabit, that's the now plus one. That's the shortest amount of time you can have a step. And that's what allows you to ensure that your anxiety is perfect for the moment. Just by taking that small action, that one step is enough to know, okay, there are more steps to come and that's fine. You don't have to think about them. You don't have to think about them. You just have to take the first step. Yes. This goes down to optimism, which is another fascinating thing, which I learned from the operator. So optimism is what the creative has because to your point, to be an optimist is to know if I took that one step, then I can take the next step.

2:41:30So I don't need to worry about those other steps because they're going to happen. I don't need to worry about them now, right? I can just focus on what's happening right in front of me because the other stuff will work out. That's optimism. Well, where does that come from? So in the modern world, most of what people will tell you about optimism is it comes from thinking positive thoughts about the future. You've got to keep thinking positively about the future. I keep thinking positively about the future. For a while, I thought that had to be the case because that seems logical. But then we discovered that the more that people think positive thoughts about the future, the more they develop fragile optimism.

2:41:56And fragile optimism, like it sounds like, means you feel really optimistic, but then when something goes wrong, it breaks. So they're like, well, how is it that people are actually optimistic? Where does it come from? Truth is that it comes from your past. And it comes from remembering all the first steps that you took. And then how that step was followed by another step. And so people who are profoundly optimistic, when they come into a challenging situation, the first thing they do is remember back to the past and how they were successful in the past. And that's how you develop your optimism over time, is by taking a step and then looking back and being like, I took a step.

2:42:34And then taking another step and looking back and being like, I took a step. As opposed to constantly looking forward and being like, it's going to work, it's going to work, it's going to work. So you get yourself caught in the future trap. A lot of what you're talking about are, I'll call them philosophical or theoretical. Are these things that can be taught? Yes. Yes. We do this all the time with kids. Let's just take optimism, for example. One of the first things we say to people is go back to a challenge that you've overcome in your past. When was the time you did that was something really hard?

2:43:03And then write out the story of that in as much detail as you can remember. Because by writing out the story of that, you strengthen neural pathways in your brain. And then a lot of people, when we give them this exercise, they say, well, I can't think of anything that I did that was really hard. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. I guess there mustn't have been anything you did that was really hard, right? I was like, well, what about that time that you learned to walk? They'd be like, what? I said, do you remember that time? And they're like, no, actually, I don't remember that time. Do you remember the time you learned to talk?

2:43:28No, I don't remember that. So do you see what's happened there? Your brain has forgotten all those times you did those things. And you need to pause and go back to your history and find those memories because you did learn to walk. You did learn to talk. And believe me, if you've ever seen a child learning how to walk, that is the hardest thing. And no child learns to walk in the same way as any other child. They all learn to activate their muscles differently. They all have different first steps. So it's a completely artistic process. And it's incredibly frustrating for children because they're sitting around there watching everybody else walk and they can't walk.

2:44:03If you ever talk to someone who's had an accident or something like that, they have to recover from a stroke. They have to reteach themselves to walk. It's so challenging. But you did that. And there's thousands of other things in your past. So at the core of this is our belief that the most important story that you tell yourself is the true story about yourself. You've got to go back into your own life and start to unearth those stories. They have to be honest. You can't make them up. You can't retell the past in a way that makes you look better. You've got to go into the parts that were hard and unfortunate and own them.

2:44:35But there are so many little miracles in your past that once you start to tell yourself those stories, you start to develop this optimism. And the reason this process is so key is because when we try and see most people, when they have a moment of doubt, a crisis in their life, is they look to someone else's life for inspiration. So they'll say, oh, you know, my hero did this or something like that, or this person did that. But what your brain does when it sees that someone else was successful is it says, I'm not that person. They're special. That's right. Exactly. Yes. And I'm not. And you have to instead go back over your own story.

2:45:09And then you say, oh, my own story isn't special. No, it seems like it's not special to you because it's familiar to you. Put yourself back in that moment before you did that thing. Did you think you could do that thing? No, you didn't. You didn't. You would have thought it would be extraordinary that you did it. And then you did do it. So go back and tell yourself the full story. Forget the ending. Only tell yourself the beginning and then allow yourself to re-experience the ending. Build the neural pathway. In the book, you said that innovation's original meaning was sin. Yes. Tell me about that.

2:45:40The term innovation was popularized by Machiavelli in the 16th century. He popularized the term innovatory, innovators. And the classical example of an innovator was Eve. Because what had she done? She'd done something which no one else had ever done before, which was she'd broken an old rule. She'd eaten the fruit. Yeah. And that's why if you look at Apple computers today, they have a bite out of the Apple. Because innovation. Because it's actually going back for knowledge. And so the church, for hundreds of years, innovation was sin because it was defying the law by making your own rule for yourself.

2:46:25And so Machiavelli came along and said, well, actually, innovation is good because innovation is what allows us to create new things. And then he said this really blasphemous thing. He said, before Moses, there weren't the Ten Commandments. So Moses was an innovator. He said, and every prophet is on some level an innovator. Every spiritual tradition is creating new things. And the church didn't like this because the church wanted to stabilize the myth. It wanted to fix the story in time. It wanted to fix the rules in time. It didn't like the idea that your spiritual practice could be something that evolved.

2:47:05It didn't like the idea that God or these higher things could be evolving. And so Machiavelli, even today, by word, for sin. And the church castigated him. But Machiavelli's writings were discovered by someone called Francis Bacon, who was an English scientist, one of the first scientists in the early 17th century. He said, we've got to break away from logic and start to embrace new ideas. Those ways of thinking ended up finding their way to people like Thomas Jefferson, who was a big reader of Machiavelli, the Declaration of Independence. The idea, one of the things I love about the Declaration of Independence is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

2:47:49Before Jefferson rewrote that, it was life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. Big difference. Big difference. Big difference. And Jefferson said, wait a minute. Property is a zero-sum game. Happiness, that's something we can all create for ourselves. Like, that's actually what independence is for. It's to innovate. It's to create your own life. It's to create your own joy. And so what's happened over time is innovation went from being a sin to being the most radical thing you could do in the 17th and 18th century. And now in the modern world, it's totally banal because it's been completely appropriated by corporations who are obsessed with calling things that are actually just recycled pavlon innovations.

2:48:29Tell me about how you would train common sense. We were talking earlier about how you've got to match the newness of your plan to your environment. So as new as your environment is, your plan has to be new. Common sense is what allows you to do that. And common sense allows you to do that by helping you measure how new your environment really is. So the common sense solution is to do what everybody did in the past, as long as the past is still working the same, but to do something totally different when it's not. And when I first went into special forces, when I first started working with them, I was diagnosed as having negative common sense.

2:49:09Why? Because I'd spent so much time in a classroom and the rest of my time I spent on a computer. And those are both environments which resist change. The whole point of a classroom is what I teach you now is true forever. And we teach the same way we taught yesterday, and it's totally stable. And a computer is also trying to do the same thing because computers are existing with mathematical presence. And so the way you start to train yourself to have common sense is you start to say to yourself, how new is my situation? How much anxiety is it causing me? If it's causing me a lot of anxiety, that's telling me I've got to try and do something new.

2:49:48And the reason this is important is that we know for most people in the modern world, the more anxious they get, the more they actually retreat into something old. So actually people behave the opposite of common sense. Negative common sense. Yes, they have negative common sense, yes. Life is changing fast and they're like, I got to go back to the way that I did before. Yeah, old playbook. Old playbook. And we also know that people take their biggest risks when they feel secure. Actually, when you feel secure, you shouldn't be taking any risks at all. because things are working. And so common sense is kind of learning you to undo what the modern world has taught you, which is to gamble when you're safe and to retreat when you're in danger.

2:50:26And instead, you actually have to gamble when you're in danger and hold your ground when you're safe.

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