Good Life Project - Angus Fletcher | Sparking Creativity with the Power of Storytelling

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

The fact that you're listening to this podcast right now tells me ‌you likely already know the power of a compelling story. Good storytelling can persuade, inspire, and ultimately grab hold of the hearts and minds of whoever's listening or reading. And so, whether you'd call yourself a lover of classic literature, an avid reader, or neither, you can probably think of a book you've read or a story you've heard at some point that's completely changed your outlook on life or given you much-needed perspective. Telling stories, although the act may seem like second nature, is a powerful tool that we all can use to deepen the way we learn and interact with one another and ourselves and help us find more meaning and direction in our own lives. And to bring the power of storytelling to light further and break down the science and impact behind it is today's guest, Angus Fletcher, Professor of Story Science at Ohio State's Project Narrative, the world's leading academic think tank for the study of how stories work. As a practitioner of story science or story scientist, Angus has a B.S. in neuroscience from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in literature from Yale. His fascinating research employs a mix of laboratory experiment, literary history and rhetorical theory to explore the psychological effects—cognitive, behavioral, therapeutic—of different narrative technologies. His newest research on resilience and creativity with the U.S. Army's Special Operations community has just been published in Harvard Business Review and the New York Academy of Sciences.Today, he joins me as one of the world's leading experts on the psychological effects of narrative and literature to dive deeper into the science of stories and explore how we all could use the stories we are told and tell ourselves to better our lives and find more meaning, joy, and hope. In our chat, you'll hear us talk more about the nitty-gritty of narrative theory and his new book on the science of stories, Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, and explore how storytelling is the free driver of change, self-efficacy, and connection that we all need in our adult lives and in childhood. You can find Angus at: Website | LinkedInIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Liz Gilbert about creativity and storytelling and writing and lifting a fully open, honest, true and real life.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book Sparked | My New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes.Sleep Number: Why choose proven quality sleep from Sleep Number? Because every great day starts the night before. And now, don’t miss Sleep Number’s lowest prices of the season with the Queen 360® c2 smart bed, now only $899. A savings of $200! Only at Sleep Number® stores or sleepnumber.com/GOODLIFE. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What a creative does is they see an exception and say, this is an opportunity. This is something that could be. How do I get more of that? And then the other core skill that they often have is what we call perspective shifting. The ability to kind of enter into other people's perspectives and say, what would I do if I was this person? And that is a story skill. And if you know a friend who's very empathetic or very curious about other people and is able to tell these stories, you know, that have a large cast of characters in them, that is a huge, deep sign of creativity. So here's a question. What if a story, not your own story, but a story that you read,

had the power to change not just your mind, but your life? Well, the fact that you're listening to this podcast right now tells me you likely already know the power of a compelling story. Great storytelling and great writing can persuade and inspire and ultimately grab hold of the hearts and minds of whoever is listening or reading. And so whether you call yourself a lover of classic literature and avid reader or neither, you can probably think of a book or a story that you've read or heard at some point that's completely changed your outlook on life or given you much needed perspective. Telling stories, although the act may seem like second nature, is a powerful tool that we all can use to deepen the way we learn and interact with one another and ourselves

and help us find more meaning and direction in our own lives. And to bring the power of storytelling to light further and break down the science behind it and impact behind it is today's guest, Angus Fletcher, professor of story science at Ohio State's Project Narrative, the world's leading academic think tank for the study of how stories work. So as a practitioner of story science or a story scientist, by the way, I love that title. I kind of wish it was mine. Angus has a BS in neuroscience from the University of Michigan and a PhD in literature from Yale. And his fascinating research, it employs a mix of laboratory experiment, literary history,

and rhetorical theory to explore the psychological effects, cognitive, behavioral, therapeutic, of different narrative technologies. His newest research on resilience and creativity with the U.S. Army's special ops community has just been published in Harvard Business Review and the New York Academy of Sciences. And today, he joins me as one of the world's leading experts on the psychological effects of narrative and literature to dive deeper into the science of stories and explore how we all could use the stories we are told and tell ourselves to better our lives and find more meaning, joy, and hope. In our chat, you'll hear us talk more about the nitty-gritty of narrative theory and his new book on the science of stories, Wonderworks,

and explore how storytelling and specific techniques that writers and storytellers have used for time immortal is a powerful driver of change, self-efficacy, and connection that we all need in our grown-up lives and in our childhood. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot.

Flight risk. As we have this conversation, you are currently a professor of story science, Ohio State's project narrative. And I actually want to get into what that is. But there's been a really meandering road to get here, but maybe meandering from the outside looking in, but not so much from the inside looking out. Like we start back in the early days when you actually studied hard sciences, came out, and then you end up spending a chunk of time in med school neurophysiology lab. So I'm so curious, what first draws you to the world of

hard science, which all feels like it's fairly rule-based, fairly rational, what first draws you to the world of hard science, which feels like it's fairly rule-based, fairly rational, and then has you almost leave that behind for a completely different context? Yeah, well, of course I left it because I had a crisis. I had a crisis of faith in what I was doing, but I was in there in the first place largely because I'm an immigrant. I come from an immigrant family. The first thing that happens when you get here is you emphasize education. And there's this sense that America is this land of opportunity

and you can go anywhere as long as you have good grades and you go to a good school and you do all those kinds of things. So I very much was kind of dialed in by my parents on science as the kind of future of humanity. And that's, you know, you can become a doctor, you can do anything with science, you can go to space, study science. And I was genuinely interested in certain areas of science. And particularly I was interested in the human brain because, I mean, to me, the greatest marvel and the greatest mystery on earth is other humans.

And I just kind of wanted to understand, like, where was all this magic coming from? And also, where was all the horror coming from? Because, I mean, as humans, we create worlds, we destroy worlds. So I kind of got in there partly because of my parents pushing, but also because I was genuinely really interested in the human brain. So, I mean, it's an interesting starting point because the way that you describe the human brain, how do we create worlds, how do we destroy worlds, is not what I think about when I think about how does the, quote, body work? How does the system of the brain work? What is the neurophysiology of it, the chemistry of it, the endocrinology of it, the,

you know, the electricity of it. It sounds like from the very beginning, there was a bigger context for you. It wasn't just, let me really understand what's happening underneath the hood. And how is this affecting the way that we live in the world and the way that we create the world we live in? Yeah. And that idea of creating the world. I mean, I think a lot of times when we get into science, you were talking about it as reason and rules. I think a lot of times we think of science as a kind of disenchantment. So it's about taking a lot of things that seem mysterious and then giving us the formula or giving us the chemicals that explain everything. But to me, I always think of science a little bit as the other way around. I mean, I think about it as the kind of door into the magic, into the mystery. And in particular, as far as humans are concerned,

I mean, what's really interesting to me about humans is our imagination. I mean, we just kind of refuse to be prisoners of the moment. We were born into this world and we've done nothing since the moment of our birth, but try and change the world, try and change the conditions that we inherited. And where does that drive come from? And beyond the drive, where does the ability to make it happen? Because you look around the world, I mean, the world now is not the way it was 100 years ago, not the way it was 1,000 years ago, not the way it was 10,000 years ago. And almost all of that is because of human hands and human brains, human minds, human hearts. And so that, to me, is just what is just so exciting about our species. And I think we live in a moment where

there's a lot of negativity around humans, a lot of despair, a lot of burnout, a lot of exhaustion, a lot of anger. But to me, there's just always this underlying sense that we can do anything because we have done things that seemed impossible. And so to me, science is just kind of the key into that. And it's about finding a way to take that just sort of big, extraordinary, beautiful thing and bring it a little closer within reach so it can be trained and taught and handed on in a little more organized fashion to the next generation. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting. It's funny. I've gone deep down the rabbit hole of positive psychology over the last five, seven years or so. And the more I learn

about it, and I have plenty of friends who are leaders in the field and really deconstructing the research with them. And the more I learn about it, the more I keep thinking to myself, I've also done a fair amount of exploration of Eastern philosophy and traditions and Buddhism. And I keep saying to myself, you're giving me the scientific basis for why things that people have been doing in Eastern philosophy work for thousands of years now. But we've actually always known all of these different things, but people are always trying to figure out, but why? How and why does it work? Because then we can package it, we can recreate it, we can train it, we can actually make it more accessible

to a wider number of people. And part of what you're saying about Eastern philosophy, I mean, in general, so a huge part of my career is taking insights that have been around for thousands of years in philosophy, in literature, in wisdom literature. And a lot of those insights have been actually thrown out of our modern education system, which has become interested in other things. And a big part of what I want to say is, no, actually, there's a reason that that philosophy and that literature was around for thousands of years. It really works. And things that seem non-logical or even irrational to us actually work with the human brain. And, you know, I had my own transformation moment with positive psychology.

I was giving a keynote address several years ago at a neuroscience conference. And I was approached by James Pwelski, who's the head of the University of Pennsylvania's graduate program in positive psychology. And he introduced me to Martin Seligman. And at first, I mean, I honestly thought it was a little bit of a cult. I was like, all these guys talking about positivity all the time. This seems really out of touch with reality. And then you actually start to do it. You start to look at the research and you realize, no, actually gratitude is the best way to bounce back from a setback. It's not just kind of magical thinking. It's different from magical thinking. And a lot of that optimism and a lot of that resilience

and anti-fragility is baked into literature, is baked into philosophy. And I think one of the real values of science can be to kind of bring that back because we live in a world that I think prioritizes logic over emotion nowadays. And we, as a result, are raising a lot of stunted selves that don't know how to handle our emotions and don't realize that our emotions are actually one of our greatest tools and skill sets. And so I completely agree that science can be a way

to recover that ancient wisdom and oftentimes not replace it or upgrade it, but just remind us of the brilliance already on our bookshelves. Yeah. Reconnecting to our past, reconnecting to what we've always known, but often had stifled. So I'm curious about your path. So you end up going from a neurophys lab to then deciding, okay, so the logical next step

for me is to go and get my PhD in literature, focusing on Shakespeare at Yale. And I'd love to know a little bit more about what was underneath the hood in that decision, because I mean, clearly a broader curiosity just about the human condition and about, you know, you've referenced stories in all sorts of ways, shapes and form. Why in particular focus on literature and why Shakespeare in particular? So I wish I could tell you that I had a kind of coherent plan when I was making this decision at the age of 21, but I did not have a coherent plan. And I think I was very lucky that it worked out. And I think I was lucky because a lot of people around me were kind of wiser and guided me in

directions and kind of helped me on my way. But basically, as I said earlier, it was born out of a moment of crisis. I was working in a science lab where everyone was brilliant. I felt very fortunate to work there. We were figuring out basically how brain cells communicated with each other. But the whole model we had for the human brain was essentially that the brain was a computer, that it was a sense-making apparatus, that it took in data and it crunched that data to make decisions, that it was essentially a kind of version of what we now think of as AI. And that just wasn't my experience in my own brain.

My brain didn't work like that. Most of the brains I saw around me didn't really work like that. We didn't take in a lot of data. And then we were also capable of things that computers weren't capable of. There's all these emotions, you know, in terms of empathy, love, hope, but also creativity, imagination. And I thought to myself, these are other things which are clearly going on in the human brain. And because we're so obsessed with thinking about the brain as a computer, we can't figure out how they're working. And so we can't figure out how to explain them or how to teach them or how to train them. And so I thought, I want to go somewhere where people really understand emotion

and they really understand creativity. And to me, that was literature. And to me, I thought, well, I'll go to Yale and study Shakespeare because that's kind of the crucible, the kind of cauldron for this. And it actually turned out to be something of an unusual decision because I got to Yale and I discovered that people at Yale literature didn't really study emotion, nor did they really study creativity. And there was a kind of a collision moment there. And also just to give you an indication of how out of touch I was with Yale English and kind of how, in retrospect, goofy a decision it was, I thought I would study Shakespeare not because I thought of him as the greatest writer of all time. I thought of him as a simpler writer. So, you know, my thought process was, you know,

in the same way that scientists, you kind of go back in time when things are simpler to try and figure out how more complicated things work in the present. So I thought, you know, I'm not going to start with this really kind of, you know, complicated technology that exists now. I'm going to kind of go work backwards to the 17th century and kind of just understand the basic nuts and bolts as English literature was being invented. And you can imagine how thrilled the faculty were at Yale when I informed them that I was here to study Shakespeare because I thought he was simpler than more recent authors. So, you know, that was just the kind of beginning of a series of shocks and jolts in this kind

of transition. Yeah, I would imagine. I'm almost picturing you sitting in class also sort of like asking all these sort of kind of like deconstruction oriented questions. Like, well, how is that working? Why is it working? What's really going on here in a way that was maybe a little bit different than your typical student there? Well, so I have to be honest.

They tried to throw me out after my first year. They were so appalled. And, you know, now since then there's been a reconciliation, you know. But, I mean, they were appalled. I mean, and they were appalled for lots of reasons. I mean, first of all, I just, a lot of the literature we read, I just didn't think was very good. You know, we'd read all these ancient works, you know, and I'd say, well, I don't understand this at all. This just seems terrible.

Why are we reading this? You know, a lot of Shakespeare's plays, particularly his early ones, I was like, oh, these aren't as good as his later ones. And you say things like this, and this is kind of considered to be sacrilegious. But one of the things that I think came out of it is the real value of innocence and inexperience in these situations. I mean, because I hadn't kind of been in kind of the cult of literature

for years and years and years, I did actually have a different way of seeing it. And I think that's something that we don't get enough of in the modern world. We don't get enough of getting the modern world. We don't get enough of getting people who are really rookies and then putting them next to true experts and then having that collision of intelligence. So I was very fortunate that they did not throw me out after a year and they put up with me. But yes, to your point, I mean, I asked all sorts of questions

I didn't have answers for. I mean, I said, well, why is it that when I read this, I feel joy? And, you know, they would say, well, I mean, I don't have the answer to that, but to the extent the answer exists, it must be in the words. And I don't believe that, actually. I don't believe that the reason that Shakespeare creates joy is because of the words he uses. I mean, I believe that there are different reasons he creates joy, because words are something that actually a computer can process. So there's something more going on there. So it was a lot of things like that. And there's a lot of kind of sputters and misfirings for a long period of time. But I just kind of kept in there because I knew at the end of the day that what was happening in my brain was happening in the brains of everyone around me.

And so I knew that the phenomenon was real and I just had to keep pushing to find the answer. It's so interesting, right? Because I think of the experience of so many people when they read Shakespeare, especially when so many are introducing, you know, like the classic high school education class. And it's sort of like, okay, so let's take these couple of sentences or just take this page and try and translate it into the way that like you actually, what does this actually mean to you? And then memorize it, memorize verses so you can spin it back on the test. And I wonder if sort of like the traditional way that we, most of us, me included, were introduced to any form of literature, created a sense of almost the opposite of what you're describing, a lack of curiosity, a lack of wonder, a lack of, wow, what does this mean? And why is it making me feel this way? And

more of just almost like a brutalizing experience of like, what do I need to do to just get through this so I don't ever have to revisit these things again, which seems tragic to me. Yeah, well, what you're describing is exactly right. And it's the horror of our modern education system. I mean, Shakespeare has been used for centuries as an almost imperial tool. I mean, the British basically exported Shakespeare and compelled many other countries who are not native English speakers to learn Shakespeare. And there's a sense that he has been used as an indoctrination instrument. And the same thing, of course, we get in school, we read, and then we feel a sense of

shame and confusion and frustration and anger at the literature and all these kinds of things. And then we get this anxiety that I just have to please my teacher. I just have to get it right. I just have to do what's expected of me. So actually, when I teach, and people often find this borderline heretical, I mean, I've been teaching Shakespeare for almost 20 years and I've never assigned Shakespeare in a class once. I don't assign Shakespeare. I ask the students to bring in their favorite stories. I ask them, you know, if you like a TV show,

if you like a comic, if you like a song, what's the art that resonates most with you? And then we start to break that song down and talk about what's going on in their brain. We talk about this, you know, the neuroscience and psychology of why that's working in their brain. And then I leverage that and say, you know what's going on in their brain. We talk about this, you know, the neuroscience and psychology of why that's working in their brain. And then I leverage that and say, you know,

what's happening here, that was invented by this other author 200 years ago or 400 years ago. And a lot of times the stuff that's going on traces back to Shakespeare or before. And that allows me to hand them a copy of Hamlet or hand them a copy of Anthony and Cleopatra. So we get into Shakespeare, not at the beginning, but as kind of part of a journey. And it makes sense to them because that journey starts with them and their own experience of life, as opposed to the institution prescribing an attempt to kind of replicate itself by forcing this culture on them. Yeah. I mean, it's such a different way to approach it. Sort of like you start with why is a story or moment or poem or song like directly relevant?

Why does it make you feel something right now? And then introducing the notion of, oh, there are mechanisms in here that have existed for time immoral. And wouldn't it be cool to see, trace it back and see where it really came from? So there's like you're planting a relevance and curiosity seed in something where there's really strong context for them and saying, oh, now let's actually relate it back to this other thing that, by the way, just has been there for a really long time. I love that approach to it. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet-black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. You know, it also occurs to me when i think about call it shakespeare in particular of an old friend of mine who grew up in a tough neighborhood was on a not on a great track as a human being and a teacher pulled him aside one day and sort of like forcibly introduced him to

shakespeare and there was something about his brain that literally just melted down and transformed in the moment. And he, to this day, now well into his adult life, is a huge, huge fan and evangelist. He helps run the Shakespeare Festival every year in the UK. And I remember interviewing him actually on stage in front of about 400 people. And he's just, we're talking about his life. And then he starts to share the story of his introduction to Shakespeare. And then he starts, you know, he stands and he is just dropped into character, like playing a chair as with everybody else in the room. There was something so palpably emotional. And it occurred to me that there's something beyond because I didn't understand what he was saying,

but I understood what I was feeling. Like it was almost like it was bypassing something in my brain where my brain got it, even if sort of like the rational filters couldn't quite catch up with it. Yeah, well, this is the great magic of the human brain too. And what you're saying about Shakespeare is completely correct. And the sort of scientific answer to this is that really only about 5% of our brain is conscious. And, you know, most of it is non-conscious. And those non-conscious regions

are mostly motor regions. They evolve to kind of help our brain, our body do things. And that's why you can kind of drive a car without thinking about it. That's why you can kind of help our brain, our body do things. And that's why you can kind of drive a car without thinking about it. That's why you can kind of react spontaneously, say things spontaneously without thinking about it because there are these motor regions. Well, motor regions work in action. That's what a motor does. It acts. And another name for an action is a narrative, is a story. And so it turns out that stories have this deep, deep impact because essentially what our brain is doing, this non-conscious part of our brain is just telling thousands and thousands of stories to our arms and our legs in terms of this is what to do. This is what part to play.

And that's why stories have this enormous primordial effect on us is because they plug right into those non-conscious parts of the brain and they shift our performance. And in the case of Shakespeare, the reason that he's so extraordinarily powerful is unlike most of the writers that came before him and like many of the writers that came for a century or so after him, he wasn't trying to produce propaganda. So, you know, writers had basically been trying to moralize and provide morals and dogma and doctrine and just basically answers. And so they're basically trying to say, you know, this is the right answer. And Shakespeare had the courage to go into the questions and the conflicts. That's why when

people read Hamlet, it's so earth shattering because here you have someone who is struggling with death. What does it mean to die? What does it mean to be mortal? And the church says, oh no, don't worry about that because there's the heaven. And if you follow these rules, this will happen. And Hamlet is saying, well, I mean, how do you know that? I mean, that is, where is that coming from? And who guarantees that? And how do I know that I'm following the right rules? There's different churches with different rules. You know, he starts to ask these questions. He starts to pull things apart. And then beyond Hamlet's questions, there are so many other questions. I mean, one of my favorite plays is Macbeth. And one of the

reasons that's one of my favorite plays is because there's this moment in the middle of it where a man loses his children. And he says, what do I do now? What do I do now that I've lost my children? And this is a feeling we know Shakespeare had himself. He lost his son around this time. What do I do now? What do I do now in intense grief? What does it matter anymore? And so it's the willingness to engage with those deep conflicts and process them through story as opposed to logic and through reason and through morality that allows those plays both to kind of plug in, but also just to help us and make us feel so cathartic because we're not in a space where we have to understand or have answers, but we can just move. That makes so much sense to me. I love the notion of basically we're just running

story scripts on the micro and macro level all day, every day. And that's fundamentally what is underneath everything. I've heard you describe part of the experience and sort of like your transition into this world was also being brought into, I guess it was a study that was being done with vets and Greek tragedies, which I thought was really fascinating. Share a bit more about what that experience involved. Yeah. So I was invited because, you know, I'm considered to be, you know, the world's leading expert on the psychological effects of narrative and of literature. And I received this phone call several years ago in Los Angeles, and I was told about this kind of new work done by Peter Meineck, who's a professor at NYU.

And he's a veteran himself. They were introducing Greek tragedies to military veterans. And the idea was that they could produce catharsis and they could help with post-traumatic stress disorder. And I was asked if I could come along and witness this. And I said, yes. But the reason I said yes is because I was extremely skeptical about this. I mean, I'm a deep believer in the power of literature to do a lot of things. I'm a deep believer in the power of literature to spark creativity and create joy and hope. And these are all things that all of us experience on a daily level with literature. But trauma, if you've ever worked closely with veterans, as I have had the honor of doing, you know just how deep trauma is. If you work with survivors of domestic abuse, you know how deep it is. And the idea that you could go and watch a Greek tragedy and that

somehow this would help you with trauma, I just seemed unrealistic to me. I just, I couldn't believe that it was going to happen. And then my mind was changed because I went to this performance. I saw the tragedy performed and then I saw the response from the veterans and I saw men and women unlock and start to grieve in a way that they hadn't grieved before and start to process those difficult emotions and then also start to organize them in their heads and start to make that really important shift in the brain where you start to organize them in their heads and start to make that really important shift in the brain where you start to collect up all these fragments of trauma and start to put them into a kind of new life story, a new life narrative. And I saw that healing happen. And that transformed me. And that made me realize, look, I mean, Greek tragedy was created by veterans

thousands of years ago. Many of its original authors were veterans or survivors. It was performed largely for veterans in its original Greek form. And literature really does have this power. And since then, I've gone on and in the last year or so, I've been privileged and honored. I work a lot with the Army Medical Corps, the Army Nursing Corps. Then I also work a lot with U.S. Special Operations now. And I do different things there. I mean, some of the stuff I do is actually using literature to increase mental performance to kind of make you more creative, more adaptive under stress.

But I also use it a lot to process because these men and women have gone through experiences like I can't even begin to articulate to you. And you start to hear some of the things that have happened to them and some of the moments where they've had their friends

dying their arms, blaming themselves, the kind of, you know, the kind of shock and helping them realize that stories can help them process that and can help them get through that and can help them heal and help them grow. And actually, in a lot of cases, actually make them stronger than before. So all of that transition was a result. And I'm very grateful to Peter and for shattering my skepticism and for those veterans back in Los Angeles. But it's something that, you know, if you talk to veterans now,

they'll be honest with you and they'll tell you that the moments that they have of healing are the moments of sharing stories. And, you know, that's just the truth. Yeah, it's so interesting because you effectively went in with one story in your head

about like what was going to happen and the story changed your own story about the context there. You know, you're talking about people who've been through these like deep and profound traumas, but if we zoom the lens out and if we look at, okay, let's look at the world that we're living in right now. You know, every human being has literally been through years now of some level of big T or little t trauma. I've always been curious, and I know there's research on this, what distinguishes between somebody who experiences trauma and then it becomes integrated as post-traumatic growth versus post-traumatic stress disorder. And what is the distinguishing factor there? I had

conversations with Bessel van der Kolk and he has certain ideas. But what it sounds like is part of this may involve how you can integrate this into a story that allows space for growth versus paralysis. The first thing I think we want to just acknowledge off the top is that it's very hard and individuals respond differently to trauma. Different kinds of trauma are different and we don't want to make universal statements about these kinds of things. But the first thing I will always say to people is that if you don't believe you can heal from trauma, it's extremely unlikely that you will. And so the first thing that, that, that, that, that if you, that if you aspire to, to change and grow from trauma is to, is to start to say to yourself,

this is something that I can do and to get that shift in yourself. And usually the way to get that shift is not, not actually to look to other people. I mean, a lot of times what happens is we look to other people who have gone through trauma, or we try and provide examples of other people who've gone through trauma. We try and provide support groups and so on and so forth. But typically when I deal with veterans, what I find the most effective thing to do is go back into their own life and look at moments where they have overcome things and start to develop a psychology of what we call anti-fragility in them. And the psychology of anti-fragility is just basically going through and realizing that there are moments that break

you that make you stronger and starting back and going through your childhood and starting to identify moments because children are incredibly resilient. I noticed this when I work with parents, they have this deep anxiety about their kids that like, you know, terrible, you know, harm is going to happen to their kids. And of course, harm can happen to kids. But for the most part, children are much, much stronger psychologically than a lot of us realize. And you and your childhood are stronger than you realized. And when you start to go back and think about all the things that happened in your childhood and how you came back from them and how you grew from them. And if you start to go back with those positive moments, rather than starting with the trauma,

but those positive moments of growth and development and anti-fragility, you start to realize, okay, I have this in me. And you start to create a narrative in your head of your own ability to process really, really hard things and find meaning and purpose and direction and growth in them. And then once we go from there,

we start to start to tackle progressively harder things. Maybe we don't go immediately to the most terrible and difficult things in life. We start to focus on other things that maybe you haven't resolved yet that were hard, that were difficult. In the case of veterans, I mean, I find beyond their battlefield experiences, the number one thing that they carry with them is relationship failure. Many of them are in failed marriages. They have difficult relationships with their own kids. And so we actually start there.

And we start to say, look, you look, you can't bring back your buddies. You can't go back in history and change that moment on the battlefield where you did this and you did that. But you can talk to your kids right now. And you can start to identify and you can start to fix that relationship and heal that relationship and get strength from that relationship. And you can call up your ex and you can talk to her and you can start to fix that relationship. And then the more that they start to take these steps of growth, the more they start to put themselves in a position where they can

start to process that trauma. And the final step that I always say to them before they even go back to their own trauma is helping them help other vets. I mean, because the real gift of helping other people isn't actually helping them, it's helping yourself. This is the dirty secret for anyone who's an altruist is you're really doing it for yourself. And that's where the brain develops the most growth, is from assisting other people. And so making a conscious decision in your life to reach out to the people around you who are having a hard time, who are having difficulty, and then helping them in a sustainable way, not just giving them a few dollars or some advice or something like that, but saying, you know, what can I give them that's

going to change the course of their life? How can I empower them? How can I help them with their story? How can I sit and listen to them as they tell me hard things? How can I have the patience? How can I give them maybe one or two pieces of wisdom? And the more you do that, the more you start to realize your own problems are nothing and you can grow beyond them. Yeah. It's so interesting. It's like, if you go back and look for the stories of resilience, like in, in your early life, and then you had on this other part of being of service to other people as they're going through their own challenges, you know, it occurs to me that we've kind of been talking about this in the context of helping you process the trauma that you feel you've already been through. But this is also, I would imagine, a powerful modality if you are, I mean, honestly, we're all going to experience

some level of trauma and grief in our lives. It's just, it's part of living, right? So what if we actually look at this as something that we train in before we need it, you know? Like, how could we set kids up, you know, if we start to introduce these as sort of like a general part of the skill set, well, as you move into adulthood, you're going to get knocked around. You know, that may be in your job, that may be in the world circumstances, it may be whatever it is.

So let's actually start to help you develop the skills and the practices now so that if and when it happens, you're not starting from zero then. I'm wondering, do you see that work going on anywhere in more of like a quote preventative level? So that's actually what we're trying to do in school, in the school system around here, in partnership with our school system. And, you know, one of the positive ways we do that is that the number one sort of psychological driver of resilience really is creativity. The more you nurture someone's creativity, the more you develop their belief that when something happens that's unexpected, that they can adapt to it. They can

be flexible. And our school system now is eroding. We know that kids' levels of creativity start to drop pretty aggressively from about the age of eight or nine on. And the more school they have, the more it drops. If you have a graduate degree in engineering, psychologically, you're one of the least creative people on the planet. Wow. What's really driving all that is kids get into this system where it's partly standardized tests, but it's also this kind of logic-based system where there are right and wrong answers to things. And, you know, if you're doing a math equation, there's a right answer, there's a wrong answer to it. And what that means is that when the situation changes and they can't find an answer, they feel lost and they feel bereft. And creativity is the ability to come up with

something where there isn't a right or a wrong answer. And creativity is the ability to adapt in these kind of fast-changing, volatile situations and being able to make something good out of a plan that's broken or something good out of chaos. And kids are naturally creative, which is one of the reasons that they're so naturally psychologically resilient. And if people are interested, we've published this recently in the New York Academy of Sciences. What we're doing is a kind of new training method that helps nurture kids' creativity. And that's this way of just kind of preparing them for impact and not just preparing them for impact, being excited for impact. I mean, I think one of the problems that we suffer from today as a society

is because we're so used to everything being standardized is we make these long-term plans in our head. Like I've got to have this happen. I've got to have that happen. There's other thing happening. And then when things start to go off the rails, we start to panic and we start to, you know, as opposed to embracing volatility, embracing change,

because volatility and change are the key drivers of growth. I mean, if your life happens just as you plotted it, it would be very boring. You'd never have a chance to fall in love with someone who you didn't know, who you couldn't imagine. You'd never have the chance to have children who surprised you. You'd never have a chance to have friends and projects that just totally reinvented your psychology. And so learning to see the positive side and embrace the chaos. And so all again, all that comes from creativity because creativity boosts what we call self-advocacy and self-advocacy is really the

driver really of resilience. Yeah. And at the same time for somebody to step into that space of effectively uncertainty, the unknown, which is where like the seeds of possibility really are born, right? Because if you know everything that can be known, there's nothing to create, you know, like all you're left with maybe replicating or slight iterating. And that's gets old fast in the context of living an interesting life. But, and yet at the same time, you know, we are notoriously awful existing in a humane state when we actually go into that space of uncertainty, you know, we step into it

and remember seeing some research that says they were actually looking at people sort of like exploring variations of the classic Ellsberg paradox. You have to make the uncertain choice or make the certain choice knowing that the uncertain choice could be better, it could be worse. And fMRI studies were showing that the amygdala was lighting up and people like, there was a real fear response to having to make a decision or take an action in the face of imperfect information. It feels like we're kind of wired to not want to do that. And it sounds like what you're describing the education system, which says, you know, like let's create a container where everything is known and there's a right or wrong answer actually just reinforces that wiring rather than trains people to say real

life actually isn't that way. Let's keep introducing scenarios and stories where you're going to have to be there and breathe into it and make decisions and take actions and realize you'll actually not only be okay, but there's some awesome stuff on the other side of it that we're training that out of kids and adults to a certain extent. Well, what you just said, I think is completely brilliant and is completely true that yes, our education system is actually reinforcing our own worst instincts. And that's the opposite of what we all know education should be doing. I mean, we don't need education to reinforce our own worst instincts. You know, we need it to stretch us.

And we have to keep in mind the way that the human brain evolved. I mean, the human brain evolved in situations where it was biased towards short-term success because it didn't have this option of sustainability and kind of long-term growth. Life was much more fragile. And so it constantly defaulted to taking a kind of, you know, small, immediate reward over a massive long-term reward. And the whole purpose of building societies such as we have built today is to stretch that horizon. And of course, the most obvious example of this, we see it in people's dietary choices. You know, I mean, you know, we don't just need to eat chocolate.

I mean, our brain is like eat chocolate, eat chocolate, and a little chocolate is great, you know, but we've learned in our society. No, you've got to kind of stretch that out if you if you want to have health. And it's the same thing in terms of our fear response. I mean, so, I mean, I work all the time with our kind of misassessment of risk. Risk is actually one of the most important things we can take as individuals in society. It's important to take risks for all sorts of reasons. It produces growth, it produces resilience. But to your point, whenever we take a risk, whenever we walk into uncertainty, our brain starts to freak out because it's thinking to itself, I'm going to die. I'm going to die because that's where the amygdala evolved in that kind of an environment. And so what we

have to do is we have to learn to take risks, to take chances and see that we don't die. And that's one of the reasons why personally, I have had many of my happiest moments in life working with actors, working with theater professionals, because there's nothing really more terrifying to the human brain than getting up in public, you know, and then doing something in public. I mean, we just know you get like the biggest fear response. And what actors have learned to do is fail in public and to have this kind of rehearsal psychology in public and to be willing to make themselves look bad in public. I mean, I have a lot of friends in Hollywood and I, and sometimes people, you know, a movie will get released and people say, oh my goodness, how could this actor have done this movie? How could they not have known this would be terrible? Why were they doing this? And to me, that's what I love about actors. I love that there's so much trust and willingness to leap. And you see this on stage every night. They're willing to take a chance. They're willing to push the envelope, even think they're so confident on stage, they're terrified. And so that to me is, again, something that I want to encourage in kids is a rehearsal

psychology, a rehearsal mentality, a sense that, you know, particularly a lot of times in school, that's a stage. It's a staging area. It's a practice space. We shouldn't be scared of taking tests in school. We shouldn't be scared of our teachers. We shouldn't be scared of messing up and making mistakes. It's the opposite.

We should embrace those things. And these are all ways, I think, which are really healthy and really productive that we could do to kind of change the psychology of how school works now. Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. You know, and as you're sharing that, what occurs to me and what I've thought about over the years is, on the one hand, we're talking about action-taking and decision-making in the context of uncertainty, of imperfect information, of taking the, quote, risk risk. But the risk, then the question is risk of what, you know? And for there

to be risk, there have to be stakes, right? And then, okay, so what are the stakes? And I think one of the biggest things that I think often we miss is that maybe the most dominant stake that we're so fearful of, you know, that we, hey, we made a decision, we took an action, we didn't have all the information and it didn't turn out the way we wanted. It's not so much the notion of like, I failed at that, but it's the notion of other people are going to observe me failing at that. And then I will become the social pariah. I will become outcast. My sense of belonging is gone. And I feel like we often discount the effect of social stakes in decision-making when we don't have all the information, because I think the brain can kind of wrap its head around like,

all right, if I mess up, you know, like this is going to be the fallout. I can figure out how to make more money or reclaim this. But it's the social stakes that I feel like often is the unspoken part of the equation, but potentially the most devastating thing. Well, that's also brilliant. And you're completely correct. And of course, the human brain evolved to be a kind of social organism. And that's why we're always anthropomorphizing everything. You know, I mean, that's why we think of, you know, our cars is alive and technology is alive

and the world is alive and the sky is alive. And we imagine gods in the sky and all these kinds of things is because we have that social psychology and nothing is more sort of shameful to us than thinking that other people think negatively of ourselves. But a couple of things I want to say

to kind of shift that culture. First of all, it's always been my experience that people actually admire you the most when you take risks in public and acknowledge mistakes. And so this is another area in which our brain is actually incorrect. It thinks by screwing up in public, it's diminishing its social status.

In fact, all of us have seen someone make a mistake in public and then respond graciously, you know, with a sense of dignity. And we love that person. We admire that person. And that's the important thing to remember. It's not how you, it's not whether you screw up. It's how you respond to that mistake.

It's how you react to that mistake. It's that rebound. It's that resiliency. And if you keep yourself in a position where you're never making a mistake, then what actually happens is when you actually, when you do make a mistake, you don't know how to compensate. And it's much, much better actually happens is when you do make a mistake, you don't know how to compensate. And it's much, much better to just to keep pushing yourself

into this mistake area. I mean, this is a lot of the work I do with US Special Operations. I mean, they were having this problem in training exercises where they were getting better and better and better and better at training. And because they were getting better

and better and better at training, they thought, well, naturally, this is going to translate to us being more and more successful on missions. Then all of a sudden, they would have a catastrophic failure. Well, why is it? Well, because they were getting better and better and better at training, they thought, well, naturally this is going to translate to us being more and more successful on missions. Then all of a sudden they would have a catastrophic failure. Well, why is it? Well, because they created a culture where actually none of them wanted to look bad in front of their friends in training and they all wanted to be perfect in training. And so basically they just kind of focused instead of taking risks in training, instead of being daring in training,

you know, they just kept doing all this stuff that they knew would work in training. And they didn't kind of take that extra step. They didn't make that philosophy to jump. And so a big part of actually what we want to do is we want to build cultures and societies because the human brain is so socially wired. Where's the society? Where's the culture? Where's the group?

Where's the team that encourages mistakes in public? We work with the brain to help alleviate its social anxiety. The other thing real quick I'll just say is you were talking about decision-making. So this is another thing which is both true and not true about the human brain. We're all taught to think that basically the human brain is the decision-maker and that life is about the decisions that we make. And this is because we misunderstand the brain as a computer. What computers do is computers have a bunch of options

and they make a choice as to what is the best one. Generally, humans do not work like that. Generally, as a human, we do not have a bunch of choices in front of us, think about them, weigh the data, and then pick the best one. Actually, what we do is we just intuit an action. And that's different from making a choice. That's just doing something. And a lot of times you'll notice when a human brain slows down and has to make a decision between three things, that's when they get anxious. That's when they start to feel shame. But when a human being just does something, they don't feel anxiety. They're not concerned about making a mistake.

And so a big part, again, and this is a rehearsal psychology, is to say to people, this is not actually a decision. You're not weighing five options. I know that that's how businesses are trained to work now. And I know that's how schools are trained to work now with multiple choice tests, which is the best answer I have to weigh them. But actually, you're much more effective in your brain if you're not thinking about the choices, but you're just thinking, what could I do? So instead of looking at the options in front of you, you just make up an option that doesn't exist. And then when you do that, you discover your fear disappears. And instead, you have joy, curiosity, hope, and all these positive emotions.

So again, there's a different kind of psychology there that I think we can leverage. Yeah, I love that. I mean, it sounds like that touches in a certain way on sort of like Danny Kahneman's vision of your two different thinking systems, system one and system two, which one is the more intuitive one where you're sort of leading with that. You know, there is this sort of sense of, I need to get as rational about the decision-making about the things that I'm doing in my life as possible because that's how a good life is built rather than just saying what you're saying. It's like, A, not only is that maybe not true, but it also is also probably not possible. It's just not the way that we are.

It's not the way that we live, not the way that we're wired. Just life doesn't happen that way. And we don't move forward that way. No, it's not the way that our brains are wired. It's not the way that life works. And you know, this is why, I mean, I'm now working with the defense department on this other way, basically of training brains, because for, you know, this is why, I mean, I'm now working with the Defense Department on this other way, basically, of training brains. Because for, you know, there's been this mythology that now exists in the modern world and business that everything's about data and you have to have the right data to make the decisions. And we're seeing that get annihilated over the past year, because it turns out that data is only a predictor of yesterday. And, you know, it only helps you make the decisions if the world stays the same and so what

has happened is actually we've built these systems that are more and more trying to create artificial stability in markets in economies and all these kinds of things and what they do is they create real fragility because that's not the way the world works and we've been here before we were here during the enlightenments and there was a guy called napoleon uh and there was this whole idea that somehow actually you could win battles in advance mathematically. And you could do all this kind of stuff. And do you know what the outcome of that mathematical approach to battle was? It was the U.S. Civil War.

How mathematical was that? You know, it was World War I. How mathematical was that? And, you know, what the military has been forced to realize over time, and I think what all of us have been forced to realize over time, is that actually the world we're in is a contested space. There's lots of things struggling in it. And anytime you have that kind of struggle, you have what's known as asymmetric conflict, which creates constant volatility and uncertainty. And actually what a brain needs in that situation is not the ability to process more data better, which is all computers can do, but it's the ability to identify what's called exceptional information or the one piece of data that's really important and then counterfactually leverage off

that to imagine options and possibilities that we don't see. And by training those parts of the human brain, we can train the brain to do things that computers can never do. And what we're seeing now is that computers, you see this in hedge funds, you see this in special operations, they're incredibly fragile. AI breaks all the time. AI is never going to drive cars. It's never going to drive cars. It's never going to do any of these things because it cannot handle a whisper of volatility. But humans can do that all the time.

And so a big part of the training that I work on and a big part of what I think is going to be the training of the future is to kind of put aside all this data decision making. It's going to be putting aside also system one and system two, to be frank, and to be fair to economists, put aside quantitative economics, all these things. They just don't work. And it's going to be embracing the kind of creativity, the adaptability, and really the artist in the human brain. Because the artist is the person who doesn't just see the future, but makes the future. They create the future. They invent the future. How do they do that? They see an opportunity because they see an exception. And in that exception, they see a

possibility. So those are the parts of the brain that I kind of focus on training. And again, that's why I like to work with kids. I like to work with entrepreneurs. I like to work with special operations, but really it's for anyone who just wants to feel like they have more opportunity and can kind of surf uncertainty and chaos instead of being freaked out by it. I love that concept. I feel like we have gotten into this rut of thinking systems and creativity systems that are basically helping us create the optimal expression or iteration of an idea that has existed for time immemorial, right? Rather than saying, but what if we just had a, truly had a blank slate here? You know, like what if we forgot that this thing even existed and we

didn't try and make it the best version of it we ever could, but what if, what if the universe was our possibility? You know, yes, it's more terrifying because again, we don't know. We're like thrust into this place of being massively wildly exposed to our peers and our colleagues and those around us. And maybe we have resources that we have to allocate and we're responsible, right? You know, we have to like worry about like, how's this going to affect me? But at the same time, there is no progress in the human condition unless people are not only willing to go there, but equipped to go there and imagine what the, not what, not what the next best iteration of today is, but what like an entirely evolved future might be. Yeah. I mean, one of the things, and again,

I think what you're saying is, is completely brilliant is optimization is actually really dangerous because what ends up happening is when you optimize is you get better and better and better in a narrower and narrower and narrower way. And then suddenly situations shift and you're destroyed. And, you know, in terms of genetics, I mean, this is the old idea, basically of eugenics. The old idea behind eugenics is that we could build a perfect human with perfect DNA, you know, and then what happens all of a sudden, you know, a new bacteria comes along and everything's gone, everything's dead. And actually what you want is you want diversity, you want variety. And in terms of what you're saying, you also want to be able to stop saying, how do I keep making the iPhone better and better and better and better and better and start saying, what's actually a completely new technology?

What's something just completely different? And, you know, I work a lot in Silicon Valley. And unfortunately, there's actually a huge lack of imagination in Silicon Valley because people are really just obsessed with these kinds of micro improvements of software. And software has almost entirely exhausted what it's going to do. We actually need to build a new hardware. We need to realize the computer has kind of reached almost the end of its ability to do what it's going to do.

And we just started thinking, what is the next big piece of technology beyond a computer? You know, what is an intelligent thinking machine that doesn't think computationally, but thinks in some of the other ways that human brains can think? That's the kind of radical thought

that I think you're going to see power people, you know, 100, 200 years from now. And there's that same opportunity for innovation all over the place if people are willing to do as you say and focus less on optimizing and kind of getting more and more kind of minor incremental improvements. Instead, take the big jump, take the big risk and say, where's the big opportunity for change? Yeah, which gets to the research that you referenced earlier that you introduced,

I think really just in the last year about like, how do we train creativity differently? And it brings us back to the early part of the conversation around like, okay, so what if we center narrative theory and storytelling in that? So rather than thinking systems and divergent and convergent

and sort of like the different phrases that we've seen, like you introduced the idea of like, what if we actually center storytelling in this in a way that seems maybe not obvious from the outside in, that this is going to profoundly change the way that we come up with new ideas, that we get creative and innovate. But what you're seeing in your research is that, in fact, it does just that. Yeah. So to sort of understand this, I mean, basically our modern theories of creativity

are, they're generally known as diversion thinking or brainstorming, and they had their origins at the end of World War II, where an Air Force colonel was actually tasked by the military, was like, what is the secret to creativity? And he came up with diversion thinking, and his idea behind diversion thinking is that creativity is this kind of logical system of randomly mix and matching from sets. And it's a very kind of powerful idea, randomly mix and matching from sets. And it's a very kind of powerful idea and it seems to work quite well or it did seem to work quite well for a while. And then something crazy happened,

which is that we built computers that could perform divergent thinking much, much, much better than humans, way better than we can ever do it. And it turns out they're not actually that creative. They can't create 99.9% of the things that humans can do. They can't create strategies or plots or new business plans or science or any of these kinds of things. And why? And this problem was brought to my attention when I was kind of brought in to

consult for a bunch of AI guys. And I started to realize, well, obviously, because the mechanism of creativity in the human brain is different. And really what's going on in the human brain is what we would technically call counterfactual thinking or what-if thinking, in which we just imagine different alternatives. It's like, well, you know, what if I did this differently? Or what if we put this character in this situation? Or what if we change this law of the world or these kinds of things? And that kind of thinking is thinking that a computer can't do because it's non-logical. And so, you know, basically I was brought in by the U.S. military, and I wrote their new field book on creative thinking, and that's gone through special forces.

And we're actually on task to brief the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And it's also yielded a bunch of publications in Harvard Business Review and places like that. And what we've seen is, you know, I don't think my theory of creativity explains everything. You know, I don't think that if you look at my theory of creativity, suddenly that's going to answer all the questions around creativity. But I think the fact that it's proved so effective in such an incredibly short period of time in doing so much change shows just how much more work there is to do in this area and how much we need to actually shift away from all these straightforward computational answers to how the human brain works and start to really embrace the complexity and the exciting thing that our brain is a machine,

but it's a machine that's far more complicated than laptops or satellites or cell phones. And if we want to kind of increase the performance of what we can do, we have to ourselves start thinking a lot more creatively. Yeah, and creatively differently. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

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Flight Risk. It's interesting. I remember it's probably gone on 10 years ago. I was reading. It may have been an HBR survey actually of CEOs where they said, like, list out the most important qualities and the people that you want to bring into your organization. And creativity topped the list. And I think it topped the list for a couple of years running. Then if you ask, well, how do you determine whether somebody is creative or how do

you help them? It was just sort of like an assumption, like you either are or you aren't, this is not a thing that's trainable. And I think part of this really, the diversion approach and then all the thinking systems and the design systems that came around it were to try and actually say, how do we train it? But what you're doing, so the assumption started to become, well, maybe it's actually not like, you know, either in your genes or it's not, but maybe this is a trainable thing. Do you find that there are certain people who are simply because this is getting to the nurture nature side of things, like a certain amount is trainable across everybody, but are there people whose brains are simply wired by the time they reach a certain point in life, the nature side of it, who are

either more susceptible to the set of prompts or processes that would allow them to be more creative or just seem to be able to generate truly novel ideas and solutions and strategies. And they have for their entire life, regardless of anything they're ever exposed to. Do those outliers exist, or is it really all about just being trained? Oh, no, it's definitely not just all about being trained. I mean, I think there's real neural divergence. Our brains are all different. So it would be extraordinary if we all were different in all these other ways, but we all of a sudden had exactly the same creativity. Before I get into how there are certain people who are atypical creativity in terms of their creativity and kind of how their

brains work. I do want to say though, that almost all of us are extraordinarily creative. And you know, the reason for that is just humans evolved to be able to deal with these incredibly fast changing situations. I mean, when you go back tens, hundreds of thousands of years ago, we were in these small groups. We were relatively, compared to many of the species around us, defenseless. We had to figure out how to adapt. And you see how quickly our species has and all the ingenuity. And you think back to all the problems that everyone solves on a daily basis in their own lives, all the creativity that people display in kind of small projects in terms of their own personal lives. You realize that everyone is hugely creative. Having said that, yes, of

course, there are people who end up kind of changing the world more than others. And, you know, this is one of the fascinating areas of my research. I get to hang out with a lot of these people and talk with them and study them. And the one thing that you find going back to what I was saying about creativity being largely narrative is that they're all really story thinkers. They're really good at counterfactual thinking. And what if, I mean, the kind of famous example here in science is Einstein. Einstein was not a great mathematician, but he was great at running these weird thought experiments in which he was like, well, you know, what if I was, you know, riding my bicycle and then the headlight was shining in this direction? Or what if I was in the elevator and it was falling at this speed and these kinds

of things? Same thing with Darwin. I mean, Darwin was running all these kinds of, you know, what if stories and basically what if, you know, a parent had all these children, you know, what would happen if the children were different from each other? What if? And so there was this kind of process of story thinking in terms of all that scientific creativity. And then, of course, you know, Van Gogh and Shakespeare and all the artists, it's obvious that they're story thinkers too. So, yes, there are people that display more creativity than others. And it generally seems to be this ability to story think, to be counterfactual. And largely the drivers of that, the two main drivers of that that we find are the ability to notice anomalies and weight them.

So what computers do is when they see something that's an outlier, they regress it to a mean. They say, oh, you know, that's a mistake. It doesn't fit to the, you know, it doesn't fit the formula. Let's basically dismiss it. What a creative does is they see an exception and say, this is an opportunity. This is something that could be, how do I get more of that? And so what we see is that creative people tend to be fascinated by stuff that's weird, anomalous. You go into their house, it's just an explosion of like bizarre things that don't seem like they belong together, you know. And all of us have that to a little degree, but creative people even more so. And then the other core skill that they often have is what

we call perspective shifting. The ability to kind of enter into other people's perspectives and say, what would I do if I was this person? And that again is a story skill. It's the ability to enter into another character's perspective. And so people who are good storytellers are often able to create dynamic stories because all the characters in them operate differently. This is one of the great things about Shakespeare, more than his ability to write language, is his ability to identify different psychologies, have people behave differently in different situations. And if you know a friend who's very empathetic or very curious about other people and is able to tell these stories that have a large cast of characters in them. That is a huge, deep sign of creativity.

You know, and I, and I like that you acknowledge neurodiversity and at the same time, like there is process that anybody can step into and say like, what if I literally, I mean, simply that question that you posited so many times now in the conversation, what if like, and what's the story that emerges from the question? What if, and get as wild, get us out there, get as different as you can. I want to zoom the lens out here. We've been sort of like focusing on creativity, but a lot of the work that you do touches on really the broader human condition beyond like, how can I get more creative? How can I be a better strategist or problem solver or function in high stakes, high risk situations? And it's really, how do I live a better life? How do I connect more closely with other people? How do I love more openly and fully? How do I see

the humanity in people who are not like me? And I feel like in both a direct and indirect way, this is also part of what you're getting at in your recent book, Wonderworks, where you literally take this world of literature and you kind of deconstruct it into inventions in no small part, because I feel like what you're doing is you're saying, okay, so people for thousands of years have done stuff in stories that in some way do things to us that we don't understand. It bypasses our defenses, bypasses our rational brain. And yet in some way, maybe it opens our heart to somebody who we never would have been in connection with. Maybe it allows us to process grief or trauma in a way that allows us to move forward with our lives. And you sort of say,

and underneath the hood of all of these different things are a set of, you call them inventions, that we can see how these things get put to use in different stories. And maybe if we understand what these inventions are, we can help them, bring them into our own experience in the way that we tell our own story. I'm so curious what led you to say, okay, so I want to actually do this project. I want to, you know, because it sounds like you've got a lot of different things going on. And sitting down and writing a book is a really, really major devotion of energy and effort. What brought you to wanting to say, let me actually go into this and deconstruct it and tease out these 25 different inventions so that I can turn around and share them with the world?

Yeah, it was a totally bizarre and bonkers book to write. And I still honestly, I mean, I imagine like a lot of people, you know, who get to the end of a book, you can't even believe that you wrote it because, you know, part of it's an out of body experience. But I mean, the first thing is, you know, I just realized there was this kind of crisis in our schools where the way that books are being taught. And I just wanted to kind of give people an alternative. I just wanted to say, look, there's a different way to talk about this stuff. And I went around and kind of explained this in a lot of situations and people were sort of like, well, can we have like more details? And so, you know, that's part of the reason that I wrote the book. But I mean, also, I mean, I think

literature, we have this idea in the modern world that literature is about sort of changing other people's minds or that stories about changing other people's minds. I mean, I think, you know, when I work with the military, stories are always put under like psyops, like psychological operations or brainwashing. You know, when I work in businesses, it's always marketing. They're like, oh, Angus, you're good at stories. You should talk to the marketing people, you know? And I have this totally different view of story, which is story isn't about changing other people's minds. It's a tool for changing our own. You should talk to the marketing people, you know? And I have this totally different view of story, which is story isn't about changing other people's minds. It's a tool for changing our own. You know, what do you want more out of your own head? I mean, do you want to be a kinder

person? Do you want to be a more joyful person? Do you want to be a more curious person? Do you want to think more scientifically? Do you want to heal faster from grief? You know, what do you want from your own head? There is a story that can do that because that story can plug into your story and change the way that you act and behave. Because so much of the human brain is about actions and processes. If you can find the right story and live that story, that will change the actions and processes. And there's a very basic example of this in psychology. You know, the stories you tell yourself, you know, I eat pain, you know, then that will, as opposed to, you know, pain breaks me, you know, I mean, that just completely changes the way in which you respond to events.

And so when you start to take those simple stories and make them more complicated and subtle and sophisticated as authors and writers and inventors across the world for centuries have done, you start to realize there's this huge resource on our shelves for changing our brains, empowering our brains, allowing our brains to be almost anything we want them to be. And we have all this time in school when we're reading all this literature in ways that are not very helpful and are actually a lot of times instantiating anxiety and disenchantment and alienation and all the things you've talked about. And what if we just took all that time, which is already in school? What if we took the one

or two hours a week that all these kids in school across this country are already reading stories and used it to make them more creative, more brave, more hopeful, all these kinds of things? Because it's as simple as just giving them the books and encouraging them to read in a different way. So what I do in the books, I basically go through and I say, look, we all know this intuitively. We all know that when we read a certain book in our life, it gave us courage or it gave

us hope. But I'm going to actually point out to you that you're right. And I'm going to point out to you that you're right by showing you the science and then also by identifying the very specific, unique thing that's different about that story. So getting away from the Joseph Campbell model, getting away from a lot of these ideas, these universal stories that do everything all at once, and instead into the idea that stories are like medicine. You wouldn't go to a pharmacy and just ask for a universal pill. I mean, that's this kind of mythology from the Middle Ages that there is the philosopher's stone, right? If you went into a pharmacy and just started

randomly eating tablets off the shelf, you'd make yourself sick. It's not any different really with literature. If you're reading a bunch of books that are designed to help your brain do the opposite of what you want your brain to do in that moment, they're going to be boring. They're going to be irritating. They're going to be confusing. So why not in a moment of grief, read a book that is going to help you with grief? Why not when you're seeking to become more curious, read a book that's going to help you be more curious? Why when you want more energy, read a book that's going to energize you? You know? And so that's the whole purpose of the book is basically to be kind of an operating manual for this thing that for the most part, we're just kind of thrown into the deep end or taught to read unhelpfully by kind of interpreting

it for symbols and themes and arguments and other stuff, which is really the kind of thing that a computer would do and not the way that the human brain naturally operates. Yeah. I mean, it's really, I love the notion of almost like, you know, like dosing yourself with a particular type of story. It's like, which gets me, you know, years ago, I was given a book

that's really hard to find now from what I understand by a guy named David Gordon called Therapeutic Metaphor. And he was a guy who was deep into the world of neurolinguistic programming and had spent time, like a lot of time,

deconstructing the linguistic patterns of Milton Erickson and how this, you know, like one therapist a long time ago was able to like take these intractable cases, sit them down in a room and literally like just tell a story and all of a sudden everything changed for a human being and what was underneath that. And he would deconstruct this, what he called therapeutic metaphor. How do you actually create a story that has a specific intended therapeutic effect? And as I was reading through one divorce, I was like, oh, this is really interesting because now this is sort of like giving mechanism to a lot of what he was talking about. It's like, oh, okay. So like these things,

when these things are present, it opens certain doorways within us to our own understanding and our own emotion, how we see ourselves and how we see the world around us. So the notion of literature, literally sort of like choosing it for an intended effect because of a state that we're in or a place we're in our lives or a place where we yearn to go to. And I think it's fascinating to me. And this is, you know, like we brought up literature a whole bunch and we brought the idea of narrative theory, which is really good basis of the creativity work you're doing. But we're talking about story and like so many different content. Look at podcasting. Okay. So let me ask you about this now. One of the most popular genres within podcasting, if not the most popular by a wild margin, has always been true crime. What's going on there? Yeah, well, I mean, people are fascinated by what's going on in other

people's heads. And people are fact like what psychology could have created this ax? You know, what could be the answer behind this? So there's this kind of innate kind of, I think, problem solving scientific drive. I mean, I talk a little bit in the book about basically the invention of crime fiction and how that's actually really the beginning of modern science. Modern science really took off with the invention of Sherlock Holmes and previously Edgar Allan Poe, you know, because it became this way for humans to kind of puzzle things through. I think it's also, to a certain extent, part of our desire to find a real mystery again in the world. So, I mean, you know, I mean, historically, the mystery plays, these were supposed to be directed towards heaven

and towards God and the idea that the ultimate mystery was happy life beyond, nirvana. But really, if you go back and look at paintings from the Middle Ages or from the Renaissance, most of the energy that those artists devoted was to painting hell. I mean, heaven is this kind of like fairly boring blue sky place with some harps in it, but like hell is just this like sort of just like explosion of like kind of like Baroque invention and kind of weirdness, you know? And I think that that really is the deep mystery because I mean, I think as human beings, we are born into a life that is actually pretty dark. And if you're a modern scientist, you believe that at the core of life is no intention. It's an accident. And so there's

this kind of horror at the center of it that our brains are fascinated by. And I think all of us need to actually go into that horror to come out of it. I mean, I think, you know, one of the weird things about the way the modern world works is on the one hand, we're so obsessed with being happy that no one wants to let anything negative in, you know, and then this manifests itself in the fact that all of us are like secretly kind of prowling the internet looking for dark things. And would be great would be to integrate those crime podcasts with positive psychology. What would be great would be to say, yes, you know, the fact that you feel this sense of horror and darkness in the world, and this sense of mystery, just in the same way that the Renaissance painters did in terms of hell, that's very organic to your experience.

But let's not just leave it there. Let's leverage that. And let's sort of say, you know, what can you use from that to kind of give back to yourself and to the world? So that's kind of how I would think about it. But I agree with you that I don't think true crime podcasts are going away anytime. They've always been the most popular sort of genre, really all the way back to penny periodicals. Yeah. And then I was also thinking as you're describing that, like the different types of genres, you know, with the advent of e-books, particular devices where nobody could actually see the books that you're reading when you're out in public., like the massive, massive explosion in romance. And like, there are like 20 or 30 or 40 different sub genres of romance, which I've learned over

time. Um, and so it's, it's fascinating to see like what we gravitate towards in terms of like, when we're willing to invest ourselves in actually consuming other stories and why that happens. Yeah. And the thing I want to say is to me, you know, romance, I read romance too. I mean, and of course I read horror, but, but I do want to emphasize going back to what you were saying about the amygdala earlier, that is very much like chocolate for our brain. I mean, those are things that make our brain feel good in the short term, but are not really sustainable in the long term. I mean, this is why Jane Austen is one of the greatest romance writers of all time is because she gives you

romance, but she also gives you the thing beyond the romance. And I think it is important to realize that at the same time that you're eating chocolate and you're doing fun stuff and you want to do at least some of that kind of indulgence every day, all of your life. You also want the more sustainable reading. You want the more sustainable stories. You want to find that balance because we find that when people only read romance novels, actually they get pretty disenchanted. Sort of got on the record and said that one of the problems I think with Disney is that if you watch too many Disney movies,

they actually bum you out. They make you more depressed. It's okay to watch a Disney movie here and there, but you don't want to basically be on Disney Plus all the time. You don't want your kids on Disney Plus all the time. You want to give them a variety of stuff. So I think that's just the one number one tip

I always make to people in terms of reading. As I say,'s just the one number one tip I always make to people in terms of reading. As I say, it doesn't really matter what you read, but you want a little bit of diversity in there, just like you want a little bit of diversity in your diets. You know, don't just always eat the same thing. Don't just always read the same thing. Reach out to a friend of yours who's a little bit different, you know, and make that effort. Because the more you make that effort, the more you'll find over time that it's really rewarded and your brain will grow. And you'll just kind of find yourself exploring life and doing things you could never have imagined. Yeah, I love that.

And that feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So sitting here in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Weed, love, and care. Thank you. in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you appreciate the work that we've been doing here on Good Life Project, go check out my new book, Sparked. It'll reveal some incredibly eye-opening things

about maybe one of your favorite subjects, you, and then show you how to tap these insights to reimagine and reinvent work as a source of meaning, purpose, and joy. You'll find a link in the show notes, or you can also find it at your favorite bookseller now. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

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