Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Angus Fletcher

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Angus Fletcher is an author and professor of story science at The Ohio State University’s Project Narrative. With a degree in neuroscience from the University of Michigan and a PhD in literature from Yale University, he developed narrative-based leadership and decision-making training for the U.S. Army Special Operations, work that earned him the U.S. Army's Public Service Commendation Medal in 2023. Beyond his work with the military, Fletcher has advised organizations including NASA, Disney, Sony, and the BBC on applying storytelling to innovation, creativity, and organizational performance. His latest book, Primal Intelligence, explores the uniquely human forms of intelligence that distinguish people from artificial intelligence and how they can be strengthened. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: AGZ https://DrinkAG1.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Lectio 365 https://Lectio365.com ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Tetrogramminton. I don't know if you have a positive or negative impression of the Army or if you have one, but I had a very negative impression of the Army before I worked with them. So first of all, I did high school in New Jersey. The Army was the thing that you did if you couldn't get into college, basically. So we had this real stereotype. Bad rep. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

And then I also just started the Army as the people who, if they couldn't solve a problem, they just dropped a bomb on it. Like, oh, let's just blow it up. Force was the solution. Exactly. Yes, yes, yeah. And then I started to work with these folks. So first of all, a little bit behind the veil.

I get this knock on my door, basically. They don't explain who they are. They reveal that they're actually, over time, they reveal their part of something called Joint Special Operations Command. And there's this intelligence unit that works there with the various units there. Was it scary being approached by them? It was scary. Yeah, it was really scary, especially because I'm an immigrant.

And also, everybody in my department was terrified of things. the army and the more that I started working with the army people in my department basically stopped talking to me in the same way they thought oh you're like a spy basically you're like you've been like programmed but anyway I got brought in and it was so different from what I thought so first of all most of this unit they're just people you would imagine a lot of them are women from all different parts of the world and their job is to solve problems from the future before they happen and so they sit in this room and they're like what are all the things are going to happen

tomorrow that are bad. How do we stop them now? At first when I heard this, I was like, well, this is just bonkers. Then you get in the room and you realize they are identifying these problems and they are solving them. And in my case, what is really weird is our friend Malcolm Gladwell had tweeted out very kindly a promotion from this book that I had written. And so it had gotten on the radar of these folks and they'd read the book and they'd read the book

and they understood the book, and they started tracking my research. And they came to me and they said, hey, Professor Futch, what we've noticed is you're publishing all this really weird out there stuff. It seems pretty interesting. And it seems like none of your colleagues are citing your work. Like, they all say really nice things about you, but none of them incorporate anything that you've done into their research. It's like you've created this field that is just like dying.

I was like, yeah, that just kind of describe kind of what I'm doing. And they're like, would you like to actually actually? test these theories? Would you like to see if they actually work? Would you like to see if the human brain does think of story? Would you like to see if you could bring in people and help them develop their imagination and their intuition and get better and more effective at these things? And I was like, yeah, I would like to do this things. And I was like, well, why do you want me to do this? Like, what are you going to do with this information? And they said, well, we've noticed that young people coming into special operations are not as imaginative. They're not as intuitive. They don't

have as much common sense. When they hit these volatile and uncertain situations, they're unable to cope with them. And so we're starting to have a real crisis in special operations. Because back in the day, we had so many folks who would come in, who would have imagine, you know, back in the 70s, basically. And our job was just to pick the ones who were the most imaginative. But now what's happening is we don't have anyone who's imaginative. And we need to figure out how to train up that ability in young folks or else basically special operations is going to die. And I was like, okay, this is kind of like a cool problem. It's a wild story. Yeah, it is totally wild. Yeah. And there was a long period of time where they thought I might be a total scam artist, you know, because a lot of the

stuff I was saying, they'd be like, well, where's the evidence for this? And I was like, well, you read this book. And they would be like, this book is written by you. I was like, yes, that's right with the evidence. They're like, yes, but where's there another book that isn't written by you that has the evidence? I was like, well, no one thinks. No, because it's a theory based on what you've seen and you're pointed to, this is what's beautiful to me. That's right. Yes, that's right. That's the extent that I am an artist, that's exactly right. Yeah, yeah. And so there was a kind of period of time, but when it turned out, there was a great moment, which I'll never forget. So I was brought inside this compound, which is like this totally

fascinating place where it's basically built from all of these relics that special operations had accrued over time. There were pieces of buildings that had been, you know, in Vietnam or other places, or battleships or whatever and these helicopter parts. And they'd taken all these pieces and they'd built them into this building. And many of these pieces of architecture had tragic histories behind them. So you'd walk through it and you'd be reminded of these catastrophes. The purpose of it was to make you realize, oh, there's a story that can come out of this. It was a bad time, but there's a story.

And so I went in there and they were training this group of new recruits, new special operators, I think maybe kind of late 20s, early 30s, and they put me in front of the room, and they said, this man is a genius. His name is Professor Fletcher. He's going to teach you how to be more intuitive and imaginative. Listen to him.

And I was like, okay. And I basically had a panic attack the night before because I get picked up in a van, like Jordan around in the circle. I don't know where you are, right? What's happening? Did all those things really happen? Yeah, yeah.

I had no idea. I mean, I had to go into non-disclosed locations and whatnot. Yeah, yeah, I know it was great. I always had guides with me. I was never like a little. loan. I always had the handler, I guess, like that. Yeah, yeah. Did you have to become one of them to be able to participate? I definitely did start to pick up weird habits. The funniest thing that I picked up from them is, so this isn't something I talk about very much, but I had troubles in my

marriage, basically, before I started working with the operators. And one of the reasons I had troubles in my marriage is because I couldn't relax. And one of the reasons I couldn't relax, it's because I always felt like if there was a problem, I had to be the one who solved it. So it's felt like everything that was going wrong was on me. And it's totally joke, my wife nuts. I could have someone coming to my life where I'd met for 15 minutes and they needed help and I would like drop everything and go help that person instead of being at home and doing sensible things, whatever. And then I met the operators. And I realized for the really like the first time of my life that there were people who were much better than me at solving problems and I could

relax because I was on like a team. And so what actually the big things that I did really take away from working with the operators was like there's just these amazing people out there, and I can trust humanity. So that was definitely one thing that I got from them, but what was weird is that we were already actually pretty similar in terms of how we thought in terms of these imaginative, intuitive processes. And so when I got up in front of the class to teach, they gave me like a piece of chalk.

One of the things that's great about the Army, in special operations, I should say. They don't like PowerPoint. It's all got to be chalk and hand. Physical. Yeah, exactly. Activate the motor cortex. So I got up the front of the board, and I was talking like I am now and being very inarticulate

and very abstract and professorial and just like saying stuff and drawing all the stuff on the board. And these recruits looked at me, and they were like, what the hell is this guy saying? And then I had this moment where I was like, oh, my God, I am a fraud. This whole time I thought that this was the beautiful. Yeah. And now I've- You have to like prove it. That's right, yeah. And then this instructor came down from the back of the room and took a piece of chalk from me.

And he goes, what the professor is saying is. And then he wrote out everything that I was saying in a much more eloquent and precise manner. Yeah. And the recruits were like, ah. And then I was like, ah. And then I suddenly realized the U.S. Army has solved a lot of these problems before me. And really what they wanted me when I came in to do is they really almost wanted me to help explain back to them what they were doing. Because it was almost like the knowledge had become so deep in their organization that they had forgotten it.

It had become tacit knowledge. It became ritualistic as opposed to. alive. That's so beautiful. And that's exactly right. That's exactly what it is. And you've got to go in there. And so they have this amazing training course called Robin Sage. And Robin Sage. Robin Sage. What a weird name, right? Yeah, yeah. And the point of it is to essentially teach creativity. And the way they do that is they give you an objective and you're setting off in your objective. And then the moment you're halfway there, a bomb goes off. And you have to make a new plan. You have to be creative on the fly.

And again and again and again, they have this environment. And what's amazing about the environment is that as you start to watch recruits go through it, none of them solve the problems in the same way. So it's not like in a lot of military and training environments, there's like a right answer to something. And they keep basically prodding you into you like figure out how to get the gasoline can over the wall. Yeah. This isn't like that at all.

Everyone is solving the problems differently. And the cadre, the trainers, the cadre, they evolve. as the students evolve, and so they change the learning environments. It's like a massive role-playing game, I guess would be a way to think about it, you know, with like the dungeon masters, and they're evolving the learning environment

as the students are going through it, and that allows for this interactive, creative process, and by the time the students come out the end of it, they've literally become the first person to solve Robin Sage in the way that they solved it. Wow. Like they've become an original, and that's why you're an operator,

because the job of an operator is to go into the unknown and do something new. But when they brought me in, one of the things they pointed out to me is they said, hey, Angus, all this stuff was don't join the Vietnam War. And a lot of the exercises were literally Vietnam exercises. They have like this guerrilla chiefdom, stuff like that. And they were like, this training is great and we don't want to touch it. But we know there can be more. Do we know who created those original exercises?

We do. So they were created out of a branch known as Mac v. So what happened during the Vietnam War is that North and the South are fighting. United States is on the side of the South, and the North is a lot smarter than us. They're a lot more adaptive. They're able to come up with all these creative ways to wage war. And they're able to use our rules against us. So we've made all these rules, and they're trapping us and constraining us. And the North is like, ah, if you're trapped by these rules, we're going to figure out how to exploit them. And so one of our rules was, we're not going to go into Cambodia, which is running right alongside Vietnam. And so the North puts this thing called the

Ho Chi Minh Trail down in Cambodia. And the United States is just watching as in plain view, all these groups are going. And so United States did this thing, which was they broke their own rules. And they started the Green Berets. It started McVee'sog. And this was, a group of folks who went into Cambodia, broke the rules, and how did they do this? They didn't go in alone. They met up with local tribesmen, and they turned those tribesmen to special operators. So essentially, the first green berets were these force multipliers who were teachers, who would go in and teach the skills of places like Robin Sage to these tribesmen.

And then these collectors would go in, and they had an over 100% casualty, right? Wow. And that sounds impossible, right? It sounds impossible. Yeah, it sounds impossible. The reason of it is, is they would go out, and many of them, I think, in fact, most of them did die, but many of them were badly wounded. They would come back and get passionate, and they would go back out again and then die.

And so you end up with this process. And so this, obviously, the Vietnam Wars Awards the United States should not have fought in, but it was the genesis of us learning, essentially from the North Vietnamese, how to do this guerrilla fighting. because we had to learn to be guerrillas because the guerrillas were beating our mass bombing and our Asian orange and all this horrific stuff that we were inflicting.

We start to realize, ah, the machine is not smart, what smart is the individual gorilla. Also sounds like this is happening at the same time as the human potential movement was just budding. That's right. It's excellent. It's right.

So the idea of new ways of thinking... That's exactly right. And that's highly influential to these units. Yeah. It sounds like it. Yeah. And so what happened is, they had all these folks who were learning all these lessons, and then they had to come back

and build a school to teach them. Traditional army schools are, this is how you make your bad, drill, da-da-da-da-da-da. And they were like, no, no, no, no, no. We've got to figure out a school in which the purpose of the school is for you to figure out how to break the rules. How to solve the problem, regardless of the methods you use. It's less about the methods. Exactly. And more about in a situation, how do you break through? That's exactly right. And so they created this entire school that does that and is amazing at it.

So it started in the 70s? Yeah, Robin Sage started in the 70s. I think technically Special Forces, I think it might have started in the 60s or maybe even the 50s. But basically, it really starts to get going in terms of Robin Sage and all these special training programs. So they read your book and felt like this is related to what we do? That's right. That's right. Yeah.

And so they pulled me in. And so what we started to do is we started to do is we started. to figure out how can we develop new training that uses all the wisdom and exactly the same structure in these schools where the instructors are reacting to the students and figuring out how to encourage the students to solve things their own way. How can we start to take that and branch it and build more of it? And we had a bunch of breakthroughs in which we realized that you could take that and not only use it for special forces, but take into actual schools. And so one of the first things we did after the Army gave me clearance is we went into a group of third graders.

Because third grade, it turns out, is where creativity starts to die. We went in and we started training all those third graders to act like special operators and helping them activate their intuition. Helping them activate their graduation. Tell me some of the exercises to turn on your intuition. One of the simple things is that every person that you encounter is unique. but all of us are in a rush to judge that person and put them in a category. And so we want to kind of assign a label to them. This is how computers think.

It's how demographics works. And as soon as you put a label on something, you limit all the other possibilities. That's right. You've really replaced possibilities with a probability because you're basically saying, well, this person is probably going to act like all the other people who fit in this label, who are like this type. So we teach people to have conversations in which they're forced to ask who, what, when, when, where, how, but never why.

Because the moment you ask why, why are you asking why? You're asking why because something has surprised you. And a surprise is an exception to one of your mental rules. And so what that's telling you is I've actually come to the limits of my rules and I need to find a new rule. But if I ask why, I'm not going to make a new rule. I'm just going to surface somebody else's rule and take that. So what I actually have to do is I have to resist asking why and start asking more questions. So you don't want to know why.

why someone makes the decision they make, you just want to know the path they take. Is that correct? That is correct, but also more fundamentally, people don't know why. So if I asked you why you did something, you'll just give me some label. And this is why when you're having a conversation with a friend,

you can understand your friend better than they understand themselves. And you can come to understand each other through conversation better, like you're helping me understand myself better now. And that comes from resisting explanation and pushing into surprise. So, for example, if you said to me, hey, it's what your favorite thing to do? And I said, oh, I love to kayak.

And you say, well, who do you go kayaking with? I say, I go with all these people, but I never go with my wife. You, of course, I want to be like, oh, why? Why don't you go to your wife? But instead, right, if instead of saying that, you say, well, what else you do with your wife like to do? Then you start building out and you start to surface more things. And then the more of those surprises you lean into, the more your brain starts to

pop with possibility and the more starts to see new possible rules. So that's just a simple example. And there's nothing more powerful you can do than having a conversation with another person to expand your intuition, but to do that, you have to really resist judgment. And how does art help with intuition? So every art work is a product of an intuition.

Because an artist saw something that everyone else had seen a million times before, but saw something new in it. So as an artist, your job is to paint the sky in a way that no one else has ever painted the sky before. As a sonnet writer, your job is to describe love in a way that no one has ever described love before.

To do that, you have to see a new possibility in love. And so what you have to do, when you're looking at an artwork, is you have to surrender yourself to not getting an explanation from it, but seeing what is unique or new or surprising about it. And that challenges people, because people want to understand work of art,

but instead you want to experience it the way you do as a child, which is you embrace the fact that I understand what's happening, I'm going to lean into the parts that I understand the least. Travel. Another great one. Children have very strong intuition. Why do they have strong intuition? Because for them, the world is always new. They're in a new place.

Exactly. And most people today don't travel. very well because they want to control their environment when they travel. But if you really travel, you're constantly being surprised, and that starts to wake up that part of your brain so that when you come back, you see your familiar world new. As nutrition science advanced through the mid-20th century, researchers began to understand that modern eating patterns,

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then say, okay, it's time for your final test. And your final test is you go to this huge area of North and South Carolina that U.S. Special Forces has essentially taken over and you enter into this story. So this is a place that you can't happen into. You only get dropped. into this place. That's right. Yeah. If you accidentally end up in Pineland, you've done something

very, very extraordinary. Yeah, yeah. No, it's a very controlled military environment. But when you're inside it, it's totally spontaneous. So it's like a recording studio, right? You can't get into a recording studio from outside, but once you're inside it, anything can have. The story that you have to buy into to play at Pineland is that a foreign country has invaded and taken over America. So you're in an occupied territory? You're in an occupied United States. You're in North Carolina. The United States. You're in North Carolina. It's been occupied. I see.

And you've got to go in there, and your job is to start an insurgency and to restore freedom and America. Are the people there all service people who are actors? They're all role players, but many of them are not military. And many of them are actually generational role players. Their father or their grandfather played the role that they're now playing. You dropped in there. And then your first thing is, okay, I have to now figure out who in this community I can trust.

And how do I make them trust me? because there's going to be a lot of people in this community at the moment they see me, they're immediately going to report me to the authorities. So immediately I have to start figuring out how do I make that first point of contact? Once I make that first point of contact, how do I know that person isn't essentially double-agentying me

and making me think, oh, I can trust this person, but actually they're trying to extract as much information as me as possible so they can find my team. If it's role play, how do you know if it's working? Yeah. The only way in the real world you know it's successful is because you accomplish the thing you want to accomplish. But in a set-up version of it, it's impossible to know.

Yes. Well, so I can't give away too many of the details. Yeah. But what I could say is, like, hypothetically, what if when you got into this area that success would be overthrowing the local government, for example, going in and taking that over? And what if that path of success meant that you had to find enough folks to give you enough resources and equipment, that you could do that final task. And then what if you were a particularly creative person,

you're like, you know what, I don't actually want to take over that thing. I've got a different idea for how I'm going to take over. I'm actually going to build my own radio station. And I'm going to totally ignore the rules of the game as it's been set up by my instructors, and I'm going to build a radio station. And the instructors are like, whoa, this person's coming here with a new plan.

Let's go with it. What can we do to disrupt the radio station? Yeah, yeah. And so it's a little bit like a role-playing game in that there is kind of an objective, which is you've got to get the treasure, you'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.

And they'd set up this obstacle course. And they'd put all these recruits there. And they said, okay, 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 to the obstacle horse, 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 was like standing at the back, and he realized that there was no way he was going to get through this obstacle course and anything like the time, the other recruits from doing it. He 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. He found the beautiful, right? He found the target. He found it his own way.

And so even now, when you go there now, the entire course, as it is, all of the course, whether it's the other 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. They 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 want to do 800 things, 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. So Special Port says, 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 to them, 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. And 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. And 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. It is purposeful, but totally in the moment. Yeah, jazz works that way as well. Yeah. One of 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, that 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 leads you to that are the question you 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 for people with these questions are coming up. Because 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 knows asked before.

What's an S-O-P? And 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 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. Tell 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 environment. 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. You know, no, no, no, no, no, I've got to figure out a totally new outfit to wear this thing. No, no, no, no, no, just fine. 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 moment's real opportunity. 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, but then the moment the situation is unfamiliar, they switch out of them and do something new. You see this also with astronauts. Astronauts are incredible at this, particularly like the old-school astronauts,

who are the fighter pilots, who came off to 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.

And 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. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using one of Squarespace's best-in-class templates. With the built-in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus.

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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, you're immediately thrown into kind of like a chaos environment, and your brain is like, get out of here. You experience

immediate panic. And the way that your brain works is that when you, you, you, have a plan, you have a sense of where you're going, you're not panicking because you have that momentum. 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 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. And 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, ducts inside the turret and was so frightened he actually started to bend the metal of the gun that he was supposed to be holding out of and the guy in the truck who was driving it, who's more experience, called up to him. But this was like, hey, how many trucks are there ahead of us? When the guy up in the tariff was panicking, you know, too deep breath and looked forward

and he said, there's six trucks behind us and he went down and they said, how many trucks are behind us and he looked up, went back. And the more he started being 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 is you walk over to them calmly and they're basically like, what's the first step that you can take in the direction? And 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. And 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 or graduating high school, these kinds of things. And so we just sit 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 or 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 action? So one action leads to another action, leads to another action.

That is a plan. That is a story. Yeah. 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? Another 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. So just trust yourself and do it next. 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, because 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 to 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. The 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. So 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 of 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. What 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 news?

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 long. 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 good idea. That's a good idea. Well, how do we prove that? How do we prove that? When they sat around, they thought a little bit more, I said, well, what is, what is, what is, what is, what is, what is, what is, 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 now it's 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. And 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 on space program, to me, I mean,

I've always, when I look at the magic of the Apollo program, and the The spaceship itself is so bizarre. It flies up into space, and then it ejects part of itself, which 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 and then that fly.

It's like so bonkers, but beautiful. Seems impossible. It seems impossible. It's certainly improbable. What do you know about SIOPs? I know a lot about SIPS. So Syops is psychological operations. And Siams 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 Siyaps 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. And by doing that, it's taking away your ability to make your own story, and therefore to innovate, change society. So, Siop 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 Syops, and so if you go to almost any kind of Syops operation, if you look at almost any of the stuff that they've developed, it's very fearless. It's very ISIS, you can't win. when we started to realize it's actually what's much more powerful for a democratic society to tell is the true story of democracy.

Rather 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 or was a parks. And what we started to find is that those stories, even though they seem initially to be more fragile or 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, whereas the idea behind the possibility was to turn the enemy into you, into a democracy. And so Sybis 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 it 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 being an American is to be able to create your own life story and 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 sciops, 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, Can I 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. A 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 of what makes the story work. If 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. 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 do things. It's all very abstract based in old rules. And people immediately see that and have no idea how to get there. Whereas you say to somebody, well, you know, we need to build a healthcare system. Okay, that's a specific objective. Okay, well, 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, 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 television. But basically what happens is if you get into a combat situation, you start seeing about two inches in front of you. And this is literal. You can't actually see. Distance becomes totally out of focus? Yes.

You can only see right in front of you. Miopic. 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 terror. It goes into the box. And 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? What 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 because 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 your brain's like, all right, I'll figure that out. I can figure out how to move my armist's

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 gentleman. How 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...

But are people experts at that? Yes. Yes. There's two sort of very fascinating ways in which they both select and develop singleton. 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 were 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.

What'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 now 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 forced you to kind of self-assess. And 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 antifigility 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. If you have an anti-fragile 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, 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. And 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's 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, and 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 beat that person. I'm going to suppress that memory. And then you exist essentially as these two people. You know, you've got to go back and say, I have gratitude for the shame. Just like I have gratitude for the grief that's teaching you something about the world. You then integrate it. When your past is not integrated. When it's 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 single thing, you've got to learn to process grief and shame rapidly. You've got to understand what I 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, or 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. And then you challenge it again,

and they immediately see another path. And so the key for the singleton is 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've got to have gratitude for the other horrible events. That wasn't meant to happen. And then once you start to develop that as a singleton, you become unstoppable

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That's right. Tell me about that. So the old version of EQ was developed out of something 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. In fact, a lot of

people would get very, very high scores and he's like, you test and be totally inept at life. And then people start to wrestle with this problem. They start 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. empathy and 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. Because something doesn't work scientifically isn't necessarily mean that it's wrong. Maybe we haven't figured out how to test it. So there's always that caveat you 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 scientific. psychic because 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.

Those are logic processes. So what we said instead is said, 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. That's what you can see. Yes. And then we start 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 counterintive way for things to have evolved. When we don't even understand ourselves. Yes, that's exactly 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, the story will trigger strong feelings in you. You'll get concern for the main character. We 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. Well, 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. And 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 the 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. And nothing is that. And nothing is that. Yes, well, I would say that. Data scientists would say, well, there's 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. And 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 it's 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 wouldn't. Yeah, it didn't go wrong. That's right. But I think I still would have done it, right? Because 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 you know, a young child, I felt very strongly that there should always be a seatbelt. And so I told them I wasn't going to stand without a seatbelt. And they said to me, no, no, no, no, no, it's fine. It's fine. Don't worry. Don't worry. The bus driver was like, I'm not going to crash the bus. I'm not going to crash the bus. It'll be totally fine. I was fine. I was like, well, that may be the case, but I still on the seatbelt. And the bus driver goes, okay, and it goes and it goes, and it'll be

fine. Please just take your seat. We're going to go. And I refuse to sit down. So you refuse to sit down because there was no seatbelt. There's no seatbelt. Yeah. Yeah. And again, I mean, as an adult, that's not a choice I would have made. I would have sat down. I've sat down on plenty of buses that seatbelt 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'd sit there for the rest of the day until, you know, the bus came back and my parents took me up. And 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. Maybe. I guess it depends on the situation. Yeah, that's right. 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 that was essentially saying, we have a system here and you as a student are interrupting the system. And 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 the system? 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 you did those things that everyone else thinks was silly. Well, you know, Rick, I have to be honest, you made my childhood possible. I didn't tell this part

of the story. This may be something you want to include. I mean. So I come here from England's 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, was totally alienated from 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 outage. cider the whole time. And then I discovered rap music. The first album I ever bought was public enemy, it takes a nation to 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. And so I was 13 years old. And there was this old club there called the Trocadero. And I, I remember reading that public enemy was going to be there. 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, along to the Trinacadero. 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 where the guy was like, you can go in. You don't need to be And I was like, oh, hey, great. And I just remember how welcoming people were. Yeah.

Because I was really scared, and especially when we were getting frisk for the weapons. I was like, come on, God, like, 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 belong because I was there for the same reason everybody else was. I loved what was happening, you know. There was a camaraderie in that world.

Yes. Everyone there was an outsider. In the early days of hip-hop, it was hated. Yeah. 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 save 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. That's really what I felt about it. And that really connected with where I was at that time of my life. So that's another way of saying that a lot of these things that we're talking about now were really launched on an almost emotional. level by the sense that I was like, you can do something interesting with your life.

How did you become who you are? I 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, I've very vivid memories of the morning it happens. My bedroom was next to hers. We had this really weird, like old house. 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. And 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. I ran back into my room and I hid and then I just next year her, my mother's scream and and all the rest of it. Anyway, out of that, what happened is I developed 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. You know, there's things we don't understand that are beyond us, that are beyond the human. It kind of did 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.

Did 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, but 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 waterfalls 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. There'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. Silence 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 and alive within everyday life. Lectio 365 is a free resource. Find inspiration there, now and always. Learn more at lectio-365.com.

What is a naturalist? A naturalist is the original biologist. It used to be that the way people 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 surprised 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. So you see all these interesting birds on the Galapagos, these various finches. and it's used other things, and it comes up with these new ideas about how the world could work. What 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. And 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 the later 20th century. And what has happened now is it's been this spectacular explosion of scientific articles. And there are literally millions of scientific articles. And 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 interests 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. I 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. Do you have a bunch of mathematical rules that help you know that? the bridge isn't going to fall over. And 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, no, everything has to exist at the same time. Frozen in time. Frozen in time.

So it eliminates your ability to think and causes and effects. And as a result, it stops you from gaining a deeper understanding of what's under the surface. It'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 that 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. So 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 the sky Aristotle, who's the founder of symbolic logic. Aristotle invented 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, so 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 as that books are made of words.

Those words had 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, then at Harvard. He developed something called Close Reading. So if you ever took a class, we spent a lot of time staring at a poem, and we're 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. And 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.

So logic works. And IA. Richards famously said that this will finally solve the problem of what literature means. We'll develop this and there will be no more discussions, you know. But when you're a child, how do you read literature? You read it imaginatively. You put yourself in the place of the character. You 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? 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. You like the character at what you're talking about? 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 and Romans, and then he wrote all of his early plays, like Comedy of Errors and Titus and Adronica and whatnot. 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, then write a poem.

Read 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 with you and turned in and they come back to your five minutes and say,

I can make it better. That's when you know you've got them. If they turn into you and they don't care, you haven't got it. Tell me about hacking the test to get into your PhD program. Okay. So I was working in this neuroscience lab. I'd 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. And I'd really, you know, never taken any literature classes and undergrad. You know, I've taken a few

like everybody had and whatnot, but I hadn't seriously studied. And, and I really, you know, I'd never taken any literature classes. 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, I was like, what do I do here? And because I've been trained in science and because one of the reasons that I'd 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. And 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 that was completely incompetent. Yeah.

Because, of course, I'd hack the test. So 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, because I've always been very good at taking tests and I've always been very bad at life.

Yeah. 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 to 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. But what I get anxious about is so when I have a conversation with them, 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 in this moment to talk,

and that puts an enormous amount of psychological pressure on me because I really think of myself, like, what if I'm not being interested in because I'm trying to give you my best self and trying to do my best? So 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 cause 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. And 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, I'd be one of the sort of the most famous individuals. And famously, that system totally collapsed. And it collapsed in the same way than in the 20th century. We've had things like postmodernism and post-structuralism. These all grew out of these logic systems that were essentially turned against themselves because logic failed to produce true. 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 Pyrannists. And you don't even 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 piranists were much more rigorous and they actually used logic to break itself. And so basically logic started to collapse in this period of time. And this is when you get the Reformation, Martin Luther comes along. And the whole system starts to collapse. And what happens is 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? And 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 his 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. And then that creative power and the Renaissance then went on to drive science, which is why you get the scientific revolution. And then 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. And according to the Enlightenment, all stories have to occur in exactly the same time

that they're performed, even this very bad, very tedious plays. And then the Romantics came back again. The romantic shattered the Enlightenment. And they said, no, actually what matters is emotion and spontaneity and 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, we've got to get rid of it. No, no, logic is a beautiful thing when it's handled by a romantic. It'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. And 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 start 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, and 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,

and 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 of the first story. No, they're actually totally different stories. They're completely different stories. They have completely different understandings of how the world works. There'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? Now, 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, 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 was a Scottish writer, he wrote something called the Golden Bow.

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. He said, this is a story of Christ, and this is also the story of the Fisher King, and this is the story of everything. So he said, actually, really, we don't have to worry about this because all stories are the same. 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 monometh. The hero's journey is a very powerful story, and we should, of course, tell up to the extent that it's powerful, 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, and 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 we can more fully embrace the mystery

and there's a lot of people who because of their faith that their beliefs find science and they deny it they'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. We'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 did you come to write the new book?

I wrote primal intelligence because of this experience with special forces. And, 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. Feel free to share any of the information you want, unless insofar as it compromises our mission. And they were very generous. They 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 try 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. So 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 U.S. government is a realization that we can only survive with the individual. And 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 Vincent Van Gogh and like Einstein and Klauswitz and all these kinds of things that are in there. Those are actually not the evidence for any of the claims that I'm making. I mean, the evidence are 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 want people to think. that I'm an expert in Einstein or an expert in Murray-Koree or anything like that. All 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 that had their intuition and imagination strengthened. And so once I start to follow that particular historical track, it became very easy to find examples for the book. And 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, you 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. And 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 for the history of investing to figure out, well, who are the folks that figure this out? The first person

that figured out was this guy Benjamin Graham, 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 stock will go up or stock will go down. And 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 in 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 innovations. 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. They'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, because 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 it 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. Because 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.

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 to this radical change happens in six months? What are you going to do? 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.

We'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? Or as if they would pause and say, you know what, I hadn't thought about that. But here's something that we could do. You would say, that's great. You've got high common sense. I trust you.

So you do little things like that. Test them and see how good they were, 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? It was a period of time where he was an ordinary writer, unsuccessful. Yeah. What changed?

So I've got to be honest, this is my theory of how he changed. So, you know, if you get a different Shakespeare scholar. What you're saying is 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 the 6th 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 play. there's nothing particularly special or exceptional about them. And then suddenly, when he writes a play called Richard the Third, everything changes. And Richard the Third, we think, was originally another one of his rip-offs. And in particular, he was ripping off someone called Christopher Marlowe. Christopher Marlowe is really one of those undiscovered geniuses. I mean, there are folks who know about him, but, you know, 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 if 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. Marlowe said, what if I have a hero who isn't punished or rewarded, but who makes a new future?

That's the first example he did of this as 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. And so they would tell him this tragic structure. Marlon just tells the part to the rise, and he ends the play. And so you just have this moment of Tamblain 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 have 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.

So 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. And 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 plant. 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 humanity ever stepped before. And in the process of writing this character, Shakespeare unlocked his own ability to be a plotter. He essentially became Richard for third. 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 from my audiences. And so you see from that moment on us, this radical shift in Shakespeare, some of those plays that he writes later like Henry V are essentially about innovators. Henry the Fifth goes on to become the model, of course, of diehard and sort of all of these heroic stories that we now like to tell ourselves because Henry the Fifth is anti-heroes. Anti-heroes, exactly. He goes on to invent the modern romantic comedy

and much ado about nothing. We've got these feisty female characters. He goes on to write, create existential tragedy in place 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 what it was like to be someone who has changed

the world, that's where it seemed to click for heaven. I wrote down a line from the book, mastering arcane formulas that have no power outside of the classroom. Tell 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. You say, well, do I go

all in on the system? And do I basically say that I'm going to 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 for my true self? or am I going to 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 I don't know I've got around college. But now it's almost become the sign that you have intelligence is the fact you have a college degree. And so I think a way to think about university is it's fake magic. You know, it's a hogworts 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.

I started out working this neurophysiology lab, like the science lab, basically. And we were like studying the brain and how it worked. 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. And 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-track to do that even though I didn't find it that interesting. Anyway, I got to university and started working the 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 our brain. 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. It's not like my brain thinks in stories. And I thought a lot back to when I was a child and how the most fascinating moments in my life

had 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. And I sort of wanted to understand that. And when 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 the 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. You know, two stories the same. They all branch. And so I wanted to understand that. And that's the opposite of how most academics think about story,

to 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 does it 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 to 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. But 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 of Yale and discovered none of them had any idea how stories work, how Shakespeare works, or how anything work. 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, re-reading Shakespeare, and didn't understand a word of it, didn't understand any of it. Talk to actors. I understood that they understood Shakespeare, but I didn't understand it. And then eventually, I got my first job was at Sanford, and I got connected to Pixar. I realized myself, like, these are people who not only understand story, but they understand to create news 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 and new stories. And 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 they also have to be open to you to engage with the story and take it to the next place.

And that's why theater is the kind of primary origin for storytelling. Because what happens in 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 the story in the other characters, then they build the story together. Because 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 like they're these authoritative myths. And so they say, this is the story of Helen and Troy,

or this is the story of Medusa or whatever. And 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 in 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 in the interaction between the storyteller and the audience. And that's actually what produces the story. And you'll notice this when you work with a good storyteller, is 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. The 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? There'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 to schools.

is what biologists do is they see a butterfly and just 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. The 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. I 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 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 opposed to be followed. And 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, though, I'm going to program you. You're going to read these books. You're going to read these sacred texts.

And once you read these sacred texts, I'm going to explain to you exactly what the rules of the sacred text 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, conference, you are. We don't 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. It 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. That'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 thing that I'm most obsessed with is the fact that human intelligence is different from artificial intelligence. 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. He'd analyzed all the probability is all the numbers, and he's established this ironclad rule, which is that there will

never be human flight. And of course, what did the right brothers do? As 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. What 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, and the right 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? What'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 or 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. And 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. So 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 you're 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. And the problem for young storytellers is they've been bartered with other people's stories and they've existed as consumers. And as a consumer, you don't understand that actually you, you have to be very precise and specific and say, this is what is better. That's your job as an artist. It's to say, these two things are both good, but this thing is better.

Whereas your job as consumers, you just appreciate everything right 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. There 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 that. And 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 is as a person who's kind of enabling that process is no, 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. But what if I get judged? And then everyone else is like, this is terrible. Then as an artist in the later stages 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. You get disorganized. And the key is always to help the artist 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 was when all this animal life started proliferating across the planet. And what's totally fascinating about this moment of life is up to that point, there have 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 primarily to the artist? 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. The 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 are invented for graphics. And it can't see. Interesting 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 is you. And so they're going to try and eat you. And so you have to figure out, how don't I could eat? And 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 impossibility. And so that's where this huge engine of essentially creativity comes from, and this is other part of the brand. 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. And 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 intuitive.

intuition was a pattern match. So I know if you've ever read Daniel Connaman or anything. And that's how computers think. So computers have a version of intuition, which is essentially a pattern match. But 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. Yeah. But it feels like when the same word means two different things, two different systems. Yes. It's a problem with the language. Yes. Yeah. No, I totally agree with you. Well, I'll put that on my to-do list. Think about it. Yeah. Unfortunately, I'm not a, see, I only work with creatives.

I don't actually create things myself. But do you think of what you do as creative? No. Really? No. 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, or I would always be focused on what I was doing, as opposed to being able to be open and and experience. And I think actually one of the reasons I've been the first person to do a 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, and 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 all those people think. And they're like, that's how people think. And so that's how almost all the stuff you look. looking at 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. We're not going to

study, you know, thousands and thousands of brains. We're going to study a single neuron. We're 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 on. 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 is you got to like, you know, write something that appeals to all these other people who are reading the grants. But But the really amazing scientific breakthroughs always come from folks who just seemed like complete lunatics. I mean, Einstein's working at like a patent office. You know, Marie Kreech's 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, 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? Did you enjoy high

school were you like someone who liked school no so i hated it totally hated it hated it you know total wasted time yeah it's a total complete waste of time and 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 then being shamed and told that i was in you know i totally hated it but everyone kept saying angus angus just hanging there hanging there i'll get to college and i got to college and i was like wait this is like high school Same thing.

The same thing, you know. And I was basically about to drop out after a week. I remember I called my mom on the phone. I called her all. 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, dude, 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 why I was like, what is that I want to learn? I want to understand the brain, whatever. So I went like walking around campus, like trying to get into basically a brain lab, you know, just to like talk to somebody, like teaching about the brain. And I walked further and further and 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. So 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 middle 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 were 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, you know. And I remember my first day, they were like, you know, 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 and we were, and 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, then neuron is so much more complicated and beautiful and interesting that transistor. I mean, part of what's powerful about a transistor is its simplicity and its elegance. And 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 of 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 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? You're the only one thinking this? Yeah. Not only was the only one thinking this. When I shared my thoughts with people, they genuinely thought it 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 everything, 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? So 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 asked 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, is I think about what I'm going to do that day.

And what is that? That's a plan. What's the word for plan? It's a plot. It's a story, right? So I'm thinking, 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. And in fact, if you do have a lot of information, it's like too much.

Like, you know, if you watch a bad movie, it has too many plot lines in it, you know, too much happening. Like, whoa, you know, 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? Or you have story. Because story can be really powerful with not a lot of information. Unlike a computer, 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, the story is saying, well, what could happen? And 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 is trying to say is, what is possible that it 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. And what we did is, in order to do these experiments, is we work with radioactivity, and we also work with various kinds of weird toxins and other kinds of things. So I had, in my one hand, I had this scorpion venom.

And 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. So it seems like a reasonable request. It's like a reasonable thing, right? So I had that in one hand. I had the scrobium venom. And then in 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 a 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 phantom. Don't inject yourself with the scorpion venom. Don't inject yourself with scorpium venom. And so, of course, what do I do? I inject myself with the radioactivity. Wow.

Right? So I could have become Spider-Man. But instead, what happened is I ejected myself for the radioactivity. I'm like, oh, my God. Like, what? What, right? And so they have this, like, emergency, like, giant metal triangle thing on the wall. You bomb case for emergency.

So I ran over 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 folks run in there. wearing these basically hazmat suits. Like, what's happening? Like, I injected myself with radioactive. Like, oh, my God, you know. And they basically, they took off my jeans and a couple other articles of clothing that were flaring up because I basically injected myself in my thigh.

And they've done some scans of me all this kind of stuff. And like, okay, they're like, you know, go through this bath, this hot wash, did do, do, do, 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 I'm 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 when you're sure. So I was walking home that night, basically, just thinking of myself, oh, my God, like this is 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 was 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 then you're like but good story in it you know and that was and it's like well maybe on an even more fundamental level right if a story is a plot as a plan then maybe every time things go 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 were like, you really have injected yourself in radio to you. That's totally nuts.

I was like, no, I think that 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. It's not thinking stories. Why do you think they want to dumb it down so much like that? I 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. So 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, we want 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. Because what is story? Story is myth. Story is made up. And that's true. That's how the world works. It 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 story. And they don't have to have the answer. It's 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. That's right. Truth is strange than fiction. Yeah. Yeah, right. This is one of things I learned from reading Shakespeare. And I remember, I was reading Richard III, which is one of its 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? And I actually had this moment. It was like, was there even strawberries? I guess I must know it. 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 had put that detail in because they're like it's too weird. It 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 history, because he broke out in the history place,

When you started to know with the history plays, he started doing that with real life. You'd look at the people around and be like, what about that person is stranger than fiction? And then I'm going to tell a story where you start to understand why that thing that seems so improbable is actually alive. 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 ghosts come from? How do ghosts work? What's the magic system of ghosts, right? Instead, the character Hamlet shows up and all his friends are 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. And 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 are not insane. And of course, the reality of the play is that you can't even have a 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, there'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. But at 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 Carey is reading Shakespeare. Darwin is reading Shakespeare. Lincoln is

reading Shakespeare. Tesla, he's reading Shakespeare. All these people are reading Shakespeare and they're crediting him. Must have some secret. Yes, exactly, right? There must be something there. Yeah. Yeah. And I said, I want, 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. And 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 it 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. It's weird, that's anomalous, and then make it move. So it's all about change. 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 that'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. of change. And 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 weird and in getting weirder becomes beautiful.

And the computer doesn't grow into itself. No, no. No, so 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 and interacting with the computer because you see a part of yourself in it that's so much more than yourself, you know, and 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. His 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. to 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? And, 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 them in all the rules. And so they drill all the young pilots and 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 and no one else has seen before. And so then all of a sudden the Army, it's like, wait a minute, being 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 it this colonel, J.P. Guilford. They said to him, Colonel Guilford, your job is to crack the security 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's 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. He 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 convergent thinking. And one of those? So diversion thinking is randomly associating things.

And so the way the computer does 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 could have like, you know, like yellow dolphin and blue turtle or whatever. It's kind of stuff. So that's creating a 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 into business meeting, they do this thing called brainstorming, these brainstorming sessions. I've heard of it.

Yeah. So they get out of whiteboard, and they say to everyone, say something random, right? And then everyone writes all these random ideas on the, on the, on the, that's how works. Yes, that's how works. They're business people, so it's not that random. But there's 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, 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 course, eliminate all the interesting ideas, which is why brainstorming sessions don't really work and why business is so boring. But that's the idea is 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. 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. In 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? Well, a lot of things. But anytime you need to do anything that doesn't evolve 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. So beauty has to be both new and specific. And computer. think in lists. So they're unable to identify a single top priority. That's why if you challenge a computer, it will change its mind. Worse if you challenge an artist,

they won't. You know, like artists will go to their grave basically being like, it's got to 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, it creates, you know, real science, any kind of social movement, is people being like, that's the way the world has to be. How 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. You sort of 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've developed 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. I'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 prune 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? The people who are feeding you, you know, the big studios, 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 your face. 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 to start to create these spaces for them where they get to choose where they get to be active. And then as an artist, you become really loathless and rigorous with yourself. And you start to be like, I can do better. Like, that's actually bad. And everyone around just like, no, that's good. You're like, no. Like, it's, 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. Yeah. That's kind of your sacred quest as a person, I think. And I believe, I mean, and I know you do too,

Everyone is fundamentally creative in not in the sense they can be an artist, but that you create your own life. And you have to be able to see yourself, this is the right life for me. And 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 it 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 it, and they just get more lost. Whereas developing that ability to discriminate, finding your beauty, being ruthless and rigorous in pursuit of it. I agree with what you're saying. And it doesn't sound like an easy thing to change. It doesn't sound like our culture supports what you're describing. No. And so one of the weird things I've done recently is I started working a lot in schools. And one of the reasons I've started working in schools is because we've known for almost four decades now that school is making kids less creative. It's annihilating their creativity.

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 likely you ought to come off the new answer. And so you become part of the 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, whole point of America is a whole bunch of people who are too weird to fit in anywhere else. And they're like, let's come here and create a society where everyone can be weird, you know? Freedom. Freedom. Yes. 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 is 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 have the teacher from 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 I went back to school to get his PhD. He's a special operator, he's a special force.

Guy went back to get his PhD. And they signed off on his PhD and they gave it to him. And he returned 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 you 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 with the American Camp Association, which is the burn it down approach almost, which is like, let's build an alternate space to do things. I 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 families. 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?

I 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 didn't have a job at Pixar. I was a professor at Stanford. I was basically giving the Shakespeare lectures. That was my job. So it's very boring when you get hired a university, as they say, we've been teaching this class for five 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 like, I didn't understand Shakespeare at all, and I was not an expert in what was going on here. To 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. So I was the University of 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 as you and I were talking about earlier, is that stories are the result of the audience. And so every place else that had tried to study, story had gone to L.A. or New York and studied the creators. Whereas 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'd never heard of it. Yeah. Well, you know what? 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 to do it. Ohio State just hasn't valued, because it's too different.

You know, it's too weird. But when I went there was like the Golden Age. Yeah. As 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 of people's kitchen tables.

Learn the old stories. Learn the old stories, yeah. And she would learn them through generations. So she'd know that she'd start up by bringing the kids in the room. They'd like, you know, tell me the stories, and they tell them the stories. And then she'd go back a generation, mom tell me stories, and then grandma and the 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 was doing, there's, is it kind of like, I would say, like almost like a hippie vibe,

you know, just kind of like, you know, we're just kind of go out and just do this research that no one else is doing it. 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 and having been at Pixar of having this theory that every story was different

and that there were no archetypes. And I'd 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 is the ground theory 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 archetypes. It's back to the corpus idea. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Joseph Campbell created the hero's journey and it worked for Joseph Campbell. George 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 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. And 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 is 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 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. There's all of these two parts of your brain. One of them is your prefrontal cortex, which is kind of 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, is the break breaks. And so that emotion just keeps exploding for the brain. That's what creates those flashbacks. Exactly. 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 of trauma, but they're fundamentally different. They have fundamentally different processes in the human brain. Poets realize this. If you go back

to Greek tragedy, there's two types of Greek tragedy. One of them treats PTSD one. The other treats PTSD2. 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 wanted to talk about is like, oh, you've cracked the code. This is how stories should work. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. 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, you know, this kind of thing? Yeah.

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 into work a special operation. 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. Anxiety 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 and your mind colliding. So that's why when you're anxious, your brain gets really restless, and you start imagining all these seven things you can do. So the stories lines coming online for you to be able to meet the speed of the future. But 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. Because 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 are we 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. They 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 into 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. So I don't need to worry about those other steps because they're going 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 optimist. 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. 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. And 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 much the people are actually optimistic? Like, where's 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 to 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. and 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, it's 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. So 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? and 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 you give them this exercise to say, well, I can't think of anything that I did that was really hard. And I was like, oh, that's interesting, you know, 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? And I'd be like, what? I said, do you remember that time? And they're like, no, I actually, I don't remember that how my language. Do you remember the time you learned to talk?

No, no, 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 through 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 and they're watching everybody else walk and they can't walk. If you ever talk to someone who's had an accident or something like that, they have to recover from a stroke, they have to re-teach 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 a 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 the way that makes you look better. you've got to go into the parts that were hard and unfortunate and own them.

But 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 let's 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. And then raises, 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 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-experienced the ending,

build the neural pathway. In the book, you said that innovation's original meaning was sin. Yes. Tell me about that. The 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 be able to the apple. 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. And 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, in 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. 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, 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.

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 Machia Valley, 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. Before Jefferson rewrote that, it was life liberty and the pursuit of property. 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. 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 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 Pablum innovations. Tell 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 to 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. Why? Because I'd spent so much time in a classroom, and then the rest of my time I'd spend it in 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 existing with mathematical precedent. 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.

And 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. When like... Negative common sense. Yes, they have negative common sense, yes. Life is changing fast, and they're like,

I've got to go back to the way that I did before. 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 work.

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. And instead, you actually have to gamble when you're in danger and hold your ground when you're safe. Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

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