The Uniting Power of Story | Angus Fletcher | EP 205

The wonder of being on this earth is that there is this possibility to tell our own story and, beyond that, to build stories we can hand on to other people to empower them to tell their own stories. It all goes back to this sense of dynamism that you're talking about, and also these emotions that you're talking about, to unite us in a collective story so that we can work cooperatively together towards the same ends, right? So that we all come under the same banner in some sense. That's that shared intentionality; that's very specifically human. You don't see that manifest itself much in other animals. Even the higher apes have a hard time with it compared to us. Absolutely, yes.

You know what's a big, what's really important about that is that it's ultimately voluntary. [Music] Hello everyone, I'm pleased to have with me today Dr. Angus Fletcher, who wrote Wonderworks, which is a study of the psychology of stories, the psychology of narrative. I'm going to read you Dr. Fletcher's bio from the back cover. Dr. Angus Fletcher is a professor at Ohio State University's Project Narrative, the world's leading academic think tank for the study of stories. He has dual degrees in neuroscience and literature, received his PhD from Yale, taught Shakespeare at Stanford, and has published two books and dozens of peer-reviewed academic articles on the scientific workings of novels, poetry, film, and theater. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He's done story consulting for projects for Sony, Disney, the BBC, Amazon, PBS, and NBC Universal, and is the author-presenter of the Audible/Great Courses GR Guide to Screenwriting.

So Dr. Fletcher, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today, and I'm looking forward to this conversation greatly. So let's start a bit with this Project Narrative at Ohio State. I hadn't heard of that previously, so tell me how you got interested in that, and then maybe how you got interested in the psychology of stories more broadly.

Well, thanks for being here, Jordan. I'm thrilled to be here. Project Narrative is best known as a rogue outpost of literary studies. We do literary studies completely differently from everyone else in the modern academy. Basically, there was a split in the 1920s that started with New Criticism, and New Criticism went on to develop what is essentially modern literary studies. New Criticism is based on the same method that was used in the Middle Ages to interpret the Bible. That's the same method that is really used across the academy, even though New Criticism has itself fallen out of favor. In Project Narrative, we take a different approach, and in my case, it's a scientific approach. We're interested in studying how stories work in the brain, and the particular focus of my research is the belief that stories are the most powerful things that humans have ever invented. They're the most powerful tool we possess.

The simple reason for that is that the human brain is the most powerful thing on earth, for good or for bad. You look around at the extraordinary achievements of our mind: the cultures we have created, the science we've created, the technology we've created, the art we have created. But also, the fact that we have the power in us to wipe out this planet, to destroy everything. When you realize that stories have the power to change how our mind works— to troubleshoot it, to make it more resilient, to make it more creative, to make it more scientific—when you couple the power of stories with the human brain, you throw open the doors to anything. That's sort of my focus and what we do at Project Narrative: we study stories, how they work scientifically, what they do. Because of that, we're considered somewhat heretical, somewhat maverick, and definitely on the fringes. Although I should say I did my PhD at Yale, so all of us are reputable and well-respected scholars.

So are you on the fringes among psychologists or among literary critics?

No, not amongst psychologists. One of the extraordinary things about my career is that my work is backed by some of the biggest neuroscientists and psychologists in the world: doctors, nurses, social workers, big businesses, the U.S. Army, special operations community, the Air Force. There’s an enormous amount of backing for my work among people who are pragmatic and empirically based and interested in science. But the way that literary studies has become...what has happened in literary studies is because everyone is using this method which is really from the Middle Ages. The same thing is happening in literary studies now that happened in the Middle Ages. People read the same book, they come up with conflicting interpretations of it. Those interpretations reflect their ideologies, and then they argue about them. We just have these sort of endless combustions that don’t go anywhere, just like the Protestants and the Catholics in the Middle Ages.

What my work says is, what if we just back out of that? What if we just do the same thing that science has done, and we focus on the way that stories can empower us, the way stories can improve our human performance? Because that's really why they were created by our ancestors. Our ancestors came to be in a tragic world where they realized their own frailty and insufficiency. They said, "How do I cope with this life? How do I find strength in the face of my own mortality? How do I lift myself up when I see so much failure within myself? I see so much frailty in terms of my capacity for anger, for hate, and also my ability to be damaged, my ability to suffer grief and trauma and loneliness. How do I lift myself up? What tool could help me do that?"

The beginning of that literature with early scriptures...there’s a ton of technologies, as I talk about in my work, that we can actually trace their effects in the brain, and then going beyond that healing work into actually making us into our better selves—empowering us with joy, with creativity, with resilience, with the power to lift up others, and perhaps most importantly, the power to grow, to not stay still, to take on damage and turn that damage around into a source of strength. My work focuses on how literature does all those things, which all of us know intuitively. All of us have read a book at some time, have read a novel at some time, or watched a movie or read a poem at some time and felt healed, uplifted, or strengthened. If you have a favorite musician, a favorite artist, a favorite rapper, you know you'll listen to their lyrics and feel the same thing. But the question has always been how. How is it doing that?

My work goes into that, but also, more powerfully, my work breaks down the technology of literature so you can identify the specific nuts and bolts—the specific blueprints that are having those specific effects. That’s the work that I do at Project Narrative.

In Wonderworks, in this book which I referred to earlier, you list out what you consider 25 inventions, and they basically constitute the chapter structure of the book. You examine the manner in which stories do such things as rally courage, stoke romance, help control anger, transcend hurt, and excite curiosity. I'm not going to go through all of them, but to dispense with pessimism and banish despair, and heal from grief, and decide more wisely. In some sense, it's a listing of existential concerns, and so you've broken down narrative in these 25 ways in this book to discuss the major sources of existential concern that plagued mankind and then have put forward the notion that we have stories that surround each of these fundamental concerns that help us understand, verbalize, communicate about, and maybe see a pathway through each of these. In the case of the terrible emotions, each of the terrible emotions, or to foster and develop the ones that are more positive.

I mean that’s exactly right, and even more than that. Part of what stories do is they give us a plot, a roadmap out of some of these negative emotions into positive emotions. But even more powerfully, they can actually shape our emotions once we understand how to use them. Certain stories can just build optimism, or resilience, or courage. So to take the first chapter of the book, which is about courage—Homer's Iliad is this extraordinary work. When you read the Iliad, it makes you feel braver; it makes you feel stronger. It can do that even when it's not talking about courage, even when it has no message about courage, even when it’s talking about other things. How does it do that? Well, Homer probably didn't invent this technology, but we don't know who did it before him, so we give Homer credit.

Homer realized that when he saw soldiers marching into war, they sang songs, and those songs made them feel braver. Why did those songs make them feel braver? Those songs made them feel a part of a larger voice. They felt they were bigger than themselves, and on a deep psychological level, they could feel that strength because they knew that even if their individual body died, the voice would carry on. That’s a scientific power of song. We know that to be the case; when people sing together in choirs, they feel braver—they feel more courageous. What Homer did was say, "What if I could give you that power of singing without you actually singing? What if I could create a technology—a way of writing—so that it tricked your brain into thinking that you were singing as part of a choir?"

That’s, of course, what the Iliad does; it makes you believe that you are listening to the song of a goddess, the anger that it begins with. It uses all these tricks and techniques, which I go through in the book, into making your brain believe that you are singing as part of this larger chorus. When you simply read the book, it makes you feel braver. That technique, that idea that that group singing unites you with the central voice whose existence transcends death—I mean there’s a very deep, religious-like idea in there that’s implicit, right? That there is a voice and there are words that unite and transcend, and that supersede death. That’s some—that’s part of that heroic pattern, I suppose, that Homer is referring to and that you can step into as an active agent in engaging in this literature. Just like when you walk into a movie and you embody the heroes or the anti-heroes sometimes that you see on the screen and experience the emotions that they experience for better or for worse, I suppose, as a form of practice.

That’s exactly right. One of the things that is distinct about the Homeric gods is they’re large humans. You know, Homeric gods, unlike some sort of extreme gnostic version of God as, you know, as the via negative or something that is completely non-human and that we can't access, these Homeric gods are essentially heroes in the sense of just being bigger versions of us. They’re gripped with all the same problems that we have, all the same frailties that we have: jealousy, rage, insufficiency. When you join with them in this bigger voice, just as you would in a hero in a movie, you feel that you are becoming yourself, only greater. You don’t feel like you’re losing yourself, but you’re joining this bigger thing that is yourself that makes you bigger, that makes you more powerful. That’s where the spiritual experience comes from.

Absolutely. One of the basic primordial experiences of literature, which is so basic I don’t even include it as one of the technologies in the book; I just talk about it in the introduction, is spiritual experience. We can actually detect you having deactivation in your parietal lobe as you have what’s known as a self-transcendent experience in which you feel the boundaries of yourself and the world dissolving. That’s associated with increased life purpose, increased generosity, and kindness because you no longer have the same sense of ego; you feel connected to others. That sense of spiritual experience—I mean, the word literature and the word scripture are synonyms; they mean "that which is writ." If there’s one fundamental thing, more fundamental even than any of the technologies I talk about, it simply is that sense of spiritual experience.

I do think that that is the basic and most powerful experience that any of us can have in this world because it makes us not only stronger and more purposeful in ourselves but kinder to others. Really, that's ethics: to be stronger in yourself and kinder to others, right? To be more effective and more useful socially broadly.

Okay, I want to ask you a couple of things. I've done a lot of thinking about narrative. When I read this book back in the 1980s, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety by Jeffrey Gray, that book had a tremendous impact on the field of psychology. Although it took about 20 years before people, I suppose, incorporated at least some of what Gray had proposed, and he got a lot of his ideas—although I didn’t know it at the time—from Norbert Wiener—a brilliant cybernetician who worked on establishing what might be the basis of intelligent abstraction so that it could be mechanized.

So I read Gray at the same time and learned about his association with Wiener and cybernetics. At the same time that I was reading a lot of analytical psychology, mostly by Jung and his students, I started to understand that the basic cybernetic mechanisms that Gray was discussing as characteristic of cognitive processing seemed to me to be the same thing as the fundamental elements of the story. So let me run this by you, and you tell me what you think about this. Okay, we’ll see how our thinking is meshing, perhaps differing.

So I thought that there are basically two types of stories in a functional sense: there's a simple story and there's a story about how stories transform. The story itself is actually the frame of reference that we use to perceive the world and act within. I don't think we have a—I don’t think we think and then we think in stories as a subset of thinking; I think that the story is the frame for our thought, and that frame is actually what produces our motivation and our emotions and so a lot of this is, again, influenced by this cybernetic work that was developed by Gray, which his tremendous knowledge of animal behavior and cognition.

He was an absolute genius. I think he cited 2,000 papers in the Neuropsychology of Anxiety. It took me like six months to read that book and understand it. He’s really dense. So, imagine that in the simple story you mentioned literature as a story—as a map—and I think that's the fundamental issue. So we’re always somewhere— that’s our starting point—and we’re always moving somewhere else because we're active creatures. We have an image of the destination in mind, and so we segregate up time and space into a functional unit that defines the geographical and temporal bounds of our current operations.

We specify a target. Even when we’re—when our imagination is free floating, partly what we're doing is playing with different spatial-temporal frames of reference. So we might be playing with ten minutes, we might be playing with an hour, we might be playing with a day, we might be playing with two weeks. We can expand and contract that more or less at will. So the map covers a spatial-temporal domain, and then the goal is specified, and then we feel positive emotion when we see any indication from the environmental feedback that our actions are moving us towards the goal. That’s technically positive affect because it’s associated with forward movement, left hemisphere activation, dopaminergically mediated.

So we can conceptualize the goal abstractly, interestingly enough, and we have to do that because we can play with these spatial-temporal frames of reference. Then, if we see a pathway to the goal—a clear pathway that we can implement behaviorally—then that fills us with positive emotion. If we see obstacles in the way, then that induces negative emotion and stops us. When we stop, we'll play around with the spatiotemporal framing, making it smaller; maybe we have to deal with the next minute, or larger, trying to reconceptualize the territory so that we can continue our movement forward. Okay, that's story number one: simple story, I was here, I went there, and here's how I got there. You might want to listen to that because maybe you're there and you want to get to the goal and you need directions.

The next story is different. It's the transformation of stories, and so it’s the typical fall, paradise-fall-paradise-rekindled story. So you have a frame of reference, you're moving towards a goal, something that isn't modeled within that frame of reference occurs—it's like an alien invader in some sense. It doesn't make sense from within that current frame of reference. It blows the frame of reference into pieces, and you enter a land of, in some sense, narrative fragments. That’s the underworld in mythology. You have to sort those narrative fragments up and rebuild them, remap the territory, and then you build another story. So that’s a meta-story: it’s a story about how a story can decompose, collapse into catastrophe, and rekindle itself. It seemed to me that there isn’t anything more basic to our abstract thinking than that sort of nesting inside of stories.

First of all, I completely agree on the overall point. I actually have a book coming out next year from Columbia University Press, and the title is Story Thinking because basically, my belief is that human cognition is largely narrative. That actually we process the world narratively—in this exact way. This actually makes our brain function different from computers and AI. Whether or not computers and humans can do the same tasks, we do them differently. Computers think in these kinds of logical correlational sequences, and humans, to your point, think in plots and plans and narratives and goals. Those plots and plans are then associated with emotions because the computer exists in the mathematical present tense.

It cannot have desire; there’s nothing missing to a computer because it’s always in the same place all the time. It’s always the equal sign of the mathematical present tense. But we, as humans, are able through plotting and planning to imagine a future that’s distinct from the present, which creates desire or fear or hope or all these other emotions. Narrative and emotion just go together completely in human experience, and that’s why emotions are both shaped through narrative, but narratives are also shaped through emotion.

The kind of simple thing is to say, well, you know, we can use narratives to influence people’s emotions. This is the sort of thing that, you know, sometimes positive but often a kind of cheap political trick. Right? Scare people or manipulate them into doing things and whatnot. But the real power here is to say, first of all, how can I shape my own emotions with narratives? What emotions, in other words, I’m not trying to shape your emotions; I’m trying to shape my own emotions. I’m trying to control my own anger or increase my own hope. How do I do that? By retelling my own stories in my own head.

Then the second factor of that is, how can my emotions come into play and enable my narratives? How can I develop the emotional resilience to be more likely to carry on my own story? How can I complete my story even though I have these obstacles in front of me? To me, the function of literature is to say literature is related to stories but slightly different in the fact that literature is really the kind of experimental zone where you’re pushing the envelope. Literary writers are people who are somewhat dissatisfied to think about how you’re talking about stories breaking. They’re dissatisfied with the stories they have; if they're not working, they say, how can I take these stories and somehow make them new? How can I innovate them? How can I go beyond the stories that I’ve inherited? How can I push that envelope?

What I do in the book is say, here are 25 examples of how stories were broken and then put back together again, and how this technology, just like any technology that humans have developed, has been expanded and innovated over time to go beyond that simple, "I just have to get to this goal" story, which I agree with you is that—I mean that’s a fundamental story: beginning, end—you know, the most basic unit, you know, beginning, end—I find myself in the middle.

The wonder of being on this earth is that there is this possibility to tell our own story and, beyond that, to build stories we can hand on to other people to empower them to tell their own stories. It all goes back to this sense of dynamism that you’re talking about and also these emotions that you’re talking about—and to unite us in a collective story so that we can work cooperatively together towards the same ends, right? So that we all come under the same banner in some sense, and that’s that shared intentionality—that’s very specifically human. You don’t see that much manifest itself in other animals; even the higher apes have a hard time with it compared to us. Absolutely, yes.

You know what’s a big, what’s really important about that is that it’s ultimately voluntary because, I mean, again, if we brainwash people to have the same story as us, you know, that’s, to me, a biological no-go. It’s not particularly effective and it’s unethical, but if we find a story that’s so compelling that when we share it with someone else it empowers them and then they join our story...

Let’s talk about that compelling issue because that’s something that’s really phenomenally interesting. You can get gripped by a story, right? That’s sort of extra-rational—and what I mean by that is, because—and that makes sense if the story is the frame within which rationality takes place. This being gripped by a story would be extra-rational, and so you can see that when you walk into a movie theater and you get engaged. Maybe even despite yourself you might be thinking, "I didn’t want to go to this stupid movie; my girlfriend just dragged me there.” Then, you know, it’s too far-fetched for me to suspend disbelief, as if you suspend disbelief voluntarily, because you really don’t. The story grips you, and so you’re in there, and you know someone taps you on the shoulder and says, “You know, this isn’t real,” and you say, “Shut the hell up because I’m watching the story.”

So the question then is, from a psychological perspective, what is that mechanism of grip and what might its biological roots be? My sense is, you know, if you watch little kids—you watch a three-year-old, a three-year-old will be enthralled by a three-and-a-half-year-old or a four-year-old. Now, they're not enthralled to the same degree by a fourteen-year-old. The reason for that—if you didn’t criticize this, okay?—because I want your perspective on it. Vygotsky talked about the zone of proximal development, and Vygotsky pointed out that, I believe it was Vygotsky, but it’s been established by other psychologists, in any case, that parents use language automatically in the presence of children who are developing their linguistic skills that is somewhat more complex than the child can currently understand. So they communicate with them, but at the same time they're communicating with them, they’re teaching them how to communicate better by stretching their limits, so that’s like that stretch you talk about in Wonderworks.

So I’m going somewhere with this, so you got your three-year-old and your three-year-old is enthralled by a four-year-old, and the reason that they’re enthralled is because the four-year-old is a stretch for them but almost within their grip. So what the enthrallment does—I don’t know if that’s a word—being enthralled is a manifestation of the instinct that specifies the zone of proximal development and facilitates imitation. So we’re unbelievably imitative, right? And what we’re moving back and forth are units of behavior or units of perception. When we find one that our intuition senses is in the zone of proximal development, then we’re gripped despite ourselves by the power of the story.

That’s—and the biological basis of that, I believe, is the instinct for mimicry. And that’s what’s operating in literature as well. It’s abstract mimicry. Any of that seem implausible?

Well, to start with the first point, I completely agree that we seek out growth spaces. I would use the term growth. In other words, the sense that we’re always looking for that threshold where we can pull ourselves forward and become more actualized and enter that space where we become more of the self we can be and want to be. So absolutely, again, goes down to plot. I mean, plot is always about the next step. The reason that plot and narrative are so powerful is, again, unlike logic, which is eternal, plot is always about the next step: where are you going and where are you growing?

Plot naturally plugs into that because, I mean, the first thing that happens to us even when we watch a bad movie is we want to know where is this going. I mean, if you watch a movie for even just 30 seconds, that’s usually your first question: where are these characters going? What’s happening here? You know, this isn’t going anywhere, right? Right? Then I gotta walk out of it, you know? But then what makes the movie emotionally gripping, to your point, is the sense that it’s taking me somewhere where I want to go.

Or in other words, where my psychology wants to grow, it’s pulling me and growing me and developing me. So I could agree with all that completely, 100%. What I think is interesting is, you know, again, this is sort of the work that we do: different people we just notice are drawn in by different aspects of stories, and different stories draw people in differently. So this all goes back to biology. I’ll just give you a few quick top lines and you tell me if you buy any of this or you want me to go deeper.

So we just know that the thing the human brain is most interested in is other people. The human brain is just most interested in other people, and that’s because other people inevitably are both our greatest opportunities in life and our greatest obstacles. You know, in other people we see our friends, our mates, you know, our potential partners, our children, whatever—our legacies. But we also see our adversaries, our critics. So humans just notice other humans very, very quickly and prioritize them incredibly quickly, and that’s why characters are so important in stories. We identify characters, and we develop these relationships with those characters, which can be imitative in a heroic story. But we have other relationships with characters too: we can have crushes on characters; you know, we can feel protective of characters.

It’s also relations that we can have. So the first thing that will often get us to grip is just the characters in the story because they’re a human. The second thing that humans notice immediately is the world. I mean, the human brain evolved in this incredibly dynamic landscape. We’re constantly having to shift where we’re living. We constantly move into new terrains because they have to be brave. So we have this huge ability to immediately sense, okay, here’s this new environment, how is it working, what are the different rules that operate here? We get this in modern society all the time, whenever you enter into a different person’s home or a different business space or whatever, you immediately sense, okay, the rules of operation here a little bit different, and you pick them up and you modulate your own behavior.

In films, this is the most obvious effect of like a sci-fi world or a fantasy world. You immediately feel like, okay, here’s the space I’m going into, where I can pull out parts of myself and explore them. But you can also feel that in a very realistic story if you just feel that that human environment is somehow different from your own and the possibilities for human action in that space—and that’s very exciting and empowering for us as well.

So that’s the second major thing. The third thing is the story itself. If the story itself is taking you on a journey that you recognize on some level as a journey you could take and might want to take but haven’t taken yet, then you say to yourself, “This is a growth space for me because by going on this journey, by continuing this plot, I can go to places, and most importantly, not just external places but internal places. I can find out who I become when I go on this journey, which I haven’t gone on before.”

Okay, let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question about that because that’s kind of a mystery, eh? How is it so you have the three-year-old who is watching the three-and-a-half-year-old and the three-year-old figures out that, or is gripped by the three-and-a-half-year-old because he or she can almost do that? Then you see the same thing in adults—you’re talking about this growth opportunity. How the hell do you think we conceptualize what we could be so that we can see that instinctively when we don’t know what we could be? Because we aren’t that yet, you know what I mean?

Is it that we’ve got some conception of what constitutes the horizon even though we’re not there? At some point, we get to the ultimate abstraction, right? Which is the ultimate good. If you’re an integrated person, the particular of your action is associated with that broad-scale abstraction, but you don’t have to refer to it in the moment. Thank God for that because it would be overwhelming! Here’s something I’ll throw just sort of sideways: I think what happens when people take psychedelic substances that blow apart their latent inhibition is that they start to become cognizant of those underlying nested structures.

Like they invade the current reality, and that’s what makes it saturated with meaning and pregnant with meaning. It also sometimes produces that catastrophically terrible experience because if that nesting is fragmented, so maybe there’s part of you that’s motivated by bitterness and despair and jealousy. There’s a war at the broader narrative levels, and you’re a disintegrated character and that’s extraordinarily stressful physiologically, partly because you can’t act out the contradictions without running into trouble.

So see part of what you’re doing in psychotherapy all the time, and this is like an integration of cognitive behavioral and analytic psychology, is you’re trying to hammer the person’s narrative into a single, non-contradictory functional unit at all levels of apprehension simultaneously. The stories can help with that.

So here’s the thing, Jordan: as I've discovered in life, you can sound smarter faster by being negative about someone else’s idea than by having your own idea. So a lot of people just like to kind of be smart by attacking me as opposed to coming with their own ideas. So I don’t usually ask them for their own because I assume that they don’t have them.

But yeah, I think to your point, the way forward for humanity...I'm going to ask you a weird question. Some of that money might be really useful for you. You’re a very creative person, and you said, you know, lots of people are making money applying your ideas, and so I think, well, you know, you had these ideas—God only knows what you might be able to do if you had your position and some money.

So this is something that people have brought up with me before. They say, "Angus, they say if you had more money, you would have more power, and if you had more power, you could do more of the things you wanted to." I actually—and this is perhaps erroneous, and you might want to put me on the couch and just abuse me of this notion—I have the view that I’m actually more existentially free by not worrying about money at all because the more you fixate on money, at least in my experience, the more you end up doing things you don’t want to do. And in my life, the more I’ve said no to money, the more I’ve been like, "This is really fun, and I’m enjoying myself, and also I’m empowering the people around me."

I should also be honest: Ohio State pays me a ton of money. I mean, I make a ton of money as a professor. And I get a lot of invites to give speeches for 50 grand a pop, you know? And you do a couple of those a year, and I mean, that’s a really good answer to that objection. I’m thoroughly retracting my suggestion. I make enough money, and you know, there’s plenty of studies that show that if you make more than, you know, 80, 100 grand a year, you’re not really substantially more happy.

I have had the experience in my life to see a couple billionaires up close, and you know, I won’t deny that it would be fun to be a billionaire for a day and just be able to have your own private island and your own planes, all those kinds of things. But very rapidly, one of them said to me once, pretty famously, “Angus, there are only so many waterfalls you can see.”

I think that goes down to the point that ultimately, you know, life is about finding our self, and we find ourself through conflict and through struggle. If you have money to remove all the resistance from everything around you, it’s actually much harder to grow.

And I don’t mind the challenge, and I don’t mind the difficulty, and I don’t mind the friction and the fog of life because to me that builds me up. And so I think a little bit of money is good and necessary because you need a safe space for yourself. You need a protected area where you can preserve your sanity and kind of have kooky ideas and whatnot.

But if you have too much money—I mean, you know, this goes down to kind of my general diagnosis of kind of what’s wrong with America at the moment. I mean, I should say I’m an immigrant; people often don’t know this about me, and so I have a very kind of quirky view of America. I chose to become an American. I was not born an American. I think like a lot of immigrants in America, I almost love America more than most Americans because, you know, I have given myself to it.

But I mean, I think the American dream in America has kind of gone in these two ultimately uninteresting directions. One is the idea that the American dream is basically having as much money as you can get; you know, that’s kind of like the capitalist conservative side.

Then the other side is, “Oh, America’s here to provide me with security.” That’s the kind of this kind of like socialist left-wing thing, whereas America’s here to protect me. America’s not about that at all. America’s about freedom. America is about freedom. I came here, and I was more free. I’ve had more opportunity in America than I would have had before. And that's not to say I have perfect opportunity, or everyone in America has perfect opportunity, or we can’t get up every day and give other people more opportunities. But that’s the point: America is to increase freedom, to increase opportunity—not to make yourself richer or to be safer. If you want to be more free, a big part of that comes from being free of fear, taking risks, being free from yourself, being free from your own anxieties and your own fears.

A huge part of what I just try and do every day is push myself to where I’m lightly uncomfortable. I mean, you know, obviously I’m really uncomfortable being on this podcast because it’s scary to be honest about your thoughts when a lot of people are listening because you might say something dumb or you might say something you regret. But I want that because I want to get up tomorrow morning and say, “You know what? I should have said this other thing," or "I wish I hadn't said that other thing,” because in terms of my plan, my path, that will help me.

So that’s one of the reasons I’m so honored to be here, honestly, is because I just don’t have a chance to have very frank, open conversations like this as much as I would like. Yes, it’s a privilege to have that possibility manifest itself. It’s been quite exciting for me to be able to call people who I’m interested in and say, “Well, want to talk for an hour and a half?” And they say, “Yes.” I think, “Well, isn’t that something? I can ask them all sorts of questions, and I can learn all sorts of things, and I can share that with like 500,000 people.” What a deal that is! I mean, it’s ridiculous!

And that’s the real freedom because I think when people look outside, you know, people sometimes look at me and say, “Oh, money or wealth or celebrity.” I’m sure people look at that same thing with you and they say, “Oh, money, celebrity, isn’t that the really wonderful thing?” And it’s actually like, “No, that’s not the one.” It’s a chance to meet people. It’s the removing of friction so I can call people, and they take me seriously. I mean, that’s the real joy of my current position, you know, that you can suddenly start to just talk to almost anyone you want and share those ideas and experience that personal growth and that building of community.

Well, it’s such a privilege too to be in a position to be able to bring discussions like this for no cost to like literally hundreds of thousands of people. You know, it’s an educator’s dream. So this is a good place to stop, Angus. You know, we’ve been going pretty hard for an hour and a half, and I like the way this just closed. We covered a lot of territory. I would probably like to talk to you again at some point. There are more things that we could discuss. I have no doubt we’ll see how people respond to this and what else they might want to hear.

You got anything else you want to bring up, mention, or...? No, this has been perfect, and I’m going to go back and read some of the works that you suggested. If you want to have me on again, I would be honored and excited to participate, especially if your audience would like to hear more of us kind of go back and forth. Yeah, with somebody that does that. Neumann—Eric Neumann, he’s a name worth knowing. He wrote the Origins and History of Consciousness, and that's a great book. It’s a tough one; it’s the much deeper version of A Hero with a Thousand Faces.

He also wrote one called The Great Mother, which is an analysis of representations of the feminine—narrative representations, dramatic representations of the feminine across history—which is also a great book, especially if you’re interested in neuroscience and instincts because the archetypes are tied to instincts in a profound manner. It’s a representation of the maternal across time. That’s The Great Mother. It’s a great book.

I will read it, and then hopefully next time I can come back, maybe things with special operations will have advanced a little bit. Some of the work I’m doing with anti-fragile AI, maybe some of that will advance a little bit. Great! We can get into that. I’d love that. All right, thanks very much. It’s a pleasure talking to you, and good luck with your work and your writing and your educating, all of that, and the work you’re doing with the military.

Thank you. Thank you. [Music]