A Hero's Journey: With Guests Ethan Gilsdorf, David Fajgenbaum & Kurt Gray

Summary

Choiceology with Katy Milkman

Episode Title: A Hero’s Journey: With Guests Ethan Gilsdorf, David Fajgenbaum & Kurt Gray
Release Date: October 21, 2024
Host: Dr. Katy Milkman

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Episode Overview

This episode of Choiceology explores the power of storytelling—specifically, how framing our lives as a “hero’s journey” can provide meaning, resilience, and even tools for smarter decision-making. Dr. Katy Milkman shares real-life heroic journeys, including the imagination-powered childhood of Ethan Gilsdorf and the life-or-death odyssey of Dr. David Fajgenbaum. The episode concludes with psychologist Dr. Kurt Gray, whose research demonstrates that viewing one’s life as a hero’s journey can measurably increase one’s sense of purpose and reduce depression, even for ordinary people. Together, these stories and insights illuminate how narrative framing can be a tool for both survival and flourishing.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Storytelling as Empowerment (Ethan Gilsdorf)

[00:10–03:27]

• Dungeons & Dragons as Practice for Life:
  • Ethan relates his childhood habit of playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and how it functioned as a mode of storytelling and self-exploration.
  • Quote: “Telling your own story can be very empowering. It allows you to interpret what happens. Just to center yourself in your own narrative is a very, I think, powerful and important experience to have.” — Ethan Gilsdorf [01:34]
• Coping with Trauma Using Fantasy:
  • As a child coping with his mother’s brain aneurysm and the profound changes it caused, Ethan found solace and psychological tools within D&D.
  • Quote: “I was trying out characters, different versions of myself, even in these fantasy settings.” — Ethan Gilsdorf [02:01]
• Growing Through Adversity:
  • D&D offered a template for Ethan to understand and endure real-world hardships, framing his struggles as adventures and himself as an empowered protagonist.

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2. Surviving—And Then Saving Others (David Fajgenbaum)

[04:28–22:12]

• Medical Crisis & Near-Death Experiences:
  • David, a former college football player and med student, suffered a mysterious, life-threatening illness (idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease).
  • His experience included multiple near-death episodes, last rites, and extended hospitalization.
  • Quote: “There’s a point where you just slow your breathing down and you pass away. But I remember hearing [my family] and being like, no, I can. I can do one more breath. ... And all of a sudden, you've now put these breaths together long enough to where maybe you can keep this going.” — David Fajgenbaum [06:49]
• Transforming Suffering into Purpose:
  • With no effective treatments available, David devoted himself to finding a cure—conducting research on his own disease, repurposing existing drugs, and persevering despite repeated failures and relapses.
  • Quote: “I knew that if I didn’t try that there was a zero percent chance, and maybe if I got involved, it was like a one in a million chance...” — David Fajgenbaum [12:51]
• Discovery & Legacy-Building:
  • Ultimately, David’s relentless search identified Sirolimus as a treatment, leading to his remission and survival. He’s now been in remission for 14 years.
  • He founded the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network and EveryCure, channeling his experience toward helping others with rare diseases.
  • Quote: “What I've realized is actually we're all in overtime. ... But living in overtime has helped me to do things that I never thought were possible. And it’s helped me to make so much of this time that I never thought I'd have.” — David Fajgenbaum [20:05]
• Heroic Narrative as Meaning-Making:
  • David’s process of writing his story, reflecting on its chapters, and sharing it with others—through books and talks—helped him extract meaning and encourage resiliency in others.
  • Quote: “You can make a mistake in the first quarter of a game and you can make up for it. But in overtime, the importance of every moment is just so clear, and there’s just such clarity of purpose.” — David Fajgenbaum [20:05]

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3. The Science of the “Hero’s Journey” (Dr. Kurt Gray)

[24:21–34:49]

• What is a Hero’s Journey?
  • Adapted from Joseph Campbell’s myth theory, Dr. Gray outlines a structure with seven core elements: protagonist, shift, quest, allies, challenge, transformation, and legacy.
  • Quote: “So your character, you shift your surroundings...you go on a quest, have a goal with allies, and you face a challenge, you transform yourself, and then after you transform yourself, you have a legacy to the world.” — Kurt Gray [24:38]
  • Kurt illustrates using popular stories (e.g., Star Wars, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe).
• Research: Mapping the Hero’s Journey Increases Meaning
  • Dr. Gray’s studies show that when people view their own lives through the lens of a hero’s journey, they experience greater meaning and purpose—and less depression—regardless of whether their lives contain “epic” events.
  • Quote: “Once you do that and you cohere them together, then you begin to see yourself as a hero. And that makes your life more meaningful and makes it seem more like a kind of epic tale of excitement and meaning, rather than just a series of events that happen to anyone.” — Kurt Gray [27:20]
  • The intervention is called “restorying”: encouraging people to reframe their experiences with the seven elements of the journey.
• Cultural Resonance:
  • The hero’s journey is so powerful because it aligns our stories with cultural ideals of what makes a meaningful life, making our experiences “shine” in a narrative that fits societal expectations.
  • Quote: “Making your life a hero’s journey makes it seem like it resonates with our cultural ideals of what a good life is...” — Kurt Gray [31:41]
• Practical Advice:
  • Simply adopting a “hero on a quest” mindset can bring greater significance to daily life. This doesn’t require dramatic quests—helping others, volunteering, or facing small personal challenges counts.
  • Quote: “It doesn't have to be physically heroic...it could be I'm volunteering, I'm helping out people, I'm building a legacy... Just something where there’s some kind of legacy and allies and challenges.” — Kurt Gray [33:47]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Telling your own story can be very empowering. ... We get to take charge of the story we want to tell.” — Ethan Gilsdorf [01:34]
• “I can do one more breath. ... All of a sudden, you've now put these breaths together long enough to where maybe you can keep this going.” — David Fajgenbaum [06:49]
• “You never want a disease with the term idiopathic in it because idiopathic means we don't know the cause of it.” — David Fajgenbaum [11:06]
• “Making your life a hero’s journey makes it seem like it resonates with our cultural ideals of what a good life is.” — Kurt Gray [31:41]
• “If you are just thinking of yourself more as a hero and a journey, that alone can give you more meaning.” — Kurt Gray [33:47]

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Key Timestamps

• [00:10] — Ethan sets the scene: storytelling in Dungeons & Dragons
• [02:12] — Ethan shares trauma and how storytelling aided his coping
• [04:28] — David Fajgenbaum introduces his background and crisis
• [06:49] — David fights for his life, one breath at a time
• [09:49] — David's approach: visualization, support, and perseverance
• [14:23] — Describing the challenge of researching rare disease
• [17:31] — The “sword of Damocles” metaphor and celebrating remission
• [20:05] — “Living in overtime” provides a new perspective
• [24:38] — Kurt Gray explains the seven elements of the Hero’s Journey
• [27:20] — Why seeing yourself as a hero changes how you feel
• [31:41] — The cultural resonance of the hero’s journey
• [33:47] — Practical applications: how to apply a hero’s journey framework to everyday choices

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Actionable Takeaways

• Reframe Challenges: Consider interpreting difficulties as opportunities within your personal hero’s journey.
• Deliberate Narrative Construction: Identify pivotal moments, shifts, and allies in your own story, and reflect on legacy.
• Use in Small Ways: You don’t need to have extraordinary challenges—any positive quest can fit this narrative model.
• Resilience Tool: In hard times, perceiving yourself as a protagonist on a quest can increase resilience and sense of meaning.

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Final Reflections

The episode demonstrates that understanding and re-authoring the stories of our lives—devoting attention to the roles we play, the quests we pursue, and the meaning we derive—can be a practical and science-backed strategy for not only interpreting our past but for shaping our future decisions and well-being. Whether confronting personal hardship or striving for small, everyday goals, viewing life as a hero’s journey can unlock new reservoirs of strength and satisfaction.

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For further reading/listening:

• Chasing My Cure by David Fajgenbaum
• Research and upcoming book by Dr. Kurt Gray: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics
• More from Ethan Gilsdorf and his writing on storytelling and games

(See show notes for links and references.)

Transcript

[Ethan Gillsdorf]

Its eyes are glowing, bright red flames are sprouting from its wings and it comes rushing at you, comes flying at you. What do you do? And if you're a character who's a stout dwarf warrior with a big battle axe, you might say to the dungeon master, I want to try to attack it with my two handed sword. A game like Dungeons and Dragons allows you to be the storyteller of your own life.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

This is Ethan Gillsdorf. He's a writer and performer and a self described nerd. And he's written and spoken about how his childhood obsession with the game Dungeons and Dragons has helped him face certain challenges and understand his life in a more meaningful way.

[Ethan Gillsdorf]

I think the moment that I discovered that all my years of playing Dungeons and Dragons may have been more than just a waste of time was when I was around 40 and I rediscovered all of my Dungeons and Dragons maps and character sheets and dice and rule books which I had kept in a box.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

Dungeons and Dragons is an open ended role playing game where your character takes part in an epic story, facing all manner of mythical obstacles like orcs and dragons and wizards, on your way to gathering experience and power. But the long term value of the game, as Ethan sees it, is in the act of storytelling.

[Ethan Gillsdorf]

Telling your own story can be very empowering. It allows you to interpret what happens. Just to center yourself in your own narrative is a very, I think, powerful and important experience to have. As storytellers, we get to define the narrative, right? We get to take charge of the story we want to tell.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

In retrospect, Dungeons and Dragons wasn't just a game. It gave Ethan some tools that he could use in real life.

[Ethan Gillsdorf]

I was trying out characters, different versions of myself, even in these fantasy settings.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

He was doing this at the same time he was dealing with a very difficult situation at home.

[Ethan Gillsdorf]

When I was 12 and my mother was 38 years old, she suffered this unexpected brain aneurysm. She came home from the hospital many months later and was this very different person psychologically, behaviorally, physically.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

Life was challenging for many years, but playing D and D provided Ethan with a helpful lens for viewing his experience.

[Ethan Gillsdorf]

I was grappling with a disabled mother at home and I was very, I would say traumatized now, looking back on it retrospectively, but as an adult looking back, I looked at what I had accomplished in these worlds and realized I actually was going on journeys, I was actually going on adventures. And it wasn't just a waste of time, but I was trying to learn how to cope with my experience. I was learning how to control my own narrative.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

For a shy kid with a single mom who needed care, this was a form of personal development that followed him into adulthood.

[Ethan Gillsdorf]

Practicing in the game while I was in a place in my own life where I was vulnerable and feeling protective gave me that sort of template for a journey that I could later go on. When you're ready, get out there with your sword drawn to take on the world.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

In this episode, we're looking at how storytelling, and actually a very specific type of storytelling can be leveraged to make your life more manageable, exciting, and meaningful. I'm Dr. Katie Milkman and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true and surprising stories about high stakes choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research and behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes.

[David Feigenbaum]

So I was 25 years old and I was a former college quarterback and a third year medical student.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

This is David, a remarkable person who I first encountered back when he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania where I teach.

[David Feigenbaum]

Hi, my name's David Feigenbaum.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

David was motivated to become a doctor by a family tragedy.

[David Feigenbaum]

I had decided I wanted to go into medicine shortly after my mom passed away from cancer. I actually had promised her that I would dedicate my life to trying to find treatments in her memory.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

He worked hard in medical school, but he still took good care of himself.

[David Feigenbaum]

I was exercising a lot from my college football days and actually was on my obgyn rotation, what I consider to be the pinnacle of medical school, where you actually deliver the first baby into the world. And that's really when everything changed for me. I started to feel this horrible sense of fatigue. It was like fatigue that I had never felt before.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

If you're familiar with medical school, you'll know that fatigue is a pretty standard part of any med student's experience. But this was different.

[David Feigenbaum]

I would sleep a full night's sleep and I would just feel completely exhausted the next day. And then I started noticing this really bad abdominal pain and I noticed these little lumps and bumps appearing in my neck. As a medical student, I knew what these things were and I knew that they were enlarged lymph nodes. And I knew that it could be a sign of something really bad, but just didn't want to go there mentally and acknowledge what this actually could be. So I just finished taking an exam in the hospital and I felt so unwell as I was finishing it up. I actually remember thinking to myself that I thought I was dying. So I walked right down the hall from taking a medical school exam down to the emergency department and they ran some blood work. And I'll never forget the doctor walking in the room and saying, david, your liver, your kidneys, your bone marrow, your heart and your lungs are shutting down. We have to hospitalize you right away. And I just remember being like, oh, my gosh, how is this possible? We didn't know what it was that was potentially killing me. And if you don't know what the disease is that's killing you, you can't start treating it. I was so afraid of what was going to happen.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

It took about 11 weeks between the time David got sick until he finally received a diagnosis.

[David Feigenbaum]

He was deathly ill. During that 11 week period, I spent nearly that whole time hospitalized. And I actually had my last rites read to me by a priest because my doctors were sure I wasn't going to survive. I was pretty confused, but I understood what was happening. And I remember just being in full body pain and just like constant suffering at that stage. It had been weeks and weeks of it. I just thought that that was it. I wouldn't say I was prepared to go, because I was not. But I accepted that maybe that's what was going to happen. I remember my sisters and my dad who never left my side, holding my hands and saying, just breathe, Dave, just breathe. When you get to that stage, there's a point where you just slow your breathing down and you pass away. But I remember hearing that and being like, no, I can. I can do one more breath. And it's like, okay, did it. All right, I can do one more after that. And all of a sudden, you've now put these breaths together long enough to where maybe you can keep this going.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

David was barely clinging to life when at the last minute, the mystery of what was happening to him was finally solved. He was diagnosed with a disease called idiopathic multicentric Kasselman disease. Kasselman disease is a rare disorder that involves an overgrowth of cells in the body's lymph nodes.

[David Feigenbaum]

There was this comfort that came with a diagnosis, and then I googled it to learn more about it. And my comfort from finally having an answer turned into just devastation. Because I learned that though it is not a cancer like we were afraid was killing me, it turns out that it actually has a worse outcome than many cancers. And so all of a sudden, I was terrified because the diagnosis I had was just so horrible.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

In the first three years after his diagnosis, David nearly died five times. It's really hard to imagine with each.

[David Feigenbaum]

Of those five times, my family came in the room. They hugged me. I just cried my eyes out. I grieved for the future that I wanted to have. I grieved for all the things that I wanted to achieve and accomplish and experience. And above all else, I was just heartbroken that I wouldn't be able to spend more time with the people that I love.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

It was an incredibly difficult period for David and his family. He suffered intensely and often thought about giving up.

[David Feigenbaum]

But I think there were three things that helped me to make it through this really challenging time. The first is that I kept visualizing what I wanted to achieve. And what I wanted to achieve was to survive and then have a family with Caitlin, who was my girlfriend at the time, and to be able to develop drugs for patience and memory of my mom. So I had this really clear vision for what I was fighting towards. Second, I had my sisters by my side, my dad by my side, my girlfriend by my side. And then the third is that I really took it, like, one breath at a time. And there's the whole cliche, like, you know, one step at a time, one day at a time. But for me, it was one breath at a time.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

Thanks to some combination of luck, great care, and amazing fortitude, David persevered a breath at a time, a day at a time, a week at a time. After that harrowing first six months, he was put on an experimental drug called cetuximab that was helping some other patients with Kasselman's.

[David Feigenbaum]

I was like, oh, my gosh, this drug's gonna help me. It's the drug that we had hoped for for my mom, and it's actually here for me. I'm gonna get on. I'm gonna get back to med school, get back to my plans to be an oncologist.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

But then the drug stopped working for him.

[David Feigenbaum]

And then I learned from my doctor that there were no more drugs in development. There were no more promising leads. This was it. He explained to me, there's nothing else coming. Like, we don't know anything else about this disease. This drug didn't work. And so I got a combination of seven different chemotherapies, which had been given to me a few times before. And the chemo saved my life. But my doctor very clearly explained to me, david, we've tried everything. There's nothing more that we can do. And when he told me that, everything about my life just completely changed.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

With no cure in sight, David decided to take his very survival into his own hands. He made it his quest to find his own cure.

[David Feigenbaum]

Kasselman disease describes a group of disorders where your immune system attacks your vital organs for an unknown cause. And there's multiple subtypes. My subtype is called idiopathic multicenter Castleman disease. And you never want a disease with the term idiopathic in it because it idiopathic means we don't know the cause of it. Basically, my immune system attacks my vital organs and it's relentless. The only way to stop it is with treatment. Otherwise it'll kill you.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

It was cold comfort for David. But Kastelman disease, particularly the form he had, is very rare.

[David Feigenbaum]

So There are about 5,000 patients diagnosed each year in the U.S. with Kasselman's out of, you know, 300 million Americans, and about one fourth of those, so a little bit over 1000 patients are diagnosed with my subtype idiopathic multicenter Castlemann's.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

He didn't take the decision to search for a cure lightly.

[David Feigenbaum]

I have to admit that I was almost reluctant to get that involved in my care. I think all of us, when we get sick with a disease, we want to go to our doctor and our doctor to say, like, this is what you have and this is what we're going to do for you, and then you're going to get better. And though I was a third year medical student, I really didn't have that much training and so I really wanted my doctor just to take care of me and like, hey, you got this disease, we're going to do this treatment. But what I kept finding over and over again was that the things that would seem like, okay, there must be a clear explanation, well, what causes Kasselman's, you know, what cell types are involved. The disease I had, no one knew the answers for them. There's no leads, and frankly, no one cares about this disease. No one's doing research. There's literally no calvary on its way.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

Not only was there almost no interest or research into the disease, but the likelihood of David being able to make a difference in his own case was vanishingly small. Still, it was better than doing nothing.

[David Feigenbaum]

I knew that if I didn't try that there was a zero percent chance, and maybe if I got involved, it was like a one in a million chance, but if I didn't, then it's like a zero percent chance. I just said, I'm going to take my odds of the one in a million chance, and I'm just Going to dedicate the rest of my life to trying to find a treatment for this disease.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

He was now on a lonely, seemingly impossible journey to search for a cure.

[David Feigenbaum]

And that's what really made me go from wanting to let someone else figure it out and take care of me, to realizing that if I wanted to achieve those things that I was dreaming about when I was in the icu, I would actually need to get involved in doing something and being proactive.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

He knew that it would be a herculean task.

[David Feigenbaum]

There were a couple things that I immediately realized. One is that I knew I didn't have a billion dollars or 10 years to develop a new drug from scratch. That's how much it costs to create a new drug. So, okay, I don't have a billion dollars in 10 years, so that's off the table. So what can I do? If I want to save my life, what could I possibly do? And it's a really simple realization. Those seven chemotherapies that had saved my life, they weren't made for Castleman's, but they saved my life. And they worked. They didn't work long term, but they saved my life. I was like, wait a minute, if those seven chemotherapies weren't made for calciums and saved my life, maybe there's some other drugs out there that weren't made for calciums that could save my life. I don't think it was a very brilliant concept, but it was like, you know, maybe there's something else out there. And so my mission became, can I figure out what's going on in my immune system, what's going wrong? And then can I see if there's a drug that already exists for something else, and then we could try to repurpose it to save my life?

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

He quickly faced a number of challenges on this quest. One, researchers didn't take David, this third year medical student, seriously. Two, doctors didn't typically share data and tissue samples between institutions. There wasn't much collaboration around diseases that affect only a small number of patients. And three, very few people in the world were even studying this particular disease.

[David Feigenbaum]

So there were a number of moments where I was just so frustrated and so disappointed. I mean, things just weren't moving as quickly as they should.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

Despite these challenges, David did make progress.

[David Feigenbaum]

I was in remission for almost a whole year and a half. I was able to finish medical school at Penn, able to start business school at Warden, and in that time, I got engaged to Caitlin, and things were really going in the right direction. I was Doing research on Castleman's and starting to get some promising leads. And then I started to relapse. I just remember the disappointment. It was like, I'm so close, but I didn't have the time. I had this window, and I fought with everything I had, and it just wasn't enough. I even tried a couple drugs. Based on the research that I had done, I thought that a couple drugs could be useful. I convinced one of my doctors to try this drug called cyclosporine. It's the top of my list. I've been doing experiments on my own blood samples. I've been drawing my blood, having lymph nodes resected, doing experiments on them. And I thought cyclosporine was going to.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

Work, but instead, his hopes were dashed.

[David Feigenbaum]

I remember getting the blood work and just seeing that things had gotten worse, even from the time that I started taking this drug. And we increased the dose, and it still didn't do anything. And, you know, after a week of that, realizing that it wasn't going to work, and I failed on the ultimate mission. And then I remember begging my doctor to try another drug called ivig. And that drug worked temporarily. And then about a week later, I started to relapse and get worse again. It had given me all this hope because I actually saw my blood work start to improve. And I was like, oh, my gosh, we did it. I remember sitting on my couch with Caitlin and just, like, cheering, because, like, my blood work improved, like the ivig. We did it. Like, this year and a half of research. It paid off. Like, I work around the clock, and we found something, and this is it. And I just remember the excitement and tears of joy. And then within a few days, seeing the relapse coming back and the blood tests getting worse and my organs shutting down despite continued use of this medicine.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

All of this effort, all of this struggle seemed like it was for naught.

[David Feigenbaum]

But then during that last relapse, I had been collecting blood samples on myself every couple of weeks leading up to it. And it was those blood samples that I then started performing experiments on. And I could actually pick up a pattern in my blood.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

That pattern led David, in the 11th hour, to identify another drug called Sirolimus that might, just might, prove helpful. And in fact, the drug seemed to work. David went into remission, but he wasn't out of the woods. He uses an analogy from Greek mythology to describe how he felt.

[David Feigenbaum]

The analogy is called the sword of Damocles, where there's this sword that is over Damocles head and you don't know when it's going to drop. And you sort of live this life where like at any moment the sword can drop and for me at any moment this disease can come back. But I'm going to live life one day at a time and celebrate every milestone. And so we literally celebrated every month of remission. It was like, oh my gosh, it's been 13 months of remission, it's been 18 months of remission. And once we crossed 18 months that became the new record. I remember by the time we got to month 34, I remember turning to Caitlin at this stage, we got married by the way, we made it to our wedding day on May 24, 2014. And I, I remember about 34 months. I was like, do we start counting in years now?

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

That third drug was the charm, that.

[David Feigenbaum]

Was the drug that ended up saving my life and now saving a lot of other Kasselman's patients lives.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

I remember hearing David tell his story about a year after his wedding in May of 2015, when he delivered the commencement speech at Wharton, where I teach. It was such an amazing story. The arc of this remarkable journey filled with incredible plot twists. He had been on the most extraordinary quest, racing against time with allies and a heinous villain in this disease. And as he told it, he'd come out the other side with this extraordinary mission and purpose to help others face down the same kinds of nightmares. David has now been in remission for about 14 years and he's dedicated his life to help find cures for rare and under researched illnesses, particularly using repurposed drugs. What he's doing is just remarkable. A few years after he realized he'd found his cure, and after that commencement speech, David recognized that the world might want to hear more about his experience. And so he set out to turn his story into a book.

[David Feigenbaum]

It allowed me to zoom out and look at the whole journey and understand the start of things and start making some connections between these experiences early on in my life and how they maybe came into play later on in my life.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

By telling and retelling his story, David has reframed his experiences, recognizing the obstacles he's overcome as part of a larger journey. And David's come to find a great deal of meaning from surviving in those dark times. He now views each day he has with a totally different perspective, like he's made it to overtime. In a sporting event.

[David Feigenbaum]

You can make a mistake in the first quarter of a game and you can make up for it. But in overtime, the importance of Every moment is just so clear, and there's just such clarity of purpose. You know, there's no wasted time. There's no wasted movements or energy. What I've realized is actually we're all in overtime. Just most of us don't figure out we're in overtime until the very end. I would have happily not gone through this horrible disease, and I would happily have not had my family go through what they've gone through. But living in overtime has helped me to do things that I never thought were possible. And it's helped me to make so much of this time that I never thought I'd have.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

David also now sees his life in chapters like he's the protagonist in a dramatic story where each challenge, as difficult as it was, helped him achieve his goals.

[David Feigenbaum]

As I think about my journey, I really do believe that it was the experiencing the loss of my mom and then battling Kastleman disease and creating a new paradigm for research for rare diseases that then has really prepared me for this current chapter that I'm in and that is applying these lessons to repurpose drugs for more diseases, and that there's, you know, still more chapters to go. But this current one is maybe the most meaningful and exciting for me because it's taking all these lessons, all these experiences, and then being able to apply it to countless other diseases and help people with drugs that are just sitting there waiting to be utilized.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

As he's told his story and recognized the dramatic role he played as the protagonist in this painful journey to overcome his disease, David hasn't just made his own life more meaningful. He's found a purpose which has led him to help countless others around the world as they face their own challenges.

[David Feigenbaum]

When I think about being able to share my story and being able to share with people all over the world, my book's been translated into a bunch of languages, and I hear from people in Poland and Korea and Turkey and all over the world that they've learned something from my journey and they're able to take a lesson from my book and apply it to their life.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

David Feigenbaum is a physician and one of my most inspiring colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, where he's an associate professor of medicine. He's the co founder and president of the Kasselman Disease Collaborative Network and co founder and president of EveryCure, a nonprofit that helps repurpose drugs for multiple diseases, and recently received a $48.3 million grant from the US government to accelerate its pathbreaking work. David is also the author of the National Bestseller Chasing My Cure, A Doctor's Race to Turn Hope into Action. You can find links in the show notes [e-mail] podcast. David Fagenbaum's story is an incredible one. It's both harrowing and inspiring, and it's not the kind of journey most of us medical novices could have hoped to come out of alive. But one of the things I find most remarkable about David's experience is that he came away from this heroic and painful journey with a total clarity of mission and purpose. He recognized that he'd been through an awful ordeal. But in the arc of his story and in retelling it, he found meaning and has forged a path forward that is allowing him to help advance medicine and save tens of thousands of other lives. It's tremendously inspiring. The reason I wanted to have David on today to share his journey is actually not because there's a lesson about decision making in his recovery, but instead because of what he realized as he began to tell his story over and over again, eventually sharing it in his best selling book. The act of telling a story in which you're the hero on a quest, which David most certainly was, turns out to have some really interesting effects. My next guest has done fascinating research on the very topic of what happens when you tell the story of your life in the style of what's called a hero's journey. Kurt Gray is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Hi, Kurt. Thank you so much for taking the.

[Interviewer]

Time to talk to me today.

[Kurt Gray]

Yeah, thanks for having me.

[Interviewer]

Well, I'm thrilled that you're here, and I was hoping we could start by having you just describe what a hero's journey is exactly. I know you boiled it down to.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

Seven key elements, but I was hoping.

[Interviewer]

You could tell us what they are.

[Kurt Gray]

Yeah. So the hero's journey is something originally formulated by Joseph Campbell. He's a mythologist who looked across the myths of the world and formulated an archetype of 22, I think, steps that heroes went through in so many of these epic journeys, from Beowulf to the Ramayana. And we thought that was too many numbers and some of them are too weird. Like the magic flight, you're on the back of an eagle. That seemed not very applicable to real world. And so we did seven steps, and they are, there's a protagonist. So your character, you shift your surroundings. You know, you find the wardrobe, you go through it, you go on a quest, have a goal with allies, and you face a challenge, you transform yourself. And then after you transform yourself, you have a legacy to the world. And all of those things kind of combine into the overarching story of the hero's journey.

[Interviewer]

That was a really clear and concise explanation of what these key elements are. You mentioned a couple of famous stories in giving that answer, and I think you alluded maybe to the lion, the Witch, and the wardrobe when you said they go into the wardrobe. But could you mention a few famous stories our listeners might be familiar with that follow this formula? And could you sort of help us map some of those familiar stories onto some of the key elements just so we can really imagine what this is like?

[Kurt Gray]

Yeah, it's a great question. And it's easy because so many of the stories that people care about and know follow this structure. And in fact, George Lucas, when he came up with Star wars, basically got a copy of Joseph Campbell's book and explicitly made Star wars into the hero's journey. So Luke Skywalker is the protagonist. He has a shift where he leaves his home because he sees the droid. The droid has, like, help me, Obi Wan. Oh, my goodness.

[David Feigenbaum]

Right.

[Kurt Gray]

Shift. So I'm gonna change my location. I'm gonna go on a quest to help Princess Leia. I'm gonna have allies like Leia and Han. There's gonna be a challenge, notably Darth Vader. Vader is going to transform himself by finding the Force and becoming a Jedi eventually, and then have a legacy where he's going to save the whole universe. And so we have this in the Hunger Games. We have this in the Lord of the Rings. I mean, you know, comic book things, it doesn't matter. They all basically follow this script, more or less.

[Interviewer]

That's great. Thank you for mapping that on. It's so helpful and really fun to see how this idea pervades all our favorite stories.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

What does it mean to see your life in terms of a hero's journey?

[Kurt Gray]

Yeah. So I think the whole core of this research idea is one, we tell stories to each other to entertain ourselves, but we also tell stories about our lives to make our lives seem meaningful and coherent to ourselves. So if you think about it, our lives are just a series of events, and what we do is we construct a narrative around them. Right. I grew up in Canada, and I had a shift. I'm already doing the Hero's Journey. Right. I came to America and had a challenge in grad school. Right. And so you can basically see your life, and anyone can do this. You can see your life following the seven elements of the hero's journey. And once you do that and you cohere them together, then you begin to see yourself as a hero. And that makes your life more meaningful and makes it seem more like kind of epic tale of excitement and meaning, rather than just a series of events that happen to anyone.

[Interviewer]

I love that summary because that sort of boils down what I want to talk with you about today related to the hero's journey and this amazing research you've done. I was hoping you could just describe the some of the studies you've run that explore the impact of getting a person to see their life as a hero's journey on having a sense of meaning and resilience in the face of challenge. So tell us a little bit about how you explored that empirically.

[Kurt Gray]

Yeah, so we ran a bunch of studies to get at this idea. And I guess before I get there, I just want to take a step back and say that the realization that we had when we came to this project was that anyone's life can be made more heroic or interesting or meaningful, and depending on the shape of that narrative and that structure. And so the studies that we ran test the idea that if you shape the events of your life more as a hero's journey, you should be more likely to feel that your life is meaningful. And this is a feeling that people have kind of in their hearts and minds. And not something that I objectively, as a researcher are saying. Even though we have a study, I think that suggests that people's perceptions of lives that are hero's journeys are more meaningful. So what are the studies? Early on, we just wanted to show and test whether people who saw their lives more as a hero's journey felt like their lives were more meaningful. And so we developed a scale that tapped each of these seven elements of the hero's journey. So one question that might tap shift is I frequently have new experiences. I travel to new places. And so what we found is that the higher you rate your life in terms of shift and protagonist and challenge and legacy, the more meaningful you felt your life was. And in fact, the less you felt depressed on a daily basis.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

That's really interesting.

[Interviewer]

So those first couple of studies are focused on the scale, and then I think you go beyond just measurement of the way people perceive their lives and ran studies where you tried to change the way people saw their lives. Could you talk a little bit about that work?

[Kurt Gray]

Right. So we know correlation isn't causation. Right. And so just because you see your life as a hero's journey and that is connected with your feelings of meaning doesn't mean that it's causal. And so we developed something that we call a restorying intervention, which involved encouraging people to see their lives more as a hero's journey and then testing to see whether that shifted their feelings of meaning in life. And so we gave people those seven elements of a hero's journey, encouraged them to see their life as containing each of those seven elements, and then they stitched it all together at the end into a kind of overarching life narrative. And then we had them rate their feelings of meaning in life. And as we predicted, those folks who did that, as opposed to thinking of objects in their life or their house or other things related to themselves, but not about the hero's journey, Folks who did the hero's journey intervention saw their lives as more meaningful.

[Interviewer]

I love that. Could you talk a little bit about what you think is driving the effect here? Why is it that seeing your life through the lens of a hero's journey is increasing a person's sense of meaning and reducing depression and increasing resilience in the face of challenge? Why is this so powerful?

[Kurt Gray]

Great question. So I think there's a kind of boring answer, and the heroic answer, shall we say. So the boring answer is the elements of the hero's journey are things that we have long known are tied to a meaningful life. So allies, people with friends feel like their life is more meaningful and feel left depressed because loneliness is bad. But I think the hero's journey research that we've done goes beyond that, and that is that it makes your life seem culturally meaningful. Now, what does that mean? Well, we all live in a culture, and those cultures make meaning by telling stories. And to go back to Joseph Campbell's thing, the most meaningful stories are those with the hero's journey, Right? And so it stands to reason that making your life a hero's journey makes it seem like it resonates with our cultural ideals of what a good life is. And so this just makes your life a shining example of our cultural scripts about you.

[Interviewer]

I love that answer. And I just have to say, by the way, Chris, I really love this paper. I remember when I read it, and I just thought, it's so creative, it's so interesting, and it's such a powerful way to think about mindset differently than it's been thought about before. We know how powerful it is to have a certain perception of ourselves or a certain perception of reality and that that can shape our decisions. But this is such a creative and positive use of our culture's obsession with a certain type of story. And I just, I'm grateful to you for doing it. What advice or recommendations do you have for our listeners about ways they could use what they've learned to improve either their own outcomes or the outcomes of the people they care about? And maybe the answer is take more quests, you know, spend more on experiences. But are there ways that people can use this to be more productive or more satisfied that bosses and parents can think about this as a tool? What do you think?

[Kurt Gray]

So I think there's two things you can do. One, you've already hit on both of these. One is just a mere mindset, right? So if you are just thinking of yourself more as a hero and a journey, that alone can give you more meaning. There's also the question of making choices in your life to better aligned with the hero's journey or make it easier for you to see yourself as a hero's journey, right? So we can all agree that there, you know, if I climbed Everest, that could be something that's a little more hero's journey than if I'm like binged on Netflix. And so try to think about what's easier to think about as a hero's journey. And it doesn't have to be physically heroic, right? It could be I'm volunteering, I'm helping out people, I'm building a legacy, right? I'm rescuing a cat. Just something where there's like some kind of legacy and allies and challenges, right? And so all these things, I think, can align with more of a hero journey, like these little choices in the day.

[Interviewer]

I love that. And I think that's a wonderful place to wrap up. And I'm so grateful for your time.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

And for this wonderful research. Curt, thank you.

[Kurt Gray]

Thank you.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

Kurt Gray is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he directs the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the center for the Science of Moral Understanding. He's also the author of a new book out in January of 2025 called why We Fight About Morality and Politics, which you can pre order now. You can find links to his research in the show notes [e-mail] podcast. There was no shortage of heroic storylines at the Summer Olympics this year. But if you're wondering how cognitive and emotional biases can impact Olympic athletes, judges, fans, and even the cities that bid on hosting the Games, check out the recent financial decoder episode titled can the Olympics Teach Us About Our Own Behavior? In it, Marc Reap explores how the same biases that affect various aspects of the Olympics also apply to the financial decisions we make every day. Check it [e-mail] financialdecoder or wherever you get your podcasts. There's something really powerful to me about realizing that taking a different perspective on your story can make you better off and Mapping your experiences onto a Hero's Journey framework doesn't require a story as extraordinary as David Fagenbaum's, but his life certainly maps well onto the classic elements of the hero's journey. David, the protagonist, experienced an extraordinary shift when he went from a healthy medical student and recent Division 1 football player to a patient dying from a rare disease. Then he launched a quest to find his cure. He enlisted allies, family, friends, doctors and researchers studying his disease, and he encountered incredible challenge five near death experiences and multiple failed attempts to repurpose drugs to reverse his illness. But ultimately he experienced a transformation. He beat Castlemans into remission with a repurposed drug, completed his medical degree and became a tenured professor, a husband and a father. And finally, David has created a legacy. He's devoted his life to finding cures for other rare diseases, and he founded the incredible nonprofit Every Cure. In the telling and retelling of his hero's journey for a large and ever growing audience, David has clearly found immense meaning, purpose and resilience. But you don't have to be David Fagenbaum to construct a hero's Journey. This mapping of your life or a given experience onto a Hero's Journey framework is straightforward for far less dramatic stories too. We all experience shifts as we switch between homes, jobs, and even financial plans. It's a question of recognizing those shifts as elements of your hero's journey. And we all enlist allies on our quests, which can range from launching a project to pursuing a savings goal to raising a child. And what quest is challenge free? None I've been on. In the end, you can step back and recognize what you've achieved and what its longer term impact or legacy may be. Kurt's research highlights that when you choose to frame your life and experiences in these terms, reminding yourself that you're a protagonist on a quest supported by allies and facing down challenges, you'll find more meaning and will be more more resilient in the face of obstacles. It's a pretty wonderful punchline really. I highly recommend giving this a try, but I'd be naive if I didn't offer one. Beware of the risk of self deception. Not every quest is good. Not every goal gives you license to call yourself a hero. Choose your quests carefully. You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, a rating on Spotify, or feedback wherever you listen. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app. And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book how to Change, or sign up for my monthly newsletter, Milkman delivers on substack. That's it for this season, but remember, we've got 80 plus episodes in our back catalog, and we'll be back with new stories in 2025. I'm Dr. Katie Milkman. Talk to you.

[Kurt Gray]

For important disclosures, see.

[Dr. Katie Milkman]

The show notes or visit schwab.com podcast.