519 - Access Imagination and Intuition that Ai Can’t Touch with Angus Fletcher PhD

Summary

Creative Pep Talk – Episode 519

"Access Imagination and Intuition that AI Can’t Touch"
Host: Andy J. Pizza
Guest: Angus Fletcher, PhD
Date: August 27, 2025

Episode Overview

In this episode, host Andy J. Pizza sits down with Angus Fletcher, PhD—neuroscientist, literature scholar, and author of Primal Intelligence. The conversation centers on the unique creative faculties of the human brain—imagination, intuition, storytelling—and why these abilities are fundamentally different from what AI can replicate. Drawing on Angus’s research with special operations, neuroscience, and the arts, they explore how "primal intelligence" offers a hopeful, empowering vision for creatives in an anxious, tech-dominated culture. The discussion is filled with practical insights, memorable analogies, and actionable advice to help creative people tap into their intrinsic superpowers.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Book: Primal Intelligence and Its Worldview Shift

• Andy opens (05:35) by expressing deep enthusiasm for Fletcher's new book, noting it sparked a "significant worldview shift" in him.

  “This really feels like a significant, significant worldview shift.” — Andy (06:35)

• Angus recounts the writing process, including four full rewrites as he became immersed in the special operations community (06:57-08:14).
• The core of the book: Scientific evidence that the human brain—specifically its ability to engage in story, imagination, and intuition—can never be replicated by computers or AI (05:35–06:35, 10:04–12:43).

2. Science, Story, and the Brain

• Angus identifies primarily as a science person but credits literature and story with connecting him to his childhood imagination (09:11–12:37).

  “Honestly, it reconnected me with who I was as a child.” — Angus (11:25)

• Central thesis: "The brain thinks in narrative." Studying story is a way to study the brain without lab rats (10:04–10:36).
• Stories are different from math and logic—they focus on the specific and individual, unlocking endless novelty (12:38–13:02).

3. The Brain is Not a Computer

• Angus debunks the entrenched view of the brain as a computer, explaining how stories—chains of actions—differ from computational logic (13:13–15:33).

  “A chain of actions is a story. That’s a story.” — Angus (13:27)

• AI imitates only a narrow version of creative thinking (divergent/convergent), but the human brain innovates through narrative, goal-backward thinking, and intuition (20:37–22:11).

4. The Limits of AI and the Power of Human Creativity

• The real story of generative AI’s invention by the US Army (1943), and how, after 80 years, the Army found "thinking like computers" made humans less effective (21:19–25:20).

  “A computer is a fork and what we need is a spoon... It’s just a different tool.” — Angus (24:54)

• Human creativity has a fundamentally different process—story and imagination—than any current or future computer technique can replicate (27:04).

5. Story, Intuition, and Exceptional Information

• Classic idea of intuition as “pattern matching” doesn’t explain true creative leaps (31:52–33:14).
• Angus introduces the idea of “exceptional information”—noticing exceptions to rules, enabling totally new insights (33:14–34:21).
• Examples: Van Gogh’s color innovations came from seeing breaks in patterns—something AI cannot do (34:33–38:13).

  “Almost all huge breakthroughs in art, science and technology come from spotting these exceptions.” — Angus (33:45)

6. Story as Change—Beginnings Are Actually Middles

• Most stories (and the brain) start from the point of change: “Every day this happened, until one day…” (41:19–42:00).
• Story structure: "Middle, Beginning, End." This approach stimulates genuine curiosity—essential for learning and creativity (42:33–45:08).

  “Anytime your brain notices something surprising—or a change—it realizes: I’ve arrived in the middle of the story. Where did this begin?” — Angus (42:33)

7. The Problem with Modern Schooling & Computer Paradigms

• Schools treat kids like computers, privileging logic and standardized data over curiosity and creativity (47:10–48:43).
• Generative AI is ironically undermining this system, forcing a shift towards valuing creative voice and unique expression (48:43–50:10).

  “Teaching voice—that’s the most powerful thing you have as an artist.” — Andy (50:10)

8. Planning, Creativity, and "Defined Strategy, Unlimited Tactics"

• Inspired by military special operators: Set clear objectives, pursue them with flexible, adaptive methods (51:59–54:22).

  “Defined strategy, unlimited tactics—identify your mountain, then find any path up it.” — Angus (53:37)

• This principle echoes in successful creative processes—having a target, but embracing chaos and improvisation as the path evolves (57:15–59:36).
• Nelson’s Touch (the story of Admiral Nelson): Leadership by setting a vision, then empowering others with autonomy, resulting in the “sublime” convergence of multiple creative paths (54:23–57:15).

9. Plans vs. Planners – The True Purpose of Planning

• Eisenhower’s maxim: “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” The point is to strengthen the "planner," not to hold to a rigid plan (67:51–69:34).
• Imagination is, at its core, the faculty of planning—"Imagination is just planning" (69:34–73:29).

  “The purpose of it is to develop the planner, not the plan.” — Angus (67:51)

10. Interviewing, Curiosity, and the Dangers of Asking "Why"

• Special operators’ interview method: Only ask Who, What, When, Where, How—not Why—since “Why” leads to judgment and stops discovery (75:58–81:18).

  “We asked who, what, when, where, how—and never why. Because the moment you ask why, you surface a judgment.” — Angus (76:27)

• This approach enhances creativity, deepens relationships, and prevents snap assumptions.

11. Creativity in the Age of Viral Validation

• Social media rewards repeated, surface-level content—not genuine innovation or creativity (86:48–89:46).

  “Do you want to be the person who’s constantly blowing up and having no effect, or the person who establishes deep moments of connection?” — Angus (88:00)

• True creative impact often starts as the “lonely future,” before audiences catch up, just as with Van Gogh (89:46–91:02).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The brain thinks in narrative. You don’t need to cut open rats to understand the brain—you can just study story.” — Angus (10:04)
• “A chain of actions is a story. That’s a story.” — Angus (13:27)
• “A computer is a fork—and what we need is a spoon.” — Angus (24:54)
• “Almost all huge breakthroughs in art, science and technology come from spotting these exceptions.” — Angus (33:45)
• “Defined strategy, unlimited tactics—identify your mountain, then find any path up it.” — Angus (53:37)
• “The purpose is to develop the planner, not the plan.” — Angus (67:51)
• “Imagination is just planning. That’s all it is.” — Angus (70:27)
• “We asked who, what, when, where, how, and never why. Because the moment you ask why, you surface a judgment.” — Angus (76:27)
• “Do you want to be the person who’s constantly blowing up and having no effect, or the person who establishes deep moments of connection?” — Angus (88:00)
• “If you feel it and you know that it’s new, and you’re living in the future, it takes a long time for other people to catch up with you.” — Angus (90:23)

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Segment Timestamps

• 05:35 — Andy’s enthusiasm for Primal Intelligence
• 09:11 — Angus’s science and story background
• 13:13 — Why the brain isn’t a computer
• 20:37–27:04 — History of AI, Army interventions, and why AI falls short
• 31:52 — Intuition, pattern breaks, and Van Gogh example
• 41:19–45:08 — Story structure, curiosity, and learning
• 47:10–50:10 — Schooling, creativity, and the AI disruption
• 53:37 — Defined strategy, unlimited tactics (special ops/military analogy)
• 67:51 — Purpose of planning: Train the planner, not the plan
• 69:34 — Imagination as planning; how special ops develop this muscle
• 75:58 — Interviewing: Who/What/Where/When/How; why “why” is dangerous
• 86:48–91:02 — Social media’s imitation of creativity and the value of real connection
• 93:05 — Andy’s "Why did you write the book?" guess (ending exercise)

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Practical Applications & Takeaways

• Value your intuition: Seek out the exceptions, rule-breaks, and moments of surprise. This is where real creativity happens.
• Set clear objectives, but stay flexible: Know your mountain, but be prepared to forge new paths as circumstances change.
• Strengthen your "planner muscle": Planning is a way to build creative imagination, not an end in itself.
• Embrace the unknown: Whether in interviews, relationships, or ideas, avoid jumping to the “why”—stay curious and keep probing.
• Don’t be conned by algorithms: Viral does not equal deep creative value; the most profound work often takes time to be recognized.
• Curate your own creative education: Focus on discovery, curiosity, and processing mystery rather than mechanical repetition of formulas.
• Demystify your creativity: Learn how your "machine in the forest" works so you can use it on purpose—without losing the magic.

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Recommended Action(s)

• Read Angus Fletcher’s Primal Intelligence for a complete paradigm shift in approaching creativity.
• Experiment with "defined strategy, unlimited tactics" in your projects.
• When collaborating or interviewing, use Who/What/Where/When/How questions to deepen discovery.
• Invest time thinking about your unique path—and don’t be discouraged if your work isn’t instantly recognized.

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Episode ends with Andy reflecting that this is one of his all-time favorite episodes and reiterating the recommendation to read Primal Intelligence for all creative practitioners.

Transcript

[A]

On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost. But don't worry, you'll lift off. Sometimes you just need a creative pep talk. I didn't mean for the past few episodes to have this kind of theme emerge. But here we are kind of in the middle of a series all about the scary times that we find ourselves in. Whether it is politics or technology or platforms changing or just the world affairs, all of this stuff, it is just so overwhelming. And for us to be able to access that soft, squishy, creative part of ourselves is difficult in times like these. But it's also essential. Now you're in luck. And I was, I feel lucky that I got to chat with the guest that we have on the show today because I believe that he has some exceptional information that potentially decimates or demolishes that fear of the threat of, of AI against creative people and creative practitioners. I think that he knows something is going to share some things with you today that will help you have some serious hope about how powerful our creative brains are. Today on the show we have Angus Fletcher, one of my all time favorite guests on the show. Angus has a background in, in neuroscience, but a PhD in literature from Yale where he studied Shakespeare. And it puts him in this kind of unique niche of science and story. And if you listen to the show, you know, that's my jam. You know, I'm feeling that. But the reason he's on the show today is because he is going to tell you why that story. Science is scientific proof that your brain can do things that computers will never be able to replicate and why right now it's so essential that we learn as people, but especially as creative people to tap into that thing that only we can do. He calls it primal intelligence. It's the title of his new book. Highly recommend it. We're going to get into that in this episode and I'll come back with some information about how you can go pick it up. I highly recommend that you do, by the way. We usually end the episode with a creative call to adventure, a CTA of how you can apply these ideas to your creative practice. Right now, however, I'm not doing that because this thing is chocked full of applications and exercises and practices that will allow you to tap into this primal intelligence and apply it to your practice in real time today. And so we're not going to do that part because you're just going to get it sprinkled throughout the whole episode. But for now, let's talk about, let's get to this chat that I had with Angus Fletcher and talk about how you can access that thing that only our brains can do. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. I love Squarespace. I'm a longtime user. One of the things I love about Squarespace is I will use. It's so easy to use that I will use use it to create pitches. If I'm pitching a book or I'm pitching something to a client, I will use a Squarespace page in my website and I'll build the whole thing there. Then you don't have these clunky like document PDFs clogging up people's inboxes and it looks super slick. If you want to see one of those that I use all the time, I did one for my series right side out andyjpizza.com/rso and you can see how I create a little pitch summary of that project. Go to squarespace.com pep talk get building for free and trying it out and testing it. And then when you're ready to launch, use promo code pep talk all one word for 10% off your first purchase. Thanks Squarespace.

[B]

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[A]

Honestly, I'm a little bit worried because I just freaking love the book more than I expected to because I'm. You already know I'm a fan. However, you know, Wonderworks I loved because I'm such a story nerd and I just, it was just a really important book to me. And then knowing that I knew this had story as like a base, but it just had a different kind of packaging and I wasn't sure. I was like, I'm sure I like it, but I don't know how much it's for me. But I. I'm going to try to like tone down how excited I am about the book because I'm loving it. I honestly like reading that. I'm like, I haven't read a book in a long time. That just feels like, like a lot of times you read books. I mean, I really like nonfiction books. I get a lot from them. But a lot of times you're like, oh, that's good. That's Good. And there's this. Is like, this really feels like a significant, significant world view shift.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Does it feel like that to you when you made it?

[B]

Yeah. So, first of all, most nonfiction books now are the title. And I had this crazy conversation with the editors about this, and they're like, if it's the title, that's good. And then there's just a bunch of paper between the title and the back of the book, and then nobody looks at it because they just say it's the title. Right. You know what I mean?

[A]

Yeah, I do think so.

[B]

There's that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then this particular book. So I had to rewrite this book four times. And when I say that, I don't mean, like, I had to, like, you know, tweak it a little bit. I mean, it was a studs, like, the whole book deleted, rewritten. And the reason for that is I got pulled so deep into this special operations community, which is so completely different from me. And I think maybe this is something that you can. You can jam with, is that, you know, when you're a creative person, you're just, like, fascinated by people who are different from you. You, you know, totally fascinated.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so I'm, like, totally hanging out with all these operators all the time, you know, all these, like, you know, like, all these classified units and all my friends, like, what's wrong with you, man, if you, like, join the military? And I was like, no, I'm just, like, interested people who are different from us, man. Like, I'm still part of the team, you know? But anyway, as I got so deep into the operations community, I started thinking like them, because, you know, this is, again, this is part of your creative process, right? Is you really open yourself up to this new world. And so I'd be like, you know, going to pick my kids up from school or something, and my wife would be like, what do you have to do? I'm like, I'm off to operate, run a little mission. You know, I got these targets I've acquired, you know, got an asset, you know, I'm gonna move.

[A]

Rubbed off on you.

[B]

Yeah, right, Exactly. And so, like, the first draft of the book was totally incomprehensible. Everyone's like, what is this? This doesn't even make any sense at all. It was just like, me speaking, like, operator, speak back to operators. And they're like, this is really weird. And so I had to, like, almost, like, come out of, like, how weird it was. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

To make it comprehensible that it really resonates with me. A lot of my closest friends are the people that I just love hanging out with. I always say there's a handful of them I can think of. I'm always like, they have a part of the brain I don't have access to. That's why I love, like they're saying things I have no way of expecting. And I just, I'm, I gravitate towards that. My wife is like that. That's one of the reasons why I think I was like, just so attracted to her is that everything she would say, I'd be like, what? How is that? Did we just encounter the same thing? So I definitely relate to that. Before we get. So I want to get into the special operators and, and primal intelligence and all that. But before we do, one question I had was, do you. So your background, you have science science degrees and you have story related degrees. Do you think of yourself more as a science guy or a story guy?

[B]

Yeah, I'm really more of a science guy. And even though I don't have my PhD in neuroscience, I have my PhD in literature. I was trained from the age of 17 at a neurophysiology lab. And so if you think of me as a literary person, my work makes no sense at all. It's like, what is this guy even thinking? But basically, it's sort of like how you're just shaped by your origins. If you grew up on the mean streets of Boston, you're just like, boston for life, basically. You know what I mean? And so I grew up on the mean streets of neuroscience and I just think about everything like a neuroscientist does. And, and that's actually why when I, when I, you know, a lot of the early stages of my career were really hard for me because first of all, I was in all these spaces where people did not understand what I was doing. And a lot of times when you've probably experienced this, when people don't understand what you're doing, a lot of times they treat you as though you're like a threat or offensive, you know.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so I spent a lot of my time in the academy and people were like, you're damaging literature, you're damaging all these things. We don't really like you, can you go somewhere else? You know, this kind of stuff. So I do really identify as neuroscientists. And you know, my big insight really is that the brain thinks in narrative. And that means that if you study narrative, you're studying the brain. So you don't need to, like, cut open rats and like, torture monkeys. In order to understand the brain, which is what a lot of neuroscientists do, you can literally just study story because that unlocks, you know, 50, 60, 70% of what the brain does.

[A]

Yeah. I asked that question of whether you're a science or story guy. My impression is that you are. That you are a science guy by nature. That was. That would have been my guess, but that you. But there's almost nobody who I've seen more kind of romantic about literature. And. And so that is a very. That's why I asked you, because it's so fascinating. That's uncommon. And so my follow up to that question is, what did. What did story give you personally that has made you like this? Or maybe it's connected to what did you learn about story that's so essential that it's made you equally kind of a story person.

[B]

Yeah. Honestly, it reconnected me with who I was as a child. And I don't know if this is an experience that your listeners have had, but, you know, I first discovered myself through reading stories, through watching stories, through sharing stories and listening to stories. Yeah. And, you know, that's what sparked my curiosity, my imagination for the first time. You know, as a kid, even when I was in a really boring place, to me, I was always imagining it as a story of something else, you know, I mean, that was just kind of part and parcel of who I was. And then I got to school, you know, and you start to get trained in, you know, by the school system. You got to, you know, you're told, you got to grow up, you got to mature, all these kinds of things. I hated literature in school. I hated the way that it was taught. You know, we were always taught to, like, analyze it for themes and symbols and all this kind of stuff. I did not like that. And so I stopped thinking myself as a literature person because I just did not like the way it was handled in school. But then going back into the neuroscience of it and realizing this is how stories work made me realize, like, this is how my brain was born to work. My brain was born to think in story. It was born to imagine. And the thing that's so cool about story, which makes it different from math and logic, these other things, is it's obsessed with the specific and the individual.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So, you know, you're reading a great story when it just has all sorts of details you could never have imagined yourself, you know?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And. Yeah, it just puts you back in contact with the Fact that every moment in your life is an opportunity to discover something you've never seen before. And that that's actually really what matters is these unique individual moments, as opposed to these universal laws of life or the math equation that conquers us all.

[A]

How did you realize that our brains run on story? Yeah, that's a huge question, but go ahead.

[B]

I'm 20 years old. I'm working in this neurophysiology lab at the University of Michigan Medical School. And what we were all taught at the time was that the brain was a computer. And this never made any sense to me because, first of all, my brain did not operate like a computer. Like, computer's, like, very logical and all this kind of stuff. And also, computers require huge amounts of data and huge amounts of information and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, as a human being, you move very quickly with little information. Sometimes, you know, that's not good, but sometimes that is good. So I just had this real suspicion that the human brain was a computer. And I was always just, like, thinking, like, what is going on? What is going on? And when you do neurophysiology, you're studying individual neurons, like, literally the building blocks of the brain. And these are so different from transistors and so different from what makes it computers. And the main thing that makes them different is they create actions. And then that neuron, once it creates an action, action, causes another neuron to create an action. And then what starts to happen is your brain starts to create a chain of actions. So it's one action that creates another action, creates another action in these chains. And all of a sudden I was like, wait, A chain of actions is a story? Like, that's a story. And I remember I ran into the lab, and I. You know. You know, there's this thing that, like, all scientific breakthroughs occur when you're, like, in your early 20s or something. And I was like, this is my breakthrough. And I ran into the lab, and the lab director was like, that is nuts. And that is not true. It's not worked that way at all. And I was like, oh, I thought I was gonna be, like, celebrated for this insight. And then I was like, you know what? I actually. I think that's right. I think the brain does think in action. And I think the key to understanding what the brain is doing is that essentially, not just that it processes the world as a series of actions, but that its job is to innovate action. Because what. What leads to success in life is. Is behaving in New ways is being able to invent things, you know, is being able to, you know, if you think about this in a kind of biological sense, outmaneuver your competitors, you know, by. By innovating your behavior, all these. All these things. And so I was like, how does the brain create new actions? And that was why I was like, I have to study storytellers because storytellers must be people who are aware of how they're creating new actions or new stories or new plots and these kinds of things. And so I very wrongly thought by going to graduate school in English literature, that's what I would learn. As you, in fact, discover when you study literature in school, that's not what they talk about.

[A]

Yeah, I bet. Yeah, it's. It's odd. I kind of feel like I've consumed people on this show that listen to this show, know that I'm a story nerd, and I've read a bunch of books on story and all this kind of stuff. I like all the different angles that people have. But the more I've read, the more I'm suspicious that the people who know the most aren't writing about it. They're using it, and maybe even hoarding it. Maybe even don't want everybody to know what they know, because the more you study those people and what they're doing, they. They have a skill set. It's still maybe some magic to it or something, but. Yeah, like that. That's. You don't. I don't expect to find that at college, you know?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. No, you don't. So first of all, there's. There's two things happening here. Like, if you're a really good storyteller, you're out in the world telling stories.

[A]

Telling stories.

[B]

Yeah. And, you know, and you love that, and it's amazing, and you want to be doing that with all of your time. And so that's why there aren't any famous screenwriters teaching screenwriting classes in college. Like, we have the world's best physicists in universities teaching physics. We do not have the best world's best novelists teaching novel writing. I mean, I hate to say it, if you go into an MFA program, you're not getting the world's best novelist, you're not getting the world's best screenwriters. So that's the first thing. The second thing, though, which I find completely fascinating, is what we call in science the tacit knowledge problem. And what this means is the better you are at something, the worse you are at explaining it to people. So, like, interesting.

[A]

Yeah. Like the curse of knowledge kind of thing. Like this thing of you just know too much or it's too innate or something like that.

[B]

Yeah. So it's a combination of things. First of all, there's a question of, like, where do I even start? Right. If you ask, like, an expert storyteller where to start, they'll be like, oh, my goodness, this is. You know, that's not. You know. But then, second of all, your brain is going so fast through the motions that it can't slow down and explain to somebody else how to get on board and kind of break down the process. And so it was almost like playing the guitar. Right, right. They were like, oh, you know, just do this. And you're like, I can't even hold the guitar. Right. Like, how do you know? And you start to realize that when people are really, really experts at things, they tend to be dreadful teachers. Like, dreadful teachers, even when they're trying to teach, you know, and then they get, like, really irritated with you, and they're like, why aren't you getting it best? Or they get frustrated with themselves, and that's a whole bad thing. So a big part of what I've been able to do is go in with my understanding of how the brain works to these expert communities and be like, this is actually what your brain's doing. And they're like, is it. How do you know that? I'm like, here's how we know it. We're going to get someone who can't do what you do, and I'm going to coach them, and then they're going to do what you just did. And that's kind of what I do with a lot of these communities, whether it's astronauts or poets or whatever, is. Then you realize, okay, we did actually find. And that sequence of actions that we're training that person is a story. So we're basically teaching people the story of expertise. And in the case of storytelling, that's the story of story.

[A]

Yeah, that's so. That's so cool. And I. I feel like I'm kind of unique in this way that every. I grew up in a really analytical household. My. My dad's outside. My mom's much more of a creative person. So I. I think I. Every step of the way, I've tried to step back and be like, how did I do what I did? Mainly because I wanted to make a living at it, so I want to. I wasn't. I wasn't, at least initially, super romantic about art. I loved Indie music. I was super into it, but I wasn't romantic about my own journey in terms of like, just wanting it all to be magic and whatever it was, was art. And, you know, I. I wanted to figure out, like, how am I doing what I'm doing? And so I definitely. Everything that I would do, I was trying to understand it. But I've told a couple people while reading your book that so many things in feels this is not a great analogy. I need more time for that. But it feels like something like I. My creative practice is like finding a radio in the woods and I've figured out how to work it. I have some ways of doing it, but there are. But reading the book literally feels like for some of these things, like I found the manual to the radio or like, that's. I do that, but I didn't know why I did it. I missed some of the steps or. It's. It's really, really fascinating. Um, speaking of the computers that are, you know, this idea that. It's a really prevalent idea that our brains are computers. They're just like really good computers. And one of the things that I think this book tackles head on is one of the biggest problems that creatives feel that they're facing, which is AI feeling like they're told that they're. Every day that they're going to. That they're basically obsolete because we have computers that do what you do. And I think your work really has a good answer to that. So I wanted to hear if you could explain why you feel that you have proof that that's not true and why you believe that AI or computers can't do what. And maybe never will be able to do what brains do.

[B]

So we do have proof. The proof is complicated and be weird to explain on a podcast because you'd be like kind of going through like an Einstein equation verbally or something like that. So let me tell you a story.

[A]

There were real. There's real.

[B]

Let me. Yeah, there's like real. I mean, there's like hard site. It's. It's impossible. And it's not only impossible. Computers are never going to get anywhere near human creativity. It's a totally different method. But let's not go down that. Let me just give you a story that, that, that hopefully will. Will kind of walk people through some of the. The steps. And I think, you know, five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, for 20 years from now, you will see the truth of what I'm saying. And that's going to be as. As history unfolds itself. So. But what people don't know is that the United States army invented generative AI essentially in 1943.

[A]

Oh, really?

[B]

And so in 1943, two things happened in the U.S. army. The first thing that happened was they built ENIAC, which was the world's first electronic multipurpose computer. So it's basically the first computer. So the army built the computer in 1943, and at the same time that they did that, they hired a guy called JP Guilford to crack the secret of creativity. And he decided that this computer was the human brain. Essentially, he thought, oh, my goodness, this thing is so smart. The human brain's got to be a computer. I've got to reduce creativity to computational processes. And so he reduced it to these two processes, which we now call divergent thinking and convergent thinking. And divergent thinking is basically just random brainstorming, which computers do great. It's just like bouncing all around different kind of sets you have in your mind and categories just coming up with, you know, random stuff, you know, like pink dolphin and stuff like that, you know, mix and matching colors and animals, whatever, all that kind of stuff.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Then the second part is called convergent thinking, and that's pattern matching. And that's after you've done all the random stuff, you pop a high probability pattern over it. So if you've ever done one of these useless brainstorms where people come up with all these great ideas and then at the end you start drawing lines to the ones that are actually really interesting but no one thinks are probable, and you end up with like a kind of like, boring middle solution at the end. That's convergent thinking. And so just mechanically divergent thinking and convergent thinking, that's generative AI. That's all that it does. Those are the two computational processes that it runs. And so basically, always what you're toggling with generative AI is how random it is and then how tight the pattern matches. And these are different dials you can play with on any program that you have.

[A]

Well, and when you hear people talking about thinking, I've heard it spoken about like, those are the two types of thinking.

[B]

Yes. Right. Yeah. So basically, yeah, because of course, when you go out on the street, right, you just see people just, like randomly just doing all sorts of totally random things, and all of a sudden they snap into a logical pattern, go back to just acting randomly, you know, like, you know, when you're planning your day, you just thousands of totally random ideas occur to you, and then you suddenly. It's not at all how the human brain works. Right? Human brain works by reverse engineering backwards from goals and things like this, which are narrative processes which computers can do anyway. We can talk about the human brain in a second. But the reason I think the army thing is interesting is because. So the army essentially invented generative AI in 1943. But the thing was, is that computer was not advanced enough to run Gilfer's protocols, so they never put the creative theory together with the computer. But what's happened over the last 10, 15 years is the computers and the theory have converged. And so the Army's, you know, basically idea of generative AI has become real. Okay, so why am I telling you all this? I'm telling you all this because five years ago, the US army contacted me and said, look, we've had basically generative AI in the basement now for 80 years. And what we realized is it doesn't work very well. And more than that, the more we train our teams to think like these computers do, the worse they get at their jobs. And so we're starting to realize, you know, like, we're ahead of the American public on this. We're starting to realize that this is not it. And so can you please come in and help us figure out what it really is? And so that's kind of the basis of the book is I basically went in because I had these different theories. And I should say, when I first started working with the army, they weren't like, oh, Angus, you're such a genius. They were more just like, angus, we're really desperate. You know, everyone else is saying exactly the same thing to us because basically what everyone will say to you is, either generative AI just needs more data or quantum computing or some other kind of computing. Right? People are always like, you know, it's just a different kind. Like the.

[A]

Brings more power, right?

[B]

Exactly, exactly. Or the software needs to be tweaked somehow, you know what I mean? Or there's some, like, missing algorithmic code we haven't figured out yet, you know, and what I'm saying is. No, that's totally. I mean, like, what I'm saying is, is, is basically, you know, a computer is a fork and what we need is a spoon, you know, or something like that. It's just a different tool, you know, and forks are great, and that's wonderful. You can do a lot of stuff with them, but, you know, try eating soup with a fork. It's not gonna gonna work.

[A]

And so yeah, you need a human brain.

[B]

You need a human brain. You need to eat your brain to eat soup. Yeah. Computer. Have you ever seen an AI Soup? I haven't, no. Totally not. But anyway, so, yeah, so they basically called me in. And so, you know, there was this initial period where I didn't really trust or understand them. I actually thought that the army was recruiting me to be a spy.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Because I have no contact with the army. And I'm also, I'm an immigrant. And so, you know, whenever I get in contact with the federal government, my first thought is, what are they going to do? Are they going to throw me out of the country? Like, what's happening? You know? Yeah, so I had all these anxieties about that. And plus I'm working with these classified units who basically either can't reveal anything to me about what they do or essentially have these kind of COVID stories, you know, So, I mean, that boosts a lot of my paranoia. Meanwhile, you know, they're going back to their bosses and their bosses. Like, who is this random person? Nobody agrees with this guy. He seems nuts. Like, why are you investing all these resources in this? But what happened is it started to work. And I can tell you much more about that story if you're interested. But the short of it is it started to work and it worked really well and it worked really fast. And it worked not just in these classified units, but then when we took it out of these units, we put it in the regular Army. It worked in the regular army. Then the regular army is like, hey, you can go try it in schools. You start doing it in schools. It worked in schools. And it's not like rocket science, it's just story. It's just shifting away from logic, which is what computers are amazing at, which is a data intensive process which is about finding patterns and optimizing and repeating them and going into story, which is a low information process, which is about imagination and innovation and creating the future. And your brain just does it naturally. Once you kind of unleash it from the shackles that have been placed on it by school and by using, frankly, too much technology, which does kind of scramble your brain, all of a sudden you get these powers back and it's amazing.

[A]

That's the second problem that I think that it really tackles the book is that the world has equated intelligence with iq, with logic, that they are. I mean, I think a lot of people would. If I said, are they synonymous? They would say, yeah, those are. That's what intelligence is. And this primal intelligence is this different type of intelligence. And the secret is kind of that it's story thinking that we think in story, that.

[B]

Right, that's exactly right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so basically when you talk to people, they'll basically say one of two things. They'll say intelligence is computational. Although say intelligence is magic. It's magic. Right. You know, it's something that we can't explain, it's consciousness. Right. It's something that is totally ineffable. Right. You know what I mean? And so I make everybody angry because.

[A]

I'm like, no, I love about what you do. Genuinely, this is what I love about what you do, is that you have, you hold this tension that's really aligned with, I don't know if I would say my values, but the way that I feel about the world, which is, I've actually thought, when I interview people, especially experts, people that have a large set of intelligence on something, what's the thing, you know, that feels like magic? Like what is it? What that you know, is real? It's as concrete as anything else, but it feels like woo woo magic. Because I know that though, that space is so interesting. And I love how you, you hold this space so kind of furiously like you're very like serious about it. And I, and I just, I love it. The space between, it's not logic, it's not magic, it, you know, it's this, it's this other thing. And between the science and the story, is that kind of space.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, it's not logical, it's biological.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And you know, the human brain can, can still be made of all of all these mechanisms and whatnot that we can study. And by the way, that doesn't eliminate the existence of magic.

[A]

Right?

[B]

I'm not saying that there isn't magic. I'm just saying that there are ways to get better at being imaginative that are practical and that we can actually study how these processes work in the brain. And maybe there's more than that. And I'm totally open to that. You know, I mean, I think science ultimately has its limits and I think any scientist should be humble and focus on their area of expertise. And I think a lot of the problem, frankly with the computer science community right now is they've way overreached, way overreached. So I'm not against magic. All I'm saying is that there's a lot of human intelligence which we can understand in a practical way better and put that into schools and make kids happier, improve their thriving. We can start to revalue art. And we can also start to demystify art in a healthy way. You were talking about earlier how you feel like your talent is kind of this machine you find in the forest. You don't understand what's going on. I think a lot of artists feel alienated from their own creative process. A lot of. I don't know what's going on. And that's why I think a lot of. In my experience, a lot of the creative people I work with, you know, there can be a tendency to use substances and unhealthy ways and whatnot. You know what I mean? Because there's this anxiety that, like, am I going to be able to do it again? Is it even me that's doing it? You know, do I have to, like, somehow summon, get in this place, whatever? And it's like, no. I work all the time with creative people who can find that groove and get into it and get better. And. And we all. I mean, you know, the example that I always use, of course, is Shakespeare. I mean, Shakespeare is someone who just cranked out plays. He, like, figured it out. Right. You know, he had a method. But there's lots of other creatives you can. You can kind of figure out the last year of Van Go's life. You know, he was cranking out art because he figured out the method. He wasn't hesitating. And I think every artist just wants to get in that space, which is what we would in science call flow.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Which is where, you know, you know what you're doing, but you're also growing every second. And so it's totally absorbing. It's totally interesting. But there's no, like, anxiety or panic or stress or. Or need to kind of use substances or anything.

[A]

And that. That, you know, I've been doing this show for 10 years. Large portion of them are solo episodes. And it's literally the point of it is to head that way is like, how can we demystify it without losing what feels like magic? Like, I don't want to lose that. I'm. I'm in love with art as much as anybody else. I'm in love with the process as much as anybody else. I don't want to lose that flavor because I think it feels sacred to me, but I want to understand it as well as I can. And the more that I have, the more I have command of it, and I'm able to kind of access it on purpose. So that's what it's all about. You mentioned Van Gogh. I wondered if you could use the story from the book about him to explain a little bit how our story, thinking, does something that computers can't do. If I understand it correctly, it's something about this not seeing patterns, but seeing the break in the pattern, right?

[B]

That's right. Yeah. So this all starts with this kind of like totally fascinating paradox, which is that we are taught nowadays because of people like Daniel Kahneman, who's, you know, recently deceased, very famous Nobel Laureate, and by the AI community, that there's this.

[A]

Slow thinking, fast thinking slow.

[B]

Yeah, thinking slow, thinking fast.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

That intuition is pattern matching.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Which is basically detecting non exceptions is something we would say everything that fits together in an algorithmic way. And computers do this. Great. So this would suggest that computers have incredible intuition. They actually don't. They have dreadful intuition. Meanwhile, children have very, very high intuition and are very bad at pattern matching. So this explanation can't be right. And so I've often wondered this because, I mean, every artist has had this where they've suddenly realized, oh, like, this is really promising. I'm seeing something new here, which is really interesting. Right. Your intuition sparks up, and it's not a pattern match because it's new. It in some ways goes beyond all the patterns you've seen. It doesn't fit. You know, what is going on there? And so I've always been fascinated by this. And then to my total surprise, the US army has a term for this. And the term for this is what they call exceptional information, which is a typical army term because, like, only the army would take something really interesting like intuition and call it exceptional information. Which is so boring. Right?

[A]

Yeah. You know, sounds like it could be classified.

[B]

That's right. No, it does. It does. Yeah. But the point is, is that exceptional information is an exception to a rule. So there's a rule, right, that, you know, things should be done this way, and then all of a sudden, your brain spots an exception. And then from that exception, it imagines a whole new reality. It's like, oh, things don't have to be that way. So almost all kind of huge breakthroughs in art, science and technology come from spotting these exceptions. A famous one in science is Marie Curie, who at the time that she was working, the rule was, is that all energy came from between atoms. So anytime energy was released, it was coming from between atoms. And she was like, wait a minute, there's actually energy coming from inside the atom. Right. That's the beginning of radioactivity. It's also the beginning of the discovery of electron and electronics and everything else and modern physics. Everyone thinks that Einstein invented modern physics. It's actually Marie Curie because she spots that exception in the case of Van Gogh. This one's a little more complicated, but I think I can explain it.

[A]

You do a great job in the book. Maybe it's. It's a. Maybe it's a little bit bigger than we can go fully into, but maybe you could.

[B]

Yeah, I'll give it. I'll give it a shot. I'll give it a shot. So. So basically, the first thing you notice when you see Van Gogh is. Is the color. I mean, that's just the sort of the most astonishing thing. There's other astonishing things about Van Gogh. I don't want to reduce them to color, but I think everyone's primordial experience of seeing Van Gogh is, whoa. You know, that is burning its way into my brain. And so, for example, something like Starry Night, you're just like, whoa. You know, the color.

[A]

You know, as, you know, clients that give feedback on designers, they would say, it really pops.

[B]

It pops. Yeah. Van Gogh, the original pop. So, anyway, so Van Gogh was obsessed with color, and so he spent a lot of time studying color theory. And in the 19th century, they had this mathematical theory of color, which was that certain colors heightened each other. These were known as contrasting colors or paired colors. There's all sorts of kind of words for them. But the mathematical theory was that the color contrasts were pairing green with red, pairing blue with orange. And there are a couple other ones, but those are the kind of the two ones that most people remember. So, for example, Freddy Krueger's sweater, Friday the 13th, is. Is. Is. Is red and green. Because somebody read one of these color books, it was like, oh, that's the biggest color Flash.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Van Gogh suddenly noticed. Wait a minute. There's actually an exception to this. He noticed this when he's looking at a painting by Charles Delfroix. He suddenly noticed, oh, my goodness. Actually, it's not blue and orange. It's blue and yellow. Yeah, when I put blue and yellow next to each other, that makes the blue bluer and the yellow more yellow. And he used this to totally reconstruct the color wheel. And the previous logical color wheel had been the red, yellow, blue color wheel. And he created the RGB color wheel. Red, green, blue, color wheel, out of this single discovery. And it led him to all these incredible color combinations that no one had used before. It led to the discovery of aquamarine as being actually the most powerful color you can use because it contrasts with red and red. There's more kind of visual receptors for red in the human eye than any other color. So if you look at some of Vancouver's portraits where he. Where he has a red beard but a kind of aquamarine background, it just blows her mind out. And so he spotted an exception to the preceding rule of color, which was that you use these two colors together. He's like, no, actually, I spot this. And that discovery, it beats science to the discovery by 100 years, because he had that. He had that, you know, and that's why his artwork is so powerful. And everyone has had that experience of just noticing something that other people haven't noticed that contradicts what they said. I mean, in a way, my entire theory of the brain is an example of exceptional information. Because, you know, I was like, I really think this is the case. No one's like, it's nuts. Nobody thinks this. Right? You know, and so one of the main things that I really try and emphasize in the book is that a lot of times, if you're one of those people who has high intuition, and this particularly is the case with children. We know that children, by the time you're an adult, you're spotting maybe only about 10% or even less of the exceptional information you're spotting as a child for various reasons that we can talk about. But, yeah, if you're a child, you're often seeing really interesting things that adults are telling you are unimportant or ridiculous. You know? You know, if adults all had their way, we'd still be listening to the music that was produced right? In, like, the. In like the third century or something, because they'd be like, this new music is terrible. Right? You know, stick with the old music. The old music is better, right? But as a young person, you're like, no, actually, this is the new band. This is a new fashion. This is a new thing. This is cool in a way that doesn't happen before. And so one of the things I just want to say in the book is that, is that we're losing that in our computer culture. We're losing that our computer culture, because we're being taught the opposite. We're being taught do things that feed the algorithm. The algorithm notices patterns, which is what most people are doing. And so we're essentially deleting the entire source of art, of creativity, of innovation. You know, if Van Gogh spent as much time as we spend on these computers, he never would have. Would have made the breakthrough that created modern Art. And so that's kind of the point of exceptional information.

[A]

Yeah, I love that example too, of, with Van Gogh, seeing this clash in another painting. It reminds me of both from my own experience and then reading about, like, how my heroes have evolved. One thing I've noticed is there's a pattern where an artist will be consuming their favorite artist stuff. And I feel like a lot of musicians have this experience where they're. They have an album that they love of this artist. But there's this one little experiment that they did. Maybe it's like one little track or one little bit of a song, and they're like, do the whole album like that. What? Why aren't you doing that? And I, I talk about it like, you know, dumpster diving your hero's work. Like, what is the stuff that. That was just a throwaway thing. But you're like, there's something there. And him noticing that little color clash in this thing, thinking that's a whole thing. That's a whole body of work right there. And then.

[B]

Or.

[A]

And just noticing the pattern break and being like, I have to explain. I have to explore what that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a really.

[B]

And I just want to point out that we're so habituated into thinking patterns that you just refer to that as a pattern. You said that's a pattern you see in artists, right? Because we've. This has become part of our. Our common and we just refer to it that way. There's actually. This is not from the book. This is actually from Rick Rubin. But Rick Rubin has. This has a story about how Tom Petty was basically creatively burnt out, but he owned. He owed some songs to his. His record label in order to break his contract. And. And so he called up Rubin. He's like, I just have all these, you know, sort of half finished songs. Maybe you can find one of them. And he sent them all these cassette tapes. Basically. Rick Rubin listened to the whole thing. He said, these are all dreadful. But there was a moment when Tom Petty was turning on his guitar and just tuning it basically, and he like, he strummed it a certain way. It's like that strum is your next song. And that became Mary Jane's Last Dance, sort of, I think. And that. And that kind of, you know, became his like. So. But to your point, that's exactly right. Is. Is. Is. Is your. Is. You're listening to these moments in your heroes where they're discovering something, but then they're retreating from it, right?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And they're Going back into whatever it was that their original method was. And you're like, oh, wait, you know, what happens if I double down on that thing? And that's the way that story works. So how does story work in the brain? Story works in the brain because it notices an exception. So an exception is something that's in conflict with the rules of the world, which is to say the exception is a hero. A hero is in conflict with the rules of the world. The hero does something different, and then what does the hero do? Does the hero give up? Does the hero conform? You know? No, the hero doubles down.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so this is where it all comes from, is story is all about spotting exceptions and then pushing them forward and saying, where does it go? And that is the kind of primordial experience of human creativity the computers just can't do because they're just essentially mix and matching and. And, you know. You know. You know, randomly, you know, vomiting out stuff and. And then splattering patterns on it, as opposed to what we can do, which is spot the one thing that is different and then make the whole world like that.

[A]

That. Yeah. It also, when you were describing it, this idea of, like, breaking of the pattern, it also reminded me of how stories tend to work where. And I've heard people at Pixar talk about this, but you also just notice this in most stories, most books, most movies, is there is a thing of every day this happened until one day this different thing happened, and then that's the story. That's where the whole thing comes from. And I thought that is kind of what this is getting at, is that those stories start and your brain really gets into that zone when you're like, wait, this isn't the same thing that happened yesterday.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Because it changes an event. That's what the definition of an event is. It's a change. And this is also fascinating to the human brain because the human brain evolved to notice change.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And the reason it did, it evolved into its changes because that's the most important thing in its life, is to be like, oh, my goodness, things are changing. That means either I'm in real trouble right now and I've got to respond, or, oh, there's something exciting and new happening. Let me be the first person to grab the opportunity. And what that reveals is the more fundamental thing about story, which is that story does not work. Beginning, middle, end.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Which is what we're taught in school. It works middle, beginning, end. Which is to say anytime your brain notices something surprising, anytime it notices A change. Anytime it notices something interesting, it's like, whoa. And then it realizes I've arrived in the middle of the story.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Where did this begin? Right? And then it tries to imagine, refine where the beginning of the story is. And this is the basis of science. Anytime you notice anything interesting, like, what's the fundamental wall beneath it? And artists practice science all the time. I mean, this is what Van Gogh was doing when he created color theory, you know, so science isn't just for scientists. Science is for everybody who's interested in finding the rules about how their environment works. And then once you've got. You've gone from the middle to the beginning, and you've been like, okay, now I think I know why it's happening. You then jump forward into the future and say, where could this go? And you tell the end of the story. And this fact, that story goes middle, beginning, end, is of course, why every Pixar movie starts in the middle, you know, with. With a flash. Abercrombie denim is everything right now. Denim should feel like this. Confident, easy, like your butt has never looked better. If you didn't know, Abercrombie's curved love denim went viral in 2019 for eliminating waist gap. And it's still a game changer. Between that and their classic fits with a straighter line from waist to hip, the perfect denim does exist. Shop Abercrombie Denim in the app, online and in store.

[A]

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[A]

You mentioned this last time I chatted with you, and I've been thinking of it since. I've been thinking about this Act 2, Act 1, Act 3 kind of thing. And I've realized, like, oh, superhero movies that do it really well, especially origin stories do this really well. Because you don't want to start with act one where it's like, how did this happen? And it's real slow and all that. You want to be like, boom, this stuff's happening. This is wild. Now you're in. Now we can get into. Let's go back to what happened or why this matters. And so, yeah, I've been thinking a.

[B]

Lot about that because it makes you curious.

[A]

Yes, you become curious.

[B]

It stimulates you. And you know, this is another example of why school is so bad nowadays, right? Because school thinks that the job is to tell you the first principles and then elaborate what those means. The school thinks I tell you the beginning, and then I tell you the middle, and I tell you the end. Kids, nobody learns like that. You want to be amazed. You'll be like, whoa, how did that happen? And then the teacher's like, oh, I'll explain this to you. And that's why, you know, going out for a walk in nature is a great way to start to learn. Because she's like, where did this dream come from? What is going on? You know? Or, you know, I mean, I had this chemistry teacher when I was young. We used to do these like zany experiments to start a class. Like, you like, blow something up or whatever. Something would turn colors. And of course you're like, what is going on? How is that happening? And he's like, okay, now I'm gonna explain it to you. And you paid attention because you were actually kind of interested to understand where it came from as opposed to. Right.

[A]

You know that I don't want to be. I don't want to tease it too much and it be annoying to listeners here, but the next book that I'm making with my wife, it's focusing on mystery and wonder. And the reason why is because I feel like school right now feels like you're learning chords on a guitar but you've never heard any songs before. And so you're literally like, why are we doing this? Why would I care about this? You know, if you go. If I went to go learn guitar, the first thing I would want to know is which song am I playing that I love? I want to know, like, what is this about? And that I feel like it took me Until I was 17, 18, I started reading, like popular quantum physics ideas, sci fi kind of ideas that were also based in reality. And I was like, this is amazing. Like, all of a sudden now I'm like interested in learning. And I. That's the next book that's kind of the aim is it's a picture book to try to get kids to be like, look, this is an incredible space. And learning isn't a way to know the answers. It's a way to like engage in questions and get into this really juicy stuff. So, yeah, I love that you said that.

[B]

I know, I love that. I love that. And first of all, one of the things that's fascinating about the difference between human and. And computer brains is computers don't know when they don't know. So the computer, everything that's inside it, it thinks is reality. And so it can't have curiosity. It just assumes that that's the way that things are. Right? Whereas as a human, because you think in these narrative terms, you can immediately know when you don't know, and that's what sparks curiosity. And the problem is that school now is taught us, though kids, are computers to be programmed with information. Because we've made this equation, equation between the human brain and the computer. So we think we have to fill with lots of data so that it acts intelligently. You see this all the time in the modern world, right? But anytime something happens that other people don't like, they're like, oh, that person was uninformed. They had misinformation, you know what I mean? Didn't have the right data in their head. We've got to put them back in school and put more information into their head, you know, and that is suffocating for children. It's, it's, it's, it's not the way that they learn. It's, it's, you know, to your point, the way that a computer learns. And instead, like, how awesome would it be? And this is actually to now plug myself, not my books or anything, but just to plug my teaching. The way I teach is I tell my students, bring in your favorite stories in the class. I've never seen them before, but I want to see them. And then we're going to break them down and you're going to realize what's going on in those stories. And that's how I think school should really almost always operate is you should start with a question that the student has and then demonstrate that you can answer that question. And then that builds confidence that this is a process. Because, you know, the one good thing I'll say about generative AI, because, you know, I, I'm a big hater of generative AI, right? But the one thing that's good about it is it is destroying the current school system.

[A]

Why?

[B]

Because the current school system is set up to treat everything like a computer. Right?

[A]

You know, yeah, I, I just went to my kids curriculum night that I will say there are things about public school that I like. I'm not saying that the system's right, but there are things about it that I, I appreciate in terms of society. But his English teacher said that, and, and they were really, like, compelling People to be teaching this seventh grade English class. I was really inspired by them. And they were saying that they're going to focus heavy on voice, creative voice in this writing class, because AI, because AI can do the perfect paper, it can do everything technical, and that's going to just matter less and less. And I thought, man, that is, that's a leap for this person doing that. And also a lot of foresight.

[B]

I love that. But, you know, the problem with the school system is not the teachers or the students or the administrators. They're all great. Like, if you go to almost any public school in America, the teachers are there for all the right reasons. They're great teachers, the kids are great. You know, I mean, the administrators are great. They just have these insane curriculum that they're forced to teach because these standardized tests, which is how everyone gets their funding and you know, that's how you're evaluated and how you're ranked. And I think what's finally going to happen is the realization we can just have AI take all these standardized tests, right?

[A]

And then that done, they'll get them.

[B]

Done else and let the teachers teach. And you know, teaching voice, that's the most powerful thing you have as an.

[A]

Artist, you know, I absolutely agree. And you know, speaking of this idea of having this top down kind of, this is the curriculum, this is the standardization, all that kind of thing. It reminds me of the Nelson's touch that you get into of. We have all these brilliant teachers, brilliant kids on all these different places. They have ways of leading things, like you said, with the questions and, and kind of giving some room for them to have power. I wanted to throw this at you and then see if you could use it to explain Nelson's touch. Honestly, I could talk to you about 500 other things. There's so many things I'm like watching the time and I'm thinking, oh, no, that's another thing I can't talk to about. But I. The last bit, I want to just focus in on some of the planning stuff because it, it gets at one of the most central ideas of this podcast and, and an obsession of mine. But okay, I want to throw this at you. So James Gunn, who just took over the DCU and made his first film there, Superman, I heard him in an interview say that his plan as CEO is to have a vision for it. But then in all these individual movies, let writers have kind of their own space to take it where they want to go, because that's really how you're going to get the Best stuff. And that was kind of his critique of Marvel having worked there. And so it really brought to mind this Nelson's touch thing. So I thought maybe you could explain a little bit about what that is, if it's fresh in your brain, and then we can get into why it's powerful.

[B]

Yeah, no, so this is fabulous. And I do agree with GUN on that point. So, I mean, so part of the thing that I found fascinating about the operators is that no matter what happens in their environment, so, you know, if you're. If you're a special operator, what happens is, you know, you're told, you know, rescue this hostage or do this thing or do that thing or do this other thing, and then the moment they jump out of the helicopter or do whatever, chaos ensues.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, it's a total disaster.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You know what I mean? And. And then, you know, what most people do in that situation is, is give up their objective, you know, get disorganized by the chaos, you know, whatever, retreat into back of the helicopter and leave. Instead, what the operators do is they leverage the chaos to create a new plan that gets them on a different path to their original goal. And I was like, whoa, that's like the secret to life, right? You know, and, you know, it's like you. You've got somewhere you want to go, everything is going wrong. And so. But instead of getting stressed, you just, you know, you ride all the different anarchic energy that's. That's flooding around you to take a different path to the place you wanted to go. And also, as an artist, you know, a lot of times as an artist, you have, like, this general idea of the artwork you want to make, but if you just go in a straight line there, it's not very interesting, you know, and you actually want to create chaos and mess and whatnot to kind of like feed your process. But then you don't want the chaos, the mess to overtake where you're going. Right. It's that delicate thing. And so I was like, what is going on here? You know, in terms of what's happening? And so basically what it turns out is that these operators have this method which they call defined strategy, unlimited tactics.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And what that basically means is you identify whatever mountain you want to climb. You say, I'm climbing that mountain, but then you say, I can take any path up that mountain. I can find a million paths up that mountain. No matter what happens, Right. I'm still going to go to the top of that mountain, but I'm just going to find a different route. And when I first heard this, I was like, oh, of course, that's obvious. Right? That's, that, that makes total sense. That's. I'm sure, you know, we, everybody other than me must do that. Right. Turns out like zero, you know, basically zero percent of people actually do this. In fact, almost everybody does the exact opposite, which is they try and do many things and they try and do them all the same way. So they actually have undefined strategy and limited tactics. It's like, I'm good at this one thing and I keep repeating it to try and succeed in all these different areas of my life. And so what you're talking about in terms of Nelson's touch.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Is Nelson touch. Realize that the best. So Nelson, Admiral Nelson, he's in charge of the sort of British Navy, and he's fighting Napoleon and, and, and, and whatnot. And, you know, up to that point, you know, I'm not an expert on, on sort of, you know, like, you know, the history of the Navy, but what I can tell you is that.

[A]

They'Re not listening to this. I can.

[B]

Okay, that's good. Okay, that's good. But what I can tell you with, with some authority is that most of the people who are sailors did not want to be sailors. Like, they were essentially either, like, so poor they were forced to be sailors on these boats, or they were literally kidnapped. So tons and tons of these, these, these sailors who are, who are on these ships were basically kidnapped from various ports, forced into service. You know, they were, they were calling, they were drunk at a tavern. And so you basically have this crew of people who are trapped on this boat and they can't get off the boat. Right. And so, you know, for years, the Navy functioned by basically just flogging all of these people and screaming at them and telling them how to behave and coercing them. And so the entire idea was that a navy can only work if the person at the top has an iron rule, an iron fist, you know, and punishes the slightest deviation. You know, you will walk the plank if you do anything that you're not told to do. Right. This is the whole idea.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And Nelson totally changed this. He said, actually, what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell everybody what the goal is. I'm going to define the strategy. I'm going to say, this is what we're going to, this is where we're going. And then I'm going to empower every individual boat captain and every individual member of that boat to do it, to get there the way that they think is best. And what this does is this just kind of like unleashes this swarm where you have all of these different people going all these different ways, but all converging at the last moment on this target. And it's devastating. And to your point about having a kind of artistic franchise that works this way, what's amazing about it is you get unlimited creativity because every individual artist can kind of jam, do their own thing, take their own path up the mountain, so on and so forth, but then all these projects together start to converge on the same point. And as an audience member, it's the definition. This is actually literally the scientific definition of the sublime. With the sublime is something that coheres but is too big for your brain to process. You're like, how is this happening? And in general, in general, so like NCU is the opposite of that. Like in nco, it all fits together, but you kind of get it right, you know what I mean? So it's never really sublime. It's kind of satisfying or interesting at moments, or it's. Epic would be another term you would use for it. But there's nothing more amazing in life than when all of a sudden all these different parts all of a sudden slowly start to converge. Then all of a sudden you realize, wait, what? They're all the same thing. What is happening now? And you know, science can do that because science basically takes all these different life forms is like, I'm going to reveal how they're actually all kind of coming together. But you know, very rarely do you get sort of industrial scale art doing that.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And to your point about what GUN is doing, brilliant. Because what's going to happen is each of those movies is going to be different, but then also somehow kind of move you, move you, move you. And then when you get to the top of the mountain, you're going to see all the paths and you're going to see all.

[A]

Yeah, all these different things going all over the place and ending in the. Hopefully ending in the same objective. You know, that's right. A couple things I want to respond to that with. One was to this idea of finding this radio and kind of fumbling my way through it through experience and also like observing other creators, how they do stuff. I have two, two ways that this one objective, many paths thing has manifested as kind of core practice for me. And I've talked about them over and over to the point where when you tell that mountain story, if in any of the long time listeners hear you say that, they're going to be like, oh, my gosh. Because this podcast started with a store with a story exactly like that. Before I go there, I just want to say real quick the other way that the other one that I talk about all the time, to the point where people probably hate it, is I feel like one of the brilliant. The brilliances of Curb youb Enthusiasm is that they make stuff this way. They have a plot. They do plotting and pantsing. They have a plot. This is kind of where it's going. And no script, so they don't know how they're getting there. And there's just this thing of they're improving these scenes. They know it needs to go that way. And there's just this pendulum kind of swing that's just magic.

[B]

Totally agree. That's exactly right. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And actually, one of the things that I found fascinating when I talked to the operators is like, so the. The example of Nelson comes up in the book because when they tell me, define strategy, unlimited tactics, I'm like, oh, because I'd been given all this kind of military training, I was like, oh, you know, Nelson is the person you learned this from. And one of the operators goes, no, actually we learned it from Beethoven. And I was like, wait, what? And because Beethoven does this, Beethoven has these kinds of, you know, these. These kind of master arcs and then huge amounts of improvisation. And that's, again, what produces this sublime sense. And I do think that Curb youb Enthusiasm does have this kind of sublimity about it when it works. Yeah, because you're like, what is happening? And then all of a sudden it like hits the ending. It just sticks the landing. And you're like, yeah, what?

[A]

You know, full circle.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the absurd becomes, like, manifest in something that is not in fact absurd, but it's almost like godlike. And it's prescience.

[A]

You know, why people have that reaction to Larry David of like, this guy's a maestro. What is he doing?

[B]

Exactly?

[A]

And I think. I think it's amazing. Back to that story. I'm not gonna tell the long version of it. I'm tell the shortest version possible. But the reason I started this show was literally, I did a talk. It was a small kind of community thing over 10 years ago. And I was telling the story as a metaphor of when I was in England. That's when I started running. I lived in the north of England for five years. And I started to, in my Running, I would see this giant tower in the distance, and it. I know now that it's the tallest freestanding structure in the uk. It's called Emily Moore Master. And I didn't know any of that, but I would run, and I would see it. I'd be like, man, that's huge. And I would think about, maybe I should run there. And so for the longest time, I wasn't running long enough to think I could do it. And I also didn't know why I thought I could do that or whatever. But then one day, I was just like, I'm gonna do it. And I didn't tell anybody I was gonna do it. I didn't have my phone, nothing like that. But I'm like, okay, here's my plan. That's so tall. No matter where you are, you will be able to see how to get there. So if this road is pointing towards it and then veers away, I'll just take the next right road that's pointing towards that, and then I'll just make it up until I get there. And so I did, and I ran. I don't know if it was seven to. Somewhere between seven and 10 miles, most I've probably ever run, but. And I got to the tower because that worked. I had this one objective, and I took a bunch of different paths to get there, and it all kind of worked out. And the reason it really hit for me and it stuck with me is because when. When I got to the tower, I realized this plan was flawless, except for the fact that my house was not a tower that I could see from anywhere else. And I got super lost and to the point where my dad didn't know where I was and ended up calling the police. And, like, I was lost for a long time, but they found me eventually. And so. But go ahead.

[B]

Wait. That is because. Okay, first of all, that creative process is how I think that every musician makes every album. First of all, right, you know where you're going, and you're like, we're not going to be able to get there, but let's just focus on these chords or this thing. And then all of a sudden, the song comes together, and then another song comes together, you know, and you're kind of finding your way. You're kind of. You're finding your way. You're kind of finding your way. You're kind of. One of my favorite movies. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Exactly. This process, it's basically a series of sketches that come together, you know, and it's you know, again. But the point is, you get to the end and you are lost because you're born again.

[A]

Right?

[B]

I mean, like, literally, right? Like, you're. You're like, I don't need to go back. Like, I just got here now. I need the next mountain. Now, of course, you know, in the real world, to your point, you know, people want you to come home and so on and so forth. But I think, yeah, as an artistic metaphor, it's perfect because you actually want to lose yourself because you are reinvented. You know, and that's the kind of profundity of it is. Is you actually. You actually are able through all these. These. And, you know, going back to gun, I mean, if he succeeds, he is going to fundamentally reinvent the DC universe. It's not going to be the same thing. There's going to be some kind of core shift in what it is, which is going to be extraordinary, and you're not going to be able to go back.

[A]

And there's a. There's a piece in the book that I think explains. So I've told that story 10 times on the show, and it's a metaphor I've used about most creative people I know. They find, you know, in writing, they call it plotting or pantsing. So you either have a plot and you see the big picture and you kind of work your way there, or it's. You fly by the seat of your pants and you just kind of make up your story as you go along. Most creative people I know get stuck in pantsing. That's. That's just. That's what comes natural. They kind of. They think that the only definition of creativity is you start without knowing where you're going, and you want to get surprised. Now, I think they're both valid. What I had found was I had started planning, I'd started plotting, I'd learned some structure stuff, and I knew this is powerful. This is. This starting with the end in mind. It's doing something for me. The thing that I feel like I was missing until this book was I don't think I understood why the planning was so powerful, because the getting lost is such a huge part of it. It's not. I wasn't trying to get them to just plan so that they got to their destination. So will you explain this idea of making planners instead of planning, instead of plans?

[B]

100%, I'll do that. Just. But just to rip off just what you just said. But then I'll get to that. I mean, what you're basically Saying is the best art is created by pantsers to make a plan.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Right. You know, it's like they've got all this enormous creativity, and there's so much really bad art out there by people who are planners because they sit down and they're like, I'm gonna do a hero's journey and it's gonna have all the parts. And you're like, this is inert. It's like, you know, you know, and on the. The problem is for most panthers is that, you know, they never actually finish. Right. They just do a whole bunch of stuff and then they give up to know where it's going. They get demoralized, whatever. I mean, catch 22, which is a great novel. I don't know if you're. If people have read Catch 22.

[A]

I don't know. I think I started it, but didn't finish it.

[B]

Well, okay, all right. But it's the ultimate pants or novel. It doesn't actually go anywhere. He just keeps repeating the same thing.

[A]

Over and over and over again.

[B]

It's good enough that you love it, but he has no plan. Right. But the point is that that's what happens to a lot of people, is they get caught in that stage. But if you. If you can. If you can. If you can actually make the plan. And all of a sudden, right then all of that individual ingenuity and brilliance starts to build and build and build and build and build and build. And then you get the awe effect, you know, where every little piece is special, but the whole thing holds together.

[A]

Just before you get to the planning versus planner thing, this is exactly how I've explained to people. The only way I've learned to interview anybody is I. For the longest time, I was like, okay, I may. When I first started, I was like, all right, I'll plan this interview. I'll do the questions. Okay. I'm going to go into it, and then I do the interview. And it would go well, but we didn't use any of the questions. And I'd be like, okay, I don't need to plan these questions. Then the next one I'd be like, I'm not going to do. I'm just going to, you know, make it up because that's what works. And then it goes terribly. And I'd be like, what the heck is going on here? And so, yeah, that it perfectly explains, I think, what's happening with that.

[B]

Yeah. Because what you're doing by making all those plans for you to remain that plan for the interview is you're developing your ability to plan the interview. And so when the interview starts happening, you're able to plan it on the fly because you practice planning the interview already. Right? Whereas if you just go in with no plan whatsoever, then all of a sudden you're like, wait, I haven't practiced planning this interview. And so on. When I'm in the middle, I don't know how to make a plan for it. So this is this thing, which the military has, and the thing I, I would just encourage people to spend a little more time studying the U.S. army because I honestly thought the U.S. army was really dumb. I got involved in this project. Part of that is because, you know, I sort of, you know, I. When my family immigrated to this country, we came to New Jersey. And New Jersey has a very dim view of the Army. It's basically what happens if you fail out of high school or can't get a job. It's like, oh, my God, you go to the Army. Yeah. Yeah. So. So I was basically raised the army is not, you know, and, and, but it turns out there's all this wisdom in the army, and I discovered this because I myself, so people who have never heard me before might think that I'm coming on here, some kind of expert, some kind of, like, genius, like, who does everything right, and I'm just like, kind of giving you my, my, my, my, you know, my wisdom from on high. But the reason I got involved in this project is because I'm terrible at most of the stuff in the book. You know, like, I'm a creature of, of an academic environment where, you know, I, I, I, I can't actually make plans effectively. You know, I have a very kind of stable world. The moment anything goes wrong, I panic. You know, I won't tell this full story, but, you know, as an example, you know, I mean, my, my mom was coming to visit us a couple weeks ago, and my, my young daughter wanted to put on an earring that my mother had given her and that somehow, while trying to put it on, dropped it into the sink. And I was like, oh, my gosh, we have to take apart the entire sink. Right. You know what I mean?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so I basically started just, like, taking apart the entire sink. And my wife is like, what are you even. That is, you know, and she basically, you know, got a vacuum cleaner, pulled the thing out in, like, two seconds, and, you know, and then I had to rebuild the entire sink. But my point is, is that I'm incompetent at life. Anything goes Wrong. If I can't find a parking space for an event, I just give up, you know? And so I was just fascinated. I was like, how is it these guys are so good at making plans? Like, what is. What is going on? And so it turns out that there's a famous general, Dwight Eisner, went on to become the United States President. And he had this saying, which is that you make plans relentlessly for, for whatever thing that you're doing. You, you, you plan. You plan. You plan for every contingency. You imagine everything could happen. You write out all the plans, and then the moment the event happens, you throw out all the plans. You junk them immediately. Why? Well, because what you're training is the ability to plan. The purpose of it is to develop the planner, not the plan. And most people fail this for one of two reasons. Either they make a plan and they think, I've got to stick to the plan. And the more that the world changes, the more that they panic and try and force the world to conform to their plan. And they start getting stressed and yelling at other people and so on and so forth, right? Then there are people who never make a plan in the first place. And when things start to change, right. It's just they add to the disorganization. Whereas really successful people do what you do for the interview, which is they plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, plan. And they just totally let it go. And they've trained up those muscles in their brain and the technical name for those muscles in your brain, imagination, which is your ability to come up with a plan, which is a plot, which is a story. So that's really the, the, the. The secret to all of it is just kind of practice imagining the story of your day. All the different ways the story of your day could go. Except it's not going to go that way, Right. You know, just like your improv routine isn't going to go the way you imagined it by doing all those practice sessions, you're prepared for whatever occurs.

[A]

Yeah, I was actually, that was the next thing I was going to ask you about because I think that's such a surprising element in the book is this idea that imagination is planning. That that's what it is. I don't think anybody would. Most 99 out of 100 people would. I didn't jumped there. Absolutely not.

[B]

I, I didn't think so. Yeah. No, I mean, so, so, I mean, this comes. This is. We're now in chapter two of the book. So chapter one of the book was about intuition and exceptional Information. We're now in chapter two, which is about imagination. There's eight more chapters, so we're not gonna get through all of them obviously, but basically the imagination chapter, it starts out by pointing out that we, we, we fundamentally misunderstand story, essentially. And, you know, we understand story as a tool for communicating. And the basic idea is that like really, really smart people think in math and stupid people, you know, don't understand math. So we create a story to explain the math for them or something like that. You know what I mean?

[A]

That's funny.

[B]

But it turns out that actually story goes back. It's how the brain naturally thinks. It goes back hundreds of millions of years. You know, crow's thinking story. And you know, there's a lot of amazing research done largely by these female educators, which has been totally ignored because they're not computer scientists. They point out that children think a story and all this kind of stuff. And so what we're often taught is that imagination creates stories. So the more imaginative you are, the more stories you can come up with. It turns out in the brain it's the opposite. It turns out your stories, your ability to think in stories. What creates imagination? And I discovered this because I was watching all these incredibly imaginative special operators coming up with all these, you know, plans on the fly and doing all this kind of stuff. And so I, I talked to one of the cadre. The cadre is the person who kind of trains them all. So they're like these like, really kind of like these 70 year old guys with like beards down to their feet kind of look like these kind of like scarecrow kind of people. Like, like, like, you know, like scarecrow woodsman kind of thing. I don't even know how to describe them. They're like something out of like, you know, like a benevolent deliverance or something I guess is what I would describe them as. You know what I mean? Yeah, so he's kind of like, you know, West Virginia wizards. So anyway, so I was like, I was like, how do you. Because the other thing is, is these operators who are so good at planning don't come in good at planning. And because they come out of the American school system and so they get there and they, they're terrible at it. And so these gurus have to train them up at all this stuff. And so I was like, you know, where's their imagination coming from? Where's their imagination coming from? And, and the guru's like, imagination is just planning. It's just planning. It's just planning. It's just planning. It's just planning. And I was like, how does. How does that make any sense? He's like, well, think about it. Why do plans fail? And this was an interesting thing that he said to me, because normally people say, why do plans succeed? And they say data or something like that, right? He's like, he did the opposite. He didn't say, why did plans succeed? He said, why do plants fail? And I was like, I don't know why plants fail. I mean, you know, he's like, because they didn't imagine enough possibilities. They weren't creative enough. And this, you know, you can read more about in the book. But this basically is imagination is story. Story is plot. Plot is plan. Imagination is planning. The brain evolved imagination in order to make plans. We don't use our imagination in this way as much as we should, which is why we experience so much anxiety and anger. Anxiety and anger. What are those? The threat responses? That is our brain saying, I don't know how to deal with this situation. When we don't know how to deal with the situation, what does our brain want? It wants a plan. It wants us to activate our imagination. Instead, what do most of us do? We panic. You know, we meditate or, you know, we ask someone for help, right? There's all these things that we do. We don't learn to activate our imagination. When you look at really little kids, kids don't have a lot of anxiety, young kids, and they don't have a lot of anger either, because when they have a threat response, they imagine something. You know, they just imagine something and we lose that. And so the kind of whole part of that second part of that second chapter of the book is like, how do operators actually train up their imagination by making plans, by doing plan or not the plan, like Eisenhower said. So you can kind of fast summon it when you need it. Whenever you start feeling stressed, your day isn't going the way that you want it to go.

[A]

Yeah, I could go a bunch of different places there. But I recommend people do get the book and just dive into all that because there's. There's so much more there. But even that I think is really useful and, and very unique too. Like, this is just stuff that I don't think is. It's just not like you say, it's not what we've been taught.

[B]

So it's.

[A]

It is an unlearning of going back to how we are primal and our basic intelligence. Right?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, when you people read the book first of all, they usually have one of two responses, which is, this author is completely crazy is one response. Because nothing in the book is like anything you've read in any other book there's been published in the last 30, 40 years.

[A]

That's true.

[B]

Totally differently.

[A]

I almost started by saying, this feels like a Plato's Cave thing.

[B]

That's how much.

[A]

That's why I was overwhelmed by planning questions, because I was like, yeah, I don't even know where to start. It's so. It's. It's a complete different way.

[B]

It is a paradigm shift. And. And. And, you know, so people are either like, this guy is crazy, or they're like, oh, my goodness. This actually explains how my brain works.

[A]

Yes. Yeah.

[B]

And this is the first time I've read a book in a long time. That kind of explains. Because a lot of books out there are like, there's something wrong with you. You've got to do it different. Different. Whereas this book is basically like, actually, you're probably. Okay.

[A]

There's just listening that you're not even doing.

[B]

That's right. Yeah, yeah. Just stop listening to all the advice you're getting from outside and just kind of go back a little bit to what you were doing before you got all the advice, you know?

[A]

Yeah. I love it. Okay. I wanted to ask you about. You do this activity with salespeople, which is trying to activate some primal intelligence and reminded me they do this activity where they're doing a Q and A with each other. And it reminded me of another thing that I think a lot about when I do interviews, which is Alex Bloomberg, who started Gimlet Media, was from Planet Money and this American Life. He has a class on doing interviews that I took. I was, like, consuming so much about how to interview people because I started doing it, and this was, you know, eight years ago, nine years ago. I was like, I don't know how to do this. This is an art. It's way harder than I thought it was. So I just started taking in all this information. One of the things that stuck with me, not a ton did, but this thing has stuck with me. And he said, really try to avoid asking people why. And I wanted to see if you could get into a little bit about that exercise and. And maybe why, as you're getting to know somebody, as you're exploring something, why not to ask why?

[B]

Just to break. Yeah, exactly. You had to break the rule. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, you are an incredible interviewer. I. I mean, this. I mean, this has, like, just evaporated this time. So this is another one of these weird things that came about with the army because I actually, you know, was meeting this. The secret unit. And the job of the secret unit was essentially to kind of, like, learn everything about me. You know, they were basically, essentially interviewing me. But it was more kind of close to being an interrogation because they had, like, surface, literally everything about me. And the reason that they had to do it is they had to make sure that I could be trusted.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so, you know, they just went through this whole. Whole kind of gauntlet of doing this stuff. And it was incredible because I, in answering these questions, learned so much about myself. It was like, maybe the most amazing therapy session of all time where you actually discover what is going on in your brain, you know, and you're like, whoa. Like, this is. You know, and. And so this was happening. And so we got to the end of. Of the. The thing. I was like, how did you do that? Like, you know, what. What was it? And they were like, oh, they're like, you know what we did? It was really complicated. It was really, really complicated. Really, really complicated. We asked who, what, when, where, how, and never why. We never asked you why. And so, like, anytime they asked me a question about something, they'd be like, you know, who did you do it with? When was the first time you did that thing? Where was it? All this kind of stuff. They never asked why. And the reason for that is the moment you ask why, you service a judgment, you service an explanation, you service an origin story, essentially. Right. And that's where this. That's as far back as you can go into the person. You've just lost your ability to go deeper into who they are. And you said, this is where the story starts, and that why will often come up from the person themselves and make a snap judgment in that moment. But a lot of times also, when you're having a conversation with someone, you'll notice that you stop asking them genuine questions because your brain has already arrived at a why. You're like, oh, I understand who this person is. I understand why they do what they do. Right. That's when you kind of leave the person all out.

[A]

I know. Yeah, I've met 50 of this guy.

[B]

Exactly a hundred percent, you know. And what the interviewer said to me is, the moment we start to feel like we've got it figured out, we start really leaning into new who, what, when questions to try and surprise ourselves. Because the moment we find a surprise, like, we actually don't know why They've got to chase that. And so we started doing this. This is super weird, but after I, you know, got tight into the special operations community, they called me over one day and they're like, angus, do you ever do marriage counseling? And I was like, what? Marriage counseling? No, I was like, that's what marriage counselors do. I'm not a marriage counselor. But the weird thing about special operations is they don't trust anyone. So they like, they don't, like, literally don't trust me. So once they trust you, they want you to do everything for them. They would probably ask me to, like, fix their cars. Right. If they could. Right? You're like, yeah, I guess you. Are you a repairman? So I was like, no, I was like, I don't, I don't.

[A]

Do.

[B]

You know, my wife, when she heard this was hilarious, she was like, oh, you're. You're a perfect husband. You're exactly the kind of person you should give marriage counseling.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So I, like, I basically, without understanding what was happening, I got led to a field one day, this is true, where there were a hundred special operations couples. So 100 operators with their spouses. Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. And they were like, we're all on the verge of divorce.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What? And they were like, you know, the divorce rates in our community are like 90%. And you know, you know, and they're like, and we need you, Angus, to help us.

[A]

I feel like this whole thing with the special ops is you're in. You're starring in a fish out of water scenario. Just non stop being thrown into these circumstances.

[B]

Stand.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah. No. And a lot of times when I tell these stories, people are like, this can't even be true. If you don't think it's true, just Google camp home front, and you'll see video of me standing in front of all these, these, these couples, basically, you know, so. So I'm. So I'm up there and like, oh, my goodness, what do I do? Because, you know, like, you, like, you're talking about, like trying to figure out how to do an interview. Right. So you're. So I was like reading all this marriage counseling stuff, you know, and I was like, I can't do this stuff. Like, I don't even understand it, like, what is happening. So instead I was like, you know what? I think the problem with most relationships is that we think we know the other person better than we do. You know, we have all these judgments about them.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And the moment that something starts to happen, we're like, I know why that's happening. I know what you're doing right now, you know what I mean? I've got to like go on the attack or the defensive or something else. We don't say to ourselves, you know what this person. There's actually something here more that I don't understand. And so basically what I just decided to do in this moment of total panic was turn their own method back against them. And I was like, I want you guys to do this. Who, what, when, where, how, exercise without asking why. And I want you to start writing down the things you find that surprise you about the other person, you know, and just kind of go at it. And what was incredible about this was I thought this was going to go for like a couple minutes, you know, and then they were going to kind of report back to me because I literally had no plan for this. I was like, you know, in this field, concerned for my own life, frankly. They talked for hours and you just didn't stop talking because they were able to do this discovery. And since then I've actually used it to improve my own marriage, you know, by asking these questions. It's kind of improved my relationship with my kids, you know, And I was just surprised to realize how quickly, once I became aware of this, I was leaping to judgments without even thinking that I was doing it. Like, I like to flatter myself and think I'm like a really open minded person, you know, I'm a scientist, I'm really curious, you know, it's like, no, you're not curious at all, man. Your head is full of all these judgments. You think you are so much smarter than everybody around you. Right. You know, and then you start to do this. You're like, whoa, I don't understand why this is happening, why that's happening. And you just learn so much more about other people. And then the really magic part is they learn more about themselves.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And that's actually what deepens the relationship is they're starting to discover things about themselves that they can't explain. You're discovering stuff about yourself that you can't explain. And then together you're kind of like on this journey. And again, that is your favorite movie.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Your favorite movie is two people who meet each other and start to learn more about each other. And then you realize they don't know where it's going and you don't know where it's going and it's a real romance.

[A]

And so, so many stories. I mean, the way I tend to think about it is this hero. This is something I feel like every. Whenever. If I write a story and I give it to somebody and they're not thinking of it as like, oh, I'm going into a movie. This is a finished thing. They're thinking critically of it. Right. They're not. They're not. They're not suspending their disbelief. One thing that happens is they'll criticize the beginning as, oh, like the. The hero. This thing they're doing, I.

[B]

It's wrong.

[A]

I know it from the beginning. Like, what. There's tension here. Like, they. And I'm like, that's the. That's the tension. That is what it is. It's literally the hero is. Has an unconscious motivator. They're going. They don't know why they're doing what they're doing, and it's causing them all of this havoc. And so, like you said, like, movies that you love, they're these. They're. This is coming from unconscious behavior. And if they're getting to know each other, they're getting to know what's going on in there.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And what you're talking about is that we're actually through things like tick tock, training people to not be able to interact with movies anymore.

[A]

Right, Right.

[B]

Because they're like, I didn't understand this in two seconds. It must be terrible. You know what I mean? I can't listen to this song because it doesn't have a hook in the first eight seconds. It must be a bad. This person doesn't know what they're doing. And it's like. It's the other way around, man. Like, it's good. Hang in there, you know?

[A]

And that's got you confused at the start. If it's got you, like, bothered. That's the point. That's how. Yes.

[B]

Is the point. And, you know, this is one of actually the real challenges writing this book because, I mean, this book will confuse people from the outset. And, you know, I mean, a lot of, you know, the. The sort of early drafts, a lot of the feedback I was getting is like, people are not going to read this book, Angus, because it's just too different. But what I found is.

[A]

I don't think that's true. One of the things that I found difficult about planning wasn't that I didn't understand it, but that I. It was just dramatic. Like, it's written very well. It makes sense. Every piece makes sense. It. But it. It kind of unpicks what you think. Yeah. Where it gets.

[B]

There's a cognitive overload.

[A]

There is.

[B]

There's kind of like a Whoa, you know. Yeah, yeah. What is happening? Yeah, yeah. You know, and I think that's disconcerting for people now in a way that it wouldn't have been 20, 30, 30, 40 years ago. You know what I mean? I think people are really used to feeling like they understand things. You know, anytime the news comes up, you know immediately what to think. Who's the villain? I know who the villain is. You know, this is the problem. This is the reason why things are bad, you know, and we've conditioned ourselves to this kind of snap judgments where we always feel like we're the authority all the time, you know, and that's actually the inverse of how democracy is supposed to work. Democracy is really supposed to work with humility. The idea is everyone else around me has the answers. That's why I'm part of a democracy. Not I'm so smart, therefore everyone should listen to me, which is the basis of autocracy.

[A]

I don't want to go super far into this, but one of the things that it brings up is having learned a lot about story. That's everything I do is like based on it's kind of allegory, metaphor. That kind of stuff is what I'm really into. And the. When I would go to make short form stuff as like little bits of content that. That lead to the podcast or the stories I'm telling there lead to this book or whatever, I realized like, oh, whatever this short form thing is, it's not story. It isn't story, it's something else. I don't fully understand what it is because it's giving something that. Something that on some biological level people want. It doesn't maybe satisfy or make them feel good, but it doesn't feel like story to me. It's something else. It's not like you say, it doesn't start with anyway. And maybe it is and I don't and I'm missing some piece of it, but I think there's some. It's almost something different.

[B]

Does it simulate, like what is, what is the effect of it when, you.

[A]

Know, the, the best analogy that I've heard that I don't think answers that question, but gets towards something is Cal Newport. I'm a fan of this guy. He wrote the book Deep Work and Slow Productivity. And I really like him. He talks about it like junk food being this hyper palatable food like substance and that it's something like that, that it's like the Doritos of Story. It's like, he didn't say that bit, but that's how I'm thinking of it. It's like there's food, which is story, and then, you know, actual whole food that satisfies, that gives you all of these things that you need and why you're compelled to eat. But the Dorito version is getting you hooked to eat it, because it's designed that way. But it's not actually giving you any of the stuff that. Yeah, you're looking for something in that zone.

[B]

No, I. I totally understand it. So it's. It's triggering this kind of hedonic response in you. Right. It's short circuiting, you know, like your brain evolved to, you know, you know, like salt, because there wasn't a lot of salt in the wild, and now it's like, oh, well, you know, we're going to give you all the salt kind of right now. Yeah, yeah. And so it's tapping right into those. Those kinds of, you know, pleasure.

[A]

Not giving you what's powerful about story.

[B]

No, because the whole point about Story is discovering something else. And the whole thing that hooks people most immediately is feeling validated.

[A]

Yeah, right, true. Yeah. That is the thing that drives me nuts about this is literally, as someone who. This is one of the reasons I love your stuff.

[B]

It's.

[A]

I find it's. It's very relatable to me in that you're trying to say something that's not being said. And what I've found is what drives me nuts about social media is the stuff that performs well is the stuff that's been said a thousand times. And I can't. You know, I've said this on the show before, but as an ADHD person, I have. I'm so novelty seeking at home. I barely. This is going to sound ridiculous. It's be very hard to explain. I barely. And my wife drives her insane. I barely say real words. I'm making up new words for things all the time. I'm just like. Like, they know what I mean. And I can say almost nonsense because I'm so novelty driven. So being on the Internet, watching, like, everything that's said, the things that blow up, these are things that have been said 8 million times.

[B]

And you know what? They have no impact.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And nobody ever remembers them. So.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, that's true.

[B]

So this is the thing. I mean, do you want to be the person who's constantly blowing up and actually having no effect?

[A]

Right, right. Yeah.

[B]

Or do you want to be the person who Starts to establish these deep moments of connection that really has this impact on individual lives. And over time, starts to become momentum and a movement. And that still happens a lot.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So, I mean, I would. I would. I would say to people, yeah, it feels very gratifying to be someone who gets, you know, 60,000 likes in your tweak or something, like tweets online, but then you'll spend the rest of your life chasing that feeling because it's evanescent and it actually doesn't lead anywhere. Whereas if you get one real follower who actually really digs your stuff, I could say this, because I've got, like, maybe three followers on Instagram, and they love me. You know what I mean? They're with me for life. They're total ride or dies, you know, but those people will be with you forever. And then as you start to, you know, get out of the clubs and into the stadium, right, they're gonna follow you. Right. And you're gonna build the big music, and it really is gonna be good music and not just kind of like, you know, disappear, like some 80s, you know, one hit.

[A]

I. I love that. I think we're in a time in creativity that I think a lot of working artists assume that if it's really good, the better it is, the more likely it will be viral. And one of the things I always. Which I'm not saying as I say it, I feel like everyone would say that's not true. I'm saying that's an unconscious thought. That's the thing that I feel like a lot of people walk around assuming is true. If I can just make this good enough, it's gonna go like wildfire. And I tried to tell people, think of the art that changed you, that the thing that this is your favorite song, your favorite movie, your favorite book. Is there anything about that that could have gone viral? And almost never. Those are different qualities. They're completely different qualities.

[B]

I mean, famously, we talked about Van Gogh earlier. He sold, I think, one work of art in his lifetime, and he died in a field because he was in a state of total. I mean. I mean, he's a famous example, but I think in general, that's actually what happens is, is is if you feel it and you know that it's new and you're living in the future, it takes a long time for other people to catch up with you. And you just have to have gratitude that you were in the future faster. You were in the. You were in the future first. And. And I have had this joy in my career, and I know you've had this joy in your career, too, is that when I followed those intuitions and that imagination, and I've got to the future faster, it has been lonely initially, and you do kind of doubt yourself, but then slowly, people will start to join you there.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it'll be a totally unique experience, and they'll be really grateful because you've given them something they never could have had otherwise. And I think that really is real creativity, real success, because that is going to live on into the next generation. And. And. And not just.

[A]

I completely agree. And like I said, I'm a creative practitioner. I didn't get into it art for art's sake, even though I. I am a huge art fan. So I am always constantly figuring out, how do you strike this balance between not being. Ending up in a Van Gogh situation, but. But also following those intuitions? And I think there. I think there is a way maybe not to do it perfectly. You might never blow up. But, hey, man, Shakespeare, right? Shakespeare.

[B]

Shakespeare blew up. And he was still. And every time he had a play, people were like, what this makes. I mean, like, when King Lear came out, people were like this. Did you miswrite this? This is so bad. He's like, no, I didn't just write this. It's awesome. And they're like, wait, it kind of is, you know, so you definitely can do both. I don't want to make it seem like you can't do both at the same time, but it usually takes you to do the first part, right. The lonely part first. Right. You do need to kind of be in the wilderness for a little bit. And then when you hit your stride and everyone kind of catches up with you, you can get that peak period of everyone kind of jamming along with it.

[A]

And my. My biggest book started as a daily drawing project 10 years before that. No one cared about. Nobody cared but me. And so I totally can attest to that in my own tiny way. The last thing I want to do is I wanted to. In. In. You didn't get to this part, but in that exercise that you had the couples do, we're having them ask the who, what, where, how, not why, the it. The it ended with a game where after asking all those questions, they would try to guess the why. Okay. And so I thought after I interviewed you with all these questions, I did ask you a couple why questions, but. But after all that, I would try to guess why you wrote this book. Now, I know you get one point. If I'm Right. One point. If I surprise you, I don't know if I'm gonna get any points. Okay. But this is. This is my guess. I think that you believe that story thinking is a dramatic world shift for most people, but they think they know story. They think that they understand what it is. They think of it as probably entertainment or they have all these other theories. It's old information to them. And I think primal intelligence wanted to frame it in a different way and write about it in a different way so that it seemed like what you call exceptional information. Do you think it's something in that zone?

[B]

Well, I'm going to give you two points. The reason I'm going to give you two points is because first of all, you're correct. You're totally correct. And there are other reason I'm going to give you two points is I didn't realize that I was doing that when I was writing the book. You know, I've since kind of realized that through having conversations, like the conversation we're having, you know, where people were tolerant enough to listen to me, like, yammer on about the book for a while.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But if you'd been the first person who read the book and we had a conversation with, you would have been the first person who realized that. Because it took me a lot of conversations afterwards to realize it. And I think that's the same with a lot of creatives. It's like. Like, you know that there's a reason that you're doing it. You can't figure it out. And then your first audience experiences it and you have that conversation, you're like, now I understand why I did it. And it's like part of your brain was moving faster than. Than your conscious mind.

[A]

Yeah, I love it. And I got two points. I'm happy. Major success. I really recommend everybody goes and gets the book. There's. There's a. So much in there that I think is just super powerful. The, even. The. Even. Just the planning stuff alone, this idea of having a1.1 objective, many paths, there's so much application to that in your creative career and in your creativity. Thanks for writing it. And I hope that. I hope it blows up, honestly, because I think. I think it's really brilliant.

[B]

I appreciate that a lot. And look, thanks for just coming on and, and talking about this. And I do feel if it doesn't blow up up, you and I at least are on the journey together, right? And then 10 years from now, right, we'll be like, we were there for the first album, man, we were there.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks again.

[B]

Thank you, man.

[A]

Okay. I hope that you enjoyed that as much as I did. This was my all time favorite episodes. No joke. Stop what you're doing. Go get the book. I lied to you. There is a cta, a call to adventure. It's. Get the book Primal Intelligence by Angus Fletcher. There'll be a link in the show notes. It's wherever books are sold. Go get it from your local bookstore, order it from them, or wherever you get your books and you're not going to be disappointed. I meant every word that I said. I think this is a really important, powerful book for everybody, especially for creative people. And if you like this show, there are so many things in this book that explain stuff we talk about on this show every week in a totally different way. And I think you're gonna love it. So go check it out. Thanks, everybody for checking out the videos on YouTube. We've got some momentum over there. It's really cool. I'm excited about being over there. Also, to all of you that just listen on audio, I mostly listen to podcasts on audio, some podcasts, I do some YouTube from time to time. I mostly switch back and forth, but hope you loved the episode. Thanks to Sophie Miller, my wife, who is an editor and producer on the show. Thanks to Connor Jones of Pending Beautiful for audio edits, video edits, animation, sound design. He's just a talented person who, you know I like you and I know you're gonna hear that. Thanks to Yoni Wolf and the band Y for our theme music and soundtrack, who. I also love and love all of your creativity and thanks to all of you for listening. I love your creativity. Thanks for being part of this community. I'm just loving it. I'm 10 years into this thing. I'm still pepped and you know what you got to do. Stay pepped. Stay pepped up. That's what I'm supposed to say. All right. Stay pepped up. Behind every great meal is a person with a story to tell. Hear them on Culinary Characters Unlocked, the podcast that reveals the lives behind the food. Hosted by me, me David Page, Emmy award winning journalist and creator of Diners Drive Ins and Dives, as I talk with everyone from culinary legends to mom and pop standouts about the creativity, grit and passion that shape the food we love. Follow Culinary Characters Unlocked on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, the podcast is over, so I don't know why you're still listening, but I am glad that you enjoyed it. Enough to stick to the end. I have one more thing for you. If you're in a place where you're feeling a lack of clarity and you want to figure out your industry, market and niche and find the perfect strategic side project to do next, go sign up to our [e-mail] and you will get a confirmation email that will give you the download of our Creative Career Path Handbooklet. And the whole process is in there. And you might also get a few bonuses in there depending on when you sign up. But again, thanks for listening. Glad you enjoyed the episode and stay pepped up, y'.

[B]

All.