Angus Fletcher

Summary

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Guest: Angus Fletcher
Date: July 8, 2026
Episode Overview:
Rick Rubin sits down with Angus Fletcher—a writer, neuroscientist, and story theorist—to explore the role of story in human intelligence, creativity, decision-making, and even military training. Their deep-dive covers Fletcher’s unconventional career path, collaborations with U.S. Special Operations, the science of intuition, education reform, and how stories inform our lives, institutions, and futures.

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Main Theme

This episode explores the centrality of story-thinking in human life—how narrative shapes intelligence, intuition, creativity, learning processes, and even military success. Angus Fletcher draws from his work with U.S. Special Forces, the study of Shakespeare, neuroscience, and his own life to argue for “primal intelligence”—the ability to act smartly with little information, rooted in narrative capability rather than logic or data.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Breaking Stereotypes: Fletcher’s Work with the Army

• Fletcher describes initially having a negative, clichéd view of the Army (00:23).
• His perspective shifted after being mysteriously recruited to collaborate with Joint Special Operations Command, working to foster creativity and intuition in young special operators (01:11–04:10).
• Special Operations faced a crisis: new recruits lacked imagination and couldn’t adapt to uncertainty, unlike previous generations (02:34).

“They said, 'We've noticed that young people coming into special operations are not as imaginative... When they hit these volatile and uncertain situations, they're unable to cope.'” – Angus Fletcher (02:34)

• Malcolm Gladwell’s tweet brought Fletcher’s research to the Army’s attention; they sought to test his “story-thinking” theories in practice.

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2. How the Army Trains Creativity: Robin Sage & Pineland

• Robin Sage: A creative military training environment where recruits constantly face unexpected challenges demanding on-the-fly solutions (08:16).
• The program is modeled as a massive, evolving role-playing game—success depends on originality, not following standard answers (09:32).
• Final test: recruits “dropped” into Pineland—a huge, controlled exercise area staged as occupied territory. Recruits have to spark an insurgency, developing trust and alliances (19:59–21:11).

“Everyone is solving the problems differently... By the time the students come out the end of it, they've literally become the first person to solve Robin Sage in the way they solved it. They've become an original.” – Angus Fletcher (09:32)

• Army training historically borrowed from guerrilla warfare and the Human Potential Movement, emphasizing adaptability and creativity over rule-following (10:04–12:23).

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3. Story-Thinking & Intuition in Practice

• Fletcher describes his technique of resisting the urge to label people/issues; instead, he asks open-ended questions—who, what, when, where, how—never “why” (14:17–15:23).
• Explains that intuition is not guessing but noticing what's exceptional or new; artists and children naturally exploit these faculties (16:32–17:21).

“The more of those surprises you lean into, the more your brain starts to pop with possibility.” – Angus Fletcher (15:09)

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4. Lessons from Special Forces: Originality > Rules

• Army prioritizes meeting objectives by any means—creativity is rewarded, not punished (obstacle course story, 23:12–24:44).
• Inspiration from Beethoven: have a clear objective, but be “infinitely flexible” on the path there (25:25–26:59).

“Beethoven always knew exactly where he was going, but every time he went there, he went there in a different way... It has a consistent purpose.” – Angus Fletcher (25:40)

• “Exceptional information” comes from asking questions you’ve never asked before—embracing anomalies and breaking out of SOPs when the situation requires (27:07–29:22).

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5. Standard Operating Procedures vs. Creativity

• SOPs are critical in familiar situations, but true creativity is only activated when facing something unprecedented (28:48–31:26).
• Mistake many creatives make: unnecessary innovation in familiar scenarios, making life harder instead of focusing creativity on true moments of opportunity.

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6. Psychological Insights from Combat & Decision-Making

• “First step plan”—breaking fight-or-flight paralysis through very small, actionable tasks; original technique used with panicked soldiers and now kids/teens (33:00–36:56).

“The way that they're coping with that panic is they're allowing someone in their environment to tell them what to do. Always taking a plan from somebody else.” – Angus Fletcher (35:41)

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7. The Arms Race, PsyOps, and Stories as Tools of Power

• Narrative—used for both manipulation (PsyOps as psychological warfare) and positive societal change (“Hollywood as the ultimate psyops,” 42:01–44:33).
• Stories motivate, inspire, and change “the enemy,” not by instilling fear, but by creating possibility (44:47–46:28).

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8. Education, Creativity, and Childhood

• Fletcher criticizes current education for suppressing creativity by emphasizing only logic and “the answer” (45:07–46:28, also 149:45).
• Argues schools should train kids as artists and critics of their own work, not as answer-repeaters.
• “School is making kids less creative. It’s annihilating their creativity.” (149:45)
• Story: Fletcher’s own dumb pride as a child—refusing to sit on a school bus without a seatbelt—and the power of embracing what feels right, even if it seems irrational to others (61:27–63:12).

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9. Primal Intelligence & Redefining Intuition

• “Primal intelligence” is being smart with very little information—a necessity evolved through struggle and partial knowledge (120:06–123:26).
• True intuition isn’t just pattern-matching (the computer’s method), but spotting the exception—the leading edge of reality (123:26–124:03).

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10. Story as Human Operating System

• In neuroscience: “The unique power of the human brain is the ability to come up with a story that's never been told before. And all of us have that power.” (104:20)
• Stories connect us and are co-created with audiences—every telling is a new creation (107:31–108:49).
• Schools mistakenly treat stories as dead, fixed “corpus” rather than living, changing organisms (111:24–111:37).

“Corpus is a corpse... what literary scholars have done is they've turned literature into a corpus, which is a corpse.” – Angus Fletcher (111:24)

• All rules, even “story rules,” only exist to be bent or broken for new growth (111:41–116:28).

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11. How To Cultivate Beauty and Artistic Judgment

• Beauty requires discrimination, not just passive appreciation. Artists (and people) must ruthlessly choose what is “better” for them (146:34–149:38).
• Education and culture are failing by bombarding us with bland mass content, eroding our critical capacities.

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12. Recapturing Optimism & Training Common Sense

• Resilient optimism is built by recalling real challenges you’ve overcome, not from positive future thinking (162:06–165:20).
• “Common sense” = matching the newness of your plan to the newness of your environment; most people do the opposite, falling back on old responses in new dangers (168:32–170:09).

“Common sense is kind of learning you to undo what the modern world has taught you, which is to gamble when you're safe and to retreat when you're in danger.” – Angus Fletcher (170:09)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the power of intuition in conversation:

  “When you ask someone a question you’ve never asked anyone before... that’s when you start realizing you’re on the trail to exceptional information.” (27:07)

• On reimagining emotional intelligence (EQ):

  “EQ is actually intuition—your ability to spot what's unique about that person, not what they have in common with you, but what's different about them.” (55:42–58:08)

• On the limits of logic:

  “Logic is amazing… in environments that are stable and transparent. And nothing living is that.” (59:42–60:18)

• On how kids lose creativity:

  “We’ve known for almost four decades now that school is making kids less creative. It’s annihilating their creativity.” (149:45)

• On optimism and fragile hope:

  “The more people think positive thoughts about the future, the more they develop fragile optimism… True optimism comes from remembering all the first steps you took in your past.” (161:18–162:06)

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Highlighted Timestamps

• 00:23 – Fletcher’s stereotype and first Army encounter
• 03:52 – Special Forces' crisis: lack of imaginative recruits
• 05:48 – Lessons learned from operators (team trust, humility)
• 08:16 – Robin Sage and creative training, role-playing
• 14:13 – Training intuition, resisting labels
• 16:32 – Art and the childlike mind
• 23:12 – Obstacle course: rewarding original solutions
• 25:28 – How Special Forces are inspired by Beethoven
• 33:00 – “First step plan” to break panic/fight-or-flight
• 42:01 – What are PsyOps, and the power/morality of stories
• 45:07 – Specific vs. general objectives in business/life
• 61:27 – “Dumb pride” story: Angus on the school bus
• 104:20 – The brain as a storyteller, importance of story
• 120:06 – What is Primal Intelligence?
• 134:38 – Why logic, not mystery, dominates science
• 149:45 – Schooling’s war on creative thought
• 162:06 – Past performance as the source of true optimism
• 168:32 – How to train common sense—beyond “the answer”

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Memorable Stories & Metaphors

• The Obstacle Course Short Cut (24:36): A candidate skips climbing obstacles and simply runs around to ring a bell—celebrated for achieving the objective creatively.

• Pineland & Robin Sage (20:01–21:11): Military training as a real-life Dungeons & Dragons where the goal is not following the rulebook, but writing your own.

• Richard III and the Mystery of Good Storytelling (136:36–139:12): Shakespeare’s “weird” historical details as a model for creativity—embracing the improbable and making it move.

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Concluding Messages

• Story is our original, most powerful form of intelligence—it’s how humans thrive with uncertainty and limited information.
• Systems (like schools, governments, organizations) suppress originality for control, but progress and purpose only come from nurturing individual creativity and narrative capabilities.
• Cultivating beauty, wonder, and the capacity for self-authored stories is both an individual quest and a cultural project that requires questioning rules, resisting conformity, and honoring the exceptional.

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For Listeners: What’s the Takeaway?

This episode challenges listeners to trust their narrative instincts, foster their intuition, celebrate their weirdness, and refuse to let institutions, logic, or mass culture dull their sense of possibility—or their story.

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For Further Exploration

• Fletcher’s book, Primal Intelligence
• The “Robin Sage” exercise (military creativity training)
• The legacy of story in schools, psychology, art, and military strategy

Transcript

[Narrator/Host]

Tetragrammaton.

[Angus Fletcher]

I don't know if you have a positive or negative impression of the army or if you have one, but I had a very negative impression of the army or before I worked with them. So first of all, I did high school in New Jersey. The army was the thing that you did if you couldn't get into college, basically. So we had this like this real stereotype. Bad rep. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then I also just thought of the army as the people who, if they couldn't solve a problem, they just dropped a bomb on it. Like, oh, let's just blow it up.

[Interviewer]

Force was the solution.

[Angus Fletcher]

Exactly, yes. Yes. Yeah. And then I started to work with these folks. So first of all, a little bit behind the veil. I get this knock on my door. Basically, they don't explain who they are. They reveal that they're actually. Over time, they reveal they're part of something called Joint Special Operations Command. And there's this intelligence unit that works there with the various units.

[Interviewer]

Was it scary being approached by them?

[Angus Fletcher]

It was scary, yeah, it was really scary. Especially because I'm an immigrant. And also everybody in my department was terrified of the Army. And the more that I started working with the army, people in my department basically stopped talking to me in the same way. They thought, oh, you're like a spy, basically. You've been, like, programmed. But anyway, I got brought in and it was so different from what I thought. So, first of all, most of this unit, they're just people you would imagine. A lot of them are women from all different parts of the world, and their job is to solve problems from the future before they happen. And so they sit in this room and they're like, what are all the things that are going to happen tomorrow that are bad? How do we stop them now? At first when I heard this, I was like, well, this is just bonkers. But then you get in the room and you realize they are identifying these problems and they are solving them. And in my case, what is really weird is our friend Malcolm Gladwell had tweeted out very kindly a promotion from this book that I had written. And so it had gotten on the radar of these folks. And they'd read the book and they'd understood the book and they'd started tracking my research. And they came to me and they said, hey, Professor Futch, what we've noticed is you're publishing all this really weird out there stuff. It seems pretty interesting. And it seems like none of your colleagues are citing your work. They all say really nice things. About you, but none of them incorporate anything you've done into their research. It's like you've created this field that is just dying. I was like, yeah, that just kind of described kind of what I'm doing. And they're like, would you like to actually test these theories? Would you like to see if they actually work? Would you like to see if the human brain does think its story? Would you like to see if you could bring in people and help them develop their imagination and their intuition and get better and more effective at these things? And I was like, yeah, I would like to do these things. And I was like, well, why do you want me to do this? What are you going to do with this information? And they said, well, we've noticed that young people coming into special operations are not as imaginative, they're not as intuitive, they don't have as much common sense. When they hit these volatile and uncertain situations, they're unable to cope with them. And so we're starting to have a real crisis in special operations because back in the day, we had so many folks who would come in who would have imagined back in the 70s, basically. And our job was just to pick the ones who were the most imaginative. But now what's happening is we don't have anyone who's imaginative. And we need to figure out how to train up that ability in young folks or else basically, special operations is going to die. And I was like, okay, this is kind of like a cool problem.

[Interviewer]

It's a wild story.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, it is totally wild. Yeah. And there was a long period of time where they thought I might be a total scam artist. Because a lot of the stuff I was saying, they'd be like, well, where's the evidence for this? And I was like, well, you read this book. And they would be like, this book is written by you. I was like, yes, that's right. But the evidence. They're like, yes, but where is there another book that isn't written by you

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

that has the evidence?

[Angus Fletcher]

I was like, well, no one thinks.

[Interviewer]

No, because it's a theory based on what you've seen. And you're pointing to this is what's beautiful to me.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's. Well, yes, that's right. That's the extent that I am an artist. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. And so there was kind of a period of time, but what it turned out there was a great moment which I'll never forget. So I was brought inside this compound, which is like this totally fascinating place where it's basically Built from all of these relics that Special operations had accrued over time. There are pieces of buildings that had been, you know, in Vietnam or other places and they, or battleships or whatever, and these helicopter parts. And they'd taken all these pieces and they built them into this building. And many of these pieces of architecture had tragic histories behind them. So you'd walk through and you'd be reminded of these catastrophes. The purpose of it was to make you realize, oh, there's a story that can come out of this. It was a bad time, but there's a story. And so I went in there and they were training this group of new recruits, new special operators, I think maybe kind of late 20s, early 30s. And they put me in front of the room and they said, this man is a genius. His name is Professor Fletcher. He's going to teach you how to be more intuitive and imaginative. Listen to him. And I was like, okay. And I basically had a panic attack the night before because I get picked up kind of van like driven around in circles. You have no idea where you are, right? What's happening?

[Interviewer]

Did all those things really happen?

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, yeah, I had no idea. I mean, I had to go into non disclosed locations and whatnot. Yeah, yeah, no, it was great. I always had guides with me. I was never like alone. I always had a handler, I guess, something like that. Yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer]

Did you have to become one of them to be able to participate?

[Angus Fletcher]

I definitely did start to pick up weird habits. The funniest thing that I picked up from them is. So this isn't something I talk about very much. But I had troubles in my marriage basically before I started working with the operators. And one of the reasons I had troubles in my marriage is because I couldn't relax. And one of the reasons I couldn't relax is because I always felt like if there was a problem, I had to be the one who solved it. So I just felt like everything that was going wrong was on me. And it totally drove my wife nuts. I could have someone come into my life who I'd met for 15 minutes and they needed help and I would like drop everything and go help that person instead of being at home and doing sensible things, whatever. And then I met the operators and I realized for the really like the first time in my life that there were people who are much better than me at solving problems. And I could relax because I was on like a team. And so one of actually the big things that I did really take away from working with the operators was like, there's Just these amazing people out there, and I can trust humanity. So that was definitely one thing that I got from them. But what was weird is that we were already actually pretty similar in terms of how we thought, in terms of these imaginative, intuitive processes. And so when I got up in front of the class to teach, they gave me, like, a piece of chalk. One of the things that's great about the army in special operations, let's just say they don't like PowerPoint. It's gotta be chalk and handle. Yeah, exactly. Activate the motor cortex. So when I got in front of the board and I was talking like I am now, and being very inarticulate and very abstract and professorial and just, like, saying stuff and drawing all this stuff on the board, and these recruits looked at me and they were like, what the hell is this guy saying? And then I had this moment where I was like, oh, my God, I am a fraud. This whole time, I thought that this was the beautiful.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

And now I've.

[Interviewer]

Now you have to, like, prove it.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's right. Yeah. And then this instructor came down from the back of the room, and he took the piece of chalk from me. He goes, what the professor is saying is. And then he wrote out everything that I was saying in a much more eloquent and precise manner. And all the recruits are like, ah. And then I was like, ah. And then I suddenly realized the US army has solved a lot of these problems before me. And really what they wanted me when I came in to do is they really almost wanted me to help explain back to them what they were doing, because it was almost like the knowledge had become so deep in their organization that they had forgotten it. It had become tacit knowledge.

[Interviewer]

It became ritualistic, as opposed to alive.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's so beautiful. And that's exactly right. That's exactly what it is. And you've got to go in there. And so they have this amazing training course called Robin Sage and.

[Interviewer]

Robin Sage.

[Angus Fletcher]

Robin Sage. What a weird name, right? Yeah. Yeah. And the point of it is to essentially teach creativity. And the way they do that is they give you an objective, and you're setting off on your objective, and then the moment you're halfway there, a bomb goes off, and you have to make a new plan. You have to be creative on the fly. And again and again and again, they have this environment. And what's amazing about the environment and is that as you start to watch recruits go through it, none of them solve the problems in the same way. So it's not like in A lot of military and training environments. There's like a right answer to something. And they keep basically prodding you until you figure out how to get the gasoline can over the wall and blah, blah, blah. This isn't like that at all. Everyone is solving the problems differently. And the cadre, the trainers, the cadre, they evolve as the students evolve. And so they change the learning environment. It's like a massive role playing game, I guess would be a way to think about it with the Dungeon Masters. And they're evolving the learning environment as the students are going through it. And that allows for this interactive creative process. And by the time the students come out, the end of it, they've literally become the first person to solve Robin Sage in the way that they solved it.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Angus Fletcher]

They've become an original. And that's why you're an operator, because the job of an operator is to go into the unknown and do something new. But when they brought me in, one of the things they pointed out to me is they said, hey, Angus, all this stuff was built during the Vietnam War, and a lot of the exercises were literally Vietnam exercises. They have these guerrilla chieftains, stuff like that. And they were like, this training is great and we don't want to touch it, but we know there can be more.

[Interviewer]

Do we know who created those original exercises?

[Angus Fletcher]

We do. So they were created out of a branch known as Mac vsog. So what happened during the Vietnam War is that north and the south are fighting. United States is on the side of the south. And the north is a lot smarter than us. They're a lot more adaptive. They're able to come up with all these creative ways to wage war, and they're able to use our rules against us. So we've made all these rules and they're trapping us and constraining us. And the north is like, ah, if you're trapped by these rules, we're going to figure out how to exploit them. And so one of our rules was, we're not going to go into Cambodia, which is running right alongside Vietnam. And so the north puts this thing called the Ho Chi Minh Trail down in Cambodia. And the United States is just watching as in plain view, all these groups are going. And so United States did this thing which was they broke their own rules. And they started the Green berets, they started McAfee SOG. And this was a group of folks who went into Cambodia, broke the rules. And how did they do this? They didn't go in alone. They met up with local tribesmen and they Turned those tribesmen into special operators. So essentially, the first Green Berets were these force multipliers who were teachers who would go in and teach the skills of places like Robin Sage to these. These tribesmen. And then these collectors would go in, and they had an over 100% casualty rate.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Angus Fletcher]

And that sounds impossible, right? Yeah, it sounds impossible. The reason for it is, is they would go out, and many of them, I think, in fact, most of them did die, but many of them were badly wounded. They would come back, get passion, they would go back out again and then die. And so you end up with this process. And so this, obviously, the Vietnam Wars Awards, the United States should not have fought in, but it was the genesis of us learning essentially from the North Vietnamese how to do this guerrilla fighting. Because we had to learn to be guerrillas because the gorillas were beating our mass bombing and our Asian orange and all this horrific stuff that we were inflicting. We start to realize, ah, the machine is not smart. What's smart is the individual gorilla.

[Interviewer]

Also sounds like this is happening at the same time as the Human Potential Movement was just budding at Esalen.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's right.

[Interviewer]

So the idea of new ways of thinking.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's exactly right. And that's highly influential to these units.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, it sounds like it.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah. And so what happened is they had all these folks who were learning all these lessons, and then they had to come back and build a school to teach them. Traditional army schools are, this is how you make your bed drill. Da da da da da. And they were like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We've got to figure out a school in which the purpose of the school is for you to figure out how.

[Interviewer]

How to solve the problem, regardless of the methods you use. Exactly. It's less about the methods.

[Angus Fletcher]

Exactly.

[Interviewer]

And more about in a situation, how do you break through.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's exactly right. And so they created this entire school that does that and is amazing at it.

[Interviewer]

So it started in the 70s.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, Robin Sage started in the 70s. I think, technically, Special Forces. I think it might have started in the 60s or maybe even the 50s, but basically it really starts to get going in terms of Robin Sage and all these special training programs.

[Interviewer]

So they read your book and felt like this is related to what we do.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's right. That's right. Yeah. And so they pulled me in. And so what we started to do is we started to figure out, how can we develop new training that uses all the wisdom and exactly the same structure in these schools where the instructors are Reacting to the students and figuring out how to encourage the students to solve things their own way. How can we start to take that and branch it and build more of it? And we had a bunch of breakthroughs in which we realized that you could take that and not only use it for special forces, but take it into actual schools. And so one of the first things we did after the army gave me clearance is we went into a group of third graders, because third grade, it turns out, is where creativity starts to die. We went in and we started training all those third graders to act like special operators and helping them activate their intuition, helping them activate their imagination.

[Interviewer]

Tell me some of the exercises to turn on your intuition.

[Angus Fletcher]

One of the simple things is that every person that you encounter is unique. But all of us are in a rush to judge that person and put them in a category. And so we want to kind of assign a label to them. This is how computers think. This is how demographics works.

[Interviewer]

And as soon as you put a label on something, you limit all the other possibilities.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's right. You really replace possibilities with a probability, because you're basically saying, well, this person is probably going to act like all the other people who fit in this label who are like this type. So we teach people to have conversations in which they're forced to ask who, what, when, where, how, but never why. Because the moment you ask why. Why are you asking why? You're asking why because something has surprised you, and a surprise is an exception to one of your mental rules. And so what that's telling you is, I've actually come to the limits of my rules, and I need to find a new rule. But if I ask why, I'm not going to make a new rule. I'm just going to surface somebody else's rule and take that. So what I actually have to do is I have to resist asking why and start asking more questions.

[Interviewer]

So you don't want to know why someone makes the decision they make. You just want to know the path they take. Is that correct?

[Angus Fletcher]

That is correct. But also, more fundamentally, people don't know why. So if I ask you why you did something, you'll just give me some label. And this is why, when you're having conversation with a friend, you can understand your friend better than they understand themselves. And you can come to understand each other through conversation better. Like, you're helping me understand myself better now. And that comes from resisting explanation and pushing into surprise. So, for example, if you said to me, hangs, what's your favorite thing to do? And I said, oh, I love to kayak. And you say, well, who? Who do you go kayaking with? I say, I go with all these people, but I never go with my wife. You, of course, want to be like, why? Why don't you go to your wife? But instead, right? Instead of saying that, you say, well, what else do you do with your wife? And what does your wife like to do? Then you start building out, and you start to surface more things. And then the more of those surprises you lean into, the more your brain starts to pop with possibility, and the more it starts to see new possible rules. So that's just a simple example. And there's nothing more powerful you can do than having a conversation with another person to expand your intuition. But to do that, you have to really resist judgment.

[Interviewer]

And how does art help? With intuition.

[Angus Fletcher]

So every art work is a product of an intuition because an artist saw something that everyone else had seen a million times before, but saw something new in it. So as an artist, your job is to paint the sky in a way that no one else has ever painted the sky before. As a sonnet writer, your job is to describe love in a way that no one has ever described love before. To do that, you have to see a new possibility in love. And so what you have to do when you're looking at an artwork is you have to surrender yourself to not getting an explanation from it, but seeing what is unique or new or surprising about it. And that challenges people, because people want to understand a work of art, but instead you want to experience it the way you do as a child, which is you embrace the fact that, I don't understand what's happening. I'm going to lean into the parts that I understand the least. Travel Another great one. Children have very strong intuition. Why do they have strong intuition? Because for them, the world is always new.

[Interviewer]

They're in a new place.

[Angus Fletcher]

Exactly. And most people today don't travel very well because they want to control their environment when they travel. But if you really travel, you're constantly being surprised, and that starts to wake up that part of your brain so that when you come back, you see your familiar world. New.

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[Interviewer]

What is Pineland?

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, so Pineland is part of Robin Sage and essentially it's a giant role playing game. So after you, after you do the training at Robin Sage, after you've got your intuition and your imagination up, then say, okay, it's time for your final test. And your final test is you go to this huge area of north and South Carolina that US Special Forces has essentially taken over and you enter into this story.

[Interviewer]

So this is a place that you can't happen into. You only get dropped into this place?

[Angus Fletcher]

That's right, yeah. If you accidentally end up in Pineland, you've done something very, very extraordinary.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

No, it's a very controlled military environment, but when you're inside, it's totally spontaneous. So it's like a recording studio.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Right.

[Angus Fletcher]

You can't get into a recording studio from outside, but once you're inside it, anything can happen. The story that you have to buy into to play at Pineland is that a foreign country has invaded and taken over America.

[Interviewer]

So you're in an occupied territory, you're

[Angus Fletcher]

in an occupied United States, you're in North Carolina that's been occupied.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Angus Fletcher]

And you've got to go in there and your job is to start an insurgency and to restore freedom.

[Interviewer]

Are the people there all service people who are actors?

[Angus Fletcher]

They're all role players, but many of them are not military and many of them are actually generational role players. Their father or their grandfather played the role that they're now playing. You're dropped in there, and then your first thing is, okay, I have to now figure out who. Who in this community I can trust and how do I make them trust me? Because there's going to be a lot of people in this community that the moment they see me, they're immediately going to report me to the authorities. So immediately I have to start figuring out how do I make that first point of contact? Once I make that first point of contact, how do I know that person isn't essentially double agenting me and making me think, oh, I can trust this person? But actually they're trying to extract as much information from me as possible so they can find my team.

[Interviewer]

If it's role play, how do you know if it's working? The only way in the real world you know it's successful is because you accomplish the thing you want to accomplish.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's right.

[Interviewer]

But in a setup version of it, it's impossible to know.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes, well. So I can't give away too many of the details, but what I could say is, like, hypothetically, what if when you got into this area, that success would be overthrowing the local government, for example, going in and taking that over. And what if that path to success meant that you had to find enough folks to give you enough resources and equipment that you could do that final task? And then what if you were a particularly creative person? You're like, you know what? I don't actually want to take over that thing. I've got a different idea for how I'm going to take over. I'm actually going to build my own radio station, and I'm going to totally ignore the rules of the game as it's been set up by my instructors, and I'm going to build a radio station. And the instructors are like, whoa, this person's coming up with a new plan. Let's go with it. What can we do to disrupt the radio station? And so it's a little bit like a role playing game, and that there is kind of an objective, which is you got to get the treasure, you got to save the kingdom or something like that. But there are a lot of different paths to get there, and if it's a good game, every team will take their own path.

[Interviewer]

Tell me the story of the obstacle race.

[Angus Fletcher]

So this is from Robin Sage, and they have these obstacle courses that if you've ever been in a military environment, these are sort of the basis of how you prove your fitness and your ability to navigate a combat zone. And so they have all these pine logs you've got to clamber over and ropes and various things. You got to contort yourself around. And so this was in the early days of Special Forces, when they were sort of trying to figure out how to set up Robin Sage. And they'd set up this obstacle course, and they put all these recruits there, and they said, okay, at the far end of this obstacle course is this bell. You got to go ring this bell. Any questions? Okay. No, go. And so the recruits would start going through the obstacle course, going through the obstacle course, going through the obstacle course. And they would all be getting there and ringing the bell. They'd be getting these good times, good times, good times. And this one recruit was, like, standing at the back, and he realized that there was no way he was going to get through this obstacle course. And anything like the time that the other recruits were doing it, he just couldn't do it. And he was getting closer and closer to the front of the line. They were running through the obstacles, running through the obstac, running through the obstacles. And then it gets to him. They blow the whistle, and he runs around the entire obstacle course and rings the bell on a record time, avoiding the obstacles. He avoids all the obstacles, and everyone looks at him. And in a traditional military setting, you would be thrown off course.

[Interviewer]

It's cheating.

[Angus Fletcher]

Exactly. It's cheating. And instead, they were like, that's brilliant.

[Interviewer]

Because he did the objective.

[Angus Fletcher]

He did the objective. He found the beautiful.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Right.

[Angus Fletcher]

He found the target. He found it his own way. And so even now, when you go there now, the entire course as it is, all the course, whether it's the object course or not, is designed as you've got to get to this point. But how you get there is up to you. You could walk in a straight line there, you could steal a boat and sail there. Whatever you want to do, you can get there your own way, but you just got to get there. And that's the difference between a Special Forces psychology, is it tells you where but not how. Whereas I think the way that a lot of other organizations go wrong is they tell you where and how. They say, this is how you make the hamburger. Do it this way, as opposed to make a hamburger.

[Interviewer]

Tell me how Special Forces were inspired by Beethoven.

[Angus Fletcher]

So Special Forces has this idea about how the imagination works. And their idea about the imagination is you've got to be able to set a single target for yourself, but be completely fluid in how you get there. And what they say is that this is the opposite of how most kids grow up today, because most kids grow up today want to do 800 things so they don't have, like, a clear objective. And they're always trying to do the same thing to get to all these different goals. So special forces? No, no, no, no. What you've got to do is you've got to figure out that one thing you're doing and then be infinitely flexible on the way there. And so I was just fascinated. I said, well, where did you get this from? And one of the guys there, he said to me, music. I said, oh, music? I said, what kind of music? He said, all kinds of music. He said, but Beethoven? Beethoven? I said, what? What does Beethoven have to do with special forces? And he says, well, because Beethoven always knew exactly where he was going, but every time he went there, he went there in a different way. And the extraordinary thing about listening to Beethoven's music is the improvisational nature of every moment of it, but it has a consistent purpose. So you always feel like you're going somewhere that is spontaneous, and that's the magic of real creativity, is it is purposeful but totally in the moment.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Jazz works that way as well.

[Narrator/Host]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

What are the questions that lead to exceptional information? Yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

So exceptional information is this totally bizarre army term. It's a military term. It means the exception to a rule. The idea is you're always looking for that outlier, that anomaly that is the leading edge of reality, that if you can hook onto it faster than the other person, you can make tomorrow more quickly than they can. And so the questions that lead you to that are the questions you've never asked before. And those questions tend to be spontaneous in the moment. So when you're having a conversation with someone, there are going to be moments in that conversation when you ask them a question you've never asked anyone before, because something in that conversation has sparked a new question that didn't even occur to you that you could ask. And that's when you start realizing that you're on the trail to exceptional information is when your mind starts asking questions that it hasn't asked before. You start having conversations with people. These questions are coming up because we are so used to technology in the world, most of the time that we encounter a new question, we go to Google or what have you to answer it. And what you're doing there is you're putting an old answer into a new question and you're breaking the question. Whereas, actually, what you want to do is you want to lean into the question that you've never asked before and be really rigorous in not accepting an old answer for a new question. How could there be an old answer for a new question if somebody knows the answer to your question already? That's not the answer. That's how you start to realize it is that you're asking a question that no one has asked before.

[Interviewer]

What's an sop?

[Angus Fletcher]

An SOP is a military standard operating procedure. And so what's really interesting is the question of when to be creative and when not to be creative. And you see this all the time with creatives is when they're not in the studio or they're not doing their creative work, they're making their life harder than it needs to be because they're constantly being creative in moments where you shouldn't be being creative. And so there's this thing that the military likes to refer to, which is common sense. And common sense is basically matching the newness of your action to the newness of the times.

[Interviewer]

Tell me more about that.

[Angus Fletcher]

So anytime you're in a situation that's changing rapidly, what that's telling you is

[Interviewer]

that you don't want to use an old playbook.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's right. Because there's new questions that are being asked, and so the old answers won't work. And so what you've got to do is you've got to start to up your creativity to match the speed of situational change. However, if you're in a familiar environment, you should use a familiar answer. And what we find with a lot of people who are creatives is they insist on being creative all the time, even in familiar environments. Just wear regular clothes, man. You know? No, no, no, no. I've got to figure out a totally new outfit to wear to this thing. No, no, no, it's just fine. Just. No, no, no, I got it. And they've always got to be doing new things. And as a result, a lot of creatives make their lives much harder for themselves than they need to be because instead of focusing their creativity on the moments real opportunity. That's right, yeah. And so a standard operating procedure is something that you do in a situation that you've encountered before. That worked last time. And this is why I think special Forces units, like hypothetically Delta Force, if it exists, are brilliant is because they have these special operating procedures that they use immediately. But then the moment the situation is unfamiliar, they switch out of them and do something new. You see this also with astronauts. Astronauts are incredible at this, particularly like the old school astronauts who are the fighter Pilots who came up with the Gemini program and whatnot is they fly the plane or the spaceship by the book, when everything is normal. And then the moment that uncertainty happens, they invent an entirely new way of flying the plane that no one else has ever seen before. And so standard operating procedures are actually important for creativity because what they're doing is they're allowing you not to be creative in all the moments when you don't need to be creative. And then you're therefore getting closer to the nature of creativity, which is to meet the moment, as opposed to your own ego, which is saying, I've got to somehow make everything new, because if I don't make everything new, it's not me.

[Interviewer]

No, no, no, you don't have to make it new for the sake of it being new. You need to make it new because it's what's required in this particular situation.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's exactly right.

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[Interviewer]

What is a first step plan?

[Angus Fletcher]

A first step plan is how you get yourself out of your fight or flight response when you're in a very new situation. And the reason it's evolved is in combat situations, the first time anyone gets into combat, no matter how much they've thought about it ahead of time, no matter how brave and courageous they are, they always panic. And one of the main reasons, particularly with modern combat, that people panic is because when guns start firing, you actually can't know where they're from. You can't actually. You're immediately thrown into kind of like a chaos environment and your brain is like, get out of here. So you experience immediate panic and the way that your brain works is that when you have a plan, you have a sense of where you're going. You're not panicking, because you have that momentum.

[Interviewer]

You have a task.

[Angus Fletcher]

You have a task. Once your operational environment shatters your plan because it becomes so new, you don't have a plan anymore. Your brain goes into fear. And fear is essentially either run away or take a plan from somebody else. Because if somebody else next to me is functioning in this environment, maybe their plan works. And so that's responsible for what we call herd behavior. So when you see crowds, panic, and then they all start going in the same direction, that's because their brain is taking a plan from somebody else.

[Interviewer]

They think someone else must know.

[Angus Fletcher]

They think someone else must know. And of course, no, nobody knows. Nobody knows. And actually, what you've got to do in that situation, you got to make your own plan. So the question is, like, how do you do that? How do you make your own plan? I got a chance to work with this guy who won the Medal of Honor, who was a Green Beret, and he was talking about his first combat experience and how basically he'd been assigned to sit at the top of this truck and just keep a watch out. And the moment that bullets started coming, he panicked, ducked inside the turret, and was so frightened, he actually started to bend the metal of the gun he was supposed to be holding.

[Narrator/Host]

I use it.

[Angus Fletcher]

And the guy in the truck who was driving it, who's more experienced, called up to him, basically was like, hey, how many trucks are there ahead of us? And the guy up in the tarp was panicking, you know, took a deep breath and looked forward, and he said, there's six trucks behind us. And he went down and said, how many trucks are there behind us? And he looked up, went back, and the more he started giving these little tasks, the more he started to get his momentum back. And he said that taught me that whenever you see someone in a panicking situation is you walk over to them calmly and basically like, what's the first step that you can take in a direction? And if you can't find that stuff yourself, I'm going to give you a little bit of a nudge, and then I'm going to back off and let you find your next step. And I'm going to keep coming back to you and giving you your first step. And what we find is that once you start to get into that momentum of taking that first step, your brain starts to get back its ability to plan, to imagine, to have intuition, and start to take those next steps. And this is a skill we try and teach now to young people. Because young people exist in almost a permanent state of fight or flight. They are almost always panicking. And that the way that they're coping with that panic is they're allowing someone in their environment to tell them what to do. So they're always taking a plan from somebody else. What are my parents telling me to do? Especially if you start to get towards graduating college, graduating high school, these kinds of things. And so we just sit them down and we say, no, what's the first step that can come from within? What is that first step? And people will immediately be like, well, you know, no, no, it doesn't have to be a big step. Doesn't have to solve the problem. It can be in the wrong direction. But that first step has to come from you or the second step is never going to emerge.

[Interviewer]

You're putting yourself into action. And by being in action, the next step will become more apparent. Instead of being frozen.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes. Because what is a series of actions? One action leads to another action leads to another action. That is a plan. That is a story. So in order for your brain to tell the story of your future, you've got to tell the story of the story.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

And so constantly getting that story process in motion. And what's important about that is each of us has our own first step. And when you're in a moment of fear because you have this herd instinct, you're constantly thinking, like, what's the safe step? In other words, the safe step is what's the right step. There is no safe step in uncertainty. There's just your step. Take your step. And you see people who have the ability to do that. And a lot of folks in communities I work with, because they doubt themselves, they can only take those steps if they are using substances or something else. Because they're basically saying, I don't trust myself enough to do that. And it's really important to know that you can do that. And even if you had the assistance of a substance before, it wasn't the substance that made the first step. That was just allowing you to calm down enough to trust yourself and do it. So just trust yourself and do it next time.

[Interviewer]

It's interesting, so many of these things that come from the military are all applicable in everyday life for everybody.

[Narrator/Host]

Yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

Because life is a war, but in a good way. It's a war that we have the opportunity to fight for the things that we care about. I mean, there was something really Idyllic about the early world where everything was just able to exist together, but you also didn't have a purpose in that world because there wasn't anything for you to fight for. And now the opportunity of life is for you to create that story, and you got to fight for space for that story. And over time, I think we've built these wonderful artistic communities in which we don't literally have to damage other people's stories, you know, because the stories we create can exist in these other spaces, the space of art, technology, whatever. But you always have to remember that on some level, you have to fight for it. I mean, and that's the obligation that you have as a creative is because if you don't fight for it. And I think that's why when you look at real change that happens in the world, it always comes from creatives, because creatives know how to fight for what matters. And everyone in this society can look around and say, this is wrong, but no one will fight for it. But it's always the creatives who step forward and say, will fight for it. Because that's the kind of primordial thing that gets you moving.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about how an arms race allows innovation not possible otherwise.

[Angus Fletcher]

A great example of this would be during the 1960s. So basically what's happening during the 1960s is you're getting the onset of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. And one of the ways in which that's manifesting itself is a race for missile technology. So both the Soviets and the Americans are trying to build bigger missiles and build more of them. And so we get into this arms race in the 1960s in which the Soviets are turning all of their industrial capacity to just making essentially more and more and more nukes. And the United States is feeling drawn into that. We've got to make more missiles to keep up with the Soviets. But at a certain point, someone comes along and goes, this is nuts, right? They're making more missiles. We're making more missiles. We're spending all of our industrial capacity on missiles. Let's think more imaginatively here. What would show the Soviets that we've beaten them that doesn't involve building more missiles? What's the way to show to them you can't defeat the United States? That isn't just having a stockpile of 100,000 nukes? So they sat around, they thought about this for a while, and they said, you know what it would be? It would be showing that our missiles are so powerful that we can put A missile anywhere that we want. And so we don't need a lot of missiles because even just with one missile, we can put it anywhere. And so I said, oh, yeah, that's a good idea. That's a good idea. How do we prove that? How do we prove that? When they sat around, they thought a little bit more. They said, well, what is the most incredible place you could put a missile that would show the Soviets that we could literally put a missile anywhere? And they said, the moon. And that was the birth of the space program.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Angus Fletcher]

And they said, you know, what if we build a missile that goes to the moon, what that shows the Soviets is that we have the best missile technology. And so actually, this tremendous act of science and exploration and hope and discovery ended up being the thing that ended the arms race. But it was powered initially from that conflict. And so really what that tells you on some core level is not that the world started out at peace and we've created war, but the world started out at war. And then you create peace, and you create peace by figuring out the way to win the war without fighting the war. And I think on space program, to me, I mean, I've always. When I look at the magic of the Apollo program and the spaceship itself is so bizarre, it flies up into space, then it ejects part of itself which, like, turns around, then flies backwards to the moon, and then, like, drops a pod on the moon that then stays there, but ejects a tiny capsule that goes back up to this thing that's circling the moon. And that fly. It's, like, so bonkers, but beautiful and seems impossible. It seems impossible. It's certainly improbable.

[Interviewer]

What do you know about PsyOps?

[Angus Fletcher]

I know a lot about PsyOps. So PsyOps is psychological operations. And Psyops is A branch of U.S. army Special Operations that evolved during the Cold War. And the idea at the time was that the way to win the war is to tell the enemy the story that they can't win. And so we've got to create this story, and we've got to create fear and despair in the enemy. And this is something that Psyops took essentially from autocratic totalitarian regimes, because what a totalitarian regime is always doing is it's always trying to tell you you can't do anything, you'll die. And by doing that, it's taking away your ability to make your own story and therefore to innovate, change society. So Psyops started out with this fairly negative mission. And when I started to engage with them. What I started to realize is that even though that had been the predominant emphasis of Psyops. And so if you go to almost any kind of Psyops operation, if you look at almost any of the stuff that they've developed, it's very fear based, it's very isis. You can't win. We're starting to realize it's actually what's much more powerful for a democratic society to tell is the true story of democracy. Rather than telling the other guy why they're bad and they can't win the war because we've got these missiles, why don't you tell them some of the most extraordinary things that have happened in democracy and why don't you let them experience and then if they question those stories, have them come and look and realize. No, actually that did happen. There was a Rosa Parks. And what we started to find is that those stories, even though they seemed initially to be more fragile, were far more powerful because what they did is they unlocked possibility as opposed to fear. And the idea behind the fear was to control the enemy, whereas the idea behind the possibility was to turn the enemy into you, into a democracy. And so CYBES is this very fascinating organization that exists in the shadows that I think a lot of times is really distrusted and is seen as a tool of control and has been used as a tool of control in a lot of cases. But ultimately, in a way is like Hollywood as what is Hollywood? Hollywood is this great thing that America exported to the world which essentially makes everyone in the world think, I can do anything and I want to be an American. Because the power of being an American is to be able to create your own life story and to come in in a hard place and make yourself into a beautiful place. And so I have always felt like on a core level that Hollywood is the ultimate psyops, even though of course it doesn't brand itself that way. And that Hollywood fails, as it often fails in the present when it's trying to lecture people, try to tell them what to think.

[Interviewer]

Nobody wants to be told what to think.

[Angus Fletcher]

Nobody wants to be told what to think. No, no. But Hollywood succeeds. When you go in there and you're like, wow, I didn't think that was possible, but it happened.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about specific objectives versus general objectives.

[Angus Fletcher]

A specific objective would be something like put a man on the moon. That's something that you can very clearly see. A general objective would be something like, let's increase our stock price by 50%. And a general objective is the way that almost everybody thinks in business now, it's very abstract. It's not at all clear how you take a first step towards that. Whereas a specific objective is something you could explain to a child and they could write a storybook about. And we've lost our specificity when we think about the future. So if you take any basic creative writing class, the first thing they'll tell you is you should write your own story because you're more specific about it. Because specificity, what makes a story work, if you've ever read a story that you like, what you like about it is the details. You're like, wow, that's weird. That's interesting. That's specific. Specifics are what makes creativity work. But so much of our society is now being planned by people who think in generalities. And that, I think, is because so much of our society has become dominated by ideology. So, you know, we have these political lefts and right. This is how we do things. This is how we do things. It's all very abstract, based in old rules, and people immediately see that and have no idea how to get there. Whereas if you say to somebody, well, you know, we need to build a healthcare system, okay, that's a specific objective. Okay, well, what does that mean? Well, we know what it means is we need to have two nurses for every 25 people. Okay. And one of the things that we notice with children is children are incredibly good at thinking specifically, and school beats that out of them because school says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You've got to think more conceptually. And I think that's where a lot of us get trained out of thinking in store.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about the fear box.

[Angus Fletcher]

The fear box is what hits you in combat. A kind of more common name for the fear box would be tunnel vision. But basically what happens is if you get into a combat situation, you start seeing about 2 inches in front of you. And this is literal, you can't actually see.

[Interviewer]

Distance becomes totally out of focus.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes. You can only see right in front of you.

[Interviewer]

Myopic.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes. And if you don't want to go into combat, but you want to experience this, you could do something like parachuting for the first time or something like that. And when you parachute for the first time, you have to look at your altimeter, your height gauge, and you'll struggle to find it because you'll be unable to see anything that's more than just in front of your nose. So this is what happens when the brain gets into this extreme moment of terror. It goes into the box. And that's when you become very susceptible to being programmed, to losing your creativity. But the way you get out of the fear box in a combat situation is you push your eyes towards your objective. So if you have a specific objective, like we were talking about, like that hill over there, get to that hill, you push your gaze forward to that hill, and you get out of the box. If you have a general or abstract objective, like raise your quarterly profits by 25%. That doesn't exist on Earth. Right. Where do I look for that?

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Right.

[Angus Fletcher]

So you stay in the fear box. And the more you push your gaze forward out of the fear box, the more your brain is able to take a first step, because your brain starts to see. Oh, that is the way. And then I can start to take that step and your brain takes over for you. Because essentially 95% of your brain is non conscious. It's governing your body. And once your conscious brain does its work of saying, go over there, the rest of your brain's like, all right, I'll figure that out. I can figure out how to move my arms. And then all of that other intelligence starts to come online.

[Interviewer]

What's a singleton?

[Angus Fletcher]

Literally, a singleton is just a lone operative. So it just means a single operative who's dropped by a parachute into a jungle or something.

[Interviewer]

How often does that happen?

[Angus Fletcher]

All the time.

[Interviewer]

Really?

[Angus Fletcher]

It does happen all the time. I'm not allowed to comment on current

[Interviewer]

world events, but are people experts at that?

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes, yes. There's two sort of very fascinating ways in which they both select and develop singletons. So the first example of the selection process, hypothetically, if there were a group called Delta Force, they would hypothetically have a selection exercise known as the Long Walk. And what happens in the Long Walk is you are told to go to an objective on a map, but you're not told how to get there. And also, more importantly, you're never told how you're doing. So when you get to that objective, they'll say you got there in 10 minutes or you got there in two hours or whatever. But they'll never say whether that was a fast time or a slow time. They'll never say whether that was acceptable or not acceptable. And they'll just give you another objective and you've got to go on to the next one and go on to the next one.

[Interviewer]

What's the purpose of not telling you how you're doing?

[Angus Fletcher]

Because you've got to learn to do your best internally.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Angus Fletcher]

And what's remarkable about this is that almost everybody quits because they don't get the feedback. And if you're living a creative life, you're not going to get feedback because you're the first person doing it. So no one can tell you whether you're doing it right or not. And that's why almost everybody quits.

[Interviewer]

And there are some people who are really good at it.

[Angus Fletcher]

There are some people who are really good at it. The way that these units work is they have exercises like that which force you to kind of self assess. And that process of self assessing is what allows you to start to operate as a singleton. Then the next thing we discovered just through our research, is that singletons have very high emotional intelligence. And what that means is they're able to read their emotions as signals to tell them what their life narrative looks like. Your ideal life narrative, if you want to have something called antifragility. So antifragility is basically the ability to grow from negative experiences. And that means that no matter how much the world resists your beauty, you're able to find an even more beautiful version of your beauty. If you have an anti fragile life narrative, that means your past is integrated and your future is branching. So it looks a little bit like a trident. You've got this long stick for your past and you've got all these different possible paths you can take for your future. And the reason that that's so powerful is because it's your past that gives you your momentum.

[Interviewer]

And because there are multiple paths, if any path gets X'd out, it doesn't slow you down at all.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's exactly right. That's exactly right, yeah. So you can think of it almost like river running down a mountain. That river gets its momentum from the length that it's been running. And if it hits a boulder, it can just go around that boulder. But then it'll go right back on its original course because it has all that momentum behind it. And so when your past is integrated, that means you can look back on your previous life and, and say that it was all for one purpose. And many people struggle to do that. And they think, oh, there are these different people that I was in my past. Or these things didn't go anywhere. And they can't integrate all these different parts of their past into themselves. This particularly happens when you have a traumatic event. You'll break that traumatic event into a different narrative and you'll pretend somehow like it didn't happen as a way of going forward in the future. And the two most common forms of traumatic event are grief and shame. So if the world does something to you which you can't comprehend, you have grief and you start living in two worlds. Essentially the world in which that happened and then the world that you pretend you're living in, you're like, oh, that couldn't have actually happened. And you have to learn to integrate the two and be like, no, that did happen. Shame is the other major one. You do something that causes you terrible embarrassment and you think, I couldn't beat that person, I'm going to suppress that memory. And then you exist essentially as these two people. No, you've got to go back and say, I have gratitude for the shame, just like I have gratitude for the grief that's teaching me something about the world. You then integrate it. When your past is not integrated, when it's, when it's fractured, you have no momentum, so you're unable to leave an impact on the world and you just kind of go all over the place. But when you're able to learn from grief and shame and integrate them, you become the most powerful thing on earth. So as a singleton, you got to learn to process grief and shame rapidly. You got to understand what they mean. And then looking forward, branching, how do you know that your future is no longer branching when you start to get angry? Anger is the sign that your future is narrowing. Because what anger is saying is there's only one way, and I've got to act that way with violence or else it's not going to work. And a lot of people, when they get challenged on the thing they want to do, become immediately irritable, short tempered, aggressive, no, I got to do it this way. And you know, someone is a fully functioning creative when you challenge them and there's no anger because they immediately see another path. And you challenge them again, and they immediately see another path. And so the key for the singleton is to develop that emotional ability to say, am I getting angry right now? If so, then I've got to activate my creative force. Am I feeling flashbacks or grief and shame, in which case I'm losing my mission, I'm losing my purpose, I've got to go back. And so a lot of times you get abandoned alone on a mission, something horrible will happen. Someone might die, you might see something, you might totally screw up, you might lose a key piece of equipment. Then you get lost in that moment. That's fracturing your purpose. You've got to go back and have gratitude for losing the equipment. You know what, that was meant to happen. That was meant to happen, you got to have gratitude for the other horrible events that was meant to happen. And then once you start to develop that as a singleton, you become unstoppable. Because the more negative events that occur to you, the more you turn those into imagination or growth.

[Narrator/Host]

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[Angus Fletcher]

This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

[Interviewer]

You redefined EQ Emotional intelligence in a new way.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's right.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about that.

[Angus Fletcher]

So the old version of EQ was developed out of something called IQ. And so IQ comes about in the early 20th century because people say we want to define intelligence and we want to understand what general intelligence is. And we want to have a universal standard that allows us to give people tests so we can determine whether or not they're really smart or not. And so all these IQ tests came out of that. And over time, people started to notice that the higher you performed on an IQ test did not necessarily translate to success in life. In fact, a lot of people would get very, very high scores in these IQ tests and be totally inept at life. So then people start to wrestle with this problem. They start to say, well, that must be another form of intelligence out there. What could that other form of intelligence be? And then really around the 70s and 80s, people started to come together with this idea of emotional intelligence. I said, well, if it's not just about iq, which is logic, then there's this other thing called emotion. So that's got to be the key. It's got to be this emotional intelligence. And what they came up with was really a focus on what we would now call empathy. And the idea being that people who have high emotional intelligence are able to read other people's emotions very effectively and make good decisions off the basis of that. But there are two problems with EQ as an explanation. First of all, it doesn't actually work. It's been tested a lot and it doesn't work. And because something doesn't work scientifically, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's wrong. Maybe we haven't figured out how to test it. So there's always that caveat you got to have, but we've been totally unable to validate it. And the other reason it doesn't really work is because it would require you to be psychic, because it would suggest that somehow I have to understand your emotions. And then in order to explain how I could understand your emotions, what EQ says as well, you understand your own emotions, and by understanding your own emotions, that allows you to read other people's emotions. But the problem with that is that, that we're not different anymore. And this is also the fundamental paradox of EQ is it's an attempt to get away from logic, but it is itself a logical operation because it's looking for identity. It's looking to say, I'm the same as you, and identity and equation, that's how computers think. Those are logic processes. So what we said instead is said, no. First of all, actually, what allows you to be really good at understanding other people is not empathy and emotion. It's intuition. And it's your ability to spot what's unique about that person, not what they have in common with you, but what's different about them.

[Interviewer]

It's what you can see.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes. And then we started to say, okay, well, if emotion isn't about me understanding you. And by the way, it would be really bizarre if our emotions had evolved to understand other people.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Right.

[Angus Fletcher]

It seems like a very counterintuitive way for things to have evolved when we

[Interviewer]

don't even understand ourselves.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes, that's exactly right. Yes, exactly. And so what we sort of say is, well, no, actually, let's think about how emotions work. When do you feel strong emotions? Well, one place you feel strong emotions is when you're experiencing a story. So if you go and watch a movie, that will trigger strong feelings in you. If you go read a book, that'll often the story will trigger strong feelings in you. You'll get concern for the main character or you'll start to feel a sense of joy when they get what it is they want. So there's clearly a connection between narrative and emotion. Well, why would there be a connection between narrative and emotion? Because our emotions clearly didn't evolve so that other people could manipulate our emotions with stories. So actually, our emotions must have evolved to help us monitor our own inner narrative. And what your emotions are telling you is the state of your inner narrative. So we've already talked about anger. Anger is telling you, oh, your path is narrowing. Learn when you get angry, not to get angry, but to get imaginative. Or if you start to feel fear, that's your brain telling you you've lost your narrative entirely. Take a first step. And so what we did is we shifted away from this idea that emotional intelligence, or EQ was a logic process that allows you to understand other people, and instead into saying it's your most profound way of understanding yourself in general.

[Interviewer]

Is logic too small?

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes, absolutely. Well, because how does logic work? The whole idea behind logic?

[Interviewer]

It's a formula.

[Angus Fletcher]

It's a formula. Yes, it's a formula. And in order to come up with a formula, you have to come up with a huge amount of data, and then that data has to be frozen in time because the formula can only work if nothing changes. And so logic is amazing and incredible in environments that are stable and transparent. And nothing is that, and nothing is that. Yes. Well, I would say that a data scientist would say, well, there's got to be some things. But yeah, I mean, nothing living is that. Let's put it that way.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about dedicating yourself to dumb choices.

[Angus Fletcher]

One of the things we've been talking about is how important it is for you as an artist, as a creative, to find your own path, to find the way that only you can live. And so no one can tell you that. And the more you start to go out on your own path, the more you start to get self conscious and insecure about it, and the more that starts to kind of pull you back. And so you got to start to say, well, okay, what is guiding me in those formative moments? What does it allow me to step ahead? And what we noticed with a lot of creatives is they have this thing called dumb pride. And dumb pride is when you do something that everybody else thinks is really stupid. They're like, why did you do that? And you look back at it and you're like, I'm kind of proud that I did that. And then people say to you, well, what if it had gone totally wrong? And you're like, I still think I would have. Yes, it didn't go wrong. That's right. But I think I Still would have done it.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Right.

[Angus Fletcher]

Because on some level, it wasn't about the consequence. It was about the action. It was about the process. It was about. That was authentic to me.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, you were doing the right thing for yourself in that moment.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's exactly right. And so the story I can tell about this in terms of my own life is when I was a little kid, I just come to this country, and we were all taken out to this school bus to go on this school trip together. And we got on the bus, and there were no seatbelts on the bus. And even as a young child, I felt very strongly that there should always be a seatbelt. And so I told them I wasn't going to stand without a seatbelt. And they said to me, no, no, no, no, no, it's fine, it's fine. Don't worry. Don't worry. The bus driver's like, I'm not going to crash the bus. I'm not going to crash the bus. And they totally fine. Let me. Totally fine. I was like, well, that may be the case, but I still want a seatbelt. And the bus driver goes, okay. And he goes. And he gets the teacher on. The teacher comes and tells me, it'll be fine. Please just take your seat. We're gonna go. And I refused to sit down.

[Interviewer]

So you refused to sit down because there was no seatbelt.

[Angus Fletcher]

There was no seatbelt.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah. And again, I mean, as an adult, that's not a choice I would have made. I would've sat down. I've sat down on plenty of buses without seatbelt as an adult, but as a child, that felt like I needed the seatbelt.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. It was a line you weren't willing to cross.

[Narrator/Host]

That's right.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Understood. Yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

Eventually, they brought the principal out. The principal came out and was like, you've got to sit down. You're delaying all the other kids. And how would you feel if I called your parents and they heard what a nuisance you were being, how disruptive you were being? And I just stood there. I was like 4 years old, and I just kept standing there. And eventually they took me off the bus and they put me in the principal's office, and I had to sit there for the rest of the day until the bus came back and my parents picked me up. And even now, as I think back on that moment, I know how proud I am of that kid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know that, like, that's not what I would do now as an adult. Normally. I would sit down and then I Remind myself.

[Interviewer]

I guess it depends on the situation. You can't know.

[Angus Fletcher]

You can't know. That's true. Yes.

[Narrator/Host]

Yeah, that's right.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah. But I do know that I need to be reminded of that child at moments, to be reminded of who I really am. And when I think back on that child, I think the thing I'm most proud about is that that child was standing up to a school.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Angus Fletcher]

That was essentially saying, we have a system here, and you as a student are interrupting the system. And as opposed to doing what a school should have done, which is, okay, you as a student are uncomfortable. Let's figure out a way to make you comfortable. They were like, let's force you into the system. Even now, that's what I spend so much of my time thinking about, is how do we actually make school change as opposed to have school damage the kids? So that's an example of dumb pride. And everyone, particularly if you don't have one you can think of in your last five years of life, if you just go back to when you were 3, 4, 5, 6 years old, you will have those moments where you did those things that everyone else thinks was silly. Well, you know, Rick, I have to be honest. You made my childhood possible. I didn't tell this part of the story. This maybe isn't something you want to include. I mean, so I come here from England and had an accent. This is a very sort of funny English child. And my mom hated America and always wanted us to return. And so I was raised in this slightly odd environment in which all my friends were older girls and went back all the time to England and was trained to think of myself as English and so on and so forth. And as a result, once I started going to school in America, was totally alienated from all of my classmates. You know, I'd grown up with books and older girls, all this kind of stuff. I didn't know that football existed, like American football, any of these kinds of things. And so I was just like this constant outsider the whole time. And then I discovered rap music. The first album I ever bought was Public Anime. It Takes a Nation of Millions.

[Interviewer]

Amazing.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah. No, and it totally changed my life. And I suddenly, really, for the first time, felt it was okay to be different. And the amount of emotional support that I took from those albums. And I have these crazy memories. I ended up doing high school in Philadelphia. And So I was 13 years old, and there was this old club there called the Trocadero. And I remember reading that Public Enemy was going to Be there. And of course, like, I had to go. My parents were like, what is this music? What are you talking about? None of my friends like that kind of music. And so I just got on the train, went downtown, walked to Trocadero, and I'm like, I mean, I. First of all, I'm pretty sure I was the only 13 year old there, period. But I was also, of course, the only white kid there. I was standing in line and they frisked you all when you went in. And I remember I got in front of the line where the guy was like, you can go in, you don't need to be frisked. And I was like, oh, okay, great. And I just remember how welcoming people were because I was really scared. And especially when we were getting frisked for the weapons, I was like, oh my God, like, what is this going to be like in there? No, it's just incredible because you knew

[Interviewer]

the right place to be. I was always accepted in places where I didn't look like I belong because I was there for the same reason everybody else was. I loved what was happening. You know, there was a camaraderie in that world. Yes, Everyone there was an outsider. In the early days of hip hop, it was hated.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah. I mean, I remember one of the things that I used to just love is because I just memorized all the lyrics almost immediately. And I used to just say these lyrics all the time. And then I was always constantly having them in my head. But then you would go to the concert and then you would actually get a chance to, you realize, like, everyone around you, it's kind of like rapping along too, and just a sense of community from that. Those songs. It was a hopeful anger. Yeah, that's really what I felt about it. And that really connected with where I was at that time in my life. So that's another way of saying that a lot of these things that we're talking about now were really launched on an almost emotional level by the sense that I was like, you can do something interesting with your life.

[Interviewer]

How did you become who you are?

[Angus Fletcher]

I think probably when my sister died.

[Interviewer]

How old were you?

[Angus Fletcher]

I was about 10 years old. Yeah. And up to that point, I'd always been a really quiet, thoughtful person who felt very connected to life. When my sister died, I was very close to her. She was four years old. And it totally broke apart my family.

[Interviewer]

Was that your first experience of any death?

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah. And I actually. I have very vivid memories of the morning it happened. My bedroom was next to hers. We had this, like, this really weird, like, old house that my dad. My dad is like a really charming, fascinating guy, but totally out of touch with reality. When we moved into town, he just wanted to buy the biggest house he could afford. And so we bought this house. It was just, like, totally collapsing. And I was at, like, one wing of the house with my sister, and my parents were like, the other wing of the house. You know, basically what happened that morning is, you know, I woke up and I was always woke up first, and I went into my sister's room and, you know, she was lying in bed. She was dead. And I just. I couldn't, like, I couldn't process it. And then I heard my parents coming down the hall to kind of wake us up, and I panicked because in my mind, I thought they would think that maybe I was responsible. You know, it's like a totally crazy thing. I ran back into my room and I hid. And then I just. The next day, I heard my mother scream and all the rest of it. Anyway, out of that, what happened is I developed a kind of a tragic relationship to life. And I started to sort of struggle with that for a long time. And then I sort of rediscovered the beauty again. But it was a kind of a beauty that I discovered in the tragedy. And ever since then, I've just always been fascinated because to me, creatives are people who appreciate the reality of life on a fundamental level. And to appreciate the reality of life, you have to understand that there's terrible darkness in that. There's things we don't understand that are beyond us, that are beyond the human, that kind of. That shatter you. But then you take that and you make that into beauty. And you have to be open to both sides of that. And so that was sort of when I started on this journey to hang out with people that are more creative than me.

[Interviewer]

Did you say fear of death was a big issue after that?

[Angus Fletcher]

Fear of other people dying? So I don't have any fear of my own death. And one of the things that, like, if you look over my career, it's really weird. So I'm a very uncoordinated person. I have, like, very limited physical ability, but I'm always, like, jumping off waterfalls or jumping out of helicopters. And it's always because I'm hanging out with people who are jumping off of waterfalls and helicopters, so I just follow them off. So I have no fear of my own death, but I'm always terrified of harm happening to other people. And it made it very hard for me to Become a parent and still is very hard for me to be a parent.

[Narrator/Host]

There's a long tradition of reading sacred text slowly, allowing each word to settle, echo and reveal meaning over time. Rather than rushing to conclusions, this practice invites reflection, listening, and attention. For centuries, this repetition has been used to stay close to wisdom, not by studying words as information, but by receiving them as something lived and experienced over and over again. This tradition is known as lectio divina. Emerging in early monastic life, it engages scripture through four gentle movements. Reading, reflection, repetition, and rest. A short passage is read, a single phrase is held. Silence becomes part of the practice, creating space for insight to surface naturally. Lectio365 brings that ancient rhythm into the present moment. Designed for for modern life, it offers brief, guided scriptural reflections throughout the day. To begin with intention, pause at midday, and wind down at night. The readings are less about information gathering and more for returning to wisdom again and again, letting familiar words meet new moments. A modern way to keep biblical wisdom close, quietly present, steady and alive within everyday life. Lectio 365 is a free resource. Find inspiration there now and always. Learn more at lectio365.com.

[Interviewer]

What is a naturalist?

[Angus Fletcher]

A naturalist is the original biologist. It used to be that the way people who studied life, studied life is they would just sit for a long time and watch for things, observe nature. They would observe nature and they would see things that surprised them. And then they would say, well, where is that going? And they would start to learn the story of these individual life forms. And the most famous naturalist really is Charles Darwin. I mean, Charles Darwin goes around the world, sees all these interesting birds on the Galapagos, these various benches, and sees other things, and comes up with these new ideas about how the world could work. What happens in the 20th century is that nationalism gets wiped out by basically industrial science.

[Interviewer]

What's industrial science?

[Angus Fletcher]

So industrial science is basically what happens when scientists get rewarded for publishing more papers. So it starts to become, oh, how do we manufacture more science? How do we do it faster? And then what they start to think is, well, the way we do it faster is instead of spending a long time observing individual interesting things, we start to use statistics. We start to develop this mathematical approach of vacuuming up data and then using a calculator to tell us what the average is. And when you use math, you're using logic. You don't have to learn the story of each individual place you're going to. You don't have to treat it with curiosity and care. You instead say, everything in the world operates on math. So as long as I understand math, I can just plug all the data into it and that'll tell me the truth. So stars operate on math, emotions operate on math, fish operate on math. And so you get the rise of this industrial science, really, starting in the later 20th century. And what has happened now is there's been this spectacular explosion of scientific articles, and there are literally millions of scientific articles, and we don't understand the world any better than we did before this stuff happened.

[Interviewer]

Maybe less well.

[Angus Fletcher]

Maybe less well. Yeah, exactly. And so what I started to wonder is if it was possible to go back to be a natural historian and to just spend a lot of time dwelling and just observing things that interest you. And that was how I got my start. I've had the chance to basically hang out and just study creatives, and a lot of times I'll just sit there and then, of course, they get uncomfortable initially. What are you doing?

[Interviewer]

Your next book could be How Math Destroyed Science.

[Angus Fletcher]

I would love to write that book.

[Interviewer]

I would love to read that book.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes, I will write that book.

[Narrator/Host]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Do you think of the natural world as existing and math is an overlay explanation of what exists, or is it the other way around? Is there math and the world follows its rules?

[Angus Fletcher]

No. The first way of saying it was correct. Yeah, yeah. Math is a way we have of explaining something, and it can be a very useful tool. So math is a great way of explaining gravity, for example, and that just helps make things simpler. If you're building a bridge, it's simpler if you have a bunch of mathematical rules to help you know that the bridge isn't going to fall over. And so math is a tool, it's a very useful thing. But the moment you start to confuse it with reality, math is equations. Things that are equations exist at the same time as each other. What cannot exist at the same time as another thing? A cause and an effect. Cause has to come before an effect. So causes and effects are narratives. They're the basic way the world works. What math does is math says, no, no, no, everything has to exist at

[Interviewer]

the same time, frozen in time.

[Angus Fletcher]

Frozen in time. So it eliminates your ability to think in causes and effects. And as a result, it stops you from gaining a deeper understanding of what's under the surface. It's all just correlations and patterns and surfaces. And what's important about the exploration of life is you're always chasing a cause you can never find. Like, this is how life works. There's Always a deeper story beneath the story, but you have to go for the story. And so bad science hooks onto a cause and says, this is the cause for all time. But good science is always chasing deeper and deeper causes, and math doesn't chase causes at all.

[Interviewer]

You talk about reading differently in the book, how you were taught to read versus how you choose to read. Yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

So what we're taught to do in school is interpret literature. So this is the word that always comes up. How do you interpret? Interpret is another logic function. It was defined back in a text called the Organon by this guy Aristotle, who's the founder of symbolic logic. Aristotle invented the three functions and or not that run all computing. So all computer chips, including the Apollo guidance computer and all AI run essentially on either NOR or NAND circuit architecture. And that is what Aristotle defined more than 2,000 years ago. A branch of that is known as hermeneutics, or interpretation. So computers can interpret texts. Another way of thinking about interpretation is it's translating from one language to another. So translating from binary into ASCII or something like that. Ever since the early 20th century, we were taught to apply interpretation to books. And we were taught is that books are made of words. Those words have meanings. You interpret those meanings to develop themes. The person who developed this, his name is IA Richards, who was a professor at Cambridge, then at Harvard, he developed something called close reading. So if you ever took a class, we spent a lot of time staring at a poem and we're told to come up with the symbolic structure of it or something like that. So that's how we're taught to read, and that's how a computer reads. And when you read that way, first of all, you're always anxious because you think that there's got to be a right answer that you're missing and the teacher's going to tell you that you're doing it wrong, and so on and so forth. Because anytime you're in a logical system, there's always a true answer. That's how logic works. And Ia Richards famously said that this will finally solve the problem of what literature means. We'll develop this and there will be no more discussions. But when you're a child, how do you read literature? You read it imaginatively. You put yourself in the place of the character. You explore the world. Even after the book is closed, you continue exploring the world. You role play the character. You say, what would that character do in my life? What would I do in that character's life? These are all these narrative processes, these are the things that happen when any kid goes and watches Star wars for the first time. They don't interpret Star Wars. They say, oh, I want to use a lightsaber. What would I do with a lightsaber? What would it be if I was Darth Vader? So they engage in all these totally natural processes that are wiped out in school. And if you even say something basic in a literature class, like, oh, I liked this character, you'll get mocked. You like a character, you have to interpret what the character is saying. How is this character teaching us to critique structures of power? You know, all this kind of stuff that happens in school as opposed to using your imagination and saying, what story would I write with this character? The origin of all Shakespeare's writing. I mean, Shakespeare, one of the great writers, it's all fan fiction. He read the Greeks and Romans, and then he wrote all of his early plays like Comedy of Errors and Titus Andronicus and whatnot. These are all fan fiction riffs on his favorite authors. What we should be doing is we should be having everyone in school read their favorite poems and write a poem, read a story, write a story. And then teachers will say, well, you can't do that because you can't grade the story. And of course, the purpose of school is to grade everybody and tell them what their numerical value is. And then you have to say to them, it's because it can't be graded that it matters. And ultimately, the person who grades it most is the student. Because you know you've got the student. If they write something for you and turn it in and they come back to you five minutes later and say, I can make it better, that's when you know you've got them. If they turn it into you and they don't care you haven't got it.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about hacking the test to get into your PhD program.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Okay.

[Angus Fletcher]

So I was working in this neuroscience lab. I'd become convinced that the human brain thought in story. I seen that all these people I admired had read Shakespeare, and I became convinced that I'd got to get into the Yale English department to start study Shakespeare because they were the experts at Shakespeare, and this is going to be the next path of my story. And I confronted a lot of obstacles on this plan. But one of the major obstacles that I confronted was this thing called the gre, which is this test you have to take to prove that you have the requisite knowledge in order to succeed in graduate school. And I really never taken any literature classes in undergraduate. I'd taken a few like everybody had and whatnot, but I hadn't seriously studied. And I just took a glance at the GRE and I realized it covered every work of literature apparently written ever in English. And I thought to myself, oh, my goodness, what do I do here? And because I've been trained in science and because one of the reasons that I've been successful as a young person is because I did think like a computer, and I was very good at standardized tests and I was very good at math, is I immediately approached the gre, which was itself a standardized test, as a logic puzzle. And so I got all of the existing copies of the gre and I didn't read any of them, but I looked at the answers for all the questions, and then I took those answers and I broke them out, and I memorized plot summaries of all of those works. And then I went into the actual GRE and I got basically a perfect score.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Wow.

[Angus Fletcher]

And it actually was kind of a while, because I remember when I got to Yale, they sat me down and they said, we know you must be a genius, because no one has ever done so well on that test. And I said, oh, thank you very much. And then I got into my first literature class, and I was completely incompetent because, of course, I'd have to.

[Interviewer]

So you were good at taking tests, you weren't good at literature.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's right. That's right. That's right. And in general, that's actually the story of my life, is I've always been very good at taking tests, and I've always been very bad at life.

[Interviewer]

You talked earlier about being anxious. Usually people who are anxious don't do well on tests.

[Angus Fletcher]

I think for me, tests have always been more of like, a game. So it actually makes me anxious, is things that I take seriously. And for me, tests have always been this way of pleasing power and authority. It's a little bit like a ritual, you know? And so I don't get stressed about them because I don't feel like I'm personally invested in them. But what I get anxious about is, so when I have a conversation with someone, the reason I'm socially anxious or the reason that I have a hard time. I have to do a lot of public speaking now, and it gives me terrible panic, is because I think there's nothing more sacred than another person. And I really feel like a real sense of using that person's time well, and that it's a gift that they've given me, their time. And you're engaging this moment to talk. And that puts enormous amount of psychological pressure on me because I really think to myself, like, what if I'm not being interesting because I'm trying to give you my best self and trying to do my best. So for me, tests and things like that have never caused me that much anxiety because they're fake, they're artificial. But things that really matter to me cause me terrible stress.

[Interviewer]

Tell me the story of Renaissance from the book.

[Angus Fletcher]

After Aristotle wrote his big book on symbolic logic, which. Which would eventually become modern AI, that book was essentially forgotten or marginalized in Western Europe for really about 1500 years until the early 12th century. And then it was rediscovered by these monks, because these monks were. Were running all the schools in the Middle Ages. And the monks rediscovered Aristotle and his symbolic logic, his computer thinking. And they thought to themselves, this is the mind of God, because it's pure reason. Then they thought to themselves, if we could master symbolic logic and we could use it to interpret the Bible, then we would ourselves be saved. And so essentially what they wanted to do is they wanted to build a computer trained on the data of the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament. And so that became the project of the Middle Ages was to develop that system of logic, that truth system. And the individual who did this became known as the Scholastics and Thomas Aquinas, I think one of the sort of the most famous individuals. And famously, that system totally collapsed. And it collapsed in the same way that in the 20th century we've had things like postmodernism and post structuralism. These all grew out of these logic systems that were essentially turned against themselves because logic failed to produce truth. And so then logic was used to break logic. In the case of the 16th and 17th century, there were these skeptics, there were both the academic skeptics and the pyranists. And you don't need to know too much about the difference between them. But basically academic skeptics went around just pointing out that stuff didn't make sense in terms of logic. And the pyramids were much more rigorous, and they actually used logic to break itself. And so basically, logic started to collapse in this period of time. This is when you get the Reformation. Martin Luther comes along and the whole system starts to collapse. And what happens in these moments is there's both a sense of terror, but a sense of possibility. The possibility is coming because the old system is breaking down, which is really exciting, but the terror is coming because people have spent their whole lives only thinking in logic. And in fact, they've only freed themselves from the old system by using logic against itself. They haven't developed a new way. And we're in that moment right now where we've all been trained on logic. We see that it's not working, but what's the new way? And back then, the new way turned out to be the Renaissance. And what happened in the Renaissance is you had individuals like Shakespeare, but also like da Vinci, Michelangelo, all these individuals, Machiavelli, who got back in touch with intuition and imagination and thinking in a story. And they said, actually, that's the way that you live and create a beautiful world, not by trying to build a computer that knows the mind of God, but instead by making new possibilities. And so that's why art became the driving force of the Renaissance, because it was artists who first rediscovered that creative power. And then that creative power in the Renaissance then went on to drive, so science, which is why you get the scientific revolution and then also want to drive engineering. We get the industrial revolution, and then, of course, business, which is why we get the mercantile revolution and wealth and all these kinds of things that ended up kind of essentially sustaining the United States through its early years. And all that came about by rejecting logic for imagination. And then what happened later, we got something called the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment went back to logic. And if you ever go back and look at Enlightenment art, it's very boring because it's all very geometric, and everything has to be in the right place. And according to the Enlightenment, all stories have to occur in exactly the same time that they're performed. You get these very bad, very tedious plays. And then the Romantics came back again. The Romantics shattered the Enlightenment, and they said, no, actually, what matters is emotion and spontaneity in the individual. And so there's always been a seesawing back and forth. And the important thing to always remember is not that logic is bad or wrong, because I think a lot of people, when they start to see the limits of logic, they start to think, oh, we got to get rid of it. No, no. Logic is a beautiful thing when it's handled by a technique. It's a tool. Yes, exactly. And now we're in this moment where AI is destroying the school system, totally destroying it, because AI can answer the test better than any human. But AI isn't going to replace intelligence. And so what we've got to do is we've got to take this moment to understand this is a call for creativity to come back and imagination to come back. And for our own New renaissance. But it's challenging for people because people can only think in the old, logical way. And when it doesn't work, they despair.

[Interviewer]

Tell me how story is used in the Bible.

[Angus Fletcher]

On the most profound level, story is used to help us explore the origin of life. And what you're always trying to do with a story is both go forwards and go backwards. And so when you're reading the Bible, what you're always doing is you're throwing your mind forward to the Apocalypse, to heaven, but you're also throwing your mind backward to Genesis, creation, to creation. And what's fascinating when you read the Bible and this created a lot of problems when people started to realize this in the late 19th century, is that there are actually multiple stories of creation in the Bible. The world essentially gets created twice. Adam and Eve get created twice. So in the first story of creation, Adam and Eve are created together, and the second story, Eve is created out of Adam.

[Interviewer]

And those are both in the Old Testament?

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes, those are both in literally. If you go back and you can go read the first book of Genesis and you'll read both of those stories and you can always tell someone who in my opinion, is a fraudulent priest, because they'll tell you.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

No, no, no, no.

[Angus Fletcher]

Those stories are actually the same story. They're the same story. And actually, you know, the second story is just maybe adding some details to the first story. No, they're actually totally different stories. They're completely different. They have completely different understandings of how the world works. There's also different stories of the flood in there. The ark is built twice. And you can go back in time. Just like the Greek myths were retold multiple times, these stories were told multiple times over time. And we can go back actually before the Hebrew Bible and find those stories in Babylon, in Akkadia and the Sumerian past. When this was discovered in the late 19th century, it created a crisis because at that time, the Christian church, all its various branches, had based itself on the Hebrew Bible. And it said, this is the beginning of time. Well, if it turns out the Hebrew Bible is itself based on earlier stories, what happens to our stories now? The answer, you could say, is, well, it just shows, right, that we're getting deeper and deeper and deeper into the story. Right? There's no problem here. But instead, they panicked and they said, no, no, no, we've got to figure out how to shore this up. We've got to figure out how to explain this. And out of that came something known as comparative mythology. And comparative mythology is the Idea. It was pioneered by someone, Dr. Fraser, who's a Scottish writer. He wrote something called the Golden Bough. And he said, actually, all stories that all cultures tell are the same story. It's a story of an individual sacrificing themselves so the world can live. He said, this is the story of Christ, and this is also the story of the Fisher King. This is the story of everything. So he said, actually, really, we don't have to worry about this because all stories are the same. And so even though it seems like there are these older stories which are different, and then the Hebrew Bible is also different. No, no, no, no. They're actually all the same story. And out of that came Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey, and the idea that there's a monomyth, the Hero's Journey is a very powerful story. And we should, of course, tell it to the extent that it is powerful and it's useful. But it was created as an attempt essentially, to shore up the discovery that if you read the Bible correctly, what it's inviting you to do is to keep going back. Not to try and find the true story, but to realize there are more stories of the beginning, and the more you trace those stories back, the closer you get to God, and there are more stories to be told in the future. And this is the kind of thing I think which people miss about, say, for example, science or something like that. People often think that science has to be true or religion has to be true, or they think that science is debunking the Bible and so on and so forth. What science is, is it's the attempt to establish everything that can be known so we can more fully embrace the mystery. And there's a lot of people who, because of their faith, their beliefs, find science inconvenient and they deny it. They're actually denying faith. They're denying mystery because actually, faith occurs when you've extinguished all the things that can be explained. And instead of existing in a fake state of mystery where you pretend that something hasn't been explained, you exist in a true state of mystery where you're like, oh, we actually do have an answer for that, but we don't have an answer for a thing before that. And I think that's really the invitation of the Bible is when you read Genesis, not to say, well, which of these two stories is correct? Or how do we synthesize them into a single story? But no, what's the mystery before?

[Interviewer]

It's great. How'd you come to write the new book?

[Angus Fletcher]

I Wrote Primal Intelligence because of this experience with Special Forces. And I had asked the army, when we started doing the research if it was okay for me to start to share the information. And being the army, they said, well, of course, they said, we're a public institution. Feel free to share any of the information you want unless insofar as it compromises our mission. And they were very generous. I didn't have a security clearance and technically there were all sorts of things I could put in the book that I didn't put in the book that I just kind of tried to restrain myself on. And then began this really long journey for me to try and explain to people who hadn't gone through this process, this totally different way of understanding their mind. And part of what's weird about the book is that it's trying to put you back in touch with the way you already knew your mind was. So your mind started out this way and it knows that it's this way,

[Interviewer]

but it's got trained out of you.

[Angus Fletcher]

It's got trained out of you. Yeah. And to go back, you have to start trusting yourself over trusting the system. You have to stop looking at what you're being told and instead be like, no, but actually based on my own primary experience, this is how my brain works.

[Interviewer]

It's interesting that the government is teaching people that.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes, well, the par idea, the paradox of our government and the paradox of the United States army is it's going in both directions at the same time. I mean, it's incredibly systems driven. But at the core of both the army and I think the US Government is the realization that we can only survive with the individual. And so almost out of self preservation, they're constantly going back and recycling that because war to win requires you to unleash ingenuity. So as much as the army always wants to program soldiers, it has to create space for individuals.

[Interviewer]

How did you find all of the tangential examples in the book to support the theories?

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, when people read the book, they'll see it's like Vincent Vanko and like Einstein and Clausewitz and all these kinds of things that are in there. Those are actually not the evidence for any of the claims that I'm making. I mean, the evidence. They're examples.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, but they're great examples because they help us understand the theories.

[Angus Fletcher]

Well, that's what I hope. Yeah, but I don't want people to think that I'm an expert in Einstein or an expert in Marie Curie or anything like that. All these theories are basically built out of my understanding of the brain and special forces. But what I started to do is I started to say to myself, I got into this project because I realized that Shakespeare was really powerful. I bet if I start paying close attention to other folks who have really read Shakespeare, that I'm going to start to find all these really interesting examples. And it turned out, in fact, that was what happened, is that all these folks had read Shakespeare that had their intuition and imagination strengthened. And so once I start to follow that particular historical track, it became very easy to find examples for the book. And the twist at the end of the book is that you've been reading this whole book, which is full of all these apparently different examples, but they're all really just Shakespeare.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about Benjamin Graham and what he did differently to what the experts believed in the time.

[Angus Fletcher]

Benjamin Graham is part of a whole tradition of investing. And one of the things that I started to get fascinated with in the book is how investors work in volatile markets. Because I'm very bad with money. I'm the last person you want to trust with any money that you have. But there are people out there who are really good at making financial decisions in markets, and that's a real test of your common sense. If you're someone who's always able to know when to buy and when to sell a stock, what essentially is happening is you're being able to gauge volatility appropriately. And so I started to go back through the history of investing to figure out, well, who are the folks that figure this out? The first person to figure it out was this guy, Benjamin Graham, who ended up becoming a mentor of Warren Buffett. And what grand decided is that people were going wrong when they were trying to predict the future. So if you talk to many people who are just casual investors, they're trying to predict whether stock will go up or stock will go down. And the thing about the future is you can't predict it. I mean, the future is only predictable if today is the same as yesterday, in which case you're not predicting the future.

[Interviewer]

Right?

[Angus Fletcher]

You're just existing at the same time. So there's actually literally no way to predict. Modern economic theory is a total hoax. There should not be a Nobel Prize given out for modern economics, because it's based on this fallacy that somehow you can predict how markets are going to work. And markets are inherently contested spaces driven by innovations. There's no way to predict them. But we have all these economic theories that are essentially trying to tell governments how to invest in the future. How to run their economies and so forth, which are all based on a total fundamentalist misunderstanding of how life works. They're based on the idea that life is logical, not biological. What did Benjamin Graham do differently? What Benjamin Graham did differently is that he said, well, you can't predict the future, but what you can do is you can determine how valuable something is. So actually, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go around to companies, and I'm going to figure out which companies have a certain value, but according to the stock market.

[Interviewer]

Undervalued.

[Angus Fletcher]

They're undervalued. Yeah. So I'm going to start buying things that I think are undervalued, and then I'm just going to hold onto them for a long period of time, because over time, no matter whether things go up or down, eventually that value is going to be realized. And so he developed that method of investing, and he passed that on to Warren Buffett. And Warren Buffett, of course, makes a lot of money off of that. But Warren Buffett also innovated that in various ways. And one of the ways that Warren Buffett innovated it, which I think was fascinating, is he said, you know, I'm not just investing in a company's value. I'm investing in the people in the company. And I want to go talk to those people, and in particular, I want to see if they have common sense. Because if the people who are running the company have a high degree of common sense, then I know that no matter what happens in the future, they're going to make smart decisions. And so Warren Buffett would invest in companies. He had no idea whatsoever about anything they were making. But he sat down, he would ask them simple questions. So, for example, he would say to them, what would happen if this radical change happens in six months? What are you going to do? What if all the satellites fall out of the sky? What if there's a war with Taiwan? Whatever. And if they said, oh, that's okay, we've got a contingency plan for that, he would say, you're fired, because how could you possibly have a contingency plan for something new? Whereas if they would pause and say, you know what? I hadn't thought about that, but here's something that we could do. You would say, that's great. You've got high common sense. I trust you. So he would do little things like that, test them and see how good they were at essentially activating story thinking. And he would invest in story thinkers, people who had common Sense, because that was the real value. That was the value investment.

[Interviewer]

Do we know how Shakespeare changed from ordinary to extraordinary? It was a period of time where he was an ordinary writer. Unsuccessful.

[Narrator/Host]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

What changed?

[Angus Fletcher]

So I got to be honest with this is my theory of how he changed. So. So yeah, if you get a different Shakespeare scholar. So what we do know for certain is that Shakespeare started out a very ordinary writer. So you go back and read Shakespeare's early plays, like Henry VI or Titus Andronicus or what have you. They are incredibly formulaic. They're pretty much like most of the other plays that are occurring at the time. They don't have any of the sort of distinctive or interesting things that occur in his later plays. There's nothing particularly special or exceptional about them. And then suddenly when he writes a play called Richard iii, everything changes. And Richard iii, we think, was originally another one of his rip offs. And in particular he was ripping off someone called Christopher Marlowe. And Christopher Marlowe is really one of those undiscovered geniuses. I mean, there are folks who know about him, but you don't really talk about him. In high school, Christopher Marlowe pioneered the idea of the innovator on stage. And so Christopher Marlowe read Machiavelli and he said, wouldn't it be extraordinary if we put an innovator on stage? So instead of the plays that existed in the Middle Ages, which were morality plays, and in a morality play, if someone does something good, they get rewarded. If somebody does something bad, they get punished. Carlos said, what if I have a hero who isn't punished or rewarded, but who makes a new future? It's the first example he did of this is Tamerlane. And Tamburlain is an example of someone who's born into poverty and then essentially makes an empire. And in the original version of the telling of this story, whenever it was told in the Middle Ages, they would say, Tamburlaine became great, but because he was a bad person, he died in a horrible manner. And so they would tell in this tragic structure, Marlowe just tells the part to the rise and he ends the play. And so you just have this moment of Tamburlain being like, I am the greatest. And then he did a series of other plays that were like this, that were just incredibly so they were themselves innovative and that they broke from the earlier stories that had been told. But they were focused around innovators. And so Shakespeare looked at this. And Shakespeare, of course, being a terrible plagiarist early in his career, not having terribly Many ideas of his own. Said to himself, I'm going to steal this idea about being an innovator, and I'm going to write a play about someone who kind of breaks all the rules. And that person he chose was Richard iii. And in order to be an innovator, what you essentially have to be is someone who makes new plots. Because a plot is a plant. You gotta be a plotter. You gotta be a schemer. And so Shakespeare had to inhabit the mind of this character, Richard iii, as he overthrew the existing government. And he came up with all these schemes to suppress the rebels who were rising against him. And he summoned this kind of diabolical imagination to create a path through life that no human had ever stepped before. And in the process of writing this character, Shakespeare unlocked his own ability to be a plotter. He essentially became Richard iii. He said to himself, wait a minute, I can do the same thing. I can create a new story for myself. I can create new stories for my audiences. And so you see, from that moment on, it's this radical shift in Shakespeare. Some of those plays that he writes later, like Henry V, are essentially about innovators. Henry V goes on to become the model, of course, of Die Hard and sort of all of these grog stories that we now like to tell ourselves. Because Henry V is anti heroes. Anti heroes, exactly. He goes on to invent the modern romantic comedy and Much Ado About Nothing, where you've got, like, these feisty female characters. He goes on to write create existential tragedy in plays like King Lear. Of course, Hamlet is essentially the beginning of the modern novel, but that was the moment when he had to get into the mind of a plotter and think what it was like to be someone who is changing the world. That's where it seemed to click for him.

[Interviewer]

I wrote down a line from the book Mastering Arcane Formulas that have no Power Outside of the Classroom. Tell me about that line.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, that line came from when I got to college and was totally disillusioned. And so basically, college gives you the illusion of power because you're taught by all these professors who, in the context of college, are incredibly powerful because they're engaged in these ritual acts that have no actual magical function, but they take them very seriously. And so the longer you stay in school, the longer you learn to sort of ape and mimic these professors doing these things. But then the more time you spend in school, the more incompetent you become at life. At a certain point, you start to realize this is happening, and you Face this weird choice. You say, well, do I go all in on the system and do I basically say that I'm going to try and get myself a job as like a banker or something? Or I keep engaging in the role play but I get alienated and alienated from my true self? Or am I going to do the courageous thing and essentially drop out and do my own school? And the pressure against that is so tremendous. Kids today, unlike previous generations, I don't think dropping out of college was such a big deal for previous generations because I don't have college. But now it's almost become the sign that you have intelligence is the fact you have a college degree. And so I think a way to think about university is it's fake magic. It's a Hogwarts that doesn't work. It's all these professors engaged in these elaborate incantations. Word stuff.

[Interviewer]

It's cosplay.

[Angus Fletcher]

It's cosplay, yeah. And you know that on some deep level, but you're too scared to be the person who calls it out because you don't believe that you have the ability to find the real magic, but you do.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. I like that you called it out in the book.

[Angus Fletcher]

Thank you.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about stories.

[Angus Fletcher]

I started out working this neurophysiology lab, like the science lab, basically. And we were like studying the brain and how it works. And I was just totally fascinated by the brain because I was fascinated by other people's brains and how brilliant they were and just the history of how creative people were able to imagine art and science and technology that never existed before and then somehow make it real. And I just kind of wanted to understand that, that power in the human brain. And so I went into the science lab.

[Interviewer]

How do you end up in science? Was that a lifelong passion?

[Angus Fletcher]

No. So what's weird about that is that my dad came here actually because he couldn't make a living in England. And so we ended up having this kind of like very sort of like itinerant lifestyle when we first got here. And like all immigrants. What are you going to be if you're the child of an immigrant? You're going to be a doctor. And so I was like very talented in school at science and math and stuff like that. And so I was fast tracked to do that, even though I didn't find it that interesting. Anyway, I got to university and started working in a science lab. And it just seems like you would think that's the fast track to understanding the brain, is to pull out a brain and then look at it. But it turns out, of course, you learn nothing from looking at a brain. It's still these. It's like all the biological sciences teach us less than artists do. But anyway, I was in that lab and I was like, we have this theory of the brain that it's like a computer and that it has all this information and it's processing all this information. I was like, that's not how my brain works at all. My brain thinks in stories. And I thought a lot back to when I was a child and how the most fascinating moments of my life have been when I encountered started a new story. And then I realized that I always wanted this power myself to be able to create a story. And I always thought that was like the real gift. And I sort of wanted to understand that. And what I started slowly starting to realize is that the human brain thinks in story. And the unique power of the human brain, which is kind of the gift, is the ability to come up with a story that's never been told before. And all of us have that power and that possibility and that comes to us from life. If you look out in life, if you go into a forest, no two trees are the same. Right? Everything branches. Same thing with stories. Two stories are the same. They all branch. And so I wanted to understand that. And that's the opposite of how most academics think about story. They think about story as being archetypes and eternal and formulas and whatnot. And so I sort of came at it from the other direction, which is I wanted to understand what makes every story unique and where it is that each storyteller gets their unique story from.

[Interviewer]

Where did you start to look at that?

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, that's right. This is a great question. Yeah, well, and I think again, it's important to say that I myself like a very limited in my own creative faculties. And so a lot of times this is me sort of like going around trying to understand something that is a bit alien to me. And so I often do it in a very idiosyncratic way. But basically, who's the greatest storyteller of all time? It's Shakespeare. I should go get a PhD in Shakespeare, because obviously people who study Shakespeare for a living must really understand story. And then I got to the literature department at Yale and discovered none of them had any idea how stories work or how Shakespeare worked or how anything worked. And so I just spent a few years. The great thing about being a graduate student is you can be locked in a room by yourself and just be left alone. And so I spent all this time just like reading Shakespeare, rereading Shakespeare, rereading Shakespeare, and didn't understand a word of it, didn't understand any of it. Talked to actors, I understood that they understood Shakespeare, but I didn't understand it. And then eventually my first job was at Stanford and I got connected to Pixar. I realized to myself, like, these are people who not only understand story, but they understand to create new stories. And that started to fascinate me, because what I started to realize is if you can create new stories on command, you can change everything. Because a story is the future. Create a new story of tomorrow. Tomorrow changes. And so I wanted to go in there and actually just hang out with the folks at Pixar and understand how they were creating these new stories. And when I went in there, I discovered they had a method. And they were very open about their method. And they explained their method exactly to me. And I realized that that was exactly the method that Shakespeare must have used. And that was the moment where I started to understand story for the first time.

[Interviewer]

Tell me how stories connect us.

[Angus Fletcher]

Every story is an opportunity for us to create a story together. That's really what it is. And for a story to work between the two of us, I always have to be listening to you to be ensuring that you're on board with the story. And I also have to be open to you to engage with the story and take it to the next place. And that's why theater is the kind of primary origin for storytelling. Because what happens in theater is first of all, of course, the writer gives his story over to the actors, and the actors each take part of the story and so on and so forth. And so it becomes that kind of a creative activity. But also when you watch an actor on stage, they have to forget the future parts of the story and discover them from the other actors in the moment. Otherwise it doesn't work as a play. It just seems like a formula. But if the actors are good and they're able in the moment to discover the story and then discover the story and the other characters, then they build the story together. Because what a story is, is it's essentially a single direction. When you come together in a story, you combine in an act of beauty in a going in a direction. And bad stories are my attempt to convince you that my story is correct and force you into my direction. But good stories are us co creating that path together.

[Interviewer]

What did they teach you about stories in school? That was not correct.

[Angus Fletcher]

So we had a big book. I remember When I was a kid, 12 years old or so, the book that I love was the Book of Myths. And they tell you like, there are these authoritative myths. And so they say, this is the story of Helen and Troy, or this is the story of Medusa or whatever. And you're like, oh, this is what everyone in the ancient world thought. And then if you pull another book of myths off the shelf at your library, you realize that the myths are different and they tell a different story of Medusa. Wait, how is that possible? Like, how are there two stories in Medusa? And what they try and convince you of in school is that there's a single version of the story, when in fact, these stories were oral and every time they were performed, they were recreated. And the thing about story that I think people fundamentally don't understand is they think that story comes entirely from the storyteller, but story actually comes from the interaction between the storyteller and the audience, and that's actually what produces the story. And you'll notice this when you work with a good storyteller is they're always looking for the audience response. When they're new at it, they're often looking for it explicitly. But the better they get, the more they can just feel that a story is interesting or not. And when they feel that a story is interesting, they start to lean into the details that the audience likes, and then the story grows in the space between the two of them. And so once you realize that story is actually a living thing and that it grows and becomes new as a result of this, this interaction, you then start to realize, well, of course, there were never any eternal myths, because the point was to come together and create something new. The point was to engage in that primordial act of life, which is to kind of make something like the gods did. And so when you're in school, you're taught the opposite. When writing was invented, stories got fixed and then they got put down, and then they became the authoritative version of the story. And then all these scholars had nothing to do, so they said, let's analyze the story story, and let's see what it means. And then, of course, they come up with these idea of themes. So there's no themes. Themes are made up. This is something that scholars came up with and they argue about, what does it mean? There's no meaning either. Stories don't have a meaning. Stories are much more profound than meaning. They connect with you in the way that your brain thinks, and your brain doesn't think in terms of meaning. Your Brain thinks in terms of life. And what does life do? Life is action. Life is doing things. It's experiencing things. And stories tap in on that primordial level. I think another way of saying this is like what happens in school is what biologists do is they see a butterfly, and to study the butterfly, they kill it and put it on a pin, and then they try and analyze it if they're going to understand corpse. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And this is always how scientists work is they love something and then they murder it and then try and understand what it is.

[Interviewer]

Is there a relationship between corpse and corpus?

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes, it's exactly the same word. It means body.

[Interviewer]

Oh, wow.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, yeah. And that's actually brilliant. You might be the first person in history to have realized that actually, what literary scholars have done is they've turned literature into a corpus, which is a corpse. That's exactly right. It's like a dead thing.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about unseeing old rules.

[Angus Fletcher]

What we do when we live is we try and control our environment as a way of feeling like, okay, I know what's going to happen to me in the morning. I know how I'm going to survive. And so we start to create these rules for ourselves, but also we start to think that, oh, these rules, I've discovered, actually apply to the world. And then we start to think, oh, the world has to behave this way. And if it doesn't behave this way, somehow something has gone wrong, there's been a problem or a tragedy. And so what happens in those cases essentially is we're fixing a story, because really, what a rule is, is it's telling you how something should do something. So it's telling you what an action is. And the story is just a series of things that are happening. So rules are stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and about the world. When we do that, we forget that the point of a story is to be created as opposed to be followed. And so actually, the key to having a joyful life is to embrace the act of making rules that you then don't follow. But in the moment of making the rule, you're following the rule, but you then move on beyond the rule. And so that's what I think unseeing old rules is. And we also have this thing where we grow up in this thing known as culture. And culture is basically stories. And the way that the keepers of culture think of themselves is it's their job to make each new generation follow the stories that they followed. So this idea essentially, that I'm going to Program you. You're going to read these books, you're going to read these sacred texts. And once you read these sacred texts, I'm going to explain to you exactly what the rules of the sacred text are. So there's no confusion. But each generation has to make its own way. And so the other thing is you as an individual constantly have to keep reinventing your rules. But we also have to create a culture in which each group that goes after us unsees the rules that we have given them and makes their own.

[Interviewer]

Seems like it's the only way that anything new ever happens is when you accept that the old rule wasn't actually true. Up until the time of the Wright brothers, flying was impossible. But then as soon as someone can fly, now flying is possible.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's right.

[Interviewer]

And it seems like that's the case with everything.

[Angus Fletcher]

It is the case with everything. And that's the difference between human imagination and, say, the way that a computer operates. So, I mean, one of the things that I'm most obsessed with is the fact that human intelligence is different from artificial intelligence. And the Wright brothers is a great example of that, because the Wright brothers, they fly. In 1903, the previous year, Lord Kelvin, the world's smartest man, had proven mathematically that it was impossible to fly. And the reason he'd done this is because he'd gone over all of the previous examples of flights, he'd analyzed all the probabilities, all of the numbers, and he's established this ironclad rule, which is that there will never be human flight. And of course, what did the Wright brothers do is they broke that. How did they break that? Well, because their dad allowed them to skip school and stay home and read storybooks. And as a result of reading those storybooks, they spark that thing that humans have, which is possibility. So computers think in probability, humans think impossibility. What's the difference? Probability is based on things that have happened before. That's how you calculate it. What is possibility? It's something that's never happened before. And that's the kernel of story. Every story, essentially, is, how do I do the possible? And when you're working with someone who's a real storyteller, their brain is rejecting all the stories they've heard before and reaching for that space that's outside those rules, but somehow still works. I mean, that's the extraordinary thing about the plane when the Wright brothers, it actually flew. And the extraordinary thing about a story that works is it flies, but it's never been done before.

[Interviewer]

Are there any rules of story that. That are helpful in writing stories?

[Angus Fletcher]

What's helpful is when you make rules for yourself as the writer and become enough of a master of those rules to remember why you created them and therefore why you can get rid of them. So when you work with a young writer, they have a very hard time disciplining themselves because their head is full of noise. All these other people's stories, and the thing about all these different stories that you've inherited is they all follow different rules, and so they confuse your brain and scatter your intention. What are the two things that your brain needs to be creative? It needs wonder, and it needs beauty. And wonder is the openness to life and the realization that there's just this vast, untapped possibility.

[Interviewer]

Wonder includes what we don't understand. Yes, that's a key component.

[Angus Fletcher]

That is exactly right. Yes. That's why wonder often turns into awe, because awe is just a sense of being so overwhelmed. So there's this fascinating duality in wonder where there's both passive and active wonder. And so passive wonder is when you're like, wow. And you're so overwhelmed that it pauses you. But active wonder is when you're like, I wonder why that happened. And then you start to kind of dig into it. And if wonder is so strong that it stops you from asking why, that it stops you from turning it into something active, then it suspends you potentially forever in a state of awe. So that's exactly right. That's what wonder is. It's that sense of something that's bigger than me, the mystery, the miracle, why I am alive, on some level, the thing that is bigger than me. But at the same time, as an artist, you can't just have that. You also have to have beauty, because beauty is your judgment. Beauty is the thing that you are like. That's right for me. And the challenge as a creative is to shift between those two modes, because you have to be totally open in wonder, but then in beauty, you have to be totally ruthless. And you have to say, that might be right for somebody else, but it's not right for me. And the problem for young storytellers is they've been barded with other people's stories, and they've existed as consumers. And as a consumer, you don't understand that. Actually, you have to be very precise and specific and say, this is what is better. That's your job as an artist, is to say, these two things are both good, but this thing is better. Whereas your job as consumers, you just Appreciate everything because you're being bombarded with it.

[Interviewer]

And another artist might say, this other thing is better, and that's right for them.

[Angus Fletcher]

And that's right for them. Exactly.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

There's not one answer.

[Angus Fletcher]

There is not one answer, but every artist has their own answer. I would say both young artists and sort of artists who are kind of late in their career have a potential to get disorganized. And early in their career, they're getting disorganized because they have so many different influences and they haven't really found their voice yet. And a huge part of what you have to do is you have to sit with them and pull away all the stuff that isn't them and then hone on the thing that is them. And then they're very fragile about that thing because it's not fully developed yet, because it's what's unique to them. And so anytime you have something genuinely new, it always comes out half formed. But you, as a person who created it, think, oh, it's deformed. And actually, what you have to do is as the person who's kind of enabling that process is no more of that, More of that. And so then as a young writer, you start to find your voice by identifying what's unique about your sense of beauty. And it's a very scary process because it's never happened before. And the thing that you find beautiful doesn't exist. And so you feel both this overwhelming sense of excitement and also terror because you're like, well, this is my true self, but what if I get judged? And then everyone else is like, this is terrible. Then as an artist in the later stages of your career, what's happened is you've had success, like deep success, but then you have to change. You have to grow. You can't stay in the thing that made you successful. Your sense of beauty has to evolve, and you know that, but you don't know how to find it again. And so you become very susceptible to outside voices and whatever's happening in the moment right now, and you're like, oh, I should go and do that thing, and I should go and do this other thing. And so you then lose yourself again. You get disorganized. And the key is always to help the artist in that position clarify their sense of beauty. And then once they have it totally clear, they can then open themselves up to awe. And the awe powers the beauty. But a lot of times when writers get lost, they open themselves to awe too fast, and then they get overwhelmed, and it's like their mind is blown out.

[Interviewer]

What is primal intelligence?

[Angus Fletcher]

Primal intelligence is the ability to be smart with very little information. And this is how the brain evolved. So the neuron, the thing that's kicking in our heads, over 500 million years old, half a billion years old. It emerged at this moment known as the Cambrian Explosion, which is when all this animal life started proliferating across the planet. And what's totally fascinating about this moment of life is, up to that point, there had been so little life that it could just exist. And so it just bobbed across the ocean. It was just in this state of perfect tranquility. But then, as more and more life starts to happen, it starts to be thrown into contact with other life and there's less resources than it needs. And so the life has to start to figure out, okay, how do I start to become more active? Like, I can't just sit here and soak in the sun and, you know, grow. I actually have to start to fight for life. And this is sort of the beginning of when what's primordial to the artist? I gotta. I gotta fight for my vision. I gotta fight for my story. So the fight starts there, and two forms of intelligence kind of emerge simultaneously to help in the fight. The first was vision. And vision allowed you to see food. So instead of just kind of bobbing around, you'd be like, oh, okay, the food's there. And so you would go to the food. And vision is a huge computational process. It involves sort of inducting data. It's very high information. It's how computers still run today. That's why all of AI runs essentially on these circuit boards which were invented for graphics.

[Interviewer]

And it can't see. Interesting two sides.

[Angus Fletcher]

That is right.

[Narrator/Host]

Yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

That is totally right. Yeah. Well, what's fascinating, though, about the way the computers work is that even though they can't see, they still think in symbols. And so we as humans can almost see for them. But language is symbolic. And so computers, even though they're not aware visually, are thinking in symbols, and that's their whole consciousness. The other kind of intelligence evolved because if you're in a sea full of creatures who can see, one of the things they're seeing, it's you, and so they're going to try and eat you. And so you have to figure out how to an academy. And that's this moment where you have to do something which breaks vision. And because vision is logical, it's based on symbolic logic. The thing that computers do, this other part of intelligence emerged, which was how do I do something that logic cannot anticipate? And so logic anticipates probability. I have to take impossibility. And so that's where this huge engine of essentially creativity comes from. And this is other part of the brain.

[Interviewer]

What can I do? That's not the obvious thing.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's exactly right. And that part of the brain, that possibility, thinking, that's primal intelligence. And out of that grows things like intuition. So intuition is your ability to spot something that is totally new because life is always changing. And what that means is there's always a leading edge of change. There's always the first moment where change happens. And can you spot that? And that's your intuition. And then imagination picks up on that and says, where could that go? For a long time, we were taught that intuition was a pattern match. So I don't know if you've ever read Daniel Kahneman or thinking. And that's how computers think. So computers have a version of intuition, which is essentially a pattern match. But what's unique about human intelligence is our intuition works the opposite. It's seeing the exception to the pattern.

[Interviewer]

We need a different word.

[Angus Fletcher]

We do.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah. Do you want to coin it?

[Interviewer]

No. Okay, maybe it'll happen. But it feels like when the same word means two different things. Totally different things, two different systems.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes.

[Narrator/Host]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

It's a problem of the language. Yes.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah. No, I totally agree with you. Well, I'll put that on my to do list.

[Interviewer]

Think about it.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah. Unfortunately, I'm not a creative. See, I only work with creatives. I don't actually create things myself.

[Interviewer]

But do you think of what you do as creative?

[Angus Fletcher]

No.

[Interviewer]

Really?

[Angus Fletcher]

No.

[Interviewer]

I'm surprised.

[Angus Fletcher]

No, No. I don't think of it at all. No, no. Because in a way, if I was creative, it would make me incapable of doing my job because my job is to see things that are creative. You know, and if I was myself creative.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Angus Fletcher]

I'd always be focused on what I was doing as opposed to being able to be open and experience. And I think, actually one of the reasons I've been the first person to do a lot of things that I've done, why I'm the first person in history to do some of these things, is because I'm moving outside of my own zone of competence. Creatives tend to hang out with other people that are creative, and people who are like me, who are not creative, tend to hang out with people who are not creative. And it's very rare that one person moves. But creatives are very accepting of people who are not creative.

[Interviewer]

Do you remember how it became clear to you that we think in stories?

[Angus Fletcher]

I worked at the University of Michigan Medical School. I was building mutant neurons.

[Interviewer]

What's that?

[Angus Fletcher]

The way we're taught to think about the brain now is psychology. And the way that psychology works is basically a bunch of people get into a room together and they say, what would be a logical way for the brain to think? And then they make all these things, and then they run an experiment on a thousand people. And then they take the statistical average of how all those people think, and they're like, that's how people think.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Think.

[Angus Fletcher]

And so that's how almost all the stuff you look in a textbook is based on these statistical derivations of the mean the average person. I worked in this lab that did totally the opposite. This lab said, no, no, no, no, no. We're not going to study thousands and thousands of brains. We're going to study a single neuron. We're going to look at one brain cell. And then what we're going to do is we're going to go in there and change one tiny thing about that neuron and see how it affects how it works. And so I was in this crazy lab where they'd started out in order to do this research at the beginning, they had to find a neuron that was large enough for them to experiment on. So they started working on giant squids. And so they'd gone to, like, Hawaii and gotten these huge, enormous neurons, and they were working on them. One of the things that people don't realize about science is how nuts it is. And I think there aren't enough crazy people going to science anymore. Science has become very bureaucratic, and you've got to get your grant funding. And how do you get your grant funding is you got to, you know, write something that appeals to all these other people who are reading the grants. But the really amazing scientific breakthroughs always come from folks who just seem like complete lunatics. I mean, Einstein is working at, like, a patent office. Marie Kreese, like, working in a shed. Darwin's working in his greenhouse. Total lunatic. So anyway, I was very lucky. I ended up. It was almost like a magical experience that I ended up in this lab. It was one of these moments in life. You're like, oh, maybe this is actually meant to happen. So I got to college, and I'd spent all of high school hating school. Did you enjoy high school? Were you, like, someone who liked school? No. So I hated it. Totally hated it. Hated.

[Interviewer]

Total waste of time.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah. It's a total complete waste of time. And there's also so much like I just felt so degraded the entire time, you know, because I felt like I was either doing things that I didn't want to do and then being affirmed for them. And then I felt like I was being alienated from myself, you know, or I was like fighting against the system and then being shamed and told that I was an idiot. You know, I totally hated it. But everyone kept saying, angus, Angus, just hang in there, hang in there. I'll get to college. It'll be great. And I got to college and I was like, wait, this is like high school.

[Interviewer]

Same thing.

[Angus Fletcher]

Like the same thing, you know? And I was basically about to drop out after a week. And I remember I called my mom on the phone, I called her up, I was like, mom, I was like, I'm gonna drop out. She's like, what? What are you talking about? And I think she wanted to basically yell at me, you know, and just be like, whatever. But instead she said this really smart thing to me, which she was like, hey. She's like, do you think there's one person on that campus you could learn something from? And I was like, yeah, probably. And she goes, go find them. And then she hung up.

[Interviewer]

Smart mom.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, really smart mom.

[Narrator/Host]

Right.

[Angus Fletcher]

So that's why I was like, what is it that I want to learn? I want to understand the brain, whatever. So I went like, walking around campus, like trying to get into basically a brain lab just to talk to somebody, teach them about the brain. And I walked further and further. Was like wandering further and further because of course all the labs are secured and locked. And this is before they allowed undergraduates into the labs. Now it's kind of a thing. But back then they didn't. And I finally ended up at the medical school. And the medical school was not only locked, but it's a secure facility because they do animal experiments. So you're like not allowed into the building. They have chimps and all kinds of things in there. But just as I was walking up to the medical school, this guy was walking out of the medical school and he just opened the door and he held it for me and I just walked right in. And I just walked up to the top floor and just walked into this lab. And they assumed that since I was there, I must have had permission to be there. But no. And so I ended up as a 17 year old working in this lab, just through serendipity and my mom kind of poking me and. Yeah, and I Get in there. And they're like, yeah, we make mutant neurons. And I remember my first day, they were like, go get this animal and execute it. And I was like, what? And that experience actually turned me into a vegetarian. But I continued to work on animals because I felt like we were doing something that was important. Whether we were or we weren't, I don't know. But to go back to your question is we were researching how these animals thought, and we had this idea that the neuron was like a transistor, and it was on or it was off, and this was kind of how everything was working. And I was like, then neuron is so much more complicated and beautiful and interesting than a transistor. I mean, part of what's powerful about a transistor is its simplicity and its elegance. And when you study the history of the transistor, you realize all these brilliant minds kept making it simpler and simpler and simpler and simpler. As it got simpler and simpler and simpler, it got more and more powerful because it scale. Whereas with the human brain, we developed the power, that power of a transistor hundreds of millions of years ago, and the brain got more complicated. Well, why? Was it stupid? No, because it needed to do more than a transistor. And I started to realize there's more going on here, and it's not just about that. And then I just start to think to myself, like, how is it that I think.

[Interviewer]

Were you the only one thinking this?

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah. Not only was the only one thinking this, when I shared my thoughts with people, they genuinely thought I was totally nuts. A lot of times, if you're a smart kid, people are both encouraging, but they're also a little bit like, don't be too smart because you're going to go in a weird direction. Got to keep you on the tracks. And I've spent, and really, until the last five years of my life, almost everyone who mentored me was disappointed in me because they're like, you're so smart, and you've totally wasted it doing this crazy stuff. So anyway, I was in the lab and I was like, how do I think? I think it's stories, because what's the first thing I do when I meet someone is I ask them who they are, where they came from, and so on and so forth. And, you know, when I get up in the morning, what's the first thing I do is I think about what I'm going to do that day. And what is that? That's a plan. What's another word for plan? It's a plot. What's another word for plot? It's story. Right. So I'm thinking story all the time. And then I sort of realized, well, you know, the thing about stories is that they're really low information. And in fact, if you do have a lot of information, it's like, too much. Like, if you watch a bad movie, it has too many plot lines in it, too much happening, like, whoa, keep it simple. So I was like, oh, I think maybe that's the key, because the human brain evolved in these environments where there was not a lot of information. How do you be smart with not a lot of information? Well, you have story, because story can be really powerful with not a lot of information. Unlike a computer. Needs a ton of data to be smart. And story, also, unlike a computer, which is taking all that data, synthesizing it and finding the truth, story is saying, well, what could happen? And that's really the power of it. And that's why it's so effective with little information, is it's not trying to predict the future, which is what a computer does. It's trying to make the future. And what it's trying to say is, what is possible that hasn't been done before? And then how do I act faster than everybody else around me to make that happen? So this is kind of what I started thinking in the lab. And what we did is we, in order to do these experiments, is we work with radioactivity, and we also work with various kinds of weird toxins and other kinds of things. So in my one hand, I had this scorpion venom. And the whole thing about the scorpion venom is it's instantly lethal. It immediately just freezes the neuron. And so the lab director was like, whatever you do, don't inject yourself. The scorpion venom.

[Interviewer]

Like, okay, does it kill you? Yeah, it kills you?

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it immediately stops that neuron from functioning.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah. And the thing about the lab stuff is it's very purified. Now, I have to be honest and say that they had a crash medical team there in the basement, so maybe they could have saved you. I don't know. But, like, the point was try not to inject yourself with scorpion venom.

[Interviewer]

So it seems like a reasonable request.

[Angus Fletcher]

So I had that. In one hand, I had the scorpion venom, and then in the other hand, I had radioactive tracer. Because that's how you see what the neuron is doing, is you inject this radioactive tracer, and that allows you to follow things. So I had these two pipettes, and I was Sitting there at this lab desk. And it was like 11 o' clock at night, basically. And I was like, don't inject yourself with the scorpion found. Don't inject yourself with scorpion venom. Don't inject yourself with scorpion venom. And so, of course, what do I do? I inject myself with radioactivity, right? Right. So I could have become Spider man, but instead what happened is I inject myself with the reactivity. I'm like, oh, my God, like, now what? What?

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Right.

[Angus Fletcher]

And so they have this like, emergency, like, giant metal triangle thing on the wall. You pull in case of emergency. So I ran over to that and I pulled that. And then all these sirens go off because it's late at night. I'm basically the only person in the lab. And a couple folks run in and they're wearing these basically hazmat suits. Like, what's happening? Like, I injected myself with radioactivity. Like, oh, my God. You know, and they basically, they took off my jeans and a couple other articles of clothing that were flaring up. Because I basically injected myself my thigh, and they'd done some scans of me, all this kind of stuff. I'm like, okay. They're like, you know, go through this bath, this hot wash, went through all these things. And they say, okay, you're clear to go home. I'm like, well, can I get my jeans back? And they're like, no, you can't have your jeans back. We're destroying your jeans. They're radioactive. And I was like, well, how am I getting home? Well, you've got some shoes and you've got a shirt on. You can go home on your shirt. So I was walking home that night, basically just thinking to myself, oh, my God, this is the dumbest thing. The dumbest thing, the dumbest thing. And I was thinking to myself, but you know what? It will make a great story. And it's when I thought that. That I was like, huh, Maybe that's what the brain is doing. Maybe what the brain is constantly doing is it's constantly taking negative experiences and then finding possibilities in them. Because that's the basis of almost your best stories is you're in the middle of, like, you plan something and it goes to hell, right? And then you're like, but good story in it, you know? And that was. I was like, well, maybe on an even more fundamental level, right? If a story is a plot, is a plan, then maybe every time things go bad, what the brain is doing is instead of being like, oh, it's over, the brain is being like, no, what's the possibility here? What's the story? What can I do? And so that was what I thought on that night, home from the lab, and I came back in the next day, and they're like, you really have injected yourself with radioactivity, man. That's totally nuts. I was like, no, I think there might be something in this. And so for years, I just kept coming back to this again and again and again, and everyone was like, it's totally nuts. So the brain is a transistor. It's a computer. It's not thinking stories.

[Interviewer]

Why do you think they want to dumb it down so much like that?

[Angus Fletcher]

I think that a lot of people go into science because they want the answer as opposed to they want the mystery. And I think, first of all, they want the answer because they have that impatience in them and they don't really realize the joy is the process, but they also want the answer because that's power in science. If you're the person who has the answer, if you're the person who can say this is the truth, then you get put at the top of the pyramid. If you're the person who your claim becomes the truth. If they claim that it's the truth, then you get the Nobel Prize. So actually, the paradox of science is you have all these people who really aren't interested in what science really is, which is the all, which is the mystery, which is the confrontation with the unknown. So you have people who are trying to get as fast as possible to an answer, and there really is no answer. So I think that was it. And I think also it was such a weird idea for them, because story really, for most of the 20th century, story has been synonymous with bias. So if you talk to an economist or someone like that, they're like, oh, story. Got to get rid of story. It causes emotions, and emotions are dangerous. No, no, what you want is reason. You want facts, you want data. And so I think that the idea that somehow the human brain would be thinking in story was threatening to them on an almost existential level, because it was saying to them, you're never going to be intelligent. Because what is story? Story is myth. Story is made up. And that's true.

[Interviewer]

That's how the world works.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes, Turns out that's right. That's how the world works. And that's actually why humans are brilliant and why every child is a genius, because a child is thinking in story, and they don't have to have the answer.

[Interviewer]

It said that fiction has to make sense. So it's less radical than the real world, because in the real world, most things don't make sense. Whereas in fiction, the story has to make sense. That's right.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's right.

[Interviewer]

To be believable.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's right. Truth is stranger than fiction.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, right. This is one of the things I learned from reading Shakespeare. And I remember I was reading Richard iii, which is one of his early plays, and this is the play where he really discovered his voice and he became incredible. And there's a moment in the middle of the play where this archbishop goes off to get strawberries from his garden. And I'm like, what is an archbishop doing with strawberries? And I actually had this moment. I was like, were there even strawberries? I guess I must have been, but it was like the most bizarre moment. And I was like, what is that about? And I went and I looked, and it turned out there's a historical chronicle and that actually happens. And of all the people who had told the story before Shakespeare, none of them had put that detail in because they're like, it's too weird. It doesn't belong on the stage. And actually, what Shakespeare started doing is he started going through all these history books and picking up the things that were weird and putting those in the place.

[Interviewer]

I didn't know that.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, yeah. That's what's great about Shakespeare is it's full of the unique and the extraordinary and the exceptional. And then once he started doing that with the history, because he broke out in the history plays, once he started out with the history plays, he started doing that with real life. He would look at the people around him and be like, what about that person who's stranger than fiction? And then I'm going to tell a story where you start to understand why that thing that seems so improbable is actually alive. And so, classic example of this Hamlet begins with this ghost. And then in any other play, it would be like, okay, let's explain. Where did the ghosts come from? You know, how do ghosts work? What's the magic system of ghosts?

[Narrator/Host]

Right.

[Angus Fletcher]

Instead, the character Hamlet shows up and all his friends are like, oh, what's this ghost? What's this ghost? And Hamlet's line is, as a stranger, give it welcome. In other words, because it's weird, embrace it. And that's life, you know? And the entire play is a doubling down on that. And I remember when I was in school, the reason I hated that play is because I didn't understand it, because the teachers kept trying to explain the play. To you, they could be like, well, this is why Hamlet does it. And then they would say, well, let's have a debate about whether Hamlet is insane or not insane. And of course, the reality of the play is that you can't even have a conversation about insanity because insanity implies a normal. And the point of the play is there is normal. That was Shakespeare's genius. And that ended up being why I studied Shakespeare, is I had this moment. It's another one of these moments where, depending on how you think about me, you either think, oh, that was clever, or that was totally insane. But I had this moment where I was like, all the people that I like and admire in history who did amazing things read Shakespeare. Like Vincent Van Gogh is reading Shakespeare. Marie Cree is reading Shakespeare. Darwin is reading Shakespeare. Lincoln is reading Shakespeare. Tesla, the original Tesla, he's reading Shakespeare. All these people are reading Shakespeare, and they're crediting him.

[Interviewer]

Must have some secret.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes, exactly. Right? There must be something there. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, I want to know that. And that really is the secret, is that he understood story, and he understood that story comes from a thing that is stranger than fiction. And it comes from taking that thing and then telling what happens next. Because from the point of view of the audience, the audience isn't sitting there analyzing it. So what an academic does is they pull out a fact and they analyze to death. Whereas the audience wants to see something move. And so if you take something that's totally weird they've never seen before, and then you move it, they're fascinated because you're like, oh, well, of course it can work, because it is working. It's moving. And then where does it move next? And the whole gift of every story is to start with something that the audience has never heard before. That's weird, that's anomalous, and then make it move.

[Interviewer]

So it's all about change.

[Angus Fletcher]

It is about change. And a lot of stories are also about a particular kind of change, I think, which I would call growth, because change on its own can just be chaos. So if you think about what happens in the mind of a computer, for example, computer creativity is very different from human creativity. And one of the reasons it's different is because computers are random. So as a computer, you can generate all sorts of just kind of random things which are constantly changing, constantly changing. Whereas what growth is is it's something becoming more itself over time. So it's a very specific kind of change. And if you think about, like, the most basic kind of story, what's the most basic kind of story, it starts out with the hero. What is the hero? The hero is the weirdo. The hero is the person who is unlike her society. She's different. She's an anomaly. Does she change? Does she get forced to be like society? No, she doubles down on what's unique about herself. And so she grows into herself. And that's the kind of primordial story, that story of growth of, like, the weird thing that gets weirder and in getting weirder, becomes beautiful.

[Interviewer]

And the computer doesn't grow into itself.

[Angus Fletcher]

No, no, no. So computers are fascinating, and computers are very smart, but basically, you know, computers take this one tiny aspect of human intelligence and scale it. And so I think there's a kind of awe that you as a human have in interacting with a computer because you see a part of yourself in it that's so much more than yourself. And it's kind of amazing, but it's not yourself. So essentially, the computer is invented in 1943, and it's funded by the United States Army. And the first computer is something called eniac. It's this huge thing. It's built in downtown Philadelphia and kicking around the army at this time was this guy, his name is JP Gilford, and he had been tasked with the army to crack the secret of creativity. Why did the army do it? Well, the army did it because at that time, the army had just launched the Air Force. So it was called the Army Air Force. At the time, the army, actually, they purchased the first Wright Brothers plane. And they were the leaders in flight. And the Army's always the leading edge. And they invented Silicon Valley. The army did all this kind of stuff. The army, they've got these planes and they start to notice, hey, some of our pilots are doing better than other pilots. What's that about? And of course, the army being the army, their initial theory was the pilots doing better must be following the rule book. So to your point about old rules, right? Let's drill them in, all the rules. And so they drilled all the young pilots in the rules. And of course, what happens is you get shot down much faster when you're following the rules, because then the other guy knows what you're going to do. And actually, the key to being a pilot is to invent a new story, is to invent a new flight path, is to be able to see a way to move your plane through space that no one else has seen before. And so then all of a sudden, the Army's like, wait a minute. Being a good pilot is the opposite of being programmed. It's being creative. We need to crack the code of creativity so that we can beat the Germans and finish this war. So they called up this Colonel J.P. guilford. They said to him, Colonel Guilford, your job is to crack the secret of creativity.

[Interviewer]

What his background was.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, so he was a psychologist at the University of Southern California, actually. And the amazing thing about World War II is that everybody joined the army. It was this one moment, they were like, whatever you did, the army needs you. And so he was pulled out of his lab, he interacted with Eniac and his mind was blown because this is the first computer. And he was like, oh my goodness, this is so smart. This is so intelligent. And he became convinced that all intelligence at some point be reduced to computer thinking. So he was kind of at the leading edge of this idea. And so he said, creativity must be a computer protocol. And he came up with this idea that creativity is these two processes. One's called divergent thinking, one's called convergent thinking.

[Interviewer]

And what are those?

[Angus Fletcher]

So divergent thinking is randomly associating things. And so the way the computer does this is the computer thinks in sets. So you can have a set of colors and a set of animals and you just randomly mix and match them. So you could have yellow dolphin and blue turtle or whatever, this kind of stuff. So that's creating this huge cloud of random possibilities. And then convergent thinking is identifying high probability options in the random space you've just created. And so if you've ever been in a business meeting, they do this thing called brainstorming. These brainstorming sessions. I've heard of it, yeah. So they get on a whiteboard and they say to everyone, say something random, right? And then everyone writes all these random ideas on the.

[Interviewer]

Is that how it works?

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes, that's how it works. They're business people, so it's not that random, but they're as random as they could be. And then they say, okay, now we're going to draw a line through everything that we can't do. And so the idea then is you knock out all of the low probability things that you've just created and you do convergent thinking. And of course, when you draw a line through all the things you can't do, you of course eliminate all the interesting ideas, which is why brainstorming sessions don't really work and why business is so boring. But that's the idea, is you have this huge cloud of random possibilities, diverge and then converge. You find the high probability ones. So on so. And this is how generative AI works. This process is called ideation. And it's different from how we imagine usually because we use imagination, which is a narrative process, as opposed to this process. So computers have this infinite ability to be random, but it doesn't lead to genuine creativity, because as a human, you have to be able to see where it's going. You have to be able to see

[Interviewer]

the growth, the point of view.

[Angus Fletcher]

The point of view, exactly. Yeah. In the same way that a synthesizer can be incredibly powerful in the hand of a musician, AI can be incredibly powerful in the hand of a creative. But if you're expecting it to be

[Interviewer]

creative for you, it doesn't do that.

[Angus Fletcher]

It doesn't do that.

[Interviewer]

So what will humans always be better at than computers?

[Angus Fletcher]

A lot of things. But anytime you need to do anything that doesn't involve a lot of information. So anytime you talk to a human and they talk about gut instinct or something like that, or common sense, these are all kind of low information processes. But I think the key one, from an artistic point of view is beauty. So beauty has to be both new and specific. And computers think in lists, so they're unable to identify a single top priority. That's why if you challenge a computer, it'll change its mind, whereas if you challenge an artist, they won't. You know, like, artists will go to their grave basically being like, like, it's got to be this way, you know? And so as a human, your ability to say that specific thing is more beautiful than anything else. And I would die for that. That's what creates art. And, you know, outside of art, it's also what creates, you know, real science. Any kind of social movement is people being like, that's the way the world has to be.

[Interviewer]

How do you think we come to know what's beautiful?

[Angus Fletcher]

I think each of us is born with a different sense of beauty, and we have to learn to cultivate that. And I think the way you learn to cultivate that is you go through the world, particularly as a young person, very open, and you start to pull your influences towards you, and you start to realize that some things are influencing you more than others. And you start to realize, okay, I actually kind of like this thing a little bit more than that thing. I like them both, but I like this thing more. And you go into the thing that you like and you start to develop that discrimination even more powerfully. You sort of say, these are the things I really like. So if I like a particular musician, this is the song that I Like the most. And this is the part of the song that I like the most. Like, that's the thing that I like.

[Interviewer]

And no one could tell you you're wrong for thinking that.

[Angus Fletcher]

No one can tell you you're wrong because you're right. And you start to develop that very, very powerfully. And then the next step is once you've developed that ability to discriminate based on the things that other people are doing, you start to realize, hey, you know what? I like that thing that person did, but it's still missing something. I've got to find the thing that it's missing. And then you start to create around that. And it's not random. You're growing in the same way that a tree is stretching out branches that are all connected, you're branching. And then some of those branches, you're like, those are more right than others. Those are more what I'm thinking. And you start to prune the ones that don't work and double down on the ones that are growing. And that's when you start to be able to find your way as an artist. And I think the challenge for people now is because we have such a consumer driven culture, they don't want you to choose. Right. Like the people who are feeding you, you know, the big studios or whatever, they don't want you to choose because they want you to like everything that they produce. And they're trying to basically eliminate yourself.

[Interviewer]

And it works. Just the opposite happens.

[Angus Fletcher]

Exactly.

[Interviewer]

We don't like hardly any of it.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's right.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

That's right.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. But we lose contact with our ability to discriminate because we're being bombarded with mid stuff. Mid level stuff.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

And what we need to do for kids is start to create these spaces for them where they get to choose, where they get to be active. And then as an artist, you become really ruthless and rigorous with yourself and you start to be like, I can do better. Like, that's actually bad. And everyone around you is like, no, that's good. You're like, no, like it's actually, it's. It's bad. I need to do better. And so that's when you really start to realize, like, I own the beauty because I'm the only person who really sees it. Yeah, that's kind of your sacred quest as a person. I think, and I believe, I mean, and I know you do too, that everyone is fundamentally creative in not in the sense that they can be an artist, but that you create your own life and you have to be able to say to yourself, this is the right life for me. And that life has to be totally unique and you have to be inhabiting it and be like, this is perfect for me. And I don't have to justify or defend it to anybody else. But most people in the world today are looking for somebody else to tell them what to do because they're lost. Because we have a consumer culture where people are scrambled and they try and find the answer by reading self help books or what have you, or being inspired by other people's lives and they try and copy, they just get more lost. Whereas developing that ability to discriminate, finding your beauty, being ruthless and rigorous in pursuit of it.

[Interviewer]

I agree with what you're saying. And it doesn't sound like an easy thing to change. It doesn't sound like our culture supports what you're describing.

[Angus Fletcher]

No. And so one of the weird things I've done recently is I started working a lot in schools. And one of the reasons I started working in schools is because we've known for almost four decades now that school is making kids less creative. It's annihilating their creativity. And it's obvious the reason that it's doing it is because what do you learn in school? You learn in school that there's an answer and the teacher has it. And the more that you believe that there's a right answer, the less likely you are to come up with a new answer. And so you become part of this system which is constantly telling you do it this way. And then you're basically forced into a dependency on the system to be validated by the system. You lose your sense that I'm an artist and I actually choose and decide what is right. So the entire system is trying to socialize that out of you. And it's so weird because systems are suspicious of individuals, right? That's why they try and beat it out. But the whole point of America, on some level, so I'm an immigrant, so I feel like I can say this whole point of America is a whole bunch of people who are too weird to fit in anywhere else. And they're like, let's come here and create a society where everyone can be weird. You know, Freedom, freedom. Yes, yes, yes. And we've created the school system which is annihilating it. And it would be one thing if it was annihilating it and making everyone happy and successful, but it's not. It's annihilating it. There's no jobs. People don't know themselves. Young folks today, I mean, I work with so many college kids today, completely lost. And we need to go back to this creative practice and start to encourage young people to understand. No, you have your own inner sense of beauty. And I here as the institution, I'm here to facilitate that. But really my job as the institution is to turn you into your own critic. So you start to develop that rigorous practice in yourself and you start to say, no, it can be better. And I, as a teacher, I'm saying, no, it's already good enough. And you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Had this beautiful experience the other day where I was talking to a guy who went back to school to get his PhD. He's a special operator, he's a special forces guy and went back to get his PhD and they signed off on his PhD and they gave it to him and. And he returned to them because he realized that he'd been wrong and he wanted to resubmit his PhD with the changes. And they said, we don't do that here at our university. And he said, well, then this PhD is worthless.

[Interviewer]

Why is your instinct to go into a school and try to change it versus burning it down?

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, I think that's a great question. I have spent a lot of time recently actually working with the American Camp association, which is the burn it down approach almost, which is like, let's build an alternate space to do things. I think the problem for me is that I think a lot of teachers are really good. I think there's a lot of human potential in the school system. I think the system itself is bad. And so maybe this is a real sign of my limitations as a thinker is that I'm always drawn to people. And so as long as there's someone in a place that I believe in, I'm always trying to help make.

[Interviewer]

You could recruit them for the new structure.

[Angus Fletcher]

We could. Well, if you're interested in this, we're trying to start some of these alternate processes here in LA and also in Ohio, where I live now.

[Interviewer]

How did you end up in Ohio?

[Angus Fletcher]

I was a professor at usc and I had this crazy idea after I'd been working at Pixar that I would come and explain to folks, what was

[Interviewer]

your job at Pixar?

[Angus Fletcher]

So I did have a job at Pixar. I was a professor at Stanford. I was basically giving the Shakespeare lectures. That was my job. So it's very boring when you get hired at university, as they say. We've been teaching this class for 5 million years. Your job is now to teach the class. So they handed me the Shakespeare lectures, and then I got up in front of the students and I realized I didn't understand Shakespeare at all. And I was not an expert in what was going on here. To solve that problem, I reached out to Pixar, started chatting with them, got inside their creative process, started to understand how they were doing things. That was when I had this insight that they were doing things differently than Hollywood. And I was like, hollywood would be a lot better if they did it the Pixar way. And so, in my stupidity, I thought I would go to Hollywood and explain to people in Hollywood how they could be making movies better. And of course, not only were they not interested in that, the fact that I was a professor made them even less likely to want to listen to me. So I was at the University of California doing this for a while, and then I got a phone call from a place called Project Narrative, which is an institute at Ohio State University.

[Interviewer]

How long has it existed?

[Angus Fletcher]

Since the 1970s. And the reason. So they're the leading institute for studying story. And the reason that they're the leading institute is because they had this breakthrough in the 70s, which, as you and I were talking about earlier, is that stories are the result of the audience. And so every place else that tried to study story had gone to LA or New York and studied the creators. Whereas what Project Narrative did is they went to the heartland and they said, this is ground zero for the American public. It's a test market. Let's see how they're operating. And so they built up this entire institute that was based on just working with ordinary folks.

[Interviewer]

Sounds amazing. I'd never heard of it.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yeah, well, you know, it used to be amazing. And I can say this, I don't want to besmirch my employer. Ohio State has totally screwed it up because they've let pretty much all of us leave. And so when I went there, I think there were 11 of us, and there's basically two really of us that do it. Ohio State just hasn't valued because it's too different, it's too weird. But when I went there, it was like the golden age. As an example, one of the things we had, we had a folklorist there, she was totally brilliant, and she would just go off to Romania or wherever and just hang out at people's kitchen

[Interviewer]

stables, learn the old stories.

[Angus Fletcher]

Learn the old stories, yeah. And she would learn them through generations. So she'd know that she'd start out by bringing the kids into the room, be like, you know, tell me the stories. And they'd tell them the stories. And then she'd go back a generation, mom, tell me the stories. And then grandma, and then great grandma. And then she'd learn how the stories had kind of evolved over time. And then she'd go back the next year and then the stories had changed again, even among the same tellers, totally brilliant. And so that was the kind of stuff that was doing. This was kind of like, I would say, like almost like a hippie vibe, you know, just kind of like, you know, we're just kind of go out and just do this research that no one else is doing.

[Interviewer]

How did you find out about it?

[Angus Fletcher]

They found out about me.

[Interviewer]

How?

[Angus Fletcher]

Well, I think they found out about me because I had sort of established this weird reputation, having been at Pixar, of having this theory that every story was different and that there were no archetypes. And I'd been saying this a lot

[Interviewer]

and do you believe there are no archetypes or that's just not the whole story?

[Angus Fletcher]

Well, I believe that there can be archetypes and you can use them.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

Well, I think Carl Jung was a genius. Carl Jung, sort of the ground zero, this. But I think the problem is that people treat those archetypes as though they're permanent and they are the reality. And somehow, if I make a story that follows that archetype.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, it's back to the corpus idea.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Joseph Campbell created the Hero's journey, and it worked for Joseph Campbell. George Lucas figured out a way to create Star wars as a hero's journey. But if you go back and try and write a script as a hero's journey, what is that? It's inert. Right. It's dead. Anyway, I'd kind of got this reputation. They called me up and they said, hey, you want to come out to Ohio? I said, absolutely not. What's happening in Ohio? Anyway, they brought me out there and it was amazing. So I got a chance to work for there. And that was when I published this book, wonderworks, where I went through all the different inventions in the history of stories. And the purpose of that book was to go through thousands of years of human history and point out again and again and again how humans had invented new stories and how those stories had created new possibilities. And so there are stories out there that were written thousands of years ago that can help with post traumatic stress. And in fact, poets discovered thousands of years ago there are two types of post traumatic stress, which is something psychologists have only realized in the last two decades. And so if you work, for example, with folks who have been in a war zone, they'll have these uncontrollable flashbacks. Whereas if you work with kids who are in an abusive home, they're the opposite. They're numb. They can't feel anything. And why is that? Well, that's because essentially, PTS is the result, post traumatic stress. As a result of these two parts of your brain. One of them is your prefrontal cortex, which is kind of the brake, like on your car, which is tapping down in your emotions. And then there's the center of your brain, which has things like the amygdala, which is pumping out the emotions. And in the first kind of post traumatic stress, what happens is the brake breaks. And so that emotion just keeps exploding for the brain. That's what creates those flashlights.

[Interviewer]

Scary stories.

[Angus Fletcher]

Exactly. Again and again and again, you're reliving the trauma over and over again. What happens in the second kind of post traumatic stress is that that break locks on and it stops you from feeling anything. And it says, you know, what feeling is so bad that we're not going to even feel any good feelings?

[Interviewer]

Yeah, like armored.

[Angus Fletcher]

Exactly. And you get dissociated. And so these are these two types of trauma, but they're fundamentally different. They have fundamentally different processes in the human brain. Poets realize this. If you go back to Greek tragedy, there's two types of Greek tragedy. One of them treats PTS1, the other treats PTS2. It was developed by combat veterans. And so this is the kind of wisdom that exists in the literature. And I wanted to share this. And I wrote the book. And I remember after I wrote the book, all people wanted to talk about it was like, oh, you've cracked the code. This is how stories should work. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. The point of the book is that people invented these things and we should keep inventing more things.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Things.

[Angus Fletcher]

And so I kept getting brought into all these companies being like, how do we use these formulas that you've discovered to program customers to buy our toothpaste, this kind of thing? So that was kind of my seminal experience there. And then that led to the big twist in my life, which is the US army read the book. And they were the only ones who understood the book. And then they brought me in to work with special operations.

[Interviewer]

What is now plus one?

[Angus Fletcher]

So now plus one is the technique for tuning your anxiety. And so anxiety is something that's been really vilified in the modern world. And they think that the moment you feel anxious, something is wrong and you've got to distract yourself or whatever to get rid of the anxiety or it's going to become overwhelming. Anxiety is your brain's way of measuring how fast your environment is changing. It's how your brain measures unknown unknowns. It's the measure of mystery. And so the more you're in an environment that's changing fast, the more your anxiety is going to go up, which is healthy, because your brain is saying to you, you've got to change. And essentially what anxiety is, is it's all these different imaginative paths in your mind colliding. So that's why when you're anxious, your brain gets really restless and you start imagining all these different things you could do. It's all the stories, lines coming online for you to be able to meet the speed of the future. But you need your anxiety to be appropriate to the environment. And we know a lot of people today are struggling because they're way too anxious for their environment. And so we need to teach them a practice for how to maintain your anxiety at a healthy level without letting it get out of control so you can't function anymore. And so what we do is a special operations technique, which is called now +1, which is to focus on the next step in front of you, and then that appropriately tells you what is in your story. And that allows your anxiety to dial itself down to the right level for that moment. Because the thing is, the further you look into the future, the more anxious you'll get.

[Narrator/Host]

Why?

[Angus Fletcher]

Because the future is an unknown unknown. And so by definition, if you're a healthy, normal person, the more you think, what am I going to be doing tomorrow? What am I doing in five weeks? What's going to happen? Your anxiety will start to spike. So the key to that is not to get rid of anxiety, but instead to shorten the amount of time you're dealing with. And you can't ever just deal with the now as a narrative person, because then you can't take a step. Because if you're just in the now, that's where computers exist. They exist in the mathematical present. But the shortest distance of time you can inhabit, that's the now plus one. That's the shortest amount of time you can have a step. And that's what allows you to ensure your anxiety is perfect for the moment

[Interviewer]

just by taking that small action. That one step is enough to know, okay, there are more steps to come and that's fine. You don't have to think about them.

[Angus Fletcher]

You don't have to think about them.

[Interviewer]

You just have to take the first step.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yes.

[Angus Fletcher]

This goes into optimism, which is another fascinating thing which I learned from the operator. So optimism is what the creative has cause to. Your point to be an optimist is to know if I took that one step, then I can take the next step. So I don't need to worry about those other steps because they're going to happen. I don't need to worry about them now I can just focus on what's happening right in front of me because the other stuff will work out. That's optimist. Well, where does that come from? So in the modern world, most of what people will tell you about optimism is it comes from thinking positive thoughts about the future. You got to keep thinking positively about the future. Keep thinking positively about the future. For a while, I thought that had to be the case, because that seems logical. But then we discovered that the more that people think positive thoughts about the future, the more they develop fragile optimism. And fragile optimism, like it sounds like, means you feel really optimistic, but then when something goes wrong, it breaks. So they're like, well, how is it that people are actually optimistic? Like, where does it come from?

[Interviewer]

Truth?

[Angus Fletcher]

That it comes from your past, and it comes from remembering all the first steps that you took and then how that step was followed by another step. And so people who are profoundly optimistic, when they come into a challenging situation, the first thing they do is remember back to the past and how they were successful in the past. And that's how you develop your optimism over time, is by taking a step and then looking back and being like, I took a step, and then taking another step and looking back and being like, I took a step, as opposed to constantly looking forward and being like, it's going to work, it's going to work, it's going to work. It's work. Because then you get yourself caught in the future trap.

[Interviewer]

A lot of what you're talking about are, I'll call them philosophical or theoretical. Are these things that can be taught?

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes, yes. We do this all the time with kids. Let's just take optimism, for example. One of the first things we say to people is, go back to a challenge that you've overcome in your past. When was the time you did that? Was something really hard. And then write out the story of that in as much detail as you can remember. Because by writing out the story of that, you strengthen neural pathways in your brain and Then a lot of people when you've given this exercise to say, well, I can't think of anything that I did that was really hard. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. I guess there mustn't have been anything you did that was really hard, right? I was like, well, what about that time that you learned to walk? They'd be like, what? I said, do you remember that time? And they're like, no, actually, I don't remember that much. Do you remember the time you learned to talk? No, I don't remember that either. So do you see what's happened there? Your brain has forgotten all those times you did those things. And you need to pause and go back through your history and find those memories, because you did learn to walk. You did learn to talk. And believe me, if you've ever seen a child learning how to walk, that is the hardest thing. And no child learns to walk in the same way as any other child. They all learn to activate their muscles differently. They all have different first steps. So it's a completely artistic process. And it's incredibly frustrating for children because they're sitting around and they're watching everybody else walk and they can't walk. If you ever talk to someone who's had an accident or something like that, they have to recover from a stroke. They have to reteach themselves to walk. It's so challenging. But you did that. And there's thousands of other things in your past. So at the core of this is our belief that the most important story that you tell yourself is the true story about yourself. You've got to go back into your own life and start to unearth those stories. They have to be honest. You can't make them up. You can't retell the past in a way that makes you look better. You've got to go into the parts that were hard and unfortunate and own them. But there are so many little miracles in your past that once you start to tell yourself those stories, you start to develop this optimism. And the reason this process is so key is because when we try and see most people, when they have a moment of doubt, a crisis in their life, is they look to someone else's life for inspiration. So they'll say, oh, you know, my hero did this, or something like that, or, this person did that. But what your brain does when it sees that someone else was successful is it says, I'm not that person.

[Interviewer]

They're special.

[Angus Fletcher]

That's right. Exactly.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yes.

[Angus Fletcher]

And I'm not. And you have to instead go Back over your own story. And then you write this. Oh, my own story isn't special? No. It seems like it's not special to you because it's familiar to you. Put yourself back in that moment before you did that thing. Did you think you could do that thing? No, you didn't.

[Narrator/Host]

You didn't.

[Angus Fletcher]

You would have thought it would be extraordinary that you did it and then you did do it. So go back and tell yourself the full story. Forget the ending, only tell yourself the beginning and then allow yourself to re experience the ending. Build the neural pathway.

[Interviewer]

In the book, you said that innovation's original meaning was sin.

[Angus Fletcher]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about that.

[Angus Fletcher]

The term innovation was popularized by Machiavelli in the 16th century. He popularized the term innovatori, innovators. And the classical example of an innovator was Eve. Because what had she done? She'd done something which no one else had ever done before, which was she'd broken an old rule. She didn't eat the apple.

[Narrator/Host]

Yeah.

[Angus Fletcher]

And that's why, if you look at Apple computers today, they have a bite out of the apple, because innovation, because it's actually going back for knowledge. And so the Church, for hundreds of years, innovation was sin because it was defying the law by making your own rule for yourself. And so Machiavelli came along and said, well, actually, innovation is good because innovation is what allows us to create new things. And then he said this really blasphemous thing. He said, before Moses, there weren't the Ten Commandments. So Moses was an innovator. He said, and every prophet is on some level an innovator. Every stroke for traditional is creating new things. And the Church didn't like this because the Church wanted to stabilize the myth. It wanted to fix the story in time. It wanted to fix the rules in time. It didn't like the idea that your spiritual practice could be something that evolved. Didn't like the idea that God or these higher things could be evolving. And so Machiavelli, even today, byword for sin. And the Church castigated him. But Machiavelli's writings were discovered by someone called Francis Francis Bacon, who was an English scientist, one of the first scientists in the early 17th century, he said, we've got to break away from logic and start to embrace new ideas. Those ways of thinking ended up finding their way to people like Thomas Jefferson, who was a big reader of Machiavelli. The Declaration of Independence. The ideaone of the things I love about the Declaration of Independence is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Before Jefferson rewrote that, it was life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.

[Interviewer]

Big difference.

[Angus Fletcher]

Big difference.

[Interviewer]

Big difference.

[Angus Fletcher]

And Jefferson said, wait a minute, property is a zero sum game. Happiness, that's something we can all create for ourselves. That's actually what independence is for. It's to innovate. It's to create your own life. It's to create your own joy. And so what's happened over time is innovation went from being a sin to being the most radical thing you could do in the 17th and 18th century. And now in the modern world, it's totally banal because it's been completely appropriate by corporations who are obsessed with calling things that are actually just recycled.

[Interviewer]

Pablo Innovations Tell me about how you would train common sense.

[Angus Fletcher]

We were talking earlier about how you've got to match the newness of your plan to your environment. So as new as your environment is, your plan has to be new. Common sense is what allows you to do that, and common sense allows you to do that by helping you measure how new your environment really is. So the common sense solution is to do what everybody did in the past, as long as the past is still working the same, but to do something totally different when it's not. And when I first went into Special forces, when I first started working with them, I was diagnosed as having negative common sense.

[Narrator/Host]

Why?

[Angus Fletcher]

Because I'd spent so much time in a classroom, and the rest of my time I spent on a computer. And those are both environments which resist change. The whole point of a classroom is what I teach you now is true forever. And we teach the same way we taught yesterday, and it's totally stable. And a computer's also trying to do the same thing, because computers exist in the mathematical present. And so the way you start to train yourself to have common sense is you start to say to yourself, how new is my situation? How much anxiety is it causing me? If it's causing me a lot of anxiety, that's telling me I've got to try and do something new. And the reason this is important is that we know for most people in the modern world, the more anxious they get, the more they actually retreat into something old. So actually, people behave the opposite of common sense when life is common sense. Yes, they have negative common sense. Yes, Life is changing fast. And they're like, I got to go back to the way that I did before.

[Interviewer]

Old playbook.

[Angus Fletcher]

Old playbook. And we also know that people take their biggest risks when they feel secure. Actually, when you feel secure, you shouldn't be taking any risks at all because things are working. And so common sense is kind of learning you to undo what the modern world has taught you, which is to gamble when you're safe and to retreat when you're in danger. And of instead. Instead, you actually have to gamble when you're in danger and hold your ground when you're safe.

[Narrator/Host]

Tetragrammatin is a podcast.

[Angus Fletcher]

Tetragrammatin is a website.

[Narrator/Host]

Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge. What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammaton counterculture, Tetragrammat Sacred geometry, Tetragrammatin the avant garde, Tetragrammatin Generative art, Tetragrammatin the tarot, Tetragrammatin out of print music, Tetragrammaton Biodynamics, Tetragrammatin Graphic design, Tetragrammatin Mythology and magic. Tetragrammatin obscure film Tetragrammatin beach culture Tetragrammatin Esoteric lectures. Tetra Tetragrammatin off the grid living Tetragrammaton Alt spirituality Tetragrammatin the canon of fine objects. Tetragrammatin Muscle cars. Tetragrammatin Ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn.

[Angus Fletcher]

Tetragrammatin.com.