Intro. [Recording date: September 30, 2025.]
Russ Roberts: Today is September 30th, 2025, and my guest is Angus Fletcher of Ohio State University, where he is Professor of Story Science. His latest book, which is the subject of today’s episode, is Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know. Angus, welcome to EconTalk.
Angus Fletcher: I’m excited to be here. I’m a big fan of the pod.
Russ Roberts: Thank you. Much appreciated. I’m a big fan of your book. It is bristling with interesting ideas, techniques for, and applications of, a slightly off-the-beaten-track way of approaching life and thinking. So, let’s start with your claim that we’ve misdefined intelligence. What do you mean by that? What does that mean, ‘misdefined’ intelligence?
Angus Fletcher: So, in the modern world, we’ve almost entirely defined intelligence as some form of logic. And, logic is basically data-driven decision-making. So, the idea is, is that you can only be intelligent if you’ve got all the facts, and you analyze those facts rationally, and then arrive at the conclusion objectively that everybody else would arrive at.
And, I don’t have any problem with facts, and I don’t have any problem with reason. But, the problem is that most of the time in life, you don’t have enough information to use logic.
And in fact, the human brain evolved in environments which, because of the nature of biological evolution, were constantly changing. Information was very fragile, was shifting. And so, the human brain had to develop intelligence that was able to operate in low-information environments.
And, that’s the intelligence that I’m interested in studying in the book. That’s the intelligence that comes out of my own background in neuroscience and my belief in the ways that humans think differently from computers. And, that’s what I essentially mean by ‘primal intelligence.’
Russ Roberts: So, I didn’t go into your biography–I rarely do–but before we start, I introduced you as a professor of story science, which sounds like an oxymoron. But, as you mentioned just now, you have a background in neuroscience, and much of the book draws on your interactions with military folks in Special Operations [special ops]. Give us a couple of minutes just about your own background and experience, and how it came to inform the book.
Angus Fletcher: Yeah. So, my origin story goes back to neuroscience. Neuroscience means a lot of things today, including psychology. I do not do psychology. Psychology is essentially a logical way of thinking about the brain in terms of constructs, and then testing those constructs through various forms of quantitative measurement, like you might do on MTurk [Amazon Mechanical Turk] or something like that. I’m interested in the hardware of the human brain. I’m interested in how neurons work physically. I’m interested in how neurons are incredibly complicated, more complicated than we’re able to fully understand at the moment. And, I’m interested in how that complexity allows the brain to do things that are obviously different from what computers can do.
So, my background starts with the fact that the human brain is intelligent in ways we don’t fully understand, but that intelligence allows us to innovate. That intelligence allows us to anticipate the future. That intelligence allows us to think like other people who are not ourselves. That intelligence allows us to do a lot of really interesting things that, for various reasons, computers can’t do.
So, that’s my background. My background is in that kind of neuroscience understanding of the complexity of the physical hardware of the human brain.
And, one of the things that I came to believe is that human intelligence is characterized by the ability to make plans. So, if you can make a plan, and if you can make a new plan, you can handle new situations. And what we’re seeing today is a crisis, particularly among young people, an inability to make new plans. When they don’t know what to do, they turn to somebody else for advice. And, whenever you’re doing that, you’re taking a plan off the shelf, and so you’re making it impossible for yourself to succeed in a new environment. Because I can tell you something: your parents don’t understand how to succeed today. Your parents succeeded yesterday. They don’t have a plan that’s going to work today.
Russ Roberts: Don’t tell my children that. Oh, go ahead, sorry.
Angus Fletcher: Unfortunately, it’s something I got to tell my children all the time, right? They’re always asking me for advice, and I’m, like, ‘I’m clueless.’ And, I think that more professors and more parents could help kids out by being honest and saying, ‘I was really smart yesterday, and today is different. And I can teach you the way that I got to be smart, but the answers that I have in my head are not the answers that are going to work for you.’
So, we know that that human ability to come up with new plans is a driver of intelligence. It’s not all of intelligence, but it’s a driver of intelligence. It’s something that computers can’t do, and it’s something that’s not taught in school. So, it’s something that I wanted to understand.
And, what is a plan? Well, a plan is a plot–is a narrative. In other words, a plan is a sequence of actions. And a new plan is a new sequence of actions. It’s a new story about the future.
And so, I thought to myself, ‘What I want to do is I want to understand how the brain invents new narratives.’ And so, I thought to myself, in my youthful naiveté, that I would go get a Ph.D. in Shakespeare, because obviously people in English departments must know a lot about narratives and inventing new stories.
And, as I discovered when I got into English departments, that’s not what people do in English departments. People in English departments actually apply various forms of philosophy to literature and interpret it, which is basically what a computer would do to literature. They don’t sit around trying to think, ‘How do I invent new plans?’
But, I did that. I was a little bit of a maverick, a little bit of a rogue. I hung in there. I stayed in. I got my Ph.D. at Yale, went on to Stanford, started connecting with people like Pixar–who actually did invent new stories. Moved on; worked a lot in Hollywood, got a job as a professor there at the University of Southern California, spent a lot of time working with creatives.
And then, I moved to Ohio State, which has something called Project Narrative, which is the world’s leading academic institute for the study of narrative. And I’m kind of the world’s expert, really, in the neuroscience of narrative, this very tiny, tiny branch, which I almost invented, which is how stories actually work in animal neurons.
Russ Roberts: I want you to say something about the military, but before you do, I want to say a couple things about the book so we do not deter readers. There is a little neuroscience in the book, but it’s not–there’s no pretense. Which I love. There’s no pretense that this book is based on neuroscience. It’s based on your very, very wide range of experiences thinking about this and applying the insights to real-world situations. So, I really love that. But, talk about the military.
Angus Fletcher: Yeah. And, just on that book part, I mean, I’ve produced a ton of academic publications, which are completely impenetrable to everybody, and possibly I’m speaking impenetrably now, but I’ve also worked a lot of my life in Hollywood working on screenplays.
So, the book is essentially like a screenplay. It’s written as a series of little kind of anecdotes, and plot twists, and characters, the job of which is to stimulate your imagination, your intuition, your common sense, all the parts of the human brain that are able to fire in ways that computers can’t.
So, the military–so basically, I’m this wacky academic who has this background in neuroscience, who believes that somehow the secret to cracking human intelligence is to understand how narratives work. And, I’ve been locked up, essentially, in an English department publishing these books and articles that nobody is really reading, because nobody pays any attention to academics.
And then I get a knock on my door from the U.S. Army, and in particular from U.S. Army Special Operations. And, they basically come in, and they say, ‘Hey, Professor Fletcher, we know you’re a little bit of a maverick. We know a lot of people out there think you’re a little bit nuts, but we’ve been reading your work, and it really tracks with almost everything that we think. And, furthermore, your emphasis on planning is really interesting to us because that’s what we have to do. We have to make plans in Special Operations. We have to come up with a plan for dealing with a new situation. And then, the moment we jump out of our helicopters, that plan is smashed by unpredictable events, and we’ve got to make new plans. So, we’ve got to train our special operators to be new planners. We’ve got to equip them with this ability that no matter what life throws at them, they can make a new plan. And, what’s exciting about your work, Professor Fletcher, is it has a theory about how the human brain makes new plans. But it’s a theory you’ve never really tested, because no one’s given you the money to test it. So, how would you like to come inside U.S. Army Special Operations, and we’ll give you all the money in the world to test your theory so you can see if you were wrong or possibly if you were right.’
Russ Roberts:And, much of the book–there are all those vignettes and narratives that you mentioned earlier about many, many great figures from history, and fascinating individuals. Many are known, many not known. But, at the same time, there was a running theme of Special Operations needing to, and often testing or using, or you learning from them how to plan.
But, I want to make sure that listeners, again, don’t get turned off by that phrase ‘how to plan.’ I hate planning, and for the reasons you do, which is that I think people actually believe–which is, I think, a fundamental error–that if you want to get somewhere, you have to make a plan. And so, you do. And then, the idea is to stick with it, and persist, and never give up, and be an optimist, and believe in it. Positive thinking–which maybe we’ll talk about later, is something you’re not a big fan of, as well as I am also not a big fan of that.
And, anybody who hears those stories, or that encouragement to plan, has it at some point. Anybody who is had some real-world experience has your reaction, which is–your truth–I would say not your reaction, your truth. Plans break down immediately. And, I think one of the virtues of the book is to help you understand both how to respond to that, because reality is a mess, and you’ve got all this information, Plan A, and situations changing, and you have to make decisions on the fly.
So, I would say the book is not about planning: it’s about thinking on the fly when you don’t have a lot of data, and, in particular, when you might have a bunch of misleading data from the past, like talking to your parents about what’s going to work in this situation. Well, they’re clueless most of the time. And, even if they weren’t clueless, them telling you what to do is not going to help you much, because you kind of need to figure it out for yourself.
But, say a little bit about this idea of why it’s worthwhile to plan, even though the plan is smashed as soon as your helicopter lands, because then most people would say, ‘Well, then that was obviously a mistake. Why would you plan if it’s not going to work out?’
Angus Fletcher: So, no plan survives contact with the enemy, which is why centralized planning is always a mistake. Which is why you always have to decentralize planning to the people on the ground, who are able to more rapidly adapt and evolve as the situation itself evolves.
The reason you plan is to become a better planner. So, this is a core thing that kind of goes to the book. It actually comes from Dwight Eisenhower, and Dwight Eisenhower says that basically what you do before any military operation is you make a plan for everything you can imagine happening. You think, ‘What if my enemy does this? What if my enemy does this other thing? What if I have this unexpected breakthrough? What if I have this unexpected challenge?’ You make plans, you make plans, you make plans, you make plans, you make plans; and then the moment the battle starts, you throw out all the plans, and you just focus on what’s happening now.
And so, to your point, why do you spend time planning? Well, the purpose of planning is to develop the planner, not to develop the plan. In other words, it’s to make you better able at inventing new courses of action on the fly. And the more you practice doing that under pressure–so the classic way that Special Operations pitches its training is role play with real bullets. So, in other words, you’re constantly imagining different situations that could happen, but you’re doing it with guns going off around you, so you feel like you might die. So, it’s that combination of imagination, but also real-world pressure, that forces the mind to come up with practical plans–whatever we want to call them–courses of action, thoughts on the fly–that allow you to shift your situation to your advantage in that moment, and force your adversary or force your environment to either push back or give way.
And so, the entire point of the book is that we have set up a school system right now which is essentially doing the opposite for students. It’s giving them questions that the teachers already know the answer to. And, what then happens is that students learn there is an answer, and the system has it. And, when I’m uncertain about life, what I should do is I should look around for a book or an authority who can tell me what to do.
That’s the entire conditioning that happens in our school system.
Whereas the reality of life is there almost never is an answer. Life comes without an answer. I mean, that’s why it’s terrifying–but that’s also why it’s beautiful, because it gives you the opportunity for your own individuality, your own originality, your ability to craft your own path. And, even if there is an answer, it’s very unlikely that the teacher has it. The answer, such as it exists, exists in your own initiative.
And so, a huge part of the book is encouraging individuals to take the initiative when they’re in uncertain environments, and learn through feedback.
So, when you make a plan, that plan comes with a set of expectations as to what will result from you enacting that plan. When things start to go sideways, what your brain then has to do is start to make other plans. And, successful planners are always able to imagine multiple possibilities for life.
So, a successful planner isn’t locked in on a single narrative. This is why I think narrative has a bad rap among economists, as a lot of economists will say, ‘Well, the problem with narrative is, is you have this narrative in your head; and then you interpret the data that you get to fit your narrative.’
That’s a misuse of narrative. Narrative did not evolve in the human brain for its truth function or its probability function. Narrative evolved in the human brain for its possibility function, for its ability to imagine new things that haven’t occurred yet. And so, you’re being an effective planner when you’re able to imagine all sorts of things that haven’t happened to you, or haven’t happened to anybody else–increasing the possibility space, flexing your imagination.
And so, to get back to your original question, the purpose of planning ahead of time is to increase your sense of all the different possibilities that could happen in your environment, and all the possible actions that you could take, so that when you hit that moment of impact, you have the maximum intellectual flexibility.
Russ Roberts: There are many movies–it’s a cliché–where a character who is an ignoramus, who are vulnerable, or inept, or simply not skilled, is paired with a super-skilled person. I’m going to reveal something embarrassing. One of my favorite movies, and I call it an airplane movie because my standards are lower on an airplane, and I want a certain set of escapist pleasure. One of my favorite movies is Knight and Day with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. And I think in that movie–but it’s in a lot of movies–a character like Cameron Diaz, who is an amateur, is with a pro like Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise is the pro’s pro. He can solve any problem. And, at one point, somebody always turns to the pro and says, ‘So, what’s the plan?’ And, we, of course, as the audience, are expecting an answer, ‘We’re going to scooch around here,’ and sometimes they whisper it into the character’s ear to keep some suspense; and there’s usually some plot reason they have to whisper it.
But, in a lot of these movies, there’s this moment where the main character says, ‘I don’t have a plan.’ Or they just kind of pause. And, the vulnerable, less-skilled person goes, ‘You don’t have a plan? What do you mean you don’t have a plan?’ And, of course, we know it almost always turns out fine.
But, what’s fun about what you just said is that: that’s actually a virtue. Of course, you don’t have a plan for this new thing that just surprised them. They fell out of this thing that they were supposed to be in, or they suddenly have to confront some new threat. ‘But, what’s the plan?’ ‘Well, we don’t have one.’ So, that’s life. It’s what that’s called. And it’s a very–I’m never going to look at those moments again the same way.
Angus Fletcher: Yeah. So, by the way, thanks for that deep cut on Knight and Day. I actually got to read that script before the movie was made. And, I also am a secret fan of the script, at least. Let me just say that.
So, to your point, I have a whole thing in there about expertise, and there’s a chapter, actually, which is based on the idea of ‘unleash the rookie,’ and this comes from this–
Russ Roberts: Let’s talk about that because I love that.
Angus Fletcher: So, ‘unleash the rookie’ comes from me working with these Special Operations pilots, and I was asking these operation pilots how is it they get better? Because, they’re already the best in the world. They are literally the expert of experts. People come to them to learn and figure out how to fly these elite planes, the most challenging of situations.
And, so I said, ‘How do you get better?’ And they say, ‘What I do is I hand the controls over to someone who is a rookie.’ In other words, somebody who knows enough to think that they’re better than they are. ‘I hand the controls over to them.’ I say, ‘Okay, that’s interesting. And then, what? The rookie does something brilliant that you weren’t expecting, that suddenly teaches you about how the airplane can fly better?’
And, they’re like, ‘No. What the rookie does is the rookie makes a mistake. And then, what I want to do as the expert is I want to correct that mistake. But I don’t. I let the rookie make that mistake, and then I let the rookie make another mistake, and then another mistake. And, pretty soon, the rookie has chained together so many mistakes that I’m starting to feel very stressed. My adrenaline level is going up. Why? Because I’m in a situation that I’ve never seen before. This plane is flying upside down. This helicopter is going backwards. Something is happening that I’ve never seen before. And that puts this pressure on me and my expertise to figure out a new solution to this problem. And so, the value of the rookie is the rookie introduces uncertainty into my training process that I would never get in a flying simulator. And so, I use rookies in order to pull out the deeper expertise of myself.’
Russ Roberts: What I love about that–well, there’s a couple things. One, you talk about how when you’re an expert, you’re overconfident; and you figure, I don’t have to learn anything, I’m the best. And, that actually can be a fatal mistake. But, the idea that you would let the rookie dig a deep enough hole that you’ve never been that deep, and now you’re going to be tested to your limit. And, if selectivity–selection bias problem here–if you survive that chain of mistakes, you have gained something deep and powerful for the next time, or a situation, something like it, or a horrible situation, but not as bad as that one. So, you keep your cool all the way through.
Angus Fletcher: Yeah. And, you’ve developed your ability to realize: I don’t know what I’m doing, but I will figure it out. Because, what we discovered with these pilots who are really successful is when they get into these crisis moments, the first thought they have in their brain is, ‘I’ve been in a crisis situation before and I figured it out.’ And, that immediately calms down your brain and allows it to online its full intelligence.
And, the thing that we discovered about working with these Special Operations pilots is they don’t just get in the cockpit and then allow a rookie to chain together 400 mistakes in a row and then try and get out of it. The first time they let the rookie take over, the rookie chains together three or four mistakes, and then the expert takes over the controls.
And then, they’re like, ‘You know what? I can handle three or four mistakes. Next time, I’ll let them make five or six mistakes, and then seven or eight mistakes.’ And so, what you’re doing as an expert is you’re constantly pushing to your own limits, and you’re constantly exploring that.
And, what you start to realize is that your expertise is deeper than you think is, because expertise is conservative by nature. Experts like to go into areas that they understand, and they like to display their dominance. And by doing so, they forget that they started out outside their zone of competence.
And so, what you have to do as an expert is constantly push yourself back to that moment when you were a learner, a beginner, which is uncomfortable for you as an expert, but it is actually the source of your own strength and your own intelligence. And, to your point, you don’t want to push so far that you crash the airplane, but if you’re an expert, you’re probably a faster learner than you think you are.
Russ Roberts: I can’t help but think about a quarterback in football, in American football, who is under very intense pressure, faces–makes a lot of mistakes, or his teammates make mistakes. And, it’s kind of a weird tension. I don’t know if you’ve thought about it. I bet you have. Football is choreographed beyond imagining the incredible set of plays that are repeated over and over and over again to the point where Bill Belichick’s mantra, when he was a good coach, was, ‘Do your job.’ Meaning: you don’t have to innovate, figure out, freelance. We’ve got that all figured out. You’re just a pawn, and we’ve prepared you for these situations so you could be at effective pawn with all the other pawns.
But, we also understand that great athletes in that situation, especially a quarterback, who is in a probably unique situation compared to the other players, has to process information at very high speeds. That 17 mistakes have been made, and it’s very small window before the helicopter crashes–before they’re sacked, or before they throw an interception, or they’re stripped of the ball. So, it’s an interesting–great quarterbacks slow down time, great athletes. Time is in slow motion. Action is in slow motion for them. And, I assume that’s also true for those helicopter pilots. And, it comes from a lot of practice. Some of it’s native, intuitive skills, but a lot of it comes from having seen many, many different situations, many, many times.
Angus Fletcher: Yeah. So, I actually worked quite a bit with NFL [National Football League] quarterbacks for this book. And, NFL quarterbacks, I think, are perhaps an even more relatable example than helicopter pilots, because with a helicopter pilot, you’re essentially trying to fly against this inhuman environment. I mean, that’s what you’re facing. As a quarterback, what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to break your opponent, and that means you actually don’t have to play perfectly to win the game. You just have to play in a way that your opponent can’t handle. And, what wins in any competitive environment is always surprise. If you can surprise the other person, you throw them off their game–
Russ Roberts: Yeah, plan for the [inaudible 00:23:10].
Angus Fletcher: You sieze the initiative. You see this all the time when you’re watching professional sporting matches. And at some point, one of the commentators will be, like, ‘Oh, this team has just quit.’ This team has just quit. Why have they quit? And the answer is: Well, they haven’t quit physically because these individuals are the most in-shape athletes in history. What’s happened is, is they’ve given up on the plan; they don’t know what to do. And, when they look at their coach, their coach doesn’t have any new ideas. And they realize we’re just going to keep trying the same approach over and over again, whether that’s football, whether that’s soccer, whether that’s tennis, whether that’s whatever. We’re cooked because our opponent has broken our plan and has given us something we can’t deal with. And so, to your point about great quarterbacks: great quarterbacks are often thought of as being these kinds of hyper-algorithmic computational processors where–
Russ Roberts: Yeah, that’s right–
Angus Fletcher: the coach draws up all these different kinds of different routes on the field. And, the quarterback’s job is to figure out is the safety here or is the safety there? So, on and so forth. But, the reality is once you actually get into the NFL, that’s not how it works, because the defense is disguising itself. The information that you see is actually obsolesced immediately by all the people that are moving. Your eyes can only be in a narrow part of the field at once.
So, actually, what you need to do is you need to seize the initiative by all of a sudden identifying a vulnerability in the defense that they weren’t seeing, and then attacking it violently. And then, the moment you do that, you start to scramble your opponent: their decisions start to come slower, their confidence that they can anticipate your play starts to fall. And, then you start to be able to get away with even bad plays because you’ve got your opponent overthinking, and overanalyzing, and being concerned, ‘Where’s the next surprise coming from?’ And so, even just that little bit of danger that’s introduced by a quarterback who can violently identify and exploit an unexpected vulnerability, is enough, a lot of the time, to win the game.
Russ Roberts: Talk about the toddler who loses her spoon and you replace it with the same spoon and they can’t handle it. And why that’s an interesting story.
Angus Fletcher: Yeah. So, when I was a young dad, I had my then six-month-year-old daughter. Took her out on a little backyard picnic, which I think is an experience many parents have. Took out with me a little jar of carrot puree, and then just a bunch of plastic spoons to feed her with. And so, started out, gave her a little spoonful of the carrot puree. She grabbed the spoon in her hand, tried to feed herself, messed up, dropped the spoon. And I thought, ‘Oh, no big deal. No big deal here. I’ve got another spoon. Dad came prepared.’ Pulled out another spoon out of the box, put that in the carrot puree, gave it to her, and she just burst into tears and wouldn’t accept the spoon. And, I was, like, ‘What’s going on?’ And, finally–as I kept trying to give her the spoon, she kept rejecting it–I suddenly realized, ‘Oh, she doesn’t want this spoon that I’m giving her. She wants her original spoon,’ because she feels like somehow I’m cheating her by trying to give her this new spoon. I’m engaged in some kind of, like, rack or something. So, I go, ‘No, no, no, no. Look.’ And, I picked up the spoon from the grass and the new spoon that I was giving her, and I held them up side by side, and I said, ‘Look, these are identical plastic spoons. They’ve been mass-produced in exactly the same factory. There is nothing different about them.’ And, I held them up in front of her, and she looked in them both, and she grabbed the original and was happy. And I was, like, ‘What is going on?’
And, I never understood this moment until I started working with special operators. And special operators said to me, ‘Well, what that revealed is the brain’s default set. When you are born, your default setting is to believe that everything in the world is unique. Every person is unique. Every plastic spoon is unique.’
Russ Roberts: Which they are.
Angus Fletcher: Which they are. In reality, they actually are. And, that’s what allows you to identify new opportunities, because by cherishing things as special and unique, you’re able to go past your stereotypes and your snap judgments of them, the kind of patterns that you’ve formed, and instead say, ‘What is different here that could lead to a different future?’
And, what happens as we get older is that sort of belief that everything is unique is slowly replaced with an efficiency process where we want to get on with life, and we want to kind of maximize on the patterns that we’ve seen. We want to become more productive. And so, we start getting much faster judgments. We start saying, ‘Oh, that person, I’ve seen that person before. I know exactly that kind of person. I know what they’re doing. Of course, all spoons are the same. It doesn’t matter. Just give me a spoon,’ and so on and so forth.
And by doing so, we, of course, miss out on the kind of pleasure and joy of discovery. But, as the special operators pointed out to me, we also miss out on opportunities, because, in fact, there are lots of things around us right now that our mind is just skipping past because we think, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that before,’ when actually we haven’t. There’s something new about that that’s revealing an emergent possibility for the future.
And so, a huge part of what operators do is they train themselves to be able to turn on that childlike brain to spot what’s unique about things in order to detect these pathways, these possible opportunities. And, what special operators call that is they call that detecting the exceptional, or exceptional information–something about a familiar object that is different or new in some way.
You’ve met a hundred bankers, but then all of a sudden, this banker is slightly different. Even though they’re dressed the same as all the other bankers. They say something which makes you realize, ‘Huh, this banker sees the market slightly differently. Maybe I should talk to this guy a little bit.’ Or you get up, and you see the way that copper prices are going, and you suddenly realize, ‘Huh, the pattern that I expect in commodities is a little bit different today. Let me pause on this and see if there’s maybe some kind of underlying shift in the fundamentals of the market that I wouldn’t have seen if I just dismissed this as a pattern.’
Russ Roberts: And, there’s a tension here, of course. It’s an incredibly beautiful thing that your daughter saw those two spoons as different. And, as you pointed out, it’s incredibly inefficient, can be paralyzing, [?you’ve got to?] figure out which one’s better, which one. And, as adults, it’s an incredibly powerful skill to categorize things, see those patterns, but at the same time, you miss a lot. And so, there’s a trade-off, a tension between generalization, I would call it, and treasuring the exception.
And, I think it’s a really important–just being aware of that is an incredibly useful skill, I think, in marriage, friendship, management. You get an employee–and your brain does this without you realizing it–‘Oh, she’s just like that woman we hired before, and she was awful.’ Or, ‘She’s just like that woman, she was phenomenal.’ And, they are unique. No two spoons really are alike. And, at the same time, sometimes it’s very useful to say, ‘That one’s off the table because we know that’s a bad habit that that person has. It’s not going to be useful for working here.’ So, that’s a very interesting mind experience to keep those two things going at the same time.
Angus Fletcher: Yeah, no, and I think you’ve expressed it beautifully, is that we do have a tendency, I think, to jump to stereotypes about people too quickly. But, I mean, if I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out which plastic spoon to use every time I went to a fast-food restaurant, I mean, how much of my life would I be wasting?
And so, the key insights are, first of all, we’re now entering a world where computers are ubiquitous, and computers are much better at pattern matching and efficiency than humans are.
And, we’re going to see this a lot with artificial intelligence and AI [artificial intelligence]. So, in the past, one of the edges for certain humans in terms of being successful in life was their ability to spot patterns faster than other humans. But, that power is increasingly being shifted from us onto machines. And so, what makes us distinct as humans is actually our ability to do the opposite.
So, one thing just to keep in mind for people is that the more that computers become prevalent, the more that your ability to spot what’s unique is going to be what helps you get ahead. Because a computer, by nature, skips over exceptions or regresses them to the mean.
The other thing is, is what’s really critical is the ability to toggle back and forth between these two. So, children just can’t help themselves. Children can’t go into an efficiency cycle. Children can’t have a conversation in which they’re, like, ‘Yes, there are two spoons that are the same.’ And, most adults have the opposite problem, where they can’t have a conversation about, ‘Wait, these two spoons are different. What are you talking about? That’s a waste of my time.’
And, if you ask most adults to slow down and try and spot exceptions, there’ve been a ton of studies–we have a bunch of studies here at Ohio State that have done this–trying to get adults to slow down and see what’s unique about things. Kids spot many, many orders more exceptions than adults do. So, the key as an adult is your ability to get back to your childhood self without losing your adult self. So, you hone that switch as opposed to just reverting to childhood.
Russ Roberts: You have a very entertaining and strange story about being grilled–interviewed–by the special operators. Special operators, by the way, are not on the telephone service. They’re working in Special Operations. ‘Operators’ is the noun for that person. Talk about when you were interviewed and their focus on exceptions. What were they looking for?
Angus Fletcher: So, to your point, they were trying to decide whether there was something about me. Was I a special spoon, or was I like every other spoon in the drawer? And, the way this came about is after they contacted me, they essentially got me in a car, drove me for six hours to this undisclosed location, put me in this room with no windows, and told me that I was about to take a lie detector test. And so, like everyone else who is a civilian who is ever been told they’re going to take the lie detector test, I thought I was going to get hooked up to some machine that was going to sort of measure various electrical signals and bleep out at it. And, I was getting kind of nervous about this.
Russ Roberts: Yeah.
Angus Fletcher: Exactly: yeah. And, instead, what happens is three people just walk into the room basically wearing boots and jeans and just sit down in folding chairs, and they’re, like, ‘We’re your lie detector test.’ And, I was, like, ‘Okay.’ And then, they start asking me these really simple, easy questions. Are you married? What high school did you go to? These kinds of things, you know what I mean? And, I start to relax, and–
Russ Roberts: You’re really good at those. Killing it.
Angus Fletcher: Yeah. I’m just like, no lying here. The moment that happens, all of a sudden, one of them leans forward to me. And, he goes, ‘Your accent is fake.’ And, I was like, ‘What?’ He’s like, ‘Your American accent, that’s fake. That’s a fake accent that you’re talking with.’
And when he said that, I almost had a heart attack, because, first of all, this is true. I do have a fake American accent. I’m not sure if any of your listeners have cottoned onto this; but I’ve gone through–I’ve talked to tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people. No one’s ever been, like, ‘Your accent is fake.’ And so, I sort of had this panic attack, and I was, like, ‘Oh my God, I hope they don’t assassinate me in this room because they think I’m a Russian spy or something.’ And so, I just blurted out–I’m, like, ‘Well, I was born in England, but I came to this country, and so that’s how I lost my accent.’
There was a long pause, and then they lean forward, and they’re, like, ‘That’s not actually true, because we can tell you didn’t lose your accent slowly and naturally over time, the way you would if you had just immigrated to this country. We can tell you intentionally lost your accent, like you were trying to conceal where you came from.’ And then, they just lean back in these chairs and look at me. And, again, I’m having this panic attack, because this is completely true. This is actually what happened. And, again, it makes me sound like I’m a spy. Right? Like, who intentionally loses their accent?
Russ Roberts: Spies.
Angus Fletcher: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. And so, I had this flashback, and I was, like, ‘How do I explain this to them?’ And, the true story is: you know, I came to this country as a child. I had this English accent. I went to school. I got bullied a lot for my accent, because, you know, that’s how kids are. It wasn’t, like, a super-traumatic experience, but it’s just kind of–
Russ Roberts: Unpleasant–
Angus Fletcher: growing up. It was unpleasant. And, I think, like a lot of people, particularly maybe a lot of people who have a little bit of a stubborn streak, I was, like, ‘I’m not going to let this bullying get to me.’ And so, I just leaned into having this accent. And so, I very proudly had this accent after I’d stopped being bullied, and I’m now 12, 13, 14, 15, and I still have this accent.
And the day comes: I’m about to go to college. And, it just occurs to me: It’s ridiculous that I have this English accent, because I’ve lived in America most of my life. The first thing that anyone ever says to me when they meet me is, ‘Oh, you’re English?’ And, I’m like, ‘No, not really. I’m American. This is odd.’ So, I just thought to myself: It’s time for me to lose this accent. And so, over the summer between high school and college, I just intentionally lost my accent, and I went to college to be my real self–with this fake accent.
So, anyway, I’m thinking all this, and then I’m, like, ‘This is nuts. I’m going to explain to these guys that I lost my accent. I have a fake accent so I could be my real self, which is being an American when I’m not really an American. Like, what is that?’ So, anyway, I finally fumble out this story to them, and they just accept it immediately, and they move on. And, when I finally passed the interview, and they’re like, ‘You haven’t been lying. You’ve told us the truth the whole time. We clear you to kind of study our teams.’ I was, like, ‘I mean, that was the craziest story that I ever told about why I lost my accent. How did you know?’ And, they were basically like, ‘The truth is stranger than fiction,’ which is another way of saying that actually reality is more unexpected than you can imagine a lot of the time.
And, in general, you know that you’re at least in a place where there’s a possible truth when it surprises you. And, when you hear something that’s formulaic or something you’ve heard before, that’s actually more likely to be a cover story. That’s actually more likely to be something that’s made up or to be a lie. And
And so, the key actually about life is it’s a series of surprises or exceptions that hang together in a coherent narrative. Whereas something that is fake or formulaic is a bunch of stuff you’ve seen before that hangs together in a coherent narrative, like a happy ending in a Hollywood movie or a conspiracy theory or something like that, is a series of weird things that don’t fit together. They jar with reality.
And so, the key to being a smart person is being able to embrace these unexpected events, these strange plot twists, but see how they can potentially cohere into an actual story.
And so, that is really, I think, the experience probably that almost anybody has in forming a friendship with another person. You start talking with them, and you start hearing their life story, and you’re, like, ‘Wait, what? That’s bizarre. How is that the case?’ And then, you realize your friend isn’t lying. Your friend is telling you the truth, and that’s rearranging your own brain sense of what is possible. And then, the more you start to understand these idiosyncratic, unique things about your friend, the more you start to understand what’s unique about their character, and who they are, and what their story is, as opposed to having this kind of general, generic impression of, ‘Oh, this person is just a kind of classic football player.’ Or, ‘Oh, this person is just a business type.’
Russ Roberts: There’s so much to say about that. The first thing is, I just think so much of our personal relationships as friends, and spouses, and family members, and employees, colleagues at work, is just shaving off all the interesting parts of the narrative of both your own and other people’s. So, you don’t reveal. You do have a narrative. It’s plausible–as you say, people have heard it before. So, you grab it when you’re sharing your own emotions after a difficult experience or a challenge or trauma you had. But, you hide. And, as you say, with your closer friends or your spouse, ideally, you don’t hide.
But, even with your spouse and with your close friends, and your children, and parents, there’s so much narrative experience that you’ve generated in the past from them that I think sometimes our brain just shuts off. And, this is considered, ironically, a sign of intimacy. ‘Oh, I know what she’s going to say next. I know what he’s feeling. I know them.’ But, actually, you’re treating them like an object. You’re treating them like a screenplay, and you’re not giving them the chance to break out and to have a story like you just told, which is extraordinary and interesting. And, really, I mean, we could spend the rest of time talking about that summer, and what you were thinking and feeling, and it’s really fascinating. So, just react to that. Then I’m going to ask you something else.
Angus Fletcher: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re missing the opportunity to discover something about this person that you’re having the conversation with, and you’re also missing the opportunity for them to discover something about you, and for yourselves to discover something about yourselves together, which is the entire reason you get into a relationship–is for self-discovery and for discovery of somebody else.
So, super-quick story on this. I got a phone call after I’d been working with the operators for a while. I got this phone call from one of them, and he’s, like, ‘Professor Fletcher.’ And, I was, like, ‘Yeah.’ He’s, like, ‘We’re having some problems. Specifically, we’re having some problems with our wives, or maybe our wives are having problems with us. It’s not clear exactly what the origin of the problem is, but there’s a problem there, and we’re hoping that you can help us.’ And I’m, like, ‘What? What do you mean I can help you?’ And, he’s, like, ‘Well, Professor Fletcher, because we trust you. We trust you.’
And, what that means is that basically special operators–it’s their whole job to trust nobody. They’re the most classified units in the United States military. They don’t trust anybody. And so, the moment that they trust someone, that’s like the only person they trust. So, literally, I’m not kidding you, I could get a phone call next week from a special operator who is, like, ‘Hey, Professor Fletcher, do you do open-heart surgery? Because I really need some open-heart surgery, and I trust you.’ Right? So, you’re, like, their guy.
So, I’m, like, ‘Okay, wait, so you want me to talk to you about the problem you’re having with your wife?’ ‘No, no, no, no, no. We’ve got something much bigger than that. We’ve got about a hundred couples that are about to get divorced in a Special Operations community, and we want you to work with them.’ And, I’m, like, ‘What?’ And, as I started to look into this, it turns out that these units have this incredibly high divorce rate–80%, 90%.
Russ Roberts: I am not surprised.
Angus Fletcher: And so, I’m like, ‘All right, okay, what do I have to do?’ And they’re, like, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it.’ So, again, I get picked up, get transported somewhere. Next thing I know, I find myself in a field. In the field are a hundred special operators and their spouses. And, one of them comes up to me, and he’s, like, ‘Professor Fletcher, everyone in this field is about to get divorced unless you help them. So, help them now.’ I’m, like, ‘What?’
So, what I did is I actually, after a moment of panic, I gave them back a technique that I’d learned from Special Operations. And, that technique is a technique into how you surface exceptional information in somebody else.
And, basically, the technique works by just suspending your judgment. And, the way you do that is you ask the person who, what, when, where, how–but never why. You never ask them a why question.
So, I might ask you, ‘When was the first time you went kayaking, and who did you go with, and who did you never go kayaking with, and what did you bring with you?’ And, these kinds of questions.
But, I would never ask you, ‘Why did you go kayaking?’ Because what that’s allowing your brain to do is surface things that surprise you. They might say, ‘Well, the one person I’d never go kayaking with is my father.’ And then, of course, you want to say, ‘Why? Why would you never do that?’ But you can’t, right? Instead, you’ve got to say, ‘Well, what else would you do with your father? And, what are activities that your father likes to do?’ This kind of thing. And, you start to surface more information as opposed to jumping to a judgment.
And so, I gave the operators this exercise–these operators who were struggling with their spouses–just thinking it would kind of, like, buy me a little bit of time. They talked for hours. They talked for hours because they were suspending these judgments.
And I can’t pretend that I saved every marriage in that field, but I can promise you that a lot of people came up to me afterwards and were, like, ‘That was the best conversation I’ve had with my spouse in a decade.’
And, I just want everyone out there to know that the people in your life that you are making judgments about contain surprises that can change your life and can change their life. And, by getting back in touch with that sort of childhood sense that every person out there is a mystery, every person is a wonder, you can not only make your relationships better, but you can discover a secret source of joy.
Russ Roberts: A couple things. First of all, you shouldn’t have mentioned you were a screenplay writer in your past, because I’m wondering if any of these stories are true. They’re very implausible, which makes them interesting, of course, because they’re surprising. This hundred-couple thing–it’s a bit of a stretch, but I’m going to go with it.
But, I think the idea, and you talk about this in a different context of the book, this interview thing–and just to make it, for those who haven’t read the book yet, in the example of the book, the topic is your favorite activity, your favorite hobby, non-work activity. And, I want to come back to this because it’s an exercise you did with salespeople. But I think this idea of barring, constraining yourself to not ask why is an extremely deep idea. Because, our brain, going back to this narrative theme, our brain loves narratives.
And, in that sense, I think economists are right–or at least the behavioral economists, I think, we were poking fun at a little bit earlier. We do like narratives, and we do–it’s one of our best skills. So, we don’t have all the information about anything, so we’re constantly creating causal chains. And, for me, I find this extremely interesting because I think our brain is desperately eager to find causation when there isn’t causation. That’s why we say correlation isn’t causation. People have a lot of trouble with that. They all know the line, but they have a lot of trouble internalizing it. Because the Latin fallacy is post hoc ergo propter hoc–after this, therefore because of this. That’s a fallacy. After this doesn’t mean it was caused by the thing that came before it. But it could be. And so, when I’m talking to you about your hobbies, what is your favorite nonwork activity?
Angus Fletcher: Hanging out with special operators.
Russ Roberts: Okay, I was going to grill you. But, what’s interesting about that is that when I’m in that conversation with you, my brain is constantly filling in the why. It’s not so much asking the why, because I know why–‘Because you’re like so-and-so,’ or, ‘That reminds me of the time, my love of hiking, or cooking,’ or whatever is the hobby. So, I don’t have to ask you why. I know why. But, the idea that you can’t ask why–really? I think it should be more than that. You can’t ask why, and you can’t presume why. And, that’s how you learn. That’s how you gather information about another human being. And, what’s fun is then you get a plot twist, because you find out the reason they don’t kayak with their father is some crazy thing that you’d never imagined. And, the one you filled in–‘Oh, he doesn’t like his father. That’s obvious. Big deal.’ That’s fascinating.
Angus Fletcher: Yeah. Like, their father’s best friend had drowned, and the father doesn’t like water, and it’s not a happy, safe place for the father. And so, instead, I actually showed my love for my father by not taking him on a favorite activity. You’re like, ‘Whoa, okay. Didn’t expect it.’
By the way, since you subtly accused me of possibly being a Russian agent who made up this story about giving–if your audience wants to Google Camp Homefront or Tom and Jen Satterly, you’ll discover, in fact, the truth of my marriage counseling story.
So, to your point about suspending why, we’ve done a ton of experiments with individuals in which we show that the driver of creativity is diversifying why–in other words, coming up with multiple explanations for why something could have occurred. And, what we find is that most people, particularly in the modern world, struggle with this because they want to jump to what they think is the most probable why.
So, they’ll always say, ‘Oh, you know what? This is what’s most likely.’
Russ Roberts: ‘That’s the AI. That’s their algorithm.’
Angus Fletcher: That’s the algorithm, right? Yeah. This is one of the many reasons why I’m an enemy of AI–is because AI is all about jumping to the highest probability. And the highest probability is completely true if you exist inside a mathematical simulation. But, if you exist inside the biological world, it’s probably not true.
And, what we find with very successful scientists, successful entrepreneurs, successful artists, is they’re able to come up with many, many possible explanations for a phenomenon. And, the more you push yourself to do this in any situation–so, if you’re having a fight with your spouse–it’s a good time to do this–your brain’s immediately going to jump to an explanation to say, ‘Oh, they’re doing this again.’ Try and come up with another explanation for their behavior, and then try and come up with another.
And, the more you do that, the more you’ll find that your anger diminishes and your curiosity increases. And, the more that your anger decreases and your curiosity increases, the more you’ll be able to not only have a conversation with them, but the more you, too, will be able to create a new place for your relationship. And so, just this simple skill of anytime you latch onto a why, saying to yourself, ‘There are other possibilities. There is never in life 100% certainty about a cause, about why something happened. What is another explanation? What is another explanation?’
Russ Roberts: Yeah. I often make this observation thinking about divorce. Why did they get divorced? People usually give a one-sentence answer, which we don’t need to list them, but we can imagine them. It’s usually extraordinarily complicated. It usually involves both parties. It’s usually an interaction effect of something that bothers the other person or that was cruel, or whatever it is. And, causation is really difficult. Of course, all of life is multivariate, which is frustrating because we like single on-off explanations. It’s just the way we are.
Angus Fletcher: Do we, though? I mean, I think we like surprise. I mean, I think actually the biggest joy in life is to discover that you were wrong about something in a way that opens up a whole area for you to explore. I mean, I think that’s why both you and I became academics, isn’t it? We didn’t become academics because we wanted to be right. We became academics because we wanted to be surprised. We became academics because we had this kind of curiosity.
And, I think at the root of this is a misunderstanding of narrative. I think people think that narratives are about being true: there are right narratives and there are wrong narratives. Narratives are not about truth. Logic is about truth. Math is about truth. Narratives are about utility. And, a narrative is useful if it accomplishes something for you. Now, if you’re a malevolent autocrat, narratives are useful because they allow you to brainwash people into doing what you want them to do.
But, if you’re an ordinary person, narratives are useful because they open up possibility in your life. They allow you to imagine different ways that things could be.
And, I think we spend a lot of time in our modern world using narratives for self-affirmation, which is another way of saying that I have stopped growing. ‘I’ve decided that I’m going to stop growing because I like who I am, and I need more reinforcement.’ Whereas the real value of narrative is to tell yourself a story that isn’t true yet, but could be true. And so, a big part of what we see in children is children are constantly imagining possibilities that adults are constantly shutting down and being like, ‘No, no, that’s wrong, that’s wrong, that’s wrong.’ And, a lot of times children’s narratives are wrong. But the impulse to create new narratives is right. And so, as an adult, what you want to do is you want to maintain that impulse, even as you maintain your skepticism about narratives that are too easy or that are obviously magical.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. My problem with that–by the way, I half agree with you–which is nothing is more fun than a plot twist. We delight in the plot twist of a movie or in real life. If you had ended your story with the hundred couples, ‘Every single one of those couples got divorced. I can’t figure it out,–‘ that’s like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s amazing,’ in a bad way. But, I think at the same time, so we do like surprises, and many of the things we’re talking about I write about in my book Wild Problems: The uncertainty of the future is very hard for us. And, I try to make the case in there that you don’t want to go to a movie every time where you know what’s going to happen. And, part of what’s fun about life is the uncertainty, or could be. You could imagine embracing the unpredictability of a career choice, or a personal choice, or a friendship choice, or a date, or a coffee with a different kind of person than you usually see. And, the unexpected happens, and it’s glorious.
So often, fun things happen for me when I accept an invitation that someone will tell me, ‘Well, that’s a waste of time.’ And, I want to think, ‘Well, let’s find out. It’s a cheap date. It’s a 75-minute coffee with a person who has an idea that they want me to possibly participate in.’ And, yeah, most of the time it’s not a good idea for me. But every once in a while, something magical can happen. And I love that. That’s the plot twist. That’s the unexpected.
But at the same time, I think most people find that scary. They like control. And, the plot twist means, ‘Whoa, we’re off the rails.’ So, I think a lot of regret in life comes from people who can’t take the leap because, ‘I don’t know what the plot’s going to be. I don’t like that. It makes me uncomfortable.’
Angus Fletcher: I think we agree completely. And, I guess what I’m saying is I think we evolved as humans to be comfortable in uncertainty, and we have lost that comfort in the modern world. And I think the reason for that is because the modern world has focused on developing competency in certainty.
So, the whole idea of being a professional is to be able to optimize, and you can only optimize in stable environments. And so, we have basically trained ourselves–really, I would say since the mid-1950s–to focus more and more on exploiting stability. And, that’s what we’ve become more and more competent in.
But, our brain evolved in incredibly uncertain environments, and all of our ancestors survived because they embraced those environments. The only way you survive in uncertainty is when you take risks. And, I would submit to everybody that the happiest moments in their life came out of moments of uncertainty–when they took a chance and something interesting happened to them that they weren’t expecting.
And, I would also submit to people that uncertainty is a lot more fun when you feel competent at it. In other words, when you feel like, I can handle it–just like those Special Operations pilots we were talking about that invite uncertainty. Uncertainty is terrifying if you feel like I can’t deal with this. And so, in order to get back into embracing uncertainty, you need to go slowly. You don’t just want to suddenly blow out the financial markets, set fire to your house, wander around a kind of itinerant mendicant trying to survive in a brand-new world. You want to start injecting little moments of uncertainty into your life and then being like, not only can I handle this, I kind of like this. This actually sort of opens things up for me. And it’s starting to revive that natural sense.
And I will guarantee you, if you look at children, children are great in uncertainty. They like uncertainty. But we, as adults, crush that out by putting them into these school systems that teach them, habituate them, regularity. And I just think that as a human being, it’s important to remember that you can be good in stability. There’s nothing wrong with stability. There’s nothing wrong with optimization. There’s nothing wrong with knowing that your home is there to come back to tonight. There’s nothing wrong with all of these things. But, also, the world is bigger than our ability to control. And so, somehow, somewhere, you’ve got to develop your comfort and competence at dealing with those uncertain things and realizing that the more that you do, the more you’re going to open yourself to joy.
Russ Roberts: Some listeners will hear echoes of the episode with Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis, where he makes some related points to this. And, much of this book is consonant with the recent episode with David Bessis on his book Mathematica. So, I encourage you, if you missed it, to listen to that because your book very much talks about the power of intuition. And, most people think of intuition as irrational–it’s your snap judgment. Bessis critiques Kahneman. He says, ‘Kahneman says System 1 is the impulsive snap judgment embedded in your biology, your evolutionary brain. System 2 is your more rational, thoughtful, use-the-data, think-about-it-more-thoroughly.’ And, Bessis argues that System 3 is where real thinking takes place because your intuition is actually drawing on incredible amounts of data that you don’t know consciously, and experience that you’ve had. And, when it clashes with System 2, that’s when you have a chance to hone your intuition. And, that’s very much consistent with what you’re arguing.
Angus Fletcher: Yeah. Well, I also critique Kahneman. The only difference is that I think that intuition is a low-information system. So, I don’t think your brain has kind of got all these Bayesian statistical networks, which are constantly crunching and finding[?] information, and kind of cycling them down, and using them to evaluate System 1, System 2, so on and so forth.
What I think is that basically your brain evolved to notice things that don’t fit its current understanding. It evolved to price a premium on surprise, because when something surprises you, that’s the indication of possibly a new threat, but also possibly a new opportunity.
And so, I define intuition in the book, and the operators define intuition, as the ability to spot exceptions. And then, I say that out of intuition comes imagination, which is the ability to leverage those exceptions into possible new plans. And then, I say that the human brain has got all these new plans proliferating, and then the question is, is which of these plans do you pick?
And I say that, ‘Well, we’ve got two other low-information systems that we can rely on.’ The first is common sense. Common sense helps us identify plans that are likely to work in our environments. How? Because common sense measures the uncertainty or the novelty of our environments. And the more new or uncertain our environment, the more there’s a premium on trying a new plan. So, in other words, your common sense is saying, ‘Hey, you’ve got all these imaginative plans. Some of them are less imaginative than others. If this is kind of a boring moment, use a less imaginative one. If this is a surprising moment, use the more imaginative one.’
And then, the final low-information system is emotion. Emotion is kind of your way of tracking which of these plans works best for you. So, you’re not just succeeding in the world, you’re also succeeding in the world in a way that fits your own life story, your own life narrative.
Russ Roberts: It’s surprising that you consider emotion as a form of intelligence. You write about anger and fear. And, there’s a lot of interesting ideas in the book. We can’t go into them thoroughly. But, a lot of what burdens us is our past and our presumption that either the future will be like it, or it won’t be because I just got lucky that time. And, you write very thoughtfully about the roles that anger and fear play. So, say something about that.
Angus Fletcher: Yeah, so we’re just taught that somehow emotion is dumb, and we’ve got to learn to dissociate from it or compartmentalize–
Russ Roberts: Shut it down–
Angus Fletcher: from it, or focus away from it. Shut it down, right, exactly. And, it’s like, ‘No, I mean, emotion can’t possibly be dumb. It’s the most ancient part of our brain, and it also remains the most powerful part of our brain.’
So, that’s telling you that it’s really smart, and we must be using it wrong. And, the reason we’re using it wrong is we don’t understand what it’s doing. And really, what it’s doing is it’s signaling to us the state of our own inner narrative.
And so, a simple example of this I talk about in the book is anger and fear. Your brain has a bias to action. So, it always wants to have a plan. And ideally, it always wants to have multiple plans, because those multiple plans allow it flexibility.
When your brain starts feeling fear, that’s because your brain is saying, ‘I don’t have a plan that I believe in. I don’t have a plan that I believe in.’ And, why is fear the emotion that your brain has evolved to signal this? Well, because fear makes you susceptible to outside influence. When you’re scared, you’re more likely to do what other people suggest. We’ve all had this experience when we get nervous, and we turn to other people for counsel. And so, what’s happening there is our brain has evolved the mechanism in fear that allows us to maintain our bias to action by taking a plan from somebody else. So, we never sit there helplessly; we’re always doing something, because we’re borrowing that plan from somebody else.
Now, that’s not to say that taking that plan from somebody else is smart–it leads to herd behavior, it leads to a lot of problems. But, the signal itself of the fear is good, because when you learn to recognize that fear is telling me, ‘I don’t have a plan. I’m becoming susceptible,’ that’s encouraging you to kick on your initiative and say, ‘Let me start taking back control, figure out a new plan.’ And, I talk about in the book how to do that.
What is anger signaling? Anger is signaling that you have exactly one plan. You have exactly one plan. Now, why anger? Why is anger associated with that? Well, because what our brain has learned is that the more assertively you act a plan, the more likely it is to work. And you see this all the time in your own life. If you act something hesitantly, it’s less likely to work. If you act it assertively, it’s more likely to work. And so, if you only have one plan, your brain is, like, ‘We got to go hard on this plan because this is it.’
Now, again, that’s smart. It is true if you’ve only got one plan, you should go hard at it. But, the smarter thing to do is come up with a second plan, and a third plan. So, you increase your flexibility.
And so, again, anger is smart, but what’s really smart is learning to read the signal underneath the anger and say to yourself, okay, now it’s time to come up with another plan. And, I go through a lot of emotions in the book, and I kind of explain how they all work in this way and how we’re all sort of misunderstanding them in the [?].
Russ Roberts: So, you’re saying that I’ve got this plan–it might be a shortcut, let’s say, to the parking lot of some event I’m going to–and that shortcut, turns out the road doesn’t go through, or there’s a lot of traffic on the shortcut that I didn’t anticipate, or wasn’t on the phone when I looked at it. And, my reaction to that’s going to be anger. Is that an example?
Angus Fletcher: Yeah, well, it could be, exactly, because then what’s going to happen is you’re going to get angry. You’re, like, ‘I got to force the shortcut.’ Right? And then, you notice this with people: they start inching closer to the car ahead of them as if somehow they can force their way through traffic: aggression, aggression. Or you know what? They give up. They give up, and they’re like, ‘You know what? I got to call somebody for help,’ this, that, and the other thing. When, in reality, of course, what a special operator would do–and this happens all the time, and Special Operations is all about you’re driving in some city you don’t know, and all of a sudden you realize you’re trapped. All of a sudden it’s, like, ‘Well, what are the other 500 things I could possibly do in this moment?’ Including just saying to myself, ‘Do I even need to get out of here early? I mean, is it even that big a deal?’
There’s all sorts of ways your brain can handle that and come up with a new plan, you know? And so, just being able to diagnose: I’m getting angry now; that’s telling me that I’ve only got one plan. And so, what I’m going to just keep doing is keep trying to force that plan harder.
And, back to our earlier conversation, one of the areas that this is most significant–it’s not driving–but interpersonal communication. How many times in your life do you find yourself getting angry at somebody else? And, the reason you find yourself getting–
Russ Roberts: It never happens to me. Ask my friends, ask my wife. I never get angry. Chill, that’s my middle name. [laughter]
Angus Fletcher: Unfortunately, maybe I don’t always get angry all the time, but I definitely get irritated with other people. In fact, I get irritated with a lot of other people quite a lot. And, what that’s basically telling you is you’ve run out of communication strategies, man. What’s happening here is you just think, if I repeat myself louder, the other person’s going to understand my position. When, in reality, it’s, ‘Let me back up. Think about how this person is thinking about the situation. Let me find other ways to communicate. Let me find other ways to explain.’
Now, is it possible that this other person, I do have a genuine disagreement, and it has to eventually go into a kind of fight to the death, and one of us has to kill the other, and decapitate them? There’s a small possibility of that in any situation. But most of the time it comes down to actually revising your communication strategy, listening to the other person, realizing there are other ways to negotiate this. And so, anytime you get angry in your personal relationships, just remind yourself: this is because I think there’s only one way here, and there probably isn’t. There’s probably another way to communicate.
Russ Roberts: So, I’m going to disagree with it a little bit, or maybe I need to reinterpret the way I think about this. I’m always fascinated by–I’ll get angry–I was kidding before, just for the record–I’ll get angry, and, at some point, I realize I’m not angry at the other person. I’m angry at myself. I’ve either messed up, I need an excuse so that I don’t blame myself, so I need to blame someone else. It could be in a work situation. I’ve failed to anticipate a problem. The problem arises, and I think, ‘Well, of course that’s not my fault. I don’t have any faults. That fault must be so-and-so’s fault.’ And, someone will sometimes say to me–a family member–when I’m discussing it, ‘That’s your failure that you didn’t prepare so-and-so for success, or you didn’t give them the tools they needed, or you didn’t trust them enough, or you didn’t put them in a situation where they could succeed.’ And, boy, do I hate to hear that, because it hurts, right? So, how does that fit in with the one-plan thing? Or does it?
Angus Fletcher: Well, I actually think we agree, again, Russ. Unfortunately–this may be because I’m obtuse–but I think we agree. Because, I think that when you hear that from someone–that you’re getting angry because you’re really getting angry at yourself–I think you probably have a moment of resistance about that. But then, when you accept it, your anger goes away, because all of a sudden you realize, ‘Oh, there’s another path here. There’s another opportunity here.’
And, what that is really saying to you–so, anger is always part of our fight-or-flight response. Anger and fear are the two parts of our fight-or-flight response. And that’s because there’s a threat that we perceive. And, the main form of threat we perceive is other people, but sometimes the threat we perceive, a lot of times, is ourselves: ‘I’m not good enough.’ You know what I mean? ‘I’m the problem.’ And, then, if the threat is me, like, I’m doomed, right? Because, there’s a problem that can’t be fixed.
And so, to hear from somebody else giving us counsel: ‘No, there is actually another way. You’re better than this,’ you can see this. You can do these other things. That actually relieves us, because it makes us realize–going back to what I was saying earlier–we can grow, we can evolve, we can become a better person.
Russ Roberts: You write, quote:
Optimism is widely understood as the belief, ‘This will succeed.’ But, that’s not optimism, it’s wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is an age-old delusion, glamorized in modern times by a method known as visualizing success.
And then, I think you write later, maybe it just follows it,
Happily, however, you can still live in optimism, because optimism isn’t, ‘This will succeed.’ Optimism is much, much stronger. Optimism is, ‘This can succeed.’
Why is ‘can’ stronger than ‘will’? Why is ‘can succeed’ stronger than ‘will succeed’? Continuing the quote,
Well, if you tell yourself that you will win and you don’t, your confidence will crack. But, if you tell yourself that you can win, then you’ll retain the faith no matter how many times you lose, as long as you win once. That one time is all you need to keep possibility alive, which is why can lives on long after will has shattered.
Angus Fletcher: That’s right. And, we figured this out by discovering something, or probing something, that’s known as the optimism paradox, which is that people who claim to be very optimistic actually are not that optimistic. And also, people often say: ‘Well, optimism is better for you. Optimism inclines you more likely to success.’ Well, if that’s the case, how come so many of us are not optimistic? If optimism always leads to success, you would think there’d be an evolutionary selection pressure.
And it turns out we’re doing optimism wrong, man. We’re doing it wrong. We’re taught that optimism is convincing ourselves that something will work. That’s magical thinking, because there’s no way you have of knowing that something will work, right? I mean, we’ve just talked this entire podcast about how uncertainty–and then the moment you convince yourself, ‘This will work, this will work,’–you go listen to Tony Robbins or one of these folks, and you get yourself all amped up, ‘This will work. I’m going to manifest. I’m going to keep throwing my positive energy into the positive wishing well, and it’s all going to come true.’
The more you do that and then it doesn’t work, your entire faith is shattered. Because you’re, like, ‘I did everything right. I did everything right, and it didn’t work. You know what? I guess I got to give up.’ And you descend into true pessimism. Whereas actual optimism is realizing, ‘Look, nothing is guaranteed to work, but a lot of things could work. A lot of things could work.’ And, the way you remind yourself of genuine optimism is you look back in your own past at all the risks you took that worked, and all the times that you tried something new and it panned out. Now, maybe it didn’t pan out perfectly. Maybe you didn’t get everything out of it that you wanted, but you got something out of it.
And so, when we discovered this, we do this all the time working with the operators, because the operators, the special operators, they’ll literally just end up in some situation where they’re having live hand grenades tossed on them. They’ll have people standing 20 feet away from them with a suicide vest–that, the vest goes off, everybody dies. Again and again, they’re in these situations, and the operators just never give up. They keep going. They never fall into kind of pessimism. And, we’re like, ‘How is this possible?’ And, it’s because they have memories in their past when they were in these really hard situations, and they kept going, and it worked out. So, they’re always, like, ‘It’s always possible; it could happen.’ And, that is actually optimism.
Optimism is the realization that a lot of improbable things happen all the time, and you only get to experience them if you hang in there. So, if you don’t have a second plan, hang in there with the plan you’ve got. But also, as you’re hanging in there, take a little time, come up with some other plans. Maybe one of those plans should work, could work. That’s optimism.
Russ Roberts: We haven’t had a chance to talk about it. It’s important. Talk about ‘now plus one.’
Angus Fletcher: So, ‘now plus one’ is a technique that the operators gave me to help with a problem in the modern world that we know as anxiety. And so, in the modern world, we’ve been taught that anxiety is a bad thing. We’re taught that we have to practice mindfulness and dissociation, and so on and so forth. Anxiety is one of the smart parts of your brain. Anxiety evolved in the human brain to detect unknown unknowns, or in other words, to detect the volatility of your environment. That’s why, when your anxiety is working properly, you get a sudden nervous sense that something isn’t quite right.
And, by turning anxiety into a problem, and by trying to eliminate it from our brains through all these various techniques, we’re eliminating that connection to reality. We’re eliminating that ability that our brain has naturally to detect when things are getting a little funny, right now; and we’ve got to start responding to that funniness. We can’t just kind of turtle and just hope that things go away, or wait for somebody to come to save us. We’ve got to act. We’ve got to act with initiative.
And so, anxiety is good. The problem is that in the modern world, we’re not using anxiety appropriately. And so, the operators gave me a couple of simple techniques to tune anxiety. The first is: A lot of our anxieties, it turns out, come from our past. So, we’re worried that something that has already happened to us is going to repeat itself in the future. [More to come, 1:10:16]
