In today’s episode of Infinite Loops, I sit down with Angus Fletcher, Professor of Story Science at Ohio State University’s Project Narrative and author of multiple books at the intersection of narrative theory, psychology, and brain science.
Angus’ research challenges one of the most widely accepted ideas in modern culture: that the human brain works like a computer. Drawing on his work with U.S. Army Special Operations, he argues that humans think not in equations, but in actions and stories — and that modern education systems are failing to cultivate the kinds of intelligence needed to navigate the real world.
I LOVED Angus’ latest book (Primal Intelligence), and had a blast chatting to him about the difference between probability thinking and possibility thinking, why standardized education may be suppressing creativity and how stories shape strategy and leadership.
I’ve shared some highlights of our conversation below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
Angus’ Harvard Business Review Article — Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think It Does.
Links
Highlights
Where is the Common Sense in Education?
Angus Fletcher: We know the more that a child believes that there’s a right answer, the less likely they are to come up with a new answer. That is just basic science. And I think the key as we start to think about this is that, you agree with this. I agree with this. A lot of folks agree with this. We need to start taking this common sense and putting it into the school system, because kids are suffering. And it doesn’t take rocket science. This isn’t an unsolvable problem. We just need to start dismantling this apparatus, this surveillance apparatus where teachers are evaluated on how well they get students to pass these silly tests. And my daughter, I was talking to her this morning, she’s taking essentially a history class. All they do in this class is they memorize definitions. They don’t actually study history. They don’t learn about history. They don’t read books about history.
They just memorize definitions so that the teachers can then have the students pass, and then the school can get its funding, and then the students can move on to the next stage. And we need to start to decentralize this system, give more autonomy to teachers, more common sense, allow them to give books out to students to read at their own pace, all these kinds of things. And of course, that doesn’t mean you totally turn everything into anarchy. You can still have math classes. You can still have some standardized tests. But it needs to be a balance. It needs to be a common sense balance that’s focused on nurturing the whole intelligence of students as opposed to just things that we can evaluate with these standardized tests. It becomes the tyranny of metrics. It becomes the tyranny of assessment as opposed to the usefulness of assessment.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And once you decide that a target is a measurable metric, it ceases being a useful information point for you. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories about the British ruling India, and they had too many snakes, and so they gave a bounty if you brought a snake’s tail in. And what did it do? All the enterprising Indians started breeding snakes.
Angus Fletcher: They hacked the system. They hacked the system, which is what smart people do. They hack the system. I mean, I’m sure the reason that you’re sitting here today is the same reason I’m sitting here today, which is that I hacked the system.
Optimism Comes From the Past
Angus Fletcher: And what’s fascinating about optimism is it’s almost totally misunderstood in the modern world. The modern world understands optimism as, this will happen, I will succeed in this way.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.
Angus Fletcher: And that’s why people spend all this time visualizing success and manifesting, doing all this kind of stuff. Actually, in the brain, optimism comes from your past. It doesn’t come from looking at the future, it comes from looking at your past. And what your brain is looking at is all the times you learned from mistakes in the past, and what your brain is looking at is all the times that you were uncertain and then you figured it out. And the more you focus on those moments, the more it gives your brain the capacity to move forward in what we call negative capability. And negative capability is the ability to go forward without knowing where you’re going. But you know that in the past you’ve made it. And we see this as really strong in Special Operators.
Special Operators are always thinking back to that last mission where they were about to die, but then they didn’t die and they pulled it out. And that allows them to go into this future mission. And the same thing with any explorer or innovator. They’re always going forward in deep uncertainty. They actually have no idea where it’s going, but they’re sustained by this optimism, which comes from the past. And it sounds to me like that is a huge part of what drives you forward, is you can probably go back through your memory at all the times when you surprised yourself and you managed to pull it out, and you’re like, well, if I pulled it out then, let’s go ahead and give it a shot now.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: You know, that’s so funny you bring that up because I was contemplating optimism the other day, and I am a very, what I call myself a rational optimist. And by that I mean, look, I’m not Pollyannish. And I don’t think that unicorns and butterflies will spring forth in front of me. But I started thinking, I wonder how much of optimism can be learned or can be taught? And you might have just given me the answer.
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Angus.
Angus Fletcher
Hey, Jim. Good to meet you.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Good to meet you. I loved your book.
Angus Fletcher
Oh, thank you. I’m very honored.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I finished it and I read on an iPad, so we might be at odds there, but I love it because I can highlight all the pieces that I want and then export them. It’s just like all of a sudden I have all of these new ideas that I literally didn’t have prior to reading your book. So anyway, I’m a big fan.
Angus Fletcher
I’m very flattered. Of course, history’s most imaginative thinkers all kept notebooks. Leonardo da Vinci kept notebooks. I mean, this is something that has totally gone out of fashion in the modern world. But I’m glad to see that someone is keeping it alive.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, if I can put even the tiniest dent in it, I would view that as a win and be very happy. I’m absolutely enthralled by the book. I’ve recommended it to several people. You’re right about the note taking thing. That is something that I have tried to get all the folks who work for me to really get in the habit of doing. And I’m kind of, you probably know more about this than I do. There is some evidence that actually writing with your hand makes a huge difference.
Angus Fletcher
Yeah. Well, so first of all, a little story on that, and then we can talk about the neuroscience if you want. But I’ve had the opportunity, the privilege to spend the last four or five years working with U.S. Army Special Operations. And I wanted to study some of their best planners, some of the folks who were able to come up with great plans and then able to implement those plans. And so I was guided to go work with Ranger Regiment, which is an elite infantry unit within Army Special Operations. And I went out to observe them, and the first thing I noticed was that unlike most other areas of the military, they don’t use PowerPoint decks.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
That’s right. I remember that you pointed out in the book.
Angus Fletcher
Yeah, they don’t use PowerPoint. And so most, if you go to a typical military briefing, you show up, they’ll just hit you with these endless PowerPoint slides, which are just crammed with lists. And of course, the human brain can’t synthesize lists. Lists are how computers think. Humans don’t. We don’t think in lists. We think in targets, objectives. And so the Rangers, they just wheel out these ancient chalkboards, and they start writing their plans on the chalkboard. And then once you’ve got your part of the plan, you go over to your chalkboard and you write it out. And so I just asked, I was like, well, why do you guys do this? Haven’t you heard of PowerPoint? They’re like, oh, we’ve heard of PowerPoint. They’re like, we tried PowerPoint for about 15 minutes, and then went back to the chalk. Because writing with your hand, much better.
And the main reason for that in the human brain is that when you use chalk, you’re essentially activating the motor cortex of your brain because you’re actually using your body. And the motor cortex is what generates actions, and actions are what generates plans. Actions are what generates doings in the world. And so the more that you can get in the habit of using your body, that’s why walking around your office helps stimulate ideas as opposed to just sitting incredibly still. All these things which everybody knows, but we’ve somehow thrown out, because people think that the more time you spend glued to your computer, the smarter you become.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I’ll tell you, I’ve written four books. I’m writing my first fiction book right now. And for the four nonfiction, every single idea for the book came to me on a walk. And I got in the habit of walking pre-iPhone with a tape recorder because I had this one great, magnificent walk, and I had this architecture and everything, but I didn’t have a tape recorder. And by the time I got home, my kids were needing care and stuff. And then I went to write it down. I went, “ahhh.” And that’s why I started with the tape recorder.
Angus Fletcher
That’s right. And every time you pick up a phone, it does the same thing that your kids do, which is essentially scrambles your thought. Because the way the computers think is associationally, they don’t think intentionally with this sustained sense of purpose. And that’s why computers can be helpful to kind of disrupting your thought or stirring things up if you’re in that moment. But if you’re trying to sustain and maintain a thought over time, if you’re trying to build, so if you just had this beautiful plan for a book and then all of a sudden you went to your newsfeed for two minutes, it would have the same effect as your kids did. It would just totally get your brain distracted.
And that’s why so many kids today, I think, are having a hard time planning their own lives. We see this a ton in schools. First of all, they don’t spend any time out in nature. I just came back from doing an event with the American Camp Association. We were just talking about how much kids, to them, nature is like this alien thing. And they don’t even understand how to use their bodies and walk around it and just, they get restless and irritated in nature as opposed to opening up and being able to draw on the creative force of the trees and the sky and everything.
And then, of course, in addition to all that, because they spend so much time on technology, they’re turned into these passive consumers of lists essentially in the computer brain, as opposed to being active generators of plans, of purposes, of directions, of strategies, of whatever. And so we’re creating an entire generation that I think, sadly doesn’t understand the benefits of writing with their hand in notebooks. Even while technology can be useful, even though AI can be useful, it’s, I think, starting to become a crutch and a disabler for a lot of young people.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I subscribe to the centaur model. Half machine, half man. In other words, that’s the way I’m writing my fiction book. I literally could not write it without AI. It’s an epic. The scope of it begins in World War II and ends in 2027. It’s a thriller. And anyway, just on the research side alone. This is an idea I have had for 30 years. It was one of my hobbies. My profession had been asset management, but one of my hobbies was generating fictional story ideas and written by hand and the one I’m writing now and I’m going to publish because we have a publishing company called Infinite Books, has been in my brain and in my notebooks for the last 30 years.
And so I sold my company, O’Shaughnessy Asset Management in 2021 and I was like, I finally get to write the fiction book, the thriller that I’ve been obsessed with for the last 30 years. But where I started was very different from where I am now. And so I went back through all the notebooks with all of the additions, subtractions, et cetera, to this particular plot and then I settled on the one that I really loved. But it was going to require ridiculous amounts of research. But the research capabilities have really helped tremendously.
Angus Fletcher
You know, I was just talking with Marty Seligman, one of the founders of Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and he was saying something very similar to me. He’s apparently at work on an entire library of children’s books because it’s been one of his desires to figure out ways to convey positive psychology and take all these ideas that he has. And I talked to him a couple days ago, and he had, through methods which elude me because I’m not this much of an AI master, he had somehow created 24 separate agents within Claude, each of whom was reading and copy editing the other ones.
And actually, what it honestly sounds like to me is that you missed your true calling as a Hollywood producer. Because, I mean, I worked a lot with folks like, I don’t know if you know, Bob Shaye. Bob Shaye, he did the Lord of the Rings and all that kind of stuff. He was a big mentor for me early in my career, and he had the greatest job in the entire world. He founded New Line Cinema, ended up becoming the biggest independent studio in the world at the time. And he basically just sat in his office and be like, I have an idea for a movie, Radioactive Cats. That would be a great idea for a movie. And then he would get on the phone and he would get the best screenwriters in Hollywood. You’d get George Clooney, everybody in the room, he’s like, go make Radioactive Cats. And they’d be like, yes, sir. And that’s basically, you don’t even need to use the AI. You can have all of the world’s most creative humans, and you order them around, and they come back to you with this movie in a year.
We know that the same parts of the brain that drive story also drive strategy. So they drive the ability to essentially make these plans for companies, for businesses. They also power your ability to anticipate futures that haven’t happened yet. So I don’t know what it was like in terms of managing assets, but I mean, if a lot of what your job is figuring out where could things go. And what we find is that really successful folks, I’ve worked with, I’ve had the opportunity to work with folks in various hedge funds and whatnot. What we find is they don’t lock in on a single probabilistic future, like a computer might. They see tons and tons of possible futures that could happen. And as a result, they’re very able, they’re very rapidly able to switch back and forth when other people are stuck in a single narrative. And so it’s probably that ability to imagine all those stories, I would think, on some level, that also launched you to financial success.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, that’s really interesting because I’ve done deep dives on that as well. And one of my conclusions is you absolutely have to be able to think of all the possibilities, but then you have to be able to hone them down to probabilities, stack rank them as to your view about which one seems the most likely. Challenge yourself, say, okay, what absolutely nukes that particular possibility. And then you go on from there. And in fact, one of the questions that I have written for you is this maps, your book maps directly to asset management in so many ways that I found it really interesting.
There’s another aspect for people who are really good at this. That I find interesting from the Big Five, the OCEAN profiles. Of course, high open mindedness is almost required. If you are a rigid thinker and you are doctrinaire and you are infected with some particular type of ideology, you might be many things, but you’re not going to be a great creative.
Angus Fletcher
No. And of course, I will be honest and say that I’m not the person you want managing your assets. I just want to put that out there. I’m not a money guy. I often hang out with very wealthy people and I’m amazed at their ability to make all the money that they have because I’m a lowly professor. But to your deeper point, I mean, the reason I think the book works in terms of asset management is so much of it was developed with work from U.S. Army Special Operations. And so much of essentially what they’re doing is a form of asset management. I mean, they’re basically, we have these resources, these are the resources that America has given us. How do we maximize them? How do we not lose them? How do we exploit opportunities? How do we demolish challenges?
And to your whole point about, you develop this field of possibilities, then you winnow it down. The way they generally think about it, as they put in the book, is that first of all, your success is only as good as your initial probability space. And what happens is that most people will hone in almost immediately on a small, narrow set of options that they think are likely to occur and in doing so, wipe themselves out. And really successful people are able to come up with incredibly unlikely possibilities. And part of that is just preparing the ground. But also part of that is that when you get into the future, things are going to happen you didn’t expect and you just need that flexibility.
But to your other point, there’s a ton of people out there that are great at thinking of possibilities. Some of them include children, for example. Children are incredibly good at thinking of possibilities. Children you do not want managing your assets. Why? They have no common sense and as a result, they’ll just pick up on some random possibility and go all the way with it. And what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to balance possibility thinking with common sense. And common sense is matching your environments to the plan so that if you’re in a highly volatile environment, you got to take more risks, which means you got to throw aside your old probabilities and take plans that you haven’t tried before. But on the other hand, if you’re in a fairly stable environment, it’s probability all the way. I mean, you might as well hand it over at some point to just this statistics machine or an AI, as long as things are sticking on the track.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And that, you know, that was something I have written down as a question which is, I love the idea. Match the newness of your plan to the newness of the environment. Right now I believe we are in a brand new environment with AI, with the possibilities that it affords us. I kind of, you know how Steve Jobs said computers were bicycles for the mind? I think used properly, and I want to underline that used properly, AI can become a rocket ship for our imaginations, our implementations, et cetera. What do you think about that? One of my ideas are that people who are highly skilled are able to notice things that other people don’t notice.
Angus Fletcher
Yeah. Well, that is the term that the Army has called exceptional information. The thing that other people don’t notice. And this was one of the eye opening moments for me when I started working with Army Special Operations is they kept talking to me about intuition. Intuition is this possibility thinking. Intuition is the ability that certain folks have to identify opportunities and seize on them faster than other people. And as you know, there’s a whole history of identifying intuition as pattern matching. Daniel Kahneman’s whole theory of computer science. But it turns out the computers are great at pattern matching, but they miss a ton of opportunities because they’re so caught on the pattern that they miss the exception. Whereas humans have this ability to actually identify and leverage exceptions to spot those.
And that’s why the combination of human and computer thought is so powerful. First of all, humans are already running a very powerful computer in our brains. So it’s important to understand that a lot of human intelligence is computational. All of our visual cortex, giant computer. We are very good at identifying patterns. We’re very good at, until the computer came along, we were better than anything else on earth at pattern matching and math and so on and so forth. But what the human brain has is it has this ability to pass back and forth between that probability engine and that possibility engine, between that visual cortex and the motor cortex, between optimization and innovation.
And I think what you’re talking about in terms of a centaur is the idea that we as humans can increase that part of our brain, that power that we have, that is about optimization, that is about pattern matching, that is about probabilism. And then that frees us to supercharge ourselves, the possibility part of our brain, the imagination part of our brain. And then you start to get this new future where the two kinds of intelligence can produce total intelligence.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And that is in a nutshell, my thesis on the whole centaur. You can’t. Look, the problem that I see with many people with exploring AI is they don’t do the human part. They basically just say, hey, make me a PowerPoint. And by the way, like PowerPoint, I hate PowerPoint. I despise PowerPoint. And in my old industry it was required. I mean, if you walked in without a deck, the PowerPoint presentation people would be like, well, where’s the deck? And so I actually started that as an experiment. I did no PowerPoint, no deck. And it happened by accident. I was giving a speech and the PowerPoint was ready to go, but we had a tech malfunction and it couldn’t go. And so my team who were there with me were like, oh, what do we do?
And I said, let’s just wing it. And honestly, Angus, it was maybe the biggest, best presentation I ever experienced in terms of the engagement of the audience, because essentially we were quantitative investors, algorithmic, we would test algorithms historically, et cetera. But I always began many speeches with, you’re not going to understand the algorithm part of this, but what you will understand are the stories. So essentially I just built my entire presentation around stories. And one of them was, would you go to a doctor who said, you know, I think I know what you have. And I just got these little yellow pills from a pharmaceutical rep, give them a try and see how they work. And everyone would laugh and I’d say, well, that’s what you’re doing.
If you don’t do your homework, if you don’t see, like with a medicine, there were double blind tests that tested the efficacy of that particular medicine. Which doctor are you going to go to? You’re going to go to the one who has the insight, but also has the evidence that this is the way to go. And so it’s really woven its way throughout my entire career and now it’s, I hope, blooming with the fiction work that I’ve done.
Angus Fletcher
Well, so stories allow for active learning. Basically, the reason that people hate PowerPoints but are addicted to them is because they’re how computers think. And so you put all this data on a screen, and the idea is that somehow the humans looking at it are going to download it into their brains. That’s not how humans work. That’s why whenever you get a new toy at Christmas or whatever, you don’t read the instructions. You just break it out and try and mess around with it. You try and figure out how it works. And the way that stories work is that they generate a sense of tension and suspense.
Because you’re telling me this story about a doctor and about these yellow pills, and I’m trying to guess where is he going with this. I don’t actually know. And as a result, I’m therefore actively learning because I’m trying to anticipate what it is you’re going to say. And that whole process of trying to anticipate what’s going to happen is both the basis of why we as humans interact with each other. That’s why we find each other interesting, but it’s also why we’re successful in terms of dealing with the future. Because the moment that you think the future is just there to be downloaded into your brain, you’re over, man. Because the future is actually unknown. And only a computer thinks that the future is known.
Because a computer can’t tell the difference between past and future, ultimately, it’s all existing in the same mathematical present. And so that’s incredible. Also, you and I, this is funny, we must be on the same kind of spiritual part of the universe, because I had the same thing happen to me a few years ago. I got basically asked by the Army to teach this class on what I do. And this was conventional Army. And they brought me in and insisted I had a PowerPoint deck. And so I spent all this time with them getting the PowerPoint deck, whatever, and then we had to go through the security clearance for the PowerPoint deck and yada, yada, yada, and then we get in the room and the whole thing breaks. There’s no PowerPoint. And they all freaked out.
And then they handed me a Magic Marker and this weird little easel with paper on it. And again, it was the best class I’ve ever taught the Army because I was engaging with the audience. Instead of the audience looking at the screen and trying to engage with the screen, we were engaging with each other. And I was able to gauge when they were interested, not interested, and build suspense or lay off suspense. And it just turned into a human interaction as opposed to us staring at a passive object.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
That is the way you get people interested and you get their attention and you get their participation. And the questions that come back to me in that type of environment are so much better, so much richer, so much more nuanced. But why? And I know you talk a lot about why, but before we get there, let’s take a step back. I want to give you an opportunity to just put your thesis out there. We made a big mistake. And the big mistake has cost us quite a bit. And that mistake was equating the human brain with a computer and computation and all of that. And you through your research have found that’s not true at all. That we have this non-logical intelligence, this primal intelligence that allows us to think in a very different and more productive manner. So if you wouldn’t mind, just for people who haven’t had the chance to read the book yet, take us through that. And also really the impact not just on institutions, organizations, but on culture, on society. You make the point that modern education gives us really great standardized test takers who are anxious, rigid, more deferential to authority, sometimes even more prone to magical thinking. But take us through it, if you don’t mind.
Angus Fletcher
Yeah, so to your point on that last thing, we’ve never created a school system that’s better at teaching kids to solve math problems, and worse at teaching them to solve life problems. And everybody knows this. The moment you get a young person in your office for the first day, you know they’re incredibly smart. You know they’ve aced all these tests and they’re also going to be totally useless for the first two years they’re in the building because they don’t have any common sense, they don’t have any initiative, they don’t have any ability to think for themselves. What is going on? How have we built this optimized education system which is taking the smartest minds and really young people today? They have the best nutrition, they have the best support, they have all of this, and yet they are absolutely fumbling at this transition between school and life. And it’s getting worse and worse and worse. So why is this happening?
So yeah, to take you back to the beginning, my background is ultimately in neurophysiology, which is a branch of neuroscience which studies living brains. And one of the things I became really fascinated by is the fact that some people could be incredibly intelligent with limited information. And those people who are intelligent with limited information are entrepreneurs, they are leaders, they are innovators, they are the people that drive the future. And I wanted to understand how that happens. And if you talk to most people in cognitive science today, they’ll say, well, it’s just luck they happen to be randomly able to do this. Now, if you just take a large enough population of humans, of course you’ll get a couple leaders, of course you’ll get a couple entrepreneurs.
But what was really incredible to me is you look at people like Steve Jobs or a lot of folks I’ve worked with, they do it again and again and again. They have a method for being very smart with very little information. And I wanted to understand what was going on in the brain, the mechanics of it, because I thought if you could understand the mechanics of it, then you would take it away from the way that people normally talk about these non-computational things. People talk about non-computational intelligence as consciousness or the ineffable or something like that. But I was like, no, if you can build it down to mechanisms and you can train it and then you can build more leaders, you can build more entrepreneurs. And that’s really what we want our educational systems to do.
So I had a theory of the brain. I had a theory of how it worked. The simple theory of that is that the brain essentially thinks in actions, whereas computers think in equations. When you put a lot of actions together, what you get is a sequence of events. A sequence of events is a narrative. That’s why great leaders think in story. They see the future, the story of the future faster than they make it happen. That’s why great strategists like you also tend to run Hollywood studios because they have this ability to manufacture stories. And then I wanted to understand how does that happen.
And so in my career I went on this odyssey. I got my PhD at Yale studying Shakespeare to understand how stories work. Taught at Stanford for a while, got to work with Pixar, worked with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, worked in Hollywood for a while before finally working now where I am now, as a professor at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, which is the world’s leading institute for the study of narrative. But for almost all of my career, I was considered to be this wacky thinker because everyone was like, well, of course computers. That’s what the human brain should be.
Because really, for the last 50 or 60 years, really since the emergence of ENIAC and then IBM and then Apple in the late 20th century, we just had this idea that computers are intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to be logical. Because computers have logic gates. They only think in logic. Specifically, they think in symbolic logic, which has a limited number of mechanical functions. They’re purely logical. Anything that isn’t logical must either be random or bias. That’s the thought process. And so therefore, all creativity must just be random, must be flailing around. And then anything that’s not random or logical must be biased. We have to eliminate bias. And so, of course, our school system has spent the last 20 or 30 years trying to eradicate bias from students, and it’s not helped.
So I have this totally different way of thinking. I keep pushing it out there. People keep saying, Angus, this is nuts. I keep saying, well, computers need all this information to be smart. Humans don’t need information to be smart. There must be something here. No Angus, you’re nuts. And then about five years ago now, I get a call from U.S. Army Special Operations. And at first I thought it was a prank call because I never had any contact with the Army. And they also introduced themselves when I talked to them initially as USASOC, which I’d never heard of before, stands for U.S. Army Special Operations Command. But when they said USASOC to me, I was like, are you telling me I need to use a sock? What is this word?
I’ve never heard this, and I don’t know if anyone’s ever spent any time with the Army, but it’s just this endless stream of acronyms. TRADOC, whatever. Nobody understands if you’re outside the Army, what it means, but you go into the cult called the Army, and you learn all the acronyms. So I got this call from them, and they said to me, hey, Angus, you’re on our watch lists. And my heart stopped for a moment. And they said, that could be very scary.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Angus Fletcher
And in particular, I got contacted by an individual. I can name him now because he’s since retired. His name is Colonel Thomas Gaines, and he was a member of a classified unit that I can’t name inside Joint Special Operations Command inside the Army, that is an intelligence unit. And their job essentially is to live in the future, solving problems before they happen. You can imagine, based on events that have happened over the past year, some of the operations they might have been involved in that went fairly seamlessly. And one of the things that they do in their spare time, apparently is they look for wild scientific theories that could be the future. And they said, Angus, we think you could have one of those theories. Now, we also think you could be a total crank.
We’re not sure because a lot of times it’s really hard to tell whether a new idea is brilliant or just totally nuts. And so we’re wondering, would you like the opportunity to come inside and test your theories? Would you like to test low information intelligence? Would you like to test whether you can actually train some of our elite units to do some of the things you think that students should be doing. And at the time, really the only theory that I had, and I talked about this thing in chapter two of the book, was imagination. It was basically how to increase your imagination. They said, oh, absolutely, I’d love to do that. So I went in and we had this really amazingly productive partnership in which it turned out that I wasn’t nuts. In
my first encounter, I go into this classified facility somewhere that doesn’t actually technically exist. It’s one of these just surreal experiences you have where this building was actually built out of parts of historic structures. So hypothetically, buildings that might have been destroyed overseas or aircraft carriers or whatnot, pieces of them had been forged together to create this almost temple to American Special Operations. Anyway, go inside. There’s the most high tech gym you’ve ever seen in your life. And I’ve been inside NFL facilities, so I’ve seen high tech gyms. I’ve never seen anything like this. And they get escorted into this classroom, which, again, super high tech.
I can’t do all the details, but you can imagine it’s a little bit like if you’ve seen Tom Cruise’s Minority Report or something like that. It’s really out there. So I’m in this room and at this point I slept about an hour the night before. I was so both panicked and amped up because I’d never been inside one of these facilities before. I had no idea where I was going. I get in there, and then I’m confronted by this group of operators. As you might imagine, they’re all incredibly fit, and they’re just staring at me with these laser eyes, their arms crossed, and I’m hyperventilating.
And they hand me a piece of chalk, and I’m trying to describe my theories on the blackboard. And of course, I’m a professor, so everything I say is incredibly abstract and there’s no relationship to reality. And they’re just staring at me with the most aggressive, I could tell I’m not explaining anything properly. And after about five minutes of this, I basically am about to quit. And then the instructor, the senior guy, comes from the back of the classroom and he walks down, he takes the piece of chalk, he says, what this guy is trying to say is this. And he then explains everything I was trying to say much better than I had explained it.
And I was like, that is exactly what I’m trying to say. And then everybody starts nodding. They’re like, oh, yeah, absolutely, that’s right. And then I had this amazing moment. I don’t know if you ever had this in your life where you’re wandering around, you feel like you’re the only person who thinks the way that you think, and then you suddenly find your tribe and you’re just like, whoa. And once we got over that language barrier, all of a sudden we were bonded and since become my closest friends, really the happiest team of my life. And I do want to say to everybody out there that as bad as you might think things are going in the world, there is Army Special Operations. They can be trusted to fix problems. So that’s also done a lot to reduce my stress.
And that was the beginning of this amazing experience where we started with imagination. And that was kind of a little bit what I taught them at the same time, really, just mostly confirming a lot of stuff they’d already thought. And then went in and we started to identify how intuition works, how common sense works, why emotions work in the brain. We built this whole theory, and then at the end of it, I basically said to them, hey, we’ve developed training that we’ve shown works on your most elite units. You guys have very generously validated me.
There’s this thing that Special Operations has called covert victory, which basically is their belief that when a victory is really satisfying, you don’t have to tell anybody about it. And they basically said, hey, Angus, we’ve given you a covert victory. You’ve come in here, there’s all this stuff you’re not going to be allowed to share with anybody ever. But you’ve got your covert victory. And it was really gratifying. I mean, I did feel like I’d lived my life purpose in a strange way, like I could have died there and felt fulfilled. But I still asked them, I said, hey, I said, but obviously, all the stuff, that’s your stuff we can’t take out of this building. But can we take the training out?
Can we take the training out and put it into schools? And the Army was like, absolutely. So we then went, we validated it with the conventional Army. They did a bunch of large scale trials on the core parts of the training. And since then we’ve started putting it into schools and we’ve shown that it has tremendous effects on helping kids develop self-efficacy, initiative, resilience. And the really dirty secret about it is it’s just getting you back in touch with your nature. A lot of it is stuff that when you talk to folks, my generation or above, we sort of, I mean, we sort of get it already because we’ve already had to take risks, experiment. We can’t just go to Google for answers for everything.
But this is something that kids today, they’re in a school system that essentially teaches them one thing, which is there is an answer and the system has it. That’s the main thing you learn when you take standardized tests. They’re habituated into that. It creates dependency in them. They’re always deferring to adults. They also, because they have a loss of self-efficacy, tend to get restless, more prone to anger and anxiety. And they also, because they have no contact with reality, to your point about magical thinking, spend a lot of time reading Harry Potter and other kinds of books, watching superhero movies, reading Romantasy, all of which is fine, there’s nothing bad with any of that stuff. But when you think that’s actually real, that’s a problem.
When it stops being something you do for fun and becomes something that you actually think is real, that’s a problem. And so a big part of what has happened on this odyssey is going, taking this rogue theory, validating it through U.S. Army Special Operations, trying to put it back into the American educational system. We’ve just started with that. But a big help has been businesses. And so I imagine one of the reasons that you and I are in contact is because you read the book and thought, oh, this could be useful in a business context. And I’ve been able to work with a bunch of businesses through writing this book, even though I know nothing about business myself. And they have been very helpful, both in terms of philanthropy and in other ways to kind of turn this wheel.
And a big part of what I’m hoping is that we’re going to start to turn the corner. We’re going to start to bring our education system back to what it could be because there’s so many good intentions and so much money in it. And all we really need is a little bit more common sense, a little more focus on human abilities and understanding that to your point, technology is a tool. It can make you into a centaur. But if you start out with technology, you’re essentially lobotomizing yourself.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I have a friend, we talk about this quite a bit. And we were on this subject and he said in his experience, the three groups of people who, what he calls are in closest touch with reality. And he names them Special Forces, emergency room doctors, and Wall Street traders. Those are his three and I believe it. Okay, now I’m watching your reaction. So tell me you believe it. I’m not going to give you his reasons. I’d like to hear why you think that he’s not too off base there.
Angus Fletcher
Well, first of all, they all deal in life and death. I mean, and so one is—
Jim O’Shaughnessy
A metaphorical death, the Wall Street trader. The other two are real life and death.
Angus Fletcher
Yes. And from the perspective of your brain, there’s no difference. This is the thing, I mean, you can obviously metacognitively realize that making and losing money isn’t life and death, but to your brain it is. And you’re constantly having to navigate your fight or flight response. And that constantly having to navigate your fight or flight response can either put you in a condition of submissiveness, short term coping, or you can learn to master that response because it evolved in your brain to help you do superhuman things. And once you get into that state, and so in addition to working with Special Operations, I had worked a ton with ER doctors for this book and also had the opportunity to work with Preston Klein. I’ll give him a shout out.
He runs something called Mission Critical Team Institute. They work with a lot of NFL teams, but also they work with a ton of doctors and EMTs, frontline responders, firefighters, and so on and so forth. And I also work with a lot of traders. And it’s exactly the same brain process, because what you’re doing is you’re going outside what Special Operators call the bubble. So the bubble is an artificial sense of stability that we’ve created in the modern world. The bubble is where you always expect there to be bananas in the supermarket. You just know. And you see the American consumer just freaks out. This is why whenever there’s a spirit snow thing, the American consumer freaks out, and it’s like, oh, my God, I got to buy toilet paper and got to buy bread.
Because that, to them is a crisis. It’s a completely artificial stability that has been built by generations and generations of people working really hard to give comfort and peace to others. But in order to maintain the bubble, you’ve got to go outside the bubble constantly, because the world is much larger than the bubble. The universe is much larger than the bubble, and increasingly fewer and fewer people go outside the bubble, and those are Special Forces. Special Forces go outside the bubble, EMTs go outside the bubble, and traders go outside the bubble. Because what traders are trying to do is essentially figure out the economy of tomorrow and the economy. I’m a very practical thinker. These are views that are not necessarily popular in the academy, but I think the foundation of any stable society is the military.
That’s why I think 1775, the formation of the Army, came before 1776. And then I think after you’ve got that physical security, you then get economic security. So then right on top of the military, you’ve got the economy. And those are the foundations that allow for all these other things to flourish. Other things will flourish a little bit in stability. People will still make art and poetry and do other kinds of things in military and economic volatility. But it’s when you’ve got that military stability and you’ve got that economic stability that you get this explosion of imagination and other things. Because the bubble essentially flourishes when you have those folks that are able to navigate the waters outside.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Robert Anton Wilson, I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work. But he’s been a favorite of mine, and he calls it reality tunnels. And he does a lot to explain. He would be just nodding furiously listening to you, because one of the things that he rails against is the educational installation of the correct answer machine, as he calls it. And he went to Catholic schools and as did I. And, boy, they’re good at installing the correct answer machine. Except I was the problem child because I just sat, and the nuns would just throw me out.
Angus Fletcher
We really are similar because I didn’t go to a Catholic school, but I went on scholarship, actually, to an Episcopalian school when I was growing up. And I remember I was constantly failing my religion tests because I just hated being told what to do in religion. And so for one of my answers, you had to define God and whatnot. And I would always show that I knew the definition of God, but change the words around in a way that infuriated the person who was creating it. Fletcher, you’re out of the class. Go kneel down outside. This kind of stuff. Yeah. And we know the more that a child believes that there’s a right answer, the less likely they are to come up with a new answer.
That is just basic science. And I think the key as we start to think about this is that, you agree with this. I agree with this. A lot of folks agree with this. We need to start taking this common sense and putting it into the school system, because kids are suffering. And it doesn’t take rocket science. This isn’t an unsolvable problem. We just need to start dismantling this apparatus, this surveillance apparatus where teachers are evaluated on how well they get students to pass these silly tests. And my daughter, I was talking to her this morning, she’s taking essentially a history class. All they do in this class is they memorize definitions. They don’t actually study history. They don’t learn about history. They don’t read books about history.
They just memorize definitions so that the teachers can then have the students pass, and then the school can get its funding, and then the students can move on to the next stage. And we need to start to decentralize this system, give more autonomy to teachers, more common sense, allow them to give books out to students to read at their own pace, all these kinds of things. And of course, that doesn’t mean you totally turn everything into anarchy. You can still have math classes. You can still have some standardized tests. But it needs to be a balance. It needs to be a common sense balance that’s focused on nurturing the whole intelligence of students as opposed to just things that we can evaluate with these standardized tests. It becomes the tyranny of metrics. It becomes the tyranny of assessment as opposed to the usefulness of assessment.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And once you decide that a target is a measurable metric, it ceases being a useful information point for you. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories about the British ruling India, and they had too many snakes, and so they gave a bounty if you brought a snake’s tail in. And what did it do? All the enterprising Indians started breeding snakes.
Angus Fletcher
They hacked the system. They hacked the system, which is what smart people do. They hack the system. I mean, I’m sure the reason that you’re sitting here today is the same reason I’m sitting here today, which is that I hacked the system.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Angus Fletcher
I figured out how to get incredibly good at standardized tests. I was considered to be a wizard at standardized tests. I got scholarships all the way through. And I always thought that they were dumb. And I remember people would come up to me all the time. They’re like, I guess you’re so smart. I’m like, why do you think I’m smart? Because you’re getting these great test scores. I was like, that’s not smart. I mean, and I was just trying to get high enough in the system so that I could escape it finally.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yep.
Angus Fletcher
And do my own thing. But that’s what intelligent people will always do. That’s why I love humans, is because we have that ability. But I think a lot of people, they get overwhelmed by all, I mean, there’s never been bureaucracy like there is now. There have never been systems like there are now. It’s all over the place. And when we start putting kids at the age of three or four or five into these systems, they stop having that natural sense that you or I might have had, that there’s something outside it, and it starts to become their entire reality. And so we’re actually training them in an alternate reality, which is a fictional reality, and we’re divesting them of their autonomy, their initiative, their humanity. And that’s what really concerns me.
I think we’re at a point in this country where we’re all starting to see that this is a problem, but it’s like no one feels like they’re in charge anymore. This is what happens with bureaucracy. You get the accountability sink. It’s like, I don’t know how to fix it. Nobody knows how to fix it. Nobody’s in charge. The system is running itself, but people are in charge. It can be fixed. We could get folks together, start, whether it’s alternative schools or just start different kind of classes or whatever. There is a path I talk about in the book, but there’s plenty of other people. I mean, this isn’t new stuff. This is just common sense. And I’m really hopeful that will be the next stage of education, is putting students first as opposed to putting metrics first.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And it was one of the things as I was preparing and rereading your sections of your book. Do you have an idea? How did this become so dominant in our culture?
Angus Fletcher
I can tell you. I can tell you. Yeah, please do. So we’re a democracy, and as a democracy, we’re obsessed with fairness. And so essentially, this is all about the byproduct of good intentions. If you look at the end of the 19th century, turning the 20th century, you get the rise of industrialized education.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Taylorism.
Angus Fletcher
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah.
And so the idea is, we got to make everything fair, we got to make everything standardized, we got to make everything optimum, we got to make everything efficient. And so we then, which is not wrong in the sense that where you can have efficiency, you should have it. And in a math class, people can’t just pick up their own answers. I’m not arguing for that. But math is only a small percentage of life. Math is a very useful skill that you want to develop, but it’s not all of life. And so what ended up happening is these systems started to take hold. They then became motivated by this idea of fairness and meritocracy and justice and so on and so forth. And many of the smart kids were able to hack the system.
And so the system, to a certain extent, kept working because smart kids would keep coming out of it and surviving. But at the same time, we were suffocating all these other students and not helping them access their potential. And what ended up happening, and this is something that happened in Special Operations, too, is that a system that was supposed to be about training ended up becoming simply about selection and assessment. In other words, it basically became about, let’s identify the kids that are already smart by forcing them to run through these increasingly complicated gauntlets. We then skim them off. And then we just abandon everybody else. As opposed to really the point of a democratic society, which is to maximize the potential of your people. That’s the difference between us and say, communism.
Communism is basically about installing a single way of doing things and then forcing people to jump through hoops. The whole purpose of America is freedom and it’s to maximize the independence and autonomy of students. And of course we want to equip them to do certain types of, calculus is not evil, computer programming. These are good things. But the moment that we think that is the only reason to do things, I mean, people forget that what was the Soviet Union’s great invention? It was statistics. Marxism emerged out of statistics. And you get from that the idea that there’s an average person, and that’s the foundation of communism.
Whereas the whole foundation of democracy is there is no such thing as an average person. We’re all unique and we want to cultivate that and celebrate that. And yes, of course, I understand that we need to have statistics because cars need to be a certain size, we need to mass produce certain things. And that’s fine as long as we’re aware that it’s a heuristic and a tool as opposed to reality. So I think basically we got caught up in this Taylorism, which I think is actually pretty close to communism, as I’ve indicated. But just these statistics based approaches, scientific management, that in a small amount are good, but when they become everything are tyrannical.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. One of my central ideas is that one thrives with cognitive diversity, but when you get a monoculture, those are the most fragile and most destined to join the, as Marx would say, dustbin of history.
Angus Fletcher
Yeah, no, this is right. So this is also biological. So we know that the more optimized the species is, the more prone it is to extinction.
So species that become hyper specialized, thrive for very short periods of time and they get totally wiped out. And I always like to point out to people that the counter to this is the human hand. The human hand is optimized for nothing. There’s not a single thing that it’s optimized to do, but it’s adequate for endless tasks. And you want to start thinking about your brain the same way your brain is like your hand, only it’s the cognitive version of your hand. It’s not optimized for anything, but it’s adequate at almost anything. And that kind of flexibility is what we want to encourage in young people.
And that flexibility is what allows us to cope with uncertainty, to cope with volatility, not to get wiped out by over specializing and then essentially becoming dependent on our environment because we can only survive if the environment stays the same as opposed to becoming dependent on ourselves, self-reliant and having this natural evolutionary capacity to adapt.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It’s like the famous, I’m blanking on his name, Robert Heinlein, I think he had that wonderful line, specialization is for ants.
Angus Fletcher
Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And the full quote is marvelous. It’s like, no, I’m a human being, I should be able to. And then he gives this huge list of very different things that he should be able to do as a human being. I was always taken by that quote of his.
Angus Fletcher
And Heinlein’s a great example because this is something we discovered working with Special Operations. Because it’s one thing to talk about how we believe in these things, but then the next question is, how do you cultivate that? That’s what we want. We want to build a culture. America has a history. The reason that America, and I think I can say this because I’m an immigrant, so I’m a naturalized citizen. So this isn’t me running around being a chest thumping patriot. This is me being a real patriot. This is me being someone who chose to be an American. The reason that America is so extraordinary is it’s had the ability to cultivate that individualism, to cultivate individuals. And how do they do it?
And so one of the things we learned from working with Special Operations is that they spend a lot of time reading near fiction, near future science fiction like Heinlein. And there’s something about it that just stimulates your imagination. And we find that when young people are exposed, for example, to science fiction as opposed to fantasy novels, they tend to do better later in life because what’s happening with the science fiction is it’s helping them to imagine, oh, here’s a future that’s kind of like mine. But there’s a couple things that are different. How would I survive in it, as opposed to fantasy, which is just putting you in a realm of magic, which has no contact with anything. And so Heinlein, I think that entire generation, Asimov, all those writers were really great at cultivating American culture, and we’re sort of losing that.
And what are our great science fiction writers today? They’re not popular, they’re not mainstream. Hollywood does very few sci-fi movies now. We’ve sort of given up on that, even though that was really the prime thing when you look at America’s golden years of innovation.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I’m a huge sci-fi fan, as you might be able to intuit. But I also concur. Have you read Bill Bryson’s One Summer, where he focuses on the 1920s? And I love the book because that’s the America that built what we have. It was freewheeling. There’s a wonderful story in there on how President Coolidge was vacationing near where the guy was doing the Mount Rushmore, and the guy just did it. He had no permission. He had no authorization. And so the President’s aide comes in to his camp. They were fishing or something and says, hey, Mr. President, you gotta come see what this guy is doing. And so Coolidge goes up there and he’s like, wow, cool. But the whole spirit of that America was exactly what you are detailing.
Angus Fletcher
Yeah, you take the initiative.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, you take the initiative. Some things are going to work out. To use a military acronym, some go FUBAR. But you have the freedom and the space and the underlying, as you point out, I think the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are perhaps the most brilliant documents in the founding of a country ever.
Angus Fletcher
Of course. Unquestionably. I don’t even know why that’s up for debate. Again, I’m not saying this as some rabid patriot. I’m just saying that is the case. They are the experiment. I mean, we often talk about America as an experiment, and that’s why it’s great, because it is an ongoing experiment. Unlike all these other countries that try to basically fix something. America has this idea that we’re going to build the plane as we fly it, and that’s going to create a culture of individuals taking risks and trying things. This ultimately is a difference between thinking in probability and thinking in possibility and systems, whether they’re communist or AI or whatever, they think in probability. And probability is based on what’s worked in the past.
And that’s why those systems are ultimately not able to develop huge innovations. They’re able to produce optimization and stability, but they don’t understand risk, because anytime they look at a possibility, they say, we have no data on it. And then what the American says is, well, that’s why we got to try it. We have no data on it, so we got to try it. We got to figure out if it works or not. And the system’s like, whoa, if we try it and it doesn’t work, it’s going to cost money. Things might go wrong. Rushmore might fall over. Just think of the disasters which might ensue. And the American’s like, no, because here’s the thing.
Once you start getting in the habit of taking risks and trying things and experimenting, you learn how to fix risks that don’t work out. And so it’s not just a case of I’m just randomly taking all these risks, and some of them are working and some of them aren’t. It’s, I’m learning how to manage risk and to use risk and to leverage risks and to learn and grow from risk. And you just get into that experimental entrepreneurial psychology. And that’s why once you’ve started one business, you can start five.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yep.
Angus Fletcher
But if you’ve never started a business, you’re never going to start one. Because you’re just going to sit there and imagine all the things that could possibly go wrong.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I’m a big fan of David Deutsch, the quantum physicist in England, and his book The Beginning of Infinity. And he does a really good job explaining what he finds. One of the worst things that you could do, and that is to fall into the grip of the precautionary principle, because it essentially institutionalizes everything you’ve just said leads to decline and collapse because it doesn’t leave open any room for change. And when you only are operating on outdated things that no longer hold true, what’s going to happen? You’re not going to be able to think your way through to the new path.
Angus Fletcher
That’s exactly right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And so the idea that we can reform is very appealing to me. I agree with you entirely. I’ve been on the soapbox about the need to change the American educational system forever. But I’ve also been on the soapbox of, America with all of our problems, we are still the place where most of the world’s smartest people, most imaginative people, want to come and live. And so if we could fix that process and we could get the best of the world and say, not only to say, yeah, you can come to America, but to actively say, hey, Angus, come become an American citizen. We want the way you think.
Angus Fletcher
Yeah, yeah, no, I totally agree. I mean, I think America is bad, but it’s better than anywhere else. It’s still the best that humans have ever done. And I think a lot of us as Americans look around in frustration because we see that best and we’re like, why can’t we have more of that? And a lot of it comes down to the fact that when America is successful, it creates the ability for long term risk. And when you focus everything on the short term, it immediately turns people into just copying what happened in the past. And you get in this mindset of just, I’m going to survive, I’m just going to cope. And so many of our institutions now are not allowing individuals to take the big risks.
And then what happens as a result is you get a small number of people who are lunatics, like me, it sounds like you as well, who just almost have it in our nature that we’re going to take risks anyway. And so you get a small number of individuals who keep the system going by taking those risks even though there’s no safety net, even though there’s no support. But when America did, I mean, my classic example of when America was at its best was when it landed people on the moon.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yep.
Angus Fletcher
And that was an enormous risk and things did go wrong. There were tragedies and there were calamities, but there was a willingness to take risks in that era of NASA that does not exist in the current generation of NASA. It’s one of the reasons why SpaceX has taken over and SpaceX isn’t even taking risks like they used to back then. And if you could institutionalize that culture of risk taking where you’re of course doing everything you can to manage and learn from things that go wrong. I mean, if you’ve read The Right Stuff, if you read about the test pilots that we had in the 1950s, that was real risk. And that was why we had this explosive period of technological growth. And you have to create a system that supports that.
You have to create a system that will economically support individuals so they take risks that don’t work out and that’s the possibility of America. But at the moment, that’s really breaking apart in ways that I think are disturbing. And to your point about schools are all about, can you pass the test tomorrow? Students are never allowed to develop a long term plan for their lives. It’s always, can I memorize these two pieces of information and regurgitate them to the teacher tomorrow? And as a result, they just are completely alienated from the part of themselves that knows how to sustain a long term strategy or a blue sky shot.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And you know, as you were talking about the going shorter and shorter term, there’s an analog in what I used to do investing, and it’s called hyperbolic discounting.
Angus Fletcher
Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And when you do it, you narrow your ability to choose between options to such a degree that you talk a lot about, fear is no plan. And anger is one plan. When you do hyperbolic discounting, you essentially so narrow your field of vision that your chances of making the wrong choice skyrocket.
Angus Fletcher
That’s right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I always try to get, I spent 30 years of my career trying to get people to understand that simple concept. It’s like, no, no, no. And one story that I told was about my first big client. And he was a gold entrepreneur. He just had a great intuition for where gold was. And so I asked him to explain it to me and he goes, I’ll show it to you. And he takes me out back, this is in the West, and we get into a single prop plane, he’s a pilot. And he takes me up and he starts flying over various geography. And then he says, do you notice anything different about the way that patch down there looks versus all of the other patches that we’ve flown over? And I’m like, yeah, it does look different.
He goes, I’m turning you into a gold prospector. But then he said something that really stuck with me and changed the way I presented this idea about if you really want to expand your possibilities, you’ve got to be very long term. He was old when he sold his company. And when I flew out, I had put together a portfolio, frankly a very conservative portfolio, because I made the mistake of thinking, well, you know, he’s 70, this is a long time ago. He’s gonna want the really low volatility type stuff. And I took him through it and he just had this big smile. We were sitting, I was on a couch and he was in a chair, and he just got this big smile on his face and he went, Jim, I gotta tell you, I’m disappointed in you.
And I went, okay, why? And he goes, why are you bringing me all this vanilla, plain vanilla stuff? And I went, well, sir, you know, not for nothing, you’re 70 and. And there was a table next to us, and it was filled with, if you can see in my background, you’ll see all my grandchildren. It was all of his grandchildren. And he pointed at the pictures and he said, my time horizon is infinite. And it so struck me that I just stole the line from him.
Angus Fletcher
That might be my favorite story of all time. There’s a couple reasons why I love that. First of all, he spots exceptional information. I mean, he’s like, the Special Forces would love him if he could just fly over and identify where gold is. I mean, that’s the secret to everything. That’s incredible. Also, he was able to spot exceptional information in you. He was able to see that you were actually, even though you gave him this portfolio he didn’t want, he was able to know that you could do something more than that. And that actually, I think more than anything else is actually the key to investing. I think that really successful investors invest in people.
I mean, this is certainly what Hollywood does. I mean, when I work with Bob Shaye, he would never buy a script. He would buy the writer of a script or he would buy a director and he would say, look, if this person produces a dreadful script, they’re still a great writer. They’ll write me something else. If this investor comes in, if this manager comes in and gets a terrible portfolio, I know we can come up with something better. But this idea that you invest for your grandchildren, now that’s actually in biology. We call this the grandchildren principle. What determines success in biology is not the number of children you have, it’s the number of grandchildren you have.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Huh?
Angus Fletcher
And that’s why, there’s famously, animals like the liger that are sterile. You could have a tiger, lion, a million ligers, and it would be the end of the line. And a lot of when you get into short term thinking, you’re thinking about your children, you’re not thinking about your grandchildren. And shifting people to think about second generation success, not just how do I get my customer to buy this car, but how do I get my customer’s kid to buy a car?
I mean, that’s where companies like Honda, establish their dominance, which I think they’re now losing because everyone is now focused increasingly, like, how do I get your cash and then run away in the other direction before you come back and ask me for it, but that focus and when America gets back into that, when companies start thinking about, no, actually what we’re really thinking about here is not the next investment cycle, but we’re thinking about the cycle birthed by that, the grandchildren of that cycle, we’re thinking always at least two steps down the road. That’s when you start to get this long term psychology that takes hold and that’s where America thrives. I mean, democracy does not work as a short term thing.
If you have a group of people who are always voting for the person that’s telling them what’s going to make them happiest now, the country collapses. And we’re seeing that now. It’s just, you just get politicians who are just offering people stuff that they can’t give them. You get into this debt spiral that we’re in now where everybody’s like, we’re not going to pay for it now, we’re just going to pay for it later. But democracy does work when you have everybody in that democracy like we used to have thinking about their grandchildren. If you get up every morning, you’re like, I’m voting for the person who’s going to be best for my grandchildren, democracy becomes the strongest institution in the world. If everybody’s thinking about what’s best for me today, democracy collapses and we lose to tyrants.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
You know, it’s fascinating to me is once I had that conversation with him, that’s how I started viewing everything. And I have six grandchildren. Ages a little under 2 to 12. And that’s how I think about things. I think about what kind of world can I affect now that will be a good world for my grandchildren and their children to grow up in. And it leads you to very different conclusions. Where you’re going to put your time, money, energy, what you’re going to fight for, what you can be fine with just the way it is. But I’ve never heard it explained that way. So thank you very much for that. I now can say, well, the reason I do this.
Angus Fletcher
Yeah, well, I mean the nuns at your Catholic school were right, there is immortality. But it comes to us through our grandchildren.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes.
Angus Fletcher
And that’s where it comes from. And when you think like that, you start to feel this spiritual connection. Of course you feel a connection and a kinship with your kids, but you then you see in grandparents and grandchildren there’s a different kind of connection. There is a different kind of spiritual connection. And that is because that’s where life thrives. Life thrives in that long term space. And I do think the fact that you’ve discovered that, that’s the thing that as much as we can cultivate that, whether it’s in our school systems, whether it’s in our businesses, I’m a big fan of family businesses.
A lot of the time when I work with family businesses and I see that they’ve been handed through multiple generations and I realize that one generation has been looking out for two generations down and basically getting their kids to think about the grandkids, it’s not just about making money now. It’s about making money two generations on. That’s when you start to develop these organic, really strong communities that thrive. And certainly the military has this. I mean, the military is always thinking about the future. The military is always thinking about the war after the next war and how do we set ourselves up. And I’m just afraid that not enough areas of American life think that way. And we have to figure out how to get people to connect really on that spiritual level.
Once you have that experience, it stays with you and it does change the way you behave. But if you just think about it in the abstract, it’s not going to deflect you from your short term hedonism.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And that was the other thing. Along those lines, when my son was expecting his first, my first grandchild, a grandson, I had said to him multiple times, you really do not understand how much I love you, but you will. And he used to dismiss me and he’d be like, oh, dad, I know how much you love me. And I went, no, you actually don’t. And when he came out holding Pierce, that’s my first grandson, tears in his eyes, he looked at me and he goes, I had no idea how right you were. And it is that connection that is very human. And you know, back to your thought about communist and authoritarian and totalitarian systems. What is the first thing they attack? The family.
Angus Fletcher
Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Get the kids to rat out mom and dad, this whole paranoid culture so that they can sustain their monoculture, which never happens. I read, speaking of notebooks, I was just going through some old ones and I found one from 1982, when I was 22, and I have a 10 page little thesis explaining why the USSR had to collapse. And it was the underlying uniformity of their system, which didn’t allow for any change. Change was punished severely. And of course, we also can’t let the Catholic Church off the hook here. They tried for centuries. No, no, Galileo. You’ll be spending the next seven years of your life as our guests in the Vatican.
Angus Fletcher
That’s right. Yeah. No, and anytime a system thinks that it has finished growing, you know, maybe in the next life, but not in this life. I mean, the basis of life is growth. Everything wants to grow. That’s when you have your deepest experiences of joy, is when you’re growing. I mean, I can confirm, when we had my first kid, I did suddenly understand my parents in a totally different way. I mean, your entire, you experience a conversion, essentially.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Angus Fletcher
You change who you are in a radical way. You suddenly understand, oh my goodness, I’m entering a totally next phase of my life in which I can look back at my parents. I have a total, I used to have a fairly contentious relationship with my dad. I’ve got a great relationship with my dad now because having kids changed my understanding of all these things. And that growth, that sense that I can change in an organic way. I’m not just being ripped out of my life and thrust into another one, but I’m myself. But more, that’s what democracy exists to nurture and to cultivate. Whereas to your point, systems exist to perpetuate themselves by crushing anything inside them that is different or new.
And this is just a feature of all bureaucracies, whether they’re communist or not, is they just fear anything that in some way might destabilize the system because the system is so optimized, it’s moving so efficiently. And it forgets that it exists for another function. It forgets that it’s supposed to itself have grandchildren. That it’s supposed to hand something on. And it starts to think that itself is the focus. And that’s like weird, almost like teenage narcissism where you think that somehow the world was created for you as opposed to, you were there to perpetuate the world. That’s what suffocates all of these chances for experience.
And I think if I’d known as a young person that I could experience the same growth and joy that I did as a child when I was 40, 50, 60, 70. That’s what we want to excite in people as opposed to, we have a culture now that is terrified of change, that pathologizes getting old, that doesn’t understand that these are actually positive forms of growth, that you develop wisdom and all sorts of extraordinary things as you age. But no, we all have to stay the same. We all have to have Botox. We all have to look, the system has to stay the same. That’s where I think we lose out on the actual opportunity for life.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I think Oscar Wilde nailed it with his Picture of Dorian Gray, right? The portrait. Perfect, handsome, all of that. The real portrait. And that can happen to a system, right? Because if it’s always trying to maintain that face and meanwhile it’s disintegrating in the background, you get to a bad place. And one of the things that I worry about, I mean, we are so ridiculously simpatico. This is so much fun for me is science, right? Traditionally in science, it was supposed to be the height of objectivity, right? And I mentioned Robert Anton Wilson to you earlier, but he’s got a great book called The New Inquisition, Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science. And essentially he makes the case that they so bought into the old theory of materialism. In other words, everything had to be fit into that paradigm. And anything, like, for example, I had Rupert Sheldrake on as a guest.
He’s a scientist and very outside the fold, shall we put it? In fact, it never ended up getting anywhere, but we were going to work with him on an intuition app which was meant to help you increase your intuition. He’s written a tremendous amount on intuition, and he believes that it’s testable and that it’s real. And one of the things that he talks about is you’ve never experienced the hairs on the back of your neck standing up. You’ve never experienced that. And everyone was like, well, of course I have. And he goes, yes, because that is intuition, and you’re designed as an intuitive being. And maybe we can harness intuition and make it better.
Angus Fletcher
Yeah. And this point about science, science is supposed to be humbling, right? As a scientist, you’re supposed to actually remember that you know almost nothing. I mean, we actually do know almost nothing. I mean, we know a lot of very interesting things, and I think a lot of the stuff we know is interesting and valuable. But we know almost nothing. And yet science has become so conservative intellectually over just a little c conservative over the last 50, 60 years. I mean, never in human history has more money been poured into science and you’ve gotten less breakthroughs. It’s just bizarre. And it’s just become this entire paper mill, essentially, of scientists having to get a grant. And how do you get a grant?
Well, you get a grant by showing that you’re productive over this cycle. And so how do you show that you’re productive? Well, you basically just recycle experiments that are going to work. And so the entire system just keeps basically saying the same thing over and over and over again and not getting anywhere. And just like the assessment system in school, it acts as though the stuff that it’s repeating is all that there is. No, this is this tiny little area. And it’s great. If you want to keep repeating yourself endlessly, science, that’s fine. But the purpose of science ultimately is to innovate, to discover. And at some point, I mean, to me, science is on some level, it’s the attempt to figure out what are the limits of human knowledge.
When you get the limits of human knowledge and you’ve explained everything, then you say, okay, we are masters of the universe. But more likely when you get to the limits of human knowledge and you still can’t explain everything, you say, okay, there’s something more, and we’ve just given up on that. We’ve just said, no, we know everything. There isn’t any more to go. We are the masters, and we’re basically the masters of almost nothing. I mean, I think Covid, if nothing else, revealed to us just how bizarre science has become in the modern world. It became this weird mix of people overinvesting confidence in new ideas and there being a staggering lack of imagination and willingness to experiment.
And I think we’re at a moment where I hope, just as there’s a chance to change the school system, there’s a chance to change science, because I think people are ready and open to the idea that there is something more out there. And to get there, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, you just need to encourage a little more entrepreneurial initiative, encourage a little more creative thinking, trust people, invest in people. As opposed to in grants and in applications and scripts, start to go back to what made America such a dynamic, innovative country in the first place, which was betting on things that haven’t been tried before.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And in our own small way, we’re trying to do that. At O’Shaughnessy Ventures, we started a fellowship and grants program. We have a dozen $100,000 annual grants with no equity. In other words, we don’t get any. If they’re scientists and they come up with this amazing thing, it’s theirs, not ours. But what we select for is exactly the opposite of the way the traditional grant process works. We are inviting the oddballs. We are inviting, because if you think about it, Isaac Newton was an eccentric fellow.
Angus Fletcher
I mean, he might have been the nuttiest guy of the entire 17th century. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And you know, out of the 5% of the time he spent on math, he spent 95% on alchemy. And he still did come up with some pretty cool stuff.
Angus Fletcher
He did. Yeah. No, I mean, I actually spent a tour. He spent a lot of time with the Book of Daniel and trying to predict the day of the end of the world.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
That’s right.
Angus Fletcher
Essentially. I mean, that’s what he spent most of his time doing. And he was actually very uninterested in a lot of the astronomy stuff. I mean, people would come to his office and he’d be trying to figure out whether the world was going to end this year or that year. And he would say, oh, yes, by the way, I have this paper over there where I’ve explained the laws of gravity. You could maybe dig it up, and they’d be like, what? Yeah, yeah. So, no, absolutely. And a lot of, I mean, a lot of really, truly brilliant thought does come out of people who, mentally, their ideas are not right. But you only have to, if you’re having those just huge ideas you only need to hit once in your life to change everything. So I’m very cheered to hear that you’re doing that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And Ken Stanley, whose book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, has a really interesting take on that, which is very in line with the way you look at the world. He says if you start with just a single goal here and you just optimize everything you’re doing, all your research, everything else to reach that goal, you’re going to be very disappointed.
Angus Fletcher
Yes, you are.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Because the title of his book is Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned. You have to iterate. You have to try. You have to make the mistake. I personally believe that mistakes are portals of discovery. And if you don’t make mistakes, you’re not going to get anywhere. Well, you’re going to get where you are, and that’s about it. But the whole path to doing something new, to doing something innovative, to thinking differently and solving a problem differently, in my opinion, is mistake, learn, mistake, learn, iterate.
Angus Fletcher
Yeah. So this might be a good place for us to start to tie this together. Because one of the things that I’m fascinated by is how individuals such as yourself continue going forward through mistakes without a concrete target. Like, how does that work in the brain? And the answer turns out to be optimism. And what’s fascinating about optimism is it’s almost totally misunderstood in the modern world. The modern world understands optimism as, this will happen, I will succeed in this way.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Angus Fletcher
And that’s why people spend all this time visualizing success and manifesting, doing all this kind of stuff. Actually, in the brain, optimism comes from your past. It doesn’t come from looking at the future, it comes from looking at your past. And what your brain is looking at is all the times you learned from mistakes in the past, and what your brain is looking at is all the times that you were uncertain and then you figured it out. And the more you focus on those moments, the more it gives your brain the capacity to move forward in what we call negative capability. And negative capability is the ability to go forward without knowing where you’re going. But you know that in the past you’ve made it. And we see this as really strong in Special Operators.
Special Operators are always thinking back to that last mission where they were about to die, but then they didn’t die and they pulled it out. And that allows them to go into this future mission. And the same thing with any explorer or innovator. They’re always going forward in deep uncertainty. They actually have no idea where it’s going, but they’re sustained by this optimism, which comes from the past. And it sounds to me like that is a huge part of what drives you forward, is you can probably go back through your memory at all the times when you surprised yourself and you managed to pull it out, and you’re like, well, if I pulled it out then, let’s go ahead and give it a shot now.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
You know, that’s so funny you bring that up because I was contemplating optimism the other day, and I am a very, what I call myself a rational optimist. And by that I mean, look, I’m not Pollyannish. And I don’t think that unicorns and butterflies will spring forth in front of me. But I started thinking, I wonder how much of optimism can be learned or can be taught? And you might have just given me the answer.
Angus Fletcher
It can be learned. It can be. So we know that some people just tend to be more optimistic than others, and this is the same way. There’s a lot of things in life. A lot of times, Special Operators, a lot of them just tend to operate better than average people. But you can train a Special Operator, and you can train an optimist, and we do. This is one of the things I was doing with the American Camp Association last week, is we were sitting kids down, and we were getting them to pause and think about moments in the past when they’d surprised themselves. And the reason this is important is we know that most young people run past those moments. And we know this because if you ask a young person, hey, when was that time that you learned how to walk?
They’d be like, what? I don’t remember when I learned how to walk, I just did it. Oh, when was that time you learned how to talk? Oh, I don’t remember how to do that. Wait, you learned language? You learned language? You don’t remember that? You learned how to move your body, and you don’t remember that? Yeah, I don’t remember that. They don’t lock in those moments and what you actually have to start doing, and we see this with really successful people, is the moment they’re confronted with a new challenge. The first thing that they think about is the old challenge that they succeeded at. It just pops. And kids today, if you don’t develop that strength in them, they see the new challenge and then they panic because they’re like, oh, my goodness.
And then you say to them, well, look, you’ve done this before. They’re like, I haven’t done this before. I’m like, no, but what you have done before is you’ve overcome a challenge you didn’t think you could overcome before because it was a new challenge. And they’re like, oh, yes, I have done that before. Boom. The optimism comes on, and they get after it. And so that is something you can train. It’s something that’s not being trained in school. It’s super simple to train. A lot of this stuff, it’s not rocket science, but we’re just abandoning kids. And as a result, a few kids who have natural optimism like you do thrive while the rest drown.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And it just is so frustrating to me. That’s why I love talking to people like you, because there are solutions. And I think the more that you had mentioned when we started talking, how sometimes you feel like you’re the only one. And another of my favorite authors, Howard Bloom, has a wonderful story. I don’t know if it’s true because I haven’t done the chemistry, but the story is great. He’s talking about if you take a clear beaker of water and you pour a huge cup of salt into it and then you boil it, the salt disappears to the vision of the human looking at that beaker. So when you’re looking at it, what you’re seeing is what you think is a beaker of water.
He maintains that if you take a single salt molecule and drop it into that container, all of a sudden the salt all comes and shows itself.
Angus Fletcher
This is so true. This is called supersaturation. This is a legit principle of chemistry. He didn’t just make it up. Yeah. Because basically what’s happening there is you’ve essentially got too much salt in there because you heated it up to dissolve it. And then when you cool it down to room temperature, it becomes supersaturated and you drop in a seed and then you’ll form crystals. That’s totally true.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Which is what I loved about the metaphor, though, is he uses it, and I’ve been using it. I stole it from him. Because when you don’t feel all alone, some of that fear goes away.
Angus Fletcher
You find the other salts.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Exactly. You find the other salts. You find the people who are like you, and there are a lot of them out there. And that’s my constant refrain. I’m lucky in that because of the fellowships and grants, I get to chat with some very interesting people, let’s put it that way. And the idea, though, is that originally some of them will come and you can see they’ve been rehearsing and they’ve been trying to fit in to the mold that they were not designed for. And so I immediately tell them, forget all of that. Tell me why this is your moonshot. Tell me why you think this is going to work. And then they entirely change and their entire personality comes out as quirky, as many of them are. I find it charming.
But they’re telling the real story rather than the other, well, I want to make sure.
Angus Fletcher
I want to make sure. Let me just say you’re a gift. That’s incredible. No, the fact that you’re doing that is incredible. And I do think that the real opportunity of life is to encourage other people’s individuality to help them tell their stories. Only they can tell it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Angus Fletcher
I mean, you get that experience when you work with young kids and you get them to write their first story, or when you talk with someone and they’re able to share with you who they actually feel. And the fact you’re able to empower those individuals to do that is a gift. And thank you for doing that. I think that the world would be a significantly better place if all of us did a fraction of what you were doing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I think that right now. Thank you for that, but I think I’ll return the compliment. I was so excited after I read your book. I said to my producers, I gotta have him on my podcast, because the more we find each other, the more we can affect some of these other things that seem intractable. Like the educational system seems intractable. A lot of societal things seem intractable, and they’re not.
Angus Fletcher
They’re not.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
There are ways that you can affect them that work. And that is what excites me. And again, it’s because of these guys. I definitely want them to be in a world that doesn’t operate the way we’ve let ours kind of decline into. And I’m not a defeatist in any way, shape, or form. I still believe that despite all of the systems fighting for control of every aspect of our life, that they are not gods, that we can change them, that there are ways and paths to do that, and there are people who do that.
Angus Fletcher
Yeah. Well, you define yourself as a rational optimist. I’m going to define you as a real optimist. A real optimist is someone who can look at the depth of the problem, can acknowledge how hard it is and still believe. That’s what real optimism is. Real optimist is looking into the depth of the night and realizing the dawn is going to come. That’s a real optimist. You accept the reality and you embrace the reality, and then you move the reality. So, look, you and I should do something together. I’d love to do it. We have a program here at Ohio State. We’re running 9,000 students at Fisher College of Business through some of this training. There’s a lot of change we’re trying to get going. Some of this stuff is happening inside the Army.
I’m working with a bunch of schools here in my district. So I would love to work on something with you or just in general, it makes me feel good to know, I mean, as I hope it makes you feel good to know that I’m not alone, that I have a team, that I have a secret team. That even if I get up every morning and you and I aren’t talking, you’re out there doing your good work. I’m trying to do my good work, and together, we’re helping make that future story happen.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I would love to do something with you and we will schedule a non-recorded conversation to do that because I just love the way you look at the world. I want to get a couple more questions in if you have time. You talk about the Disney danger and I’d like you to describe for our listeners and viewers what the Disney danger is. And then extend that to non-entertainment environments. What narrative formulas are infecting business, government, politics, science, all the things we’ve been talking about that are danger, Will Robinson, danger.
Angus Fletcher
Yeah. So I learned about Disney through my experience at Pixar and working with folks. Pixar was one of the most exciting opportunities of my life. It also turned out to be tragic because Pixar in the end got bought by Disney. So if anyone’s seen the original Toy Story, if you’ve seen Up, if you’ve seen…—
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Beautiful movies. Wonderful, wonderful movies.
Angus Fletcher
They’re astonishing, they’re heartfelt and they’re really original. And they remind you that there are new stories to be told. And that’s really important because we as a country have always existed by telling a new story. That’s what we do. Every new technology is a new story. Every political movement, every artistic movement, it’s a new story. And what we’ve seen in this country is we’re falling back into the old stories. We’re repeating the old stories. We’re fighting with each other over which old story is right. The old story is never right. What’s right is a new story. What the American people want is a new plan. They want a new way of doing things. They want to go to the movie theater and be surprised. And so I asked Pixar, like, how are you doing this? How are you creating these new stories?
And they said, it’s really simple. Way back in our DNA is Steve Jobs and engineering. And the way that engineering works is it starts by saying, what are we trying to do? In other words, what’s the function? What’s the effect? And then we reverse engineer the structure from that. So when we’re building an iPhone, we don’t start with some eternal blueprint for a phone. If we did that, we’d still be using the Bell telephone and we’d just be optimizing it, making the receiver better and better. We instead say, what do we want to do with this phone? And then how do we build the technology to give you that result? And it’s the same thing with the story. So in the case of a movie like Up, what do we want to do in Up?
We want to lift you up. So how do we lift you up? We reverse engineer and we create the saddest beginning to a movie you’ve ever seen, and then you’re down, and then when you’re down, we lift you up. And so what they were doing is they were innovating story structure by thinking, what new thing do we want to do? And once we figured out the new thing that we want to do, we build a new story to get us there. And then of course, what happened is that Disney ended up taking over Pixar. Disney said to Pixar, what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to make two, even three Pixar movies a year. How do we do that? We take your standard stories and we just repeat them. Cookie cutter.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Cookie cutter, yeah.
Angus Fletcher
And Disney has been doing this. I mean, Disney did this with Marvel, Disney did this with Star Wars. I mean, Star Wars is one of the most mind blowingly weird movies of all time. George Lucas’s imagination extraordinary. And somehow Disney has managed to make it boring and predictable by just repeating the story over and over again. That’s what Disney does, and that’s okay. I mean, Disney’s an optimizer, whatever. But the point of stories ultimately is to kindle the imagination of people to have them create new stories. And what Disney really wants to do is Disney wants to make you a passive consumer of its stories. It actually wants to take away your autonomy by basically feeding you the same thing over and over again.
And so what we all got to do is we got to go back to what Pixar discovered. We got to get back to that. You can go back and watch those movies and you can read the history of the early days of Pixar. You can study how it works, and you can realize, no, there are new stories to be told in Hollywood, but also in life. Your story can be a new story. You can walk a path that no one has ever walked before. You just have to figure out something new, whether it’s carving Mount Rushmore or whatever, and then figure out your path to get there. How are you going to get to that new outcome? Same thing in politics.
I mean, I think everyone is exhausted with politics right now because we’re just being yelled at the same answers over and over again. It’s like, no, we need you to come up with a new plan. That’s your job. Come up with a new story. And it’s a struggle for these folks because they’ve been brought up in a culture that doesn’t understand that. So that’s the Disney problem. But the good news is that every child is born being able to imagine new stories. Life keeps coming back. It does keep coming back. Every generation has a new chance. If we stop taking that young generation and putting it in schools and making it watch Disney movies, it’s going to be much more likely to be able to fix all the problems that we old people have created.
So that’s the pitch that I make in the book. And I’m sure everyone has experienced that same thing. I mean, you go now to a Hollywood movie and you never expect to be surprised. You never expect to discover something new or interesting or exciting. And that’s nuts, because these movies are made by the most creative people on earth, literally. And you and I have all had the experience of talking to someone and suddenly being like, whoa, I can’t believe that you existed. If you can have that experience talking with someone, you should be able to have that experience walking into a movie, because that person’s life story is amazing. So should a Hollywood movie amaze you? So I think we just got to get back to that.
It sounds to me like the novel you’re writing, you’re taking some risks, you’re doing some interesting things. And I think in general, the more we can encourage that, a little more creative writing classes in school, encourage students not to try and write to a formula. Marketing is so formulaic. How do you break through in the modern world? Not with a formula. The human brain does not want to see a formula. The human brain wants to be surprised. How are you surprised? Surprised with something new. So all of these things that we are getting out of the habit of doing, I think that there’s going to be a golden opportunity for creatives and original thinkers in the future. They just got to break through this crust of conformity.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I could not agree with you more completely, Angus. And I’m looking at the time, and we’ve already been talking for an hour and a half, and I haven’t even gotten to half of it. So first off, yes, I would love to have a separate conversation about working together on something, because it sounds like we’re directionally trying to head in the same direction. I’d also like to have you on the podcast again, because these are the kind of conversations I want people to be able to listen to and watch. And they’re like, oh, yeah, okay, I can do that too. That’s really cool. But I’m gonna ask you our classic final question here at Infinite Loops. And it is this. We’re going to make you, for a day, the emperor of the world. You can’t put anyone in a re-education camp.
You can’t kill anyone. But what you can do, we’re going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it, and the entire population of the world is going to wake up whenever their next morning is, and they’re going to say, you know, I’ve just had two of the greatest ideas, and unlike all the other times that I have these great ideas, I’m going to act on both of these ideas starting today. What two things are you going to incept in the population of the world?
Angus Fletcher
I want you to remember a time in your past when you took a chance and I want you to be that person again.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I love that.
Angus Fletcher
And I want you to look at all the people around you and realize that they’re a mystery waiting to be discovered. Go learn their story.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Oh, wow. Those are fabulous. I’m gonna do both of those. Angus. Where can people find you and your work and your books?
Angus Fletcher
I’m pretty much the only Angus in Ohio, so if you Google Angus in Ohio, you’ll find me. My latest book, which is a national bestseller, it’s called Primal Intelligence which s why I’m on here. And I also bizarrely, have one of the top articles in Harvard Business Review from last year, 2025, about my work with Special Operations. So if you’re an HBR subscriber, you can just Google Angus Fletcher and you’ll get that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Very cool. We will link to all of your stuff in the show notes. Angus, this has been ridiculously fun for me. I hope you enjoyed it as well. And I look forward to our next conversations about working together and doing another segment of the podcast, because this is the kind of stuff people need to hear.
Angus Fletcher
It’s just been a huge pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Thanks for coming.
