Conversations: When Science Meets Storytelling, Storylife w/ Joel Christensen
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Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host, Liv, here with a very quick introduction for a returning guest we all know and love. Joel Christensen returned to the show, this time not to talk directly about the Homeric epics, though indirectly, definitely still the Homeric epics, but instead to talk about a new book he has out called Story Life. And I am always happy to have Joel back.

he is incredibly supportive and generally doing good things when it comes to ancient history and welcoming people into that realm. Um,

And so I'm thrilled to have yet another conversation with him. And yes, there will be another one soon. We didn't really plan it like that. It's just we've been recording them over like months and months and now they're lining up. But we had to talk about toxic masculinity in the Iliad. So you will forgive me when another episode with Joel comes out next month. For now, enjoy Story Life.

Conversations. When Science Meets Storytelling. Story Life with Joel Christensen. But why don't you tell me about the new book and what you were looking at? All right. So the book is called Story Life and the subtitle is on epic narrative and living things.

And the sort of summary of it is that it's a series of biological analogies applied to epic poetry, myth, and how stories function among human beings to try to understand the impact that narrative has on our lives.

And there's sort of like a couple, there are a couple different aims with it. Aim number one is to decenter author and authority and to get us thinking more about how creative works come from communities. Aim number two is to get us to think about narrative as not having

authorial intention, but having a sort of life and mind of its own. And aim number three is to ask or really to give examples of how narrative functions negatively and to get us to think of it as a type of parasite virus that has a function of its own. And so the soft form of the question of my proposal in the book is that narrative is like a living thing. The hard form,

is that it is actually essentially alive and that we should treat it as such and that it has its own agency and interests and that we are its environment and its host, not necessarily its beneficiaries. That's very interesting. So scientific. It is and it isn't. But I mean, yeah, you know, like I use DNA and epigenetics and thinking about how the fact

the fabric of epic narrative comes together. I use evolutionary biology to think about where different narrative traditions come from. So I compare the Iliad and Gilgamesh in one chapter and look into arguments for their origins and similarities. And then I focus really near the end on symbiosis and how

How much of our DNA, 8%, is made up of viruses and other beings that have been integrated into who we are and offering up different models, mutualism as opposed to parasitism, to get us to think about the interaction between narratives and their environment, which is us, which is human society.

Yeah. That's sort of like and I use, you know, my use of epic is sort of double sided. One, as you know, from our earlier conversations,

People don't talk about Epic and where it comes from the way I do. And so I've always sort of, that's my jam. Let's think about how we can think more deeply about Epic and its structure. But on the other side is that Epic is a good test case. People are not familiar with its language, it's distant. And so if you want to say, look, Homeric Epic,

uh develops without an author it has intention and direction of its own um i think it's a good way to start people down the path to think well maybe you know um your own book that you write actually comes from a place that's not just you and we have to think about what the consequences of that are yeah okay that's absolutely fascinating i'm trying to form like a question about it because i just want to i mean i just want to hear more well yeah well

Yeah, so I started out, look, so in the earlier episode, I talked a little bit about the structure of early Greek poetry, how each line is its own sort of self-contained meaning and how it's built up of different structures. The point I make in the first two chapters of Story Life is that you can actually take recourse to multicellular life and DNA to think about two things.

One, how language unfolds in its environment. Any given word that you use has no meaning in isolation. It doesn't have meaning until it's activated in its environment. And that environment is both the other words around it, so other genes, other cells, but also the people who listen to it and give it meaning and activate it.

And so that's part of it. I really ask people to think about both morphology, the shape of words and lines, and the semantics, their meaning, from a perspective of what the audience does to it. And so I try to use the language of morphology

DNA and epigenetics to defamiliarize ourselves from what's a really simple thing to us, right? We have language, it works. We're like, it's that simple, right? But it's not that simple. It's much more complex and we have many different fields of linguistics to try to help us understand it. So there's that, like that's the first chapter, thinking about DNA and language and the basic shape of a line of epic poetry.

The second one is a larger problem. So as I think we talked on the in the earlier episode, many people accept the oral derivation of the Homeric poems, but far fewer are willing to say that the structures that we have don't bear the imprint of human designers.

And so I suggest instead, I say, well, look, let's take the model of multicellular life, right? It's built through repetition of the same types of cells until they have to specialize in their environments in different ways. And so I lay out, it's not just about the lines of Homeric Epic, right? The individual lines, but they're built of...

triplets, ring structures, and other repetitions that you don't actually have to plan for. It just naturally stacks.

until you get to a certain point of complexity where people say, well, clearly it's planned. And so in this chapter, and this is something I think we talked about before too, I emphasize that there's also a relationship between the structure of that poetry and how narrative works with our minds.

So one of the things that I that I emphasize both in my last book and this one is a cognitive approach to narrative that understands that when you and I read the same story, right, we get we don't actually read the same story, right? We create a version of the story that's a compare a combination between our experiences and stories.

the information we're getting from the story, right? So if you and I are reading a story about a princess escaping from a castle, what the princess looks like, what the castle looks like will depend on our experience of the world and narrative. How we imagine the body moving in space will also have to do with our own experience of our bodies moving in space. And based on the way we're gendered in this society and we move through the world, you and I will likely have

separate versions, very different versions of that in our mind. So this to me is an example of, you imagine the story unfolding like DNA in its environment, right? You and I can both adopt the same amphibious egg and raise it, but the frogs would develop differently because we might feed it differently, might have different environments for it, et cetera. But the point I make is that Homeric poetry is built of ring structures that

pose openings and then closings and then information in between and encourages you to reflect on the information in between in a mirroring way, whether it's speech openings and closings, introductions and closings, or similes, right? Where someone says, you know, Hector goes forth like a snowy mountain, right? And there's movement in the similes. And you're encouraged to think about the outside of a comparison and the inside.

And so at the end of the second chapter, I don't look at Homer. I actually look at Sappho fragment 16, which is the famous one. But, you know, people say some people say the most beautiful thing on this dark earth is a cavalry. Some people say infantry. Some people say it's a Navy. I say it's the one you love. But then from that opening frame, Sappho says, no.

And so Helen left her husband and fell in love with Paris. And she goes through that story. And then she says, and this reminds me of Anictoria, whose lovely walk I would rather watch than all the Lydian chariots on the earth.

And so it shows a model of reading that actually echoes what cognitive scientists say happens when we listen to a story, which is that we look at something in a narrative, we compare it to ourself, and then we produce a blend of the two.

And that's really what Sappho does in fragment 16. And what's actually going on throughout Epic is that it's modeling a type of reading that is reinforced by the ring composition structure that is intrinsic to the stacking form and repetition of Homeric Epic. So rather than being the product of someone saying, oh, this is a good idea, I think it would work.

It's just what happens with narrative anyway, and has stuck because it's so effective and it's such a reinforcement of what our brains are already doing.

So that's essentially like an overview of chapters one and two. I don't know if it makes sense. Sometimes I feel like I'm the guy at the bulletin board with all the strings and everything. But I think that's a way of at least getting you to that point. Yeah. I mean, it's so intricate in a way that I'm definitely like, I'm wrapping my head around it. I am. Yeah.

But I would, this I'm thrilled to hear about the Sappho reference. Also, I don't, it's funny. I've been weirdly coming across that name, Anictoria a lot lately. And it's a bizarre name to then suddenly be like, Oh, I feel like I just, I just keep seeing this. It's a favorite. But so when it comes to Epic, like, okay, I'm just trying to, I'm trying to wrap my head around everything, which it's just so, it's so interesting. And also Epic generally is,

is so interesting. So you mentioned comparing the Iliad and Gilgamesh, right? Like in this, does it fit in with that? Could you tell me more about that? And I'm hoping that that will also help to explain all of the layers that you just went through. Yeah, absolutely. So in the next chapter, so the name of chapter three is Crabs and the Monomyth.

Amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the argument I make there, well, first I start with what we do when we see similarities in narrative traditions. And the reason I focus on the monomyth thing is the obsession with Joseph Campbell's monomyth that this is one story and there are generally two different ways. I mean, there's a big criticism of Campbell, which I'll get to in a minute. But when there are similarities in tradition,

people take recourse to two different things, right? And these are extremes, of course, but one is, all right, there's a genealogy here. So one leads back to the other and we need to trace it to the primary authority because that's important, right? The original myth, quote unquote. Yeah, the original, the or myth, which of course should come from Ork, right? But the other side is like a recourse to universalism that again, like,

Well, what does that even mean? You know, if we're like, oh, this is a universal, like we all have eyes and bodies. Therefore, sometimes we talk about looking at hands. You know, I mean, what does that actually do for us?

And so as a way of dealing with the many, many problems of the monomyth, which again, a simple criticism is that it's cherry picking a bunch of details to adhere to one sort of Western narrative detail. I instead introduce a couple notions from evolutionary biology. And so the example I use is the development of crab morphology.

So crabs, we have seven different type things that look like crabs that developed independently, right? They're not from the same family tree. And the fossil record adds at least four more. And so there are 11 like, you know, crab formations in the history of the planet Earth, and they don't come from the same family tree.

Instead, they come from an interaction between organisms and their environment. The crab morphology develops to answer certain problems in the natural world. And so for me, this is a great metaphor for thinking about why we choose the narratives we do. And how do we find that balance of like, all right, we have these genes, we'll call them narrative genes, like the kernels of narratives.

And we select for them or they develop in certain ways based on their environment. And so the model I use from that is in evolution, there are two types of things. There's parallel evolution and convergent. And so in one, right, like you from completely different genetic trees, you evolve in parallel based on the demands or interaction with your environment.

Another is that you come from similar backgrounds, but diverge and then converge again, again, based on the environment. And so the question I ask in book three, sorry, book three, chapter three, when I talk about the similarities between the Gilgamesh tradition and the Iliad is how do we imagine this? Like, do we imagine Homeric poetry

and Gilgamesh poems coming from the same family tree? And even if they do, why would they select for certain details? And how do we understand it if we look to the natural world instead of our basic tree models that we have in scholarship? And so I suggest that like one of the important things is audiences don't know.

Right. They, you know, audience of ancient Greece never knew anything about Gilgamesh. Right. And so why would we privilege certain details? Why do we end up having stories that are roughly similar? And the ones I look at, I look at a couple examples, but sort of like fear of mortality, like female characters offering like an out from it and like the rhetoric of immortal fame. Right. Like if you distill it down to those basic details.

You could make the argument pretty simply that, well, this could just be parallel evolution, right? Because the environment that it's answering, like you have similar cultural environments in the Eastern Mediterranean where you have similar family structures, ideas about life and death and gender, right? All of these things are already latent.

And then you have similar class pressures and similar social functions for narrative. And so it actually shouldn't be surprising if there are themes and motifs that are shared.

And I actually use a comparison I use is the song Spanish Pipe Dream by John Prine, which if you look at it like in the same way Joseph Campbell would for a monomyth, you could say, oh, it's part of the same tradition. Do you know Spanish Pipe Dream? No.

All right. So it's a song where this guy, the basic narrative is this guy is, is a sailor who's on break. Um, and he's good. He goes to a strip club and, um, the dancer there tells him like he should give up war. It's not worth it. They should move to the country and have children, have a farm and let them figure out their life on the road. Uh,

And so in ways like engagement with martial discourse, woman as sort of an alternative figure, promise of children for glory instead of the rhetoric of glory, it checks all the boxes that you get in Gilgamesh's speech with the barmaid and Achilles' speech with Thetis and others. And I'm like, nobody in the world thinks that John Prine was reading Gilgamesh and the Iliad.

Instead, what you have is a natural, you could call it universal, but I think a human embodied response to a particular set of inputs that we can think of in terms of an ecosystem. And so one of the things I emphasize is that you should think of audiences and their cultural context in the way that we think of ecosystems and lifeforms.

It's a complex relationship that allows narratives to develop to fulfill particular functions. And I think if we look at Gilgamesh and other, you know, the monomyth and other traditions like that, it's a richer, much more...

yeah complicated way of looking at narrative development um that looks at all sides of it it's not just about supply side poetics like who's telling the story but it's also about audience need in their response to it yeah that's okay that's very interesting I keep just saying that's very interesting you can also say it's crazy no it's not crazy it's just more that I'm like I mean

I think it's just more that I feel like that sounds so reasonable to me. Specifically that side of just the way a narrative would evolve. Like,

I mean, I've definitely heard the idea that Gilgamesh has similarities with the Iliad, but I guess I haven't investigated that much into sort of what is said about why. And I also have never read Joseph Campbell, and that is fine with me. It's much better for you that way. I think so.

think so I know enough to know I don't need to read him yeah but I mean it seems to me that that that just seems so reasonable that that these stories would have similarities because they're just yeah evolving in similar um

you've used the word so many times and now I can't find it. Environment. Yeah, environment. Yeah, that was the word. I'm just doing really well today and I can't think of the word environment. Yeah, but it just seems so reasonable. But the alternative would be that

that they were, that one was being learned from the other? Is that kind of what else is being said about these? Yeah, the other alternative people say is that one story is taken, right? Right, right. But I can't remember if I used this analogy with you before, but the one I always use, so I always thought that if one culture borrows a thing from another, there are two things going on there.

One, they're taking something that they recognize a need for, right? But they're also taking something that,

has reference in their world, right? So let's say the ancient Greeks took Gilgamesh. Well, it's because there's a Gilgamesh-sized hole in the world, right? And the analogy I use in the opening of the book is of like a tree in a garden, like a manicured tree, right? When we look at the placement of a tree, most of the time we don't think about it. But if we think about it, we're like, oh, well, who planted it?

it, right? Like whose choice was it to put it there? But then we don't go to the next step, which is what are the aesthetics of tree-ness that we share as a society that brought it there, one. And two, what about the human engagement and domestication of the plants that made it possible for this tree to thrive in this environment that it's not made for?

And if we add all these things up, to what do we give the credit of the appearance of this tree?

Is it the gardener? Right? Is it the designer of the garden? Is it the first person to like domesticate a sugar maple for a garden? I mean, you just go on and on and on. Right? When again, you get to the one end, you have someone appreciating a tree in a garden, right? And on the other, you have just wild trees.

But along the way, you have this interaction between human beings and the environment and a thing that's both found and curated that has to be both or else it's neither. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know if we want to say, well, Achilles is a tree or Gilgamesh is a tree. But I mean, that's essentially what I'm also saying, which is that these narrative traditions like they like, you know, a storyteller receives story traditions.

And we know that most of the time what makes storytellers exceptional is timeliness. So they're telling a story that people need at a particular time, but also their ability to work within the tradition, to push it to something that's slightly different and interesting to people, but not so different and strange that people can't understand it or make sense of it.

Yeah. And so in that dance right between so the novelty and the tradition, like we have come to such a place in like a modern world where we completely credit the innovation, and we don't understand how much of what was already there had to be there for the innovation to get made. Yeah, makes me think of AI. Yeah.

I talk about AI in the introduction, basically like it's crap, it's stupid. But also that the big trick about AI that we're not acknowledging enough is that we're attributing meaning to its nonsense. We're actually doing the post production work, which is it gives us an average of our own gobbling hook and we're like, now we give it meaning. Yeah.

Because it still requires the human interaction. And so we're just...

Yeah, it just doesn't make any sense, I think, in any reasonable way other than just that obsession with like, but we can do this. Right. But the thing I just said, so that contribution that individuals make when they receive like narrative art and give it back again, right? That difference is based on the ability to combine your experience with what you're receiving and read it that way, right? Mm-hmm.

AI has no experience. It doesn't actually think. It's not embodied. So it can't take it and innovate. This is why all the AI art is so boring and mediocre. It's because it actually has nothing to contribute. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's why I've talked about AI recently on the show and just about how, because people asked me, you know, my thoughts on using it to,

It was something to do with understanding otherwise lost works. And I just... I try to be kind in my replies on those things because I also know I have very strong opinions. But I just think everything good and interesting about the ancient world and the work that came from it is the human interaction with it. Is the humans taking it in back then, creating it back then, us taking it in now. And if there's some...

computer nonsense in between breaking something down and then giving us something like I don't trust it and I don't think it would have any of the like the humanity that is that makes art art I feel like that's such an obvious thing to say but but AI keeps happening so maybe not well no but I know I know AI keeps happening because they want to steal all of our cultural material from us and then sell it back to us worse and

Yeah, because capitalism's cool. It's going well. Yeah, it's a transfer of wealth issue. You know, nothing to do. If AI art were real, we wouldn't understand it because it would be related to AI experience, which is completely alien to us. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like, you know, if actual space aliens showed up and they had an art form, the chance of us understanding it as art would be pretty slim. They would have to have to go back to like my models, right? They would have to have like cultural frameworks that are translatable to ours, and they would actually have to have embodied features that are in some way translatable to ours. They would have to see in the same spectrum.

here in the same decibels like you know or some translational element otherwise like if they were like light forms rather than like carbon life forms um we couldn't understand yeah there are there art would seem like math to us or would seem like fractal jaw you know fractal light shows maybe we would get it but we probably wouldn't because we're pretty solipsistic and dumb yeah

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So if you're looking for a gift for the food lover in your life, head to goldbelly.com and get 20% off your first order with promo code gift. Well, and the only, like, yeah, it feels like this, your, this, everything you've just said essentially, but you've, you've put such scientific, you know, frameworks around, I think what I've often been trying to understand about the appeal of AI and, but also like, like,

The ways I have been trying to find to explain why I hate it so much. So I love that this connection has been made because, you know, my thing is I just kept...

I can't put it into words beyond saying that it isn't art because it lacks the humanity and that is what is required in order to create art. And even if it has anything that looks like art, it's because it's taken it from human art. Right. And that's, you know, to go back to like the supply side stuff. I mean, one of the things that I'm really animated about is that our notion of art and creation is so thoroughly dominated by two things.

One, the God as our author model. And two, the artwork as intellectual property model, as something that can be commodified and sold. And those two things so thoroughly put the emphasis on the creator and completely divorce us from the audiences. And we know in an area in which...

In an area in which audiences matter, art is very different, right? When you're in a community and people are telling stories, singing songs, and audience members are involved and feeding back to them, it's not like a committee of executives saying we need to sell people AI in their refrigerators.

Like, I don't want AI in my refrigerators. I want a refrigerator that lasts more than 10 years. Like, it's not that hard, you know? But I mean, it takes us back to, I mean, let's see, another way to get into this. So the later chapters of the book get crazier. Great. And you want to, so can I give you an origin story for the book? And then we can talk about some of those things. Please. Okay. So this book is very much a COVID book.

And I wrote a blog post where the title was, Did COVID Write This Book? Because I started talking about some of these ideas with editors in probably the second fall of COVID, so 2021.

And I'd spent so much time, well, like everybody thinking about virology, right? But early on not thinking about the actual virus, but instead thinking about all the stupid ideas and bad responses to the virus, right? And how quickly the facts of science or virology or vaccines,

Or, you know, mitigating the disease by wearing masks became a political issue. And suddenly, you know, I mean, we're trying not to remember, but because he's back, but ivermectin, bleach, and, you know, go out in the sun, it'll kill COVID, all that stuff that actually was harmful to people.

That started making me think. So I'd always been thinking about COVID and not COVID about, you know, narrative as akin to DNA. But I started to really think then, you know, cause we were past the fake news or alternative news thing. Um,

And I started thinking, well, what if we stop worrying about fake news and alternative news and think about why some stories make people do what they do? Because everything in that summer of 2020 through 2021, we had the re-election.

election campaign, we had the Black Lives Matter movements, we had all, you know, all the failure of our society to accept, you know, the mitigation. It was all driven by stories.

And so I actually, you know, I wrote the book proposal, I finished it in the sample when I got COVID. I had like 10 days of a pretty bad fever. I sat down and wrote this out because my real concern was like, how are we going to face the challenges we have in the future? Climate change, you know, and rising income inequality, rising violence, all this stuff. If we don't understand how stories make us choose things that are actually worse for us.

us. You know, our science, our technology has outpaced our ability to understand it.

Right. Instead, we have to understand we have to sort of catch up and understand like how we get people to accept like the fruits of science and labor and accept like, you know, maybe we do need to wear masks to to protect people. Maybe it's not a bad thing, you know. And so the fourth and fifth chapters of my book are about how narrative goes wrong.

So in chapter four, I look at kleos narrative. So narratives of immortal fame in early Greece and how they go in multiple directions, how we often misunderstand them. And then chapter five, which is something we've talked about before, but we can always hit again, is really a subtitle. If I had it would be toxic heroism.

And now heroic narratives are misunderstood and misused. And I start out by talking about the story of Cleomedes the Astyphilian, the boxer who goes back and kills a bunch of kids. And I end up talking about school shootings and narratives like that as a way of sort of understanding how heroic narratives go wrong.

And so these are the chapters where I use, you know, symbiosis and mutualism and parasitism to think about how narrative lives off of us and how we're not in control of

And so, yeah, sorry, I just gave you way too much there. But what of that do you want to hear more about? I mean, the thing is, I mean, I'm generally interested in all of it. But obviously my knowledge in terms of interacting with it would be around this like epic and myth and everything. And so I'm, well, also like the toxic heroism I'm always down to talk about. But just generally, yeah.

I don't even know what to ask because I just want to know more about the epic side of it, I guess, or like, you know, how you're looking at the growth and, and the, yeah, the way that, that epics did, you know, basically what you came out of all of this, this very scientific. And therefore I have so much trouble even asking questions about it, but like, yeah, like,

I love the idea of it being able to be sort of tracked around Epic. So I want to know more. Let's start with the idea of kleos, right? This is the Greek word for fame, um, and glory. And it becomes, um,

you know, concretized in the Iliad as kleos aphtaton, right? As imperishable thing. And so the thing we hear from Achilles when he first talks about it is he says, well, my mother Thetis says I have two choices, right? I can go home and like be, you know, ignominious and farm and nobody will ever remember me, or I can stay here and die young and have immortal glory.

So when people talk about the Iliad, and these are people who really don't understand it, they're like, well, this is the heroic code. This is the important message. But I actually think what the Iliad is showing is that that is a story system that makes people make bad choices. And it can be for good. It can make you brave. But it can also make you value death more than life.

And that is a crucial problem with it. And so what I do in that chapter is I actually look at evocations of kleos in Greek poetry, in epic, in lyric, in inscriptions as well, to see how people use that narrative of sacrifice of life.

of like mortal life for immortal glory to show how epic really complicates it and shows how it can be a impetus to bad decisions. And I use this as a way to think about, all right, let's talk about symbiosis.

So symbiosis, basic scientific idea is like when two organisms live together. And what can happen over time is you can actually evolve with different organisms. So as human beings, I think Carl Zimmer says in his book about viruses that up to 8% of our DNA comes from other things that aren't mammalian. Right.

And so there's a moment in our history, in mammalian history, before we actually gestated fetuses and wombs where we couldn't do it correctly because the placenta wouldn't connect in the way it does now. And it was actually an endogenous retrovirus that integrated into our DNA that allowed that to happen. And it was a mutation. In other versions of the development of different creatures, this retrovirus was destructive.

But we got lucky and it made the placentation possible in mammals, which then created an entire tree of life in this way. And so many examples of how we have absorbed viral DNA into our organisms and they've started out as what you call parasitic, but eventually they become beneficial as a type of mutualism. And so I suggest, look, let's think about story.

as a technology to start out, or let's think of it as an aspect of human beings, right? Like story and language is the thing that sets us apart from all other creatures that we know of, right? Like we know dolphins communicate, other animals communicate, but our ability to convey

convey complex information means that you and I don't have to make the same mistakes our parents did, right? Or our grandparents, our great grandparents. And we can live. And yet we do. But we can live, as people said famously, like readers live a thousand lives within one. Like we can have all this experience, right? So on one level, narrative gives us these resources as individuals. As groups though,

Narrative is actually what gives us a sense of belonging and a sense of mission, right? Agency and belonging are the two primary things we need to be part of groups. And people have written like once you get above a certain level of organization and Yuval Harari in his book, Sapien says it's like three to 600 people.

narrative is crucial to get you to work together as a group. You need a story that binds you, that gives you a sense of identity. And so that sense of belonging and mission comes from narrative. It binds us together and it's a fabulous technology because it actually allows us to work as much larger organisms. We just don't sense that that's happening because our bodies focus on what's right in front of us.

of us and we have a prejudice towards an individual point of view that is, let's say, concretized and magnified by cultural frameworks, right? Let's say we're more important. I'm going to make sense with this. Don't worry. Right. But the problem is not all narratives that give us a sense of group belonging are positive to ourselves or to other groups.

Right. I mean, I don't need to point out too many examples. I know. I'm just like, OK, I won't start screaming. No, no. But our narratives that allow us to belong and work as corporate entities, other other people. Right. And they dehumanize others. They make it less than us. That also makes us resistant to information that challenges our core identities.

So you can go to things and I'm going to try to resist current events and look instead to data I saw online recently is that surveys during the 1940s had 92% of Americans in favor of interning the Japanese in our country. 92%, right? Jesus Christ. None of that is based in facts.

All of that is based in vibes, narrative vibes, a sense of who we are as opposed to other people and an ability to justify cruelty for the sake of our notion of a common good. And this actually blinds us to certain things. Like, for instance, I don't know how many Americans have ever asked how many Iraqi and Afghani children we killed in the war on terror.

And I mean, it's the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. We don't even know. We don't ask the question because it was for freedom. It was justified. Right. And so like in that chapter where I talk about class, I say, look, any story tradition that develops for social good can also mutate to social ill without anybody actually meaning to do it.

It's about the environment. You deploy a narrative tradition in an environment and it will adapt and people will use it because there are levers that people are out there using without a plan. Now, some people do have plans, of course, and they use them deceptively. But, you know, all we have to do is look in the change of pace and conspiracy theories online. Right. And how rapidly stories go.

One of the things I've been thinking about lately is the double-mindedness you need to believe that the Democrats were capable of deploying hurricanes to disrupt voting in Georgia and Florida, but at the same time deny that human-made climate change is real. I missed that one. Yeah, it was in the New York Times. It's a crazy one. And you and I are like, all right, that's madness.

Right. But on the other side, someone could say, look, I mean, you say climate change is real. If humans can change the climate, why can't we manipulate it for our own good? Right. I mean, again, you're thinking, well, what the hell? Right. Like it's impossible. But I think one of the important things we need to do going forward is to stop

as much as we want to, judging people for the crazy shit they believe. And instead asking, what are the environmental factors? What are the contextual factors that make this an effective story for people to understand the world with? And what can we do about it?

And so when I look at Klaus narratives, I look at, look, like, let's just imagine heroic narrative at a basic level. You need to convince people to stand up and risk their lives to defend their community. The narrative of glory is

facilitates that. You're a great person, you're going to get all these honors, rewards for risking your life for the community because that's important. That's stage one. But step two, and this is really where we're at at the beginning of the Iliad, is what happens if you've accepted all that and it's still not enough? What if you expect that as your position for someone who risks their lives for the community, you expect honor beyond everyone else?

I think of it as types of extra mortality. At some level, wanting any type of life outside of our own, that which we're allotted, is vampiric.

Right. I mean, this is the peak of like weird techno capitalism. I keep forgetting the guy's name who's like using his own son's blood and plasma to live forever. Right. But you don't even need to go to that whack job. Just think about what is it? Health tourism. People who go to India to get a new kidney. Right. All of these things like there is the desire to outstripe.

stretch our mortal bounds is connected in part to the sense that we have more of a right to life than others. And that's where we are at the beginning of the Iliad, right? I think at some level, that type of heroism that positions Achilles at a point where he thinks he should be able to ask the gods to punish, um,

the Greeks for his suffering, it results in the death of Myriad Achaeans, but it also results in the death of Patroclus, which is his greatest loss, right? And so Achilles' paroxysm, his rupture with his community and himself there, is an echo of the heroic narrative gone terribly wrong.

And so I think the Iliad and the Odyssey are both deeply engaged in criticizing the heroic narrative and showing how it goes wrong. But most people don't get it.

Right. And that's a central theme of the Italy and the Odyssey is that we actually don't need these types of people like they're harmful to us, except in very specific situations. So the notion of like a class narrative to go back to that sort of environmental narrative that develops that does good things for us is, you know,

American patriotism, let's go back to that one. The idea of having a coherent identity built around freedom and independence, it's good. At some level, it creates a desire. It gives you a sense that you're in control of things. It breaks down all boundaries. But on the other, it obscures things like...

We're the wealthiest nation on earth because we stole labor from millions of enslaved people and we stole resources from millions of indigenous people. We didn't pay for any of that. Right. And we're lucky because we have two oceans protecting us from, you know, from the masses of Asia and Europe.

And so, you know, the narratives that we tell direct us to see things and not others. Yeah. And, you know, it is ultimately as harmful to us as it can be to other people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. The American patriotism narrative specifically is such an interesting way to look at that because,

Yeah, yeah. I'll give you an example. I'll give a personal example because I think it'll help people. They can tell the stories they want to tell. But my maternal grandfather is about to be 98 years old.

And about four years ago, he self-published his autobiography. He is, full disclosure, a Trumpist extraordinaire. And the story he tells about our family is that we're the bootstrappers. We work really hard, unlike all these other people who get things. And the point is,

So that's the way he tells the story and why other people shouldn't get handouts or steps up. But then I asked him, I talked to him, like, well, two fundamental things that happened in our family that put us where we are here is one, the Homestead Act that allowed your father to come from Norway and get free land in Minnesota. And two, the GI Bill that allowed you to go to college for free and raise the family up to a new social class.

I'm like, those were government actions. One. And two,

The first, Homestead Act, relied on us displacing people from land and just taking land from others and giving it to you. And the GI Bill actually wasn't made available to all soldiers. Like if you were Black, Latino, Native, you didn't get that. So these two things, I can tell a different story where our family is the beneficiary of white affirmative action, not of their own hardware.

And so people's sense of belonging, though, sense of identity is so tied to specific narrative traditions. It shapes how we see the world and engage in it. And I guess that's where I can talk more about the school shooting thing. But really where I go in the conclusion is our world is filled with STEM stuff and we have STEM problems. Right.

But if we don't have a science of narrative to understand how to communicate it and relate it to our identities and shared mission, we're never going to do anything with that knowledge.

Right. Because language and story is what creates communities. Yeah. And knowledge, science doesn't. Right. It's a tool of communities. But we need a science of story and understanding of how to engage with narrative better, how to teach people how to understand it better in order to face these great challenges. Mm hmm.

I've been thinking a lot about community and just the way that it has been sort of systematically broken down over recent years and decades. And just like kind of what that does to specifically a place like North America, like Canada is equally bad, I think in this specific way, but also North America, I think is such an interesting place.

I mean, what you said earlier, but like, yeah, you know, the States being like in between two oceans and therefore like quite literally protected, you know, like, and Canada is so the same. And we sort of as a, as a kind of counter to the States while simultaneously, you know, remaining in line with everything the U S ever wanted of us, we became, we developed this narrative about Canadians that, um,

compared to the US, we were, we're the nice ones, we're the polite ones, we're the ones where things is are good thing, you know, and like, it's just a it's a bizarre thing, the more the older I get, the more I start really paying attention to the world around me. And like, particularly North America, because it's so fascinating to me to look at, like,

I mean, I've never thought about it in this way. So I'm glad that, I mean, that thinking about these things as this kind of narrative, as this thing that it, I think it for a long time did build community and it did probably do a lot of really good things like American patriotism originally like had kind of, there was at its core something good. And in Canada, it really like we sort of developed all based on this idea that we are good. And I think that in a lot of ways it's made a lot of Canadians somewhat, um,

nice and then in a lot of other ways it's allowed us to completely like disregard everything else like one of the um one of the things i've seen most recently about um pierre polliev who is our trump he's gonna he's and he was sitting down with jordan peterson and these two white yeah these two white canadian men generationally canadian white canadian men

Had a whole conversation about how 15, 20 years ago, Canada wasn't racist and how racism in Canada and the idea of racism in Canada has been imported over the last couple of decades. And it just like the level of disconnect and irony involved in two white colonial Canadian men fighting.

Discussing racism being imported is like... It's the most unhinged thing I've ever heard. And it just makes me... It feels so Canadian too. Like it is both utter nonsense and also it is...

The result of decades of Canada being presenting ourselves like the nice ones in North America, like the peaceful ones, like the result is then we have these two white men who have benefited from all of the whiteness that colonial Canada has to offer. And they can have what they believe to be a reasonable conversation about racism. Yeah.

I don't know how that, yeah. No, no, it works perfectly. And so I'll recap it because like, you know, again, following the model where like narratives go out on their own and do their own things, right? You start out with an aspirational narrative. We're going to be better. We're nicer people. Like we aren't going to stick to the class and the suffering of the old world. This is the new world. All right. But then that goes from being aspirational to being self-reliant.

affirmative, right? This is who we are now. And once it becomes a feature of your sense of, of identity and belonging, then you can't be doing things that are bad.

Right. They're not bad. So then if someone's saying that you're doing something that's bad and that's not nice, well, they're wrong. They just don't understand it. Right. And when it comes to dominant ideas, like we are all at some levels stuck to the structures of our birth. Right. At the families we were born in, race, the racialized structures we were born into. And when you introduce a new idea into that.

It's like the graft host problem. You're introducing a new organ into a host body. You need to have some type of immunosuppressant for you not to attack it. That's why people don't like to say white fragility anymore. But I mean, that type of... That sounds like a very fragile decision to make. Right, but the visceral response...

to new information that challenges your identity is like an immuno response, right? It doesn't belong here. I can't accommodate this knowledge. We believe in merit and freedom and self-determination. And if somebody tells me there's structural racism that is privileging me,

It's downgrading my worth. And I reject it. They must be wrong. Right? And that's the thing. I mean, like we have the fiction of meritocracy. It's not a total fiction, right? I mean, we don't live in a world that's as completely class basis, say the medieval period. We're not serfs, right? But we have racialized things to the extent that it's almost a type of serfdom. But those of us who are outside of that,

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Right. And so, you know, if you're thinking again, I mean, I can't imagine this conversation, Jordan Peterson, anything with him is horrifying. But if you drop a narrative tradition into a system that can't abide it, it will be rejected and it will be vilified, which is what happens. That's what's happening right now. Like all like we went like, like,

Three years ago, everyone's like critical race theory is the devil. It's ruining everything. Right. And now like DEI is evil. Right. And then you just break it down like, okay, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Like we want like a diverse population. Cool. We want to give people an equal opportunity to things. And we also want to make things more inclusive. Like I just, the whole notion that that is evil is,

Right. To take that and flip it and say these things are all wrong. And actually they're doing the opposite of what they're saying. Like, yes, some of these initiatives are misused. People do things badly. Right. But the violent response, like any time somebody responds so violently to an idea. Right. It's because it's challenging who they think they are. Mm hmm.

And again, it's like, how do we come, how can we articulate ideas in a way that they'll be effective and they'll not be subject to the perversion that we're seeing? I mean, I don't have all the answers, but I think a simple thing is we have a poverty of the way we talk about narrative and the way we train people to deal.

And we also, and to add to this, we have a super highway of narrative transmission, which I think is something we don't talk about enough. Like we are not cognitively capable as human beings to deal with the level of information that we're getting on.

And it's also like the best or the most automated, impressive confirmation bias system ever. Like when we were kids, when I was a kid, like if someone said, oh, I believe that there are secret lizard people who are really running the government. I say this, I grew up in the middle of the woods in Southern Maine. We knew a guy who actually was all about the lizard people. And we're like, all right, you're crazy.

But now, like, you can go online and find, like, everything. You can find a group that supports that. And you create new communities based not about what's good for your local community and the people you know, but instead for some narrow sense of, like, alienation or difference that has no relation to the community that you're built around and that you can actually contribute to. Mm-hmm.

Well, and when we don't also value community in the same way as I think was necessary decades earlier, or rather, I'm saying that poorly, it's...

it has been trained out of us not to think about community, particularly in North America with like the hyper individualism of, you know, of suburbs and highways and just like everything about how we are, we are not meant to be together in this space. We're not into like form communities and things. I think that then too, like the ability the internet has to provide those confirmation biases and all of that then provides its own community to,

that is perhaps far more dangerous than like, than a, than a sort of literal, like a physical community. Um, and that's like, so to go back to that, to go back to my last chapter, which is really, I don't call it toxic humanisms, uh, sort of heroism. I try to figure out what it is. I just call it what stories do in the world, much less interesting. But, um, you know, the, the, the narrative of individualism and heroism itself, um,

is toxic because it emphasizes the individual over the collective. Yeah. Right. And that's one of the things, you know, that I, we've talked about this before, but every time I try to teach heroic myth now, I try to say, look, if you actually read Greek heroic myth,

carefully right what it says is heracles kills his wife and children and is killed by his last wife right it says that achilles kills myriad achaeans or causes their death it says that odysseus tried really hard but all of his companions died and murdered a bunch of people when he comes home it actually says that like you know heroic individuality is bad for communities

Right. And yet, you know, again, thinking of American exceptionalism, thinking of the rugged individual in the West, right. For us to have taken the risks to make our nations possible. I mean,

you needed some of that rhetoric, right? Because it's crazy to cross an ocean and then set up a stupid farm in Northern Minnesota when you were fishermen off of Norway, right? You have to believe in this. But on the other hand, what happens when it's out of control? I mean, right now what's happening is that we have a

a ruling class of billionaires who do not believe in a social safety network, right? Who don't believe that we should be giving back and supporting people. Don't think about public health and think that, what did they say? They said that children who come from poor communities who need free lunch and breakfast are freeloaders. Children.

Right. I mean, yeah, I mean, things like that. I mean, this is an absolute devaluing of community in order to serve the self. This is it's horrifying because what's the end point? Right. And so the story I focus on in the fifth chapter is a story about Cleomedes, the Astropelion, right?

And the story is told by both Plutarch and Pausanias. And it's basically, there's a guy named Cleomedes. He went to the Olympic games. He was a boxer. He won his match and was going to get crowned. But the judge said he cheated.

And he got pissed off that he didn't win. And he went home and attacked the school where he had trained and killed 60 children and then escaped into the temple of Athena. And then when the people of Astupalaya went to find him, he was gone. And they went to the Delphic Oracle and the Delphic Oracle said, Cleomedes the Astupalayan is the last of the heroes. Worship him or give him the rights as if he was one.

And so, yeah, Pausanias and Plutarch don't make any sense of the story. They just present it. But my reading of this is that it's a story. It's the end of the heroic age. And it's a story that's saying, look, like he's the last hero. He's the final one because heroes are bad for communities and they do bad things. So give him the rights, give him his honor that is due, acknowledge him, but acknowledge the full story and the danger.

And so I, you know, I talk in the last chapter about and so a lot of what happens in this book is I go between my experiences learning things like how I learned about similes, my experience like learning about forests as a child. And then about this one, I go back to, you know, when I was first learning about the Iliad and Epic as an undergraduate, I watched the Columbine shootings unfold on television at my college.

college. And like, whether we're talking about Columbine, or almost any mass killer, there are two things going on. One, it is a valuing of the individual over the self, it's a rejection of the social compact. And

You know, it's a, it's a deaf cult, but it's also a paroxysm like what Cleomedes feels, right? People, and again, there's a reason why it's almost always white dudes, occasionally not, right? It's because of people who think they have the most right to honor and to a position, and then they don't get it, whether they are not getting, you know,

the girls they want to get or they're not getting glory online, they want whatever it is, they feel left out of their right and they strike back. And why do they strike back at children?

Because they're weak, because they represent the community. They're the last group of people that we as, you know, our individualistic society will actually put collective resources into. And they also represent the potential of a future that's better than the shooter's future.

For me, these stories of the mass shootings are a way to think about the sickness of our society and how that sickness is advanced by story. What are the narrative traditions? What are the narrative ideas that set them in a position to take other people's lives? Again, I

I think that they wouldn't be taking lives if they couldn't get guns. That's one thing. So let's just leave that aside. First and foremost, there's a reason why there's most down there. Right, right. But on the other side, like the impetus to harm others because of lost your sense of self comes from a type of narrative that communicates our relationship with the world. Right. And that's the thing, you know, when I was starting out,

writing this book again during COVID, I'm looking around the world falling apart from behind a computer screen. And I'm also looking at my own kids and thinking, well, what am I doing? What am I producing in the world that's any good, right? I got in real trouble with my dean at the time because I kept saying at meetings that I don't want to have to say in the future that while the world was falling apart, I wrote a big book about a small thing.

Right. You know, like, what do I know? What do I understand? What do I see from my own studies that can help us understand the world? And for me, it was, all right, it may sound crazy, but like Achilles has the same problem as a school shooter does. Achilles in a way, I can't believe I'm going to say that, has some of the same problems as Elon Musk, right? He thinks that because he inherited this wealth and he has control of the world, he should always do so and has a right to do whatever he wants to do.

The problem with Elon is that he'll never love someone as much as Achilles loved patrol cars. He'll never realize the sense of loss that comes from his own actions. He'll never see somebody else as alive as himself. And so at the end, it may sound like a really terrible joke that someone who specializes in narrative

identifies narrative as a problem, but then also thinks narrative is the solution. Right. But like, we have to teach people more about stories. We have to get them to tell more complex, diverse stories that have different people that elevate the community, that elevate women and people of color and people of all different types. We need people to see themselves as part of a whole, not as the whole in service of their part. Yeah. Yeah.

I the way I I feel like I should have expected it but I did not expect the this conversation even though no no in a in a great way because it's I mean it's so it's so interesting and like not to not to harp too much on it being North America because North America because this is obviously like it is a global thing we're talking about here broadly but like

I just think, you know, when we're looking at community in that way and the way that it is, you know, affected by narrative like you are, I just, it feels to me like North America is so, I think we stand above in a lot of ways of where we have sort of are the farthest from

Sort of the community of, I don't know how to phrase it, but I mean, just, I just mean the colonialism of it all is in itself like a separation from community and also like the destruction of existing communities in order to make a new quote unquote community. Like, so it just becomes so much more virulent here. Yeah. I mean, think about it this way. I mean,

I don't know how much these words are repeated in Canada, right? But in the Declaration of Independence here, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And originally it wasn't pursuit of happiness. It was pursuit of property.

Right. But I'm serious, but there's nothing. The laugh was that I know you're serious. Right. But like, it's not like it's life for me. It's liberty for me. It's happiness for me. It's there's no notion of the cost to others. Yeah. Well, that's what I think about when I hear the American concept of freedom all the time, because like when I hear the American concept of freedom, like, you know, it just it's

It's so on. I mean, I don't want to say on his face, obviously, because you have to be able to see it. But like, it is not freedom for all Americans. It never has been. I don't see anyone ever forming a convincing argument that it is for everyone.

It's it's freedom for white Americans. And it's the same thing with the white Canadians who came in here and they colonized people. They committed a genocide and then they convinced the world that we're the nice ones. We're the peacekeepers. And then we just live on that narrative. Like that's our version of freedom is this being the nice ones, the ones who say sorry, you know, but it is just as toxic, right?

Yeah, no, no. And again, but to go back again to the book, it's like, you know, we tell stories for certain reasons. Right. And sometimes they're really, really good reasons, but then there are unintended consequences and stories go out in the world and they do their own thing. Yeah. Right. Um,

And, you know, so the model I use again, paratacism or a virus is that like they can be good for us or bad for us, but we don't actually know until they're released.

And unless we have a method of educating people, unless we really teach people how narrative works in our brains, how we're vulnerable to it, how confirmation bias works, if people don't understand these things, then we're constantly going to be the playthings of narrative. And worse, we're going to be the instruments of people who know how to use narrative better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, they weaponize it. Like we're worried, you know, here, I don't know if we're getting the same news there, but New York Times last week was like, oh, now the CIA is saying that COVID was probably a leak from a lab in China.

Right. I'm like, God, whatever. Like, I believe that. Yeah, for sure. That seems super likely and not at all propaganda. Definitely. Right. But like we're bioengineering stories all the time. Like we're always taking them and deploying them and manipulating people to their own harm. And like, you know, and this actually, you know, the failure of people to follow the right protocol for COVID is

killed more people than the disease would have otherwise. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so how is that? How is our ability to convince people of science not the first public health crisis? Right. Same thing with climate change. Right. I mean, we

Like it's there. People don't want to believe it. I understand why they don't want to believe it. Who wants to believe that the end of world is end of the world is coming. Right. It's really big. Yeah. It's big. We don't think well in the aggregate. There's nothing we can do about it unless we like band together for the collective good. Right. And then we'd have to sacrifice certain things. Do you know what the largest polluter, largest contributor to greenhouse gases is in the world?

is it not factory farming or something like that i'm pretty sure i may be wrong but i'm pretty sure it's the u.s military industrial complex oh that makes sense yeah the u.s military and maybe the other military that is not technically part of the u.s but like is part of the u.s military complex i mean i mean imagine like you know we we have the largest military in the history of time and what do we do with it like we just fucking have it

Yeah. But at some level, it's nuts. Billions and billions and billions. Yeah. Yeah. And so we talk about the money because we're trained. Yeah.

Because we're products of late market capitalism or late stage capitalism. We talk about the money, right? But what is the indirect human death toll, health toll from what is pouring into the environment? Yeah, yeah. Well, and the easiest thing for everyone, the easiest reason why people

in North America specifically, but in the West broadly, love to just not think about it now or not worry about it or think it's fake is because the effects are all happening on the countries that we've already turned into countries that we can look down on. Yeah, exactly. I mean, a few years ago, so in Trump's first campaign, or first presidency, I thought, well, all the drama at the border. Hmm.

is really going on in part to ready our population for climate change refugees. They're trying to habituate us, to casualize us to violence at the border because they have think tanks saying, we have water, we have land, but the unwashed masses are going to come from the South and we need to stop it. Right? And I used to think, I'd say stuff like that to my wife and she'd be like, you're a little crazy, Joel. Right?

But now Trump is back in power and he's obsessed with getting Greenland. Like, come on. This is all about looking forward for resources and not even trying to do anything about climate change. No, no. They just need to take more. A billionaire class has said, well, has decided lots of people are going to die because of climate change. We can't stop it. And we're probably better off if tons of people die. So let's grab as many resources as we can in the process so we and ours will be okay.

Yeah. And not to, I wasn't going to mention it, but I also think part of the part of the media treatment of the war on Gaza has been similarly to casualize us to violence against others. Yeah, I think, you know, we and now in this country like we are now casualized to the government doing nothing. When there's a natural disaster and people are suffering.

we're just like oh it's somebody else well yeah they can still send seven billion to bomb gaza yeah right like spend all that money but god forbid you rebuild roads in kentucky yeah yeah absolutely yeah or help flood victims or fire victims or right or like the first thing like like it just it's crazy imagine like your neighbor's house is burning right and like they're trying to get their kids out of the house and like instead of helping them you're like

you know, you should have invested in a better sprinkler system.

I mean, California's burning and Trump is like, it's Governor Newsom's fault. Like, that's insane, right? It's climate change. It's like 50 years of bad water policy. And yet you're just going to play games with it and lay blame because otherwise to accept collective responsibility is to act against the basic narrative impetus to focus on your own first. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry. No, no. I mean, yeah. Like, yeah, I'm glad we're having this conversation. Absolutely. I'm trying to find a way of like wrapping it up slightly positively because I think you have to go soon. Yeah. No, I mean, look, story. I mean, I think the positive thing is that like we we have we have dozens of disciplines that.

sociology, psychology, cognitive science, telling us how stories work. Right. And these are narratives as well. But they're telling us that like we're subject to them, we're vulnerable to them. They knit us together and they tear us apart. Right. And so basically,

we've seen what narrative has done to tear us apart, right? It has a potential to bring us back together if we're willing to understand it and use it and to tell different stories. And so I think that's the real thing is that we need people who want to craft narratives to believe in. And we need people who want to train people, to teach people, to understand narratives critically and to take control of them rather than be subject to them.

And so I don't think it's too late. I just think we need to understand that, you know, it's fine to come. It's great if we come up with science that will kill cancer. I hope we do it. But we also need to invest in the stories that will make people accept that truth. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. And so that's something to evangelize. If that's something to invest in, again, we need a science of story. We need people who believe in it. And we need, you know, put things in education perspectives. We needed to invest in humanities to help people see the value of science. Because otherwise the only people who are going to benefit from it are the people who have the education and the power to make the distinction on their own. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, that's yes. That was very well said. I just, oh my God. Great conversation. I don't even know how to pull it. I'm like trying to pull this together now. Yeah. That, that was a very, very fucking interesting and difficult and ultimately inspiring. Thank you so much. No, thank you for having me and for, you know, entertaining my, my madness and,

I mean, as somebody else who sounds like they're usually, you know, saying the thing, like, I just, I related to the border reference where you're like, you sound crazy. And then it's like five years later, you're like, I know, I sounded crazy. I'm sorry that I, like, I'm just obnoxious with my pessimism, but also it's crazy.

It's valuable in a way. Well, also, so there are a couple of things in the book. So I do talk about a few conspiracy theories. I talk about one that involves presidential candidate Romney, Clear Channel, and Mumford & Sons, and the suppression of like Black music. So there's some wildness in there. Yeah.

And I just, you know, if this makes it to the podcast, I want to shout out to Yale University Press and my editor, Heather Gold, for just giving me the license to be a little crazy. And then just like saying, all right, let's do it. I mean, but I think that makes a big difference. So absolutely a shout out to that, because I think that's what makes a book like this more valuable is to be able to go a little crazy. Yeah. Yeah.

I feel like you always have an answer to this that's just no, but is there anything you want to share with the listeners or tell them to read more? You know, I mean, I'd love people to read this book, Story Life, and let me know what they think. And my last book, The Many-Minded Man About the Odyssey, is open access now, so you can get it free. You can download it on Kindle for free or download it for e-reader from the website.

And then I would just say keep reading all stories you can critically and thinking about them. And the number one thing, and this is the thing I didn't get to, is we talked earlier about how when each of us read a story, we create our own blend. You should read your things in groups and talk to people about it. Because when you talk about stories with people, you hear their interpretations and you create a composite blend together and that creates a new sense of community.

And so in this day and age, we're sitting behind computers, we're doing things alone. Go to a coffee shop, make a book group, make a Zoom book group, right? Talk about movies together because that's how you create community. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Great. Yes. Good. All of it. I just thank you so much. This was both very fun and interesting. And also the world's on fire. Yeah. Sorry.

Ah, nerds, thank you for listening. As always, I am kind of bouncing out a bunch of these pre-recorded episodes while I am over in the UK to do some events and book things and also see all the stolen stuff. They won't give back to Greece and thus I have never seen. So this and a few more episodes will be sort of in that realm. It'll be more obvious with the other ones.

But I just happened to say that in this one. So here we are. Check out Story Life. There's a link in the episode's description and generally read more from Joel also at the link in the episode's description. It's a Latin phrase that I don't want to try to say right now.

Let's Talk About Myths, baby, is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Penguish is the Hermes to my Olympians, my incredible producer. Select Music by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network, bitches. It's a thing I founded because I wanted to.

Learn more from the Memory Collective, which is so much more than podcasts, or it will be. It's not currently, let's not pretend. But you can learn more about the collective and what our goals and aims are at collectivemem.com. That's collective memory, but just M-E-M.

And I am working on a newsletter, so you can sign up for that and you'll get more information. We're also looking at all of the different options we have for reaching listeners and interested learners outside of the increasingly worrisome social media, where you all might notice I've been pretty silent because it's just...

terrible. And I'm trying to keep myself afloat. But we are looking into that. If anyone has kind of ideas, we're imagining maybe a group discord where we can be sharing this stuff. Maybe something bigger. I'm not totally sure, but you know, we're here with suggestions. And leave me a question for the next Q&A episode. Link in the episode's description. I'll stop saying that. I am Liv and I love this shit. Hey guys,

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