Conversations: When Science Meets Storytelling, Storylife w/ Joel Christensen

Liv is joined by our favourite Homerist to talk narrative, virality, and how epics can help us understand the mess we're in. Find more about Storylife here https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300269239/storylife/. Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.

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• 2:10Liv Albert?

  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.

• 2:52Liv Albert?

  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.

• 3:30Liv Albert?

  Conversations: When Science Meets Storytelling. Story Life with Joel Christensen.

• 3:52Liv Albert?

  But why don't you tell me about the new book and what you were looking at?

• 3:58Speaker 05

  All right, so the book is called Story Life, and the subtitle is on epic narrative and living things.

• 4:06Speaker 05

  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 like 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 of different aims with it. Aim number one is to de-center 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 in mind of its own.

• 4:52Speaker 05

  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, a virus that has a function of its own. And so the, 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.

• 5:31Liv Albert?

  That's very interesting. So scientific.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  It is, it is and it isn't, but I mean, yeah, you know, like I use DNA and epigenetics and thinking about how

• 5:46Speaker 05

  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 like, you know, arguments for their origins and similarities. And then I focus really near the end on symbiosis and how, you know, how much of our DNA, eight percent, is made up of viruses and other beings that have been integrated into who we are. And offering up, you know, 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.

• 6:28Speaker 05

  So 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, 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 tech test case. People are not familiar with its language, it's distant. And so if you want to say, look, Homeric epic develops without an author. It has intention and direction of its own. I think it's a good way to start people down the path to think, well, maybe, you know, your own book that you write actually comes from a place that's not just you.

• 7:13Speaker 05

  And we have to think about what the consequences of that are.

• 7:16Liv Albert?

  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.

• 7:23Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, well, yeah, so, 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 unit of 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 multi-cellular life and DNA to think about two things. One, how language unfolds in its environment. Any given word that you use, right, has no meaning in isolation, right? It doesn't have meaning until it's activated in its environment.

• 8:04Speaker 05

  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. And 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, you know, 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 many different fields of linguistics to try to help us understand it.

• 8:46Speaker 05

  So there's that, like, that's the first chapter, thinking about DNA and language and the basic shape of the line, of a line of epic poetry. A 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.

• 9:31Speaker 05

  And so I lay out, it's not just about the lines of Homeric epic, right? The individual lines, but they're built of doublets, 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 emphasized both in my last book and this one is a cognitive approach to narrative

• 10:15Speaker 05

  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 comparison, a combination between our experiences and 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've moved through the world, you and I will likely have separate versions, very different versions of that in our mind.

• 10:59Speaker 05

  Um, 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. Right? Um, but the point I make is that Homer's 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 and closings, introductions and closings, or similes, right? Where someone says, you know, heck, she goes forth like a snowy mountain, uh, right?

• 11:41Speaker 05

  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 sixteen, which is a famous one, but you know, people say, some people say the most beautiful thing on this dark earth is a cavalry. Some people say, uh, infantry, some people say it's a navy. I say it's the one you love. But then from that opening frame, Sappho says, 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 Anactoria, whose lovely walk I would rather watch than all the lydian chariots on the earth.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  Right? 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.

• 13:02Speaker 05

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

• 13:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I mean, it's so, it's so intricate in a way that I'm definitely like, I'm wrapping my head around it. I am. But I would just, I'm thrilled to hear about the Sappho reference. Also, I don't. It's funny, I've been weirdly coming across that name Anactoria a lot lately. And it's a bizarre name to then suddenly go, I feel like I just keep seeing this. It's a favorite. Um, 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 so interesting. So you, you mentioned comparing the Iliad and Gilgamesh, right?

• 14:09Liv Albert?

  Like in this, is, 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.

• 14:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. So, so in the next chapter, so the name of chapter three is Crabs and the Monomyth.

• 14:26Liv Albert?

  Amazing.

• 14:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the argument I make there, well, first I start with, with what we do when we see similarities in narrative traditions. And the reason I focus on the monomyth thing is the, you know, the obsession of 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 similar similarities in traditions, 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. Hmm. Right? The original myth, quote unquote.

• 15:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, the original, the Oremeth, uh, which of course should come from Orem, right? But, uh, 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? Yeah. And so, right, as a way of dealing with the many, many problems of the mono myth, 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, uh, notions, um, from, uh, evolutionary biology.

• 15:50Speaker 05

  And so the example I use is the, 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, in, 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. Right? And so for me, this is a great metaphor for thinking about why we choose the narratives we do.

• 16:34Speaker 05

  Right? And how, how do we find that balance of like, all right, we have these genes and we'll call them narrative genes, like the kernels of narrative. And we select for them or they develop in certain ways based on their environment. Um, 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.

• 17:07Speaker 05

  Another is that you know, you come from similar backgrounds, but diverge and then converge again, again, based on the environment. And so the question I ask in, in book three, so 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, how do we understand it if we look to the natural world instead of our basic tree models that we have in scholarship?

• 17:50Speaker 05

  And so I suggest that, like, one of the important things is audiences don't know.

• 17:54Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 17:55Speaker 05

  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 of 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, right?

• 18:39Speaker 05

  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.

• 18:50Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:51Speaker 05

  And the, 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, it, you could say, oh, it's part of the same tradition. Do you know, do you know "Spanish Pipe Dream"?

• 19:09Liv Albert?

  No.

• 19:10Speaker 05

  All right. So it's a song where this guy, the basic narrative is this guy is, is a sailor who's on break, and he's He goes to a strip club and 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 their own. And so in ways like engagement with martial discourse, woman as sort of a, you know, alternative figure, promise of children for glory instead of like the rhetoric of glory. It it checks all the boxes that you get in like 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.

• 19:53Speaker 05

  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 we, you should think of audiences and their cultural contexts in the way that we think of ecosystems and life forms, right? It's a complex relationship that that allows narratives to develop to fulfill particular functions. And I think if we, if we look at Gilgamesh and other, you know, the monomyth and other traditions like that, it's a richer, much more, uh, yeah, complicated way of looking at narrative development

• 20:35Speaker 05

  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 and their response to it.

• 20:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's okay. That's very interesting. I keep just saying that's very interesting.

• 20:52Speaker 05

  You can also say it's crazy.

• 20:54Liv Albert?

  No, it's not crazy. It's just more that I'm like, I mean, I, I, I think it's just more that I, 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, I've definitely heard the, the idea that, you know, that, that Gilgamesh has similarities with the Iliad, but I, I guess I haven't investigated that much into. Sort of what what is said about why? And I also have never read Joseph Campbell, and that is fine with me.

• 21:28Speaker 05

  It's much better for you that way.

• 21:30Liv Albert?

  I think so. I know enough to know I don't need to read him.

• 21:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:34Liv Albert?

  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.

• 21:47Liv Albert?

  You've used a word so many times, and now I can't find it. But similar situations, environments, yeah, environment. Yeah. Yeah, that that was the word. I'm just doing really well today, and I can't think of the word environment. Yeah, but it it just seems so 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?

• 22:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, so that the other, yeah, the other alternative people say is that they they one is story is taken, right?

• 22:14Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 22:15Speaker 05

  But you know, I I can't remember if I use this 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 their world. And then the analogy I use in the opening of the book is of like a tree in a in a garden, like a manicured tree. When we look at the placement of a tree, most of the time, we don't think about it.

• 22:58Speaker 05

  But if we think about it, we're like, oh, well, who planted 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? Um, and if we get, if we add all these things up, like, to what do we give the credit of the appearance of this tree? Is it the gardener, right? Is it the designer of, of the garden?

• 23:39Speaker 05

  Is it the first person to like domesticate a sugar maple for a garden? I mean, you, you just go on and on and on, right? When again, you get to the, you, you, one end, you have someone appreciating a tree in a garden. Right? And on the other, you have just wild trees. Um, but along the way, you have this interaction between human beings and the environment. And a thing that's both found and curated, um, that has to be both, or else it's neither.

• 24:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 05

  So, 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, uh, 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, 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.

• 24:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:55Speaker 05

  And so in that dance, right, between, so the novelty and the tradition, like, we have come to such a place in like our modern, um, 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.

• 25:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 25:15Liv Albert?

  Makes me think of AI. Um.

• 25:17Speaker 05

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

• 25:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Because it still requires the human interaction. And so we're just, yeah, the, it just doesn't make any sense, I think, in any reasonable way, other than just the, that obsession with like, but we can do this.

• 25:58Speaker 05

  Right. But the thing I just said, so that, that, that contribution that individuals make when they receive like narrative art and give it back again, right? That, that difference is based on the ability to combine your experience with what you're receiving and read it that way. Right? 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.

• 26:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 26:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:36Liv Albert?

  Well, and that's why I, I, 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 like, understanding, you know, law, otherwise lost works. And I just, I, I, I try to be kind in my replies on those things because I also know I have very strong opinions. But like, 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 like, if there's some Computer nonsense in the in between breaking something down and then giving us something like I don't

• 27:20Liv Albert?

  trust it and I don't think it would have any of the like he 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.

• 27:31Speaker 05

  Well, no, but I know, you know, AI keeps happening because they want to steal all of our culture material from us and then sell it back to us worse.

• 27:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah, because capitalism's cool.

• 27:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:42Liv Albert?

  It's going well.

• 27:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a transfer of wealth issue. Um, you know, there's nothing to do. No, if AI art were real, we wouldn't understand it because it would be related to AI experience.

• 27:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 27:54Speaker 05

  Which is completely alien to us.

• 27:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 27:59Speaker 05

  It's like, you know, if if actual space aliens showed up and they had an art form, the chance of us understanding it as art um, 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 shit.

• 28:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 05

  Their art, their art would seem like math to us or would seem like fractal, you know, fractal light shows. Uh, maybe we would get it, but we probably wouldn't because we're pretty solipsistic and dumb.

• 28:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 28:59Speaker 06

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  Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.

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  Love the crown molding.

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• 31:00Speaker 01

  No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.

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• 32:03Liv Albert?

  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, the ways I have been trying to find to, to explain why I hate it so much. So I love, I love that this connection has been made because, you know, my thing is I just kept, I can't, I can't put it into words beyond saying that, that it, you know, we, it, it isn't art because it lacks the humanity and that is what, what is required in order to create art. And even the, if it has anything that looks like art, it's because it's taken it from human art.

• 32:44Speaker 05

  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, right? And those two things so thoroughly put the emphasis on the creator and completely divorce us from the audiences, right? And we know, like, in, in an area in which, in an area in which audiences

• 33:27Speaker 05

  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, that takes us back to, I mean, let's see, another way to get into this, so the later chapters of the book get crazier.

• 33:58Liv Albert?

  Great.

• 33:58Speaker 05

  And, and you wanna, so can I give you an origin story for the book? Um, and then we could talk about some of those things.

• 34:05Liv Albert?

  Please.

• 34:06Speaker 05

  Okay, um, so this book is very much a COVID book. Um, and I wrote a blog post with the title was, did COVID write this book? Um, because I started talking about some of these ideas with editors in, uh, probably the second fall of COVID, so 2021. Um, and I'd spent so much time, uh, well, like everybody, thinking about virology, right? Um, 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, the facts of science or virology or vaccines, um, or, you know,

• 34:51Speaker 05

  mitigating the disease by wearing masks became political issue. Um, and suddenly, you know, I mean, I, we're trying not to remember, but, uh, 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, I'd always been thinking about COVID, not COVID, about, you know, narrative as akin to DNA. But I started to really think then, you know, because 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.

• 35:33Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 35:34Speaker 05

  Um, because everything in that summer of 2020 through 2021, 2021, we had, you know, the, the election campaign, we had the Black Lives Matter movements, we had all, you know, all the failure of, of our society to accept, you know, the, the mitigation. Um, it was all driven by story.

• 35:55Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 35:56Speaker 05

  Um, 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, and wrote this out. Um, because my real concern was like, how are we going to face the challenges we have in the future? Uh, climate change, uh, you know, and rising in income inequality, uh, rising violence, all this stuff. If we don't understand how stories make us choose things that are actually worse for us. Right? Um, you know, our science, our technology is, has.

• 36:28Speaker 05

  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 the fourth and fifth chapters of my book are are about how narrative goes wrong. So in chapter four, I look at clayos narratives, so narratives of immortal fame in early Greece. And how they go in multi directions, how we often misunderstand them.

• 37:09Speaker 05

  And then chapter five, which is something we've talked about before, but we can always say 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 Cleomity as the Astypalian, the boxer who goes back and kills a bunch of kids. And I end up talking about school shootings, 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 empiraticism to think about how narrative lives off of us and how we're not in control of it.

• 37:52Speaker 05

  And so, yeah, sorry, I just gave you way too much there, but what of that do you want to hear more about?

• 37:57Liv Albert?

  I mean,

• 38:00Liv Albert?

  the thing is, I mean, I'm generally interested in all of it. But obviously, my my knowledge in terms of interacting with it would be around this like epic and myth and everything. And so I'm I'm well, also like the toxic heroism I'm always down to talk about, but just generally. 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 the growth and and the yeah, the way that that epics did, you know, ba- 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 of it being able to be sort of tracked around epic. So I want to know more.

• 38:41Speaker 05

  All right, let's let's start with the idea of klaos, right? This is the Greek word for fame and glory. And it becomes, you know, concretized in the Iliad as klaos af katon, right? As imperishable fame. 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. Right? So when people talk about the Iliad, and these are people really don't understand it, they're like, Well, this is

• 39:25Speaker 05

  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 klaos in Greek poetry and epic and lyric in inscriptions as well to see how people use that narrative of sacrifice of life for of like mortal life for immortal

• 40:09Speaker 05

  glory to show how the epic how epic really complicates it and shows how it can be a a impetus to bad decisions. And I use this as a way to think about, All right, let's talk about symbiosis. Right? So symbiosis, a 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 eight percent 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 in wombs,

• 40:53Speaker 05

  where we had, 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 like the development of different creatures, the, this retrovirus was destructive. But we got lucky and it made, you know, the placentation possible in mammals, which had then created an entire tree of life, right, in this way. And so many examples of how, you know, we have absorbed viral DNA into our organisms. And they've started out as what you call parasitic, but eventually they become beneficial, right? This is a type of mutualism.

• 41:38Speaker 05

  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 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?

• 42:21Speaker 05

  So on one level, narrative gives us these resources as individuals. As groups, though, narrative is actually what gives us a sense of belonging.

• 42:33Speaker 05

  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, Sapiens, 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

• 43:18Speaker 05

  front of us and we have a prejudice towards an individual point of view that is, let's see, concretized and magnified by cultural frameworks, right? That 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.

• 43:49Liv Albert?

  I know, I'm just like, okay, I won't start screaming.

• 43:53Speaker 05

  No, no, but our narratives that allow us to belong and work as corporate entities, other, other people, right? They dehumanize others, they make it less than us, that also makes us resistant to information that challenges our core identity, right? So you can go to things and I'm going to try to resist current events and look instead to, you know, 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? None of that is based in facts.

• 44:34Speaker 05

  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.

• 44:46Speaker 05

  For the sake of our notion of a common good. Right? And this actually blinds us to certain things, right? Like, for instance, you know, I don't know how many Americans have ever asked how many Iraqi and Afghani children we killed in the war on terror.

• 45:05Speaker 05

  Right? And I mean, we, it's the tens, 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.

• 45:47Speaker 05

  But, you know, all we have to do is look in the change of pace in conspiracy theories online, right? And how rapidly stories go. One of the things I've been thinking about lately is the, 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.

• 46:16Liv Albert?

  I missed that one, so.

• 46:17Speaker 05

  That was, it was in the New York Times. It's a really, it's a, it's a crazy way. And you're like, you and I are like, all right, like, 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, 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, how, what can we do about it? Yeah.

• 47:01Speaker 05

  And so, so when I look at Klaus narratives, I look at, look, like, let's, 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. Right? The narrative of glory facilitates that. Right? You know, you're a great person, you're getting all these honors, rewards for risking your life for the community because that's important. All right, that's stage one. But step two, and this is really where we're at at the beginning of the Iliad, is, well, what happens if you've accepted all that and it's still not enough? Right? What if you expect that as your position for someone who risks their lives to the community? You expect honor beyond everyone else, right? It's, I think of it types of extramortality.

• 47:46Speaker 05

  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, the, the desire to outstretch 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?

• 48:31Speaker 05

  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 the Greeks for his suffering.

• 48:45Speaker 05

  It results in the death of Myriadikeans, 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, 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. All right. And that that's a central theme of the Iliad 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.

• 49:27Speaker 05

  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, right? Like the idea of having a coherent identity built around freedom and independence is like, it's good. It creates like, like at some level creates a desire. It gives you a like, you know, a sense that you're in control of things. It breaks down all boundaries. But in the other, it obscures things like, you know, 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

• 50:12Speaker 05

  and Europe. And so, you know, the narratives that we tell direct us to see things and not others.

• 50:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 05

  And, you know, it is ultimately as harmful to us as it can be to other people.

• 50:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, the American patriotism narrative specifically is such an interesting way to look at that because, yeah, yeah.

• 50:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'll give you an example, like, no, just about correcting. No, 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, you know, we're the bootstrappers. We work really hard, unlike all these other people who get things, right? And, you know, the point. So that's the way he tells the story. And why other people shouldn't get handouts or steps up, right? But then, you know, I asked him, I talked to him, I'm like, well, two fundamental things that happened at our family

• 51:24Speaker 05

  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, like 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, or Native, you didn't get that, right? So these two things, I can tell a different story.

• 52:06Speaker 05

  Where our family is the beneficiary of, you know, white affirmative action. Not of their own hard work.

• 52:16Speaker 05

  And so, you know, 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 like, you know, I can talk more about the school shooting thing. But like, really where I go in the conclusion is, you know, like, 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.

• 52:58Speaker 05

  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, you know, these great challenges.

• 53:12Liv Albert?

  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, 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.

• 53:38Liv Albert?

  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 US ever wanted of us, we became, we developed this narrative about Canadians that compared to the US, we were, we are the nice ones, we are the polite ones, we are the ones where things is are good, 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

• 54:22Liv Albert?

  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, 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 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 Pierre Poliev, who is our Trump, he's gonna, he's, and he was sitting

• 55:07Liv Albert?

  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 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 like utter nonsense and also it is

• 55:52Liv Albert?

  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. I don't know how that, yeah.

• 56:15Speaker 05

  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 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.

• 56:54Speaker 05

  Right. They, they, 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 at some levels stuck to like the structures of our birth, right, of the families we were born in, the race, the racialized structures we were born into. And when you introduce a new idea into that, right, it's like, you know, the graft host problem, right? You're Producing a new organ into a host body, you need to have some type of of immunosuppressant for you not to attack it.

• 57:35Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 57:35Speaker 05

  That's why, like, when you, you know, the people don't like to say white fragility anymore. Right? Um, but I mean, that type of

• 57:43Liv Albert?

  That sounds like a very fragile decision to make.

• 57:46Speaker 05

  Right, but but that's the visceral response to um new information that challenges your identity is like an immun 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.

• 58:13Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 58:14Speaker 05

  And I reject it. They must be wrong.

• 58:16Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 58:16Speaker 05

  Right? Um, and that's the thing. I mean, like, we have the 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 based as, say, the medieval period. We're not serfs, right? Um, but we have racialized things to the extent um that it's almost a type of serfdom. But those of us who are outside of that have trouble seeing it because we've been conditioned not to.

• 58:56Speaker 07

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• 59:27Speaker 01

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• 1:00:14Speaker 05

  Right. And so, you know, if you're thinking again, I mean, I can't imagine this conversation with 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. It's what's happening right now. Like all like we went like, like three years ago, everyone's like, um, 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.

• 1:00:57Speaker 05

  And we also want to make things more inclusive. Like I just, the whole notion that that is evil. Right? To take that and flip it and say, these things were 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 anytime somebody responds so violently to an idea. Right? It's because it's challenging who they think they are. Right? And again, it's like, how do we come like, how can we articulate ideas in a way? That they'll be effective and that they'll not be subject to the perversion that we're seeing.

• 1:01:39Speaker 05

  Um, I mean, I don't have all the answers, but I think I think a simple thing is like we have a, a, a, um, a poverty of the way we talk about narrative and the way we trade people to deal with it. Um, and we also, and to add to this, we have a super highway of narrative transmission, um, which I think is, is, 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 online, right? Um, and it's also like the best or the most, uh, automated impressive confirmation bias system ever. Like when we were kids, uh, and I was a kid, like if someone said, oh, I believe that there are secret lizard people

• 1:02:24Speaker 05

  who are really living, like running the government. And I say this, you know, 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, of like alienation or difference, um, that has no relation to the community that, that you're built around and that, that you can actually contribute to.

• 1:03:01Liv Albert?

  Well, and when, when we don't also value community in the same way as I think was necessary before, like, you know, decades earlier, or, or rather, I'm saying that poorly. It's what, 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, 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. That is perhaps far more dangerous than like than a than a sort of literal like a physical community.

• 1:03:46Speaker 05

  No, and that's it. So to go back to that, to go back to my last chapter, which is really, I don't call it toxic humanisms, sorry, heroism, I try to figure out what it is. I just call it what stories do in the world, much less interesting. But, you know, the the narrative of individualism and heroism itself is toxic because it emphasizes the individual over the collective.

• 1:04:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Speaker 05

  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 Myriadikeans or causes their death. It says that Odysseus tried really hard, but all of his companions died and then murdered a bunch of people when he comes home. It actually says that, like, you know, heroic individuality is bad for communities.

• 1:04:46Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  Right. And yet, you know, again, thinking of American exceptionalism, thinking of the rugged individual in the West, right? For 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

• 1:05:28Speaker 05

  we have 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, who 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 like 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, the story I focus on in the fifth chapter is a story about Cleomides,

• 1:06:12Speaker 05

  the Astropolion. And the, the story is told by both Plutarch and Pausanias. And it's basically, there's a guy named Cleomides, he went to the Olympic Games, he's 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 Astropolia went to find him, he was gone. And they went to the Delphic Oracle, and the Delphic Oracle said, Cleomides, the Astropolian is the last of the heroes, worship him or give him the rights

• 1:06:55Speaker 05

  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, 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 force as a child. And then about this one, I go back

• 1:07:37Speaker 05

  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. 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 of the social compact and you know it's it's a death cult but it's also a paroxysm like what Cleomides feels right? People and again, there's a reason why it's almost always white dudes occasionally not, right?

• 1:08:18Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:08:58Speaker 05

  Right? And so like for me, I mean, the these stories of of the mass shootings are a way to think about the sickness of our society. And how that sickness is advanced by story, right? What are the narrative traditions? What are the narrative ideas that set them in a position to take other people's lives? Because, you know, again, I think that they wouldn't be taking lives if they couldn't get guns. That's one thing. So let's just like leave that aside.

• 1:09:25Liv Albert?

  First and foremost, there's a reason why there's most in down there.

• 1:09:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, 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 I, while the world was falling apart, I wrote a big book about a small thing.

• 1:10:12Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:10:13Speaker 05

  Right, um, 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 gonna 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 the troopers. Right? He'll never realize that the sense of loss that comes from his own actions. He'll never see somebody else as alive as himself.

• 1:10:56Speaker 05

  And so at the end is like, you know, 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 a 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.

• 1:11:30Liv Albert?

  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, and the way that it is, you know, affected by narrative, like you are, I just, it, it feels to me like North America is so. We, I think we stand above in a lot of, a lot of ways of where we have sort of are the

• 1:12:12Liv Albert?

  farthest from sort of the, the community of, of, I don't know how, how to phrase it, but I mean, just, I just mean the colonialism of it all is in itself, like a, 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 viral and here.

• 1:12:33Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, think about it this way. Uh, 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.

• 1:12:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:46Speaker 05

  And originally it wasn't pursuit of happiness. It was pursuit of property, right? But I'm serious, but there's nothing.

• 1:12:53Liv Albert?

  The laugh was that I know you're serious.

• 1:12:55Speaker 05

  Right. But like, it's not like, it's life for me. It's liberty for me.

• 1:13:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Speaker 05

  Happiness for me. It's, there's no notion of the cost to others.

• 1:13:05Liv Albert?

  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, it, it's so on, I mean, I don't want to say on its 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 a 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

• 1:13:48Liv Albert?

  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.

• 1:14:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, no.

• 1:14:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:04Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:14:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:21Speaker 05

  Right? Um, and you know, so the, the model I use again, paraticism or virus, um, 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, like, unless we have a method of educating people, um, unless we really teach people what, 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, 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.

• 1:14:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:58Speaker 05

  Right? I mean, they weaponize it like we're worried, you know, here, I don't know if we're giving 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. Um, right? I'm like, whatever.

• 1:15:13Liv Albert?

  Like, I believe that, I, yeah, for sure. That seems super likely and not at all propaganda. Definitely.

• 1:15:19Speaker 05

  Right? Um, 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. Um, and like, you know, and this actually, you know, the failure of people to follow the right protocol for COVID killed more people than the disease would have otherwise.

• 1:15:43Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:43Speaker 05

  Right?

• 1:15:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44Speaker 05

  Um, and so how is that? How is our ability to convince people of science not the first public health crisis? Right? Same thing with, with climate change, right? Um, 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? Um, it's really big.

• 1:16:09Liv Albert?

  We caused it.

• 1:16:10Speaker 05

  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, uh, certain things. Do you know, um, what the largest polluter, uh, largest contributor to greenhouse gases is in the world?

• 1:16:28Liv Albert?

  Is it not factory farming, something like that?

• 1:16:31Speaker 05

  I'm pretty sure, I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's the US military industrial complex.

• 1:16:36Liv Albert?

  Oh, that makes sense. Yeah.

• 1:16:37Speaker 05

  The US military.

• 1:16:38Liv Albert?

  And maybe the other military that is not technically part of the US, but like is part of the US military complex?

• 1:16:45Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:16:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52Speaker 05

  But it's at some level, it's nuts.

• 1:16:55Liv Albert?

  Billions and billions and billions. Yeah.

• 1:16:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so we talk about the money because we're trained. Because we're, 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, uh, health toll from what it's pouring into the environment?

• 1:17:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it, the, the, 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.

• 1:17:34Speaker 05

  We've already said that.

• 1:17:35Liv Albert?

  We can look down on.

• 1:17:36Speaker 05

  They're crappy.

• 1:17:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:17:37Speaker 05

  I mean, a few years ago, some Trump's first campaign, uh, I, I was, or first, um, presidency. Um, I thought, well, all the drama at the border 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, the unwashed masses are going to come from the south and we need to stop them. Right? Um, and I used to think I'd say something 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.

• 1:18:17Speaker 05

  Like, this is all about looking forward for resources and not even trying to do anything about climate change.

• 1:18:23Liv Albert?

  No, no.

• 1:18:23Speaker 05

  Billionaire classes 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. Um, so let's grab as many resources as we can in the process. So we and ours will be okay.

• 1:18:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40Speaker 05

  And not to, I, I wasn't gonna mention it, but I also think, um, part of the, part of the media treatment of the war on Gaza has been similarly to casualize us to violence against others.

• 1:18:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:53Speaker 05

  I think, uh, 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, God, somebody else.

• 1:19:04Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah, they can still send seven billion to bomb Gaza.

• 1:19:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, right? Like, spend all that money, but God forbid you rebuild roads in Kentucky.

• 1:19:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Or help flood victims or fire victims or.

• 1:19:17Speaker 05

  Right. Or, or like the first thing, like, like, I, 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.

• 1:19:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:34Speaker 05

  Uh, 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 fifty years of bad water policy, right? And yet you're just gonna play games with it and lay blame because otherwise to accept collective responsibility is to act against the basic narrative impetus, uh, to focus on your own first.

• 1:19:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:02Speaker 05

  Sorry.

• 1:20:03Liv Albert?

  No, no, I mean, yeah, like, yeah, yeah, I'm glad we're having this conversation. Absolutely. I'm trying to find a way of like, uh, wrapping it up slightly positively because I think you have to go soon.

• 1:20:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, I mean, look.

• 1:20:18Speaker 05

  Story, I mean, I, I think the, the positive thing is that, like, we, we have, we have dozens of disciplines, sociology, psychology, cognitive science, telling us how stories work. Right? And these are narratives as well, um, 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? Um, and so. We've seen what narrative has done to tear us apart, right? We have, 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

• 1:21:03Speaker 05

  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, right? I hope we do it, but we also need to invest in the stories that will make people accept that truth.

• 1:21:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:33Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:21:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Ah, 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.

• 1:22:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that, that was a very, very fucking interesting and difficult and ultimately inspiring. Thank you so much.

• 1:22:23Speaker 05

  No, thank you for having me and for, you know, entertaining my madness.

• 1:22:30Liv Albert?

  I mean, as somebody else who sounds, who sounds like they're usually, you know, saying the, like, I just, I related to the, 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, it's valuable in a way.

• 1:22:48Speaker 05

  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 and Sons, and the suppression of like black music. So there's some wildness in there.

• 1:23:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:07Speaker 05

  And I just, I, 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.

• 1:23:21Liv Albert?

  I mean, but I think that makes a big difference. So absolutely a shout out to that because I think that that's what makes a book like this more valuable is to be able to go a little, a little crazy. Yeah.

• 1:23:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:23:33Liv Albert?

  Oh, um, is there, I feel like you always have an answer to this. That's just no, but is there anything you want to, to share with the listeners or tell them to read more or?

• 1:23:42Speaker 05

  You know, I mean, I, I'd love people to read this book, the story of life and let me know what they think. Um, you know, 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. Um, 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.

• 1:24:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Speaker 05

  You should read your things in groups and talk to people about it. Because when you talk about stories of people, you hear their interpretations and you create a composite blend together. And that creates a new sense of community. And so they, in this day and age, we're sitting behind computers, we're doing things alone. Uh, I don't know, go to a coffee shop, make a book group, make a Zoom book group, right? Talk about movies together. Um, because that's how you create community.

• 1:24:39Liv Albert?

  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 uh, the world's on fire.

• 1:24:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:25:07Liv Albert?

  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

• 1:25:50Liv Albert?

  to say right now. Let's Talk About Myths, Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Pangoish 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

• 1:26:33Liv Albert?

  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 and A episode. Link in the episode's description. I'll stop saying that. I am Liv and I love this shit.

• 1:28:09Speaker 07

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• 1:29:11Speaker 04

  Enemy of My Dreams by Jenny Williamson is a historical romance novel set in the time of the late Roman Empire, where Alaric, a brutal Gothic warlord, and Julia, a Roman princess, with a love of good wine, team up to take down Rome.

• 1:29:28Liv Albert?

  The much awaited sequel, Game of Thieves, comes out December 8. In this sequel, Julia and Alaric must overcome centuries of conflict to work together, or the turbulent riptides of rebellion and the demons of their past will tear them apart.

• 1:29:42Speaker 04

  And now, for a limited time, when you preorder Game of Thieves through Burning Pages Bookstore, you'll get a signed book plate and a free art print of one of Jenny's favorite spicy scenes from across the series.

• 1:29:55Liv Albert?

  Get this amazing artwork only from Burning Pages at burningpagesnc.com/game-of-thieves. Don't wait. Order your copy from Burning Pages today at burningpagesnc.com/game-of-thieves.