How Great Founders Tell Their Story

Everything is a narrative. Really, anything in society is some version of a narrative. When pre-narrative understanding of what is actually happening is made conscious and communicated in a way that doesn't quite name the thing but is able to metaphorically describe it, it can be extremely inspiring. It simply seems that these 3 elements—the external, the internal, and the philosophical—combined unlock something that moves people very deeply.

I'd love to ask a bunch of questions about work that you've done with companies, helping the founders of those companies distill the narrative of themselves, their business, and their product in a way that's transformative for them. I know you've done this with startups and with massive companies we probably can't name. It's a thing you've done over and over again.

Can you describe this thing that you've done with a number of people in as much detail—crazy detail—as you're willing to? The method that has started to emerge from you, this curiosity you have about certain builders, and what you do with that curiosity and how you help them. When you talk to someone about this self-knowledge exploration or something, is the thing the underlying reason that they themselves may not yet know for why they're doing what they're doing? Does it boil down to that?

The way I think of it is, the story works in 3 layers. One, there's the external mechanics of how the character interacts in the world, and you can substitute character for product. That's a requirement, and in the case of technology, it's technical. You have to have something that works, right? I mean, there's no way around that.

Then there are 2 more layers. One is a subjective layer: Why is this series of events important to me, and what does it mean to me personally? Then there is a philosophical layer. On a philosophical level, it's probably where you try to find out—and you have to steel-man this, and it's very easy to straw-man it, but you've got to steel-man it—how you believe the world works today and what people believe makes a good world, because everyone, most of the time, believes they're doing what is the right thing and what needs to be done the way it's done for a reason. They're mostly not wrong, right?

1. The Three Layers of Story

So there's an almost intractable philosophical belief about how the world works and why that's a good thing. Then you juxtapose that with your own personal philosophy: The dominant worldview is actually wrong, and you supplant that with your own personal philosophy. Ideally, you do this—you know, there are 4 or 5 points—and you do it on a direct oppositional basis. For each one, you say, “Everyone believes this; I believe that.” When this is steel-manned, it's really helpful, and then you do the same.

This is on a sort of global level about how the world works. When we talk about “the world,” it's probably specific to whatever it is you're building or running. Then you do that for the personal as well. You can do it for a customer, or you can do it for a person you're selling to: How do they believe things should be done, and how do you juxtapose that with what you think should be done?

I want to drill on these 3 layers of the story and try to turn them into a device that someone could take away from this and apply to themselves. If I'm listening and I'm curious about—I'll just keep it grounded in business—the story of my business at these 3 levels, is there a good question that I could ask, a prompt to get at the external, the emotional, and the philosophical? Can you think of 1 question for each?

The external would be: What are we doing? What are we making? What are we selling? What are we buying? Whatever it may be, as the core function of the company.

The philosophical is the why on a more abstract level. You believe in certain ideals, a certain way you believe that the world should be, on an abstract level. The emotional is a personal why. In the founder's case, it's very often why they are doing it, right? There is an origin story around that.

2. Prompts for the Three Layers

They will recruit people, consciously or unconsciously, who are in a similar vein. You can get very theoretical about this if you want to, right? I think for the majority of people, it's a visceral, personal experience that other people can relate to. If it's a large organization, it's why one does this on a personal level. It's these 3 things working in concert, picking up where the other leaves off and having a trifecta dance.

So maybe to rebuild it in the other direction, the questions are something like: How should the world be in a general sense? How do we believe—or how do I believe—in a good life?

Yep. The second layer is: Why am I doing this? What is it about my specific story that maps back onto that? And the third is: What are we doing about it? If you tell the company's story in that way, what does it galvanize that makes it worth pursuing in the first place?

The thing that I encounter over and over again is that even companies making something really great don't know how to talk about themselves, for whatever reason. I'm curious why you think that is—why companies struggle with that—and then why there's such a payoff to doing the work to figure it out.

3. Why Companies Struggle to Tell Their Story

I think sometimes it's because doing the thing is so difficult and complex that the idea of having to frame this now, on top of everything else, in some sort of philosophical way is overwhelming and doesn't even seem necessary at times. Of course, it's always present, and people are just not conscious of it. I think that's very often the case: It's all there; it just hasn't been unearthed yet.

Which is great fun, because the second you give people these tools, they're just frameworks to live within, right? They're decision-making frameworks. Everything is a narrative. Really, anything in society is some version of a narrative.

When the predicate understanding of what is actually happening is made conscious and is communicated in a way that doesn't quite name the thing but is able to metaphorically describe it, it can be extremely inspiring. It simply seems that these 3 elements—the external, the internal, and the philosophical—combined unlock something that moves people very deeply.

I was at Stanford when the turnaround for Apple was sort of in its second inning. I should not be using baseball metaphors because I have no idea what they are. But this was a man who had a philosophy, a personal worldview, and knew exactly what he was fighting against at all times. He acted accordingly, with unbelievable discipline and courage, and created something that was a work of art in many ways. He literally wanted to make business art, and he kind of did.

Every one of these instances is completely unique, obviously, but I think that is what's possible. It also makes it just more interesting in general, right? It's very easy to be conformist in some sense because you know what's expected, but there's a lot left on the table, too.

At the same time, espousing a new narrative or finding a pre-narrative understanding just unlocks a ton, right? It doesn't need to be life-changing. Sometimes it can be incremental and just unlock a whole new world of potential that is very easily implemented.

4. The 80/20 Rule: Familiar vs. New

In many ways, stories are very good at creating symbols that represent some sort of transcendental belief that people participate in, in the sense that everyone has an ultimate concern—something that they're absolutely concerned about. We won't talk about it, but it can be many different kinds of things. It can be money, it can be a deity, it can be truth.

To be able to present an ultimate concern around a business organization that makes a product of some kind, I think, fulfills a personal life picture for the people you're communicating it to. So it just feels more important. It feels truer, and it feels more meaningful and worthwhile.

We're going to talk a lot about applying some of these principles to the world of building companies or making things. One of the very first things I can remember you teaching me is something to the effect of: Everyone focuses on the new when trying to tell you about their thing, but the right approach is actually maybe only 20% new and 80% familiar, or something like that.

Can you say more about this principle of storytelling, or of delivering a message or conveying something to people—the trap we fall into of just trying to focus on the exciting new thing?

The interesting thing about this whole world is that there are no rules to it, right? Everyone gleans and tries to come up with rules for themselves that sometimes seem to work more often than they don't work, but there's no book on this, really.

Raymond Loy, the designer, had a similar rule around 80/20. This is sort of the most tolerable element of new before it's rejected by the human mind as incomprehensible. With the idea of originality and creativity, there's a sort of tension. Even that, of itself, is a story.

Especially now, originality is highly prized, and there's sort of this belief that only the very new is truly novel, especially with storytelling. But I even think—maybe this is confirmation bias—but I even think in business or in innovation, the new is really just the obvious uncovered through systematic trial and error over a certain period of time.

5. Suspense from Minimal New Information

By striving to stay within the obvious and trying to find a variation on the obvious, I think you have a higher chance, at least in storytelling, of discovering something novel that will still feel intelligible enough to categorize in the world.

Some people have an ability to see something truly new and immediately categorize it, and those people tend to be very successful investors, for instance. But generally speaking, I think the idea of originality is overrated, and the great filmmakers know this. Great novelists know this, too: you can begin with something very familiar and make it feel totally new incrementally.

Tell me about the short film that you like so much that’s nothing more than a camera panning back and forth.

It was a project where there’s simply a camera installed in the room, and the camera would move back and forth across the room, each time uncovering a little bit more of the room. Nothing else happens. There’s no payoff to it.

6. Understanding the Customer's Story First

But the suspense of seeing a little bit more information about the room is absolutely riveting. Even just this tiny amount of new information being given creates enormous suspense because somehow we’re good at anticipating. We’re really always anticipating. Each new piece of information gets put into some kind of puzzle, so by the end, the suspense is unbearable.

If you think about the power of communicating by starting with the familiar and the known, how would you encourage CEOs, companies, and people talking about their thing to use that truth? What is the method that you’ve seen the best explain—accepted reality—before trying to explain their new thing? Is there a method that comes out of this that you think is useful to founders, especially as the group that I’m the most interested in?

I think the reason storytelling, to me, is so effective is because you have a subjective point of view that an individual can relate to, because it’s sort of imitating and processing the character’s point of view. So it’s subjective in that way: subjective access to what, in storytelling, would be a universal truth, but that can be accessed only subjectively.

Does that mean that, in trying to reach the mind of a customer, let’s say, the right allocation of time for the founder is to spend most of their time understanding the natural story of the customer as it currently exists versus how it should be, and then build off of that?

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. It’s easy to forget that you’re dealing with human beings, right, who have a human experience at the same time as having a professional experience. Story is really good at seeing these 2 layers at the same time. There’s a subjective experience that a human being has, and then there’s the professional experience on top of it. I think you want to combine these 2 and understand you’re dealing with human beings first and foremost. The greatest founders and the greatest builders understand this instinctively.

What did you learn running studios? You’ve made, or been a part of making, so many things—so many movies.

I always ran these sort of midsize places. I never ran a Warner Bros.-type place simply because I thought they don’t make the kinds of movies I’m particularly good at or interested in. At the same time, it takes a very specific skill set to run the big ones, so I ran the midsize ones.

7. What CEOs Can Learn From Filmmakers

I think it has to do with being able to communicate in different worlds, which is actually quite difficult, because you have to speak the language of filmmakers, who live in their own world. Then you have to speak the language of corporate, because there are reporting requirements and business requirements, and you have to speak the language of marketing and sales. You are a communicator between worlds, and your job is to understand the language of filmmaking, the language of business, and the language of marketing, and run interference so the thing can happen.

What could CEOs learn from filmmakers, or from 2 groups that lead a group of people to make a thing? I’ve always had this weird obsession with filmmakers. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the fact that the thing they make ends—the project ends—and then it’s on to the next. It’s not just this continuous thing that you have to constantly build, and that’s appealing to me in some way. You’ve worked with some of the amazing filmmakers and appreciated their art. What could one learn from the other?

I come back to this ability and willingness to take ultimate responsibility, right? That’s really not what most people want to do at all. For some reason, especially filmmakers that have a true vision of what it is they want to be doing—which means they’re birthing this project and then taking ultimate responsibility from beginning to end, and then doing it again and again, each time risking total failure and staking their entire being on this one next thing—they’re running these pretty big temporary startups that get funding from the outside world. They get distribution from someone else, not themselves.

8. The CEO's Job: Master Communicator

I think it’s the courage, and it’s also the courage to espouse that particular worldview. All the great filmmakers have a very particular worldview. I think it’s extraordinary that this exists at all in the world: someone like that exists who will do that even if it fails, and then is willing to do it again. Some of the CEOs I’ve gotten to know are also artists in some ways, right? Because this is difficult stuff, especially when you have 100,000 employees, and you’re owning it, too.

Having been and worked with lots of CEOs that have chosen this ultimate responsibility, how would you articulate the job of a CEO? In your experience, when you’ve seen people do that job well or do it poorly, what are the good ones, in some basic sense, doing really well?

The CEO’s job is communication, and because of its complexity, communication breaks down into buckets of specialty. But it’s, in essence, being a master communicator of an almost infinite number of buckets and knowing to context-switch between them, understanding the language games each one of these buckets plays, but never forgetting the core principles underneath all this. Some of it is unspoken.

9. The Definition of an Iconic Character

The person I’ve observed, especially, is someone I admire enormously who’s doing a massive turnaround. He has been communicating the same marching orders for 2 years to this huge company, and everyone around him was in doubt. The results are finally coming in, and he’s right. He’s sort of imposed this against all these obstacles, but he was able to do it because he could communicate exactly what he was doing, almost in these 3 layers, to anyone.

He was always adjusting—not the philosophy, but always adjusting the emotional component to whomever he was speaking to, so that each person could hear the point that needed to be conveyed. They could be at peace knowing that they’d done their bit for this thing to work out, and he was able to communicate that in such a way that the people he was speaking to could hear it. You’re adjusting this emotional, subjective component to them. That, to me, is the secret of great communication.

What is an iconic character to you? I ask that because I feel like most people, maybe selfishly, want themselves to be like an iconic character in their own story—their company, to be an iconic thing in the world that it operates in. When you think about iconic characters, what things come to mind?

My view today—and it might change—but it probably has to do with an ability to be a Greek hero, which means to live and espouse a worldview that is universally disliked. That’s iconic.

10. All Stories Are About Death

I’m really interested, on this pure narrative level, in what Elon Musk is doing because it is so unconcerned with the traditional hero trajectory. It’s almost Greek, and this idea of breaking societal rules, if you will, that you get to some Platonic ideal, right, that is worth more than acceptance.

I think all stories have in common the idea of resilience, right? That a character will overcome these obstacles when things are not working, and there’s enough knowledge and enough power to go where one must go, or where one is impelled to go, and keep going anyways. This idea of resilience, and to keep going anyways even though the obstacles are getting enormous, inspires that begrudging admiration.

11. Two Kinds of Stories: Desire Fulfilled or Anxiety Purged

None of this is a moral evaluation, and no one cares what I think—what’s good or bad on a personal moral level. But on a narrative level, I think it’s absolutely fascinating that you have someone willing to step out on such limbs all the time.

Is that also just fighting death?

Everything is, in some ways, a death project, right? Yeah, absolutely. I feel that creativity—the art of creating—negates death and therefore is the purest expression of a battle against the inevitable. Tolken has this famous clip on YouTube that says all stories are about death, and I think he’s absolutely right, because it’s the ultimate stakes. It’s the stakes everyone lives with every day, and we get up and do things anyways.

Go deeper on that. We all have to die, and therefore a certain kind of story is appealing?

I think it has to do with a perceived power differential, right? We’re completely powerless in the face of death, at least for now, and that is a fantasy to acquire more power. We have this capacity to imagine the future, and we can imagine pretty much anything.

We have an ability to create our own cherished outcome. They're overcoming this weakness with the power fantasy. Robert Town, who was a great screenwriter and wrote Chinatown, recently died, but had a wonderful life and a wonderful career. He said this to me at lunch years ago, when I was a young executive: “Stories are either desires fulfilled or anxieties purged.” I think he's right.

These are great minds who've made great films. It's never left me. I think it has to do with overcoming the basic human condition.

I want you to expand on each of those two: anxiety purged or fantasy fulfilled. These are the two fundamental kinds of stories. Is it important that people know which one they're in?

12. Story as an Ultimate Concern

We experience both desire and fear, right? It's not just one or the other. The hero's journey is very often a desire to rise in the world. It's a desire to fulfill one's potential in the world.

An anxiety or a fear purge is an idea of an inherent fear of something that might happen to you that you really don't wish to happen. It feels good to see a version of the world play out where that which you're afraid of actually doesn't happen because you have had agency in defeating it. This is always really important.

Story is character and action, right? Things don't happen to you. You act against obstacles, and as you do, you acquire knowledge. With knowledge comes power to then affect the outcome.

It's also interesting to see that this is never done alone, right? There are always surrogates: people who give you knowledge and people who aid you in the quest, whatever the quest may be.

As you begin to process what makes a great story, in making them and enjoying them, what elements started to fall out?

I have an unusual view of this because I don't always think it needs to be enjoyable. I think that's a recent phenomenon, in the last 30 or 40 years, where storytelling became almost exclusively entertainment. I don't think that's the genealogy of that space at all.

I also think story has a religious aspect, not in the organized way necessarily, but perhaps in the way of ultimate concern.

Maybe the most common ultimate concern, probably by revealed preference, in the U.S. and in the group of people listening to this, is money.

Yeah.

What do you think about that?

It's an unbelievably powerful symbol because it has stored potentiality.

13. Deconstructing Great Stories

The mind can imagine anything, so it's the ultimate story in some sense, outside of the greatest story ever told, where all your desires and fantasies can be fulfilled and all your anxieties can be purged to such a degree. Maybe the money project is a denial-of-death project. The more you accrue of it, because it allows itself to be imprinted with any vision that you want, the more it gives the illusion that you're not going to have to leave your consciousness.

What is a great story to you? What does that mean?

I think it's a character starting at an extreme point, going to an extreme point that they cannot consciously imagine at the beginning, but somehow deep down know that this is where they need to go. Then situations are arranged in such a way that the original intent faces bigger and bigger versions of a barrier that is then resolved at the very end, to some degree.

Most characters that you meet are either underdogs trying to rise or kings who are falling or queens who are falling, right? The biggest people in the world believe they're the underdog, because we are again locked into this subjective experience of the world and we are wanting beings.

Why is that such an appealing story? Why is the underdog who succeeds so universally enjoyable?

Because everyone views themselves as one, right? You get access to people when they recognize themselves in what it is you're saying. There's the human desire to overcome our wretched state. There's this Kikot phrase I always love, and it's that humans are gods who have to die, right? In that sense, all these things are questions of death.

I'd love you to evaluate my distillation of great story and ask you what's missing in the elements. As I've thought about it, and I knew you were coming to see me, so I was thinking about this a lot, I was trying to give myself only 3 common traits to keep it simple. The things I came up with were originality, which we talked a little bit about in terms of the dominant worldview versus how you think the world should be; hardship; and ultimately transformation.

As I think about my favorite stories, or the best versions of my own story that I've lived, because I know it intimately, those 3 elements have been present and/or dominant in what I view as great stories. Where do you agree and disagree with those elements? I'm curious.

Hardship as the barrier to be overcome is the foundational element of any narrative. I find it very interesting in general that, when you look at the history of storytelling, the archetype, or if you will, the paradigm of what a story is, is someone actively overcoming obstacles to achieve something.

14. The Relentless Role of Status

Somehow, this must correspond to how, collectively, you see this in Chinese mythology and in Indian mythology. You overcome through activity, through intentional action. Big or small, it doesn't matter; it can just be very, very small. Ingmar Bergman is full of interiority. There's almost no external action.

Most of these, by the way, are internal barriers as well as external barriers. So I think that's probably a foundational piece: the overcoming of obstacles, which then becomes, in and of itself, the reason for doing it, right? There is no journey to go on without an obstacle. In that sense, I think it's essential.

Originality—I have this specific view in mind because I think very often successful people will claim originality. I just heard an interview with a brilliant designer, and he talked about originality and how important it is. It felt like a status game that people play: when they do something great, somehow it was entirely original, as to aggrandize their achievement. It's entirely possible that they felt this was the case.

I think very often it's much more derivative, and I think we should be much kinder to the notion of the derivative. We should understand, perhaps, that originality is just another form of derivation, except it's one that perhaps hasn't been done quite in this way before.

Everything's been said, right? Everything we've just said in this conversation has been said before in some way, by someone, at some point. It just wasn't maybe heard, or it wasn't said in the right way that one specific person could hear it. I think originality is the same in the same way.

Maybe to redefine originality, then, originality is the wrong word. Instead, it's a novel revelation of some constant truth, or something like that—a new way to show people an old thing. What about transformation?

Transformation is interesting because, in the Greek poetic sense, it would be a transformation. It would be the emergence of a new insight, a new power, which then creates a new kind of version of yourself, or of the hero self.

Lately, I've also added, maybe in my mind, this idea of transcendental insight as enough. James Joyce was all about this—the Joycean epiphany, the moment where the character accesses a universal truth, a transcendental truth about the world, just for a brief moment. That's the end of it.

Even just the recognition—“Oh, this is the way things really are”—maybe that's enough, too.

What have you learned about status and the role that status plays in human behavior? I know this is a topic that you've thought a lot about. Teach us about status a bit.

I think everything is about status. Every scene is about status, and every scene is about a power differential. That's what we find relentlessly fascinating. Every interaction is about status.

There's a story about a British actor who knew absolutely everyone in English society and, for some reason, was unsuccessful at getting what he wanted. He said that when he overplayed his status, he would be hated. When he underplayed his status, he wouldn't get what he wanted. Everyone liked him, but he wouldn't get what he wanted. When he matched status, he would get whatever he asked for.

How do you define it? What is it?

It's a sense of accepted superiority vis-à-vis another, whether it's physical, societal, or moral.

What about just on the very basic level of the thing you're doing and why?

I'm building a film studio from scratch.

Yeah.

With Mitch Lasky as my chairman and A16Z as my investor. Mitch Lasky is a former partner at Benchmark and comes from the video game world, and Mark and Mark is obviously a great lover of cinema and has seen absolutely everything.

15. The Story So Big It Terrifies You

The quest is twofold: trying to make movies in a very traditional sense that, at least for me personally, have an aspiration toward some kind of epiphany or some kind of transcendental insight, even if it's very brief, or maybe show some kind of transformation possible around these philosophical principles.

Then there are 2 technical components to it. One is how we make things.

Again, I very much believe that the nature of artistic expression is in the human intent. But technology can help in filmmaking, which is inherently a technological endeavor because you're representing the world via cameras, right? You're staging events to make them look as if they were real, but they're obviously not. In that sense, it's technologically mediated and always has been.

The third endeavor was going to be around distribution, but marginally. We're all three very interested in whether something can be done on the edges that espouses this 80/20 philosophy of, well, it's going to be very much a movie company. It is very much a movie company, but maybe it has a couple of points in the dominant worldview that it perhaps doesn't quite believe in and wants to substitute something else for.

What have you learned from each of those guys?

They're both very talented and absolutely amazing founders. They're both amazingly successful investors. They've done the whole thing. They've done it numerous times, and they're very patient and generous, at least at this stage of the game. They both have a real understanding of and passion for the craft and artistic nature of storytelling.

16. Inner Conflict: The Heart vs. Itself

They have courage and complete comfort with calculated failure. If you know what you're doing, you're trying something, and you know it's a trial balloon, it's totally all right if it goes wrong, as long as you really thought about it. There's a calculated risk, as opposed to a random, “Let's see what sticks” kind of risk.

They have a really incredible ability to map out, in an imaginary way, what could be, always allowing for the possibility that you're not seeing something, but really mapping it out. It's never, in a sense, “This or that.” It's always, “It could be all these kinds of things,” and, based on past experience, “This has really worked,” right?

Branching off of that, most of all, I think, is their risk tolerance. I guess maybe it's a blessing of success, right, that you just increasingly become tolerant of a sort of calculated risk, which in the creative endeavor is a requirement because you're going to fail.

Do you think we take enough risk in general as people?

No, not on a personal or emotional level, and not on a professional level. Even just being around people who have a more benevolent attitude toward failure can be extremely helpful because one's own worth is not caught up in whether something works or not.

This is also a huge advantage that the Americans have over the Europeans, where failure in Europe is so shameful. I have tons of reasons for why this might be, and America is more forgiving, obviously, on the margins. Sometimes you think, “Oh, wow, this is a level of heartlessness that perhaps is a little irresponsible,” but, yeah, I think risk is inherent—sort of the end stage of this kind of transformation that you talk about, right?

When you have figured out your ultimate concern, you have figured out that there are going to be barriers—you can even name the barriers—you gain self-knowledge. You realize that through action there is power, even just in the action itself, even though it doesn't actually yield anything immediately. Action begets action, which begets courage.

I'd love to redo an exercise that you've done on me before because I think it's translatable for everyone listening. You asked me some question that was something like, “What is the version of your story that's so big that it terrifies you?” Can you unpack that very powerful question?

17. A Unified Theory of Storytelling

The mind is obviously very good at projecting into the future and can imagine really, really anything. What is possible, even emanating from our own subconscious, is so much bigger than what the left-hemisphere brain—the rational, analytical brain—can handle.

I think there's a fear of the bigness of the world, and that fear of the bigness of the world is also reflected in the inner world. So much of story is actually an inner transformation. When you have infinite potential in the outer world, this potential is probably also inside of you, and it's overwhelming. Fear is present, but it's a fear of potential, of all that could be.

Do you think fearing greatness is the ultimate fear?

18. The Two Core Truths

I think fearing greatness—as long as we define greatness as a manifold of flourishing, of life in all its forms, right? Not just a great engineer or a great company builder. If we believe, as I do, that storytelling, especially through the course of thousands of years—from Gilgamesh all the way to now—is thousands of years of storytelling and mythmaking, then we have thoroughly enjoyed people realizing potential in the world, right?

There is an inner drive to reach one's potential. There's probably also a fear of reaching one's own potential because it might be too big.

What about inner conflict, like a character who wants two opposing things at the same time?

Well, that's the definition of story, right? This is a Faulner quote: “Great conflict is the heart in conflict with itself.” That's a great story.

You want two conflicting things at the same time. You're afraid, and you're very invested in your fear. You create situations in the original state where this investment in your fear pays off. At the same time, there's a part of you—mostly subconscious, but it can be conscious—that has a dream of greatness, if you will.

Those are absolutely in conflict because the fear wants to dominate, and the greatness wants to come out and do its thing. It's through the story itself that this gets worked out.

I always think of this: When someone takes on the position of a leader, how relieved everyone else is not to have to do that. People love to just disappear en masse and be relieved of the burden of individuality. But this is possible because someone has a will to power and steps up and says, “I will do it.”

Why do you think that is? Should more people want to—should we all be leaders in some way?

In some way, I think. We have a very narrow definition of leader: business or political leader, and then that's sort of the end of it.

19. Kindest Thing

I think if you invert that and simply say you have a pretty deep understanding of yourself at that point in time, based on reflection, and you act according to this understanding as best as you can at that point in time, you're already a leader, right? Simply because you're guided by a philosophical worldview that feels absolutely true to you at that moment.

Back to this exercise of a version of a story that's so big it terrifies you: It sounds like the model is that the raw potential is so big, but the mind can't figure it out. The process is figuring out how to get something subconscious out—let it free. How does one do that?

Character and action—through action, right? This is the great discovery of the pragmatists, which I think is a huge reason why the American experiment has been so successful: People do a lot of doing and happening.

You cannot have a good narrative without an active character. There's no one who sits around and thinks their way through problems. I think it's a combination of having a dominant worldview to fight against, having a personal worldview to espouse—all of which can change, probably won't change all that much, but can—and a willingness to let those voices that are perhaps in the subconscious safely come to the surface and see where it goes without having a specific outcome in mind.

Narrative is fear made conscious and conquered through action.

If I go back to the beginning and take everything we've talked about, and ask you again to give a sort of grand unified theory of everything that you've been searching for, what's your best attempt at that?

It's a technology that is able, through consilience—through pulling from all strands of knowledge—to communicate an ultimate concern, an absolute truth in the story universe, in such a subjective way that the individual can understand it on an emotional, personal level.

That's also, in a way, what philosophy has been trying to do, and it's also what religion has been trying to do. In that sense, it's a technology layer of arranging situations and character in such a way that enables this transmission.

Storytelling is soteriological and has a form of salvation—not the form of salvation, but a form of salvation. Maybe the answer to the question, “Am I worthy of love?” is yes. It very often comes back to that on the emotional level. And then, very often, “Is it safe to die?” The answer, in most cases, is yes.

Wise answer. Both are yes.

Because it's better than the alternative.

You mentioned a guy named Don Rosenthal to me one time. What did he teach you, and how did he teach it to you?

Yes. He taught me that it's safe to die and that you're worthy of love.

So, how did he teach it to you?

By saying that, in the end, every story is a metaphor, right? You want to couch all these absolute truths revealed in a subjective way in metaphors that don't spell it out directly, but convey their meaning through something that's close but not the thing itself.

He had this wonderful way of repeating back to you the absurdity of your beliefs and laughing at them. You would be laughing at these absurd constructs, these stories that you've come up with and believe to be fundamentally true, mainly because you hadn't done the work of just saying, “Well, what do you really believe?” Right?

Once you do that, it's your ultimate concern and it's your bedrock. You can refer back to that at any given time, usually every 5 minutes, when you have to communicate and make a decision of some kind. It gives you enormous confidence.

There's another guy that I really like. This guy, John O'Donohue, talks a lot about Meister Eckhart, the German mystic who was on the edge of Christianity because he was really almost emerging into Buddhism. He had this concept of Gelassenheit, which is the letting go of all intent, simply experiencing the divine nature that's already in you by the pure fact that you're alive.

Once you realize that, all else is an afterthought. I think that's probably what Don Rosenthal communicated to me in a visceral way.

I'm going to ask my traditional closing question. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

I thought about this. There are so many people that I owe a lot to. I know that it's my wife who married me. I think that probably is the kindest thing.

Simple as that. Yeah.

Yeah.

Wolfgang, I've counted on you for so many episodes of trying to figure things out. You've pointed out several times today that each version of this exercise is deeply personal, and you can't abstract it into some perfect formula to have everyone find their way. But I hope we've done a decent job of leaving some breadcrumbs that people can follow in pursuit of their own most interesting version of their story.

Thank you so much for doing this with me.

Thank you. And thank you for your time.