Angus Fletcher

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
Tetragrammaton.

**Angus Fletcher** (0:23)
I don't know if you have a positive or negative impression of the Army, or if you have one, but I had a very negative impression of the Army before I worked with them.
So first of all, I did high school in New Jersey. The Army was the thing that you did if you couldn't get into college basically. So we had this real stereotype.

**Rick Rubin** (0:37)
Bad rep.

**Angus Fletcher** (0:38)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
And then I also just started the Army as the people who, if they couldn't solve a problem, they just drop the bomb on it. Like, oh, let's just blow it up.

**Rick Rubin** (0:46)
Force was the solution.

**Angus Fletcher** (0:47)
Exactly. Yes, yes, yeah.
And then I started to work with these folks. First of all, a little bit behind the veil, I get this knock on my door basically. They don't explain who they are. They reveal that they're actually, over time, they reveal they're part of something called Joint Special Operations Command. And there's this intelligence unit that works there with the various units.

**Rick Rubin** (1:08)
Was it scary being approached by them?

**Angus Fletcher** (1:11)
It was scary. Yeah, it was really scary, especially because I'm an immigrant. And also everybody in my department was terrified of the Army. And the more that I started working with the Army, people in my department basically stopped talking to me in the same way. They thought, oh, you're like a spy, basically. You've been programmed.
But anyway, I got brought in and it was so different from what I thought. So first of all, most of this unit, they're just people you would imagine a lot of them are women from all different parts of the world. And their job is to solve problems from the future before they happen. And so they sit in this room and they're like, what are all the things that are going to happen tomorrow that are bad?
How do we stop them now?
At first when I heard this, I was like, well, this is just bonkers. Then you get in the room and you realize they are identifying these problems and they are solving them. And in my case, what is really weird is our friend Malcolm Gladwell had tweeted out very kindly a promotion from this book that I had written. And so it had gotten on the radar of these folks and they'd read the book and they'd understood the book and they'd started tracking my research. And they came to me and they said, hey, Professor Fletcher, what we've noticed is you're publishing all this really weird out there stuff. It seems pretty interesting.
And it seems like none of your colleagues are citing your work. Like they all say really nice things about you, but none of them incorporate anything you've done into their research. It's like you've created this field that is just like dying. I was like, yeah, that just kind of described kind of what I do. And they're like, would you like to actually test these theories? Would you like to see if they actually work? Would you like to see if the human brain does think in story? Would you like to see if you could bring in people and help them develop their imagination and their intuition and get better and more effective at these things? And I was like, yeah, I would like to do this. And I was like, well, why do you want me to do this? Like, what are you going to do with this information?
And they said, well, we've noticed that young people coming to special operations are not as imaginative. They're not as intuitive. They don't have as much common sense. When they hit these volatile and uncertain situations, they're unable to cope with them. And so we're starting to have a real crisis in special operations. Because back in the day, we had so many folks who would come in, who would have imagined back in the 70s basically. And our job was just to pick the ones who were the most imaginative. But now what's happening is, we don't have anyone who's imaginative. And we need to figure out how to train up that ability in young folks or else basically special operations is going to die. And I was like, okay, this is kind of like a cool problem.

**Rick Rubin** (3:51)
It's a wild story.

**Angus Fletcher** (3:52)
Yeah, it is totally wild. Yeah. And there was a long period of time where they thought I might be a total scam artist. Because a lot of the stuff I was saying, they'd be like, well, where's the evidence for this? And I was like, well, you read this book. And they would be like, this book is written by you. I was like, yes, that's right. But the evidence, they're like, yes. But where's there another book that isn't written by you that isn't evidence? I was like, well, no one thinks.