Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

Those of you who are Game of Thrones fans and remember the finale earlier this year,

mostly not a success in my eyes and those of some others, but there were some good moments

in there. There's a quote I remember from Tyrion when he says, there's nothing in the

world more powerful than a good story. You hear quotes like that quite often in fiction

and maybe a little self-serving since these are words written by storytellers who are

basically telling us through the mouths of their characters, there are no people more powerful

in the world than us. But still, I'm sympathetic to the quote. They're individual people who

do things, people who have more power, instruments of power, whether technological or otherwise,

but these are often motivated by the stories people are telling themselves and each other

about why they're here, why they're acting in certain ways. And a wonderful person to

comment on the role of stories in our culture in our world is today's guest Stephen Greenblatt.

He's the John Cogan University Professor of Humanities at Harvard and a very well-known

Shakespeare scholar and literary historian. He's one of the founders probably the main

driving force between the new historicism, school of literary criticism, that takes both

the literary text and also its context and the historical resonances all together as part

of the analysis of that text. So Shakespeare has been Stephen Greenblatt's main focus of research

over the years, but he's also won the Pulitzer Prize in the National Book Award for a book

on Lucretius. The book is called The Swerve, How the World Became Modern. And Lucretius, of course,

is one of my favorite ancient poets, author of Derrero Mnattura on the Nature of Things, which

tells a cosmological story for ancient Adamists who didn't want to just give God all the credit

for everything. And Greenblatt has also written about Adam and Eve, the origin story of the

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