Welcome to Praxie. I'm Yo-A. Shaw. So I'm somebody who hates getting asked about what I was like as a kid, teenager, college student. Not because I have a dark past or anything. It's just that I don't have a good answer. It's honestly all a blur. I don't remember much.

And I certainly don't have any good stories with the beginning, middle, and end, with action,

details, dialogue, scenes. Precisely the kind of thing I ask people to tell me in interviews

all the time. Yes, I'm aware of the

double standard. That's why I have a hang up about it. What do you mean your podcast host who

melts when asked about her childhood? And then recently, I talked to the psychologist who blew

open the way I think about all this.

Jonathan Edler is a psychology professor at Olin College, and he explained what it means to have an internal narrator telling stories about your life.

An inner voice I've never had, or at least been aware of.

Jonathan was the proxy in her last episode, Amanda and the nonstop narrator.

That episode is all about what to do when your internal narrator is too good at telling stories about your life,

to the point where it's getting in the way.

But what if you're floating on the other end of the spectrum, like me?

The conversation with Jonathan helped me understand things that have been a mystery in my life,

why I felt like I wasn't awake as a kid, why I'm so drawn to podcasting,

and what anyone can do to strengthen their

self-narrator if they wanted to. This is one of our bonus episodes. They come out once a

month for our Patreon members, and we're going to play you a preview right now. To listen to the full

episode, go to patreon.com slash proxy podcast to become a member. Starting at $5 a month, you'll get access to ad-free episodes, plus our library of 12 bonus interviews and counting. To sign up, go to patreon.com slash proxy podcast. Okay. here's my conversation with Jonathan Adler.

So I want to start with a very basic question. Why do we have a narrator in our heads? Like, what value is it serving?

So a wide range of scholars from, you know, philosophers to evolutionary biologists talk

about narrative as the human adaptation, that this is the tool that evolution has shaped

...