Primal Intelligence (with Angus Fletcher)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2025

⏱️ 81 minutes

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Summary

What do Shakespeare, Hollywood storytelling, and military special operations have in common? They all excel at inventing new plans, or improvising when we're facing radical uncertainty. Listen as professor of story science Angus Fletcher tells EconTalk's Russ Roberts how we've misdefined intelligence, equating it with data--driven reasoning in place of what he calls "primal intelligence"--the uniquely human ability to think and plan in situations with incomplete information. Drawing on years of work in Hollywood and working with elite military operators, Fletcher shows how narratives aren't just entertainment--they're the foundation of human intelligence. He reveals why military special operations personnel need to create new plans on the fly, why Shakespeare remains profoundly relevant to modern problem-solving, and why reading challenging literature literally rewires your brain for greater adaptability.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.6	Today is September 30th, 2025.
0:38.9	And my guest is Angus Fletcher of Ohio State University, where he is professor of story science.
0:46.0	His latest book, which is the subject of today's episode, is primal intelligence.
0:51.3	You are smarter than you know, Angus.
0:52.9	Welcome to Econ Talk.
0:56.3	I'm excited to be here. I'm a big fan of the pod.
1:04.8	Thank you. Much appreciate I'm a big fan of your book. It is bristling with interesting ideas,
1:14.0	techniques for and applications of slightly off the beaten track way of approaching life and thinking. So let's start with your claim that we've misdefined intelligence. What do you mean by that? What does that mean
1:20.0	misdefined intelligence? So in the modern world, we've almost entirely defined intelligence
1:26.8	as some form of logic. And logic is basically data-driven decision-making.
1:31.2	So the idea is that you can only be intelligent if you've got all the facts and you analyze those
1:36.0	facts rationally and then arrive at the conclusion objectively that everybody else would arrive at.
1:41.5	And I don't have any problem with facts and I don't have any problem with facts, and I don't have any
1:44.5	problem with reason. But the problem is that most of the time in life, you don't have enough
1:50.4	information to use logic. And in fact, the human brain evolved in environments, which, because of the
1:57.5	nature of biological evolution, were constantly changing.
	...

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