Benjamin (Ben) Rogers

speaker

286 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Benjamin (Ben) Rogers’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Hidden Brain · You Are Not Ordinary · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

And you see this sort of on two tracks.

But the main focus is that, you know, while it's exciting to watch someone like Harry Potter face magical, you know, face down dragons and face down monsters and Voldemort.

But what really brings people back to the story time and time again is this idea that you're watching someone transform and learn and figure out how to be an adult, how to be someone who is worth something.

wanting to model your life after and this hero's journey is the way to represent that psychological change on a broader more adventurous exciting way that people want to experience on both levels

Yes, so Joseph Campbell was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College, and he worked in comparative mythology and religion.

So he's looking at some of the most enduring ancient stories across the globe.

So not just in terms of the West, but looking at all these stories worldwide.

across various areas and various cultures.

And what he found was when he was looking at all of these myths and looking at these enduring stories, that there seemed to be the same basic plot line.

And he ended up calling this the monomyth, but that's what we call the hero's journey.

What he attributes this to is this idea of birth and death and separating from yourself in the past.

And these stories are able to represent this really profound human condition in a way that replicates and shows up.

So while the individual aspects of the story might vary, Campbell was able to say, look, look at these various stories from all these countries across the world.

they actually follow the same plot line in a really interesting way, which he wrote in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is one of the most popular narrative psychology or narrative, maybe even philosophy books that exist today.

Absolutely.

And if you ever read Hero with a Thousand Faces, I think what's really powerful about that book is it's told through examples from myths that you've heard of and from myths that at least I had not heard of or had not learned while I was in school.

And I think that speaks to the power of this, this idea that all of these stories, even stories you may not have ever imagined or may not ever heard of otherwise, actually are all speaking the same language or using the same underlying plot.

Yes, absolutely.

George Lucas really attributes a lot of the success of Star Wars to Joseph Campbell, and I believe they became friends, or at least George Lucas saw Campbell as a mentor as he went along.

And actually, there was a speech that I really loved that George Lucas gave, I think in 85, in which he mentioned that he had been working on many, many drafts of Star Wars, and he just couldn't quite get it to work.

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