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

So it'd be one thing to face challenges and just immediately win them.

And that might be a satisfying story on some level, but that wouldn't be a story that people might come back to.

What we really like to see in our protagonists is this idea that we face challenges, we face things that we don't know if we can overcome.

overcome, and we realize that as a result of facing those challenges, we become transformed.

Now, in a lot of stories, that's a literal transformation.

So you might gain magical powers, gain superpowers in various superhero films, but that often parallels or goes along with a personal transformation of realizing maybe you're stronger than you thought you were, or realizing some sort of depth of character that might not have ever been apparent had you not

had to face these challenges and figure out, can you face them down on your own?

It's one of the things I love most about Lord of the Rings is the idea that Frodo, as a hobbit, is both sort of unknown and unremarkable in terms of his character at the start, but he's also pretty unremarkable in terms of his stature.

The hobbits are literally small.

And what's great about the Lord of the Rings and the journey that he goes on

is Frodo and some of the other hobbits as well end up being some of the most heroic characters.

They're the ones who stand up to take the ring to try to destroy it at the end when other people are too nervous.

So both in terms of their stature, but also in terms of their character, more importantly, they go through this transformation and end up being the ones that people really remember and identify with.

Absolutely.

I think there is a strong degree of identification.

And the most powerful stories are the ones that, while it might be circumstances that we never actually find ourselves in, it's really enjoyable to imagine, what would I do in that case?

And the hero's journey kind of takes you from this –

unremarkable baseline protagonist, farmer, orphan, et cetera, to something more powerful.

And if you follow along in that journey as the reader, you're also going on that journey yourself, where while you might not be the one who's literally gaining magical powers or superpowers, but you're in the perspective of the reader.

And that feels like you're developing some deep personal insight by following the steps of this journey.

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