Dr. Randolph B. Schiffer on The Power of Stories to Build Courage in Children and Adults

 summary

In this insightful interview, Dr. Randolph Schiffer shares his unique perspective on fear, resilience, and storytelling. Drawing from his extensive background in neurology, psychiatry, and military service, he discusses how stories can teach courage, how parents can model resilience, and the importance of shared narratives in society. The #ReadTogether movement is based on Dr. Schiffer's book "Bedtime Stories that Will Terrify Children."  Details can be found at https://randolphbschiffer.com .

keywords

#fear #resilience #storytelling #parenting #courage #neurology #psychiatry #military #PTSD #emotionalintelligence #EQ #childdevelopment #mentaltoughness #sharedstories #Courage #Parenting #BedtimeStories #MentalHealth #Resilience #ReadTogether

 key  topics

The neurological basis of fear and courage

The importance of storytelling in teaching resilience

Parenting strategies for modeling courage and handling fear

The impact of societal narratives on collective resilience

guest  name

Dr. Randolph Schiffer

sound bites

"Fear and memory shape the human brain"

"Parents often hide their fears from children"

"Shared stories are essential for societal unity"

"Courage is not the extirpation of fear"

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Dr. Randolph Schiffer

02:08 The Origin of Bedtime Stories

03:48 The Need for Resilience in Children

06:55 Understanding Courage and Fear

09:49 The Role of Stories in Teaching Courage

14:02 Parental Influence on Children's Fears

18:10 The Importance of Acknowledging Fears

20:57 The Power of Imagination in Overcoming Fear

22:01 The Art of Listening in Psychotherapy

25:25 Navigating Fear and Anxiety

26:55 Parenting Through Change and Uncertainty

29:23 The Role of Storytelling in Healing

33:14 The Limitations of AI in Therapy

35:38 The Importance of Shared Stories in Society

 resources

Check out all the Details on Randolph B. Schiffer and Book Website - https://randolphbschiffer.com

Buy the Book on Amazon Today: https://a.co/d/03mmCUZ6

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:26

Hi, this is John Rasmussen, and I have the pleasure of speaking today with Dr. Randolph Schiffer. And uh Dr. Randolph Schiffer is a former Marine, a neurologist, a psychiatrist who spent more than three decades studying how fear and memory shape the human brain, including serving as founding director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Brain Health. Today he brings that clinical insight together with lived parenting experience and storytelling to help families understand how children process difficult emotions. His recent work explores how stories, especially the ones we tell at bedtime, can help children face fear with resilience rather than avoidance. And he's just written the book Bedtime Stories that will frighten children. So thank you. Thank you for coming on, Dr. Schiffer. I can't wait to hear uh your wisdom on on this subject. Uh it's something that uh not only affects parents, but quite honestly, I think uh I think this is good for adults. It's never too late to uh to figure out what what how fear drives us, you know, and how it affects our brain and and all that. So thank you for coming.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Thank you for having me, John. I'm anxious myself to hear what I'm gonna say. Perfect. That's what I love.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

I so so uh what when did you get the idea to write this book?

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Uh wait, I got a I got a picture of it here. Yeah Badtime Stories That Will Terrify Children. The book comes from stories, a year of stories I told actually about 30 some years ago to our two boys. My wife and I had two young boys then. We still have them, but now they're big. And at that time in 1990, the older one, who was three years old just, the younger one was one, the older one was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia that year in March. I had done, I was always in the pediatrics departments. I'd taken care of some of these children. I knew about it. It was it wasn't good. Uh at that time, ALL, as they call it, had a 50% mortality, as the doctors say. That means half the children died. And I, but I knew it because I'd worked with these children. They didn't all die because of the biology of the disease. A significant number of them died because they were unable, or their families were unable, to take the treatments, which were long and arduous. So I resolved to develop a year-long series of stories that might hopefully help our boy with the leukemia to inure himself, toughen himself against what lay ahead for him.

SPEAKER_02 3:26

Wow, that's that's amazing. I I uh, you know, having been around a lot of children myself, worked with a lot of families, you know, I can tell you uh as well that being, you know, a little mental toughness and and overcoming fear goes a long way. I mean, I I think it's something that, you know, you and I uh I think inherently faced it the way we were raised and we dealt with it, and we didn't talk about it much. There was nobody to really talk to, right? But we uh we learned to overcome fear uh mostly the hard way, but I think it serves well in the long run.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Well, um I I've come to think that it's not just the children with terrible diseases or injuries that need help now with this hardening, resilience, toughening. Uh my concern, John, is that we have really raised in this country two or three generations of young people who have excessive timidity, anxiety, and fearfulness. And I could give you some stories, could stories of my life now. All right, I'll give one story. Um, of course, I spent 35 years in the academic medical centers, and I still am in touch with some of them. And I was back at one a couple years ago, and uh a social function, but the dean of the medical school was complaining to me they had hired a general surgeon from one of the prestigious general surgery residency programs in the Northeast Ivy League program with glowing recommendations, glowing competence reports. But this guy got to a the different medical school where I was, and he was afraid to be on call for surgery. He had never operated alone at night. Now, when uh uh the five years or so that I spent in the hospitals as a resident, I work more with neurosurge than general surge, but those neurosurgery residents they operated alone every night that they were on. So something has changed. And I don't think it's for the better. Right. How what is it?

SPEAKER_02 5:45

Um the only question I would have is then how do you overcome that, right? So if you've got people now, and it is uh, you know, gentle parenting that's been a huge thing for the last generation or so. And uh and you know, there's a lot of uh studies around trauma and you know, and I think it it's sort of it's sort of built on that, and our approach has been to protect people from from from fear and trauma instead of teaching them how to deal with it, right? Because in my my work, I've understood that you know, five five people can witness the same event and have five different experiences of it from horror to bliss. And in the military, there's you know, this is obvious, right? You you see you see something horrible happen and and one guy is like uh you know freaks out and and says, you know, uh uh I'll never be the same. Life is life is dangerous and it's this is horrible, and and uh they go home with you know with PTSD as a result. And the other guy says, Oh, look at that, that was amazing, and you know, hey, this is war. Stuff happens, you know, and and carries on and he goes home without PTSD typically. So it's you know, once once that's happened though, and you haven't been taught how to perceive danger in a way that you don't become a victim or feel you know, feel that disassociation, if you will, in that way. Um how do you heal that? How do you come back from that? Is is something like your your book a good a good approach, not just for children, but people of any age? How how would you recommend that people get get uh the right perspective and get toughened up again, if you will, such that they don't suffer long-term effects of trauma.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

Right. Uh what you're bringing up is the core issue here, I think, which is how do young people learn courage? Uh we are born with our fears. You don't have to teach uh uh an infant uh to be suddenly afraid if a dog comes up and barks or bites at him or her. But there are no courageous infants. So excuse me. So we uh but the Keith issue is what you were hinting at, I think. Courage is not the extirpation of fears. It's not getting rid of them, externalizing them. Our fears are essential to our identity and to our success in whatever we choose to do, whether it's uh work or love. Uh an example you brought up the military, and um if um um if you don't know, I was an infantry uh commander in the Marines. If you don't know when you're in a danger area, if you can't feel it, bad things will come to you and to your men. So you need to keep your fears, but learn from them, keep them close to you, accept them, and regulate them. The same is true in medicine. Uh, I was 35 years in the big medical centers. In medicine, you it's a lonely field still if you're the doctor, but you have to know when you're afraid, when you you're not sure. Because then you can always seek help. So so the problem is, so I'm I'm uh concerned that we're not teaching c courage well enough, and there's multiple steps in all this, but I've come to think that our stories and our examples for our children are key for this. And my another related concern I have is that our children's books have all grown swashy and mushy and soft, totally bereft of suspenseful plots, of evil figures, of um situations where it looks like it might not turn out well. And I think that children, young children, I'm talking ages three, four, five, six, seven, they love stories like that. They are tired of stories about a small lamb who got separated from her flock and as a result had a total and utter lamb nervous breakdown and was unable to function for a day. They don't want to hear that. It's too boring.

SPEAKER_02 10:34

Fascinating. Fascinating. Yes. I uh when I when I first started learning a little bit about the difference between fear and courage myself, um, and recognizing that fear is a valuable, a valuable thing in life and a natural thing, and that uh courage is is basically a way to face fear. I was uh I was in the jungles in the Amazon and uh on this little island in the middle of a river, and we knew there was a jaguar in the in the tree line. We'd been hearing it every night, and and it was night, and and I thought, well, I'm I'm gonna put this to test. I'm gonna I I most of my life considered myself fearless, which is as you would say, is not necessarily a good thing. I mean, I don't know why, but I would just do the craziest things because I wasn't afraid to to die or get hurt or whatever. But that that can be that could be problematic, obviously. Uh but but I wasn't sure if I was courageous. So I uh I walked to the edge of that tree line, and uh and I was I was frightened. I then I then I understood fear and my knees were shaking, and I could hear that jaguar about 10 feet away from me, curious about who I was. And I know we're not on the menu, so we're not really in danger of jaguars, but but nonetheless, that's quite an experience, right? So I'm standing there and I'm getting I I everything in my body wanted me to run back to the to the circle, you know, about a hundred yards away of people who were doing a ceremony on the beach there, and and I had to I had to muster everything I could to not do that, to just stand there and shake and be in fear and remember that I'm not on the menu, that it's not really out to get me, it's just curious. And uh I think that's when I first learned the difference, right? That that courage is feeling fear, but sort of moving forward anyway, not the fight, flight, or freeze response. What what would you yes?

SPEAKER_00 12:45

Now that that's a good example. You felt the fear and you knew what it was, but your higher order cortical-based regulatory systems kicked in too, you reasoned it through, you didn't go further into those shadows, you know, whatever. So and if you want to think about the neurology, so the courage is the uh demonstrated capacity to think, speak, and act in spite of our fears, not without them. The learning of that, I think it starts at about age three with the bedtime stories, but it persists and goes well into mid-life sometimes. And one of the getting back to uh the military and patrols in Vietnam, the the young Marines, they don't, they're not like John Wayne, you know. They're 18 years old. They're they're just they're just big teenagers. And you might think, well, isn't that that's not we should have guys like John Wayne in the Marine. First of all, they would they're too expensive. They wouldn't, you know, they demand too much money. But um the 18-year-olds don't yet have the full neurology of regulation of fear, ability, whatever, for various reasons. White matter of the brain isn't complete, at least in boys, until they're 25. So the 18-year-olds have tremendous physical stamina, but if you ask them to do things which which are a little bit reckless, which sometimes you do, they'll do it. So I think it's that's that's that's why it fits very well. And and the old men in Washington who send us over there, well, they don't they're not gonna go over there. You don't see them over there.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

That's a that's fascinating, totally. Yeah. So what you you know, I think parent, this is uh I want to get into the parents of today and how obviously your book could benefit them if they if they use this. I think it's genius, I think it's critically important, especially since the world isn't isn't necessarily uh getting safer, so to speak. In other words, um yeah, it's um there there's more there's more complex things happening in the world, there's more things to be afraid of, and I think it's critical for these generations now to to learn early. So when you say something like, you know, attempts to calm children down can interrupt the emotional processing rather than support it, what what would be the alternative? What should parents do when a child is in a in a state of of terror or fear or or what have you? What is the better thing to do?

SPEAKER_00 15:37

Uh I'll answer that a little bit as a derivative, John, uh addressing the parents' fears uh downstream from the children and pointing out here that the bedtime stories book that I wrote, I'm not sure it's a children's book. I think it might be more a parent's book. But uh so here's the an example I'll tell you. Now I write stories so I tell them all the time. There's a school district in New Jersey. Are you in New Jersey?

SPEAKER_02 16:04

No, I'm in uh I'm I'm presently in California.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

Thank goodness. Uh so there's a county in New Jersey called Orange or something, and uh about just about a month ago, the PTA or the school district governance outlawed a book, a teenage, an adolescent novel about a young boy, a teenage boy who had suicidal thoughts or attempts or even a completed suicide. I don't know. I didn't read the book, but they banned the book. This is no, you know, you know, um uh right-wing conspiracy type county. They banned the book because they were afraid that it might push some of the children in the school if they read it to do suicide. Not likely that that would happen, but what I uh would suggest is it's the adults who have the fears here. They're afraid of these topics, including suicide or whatever. And they they and their own fears, they have difficulty acknowledging their own fears. And the children need to see the examples we set, not just from the bedtime stories we read and tell, but how we ourselves deal with our fears. And so I would ask, not addressing you directly, but any of the listeners who have children, and we all have children one way or another, except for very few, um how often when the children were young or even teenagers, did you ever say to the children, I am afraid? And the answer, aside from a few colloquialisms, like, I'm afraid you're in trouble now, Mary, you know, aside from that, which is not really I am uh the answer is probably never. So I would ask the how come? How come you didn't share some of your fears and how you handle them with the children?

SPEAKER_02 17:58

Interesting. Yeah, so what what is it? How why why wouldn't they? Are they I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

I'm uh I'm just the book author, you know. I'm okay.

SPEAKER_02 18:08

Well, I'll tell you, okay, I I have something to add to this because I I think um children learn by example, obviously, right? And let's say a parent's a terrified of going into an elevator, a child doesn't know an elevator yet by you know, from from any other room. And you know, and and I believe ch children can can sense, you know, all kinds of things through whether through facial or body language or God knows, uh smell, who knows? But it's like if the child feels that the parent is afraid or the parent admits to being afraid in some way, perhaps the the parent is is worried that they will they will you know pass that that fear on to their to their child. And and based on our conversation to this point, that's obviously the wrong approach. You want to you want to teach and exemplify courage. So let's say you're a parent who's terrified of the elevator, you're shaking, you're nervous, you're it's obvious you're afraid, you might even say I'm afraid, but you know, it's gonna be okay, uh it's it's nothing bad's gonna happen. Let's go ride this elevator together anyway. Seems to me that that could both teach the child that it's okay to be afraid, but to keep moving anyway, and that fears are normal, that they're not the only ones afraid of things. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

Uh well yes, yes. So um I think we have we as the grown-ups now have certain strong mythologies about how we need to present ourselves to the children, so we'll be a good example. But as you mentioned in your comments, they knew who we really are. They're they may not be able to uh write a differential equation, but they they they know who we really are, and we feel that to be who the type of grown, we must have no fears, and we must be omniscient as well as omnipotent. Omniscient. I would challenge the um the some of the viewers who are or have been parents. How many times did you tell your child in answer to his or her question, I don't know. Rare if at all. Well, wait a minute. We don't know that the truth is we don't why why would we be afraid? These are the fears of us, the grown-ups. Why would we be afraid to let the children know we don't know everything? I'm not sure I know the answer to that question, but I'm pretty sure that's a myth that's out there.

SPEAKER_02 20:51

I suspect it maybe have something to do with control, right? If you don't position yourself like a certain, you know, uh with a certain amount of certainty, then perhaps the child won't respect them. Or I think maybe that's what they're thinking, right? They're trying to do everything they can to keep this kid from just completely telling them, you know, get lost. Who knows? But um I wanted to ask you about, you know, yeah, I I have my own theories on, you know, how the body or the mind doesn't know the difference between what you're imagining and what is actually happening. And I I use this a lot in in my work with people to help them to work through things uh you know, without having to face the actual situation. Can you can you elaborate on that? Why imagination, right, can be can be so powerful?

SPEAKER_00 21:55

Um again, I'll kind of make a little derivative model of but uh but the question is this is the question of distortion of communications uh between us are uh based on our own prejudice. Prejudice is unconscious. Prejudice is not what it's often said to be by the politicians. We're not fully aware of prejudice and and related kind of predispositions, beliefs that are deep in our brain. Um And people sense what I I was a psychotherapist for many years, uh, even when I was a neuroscientist, I would I always had a couple of psychotherapy long-term. I I was kind of psychoanalytic in my approach. I thought it gave a good way to look at things and it had a treatment for everything, which neurology and neuroscience didn't at that time. But when you do psychotherapy, and one could say every interaction, including what we're doing, is a psychotherapeutic experience. And what you have to do is you just have to try to bracket all of your all the background noise in your brain, all the prejudices that you know of, all the ruminations, all the personal worries. Wait a minute, do I have to go to a dinner party? You know, all this. And you just concentrate totally and utterly on that person and what he or she is saying. And if you do that like at a cocktail party, you'd be surprised how popular you become very quickly.

SPEAKER_02 23:26

Interesting. So focusing your attention. I I this this reminds me of Yeah. Listen. I have a a story like that where I was in college and a bunch of us decided to go spelunking, which was, you know, to go down into a cave. It was the ca calaveras, I I can't remember where it was, somewhere in California. And you sh you you you roped down 200 feet into this giant cavern, and then they had these tiny little holes that you'd go through, and one was called the meat grinder. It kind of turned and you had to turn your body. And you know, claustrophobia is a thing, right? I mean, there's people that went in there and panicked and died, you know, from that. So it was kind of serious, and I didn't realize being a being a crazy college kid, uh, just how serious it was. But I I went for it anyway. And I got to a point in this one section of the cave where before you get to the meat grinder, there's like two slabs and you're a tiny little thing, and you're shimming through, and your nose is about that far from the top. And you and if you think for a second that I am 200 feet underground in a tiny little hole, you're done. You're you're done for, right? And it's hard not, and and you, you know, I did not want to panic and and die down there like that. So what I figured out was if I just focused on each individual grain of the granite that was right in front of my eye, and I started analyzing them like a scientist. Oh, look at that one. Oh, that's interesting. As I was moving through this this part of the the thing, then I would I'd be okay. And sure enough, it worked. It was fascinating to just focus on the minutest things so that my mind didn't go to the overall situation, which was horrible. Um, I I don't know if I could do that again. I'm pretty sure I couldn't do that again today. But that's how I got through it. So that you what you told us reminds me of that, that you can use your imagination, right? Use your tool to put yourself you know exactly where you want to be in any situation such that uh such that you mitigate the the overall fear.

SPEAKER_00 25:49

Uh hearing that story, John, I can say you would have fit in very well with my Marine Platoon in Vietnam.

unknown 25:57

I bet.

SPEAKER_02 25:58

I almost I almost got I tried to get into the military. All my family. My uncle, my favorite uncle Jack was a forward scout in the Vietnam War. He was a colonel ultimately, but uh man, his stories, it's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 26:14

Amazing what what you guys what you guys did had to do.

SPEAKER_02 26:20

Do you have any other um thoughts about essentially what um you know what parents can do differently when when their child is is facing uncertainty, illness, or change, you know, something this I see this a lot too. It's I'm comfortable with change, not everybody is. Even when I was a kid, I was comfortable with change. When we were gonna move, I was like, this is gonna be exciting, it's an adventure. Yeah, but I've seen the opposite, I've seen kids actually absolutely panic.

SPEAKER_00 26:56

Yeah. Uh I'll uh move uh forward in time from toddlerhood, where my book, Bedtime Stories, is about, and just give some comments about uh adolescent parenting. By the way, parenting is the most difficult task that we have. It's more difficult than being a spouse, it's more difficult than work, it's because what's required always changes, and each child's individual. All right, uh drop all that. One other uh one of my complaints about modern life is the myth that for our teenage children, it's quality time that counts. What a bunch of baloney. What counts is quantity and predictability. Like you can't say, well, uh Sunday morning at 10, I'm gonna talk with, you know, my daughter Mary about whatever the facts of life. I'll make an appointment with her and we'll do it. You can try that, but it doesn't work because she's not what you have to do is to the extent you can, just be in one place that's centrally located, not totally self-affected, like maybe before dinner or after dinner, and they'll walk by and ignore you for a hundred nights, and then all of a sudden she'll sit down, turn to you, and say, Dad, am I pretty?

SPEAKER_01 28:16

Amazing. Amazing. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 28:20

So it's funny because I just read an article about how to make friends with crows, and it's a very similar strategy. You you sit in one space, one place consistently, you bring a little food, and you wait till the crow decides uh it wants to cozy up to you, and and feel like a book.

SPEAKER_00 28:41

That sounds like a book I should read, Making Friends with Crows.

SPEAKER_02 28:45

Yeah, it was a cool article I just read. Um, but yeah, so that's so so uh uh explain more about it's it's not the quality, it's the quantity.

SPEAKER_00 28:57

It's quantity and being available, not working at your desk, you know, trading stock futures or whatever, uh, and being receptive, not intrusive. They'll come the idea is, or other ways you can think of the meaningful interactions, major transformative interactions with the parent. There's not a whole lot of them, uh, and they can't be predicted. So um the children will come to you if you're if they have if you're there, available, receptive, and and when they come on their schedule, the impact is much greater.

SPEAKER_02 29:35

That's amazing. I love that. That reminds me of something we learned in our in our shamanic training, which is people will not hear the answer to a question they have not asked. Right. But what is what does shamanic mean? Shamanic is a it's a it's an it's one word in one language, um, the Tungus language, they call them shamans, but every village around the world since the beginning beginning of time has had one person born in the village who was a little different, right? Could see things other people couldn't. They became the psychologists, they became the doctors, they became the the medicine people. Um I got specific training and a certain set of techniques from a group of people in Peru called the Caros, small tribe, very that have very ancient, they've been isolated, so they they they go back 15,000 years and they sort of have sort of have kept a lot of their a lot of their things. So I I use that word uh to describe a training that I guess would best be considered sort of deep psychology, right? Sort of um sort of including uh uh not only our subconscious, but uh on some level they consider also energy fields around the body and stuff like that. But the training is intense. The training is all about the same kind of training you'd have to go through as a as a psychologist or psychiatrist or a coach or anyone working with people where you have to learn to manage those gifts. Like I just said, not shove them down people's throats, not stop somebody in the grocery store and say, you know, looks like you might have symptoms of you know bipolar disorder. Maybe I should talk. You know, you can't you can't do that, right? You have to wait till it's an appointment, you have to create a safe space. And so that's just one of the one of the little little uh anecdotes that that I remember, you know, based on this story you you told of the the daughter coming to the father. And that is that, you know, if if they're not ready or they're not asking, they're they're not gonna really receive it, right? They're not gonna be able to do it.

SPEAKER_00 31:48

And you can't force people, you can't order people into psychotherapy, which I think the courts think they can do now sometimes. I mean, you can do it, but it's fatuous, it doesn't accomplish much.

SPEAKER_02 31:59

And of course, storytelling is huge in the shamanic traditions because this is the way, you know, parables and storytelling of all kinds, and using your imagination because that's how we access the subconscious, right? It's not prose, it's poetry.

SPEAKER_00 32:14

You it's imagery and symbols and I think for I've heard Freud would tell stories uh now and then. He was much more active than you know, psychoanalysis became uh a a school, uh uh, you know, whatever. But he would interrupt his patients to tell anecdotes and things. I'm pretty sure. I heard from people who had known him that he would do or had been and had been treated by him, that he would do that. The psychotherapeutic skills might be universal, engagement, listening, understanding, you know, but then I think we individualize it too. Those of us who really have worked at it over a lifetime, we kind of develop our own ways, and that's because we're using ourselves as the therapeutic tool. So some of the things you're talking about in that shamanic school, not too different from psychoanalysis. Right. I love that.

SPEAKER_02 33:13

And and uh it it's interesting you said it this way too, how how the the uh you know, the psychologists or or in my case, the shaman or whatever will will engage with each client. It it's it's it's critically important that it becomes individualized. And I think this is an argument for why AI isn't gonna be the best psychologist, right? Which is the good the the latest new subject, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:38

Of it's gonna be terrible, it's it's gonna be horrible. And the AI writing is crap. Uh, I've looked at some of it. I have this fancy computer. I'm talking to with you on it too. I had to buy it for to do this, these podcasts. And it keeps, when I'm writing on it, it interrupts and it says, Are you sure you wouldn't like us? I don't know who us, I don't know who's in the computer. Are you sure you wouldn't like us to write this paragraph? And I I you can't talk back to it, but of course I'm sure because you can't write very well. But I there's no one I can.

SPEAKER_02 34:09

It's amazing. No, I mean honestly, because it is, it's that nuance of recognizing a moment when a particular story will hit with your client, right? That that you you could and it really does. I I'm just I just I I'm so excited about your book. And uh, you know, because it is it is the storytelling that really really gets to the deepest part of us that's the most, you know, that is the roots of our our struggles, right? And and you want to we we call it going furthest upstream. If you can if you can get deeper and deeper into the subconscious and make the changes there, then it becomes much easier for the person on a conscious level to do the things they need to do.

SPEAKER_00 35:01

Yes, and uh the stories, I know it's probably time to start our the stories are so powerful. All risk making a political comment. Our terrible political divides now is because we have lost our shared stories about our nation. And and that's something it's happened before, but not for a very long time. And we're struggling to get a shared story and not doing very well. If you don't have that, you don't have the values for a political discussion. Yeah, no, that's the one. I'm no politician, but I think that's one of the problems down there in Washington, no.

SPEAKER_02 35:40

I love that because I again that's that's going further upstream instead of trying to figure out how to clean the clean the swamp. You go upstream and you you wiggle your finger with a good story and the whole thing. Well, I I agree that that is that's a very profound, uh profound statement that we need we need shared stories.

SPEAKER_00 36:03

Lincoln told many stories to defuse conflict and facilitate, you know, what he felt they had to do. And um now many of our politicians they're afraid to tell a story because they're afraid that they'll m make it um uh inappropriate and distasteful. And actually for most of them, they probably would. That's a good that's a good point.

SPEAKER_02 36:30

It's really difficult these days. I mean, you and I are you know come from a j generation that uh uh you know we yeah, I think we we weren't as offendable, right? We we didn't uh we didn't worry too much about the the little the little mishaps and the little misstatements and things that nowadays, I mean, you gotta watch every single thing you say because somebody's gonna make an issue about it, and that is unfortunate, but um, but you know, in in addition to your your your wonderful book, right? Bedtime Stories That Will Terrify Children, which I I absolutely love. I think that's just the best, and it's important. How would you recommend, you know, adult listeners, if you will, besides in addition to reading your book, because I do believe it it's uh it's valuable for for everyone? Um, but how do we how do we get that storytelling back? What what what would be your your sage you know recommendation for people to develop? I mean, should should they read go back and read Shakespeare again? I mean, I thought that was valuable for me. I mean, I loved the classics. I mean, how do you develop a storytelling muscle?

SPEAKER_00 37:53

I don't ha I don't have the answer to that, John. I don't I don't have the answer. I suppose you try, you you whatever. The book uh there are eight stories in the book that I wrote. I told the book thirty told the stories thirty-five years ago, but I wrote them. Each one does have an underlying theme of what I consider the major cardinal virtues of our civilization. Courage, generativity, um, selflessness, uh, responsibility. Yes, it was a terrible mistake, and I am responsible. We never hear those words from our leaders in business, in the universities, or in politics. When we hear someone say that, we will know that we have found our leader. But I'm still waiting. I'm still waiting.

SPEAKER_02 38:48

Well, we we gotta keep yeah, as you say, it's happened before. People uh have to have that perspective and know that um all is not lost, that uh there's a chance we will we will return, and you're certainly I think an important um contributor to that. And I I can't thank you enough for your work and for uh you know your your life of work and your life of service, right? In in in all respects. And uh you know, I know you even even now uh mentioned that you, you know, you're you're you're doing these podcasts and things, and it's kind of a new thing. It's new for me as well. I mean, this is this is all very uh very foreign to me in a way compared to the the young people today. But um what what's next for you? What do you what what are your uh I guess I'm gonna do the books.

SPEAKER_00 39:48

And now I got this one. I actually have three other books. I've been writing books. I left medicine 15 years ago. I've been writing non-science books. Uh I have three others, and I think I have this great publisher, the Omera Press in Canada. I think we're gonna push this one this year, and then uh there are there are th three others coming. One about medicine, uh, one about the war, and the last one which I'm working on, which I think I'm not gonna talk about because it's bad karma to talk about it. Okay, good. I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_02 40:26

Well, you know, I guess a good good time to to wrap it up here. And um again, thank you so so very much uh for all that you do. And uh I'll look forward to sharing sharing your work and your you know this book in particular. And we'll uh is there uh the book is it's published now, right?

SPEAKER_00 40:49

It's yeah, it's out. If they want to people want to see it, I have I have a website. I didn't make it the publisher, but but it's fabulous. I sometimes don't recognize anyway. The reb website, if you have a computer, is randolphbshifford.com. And then all this stuff comes up about the person I wished that I had been.

SPEAKER_02 41:09

That's wonderful. You you are you are that person, and we need more of you. We need more. Um, so yeah, thank you. RandolphBschiffer.com, and we'll um, you know, I'll post that uh on all the all the links here and stuff. So then thank you for your kind words. Uh I've uh John, I've enjoyed it. Thank you. Have a have a beautiful rest of your day.

SPEAKER_00 41:29

All right, you too. Take care.