How Stories Can Save Us: Colum McCann on Narrative Four, Einstein, Freud, and the Power of Empathy

00:00:01 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It is Thursday, March 26, 2026. We've been preoccupied with stories recently on the show. A couple of weeks ago, we had Kevin Ashton on the show, the author of a really intriguing new book called The Story of Stories, which argues that we humans invented language in order to tell stories. In other words, the desire to tell stories came before language, and we created language for the telling of stories.

00:00:33 Andrew Keen: And in a few days, I've got a really interesting conversation with the biographer of Bob Dylan's second act, Robert Polito. He has a wonderful new book out called After the Flood. And he ends the book with reference to one of the great songs from Dylan's last album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, called "Key West." One of the lyrics in that song is, "That's my story, but not where it ends." And that's how he ends the book.

00:01:13 Andrew Keen: And stories, of course, are stories because they never end. My guest today, Colm McCann, knows that as well as anyone — a distinguished, brilliant, bestselling writer and thinker. He's been on the show before. He came on last year to talk about his telling of somebody else's story, Diane Foley, from his excellent book American Mother. And he's back on the show today to talk about another of his initiatives. He is the co-founder and president of a group called Narrative Four, which focuses on the importance of telling stories. Colm is joining us from a cold barn in Connecticut. Colm, welcome back to the show. Lovely to see you again.

00:02:06 Colum McCann: Lovely to see you too.

00:02:09 Andrew Keen: I'm not sure if you've had a look at the Ashton book, The Story of Stories. What do you make of his thesis, Colm — that we humans invented language in order to tell stories?

00:02:24 Colum McCann: I watched both of the episodes, and it's fascinating to me. Some of it's above my pay grade, I think. But one of the things I often say is that the scientist deals with muons and gluons and atoms and molecules — and that's, of course, obviously true, or certainly seems to be true. But really, the shortest distance between you and me, especially at this particular moment, is a story.

00:03:03 Colum McCann: And it does seem to me that the world is woven together with stories. I feel that it's become sort of trendy to talk about stories at this particular moment, and I'm a little bit scared that some people might think it's too trendy and everyone's hopping on a bandwagon. But I do think that stories are incredibly important. They can be used in all sorts of ways. In the right hands, they can work miracles.

00:03:35 Colum McCann: But in the wrong hands, they can be very dangerous. They can take your house away. They can take your car away. They can take your identity away. They can take your country away. And I think it's very important for us to be able to reach out to one another. That's why I got involved with this organization, Narrative Four, over a dozen years ago now, Andrew.

00:04:04 Andrew Keen: So speaking of jumping on bandwagons, Colm — if everyone's jumping on the storytelling bandwagon, it's your bandwagon. You founded it back in 2013. But what was your thinking? Why did you co-found it, and who was your co-founder?

00:04:23 Colum McCann: My co-founder is this amazing person by the name of Lisa Consiglio, and she was in charge of a literary organization in Aspen. She brought together writers and thinkers up in the mountains beyond Aspen, and she asked a very simple question: what do you think is the highest aim of storytelling? It turned out not to be such a simple question. It was people like Tobias Wolff, Terry Tempest Williams, Edwidge Danticat, [unclear], Reza Aslan — a wonderful group of people.

00:05:03 Colum McCann: And we all got together and started talking about the power of empathy, the power of telling one's own story, but also telling somebody else's story. We got to the stage where we started to talk about the nuclear power of being able to inhabit the story of someone else. And we started to ask: what would happen if we told one another's stories? So if you and I were together in the room, I would talk to you. You tell me something profound from your days in London or when you first came over to the States, and I would tell you a story about my bicycle journey across the United States when I was 21 years old. And then we'd get back to the group, and I would say, "Hi, my name is Andrew" — and I would tell your story, and you would tell my story.

00:06:00 Colum McCann: And what happens is there's an incredible sparking in the brain. It releases dopamine, but it also engages those areas that have to do with memory, with imagination, with deep empathetic engagement and understanding. And it's something we have now applied to the lives of young people all around the world. We created Narrative Four, which is now a global organization. We're in thirty-plus countries, twelve countries in Africa. We're very strong in Ireland and—

00:06:41 Andrew Keen: Thirty-five countries. I was looking at your website — 1,200 school partners, 285,000 participants engaged in your story exchanges in the last couple of years. Those are serious numbers.

00:06:54 Colum McCann: They're serious numbers, and they're powerful numbers. I've got to tell you, when I go into a school and we run this program, it's one of the things that makes me happy about where we are now and gives me some form of hope. These are dark times. We talk a lot about how dark and shattered these times happen to be. But one of the things we've done is bring together kids from the South Bronx — which is, as you know, the poorest congressional district in the United States — and we put them together with kids who you would think could not get on very well with them: kids from the hollers in Eastern Kentucky. On one hand, you have kids who are Black and immigrant. On the other hand, kids who are white or Cherokee. One group is rural, one group is urban. One group is red, politically; one group is blue.

00:07:59 Colum McCann: Put them in a room together, and guess what? They're terrified of one another. Terrified — until they get a chance to tell a story. Now, the secret sauce here is that they have to tell a personal story. Not a didactic story, not a moralistic story, not something that attempts to win an argument — not something that says, "I'm going to change your mind about x, y, and z, politically." Rather, it's something that gets deep down, opens up the rib cage, turns the heart backwards a little bit, and suddenly they realize: we're not so different after all.

00:08:43 Colum McCann: Now that might sound a little bit kumbaya to some people, and perhaps it is. But I'm prepared to say that is one of the things I have seen that can radically change a school environment — and even a community — when it's done properly. Our real thought behind all of this is that stories lead to action, lead to change.

00:09:11 Andrew Keen: And when you launched Narrative Four, there was a feature on you in the New York Times Magazine with the headline "Colm McCann's Radical Empathy." Sometimes the e-word gets overused. But is that what it's all about, Colm — if we don't just tell each other our own stories, but try to put ourselves in someone else's story, we acquire empathy? Is that the real foundation of Narrative Four?

00:09:45 Colum McCann: Yes, in many ways. I mean, "empathy" is not a word that translates in all directions, and I do want this to translate in all directions. I'm really interested in it going across various political divides. We brought kids together from Limerick and Belfast — kids from Southill with kids from the Shankill Road. Kids from the Shankill Road in Belfast didn't even know there was a town called Limerick in Ireland. And you'd think, because they're coming north and south, they were going to kick the head off one another. In fact, one of the young fellas said, "We were afraid we were going to start a war." And then when they got into this position of understanding one another, things sort of dissolved.

00:10:38 Colum McCann: We've done this in several different instances. Is it about empathy? Yes. But it's about compassion. It's about decency. It's about recognizing yourself. It's also about recognizing your life outside that arc, that radius you live in — in which you're operating in your phone, mea maxima culpa. I have a relationship with my phone, and sometimes I don't like it. But when young people come to us in the classrooms through Narrative Four, they'll say to me, "I don't have a story." And I will say, "Yes, you do — you just have to access the story." They say, "No, no, no." Because they've gone through this terrible epidemic of loneliness and isolation, particularly young people over the past decade. And then when they're given a chance, they're surprised: "Wow, someone's listening to my story. Somebody's not only looking me in the eye, but they're telling my story back to me — so my story must be valuable."

00:11:56 Colum McCann: And the great exchange there is not so much about empathy, but about a kind of equality. Because if you give someone your story, then you want your own to be treated decently. They won't always get the details right. I might say, "Hi, my name is Andrew. I grew up in Bristol, and I'm a Stoke City supporter" — which I know you're not.

00:12:24 Colum McCann: Fortunately.

00:12:25 Andrew Keen: On both counts.

00:12:27 Colum McCann: But it's okay. What we really want is to get at the texture of the story, the profound truth. We live in an age — and you talk about this, and lots of people come on your show and talk about it — where facts have become mercenary things. You can ship a fact off to whatever little orphanage you want it to go to. You can take a fact and it can be used by any number of sides. Facts are convenient things. But what are the true facts of human experience?

00:13:23 Colum McCann: It seems to me that the true facts of human experience are the ineffable things — the things we can't pin down, the things that don't have a statistic we can wrap around them. These ideas of love and pride and pity and compassion and sacrifice, and even violence. These things have actually become the signals of contemporary experience — the facts, even, of contemporary experience. So what we're asking these kids to do is to tell something that matters to them. Get into the heart of things and see what you can discover there. And invariably, they end up feeling better about themselves and feeling better about the other side.

00:14:21 Colum McCann: We had a major study done by the University of Oxford and Ohio State University, and it just came out a couple of weeks ago. Polarization was dramatically reduced when young people got together. There were all sorts of benefits to our form of storytelling. Does that mean it's going to change the world? I wish it could, but it's a drop in the ocean — at least it's a drop.

00:15:01 Andrew Keen: Colm, yesterday there was a landmark legal case about how Facebook and YouTube are addictive social networks that are ruining young people's lives, and this has become an increasingly familiar legal story in America. Some people, though — when social media was invented in the first decade of the century — thought that social media would be the platform, the opportunity for everybody to tell their stories. Now I think many people think the reverse. It's become a platform for destroying storytelling in a way. Why didn't social media work out? Why the need for something like Narrative Four when we've got Instagram and Facebook and YouTube and all these other platforms?

00:15:55 Colum McCann: I think the simple thing is that human contact matters so much. This ability to look beyond the one-dimensional space of the phone. We can use technology — there are ways to use technology. Technology is neither good nor bad. We all know this. It's like that Niels Bohr notion — at the far end of every good argument, there's an equal argument that works just as well. So I can tell you that technology is good, and I can tell you that technology is bad. It's how we use it. There's nothing inherently wrong with this thing.

00:16:50 Andrew Keen: And for people listening, Colm is waving his iPhone.

00:16:54 Colum McCann: My phone. Nothing inherently wrong with the phone. It's made of cathodes and diodes, I presume, and copper and bits of precious metals and plastic. But it's our relationship with the phone — it's how we choose to use it. My son, when he heard that verdict yesterday, has been saying for years that social media is going to be like the cigarettes of the future. Turned out he was right. Yesterday was a Big Tobacco moment for social media. And in fact, even the day beforehand, there was another case.

00:17:39 Andrew Keen: Another Facebook case.

00:17:41 Colum McCann: Another Facebook case. So why did it fail? I don't know. Do you think these guys are bad? Are the people behind the curtain inherently bad? Do they want something from us? Did they know from the get-go that what they were going to do is try to destroy us? What do you think?

00:18:05 Andrew Keen: I have to be a little careful here, Colm, because my wife is head of litigation at Google. So in our house yesterday, it wasn't such a happy day. But — off the record, of course, nobody's watching — I think I have a degree of sympathy with what you're saying.

00:18:24 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Niels Bohr, one of the twentieth century's great scientists. You recently made an interesting speech which began with reference to two other great twentieth century thinkers, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, who had an interesting exchange on the value of stories. What do Einstein and Freud tell us about the value of stories?

00:18:53 Colum McCann: It's really interesting. Back in the early 1930s, Einstein could see things going to pot — the German propaganda machine was getting going. It was actually just before Hitler came to power, but he could see things beginning to crumble. And he decided to write to Freud. He said: do you think there's any way that humanity can learn to curb its instinct for war? A couple of letters went back and forth between the two greatest minds — the bellwether minds — of those particular times, recognized as such even then.

00:19:48 Colum McCann: And Freud wrote back saying, essentially, no. That mankind's instinct for death and destruction could not be curbed. He investigated this over the course of fourteen handwritten pages that he wrote back to Einstein. But at the end — and this is what's interesting to me, Andrew — he said that despite all that, the desire to end war is not something we should ever abandon, because he believed in what he called a "mythology of instinct and a community of feeling." And so the only way we could curb our tendency towards doom was to communicate with one another — community of feeling, a mythology of the instincts. Basically: storytelling.

00:21:00 Colum McCann: That was 1932. The book came out in 1932, sold 2,000 copies, and then faded away — because we all know what happened in the thirties and why Freud and Einstein both had to flee. The world went down its various tubes. It's ironic to me that we're still talking about the same question.

00:21:26 Andrew Keen: So were Einstein and Freud in disagreement on the value of story?

00:21:34 Colum McCann: No, they weren't in disagreement at all. Einstein saw it, but he thought about it more in terms of world government — getting the United Nations together, getting these bureaucratic regimes together. He dreamed of that sort of world government. Whereas Freud saw it much more on an individual level. If we could have put the two together and harnessed the power of what they were saying, it could have been a mighty thing. Who knows what would have changed in history if people had been allowed to merge those ideas. They were very much together on the fundamental point, but Freud said, "I am old, and I've been telling people the truth for a long time." He was older than Einstein at that stage. He was sorry to disappoint him, but he didn't think it was possible to ever cure humanity of its instinct for war. But it could be mitigated — by knowing one another.

00:22:45 Andrew Keen: Colm, you're best known as a novelist. Your best-known novel, Let the Great World Spin, won all sorts of awards, including the National Book Award in 2009. So it's not really surprising that as a professional storyteller you founded Narrative Four. What do you think about scientists? Kevin Ashton is not a hardcore scientist like Einstein or Freud, but he's nonetheless a kind of social scientist trying to analyze language. Is there an artistic or scientific foundation to Narrative Four, or is it a mix of the two? Do we need to come up with scientific explanations of the value of storytelling, or is what a novelist does good enough — something that can't really be quantified?

00:23:42 Colum McCann: It's a brilliant question, and it's one that's entirely on my mind right now. I would say that the stories should be enough, and I wish the stories could always be enough. But the fact of the matter is we do need metrics more and more — for our schools, for our politicians, for companies that want to fund us, for people who want to get behind us. Metrics are the key into the door. So if we can tell people that polarization goes down because of storytelling, they're going to perk up and look at something like Narrative Four and say, well, maybe we can find some form of repair there.

00:24:35 Colum McCann: It does seem to me that the theme of our times — and it has been, and will be for quite a while — is repair. I love bringing up the theme of repair with these kids. I say, why don't you tell each other a story about repair? And they say, "I don't know anything about repair." But then they tell stories about repairing their bicycle tube, or repairing their relationship with their grandfather, or repairing their school, or repairing their community. All of these things are marvelous. When I witness them, I wish I could bottle the energy that's there — but I also have to bottle the science behind it, to convince people that this is something we can do.

00:25:23 Colum McCann: So when we talk about scientists getting on board and braiding themselves with artists, I think it's incredibly important. In fact, I don't think we do enough of it. I think scientists link in better with artists than artists link in with scientists. Scientists have a better handle on art than artists do on science. I say that for a number of reasons, not least because science has entered into the realm of mystery in so many ways. We don't know a lot, and so scientists reach for — well, the word "quark" comes from Finnegans Wake. Murray Gell-Mann was looking for a word, happened to be reading Finnegans Wake at the time, and came upon "quark." The rest is history. Science started engaging in poetic naming. And now if you go into some of the AI firms, they're even hiring artists and philosophers. I wish they'd hire more of them.

00:26:38 Andrew Keen: I hope they pay them. Kevin Ashton — he's a technologist, actually the guy who invented the term the Internet of Things — is very pessimistic on AI and its impact on storytelling. Your profession, Colm, you don't need me to tell you this, is incredibly nervous about AI replacing human storytelling with machines. Can machines tell stories? Do you have a role for machine narratives in Narrative Four, or does it need to always be between humans?

00:27:17 Colum McCann: I don't know. And I'm really fond of saying "I don't know" right now, because we have this culture of certainty where everyone has to have an answer. I do see machines being able to tell stories, but they're telling the stories we have already told and recombining them in new patterns and new ways. Do I care about those stories? Personally, no. Absolutely not. But I'm not as scared of AI as a lot of people are. I always think we're going to be one step ahead of it. It's built on these other building blocks, and it's going to take some sort of peculiar genius to harness the beauty of all those things.

00:28:14 Colum McCann: Going back to Niels Bohr — I'm both a pessimist and an optimist at the exact same time. That's a very Gramscian notion too: being a pessimist of the intellect and an optimist of the will. I'm prepared to say that I think we can use this stuff that appears to be capable of destroying us — we can use it in a more profound manner, and that somehow we'll keep ahead of the game. I'm aware that if Einstein were here, he would say we need controls on this, we need a United Nations to put controls on social media. And the jury verdicts yesterday are really interesting — we're beginning to recognize that we need to put controls on these things. But stories matter. They can do anything. They can take away all my books. The book itself might go the way of opera, or disappear entirely — but they can never take away stories.

00:29:33 Andrew Keen: That brings me back to that wonderful line in Dylan's "Key West": "That's my story, but not where it ends." And certainly it's not where it begins either. Stories are infinite. Some people suggest there are only a fixed number of stories that we tell and retell in different ways. What about this issue of ownership, Colm? IP — both in AI terms and in terms of what you're doing at Narrative Four. Should people be possessive about not just their own stories but other people's? Or do we need to share them a little more selflessly? Dylan, of course, has from some people's point of view shared a little too selflessly — he's sometimes been accused of borrowing without permission. But of course he's a great storyteller.

00:30:30 Colum McCann: What was it T.S. Eliot said? Good writers imitate, great writers steal. But I don't know. I'm fairly comfortable with the notion that if you've told your story or written it and it's out there in the world, it should be available for others. We get our voice from the voices of others. Nobody springs up into the world with a voice that's fully formed. We have to read first. We have to do our philosophy. We have to listen to our music. We have to listen to the idiots too. And eventually we come out with our own voice, built on a pyramid of many other voices.

00:31:21 Colum McCann: To say that we own something entirely seems wrong — but you also don't want people pinching stuff. Now, in relation to the stories we tell in Narrative Four, we don't publish them. They stay in the room, and the lessons are what leave the room. The power of the story is not actually the story itself, but what it evokes and what it makes you feel. That gives me — I was in Portland, Oregon recently, and I met a number of young kids who told stories. They were reluctant at first. And at the end, they all wanted to stay in touch with one another, and stay in touch with me. And I thought: this is how we build community. This is the thing that actually matters. I have that optimism, but I also know how dark the world is. I have to balance these two things together. It's a bit like Philippe Petit on his tightrope—

00:32:31 Andrew Keen: And that's of course from your great novel Let the Great World Spin. Colm, we did a show recently with the Yale political philosopher Hélène Landemore, who's an expert on citizen assemblies — where, by lottery, citizens get together to make policy. This has been most successfully pioneered in Ireland, especially around abortion. I actually made a film about this a few years ago, went to Ireland, talked to a woman who'd been on this citizen assembly, and she spoke of the value of the physical experience of talking to others and experiencing their stories — particularly, I think, for men beginning to understand women's experience around abortion. Can this be manifested in political terms? I know Narrative Four focuses mostly on education, but have you had a look at citizen assemblies? I'm sure you're familiar with what's been happening in Ireland, and now Landemore is pioneering something in Connecticut, probably just up the road from you. Can this be manifested more concretely in political terms?

00:33:47 Colum McCann: Yes. It's going to take real courage, and it's going to take people really believing in this — tenacity, desire, stamina, perseverance. Obviously, the political system we have is completely broken right now. Can it get more broken? Yes, it can. But can we begin to pull it back together with things like citizen assemblies? Absolutely. I wish I could harness the energy we have in our educational work to bring this out into the wider world. But we have done things. For example, we went out to the Dakotas and brought people who were anti-immigration together with Somali immigrants, and put them in a room to tell stories to one another. They ended up changing their opinions dramatically as a result.

00:35:01 Colum McCann: It's about the desire to actually put boots on the ground. This may sound silly, but you're not going to slam a missile into a fruit market in some city if you know that person's story and their background. It's certainly not going to be such an easy thing to do. And given the ease with which we recklessly go in and try to change regimes and democracies in various parts of the world — wouldn't it have been better to have put money into things like Voice of America radio stations? We've allowed this desire to change things to slip away from us. It upsets me, but I still think it's possible to retrieve it.

00:36:05 Andrew Keen: Colm, as I mentioned earlier, you were last on the show with Diane Foley. You told her story as an American mother — and the story of her son — in your book. And as I said, you're also a very distinguished novelist. Are you — and I don't mean this in a critical or accusatory sense — trying to turn everyone into Colm McCann? Where did your stories come from? Why didn't you need to go to Narrative Four?

00:36:34 Colum McCann: Nobody needs to be me. I feel privileged. I feel lucky. I came from Ireland when I was 21. I came to the United States. I sat down, Andrew, to write a novel. I bought a typewriter, and I thought I was going to be the next Jack Kerouac. I bought a big roll of paper. And at the end of that summer, all I had was a foot and a half of gibberish. And I looked at myself and said: you don't really know all that much. You better get out and go into the world.

00:37:09 Colum McCann: And I ended up taking a bicycle for the next eighteen months across the United States. I learned a lot of things — an awful lot of things. But mostly what I learned was that everyone has a story, and everyone has a deep desire to tell their story. People would come up to me in my bandana, long hair—

00:37:30 Andrew Keen: You've still got a bit of the bike about you.

00:37:32 Colum McCann: Thank you very much. I know — I'm glad you noticed. Very impressive. They'd come up and look at the bicycle and the pannier bags and the sleeping bag and the tent, and they'd say, "What are you doing?" And I'd say, "I'm going cross-country." But within five minutes, they would be telling me their own story. And part of me thought they were telling me their story because they wanted me to take it with me and carry it down the road. In a weird way, vicariously, they were becoming novelists.

00:38:02 Colum McCann: And so many of us want our story to be known — not in a chest-thumping sort of way, but because we'd like to be understood. I realized this again many years later when I did another book, This Side of Brightness, and I stayed with homeless people in the subway tunnels of New York. Living down in the tunnels, one of the things I realized was that food wasn't the problem, and clothing wasn't the problem — but dignity was the problem. They liked nothing more than to be able to sit around and talk with somebody.

00:38:40 Colum McCann: You try to harness that sort of energy without becoming sentimental about it. I do think there's a difference between having sentiment and being sentimental. So I definitely don't want everyone to go to my sort of school, but I would like everyone to have access to telling not only their own story, but listening to the story of someone else — and seeing that the world is a little bit bigger than that arc, that radius we live in, beyond the screen. I think that's what you do. I think that's what a lot of artists want to do.

00:39:21 Colum McCann: And the more we can get out there and debate this stuff — argue with one another in a positive, constructive way, and create those forums for citizens — the better off we're going to be. It's going to take a lot of work, and it takes a lot of bravery to do it.

00:39:41 Andrew Keen: And of course Dylan had another song called "Dignity," dignity being such an important theme. Let's end, Colm, with you telling us briefly — for people who haven't heard of Narrative Four and want to learn more, maybe they're involved with their local school, maybe they're a parent — what should they do?

00:40:05 Colum McCann: We'd love to get people involved. Go to narrative4.com. You can become a facilitator through our online facilitator training. You can become someone who supports us. You can get your school involved, or become involved as a volunteer. The bigger this network grows, the more powerful it is. You can be both tiny and epic at the same time. Both local and universal. And if they want to get involved and get their school involved, I would like nothing more. Can I just say — I enjoy your work so much. It's a pleasure to get on the program, but it's a real pleasure to get this message across, because these are rough times. And if we can do anything at all to mitigate them, something like Narrative Four can do it.

00:41:11 Andrew Keen: And I assume you're a nonprofit. How are you funded?

00:41:16 Colum McCann: We're funded by foundations and individuals. I do a lot of dinners and a lot of talks. I knock on a lot of doors. I have a marvelous co-founder in Lisa Consiglio. We have a great staff. This takes up a lot of my time, but I love doing it. I actually — strangely enough — feel that it's almost as powerful, if not more powerful to me, than books. I don't know if I would have said that to you ten or twenty years ago, but as the work takes shape and grows, for me it has a more powerful influence than the books themselves.

00:42:01 Andrew Keen: I think that bicycle journey has been continuing with Narrative Four, Colm. A real honor to have you on the show talking not about books but about your work at Narrative Four. I know you're working on a new book, and we will certainly get you back on the show when that comes out. Thank you so much.

00:42:19 Colum McCann: Thank you so much.