Evija Volfa Vestergaard; Jung, psychology and why people tell stories

About this episode

This is a deeply personal reunion episode: Vance interviews Evija "Evie" Volfa Vestergaard, a former World Bank colleague and mentor who left an established institutional career to earn a PhD in Jungian psychology. The conversation opens with epistemological framing — Evie's lifelong pursuit isn't career advancement but "what is the truth," and she describes psychology, especially Jung's, as a legitimate route to that truth precisely because it takes subjective experience, synchronicity, and dreams seriously rather than dismissing them as noise. A substantial middle section explores Latvian dragon folklore as psychological allegory (dragons as helper-or-destroyer forces tied to guarding one's harvested "riches," both material and internal), which Vance connects to Jordan Peterson's later popularization of similar Jungian-dragon metaphors. The episode's most vivid and historically grounded material comes when Evie recounts her father's life as a Soviet collective-farm agronomist in occupied Latvia: deported to Siberia as a toddler, orphaned by circumstance, self-taught back to an advanced agronomy degree, and eventually forced into an absurd institutional deception — planting cosmetic corn borders around fields of grain to satisfy Khrushchev-era corn-planting directives that didn't suit Latvian soil, on pain of being sent back to Siberia if caught refusing. Evie also recounts living through the literal collapse of the Soviet Union in Latvia (tanks in the capital, barricades, five deaths, the sudden arrival of English-speaking foreigners) and her own unlikely path from one of only nine Latvians permitted to study English that year to a World Bank human-development career. The conversation closes on stories-as-medicine: Evie's clinical view that healthy identity is a "story" that can be revised, her use of South African Truth and Reconciliation as a model for the power of testimony, and a direct tie-in to Vance's own "Legacy Interview" business of recording family oral histories before they're lost.

“Psychology is in a way, the truth that we constantly create... it's not that there is some kind of reality out there, but we can't know it. We only know what we interpret of what is.”

“Your story today can change your past... this idea that there isn't really the past and the present and the future. It's all one thing. And the way you change your past is by changing your story today.”

“We each live in our own bubble and we keep telling the same story to ourselves... by becoming open to stories that we have never heard about... it's bursting the bubble, it's healing, it's changing the history.”

Key moments

• ~8%: WINDOWS peak — Evie's foundational claim that psychology, not just hard science, is a legitimate epistemic path to truth, reframing the whole episode's premise.
• ~35%: The Latvian dragon folklore explainer — dragons as helper/destroyer forces tied to guarding accumulated wealth (grain, and by extension, psychological "riches").
• ~48%: Evie's account of a precognitive dream about mold/structural damage in her old Copenhagen apartment building that reportedly manifested a decade later — offered as an example of Jungian synchronicity taken at face value rather than explained away.
• ~60%: INSTITUTIONS peak — the corn-planting ruse: Evie's father plants decorative corn borders around actual grain fields to satisfy a Soviet agricultural directive that didn't fit Latvian soil, under threat of exile to Siberia.
• ~66%: Evie's account of living through the Soviet collapse in Latvia — tanks rolling into the capital, barricades, and the sudden, disorienting arrival of foreign languages and market economics.
• ~72%: LEGACY peak — the therapeutic claim that revising one's present-day narrative can effectively "change the past," directly tied into Vance's Legacy Interview business model of recording family oral histories.
• ~75%: BUBBLES peak — stories as bubble-bursting mechanisms: encountering narratives radically unlike one's own as a form of psychological growth, illustrated by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation process.
• ~82%: Evie's account of "dangerous stories" — her father's Siberia deportation was withheld from her as a child because knowing it could have endangered the family under Soviet surveillance.

Notable quotes

“So what he does is he plants the corn around the fields and then puts the grain in the middle so that when the inspectors come by, they see the corn. But in reality, there is grain growing there.”

“Your story today can change your past... the way you change your past is by changing your story today.”