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"Mining the hearts and minds of unorthodox teachers"
For the life-long learner who wants honest, human conversations about how we grow, heal, create, and understand ourselves. These are longform dialogues with artists, thinkers, authors, meditators, psychologists, musicians, creatives, leaders, philosophers, healers, and everyday people with something real to teach.
Each episode offers a perspective, story, or insight that tends to lands exactly when someone needs it most. Thoughtful, curious, and quietly life-changing, this show exists to help us live a better life by understanding our own inner world more deeply, through the perspectives of one another.
The Junkyard Love Podcast - for a better life.
The Junkyard Love Podcast. At what age do we learn how to have better conversations? At what age should we learn to have better conversations with ourselves?
Jacob:How are you? What what what's going on just in your personal life? How are you?
Anne Riley:Oh, well, I I wanna thank you so much for having me because I love the concept of your podcast, and I was like, I think this is down my alley. And so it's fun to meet people who want to share a new idea even if they don't really know anything about it. So that's really cool. And my life has been kind of weird the last, few few weeks. My my beloved mother passed away just a couple of weeks ago, and she was a 102 and, the mother of 12 children of which I am the 11.
Anne Riley:And, so these past few weeks has been, you know, not unexpected, but difficult. But it was really helpful to have, 10 of the 12 siblings come together and celebrate her life. And that was that was really she was an amazing woman. You know? Just just just amazing person.
Anne Riley:And, you know, I will miss her every day, but she's in my heart every day. So, and after writing this book, I understand that this process is a natural process, and yet humans imbue it with their emotion. And so you have to work through this what is a natural thing as as a human who can think and make ideas and decide how to deal with things. And so it's been instructive on two levels for me. But I I love my mom and miss her.
Anne Riley:So but I also accept that you can accept something and be sad about it.
Jacob:Yeah. Absolutely. Paradoxically, indeed. Okay. So what is your ...?
Jacob:I'm just curious, like, how it would work for me because I'll read all these all these, you know, books or listen to these YouTube things, and I'll intellectually hear, like, okay. You know, death is a process of life. And when these these things will happen for me, I will certainly die as well, everyone I ever love. Like, you can intellectualize those things and feel prepared. But but when that moment happens, you know, I I what what was that like for you?
Jacob:Was it did did your preparations, seem fickle in that moment? Or
Anne Riley:Well, you know, I had, my dad passed away 8 years almost to the day. So and that was, before I had thought of all these things, before I had come up with this theory, before I did this thing. And that experience was much more difficult for me because I even though I understood that, you know, what was intellectually happening, there was this sadness that I had never lost really anybody before. So it was and I I didn't quite know how to deal with it, but I think that was instructive for writing my book. And then when I I got to my mom, who's a 102, you cannot I know you cannot live forever, and my mom was sharp up until the last minute.
Anne Riley:Amazing. So so, you know, I I, you know, I was still telling her jokes and singing, you know, one of dad's favorite songs, and, you know, she was right there. But I think the hardest thing and she did it all her way. She got she did it her way. She wanted to die at home.
Anne Riley:She was she got last right. She did all the things that she was ready for. And in fact, she joked. She was like, why is this taking so long? You know?
Anne Riley:And I'm like, mom, I you know, those cells like to live. You know? That's what they like to do. So you know? But it took she's a very literally a constitutionally strong body, and it took a while.
Anne Riley:And my biggest worry was I don't want her to suffer. I don't want her to hurt and make this hard for her any harder than it I think it has to be. And I think that was the hardest thing for me was to figure out with my siblings what was the proper care with the hospice people and the nurses, what was the right thing to do so that she for me, it was just, I don't want her in pain. You know? But I have accept I was accepting.
Anne Riley:This wasn't especially once we saw yeah. Just over 2 months this happened. It wasn't like she'd been sick for a long time. She'd been you know, she followed the election. She was, you know, up and, you know, the next day, she wanted to know what we were gonna do about things.
Anne Riley:You know? And I was like, oh, so it just went so fast. And but she did it on her terms, and I could accept it. But I just my my line was, I can't deal with her being in pain. That but but the but the process itself, I could accept as the natural way of how things work.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It must be this impossible, but, you know, kind of beautiful balance of continually, you know, feeling the sadness. Emotions are happening.
Jacob:Right? But Mhmm. You know, what can I do? Okay. What can't I do?
Anne Riley:Exactly. Are
Jacob:those the emotions gonna yeah. I I just I,
Anne Riley:Yeah. Yeah. And and my husband is quite the journey. When in doubt, love her, love her chill other children, my siblings. Do what you can to help be, you know, just do be there for whatever is needed to be done.
Anne Riley:And that's what we did. And and during that time, we were all together. And then after that time, we all worked together to do all the things that needed to be done, you know, the funeral and contacting family and and all that stuff. And that's what we did. Yeah.
Anne Riley:And that was the best I could do in this situation.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. And and what more can you do besides the best you can do?
Anne Riley:Exactly. Exactly. And sometimes, you know, nobody's perfect, so sometimes screw that one up. But Yep. You know, we were there.
Anne Riley:We were a team. We made decisions together. And when you didn't, they were like, oh, we're not gonna do it that way. It's like, oops, sorry. You know?
Anne Riley:And we moved on. It was good. We we got close. Yeah.
Jacob:Well, beautiful thing. Okay. Well, so now I'm just I'm just curious, you know, you said that, when your father passed away 8 years ago, you hadn't written this book yet. And Nope. Now that you have, as we begin, I wanna start to introduce introduce your book slowly to everybody.
Anne Riley:Okay.
Jacob:What so what what do you mean? Like, how did writing a book change your perception on death and losing a family member, losing someone you love? What do you mean by that?
Anne Riley:Yeah. Well, it wasn't I guess I would look at it as not writing a book, but writing down this theory of how humans work. I think, so when I was 10, I was at Catholic school, but I learned about evolution. So it's the sixties. It was, you know, wide open.
Anne Riley:We didn't have these divisions that we have now. And I, from that moment on, I was confused. It was like, okay, we evolved from these animals. Okay, I get that. I could see the eyes and the ears and that we got we got hands and feet just like animals.
Anne Riley:I get it. We're alike. But, boy, have we done different things, so we're different. And what I wanted to know was how we were alike and how we were different and what that meant for us living as humans on this earth. And that, actually, I just it wasn't like I was like, I have a I'm going to go on and live this, you know, ask this question.
Anne Riley:I'm like, it was just in the back burner all my life. And everything that I learned, I was like, back there, at some point, I was saying, does this help answer this question, or does this not answer this question? And, you know, things like religion, I can see their use. I grew up Catholic, but didn't answer the question for me. It didn't.
Anne Riley:And then I went on and I, you know, I went to school and I learned all this stuff, but, you know, I read a lot of Stephen Jay Gould and about how animals work, and that answered a lot of questions just like, oh, how do animals work? Oh, you can see the similarities between things. You can see how things evolve. I was like, okay, okay, I get that. And then I went to school.
Anne Riley:I became a I became an accountant and I I had an economic background. And, you know, I'm sitting there listening to the supply and demand and the prices and everything and and, of course, technology never change assuming technology does not change. I'm like, oh, no. Well, that doesn't work, you know? But but I was like, I understand these theories and they make my logical mind it it makes sense, but this is not how people work.
Anne Riley:So this is not this is not quite right. And then I read a lot of Keynes and Keynes had it right. He's like, people are gonna do what people do. So you have to use you make your economic systems work with what people are actually going to feel and think and act on. And I was like, oh, that was a clue.
Anne Riley:And then I read a book in 1993 or 4, a long time ago, by Michael Rothschild, and it was called Bionomics. And what he did was he compared economic systems, human economic systems, to biological systems. And, oh, the lineup was really, really close. And I was like, oh, he's on the right track. But he ended up saying, yep.
Anne Riley:We all need to compete and or capitalism is the way. And I was like, oh, that just it just went clunk after all of these things that were going click, click, click click, it went boom, clunk. So I had to think about that. And then I worked here. I raised my family.
Anne Riley:I did all these things. I was busy, but this the wheels kept turning. And finally, I worked on a political campaign for a, Trump facing congressional campaign. So it was a I'm I'm a Democrat. So it was a republican was in office, and we were trying to elect a Democrat in a very red district.
Anne Riley:And it was an off year election 2018, so everybody came in. You know, Jeff Merkley from Oregon. Joe Biden came in. You know, all these people came and campaigned for Lauren Underwood. She was our congress she was the one trying to get elected.
Anne Riley:And I looked back and I was like, why are everybody why are so many people interested in this? And of course, you have to understand that government is the coordinating system in your brain in your body. Your brain is your coordinating system. It keeps all your 35 trillion cells working together. In human societies, government is the coordinating mechanism.
Jacob:Nice.
Anne Riley:And whoever controls the government controls the rules that people are allowed to live by. And I was like, ah, this is what I missed about humans. I understood competition. I understood collaboration. I didn't quite get the coordination piece all the way.
Anne Riley:And for some reason, it just clicked. And then I was able to put the pieces together. I had to work with them a little bit, but I put the pieces together, and I made a parallel construction of the you know, like a concentric circle of DNA, a cell, you know, a a body. Those are the 3 major pieces. And if you look at it on the human side, it's a human and, you know, you could do a business, like, for for, like, organs, and then a society is at the top.
Anne Riley:And their brain I I'm sorry. Brain in the middle, humans, and then a society. And those things are actually parallel, and they work very similarly except for one thing. Humans have brains and they can think, whereas animals have DNA instructions that are much more limited in what they can do. They are they are born with those instructions and have to follow them.
Anne Riley:Humans are born with no ideas, but once they get the ideas, they can do whatever they want with them. Yeah. And that's the difference. And so when they survive, they look different. Whereas a human, like a a bird, can build a nest.
Anne Riley:But it can't build a 3 story concrete structure in the tree and save it for its generations to come. But we can. We can build houses. We can build 3 story constructs and all kinds of things. We can also build a tent, or we can build a building.
Anne Riley:Humans have the vast ability to choose what they do, and that changes the world. Whereas animals are very limited in how they can change the world, we have this massive impact on how we change the world.
Jacob:Yeah. Well okay. So what is the what what do you pose in your book for listeners? What is the difference between us and animals? Like, what how why do we have suddenly bigger brains?
Jacob:Why are we given the gift of thinking, and and why don't they think?
Anne Riley:Well, they do think, but it's at a very much more limited scale. Remember, the the brain so the brain and the neural system, their job is to keep all the cells working together in a body. So, you know, whether it's a, you know, a worm or a tiger who has 300,000,000,000,000 cells or us who have 35,000,000,000,000,000, the brain is the coordinator, keeps everybody working together. But in nature, nothing stays the same, and evolution occurs. And one of the evolution I mean, always evolution occurs.
Anne Riley:So brains and bodies are changing all the time. That's why we have tigers, and we don't just have worms because evolution changes all the everything all the time. And even today, even though we can't see it because changes work slowly, but things are changing all the time here. And what happened is the evolution occurred that was growing brains. I mean, dolphins have big brains, whales have big brains, octopus have big brains.
Anne Riley:So a brains a brain growth evolution has been occurring all along. But what happened with with Homo sapiens is, for some reason, our brains kept growing to the point where our brains brain mass to body mass ratio is, like, weird Yeah. Compared to everybody else. I mean, we are just, like, weird. But when we started using those those extra brain cells to think and create ideas, which is something animals do maybe on a very limited basis.
Anne Riley:They don't have big enough brains to do it, but when they evolved and we survived well doing that, it became an evolutionary advantage that continued to grow. Yeah. So Homo sapiens came along 200000 years ago. We only started to speak and write maybe 10000 years ago.
Jacob:Yeah.
Anne Riley:So the brain was growing all that time. And if you look at apes and you see what they're doing, they some of them can use their they can make simple tools. They can but their brains are much smaller. But someplace along the line, we kept using that advantage to grow the brains to the point where we could create a new create ideas and act on them in a way that nobody else could. And that's what I call the ideasphere.
Anne Riley:It's a brand new ecosystem based on ideas. It doesn't have any physical representation except when you put it into action. Like, when I had the idea of the idea sphere and I wrote a book, I put it into a physical form that can live beyond me. I can die tomorrow, and the book, hopefully, will stay out there. You know?
Anne Riley:It's got a life of its own now. Yeah. And just like beings in the in the natural ecosystem, these ideas have created. I use Charles Darwin's ideas from 18/59 to write my book in in 2024. Those those ideas get to live and evolve just like just like other beings in the ecosystem.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So more in your book, you said something about, I'm gonna probably butcher you said it more elegantly, but basically, the mind does not exist with with inside the brain. Like, our mind is not inside our head here.
Anne Riley:Oh, right. Right. Well, I I make a distinction between the physical and the nonphysical that what I call our brain is our physical brain, our synapses, our lobes, they do all this thing. But the mind is the accumulation of the ideas that that we create from the brain interacting with its own cells. Right?
Anne Riley:Our synapses go along and we say, ah, I need coffee today. That's an idea that you came up with. The brain, if you cut open your head and look for the coffee idea, you wouldn't find it. It doesn't exist. We have this ability that no other animal has quite the way we do to be able to take these synapses and turn them into a nonphysical idea that we can act on and then make a physical thing.
Anne Riley:I actually can think about a cup of coffee and get a cup of coffee. If I just think about a cup of coffee and don't ever get one, well, it's just an idea. Yeah. Right? But if I think about the cup of coffee then make the coffee, oh, now I have the idea and a thing resulting from the idea that can be shared or at least the cup has to be washed or something.
Anne Riley:But, you know, there's it's in the physical world now.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. It's, like, the precursor to an action. You know? And then some somewhere in there, we have, like,
Anne Riley:the ability
Jacob:to to say yes or no and and make the action.
Anne Riley:Can occur unless there was an idea before it. None. No action. You know? So
Jacob:Oh, it's yeah. It's so fascinating. Okay. So what I I wanna we don't have to go off this whole adventure, but I just wanna back up a little bit. Where do you sit where do you sit on that jump from apes to humans?
Jacob:Like, how do we suddenly get a bigger brain? Do do you think it is, like you know, I've heard the stoned ape theory is enticing to me in some ways. Yeah. When we started eating and and cooking meat, that that sort of thing. Where where do you land on how our brains got big?
Anne Riley:Yeah. I, you know, this is where the fallacy of my book is. I went across, and I didn't go down. I mean, my first reaction is, I don't care. It happened.
Jacob:You know
Anne Riley:what I mean? Yeah. And and unfortunately, because I'm at the top and I say, this happened. I know this happened. How it happened?
Anne Riley:Oh, yeah. There's a lot of great scientists who delve deeply into these things, who know these things. All I know is that it could be a combination of things. There's always the pressures of evolution. The environment is prepping on people.
Anne Riley:There are are are on these on apes. There's wet you know, the weather and, you know, they might have to move around for food, food availability. Like you said, cooking, I've heard that that has released the energy so that humans could get more of the protein easier in their body. Yep. Maybe that's true.
Anne Riley:But what I what I do know it could be radiation. You know? The world is full of radiation. You could have just mutated to the place where, you know, a couple of offspring had these big brains that then they did so much better, you know, that that everybody else kinda you know, that that kinda won the war because that's exactly how DNA formed. Before when DNA was forming back 4000000000 years ago, there was RNA, which is still exist today, but scientists think there were other things.
Anne Riley:There were other nucleic acids running around. But when DNA got the ability to protect itself and copy itself and get resources from the outside, it won. I mean, it just it just cleaned the floor with everybody else. And the only one that existed and stays still exists today is RNA, and DNA uses RNA to do its work because RNA is the only thing that could copy stuff. DNA cannot.
Anne Riley:DNA is not capable of copying stuff, but RNA can. So RNA got captured, you know, and is used in a is exists in a cell, but only to do the DNA's bidding. All the other nucleic acids, gone. And my guess is that's very that's happened timeless, you know, many countless times in our history that one form of animal just cleaned up and the other ones, we don't even know about them, are gone. Yeah.
Anne Riley:You know? And that's that's probably what happened is somewhere along the way, these these larger brain things had such an advantage that the other ones died out. We may not have the fossils to see them, but you can you can surmise the the the path and the journey even without knowing that that's exactly what the journey entailed. Now scientists can't say that. I can't because I'm not a scientist.
Anne Riley:I can say, oh, I could surmise that this happened. Scientists is why I can't prove it. And I'm like, you're right. That's why I'm not a scientist.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think they they kinda get caught up in the the same exact conversation with the big bang theory.
Jacob:It's like, you know, you kinda have to assume that, yes, it did happen. Maybe you don't know all the details. It does seem like we're finding more details out, you know, Uh-huh. It seems like Mhmm. I hear more and more people on podcast, and I'm like, wow.
Jacob:That's a mind blowing thing. That totally makes sense, and we are discovering more. But, you know, in order to do what's next and make action into our physical reality, we have to just at least let's assume it happened. We're working on figuring out exactly, you know, look, like you said, maybe it doesn't even matter in a sense, but, like,
Anne Riley:let's assume it
Jacob:happens so we can make some momentum forward.
Anne Riley:Right. Right. Yeah. I've been reading all this about maybe there was a second big bang with dark matter. I'm like, yep.
Anne Riley:It occurs. But we, you know, right now, 6% of our universe is physical matter and the 94% is dark energy and dark matter. I'm like, I can't access the nineties the 94%. I just can't. I have no ability.
Anne Riley:It exists. It's there. It it influences gravitationally. You can see. But other than that, I just need to know I'm part of the 6%, and that's what I'm working with because I don't know the rest of my pay grade.
Jacob:You know? Yeah. I
Anne Riley:hear you. Like to say.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's fun to contemplate on a Saturday night, but, like Yeah. On Monday, you gotta go to work. So
Anne Riley:Exactly. Exactly. So and that I think that was the hardest part of the book was figuring out what I can safely surmise and what I what I have to, where I have to cut that line and say, I don't wanna go too deep. I I talk a lot about DNA and RNA, but this is where when people say, oh, that's so complicated. I say, look.
Anne Riley:My 102 year old mother read this book, and she had no problem with it, so you can do it too.
Jacob:Yeah. No. Absolutely. You you broke it down very well multiple times. I feel like you're very good at presenting something in a paragraph, and then your last sentence or last two sentences wrap it up very nicely because you have a sense of humor about you.
Jacob:And so Right. My my my learning style really, fits well with the way that you write.
Anne Riley:Oh, good.
Jacob:I I you
Anne Riley:do I wanted to make it accessible. I knew the some of these concepts just by looking at DNA, people go, oh. You know? Yeah. And I was, no.
Anne Riley:Not that hard. I will tell you. And every time later in the book, when I compare it to humans, I will always restate what the natural world was, and this is how humans are different. And so you can see them side by side. And that was very important for me to get people to be able to see the difference between humans and animals even as we're looking at their similarities.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let's we we presented a couple of the cool ideas in in in your book, but let's just, meta back up just a hair. Yeah.
Jacob:Give me the like, I just sat next to you on an airplane, and I look over your screen and see that you're, like, working on a book. You're typing it up. And I lean over. I say, hey. I'm sorry.
Jacob:I've been eavesdropping. I've been reading a couple of your your sentences there. It looks really fascinating. What are you working on? What are you trying to present?
Jacob:There's your impossible question to answer. Like, what like, what's your
Anne Riley:book about? I'd say, first of all, I'd say, are you a producer?
Jacob:Would you like to make a
Anne Riley:film of this? Just teasing. That's always been my dream. Somebody will say, I'll stop ring you. Yeah.
Anne Riley:And I'm like, not so easy. I have to go I have to do this the hard way. But I would say that, I had a very hard time trying to answer this question because the the answer is simple, but the the case it takes a lot to make the case to to convince you it's right. So I I, you know, I would say, well, I'm writing a book about how humans fit in the world. And people go, that doesn't mean anything to you.
Anne Riley:And so it's very hard, to to make something sound interesting when it's like basically, what I've come up with is an idea with all the facts we still have today. I haven't changed any obviously, I haven't discovered any new facts, but I've synthesized them in a new way. And people are today don't think that you can create a new idea. You know, everybody's invented everything. Right?
Anne Riley:It's like there's so many people. There's so many new ideas. And to me, I look at this idea and I say, why did anybody think of this before? Because it seems really obvious to me. But it's only obvious because I went through this journey of looking at how animals work, how people work, and and and looked at the difference.
Anne Riley:I mean, literally, item by item where I could. And, really, what's happened is in our world, we have had thousands of years of people theorizing why we exist. We have philosophers. We have religion. We have all these people who say, this is the human condition.
Anne Riley:This is what we're made of. This is all the things. And these ideas have been carrying on for 1000 of years. Right? And then when did we learn about cells?
Anne Riley:When did we learn about DNA? Maybe a 100 years ago. So what's happened is we have all of these answers that are moved through time, and now we look back and go, oh, but now we know really how animals work. And we can look at how cells collaborate, and we can make the parallel to humans, but we have to make some adjustments because of that human thinking thing. But only now can we look at the parallels and yet nobody has done it.
Anne Riley:And so I'm not the best messenger for this. I'm a total introvert. I you know? But I it's like this is something I need to tell the world about and let them let these really smart people go with this idea. So and and what I what I ended with is that there is in fact, like, animals have one job.
Anne Riley:Their cells do one thing, they survive. And they have a very intricate way they work together to survive. And I think that humans also have a one one sentence solution or a one word solution. It's 2 words actually because we have two levels. We have physical level and we have a mental level, but we have 2 words that can keep us surviving.
Anne Riley:And what I did was come down to, in my case, is one sentence. This is the sentence we need to survive. But to know how to implement that one sentence, we have to look back and look at how animals do it as a guide. So you wanna know the one sentence?
Jacob:Yes.
Anne Riley:Okay. The one sentence is is that humans should be able to do whatever they want as long as they don't harm one another. That's it. That's exactly how cells work in a body. Those cells can do their jobs 247, but they can't harm the other cells.
Anne Riley:And if they do, the brain gets, you know, gets notice of it and comes down and says, okay. We're gonna fix this. We're gonna stop this. They will do whatever they can to stop harm to the body and other cells. And they will and cancer is a case where the cells trick the brain into thinking they're part of the body when they're not, and that will kill the body.
Anne Riley:You know, that's like cancer is a great example of the cells that got away with it. Right? But if we you know, a lot of people say love one another. Love is the answer. Love isn't the answer.
Anne Riley:We don't we're too different for everybody to love and agree with each other. That's okay. We are made to be different. We are made to choose, but what we can't do is harm each other. And the coordinating system, the government of humans, should be a system that allows people to maximize their choice and minimize the harm to others.
Anne Riley:And just imagine how good our society would be if we allowed that to be the foundation of our decision. Yeah. And when we look at that, our constitution, I think, was trying to do that. They just didn't state it so clearly, but those 5, you know, preserve the commonwealth, or preserve the common good, you know, protect our borders, do all these things, you know, keep maximize liberty. I mean, we were doing those things in the so what happens is the constitution is like the set of DNA, right, for our society, and the laws we make are are the instructions we've we the RNA makes up.
Anne Riley:Right? We say here's our goal and the laws need to make those those things. But because we've done it using religion as our background or or, other philosophical, you know, ideas, we've come up with ways that don't quite match with what I call the prime directive, you know, the the sort of do no harm and let everybody do what they want. So if you were gonna make laws, we would look at a law and say or look at a thing, like, somebody says, I don't like gay people. I don't want people to be gay.
Anne Riley:It's like, well, gay people don't harm anybody. They can marry another gay person, and it does not harm me. Nothing harms me there. And so the government says, nope, they get to do what they want. They're not harming anybody.
Anne Riley:But if the same person says, oh, I want 30 guns and I wanna be able to shoot, you know, kids up in a school, we say, oh, wait. Guns can harm people. We need regulations to prevent harm. So if you look at how a government would be designed in what I call the ideal sphere, we would have a government that assesses everything based on harm. If something can harm another person, it gets regulated.
Anne Riley:End of story. And in a world where more complicated ideas are coming up, more harm could be done, there are going to be more regulations. But the goal is you can't harm people. And, you know, things that aren't harmful, like transgender people, they don't harm anybody else. Nope.
Anne Riley:That's okay. You know? Racism, stupid. Cells cells don't care about race. They don't care if a cell is a little different of color.
Anne Riley:It means nothing to them, and we should be the same. But we have a long cultural, religious, philosophical history to do things differently, and we knew it when we think they're right. And I'm just saying, look at nature as your guide, and maybe that's not so right.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's so interesting to think of, I I think the the intersection of, like, DNA wanting to proliferate, like, life wanting to continue on having, an innate moral feature to it, like, it's it's always a fascinating intersection. Like, I feel like, you you know, your work in the book kind of does present ways in which it's like that there's a, like, nature rewards morality.
Jacob:Like, like, there there's a reason why we have these concepts of, like, good and bad or we should do these things, and and they have their own, reoccurring, rewards.
Anne Riley:Well, I I make a point in my book that morality is a human construct. Nature doesn't have morality. Nature follows instructions. And if the instructions allow it to survive and its progeny to survive, then that's a good thing to do. If it turns out that it's also good for something, that's kind of an incidental purpose.
Anne Riley:Their prime directive is to survive and they will do what they can to survive. And even animals who, you know, they generally will not attack their own kind because it's too risky. It's the size, same size, same way. You don't have a good chance. It is much better to go go after the rabbit or the squirrel who are smaller and can't defend themselves than to go after a big animal.
Anne Riley:You know? So what looks like morality is just what worked for 1000000000 of years in survival. But we come along, and this is where humans are really different is we can choose morality. Everybody chooses morality. So that's why you had religions with one set of rules and another religion with another set of rules and one goes, wait.
Anne Riley:That's not good. And we say, well, it's not one or the other is right. Humans have the ability to choose our ideas. As long as you get people to accept your idea, it's gonna live in the world. If nobody accepts your idea, it's not gonna live in the world.
Anne Riley:So you can have a good idea, you can have a bad idea, you can have an indifferent idea, but if somebody follows you, that idea starts to get legs. And that's what history is made of, ideas that won.
Jacob:Yeah. Right. Exactly. Okay. So so what's your what's your, thought?
Jacob:Have you read oh, jeez. I forget the author. Katherine, it's called Big Magic. It's a
Anne Riley:I have not read that.
Jacob:Oh, man. I I'm spacing the author, but, it's kind of like a book for creatives and artists. Like, I I stumbled upon, a a friend suggested it to me kind of, like, it's it's a good for artists to read of, like, believing in yourself type thing, like, ideas.
Anne Riley:Oh, okay.
Jacob:Kinda talks about the muse a bit. Right. But she she talks about kind of, like, where do where do ideas even come from? What are ideas? And then she has these fascinating stories.
Jacob:She has she has one I'll summarize really quickly of. She met this woman, and they became close friends, and they're both authors. And, she ended up this author who wrote this original book, she had this, like, idea she'd been kinda working on throughout the couple years, and she has these characters and a plot line and all these things, and she kinda shelved it. It was, like, you know, in a storage unit. It's been 5 years since she had opened it or something like that.
Jacob:Well, and and her and this other author friend came close, and they were having lunch one day. And, her friend was like, well, let me tell you about my new book. She starts explaining explaining it to her, and it's the the correlation. She's pretty much telling her of her own book. And she's going, like, wait.
Jacob:Hold on. Like, are you sure? Are you messing with me? Like, you didn't read my book. I I didn't tell you about this, whatever.
Jacob:And so she kinda backs up, and it and it kind of expands the, you know, ideas aren't ours in in in some sense. They're like and sometimes if you don't catch it, if you don't take action, it's gonna go on to the next person, and they might have that invitation.
Anne Riley:Right. And it's in the air. In fact, there's a very a very famous story about Charles Darwin. So Charles Darwin did the Voyage of the Beagle when he was, like, 22 to 27. He went on a 5 year cruise, and he was the the basically, he was the the botanist, but he was also the companion to the captain because the captain wasn't allowed to talk to the the lower rungs of the ship, the guys who'd, you know, oared the ship.
Anne Riley:So he needed somebody of his same class to go with him and keep him from going crazy. That was the whole idea why Charles Darwin got this 5 year gig. And in that, if you read the Voyage of the Beagle where he wrote all his notes, you can see that he worked out the evolution the the the whole concept of evolution then. And then he wrote it and rewrote it and studied it and did this, and he he put together the book and then sat on it until I don't know. He had it, I think, done in the 18 fifties.
Anne Riley:And then same idea. He gets 1, from a a guy named Alfred Russel Wallace, something like that. Sends him he's over in Tahiti or the the far east. He sends him his book and says, I'd like you to look at my book and comment on it before I publish it. It's the theory of evolution.
Anne Riley:And he's like, oh, shit. And so but being the kind of man he was, they both agreed to publish together. So if you look at the front of Charles Darwin book, it will have Wallace's name in the book because it was like they he didn't publish it before, so they agreed to publish it together. Charles Darwin, of course, got the most. He was more famous than the other guy, so he got all the credit.
Anne Riley:But this this in fact, in there's a book I I wrote a a a fictional story of of this theory. It's called Dina. And in in here, the the character's name is Sarah Wallace, and Wallace is a shout out to Wallace. Nice. From yeah.
Anne Riley:Yeah. That was my one Easter egg I put in.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Little hint. Okay.
Anne Riley:But but, yeah, it's in the air. That's what they say. When you get new theories, they're in the air. I haven't seen this one as much, I think, because most people deal with such details about humans. I'm going, what is the foundation of humans?
Anne Riley:So it's not in the air like I I kind of thought it would be and I would find people who were connecting to this. I'm not finding that, but I'm hoping that this will be a kind of the book that people can use to I I think the people to take this concept of do no harm and let people maximize their choice and apply it to our problems, to our industries, to our to our, you know, construction of government, all of these things, and make better and different decisions that will allow us to survive.
Jacob:Yeah. Okay. So how do you how do you think about, like, getting this book in the hands of people who, you know, aren't necessarily interested in deeply in science or philosophy, or or even like, say they're materialistic thinkers without realizing they're materialistic. Maybe that's not even a word in their vocabulary, you know, because Mhmm. Sometimes a lot of these concepts, to someone who's not used to, you know, hanging out in them, it takes it's, like, takes a little a little bit.
Jacob:You do do a nice job of setting that layer and building on top of it, though, I I will say.
Anne Riley:Right. Right. And, well, that's the first thing you do is you make it accessible to anybody who is remotely interested. You'd be like, oh, here's a way that you can access these ideas. And this might be the kind of a thing because it's sort of a new concept.
Anne Riley:You know, you have to revisit things multiple times before you get them. You know? I mean, that's why you have, you know, 12 years of math when you're in school because you keep repeating the lessons and then extending it. Well, that's the one thing. The second thing is is, you know, I you know, social media.
Anne Riley:I'm I'm doing podcasts. I'm I'm gonna sign up to I'd I'd like to do some speaking, you know, at different, you know, functions where people can be like, oh. You know, because what I want is I don't wanna own the idea. I want to spread the idea. I want people to take this one simple idea and look at their world in this vein and see if they can't come up with better solutions.
Anne Riley:And it sounds easy, but it's not really it hasn't been something we've done. You know? The closest thing we have is the golden rule, and that says, you know, treat others like you want to be treated. And there's a big caveat in there. It's like, well, I treat myself like shit so I can treat everyone like shit.
Anne Riley:Like, well, no. That's not what we meant. Yeah. So, you know, so this is trying to be a little more clear, you know, in how we do it. But, you know, it's just it's gonna be a slow, slow effort because, it's a big world with lots of com com, competing.
Anne Riley:I think just it's a competing ideas. And and I'm not talking like I'm competing with Charles Darwin or Isaac Asimov. I'm competing with Kim Kardashian and That's so weird. I thought that
Jacob:was in my tongue. Yeah.
Anne Riley:Yeah. It was like, oh, yeah. You know? What's she wearing today versus, oh, let's talk about the, you know, the definition of human, you know, existence. It's like, I think I'll go with Kim.
Jacob:Yeah. You're like, I got a lot
Anne Riley:going on today. Like, I got Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So I know I know what it's like.
Anne Riley:You know, I know what I have to do and I will I will do it in good faith, but I don't know the answer to how it's gonna turn out. I would just hope that people will pick it up and go, oh, yeah. This is really worth thinking about. You know, and I'm like, okay. Maybe I should make an audiobook because young kids don't even read.
Anne Riley:You know? And I'm like, okay. I'll I'll I'll do that because, like you said, then I can view view my voice with all the, you know, the jokes that I wanna get in there that are kinda subtle in there. It's like, yeah. I can put those in there.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's as much as I I love reading in any form, I I must say, I spend a lot of my time reading audiobooks just because I if I can go for a walk while I'm reading, I am having the best day ever. So
Anne Riley:Exactly. And and I know that and that that's like, okay. This is the next thing, you know, to to find a, produce I do a YouTube where I've gotten better at my voice and doing that stuff, and I I am doing, you know, 3 or 5 minute, you know, snippet of the book. Great. It goes forward.
Anne Riley:But it will you know, at this rate, 500 years, I'll have it done. You know? It'll be good. So
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's I mean, I think that's the fascinating thing about, you know, we're talking about even, you know, where ideas come from, even kind of I'm thinking of your, when you talked about, you know, bees collecting pollen. You know, maybe that bee feels like an individual or or whatever, but, realistically, they're making honey with with with the hive.
Jacob:Mhmm. I think,
Anne Riley:in
Jacob:in some sense, when we follow our own bliss or we follow our own, like, you know, whatever is hinting at us personally to work on and we put it into the bigger picture, it's like we may not you know, we're we let go of it so it doesn't have to be so personal anymore, and now it's it can be part of making honey
Anne Riley:and Right.
Jacob:Part of, the pollination process. So
Anne Riley:Right. Well, and it's it's very I think bees are very interesting because I think I make a book a point in in Dina, in this book, that, you know, there's a a Socratic dialogue going along between Dina and Sarah Wallace, the the main character. And and Sarah asks Dina, will humans ever be like bees and live in colonies? And Dina says no. And and she says, well, why not?
Anne Riley:And it's because we have ideas. We went a different direction. Once you have ideas, choosing and being individual becomes our nature and bees follow instructions. You have a colony which is the a very weird thing because it's a it's a structure of its own. You can think of it as its own body where the queen is the brain and the bees are all the cells, but they're not cells.
Anne Riley:They're bees. But they work together for the good of the hive and the bee bee core, the queen bee coordinates them. And then that's how they work, but we don't work that way. We went the idea route. And so we part of our meaning is that well, let me go back a little bit, Is remember, any animal, they have their DNA is their their sort of goal.
Anne Riley:And when they process the DNA instructions, that's their rules that they live by. Right? You know? So that's how it works. We go along.
Anne Riley:We are born with no ideas. We are required to create our own goals if we are going to have a happy life. And you know what's one that's very interesting is when we're born, a lot of times, your parents who are the coordinating function of your family. Right? They're the coordinators of your family.
Anne Riley:They put ideas in your head, but do they always put I the idea in your head that you must create your own goals? No. They're like, you need to do this and you need to do this and you need to do this. They do all the rules, but the kid doesn't have the goals. It gets confused.
Anne Riley:I grew up and I think this is part of the roles of, you know, I grew up very one of 12 kids where it wasn't just my mom and dad saying these are the rules. All my older siblings were saying, here's what you do. Here's what you do. I'm, like, I'm confused. But, you know, my job and the job as an adult is to sort it all out and say, these are my goals.
Anne Riley:These are my values. This is what I'm gonna do. And then make the rules that you're going to live by. This is not universally taught to our children.
Jacob:Yeah.
Anne Riley:And I think the world would be better if we taught them that. Instead of saying, you can't be gay. You can't do this. You have to go to church after the It's like the kids like, but I'm not built this way.
Jacob:Yeah.
Anne Riley:And instead of saying, oh, honey, you're built this way. I I remember telling my kids, you know and I wasn't very good at it, but I said, look. You get to be the expert on you. You are your expert. And when you're 18, all I done is put in the best ideas I could for you.
Anne Riley:But you need to figure them out which ones work for you. And, you know, my kids I have 3 kids and they're diametrically opposite from each other, not just by nature, but because of the choices and the values that they carry forward. And I was pretty bad at it because I was one of those, you have to do this and this and this and this while I was telling them they get to be the expert on themselves. So
Jacob:Of course. Yeah.
Anne Riley:You know, this is pretty, you know, double message there, mixed messages from mom. But
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. I I think that's just just part of life is is of course, we're gonna have a structure of how we think it should all work, but we're also humans with emotions and, you know, the dishes still get dirty and the burrito's still delicious and all that sort
Anne Riley:of stuff. So Right. But if we did more to say, look. You are a person who has to form your own goals. I can give you lots of ideas, but know that you form them and it's okay for you to form the ones that work for you.
Anne Riley:And form the rules. The only the only rule that exists is you can't hurt anybody else. So whatever goals you form, you just can't hurt anybody else, but you can do whatever you want. And I think that's why my kids are so different from each other. They made different choices based on what was important to them.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I mean, like, what what a beautiful invitation to open, you know, to infinite possibilities, you know, because we all we all know how the internal dialogue in our head goes and and how easy Right.
Jacob:Quickly it can be defeating. And so,
Anne Riley:I love that.
Jacob:I I think that's it. I thought
Anne Riley:I was embarrassed to listen. Yeah. And it made my life better because as soon as I figured this out, I can look at my own behavior and go, you know, okay. I didn't hurt anybody by that. And maybe I wasn't really thrilled with that behavior.
Anne Riley:Don't do that again. But you weren't hurting anybody. You're okay. Or when somebody is bugging me, I go, you know, they're not hurting anybody by that. That's just who they are.
Anne Riley:That's okay. You need to step back and be okay with this because they're not hurting anybody. And it really helps me to sort out what's really important and what's not. You know? And my life has a lot more people because of that.
Jacob:You know?
Anne Riley:And I think that if we taught kids because kids are born with, I mean, babies are born with literally no ideas, and I have a kind of a funny little story about, you know, babies born with no ideas and what the parents immediately get the baby home and we put 90 of them in their heads. You know? But if we did a better job as all these coordinating functions, understanding that they don't have any ideas and what ideas we put in their head is very important Yeah. That that would be something that if you taught kids this in school and at home, how much better would they be when they got to 18 and were on their own or started living their own lives? I think we would be better if we said, yeah.
Anne Riley:This is okay. You get you get to make your choices. And the only time the direction occurs is when you say, look. You can't harm. I'm sorry.
Anne Riley:You may be, not like what Johnny did, but you can't hit Johnny. You can't. You know? That's harm. That crosses the line.
Anne Riley:You can tell Johnny you don't like what he says in a nice voice. That's okay. But you can't you can't haul off and hit him. Yeah. You know?
Jacob:Yeah. I I love this. Okay. So I I was thinking, I I'm pretty fascinated myself in in my own world. I'm deeply into meditation and, like, I love learning about the concepts of self, and, I I take a I take a lot from, like, Advaita Vedanta.
Jacob:I don't know if you're familiar with those.
Anne Riley:Mhmm. Well, not much, but some.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Enough to kinda if I say say the word, you know, at least a a bit what I'm talking about. So I I kinda wonder, you just said a baby is born with no ideas, with the preemptive that I just was talking about the self and our identity. Can you expand a little bit more on that?
Anne Riley:Well, yeah. Now a baby is born with no ideas, which means the the, the mental structures in their head. Right? But they're born with all of their natural instructions. They are, they are a person.
Anne Riley:I I I liken a baby to a full member of the ecosystem and a potential member of the ideas sphere.
Jacob:Oh, I love this.
Anne Riley:Right? They have no ideas, but they have all their instructions. So you have all their history, their genetic history. They have inclinations. They have potential talents.
Anne Riley:And, you know, all those things are in there, but they're they're they're not, evident at any point. Right? You just you have a baby and they come home and what do they do? They cry and they eat and they poop, you know, and that's about it. But, you know, you start it's it's even 3 or 4 weeks before they start to smile.
Anne Riley:Right? You know, and they get up in the middle of the night. It's like they don't know. They just they're doing their full ecosystem members who are surviving in the way they know how, which is cry to get fed, cry when they poop, cry when they're tired, cry when anything. That's what they do.
Anne Riley:And then but over time, you start talking to them, you hug them, they do all these things, and you start developing these ideas. Even though their brains can't handle ideas, you're putting ideas in their heads from the very beginning. And they are starting to become members of the ideasphere. And what ideas you put in their heads will be critical to how they, how they develop and and who they are. I mean, if you, you know, are in a in a home in which the parents are always yelling, that child may be traumatized by that, and you won't even know it for years because they don't know.
Anne Riley:It's just gotten into their deep, deep, deep level of ideas that they don't even know they had. I mean, that's what I think. I think by the time I had my first idea, I can remember my 4th birthday, I heard there's already a lot of stuff that I had figured out that I didn't know until, like, my brain caught up to me to go, oh. Oh.
Jacob:Yeah.
Anne Riley:I get this or I get this. You know? So
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Anne Riley:It's a mystery.
Jacob:Yeah. The the ideas are always working underneath the surface and, like, waiting for connections to be made to where you can express them. Yeah.
Anne Riley:And the deeper they are, the harder they are to access and change so that if you have deep trauma from early childhood and you may be acting out here, getting back to that to change it is really hard. That's why people do meditation or they go to therapy or they do these things because these things are deep. And I don't know the mechanisms by which you can access them to get a child, you know, to get adult to be okay with themselves because they didn't learn it as a child. You know, that's a hard one. That's a really hard one.
Anne Riley:But that's why I think it's so important to add element of teaching children this sort of prime directive as they grow and how it looks in the world. And, you know, when you're 34, it means, you know, you can't take a toy away from your other friend or, you know, but, you know, but when you're 12, it's gonna be like, woah, you can't, you know, I don't know, drive, you know, drink and drive the car home. You know? I mean, there are things you do. These these are potential dangers.
Anne Riley:And so how you teach that as a child develops needs some experts to help with people who understand child development and people who understand that's not me. I can give you the idea, but I need those experts to say, oh, this is how we should implement these ideas as children grow.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I think about a lot, just kind of the concept of podcasts in general or even just, you know, the Internet, social media, we're also connected. We can have you can have an idea, you know, wherever you're at, and then within minutes, I can be thinking about the same idea because you called me up. That's pretty profound as far as ideas are concerned.
Jacob:Like, they just streamlined to they just learned how to teleport, basically. So how do you think about, kind of the way that within time and technology and in all of our cultural advancements, how do you think about, I suppose, like, the how quickly ideas pass through each other in their, scenarios and settings? Like, it Yeah. Are we gonna look back and look at podcasts and go, wow. Those were a much more profound thing than we thought they were at the time.
Jacob:We thought they were just fun, cool conversations. We're gonna talk about our book, but they're actually we're figuring out what who and what we are in some ways in a lot of these conversations. Right.
Anne Riley:Well, I have, I don't know if you've gone to appendix 2 of my book, but I talk about social media. And Okay.
Jacob:I didn't get to that. I wanna hear.
Anne Riley:That's okay. It's a it'd be really interesting. I'll I'll I'll kind of spoil it for you a little bit, but but, but it's also any sort of podcasting. So the the the whole concept of social media has changed how we communicate. You know, if you look at the concept of freedom of speech and you look at how, when when that that, was written into the bill of rights.
Anne Riley:People could speak it was pretty limited. Right? People could get on a soapbox and speak, and it would go maybe 30 yards and that was it. Right? So freedom of speech was relatively harmless.
Anne Riley:And maybe we had a newspaper and at the head of the newspaper was it was sort of a you know, the newspaper is like a a gate. Right? And the people at the head of the newspaper could decide what goes in and what doesn't go in. And what happened, I think kind of historically, I look at it this way is there became a sort of a mutual benefit there. People wanted truth, so they paid for truth.
Anne Riley:And the new newspaper people wanted to sell their newspapers. So if they were true, people would buy their newspapers. If they were false and they found out, people wouldn't buy their newspapers because they couldn't count on them. So journalism grew up with an ethic of we gotta tell the truth, it has to be verified, we have to be accountable. You know, all of these things, there's 5 values.
Anne Riley:If you look up journalism, there's 5 values that they have that says, okay, we'll do this. And and that worked for a while because there was the gates, there were very limited gates. It was really expensive to produce the newspaper, and and there wasn't anything else. But then, you know, we got to radio. And, and, you know, with radio, now we were going over the airwaves.
Anne Riley:And so they they you know, the government said, oh, we have a problem now. We we we we can't ensure this truth. Now so they put in a fairness doctrine. And the fairness doctrine said if you're gonna talk about a current issue, you have to talk about both sides of the current issue. End of story.
Anne Riley:And that, went up until 1987 when Ronald Reagan abandoned that law. And partly, he was sort of like, well, we'd we'd now had cable TV. Well, cable TV went under the ground, so it couldn't be regulated over the air because it didn't go over the air so people could say what they wanted. So it was kind of like it was coming anyway. But so that's how that's how things have kinda evolved.
Anne Riley:And now we've had social media. And social media, the difference is, again, it's like now we have anybody could speak and anybody can say anything. They can post anything. The problem is, there's no longer a standard of journalism. And the the post that you make is a physical thing.
Anne Riley:It has a life of its own. It's not it's like a newspaper. You can pass a newspaper around. Well, you can pass social media posts around a long time. So now it's not just an idea, it's a thing.
Anne Riley:Yeah. So now is it really speech when you create a thing or is it something else? And so what I'm thinking is that freedom of thought I know. I'm blowing your brain. I'm sorry.
Anne Riley:No, it's true.
Jacob:I love it.
Anne Riley:Yeah. Yeah. But but, so I think what's it's freedom of thought should be unfettered. You can think whatever you want, but when you start to get into speech where it is can be spread around and picked up by other people, it's a different animal. Now what so the solution I came up with is that in social media, because it has a life of its own, and we can't people should be able to say what they want, they should also be required to describe their speech as truthful or not truthful.
Anne Riley:So if I say, I post on Facebook, oh, my dog is the cutest dog in the world. I will also have to say, this is not true. This is my opinion.
Jacob:Right.
Anne Riley:If I say, the election was rigged, I have to say, this is not true. It's my opinion. Right? And if some if I say the election was rigged, it's true. Anybody can come back and say, nope.
Anne Riley:Nope. Nope. All the evidence shows there is no evidence that this election was rigged. It's not true. And then that person gets warned.
Anne Riley:And if they keep doing it, they get taken out because it's like, nope. You're required to accurately describe your speech. It you're still free to speak, but you must accurately describe it because we're in a world in which the speech can be the speech can be equally true or equally false.
Jacob:Yeah.
Anne Riley:You know, it it you can say both, but you have to tell us which one you're saying. So if somebody says, you know, Hillary Clinton is a pedophile, I have to say, it's false. It's my opinion. And then everybody can go, oh, that asshole, it's their opinion. You know what I mean?
Anne Riley:It's like you at least have described it as something that is untrue.
Jacob:Right.
Anne Riley:Yeah. You know? And that's the best I can do because people have the right to speak in our society. So that was my solution, to do and the regulation is very easy because the guys at the top, the the, you know, the Zuckerbergs and the Elon Musks, they must say you know, they can put in the thing that that says you have to describe your speech. You can't even post unless you describe it as true or false, you know, and that you take responsibility for this post.
Anne Riley:And then and then the the there's 2 or 3 rules that say you can argue whether it's true or argue whether it's false, and then if you do it 3 times, you're out. Like but so Yeah. That's an idea. I I I I wanna put up I am not an expert on social media, but I want to put out things and say, this is actually, I said, you know, if this is how a cell work, a cell is required to put its information up to the brain and the brain gets to decide what it needs to do about the cell situation. So if you cut your finger, there are messages that go up from the cells to the brain and the brain says, oh, emergency on right index finger.
Anne Riley:You guys get down there, fix it, make it what what happens? First of all, you get a clot, then you get a, you know, then you get a scar, and then it's back to normal. You know? Because this stuff is going we need we should be able to do the same thing. Right?
Anne Riley:And the thing is if it's a sell, a sell's gonna look at Facebook and go, well, 99.9% of this is crap. We don't even need this. Yeah. You know? But but people rule differently.
Anne Riley:People like the 99%, you know, stupid stuff on, social media. So let it go. We have to be we have to adjust for humans, but nature can guide us in how to proceed.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I was thinking of, I as much as it's awesome just a cesspool, but I do drop in from time to time on Twitter, and, they have a a community notes. I don't know if you've seen that.
Jacob:Mhmm. Yes. And I think that's a that's a I like that. I think it's a step in the right direction for us to planning on. Sometimes it's a little confusing because it's like, well, who is the arbiter of truth here?
Jacob:Like, is there a ceiling on that? Who who watches the watchers? Sort of there is that whole thing, but I think it's a step in the right direction.
Anne Riley:Well, nature requires the every cell to report up. So my thing was, well, if nature can make every cell report, you make every poster report on their work. Don't make an arbiter. Don't you don't have to have community codes. Every person must report on their own, and they are going to then learn.
Anne Riley:If they don't understand the difference between a truth and a lie, they're gonna figure it out pretty darn quick. And that's the difference is you make you you put the responsibility where it is where it is most effective. And this one, I think, is most effective when you make people be accountable for their actions. Because a lot of these people post this stuff and they're not accountable for how where it goes and how how far it goes and what damage they're doing. So I'm gonna make them I want them to be accountable for what they say.
Anne Riley:And when it comes back, there's there's gonna be somebody says, oh, somebody posted this and said it was true, and it is not we can get that guy to, you know, to repost and say, oops. We screwed up here or whatever. Or Yeah. They don't get to play because truth is important. Knowing that something is true and knowing that something is false in our world today is very important.
Jacob:Very important.
Anne Riley:And we don't have any mechanisms to do that, so this is a very easy one to make everybody start being trained on how to know the difference between a lie and a truth.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I think what happens with social media that gets really confusing is so as much as very important conversations are taking place on there, there's also, like, you know, there's also me laying in bed before I'm trying to fall asleep just trying to get a little laugh from a from, you know, a fart joke or what something that's in school. So right now it's a very
Anne Riley:important dog video for me. Yeah.
Jacob:Yeah. It's a so it's it's kind of hard. I I I I kinda just wonder where we're gonna end up. You know, in 10 years when we talk about social media, are we gonna have this strange conversation? Yeah.
Jacob:We used to have all that stuff right on the same, like, within a millisecond, you're looking you know, you just thought about something deep about society and the government and human's existence, and then the next thing is, like, just, you know, a dog fart.
Anne Riley:So Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And that's the and you know what? If that's what we wanna do, that's okay.
Anne Riley:But let's let's put some accountability there for the things that are again, the problem is you're having just like you said, oh, I would I would reinterpret what you said as you can have non harmful posts and harmful posts, and they're all mixed up together.
Jacob:Yeah.
Anne Riley:So how do you how do you let people know what they're getting?
Jacob:Right.
Anne Riley:And that's what I'm saying is that people have to say it themselves. And over time, people will get trained. Oh, I know I'm not gonna be able to say that because it's not true, unless I say it's false. And then it's like, okay. You know, you said the election was rigged, but that's false.
Anne Riley:I'll just put it out there as false. You know?
Jacob:Right. Right.
Anne Riley:Like, are people still, FEMA didn't come to Asheville. It's like, actually, they did. So you have to say, just my opinion. It's like, well, what do you know? You live in Minnesota.
Anne Riley:You know?
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I mean, I I think that is a powerful move though is is putting the responsibility on that's we should be deeply we were interacting with each other in in potentially a very profound way.
Jacob:We should take responsibility. I do kinda wonder, about I I spent a lot of time in the world of, just creating stuff. I let read a lot of poetry. I make a lot of music. I'm really not very good at making music, but I love making it.
Jacob:Sometimes I like sharing a you know, just I mean, sometimes I'm going on a walk, and I smoked a joint, and I wanna share a thought.
Anne Riley:So Right.
Jacob:I I get, like, sometimes having all that freedom exist in the same place. Like, sometimes I'm hard it's hard to quantify.
Anne Riley:Right. Right. Right. Well, again, what you're saying is exactly the nature of humans is we wanna maximize our freedom, and I'm, like, all for maximizing freedom.
Jacob:Yeah.
Anne Riley:But the only line is no harm to others. If you went on your walk, you smoked a joint, you punch somebody out, you'll you cross the line. Right? But if you go and you do it and you're thinking your thoughts and you're maybe making up some new music, that's great. That's what I want people to do.
Anne Riley:The world is great when everybody is in tune with what their values are and doing them. That's what makes the world great. And if everybody could just let everybody do that and not be afraid that they're gonna get hurt by the next guy who doesn't like how they look. Yeah. You know?
Anne Riley:We're we have to that's to me, if you're gonna make a better world, you have to envision a better world first. And that's what I'm doing here is envisioning the the core, the goal, or the the the foundation of a better world, and then lots of people fill in the gaps.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant. I love that.
Jacob:Okay. So where where do you see the concepts that you that you've posed in not just this book, and this is the only one that I've read from you, but along with your other books. For 1, I would love to know kinda what's what's what seems to be for you anyway, the kind of the through line between then them, if any? And then also, what do you what are your expectations with this work? Like, what what source you know, outside of of these conversations?
Jacob:Like, do you want to be cross laterally, collaborating with with other philosophers and and scientists who are also in in these same worlds? Like like, where would you like this to end up? What do you want it to face?
Anne Riley:Okay. Josef, that's a good question. So I'll start with the through line of the book, so then I'll tell you what I, remind me if I forget to tell you what I'd wanna you know, where I want this to be. But so I started writing books. I only write books when I have something to say, something important to say.
Anne Riley:And my first book is about happiness. And it was my struggle because I grew up really insecure. The 11th of 12 children and a pretty, you know, anxiously, you know, designed person, it was hard. I had a lot of I just had a lot of trouble when I was early on. And so this is a, like, little vignettes of my challenges and, like, little lessons I learned from them.
Anne Riley:And what I but what I came down to in this book was that I needed to make my own values. So that was it went later on, the book about humans need to make their own goals, I had discovered independently sort of for my own sanity that I had to do that. Yeah. So it ends up being, oh, no. That's the actually kind of based on how this all works.
Anne Riley:We really need to do that because that's a hole that missed in how we're designed. You know? So that was that one. The second book is kind of a romantic suspense business book, and it was really starting my views about business and what, you know, that that I have a big section of my book about the dangers of profit maximization.
Jacob:Right.
Anne Riley:That profit maximization is a vehicle by which people, can harm others and say, well, I got a good reason. I maximize my profit. Agree. And and it also skews the resources into one direction because once you get really good and get a lot of resources, you can use those resources to, to change your environment. You can buy off the government.
Anne Riley:You know, you can lobby lobby the government legally that is just legalized bribery, you know, and do all these things. So so I have a I'm an accountant, and I have economic background, but profit maximization is, to me, one of the great evils of of a society, of coexistence and living together. It's what creates social inequality and creates so many pressures on people when we should be going the other way. So that book was sort of my start of that. And it was a it was just a fiction, and it's a love story, and it's all that stuff.
Anne Riley:But that's what that one is. And then Dina was where this one where I worked out the theory using the Socratic dialogue between the the creatures, you know, the the Sarah and and Dina. And that was where I really worked out the details of how this worked. And so it's twice as long as the theory book. And the theory book, the human idea, which is this new one that just came out, this one, I just cut the story out and put in more examples, and it's just the theory.
Anne Riley:So that's how they all link together. But those early books were really seeds, planting seeds. This was the thing. I keep thinking about this stuff. I hadn't put it together yet.
Anne Riley:And this is just the culmination of putting those ideas together in one place. So and so what I want out of this is I wanna be a Charles Darwin who's alive. You know? I want to be the the person who sort of is the you can go to and say, oh, Anne Riley created this ideas the ideas for your theory, but look at what we can do with it. I don't really care about Anne Reilly.
Anne Riley:That's just the base. But look what we can do with this idea, and that's what I really want. As I wanted to spread as far and wide is because there are so many smarter people than me who know so much more than me. And if they apply this one concept, what would their decisions look like? What would homelessness look like?
Anne Riley:What would education look like? What would policing look like? What would, you know, these militaristic groups look like? How do we do this? I have ideas on all of those based on just this simple start, and I'm not an expert in any of them.
Anne Riley:But part of that is my advantage because I'm not I'm not bogged down by the details they know. But if they could tell what I knew and then say, oh, but here are the details, they can figure out how to make them work.
Jacob:I can't.
Anne Riley:You see what I mean? That's what I want for the future. I
Jacob:yeah. I I love that. I I think that's so good. I I, Yeah. It makes me think you might, you may have heard this, but, this concept that I think you'll like, that I've heard is, being the usher of epiphany.
Anne Riley:Yeah.
Jacob:What do you
Anne Riley:think about that, like That that's a pretty high standard.
Jacob:Setting the ideas out when it comes to you and you're making sure it goes out, but, like, it's not necessarily a personal, like, I need to achieve this thing.
Anne Riley:Don't want in fact, you know, I'm old that and the world's gonna go on. I mean, I'm you know, I want I want this to be an idea that people embrace because it's a good idea, not because it's my idea. That will probably go the other way. I was like, oh, it's her idea. Uh-uh.
Anne Riley:You know? But I'm like, you know, I want people to say, oh, yeah, there's some value here and I can use this and make the world a better place. But from what I'm talking about, we need we have a long way to go. We do not make decisions this way. We have not structured our economy, our social structures, or anything this way.
Anne Riley:We got a long way to go. But if you start, it may only be a few generations before the world would really be a better place.
Jacob:Yeah. Absolutely. So Yeah. Yeah. Let let's at least get the right hand talking to the left hand.
Jacob:You know?
Anne Riley:Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Jacob:Yeah. Well, cool. Let me glance at my notes over here just to make sure there wasn't any I I I had so many. I just, your book was difficult that I as I I was reading it, I feel like every three sentences I have, like, oh, that sparks a cool idea. And I had to write it down.
Jacob:And after a while, I had to chill out on taking my own notes because I wasn't getting anywhere on the book. So
Anne Riley:Yeah. Well and that that's why the book is so important is it has everything in there and, like, a small space. Right? There are I say to people, I say, you don't understand. There's a lot in there.
Anne Riley:What do you maybe there's one part you might wanna talk about because if you just wanna talk about all of it, there's a lot.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah.
Anne Riley:You know? But that's why you write a book like this. If you read Darwin's Origin of Species, he goes through all his case. He makes he not only does he make the case for, he takes every argument against evolution, and he bats it down. And I was just he was the smartest person in history, in in my opinion, because he was just he was a thinker.
Anne Riley:He could just think through it all. And I used him as a guide, you know, to help me reason through this. You know? But but, there's a lot in there and, you know, every chapter has something that goes, oh, oh, oh. You know?
Anne Riley:And I want you to feel that way. I want you to keep reading. But the thing is is if you start I started the big bang and I end up at, you know, the structure of government, you would that's a long way to go. Yeah. Yeah.
Jacob:Yeah. You did it pretty elegantly, to be honest. Yeah. I I I do feel like it's a very inviting for someone, like I was saying earlier, for someone who isn't typically in these realms of, like, studying or thinking deeply about this stuff. It's super inviting.
Jacob:It it lays out these things that, for the most part, a lot of people, you know, we kinda learned at least a good percentage of a lot of the stuff that you said, you know, in school and college and whatnot. Right. It's it's it's very easy to ask them, listen to the book, go like, yeah. Makes complete sense. Yeah.
Jacob:I agree. Couldn't agree more. And so it it does stack on itself nicely.
Anne Riley:Yeah. I I did have a lot of people say, yeah. I reviewed high school biology. You know? And I was like, yeah.
Anne Riley:But then there's sociology, and then there's economics, and then but then you end up in a different place for people. And that's what I wanted. I wanted you I wanted my reader to see the through line between nature and human the the the construction of a human society. And it you know, I am a step by step thinker, so I had to do it step by step.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Well, it it helps other people other people wrap their head around it so it's not so daunting. So sometimes I feel like, I I use the I use the term throwing out the baby with the bath water. I use it just way too much.
Jacob:So sorry for listeners who have sick of hearing me hear it say it. But, I I do think that I mean, I I stumbled into kind of the world of understanding myself and humans and, like, not only just my own thought process, but, like, what, you know, what does it mean to be a human? It would the whole why are we here? Just the you know, everybody has those moments in their life. I mean, I stumbled onto it, via necessity, and so I I felt that I dealt with a lot of depression and these sorts of things.
Jacob:I was confused about who I was and what I should do and blah blah blah. Make lying to myself, not realizing I was lying to myself and experiencing the
Anne Riley:rapid consequences around. I'm in that club too. So yeah. Yep.
Jacob:Oh, you're human as well. Gotcha.
Anne Riley:Yeah. I got it.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. And and so I'm just always, like, back to the throw throwing the baby out with the bathwater is is I've realized as much as I was so egotistically sure that I already kinda knew everything I needed to know, like, all these old these old texts and stuff are hippy dippy, and and I don't really need to indulge myself in the way other people think to understand myself, blah blah. But I I do think that it's so important that everybody, even outside of necessity and outside of being forced to because your brain is attacking you out of depression or whatever, It's such a superpower to understand yourself on such a deep level. And and I I I don't know.
Jacob:I I, I don't I guess, suppose I don't have a question for you on that end, but what what do you think about that? Does that make you think of anything there?
Anne Riley:Well and I think it's so I think you're right. I think that the well, that was sort of the point of my first book was I couldn't be happy until I I think the okay. Spoiler on this book. Sorry, readers. Don't listen if you don't wanna hear this.
Anne Riley:But there's 5 words, in order for me to be happy. Identify your values, live them. That's it. And so what happened is once I did that, I became at home with me. When you become at home with yourself, you can figure out how to become at home with the world.
Anne Riley:And that's what I did. And it's just been a learning experience. I have to keep like you, I don't know everything. I have to keep learning. Then the job I have is to keep my eyes and ears open and be like, I maybe I'm not getting something here.
Anne Riley:Let's work on that. You know? But you start, the the core is there so you don't beat yourself up because you're not perfect. Of course, you're not perfect. You're a human.
Anne Riley:Nothing's perfect. But you can be the best you can be, and that's all you need to be is the best of you. And then you give yourself out in the world the way you want to, and you're much more comfortable because your aura is, hey. I'm cool with me. And people love be being around people who are cool with themselves because they just get it.
Anne Riley:It's a it's an unspoken thing. They'll be like, oh, I kinda like that. I kinda like that. So
Jacob:Yeah. I I think even kids call it riz or something noted.
Anne Riley:Yeah. Yeah. But it's it doesn't have to be riz. It just can be weird. Yeah.
Anne Riley:You know what I mean? You can just be okay yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Jacob:Exactly. So so what are the, one more time. What were the 5 words?
Anne Riley:Identify your values. Live them.
Jacob:That's profound. What what are the benefits? I'm sure you say this in the book. What are the benefits of identifying your your values? That was another thing in that same Yeah.
Jacob:Rambling that I had. It was I I I didn't realize I didn't even know my own values. I was like, values. I never really thought that deeply about that, and it was a whole thing unfolded for me.
Anne Riley:So Right. It's it, it you know, values are equivalent to goals. And when you have DNA, remember human born with no goals. No born with no ideas. They can't have goals and they can't have values.
Anne Riley:They have to establish their own. Animals don't need to. They don't need them. They got their instructions. They go.
Anne Riley:They they come out born perfectly capable of living as a a horse or a tiger in the world. We are not born perfectly capable to live as humans in the world. We have to learn stuff. And what we learn is dependent on what other people learn before us. So when I say identify values, it means you have to learn your own goals from all the things you've learned and all the things you've read and done all of these things.
Anne Riley:You have to say, this is what works for me. And the only way you know is you feel this sort of inside that says, yeah, that's the one for me. So for me, personally, I came out, my values aren't external. Like like, I will feel better if I have a $1,000,000 house or something like that. It's like, well, just go to California.
Anne Riley:You know? It's easy. You know? But, but for me, the the values that I came up with with the word heck. Honesty, empathy, calm, and kind.
Anne Riley:Those are the four values that work for me, and sometimes I don't do them. And then I'm like, come on back. You need to practice some more. But if I do those, I tend to be at home with myself. And everybody has a different set of whatever it could be.
Anne Riley:It it can be anything. It just depends on what connects to you. And this is the whole idea. People choose because they have to be able to choose what works for them. So maximizing choice and giving people to understand that they get to make the choices for that are right for them is what will make them happy.
Anne Riley:You know? It all connects. To in my mind, it all connects together.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. No. It totally does. I, it makes me think of, oh my gosh.
Jacob:I get excited sometimes, and then I lose the thought. But, like, I I was thinking about, Oh, dang it. I lost it. Okay. It it was something, apparently not worthwhile in that moment.
Jacob:But I I I will say, I I did I feel like I'm going to, replicate what you have behind you in some way. I feel like I I also do little sticky notes.
Anne Riley:Oh. So Yeah. I I
Jacob:use sticky notes because I'm in an apartment now. I can't necessarily write out the wall, but my house back, I'm originally from Washington state. I used to write quotes
Anne Riley:the three six seven number. Where in Washington?
Jacob:I grew up just north of Portland, Oregon about an hour north. So Kelso, Washington is the name? Kelso.
Anne Riley:Kelso, Washington is the name? Oh, Kelso. Yeah. I lived in Portland for 35 years.
Jacob:Oh. And
Anne Riley:I was born in in Richland. So other side of the state, Richland, Washington. So yeah. I saw that 360 number, and I said, I wonder if you're still there.
Jacob:Yeah. No. I I I am not. I found my way down to Austin, about 5 years ago. I I work in the event industry, and so
Anne Riley:the pandemic the
Jacob:pandemic really, like, just set me for a loop. So I just had to escape to somewhere that was open. So, I've been in Austin 5 years, but I'm I'm I'm definitely missing the Pacific Northwest in tons.
Anne Riley:So Yeah. Well, now I'm in the Midwest because we were, we spent the last 10 years caring for elderly parents. So but, you know, I think we're making our way back west. We have 2 of our kids are back there, so probably make it make our way back there. So, yeah, I love the west.
Anne Riley:It just more suits me a little bit better. But
Jacob:Yeah. I I think I'm with you on that. Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it's beautiful, though, because the the way life works is, I've been here about 5 years.
Jacob:Like I said, I'm starting to take a step back and go kinda ask myself why I'm here and and why I ended up here and what it's done. But I look at, you know, things, like, in my work and my just personal development of me as a person is I go, I see why I moved here. I see why I needed to move here and develop these parts of my, you know, just personal structure and how I express myself. I I needed this this few years of this in my life regardless of where I end up. I see
Anne Riley:some value. Right. Right. And that's the thing is nature is nothing but change. And so what works for you now and work for you may change over time.
Anne Riley:And as long as you're open to it and say, oh, I think I'm ready for something different. You know? What what is it that I'm still looking for? What is it that I want to accomplish? Or what am I missing?
Anne Riley:Those are things that only you can tell yourself because you're your own expert. No one else can tell you. And you you don't have to have you don't have to make decisions. You can run over all kinds of ideas because ideas are free. You can have as many of them as you want.
Anne Riley:And then but acting on them, you have to be a little more judicious. And so play with the ideas and then, you know, poke around and and what you act on is where that will impact you because it starts it's a thing in the world. Right? It exists in the world. When you move from Austin to Tennessee, you know, it's a change in the world that's gonna affect everything.
Anne Riley:So those you wanna be really judicious about, but ideas, ah, go at them. Have as many as you want. Look at them from different perspectives. You know? That's great because they don't exist.
Anne Riley:They don't exist in their world. They just exist in your mind, and that's okay.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. That's brilliant. That's fascinating. Well, we are getting up here in time.
Jacob:I think that's a a pretty decent note to, start pointing us towards. What what I wanna do so, obviously, in the in the description, I'll have some links to Mhmm. To your books and, where to find more info about you. But, also, just for anybody who's still listening in this moment right now, what what are you working on next? How do they connect with you?
Jacob:How do they explore more of your stuff if they're if they're turned on by what we've been talking about?
Anne Riley:Right. Well, right now, I the the the newest book just came out 2 weeks ago, and I was in the midst of all the stuff with my mom. So I've done literally not very much on that. So but, you know, on the other hand, I'm like, I guess I like the person who took care of her mom rather than worried about her book. You know?
Anne Riley:I guess I like that person better. More. Yeah. So I'm good.
Jacob:Yeah. You know?
Anne Riley:But but I think, ultimately, I do want to put together my ideas about the current problems of today using this mindset, as a book that maybe could get people started, you know, to say, let's talk about homelessness. What would nature do? Well, nature doesn't even have homeless cells. You know, a cell lives in a body, and it is always fed. It's always taken care of.
Anne Riley:It has to tow its line 247. And it, you know, if it it has to report up how it's doing. So given that, how would we treat homelessness? You know? How would we treat, like I said, education?
Anne Riley:How would we treat police violence?
Jacob:What a great baseline. Yeah.
Anne Riley:Exactly. It's a way to think. And that base of thinking will make really drive different kinds of decisions. And the question for me is to envision them enough for somebody else to say, oh, we might be able to do that. That's what I want.
Anne Riley:But that's probably the next thing I'll work on. You know? And I just don't know when I'll start that. It runs around in my head, but and you know what I think the last time I was like, oh, this will take, oh, couple months to write. 5 years later, still going.
Anne Riley:You know? So I don't know because I leave myself open to that that's the point. For me, I always have to leave my mind open. I don't have any strict rules about what what I should do or what has to be done because part of my mind always has to remain open to the new ideas that are coming in.
Jacob:Yeah. I I find myself I get I get my own way if I end up trying to structure it too much and trying to plan it too much.
Anne Riley:Mhmm.
Jacob:I end up, like, tripping over my own dang feet if I do that too much.
Anne Riley:So Yeah. Well and I know that I'm not the smartest person in the world. So I need input from people. And I read some, I go, oh, that that's a good idea. I I did a podcast with a lady who was talking about plant intelligence, and it was really interesting.
Anne Riley:And and what what we got out of that is that by humans having their brain, they're literally less close to nature because we have to filter it through this thinking process. Whereas Mhmm. Plants and animals are just directly linked to nature.
Jacob:Yeah.
Anne Riley:You know? And plants even more so because they don't have even brains. They they have this neural system, but not really a brain. But I was like, oh, you're right. They can just respond to nature like this, and we, like, have to go, wait.
Anne Riley:I have to think about that. And what am I gonna do? And I have to build a structure and I have to do now I was like, oh, and and her she titled it how brains limit us, and I was like, wow. I never even thought of that. So That's
Jacob:a nice title too.
Anne Riley:Yeah. I I just totally totally blew me away that that, oh, I hadn't even all this stuff, I'm talking about humans, and it's like, kind of as they're so unique and interesting, and it's like, actually, maybe they're not as great as we thought.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've I've been, the there I've been slowly chipping away at this book called, Light Eaters.
Jacob:It's like Oh. It's about plants and and, like, the life behind plants. It's so fascinating. The author is really good too.
Anne Riley:Right.
Jacob:But I it it it it's funny that you mentioned that because, I I was actually gonna try to bring that that same book into this conversation earlier. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jacob:What what you would think about it. So maybe maybe check that one out. It's called Light Eaters.
Anne Riley:Light Eaters, I will. I will. Well, this woman's name who did the podcast with me, her name is Tabria Gardena, and it's Tiger Lily Gardena. I was like, well, that's a good name for a plant person. But There you
Jacob:go. Yeah.
Anne Riley:She she had several she if you ever look her up, she's I think she's on podcast. That's where I found or PodMatch. That's where I found her.
Jacob:Nice.
Anne Riley:She might be interesting to talk to you because you might get some really especially if you're reading this other book. She she's fascinating. You know?
Jacob:Yeah. I've I've been my mind has been being blown. Like, little facts that, they were talking about how they would take a speaker underground or some sort of in some sort of environment, and they would play the sound of running water, And then they would notice that, oh, the roots will intentionally listen somehow hear the sound of the running water and go towards it.
Anne Riley:And move that way. Yeah.
Jacob:Yeah. And that makes me have to, like, take a break from the rest of my day. It's so profound to me. Yeah. I just they've been so cool with the implications of that.
Anne Riley:Yeah. And this is what I what I assume is that there are abilities that plants and animals have that we have no way with our 5 senses to understand.
Jacob:Mhmm.
Anne Riley:And we just don't. And so rather than I mean, I can't even imagine that that we can see them as inferior beings. They are different beings, and their skills or their abilities are so different that we should stop. And and and and before we do some of the horrible things we do to animals, we should stop and think about things because there are there there's just mystery out there that we don't know, stuff we don't know. I call it energy.
Anne Riley:Energy we don't know, and it moves ways we can't even fathom. And rather than, you know, this whole concept of manifest destiny and we're the kings of the world, no. We are participants in a a big web Yeah. And we should be respectful of that.
Jacob:Yeah. It's a pretty bold claim to think that we're, like, the the the head of it, the the only ones who who have it all figured out.
Anne Riley:Yeah. But that claim started 1000 of years ago, and we've decided a a big number of us have decided to keep that claim going. So even though if you look around, you're like, facts don't bear that out. But
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. It's, in in that book, they I think they talk about how, we they they talk about consciousness basically in in kind of the assumption that we've kind of always assumed that a brain is what gives rise to consciousness. Like, it requires, like, a complex, snaps, this firing thing. But then, we're kind of discovering that, okay, like, this plant is clearly so intelligent in a way that is beyond the brain in this in some crazy sense.
Anne Riley:Yeah. We're gonna see that separate now. Right. It has a neural system that may have to do all that without needing and probably because, you know, every neural system grows within the environment that can support it. So there are I mean, plants have been around.
Anne Riley:They're the winners in the evolutionary. I mean, there's 450, you know, I mean, giga mass bites, whatever they call it, but they are the winners. I mean, they're 80% of all life in in carbon mass as plants. But but animals need brains because they move. You know, they have to move.
Anne Riley:They have to maneuver in the world. They have to they have to figure themselves out. There's a lot more brainpower needed to do that than it is for an animal with or a plant with roots in the ground. But the plant still does all the other things that it needs to do to survive. It works with the other plants.
Anne Riley:It it protects itself. It does all the other things. It just doesn't need a big brain to do it. It's just very efficient. You know?
Anne Riley:But we don't we I mean, that still is kind of in a far out. Everybody goes, oh, yeah. What are you smoking today to have come up with the plant intelligence concept? I'm like, no. Just yeah.
Anne Riley:Exactly. It's a yeah. Those are what they told me.
Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We gave me this idea directly.
Anne Riley:Yeah. Exactly. It was like, hey, stupid. You know?
Jacob:Yeah.
Anne Riley:But, but, you know, that's that's the thing is, I have a a quote up on my wall. It's by Canes, John Maynard Canes. It says, the difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. And I think that is where we are in this world today is there's a lot of ideas that we need to escape from before we can come up with the new ones.
Jacob:Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well well said. I love your choice of quotes.
Jacob:Also, by the way, we both have Albert Einstein right behind our heads.
Anne Riley:Albert Einstein. I have a lot of his quote. The this one's a good one. The other one is one I live by is make things as simple as possible, but never simpler. And I love that one too.
Anne Riley:And that was the what I used to write this book. It was this is as simple as I could make it, but sometimes I couldn't go simpler because it just wasn't gonna I wasn't gonna tell you that I wasn't gonna tell you what you needed to know.
Jacob:Yeah.
Anne Riley:So
Jacob:Yeah. I I, the word I I remember thinking of the word concise. I've been using that word a lot in my own mental things, and I as I'm listening to you to your, book, thinking of the word concise, you did such a great job on that.
Anne Riley:Yeah. And you also just
Jacob:just around all the the plant talk, I I took us on a little side side quest on the end. It
Anne Riley:I was gone.
Jacob:You you talk about it made me even think about more things. You know, you present, words like ecosystem really, really elegantly. I love the way you describe all that. So, if anybody has been enticed at all who's who's listening right now, like, Anne expands on a lot of this stuff that is, like, there's a lot of touching billiard balls. So so, yeah, there there's a your your book is is worthwhile, and it's enjoyable.
Jacob:And, yeah, thank you so much for writing it. Everybody, check it out. We are getting up here in time. I I don't wanna hold you off too long, Anne. But so thank you so much.
Jacob:I really appreciate your time. Thank you for writing this. Thank you for willing to send it to me and spend some time with me today and
Anne Riley:and let me know. I loved it. I had such a delightful time, and you are very great conversationalist. Good questions. Good conversation.
Anne Riley:Just and you make me think a lot. So I love that. It's my favorite thing to do is think. So
Jacob:Likewise. Yeah. I I man. Okay. Well, the light in me sees and honors the light in you, and thank you for following following this internal thing and writing this book and and doing all this.
Jacob:So, I'll I'll I'll be in touch. Everybody else, check out Anne's stuff. The links are below. And, Anne, you have a good rest of your day. Okay?
Anne Riley:And you too. Thank you so much. This was really, really, really enjoyable.
Jacob:Likewise. Yeah.
Anne Riley:We'll chat soon. Yep. Okay.
Jacob:Knowledge is power. Reality is
INTRO:Junkyard Love Podcast.