# The JYLP Episode 0108 - with Author of 'The Human Idea' Anne Riley - 'Always Evolution Occurs'

- Episode: 0108
- Date: 2024-12-15
- Duration: 1:32:32
- Guest: [Anne Riley](/guests/anne-riley/)
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOsh-DCh6qU
- RSS: https://share.transistor.fm/s/6b9b704a
- Spotify (show): https://open.spotify.com/show/45J7CBdM8j29doqyBp2bFs
- Apple (show): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-junkyard-love-podcast/id1489118788

## About

Anne Riley, armed with an MBA, experience in multiple industries, and the mind of a curious philosopher - has been on a lifelong quest to understand how humans logically fit into life's panorama.  Spending much of her time studying the works of Charles Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould, and Michael Rothschild among many others, and immersing herself in the basic knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology, economics, and government - all gave her the foundation for a new way of thinking about humans - and has arrived with her new book to encapsulate these concepts - "The Human Idea - Earths Newest Ecosystem"

Anne Riley is the author of 'The Human Idea - Earths Newest Ecosystem': a book that flips humanity's attention upon itself, and uncovers the essence of what it means to be human. This episode explores the profound inquiries of why we are here and how our capacity for thought distinguishes us from other species. Riley invites us on a journey through the tapestry of life, blending scientific acumen with philosophical depth to illuminate how the survival tactics refined over eons can inform our modern challenges. Discover in Anne's book "The Human Idea":

The Ecosystem of Life: Insights into the vast web of life that connects us all, tracing our evolutionary path to understand our place within it.

The Power of Ideas: Exploring the uniquely human trait of ideation, fostering both our greatest triumphs and our most pressing dilemmas.

The Ideasphere: Riley's innovative concept of the ideasphere, a lens through which we can view human society and leverage this understanding for sustainable progress.

Anne Riley's narrative is more than a contemplation on our origins; it's a clarion call for our future. Facing existential crises like climate change and social divides, "The Human Idea" provides a blueprint for harnessing nature's lessons to forge a path toward a more harmonious existence. Join us for this enlightening conversation, about the human ecosystem. Episode 108 with Anne Riley - Always Evolution Occurs.

## Chapters

(none published in episode notes)

## Quotes

(none published in episode notes)

## Guest links (from published notes)

- For more on Anne, checkout her pages here:
- https://www.thehumanidea.com/
- https://www.instagram.com/anne_riley_ideasphere/?hl=en
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/anne-riley-656b0125a/

## Tags / keywords

anne riley, the human idea, always evolution occurs, ideasphere, ecosystem of life, power of ideas, earths newest ecosystem, junkyard love podcast episode 0108, JunkyardLovePodcast, AnneRiley

## Archive picks

Extracted from the YouTube auto-caption transcript and published About / links already on this episode. Labeled separately from Jacob’s published About / Chapters / Quotes / Hashtags. Published notes have no chapter timestamps and no quotes — leave those `(none published…)` markers unchanged; Archive picks add `#t-…` timestamps, chapter beats, keywords/hashtags, and a short bio.

## Memorable quotes

- [00:00:12] Anne: “you can accept something and be sad about it”
- [00:06:30] Anne: “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”
- [00:10:07] Anne: “government is the coordinating mechanism … whoever controls the government controls the rules that people are allowed to live by”
- [00:11:29] Anne: “humans are born with no ideas but once they get the ideas they can do whatever they want with them and that's the difference”
- [00:13:06] Anne: “always Evolution occurs so brains and bodies are changing all the time”
- [00:14:54] Anne: “that's what I call the idea sphere it's a brand new ecosystem based on ideas”
- [00:15:58] Anne: “if you cut open your head and look for the coffee idea you wouldn't find it doesn't exist”
- [00:21:42] Anne: “my 102-year-old mother read this book and she had no problem with it so you can do it too”
- [00:24:34] Anne: “humans should be able to do whatever they want as long as they don't harm one another”
- [00:24:34] Anne: “love isn't the answer … we are made to be different we are made to choose but what we can't do is harm each other”
- [00:31:03] Anne: “morality is a human construct nature doesn't have”
- [00:39:04] Anne: “I'm competing with Kim Kardashian … what's she wearing today versus oh let's talk about the … definition of human … existence”
- [00:42:48] Anne: “we are … Required to create our own goals if we are going to have a happy life”
- [00:43:59] Anne: “you get to be the expert on you”
- [00:47:48] Anne: “I liken a baby to a full member of the ecosystem and a potential member of the ideas sphere”
- [01:03:01] Anne: “we want to maximize our freedom … but the only line is no harm to others”
- [01:05:52] Anne: “profit maximization is to me one of the great evils”
- [01:14:24] Anne: “identify your values live them that's it”
- [01:14:47] Anne: “when you become at home with yourself you can figure out how to become at home with the world”
- [01:29:32] Anne: “make things as simple as possible but never simpler … that was the what I used to write this book”

## Chapter-style timestamps

- [00:00:00](#t-00-00-00) — Opening — better conversations / check-in with Anne
- [00:00:12](#t-00-00-12) — Mother’s death at 102 / 11 of 12 siblings / accept and be sad
- [00:06:30](#t-00-06-30) — Age-10 Catholic school + evolution — lifelong how-alike/how-different question
- [00:08:32](#t-00-08-32) — Keynes, Rothschild’s Bionomics, then 2018 congressional campaign click
- [00:10:07](#t-00-10-07) — Government as coordinating system / competition + collaboration + coordination
- [00:11:29](#t-00-11-29) — Humans born with no ideas vs animals’ DNA instructions
- [00:13:06](#t-00-13-06) — Title beat — “always Evolution occurs”
- [00:14:54](#t-00-14-54) — The ideasphere — new ecosystem based on ideas
- [00:15:58](#t-00-15-58) — Brain vs mind / physical synapses vs non-physical ideas
- [00:17:45](#t-00-17-45) — How big brains happened — “I don’t care it happened” / DNA–RNA analogy
- [00:21:42](#t-00-21-42) — Accessibility — 102-year-old mom read the book
- [00:24:34](#t-00-24-34) — One-sentence survival rule — do what you want, don’t harm one another
- [00:28:11](#t-00-28-11) — Constitution as society’s DNA / laws as RNA instructions
- [00:29:23](#t-00-29-23) — Ideal-sphere government — regulate by harm
- [00:31:03](#t-00-31-03) — Morality as human construct / nature’s prime directive is survive
- [00:39:04](#t-00-39-04) — Competing ideas in attention economy (Kim Kardashian vs human existence)
- [00:42:48](#t-00-42-48) — Create your own goals & values / parents as family coordinators
- [00:43:59](#t-00-43-59) — “Expert on you” parenting / mixed messages
- [00:47:48](#t-00-47-48) — Baby as full ecosystem member / potential ideasphere member
- [00:50:36](#t-00-50-36) — Teaching children the prime directive across ages
- [00:53:07](#t-00-53-07) — Journalism gates / truth ethic / Fairness Doctrine → social media as “thing”
- [01:03:01](#t-01-03-01) — Maximize freedom with a no-harm line
- [01:05:52](#t-01-05-52) — Dangers of profit maximization / earlier dialogue books → The Human Idea
- [01:14:24](#t-01-14-24) — Five words: identify your values, live them / at home with yourself
- [01:20:16](#t-01-20-16) — Nature is nothing but change / ideas are free, actions are judicious
- [01:26:50](#t-01-26-50) — Mystery / participants in a web (not kings of the world)
- [01:29:32](#t-01-29-32) — Escaping old ideas / Einstein: as simple as possible but never simpler
- [01:31:11](#t-01-31-11) — Closing gratitude / thehumanidea.com + IG + LinkedIn

## Keywords

Anne Riley, The Human Idea, Earth's Newest Ecosystem, Always Evolution Occurs, ideasphere, idea sphere, ecosystem of life, power of ideas, MBA, Charles Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould, Michael Rothschild, Bionomics, John Maynard Keynes, evolution, DNA, RNA, brain vs mind, humans born with no ideas, coordinating system, government as coordinator, competition collaboration coordination, prime directive, do no harm, maximize choice minimize harm, morality as human construct, Constitution as DNA, journalism ethics, Fairness Doctrine, social media regulation, profit maximization, identify your values live them, at home with yourself, expert on you, child development, Lauren Underwood campaign 2018, Einstein, Albert Einstein, thehumanidea.com, @anne_riley_ideasphere, Junkyard Love Podcast, JYLP 0108, Jacob Rhines

## Hashtags

#JYLP0108 #JunkyardLove #AnneRiley #TheHumanIdea #Ideasphere #AlwaysEvolutionOccurs #Evolution #DoNoHarm #HumanEcosystem #Philosophy #Biology #DNA #Values #JYLP

## Short guest bio (from published About + episode speech + published links)

Anne Riley is the author of *The Human Idea — Earth's Newest Ecosystem*, an MBA-armed curious philosopher who has spent a lifetime asking how humans are alike and different from other animals—and what that means for living together. On this episode she opens with her mother’s recent death at 102 (Anne is the 11th of 12 children), then traces the theory from a childhood Catholic-school evolution lesson through Stephen Jay Gould, Keynes, Michael Rothschild’s *Bionomics*, and a 2018 congressional campaign that clicked the missing “coordination” piece: government as society’s coordinating system, parallel to the brain in a body. She introduces the ideasphere (a non-physical ecosystem of ideas), the one-sentence survival rule—do whatever you want as long as you don’t harm one another—and practical threads on teaching children that “prime directive,” regulating speech/social media by accurate labeling rather than silencing, the dangers of profit maximization, and the five-word personal practice: identify your values, live them. Published notes point to https://www.thehumanidea.com/, Instagram @anne_riley_ideasphere, and LinkedIn.

## Transcript

[00:00:00] Jacob: Junkyard love podcast at what age do we learn how to have better conversations at what age do we learn to have better conversations with ourselves how are you what's going on just in your person life how are you

[00:00:12] Anne: Oh well I want to 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 um and my Life has been kind of weird the last um few weeks my beloved mother Passed away just a couple of weeks ago And she was 102 and uh the mother of 12 children of which I am the 11 and um so these past few weeks has been you know not unexpected but difficult um but it was really helpful to have uh 10 of the 12 siblings come together and celebrate her life um and that was really she was an amazing woman you know just this amazing person and you know I will miss her every day but she's in my heart every day so um 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 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 uh but I love my mom and miss her um so but I also accept that you can accept something and be sad about it yeah absolutely paradoxically indeed um okay so what has your been 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 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 when that moment happens you know um what was that like for you was it did your preparations uh seem fickle in that moment or well you know I had um my dad passed away eight years almost to the day so and that was um 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 didn't quite know how to deal with it but I think that was instructive for writing my book and then when I got to my mom who's 102 you cannot I know you cannot live forever and my mom was sharp up until the last minute amazing so you know I you know I was still telling her jokes and singing and you know one of dad's favorite songs and you know she was right there um 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 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 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 constitution strong body and it took a While 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 um but I have accept I was accepting this wasn't especially once we saw just over two 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 going to do about things you know and I Was like oh um so it just went so fast and but she did it on her terms and I could accept it but I just my line was I can't deal with her being in pain but the but the process Itself um I could accept as the natural Way of how things work

[00:04:19] Jacob: Yeah it must be this impossible but you know kind of beautiful balance of continually you know feeling the sadness emotions are happening right but you know what can I do okay what can't I do exactly EMS I just I Am when and doubt love her love her

[00:05:09] Anne: Children other children my siblings do what you can to help be you know just do be there for whatever is needed to be done and that's what we did and during that time we were all together and then after that time we all work together to do all the things that needed to be done you know the funeral and contacting family and all that stuff and that's so we did yeah and that was the best I could do in the situation yeah and what more could you do besides the best you can do exactly and sometimes you know nobody's perfect so sometimes screw that one up but you know we were there we were a team we made decisions together and when you didn't they were like H I'm not going to do it that way it's like oops sorry you know and we moved on it was good we got close yeah oh well

[00:05:56] Jacob: Beautiful thing um okay well so now I'm just I'm just curious you know you said that when your father passed away eight years ago you hadn't written this book yet and no now that you have as we begin I want to start to introduce your book slowly to everybody okay so 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 yeah well it wasn't I guess I would look at it as not writing a book but writing down this theory of

[00:06:30] Anne: How humans work I think um so when I was 10 I was at Catholic school but I learned about Evolution so it's the 60s it was you know wide open we didn't have these divisions that we have now and I from That moment on I was confused it was Like okay we evolve from these animals okay I get that I could see the eyes and the ears that we got we got hands and feet just like animals 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 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 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 J gold 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 it's like okay I get that and then I went to school I became a I became an accountant and I had an economic background and you know I'm sitting there listening to the supply and demand and the prices and everything and of course technology never change assuming technology does not change I'm like oh well that doesn't work you know but I was Like I understand these theories and They make my logical mind it makes sense but this is not how people work so this is not this is not quite right and

[00:08:32] Jacob: Then I read a lot of K's and kan's had it right he's like people are going to 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 um and then I read a book in 1993 or four a long time ago uh by Michael Rothchild and it was called bionomics and what he did was he compared economics systems human economic systems the biological system and oh the lineup was really close and I was like oh he's on the right track but he ended up saying yep we all need to compete and or you know capitalism is the way and I was like oh that just it just went clunk after all of these things that were going click it went clunk so I had to think about that um and then I worked you know I raised my family I did all these things I was busy but this the wheels kept turning and finally I worked on a uh political campaign for a um a frunk facing Congressional Campaign so it was a 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 and it was an offe election

[00:09:50] Anne: 2018 so everybody came in you know Jeff

[00:09:54] Jacob: Merkley from Oregon uh Joe Biden came in you know all these people came in campaign for Lauren Underwood she was our Congress she was the one triying to get elected and I looked back and I was

[00:10:07] Anne: 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 right 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 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 D you know like a concentric circle of DNA a cell you know a body those are the three major pieces and if you look at it on the human side it's a human and a you know you could do a business like for like organs and then a society is at the top and they're brain I'm sorry brain in the middle humans and then a society and those things are actually parallel and they work very

[00:11:25] Jacob: Similarly except for one thing humans

[00:11:29] Anne: 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 humans are born with no ideas but once they get the ideas they can do whatever they want with them and that's the difference and so when they survive they look different whereas a human like a bird can build a nest but it can't build a three-story concrete structure in the tree and save it for his gener generations to come but we can we can build houses we can build three story constructs and all kinds of things we can also build a tent or we can build a

[00:12:09] Jacob: Building humans have the vast ability to

[00:12:12] Anne: Choose what they do and that changes the

[00:12:16] Jacob: World whereas animals are very limited in how they can change the world we have this massive impact on how we change the world yeah well okay so what is the what do you pose in your book for listeners what is the difference between us and animals like why do we have suddenly bigger brains why are we given the gift

[00:12:35] Anne: Of thinking um and why don't they think well they do think but it's at a very much more limited scale remember 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 um whether it's a you know a worm or a tiger who has 300 trillion cells or us who have 35 trillion the brain is the coordinator keeps

[00:13:03] Jacob: Everybody working together but in nature

[00:13:06] Anne: Nothing stays the same and evolution occurs and one of the evolution I mean always Evolution occurs 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 so a brain a brain growth Evolution has been occurring all along but what happened

[00:13:47] Jacob: With Homo sapiens is for some reason our brains kept growing to the point where our brains brain mass to

[00:13:56] Anne: Body mass ratio is like weird compared to everybody else I mean we are just like weird but when we started using

[00:14:04] Jacob: Those extra brain cells to think and create ideas which is something animals do maybe on a very limited basis they don't have big enough brains to do it but when they evolv and we survived well doing that it became a Le evolutionary advantage that continued to grow yeah so homo sapiens came along

[00:14:26] Anne: 200,000 years ago we only started to

[00:14:30] Jacob: Speak and write maybe 10,000 years ago yeah so the brain was growing all that time and if you look at apes and you see what they're doing they can 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

[00:14:54] Anne: Them in a way that nobody else could and that's what I call the idea sphere 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 IDE of spere 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 it's got a life of its own now

[00:15:21] Jacob: Yeah and just like beings in the in the Natural ecosystem these ideas have created I used Charles Darwin's ideas from 1859 to write my book in 2024 those ideas get to live ju and evolve just like just like other beings in the

[00:15:42] Anne: Ecosystem yeah uh somewh in

[00:15:45] Jacob: Your book you said something about uh I'm going to probably butcher you said it more elegantly but basically the Mind does not exist with inside the brain like our mind is not inside our head here oh right well I make a

[00:15:58] Anne: Distinction between the physical and the Non-physical that what I call our brain is our physical brain our synapses our loes 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 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 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 non-physical idea that we can act on and then make a physical thing 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 and 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 has to be washed or something but you know there's it's in the physical world though yeah yeah it's like the precursor to an action you know and then somewhere in there we have the ability to say yes or no and make the no act can occur unless there was an idea before it none no action you know so oh yeah it's so Fascinating um okay so what I want to we don't have to go off this whole Adventure but I just want to back up a little bit where do you sit where do you sit on that jump from apes to humans

[00:17:29] Jacob: Like how do we suddenly get a bigger brain do you think it is like you I've heard the stone date theory is enticing to me in some ways um we started eating and cooking meat that sort of thing where do you land on how our brains got big yeah I um you know this

[00:17:45] Anne: 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 you know what I mean and unfortunately because I'm at the top and I say this happened I know this happened how it happened 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 pressing on people there are on these on

[00:18:15] Jacob: Apes there's W you know the weather and you know they might have to move around for food where food availability like you said cooking I've heard that has released the energy so that humans could get more of the protein easier in their body yep maybe that's true 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

[00:18:44] Anne: That everybody else kind of you know that kind of won the war because that's exactly how DNA formed before when DNA was forming back for billion years ago there was RNA which is still exists today but scientists think there were other things 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 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 can copy stuff DNA cannot 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 you know and that so that's probably what happened is somewhere along the way 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

[00:20:03] Jacob: Surmise the path and the journey

[00:20:07] Anne: Even without knowing that's exactly what the journey entailed now scientists can't say that I can't because I'm not a scientist I can say oh I could surise if this happen scientist is why I can't prove it and I'm like you're right that's why I'm not a scientist yeah well I mean I think they kind of get caught up in the same exact conversation with the Big Bang Theory is like you know you kind of have to assume that yes it did happen maybe you don't know all the details it does seem like we're details out you know like I hear

[00:20:32] Jacob: More and more people on podcast and I'm like wow that's a mindblowing 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 like you said maybe it doesn't even matter in a sense but like let's asse it happen so we can make some momentum forward right yeah I've been reading all this about maybe there was a second big bang with dark matter I'm like yep it occurs but we uh 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 90 the 94% I just can't I have no ability it exists it's there it influences gravitationally you can see but other than that I just need to know I'm part of the six% and that's what I'm working with because I don't know the rest but my pay grade you know like yeah yeah it's fun to contemplate on a Saturday night but like on Monday you got to go work so 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 um you where I have to

[00:21:42] Anne: Cut that line and say I don't want to go to deep I talk a lot about DNA and RNA but this is where when people say oh that's so complicated I say look my 102-year-old mother read this book and she had no problem with it so you can do it too yeah no absolutely you broke down

[00:21:58] Jacob: 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 and so my learning style really uh fits well with the way that you write so wanted to make

[00:22:15] Anne: It accessible I knew some of these Concepts just by looking at DNA people go you know and I 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 yeah okay um so let's we presented a couple of the cool ideas in your book but let's just uh meta backup just a hair um 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 I've been EES dropping I've been reading a couple of your sentences there it looks really fascinating what are you working on what are you trying to present there's your impossible question to answer like what like say first of all I say are you a producer would you like to make a film of this just teasy um that's always been my dream somebody will say stubing you yeah and I'm like H not so easy I have to go I have to do this the hard way but I would say that um I've had very hard time trying to answer this question because the answer is simple but the the case it takes a lot to make the case to convince you it's right so I you know I would say well I'm writing a book about how humans fit in the world and people go H that doesn't mean anything to you and so it's very hard uh 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 synthesize them in a new way and um people are today don't think that

[00:24:14] Jacob: You can create a new idea you know everybody's invented everything right 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 didn't 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

[00:24:34] Anne: How people work and looked at the difference I mean literally item by item where I could um 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 this is what we're made of this is all the and these ideas have been carrying on for thousands of years right and then when did we learn about cells when did we learn about DNA maybe A hundred years ago so what's happened is we have all of these answers that have 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 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 what I what I ended with is that there is in fact like animals have one job 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 sentence solution or a one-word solution it's two words actually because we have two levels we have physical level and we have a mental level but we have two words that can keep us surviving and what I did was come down to in my case it's 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 want to know the one sentence yes okay the one sentence 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 and if they do the brain gets not you know gets notice of it and comes down and says okay we're going to fix this we're going to stop this they will do whatever they can to stop harm to the body and other cells and they will if in 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 you know that's a cancer is a great example of the cells that got away with it right yeah but if we you know a lot of people say love one another Love's the answer love isn't the answer we don't we're too different to 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 and just imagine how good our society would be if

[00:27:51] Jacob: 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 five you know preserve the Commonwealth uh or preserve the common good um uh you know protect our

[00:28:11] Anne: Borders do all these things uh you know keep maximize Liberty I mean we were doing those things and the so what happens is the Constitution is like the set of DNA right for our society and the laws we make our are the instruction we the RNA makes up right we say here's our goal and the laws need to make those things but because we've done it using religion as our background or other

[00:28:40] Jacob: 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 sort of Do no harm and let everybody do what they want so if you were going to make laws uh 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 it's like well gay people don't harm any money 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 but if the same person says oh I want 30 guns and I want to be able to shoot you know kids up in a school we say oh wait guns can harm people we need

[00:29:23] Anne: Regulations to prevent harm so if you look at how a government would be designed in what I call the ideal sphere

[00:29:32] Jacob: We would have a government that assesses everything based on harm if something can harm another person it gets regulated 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

[00:29:53] Anne: Know things that aren't harmful like transgender people they don't harm anybody else no that's okay you know racism stupid sales don't care about race they don't care if a cell is a little different of color it means nothing to them and we should be the same uh but we have a long cultural religious philosophical history to do things differently and we knew when we think they're right and I'm just saying look at nature as your guy and maybe that's not so right yeah well

[00:30:26] Jacob: Yeah it's so interesting to think of um

[00:30:28] Anne: I think the intersection of like DNA wanting to proliferate like life wanting to continue on having um an innate moral feature to it like is always a fascinating intersection um like I feel like you know your work in the book kind of does present ways in which it's like there's a like nature rewards

[00:30:49] Jacob: Morality like um like there's a reason why we have these concepts of like good and bad or we should do the things and they have their own reoccurring uh Rewards well I make a

[00:31:03] Anne: Point in my book that morality is a human construct nature doesn't have

[00:31:08] Jacob: Morality nature follows instructions and

[00:31:11] Anne: If the instructions allow it to survive

[00:31:15] Jacob: 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 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 after the rabbit or the squirrel who are smaller and can't defend themselves than to go after a big

[00:31:45] Anne: Animal you know so what looks like

[00:31:49] Jacob: Morality is just what worked for billions 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 have religions with one set of rules and another religion with another set of rules and one goes wait 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 going to live in the world if nobody accepts your idea it's not going to live in the world 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 yeah right exactly okay so what's your what's your um thought have you read oh gez I forget the author

[00:32:39] Anne: Katherine it's called Big magic it's a no I have not read that oh man I'm spacing the author but it's kind of like a book for creatives and artists like I it stumbled upon um a friend suggested it to me kind of like uh it's a good for artists to read of like believing in yourself type thing like ideas okay kind of talks about the Muse a bit um but she talks about kind of like where do ideas even come from what are ideas um and then she has these fascinating story she has one I'll summarize really quickly of uh she met this woman and they became close friends and they're both authors and uh she ended up this author who wrote This original book she had this like idea she'd been kind of working on throughout the couple years and she has these characters and a plot line and all these things um and she kind of shelf it was like you know in a storage unit it was been five years since she had opened it or something like that well her and this other author friend came close and they were having lunch one day and uh her friend was like well let me tell you about my new book she starts explaining it to her and it's this the correlation she's pretty much telling her of her own book and she's going like wait hold on like are you sure are you messing with me like you didn't read my book I didn't tell you about this whatever and so she kind of backs up and kind of expands that you know ideas aren't our in some sense they're like sometimes if you don't catch it if you don't take action it's going to go on to the next person and they might have that invitation 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 voids of the beagle when he was like 22 to 27 he went on a five-year cruise and he was the basically he was the botanist but he was also the companion to the captain because the captain wasn't allowed to talk to the lower rungs of the ship the guys who you know ored the ship 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 five-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 whole concept of evolution then and then he wrote it and rewrote it and studied it and did this and he put together the book and then sat on it until I don't know he had it I think done in the 1850s and then same idea he gets one uh From a guy named Alfred Russell Wallace something like that sends him he's over in Tahiti or the fares and he sends him his book and says I'd like you to look at my book and comment on it before I publish it's the theory of evolution and he's like oh 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 Daren of course got the most he was more famous than the other guy so he got all the credit but this in fact in there's a book I wrote a fictional story of this Theory it's called Dena and in here the character's name is Sarah Wallace and Wallace is a shout out to Wallace nice from yeah that was my one Easter egg I put in yeah little hint but yeah it's in the air and that's what they say when you get new theories they're in the air um 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 so it's not in there like 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 think to 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 things and make better and different decisions that will allow us to survive yeah okay so how do you

[00:37:05] Jacob: How do you think about like getting this book in the hands of people who um you know aren't necessarily interested in deeply in science or philosophy um 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 CU sometimes a lot of these Concepts uh to someone who's not used to you know hanging out in them it takes it's like a little a little bit you do a nice job of setting that layer and building on top of it though I right 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 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 you know I you know social media I'm

[00:38:04] Anne: Doing podcasts I'm gonna sign up to i'd like to do some speaking you know at different or you know functions where people can be like oh you know because what I want is I don't want to 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 um 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 so I can treat everyone like well no that's not what we meant

[00:38:50] Jacob: Yeah so you know so this is trying to be a little more clear you know and how we do it but I you know it's just it's going to be a slow uh slow effort because um it's a big world with lots of

[00:39:04] Anne: Com uh competing I think just it's competing ideas uh and I'm not talking like I'm competing with Charles Darwin or Isaac azmo I'm competing with Kim Kardashian and tip my tongue 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 H I think I'll go with Kim you're like I got a lot going on today like I got yeah exactly so I know I know what it's like 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 going to turn out I would just hope that people will pick it up and go oh yeah this is really worth thinking about um you know and I'm like okay maybe I should make an Audi book because young kids don't even read you know and I'm like okay I'll do that because like you said then I can IM imbue my voice with all the you know the jokes that I want to get in there that are kind of subtle in there it's like yeah I can put those in there yeah as much as I love reading in any form I must say uh I spend a lot of my time reading audio books just because I if I can go for a walk while I'm reading I am having the best day ever so exactly and I know that and that's like okay this is the next thing you know um to find a a prod I do a YouTube where I've gotten better at my voice and doing that stuff and I am doing you know a three or five minute you know snippet of the book great it goes forward but it will you know at this rate 500 years I'll have it done you know it'll be good so 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 uh when you talked about you know bees collecting pollen you know maybe that bee feels like an individual or whatever but realistically they're making honey with the hive I think uh 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 and part of the pollination process so right well it's very I think bees are very interesting because I think I make a book a point in Dena in this book that you know there's a Socratic dialogue going along between Dena and Sarah Wallace the main character and Sarah asks Dena um will humans ever be like bees and live in colonies and Dena says no and she

[00:41:41] Jacob: Says well why not and it's because we have ideas we went a different direction once you have ideas choosing and being

[00:41:50] Anne: Individual becomes our nature and bees

[00:41:56] Jacob: Follow instructions you have a colony which is 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 they're bees but they work together for the good of the hive and the bean be co uh the queen bee coordinates them and then that how they work but we don't work that way we went the ideal route and so we part of our meaning is that well let me go back a little bit is remember um any animal they have their

[00:42:33] Anne: DNA is their sort of goal 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

[00:42:45] Jacob: We are born with no ideas we are

[00:42:48] Anne: 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 um they put ideas in your head but do they always put 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 the kid's confused 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 these are my values this is what I'm going to do and then make the rules that you're going to live by this is not universally taught to our children yeah

[00:43:46] Jacob: 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 you have to that it's like the kids like but I'm not built this way yeah and instead of saying oh honey you're built this way I

[00:43:59] Anne: 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 are

[00:44:07] Jacob: Your expert and when you're 18 all I done is put in the best ideas I could for you but you need to figure them out which ones work for you and you know my kids I had three 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 um and I was pretty bad on 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 course yeah you know this pretty you know double message

[00:44:35] Anne: There mixed messages from Mom but yeah yeah I think that's just part of life is of course we're going to 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 still delicious and all that sort of stuff 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 is but know that you form them and it's okay for you to form the ones that work for you 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 yeah wow yeah I mean like what a beautiful invitation to open you know to infinite possibilities you know cuz we all we all know how the internal dialogue in our head goes easyly it can be defeating and so I love that I think that's 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 don't do that again but you're aren't hurting anybody you're okay or when somebody's bugging me I go you know they're not hurting anybody by that's just who they are 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 is a lot more peaceful because of that you know 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 they start putting ideas in their heads you know um but if we did a

[00:46:24] Jacob: 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 that would be something that if you taught kids this in school and at home how much

[00:46:40] Anne: Better would they be when they got to 18 and were on their own or started Living their own life I think we would be better if we said yeah 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 you may be uh not like what Johnny did but you can't hit Johnny you can't you know that's harm that crosses the line 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 yeah I love this um okay So I was thinking um I'm pretty Fascinating myself in my own world um I'm deeply into meditation and like I love learning about the concepts of self and um I take a I take a lot from like ADV Vidant I don't know if you're familiar with those well not much but some yeah enough to kind of if I say the word you know at least a bit what I'm talking about um so I kind of Wonder you just said a baby is born with no ideas um with the preemptive that I just was talking about the self and our identity can you expand a little bit more on that well yeah now a baby is

[00:47:45] Jacob: Born with no ideas which means the

[00:47:48] Anne: Um the mental structures in their head right but they're born with all of their natural instructions they are an uh they are a person I liken a baby to a full member of the ecosystem and a potential member of the ideas sphere oh I love this right they have no ideas but they have all their instructions so they have all their history their genetic history they have inclinations they have potential talents and you know all those things are in there but they're not uh evident at any point

[00:48:20] Jacob: 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 even three or four weeks before they start to smile 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

[00:48:38] Anne: 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 and then but over time you start talking to them you hug them they do all these things and you start developing ideas even though their brains can't handle ideas you're putting ideas in their heads from the very beginning and they are started to become members of the idea sphere and what ideas you put in their heads will be

[00:49:08] Jacob: Critical to how they um how they develop and the who they are I mean if you you know are in a in a home in which the

[00:49:19] Anne: 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 it's just gotten into their 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 fourth 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 yeah I get or I get this you know so yeah it's a mystery yeah the ideas are always working underneath the surface and like waiting for connections to be made to where you can express them and the deeper they are the harder they are to

[00:50:01] Jacob: 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 um 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 uh 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 but that's why

[00:50:36] Anne: I think it's so important to add the element of teaching children this sort of prime directive as they grow and how it looks in the world at you know when you're three and four 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 going to be like whoa 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 the these are potential dangers and so how you teach that as a child develops need 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 o this is how we should Implement these ideas as children grow

[00:51:18] Jacob: Yeah well I think about a lot um just kind of the concept of podcasts in general or even just you know the internet social media where connected we can have you can have an idea um you know wherever you're at and then within minutes I can be thinking about the same idea CU you called me up that's pretty profound as far as ideas are concerned like they just streamlined they just learned how to teleport basically um so how do you think about um kind of the

[00:51:45] Anne: Way that within time and technology in

[00:51:48] Jacob: All of our cultural advancements how do you think about um uh I suppose like the

[00:51:55] Anne: How quickly I pass through each other and their um scenarios and settings like is are we going to look back and look at podcasts and go wow those were a much more profound thing than we thought they were at the time we thought they were just fun cool conversations weren't talking 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 is right well I have um I don't know if you've got to appendix two of my book but I talk about social media and okay I didn't get to that I want to hear that's okay so it' be really interesting I'll I'll kind of spoil it for you a little bit but um but it's

[00:52:28] Jacob: Also any sort of podcasting so 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 that was written into the Bill of Rights um people could speak it was pretty limited right people could get on a soap box and speak and it would go maybe 30 yards and that was it right so freedom of speech was relatively harmless um and maybe we had a newspaper

[00:53:07] Anne: And at the head of the newspaper was sort of a you know the newspaper's like 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 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 got to tell the truth it has to be verified we have to be accountable you know all of these things there's five values if you look up journalism there's five values that they have that says okay we'll do this and that worked for a while because there were the G Gates there were very limited Gates it was really expensive to produce a newspaper and there wasn't anything else but then you know we got to radio and um and you know with radio

[00:54:07] Jacob: Now we were going over the airwaves and so they you know the government said oh we have a problem now we can't ensure this truth now so they put in the fairness Doctrine and the fairness Doctrine said if you're going to talk about a current issue you have to talk about both sides of the current issue end of story and that um went up

[00:54:26] Anne: Until 1987 when Ronald Reagan abandoned that law and partly he was sort of like well we 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 kind of evolved and now we have social media and social media the difference is again it's like now we have anybody can speak and anybody can say anything they can post anything the problem is um there's no longer a standard of Journalism and the post that you make is a physical thing it has a life of its own yeah 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 yeah so now is it really speak 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 I love it yeah but um 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 so if I say um 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 right if I say the election was rigged I have to

[00:56:26] Jacob: Say this is not true it's my opinion right and if some if I say the election was really it's true anybody can come back and say nope all the evidence shows there is no evidence that this election was rigged it's not true and then that person gets warned and if

[00:56:43] Anne: They keep doing it they get taken off

[00:56:46] Jacob: Because it's like nope you're required to accurately describe your speech you're still free to speak but you must accurately describe it because we're in a world in which the spee can be the speech can be equally true or equally false yeah you know 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 it's their opinion you know what I mean it's like you at least have

[00:57:19] Anne: Described it as something that is untrue right 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 uh to and the regulation is very easy because the guys at the top

[00:57:34] Jacob: The you know the Zuckerberg's and

[00:57:38] Anne: The Elon musks they must say you know

[00:57:42] Jacob: They can put in the thing 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 and then and then there's two or three rul rules that say you can argue whether it's true or argue whether it's false and then if you do it three times you're out like fine so yeah that's an idea I

[00:58:05] Anne: I want to put up I am not an expert on social media but I want to put out things that 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 you guys get down there fix it make 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 and the thing is if it's a cell a cell's gonna look at Facebook and go well 99.9% of this is crap we don't even need this yeah you know but people roll differently 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 yeah I was thinking of um I as much as it's often just a sess poool but I do drop in from time to time on Twitter and um they have a uh Community notes I don't know if you've seen that and I think that's a I like that I think it's a step in the right direction for us to landing on sometimes it's a little confusing because it's like well who is the Arbiter of Truth here like is there a seiling that who watches The Watcher sort of there is that whole thing but I think it's a step in the right direction well nature requires the every cell to report up so my thing was well if nature can make every sell 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 if they don't understand the difference between a truth and a lie they're going to figure it out pretty darn quick yeah and that's the difference is you make you put the responsibility where it is where it is most effective and this one I think it's 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 far it goes and what damage they're doing so I'm GNA make them I want them to be accountable for what they say and when it comes back there's going to be somebody says oh somebody posted this and said it was true and it is not we can get that guy to rec you know to post 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 very important 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 lie and Truth yeah I mean I think what happens with social media that gets really confusing is so as much as very important conversations are taking place on there's also like you know there's also so 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 right next dog video for me yeah it's so it's kind of hard I kind of just wonder where we're gonna end up you know in 10 years when we talk about social media are we going to have this strange conversation yeah 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 part so yeah exactly and that's the and you know what if that's what we want to do that's okay but let's put some accountability

[01:01:35] Jacob: There for the things that are again the problem is you're having just like you said 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 yeah so how do you how do you let people know what they're getting right 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 going to 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 I'll just put it out there as false you know right like people FMA didn't come to Asheville it's like actually they did so you have to say h just my opinion it's like well what do you know you live in Minnesota you know yeah I me I think that is a powerful move though is putting the responsibility on that's we should be deeply we're interacting with each other in potentially a very profound way we should take responsibility I do kind of Wonder um about I spent a lot of time in the world of uh just creating stuff I

[01:02:38] Anne: Like write a lot of poetry um I make a lot of music I'm really not very good at making music but I love making it um sometimes I like sharing you know just I mean sometimes I'm going on a walk and I smoked a joint and I want to share a thought so right I get like sometimes

[01:02:52] Jacob: Having all that freedom exist in the same place like sometimes I'm hard it's hard to quantify right that right well

[01:03:01] Anne: Again what you're saying is exactly the nature of humans is we want to maximize our freedom and I'm like all for maximizing Freedom yeah but the only line is no harm to others if you went on your walk you smoked a joint and you punched somebody out you P 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 the world is great when everybody is in tune with what their values are

[01:03:30] Jacob: 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 we have to that's to me if you're going to make a better world you have to Envision a better world first and that's what I'm doing here is envisioning the core the goal or the foundation of a better world and then lots of people fill in the gaps yeah brilliant I love that um okay so where do you see the concepts that you that you've posed in not just this book um and this is the only one that I've read from you but along with your other books uh for one I would love to know kind of what's what seems to be for you anyway the kind of the through line between them if any um and also what do you what are your expectations with this work like what sorts of you know outside of these conversations like do you want to be cross laterally uh

[01:04:27] Anne: Collaborating with other philosophers and scientists who are also in these same worlds like where would you like this to end up or do you want it to face okay um has a good question so I'll start with the through line of the books and then I'll tell you what I um remind me if I forget to tell you what I'd want to 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 and my first book is about happiness um and it was my struggle because I grew up really insecure of the 11th of 12 children and a pretty you know an anxiously you know um 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 vignette of my challenges and like little lessons I learned from them and what I but what I came down to in this book was that I needed to make my own values but that was it when 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 a based on how this all works we really need to do that because that's a whole that Miss in how we designed you know so that was that one the second book is kind of a romantic suspense Business book and it

[01:05:48] Jacob: Was really starting my views about

[01:05:52] Anne: Business and what you know that I have a big section in my book about the dangers of profit maximization right that profit maximization is a vehicle by which people um can harm others and say well I got a good reason I maximize my profits agree 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 um to change your environment you can buy off the government you know you can Lobby the government legally that is just legalized bribery you know and do all these things so I have a I'm accountant and I have economic background but profit maximization is to me one of the great evils of a

[01:06:40] Jacob: Society uh 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 um so that book was sort of my start of that and it was a it was just a fiction it's a love story and it's all that stuff but that's what that one is and then Dena was where this one

[01:07:01] Anne: Where I worked out the theory using the socratic dialogue between the creatures you know that Sarah and Dena and that was where I really worked

[01:07:11] Jacob: Out the details of how this worked and

[01:07:15] Anne: It's twice as long as the theory book and the theory book the human idea which is this new one it just came out this one I just cut the story out and put in

[01:07:24] Jacob: More examples and it's just the theory

[01:07:26] Anne: So that's how they all link together but those early books were really seeds planting seeds this was the thing I been thinking about this stuff I hadn't put it together yet 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 want to be a Charles Darwin who's alive you know I want to be the person who sort of is the you can go to

[01:07:53] Jacob: And say oh Ann Riley created IDE ideas for the but look at what we can do with it I don't really care about an Riley that's just the base but look what we can do with this idea and that's what I really want is I want it 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 applied this one concept what would their decisions look like what would homelessness look like what would education look like what would policing look like what would you know these

[01:08:26] Anne: 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 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 yeah I can't you see what I mean that's what I want for the future yeah I love that I think that's so good I umum uh yeah it makes me think you might you may have heard this but um uh this concept that I think you'll like that I've heard is uh being the Usher of

[01:09:08] Jacob: Epiphany yeah what do you think about that's a pretty high standard

[01:09:14] Anne: Setting the ideas out like 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 don't want in fact you know I'm old the and the world's going to go on 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 like oh it's her idea uhuh 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 a we have a long way to go we do not make decisions this way we have not structured our econ economy our social structures our anything this way 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 yeah absolutely yeah let's at least get the right hand talking to the left hand you know exactly

[01:10:13] Jacob: Yeah well um cool let me glance to my notes over here just make sure there wasn't any I had so many I just uh

[01:10:20] Anne: Your book was difficult toight as 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 and after a while I had to chill out on taking my own notes because I wasn't getting anywhere on the book so yeah well and that's why the book is so important is it has everything in there in like a small space right there are I say to people I say you don't understand there's a lot in there what do you maybe there's one part you might want to talk about because if you just want to talk about all of it there's a lot yeah you know but that's why you write a book like this if you read Darwin's Origin 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

[01:11:05] Jacob: Smartest person in history in my

[01:11:08] Anne: Opinion because he was just he was a thinker he could just think through it all and I used him as a guide you know to help me reason through this you know

[01:11:19] Jacob: But um there's a lot in there and you know every chapter has something that oh you know and I want you to

[01:11:28] Anne: Feel that way I want you to keep reading but the thing is if you start I started a big bang and I end up at you know the structure of government you would that's a long way to go you know yeah you did it pretty elegantly to be honest yeah 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 it lays out these things that for the most part A lot of people you know we kind of learned at least a good percentage of a lot of the stuff that you said you know in school and college and whatnot it's very easy to as I'm listening to the book go like yeah makes complete sense yeah I agree couldn't agree more and so it does stack on itself nicely

[01:12:08] Jacob: Yeah I did have a lot of people say

[01:12:10] Anne: Yeah I reviewed high school biology you know and I was like yeah 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 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 yeah well it helps

[01:12:36] Jacob: Other people other people wrap their head around it so it's not so daunting so sometimes I feel like um I use the I use the term throwing out the baby with the bath water I use it just way too much so sorry for listeners who have sick of hearing me hear it say it but um I do think that I mean I stumbled into kind of the world of understanding myself and humans and um like not only

[01:12:59] Anne: Just my own thought process but like what you know what does it mean to be a human the whole why are we here just the you know everybody has those moments in their life I mean I stumbled on to it uh via necessity and so I felt that I dealt with a lot of depression and these sorts of things I was confused about who I was and what I should do blah make lying to myself not realizing I was lying to myself and experiencing the rep I think I'm in that club too so yeah oh you're human as well gotcha

[01:13:25] Jacob: Yeah I got it yeah um and so I'm just always like back to the throw throwing the baby out with the bathwater is I realized

[01:13:36] Anne: As much as I was so egotistically sure that I already kind of knew everything I needed to know um like all these old these old texts and stuff are hippie dippy and I don't really need to indulge myself in the way other people think to understand myself blah um but I do think that

[01:13:55] Jacob: So important that everybody even outside of necessity and outside of being forced to because your brain is attacking you out of depression whatever it's such a superpower to understand yourself on

[01:14:07] Anne: Like such a deep level um

[01:14:10] Jacob: And I don't know I don't I guess suppose I don't have a question for you on that and but what do you think about that does that make you think of anything there well and I think it's so I think you're right I think that the well um that was sort of the point of my

[01:14:24] Anne: First book was I couldn't be happy until I think the okay spoiler on this book sorry readers don't listen if you don't want to hear this but there's five words um in order for me to be happy identify your values live them that's it and so

[01:14:44] Jacob: What happened is once I did that I

[01:14:47] Anne: Became at home with me when you become at home with yourself you can figure out how to become at home with the world 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 um maybe I'm not getting something here let's work on that you know but you start 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 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 AA is hey I'm cool with me and people love be being around people who are cool with themselves because they just get it's a it's an unspoken thing they'll be like oh I kind of like that I kind of like that so I think the young kids call it Riz or something now dud yeah but it's it doesn't have to be it's just gonna be R you know what I mean you can just be okay yourself yeah

[01:15:53] Jacob: Exactly but uh so what are the uh one more time what were the five words identify your values live them that's

[01:16:03] Anne: Profound what are the benefits I'm sure you say this in the book what are the benefits of identifying your values that was another thing in that same rambling that I had it was 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 so right it's it um it you know values are equivalent to goals and when you have DNA member human born with no goals no born with no ideas they can't have goals and they can't have values they have to establish their own animals don't need to they don't need them they got their instructions they go they come out born perfectly capable of living as 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 learned and all the things you read and done all these things 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

[01:17:10] Jacob: My values aren't external um like I

[01:17:14] Anne: Will feel better if I have a million dollar house or something like that it's like well just go to California you know it's easy you know but um but for me the the values that I came up with the word heck honesty empathy calm and kind 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 it could 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 you know it all connects to in my mind it all connects together yeah no it totally does I uh um uh it makes me think of um oh my gosh I get excited sometimes and then I lose the thought but uh um I was thinking about um oh dang it I lost it okay it was something uh apparently not worthwhile in that moment um but I will say um

[01:18:32] Jacob: I did I feel like I'm going to uh replicate what you have behind you in some way I feel like I also do little sticky notes so yeah I do sticky notes because I'm an apartment now I can't necessarily ride on the wall but my house back originally from Washington State I used to write I notic the 360 number where in Washington uh I grew up just north of Portland Oregon about an hour north so Kelso Washington is the name oh Kelo yeah I lived in Portland for 35 years and I was born in Richland so other side of the state Richland Washington so yeah I saw the 360 number and I said I wonder if you're still there yeah no I not I found my way down to Austin uh about five years ago I work in the event industry and so the pic pmic really like just set me for a loop so I just had to escape to somewhere that was open so um I've been in awesome five years but I'm definitely missing the Pacific Northwest tons so yeah well now I'm in the midwest because we were uh we spent the last 10 years caring for elderly parents so but

[01:19:27] Anne: Um you know I think we're making our way back West we have two of our kids are back there so we'll probably make it make our way back there so yeah I love the West it just more suits me a little bit better but yeah I think I'm with you on that yeah but it's beautiful though because the way life works is uh I've been here about five years like I said I'm starting to take a step back and go kind of ask myself why I'm here and why I ended up here and what it's done but I look 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 needed this few years of this in my life regardless of where I end up um I see value right and that's the

[01:20:16] Jacob: Thing is nature is nothing but change and so what works for you now and works for you may change over time and as long as open to it and say oo I think I'm ready for something different you know what is it that I'm still looking for what is it that I want to accomplish or what am I missing those are things that only you can tell yourself because you're your own expert no one else can tell you and you don't have to have you don't have to make decision you can run over all kinds of ideas because ideas are free you can have as many of them as you want 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 what you act on is where that will impact you because it starts go 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 going to affect everything so those you want to 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 they don't exist in the real world they just exist in your mind and that's okay yeah that's brilliant that's fascinating um while we are getting up here in time I think that's a pretty decent note to uh start pointing us towards um what I want to do so obviously in the in the description I'll have some links 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 um what are you working on next how do they connect with you how do they explore more of your stuff if they're if they're turned on by what we've been talking about right well right now I the newest book just came out two weeks ago and I was in the midst of all this stuff with my mom so I've done literally no 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 I guess I like that person better so I'm good you but but I think ultimately I do want to put together my ideas about the current problems of today using this mindset um 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 it has to tow its line 247 and it you know if it has to report up how it's doing so given that how would we treat

[01:22:42] Anne: Homelessness you know how would we treat like I said education how would we treat police violence what a great Baseline

[01:22:49] Jacob: Yeah exactly it's a way to think

[01:22:52] Anne: And that base of thinking will make will really Drive different kinds of decisions and the question for me is to Envision them enough for somebody else to say oh you might be able to do that's what I want so that's probably the next thing I'll work on you know um and I just don't know when I'll start that it's runs around in my head but and you know what I think the last time I was like oh this will take oh a couple months to write five years later still going you know so I don't know because I Leave Myself open to 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 yeah I find myself I get I get in my own way if I end up trying to structure it too much and trying to plan it too much I end up like tripping over my own dang feet if I do that too much 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 something I go oh that's a good idea I did a podcast with a lady talking about plant intelligence and it was really interesting and 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 plants and animals are just directly linked to Nature yeah you know and plants even more so because they don't have even brains they have this neural system but not really a brain I was like oh you're right they can just respond to Nature like this and we like have to go wait I have to think about that and what am I going to do and I have to build a structure and I have to no I was like oh and her she titled it how brains limit us and I was like wow I never even thought of that so that's a nice title too yeah I just totally totally blew me away that oh I had 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 yeah I've been I've been slowly chipping away at this book called uh light eaters it's like it's about plants and um like the life behind plants it's so fascinating the author is really good too um right but it's funny

[01:25:09] Jacob: That you mentioned that because I was actually GNA try to bring that same book into this conversation earlier because I was wondering what you would think about it so maybe check that one out it's called light eaters light eaters I will I will well um This Woman's name who did the podcast with me her name is gardinia uh and it's Tiger Lily gardinia

[01:25:28] Anne: I was like well that's a good name for a plant person but she had several she if you ever look her up she's I think she's on podcast that's where I found or pod match that's where I found her nice um she might be interesting to talk to you because you might get some really especially if you're reading this other book she's fascinating you know yeah I've been my mind has been being blown like little facts 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 and move that way yeah and that makes me have to like take a break from the rest of my day it's so profound to me so cool the implications of that yeah and this is what I what I assume is that there

[01:26:17] Jacob: Are abilities that plants and animals have that we have no way with our five

[01:26:25] Anne: Senses to understand and we just don't and so rather than I mean I can't even imagine that we can see them as inferior beings they are different beings and their skills or their abilities are so different that we

[01:26:41] Jacob: Should stop and before we do some of the horrible things we do to animals we should stop and think about

[01:26:50] Anne: Things because there are there's just mystery out there that we don't know stuff we don't know I call it energy we don't know and it moves

[01:27:00] Jacob: Ways we can't even fathom and rather

[01:27:03] Anne: Than you know this whole concept of manifest destiny and we're the kings of the world I'm no we are participants in a big web yeah and we should be respectful of that yeah it's a pretty bold claim to think that we're like the head of it the only ones who have it all figured out yeah but that claim started thousands years ago and we've decided a big number of us have decided to keep that claim going so even though if you look around you're like ah facts don't bear that out but yeah it's a in that book uh they I think they talk about how um uh we they talk about Consciousness basically in kind of the assumption that we kind of always

[01:27:47] Jacob: Assumed that a brain is what gives rise to Consciousness like it requires like a complex synapsis firing thing but then uh we're kind of discovering that okay like this plant is clearly so intelligent in a way that is a Beyond a brain in this in some crazy yeah separate it has a neural system that manag to do all that without needing and probably because um you know every neural system

[01:28:14] Anne: Grows within the environment that can support it so there are I mean plants have been around they're the winners in the evolutionary I mean there's 450 you know I mean uh gigum Mass bites whatever they call it but they're the winners I mean they're 80% of all life in carbon mass as plants but animals need brains because they move you know they have to move they have to maneuver in the world they have to they have to figure themselves out there's a lot more brain power 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 it protects itself it does all the other things it just doesn't need a big brain to do it's just very efficient you know but we don't we I mean that still is kind of an a far out everybody goes oh yeah what are you smoking today to have come up with the plan intelligence concept like no just yeah exactly yes yeah those what they told me yeah weed gave me this idea directly yeah exactly it was like hey stupid you know but uh you know

[01:29:21] Jacob: That's the thing is um I have a quote up on my wall it's by kaes John Mayor kanes it says the difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as

[01:29:32] Anne: In escaping from old ones and I think that is where we are in this world today there's a lot of ideas that we need to escape from before we can come up with the new ones absolutely yeah well said I love your choice of course also by the way we both have Albert Einstein right behind our heads third I have a lot of his quotes this one's good one the other one is and one I live by is make things as simple as possible but never simpler and I love that one too 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

[01:30:09] Jacob: Because it just wasn't gonna I wasn't GNA tell you the I wasn't G to tell you what you need to know yeah so yeah I the word 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 your to your uh book thinking of word concise you did such a great job on that you also just around all the plant talk I took us on a little side quest on the end um I was G you talk about it made me even think about more things you know you present uh words like ecosystem really elegantly um I love the way you describe all that so if anybody has been enticed at all who's listening right now like uh an expands on a lot of this stuff that it's like there's a lot of touching billiard balls

[01:30:52] Anne: Uh so yeah there's

[01:30:55] Jacob: A your book is worthwhile and it's enjoyable and um yeah thank you so much for writing it everybody check it out we are getting up here in time I don't want to hold you off too long in um but so thank you so much 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 let me

[01:31:11] Anne: I loved it I had such a delightful time you are very great conversation list good questions good conversation just and you make me think a lot so I love that it's my favorite thing to do is think so likewise yeah I

[01:31:29] Jacob: I man okay well The Light in Me seas and honors a light in you and thank you for following this internal thing and writing this book and doing all this so um I'll be in touch everybody else check out Ann stuff the links are below and Ann you have a good rest of your day

[01:31:30] Anne: Okay and you too thank you so much this was really enjoyable likewise yeah we okay bye

[01:31:32] Jacob: Knowledge is Power reality is junkyard love podcast