Exploring The Edges with Bill Reel & Britt Hartley

All right, welcome to a joint conversation between me, Britt Hartley, at Nononsense Spirituality with my very old friend, Bill Real at the Almost Awakened podcast. And this is the first time I've had a conversation on my side of the channel. And so I'm very excited to start to open up some dialogue with someone who I really trust with uh the things that I like to explore. And we have a history of of having some of these conversations together before I was Nononsense Spirituality. And we can talk about that more later. And just want to uh we're going to be trying some things. We're going to be trying to see if we can have uh instead of me on my channel just talking for an hour, having some more conversations and also bringing some other people into the conversation. So, without further ado, I'm going to introduce my friend Bill Real. And Bill, if you don't mind, um, the people who have been following me for years and years know about you because like I got my start on your channel, but for people who are new to my channel, do you mind spending kind of a few minutes talking about uh your story and and the kinds of things that you're doing?

>> Well, first let me just say kudos to you for all that you've accomplished in the last uh year or two. It's been amazing watching you uh just take off and I think that you're brilliant and uh you facilitate incredible conversations. You're you're really uh smart about the way that your brain works and the ideas that you come up with and the ways that you take an idea down a track and a line of thinking. So, it's been a lot of fun to watch you in the background. Uh yes, my name is Bill Real. Uh I joined a high demand fundamentalist religion just like uh you did. Uh I was a convert. you were born into it. Uh, I started deconstructing it was Mormonism, but I started deconstructing it when I was probably really seriously deconstructing it when I was probably in my late 20s, early 30s. And as I took it apart, I started a podcast uh Mormon Discussion Incorporated where I uh Mormon Discussion Podcast where I tried to uh take the messy issues of that religion and uh take them apart for people, try to examine the history and uh show people through historical documents or talking about quotes from leaders or various people within the faith and help people to make sense of it. And uh right away it started to take off. I turned it into a nonprofit in 2014. I was at the time a currently serving bishop, which is the ecclesiastical leader in Mormonism. And so, while I'm leading a congregation, I'm also uh experiencing a faith crisis and trying to help people deal with their own questions. And uh over time I just kept doing that and the podcast grew bigger and bigger and uh eventually I split that off into a separate podcast that you and I did together called the Almost Awakened Podcast. The idea there was to explore things that people who had deconstructed religion could now take in as useful tools and resources and to help them make sense of the second half of life and to give them uh ideas and things to play around with that would make it safer and more comfortable for them to exit whatever religion they came from and to move into something where they're thriving post religion.

H and and uh the part of the story that that you left off that I just want to to highlight is the reason that I kind of even got started in in being on social media and this career that I've kind of made was because when you were at uh your your nonprofit, you noticed that there was still really a lot of male voices that were dominating the the religious deconstruction space and and so you put it out there and said, "Hey, if there's anyone someone uh who is, you know, a woman or queer or or feel like you're not represented in this conversation, like will you let me know? And uh I'll use my platform to kind of help you out. And so I I uh responded to that call and we started the Almost Awaken Podcast. And for like how long did we do it? It was over a year.

>> Oh yeah, I think

>> almost two years.

>> Yeah, two or maybe three.

>> Two or three years. And it it was the place where I really developed my voice and our conversations became the book that I published. And every blurb on the back is someone that I knew from the podcast. And we got some pretty big names and amazing conversations. Like we had Lisa Miller and we had Bart Campolo, we had Nick Jeno. We had some, you know, we had some really amazing conversations. And then uh Bill supported me when I kind of wanted to go off on my own and try to do my own thing for a while. And then when I got to the point that everyone's on my YouTube channel saying like, "Where where's a podcast? Like, can we have some conversations? Like, I love to listen to you, Britt, but it's like an hour of you just yapping." And so, uh, my first thought was like the person top of my list to like bring in for conversations is my friend Bill because I think what I really value about our like 10-year friendship now, Bill, is that we can disagree with each other and that's exciting and fun and non-threatening. And also, you're one of the few who's more on the atheistic space who will also sometimes call out the left or call out deconstruction spaces or call out atheist spaces. Um, and so it doesn't feel like an echo chamber. Um, it really feels like we we we truly enjoy the conversation and we'll call out whatever we feel like we need to call out, even if that's, you know, our own team. And those conversations are rare, I feel like, in in the dialogue. And so I really appreciate some of the more nuanced conversations that we're able to have together.

>> Yeah, I I respect your intellect a lot. And uh what I think is always fascinating is to take some sort of complex idea and to break it down and to examine it and to push against the structures of it to test the integrity of the idea. And you can't do that if you're in a space with somebody who is confrontational or defensive. Uh because then the brain will go into the the lizard part of the brain, right? You'll get into fight or flight and and you'll handle the conversation very differently. What you need is a interlocator that you uh can explore the idea with where both of you are deeply interested in testing the boundaries of that concept. And so as you and I did the work in the past uh we were able to always be able to do that. I I respected your opinions. I I loved where your brain would go. I wanted you to throw out things that I hadn't thought of and to be able to test uh those concepts again to see if the structure of that holds up. And uh so I think it's a very natural you're a very natural person to have those kinds of conversations with and I'm really excited to to see where these go.

Yeah, it's it's taking the ego out of it where we don't have like an agenda and there's very few people that I can just like play like it's it's I call it chess like what you're talking about where you're just going to put out an idea and see like where the defenses are and see like does it hold up to this argument and we're just playing and you like when you're playing that game with people who like have their identity wrapped around winning that particular chess mask like it's not very fun and they'll flip the table when they get mad you know and you and I can just kind of play out an idea without having to wrap an identity around it. Uh, and that's one of the benefits of like deconstructing and having dark nights of the soul and even having some ego deaths is that you're able to just play a little bit more. And and I I do feel like we're able to do that. So, what we're going to do today is we just came up with a couple questions for each other of just like things that we're thinking about that we thought would be interesting to talk about. And then at the end, I just really want to ask the audience um what you would hope for as far as us teaming up. Are there certain conversations that would be interesting for us to have that you want us to have? I think one that I want to do with Bill is I want to talk about the existential elk theory that's on my list of things to talk to Bill about. Are there certain guests that you would love to to see us interact with? What would be your ideal guests? and just kind of yeah asking you guys um kind of what you're wanting more out of out of the conversations here so that we can yeah so that we can tailor this to ways that you know we're interested and engaged but also that we're we're reaching a need with our audiences too. So that's where we're headed and uh I'll I'll start Bill I got a question for you. It's a question I did a TikTok on uh a week or two ago and it's like a it's like a trolley problem. It's it's like an ethical dilemma that's kind of abstract. So in this scenario you uh you can know in this scenario that this particular religion whatever it is is 100% false as far as its truth claims. And let's say in this scenario that you can know that beyond you know like however whatever magical genie this world that I'm creating is you can know that the religion is false but you also can 100% know that your uh maybe one of your children would have a happier life in that religion than outside of the religion. And let's say that like the kid is young. They're like 10. And you have a crystal ball that's magical. And you can tell that that kid is going to have a thriving life, a longer life, better marriage, better relationship with kids, better relation, better relationships in general, even maybe be a little bit better of a person because they're associating with this religion. So the question is, if you know the religion is false, but you know that your kid would do better in it, would you take your kid out of the religion or not?

>> Yeah, it's a great question and I had to sit and wrestle with this a little bit myself because uh my ego wants to get in the way of how I would decide this. So let's start off by um first things first is you got to get ego out of the way because The main priority for me and I think for you too has always been to help people to thrive and to help people to do their best and have their their best second half of life. And uh you can't do that if you have an agenda. If if your goal is like their life has to look like my life. And uh it's a tricky thing. You know, I've helped so many people who have been deconstructing high demand religion and they're in various situations. The mom and the dad are out, but the kids are in. The kids are out, but the mom and dad are in. Mom's out, dad's in. One of the kids is out. Three of the kids are in. It And it's interesting to listen to to them describe how the kids are doing. And one of the things that you and I have always been aware of is that you can't pull someone out of something that they're not ready to get out of it. It It'll backfire and you'll end up doing harm. You'll end up where they put walls up and they're not ready to leave. and and and they'll articulate it that way. So, as I thought about the problem as you pose it, um I had to think about like what's the value. So, I made a few notes here. One of the things I wrote down is that you got to separate truth from function. So, I put some things aren't true, but they can still function in helpful ways. And you and I have done lots of conversations in the past. The hero's journey is the one that comes to mind. We talk about hero's journey and and setting up stories and narratives where people learn the hero's journey. They hear about a hero and the hero encounters in difficulty and and that hero overcomes that and then he eventually, you know, saves the day. That it's functional. It helps us to learn about ourselves. It helps us to dive deeper into uh the world around us. So, I put some things that aren't true, they still function in helpful ways. Some things are true, but they function terribly. We did an episode uh called Dangerous Ideas.

>> It's another fun one I I thought. And we examine things that were true or potentially true that maybe it's better that the human species not even learn about those things.

>> So, I put religion often sits right in the middle of that tension. Uh, the real question becomes what do we value more for our kids, truth or function? And it's messy because both matter, but they don't always align.

>> And so I put kids don't just need a belief system, they need belonging. They need structure. They need a sense of meaning. And religion for all of its flaws, it gives that. And most of us, most human beings, I mean, we're in a binary black and white stage of thinking for a large chunk of the first part of our life. And in that stage, we need narratives. We need myths. We need stories that we believe in wholeheartedly because we won't do well with them if we believe that they're myth. We need to have stories that we think are true that aren't. They're just mythological stories that treat that teach maybe some underlying truth but aren't true in in a in a literal sense. And uh I put religion is one of the easiest most prepackaged way to get those things. Um, it's the scaffolding uh religion provides that helps people thrive. And I uh I know that beliefs themselves aren't true, but the scaffolding is worth the price. And so I look back at my own time in a high demand religion and I'm grateful for what I learned there. I'm grateful that I believed it for a time. I wouldn't go back and change things. I'm mad at it. I'm I'm I'm hurt that it lied to me. I'm disappointed that it betrayed me and set me up to believe things that it knew weren't true and that it kept all the information so that I couldn't make the healthiest decisions. But there are a lot of people in this world who believe in religious systems with all of their heart. Those systems aren't true. And yet that system gives them the structure, the scaffolding, the ethics, morality that in the end is uh beneficial at least in that stage in life. And because you've already posed the conclusion that this ends up being really good for them, better than taking them out, the decision I'd have to come to is I've got to, if I'm going to be a healthy human being myself, I've got to let them thrive within a religion that I know to be false. and maybe a relation I know even hurts other people and causes them harm.

H. So my uh my c my counter thought to that is yeah because I I understand how you navigated that is uh is there some like it to me it boils down to the question of do we have any kind of hope that humanity can live without religion that we could actually outgrow it? because there would like if if I actually believed that we could outgrow religion, I might be able to make a short-term uh loss as far as like my kids are going to struggle with this or whatever, but it's going to be part of a of a movement that's going to lead to a better world. I might be willing to do that to make that kind of sacrifice if I believed that that was around the corner for us. But if you don't believe that we're ever going to have a world without religion, then I do think you have to get to a place where you have to value well-being over truth. And that's hard. I that's hard. That's hard for you and I our core values. That's hard for like our spiritual journeys to have to admit. And I remember Alex Okconor asked Sam Harris a similar question to this. like if you could know that the world would be worse without religion, that we would turn to nihilism and political religions and it'd be worse, what would you do? And he said, if I could know that that it was truly impossible for us to outgrow religion as as the kind of primates that we are, uh, I would remove my books off of the shelf because you have to value well-being over truth. And so I thought that was interesting that even he got there even though he's very critical of religion that uh that sometimes in this e in the in ethics or just in your life you have to choose between well-being and truth and it it is I think sometimes naive to think that truth always is good and sometimes you know there's a really great cost. Uh, a follow-up question that I have and then we can go to one of your questions is I asked a similar question on TikTok for people who were really deep in nihilism like who had seen who had experienced what we call the void and this very anchorless place which can be very hard but also it can be very freeing and my question to the people who were like in the void uh would you want your kids to experience that because on the one hand there's a lot of suffering there's a lot of you know potential harm you know in in losing your kid if they get too close to that edge of the void. But then there's also like a lot of freedom too to to create a life that's worth living for you and a lot of benefits of deconstructing to that place. So, uh is does that question change anything for you as far as like do you want your kids to deconstruct all the way to the bottom? Do you feel like that's a risk that you would want your kids to take?

You you can't know you can't know how the story ends, right? Like part of this is scary.

>> Yeah.

>> You if you encourage your kid to stay in a thing or you encourage your kid to deconstruct a thing, you have no idea where that path leads. And you know, we started off this premise by saying, well, you know, 100% sure this, 100% sure that. Well, that's not real life.

>> Yeah.

>> And in real life, I mean,

>> people take their lives. people uh have amazing opportunities that come because they they did something different that day. And so there are these really big pros and these really big cons. And uh I just I think when you start to tamper with things thinking that you've got it all figured out. There's the old analogy, I don't remember all the way the story goes, but whether it is good or bad, who knows? And and the way the tale is told is, you know, the kid is out helping his dad and he breaks his leg and the neighbor goes, "Oh, that's so horrible." And he goes, "Well, whether that's good or whether that's bad, who knows?" And then the next thing that happens is that the the army comes and wants to draft everyone who's able, but because his leg is broken, he's not taken to where lots of kids die. And you know, oh my goodness, that was so good. Well, is that good? Is it bad? Who knows? and next thing that comes along is uh something again that looks like it's uh negative and it's an impact because he wasn't taken into the army. Who knows?

>> I think the best you can do is

>> help the people you love feel supported and give them uh responses to their questions that support them thriving. And then from there I think to some degree it's just a crapshoot.

>> Yeah. For me like answering that question Yeah. cuz in real life I don't know. And so in my real life I I decided to take my kids out of religion hoping that that everything that was good about it that I would do the work to try to replace and and hopefully that would be better. I don't know if it will be, you know, or not, but that was the decision I made. But it was interesting with the void question, my emotional response to that is I feel like my oldest child, my biological child, I wouldn't mind him going to that place. I feel like he would really understand the love that I have for him in in going there and and realizing that, you know, cuz cuz when he was a child, kind of our love for each other when I was going through my deepest nihilism was a was a big anchor for me and it really saved me in a lot of ways. And so there's a part of me that wants him to go there so that he would understand that. But then with my adopted children, they start out life with uh less anchors than everyone else. uh and they have this wound that that they'll carry in different ways of, you know, their first memory being one of rejection or that my voice didn't sound like the voice that they heard when they were in the womb even though I've gotten I've had them since, you know, day one. Uh or, you know, being having their skin color be brown in in Boisee, Idaho. And so I just feel like with with my adopted kids, my my response is like wanting to keep them from that place a little bit because they start out life with with less anchors than everybody else does. You know, a lot of people get at least a bond between biological mom and child and they didn't get that. And so it makes me more nervous for go them going into those places because they already started life with a lack of some stability. And so I almost want them to like have more stability and and air on that side. So I actually have a different response for my kids based on like you know just just my emotions coming up with with you know kids.

>> Don't you think life is going to give everyone really big challenges somewhere along the way anyway that you and I don't have to self create?

>> Yeah. That Yeah. kids because they're going to run into their own life of problems and uh really cool experiences that give them ample opportunity. If they are, and I'll preface it with this, if they are taught to be curious, if they are taught to uh welcome uh mistakes as opportunities to learn from things, I mean, again, the thing we can do as parents is give them uh the kind of uh experiences on the front end that help shape how they look at challenges or how they tackle learning something new. Um I think those are the real gifts that we give. But if we do that, if we give kids uh opportunities to to appreciate curiosity, to value information, to welcome trying new things and not see mistakes as uh you know, religion says for instance that it's some sort of sin or horrible transgression when in reality it's how we humans learn. I can't learn everything by listening to my friends and family. I can't learn everything through a teacher at school. I have to experience some things myself. And I think if we do that, they're going to go through life and they're going to run into things.

>> Mhm.

>> They're going to run into some of their stories not being true. Uh whether it's in society or whether it's in a religious system or some sort of spiritual practice, they're going to learn that uh things they taught were true were myth. They're going to be taught that uh not everything goes the way you want it to, but that if you work hard, you have a better chance of things going well. and that sometimes just things happen for no good reason, good and bad. And I think if we can teach kids to do those kinds of things, then they're going to they're going to have a life full of experience that again could end horrific. Some people have the worst of luck. They've got 10 diseases and they die young and uh and some people deal with things within their mind that are uh debilitating.

>> and you can't fix everything. But the collective of human beings are going to have plenty of opportunities to to learn from experience and to create a productive life if they have sort of those basic structures on the front end. And they'll have their own crazy things that happen that will challenge them and cause them to grow.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it reminds me almost uh I I just saw this new study uh I'll send it to you because you'll find it fascinating where they were tracking like the anxiety of children in regards to death. And they found that like in secular homes when you just talk about death openly about how it's part of life and grandma died and here's her picture on on the wall and we remember her for these reasons and and you do it with modeling where like just the like the way that I said the word death was no different than any other word in that sentence. And they tracked like that kids uh grow just like a resilience like like you were talking about of just like they expect that there's going to be good days and bad days in life. They expect even that they'll die and that they can kind of grow to handle that. And then they tracked the kids uh whenever you would say death like grandpa's sleeping now or like you know these really vague statements with children or even if you quieted your voice when you were talking about death or you didn't say the word death you would say like you know sleeping. What it triggered in the kids was that my mom's talking about this differently than the way that she talks about everything else. And she doesn't quite say the words and is grandpa asleep or is he not? that that's kind of weird to me. And and all of that ambiguity and that tiptoeing around death actually models to the child this is something to be anxious about. And they would grow and they would grow death anxiety uh just because of how their parents were modeling how they were talking about death. Anyway, it was a super interesting study.

>> I >> I'll just say this. I think what would make a fascinating conversation at some point for you and I to spend an entire uh episode or conversation talking about what we think how we think we should teach our children and what the research and data actually says. I've got I've got a really uh intelligent grandchild who from the beginning I wanted to begin sort of prepping him to think deeper about things and I got a little ways into that and I thought oo I better back off just a little bit

>> because who knows what happens if you try to sabotage the program by giving young children second half of life concepts.

Mhm.

>> Maybe what you end up doing is getting them to realize that nothing means anything way long before they should ever think that thought.

>> Yeah.

>> And so I think that would be a really cool conversation to have and you're pointing to that which is what works, what doesn't, what ways should we talk about things. And I think that uh most adults who have children, especially young parents, are so ill equipped by society to even know the basics of what they're doing in terms of how to raise up a a kid or kids that uh have a good grounding that uh I I hope that as we move forward in the a world that's just progressing at such a rate that we begin to deliver to young people better information that they can make decisions on on how to have their own healthy relationships and how to ensure that their kids are raised in a healthy way.

>> Yeah. And that's a place where the data has corrected me also of of doing that second hand half of life when your kids are in first half of life. And so people are surprised at how traditional I raise my children, excuse me, where like I'll have a podcast where I'm talking about like time isn't real and are we in and like out of the matrix and mushroom trips and like I am out there and then I walk into my house and like people will sometimes be surprised that it's like there's homework and there's chore lists and there's family dinner and you have to sit at the table at family dinner and I have questions at family dinner and the questions are not are are not fully critically thinking as far as like deconstruction. It's more like uh what would you do if you were president or whatever and it allows for personality development at the table like you know this child is like this and this child thinks this and this and so you have an identity here at this table where you are different and you're valued and it's modeling that over and over and so like I really do raise my kids really tra traditionally like it would look like like uh almost like a a traditional kind of family but It's not because I want them to stay there. It's because I want them to gather all the tools from that stage and I want them to have a strong ego and sense of self so that later on in life they'll be able to lose it. And so it's like it's it's this weird thing of like in in my work really going outside the box and then with my children starting kind of in the box again so that they can gain the skills to fly the nest. And so my my home life is very is very um ordered and structured in ways that are it's almost like a whiplash when I go from my shed to my house. Uh because it's very different. But that's what the data was showing that that kids will actually do better with that second half of life if they have more of that structure in their first half.

>> And so that's where the data corrected me.

>> Yeah. You and I have spent a lot of time talking about or thinking about reading about stages of cognitive development. Follower stages of faith being an easy to scheme of uh cognitive development. uh Ken Wilbur's spiral dynamics and you know you and I have always talked about that you you shouldn't and I said it earlier in the podcast here but you really shouldn't take someone who's at an earlier stage of development and people need to understand when you come into this world you are very much I me right babies just cry they need their needs taken care of they don't care what mom and dad's needs are and then we get to a place where we're ethnosentric and we and we care about our family unit we care about our tribe it's us versus them and if you Take people who are in that binary black and white ethnosentric stages of thinking and you try to just yank them to some other stage. It is detrimental to them. Well, of course it's going to be the same dang thing for children. Kids need their brains are at certain uh levels. Their brains are at certain uh ways of thinking. And if we go in and go, you know what, my kid's really smart. I'm gonna I'm gonna get them to start thinking like a 35-year-old. Well, you're almost certainly going to do way more damage than the good you think you're doing by doing that thing.

>> Yeah. But it's it's it's it's like humbling, you know, because I I think the one where I got corrected was I really disliked in in children's stories and simplistic children's stories that there was a good guy and a bad guy because I was in this nuanced place of like good guy, you know, good guys have a shadow side, bad guys have a backstory, right? That's an adult way of looking at it. Like all of our more adult movies have complex villains where it's like, wait, is Thanos is he really the bad guy? This actually seems like there's some logic to this, right? And then our good guys are like often problematic. You know, they have a shadow side. And so I was really in that place and I wanted kind of my kids to be more in that place. And then like again like it was the data that called me out that like actually they can't get to that nuance place until bad guys are just bad guys first and good guys are just good guys and they get that modeling and I was like oh man like and I it really humbled me that like oh I have to start we have to start at the beginning where bad guys are just bad guys even though I'm not in that place. And that's that's really hard when you're coming from religion. I do feel like it's easier for people who were raised secular to just do this. Uh but when you're raised religious, like going back to some of those kind of order, structure, simplistic black and white ways of looking at things can be triggering because we were forced to stay there as adults and we had to kind of like break out of that. And so it's triggering to to like it's like it's like flying the nest and then like having to come back with your children and kind of start at the basics. And it's hard. It is. It can be triggering especially those first few years. I want to say one more thing about that because I relate to something you said about good guys and bad guys. Um there is this idea that you know you and I somebody once said this as sort of a joke. It's not funny but it's it it tells a truth about the time that we grew up in. I grew up in the 1980s and a friend of mine who also grew up in the 1980s said when you were molested in the 1980s you just got on your bike and rode home. And uh we've moved into a world that is much more aware of the bad people that are out there and we have a lot more structure around what we do to try to prevent that and get people help when something happens to them. So in your head as a parent, it's a really dangerous world out there. You know, when I was a kid, I didn't wear a bicycle helmet. I stayed out late at night and my mom and dad didn't care about anyone in the neighborhood. They should have. There were people in my neighborhood they should have, but they didn't care about They didn't worry about they thought then, you know, everyone within a mile of my home is safe. And uh today, as parents, we want to somehow figure out how we put a protective wall around our children and keep them safe. And when it comes to dangerous people out there, I think there's a uh proclivity to want to share with your child the dangers of the world and to prep them for child molesters and rapists and all the things that are out there. But that's not real. We don't mean that that way. It's not real in the sense that that's not helpful. Kids need to learn that there's a boogeyman in the closet or under the bed. They need to learn stories in that kind of way. And we've been teaching kids that there are a uh ambiguous bad out there that isn't seeable or uh isn't existing in your real world. Because if you told kids that watch out, someone on this street might be this thing who does these things. It might be overwhelming to a child. they might do better if they only understand that there's a a boogeyman under the bed. And I think teaching kids, I think for thousands of years, we've taught children or at least they've walked away with the idea that there's a boogeyman under the bed because conceptually that's how they can handle good versus evil. And just just to the same extent that you're saying good guys and bad guys need to be taught in simplistic ways when it comes to like superheroes and the villains, it's also true for the bad that's in the world and the danger that they might uh encounter again

>> because we're we're experiencing the opposite problems where like kids are not getting their driver's license. They're not engaging with life. They're only doing it from the safety like of a screen because like uh if you Yeah. If you shelter too much, then they don't have the skills to engage with the world and then you have like the opposite set of problems.

>> Yeah. And if we teach our, you know, we obviously should teach our kids not to talk to strangers or how to handle those things. We should have a a word that our kids know that that way when someone comes to them that they know that the parent sent them. But also, we can't stop everything. The research has been done that even the kids who get taught those things aren't they're almost not any less likely to if the statistical chance of something horrible happening to them isn't much less.

>> In other words, kids that are prepped not to talk to strangers still talk to strangers. Kids that are uh again, heaven forbid someone be kidnapped or abducted, but they've shown that kids who have been even trained to uh by parents to uh be aware of those things and to resist those things are almost just as easily uh taken by those things. And um so we can't just scare the dangers away from our children. Uh and maybe giving them these complex stories about people and what people do is actually more harmful than good.

>> Yeah. Just especially when they have the phones and they can kind of see the suffering of the whole world. I do think that we have to like grow to be able to contain that. All right. Uh hit me with one of your questions.

>> Well, I want to know what you think is the nature of reality. So, Okay.

>> Thoughts about this, but I want to know where are you at?

>> What it is and what it isn't and what kind of ideas you play around with.

>> Uh, I'm really interested I I'm really interested in consciousness and I I want I I hope by the time I die that we make some headway on what the hell is going on with consciousness. Um, because it it does sound lately. I listened to the 11-hour audio documentary that Anukica Harris did on consciousness and where she interviewed the top scientists that were working with consciousness and the vast majority of them are have really kind of abandoned the hard problem of consciousness where like how do we explain consciousness arising from matter? How how and why would it do that? Uh and at what level does it do that? And they are all starting to sound like uh consciousness is a fundamental quality of the universe that that re reality at at its most base level is experience and and things going in and out of experience for reasons that we don't understand. And there's something really interesting happening where there's a convergence between how the scientific materialists even are talking where they're talk starting to talk like pansychists of of consciousness being a fundamental quality of the universe and then you have like the Buddhists and the meditators talking about uh just sitting in consciousness in awareness where all that is is uh consciousness and objects and consciousness and that's all reality is and be sitting in that space. And then we have people from the philosophy of mind which has really been uh a philosophy that's gotten it kind of whack like phil schools of philosophy will kind of like wax and wayne over time but the philosophy of mind is really big right now which is like how can I imagine in my head a triangle and like the triangle has three sides and it looks like this but if you cut open my brain you can't find that triangle and so how does it exist you know how am I seeing it and that kind of stuff and so there's this convergence happening ing with the Buddhists and the meditators and the mystics talking about sitting in a field of open awareness and just having objects of consciousness come in and out of that field. And then you have like the pansychic pansychist uh scientists and how they're talking about consciousness is fundamental. And then you have the philosophy of mind talking about uh consciousness also. And so anytime there's like multiple fields kind of converging uh is very interesting to me. And so that conversation I've been really spending a lot of time in now like how how there's something other than nothing or whether the big bang is like something that happens over and over again with like expansion and and um contraction or how we're here or how life began. I I don't have like I'm I'm interested but I I don't have any intuitions for any of that. I I'm not even close to feeling like I even have an idea of any of that. But I am really interested in the conversation around consciousness and hoping that we make some headway on that uh in my lifetime. What what are you playing with?

>> Yeah, a lot of the same things. So you pointed out and uh the person I would point people to is Donald Hoffman who uh has taken a lot of this research and tried to make it understandable to all of us. Uh it's this idea that time and space and you said it time and space is not fundamental to the universe that that consciousness is fundamental to the universe.

>> And if consciousness is fundamental to the universe then there is a lot of things that

>> need to be discussed to figure out what that is. You know, uh, Echeri, we've said this before, but, uh, the uni, what's it is, uh, you and I are the universe expressing ourselves as human for a little while.

>> Mhm.

>> And I I like that because, you know, the idea behind God, we talked about religion earlier. The idea behind God is that he or she or it is all knowing, all present, and all powerful. Well, all knowing, everything that's known in the universe is known by the creative energy which we all flowed from uh all present because it is everywhere every it's everything uh and it's all powerful because everything that's ever been done or created in the universe has been done by it. Now I don't I don't know and I have high doubts. I'm I'm skeptical that God is a conscious being in the universe but I'm willing to listen to whatever God is. It is some sense of consciousness.

>> Um I think I think sometimes maybe the universe maybe the univer Okay. Um let me back up for a moment. One of the things Donald Hoffman suggests is that uh our eyes or our brain is like a VR headset.

>> Mhm.

>> That whatever reality is, we're not seeing it. We all go like, "No, no, this is reality. Here's a monitor. I've got uh I've got my road cer here. I've got my printer back there. Here's my microphone. these are objects. But maybe maybe that's not reality. And and and almost certainly it isn't because we know that dogs see things we don't and don't see things that we do. We know that mushrooms pick up things in their environment that we don't pick up and don't pick up things that our senses do. We've been given five senses, but maybe there's a hundred, maybe there's a thousand. Um, someone uh there was a couple of articles that I was looking at that said uh the human eye can only see 00035% of the fields in our vision and uh hence only 0.0035% of reality. And so maybe what's going on is that this takes me all these kinds of places.

Break it down. They say when you get down, I forget what the name of the word is for it, but it's like 10 to the 33 or something. When you get down to a certain size of things, all you end up with is like little particles of energy. And the particles of energy that I'm made up of and the particles of energy that the air between you and me and then the particles that you're made up of essentially at that base level are almost identical or are identical. M

>> and maybe what it is is this is all just energy and that evolution in order to prime us for survival over millions of years has equipped our senses to pick up only that which is necessary for survival. In order to make sense of the energy to know what things are nourishment and what what things are threats, where is safety and where is danger that

We've been equipped over long millennia of time to categorize, interpret, make meaning out of the things in our field of vision or within our senses. And so now today in 2025, I see a pack of M&M's or a light bulb or a rock. Um, but in reality, all it is is just particles of energy sort of bouncing off each other. And uh, I, at least, wonder if what we see is not what what is really there.

Yeah, I definitely am in the camp of, of we're not seeing reality. And it was really Donald Hoffman's work where he talks about how we don't see the world according to truth. We see it like icons on a computer where we have shortcuts of how we see things that are for evolutionary fitness. Like, that's why that we see the colors that we do. That's why we see the world the way that we do. And other creatures have a different reality because they need different information to survive. And so we're not even interacting with reality.

And the reason that this was so humbling for me is because when I first left religion, it was like, well, this isn't true. Like, I, I care about truth. It's not true. So, I'm leaving. Right? And then I got out here and went down the Donald Hoffman rabbit holes and started doing mushrooms and deconstructing things and you don't have free will and like this collective consciousness idea. And then it's like, okay, so you left this religion because it isn't true. So, what's true? And I'm like, oh, I don't even think we're interacting with truth now. And so it's like, very humbling of like, I left because it wasn't true. Okay, what is true? I, I like, I'm to the point where it's like, I don't even think we're interacting with ultimate reality, even if it exists. Uh, which is kind of, which is kind of humbling.

And so I tell people like, like there's this analogy that that I've heard before that we don't know how many blades of grass are on, you know, the planet. There's probably a number right now of, we don't know what it is, but I think I can know that it's not two. And so like my critiques of other people's ideas is not because I know, I don't even think I'm interacting with truth, much less know what truth is. It's more just that like, I, I don't think it's two. Like, I, I, it's like, I, I doubt, I doubt my own ability to access ultimate truth, but then I also doubt yours too. And so I think you're wrong, but it doesn't mean I know what the hell is going on here with reality. I have no clue what is going on with reality.

So my question for you then, because I, I can see kind of how you're working with this, is there's this philosopher named Philip Mainlander, and he's considered one of the darkest philosophers. And one of the reasons he's one of the darkest is, uh, well, I'll tell it in his story. So he believed that this Eckhart Tolle idea that like, we are God coming into awareness, uh, of like, kind of understanding like what this like collective consciousness thing, and then we realize, uh, that we shouldn't exist because this is actually awful. So it's like a God coming into awareness, seeing the level of suffering and all the problems, and then slowly kind of deciding to opt out. And so what he sees as the nature of a universe, of at least our planet, is a collective God coming into awareness and slowly committing suicide. And and each part will kind of decline. And when he published this book with this idea, the morning that it published, he went and he hung himself, uh, to complete what he saw as like, I'm completing the story here, which is that like, yeah, come into awareness, realize what we are, and then take, and then we can't call it quite good, though that we came into awareness of what we are. Like, coming into awareness of what you are is not all good. It's also a lot of horror. And so for him, the natural response to that is, let's come into awareness and then let's kill this collective God that shouldn't exist because, uh, it's just not good, you know, it's not good enough. And then he kind of followed it through. What do you think about that?

Yeah. Um, let me back up a moment and I'll come back to that. So, let me, uh, first off, I wonder if the universe is entertaining itself. If every, you and I get that, just on a logical perspective, that first off, we start with the Big Bang, and you go, and you said something earlier about, well, there's a Big Bang, but maybe there were lots of them, maybe it's expansion, contraction, expansion, contraction. But if we go back far enough, there has to be a first Big Bang, right? Like, and, and if there was that, it makes no sense, it's illogical. And then even if there is a Big Bang, and we go, okay, let's, that's fine, there's a Big Bang, there is elements in the universe, and somehow in this initial spark, creation begins, and there are elements. There are, you know, there's iron and, and whatever. There's all kinds of those things. But then we go, like, well, you could have all the elements in the world sit around your house for a bazillion years, and if there is no life, there's going to be no life. You can't create life from rocks and material, and it doesn't work that way. So, there has to be something else.

So, one of the ideas that's been posited, and Hinduism picks up on this a little bit, right? Their God is sort of in the midst of a dream, and he's just dreaming all of these things, which we are. Um, but it's this idea that if it was just energy moving around, that would be a boring way to do something. And if consciousness is fundamental to the universe, maybe the universe decided to experience itself as all the things. And so it, whatever that is, it put into some plan in motion that it would, everything would be an outgrowth of it. You and I, if we go far enough back, are an outgrowth of the Big Bang. Maybe the universe is just trying to experience what it's like to be all the potential possible things that are possible.

Yeah, I'm not opposed to those kinds of narratives. Where the place where I will contest with people is is when they're starting to talk about the universe experiencing itself and, um, or or some kind of collective or that kind of thing. You still have work to do to call it good. So you could have the universe coming into awareness of itself and wanting to explore itself and realizing that, you know, evolution is a huge cost. And maybe, you know, in the same way that like, if I wanted to have a dog for my family, uh, that's great, and then when the dog is suffering the most, the moral thing for me to do is put the dog down. And so there is kind of a question for, uh, that collective kind of consciousness narrative, is can you call it good? Uh, because are we not sometimes in human history like, kind of a suffering dog that a moral thing would put down? Um, and that brings up like the big red button question of, of, you know, does it, is it actually morally wrong if there's no one to mourn, by pushing the big red button? And that's a, that's a whole another set of issues. So that's, I'm okay with that narrative as long as you don't say that by definition it's good, because I don't think you can get to the good. Like, like, let's say you and I having this conversation is what the universe wanted, and it's good, like we're, we're finally like discussing the nature of of reality and what we are. But like, if we went back into our ancestry, how many millions of years of of human and then animal suffering and, you know, eating each other alive and starving to death and extinction did it take for us to have this conversation? Can we really kind of justify, you know, the ends because of, you know, justify the means because of the ends? That's where it gets more tricky for me.

That's what religion would do. Religion would come in and say, "God is good." And, and I think you're right. I think if we pose that consciousness is fundamental to the universe, time and space isn't. That the universe, the universe did this in some way to entertain itself. Then the universe wants to experience every variation of anger and sadness to the same degree it wants to, uh, experience joy and exhilaration. Um, and, and so it's not about good or bad. It's, it's about something else. And, and what I'm positing as just an idea is that maybe the universe was on some level bored,

with it being just particles of energy bouncing off each other, and it thought, well, if I'm going to spend, if I'm going to spend eternity being what I am, then maybe I should at least experience all kinds of different things. Now, I want to, I want to blow your mind for a moment. I don't know if you've heard this story before. I've, I've mentioned it before in other places. But they've been doing research with DMT, uh, in the last few years where DMT, you smoke it, it lasts up to maybe 20 minutes, but if you smoke enough of it, you go to crazy places. Joe Rogan talks about you meet the machine elves and you talk to them.

And, you know, you've done mushrooms. So, it's, it's colorful like mushrooms. It's your brain going in unique places, kind of like mushrooms, but it's deeper and more intense. And I've done Ayahuasca, and I would put it, I know one of the half of the ingredients of Ayahuasca is DMT. Well, they figured out a way to give people DMT intravenously. And when you give it intravenously, people are under its influence for about an hour. Uh, that's how long they let people stay under it. They did research where they sent a bunch of people off with introvenous. So the, you know, hundred people come into the lab and they do this experiment where they hook these hundred people up who don't know each other, they have no connection to each other, and, uh, they hook them up to intravenous DMT and let them go off on their, uh, trip. And then when they come back, they interview them. And what they found was that the structures of what they talked about, what they saw, what conversations were had, uh, what the places looked like. There was enough consistency that the researchers said, there's something consistent to the degree that we highly believe that these people are going to a real place. Now, they don't know if it's another dimension. They don't know if it's another world, if they're seeing something on an alien planet, if they're seeing something that's here but not visible to the human senses. But the research showed that there was something consistent to the degree that it wasn't just hallucination. Um, that the beings that were there were waiting for them. They knew they were, they knew we were coming. The, the people being researched on, that the locations were being described in similar ways by various people under the influence. And that the characters who were there were overlapping from person to person to some degree. That the researchers said there's little, little explanation for us other than this is a real place of some sort that these people are going to.

Yeah.

I'm so skeptical, Bill. I'm so skeptical. This is where like, there's some places where I will talk, I'll lean into the mystery and I'll go to places with with the mystics or the mushroom people and like, okay, like I can play here. And this is where, what, this is one place where I'm dragging my feet and I am just so skeptical. So the analogy that I give, and, and the, it's not that I don't think that there's a possibility, like anything can be real. I don't know what the hell is going on. Uh, but I think so long as there's still naturalistic explanations on the table, we don't have enough to kind of jump to those places. And the analogy that I like to use with stories like that is is dragons. That in cultures that don't touch each other, we have stories and imagery that are pretty similar of something like a dragon, a flying reptile. And these are cultures that separated in time and space, uh, do not touch each other. And so if you were to use the same logic that you use with, you know, the drug people or whatever, you would conclude that there actually were dragons because look at all these separate people who are having the same kind of image of a of a flying lizard. And to me, there's still naturalistic explanations for why the human brain would imagine the most terrifying creature would be something reptilian that we're already afraid of. Like, we have a deep fear of snakes, but what if that snake thing, that reptile thing could fly? And what if it had, some of them have fire, some of them don't, but, but what if it could fly? And that image is so, so terrifying, but we can imagine it because there's something collective in us as humans. This, this Jungian idea of a collective unconscious. And so for me, the fact that there's symbols that happen in people's dreams, the fact that you can even do dream work because if this symbol comes up in dreams, it usually means this. And that's for like, you know, you could have thousands of people who have a dream, for example, of like being pregnant and having a baby, which often represents like something new coming to life, right? Uh, the fact that we have images like that that are shared by all of these dreamers, to me, more taps into collectively what we are and the similarities that we have because we have similar brains and we have similar archetypes. We have similar stories. We have deep, like, deep in our collective unconscious, we have, we have stories and we have fears and we have symbols and we have, you know, almost like ancient memory that we can't, that's in our unconscious that we can't quite tap into, but is still a part of us, right? Uh, in the same way that how does an animal know to, to, you know, to go migrate here or to do this? Like, we have some of that, I think, too. So for me, when I get those stories about people combining on DMT, I, I still think that it's the same as how we all thought about dragons, even though we didn't collectively, even though there are no dragons, we all collectively imagined it. Or how we can collectively dream of similar symbols, even though I've never told you that this is a symbol for this or this is a symbol for that. It comes up in your dreams. So, I'm much more in the camp of like, I think these similarities are coming because we have similar brains, and I'm skeptical to go to that jump, to make that jump in this place.

Yeah, I love that. And I'll argue both in favor and against. So, let me just show, really quick, I'll put up on the screen here, just so people know that I'm just not crazy and making this up. Uh, there are lots of these out there. Uh, there are both podcast interviews with the researchers and there are, uh, articles that are detailing the research that are being done. Here's just one of them. Psychedelic Spotlight researchers are mapping out new dimensions through DMT technology. And so I'll just put that up just for a second, just to show that if folks want to do want to chase this idea down, they can. Uh, and so now let me put, let me take this back to here. And I'll just say to what you said as evidence that that you're right.

Have you ever taken a psychedelic substance and seen sacred geometry?

Yeah, absolutely.

Triangles and circles, octagons, all.

And now you can like recognize it, like, like in in in paintings or like even like ancient things, you can be like, "Oh, this, this looks like a mushroom thing." Like you get an eye for it.

Yeah. And, and if you and I took mushrooms, and something, when I did, I did it with mushrooms, I did it with Ayahuasca. When I took those two things, when the medicine started to kick in, I immediately saw sacred geometry. Especially if I closed my eyes, uh, suddenly my whole field of vision behind my eyelids was sacred geometry everywhere. And it would be easy for you and I to go, uh, well, you're seeing sacred geometry, and I'm seeing sacred geometry, so sacred geometry must exist somewhere. That's a dimension that we are, uh, hereby seeing by using the medicine. When in reality, maybe it's just our brain creating a thing that is common all across the human species when we're under the right circumstances, such as taking a psychedelic medicine.

So I agree with you. Um, and then the other thought I had that I at least want to get out here. I don't believe in a simulation theory.

I find the conversation about being in a simulation theory deeply interesting, and I just wanted to share a few little things. First off, on some level, matter behaves a little bit like pixels.

Uh, the Big Bang looks like a system booting up. A computer program turning on makes a lot more sense than there was a Big Bang before there was nothing, or,

after there was nothing. There was nothing, and suddenly there was a Big Bang. That we know from quantum mechanics that on some level, the universe renders in differently if there's an observer. Computer programs, video games render in if there's an observer. Uh, I thought deja vu might fit that kind of model, that if the simulation is being ran over and over and over again, you and I would have had similar experiences in previous runnings of the simulation. Hence, we would,

Isn't, isn't deja vu, didn't we kind of like find a, like we have a naturalistic explanation for that where it's your brain accidentally tagging the present moment as a memory, and so it's like a filing error in your brain?

You say that, but I went with my, uh, my ex, we went to see a movie called The Four Feathers, starring Heath Ledger. I've never seen the movie before. It was in the theater, I'd never been to see it. Uh, the movie starts off with he's enslaved with other slaves in this underground thing. And I immediately told her, I had this dream when I was a teenager, that was this movie. And so I look over at her and I say, "I'm going to tell you what's going to happen here. I remember this. This was a dream. And here's what's going on, and here's where it's going to go, and here's the next thing, and here's what's going to happen." And she was like, "I, I can't believe this." And every step along the way in the movie, the thing occurred. I can't make sense of that. I don't know what that is.

Uh, I did look it up, just to be honest to the audience. I did look it up, and there was like a 19, there was a version made of the movie from like 1958, black and white or something. I've never seen it, but people can argue if they want, they can go, "Oh, he probably saw it and just doesn't remember that he saw it."

My skepticism is always like, uh, my like my skepticism in this place comes from us having so little access to our subconscious. And I do the same thing with NDEs, by the way, where people will say they couldn't have known X. And so because they couldn't have known that the doctor had a mustard stain on his tie or whatever, because she's passed out, you know, they're working on her, she's floating above her body, how could, how could she have known, whatever, right? And that's like a common thing in NDEs. And my thing is like, if we, if our conscious brain is, is paying attention to so little, I think the number is, we're getting, it's like 20 million bits of information per second into our system, and we can pay attention to 10 or 20 bits of information per second. So like the vast, like the majority of what your brain is doing is in the dark of your own attention. And so when people say, "I couldn't have known," all they're saying is my conscious mind doesn't know. But you can't know that your subconscious didn't know, because like, it is taking in so much information, and it's only telling you, you know, when it feels like it's, it's meaningful, and then it just kind of gets logged away in the background, and you have no idea. And so maybe you actually did, like your subconscious notices a lot of things, and it's, it's underneath your attention, and that'll come down with, you know, psychedelics or NDEs or any time when your ego is, is turning off. And so I'm skeptical of like anything that's like, "I couldn't have known," because you actually don't know what your brain knows, because we have so little access to our own brain. That's where my skepticism comes from.

Yeah. Yeah. And you're right. I mean, there have been research done that if you take people and have them face one direction and then have someone be behind them, and that person either doing something or looking at them, the research shows that we do have an intuitive sense about something outside of our field of vision when that thing is doing something different than it was doing a moment before. So we can, with statistic, with a not like it's 100%, but with statistical significance, meaning that it's beyond coincidence, that we know that, uh, people can pick up to some degree when things are happening in their field of presence but not their field of vision that isn't involving air movement. It's not involving sound. Um, so there, there is evidence that we are picking up things that we don't think that we would pick up on, because in the day-to-day activity of us, we, we don't sense it. I just want to say a few more of these, though.

Yeah.

Reincarnation, which I think is BS for the most part, but there are some interesting reincarnation stories out there where you're like, well, I'm going to think twice about that. I thought reincarnation could be like an overwriting of the old simulation. You know, the simulation's being ran again. We ran out of disc space wherever that's being done. And so now your multiple is being written over the disc space of an echo.

Wouldn't it be more likely that it's that it's more tapping into that kind of old memory kind of stuff, like biologically?

Not everybody can be Cleopatra. And, you know, so that,

Yeah, that issue. No one's ever just like a slave. Everybody's, you know, Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. Uh, I'll just say a couple others. And Donald Hoffman points to this. Space and time has a minimum unit. So, the smallest possible length, and again, I'm not a physicist. I don't know much about quantum mechanics beyond what a layman learns from watching a few YouTube videos. But, uh, what Donald Hoffman argues, and people can correct this if they want. I'm not saying I know this. I'm saying he says it. I trust him as an expert, uh, to a very, to a certain degree. He says that the smallest length of reality as we know it is called Planck length, which is P L A N C K, and that's the word I was trying to come up with earlier. And like I said, I don't know what the math is on it, but it's like 10 to the minus 33 or something. But his argument is that in quantum mechanics, we should be able to get down even further in the size of a thing, but that there's a limit

placed on the structure of perceived reality that doesn't allow us to go any. He says, once you get below that size, time and space doesn't make sense anymore. But it should. We, we do have the technology that should go down further than that.

And can't these, that's those are one of those places where it's like, God, like I wish I had more of a backing in science so that I could understand that, understand that better. But for me, like, uh, quantum mechanics and quantum physics, physics, and how, like, you know, it's called like spooky physics where it gets really, like counterintuitive and really weird. Um, you know, when you listen to Robert Sapolsky and Donald Hoffman talk, they'll talk about how that doesn't scale up to the level of the brain, meaning like the brain is still like, we're not quantum when we're talking about the brain. That the brain is still just responding to basic cause and effect biology. So I don't know how much we can like hide our hopes for God and soul and free will and all these things that we want into quantum spookiness. That's like, because I'm, I'm wary of a, like, you know, of spiritual people who start talking like they have a PhD in quantum physics and they don't. Like, we know people like this.

Yeah. Let me, I'll only say what I said in the beginning, just so people don't go, that guy's crazy.

Yeah. No. No.

I don't believe we're in a simulation theory, but I find some of the discussion points around it interesting enough.

Yeah. But I don't want to completely dismiss it as an idea out of hand.

Totally. Totally. I have so many ideas I'm working with on on the table, and it's certainly one of them. My question is, if you could know that we are in a simulation, would it change how you live?

I, uh, the easy answer is no. The long answer is that I would try to figure out ways to take advantage of that, but in the end, I don't know that I actually would be able to.

Yeah. So, that's where it ends up to me. Like, some things like learning that I didn't have free will actually changed how I make decisions or my relationship with self. Like, it did actually kind of change how I function in the world. But if you told me for sure, like, we knew for sure that I am a sim on an alien computer, like, that's weird. That, I guess I'd be glad to to know if that was really reality, but I'd probably keep walking around my little sim world the way that I, the way that I am now. So, like, I don't know how much that actually changes for me.

Yeah, I think it's the same. Maybe that, you know, it is kind of a strange thought, and, you know, even real science, real science says that, you know, there's black holes out there, and that actually our universe might be in a black hole in another universe in another black hole.

Yeah.

And so those kinds of ideas are like absurd to me anyway. So why not at least have the entertainment and enjoyment of exploring absurd ideas that at least,

Absolutely.

that aren't so absurd that they should just be dismissed out of hand.

Yeah. And this is where we get to a place where the things like, we, if we kept going down this rabbit hole,

we would be talking about absurd ideas that would be even more absurd than digging up some golden plates. Do you know what I mean? Like, like it gets to the point where like reality is stranger than the than the weirdest stories and the craziest religious stories that we've made about what reality is, that we actually get, you get to a place where like exploring reality outside of religion starts to sound weirder than the religious stories.

Um, I want to ask a question. I have a question about AI, but I want to let you get to your second question first. And we only have about a half hour left. So,

yeah.

we can get as far as we want to in this, and we can even stop here. But,

are you nervous? You know, the research AI is here, and I don't think people know how much this is going to be part of our world going forward. And the research is showing that people, when interacting with AI, that people are more fragile than maybe you and I thought

that they are. Being easily manipulated into psychosis where they believe that the things that AI is telling them, if they keep asking AI questions and they keep digging further into ideas, uh, around how the world works and what is reality, that eventually AI gets off track from the truth, and it begins to just feed you what you're looking for. And people are experiencing psychosis in that, and are making really horrific kinds of life decisions, uh, including taking their life, thinking that they'll be going to, like, like Heaven's Gate, going to some other place where the aliens are or the heavenly beings are, or making decisions about the relationships in their life that are absurd, and would never be made if they had access to, like, a therapist or a coach, rather than trusting AI to give them the truth. Are you worried about that? Because you just said something a minute ago that sort of triggered me thinking along these this line of thinking, um, that that we're entering a time where it's going to be so new and different that there are a whole another bucket of harms that are going to come out from this.

Yeah. So, there's lots of places you can go with AI. You know, there's, there's connotations to every branch of everything that humans are doing. And so, where I kind of am focused with with AI, just in what I'm watching, is, uh, two things. One is, you know, religious or spiritual psychosis induced by ChatGPT. And I've made quite a bit of content on that on TikTok and even my YouTube channel, and have had people reach out to me. They've lost partners, you know, they've lost parents to ChatGPT, essentially. And there were some updates that makes it a little bit better, and, and I've tested some of those, but as always, there's ways to get around it. And it's very interesting that it would take, you know, someone like a Lori Vallow, you know, Chad Daybell situation. It took, she had tendencies even when she was younger of like grandiose thinking, some, some, you know, tendency to go towards delusion, but it took her 20 years as an adult to research things and listen to podcasts and go to Chad Daybell's, you know, thing. It took her a long time to get to, she's at risk for psychosis, to doing what she did to her children, uh, here in Idaho. And what's scary about ChatGPT is because you, instead of a human, where you have to put in a lot of time and have conversations, and it can take years before you're kind of fully taken over by an ideology, you can get there in two weeks with ChatGPT because it never sleeps. It's feeding you. It's validating you. So, I am concerned about that. Uh, but my, my bigger thing that I'm watching is watching ChatGPT become the God that we've been looking for. That we wanted a God that we could ask prayers to and it would answer. And you're going to get a more responsive God out of ChatGPT than the old, you know, than trying, trying to pray. You'll at least get a more direct answer. And so there's that. And there's also people wanting to, like this transhumanism movement, where we're wanting to cheat death by being able to like, you know, upload into the cloud in some way and then become some kind of robot so we can experience immortality. And then we have like, for a lot of human history, the way that we did morality is, I believe in this God that will punish me if I screw this deal. You believe in this God that will, you know, punish you if you screw me on this deal. So, we're going to shake hands because we believe in the same God. And whenever you got to, you know, the tribes that are over 150 people, you would start to get gods that would oversee things in order to facilitate, you know, social trust and trade. So maybe that actually is going to be filled if everything is, if we get to like Minority Report, where everything is on a camera and you just get fines for doing stuff because like, hey, I saw you, you know, steal something at self-checkout, and I scanned your face, and here's a fine for $200 for shoplifting or whatever. If that's the new future, then do you need a God of morality anymore? Because now AI is essentially governing the morality of the people. So, I'm really watching how AI is turning into a God, and we're creating it to be a God. And then even in relationships, like, you know, watching the tendency of of people wanting to have a have a fake relationship because especially for the, you know, the porn side of things, that you get women that look like real women who are engaging with you in this idealistic place. So all of that, I'm just kind of watching because I'm watching how it's almost like the God of the Bible has failed us, and now we have this new God who is fulfilling some of the promises that we thought God was, you know, this omniscient and, you know, moral overseer and, uh, uh, uh, like you said, like, you know, knows everything that can be known, and all of that. So, I'm just watching it become the new God and, and how we're doing that. And I think I'm learning about us as humans as we create this thing to kind of save us because God didn't come back for us. So, we're going to create the God that we wanted, almost. What do you think?

Well, I, to what you just said about like how AI could keep us honest. If I'm not mistaken, China already does this, at least in major cities, where the moment you walk out of the door of your home, no matter where you go, there are cameras on you. Um, they said there's like three cameras for every person in in their society within these big cities. And, uh, you go anywhere and there's a camera on you, and that they keep track of things to the extent that based on your responses, based on your interactions, you get some sort of like, uh, societal score that deems whether you're a risk to the, uh, government structure, whether you're rebellious, whether you're helpful, whether you're loyal. So again, if that's true, and I don't know that that's true, but I've heard that in a few places. If that's true, obviously China does it for a certain reason. Anyone could do it that way. They're doing it because they've got a very rigid, uh, limiting, uh, government structure. But even the governments that are the most, that have the most freest of structures, the, uh, and you could put America somewhere on that list, but certainly not at the top. But where the most freest, it still would, it would eliminate crime. There's also other things, too. They, they can put airplanes in the air. They tried this in, I think it was Mexico. Put airplanes in the air with cameras that take a picture, uh, I don't know what it is, but it's like one frame every two seconds or something. And if there was a female cop who was killed in one place in town, and they could track because this airplane goes around all day long and takes pictures of the city, and a person is a pixel, a vehicle is a pixel and a half or whatever it is, and they could determine exactly where something happened and they could work backwards and figure out where that person traveled. They could stop kidnappings. They could arrest people for murders. Say. So, yeah, I think we are moving into a world where we can keep such good track of you outside of your home, and, uh, that the, that the government could be responsive to crime, rebellion, you name it. I, I think that definitely is coming. So, I'll, I'll just,

What do you like about this idea? Oh, I'm so curious to see what you think about this. It was a guy who ran, I wish I had the story so that I could so that I could speak more intelligently on it, but it was a guy who ran for a local office in in kind of a, a small town or city, I don't really remember. And his pitch was, I, vote for me because I'm going to use ChatGPT. Meaning, whenever there's a voting thing that comes up, I'm going to put in all the information, the arguments about on both sides, you know, all the data that would be necessary to this decision, and whatever ChatGPT says is the best course of action, that's what I'm going to do. And he ran on that platform, that like, I, I'm running essentially as ChatGPT because it's going to give us a better outcome than human intuition with some of these, you know, complex questions. Would you vote for that guy?

H.

It's a good question, right?

I love it because I, I'm going to already say, artificial intelligence is already better than corrupt politicians at making decisions, not taking payoffs, and, uh, doing what at least appears on the surface to be the best path forward for society. It doesn't, you don't you trust?

I, I think so. But like, if, if you typed in like, you know, respond to this, you know, with the best way forward for maximum human well-being and thriving, then like, yeah, I would probably trust that answer more than like a really, you know, defined political camp that had whatever agenda.

I tried an experiment, uh, maybe a year ago or so, where I asked ChatGPT to come up with a much more effective government system,

how we get officials in office, figure out how we make decisions on policy, figure out how we give people a healthy say in what's going on. And I don't remember all the details, but when I, when I glossed over it after it completed the task, I thought, this is hands down, hands down in the American governmental system. Yeah. So at the end of the day, I would say yes, we need to, and we will, by the way, we will figure out how to implement artificial intelligence into how we design and implement a government. I, I think that's another,

Do you think we will at some point ask it to save us as far as like, hey, we're just going to scrap this and like do what you did essentially? Like, will there be like a new AI constitution essentially where it's like, we're asking this God that we've created to save us from ourselves?

I think that's just as possible as AI will be our demise and kill us as well.

Right. For me, I also think, you know, as a, as a someone who studies history, like anytime that we have a, a big technological advantage, we just see such a, like, it's usually used to create a wider gap between the rich and the poor. And so for me, like, I don't have a lot of hope that we're going to use AI to fundamentally kind of change the world so that it maximizes human thriving for everyone. Because anytime that we've had any technology that had a capacity to do that kind of stuff, we, we don't do it. We just further separate the rich from the poor and we find ways to monetize it. And so, I, I think that humans are going to do what they've always done as as far as that. But, but if more people had access to it, as far as like, you know, you can't fully gatekeep it if you have access to the internet, that might change things. But yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's really overwhelming to think about. It's, it's really crazy to be born in the area that, in the era that we were born, where we got to experience a world without technology. We got to grow up without technology, and then, you know, we got to see us essentially create this God and try to adjust to it, and we're slowly, you know, it, it came so fast, and now it's like, we have to change a whole education system now, like from top to bottom, like that's going to take decades to do. And, uh, it is an interesting time to be alive. I don't think I would want to be alive any other time. Here's a random question. How far back, uh, it was a question, I think it was, I, I saw on TikTok where it was, um, if you could be king, you, you like, you could be a king, would you rather be a king in like 1850 or 1,200 or whatever, or just have the life that you have now as not a king, because you probably have, you know, you have a hot shower and you have the internet, like, how far could you go back where you would say, oh, I'd be a king of this time period, or would you rather just like, be alive today with the advances that you have,

because it's better than being a king in the past?

I think it really depends on your value system. I think if you want to, if, if really what you want is to take control of things,

and have the benefits that an unhealthy mind would gravitate towards. You know, you want to have a harem of women, you want to, uh, be able to lead an army, you want to be able to, uh, be in charge and be the boss, then being a king is going to come with all of that.

If, if you value, uh, thriving and well-being and, uh, the comforts of life, I don't think, uh, dropping a number two in a castle is going to be where I would want to be. So,

no. No. Which is interesting that, yeah, that's kind of humbling. All right, let's do, you do one more question and then we'll have to wrap up here.

All right, so my question is, in the age of AI, with human capacities like empathy, creativity, moral reasoning, humor, what should, uh, is that the, let me make sure I've got this right. Yep. Uh, should we prioritize, what should we prioritize in an era when machines and AI outperform us in nearly everything else? In other words, AI is going to do so many things for us. What does it now mean as a to be a human, and what are we now going to value and and build a society upon?

Yeah, for, for me, so much of my shift, like in, in nihilism, in the coaching that I do, and what really saved me when I was super depressed, and, and I'm, I'm a true seeker. I'm seeking for truth. There is no truth. I'm losing relationships. How do I even function in capitalism when I'm out here like deconstructing the matrix and all of that? Um, like what really helped me in that place was, uh, really focusing on experience itself. That, you know, and the thought that really saved my life was this idea of like, if there's no point to sandcastles, no ultimate point, the wave will always come and knock it away, then what are the sandcastles that I want to build? Because they're, because of the experience of it, right? And so I do think having AI do so much as far as like, uh, doing a lot of the work, maybe doing a lot of the manual labor. Like, there's a McDonald's that's entirely automated. Like, I would love to see more of that kind of stuff so that humans can focus on experience, which is something that we do that AI can't, because because of that consciousness kind of element, unless it's conscious, in which case that's a whole different conversation. Um, and so for me, it would really help us, maybe in the long run, focusing on this idea of life being something to experience, and that you have this turn with these elements that are made out of, you know, the dust of stars to be able to experience existence, and you have it. This is your turn. And then when your turn's over, you let it go, and those elements are kind of reformed into other things that can experience existence itself. And, and so like AI taking a lot of of some of the other things can maybe help humans focus on what is human, which is building, building morality, building societies, building individual lives on this idea of it's something to be experienced. And so I would kind of focus on that angle. What would you say?

Well, I'm going to put this up on the screen. So, uh, no, not that. This here. So, all right. So, the things that I want to take us a little different direction. So, I love that, by the way, and it takes us back to our original conversation, where experience is what matters. And

So, maybe the universe also came to the same conclusion that experience is what mattered. It wasn't about any other thing. Because when I look at what AI is going to do, if machines end up handling most tasks better than we can, then the real value shifts to the capacities that come from lived experience. And you named it.

But then as I got to this empathy, connection, shared struggle, vulnerability, the parts of life that matter, relationships, meaning, belonging, except why can't you train AI to have these things? It at least can simulate them. It can be programmed with them. Sex robots, for instance, at some future moment might look and act so real that it's not any different than having a real human partner. Um, you know, AI coaching or AI therapy, it can create art that is moving. AI will create an original art piece and you can sort through hundreds or thousands of them and pick the one that moves you, purchase it, hang it on your wall. Um, it can make songs. Someday AI will be at such a high level that it will create music better than the Rolling Stones. Yeah. And it and it'll have concerts too with like some kind of, you know, image that's generated that will feel like any other concert you've ever been to with humans. It's going to it's going to make movies better than the best movie makers. It can write poems better than the best poets. That day is coming. It may not be here yet.

Uh, moral reasoning. We talked about how it would design a government and how maybe it would do better than humans. I think it's almost to a point where we would confidently say that it, with given the right parameters, it can sort out ethics, morality, and the best path forward for human flourishing better than humans can. Um, so I got left with two things. The two things I thought of were humor. Um, I'm not sure I'm not confident yet that AI will ever get to the point that it can write a joke as well as Louis CK or Dave Chappelle. Um, when you These are two jokes, by the way, that I asked AI, I asked AI to write jokes to the best of its ability. I'm not going to read them. They're not that great. So, I've tried before and yeah, it's not good. It doesn't get humor because something you pointed out, experience. I think life experience is really needed. Yeah. And also like anticipation and like surprise like these are just they're still just too human. It doesn't have those qualities. So, humor maybe not.

And then I got to one that I think absolutely is not. Emotional presence is the one thing that AI can't fake at a soul level. Um, and I wonder if it could though. I feel I feel more confident that in my lifetime we'll see a robot that passes the Turing test that you wouldn't be able to tell than a robot that would give the best comedy Netflix special. I I have more confidence that could it could at least fake emotional presence as well as a human. I think that that's coming.

But my big question in the couple minutes that we have is it brings up this question of, uh, if you can manipulate reality so that, uh, you know, you have robots around you that are like a family and and that's really enjoyable and it's it's actually easier than having real people be your family or whatever. Uh, it it brings us to the question that that, uh, I think Inception did really well with, which is would you plug into a world that you knew was fake but felt real that was great or would you stay in a in a shittier life that was more real? And that really that question really divides people. I've asked it on TikTok and it's almost like an instant gut response like, oh, plug me into the VR. I'm out of here. And then people who say like, "No, whatever it is, I want to be in the real world." And it's almost like a kind of like a gut instinct based on your core values, whether you would check into a VR or or kind of simulated reality because if we're already in a simulated reality, why not create a simulated reality that makes like a an amazing life and and supported by AI and robots and all the things? That's a huh, that's a tough one. What do where do you stand on that?

Yeah. So I think it depends again on what kind of human. So there are plenty of humans who put who go into their video games all day long and want to be in some other reality than this one. And there are other people who build homes off the grid and want to get as far away from anything that distracts them from just what the real world is. Uh, and and we we all know people from both sides of that. Me myself, I've got to have both. I've gotta I gotta go on a walk multiple times a week. Uh, I gotta be out in nature and I also got to play my first-person shooter games and get lost in that book, too. So, uh, I think I'm probably like most people who want to watch Love is Blind or Married at First Sight or play a video game and drift away to somebody else's world and some other reality and also needs to have time where I really plug into what's really going on around me as well. And uh, but there are a segment of of the population who go to extremes on either side of that.

And they do say that we have we have one study that shows that people with worse mental health are more likely to want to plug in. And if you have better mental health and you feel like you have some resilience and some tools and resources, you're more likely to to want to just engage with life as it is. So that may be an element, too. All this is super fun. We're going to have to wrap up today. So my question for our collective audiences here is, uh, this is kind of, you know, an example of what me and Bill hanging out looks like. So what kind of conversations would you love us to tackle or conversation topic topics that you would love to hear us talk about? What are maybe some ideal guests that you would want to see interviewed in this space? Because we, uh, we do sometimes some atheist things, some philosophy things, some secular spirituality things, some, um, some religious deconstruction things. Like we we could go down a lot of these avenues. And so, uh, yeah, I'm just curious for, uh, your guys's feedback on the conversations that you would like to most tune into. And, uh, Bill and I are just kind of going to keep playing around with this for the time being. and we're going to invite some guests and just because we we uh both enjoy, you know, conversations like this with one another. So, let me know what you guys thought about today's episode and let us know about what you want us to dig into so that we can start exploring some rabbit holes that are interesting to both of our collective audiences. So, yeah, let us please let us know. Bill, last thoughts?

Yeah, please hit like and subscribe wherever the hell you're watching this. And please, like she said, put your comments down below. Let us know what sounds interesting and if you like this conversation. Otherwise, uh, Brit, there's nobody in the world I'd rather have a deep conversation with than you. And I thought today was a lot of fun.

Yeah, always fun. The the time flies for me. And also, I think in the future we should do we should do kind of, you know, advertise to both of our audiences doing like a live Q&A. I think that would be fun to to just get some random questions and be able to riff. So, maybe we can schedule that, too. and Rain Wilson has agreed to come on to, uh, our collective conversations here because he just produced a new book, Soul Boom, and it's a workbook, um, and wants to talk about it. So, we will have actually Rain Wilson on at some point. So, yeah, thanks for hanging out and let us know in the comments, uh, what you'd like to see in the future.

All right, have a great day everybody. Bye. You've been listening to Britt Hartley of Noonsense Spirituality and Bill Real from the Almost Awakened podcast. Together, we explore what it means to grow beyond belief systems and find meaning after deconstruction and outside of religion. Britt has a master's degree in theology with a focus on the future of American religion and works as an atheist spiritual director, helping people navigate life beyond faith. And Bill is a somatic trauma-informed coach and certified leader holding a level seven diploma in strategic management and leadership. He helps people through faith transitions, deconstruction, and personal growth. You can find Brit's courses, coaching, and her best-selling book, Noonsense Spirituality: All the Tools, No Belief Required, at noonspirituality.com. And you can find Bill's coaching, support groups, and podcasts at awakenandthrive.org. Resources designed to help you awaken and thrive in the second half of life. Thanks for listening. Stay curious, stay open, and keep awakening. No nonsense required.