The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being by Neil Theise

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being by Neil Theise https://amzn.to/3XLYTqa An electrifying introduction to complexity theory, the science of how complex systems behave, that explains the interconnectedness of all things and that Deepak Chopra says, “will change the way you understand yourself and the universe.” Nothing in the universe is more complex than life. Throughout the skies, in oceans, and across lands, life is endlessly on the move. In its myriad forms—from cells to human beings, social structures, and ecosystems--life is open-ended, evolving, unpredictable, yet adaptive and self-sustaining. Complexity theory addresses the mysteries that animate science, philosophy, and metaphysics: how this teeming array of existence, from the infinitesimal to the infinite, is in fact a seamless living whole and what our place, as conscious beings, is within it. Physician, scientist, and philosopher Neil Theise makes accessible this “theory of being,” one of the pillars of modern science, and its holistic view of human existence. He notes the surprising underlying connections within a universe that is itself one vast complex system—between ant colonies and the growth of forests, cancer and economic bubbles, murmurations of starlings and crowds walking down the street. The implications of complexity theory are profound, providing insight into everything from the permeable boundaries of our bodies to the nature of consciousness. Notes on Complexity is an invitation to trade our limited, individualistic view for the expansive perspective of a universe that is dynamic, cohesive, and alive—a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Theise takes us to the exhilarating frontiers of human knowledge and in the process restores wonder and meaning to our experience of the everyday.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show. My family and friends, my loved ones, my joyous audience, and the music didn't fade this time, so there's that.

Welcome to the show, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the big podcast tent in the sky. Today we have an amazing gentleman on the show. He's going to expand your mind, make you smarter and more brilliant, and heaven knows, I don't know why heaven wouldn't know this, but I don't know, I would know this but i don't know i've heard rumors that uh if you're smarter you're sexier to whoever you want to be sexy to baby i don't know i don't know the lawyer said i can half say that but if you sue me i don't know

you better be hot i don't even know what any of this means i'm just doing a ramble as we always do anonymously at the beginning or randomly randomly randomly and anonymously. I don't know. It's still on the show. Uh, yes, the segues we do just to get the plugs in, uh, go to good reach.com for chest. Chris Foss,

refer them to your family, friends, or relatives and tell them it's because you love them. Even if you don't, I've seen your relatives, uh, go to youtube.com. Where's this Christmas?

LinkedIn.com. Where's this Christmas? Uh, we're on that new threads over there at the instagram the twitter copy six months from now people will be like that went out of business um and then we're also on tiktok as well uh so be sure to check that out uh he is the amazing author of the newest book that is just uh coming out here fairly soon and uh the book is entitled Notes on Complexity, a scientific theory of connection, consciousness, and being. May 9th, it is coming out and you can check it out. In fact, I think

it's already out now, technically. Neil Theis is on the show with us today. People watch these videos 10 years from now, they'll never know what date we were doing the show. I still got people making comments on 10-year-old videos. So Neil Thies is on the show with us today. He's going to be talking about his latest book. He is a professor of pathology. That's his path, eh? I don't know. That's the best joke

I got there, people. He works at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Through his scientific research, he is a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity and the anatomy of the human interstitium. Did I say that right? Interstitium.

Interstitium. We'll find out what that is here in a second. He is also a longtime student of Zen Buddhism, and his studies in complexity theory have led to interdisciplinary collaborations in fields such as integrative medicine, consciousness studies, and science religion dialogue. And he lives in New York City. There you go. Welcome to the show, Neil. How are you? Oh, thanks. I'm very good. How are you? There you go. I am good. You can tell I never went to college and I flunked second grade.

So I was having trouble with the big words there, like through. What is an interstitium? And did I pick that up from someone in Thailand? Interstitium. Interstitium. Interstitium. So it means the stuff that's in between and in bodies. It's usually been referred to like spaces, tiny spaces between cells. Some cells have little gaps between them. So it's an interstitial space. And then slightly

bigger than that, we've known, you know, since we had microscopes that around capillaries, there are little spaces through which nutrients come into tissues and waste products go out of the tissues. So that's an interstitium. What we discovered back in 2018, and the news sort of hailed it as a possible new organ, that all the connective tissue of your body, all your collagen has spaces in it that we hadn't recognized before that are fluid filled. And so there's a fluid filled network through the body. Basically, that's four times the size of the cardiovascular system. Wow.

Yeah. And it's a signaling pathway probably through the body for cells, molecules. Cancer can travel through it. Infections can travel through it. So it's a pretty big bit of anatomy that no one had ever really noticed maybe that's where all my vodka stays it could well be yeah but i'm also my my subspecialty in liver is liver pathology so we could always go down that rabbit hole if you wanted to uh okay well let's let's get some plugs

in for your book first so what dot coms wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs to get to know you better um i have a website neilfeasofficial.com i used to have neilfeast.com but i'm sort of naive about these things and i lost it oh no for where it went yeah so neilfeasofficial.com and that has um links to all my prior videos before I turned all this stuff into a book. The complexity theory stuff I do, I've been talking about for about 20 years. The videos online relating to that go back two decades. And then subsequent interviews since the book has come out are accum there and uh and future things that i'm going to

do that's where i'm going to be posting them there you go the book style notes on complexity a scientific theory of connection consciousness and being so give us a give us a a foundation of what is complexity theory i guess yeah so so complexity theory is basically the scientific theory that came out of the 20th century, 1970s, 1980s is when it really sort of percolated up and became prominent. And it's how we basically can think about where life comes from, how life happens, how living things organize themselves into larger things. And so how ants form ant colonies, how people form neighborhoods, cultures, economies, how all the life on earth forms the entire ecosystem of the planet, how cells form tissues and organs. So anything that we consider living, complexity theory is the fairly simple, actually, despite the name, mathematics that describes how that

organization, that self-organization happens. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty cool. And, you know, everyone has at least heard of quantum physics and theory of relativity. And quantum physics describes, you know, the minute, most infinitesimal parts of existence and is completely non-intuitive, which makes it notoriously difficult to understand. And relativity, on the other hand, describes everything at the biggest scales. Complexity is what spans everything in between it including where life happens so yeah there you go we had we had an author wrote about einstein recently so we did the relativity thing so now we're just doing we're just doing the full spectrum of the shows um so why is this a theory because it seems to me like everything is pretty complex uh and you know

it's i i have a hard time challenging you on that whole thing because uh you know i've seen the universe eh uh and uh it seems you know there's a couple levels going on it's pretty complex yeah yeah so first off there's a difference between complicated and complex right so um so what we mean in part by complexity is that, you know, things that are simple, like a clock or a car, if you take it apart and you get all the pieces, you can put them back together again and you'll get the same clock and the same car, nothing more, nothing less. And if you're a really good engineer, you can look at the pieces and figure out that if you put them together, you would get a clock or a car or something like that. So the parts are exactly equivalent to the whole, and the whole is exactly equivalent to the parts.

The two define each other. But in complexity, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, as they say. And you can't predict on the basis of what you know about the parts. Like if you know everything about how ants interact, you can't predict what the colony is going to be. If you know everything about how cells interact, you still can't predict what the living thing will look like and how it will behave. Now, there's another theory that covers similar sorts of things. That's chaos theory. And some of your listeners may have heard about that.

That's much more well-known than complexity. And there also, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And the value of having a theory in these cases is that you can computer model these things. And in terms of chaos, an example would be the weather. So you can know about everything you want to know about water molecules and air molecules, you know, oxygen and carbon dioxide, etc. But you can't intuit what the weather is going to do. But now we have these models that actually, compared to 20, 30, 40, 70 years ago, we're actually pretty good at knowing what the next hours of the day look like, what the next

few days of the week look like. We can tell when hurricanes are likely to happen, and we can pick them up before we spot them. And that's because we have this theory that you can apply as a computer model and it makes predictions. So in chaos, the predictions are pretty accurate, but in complexity, as I said, there's always some little randomness in the system that makes it impossible to predict. And that's the hallmark of living things. We can't predict them. For the last few centuries, we talk about bodies as machines, making them sound like they're predictable. We have Newtonian mechanics, which sort of made it seem like if you know everything in the universe at this moment, then the future is laid out. There are no questions.

There's no free will because everything just happens the way it's going to. But what we now understand with complexity is there's always sort of a low level degree of randomness in every living system. And that means you can predict what the possibilities are for the next moment. But you can never predict which possibility is going to be the next moment and that's what keeps us on our toes but that's also where the ability to choose adaptive responses comes from the creativity that keeps us alive and from that randomness and probably helps us in survival mode right because exactly yeah you know like when we get something like covid comes at us and has potential it killed a lot of people and has a potential to had the potential to kill more because it was so overwhelming it for our hospitals immediately um you know we had to adapt right right right and if we didn't then you know things might not work out hi voksters fahs here with a

little station break hope you're enjoying the show so far We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as CEO, and be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. Right. And there's an example of if everyone was thinking about disease and health care and medicine exactly the way they were the day before

we'd have been screwed it required new ideas and you can't always tell where those new ideas are going to come from you know some of them come from bottom up, some of them come from the top down. And that's another hallmark of complexity is it's bottom up stuff. So you look at an ant colony, it looks like someone has planned where the food lines are going and where the cemetery is and et cetera. But in fact, it's just the ants interacting down here at the local scale that lead to all these complex structures and that's the magic of complexity and that's where the the modeling comes in and the mathematics comes in and the implications that go beyond just science yeah it's sort of philosophy and consciousness and religion and stuff one thing i've always looked at it models um is you know

out of the box and trying to look at things out of the box i remember being a kid and just seeing the whole world and the complexity of it and just thinking holy shit a lot of take in um and you're like where do i start where do i finish and um and so uh it's interesting um so as you study it and as you address it you're you're doing this a lot different things uh it's interesting that you say you know the sum of the parts are bigger or the sum of the parts are the whole is greater than the sum of the parts there you go i let my kidney run the show one time and it did not go well we're still trying to get the smell out of the mic um the uh but no i i i get that it's kind kind of interesting to me.

I would suppose, like, when I was a kid, we took apart my dad's watch, his favorite watch. And we were just kids, so it didn't go back together. But I bet he could take it to a watchmaker. He could. I think he mostly just beat us silly, which we deserve. He was very upset about it. We thought he'd be so proud of us.

But yeah, that was a case where the parts, before we started talking about it. The whole thing became less than a part. In the end, we certainly changed it. Put that in your theory box, scientist. I don't know what the hell that means. You can Put that in your theory box, scientists. I don't know what the hell that means.

You can call that the children theory, maybe. I don't know. Well, kids are also kind of a demonstration of that low-level randomness in the system. Talk to any parent about how unpredictable their lives have become, but also how they have to think on their feet and come up with new ways to do things to keep the whole family enterprise going. And they do. But it's not, you know, an example would be, so the parents in that case might pat themselves on the back and go, oh, we're really so smart. But the fact is, it's the craziness of the kids that's driving the parents to become creative.

Did you ever see the Beatles anthology from the BBC? I don't think I did. It was 10 hours of interviews with the Beatles covering their entire history. Wow. Yeah, it's really, if you're a Beatles fan, it's like the ultimate. How much have you used Yoko Yono? No, I'm just kidding. If you're a Beatles fan, it's like the ultimate. How much have you used Yoko Yono? Pardon? Just kidding.

I got hit by a car, and someone gave me the complete set of the DVD, so I watched the whole thing. Wow. The Beatles were really clear. If you're a Beatles fan, you think, wow, the Beatles were the most creative band ever. Sgt. Pepper and blah, blah, blah. But if you listen to the Beatles,

they over and over talk about how their creativity was driven by the fans that their fans were behaving in ways that required them to come up with new ways to react so when the screaming of the girls got so loud they couldn't hear themselves play they decided they had to make an album that couldn't be taken on tour. And that's how they came up with Sgt. Pepper. And they're very clear, their creativity was bottom up, coming from the fans. And that's a complexity thing. So we're experiencing complexity all the time. That's why when I talk about it, I give lectures on it to science crowds, and that's fairly straightforward. They usually haven't heard about it either in the medical world, for example.

But I also give talks on it to fifth grade classes, to people in yoga centers. And it's just really intuitive because it's what we see all around us yeah but like what i just said with the parents and the kids it's a way of framing it that makes you sort of appreciate what's going on here that there's there actually is a process um and everywhere you look you see the same processes it's almost like math sometimes isn't it seemingly well except that with math what we expect is you put in some numbers into an equation and you always pop out the same answer yeah two plus two equals four yeah i know some people that will argue with you on that well and then i i could make some

good arguments against that idea too but the the let me let me can i dig into this randomness example i think this makes it clear. So when you look at an ant line, it looks like a food line of ants. It looks like a straight line. And the ants are going back and forth, carrying the sugar cube back to the colony. But if you bend down and look more closely, there's always a few ants that aren't following the line. So those look like ants just that aren't getting the message, right? They're just sort of evolutionarily. Yeah. Yeah. But it turns out that those ants are the ones that if you step your foot in the middle of the food line, the ants in the food line are still trying to do

what they do. It's those divergent ants that are the ones that quickly find the fastest route around your foot or are finding a new food source so that when this one runs out, they're ready to go to set up a new food line to that food source. Little fuckers are multitasking. No, well, they're just busy being the creative wing of the colony, you know? So if there's too much randomness in the system, too much unpredictability's no food line there's no organization the colony you know that's anarchy yeah they're just back at the anthill smoking dope and right exactly but if there's too little then there's no way to explore new territory that the the colony has to figure out whether it's a more rapid route around your foot or a new food source.

So you need this low-level randomness. And what that low-level randomness is, it creates the possibilities for the next moment. Most of those will be adaptive. Some of them won't, and you'll step off the ledge into chaos or just rigid machine-like order and that's when death happens so you know and this is where complexity sort of gets right into the philosophy side of things because the the this low level unpredictability that makes you a living adaptive thing necessitates mathematically that sometimes a piece of you or all of you is going to die there's going to be a mass extinction event yeah i'm 55 man i wake up every morning something's died i had a couple of strokes three

months ago i had a couple little mass extinctions up here, but we're adapting. We're adapting. They were partial events. That's why I drink coffee. That's my adaptive juice, I call it. So let me ask you this. You know, I see this stuff in people who create conspiracies. We see it in a lot of our world today. You know, of course, JFK and JFKk jr is running the country according to some people uh flat earthers uh you know we see a religion um and where people seem to want to you tell me if

i'm wrong here this is my theory and my theory is that some people the world is just so complex and it's scary to them, partly because of that survival, you know, death can come in a moment. They're overwhelmed by the complexity. And so they log on to or latch on to simple things, you know, that make no sense. But then the simplicity of them, that make no sense, but then the simplicity of them, for the simplistic mind, for the Dunning-Kruger crowd, it's easier. And it's maybe laziness. Maybe it's a, I don't know, maybe it's just they just don't want to,

you know, like imagining that there's a horrific hurricane and Mother Nature is so evil that i mean and she's not really evil she's doing her thing you know we're probably the visitors actually here and uh uh but but the horrors of that and seeing you know the the death that takes place is you know and we have that with covid as an example, you know, people, people can realize that maybe, you know, there, there's just, there's just some evil pathogens out there and, uh, and they don't like us. And maybe, you know, they're just getting sick of us. I think George Carlin used to do a joke about that.

She's trying to get rid of us at this point. Um, so is that theory true that there are some people that they have such a hard time dealing with the complexity of life and everything else. They have to try and go the simplistic route. Sure, I think so. And I think that's always going on. But I think there's something more going on in our current circumstances. And again, complexity theory, I think, gives a window on that. So one of the simple mathematical things that I can easily explain about complexity is that living things have to have feedback loops inside them that help them keep a steady level of organization.

So your body temperature always oscillates within a normal range, right? Your hunger comes, your hunger goes, etc. And what are called negative feedback loops have to predominate. And negative not as in bad, negative as in it's sort of bringing things back before they get too far out of range. So you think about an air... I'm gesturing to my air conditioner. You think about an air conditioner, the temperature goes up, the air conditioner turns on, the temperature comes down again to my air conditioner. You think about an air conditioner, the temperature goes up, the air conditioner turns on, the temperature comes down again, the air conditioner turns off. So you have this oscillation in a healthy, comfortable zone, right? You can have positive

feedback loops, which an example would be if the temperature of the room gets hotter, the heater turns on. And the hotter it gets, the higher the temperature of the room gets hotter, the heater turns on. And the hotter it gets, the higher the temperature gets. And there's a role for that. Think about when you get a fever, right? You want your body temperature going up because that helps get your immune system to fight off whatever the infection is. But then you have to have the negative feedback loops coming in bringing things back down if if positive feedback loops predominate then you get larger scale structures but instead of

being creative and adaptive like a complex system they become energy expending they grow rapidly and then collapse or think about cancer in the body think about economic bubbles um grow rapidly and then collapse or think about cancer in the body think about economic bubbles um grow rapidly and then collapse and you have a depression a recession or a depression yeah good example so i think what's going on to be honest with currently people yeah there's always an urge you want a simpler explanation for. But now where do people get their information? They're getting it on the internet. And it used to be when the internet first formed, all these ideas got thrown up and community response sort of drove things towards community ideas of truth. You know, news came on the radio and the way people would, or on the TV,

and people would talk about them and people go, no, that sounds crazy. Or that sounds good. Walter Cronkite, he's believable. That guy not. And so you developed, you know, there was, those were negative feedbacks on the way information got produced and it kept within a range of believability. But now, once they started coming up with algorithms that guided you to information that reinforced what you're believing, regardless of truth, and that's on Facebook and on Instagram and on TikTok, et cetera, those algorithms are sort of like the positive feedback loops and driving this. It's like a cancer or an economic bubble, but it's a cancer of information. Yeah.

And so now you're getting, there's tremendous energy, you know, but it's also wild. There's no adaptation there. It's just wild. And what's going to happen eventually is the whole thing collapses. Well, it's not going there's no adaptation there it's just wild and what's going to happen eventually is the whole thing collapses well it's not going to be pretty yeah i hope i'm not there when that happens that's that's always sort of my default i'm 64 now and i'm like okay when i think about my niece and my nephew and my my greatnephews, and I'm like, oh. Have fun with that, boys.

That's what I tell mine. I'm like, I'm out. Have fun with that. It's your problem now. Have fun with that ball. You know, and I don't know. There's also, I guess, the flip side of what I'm saying as a suggestion to why people sometimes have a hard

time facing reality where simple things they make complex like you've ever talked to anybody who talks about q anon um i mean there's a whole i mean you almost need to go to college to fall at all it's a it's a whole elaborate and it has so many branches and and yet yet it can come down to simple like uh yeah somebody just didn't win the election buddy right right but but but exactly there so you have that image of this tangle of ideas that's growing right now you can either have a um a nicely tended garden or a nicely tended ecosystem where things keep each other in check or you have an invasive an invasive species come in and you get tremendous growth but it's just a crazy tangle that eats up

all the oxygen in the room yeah right and so i think q anon is an example of that of course it's wildly productive of all sorts of stuff but there are no feedbacks to check. Like, is this crazy? Is this crazier? Is this less crazy? Does this make sense? And it's, again, back to the information thing. It's an invasive species of information. There you go.

Feedback loop. And when the crazies run in the sanitarium, you know, basically sort of thing. when the crazies run in the sanitarium. You know, basically sort of thing. But I can see how, like, I've seen this with different religions and cults that are wacky. And it's almost like they use the complexity of it by building complexity as a way to form truth or reality. Am I on the right track with that?

Yeah, yeah. But so, you know i'm you said i'm a buddhist i'm also uh an observant jew and i've got a few other religions thrown into the mix and um and that's partly what the book is about that where the science leads in part is to it's it's not to an atheist perspective blah blah blah whatever um but the thing is that religions and spiritual practices like anything else humans organize can be used for good or for ill yeah um in buddhism uh the buddha is said to have um commented that everything is medicine and everything is poison. And I think that's true.

That's why vodka again. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, if you're just kicking back with the vodka day after day after day, bad. You say that like it's a bad thing. Yeah. If you've got a bottle of vodka on you, you're in the middle of the wilderness and you fall off a cliff and you've got this open wound, douse it with vodka. It'll keep you from getting infected and you may live to get out of that. So everything's medicine, everything's poison.

I think religion is exactly the same thing. There are ways in which it can lead to an understanding of the true nature of reality. But if people get in control of that and see it as a way of manipulating things and conning people out of their money and their labor and et cetera, then you've got a means of social control that's malignant. There you go. The problem is the people. It's always the people.

It's always the people. The problem is is the people. It's always the people. It's always the people. The problem is always the people. I always say this. What's the line that I always use? The problem with the human beings is the humans are, no, it's something along the, I can't remember the line I used. Somebody was right the other day. They're like, why is it human beings do the worst things? And I'm like, human beings are the worst people.

That's it. That's my line. Human beings are the worst people. Worst people. Yeah. That's my line. That's why I like dogs. So, you know, we talked a little bit about business on the show and leadership and building companies and entrepreneurism.

How can this be applied to leaders and companies and businesses? And, you know, businesses are complex. Right, right. So, exactly, they are. And so, first off, you know, a mistake in leadership often comes when you think that if you're at the top, that means you are absolutely in control and you're monitoring everything that's going on.

And you think you can't be surprised because, you know, you've got your eyes on everything. There's always something you're not seeing. Yeah, that's true. You know, and let's get Thomas.

Yeah. Yeah. So, um, the recognition that in fact fact creativity comes from the bottom usually doesn't come from the top me really yeah so i mean okay a company will start with an individual who has an amazingly creative idea right um and then they start to develop a company around that and it builds and builds and builds. But then eventually, you know, it can't make the leap.

So, you know, what do I know about business? I'm a liver pathologist, but I think about IBM was running the computer world until suddenly it wasn't. And there was Microsoft. Microsoft, that it was running the world until it wasn't because there was Apple. Now, they found ways to survive, but that was usually the people who were overly rigid at the top get axed because why weren't you paying attention?

We weren't innovating. We stopped innovating because we thought we knew. And then you turn to what's going on in your laboratories down here and you go, oh, there's some really cool ideas. I think one of the things Steve Jobs was really good at was cultivating a community of innovation within the company. So that's one thing. The other thing is this notion that regulation is a lack of freedom and therefore, you know, strangles a company. Well system, but this would be true on the smaller scale for any company. You take off all the guardrails on how the banking industry goes, and the result of that is you get the Great Depression. So they add on the Glass-Steagall

Act to control banking, not to eliminate it, but to bring it negative feedback loops that are healthy. And then we have an economy that can deal with World War II, an economy that can deal with the 1950s. It's chugging along pretty well and handling major problems along the way until we get into the 70s and 80s, when both Democrats and Republicans start stripping away the regulations. What happens? We have the Great Recession in 2008. So we have the Dodd-Frank things, and they start coming back in with,

you could look at it as limiting your freedom. But what it really is, is healthy negative feedbacks to keep things from going crazy. And then now we start eroding those and what happens? So that's working and you can see that at work in companies. You can see that at work in political systems. You have too much freedom and you get anarchy and you don't have a working economy. But you have too, if you have too much freedom, but if you have too little freedom, think about the Soviet Union, it crumbled because it was holding things

too rigidly. There was no way to come up with novel solutions when the environment changed. And so that would go back, right? And so if I'm correct in understanding you, that would go back to what you're talking about, kind of with the ants, right? And so if I'm correct in understanding you, that would go back to what you're talking about kind of with the ants, right? It's exactly the same thing. And this is kind of the amazing thing about complexity. It's like, it doesn't matter whether you're talking about microscopic cells or ants or economies or businesses or what's going on in a classroom or a global ecosystem or the local ecosystem, it's all the same thing. So when, when what people often come back to me and my experience of learning about complexity is once I sort of understand the terms and the basic concepts,

which, you know, I've given you half of them. They're pretty straightforward. You walk outside and you just see it everywhere. How is it that people are walking down the street in orderly rows without bumping into each other? I live in New York City. Can you hear the sirens? Yeah.

Should we pause for a moment? I mean, sure. So let them get out of the way. Yeah. Unless they're looking for you. That's all. Yeah. Um, so I'm walking to, you know, I, I opened chapter two of the book with what it's like when I walk out on the street in the morning to go to work in the spring and spring is happening and leaves are budding on the trees. Well, that's complexity. How the tree is soaking up atoms and molecules from the environment, the ground, the water, the air, the sunlight, and turning it into leaves and how robins are on the front lawn in front of my building. And you can see them cocking their ears to go

after a worm do you know why they're able to get a worm when they when they do that why it's because they're not listening for a single worm it turns out worms are self-organized into herds as a complex system so the robins are listening for the herds of worms this explains the q anon thing yeah so they don't exactly so they don't have to like get that one worm they just wait for the herds of worms this explains the q anon thing yeah so they don't exactly so they don't have to like get that one worm they just wait for the herd and like reach in and they're likely to get one yeah and then i get out into the sidewalk and we're new yorkers you know this one's on their phone that one's holding a baby this one's listening to their their uh their phone someone's getting mugged someone's getting and yet we're all

walking down the street without bumping into each other yeah how does that happen um i'll give you an example um of how yeah what you see in ants turns out to be everywhere i was on a um trip to japan for a medical meeting and i had an afternoon off in Kyoto, and I was sitting in a Japanese garden, beautifully manicured. And there was this wisteria branch with these beautiful purple flowers hanging down. And I looked at it. I saw something moving, and there were two rows of ants going up on the outside and one row of ants coming down. And I thought, oh, that's a little bit like complexity. ants going up on the outside and one row of ants coming down. Ants coming down. And I thought, oh, that's a little bit like complexity.

And then I came home and was going to work a little bit different route than I usually do a few days later. And I got out of the train station at Delancey and Essex. And the stairway is a little wider there than most stairway systems. And it was rush hour. And what I saw were two rows of people going up the outside and one row of people coming down the inside. Exactly like the ant. But no one was thinking, how do I walk along this, you know, staircase like an ant? None of the ants were paying attention to each other none of the humans were and yet on some level we were and we self-organized like that wow that's the complexity theory thing it's like once you learn it you can't unsee it flocks of birds in the sky you know just look at your your

body and what the cells are doing inside it's all the same thing wow that's i'm gonna be seeing everything that way you fucked me up now yeah yeah that's my intent you know you don't have to read the whole book just read the first two chapters you'll get there well this has been really insightful man and uh we learned lots of things and that's why i love the show uh give us what you uh hope people come away from on the book and uh final plugs there um you know as i as i joked earlier but not entirely what's it about it's about the universe um i i think it's it's to be able to look at things that we have intuitions about and understanding them it's all really very simple but with a little bit of heightened awareness and a little bit of heightened understanding, we can think about what we're doing. And, you know, so many things we put them

in the political realm and go, this is a political question and everyone gets very angry, et cetera. And it's not, it's just ants. Are we behaving like ants or aren't we? Do we want a healthy system? A little bit more negative feedback loops. Is it too rigid? Are we getting no creativity? Well, loosen it up a little bit. It allows us to see that the solutions to a lot of our problems are not political questions. I'd love to see this stuff taught. I've taught this to fifth graders and they get it. Yeah. My, my nephew asked me to come to his class when he was in the fifth grade. This was about 20 years ago. And so they had me come in the last period of the day and the teachers wound up calling all

the parents because they were holding the school buses because the kids had so many questions oh wow that's awesome right so um it's it's a new way of understanding well it's it's new to us it's been around for a while um but i think it's a way to look at the world that helps you find ways to be creative and resilient. It's not just science. It's not just, oh, I know a few facts. It's a way to move through the world and understand one's place in the world. There you go. And how maybe to improve the world. There you go.

Yeah, I mean, I'm going to be looking at it from a leader aspect and a business aspect. And I've always been like a try-and-think-out-of-the-box sort of person where i'm always trying to look at things for new paradigms uh i'm always trying to figure out what's katomas i have the blind spots that chapter three might be holding me really okay and uh um you know i'm always trying to figure all this stuff i i will read it um it's uh it's important to me um and yeah life is life is complex like i read one time about all

the work that my body's doing all the time you know the pumping in the blood and moving the vodka around and it ain't top down you're not going wait a second send more blood there wait a second if you were you'd die yeah you know i thought i read about all the stuff that goes on most of it i don't think there's a way to read about all of it but most of it and i was like uh man i'm tired i ain't gonna take a nap man there's a lot of work going on over here man but even when you took a nap it all went on from the bottom up your body was adapting and changing and reacting and that's just complexity yeah it sounds you know sounds complicated, but it's not. It's actually just kind of simple and beautiful.

Most of the bottom up was coming from the Taco Bell the night before. Anyway, thank you very much, Neil, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun and interesting. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Chris. Thank you as well. Give us a.com wherever you want people to find you on the internet, please.

NeilFeesOfficial.com. Or just go to Amazon and buy the book. the book damn it go to amazon you don't even have to read it just buy the book you can check it out there and all that good stuff so folks uh order the book wherever fine books are sold available may 9th 2023 notes on complexity a scientific theory of connection consciousness and being i mean that's what we all want we want to be more connected more conscious and being and probably more present too uh thanks so much for tuning in go to goodreads.com fortress christmas youtube.com fortress christmas linkedin.com fortress christmas hell it's uh whatever i'm on there uh thanks for

tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time