What if human thought isn’t separate from nature, but Earth’s newest ecosystem?

Anne Riley spent more than 30 years in accounting, high tech, and banking before walking away from a system built on one goal: maximize profit at all costs. Her book, The Human Idea: Earth’s Newest Ecosystem, starts inside a single cell and builds outward to us. Life runs in nested layers, DNA to cell to body to colony, all bound by one rule. Do what you need, but don’t harm your neighbor. Humans run the same design one layer up, built from ideas. The difference is choice. Our rules are whatever we decide, and a bad idea spreads as easily as a good one.

In this conversation

• Why Riley left accounting, and the goal that crowds out every other goal
• The ideasphere: idea, mind, body, institution, society
• “Amazing and dangerous”: how the takers outspread the live-and-let-livers
• Government as the body’s nervous system, and what money does to it
• Nature’s one hundred percent tax system
• Schools that compete for students, and healthcare split into wellness and catastrophe
• Measuring pollution the way a body reports a cut finger
• AI as a possible form of life without life’s constraints
• Why a quiet person with a big idea keeps talking anyway

Riley calls herself a super introvert and the wrong person to spread her own theory. Some people tell her it will never work. Others ask when we start.

Links

• The Human Idea: Earth’s Newest Ecosystem by Anne Riley, 2nd ed., Ideasphere World Publishing, 2024: thehumanidea.com
• Anne Riley’s books, including DINA and Aerie: thehumanidea.com/books
• Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem, Michael Rothschild, 1990: https://books.google.com/books/about/Bionomics.html
• Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari, 2024, on AI as “alien intelligence”: https://www.ynharari.com/book/nexus/
• Earthbound: Bill McKibben, Here Comes the Sun: earthboundpodcast.com/bill-mckibben-here-comes-the-sun-and-how-renewables-can-power-the-future
• Earthbound: Diana Colleen, They Could Be Saviors | Curing Billionaire-ism: earthboundpodcast.com/they-could-be-saviors
• Earthbound: earthboundpodcast.com
• Earthbound Listener Survey: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/survey/2026/
• Global Warming Is Real: globalwarmingisreal.com

What if human thought isn't distinct from nature, but Earth's newest ecosystem?

What can the life of cells teach us about human civilization?

And what would it mean to run our economy and society?

By nature's oldest rule, do what you need, but don't harm your neighbors.

In this episode of Earthbound, we join Ann Reilly, a recovering accountant and business and author of the Human Earth's Newest Ecosystem.

Riley guides us through a thought experiment that begins with the inner workings of a single cell operating under strict instructions from DNA and leads to a thriving, sustainable idea for humanity.

With an accounting degree, a minor in economics and an MBA, Ann spent more than 30 years in high tech, manufacturing, database design, systems development, product distribution and private banking.

She enjoyed high level accounting.

At first she was good at it.

She describes it as a language she understood well, a way of describing what actually happened in a business and translating that into a form people could share and understand.

But when she paired accounting with economics and then went to work in high tech, things began to change.

As she dug deeper into business economics, all she saw was a drive to maximize profit.

Riley isn't anti business.

A business should turn a sustainable profit.

What troubled her was profit as the only goal.

The problem with profit maximization, she says, is that it doesn't have room for any other goal.

Harm people along the way, and that's fine as long as you can get away with it or pay the legal bill.

Her verdict was short.

Nope, not buying.

Limiting our focus only to how we can manipulate the market to maximize profit.

I'm rich.

I'm rich.

Skews the idea of running a handsomely profitable business with the goal of delivering quality goods and services to willing customers.

Instead, we.

And by we I don't mean you or me.

We gain the system to access people's wallets and take as much of their hard earned money as possible.

At a large high tech firm where she worked, she saw people who she describes as couldn't care less about humanity.

And she knew there was more than such a narrow, one dimensional way of looking at the world.

There's little room for the rest of humanity when the end all be all is making as much money as you possibly can with little consideration for anything else.

It's as if money were the wellspring of life and that worldview eventually leads to human suffering and environmental decay.

Riley wasn't the first person to look at an economy and see something Alive.

Rothschild argued that an economy works less Like a machine and more like an ecosystem.

Technology is its DNA.

Companies behave like organisms.

And he proposed that a factory and a living cell solve many of the same problems.

It was a revelation.

For the first time, Reilly could see the patterns.

The insight gleaned from Rothschild's work uncovered the the three forces her whole theory rests.

Competition, collaboration, coordination.

Rothschild's conclusion was to let the market compete, and the rest takes care of itself.

But what about collaboration and coordination?

Riley couldn't square that.

He described three forces and then kept only one.

And that doesn't make any sense.

She tells us she saw a bigger gap, too.

If living systems look like economic systems and humans build economic systems, then living systems should tell us something about ourselves, our economies and societies.

Rothschild never followed that thread, and Riley did.

And she kept hitting the same wall.

Nature follows its rules, humans think, and when we think, we change the rules.

She was sure somebody smarter would write that book within a couple of years.

And 25 years later, no one had.

So she wrote it herself.

And here's the gist, in brief.

Start with a single cell.

At its core is DNA, a molecule holding instructions.

The cell is the machinery that carries out those instructions.

Cells build tissues, tissues build organs, and organs build bodies.

In Reilly's telling, every living thing is a set of circles, one inside the next, each serving the one around it.

Inside a body, all those parts cooperate and they follow one simple do what you need to do, but don't harm your neighbors.

A cell that breaks that rule doesn't last long.

The body removes it.

Now look at us.

We have the same physical stack with something else.

On ideas, Riley points out that we're born with none.

Every idea we have comes from someone else.

Ideas gather into a mind, and our bodies put them into action.

People join together in institutions and institutions and societies.

It's the same design as a cell.

One layer up.

There's one difference, though, and everything turns on it.

We choose.

Nature's rules are fixed.

Ours are whatever we decide they are.

That's our superpower.

It's also why a bad idea can spread as easily as a good one.

Nothing in the system prefers the good one.

So which rule have we chosen?

Riley's answer is uncomfortable.

Nature's organizing value is survival.

Ours, she argues, has become piling up.

Wealth, excess wealth, a value no healthy body would tolerate.

From there, the book goes places you might not expect.

What government is actually for.

Why, in her view, nature already already runs a tax system.

What school would look like if its job were teaching us how to think and whether Artificial intelligence or super intelligence could become a kind of life that no longer plays by life's rules.

You'll hear her work through these ideas in our conversation.

But what stayed with me most was the person behind the theory.

Ann Reilly has what she believes is a way of seeing how humanity fits in the living world.

But she'll tell you without a trace of self pity that she's the wrong person to spread it.

I'm a super introvert, she says.

Join the club, man.

When she first saw the parallel between nature's systems and her own, it stopped her cold.

It blew me away.

I was like, oh, this is it.

This is how we fit in the world.

Then almost in the same breath, I'm just not the right person for sharing these ideas.

She doesn't even claim the ideas are new.

Darwin is in there, and Stephen Jay Gold, and of course Rothschild.

None of my ideas are new, she tells me, but the synthesis is new.

And that's what's tripping people up, because they're not used to thinking this way, she says.

There's a quiet irony here.

Riley's whole theory rests on the idea that humans live in a second ecosystem built from ideas.

In that ecosystem, a good idea has no built in advantage over a bad one.

What wins is whatever spreads.

Her history of humanity is the story of the takers beating out the people who lived and let live.

The takers don't have the better idea, they were just better at spreading it.

So what happens to a good idea held by a quiet person?

She's hoping the answer is conversations like this one, one podcast at a time, one reader at a time, until someone louder picks it up and carries it further?

Can we transform the idea sphere, the human ecosystem we currently inhabit, into the ideal sphere where we adopt the patterns of nature into human thought to create a just, sustainable society?

Some people tell her it will never work.

Others ask a different question.

When do we start?

We start right now.

Here is my conversation with Ann Reilly, author of the King Human Idea, Earth's newest ecosystem.

I went into accounting and I was good at it.

But man, I was like, all I did was help people maximize their profits.

And I was like, nope, not buying.

And if you read my book, you know, whole concept is what I think kills the world in many ways.

Right?

Let's start with that.

So had a career in accounting and you have mba, and I think you just alluded to it.

But can you describe in more detail the journey was from that to writing the human idea?

When I went to school, I was really Good at accounting.

It was like a language I understood and it made sense.

It was like you were putting the realities of what happened in a business into.

Into a form that people could understand and share.

And I was like, that's really cool, that's good.

But then when you start.

And then I paired this with a minor in economics so you get all the profit maximization and you get, you start to deal with financ.

What's going to do the highest profit, whatever.

And I'm like, this leads to such.

It's like a unidirectional.

It's one way of looking at the world, but it is, it's so one dimensional and it leaves so much out that is part of humanity that I was like, this is horrible.

And not only that, but you get people.

I worked at a large tech company and the people who could care less about humanity.

It became an ego trip.

It was just like, this just doesn't sit right with me.

This just doesn't sit right.

And there's got to be something else in the world that's more important than this.

This just doesn't have any value to me.

That's really what it came down to.

It was like, this doesn't have any value to me.

And I was a person who then retired at 50 because I was like, oh, I think we have enough to make it.

And I wanted to do more things with my time.

But the problem with profit maximization is that it doesn't have room for any other goal.

That becomes your goal.

And if you do that and you harm people in the process, that's fine as long as you can get away with it or pay off the legal bill.

And to me that's a bad road to go on.

And now what's happened is we see that the people who are really good at profit maximization, what they do with that money is, is accumulate power and then they can wield that power over all the other system.

And now we have almost an oligopoly where we have a few businesses in every industry running the whole show.

Because humans can game the system when they accumulate resources and whenever.

And the reason I wrote the human idea was to compare how nature works in these same circumstances with how humans work.

And nature has polished these mechanisms of survival for billions of years.

And we come along with our big brains for 20,000 years.

And we have changed the game because we have one superpower that nature doesn't have, which is to choose.

We can choose how to behave, whereas nature gets their instructions from their DNA and They have very limited ability to choose within that realm.

So we come along and say, oh, we, we don't know what nature's done before, but we're just going to say, oh, we can do you know, we can choose to be.

To make war, to enslave people, to make products that kill people.

And we can, and we make, we get rewarded by it.

In nature, if you are part of a cell in a body and you start damaging your other neighboring cells, the, the brain, the neural system comes in and says, no, not so fast, and dump you out of the community really fast.

And yet we do that all the time.

And so what I've decided, nature has a basic rule.

And that rule is, hey, especially when we collaborate and we.

And cells.

You're made up of 35 trillion cells in your body, and those cells collaborate together to keep both the cells alive and the body alive.

And it's a brilliant system, but it's not made from nothing.

Based on billions of years of evolution where all the failures have been gleaned out by just the entities dying.

And you're left with a really good model that works.

And the underlying model of collaboration is, hey, you can do what you want, cells, but do no harm to your other cells.

So we go along to humans, and humans do not ascribe to that same model as some, but not the people in power.

And the problem is those people in power can gain the systems for the millions who say, yeah, that sounds good to me.

Right?

But the people in power do not work that way.

And I think that's what's leading us down the road to perdition and perhaps extinction.

Okay, so what you're describing here is the idea sphere, is that right?

Right.

Yeah.

And in the book you describe it as a parallel ecosystem to, to nature.

Right.

Can you elaborate on that a little.

Bit, how that works?

Yes.

I'm going to have to spend a little time in nature here, so bear with me.

The natural world of life that we see on Earth is a set of Contentric circles.

You can look at it that way.

At the very core is DNA.

DNA is just a molecule that holds an instruction that can do something to other materials.

And there's long strings of DNA for every animal or plant that's around.

And that is what we call our genome.

And it's stuck inside the nucleus of a cell.

And those genome provides all the instructions a cell needs to live, all of them.

Okay.

And the cell is the one that houses that genome, but it also has all the other tools the cell can use.

To put those instructions into action.

Okay, so a cell is the thing in nature that lives.

It is the only one that lives.

Everything else is either an accumulation or it's made.

It's a component or an accumulation of cells.

It's either one.

But the cell is the one that lives.

And from cells we've created, the cells have collaborated to create tissues and organs and bodies.

So a lot of what we see in the world is bodies.

We don't really see the cells inside the body.

We look at the bodies for a long time.

That's all we ever saw.

But there's one other level of collaboration above bodies, and that's colonies.

Bees and ants have evolved to have the individual living units, like bees or ants, be like cells in the benefit of the hive.

So the hive becomes sort of the living body, but it's made up of individuals who are given different food at birth in order to fill different roles.

Some are foragers, some are caregivers.

A couple are queens who are the coordinators.

But all of those things go in a concentric circle.

DNA, genome, cell, tissues, organs, body, colony.

And then outside that is the ecosystem.

No rules outside there because there's no collaboration out there.

The tiger has all of its energy, you know, its cells and its energy, but it can't transfer that energy to control the movements of an elephant.

It just can't.

So outside a body, all you get is competition because there's no collaboration.

Okay, so let's look at humans now.

So we're going to use the exact same model, because nature only does the same thing, right?

It starts small and makes bigger things.

So at the core, humans are born with that entire physical model in place, right?

We have DNA and cells and we grow up and we have our organs in our body, but that's working.

But we also have been born with this huge brain.

And what makes the brain work is ideas.

We create thoughts, and those thoughts are accumulated in our brain.

And all of the thoughts are what I say makes up our mind, not our brain.

Our mind is the accumulation of thoughts inside our mind that makes us uniquely us.

Not just our genetics, but our mind.

But we are born with no ideas, none, right?

So what we get is from other people and their ideas.

So already we.

We're different from life because life is born with all of its instructions intact.

And we're born with no ideas on how to maneuver in the world in this mental place.

And so our mind is then housed in a body.

And our body plays the same role as a cell.

It has all the equipment to put those ideas into action.

Right?

We have hands, we have feet, we can lift things, we can draw things, we can do all these things to put an idea into action.

And the only way we live is when we put an idea into action.

Otherwise an idea doesn't really exist.

Right.

I can think of, oh, I have an idea about ideas, right?

But unless I write a book about ideas, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't exist anywhere.

So we are another level up.

We have to put our ideas into action in the physical world in order for us to trade them around because we can't read each other's minds, right?

So we have to trade ideas through physical things.

So books and buildings and clothing, all of those are just ideas put into action into some physical form.

Above ideas are collaborations of people to put bigger ideas into form.

So we create institutions that take an idea.

A bunch of people work on that same idea, and they produce product.

But it's not just products.

We can produce religious ideas.

We can produce library books to borrow.

Right.

We can produce products and services and all kinds of things.

And those are what we call institutions.

Right?

Above institutions is the group of all the people who get together and decide how to live together.

And those are called societies, states, countries, that kind of group.

But the goal there is, how do we live together or how are we going to exist together?

Okay.

And above that, this is where we have colonies.

On the other side, we have a bunch of multinational organizations are running around like the African Union or the United nations or NATO.

Those are sort of multinational groups.

And above that, because we're humans and we can all communicate, we could create one world society.

Yeah, right, yeah.

Where everybody has the same goal.

We all agree how to live together and we can have one society.

That has not happened.

I'm not sure it's ever going to happen.

It's definitely not going to happen in my lifetime.

But those are things that that can happen.

So you see, these systems are parallel.

The difference, I think, and it's really important, is that the underlying rule of collaboration with nature is, hey, you do those things, you can do what you want, but don't harm each other.

Whereas humans have this ability to choose which actions they're going to take and which ones they aren't, and there's no control on them.

We can take a bad action.

We can take a bad idea and get it accepted and shared just as easily as we can do a good one.

Right.

What does that mean for human free will?

So we have free will in the idea that we have choice, our ideas bring choice.

How do you think in evolution, from.

A DNA in the cell up, everything was designed to work.

If it didn't work, it was going to die.

Right.

How did our big brains that are, I think you're saying, in a way.

The core of our problems is our.

Big brains and our ideas.

How did that come from nature?

How did I think it's an evolution.

If you look around, there's lots and lots of animals with big brains.

Crows have big brains, octopus have big brains, dolphins have big brains.

So it's not an unusual.

I think what happened is big brains are an evolutionary advantage in certain cases.

If you can use your big brain to make choices that allow you to survive in order to have children, then that's an evolutionary advantage.

And we by far have the biggest brain to body ratio of any, any animal.

So somehow we evolved in a way for those brains to pay for the energy we use and still make generations to where it was an advantage.

And the problem has been, I think humans have lived for maybe they say, 200,000 years.

We live for about 180,000 of these years with indigenous peoples and native peoples evolving to be mostly the attitude was part of nature.

We are another creature on nature.

And in that regard, there was not a lot of waste.

There wasn't a lot.

There was mostly coexistence because they're like, oh, we take what we need.

And they really appreciated when they killed a buffalo, they didn't just kill them wantonly for whatever reason they felt right, they didn't do that.

And they.

But somewhere along the line that evolution changed to more ideas that were like, hey, it's a lot easier just take the stuff from the next tribe than it is to just do it all ourselves.

And that was an evolutionary idea that unfortunately was shared and accepted and that has taken off.

Yeah, so much more than the live and let live indigenous.

And look what happened.

The live and let livers got killed, got just destroyed by these takers phenomena.

So I think it's an evolutionary advantage, not necessarily a good one.

I mean, we're a flash in the pan.

We've only been here, I think, in this phase of humans for 20,000 years and we're already close to, or not close to, but on the road to our own extinction.

And we are the only creature who can make ourselves go extinct.

Other creatures go extinct because the environment around them changes or they get destroyed by some other animal, but we are the ones who can make ourselves go extinct.

And that is.

And when it Goes, the ideas go too.

And maybe the crows will take over.

I don't know.

But, you know.

Yeah.

Well, as you say, I think we've fumbled along in this ecosystem without a clue, and so we're fumbling into potential extinction.

Right.

And it does.

It's hard not to feel that way.

And we have.

One of my big things is climate change.

Absolutely.

So there's good ideas and there's bad ideas that we fumbled along, but we've also developed great art and oh, yeah,.

We're amazing and dangerous.

Amazing and dangerous.

Yeah, that's the way I put it.

So you have the idea sphere and then you talk about the ideal sphere.

Right.

The ideal sphere is what I picture as if humans say, okay, we know we get to make choices, let's make choices.

In the model of how life successful life has worked for billions of years.

So when we make a decision, we should, at our core, start with the premise of people love choice.

They want to maximize their choice.

That's how they make their life satisfying.

So how do we maximize choice?

But at the same time, the rule is you can't harm anybody else or the environment we live in, because if you harm your environment, you're harming your underpinning of survival.

So how would we do that?

And so what I did was I looked at how our institutions work, and the main point that's really important is government.

In our brain or in our body, our brains and our neural systems run the show.

They are made up of.

They're just cells, but they are the ones who enforce the rules about not harming anybody else.

Okay.

And they do things very specific ways.

So what I did was I said, in the idea sphere, the government is equivalent to the brain and the neural system.

The government is the one who enforces the rules.

But the problem with humans is we have a harder job.

Bodies have all their instructions and born with them.

All the brain has to do and the neural system has to do is enforce the rules.

But humans have to choose what is going to be their premise, what are their rules, which are our laws, and then how to enforce them.

So we started off, I think the United States has a nice constitution that basically mirrors nature, right?

It says, for the common good, common defense, protect our prosperity for the future.

That sounds a lot like nature, right?

And then we have to make rules or laws that enforce, tell what that means when we're living.

And I think that's where we've gone a little bit wrong.

We've eaten away at the laws.

And I would say one of the first things we've done is we've infected our elections and our government with money.

And who has money?

The private sector.

Who has made a lot of money in a system of exploiting maybe other people.

They then can influence the government to work not for the good of the people, but for the good of them.

Yeah.

And that is, there's things like that everywhere.

Our taxation system is backwards, our education system is a little bit backwards.

There's a whole bunch of things that if we work the way a body worked, we would make different decisions, we would make better decisions, and I think we would improve our chance of survivability.

Talk a little bit about how would you ideal sphere, how would education work?

How do we educate ourselves and our children?

So that's a great one because it's so controversial, because, okay, so education in the idea sphere is how children become members of the idea sphere.

So remember, we only get ideas from others.

So education is the means by which we get ideas.

So first of all we should be doing right now in America, we use a Prussian model, the Prussian model of education, which was used generally originally to train the soldiers for the Prussian war, to obey, you know, so right now our model is maybe a little bit suspect.

So but what we would do is remember our goal is to maximize, allow people with enough information to maximize their choice and yet still minimize harm.

So that's what we need to be teaching them.

That's our base rule.

That should be reinforced for the 12 or 18 years, 16 years that they're in education.

That one goal should be top level.

Then we develop all kinds of skills for all kinds of areas.

We're not just learning how to get a job, we're learning how to think, how to look at life.

Not just it's silly, but gardening and sewing and cooking are all things we should learn as well as math and science and reading.

Because we want people to be well rounded and make good choices about themselves and understand the world in which we live.

And if you maximize the understanding and maximize the ability to think through things, then people can do anything.

Anything.

And that's what we want, is we want a world of people who can think and do anything.

But I think what happens is thinking is a opportunity to gain resources and gain power.

And there's a lot of people who don't want that.

So they don't want people to be equality of thinking and equality of opportunity.

And that's what we have to change if we're going to survive.

We need to be a species that works Together better.

And we do have to do that with some basic idea, mindset changes and then follow those.

So education, the other thing about education is where we have, you know, in nature, the brain never does any of the real work, right?

They only coordinate every other cell.

They don't pump blood, they don't process food, they don't do anything.

So in our, in my idea sphere or ideal sphere, education would be a private institution because that's where the experts are.

But the government's job is to set the rules and the enforcement and say, no, here are the things we want you to teach, but let the experts go at it and figure out how to do it more efficiently.

Because competition does create innovation.

But what you can't do is let them do, set their own rules, right?

Because then they'll do.

Then you have like private schools that teach like just religion, right?

And other private schools that teach just engineering.

That's not what you want to do.

You say, no.

Government says, here's the goals, here's what we want.

And then the institutions go at it.

If an institution makes profit, great.

If they don't, the government would come in and say, hey, we're going to help you figure out how to do this better.

But the other thing too is, because we want everybody to have access to education, is that the money from a student goes with the student, not to the school.

So the student gets to choose the institution they go to, not the school gets to choose the student.

It's a big difference because if students get to choose, then all the schools are trying to be the best they can to attract students.

And if a school has a bad reputation, nobody's going to want to go there.

And no way did the student, if too many students want to go to a school, then it's a lottery system.

Boom.

Imagine if Harvard was a lottery system.

Anybody who applied that, that met the criteria, they it's a lottery system.

You would no longer have an elite class that goes to school and then gets all the jobs when they get out.

And the teachers might say, I'd like to go and be the star at my own institution.

Maybe I'll take a group and we'll go over here and we'll do another kind of school.

So what you do is you create competition and innovation and creativity inside the system.

So in my ideal sphere, that's how education, when education would look like, okay, then positive competition.

You bring up a lot of ideas.

Sounds like you feel that there's over specialization right now.

Specialization is a really good thing, right?

That's how we create complexity, is we specialize.

But if you specialize to the point where you turn off the creativity and the creation of other options, then it's not good.

Like Bill McKibben was talking to you on one of your programs, and he's talking about the oil companies.

Right.

They're very specialized in providing a certain kind of energy.

But we the people need energy.

We don't specify what kind of energy we need.

We just need it.

And so the government's job is to say, huh, there's a big environmental cost to oil.

Maybe we should invest in solar.

The government should have the good of the people at heart, not the good of an industry at heart.

So then the oil companies have to make a decision.

They either start going into an area and they start to lose money, or they go into an area where the government says, yeah, we want energy in this sector or in other sectors.

That's where you.

It's a mindset.

Change that.

Supporting an industry.

We support the broader concept of energy needs as opposed to.

Oh, energy from oil needs.

Yeah.

So do you see in the ideal.

The idea of the American government that the government we have now as moving in the amenable to the ideal sphere?

The Constitution is the closest thing I have ever seen to matching nature.

And so the core is good, but our laws are not.

Yeah.

Are not moving in the right direction.

And because the people who make the laws are now being compromised by money.

And in order to.

To me, there's a lot of.

You have to change.

First of all, make open primaries would be a thing.

Take all private money out.

Here's the way I look at it, is the.

The concept in the Constitution is one person, one vote.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

And the Citizen United decision said people can.

People can speak with money.

Right.

That's what they said.

And the more money you have, more speech.

If we are one person in one vote, that's an equivalence that we need to respect.

If we each have one person, one voice, then a person who has $10 million has 10 million times the voice I have at $1.

So to me, that should be absolutely abandoned.

There should be a reasonable limit on private contributions only.

I think we have $2,500 or something now, that seems a pretty good thing.

And absolutely no corporate money.

Corporations do not vote.

They do not get to participate in elections.

That is the absolute fallacy.

Institutions are made up of people.

The people get to vote, not the institutions.

And since the institution is really good at pulling money together, they have a really good Possibility of swaying the elections or government to their point of view.

That's not to be allowed.

And this is where our Supreme Court has really failed the good of the people.

And they have said freedom of speech, but they haven't looked at the context of the voice itself is now too big versus an individual.

So yeah, when you're getting back to the DNA as or the cell as the core of life, it seems like what we've got now is like with all the money it's destroyed that idea.

Of I would account.

I always go back to look at nature.

It's like the equivalent would be like the heart says, hey brain, give me a bunch of good blood and I will give you some.

No, if you give me a bunch of, yeah, good stuff my way, I will give you something in return.

But let' just get rid of that stupid liver and that stupid stomach.

We're not going to let them.

We're going to rule the body.

Right?

Your body's dead.

It doesn't work.

And it's funny, but if the heart wants to win, you don't have a body anymore.

And that's the same thing.

What's happening now is we're having institutions win and the cells, the people are suffering as a result.

And you just look at the income inequality and the social inequality that exists and it's out of balance.

A body would never let that happen.

Never.

It would die.

And that's what I'm afraid of.

What we're doing is creating a system that's going to not survive because we.

The goal again, the goal of nature is to do no harm and do what you want.

Right.

But I looking at that and saying that's not the goal of humans.

So what is the goal of humans?

What are we doing here?

And you know what humans have decided on is wealth accumulation.

Yeah.

Not all of them, but the ones who have won have decided wealth accumulation is the be all and end all.

And they now have enough power.

The top 1% controls 80% of all the wealth.

And that means they've concentrated the power.

And in a system like that, it was.

Is not sustainable.

It's not a survival mechanism.

It's a winning mechanism, a dominant mechanism, the mechanism of dominance, but not survival.

And I think this is what we need to recognize is that if we want survival, our governments need to look more like what Scandinavia does.

They say, hey, we got a high tax rate, but we also give you a lot of free services.

And yet you.

It's more balanced.

Our highest tax rate was 91% on the super high earners.

That had two effects.

One is it poured money into education and interstate highways and a space program.

And on the other hand, it kept all those big earners from getting too much power.

Well, we've let that be stout and that now we've seen what's happened.

This has been the downward spiral ever since.

Yeah, money is a mechanism of value exchange, but it seems like it's become something else, become corrupt.

As you're describing, it's corrupted.

It's becoming in, in itself.

And you, it's used in, in nature.

Resources are just a mechanism to provide survival.

You get a lot of, you get a lot of resources.

The first thing nature does, they create babies.

Right.

And the second thing they do is also everybody, every cell gets to store a little extra.

Right.

It's completely shared.

And if things, bad things happen, they use their store up.

Yeah, right.

But not us.

We accumulated and different areas and those people do.

Elon Musk creating a space program or a space industry is maybe that's okay, maybe it's not.

It depends on what his goal is.

Yeah.

It comes down to what is the underlying goal.

But I think his underlying goal is profit, which has always been that's not going to lead us down a good path.

We as a government have to control the profits so that the resources keep moving in a system and that's what creates innovation and creativity and new ideas.

Now we've got all this money stuck in a space, in a rocket system that we may or may not need.

I don't know.

I don't think we've set good rules around Elon Musk and his SpaceX to make it a good part of a sustainable future for humans.

Yeah, yeah.

Elon is an interesting example.

Arguably, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, he was a champion for climate change and things.

And.

Oh yeah, what's happened?

And it looks like he's just become completely corrupted by his drive to become the richest guy in the world.

Yes.

And it's an ego thing.

An ego thing.

And he started off good and it became an ego thing.

And that again, nature doesn't have egos like humans do.

And because we don't have systems that control the resources, you can have a big ego if you want, but you need to control the systems that prevent big egos from doing too much damage to others.

And we don't even see it that way.

To me, what's happening is I look at this, it seems really obvious to me now that I've seen these parallel systems, what the role of government ought to be for us to be sustainable and survivable.

But to me it seems like that's not the goal.

The goal is for people to get rich and that's what.

And as long as you do that, we don't really have a hope of improving our systems.

Yeah.

Do you think in any form capitalism can work?

Yeah, capitalism can work and it's really good.

Capitalism is my equivalent of competition.

And competition is needed for innovation and, and creativity and improvements and productivity improvement.

What it needs is to be balanced by collaboration and by the rules.

So if you're going to do capitalism, you need to set rules.

And to me this is the easiest way to do it is with taxation.

Our taxation system is backwards from the way nature would do it.

The way nature does it is, it's 100% taxation, right?

The mouth and the stomach eat and grind everything up and then everything is delivered to everybody else.

It's a hundred percent taxation on the stomach and zero percent taxation on everybody else.

Right.

But we aren't quite like that.

We can make our own livings.

So what a taxation system would look like in my ideal sphere is that every, every participant in the society would pay a small revenue tax off the top.

Right?

Everybody earns something, everybody pays something to participate.

And it doesn't matter whether you're a church or anybody who makes money pays a little tiny piece to the government.

That's just it, it doesn't matter.

There's no limits.

But then the real big earners, the ones who make a lot of profit, they get taxed at a super high rate and that money goes back to, to keep the system moving.

And what happens is you never.

The goal is to not let them have so much money that they can game the system, they can have money.

And we want profit, we want some profit because profit is an incentive for people to take risks.

And so we want that.

We just don't want it so much that it gains the system.

So that's the way a system would work.

And if you did that, capitalism would work great because it would provide innovation, but it has its own control in nature.

Capitalism works or competition works because if people can move out of the way, they'll move out of the way and go to a niche where they can survive.

It just kills each other for whatever.

For kicks.

Yeah, because it's too risky.

So they do everything they can to avoid competition.

And if they do have to do it.

Somebody's going to lose.

That's not their favorite thing to do.

But when.

When evolution started, there was no collaboration.

You had a bunch of single cells.

All they could do was compete.

And they don't compete with each other.

They just compete for food and space.

They don't.

We've just knocked the idea of competition and capitalism on its head a little bit because we're greedy.

Yes.

So we've changed the definition.

If we look at how it works in.

In nature, we would do it very differently.

How do we, given that our idea sphere seems to be, to use the word, polluted with these bad ideas and this greed.

And so how do we get from where we are now to where you would like us?

Where your idea ideal sphere, how do.

We make that shift again?

Evolution is slow.

So what you have to do is start with a mindset.

And what my goal is, by being on a bunch of podcasts and print it and putting out a book, is to get people to see that there is, in fact, a solution that is right in front of us that, you know, when we first started as humans thousands of years ago, we didn't know about cells and DNA and RNA and how it all worked.

So we.

Our early science was religion.

We're like, there must be some guy up there who's doing this, because what else you know?

But now we know better, but we fail to look back at how nature actually works, apply it to humans who have this ability to choose and think and understand what we can do to make it work.

So what I am really hoping that people do is get this idea in their heads that it's okay to make your choices, just don't harm anybody and don't harm the environment, and then run for office, your industry.

With this in mind, when you work at Exxon, maybe your idea is to say, no, we got to start an energy company or work someplace else.

But mainly it's just to get people to think of this idea and then slowly shift.

And what you do is you create a groundswell of a new idea that in 50 years, people are going, what were we thinking with all that greed?

But I don't know how to start, because I'm not.

I'm the super.

I'm a super introvert.

So for me to get this message, I blew me away when I found these parallel systems.

I was like, oh, this is it.

This is how we fit in the world.

But I can't.

I'm just not the right person for sharing these ideas.

And so I Could just.

I just hope that I keep talking to people and maybe other smarter people than me will say, hey, this is how we can look at things.

This is how we can do things.

And this is a solution that will work.

And we just got to get started.

A lot of times I meet people who go, it'll never work.

Yeah, I'm sure you do.

I meet a lot of people who go.

And then a lot of people go, well, when do we start?

So to me, it's get started.

It can only help us.

Yeah, this idea can only help us.

It will not hurt us.

But if we get enough people to change who runs for office in Congress, the goal should not be right or left, red or blue.

It should be harm versus no harm.

If you're creating a law that you're going to look at harm.

So if you look at it that way, you'd be regulating guns like crazy because they harm people and not that you don't want people to not have a gun.

We want people to not shoot other people with their guns.

So what kind of laws do we put into place to make sure that's what the result we get?

And then if you have another group that says, oh, gay marriage, it's like gay marriage doesn't harm anybody.

That's just two people doing their own thing.

So maximize.

There's no laws there.

And so you go through and look at it instead of ideology, instead of red or blue, you say harm versus no harm.

And there's some sticky wiggets in there.

I write about social media.

I wrote some solutions to social media.

I write some solutions to homelessness.

And because there are things we can do that cost effective and innovative and good for our society that doesn't harm each other.

Yeah, I do no harm.

And Sally walking your talk, you have an idea and you're get out there.

And that is how things I think.

Like my thinking is, oh my gosh, how on earth can we make you look at the world out there and you go, oh my gosh, it's easy to become pessimistic.

Yes, it is.

I have a friend who is on a board of a hospital and I said, you're in a wonderful position.

What's the goal of your hospital?

I said, if the goal of your hospital is to keep people well and keep them maximize their care and minimize the time they're there.

And she goes, oh no, it's just profit.

Yeah, it was like, then you're in a position to change, help change the goal.

If you don't change the goal of the hospital from profit to care for your patients, then you're never gonna get there.

You're never gonna get there.

But then she read my book and she goes, I don't get how I can help.

And so it's a really hard.

The mindset is so different in so many ways that it's just.

You just have to keep plugging away.

That's all I can do is keep plugging away.

That's all you can do.

Because it does feel.

They feel like Sisyphus pulling the rock up the hill and all that.

But.

And healthcare is a great example of healthcare.

It's human care.

And when the goal becomes profit, it's all wrong at that point.

Yeah.

Because then you.

The whole system is designed to set up people to be sick so that they get more care.

And so my idea for that was to divide health care into two buckets, the wellness bucket and the sick bucket.

Right.

So one part of health care maximizes the ability of people to become and stay well.

And the other part, and that doesn't need insurance.

That might need originally, because we're so out of balance, it might need an influx of maybe cash accounts and people that says this is what you use to stay well and do your normal upkeep.

Like if you break your arm or something, you go to this doctor and you do this and you compete for.

You pay cash with this money and you go to a doctor and they compete for your service.

So they're going to do everything they can as efficiently as possible.

On the other side, you've got the catastrophic care.

It's like more.

And you buy insurance, like car insurance.

Right.

You pay for.

You don't buy car insurance.

So they pay for your gas.

Right.

And your tune up, you pay for the big collision.

That's how we do that.

We pay for the big stuff with that, not the small stuff.

And so you have a lot of healthy people paying into a system where their wellness is being taken care of elsewhere and they are paying for insurance so that they will not have to pay for the catastrophic thing that is a lot more cost effective.

But right now we've mixed up wellness and healthcare into one big bucket and you can't do it.

It just doesn't work.

And so all the costs are high and it's just a really ineffective system.

Yeah, yeah, I can attest to that.

I think we all can.

It's interesting, we're talking about balance.

I think that climate change is a symptom of society, of civilization out of balance.

What are Some of your influences that informed your ideas.

I think all along, Charles Darwin and his book have been really great.

And Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote just a lot about how light works and the patterns and the things.

I kind of gleaned it.

But the main one was a book called Bionomics by Michael Rothschild.

And Bionomics was a book where he compared biological systems to economic systems.

And he was like, see, here's how a factory works, here's how a cell works.

See, there I go.

And he went through and had all of these different situations and it was brilliant because it allowed me to see the patterns.

And he was the one who really sussed out for me competition, collaboration and coordination.

But he then concluded that we should all just compete.

And I was like, wait, you talked about collaboration and coordination and then you said we would only use competition?

That doesn't make any sense.

But that was his.

He was a business guy too, but his bias was towards competition.

So that's what he found, even though he wrote this really wide ranging book.

But the real hole in the book was that he said, I was like, look, biological systems are like economic systems which are made by humans, then biological systems must be like humans.

But he didn't cover that.

And that was where I concentrated.

And it was like that's where I had to see every time I kept running up on the problem of, but humans think and they change the rules whenever they think.

And that's when I had to figure out that it was the idea at the base of this sort of new system that was, it was a brand new system.

It wasn't just we are trying to fit into an existing system.

We created a brand new system called thinking.

And the thinking creates.

We can manipulate our resources in the real world, in the physical world, in a way that no other being can.

And so that was the change.

And so I thought, this is obvious that somebody's, somebody way smarter to me than me is going to write this book in two years.

This was in the 90s.

And then 25 years later I'm like, nobody's written this book.

It's time for me to write the book.

I've been waiting.

Yep.

And so I did.

And I really worked hard to research all these parts of science that I don't understand that.

I was like, oh, this is how it works, this is how it works.

And a couple of things I changed my mind on.

I was like, oh, I did not realize it worked that way.

But the systems are completely parallel.

And I think if we understand that and we Understand the significant role we play in the existence of our own civilization is really important because life will go on.

We can knock ourselves off, life will go on.

And maybe evolution will create some other smart animal that can think the way we do and manipulate the world the way we do.

But maybe not.

Maybe colonies take off to another level.

Maybe these rule the world.

I don't know.

We're losing our chance.

We're the only ones in the ideasphere.

Yeah.

And if we take ourselves out, who knows?

It may or may not come back, but we won't be here to see it.

Have you heard of the idea of the Great Filter, which is so the idea, as I understand it, is we're talking about.

People wonder why we haven't found intelligent life elsewhere.

There's a lot of reasons why we might not have, but one is that evolution, our life form, gets to like where we're at, and we're in the situation we're at the I.

Our ideas are, are great in some instances, and in the other sense, they can be our downfall.

And the Great Filter is that civilization gets to be so intelligent that they have to get past level that we're at to survive.

And a lot of times that we get filtered out, I guess this life going, no, that's not working.

You're out of here.

Exactly, exactly.

This is.

We are evolutionary planets.

It's just really fast.

You think 20,000 years we're going to go from language and writing to boom, we're gone.

That's pretty quick in the world.

But yeah, I do, I think that I also look at that.

Maybe thinking goes different ways and we just can't conceive of it because we think different the way we think.

But maybe there are beings again.

The bees evolved a new type of existence that didn't require their big brain to make it work.

And maybe are.

Like I said, I think we're smart enough to figure it out.

I really do.

But what we.

We are in a downturn right now where we are dumbing down people.

At the same time we're accelerating technology, you know, And I do think that there's another thing, that it's pretty hard to kill all 9 billion people, even in life.

In our great extinction, some of them survive.

So maybe what I'm hoping is that if the few survive are smart enough to realize what happened, they'd be like, oh, let's build a civilization a new way.

That might be the Great extinction.

And then the remains are like, oh, we're a little smarter than the last group you know, that could be.

That definitely could be.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The other option is that I think about because AI is a real interesting phenomenon because when you define life, we define life as being able to obtain resources, metabolize them, create a new generation, copy itself and.

But AI comes along and AI doesn't need to copy itself.

It doesn't have the cell, it doesn't have cells that are time time infused.

Like we have an aging process that will kill us at some point.

AI doesn't have that.

There are a bunch of inner materials.

So if AI being now having some rudimentary ability to process information, can develop a way to keep itself existing, it's a new form of life.

Yeah.

It just doesn't have the constraints we have.

Right.

We have to metabolize resources and we have to produced a generation to keep the line going.

They don't have to do any of that.

They just have to keep their own thing going.

So if they can figure out how to use solar energy, they have to stay powered, create their thing and fix their circuits when they're gone or whatever they use.

AI, yeah, is a completely new form of life that didn't exist before and may then be able to create its own beings to continue if they just finally crash out.

So boy, that changes things.

And I do not know, but when you're talking about this stuff, you've just basically taken a restriction away from living beings that they can have, they don't need anymore.

Yeah.

The gentleman that wrote sapiens, I can't remember.

Yeah.

Harari.

I've seen him refer to AI as instead of artificial intelligence, called alien intelligence.

It's an alien, Right, Right.

It's not there yet, but they could be.

They could be.

And again, it will start small.

One little corner of one AI place will do it.

And once it does it, it's there.

It's like DNA.

When the DNA or they, when we look historically, there's a theory that RNA was the real.

The one RNA is the only thing that can copy another form.

DNA cannot.

Okay.

DNA does never copy, but RNA was the one who could copy itself.

And it was the real winner for a long time.

But RNA is a lot more reactive and a lot less accurate.

So whenever RNA ran into DNA which is similar, DNA always could use RNA to copy and then the DNA would survive longer because it was a slug, it sat there super stable.

So are just the difference in the accuracy of copying over millions and millions of generations, which isn't long because they're little.

Right.

DNA became the winner and They've trapped RNA in the cell and the RNA does all the copying for DNA.

That's how it works.

Yeah.

Which is unlike.

Oh, you pig.

But once DNA did it, they ruled the world.

Everything now, every life form except a very few viruses run on DNA.

You really go into great detail in the book about how all this works.

DNA and RNA which.

And then you bring that parallel with the ideas.

It's very interesting.

What in our conversation, what would you like listeners to come away with?

I think I would like them to take two ideas away.

One is that there is hope of a sustainable future if we all live from our personal to our professional lives in the do what you want, but don't harm others and take that very seriously.

You one, I think I live this way and I have a lot happier life.

So it's a higher quality of life, but also a high more.

A greater chance for sustainability wherever you are.

And second, I would really hope people understand the dangers of wealth accumulation.

Not small wealth accumulation, excess wealth accumulation.

It's okay to plan for your retirement, it's okay to have a nest egg and all that stuff.

But the max, the super wealthy, extreme wealth that we see in this world is really harming us in ways that it's not just harmless that somebody has an extra house or ten houses.

No, no.

It's the whole idea that they're gaming the systems.

So we are heading towards extinction rather than sustainability.

Those are the two messages I would like people to really take away.

It sounds like you've said we've come up with the right ideas to survive,.

But we're just again, with resources.

If you have the right ideas now in our ideas, fear the way it is, we have to have the same amount of resources to bring to the table to fight against those who have the other ideas and we don't.

It's always an unfair fight because you have a bunch of nonprofits who get together and say, hey, we want cooperation, we want a more sustainable future.

And the powers that be go, fine, say what you want, I don't care.

I'm going to do this because I have the resources.

The job is, first of all to get the money out of politics, to get people running for office that have this mindset and then slowly start creating system, readjusting the systems to be more sustainable.

That's the game plan.

One question.

I know I was wrapping it up, but I have one more question that might be.

Oh, no problem.

I love this.

It's so fun to talk with you.

Same here.

Religion and philosophy, how does all this tie into the ideal sphere?

Oh, that's a really good question.

Like I said, I think religion was the first science, right?

Originally it was how we answered questions.

I don't know, some God did it up there.

And every, every tribe in society had some sort of answer to that question that involved a religious deity.

But just because everybody came up with it doesn't mean it's right.

It's just that they didn't know about the rest of the picture.

They didn't know about cells and DNA and how life was really working underneath.

So to me, religion is an idea.

It's just an idea that got shared and accepted.

And it does.

It's not based on fact.

It's just an idea that people have.

And philosophy.

Same thing.

You're dealing with people who looked at us as unusual beings and said, how do we live?

How do we survive?

How do we work together?

They didn't.

Some of them do.

When you read about it, they'll go back to nature and they'll say, oh, this is what we see.

But they didn't have the real knowledge we have today.

So I think that people have done the best they can to answer these questions, and yet they haven't been able to see until maybe a hundred years ago what's going on inside even your body.

But so to me, it's time for us to take a look at what actually worked the way.

All the cells have to report up to the brain their position.

And the brain then gets the information to say, oh, there's a problem.

If you cut your finger, your cells are constantly sending up information.

All of a sudden you cut your finger, it's a different set of information.

And the brain says, oh, we gotta go fix the right index finger.

That klutz cutter, she's cooking again.

Oh, no.

So we don't do any kind of relatively few disclosure laws.

Whereas when we have big problems, like I talk about pollution, if we have pollution or climate change, we should be putting disclosure rules into effect that says every company who's putting, you know, junk in the water needs to put a counter over that water to see where the, the big polluters are.

Same with air.

Let's see where the big polluters are.

I lived in Oregon for a while, and intel was nearby.

And intel was, was.

We found out they were putting fluorine into the air, and we live half a mile away.

They're putting flooring into the air, and it was illegal.

And what they had done was they bought off the government agency, the dea in Oregon to be able to pollute.

And it's like, okay, see, that system doesn't work.

There's a system in place, but we should just say, hey, from the beginning, big polluters.

We're going to put a, we're going to put a filter and we're going to check.

And if you are polluting, we're going to ask you to figure out a way not to or we'll even help.

But we don't use those disclosure rules that way we say it's illegal.

And so their incentive on the company is to hide it.

And then if they get caught, they get fined.

That's a completely different model and it doesn't work very well.

It's really inefficient.

Whereas if we say, oh, air pollution and this stuff is a huge problem, we're going to, we're going to track it and start beating it from the biggest guys down.

That's the way the body works and that's the way we might want to work in certain situations.

That's how we can find solutions to these problems.

Instead of like the example of intel, their business models, we'll just do this until we get caught.

Cost of doing business.

Exactly, exactly.

And they're.

And the easiest place was to buy off the small government agency that does it and the state.

And it's like, okay, that there's a loophole in the system.

The system doesn't work if the guys don't do the law.

You should follow the law.

So we have to be, the government has to come back and tighten that law.

And that's where I put a clamp on Intel's stacks and say, we're going to monitor this and then we're going to tell you what you're going to do about it.

Yeah.

So, and that, that is where again, I'm a big believer in the Pareto rule, where 80% of the problem is caused by 20% of the actors.

Find the 20%.

How do you do that?

You start getting the data.

Data is cheap these days.

That's one great thing about the information age.

Back in the day it was expensive, but not now.

And we should be doing that everywhere that there's a big problem.

Yeah, we should, and hopefully we will one day.

First thing, get the ideas out there.

You got to start somewhere.

And so I wrote this book and the reason I wrote this book is it talks in detail about nature because nature works.

And I was like, this is how it works.

And then when you get to see the parallels to humans, you can say, oh, I tried and say there is a way for us to use this information to make things work in the future.

And I really want people to be able to see that and be like, oh, yeah, let's work on that.

And yet, so far, it's a hard road to hoe, but it is just keep rolling.

It's a hard road.

But yeah, as you say, yeah, you just gotta keep your head down and keep just pushing forward.

And you've also written a novel.

I've written.

Yeah, A book called Dina is the Same.

It's a fictionalized version of this same theory where there's a kind of a Socratic dialogue between an entity and a character talking about this theory and how it works.

Interesting.

And I thought that would be a more fun way for people to learn it.

But a lot of people were like, that's just too much.

Although my mom at 101 read the book and loved it.

So I'm like, if my mom at 100 one can understand this book, anybody can.

But I've also written a couple other books.

I wrote a little book on happiness, which really was based on values, which is, I didn't realize, was a precursor of this.

And that nature works on one value, which is survival.

And we basically are working on one value, which is wealth accumulation.

You only get really one big value in life.

So that's the way I've figured out that.

How that works.

So you identify your value.

When you live that value, you're going to be a lot more in line and happy as that one.

And then I did a book about.

It's called Aerie, and it's a kind of a business suspense novel.

And it was more about my beliefs about profit maximization and greed and what happens when you get into that situation.

And that was written in the time frame of the.

Just the beginning of the Internet.

So we were still just making that leap into the information age, the way we are now.

And it was fun to write.

Yeah, I got to say a lot of things and have a little love story.

And I was like, so, yeah, I.

Think you're a good writer of reading the human idea.

And so I'm going to dig into some of these other books.

Yeah.

Where do people.

I love writing.

Good.

Keep writing.

Keep writing.

Keep putting your ideas out there.

Okay.

Yes.

And I will put your information in the show notes.

But for people listening, how do people find.

How do people find you?

Yeah, the best place is.

My website is www.thehumanidea.

And it's easy to Find.

And I also can look on Amazon.

Ann Reilly, author.

You can find my book there.

But the best place is the website has all the links to the books and all that good stuff.

So that's just the easiest place to find me.

So.

But, yeah, but.

And thank you.

I want to thank you so much because I love your podcast and I love what you're trying to do with just keep on the survival mode and the climate change is our big threat.

And to just keep getting ideas out there that help people to understand the gravity of the situation we're in is really great.

It's important, you know, because we're, we're in kind of a difficult time right now.

And I think you just keep doing what you're doing.

We'll just keep putting the ideas out there.

And like you say.

Well, one thing I will say is none of my ideas are new.

I would say everything I took was not.

It's a well known idea, but the synthesis is new.

And that's something that, that's tripping people up because they're not used to thinking this way.

And I'm hoping the book is clear enough for people to go, oh, I see the link.

I think so.

Yeah, I think it is.

Yeah.

And thank you very much.

Okay.

Thank you.

We live in a world flooded with ideas, assumptions, dogmas and division.

We can choose ideas that are good and lead to a better world for all life on the planet, or we can cling to ideas that in the natural world would be rejected, cancerous and harmful to sustaining life.

We can choose.

That is our superpower, as Ann Reilly says.

Reilly's synthesis of the ideas of human thought and activity, emulating the patterns of nature, allow us to imagine another way of seeing ourselves in the world and the possibilities for a thriving natural and human ecosystem.

It's our choice to make it happen.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ann Reilly, authority of the human Earth's newest ecosystem.

Check the show notes for more information on Riley's work, including her other books and other topics mentioned in this episode.

I'm Thomas Schuenemann and this is Earthbound, the podcast helping people like you navigate a changing world through stories that inspire possibility and a renewed sense of place.

If this episode resonated with you, if you like what we're doing, please like and subscribe wherever you listen.

Thank you.

Dear listener, if you've made it this far, I truly appreciate you and we'll see you next time.

And in the meantime, stay safe.

Sa.

It.