Neil Theise: Resilience, Recovery, and the Interconnectedness of Reality

Neil Theise (00:08.014)

Well, so the last time we spoke, I was recovering from a stroke, right? Right. Then I tore two tendons in my rotator cuff. Then I had rotator cuff surgery. Then recovering from the rotator cuff surgery, only able to roll onto my left side at night, I ground down the cartilage of my left hip. And two months ago, I got a hip replacement.

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Gerry Scullion (00:11.086)

What's going on?

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Gerry Scullion (00:18.094)

Alright, I remember. 14 months ago.

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Neil Theise (00:38.894)

And yesterday I was practically drunk and dancing and crying on the street because it was the first time I walked without a cane in seven months. And I had no idea how powerful an experience it was going to be. Almost as powerful as being pain free two weeks after the operation for the first time in a year and a half.

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Gerry Scullion (00:52.718)

Really?

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Gerry Scullion (01:05.55)

Whoa, that's serious.

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Neil Theise (01:07.15)

Yeah, so, and during that time, my book. So, could I have a boring middle ground for eight minutes? And the last three weeks have been really hard because I've been back at work for the first time in two months. I wound up needing six months off last year. And re -entry was...

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Gerry Scullion (01:07.701)

Whaaaa

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Yeah, I came out at all at the same time.

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Gerry Scullion (01:21.582)

Let's.

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Gerry Scullion (01:30.126)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (01:33.838)

Hard, but but I feel like yesterday. I also turned a corner with that too, so I'm ready to work again

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Gerry Scullion (01:34.766)

won't be.

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Gerry Scullion (01:42.094)

Yeah. So there's usually, if you look at Dr. John Serino, you know, Dr. John Serino, the whole kind of mind body connection. He was, he was a professor in one of the universities in New York, actually. And he speaks about the impact in the body related to trauma, to a, you know, kind of suppressed trauma. And that's where it manifests ourselves in our bodies. So Van der Kolk as well is a big.

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Neil Theise (01:49.518)

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Neil Theise (01:55.918)

Mm -hmm.

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Neil Theise (02:05.422)

Mm -hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (02:11.31)

believer in the whole kind of the releasing of the drama through our, through our body. So you've, you've been through an awful lot, the stroke and then all of this stuff. So it's been a tough 18 months, two years.

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Neil Theise (02:23.438)

Well, and then there was sort of, I sort of crashed into a pretty bad depression. Shocking in the fall. I thought it was the shoulder initially.

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Gerry Scullion (02:31.95)

But you've had a lot going on and you're kind of. Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (02:47.79)

Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Neil Theise (02:52.046)

but then realized, no, I've been sort of, you may remember I was talking about my stroke as being one of the best things that ever happened to me, which in some ways it was. But I was really holding at bay the horror and everyone around me was sort of like, why aren't you more upset about this? You had strokes. You had to do.

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Gerry Scullion (02:59.086)

Yeah.

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Yeah, but in other ways.

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Gerry Scullion (03:14.99)

Yeah, huge thing to happen to you.

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Neil Theise (03:17.454)

And I think I just needed, it was a pretty solid coping mechanism to be in denial of it. But when it got safe to not be in denial, I wasn't. And then I got misdiagnosed with prostate cancer for a few days. The day I started a Zen retreat.

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Gerry Scullion (03:25.358)

Amen.

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Gerry Scullion (03:31.118)

Yeah, absolutely.

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Neil Theise (03:43.214)

Then I had a really weird meditation experience where I was starting to hallucinate. and, which is fine. That can happen. But having had the strokes in the middle of the treat, we're like, we need to get Neil to the emergency room to get cats. and then I came back from that to see the hip doctor who said, you need a transplant replacement.

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Gerry Scullion (04:00.462)

Yeah, see what's going on, yeah.

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Neil Theise (04:10.03)

but I couldn't do the replacement for six months because I'd used up my time at work. I had no leg strength because I hadn't walked or bicycled since the strokes. And so I had no reserve and I needed my right shoulder to be able to support myself with a cane and a crutch when I got my left sholt hip replaced. So January through June, through May was just.

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Gerry Scullion (04:16.206)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (04:34.83)

Ma -

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Neil Theise (04:39.598)

rebuilding everything and doing my work and just, you know, and slowing.

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Gerry Scullion (04:45.454)

It's a mini miracle you're here speaking to me again then.

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Neil Theise (04:48.974)

Well that's kind of why I was so difficult to reach.

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Gerry Scullion (04:51.918)

No, you weren't. You think we pushed it out. We pushed it out. You said, it's going to be better if we do this in the summer. I was like, yeah, no worries. Like, you know, it was just like, let's have a follow up. You know, let's see how you get none. One, personally, I like chatting to you. And then two, I know people really enjoyed that episode. And also just to see where things are out with the book. But you're. Did it win an award? I'm not surprised, but what award?

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Neil Theise (05:13.102)

It won an award. Yeah. Yeah. The paperback comes out next month and it's going to have a big gold star on it. It's, I won the Nautilus Book Award gold medal for science and cosmology.

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Gerry Scullion (05:22.734)

Wow.

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Gerry Scullion (05:28.494)

Wow. Head shake. Do you walk around the hospital now holding that gold? Like, you know, let me into this this room.

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Neil Theise (05:32.366)

I came back to work and they had to move my office because we're over. We have no office space left. And but they came up with a block of offices in a basement 10 built 10. Three blocks away from the hospital, and no one would move to it because everyone thought it was a punishment. So they asked me when I came back.

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Gerry Scullion (05:48.27)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (05:58.511)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (06:03.918)

Hmm.

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Neil Theise (06:04.43)

to move in because people would know it's not a punishment if I'm agreeing to go there. And it's not a punishment, but I have no windows. I've never not had windows. But it's very quiet.

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Gerry Scullion (06:09.966)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (06:15.47)

Yeah. So how are you coping with that? Because the windows are so important, like light is so important for just releasing your brain and. Yeah, yeah, we speak, we've spoken about this in the podcast before being able to switch off and just I look at the clouds and just bring it back to work. It's very powerful.

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Neil Theise (06:24.526)

I kneel bland and yeah.

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Neil Theise (06:32.75)

Yeah, yeah. Right. And so I have a light box in my office. It helped. It helps. You know, I mean, to what extent was that part of becoming depressed? I don't think it was a major thing, but it didn't help me. So it's been, but on the upside, it became very clear.

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Gerry Scullion (06:39.562)

Works. They work. Scientifically proven.

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Gerry Scullion (06:48.878)

Mm, didn't, did not help.

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Neil Theise (07:00.142)

post -stroke that I'm kind of done with being a hardcore researcher. I don't want to do this anymore. I've got a bunch of data for some solid papers that I want to push out. Having done the work, I want them to go out there. But that's just writing papers. And because how many papers do you have to write in a lifetime? Yeah. And and I started working on the next book.

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Gerry Scullion (07:06.35)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (07:12.942)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (07:16.718)

Mm.

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Gerry Scullion (07:21.582)

Yeah, exactly. You've written a lot.

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Gerry Scullion (07:28.558)

Okay.

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Neil Theise (07:28.782)

which is the, the, a solid drop. Hmm. No. Yeah. No, no. It's, it's the story of, are you recording? Are we already in recording?

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Gerry Scullion (07:31.246)

No, it's not complicated, is it? No, it's not complicated. No, it's not chaos.

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Gerry Scullion (07:43.246)

We're recording at the moment. We'll edit all this gobbledy out and your personal stuff.

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Neil Theise (07:46.926)

Okay, because this might be fun to talk about. So this is the book I wanted to write, but I was told I can't write until I write the complexity book.

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Gerry Scullion (07:51.918)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (07:56.078)

I think you mentioned this in the prelude the last time. By your mother. Let me give that woman a call now. Like I'm going to have her a call and tell her to reel her neck in.

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Neil Theise (07:58.446)

It's about my mom. Yeah.

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Neil Theise (08:07.822)

Well, well, she might be reachable even though she died in 2016. Yeah, well, you're just not paying attention, particularly if you're Irish. Come on. Well, during her last six, seven years of her life, she lost her short term memory.

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Gerry Scullion (08:16.014)

She's not picking up here. Go on. yeah, true. So what happened? Tell me what she say.

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Neil Theise (08:32.91)

and probably mini strokes or something. We don't really know. She knew who everyone was. Her long -term recall was fine. And she started speaking to dead people and spirit guides from the universe started showing up and she started having spontaneous awakening experiences and died in a bliss bubble. And at the time I called her my little consciousness laboratory.

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Gerry Scullion (08:52.078)

Bye.

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Gerry Scullion (08:55.95)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (08:56.846)

And she really was. Some of the things I watched with her influenced how I started thinking about things that when I talk about consciousness in words and complexity, some of that is in response to what I witnessed with her. And when I originally thought of writing her book, I had,

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Gerry Scullion (09:08.046)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (09:20.59)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (09:23.278)

there were a series of newsletter emails I wrote to the extended network of people around the world who cared about her through all of this. And people said to me, you should publish these. And they're not publishable, but they're great material. And so that, and I imagined it being a book about elder care with some magic stuff in it. But now having written notes on complexity,

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Gerry Scullion (09:29.326)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (09:48.462)

Hmm.

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Neil Theise (09:51.982)

No, it's about the consciousness stuff, the magic stuff and the stuff I couldn't write about in Notes on Complexity because it would have been a step too far for a book like that. And you can't really speak about it in scientific detail or even philosophical detail. It has to be really discussed more as a case study. And she's a really good case study.

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Gerry Scullion (09:55.502)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (10:04.526)

Okay.

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Gerry Scullion (10:15.31)

Yeah.

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Great case. Yeah.

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Neil Theise (10:19.95)

So now it's about the magic with sprinklings of elder care.

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Gerry Scullion (10:26.958)

When you say they couldn't be published, do you mean like through the university through as a white paper?

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Neil Theise (10:32.59)

No. no, no, no. The university doesn't care what I, what I write about the university. What they care about is do I diagnose my liver biopsies? Well, you know, that's what my salary is. What I think about academic. Pardon.

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Gerry Scullion (10:37.646)

should do. If you're listening to university, you should care about Nothaniel. He's cherished.

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Gerry Scullion (10:46.094)

Okay.

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You mean published by public like in a physical book? When you say published, like I couldn't be published. Are you talking about like?

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Neil Theise (10:56.11)

yeah. As a, well, no, what I mean, right. If I had tried to put that information into notes on complexity, the critics would win. You know, if you look on Goodreads, I have a 4 .1 reading rating on Goodreads. That means 20 % of the people hate me and hate the book and they hate it because it's anti -materialist.

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Gerry Scullion (11:05.23)

Mm -hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (11:09.55)

Okay.

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Gerry Scullion (11:16.558)

Micro.

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Gerry Scullion (11:20.814)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (11:25.902)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (11:27.605)

It's threatening to our culture's predominant materialist. And if I, right, but it, yeah, but it, but it does it, I think I'd like to think, I think it's successful from a really solid scientific conceptual philosophical standpoint.

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Gerry Scullion (11:33.454)

I was going to say it challenges a lot of the conventions that we that were structured for.

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Neil Theise (11:53.742)

But if I had tried to say, I believe in life after death and spirit guides from the universe and people traveling out of their bodies on the astral plane, I would have been cutting at the roots of my credibility. But with her, a lot of these experiences she had were independently verifiable by outside sources.

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Gerry Scullion (12:09.934)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (12:23.694)

not tons of them, but enough to make you go, we have to pay attention. And it fits well with a lot of contemporary research, that's accumulating about, deathbed visions and, near death experiences, to some extent, physiology of the brain, in, as in altered States.

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Gerry Scullion (12:40.654)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (12:49.198)

Hmm.

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Neil Theise (12:54.622)

and, side phenomenon, you know, whether people like them or not, they're demonstrable. so I can use her and it's a beautiful story. She really died a lovely, her last years were, were, they weren't easy for us, but for her, they were extraordinary.

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Gerry Scullion (13:00.846)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (13:12.75)

Yeah.

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Yeah, I remember you saying that. I remember you saying that. It's funny, like last week we were in my in my calendar. We were going to connect for anyone listening here, but then we got our dates mixed up and stuff. So before you told me the prelude of all your kind of medical pieces that are going on, I had highlighted a section of the book that I wanted to read out and get your thoughts on. OK, which is bodies are not machines. OK, so it seems really.

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Neil Theise (13:37.262)

Okay, sure. yeah. Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (13:43.406)

really fitting in from what you've spoken about me. And it's not like proof that I wasn't just making this up. This is my daughter's photograph, which I use as a bookmark. So this is this is I want to get your kind of your perspective on this and tell us a little bit more on the impact that it's had on your life as well, because I believe, you know, there's some some parallels happening here. After the rise of the cell doctrine in the 17th century, the next fundamental shift in how Western science regarded the nature of the body.

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Neil Theise (13:49.358)

You

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Neil Theise (14:03.586)

Sure, sure, sure, sure.

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Gerry Scullion (14:12.622)

came during the Industrial Revolution. The explosion in technological progress and understanding led to the rapid invention of machines that can convert energy into rapid mechanical substitutions for human effort. This development impressed on the popular imagination the idea that bodies are objects constructed like machines, whether machines could be more and more like bodies. To this day, machine remains the dominant metaphor for biology. Cells are called the building blocks.

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fit for stacking up into tissue or an organ. Tissue engineering is an entire field based on this metaphor, but cells are anything but inert stackable bricks. The most successful efforts are creating living tissues organs for heart or liver transplants, for example, now involve taking a liver piece of tissue or even the whole organ, digesting all the cells away to leave only an underlying biomolecular scaffold.

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and then repopulating the original scaffold with new human or animal cells. The scaffold provides the right structures and molecule cues, the newly transported transplanted cells so they can interact gradually self -organizing into an emergent properties of the living physiology, physiology of the new organ, either engineering.

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Neil Theise (15:26.414)

That sentence needs a period or two. How I would rewrite the book if I could.

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Gerry Scullion (15:29.774)

That's all right. Neither engineer. I'm like, it was a long sentence. Neither engineering nor building is an accurate metaphor for this process. Rather, we are cultivating a healthy, complex ecosystem of cells within their molecular environments. And I went, well, there's so much we can learn from that within design when we're trying to reshape organizations to become a lot more human centered and how they're creating things. What's the back story to that?

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that prose there that I just read it.

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Neil Theise (16:02.542)

probably doing stem cell biology, which is what led me to complexity theory in the first place. you know, number one, when you're as a, well, actually before that, even my training as a pathologist. So,

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Gerry Scullion (16:12.078)

Hmm.

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Neil Theise (16:25.934)

Being a pathologist means in my case that I'm looking at pieces of tissue of humans under the microscope and looking for signs of disease, injury, recovery, et cetera. Scar, inflammation, cell death, structures reorganizing and rebuilding themselves and eventually returning to normal when successful. And so...

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Gerry Scullion (16:39.758)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (16:53.774)

I'm watching biological processes at the cellular level in great detail. And it's not like, you know, there's a bridge collapse and a bunch of guys and machines come up to the bridge and start re plastering things, you know, it is not a mechanical rebuilding. It's like watching a garden grow.

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Gerry Scullion (17:12.174)

Sure.

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Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (17:19.694)

Hmm.

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Neil Theise (17:21.486)

And when you're looking at normal processes of aging and repair, you know, it's like watching a garden through the seasons. When you're looking at cancer and recovery from cancer, it's like looking at something where there's become, there's been an invasive species and you watch it challenge the whole.

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Gerry Scullion (17:31.534)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (17:45.102)

Okay.

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Gerry Scullion (17:48.974)

Hmm.

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Neil Theise (17:50.606)

ecosystem and then you successfully treat it or you don't. But you know, sometimes you have to like the garden is over. So it forces you. It forced me out of one metaphor into another one, but then thinking in detail, how are cells actually doing this? I think the primary thing was that my group was amongst those groups that.

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stumbled onto the idea that cells from one organ could repopulate another organ. In my case, it started with showing, with guessing, educated guess, but a guess that cells from the bone marrow could move from the bone marrow into the liver and help restructure re...

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Gerry Scullion (18:24.43)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (18:47.086)

regenerate liver tissue. And then, so, so in imagining this, you know, I, the first, it was a very dramatic moment, actually. one of the, ⁓ a peak experience,

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My collaborator in this stuff, Diane Krauss at Yale, I had come to her, she was a bone marrow expert and I was a liver expert. And I came to her and I said, I have this crazy idea that cells from the bone marrow might go to the liver, stem cells from the bone marrow might go to the liver and be stem cells for the liver. And she, you know, we had a lot in common and we liked each other. So she thought it was a crazy idea, but what the hell.

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I was on sabbatical there so we could spend time and she gave me space in her lab. And we knew what techniques we had to develop to show this. And then we had to perform an experiment where we put male bone marrow into a female mouse.

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And so we could use the Y chromosome of the male cells to see where cells in the body of the mice came from. If they had a Y chromosome, they must have come from the bone marrow we had put into the female mouse. And then we had a plan to the experiment. And I knew that on this particular Tuesday,

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Gerry Scullion (20:08.558)

Okay.

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Neil Theise (20:18.958)

we would have harvested, as we say in animal research. I don't do animal research anymore. It's not something I love doing, but I did some for a while. So we had to harvest the first bunch of animals in whom we had done this and isolated their tissue, made them into slides. I had been spending months developing the staining technique to highlight the Y chromosome with a fluorescent microscope.

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Gerry Scullion (20:31.758)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (20:48.078)

And I told everybody I knew that on Tuesday I'd find out whether we were right or not. And my friends sort of joked that I wouldn't have to call them because they would hear me screaming with excitement from New Haven back to New York. And...

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Gerry Scullion (21:02.798)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (21:06.798)

And I finished the staining run. We looked, it was late afternoon in February. So it was dark early. We went into the fluorescent scope room and...

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I got kind of choked up thinking about it. And I put a slide under the microscope and there were liver cells with bi -chromosomes. And I said, I highlighted one for her and moved over. She sat down and we're in the dark because it's fluorescent scope. The only light is on the slide. She goes, -huh, find another one. We looked around, we found a few, turned on the light and we're like,

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Gerry Scullion (21:36.558)

Hmm.

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Neil Theise (21:48.686)

I guess that worked. And then we went off. I tried going to the gym. I was listening to Madonna's Ray of Light on the treadmill and I just couldn't. So I thought, go distract yourself. Go see a movie. And so I got online at the movie cinema on the way from the gym to my little bed sit.

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Gerry Scullion (21:51.182)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (22:05.486)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (22:11.63)

Don't be busy. Yeah.

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Neil Theise (22:20.053)

in downtown New Haven and I couldn't bear that either. So then I went to a small grocery store and I got a box of one of my favorite cereals from when I was a kid, Cocoa Crispies and a carton of milk. And I went to my bed sit and I sat on the floor and ate my way through the box. Cause I just...

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I saw something, I had seen something that at that point I had, as far as we could tell, no one else had ever seen this. And when I tried to think of what it meant, Einstein was my hero growing up. He has long ceased to be my hero, but growing up, I learned how to do thought experiments reading about him doing thought experiments. And I thought, what would Einstein do? Well,

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he would sit down and imagine the way he had imagined saddling up on a beam of light to see what it would be like traveling along with a beam of light. I thought, let me go, let me hop onto a cell coming from the bone marrow and going to the liver. What has to happen? What would I see? And it wasn't mechanical.

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Gerry Scullion (23:36.046)

Hmm, what would they say?

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Neil Theise (23:41.262)

You know, a cell had to move and shift and change shape and then enter and then interact in a complex biological way as it shed its own bone marrow proteins to become a liver protein laden structure. And in fact, the only thing that had gone, the only thing that identified this cell as a cell was the Y chromosome.

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Gerry Scullion (23:57.646)

protein.

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Gerry Scullion (24:10.702)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (24:10.862)

the genome, everything else about the cell had completely changed. So when I said it's the same cell, what did I mean by that? The organization of proteins around it as dictated by the genome that started in the bone marrow. And so things just ceased to be solid. And the best reason is

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Gerry Scullion (24:34.702)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (24:38.606)

But on that, sorry, Neil, go on. On that point. So the protein, you know, has found its new home, it's it's been reshaped effectively. What can we draw from that? I don't want to say conclusion, but like, how does this manifest itself into into new findings?

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Neil Theise (24:52.366)

that

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Neil Theise (24:59.598)

Well, so the theme of the whole complexity book, this was the first glimmer I got that this idea that things only look like things from a certain point of view. From another point of view, they are purely phenomena with no thingness about them. This was my first glimpse of that. And, you know, when you have a good...

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Gerry Scullion (25:13.87)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (25:22.862)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (25:29.07)

research finding or research idea. You sort of can tell, you know, it's gonna, it's got this kind of scope. It's gonna make an impact in this kind of way. And it's usually very limited. It's like, okay, we've incrementally moved forward with a new little thing here. And I've had lots of those. This was the first time I ever had a finding where it was like,

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Gerry Scullion (25:38.958)

got legs.

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Neil Theise (25:55.246)

dominoes cascading in lines out to the horizon all around me. It was a very visceral experience. And I had no idea what the possible implications of this were going to be. One of the implications is everything that's in Notes on Complexity. It came from that moment. And the core idea of complementarity, that things only appear to be things.

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Gerry Scullion (26:07.342)

Absolutely.

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Gerry Scullion (26:12.59)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (26:21.038)

from one perspective or at one level of scale, but that thingness disappears into pure phenomena. And that the idea that the entire universe is in fact like that. It all came from that moment.

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Gerry Scullion (26:27.182)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (26:30.83)

Absolutely.

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Gerry Scullion (26:35.118)

that moment. I remember when we were speaking the last time we were talking about the four principles that are contained within the book. And I couldn't help but look at, you know, the trajectory of the book from a distance. And I could see complexity at play where you ended up in certain other podcasts and other kind of dimensions of things. And I was just like sitting back and I go, this is crazy. It's so trippy.

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based on our conversations of where things are at. So you must have had this is from my perspective of looking at you. Yeah, you were like, you know, you were like like a drunk and.

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Neil Theise (27:09.393)

It's so little type rich man. And it keeps pumping into things that like, you know, I feel like it's out there and I get postcards back. Guess where I was today.

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Gerry Scullion (27:22.83)

I know. Yeah, it was it was it was quite like the the drunk and when I did that keynote and complexity in emerging practices, someone was like, I've got a drunk uncle. And I was like, I think you're you're missing the point. It's a drunk and doesn't like an insect. I like. OK. But tell us about some of the stories and you must have seen almost like, you know, life manifest.

‍

Neil Theise (27:28.526)

Mm -hmm.

‍

Neil Theise (27:39.69)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (27:49.102)

The art that you've created like it's it's it's taken you on some interesting journeys. Do you care to share any of these anecdotes?

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Neil Theise (27:53.07)

you

‍

Neil Theise (27:57.71)

Yeah.

‍

You know, I told you about all the physical health issues I've had, and psychological to some extent, because of it in the last year, and yet this has been happening. I never know on a day when I'm gonna wake up and get some email from somebody completely out of left field that turns out to be this thing. So I got an email.

‍

Gerry Scullion (28:07.63)

Mm.

‍

Gerry Scullion (28:11.886)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (28:16.718)

Yeah, the book has been on its long life journey.

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Neil Theise (28:30.702)

from someone, I think it was shortly after your podcast and it was very early. So I said yes immediately. It was the first invitation I got from someone after the book. And for a brief moment, I thought it'll be fun to get invitations. So I said yes immediately for a trip to Rome. The Jungian Analysts of Rome.

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Gerry Scullion (28:53.198)

Really?

‍

Wow.

‍

Neil Theise (28:57.23)

wanted me to come to Rome and I went with my cane, wheelchairs at the airports to speak about complexity and consciousness and to an audience of...

‍

I don't know, there must've been 30 Jungian analysts in the room and another 30 or 40 online. Best audiences, you could, I mean, listening with total empathetic attention, like I've never experienced, and they see parallels between what I'm talking about and what Jung is talking about. And then someone, it was a day -long symposium around the book and my ideas, finishing up with one of their scholars.

‍

Gerry Scullion (29:37.134)

Yeah, you're thinking.

‍

Neil Theise (29:41.262)

juxtaposing quotes from Jung and quotes from the book. I heard from some Norwegian artists who recognized something in their art practice that I, what my approach is in the book.

‍

Gerry Scullion (29:44.878)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (29:58.414)

And one thing that came out of that is they sent me pictures. Someone created an art installation outside of Oslo at the small museum, which is a former munitions factory and it's this old brick building. And in the lawn, which leads from the building to the beginning of the forests that extend north from Oslo, there's a little hut. And you go into the hut and there's

‍

a beautiful old chair, a nice looking lamp, and a shelf. And on the shelf is my book. And that's the installation.

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Gerry Scullion (30:40.013)

It's incredible. It's landed in some probably far away places that we don't even know about yet.

‍

Neil Theise (30:47.214)

if I know about these things, then I'm sure it's, you know. Here's a good one.

‍

Gerry Scullion (30:52.046)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (30:57.646)

I got a note from someone local who's a big thinker in psychedelics in America who thinks of it from a business and economics model, how to increase its penetration and utility in our culture and stuff like this. And it turns out, so he was inviting me to a book club where they were going to read my book.

‍

Gerry Scullion (31:27.662)

Mm -hmm.

‍

Neil Theise (31:27.918)

The book club is a lot of high level players in psychedelics world. And my book is the first book the book club has read because it was the reason to form the book club. And this guy knows about the book because his therapist told him he should look at this book.

‍

Gerry Scullion (31:39.982)

Thanks for watching.

‍

Very cool.

‍

Neil Theise (31:51.246)

And his therapist happens to be the husband of my editor and publisher. So now I'm in psychedelics world and people I'm with one of those people we just met yesterday. She's a design person. Tracy. What's Tracy's last name?

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Gerry Scullion (31:57.55)

Wow, that publisher, what's her name? Nicole?

‍

Gerry Scullion (32:04.27)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (32:15.79)

Tracy sounds like a cool person. She's a designer. Tracy in New York.

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Neil Theise (32:20.878)

Tracy DeLuca. She's actually, I think, in California, but about to move to Austin, Texas. And she and Cassie Vieton, who's a woman I know from the Institute of Neuetics Science from years ago, who's now writing a book on imagination and does integrative medicine stuff in San Diego, they invited me to propose a panel for South by Southwest Festival for next year.

‍

Gerry Scullion (32:23.022)

very cool.

‍

Gerry Scullion (32:47.342)

Wow.

‍

Neil Theise (32:47.438)

on design, imagination, and complexity. Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (32:51.406)

Yeah. I'm just thinking, can I, I'm just thinking about that whole story of the tissue and the protein. I want to see if there's like, is there, is there a connection between resilience at the cellular level and what we can derive of that at a societal level? Like when we're forming, you know, reshaping, should I say communities? Cause I think we're at a point in time.

‍

Neil Theise (33:06.382)

Mm.

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Gerry Scullion (33:19.694)

Where things are radically changing like today's the fourth of July. We know lots of going on in America, but in the UK, they're there. The election is happening today. Like so. And I'm in Ireland, by the way, I'm not in the UK. So just a little red flag just putting it up there before anyone makes any focus. But there's lots of lots of change and there's probably going to be something happening in America as well. Who knows what that resilience is something I keep on coming back to in my coaching practice and developing resilience.

‍

Neil Theise (33:25.166)

yeah.

‍

Neil Theise (33:30.862)

I know, I know, I know, I know.

‍

Gerry Scullion (33:49.614)

And based on your work and your extensive work in this field, how do you see resilience and what learnings can you take from your understandings and that anecdote of the protein being transferred into the liver? What can we learn from that in deriving and cultivating more resilient communities?

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Neil Theise (34:11.117)

This is actually, that question to some extent is why I wrote the afterword for the book. And in fact, it's kind of the last five paragraphs or so of the book are exactly that question. One of the things about, so first off, you know, a cell being a cell and yet it's given up everything about itself.

‍

Gerry Scullion (34:20.078)

Hmm.

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Neil Theise (34:39.758)

but some tiny core thing in becoming a different cell. Yeah, the notion of the self, if we hang onto our notion of self too rigidly, then we're fucked. There's no resiliency. You can't grip things too tightly.

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Gerry Scullion (34:39.982)

Yeah.

‍

to survive.

‍

Neil Theise (35:06.062)

But one of the things that happened when I was writing the book, when I was coming down the homestretch, it was nearly finished. And my husband, Mark, and I were out with a little group of people, one of whom was a young friend. And we'd all been drinking a little bit and he was a little disinhibited. He was in his mid 20s. And he got really angry talking to me about how...

‍

our generation, Mark and I, had fucked over his generation. And I couldn't say that we hadn't, but I thought if my book can't say something to him about this, then what's the point? Yeah. And so I had to really think hard about that. And where I landed, and this is the last few paragraphs of the book, an implication.

‍

Gerry Scullion (35:40.461)

Okay.

‍

Gerry Scullion (35:51.79)

then what is the point? Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (36:00.558)

Hmm.

‍

Neil Theise (36:02.67)

of resilience, of the ability to change and adapt to a changing environment, which is the heart of what complexity is. It's the definition of what living things are. And that living things are not things, but processes. Is that there's the potential for mass extinction events, not only the potential, there is the inevitability of mass extinction events, either partial or complete.

‍

And I say this explicitly in all my talks and I say it explicitly probably in just about these words in the book. The price of being alive, of adaptation, is the necessity that you will die.

‍

what allows you to adapt and change is that there's always this low level randomness in the system. Too much randomness. You can't get self -organization. There's no living system too little. If the environment changes, there's no way for the system to reorganize itself to, to be resilient in the face of change and it will die. And because of that low level randomness in the system, there's an inevitability that you will step out of the.

‍

Gerry Scullion (36:55.566)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (37:00.974)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (37:08.782)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (37:19.182)

information rich zone of mathematics, the mathematics of complexity into either rigid order or fractal chaos. And then the system part of it or the whole thing collapses. So to be alive means you're going to die. Part of the reason I can write this book is could write this book is that I've

‍

have an imminent intimate relationship with two very big mass extinction events. My father was born in Germany, we're Jewish. His parents were killed in worship to Riga and killed in the forests of Riga. I grew up as a child of Holocaust survivors in a community of Holocaust survivors. And then I came of age as a gay man in New York City at the height of the AIDS epidemic. And what I learned

‍

Gerry Scullion (37:58.35)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (38:04.526)

Mm -hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (38:08.686)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (38:14.798)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (38:19.15)

about resilience is that you can.

‍

Gerry Scullion (38:20.75)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (38:26.702)

you can try to mitigate a mass extinction event. You can maybe forestall a mass extinction event. But inevitably we will all experience our own mass extinction events individually, if not on a social level or even an ecological scale. And I saw survivors of the Holocaust who lived joyfully and generously and happily. And I saw those who lived...

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Gerry Scullion (38:29.774)

Thank you.

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Neil Theise (38:55.118)

burdened and in continual pain and never got past that. And I had friends who were on their deathbeds dying in anger and fear and regret. And I had friends who on their deathbeds were joyful and compassionate to everyone, more worried about what was happening to the people around the deathbed.

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Gerry Scullion (39:22.485)

Mm -hmm.

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Neil Theise (39:22.734)

than their own fate lying there being the person who was about to die. What's the difference between those? Those who could live in a resilient way that allowed them the scope for compassion, contentment, were people who understood that everything changes. And...

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Gerry Scullion (39:47.374)

Hmm.

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Neil Theise (39:50.67)

and they understood it, they felt it in their bones. This wasn't an idea or a concept. And we have ways that are well established to cultivate that kind of awareness. Nothing about my book is useful if people just keep it as ideas. It's a pointer for how to experience the world in a different way.

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Gerry Scullion (39:54.19)

Mm.

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Gerry Scullion (40:05.954)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (40:12.43)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (40:13.934)

Gerry Scullion (40:14.958)

One of my children asked me a little bit more around indirectly, and I didn't know the term consciousness, and they're at that point where they're they're trying to try to understand more of their own kind of sense of being. How do you describe consciousness if you're out for at a dinner party? Because at some level, we're all conscious.

‍

And we're all here for a dinner party. We're most likely alive, although some dinner parties I've been to. That's questionable. Anyone listening that I've been at a dinner party, I am not speaking to you.

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Neil Theise (40:52.806)

It's either a question or you wish you were dead.

‍

I'm suddenly having of image images of James Joyce

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Gerry Scullion (41:07.662)

blowing up myself in a circle.

‍

Gerry Scullion (41:13.134)

But I want to get your thoughts. You spoke about it in the book. But for people listening, I'd love to get your definition of consciousness and how can we enable more, more reflective practices in our work as changemakers?

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Neil Theise (41:33.55)

So the second half of the book, so we can think about consciousness in different ways in our culture. The dominant theme is the brain is a factory for making mind. That's the machine.

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Gerry Scullion (41:49.902)

making mind.

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Neil Theise (41:51.086)

making mind, making consciousness, making our thoughts, making our experiences. There's something called the hard problem of consciousness, which is I can tell you all about the chemical, electrical, and architectural signaling things that go from seeing, you know, the classic example, the color red. I see there's red on our screen here.

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Gerry Scullion (41:53.294)

Okay.

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Neil Theise (42:11.822)

photons are hitting my retina and they're going down causing a chemical signal which starts an electrical signal along my optic nerve it goes back to here so I see red and this is the kind of thing I will do at a dinner party now close your eyes and imagine the color red but there are no photons entering the retina to begin the cascade

‍

your experience of red in the absence of there being red outside of you to perceive is our, our, we can't explain that. No amount of cognitive neuroscientific publications have yet been able to explain. We can explain how red changes the brain.

‍

But all we can do is say that those things we can observe in the brain correlate with our experience of red. But we can't ever, we have not yet been able to show that they cause the experience of red. There are even some famous bets between materialists and non -materialists. How many years will it take for cognitive neuroscience to explain how the brain makes the experience of red?

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Gerry Scullion (43:18.158)

Okay.

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Neil Theise (43:32.014)

And the non -materialist can't ever collect the bat because the materialist says, give us another five years, give us another 10 years, but they don't. Another view, which is what I think is solves, is a far more explanatorily rich approach is that consciousness is the fundamental mental nature of existence. It is the ground out of being, out of which the appearance of material reality.

‍

arises. So brains don't make our minds. Big mind, big C consciousness gives rise in its attempt to understand itself to what appears to be material reality of our universe. And again, the way I would try and give an example of that at a dinner party, close your eyes.

‍

and picture a red apple. Go ahead, close your eyes. Okay, so where is the red apple?

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Gerry Scullion (44:36.065)

I'm trying to, yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (44:45.774)

Right now.

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Neil Theise (44:46.19)

Now, is it in your brain? Is it in your skull? Now, when I do that, I sort of imagine it, I sort of experiencing it kind of in the center of my head.

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Gerry Scullion (44:49.582)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (44:58.318)

Yeah, exactly. I was going to point around here.

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Neil Theise (45:01.134)

But now put the apple on the table in front of you without opening your eyes.

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Gerry Scullion (45:06.766)

Yeah. Okay.

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Neil Theise (45:08.238)

And if I ask you to think about standing outside at night with the moon shining on you from behind, where is the moon? It's not inside your skull. Where is your mind? It's not inside your skull. It's not limited by that box. So that's a little bit of a hint of mind is not limited.

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Gerry Scullion (45:19.95)

behind me. Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (45:29.742)

Mm.

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Neil Theise (45:37.806)

by physical space, by physical time. It's something that extends the experience that is consciousness, the awareness that is consciousness is infinite. There's no limit. If I, you know, now I say picture the Andromeda galaxy, now picture the deepest galaxy seen by the web telescope. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger. There's no limit.

‍

That's consciousness.

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Gerry Scullion (46:09.397)

What's the connection between, and this is most likely a silly question, the mental health condition that many of us have mental health problems, like the majority consciousness and mental health issues. What is the connection between the two of them? Is it a sense of, you know,

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Neil Theise (46:15.982)

No salute.

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Gerry Scullion (46:35.79)

really trying to rethink what we think about consciousness? Is there a connection between the two?

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Neil Theise (46:43.726)

Well, of course, because I'm saying that everything's consciousness, so there's a connection between consciousness and everything. So, you know, I mean, a useless thing is, yes, of course there is. For me personally, I have a long history of depression. Yeah, I've been successfully on antidepressants many times in my life. I needed to be.

‍

Gerry Scullion (46:46.158)

the last way.

‍

Gerry Scullion (46:51.374)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (47:00.025)

Yeah, same as me myself, by the way.

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Neil Theise (47:10.094)

I just am weaning myself off actually from my latest bout. I've gone 10 years being okay. And I think partly what helped me be okay during those 10 years, maybe part of it is just wisdom of age, I'm getting older. But part of it is how thinking about complexity and how it interfaced with my Jewish and Zen Buddhist spiritual practices and shamanic practices.

‍

Gerry Scullion (47:15.502)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (47:35.95)

Hmm.

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Neil Theise (47:39.15)

made me more resilient in the face of challenges. I didn't become depressed, but this year really knocked me for a loop. I don't know if it's in the part of what we talked about before that you'll use for the show, but I had a couple of strokes a year and a half ago. That was the, during which the book was happening. And finally it caught up with me. I did really well for the first six months and then not so well.

‍

Gerry Scullion (47:43.022)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (47:55.406)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (48:08.238)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (48:08.526)

And, but what's different now is that when I experience being depressed, I experience it like that red apple in my consciousness or the moon over my shoulder. I can recognize the physiological stuff. I can recognize the brooding. I can recognize the obsessive despair.

‍

Gerry Scullion (48:23.47)

Mm.

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Neil Theise (48:37.39)

the fatigue, the fear, but it's within my field of awareness. And I remain aware of my field of awareness that tells me, this is just another apple. And I know what helps me for that. So for me, one is being on an antidepressant. I know which ones are helpful to me. Number two, I know physical exercise is really important for me.

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Gerry Scullion (48:48.238)

Hmm.

‍

Gerry Scullion (49:01.614)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (49:06.286)

when I get into those states. And given the limitations I had physically, because I then tore my shoulder and then how to exercise in the middle of that. But a big piece of coming out of the depression was I had to get myself ready for my hip replacement in May. And I had from December, which was the depression really hit in November. I had till May to re -strengthen my legs.

‍

Gerry Scullion (49:12.174)

Yeah.

‍

Neil Theise (49:35.534)

because I'd lost basically all my leg strength in that walking or bicycling after the strokes for about 10 months. And I had to heal my torn shoulder so I could support my left hip with a crutch. And so I was in physical therapy so intensely. And the endorphins.

‍

Gerry Scullion (49:49.966)

Absolutely.

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Neil Theise (49:58.894)

as well as the emotional experience of I'm rebuilding myself and I'm engaged in it and it's purposeful and it's positive because physical exercise, you do it, your body changes because your body's not a machine. And you discover its resilience. And I think for me, depression is partly, has always been this feeling of, I have no resilience.

‍

Gerry Scullion (50:11.086)

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. To quote yourself.

‍

Neil Theise (50:25.326)

it's always gonna be like this. I can't change. And now even when I'm depressed, it's happened enough times that I'm like, you're resilient. I'd like to not have to be resilient. This year was like, I was really resilient all year. I'd like some periods of time. So there's that personal aspect of...

‍

Gerry Scullion (50:25.614)

Hmm.

‍

Gerry Scullion (50:39.438)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (50:43.15)

Yeah.

‍

Neil Theise (50:50.478)

Having spent my adult life cultivating a sense of my mind, of my conscious awareness, as being this open field, out of which my experiences arise, and into which they disappear. The classic Zen thing about, you know, a thought comes into your head, you should treat it like a cloud passing by. Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (50:57.518)

Hmm.

‍

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (51:07.726)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (51:13.454)

Absolutely relief in a river.

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Neil Theise (51:16.078)

Or my favorite is you're sitting on your porch having a cup of tea and a neighbor walks by. You can say good morning without having to invite them in for a cup of tea. They can keep going. Hi, have a good day. I think that there are broader ways, you know, what is mental illness as...

‍

Gerry Scullion (51:27.886)

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's a night.

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Neil Theise (51:44.878)

You know, I think the brain obviously has a role in mind. And, but I think what it does is it, it's, transforming the big C consciousness that is the fundamental reality into a mind that we as humans can experience, or if you were a bee, the mind, yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (51:58.478)

Hmm.

‍

Gerry Scullion (52:05.454)

or reflect on or reflect on like that consciousness is based on what we use that consciousness and consciousness for to see reality. I find that like that that reflective practice is really, really powerful. Like with my own depression, like when I see that that's kind of the question, I guess I'm reframing my question. And some people have got, you know,

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Neil Theise (52:21.23)

Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (52:32.654)

maybe I'm wrong, but high levels of consciousness and they're able to really think like you sound like you're really in touch with exploring radical ways of thinking. You spent your life doing it like, you know.

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Neil Theise (52:43.406)

I spent a lifetime trying it. I mean, and what are we here for?

‍

Gerry Scullion (52:49.23)

I know those big questions. I look at some other people walking down the street and they look and I know you can't judge a book by its cover. But I'm jealous of that kind of lack of expansiveness that sometimes I find my own brain going to and I can't imagine what it's like for yourself. So that consciousness question is really kind of coming from that place.

‍

Neil Theise (53:07.95)

But

‍

Neil Theise (53:14.725)

Yeah, yeah. But this goes back to that resilience question, you know, I think about my father who suffered terribly as a kid. He was sent from Germany to, the way he survived is he was one of the Kindertransport kids. He was sent to England five days before Germany invaded Poland. So really at the last moment. And I don't think he understood at the time why his parents were sending him away and not his older brother.

‍

Gerry Scullion (53:20.206)

Mm.

‍

Gerry Scullion (53:36.654)

Wow.

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Neil Theise (53:43.886)

I think he felt like he was the one who was thrown away. And only years later realized, no, he was the one who had been saved. And he never spoke about it. Never, ever, ever spoke about it. And in his last days, he had an inflammatory condition that in part involved his brain and he would sort of have these momentary

‍

Gerry Scullion (53:53.166)

Yeah.

‍

Neil Theise (54:12.942)

states of, you know, not being entirely present and therefore not guarded as he had been all our lives. And my mother came in to the to find him crying in bed, saying over and over again, he wasn't aware that she was there. Why didn't they leave? Everybody else left. Why couldn't they leave? Meaning his parents, because they waited too long to try and get a visa.

‍

Gerry Scullion (54:16.75)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (54:21.518)

life.

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Neil Theise (54:41.966)

He'd carried this with him forever. In such a rigid, tightly held fashion, he was so terrified to speak of it because something might come, you know, I think he felt like he would crack open.

‍

Gerry Scullion (54:44.142)

higher life.

‍

Gerry Scullion (54:58.67)

Yeah, fall apart.

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Neil Theise (55:00.814)

Right, but you know, sometimes that's what's necessary. I cracked open over the fact that I was a closeted gay kid, pushing myself to go through medical school because I thought it would give meaning to my life, which would otherwise be wretchedly lonely. That was a fucked up notion. So that was my first episode of depression. Shocking, and I failed a year of medical school. Shocking.

‍

Gerry Scullion (55:18.382)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (55:22.702)

I know.

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Neil Theise (55:25.038)

and went into therapy initially to change. I thought I'll go into Freudian analysis in order to be straight and that will solve everything.

‍

Gerry Scullion (55:33.294)

It's so sad when you hear these kind of stories like it's the pain.

‍

Neil Theise (55:39.342)

We all have something. I'm not sad because I think, wow, I had way more strength than I imagined I did to go in, in the middle of medical school, for Christ sakes. I was on an analysis four times a week on a couch on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and I lived 100 blocks north on the other side.

‍

Gerry Scullion (55:41.71)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (55:47.79)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (55:51.566)

I know.

‍

Gerry Scullion (56:00.878)

But the resilience you would have had to show at that point was almost, it's within you. That's kind of what I'm seeing.

‍

Neil Theise (56:08.846)

Right. But that's our birthright. It's within all of us. What's in us is that open field of awareness out of which everything arises. And my father held himself so tightly out of so much pain and so much fear that, you know, people, I had a conversation with my Zen teacher about this. I said,

‍

Gerry Scullion (56:18.254)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (56:31.63)

You know, people are always talking about enlightenment as a bliss state, but why does it have to be a bliss state? And she goes, it's not always a bliss state. Sometimes it's terrifying because to lose sense of yourself is terrifying. I'm a slow Zen student. and I think a real thing that keeps me held back from deeper understandings is I love being myself.

‍

Gerry Scullion (56:35.598)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (56:41.934)

Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (56:50.094)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (57:01.55)

I don't want to have it shimmy apart.

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Neil Theise (57:07.502)

My father, you know, resisted any possibility of that for his entire life. I was fortunate that I had the right constellation of things to break me apart and the right resources to help put myself back together. Yeah, but again, it wasn't a one -off. It's a lifetime practice. I'm 65 now and I think...

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Gerry Scullion (57:14.67)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (57:24.654)

Rebuild yourself. Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (57:29.518)

No.

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Neil Theise (57:33.07)

God, you know, I'm constantly talking about, I can't remember anything. And then I can't remember names. And then someone who's 50 or 40 or 30 goes, I know that happens to me too. And I'm like, no fucking clue what's coming. But I just went to a birthday party last weekend of my mother's last surviving friend who turned 90 sharp was attacked totally with it. And I was complaining and she says, baby, you don't know.

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Gerry Scullion (57:57.55)

You're only a baby.

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Gerry Scullion (58:03.534)

Absolutely.

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Neil Theise (58:03.694)

But that too, you know, if you view your life as, if you view yourself, capital S, as the current version of you that is the leading edge of who you are as you approach some future moment where you imagine who you will be. And you look back and you're, you're nostalgic for things you used to be like more energetic.

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Neil Theise (58:32.846)

That's hard, that's grim, that's difficult, that facing aging. But I'm just starting, this is just, you know, the last couple of months I've been thinking, but if you step back, I guess from that sense of that field of awareness that can encompass the moon and the farthest galaxies of the Webb telescope.

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Gerry Scullion (58:36.238)

Yeah, it's challenging.

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Gerry Scullion (58:53.006)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (58:59.566)

Mm -hmm.

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Neil Theise (58:59.982)

then this thing that I call my life already contains, if I live that long, that 80 -year -old version of me. It certainly contains the 65 -year -old version of me. And this 65 -year -old version of me is exactly what a 65 -year -old should be, including, now I don't feel like going out dancing. I'd rather stay home and watch House of Dragons.

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Neil Theise (59:28.59)

Why can't I be that person that goes, I'll watch it later. I'm going out clubbing tonight. But I don't want to.

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Gerry Scullion (59:34.094)

Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking about where you're going to be when you're 80. OK. And between now and there, there is going to be another book that you mentioned there at the top of the conversation. You've tackled complexity. Are you going to continue to tackle, try and explore the sort of the area of complexity further, or are you going to try and move more into the chaos side of things?

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Where do you see it going?

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Neil Theise (01:00:06.126)

The book is getting other people to think about complexity. That's the job it needed to do. I think that was the job I needed to do. People are reaching out to me like the Jungians or people in the sustainability world. I'm gonna be keynoting a sustainability conference in the fall. Also they're talking to people about doing stuff in education, crazy stuff, yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (01:00:35.054)

design.

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Neil Theise (01:00:39.374)

So that's happening. I don't have to push it. The ideas are out there walking about. And if I can be helpful to other people in figuring out how to use it to design their worlds, their feelings, that's sufficient.

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Gerry Scullion (01:00:50.574)

Curate.

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Yeah.

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Neil Theise (01:00:59.342)

The next book is this one about my mom and that's really about exploring well if I truly mean what I say that consciousness is the fundamental ground of being and my mother as she was diminishing as her mind became incredibly more expansive in her last years as her short -term memory disappeared.

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Gerry Scullion (01:01:09.966)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (01:01:15.95)

Mm -hmm.

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Neil Theise (01:01:24.526)

and was directly perceiving the true nature of reality. I mean, there were things that came out of her mouth that are like from Dogen, the guy who brought Zen from China to Japan 800 years ago, and she's saying things from her own experience. There are things Dogen wrote, for Christ's sake. Then it's not complexity help bring me to understand how those insights and my scientific practices are not separate.

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Gerry Scullion (01:01:40.91)

Well.

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Gerry Scullion (01:01:54.542)

Hmm.

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Neil Theise (01:01:54.542)

and not contradictory and are not at war with each other. So now that I'm relaxed about that, what can I say about the nature of mind, the nature of consciousness, the nature of death? And then the book after that, which I didn't think there was, actually, writing my complexity book was so painful, I vowed never to write another book. But it turns out I can't stop thinking about it.

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Gerry Scullion (01:02:05.614)

Hmm.

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Neil Theise (01:02:22.574)

Those experiences of living through the AIDS crisis and how my husband and I, having survived all that, and we lost like 70 to 80 people who we knew well enough to either deeply love or at least if you saw them on the street, you'd want to go have a cup of coffee with them. Right.

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Gerry Scullion (01:02:43.694)

Wow, that's incredible.

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Neil Theise (01:02:48.398)

We are grateful that this was our time. So why? Why would we be grateful? And because I think it taught us some really deep things. And I think that's worth a book. And it's really easily sum upable. But I think how you learn it through these experiences is the interesting story. Perhaps, maybe it'll be boring, but number one, everybody dies.

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Gerry Scullion (01:02:55.502)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (01:03:12.302)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (01:03:18.062)

Why are we surprised by this? We all know it, but to actually experience it vividly, why is it shocking? And if you then open up to the fact that, yeah, in fact, everybody dies and really connect with it, how do you live without regrets? By showing up. And you don't have to know what to do.

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Gerry Scullion (01:03:24.974)

What is that?

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Gerry Scullion (01:03:39.854)

for sure.

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Neil Theise (01:03:47.086)

You just have to show up and be willing to find out what to do. And there may be nothing to do.

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Gerry Scullion (01:03:54.03)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (01:03:54.99)

But what we eventually learned is, you know, everything comes to an end. There's sorrow and grief everywhere. But if you show up for it, it somehow is okay. So that's something, that may be another book.

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Gerry Scullion (01:04:09.87)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (01:04:14.926)

That's. Yeah, you've definitely got more than one book in your nail. I think everyone listening to this knows that for sure. Like, you know, you're a deeply interesting person to speak to. I'm sorry to hear like you've had so many health issues since we've last spoken, but it sounds like you've got them all out of the way at once. So the only way is is up now as the famous 1980 song, yes.

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Neil Theise (01:04:20.846)

of health.

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Neil Theise (01:04:33.39)

you

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Neil Theise (01:04:41.838)

I can hear my mother spitting. That's what Jewish mothers do to ward off the evil eye. Of course I do.

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Gerry Scullion (01:04:44.014)

The only way is up.

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Gerry Scullion (01:04:50.477)

Maybe one of you remember he has. But yeah, it was as always. It's it's brilliant to speak to. And I have literally carried the book and told everyone that I mean, I just had a call before this with one of my collaborators and I was telling them I was speaking with you again. And he was like, you told me to buy that book about 18 months ago. I'm still still on my to do and to read books. Anyone out there who's even thinking about buying a book.

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And notes and complexity is still probably one of the finest examples of what I see is the future design and something that we all need to get our heads around because now it is near like, I mean, it like I was was training in Amsterdam six weeks ago with one of the Middle Eastern governments. And I was explained to them about why this is so important and it articulates really well what what before was seemingly an academic and out of.

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Neil Theise (01:05:31.47)

Thanks.

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Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (01:05:46.702)

you know, out of my reach, you know, academically, you've distilled it really nicely. And yeah, another hat tip to you. I gave a tip to you 14 months ago and it's brilliant to have you back in the show. You are always welcome whenever you want, even if you just want to have a podcast talking about like, you know, I don't know what's going on in New York or you're always welcome back in this podcast, because I know our listeners absolutely love hearing your.

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Neil Theise (01:05:51.886)

Thank you very much.

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Neil Theise (01:06:13.198)

I want to get to Ireland and take you on the tour.

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Gerry Scullion (01:06:18.437)

You still have, you nearly made it to the Dorky Book Festival, I think it was last summer, and I was like, this would be so cool.

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Neil Theise (01:06:24.11)

Yeah, no, they didn't. Somehow that didn't, I didn't get on their radar, but please.

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Gerry Scullion (01:06:26.67)

That didn't happen.

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Absolutely. My car, if Doki Book Festival are listening to this podcast, I'm going to try and tag them on LinkedIn. My car is literally it picks people up the airport every couple of months and bring them around and I show them Dublin like, you know, I did it on Sunday. Friends from Australia were over playing in the Gaiety Theatre and we lots of fun driving around the city. So we'll do it again someday. And I have no doubt in the near future, we'll get to hang out like in person. But again, Neil.

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One thing is there anywhere that people can go and sign up for your newsletter or anywhere where they can find out about upcoming releases? I know Nicole Jewie is the name that comes to my mind from 14 months ago. She's your publicist.

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Neil Theise (01:07:07.854)

Yeah, she's at my publisher. You know, I'm just so bad at this stuff. Basically, I post everything on Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn. And so if there's anything happening, it's there. And oddly, you know, LinkedIn is something. I'm a pathologist. It's just not very useful to me. I'm not looking for job networking.

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Gerry Scullion (01:07:20.334)

Okay, well we'll put links to those. It's there.

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Gerry Scullion (01:07:31.63)

Yeah.

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Neil Theise (01:07:33.742)

But LinkedIn is where I've made some extraordinary connections. So yeah, I'm just kind of out there flapping in the breeze.

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Gerry Scullion (01:07:37.518)

Yeah, professional people connect there.

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Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to put a link to the May and Bealick podcast episode, which I watched. I mean, who knew when I was watching Blossom in the early 90s that they were going to turn out to be a PhD? They're probably more of like a professor at this stage. I don't know.

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Neil Theise (01:07:47.822)

Okay.

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You

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Neil Theise (01:08:02.318)

No, she's, I mean, she's got the mind of a professor, but she does the podcasts. Her life is sort of about helping people understand how to, it's called My MB Alex Breakdown, in part because I think she had a breakdown at some point. We all do, as we talked about, but I think she sees her life work outside of her performing, which she still does, as...

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Gerry Scullion (01:08:17.294)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (01:08:27.758)

She's seriously smart.

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Neil Theise (01:08:29.198)

She's seriously smart and she wants to help people understand complex and complicated things that they might think are too complex and complicated for themselves in ways that they can help themselves. She and her boyfriend, Jonathan Cohen, do this and they're just really an embodiment of compassion. And they're so smart. We had such fun together.

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Gerry Scullion (01:08:42.862)

Yeah, that's why I love her podcast.

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Gerry Scullion (01:08:54.99)

Did you get to go in person or was it online?

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Neil Theise (01:08:57.71)

No, this was online. The only one that I did in Rootsland, pardon? Armchair expert. So they require you to do that in person because the attic studio in the garage behind his home is its own personality as part of the podcast. And I just had the strokes two months before. Yeah, I mean.

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Gerry Scullion (01:09:01.006)

You did Doc Shepard as well, didn't you? You did Doc Shepard's podcast.

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Gerry Scullion (01:09:08.654)

in person.

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Gerry Scullion (01:09:15.534)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (01:09:22.894)

Really? Was that close? Yeah.

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Neil Theise (01:09:25.422)

yeah, yeah. And if you remember, I mean, you did a nice job of editing, but there were moments back then where I just would stop speaking because the wind would go out of my sails and I had no idea. Yeah. And so I had to go to LA. And I was like, I don't listen to podcasts really. So I wasn't aware of Dax Shepard, an armchair expert. I thought of him as this Hollywood guy.

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Gerry Scullion (01:09:34.542)

That's right. I remember it was pretty close to the strokes when we spoke.

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Gerry Scullion (01:09:49.07)

factors.

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Gerry Scullion (01:09:53.646)

Pretty big podcast.

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Neil Theise (01:09:55.118)

Yeah, and then my publisher, they wanted dates when I could go. And I said, the only date when I don't want to go is the date when the book comes out, because I want to be home for that. And she said, if they want you on that date, we'll change the date. So then I got the idea. But that was my first time going to an airport and having a wheelchair. I love having a wheelchair at the airport. It's really good. And I went and met him. And then on the way back,

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Gerry Scullion (01:10:05.358)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (01:10:09.71)

I know.

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Gerry Scullion (01:10:14.862)

Really?

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I'm sorry.

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Yeah.

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Neil Theise (01:10:25.806)

landing in New York, I turned on my phone and my imbialic had been talking to her people had been talking to my people about getting me online, but they couldn't find a date and were thinking the fall. But when I landed in New York first week in June after Dax Shepard, there was this thing on my phone saying they can talk to you this afternoon. So I landed, took a three hour nap and then and

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Gerry Scullion (01:10:46.414)

Really? So you did that straight away?

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Neil Theise (01:10:52.27)

And that explains a little bit of why I'm so loose in that interview, which helped, I think, but I...

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Gerry Scullion (01:10:56.686)

Yeah.

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I've listened to both and I prefer the main Beelix or Bealex episodes. I think it's just more from their approach to it. Like where I don't really know much of Doc separate.

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Neil Theise (01:11:03.182)

Yeah. Yeah.

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Neil Theise (01:11:10.254)

Yeah. And there are people who prefer my podcast with you.

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Gerry Scullion (01:11:15.438)

The other one. there you go. Well, I'm I'm I'm a total newbie to this. So you're introducing me and you're a remote mentor to complexity. So again, and a lot of people have said the same to me. They listen to your podcast and they too have kind of they learn so much from from your thinking on this topic. So on behalf of everyone in the human centered design world, we really thank you for writing the book because it helps us understand things that were previously probably out of, you know,

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reach for an awful lot of us. So thanks so much for that. Neil, I'm going to put a link to every single place that we can find for you online. So if you ever need anything, you know, just let us know. It's brilliant to speak with you. And I wish you the very best over the next couple of months recuperating and getting everything back on track. You deserve to have the the next couple of months sickness free and start enjoying the rest of the summer.

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Neil Theise (01:12:10.798)

Thank you. Thank you so much, Gerry. Till next time, there'll be more, I'm sure. Okay.

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Gerry Scullion (01:12:16.782)

Absolutely. Now let me click here. I'm using a second screen over here. Let me see.

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