Episode 136: Michael Golding on Mental Illness and Universal Explainers

Hello out there. This week on the Theory of Anything Podcast, we had the absolute pleasure of interviewing Dr. Michael Golding. Michael is a psychiatric physician. He is also heavily influenced by the philosophical ideas of David Deutsch and Karl Popper. And at one point, he calls himself a proponent of homeschooling and taking children seriously, or the assertion that children should be raised without coercion. I enjoyed this conversation with Michael immensely. I believe he is a fellow traveler who is wrestling with these ideas about humans and reality in a very real way. And I hope someone else out there gets something out of this too. Welcome to the Theory of Anything Podcast. We've got Michael Golding here with us today and Peter, obviously. Yeah. Michael is a friend of mine. We've been friends for quite a while. We're online friends. And we've talked quite a bit about different subjects. And I've kind of followed him on Twitter also and really like a lot of what he has to say. So I finally decided that we really needed to bring him on the podcast and ask him questions. So Michael, can you maybe give us a little bit of background about who you are, what your position is, what you do for a living, that sort of thing? Sure. I've been a board-certified psychiatrist for maybe 25 years or so. I've worked in just a broad variety of settings. I've worked in academia. I've also worked with homeless populations. I've had the privilege of cutting my teeth with some of the toughest for treat backward patients back at a time when we were allowed to keep them in patient hospitals for very long periods of time. And that's, I mean, we could maybe talk about that later, but that was a very formative for me. Interesting. And few psychiatrists nowadays, the younger ones have that opportunity. And to me, that's really, really sad because they don't get to see over like four or five or six years what can happen when you treat somebody who whom they think cannot be treated. So I have that experience and also the experience of that culture which really has not been written about much in psychiatric circles. There is, there are a few psychiatrists here in California who are starting to do it a little bit. And, you know, they're known as very, very good pharmacologists. I think because of the insight that they've gotten working with deeply, deeply ill psychiatric patients. But in addition to that, I've also had the opportunity to work in administration in a prison system and actually one of the largest prison systems in the United States, or perhaps used to be the largest as the statewide chief psychiatrist. So I have a lot of experience with administration as well. So I've done a number of things in my years. And nowadays, I'm still in administration, not in the same position that I once was for a variety of different reasons. And I am enjoying my life and a plan to keep continuing doing psychiatry for, you know, hopefully another five, 10 years, something like that. While I, you know, figure out what one would do if I were to ever retire. It's become a bit of an identity for me. So yeah, that's my background. It's broad. I publish some papers, done some experimental work with patients, done a lot of different things over the years. Before we ask any questions, I would actually like to know what your background is with David Deutsch. So David Deutsch, I read his books years ago, actually before beginning Infinity even came out. So I read fabric of reality. And that book really inspired me in various ways. I ended up going back to school and studying artificial intelligence because of that book. And a lot of the stuff in the show, we've mentioned him quite a bit. And he's in some ways an inspiration for the show. And I know that your friends with him. So can you maybe talk about your background with David Deutsch? Sure. I do know David Deutsch. And I've been pleased to meet him a number of different times. And he's provided and dispensed a lot of wisdom. And we've had the opportunity to engage in wonderful conversations to gather over the years. I initially met him through a friend of mine. We had been engaging in discussions of mental illness. And this friend of mine had said that she really didn't think that mental illness existed. She had read Atomis' books and thought that as universal knowledge creators, we could generate knowledge that would, in any given time, solve a particular problem. Or perhaps that I'm misrepresenting her. At least she thought that or heard that said what changed her mind. And by the way, I may well be misrepresenting that. So I apologize and advance if I am. Is your understanding at the time? That makes sense. That was my understanding at the time. My guess is because this person is extraordinarily bright that is a misapprehension. I should go back and ask. Before I state it, so I won't mention the person's name. And to put this in context, are we talking about a decade ago or before more like two decades ago? Two decades ago. Okay. So you're kind of like Bruce. You're old school here. Yeah. I am. Yeah. Yeah. My gray hair is a salute in honor of my age. But yes, it was for maybe 20 years ago. And this person had the opportunity to volunteer at a hospital and to see some of my patients. I sort of challenged her to challenge her own ideas about what meant to live on this was. And I think within maybe hours, maybe days, she had just a radical, radical change in mind. Sometimes what's explicit rather than what's imagined helps one to criticize or refute theories better than just imagining them. So she then became, and this is maybe the most humorous part of this of all, she now sort of went a bit into the field herself. And now is far more biological than I ever would have been. And that I am. She actually points out to me the way in which various chemical precipitants can cause problems. I'm not going to identify this person because it wouldn't be fair. But she's very much into biological psychiatry now. And seeing a few patients helped her to understand the way in which the brain can influence the mind. A dose of reality sometimes cures a whole bunch of metaphorical, whimsy, and a disease of the mind. I say that metaphorically because all of us, aside saws, know that psychiatrists are aware that there is no disease in an idea. And that it is a metaphor. It was certainly a Thomas Saz as a very, as you may know, a very famous critic of psychiatry. And is a psychiatrist who criticized psychiatry, said that illnesses are met-- that psychiatric illnesses are metaphorical, essentially because ideas can't be diseased. And to clarify, was she more into the anti-psychiatry? Of Saz. She wasn't-- first, I thought you were saying that she is the one who turned you on to David Doich. She did. Oh, she did. Okay. So she was into both both. Yes, exactly. She was into Saz. And she knew David Doich very well. I see. And she actually knew Thomas Saz very well. Okay. Well, but she knew Thomas Saz a bit and it actually interviewed Thomas Saz. Okay. And so she introduced me to David Doich. And I had wonderful discussions with him on that topic and many others, and particularly subjects other than that. And he served as a mentor to me since. And that's been at least 20 years. Nice. So you mentioned Thomas Saz or Saz, I think was what we did. I have no idea how to pronounce it. Yeah. None of us know how to pronounce it. Somebody who was from Poland told me it was spelled at SAS, but I think I'm going to do Saz because that's easier for me to pronounce and it looks more like the way more people probably pronounce it that way. So I'm going to go with Saz throughout this episode, but that's probably wrong. So you mentioned him. Can you maybe talk a little bit about his ideas and your feelings about his ideas? What do you think he gets right? What do you think he gets wrong? Sure. Perhaps I should just let your audience know ahead of time that people can be of good individual character, treat their wives and families well and have honorable intentions and have really, really bad ideas that injure people. So I don't think Saz intentionally tried to injure people. Indeed, I'm quite sure he was a felt he was trying to help them. But in that, I feel his contribution was a negative one, although there were some things he said that were very good. Saz was a libertarian in many ways. Certainly a very fierce advocate for human rights and for and and and very much defended people's people's freedom and ability to choose. One of the things that he very much got right was that physicians or psychiatrists should not be able to force people into hospitals against their will. And I want to clarify that for a moment. And I think Saz would say that even if someone were just completely out of their mind from my perspective and I knew that I could help them to think better. I think he would tell me that I shouldn't be able to even immediately put them in the hospital. I don't agree with that. I think I very much should be able to put them in the hospital. But he used to be that physicians were able to keep people in hospitals virtually indefinitely without a court order. And what Thomas Saz got very right was that that can't be just a medical decision. That has judicial implications and legal applications and moral implications and it needs to be more of a society wide decision. And hence it should be judges who after a very brief period, often 72 hours must determine whether a person stays in the hospital. And I agree with that. In fact, I agree even in some sense, that's more strongly. I think and most of my psychiatric colleagues, I think based on set of informal polling that it should be judges who decide when patients leave as well. So is this is he part of this larger movement of the institutionalization? Oh yes. Is it fair to say that he is like the big name behind this or like is that overstating things? Maybe overstating it a little bit. But I think his deinstitutionalization was he provided academic credulity for that point of view. Okay. There were a lot of people, civil libertarians and others felt that we were keeping patients in hospitals for too long and it would be better if we treated them in the community. But the problem is treatment in the community never materialized and we ended up shutting down virtually all of our long term psychiatric hospitals, the ones that I told you about earlier that I had the opportunity to train in. And as a consequence of that, many of them ended up homeless and the real big consequence of that. And this is maybe not the discussion to have if you wanted me to come back. I have another discussions about that. This led to massive increases in our prison population of mentally ill patients. And that has been in my view, a catastrophic. It's radically different. Our rates of psychiatric hospitalization. These massive increases in psychiatric, rather in prison incarceration rates. Many of them do to our mentally ill patients who it's both more expensive to treat them there. It's unethical to treat them there. They don't get as good care there and more interestingly, it's more expensive to treat them there. That's an example of sort of his bad ideas leading to helping us into a rather bad place where we currently are. A lot of people will say, for some reasons, it's repeated all the time. They'll say Reagan closed the institutions, which is a myth, right? Do you agree with that? I don't know the history of Reagan, but I don't know. I don't, I don't, I honestly don't know, but I think that there were a lot of forces. There were a lot of anti-scikiatry forces. There were a lot of civil rights forces. It was a complicated-- There were a lot of humanitarian forces and there were academic forces coming from people like Thomas Oz, who helped us to close a lot of our psychiatric institutions. Fair enough. Can you talk about your experience? You mentioned cutting your teeth there. What was your actual experience in such a hospital before they started closing down? Well, you might imagine that it was not perfect. It's certainly far better than what I currently see in our prison system. The difference really was, is that, and certainly in the early days, we had far more time to try to get things right for patients. And therefore, we really learned to iteratively try medications to learn what works for the individual, which is to say individualizing treatment rather than just basing treatment on study averages, which don't apply to the individual. And as a consequence of that, we got to see over time how patients can, in fact, improve with multiple different trials of medications. And importantly, a multiple psychosocial interventions. Let me, let me give you an example of this. One of the few papers that it was actually a poster that I really should have written up as a paper that an undergraduate UNC student did with me was looking at rates of return to the hospital. Now, we were looking at patients who had had, I can't remember the study criteria, but I think it was like four or five previous psychiatric hospitalizations in the last year to the state hospital. Now, what kind of interventions were we able to try back in the old days? We ended up showing that of like, something like 200 out of 200, or some very high percentage of patients whom we discharged from these long-term hospitals did not return in the next to two years. It was astounding, which was the lowest rate to my knowledge of return or recidivism ever recorded. But what is the simple thing that we did? It wasn't medications. It was something that they allowed that I wish they would allow now. What our social workers did was basically allow them to stay enrolled in the psychiatric hospital while we essentially discharge them to various places around North Carolina, various group home. We'd have them stay there and we'd call like every couple days or every week, these very, very sick people and ask, "How is Mr. Smith doing?" He's doing fine or assistant to good place for him. And we literally would try a place after place if someone didn't work out in these trial visits. We would bring them back to the hospital. So before we finally discharge them, we iterated. We learned what worked for the person. And that is what I think is missing when you don't have continuity of care with patients anymore. You don't learn how to help them. And I think this is what's wrong with so-called evidence-based studies, even though I very much love and appreciate evidence, but understanding is not based on evidence. Evidence follows from understanding. So the term evidence-based is a bit of misnomer, even though evidence is of absolutely critical importance in my field and others. I just, the terminology seems backward to me. However, with that aside, the ability to learn is not really accounted for in the most randomized trials that goes for psychiatric medicine as well as physical medicine. And because it isn't taken into account, we make sort of egregious errors. It needs to be taken into account. If you can learn whether someone does well and if they don't do well by trial and error, well, bring them back to the hospital and send them somewhere else. Then ultimately the place you pick, and we were able to do that for like two months. So now you can imagine why the authorities would get mad at us because what was happening, they were basically we were basically billing the hospital was billing to care for the patient, which maybe they shouldn't have been. And the family care home was billing to take care of the patient. So it seems like it's fraud, but it's fraud in a very interesting way. Two sets of teams are monitoring the person, both in the inpatient and outpatient and making sure that critical transition where there's so many slips between the cut and the lip occur. We were able to monitor and make sure that critical transition was smoothly and essentially none of the patients returned to the hospital just by learning where they like to stay. Interesting. You mentioned the whole universal explainer thing where some people who believe, I mean, I agree with David Deutsch, where universal explainers human beings are, where the only ones that we know of in the entire universe at this point, that's what makes us separate and distinct from animals. Now there is amongst people who believe in that, there does seem to be a strong belief among some of them that because human beings are universal explainers, mental illness is impossible. And you already talked to this a little bit, but let me make a steel man case for it, even though I honestly don't really agree with this point of view. So if we are universal, you should do that. You're quite poparian. Try to make the opponent's argument in as strong as possible terms. Yes. So what I haven't made is something like this. So if we're all universal explainers with essentially equivalent ability to understand or create explanations, I really think I can see why some would believe that that implies a lack of genetic influence and an inability for mental illness to exist. So given that animals as a species, we literally have animals and then great apes, let's say, and suddenly there's this jump to universality. And then at this point, it's the ideas that are the main driver. It's no longer the genes that are the main driver. And based on that, and then there's this idea, I can talk about this a little bit more in a second, but there's this idea of we can error correct our ideas. So if you've got bad ideas, you can error correct them. You can almost see why someone might look at that and say, you know what? I'm not sure there's such a thing as genetic influence. I'm not sure there's such a thing as mental illness. How would you tell the difference between this is the way this person would argue? How do you tell the difference between a mental illness and just someone just making choices that are unique or interesting, right? Or maybe even bad. And based on this argument, I can kind of wrap my mind around this idea that there's no such thing as mental illness. Can you maybe speak to that a little bit? The steel man form? What's your, how would you respond to that? And what's wrong with this argument? I have a feeling that other than not what I said previously, but what you just said is probably what my female friend would have argued to me so many years ago. So that's well said. And in some ways, very strong and in some ways, very true. I mean, there are several points along the way that I might quibble at. The overall argument is good in the sense that it leads to the optimistic conclusion that because we are universal explainers, we can increase our ability to understand things indefinitely, and it's therefore possible for us to understand anything that can be understood. If the universe is, I guess the way our, or at least my, at least the way our colleague Dr. Doich describes it, at least if the universe is simulatable on a quantum computer, or at least if the universe is essentially a simulatable on a standard digital computer with enough space and time. So how do you square that with the idea of mental illness? Well, one thing I'd quibble with is your sense in what you said. I don't know what you actually believe is that we are having equivalent abilities to explain things. Okay, so yes, let's talk about that because I have actually challenged that idea on this podcast. So you're right that I don't actually believe that. But it's one of those, I don't mean any way to believe that. Yeah. Well, it's one of those things that I can kind of see why someone would believe it. So can you maybe talk to that very specifically? Do we? Oh, yeah. Okay, go ahead. I mean, it seems to me there's some basic truth that I think they would emphasize this idea that all of our abilities are interest driven, which I mean, I kind of see a lot of evidence for that in, in my life, at least that, that, you know, if the kids in my math class that are interested in math tend to be good at math. It's hard to separate that, right? Yeah, well, it's hard to separate someone being intrinsically good at math and therefore developing an interest from being fair enough. And then being good at math, both seem to me to be true and not surprised, maybe not surprisingly. So in terms of the, first of all, just as sort of almost an empirical falsification of the claim, I would just, I don't know if you've ever met somebody with say angelmans syndrome who may have an IQ of say 30 or 40. And, you know, I think if I'm a calling correctly, it comes from a deletion on chromosome or parts of chromosome 15. These kids are really sweet. They're very nice. They, some of them learn a few words. They seem to be able to understand something. But if anyone thinks that they're going to be able to in this lifetime understand quantum gravity or come up with a new theory of quantum gravity, I've got another thing coming. None of them ever have and that just the level of creativity isn't there. You can sell them with Down syndrome, try to be 21 with an IQ of say 70 or 80. They're not going to be able to do that either. So what's not even given 100,000 years? Okay, now that is there you go. Thank you. There you go. Thank you. Well, all right. Let's interview. Let's let's shift. I'll be the interviewer. No, no, no, no, no, sorry. You're right. Thank you for helping me with my, thank you for helping me with my argument. I think that's very, I think I think you're right. That is exactly where I was going to be going. And what I was going to say is that if people can understand something, then they need to be able to continue to improve their understanding to be able to ultimately explain ultimately to explain anything. But in order to do that, what are they going to need? Well, they're going to need knowledge. They're going to need knowledge of knowledge to be able to increase that knowledge to figure out how to mutate ideas, how to add variability to the ideas, and then how to select them. That's knowledge of knowledge. And I would add a third point, which is really the second point, but it's the details are a little bit different. I would say that one of the very key things, and it's something that I think experience brings, is the ability to know when to leave well enough alone with a given bit of knowledge and explore something else. Like how not to break things, if you will. That I call wisdom. It's another form of knowledge about knowledge. And it's a type of knowledge about knowledge that is learned. But there are two other things that drive this. Even if we were imagining that the universe can be simulated by a Deutsch quantum computer in the rest of it, and therefore all problems are soluble because everything could be simulatable and therefore understandable. And we could, we can reverse any problem that doesn't involve violating a law of physics. It's difficult. It's one thing to say that, another thing, how do you get there to be able to solve any particular problem? And speed and memory are really, really key elements of that. And so we've been talking in a very high flutin way. And you know, I don't know that everyone that's going to be listening to this podcast is very familiar with Professor Deutsch and his ideas. Although we probably, I probably already not explained enough, but let me try to break this one down and make it, you know, much simpler. And talk about something that's really very concrete. Let's just talk about a chess program for a minute. And whether a chess program can indefinitely continue to learn and what would it be required for just a chess program? That isn't a universal explainer. But it's something, it has knowledge of a sense that it has no how, if you will, of how to of the models of chess. It's implicit knowledge. It's not aware of its knowledge. It's not human. It's not thinking about it. A few years ago, Google created something called Alpha Zero, which was at least in the press advertisements. All that was given to the computer was a set of rules of how to play chess. And so at first, it played very poorly. But literally within, as the story goes, hours, it became the most powerful chess program in the world by increasing its, if you will, knowledge of how to play chess. So that seemed to so many people as knowledge of knowledge. It knew how to increase its knowledge. But what happened to that program since? The answer is, well, it didn't improve. In one sense, it did improve in another. How did it improve, though? It improved not by continuing to learn just by giving the rules of chess. It continued to learn by a human being intervening and changing its programming. So now Alpha Zero and I gather stock fish, certainly can destroy any human in the world and are one of the two, if not the two strongest chess programs in the world. But I want to ask the question, because I think this is more concrete. What would have made or what would make something like Alpha Zero continue to gain knowledge? That doesn't mean it would be a universal explainer, because again, there are the other components, like understanding and meaning. And we don't exactly know what those are. But at a minimum, at a minimum, and I think this has a lot to do with large language models, it should be able to continue to learn and get better and better, and yet it doesn't. So what is missing from it? And so let's imagine for me, we know that if we give a computer more time to think, even say Alpha Zero, it tends to play a better game. And if we give it less time to think, tends to play a worse game. We also can imagine that if we say, took away its ability to use memory, it would play a worse game. And what it does, it plays games against itself to judge its relative quality. So let's say we-- and it's said to have an elo now of 40-- whatever that means, exactly, 450 or 40 or something like that. And the very best chess players in the world, whatever this means, have an elo rating of 2700 or 2800, like Magnus Carlson. Yeah. OK. Well, what would make this program actually continue to get better, which would be a prerequisite for explanations to continue to get better? Well, let's imagine that what we did was-- and I think I'm doing this to explain why speed and memory are really, really important in the ability to improve in a reasonable time frame. Let's imagine that we designed the program to eliminate part of its memory and to restrict itself in terms of the time that it has relative to another version of itself. Now let's imagine that we have it randomized, many of its algorithms and subroutines. By the way, I'm going to come back to this point, so don't jump too quick. Because this is a key point. And keep doing it until with less time to think and less memory space, it plays as well as it did previously. Not necessarily better, but just as well. So it is measurably as good. That we can measure. Is it as good? If so, then it is now using less space, less memory space, less time to think and less time to play equally well. Now what happens then? Essentially, its algorithm has been compressed. It's been compressed. And in a way, one can think of it as deeper-- as a deeper bit of implicit knowledge. It's smaller. It encompasses more and implicitly understands how to play chess better, but with less computer space. So then what would happen if you re-expanded its memory and gave it more time to think? I've worked out some of these equations. I've shown them to Professor Deutsch. I've done some of this work myself, which I find very, very interesting. But briefly, every expectation would be that it in fact would play better than its original self, because its algorithm would have been forced, essentially, to be deeper, to use less space, less time to accomplish the same measurable tasks. This is a measurable outcome. And then we could keep doing it. And then this chess program should get, indeed, indefinitely better and better, in the sense of its ability to use space and time more efficiently, knowing how to do that efficiently. Now the logical question is, well, then why don't people do that? And I think there are two answers to that. One is most don't know that they maybe should think that way, or at least in my opinion, they should. But the second reason is that business that I said that I'd come back to, what about that mutation thing of algorithms and that shuffling things about to make it play equally well? How precisely long is a program certainly coded by me? How long would it take if the program coded by me to do that? And play as well? But maybe it would take a million years. Maybe it would take 10 million years. So clearly, this program can-- the logic of that program can increase the knowledge of how to generate knowledge better. It particularly the knowledge of how to play chess better. It can go on indefinitely. And therefore, we have an engine of change for how if we add understanding to it. Explanations can go on indefinitely. But it might take, as Peter says, 100,000 years, as he previously said, or a million years. So I think time is very relevant. Let's take it a step farther. Now we have a program in order to be able to get depth of knowledge, a compressed knowledge is able to handle more variation with less space and time use. What if we wanted to make a program that discovers how to do mutation and selection more rapidly, effectively evolves evolution? Now, I suggest that that is precisely the kind of program that we must have evolved. It doesn't take us millions of years to come up with new ideas and select and measure whether our ideas are better. It's actually-- we've evolved evolution. We've made the algorithm forever for randomizing and selecting more efficient. But just because we've made the algorithm efficient so that an principle that can go on forever, that doesn't mean some people can't do it better than others. And that doesn't mean that somebody with angelman syndrome is really doing it poorly, even if they're able to gain knowledge. And that doesn't mean that someone with down syndrome is not doing it poorly. So I would really challenge this idea that people have equivalent ability to gain knowledge. Now, I would say we could take this one recursive level up. We could learn how to do mutation more efficiently. So that's knowledge of knowledge of knowledge, right? And that would be how do we learn to evolve evolution more rapidly? All of that is absolutely possible. But it starts with sort of breadth of knowledge, the ability to do things quickly. And then once you have much deeper knowledge, then you don't need the time and the space as much to continue to evolve because your knowledge is deeper. And I think a simple algorithm like trying to figure out how to use space and time more efficiently is likely to have reach. Reach not only to playing chess, but to a whole host of ideas. And I personally, in my own modeling, see this sort of in a fractalized way, where sort of lower level improvements in managing how when you space and time leads to higher levels. level sorts of efficiencies, if you will, deeper knowledge all over the place. So I think there are many levels evolving at once of learning how to do things more efficiently. So does time and space does memory and speed matter? You bet it does. And that I think explains the various counter examples with developmental disabilities and many things we see in our life or strokes or other sorts of things, which create all kinds of interesting conditions, though we are universal explainers and though in principle evolution and evolving evolution and evolving the evolving of evolution can and principle go on indefinitely. Interesting. Thank you. Yeah, that's great, a great perspective. I thought it might be interesting if I tried briefly to steel man the other extreme position more of a biological determinism position and see what see and get your thoughts on that. So we had a guy named Brian Boutwell on the podcast who he he's also influenced by David Duage. He at least somewhat I don't think he says deep into it as you are or anything, but he at least read the book and is into popper. He has a. I'm not claiming to be deeply familiar with David Duage, you know, personally or professionally or anyway. Fair enough. Fair enough. I do know him. I've interacted with him. I know him as a gentleman in a scholar. Okay. Trying to help the world. I get it. And I really just all get out, but I can't claim personally. Of course. Of course. I get it. He's an interesting guy. He's got a Ted talk on this and written all kinds of articles for a quiet, wrote a paper in nature on a hundred years of twin studies. He's a he's a did I say he's a criminologist. So he is kind of like a similar similar background to you. He believes that criminal criminal behavior. I don't want to put words into his mouth. But I think he believes that criminal behavior is I don't want to say holy genetic, but there's a distinct genetic component to it. His perspective is that again, a hundred years of twin studies indicate that everything we can possibly measure, academic ability, temperament, mental illness, IQ, all of this, I is strongly heritable. I don't think I'm putting words into his mouth to say that. I mean, a lot of people think this, obviously. I, you know, the example I keep coming back to is that siblings, let me see if I can get this out right. So siblings raised or twins or siblings raised apart. Practically everything about them is high about that we can measure about their personalities. It's highly correlated, whereas non genetically related siblings raised together almost nothing is correlated. I don't think that's really overstating the case. So the conclusion from this kind of thinking, so I'm sure you're familiar with it and, you know, Stephen Pinker's blank slate, Judith Rich Harris's, the nurture assumption is that it's not the parenting doesn't matter, but that, you know, it's mostly genetic. Ability is mostly just genetic and that's just who we are in nature. I assume that you don't quite, you wouldn't go this far. So what would you say to someone who subscribes to this kind of mindset? Yeah, I, I, I respect it. Yeah. And think that differences in genes absolutely matter as I just gave two examples with tricycle one and Angelman Syndrome. Let me give you something that it's not quite 100% heritable in one sentence. Yeah. Or something I would say that used to be 100% heritable, but it's now, well, it is 100% heritable, I guess, but it is entirely created by the environment. And hopefully that would be a good counter example to everything you just said. Okay. Think about the genetic disorder called phenolketinuria. phenolketinuria is a disease that it's an it's an autosomal recessive disease. If, if both parents, if each parent has the, the, it's a phenol, I think it's a, I'm trying to remember, I think it's a phenolalanine hydroxylase. It's something called PAH is the way it's usually abbreviated. If you lack this enzyme called phenolalaneline hydroxylase or the enzyme doesn't work particularly well, and each parent has a gene for that. There's essentially 100% chance that the kid will have phenol out, that will have PKU and be mentally retarded. So surely that's genetic, isn't it? 100% heritable, like it's heritable, just comes from the genes. Even now it did it. It's absolutely heritable, right? I mean, what else could you say? Geneticist, like your friend, couldn't say anything else other than it's heritable. Except nowadays, if any kid in America develops mental retardation because of those genes, probably the parent should be taken in and charged with child abuse, huh? How can it be genetic and the parent's fault? This is the problem with the meaning of the word heritability. People don't know what the word means. Let me explain. In what, in what, genes only do something given the environment in which they're in. What happens if you give a kid born with this genetic defect, a diet free of phenolalini? Well, if the phenolalini can't build up in the blood, even if they don't have the PAH enzyme, it can't become toxic to the brain and then the child won't develop any mental retardation. Is it due to the genes or is it due to the environment? Come on, real quick. I'm teasing you. But obviously it depends on how you think about it. Before we understood the explanation for it, I would say logically, it was due to the genes. Well, I'm not going to blame a parent. Back in 1905, what a monster I would be. Yeah, it's heritable then. I'll say it's due to, if heritable means due to genes, then it's heritable. But in 2026, with these low phenolaline diets and kids knowing how to do it, they don't have to be mentally retarded. Mental retardation is due to an intervention in the environment. What matters is your ability to explain. A gene can't cause anything. If we understand it well enough, so genes no more determine things than bacteria or anything else. What really determines things is our ability to explain and understand things and make things happen that are better. And the same thing goes for all of those twin studies about whatever or whatever. Now, that may seem like I'm not sympathetic to genetics. I am far, far more than I think a lot of doy genes are far more than others. Because I really think that when you don't understand what the genes are doing, it very well can be that the genes are doing something to you. That's why I say that it really wasn't genetic condition and it isn't anymore. So I think one has to understand what heritability means. And I think the failure to understand, let me give you one more example of something. This is a very famous example. I don't know, for me, very famous example from David Deutsch. And I can hardly say this one in public and I'm going to say it very, very carefully. Because people really get mad when they don't understand what I'm saying. And so I have to be very careful. So I may sound a bit redundant. David Deutsch asks the question, whether lynching in the deep south is heritable in the 1830s? Well, by any analysis using the standard mathematical tools that we use nowadays, it certainly is. So let's take those identical twins. Do they, if you had a white kid who was raised by a black family, their odds of being lynched are essentially zero. But even if that black kid, who's identical twin, were raised by a completely different family, he shares the same likelihood, or a higher likelihood of being lynched. Why? Because his genes, 'cause he shares genes in common, what are those genes to? Those genes cause black skin color. And what does that black skin color do? That black skin color cause racist white people to wanna hurt people. So is lynching heritable? Oh, absolutely it is. But in the same way that PKU is heritable, it depends on how the environment interacts with the gene. If you eliminate the evil white people, then lynching is no longer heritable. If you eliminate the phenylalanine, it's not that it's no longer heritable, it's no longer caused by genes. If you eliminate the phenylalanine, then the genes are no longer causing anything. So this is a good reason why we need explanation in science. Cause is not good enough. Cause doesn't tell you what's relevant or not. Otherwise lynching is heritable or rather lynching is due to genes and the old South and PKU is due to genes. Mental retardation is due to genes when both can be easily overcome with the simple environmental intervention. Explanation matters. Cossality is not really the operative variable. Does that make sense? No, that's fascinating perspective. So yeah, really early in the show, I, and this podcast, I made a similar argument that there is nothing that the genes can cause that once we understand how it causes it, we can't intervene. Right. But if we don't understand how it's causing it, then it might as well just be heritable. Correct. Yeah, agree. Or, or, but I would add, or cultural rather than due to the parents because both of those things, PKU was due to lack of cultural knowledge. lynching is due to a lack of cultural knowledge too. One can, anything that one can attribute to heritability, one can also attribute to culture. Studies can't just entangle, genetic studies can't disentangle that. No matter how detailed the math, the only thing that can disentangle it is explanation. So along those same lines, there is an idea, again, people who believe that humans are universal expiners, which includes myself. We have this idea that I've heard that I actually think is a very beautiful idea. And it's this idea that the evil in the world comes from bad ideas and that bad ideas can be error corrected and changed because we're universal expiners. And I think that this, I love this idea, like I really do for a number of different reasons. I think it hints at the idea of something that we might call free will. I think it's extremely hopeful. It does seem to me though that there are certain mental illnesses and here I think of maybe paranoid schizophrenia comes to mind that seems to at least in edge cases challenge this idea. So now I'm not an expert in this, but as I understand paranoid schizophrenia, this isn't just merely a case of someone with bad ideas and we can error correct them. There's actually something wrong with their ability to error correct in the first place, due to presumably something wrong with their brain. I actually have a neighbor, she's not my neighbor anymore, but she was got hit on the head and she became paranoid and there was a night and day change from the way she was before she got hit on the head and the way she was after she got hit on the head. And she became paranoid and I accidentally called her once, I was like going over a list of people in my church congregation and I called her instead of somebody else and she was convinced I was working for a conspiracy, an evil conspiracy. - So sorry. - Yeah, yeah. - And so I talked her out of that and she became convinced that I had simply been used by the evil conspiracy. - Right, we're actually a man. - Beautiful, congratulations, isn't it? Yes, yes. - Right, right. There's just no way you can convince me that this is just a matter of her having some bad ideas. There's clearly some sort of functional problem going on that is causing her to not error correct, okay? So to what degree does the existence of certain types of mental illnesses, like a paranoid schizophrenia? I'm sure we could pick even stronger examples of this. Does it undermine this beautiful idea or is it more like it only undermines it in very small edge cases and in general it's true? What would be your at least opinion on that subject? - Yeah, that's a hard one. It's a beautiful question I work with such people all the time. And I want to say, because I want to be sort of philosophically neat, but I understand it's not practically, and I sort of am able to error correct myself, even as I'm thinking this and about to say it. But let me just say what I first was going to think and then error correct myself. What my first response was, I want to divide this into either people can, indefinitely, they are in general on average, sort of error correcting more and improving their performance. The machine really is mutating, selecting its chess program, and now with less space and memory, it really is playing better. It really does have sort of deeper algorithms because it plays as well as it used to play, but now with less space and memory. And then when one gives it more time and space, it really is playing a better chess game. Either we really are able to compress our knowledge and come up with deeper and deeper theories that explain more and more on average, or we can't. And so, now I think most people with paranoid schizophrenia can continue to learn. I just think it's much harder. Surely there are cases with paranoid schizophrenia in which that is absolutely gone, in which as they're getting worse, their ideas are getting worse. I would say they don't have free will at that point. And so I want to sort of make the clean distinction between somewhat, I think someone who's dreaming, for example. Now, dreaming is a state it's clearly chemically induced. People clearly start, they don't know that they're not awake. They certainly perceive that what they're seeing is real and yet pigs are flying. They're deeply impulsive. Millions of people are chasing them and they're jumping 100 feet in the air. They're not only not ever correcting it, it's getting worse. Now, one of the things that I feel so sad about that most people don't get to see, that I feel just incredibly privileged to have seen is what it looks like for someone to go in and out of madness. The gradual change that happens. Where when someone's going into madness, their associations between words start becoming looser. It's like their ability to, so it's like the mutations in their ideas, the randomness in their ideas in a way, what originally brings creativity is, which is good, is almost happening too fast. So they're mutating ideas, but starting to use them before they really tested them to see whether they, in some sense, play chess better, in some measurable way. So their ideas are getting mutated faster than they're being selected, which increases the rate of error, which then makes it even worse. And so I want to say that the spiral is, when the spiral is going away from innet learning, that either losing free will or have lost free will. And in a sense, as it is going the other way, that is a state of free will. will or they're or you could also say maybe their free will is increasing depending on the way you define things. So the criticism of that is I've seen both happen at the same time in different aspects of mind. And so clearly that's the simple way when I had the thoughts like well this is how I'll answer Bruce and Peter and then I'm like no that's not quite right isn't Michael I did a little our correction myself you know as I was going along there but I think that's that's how I look at it I'm not sure that that's the only way to look at it but I think when someone with paranoid schizophrenia is not gaining knowledge and in fact they're deteriorating I think they've either are losing free will or have lost it. So there's two things I want to ask you about here so there's an interesting paper by Stephen L. Peck who is a biologist that at BYU I live near BYU and yet the paper is called My Madness and he he described so what happened was his mind was attacked by a bacteria that caused him to temporarily go insane and he writes about it he did recover so he's writing about what it was like to be insane and like like and it's a very interesting paper I think people who aren't aware of like if you question whether insanity's real or not go read this paper and it will convince you that it's completely real okay so you've got something that's physically wrong with the brain that's causing him to not think well and so for example some of his kids drew some little pictures um little crann pictures and he became convinced that these children's drawings were the head of a conspiracy called the Satan Wal-Mart organization. Now I don't mean that they were drawings of the leaders of the conspiracy he thought the drawings were the heads of this conspiracy right yeah and that's like he would they were like put him into a cat scan like I'm going off of memory here so I'm gonna get something wrong but like putting him into a cat scan and he is convinced that the guy putting him in the cat scan has just told him that he's part of the conspiracy and he's gonna kill him inside his cat scan right and he believes that's what that person just said and he would actually be like watching television and he'd be watching like real television the news and suddenly a new story would come on about these ninjas that were part of the conspiracy that were coming after him right and and he would later see the same ninjas down in the parking lot right so like and people would talk with him and they would explain this doesn't make sense and he was convinced like he he believed that all his kids had been cloned and there were evil clones and he felt that he had a moral responsibility to take care of these evil clones of his kids because they're genetically his kids and he had this giant moral dilemma going on in his mind and they finally give him medication and he's still convinced that the that they're like apparently the kids were all gonna show up at a certain time and so he's waiting for that time and the medicine starting to work and suddenly the time passes and it finally occurs to him oh I really wasn't saying because the medicine started to work right yeah and so you so you you've got this um again I want to get back to this idea of error correction right that it's it's almost like he just cannot error correct his ideas and he he mentions it was similar to dreaming made way higher fidelity dreams are not nearly as consistent as the hallucinations that he was experiencing like he would see that people on the television that he'd see him the ninjas down in the parking lot from the hospital window so there was a high degree of consistency that you don't get inside of a dream but he said it had this quality or an idea would come into his head and he just knew it was true and he didn't have the ability to question it and thus the drawings the crend drawings on the wall are the leaders of the Satan Walmart organization conspiracy right like what's happening here when the brain's not functioning correctly and of course you may not even know the answer this may be beyond our current science but just to the degree that we actually understand this or not what's going on here that causes someone in this situation to be incapable of error correction yeah we we if if I really understood that we would be able to we'd be able to to fix it it's a yeah and you would have a Nobel Prize I wouldn't be sitting up but the story is a good one you actually had mentioned his name to me so I I did I did look it up a little bit it's a fascinating story it's I wish everyone would would read that too I I wish also that people would know when they're writing online about mental illness not existing and this is all nonsense and we don't know how to treat it and we can't make this stuff go away all of which is wrong I wish they'd understand that we as psychiatrists and neurologists see this on a daily basis this is not uncommon for us this is what we work with we having it be as a result of a bacterial infection as a little bit with myself for haven't been keeping up for not recognizing this organism they would you know it's a brickhole derrius pseudomalii when I looked it up on a great name for a bug bacteria and you know I think probably if I had gotten in order to do a super spinal fluid analysis which I would have on a guy like this I think the lab would have grown it out I didn't look that part up and so I I think I would have been saved and I would have caught it but that these kinds of things are very you know are very common and our psych hospitals used to be filled with people with a bacterial infection called tertiary syphilis which made people sick and it in many ways resembles what people look like with schizophrenia so we cleared out the psych hospitals when we developed treatments for for that I mean this is a you know a relatively kind thing though a few years ago the the one that made the rounds was remember the brain on fire thing where yeah exactly another box the brain on fire one and that one was not about bacteria that one was about auto antibodies to NMDA receptors which can be cleared with plasma for recess other sorts of things so yes this stuff happens all the time yes we fix them with meds yes people don't know not fix sometimes we control the symptoms sometimes you know we can actually clear it up like give them antibiotics and and fix their their brain infection but yes this type of thing happens all the time and so that's why I I'm sort of incredulous when I read the internet and there's such a high prevalence of people who think that psychiatric illness isn't real or doesn't exist and it sort of just reminds me of people sort of like saying atoms don't exist or something like well I can't exactly see it but I mean if you study them well enough you you sort of understand that that that they exist at least it's a vast explanation so yes it's a it's a real thing so obviously I'm asking a question that I didn't expect you to have a full answer to as you said if you had the answer you'd be winning a Nobel Prize at this point but it does seem like at a high level that something has gone wrong with the error correction right yeah that they that they can't inspect now you brought up a possibility here that I actually found really intrigued just a moment ago that it's almost like their thoughts are mutating too fast so they're still they're still universal explainers he still has some technical ability he can he can explain to people around him what's going on he can say I've got these you know these evil clones of my kids and I'm worried about that like that still requires the ability to explain things right so it's not like he lost his ability to explain but for what whatever reason he simply can't seem to inspect his own ideas right it's such a fascinating thing to read about you use brain on fires an example with the same sort of thing happened luckily she didn't remember very much so that was probably good for her that a lot of it she discovered by watching videos for self afterwards but it is like it's almost like you talked about like the variation in selection the fact there's evolution going on inside the brain it's like the selection mechanism has ceased to function or something along those lines yeah yeah no that's exactly what I think is going on I mean there we we speculated I mean psychiatrists we when we have a theory of that at least it was as of five or ten years ago I haven't looked at the latest sort of philosophy of psychiatry ideas but we think that there's something called a tholanic filter that it's kind of like the high level secretary that tell whether it's going to bring something to the boss is your conscious mind's attention. And there are all kinds of loose associations and creative associations going on in the unconscious mind, which you have access to when you sleep. And when the thalamic filter breaks down, those associations, those loose associations are getting into consciousness before being error corrected. It's like your secretary is overwhelming with you. Look here, look here, look here, look here, look here, look here. And you can't see. And you can't organize what's what's going on. So that's the that's the current theory. So what's the current idea of how meds work? Well, meds slow that down. They slow down the process, which then gives the error correct is slow down the rate of mutation. So then gives this is these are sort of my ideas put on top of some standards psychiatric ideas, my perian ideas on top of psychiatric ideas. And so these ideas are medicine doesn't have knowledge or insight can't debug, but it can slow something down. And then it gives one's conscious mind a chance to essentially error correct, not be exposed to the rapid rate of mutations that you get, for example, when you're dreaming. Now, there's a subtle psychiatric difference. I don't know if this is relevant to you guys, but it's or to the audience, but there's a subtle psychiatric difference between dreaming and psychosis, even the psychosis that the Baylor professor was describing. And that has to do with something we call focus. And the Baylor psychiatrist and people with paranoid schizophrenia usually retain reasonably good focus. And that means that their ability to sustain attention on one thing or one idea is intact. When it's not intact, that's more like the dreaming state or more like what happens when you have high fevers or when you've just had a lung transplant. And 50% of people coming out of lung transplants go nuts and you actually tie them down. So there, you know, people are going crazy all the time. Mental illness is delirium in that case, is very real. People call psychiatrists all the time. We use meds and we help them not be crazy anymore. And if we didn't do that, if we didn't tie them down, gently and lovingly and as best as we can to make them comfortable and we didn't give them meds, we would be very properly sued. They pull out their breathing tube and they die. But these are folk that have very poor focus. And that's the difference between sort of a focused crazy, a focused madness and a non-focus madness, which is like delirium. And there are physical differences too. They're not really good enough to be to make it to prime time. But if you check any EEG, electroencephalogram of people who have a poorly focused sort of a state or delirium often it's slowed. Whereas if you check an EEG and someone with schizophrenia, it really isn't that much slowed. So yes, there are biological errors in the filtering device in the thelamic filter. That filter breaks down. It's sort of your unconscious associations get projected into the conscious. You're overwhelmed by them. You can't, the world becomes just not understandable. I mean, the part about the article you gave me that I really found very interesting is his comment that prior to my experience, I imagine that going insane, merely involved seeing and hearing things that were not there. So I was surprised to find that not only my sensual experience had been rearranged and recreated, but also that my entire belief structure about the world was rewritten. And I find that interesting because I don't consider someone who's just hallucinating to have a mental illness. And I think most of us don't. There has to be an error in the thinking part of it. If you start hallucinating Bruce, we're not going to say you have schizophrenia. Can I tell you a very funny briefly story about myself? Sure. Okay, this was in the early days of phones and please don't make too much fun of me. I was in a parking lot and I just parked my car and I started hallucinating. I thought the news. So I looked at my phone. It was off. I looked at the radio. It was off. It looked all around me. It was off. So I was hearing a voice that was speaking to me. So then I, oh my god, and of course, you know, I was a psychiatrist. So then I'm getting a little bit scared. So then I open the car door, start walking. I still hear the voice. And that's the news. I'm like, what that? And then I sat down for a second. I said to myself, okay, hang in there, Michael. Think about this for a second. Are you aware that something is not there? Really? And I'm like, yes, you are. Okay, so what can you do if you can't tell? Well, not everybody has this experience. Maybe you can speak to your wife and ask. I really thought I was going crazy. But then I recognized in some sense because I knew what mental illness was that this is different that schizophrenia, whatever the hell's happening to me. Let me tell you what it was. I mean, it's the early days of phone. The phone was black. It had turned off. The screen thing was off, but it actually was on a radio station. And I was just carrying around with me and I wasn't aware of it. And I literally listened to the news. I'm like, and I was saying, this is absolutely amazing. So my mind is simulating this. Things that aren't really happening. That aren't really happening. But boy, does it sound real? So can I give you a similar example that happened to me when I was there? Go ahead. So you have a little sleepover with your siblings. And so you're all together in one room and and you're having fun and you stay up really late talking. And I started to hallucinate. And it wasn't crazy. I was mentally ill in any way. I could tell. I was hallucinating. And so I started saying, oh, cool. I'm hallucinating. I can see these little, this little family of people running across the lights were out. So I'm hallucinating in the dark. But I still see things. And this big purple dancing skeleton comes into the room. I'm like, I can see a purple dancing skeleton. Yes. Yes. And so I knew I was just hallucinating. I knew it was because I was tired. I stayed up. When I would close my eyes, I would still see the hallucinations. So they were naturally in the room. Yeah. And so like I was able to check that. So the error correction was still functioning. Yes. Absolutely. Right. Absolutely. And that isn't the people don't understand that isn't the mental illness. Yeah. It's just not. I mean, people also say, you know, well, you're in the business of trying to control people by hospitalizing them, enforcing them into your control program. And I find the whole that whole thing funny because in a way, we're doing the opposite and giving people back control of their own minds can sometimes be very, you know, very dangerous. Let me give you an example. Let's say, and I've had examples, sort of like this. I'm an exaggerator just to make a point. So I never had something quite like this. But I had a patient who was, you know, who was seem to me very much a legitimate Nazi kind of guy. And he was deeply, deeply paranoid and hallucinating. Not paranoid in the way that Nazis are, which is kind of a logical set of false assumptions. Then leading to a conclusion without the kind of loosening of associations that you that feels biological when you're talking to someone who's schizophrenia, he had the usual misunderstandings, sort of cultural delusions about Jews. You know, he would comment about my last name. This is the kind of guy that is not going to be very effective as a Nazi. His mind is thoroughly disorganized. He is seeing things that aren't there, hearing things that aren't there. On the other hand, I mean, if I really were into controlling him, what would I do? Well, I'd leave him like he was. Because I like that, probably going to, you know, more likely to die. We'll get no support from anyone. What is your job as a psychiatrist? Your job as a psychiatrist is to help him to think better, to help him be more rational, if you will, in his irrationality. So in helping deal with his break into schizophrenia, I was making him a more powerful Nazi. That isn't trying to control somewhat. That's not doing the opposite. You're really trying to give people their freedom back. Now, I like to say and I tease my medical colleagues because they tease me about psychiatry but maybe with the exception of surgeons and pediatricians, pediatricians have antibiotics that they can give to kids and the kids then get their whole life back in surgeons, remove something bad appendix or something and the person gets 20, 30 more good years. But a lot of my medical colleagues are treating things like congestive heart failure, things that you know, various forms of cancer, other sorts of things that tend to be chronic and disabling and they can help and sometimes they cure cancer, which is just wonderful when they do. But when you help a heart function, the heart doesn't all of a sudden start healing itself. That's very different from a brain. Once you get its ability to error correct back intact so that it can grow knowledge again, I have to do very little and my patients then really become very powerful, amazing human beings, not because of what I did, although I at best what I did was a precipitant. But because the mind has this ability to grow and learn and be creative. And so I tease my medical colleagues when they say well you're not doing very much, you don't know what you're doing. All of it is true. I'm really not doing very much and I don't exactly know how it all works. But I do know that once I get somebody going in the right direction, their own creativity then can take over in a way that my medical colleagues really can't do. They just make maybe their heart a little stronger or something but the heart doesn't start then regenerating and healing itself and making five hearts. Whereas the brain becomes more and more powerful because the mind is. And that I find very satisfying about my field and is why I went into it. We've mentioned dreaming several times. Let me ask you about dreaming. So I've noticed that when I'm dreaming, I'm not really myself. The dreaming version of myself can't seem to think straight. He does reason to a degree. So might still count as a universal expiner. But his erecorrection seems largely turned off. He rarely even realizes that. And that's why despite this irrational world taking place, he never really seems to he meaning me. Never seems to notice that it's a dream. Sometimes that's not true. Lucid dreams might happen where you suddenly your erecorrection is working better and you go oh I'm in a dream. But that's rare. So I know my waking self would never make such obvious mistakes that he's making. And it seems to me that he also has drastically reduced impulse control and drastically reduced inhibitions. So he will do things that I would just never do. And I know that's a 40-in-thing that you play out the these ideas that you wish you could do but you're not allowed to. It seems to me it's more like something's not functioning. And so I will do things in a dream that wouldn't be appropriate in real life. In way. No Bruce. I'm horrified. Oh my gosh. So have you told your family and friends? Go ahead. So like have I it seems to me like I've effectively lost my mind while I'm dreaming. I don't even believe it's me in a straightforward sense. Surely I'm seeing through this person's eyes. I think of it as me at the time. And in some ways it's disconnected from me. Like my dream I can sometimes remember my dreams especially if you like write them down when you just woke up. But for the most part my dreams get it get erased right. So it's not even it's not even clear to me who have the dream because it's not really me. So it's not even part of my memory right of continuity of who I am. But is that like what it's like to be insane? Like do we all become mad at night while we're dreaming because parts of the brain aren't working correctly and our error correction is shut down. Yes. I'll do become mad at night due to a chemical change. It's more of a delirium than a schizophrenic psychosis but yes I do think that's exactly right. When I push back a little bit it's not I I don't know if it's a disagreement. I just it's a subtlety on one on one thing you said. And that's that you feel that your universal explainer. I think you are in one sense but not another. I think part of being a universal explainer is being able to improve at least in my opinion and definitely improve one's explanations. Yeah. And it's not even though you are explaining things to yourself and you're confabulating often brilliantly the you know the the lie center of the what I call the lie center the aspects of the left front alone or what others call the lie center and I copy is is is function beautifully just filling in the gaps making sense of things that are utterly unonsensical but I'm not sure you're really improving your ability to explain. So in that sense I would say your your free will is decreasing your capacity is decreasing so your explanations aren't improving even though you know you obviously are explaining to your things to yourselves and in in in one sense the word. I think that the ability to improve has to do with what you said the lack of error correcting ability. The other thing I want to point out is the the language you use which I think is very evocative. You you you you are speaking to yourself in the third person like you said he does this you didn't say lie you said he does this and the third person and um you know in in sort of the the Freudian sense the the German word and I you know I don't speak German but I understand that we in in America we imported the word id to refer to unconscious but my understanding at least according to Bruno Bedelheim who my read many years ago was that the the translation of id the namely the unconscious the impulse of the the the the type of thing that Freud felt was active at night was was it which is sort of a third person it is doing that or he is doing that it's a it's a sort of a third person it's not really you is it um and and and so I I can empathize with that but I think that the short answer to your question is that lack that that a lot of this is your unconscious creative mind processing things and it's being leaked um into the conscious mind now interestingly are are brain that there must be some function to this since all of us seem to dream I mean not must be but I assume there is I could speculate about it I have some ideas other people have some ideas about it but there's some things that are interesting about the you know evolution clearly knows that this is a dangerous state so uh what does it do why it paralyzes your muscles right and why is that because well if you're imagining jumping and flying that might not be a very good thing now there's this interesting condition called um REM behavioral disorder and it's induced it's often a a pre Parkinson's like condition but more commonly nowadays it's caused by often a lot of psychiatric drugs for example SSRIs and they it is partially removed the inhibition on one's action during dreaming and so these people actually people with REM behavioral disorder actually act out their dreams so if they're thinking they're defending their family from a villain or attacking them or kicking them they may actually kick their bet partner so that happened to older older people like isn't that like yes it's just okay because it tends to happen more in older people are people with you know basal gang leader damage people on on different sorts of medications but it's it's relatively common um as a condition and um you know you have to work with such patients you know you if it starts getting bad enough i'm first of all there are meds we can use to to to help with it and and and i do and i recommend that people take these things but if you can't control it then often you need to have separate the beds of husband and wife or whatever so people don't get injured i mean you have to you know you have to do something about it if it becomes a seemingly dangerous experience it's hard to know because the partners often want to be close together and it's infrequent and so then what do you do um but but yeah it's i it's sort of a risk benefit analysis so is it's like sleepwalking a similar problem i used to sleepwalk a lot as a kid i don't do it anymore in there i guess that's not uncommon as a kid it's it's it's it's slightly different uh one it is I mean, there are types of sleep walking that are like that, but sleep walking is a different kind of a parasymne, which is sort of a different phase of sleep than REM sleep. So I like acting out of dream. No, not. So it's different. I mean, it's interesting also, but sometimes I think I should have gone into sleep medicine. It's extremely interesting field. So so many things that you don't live along enough to study all the things you'd like to learn about. Yes, definitely. Okay, let me ask you a more controversial question now. Sure. We always hear about developing children. They don't have a fully developed prefrontal cortex, and that supposedly reduces a child's impulse control and ability to reason. Well, first of all, is there any truth to that? And if there is, or is this more like pop psychology and you hear about it, but there's nothing to it? If it is, if there is any truth to it, is that similar to dreaming Bruce where the impulse control is removed and they don't have as much control over themselves? Okay. The first question is that a real phenomenon. I think probably a bit. I mean, I don't, I think it's it's true. And remember when I said that the explanatory mind should have a ability to understand, should have the ability to increase understanding. For that, it should have knowledge, underlying knowledge, which, you know, certainly we're not born of blank slate and so our brains are born with certain modules and certain knowledge. And it should have knowledge of how to create knowledge. But one of the key kinds of knowledge, which I said was a subset of the second type, is knowledge of what, not to change and what to leave alone and what to leave in place. And I've called that knowledge wisdom. And so the knowledge of what the other children certainly have great knowledge of knowledge. They're learning frankly a lot faster than we are. Their memory and speed is better. I don't think they know as well what to leave alone. And so I don't know if that's a metaphor for the kind of of changes of neurological changes that you're describing or whether it actually is related to it. But I can have no problem believing that younger people are a bit more impulsive on average than older people would. But of course, breaking more things by being impulsive on average is also a way of learning. More things. It's kind of like mutating things, just like an example of my chest program. What are you really trying to do in order to learn faster? You're trying to break things faster. You're trying to do the mutation and test cycle faster. So break what's already existing faster almost every single time. You're creating errors. The goal is to create your errors as fast as you can. But simulate them hopefully and then move on to the thing that's actually better. But kids are not just simulating things. Sometimes they're really breaking them. That's a wonderful connection to paparian epistemology that I'd never considered before. So I always let it kind of trigger my BS detector a little bit. The way people parent this idea that, oh, your prefrontal cortex is not completely developed until you're 25 or whatever they say. I don't know. I didn't do versions of this. It never really quite. It seemed like a little bit suspicious to me. But it sounds like quite suspicious. But I think there's something to it. There's something to different styles of learning. You're almost connecting that to learning. You're saying that in order to maybe one of the reasons conceivably that children seem to learn so much. I see that with my own kids. It's like they'll spend like, it seems to me they just spend all their time scrolling on their computer or playing their games or whatever. But then they are learning all this amazing stuff. So I don't know where they're picking this up. But maybe it has to do with it's connected to just they're making a lot of mistakes. Yeah, they're practicing making mistakes really rapidly. They're mutating like crazy. They learn fast. Yeah. Yeah, if you're going to make your hours make them as rapidly as you can so you can learn faster. Yeah, okay. Wow. Sounds like words to live by maybe. Yeah, well, yeah. But please, God, let them simulate it in there rather than breaking my computer or throwing it or what. Or playing football in the hopes that record. Yeah, stable or something. Fair enough. Yeah. So, so I do think that's so I think that there's some there's some truth to that at least in styles of learning. It seems to me, you know, I'm a my background is a special education and also math teacher. And so I have kind of like, yeah, somewhat similar background to you and that I've seen. Oh, yeah, you do. I mean neurological difference. Oh, yeah. For sure. But then I also have some experience with kids that are more, you know, normal. Normal. Still have. My kid is normal, but yeah, I understand. Yeah. But still have have now in our modern world, identifiable conditions, you know, whether ADHD or dyslexia or or, you know, autism, assburgers, however you want to there's there's all kinds of things. You know, site is circling back to Thomas. Zoss. Zoss. However, we decided to pronounce that. It is all there. Probably wrong. They were not Polish and we're not probably wrong. But I circling back to him, you know, one of the things that I that is. You know, I agree with how we, you know, I think on a previous episode, we looked at how popper said something like, well, I agree with 95% of what you say. And I really liked poppers take on that because I mean, there's there's to really give him his his due. I mean, he was very concerned with the authoritarian overreach of this psychiatric industry. He said that you know, this whole illness thing is just the wrong metaphor for what is essentially moral, I guess you could say just just it's essentially something that should be dealt with on the as theories about life that are incorrect rather than something more an illness seems to that metaphor seems to take it outside of our control because, you know, it's like getting cancer or something like that. It's which is which is not it takes away agency from the from the individual, which I think is a fair. I mean, his his his take kind of seems like prescient almost in the way that, you know, I look at a math classroom as I do every day and I see probably a good quarter of the kids or more. I mean, who have some kind of who many of them are on meds, they have some kind of identified disorder, rightly or wrongly. I mean, I don't know. It's hard hard to know if it's helpful for them or not to have these I am probably it's very complicated whether or not these conditions have are make their their their life better or not. I mean, you know, a hundred years ago, thousand years ago, our ancestors wouldn't have been identifying people as ADHD and one of the reasons is because we didn't make everyone sitting a classroom for six hours or more every single day learning things that they don't want to learn. They probably would have been out. I don't know taking care of animals on the farm with their parents or or hunting and gathering or whatever they did. So I mean, does that does does that aspect of Thomas Saas's ideas resonate with you this the idea that that we could be looking at sort of an authoritarian overreach of the psychiatric industry where where everything is medicalized or pathologized, I guess. I can relate to aspects of of that, but I don't it's not it's not quite the emphasis that that that I I take. I mean, so that you said you said many different things. and I wrote them down as I was going to. along to try to keep track of it. First off was the 95% comment where where Papa in the letter to Saas said that he agreed with a 95% of what he was saying. To my mind that, let me call Papa Papa to my mind that's sort of like saying well chimpanzees and humans share, I don't know what it is, I'm just making up a number 99% 98% of their genes in common and so essentially we're very much like them which you know isn't one sense true in terms of sort of physiological structure but the I mean I think we share a lot of genes with a banana too. Exactly so yeah but that 2% makes a difference and I think Saas what Saas said that he differed with him in in his what Papa said that he differed with Saas about I think is very significant and that letter that he sent he first said one that he feels that memory is declining and he in my view correctly called that a mental illness, a popper due because it why is it mental because memory is mentation it's you're not talking about nerves or structures of nerves you're talking about one's memory just like one's one's sadness or whatever we're talking about a psychological quality and when a psychologically quality is impact we call that mental illness that doesn't mean that the ideas are disease but he correctly says and then he correctly says in that very same letter but I'm not prepared to argue with you about definitions and that's a very powerful buparian thing to say also Saas was heavily into you know into definitions you know a mind can't be diseased therefore there is no mental illness an idea can't be diseased therefore there is no mental illness now that's fine except no one thinks that the word mental illness means that ideas are our disease that's really the area of essentialism as as ascribing some particular essential characteristic to to a word or a definition or something and it's just a philosophical error the other thing saw the other thing popper said to Saas which which I guess goes in his 5% disagreement is critical as well he said that when people are sick that that for example have the flu I don't know if he used the word flu but he imagines that there are chemicals that are that change that can make a person feel ill say as a consequence of being exposed to a virus but he adds something to the effect that I imagine that the body's own chemicals can create the same feelings and indeed that's you know that's true the flu virus increases you know too many crosses factor alpha increases interleukin 6 and it increases interleukin 1 and increases all these cytokines from cells called macrophages that go to your brain and make you feel sick and the question is just if a virus can make you feel tired and depressed and not wanting to do things and depression causes the same increase in those neurochemicals why is one real and the other not so just like chimpanzees are not like humans in the sense that humans tend to go to outer space and can be reworking and rewiring the the the the shape at the face of the earth and maybe at some point as we get more knowledge the the solar system and maybe even one day the galaxy similarly the huge difference in saws as a perspective from popper is really the relevant thing that the mind that body can affect mind and we didn't have the chance maybe at some future time we can talk how changes in your mind changes the physiology of your body it's an absolute loop and these are the things that popper in my view correctly paid attention to now in terms of the the statement about kids being made to sit in school and sit still particularly boys for hours on end I I couldn't agree more I would just ask I would just say that let's say we even 100% completely agree with you and I and I do that that I you know as you know I favor homeschooling most of the time or virtually all of the time I want you know parents to be actively involved in what kids to be to be free and to inquire about things you know to learn about their interests and I do think that all roads lead to to to Rome we didn't get a lot of chance to talk about that today but I think whatever path a child learns a child learns to play games then he can learn to code the games then he can learn math then he can learn to 3d perception then he can learn from 3d perception he can learn how things how you can make things improve and then he can learn evolution and then he can learn physics it's black you know knowledge is an interconnected web of ideas so I certainly share that but let's say we even if I made just interject I even though I'm a teacher I agree with what you just said I'm sure I've gotten I've gotten a bit radical I'm afraid but no no you're good I really want kids to enjoy themselves I want them to have fun when they're learning and and and to really be into it but but let me just ask and I'm asking this hypothetically let's let's say that children were being obviously hypothetically we're being beaten in schools on a regular basis and I guess maybe they used to be used to be hit or something like that or even a generation or two really yeah even a generation I mean in my generation when I went to school I mean I was threatened with being at any number of times it never happened but I you know certainly my many my friends got hit and I'm not laughing as a funny it's really terrible people used to beat beat kids but let's say it really hurt when they were you know being hit I mean should a doctor deny a kid a pain med because the kids shouldn't have been hit that's that I mean that's one way to think about it and so if a child is going to be forced to sit in a classroom I'm not saying one should or shouldn't but will you help them to be more independent if they are being forced to sit in a classroom and they can't if you give them a riddle it to help to help them do better in the unfortunate environment that they're in I favor home education I don't you know particularly I mean there are girls like this too I mean you've seen them I've seen them in my bag it's absolutely there are girls who will not sit still they learn by doing and running around that's how they look and but it's still not obvious that one shouldn't necessarily give them medicine I think when you give a lot less medicine if one schedules even in school a lot more recess a lot more activity is a lot more active learning or even segregates those who are more active or segregates boys from girls in some way to allow them to to enjoy themselves more and better yet to individualize and tailor education at home to the individual mind of the of the child who one is is taking care of so I I I agree that society shouldn't be taking away people's agency but I think you know people not homeschooling for example is really the most powerful way of taking away people's agency not psychiatrists you know maybe trying to make a kid more comfortable in the in the classroom in which he's being in which he's being held in in which there's not enough exercise and not enough physical activity and by the way there are some kids who are so distractable that their ability to learn at any environment is compromised and every now and then a little bit of riddle in is or a little bit of a stimulant can help I really don't favor giving it much I I'm a minimalist particularly when it comes to kids because I want to change and shape the environment but yeah and so it's not it's not obvious to me that it is the sort of the the larger psychiatric establishment that's corralling kids and trying to control people our goal is really to help people people kids develop more independence if you force kids to do things in a particular way than we might try to help them accommodate themselves to that environment I also think that most you know I think most psychiatrists like most parents are not in favor of of homeschooling. And so I would disagree with not just psychiatrists about that, but virtually all parents about that. That's my view. I think homeschooling is better. Yeah, no, that's an interesting perspective. I, so it seems it always, even though I, you know, I've read John Holt and probably some of the same guys you have about, yeah, about, learning in children and homeschooling and all that. But at the same time, it seems like a bit utopian to just say, I mean, it would just like involve restructuring our entire society if we're going to snap our fingers and say, well, okay, everyone just needs to homeschool. It's very hard as, you know, as a parent, I'm a parent of two teenagers and they don't want to be homeschooled. They want to go to school with their friends and, you know, no, I know. So it's complicated. It's just, and the real world, they want to go to school they should. I mean, I, sure, that's exactly where they should be. They want to be there. Yeah, like that's fine by me. And so, I mean, some people just can't, they can't homeschool. They're, you know, there's one of them, they're working and there's no other choice. I mean, I, they're feeling towards the kids are feeling towards no one's in an ideal situation to have someone stay home with them. I get that. Yeah. The reality is not, reality is deeply imperfect. I think the philosophy of parenting that I want is that is the one that has a commitment to making everybody better off and not trying to sacrifice and compromise. And that's the philosophy of parenting that I favor. It's the taking children seriously philosophy of parenting, recognizing that the world is deeply imperfect. And I can't even always agree with myself. And sometimes I find myself, hopefully not often, coursing myself. You know what I mean? I'm just imperfect, but, but if a commitment to try, I'm trying not to do that. I'm trying to be a person who's not suffering. I try not to cause kids. I try not to cause my wife. I, you know, I try not to cause people. I want people to enjoy themselves. I want to figure out ways that I can be happy, more happy, and they can be more happy simultaneously. I don't always succeed. If I can say one more thing about the medication angle, and I like your perspective, it sounds like you're not completely against it. You're not like moralizing about it in the same way that a lot of people who have similar ideas might about the medication. And I agree with that because, you know, it's hard for me to say that in all circumstances, no child should be medicated because I've seen too many extremes. But I will also say that at least in my personal experience, and again, this is more with the ADHD or autism side of things, where it sounds like maybe you have a lot more experience in other areas, more psychiatric disorders, or however you want to put that. But it's not really clear to me that the medication actually, when you look at it a little bit with a more maybe cynical or skeptical, skeptical eye as an educator, it's not actually clear to me. It works very well. I don't. Maybe you have a different experience there. But my final question is meds even work. Before you answer that, can I give my own experience with that? And then you can kind of answer both of us at the same time. Sure. So I have seen that too. I mean, like to some degree, I'm surprised medication works at all for a mental illness. Obviously, we've got this idea of the mind being software. And so you're going to throw this medication in to affect the hardware. And that's somehow going to impact the software. It's like trying to use a hammer to, you know, unscrew a screw or something like that, right? So it's surprising that it does work, but it does seem like it's, it's effectiveness differs. Like, I don't, I've never been mentally ill. I have been depressed before when my sister got sick with cancer. I went into a depression for a while. I was very grateful to have access to antidepressants to help me get through that. But I wouldn't say they were great. Like when I'm taking an antidepressant, it pops me up a little, but it's not like I, it really reverses the problem, right? In the other hand, I have known people who have more severe mental illnesses. Like, let's say, I've known some people who've been manic depressives. And I've heard from them that often the medication actually is pretty effective. That it's a night and day difference for them when it's a more severe. But I've also had ones where it just wasn't true. The medication didn't seem to be effective. And they continued to spiral into difficulties and problems. To what degree is, so my question would have been, it's kind of the same as Peters, to what degree is medication effective? Clearly, it's sometimes effective. But it always seems like it's, it certainly isn't like taking their flu. Or, you know, something where we understand it better and it's just a physiological problem and the medication seems to be far more effective. It seems a little more hitter miss to me. Yeah, I think that's fair. So in terms of effectiveness of medicine, I guess it depends on what you're measuring. Although possibly debatable because of, you know, confounders and these are very difficult studies to do, you might be surprised that Ritalin is one of the few psychiatric medications that we really have a good data on that it actually decreases death rates. We can, in people who take it. Much of it is because, and now, I don't know if it's in the population that you're talking about. The problem is it's kind of like, if you give Ritalin incorrectly, then it's not going to do anything. And not only is it not going to do anything, it's going to make people worse. And even some people who do have intentional problems and you give them Ritalin, it absolutely makes them worth. They become agitated on rather than being able to, it's not even focused more. It's almost attention depth order, it's more like attention deficit is more like too much attention disorder. It's, it's more like they're able to pay attention, they're paying attention to too much. Or it leads to sort of, sorry, death rates from, from suicide or no, no, no, no, no, no, no, drop it from accidents. Oh, it's from accidents. Right. You know, like, like, car accidents and other sorts of things. So we have, it's, you know, I don't think there's any reason for it to be good for the heart. It may be even bad for the heart. I don't think it's good for blood vessels or, or anything of the kind. It just, you know, decreases a lot of accidental death rates. And so, Ritalin is, is interesting. One of the few drugs that we do have data like that. We have drugs on other things like we have it on with him. We have it on anti-psychotic, particularly plasero decreasing death rates. It's a, you know, it's a, it's a talk I like. I do a talk on which drugs that, you know, are, are, are, are, are, the talk I, I title, humor, I hope humorously and I don't mean to degrade my profession because as I told you before, I'm very proud of it. But I say, are psychiatrists real doctors? And it's the title of the talk. And I talk about various classes of medicines in which ones have been shown to, or we have good evidence consistent with the explanation that these medications decrease death rates and Ritalin is on the list. You know, obviously, if, if properly used. Now, so in terms of whether the, the, the meds are a fact, but and this is the other issue. It's sort of psychiatric, giving psychiatric drugs is not quite like giving antibiotics, as you both correctly point out. It is very much hit or miss. And it's, it's more like neurologist treating migraines or neurologist treating epilepsy. There's some people are better at this than others. And this is where learning comes in. And you know, without getting too much into this, this debate, which is a very complex debate. But you know, the, the, the, the questions do antidepressants assoccerize in kids increase suicidality. What antidepressants increase suicidality? Yes, they very well could. Now, I would say first this depends on what study you look at. But there are some studies or some people certainly who suggest that the implication of some of the studies is that on average, suicide rates go up. But let's say, but let's, I don't think it's true. But let's say it is true that that suicidal thing goes up on average, even then, is that a reason not to give a kid an SSRI? And it depends, it kind of depends on whether you're a poparian or not or a poparian. And for both people are poparians in practice, but not in theory. Because the obvious question is, well, first of all, let's just let me just tell you about some, some incredibly fun or scary data. They were black box warnings put out in the country a few decades ago about using SSRIs in adolescents. And this happened in multiple different countries across the world. And what and the reason was because they were worried about the signal in the studies about increase suicide alley from an antidepressant, the very thing that's supposed to stop it. And when you look at what happened to the suicide rate right after the regulators said that SS be wary of SSRIs in adolescents. The prescriptions of antidepressants went way, way, way, way down because of the warning. And if anything happened, the actual number of suicides went dramatically up. And in some countries it was really dramatic. I think in America, I can't remember. I'm just making up a number. So don't quote me on that. But like 20%, 30%, there's a pretty substantial increase right after they say, how does that make sense? And you have to be a poparian really to understand how it might make sense. And the simple question is when when when we do a randomized study, are we allowing, are we controlling for changes in knowledge? No, we're actually doing the opposite. Let me let me explain why that's so. Let's say I give an antidepressant to to a kid. And to in a study design trial and two weeks later the kid comes in and says, you know what? I really want to kill myself. And I look and I noticed that because I gave the antidepressant the kid isn't sleeping, they're agitated. They're just not feeling well. What am I going to do? Why? I'm going to take the kid off the medicine. Will that be considered a study failure? Why yes, it will. Should it be considered a study failure? Absolutely it should. Well, that just shows, you know, doctors that giving kids antidepressants is a bad thing. But it doesn't quite show that if you think about it for a minute. Because what about the other kid who wasn't taking off, who got better on it? That kid may have a lower rate of suicidality. So what do I do when I try kids on meds? If someone has a bad reaction, I take them off or you iterate. What is that called? That's called learning how to treat patients. You learn to individualize and a study measures an average, not an individual. And so what we're really doing is we're trying to learn how to treat the individual. It is quite plausible and I'm not the only one who suggested this. That when the FDA came out with its warning, not only did we take off kids who would have done words on the med. We also took stopped kids who would have gotten better on the meds from getting better. And thus the net suicide rate went up. So what should the warning be? By the way, the FDA may not have been incorrect in its signal based on the studies. But that warning doesn't mean don't give kids antidepressants if they need it. What it means is you better friggin watch them damn close and don't give it in the pediatricians office and see them back five months later. Don't do that. If you're going to start a kid who might become suicidal on an antidepress follow them closely. If it makes them worse, take them off. If it makes them better, guess what? Keep them on. So now I come back to your question. Do meds work? They very rarely work the first time. Just like migraine, that's very rarely work the first met time or seizure meds very rarely work the first time. What we do as doctors is we iterate. If something doesn't work, we create a theory about the kinds of things that work with people. And when patients tell us that they're feeling better and we notice that they're doing better, and it's not just what people say, it's also what they do, then we keep them on the meds. And so it depends on what you mean. If you look at a short term study of whether meds work, the answer is most of them don't very well. And this sort of gets back to my original point that we started the interview with. I had the interesting experience of being able to follow people for like five years in these hospitals and try med after med and combination after combination. A guy by the name of Stephen Stahl is maybe the most famous cycle pharmacologist nowadays and who's really, really carefully looked at these very, very sick people that had to create them and use his combinations very much like we did back in North Carolina. Combinate, but he unlike me is smart enough bright enough and brave enough to publish this. And he's become quite famous for doing so. Showing how you really can help the patients. If you take this kind of iterative approach to learning how best to treat people. And you know, we were doing it in North Carolina in the long term psych hospitals. And what's scary to me is that people have sort of are losing that knowledge in our profession. Thank goodness for people like Stephen Stahl who, you know, truth crush to earth will rise again. And he is actively bringing a lot of this knowledge forward that was just in the backwards of these psych hospitals. But it's really very much an exercise in poparian thinking. Drugs are not just what drugs do. Drugs are how you interact with them and make them work. And it's the same way. It's a theme that maybe throughout we've had throughout this. It's not what genes do. It's how you react to them. It's not that that genes cause phenolcettinuria or that genes, you know, cause black skin in there for lynching. It's what you do with the black skin. What you do with the black skin is you honor it. You treat it like it's a normal skin color. And like these are reasonable good decent people. And you don't act like a complete a hold and hurt them. That's what you do. In case of phenolcettinuria, what you do is you figure out what the cause is and then take phenolaleline out of the diet. And what you do when you give people psych meds is you watch what happens and you figure out whether it's helping them or hurting them. And if it's hurting them, take them off. And if it's not, keep them on and you keep trying. And so you learn how to treat people. And that's so yes, it is a bit of a trial and a approach very much like I think in the middle ages, David Deutsch talked about how many of the cathedrals that people built fell because we didn't have a full blown, full on theory of structural engineering. But some of them didn't. And there's some awful, beautiful churches in Europe that stood. And that was done by process of trial and error. We're still in that phase in psychiatry. We don't have a model of what creates general artificial intelligence. And so we're left with trial and error. But just because we're left with trial and error doesn't mean that we can't create something beautiful. And when you look at the European cathedrals as a model, many of them are absolutely amazing. And I'm sure probably many in our audience who are listening and maybe you guys have gone and seen them. They're astounding. And that was done without any theory of general structural engineering. One day we'll do a lot better. But for now we have what we have. And the issue is to keep trying. Or as I like to say with parenting and everything else, it's a commitment to trying to make it work. I'll close like that. All right. Well, thank you very much. I don't have any more questions. Do you have any more questions, Peter? I don't, but I just want to thank you so much for appearing on our humble podcast Michael. I've really enjoyed listening to you and and got a lot out of your perspective. Thank you, sir. I appreciate both of you. You take care. All right. Bye. Bye. Hello again. If you've made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating or whatever platform you use or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the popper, Deutsch theory of knowledge. We believe David Deutsch's four strands tie everything together. So we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at BeNeilson, '01. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group, the many worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting. Thank you.