Episode 70
Dream: The Art and Science of Slumber with Scott Carney
Scott Carney makes his second appearance on the podcast to talk about his new book Dream: the Art and Science of Slumber. It's a deliciously short book that reframes sleep. It's a little bit science and a little bit art and it manages to quote Jurassic Park once, so it's a big win. In this episode, Scott and I chase some rabbits around ideas related to sleep. Have we couched sleep in the language of economic productivity and forgotten what it is to dream? Does our sleep distill our life into emotions and do those exist to form the basis of our memories and who we are in waking life? What does the spectrum between sleep and wake say about our consciousness? We also touch in on Scott's dreams of anacondas and what a rumen does anyway. This is a podcast that gives you, amongst many things, permission to dream.
Find Scott:
Scott's Most Recent Book: Dream: the Art and Science of Slumber
Scott's Instagram: @sgcarney
Previous MBS Episode with Scott
Books Mentioned:
the Experience Machine by Andy Clark
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
Support the Podcast:
Connect with Kate:
email: kate@groundworkcollective.com
Current Discounts for MBS listeners:
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Transcript
Oh, we can't recreate the brilliance.
Kate (:My best conversations always happen outside of the record button, usually after the podcast ends, but some sort of conversation takes place and I'm like, oh, that's, that's where the really juicy stuff was. The book is fantastic and I have a very, kind of a strange direction to take today's, today's conversation. So I hope, I hope that's all right. And I'm hoping my goal lately, I've been interviewing a lot of authors and my goal is to
Scott Carney (:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Scott Carney (:Right, right, totally.
Scott Carney (:love it.
Kate (:pull out some thematic elements that make people want to read the book, but doesn't ask you to recount the book.
Scott Carney (:Yeah, that's the way to do it in general. Like I, first of all, I have no idea how to promote a book anymore. Like I've written books that are super successful, but everything has changed in book promotion in the last like four years. And now I have, my plan is no plan. I am literally doing nothing, except I'm gonna go on like occasional podcasts and I put out some YouTube videos. And I think that's sort of.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:what it is. Like I think that's book promotion these days. Like I don't care about reviews anymore. Like I don't care about going on getting the New York Times or anything. Like it's just no, I'm just going to do it this way.
Kate (:Yeah, I think.
Kate (:No, and I think people have, I think your work has a following unto itself and people are really interested in your perspective and the way that you come at certain problems. And I think that this is, you came at this from a direction that I did not see coming and just tickled me to no end, if I'm being really honest. And I think that's what I loved the most about it is this book really surprised me.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Hahaha!
Scott Carney (:It's weird, it's a weird book, because A, I'm a weird person and B, yeah, right, totally. I'm a weird person, but also my interests changed. I really wanted something very tightly focused on just napping. And we're gonna nap and I teach you how to nap and I figure out the science of napping. And I was like, there's nothing to that. There's so little involved in napping other than.
Kate (:You and me both.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:you know, a couple, like a couple technical things, but not even that technical. And then once you get that, it's like, am I gonna bore you with even more? Like I need to say the same thing 50 times. And it's the other thing is like, the reason I did the book like this, like I've written long books, like my last book with the Vortex was like five or 600 pages. And I was like, wait a minute, when I read nonfiction books, I get bored even with amazing authors by about page 80.
Kate (:Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:And then I'm like, well, do I finish the book? But what if I just wrote 80 pages? What if I just stopped there? And so I'm trying to see if that's like a good way to like get in touch with people. Like I'll say all the important stuff really quickly and then go and be fruitful readers. Go get another book.
Kate (:Yeah.
Kate (:Mm hmm. I think that's really that's a really interesting thing. I've read a lot of nonfiction this year, and I've gotten bored in some I'm harder to bore, maybe but I think one of my favorite books of the year was Dan Egan's The Devil's Element, which is really a quite short exploration of phosphorus. And and is incredible and the sort of paradoxical nature of how we are running out of minable phosphorus.
Scott Carney (:Mmm.
Scott Carney (:Whoa!
Kate (:and applying it as fertilizer, but it is also creating toxic algal blooms in our waterways because so much of it runs off of agricultural lands. And he covers the history.
Scott Carney (:Oh.
Scott Carney (:You read very specific books. You chose a phosphorus book as your... I love it. Love it.
Kate (:Oh, favorite book of the year. Top, top book of the year, phosphorus. I'm a weird person. Told you I was a weird person. Okay. Um, you can dive in a little bit. I kind of, cause this is, this is a, it hit me in a funny place, I think too, because I've had the weirdest year of sleep of my life. I've had insomnia for the first time in my life. Um, and I had a resurgence of, I have sleep paralysis, um, which is a
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Oh no!
Kate (:which is a fascinating, fascinating phenomenon.
Scott Carney (:I have ideas and thoughts about sleep paralysis. I've only had it like once or twice, but it's terrifying and it's like this weird thing where your body, usually you're paralyzed when you go to sleep. That's why, because when you're dreaming, you're acting out, your brain thinks it's the real world. Like your brain thinks a dream is the real world. So it's like sending the signals to move your muscles. And then we have this other evolutionary program to be like, you really shouldn't do that people. And it paralyzes your body.
Kate (:I do too.
Kate (:Hmm.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:even though your brain is doing that. And then it also like squenches off cortisol. So you can't, you physically cannot be stressed out in a dream, which is weird. Cause some people, yeah. I mean, you can, there's other things that happen. There's other chemicals and things, but like you don't release cortisol. And then you're, when you, when you wake up, that paralysis program was not like removed and then you're stuck.
Kate (:That fascinated me. I didn't know that until your book.
Scott Carney (:and it's super anxiety inducing because you're usually not stuck in life. Usually you don't have that paralysis feeling. And then that makes you anxious. And then you get this, like sometimes, yeah. And the common thing was like the hag that sits on your chest. This is the old timey thing. They call it the night hag in the old timey, in like the 1700s. And it was the feeling of a person actually on you, because that's what your brain does. It's like, no, someone else is doing this to me. And, mm-hmm.
Kate (:Yes, very.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:There's a paranoia that can come with it, like a feeling that there is another entity in the room. And I mean, just crippling anxiety that you are, my fear is always that I now have locked in syndrome, right? That I'm stuck forever within my own body, unable to move, but still conscious.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm
Scott Carney (:Yeah.
Scott Carney (:Well, you had it. You did have locked-in syndrome. It was just short, like short locked-in syndrome. And since you have it, you probably know how to get out of it better than I do. But like my understanding is that if you just tell yourself, oh, I'm having sleep paralysis right now, it will go away soon. That helps.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:This is really funny because my sleep paralysis really only happens when I'm napping or when I am dozing after being awake in the middle of the night, which is usually how insomnia shows up for me. And so it kind of happens in those, in those lighter spaces of sleep. And I often find that when I am in sleep paralysis, I am on what I would call the cusp of that hypnagogic space that I am awake, but not quite.
Scott Carney (:Oh yeah, okay.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:Like there is a little bit of an element of thick, viscous, dreamy quality to everything. And I find that getting out of that sort of experience of the groggiest you've ever felt is really hard. And one of the things, few things I can regulate is my breathing. And often if I can speed up my breathing, I can kind of begin to wake up my body. And then I have to force myself into a sitting like,
Scott Carney (:right?
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm
Scott Carney (:Okay.
Scott Carney (:Oh.
Kate (:up and sitting or else I'll fall right back in to that paralysis state.
Scott Carney (:Yeah, interesting. So actually, we're probably gonna get into this. We've already just jumped into the podcast. We're like, all right, where are we going? So hypnagogia is the, and I pronounce that like eight different ways. So I'll say it's like three different ways in this podcast. Yeah, me too. So what that is, that's your first, like that's when you're falling asleep or you're not quite asleep, or you're sort of asleep and you're having these like sort of free associations. I don't think you're getting sleep paralysis there. I think you actually went down at least one more level into like,
Kate (:Yeah
Kate (:Me too, I say hypnagoja.
Kate (:Mm.
Scott Carney (:stage two sleep and then woke up out of it. And you're like, you know, when you wake up from a nap and you feel like you're underwater, you're like, bruh, things just don't work right. I don't know what's going on. That is, you were sort of in between that and the next stage where you actually get paralyzed. And like, that's the worst nap. Like the worst nap ends at that point because you're like, how do you get out of it? Like it's hard. Like.
Kate (:Yes.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:Yeah, that's exactly what it is. And I think, I mean, since we're here, I just want to dive right in because I think that one of the interesting things is to think about, and I always think about this whenever I'm in sleep paralysis is like, who am I in this space? And one of the things that I thought was really interesting that your book played with was this idea of consciousness.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:idea that we think that who we are in sleep is different than who we are in our wakeful life and playing with both that idea and the idea of consciousness as a continuum, not an on-off switch. And I kind of wanted to start there because I thought that this was a really, I don't know, interesting place to play around in.
Scott Carney (:Right?
Scott Carney (:Yeah, it's the most interesting part of my journey. Like it's why I didn't do a napping book, it's why I did a dream book, because all of my, not all of my books, but most of my books have to do with consciousness in some way, like who are we? What does awareness mean? How do I act in the world? What is my relationship with outside of my body? And dreams are sort of like what's going on inside the body. And the, we can talk about this in a few different ways, but when...
Kate (:They do. Yeah.
Scott Carney (:we are dreaming, like in the normal waking world, when you sense what's going on outside your body, your flesh, your flesh sack, you get all of that information through your nerves, through your peripheral nervous system. And in order for it to get into your brain, it has to literally travel. Like it has to travel and traveling takes time. Not, yeah, not very much time, but a little bit of time.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:Okay. Yeah, this is part of it.
Scott Carney (:In fact, like on average, it's like, depending on the length of the signal, it's about one fifth of a second. That's how far the lag is. And from an evolutionary perspective, a fifth of a second doesn't matter all the time, but it does sometimes. Like if someone was shooting an arrow at you or throwing a spear at you, you don't wanna be a fifth of a second behind in your reactions. You wanna be like on the spot, but you literally cannot detect.
Your brain can't detect and react in that time. So what your brain does, and this is insane, is it gets that information and it assembles the information from that world into experience, we can call it. This is the experience of consciousness, which is a simulation of the world, because your brain isn't directly experiencing the world. It's experiencing the electrical and chemical signals and it's telling you what those signals mean. And so there's that like already, what you experience in the world is a simulation.
and it's behind time. So then what your brain does, and this is all very well established neuroscience, like I'm not making shit up, this is the way it goes. What your brain does is then it makes a whole predictive model about the world and speeds it up one fifth of a second. So you're not only not experiencing the world, you're experiencing the world behind time, and then you're experiencing the simulation of the world in advance. And that is how you and me are talking.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:That is how you do everything. It's like this weird simulation plus prediction. And sometimes it's wrong. Like sometimes it's wrong. Which leads me to this like stunning, stunning revelation, which is that throughout the day, when you're awake, you are actually dreaming. The simulation we live in is a dream because it's a projection, it's a simulation. So when you're dreaming,
Kate (:Yes.
Scott Carney (:in when at sleep, like when you're actually asleep and doing what we normally think of as dreaming, that is a more fidelity simulation of consciousness than anything else. So I'm flipping everything on its head because it all happens in your dream. It doesn't need to speed it up. Doesn't need to make predictions. It just comes from what's already there.
This can lead me to like an existential crisis. If you wanna go down the hole. Now I'm not saying like the world's a simulation like Elon Musk might make it, but it is a neurological simulation that we all live in.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:Have you read Andy Clark's The Experience Machine? Is this on your radar? I pulled this out because you have this sort of tension that you put in the book between perception and conception, right? That we have these external stimuli, which you've written about a lot. And then we also have our projections, our predictive capabilities within the world.
Scott Carney (:No, but it sounds great. Great title.
Kate (:And Andy Clark is a philosopher that kind of philosophizes about neuroscience. And I actually pulled out this little quote because I think that this is a really salient thing to bring into the conversation. He says, since brains are never simply turned on from scratch, not even first thing in the morning when I awake, predictions and expectations are always in play, proactively structuring human experience every moment of every day.
On this alternative account, the perceiving brain is never passively responding to the world. Instead, it is actively trying to hallucinate the world, but checking that hallucination against the evidence coming in via the senses. In other words, the brain is constantly painting a picture and the role of the sensory information is mostly to nudge the brushstrokes when they fail to match up with the incoming evidence. That means that we, yeah, isn't that, yeah.
Scott Carney (:That sounds awesome. Yeah, I should have coded that in my book because it's really well described, totally.
Kate (:Yeah, yeah, and so, and he kind of goes on to say that this also means that the experiences that we have had within the world are going to form the way that we conceive of these conceptions of these hallucinations that we are projecting outwards to maybe make up for this one fifth of a second time, time travel experience that we're having.
Scott Carney (:Yeah, absolutely. And it's so, the thing that's so elegant about what that passage does is it says, we're playing this hallucinatory prediction game, but we are playing it in a real world. Like we're playing it in an actual physical world that has actual physical contact, like consequences. And the real world's not an invention, but our perception of it is. And that is bananas. Like the technical word is bananas for that. And...
Kate (:No. Yes.
Scott Carney (:And, but what does that mean to be conscious? What does that mean to be human? What does that mean to like have emotions and predictive behavior? And all of that stuff is like what I'm like running through in this dream book. Like that's my entry point. And it also like interestingly answers one of the questions in my book, The Wedge, that was like missing for me. Like, you know, in The Wedge, I'm talking about the same stuff, like stimulation coming from the outside world, how you respond to that stimulation. Is that a bad thing or a good thing? Like, is that ice water?
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:gonna kill me or is it gonna make me healthy and do I enjoy it? So that ability for you to say, okay, this is fun is like a sort of a superpower that humans have. But one of the things that I did not adequately explain in the wedge is where emotions come from in the first place. And like, because like how can you be sad or angry or fearful of something if you don't even like.
have the ability to form the idea of sad or fearful or angley. Where does that emerge from? And this book allowed me to sort of fill in that gap. And emotions come from dreams. Like they actually emerge from dreams. You can't have, like, you know when you wake up and you have a bad night's sleep, you know how the next day you're sort of an asshole? Like you say mean things to your partner, you snap on somebody on the phone, and it's like you feel like it's sort of out of character.
It's because you didn't sleep. It's because you didn't get emotional processing that night before. And we can go all into what that's all about if you wanna go that direction.
Kate (:To some degree, I think I want to leave some of that in the book. I think it's interesting to talk about this, though, because I think it forms the foundation of who we are. And I was really interested. This is going to be a little silly. I don't see where you take this, but you mentioned the word just six times in the book. And I thought that this was. Yeah, so I get to search. I get to search it. And I love this. And you talk a lot about how the gist of.
Scott Carney (:Oh, I sent you the PDF, didn't I? I'm like, what? Ha ha ha.
Kate (:are dreaming, and I have a quote here, is emotion. You say, as the brain cycles through whatever got collected in your bin of short-term memories from the day, a cognitive process kicks in to discard useless information and forge them into gists of memories that later turn into the basis for your emotions. Another way to say that is that, as the brain churns through the grist of short-term memories, it spits out two byproducts, emotions and long-term memories.
And I was really struck by how often you return to the word gist in such a short book, because I had recently learned that there's sort of this relationship between the word gist and yeast. The word yeast is based on gist, which the Latin is to boil down. So to boil down to the essence. But yeast is also from gist. And what I find interesting about that is that yeast is sort of the boiling down of life, but also the place from which life
Scott Carney (:Ha ha.
Scott Carney (:Whoa.
Kate (:proliferates. And I think that emotions, I think that emotions are that thing, right? This is the very fundamental aspect of who we are. And it is also the place from like the proliferative generative force of who we are.
Scott Carney (:Whoa, deep. I don't even know. Only a butcher would come up with this A. But go on.
Scott Carney (:Yeah, like, you know, we like to think of ourselves as like Vulcans. Like we like to think of ourselves, we are very logical in everything we do and we're smart and we can look at the data of the world and like computers figure it all out because we are super duper smart. Like we like, and we don't actually think of ourselves as Vulcans, but we like to think that our decisions are as logical as a Vulcans. And right, but the...
Kate (:We love to think that. Very rational.
Scott Carney (:Very rational, oh, I'm right, because look at my facts. But like most of the time we take actions not because we've thought it out, we've crunched the data. We act because we feel we should do something. Should I cross the street or not? So I look right and I see a car and I don't say, well, rate times time equals, okay, and that's about 50 meters. And then it will intersect with me at X point in the middle, so I will not go now. No, I'm like, I look at that like, hmm, that scares me a little bit. I will wait.
Kate (:Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe
Scott Carney (:That is how we, that is like usually how we react. Where I go down the street and I see someone who I love and I'm like, oh, it's so good to see you. Or I see someone who I hate and I'm like, I don't like you at all. And I go across the street or whatever. And like, this is, it's all feelings. And that feelings are actually based on data, but it's based on data that was processed by dreams. Because throughout the day, your short-term memory,
is collecting everything. Like I like to think of the brain as, it's not an exact anagram, connect, it's not exact metaphor, but we'll go with a analogy. There we are. It's not an exact analogy, but we're saying that the brain is sort of like a computer and you have your RAM chips, those short-term things, when you turn off your computer, it all vaporizes, and you have long-term memory, the data storage, ones and zeros on the hard drive. In the day you work on RAM, just like a computer works on RAM, it's all short-term stuff, it comes in,
Kate (:Analogy? Analogy.
Scott Carney (:and it just sort of floods your senses and it's sort of there and you connect, you actually collect more information than you can consciously connect, collect your access, but it's all sort of there. At night, your brain's like, I don't wanna fill up my hard drive. So I'm gonna discard all the crap, like the quality of light, maybe someone asked me to take out the trash. I don't need to remember that when I'm 80, right? I'm just gonna discard all of this information, but then compress it into essentially like a zip file.
And then that stuff, that compression is an emotion. Like all of that stuff gets compressed into one little thing and then it's stored in like this very easy to read format and it's like a feeling about things. And that is why we dream. Like that, well, there's like a few things that happen in dream, but that's like one of the primary functions of dreaming.
Kate (:I think it's really interesting that you couched that in terms of computational efficiency. And I'm going to tell you why. And what surprised me the most about your book was this exploration and flipping on its head of productivity. And productivity features a lot within the context of the book. And the...
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:idea now I think is that we have this idea that all the conversations that we're having around sleep are around efficiency, right? We have our little tracker devices and we just want to make sleep as efficient as possible instead of maybe leaning into a different version of sleep that you begin to define in the book. And even the language that we have around sleep is the language of economics and of efficiency.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Hmm.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:maybe in many ways the reasons that humans have been so efficient at sort of world girdling, as it were, for better or for worse, right, is that we sleep less than our primate ancestors, making us arguably a more efficient organism.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I mean, what was the quote by, I think it's Alan Rexhafin, the sleep scientist, one of the early most important ones said that, if sleep was not absolutely vital, then evolution made a horrible mistake. Like it's the biggest mistake evolution made, because you're spending eight hours not doing stuff when life needs to do stuff. Like you need to go mate, you need to go hunt food, you need to do the things. So why are we spending eight hours not doing things?
had to be very, very important to our survival. But that question of efficiency is really interesting because I think that sleep has also been hijacked by the industrial work method and the invention of electric lighting, the nine to five work day. It all messes up with our sleep. It's not, we didn't evolve to be in a, to clock in and clock out of a factory. Like that's...
Kate (:Yes.
Scott Carney (:something we hijack.
Kate (:No, and you know, it's funny, one of the things that's been happening to me lately is I'm usually reading like four or five books at once, whether that's smart or not. And it's interesting the way that they'll overlap, not on purpose, right? I don't know that they're gonna overlap, but I've been reading Saving Time by Jenny O'Dell. Have you seen this book? I've been reading a lot about time this year. So I read Richard Muller's Now, which is The Physics of Time. I read Ellen Leightman's Einstein's Dreams, which is sort of a fictional.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm. Yeah, me too.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:No, cool.
Scott Carney (:Oh yeah, uh-huh.
Kate (:account of time, but saving time has been a really interesting peak at the rise of productivity and the rise of efficiency and even the way that we began to codify time. And I thought that you touching on this was really critical, that we have this space where electric lighting comes into the picture and all of the sudden that
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:creates this means by which we can create more work hours in the day. And so that people that are selling their time as labor can then labor longer. Better, longer, yes, more. Make more money for corporations, get on more assembly lines. And you also touch on Bell Hooks and Trisha Hersey looking at the nap ministry and how plantations thought about
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm. Better, longer, more efficiently, make more money. Like. Ha ha ha.
Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Yeah.
Kate (:labor time and what that did to black sleep.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm, absolutely. I mean, Teresa Hershey's book is, is it the Nap Manifesto? And I forget the exact title of it, right? But she founded the Nap Ministry, which is like get around a nap and do it as an act of revolution against the grind culture. That's how she calls it. And I think that's a really good way to call it is that we grind as Western Americans at labor that.
Kate (:I'll pull it up.
Scott Carney (:doesn't always serve our purposes, it serves someone. That's why you're selling time. Like I don't need to, if I was selling life insurance, selling other people life insurance doesn't really let me survive in any real way other than I get money to do the things I need to do. But then you expand those work hours to take up as much as possible. And as a segue, I just wanna say that COVID sucked, but the one thing that it did for us,
that was so remarkable is that so many people started working from home. And then they realized when they worked from home, they could get their stuff done in a reasonable amount of time. And then they could fuck right off and do whatever else they wanted. They could take naps, they could take a walk around the block and it wasn't like this guilty, like I have to, like the time is what matters, not the efficiency. And I think a lot of people, not all people of course, but a lot of people.
have sort of breaking that bond. And I think the reason most people don't wanna go back to the office right now is because they're like, forget that, I hate selling my time, it is inhuman.
Kate (:Yes, it is. I mean, it is in many ways inhuman and we haven't been doing it really for all that long. And we used to have a lot more time. I actually think agriculture breaks time in a really specific way that prior to this as hunter-gatherers, we had a lot more leisure time, a lot more time to lean into naps and to perhaps into polyphasic sleep.
and these other modalities of sleep that as you talk about in the book, we might not even have ever experienced as modern humans.
Scott Carney (:Yeah. Or we look at something which is totally natural as something which is bad. For instance, waking up in the middle of the night, you know, at midnight. Like oftentimes I'll wake up somewhere between midnight and three a.m. for a little bit and I'll look at the ceiling and I'll be like, gosh, why aren't I asleep? I need to be so productive tomorrow. And and we all hate that. We're like, oh, man, I had terrible sleep last night. Whereas in our evolutionary past, or if you not even that, if you just
put a human in a natural light cycle for, I think, three weeks, they become polyphasic, which means they wake up in the middle of the night and they have this sort of semi-conscious state where they're up there and they're thinking thoughts that are different than waking thoughts. They're like sort of more abstract, especially if you test them. They have these more abstract connections and they're thinking things that's more emotional, more spiritual. And...
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:Hmm.
Scott Carney (:And that is normal human consciousness. Like that is bang standard normal. It's not really insomnia unless you think that you have to, the unnatural thing was the, I am waking up at eight and I'm going to be at the office at nine, I'm gonna leave at five or 5.30 or six with overtime, right? That is the unnatural thing. It's not the waking up, which is why, and the other thing that humans do is around 3 p.m., something which corresponds with the melatonin dip.
around that time, about eight to 10 hours after you wake up in the morning, your melatonin drops. The other thing that happens there is like that's normal. It's normal to take a nap as a primate at three-ish PM. Work doesn't like that.
Kate (:Mm-hmm. Not to drink another coffee, another Red Bull, another Monster Energy drink, and to power through it, and to sort of go into this, you called it a relentless culture, which I really liked. And that is my sleep pattern. I wake up in the middle of the night regularly.
Scott Carney (:Right!
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Yeah. Wouldn't it be amazing if you just woke up in the middle of the night instead of had the first thought, gosh, darn it, I'm not asleep. Gosh, God damn you, gods of sleep, right? Because we all think it, right? Because we're raised in this culture. What if instead we thought, oh, well, where are my thoughts going? Let's see what this is about, right? And then, because sometimes I'll, in that crunching,
Kate (:How do you know what I'm thinking?
Scott Carney (:night of anxiety, I will, sometimes you just like, your brain spins in like meaningless ways, but sometimes it spins in ways that are actually super useful and gives you like actionable things to do in the morning. And you feel anxious about it, maybe your anxiety fueled it. Like I, you know, there's a lot of things to pick apart here, but sometimes I'll wake up in that middle of the night and I'll have the big idea. And then that big idea becomes useful when I'm writing in the morning or, you know, if I was gonna go hunt anacondas.
and I found the perfect way to hunt an anaconda. This is my hunter gatherer past. You know, that's anacondas. Yeah, yeah, they're delicious. Don't let them eat you, you eat the anaconda.
Kate (:Anacondas. Yeah. Mm hmm. Go to Florida. I think you can, I think you can hunt pythons in Florida just willy nilly. Cause they're taking over the Everglades.
Scott Carney (:See, and there we have it. And see, what a nice random thought we had, which means we're good dreamers.
Kate (:I really liked this exploration and it actually helped me reframe my own middle of the night wakeups where I often become ruminative in a negative way. I get on the worry wheel and spin and run. But lately I've been exploring what it would mean to enjoy that time and I tend to live in a, I'm lucky enough to live in a pretty circadian aligned situation and to be able to do that.
Scott Carney (:Right. Yeah.
Kate (:I did want to bring up, I had to pull this out because I think it's really interesting that you explore second sleep and you explore this as a time that has historically correlated with a lot of spiritual practice, that a lot of monks and priests and various times, this was a time to become more connected with God. And because I just can't help myself, in this book, Saving Time, she talks about the creation of the clock.
which is actually born out of the bells from these monasteries, and that they set these regular chunks of hours that were initially calls to prayer, including that eighth one in the middle of the night, and that the bourgeois class adopted these as a really great way to demarcate a cleaner idea of labor.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:and that this is where a lot of actual clock hours were born out of. And so I thought that there was a funny, a little connection in there.
Scott Carney (:Yet time and spirituality are like central to the human existence. What, you know, the Mayan cycles, we have these seasonal cycles, the day cycles, the, you know, why does, do all the ancient religions care about the equinox and the solstice and all of these other things? So then the demarcations during the day became vital to prayer, right? We have.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:in Islam, right, you pray five times a day, right, at different demarcated times, and that segmented your day, and it was essentially a spiritual thing, right? You know, I would assume, and who knows how religions really start, like there's so many questions, right? But I assume like this is, it's because we're giving praise to God, we're supplicating, or we're taking a time to think about our relationship for why we're here, but then that becomes super convenient also,
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:Lots of questions.
Scott Carney (:to be like, well, you got your call to prayer, yes, but then get back to work, right? So you sort of invert it to become a tool of the society that controls us. And if anything about dreams, like if you think about what a dream is, it's so random. You're connecting all this random information and you're thinking very abstractly. Like it is revolutionary. Like dreams were like designed to be revolutionary because they're like, we're not doing the.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:the A to B focused thought stuff, this is our time to be like insane. Like you hallucinate, you're being super abstract and that abstraction is vital to the human organism. Like it's there because of evolution. And as we progress as a society where we dream less because we dedicate less time to sleep, we are becoming less human because we're not sleeping well in part.
Kate (:Mm-mm.
Kate (:Yes.
Kate (:Yes.
Scott Carney (:There's a lot of other reasons too, but like that's a big one.
Kate (:I wondered in this, because we do bend time and dreams and this becomes, and this space, this second sleep that you described becomes a space for creativity. And because you set so much of the book kind of talking about some productivity and efficiency that led to some of our sleep deprivation, I started to wonder if creativity was, and dreaming, dreaming and creativity were the antidote to some of our efficiency and productivity.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:that they feel to be antithetical to that and they begin to break it.
Scott Carney (:Yeah. Well, why do we have to be so productive? Like that's a great, just essential question that I think we have to grapple with as a society. It's like, what is the point of being productive if it doesn't serve you? Like, if it doesn't serve, like, you know, obviously we need to eat, we need to meet our needs. Like there's a level of productivity which does have to happen as it has happened since the beginning of evolution. You found your mates, you counted anacondas, right? You did those things, but.
but it wasn't all about productivity. Like I have cats, okay? I have two cats and they, I think there's one right here. Yeah, there's one sleeping right now and it is doing just fine with its nap. And I'm assuming that the cats in the wild sleep a hell of a lot too. That was super evolutionarily useful for them to get there. And as humans, when we think that...
Kate (:Heh.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:productivity and the reason of being alive is doing things. So what do I do? I write books, I make silly YouTube videos, I'm podcasting, you butcher things. And that stuff is meaningful to who we become because what we are is what we do, but it's also like how we ponder, how we ruminate, how we make sense of this. Why is making silly YouTube videos important? Like,
It's not the YouTube video creation. It's what those mean. It's like you're listening to this podcast because it is meaningful to you. It's not just a distraction, I hope. I mean, actually, I don't know listener. Maybe it's like, I don't. Yeah. Right.
Kate (:We won't make assumptions about you listener. Might be distracting yourself. That's okay.
Scott Carney (:Right, and then again, maybe distracting is good. And you also mentioned that time, time in dreams, and I think we can look at that for just one second, whereas in the day, time goes forward. Like it's one minute after another, or actually, the way we experience time is not actually segmented like a clock. Like sometimes time feels like it moves faster and slower during the day. Like that is a physiological empirical reality. But in dreams,
Kate (:Please.
Scott Carney (:Dreams don't give a fuck about time. It's like, here I am in my childhood bedroom and now I'm being chased by dinosaurs, which I never have met, right? But I'm in, and now I'm in the future and now I'm fighting terrorists. Like it is, it's like, it's, and it all happens in one seamless simulated hallucination that makes perfect sense to you. And you don't feel any different in that dream space. Like you feel like you're yourself.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:in that entire thing, even though time is bending all around you like the movie Inception.
Kate (:Mm-hmm. Yes, absolutely. And I think that this was sleep allows us to time travel. I mean, both literally, if you're if you're out there with some dinosaurs, but also within the space of and you say this when we're awake, time seems to move forward in one direction and the transitions between who we are from one moment to the next retain a measure of continuity.
In dreams, it's entirely possible or even ordinary to perceive yourself in a different body with a smaller or taller frame, a different gender, or the ability to fly, while at the same time, moving between different timeframes. And so it is, it's bending and changing our concept of time and I think it is also laying down that emotional foundation that also changes our perception of time throughout the day because fear makes time
slow down and sometimes joy makes time slow down, sometimes it makes it speed up, you know, and so that also changes our time reference in our waking lives.
Scott Carney (:Yeah, and like if you have like, you know, what anxiety makes things slow down, like if you have a traumatic event, that actual time period stays with you, like a key frame in a video editing for years and years and years until you are able to process it, discard it, reduce it to a gist or discard it. Like it, like, we like to think that everything makes total perfect rational sense, but our-
reactions to the world, the way we actually experience being alive, it is bizarre if you actually start segmenting, like, what was happening here? Why is my mind flitting back to my dreams last night? Or why am I thinking about the last time I spoke with you on this podcast? That actually happened, what, a year or two ago? And yet, we're, the brain casting a thought to a different time is time traveling. It's...
Kate (:Yes.
Scott Carney (:just that my body is time traveling, but that simulation, you know, I don't experience the world, I experience my simulation, so I can move my simulation around consciously. That's bizarre, it's bizarre, it's awesome.
Kate (:One of the things that's actually come up a lot this year on the podcast, I was just reading, um, Kat Bohannon's Eve. Have you picked this up? I feel like you'd actually really like it.
Scott Carney (:No, but you're you better put a book list for me to look at because it's not you've given tons of great suggestions
Kate (:I'll give you a book list and there's always a book list and show notes because that's what I like about this, just a book recommendation podcast. She kind of talks about how crucial the idea of story might be to the evolution of what it means to be human and I think fundamentally story is our ability to look at different situations, and Daniel Quinn also would argue that within hunting, this really happens, that we're telling a story as we track.
Scott Carney (:Mmm... Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Daniel Quinn, the guy who did Ishmael? Is that who you're talking about? Okay, right, okay. I'm like, what? Ha ha ha.
Kate (:Yeah, yeah, I know. This is gonna be weird, but I'm gonna go there. Whatever, whatever. In the story of Bee, he talks about this idea that our ability to tell ourselves a story is part of what makes us human, and that the first stories may very well have been about hunting, because what we're doing is we're looking at a set of tracks. And I hike every morning, and with some light snow cover, I've been looking at a lot of tracks.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Totally.
Kate (:and to think about what might have happened in the past. So I'm looking at these little mouse tracks and watching it scurry and imagining what might have happened and telling myself this story that will then lead into my present where I have intersected with these tracks and a predictive measure of where that mouse might be in the future. And so I think our ability to...
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:to dream and to time travel and to have memory and emotions is this actually bending of time in a way that we don't always think of as that. And yeah.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Yeah, absolutely. It's funny you mentioned this. I will talk about my own wildlife tracking experiences, which just happened this morning as well. Last night, my cat brought a mouse into the house and we noticed it like looking under the refrigerator like really intensely. And I went down there with a flash, I couldn't see the mouse. I was like, ah, she's probably inventing it. Like she did, she's acting like there's no mouse there. And then
Kate (:Excellent, I love it when they do that.
Scott Carney (:and my wife and I were both looking there and whatever. We went to bed. This morning we found a dead mouse on our carpet, right? So we're like, oh, yep, she was into it. And then this morning I was out taking out the trash or something and I saw the mouse tracks and I saw my cat's tracks in the snow. So the whole story has come together through signs of never seeing the live mouse, but knowing exactly what happened. But we do piece that information together. Like seeing tracks in snow indicates historical past.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:it's meaningless unless you know what that means. Like if you see the owl's wing feathers in the snow and you see the blood on the snow, like you're creating that story. And I forget in Story of B, it's been like 25 years since I've read that book, but there were anthropologists who used, oh, I can't remember the name, but it's like homo narrativist. That's not the word, but like it's the idea, like the storytelling human is.
Kate (:Yes. Yeah, that we are we are a storytelling human and Eve cat bowhannon makes an argument that language might have really first occurred around the concept of a story. And she tells this story of perhaps the first the first woman to tell a story and I think that we are very much story creative.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:And you talk about this too, that perhaps when we go to sleep, we could tell ourselves a bit of a bedtime story.
Scott Carney (:Oh yeah, if you wanna fall asleep, here's a trick. Here's, like I have a couple hacks in the book, like a couple things you can do because everyone wants some tips. And I found this one really cool. It's just close your eyes. The first thing that comes into your mind, whatever that might be, maybe it's you're in a place, like you're in a forest, right? And you think about the forest and you say, well, what happens next? And then you see a rabbit and then you follow the rabbit. And then the rabbit gets eaten by an anaconda.
Right? And then the anaconda slithers away and then you chase the anaconda, then you pet the anaconda. Like it doesn't really matter what happens, but you just add one event after another and that can actually lead you into that free associative sleep that lets you fall asleep. Or at least you just get a good yarn out of it. Because you're letting your brain do the thing the brain wants to and you can just lead it into that.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:I loved that because I'm constantly telling myself stories and it was a way to have a little bit more agency and autonomy over the, I think sometimes I feel like I'm going along in the story that my brain is telling me and instead this felt like you get to sort of begin to weave that yarn instead of just following your brain down a rabbit hole.
Scott Carney (:Yeah. Yeah, and it's natural and I don't know if it matters. Like I don't really know if the content of dreams directly matters. And this was one of the things that I was talking about with a neuroscientist at MIT named Adam Harhorwitz. And I was like, look, if you're the dream guy, and he's like the dream guy right now, I was like, if you're dreaming, like why, and dreams are important, why can't you remember them?
Kate (:Mm.
Scott Carney (:And he was like, why do you think we're supposed to remember them? And I was like, you're just supposed to experience them. They're doing their forgetting thing and you're supposed to experience those things. And that's like the free associations going on in your brain as your brain makes new neural pathways. Like in the day you make focused neural pathways, I see anaconda, I must kill, I hit anaconda on head with.
Kate (:Hehehehe
Kate (:Hmm.
Scott Carney (:I don't know, how do you hunt anaconda? You probably know better than me. With a thing, I hit it with a thing. Yeah, you club the anaconda. So, but it's a focused thought, whereas the dream thought's like, there's the anaconda. Wait, no, is it a rabbit? Oh, wait, who are those terrorists? I like elephants. And it goes through these random directions to tell the story. And...
Kate (:I don't know. Yeah, let's club it. We're going to club them. Yeah, that sounds right.
Kate (:Hmm.
Scott Carney (:And all of those are emotional associations. They become emotional associations as well. And dreams don't need a direct path because they don't have a direct output, whereas in the day you do have direct outputs. Dreams allow you to think outside the box and most of the time it's probably useless, like to be efficient. But you know, what's the point of being efficient in the first place?
Kate (:Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking as you were saying that, that you can just allow dreams to be what they are. They don't have to be this thing that creates an output. They can just be this experience that perhaps creates an emotion that provides a foundation. And maybe even, and I kind of want to go back in time because you said something about anxiety and these sort of, you know, if you have PTSD and a memory that...
The dream space is also a space of healing. And you got into this idea of suggestibility, which I really loved. And you talked about, I thought this was so great, in America at least, we like our rugged individuals who buck any attempt at undue influence. Isn't it strange that every attitude towards stubbornness also correlates with worse healing outcomes?
Scott Carney (:great.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:Um, and within this context, you talked about some of the placebo and nocebo effects and, and how dreams can be a space where our minds begin to heal and our, our bodies heal too, um, in sleep.
Scott Carney (:Yeah, and with the placebo effect, what they find is the people who get the best placebo responses, which is like your, you know, placebo effect gets this bad rap, it's like, oh, that's just placebo. But like in my mind, like if you healed, so the output was important, right? And so if you can have a better placebo effect, that seems good to me, whether or not it's quote unquote medicine or not, like I don't care about medicine, I care about the outcomes and outputs. And the people who have the stronger placebo responses,
are people who are suggestible, who are easily, who are manipulatable, who are, all of these things that we think of as weak, as like really bad traits. Like I don't wanna be a person who's just a sap. I'm the best skeptic in the world. Well, being the best skeptic in the world actually makes you unhealthy. And so how do we reckon with that? Like how do you be, cause I don't wanna be taken advantage by charlatans, right? But I also...
Kate (:Absolutely, I don't want to answer every email that says that they have my Netflix account password. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Scott Carney (:Right, right, you don't wanna be a sap. On the other hand, like you can just, for some things if you just let go and you're like, okay, we're gonna see where this goes, that actually can make you, you know, it can do whatever your body needs to do to heal because you're not forcing an issue. And yeah, and so if you can teach yourself to be suggestible in the right contexts, right? And then that's the trick, right? And that's where I don't have the answer. What is the right context?
Scott will not tell you, because he doesn't know either. Because I've been taken advantage of by charlatans as well over the years. So it does happen. But.
Kate (:Me too.
Scott Carney (:Don't be too hard and don't be too soft, you know? And that's the yin and yang of dreaming too. Like you have your unfocused time for eight hours, you have your focused time for the rest of the time and that's okay. And the other thing, you know, I end the book with this really cool meditation called yoga nidra, which is sort of getting like popular in the press these days. Oh yeah.
Kate (:I think Huberman has the non-sleep deep rest, yoga nija protocols have popularized that.
Scott Carney (:Yeah, yeah, and you know, actually I talked to Andrew when I was doing this book, and I was like, hey, hook me up with your Yoga Nidra sources, because like, I don't have, like I didn't have good ones, and so he hooked me up with Kamini Desai, who has a book called Yoga Nidra, which sounds like on topic, on brand, so I talked with her, and when I was reading the book, it's interesting, like, her book is like mostly like, here's why you need to Yoga Nidra.
Like it's like, it's like all like the, the why, the, you need to do this because it makes you better in a number of ways. So it's like 300 pages of that. And then it's like, here's how to do it. Like at the end, which is essentially listen to a playlist that, and then follow their instructions. Like it's not so different than hypnosis. And there are ways to do it yourself without the playlist. Like that's cause it's an ancient technique that happened even before records were invented.
But it's a way of thinking about your body and sort of letting go and having calmness enter to your body and like allow yourself to heal or implant a suggestion that in your subconscious that then what may play out in the future. And the crazy thing for me is like, I had set up this interview with her like two or three weeks beforehand. I was on a Zoom call and I...
like the day before or two days before I got COVID, like I was like, crummy COVID, not wonderful feelings. And I was like, but okay, I'll do the interview anyway. And we did this and she's like, oh, you should do my yoga nidra and sleep like with my yoga going and I'll do one especially for healing your body. I was like, cool, we'll do that. And it actually was the turning point in my COVID. Like I wasn't gonna die anyway. So I think I was gonna.
survive no matter what. So let's not like say this is like mana from heaven. But for me, after my 30 minute yoga nidra nap, I felt a ton better and it coincided with that turning point in the illness going away. So there's my total anecdotal evidence for why this is cool.
Kate (:Mm-hmm. And I think it's cool for a lot of different reasons too. The first time I did yoga nidra, I didn't know what I was getting into was probably seven years ago. I fell into it and had never had that experience really of having that body awareness and deep rest at the same time of not being asleep, but being asleep. It felt like almost a positive, an inverse to sleep paralysis.
Scott Carney (:Yeah. Yeah, it's, anyone who's never done it before, just try it. I have my Yoga Nidra in the book. There's a, I wrote the script out, but like you can't read that as you're sleeping. So I also have like a YouTube video. I think it's at like scottcarney.com slash dreaming, I'm gonna guess, you know. Yeah, go to there and like, it's a free YouTube video and I took out the ads so you can go just sleep.
Kate (:in a lot of ways to me.
Kate (:We'll get a link in there.
Scott Carney (:And I think I put an hour, like an hour or half an hour of silence at the end too. So it doesn't go right into the next video in your queue or whatever. But the idea is, is that as it guides you through these sleep stages, like, you know, you're in hypnagogia, you're sort of going, you feel like you're asleep. It feels familiar, right? Yoga Nidra feels familiar because you're in these like very deep wave sleep settings, and yet you are also aware. So it's unfamiliar and familiar at the same time.
And it's cool. Like it's, yeah. I mean, it's hard to describe a sensational state. It's hard to describe experience, but like, you know, it ain't gonna hurt you. You know, I should have put a line in there like give me your credit card number. We'll see what that word, right? But I didn't. And as you go there, you're aware of things and then you also, it instructs you to let go. Let go into doing nothing.
Kate (:It is cool.
Kate (:Heheheheheheh!
Scott Carney (:And how do you describe doing nothing? And that was like, I wrestled with that for like a month. Like, how do I say to do something when I'm telling you not to do something? What is non-doing? And in a sense, you just don't do it. Ooh, it's like Nike, just don't do it. A reverse swoosh. And then things happen, because even the act of choosing not to do something is an act of doing something.
Kate (:Hmm.
Kate (:Oh, that's a tongue twister. That's a mind bender. That's really interesting too, because I think that a lot of this book is creating an invitation or permission to do a little bit less and to allow your mind to drift a little bit more. And I think we've talked about in the course of this interview, a lot of dreaming at night, but this was also a permission slip to daydream and to let your mind
Scott Carney (:Yeah.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:wander during the day. And as I was reading it, one of my favorite things to observe, we live on a farm, are my goats when they chew their cud. And I find that animals especially, probably even your cats, drift in and out of a certain presence, that sometimes they feel very embodied, and other times they feel a drift in a sea of nothingness. And when goats chew their cud, they
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Yeah.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:and are ruminating, right, so to speak, they sort of drift away into nothingness. They'll just kind of sit in the sun and there's something about them that goes away. And that has taught me a lot about allowing my own mind to drift away. And I think that this was also about reclaiming a space of daydreaming.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:I love that. And like, doesn't chewing your cud just sound amazing? Like if you could, oh, so I have a question for you. This is completely unrelated to my book, but as a butcher and a farm dweller, you may actually be able to answer this for me. Cows have four stomachs, right? Four or three.
Kate (:And it sounds so good! Okay.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:Four chambers. I mean, it's not quite a literal, it's not like four separate stomachs, it's a four compartment stomach. Yeah. Yes.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm. Okay, so they got their compartments and they're cud-chewers, okay? I was really thinking about this like two weeks ago. I was like, how does that work? Like, okay, so I eat food, do I choose the stomach I put it in? And then when I regurgitate it to chew it, how do I choose the next chamber? How does that work?
Kate (:So this is really interesting, and I've thought a lot about how that regurgitation of that bolus of biomass kind of happens. And so what happens is all of it is moving through these four chambers. And as it moves through the four chambers, my favorite thing to do when I do slaughter demos is to open up the rumen and to really look at it. The texture of the stomach changes, so it goes from something that's studded to something that looks like a shag carpet to something that has a bunch of honeycomb.
and the food gets successively more liquid. And then it reaches the small intestine. It is kind of like a strainer. Yeah, so that last chamber is very liquid. And so that first chamber, you're getting two things that are happening. They're bringing up that bolus of CUD to reach you, to break down the biomass mechanically while you also have this whole bacterial and enzymatic milieu.
Scott Carney (:Ah, so it's like a strainer, basically.
Kate (:in that chamber that is working to break it down chemically. And it's also turning that matter within that stomach. There are these contractions and like peristaltic actions.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Okay. Does it come back down through the same hole? Like, is it like, are the chambers like attached? Big chamber, next chamber, shag carpet chamber, and then like small intestine? Or does it come back and then choose, like choose your own adventure?
Kate (:It goes, it's a linear journey. It's always going through the same order and being moved through muscle movements.
Scott Carney (:Okay.
Scott Carney (:Okay.
Scott Carney (:So it's like when it didn't finish digesting, it was like, go back up there for more chew processing, and then it goes back down. That makes so much sense. Thank you for clearing up my confusion on what cud chewing is all about.
Kate (:Yeah. It's fascinating. It's fascinating to watch them do it and to pull it like you can pull it out of out of their mouths and kind of look at how it's being broken down and kind of what's in there or you know, when you butcher stuff, you'll find that their teeth and
Scott Carney (:And are they like totally, because they're sort of like zenned out, you can just go in there and take it out and they're like, whatever.
Kate (:I spend so much time with my goats. I think they think I'm an honorary goat. And so they just kind of let me do stuff and I can get away with a lot more. I wouldn't do this to some random goat. I wouldn't find a goat in a pasture and reach in their mouth, especially because their back teeth are very sharp. You can cut yourself. And it's kind of a gnarly cut because of what's going on in there. So I don't recommend doing this at home, but I have done it. And you can smell too. You can actually smell the methane.
Scott Carney (:Got ya.
Scott Carney (:Hahaha
Scott Carney (:Right.
Scott Carney (:Got it.
Kate (:when they burp because they'll as it moves up there will be some little gurgles and you can smell these little methane burps.
Scott Carney (:Uh...
Scott Carney (:Delightful. Yeah, I try not to smell the methane burps from my cats, but you can too if you want.
Kate (:Yeah, so I've learned a lot about, we got here because I've learned a lot from country about how to drift into being this, how to be a daydreamer, how to do nothing as it were.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Yeah, I love it. I mean, yeah, sorry. Brain has gone down to the cud chewing, but we are here to talk about a book about dreaming.
Kate (:Well, dreaming, cut chewing. I mean, I think that this is, you know, animal dreams, do animals dream, it's all kind of related. Do animals daydream?
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Well, I like the fact that when I think about evolution, we usually think about evolution in terms of morphology changing, right? Like in order to get to the environment, in order for the animal to survive to the fittest, something physically changed. And you can look at that in their skeletal history in the fossil record. And I think that totally, evolution happened. Like we can parse it out pretty well. But what we're not...
parsing out very well, because it doesn't fossilize our experiences. But undoubtedly, things had experiences. Like, I think we can take on an act of faith, experiences happen. And so if experiences happened, they also evolved over time, whether or not the evolution occurred in brain structures. But there's also the phenomenological thing that occurs that's parallel to the body, like the.
Animals learned language, like animals dreamed. Like, so how do we fossilize a dream? How do we access a fossilized dream? All I know is that my cat does dream. And she's right here. Oh, okay. Okay, all right, chew your cud, Portia. Chew your cud. Oh, obligate carnivore at that. She's like, yeah, can you, you're waking me up from my nap for a second. Let me out of the room. I'm gonna go do something.
Kate (:Yeah, I can hear her. Bring her on. We love a pet visit.
Kate (:Portia needs to learn how to check cud chew. She's a carnivore, so she doesn't get to chew cud. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Um, sorry. Porsche is sorted.
Kate (:No, don't be because we watch our we watch our animals dream, right? I watch my dog Goldberry dream. And you talk about this some in the book, too. Those those twitches and are they dreams or are they just the experience and acting out of muscle twitches?
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Yeah, and every time you talk to a scientist, like a person who's like, well, I studied this objectively, they invariably come to the conclusion that is just a muscle twitch. And I know this because I study muscle twitches and I tracked it through the brain. I checked the pathway that activated the motor cortex and the motor cortex was involved, so therefore that was a muscle twitch. And like, okay, cool. The methodology,
Kate (:Mm-hmm
Scott Carney (:guaranteed that was going to be your result because this is the hard problem of neuroscience versus the easy problem of neuroscience. This is David Chalmers came up with this conception. The easy problem of neuroscience is the pathways which things occur. Like where does the nerve fire into the brain and how can we detect how a thought occurred? Here's the physical place of the thought. The hard problem of neuroscience is how that hardware becomes experience.
becomes a thought. How can I point to love? How can I point to dream? How can I point to that? And that is the thing, like, even if you mapped out every thing in what they call the connectome, which is the total connectome of all the nerves, how they interact, and you mapped it out, and you figured it all out, how does that add up to an experience? Like, I can't map that out, and like, look, I have the map, here was your dream.
It's never gonna happen because the hard problem is taking it to that next step to phenomenology. And so, and the reason I'm talking about this is we're talking about experiences through our evolutionary past. Animals dream, I dream, I experience emotions. Well, they didn't start with homo sapiens, right? The emotions are way back, and how far back did they go? Well, we will never be able to answer that with objective measures, because it's not like a...
Kate (:Oh.
Scott Carney (:Insect wrote a love letter that is now fossilized and stored on a CD-ROM that then I can access that will never occur So instead we have to just assume through I guess looking at it. So cats have emotions I know because they manipulate me so So so cats and us have a common ancestor at some point, right? It's probably like 65 million years ago ish around the dinosaur time. Maybe even a little bit before that
Kate (:Hehehehehehe!
Scott Carney (:So either emotions co-evolved at a later point or emotions start before that point. And my guess, my feeling is it goes like all the way back to whatever was first. Something that first thing, once it had the, it could make a decision about its environment, right? And I don't know when that happened, right? But if an amoeba is wandering around and it's like, I wanna eat this other bug instead of that bug,
Kate (:Yeah.
Scott Carney (:Maybe it did that through emotions or something like an emotion. And I don't know. Like here's where in super speculative area, no scientist is gonna be like, well, Scott cracked the code.
Kate (:Fascinating.
Kate (:Do you think chemicals enter this equation? If we're talking about prolactin, we're talking about oxytocin, in the formation of emotions too, or are these two things separate? One thing that you kind of tease at in this is the location of consciousness. If while we're dreaming, our body is in this state of paralysis, then our consciousness is not indeed embodied. Which, and right now we have this sort of race to like, could we?
Scott Carney (:Yeah.
Kate (:contain consciousness, which I think is, I have my own opinions about.
Scott Carney (:Yeah.
Scott Carney (:I think chemicals form a language for consciousness. I don't think they are the totality of it. Like, if I inject you with testosterone, right, and I'll big, big dose of testosterone, I can predictably say you're gonna have some emotional changes, right? Predictably, that something's gonna happen to you. I don't know exactly what it's gonna be. Maybe you're gonna rage, okay? Or maybe you're gonna be super sexual, or maybe, I don't know, something that's associated with testosterone.
Kate (:and emotion.
Kate (:I'm sorry.
Scott Carney (:it will happen to you. But I can't say that it was the testosterone, like I can go one direction, the testosterone will cause something, but it has to interact with all the stuff that's in you already, right? So it's more like a verb in the sentence of your body. And I know that different creatures have different chemicals that go through, it's different hormones, different stuff. And...
Kate (:Hmm.
Scott Carney (:And I think that some of these chemicals are, I think dopamine's pretty common throughout most creatures and it's sort of the more chemical. And I know that bacteria will respond to dopamine in various ways and you drop dopamine. And I don't know if there's a dopamine feeling that occurs, but maybe there is, maybe there's not, but I don't know how we scientifically test that. I don't know how, I can't even tell you how you feel on testosterone versus how I feel. Like we can describe it with words.
But how does a feeling actually get translated in a Fidelidist way?
Kate (:Yes, absolutely. And I think that our language is incredibly limited when it comes to describing some of these feelings. We have a fairly small word box from which to choose from and to assume that we are experiencing the same thing when we talk about love or empathy or rage or cats even. And I think that
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:One of the things I like about the book in particular is that it's tugging at the idea of the constellation of experience, both coming in, in terms of perception and in being created within in terms of conception and being predicted outwards in terms of time as interactions with other humans with me, Kate, you Scott, you know, across a 3000 mile stretch and you listener.
And all of this is coming together to create this complex experience of our own consciousness, which we are never going to find in the fossil record.
Scott Carney (:Yeah, yeah. And like, it's sort of like the way you describe it, we certainly need a flow chart. Here's the stimulus that goes through X, Y and like, and it's so interconnected and weird. And like where I come down on consciousness and is probably alienated for people to hear at first is that I don't think we are conscious. I don't think Scott is conscious. I don't think Kate is conscious. I think consciousness is a act that occurs.
and it is about the interaction between two things. So I am not conscious as a person. I enact consciousness and we build consciousness by interacting and conscious ebbs and flows. And it's also about the interactions inside my body, but it's not a static thing. And some people, when I talk about this, they'll write to me as like, Scott, you don't believe in a soul, right? You don't believe that the body has a ghost in it.
Kate (:Yes.
Kate (:Hmm.
Kate (:Hehehehe
Scott Carney (:that creates all activity. I'm like, well, you're right. I don't believe that, but I do believe that if this thing like a soul is out there, it's really, we're all participating in it. It's something that's so much bigger than us. It is the super organism of life on earth. And that's embodied in me right now, and it's embodied in you right now. It's embodied in your listener and my cat and all of those things, the anaconda in my dreams. It's all embodied in all of these things. And we participate in it.
and we have this certain amount of time to participate in it. And when we die, and I did this video on my YouTube channel, you know, what happens when we die? And sort of, I'm sort of hitting on some of these notes there.
your activity in life changes the environment around you. Everything's activity changes the environment around you. And those reverberations go out like ripples to infinity to some degree. Like to, because one thing touches another, touches another, or at least to the whole planet. And if we go out really big, if we think about cause and effect, the chain of cause and effect, you can just keep going backwards all the way to the beginning of the formation of the universe. Like this is a Carl Sagan quote. Like if you want to
make bacon apple pie from scratch. First you have to invent the universe. That's his quote, not mine. And at some point the whole universe, everything in the observable universe, everything in the unobservable universe, the country of France, the moon of Europa, all of that stuff was at one point at an infinitely small singularity point.
Kate (:Yeah.
Scott Carney (:that where matter didn't exist, energy maybe didn't exist, like I don't know what's in a singularity, but it was all there. And then it poofed out. And so everything in you was attached to everything else in the universe physically at one point. And how we think about that, I don't know, but I think it's hard to think about that and not go spiritual to some degree.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:It is and it tugs at something, you know, and I've thought a lot about this, this is gonna sound a little bit funny, but we'll throw it around since we opened it up through the lens of food, right? And I think that oftentimes we can't experience whatever consciousness or self is in a vacuum, right? Because it is always in relationship to other within this world. And I think maybe that gets at some of what you're saying is that we exist in relationship in connectivity.
Scott Carney (:Right?
Kate (:And I've thought a lot about, you know, you have this singularity and everything comes burst forth from this little tiny point and it makes all the matter in the universe, which we then interact with in this sort of ever exchanging way through our metabolism, which I think is, original Greek is to overthrow. But it is this assimilation of nutrients that cross this boundary because we really do think of ourselves as this meat suit.
Scott Carney (:Yeah.
Kate (:as it were from my butcher perspective. And we take in nutrients, they cross a one cell wall thick barrier and they become us. And so those things that were once other, that were once plant, that were once animal, now become a part of CAPE. But before they were plant or animal, they were rock and that rock was stream and all of these other things throughout time that are just kind of reorganizing in this ever.
Scott Carney (:Right?
Kate (:going exchange of energy.
Scott Carney (:Absolutely, I mean, that's the thing. It's a web of interactions. And we like to think that time is this point. Like we are a point in time. We're right here. And really we're the confluence of time. I'm the collection of things that happened in my past and all of the interactions that led to that. And so what am I? I am everything and I am nothing, right? All both at the same time. And-
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:We like to, it's so much easier for us to think of ourselves bounded at the barrier of our skin. Like I'm an atom somehow disconnected from my environment. But like you put me into the vacuum of space and I'm toast. Like I really need this planet to support me. And then everything that goes into supporting the planet, it's all connected. Which I mean, to go back to dreaming for just one second, this is why dreaming is the most fundamental unit of consciousness.
Kate (:Please, that's why we're here.
Scott Carney (:Because during the waking life, I'm interacting with the outside world. In dreaming, I'm interacting with what I have collected from the outside world and reduced to gist. So like when you're dreaming, you are experiencing your experience of consciousness, which is you. Like that is what you have stored. That is you, the dream. Which is why dreaming is so vitally important to who we are. And that's why it's more real than the outside world, but not in an Elon Musk way.
Kate (:Oh, wow, I love that you, that was perfectly said. That was incredible. And I think, what an interesting thing for this to be. I mean, it's almost kind of only, the only recursive loop of self that happens. Though it is made out of all of our experiences of other, but it is the only sort of.
Scott Carney (:Yeah.
Scott Carney (:interior, completely self-contained world that is in your head, that you have created, that simulation is, as far as I'm concerned, me or you. And it's during the day we add to it, right? We add, we, oh, here's some more information. We're gonna grist that away, but you are who you dream. You are, and I actually, I think I have these stickers that I put out for my Kickstarter people, like, and the quote is, you are what you dream. And the dreams are the, dreams are the unit.
Kate (:Hmm.
Scott Carney (:of who we are.
Kate (:Oh, I love that dreams are the unit of who we are. And it's, it's funny because, you know, as a butcher, I like to say that you are what you eat, which is also true.
Scott Carney (:Hey.
Scott Carney (:Yeah, but what would those things be without dreaming? Like how could the cow have cowed if it didn't dream to get to be, and it's pre-cows, it's evolutionary ancestors. Dreams help that cow emerge to whatever, I don't know what cows dream, but like they had those cyclical cycles, we have that fossil record, all of those connections are there, and the phenomenological experience of cowing.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:was important to that cow's life, was important to who that cow was, and maybe it makes it taste different, I don't know. Maybe a happy cow tastes better than a sad cow. I actually have no idea if that's true.
Kate (:It is, I mean, we could talk about different ways in which that is actually true, but mostly has to do with cortisol and adrenaline and the way that it changes the flavor of muscles right prior to death. You know, that has experienced throughout a lifetime, you get into a little bit of different territory, but I could make a couple of arguments for it.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, that's the Kobe Beach, Kobe beef brand. Like if you massage your cows, but and I don't think they do. Yeah, I don't think Kobe beef cows are massaged. I'm going to go on the record here. And I think that's not I don't I have gotten massages. They're 200 bucks a shot. There's no way they're putting that into cows.
Kate (:Feed it, Snickers.
Kate (:I don't think they're putting that into cows. I also think those cows aren't living, aren't living out a life that aligns with their biological urges to forage and eat in the same way. And I think that changes, that changes flavor. And it might indeed be happiness and we could call it phytochemical richness. You know, that if you're just being fed Snickers bars in a small space, are you really happy? I don't know.
Scott Carney (:Oh yeah.
Scott Carney (:Oh, undoubtedly.
Scott Carney (:Yeah, I mean, cow is such an interesting word because there was a wild cow at one point. And I think there was even a photograph of the last wild cow, like truly wild ancestor. I think it was in Spain. My memories are a little hazy, but there was a word for it. Orox, there we are. There's your ancestor. And I think the last one died in like 1905, 1904, somewhere in there.
Kate (:Yes, yes, yeah, the progenitor. Yeah.
Kate (:Orox, I think. Yeah.
Kate (:Hmm.
Scott Carney (:That was wild cow. The thing that we have is human cow, human made, our culture has changed that cow's dreams and everything else that goes into making that cow and it is a different thing just like a banana. And it also has a subjective reality. There's also the thing, and maybe then you could rewild the cow, I don't know. There probably are re-feral cows in the planet.
Kate (:Yes, but I think the question is, have we changed that cow beyond anything for it to go back in time? And I think that's kind of the question with humans too, right? Because I think that we've domesticated ourselves in many ways. And I think that, you know, and to touch back into the book, I think that we have changed the way that humans dream in the last 150 years anyway, maybe the last 10,000, 12,000 since the dawn of agriculture.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm. Right.
Scott Carney (:Certainly in the last, since 19, what, 12, when Edison invented the electric light bulb, there's like demonstrable changes, right? And there was an epidemiological study that came out like three years before the tungsten bulb came out. And we had light bulbs before them, but they sucked. Then we got the tungsten bulb, which was like, oh my God, it's so cheap. And you can put it in, it burns bright and everyone can afford one all of a sudden. And in the time pre-bulb to after bulb, humans slept one less.
Kate (:Yes.
Scott Carney (:one less hour a day. All across the world within a few decades, everyone had an electric light bulb and that's thousands of hours of sleep missed per year. Well, I guess not per year, per year would be 365. But like over the lifetime, it's thousands and thousands of hours that are missed. That's dream time, that's experiences that are lost. And those experiences have been with us since the beginning of.
Kate (:Yeah?
Kate (:Yes.
Scott Carney (:you know, evolution, right? You know, since the rotation, like our sleep cycles are in relation to the rotation of our planet in relation to the sun. Like that is, our biology is literally linked to that. That's called chronobiology. Mm-hmm, right, exactly. Both cycles in turn, like that's like the Mayan calendar. Both are spinning and there's another greater cycle on top of it. But that changed in like 1912 and-
Kate (:Yes.
Kate (:within a day and a year.
Scott Carney (:And now we are different. We are fundamentally different because of that. We can go back to that biology. We've proven scientifically, they took some humans and they put them in a cave, and they lit them according to the normal light cycles. And you do revert, so we haven't physiologically changed, but the change is, for all intents and purposes, like you and I,
are not getting rid of our electric lights. Like, can you imagine how angry you would be if I forced you never to have a light bulb again? You would be so pissed at me forever.
Kate (:I might be the wrong audience for this. But yes, in general, yes, I do think that is unequivocally, like it's absolutely the case. And I also think that, you know, so much of what things get boiled down to on this podcast is our ability as humans to take a sine wave and create a line or to create it, to take a circle and create a line. And so we create this.
Scott Carney (:Hahaha!
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:very consistent flat environment, this consistent ability to turn on the day at any given time. And I guess this is a good question to ask because I think at 1912, we see this massive shift in our biology and in how much we sleep. Though I'm also reading Ed Conway's Material World and he talks about how much labor hours it takes to buy a light bulb versus a candle, which is fascinating because he talks about
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:copper as being really integral to this process of electricity and the way that things change. But do you think that with the, I mean, now you can't even sell incandescent bulbs, we're changing our lighting once again into LED lights with even more exposure to blue light from not just our light bulbs, but also our devices? And do you think that will take us down again?
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm.
For sure, for sure.
Scott Carney (:Mm-hmm. Right. I'm gonna go ahead and do a little bit of a
Scott Carney (:Right? Right, because the tungsten bulb is fire, essentially. Essentially, it's heating up a thing, it's fire. Whereas, like, LEDs, that's like lasers. And yeah, that aspect of chronobiology is fascinating, which is why I buy my LED bulbs to simulate the old tungsten bulbs. And yeah, I will say that whenever I go out into places where there's like a fluorescent bulb, I feel bad.
Kate (:Hmm.
Kate (:you too.
Kate (:Me too.
Scott Carney (:Because that's not a natural color like that's weird stuff and I didn't go into any of this in the book But it you know, I'll bet you people have in depth
Kate (:Hmm.
Kate (:They have, yeah, and we can link to some of that. Thank you, we've gone on a kind of rollicking adventure throughout the part of this podcast, and I think what I really want is for people to open up the book and to experience some of this for themselves, because I think that you put it so, number one, succinctly. I mean, this is a deliciously short read, and I think it's an.
Scott Carney (:Yeah.
Scott Carney (:110 pages, guys. That's my selling point. A hundred. Look how thin it is. 110 pages. And you learn you get all this cool knowledge. The audiobook is like three and a half hours. It's really funny.
Kate (:Yeah
Kate (:I'm sorry.
And it's fantastic. We talked about this last time, but I love the way that you narrate all of your books. That's always how I've interacted with you is listening. I was thrilled, thrilled. Never happened to me before and I was thrilled. And so it's really fantastic and it's well narrated. And I think that, you know, I don't know where you wanna leave listeners, but I think one of the biggest things that I took away from this is getting back to doing
Scott Carney (:Oh, thanks.
Scott Carney (:Oh, yeah, because I sent you the audio book, right? Right, I did, yeah, yeah.
Kate (:nothing and to resting and to dreaming.
Scott Carney (:Well said, well said. And yeah, thanks, go check out the book. I also have this YouTube channel where I talk about this random philosophical stuff. And I had this video that got really popular. I don't know if you noticed it. I had a video that had like 2 million views, which is like insane. And it's about split brain experiments. Like what happens when you split a human brain into and then consciousness literally divides on either lobe of the brain and they have separate experiences. And what does that mean to everything?
Kate (:Yes.
Kate (:Mm-hmm. I saw this.
Scott Carney (:That was fun, but like I've got tons of more things.
Kate (:You also have, and I feel like this year have really built on the podcast. And I know that is cross-linked through YouTube, but I don't do a lot of YouTube because I, so more podcast format, but Scott Carney investigates. Um, and you've had some really fantastic and topical investigations. I mean, I told you, I really enjoyed your exploring the Bhagavad Gita, uh, when Oppenheimer came out to look at the origins of I am become death.
Scott Carney (:Yeah.
Scott Carney (:Yeah.
Scott Carney (:Thanks.
Scott Carney (:Oh.
Kate (:I enjoyed your last one talking about our techno solutions to climate change.
Scott Carney (:Climate change, right. Yeah, the podcast is really, it's funny. It's hard to do all of these different formats and like do them well. I'm putting more energy into YouTube right now because I don't know why I just am. I feel like I'm juggling so many balls at once and we'll see which balls I drop first. I'm wondering if the podcast will continue, but right now there's like.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Kate (:Mm-hmm.
Scott Carney (:30 or 40 episodes, I think. Some of them are good, I think.
Kate (:They're really good, I really enjoy them. No, I think it's all fantastic. I love that you're out there and that you have a lot of different passions. This sounds funny, but I mean, just like from the vortex to this book is a very different continuum, and I think you're chasing down a lot of creative pursuits, and I think in that, perhaps...
You know, I don't know how this book changed your sleep habits, but I think that you really are leaning into creativity as the antidote to efficiency, perhaps.
Scott Carney (:Yeah, I'm totally inefficient. I sleep a lot, it's great. Life is awesome. I have cats. They're... Oh my God. Yeah, so much to say. Well, thank you so much for having me. This was a blast as always.
Kate (:You have cats, you have cats, you're a cat person cat. Cat people like to sleep with their cats. Like, yeah, cats teach us about sleep. Okay. Thank you so much. We'll have links to where to find you and to the book. And I'm just excited for everyone to read it. Thank you so much for coming back on Scott.
Scott Carney (:Absolutely.
Kate (:Okay.
