Ella Simone: Intro. Hi guys, welcome back to Cobra Lily. This is Maria and Ella and we have a really trippy episode install for you today. What are we gonna be talking about, Maria? Maria Eddleman: I'm so excited. The theory of today is is it all an illusion? We're gonna be talking about the impact of artificial intelligence on people's grasp of objective reality and the increase in content created on manifestation, especially since the pandemic. We're gonna talk a little bit about the various ways that the nature of our reality has been negotiated throughout history. And I'm really excited because I'm gonna go into some scientific theories about the subjectivity of our reality that are still being debated today. I'm really excited because my physics knowledge is limited, but I studied it for a time and I also got my degree in clinical neuroscience. So I am extremely excited to start diving into some of these theories. Ella Simone: Yeah, and I used to spend a lot of time reading about manifestation. And that's my contribution. okay, so what we want to start with today is a story that broke in April about Emily Hart, who is an AI-generated MAGA influencer. Some words that are definitely not in the Bible. she was created by this twenty-two-year-old Indian med student who's Chosen to remain anonymous, he goes by Sam as his pseudonym. He used Google Gemini Nano Banana Pro, which I never heard of, because I'm not a nerd. ⁓ to create he wanted to he wanted to make money online using AI, and at first he was just trying to create kind of a generic hot girl to like bait users into fan subscribing to her fanvue fanview, I think is what it's called, which is a competitor to OnlyFans. So he was basically trying to make an AI OnlyFans girl. And he just made some generically hot looking girl, but he said shouldn't really get much traction because there's millions of hot girls and millions of AI generated hot girls on the internet already. And he looked to Gemini for advice on how to make her more distinctive. And Gemini suggested that he make her MAGA since most young women overwhelmingly skew liberal This would set her in a part and create an appeal to conservative men who were kind of I don't know, maybe a hotter market, or maybe maybe not a hotter market, I don't know. Just would comp ⁓ appeal to service conservative men. Let me start that over. ⁓ since young women like overwhelmingly skew liberal, this would set her apart and create an appeal to conservative men. So he created this AI generated Jennifer Lawrence lookalike. Who he styled as a nurse in her 20s. And there's pictures on her Instagram. The Instagram's actually been removed, but she had an Instagram with tens of thousands of followers. Pictures of her drinking beer, ice fishing, going to the rifle range. And he would add these captions, like, this is an example. If you want a reason to unfollow, Christ is king, abortion is murder, and all illegals must be deported. And although Sam had never lived in the United States, he became kind of a student. Of MAGA ideology, and he said every day I'd write something pro-Christian, pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, anti-abortion, anti-woke, and anti-immigration. And within a month, the Instagram had 10,000 followers. The reels he was making were getting millions of views. And Emily was already generating a couple thousand dollars a month from her fan view count, where he was posting softcore artificial intelligence porn, which Nightmare, nightmare, nightmare. That's just so dystopian. before I go forward, do you have any thoughts? Maria Eddleman: Wait, ⁓ God, so many thoughts. Like, I just I just think it's so dystopian that you generate this AI image and AI is trying to tell you like how to make it more lifelike and how to manipulate more people. I think that in itself is kind of like breaking your brain. But I think it really like, it really speaks to this idea that we already know this, but Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: AI becoming so indistinguishable re from reality that it's breaking people's brains. I think that the reason it's really hitting home right now is the way that it's been able to mimic human connection. Cause I think that we've had like A lot of things in media and technology that have been able to mimic reality. I mean, look at like virtual reality, like, what is that thing? It's called Oculus. Yes, like if you've been on Oculus, I've done that before and it feels like I'm in an elevator when I'm on an elevator. I'm like, whoa, that's freaky. But the ability to really mimic human connection is I think what's breaking people's brains because we're so primed to seek that in general. Ella Simone: Yes. So he used a different type of AI, Grok, to generate nude photos of her and uploaded them to the platform. And her fans were sending him payments and asking for exclusive content and exchanging messages. And he actually said that he got really tired very quickly of dealing with the horny, creepy messages from all these men who had varying degrees of of investment in her as a real person. And this isn't really that relevant to the topic, but I just had to throw it in there because it's interesting. He so Sam also created a liberal counterpart for Emily on Instagram. But he said Democrats know that it's AI slop, so they don't engage as much. He said most Democrats would just go on there to like angrily comment, this is real, this is fake, this is AI. ⁓ which still like obviously drives up the engagement, but they weren't buying into it. ⁓ he said the mega crowd is made up of dumb people, like super dumb people, and they fall for it. However, there's this kind of interesting caveat where later in the article he said that a lot of the fans know that she wasn't real. where are we going in today? Sorry. Maria Eddleman: really in interesting thing to talk about too because what is really that different from interacting with like an Instagram girl that you're never gonna know and dealing with an AI person? And I think that that's something to be said too. Like so these hawk girls are basically fake to them anyway. So like why not engage with AI? And like Ella Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maria Eddleman: We ⁓ we don't need to talk too much about like fantasy being more appealing than reality. I just think we're getting to the point where when we create completely fake people, it starts to break people's brains a little bit. Like the level of reality shattering, if you fall in love with somebody who turns out to be a fake person. Now, if someone's scamming you, that's one thing. But you falling in love with a fake person, that's an entirely different form of like I don't wanna say psychosis, but it is it does kind of break your idea of reality a little bit. Ella Simone: Yeah. I I would love to be a fly on the wall and hear these guys who were sending her money talk about how real that she seemed to them. 'Cause in the article they don't have really a direct quote from him about it, just the journalist was saying, even among some digital natives there's a perspective of, well, I don't actually care if this is true. I like the sentiment of it. Because I guess it I guess it is much more rare to find like a a gun toting girl hot conservative girl in her twenties than it is to find a liberal hot girl in her twenties. You can find them anywhere. ⁓ so I don't know. I think that n like the novelty, I guess, is enough for certain people to overlook whether or not she's real. And like you said, like guys who are sending Kylie Jenner DMs, they know that she's not interested in them. And they know that there's no possibility of them being together. But I I I liked what you said about she's so kind of like implausible and removed from them that she might as well be an animated two D image. Maria Eddleman: And I think that the real thing that's driving a lot of this is the lack of human connection. Because when we have a real human connection, it can go ahead and like fill in that hole that AI is. And it's genuine genuinely more satisfying. But the problem is too, like when you start. With this AI slop as your framework of real connection, then your brain starts to break. And that's when I think about how it's so damaging for kids. Because when we deal with like TikTok, spirituality, manifestation for all this stuff, their base is very young. And this is their first idea of dealing with like human connection. This is our first idea of like dealing with like interacting with people online. You don't know you can you figure out. At an early age, that AI is everywhere, but it feels like human connection, so you don't really care as much, if that makes sense. Ella Simone: Yeah. And there's been this phenomenon over the past couple of years called AI induced psychosis that isn't an official diagnosis yet. ⁓ but it's something that clinicians have been reporting where people develop or experience symptoms of psychosis such as paranoia, delusions, ⁓ connected with the use of AI chatbots like ChatGBT or Claude, for example. The ⁓ like I said, it's not recognized as a clinical diagnosis, but there Are all these journalistic accounts that describe people who develop these strong beliefs that the chatbots are sentient and that they channel spirits and that they reveal conspiracies and patterns? ⁓ just in the way that like people with schizophrenia will like infer meaning by like connecting all these different like unrelated signals and reality. Like they're they're having that kind of relationship with AI, and I can't even blame them because that that is kind of I don't know, I think it's kind of the anyone who has a history of psychosis, like AI is kind of their worst nightmare. Maria Eddleman: Absolutely. Yeah. Like and I'm sure if I can't speak to this too, but I am very feel very strongly if you pull out like a list of recent psychosis cases that you'll probably see that AI is a feature in psychosis. And I think I might have even seen that in some journals, but I just can't pull out a source right now, so I'm not gonna stand f firm on it. But Yeah, it is someone's psychosis' worst nightmare. And I think it speaks to this idea that people are just developing all these different ways to try to cope with the new reality where they can't really see the difference between what's real and what's fake. And they're just trying to find different ways to cope with it. Ella Simone: Yeah. I mean, I just we're just increasingly every day more immersed in the digital world, especially since the pandemic. And I think we're gonna see more more kind of magical thinking, more Dululu behavior, more I don't know, angel numbers on our feed, which I feel like I've been seeing a lot of that stuff since the pandemic, which leads me into kind of the main topic of this episode, which is manifestation. And specifically the manifestation that comes from TikTok. so manifestation as a concept has been around for a long time, but Google reported a 400% increase in the use of the word manifestation between 2020 and 2021. And as of 2026, August 2026, which is when we're recording this, hashtag manifestation has 36 billion views on TikTok. So there's a huge, obviously like global uptick in interest in this. Why do you think that is? Maria Eddleman: Well, I think that in a sense, it's really grounded in cognitive psychology because confirmation bias is a real thing. And a lot of what we do in therapy is trying to convince people that their negative views of the world can be disproven. Because the way that the brain tends to work is I have an expectation and I seek to fulfill that expectation. Because any change from my expectation is scary. That's why people often do these like Self-fulfilling prophecies all the time. Like if you if I was to have trust issues, I was to go, I would go up to a person, make friends with them, and I'd expect them to betray me. Over and over and over again. And eventually I'd push them away enough that then you'd be like, Okay, I'm gonna leave because I'm exhausted by you. And then they look at you and then they s and then you say, Okay, well, you never trusted me in the first place, and you were never trustworthy. So clearly I was right to never trust anybody. So this idea that let's actually have a positive view of the world, because then when positive things happen, they're less mentally taxing on you and you're more likely to integrate it into your schemas. So in that sense, manifestation can be kind of great. But I think the problem is we've kind of gotten into this space where we think that manifestation can change our objective reality. It does not. It changes how you interact with your reality and that can Ella Simone: I think we need to define it before we get into like the opinions on it first. Cause I have a definition. Maria Eddleman: Okay, perfect. Okay. Ella Simone: So for those of you who don't know, manifestation is the practice of trying to turn goals or desires into reality through these specific techniques, such as visualization, positive thinking, intentional action. And it's rooted in what's called the law of attraction, which has been around for a long time. And that's basically the idea that a person's thoughts or energy will influence what the universe brings to them. So if you're having positive thoughts, you're gonna have positive experiences that the universe kind of like answers to. so some techniques, so manifestation is governed by the law of attraction. Manifestation though is are is the actual practices. So some examples of these would be making a vision board, which is it's basically a giant collage. You piece together pictures of like your goals with words and images ⁓ on like, I don't know, what is it called? A cork board or like a poster board or something. ⁓ So say you're visualizing like a life as an FIT student in New York City. Like you would take a picture, you would clip out a picture of the FIT school. You'd you'd put a picture of what apartment you live in. You'd put a picture of what your Friday nights would look like. You create like a tangible pe picture of what is in your imagination. And the advice is to hang your board in a place where you'll see it every day so you'll be reminded of the path that you want to be on. Another technique is called scripting, which is where you write about your ideal life in the present tense as if it's already happening. So you're you would say, I'm an FIT student in my junior year, and I live in New York City. And part of the trick is you incorporate sensory details and like seemingly minor information into the script to make it feel more real. So you would say, I'm drinking a hot cup of espresso in my beautiful apartment. I'm an FIT student in New York City. And that kind of goes hand in hand with writing and speaking your intentions, which I think is probably the most well-known technique of manifestation. some people follow what's called the 369 method, which involves writing down what you'd like to manifest three times in the morning, six times in the afternoon, and nine times at night. And so you would write like, I I have a successful podcast three times in the morning, six times in the afternoon. Nine times a night to kind of like drill that into your brain, I guess, to well, we'll get to the neuroscience part of it. ⁓ the last part part is positive affirmations. These are pretty well known. They're all over TikTok. Some some famous examples are like, I I don't chase, I attract. Like money flows to me easily, and I have an abundance of it. I'm worthy of success. I'm capable of handling any obstacles. These short encouraging statements that you repeat to help you challenge limiting beliefs about yourself and change your self-concept. The idea is that once you do that, you'll ⁓ be more likely to energetically attract what you want. And this a lot of this stuff does appeal to to 14 year old girls, but there is some there is some psychology behind it that supports this idea. And that's what Maria's going to talk about. Maria Eddleman: Yeah, absolutely. And this is something that if you read it in textbook, therapists will use positive affirmations in their everyday work. Because this idea that is rooted in psychology is we have expectations about the world and our brain is really uncomfortable with uncertainty. So it's the same way like you might have seen like a beautiful woman who's been in absolutely terrible relationships with these horrible guys who are just ugly, terrible, whatever. And she believes that all men are cheat, all men cheat no matter what happens. So she's gonna be more likely to be with a man who is a very obvious cheater that she can predict versus taking a chance on someone who doesn't appear to be an obvious cheater because she doesn't want the other shoe to drop in a way that she doesn't expect. And you see it all the time where people get in these self-destructive cycles and these self-fulfilling prophecies. Like if I was to have issues with trust. Ella's my friend, and let me s I meet Ella and I'm like, okay, well, you can't trust anybody. So eventually I start behaving in ways that push Ella away. And then Ella is like, okay, fuck you. You don't trust me. Why would I want to be friends with you? And then I get to say, okay, well, look at that. I was right not to trust you. Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: So this idea of embracing a positive expectation is saying, okay, when good things happen, I'm less likely to reject it. I'm less likely to be uncomfortable with it. Because in general, when our brain deals with discomfort, it's takes away a little bit of our energy. So in a way, this is really helpful for developing new schemas about the world, right? And I think the difference between real psychology and the manifestation is it does not actually bring you a different reality. It is really useful if self-doubt is what is plaguing you and keeping you from your goals. And the wrong decisions are keeping you from your goals. But you can't manifest your way from the poverty trap to being a millionaire in two years by simply, you know, doing all these steps. There is a level where you have to embrace reality. Ella Simone: Yeah, like you can't manifest your way out of Gaza. And I think a huge criticism of manifestation is that there's a bit of privilege baked into it. This idea that the only thing that's stopping you is yourself. That's really not the case for a lot of people. I mean, I it's if your biggest problem is confidence, you're really, really lucky. There are pe there are people who are dealing with truly immovable. barriers that have nothing to do with them and like that they really are not in control of. Like I you you you can't control being born into Yemen as a young woman where they practice female genital mutilation. Are you gonna tell a girl like that to just think positively and manifest her way out of that situation? Like I think that's a huge ⁓ shortcoming of manifestation is that it kind of kind of stops making sense once once self doubt has been been removed. I don't I don't know if it has the same objective like effectiveness. What do you think though? Maria Eddleman: Well, it's interesting because in a way, in those circumstances, these things can be helpful because of the principle of learned helplessness. Right? A lot of the times when people have experienced traumatic situations, you learn to essentially become helpless. It's like no matter what I do, I can't get myself out of the situation because everything in my reality has told me I cannot escape. So you kind of construct this new reality in your head. Right? Now It's also because if you're fighting so many barriers, sometimes that energy difference that it can save you can help you get out of that situation faster. Because if you're struggling with self-doubt on top of all these barriers, it's gonna be that much harder to deal with. But that being said, like you can't, it's this you have to be knowledgeable about the fact that the reason it's working is because. Of psychology, not because you are magically attracting better things. I think what this TikTok manifestation thing does is it kind of sums up a bunch of psychology tricks and just spits it at you in this like Eastern philosophy way, which is really popular right now in like pop culture. Like everyone loves Eastern philosophy. Ella Simone: Mm-hmm. Yeah, we're all Chinese traditional Chinese medicine pilled, suddenly. But like any kind of pop psychology, you know, it's it's hugely oversimplified. There is I think there are a lot of I think there is a lot of merit to some of the ideas with manifestation and I'm kind of a fan of it. I I don't sit down and like do the techniques really, but I read this one book when I was twenty-two. By Deepak Deepak Chopra, who's like a major wellness guru author. ⁓ you know, there's much to be said about him. I'm not saying he's a perfect, he's a perfect figure, but he wrote this book called Abundance, The Inner Path to Wealth. And I read this when I was making $12 an hour and working in the back of a thrift store. and it I think a lot of people might open that book and think like it's gonna be like Think and Grow Rich. Think and Grow Rich, I think, came out in the 50s, and that was a big, like, monumental. Text in the kind of like positive psychology like manifestation movement. But I think his approach is more nuanced, and the most valuable thing I got out of it was this dichotomy he created between having a scarcity mindset and an abundance mindset. So a scarcity mindset assumes that life is a zero-sum game where resources like money and time and success are strictly limited. Zero-sum game is an economic Like a concept in economics, which is if someone gains, someone has to lose at the same time. So, under this paradigm, if someone else gets a big slice of the pie, you're gonna get a smaller slice of the pie. And Choprick kind of describes scarcity mentality as this egoic like he kinda he states that the scarcity mentality is rooted in the ego. The ego thrives on fear, on separation, on I versus you, the constant anxiety of not having enough or being enough. Or the fear of losing what we already possess. That scarcity might mindset keeps people trapped in endless desire, which leads to suffering and kind of a lack of satisfaction. And that that's a very like Buddhist concept. The abundance mindset challenges you to think that there are plenty of opportunities and resources for everyone instead of sorry, plenty of opportunities and resources for everyone, which naturally think fosters more trust. sorry, let me start this over. ⁓ resources for everyone. Okay. An abundance mindset, on the other hand, challenges you to believe that there are plenty of opportunities and resources to go around. You just need to kind of trust that they will come to you in due time. So an abundance mentality is rooted in kind of your spirit and your true self rather than your ego, as Chopra puts it. So it's not so much about like I want this type of car because I need to feel it's not so connected to like material. It's more about like I'm sorry, I don't like know where I'm going with this. Sure. Maria Eddleman: I have a place to go with it. So so when you talk about like the scarcity mindset, the first place I think of is I think of intermittent reinforcement and addiction. Cause I've talked about this a lot before. How like the idea of gambling addiction really is on this idea that like you don't know when you're gonna hit big and you don't and someone else could get it before you. And like whenever you don't know when something is gonna make you feel really good or really terrible. Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: It pro it kind of reinforces this idea that this thing is scarce. Get it while you can. And that's really the I think that's roots. That is a root in a lot of like addiction and a lot of like attachment issues. It's that idea of scarcity. Like they did a study with capuchin monkeys a long time ago. I can't tell you the exact study. ⁓ we'll figure it out. But it was a mother, and one was very loving, and one was very abusive, and one was Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: half abusive and ⁓ half loving. And the pe and the child, the monkey, bonded most to the mom who was both neglectful and loving because it was Ella Simone: Yeah. Intermittent reinforcement. Maria Eddleman: Exactly. And that kind of is the scarcity principle. And again, like the idea is it's distorting actual reality. Like that's the idea of where superstition comes from. It's just intermittent reinforcement. You don't actually know why something is happening intermittently, but you believe it. Same reason why people like do weird little superstitious things during like baseball games. Because every once in a while, like if you put your hat on sideways, you know, someone's gonna score a goal. Or like If you're at the gambling hall and you hit big once when your feet are in the chair, you're gonna do that over and over again. So it does have a way of kind of distorting our reality because it preys on our emotions. Ella Simone: Yeah, and I've read about this intermittent reinforcement concept, which is basically not knowing when you're gonna get a hit. So it's boring to get a hit every time. You lose interest if you never get a hit. But if you get a hit sometimes and you don't know why you get a hit, that's interesting. And that the brain attaches to that because it can't predict the code and it's trying to predict the code. And you can make a analogy to dating with this. Like if you're in like the early talking stages stages with someone and they always answer you right away or they never answer you. Neither of those are as interesting as they kinda answer you and then they push and pull away and then they are and then then they're like really interested in you and then they pull away again like this that's kind of the idea of love bombing, right? Like I'm gonna like I'm gonna kind of like overwhelm you with affection and then take it away to make you confused and then therefore more interested in me because you can't really figure out the logic or the pattern to what I'm doing. And I think that's something that both men and women like, but especially men, like employ all the time, especially in like the early dating thing. Like just I'm not gonna answer for six hours for some reason. Cause it kind of like keeps the other person on their toes. Maria Eddleman: And I think that's why manifestation really appeals to people. Like it is, it does kind of hit on these big psychological constructs. But then it just brings in like, hey, you can warp objective reality. And that's where it starts to lose me in the sauce a little bit. Because I'm like, yes, you can create your own life. And to a to an extent, you create your own reality because you get to carve out the piece of reality that you exist in. But there is a limit to that. Like, I don't know, you can't cure cancer with I don't know positive thoughts. Like that's not possible, right? Yeah. Ella Simone: Yeah. And I think and I think Schilbert does a pretty good job of emphasizing that there needs to be intentional action behind all this. You can't just write out, I will have a successful podcast and then not put any work into the podcast. and when he talks about the abundance mindset in comparison to the scarcity mindset, he's not really defining it as a specific dollar amount, but as this inner awareness that you're connected to. a whole field of infinite possibilities. That there are plenty of opportunities and resources for everyone and it's actually more available to you than you realize. So he's he's go ahead. Maria Eddleman: No, I just gonna say, ⁓ I think that that really ties so well into like digital reality. Because there is this idea of limitations in physical space, but the digital reality is infinite. So I think that's why some of these things are latching on more and more, because people are existing more in the digital reality than the actual reality. And I think there the idea of infinite possibilities with intentional action feels a lot more real. Especially when people are generally disillusioned with the current reality they're living in. Like economically, and I don't need to go into all of it, but we all know why there's a disillusionment with reality. We all got our reasons. Pick one. There's a list. Go write a blog about it. Ella Simone: Yeah. Yeah, and I think the fact that this blew up over the pandemic is very telling because I don't know, that just threw a wrench into the entire human reality as is. Like, I don't think people alive today would ever have thought that that was possible, just like they probably never would have thought that Donald Trump being president was possible, just like they probably never would have thought that artificial intelligence was possible. And I think Manifestation is like kind of the perfect framework for a digital world because we don't we don't really know what's possible with it with, you know, the internet and all that's all that technology has brought us. Like there is really no way to predict what's coming. So it does, I think, lend itself to kind of like wishful thinking and like maybe a little bit of like Dululu ways of perceiving things. Because like, who would have even thunk that like 10 years ago, that like a WWE socialite would be like the president of the United States. Like, I don't know, our realities have like fractured so much been fractured so much by the internet and by like the digital world that I think a manifestation is kind of the perfect way to say you can capture the like randomness and overstimulation and absurd nature of the digital landscape by doing these practices. It's like you they're actually they're telling people that like there is a way where you can actually orient reality. And I don't know if I believe in it like genuinely orienting reality, but I think it's helpful enough on a psychological level that it's it might as well. And it helped me a lot. I used to have such a a scarcity mindset about everything and like I always felt like this good thing is for other people. And I always kind of felt like beneath my peers, like financially in some ways, and jealous. And this book did really help me think about like, no, like these things like true love or like a great career are not for other people. They're also for you. They're also available to you. You but they're not gonna seem available if you h have this like if you're completely clouded by your own self doubt, I guess. Maria Eddleman: And that's that's powerful. Like hope is a very powerful thing. And honestly, like the cog the psychology framework, it's complicated and scientific. You can go down a million different rabbit holes, but psych but manifestation is very hopeful and it hits all these buttons well. Like cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility is this idea that we want to not get so stuck. I'm trying to think of the best way to describe it. The way that I think of it is our brain has boxes that we sort information is in. And cognitive flexibility is essentially we stretch those boxes to fit our new reality, right? It hits on that because it's like, okay, let's change what we what we think the world is. It hits on intermittent reinforcement. It hits on this idea of hope. And it does this all in this neat, discreet package that also really, really meshes well with the digital reality. But yeah. Ella Simone: So what is cognitive flexibility in contrast to? Maria Eddleman: So like rigidity, like so let me give you a good example of this. So it's like if I am a child and I think a relationship is a man and a woman and they love them and they love each other forever, la la la la la. Like it's very rich, and this is what a relationship looks like. If you see your mom and your dad sheet on your mom, it's a lot more painful and traumatic for that child because they have rigid ideas about the world and they don't have the resources to process the new reality. They don't know how to interpret that information. If I'm 30 years old and I see my dad sheet on my mom, it's really gonna hurt. But I understand that relationships are nuanced and I understand that it's not gonna fracture my reality. But when you're a child, your boxes are still being built. And they're more rigid. That's why you give structure to a child because they have to build the box and then learn to stretch it out. If that makes sense. Ella Simone: Yeah, and I think I think most mental illness is kind of rooted in rigidity of thought. For example, OCD. This these I the idea I mean that's kind of an extreme expression, but the idea that these rituals, these compulsive rituals you do really will change your reality and will change what what will happen. That's just an extremely like rigid idea of cause and effect, I guess, that doesn't account for nuance and randomness and fate and luck and all these other things that like explain why things happen. Or anxiety to some degree, like it's fear, I would say, is rigidity, right? Like it's and some fear is is valid. Like you should be afraid of a shark coming toward you. There's no way to like spin that as, ⁓ that's just in your head. But a lot of anxiety isn't about something as tangible as that. Like I've I've had horrible social anxiety for periods of my life, and I I truly felt like if I mess up in this way, then everyone will hate me. It's just like A will happen and then B will happen, and that's what it is. Whereas I think like maturity and I don't know, groundedness and wholeness is the ability to entertain like more rubbery, flexible ideas of why things happen without being so rubbery and flexible that you lose touch with reality. Maria Eddleman: Yeah, that's I think that most I mean, again, like I'm just a person, but the way that I've always thought about therapy is most of it is built around increasing your cognitive flexibility. There's no way, at least from everything I've seen, the brain does not like uncertainty. And I will talk about that more about how it's grounded from even a sensory perspective. Your brain hates it. So like uncertainty with a flavor of negativity is much more Detrimental to the human experience is much more maladaptive than uncertainty with a positive spin to it. Like if you don't know what's gonna happen, but you expect it to generally be positive, it's a much more adaptive life. Most of the time, when you're working with people or when I've been in therapy, right, it's mostly about okay, how do I become less attached to my negative beliefs about the world, right? But yeah, no, exactly. Like essentially, like, I kind of forgot where I was going with that. But the idea is like the way that we think about reality, we do want to have like a level of flexibility where we can adapt to new circumstances, but we don't want to be so unmoored to the world that we start to like lose touch with reality. And that's where like being mentally healthy comes from. It's like, okay, how do we stay positive without losing touch with reality? Ella Simone: Yeah. And psychosis is just kind of the extreme expression of losing touch with reality. But I think we've all had periods of time where you've been on your phone a little too long or you haven't gone outside in a long enough time, or maybe over the pandemic this was the case for people, and you start getting a little weird. Like there was a point where over the pandemic where I was just like on Reddit too much, and I was just starting to I didn't literally think that everything I was reading was true, but my grasp of reality was getting a little too shaky for my comfort. And psychosis is just kind of the extreme realization of that. But I think everyone is kind of on the spectrum of of I don't know. On on every I think everyone could become psychotic. Maria Eddleman: A version of psychosis that comes from like really intense spirituality. Like you'll see that like in case studies, like that flavor of psychosis where someone goes too deep down the spirituality rabbit hole. Because the way that psychosis works in the brain, one of the leading theories, by the way, keep in mind the brain is a complex box that we don't understand fully. But the idea is one of the leading theories of schizophrenia is there's too much dopamine in the brain. Essentially, you're making connections that aren't really there. And that's why a lot of the time you can Ella Simone: ⁓ yeah. Maria Eddleman: you're like, hey, are is this person is this person just like a little bit like is are they just a little bit out there or are they starting to enter psychosis? That's usually how that tends to progress, right? And that's kind of, I think Ella Simone: Mm-hmm. Maria Eddleman: Like one of the places where things start to get fuzzy. Because I think where manifestation can go too far is when people completely lose touch with reality. And I think that's what we're happening right here. Again, this primal desire to seek human connection, we're not feeling connected as people. So we're finding ways to feel connected. And these AI chatbots and all this shit, it's mimicking reality with a human being a little too comfortably. Like when I see teenagers go to chat GPT instead of therapist for relationship advice, it literally makes me want to strangle them. Not the kids, but like some abstract idea of like what of I don't even know who I want to strangle. Like yeah the ether. I want to strangle if society was a person, I'm like, I want to strangle it. Because like I see a lot of people do that. Ella Simone: The ether. The ether. Maria Eddleman: Like you'd be surprised how many teenagers and people will go to Chat GPT and say, Hey, was I in the wrong for that? As if they're talking to a friend because they see Chat GPT as like, this is a wealth of information. So why not ask it about my relationship problems? And that's if teenagers are doing that, what are little kids doing? And it's terrifying. Ella Simone: Yeah, I think that's also a convenience thing. Like ChatGPT is available to you at all times and you can get a result in two seconds. Whereas having getting a therapist and or getting a friend on the phone, that you can't just you will that into existence the way that you can will a chat GPT response into existence by just typing into it. ⁓ sorry, go ahead. Maria Eddleman: No, I was just gonna say, I think it's also like, we also are very being very con we're talking about how it's getting worse, but I think it's also a little too convenient to say this is all a result of psychology, because the idea that our reality is not our reality when faced with something that feels too much like reality has existed for a long time. And that sentence counted kind of convoluted, so let me just say it in one word. Dreams. Like how many people have had a really intense dream and woke up and you're like, Whoa, am I really awake right now? Ella Simone: Mm-hmm. Or even if even if you smoke a little too much and I don't know, there's that meme of like I shouldn't have smoked that shit. Now I'm like at Blockbuster in the parking lot at three in the morning. Like, I don't really remember my dreams, but I'll smoke sometimes. Not so much anymore, but I used to when I was earlier in my in my days of being kind of a stoner, ⁓ I would have moments where I was like, Was that real? Did that just happen? Did I Or was that a dream? Am I asleep? And Ouija can kind of like s kind of artificially like induce this almost kind of like dream like surreal state. And I don't know. I think it's I think we should be a little more careful with that, I guess. Maria Eddleman: ⁓ yeah, that's a whole rap the weed psychosis rabbit hole. I could go on it for hours. But what I'm kind of talking about for myself is like sometimes this will happen a million times. I'll be having a dream and I'll be like, whoa. And then I'm I think I'm awake. And then I'm like, wait, shit, I'm still dreaming. And then I'll snap myself awake. And I'll do that like four times until I actually wake up. And there's like a solid five or ten seconds that I'm like, what if I'm still asleep and this is actually my dream world? And it's Ella Simone: Yeah. Yeah, and there was an ancient Chinese philosopher who asked that very question. Maria Eddleman: Mm-hmm. Yep, his name was Zhang Cho, and he wrote an ancient Chinese text that's one of the foundational tenets of Taoism. ⁓ and he basically in that book he talked about a butterfly dream. So essentially he said that he dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhang Cho, right? And then he woke up and suddenly he was himself again. But he didn't know if he was the man who dreamed he was the butterfly. But how does he know that he wasn't the butterfly who dreamed he was a man? And I bring up that ex Ella Simone: Can you explain that in like layman's terms? Maria Eddleman: Yeah, so like I am gonna sit here and I'm gonna have a dream that I'm a dog. Or like bigger better example, everyone ever ha anyone ever had like a dream that they were like a bird that could fly? Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: I mean, I'm never a bird, I'm just like they're gliding, but whatever. If I have a dream that I'm a bird, I can fly and I wake up, how do I know that I'm Maria who dreamed she was a bird? And not the bird, the bird that bird that dreamed she was Maria. Exactly. Like this idea of like better example, who's seen the movie Inception? It's literally all about that. Ella Simone: And not the bird who dreamed that she was Maria. Mm-hmm. Maria Eddleman: It's literally just be like, ⁓ well, how do like at the very end of the movie that spoilers, ⁓ there's like this, ⁓ there's this top and it's still spinning. And that's like the sign that the dream is over, right? So the whole thing, there's a little top in the movie, and if it's spinning for too long, it means you're still in the dream. And at the very end of the movie, the top is still spinning and they don't know whether or not and then it starts to wobble a little bit and it cuts to black. Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: It's this idea that like what was a dream in the movie and what wasn't a dream in the movie. Ella Simone: Yeah, I feel like there's almost a whole subgenre of movies like this, like The Matrix, Everything Everywhere All At Once. There's kind of a whole I shouldn't have smoked that shit, now I'm questioning the nature of my reality genre of movie. I think because that question is is so unanswerable and has like persisted throughout all of human history. Maria Eddleman: Yeah, I think it's way too convenient to be like, okay, this idea of like not feeling in touch with your reality is solely a product a consequence of the absurdist digital age we're living in. It's not. It's existed for hundreds of years. Like, ⁓ Descartes does a similar talks about it similarly too. Like if you guys have ever heard the I think, therefore I am. Ella Simone: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Maria Eddleman: Like a part of that general thought experiment was him trying to discern how he knows his reality is actually his reality. There's a whole genre of philosophy called epistemology, which is the study of how we know that we actually know anything. And one of the things he posits in this theory, this thought experiment, how do I know that there's not this evil demon that's projecting a reality and I'm just like Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: upon inside of it. And the modern equivalent is gosh, what is it? ⁓ yes, absolutely, please. Ella Simone: Wait, can I ask a question about that? For context, guys, Rene Descartes was a French philosopher who wrote during the time right before the Enlightenment started, and he wasn't part of the Enlightenment, but he was considered kind of a foundational thinker that preceded the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. But why is the demon inherently evil? Maria Eddleman: Goodness, that's a really good question. I think the reason that well, I think it's because I believe, I don't know, but I've always thought it was because Descartes was very religious. So he looked at the solid reality he lived in, from everything I've gathered, was a result of God. Ella Simone: And why is it a demon, like not a spirit? Mm-hmm. Maria Eddleman: So he was trying to like understand the nature of his reality. So he was saying, how do I know that there's not an evil demon constructing my reality? And like Yeah, and like there's a more positive version of this in history too. Like, there's this idea of I don't w I don't know enough to go into it. Shit, never mind. Mm, hold up. Ella Simone: Yeah. It's okay. Maria Eddleman: Shit no, I have it. It's about the Maya. Ella Simone: Yeah, it's in there somewhere in the dock. Maria Eddleman: Let just control fly. Sorry, I didn't prepare. I have this here. ⁓ So there is this idea that our this there is an idea in Hinduism where our reality is God's dream. I'll be so honest, I don't know enough about it. But there is a lot of religions in the world that think we are all living in God's dream. And that's like a slightly more positive idea of like the reality we live in isn't really reality. But in Descartes' case, he was like, How do I know that it's not some evil demon trying to trick me? I don't know why he he made it evil. I just thought it was because he was Catholic. And he was like, My reality is the creation of Ella Simone: Probably. Yeah. Yeah. I mean the idea of a spirit is not as translatable in the West as it is in the East. So I think we're and this is a huge overgeneralization, but we have the Holy Spirit in Christianity, but in a lot of Eastern religions they have many spirits, they have different deities. It's like much more complicated. I think we have a much more like black and white, like Maria Eddleman: of God and he gave me rules for the world. Ella Simone: demon versus angel, like God versus devil. Like it's it's just more I don't know, it's just more like monotheistic and like singular. So I guess if I guess to someone like Descartes who was a a devout Catholic, anyone who seems to be controlling reality and who isn't God must therefore be evil. Maria Eddleman: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that what was interesting about these two philosophers that distinguishes them from the everyday world that we're living in is they were great thinkers. Like you can see it. Like it's this foundational text of Taoism. And Rene Descartes, if you don't know anything about Descartes, shout Ella, I know that you love Descartes. He was a foundational philosopher. And again, like you were saying, he came pre-enlightenment, but the I think therefore I am, I can't generalize. But we we a lot of us have heard that before. He's like the thinker, right? That little statue, the thinker, right? Ella Simone: Major major. Maria Eddleman: Like they made the choice to kind of have this foray into this crazy world of what is real and what is not real. And the problem is I think for us right now, we're kind of bombarded with so much that is making us question our reality that we don't really get a break. We don't really have the time to like sit and think about these and mull over our idea of reality. It's just thrown at us so quick. Ella Simone: Yeah. Yeah, it's not a consensual relationship. Like mo I don't really know anyone who is gung ho about AI. Even people I know who are ultimately pro AI and pro more accelerationists, and that's the minority of people I know, they still have a lot of reservations about it. And like you said, like Descartes could sit in a room and think about this stuff and write out a text and ostensibly turn it off. Like maybe maybe he struggled to like get back snap back into his everyday life and, you know, like make food and do chores and go to work and go about his day without thinking about this stuff. But there was still I feel like the the thread was like still more within his control. Whereas with AI it's aggressively confronting us with these like splintered realities that we really didn't ask for and that people don't really want, I don't think. Maria Eddleman: ⁓ yeah. No, I completely agree. I mean, I find it comforting to see that ancient philosophers have like had same similar ideas that we do, right? Like ⁓ like Inception with ⁓ Zhang Cho and like Rene Descartes and like The Matrix, right? Very similar concept. If you've ever seen the movie The Matrix, it's basically like Rene Descartes' evil demon. Basically like aliens have us in the little sleeping pod. Like I won't go into the whole thing. But yeah, like the difference is they're making the choice to do this and we're not. Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: And that's I think a really great segue to talk about too, how our brains like on a biological level ⁓ I can't hear you. You mu you mooted yourself, babe. Ella Simone: ⁓ sorry. ⁓ I wanna add something about the manifestation thing that's like ⁓ about the nature of reality. Okay. ⁓ so kind of circling back to manifestation, there's this man, Neville Goddard, who's kind of considered the godfather of modern manifestation. Manifestation has kind of existed in various forms throughout history, but he lived in the 20th century and he wrote, I think over like f 40 books about self-help and self-hypnosis, manifestation, meditation. he was from bar he was a white guy, but he was from Barbados and he didn't move into the United States until he was a teenager, which I wonder like I wonder if he was like influenced by, you know, like the the religion and the spirituality around him that was not like American Christianity. I imagine he was. But he wrote this book in 1944, The Feeling is the Secret. And it opens with this statement, the world and all within it is man's conditioned consciousness objectified. Consciousness is the cause as well as the substance of the entire world. And a few lines later he says, Consciousness is the one and only reality, not figuratively, but actually. What do you think about that? Maria Eddleman: ⁓ god. I love it because it really ties into the idea that I was talking about within perceptual neuroscience. So there's this guy named Anil Seth. ⁓ I hope I'm pronouncing his rank name correctly. But I don't know if you've ever heard of him and the idea of controlled hallucination. Ha like, have we have we talked about that, Ella? Ella Simone: No. Maria Eddleman: Yes. Okay, awesome. So I'm super excited. So it's this idea that our perception of reality is just one controlled hallucination generated by the brain. So essentially, instead of taking in information and building a model, basically we don't think We don't get information and then build things, right? We essentially have an internal model of the world, and then we fine-tune it based on the sensory information that we're given, right? So essentially our brain is continuously making predictions about how about the causes of the sensory information that we're getting, if that makes sense. Ella Simone: Can you give an example? Maria Eddleman: Okay, so our brain is not passively receiving sensory information. Like, if I have the idea that Ella's face is right in front of me, like I have a model of what a face looks like before I even see Ella. So, like, I already have this idea of this person in front of me before I hear you speak or I listen to you talk, if that makes sense. I'll give you an example of like conversation, right? So the average gap between turns in a conversation is only about a fifth of a second. So your brain jumps ahead. And we've all had that experience. That we kind of predict what someone's gonna say before we say it, so we accidentally cut them off. That's bound, that's basically structured in real neuroscience. It's this idea that we We jump ahead. And we do that because it allows us that reaction time to survive better, right? It causes us to be quicker. But also, the amount of information that our senses receive is too vast and complex for our brain to understand. So this was a bit of from BBC Future. They said all of the research points to one thing. Our visual system remains too limited to tackle all of the information our eyes take in. For that, our brain would need to be bigger than a building, and then still it wouldn't be enough. And that's why. Ella Simone: Yeah, there's that movie, Lucy, that I haven't seen, but it's about I think this I think the premise is humans only have access to like 15% of their brain activity. And this character, Lucy, it's a kind of a sci-fi film, is for some reason, I guess, given more access, like 35% of her brain or something. And she has these like superhuman powers of like perception and ability. And I read this book. This collection of essays called The Collected Schizophrenias, and the author has schizoaffective disorder, and she and her husband went to see the movie and she had to leave the movie because she started think feeling like it was real and that she could be like Lucy and she could get access to more of her brain. That's how suggestive people are, especially if they have any kind of like psychosis or Alzheimer's, any kind of disorder that like splinters reality. Like it can be as simple as a movie triggering you. Maria Eddleman: ⁓ I'm so happy you brought up that movie because I genuinely have such a beef with that movie for so many reasons. But it's this idea, sorry, you see me getting so excited on the other side because I talk about that all the time. Because this idea that if we use 100% of your brain, suddenly we're gonna have superpowers, it's bullshit. Basically, our brain, we activate different parts of our brain at once, but Ella Simone: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Maria Eddleman: You're not supposed to. Think of it like having a MacBook. If I open a hundred tabs on my MacBook, it's not gonna give me superhuman processing ability. It's just gonna make me slow and fragmented and like disjointed and have no idea what's going on. And that's the problem. Like essentially like Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: We're not supposed to be using all of our brain at once. We're not supposed to be doing all that. And when you have too much activation, that's when things like that happen, right? Psychosis happens with too much activation. Right? Like, let me give you another example too, because I haven't. Ella Simone: Well, would you say our our daily exposure to technology, to the internet, to social media also counts as too much activation? I mean, everyone kinda calmly expresses feeling overstimulated and burnt out. I think that is connected to the uptick and, you know, disorders like ADHD and autism that we're seeing. I'm not claiming to know that the what is causing those, but I think, you know, those autism is predicated on like sensory overload. And I I I think it's I'm not really like inventing the wheel when I say that everyone's feeling a little overstimulated with the internet and we're all we all we all are like facing sensory overload now. Maria Eddleman: Well, the way that I think about it is like this. There's a difference between making too many associations and overstimulation. So I think of overstimulation, you know, I'm ADHD, I got some like eight I got some autism symptoms. One I don't have, but I know other people do, is the feelings of clothes on their body. Right? So, like if I'm sitting here and I'm looking at you wearing like whatever shirt color you're wearing, like you eventually stop feeling that shirt on your body. You put the shirt on in the morning and you feel it on your body, then your brain acclimates and you tune it out. But if you struggle with something like autism, you might feel that shirt a bunch of times throughout the day and you just can't turn tune it out. The other day I was listening to the rain, and usually I can tune out the rain, but for some reason my brain couldn't tune it out and I couldn't go back to sleep, and it was driving me insane because. because I couldn't tune those things out. So that's more overstimulation. So what something like psychosis is, is it's like you keep connecting things that aren't actually connected. And I think that both can be possible dependent on like the sensory overload that you're getting. Losing touch with reality because you're making too many associations can be a consequence of this crazy information age we're living in. Or you could have this experience like, whoa, this is too much. I'm just gonna tune it out. And I think it's just like, do we into do we kind of take this information and take it in and take it a little bit too seriously? Or do we just get overwhelmed and push it away? That's how I think of those two different things. Ella Simone: We'll define getting overwhelmed and pushing it away. Maria Eddleman: Like if you get overstimulated, you just get too much and you just go like, ⁓ my brain can't handle this. Right? And you just need to get out of there. Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: Right? Like it's just becomes like noise that your brain can't process versus like I'm gonna take these things in and I'm going to integrate it into my idea of reality. So overstimulation is a bit more like ten people are screaming at me at once and I'm just blo and it's just all sounds like noise versus like three different people are like all saying things to me at the exact same time and I'm trying to figure out what's real and what's what's not. I can't I'm like piecing these things together in ways that aren't making sense. Ella Simone: Okay. Maria Eddleman: Yeah. There's this concept that one of the main symptoms of like schizophrenia is called ideas of reference. And this is idea that like these connecting things that aren't truly connected. And that's why, again, like the spirituality thing, like often is like a precursor to not a precursor, but there's like a specific path to psychosis, to getting way too into like manifestation and spirituality, and then you know, starting to get into psychosisy territory. Because like Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: You're associating all these things that aren't actually associated. Ella Simone: Well, I don't even know if they're not actually associated, but they can't be disproven really, which makes it harder to let go of that idea. Because my last job, I was a adult mental health case manager working for the city I was living in, and I had 50 clients and half of them had schizophrenia or schizophactor disorder. So I I probably saw at least one schizophrenic person every single day. And the job I had before that I also had schiz schizophrenic clients. And there's almost always a spiritual, religious element to their delusions and to their break with reality. And I think that there are a lot of nuances to that. And I actually want to do a whole episode about schizophrenia where we dive into this, but I think the fact that it's kind of unpro unable to be disproven makes the delusion stronger. Like can you prove to can you prove to a schizophrenic person that like that the chemtrails aren't putting thoughts into their brain? No, not really. It it's it's like nonsensical. It's not like based on evidence, but you can't really disprove it either because it's so intangible. Maria Eddleman: Well, I think that's well that's kind of Well, and that's kind of the problem, right? Like, ⁓ there's a I can't remember the name the name of the person who said this quote, but it's like it's crazy how paranoia and reality can sync up everyone now and then. And that's what I think is the problem. Like paranoia in small doses is adaptive. Like Pablo Escobar was extremely paranoid, but you know what? People were after him. Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: And you know what? It freaking worked. He evaded them for a long ass time because he was always on his toes. And that's the thing too with like paranoia is evolutionarily adaptive in certain situations. Like if you're in like a war zone, you should be paranoid. So like yeah. Ella Simone: Yeah. Would you say paranoia is kind of like just a s extreme form of anxiety? Cause anxiety is like anxiet symmetry people are a little too anti anxiety these days. And I'm like, anxiety's all we got left, girl. Like we need to have some anxiety. It's a survival mechanism. And I feel like paranoia is just kind of like a more extreme intense realization of anxiety. Maria Eddleman: Absolutely. Absolutely. I say that all the time. Like listen, anxiety is like an overzealous, controlling, like parent. She's trying to protect you. You just don't need to listen to her all the time. Listen to your mom when she says don't, you know, take drugs from strangers, but don't listen to your mom when says if you drink a water bottle with microplastics, you're gonna die. Right? Ella Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maria Eddleman: Like you do want to listen to it every once in a while. Like paranoia is absolutely like a form of anxiety. Paranoia also happens when there's too much dopamine in the brain. That's how paranoid schizophrenia works. To your point about weed, that's why people get like super paranoid when they smoke, because too much they're making too many associations where there isn't one. It doesn't happen with every single drug. Happens with for weed with some reason. I don't know the neuroscience behind it. But yeah, like, and I think that's that's a natural paranoia is a natural consequence of. having too much information and not being able to make sense of the world. Because if you don't know how to keep yourself safe and if you don't understand your real if you don't understand your reality, you can't keep yourself safe. And that's why I worry about these young kids. Like when you say the whole AI psychosis, I don't know anything about it truly. But I think about little kids because if they can't distinguish reality from the digital world, then How are they supposed to understand reality and keep themselves safe? So there's actually like I read this little article by this woman at McGill. ⁓ I think her name was Leah Erickson and it's was called When Phone When Your Phone Makes Time Disappear. She said, This experience raises an interesting question. The experience she's talking about is getting on your phone in the morning and then like where does the time even go? She said, This experience raises an interesting question. Do you truly remember the time we spend on our phones? Or does it merely t create craps cracks in our real world timeline and what happens to the moments around our phone usage? So I think she was just being poetic, but it was fascinating. Ella Simone: Hmm. Yeah. No, I mean I think there's something that resonates with me about that. Because the phone is so is so like, I don't know, braided into our daily sentience, like you're constantly checking your phone, you're getting notifications from your phone. It it makes me feel like my reality is a little fractured too. Like, am like living in real life or am I like putting like am I Sometimes I feel like I'm putting my head in the water, which would be in my phone, and then bringing it back up and looking at around me and be like, ⁓ I'm in real life, as opposed to the other way around. It really I feel like I really should feel like I'm my head is above water and I'm dump dumping it in water. Sometimes look at my phone, not being so and but I feel like it's the opposite sometimes. Like it feels like the phone and like the digital reality like is constantly imposing on our lived reality and I think for children who have grown up with with that, like it's gonna be harder and harder for them to distinguish between the two. Or maybe it won't, actually. I'm I'm gonna challenge myself on that because I've noticed that like people over the age of 45 actually have kind of worse digital hygiene than young people in some ways. Like the epidemic of boomers who are addicted to like AI slop, Timu. the news, which is like spiking their cortisol constantly. I saw this video today that was like some AI generated video of Trump walking with these like two like fourteen foot tall, like strange pale Norwegian looking figures who look like they're out of a video game. And someone was like, don't let the anyone's grandma see this. Like young people know that that's not real, but actually it's like old people, and I'm not even just saying old elderly, but like let's say 45 and up. They have less of a grasp on what's real and what's not. And young and young people are like more digitally literate. So I wonder I don't even know if it's gonna be as as cut and dry as like kids struggle to distinguish between reality. I think it might just be that their reality is just way more like is way more ⁓ what is the word I'm looking for? Maria Eddleman: Important. Ella Simone: Like their their their IRL reality is just way more tied up with their digital reality than it was for previous generations. Maria Eddleman: And I as you said that too, like I've thought about that too. Like again, like older people, they don't have the schemas for things like this technology. So they're gonna be more sorry, it's like this idea of the cognitive box. Thank you for correcting me on that. So let me actually pull up like a proper definition for you, but I'll tell you how I describe it. So a schema. Ella Simone: What is a schema? Aren't schemas like deep seated beliefs? Maria Eddleman: A schema is, according to Google, this is just how I've always described it as a box that you put mental information in. But a schema is a structured framework or mental model used to organize and interpret information, right? So it's this mental framework that helps us organize, categorize, and make sense of new experiences and like social roles. So for me, what I was talking about with cognitive flexibility, when I talked about those boxes we build, that's a schema. Ella Simone: Mm-hmm. Maria Eddleman: Yeah, 'cause again these are things that have existed in psychology. Ella Simone: Yeah, and cognitive behavioral therapy, which we both practice and is kind of the standard therapy in 2026, is all about changing your schemas that you have about yourself. So if it's the idea that you have these like core the way I learned it in school was in more of a psychology framework of these core deeply held beliefs that you might not even be really conscious of. And for instance, like the schema someone kind of a scheme of like, I'm unlovable. There's something deeply wrong with me that is not going to appeal to anyone. And they will subconsciously make choices and choose people who are unavailable to them because they don't trust that that person could really love them because of that deep seated belief they have. It's not they don't bring up like the conscious and unconscious and subconscious in the way that Freud did, but it is kind of like parallel to that idea. These ⁓ beliefs that are that are running your life that you don't even really necessarily have an awareness of at the conscious level. Maria Eddleman: Well, I mean I I always think of it like too, like it's not just about like our ideas about the self. Like that's what I talk about in psychology, but I think of like, okay, like what is a like what is a horse? A horse is a large animal that has hair, legs, a tail, right? So like Sorry, what I was talking about with like older people is they don't have like a framework for like AI versus reality. Like it's only as they're much older, they've really already encoded their reality. So young kids I think are gonna be able to distinguish from reality and digital reality, but I think where the the trippy part is gonna come in for them is like where do we encode that This is just a fake, weird, not real thing versus like r our reality. Like, I'll give you an example. When my dad, I told him about cyberbullying for the first time. ⁓ he was like, I was told him like I was being cyberbullied, and I was, ⁓ but he was like, why the fuck? Why would I care? It's a box. Like Ella Simone: Ha ha ha. Maria Eddleman: some random person I don't know says a w thing about me who I don't know and they're just typing it on a little screen. Why the fuck do you care? It's not like they're saying it to your face. Because like he doesn't encode like technology as the real world. But I think that kids now, like, they're basically imprinting too much of their digital reality on their actual reality. They don't have as much separation. And that's where I think they're gonna get impacted more. Not really like, ⁓ what's real and what's fake. It's really more like what's more important and what is real life. Yeah. Ella Simone: Yeah. Yeah. And just I think yeah, they might be more discerning about distinguishing AI between something that's real, although the AI's only gonna get more and more advanced as time goes on, so I can't even guarantee that. But I think I'm more concerned about them failing to adapt or struggling to adapt to physical reality because it's where was I going with that? Basically, like I'm I'm not even at the point of worrying about AI being sentient yet. I'm more worried about how it's making people less sentient now. Like them struggling like kids are struggling to pick up social cues and like read basic like facial expressions because they're not spending enough time like talking to real people. I think they're the struggle to adapt to reality is like more concerning to me than like are they gonna know if a video is AI or not? But that's also concerning. Maria Eddleman: No, exactly. No, and that's that's what exactly what I was like on the point like the importance factor, right? 'Cause like dopamine also assigns importance in the brain. That's why you feel instant gratification. Like this is an important thing. And you know, taking away from that like neuroscience take, I wanna talk about the fact that like I was talking to somebody the other day and somebody who works with kids and they were saying, I have to teach my kids how to play with toys, some of them, because they only ever have an iPad. Ella Simone: What? ⁓ my god. Like playing with blocks and stuff? Maria Eddleman: Yeah, like toys, like real like like Barbies and things. Like they're used to the iPad. And that's what I mean. Like that is their their think about that. Think of a child's idea of play, being an iPad. That's what play is. How are you supposed to play with other kids when you get to be a teenager? Like, you're more adapted. Like, and I started to see this when I was growing up. Like, I played with sticks and things, and people thought I was weird. Like. If you're like a farm kid, like and you don't have an iPad, other kids like socialization for kids is like emojis. Like, and you see this too, like just like how much do emojis convey language? Like, I'm not concerned that they can't distinct I'm not really concerned that I know people make fun of me. I know it's emoji, but I say emoji because I'm old, right? But that's like that's the idea, like. Ella Simone: I like how you say emoji. Maria Eddleman: Be it's not that the kids can't distinguish ready. They're better than distinguish at distinguishing reality from AI than we'll ever be. But the problem is what's real in their heads. What really sits in their head? Like this is play. This is relationship. This is job. This is life. Those are the things that I'm worried about. Right. And it circles back to the idea going all the way back to this Emily Hart thing, right? Like, well, these Instagram models are just as inaccessible to me as Emily. Heart, so why the fuck do I care that she's not real? It's not like freaking Sydney Sweeney's not real to you. People project all this shit onto her. You do not know this woman. She's just a conservative lady with big tits. And we don't even know if she's conservative. She's mostly pandering the same way, or I don't know what she is, but like whether she's pandering or really believes it, we don't fucking know. We don't know these people. Like Ella Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But she I think she's very I think she knows what she's doing when she kind of I don't think that ⁓ that American Eagle ad meant anything, really. But and I certainly don't think that she was the one writing and producing the commercial. Obviously she's just an actress. But she's I feel like a blank enough canvas because she doesn't really d make political statements like most public facing Maria Eddleman: No. Ella Simone: celebrities and like musicians, actresses do. Like, it's kind of expected that you're gonna make a statement about Israel Palestine, you're gonna make a statement about LGBT rights. And she doesn't really like declare any kind of take on money things, so she's a better canvas to project onto. And that's kind of what Emily Hart is, is like she I feel like Sidney Sweeney like the real life Emily Hart. And and Maria Eddleman: ⁓ God. Ella Simone: I brought up the Emily Hart thing also because there's this idea in manifestation, and I'm not as good at like parsing through the science of all this stuff, but if you watch like a TikTok or YouTube manifestation video, they'll say what you want already exists on some timeline, in some dimension, somewhere. Like if you want a successful podcast, there's a reality in which you're you have a successful podcast, and you just need to like find a way to tap into that reality. Maria Eddleman: Mm-hmm. Ella Simone: mentally. And that's where people have very different explanations of how you can do that. I think some of it's kind of wacky. I think the I think the more positive thinking stuff I get down with. I don't know about I don't know, this stuff remote viewing and jumping timelines. I don't really know about all that stuff. but Neville Goddard in his book talks about how, like I said, how consciousness is the one on only reality, not figuratively, but actually. So he was seriously saying No, there is no objective reality, it's all consciousness. And he also said, chance or accident is not responsible for the things that happen to you, nor is predestined fate the author of your fortune or misfortune. Your subconscious impressions determine the conditions of your world. The conscious generates ideas and impresses these ideas on the subconscious. The subconscious receives ideas and gives form and expression to them. By this law, first conceiving an idea and then impressing the idea conceived on the subconscious. All things evolve out of consciousness. What do you think about that? Maria Eddleman: I'm trying to really process it because that feels like so much, but I think it kind of goes in line with this idea that of the perceptual neuroscience of most everything that we kind of everything that we see is just an interpretation of our reality. And the fact that we're not really living in one big objective reality, if that makes sense. ⁓ goodness. ⁓ well, ironically, we get into like physics a little bit. ⁓ Ella Simone: Do you think we are? Maria Eddleman: this idea that like if you look at like the way that our pro our brain processes time is also not the same. So we're living in slightly different times. And like every time that you move throughout space, time slows down a little bit for you on like a really, really, really microscopic level. Ella Simone: Yeah, I don't understand that at all. And I don't understand space. Maria Eddleman: It's okay. ⁓ that's okay. I mean, we'll talk about that more when we talk about how like we have all these different frameworks for we'll talk we're gonna talk about this next podcast too, but this idea that like we have boxes that we use to organize information. Science provides us with, ⁓ hey, like we don't know anything, let's build from there. Religion is more like, hey, God knows everything, reality fits into there. And I think that's why religion is more soothing. Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: than sciences. Ella Simone: Yeah. there's a book that I skimmed over called Mind Magic, The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, by this doctor who died last year, James Doty. He was the clinical professor of neurosurgery at Stanford. And he opens with the line, the universe doesn't give a fuck about you. But from there he takes kind of a neuroscientific pus perspective to explain manifestation. I would love to hear you close out by explaining that. Maria Eddleman: Yes, absolutely. Go. ⁓ yeah, so from a neuroscience perspective, manifestation is about rewiring your brain so it's prime to subconsciously seek out something you want and convince yourself it's within reach, right? It's be creating these task-positive networks or systems of neurons to help you achieve high-level tasks. So you're more likely to pick up on helpful tools and cues in your environment that you'd normally never pay attention to. So I'll close out with this idea of like the alien face illusion. This is just an optical illusion trick. But it basically is if you can Google it, you stare at a white cross and there's two pictures of celebrities on either sides. And if you stare at the center from for long enough, eventually the faces begin to merge together. And I always use it as an analogy for describing when your brain is locked in on one thing, your brain distorts the reality around it to fit that thing. If you have a negative mindset, you're only gonna pick up on negative cues in your environment. If you have a positive environment, you're more likely to pick up on cues that validate your beliefs. So this idea that you're more likely to pick up on things that you would normally never pay attention to, it's because you're already your brain is seeking to validate its expectations. It's seeking to confirm your expectations. So if you have higher expectations from yourself, you're going to pick up on more things. Ella Simone: Mm-hmm. Maria Eddleman: Because again, going back to what Anil Seth was saying and the BBC Future was saying, like Not only are we living in a controlled hallucination, but your brain takes in too much information and it has to filter out a lot of it. Now some of that is sensory, but it's also psychological, right? Like both are true. So you're more likely to pick up on sensory information that affirms things, and you're more likely to psychologically encode it into your schema if it sets your expectations. Right? So if I think everything's about me all the time. I might be more likely to pick up on little snippets of conversation that someone's that la la la la la la la. And I'm also, if I hear someone say the word Maria, I'm gonna be like, ⁓ they're talking about me, versus somebody who's just very like la la la la la all the time doesn't care. Right? So our brain is an expectation machine from our senses to our psychology. Ella Simone: Mm-hmm. And I have these, I have these weird instances all the time, dude, where I'll think of a song or just a concept or a person that I haven't thought of in years, and then it'll just appear. Like I randomly thought of the song DJ Gotta Fallen in Love Again Love Tonight by Usher from 2009. And I hadn't heard that song in years, and then it played in the store right then and there. Like that happens to me all the time. And I start getting like feeling skits out and like, ⁓ my God, is my brain more powerful than I realize it? And like, how am I gonna harness this power? Whatever, whatever, because of just these little instances I have. But it's also like once that happened for the first time, I was primed to keep picking up on when that would happen. And that's kind of how manifestation works. Like, if it works once, then it can work a thousand times. Because if you convince your brain that, ⁓ I do have like my My if I can change my feelings, I can change my destiny, then I think you your brain will start to make that true. Like if you're if you're if you're constantly thinking about I wanna have a successful podcast, I'm going to have a successful podcast, I'm gonna have a successful podcast, your brain would rather be right and be able to predict something. Or sorry, your brain would rather feel right in that it's able to predict something than to literally be right. So if you have the expectation that all men cheat, I think you're gonna subconsciously keep ending up with men who are cheaters because your brain would rather be right or feel right, even if it means that it's miserable, than to not know what's gonna happen next because that's just a a crucial part of survival. Maria Eddleman: Absolutely. Yeah. No, and absolutely. That's pretty much exactly what I was that's that's all of it in a nutshell, right? Our brain likes to be right. And that's what we'll talk about this next time too, about how like we build different boxes in our head. We're gonna talk about science and how it's similar to religion and how it's different from religion. And we're gonna talk about how both of these have kind of played on the neuroscience of expectation. And I'm super excited for us to get into it. Ella Simone: Yeah. Did you wanna I can edit like where each like I could edit like the transcript so if I we said something 30 minutes in, I could edit it so it's actually five minutes in. Did you wanna say anything about simulation theory? Cause that's really well known. Maria Eddleman: Yeah, so essentially So, simulation theory is very Rene Descartes, like evil demon, right? It's basically like the sci-fi version of it. It's this idea that how do we know that we're not living in an alien simulation? And this is something I kind of nerded out about because there is a lot of intense science to it. Not the simulation theory, but it kind of like does the same thing that TikTok spirituality does, where it takes in these psychological concepts and kind of like makes it into a like a pretty discrete package. So it's this idea that essentially the speed of light is like the maximum processing speed on a computer. And it's this idea that essentially black holes are kind of like I'm trying to think of the right word for it. Black holes are like servers. Ella Simone: Isn't there something about like reality as data or something? Maria Eddleman: Yes, so okay. So it's this idea that the universe is code. So quantum physics does say that Basically, reality is like little discrete information packages rather than like one solid thing of matter. So it's like these little discrete packages, almost like bits of code. And there's this idea that black holes are like data processing hubs where information is stored, encoded, and compressed. So the reason that a black hole like is a black hole and doesn't make sense is because the data is being stretched and compressed and encoded. So all data breaks down. And like they even fold this into this real theory, which is holographic universe theory, which is this idea that Like, I will not pretend to be able to explain it perfectly, but the the long the short of it is essentially the entire universe is a 3D hologram projected from a 2D surface. So you can see how that would kind of like tie into simulation theory. It's like everything is like two-dimensional and it's projected as 3D. And there's actually a Doctor Who episode about kind of that kind of like low-key talks about this. ⁓ you know, it doesn't actually talk about it, but it is about Ella Simone: Mm-hmm. Maria Eddleman: Let me see if I can find the exact episode about it, 'cause I feel like I should put it here. Because it kind of is like an allegory for this. Extremis. So it's basically this idea that like the episode takes place in a computer simulation rather than an actual reality. And they have these projectors that like appear 3D, but it's projecting a 2D reality. And ironically, it kind of takes place because they find this ancient Catholic text that says your reality isn't real. So it's kind of playing on Descartes. Yeah. And as I'm saying it, I'm like, ⁓ Ella Simone: Whoa. Maria Eddleman: ⁓ my goodness, I'm connecting the dots there. Yes! Ella Simone: It's all connected, dude. No, it is. Like the Descartes the Descartes evil demon theory is using religious language of his time to basically describe simulation theory. Like now we would understand that as in a scientific way. Tech people love simulation theory. Elon Musk loves simulation theory. But he they're basically saying the same thing. They're saying that there's some entity, be that an alien, an evil an evil demon, a supercomputer that's generating this giant projection. And it's interesting how like that theory has basically persisted. It's just in scientific language rather than religious language. Maria Eddleman: ⁓ yeah. And in that episode, I'm going on a slight tangent. That episode actually everything takes place in the shadow world. And people come back from the shadow world and then nobody believes them when they say that they went to the shadow world, which is a play on Plato when his theory is like the ⁓ his allegory of the shadow people, which I won't get into. But The idea is the idea is basically on that episode. But the reason that make it makes me feel freaked out and it's kind of like gives me the ick be this whole theory is because I'm like, why are we projecting this computers our reality? That's what freaks me out. I'm like, okay, so the nature of our reality is just one big computer, and that's what really starts to freak me out. And it's just Yeah. And then I start seeing things. Ella Simone: Then what is a computer? Like what's a physical computer? Maria Eddleman: Yeah, exactly. I'm like, if if we're in a computer, then what's an actual computer? Like, are we starting to crack the code of like the nature of our own reality and universe? And that's where I start to get freaked out. Because I'm like, okay, like, what do you mean we're starting to understand the base code of the universe? Like, is ev like it just it just absolutely creeps me out. But yeah. Ella Simone: Yeah. I started freaking myself out when I was reading about Emily Hart. I was like, what if she does exist in a different dimension, on a different timeline? And I remember when I was in college I got really high and I wrote some stupid notes app entry where I was like, I have this is back when I had a personal Instagram, I was like, I have myself and then I have my Instagram self. Is there a timeline in which my Instagram self is real? Is the Instagram self real just on like a two-dimensional plane? I don't know. And is there and who defines what is real? If Emily Hart is perceived by you know a seventy six year old boomer as being real, is that is she not real? If every if everything if everything is just perception and she's being perceived as real, then is she real? Maria Eddleman: I kind of like again like And it and it and that like to an untrained scientific mind, like as I consider myself very, very partially trained, like this ⁓ there's a like quantum superposition essentially says that things exist in two places at one in places at once until enough chaos is introduced into the system that things snap into one place. Right? So like and for a lot of that that's being perceived. So if you look at something, it goes from being in two places at once to one place. Because when you look at something, a photon is hits the thing and then the photon introduces enough energy and then it snaps back together. But to an untrained scientific person, you're like, what do you mean? Like when you look at something when you look at something, suddenly it goes from existing in two places at once to one place. That's crazy. Ella Simone: Yeah, like me. Yeah, and manifestation girls on TikTok are saying, if you wanna have if you wanna have a nice apartment in New York City, that is your apartment, there's a reality in which you do have an apartment in New York City, that is your apartment. Maria Eddleman: ⁓ yeah. Yeah, and that's multiverse theory. Basically a lot of this, and we'll and that's why it's so exciting to talk about this next time when we talk about like science. Because like science can be so wonderful and comforting, but you can spin off the rails real quick if you don't understand the actual physical mechanics behind it. When it stays a theory, like simulation theory, I don't understand the physics enough to stop myself from getting like kind of like Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: crazy about it. But when I look at like quantum superposition, I'm like, I get that in the basic level. Like it's not like, ⁓ my God, things snap into one thing. I'm like, ⁓ okay. Like Ella Simone: Yeah. Maria Eddleman: I I at least understand some of the mechanics behind it so it doesn't freak me out as much. Another consequence of the age of technology, like we're getting so much information, we don't have the ability to like truly digest it and then understand it so it doesn't all blur together and be like, ⁓ we're associating things that aren't really associated. That's literally what we talked about. Like associating things that are not associated is the journey to a dangerous place. So we're getting too much too quickly. Ella Simone: Yeah. That makes me think of Swifties because they're always saying like she wore this lavender dress and that is a reference to Carly Kloss, which is a reference to her secret album. And this means that like it they get really schizo with the with the with the Easter eggs as she calls it, and I think she definitely plays into that. it it it literally is like ideas of reference. Like ideas of reference in schizophrenia is like when you think that something is like Maria Eddleman: Ha ha ha. Ella Simone: about you specifically. Like you hear an announcement on the intercom at the airport and you feel like it's not just a general announcement on the intercom. They're talking about you specifically. And I kind of feel like like, does Taylor Swift have schizophrenia? Like like she just she just like is constantly putting in these little Easter eggs and like symbols and stuff like that or is she or maybe she doesn't have schizophrenia but Maria Eddleman: ⁓ my god. Ella Simone: Is she like inducing like Swifty psychosis in her own fans by like inundating them with all these like codes and secret messages and whatever like inferences inferences to make so it's his puzzle? Like that's exactly what schizophrenia is. I'd be following people on like on Facebook and on Instagram who are schizophrenic and they'll like lay out these crazy, nonsensical, like, I don't know. Patterns and they'll say, see, this is connected to this, and red means that, and that's why the weather was like this today, and this is what the frogs said, and just all this like nonsense. And sometimes I feel like we're all getting increasingly close to that just because of the internet, because of conspiracy theories, because of the brain rot, like slop, inundation inundated like state of digital, of like our digital reality. Maria Eddleman: So I do not have push to say that because that's a whole thing with celebrity stuff. I just feel like you're more skilled on that. Also, like I think this is a good point to like tap us out and like put it all back together. Like I don't know. I just I'm thinking like this is like too many I this is the right amount of ideas. And then we can edit from there. Ella Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well I don't know Maria, what do you think? Do you think there's a reality in which we have a really successful podcast? I think there is. Maria Eddleman: Quite possibly. I mean, absolutely. I mean i I mean, an infinite amount of possibilities exist. So there is absolutely a reality. I mean, there's a reality where you're Maria Namella. Like, that's the whole idea. Like, and we'll talk about that next time. We will. We will talk about the multiverse in brief. But yeah, there is absolutely a reality where we have a successful podcast and it absolutely could be this one. Or if you want to say it, it will be this one. Or it will happen because Ella Simone: And if if we want that to happen, then what? Yeah. Well I like one mantra I really do like from the manifestation TikTok early says if I want it, I already have it. So I suppose if we want a successful podcast, then that means we already have one. We have forty five listeners. Maria Eddleman: You know, manifestation. I love that. Thank you to the forty five listeners. Ella Simone: Yeah, shout out guys. You're keeping the lights on at Cobra Lilly HQ. Okay. Do we have any do we have any closing thoughts? Maria Eddleman: Ha ha Mmm, too much information is bad for your brain. I'll talk about that next time. It's just that's the real that's the long and short of it. Re-digital reality should not be this close to actual reality and we do not need to have this much information. It's not good for us. Ella Simone: Yeah. Yeah, but we do. And now what? Maria Eddleman: You become digital hygiene, genuinely, digital hygiene. Like you cannot be a passive recipient of information. You have to be a content curator. Like you cannot just the algorithm you control your algorithm, not the other way around. You don't the algorithm doesn't control you. Ella Simone: Yeah. Yeah. You can't just like lay f you can't lay flat and let all the brain rot wash over you. You have to you have to try to filter out as much as you can. Maria Eddleman: Yeah. And that's I think what separates young and old people, like when it comes to this. Like you have to be, you take ownership of your algorithm and stay off your damn phone. Go touch some fucking grass. Ella Simone: Yeah. All right guys. Sorry. Sorry if this was confusing. ⁓ I'm gonna I'm obviously gonna edit this a bunch to like make it more concise. I was just like throwing out as much stuff as possible and I'm like I'll stitch it together and something that like makes sense. All right. Maria Eddleman: I'm super excited. I'm genuinely so excited about this one. Ella Simone: Yeah, this is like this is kind of Maria's like this is time for Marie to let her freak flag fly as the stem girly of the two of us. Alright guys, well that's gonna be it for today. Class is dismissed. Thank you for listening and we will see you in two weeks. Bye guys.