Breaking the Cycle: Tony Brussat on Rethinking Addiction and Embracing Qualia

You know, we we're in a world of addiction, you know, we're not just talking about drones and alcohol, you know, we're talking about school, you know, phones food, you know, just all kind of addiction. So Tony is going to be talking all about uh helping us uh reconnect and and kind of get away from that and just reconnect with the things that really matter. He's gonna be talking about something called qualia. So we're going to be talking to Tony about that and everything that he's up to and gonna be up to. So, Tony, thank you for joining me.

Pleasure to be here.

Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

Okay. Um let's see. Uh I I'm 62, so I was born in I'm actually 63, sorry. I'm born in 1962 in uh in Washington, DC. And and that was the time when DC was still considered kind of a southern town. It was a small town. When I was about 12, they put in the subway system, and this the city turned into a huge metropolis. But I grew up in a nice little neighborhood with a bunch of kids and uh you know concerned parents, uh, sort of keeping an eye on us. Um, you know, we got into our share of trouble, of course, but uh but really I guess what's important about growing up was that my parents instilled in me, and also in my two older brothers, I would say, a real love of an appreciation for for learning and for the life of the mind. Um my dad was very enthusiastic about things he thought were beautiful, and my mom was uh uh actually she really inspired me uh after my father passed away. She uh she started doing amateur theater, and she had studied theater in college, and she uh it was just a side of her that I had never seen, and so I guess what that stands for for me between the two of them is just uh uh a love of things beautiful and expressive. Um uh let's see, where should I go from there? I I guess I'll talk about my a little bit of education, you know, in this you know, love of learning. Um, you know, my direction was the liberal arts, and you know, I got a degree in in English literature, and then I uh quite a few years later got a master's degree in rhetoric and communication, and rhetoric is the study uh traditionally the study of persuasion, but I was able to study it in a very philosophical way, and it was sort of how we create reality using symbols, and that that was very important to me. Um, and uh you know, I I never put those degrees to work, and I was just sort of futzing around with my life. Uh and I ended up actually going to nursing school, and so for 17 years I was a uh psych nurse, and so I I learned quite a bit about um human behavior, especially um, you know, people who were troubled and scared often, and uh it suited me, it suited me very well. Um so uh just to move back and tell you how I got here now was in graduate school when I was studying rhetoric and I was studying how we use symbols to create reality. My advisor suggested I read about ritual. Um, and it was kind of curious because he had an understanding of ritual that said that ritual is a tool with which we keep things the same. And the the example he always used was an inauguration, when um you know, when we change precedents, there's a whole ritual involved in the inauguration, and it's this you know, we're changing, but we're really we're making sure that things don't fall apart. I'm not getting political here or anything, this has nothing to do with our world today, um, in that sense, anyways. Um, but what I've I was reading about ritual on his advice, and I found this anthropologist named Victor Turner, who wrote uh, I guess in the middle of the last century, and he started applying some old concepts of ritual uh to our present day or his present day, and what he the his definition of ritual, which really struck me, was that ritual is actually uh a tool of transformation. You know, a ritual has three parts. We we start out by separating from the routine, then we do something that's the center of the ritual, and then we return to the routine. And his example was well, let's say we we go to the theater, you know, we we make a special night, we you know, don't stay at home or whatever, so we're separating from the routine. We go to the theater to see a play, we see a play, and we are exposed to all kinds of emotions and ideas and colors and sets and all this type of stuff, and and then the play is over and we return home. But when we return home, we're changed that that ritual has left us with an experience, and uh you know, so that's what I I wrote about. I actually wrote about how this um early part of Americana called the concert saloon, and this was sort of a precursor to vaudeville, uh helped to people's experiences going and seeing variety shows, helped to transform America into this idea with this idea of itself as rude and coarse, but always right, you know. We we can solve the problem always, you know. Anyways, uh the point there is that I left graduate school and ended up moving out to Colorado to hike around the mountains and stuff, and I had this idea of ritual as like this is the greatest self-help tool ever. I have to start writing about this, and so I did for a few years. I started writing about ritual as a self-help tool, and then then I discovered uh a book that came into my hands called Consciousness Explained by uh a neuro philosopher, kind of guy, scientist, I named Daniel Dennett. And in his book, he talked about this new word I'd never heard of called qualia. And it totally it totally fit with me. Qualia is basically, you know, all that our senses uh send to our brains, all the color and sound and uh smells and textures and taste, and that's qualia, but it it hits our brains and we react to it. And I guess it really struck me because that's what happens in the center part of a ritual. If we go to a theater, our senses are bringing all this qualia to us. Now, when an animal senses qualia, it reacts instinctually. But we humans, when we receive qualia, we can pause and reflect on it, we can think about it. We have a mind that is reflective, and actually, this is why I think Buddhists uh call the mind the sixth sense. So, anyways, I it just I just had this epiphany when I read about that. It was perfect for what happens to us. It explains why ritual works, because when we separate ourselves from the routine and we start paying attention in those moments, and it could be it could be just a minute, uh, it could be an hour, and and we could be doing all sorts of different things. I ritual almost every morning when I make uh oatmeal, and I've got like five minutes there, and I'm sort of watching the clock, and I'm ritualing with my internal self, and this is a way of calming myself down, uh, and you know, because I can sense all this stuff, but in any case, so that's what happens. I reflect, we reflect during ritual on input, and the final stage of my little journey so far, the final stage, is that it occurred to me that all qualia comes to us from ecosystems. That's a heavy-duty thought. But if you think about it in terms of animals and their landscape, you know, they see things, they hear things, they smell things, and they react. They react to qualia. Those the reason they see those things is because the color, the smells, whatever it is, guides them to what they need to survive. We do that also. We uh, even if stuff that goes through factories and farms and is you know, colleges and books and TV and everything, that comes to us and we reflect on it, but there's a major difference between us and the animals. In the animal landscape, they react instinctually and it helps them find what they need to survive. Now, Curtis, here's the ultimate point: what we receive that we reflect on through the human landscape, doesn't guide us to what we need to survive, it doesn't guide us to what we need, it guides us to what we want and what we desire, and so um and so that's sort of where the crux of my work has taken me, that the human economy has turned into uh uh a big dopamine factory, leading us always to wanting more and more and more. You know, our economy once rested on the dollar, on the gold, on gold. It took the gold away and now it rests on you know the dollar for many years. But in truth, the foundation of our economy is addiction. Everything moves us to wanting more, and that's because we aren't really reflecting properly on the qualia that comes to us. All right, I've gone on and on and on, please. You can I'm sure I've said gotten everybody lost.

Well, I know that uh like you just said, you you describe our world as super addictive. So what are the most forms, dangerous forms of that addiction that uh people don't even realize they're caught in?

Well, it's it's interesting. Uh in nature, in ecosystems, I prefer the word ecosystems to the word nature because um nature is sort of the physical manifestation of the qualia that is ecosystems. So so in any case, animals in in ecosystems uh react to the qualia, and most of the qualia is what I like to call little dopamine. I make a big distinction between little dopamine and big dopamine because when I worked on the psych unit for like 11 years, um my the patients I've worked with they understood that they got that almost immediately, the difference between little dopamine and big dopamine. One is maybe not addictive, one is definitely addictive, and in nature, in ecosystems, uh the qualia triggers little dopamine, and so uh you know, animals follow their sense, uh senses, and they find what they need. Now, of course, uh the qualia in nature sometimes leads uh animals to big dopamine, and I always think of a bear when you know we see these pictures of bears in the river eating all these salmon and stuff, and that's big dopamine, but in nature, big dopamine only lasts for a season, and then it's gone, so it's it doesn't last long enough for animals to become addicted to it. So, in the human landscape, we have provided ways for even the you know the littlest bit of dopamine, like you're looking at your phone and you're just looking at a little screen, and it doesn't seem like much, but it's non-stop and it is addictive, it becomes big dopamine pretty quick. So the most dangerous addiction, you know, I it it it's hard, it's hard to say what's the most dangerous. To me, I I I like this deep history stuff that goes all the way back to the transition from when human beings were nomadic creatures to when we started farming, and when we started farming, we started settling into communities and we had an excess of what we needed. We started saving grain for next year, we had more than enough, and because we had more than enough, we also started fearing our neighbors or strangers, I should say. Uh, and so that was like the inception of this addiction to more, which you know it's taken you know 20 centuries, 25, 30 centuries, but now the seeds of so much distrust is because we're all scared of losing the more we have, and our economy has changed to one of competition from what ought to be an economy of giving and sharing, which is kind of what happens in ecosystems. Ecosystems are always giving, and we need to do that too. So it's hard to say what the biggest addiction is, it's it's it's just an addiction to more um physical addictions, uh you know, smoking or doing drugs, they're almost more quantifiable to an individual. You know, how many cigarettes did I have today? How many beers did I drink? Um, you know, in a way, when things are quantifiable, they're almost easier to overcome. They're not so um, what's the word I'm thinking of? Uh um shocks, I can't think of the word. Insidious. Um, you know, it it's it is they're bad, but in a way they're easier to overcome because we can see them for what they are. So it's almost as if the addictions we have that we don't really recognize as addictions are the worst. There's there's a lot of a lot of um, you know, stuff in the news and stuff always about addiction to uh media and screens and all that kind of stuff, and and that that's bad. But you know what? Sometimes I think it's just shopping. We we're just not satisfied with what we have. You know, I love the fact that there's all this uh literature on minimalism these days. Uh it's so hard for people to give up more. You know, you have a car, well, you want a second car, and you have uh a jet ski, but you want a boat, you know, you have more shirts than you can wear in a week, but you want more than you can wear in a month, you know. And the pleasure, the the pleasure, like any other addiction, wears off. So I I guess I can't really say what's the worst.

Well, how can uh qualia influence uh how people make day-to-day decisions?

Okay, that's the that is the big question, and that's where qualia and ritual come together. Noticing what is coming in through our senses is a first step. Let's just start at the beginning of the day. Uh we're awake in our bed, we're lying there, we don't really want to get up, and a breeze comes through the window, and we notice it. And maybe it's cold, maybe it's not, maybe it's a spring breeze that feels so good, and in that moment we have to recognize oh, let me treat this as if it were a ritual. This is a moment where I'm separated. I'm I could be just lying in my bed dreading, have to get up, but I'm making a moment of this. I smell the breeze, it feels good. Take a deep breath. Maybe I do something physical that will express or congratulate myself for noticing. Like I'll put my hand in my heart just for a second, or I'll take a deep breath, or I'll smile, or you know, I'll say, Amen, beautiful. Uh and also in that moment, I'll express a little gratitude, thankful. Same, they're all sort of the same motion. So we took a moment, we separated, and now we're by golly, I can get up because I just started off my day in a good way. Um, it's not always easy to find those little bits of qualia that um that come to you. I believe most qualia is revealed to us, we just don't know. Notice it. And so this little exercise of waking up is an exercise that will bring us in the habit of noticing new qualia. So then let's say we get up, okay, and what's the first thing we do? Well, we make ourselves that cup of coffee. That's our habit. And I say habit because it's a routine. We a lot of people call their cup of coffee the morning ritual, but it's really the morning routine, unless they really consciously set aside the moment and appreciate that coffee. It could be just that one sip of coffee. Hopefully, it's will extend to become the whole cup of coffee. Uh the key is that our ritualing becomes very conscious, and we're doing it every moment. Now that way, you know, throughout the day, there's little things that happen and that we can uh appreciate. It could be almost anything if we treat it like a ritual, we get in the habit of appreciating whatever is good for us because in ecosystems where we all come from, qualia is good for us. As I said, in deep history, we develop this economy of more and more and more, and much of the qualia that comes to us in the human landscape is not good for us. So by examining what comes to us, what is revealed to us, the first customer, you know, is mad at us or something like that. And we have to sort of uh how can I say we have to try to put it in perspective. We have to go, oh, here I am in another ritual. Maybe I'll just notice that person's clothing or something like that. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna let them hurt me. I am I am in control of this conscious ritual. So uh, you know, throughout the day, we have all these opportunities to make the best of a situation, and it starts to flow into bad situations where you know uncomfortable, you're uncomfortable, you gotta go see the boss, you're nervous. Oh no, you know, you gotta go on a podcast, and you've never done it before. It's a ritual, you're good things are gonna happen. Um, so that's you know, one that's the beginning of using qualia. There are other exercises that involve qualia and ritual that are much more common that we hear about all the time. Meditation, taking a walk in the woods, uh, reading a book. You know, a lot of the arts seem as if you know, they they reflect they reflect human culture, and so they reflect a lot of bad stuff. But in a way, a lot of the arts, um, as much as we love them, they're not they're not, they're like little dopamine pleasures. Like, take music, you know. Obviously, we love music, we start to dance to it, it it sort of pumps us up and everything like that. But that moment of big dopamine is a moment that has an ending, we don't become addicted to it. You pick up a great book and you read, and you're like having all these great ideas in your head, but you're not gonna become addicted to them. Uh, and so there are many, many rituals that we can have where qualia, where we experience qualia, that's really good. It's little dopamine, it might be big dopamine just for a while, but we're not gonna become addicted to it, and it's healthy. Um, and so as we get into that um habit, um we can apply it to our addictive experiences. So I used to start thinking about drinking beers right after lunch. You know, I had a full day of work ahead of me, I couldn't drink, you know, of course. But I I it would have come to my mind, I'd be like, God, the first thing I do when I get home is have a beer. And you know, I began to to recognize that thought as um kind of an adverse, you know, it's not a healthy thought. I mean, I have much better things to think about. I could think about qualia, and so I learned to uh divert those thoughts. I learned to say, okay, I'll make a ritual. I'm gonna see what in this moment of having that thought, I'm gonna see what other qualia comes to me. You know, it might be somebody coming up and talking to me. Um, it might be I have something better to think about for a moment. I I play music and it's like, oh gosh, okay, let me let me see if I can go through this song in my head and remember the lyrics, or you know, change change the chords in the keys, you know, transpose it, something something like that. Um, so I could get away from that, and then later, you know, I'd get home and I'd be like, Oh, great, you know, now's my time. I can do whatever I want, I can just drink. And uh, you know, over time I started to treat that the same way, cutting back. You know, one beer is great, and as the buzz of one beer begins to dissipate, and I find myself, well, should I go get another beer? I'll do another ritual to see what else comes for me for me, and I'll be distracted. So that's kind of the the method of of using ritual and qualia. Uh it's it's important to me to express that quality is revealed to us. That you know, that com goes all the way back to the ecosystems. Qualia is revealed to us, and you know, even in human landscapes, the quality that comes to us comes to us either as a gift or as here's my rhetorical rhetorical training, it comes to us as some persuasion, some marketing, something reminding us and triggering the dopamine reward system. But we recognize that and we work with it, we ritual with it. Um sounds sounds commonplace, but there's a there's uh there is uh something larger, bigger going on, and it has to do with our value systems. You know, we ask ourselves, well, why am I resisting addiction? And well, it's you know affecting my family, or um, you know, I could lose my job, or it's affecting my health, and those are all like very good down-to-earth reasons to try and correct an addiction. But when we sort of expand the camera out, um, we see the world we're living in and how the human landscape has spread across the planet, sort of like a cancer. You know, we are exploiting everything in nature that should be our the source of what's good, the source of all our needs, but we're making it disappear, you know, we're polluting the air, our we're polluting the water, we're you know making species go extinct. It's just it's endless. And so the the bigger picture of this is that qualia comes to us from ecosystems, and we have to keep in mind that if we don't pay attention to qualia, if we don't ritual with qualia and apply those rituals to our addictions and move a little bit beyond that to the bigger picture to try and change our habits so that we're not participating as much in the destruction of our planet. Um, you know, that that's it's a long, hard route. It's hard for an individual, it's gonna be hard even for uh communities, and you know, there's oftentimes I'm very hopeless about whether the human race can change, but this is my soapbox, and I'm standing on it.

Well, tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of.

Um well, I I uh have written uh you know a blog. I have a website uh called Planet Qualia, planetqualia.com, and I've been putting short little pieces up there for many years, a couple times a week. Um, but nobody was really reading that stuff, and so I'm gonna be really upfront about something. I started taking uh you know those essays, which are all short, you know, they're anywhere from you know sometimes a hundred words up to you know a few thousand words, maybe. And I've been taking my blogs if they relate in some way and putting them with no title or anything, just like a bunch of paragraphs, and giving them to Chat GPT and saying, Hey, this is a blog about the meaning of success, or this is a blog about contentment, um, uh, or love, you know, and actually uh ChatGPG has actually turned those groups of paragraphs into uh you know pieces of writing that you know I don't like the writing style, but the ideas come across and and they're pretty simple, uh a little bit repetitive with chat GPT, but I've I've put much of that stuff out on on uh on Gumroad, but really what I'm doing now is I'm turning them into uh YouTube videos, and so I have a uh a YouTube channel uh that's YouTube at Planet Qualia. Um I think that's what it is. Let me double check that. I have it here so I can get that right. Oh come come on. YouTube at PlanetQualia. And it'd be really nice if you know anybody could look at those and uh respond. That would be terrific. So that's really where you can find me mostly. I have uh ebooks and audiobooks of a lot of the same stuff at uh Gumroad at Tony Bressett. Gumroad is a neat little website that you can publish all kinds of electronic media on. Everything's real cheap for me, for the person who wants one of my ebooks or audiobooks.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, well, planetqualia.com, and please be sure to check out Tony's uh YouTube channel. He's real passionate about what he's doing, and uh he's definitely trying to help the world uh break the addiction cycle and make the world a better place. So please follow Rank reviewers for this episode to as many people as possible. Also to keep up with everything live in the journey, please visit www.girv337.com or share the website of the show to everybody that you know. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Tony, thank you for all that you're doing and thank you for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me. I I know I kind of went on and on. Uh oh my feel better. So thank you very much.