Bursting the Reality Bubble w/ Ziya Tong

Feb 1

EPISODE #34

Science journalist Ziya Tong shares her insights into the hidden worlds that exist beyond the limits of the human senses, how illusions contribute to our understanding of reality, and how our collective blind spots are at the core of our current environmental crisis.

Ziya Tong is the Vice-Chair of WWF Canada. She anchored Daily Planet, Discovery Channel’s flagship science programme, until its final season in 2018. Tong also hosted the CBC’s Emmy-nominated series ZeD, PBS’ national prime-time series, Wired Science, and worked as a correspondent for NOVA scienceNOW.

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Transcript

Luke Robert Mason: You're listening to the FUTURES Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.

On this episode I speak to science journalist, Ziya Tong.

"When you're inside the bubble, it's like you're inhabiting a fiction; a fictional bubble. There's a much bigger picture of reality out there and if you're not paying attention to it, it'll sort of crush its way in." - Ziya Tong, excerpt from interview.

Ziya shared her insights into the hidden worlds that exist beyond the limits of the human senses, how illusion contributes to our understanding of reality, and how our collective blindspots are at the core of the current environmental crisis.

This episode was recorded in person before the outbreak of coronavirus, whilst Ziya was in London promoting her book, 'The Reality Bubble.'

You can view a full video version of this version at FUTURES podcast dot net.

Luke Robert Mason: Ziya Tong, in your new book, 'The Reality Bubble', you share the hidden truths about the world around us. More importantly, you show us how reality operates beyond what's perceived by the human senses. It's a truly weird, wonderful, and eye-widening book. What is ‘the reality bubble'?

Ziya Tong: Okay, so it's the first question people tend to ask me, but I know that people are familiar with, say, real estate bubbles, or stock market bubbles, or tech bubbles. We know that when we're inhabiting a bubble it's a dangerous place to be. It may feel prosperous at the time but the problem is that of course, inevitably, all bubbles do burst.

One of the best definitions that I've heard is really that when you're inside of the bubble, it's like you're inhabiting a fiction; a fictional bubble. There's a much bigger picture of reality out there, and if you're not paying attention to it, it'll sort of crush its way in. That's the starting point of this book.

Of course, I'm using a scientific lens with this book. I've had the chance to interview many different scientists over the years, working as a science broadcaster. I started realising that scientists were able to see this world that I couldn't perceive. Whether it's the ability to image something like a supermassive black hole, or the ability to image something like an atom - these are things that we know surround us, and a reality that surrounds us - but that we can't see.

As I started speaking to many different scientists from different fields, they all had a different lens on the world. It's almost like when you picture a dragonfly's eye - the compound lens with the 28 thousand lenses on it - that's almost how this picture of the world starts to come together with all these scientific views put together.

Mason: So it kind of feels like the bubble has come to define the 21st century. We have this environmental bubble which I guess is the atmosphere. We have the financial bubble - or the stock market bubble as it's more well known; the intellectual bubble or the filter bubble; and this psychological bubble, which is your reality bubble. Why do you think the bubble is such a useful metaphor to describe this kind of state of mind or state of being we're in, in the 21st century?

Tong: I think it's because we're increasingly atomised. We're increasingly feeling like we belong to these collectives where we're supported with our viewpoints. But at the same time, we're inside of these little buffer zones; these little echo chambers that we subsist within. Sometimes you feel like your bubble sort of intersects with other bubbles that bounce off of each other. That's when you can see that there's a little bit of friction in the world and how we're starting to see the world differently - especially when it comes to, say, political bubbles of the left and right.

Mason: In the book you try to break us out of our reality bubble. I have to wonder, is that bubble useful? Is it shielding us against the craziness of reality and the world? Is the reality bubble actually a useful concept? Is it a useful place to be?

Tong: That depends. I think that generally speaking, if you're inside the bubble, it's an unrealistic place to be. We feel safe inside of those bubbles. Of course, we like to feel like we're secure inside of our own knowledge. It's the same thing as when people say, "Is ignorance bliss?" I would not choose to be ignorant if I had the choice. It's a very dangerous thing, and that's really why we find ourselves in the position we're in today.

When we look at - this is one of the things that I've been mentioning in my talks - the apocalypse, essentially it's an invisible beast. When you're looking at biodiversity loss and when you're looking at what's happening with climate threats with the Co2 coming out of buildings and tailpipes, we simply can't see any of this. We can't see where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes. Because of this, we're fundamentally blind. We're entering a really catastrophic situation because we haven't been paying attention. I think it's important to exit the bubble.

Mason: Specific to that, you start this wonderful revelation about where cameras are and where cameras aren't. It was a shower thought, wasn't it?

Tong: Yeah, exactly. Just one of those things that kind of comes to you. It's of course because I have many friends who are hackers and who work in the surveillance culture, not actually doing the surveying but the counter-surveying. I was noticing there are cameras everywhere, everywhere around us - there's a whole chapter on surveillance in the book - except where our food comes from or where our energy comes from or where our waste goes. I thought this is so weird, because we're the most powerful species on Earth but we're also a species that has no idea how it survives. That's another danger.

Mason: To some degree, do we deliberately fail to pay attention to so many aspects of reality?

Tong: Yeah. Well I think that there's the biological blindspots that we can't see, which is the first part of the book. The second part of the book is the willful blindspots. There's reasons why we've always wanted to stay away from certain things. In the chapter on food, I mention the work of these scientists who call themselves 'disgustologists', because they actually study disgust. Why do we want to keep factory farms far away out in the further boroughs? It's because of death, disease, rot and screaming bodies - you don't want to see any of that stuff. Not seeing it becomes, again, really critical in the societies that we're living in now.

We're living in the midst of a pandemic as we're filming this. That's because a lot of the situations that we've crammed so much of our life into, like disease and decay. All these things are things that we need to pay attention to. If we're not paying attention then it becomes very dangerous. When we talk about factory farms, it seems like antibiotic resistance, right? That's something that's very scary. In China, of course they have the wildlife markets, which is why today, we have coronavirus.

Mason: In the book - you mention the word 'blindspot' - you reveal these blindspots. There are three key blindspots that we have, aren't there?

Tong: Yes. We have basically what surrounds us, we're blind to. What sustains us, and then what controls us is the sort of way in which I've structured it. Another way to put it is these biological blindspots, the societal blindspots, and then spreading wider are civilisational or intergenerational blindspots. These are blindspots that are passed down from generation to generation.

Mason: Well let's talk about some of those biological blindspots because that opens this book. It looks at one of the blindspots that all of us have, and it's with our own perceptual apparatus. It's a blindspot literally in our eye.

Tong: That's right, exactly. Where your optic nerve jacks into the back of your brain is a place where you can't see. I think I say in the book it's something like nine full moons could fit in the sky from that area that you're blind to. There's an illustration in the book that lets you test it out for yourself. You can cover one eye and stare at a dot, and you see it suddenly disappear from plain sight.

Mason: You look at blindspots throughout the book and one of the things you look at is how these blindspots are exploited. In what way have our blindspots been exploited? In what way does that control the way in which we view and see reality?

Tong: There's one instance that I talk about in the book in terms of our biological blindspots which kind of illustrates why it's important to be able to see them. I talk about a surfer named Mike Sturdivant. Mike is a surfer who lives in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. All around him, the beach was crystal blue waters, aquamarine waters, and white sands. One day, he started coughing up blood and he started getting sores on his skin, and blurry vision. This was happening to a lot of people on the beach, as well. Everybody was confused by it. Why are these beachgoers getting so sick?

One night, he had a UV lamp that he would carry around with him to look for petrol leaks on the back of his boat. He shone it on the beach, and the beach was glowing this bright orange colour. He and his friend - who's a geologist - took in about 71 samples and got them tested. What they discovered was that on the beach, there was a Corexit dispersant, which had come down 200 kilometers away from the BP oil spill and had floated down with the water. The mixture of Corexit with the oil actually made it 52 times more toxic. When you're actually going and looking at the cleanliness of a beach, a beach is considered clean if there's no oil on it and if you can't see any oil. Of course, nobody could see any oil. Nobody could see any dispersant. He had to be able to see it in a completely different way, and he saw it through UV.

Mason: That's a terrible case, but in so many cases isn't human progress really reliant on making certain processes invisible? You quote Alfred North Whitehead in the book, and you say, "civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations we can confirm without thinking about them." In some cases, is that process of making things invisible very important for our hubris?

Tong: I put that quote in because I just agreed with him. I actually said that all our fundamental processes - our life support system, our food, our energy, and our waste systems - industrialised to human scale, are things that we don't see. That is the problem.

Mason: If we were to look more specifically at reality in general, are we being conditioned to perceive a certain type of world, or to have a certain relationship with the world?

Tong: I think that there's no doubt that we're conditioned in certain ways. If you look at nine to five clock time - the way in which we scurry around all the commuters without even stopping to think how we became conditioned to operate in such a way - it was a process that took a few hundred years. It took all those school bells. It took all those factory bells. It took all that training for us to start working that way. It took the Haymarket riots. It wasn't a natural system for any of us.

Even today when you look at the capitalist system, when I was growing up 7/11 was called 7/11 because it was open from 7am until 11pm at night. It wasn't a 24-hour store. It was only in the 80s, really, that capitalism crept into the nighttime and we started this full night cycle, as well.

That's one of the things that I've been thinking about lately, especially when we start thinking about things like climate change: How wonderful it would be if we were able to take back the night in that sense. Not only would we be helping the birds and all the insects, and our own circadian rhythms. I was struck by this because I came across this story - not a story, actually, a fact - of what happened in the 1990s in Los Angeles when they had a blackout. They had a full blackout in the 90s and everybody started calling the Griffith Observatory. They didn't know what was going on. All these people were calling up, and it was because they'd never seen the Milky Way. Los Angeles is a city of lights. They have the lights on all the time. To see all these baffled people who hadn't even seen the universe - and of course seeing the universe gives you this sense of scale.

I think even returning the night to people or returning that rhythm - the more natural rhythm that every other species along with us has - it would really be helpful when it comes to the climate crisis in terms of saving some energy for another 12 hours in the evening. It would be beneficial to a lot of creatures and insects but it might also be beneficial to us, as well.

Mason: It's always when I watch these ancient history documentaries and I see how people are creating pyramids or structures aligned with the stars. It all feels so alien to us, today in the 21st century. Then you realise when you go to Egypt - where there's no artificial light - and you look up, the stars are so bright. It makes obvious sense that's how you would plan out an entire city.

Tong: Totally, yeah. Mount Sinai is probably the only mountain I've ever climbed, twice. It's the only mountain I plan on ever really climbing again. I had the same truly starstruck feeling - I guess that's where the word comes from. This luminous landscape up there of many different landscapes, really. It's bewildering. I think that that's something - that sense of scale, of course - is something that makes us feel small and reminds us of where we fit into the larger scheme of things. Instead of this very human-centric, dominant, human-exceptionalism; this whole world view that we've come to these days.

Mason: We've jumped straight through to space and time so why not go there. If we were to first begin with a big philosophical question, I suppose. What is time? Is it a dimension? Is it a perception? You try to tackle some of this in the book.

Tong: Yeah. I'm not going to lie to you, I don't know what time is. I've been thinking about time for 20 years and I'm no closer, just like most people who actually, fundamentally are interested in time. Carlo Rovelli is a great author who gets into the science of time in a wonderful way. There are anthropologists whose work I was really intrigued by, who look at time in many different societies and how people operate in different temporal ways. Of course, there's the psychology of time. I don't know if time exists, but I do know how it came to be structured historically.

My book is more about how scientists with a scientific lens shifted time, and how we actually broke the cycle of time. How our own nine to five clockwork and our own tempo, and our own human beat of industrialisation, and capitalism, and production has now changed the world around us. We're filming today in London, in springtime - early February - and there are cherry blossoms everywhere. It's not normal.

Mason: You say in the book that there's something weird happening, as our atomic clocks get more and more accurate, our natural clock has something very weird going on. I wonder if you can explain what that is?

Tong: Well I think just what I was saying there is the fact that the human beat of time is using all the natural resources - obviously, this is nature that we're using up. In that mass production process and all the fuels and all the Co2 that is required to make, and ship, and create all of these objects and goods that we buy and throw away constantly - that is changing, fundamentally, our environment around us. The heat is changing, and that's having an effect on the flowering times. It's making a big impact in terms of phenology which is really the study of the timing of nature and its cycles.

Mason: What's so interesting about the way in which you tackled time is that you looked at it as this civilisational blindspot. I think the best way to summarise where you were going within that section of the book is this phrase 'time is money'. Time became this operating system through which we understand reality and we create these other systems such as capitalism, or exchange our time for money. I just wonder, how has this simple concept - time is money - come to define the entirety of Western civilisation?

Tong: That's a huge question, Luke. That is a massive question. I think I do have a quote in there for that very first moment when this system of exchange began and when we started thinking that if we weren't working, we were actually fundamentally missing out, and misusing our time. That's a big problem, because what we've been doing is we demonise the poor, and we make it a form of laziness if you're not always at your highest perfunctory level. If you look at even societies - this isn't what I talk about in particular in the book, but the elderly who have long been revered as the wise in human society are now rendered useless because they're no longer functioning economic units within our society.

Again, and I'm sorry to quote another book - and I can't remember the title of this book which shames me, but I'll try and remember for you if you want to add it into any of the notes. I thought it was really quite interesting. A female author was writing about how in the past, our society was structured around Gods and basically around religion. Science came along and our whole world view became very mechanistic. Now, today, we see everything as widgets. We tend to commodify everything into units and into how it fits into our economic story and narrative of the way the world works. That's just another narrative. I like the way she spins those as big temporal reality bubbles that we've existed in.

Exchange, of course, has always been critical in human society. It's been fundamental, because we've needed different goods and resources from different places. We've never seen it operating in the way it does today. Of course as you know today with high frequency traders, it's operating these little digital handshakes which are taking place at the speed of light. It's at hyperspeed now. It's not even 'time is money'. It's almost 'money is light'.

Mason: We've accepted kairos time which is the idea that chronological time has reality. Is there something useful in retrieving a more human time; a more circadian rhythm; to have a biological clock that depends on the moon, for example? Is there something we're losing by relying purely on the mechanical clock?

Tong: Freedom [laughter]. I think it's just freedom. I talk about the riots in India when the institution of time began to take place there. We'd all had local time for many periods of time, but if you think about when people go away on holiday, what they love the most is that sense that time has shifted and that time has slowed down. That time is your own and you don't have to walk to the beat of that constant atomic clock drum, you know? Freedom, I think, is the number one thing that we regain.

Of course, it wasn't particularly easy to meet in the past. You'd have to meet at dawn. I grew up in an era where people would have to arrange before cell-phones. To meet at a certain place at a certain time. It's always been doable.

Mason: I have an artist friend who refuses to carry a mobile phone, because everybody is always on time for his meetings. No one can call ahead or text ahead and say, "I'm going to be late". They're always there at the time they're supposed to be. They show up.

We jumped straight into time but I want to jump back to the beginning of the book where you talk about these biological blindspots. At the end of the day, it's so obvious that throughout the book, your science nerdiness is showing. In what way have you found that scientists have a fundamentally different view of this thing called reality?

Tong: When you're looking at them, they're all looking at a piece of the puzzle. Whether you're looking at geologists who are looking at long scale time and the history of where we came from, or marine biologists, or oceanographers, or microbiologists. They're all looking at an important piece of the puzzle: how we've come to exist; how we survive. Water is absolutely critical just as microbes are. They all tell a very big story about our existence. The fields of view are so fundamentally different, and scientists are siloed. If you're in the geology department you're nowhere near the microbiologists for the most part, and you're looking at completely different areas and aspects.

Working as a science broadcaster, I had the chance to interview them across the spectrum. Speaking to so many different scientists, I was realising that they all have a slightly different lens on the world. Putting them together was really fascinating.

Mason: How does that scientific perspective on the world work to challenge everything we know about reality? How have scientists historically always seemed to question reality? I know you focus in the book on saying that the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum is the starting off point for us realising that in actual fact, what we can see is not actually everything. Constantly, scientists are beginning to surprise us over and over again. We're now at quantum mechanics, which is a new way of seeing reality. How do they continue to challenge our understanding?

Tong: I love scientists because I see them as reality testers. They're always testing things that are invisible - whether it's Newton looking at gravity; whether it's Albert Einstein looking at time and space. We rely on these things so fundamentally. We wouldn't have GPS or satellites functioning if you didn't have the special theory or relativity or the general theory of relativity. They play in these invisible realms.

Van Leeuwenhoek - who I start the story off with - who ground down the microscope to the point where he could see little bacteria swimming. Millions and billions of these creatures, swimming in our mouth. He looked at his own ejaculate and discovered sperm. You know what I mean? Nobody had seen these things. They thought he was completely mad. They thought that he was a charlatan and that he was making all this stuff up. He was looking at the invisible. These are these people who can go back into these reaches of the world and show us that there's something beyond the reality that we perceive today.

I'm not a technological determinist at all, I don't think science has all the solutions, because science is so often wrong. The other wonderful thing about it is that it's self-correcting. When it's wrong, it actually - better than most people - admits it. You know what I mean?

Mason: When you look at these biological blindspots, you look at the technological lenses, I guess, and how they've manipulated and changed the way in which we view, perceive and understand reality. It feels like there's two pieces of technology that are core of that. The telescope and the microscope. Two very different forms of lenses. I just wonder how they continue to transform the way in which we see reality?

Tong: Yeah, I think I've got that quote by Victor Hugo which has the grander view. As you know, in the book I refer to us as microscopic giants. Larger than 95 percent of all species that are smaller than a human thumb, but at the same time, for anyone who's flown in an airplane you know that we're absolutely tiny.

We exist in a human-sized world. This is a dollhouse-sized world that we've constructed. A bar that fits us to human size, the chairs are human size. It makes us feel like everything in the world and everything, in reality, is human-sized. I love how jarring it is when these scientists snap open all these other spheres. Keep in mind, of course, we know that it can go so much further than what we can currently even see.

The Planck length, for example. We're no way near being able to see anything at such a small level, but increasingly it seems like as we evolve, we keep opening these windows further and further into worlds that will continue to surprise and amaze us.

Mason: How do we deal personally, as human beings, with that surprise and amazement when we realise that in actual fact, the world isn't human-sized? When we suddenly have this revelation that our experiences are telling us that this reality is human-sized, but our technology is telling us something completely different? How do we deal with that juxtaposition?

Tong: I think really, it's exactly what you talked about when you said you went to Egypt and you saw the stars. That is the sense of the luminous, and that is the sense of scale and awe. That's what I really wanted to imbue this book with as well - that sense of wonder - that we don't have everything all figured out and that it isn't this mechanistic universe that we have all the answers to. Sometimes we can just be surprised and sit back and be witnesses of the glory and the splendour of it all.

Mason: Some things in the book do that. They make you feel like: Wow, this is incredible. This is wondrous. Other things in the book sucker punch you and make you go: Ooh, urgh. Really?

Tong: Well if you follow me on Twitter you've known for a long time that that's been my: Hello, look it's cute puppies and kittens! Pow...

Mason: Well it feels like that. I think when you focus on this stuff that is small, tiny, the teeming life that is happening around us; this invisible life that makes up the entirety of human existence and life on Earth. I just wonder, how do we come to terms with the fact that we're teeming with bacteria? We are not just these human-sized bodies. There's so much more going on intricately across our skin, across our faces, across our body, across every single surface that we inhabit.

Tong: Yeah, well I think it's humbling, isn't it? I talk about that a little bit in the beginning of the book. I had that sense when I was sitting alone, writing sometimes. I would think, oh, I'm alone. Then I would be like, oh shit, I'm completely not alone. I'm surrounded by invisible creatures that I simply can't see. I think it's important because they're the engineers of our planet. These are the little critters that are responsible for the oxygen that we breathe and for so many different life cycles and systems.

I do a talk and it's so funny because I talk about dirt, and earth, and soil being perhaps one of the most boring topics in the world. People are actually quite enamoured by it when you start realising how much life is in just even a single teaspoon of soil. Of course, as you know in the book, I talk about how scientists have come to see the bacterial diversity and all the life that is inside of the soil is through that underwear test, right? Do you remember that? If you put men's underwear into soil, you can get a sense of how healthy the soil is. If you remove the underwear and it's basically threadbare and invisible, it means that the bacteria have been having a magnificent feast

Mason: Part of that not being able to see the very very smallest part of our - scale blindness is what you call it. Part of scale blindness - part of that ability to be unaware of so much of reality - is tied to this thing called human exceptionalism. What is human exceptionalism, and how does that fundamentally affect the way in which we understand and navigate reality?

Tong: That's a big question but I think that that's one of the most important things in terms of our blindspots. We have a tendency to see ourselves as the centre of the universe, don't we? It was Galileo who fundamentally shifted that idea that it wasn't the sun revolving around us. That was how we saw the entire universe, as revolving around our species. Not only that, we see ourselves as separate from all of nature. We live in these cities, these habitat bubbles that kind of keep us separate from all the other 8.7 million other animal species and then on top of that, there's another layer of exceptionalism which is that we believe we're better than all the other species on Earth, as well.

Those three ideas coupled together, those are critical and they're crucial, because they came to position the way we see ourselves as separate from nature, and our need to dominate nature, but fundamentally our need and our belief that we have the right to own everything that surrounds us. We have the right to own all the food, energy, time, space - everything except our own waste.

Mason: In a funny sort of way, ownership is really the key thing that runs throughout the book.

Tong: I'm so glad you've picked that up.

Mason: The idea that we are able to have ownership over space, over time, over dominion of the plan. It's a very Judeo-Christian idea that we have dominion over the plants and the animals, and all that was created for us. I just wonder, why are we so stuck in that world view, or that lens of ownership?

Tong: Because we see everything as separate from us, right? That's the great thing in doing work with WWF - especially in Canada for the last eight years. Our work there is not just from a scientific lens. The absolutely indigenous partnership is 50 percent of what we do. An indigenous lens doesn't see the world or the environment as separate. It's not a human-centric point of view. Human beings are just one among many different species and you have to be able to be living in simpatico, otherwise you have a sense that you could topple it over and start destroying it.

I don't think that it's something fundamental to the way we see the world. It's just fundamental to the way we see the world now. That's why I believe it can be shifted.

Mason: One of the ways in which you're trying to shift individuals into thinking about this holistic environment where us and animals and the environment have something to really offer each other is by elevating the idea of animal intelligence. You look at other forms of different intelligence. I wonder, if we're more sympathetic to this idea of animal intelligence, what could we actually learn?

Tong: Maybe some humanity. I think that's what we're always looking for. I always find it baffling that when you're on the internet, that's what makes people happy. So much of the internet is surrounded by viral pictures of dogs and cats, and friendly animals, and animals doing human, funny things. If an alien was to take a look at that, they would be like: oh gosh, this is such a strange species. On the one hand they seem to have this remarkable fondness and admiration for their fellow species, but behind the scenes we're killing 60 billion of our domesticated animals while we're not looking.

I've noticed this on Twitter. I can Tweet about animals and I'll watch that retweet button go frickin' bananas. Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of retweets. But if I Tweet anything about animal rights, nothing. Crickets. Lose followers, immediately. We don't like to see those sorts of things. We don't like to pay attention, understandably, to suffering. But that's what we need to start paying a little bit of attention to. We need to have that compassion again.

Mason: To some extent, is that deliberate? Do we have a willful blindness to so many things? Are we willing to be blind to the reality of the world we live in, because there's some things we just don't want to know?

Tong: Well because it's painful, absolutely. There are things that bring us pain and if it hurts our brains, brings us shame, or guilt - or any of those feelings - the easiest thing for us to do in a digital world where the problems are distallised is to turn it off. It's a quick and easy response, right? Just fill your feed with puppy dogs and ice cream, and things will be a little bit okay. It's something that we need to pay better attention to. As you said, when we do spend time with animals as E. O. Wilson talks about - this sense of biophilia - there's a deep love for animals and nature. It's just a shame that we turn them into caricatures.

Mason: It feels like throughout the book, there's this subtle environmentalist message. It's not preachy, but there is a part where you go: aah, I see what you're doing.

Tong: Maybe you might, but I have to be honest. The book took a year to write, but it took five years to think about, because there was no way I was going to write an environmental book. I knew that I wouldn't read an environmental book and I didn't think anyone else would either. I was very thrilled when the New Scientist compared it to 'The Matrix', because I wanted it to be more like illusions and shifting perspective, and seeing the world in a different way. Seeing what controlled you, rather than a finger wag - because I don't think that's particularly helpful or informative. I don't think it works. I don't think preaching works. I've tried it. The only place where preaching works is with preachers. They're very effective.

Tong: Is that what you're subtly trying to do with the book? Are you trying to subtly wake us up to the reality of a global crisis - instead of shouting at us or proclaiming that it's happening, and it's all going to be terrible? Are you slowly unveiling the micro and the macro aspects of our world and our reality, and our environment, and revealing those to say, "Look, all this is weirdly connected."

Tong: Yeah, well it's really providing the glasses so that people can see for themselves. I don't need to say that you need to feel any way, when you can see for yourself. I think that you and perhaps some of your viewers will be familiar with a reference at the beginning of the book which is 'They Live' - the film that featured Roddy Piper - which was a bit of a cult film. In it, he puts on these glasses. He starts seeing the terms, "obey", "stay asleep", "consume" - where of course that OBEY Andre the Giant comes from - Shepard Fairey was inspired by this film.

I think many of us have this sense of unease as we're walking around the world. We know that this make believe world that we've constructed isn't the way things really operate. That's why we love children. Children can point it out to you like this. A child can look at a border between here and Mexico and be like, "That's not real. You just put up a fence." There's not a single animal - the ants that will be walking through, the birds that will be flying overhead - this is just our bullshit notion that we came up with. I love children for that, because children can see through it, you know? The elderly - they've got nothing to lose - they can see through it now too. It's really our generation - the generation that's in power - that needs to kind of poke at the reality bubble.

Mason: How do we poke? How do we poke at the reality bubble, not not - as Galileo was - get punished for that? How do we poke at it and not get mocked for it? How do we try to challenge some of these dogmas that exist about how we have to live and act, and be in this reality bubble?

Tong: I think that's an issue of critical mass. Today when we see the Extinction Rebellion, for example, calling for 3.5 percent of people to see; to open their eyes - it's the same sort of thing. We live in a time where we're communicating at the speed of light, so it's a very different world right now. In olden times when you'd need to have a paradigm shift, I can't remember which scientist said it - I think it was Max Planck, I'm not sure - but basically you had to wait until people died. Until they dropped dead.

Mason: Science advances one funeral at a time.

Tong: Yeah, exactly. Until a new idea could come to pass. Just wait for the oldies to go. We don't have time for that, so really we're in a very different position. Thankfully, we're able to spread ideas very, very quickly. I just think we need to be using memes in a different way. Not just for jokes and in-jokes, and humour - like these viral memes - we need to start spreading ideas through them as well.

Mason: Is one way then to be playful about it? To be playful about how we construct and understand reality? As I was reading the book, I kept thinking of Robert Anton Wilson.

Tong: Oh really?

Mason: Robert Anton Wilson's approach to reality tunnels and how he would approach dogmas with these things called 'catmas'. Catmas were the ability to have multiple beliefs and test those multiple beliefs, and never let anybody really know what you believe. Robert Anton Wilson famously said, "I don't believe in anything but I have my suspicions." He was playful with reality. I wonder, how do we get permission to play with reality?

Tong: That's also a great question. I think that reality itself is so playful and multifaceted. Once you're willing to accept that there is no such thing as one dominant worldview. I hold science in the same light. Science isn't just one dominant worldview. There are many worldviews and I think we need to embrace that. I think it's when we actually get stuck - we turn into zombies when we think that there is only one reality.

For example when we started talking - this one nine to five economic reality that we all believe in. I think once we start getting more playful with it...for example, in different countries and cultures, and in different businesses right now, people say, "You know what? I don't need to work five days a week. I can work four days a week, or I can work 30 hours a week." You know what I mean? Once we realise that the boundaries are actually elastic - when we can play with them - that's when we have more freedom again.

Mason: I think boundaries are already, to a degree, elastic. We're seeing that elasticity - not when it comes to society, or the environment, or biological blindspots - but in politics. You don't mention politics specifically in the book but the idea of post-truth politics is already making reality elastic. People have very different worldviews based on their political allegiances. Trump's idea of post-truth where he dogmatically believes the reality that he is creating through language is an example where we're becoming more comfortable with this idea.

Tong: But I think that there's a big difference between shaping opinion into fact, right? There are facts. I know for a fact that if I look with a proper microscope, I will be able to see the microbes and the bacteria inside of your mouth. That's a fact, that's not an opinion. That's why in this particular book, I didn't start talking about alternate realities or whether we're living inside of some great simulation. I didn't want to go into things that I simply couldn't prove. I wanted to show you things that I can actually show you with a lens. If you went and bought the right UV lamp or if you bought an x-ray machine, or if you got a mass spectrometer, you'd be able to see it with your own eyes.

Mason: The other thing you're trying to show us is the stuff we really can't see with our own eyes. No matter what technology we use. To some extent, that thing is the system - whatever that system may be. You have multiple ways of playing with this idea of these human systems that we create, but it seems that no matter what way we approach these systems, it seems like they're threatening the planet. The human made systems are the things that are threatening the planet. We can see those systems going very, very wrong. Yet we choose to do utterly nothing about it. How do we dramatically course correct when we know the system that we're in is exploitative, is causing damage to the environment, and yet is not allowing us to escape because we feel quite comfortable within our reality bubble?

Tong: I'm going to quote Josh Tetrick here - he's the founder of JUST Inc. When we talk about the system, our life support system - and you know this from the book - basically our life support system is what's killing us right now. The way we survive is what's destroying the world. It's not all broken. Josh Tetrick argues that when it comes to the food system, it's half broken. I like that idea. I like it quite a lot. We have ways of, let's say, getting our food distributed, stored, frozen. That part of the system - that network that allows us to feed ourselves - functions incredibly well.

What he's looking at, for example, is the protein system. Up until now it's been these very horribly treated animals that are mass incarcerated and slaughtered. Honestly, as you know, the slaughter is probably the kindest part of the entire process. If you change that protein system - which we're starting to see now with pea protein, with clean meat - and you put it into this part of the 'sausage factory', it'll still continue to work. The inputs are what I think we need to begin to change, and we can do that.

Jeremy Rifkin is another writer who talks about the different industrial revolutions that we've had over time. He argues that we're in the midst, now, of the third industrial revolution. Every one of these industrial revolutions requires three major inputs: you need to have a source of energy; you need to have a source of transportation; and you have to have a source of communication. We have that in England - whether it was rail using coal; using the telegraph. You have that in the States - when it's the car; when it's oil; and when it's the telephone. Now we're merging into a new industrial revolution where we have renewables; where we have smart vehicles; and where we have the internet. There is the potential for us to fix the system without completely smashing it to bits.

Mason: The problem with revolution is it's so similar to the idea of paradigm shift where it's all about progress. It's all about: let's have another revolution, let's continue to grow economically, let's continue to grow industrially. It's getting away from what felt like the crux of the book which is this idea of cyclical.

Tong: I love that you've read it and understood it so well. That's so great.

Mason: It feels like we set up these reality bubbles because we want to escape cycles. Cycles don't make us feel comfortable, whereas progress does. With cycles, we have to deal with birth, we have to deal with death...

Tong: ...and rebirth.

Mason: Well, we think it stops there. Rebirth is the cycle. You have this wonderful description of how we're made of starstuff. When you speed that up, Quinn and Starsky-esque, you have a human being come together made of a multitude of cells. It exists as a human biological entity that is human sized and we believe stops at the boundary of the skin. Then in death, it just dissolves and goes back into starstuff. It was such a beautiful metaphor of this cycle of a human being as opposed to: you're born and then you die, and you better exploit the Earth while you're here and make lots and lots of money, because that's what we value within our reality bubble right now.

I wonder, how do we escape this idea of linear narratives associated with progress? How do we return back to this idea of the cycle, and feel comfortable and okay with the idea that things can be cyclical?

Tong: I think that human beings are storytelling species. We have been for millenia. I think that it's just about the sorts of stories that we need to begin to share and tell each other again. I think it's really as simple as that.

Mason: How then do we get away from the reality bubble that we're in, which is so destructive? It feels like these manufactured entities, i.e. these corporations - they construct this idea that we own - ownership being the keyword - we own space, we own time, we own energy, we own everything apart from the waste. We won't talk about the waste. That's in that blindspot so let's not discuss that. It feels like it's led to this belief that we own everything on this planet. We own life itself. How do we challenge that notion? How do we feel comfortable as a society with the idea that again, we're no longer the centre of the universe?

Tong: You've brought us full cycle to the very beginning of our discussion, which is being able to poke at the bubble of human exceptionalism. It's that. It's exactly that. Once we don't see ourselves as exceptional anymore; once we see ourselves as part of the system, not having to build a separate system that's just for us - then maybe we have a better chance. I'm still incredibly hopeful.

Mason: One way is we can not conform. You have a wonderful analysis of conformity. It's not as easy as it sounds. You read the book and you go: oh, so the reality bubble is this William Gibson style consensual hallucination. It's something we've all accepted. We all accept time. We all accept that money is time. It allows us to live and allows us to pay our taxes. It allows us to operate on this planet. But the only way to challenge the reality bubble is to not conform. That becomes really challenging - not just on a societal level but on a biological level. There's something actually at stake. There's something we lose when we don't conform to the reality bubble.

Tong: It just takes courage. It takes courage. You know, one of the biggest fears people have is speaking in public. We're a species. We're primates. We're a group-oriented species. We like to fit in. We like to conform. You don't want to be the one that's running off after the lion in the Savannah. Not all the time, anyway. We've actually been protected by being small groups and being small communities. When people stand up - when they actually want to separate themselves from the rest of a pack, the rest of a group - there's a bit of a psychological cost to that. That's why people do fundamentally have this fear of speaking, getting up in front of everybody and being a little bit different.

At the same time, we live in a society that absolutely reveres difference and reveres individualism. That individualism - as you've seen with anything trendy - very soon becomes co-opted and very soon becomes conformist in itself. It is freedom. It is really about freedom.

As a first time author, I think that's been one of the most remarkable things. When you write and you get a chance to speak about what you write, you're free. It's so different from having a day job where you have to conform - you don't want to offend your bosses, you don't want to offend whatever your corporation represents. Retweets are not endorsements on Twitter. You can be like, "I'm going to say whatever the fuck I want." which is a beautiful thing. Freedom and that ability to not conform - although it has its social costs - is a truly powerful thing.

Mason: So how do we individually stay open and stay receptive to anything that might break through the reality bubble? How do we accept it with open arms as opposed to trying to avoid it or trying to deliberately ignore it?

Tong: I'm actually going to quote Rob from Massive Attack. He actually said that the people that we should look up to today, they're the heroes and artists. The mavericks and the rebels, and the artists. These are the free people and the free thinkers. I think that we're in trouble right now because we're quite often bowing at the temple of celebrity. Celebrity is the ultimate temple of conformity - whether it's conformity in terms of what you're listening to, or the clothes that you're wearing, or what you're thinking - that's really where I think we've gone astray.

Mason: So how does our awareness of these hidden realities that you're describing affect us personally? It feels like it would eventually just drive us crazy, drive us paranoid, or even turn us into crazy conspiracy theorists if we go fully one way and try to challenge every aspect of reality.

Tong: I don't think that there's a need to challenge every aspect of reality. There's basic things that I need to be able to assume: that my feet are going to stick to the planet; that I'm going to find my keys on the counter when I need to, in the morning. There are things that we need to make assumptions about and not over bog our minds with so that we can get on with our day to day lives. I think that what we need to start questioning today are the bigger questions. The day to day zombie, machine-like aspects of our lives. If we don't start to question those basics, then we're going to be in a lot of trouble very, very soon.

Again, returning to where our food comes from or where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes, if we just act in the perfunctory fashion and if we act in the way that society expects us to be, we don't question the nine to five of our daily existence; we don't question why some people are living in ghost mansions and some people are living in the size of coffins; we don't question why we are throwing out so much food which is the equivalent of all the oil that we drill in a year offshore in America. If we don't begin to question those big things, then we're in a lot of trouble. The small things? Who cares! The small things - the fact that gravity exists - I don't think we need to constantly ask ourselves: is gravity happening? We don't need to use our brainpower for that. There are some bigger challenges that we have to face.

Mason: There's one way out of the reality bubble that we exist in everyday life: immersing ourselves in other realities. Finding other ways and viewpoints on the world through immersing ourselves in different locations; in different environments; in different societal groups. Is this possibly one way that we can begin to challenge the reality bubble?

Tong: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the people who do that are the greatest artists of our time. Those people who have challenged our perspectives and challenged our way of thinking. That's a beautiful way to pop our reality bubble.

Mason: The people who are most blessed to be able to have their reality bubbles popped are astronauts. They have this wonderful thing called the overview effect that you cover in the book. I just wonder, do we need to go to space to see reality differently, or is there a way we can see the world with a fresh eye here on terrafirma?

Tong: One hundred percent, we don't need to go to space. I was thinking for the longest time: Oh, is this something where eventually when we have space travel and everybody can hop on an Elon Musk vehicle that will change the world. But it isn't. When I talked to Chris Hadfield who was the commander of the ISS - a very famous Canadian astronaut - he told me that most of the astronauts don't have this overview effect. Most of them don't have this profound shift that takes place just because they saw the Earth from space. In fact, you could probably do that with a VR headset. The truth is, learning to see with new eyes is something that can take place right here on the planet, right here on the ground, right here on terrafirma. We don't have to go to outer space to see it.

Mason: Is there something very specific about this moment in time? You say in the book, "Our chances of being here as human beings in this moment right now are pretty much unfathomable." But we are here, and it feels like we're at the dawn of this thing which feels like an apocalypse in many ways. The question I have is: What do we do now, collectively?

Tong: Yeah. One of the things is that I talk about what the apocalypse is, etymologically, in the book. The apocalypse truly is not as scary as you think it is when you understand the Greek meaning. The original intended meaning is to 'lift the veil', and to remove our illusions, and to begin to see in a new light.

Mason: How do the readers of this book become visionaries - in every sense of the word? 'Visionary' is an overused word but the idea that you can now see what was previously invisible. How do you truly become a visionary?

Tong: You have to have courage.

Mason: Thank you to Ziya for changing our perception of reality by revealing our collective blindspots. You can find out more by purchasing her new book, 'The Reality Bubble: How Science Reveals the Hidden Truths that Shape Our World', available now.

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