Understanding Consciousness with Clément Decrop

george grombacher 0:02
Clement Decrop is an author. He is a founder, he is a Master Inventor, a deal leader. His newest book is the idea space science of awakening your new self. Welcome to the show. Clem.

Clement Decrop 0:16
Thanks for having me, George. It’s

george grombacher 0:17
a pleasure to be here. excited to have you on. Tell us a little bit your personal lives more about your work, why you do what you do?

Clement Decrop 0:24
Yeah, so I’ll give you the quick elevator pitch story. So born in Belgium and moved to Spain and then moved to the United States at the age of six, went to a small school with 20 people in my grade up until around eighth grade than high school was 700 people in college with 10,000 people in my grade. So kept exponentially going up, decided I want to do consulting after school. So went to work at IBM, but then an IBM and fell into the classic purpose trap, which is like, Oh, what am I supposed to do kind of what is the bigger picture of life? And so all of that culminated in me trying to take a sabbatical. And through writing the book, the idea space, like you mentioned at the beginning, and so now I’m just expanding the brand. However I can so wrote the book. There’s two meditation card decks out related to the book out now a third card game on the way and 10 ai meditation app that’s coming out within the next year. So lots of stuff, lots lots of good stuff happening at the moment. Nice.

george grombacher 1:21
is bigger, better than smaller or smaller, better than bigger? Or does it all depend?

Clement Decrop 1:25
I mean, I feel like it all depends. I know. Nassim Taleb? He’s got a good saying were some of the books that took him the longest to read or some of the shortest ones right. And so some can be jam packed with good info others it’s just blabber on blabber? Yeah,

george grombacher 1:40
that’s, that’s it’s a good point. I think we’ve all had that experience. So classic purpose trap. What does that mean? Yes,

Clement Decrop 1:49
I think it’s like, the idea of what we want to do with our lives. Like I was watching the show the bear on Hulu. And in one of the episodes, they were talking about kind of what’s their dream, what do they want to do. And it was kind of sad, because they were talking about how they didn’t get to achieve their dream, right. And they’re just at a point in life where they feel like it’s too late. And then they live in with this regret. And Jeff Bezos has good saying where he goes, I try to live my life in a way to minimize the amount of regret. And so I was in my early 20s. And I was like, you know, what, now is the best time better than ever to try to minimize as much regret as possible. And so I needed to do something that would give me wealth, and not wealth in the traditional sense of money, but wealth in the sense of time, having the time free to myself, because like Neville says, if someone’s telling you when to be at work at 8am 7am, but you’re not truly free, right. So I think that was kind of the purpose gap. I was in and tried to find a solution that was that would work for myself.

george grombacher 2:50
existential questions and crisis is at such a young age. Yeah,

Clement Decrop 2:54
my quarter life crisis, so I’m excited for the midlife one. That’s gonna be a wild ride.

george grombacher 2:58
It’s gonna be really good. For sure.

Clement Decrop 3:00
Yeah. What’s it called? The convertible? It’s definitely coming in at some point.

george grombacher 3:05
Awesome, awesome. Convertible. You could probably grow your hair long or something

Clement Decrop 3:09
like that. Yeah, get it. Nice and flowy. Yeah, maybe.

george grombacher 3:12
Maybe my midlife crisis taking place right now? Probably. Who knows? You got a convertible? Nobody? I’ve been thinking about getting one. There you go. It’s time we are on to something. All right. So what is what is consciousness?

Clement Decrop 3:30
Oh, loaded question. I don’t know if there’s like a true way to define it. Because I feel like life is one of those things where as soon as we try to put something in a specific frame, it changes to something else. So to define consciousness, acutely, is almost impossible. But in the book, I tried to define it in a way that’s congruent with modern physics. And physics isn’t the end all be all truth. It’s an approximation for the world around us, right. And so in this sense, you have your idea space, which consists of your thoughts, emotions, sensations, perceptions, and the empty set. So that’s kind of a mental model for your mind. And then consciousness is like shining a light onto any one part of your idea space. And so a cat and a dog, they have their own form of ideas, spaces, and their own form of consciousness that they can light onto their idea space.

george grombacher 4:24
thoughts, ideas, emotions, empty set, and what else?

Clement Decrop 4:27
Thoughts, emotions, sensations, perceptions, and the empty set?

george grombacher 4:33
What’s the empty set?

Clement Decrop 4:34
Oh, I’m glad you asked. So the empty set is intuitively nothing. So for instance, let’s say I have a table that’s describing apples that has various characteristics like color, has it ever stem? And then if you look at the table, you’ll see it’s like, Oh, this one’s yellow. This one’s right. And this one’s blank. That’s kind of the empty set. There’s not nothing there. Right? It’s like we don’t know what the value is. It’s empty. There’s nothing and so in our mind in our head idea space, the empty set is kind of beginner’s mind when you’re able to take your idea space and just for a moment, just have it vanish and go whoosh. Where there’s no thoughts, you’re not really, it’s just a moment of just pure bliss, and you get to start over and in life, your idea space is always changing, right? It’s impermanent, it’s uncountable. And because of that, it’s new ideas are always pouring in. And if you never take a moment to just stop and refresh your idea space, then your mind is gonna get cluttered thoughts of things that you were doing, like 30 minutes ago, when you’re trying to start a new task are just going to bleed over and it’s not going to work as effectively as you want it to. So that concept of the null set is really important is because it’s something that’s always there, and you don’t really have to do much to achieve it.

george grombacher 5:48
So is it. I’m not dragging all my past baggage into this, and in printing all that crap on something that I shouldn’t ruin with that.

Clement Decrop 6:01
Yep, exactly. Like, a good example of this is I was living with a roommate a couple years back in Washington, DC, and he came home and someone cut him off in traffic. And it was like an hour later, and he was still fuming, like, absolutely fuming. And I was like, Hey, man, like, that was an hour ago. And the more you think about it, the more you were remunerate on it the, it’s like you’re only doing yourself a disservice. And so, again, that ability to just take a step back, take to see look at your ideas space objectively, and try to make it kind of vanish in a way so that you can start fresh is a vital skill to have in life.

george grombacher 6:37
For sure. You hear stories about like Airbnb, or companies that have come in and disrupted a space because the founders weren’t coming from the hotel space. So they’re not taking all this the way we do it onto this new thing. Is it sort of like that?

Clement Decrop 6:55
Yeah, that’s a beautiful comparison. And feel like you get a lot of that nowadays, to where I think in academia, there’s a heavy emphasis on peer review. And that whole process, and I know that people in academia themselves, sometimes aren’t the biggest fans of that process, just because it has become cumbersome and overburdened. But back in the day, that was basically the gist of it, right? Where you have a person with an idea that’s coming in, usually, sometimes from the outside, and it completely innovates the way that the space is happening, right. But at first, they probably seem like a crazy person, which makes total sense, right? And then over time, it’s one of those things where Father Time is the judge of whether the idea is worth it or not.

george grombacher 7:42
It certainly makes sense that, that when I’m making the decision about something I’m taking in information and trying to say this is the best way forward, that I would want to strip away all my past assumptions and fears and wants and that I’m tire whatever, to be able to make the best possible decision. That there’s a lot of value in that, that demands that I’m courageous that demands that I understand that I’m doing it, it’s how do I do it?

Clement Decrop 8:14
Yeah, I have a little cheat that you can do. So it’s called the three years. So there’s past, you present, you and future you. And so what you do is you look at what each of the three years would do in a specific situation, right? And then you give an arbitrary weighting to what past you want President you want and what future you wants. And of course, this all depends on what future you want, right? And then based on that waiting, it’ll give you a really good perspective on whether you should make a certain act take a certain action or not. So for instance, if you want for me, it was like do I would do I want to develop an app right? past me probably wouldn’t have thought much about it, presently wants to do it. And future me would be super thankful for me having done it, right. So when I was making that decision, where it’s like, I don’t even know where to start. I was it didn’t really matter, just because in my mind, the decision to create it over the long run was worth it. So that’s kind of a good example of where that decision matrix came to. came in handy. Yeah, I think

george grombacher 9:15
that’s awesome, right there. You think about, like, if I were to make a move, I want to make a career move, or I want to move to a new city, or whatever. It’s like past me. Yeah, past me wants me to do that. Because my mom would be proud of me. Or my ego would really like that. But dA. So I love that. That’s awesome framework.

Clement Decrop 9:36
Yeah, and it’s easy to do. It takes like 510 seconds. It’s just a matter of remembering to do it. Which is hard sometimes in life when everything’s just happening so fast.

george grombacher 9:45
What right, that’s kind of the whole game, right? To be able to be conscious and make conscientious decisions about things and do you find that conscious being conscientious and being conscious? That’s is it exhausting at first is it it’s like building a new muscle.

Clement Decrop 10:06
Yeah, 100%. And I think consciousness, this layer that’s always there. And then whether we are conscientious or mindful of it is like a whole different ballgame. Just because a lot of times we get lost in thought, I feel like most people have had that experience before where they’re daydreaming about the inaccessible past, or about the imaginary future. And that’s totally normal. But there’s a good quote by Joseph Goldstein, who’s sort of a guru who says, you experience the past as a thought in the present. And you experience the future as a thought in the present. That’s a super powerful just to realize that, okay, you could be thinking about all these other things, which could be triggering certain emotions, usually anxiety, or worrying if it’s about the future. And through that just realization, you’re able to take a step back and come to that choice point and come to a more mindful routine that’s a little less stressful, just because like you said, when you first started, it can be overwhelming. Like, I don’t know about you, but like, a lot of my friends sometimes are afraid to just sit alone for their own thoughts. There’s a thing called a sensory deprivation tank where you just sit float. And I love it. It feels great. But I bring it up to some of my friends, and they’re just terrified of sitting alone with their thoughts. I don’t know how you experience something similar with kind of friend groups in the past? Sure. For sure. One of

george grombacher 11:30
my favorite quotes comes from Blaise Pascal, he says, majority of man’s problems stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room by himself. So Oh,

Clement Decrop 11:38
yeah, I’ve got I have got a as you can tell, I’m a sucker for good quotes. So I write them all down on my phone. And that’s one of them. Somebody brought it up. That’s one of my favorites, too. Yeah.

george grombacher 11:47
You know, I always wonder how do in solitary confinement.

Clement Decrop 11:53
Right, like, how long do you think you could go before you start going cuckoo?

george grombacher 11:57
I think I could go a long time, but probably like six minutes.

Clement Decrop 12:02
Yeah. Have you ever done a silent retreat? or anything of the sort?

george grombacher 12:05
I haven’t I really need to because I do think highly of my ability to do that.

Clement Decrop 12:10
Yeah, I feel like he would love it. I did a one week one. And it was illuminating. But the people that were doing a three month one. I’m like, oh, good for you guys.

george grombacher 12:21
That is that is next level for sure. Yeah. So awakening your new self? What is? What is that? Yep.

Clement Decrop 12:29
So it’s nonself nonstop.

george grombacher 12:31
See, I’ve such good handwriting itself. You’re

Clement Decrop 12:35
golden. So non self is. So let’s break the title down. So the idea of space is kind of what we talked about before, a mental model for your mind that consists of your thoughts, emotions, sensations, perceptions, and the empty set awakening is to know what reality is not. So in science, you can never prove something to be true, you can only prove something to be false, or you don’t have enough information. That’s kind of like the standard scientific method. For instance, you make a hypothesis, you test your hypothesis, and then it’s either, okay, that’s wrong, or we got to do more tests. And if you do a lot of tests from different angles, and your hypothesis still stands, then you have what becomes a natural law, right? It’s not true, but you just really can’t disprove it. And so that’s kind of this concept of awakening to have a better understanding of what the world isn’t through science. nonself is this concept that I your name, George Komal, isn’t really who you actually are, right? It’s an approximation of who you are at a certain point in time. So for example, there’s the physicist Richard Feynman, who’s one of the greatest physicists of all time, he had a good expression where he’s what is the chair? Right? When we look at a chair, we’ll say, okay, that’s obviously a chair. But if we look upon a closer look at the atom, some of the atoms are chair some of the atoms or paint some of the atoms or dust falling on the chair. So to say what a chair is very precisely is borderline impossible. And so in order to make life easier, we deal with idealizations, and approximations. And so in a similar light, your nonself and AI is just the characterization and approximation we use to approximate our idea space. Right? So George, you have all your thoughts, emotions, sensations, perceptions, and the empty set right in your mind. And all that is happening, and I can’t see it. No one can see it other than you, right? It’s the first person. And so in order to approximate your idea space at an appointed time, I’ll just say George. And so the concept of non self is very important and powerful in a lot of teachings, especially as in because we attach a lot to it. I’m supposed to do this in life. I want this I crave that right? And is kind of at the heart of it all. And what we realize is the more we attach to objects, the more we suffer, just because the world is impermanent, the world is always changing. And when you grow, try to grasp onto something that is always changing. It’s like trying to grab onto water. They’ll grab it in your, in your palms, and then we’ll just float out of your hands. And so putting it all together, so you have your the idea of space, which is your mental model of the mind. Awakening is using science to better have a better understand and point of view around the world. And your non self is just this idea that AI is just an approximation of who you really are. I love it. Yeah, big, beefy. No, I

george grombacher 15:31
think that that’s great. How is how has it all been received so far?

Clement Decrop 15:37
I think so far, so good. I’ll, I won’t sugarcoat it and say that it’s a super easy concept to fully digest. So like, at its heart, the idea space is an exact solution to Einstein’s field equation, which is the guiding force for all general relativity. So there definitely is some learning curve. And I think with the book, he tries to approach it in a way that’s more accessible to a mass audience. But it still is tricky. For instance, there’s this concept called cloven, which is something that is open and closed at the same time. It’s not a very intuitive concept for most people, just because for us in our human minds, like a door is either open or closed, it can’t be both. And so I think there’s sort of some challenges to it. And I think just making more content, especially on like, the video side with YouTube, nowadays, it’s so easy to discount content out there and just break it down further, and then getting more content out with the app as well, just to ease people into it and explore it from different angles, just so it is easier to digest, I think will be important. But everyone who’s read it so far has loved it. At least that’s what they’ve told me. And they may be biased. So I’m okay with that. But yeah, it’s been a great ride so far. Well,

george grombacher 16:57
I think it’s really exciting. I think that the reality that so many of us are afraid to go into that sensory deprivation tank or to sit quietly in that room by ourselves. And that we are all so distracted these days, because there are so many distractions in the world that’s sort of coping, right, that the world itself is closed, and that there are some people who are deeply in tune with their non selves. And some people are absolutely disinterested, because all they’re doing is watching TV and and eating. And then both those things, by the way, so I appreciate your work.

Clement Decrop 17:32
Same day. All right. I’ve been crossing some TV, we’ve been watching House of Dragon here. And that’s been very exciting. But yeah, you hit the nail on the head. I think one of the key things about the book is that it approaches this whole concept very objectively. And so if you are very skeptical of it, which is totally fair, because mindfulness usually is very woowoo. It allows you to approach it from a new, more scientific lens.

george grombacher 17:58
I’ve got one more quote that we all know the unexamined mind is not worth the unexamined life is not worth living. So yeah,

Clement Decrop 18:04
that’s a good bar right there. I love that one, too.

george grombacher 18:09
So this is a wonderful, probably, well, I imagine this is not a one on one level book club. But it certainly can be anybody’s entry point into exploring their consciousness. And that is really what it’s all about. So thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? And where can they get a copy of the idea space?

Clement Decrop 18:31
Yeah, thank you for having me towards this has been a blast. Yeah, the website, www dot the idea space.io. It’s got everything you need. It’s actually got the first chapter for free online. So go there, download it. And then if you like it, you can go check out the book as well.

george grombacher 18:50
Awesome. Well, if you enjoyed as much as I did, she’ll claim your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas, go to the idea space.io And check out the first chapter of the idea space and pick up the whole book and get started down this path. I know I’m excited to dig into it myself. And I think that the more thoughtful we can be and the more discovery and seeking that we can do, the better off then that we’re all going to be and it’s gonna help everybody. So thanks again, Colin.

Clement Decrop 19:23
Thanks again for words have a go on YouTube. Till next time. Remember,

george grombacher 19:26
do your part by doing your best

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.