ASM132 LIVE in Edinburgh, Scotland

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coming to you from greyfriars kirk in edinburgh scotland is ask sciencemike live [Music] science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life this week i had to get a guest introduction as i cannot pronounce the name of the city i'm in to people's satisfaction so we want to thank you for that a couple of announcements one the liturgist gathering is coming to london october 5th and 6 2018 so go to the liturgistgathering.com for more details november 15th i'll be at the ripple effect conference in lawrence massachusetts february 7th at science mike in orange county uh february 10th at science bike in cincinnati ohio february 23rd the revive 2018 conference in san diego for more information about my events head to asksciencemike.com and click the events button i also want to let everyone know that my paperback is now available in the united states and the united kingdom of my debut book finding god in the waves so let's get it started [Music] good evening mike i've been giving this a lot of thought i wanted a question that would really challenge you something really deep and profound and this is the best i could come up with right mike pumpkins it's pumpkin season last year i bought a pumpkin about this time of year i sat on the worktop i forgot about it for nine months and then in june i was like i think i'll make soup and i cut that pumpkin open and mike it was like it had been in stasis totally unchanged how is that possible and and this is like a bigger question about how do plants are not so much plants how do fruit and veg defend themselves against going off are they living things do they have an immune system do they have some way of actually fighting pathogens or are they just really tightly sealed up and obviously most of them don't last as long as that but you know you you can get a potato will last about that length of time some of them you know an apple will last months how wow that and i'm not kidding when i say that's the best first question i've ever got in the history of the program that's incredible first of all because like that's uh so far from my lived experience i grew up in florida which is uh on average maybe 10 points more humid than this part of the world accompanied by searingly hot temperatures year round so when we get a pumpkin for halloween we've got to make sure we get it within like what 10 days of the big day or that thing is going to be disgustingly rotted just nothing nothing survives florida's heat and humidity when when houses foreclosed in the housing crisis in the united states and they would cut off the utilities to houses they would start to rot inside from mold and mildew so they had to figure out in that part of the world if you don't keep the utilities on to run the air conditioning to keep the humidity down the house will rot from the inside and be unsellable so when i looked so incredulous while you were asking the question i was like pumpkins last for nine months without intervention they don't last nine weeks where i'm from that said it it makes perfect sense for certain vegetables and fruits to last a long time given the right climate conditions because absolutely just because you cut a fruit from the vine does not mean it immediately begins to die based on how plants reproduce by the way if you ever want wonder what allergies are like what you get that thing going on that's because you're walking typically through plant group sex plants just release the reproductive particles into the air especially trees it floats through the air it's supposed to catch on to another plant's reproductive part occasionally it catches on to your nostrils and your immune system thinks it's an invasive protein but when two plants really love each other you have a successful a successful genetic pairing between two separate plants that grows into a fruit the fruit contains seeds and uh seeds are little you know microcosms of an ecosystem they have water and they have calories to support the the early stages of a plant and a fruit is like that but more so fruit typically contains lots of seeds like in a pumpkin and that can happen a couple of reasons usually it's to be delicious to some kind of animal that will consume the fleshy part of the fruit swallow the seeds digest the fruit part and then excrete the seed parts and in doing so do plants are real solid because animals walk and plants don't so in order for that to be successful your fruit has to be successful and stable over time now oddly enough the degree to which that happens with the pumpkin isn't um caused by darwinian evolution and natural selection pumpkins apples basically all the fruit and vegetables we eat their properties have been amplified by artificial selection where humans have realized even before we knew what dna was by cross-breeding plants you get plants that are more edible that are ripe longer whose fruit is more stable so if you look at the modern tomato this beautiful red shippable tasteless garbage that's what happens when people optimize natural life the artificial selection for what we want and in the case of tomatoes what do we want ship ability put it in a truck get it shaken around in a crate it still looks fresh and ripe at the store it tastes like water and vaguely of ketchup right and we see this over and over when you say have you heard people talk about the paleo diet is that a thing here yeah that's not a thing none of the plants and animals that humans ate in the paleolithic era are available at your grocery store it was pre-agriculture everything you eat has been amplified through artificial selection so in the case of these beautiful big orange pumpkins we're looking at evolved features to allow seeds to be self-sufficient to be fed by the fruit and maybe to attract animals into the reproductive process as amplified by the needs of agrarian humans refrigerators by the way relatively new so as we look at the agricultural process one thing that we've bred for as we've seen fruit of different lines of seeds that we've planted we have uh allowed to reproduce fruit that was more stable in a local climate and i don't know this for sure i'll fact check myself later but i'm guessing wherever the pumpkin was designed over time was more cl similar in climate to this part of the world than the part of the world i grew up in which is why pumpkins are not nothing is shelf stable in the southeast bananas maybe and other things last here because you have this incredible gift you're unaware of it is not searingly painfully hot 11 and a half months out of the year here yeah so that's why [Music] i'm timmy good to meet you good to see you so actually like what day we on tuesday so saturday night i was no sunday night that doesn't matter but anyway i was watching this uh documentary well actually kind of fictitious documentary about veganism called carnage and it's basically the idea of it set in the future 50 years in the future and it's about if veganism became so popular that eating meat was actually the kind of weird thing to do or unacceptable yeah so almost as if we'd think about eating meat as same as being racist or yeah something like that there was like funny analogies about when paul mccartney brought up meat-free mondays it was almost as like ridiculous as saying ethnic cleansing tuesdays or something like that um so yeah i guess the question is do you think in 50 years we will um regard veganism as as normal as not being racist or yeah something to that degree great question um i don't know i think it's plausible uh i don't know if you noticed a hurricane just rolled through ireland and because i'm a human and we tend to assign purpose and human intention to things in the natural world i thought it was florida lashing out at me for moving to california so it was like fine oh you left i'm going to send a hurricane to the uk where you are right now that's not what happened we keep putting carbon in the air at such a rate that it's increasing global temperatures which more than anything is shifting the temperature of the oceans especially at the mid latitudes and equatorial latitudes which makes hurricanes just like it's like hurricane steroids you know what i mean like for the same amount of working out they get bigger and stronger and even here believe it or not in the uk there's like a decent amount of climate deniers there's an incredible number of climate deniers in the united states unfortunate given the carbon footprint we have as a nation um but i think in the coming years it's going to get a lot harder to deny the impacts of climate on our daily lives and it's not just people in the impoverished world are going to be the most affected but everyone's going to be affected well the wealthiest parts of the world right now northern california is on fire like record fires with destruction of property and human life and vineyards and this is exacerbated by global warming and one of the main things driving the warming of our climate is our consumption of meat especially beef because to get a calorie of animal protein takes many more calories of plant protein and plant calories and a lot of water and a lot of shipping and distribution and logistics and plus cows fart a lot they're just great farting machines you they have done this with experiments where they've attached 55 gallon plastic containers to cows to catch their flatulence and they fill them really quickly like 55 gallons of fart is no big deal to a bovine and when you look at that uh it becomes almost unconscionable if you care about climate to eat beef but all animal protein is incredibly inefficient in terms of land usage and output so if we're logical about it we would start to create a social stigma against meat consumption i don't know that we're logical about it i think there's two possibilities one in 50 years or 100 years it's like you eat meat you're destroying the planet and causing suffering savage but then i look at the election of donald trump in the united states i look at brexit over here i look at the the rise in populism all across western and eastern europe and i think some people are just like real into destroying our home they're so i don't know if maybe instead of like stigmatizing it we will fetishize it and just deny anything's happening as the world burns around us i think both of those are pretty plausible and i think that means every person's personal involvement in discussions about earth care and climate change and meat consumption are instrumental into the kind of world we live in and the long-term viability of this species on the planet what we're seeing pretty consistently across cultures is urbanites and city dwellers kind of get it on climate change even though they actually have giant carbon footprints they get it intellectually they don't change any of their behaviors but they they talk to talk well whereas people in rural communities generally have like maybe even a little bit lower carbon footprint but deny that anything's happening and i don't know what the ratio is here uh urban to rural climate change accepting versus climate change denying i'll assume like most of my audiences it shifts heavily towards people who read lots and lots of books and away from people who think that books are from the devil and that can create in us a felt superiority and an impatience with conversations about fundamental issues like climate change and diet and i think the pressure is on us the people who get the science to some degree the people who understand the potential magnitude of the issues we're facing as a global civilization to have tough conversations with people who've been handed a cultural narrative of nostalgia it was better back when we burned coal we cut down forests we had factories etc and explain how if we care about our children and grandchildren and their children we're going to have to make pretty significant and radical changes in the way we live and that a reasonable start may be eating less or no meat at all [Music] hello my name is barney from glasgow not glasgow i've got it now it turns out uh my living relatives in scotland are all from around glasgow i said gal again go so uh thanks to the news and the internet we are more aware than ever of random events that are happening all around our planet i listened to your literature's podcast on fake news which is brilliant and then recommend everyone to listen to it but it left me wondering this would there be any danger if i were to completely bury my head in the sand when it came to the news that a doesn't really affect me and b that i can't have any impact on to then only expose myself to news that is happening in my city in my neighborhood my day-to-day surroundings and areas that i can actually have some kind of impact on it's not that i don't care about something that's happening to people and say tasmania or the u.s election it's just that i only have so much time and can only make a small dent in the world would it be more realistic to focus on making it here oh wow yeah i think there's an excessive focus on national and international news for people today that we're actually getting psychologically addicted to the profound drama of the international narrative right now if you go back to this time two years ago and you talk about national electoral politics in the united states there would be no better way to put a group of americans living outside of washington dc into a deep and settled sleep nobody cared nobody cared for about six to eight months every four years we got really into national politics and then we quit caring and you can tell that because the midterm elections the united states typically have almost no turnout no one cares even though they're national elections who's my congress person don't care who's my senator i think i saw him on the news once right um but it's like something's in the air right now i know more about politics in the united kingdom right now than i knew about american politics four years ago there's something and it feels like the stakes are getting higher and higher and higher why because our ideas are not distributed via mass media anymore there's not a few people looking over the topics that should be communicated into a community and then making editorial decisions instead thousands and millions of computers running algorithms designed to turn attention into money make a determination about what you see every day every time you scroll through your facebook news feed or your twitter feed or god help us your instagram feed machines are making decisions on what will hold your attention longest to show you that and it turns out at this point moral outrage is the most sellable thing on the internet so a great way to make your stock price go way up is to pit two groups of people against each other convince them they're morally superior to the other and then milk their moral outrage for attention and ad revenue it's happening all over the world and then you add to that which is act honestly for the tech companies an accident some people figure that out what was happening and then they insert themselves into the ad process to deepen these divides to get people into power who would have never passed the gatekeeper's years ago they would have said these people are crazy they're fringe and now those are the people running the show all over the world and what's doing that is social media on your smartphone in your pocket so i've thought for years we should pay much more attention to local politics your city surrounding area and then go out from there because it's where you can have the biggest impact [Music] we see dramatic images of impoverished people around the world and we're moved to compassion we pull out our wallet we give somebody over the telephone or the internet our credit card number knowing that we're bringing aid and comfort to someone across the globe and then we do this internet i shimmy to the side they can't see what's happening in the room whenever we see a homeless person in our community isn't that remarkable we always care more about impoverished people we don't see every day because when we see them in person they're kind of uncomfortable and kind of smelly and kind of so desperate to survive they invade our personal space and ask for currency so i think a local engagement is vital but i also think we can't disengage from the larger narrative [Music] we elected an egocentric baboon and put them in the oval office of the united states which is kind of hilarious i mean you don't feel like the president of the united states with all the pomp and circumstance that has been created as a construct around that office created a national conversation about the size of his hands that's a thing that happened in our universe that's real and so it's like on one level it's hilarious on the other hand our baboon is having a social media fight with a regime in north korea the backdrop of which is the deployment of nuclear weapons and so we can say well that's not my issue and stand to the side but if our baboon decides to launch warheads you're just as screwed here as i am in california so on some level some issues necessitate everyone's involvement do you know how proud i am of you all that our baboon is not welcome to be a guest of the crown here you killed it you're affecting the baboon all the way across the pond because he doesn't get the normal deference and normal normalization that comes with the office because of his aberrant behavior so somehow your attitude here in this country is shaping the excessive acceptability of his behavior across the ocean so we should focus more on local actions absolutely we should focus more on local media but we should also remain involved on issues where collective action makes a big difference climate change is another place where you individually can have a massive impact on a global scale you making decisions in your life can make the difference of not a little bit but tons literally tons of co2 emission every single year so i think it's necessary to learn those areas in which we can be influential with our own actions learn those ways in which through careful personal conversation we can shift people's attitudes and opinions but understand that no action is as powerful as that which you take in your own backyard and in your own neighborhood hey my name's alex and i'm from falkirk and the church building we're in just now was finished being built in 1620 which is older than a lot of countries in the world today and although the church that i'm a leader in isn't that old it's certainly founded beyond loving memory i often hear the cry of this is how we've always done things i don't know how common that is in america but certainly in scotland it's intrinsic to our christianity in a building where the whole culture of christianity is supposed to be about having faith not having fear uh i've got two questions one is what is a psychology behind we've always done this that isn't just rooted in fear of change and secondly how long do we leave things before people start saying that we've always done them oh someone's in fire yeah so we're not that different culturally i grew up southern baptist and there's this great joke uh how many southern baptists does it take to change a light bulb change exactly somebody knows there it is you can't change anything in a southern baptist church they will throw your ass out it is completely unacceptable so where does that come from humans as a species are remarkably change averse it's not just in religious contexts the way our worldview works we hold on to it as long as we possibly can until we feel like our survival is threatened and then we become open to new ideas so you'll see churches get really flexible what what's allowed usually around the time they can't afford to pay their bills for their facilities and they're like we should try something new we should listen to new voices but until you get to that point people want to do it the same way they've always done it because it's known and it's comfortable we have um a psychological need for certainty in how we view the world and we like to feel like our map of the world is accurate we don't like to be surprised about reality uh because we have a part of our brain called the orbito frontal cortex orbital meaning orbit of the eye frontal front of the brain cortex meaning cortex part of the brain that's main job is constantly predicting the future and it doesn't like to be wrong so if your church has in your estimation generally described reality well it's kept you safe it's kept you prosperous and it's kel to you feeling like you belong which is like the biggest thing people need is a sense of social identity so if the church is succeeded at those things we've always done it that way is like the most human thing you can say but humans are also incredible change pioneers when they feel threatened for their basic survival so that's where you get these counter narratives if i were to use an american example a large part of the united states said we've always known it that way in terms of racial segregation it works just fine everybody's happy said the white people then other people felt their survival was very threatened african-americans living in the united states and they're the ones who said we have to change this because everything's not fine everything's not okay we are struggling to survive and the vehemence and intensity of those voices and stories drove change with incredible trauma and difficulty and resistance so it is with our religious institutions i was uh a couple years ago in westminster abbey real progressive spot you know like tradition has no bearing in that room and you you buy a ticket which is amazing to buy a ticket to a church and then you walk in and there's like lots of signs that are like hey don't take pictures with your cell phone it's not okay to take a picture with your cell phone and i being a devout person read those signs and agreed until i saw isaac newton's grave isaac newton he invented calculus and modern science so i got really excited and pulled out my phone and took a picture right you're not supposed to do that jenny was like hey my wife jenny said you're not supposed to take pictures in here i was like oh my gosh sorry put my phone away so i walked a little further and there was charles darwin's grave and i was like like seeing the beatles you know what i mean like it was so exciting that i pulled out my phone only now the lighting was different so the flash went off in westminster abbey during a service so this uh very regally dressed man came walking at me like this and says have you no respect for our sacred institutions oh i felt terrible i really did it i felt awful but as i like left i was like what did i the services that was bad there were people in service but if the people weren't in here how does like capturing some photons that were there anyway against a ccd element instead of my skin defile a space because psychologically tradition matters and as you know an american living on the west coast i have a tendency to thumb my nose at tradition and forget the profound psychological value it feels for people so to be an effective agent of change i think actually requires us to pay tradition it's due to understand why things were done that way and why they worked what was the animating energy beneath that that we can capitalize to draw people forward so in my work i'm kind of a radical nihilist christian atheist person mystic just word soup whenever i describe my spirituality but at the core of what i believe about god is that behind every photon that collapses under observation behind every event that happens in our world is a divine love and that the work of christ is to invite people into reconciliation with that love and when i honor the tradition of the christian faith by saying something like that i find like a lot of people who you wouldn't think would appreciate my work get really into it because i honor the tradition of what it means to be a follower of christ i claim the name and the label christian even though in some ways it fits even less well than the t-shirt that i'm wearing while still inviting people to the original vision why did we build these beautiful buildings why did we create these altars the altar was created in contrast to a previous altar which was closed off to the people these beautiful old churches are actually monuments to an insane idea god is open and available to all and so i make progress by pulling people back to the deepest part of their tradition which in the church is the availability of divine love for all the created hi mike i'm maddie um this is coming from a bit more of a sci-fi kooky uh kooky direction um i study publishing but i don't study it because i love books i study it because i love vr which sounds like a really odd uh thing or not maybe it doesn't um this is a bit you can edit this out but have you read ready player one or a familiar are you familiar with it oh wow yes and i loved it okay um i've been sitting in all my classes and they're talking about you know how to confront the business now how to and all i'm thinking about is okay well what happens when global global warming like does have a huge impact and we all end up in a virtual world having to do our relationships and even our faith that way um and so i wanted to ask you i think a bit of a three-pronged question a little bit one is um how do you feel about the idea of vr in general and the impact it'll have on when it becomes a widespread thing two what kind of impact do you predict it would have on spiritual life um if it became again like a mainstay of daily life and then the third um i don't ha maybe it was a two-pronged question awesome thank you uh well first i'm a ridiculously huge fan of vr i've been waiting for mass availability of virtual reality since a little before a film called the lawnmower man came out in the 1990s i have loved computers as long as i've existed personal computers and myself are around the same age so we entered the school system together and as soon as i realized you could render objects on screen i thought why couldn't you just hold a screen up to your face and track where you move and and really make some [ \_\_ ] happen with computer graphics and today i have an htc vive which is one vr rig i also have an oculus rift which is another vr rig i have a google daydream vr which is a mobile vr rig and um i'm well i'll confess this before the people my wife doesn't know this yet i've already ordered an oculus go which is a mobile vr rig coming from oculus i pre-ordered it so i'm really really really deeply into virtual reality and i've experienced it a lot and i'm really encouraged by it in a lot of ways because when we look at social interaction on smartphones it's super unhealthy it's incredibly unhealthy so smartphones create social craving but not social fulfillment so they create the same dopamine cycle for approval only more intense that missing people does but they never pay it off so just because you like get a like from somebody on facebook you don't actually feel connected to other people you just feel kind of like com a compulsion to get their digital approval again it's driving really strange human behaviors it's driving depression it's driving suicidal ideation the more research we see about social media on smartphones the more it's a terrible genie that we can't put back in the bottle but what if we could replace it with a new form of digital media that does trick the brain into physical presence of proximity i have an app on my vr rigs called vr chat i think that's what it's called uh yeah i think it's v no vr chat's a different anyway i can't remember what it's called but you just sit in a space with other people with avatars and talk to them and because you're wearing a vr rig they look three-dimensional like people and so even though they're not photo realistic like a video call the fact that they have depth and volume and hands that move like real hands and can point and thumbs up and really that's all you can do right now these three fingers only move together but you'll be like hey hey that's what everybody i made a bunch of hand gestures internet it doesn't translate um you feel like you're with the person right so i had a conversation one night where i was in florida i was talking to someone in california someone in the netherlands and someone in russia and we're all just sitting there talking and it was amazing except you can't touch anybody and in the west we're really touch a verse which psychologists and sociologists is driving some of our social unhealth and for good reason we're touch-a-verse frankly patriarchy has led men to believe they're entitled to women's bodies and so we tend to over sexualize touch as a predatory action but if you look at our species divorced from that we're actually a very touchy species and we've gotten touch a verse we have our boundary and when we cross that boundary it's forcefully and up in a predatory way so i actually hope that through haptics or more realistic touch technologies we could become less touch-averse why because in vr if someone's bugging you you can look at them and say mute and they vanish so if they're like oh my hands are in your they just disappear that you can't see them they can't see you so imagine like you can set up in vr where only people that you've pre-selected can get in your bubble so someone else that you don't know kind of gets in your space you both start to fade out and then disappear so imagine if like a creepy guy in a digital bar makes a move on you he literally can't but for people you know and trust that boundary is open until you say it's not the moment you don't want them there they're not so i have great hope and this is super weird i actually hope that vr could reclaim touch and non-sexual intimacy for our species in western cultures because of the degree that allows a check and balance on our weirdest impulses and this has all been designed of necessity by the way when vr first started the first vr communities appeared with these mass-market vr devices whenever a woman would enter a vr space 30 or 40 men would get right next to her pretend to fondle her digital bits you know shape their vr appendages into a phallus and do really disgusting things that's when tech companies realized we have to give people the ability to police people's interactions with them and so this kind of approval based contact was the result of that and it took me from being a vr cynic to being vr hopeful because it reinforces very quickly what's socially appropriate if every time you go out of pounds you disappear and can't see anyone now if you've seen netflix's black mirror this does have a dark side like what happens if you're banned in vr and you enter a space like this one tonight and there's no one there but you so i think there's more to unpack but i have great hopes for vr and how it could enable human society assuming we can create technology that allows realistic tactile interaction if not it will be a more addicting more problematic version of the smartphone a simulation of a social interaction that doesn't get you all the way to a truly gratifying social interaction [Music] um hello mike my name's adam um and i got completely lost in your last answer so it wiped my questions i'm just going to try and um try and find it again so it's obvious that we we live on a planet where everything is finite but we have an economic model um that is obsessed with growth and it stalled in 2008 and our way of solving it was to try and encourage the whole thing to consume more so we've started consuming more um i would love for you to answer a question about two questions one about what you think could happen and one about your greatest hope about what what we could do especially in consideration of the question two questions ago around humans inability to make change but can we decouple growth from prosperity you know can we live in a can we build a society can humanity build a society that isn't reliant on the continuous consumption of stuff that is eventually going to run out what sort of world are we going to leave our children wow great question we're pretty predictable in groups we're hard to predict as individuals we're pretty the more people you add to a group the easier it is for scientists to statistically estimate what we're going to do and as groups of people we respond readily to economic incentive structures almost ridiculously easy whatever we place as a carrot economically the vast majority of people get on whatever treadmill they need to head towards that carrot right so in a capitalistic economy that is the acculation of wealth and therefore resources and signs of material success uh oddly enough when we look at the data in terms of returning a dividend and that on personal happiness is extraordinarily limited you get a bit into the middle class and then you don't get any happier as you have more uh resources and then when you get past another point of kind of the top three quarters of the middle class you start getting unhappier to the point that uh the unhappiest people in society tend to be the very most wealthy it's very strange to imagine someone with billions of pounds being profoundly unhappy that is almost inevitably what happens uh when people get like a wish fulfillment a lot of money they didn't work for like through the lottery those people have incredibly elevated risks of suicide and bankruptcy so we don't handle the system we've created all that well and it is arguably destroying our natural world um so what do i think is one outcome we chase growth into our collective grave whether that simply means the end of our civilization and hominids regress to a more primitive social state without easy access to fossil fuels to kick start another industrial revolution where we just kind of are clever primates until the next asteroid strike totally plausible total bummer by the way total bummer not rooting for it but definitely plausible what's my hope in the west in europe and the united states there has been a great hand ringing of late by of late i mean the last 10 to 15 years because an entire generation of westerners won't get on the treadmill they don't want to own homes or don't try to own homes or can't afford to own homes or vehicles or wealth and we've seen a sociological shift away from owning things to collecting experiences and existing within community smaller more intimate community than previous generations my hope is that continues and intensifies that collectively generations decide to get off the treadmill forcing social institutions and systems to adapt to a post-growth economic paradigm now what does that look like i have no idea and i've thought about it a lot because if i if i could figure out some system that i thought made more sense than what we have now i could advocate for it and a few million people listen to me a month and i might help shift a tiny percentage of the global population that way but then they shift other people and that's how change happens i don't know what it is you know because i critique capitalism so loudly people go oh science mike is a marxist no i'm not a marxist every economic system i've seen us devise has a different set of terrible attributes associated with it much like human governance right it turns out like creating a system which and millions of homo sapiens can live in relative equality is incredibly difficult um so smarter than p smarter people than i will have to come up with those solutions probably younger people than i will have to come up with those solutions but growth cannot be the central metric in a short-term kind of transitional sense um i would look at norway sweden the netherlands this really strong social democracy where you have a focus on equality and as your income grows an increasing contribution back to the social good i think that just makes economic sense i think if you look at a forced embrace of post growth you've got to look at japan japan is having uh children at below the replacement rate and they're not really into immigration so a lot of western economies are also not at the replacement rate but we either have legal or illegal immigration that ironically props up our economies as we complain about against destroying our economies which is hilariously wrong but japan out of necessity is having to look at different economic metrics and social structures uh right now it's more panic like they're really incentivizing marriage and childbirth um and panicking at their kind of stagnant economic growth because of the lack of population growth but remember when our backs against the wall that's when we change that's why i'm watching japan japan as a culture their collective back is against the wall in terms of growth based capitalism and that may create a forced creativity for a new paradigm that i would like to ape around the world as soon as one exists um but i don't know humans we haven't been around that long compared to other dominant animals in global food chains and ecosystems but i hope our capacity to create with intention which i sometimes refer to as the image of god will lead us into an increasing harmony with our planet as opposed to an exploitation of it and an increasing harmony with each other instead of an attempt to mutually exploit it's just a matter of changing our intention away from winner take all to none of us are free until all of us are free hi i'm sarah so belief in god and experiencing god do not come easily for everybody but that doesn't mean that people don't long for an experienced relationship with god so i'm wondering if you did not have a felt sense of connection to god but you wanted to experience one and you felt like there was something there there was enough of your brain that would allow you to get on board with the possibility that there is this being that we call god what would you do given what you know about the way the brain works to bring yourself into a place where you experience that felt sense of connection to god fantastic this is the animating energy behind all my work people who long to feel closer to god but can't get there so they are former christians or they had some faith system that worked for them and that fell apart and now they can't get back also there's a lot of secularists and atheists in the audience who have a desire for spiritual things but don't particularly want to delude themselves into believing in a personified sky god they have too many objections to that model but for one reason or another they're haunted by spirituality [Music] and one of the most common things people ask me is like so how on earth can i get to that light you saw on the beach um how can i have some sense of god in my life because it turns out a post-enlightenment perspective on reality is overwhelmingly centered in the left hemisphere of the brain and for most of human history our dominant way of viewing the world was in the right hemisphere you might have heard that the left brain is analytical and the right brain is creative and that's super wrong that's like a popularized defiling of good neuroscience a more accurate way to look at that would be that the left brain is reductionist and the right brain is holistic the left brain wants to take things apart and look at them in pieces and the right brain wants to look at the whole and that both halves of the brain are therefore deeply creative but with different approaches to creativity right so you can't actually be effective in the arts without some mixture of those two perspectives you have to be able to view notes and an entire piece of music and you have to look at both to be a good composer it turns out that the kind of transcendent or imminent spiritual experiences people have are largely holistic brain functions and the way we tend to talk about god in the west is reductionist there's a book about this thick called systematic theology which is just the left brain's opus towards god it's literally 700 pages a thousand pages i don't know how long it is i've read it it's enthralling i'm scared uh it's not enthralling of propositions about god which by the way it starts with like we will accept two propositions or presuppositions for this work one god exists and two the bible is his word like just totally obvious assumptions everyone will agree with god exists and the bible is god's word so it's not that left brain anyway um my point is when we try to help people understand god in the west we give them a lot of information and ideas read the bible read understand this theology go to seminary and then the people doing it doesn't work in fact some people had like a profound faith that informed their life and changed the way they saw the world and they read a book or they went to seminary and it went away because they've trained their brain to distance itself from the lived emotive posture of faith so when you have an experience with god and they put you in a brain scanner it turns out your idea about god isn't an idea or a noun or a word at all it's not an object in the language of neuroscience god in the human brain is much more of a felt experience more like being in love or watching a sunset than understanding the standard model of physics and that means if you want to experience god in your life reading more books will never get you there other than my best-selling book finding god in the waves which if you read that delightful tome you'll find it gives you a lot of science and what's the job of me giving you information in that book to satisfy your left brain it's not wasting its time by trying all the non-verbal stuff i recommend in there i'm literally just trying to rock your inner skeptic to sleep so that you can have a little time with god right that's all i'm doing here's some brain science this is amazing look science science science science oh science that's good left brain falls asleep okay right brain now we can talk have you ever been in love right to know god is to sit in god's presence but how how what does that mean you might find god in silence i feel closest to god when i stay on a streak of daily meditation which involves 30 minutes a day of total silence both around me and right here it takes weeks of meditative practice to convince your monkey brain to not interrupt you when you start meditating have you ever tried to meditate westerners you say have you meditate a lot of people raise their hands let's do this right now if you've ever meditated raise your hand if you have failed at meditation raise your hand look at look at that look at that look at all those hands you can't see internet lots of hands went up westerners always feel like they fail at meditation which is the only way to fail at meditation you literally can't fail at meditation there is no wrong in meditation it's simply being aware and present in a moment and what happened to you the reason you thought you failed is you did what some expert said you sat the right way you were listening to your breath and nothing happened in the first nine seconds and because you've been trained by media to expect things quickly i mean has a movie trailer ever made you made you wait for excitement no your monkey brain was like well nothing's happening hey what are you gonna eat for dinner we gotta have dinner hey did you pay the light bill hey student loans are due like all these things come into our minds in meditation and in order to encounter god in silence you have to take the time to train the monkey to be quiet too so you've trained the skeptic to be quiet by saying science says this is okay you train the monkey through experience by going okay monkey i get it so when i meditate and i go oh my gosh i haven't made a science mic this week i go shh i'll do that later back to my breath and you continually return your posture to your breath or whatever you're centering your meditative practice on it's only after you've learned to be still here over time that you create the space to encounter that which we call god now if that's too weird you can't sit in silence there's other forms of meditation you can read the bible in a certain way called the lectio divina that's very effective you can have a visual aid like lighting a candle there's lots of different options but some regular practice is going to help you experience that which we call god now there's another trick your attempts to encounter god are amplified if god is reinforced via social identity what does that mean if you hang out with other people who think god is a thing your brain is more likely to accept it because what does your brain want not truth about the universe your brain could care less about what is true and correct about the universe your brain wants to fit in with other cool brains that's it it wants to be accepted by other brains therefore securing your material security i said securing twice still grammatically correct but hilarious securing your material security uh by fitting in with other homo sapiens and so when you hang out with other people who care about the god thing and believe in the god thing your brain goes good enough for me because you're a social life right and your social ape uniquely in the animal kingdom suited to experience that which we call god [Music] hi science mike um so my question is about counseling or therapy and it seems like lots of people are going through crisis or mental health problems and quite often in the modern world they turn to therapy as a way to get over that i listen to a lot of podcasts including yours which i love and quite often when people write in and they're really struggling it's counseling or therapy that is recommended and it seems like sometimes that's the only way people can survive and keep going it's the only thing people can turn to a couple of things strike me about that in that it seems like a very western approach that people take and to therapy also it's it seems to be um something that's a modern day thing you know it's not been around for uh centuries millions of years but at the same time there seems to be something about it that is absolutely crucial for people and so i'm wondering to kind of summarize everything do you think there's something about therapy or counseling that people need to survive or do you think that actually it's replaced something else and could that something else perhaps be religion oh man westerners are weird we are weird people we are historically strange we're incredibly hierarchical monarchies i mean governments everything we have we've got an organizational chart who does what we are formal we are touch averse uh when as part of my work i am in central america everybody touches me a lot just a lot of touching a lot and i'm supe wait wait whoa and i'm like not that touch of verse a person when people have like just met like not only give me a hug but it's like leave their hand on me i'm like why just leave your hand on me you're still touching me we're talking you should be standing like an appropriate distance away not physically touching me right now this is weird and it's because our world view as alluded to previously is reductionist the western world because of the enlightenment because the scientific revolution everything is about taking things apart to its smallest component and understanding it intellectually primarily through the left prefrontal cortex to view it neurologically the enlightenment was a patch of tissue a little bit bigger than a pound coin silver dollar americans as thick as like a tortilla executing a hostile takeover over the entire brain little patch of tissue right here about this thick took over the supervision of the entire brain it evolved as a tool to help the rest of the brain it did not evolve to be in charge of the brain but as we became increasingly linguistic and increasingly analytical in our focus it took over to the point that among westerners even when our left brain our prefrontal cortex is not in control it lies and says that it is the the story told by your consciousness as you choose to do everything like if i took my phone on my pocket and hurled it at someone's face and they caught it that was not like a weighed decision you know what i mean an ancient part of the brain closer to motor function just going ahead and moved your arm and saved your face but your prefrontal cortex goes i did that i chose to do that you see this with people who are are heroic in moments of crisis and they start to tell the story of why they did that they did that because their lower brain made a call in flight or fight the prefrontal cortex got pushed out of the way and later told this story about how it's in charge and and interestingly enough only in the west do schizophrenics hear voices that accuse and harass them in central and south america schizophrenics hear voices that affirm them that they welcome huh it's almost like the fundamentally different strange and alien way in which western minds operate and western cultures function require a unique set of tools to deal with the resulting trauma from being so distant from our lived experience so i have invested so much money in my therapist it's ridiculous because it's the only environment i can let my guard down and stop trying to appear smart and successful and self-sufficient and self-reliant i mean come on where do you think we over there in the colonies got this self-sufficiency self-reliant thing from our parent nation over here like i did the event a couple weeks or a couple days ago in london and then in birmingham like the like very proper approach to the whole format was was self-evident even compared to americans everyone's very centered in themselves took a minute to kind of everybody let their guard down and be vulnerable in the space because it's culturally frowned upon so therapy is where we pay someone to listen as we express that which we're afraid to usually because of rejection is there a counter yeah safe community we create spaces where it's okay to be you it's okay to not be perfect it's okay to not put forward your best presentation that's messy it's chaotic it creates its own sense of trauma as we learn to do it in terms of like interacting with each other in a lot of ways we're like stunted toddlers like if you put a bunch of toddlers in a room you're like live an authentic community someone eats the paste someone hits someone else over the head with a block you know what i mean like they don't really know how to be themselves without hurting others and westerners are that way as they learn to live authentically but as we get there we do get better at it we learn to be gracious to each other we learn to be forgiving and we learn to forgive others and in doing so a truly miraculous thing happens we learn to forgive ourselves so i found over time i don't have to go to therapy as much because i've learned to lo i have no expectations of myself i come into a room like this and i had someone say one like aren't you afraid you won't be able to answer the questions no how on earth would i know the answer to every question my job in this room is not to have the answers my job in this room is to model being comfortable in my own skin loving myself and accepting myself so that hopefully some of you are inspired to do the same as you leave this room truly vulnerable community is the answer to therapy but in the meantime therapy is a fantastic tool to help us get in touch with the entirety of our consciousness and lived experienced and not the small box that western society allows [Music] hi mike uh my name is freddy um i spent the last christmas with my family in south carolina and as you do at christmas i got into a very heated shouting argument with one of my extended relatives who did vote for the current president but i won't hold that against them about issues that i think stemmed from a disagreement about gay rights as a emotional animal i recognize that i'm addicted to feeling right and i recognize that that is in large part part of the problem in the uk and usa with reasons why we don't like talking to people who we see as disagreeing with us how do you think we should go about trying to disentangle that animal part of our brain without compromising what we believe to be right great question uh timely and tough because as you know if you follow me on twitter i am universally loved by american conservatives both political and theological they all are huge fans of my work including my family that lives in rural north florida that literally never engages with my work publicly except my dad who i love who only tweets at me to tell me i'm disrespecting the president only tweets i get from dad not not calls or texts calls and texts are all personal and loving and engaging but tweets are stop disrespecting the president so i'm clearly an expert on this topic um but i do have a thing in my tool set that helps a lot on social issues almost every social view i abhor i held at one point in my life so i've been affirming of same-sex marriage for a few years and before that i too thought that a man marrying a man was sin that invited destruction onto humanity so i go back and replay the tape and i'm like oh i don't get to feel superior to people who believe what i believed most of my life i can understand if someone is gay or a lesbian or trans or queer that engaging in difficult conversations about the morality of their very life and identity is exhausting and emotionally destructive and i don't think those people should have to i think people like me who whose neck is not on the line in these discussions are the ones tasked with having those difficult conversations and for me it begins with understanding i'm not a terrible person and i wasn't a terrible person when i opposed same-sex marriage i was executing a set of values that i was given so people are doing they're executing a social identity that they were indoctrinated into as children and the only way out of that is an invitation into new perspectives via storytelling and someone who can patiently listen as they justify where they've been and graciously accept them as they grow it's got to be that safety it's my job that's my job with people struggling with all kinds of social topics that i've moved on and they haven't i have to pay that forward because somebody did that for me i could have never become who i am on social issues without someone being gracious and patient with me while i learned and that's i think what we've lost right now so much is we see our growth as people and our thirst for more universal human justice and we mainly use that as a form of self-validation feel good feel like we're in with the right people to feel like we're crusaders for morality but the problem is everybody thinks they're a crusader for good morality and change only happens i think when we admit how often when we're wrong so i don't argue with people about issues of racial justice or reproductive justice or anything i just i won't do it but i will sit with people and listen to them and listen to their fears and their anxieties about the changes that are happening in society i will empathize with them and then i'll tell them one story that helped me see the world differently and i'll leave it you might if you listen to my work you might notice i don't close the ribbon a lot i don't put a bow on most things i leave it open at the end why because i'm not telling you how you should think i'm just inviting you to explore that's all i do and that's the same thing we do on justice issues and it's not easy a lot of people what they really want to do is fight because fighting is like gratifying on some level and i just won't do it i won't do it i'll just say i just love you so much just love you so much um and i love you too much to fight about this if we're gonna fight let's let's talk about something else but when people are ready if you get vulnerable i'll be vulnerable too i'll talk about what i'm afraid of and i'll talk about why i'm afraid let's share our fears let's share our hopes and we'll find that we have more in common than we think and we can transcend the like exchanging talking points we each read in respective media bubbles and connect with each other on a human level and i think that's the engine of social transformation and dare i say the great commission it's the way the work of christ is made known to others hey my name is patrick um so my question has to do a bit of kind of the intersection of scientific consensus and its use in science communication having myself grown up in a rather theologically conservative environment and still quite involved in the church i really have a heart in appreciating the science and seeing the need for better communication in the sciences for how to effectively effectively communicate in these contexts and sometimes being a very verse to the way scientific consensus is used as this sort of honorific sledgehammer that almost that really ends conversation oftentimes um and treats someone as if they're some sort of intellectually less superior because they don't affirm whatever particular view of the day and most of the scientific communicators i see today i'm not incredibly impressed with i won't name names but i just feel like they rely too much on just science says without actually sitting down and explaining it so what advice would you give to someone like myself or other people or maybe up and coming science communicators for how we can better build bridges for science communication on science and faith issues or political policy and science especially in theologically conservative contexts okay i've actually done that i might i actually feel qualified to answer a question for once it's amazing thank you um i think if you really really and so what is science science doesn't say anything there is no church of science there's no priests of science there's no unquestionable scientific dogma we act like it but there's not science is a tool it's a method of understanding the world it's a way of asking questions and validating what we find that's all it is science is a method it's a tool it's a great tool it's wrong sometimes it's wrong a lot there's massive issues right now in uh reproducibility of scientific experiments there's a big problem in science nobody wants to do reproduction uh reproductive work i mean people love to do reproductive work but they don't want to reproduce scientific experiments that have a negative result because nobody gets funding for running a negative result in fact even if the work hasn't been done before and you think you might get a negative result people are reticent to bet their next step in their academic career on that work even though negative results tell us a lot about the universe and for good reason people fear this work uh the one of the most expensive scientific apparatus in human history is uh the large hadron collider with cern and it's done something really cool it helped us find the higgs but it hasn't actually told us anything about new physics it hasn't revealed any weakness in the standard model of physics and because of that when we talk about funding for new things politicians and the government go well we gave you all that money for the large hadron collider and all you told us was a particle exists that you already told us probably existed who wants to spend money on that when we have social programs that we can't fund i think when you really embrace what science is built on which is a philosophy called empiricism and that means you put you place confidence in a belief in proportion to the evidence you have for that belief it will propel you to a profound humility when you realize there's absolutely no belief you have 100 certainty in there's absolutely no belief you have that could not be taken apart by sufficient evidence and when you execute that level of humility people stop listening to you sorry that's true like when you if you take two people and you put them on stage in front of people and one person says something incorrect with great confidence and the other person says something correct but says i could be wrong most people believe the blowhard hello november right now we know how trump got in office he's very confident about his [ \_\_ ] but i have found kind of a hack to that people love enthusiasm i'm not a scientific expert but i go up on stage i go science is so awesome check out what i learned five minutes ago y'all it's it's so cool and people are attracted to that level of authenticity in an age where everyone is screaming at them in confidence telling them what they should believe i don't tell people what they should believe about science i tell them what i can't sleep over because i'm so excited you know what i mean i get so into new insight our we have a field of science called neuroscience where brains brains it's the only field of science where something studies itself if that doesn't get you up in the morning check your pulse or maybe you're just not a nerd i don't know i get so into cosmology i get so into there's stuff happening in the cognitive sciences right now that help us understand how we make decisions and why that is not only fascinating but may help us create better systems for human behavior and societal interaction so we bring that enthusiasm and that love that's wrapped in a true humility and that true humility means i understand my worldview is just a survival mechanism and so is yours and so is yours and so is yours and i can't feel superior to a system of seeing the world that has kept you just as alive as mine has so what can i show you that i love and that excites me that may open you up a little bit more to this great tool that builds iphones and nuclear-powered robots on mars come on that's amazing everybody thinks astronauts are cool everybody you take the most hardcore political theological conservative fundamentalist and you put them in the room with an astronaut and they are excited except those flat earth people i don't know what to do with them yet but i'm working on it i'm working on it people are attracted to love and acceptance and enthusiasm so if you like you can't you know the earth is six thousand years old climate change isn't happening that's fine you stick there right now but i'm going to find something in the world of science that will put a twinkle in your eye in the same way it puts a twinkle in mind and then i'm going to explain it so accessibly and so clearly that you truly understand it too because if my job as a science enthusiast is to convince you i'm smart i'm doomed to failure but if what i'm doing is taking six weeks of my life and giving you the same insight i got across nine books in two and a half minutes that's an honest to god public service so i'm not interested in a cultural war around science i am much more interested in introducing people to one of the greatest shows on earth the investigation of physical reality and what that means to us all hi so i want to apologize because i've been yawning at you all evening and it's not because you've been boring and i'm super fangirling right now i'm really sorry but i was working last night and i work in a castle which is i developed it's really quite cool and i was thinking about this and you may or may not have realized last night there was this ex-ophelia storm and so it was blowing a huli and it was really creepy and then i got up this morning and the plan i it's a children's home this old castle and the plan was to decorate for halloween and every bone in my pentecostal upbringing like body just cringes at the idea of decorating for halloween because we're supposed to go and turn the lights off go in the basement and pretend we're not there and but it made me think i didn't sleep last night because the wind i knew it was just tree branches i knew it was the lights i knew that oh for goodness sake this is just blowing across the way i woke up every time there was a noise didn't get any sleep last night and then i'm throwing all these skeletons and i'm throwing these spiders up and i'm putting cobwebs everywhere and the sky is red yeah yeah yeah yeah totally um so like clearly joel is being you know lived now and i just had to ask ghosts real not real now okay okay hold on i'm gonna preface this with i totally don't believe in ghosts at all at all i believe yes pentecostal upbringing so i believe in demonic spirits i believe in the holy spirit and i believe that the holy spirit is greater than anything else on this planet so it's okay i'm safe but there's a lot of creepy [ \_\_ ] that goes down in this castle and there's a lot of people with really creepy stories and people who are floating about and it's halloween and it's october so ghosts real or not okay it's the most human thing in the world to see consciousness at action and everything we observe an incredible amount of our neurological networks and systems are devoted to estimating what other people are thinking about us because so much of our environment threat and reward is associated with other living things if i can predict which way the prey animal is going to run and throw my spear better better chance of survival if i can think which way the potential predator may attack me and evade survival if i can figure out how much another person likes me and convince them to like me more or if they don't like me get everyone else to not like them so i went in the end that's successful so those patterns seeking systems in our brain that ultimately feed the social parts of our brain tend to create agency in everything this is one of the cognitive foundations of religion this is why animism is so common in human cultures animism being everything has life celtic spirituality deeply invested in animism so believing in unseen agents is one of the most natural things human cognition can do also in secular nations more than half of people believe in the afterlife so it's hard for us to contemplate our own death so of course most people believe in ghosts because they want to be a ghost they want to believe in some way their conscious experience persists beyond their physical death scientifically speaking do we have any evidence for a continuation of conscious experience beyond our physical death absolutely not i've told people this many times and they go on ghost tours and they tell me with great conviction about the ghosts they've seen and the experiences they've had so what do i do with that i know what what the scientific consensus is i'm relatively confident i leave some openness but i understand the underlying energy behind our ghost mythology our superstition our fear of the dark is a system of understanding the world that kept us alive for as long as organisms have had brains this is old software in the human brain and i'm just not especially interested in tearing apart people's beliefs and expectations and involving the afterlife because i think like any idea of the afterlife is as good as any other um and although scientifically i don't have any belief in the afterlife if you pin me down what do you believe will happen when you die i have no idea my experiences with the love and light of the divine make me hope for something i hope that this is going somewhere and i hope in some way after my cells stop metabolizing and my neurons stop firing in this electrochemical soup that creates my consciousness that that light i've seen so many times on the beach or in meditation that has led me towards greater love and acceptance of myself and others will be there to greet me on the other side whatever that means [Music] hello mike i'm so my question ties in a bit to the last one uh so ever since i was a child i had sort of a deep-seated panic about the concept of eternity and it really had nothing to do with like a fear of hell or heaven or what have you i just remember as a kid um just it sort of lulling in my head for a minute and then just getting up into bed my heart was beating really quickly my mind was racing i would run to my mom's room and say like mom mom i'm so i'm so scared i'm so anxious and she's like were you thinking of eternity again i'm like yes and um and she would say oh it's fine it's fine it's fine but even as in an adult i still have this this weird panic when i think about it and i don't know where that comes from and it's a bit yeah it's just weird so if you can shed any light on that i would appreciate it it's not just you first of all i've had this question multiple times there is a uh name for a fear of eternity i can't remember what it is but it's like a documented thing um and you say you tell me so i'm going to take out your word that it's not attached to the idea of eternal conscious dormant for many people it is very attached to the idea of eternal conscious torment it turns out that's a sticky idea when you tell a child if they believe the wrong thing that could exist in a permanent state of pain and suffering forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever that that actually tends to shape their conscious experience and be emotionally traumatic believe it or not who would have thought in my case i would say the sinner's prayer over and over and over and over and over and over to make sure i was saved because i didn't want to go to hell fraternity but i can also get how just eternity like is a terrifying idea has anyone ever been runway delayed on an airplane i'm not talking about the good delay where you're in the airport and you can walk around and go get like a snack or watch television on all the monitors about something mind-numbingly boring that sounds terrible until you are runway delayed where you have to sit in your seat with the entertainment system not turned on yet and your laptop in your bag for hours it is awful and i love not doing anything i'm a master at the sedentary i went to bed early last night and woke up late today because that's just how i roll like there's nothing i love more than like a 14 hour of sleep day followed by a really laid back morning that's a great day and you had a runway delay where i sit for four five six one times eight hours in a chair looking at a seat back is horrible and then multiply that by infinity i don't care what you do you get bored with it eventually like i thought one day what if i eat pizza for a hundred thousand years like i love pizza i really genuinely love pizza would i love pizza for a hundred thousand years so it's not weird to be terrified of eternity some people look forward to it i don't think they thought deeply enough about eternity it's not just you in terms of uh what you do about it therapy would be a good start also think the way you experience time right now is tied to the structure of your brain well no matter what happens to your consciousness after you die your brain doesn't make the trip so if this is any comfort the way you experience time is extraordinarily likely to be radically different on the other side of not being in a physical body anymore if that's your afterlife belief um in in physics there's nothing special about time it's just another dimension of measurement everything that happens is reversible in physics you can run every equation and time doesn't matter which direction the arrow of time is flowing and so i think if there's a god if we get reunited with that god after our deaths we're very unlikely to experience time as a sequence of linear events whatever that means perhaps time looks more like a tapestry when we see it all at once if we see anything at all so eternity as an infinite set of moments you experience one at a time i think is extraordinarily unlikely to face you on the other side of your physical consciousness and if you're geeky enough that might be comforting if not you probably have to talk with a professional about what life experiences led you to that place and coping strategies to deal with this so sometimes it's just as effective to deal with the symptom as the root cause in psychological issues so there's something like cognitive behavioral therapy you might be able to interrupt the thought loop that leads to the anxiety and find some comfort as you search for the source ultimately [Music] hi mike um thanks very much for coming um funny story and when i came up and sat at the front i had one question which you then proceeded to answer twice in a row so thanks for that um and this was not like a repeat questions crowd so that's impressive no it's it's it's nice how it's all gone together um but i've got another one so i was um brought up in um a church where everything was very black and white you had right you had wrong it was god it was not of god um and that was lovely because that provided certainty um and then i met my wife and her family and uh they introduced me to a concept that not everything is black and white some things are actually quite gray so some of this certainty got ripped up and thrown up into the air um and then i discovered this thing called the internet and podcasts um and justin brierley and uh mike mccagg and and suddenly i realized it's not just some things that are up in the air everything is up in here everything is grey um and i'll look at people like yourself who doesn't just seem to live happily in the gray you seem to be thriving in the gray i'll i read about you know pete ends and richard raw and the people like that who you've had the honor of spending time with who are totally thriving in the grey um but when i'm in the grey i'm finding it really knackering and really tiring um because i just don't have that certainty and i haven't got found anything to really replace it yet and i've got a wee boy who's three and in a couple of years i hope and pray that he's gonna start asking questions about what that dad's life is based on um and i don't really know where to go with that um so if you could just give me all the answers to that that would be lovely thank you buddy it's the normal thing to be freaked out by a state of uncertainty that's called human psychology so learning to dwell and thrive in uncertainty is a discipline that you develop over time with great intention i am impatient so i didn't want to develop comfort and uncertainty over an extended period of time so i created a cognitive hack i have a profound sense of uncertainty that i am uncertain about things i'm not kidding i internalized the idea that i don't really know anything and became very certain about that as the core of my worldview and found it profoundly comforting i can be certain that i know nothing and that's why i always call myself an evangelical nihilist if i can convince other people to let go of literally every idea they have they may to find a profound sense of peace or a total psychological breakdown it can go either way and hey it's your life not mine it worked for me um to get to that place of comfort requires a lot of trust frankly so what do i trust i trust that the universe is fine no matter what i believe my beliefs don't cause the universe to exist or not exist god is just fine no matter what i believe if there is a god god's belief is not predicated or god's existence is not predicated on my belief so what do my beliefs do they help me navigate the world so that lets me get much more pragmatic about what i believe i believe things that help me navigate the world and when i'm having discussions with other people i have to have some kind of way of agreeing on some concepts in order to communicate so that's why i lean into science and empiricism to create a common set of things we can all basically agree on to have a conversation that doesn't mean like i'm i elevate science as the only means of navigating reality it just means it's a good one that gives you some point of reference for agreeing on what we're talking about and then i just sit in that uncertainty in my meditative and contemplative practice which by the way richard rohr taught me more about that than anyone i've ever talked to i mean richard rohr that guy is so confident for someone who seems to believe nothing because it creates in him a humility richer war doesn't have to convince you of anything he just shares from his heart and what he's tasted of the divine it took him i don't know 30 40 years to build up he's quite old so now he's been talking about that for 30 or 35 years uh so so view this as a growth in your life we get scared when we don't know where we belong and we try to land the plane as soon as possible i just stopped trying to land the plane there's no tribe i'm trying to fit into with my belief system i don't even have a belief system i mean i wear world views like hats i once called myself an epistemological contortionist you know what i mean wherever i need to get through to get through this conversation i can fully embody that worldview for as long as i need to because they're survival mechanisms and that's great for someone who's 39 years old it's not so great for a four-year-old if you greet your children with hey welcome to the world everything is an abstraction and you can be certain about nothing that's going to be a screwed up kid so kids need to know that they're loved and they belong and it's okay to talk about your world view with certainty with your children you can talk about what you believe about god you can when they ask a question well i believe or will we believe and then you just say what you think at some point they'll outgrow that need for one story and you'll know this because they'll start asking you well why do you believe that well what do other people believe and then you just answer their questions honestly the best thing you can do after you make sure your children know you love them unconditionally and give them the story of your family and your people is to create an environment of trust where no questions are off limits when my daughters ask me about sex and sexuality for the first time i think they were shocked how comfortable i was it made them deeply uncomfortable but over time the fact that i was a completely non-reactive non-judgmental presence in the conversation means they were comfortable coming to me and their mother with questions that kids don't usually ask their parents because we don't judge questions and curiosity in my house we deeply reward them so if with your children if instead of trying to reproduce your worldview and your memes and your ideas and clone them into another person instead you give them their own tool set to form their own worldview they won't go to therapy for the reasons you did they'll go to therapy for completely different reasons and you'll still be your fault so all we can do is our best all we can do is love our kids and the fact that you care enough to ask a question like that tells me like you're a really great dad and don't let the world pressure you into parental perfection just be present and real with your kids and uh you know if you do that then it's their job to pay their therapy bills and not yours um kind of just answered a large part of my question maybe just to slightly um specify that you talk about the need to be with other people who talk about god we also talk about how we're so driven to certainty most of us so how do we live in community um with where everyone around us wants to be certain and wants to pinpoint us without it like making our inner skeptic wake up and this is why i tend to be a border crosser in communities so i i find myself grounded in a local congregation and i'll say the creeds with them as long as they realize i'm putting a lot of stars and fine print on every word in that creed if they're comfortable with that hey we can roll together this will be fun but then i also make sure i spend a lot of time with people with oppositional worldviews and i don't allow myself to feel like my tribe is defined by anything more than all human life so i intentionally spread my time across multiple communities and multiple ways of viewing the world and just understand that all of them tend to kind of hate each other on some level because of their need for certainty and to realize oh yeah that was me three years ago five years ago whatever it was and so i don't judge any of them i try to invite them into a greater sense of understanding among each other since i feel like i belong equally with all of them so funny thing happens at my events i mean i've spoken at like conservative evangelical mega churches and mit and google these are slightly different mindsets of audiences and my love and understanding of both lets me act as a liaison between the two and to show like why they're both amazing and why i love them so much so my sense of belonging in a church community is not based on an equal certain in a certain set of theological premises it's not like i'm so i so believe this as deeply as you and that's why we're together we believe the same stuff about god i'm there because their beliefs about god any church community i'm a part of propels them to want to change the world in a great way in a matthew 25 sort of way and i can be a part of that any day and if i can just delight in people's presence and working together i don't have to worry about who's certain about what other than as a translator a translator i'm great at talking to white people about racism because i've spent so much of my life as a white supremacist racist i'm great at talking to skeptics about religious fundamentalism because i've been a religious fundamentalist for so long i'm great at talking to christians about atheists because i've been an atheist so deeply and for a long time like i get atheism most days i think it makes more sense than christianity um and so yeah that's just my whole posture on life and living is to not convince people to believe like me i have no interest in that i have an interest in connecting with people on a relational level and inspiring them to be excited about being conscious and aware and alive and hopefully that excitement about having experience propels them to treat other people more graciously and more lovingly and the gospel is great at that the gospel is so subversive jesus was always talking to people he wasn't supposed to talk to who it was socially unacceptable who he accepted on a profound and deep level and loved and i just want to help the church get back to that kind of erratically inclusive politically subversive way of loving other people and if they have to be certain about that that's fine with me [Music] hi mike um i has a question around confirmation bias thinking particularly in the church but then i'm also thinking um in a wider context and and kind of from personal experience and i felt a bit like um as christians we can be really really good at listening to a lot of christian teaching and doing a lot of church stuff and reading a lot of really good books and reading history books written by christians and moral books written by christians and just reinforcing a view that we already have and that we never really get anywhere because we're already just kind of circling around and it ends up being a little bit pointless and that potentially even some of our experiences from god and what we feel like god is saying is a product of confirmation bias instead of anything that's actually um kind of potentially putting forward any change um and kind of around similar things and what you've been talking on already i'm i'm just curious as to if you have any advice in terms of how can you add any rigor to that or is it possible to add rigor to that will confirmation bias always play a part how how can we make ourselves more aware of that there's a cognitive bias where we believe other people are affected by cognitive biases and we are not so that's always the cognitive bias most present in my mind is my tendency to believe i alone am a rational actor in the universe and so my way of combating confirmation bias is to make at least half if not more of my media consumption and reading come from perspectives and worldviews i profoundly disagree with and my goal reading those is not to disprove those works but to see if i can fully embody the perspective of the author as i read it that's challenging stuff with my personality it may be easier for me than many other people but it's still challenging it is hard for me to read hard right political conservatives in our current geopolitical environment but i still do it both in short form and long form when i am feeling deeply spiritual i tend to read skeptics when i'm feeling deeply skeptical i tend to read mystics if mysticism comes too easily then i lean more into the writing of systematic theologians and if i read them in wretch i know i have more work to do so i double up on my reading and i just actively fight too strong a sense of belonging in any social label all the time because one of the animating mechanisms behind c confirmation bias is a sense of social identity and labeling which is why when people say hey are you uh whatever it's always a hard question for me to answer i have to almost like play pretend i publicly use the word christian much more often than my own internal cognitive experience christian is a fantastic like hashtag for part of my experience in life more than a comprehensive description of who i am same with atheists same with skeptic as much as possible in and of myself i try to live free of labels and the labels i become most comfortable with are the ones i most actively subvert in what i read oh yeah when i feel super like right now i'm in a real sort of jesus zone in my life uh i'm getting real comfortable in that again so i've been reading more uh muslim and buddhist scholars yeah how about that um because otherwise i just allow my brain to start filtering out information about the world again which it loves to do so you know not even remember that it's not important it doesn't validate your social label so i do that by destroying my own experiences social labels um so the more involved i am in church the more richard dawkins i read and uh i love that it took a long time to get to the point where that was something i enjoyed again it's that sort of like i know nothing i know nothing i know nothing i know nothing which is a meditation i use by the way like the elimination of my own knowledge i meditate on my unknowingness um it's weird but it lets me truly view all people as the beloved and created of god or truly view people as miraculous manifestations of the cosmos or basically see beyond language to those things in the human experience which feel most true love and beauty solidarity and even then these words feel so inadequate compared to lived experience i feel we should have probably ended on that last bit but i'm going to ask you the question anyway an american pastor that i know recently said that he thought that american male culture had been sissified and that european males had been emasculated and i was wondering i was alternately baffled and outraged by this but i was wondering what you thought the ideal of american manhood was this american dream that he was talking about and whether it has any place in the world today every time i think masculinity historically can't get any more over the top and toxic it does masculinity as we understand it today started to emerge when we learned we could plant seeds in the ground on purpose and we shifted from a hunter-gatherer culture to an agrarian society at which point men seemed to have more value because they could work harder in the field and they were better at fighting the borders around our farm from invaders so male labor became very valuable and the primary function of value women had was what they could make more men or more women who could make more men so women moved from partners in the creation of human culture and society which by the way when we look at depictions of god and pre-agrarian cultures they were just as likely if not more likely to be female than male you have agriculture enter the scene and suddenly it's all about a male god and a male-dominated society and women is property to the point that you had to have a dowry to marry off your daughter to someone you had to like justify this economic loss of taking on a woman into their family burden um yeah and then uh you know i mean you just watch this arc um so in in the medieval ages in the west uh chivalry was a thing sure but it was also masculinity was about conquest and wealth and the acculation of wealth and then we get into modernism and individuality and our media gives us depictions of john wayne we sort of invented this motif of uh and boy i'm sorry hollywood and america media did a lot of this this depiction of men as rugged settlers our culture became about men repressing emotional vulnerability and displaying strength at all times uh physical prowess and virility were signs of masculinity uh and and so our cultural tropes became more about like men were studly if they had sex with more women and women who had sex with more wind were [ \_\_ ] because this is supposed to be a one-way street which is oddly strange by the way i don't know if you know in the victorian era it was widely understood that men had almost no sex drive and women were uncontrollable in their sexuality and so men sort of had to like acquiesce to have sex to reproduce with these uncontrollably clear even women which how far is that from the modern narrative that women are sort of like disinterested in sex but men can't get enough of it these are just social constructs that immensely impact our behavior and so the ultimate depiction of masculinity for so many people today is like rippling biceps that take what they want and never cry that have their name on an airplane and like big bold capital letters this is masculinity this is what is it someone in the media said it's a a weak man's conception of a strong man or a poor man's conception of a rich man that's where hyper masculinity has taken us hyper masculinity has taken us to pervasive sexual assault have you watched me too have you seen this how common sexual harassment and assault is in our culture and to men who feel so lonely they get in their 50s and 60s and commit suicide despite having more wealth than men of that age in any point in human history by having more social access and a greater share of decision-making than at any point in human history and they're miserable because toxic masculinity is a false bill of goods that destroys men and women i think the greatest compliment i've ever received was on twitter believe it or not when someone tweeted in a world of donald trump's men be a mike mccarth so what's my depiction of masculinity i got a big belly and i love it i have tiny scrawny arms why because the size of my biceps don't define my ability to be a good husband or father i the more skilled i am at a hug the more of a man that i am the more my daughters feel completely at ease and comfort in my presence the more my wife feels respected as an equal by me the more of a man that i am the more i cry at movies because i'm in touch with both my wounds and my responses to my wounds in my life the more i can't stand to see violence on screen because i can't stand the idea of people willfully hurting one another the more of a man that i am the more i am completely unconcerned with posturing and looking successful and looking important and the more i am concerned with genuinely impacting people's lives for the better the more of a man that i am the more i understand that masculinity isn't attached to my particular gender and that it's perfectly acceptable if women are extremely masculine or people are non-gender conforming altogether the more of a man i am because i am so comfortable in my skin i don't have to have other people meet my expectations i can accept them as they are that's a more healthy masculinity that's a more gracious masculinity it's so funny to me like in this kind of rah-rah sports guns action movie over-the-top masculinity so many of those people profess to be christians and there's nothing depicted about jesus that was hyper-masculine jesus wept jesus mourned with those who mourn jesus walks in and his friend lazarus was dead and he could fix it he's the incarnate of god he can raise this guy from the dead and he didn't say people stop crying stop crying be grown ups i'm going to fix this what did he do he wept with him his heart was broken because he loved people so deeply my picture of masculinity doesn't come from progressive critique my picture of masculinity comes from the gospels masculinity is having power and setting it aside to help others masculinity is admitting when we feel weak or afraid if it's possible let this cup be taken from me masculinity is doing the most radical act a person can do it's loving their neighbor as themselves may we find a world full of masculine men where the hashtag metoo would be completely empty well you've listened to another episode of ask science mike uh if you'd like to see where i'm headed in the future go to ask sciencemike.com and click on events i'd like to thank greg nordeen for producing these very long live episodes with lots of notes given by me andrew lucky for his role in pre-production my my bff jeb bottaford for writing the ass science mic theme song and most of all my delightful patrons on patreon who make this show financially possible if you'd like to learn more and maybe send me a buck or five a month go to asksciencemike.com for more details thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week [Music]