ASM095 LIVE in Tacoma, WA

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coming to you from emmanuel presbyterian church in tacoma washington it's ask sciencemike live

[Music]

thanks for taking my question um many of us find ourselves in the position of defending science on facebook and in public conversation and i think many times that becomes a conflict between the world the way we can verify it is and the world the way people would prefer it would be and so it becomes a tough sell you are somebody who has been successful at persuading people to to choose the truth what's your secret okay great question my secret is i am just a really really manipulative person uh it drives me crazy um because i have this this very intentional vulnerability and uh and the people who are closest to me say i'm manipulative so my wife is like you're super manipulative i'm like what are you talking about i used to be manipulative because i wouldn't create an emotional response in people to get what i want but now i don't do that now i create an emotional response in people so they'll get what they want that's totally different and my friend michael gunger says i'm the most authentically manipulative person he's ever met so i will confess that to some degree i see humans as computers running software that can be manipulated with uh with the right code so how do i get people to join me in conversations that may traditionally be adversarial brain science mainly i understand that um a lot of our discourse is centered around rallying identity via amygdala activation so you get really angry and confronting other people by shaming them and that is somewhat successful you can actually drive social changes with a shame but when you shame people you don't change their ideas you encourage them to hide them if you encourage people to hide their ideas for a long enough time they do things like answer polls one way and then go to the voting booth and no one's watching and they're like check this out right um and that's oh uh internet i made a birdie and it was funny so uh they can't see it so what i try to do uh let's let's talk science for a second i'm a former evangelical and as you know evangelicals are universally scientifically affirming folks and um my science mic work started not where we are now where it's this weird social issues dear abby unsolved quandaries and philosophy and science show originally asked science mike was like remedial science for evangelicals and i started by saying i understand your perspective because i held it too for most of my life and i understand that given your context it's a reasonable thing to believe and i said let's not assume that i'm correct let's explore this viewpoint and see what fits and what doesn't so you make people feel very safe and you make people feel respected that lowers their cognitive defenses now the other thing i do this this is the real dirty trick is amid all my facts and figures i usually tell stories right so even in the context of science i will often describe in a narrative fashion what incorrect beliefs or approaches to scientific fact do to real people especially people i know and that a lets people place their consciousness in someone else's when we engage in a story we take on the persona of the protagonist and it lowers and almost eliminates cognitive defenses and skepticism now this can be a dark art uh there's kind of a thing right now where people make a lot of money writing fake narratives and putting google adwords to them and it's kind of destroying civilization if i'm not exaggerating or i hope i am exaggerating but done right starting by saying you respect and understand someone's position avoiding activating the amygdala and telling stories is a good way to go with this caveat with outright abuse and oppression sometimes you actually have to start with like an amygdala shock people have to have a visceral response what's happening so like it's very possible someone could take the answer i just gave and retroactively apply it to say i don't know hypothetically the reverend uh martin luther king jr and present a very neutered toned-down version of historical figure saying he never raised a fuss which is historically completely wrong right so there was a there was there's often a cycle to social advocacy where is there is a necessary outpouring of anger and frustration and lament that pushes back on extremely abusive dangerous behaviors but then is followed up with a more open space for conversation and change that is a societal look um a personal look may look more like if you're in a abusive relationship with someone sometimes you can't do the create a safe space and share a narrative because they're punching you and sometimes the only way to stop that behavior is actually to just kind of let the inner animal out which will kind of put their guard up because they'll feel physically threatened which may be the only way to create the space but in general in my work i'm always aware that systemically i'm in a you know a position of historic privilege like there really has never been a group of people that have the kind of automatic authority and deference that modern straight white men have and that means i get to always be really calm i get to always try to create space and in some ways have a step of distance when i'm talking with someone who disagrees with me because i'm not the one with a boot on my throat and that's also why in my work i'm careful i don't necessarily prescribe my approach to everyone i think it can be very twisted and sick to expect a lesbian woman to explain to people who are trying to take away her right to marry and transfer property in a calm manner what's happening of course herb was going to be aroused she's she's worried that with one quick legislation change if she goes in the hospital her wife can't visit her so that's why we have to create social coalitions to get anything done it needs all of our perspectives working together to drive change and uh if my email inbox is any indication a majority of the country right now is afraid that we have just taken a giant step backwards and i think that means we need to grieve and we need to lament and we need to keep working it might be more important today to be an accomplice in fighting for equality for all people than it was three weeks ago and uh we all need to think intentionally like that not only how do we protect people but how do we actually create effective conversations that start changing minds of people right on the edge you know what i mean like i'm probably not going to try to go to an alt-right rally and talk about racial justice like they're pretty far gone but i sure as hell better show up at thanksgiving and talk to my own family because no one else is going to so just kind of stem off from what he said um thoughts versus feelings is kind of what i'm hearing and i feel like the points that you made were very true of how you approach a person but it makes me wonder from a child growing up to an adult how they take in information i mean stemming from education in itself what if it'd be a better idea to teach kids say critical thinking skills or how to have an open discussion and learn how to debate correctively so that's my question uh well my answer is i agree with your question that one was easy [Music] yeah i think part of the problem we have today is related to how we teach our kids several several ways one we try to teach our children a social narrative instead of how to evaluate social narratives this is a problem we rest control over what group gets to portray the historical narrative and i've never met a historian who peddles in a narrative historians do their work by understanding that different people in the same historical context present different accounts of events and facts and this has all kind of messed up implications so like um thanksgiving's a pretty weird holiday like uh we're celebrating like a bunch of like undocumented european immigrants sharing a meal with uh people who are like yeah come on in we're like that's awesome by the way this land is our land but our social narrative is like oh they you know native americans were so happy we were here and they helped us survive and you know it's just been peace love and happiness ever since and uh it messes up how we read the bible we read the bible as like this one narrative that starts in genesis and ends in revelation and we don't acknowledge the fact that the bible is actually a bunch of narratives kind of fighting about who god is which by the way like if you follow my work you know me and paul are complicated but lately i can get really into paul because he was kind of like the first christian bad boy you know what i mean like they wouldn't have put paul's epistles on the shelf at lifeway do you know what i mean like he kind of like started fighting the orthodoxy of the church in jerusalem and they were like what are you doing he's like i'm going to plant these churches like you can't do that he's like no i'm gonna plant churches with gentiles they're like oh gentiles have fun with that whatever and paul goes and plants all these churches and then they hear what he's teaching in jerusalem and they're like whoa so they send people to correct paul's bad teaching and then paul gets really mad about it and writes a letter to the domination like why are you drifting from what i said and we call that the new testament like the first thing like the new testament starts with like like the first rob bell like it's amazing so uh and so the bible's not like a neat narrative and neither is our history so we need to teach people how to just understand multiple narratives and test them and realize that pretty much every narrative has some reason for existing but we also need to expose children to multiple narratives and we fail to do that because systemically we fund our schools with property taxes and we allocate school funding based on local tax collection so it creates an incredible economic segregation that a little too cleanly also correlates with racial segregation so my children go to a school where they feel like they have a very multicultural experience but all of the children of color in my children's classes are affluent so i've realized how my children their narrative about race in america is pretty wrong um i mean because their dad is a is a podcaster so we're kind of on the lower end of the school's income gradient and uh um but i've had to have serious conversations with my girls about they they would ask me what's happening in ferguson what's happening in detroit and i had to sit my girls down and one's a middle school ones in elementary and say tallahassee is one of the most racially and economically segregated cities in the country what you're talking about is happening five miles from our house and until we structure our schools like instead of an industrial age factory worker education program that's what we that's what it's built our schools are an intersection of training factory workers and dealing with kids that have to work on farms that's where the model comes from it's a little antiquated um so we need to retool that we need to present multiple narratives and we need to just take all that same tax money for the schools and divide it equally among the schools in a given geographic area because otherwise we're creating a structurally classist and racist education system that reinforces a single narrative that then children don't have the intellectual tool set to approach the problem that produced them and there we have the difference between systemic and individual racism sexism and classism and it's got to start with schools and when the schools aren't doing it it's got to start with parents i'm a little reticent right now to talk too much about my kids schools because i mentioned stuff on on twitter and the internet thought they would advocate on my behalf so but i would say generally when things happen at school call the principal call the teacher call the school board and the only people that will drive change in america is you we can't wait for somebody else to do it i've actually been really encouraged uh post-trump because protests have been matched by people forwarding scripts and phone numbers for congressional representatives i'm pretty excited about that let's work in the system and outside of the system to change the country because otherwise somebody else will um so i've only read your book i haven't listened to podcasts so i don't know if you've covered this there but um you mentioned your wife's response to when you shared about being a atheist for some time i'm curious a little more on the story on what went down as your timeline continued how did you handle marriage and transitioning out of the church did her faith i'm sorry out of the church you were in um did her faith organically shift or did she feel pressure to shift since you were shifting um so maybe just also within this like how do you handle marriage and one of you having a faith crisis and coming together on that sure great question uh there's a liturgist podcast episode called the other side of the mattress that the honey badger aka jenny aka my wife was on where she talked about that from her perspective for a while was like the most downloaded episode we've ever done it was just smooth sailing easy let's see at first we uh agreed not to talk about it which meant we talked about every night and she would say i don't want to talk about this anymore and i would say okay and then she would talk about it some more and then we didn't know if we could stay married um for a while so that was that was a good time um and then people at the church started to attack me because i thought like the classy way to tell people my beliefs were changing was on my blog so i'm teaching high school seniors in a southern baptist church and on chick-fil-a day i read a blog post about why i think it's okay if people have same-sex marriages church loved it um you know immediately people called the pastor to express their support for having me removed as a sunday school teacher and deacon and then like even though i was like real mad at me she was real protective of me so now it was like okay church people just so we're clear i'll stab all of you and uh he's like no no no no no forgive them they know not what they do you know i've become an enlightened uh follower of christ and they're pharisees and they can't help it and seriously like oh man like i'm just like a real good jesus person now i've learned since then jesus tells the story about the prodigal son you've heard this story it's pretty good that i was a prodigal and the thing i took from the prodigal story was that god loved me and was happy to have me back and i forgot there's another character in that story the older brother and the older brother just stayed and worked the whole time and i recently realized that all of my baptist brothers and sisters are older brothers and they're going wait a second god he went and ate with pigs and atheists and he's come back and as one of my uh former friends says i have a national platform leading thousands of people to hell and um it's a quote and uh that god i've been here the whole time why does he have a book deal and i've mistakenly painted them as either adversarial or outside of the faith but the point of the prodigal story is the father also loved the older brother and was proud of it so as we've kind of evolved through this um we ended up leaving our church it was mutual but it was very mutual um and then my wife was just like i don't believe any of this and so then it was like i was the believer in her house and she was the she wasn't an atheist she was like a like i don't give a shitist and um like agnostic i i would care way too much if i called myself agnostic and uh i just kind of like left space for that and um and we did brunch for a while i don't know if you've ever done brunch two weekend days in a row it's incredible like i never knew like you could just eat waffles saturday and sunday because i'd always been a baptist and sunday like you got up earlier than monday and and then i realized like i can't do it i'm not a sunday bruncher i want to go back to church and my wife and children were like no so we went to another church and uh and when we joined that church my wife was really clear i don't know what i think about all this i didn't really care and because i was rolling with the methodists they're like awesome we're just really happy someone here under the age of 65 has come coming the building and um hello you know i love the methodist church because i could like make jokes on the internet and they're still like we love besides mike um uh please keep bringing young people and uh but the funny thing happened we kind of got in this church and she felt like she belonged again and that she was just like a christian again and i was like what is wrong with you don't you understand that like belief is a personal profession wait i'm not a baptist anymore don't you understand that belief is a personal experience wait i'm not even joking anymore and then i realized one day like my wife has a historic christian faith the bible speaks to communities when the old testament speaks of the salvation and deliverance of the people it doesn't say the persons paul's letters must the new testament was designed to be read aloud to groups it's meant to be a social faith i realized one day that my wife had a first century christianity and i had a post-enlightenment one i don't know now we're pretty good but we're pretty good because we've no longer we don't try to convince each other to believe the same stuff anymore my wife and i have never been more comfortable disagreeing about even really important things we don't care because our family is not a cult it's not my wife and i are holding hands through a roller coaster called life and when she has a really bad day i hold her and when i have a bad day she holds me and it doesn't matter like what we believe the most amazing thing happened last week in my house my oldest and youngest daughters debated about whether hell was a thing or not like my youngest is like really convinced hell is a literal place and she's afraid that like her older sister's going there because she doesn't believe in hell and i was like i don't believe in hell either and you know she's like but i didn't like try to force her to believe like i believe because if i try to just replicate my faith into my wife and children i'm just setting them up for a failure but if i try to teach them how to receive a new understanding of god as needed as life moves and changes then i'm setting them up for a lasting faith but i also understand that may be no faith at all if christianity is just like convincing people a set of ideas it's really uninteresting and it seems relatively unrelated to the work and teaching of jesus christ because when jesus talked about the faith yeah it was about loving god it's about loving your neighbor but then to create a exegesis of his own statement a hermeneutic he told a parable that involved nothing but putting love into action so if my kids care about never passing by the one on the side of the road and my wife does too i'll take it okay so i'm very curious about your views about the psychological adaptability of christianity i think it's adaptive as a faith like oh super adaptive yeah would you expound on that for a little bit um and how i can throw you more things if you want if you want to throw more things some more things okay so often in the church anxiety is taught as a like something we need to like a sin and obviously we could talk about it we could go off on a tangent about sin itself but i'm more so thinking it doesn't work when people confront their anxiety or depression like as a sin um i don't see it to work at all so i'm just curious um about your reflections on that perfect that helps okay christianity is one of the most adaptable belief systems ever people like the church is dying the church dies over and over that's what it does it's a death and resurrection faith and every movement in christianity is a reaction to something else and social changes and then it ceases to be timely and the gospel mutates and moves on now if it sounds like i'm spouting heresy well maybe but everyone does every christian is some other christian's heretic show me a christian and i will show you someone who says they're in rebellion against the church right john piper in rebellion against rome the pope been excommunicated by the greek orthodox the greek orthodox thenx communicated by rome everybody right if you're if you're if you're a reformation person right you're a heretic if you're catholic it doesn't matter who you are you're somebody's heretic so without understanding um that the word heretic is almost meaningless i love this slightly uncomfortable energy in the room where is he taking this a faith that adapts is the most biblical thing in the world the reformation was born out of legitimate problems with catholicism different christian denominations responded to different societal contexts paul hellenized christianity so it worked and was available to gentiles and it was a big fight because he said they don't have to uphold the whole torah which was scandalous for christians who actually knew jesus right if you look in the bible the people that followed jesus were in jerusalem and they were the christianity is a movement of judaism folks but in the bible itself over and over different images are presented for god to meet different contexts we've got a god in the first part of genesis who creates a with a cosmology exactly like every other culture in the world had only he didn't cut open other god's guts to do it this is god who said it's good who is excited about creation there's a big point as a major major progressive theological point for that cultural context and then that god became a burning bush that talked about existentialist ideas i am that i am i will be that which i will be think about it you'll get dizzy and this presented a new understanding for a people in exile and over and over what you see is different understandings of god in response to exile appearing in the bible's text so if we talk about modern psychology probably the dominant normative understandings about mental health and emotional stability in christianity are heavily influenced by the rise of protestant fundamentalist christianity primarily in the 1940s it's a very remarkable figure named billy graham he took rural tent revivals he took him into the cities he took the same liturgy from the tents into stadiums and tens and thousands of people came forward to be saved now i don't know if you know this america wasn't a secular nation at the time where all these new converts coming from the main line they've probably been confirmed when they were 11-13 but billy graham talked about the necessary personal salvation experience and described a god who is intimate and close and to a lot of people who were grew up with a distant but philosophically elegant god craved a personal god and then they became evangelicals and you had this period when the mainline church did this that period's actually still going uh and the evangelical church did like this but now the evangelical church is starting to do like this oh no what's happening society's changing the theology doesn't work anymore this personal god it's wonderful but this personal god demonizes really normative human behaviors this personal god encourages a single narrative homogeneous culture not real compatible with multiculturalism right so what do you have you have evangelicals what are they doing they go one or two things they go back to the main line because they just need some mystery man i just got to be grounded in the liturgy i need some incense and some candles recite some prayers this is cutting edge stuff and they're like they're following their grandparents and great grandparents or they become skeptics or post-religious spiritualists which is fine because it's a reaction something funny thing this is becoming a recurring theme in these events so sorry for internet people who've heard this before but the children of atheists are very likely to become religious atheists have some of the highest affection rates in the family of any religion because even if they're like better thinkers or whatever even if they even if they have a very good way of discerning facts about physical reality skepticism and indeed even humanism fails to meet some fundamental cognitive biases endemic to human brains this is why in secularized europe right now there's a fundamentalist revival right because these these people they're like rebelling against secularism it's incredible um that's going to keep happening so the second part of your question the relationship between uh demonizing depression and anxiety as spiritual conditions or consequences of sin science is just tearing that to pieces and people in their own lives are seeing the different efficacy of having people put their hands on you and pray that the demons be released and that you be stronger in your faith and defeat this depression or seeing a counselor and maybe if you have clinical depression taking a pill that restores more normative brain function and in their own experiences they go wow this one keeps working that starts to undermine this understanding but do i think this is the end of christianity no christianity is just kind of overdue for another reformation i think that's what's happening that's what's happening it's happening on the west coast it's happening in brooklyn the least religious cities in the country are becoming the epicenter of a more open scientifically informed christian faith and practice and i think that's amazing and it may not be culturally dominant like the last two american christian movements have been and that's great because christianity is not an empire religion christianity is a religion that formed under the boot of an empire and resisted it so a christianity that says these are the rules you must all follow them looks more like rome and less like jesus but a christianity that says we stand with the broken that we stand with the samaritan and the muslim and the atheist and the gay man looks more like the first century and not less and i get really excited about a post-christian america because it may allow the gospel to return [Applause] i'm here with uh my wife and my uh brother and sister-in-law and um so kind of going off of what you were just talking about with the the difference in effectiveness between people praying for healing and taking a drug you know that are taking a pill that would produce you know a similar effect we've come from a more traditional understanding of god's involvement in the world where you know you pray for things and god you know when you get something good god is the source of that good thing right and as we're becoming more and more aware of different ways of thinking and um like really into open theism right now you know like shout out to greg boyd greg boyd yeah love it love it man that guy's got some amazing things to say um so i guess the problem is we're wondering why to pray at all oh yeah you know why i do why you know and and if we pray what what reason like do we ask for things or am i just am i just doing it because it's good for me you know am i just doing it because i could be praying to anything any god and it would be equally as healthy and effective to me as long as i believe that god to be peaceful and loving but like but why pray to the god of the bible okay um first of all excellent question i've heard um the best-selling book finding god in the waves has a chapter called teach us neuroscience to pray that may wrestle with those issues in some depth but we'll we'll kind of skim them and then if you want more i think the book's available downstairs so um see what i did there commerce when i lost my faith prayer did it that was like the final thing first i lost my faith in the bible but prayer was really kind of the grounding of my faith and then when i lost prayer is curtains richard dawkins challenged me not personally in his book the god delusion to pray to a milk jug i prayed a milk jug why would i do that well he's like in christian prayer intercessory prayer asking god for something we say that god answers in one of three ways yes no maybe or no yes no wait right that's everything that can happen um if i pray that i want to sell 500 tickets in augusta georgia for an ass science mic event god i need to sell 500 tickets in augusta georgia for ass lance mike i could sell 500 tickets god said yes i can sell 200 tickets god said no the venue could burn down god said wait [Applause] right so i did this i prayed to a milk jug about a promotion at work and i got the promotion and i was like crazy two percent and uh that hurt that hurt a lot so then i became an atheist and uh i didn't really pray anymore because it's ridiculous like sometimes i would start praying and i would just be like whoa what are you doing i guess you're talking to yourself just talk to yourself um just not allowed people think it's weird and then i had you know my like mystical thing that's in the book and i came back to faith but i'm still weird about prayer because i didn't want to talk to a milk jug and i discovered neurotheology which talks about the neurological benefits of prayer and it also talked about the neurological benefits of meditation and i'd picked up a meditative practice as an atheist that actually found really beneficial and then i discovered like christians meditate too not a thing baptists tell you um there's like centering prayer there's contemplative prayer practices where the goal is not to treat god as a vending machine that if you make the right offering you get the right can of soda or promotion or healing or whatever but to be in the presence of god and by being in that presence to be transformed and a contemplative approach when you would pray for example that the hungry be fed you would understand that as the body of christ you are the one to do the feeding very powerful so for a while i was just a contemplative guy and i didn't do intercessory prayer and then when i was writing the chapter about prayer in my book i got a call because my dad had a stroke like a major stroke and they said you you've got to come now he might not make it so me and my mom his ex-wife drove four hours and on the way we just started praying and i didn't pray contemplatively i asked god to heal my dad and when i got to that hospital room and here was superman my dad his face etched in pain more accurately half his face etched in pain the left side of his body completely went i kept praying i put my hands on my dad and i prayed and i still wasn't pressing keys on the vending machine in that moment my prayer was an admission of my own helplessness and powerlessness and an expression of grief and feeling and desire i had no one to ask the doctors were going to do what the doctors did and for several days when i prayed i didn't sit in contemplation i old school southern baptist put my knees and my nose on the carpet of my hotel room i cried a lot dad got better praise god what if he didn't if i say that dad got better just because i prayed this raises all sorts of really thorny issues because when i talk about my dad's miraculous recovery i may end up sending one of my friends who said the same prayer in the same situation but their dad died i was paralyzed for 18 years into an existential tailspin and even a loss of faith so i think we can have a redemptive perspective on prayer that allows us to pray by speaking to god but to do so in a much more open uncertain way than we once did so am i done with vending machine prayer yes am i done with intercessory prayer that allows me to express loss hopes dreams and fears to a god that somehow i believe listens i think i'll do that for the rest of my life that's too somber to go do do uh right here all the way up front you talked earlier about um about kids about education a little bit i wanted to ask a question specifically about parenting and it's kind of two parts one as you um i know are consciously aware taking in a lot of information about what's going on in the world a lot of it sucks it's horrible yeah it's depressing um especially lately and so i'm curious for you as a parent as you take in that information um how do you still like parent as you're grieving as you're depressed as you're angry and you have to be present for your children and you don't want to bring that anger that depression that that angst or whatever the news or the twitter feed is is causing in you um so do you have any tips on like boundaries or how you manage that and then the second part of that is um when it is appropriate for your kids to know your kids are a little older than mine but um you know they know what's going on in the world and and when they get to a certain age they know whether you're telling them or not but particularly when you're still the main source of information about what the world is and how it works how do you present them you've talked about multiple narratives and that was a help that was part of the answer for me but um how do you know what to share how to be real and not have them come to you at a certain point and be like why didn't you tell me but also not to crush their spirits yeah yeah um i follow the teachings of the great moral philosopher fred rogers you ever go back and watch his oh man what a legend i have this printed out on a little piece of paper in my office at home his quote about when bad things are happening look for the helpers they're always there there's some scary stuff right now historically it has been scarier and any abhorrent terrifying moment in history there have been helpers i watched schindler's list recently to remind myself of that so when my daughter oldest daughter november 9th came out excited to talk about hillary clinton's victory and we said well and she started to cry before we could describe it um and we were like let's go you know we're it's okay it's okay and she said dad what about and she's named a specific girl's name one of her close friends who's a muslim american and hey i was proud that her grief was not one of political identity but one of a personal expression of fear and compassion but two i said hey we're never gonna give up on and i said the girl's name i said i will do everything i can up to and including losing my life to protect the rights of your friend and that's scary we don't want to set our children up for chronic anxiety and fear but neither do we want to put them in a bubble where one day the world crushes them and this means what we have to do is as children already tell them about the news and emphasize the power of their agency this is new for a lot of us white folk but i've learned that some of my friends of color who as one recently reminded me has a phd in suffering they have known how to talk to their children for years about scary societal oppression but to still have hope one of the biggest things and i speak to my white friends for a moment that we progressive or liberal white people have a a grave grave problem with is being sympathetic towards people of color instead of empathetic and we can be paternalistic and we can do the same thing that more conservative folks do and define marginalized ethnicities by their suffering but there is a profound joy in african-american communities there is a resilience in the face of adversity that those of us who have not learned to suffer well don't have yeah and part of what i do is i don't just take cues from fred rogers [Music] i take cues from people who know how to be real with their children about the world but still give them hope and joy and presence so we talk politics as much as the kids want and we always talk about what we can do we always talk about how we can be a good friend to everyone but we also go watch stupid action movies or uh you know my daughter wants to go to harry potter world for her birthday so we're doing that i wasn't gonna do that because it's ridiculously expensive but i decided in this context a little escapism is gonna be really fun right so we've all got ones we're gonna wear robes and we're going to go find our patronus in a dark time right and by the way my patronus is a slice of pizza [Laughter] and that's what we do and finally on parenting give yourself some grace these crazy self-expectations you know what i mean like historically speaking and i mean pre-civilization successful parenting means they lived they were like what if they don't get a phd from harvard and experience ultimate joy and transcendence by 11 and you know what if what if in therapy they have unkind things to say about me and that's just gonna happen you will mess your kids up so all you can do is make sure they always know you love them and the love is unconditional and that will cover up everything else i speak from experience i was bullied so bad as a kid and i got through it why because my parents loved me and i never doubted my parents loved me now the greatest of these is love [Music] one of the things i really wanted to talk about is earlier you mentioned the fictitious news that seems to be pervasive especially in social media this isn't really new there's been lots of propaganda for years but it's easier to access now like i think we could agree with that social media anyway how do you how do you want to approach that sort of thing so what like how do we define what's fake how do we define what where real facts lie and then also how do we encourage one another to do that sort of research on our own with others and get unbiased pieces of media that aren't uh that aren't written by underwriters and when i say underwriters i mean advertisers yes even npr has underwriters which is ridiculous because it's national public radio so um this is sort of a sort of an agenda of mine i guess because i'm a big proponent of value for value models if you want to be paid get patreon try not to get advertisers because then you're beholden to their agendas um i've had advertisers though yeah it's a tough one though right the autograms was a lot of fun yeah but anyway i just kind of wanted to throw that out there um as you know i'm a no agenda show listener if you've heard of that they're they're big proponents of value for value and no no advertising um so i just wanted to see your thoughts on that and how do we approach that you know as unbiased as possible using scientific method and moving forward yeah okay great question first of all an upcoming episode of the literature's podcast is going to be called how do we know and it's going to be an exploration of this topic in incredible depth with people we interviewed that know about that stuff so people we don't know yet that know about that stuff uh it's really tough we're kind of talking epistemology talking media literacy uh there's a book called the information diet it's fantastic the problem is not that fake news exists the problem is fake news and real news all look the same in google and facebook just look exactly the same um i saw one study that showed that 38 of conservatives consistently share and believe fake news whereas only 19 of liberals and like one of my friends like trumpeted this like go liberals i was like hey one in five is terrible you need to math um and it is i honestly think it is tearing civilization apart um there's no such thing as unbiased news it doesn't exist people are biased we do have some very concerning economic incentive structures in media today where the primary value is views to get advertisers to pay for things and based on the human brain's work the more sensational you can say it and the more you tickle someone's sense of identity the more likely they are to click or watch and this incentive structure favors donald trump like people because trump says outrageous things and see people go finally and other people go i can't believe it but they all turn on the television and media companies have record quarters and so then advertisers on the sideline are like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa we love money so if msnbc is like kind of like left-leaning but still mostly reasonably remotely factual and fox news is like maybe a little more right-leaning but still outside of the screaming opinion people actually does studies have shown a reasonably factual portrayal of news the problem is they don't go and now we're switching to opinion the audience is all news msnbc does the same thing cnn is like no no we're totally in the middle they're not they're skewed both ways and uh so these other people going to say well if a little leaning is work working and getting dollars what if we just make stuff up right and i put a post on facebook today because i saw like three liberal fantasies in a row in my news feed just totally divorced from fact and they would take one statement that was true and then build an entire non-existent fantasy piece on it and uh people i respect are really smart we're sharing this stuff and well this is this is not helping so how do we evaluate things number one this is why skepticism and critical thinking are important i expect everybody to show me their data i expect everybody to cite their sources and the news cycle is slower for me because it takes me longer to read stuff because i click all the links and read those too and if they cite a paper i have subscription access to a lot of journals i'll go read the paper i don't mean like the newspaper i mean like the scientific paper uh i also believe it or not i do not primarily consume news on social media i primarily socialize on social media it's great for socializing if you're like hey what are you doing this weekend facebook's amazing right if you're like hey let's all photoshop pictures of cats together twitter is incredible um but if you're like hey let me get an informed perspective on what's happening in the world i don't go to facebook or twitter and i've now as a discipline i'm hiding all news articles that show up on facebook all of them i'm pruning my facebook from news it's not a news feed it's a bad name it's a friend feed where do i what do i do my daily discipline i do listen to npr uh i'm aware of the underwriting bias right so what i what i i'm okay if you have bias if you tell me about it great um i read the new york times i read the washington post i read usa today understanding that it's a real mixed bag and i also read the wall street journal why don't i read the wall street journal because they've got an opposite bias that will check my assumptions a lot but they're still mostly going to cite sources they're going to have fact checkers they're not they get in a lot of trouble if they misrepresent what someone said and then i also read a lot of news magazines for commentary on issues that happens weeks and months later and i try to make sure uh i'm pretty pretty dang liberal these days there's some really good conservative news magazines that are not rush limbaugh style thinking uh there's some incredible conservative voices out there and um and so i'm constantly trying to check my biases and check my assumptions but it means i can't quite keep up with the treadmill everybody else's on which is tough because people because i'm a podcaster people know what i think about things what do you think about blank i don't know yet what do you mean you don't know yet it happened 12 minutes ago [Laughter] i'm still trying to figure out to the must-ability what actually happened and scaling things is tough i think value for value is an interesting model i think most people don't want to pay they want free which brings advertisers into the picture uh so we've i've done advertising on a science mic but i've been really careful to work with advertisers that don't have any interest in what i say on the program sanebox wants to clean your email inbox they do not care about what you think about science and religion pinatagrams that was just hilarious they became patrons on patreon uh and i was like wait you do what and i made them sponsors on the show and they're like well no we don't want a sponsor i was like no i'm you're my sponsor now you mail people little pinatas that's amazing and then went into the like you could mail a hillary or a trump pinata that's so good uh we've talked we might just sponsors sometime on the liturgist podcast we haven't like ruled that out because um we're trying to do an mpr level production quality on that show with four people so basically we are all just tired all the time and we need to grow that team which means like building an organization it's really tough if your principals are me and michael gunger who are like the most organizationally antipathy people you can imagine it's like um but if if we want to keep doing the shows regularly and substantively shift conversations we're gonna have to have more revenue and i don't know we're just frustrated idealists we don't want to bring money into the thing which is why most episodes we even forget to mention we have patreon we we literally ship the shows and go oh my god we forgot again because we're so busy just trying to like share a story and that's what we get excited about it's a lot of work you've got to learn to evaluate scientific claims for yourself you've got to learn to look for warning signs in media no author attribution uh no date on an article um single source uh quotes quotes that don't mention the time and date or context in which the quote happened all those things are big red flags uh but also i got to be honest all caps i'm done you got an all-cap sentence in the article i'm banning your domain i'm never looking at it again um yeah this is this is like the i don't know maybe like the defining issue of our time i'm really deeply concerned about it and that's in addition to this riff of an answer we're gonna do a whole podcast on it with the liturgists great question and by the way right-leaning libertarians there's a lot of you in the liturgist podcast now science bank audience i've learned it's amazing the people voting for trump that listen to these podcasts didn't say a word until november 9th and then on november 9th all of a sudden i realized like maybe a quarter of the audience voted for trump which really surprised me um but i'm glad you're here if you voted for trump and you listen to literature's podcast you're a real weird person and i'm into that i'm really into that um like i just i want to understand like i really love the episode on like black and white racism in america and lgbtq and i voted for donald trump like let's sit down have a beer you unpack that for me i want to know [Music] so i wanted to know how ptsd works in the brain and how do you recover from it instead of letting it get worse and worse and escalating fantastic question uh ptsd is uh more than just in the brain it's in the whole body ptsd is trauma so severe that it creates a lot of false positives that give you flight or fight or danger responses in everyday living neurologically speaking so the way your brain works when you think of something anything with a brain scanner we can kind of understand how you feel about that thing so if we mention a person's name and you just get a little activity in your prefrontal cortex and your hip to campus you know that person you don't really think or feel anything about them if we see like a lot of activity in your anterior cingulate cortex you're pretty affectionate toward them if it's evil activity in your amygdala you're probably like kind of afraid of them or angry with them if you have your anterior cingulate cortex and your amygdala it's probably one of your parents and uh i just think that's hilarious that's an oversimplification but it's funny um and so when you remember a person or an event that was deeply traumatic you get a lot of amygdala activation and your brain in order to function will try to avoid things that trigger that neural circuit i'm oversimplifying dramatically until you get something that kind of your brain says is similar to that circumstance and then you have like an unexpected overwhelmingly strong reaction an anxiety attack a flash of extreme anger and emotional outburst and what we understand about ptsd is that trauma is so intense it affects the neurons in your gi tract and it starts to affect the chemistry of your stomach it affects the balance and ratio of different species of bacteria in your gut it causes you to produce excess amounts of cortisol stress hormone it affects the whole body it's pretty hard to treat because with normal trauma i hate that that's a word with normal trauma if you can talk about what traumatized you in a safe environment you can begin to condition your brain to have less and less amygdala response to the thing you're remembering or thinking about but ptsd is characterized that whenever you try to discuss even in therapy the traumatic thing the amygdala response is so extreme that it continues to be self-reinforcing and that's one of the things that characterizes the difference between a normal grief or trauma and ptsd is ptsd is so self-reinforcing so if you have a grief or trauma in your life you can get pretty good therapeutic effects by praying about it or talking to trusted friends and family if you have ptsd you really need to work with a trained professional to process that and it may include a medical component because it's so difficult to get the brain to believe that you're not actually in immediate danger whenever you recall that event and i think it's really vital that those of us who aren't experiencing ptsd don't minimize or erase the experiences of those who are because this is not a a soft science the effects of ptsd are well documented the diagnostic criteria is uh for a psychological condition quite clear and some of our bravest people experience this um i don't want to get into like a a over cultural you know military worship but a lot of soldiers experience ptsd but so do emts um and a lot of people who work with people in high-risk vulnerable situations experience ptsd um so i'd love to see if culturally we could come up with healthier responses to people who have episodes related to ptsd if we could just create a little extra grace and a little extra space as they go through the hard work of healing their brains like ptsd is a significant enough condition that it's it's brain scannable um and that's considering the very low resolution we can scan a brain today that's saying something you know like i talk about brain science i want to be really clear like we're talking about galileo talking about the solar system when we talk about brain science today our telescopes that look into the brain very low resolution one voxel one little unit of information and fmri includes millions of neurons every single little pixel three-dimensional pixel includes millions of neurons so the very best most cutting edge neuroscience today is dealing in gross over generalizations and then the media tends to over generalize the over generalizations that comes from the experiment which is why i say it's so significant that ptsd has such consistent characteristic signs in the brain and in the body [Music] thanks for your work i'm a recovering baptist as well i actually uh got married at a baptist church in tallahassee that i used to work at so what's up i got married in a baptist church in tallahassee that's so weird it is weird it is weird uh so one of the things i like about you that you talk about on the podcast a lot is that you cry a lot really easily um and i i used to be that way too um but i had this bizarre experience growing up they called us like the curse class i had like 15 friends die in a span of like five or six years uh and i realized like the last couple funerals i went to like i couldn't emotionally engage with that anymore and i'm like 34 now and i think maybe in the last 10 years i've cried maybe twice and i find now when i start to feel sad like it turns into anger and i can't really release it anymore and yes i'm in therapy and yes i'm on some drugs but i'm just curious from like a neuroscience standpoint from like rewiring your brain is there a way to to connect like the the physical act of like crying and releasing that sort of emotion um with the sadness that you're feeling yeah great question i've done it that's why i'm quiet for a second i'm trying to think about how that happened for me well first of all it's a defense mechanism crying doesn't feel good and we've kind of culturally reinforced that crying's not okay especially for men and so you have this cultural condition because it's not okay to cry combined with like it's unpleasant and we characterize uh positive or healthy emotional development in the west a lot with stuff that feels good and we say grief is the thing you do at a funeral but if you cry four days in a row after your mom dies people like okay that's enough they don't say that but their social cues say that tuesday i listen to you cry why are you crying again and so we have several defense mechanisms that help us avoid grief my favorite is intellectualization where you take your analytical capacity and turn it inward and dissect your own feelings which makes them magically evaporate uh i am really good at that um sadness intense sadness involves a dance between the anterior cingulate cortex and the amygdala and the orbital frontal cortex and once the amygdala is kind of fired up but you're real close to anger already so converting sadness to anger is another defense mechanism depending on what medications you're on some of those if they treat depression work by suppressing certain neurotransmitters that in the right ratio create depression but also create sadness can make it more difficult to grieve and to get in touch with those feelings and i would just remain in continuing communication with your practitioner about what is the appropriate dosage at what times and if healthy grieving you think is an important part of healthy living that's a conversation you include with your therapist but assuming you don't have a pharmaceutical blockage to grief uh the therapeutic approach is very consistent you keep talking you get someone who is expert at asking very probing introspective questions and you answer them honestly and at that moment you want to clam up that's when it's most important to keep talking and maybe you do get angry you just let yourself get angry and you talk through that anger and as you do that and as the amygdala doesn't get a flight or fight response from your therapist that's their job more than anything else is to not mirror your emotional responses but to be neutral which is incredibly difficult it's countered how human beings are wired but for you to go and your therapist to go and tell me more about that like it's it's it's a phenomenal gift um but then as you kind of process through anger you may begin to lose that distance and find that you can get into sadness i learned i went to a therapist to talk about why i was so despondent about my church rejecting me because that ended up being like the most painful thing that ever happened to me and i said okay we got to talk about the church my dad just kind of got divorced from my mom but i've already processed that we don't even talk about it i was really bullied as a kid but i've processed that we don't really need to talk about that we just got to figure out this church thing because they're all unrelated and then she would ask me questions and i would she'd ask me about the bullying and i'm like well we don't really talk about that but i can tell you all about it and i could go through incredible detail about what happened how i felt about it whatever she said how do you feel now it's nothing i processed it and she said well if seven-year-old you was here right now what would you say to him and as i thought for a second in my analytical fortress and i imagine seven-year-old me all of a sudden it felt like some damn was about to burst like i'd kind of it's like you're walking down the hall in your house and you walk by a door and you're like there's never been a door right there you know what i mean and you walk towards the door and there's just this like house fire heat radiating from the doorknob and you're like oh that's strange i should keep walking and so i said she said what are you doing i said well i'm feeling like some unexpectedly strong emotions so i'm turning them off and she said what do you mean i said well i i learned a long time ago if i cried i got beat up more so i learned how to turn off sadness she turned off sadness i was like yeah all your feelings are just neurochemical reactions i figured out where the switches are so i learned like if i'm going to cry if i blink a lot and suppress the reaction of the tear duct if i shake my head off my inner ear if i realize i have tension in my core and relax it and control my breathing i don't cry and i learned in cognitive behavior therapy that thoughts can lead emotions and just turn my feelings off and she said okay that's an effective coping strategy but what if you didn't do that why would i not do that you just want me to cry what like what productive thing is going to happen if i cry and she's like why does it have to be productive i was like because i have limited time if i have n number of seconds on the earth i want a very small fraction of them to be spent being sad or angry and she's like why is anger bad and then i realized a lot of things about myself and so then we decided like i was going to cry and then i realized i've trained myself to not cry so much that i couldn't because the biofeedback i'd never heard that term but that i taught myself to do when i was eight had become automatic as soon as i started crying my brain executed a script that sent it away and so i spent like several weeks learning to cry by biofeedbacking my bio feedback so i would start to relax my stomach and go no don't relax your stomach right i started to control my breathing i don't control your breathing i start to squeeze my eyes and say don't squeeze your eyes i'm a weird dude and um and i remember like the first time i cried about my childhood bullying he didn't get to the church stuff yet that was like the mother of all ugly cross you know what i mean it was like snotty beard just like great fat raindrops around both sides of my eyes um i think i snorted at one point i mean it was messy and then i was like that was incredibly unpleasant that's what i said to my therapist after i cried for like five minutes i said okay but how do you feel now and i went and i kind of walked by that door that i'd never seen in the hallway and it was still there but it didn't give me like i wasn't spooked out to walk by i learned over and over like sometimes just open that door and eventually in therapy we went to that door and it wasn't there anymore it was just a hallway wall again and i was like whoa and so then what we did in therapy is go kind of event by event through different things in my life and they figured out whether they would make me go to pieces or not and eventually like stuff stopped making me go to pieces and oddly enough once i reached those points i found that for the first time in my life i could really wish well to some of the people that hurt me in those circumstances grief's amazing so now i grieve all the time i grieve all the time i'm grieving right now uh you know what i'm grieving the intimacy of ask science mike live a year ago his rooms keep getting bigger and um i've realized probably a year from now i won't be able to stand and meet every person after the event because right now i love you all but uh 200 people at night every night i start getting really tired and there's agree i'll start crying right now because you know why i do this podcast because i love all of you i want to i want to help as many people as i can get to a healthy place with their grief and their agency and their fear and their doubt and their hope and their faith and science as i can and if it keeps attracting people i lose the ability to see everybody's eyes and that makes me sad it makes me grieve but it's essential that i do that or i can't do what i do i can't be an agent of health and healing in the world if i don't allow myself the grace to heal and to grieve your mileage may vary but in that situation i have more of my own experience than i have neuroscience okay right here i literally could not right here second row i could not do do do after that um i have a question about the concept of uh normalization when uh when atrocities are becoming more visible and more immediate in our lives uh where i am online where i hang out online there is repeatedly discussion that uh what we're seeing is not normal what we're saying shouldn't be normal um and that we don't need to accept that it's normal but from from what i understand uh normalization is something that our brain does because we're trying to feel safe in our context um so rejecting that makes us more vulnerable and makes it more difficult to cope and uh especially for those of us who like you were talking about earlier we have the boot on our neck um and those of us who were mentally ill or disabled ptsd that was very difficult for me on the ninth being up like sobbing and panic attacking at night are there ways for us to protect our vulnerability without turning off our consciousness of what's going on around us how do we take care of ourselves when we're still trying to see things and enact change fantastic question really really fantastic my answer is a quarter formed if that i'm trying to figure that out right now this election reinforced some terrible habits right now i want you to think how many times per day you check social media or traditional media for the events happening in the world compared to a year ago i bet it's more i bet you're starting to hit your iphone like cotton candy or you know a bag of skills or whatever whatever your pleasure is a pizza buffet that would be mine uh and what are you doing you're exposing yourself this is a pretty extreme stimulus you're expecting extreme stimulus so you're getting a dopamine spike every time you reach for the phone every time the phone goes you get a dopamine spike only it used to be the dopamine spike was did someone like the picture of my kitten so i get social validation or did someone send me a message so i'm remembered so i get social validation did someone say something bad about me on twitter because it's on because i get social validation to now did my phone go because the world's about to end that's where we're at that's where we're at um all of us i'm not being partisan right now everybody's like we're just i've just watched people so step one i turned off all the notifications on my phone all of them unless i get a call or a text message nothing else makes my phone go the new york times doesn't twitter sure as heck doesn't um i even turned off the little icons that tell me how many notifications are waiting in an app and then when i get good and dern ready at a certain point in the day i catch up with what happened the world will be fine if a couple hours go by before i know the thing that doesn't undermine my ability to be an advocate right if i find out at 4 pm when i'm reading news media about the the latest way the where the the dakota access pipeline is unfolding i can still call my congressperson i'm not abandoning the post by giving my brain the space to live and remember why living is a thing worth doing do you see what i mean put your phone in your pocket put your phone on your nightstand try that it's incredible um i do on tour nobody can reach me because i know like it's so emotionally expensive to do this at night so my phone was like this uh face down on the desk on the far side of the hotel room and i got as physically as far away from it as i could has left it there all afternoon i never even looked at my phone i didn't get on my laptop i read a sci-fi novel and it was awesome right so part of that normalization is the frequency of exposure i'm not talking about checking out i'm talking about being aware of yourself so you can actually check in effectively but then your brain whatever you see over and over becomes normal i am so fatigued every outrageous thing i imagined could happen with him is happening so it's like that's trump normal you know what i mean white supremacist in the white house sure of course of course this was going to happen yeah oh there's a rally where people said hail trump and did a nazi salute with the founder of a movement that that a white house staffer has a public affiliation with yeah of course that's how we roll now and this because i understand that that's becoming normal does not mean i accept it um it doesn't mean i won't oppose it it just means i realize that screaming at the top of my lungs 12 times a day just wears me out and changes nothing so i'm going to be relentless with focus on how i spend my energies to be effective at promoting life liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everybody um [Applause] and that means i'm going to be on twitter less not more means give me facebook less and not more you follow me on twitter i don't hold back you know what i mean i'm not like let's give trump a chance i never said that i said it to myself i'm like maybe it was just like like playing the right to get richer and we'll just have like a really dysfunctional presidency for a while and screw over the environment and that'll be it that was like my best case and uh doesn't look like how it's going um so i'm gonna be really strategic in my opposition but i'm also going to make sure that my kids know i love them that i remember why i love pepperoni pizza so much that uh by the way my pizza references per hour seem to be going up the further into tour i go i think that's my coping mechanism um and we gotta celebrate each other you know what i mean um there's been this lost stuff lightly about identity politics and how bad it is and why can't we celebrate the common good i might be incredibly ignorant right now but can't we do both can i not celebrate our amazing differences and our amazing similarities can i get really excited about the musical heritage of black america but also understand the ways our economic systems are linked i can do both i can understand that i have a cultural heritage that when i say i don't have a culture i'm perpetuating a system in which my identity is normative so i can reclaim my heritage without becoming a white supremacist it's possible you know what i mean i could say i have a cultural identity but it's not better than anyone else's when i say i have no cultural identity i'm actually saying mine's the correct cultural identity so let let your brains normalize it's being stressed 24 7 won't stop it having the emotional reserve to have the fortitude to say i will not rest or give up until all of our rights are protected until we all have economic opportunity and access to education i won't rest i can only do that if i take care of myself i probably should channel some of that into taking a walk and not pizza but i'm grieving so uh when i get off tour i'm probably gonna start walking a lot more other than just at the atlanta airport but normalization is how our brains work but normalization it's different to have a personal awareness that this is a thing that's happening so much i'm becoming accustomed to it then accepting it you just maintain that distinction i don't accept it i just understand five times a day for the next four years two months at least outrageous news is coming my way like it's going to be can you believe that no i can't but it it's happening it will continue to happen um and you know hopefully in 2020 we'll peel the gold letters off the white house and uh you know and uh i'm actually a little excited because the american electorate it's this is this is supremely normal that we go in reaction to leadership in america that is the 1776 and all it's pre 1776. america gets mad at the people in charge and throws them out and having the whole government is usually like a sign of doom for like 10 to 15 years for political party because you have no excuse so the good news is obviously a lot of people at voter hilly they're not voting for trump next time but a lot of people that voted for trump this time in four years will vote for literally anybody but trump and they'll probably be really mad at anyone who shares his party affiliation because that's how america rolls um so we just really have to survive that long that's it we got to keep like like we can't let them roll back marriage equality rights we can't let a meri of a muslim registry become a thing i will register day one i will encourage every person who listens to every podcast to register i will make it useless um this is it turns out there's 190 million muslims in america i would be so happy so we can't give up on like people's rights and freedoms and protections and we have a lot of work to do with carbon levels in the environment but um as a science guy i'm pretty disappointed with democrats on climate science i mean it's not like that was going to be a great move it'd be like well we're going to put slightly less carbon in the atmosphere at maybe the most critical juncture in human history so maybe another message we can send to the party of the left in the next election is get serious about the climate because maybe trump showed that always bowling down the middle isn't the best strategy that sometimes you do need to take a stand and uh 400 parts per million co2 to me is a stand really really worth taking that had nothing to do with the question but i felt really good about it [Music] this is a play-off your last the last question uh it is also the last question since the since the election i am just so heartbroken um i can't i'm actually doing the opposite i can't bear to go online i can't bear to read about what's happening i get so angry i don't know how to how to even do what you're talking about doing the moderation thing and and take care of myself and and and but i i recognize what you're saying that that i have a responsibility to not give up i want to give up yeah it sounds like you have a terminal case of humanity which we all do um grieve as long as you need to grieve it's okay everything will be fine if if it takes you a month to come to terms with the election it doesn't seem okay if it takes you six months to come to terms with the election um there's like some days like i read the words president-elect donald trump and i go oh my god what that's real that happened that's that's the part of the multiverse we're in um the cubs won and so did trump like like oh man like this is may this could be cool maybe we're all gonna get wings or something like just really we're infinite in probability drive segment of the universe sorry douglas adams reference that's pretty obscure these days um so grieve like get mad understand like it's why are you angry part of it social identity part of it is social identity part of it is you had a world view that you've realized is wrong a prediction you made that you're confident about was wrong your brain hates that it's undermined your certainty i have been repeating an idea to myself since november the 9th donald trump knows more about human behavior than i do that's a real big piece of humble pie to eat so i have to like start i tweeted about two in the morning three in the morning no november the ninth things i am questioning one everything and um so i'm grieving i'm grieving and i'm telling other people grieve there's a lot of a lot of people saying we got to get to work that's true some people are ready so get to work but let the other people grieve for a while if if a year from now you're like i just i can't call my congressman it hurts too much then i might be like okay grieve and call your congressman um but right now yeah it's okay like the world's not gonna explode because you can't get on the internet um but as you kind of come to terms with this new thing re-engage we got work to do and part of that work why your grief is so important white folks our friends voted our family and our friends voted for trump so our friends and our family who voted for trump uh about a third of um latino and hispanic people voted for trump it's a lot better than white people still pretty scary um my african-american friends you guys nailed it so sorry why did my family vote for trump well my family all is in rural farmland in the middle of nowhere and they have spent a solid generation generation and a half maybe two watching their counties depopulate there's the opposite of this area there's less people every year it's also less jobs there's less infrastructure and resources they are literally watching their way of life disappear and for oh a couple hundred years elite power structures have told them that their lot in life is someone's fault really common cycle in cultures is blame immigrants happens over and over hey you're disadvantaged you know why those people took your job um we named in this country for a while in the south we told the people in the south you know you know where are money's going all those welfare queens right so people in presidential offices and significant points of authority told people who have very little multicultural exposure they have no personal narratives to undermine the experience that where their money is going is people of color who refuse to work so they created this paranoia and this fear they created a monster of racial anxiety mixed with genuine economic anxiety and then they lost control of the monster and it turns out donald trump really knows how to speak the monster's language only he won't speak the monster's language just to benefit economic elites he will only speak the most language to benefit him he might be the first american president with a single constituent they were all beholden to somebody donald trump is beholden to donald trump one thing that gives me hope is he is probably going to give the republicans a fit starting january 20th um and so i don't think it's gonna be like a smooth cohesive plan because you're like hey you all need term limits and mitch mccoll's gonna go we don't need term limits and the first day it's going to be attention so but what i've done in my life is hear the anxiety of my own family and say you're a bunch of racists my flesh and blood family and because i've identified their beliefs as racist i've distanced myself from them and when they didn't come along with me on same-sex marriage i decided they were backwards and i was superior like 10 minutes into my belief change most of my life i was not affirming of same-sex marriage but suddenly i am and i see the light and they're fools so in every conversation i allow myself to what mr peace and love gets riled up when i go home for thanksgiving so i over and over and over when i talk to my family we just tell them they were wrong they don't get it how would they i lived in a city i had a great job i've never worried about paying my mortgage i've never worried about putting food on my kids table i get on airplanes and i fly to cities and i eat exotic foods and of course i understand multiple cultural perspectives i have the economic privilege to sit across the table from whoever i choose you know many of my cousins have never been on an airplane do you know how many of my family has never crossed the state line i abandoned them i elected donald trump who did i expect to have a conversation about race and privilege with my rural family who did i think was going to do that i i got a b in my bonnet because a 12 year old cousin came up and told me i was famous and i laughed and he said no no you're you're the most famous macarthur he said but why are you a liberal is it because you go to hollywood and like i realized this is the fan the family story about me and so for a couple years i've been writing my family off and then i'm surprised they they don't follow my voting recommendation do you see what i mean like i gave up any ability to speak into their lives and oh man i'm as useless a person as they come like i couldn't defend a border are you kidding me every person in this room could just straight up beat me one-on-one on a fight every single person without exception like if you need like a really good blog i got you you want like an eloquent podcast now we're talking but when my fence fell down in my backyard and i was touring and i can't fix a fence anyway and my poor wife is having to go outside with our two giant dogs on leashes several times a day so you can use a bathroom who showed up and fixed my fence who did that my family has never been on an airplane the world is complicated it is not the job of the media to talk to my family is not the job of people of color to talk to my family it is not the job of the mexican immigrants who do in fact have jobs in that community who do pick the tomatoes to talk to my family it's my job to get off my high horse and talk to my family so yeah i've got to grieve but then i also have to stop denying who i am i spent 12 years trying to erase my southern accent as a kid and all of us southerners who are leaving the south in droves for the coasts are turning those counties red and it's our new white fight that has allowed oppressive power systems to capitalize on genuine economic anxiety to turn disadvantaged people against each other so grieve grieve but go to thanksgiving go to christmas and don't turn a deaf ear when your rural family tells you how hard it is for them to find work because none of us will be free until all of us are free i might be too much of a mess to finish the podcast sorry look at me being ashamed for grieving i'm a hypocrite too sometimes okay well thanks for listening to ask science mike it's been so good to be in seattle tacoma this week and uh also to talk to all of my friends on the internet i want to thank greg mourdin for his work producing this program andrew golucky for his amazing work uh both picking the questions for as science mike and creating our together groups if you're in a city and you think you might be the only one who has these questions and concerns and struggles with science and faith just go to sciencemike.com and click the together icon and we'll help you connect with other people nearby thanks for listening everyone and i'll talk to you next week [Music]