ASM152 LIVE on the Internet

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coming to you live from the internet yeah it's the first ever ask science mic live for patrons [Music] science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life and we're doing something a little different this week this is an in studio version in front of a live internet audience who will be asking the question these are my patrons for ask science mike and the liturgist podcast who will be giving completely unscreened questions so my answers are fun rehearsed if in doubt use google to fact check me this week it should be fun i don't know how it's going to go hopefully we'll have a good time but whatever we do let's do a podcast get it started [Music] i'll be on the road really soon and i'd like to see you i travel and do events and i've got a lot coming up may 25th the liturgist gathering is coming to austin texas finally a liturgist gathering in the southeast well texas uh we'd love to see you there may 25th there's still tickets available june 7th i'm going to be in vancouver canada with hillary mcbride for an event called radical inclusion that i'm very excited about july 27th i'll be at the skylight festival with a bunch of really cool people uh in the toronto area and then october 5th the liturgist gathering is going to london so crossing the atlantic for a eurozone party with the liturgists so if any of those sound interesting to you head to asksciencemike.com and click the events button and i'd love to see you there in my uh foolish rule-bound youth which is about three years ago i never swore uh to give you an idea of what this means i gave birth after more than 20 hours of labor without swearing wow and then deconstruction it occurred to me that the uh the line between the god ordained and the human constructed might be rather more porous than i had originally thought and so naturally i began to god [ \_\_ ] damn it all into hell more amazing which is so far so good however i have a five-year-old son and i often drive him places and i want nay i need to listen to hamilton in the car so badly so badly but it's those southern [ \_\_ ] democratic republicans so is there any cognitive developmental reason for withholding one's profanity from the presence of children you seem to operate on a profane-free setting around your kids so why what a great question uh thank you and i am not as profane free around my kids as you would think um i think most of the time um i'm in the same mode with profanity with my kids that i am when i do ask tonight's mic which is i save profanity for when it will make a profound dramatic impact so i don't overuse it if you heard me in casual conversation with william matthews or michael gunger then i make a stand-up comedian blush so i kind of i use i use profanity for maximum communication impact and i've kind of like you deconstructed the taboo and i'm not really aware of any cognitive psychology or child development psychology that would reinforce a prohibition around profanity as developmentally necessary what i do think is uh it is important to understand is that we still have pretty pervasive taboos around the use of profanity among children in our society and children who use grown-up words might find themselves shunned or ostracized or in other ways socially challenged in ways that they're not developmentally prepared for so what we've done in our home uh my wife really has a dirty mouth especially when she drives and we love hamilton and we love music that uh explores the full the fullness of the human experience and that includes profanity so we use those moments for conversations with our children about what words and language are appropriate in what context including profanity so i i don't actually my kids wouldn't be in huge trouble if they curse but i would discourage them from doing so is i want them in their formative years to learn the power of self-control regarding language in the same way that like it really wouldn't kill my children if they got wasted one time by drinking you know if a ten-year-old one time got super drunk the long-term consequences neurologically aren't significant but the learning to deal with poor impulse control is especially critical at these developmental stages when children literally have less impulse control because they have smaller orbital frontal cortexes and and corresponding neurological uh structures in their brain so i think you're on the right cast of of expressing freedom around your children i don't think there's any any any psychological neurological research that would say you're wrong to do so but i think it's also important that we teach our children nuance and we have open conversations so that we're they're prepared for environments outside of our home [Music] so as a self-identified nine wing one how do i transition from the intellectual because it's all about deconstruction and the breakdown of all things that we used to know before how do i break down from the intellectual intellectual and the rational into the emotional and spiritual or better set from deconstruction to reconstruction or how do i manifest a word into flesh and blood so so what you're saying is you've gone through a period of deconstruction where everything's kind of become disembodied and idea based and now you're you're craving or longing for some spiritual practice spiritual practice practice i kind of miss um i don't know the feeling of of what i used to have as um as a non-denomination and then even then um in the new sense i always want to do and be more active or help in any way shape or form i can with like blm or or lgbtqia plus or um just anything in that fact but i kind of feel helpless if that makes sense so you've deconstructed spirituality and now you have a justice orientation as opposed to yeah and and help me understand a little better how i can help you hmm it was it's kind of like the reverse question because we always ask like oh i was i was with this view and experience now how do i turn it into something um or how do i like release myself from it but now i'm kind of like the opposite how can i um from um now like seeing hearing and understanding how do i put this into practice okay now the light comes on okay i see so you've gotten so good at deconstruction basically if i could kind of put this in my own experience that it's almost hard to place emotional investment and existential weight to almost any issue yeah because i i like i almost identify as a mystic like i can't even place it like there because everything is just so like oh it's all a construct all this yes right awesome great question brandon thank you so here's what i would say um this is really common when you go through deconstruction especially when you embrace mysticism and you see a unity in all things good and evil can start to seem uh like two sides of a single coin and and you might have uh an understanding on some level of a necessity for action in the world or movement towards justice but it's hard to get out of that space where everything seems illusionary or everything seems ethereal where it's good that the supernatural and the natural no longer seem like separate categories but it also seems like the natural's not really a thing um it's kind of a mystical or spiritual nihilism which is very freeing it helps you counter anxiety it helps you avoid the kind of fretting over the end of life and consciousness that humans tend to be obsessed with but it can make it hard to find a sense of identity and communal belonging and collective action so this is why i think it's necessary for us to engage in spiritual practices that embody ourselves so you've arrived at this mystical place brandon through deconstruction primarily through analytical reasoning and you got to the end of that road but let me ask you this what does it feel like when you dance what does it feel like when you do things with your body how do you feel in a room full of people you don't know very well or in a room full of people you know well but there's five more people than you're comfortable with how do you feel looking directly into another person's eyes and having a conversation without looking away so i would imagine if you're like so many men in the west or really even people in the west you've become comfortable and accustomed to dealing with the world as a set of ideas and you took all that apart but there's still a more broad and beautiful experience available to us in mysticism when we connect to the world through our bodies through our senses so probably the first thing i would recommend is a meditation practice that is centered on physical awareness physical sensation body movement you might look at yoga you might look at tai chi you might look at any form of practice that connects you with movement first by yourself but also in community with others and the other thing i would recommend is a non-fiction detox surround yourself with stories surround yourself with fiction surround yourself with literature and film and especially media that immerses you in the perspectives of others so you've indicated that you care about black lives matter you care about justice for lgbtqia people and that community and that's beautiful but put some flesh and blood on it i had a i don't know an hour and a half conversation this morning with a gay man who was moved to tears because of the way that his family won't accept who he is and that members of his family have even said that he's not welcome on their property at all simply because he is a gay christian encountering those kinds of life experiences face to face pulls us out of this mystical potential this this unity with all and reminds us that there really are individual stories and individual perspectives and that it is necessary for us to get involved i think of it this way so often mystical spiritual practices pull us out of the world and show us what truly is the unity of all things but why i am a christian and not simply a mystical spiritualist is the fact that christianity is about spirituality incarnated christianity is about the divine made flesh operating in the world and so while buddha might rightly say that life is suffering and that suffering comes from a desire for things to be other than as they are christ comes wrapped in flesh and suffers and asks us to move on behalf of suffering christ asks us to be a good neighbor to take up our cross and suffer as well christ absolutely says that he is one with god and we are one with him but christ also says that that connection to the divide must be put in practice in this life here and now on behalf of those who hurt in this world and by the way that much must also include ourselves brandon do you love your neighbor as yourself brandon as you've deconstructed the world and as you've encountered mystical spirituality has that filled you with a love for yourself for your body for your flaws and for all the experiences that have led you to become who you are today one other idea the more you can practice spirituality in community the eye the easier it will be to have an embodied spirituality the next question came in via the question and answers box and it reads do you know anything about can avoid oil is it actually effective and to what extent i've i have a friend who has ptsd and they have considered trying it because the marketing suggests it could help with those symptoms thanks love the show i actually yeah i know a lot about uh can avoid oil and cannabis i have a brain injury and in conjunction with a neurologist i was actually encouraged to try uh medical marijuana to relieve symptoms associated with brain injury i actually have right here on my desk a vape pen that i've had about a year and uh it still has quite a bit left in it so i'm i what you would call a very occasional uh marijuana user um but i have found that it has been remarkable in alleviating migraines brain fog and mental fatigue when used occasionally so here's what we know a lot of research shows really promising uh potential for cannabis and people suffering from brain injury there is also some promising research showing that marijuana can be therapeutic for ptsd for anxiety disorders and for depression and also for pain management with a couple of caveats one marijuana works best with occasional use not frequent use some studies have shown that using marijuana regularly increases feelings of anxiety and depression as opposed to decreasing them similarly for pain management marijuana is best used occasionally except in conditions of chronic pain where it's a better alternative to things like opioids but again can cause increases in anxiety when used too often but i think the most important thing i would share about cannabioids and cannabinoid oil and medical applications is the fact that it is illegal in the united states at a federal level and so you put yourself at risk of prosecution and possibly incarceration by using marijuana in any of our 50 states i don't have to tell you that the political climate has changed since november of 2016 in this country and drug policy and so even if you're in a state that's legal it really only takes you know one hard-line federal bureaucrat to really change the way drug laws are enforced in states where marijuana is legal i also want you to know that because marijuana is illegal at the federal level we don't have enough research on it to know how safe or unsafe it is generally or how effective it is in treating what conditions when you take tylenol when you take prilosec when you take any drug that's been tested by the fda there are incredible volumes of research related to that substance that have gone on for decades to let you know the long-term impacts on your health and we just don't have that for marijuana what we have are some encouraging early bits of research that are limited typically small sample sizes and so i would encourage a high degree of caution and and i would discourage people from trusting marijuana simply because it is natural or from the earth lots of things come from the earth that will kill you plutonium uranium is a naturally occurring substance for sure and uranium is not safe for consumption uh you know the the toxin of a black widow's bite is naturally occurring but not something that you want in your body so don't go for like the green kind of new liberal fundamentalism of everything that's natural is okay if you're thinking about can avoid oil for treating any medical condition i strongly recommend you do so in conjunction with consultation with a physician and an understanding that the scientific research on these substances is just not where we need it to be to make good medical decisions [Music] all right my question is i'm a teacher and i have been going through your liturgist course on meditation and i am really struggling with the mindful speaking that you talk about um and um sort of you know going through your words like that before they're spoken and that being a form of meditation and as an educator it's something that i really want to focus on and use in my practice um you know seeing so many students today and not wasting my words um do you have any other tips that you can give for how to sort of hone in on that and really be able to put that into practice in something like a vocation i i do could i start by asking you a couple of clarifying questions yeah what other mindful practices do you engage in and what has your experience been with them um i do like meditation and mindfulness classes so i go once a week um and then i just engage in like regular like walking meditations yeah how long have you been doing that about a year about a year okay so you've got a pretty good base to build on okay uh so the first thing i would say is um mindfulness is a practice so i don't know i know you know that but i'm gonna catch up listeners uh who aren't as on the mindfulness train as you are mindfulness is a practice of intentional awareness where we become aware of not only what's happening with our bodies but our feelings and our cognition we simply step back and observe things as they happen it's the act of awareness and when you do that you become aware how many things in your life are automatic for example as i begin to mindfully speak right now i'm not doing anything without intention you might notice that my hands are no longer waving around badly as i speak because that's something that simply happens as i speak without any conscious control and now i'm simply becoming aware of the part of me that has a desire to move my hands when i talk and then with a moment's more effort as opposed to a stream of consciousness of just verbal expression that happens now i'm taking the time to choose each and every word with intent to move every part of my mouth on purpose and as that happens i feel an increased sense of calmness of stillness of groundedness of connectedness and the reason i could do that relatively easily is i started with several years of nothing but mindful awareness and mindful uh meditation practice then i moved into things like mindfully walking and mindfully driving i'm aware of everything i'm doing and paying careful attention and i would say that at least for me mindful speaking was the most difficult of all by far because it so often feels like we're very much in control of our speech anyway uh and it can take a moment to step back and realize the degree to which um and the speed with which our brain takes our internal experiences and verbalizes them and our consciousness just kind of watches it as it happens right so i think if you take more time uh with a mindful observation of your speech perhaps uh in private uh or perhaps in conversations with friends you can then um take a step further back and actually mindfully engage in the active speech itself but for me it required a lot of practice basically listening to my self-talk and becoming aware of how how i mostly speak thoughtlessly and automatically right it's just it's a it's like a riding a bike kind of just do it over and over thing there might be other people uh who are mindful have mindful practices that disagree with me but in my experience uh it's simply a matter of really really building up that mindful muscle um and and by the way like i guess i shouldn't say mindfully talking was the hardest thing i'm still learning to mindfully dance or dance at all right so uh mindfulness is a journey i think that we're we're on for our whole lives [Music] uh so i'm married and my husband and i have been together for a while um and we have been debating on and off for like a million years whether or not we should have children um but we're well mostly me i'm the worry work i'm concerned uh especially as a middle-class person in america about the impact having children has on climate change you know every study i've seen says that like having children just makes the impact like astronomically worse like i could go vegan and live off the grid and have one kid and just mess it all up um so everyone i've talked to in person thinks i'm blowing it out of proportion uh or they're like oh well you're a married woman so obviously you just naturally want children so don't worry about it uh so i guess i'm wondering about the ethics of having kids in the era of climate change and uh like how bad the impact actually is and you know i don't want to offend people who already have kids but that's where i'm at right now um so yeah that's a great question thank you well good after asking no i think i think a lot of people identify with it um ethics are tough well think about it this way uh it helps the climate if i don't eat red meat and if i don't eat red meat less cows are slaughtered so there's less suffering seems like not eating red meats a good thing except i really love red meat i mean i love hamburgers not as much as pizza but hamburgers are almost pizza little food items for me um and the joy i have eating a hamburger is well it's difficult to describe i don't think most people enjoy hamburgers as much as i do i don't think most people enjoy heroin as much as i enjoy hamburgers i mean i really really like hamburgers well i look at it ethically it seems like a no-brainer save the client climate reduce uh animal suffering no hamburgers but if we look at climate impact as the primary metric for ethical considerations um well then a certain recent movie villain's decision to eliminate half of all life on earth seems very ethically valid the fact is there would be a dramatic improvement in climate change if we just killed half of all the people alive and do you know what would be better than killing half of the people alive killing 90 of the people alive that would be great for our climate and our carbon emissions if you got rid of 90 of the people the remnant would have a very difficult time creating the same scale of climate calamity that we are currently producing do you see where i'm going with this i'm no ethicist and a good ethicist and a good philosopher will run rings around me here i simply mean that we can't look at climate change in a vacuum i mean you seem like a really thoughtful person the fact that you're considering the climate impacts uh of having children seems to me like you're exactly the kind of person whose ideas i would like to see passed on into the world uh i don't see a lot of people who have really high climate footprints and think climate change is a myth having concerns about their rate of reproduction right so um here's a couple of things i would consider if i were you now i've already had kids okay so my children are my children they're my biological children i'm glad that they exist in the world um and i've devoted an enormous amount of personal resources and financial resources and carbon into bringing them along um but if you both want to be a parent and not contribute to climate change which is a laudable goal perhaps consider adopting a child there's lots of children in our world who don't have biological parents who are in their life and us you could meaningfully impact their life and reduce suffering without adding a net increase to the planet's population that would be one option if you do have children your old biological children which i don't think is ethically wrong you could teach them how to be good stewards of the climate and uh in doing so modeling with your behavior and having this enormous influence over your own children uh help them be good stewards of the climate without being fundamentalist or legalistic about it that probably would be a net positive for our climate as well you see what i mean i think i think we also have to give ourselves grace uh i weigh less meat than i used to i mean way less but i still get shake shack sometimes because it's just such a damn fine hamburger and ethically i think i should probably never eat another hamburger again but i understand that i am not a machine i'm not a rational observer i'm a i'm an ape trying to navigate the world and sometimes my desire for a banana well it gets the better of me our next question came in via the question and answer box and it reads how do you view jesus within a non-exclusive view of christianity or rather what purpose does he have within a universalist view of heaven well that's a good question um how do i view jesus i view jesus as the incarnate christ as the reconciling part of the divine came to earth and wore a body and was a human and showed us how to be reconciled with the divine and with each other but by non-exclusive i don't make exclusive claims like without jesus you go to hell because i don't even know that i believe in a a place that happens after death that we go to where we suffer because we're apart from god i just don't know that i believe that um and in my personal views i don't actually have a strong belief in heaven i don't know what heaven is or what's that like for me heaven could be simply a cessation of my awareness and and just just all my atoms are still atoms the universe is still the universe and stuff that made me is still there the the the god that animates all that is all there i'm still a part of that i just don't know anything about that i would call that heaven just fine uh or maybe heaven is a place that the divine takes us whatever that means um and these are just things to really grapple with so i think the best way i can honor your question is to assume the framework of christian universalism which i don't actually hold but what i mean is i'm going to make some assumptions one that god is like a being like a conscious being that has desires i'm going to make an assumption that uh jesus was literally god's son and that there is a heaven um and god wants people to go there uh and in fact you know what i'll go ahead and say that for some reason christ's death was necessary to allow people to get to heaven now these are a lot of assumptions but uh what i would say is that jesus sacrifice could just apply to everybody so it wouldn't matter what you believed it would mean that that god structured a system by which all things could be reconciled to god and jesus did that but it's not predicated on some belief it's not predicated on some requirement that god's love and god's grace and god's mercy truly is universal at which point jesus merely not merely jesus quite beautifully becomes the manifestation of god's redemptive action of god's reconciling power universally applied to all people and i actually find that to be a bigger view of jesus than the like the bouncer for an exclusive club you know what i mean it'd be like if it was an amazing club in town it could only get in if you said and genuinely believed that kanye was the greatest musician of all time listen kanye is a terrific musician his politics are whack but he's an amazing musician but i don't want to say that now and forever i believe kanye is the greatest musician of all time i mean if i had to say someone i'd probably go with beyonce anyway so i think that's a beautiful view of jesus i think that's a redemptive view of jesus and i think that's more consistent with the theology of an all-loving god but of course i'm a mystic so that's more assumptions than i make so i grew up in a christian home my dad was a pastor he also ran the christian school that i went to kind of grew up in this tiny little bubble about five years ago it started but it kind of over the past you know five years um i've deconstructed basically everything was atheist for a while um kind of come back to it i don't know i'm very much in the literature space like post-deconstruction i still go to church sometimes even though i don't believe a single line of our doctrinal statement about a year and a half ago um it was found out that um my dad was embezzling money for about four years um upwards of like sixty thousand dollars and using it for prostitutes and and uh cheating on my mom and um totally tore up my family um uh i mean my siblings and i are they're still fairly close but we all processed it very differently and so then there's a lot of uh stuff that's hard to talk to about each other like with each other um recently two of my siblings two of the three siblings two of them have uh contacted my dad i haven't talked to him in over a year um but they've contacted to him and just try to like you know rebuild some sort of relationship with him he's kind of been exiled from uh the church and the the school um most of like the lives that we knew were growing up i've recently been feeling like i want to talk to him um i want to tell him about my whole deconstruction because i never really got a chance to talk to him never really had a meaningful conversation since i deconstructed since i my beliefs changed at all from uh when i was growing up i kind of had this like burning desire to talk to him before all the stuff came out and then that came out and then now i just haven't talked to him in forever so that's part of me and then another part of me and like i feel like i relate to split brain patients here because part of me just never wants to see his face again what he did to my mom and uh my family and so uh i go back and forth a lot and a lot of people that i talk to they say well you should talk to him you should eventually try to forgive him because he's your dad and that's kind of a very recurring thing that comes up a lot is he's your dad and and um i don't know sometimes i i have a hard time even knowing what that means i felt like i had a formulated question coming into this and it's kind of i'm not exactly sure what the specifics of my question are but i just kind of i don't know how to trust myself in my own decision whether to reach out to him and talk to him i don't know uh what i would say because what i want to say changes all the time and i don't even know what the importance of having a dad i mean now that now that i'm i'm 28 now and so i i don't know if i i don't what do i need a dad for now anyways i don't know i just kind of yeah i guess i'll just leave it at that i just um any sort of response that you give me i would appreciate a lot so thank you for your show i love everything you do your books courses meditations podcasts everything so just uh thank you so much for listening um first of all kenny it sounds to me like you have a lot of grief and a lot of hurt that it like is so intense that you have to keep a distance from it inside of yourself and it is so difficult to speak out especially in a weird public internet forum and that kind of a condition so i want to applaud your honesty and your vulnerability and your willingness to reach out it's very inspiring and healthy and something our culture needs more of i think anyone who tells you you have to talk to your dad is wrong i think anyone who presumes to tell you what the next right step is for you is out of bounds if you're in pain and you need time take time period you have been through an incredibly traumatic experience that involves not just the portrayal of a key figure in your life a parental figure also a spiritual authority also involved your entire community also involved shame and stigma and social fallout this is a level of difficulty and trauma few people will know in life so take the time that you need to grieve it may be years and don't allow anyone to pressure you to grieve on some timeline or some way that's comfortable for them or make sense in some theological framework you have been hurt and you have been hurt deeply now in time i think it is necessary from a mental health standpoint and a psychological standpoint for you to come to some term of forgiveness with your father but let me be clear about what forgiveness means i'm not talking about christian theology i'm talking about psychology forgiving does not mean forgiving forgiving does not mean pretending you are not hurt forgiving does not mean a restoration of the same relationship it doesn't forgiving in a psychological context means accepting the harm that has been done to you accepting the harm that has been done to you while not wishing ill the one who harmed you that's it that's it i don't know what acts of restoration that your father has made in his life for his relationships but it sounds to me someone who would embezzle money uh from a spiritual institution and spend it on prostitutes and cheat has some serious psychological issues that will prevent them from living in healthy community and relationship with others so if you ever decide to talk to your father again and don't hear me saying that you have to you'll probably have to have specific boundaries on that relationship to protect your mental health it is necessary psychologically in time after going through an appropriate time of grief which only you will know how long that time is and you'll know best in conjunction with a therapist or mental health counselor then you can work on the process of forgiving and that process may or may not involve conversation or relationship with your father if you don't forgive him eventually it will have emotional consequences and in the event that your father dies and he will eventually the separation anxiety we call grief will be deeply complicated if you haven't forgiven him also we know from scientific studies that when we can't forgive others it has cognitive emotional and even physical performance consequences for people we are a social animal unfortunately so start by grieving and grieving well and grieving deeply and taking taking the bottle cap off that pain in conjunction with a therapist and understand that there's you don't have to feel ashamed for feeling angry you don't have to feel ashamed for feeling sad that if you cry it's good and it's healthy and it's manly and it's beautiful and wonderful to have the strength to admit that you've been hurt to let tears stream down your face and that it's okay to scream and to yell and to pound the desk because of the injustice and the destruction that happens in your life and in your family's life because of your father's actions grieve and grieve well and then begin the process of forgiveness because as my friend rob often says the one who've hurt you doesn't deserve to live for rent free in your head how many times a day do you think about what happened how much of your mental and emotional energy goes into what was done to you i don't ask you to forgive your father because it's a spiritual impetus for you to be right with god i don't ask you to forgive your father for your father's sake i want you to eventually forgive your father kenny so you can be a healthy whole person who can go on living life and living life well bless you for your honesty and your vulnerability yeah as an enneagram 9 i commonly experience agreeability or maybe an aversion to conflict um or to instigate that and i found i'm actually like pretty okay talking with someone or strangers but it becomes uncomfortable when there's a person that i'm actually friendly with i have a pretty friendly relationship with but we don't know each other very well so like a good example would be like my girlfriend's dad or like an older friend at church um and so like if all of our reactions are usually light-hearted conversations uh it becomes very difficult for me to address something when they say something out of insensitivity or out of ignorance about an oppressed group or something like i want to be an advocate or a an accomplice as the language that's been used before and so my question is like do you have any advice on knowing when to step into that and when to not uh and then for me as someone who doesn't it really doesn't like putting myself out there what are some ways that i can encourage my brain to make that first step and and do that what an amazing question i mean what an amazing question i don't think that just applies to people who identify as enneagram nines i think that's a really common thing in our world today how do we both identify as nice people polite members of society and then confront casual injustice oh man there's so many people in the world who will say things that are kind of socially accepted that are deeply deeply hurtful to real human people the casual transphobia in our society the casual ableism the newly revitalized overt anti-black language and anti-latinx language i hear every day turns my stomach and i live in liberal los angeles i live in the epicenter of the american progressive movement and oh gosh daniel the other day my oldest daughter asked me what to say when her friends at school say the n word these are middle schoolers in 2018 white middle schoolers in 2018 you still have the audacity to use a word once meant to demean men who were property well i have great news there's two strategies and both work with varying effectiveness depending on the person one approach which is often used is stigma and social shaming expressing outrage that something has said actually does in some cases have some corrective measure especially if someone feels like they know you well and you're shocked or outraged by their behavior and you let them know so i can't believe you would say that that actually has an impact on their brain in person not so much online but in person that kind of reaction does carry weight but since you call yourself a nine and i do as well that's not a reaction that comes easily to you and so the good news is you have another reaction that can be just as effective and in some cases more effective you can empathize with the person who said something you don't agree with and you can say kindly hold on just a moment i don't mean to interrupt but can we go back over something you just said because i need to understand how you you said it and and if i misunderstood you did you just say quote horrible thing you just said unquote question mark and you invite them into dialogue and they might say oh gosh no i can't believe i said that congratulations you just created a social correction they might say yeah of course i said that what's the big deal and now you have an honest honest-to-god in-person dialogue that can create social transformation i've learned to love it when people say things that make me uncomfortable because they're inviting a deep and profound conversation that's not an internet flame war and can substantively impact people's beliefs and behaviors if you're wondering how we address racism and white supremacy in the world if you're wondering how we address homophobia if you're wondering how we address ableism it is those exact moments that are most effective if you just bring it up in conversation it can come out of left field if it's just something you raise at thanksgiving dinner it seems like you're picking a fight but if you wait for those moments in conversation for the door to be open to a dialogue and you use your emotional sensitivity to not judge the other person but invite them into mutual understanding and then you share your experiences of how you used to say that or you used to believe that and you've been changed because of people's life stories that has been demonstrated to be effective in modifying human behavior i think that daniel is one of the best ways to be a good neighbor so my question is about morality and what causes it before deconstruction i never really put much thought into the actual concept of sin as a supernatural reality but during deconstruction i began to think about it and how weird it was like how does this work if i steal a candy bar from 7-eleven does an angel press a red button or something or is it like an automated system uh where do they keep the ledger of all the sins and stuff um so it wasn't too long before i let go of these beliefs and kind of embraced the idea that morality is just a construct uh i like your kind of basic code of ethics or whatever does it violate someone's consent or does it increase human suffering uh and that seemed to work as a replacement for whatever i used to think of as morality but lately i've been thinking more of that concept of sin and how it seems like in a way it kind of caused religion and i love that it's you know in the creation story they talk about coming across the knowledge of good and evil i'm like that's so strange it seems like in creation they're trying to say here's how we're different from the animals like we wear clothes we like have a knowledge of good and evil we feel shame for things uh and so i guess i really just wanted to try to get to the bottom of now that i don't believe that right and wrong is something god gives to us but maybe something that that became in us like in our brains why did that happen i don't understand like i guess i have some theories but they don't fully make sense so where did that come from okay uh fantastic question where did that come from i can only offer you theories as well i don't know that that's like a solved problem in the sciences and may may never be uh but if you look at evolutionary biology and you look at animal behaviors you will find that altruism and reciprocity are often rewarded survival strategies so there are certainly organisms which are so brutal and so ruthless they will eat their own offspring they will eat potential mates they're deeply cannibalistic and those species tend to do well if they reproduce in incredible numbers and are indiscriminate resource consumers delete anything uh and that is one strategy but in uh our biosphere uh organisms are competing with each other for resources and sometimes you can actually acquire more resources per per capita by cooperating and so organisms that through usually uh increasingly sophisticated neurological mechanisms read brains learn to work together they increase their chances of passing on their genes and evolution says ah good i like that and of course evolution doesn't actually say anything i'm personifying evolution basically as a metaphor to make this more understandable but it's it's simply the fact that altruism and reciprocity are so often great ways to acquire safety food shelter and sex that they become rewarded and they the species that are most cooperative generally end up with the biggest brains you need a big brain to exist in community and exist socially so elephants and dolphins and humans and chimpanzees and bonobos all these very large brain animals are social animals and their lives involve altruism and our brains became so sophisticated uh that we created language and metaphor and constructs and symbols to describe our morality and to wrestle with why we have it that may or may not be unique in the animal kingdom we may find that elephants and dolphins maybe even chimps also wrestle with why am i here why do i have these beliefs uh but as far as we know right now homo sapiens is the only species uh that has that kind of meta self rep referential ethical framework where we don't just have behaviors that are conditioned by a genetic template and then reinforce an environment our map of the world we build the language influences the way we make moral and ethical decisions and does in fact become related to our beliefs about god uh which in and of themselves are another kind of interesting set of biases in our species in particular we are a spiritual religious species and appear to be the only one like that on earth our brains as narrative machines have a natural tendency to produce a narrative where there's an ultimate awareness and an ultimate narrative producer and to relate to that of course as we contemplate that idea of god we contemplate why we do what we do and why we make moral decisions so fantastic question so i had a very uh quick question for you um do you have any advice or how would you recommend going about talking to like trump supporting family and friends who their interest in carrying on the conversation drops pretty much immediately um once they find out that like the the things that you're citing and the things like that aren't from their trusted sources so like like if two people can't agree on what a fact is um is there even the possibility of having like a rational discussion um i know it's a bit of a bummer but it kind of jumps off of daniel's question a little bit but yeah so that that was my question thank you great thank you uh parker that's a great question and i have great news actually humans aren't rational actors and discussing things rationally is a terrible behavioral motivator for this species we elevate it as so important as post enlightenment humans but there's just no evidence to support the idea that rational discussions in relaying facts and information is in any way effective at changing human beliefs or behaviors it's just not there how do i know well there's a lot of progressive listeners of ask science mike who believe that man-made climate change is an existential threat to the human animal a tremendous number of listeners of this podcast believe that climate change caused by human activity could end human civilization at some point in the future and they have the facts and figures to back that up and yet the americans in the audience and the westerners in the audience who accept this police emit an awful lot of carbon i talked earlier about hamburgers i know how bad hamburgers are for the climate and i still eat them because my rational brain is not the primary motivator in my life my rational brain is as big a round as a quarter and as thick as a tortilla it's a tiny tiny part of my brain my emotional brain is like the size of a burrito and sits closer to my brain stem feelings and social identity and social belonging are the major motivators for human behavior along with incentive structures and and meaning we're complex here's my point i don't try to debate the new york times versus fox news in conversation with people who support donald trump for president some of which are like wildly racist regressive people who have centered their life around white resentment and others of which you know uh are just really pro-life so i don't lump them in as some monolithic entity i take each conversation on an individual basis and i really listen to them and when i hear what they're afraid of and when i hear what they're angry about i ask them more about that anger and i ask them more about that fear and they get them sharing they get them talking and at some point i find an opportunity to raise the fears and the anger of someone who isn't other to them if it's a if it's a person who's a trump supporter who's a parent then i might ask them about the experiences of undocumented parents in the united states who say for example fled from drug cartels and what would they do in that situation as much as possible i avoid the hypothetical i am extraordinarily gifted to have a very diverse set of friends and acquaintances in my life so i have friends who are undocumented immigrants i have friends who are trans i have friends who are lesbian or gay intersex have asexual friends i have friends of every race and ethnicity i'm aware of in the united states practically and so when i talk about someone's life experiences i'm not generally citing a piece of times i'm citing a friend someone i know who's impacted by the actions of this administration and the 40 percent of the country who thinks the administration is on the right track i don't use facts and figures and you know me i'm great at memorizing facts and figures i can drop them like nobody's business they're just great now i feel smart but i'm much more interested in doing is helping people see the commonality of our humanity and the mutual struggle we face trump supporters are being manipulated by powerful interests in many cases against their own benefit many trump voters have much more in common economically with an undocumented immigrant than a stock trader or ceo so it's those stories that commonality that empathy that i find most effective in those discussions and for people who merely want to kick my ass for being a liberal well guess what those are people i cut out of my life i'm not interested in people who are only interested in feeling powerful or superior or beating other people up you know just great have a good life i'm even though i actually know you're not you're actually having a miserable life or why would you be so drawn into this kind of chronic confrontation i'm just going to go live life well so you know if you're just adamant that my view on the world represents some end of america by god go enjoy your applebee's i'll be in a taco truck with my trans friend and i'll have a better time [Music] our next question came in via the question answer box and it reads what are your thoughts on trying psychedelics such as lsd and psilocybin for various effects mental health mystical experiences meditation enhancement mind expansion etc etc it's a great question it's a question i get all the time to the point we're probably going to do a liturgist podcast on psychedelics because i think it might be the most common question i get now if i i'd have to look but it's it's close it's close if you combine questions about marijuana with questions about psychedelics then it would without question be the most common question i get anymore i think that's great i think feel like taboo prohibition based relationship we have with psychedelics is not only unhelpful as a matter of public policy we're finding that drug prohibition is does not in any way meaningfully influence human behavior it merely creates a bloated prison system and a lot of racial discrimination so i like that um what i i'm not a fan of is the lack of caution uh people approach these substances with once the taboo drops so once we realize that the taboo is unhelpful and that in many cases government institutions have literally lied about the scientific health impacts of these substances then we just assume that they're okay carte blanche you know go nuts and i just disagree so to to the point of the question we do have studies that show some real benefits under you know clinically supervised research uh for depression for anxiety for ptsd for all sorts of mental health issues we absolutely know that people have incredible spiritual experiences on psychedelics that people will have an experience like i had naturally on the beach where i felt like god was with me and physically present with me and i was physically present with god people have those experiences on magic mushrooms which have psilocybin or lsd and they have them for hours and they have beautiful experiences people have incredible meditation um steve jobs said that everyone should try psychedelics at least once in life he did okay right so so what do we do with that there's just not that much research it could be that occasional or even frequent psychedelic use is completely harmless but it could be that it exacerbates some mental conditions most people don't know that your blood pressure for example can rise pretty dramatically on psychedelics and if you have an underlying health condition that could create a medical crisis we don't know what the 20 30 and 50-year impacts are of these substances and as is so often cited yes many indigenous cultures did use plant medicine but they use them to mark life transition they use them occasionally under controlled circumstances i have concerns that young people are um overly invested in the promise of these substances without an awareness of the potential pitfalls and remember you can absolutely go to prison for possessing not even using just possessing these substances in the united states so be careful careful because these drugs are illegal you can't ensure that you're actually getting psilocybin or lsd if you buy these substances from a dealer who's breaking the wall there's no telling what substance you are actually getting or what that has been mixed with there are instances of people doing international travel for example for ayahuasca trips where people have been mugged or raped because they've been incapacitated by these substances or given a different substance and been told they were getting a psychedelic people been kidnapped that's why i don't like the prohibition by the way driving this stuff underground simply attracts unsavory elements to exploit people i'd love to see psychedelics made illegal in the united states and to have considerable medical research scientific research assigned to them in an ideal world i'd like to see them first made available wide scale with federal funding to scientists to do research like we do with any drug to see the impacts and if we genuinely discover severe public health risks then maybe prohibition is the right strategy today we're not making that decision based on an educated foundation but based on fear and prejudice but if science shows that these substances are safe and we can create guidelines for dosages in medical contacts or hell even for recreational context i think that's great i just worry today about the action in the absence so i would encourage everyone listening to my voice to be extremely cautious and to be aware that anytime you use anything there's a potential to create a habit and a compulsion so that psychedelics aren't chemically addictive um but you just want to watch out if you have this experience do you crave it more and more and more frequently is it interfering with the way you live your life with your work with your relationships your friendships your family be careful be cognizant look out for warning signs and remember there's no telling what you get when you buy those things please please be careful uh i know i have a real uncle dad vibe sometimes i know it but it's because i really care about you all and i know that many of you have had traumatic experiences with authority figures and part of that is what draws you to my work and so know that what i'm saying right now is not in the interest of restraining you or creating societal prohibition because i want you to be happy and safe whole people because when that's who you are you can change the world i i kind of have sort of a a lighter question right i love to end with like questions wrong and a bonus even lighter question so how do you think healthy human life extension uh relates to like the kingdom of heaven coming to earth i see okay yeah just death and god and uh bonus question do you have any thoughts on floating dirigible cities oh man that's really good um i think floating dirigible cities would be the most plausible way to colonize venus for example um because you would stay out of the hot highly pressurized portion of the atmosphere and remain in a layer that was more earth-like i think on earth there's just a lot better ways to build cities that are much more economically feasible and safe uh to your other question life extension and heaven on earth wow wow um i read a book about that i can't remember the name so i can't tell you it was a novel um i you know a lot you talking about like uh biomedical advances for physical health are you talking about the technological singularity of transferring human consciousness into digital media and then literally creating a world of our making whatever we wanted would that even be heaven or would that reveal the weirdest and darkest part of our cognitive functions uh repairing thanks but interesting i can't get this on the podcast i just got a clarification from dev that says repairing cellular damage mostly um yeah so we can we can extend the quality of life i was taking a pill for a while uh i'm almost embarrassed to say it um that this whole premise was uh cellular health which i took as a lark um and then i realized like why would i waste money every month on a lark uh i don't know like in terms of heaven on earth um i mean we already know what it's like to be healthy at the highest part of human biological potential it's called being 18 to 22. so if we were just like that for 200 years would that be heaven on earth uh i don't think it would i don't think it would at all i actually here i'm 39 i'm a whole lot happier now than i was at 22. i kind of learned who i who i am now i had my 22 year old body and physical capacity here at 39 that might be lovely but i also think coming to terms with my physical limitations is a huge part of what maturing is coming to terms with my slightly dumber slightly slower brain every day i think that's part of maturity would that be impaired um i don't know i don't know i think you have a great question i think that i'm ill-equipped to answer it well especially right now at this juncture of my life where i i'm starting to i turn 40 next month and i'm just starting to really come to terms with what aging really means uh i'm learning to to giggle at how long it takes me to pee i'm learning to delight in how much hair wants to grow out of my nose and my ears i'm learning uh that i savor a good bottle of wine and when i really hit it hard which i don't usually but i mean it's like there's two or three people and we we put down two or three bottles of wine i understand that's not gonna be a bad morning that's gonna be a rough three days which means i would only do that in the conjunction of the highest possible celebration and i think i think i like all that i think i'm looking forward to getting old and to dying i i don't want to be here forever i don't think i want 200 or 300 years on earth i think i want to disappear and make room for someone else to have a shot i mean you think population growth is a problem now make some 200 year old 300 year old lifespans oh my gosh uh it frightens me so i don't know now again i'm old i could it could happen it could be a utopia i just think that death and aging are necessary change agents to drive our species and our culture forward and in that way i think heaven is drawn most near through the grave [Music] well you've done it you've survived the first ever live on the web episode of ask science mike that was super fun i definitely want to do more of these in the future so if you're interested in being on a show like this you can join me on patreon just go to asksciencemike.com and click the patreon button to learn more uh other than that i'd like to thank my patrons for making this show possible andrew golucky for pre-production greg nordine for being the show's producer and my friend jeff bodaford who we have been friends for 11 years on facebook as of today uh for composing the ask science mic theme song thanks for listening everyone and i'll talk to you next week