ASM091 Ask Science Mike LIVE in Costa Mesa, CA

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coming to you from the first united methodist church in costa mesa california it's ask science mike [Applause] got live even though he may not understand he'll talk anyway he got problems he won't stop there but he'll talk and talk and talk until he flew in the face science faith

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith in life and right now i'm supporting my new book finding god in the waves uh so if you'd like to come on see me on tour just finding on the waves.com tour coming up november 20th i'll be in portland oregon november 21st tacoma washington november 26th thomasville georgia november 30th quincy mass uh right by boston january 21st grand haven january 29th mableton georgia february 15th nampa idaho sorry idaho didn't mean to sound surprised february 19th chapel hill north carolina and march 29th in houston texas again go to findinggodintheways.com to learn more but for now we've got a podcast to do so let's get it started [Music] and a couple more things before we get started my friends on the internet uh finding on the waves is now out in the united kingdom so you've got a local paperback copy where we put you every time the word color appears and that's true and you can win a free autographed copy of the book we're giving away one a week at findinggodinthewaves.com giveaway and uh that's it so let's do a podcast uh so someone wants to start hi mike i'm steve i've been listening since last february and had the pleasure of sarah has been our pastor before she moved here right enjoyed making that connection but uh i'm a shy ally i'm a shy ally and i really resonates with me your discussion of becoming a accomplice yes so i'm intrigued by your discussion of multiple brains and the fight between the brain that wants that i want to be out there being an accomplice but fighting with the shy brain so i'm wondering if you have tricks or thoughts from a brain science standpoint to maybe help us shy allies move to be more active that's an incredible question thank you and i think it's really important because uh well this is the first episode we've done following that tremendous election that just happened and i've noticed there's this movement online with safety pins because so many people in our country right now are terrified it's just a lot of fear like i've never seen you know i remember uh previous elections there wasn't this kind of like outright what is going to happen to us feeling when we switch party leadership all of my friends in the lgbtqia plus advocacy space are really really worried and the accomplice thing is is important because thanks to the systemic injustice of society those of us who are straight and white and male have disproportionately valid voices in society and i think part of the shyness comes from being a social mammal where we are terrified to have a loss of social standing because our brains equate that with possible death if you go pre-agrarian society you go hunter-gatherers you lose status far enough in the tribe you have trouble breeding you fall any farther than that you get out of the tribe completely and you starve to death or get eaten by something bigger than you right it's a real bad deal for humans to feel less popular that's why we're obsessed with what people think about us and then if you combine like social shyness of that already so i grew up in the south and the whole idea of like saying something that could make someone uncomfortable is a huge taboo even if it's true even if it's helpful there's just things you don't discuss and that turns out to not just be a southern thing southerners just have a very special type of passive aggressive tone that goes with breaking the the edict but everybody all across america at least all white people have this cultural norm of not upsetting the apple cart i've heard in the midwest it's called like minnesota and ice or michigan nice right so we associate upsing the apple cart with a loss of standing and it just it paralyzes us so we have this movement where we realize that something we used to believe is harmful that it marginalizes and oppresses people for for no good reason right you know there's sometimes marginalization is is probably good uh i think it's it's good to marginalize the modern american neo-nazi movement for example right because that movement embodies harm to others as part of its core values it's not true for uh our lesbian and gay and trans friends so how do we get out of that trap that evolution set and culture reinforced one way is continuing to consume the stories of people who have suffered because that's one of the most powerful ways to change human behavior and empathy is storytelling so if you listen to stories of people whose lived experience have been harmed or suffered under oppression it'll rile you up a little bit and then you also read the stories of people who have successfully gone from being non-affirming to affirming to allies to accomplices and that will cause you to mirror that behavior in your life scientifically speaking so if you if you read a story for example studies have shown this where the protagonist votes you're more likely to vote so we should have just been dropping airplanes full of leaflets all across america two months ago with stories of people voting but get out the vote like tell a story but that's not even the most powerful thing you can do the most powerful thing you can do is realign your sense of social identity so even though i'm a southern straight white male like post evangelical i don't throw my sense of social identity in with that crew anymore the people who i'm most enmeshed with in my life socially are people in traditionally marginalized groups and what that does to my brain is associate successful social standing i did not mean to alliterate there uh successful social standing with groups that are traditionally marginalized and that makes me an accomplice in some ways i had to to uproot myself from the soil i grew up in and plant myself somewhere else now that's relatively difficult to do in north florida you know what i mean like we're really close to south georgia have you ever been to south georgia there's a lot of trump signs in south georgia that wasn't like a like a shy trump supporter in south georgia they're like fly the like i saw a truck a week before the election it had a big rebel flag on a pole in the back and then next to it it had a big trump flag and they had modified their engines so they could do that rolling smoke thing where they just belt black smoke and uh that's a thing in the south is like virtue signaling like i hate the environment like i hate it and what they'll do is they'll they'll get a traffic light and get in front of a prius and just build up the smoke so they take off the prius has to turn on its wipers to see because their car is covered in soot so um like this week you know when i'm like okay trump won congratulations i'm trying to uh i'm trying to do a better job understanding the motivations of people who voted that way um but like the fact that i got like 20 emails last night from people that used to go to church with me telling me i'm a horrible person and that i'm i'm tearing the world apart by standing up for racial equality or or being an advocate for same-sex marriage it didn't bug me because i felt no sense of loss of social standing so just may not love those people i'm still gonna go to thanksgiving i mean for a little while and cut the trip real short but i'm still going to thanksgiving i'll still go to christmas but my sense of identity and belonging doesn't rest there anymore which makes my brain feel liberated to be bold now i i never i never want to get so bold that those people feel like i've written them off and this is probably the most important thing i would say for those of us who are traditionally privileged it is one thing for someone who directly experiences marginalization and oppression in the form of racism or sexism or other forms of bigotry to say i'm done i'm not talking to those people because they live under a system of oppression those of us who do not then have a responsibility to be the bridge and the translator between the groups right because we're the ones who know i don't worry if i walk into a southern gathering that i'm going to get beat up or discriminated against or whatever i don't worry about acts of violence against me because my height my skin my voice my accent all give me a passport to safety and to truly be an accomplice means i don't get to use the block button nearly as often as i would like i don't get to sever relationships as quickly as i would care to because i have to tell stories that can't be told directly and i have to have the patience to tell stories in a way that helps people see beyond their perspective because the fact is today i am affirming but it wasn't that many years ago that i was not and i didn't find my way out of that perspective someone else was patient with me had conversation after conversation and answered question after question that helped me take a journey to the point that i realized that what i once believed was the will of god was actually causing active harm to people in the world with no reasonable justification and that's that's the work that's the mission and i believe very very very very strongly that that work is as important as it's ever been since tuesday [Music] kathleen and i swear this is not a plant this wasn't planned he has no idea what i'm going to ask him honestly so when this happened i might even have turned to my friend sarah who was with me and said i really need to talk to mike about this because i want to know why this is happening i recently saw sia perform live and every time i hear her sing i cry and it's not because of what she's saying but there's and it's not at the beginning of when she sings when she hits a certain timbre i can't and they're like explosive tears and i know i mean there's the whole like what's going on spiritually question there which you know frederick beekner said pay attention to the things that bring a tear to your eye because it means the holy is drawing i but i want to know like what is my brain responding to when it's not the message or what she's doing on stage it's the actual sound that moves me like that okay music in the brain is weird um some anthropologists believe a couple of things we had verbalization before we had language so if we have verbalization verbalization before we had language one of the most ancient human vocalizations is right that's um that's called a laugh and the theory anthropologists hold is that if um two humans ran into each other in the dark that's a flight or fight response it creates a potential for violence and if one of the humans realizes that's another human to displace the emotional attention they go like that's hilarious we almost killed each other and and then the other person would go oh that's hilarious we're actually the same species and friends and allies oh haha we can't talk but if you think about it like the most primate humans ever sound is laughing i think i mean it's just the most monkey we ever are so that's pre-verbal communication so that's why you sometimes laugh at inappropriate moments you get like this well of emotional energy and your brain goes what do i do to signal everything's actually okay i laugh well another thing anthropologists believe is possible is we started to create music before we ever spoke so and you could watch gorillas this makes terrible radio all these hand motions they were laughing because i made monkey motions while laughing and i just made rhythmic gorilla motions internet people i don't know why i talked to that mic like it's the internet so weird so but if you watch there's a lot of primates that make displays that include some rhythmic component so we likely started with rhythm and then moved into vocalizations that corresponded with the rhythm i thoroughly believe that's why we love it and what we find because of the pre-verbal nature of music if that theory is valid music has an ability to evoke emotion without conveying specific information so as a speaker and a writer what do i specialize in rhetoric verbal communication i'm trying to take you to some feeling and i have to use a story or a chain of words to take you to a specific place music and i get really jealous of musicians this way they can play a couple of chords and you're just there so when you have really really really accomplished talented musicians who've developed their art they've created a feedback loop with audiences and they've learned from their repertoire of dissonance versus major versus minor versus progressions of chord and changes in dynamic tone what carries the most effect for the most people and that's why the master composers and the master performers can bring a tear to your eye without saying a word now when we look into the brain you find that there are very very few activities that involve as many different parts of the brain operating in concert simultaneously as when you're truly enmeshed in a musical experience more of your brain is doing stuff when you listen to a symphony then when you read for example which is an activity we have typically associated with very high levels of brain activity and brain development there's fascinating studies i've seen that show uh across cultures the effect of different types of chords with a specific type of emotional response even without context it's almost like we have to be taught language but something about music becomes much more universal i mean i've experienced that myself because when i listen to non-western forms of music i find the barrier to cultural translation much lower than with other forms of media do you know what you know what i'm talking about like if you tune your radio to the spanish station and you don't speak spanish like no one does where i'm from a lot of people here do uh but you can understand the emotional component of that song without understanding any of the words and the same thing when i listen to music from india i understand the emotional component the composer and performer intended without connecting to the language you know it's evolution baby that's it hey mike hey uh these last uh these last um six months have been really tough um a lot of what uh i thought i knew and i know a safe place i think i needed that laugh so thanks thanks um i think a lot of people that maybe have stumbled upon your podcast and the liturgists have sort of gone through a lot of similar experiences traditional evangelical background i think what i'm noticing for me recently uh among many things that i'm processing right now is that uh i'd like you to talk about self-preservation i'm noticing that um for those that maybe are not uh and i've i've heard rob talk about this before um rob bell um yeah i've heard about but yeah about the box being open and some people just aren't ready to to have that conversation um and i think i don't know what it was but for me i was i think for a while it's been boiling up to have that conversation and i think that uh i was ready for that but i'm noticing is for those that are around me um that i've maybe had long-term established relationships with um that are not ready um i'm starting to notice some patterns about the things the constructs that they set up for themselves whether it's career i know if you've had questions from people on the podcast before about their career being in jeopardy because of their beliefs and things like that and so um for me um so if you wouldn't mind talking about that um just sort of what it takes for somebody to maybe to break down those boxes when they're ready maybe their studies on that kind of stuff and then for me personally and i'm sure there's others what i'm noticing is um some of these things that some verbal language that has triggered me to sort of recoil in some ways certain words like that for me traditionally and again i gotta preface myself like save space but uh so just you know words that maybe in the traditional evangelical sense like feminism would be like a like a dirty word right correct right but like on some level for you it still feels taboo is that what you're saying yeah so when i when i hear people talk about it i believe like like i'm on board i got and that's weird for me just yeah but when i say those things i don't i don't have a problem um necessarily but i find myself still sort of being like oh um and i'm wondering if there's something scientifically um at a point where the conditioning in my own brain will be able to get past that and i think some of the stuff that you're talking about and i think the process that i'm going through now which has been super healthy i'm very fortunate to be going through this with my wife i'm excited for when those things don't exist anymore um so that i can sort of feel free but i'm just wondering anyway i'm going to stop talking because i'm rambling but i'm just wondering if there's anything that you can speak to that maybe speaks to that at all for other people that maybe are experiencing the same thing coming from that tradition okay man we're so glad you're here mike [Applause] man and there's so much heavy evangelical suitcases in that question you lugged them up the stairs you had to carry them all the way to your seat and now they're sitting in your lap full of bricks and you can barely breathe there are so many beautiful things about evangelicalism there really are but there's some real [ \_\_ ] too the first thing you were handed a story that said it is not okay to be a hot mess and now you're a hot mess and you just constantly judge your hot messiness and just can't deal with it so the first thing is being a hot mess is awesome i'm a hot mess all the time all the time i i saw a movie today this just happened and i lost my self container for like two hours i felt like a player piano going through the motions i was very very very raw emotionally uh i caught i got i came to the church sort of in a daze and met sarah and we went to home depot and i was just like everything is an illusion like everything's illusion i don't i don't have any will i only have the choice of like what posture i take to the part i have to play in the symphony but the sheet music is right there i play it no matter what that sounds crazy but i'm externalizing my existential dilemma to say now when i cry because the world seems bigger than i ever thought it was i love it because i know it means i'm growing and i never want to stop growing and never again do i want to fall under the illusion that i've got everything figured out all i figured out how to do is get to next friday that's it all i figured out how to do is when i sit down at the table with my family be thrilled that that's happening and recognize the beauty and the gift that it is so you have trauma you have panic attacks raising certain issues because you've been conditioned for so long to think in a certain way and told if you leave this box you will spend eternal conscious torment in hell that your brain puts you into a panic attack just for asking certain questions you've been conditioned so you just did the most healthy thing you can do talk and cry and sob and be a mess in front of people who can receive it in grace by the way that's why we are all here if all you want to do is grab the mic and sob for three minutes we'll do this afterwards okay because that's what this is this is the safety pin tour okay so how do you get through it you cry a lot you cry a lot after i got divorced from the southern baptist faith an event that was far more traumatic to me than my parents divorce an event that was far more traumatic to me than death of actual people in my life maybe was more traumatic than the loss of god i just went into a room every week and paid a hundred dollars an hour to cry because guess what i'm a southern man you know what we're not allowed to do cry you can cry if like something moving happens if if the beauty of god opens up to you but you can't grieve the failure of american culture to allow grief sits at the root of some of our most difficult social issues right now 51 million people have been told you can't grieve that's what are you grieving for there's a fair and democratic election we are not comfortable with grief you've lost something you need to grieve the grieving comes first finding a new paradigm comes later now in terms of the things that seem taboo you're doing the right thing you're aware i'm a feminist who is on some level uncomfortable with the word feminism that's who i am because you're a work in progress and you've got to let go of the evangelical expectation that in order to be effective in the world you have to start with all the answers you start with the questions and you spend your whole life wrestling with it i get uncomfortable when protest turns to property damage still i shouldn't don't don't break the car that's just somebody's car right i get super uncomfortable viscerally and then i step back and i go do i think a car is more important than justice when martin luther king wrote a letter from a birmingham jail am i the white moderate who cares for order more than justice and sometimes i am and that's the process the process is reflection and examination and slowly but surely training your brain to see the world a different way i do a thing i don't know if you can tell i'm kind of into food like a little bit and if i like contemplate a justice issue that's new to me i'm not above like literally giving myself a piece of candy like path lobby and reconditioning you know what i mean like oh i found a new taboo i'm uncomfortable with and i'm processing through it hershey kiss good boy and it totally works but the the biggest thing you have to do is give yourself permission to be a work in progress instead of a finished product i would like to tell you right now all of the things i know for certain about god [Music] would you hear some things i hope about god god is love when we love god we love love itself that god is inviting all of creation into reconciliation and peace and that somehow even though the world seems full of a lot of crap ultimately the desire of god is for the world to exist in love that the glue that holds the whole universe together is love that dark matter and dark energy and whatever else are all springing up from a well of love and it doesn't make any sense and my science fans are like hey you should probably get another brain scan but i thought that'd be funnier sorry sometimes the jokes i make up on the spot just don't land but who knows who knows so delight in not knowing just delight in it just i think that's the greatest trust the greatest faith you can have what faith was it when i was a southern baptist and i just had figured out all the facts i knew i had the proof and the best equation for god that's not faith i didn't have any faith i had a set of post-enlightenment beliefs what i have today is a trust in god i might even say the faith of a child you know the greatest theologians i know there's six just b6 again [Music] hi mike hi jamie and um on your podcast when you said that you're coming to costa mesa i'm like oh that's that and specifically this building like that's four four blocks away from my office so it'd be a tremendous waste to pass up that opportunity um speaking of costa mesa and orange county in general there are you may have noticed a lot of affluent people here and there's a lot in the bible that talks against uh affluence you know the love of money is the root of all evil and all that so my question is um is actually about charity and like why does it still exist so to elaborate um thank you because i was about to strike out on that one yeah um you know it's easy to imagine that um that like with tribes of about 150 people that if there was somebody who is not doing super well that you would want to like help them out a lot and so i'm figuring that that's a lot of the route where charity comes from but now we have like charities that are across the globe and helping people that don't even help us back and like there's no tangible way in which they enrich our lives because i think i can give to a patreon thing and but that's not charity that's me placing a value statement on this or if i that's how i think of it if i help my brother out who's hurting or something like that and they can't immediately give back to me i i i love them enough and that that comes back to me but i don't even know these other people across across the other side of the world and so we have so much opportunity here to uh to give to those things but i think that we don't because we don't really see it and um but then there are some of us who do and um and continue to give to to charities like that and i'm wondering like why is that just a vestigial remnant of a tribal culture or is there some further utility that that's not immediately obvious love it i love it i really like how that question ended is there a further utility to quest to charity that justifies this ongoing existence welcome to the enlightenment folks um that's spiral dynamics you have you heard our episode on that yeah this is super orange so obviously i'm pleased uh okay so there's a funny thing about people we are really amazingly kind and generous and incredibly violent and selfish that so we are both the most gregarious primate and the most violent it's real weird there's a huge spectrum our brains are oversized to say the least and that's been a pretty good gig for us you know we invented clothes and we got to go further out of our tropical range than we were kind of evolved for we invented shelter which further extended that advantage then we figured out you could burn stuff which was a real boon to the species may ultimately be our demise but for now it's good um i'm serious like 440 parts per million that's where we are right now like right now the air outside doesn't meet the quality level that air conditioning systems are supposed to meet inside in terms of co2 concentration that's a real pickle how do you get the co2 in the building lower than the co2 outside when you're pulling air from outside i mean that's like a real problem sorry that one was free and if we look at our nearest uh genetic relative the chimpanzee we find a fellow brutal ape uh chimpanzees compose war i don't know if you know this they wage war they're another war-making primate they uh assemble coups to overthrow their governments it's not just us and when the when the guy in charge figures out aku is forming he puts it down with incredible force like possibly including a loss of life in his own 50-member community so losing a member of a community that size actually pretty traumatic and chimpanzees have a pretty pretty rigorous loss assessment protocol for members of their troop some injuries and it's like it's really good knowing you but then other times if they kind of have this assessment that you might make it through it then you might be brought food you might the the troop might slow its progress through a given region to help you out so judged by that metric it's kind of weird that we're charitable uh some of you know this is going if you've heard if you've heard me give this speech the other ape that's the closest to us genetically is the bonobo bonobos are like just like chimps except completely different they look similar their dna is really similar but they're incredibly philanthropic they're incredibly violence averse chimpanzees resolve conflict through brutality bonobos resolve conflict through mutual masturbation that's how they figure out like that you had a big fight there's a disagreement i got an idea right because they're both just states of neurological arousal so you've got to just you've got to displace neurological arousal so chimps fight and bonobos friend each other so what's the difference between the evolutionary pressure on chimpanzees and bonobos they are on other sides of a river valley and there's just so much food where bonobos evolved that nobody has to worry about getting enough to eat and where chimpanzees evolved there's not as much food and so troops viciously and violently patrol a territory to make sure they can feed themselves and their children has absolutely no parallels in human civilization right when do we get generous when we feel like we have enough or when we feel like there's an existential threat to our community and then we become very generous to members of our community those are kind of the two generosity buttons for humans so we feel like we have enough we can be generous now then you have this uh philosopher early in the first century named jesus and he said it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven it's not a verse i've always been a huge fan of because i didn't like really identify myself as rich as a kid and then i learned about like the conditions of the world and i went oh man i'm loaded and then some of his his cohorts in the new testament uh money is the root of all kinds i think that's paul right money is the root of all kinds of evil not all evil but many different varieties of evil i think is a pretty good translation of that verse and i think that's completely true because we want to secure our chimp self wants to secure enough resources to take care of ourselves and take care of our families well how much is enough resources to take care of your family well who knows what could happen so i'll be real i'll be r can i be real a second for just a millisecond tell the people how i feel for just a second uh sorry so it's a hamilaria okay some of you haven't seen hamilton yet go see hamilton what are you doing uh it's coming to l.a do you know that yeah i'm going to see it again so i used to work on advertising and i don't know if you know this but if you're an evp and an ad agency network that is somewhat more financially lucrative than podcasting like slightly and i would have all this anxiety about did we have enough money to take care of the family in the event the global economy collapsed and i didn't make any income for a whole year so i wanted to make sure this is real talk i'd keep enough money in the bank that we could survive for a year with no income that's a lot of economic resources and then when i had that i was like but what if currency stops meaning anything i should probably stock up on some kind of barnable goods and then i need like a secure enclave to store those things because let's be honest i can't fight anybody so i gotta hide that stuff and like something people can't tear down but like it's hidden because humans are clever and they could tear apart my secure enclave and then i don't have a million rows of toilet paper or whatever crazy thing i came up with that would be useful in the apocalypse right by the way i'm convinced if things go down he who has the most tp is a rich man indeed can you just imagine they're like i've got these chickens you're like hey you remember this stuff come on leaves how many chickens you get for all right so i just want to act and then what happens we become so justified that through our work that we have stored up our stuff and the reason the other person stored up stuff they just didn't work as hard as we did and at that point we see the person walking by and you know hey man you should have got a job you should have a job or we hear about someone you know working at housekeeping it's like get a better job go to school work like i did build yourself from nothing if life is a race not only did i start 20 yards ahead i've got running shoes on and they're barefoot and that's what jesus and paul are talking about we get convinced that we filled our storehouse and someone didn't because they're lazy and then we ignore the poor and when jesus gave that parable about the rich man and the poor beggar it didn't end well for the rich man right like he he went to this place of eternal torment and he could see back on the earth he would i'd do anything for just a little water it's like one of the harshest warnings jesus ever gave and why did jesus give such a harsh warning as a story we've already talked about that story is what changes human behavior now we get to charity charity works when you take someone with resources and you tell them a story about someone who lacks and that creates a sense of sympathy and charity is better than no charity but i'm becoming increasingly convinced people without economic resources don't need sympathy there's a term i've heard in the last couple months that i love called poverty porn and poverty porn is when you take a child usually black in africa who's malnourished and you take a picture of them doing this and it just stirs people's heartstrings right so they give money every month going a place they don't really know or understand and then sometimes they even go visit africa because they can help and they can dig a well or whatever and then some people go to africa and they go wait what's that and the africans are like oh that's a city it's like but i saw a picture and you just live in dirt and it creates a false narrative about the many countries of the continent of africa have you ever noticed that charity just talks about africa you know what i mean like not every continent is so nationally dominated as north america sorry canadians um like other continents that it's such an oversimplification to distill africa to just this one block and just this one living condition and so the problem with narrative driven charity is we want to create a relationship in which the recipients of charity need us and our generosity and i'm becoming convinced a better narrative is the way in fact that the west needs african nations and the west needs india and the west needs the far east and the middle east why it's not like we got everything figured out it's one of the masters of multiculturalism we are in the united states right the masters of sustainable living uh we've got to come up with models that transform charity into partnership we don't need to ship shoes to africa if you ship shoes to africa you put the many nations of africa shoemakers out of work we need to invest in people in other countries that make shoes we need to invest in job opportunities we need to secure basic resources and the best way you do that is by funding initiatives that put people in communities to work and don't rely on us exporting people there to build something that no one knows how to work and then leaves so charity is a beautiful notion that i think is it needs to be replaced it needs to be replaced with partnership and that means the stories we need to tell are yes those who don't even have the basic necessities but those who just need a little boost to get an economy going and uh i haven't seen a perfect model that's one reason like i love kiva anybody any kiva people in here kiva like you do micro loans into communities for investment to build local businesses and i think that's a pretty good thing so i keep putting money in kiva and then when i get paid back in kiva i just loan out the money again and i keep adding money and people came back and it just keeps growing into this my own little fund i managed that's not ideal i'm not on the ground right there's kind of a weird international kickstarter component to it but i'm saying we need to find models that allow us to work in partnership but the only way we become interested is through the story in the first place that's why jesus told stories that's why all the compelling people in the world tell stories that's why when i wanted to give a book that i'm plugging my book in an answer about charity that is terrible mike that was an accident it is a good book though and for sale on the back um i i gotta i go to kathleen i'm like i've got all these ideas about science and god and faith and and i'm building this encyclopedia and i think i brought you like a 39 page table of contents 39 page table of contents about all the topics i would like to explore in depth because i have the ultimate answer to how science and god are compatible so we sit on kathleen's porch for like hours and she goes hey what if you told your story i was like nobody wants to hear my story hey like i've been on you made it weird and told a bunch of places everyone's heard my story she's like uh hold on like not everyone's heard your story there's more people in the world than pete holmes listeners uh and also what when people bring you in to talk somewhere what they ask you to do oh they usually ask me to tell my story so i took like some of my favorite stuff of that 39 page outline and i put it in the narrative of my experience because it opens people's brains up but to to finally wrap up your question i've rambled a lot i apologize charity is the intersection of our chimp nature and our bonobo nature and it's hacking our brains to believe that the conditions for generosity exist that's a good thing ultimately but today many of the ways that we execute charity create dependence and exploitation instead of what we actually need which is universal economic empowerment and education especially for women nothing changes a society like educating its women [Music] how's it going good how are you excellent um okay so i apologize for any generalizations i might make with this question in advance i tend to do that um but i i my question was about empathy okay so um i i am one who struggles with empathy just like generally like socially relationally in all things and um and uh in this um election season i have become like acutely aware of the lack of empathy that um and this is when the generalizations come in that like you see particularly between white people and and people of another color and also on the other side of people of another color with white people we i i'm here with some friends and we're starting a church in a place um that is a little bit more um i'll say it it's browner than us it's more hispanic than us and that's and that's all sorts of interesting and something we've been learning to kind of uh to kind of lean into um it's really interesting with language and all of that yeah and so my like my question is is how do we learn empathy on both sides um i heard um like kind of one of the most the more interesting things that i've heard recently is i don't know if everyone here knows about colin kaepernick he's a quarterback for the san francisco 49ers and he kind of started this movement in which he was kneeling during the national anthem yeah and i heard barack obama and he he talked um president barack obama i'm sorry uh he uh he uh barack obama from columbus ohio correct yeah the president brock that's a common mistake yeah yeah he uh he was asked during like a forum with like veterans like hey what do you think about this protest um as as a as a as a veteran as a wife of a veteran who's someone who was killed in combat this hurts me what do you think about this protest and his answer was i would encourage all of us who feel against colin kaepernick hear the pain that he is expressing by kneeling during the national anthem and i would also encourage colin kaepernick and whoever else would feel like hey it is necessary to kneel or do something during the national anthem to hear the pain of like a wife a mother a sister a daughter whoever it might be of someone who might have been killed in the army yeah and i thought that was just like a profoundly beautiful statement of like it is it is listening on both sides and so to wrap all of that up how do we learn as christians and people who love jesus to have empathy for the black man for the white man for the brown man for the one who is for war for the one who was against war for the one who was for gun for the one who was against gun for the one who was for clinton for the one who was against clinton for the one who was pro-trump for the one who was against hmm if only that question had any relevance to our current circumstances uh i'm super empathetic by nature let me start there and i didn't know why that was then i i've decided god didn't exist and then i decided god did exist and then i got kind of kicked out of my denomination and i felt great empathy for the people kicking me out of the denomination and in therapy i figured out i'm so empathetic because as a bullied kid and so i know what it's like to suffer so i don't like it when people suffer this is a terrible analogy but the only stories i have on my own one of the reasons i respond so viscerally to seeing black men under the knee of police officers is because two kids used to love to throw me on the ground and put their knees in my back and just let me scream and it's just why would you do that to a person ever and i was telling my mom i figured out that i was empathetic because i was bullied as a kid and my mom said no you're not well i'm out of therapy and insight in therapy you don't question people's therapy insights but she said don't you remember we used to pray every night and i said yeah and she said don't you remember every night you would pray for your bullies um so i don't know why i'm so empathetic but i've just always been that way but i've found sometimes i am less empathetic so what creates empathy your own suffering when you identify in someone else your own suffering that's why we grow new insights to new groups of people is we recognize it's very selfish you don't want others people to suffer because if you stand up for them maybe when the knee is in your back they'll do the same for you it's not all that altruistic if you think about it uh remember that we'll come back to it but when i'm not as empathetic either i don't recognize the suffering or i've let cynicism creep in now cynicism is what happens when an figures out the thing they hold dear doesn't apply in the real world cynicism is a way to cover woundedness to cover pain to intellectualize it to distance yourself from it to ironically laugh at it cynicism exists as a psychological defense mechanism and we live in an age in which irony is just sprayed like spray paint on everything tagged everywhere to distance ourselves from the trauma of living in our society i think if i can get really like where i've been reading lately a lot of this has to do with an innate awareness of the way a culture premised on white supremacy just grinds out marginalized people like greece under its wheels and you need that ironic detachment to not become aware of not only your suburbs are nice because we did government wealth distribution after world war ii specifically to people of a certain skin color but also that most of the stuff we buy that's not very expensive comes under a mechanization that grinds that labor out of the most economically disadvantaged people in the world my liberalism is showing so um i'm real new to the liberal thing i grew up in the south so we've become cynical we've either been hurt and it detaches us from our ability to feel and sense the suffering of others so to become more empathetic am i cynical and am i recognizing suffering mindfulness helps now what has ultimately helped me become empathetic in the most situations is a very scientific world view of human beings in which i understand every single person is a computer and their brain is running software they didn't write or install so if you're told your whole life that the reason we salute the flag and say the pledge of allegiance and the reason we stand at the national anthem is because good honest men gave their lives to fight for freedom in a world that wanted to take it away over and over and over you've implanted some code deep into someone's operating system and when they see someone burn a flag or kneel they have a visceral reaction but they didn't create that stance that was indoctrinated in them by culture this is especially hard for white people why because our culture is dominant so we know our culture you know who else knows our culture everybody else because you want to go to public school you want to go into a supermarket you better act a little bit white right you want to get a job that pays well you gotta act super white so other ethnic groups have learned to to put on a mask of whiteness and enter our spaces and then they leave and get to be themselves like it's i literally did this when i realized for the first time not that long ago that my black friends weren't truly themselves even one-on-one because it couldn't be so i got on youtube and looked for videos that they were only black people like socially like what's it like like what do they do and uh it was amazing i'm serious like like when i would go to a family gathering everyone sort of stands around like kind of formally like very whitely and like very in control of themselves and like maybe someone do something funny everybody goes that was funny ted and i remember i saw this one this one video i didn't remember what happened but something like good happened and everybody started cheering and then dancing and there was no music and everybody was just dancing and like joyful and i was like whoa and i was super jealous i'm not kidding like my culture hasn't equipped me to have that kind of moment so different groups get different software from their culturalization and it's all culture because if you look at brain structure you look at dna these aren't innate things these are cultural things and when i realize everybody is doing their best to live out the cultural code they've been handed i'm much more empathetic so what is my goal with a given person to give them the perspective of another code base right to translate the networking protocols that don't make sense uh i've noticed a lot like when my white friends first wake up to racial justice they're like we gotta do something because like it's just it's terrible to be black in america which is true but it's not all terrible to be black in america so like the first thing that happens when white people get into racial justice is like we gotta go save black people because and this this became rhetoric in trump's campaign like the inner cities are terrible places uh there's this thing called black joy and it's incred like that we can't demean the existence of black people to nothing but suffering all we've got to do is like stop actively oppressing black people and they'll be fine that's all they need is like hey white people like just don't arrest us way more often for doing the same [ \_\_ ] you do like boom like most of the problems off okay now what like maybe like suspend our children at the same rate you suspend your children from school it's not rocket science but it's cultural code but that works really well to explain to the privileged where i have a lot more trouble is trying to create empathy the other direction and what i've learned is that's just not my job it's never my job to take someone from another cultural context and be like hey you need to understand this so what i do in that situation i'm an on-demand resource that's why i started this podcast so a big part of my audience is secular people they're not christians they're not interested in god they're just trying to understand this like weird religious thing that seems to regularly take over the whole country politically and so they follow me and like hey could you like what's the deal with you guys loving like a like a rabbi carpenter's kid 2000 years ago explain that to me then i create that cultural context and because i've i've presented myself as a very safe person i also sometimes get questions from marginalized people wanting insight into the lived experience and thought process of their oppressor but i never push that those insights out do you see what i'm saying this is part of the i think in all these situations in fostering empathy and awareness it has to start with us and then when we start to extend that beyond ourselves we always have to be aware of power dynamics and as much as i would love to say we're all the same and we are we aren't all treated the same and so my words carry the weight of a system and i can't ever get away from that i can never get away from that i can never get away from the fact that if i walk into a room full of people of another ethnic group or race it changes the dynamic my very presence changes the dynamic i'll tell you exactly how to end this very long answer i was in the holy land and i was with a friend he said you know what we should do we should go into the muslim quarter of the old city i was like hey i don't know if you know this it's like 1 30 in the morning and we went through a certain gate i remember what i think the damascus gate and the state department says never go to the damascus gate somebody's like hey what if we just went like two in the morning to the damascus gate i was like that's a great idea and so this kid on twitter had tweeted me he's a muslim kid he's like listen your podcast if you ever come to the muslim quarter let me know so i direct message him at 1 45 in the morning like on my way right now so we get there and it's pretty much shut down kind of spooky it's the old city at night and everybody was like closing down their shops and they see us walk in and they start opening back up their shops right and so this uh very nice muslim man like right by the gate we go hang out at a store we're talking about like football with him like football not football um sorry internet you'll just have to figure that out through context close and he like gave us drinks and um i noticed that as we kind of walked through people kind of watched out for us and i asked one man i was like why are you're i mean it's great you're so welcoming but like it's late and he said well you know there's a lot of fear right now and we haven't seen americans in a while especially not in the middle of the night and uh we just want to make sure you're safe and i said well why are you so concerned that i'm safe you don't even know me and he says if one american gets stabbed in this quarter my children and my grandchildren will starve so even though i'm an individual i represented a power system so strong that that vendor feared for my safety because of the ramifications of the system so i was having this conversation between two people both of us the universality of mankind and what he saw was the largest military force and aggressive foreign policy in human history [Music] hi um i was curious as to what science is behind gender norms if any what science upon gender norms okay yeah i can do that it's bell curves it's where it starts if you look at height distributions male and female they are both bell curves and they overlap but because we're pattern finding machines we kind of associate some heights with being female and some heights of being male if you look at the amount of body hair on a person their bell curves i'm way on one end of that bell curve right i don't know if you could tell from your seats it's actually quite gross um i just body shamed myself which is funny but actually body shamed hairy people i'm sorry uh that was it's funny but it's it's i was very serious so but if you look at those curves right they overlap again but then we denote a certain amount of body hair as being male and a certain amount as being female pick any trait and that's how it works so in time it becomes used to those bell curves we kind of lop the ends off and we assume one is one and the other is the other and then that gets reinforced by some neurological uh predispositions without culturalization as far as researchers can tell a few things are true number one we pretty much universally show favor to more symmetrical faces because that's a sign of a good immune system and someone who's you need a lot of resources to develop symmetry you've got to be free from disease and have great nutrition which means you've got good survival skills and then in women across all cultures the same ratio of hips to waste is favored most all cultures including hunter-gatherer cultures that are still on the planet now the size the absolute size of the hips and waists is not universal but the ratio is universal in men the ratio between the shoulders and the waist is attractive as i get older i get less and less attractive right because my wet my shoulders are pretty fixed my waist varies dramatically by the way i'm not just science mike i'm tour science mike this just goes crazy when you only eat in the atlanta airport so we uh we favor taller people i don't know if you know this like across cultures tall people get paid more for the same job we treat them for more authority tall people men tend to be taller i love this by the way we have an innate deference to deeper voices so whenever i wanted to say something in a meeting i didn't have to like raise my voice i'd just go will i would like to just turn and look now why do we favor taller deeper voice people because if you take civilization out of the picture and you interrupt the tall deep force person both of those are signals that correlate with size and physical strength and pre-civilization he might just whop you one right so those are all kind of innate fixtures that culture builds on oh one other thing most of the neurological differences between men and women are overstated as research is developing one that still has pretty good acceptance although some researchers have pushed back on is that women's corpus callosums in their brain are more active so the two hemispheres of their brain communicate more often effectively men's brains don't talk to each other except they have to so it's like we've got to brush our teeth pick up the toothbrush okay and that's like a male neurological conversation kind of explains how we talk to each other and then women's brains the two halves of the brain are much more communication which some neuroscientists say that women actually form more detailed models of reality that men's models of reality are more simplified i've experienced that because like my wife knows our kids like hopes and dreams and fears and social circumstances and like what they want to do when they grow up and what happened last tuesday at school and like i am vaguely aware that shorter people live in the house and if they don't talk for a while i forget they exist and i love my kids i just my map of reality tends to include like my immediate vicinity right so culture then builds on those things and most of the way we relate to gender is absolutely culturalized this includes gender norms gender identity sexuality in the animal kingdom gender identity and orientation pretty fluid pretty fluid basically the animal kingdom tells us that in terms of our sexual orientation we all have an orientation to seek general stimulation orientation complete right like if we can get general stimulation it's like this is good but humans culturalize that through very elaborate rituals and and and internal narratives where storytelling animal is one of things that's kind of the most human thing is we tell stories and that's why you see pretty dramatic differences across cultures before western globalization and the west kind of through its colonial conquest of the globe has started to impart very specific realities on all cultures and through economic necessity most cultures have adapted more and more towards our norms but they're ultimately just stuff people made up and i think that's an important realization as we talk today uh about where people are and how how they experience their own gender identities that we just made all that stuff up that what we're talking about is overlapping bell curves that biologically are nowhere neat and tidy as the story we tell and i think this is also true if we forget non-traditional gender identities and sexual orientations when we talk about the role women play in society even in a room like this which i'm assuming is is fairly open-minded and progressive um we've got a a relatively similar gender split in the room but there's a bias towards men going i got a question in women listening and assimilating and that's a cultural pressure and a conditioning and we've got to intentionally create the space and the incentive to tell a new narrative to change the software running on our brains [Music] my name is taryn and i work at the university and we're planning an event um about the title of surviving the end of the world but the tweet yeah but the topic or the questions are why it's interdisciplinary panel um and we're talking about why are people so obsessed with the apocalypse why is that being reflected in our popular culture in walking dead world war z etc um and as i've been planning this event i've been listening to your podcasts and little churches and interested to hear what you would say about why neurologically psychologically our culture um is obsessed with that and what do we gain from shows like the walking dead and which i've never seen and world war z okay that's a great question pretty easy gig modernism for all the stress we have about identity issues and economics we are eaten by predators way less often than we have been historically and do not hear me minimizing anyone here but we starve to death far less often across the globe than we ever have the existential immediate danger of living is much less than it used to be we have a whole new set of diseases that come from a species that has too many available calories that has things too easily and most of our leading causes of death among young people have to do with like transportation we put like evolved primates behind the wheel of metal cages moving at high speeds with far more energy than it comes out of the barrel of a gun and we're just like hey you know what put them all in the 405 at the same time and we just that's going to be cool it's not going to be a problem and we weren't designed to deal like as much we tried to engineer our environment ultimately humans shouldn't drive right like that's i just can't wait for robot cars so why do we love apocalyptic fiction one of the reasons is the same reason we love a roller coaster the same reason we love a haunted house the same reason we love a thriller novel in some way for us it feels good to be scared fear is a state of neurological arousal now that's different than sexual arousal but it's still in some ways physiologically similar and it reminds us like what it's like to be alive because most of the time like our native environment has become the cubicle it's that's just not a visceral existence you know what i mean it's like well uh did you get that powerpoint done that we've got to do tuesday uh no but i got like two more slides to do okay and then like our inner ape just goes what is happening what if this is not what i'm meant for why does life seem so empty because it kind of is you know what i mean it's like oh i'm really hungry like i guess i gotta get my phone out and open post mates i mean that just never happened in our evolutionary history so i mean that never i mean like that's not unfathomable to me as a kid like you can just pull out a slate of glass and food appears at your house that's incredible and so we like to be afraid we like to experience some of the things we were developed for only like it's not actually dangerous like occasionally people die on roller coasters but not much not much nowhere near as often as running from a bear um it's just not even close i some of you might say citation needed i don't actually have the research to back that up that was conjecture uh so that's one thing the other thing is i think we have a an innate awareness today especially of the shaky ground in which our safety is built on and we're becoming increasingly aware of that i've seen several anthropologists lately who are like yeah of course brexit of course trump it's been a long time since we've all just blown each other up and humans have an itch for that like we really historically we just don't go more than three generations without massive conflict historically speaking and this is totally indisputable fact war is the normal state of human cultural behavior and peace is the abnormal state so we've had this very odd post-world war ii period that despite some really messy stuff inter-state violence is as low as it's been for as long as it's ever been intra-state violence it's a different story but inter-state violence has been as low as ever been now part of that we think is probably nuclear weapons because you've got some powers now they're like well if we really throw down if we let the monkeys out right we're all gone but at some point when you get enough generations removed and that assumption is just made and no one has in living memory has seen thousands of people die on a battlefield no one in living memory has seen an atom bomb except for on youtube like maybe it's worth it just to let them know we're the best and i think in the same way that a roller coaster is a safe exploration of what it used to feel like to run from a bear world war z is a safe exploration to imagine where we could be heading as a civilization part of your brain is called the orbito frontal cortex and among its many jobs it's your daydreamer a third of your time is spent daydreaming in fact tonight you're listening then you're not then you come back then you daydream again that's normal it's survival like someone here tonight has been like what if science might get sick and i have to answer the questions anybody go ahead raise your hand if that was you tonight oh man i actually got that twice man oh well la's too flight or someone's lying but you know what you've done that before like you've been at an event you're like what if i have to be up there your brain is like trying to predict a possible outcome to have a planned response so you don't lose social standing right uh and you think about this all the time and these types of fictions are way of our cultural imagination collectively using our orbital frontal cortex to prepare for the worst so for someone like me like i got really into zombie fiction and just so we're clear i shouldn't say this on the internet because i'll get raided if it happens i got a lot of freeze-dried food like if it comes down i can't eat a long time i'm not telling you where internet so don't come looking but uh like when the hurricane hit tallahassee and all the power was out and everybody's like it's no big deal we're gonna not power from afternoon i'll be like i know what's happening we'll be out power for days and it's okay because i got these jetboil stoves where i can boil water a little bit of time and then pour powder in them and then have a delicious meal and my wife made fun of me so much until about the third day we were eating that hot food and all our neighbors were like almost out of saltine crackers and i remember my daughter brought over the neighbors like as of his jet boiling she's like look this is my dad's have and i'm like mad i said what are you doing and that's when i realized my true nature and character but the reason i had all that free stride food was zombie fiction right that it just got real in this room and it's it's uh it's us trying to imagine the worst and the you know the question is how likely is it a rising of the undead not very a collapse of the social order i hope i'm wrong about that but history tells me civilization isn't nearly as galvanized as we've believed in the post-war period so i'm laurel from san diego hey and um i've been thinking about the idea of anger lately since uh you know tuesday and um and hold on for just for a second i want to be very clear to the what i found out relatively significant number of conservative trump voting ass science mike listeners i really do genuinely appreciate you and i hope you haven't felt too much like the butt of the joke tonight although if you feel too bad just remember you run the country right now so all right so um i've been feeling uh i've been feeling very angry and especially in terms of just my place in this world as a woman and and i don't want to talk about it because i'm going to get mad even more mad but i want to talk about the emotion of anger and i want to talk about where it's housed in our bodies from like a scientific perspective and i want to know if the intention of moving successfully through that feeling is to get rid of it or if it is to transform it into something else i'm not sure if you're familiar with like somatic experiencing but the idea that you're sort of dispelling the trauma from your body or integrating the trauma and i want to know what purpose anger serves and like how do i get it the f out of my body okay great question um first anger's not bad i'm saying that for me i've had a lifelong notion that displays of anger are bad but like this it's not bad evolutionary anger is really important when two cute little cubs on the nature program are frolicking and all of a sudden the two cubs and mom both do like this and here comes a big grizzly and then the narrator goes like in the most like impartial way sometimes when calories are scarce adult male grizzlies will murder and consume cubs and then mate with the mother and you're like what my kids are sitting here it's not geo um and they like run and then like the much larger male grizzly is kind of closing in and then something happens in mom and she stops running and she's like you know what i mean what just happened she got angry and when she got angry a lot of stuff happened a part of her brain called the amygdala which coordinates the anger response went let's do this adrenaline glands warped in right body chemistry starts changing okay so the adrenaline surges capillaries all restrict they reduce blood flow to the outer layers of the body so in the event that the skin is cut you bleed less this creates a tingling sensation cold hands cold feet right so the capillaries are strict respiration increases we start getting more oxygen into the blood so as we exhaust atp we can create as much as we can as long as we can to fight as hard as we can or run right it's called fight or flight for a reason but fear and anger are so similar in the brain for a reason you can turn on a dime between those two right and it's all based on your brains your limbic system really assessing the probability of you winning or losing the fight if you start to lose the fight the anger goes fear and you want to run if you think you can take them or you think running is not an option you're going to get mad as hell so you can survive now when your amygdala is on you can't learn you're defending yourself your analytical capacity is not available right forming complex mirrors memories or theory is hard you don't really have empathy when you're angry but it turns out sometimes an anger display even if it creates a corresponding anger in the other person can throw off enough balance to actually create a productive conversation or change behavior so if i'm in an environment where someone punches me often and i say can we discuss your need for violence to resolve situations that's not an effectively like a good behavior determined but if i'm like i'm going to kill you if you hit me one more time and like i put up enough of a display that can modify human behavior and i've learned that in driving different forms of progress and change an anger reconciliation cycle is actually helpful it's just blown my mind uh the problem is if you're angry all the time if you're angry all the time it's not only terrible for you like after you have like a big angry outburst you're at a significantly increased risk of heart attack for a couple of hours create stress on the heart so if you're angry all the time by the way anybody here maybe feel angry a lot thanks to social media like every time the them and the us or them says something you're like that's cardiovascular stress you are killing yourself um i'm serious so we recognize first that anger is not all bad but that chronic anger is unhealthy for us and potentially less productive at creating the outcome we desire socially is that enough fine print and caveats uh and then to dispel that kind of anger a couple things have to happen one you can have a therapeutic approach to anger anger mindfulness can help a lot i feel angry what do i do i become aware of what anger does in my body my respiration rate increases so i intentionally breathe more slowly i tend to bring my body in ready to defend myself so i intentionally relax and if it's my thoughts that are triggering that i learn to observe my own thoughts and when i have a thought that could potentially make me angry i say hey thought let's just move along i'm going to think about bunnies or whatever i don't know why i went to bunnies bunnies are adorable have you ever been mad at a bunny no why am i apologizing that was a great example think of a bunny uh but that's like a therapeutic approach to anger and there's another approach uh sometimes we're angry because we haven't forgiven someone this is big because evangelicals use forgiveness like a sword you must forgive that person that hurt you as a spiritual discipline it becomes oppressive and abusive this is not what i'm talking about what i'm talking about is the scientifically documented fact that when you harbor resentment or you haven't forgived another person our friend rob says you give them uh rent-free space in your head and that turns out to be neurologically true when you haven't forgiven someone you have diminished cognitive capacity so on problem-solving tests if you remind someone of a person that you have them to think of someone they haven't forgiven then their cognitive capacity on tests is reduced they can't jump as high that's great they can't jump as high and if you give them a task that's physically difficult they give up faster so the rent-free space in your head hey it doesn't even affect the other person and it hurts you so what i'm saying is as an act of self-care i encourage the discipline of forgiveness now how do you forgive people scientifically one you try to understand the motivations of their actions even the ones that hurt you and you might say i can't do that what they did was so horrible that means you have more grieving to do and if the trauma is deep we may be talking about decades of grieving before you can get to an understanding of what motivated their actions not a justification mind you simply an awareness of how from within their context they did what they did and then after that this comes from studies if you can harbor no ill will toward them that's another big step towards forgiveness and finally if you can wish them well this is not a two and a half minute process and depending on how deeply you were hurt by someone this can be a very very long process indeed and what i'll tell you is neurologically that process improves your cognitive performance and your physical performance and ultimately makes you feel less angry one more thing studies have shown that belief in a god whose primary attribute is loving also reduces our anger response so if the person has hurt you too much you can't get there praying or meditating towards god can reduce your amygdala response and ultimately help enable the forgiveness process because if you believe god is love the world becomes safer and even if you can't balance out you believe god can whether that is true or not factually i don't know by the way it changes your behavior and it changes your ability to operate in the world [Music] so um i think all of us are still processing the results of tuesday yeah and uh some of us are processing it by going to the streets and protesting yeah i was curious to get your perspective on this um what do you think is being communicated by these protests do you think uh it is is grief pure grief or do you think people are kind of losing faith in democracy and our kind of our whole social structure yeah protests one common narrative is they don't do anything that's a really common narrative so they're just an expression of grief they're a language of the oppressed they don't do anything but we still talk about a bridge in selma alabama and it's not because it was a hashtag because that wasn't a thing it was because people organized to reveal a systemic issue and we remember selma because men on horseback and with batons beat black people and some sympathetic clergy for a little bit um and it got pushed into our cultural identity and actually drove change so we have a tendency to romanticize the reverend martin luther king jr by saying well he never organized stuff like this that's ridiculous he totally organized social movements and non-violent resistance and he wasn't just always this like quiet you know what i mean that's like a false narrative um so protests absolutely express grief and they absolutely express anger and they are part of the democratic process not something outside it right to assembly is in the constitution for a reason because at some point america was the colonies and what do we do weeped into our tea which we hurled in the sea when we saw them go by sorry i went right into hamilton again we had a protest that went to a riot and sometimes the riots turned into massacres and the massacres did what they raised sympathy for the rebels when the british oppressive force massacred colonists which by the way is why hamilton is so brilliant among many reasons because it is it associates the founding fathers with hip-hop culture because they were like the upstarts fighting against the man and so i love that all the british people in hamilton are like literally white i just really it's so clever but we shouldn't i don't i think it's i don't think it's a great narrative to ascribe protests as being a lack of belief in democracy as much as an expression of what democracy actually is democracy is messy and has always been like we tend to say like we're in this unique age of divisiveness and it's like are you kidding me you know i mean go back and read about the founding fathers hated each other i mean like aaron burr killed alexander hamilton like that's not a figure of speech like he literally shot the guy and our constitution represents a messy compromise between multiple groups of people that had conflicting interests and created a working framework where nobody was super thrilled with the result but they feel like the other guy was equally unhappy so they signed it you know like that's it i said the electoral college they hated it the electoral college was designed as like a compromise agreement between people who wanted a republic and people who wanted democracy and finally like i'm sure they were all tired we got to ratify something so none of us like this sign it and if i i am not aware of any point in american history where systemic change or reform did not involve some form of protest the abolitionist protested the people fighting for women's right to vote protested the civil rights movement protested protesting happens when voting won't allow the progress protesting happens when votes aren't enough so for a while only certain people could vote now voting is relatively universal although we did pull back the voting rights act which has made voting like less universal again uh which is a real problem but it's totally a means of democracy now do i think people have maybe less confidence in the republic right now yeah i do but we're in a lot of ways we're doing like a really terrible job here's the thing the people who voted for trump some of them were just like normal gop elites but not west virginia west virginia is not full of elites that don't have a legitimate gripe about being left behind in the economy poverty in west virginia is terrifying the people in the in the uh the blue firewall that all their factories are gone they don't know where to get jobs they don't know how to feed their kids and they feel not only left out but actively mocked by urban elites like us and the the the i believe firmly the cauldron we sit in now is a system where the most powerful among us have either intentionally or accidentally through a system inherited a system that was intentional designed to keep disadvantaged people fighting each other while the top of the food chain just is getting better and better right that's the brilliance the brilliance of 2016 is to take oppressed and marginalized coalitions with the democrats and get them fighting oppressed and marginalized republicans uh the part of the country i live in north florida i live in what is basically manhattan in that region tallahassee it's a huge city of over 300 000 and compared to everything around us is unimaginably huge for three hours in any direction there's nothing but farmland and all my family grew up in a rural farming community my dad came from nothing the first first person in our family to go to college ever he used to wake up early in the morning and farm for hours before he went to school and then he went to school and then he came home and he worked the fields and did his homework and played football and went to bed exhausted his dad couldn't be on the farm because he drove a truck to try to make up for the bad years and he worked on the razor's edge of poverty his whole life and compared to how things are and now in madison county dad was pretty well off because rural america is collapsing it's just collapsing but culturally they don't protest because a coalition was built that said hey don't worry you're white so you're gonna get taken care of and for a while that was enough forget the fact that you make so much less than us up here like you get your own bathrooms and your factory job you're gonna take care of your family and that contract is falling apart and i think ultimately like maybe we'd be healthier if there were rural marches too if there were rural protests as well if that same sense of was expressed that way and we could figure out that the basic engine of misery in the modern world is a disgusting inequality is a tendency natural for humans to hoard but ultimately that it's not in anyone's best interest it's not in anyone's best interest for the power law to play out and for wealth to accumulate into small pockets of the economy because you don't have an economy anymore and then currency drops and goods productions drops and your big house is no good if there's no economy to run the whole thing and that ultimately the healthiest thing for everyone is more economic equality but all that to say i think we actually need more protest and not less gosh i'm going to get some email on that one but i believe i believe it i believe it like so when i you know i i was flying out the next morning and i opened up facebook live and i saw people were finally protesting in tallahassee and i was happy not dismayed now let's be clear i don't like when protest turns to violence against people for many reasons for many reasons so i'm not saying like that's a good thing it's also i think relatively isolated i think those those stories get over told but i think i think protest is the core democracy not a rising up against it [Music] hi mike my name is dustin um i have a question been contemplating kind of biblically where i feel like we're taught so often about jesus exemplify so often unconditional love yet i was raised under the notion of evangelism and sometimes those things don't go well together and so we're just kind of curious as to your thoughts as to like how do i unconditionally love somebody and true friendship and relationship without trying to convert them or is that the ultimate goal and is that at the end of the day what the bible says and so i'm just kind of like seems really muddy being raised in traditional evangelical world yes great question uh okay we misread the bible a lot in the west because we bring the wrong assumptions to it um jesus was a palestinian literally now the word palestine didn't exist yet but the condition of the soil jesus lived was more similar to the word palestine than the word israel okay why it was an occupied territory it's part of the roman empire roman empire real tough dudes really tough dudes um they reserved crucifixion for treason hell the murderers don't don't get crucified and we don't care if you kill people are you paying your taxes okay then we'll we'll just execute you but crucifixion is for the the great sin of treason which included by the way not honoring caesar as the primary god of the pantheon now you could have as many gods as you wanted but but caesar you had to admit was the ultimate god and so we read the bible as americans and identify with jesus and the jewish people but culturally we're a lot more like rome so a lot of jesus's language was actually incredibly politically subversive and to go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations that was that was like some black lives matter level subversive language to an empire now the trick about the kingdom of jesus as we understand the biblical scholarship most biblical scholarship is uh instead of raising a sword jesus took one in his side jesus had a kingdom whose weapon was love and submission mutual submission pretty wild frankly kind of blasphemous in roman culture and this led some of the earliest church fathers to understand the language jesus used about salvation their soteriology if you will to be a healing of sickness and not a set of things you teach someone that uh the christ which by the way christ that was a real controversy idea the whole trinity thing not real popular uh when it first hit the scene among uh other other similar faith traditions so it was actually fight within the church and also like once the trinity kind of showed up um messianic jewish people were like whoa there's one god but god one god stop with that heresy sorry let's love it we like heresy is just like the best christian tradition there is like we're just a line of heretics so i'll get email about that um so this in this trinity there's a christ that invites to reconciliation and that reconciliation is a healing of sickness so go you therefore in that model is you're on a hospital bed too weak to move and someone puts a cold rag on your head and gives you water and helps you and finally like you start to heal and you sit up and you can sit up and start feeding yourself and then sometimes you can like walk down the hall and lay back down and about the time you're like still not feeling great but you you can function your mandate is to turn to the next hospital bed and put a rag on their forehead and that's the go ye therefore that's the making disciples that's the healing of a sickness the thickness to now blow up that paradigm and bring in modern neuroscience is to invite people into the generous reference frame of certain parts of their neocortex that's the healing of the sick to bias us away from behaviors that only serve ourselves and those we identify as our tribe and to hack our brains to identify all of humanity as the same tribe to work to help other people have that realization that we are in this for each other that the kingdom of heaven is drawn near only when we co-create it and make the room for it we make the room for it by fighting sin now i have almost a trigger to that word uh because it was used in such a specific context in evangelicalism but the idea that sometimes we work against the creation of peace to serve our self-interests instead of for the creation of peace even though it may cost us something that's what i'm talking about when i say sin and in that instance being a good friend is always fulfilling the right commission there is no sales pitch we aren't insurance salesmen there is no quota we are put on this earth to be salt and light we are put on this earth to love people in such a radical way it seems ridiculous and impossible teacher what's the greatest commandment in all of the law to love the lord your god with all your heart your mind your soul and your strength what's the next greatest commandment to love your neighbor as yourself ah but teacher who is my neighbor he tells the story of what the good samaritan the protagonist in that story is probably not the good samaritan the protagonist of the story is probably the man on the side of the road who saw the righteous of his society walk by and failed to help and it was only an outsider who ultimately rendered aid that's a really subversive idea in jesus culture that your neighbor is a samaritan who will help you more than a priest more than one who is educated in the law says to me that jesus is saying your neighbor is not your denomination your neighbor is not people who will say a certain creed the samaritans did not uphold the torah but the go you therefore through that lens is the one who will pour oil on your wounds who will give you water when you've been abandoned who will take you to an end and say whatever he needs to get back on his feet put it on my tab i'll be back to get the bill you want to make jesus known love like jesus did [Music] i i've heard you say on at least one or two other times i think on your podcast that when you're broaching a difficult subject with someone you're very careful to employ certain tactics in your conversation with them to avoid provoking a response from their amygdala so i'm curious what are like some of those techniques that you found to be most helpful okay so i don't like that question because it brings up some identity issues in me i've found a thing lately i consider myself to be an incredibly kind empathetic generous hearted person that's how i identify as a person a man of great humility uh and then my wife says to me jenny fry the honey badger you are so manipulative it's like i'm not manipulative i don't change other people's behavior for my benefit i change other people's behavior for their benefits michael gunger says i'm the most authentically manipulative person he's ever met all i'm saying is once you see the code you can do some cool stuff in the matrix right so so i've over my life fostered several practices most of which i probably won't share because it would take away my advantage but i'll give you a couple i'm quiet a lot i ask a lot of questions and when people start talking i uh physically lean forward i keep my arms uncrossed and if someone says something that would make me angry i say can you tell me more about that and when people say something that is obviously hurting them and they say oh i'm sorry i say don't apologize i'm so glad to hear this and i help relieve their social anxiety of expressing vulnerability um i try to now some of this comes very naturally because i am empathetic i'm having to verbalize things that have just become disciplines for me that i've kind of developed from my innate self i have a way of watching people's posture i kind of visualize i can only do this as a metaphor i almost visualize myself as an antenna and i turn the gain up very high and that antenna is something that feels the other person's emotions and what that usually looks like is unconsciously mirroring their posture their breathing patterns their tone of voice uh i can't do this on purpose it's just wired in me if you cry i cry it's guaranteed um which by the way if any of you stick around to talk to me after the event if you start crying don't do that because you and i will just cry for 20 minutes and everybody in line is like at first this is really moving and then they're like it's got a long drive to get home and so you you you kind of open this emotional resonance where you feel with other people now the reason i do this now this is the tricky part and i can't entirely explain how i do this but once i've learned to feel the other person's feeling i've done enough self-manipulation i can actively readjust my emotional states like kind of on demand so i start to change the way i feel which starts to reflect into them because we have a state of mutual vulnerability and it's a real delicate dance you can't do it too quickly by the way i also do that with audiences the reason i get so wiped out after these events this tonight hasn't been that heavy but the really heavy ones i'm up here doing this with all of you at the same time i'm trying to feel the emotional aggregate of this entire room and as i answer the question i make sure we've kind of achieved a resonance and then i try to show slowly shift your emotional experience as the answer unfolds so that hopefully whatever i said has enough limbic system resonance to leave the room with you and why i typically do this to help people feel empowered what i found the great disease of our age is a sense of universal disempowerment a lack of agency and so what i try to tell people is the thing that hurt you is real it's okay to cry about it it's okay to hurt about it and ultimately you can move through it and to what end that may vary it might be you can help others in the same situation you can help prevent that situation but i help people be less afraid of their own agency and own it and i think that's my entire playbook and everything i do every book every podcast every allergist podcast episode when i'm talking science all i'm doing is suspending your sense of enlightenment skepticism lowering your cognitive defense mechanisms so i can maybe convince you to care about a group of people you didn't before or if you cared about those people before give you the language to help other people care about them so basically i just admitted to all of you i'm a horribly manipulative human being but i'm doing it hopefully because i genuinely want to see less and less and less suffering in the world and more justice and more equality if i can be like really i'm fostering this honesty and vulnerability publicly that's what i do for a living i am always afraid of my ability to convince other people things and especially now there's some kind of tipping point i've hit where when i say things on the internet they get shared a lot you know like an episode of the literature's podcast now like just a normal episode we'll get a million downloads that's a lot of downloads that's a lot of people listening and i'm finding i have to balance vulnerability with care because as i unpack my experiences people who are very into my work might run ahead with an idea before it's ready and cause more suffering than they address i deleted a tweet yesterday and i'm not even going to be specific about the situation other than people on the internet were beginning to act on the tweet on my behalf like trying to defend me in a way that was intersecting my real life and real relationships so i would say the whole keeping someone's amygdala off is both very powerful and kind of a dangerous drug some people do this intuitively and when they do this intuitively they're just empathetic people when you're cerebral as i am and you don't have any intuitive capacity and everything is a matter of cognitive emulation uh i'm on a constant quest to through great mental effort and self-conditioning just be the kind of person my wife naturally is and that's why when she sits with someone and cries it's not manipulative because i i will admit i literally just see like switches in on people's heads i'm like which one do i need to get their desired outcome like what do i need to convince them of first i have to figure out what they want and then manipulate them into doing what they actually want to do and my wife just goes i'm so sorry anyway she's a better person than i am uh does that answer the question anything else that's good well you've done it you've listened to another episode of ask science mike i want to thank the wonderful greg nordine for his work editing the show my friend andrew golucky for his pre-production work on ask science mike i want to thank my patrons on patreon who picked the questions on the show except for on these darn live episodes but thanks for making the show possible and i can't wait to see you next week and by the way that could be a physical real thing if i'm going to be near you so again go to findinggodinthewaves.com tour thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week [Music]