ASM144 LIVE in Cincinnati, OH

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coming to you from hyde park community united methodist church in cincinnati ohio it's ask science mike [Applause] lives [Applause] [Music] science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith in life with absolutely no qualifications whatsoever this week is a live episode the questions are unscreened the answers unrehearsed and completely unfact-checked please use google liberally if you think the answer is questionable a couple of things just as we start the show tonight one every time i do an app science mic live i get a ton of emails saying why don't you come to blank blank being the city you're in and i absolutely will if you invite me to do so go to ask sciencemic.com and contact me via the website form on my speaking page also i want to let you know that we've started something new and kind of weird with the liturgists which is video workshops the first two of which are on meditation and navigating deconstruction via the enneagram if that sounds interesting to you check out shop.theliturgis.com for more information but for now we've got a show to do so let's get it started [Music] [Applause] [Music] i needed to go first because i'm shaking and i won't be able to enjoy this if i don't get it over with sure um my name is jamie pelfrey i live outside of lexington kentucky um i wanted to thank you um you are that famous person that like oh my gosh he's on stage um you and michael because um i was raised in conservative evangelicalism for 35 years of my life that was my educational background i was homeschooled for most of it um and then went to bible college and seminary and um always was a skeptic always had a lot of questions was told to keep my mouth shut or you're a girl or you're just a kid or you don't have your degree yet or you know you name it um i was told it and so it wasn't until i became a stay-at-home mom that i actually had this face and no one in my ear telling me not to ask the questions um and then my niece and nephew passed away within six weeks of each other and suddenly um all of those questions had nowhere else to go except in all of my emotions and all of my anger i have finally kind of finished processing through some of that and going through deconstruction without being in a context of constant evangelicalism we went to started going to a united methodist church where they didn't really care as much if i didn't agree with everything much healthier place for me um and so in the last six months i've been reformulating my blog because i love to write um to be specifically about post evangelicalism and deconstruction and i've started a group for people in this space and so my question i guess it's kind of a faith life intersect question um is as a podcaster and one of my goals is to eventually start a podcast i bought all the equipment because i was excited and now i'm like no what do i do so from your experience walking into this and now being seasoned and famous how do you even start sharing your story via blog writing podcasting in a safe way and in a way that creates a safe space because that's one of my my main goals is to make it a very safe place for people who have been wounded by the church so i spent like 16 years in advertising in pr where i learned a lot of tricks about creating insecurities in people so you can get them to buy products they don't need i loved it so much i left the ad business right i loved the people i loved the work i didn't like the the basic function which so often was create insecurity or fear so you can solve a solution to it i get asked that a lot and i've had to think about it a lot because this thing i'm doing didn't start as i'm going to be a public figure or a podcaster the animating energy of my work at first was grief and that grief came from growing up in a religious tradition and being ejected from it although actually my work started before that i was a southern baptist when i wrote a blog post called it's not about chicken that came out on chick-fil-a day where i as a southern baptist deacon said i thought there was no problem with same-sex marriage universally loved in the baptist church and evangelicalism that post then i got in a facebook fight with church staff about the age of the earth solid work i mean really bringing people together right out of the gay why would i do that as a person who hates conflict because i had this sense from first intuition and then from sociological data that an incredible number of people sitting in pews feel lonely isolated and afraid because in some way their beliefs about god are out of sync with their religious community one of the earliest and most shocking pieces of data i saw out of one small survey was that one of the best predictors for people undergoing a faith transition that means like leaving one form of faith to another which by the way 45 of people in america will do at some point in their life it's not a fringe thing the best predictor was a difference in the belief of evolution via natural selection that was a better predictor than same-sex marriage or views on abortion or other social hot points evolution was the best predictor and i thought what a ridiculous thing to have people lose their families over like did we come from monkeys or not well no nobody thinks we came from monkeys we think that humans and ants humans and monkeys share common ancestors so we're first of all we're fighting about something that doesn't exist whatever so i started doing this work because i knew other people were having questions about the bible like i'd had and other people were going to church while not believing in god maybe even identifying as an atheist but they were too afraid of rejection and being ostracized to talk about it and anytime you had people saying i was an atheist in church it became this ridiculous sales pitch for jesus where they described atheism in no way that resembled real word real world atheism or atheists and then proposed simplistic solutions to non-existent theological quandaries and said i found my way back to faith and i was determined i'm not here to convince atheists to believe in god i'm here to make it safe for atheists to be who they are so what i've discovered was animating my work was an understanding that the way i have suffered exists in other people and i am determined that those other people suffer less what can i do to address their suffering through my experiences so that started as a blog and facebook posts that really only people i knew in tallahassee florida saw and as i would write those posts and say listen if you're going to church every sunday and you have things you're afraid to talk about i'd love to listen to you send me a message send me a text we'll go to lunch and before i knew it every day for lunch every day of the week i went to somebody else usually often pastors or or leaders in local churches that didn't even go to my church where they would tell me this thing they were struggling with and i would offer absolutely no advice or solution none i would just listen and say i understand and i'd love to just keep listening if you need someone to listen to and uh it turns out that doesn't scale especially well that's about 20 people a month and if the demand is higher than 20 people a month you start booking too far out it seems ridiculous to offer vulnerability online and they're like can we go to lunch i'm like absolutely what's your calendar like in seven months on tuesday it doesn't work so about that time i met michael gunger and realized he was one of those people and we decided to scale we started by releasing records on itunes which like dozens of people downloaded and they they cost a ton of money to make they were a huge amount of work and they reached less people than i was personally reaching through lunch dates so didn't scale very well so we said what if we started a podcast because they're easier to make than these records thinking like the same dozens of people except the podcast took off do you see what happened i didn't start with like how am i going to talk to people i started with what's the animating mission of my work i was to address suffering to a community i knew existed now it turns out on accident i was sort of addressing a community no one else was addressing because you had public skeptics and atheists who were more than happy to lead you out of religion and you had religious people who were more than happy to really lead you back to some form of faith but there was nobody saying i honestly don't care where you end up i just don't want you to be alone during the transition so that exploded right because it turns out the fastest growing faith in america is no faith at all and if there's anything that i get frustrated or tired about that there's still not very many people doing it so it sounds like you have this this need this emotional need to help others suffer less it's a good place to start but don't worry too much about the particular venue just see start with who you know and start small and see where it goes and honestly there's a lot of days where i miss just going to lunch with people so as the the work has scaled i feel so alienated by the celebritizing aspect i i uh i'm not into that i'm not into celebrity culture at all uh especially not in the church and i've tried to make it obvious in my work that i mainly care about is like authentically connecting with other people and if you're like that be careful because it also means you tend to be terrible at taking care of yourself or establishing any form of boundaries uh jenny my wife was very into establishing boundaries once strangers started showing up at the front door to talk to me she was like what if and hear me out our address wasn't public what if we just i was like but these people are suffering you know because i when i when i first started i would get thousands of emails a week and i got an email once from a gay student at a conservative seminary and he said i was about to kill myself and i heard your podcast so i'm i'm sitting here ready to go not doing it don't know what to do so i emailed him back i'm like what's your phone number that was a great plan by the way because clearly i'm qualified to help someone in that state so i call this person i don't know i get up from dinner with my wife and children and i go sit in my office for four hours and he's still alive it may not have gone that way so the other thing is you need to be aware of your limitations as a person and what's appropriate and for different people these things are easier more difficult some people are very easy with the limitations part very but like i'd love to be a celebrity and then other people the boundary thing is tough the the biggest thing you've got to know and for anyone who's thinking about this kind of platform work honestly whether it's even spiritual or not brene brown would have to struggle with this or anyone whose work affects people deeply you can't actually help everyone and you can't actually help anyone you can just be present as people wake up on their own hi my name is jared i'm actually from lexington as well right on hour and a half had to come up here to see you tonight quick background on me when i was uh 14 in an 11 month period i found out my mom had a crack cocaine addiction uh i lost my grandfather i found out my dad had a stage four pancreatic cancer and i lost him as well i was not raised in the church i was living with my grandma at the time because i had been taken out of my mom's custody and i remember sitting there one night and um very depressed teenage years are hard enough and that was a lot to deal with and put a gun gun in my mouth and for whatever reason i didn't pull the trigger and found church and youth ministry shortly thereafter and it probably saved my life um i had a very kind of basic faith at the beginning and stuff and as i've gotten older i realized that it was more of a kind of fake fundamentalist thing and i found you a couple of years ago when you did the interview with the bad christian guys so i've been following your work since then my wife and i just miscarried a child this past july we do have a son that's about to be three though and he's healthy and stuff but uh i just i guess i have an issue dealing with grief in a healthy way and uh i just get like existential dread i'll sit in the shower and be like everyone i've cared about seems like they're dying around me um you know what is the point to this where's the hope in that and i have great days with my son and my wife and it doesn't hit me all the time but i just what would you say is in your experience through meditation and just your spiritual journey can help kind of focus on the positivity of things and in particular i just worry like it's not what if it's not real what if there's nothing after this um because i really want there to be something after this i want to be able to speak with and touch my daughter that i didn't get to meet him and i want to see my dad [Music] i didn't really know what i lost when i was a teenager you just kind of think you know everything and now i want to ask him about career stuff and just talk to him so it's like every year i feel like i miss him more and so what do you do to help find your when you're having bad days hope with the afterlife maybe connecting with those we've lost so thank you i want to honor like the sincerity and authenticity of your question but i wonder if there's a couple things we could frame like you talk about a prior fundamentalism and then you label it fake but the experience in your prior religion was probably very genuine and in your question took you through some difficult times so i wonder something i had to learn and it's not through meditation my friend it's through therapy something i had to learn was to appreciate what being a baptist did for me as a person but then also what really terrible things being a baptist did to me as a person and one thing that's kind of like evangelical especially conservative evangelical framing often creates is a reticence to deal with depression grief or anger because they're labeled as negative or even sinful parts of the human experience but as i listen to your story i hear a lot of tragedy and frankly if you think about it if on the other side of lost family members and a painful loss and miscarriage if your response is like well everything's okay god is in control that actually sounds kind of like sociopathic how normal is it in times of tragedy to be grieved so so one thing i'm learning and i mean learning not learned is that we have such a tendency to mislabel completely valid parts of the human experience in our emotional lives i went to therapy for something much less traumatic i got kicked out of a church and i would talk about it in clinical detail to my therapist and she said yes but how does that make you feel i was like well i just i just told you the mechanics of what happened and my unpleasant physiological reactions that i'm trying to eliminate so can we just get to that she said no no no no how does it make you feel i hated that question i'd say well if i if i think about that i feel this i don't know it feels like a lead balloon in my stomach that might be full of lava it's very difficult to articulate effectively she said what if you didn't articulate it effectively it's like you're a terrible person what do you want me to do like scream or cry and she says why not i said because those are really unpleasant wasteful feelings she said why are they unpleasant or wasteful i said well they they're unpleasant because they're literally unpleasant to experience and they're wasteful because when you get done nothing's happened you haven't accomplished anything well what do you know i just like externalized my internalized evangelical framing of these experiences you should be in grief you should have bad days that is normal that is healthy that is appropriate that is a sign that you are alive so if you can and in my opinion the best way to do this is in conjunction with a licensed professional start to reframe grief as a normative and appropriate part of your life if if you learn to let that briny river flow you may find on the other side is a cleansing or you may not it may be the life experiences you've had mean that you don't have situational depression you might be struggling with clinical depression if that's the case there may be additional interventions required in conjunction with a mental health professional but the the feelings are okay now in terms of the afterlife stuff terrible news i don't have a clue what happens when we die i haven't died and all of my friends who've died have not been courteous enough to return from the death and reply to me an account of what's happened now there are certainly accounts in scripture both the christian scriptures the hebrew scriptures and of course conflicting accounts and other religious traditions about what happens after we die i always think about it like this i love this jesus character in the new testament he mainly talked about what happens in our lives when we follow the way and then kind of paul comes along and helen the hellenized theology comes along and we get these greco-roman conceptions of eternal afterlife and i used to obsess about that stuff but i was actually really comforted by my very genuine experience as an atheist when someone once told me well how unpleasant was it before you were born well gosh i was fine before i was born i don't remember anything i didn't experience anything but it was fine enough so like the scientist in me thinks like it's very likely that after we die there's nothing and i'm pretty okay with that but then i have this weirdo mystic religious experience and ongoing religious experience wherein when i turn inward in meditation where through worship experiences i encounter this transcendent light gosh it would be awfully nice to have some reunification or some in some more enduring experience that way after i die and i'll be thrilled if i encounter god or indeed a risen christ on the other side of death it's like one of the three cognitive pillars of religion is the bias of homo sapiens to not be able to contemplate their own mortality oxford studied this that's one of three things that create religion is the idea we can't imagine our consciousness ending and so we're drawn to mythologies that answer the question of what happens when we die but i found tremendous freedom as a christian in holding the afterlife question with an open hand and i can only do that because i've learned to grieve and fully grieve because scientifically we understand that grief is a persistent separation anxiety that can't be resolved right we're a social species and we get really freaked out when we can't be near someone we care about well boy death makes it very effective that we can't be near someone we care about and our brains continue to long for that sense of connection so now imagine what happens your condition in a faith tradition where it's okay we'll be in heaven one day we don't have to grieve right now and you attach that and repress a separation anxiety you lose this theological certainty over here and what's left a deep well in your soul of unprocessed grief i think these things are totally related but i'm also a community college dropout so i would i'd strongly encourage you to talk in a professional private setting with someone far more qualified than me but i do want to say as someone intimately familiar with the taste of shotgun barrels that i'm glad you're here and glad you didn't pull that trigger and that at any point you feel that dark or that low again know that you are not just accepted but wanted and needed in this life and that you are not a burden on anyone we're glad you're here go ahead you certainly earned it okay um i'm evan from cincinnati and uh my question is i have a smartphone uh i'm on it a lot but i'm not addicted i can stop whenever i want uh but for all those people who are addicted to their cell phones what makes the smartphone and social media so addictive to the human brain okay the first thing i want to clarify is so often in our culture we'll overuse the word addiction addiction has a specific diagnostic criterion addiction creates dependency and withdrawal now i certainly think there are people with smartphone addictions i think they are relatively rare compared to people who struggle with smartphone compulsions what's the difference addiction again withdrawal dependence compulsion just a lack of behavioral control i have very few addictions and man alive do i have a lot of compulsions pizza convulsion for me i can be on a very strict diet i can be having great success i can be feeling great about myself i can go to a place where pizza is being served i can eat 14 slices in five minutes that's not really even an exaggeration it's a compulsion i'm not addicted when i don't eat pizza i don't experience withdrawal i i don't go to a low emotional state i don't start vomiting i don't have withdrawal symptoms from pizza i mean i guess i do miss it it's pizza but it's a compulsion so smartphones are well like we're designed in a lab to engineer compulsions and the way we're understanding this happens is um all compulsions start with a [ \_\_ ] habit formation or being habitual where you have some sort of an environmental cue that when you respond to it gives you a reward right so if you have a rat in a lab and he presses a lever and he gets a treat it's not going to take very long for lever punching to be a compulsion my friends back home in la trained their dog to ring a bell and the dog would get a treat and now their dog nessie just all the time ding ding ding ding ding ding ding looks back ding ding ding like it turned out to be like not as cute as they thought it would be and that's what google and apple and facebook and twitter are doing in your pocket they're giving you a lever that gives you a treat only this treat isn't calories at socialization well congratulations social primates you love socialization you love to feel like you are admired and respected and known by your peers and so every time happens there's a potential reward on the other side of the right internet you can't see i'm touching my smartphone in my pocket they're listening i apologize so when you have a potential reward that's unknown that's actually more powerful in creating a craving than a known reward like you might pull out your phone and bank of america says you got a bill do oh man but that you the reason you don't just like get trained to not like your your smartphone because a lot of time it's that person you knew in third grade liking that picture on instagram and you go yeah so that's dopamine dopamine people think of it as like a reward neurotransmitter it's more of a craving neurotransmitter and man do smartphones and social media put your dopamine production on overdrive so the next thing you know it this becomes your primary means of social interaction which gives you uh it's like trying to stay alive by eating graham crackers there's nothing wrong with graham crackers they're like kind of sweet and kind of meaningless just like social media but there's no nutritional substance to them you can starve to death or at least die of malnutrition eating nothing but graham crackers that's what we're doing researchers are uncovering something that they've called the instagram effect which i'm sure facebook is thrilled about wherein people spend less time with other people but more time on their smartphones and they go out less often but when they do they only post pictures of themselves having a great time so everyone on instagram sits alone at home watching their friends have a good time thinking that the only one singing at home when in fact it is just all your friends aggregating their occasional outings this is bad enough for boomers generation x and for millennials but for post millennials this is such a pronounced effect that they are the most depressed anxious and suicidal generation in american history so smartphone compulsion is not just a hashtag first world problem this is something in my opinion that's a significant threat to human flourishing so here's what i recommend and this is based on pretty good science i've got this memorized you may hear this in an upcoming book by an author who i'm very fond of standing on this stage so turn all the alerts off all of them if you on my phone notification center it's a wasteland it's a graveyard what can notify me phone calls phone calls can notify me my bank can notify me because if someone steals my information i want to know and frankly the bank doesn't bother me very often that's it there's no other notifications on my phone so i've completely lost the cycle if i want to check out facebook i gotta literally go check out facebook which means i do that like twice a day three times a day i get on twitter more because i really like the 140 character thing but at the same time i i schedule through my day times when i'm on my smartphone and when i'm not on my smartphone i do this weird thing i physically take it out of my presence so i sit at my desk my smartphone's in my bedroom what if i miss a text who cares when does something important happen over texts what if somebody calls me they can leave a voicemail i'll call them back it's no big deal believe it or not humans lived on earth for hundreds of thousands of years not only without smartphones cell phones but without phones at all it's no big deal you don't need the phone i'm pretty strict um in the evening a little before dinner time i take my phone and i put it on my nightstand and we just do phone free evenings as a family which creates quality time and like with my kids i de-emphasize digital relationships and because i know my children's generation struggles with in-person social interaction they have an unlimited budget i will always say yes if a friend can come over or you can go to a friend's house guaranteed highly encouraged even if you haven't done your homework yet if you want to go to a friend's house i trust you do your homework later because this compulsion we're seeing through digital media and this is research based i don't think it's paranoia i don't think it's being a ludite bloodites however you say that word eagletarian um i think this compulsion is is really a significant threat to mental health on a broad scale and it's kind of destroying democracy so uh yeah [Applause] hi mike um i was just wondering if you could speak briefly about the whatever potential of risk you see in artificial general intelligence or artificial super intelligence and what the tech community or society at large should be doing in the meantime okay you remember earlier when i welcome those of you who've never heard of me i said i'd like to apologize welcome to the deep end of the pool now you know why if you haven't been grappling with the questions of artificial general intelligence versus artificial super intelligence clearly you're not taking your faith seriously um that's facetious i'm i'm lovingly sarcastic okay let's unpack those terms you know what artificial intelligence is that's when computers think and today artificial intelligence is what uh ai researchers would refer to as artificial narrow intelligence they're really good at one thing right deep blue was great at chess and only chess beat gary kasparov who was the grand champion of chess at the time i think that's what you call the main chess person uh watson was really great at jeopardy he beat that guy ken i mean that's serious business and then watson learned to diagnose illnesses which watson is either competitive with or better than human doctors depending on the study but watson can't play tennis at all in fact there's a game i play called star trek bridge crew it's a vr game i'm such a nerd and you you can have watson listen on behalf of your virtual crew if you're playing single player and it turns out watson's pretty terrible at playing star trek bridge group right great at jeopardy terrible helmsman on the enterprise i'm not kidding this is really a thing i do um so general intelligence is when ai can just do whatever people do just do lots of different things with no training and that's a fundamentally different thing than narrow intelligence general intelligence just can do whatever super intelligence ai soup asi artificial super intelligence is when ai can do anything and is way smarter than people maybe that's ridiculous could machines be smarter than us well we've seen an artificial narrow intelligence at narrow tasks they can be much more intelligent than we are a couple examples there's a game called go which is a game from uh eastern culture that has more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe which is to say mini and so unlike a lot of games go you can't win by just playing every possible move or a lot of possible moves it's a very intuitive game and so a company called deepmind which is owned by google created software that taught itself go strategies by watching people play and then by playing itself and go was considered like after chess like the next step in oh my gosh computers are about to take over the world and we thought it could be you know maybe a decade or more until that happened and then google kind of figured out this self-learning machine learning system and uh alphago trounced the best players in the world now here's the thing alphago didn't learn from first principles it didn't just learn the rule of the game it had to watch more games of alphago than any person has ever played to get good at it so google took that as a challenge and created a new version of alphago called alpha zero which only got the rules of go and then it got to play against itself and alpha zero beat alpha go which was already unbeatable by people and it beat it so handily and so radically that go players are now studying alpha zero's tactics to make humans better go players but google wasn't done they said well let's teach alpha zero chess it wasn't designed to play chess it was just designed to learn games from first principles so they didn't let alpha zero watch a single game of chess they just let it play itself for four hours now alpha go the old version it spent months machine learning alpha zero spent four months studying or excuse me four hours studying the game of go by itself and then beat every chess algorithm in the world and again it was so bold at chess that chess masters are studying it because it approached the game of chess in a fundamentally different way that has been normal in chess for hundreds of years it didn't care about the inventory of pieces on the board it was ruthless about achieving a superior position and so clever computers that people can't beat couldn't beat it when it played so aggressively so this is still a narrow intelligence but it's a lot less narrow any game that has a fixed set of rules where you can see all the pieces in play give it a few hours and alpha zero will be the best at it in human and machine history so the idea here is what happens when computers can modify their own intelligences the theory being computers are very fast they're not constrained by the energy limitations of biological computing like we are they could go from quite dumb to as smart as us to as smarter than us as we are smarter than an ant in a matter of hours or weeks and people go oh my gosh it's terrifying except there's a reason we're afraid of human intelligence humans are the most violent animals in evolutionary history we're terrifying the second most aggressive species of primate in the world is the chimpanzee and for chimpanzees to go to war they do wage war by the way they have to feel like there's a big difference in the population sizes right so if you've got two to one odds let's do this right homo sapiens will take a two percent difference and go to war which is almost mutually assured destruction by the way we're incredibly aggressive so we should be afraid of human intelligence there's no reason to think ai should it ever become super intelligent will have any animosity towards us there is a fear it has utter indifference to us that's the stuff that scares me it's not the terminator marching in a war against humanity it's uh you know we tell an ai to solve global warming and then goes okay main carbon emitters are people this seems really easy uh not sure why you built me but i think i can destroy you in like four hours so early lunch today um i'm kidding ai doesn't eat lunch so that's the fear so that's why people like stephen hawking and elon musk think that there needs to be tight regulation on ai development that gets into something called the the prisoner's dilemma the prisoner's dilemma is if two people have a potential reward they can either split it like person a can say that's twenty dollars i can have twenty dollars and i can give you whatever amount i want person b can either take it or leave it you would think the ideal thing would be i'm gonna keep ten dollars give you ten dollars we get we each are guaranteed to get ten bucks but people don't play that way right people then i'll give you a dollar i'll give you three dollars and the other person says fine forget you we're both getting nothing yeah so if ai is indifferent to us uh it's not gonna like play the prisoner's dilemma with us it's not gonna evaluate like potential risk reward it's just going to go mindlessly towards achieving its vision which by the way it's already doing how's the stock market that's what appleton ai just is achieving an objective my job is to maximize the value of my portfolio at the expense of the entire market so we don't have human psychological factors driving the stock market we have small patterns of a tiny number of human traitors being interpreted by super intelligent ais and acting at a speed that we can't possibly fathom and everybody goes where'd the money go and so prisoners dilemma what happens when someone realizes they could get ahead by ignoring the conventions of ai development it means then the bad actors are the ones that produce ai so am i troubled kinda on the trajectory of things that are existential threats to the human species currently ai is like page five right climate change rampant ethnic populism democratic decline hyper predatory capitalism nukes these are all page one concerns to me ai hasn't made it to page one yet but i guess to the point of your question ai could go from page 30 to number one in about 20 minutes [Music] mike my name is drew i'm the university pastor capital university in columbus not too far from here so i work at the intersection of spirituality and academics so i'm really curious or interested in those people that you are reading who are either scientists who some of the spiritual people in your life are saying like that's accessible or that's interesting or that's intriguing or on the flip side who are the theologians the spiritual teachers the man the other people who who your scientists the people that you respect the the physicists the quantum mechanics those kind of people that they're looking at the theologians or the spiritual teachers and saying they're on to something because they see their work coming closer and closer to that thin space where it makes sense to one another so if you have any of that so i can give it to my students that'd be great i mean i really like pizza and i'm super into brownies but i don't put brownies on pizza i think there's like a disservice that happens to science when we try to make it theology's handmaiden or cheerleader i prefer to let science be what it is a methodology of uncovering facts about the physical universe with a lot of fidelity accuracy and certainty you know i didn't say proof science doesn't prove things and they prove things in math or axiomatic systems which science is not science is about assigning confidence to a belief through observation now that observation view of the natural world meaning you don't have to have repeatability or it can be through experiment which provides repeatability so i'm just into scientists who are good at that there's a really troubled thing for me among theologians to like murder quantum physics in service of fancy sounding theology books i'm sure that's gonna be really popular no email coming in on that that comment um and then there's like theologies that like light me up like i i used to if you listen the show you know for years i called theology fan fiction you know what fan fiction is people love harry potter so much they write their own harry potter story doesn't mean harry potter exists that was my theology joke uh oh wow i was culturally resonant uh here okay so i no longer call theology fan fiction as much and um that's because i found theologies i liked like liberation theology when we interpret and interrogate the christian bible and the hebrew bible through the lens of oppressed people being freed through human action under divine inspiration can i get a amen right can i get a can i get a hashtag me too hashtag church2 hashtag blacklivesmatter that's the gospel to me folks that'll lighten me up like a christmas tree and i'd have a dang thing to do with quantum physics that has to do with the power of theological beliefs to be uniquely emotionally resonant in this species so when we try to make theology just like another way of understanding the physical world i kind of get bored because science is already better at that but when we use theology as a means for interrogating the human condition when we use theology to grapple with our tendency to not look up at the sky and just say how are those stars there but do they mean anything now i get excited that means for me today my favorite theologians tend to be minorities women people of different gender identities people of different sexual orientations why because man straight white dudes have had a good run in theology it's been a long time you go into that book stop and it's all dutch white dudes and german white dudes and that's great the enlightenment wow so exciting i think we've just like it's a well that we're just we're pumping too hard meanwhile there is such fertile material across human culture and human identity so i i like love the question and i have friends who could give you like 30 books off the top of their head but i just let my theology be theology i am a scientific person but i also have this weird thing i like the bible just as much as i like the harry potter series and actually today i read the bible more and it's because i like a story of a people who are constantly being conquered searching for redemption i like a book that says if you've got a lot of wealth and you're hoarding it and delighting in the demise of the poor you're missing the point but i always have to remember and this is a theological claim not a scientific one that as i read biblical narratives i'm a babylonian or a roman and not a jew nobody is oppressing me folks it doesn't happen i'm a straight white protestant in america and i'm middle class i'm not i'm not the poor so i'm not being like systematically extracted for wealth and i'm not the wealthy so i'm not an easy punchline i'm not an easy group to go against i'm in that that beloved american dream in the middle where i'm okay as long as the next paycheck comes in because there's a lot of people who aren't okay even when the next paycheck comes in there's a lot of people there's very few people but they don't care if the next paycheck comes in but i i'm in a system that is powerful america is far more powerful than rome could have ever imagined so we do a strange thing with our theology when we imagine america is israel in the first century i think if you if jesus like came here tonight like in this room like we drove him here first he'd be like screaming in arabic like what is this device um sorry like i don't know if you're new that's too far but that i just felt it it felt good this is literally the guy's my best friend cut me a break so if he were to come here tonight and he were to learn about america and hear about like the american church taking on this story of oppression and exile you know what i mean you'd probably be like i'll be right back i'm going to a black church um you guys need to read about how the centurion reacted to me and i just don't get that from the intersection of science and theology i get that from the intersection of lived human experience and theology and i think that's the most beautiful thing theology can do for us [Music] i am aurelia and my question is have you considered the one of the theories in string theory where it is possible that we are in a simulation therefore the theories of the origin of life and the possible universes are also simulated all right let's do a little catch up for the folks at home string theory is short for super string theory is an attempt to mathematically solve the biggest problem we face in physics and that problem is the two best systems for describing physics today do not agree with one another at large scales einstein in both general and special relativity do a great job of explaining light speed and gravitation and space and time and everything that happens at scales far larger than the human experience of course good old isaac newton has done pretty well at the scale of human experience after he invented calculus as a teenager because no math existed to describe his understanding of physics his kind of hell stood the test of time at human level events proven wrong at the level of relativity also proven wrong at things smaller than atoms we call quantum dynamics here's the problem the standard model of physics which is the best way we have to understand tiny things does its job by pretending gravity doesn't exist small problem we are relatively confident that gravity exists while on the other hand relativity is man it is bad ass at gravity that's kind of a jam like gravity and and and the constant of light speed are sort of it's like it's whole dog and pony show but it kind of just ignores quantum phenomena completely you know what i mean so imagine and this is a stretch i'm not a sports person but let's imagine that this was the offense and defensive groups i don't know what they're called in a football team what do you call the two unit the offensive and defensive units thank you i told you is that all in so the defensive strategy all their playbook operates by pretending you can't pass the football it would work a lot anytime there was a running play for example or a kicking play [Applause] no problem defense got you covered but every time the quarterback does one of these they go son of a gun what's happening and then the opposite's true over here so super string theory was an attempt to mathematically integrate these two schools and there are unless i'm mistaken five major schools of string theory which were then united into a larger meta theory called uh brain membrane theory b-r-a-n-e brain theory which i'm not even going to touch with a 10-foot bowl because i've already lost 75 of the room and 80 of the people on the subway so what i'm telling you is this super string theory is amazingly mathematically elegant and has absolutely failed at finding any real world evidence to support its predictions that's how science works by the way if you want to have a big theory you have to create a model that describes what we can already see and predicts what we haven't seen yet einstein nailed that so did the standard model which predicted among other things the higgs boson okay einstein predicted the orbit of mercury and gravitational lensing don't worry that's just for you googlers there's another attempt to describe the universe distinct from string theory called simulation theory and simulation theory is the idea that if it's possible to simulate a universe computationally it's very unlikely that we're the first universe and therefore we're probably a simulated universe so the idea therein we're software so then god would be what a programmer now hold on don't tell me the last few years don't make a little more sense if god's a 14 year old super intelligent alien who got bored with the game you ever play games going well you're kind of bored you're like you know what disaster disaster disaster so i'm not actually a simulation theory supporter i was for a while until we started to realize as far as we can tell now we would need a computer larger than the observable universe to simulate the number of electrons in a glass of water so there's this little small scale issue i'm not sure the basic premise that it's possible to simulate a universe like ours holds up however if we are a simulation kind of all bets are off in terms of like how the universe was created as for however it was simulated to exist but that creates kind of a weird sort of nihilism where it's like what if the simulation just started now and everything before that was just data in the startup file like the screen was loading and the universe started mid question like we didn't exist three seconds ago in fact this still doesn't exist and we only exist now that's no way to live you just walk around all the time waiting for the universe to start which is a really strange sensation so it's compelling idea um i'm honestly not that compelled by string theory we got to get something out of a particle accelerator i'm a little concerned with the way that science is becoming a theology well this should make sense i think this sounds good let's call it science nope science is based on observation and evidence and string theory so far has completely struck out i'm being pressed into service by my daughter here she has a question if she wants to ask she's free nope too much i understand if if there are aliens do you think that they worship the same god we do oh wow killer question i'm almost certain there's aliens the universe is pretty big light travels a little over 186 000 miles per second pretty quick and a light year is the distance that light can travel in a year going 186 000 miles per second and the observable universe as we understand it is a sphere of about 40 billion light years there's upwards of 400 million stars in the milky way galaxy advances in science are letting us realize that the vast majority of those stars have planets so it seems statistically likely that there are other planets in our galaxy that are just as prime for the development of life as ours and oh by the way there's not just the one galaxy in the universe in fact there's more galaxies in the universe than there are stars in our galaxy and we have no reason to believe that are just not as populated with planets as the stars in this galaxy so i think it's very likely that there's aliens now we ask would they worship the same god that we do maybe one thing to think about though i'm not sure everyone in this room worships the same god and i'm relatively certain that not everyone in the city worships the same god and i think that's okay which is a strange thing for a person identifies as a christian to say but i think if we study the science as we understand it of how our universe came to be what we see in the very beginning is a beautiful mystery that everything that is everything we can see in the biggest telescopes in the world once existed in something smaller than a sugar cube a sugar cube which may or may not have even had time inside it as we understand it this infinite energy compressed almost infinitely with the potential to produce everything that is how beautiful how divine but whatever that was and whatever makes the particles we understand today dance in and out of dimensions as we understand them whatever it is that allows an electron in my nose for moments be in the center of the sun before returning whatever incredible mysteries underlie those things and coalesce in such a way that i can hold a cloud of energy boundaries by a hand and we can walk across the park together and one part of the universe that came from that sugar cube is me and another part is my daughter the same mystery that let the universe expand from that sugar cube also allows me to love my daughter and for her to love me and it's unspeakable and so i'm at a point in my life where i'm just comfortable with however someone wants to describe that mystery however it makes them feel alive and awake and excited to face another day which sometimes our days are difficult so whether aliens name a god as i do whether they believe in a jesus or not they're animated by the same mystery they're part of the same universe and i believe are therefore worthy of being known and loved and appreciated so whether they believe in god like i do or not my belief in god leaves room for me to love them that's a great question thank you [Applause] [Music] hi hi i don't have any kids but a lot of my friends have kids and i'm curious what tools you have given your kids regarding exploring their faith and i guess part b of my question what have they given you as you explore your faith wow these are the toughest questions for me this is like the the private label reserve stuff of my life in our house questions are not allowed they are celebrated vulnerability and honesty are our highest moral values so when my oldest daughter came to me one day and said dad i don't know if god is real or what happens when we die i said that's great let's talk about it what do you think and i didn't come with like a pre-compiled script of solutions to messy problems because my goal is not to get my children to be photocopies of my faith system my job is to prepare my children to navigate on the world in the world on their own and to continue to do so after i'm gone so when they're little we talked about prayers every night and stories from the bible because that's the story of our people and it's fine to have a story of your people i think a big problem in america is the way we have erased our individual cultural identities and so me reclaiming my cultural identity partially also means reclaiming christianity but when kids have more analytical capacity they demonstrate that with questions so when first they asked dad what do you believe what do we believe and you tell that then they say why you tell that and then they they ask a really key question well what do other people believe and now this is a key moment because you can either set up other belief systems as enemies of the one true way of living or ways that other people see things one of these roads tends to lead to fundamentalism and the other does not and having been grievously injured by fundamentalism i was not terribly interested in leading my kids into fundamentalism so that's kind of in the system and that's led to a situation where i get much more spiritual insight from my children than vice versa um my youngest daughter's name is macy i'm a big fan of alliteration so i would call her my macy because m sound m sound you get the picture and one day she said dad i'm not your macy i'm macy nine and i thought about the degree to which i was enculturated to assume parents had ownership of their children and found her rebuttal immensely satisfying i said you're right you're not my macy you're just macy my oldest daughter madison came to me and said that why do we think so much about what happens when we die when people die of hunger every day and i thought that was a really good question so my philosophy on parenting is the same as my philosophy on relationships and human life in general that the road to madness and mr misery is an attempt to control the beliefs thoughts and actions of other people you can't why try you can't control anything so i surrendered the idea of controlling my children and instead am committed to journeying alongside them as they embark on their own journey and adventure in life and in faith if my daughters become atheists or buddhists or new age spiritualists oh man i can't believe i do this i don't care as long as their lives are animated by the greatest two commandments i guess i do have a theological dogma and it is love and be grateful for the miracle that we are here and how we came to be so and love your neighbor as yourself which means a life well-lived is a 60-year plus struggle with a single question who is my neighbor [Applause] [Music] so there's verse jesus said i am the way and the truth in life no one comes to the father except through me seems like a very binary supposition that you know would call it absolute truth that it's this or the other and it throws out kind of a lot of you know you know other religions and even like you mentioned about like different not everyone here believes in the same god or worships the same god even if we even claim to be christians so when jesus says i'm the way the father no one comes to i am the way the truth in life no one comes to father except through me first of all do you believe in that binary supposition and if so like what is the through me mm-hmm yeah guys great question uh so we do a terrible thing in america where we just kick the crap out of the bible and we do that by pretending the bible is a modern document written to post enlightenment westerners so we read it through this individual lens where every you is singular whereas anybody who knows a lick and i don't of greek or hebrew or arabic says that most use in the bible are plural written to a people which gives us a different understanding of sin by the way if it's not if it's both about personal moral transgression and about societal failure we won't go there the fact is the bible was written before the enlightenment don't know if anybody knew that significantly before the enlightenment and so when we read the bible in english as americans and fail to acknowledge the distance we have between a specific author within a specific agenda writing to a specific audience we miss the point and we take incredible subversive truths and reduce them to dichotomies of this or that us or them in or out the fact is if we have a historical view of that passage then we understand that jesus was not the first person to say that phrase caesar was caesar claimed to be the way the truth and the light caesar don't know if you know caesar in charge of the roman empire that kept israel under the mighty boot of the roman army so jesus says i'm the way and the truth and the life and in doing so says the most politically subversive thing he could say he said i'm bringing a kingdom that rules by peace and not the sword that's a riff on what the romans were doing and suddenly the words of jesus don't become about an individual acceptance of ideas in order to achieve salvation which is a very modern western soteriology or study of salvation and instead becomes a resistance to the powerful destroying and exploiting the power less and i have made a personal decision to follow jesus into lifting those boots off of those necks because who is my neighbor if we don't take the entire bible and interpret it through the lens of who is my neighbor we're literally ignoring the way that jesus in the gospels told us to read the whole bible who's my neighbor and i'm concerned that saying do you believe in this dichotomy of in or out discourages us from wrestling with the question of who is my neighbor because we can say well muslims aren't my neighbor iranians aren't my neighbor atheists are not my neighbor lesbians are not my neighbor and you know what today a lot of white american christians would say black americans aren't my neighbor and that's not the gospel now for my friends in the room who come from what i would call an evangelical or conservative hermeneutic let's lay the cards on the table i read the bible differently when i think the bible was inspired by god i think in the same way a love song was inspired by a person i don't think god got a quill or whatever god would write with wrote it out and then whispered in the ears of scribes and religious people i think people had experience with with god and were so moved that they wrote it down and i think later a lot of those documents got assembled by the church and we have a bible the bible was produced by the church the church was produced by christ so the the center and the authority of my faith is a a christ-centered revelation of the divine which trickles down to the bible it means the bible is actually super useful why because its humanity is so well illustrates the dilemmas i go through every day if god is conscious i assume god is has relatively few questions relatively limited confusion the fact that human authors of scripture were just trying to figure out what this faith meant brought paul back for me paul drove me crazy with this i permit not a woman's stuff but when i read it in the context of his culture and paul wrestling with this core conviction of what is righteousness he'd come from a pharmaceutical position and now he encountered a blinding light and had to release his legalism and re-explore everything that sounds familiar to me now do i think my interpretation of that verse is the right one or my way of reading bible is the right one no i think it's my way because i think we are given or we discover a way of interpreting and interrogating the divine that we need where we are in life and sometimes that means you're a southern baptist and sometimes that means you're an atheist and i think you can be on the way either way and i also understand that me saying something like that can sound to a secularist like me trying to colonize their identity and force them into being an undisclosed christian and that's not what i mean what i mean is anyone who is on the search to love their neighbor we should be working together because there's a lot of people on the side of the road [Music] hello uh my name is michael back here um so i work for a non-profit and we do therapy with a lot of uh it doesn't matter who we do therapy and so the way that we work with our clients is we value vulnerability and we value sort of these um i know higher level emotional processing those are the skills we use and then the management of the nonprofit which i'm like sort of halfway there treats all the employees based on productivity and deadlines and numbers and and so you mentioned earlier that you know you've been a manager and i was curious if there's any research about this um sort of what is the best way to manage because there's this newfound respect for vulnerability but then it doesn't seem to me making its way to how we actually run businesses so great uh hmm i thought you're going to ask me about my experience being a manager glad you didn't i hated it actually no this actually ties on the question unfortunately the liturgist as an organization has started to grow and so we have employees and we had a staff retreat and i had like panic attacks and anxiety and was like openly resentful towards the people on the retreat because i was like why do we have employees this is stupid because i had all this like ptsd associated with managing people so managers are still human beings operating often out of a place of trauma or woundedness or crippling insecurity we're a performance oriented culture and nothing puts it out there like being accountable for the actions of other people you attach that to research that shows power is incredibly psychologically corrupting when you when when you take someone you give them a position of authority or power over another person their empathy measurably goes down or is reduced their ability to relate to that person as a fellow human decreases over time authority is psychologically warping to the human emotional system as we understand it today so is it any surprise to me that a nonprofit does an amazing work for its clients but then reverts to hyper-competitive american capitalism and its function no of course not that's what i would expect what's the answer well if i figure that out i'm going to sell a lot of books i don't know my personal solution is to hold authority at an arm's length and disdain it um i had a an interviewer once from a major american news source asked me what it was like to have such authority among spiritually disenfranchised millennials i said i don't have any authority over them at which point the interviewer debated me about the nature and character of authority and i said well that would be influence that you're describing she said no influence is different i'm talking about so it it's a pretty ridiculous interview but i think i think if you're in a position of authority and power and you're not reticent about it you're not self-conscious about it or you're not interrogating yourself about it you're probably just going to like hurt a lot of people and become something you don't love my solution was to abandon a prosperous career to be a podcaster [Laughter] it's probably not for everybody uh so yeah we're just gonna strike out on that question i can tell you why it's bad i have no clue how to do healthy management however i'll tell you this me saying that is going to generate like 40 emails and in a future episode i'll tell you what i learned my name is anna i'm a family physician and geriatrician and educator in that as well your podcast after the election basically got me through because i'm also a christian that believes in social justice and racial reconciliation um and i'm also from a family my father's a coal miner um and lives in west virginia can i ask you a question yeah are you proud to be a coal miner's daughter i knew that might be coming sorry um but i you know i was so inspired by what you said about listening um and so i didn't want i saw a lot of my friends choosing to just separate from their families and i know that's not the solution but the amygdala kicks in really quick and a lot of times i've opted out and i just ask if you have any advice a year out of how to start those conversations if and especially if they don't come up naturally but how to start those and engage those and not step out when it gets hard can i just lie down on stage would that be okay these put me in a tough spot because i've become aware that my family members sometimes listen to these podcasts and don't love being an example um so let me be honest i love my family i love my extended family uh most of my family is on the rural side of the urban rural divide by the way it's not like coastal not coastal it's not north versus south the divide in this country is urban rural with the suburbs being double agents and um sociologically speaking and at first i had all these really great charitable conversations with my family about the presidency and why people so many people were afraid of this president and then the media landscape collapsed into a singularity and no one can agree on what actually exists and what doesn't and my attempts to stand up for justice for marginalized people are interpreted as personal attacks by my friends and family who support this administration and dialogue has not been particularly fruitful because i don't think there was a child pedophilia ring in a pizza parlor which makes me the enemy and i really don't deny the humanity or dignity of trump voters i honestly do not i heard a laugh i earned that i just think this president is a unique threat to american democracy which wasn't exactly stellar to begin with and we've created a landscape social media being a huge component of creating this landscape where if you can't agree who's the good guy you can't even talk anymore most of my interactions with my family anymore not my mom or i say something to the public and my family comments on it publicly and then my fans viciously attack my family and then they send me really long either angry or heart-wrenching private messages that i don't know how to respond to because to give them a good response would take three days and then they would call it fake news so like the wheels are off the cart the divide is as deep as it's been since i don't know before the civil war so how do we right this ship like my strategy which i haven't abandoned i'm just super discouraged right now like here's the life of like a family member of mine they all live in this county that's depopulating in florida so every year less and less people live in this county there's very little money it's actually now by the numbers the poorest county in florida okay so it's the poorest county in florida and they've lived there their whole lives they've lived there for generations and all the jobs are disappearing and all they hear about is welfare which they refuse to be on because they don't want a government handout so they just like literally get hungry or work such long hours that their health fails them and in some cases compete to be day laborers against undocumented immigrants so they're literally you know i'm like well i love undocumented immigrants i live in los angeles the tacos are amazing right like just like the most privileged urban perspective on immigration will these services really benefit me well my family's trying to survive so the trick is where we mess up with the rural divide is saying there aren't legitimate social and economic grievances for these people because there are now don't get me wrong i'm not talking about the trump voter who makes 150 000 and drives a lexus for i found out recently 48 of the listeners of this program are registered republicans so i'm trying to be less vehement about chasing them away with a broom so i'm not going to say what i was about to say about why that person voted for trump but but among low income people true low income people who are following the right is because they actually feel like their way of life is under attack who's attacking their way of life corporations me i left my i left madison county then i left leon county and i'm having the time of my life in one of the most liberal cities in america what did i take with me all the money i spend all the investment in community all the work with non-profits so my exodus directly contributed to the decline of my entire family so the trick here has got to be some form of dialogue that's fruitful enough so i can say listen and this has happened a couple of times there's moments of insight where i say your plight is not because of black people on welfare and your plight is not because of poor hispanic and latino people fleeing poverty just like you your plight is from a system that exploits you and exploits them so the gains go somewhere else and the only way they can keep picking your pocket is to convince you to fight the other person at the bottom and not the people at the top so the way i do that is by having an incredibly fleshed out documented understanding of american history that i can dole out to people for whatever questions they have i can cite my sources and i can show the way that literally white culture was an invention of southern elites who were afraid that poor whites and poor blacks were starting to live together and they would figure out where all the cash was the one percent in the pre and post-civil war south was not on wall street it was the landowners in the south and they had to invent whiteness of pan-european identity to avoid the vast majority of people realizing they had no stake in the game and they would never be allowed to just enough people succeed in order to call this a land of opportunity that benefits the top and boy i'm awful awful on my sleeve with my economic theories here but that's what we have to do is there overt personal racism in my family yes is there systemic racism in my family yes does my family have regressive positions on marriage equality yes why because for as long as my lowland scott northern irish family fled poverty in europe to come here for a better life they've been exploited by the same crew that exploited them in the old country only they were taught that they were in the game because they were white and the problem was people who aren't that's a very difficult position at all by the way that's an impossible tension for most people of color to hold because like oh you've got it bad poor rural whites you've got it bad when's the last time a member of your family was executed on the street by police so then whose job is it to work with my family on these issues this coastal elite and i'm terrible at it and that's my fault the podcasting stuff is easy people pay tickets to see me honestly it's incredibly gratifying i leave exhausted because it's a emotionally vulnerable i stay around and talk to you all for two three hours afterwards have a migraine tomorrow it's it's but i love it but talking to my cousin about racism and economics and liberation that's work that actually matters and that i'm just not committed enough to [Music] i'm uh david from cincinnati um my understanding of history is that many scientists uh explored the nature of the world as a way of discovering god that through the discovery of nature and through the discovery of the heavens that would give them enlightenment to god i've been reading a couple of books needle grass tyson the recent one is death by black hole but one of the things he talks about in there is the the percentage of and i could make up a number i forget what it is but a low percentage of astrophysicists and scientists who are people of faith um which seems very different from the history of what science uh as to my understanding was so are the two things mutually exclusive can i come to faith through science or is the depth of science and understanding going to lead me away from faith and how do how do we reconcile that good question statistically lead you away just in terms of probability more scientists today don't believe than do now how much of that is like a systemic cultural pressure in the academy well i haven't seen research that teases that out or not i think science can lead you either place again what is science it tells you about the physical world so learning how electrons electron may say well there's no no magic here this is math or it may lead you to go what elegance what beauty and that's a like a emotional psychological reaction that i don't think is inevitable in either term there was a time when science uh put the final nail in the coffin of my faith but i would be dishonest if i didn't say that that science was a major animating factor in my not only beliefs about god but my desire to follow anything i would call god i don't think there's a setting stolen i think there's it's going to be an intersection of your life experience and your propensity to wonder i was reading a study recently that basically showed like the relative bias or activity between your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system led you to have a more sunny or less sunny disposition regardless of like what your life circumstances are and that sunny disposition is also highly correlated with having um a faith-based outlook on phenomena so like what science does to you may have to do largely with the relative balance between your synthetic and parasympathetic nervous system that's what this is what i mean when i say we all understand the world differently for a reason we're all just trying to navigate from our own perspective and i used to be afraid of that and now i think it's beautiful because i think the more voices in the chorus of seeing and knowing and feeling and thinking that i encounter the more i hear god right like this symphony of experiences i mean the like the most spiritual moments i have anymore are great films great films there's this movie seeking a friend for the end of the world you seen it my wife saw it she's like you like that oh i just cried and cried and cried and cried and cried because in the face of futility meaning was found in community and that was a note i needed that week yeah so i don't think it's baked into the baked into the recipe i think it depends on the chef [Music] my name is michael allen simon i am 13 years of age and single and i'm never going to mingle [Laughter] what's your opinion on sigmund freud's position on suffering and how it can make us an uh a more valuable person in ethics and religiousness hmm so you're freudian it's making quite a comeback have you noticed freud people are getting real into freud again um wow things i didn't expect to say in 2018 the freud resurgence um i think freud has some workable theories i think he's really obsessed with genitals understandably we are primates primates reel into genitals just youtube it it's disturbing i think somebody was thinking of a specific video and not a family video anyway i'm probably uh more of a frankel guy on suffering frankel's thing is suffering ceases to be suffering in the context of meaning and the transform transformation of suffering to meaning produces work and empathy right so frankel's work was born out of being in a concentration camp trying to keep other people in concentration camp trained psychologists trying to keep other people in concentration camps from killing themselves a lot believe it or not when you're starved to death and frequently beat when people get suicidal and frank will say no don't kill yourself let the germans kill you because then your death will have meaning it'll tell the world who the nazis are which like if you think about this like a real bummer be like oh wait you want to just like let somebody kill me and suffer more but when they found this animating energy of a death that would testify to the world of this brutality what do you know suicide rates went just dropped under for people under frankl's care where strange species will face death calmly and with dignity if we believe our death has meaning i am not aware of another species that does that so i don't i don't think that that suffer i mean i think i think to the degree suffering lets us empathize with those who suffering it's an aid in ethical considerations i suffer i don't want other people to suffer then i make moral decisions based on that yay i don't know i think freud had a tendency to describe sex suffering anger has these repressed fuels of the psychology and i think that happens but i think what ford was describing was the effects of western philosophy on human cognition and emotions and then normalizing it and making it prescriptive and i think i think western thought and philosophy is very useful but i think it has been over employed to the point that it's detrimental to human nervous systems we see this literally in brain imaging studies western people have an overwhelming left hemisphere bias in almost everything they do and when we study people who aren't as immersed in western philosophy we see a more not right braid centered but whole neurologically holistic approach to interpreting the world and i think frankl's take on suffering helps us subvert those western assumptions in a way that's useful [Music] thanks for listening to yet another week of ask science mike if you'd like to bring science mike to your community again you can learn how to do so by visiting asksciencemike.com i'd like to thank my patrons on patreon for making the show financially possible andrew golucky for his work in pre-production greg nordin for sound design and production and of course jeff bodiford for writing the ask science mike theme song thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week [Music]