ASM072 Cynicism, Beauty, and a Simulated Universe

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cynicism beauty and a simulated universe all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life happy july 4th everybody so good to be back with you after a brief hiatus we'll let you know that this week yes this week i'll be at the wild goose festival on july 7th 8th 9th and 10th we'll do a live ass science mic we'll do a little just podcast i hope to see you there but for now we've got a show to do let's get it started [Music]

before we start questions this week i want to tell you a little story about why i missed the last two weeks of the show which was completely unplanned and frankly um the timing would it would have been hard to have the timing be worse to have two weeks off the air but a strange thing happened if you listen to the liturgist podcast or especially the liturgist conversations podcast which michael and i do in the literature's podcast off-season for our supporters on patreon over there you heard that i lost my voice and that i fell down some steps and broke my leg well breaking my leg usually won't cancel the show although i had a lot of travel and and trying to fit medical visits in with with cross-country flights is tough but something a little more serious happened i was in the recording studio to record the audiobook for my upcoming book finding god in the ways which of course means yes there will be an audio book and yes i will be the narrator but i was having a hard time keeping my voice i was also having a strangely itchy painful scalp and then toward the end of the recording session my ear started to swell up like a red balloon it's really strange my throat started to hurt really bad so i went to an urgent care center over there and they diagnosed me with an ear infection and uh gave me some medicine and it didn't help so i came back home and i went to an urgent care center here and they sent me to the emergency room because it turned out i had like a bacterial infection maybe even mrsa in the flesh the tissue of my ear scalp and neck and i got put on these crazy uh iv antibiotics and the joke the doctor made was if it was your leg we could just amputate if we needed to but this is your head and i got to be honest i learned in a real visceral way something that used to be academic i've always known that bacteria run this planet but it wasn't until they took over my body that i realized how true that is because i got to tell you i felt awful and the pills i was taking that would kill the bacteria in my head also killed all the bacteria in my gut and all over my body and i felt terrible so i really felt too sick and too weak uh and frankly a little bit too depressed to record the show which was another fascinating insight for me is the degree to which throwing off the balance of bugs bacteria in my gut completely affected my mood and how i felt about life fascinating stuff now so that's why i was off the show for or off the air for two weeks here's why that was a bad thing because we launched the official pre-order campaign for my book and that i was supposed to have this big podcast to talk about it and tell you this exciting news and instead i just laid on the couch and felt like a slug so if if you would just uh do me a favor and listen for a second before we jump into the questions i am genuinely super excited about this so my book comes out september 13th it's called finding god in the waves and if you go to finding god in the ways.com you can get more information about the book as well as links to a bunch of places you can pre-order it now you would say mike the book comes out in september why on earth would i pre-order your book in july well we've put together some cool stuff for you and we're going to announce new bonuses and new exclusive content for people who pre-order every month in the month leading up to the release of the book and the first thing we've announced is once a month we're going to draw a name of someone who've pre-ordered the book and we're going to send them a pre-release copy of the book and schedule a one-on-one call with me for 30 minutes to talk about the book so if you a want to get the book early and b would like to have a one-on-one call with me to talk about the book you can all you've got to do is go to findinggodintheways.com and click on one of the retailer links buy the book and then come back to that website and give us your order number and a form we've got on the website that will also go ahead and get you registered for all the other pre-order bonuses that are coming and that i will announce in upcoming episodes of the show i'm also super excited we're not announcing the dates yet but we are doing a book tour with a lot of stops all across the country it's mainly going to be an ask science mic live tour so we're going to bring the podcast from city to city to city to city and i'm really excited about that fall is going to be completely packed with live shows as you know they're my favorite now the two dates we've announced so far are for the liturgists gathering i think that's september 16th and 17th in denver and october 20th and 21st in chicago so those are going to be official stops on the book tour but you'll get the bonus of seeing michael and lisa gunger and a few hundred other uh very cool people with the literature so tickets are already on sale for the largest gathering in denver and chicago now it's summer and you're thinking that's way in the fall why should i worry about it well tickets are selling really really well in chicago i think that one's going to sell out well in advance and tickets are selling solidly in denver uh so go ahead and buy those tickets go ahead and ensure that you'll be at the liturgist gathering if you've been thinking about it in denver and chicago those will be the only liturgists appearances for the remainder of this year okay so sorry for taking two weeks off i'm feeling a lot better now and i'm really excited to see all of you who will be there at wild goose this week so there'll be a live liturgist podcast and live ask science mike wild goose and i hope to see you there [Music] hey science mike i have a question for you about the simulation argument it's a philosophical concept that was codified in an academic article written in 2003 called are you living in a computer simulation by nick bostrom who's an oxford philosopher in its most basic form the argument posits that our reality is in fact a computer simulation ran by advanced humans the idea recently came back into the popular consciousness after elon musk stated he believed there is a strong possibility the simulation argument is correct and since then several outlets such as vox and the new yorker have run articles on the subject so it's kind of a big deal again my question is what are your thoughts on the plausibility of the simulation argument and if it is hypothetically possible what do you think are its implications for our lives if we aren't living in capital our reality are we faced with a if god is not all things are permitted a la dostyevsky scenario do we continue to strive to seek after justice and purpose despite everything not actually existing in the sense we first believed it did um does the simulation argument mean that everything doesn't really matter thanks for everything that you do and i look forward to hearing your response i knew at some point computer simulation hypothesis or universe simulation hypothesis would make it on the show i have just been waiting and so finally finally someone asked the question the first thing i would like to clarify about nick bostrom's idea of simulation theory is um its scope the argument is not that we are living in a computer uh boston's argument is a little more subtle his philosophical case is that one of three things is true or at least one one that the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a post-human stage two that any post-human civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history or three we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation now the idea here is that uh we now have the ability to create virtual worlds and software we can do that now they're pretty primitive they're simple but we can do it so if you imagine our ability to continue to scale that up perhaps even in the ray kurzweil singularity theory to begin to put ourselves into those simulations therefore becoming post-human if it's possible then we're probably living in a computer simulation civilizations run simulations of themselves yeah it's it hit first of all is it is it plausible totally absolutely it's plausible that we're living in a simulation uh our reality in many ways looks like a simulated reality uh it's very fascinating to me that there's such a thing as the planck volume it seems that there is a planck time there are units beyond which we don't believe time or space can be further subdivided which creates a finite granularity which is something that's essential to do computation there's a controlled interaction speed between these individual units information only propagates at c the speed of light the constant and as far as we can tell our observable universe has a finite volume um so finite volume would be another requisite for a simulation uh now we we get indicators that our universe is spatially infinite or has the potential to be but you could simulate that with math and just simulate part of it and call it the observable universe and control the boundaries of that using lightspeed and redshift right you create these boundaries so that what seems to be spatially infinite for the case of your mathematics has a finite volume i probably lost a significant number of people right there sorry i got a little lost with myself but here's the thing if it's if it's possible if it's plausible the we're living in a simulation some people would argue mathematically that it's more likely we're in a simulation than in ultimate reality and here's why how likely is it that we would be the first if it's possible to simulate universes it's more likely for any perceived universe to be a simulation than to be the original universe now what do i think about that i don't know we i don't think we have enough data to make a determination which is also what nick bostrom says he says there's not enough data to make a call although honestly some cosmologists have been devising clever means with which you could test if the universe is a simulation or not um pretty wild stuff now for a lot of people this raises all sorts of ethical questions and quandaries right if you're a traditional theist a judeo-christian theist and you think morality comes from god and it turns out you know god the creator of everything is some computer scientist and we're running in a cosmological version of uh vmware or some emulation package what does that mean for us does it mean life is meaningless does it mean that morality doesn't matter we should do whatever we want well i've kind of already been down that road of where morality comes from when i lost my faith and became an atheist so the way i make moral and ethical determinations continues to be influenced by my experience with atheism you know there's the argument you can't have law without a law giver and i just disagree i just disagree with that statement a lot [Laughter] we can decide that we're going to band together and not have to experience some things right i don't want to be murdered and because i don't want to be murdered we can all agree that it's immoral to murder other people uh i don't want people to steal stuff from my house so then we all band together and it's you know what i don't want people to steal stuff from my house either and we create this social construct that says it's illegal to steal things from people's houses and if you do there's some sort of punishment or some punitive function and that's a perfectly adequate way to create ethics and morality so if it turns out we're actually living in a simulation it doesn't change my day-to-day life at all i still try to leave this simulation better than i found it and because i'm having this lived experience our subjectivity exists inside the simulation which to me is not materially different than if our subjective experience lived in some more ultimate reality so we live the same way now but if we figure out for sure we are in a computer then of course i would think on a societal level it would matter a lot uh to try to communicate with that simulator to see what the goal is what the purpose is to see if there are inexpensive ways from their perspective to materially improve our lives here in the simulation that all kind of crazy stuff would come up there but i don't think it suddenly creates a morality isn't relevant because the way i derive morality and ethics is what kind of experiences our actions produce for other people and whether our actions are real or simulated i don't actually see a huge difference either way our experiences are emerging from more base phenomenon and whether those are actual physical particles uh that are you know uh in the manifestation of energy fields or where those energy fields are just math running on computer hardware it doesn't matter our lived experience is the same way regardless and it matters that we treat each other well our next question came in via email and it reads hello mike greetings from germany i have a rather elaborate question concerning physical human beauty from a scientific viewpoint why is human beauty comparatively rare from what i've read there exists three different kinds of standards one the beauty ideals created by culture which seem to favor traits correlated with status fat people in society with food shortages fit people in societies with an abundance of food and leisure two general beauty standards associated with human preference traits such as symmetry purity or youthfulness and three subjective preferences but i wonder why is it that humanity evolved to value beauty standards which usually exclude the majority of members or in other words why is it that people perceive the attractiveness of the majority of sex partners as average or below average wouldn't it be more advantageous to have a perspective from which we perceive the majority of sex partners as attractive in even simpler terms why do most people find so many potential sex partners visually unappealing especially from a male point of view it just seems unfair to me as a man when i look at how i look at women how i judge the majority of them is visually non-attractive apart from feeling rather arrogant isn't that an evolutionary disadvantage shouldn't it be the other way around sorry for the long question i find it hard to frame the problem adequately also i don't want to miss the opportunity to say thank you for your podcast your work with the liturgists and the amazing knowledge and honesty with which you share your thoughts and stories all the best chris well chris i want to thank you for a really honest question why frankly one that's i haven't been asked ever on the show that question or anything like it so i love new and original questions thank you for that uh your question seems to be centered primarily ow i just hit my hand on the desk really hard non-viable organism anyway hope that's probably gonna bruise okay sorry uh i i wave my hands wildly while i stand here and record the podcast and sometimes i get injured so anyway it's a really good question and your question centers around not like philosophical beauty or art or nature but mainly around why we find people attractive so let's kind of start by understanding a little bit more about what humans find attractive about each other and see if in that process we can illuminate more of your question about the amounts of people we find attractive on a case-by-case basis so uh as you mentioned there are some really consistent markers for human beauty across all known human cultures symmetric faces are viewed as more beautiful universally and even for people that haven't been influenced by socialization yet like babies babies stare at symmetric faces longer than less symmetric faces or i should say more symmetric faces i don't think there's any such thing as a perfectly symmetric face clear skin is universally regarded across cultures high cheekbones and women universally regarded as attractive square jaws in men universally regarded as attractive across cultures i'm not saying every single individual i'm saying but as an aggregate of cultural preferences these things are always viewed as attractive men almost universally prefer women with higher voices and women almost universally prefer lower voices in men a fact for which i am very very grateful i think my voice helped me win over the honey badger now the preferred build for women varies in different cultures some cultures like women that are are thicker some like them thinner but a similar waist to hip ratio is consistent across cultures so as the waist thickens the hips thicken as well to create that same ratio remarkably shallow creatures we are when it comes to sizing up potential mates now socialization certainly plays a role you see incredible variations in preferences regarding skin color pale versus tan of course fashion cues right one culture might find as a red dress with a low neckline riveting while another may find metal rings that elongate the neck to be irresistible and social cues vary enormously to the point that masculine and feminine roles aren't set in stone at all across cultures some men in some cultures would be very effeminate by western standards and some women would be very masculine by western standards which illustrates the degree to which our behavioral signaling tends to be very associated with culture and not innate biology now that kind of says what we find attractive it doesn't say why as you said in your question many people find the majority of members of the sex they're attracted to unattractive well let's see if we can learn a couple of things there one some sociologists believe we tend to seek out a partner that we think is about as attractive as we are so if you view yourself as average you're going to try to find a partner who you think is about as average looking as you are if you think you're very attractive you're probably going to try all things being equal which they are not a very attractive partner if you think you are unattractive you will probably try to find an unattractive mate that's one sociological theory of course scent plays a role too monthly fertility cycles birth control pills can't even influence that something as simple as the smell of sweat that signals immunocompatibility plays a huge role in attraction for both men and for women so if you find yourself thinking most people are not visually attractive maybe you have a really picky nose maybe you view yourself as very attractive maybe you have conditioned yourselves or been conditioned by your culture to be very critical now here's why i mentioned that my subjective experience could not be more different when i was a single man i fell in love a thousand times a day [Laughter] i just found i am heterosexual um and i found something alluring and interesting and pretty much every woman i saw all the time they women were just a source of unending fascination and attraction for me so i had i had completely the opposite experience with you whereas i found i found most women to be visually attractive an overwhelming majority now as i've gotten older and i'm strongly pair bonded that experience has changed and that i no longer i no longer process women at first blush as potential mates that's no longer the part of my brain i'm using but i've also found that process my appreciation for others has deepened and now i just think every woman is beautiful and as i've gotten older i've started to sometimes think that men are striking i was in new york last week and just i noticed how how beautiful everyone looked men and women what i'm getting at i'm not just meaning to ramble here about being old what i'm getting at is i think our outlook on life and the way that we ruminate on others affects the way that we judge the appearance of other people so perhaps if you would spend some time in gracious contemplation of others uh take a longer look at people and see the thing about them which is unique and beautiful and radiant you might start to recondition yourself to be less selective if that is an issue that matters to you you know i try to avoid judging other people as much as i can and i find that to be freeing and life-giving and affirming and i don't know the the spirit of your question i don't know if you're asking because you're frustrated or if you're just curious if it's not broke don't fix it uh but if you're if you're having some stress i would say practice looking at people with eyes of love i would dare say even with the eyes of god if you're if you're a god person if you're if you're a person that believes in god more than anything my views on the attractiveness of other people changed after my experience on the beach where i felt like i i met god directly and felt god's love for me and god's love for others and i've continued to feel that sense of love and connection with other people and that does affect the way my eyes see them now for me who cares i'm an old married guy and happy with it but i do wonder if i was still younger single and dating what those eyes of love would mean for how i encountered other people and chris maybe you could find out i'm so thankful for the sponsors of ask science mike and wow do i have the most fun thing to tell you about this week with our sponsors uh you know i love pinatagrams it's a way that you can go to penautograms.com fill out a form put in your credit card number and they mail a miniature pinata to somebody it's amazing it was recently featured in the huffington post uh incredibly exciting stuff but they've expanded their product offerings it used to be a traditional pinata like a little uh donkey you know rainbow colored donkey it was really cute but they've expanded now with minipolitics.com you can send a miniature donald trump to someone i think there's a there's a hillary clinton too but she's out of 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## Cynicism

"hey mike uh my name is nathan and i just want to say first off thanks for the show i really appreciate it it's been a big weekly encouragement to me living in a very conservative fundamentalist uh small town in the south and i just really appreciate it um i want to ask about the science of cynicism as my faith has changed disappeared been deconstructed any of those terms i have found myself becoming a lot more cynical towards specifically christians in the area that i live but really anywhere and as someone who has kind of redeveloped a faith in jesus now i still find myself as a sunday morning christian looking around sometimes and struggling to not think cynical negative thoughts about the people around me things like oh they're just doing this for show or you know they're faking that they can't really be having any sort of emotional reaction you know stuff like that and i know that some of the people that i'm thinking of aren't faking anything like that and i'm just really kind of wondering what about my brain causes me to think that way um i know that i am much more cynical than some of my friends uh and so i i'm sure that you know different people's brains make them maybe more inclined to that i don't know just kind of spitballing here uh sorry for the long pauses and lots of um's and us thanks again for all you do i look forward to your answer"

don't worry too much about um's and uh and pauses on ask science mike because the canadian wizard greg nordin makes me sound smarter all the time

and he does the same for your questions

so if you're like me and you listen to your voice and you're like wow i don't remember sounding that smart or concise or put together you didn't

greg is a genius and he's helping you out like he helps me

so that out of the way

boy do i know where you're coming from

boy do i know where you are coming from

cynicism is the language of our age

it is the thing in the air

let's start by describing specifically what cynicism is so we can talk about it and then we can talk about what to do about it

so cynicism is an attitude or state of mind characterized by a general distrust of others motives

so what you're describing being at church and looking at other people's behaviors and thinking man they can't really be feeling that they must be faking or posturing or putting on a display for others that is textbook cynicism

absolutely textbook cynicism

and what i understand by studying a little bit of psychology this week is that cynics are made not born

so there may be possible genetic factors and certainly cognitive risk factors but in general cynicism is a response to trauma or pain

i'm going to say that again cynicism is a response to trauma or pain

you see a cynic had hopes or dreams that crashed and they use cynicism to protect themselves from further disappointment

this means cynicism plays a major role in burnouts you know both becoming burnout in the first place and the aftermath of being burned out or both deeply tied to cynicism an attempt to not be hurt again

so you maybe had some hope or some dream for what religion meant or what your church could do in the world or what your faith could mean or who god was or whatever

and it didn't work out in fact it crashed

it went sideways it went wrong and it hurt

and your brain is designed to try to avoid that kind of pain

you see the problem is cynics are so often right

they have the data on their side because the cynic says you know we tried it and it didn't work

a cynic says people always look out for themselves

people only care about their appearances

people are selfish

and that's often true

that's the difficulty with cynicism is how often it's rewarded

my friend rob bell often says that cynicism presents itself as wisdom because it is based on some experience

cynicism is based on lived experience and it can seem more sophisticated or more learned or more aware than naivete

go ahead i'll look for it in the comments correct my pronunciation of naivety or naivete or whatever what last week what was it uh historicity i think they said it was historicity not historicity i'm not a pronouncer guys i'm a reader anyway guys and girls and gender non-conforming people you see you're watching me work out my cognition live in front of everybody

anyway that means cynicism can be healthy some cynicism is healthy

some skepticism is healthy

but too much is toxic

so ruminating on negative thoughts or wallowing in cynicism increases the risk and duration of depression

it reduces life satisfaction

it reduces sense a sense of happiness or well-being

and some studies have been shown that chronic cynicism can increase the risk of dementia later in life

cynicism is bad for your brain

so how do you combat cynicism

well i am a major cynic or have been a major cynic

how did i combat it

by living the opposite

so i was cynical about well let's say pop music

i think pop music was vapid and meaningless and then i listened to pop music with my daughters

and i saw the way that it lifted their spirits

i saw the way it became a celebration of life

and i realized that pop music has its place and the answer to cynicism is context

understanding that everything has its place and understanding that although we've been hurt that does not eliminate worthiness or merit or even dreams

the trick is to nurture a healthy optimism that is tempered by the cynicism that comes with experience

so to dream but to dream wisely

to be optimistic but to be guarded about it

to find some balance here is the way forward

so the trick is to not to destroy cynicism but to learn its place - to understand that sometimes people are posturing

so what do you do about that

you accept people at face value until they give you reason to do otherwise at which point you nod your head to cynicism and say you were right about that one but that doesn't mean you're right about every one

do you see the difference

it's easy to shut down and be cynical

what's difficult is on the other side of hurt trauma pain loss difficulty is to reorient yourself and reacquaint yourself with beauty and hope anyway

but you may find on the other side is a life better than you had before the pain started

## What If I Don't Have Mystical Experience?

our last question came in via email and it reads, "hey mike i have a question about spiritual experiences and encounters i'm frustrated i'm a christian turned atheist turn christian agnostic of sorts i want desperately to have a life of faith i worship i study the bible i read rob bell books and heck i even listen to the liturgists i feel like there's a spiritual side to existence even if it's perfectly explained through science but in the back of my mind i can't shake the suspicion that this is all pretty pointless that there probably isn't a god and i'm just falling back on what seems comfortable and safe due to the fact that i was raised in church people who i trust to be sane reasonable folks have claimed to have had experiences that have shaped and strengthened their beliefs sometimes it's a miraculous event sometimes an auditory or visual message of some kind but it's always something that would be an actual tangible experience that they can hold on to from what i've read and heard from you i understand that you have also had an experience of some kind that deeply affected you my question quite simply is what about the rest of us those of us who have had no meaningful encounters to make us believe there is anything going on under the hood i know it sounds shallow and selfish but are we doing something wrong are we missing something spiritual right underneath our noses or is this simply how the cookie crumbles sorry if i rambled thanks for reading and all that you do

well first of all i'm so sorry that you're feeling frustrated that is difficult especially on something as big as knowing or encountering god and to some degree i understand how you feel because i had a period of time where i desperately wanted to experience god and i was not able to and shortly after i started telling my story my experience with god to other people this question started to come up why you and not me what did you do to have an experience like that because i would do anything to experience god in such a real way such an obvious way such a powerful way and that led me to the most intense period of deep scientific research i've ever done in my life this is it this is as deep as i've ever gone into science i was looking for that answer why me what happened to me and why that's when i started to learn so much about the human brain was trying to find an answer to that question so let's talk about runners you didn't see that coming did you let's talk about runners for a second let's imagine a guy named tim he's not real active uh he's let's say he's 28. he's pretty thin and tim decides he's going to run a 5k 5k race five kilometers and tim gets up three times a week uh with no formal training regimen and just you know kind of runs pretty fast sometimes tries to run really fast for 30 or 40 minutes and tim runs a 5k and tim comes in third place in his age bracket in the in this 5k in his age and gender bracket he comes in third place his first 5k and now let's imagine sarah and sarah has been training for two years to run 5ks and the first 5k she ran took 60 minutes and on this same 5k she does a 28 minute 5k she's so proud and she's so happy and then she hears about her friend tim who on his first 5k and this guy is not a runner comes in third and she's so discouraged sarah is just heartbroken because she works so hard at running and she loves running well what happened it turns out genetically some people are faster runners than other people that their muscles respond more quickly to training that their respiratory and circulatory systems are better at extracting oxygen from the air and delivering it to their muscles and they're just faster runners what does that mean for sarah well it means sarah still took her time from 60 minutes to 28 minutes through practice and intention and focus she cut her 5k time in half now what does this have to do with spirituality we are learning that some people are more genetically and naturally prone to spiritual experiences than others there are genetic markers some of which are relatively clear for example the the off-quoted god gene this propensity of the body to produce a certain substance in the brain that uh acts like a low-grade hallucinogen all the time and people who have the high expressions of this gene tend to have all these spiritual experiences because their brains are prone for it or the telogen absorption scale some people score highly on this because of natural factors and and uh their life experiences and those people are also what more prone to have spiritual experiences there is a nature component to how we experience god but there is also a nurture experience what we also see through science sciences anyone who prays and meditates six days a week feels closer to god reports feeling closer to god and is more likely to have those kinds of experiences so whether you are a naturally fast runner like tim or it doesn't come as naturally but you work out like sarah everyone can run faster and everyone can get deeper in spiritual practice if they put the effort into it so you should not get discouraged when you compare yourselves to others who are of different makeup and temperament because your journey is your journey it's not a competition it's not a race and if experiencing god matters to you the best way to increase your propensity to have experiences like that is to pray often to have an open posture to participate in communal worship to surround yourself people socially who believe in god and are prone to have those kind of experiences that's what science tells us is most likely to help you have one of those experiences now the earlier question you said you feel that there probably isn't a god and you're just falling back on what seems comfortable well if you've followed my work at all think about how you're using that word god maybe you have too many expectations attached to the word god maybe you have too specific a meaning for god in mind and you need to let go of that in order to move forward i don't spend a lot of time worrying that there might not be a god because of how i define god it's actually unimaginable that there is no god [Laughter] there is we're here we came from something that which we came from is god right that's i don't i don't mix words i don't mess around with it we're here there's a god it's that simple to me now this gets into all kind of weird stuff about what we experience and voices and revelation and well that's why i wrote a book about it honestly um i can't answer a question like this well in 5 minutes and 30 minutes and 60 minutes so i wrote 225 pages about it uh so i hate to do the book pitch at the end of an answer but honestly this is why i wrote the book was for this question more than any other so i'll have a link to my book finding god in the waves in the show notes this week on asksciencemike.com and i'd love to take you through the science behind why people experience god what god is and how you can be more likely to experience god in depth in the chapters of the book especially the second half of the book called god and science but it's a really great question i totally totally understand your feelings and your frustrations i hope like sarah you learn to cut your time in half well that's another episode of ask science mike in the books send me your questions go to asksciencemike.com scroll down you can type a question and email it in you can record a question and drop it in our voicemail inbox and either way we'll consider it for inclusion on the show the show's questions come from our patrons on patreon so if you would not only like to make ice science mike financially possible and viable and thank you so much to those of you who do but you'd like to actually start picking the questions for the show just go to asksciencemike.com click on the patreon button and you can become one of my patrons and have a hand in picking the questions that actually make it on the show now if you if you're broke i get it i'm broke a lot i know the feeling but you still want to help the show tweet out an episode just an episode you enjoyed or go to itunes and give me a rating those those five star ratings really help people find the program and help their rankings on itunes as well i want to thank andrew golucky for his work uh pre-producing the show also for facilitating together we've got groups now called together we're city by city helping people find each other you can learn about that at sciencemike.com as well just look together icon and i want to thank greg nordine for his work producing the show and making it sound so super awesome every week and our theme song is by my boy jeb bodafort if you need some podcast music he can help you out you can find andrew greg and jeb in the show notes at asksciencemike.com thanks for listening everybody and i will see you next week