ASM131 LIVE in Birmingham, England

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coming to you from gallery church in birmingham england it's ask sciencemike [Applause] [Music] november 15th i'll be at the ripple effect conference in lawrence massachusetts february 7th we'll do an acid science mic live in orange california february 10th ask science mike live in cincinnati ohio february 23rd revive 2018 in san diego and the paperback of finding god in the waves is out right now in both the united states and the united kingdom that's the announcement and let's get it started [Music] just two weeks ago we had the creation science ministries at the church and i asked them the question why were there no debates about the different views on creation and evolution amongst christians on the bookshelves because i've recently read uh the three views on creation evolution and um also previously about 30 years ago read a debate with the ivp that advisors universities and graduates and so on um and then i made the big mistake of inviting people to this event and got a lot of kickback saying am i an evolutionist and are you an evil illusion that's a question are you an evolutionist am i an evolutionist so yes oh man here's how much of an evolutionist i am i was in a westminster abbey which is a solemn and serious place of spiritual reflection and also a thing on tv it's real weird i walk past this this tomb marker for charles darwin and had like a moment of beatlemania like oh my gosh it's charles darwin so of course uh being a 21st century american i pulled out my phone and took a picture with the flash on in the middle of a service in one of the high holy sites for the church of england so a lovely man in a robe came directly towards me with great intensity in his step and said basically how dare you defile our sacred institutions and i felt real bad because i forgot the little sign that says don't bring your cell phone out because i got so excited because of charles darwin's incredible contributions to the sciences uh now i am really really not into creationists and evolutionists debating each other because if you look at how the human brain works when people get in a debate they're not actually exchanging rational ideas and comparing notes they're trying to primarily defend their sense of soul standing and win and when your brain is in that state you're not actually capable of learning to any significant extent so in the list of things i care about in the christian faith whether all life descended from a common ancestor and therefore the diversity of life on this planet comes via evolution via natural selection or god reached down with his mighty hand and shaped us out of the dirt went and there was life it's just not even remotely on my theological priority list the the exciting thing about genesis to me is in contrast with every other creation story of its era genesis is about a god who calls creation good genesis is about a god that creates with word and not violence genesis is about a god who is actively involved and cares for the creation and those are far more interesting theological points to me than debating over what people 3500 years ago thought about cosmology the amazing thing about the bible is the degree to which it reflects the time of its author and yet with that extremely specific chronological implication continues to resonate with people today we all know what it's like to look at fruit we shouldn't have and go oh man i'd like some of that right and that that fruit can look a lot of different ways you know sometimes it's somebody else's car i love those teslas uh sometimes it's you know naughty bits on the internet whatever it is like we're really into things we know aren't great for us we all know what the serpent's whisper sounds like so whether adam and eve were two literal people or a metaphor describing what it was like for our species to emerge with consciousness and awareness and creativity and existential anxiety from those that preceded us it doesn't matter because genesis really speaks to me every day so i say in the church what do i want i want grace i want peace compassion faithfulness and the greatest of all love if christians who believe in evolution and christians who believe in creationism can't love each other there is absolutely no evidence for our faith or for an empty tomb throw one up um complete science nerd question nothing to do with faith at all but let's go for a sciencey one so we had elon musk with spacex thanks for that the other day when you covered that but yesterday uh tom de long of blink 182 fame has just started crowding crowdfunding an electromagnetic powered vehicle and i kind of wanted to know what your thoughts on that do you think it's going to be the future that we have emp firewood vehicles or do you think it's a complete nuts idea i haven't heard of this so it's not just like an electric car i was on a train today i mean i just know uh do you think it's possible to power a video p power an emp powered vehicle he's already got 300 dollars worth of funding for it but he has also been chasing aliens for the last five years emp powered vehicle so an emp is an electromagnetic pulse where you basically send out a very high amplitude signal in the electromagnetic spectrum which goes all the way from gamma rays to radio waves and they have something in common at every conceivable frequency they wreak havoc on electronic society so i'm missing something i think because i think he might be too if he if he fires up an emp engine all he's going to do is wipe out all the electronics in the car and depending on the strength of the wave based on the inverse square law all the electronics of the neighboring cars and potentially if it's powerful enough total electrical destruction of an entire city block or more so do i think an emp powered vehicle is a stunningly good idea no unless there is some secret to that sauce that i haven't caught yet based on the scientific brilliance of the incredible pop punk band blink 182. uh in the meantime i think elon musk's ideas of batteries built at scale attached to solar facilities is pretty plausible seems to be working well fuel cells are fascinating how we get the hydrogen without increasing the carbon footprint too much how we safely transport it because hydrogen likes to explode is a big issue but i tell you what i will absolutely look up electromagnetic pulse cars as soon as this event is over who's next uh are there any scientific developments that are kind of popular on the horizon at the moment that particularly concern you in terms of the implication they might have on you know communities culture uh yeah two they're not terribly new they both concern me deeply the first is we can split the atom we've only done that in warfare twice both times my country americans go america which by the way our president there's rumors that he ordered wants ten times as many nukes as america has right now because he saw a graph that saw there were more in 1960 and just wants that many again because clearly being able to destroy the world four times over is insufficient when we could destroy it 40 times over and that's why nuclear weapons still freak me out just because we've been almost sane about them since world war ii it takes one madman once and there's no species like what do i want you know there's this press conference today trump wants to make sure iran never gets the bomb i'd like to take the bomb from trump you know what i mean if the fastest we can get bombs out of the hands of putin and donald trump come on these are not the men i want with the keys to destroy human civilization and culture i mean maybe honestly maybe like british society is honestly too polite to nuke anybody so like maybe you could keep the the remainders and just like sternly look at the rest of the world in foreign policy um so the nukes the nuclear the whole thing is the the statistically the a small chance of something over and over becomes a high chance of inevitable so in any one gear it's very unlikely that the earth gets struck by a extinction event level asteroid but over a 200 to 400 million timeline that small chance rolled over and over becomes almost certain and some folks smarter than me argue that the annualized chance of nuclear war rolled over and over over about 150 year timeline approaches certainty so that that's concerning the other thing that concerns me right now is uh social media in our pocket i know that like what of all the things technologically that's what concerns you very universally the youngest generations on earth right now in any culture with pervasive access to social media on smartphones has higher anxiety levels than we've ever recorded higher depression levels than we've ever recorded higher levels of suicidal ideation than we've ever recorded that's not good um what we're finding in the research is screen time is almost universally bad and non-screen time is almost universally good so europe and and the americas are de-institutionalizing they're definitely secularizing and leaving church behind and instead of experiencing an age of enlightened culture and universal tolerance and self-acceptance they're lonely depressed and suicidal so why am i like into the church as kind of a radical nihilist because scientifically community is the response to the death the smartphone is costing us every minute you spend on your phone is making you less happy every minute you spend with flesh and blood people even if you're like upset with them it's better because the the crisis forget the whole fake news thing that powered brexit and the trump of just forget that for a second it's tough for me too but let's just forget it for a second when you encounter a friend or someone you know on your smartphone your brain associates social connection with them it creates that dopamine compulsion cycle and that creates a social craving so your smartphone is great at creation creating social craving and it gives you a mild reward when you see someone like your picture of your cat or whatever but it doesn't create social fulfillment and the other thing that happens because of social media almost everyone now is sitting home alone doing this and what do they see jolly happy people holding hands like just everyone's laughing having a good time so on the rare occasion you go out it's all this right so everyone gets this reinforcing effect where all my friends are having more fun and i'm left out so these digital networks in our pockets are creating social craving but not social fulfillment and some researchers are linking this to not only suicide but acts of mass violence people feel so lonely and so unknown that eventually they lose the ability to feel they just want to feel something and if you get in that dark a place an assault rifle in a hotel or a van on a bridge starts to seem like you would just feel alive so i'm not being trivial when i say social media in our pocket might be the scientific development i'm the most concerned about other than the nukes [Music] um do you believe in alien life and if so how do you reconcile that with a religious worldview okay so my philosophy on knowledge you could call it my epistemology is i'm an empiricist so i place confidence in a belief in proportion to the evidence i have to support that belief i have no evidence of a specific existence of alien life so i can't make a positive claim that aliens exist what i can say is based on the scale of the universe which is mind-blowing and the frequency by which the basic chemical components of life are available on planets in what we call the goldilocks zone of a star there's a lot of planets trillions of planets probably within radio range of this planet with the possible conditions to produce life as we know it now radio range of this planet is quite quite far um billions of light years so i think it's it's likely that there is extraterrestrial life and less likely but still better than even odds that there's intelligent life out there i think the problem is that the scale of the cosmos it's entirely possible for civilizations to develop and wink out faster than they can find each other across the vast gulf of empty space which is super bummer it's just a really bummer answer yeah i think there's probably aliens i don't know if we'll ever know they're there because you know smartphones and nukes are going to wipe us out before we find them um there's a theory called the great filter out of the fermi paradox and the fermi paradox is like there's so many stars in the sky why is it quiet the universe has been around a long time why don't we see like the faster than light m5 you know going past past our solar system and um m5 is a real road right i didn't blow that okay good i thought for saying like wait no is that an intelligence agency no m5 is the road and the theory is in the fermi paradox there's a great filter civilizations learn so much with technology they figure technology out faster than they figure out to handle it and then they accidentally destroy themselves so i mean you could think of several not just splitting the atoms we wanted to make antimatter it would not take very much antimatter to really really wreak havoc on this planet just not much at all if we learn to you know use negative energy to warp space and time which is something that's theoretically pop possible you know you could conceivably not it it would be different than nuclear war instead of like a nuclear winter you might just shatter the whole planet um just like one engineer is like i wonder what this will do this is a real bummer tonight because this is all hard for me to talk about right a i'm a christian so i believe that the core of all things is love um and b my work is like like a combination of bill nye and mr rogers like science is amazing and you're special just the way you are if you listen to my answers i try to get to both of those things on every single one and i got the science is amazing what's the special you're just the way you are if we might not ever find extraterrestrials oh that's just a theory it could be wrong and if i have this non-scientific idea and that's that there is a cosmic christ there is a part of the trinity that for all eternity invites all of creation into reconciliation with the creator that which we call god and if that's true great filter or no great filter all of this is playing out as part of an invitation to reunification with the creator so maybe even if it doesn't happen on this planet in terrestrial time scales perhaps some way i don't want to say something day because that's temporarily induced but someway eventually we're all reunited with that same source which is still kind of a bummer [Music] my question is about gender um i have a two-year-old daughter and she we're already starting to see her exhibit stereotypically female behaviors like she loves her trains but she loves to feed them breakfast and cuddle them rather than put them on the tracks so my question i haven't really thought it through properly but i was just wondering if you could speak about kind of what is natural in someone with regards to how we behave from a gender stereotype perspective what is just constant reinforcement and if it's more the latter how can i make sure that she doesn't grow up with imposter syndrome that she's good at math or at least not scared of math all of that stuff yes what a great question uh and a terribly difficult one [Laughter] how do we this is a big problem for sociologists how do we study what's environmental versus what's an inate because you can't remove humans from culture right i experience the same thing i have two girls who are like girly girls one more than the other and i tried to like raise them as confident self-assured feminists basically my oldest daughter is a shirt that says america needs nasty women and she has a hat that says the future is female i'm real proud of both those things but how do i know that's not just like another set of social cues so when we look at animals we find that gender is not so neatly defined but the problem is like even studying mammals mammals can create environmental conditioning the same way we do um so i think the best thing to do is look at the underlying biology below gender where you find that the binary gender system that has been popular since the victorian era that's not a timeless conception by the way two genders if you went to like first century rome and talked about two genders they'd be like what are you talking about there's one gender it's male do you mean there's what are women the inferior opposite of the one gender they're not even really gendered women are just the receptacle for masculinity to reproduce so we don't believe that anymore so we definitely evolve on gender standards but when you look at the the binary post-victorian conception of gender what you find is if you if you assign a bunch of sets or attributes to gender and then you plot a distribution of those features in the population and you call one male and one female they create bell curves right bell curve distribution nobody's lost okay the problem with these bell curves is they actually overlap fairly well especially on the the gentle part of the slope and that's what's causing so much strife and discussions about gender is the degree to which we oversimplify the biological story of gender and then have that create tremendous societal and social expectations so one thing i found out recently that stunned me is the women who do the most housework in the home are women who make more than their husbands in the west so men are so freaked out by the idea that their wives could make more than they do that to keep peace in the home highly financially successful women do more housework than their less incomed counterparts which i think is totally weird i would love it if jenny made more money than i did we had kind of a fight not a fight but a spirited discussion once we had kids because like we both thought it'd be cool to be a stay-at-home parent like that sounded awesome she won um because i roll with matriarchy that's how i fight the patriarchy um but you you will not here's gosh this is like the bummers version of athletics like ever you can't completely overcome culture because what you say and do is such a small fraction to what trains your daughter's neural lattice it's ridiculous so we can talk about standards of beauty all we want but there's a lot of billboards and adverts sending a certain message there's a lot of movies there's a lot of stereotypes so one thing you can do in addition to just what you say is curate the media experience i was way more into my daughters watching frozen which is about two sisters taking care of themselves thank you very much in fact the one love interest turned out to be a villain spoiler sorry if you haven't seen frozen but they they have they were that they frozen as far as can tell is one the first mainstream features animated or not wherein a woman underwent the hero's journey there's this fasting thing out of feminist scholarship where if you take women out of most films it doesn't change the plot at all it just means the hero doesn't have a love interest what this is what we're telling our daughters you exist to be a love interest come on come on i mean we don't see a lot of differences in male and female brain structures other than that women's neurons tend to be a bit more efficient so women can get more cognitive workload out of a similar number of neurons it's really the only oh and they don't need as much oxygen to run their more efficient brains which is why most scientists think we'd be way better served if the first columnist to other worlds were colonies of women because anyway i'm about to go on like a anti-man screed kind of a female chauvinist and that might not be cool with everybody um so it's all about media curation it's all about finding those things in our culture which are doing a good job displaying a new femininity a new understanding of gender and a new understanding of masculinity where what it means to be a man is not to be the dominant household breadwinner and when that only partially succeeds that means as your child gets older you get to deconstruct gender stereotypes with them and do investigative work and especially at those key points we know that girls who don't feel like being totally girly the pressure really bakes in that's about 10 to 12. when do we see girls just like dropping out girls who are great at math suddenly aren't interested in math it's around that age when the boys get a little more aggressive and the other girl's like ew what do you mean you're like math i might have been a little too california there but um and it's just about this intentional counter pressure and with all that it's still going to be an incredible battle because patriarchy is everywhere we've just decided since like we plowed fields the first time like when we started planting seeds is when we as a species said you know what men are in charge this is not a recent development in human society so if it took us oh i don't know ten thousand twenty thousand years to build patriarchy it's probably going to take more than five years to tear it down all i know is i'm in i work for a charity and even though we're very successful at what we do and we generate more income every year to help the people around the world that initial problem still exists and that's not exclusive to our charity but charities all over the world they do better and we take more money from rich people in the west and give it out to the rest of the world and yet the problems still exist so it's a two-part question one why is the model not working and two is there a better model that's some fire great question first of all you know more about than i do you're working in a charity and i'm a podcaster so i'd be happy to tell you what i read in the atlantic um i actually have talked with some friends who run very successful charities and um there's this idea called colonialism where european nations especially for a while decided you know would be cool if we just owned everything so let's build some boats and let's go liberate some people from their savage lifestyles with the beautiful enlightenment of western capitalism so they too can deplete all their natural resources only since we showed them how we'll keep most of the gains right and so this created incredible wealth in a handful of countries and never before seen levels of poverty and wealth disparity in other parts of the globe and so then we decided oh that was a terrible idea and so we went from colonialism into neocolonialism which meant instead of exploiting countries primarily through settling and militaries we'll just do it economically and it'll be harder to tell who's doing what and in all of these systems resources are pulled out of less wealthy countries and then used to make stuff that's sold in more wealthy countries and because of intellectual property the really wealthy countries keep most of the gains again same cycle so when we work in good intentions to do charitable work across the world because colonialism is kind of our baked in expectation we go we have the solution we're going to take it to the other people and and just solve their problem we're going to be the saviors and this has been a problem current like kind of cutting edge methods of social capitalism have involved around like you buy something and we'll make an extra pair out of our profit margin and then we'll just give it to someone in need and we do that with nations that have suffered from colonial effects uh we just like wreck their local economies we're like look at all these shoes and pants and glasses that we made and ship to you aren't we generous and then like the guy in town that knew how to make shoes now he can't feed his family either so the smart money on charitable investment is about firing up and training local production and economic activity so with one caveat we got to cover the basics you can't start an economy if people don't have water you can't kick start an economy without sanitation you can't kick start an economy without you know basic agriculture so if we're shipping food somewhere and we're not working just as hard on sustainable farming practices and access to clean water then we're just perpetuating suffering and it's really weird the way the west feels the need to save the rest of the world as statistically we're the unhappiest people on earth uh-huh every time i see like other than extremely war-torn parts of the world most parts of the world we consider impoverished are much happier with better uh social structures and stronger family systems i sometimes wish like impoverished nations would send charitable workers to the west to be like hey here's how you continue to get along with your mom and your aunt for your whole life and we'd be like what but i have a minor geopolitical difference from my family so i quit talking to them but the trick is in all things equip local people to create their own solutions it's not perfect but one thing i stay pretty active in is kiva where i do these like micro loans to people starting businesses and uh there's not like a terrible penalty for non-repayment at all um and the repayment terms are generous and they take a long time but you know if i if i've and i've i've got quite a few that i've funded and if it's someone who has a vision of making bags in a community that doesn't have retail that's how economies get started so i think we should be totally generous with drilling wells and access to clean water and creating sanitation i have no problem if we just fit the bill and we go and we do that we train people we train people how to maintain it but beyond that we've got to bootstrap local economies or we're it's just a new like friendlier colonialism and that's where that cycle of dependence comes from we create it on accident with the best of intentions so on the basics thing like i've got a friend who has a company called charity water and they just make they just they just drill wells and sometimes it doesn't work you know what i mean so this acknowledge like some of the money we all the money raised we go to the effort but sometimes it doesn't work we drill a well there's no water there we drill a well and then it breaks down so we have to go back it's hard work it should be hard just whatever your model is make sure your model is not designed for westerners to save the rest of the world but instead to partner with and listen to local people about what is needed and the best way forward [Music] all right so um for most of human history i like this question already but for most of human history most of our efforts gone basically on survival fairly directly and then technology and innovation has meant that we can spend a very small amount of our efforts directly staying alive and yet people are still frantically spending their lives desperately doing stuff not directly related with survival to survive so what needs to change in our approach to technology and innovation to get off the treadmill this room is throwing fire just straight fire questions uh yeah that i saw one researcher estimate that pre-agrarian hominids spent about 16 hours a week securing their access to food and water 16 1-6 what what they do the rest of the time napped played with each other probably scratched they probably scratched a lot they didn't have showers and lice were an issue but like i don't know i might take lice for a 16 hour work week you know what i'm saying like that's that sounds amazing um and so then we like created a dramatically more efficient way of feeding ourselves called agriculture which took way more time to not die by doing and we agriculture legitimately is back breaking labor for people to survive and then we were like oh industry right and then machines just suddenly can create everything easier and so now it's like probably feasible to survive on 16 hours a week again only we went to like an 80 hour work week in the industrial revolution because why not because we could have like more more cheaply produced crap if we work more and have actually the dawn of the industrial revolution you all know the people building the stuff they just didn't get a lot of the economic value they produced they had to work all that time just for the basics so the first answer to why we work so much is human greed some people just like a huge cut of economic activity because i cannot stand this 35 yacht one more day if i don't get a 42 foot yacht like tom has my life is pointless so greed is a huge tax on human activity then we all decided we wanted to be rich people because we saw like the opulence of wealth and we transformed into an information economy still with industrial activity we unionized we got better working conditions and we worked really really really really really hard so that we could have like the biggest houses average people it had in human history that we never spent time in so then that would be greed again two for two on greed um so what kind of change has to happen i think we have to de-prioritize accumulating wealth and things as the primary metric of a good life and i think that's smart because people are just miserable they're just miserable i used to work in corporate america and the wealthiest people i knew were consistently the most unhappy human beings i'd ever met i knew so many self-loathing billionaires working themselves to death literally working long hours longer hours than their employees because there was like one other person they knew that had more total digits of wealth like i've known people who are on the like the lists of famous not famous but wealthy people and every year they would look at that list and if other people were higher than them they would like make these great plans about how they might increase their wealth and to some degree we all do that we all do that i moved to los angeles with my family and it was really expensive to move our stuff so we got less stuff than before but nicer stuff and i've discovered that like the secret to happiness was a 65-inch 4k television it just had to happen like i didn't really i told i told jenny like i'm gonna order a tv i didn't say which tv or what size it was it just showed up and she's like what is this box and i was like this my dear is happiness that was ridiculous i would i i'm positive other than the fact that my friends make joke about the tv that i really enjoy one of my friends like the picture doesn't look that great when i watch outside through your window from two streets down um like i think i probably would be just as happy with a 45-inch set or a 35-inch set you know it's ridiculous but we we extract everything to numbers and numbers to happiness and more with better that's not the life of fulfillment laid out in the gospels or by paul they kind of portray fulfillment as service and submission and you know when i play stranger things that's a netflix series when i play stranger things in 4k on my tv it's cool but when i get an email from someone who says i was contemplating suicide and i didn't because of your show that's fulfilling in a way no possession i've ever had is so on an individual level we need to reorient ourselves to what matters in life and in my opinion that's working towards universal human justice and liberation um societally we've got to change the incentive structures the one of the most depressing things i've ever seen is the way in which humans predictably follow whatever incentive structure reward system they're set in and right now the way we've structured our society is one of the primary forms of incentivization is economic success for your organization that's shareholder value that's your sales quota if you work in operations in some way that's driving costs down and that not only drives us to chase relatively meaningful number based metrics excuse me relatively meaningless number based metrics it also encourages us to behave unethically there's a book called the honest truth about dishonesty by dan ariely and in his research he found that people have to believe that they are good to be happy but that if you invited people to play a game where they could cheat if they only cheated a little at a time they continued to feel like good people and when you play this out in a working environment in a capitalist economy cheating a little bit at a time can have incredible implications for real human life small moral transgressions at a time can get you to bernie madoff and 50 billion dollars gone and people's retirement doesn't exist bernie madoff would look in the mirror and like think i'm a good person i can fix this eventually small moral transgressions over time add up until finally the guy is relieved to be caught because he was having trouble maintaining the illusion of being a good person anymore because like his friends and family's retirement got lost too and that's what on us on a societal structure scale we have to fundamentally realign and change the economic incentive structures of our economies and i have no clue how to do that and if you talk about it people go crazy you know what i mean the thing i've noticed consistently if you critique modern capitalism people go what are you a marxist it's like no i'm not a marxist i'm just saying this is not working great for everyone including the people who say that it's working for them because they're rich and wealthy and miserable and committing suicide at record rates so i guess the first step is an openness to the idea that owning the world is not enough to be happy hi mike um just sorry just to say um i've had a couple of beers so please excuse any inca here we need more beers in this room not less don't apologize at all cool um so just a little bit background um i was raised pentecostal and so in spite of that um i still would identify as a christian and my question is about um yeah i'll be quick no no no no that was me checking the overall time of the event okay um eschatology so yeah time yeah yeah very good um so basically i don't know i really struggle with especially these days and i don't know if you're familiar with the british new testament scholar nt wright heard of him yeah yeah so for quite for quite a while i really liked his stuff and what you were just saying about us all working together towards human flourishing i guess the um the sort of the golden thread of what he says is that um in the end god will put the world to rights and everything will be great at the end of history um everything will be restored etc um but the more uh theology and philosophy and psychology that i've read i just really struggle um with the idea that eschatology isn't anything more than a human response to death anxiety and i just wondered how you respond to that we did a literatures podcast on eschatology where we talked about basically all theological components of the afterlife and the end of the world come from a primate who can't contemplate the end of its consciousness and then we decided our most likely eschatology was artificial intelligence taking over the planet and converting it into a handwritten letter factory because it's super intelligent without morals and that was one of the most uplifting pieces of work we've ever produced i'm catching a thread tonight your smart crowd highly educated highly logical and eschatology and related theological disciplines come from understanding god through the lens of the enlightenment and in the enlightenment what do we do we take everything and we break it into tiny as small as possible components and beliefs and testable ideas and we create a systematic understanding of stuff when you create an enlightenment based understanding of electrons protons neutrons quarks you get the standard model of physics when you take an enlightenment based approach to space and time you get general and special relativity from our friend einstein that's what the enlightenment does and it's great at it i love it i like having an iphone you know what i mean you can't make an iphone with pre-enlightenment thinking you know what i mean you can't like collect some aluminum and and just like pray over it or ask the spirits to assemble into a magical slate of glass with global communications infrastructure it just won't work the enlightenment's your ticket to that party and i'm a huge fan that's why they call me science mike but the enlightenment when applied to the meaning of life gets you eschatology what's the ultimate purpose what can we most clearly intellectually define and defend and when we do this educated western folk neuroscience tells us you're basically assassinating god's presence in your brain because when the enlightenment happened we took one feature of our brains the reductive capacity of the left hemisphere and we put it in charge of not only our culture but our inner landscape we put our hopes and fears and trust in intellectual deconstruction and reconstruction and human beings had never processed the world that way that was one type of thinking that was balanced and usually over balanced by the holistic view of reality that our right brain offers and we don't trust it anymore we don't trust intuition we don't trust feelings they're squishy they're vague they're ambiguous they are all the best things in life they are all the best things in life it is fascinating to know that when i look at the sunrise it's not there yet that the atmosphere itself is acting as a lens that's bending light around a planet that's still obstructing that close star and that the reason the star looks red is because blue light scatters more readily in the composition of our atmosphere and so the red light is what's left and that's why the sun rise has this beautiful red glow that's why the sky fades towards purple and then blue above as the sun rises and it's gorgeous and it's gorgeous because of my right brain it's gorgeous because of the emotional centers of my brain in the same way that the only reason we give a [ \_\_ ] about eschatology is at some point we've tasted something we can't actually explain the presence of god and the presence of god survives in the emotional centers of the brain in the holistic regions of the brain so we have to be careful to never let our theology become the master of our experience with the divine because neurologically speaking and god i hope truly speaking universally speaking god is greater than our ability to deconstruct so what i like to do with eschatology is have a couple of shots and go nuts uh one of the greatest disappointments of my life was um i had stroke-like conditions and had to miss a conference where ntn i in t wright and i were scheduled to speak and i was desperately looking forward to some beer-fueled eschatology chat with n.t wright kind of a bucket list thing for me still but what's my eschatology really spiritually love is at the core of all things so where is all this going love that's an unscientific idea so is the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice but that unscientific idea got us the american civil rights movement and so at the same time i understand science so clearly i never let go of this beautiful notion that no act of love and kindness or gentleness is ever wasted that no matter how depressing nuclear war seems or smartphones make us that the way to conquer those things is to do for others what i believe christ did for me to be broken and poured out to be present to be humble to be kind to be gentle to be generous to always be present when someone needs to be clothed or visited to be fed to be loved eschatology is not some distant idea that i wait to observe but if i am invited into the work of christ in this life then i am an active participant in bringing the kingdom of heaven near and the only way to do it is to love your neighbor and therefore my eschatology is not actually robots take over the world my eschatology is to love god with everything that i have to love my neighbor as myself just as the good samaritan did to the man by the road hi mike um i've got two questions and i'll probably blur them in the middle and forget which one i was asking fantastic apologies i'll do the same with my answer excellent um i'll go with the one i originally thought of um in order for us to be able to stave off some of the worst effects of global warming should i become a vegan and if i should why did god make cows out of steak oh man oh man see most questions i get to kind of stand up and be like i've been through this i've processed it i'm showing you where i've been so you can go where i'm going but you just spoke to my heart today oh man agriculture specifically meat production is a massive contributor to climate change into carbon dioxide production of all the meat cows are the worst and the worst by far cows are very very very hungry per pound or kilogram of meat produced they're very very thirsty and they fart like mad constant constant farting if you attach a 55 gallon container to a cow it can fill it with methane in a matter of hours you know what i mean like you could you could like have cow powered hot air balloons pretty easily it'd be disgusting but it would work enough cows you could fuel that flame and just cows are gross man we eat them all the time so one of the biggest impacts you can have in combating climate change is to reduce the amount of meat you consume especially beef one study recently claims it has not been peer-reviewed yet so don't quote me but you can google it to see for yourself that if americans every time they were going to eat beef ate beans instead america would hit its goals in the paris agreement that's the right reaction what i heard a climate scientist say once that it's better for you to be a vegan driving a hummer than a meat eater driving a prius like this is how dramatic we're talking here's the problem and it's a big problem meat is amazing and it makes me happy right some people know what i'm talking about i'm having a rough day like i i can control pretty well when i'm home it's like what do you want for lunch all i think have a peanut butter sandwich and i enjoy it but i get on the road and i get tired and like hey what do you think you'd like for dinner i was like how about steak wrapped in pizza and uh just like make sure there's bacon on the pizza like what we took like a steak and stuffed it with bacon and then i eat it and i'm happy like all the emotional exhaustion goes away and i'm just my body's just like that was perfect good all the reward chemicals dumped from the brain so i think if we tell people the way to save the earth is to become vegans they're going to try it they're going to fail and get stuck in a guilt shame cycle right so i tend to be a little more pragmatic you want to help save the planet start with one less meat meal per week for four weeks did you pull that off congratulations now try a meatless day then two meatless days then three meatless days and then you want to try a meatless meal for the whole week you don't eat meat at breakfast lunch or dinner and then see how far you can take it and if meat becomes an occasional thing for you you are no longer a part of the agricultural problem by the way the amazing thing about this it subverts all the political fighting about climate change you are personally in control of a pretty significant source of carbon emissions and if you don't eat it nobody buys it it doesn't get grown it's that simple this is a grassroots solution to a huge issue undermined by the fact that meek makes us happy so i'm saying don't be unhappy just use meat as an escape route to happiness less often over time and in doing so you can help create a better tomorrow so um we often hear that contemplation of love is a good starting point for an encounter with the divine if we're to understand god within a framework of love what if animals with lesser social consciousness a way to assume that they're unable to experience god because they have no need for love or interpersonal relationship or do you have a broader definition of love that is more fundamental to all being without becoming so abstract as to be impossible for us to know experientially yes please applaud that question [Applause] i mean i'm proud of myself that i was smart enough to understand the question but i don't know that i'm smart enough to answer it let me can i'll just riff out loud is that okay um dogs know love like we've brain scanned them they wanted to see if when dogs display affection if they're posturing to manipulate us or genuinely experiencing love it turns out your dog loves you more than you love anything anything you think you love your mom not as much as your dog loves you your dog loves you so much the sound of your voice creates a more evocative reaction in their brain than the sounds or smells of other dogs your dog has it bad when you leave your dog goes into a deep profound and genuine state of grief because what is the key to happiness let's just be together all the time forever because you're like a dog i gotta use the restroom he's like no problem i love it when you come with me i'll go with you this is perfect that sounds really exciting it'd be easier to sniff you dog i'm not into that but i am so dogs no love do cats know love [Laughter] we brain scan cats too they love their owners sometimes they love their houses if you move your cat would rather like get to know a new roommate than leave their house but cats do love you so mammals mammals have it on lock do crocodiles love to our knowledge no for a while they will resist the urge to eat their babies but only for a while and then it's like you're a good size reptile it's over do bacterium love i think no bacterium do have a very basic model of reality um in their rudimentary cockoo-esque consciousness but i don't think that includes love so which is why my theology on god love is not strictly emotive i'll be honest i don't know if god loves like we love the this like highly limbic system based oxytocin driven cuddly thing it's very mammalian i don't know that god has an anterior cingulate cortex or neurons to drive such an experience so when i say god is love um i guess i mean something more fundamental god is source god is the infinitely generous source of all things so not just every human and every dog and every damn holier than thou cat but also every bacterium and every crocodile and every rock and every quark and every gluon every neutrino every photon every vast curve of space time all of these things are continuously given and sustained by love for god so loved the world that he made it exist and continued to have it do so and in that situation all things participate in that love and are part of that love and are drawn to that love and cannot escape that love but that makes no sense to social primates so then god so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son god became incarnate in flesh and walked and talked and burped and gave people hugs and met samaritan women at a well which was a big deal and he told righteous people they couldn't stone a woman caught in the act of adultery and then we understood that cosmic love much more intimately because god's willing to meet us where we are knowing that we can't do the opposite and that understanding of both a personal human-like love and a more universal love delivers me to a posture of unending gratitude uh every moment i'm thankful for even like the ones that kind of hurt sometimes when the arthritis in my right foot kicks up and it feels like i'm walking on glass i go i can feel my foot like glass that means i can feel anything at all that's amazing i'm super grateful for the rain forest level diverse ecosystem in my gut that lets me survive and not only survive but experience pizza by the way you'll notice pizza is a recurring theme in my examples because it's ultimate joy and you know what like without a huge colony of diverse bacteria there's literally bacteria that hunt and eat other bacteria in your intestine and there's species of bacteria that are only found in human intestine that only hunt species of bacteria only found in human intestines and there's things called bacteriophages have you heard of this these are specialized virus that only hunt the bacteria that hunt the bacteria that live in your gut there's a multi-tiered ecosystem that lets you eat pizza if that's not a miracle i don't know what is and all of it stemming from a fountain of love so if we don't take the time to like enjoy it we profane that gift take a lesson from your dog what's on your shirt oh pandas okay sorry wait a panda with a chair because it's wwf would you stand up let them see your shirt because only i got to enjoy it that's the right reaction awesome why do people still believe in conspiracy theories even though there's no evidence for them like flat earth which is a hot topic at the moment for some reason yeah why do people believe in conspiracy theories without evidence because people don't generally believe things because they have evidence for them that's the normal state of human experience not the aberrant one our brains aren't designed to find out the truth about things our brains are designed to fit in with our friends as the primary function of human belief why because in a pre-agrarian society if you don't have the acceptance of your friends and you get exiled from your social community you're a solitary homo sapien in the wild and we suck at that we are one of the most pathetic isolated species in the world imagine for a moment a baby antelope separated from its mother oh it's so sad but it can walk and it can graze and it can drink water and it can run and it may find its way back to the herd now imagine a human baby lying on the ground alone in the same circumstances there's no possible happy ending okay now i want you to imagine you right now at your age with no phone no shoes no clothes dropped at a random point in the temperate zone of this planet at least 200 miles from civilization how long will you last not long not long because you're homo sapien and we thrive in groups it's why we have crippling crippling anxiety if we're alone too long even introverts sorry introverts you also like people you just get tired of them so you just need a little space but if the space lasted say 30 years or 30 months you'd lose it so conspiracy theories come from the fact that our beliefs are primarily driven by social identity and conspiracy theories offer some really exciting features that other knowledge systems don't one is a sense of immediate belonging because you're part of a group that's outside of the dominant cultural narrative two conspiracy theories make you feel like you have elevated access to insider knowledge and that's really exciting you go oh you're a spherical earth person [Laughter] i used to be stupid like you you know what i mean so it creates this gratification but the funny thing is we've discovered in research that anytime you give yourself a social label you create an immediate cognitive bias and that cognitive bias will subconsciously filter out information that subverts your assigned social label that can be christian that could be tori that could be atheist or secularist all of these labels diminish the aperture of information your brain can process so i try to have pity not pity empathy for conspiracy theorists they're doing what social primates do they're fitting with their friends the problem is sometimes those unevidence-based beliefs cause tremendous problems for the world and that's why so much of my work is grounded on helping people think skeptically so i don't attack conspiracy theorists head on because i'm super conflict diverse and manipulative and instead over time i try to subtly train them in the tool sets of skeptical thinking and if you teach people to be skeptical too well unfortunately it's always the same end of the road radical nihilism where you realize you can't justify any ideas whatsoever and that's where i live um and then so people if you do your job well and they say oh my gosh i you're right i can't justify that the earth is flat but can you really justify the earth is spherical or there's an earth at all or that you're not just a brain in a vat being fed information by a giant supercomputer you no one here i tell you what i got 80 pounds for anyone in this room who can prove they are not dreaming right now if you can prove to my satisfaction that you are not dreaming at this moment 80 pounds is yours go ahead donald trump exists how do you know donald give this man a microphone this is going to be fun how do you know donald trump exists i don't think that's within the terms of your original question what no it is because that was your proof that you're awake right now how do you know you're not dreaming about a figure donald trump that exists because that would be the most abominable nightmare and not a dream so all your dreams are pleasant uh no i'm just suggesting that we're living in an abominable nightmare but that would technically be a dream right you got do you want to play give him a mic let's do this we'll do a couple of these am i allowed to take my trousers down i need that one more time because i think i heard you but i want to be sure whenever when when you realize you haven't got your trousers on you wake up okay so if i can stay for about more than 30 seconds with my trousers down i'm definitely not asleep okay fair enough fair enough but could we admit it's possible to have a dream in which you are trouser-less and remain that way and i would interject although possibly as a figment of your imagination that i have had that very dream in fact when i first started this is a little too vulnerable when i first started doing ass science mike live i had a dream that was doing a science monthly live and killing it and people weren't really reacting well and i couldn't figure out why and i looked down and i was fully nude and now i was uncomfortable but i didn't want to like not finish the show and that was a long and awkward dream [Laughter] [Applause] that's what i'm talking about okay so enough of the proving a dream thing i will i will go ahead and tell you spoiler i've in doing a lot of these and sometimes i have more time and we'll do that for 30 or 40 minutes no one's ever proved to me they're not asleep i've never proved to myself that i'm not asleep so the end of the road of skepticism ends up being nihilism um and what's that gotta do with conspiracy theories after you take the world apart which you seem very clever and i think you're on the way to doing which is why i'm going ahead and telling you this uh you have to have some response to like how do i justify anything and i always say the best answer to a nihilist who says nothing exists ask them if a bus exists if they say no ask them to stand in front of a moving bus without moving themselves and you'll generally find that they believe the bus exists or they get a darwin award and it turns out that nihilism isn't rewarded by natural selection so at some point we have to accept that there it really is a universe and make decisions about what we're going to believe within it and so then i think the healthy thing is to agree evidence is the best way to justify ideas but that can still take us to really troubling places morally and ultimately every person still needs a moral philosophy that allows them to understand that other folks have needs too and to fight for them so i've got a four-month-old daughter and we're kind of having the same sort of debate that in our family that you alluded to earlier how we're kind of i know i want to be the stay-at-home parent no you want to be the stay-at-home parent um so i was just wondering does science have anything to say about that is there's a scientific benefit to the dad staying at home or the mum staying home and and being sort of the full-time parent yeah it's so new dad's staying home in any significant number there hasn't been a lot of time to do large tract decadal or more studies but i'd say early on unfortunately stay-at-home parent is a real luxury for a child i think it's fantastic if one parent either parent stays home full time with the children for the child i think it's rough on the parent i would say whoever decides to stay home be careful not to lose your sense of individual identity and emotional need and accomplishment because at the end of the day children are [ \_\_ ] they are incredibly selfish they have been designed by evolution to be that way they have no problem torturing you with sleep deprivation they have no problem putting their needs before your own if they walk into the kitchen and you're sobbing they will be upset to the degree that it interferes with their lunch but if you like get it together enough to make lunch they'd be like i'm glad you're okay so about that sandwich right um and what we do see in the data is stay at home parents often experience pretty intense emotional or existential crisis around the time their kids start leaving the house a lot and so you'll be really careful to maintain some emphasis on your spousal relationship and on your individual sense of identity and your needs uh i say this with the maximum possible hypocrisy but if you've got a stay-at-home parent the stay-at-home parent needs to be able to not stay at home frequently and the supposed like income earning parent needs to pick up that slack i'll hear about this later um like in our case uh jenny doesn't have like a huge interest in me staying with the kids and her going out alone she would rather us go out together and then we have to get like a sitter omg but it is important that you just you just your kids will take over your life they really will i thought this is not science this is my opinion as a parent that ultimately makes them like less effective people if you're a stay-at-home parent you are not your children's live-in servant i've noticed that i have a friend who's a stay-at-home dad and his wife is the disciplinarian which i love but like because the kids are around dad all the time they just stop listening because kids are [ \_\_ ] it's whoever wins that fight to stay home all the time it's not actually like a rainbow with candy at the end it's the hardest job in the world like not letting some humans die the stakes are high like if i blow it tonight on this podcast you guys go that was a real waste of an evening you know what i mean if stay at home parent really blows it a human being doesn't exist anymore and that's just like a different level of anxiety so make sure you take care of yourself in doing the hardest and most important job our species is capable of [Music] so we're in school at the moment doing exams and i really don't like french somehow i've managed to work my way into the top set french and how do i train my brain to revise french even when i really don't want to and how do i make revising french a long-term sustainable thing i can do instead of just saying oh i revise french tonight and then just not the next week so yeah okay so how can you continue doing something that your brain tells you this is terrible i'm not into it a conditioned response to train yourself you need to create a cue that drives a routine that creates a reward there's a book called the power of habit that the first third is grounded in great science and amazing um on this top on this specific thing so that might look like at a certain time each day your smartphone goes well study french in response to the study french you have a set routine a set amount of time you do the work that you have to do and at the end of that process you do something you really like but you only do that after you study french and be careful with this because i decided i wanted to get in shape a while ago and i was a member of a gym and i would go to this gym and they made smoothies so i would make myself basically a milkshake that every quarter mile i would drink some of the milkshake on the treadmill and i got super sick because it turns out that was like a bad thing like drinking like fatty dairy like wild blood was being drawn away from my stomach to power my leg muscles was a flawed reward so i'm saying is like maybe the reward's not like a cook literally a cookie because then you'll be good at french with a much higher bmi um and whatever your reward is understand that uh you need to think of um that requires some introspection and some contemplation why do you hate studying french and what uh what reward could you give yourself that meets the emotional need that's causing the antipathy towards studying french but ultimately it comes down to a cue a routine and reward and that's how i engineer myself to do almost everything is i turn it into a habit [Music] okay so my question is um as a huge bats to the future fan um i'd like to know what your thoughts are on time travel whether or not you think it's possible or not and what the positive or negative implications of that would be uh on civilization and also on faith as well okay time travel easy one uh yes time travel is possible uh you're doing it right now no but in all seriousness you're moving at a fixed rate forward on a temporal dimension i'm assuming you'd like to do something else maybe you'd like to travel to uh the future piece of cake go to birmingham international book literally any flight attain altitude and speed and now your local reference frame is being slightly slower than the reference frame on the future and when you land you will have traveled minuscule fractions of a second forward in time compared to where you would have been if that's not enough become an astronaut get on the international space station orbiting the earth at 17 640 miles an hour or more depending on its exact orbital height at the moment orbital velocity and then that disparity will get even greater and if you stay up there for a few years you could maybe decades probably decades you could gain seconds you could travel seconds in the future if you want to do more than that you're going to need to build a very very very very very very very very very fast spaceship faster than anything we know how we would build right now and move a significant fraction of light speed and then you want to head away from the earth traveling some nice fraction of light speed and then come back toward it which is going to cause a sustained desynchronization of your reference frames at that point you could travel hundreds or thousands of years into the future if you can't figure out how to do high fraction of light speed travel because of relativity and energy another strategy is to get in a very very tight orbit around a supermassive black hole which will also allow you to travel into the future just don't cross the event horizon or very bad things happen very bad things happen here past the event horizon or at the event rise of a black hole mostly you would be slowly transformed into gamma radiation maybe x-ray depends on the mass of the black hole um now that's true that's not that's not a joke it's funny but it's not a joke so if that's not what you want to do uh let's say you want to travel back in time well uh all you got to do is invent wormholes large enough for people to travel through and once you've been a wormhole now put it on one of those very fast rocket ships okay if you put a wormhole one end on the surface of the earth and the other end on your rocket ship that not a rocket rocket's too slow your spaceship your near light speed spaceship and you fly to the edge of the milky way galaxy maybe beyond it ideally you head towards another galaxy you loop back when you return you'll have a wormhole with two ends in different temporal reference frames which means by crossing through that wormhole you would be able to traverse thousands of years now the downside is this thousands of years is like back to shortly after you launched no no i did that wrong i did that wrong yeah you step out and you're in the distant future but you step back and you're back in the present in the cockpit of the spaceship very exciting i know and so now you've created a wormhole time machine between two times on the earth a small problem you can't go back before the invention of your time machine and you can't like arbitrarily select a time distance other than doing the math to figure out how fast and how far you should fly and to return that's plausible if we can make wormholes large enough for people to pass through and make spaceships that can travel a significant factor of light speed you want to travel to the past sorry physics doesn't allow it not that we know of the good news is it exists in einsteinian relativity the past is still there the future is already there all coordinates of space time already exist we just don't know how to have a human consciousness or the arrangement of matter that creates a human consciousness go back in time before the invention of a relativistic wormhole based time machine [Music] earlier on this evening you described yourself as an atheist and then later on you called yourself a christian i'd just like to get you to share something about your journey between the two okay uh in the lobby there's a book called finding god in the waves the best-selling account of how i became went from a southern baptist to an atheist to a christian mystic in summary i was a fundamentalist christian loved god believed in a literal creation like god formed us on the clay breath of life the whole thing jesus is the only way to heaven devoted my life to serving god my dad who was a music minister in our church had an affair said it was leaving my mom i told him yo that's not biblical and i'm a deacon i have a problem with that so you and i are going to do bible study and your request for divorce is denied so then i read the bible four times in a year trying to memorize it because i'm a nerd and nerds can't win fights we can only bore people with data to the point that the acquiesce and at the end of reading the bible four times in one year exactly what happened that you would expect i became an atheist and basically all the bible i found more questions and more contradictions than i ever expected even though i'd read the whole thing before just never in order annual bible plans are really smart read from the torah read from the prophets read from the gospels read from the epistles if anything's too troubling don't worry you're about to skip forward a quarter of this library of books i was an atheist for a few years small caveat i didn't tell anybody that wasn't on the internet because i was afraid of losing my marriage and my social standing in the world when i finally told my wife it was tough she didn't divorce me she told my mom that was tough my mom didn't disown me i got this little kind of burning ember of hope that i could just be an atheist publicly in the world around that time i met a man named rob bell who is universally loved in the christian church worldwide and and rob invited me to be comfortable as an atheist if that's what i needed to be or to realize that perhaps what i was rejecting was my understanding of god but possibly there could be other ways to think of god i thought that was interesting if a bit superstitious then i heard some people know the story then i heard jesus talk to me then i saw a bright and blinding light that made me feel divine love i was so moved by the experience i asked my neurologist for a cat scan because i thought i had brain cancer because i was hearing voices and seeing lights and then when i didn't have brain cancer i said huh what do i as an atheist do with that light so i started studying cosmology in search for space and physics for a creator i started studying neuroscience to try to understand how we can believe god loves us or experience a god that loves us because physics god and consciousness is a non-starter and in that process discovered that neuroscience validates not only the christian practice but a specific school of christian thought called mysticism where we live with our spiritual experiences without tearing them into tiny cognitive pieces and in the process of that mysticism encountered a god that deeply loves me and is ready to help me help others experience that love definitely the shortest version of my story i've ever given but the more resonant stuff that might be a tear jerker is in dead tree form also audiobook [Music] hi um i'm an enneagram two and my husband is an enneagram nine i wonder if you've got any advice for me living with a nine [Laughter] do you have any advice for living with an enneagram nine miss fry no okay she's not a stage person like i am um her answer would be better a two nine any okay you don't know what the enneagram is okay i feel you the enneagram is a way of understand it's a personality typing system that is kind of fascinating and very pseudo-scientific so as much as i don't appreciate it clinically and i don't i deeply enjoy it as like a shorthand for talking about personalities with people so it's there's basically nine types of personality and the two is the helper and the nine is the peacemaker which means it's a pretty stable combination except for one thing the two needs to be needed that's why they help and nines don't like to need anything ever so we're always emotionally available and vulnerable but we'll never give a vibe that we need you because to do that we'd have to come out of our private emotional inner sanctum that we never do for anyone and that's the trouble between the two and the six i need you to need me i need excuse me the two and the nine and the nine says i need to need nothing that's intrinsic to my happiness so how do you live with a nine you fought you help them and this is tough for two especially find their missional calling because when nines finally figure out who they are and believe me nines understand everybody but themselves um when they find out who they are and what they're called to do they start to look like a three and a three needs help um so that might be one strategy the other thing is understand like if you have a fight and um we're frustrating to fight because we don't fight uh but then after the fight you're like why are you just lying on the couch completely immobile that's just how we process things um nine's big uh problem is sloth and believe me after i do an ass science mic live i am a vegetable the next day like we were in london the day after i science mike live and i never left the hotel room all day i just kind of did this that was it we went to wicked and then that kind of emotionally exhausted me so i was quiet this morning so that's just part of who we are we go the inner sanctum nines are nines because we developed an exquisite emotional sensitivity because someone in our life or multiple people in our life that were important were emotionally volatile and so we learned to preempt people's emotional journeys and suddenly manipulate them and at the seat of all that is an inability to recognize our own anger so when we do get anger we get incredibly frighteningly earth-shatteringly angry and then pretend it didn't happen by going into a state of sloth we're a hot mess but we'll never abandon you because that's who nines are take walks every day that'll help hi mike hey um just also want to say thank you to you and to michael for all you do your honesty and integrity and vulnerability has changed many lives as you know um in part in your book you talk um about how maybe when a relationship a marriage or or something like that is not going so well you might want to try and analyze it and break it down and try and find ways to fix it or make it better and how that neurologically maybe undermines what you're trying to actually do i wonder if you might speak to how neurologically you could do the opposite how you might um improve and build um and recapture love um in a relationship um if that makes sense it makes perfect sense and also could you tell us some of the lyrics to um a song for jenny [Laughter] that's real insider stuff i'll start with the second part there's a girl one time i thought she's really cute and i liked it when she smiled and she made me feel funny whenever i saw her and i wanted to be with her forever and so i asked her out and she said no you're just a kid oh but i kept at it and some years later we went out and then later we got married and i wanted when we got engaged for her to feel like she was like in a movie so i wrote her a song and to get engaged i performed it for her small problem i'm a terrible singer so it's like it's like it was a real budget movie you know what i mean and the lyrics what's that i'm an excellent rapper i won't even deny that um i don't know i don't know i don't know if i want the lyrics of that song to be public consumption that's a pretty the intent was so good for a result so bad i just want the intent to be what floats out in the cosmos uh in terms of how to rekindle love that is actually methodologically pretty simple uh your brain tends to think is pretty special whoever of the gender you're attracted to you spend the most time with it's not it's not rocket science your brain is like love the one you're with but with one problem sometimes we spend time with each other we go slowly mad with anger and resentment because the other predictive factor for successful versus unsuccessful relationships is the ratio of positive to negative experiences you hear that the ratio of positive to negative experiences so people who feel like they love each other deeply and their relationships are going right great have a four to one to five to one ratio of positive to negative experiences people whose relationships are about to collapse and they hate each other have a ratio of about point nine to one is a slight slight win for negative experiences over positive experiences it's not like the inverse of a happy relationship right if you're just even steven you're in deep trouble so how do you rekindle love you intentionally create positive experiences for each other which means you have to think about each other you have to be intentional about it this is not scientific subjectively i feel like with ginny that ratio was probably like 30 to one and that's why like it's been 17 years this december and it just hasn't seemed that tough and this is not like giant gestures at all these are small things that happen every day but if you can just increase that ratio of your spouse what they think now is here's the problem if you want to do this your partner doesn't when you increase their ratio and they don't retort that's going to be bad so you probably have to start with a conversation like hey are we in on this thing this relationship thing if we're both in then let's try a couple things let's spend time together let's do small acts of kindness to each other and let's focus on experiential expressions of love walking outside's great you know reading together is great you know what i mean like just the ridiculous like but a great one i've seen look at each other for 30 seconds without speaking that's harder than you think just look at each other and then you don't let language screw it up and that's really i mean i don't want to make it sound that simple but that's pretty much enough to trick your brain that ratio now but here's the trick that ratio of positive to negative that's where you get into some [ \_\_ ] that's where you get into the habits you brought into the relationship that's where you get into your trauma that's where you realize how many times you have a tendency to blame them for everything and accept no accountability yourself and getting to that ratio may require some therapy and some serious self-development work but if you don't and the relationship crumbles you're gonna carry the same bad habits to the next relationship and not have the right ratio and you're just gonna be stuck in this pattern so aim for that five to one and i think things will be okay [Music] thanks mike uh so i just want to go back to what you were saying before and you i don't i don't watch your podcast i don't watch any podcasts and so you may be asked this a thousand times but when you're an atheist what made it so difficult just to accept that maybe there was no god okay so there's a problem of my work there's there's people are drawn to my work because they've had like an existential faith crisis and they've read all the theologians and all the skeptics and they got to the end of both the libraries and went neither that really did it for me and so then they find my stuff and like oh he doesn't claim to know anything so i feel very comfortable and then there are people who encounter my work are like pretty comfortable in their faith and then they're like i wonder why he doubted and they read my book and they're like oh my god i never thought of that so i'm always afraid to like drop the atheist mind virus on people you know what i mean like so why did you doubt god well i had really good reasons i'll give you a couple of the greatest hints does god answer prayer if god answers prayer and like does physical miracles why don't we pray for amputees to get new limbs if god answers prayer and we say god answers every prayer with yes no or wait how is that not just everything that could possibly happen in every situation and we've just allowed ourselves to project a caring god onto the universe i once prayed at the advice of richard dawkins in his book the god delusion what he meant as a rhetorical experiment or a rhetorical exercise praying to a milk jug i literally prayed to a milk jug for a few weeks about a promotion at work that i got so does that mean i have to become a milkist like is god's favor only with me until the expiration date and they have to make a new financial sacrifice for another thing a two percent in order to get god's favor like that goes down a logical absurdist realm of thought so does god answer prayer if god does answer prayer why do some prayers get answered and others not if god can intervene in the universe how is the holocaust okay with the lord almighty oh and speaking of the lord almighty and his morality what in the heck is up with the torah this god who loves all loves the world so much they sent his only son to die for us also told warriors to go and take land people were already living on to not only kill enemy combatants but their wives and their children in some cases burn the livestock too that's god this is a god who says when you kill a soldier from under the land these are the rules you have to take his wife as your own this is a god by the way who multiple times in the old testament directly mentions how slavery is regulated and his representatives in the new testament have commandments for slaves being obedient to masters and not a condemnation of slavery as an institution if god is real where is god and is god good i was unable to find a single piece of forensic evidence to support the documented cases of supernatural events as recorded in scripture and if people appealed to me saying scripture is self-justifying through eyewitness testimony in what way is the quran not also self-justifying by that same metric these are the greatest hits i could not accept god was just there and ultimately i learned why because god could have prevented my parents affair and did not and i was awfully mad about that so at the same time there was a very genuine intellectual search for the nature of all reality there was also an incredible grief that my parents who i loved did not love each other anymore sometimes that's an elephant in the room for skeptics and sometimes it's not i don't want to minimize the very real experiences of atheists who simply don't believe because they don't believe because they thought about it now today i am equally unable to create a logical set of empirical proofs for the existence of a god being in the sky than i was as a christian what i have instead are moments in the light what i have are times where images of people hauling each other out of flood water seem divine where i realize that i look at my hand and i don't see my hand i see photons bouncing off electron boundaries on atoms that never touch each other that this is just a fuzzy wave of probability that i can reach out and interact probabilistically with another fuzzy wave of probability that i call my daughter's hand and when that happens in neurochemical soup happens in each of our respective illusionary brains and somehow a daughter trusts her father as she crosses the street and i see poetry and i see beauty and i realize that some things in the human experience cannot be articulated with mathematics that some things require a poet or a painter and in that way to simply call the source of the all a universe is obscene that the only way i can honor the gratitude for existing is to relate to this mystery as god and the only way that relating to god that makes sense to me is the signature of this god in creation is resurrection is empty tomb living an ultimate abandonment of the fear of death and a reckless life of radical love because in the end the thing we're most afraid of doesn't matter and that's all sentimental well no skeptic in the world is convinced by it but i don't try to convince a skeptic that god exists i try to convince them that i love them because that's the best way i know to honor an empty tomb hi mike um i'm libby i've got a basic question uh how do you feel about people using psilocybin or microdosing psilocybin to increase religious or mystical experience in a church for example yeah everybody know what she's talking about shrooms man shrooms the 60s are back in a big way shrooms psilocybin their cousin uh lucy lsd right big i get so many questions about these um okay first in most of the west these are highly controlled substances and because they're highly controlled they're under research we don't properly understand the risks and benefits of these substances let's start there the little bit of research we have there was a lot of like boogeyman stuff that came out of the drug war in the 80s that gave these substances a really bad rep and put them in the same categories like cocaine and heroin which i definitely think is scientifically irresponsible we have some research now that shows a psychedelic and psychoactive substances when used in controlled medical circumstances can have incredible effects on things like anxiety and depression so first and foremost i would say that we should make legal changes in our societies not for immediate recreational use but for responsible scientific study so we can know what we're dealing with now people who've had these substances often describe profound and incredible spiritual experiences but if you look at the way especially psilocybin was used before western culture picked it up as a party substance many indigenous cultures used these substances as a means of facilitating spiritual transformation in highly regulated environments transitions from childhood to adulthood shamanistic rituals with elders of a tribe my concern with these substances in the west is they become a touristic way to have a pretty good party with god you know it'd be great we're having a good party what if we invite god with these shrooms i think that's really irresponsible and dangerous i think if you have a tendency towards that kind of tourism touristic spirituality it's probably much more healthy for you to try to meet god through meditation over a period of weeks months or years than to take the easy way out and dose yourself so i would say i don't judge the indigenous use of these substances i would say for westerners be aware that this is highly controlled highly illegal and we don't know the health effects but yeah i have definitely heard some people try these experiences and they find themselves in what feels like the presence of god i don't know we've got a real problem with compulsion in the west an experience is that powerful that accessible i'd be really afraid that people use that unhealthily the the neuroscience is so encouraging psilocybin when people take psilocybin their brains go into a state of uh and this is not plain speak hyperbole hyper connection uh your synapses produce a lot of dendrites and your brain communicates with itself very rapidly so one thing people experience trauma if you have a lot of repressed emotional trauma it comes out because you can't hide from it anymore some people experience profound therapeutic effects micro dosing on psilocybin which is taking a very small dose has been shown to have benefits on anxiety and depression for six to 14 months people who take psilocybin have an increased appreciation for the arts for over a year in the literature they see colors differently and they report that they feel happier there's a lot of promise there but for all we know right now in the process of feeling that happiness they dramatically elevate their risk of liver or brain cancer we just don't know so and i know in my audience there's a lot of interest in these substances i love you all too much to not say be very very careful well you've listened to another episode of ask science mike and as always i appreciate it i'd like to thank thank uh the lovely folks here for hosting uh if you're looking for a spiritual community in this area i highly recommend that you give the folks gallery church a try i'd like to thank greg nordin for editing ask science mike andrew golucky for his work on pre-production the patrons for making the show financially possible and my bro jeff bottaford for writing the ask science mike theme song thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week [Music]