ASM111 Addiction, Pushy Parents, and Why Time Flies

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addiction pushy parents and why time flies all that and more on this week's episode of ask science [Music] [Applause]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i'm your host mike mccarthy known all over the internet as science like which is kind of strange because i'm not a scientist i'm just a person who's passionate about the sciences and how it can be integrated into faith in our lives so let's do what we do every week and get it started hey science mike this is jay from church and other drugs podcast just want to say thank you for what you do truly enjoy your show real quick wanted to ask if you could explain kind of brain chemistry wise what happens in alcoholics and addicts brains to make them continue to drink and use drugs in spite of dire consequences you know burning through relationships um health serious health consequences getting in trouble with the law um if you could explain that that would be fantastic and also a lot of 12-step programs have a component or a faith component to them can you explain or do you know why or what happens in the brain to make that beneficial to recovery thanks so much well jay great question i think that uh substance addiction is something that um the science has been oversimplified about there's a couple of dominant narratives out there there's a narrative and a counter narrative and i think when it comes to addiction both contain elements of a reasonable interpretation of the science but neither carries it alone so let's talk a little bit about you know how we make uh decisions as people um you know we we feel like we make choices that we're we have this will and this agency that we move through life with and that comes from a part of our brains called the neocortex which is about as thick as uh like like a dinner napkin right like a cloth like you know what i mean like a nice restaurant dinner napkin and uh that's wrapped around uh a part of the brain called your limbic system which is like the brain of a monkey or a dog about the size of your fist so a dinner napkin versus a fist the limbic system is kind of wrapped around a very small maybe the size of your pinky um part of the brain that is like a frog or or reptile brain okay and so by volume the more ancient um mammalian part of your brain is a much larger percentage of the brain's volume than the neocortex this very elaborate complex human brain that does language and culture and rational thinking and so there's a lot of decisions that get made about our lives below the level of our consciousness whenever you drive you get to work you don't really remember how you got there that's because your basal ganglia was driving i know that sounds kind of dirty that's just a part of the limbic system um the basal ganglia whenever i say it live people giggle so um and as you learn things they start neocortical and with repetition they move deeper into the brain uh where you don't have to think about doing an automatic task and and one of the types of automatic tasks we have are habits and um there's a book called the power of habit i read recently i really enjoyed that puts good language around habit formation and any habit includes basically three things one there's a queue two there's a routine and three there is a reward okay so we can imagine uh one really normal habitual cue uh would be you get hungry you feel hunger in your stomach uh your routine is to walk to the break room at your office and grab a snack out of the vending machine and the reward is you get the you know the pleasure of eating some food you probably get some social interaction with other people in the break room it's really gratifying right so the first time you do that you like make a choice like you're new to this job and you say i feel a little hungry kind of bored you walk to the break room you get a snack you get the reward but as that happens over and over it becomes a thing that you don't think about you just sort of automatically get up around the same time every day and you go get a snack in the break room and maybe put on a few pounds as a result right so that's how habits are formed habits tend to grow if they are based on a common queue so research tells us that most people who eat fast food start by eating fast food occasionally so they've had a long day at work and maybe their partner has as well and their kids are hungry driving home they go through a drive-through they get happy meals the kids are happy the food wasn't great the parents didn't really enjoy it but the kids are happy it was very low effort right uh and so just occasionally when they've been working hard they get they get fast food but then that becomes a a monthly thing and then a weekly thing and then you know multiple times a week thing and the frequency increases why because fast food establishments are designed to give you the cue more often there's a reason mcdonald's puts those arches all over by the interstate on roadsides everywhere you look you see those arches that's a queue saying oh i would like some gratification from very inexpensive you know high fat high salt food and that's when habits start to become troublesome is when they become compulsions okay so you go from a habit which can be healthy or unhealthy to a compulsion which is where you engage in activity thoughtlessly okay so this has internet porn and masturbation becomes a compulsion that grew from a habit typically not an addiction because you're engaging it without thinking but if you interrupt the loop you don't actually encounter any negative consequences right so the difference between a compulsion and an addiction a full-on addiction is where the brain has developed a dependence on a given stimulus or substance so this is what you see with alcohol and with drugs where these these drugs can release just far more dopamine and other uh craving and and pleasant neurotransmitters than any natural stimuli two to ten times as much and if you take the drugs more than once you take them regularly your brain adapts to these new thresholds of neurotransmitters which means normal stimuli no longer really produces pleasure you can't feel good without the drugs and now you have an addiction and it begins to change the production and activity of chemicals in your brain especially neurotransmitters and to the point that if you don't take the substance your brain can't produce release reabsorb and regulate neurotransmitters normally and then you have a real problem you have withdrawal symptoms you have an addiction that really just has a hold of you and that's why in america drug policy has been centered around prohibition if we make drugs illegal we make them hard to get then people won't get hooked in the first place now i am not denying the degree to which some policymakers had very racist and classist roots for the war on drugs okay some of that i think there's there's really good historical data out there to tell us that a large part of this this effort um was you know to aid prosecution in poor black communities but in addition to that some people really looked at the sciences that we got we got to keep people off drugs these things are dangerous and that's kind of the traditional narrative about drugs is they wreck your brain so you shouldn't take them there's a counter narrative and this comes from an experiment done with rats and some were in isolation and cages by themselves and others were in this like kind of rat park this really nice [Music] well-furnished environment where the rats had things to do there were activities there were other rats most lab rats are highly social so you can imagine locking a rat alone in a cage it's a social animal that's actually torture so you know if you locked me in a room by myself long enough i'm sure i would want some kind of numbing relief so these these rats had an opportunity to drink morphine basically and i'm gonna this is a really complex experiment i'm gonna oversimplify for the sake of not making this a two hour show but basically that the rats could drink morphine or not and what they found was the rats in isolation drank more morphine sooner and became dependent than the rats and the rat park are you with me so the rats that had social opportunities and social community and things to do they didn't really want the morphine but the rats were trapped in cages alone really wanted the morphine and what they also found was if you released rats who had been forced into a physical dependency on morphine into the rat park they would like wean themselves off morphine they would go through withdrawal the whole thing because they'd rather spend time with other rats than be doped out so this is really interesting research in that it tells us that maybe addiction is not exclusively because because of dependencies in the brain but can be linked to feelings of isolation or disempowerment now why do i say this counter narrative uh isn't complete i think i think both things are true i think um the brain really can become very dependent on substances and i think socialization and good social support can help people prevent building a substance addiction in the first place or breaking an addiction that they have but i think different people have different environmental and genetic propensities towards addiction so it's unrealistic to say all we need for people is social support some people can have good social support they can feel connected to other people and still have substance abuse issues other people can be pretty isolated and aren't especially tempted towards substance abuse but what you see is uh over time when uh you build an addiction is the brain subtly and not so subtly changes the connectivity between parts of the brain and effectively the q the q for the addiction uh goes directly to you know the action centers of the brain and bypasses the parts of the brain that make decisions okay so you lose the ability to exercise willpower over the addiction and this is what happens with addicts who abandon relationships and who wreck their lives for substance abuses you can you can scan their brains and you can see the damage caused by drug use so this is a a public health mental health issue i think treating this like a crime is uh well it's the the data tells us it's not very effective i think it's wrong you know what i mean this is it's like you know criminalizing people who get malaria um what a ridiculous notion right we need to treat drug addiction as a public health issue because we can see very clearly the effects on the brain and in the brain now in terms of aaa and other 12-step programs interestingly enough studies on aaa show very mixed results and the researchers who have conducted that kind of work freely admit it's very hard to study an anonymous organization you don't know who the people are in the program well how do you study them so the research is mixed but but one thing researchers tend to say is when they study people for whom a a has worked uh the big thing a a has going for it versus other programs is belief so i'm going to read you four paragraphs from the power of habit beginning on page 84. a pattern emerged alcoholics who practice the techniques of habit replacement the data indicated could often say stay sober until there was a stressful event in their lives at which point a certain number started drinking again no matter how many new routines they had embraced however those alcoholics who believed that some higher power had entered their lives were more likely to make it through the stressful periods with their sobriety intact it wasn't god that mattered the research the researchers figured out it was the belief itself that made a difference once people learn how to believe in something that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives until they started believing they could change belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior i wouldn't have said this a year ago that's how fast our understanding is changing said tonight the university of new mexico researcher but belief seems critical you don't have to believe in god but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better isn't that interesting so what the research is finding is that believing change is possible helps people change difficult behaviors in conjunction with habit replacement or creating new routines and another thing that this this book talks about is that belief is easier when it occurs within a community so aaa stands as an example for our social brains that change is possible because you hear stories of people who suffered as you have that have turned things around so that's kind of what's going on with addiction and aaa and the show notes this week on episode 111 i've got two resources that are really fascinating on this topic one will be a link to this book the power of habit which is available everywhere my link will be on amazon and then a link to a comment by stuart macmillan about that rat park experiment that will give you a deeper look at the procedure and the outcome and the insights of that work [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads thank you so much for doing your podcast your humility humor kindness wisdom and knowledge make a healthy mental smoothie that's funny question as we age why do so many people including me feel like time moves faster how do we slow it down thanks again aaron okay yeah i used to think about that a lot i thought about it as a kid because i could remember you know older people in my life my grandparents especially telling me how fast time moved and that seemed so strange to me because it seemed to take millennia to get to christmas and then from christmas to summer break and then once we're on summer break it seemed like summer lasted forever it was marvelous and then as i got into high school things started to move at a greater clip and then once i got into the working world and had kids of my own it seemed like every time i blinked a year a week went by and years you know did not take long it seemed like in the time shorter than a summer break of my youth my kids would have two birthday parties um really strange and i i had this posit this idea um that maybe it was the percentage of your lifetime right so when you're young uh when you're 10 one year is like 10 of your whole life that's a lot whereas when you're 60 a year is it's not very much of your life at all um and it turns out i was not the first person to have that idea it's called ratio theory and it was first written down in 1877 that it was just we were kind of figuring out things by you know comparing it to the totality of our life experience so i tried to test that against the findings of modern neuroscience and it turns out that things are about where they were when i last checked we don't know exactly how the brain perceives time we know that it appears our sense of time is distributed across many parts of the brain and that different parts of the brain look like they're responsible for measuring different intervals of time so you've got one part of your brain that works with your circadian rhythms this kind of 24-hour cycle other parts of the brain are responsible for looking at small intervals of time we don't know exactly which parts do what we don't think we've seen all the parts and the specific mechanisms of action are unknown to us we do know that by doing research uh awe fear and empathy can make people feel like time is slowing down so when you see something that is amazing time seems to slow down when you're terrified as a survival mechanism uh time seems to slow down your reaction times speed up empathy interesting i'd never that had never occurred to me that empathy can make time slow down also really surprising depression seems to make the brain track time more accurately people who are depressed when are they're asked to sit for a period of time and estimate how long it was they tend to give the best most accurate estimates of the passage of time that's interesting me that in some ways depression is just a realistic view of the passage of time now if we look at how memory formation works major events in our life act as as markers for the sequence of events and the the passage of time so when you're young there are these major events all the time every winter break is a huge deal every report card and progress report is a huge deal summer break is the pinnacle of huge deals even bigger than your birthday party right so the year when you're young has over and over and over and over and over on a constant cycle major events every few weeks there's a major event in your life so time seems to pass slowly as we age life becomes more routine things that were once major are no big deal [Music] and when you get into the working world every day is basically exactly the same your birthday ceases to be a big deal major events are like when your kids are born when they have major life events when you get married when your friends get married but now months or a year pass between major events in your life and sometimes more than that so life becomes more routine and time starts to accelerate and this continues the older we get i've heard from a lot of retired people every day it gets even more the same and you know about the time you get used to your friends dying and that's no longer a major event uh time is passing with dizzying speed so how can we slow that down well can i tell you a secret since i've embarked on this uh science mic work and since i had my mystical experience in 2012 time has really slowed down again almost as slowly as it did when i was a kid it seems like each day lasts forever really does oh how mindfulness research has shown that mindfulness being present in a moment slows down the subjective passage of time i intentionally savor every moment of the day with gratitude every feeling every experience do you know that i would take time to savor my headaches when i had them for so long after the motorcycle accident i would just sit and be present with my headache and now that like i don't have a headache this has been over a couple weeks now and i haven't had a headache oh boy all the time i just sit and feel my head i don't mean like with my hands i mean just put my awareness in in my head and the clarity that comes with not having a chronic severe headache but that mindfulness that presence that awareness it stops that extreme acceleration of time frankly by making the mundane major events in life [Laughter] you know a bird built a nest in a bush behind our house and our whole family reveled in the whole process watching them you know bring in branch by branch watching their progress and uh that became a major event so if you practice a discipline of mindfulness and presence you may find that this warp speed life goes away and you once again feel the passage of each day as a day and not the blink of an eye [Music] okay let's see before we do the next question let's talk about events do you see how i've cleverly moved this to the middle of the program in case somebody used to fast forward at the beginning don't fast forward i want to see you so if we're going to be near each other i'd like you to know may 13th i will be at christ church in greenwich connecticut i've been heavily corrected for my greenwich connecticut pronouncement so or announcement or pronunciation uh so greenwich connecticut i'm on the way may 16th i will be at buckhead church with their singles group in atlanta georgia september 15th and 16th los angeles for the liturgists gathering october 6th boston for the liturgies gathering that'll be the 6th and the 7th october 27th and 28th the liturgists gathering in seattle washington tickets for those are on sale right now at the liturgistgathering.com if you're anywhere near one of those cities don't miss it the litters gathering is an incredible event it's different in every city and for all you people that listen and feel like you are weirdos you're the only one you're the uh you know the only christian who uh loves science or cares about justice and your community has kind of turned you away there'll be a lot of people like you if you're not a christian but you have a spiritual leaning that your secular friends think is too weird you're not the only one several hundred of us will gather in each of these cities october 21st i'll be at the rubicon conference in dublin ireland we'll also do a short ask science mike tour across the uk in that same time period more details to come if you're in glasgow glasgow or not gal i've learned glasgow edinburgh manchester sheffield any of those cities go to ask sciencemike.com click on bookmic and uh fill out the form if you'd like to host an ask science mic this will be the easiest way to get me in your city that you can imagine okay and then november 15th the ripple effect conference in lawrence massachusetts so that's the events coming up and uh let's do some more questions hi science mike i have a question about christian relationships post deconstruction on honesty regarding one's own positions on hurting others with your deconstructed positions and grandparenting i'd love your insights from a relational and neuroscientific perspective i went through deconstruction a long time ago and i moved away from home after college so i only see my family a few times a year i attend my parents church when i go home and i can't stand the sermons and the politics of the church i can grin and bear it for the sake of social relationships something i often do as a woman and in many cases i think it's worth it to respect my parents their friends people who used to teach me to keep the peace and so forth my parents don't think i'm asked about i.e evangelical as they raised me to be and my dad daily texts me long prayers expressing some sort of sentiment like this and it's good-natured and i try and take it that way on the other hand if i'm honest with them it would really hurt their feelings it would make them believe i'm not christian anymore and that would devastate them i live my life in conversation with christian texts and spirituality and for me that's as christian as i want to be but for my parents coming from their very evangelical perspective that's nominal christian which is as good as not being a christian i know i terribly disappoint my parents by not believing as they do and that would actually be really hard for me to disappoint them i also get the feeling that they don't want to know what i think if it contradicts them which one of my parents has basically implied like i said i live far away and i can grin and bear it in relative silence but since having children this has gotten so much harder i'm raising my kids by exposing them to some christian ideas mostly progressive ones and to other spiritualities as well and i'm not interested in having them believe literally or believe in heaven or hell the gravity of their own sinfulness in other words evangelicalism maybe my kids will get there one day on their own and that's their choice but that's not what i wish to teach them and those are not the ideas that i'm exposing them to how can i navigate this with my family i don't want to explicitly forbid my parents from speaking about faith with my children but after telling my father i didn't want him saying a prayer of profession of faith with my then five-year-old she told me that he did i let it go at the time but i'm not sure how to deal with this as they grow up until now i just say they think that and we think this and you can make your own decisions but it really bothers me for my kids to come home from their grandparents house singing songs about the blood of jesus and have their heads filled with new ideas and potentially be newly converted yet again i love your thoughts on this thanks i have a feeling that uh you're not the only person with this question listening i have that feeling because i hear this a lot at events afterwards in line people tell me about the difficulty they have with grandparents evangelical grandparents and what they tell their children by they i mean what the grandparents tell the question asker's children um so this happens a lot and [Music] it's tough right so if you if you look from the grandparents perspective what do they fear they fear their children and grandchildren will spend eternal conscious torment in hell away from not only themselves but god that's a very powerful incentive structure to uh push inappropriate social boundaries to deny the agency and legal authority of parents to instruct their children if you believe the family will spend eternity in hell so whenever i speak to my evangelical friends and family i try to remember how much fear of hell animates that church's teaching and proselytization i try to provoke a little empathy within myself but then on the other hand i'm constantly trying to foster a culture of agreeable disagreement i i don't believe in a literal eternal hell at all if they do great can can we just agree that we disagree on that if not this is gonna be a really stressful relationship we might need to set up more firm boundaries the trick is uh to be honest without hostility to as much as you can in relationships you value uh let go of any hostility or resentment even when it's justified and simply be honest about your perspective and open to discussion and also understand and this is something we weren't really taught in evangelicalism boundaries are actually healthy boundaries are a healthy part of relationships it's okay for you to disappoint your parents if that means you can authentically live your life in a way that doesn't hurt others you see what i mean um if if your parents thought it was a sin for uh people to be in same-sex relationships and you were gay then it would be perfectly fine and healthy for you to disappoint them by living your life okay so uh in this case you have different theological beliefs it's okay if they're disappointed your life is not simply a mission to win your parents approval although that is a completely normal natural impulse uh one of the things i appreciate most about my relationship with my parents is that their approval and acceptance of me is not predicated on sameness of belief my father and i disagree vigorously on all sorts of political and theological points my mom and i have more subtle disagreements in uh theology and politics but never with either my folks if i felt like if i come from a different viewpoint that they will be disappointed in who i am they'll just disagree with me and i think that's more common than we think i would say don't assume your parents can't handle your beliefs or participate in a grown-up discussion if everyone makes an effort to keep the conflict healthy and to avoid going into places of unpacking anger or resentment or you know turning it into an argument you know in terms of some boundaries you could do you could encourage your parents to say you could say listen it is our moral and legal obligation to teach our children about the world including spiritual things uh and and we want them for good reason to understand there are multiple perspectives about god because we've seen in our own lives the way a single perspective without nuance and without awareness of other points leads to weakness later in life right so it's a great justification why so you could say instead of telling your my children god says or presenting your interpretation of scripture as fact simply add the words i believe before it and kids are smart if you have honest conversations with your children after the services and after the visits to unpack what your grandparents said what the pastor said what sunday school said get their reaction to it let them talk you know maybe share your perspective as well elevate their perspective alongside your grandparents and yours as peers and uh and they'll get through it they'll get through it especially as they get older um ask them if anything scared them or frighten them help them work through that but don't be afraid to be honest with your parents now if your parents literally can't handle honesty and can't handle adult conversation can't handle disagreement it might be a signal that you need to establish stronger boundaries you need to be more clear about what is and is not acceptable uh with your children and with you we have a tendency to uh exercise some almost codependent behaviors in family groups and i'm not advocating an emotional distance or detachment that's not what i'm saying at all but i am saying it it is more healthy for people to stand on their own in terms of their belief systems and their lifestyles and for families to simply love support and encourage one another even when we disagree and this may involve some self-development and self-reflection work for you you might need to spend some time in introspection perhaps even in therapy and unpacking why you're afraid and if you are i mean i've only ever questioned to go on i don't know what you're feeling in in detail um but you know in fact why why it would hurt you so much to disappoint your parents uh why i would disappoint you so much for them to know maybe you're in more different places than they realize and see if there might be some unresolved issues in your own life related to your parents and your experience growing up that you might be able to work through and get into a healthier place before you engage in this discussion with them whatever happens i i just want to applaud you for caring about your children's spiritual experience but also your parents experience moving through the world that empathy is beautiful and laudable but when we're empathetic we always have to be careful not to [Music] minimize or infantilize people in our lives we have to remember that people have agency and a responsibility for their own thoughts and feelings and beliefs and hey they have to do their own work towards a healthy productive spiritual and emotional journey through life the last question came in via email and it reads hi science mike thanks for all the work that you do it's so good and important i have my degree in biology and you've helped me so much in my understanding of faith and science this question has to do with racism and talking to people of opposite opinions i remember hearing propaganda say once that people are at different levels of understanding when it comes to racism in america i'd place myself in about the fifth grade i'm being generous i started thinking about things with a lot of other white americans during the time of the trayvon martin case and have steadily become more open to learning ever since i believe that white privilege is a problem i believe that racism exists today and probably mostly subtle ways that have become less the subtle the more we're willing to listen the question i have is about what to say to someone who believes that racism in america is dying that the playing field is no longer uneven as it used to be that white privilege does not exist someone who is close to the idea that the opposite is true being a single white girl in atlanta i tend to date a lot of white men i can think of at least three scenarios in the last six months in which i got into conversations on dates where the guy was as i described close to the idea that racism is a problem and actually adamant that discrimination is now happening against white males wow i try to take this in stride as i am a christ follower which i do think helps in my understanding and expression of these ideas and i did not come to my understanding overnight i still find my words frustratingly inadequate what do you say to someone across the table that believes racism is dead please forgive me if you have answered this question elsewhere and i've overlooked it best brooke well if you haven't heard episode 34 of the liturgist podcast which is called black and white racism in america check that out immediately it's 90 minutes or two hours something like that with propaganda and william matthews michael gunger and i talking about racism in this country um let's see how do you talk to someone you know you gotta assess where they're at and move them a millimeter at a time so uh you know someone is adamant that white males experience uh discrimination tell me more about that those five words tell me more about that i i didn't know white males experience discrimination tell me more about that as they talk and you're listening um they'll probably say a lot of things that undermine their own position white males aren't discriminated against in america that's uh almost comical white males have had some privileged erosion though you know white males can no longer physically assault black males for using the wrong bathroom right so that's less privilege it is a you just a win for human rights but if you were a white man who liked to police which bathroom people could use oh gosh that was an accidental parallel to current events uh now that's harder to do so now you can only police trans people um but uh yeah so just kind of have them unpack it and then then maybe show what the erosion of privilege compared to discrimination looks like if by any measure as a group white men aren't losing out in the job market just i mean go look at the cabinet of the president look at boards corporate boards across the country look at executive management positions white men are doing just fine thank you by the way i am a straight white male and i do experience life on easy mode as a result is the lowest difficulty setting when i open my mouth people listen um i'm constantly invited to lead or be on stage and uh i do get funny looks sometimes when i recommend women and people of color and women of color as a better alternative myself in in many venues and a lot of times i just lose the booking and another white guy gets it instead that's just that's just white supremacy lived out isn't it so that that's kind of the you know really extreme case of white males are discriminated against but someone else says the playing field is even just ask them about like commonly labeled data about persecution rates and incarceration rates for crime ask about the wealth gap between white and black families which is incredibly vast it's a huge huge gap i think the average family wealth of a white family is like 140 000 and for black family it's like 12 000 i mean that's a huge gap there's a there's an incredible gap and those numbers may be wrong that's off the top of my head i think they're in the ballpark um and where does that come from that's the question this this is where it goes just explain to me why this wealth gap exists why these differences in criminal prosecution and conviction for the same crime exist and are widely documented just ask them to explain it they may be unaware of those points so it's not a terrible idea to have sources in your back pocket and then i always ask people if if racism doesn't exist in america why do people of color insist that it does and is it possible that their experiences may be different than ours as white people and that because of that they may have a perspective that's impossible for us to survey because we don't experience the effects of systematic racism and the effects we experience of personal prejudice are so minor as to have no influence over our lives what effect does it have on me if a person of color is prejudiced against white people all the systemic legal and economic systems are on my side as a white male so uh ask questions ask questions ask questions ask questions and tell stories tell stories about people in modern america who have suffered from the effects of systemic racism and personal prejudice by the way overt prejudice has really been on the rise since november the 8th um peop you know the racists the the overt racists are coming out of the woodwork they have been emboldened um by the alt-right and frankly the rise of trump i know i'll get email a lot of you will say trump has nothing to do with racism i don't think the data supports that you know i've seen a survey recently that showed the primary motivating factor in trump voters as a group was racial resentment that doesn't mean every trump voter i'm talking sociology here but that was for the group of people who self-identify as trump voters the most common motivator for their vote was racial resentment so so brooke i laud you for caring to have the conversation and not just walk away from the table because it's going to take a lot of us white folks having these conversations that are difficult with other weight people which is the only way people will feel safe enough to continue the conversation as much as possible avoid having people feel assaulted or judged if you can tell stories about racism in your own life and how you overcome it that will help a lot to show solidarity um i don't get to be holier than now on race issues i am a southern white male and i you know it's been nothing but growth and evolution in my life in regards to race uh you know you don't have to go that far in the past before i'm the pinnacle of colorblind racism just no it was it's happened we're all equal what what's everybody talking about i don't see i don't see color i don't see race i just see people so that was actually true for me by the way um but by not seeing race i didn't see the struggles and life experiences of people in my life that i cared about so brooke it's hard work but ask questions tell stories and tell your own perspective of how you confronted and are overcoming your own racial biases and fighting against racial injustice in america today okay what a wild episode that one was all over all over the place we got some like just straight up science we got a little uh like some fun science some addiction science we talked about family relationships and racism it's like the very special episode of ask science mike uh let's see andrew golucky my man thank you killing it as always on pre-production for the show greg nordin as always killing it on production and sound design on ask science mike i want to thank my patrons on patreon who pay for the show you should thank them if you listen to show and you you're not a patreon should thank the patrons because they pay for your show they also pick the questions if you'd like to figure out how to be a part of the the patron group just go to sciencemac.com click on that patreon button and uh you know a buck a month would be really helpful five bucks a month is life-changing okay it also lets you pick the questions on the program of course if you'd like to submit a question to the program just go to asksciencemike.com if you scroll down to the bottom of the page there's two things you can do one you can send me a voicemail that's how you hear people's voice on the show two you can type out a question and email it to me of course if you're a patron you can skip that whole thing at a certain donation level you can just send me a message on patreon and bypass the voting and i'll just drop your questions straight into the program half science my theme song was written by jeb boniford my dog and that's all we got so thanks for listening everybody and i'll [Applause] [Music]