ASM101 LIVE in Grand Haven, MI

[transcript automatically generated - please help edit to make it better]

coming to you from the first presbyterian church in grand haven michigan it's ask science mike [Applause] live [Applause] [Music] science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life this is another stop on the finding god in the waves book four and we're doing a live episode the questions are unfiltered the answer is unrehearsed and calamity is likely just around the corner uh if you want to check out an event like this or something else that could be coming up go to appspike.com and click on the events tab or you can know for sure that i'll be in san francisco california february 2nd fort smith arizona february 6th uh february 15th i'll be at northwest nazarene university in boise yes boise february 19th i'll be in chapel hill north carolina for another ass lance mike live and there's a lot more events coming up after that so i'd love to see you there but for now we've got a show to do so let's get it started [Music] hi hi ty first-time listener long-time fan so i need to know why do women go to the restroom in like large numbers what are they doing in there and why don't babies cry in asia why don't what don't babies cry in asia why don't babies cry in asia yeah oh man okay why do women go to the bathroom and group scientifically speaking that's definitely gonna be a social science thing there's no evolutionary impetus and unless i'm misrecalling my anthropology that's not universal across human cultures um what in our culture that reinforces that i think you have stumped me on the first question like do you have an answer you do let's do this i've never had an audience answer ever but let's knock down some patriarchy and let the ladies speak for themselves okay [Applause] thank you thank you okay i may have an answer to your question has anyone ever seen harry potter raise your hand high higher okay cool we got some hands first movie or first depends on how hardcore of a fan you are um the scene in the bathroom where hermione gets touched by a troll she went alone okay that's what happens when women go to the bathroom alone you get attacked by trolls and it is not fun for anyone all right this is going to be a fun night i actually read an anthropologist's explanation for why babies don't cry in eastern cultures as often but i can't remember it strikeout first question okay the other part of why people listen to me on the internet is i have a weird habit of being honest so you'll notice a lot of people that do like have you ever seen like a a radio call in show with some expert like if they don't know something a lot of times they'll just tap dance and i have this bad habit just going huh beats me okay so first question i have no idea question two [Music] so on another note how do you grapple with the idea that the children of god live on earth but there's this idea that the universe is kind of um infinite and there could be planets with life out there somewhere so when you say the idea that the children of god live on earth you mean as described in the scriptures for example has the idea that we've all been kind of raised in the bible kind of denotes that yeah like it doesn't exist like other planets out there like he created earth yep what's the point of the torah right that's the first five books of the bible that's where the creation story that christians hold dear is uh is chronicled primarily in genesis uh although lots and the torah even further into the writings and the prophets will have elements where they discuss creation uh what's the what's the purpose of that document um i would argue that it is a very post-enlightenment modernist thing to do to approach that text as making scientific claims and here's why when the bible was recorded the whole thing not just the torah science didn't exist and there was no such thing as a scientific claim right so we take a modern way of thinking that has shaped our cognition and we force it back onto that text and i think doing that has some advantages makes the bible very personal first of all and for a lot of people that helps them feel closer to god but on the other hand can make us really deeply misunderstand what those texts are about so if you talk to anthropologists uh the creation story in genesis has incredible similarities to contemporary creation stories of its day it's very similar to you know babylonian accounts for example floods stars being created and earth being populated but the big the big thing in genesis is not the scientific description of cosmology it uses the same cosmology every other culture did a flat earth resting on pillars inside of a dome that had holes in it heaven was on the other side the light of heaven shone through those holes and then sometimes the floodgates of heaven would be opened and water would fall from heaven through all those tiny holes and you would get what rain today we would understand that as a relatively inaccurate cosmology but the point of genesis was not so that people herding livestock in the desert 3 500 years ago would get quantum physics the point of those documents was to describe god and so when you look at other creation myths of that time universally the universe was born out of violence wars between gods or in one case a god slaying his lover and slinging her entrails across the sky and that's the milky way right i'm serious and in genesis god says i'm going to create with word and with thought and with intention and i'm going to what i call it good this god loves creation was not indifferent to creation and you know the earth was not a ball of poop as it was and some other creations which i mean is like not totally unreasonable go grab some mud like from a riverbed and you'd be like oh want a big ball of dung like it's there's some thought there so what does that have to do with aliens what we get from genesis and christian theology is the idea that within us is what the image of god well what is the image of god where i've been thinking lately as i get i guess increasingly kind of theologically orthodox which makes my inner skeptic kind of wretch a little bit but i am who i am and what we see there is what is the image of god the image of god is the power to create with intention right so what what makes us different from so many other animals on the planet we have a unique capacity to co-create the world with god and are given the freedom to do so and the question is what are we going to do with that image are we going to pick up the work of god revealed through christ of creating shalom and peace are we going to embody a christ energy or are we going to go against a peace and therefore denote an anti-christ divine image that lets me believe in the same way the scriptures were written completely in line with a cosmological understanding of that day no one had ever thought of another planet because no one had ever thought of a planet so you couldn't talk about beings on another planet it would literally be incomprehensible to the people who wrote the first five books of the bible but if we think in terms of the image of god is it possible that there are other beings in the cosmos that have the power to co-create along with the divine sure and i think they would face the same choice do they do a creation which is of christ or antichrist do they try to create a universe of of more peace more justice more righteousness or do they try to win everything right i mean that's the question and uh i think in that way when we try to read genesis more like the people who lived in that time it tells us more about god and not less [Music] all right so with the new presidential all the way the third question i thought it would come faster than that to be honest with you okay well it's gonna be it's gonna be so closely related um but he's a big ad advocate for climate change so we're gonna talk about climate a little bit um so my question is uh it regards wind and i was laying in bed the other night and had to turn the fan on and came up with the question that why do fans cool us down why does wind just naturally cool us down because in my mind i would think it's you know creating friction so you might even think that it might heat you up a little bit second question you know pretty easy what is wind i gotta be real honest when you open with the election and climate change i did not see the question going to ceiling fans keeping us cool and what is wind i'm real impressed because usually about the fourth word i know the end of the question so you kept me on pins and needles the whole time like i was spooling up climate studies and nasa funding and ceiling fans okay uh everything in the universe exhibits what we call hot body radiation and i don't mean like hot body like i've got a hot body i mean like i've got a hot body i think the dad bod's a thing now right so i'm good but what i mean is thermal energy is radiated from anything that has thermal energy so unless you cool something to absolute zero it will emit photons and uh you're doing that right now you can't see them because you can't see infrared light but you can feel infrared photons right your skin is photosensitive to infrared photons but your retinas aren't have you ever thought about that like your hands are technically retinas so it just makes me feel like an x-man anyway so uh the way cooling works in an atmosphere it's different in space but in an atmosphere is one uh your atoms are kind of jiggly like my belly's jiggly like they're dancing all the time and they bump into other atoms and they release some energy right and another way that they cool is just by shooting photons out the the jiggly bumpy is a way faster way to transfer energy and whatever um you're transferring energy into is some kind of substance that will have a cooling or heat carrying capacity so this is why for example water is so cold you know what i mean so if you get in 68 degree water it feels very different to your body than 68 degree atmosphere right because water has a very high thermal carrying capacity here's the other thing humans are terrible thermometers you don't actually have any absolute capacity to measure temperature what you can measure is the rate of temperature change that's happening to you right now so because heat is carried away quicker in 68 degree water than 68 degree atmosphere 68 degree water like feels like 20 degree air or colder because it's just pulling heat away from your body really really fast so why is a ceiling fan help cool you down turn your car on don't do this do this as a thought experiment i just realized a bunch of people that someone on the internet will literally do it and send me an invoice so turn your car on and disable the water pump right the water pumps job is to pump water from the engine block out to the radiator and back why is it called a radiator it radiates heat that's its job right it's got a large metal surface so lots and lots of photons can get away and lots of atomic jiggling can happen with a conductor which is the metal casing of the radiator if you turn the water pump off well the water still has the same carrying capacity that it did a moment ago so why is your engine explode because we've stopped the convection the movement of the system that allows heat energy to be transferred out into the atmosphere right so you turn on a fan you're basically turning on a bit of a water pump but it's an atmosphere pump and you're you're forcing convection which is temporarily slightly increasing the thermal carrying capacity near your skin that's why a fan really works best if you're like like believe me we know this in florida like in august fan on high whole family standing right under it looking like this right because it's a gazillion degrees with all the humidity right and so that's why a fan feels good it actually does more effectively cool your body it is not changing the temperature of the air at all in fact the irony is actually slightly increases the temperature of the room it just increases the thermal carrying capacity now what is wind moving air so my dad used to like wind me up on car trips because he'd go sun what is wind i go dad it's moving air he's like why is the air move i might because you have a different temper differential between different points on the earth's surface which causes movement as you get temporal differences that move up into the atmosphere duh and he'd say we'll roll down the window and put my hand out the window yeah he'd say is that when i was like no we're moving the atmosphere is relatively static he's like but it feels like wind how's that possible science kid like and he would do this for hours so i would like get the encyclopedia when i got home and like exhaustively research wind and atmospheric dynamics so on the next car ride i i just realized my dad literally turned me into science mike [Laughter] thanks dad okay hi hi my name is megan um so i just wanted to give a little bit of background i'm a physician i don't work here in grand haven or even in michigan but i work for this really wonderful department of people who care a lot about the most vulnerable populations among us both locally and abroad so our department has set up clinics for the homeless for transgendered persons um for migrant workers who are undocumented um and and i'm just very lucky to work with such inspiring passionate motivated kind of tireless people and yet kind of since the election and i will say our department grieved a lot after the election mostly because we were just worrying about the homeless and the undocumented and uh the transgendered persons that we all know and care for um i just i haven't seen as much of that passion and energy and i've kind of felt that too um you know i seem to have this like roller coaster of emotions where you know one day like yesterday you know i can't get off the couch to go to a party to make signs for the women's march happening in my home or in the town where i live uh you know let alone take five minutes to write a letter to my congressman and then you know fast forward a couple days and i might be trying to rally everyone to you know start a letter writing campaign and so my question ends up being kind of two parts uh so one is is there some either neurologic or social science reason for why some days i seem to be that kind of like apathetic you know belly up waving the white flag of surrender like there's nothing i can do so i'm not gonna do anything and other days i am just so completely driven and passionate and trying to fight for those who don't have a voice and kind of the second question is if there is a reason is there like some sort of trick like can i can i convince myself to engage can i can i you know rise up and write like i'm running out of time and [Laughter] you know can i can i motivate myself to act and can i then you know motivate those around me to act awesome uh rise up when you're living on your knees you rise up tell your sister that she's okay so sorry a little little hamilton moment it's involuntary um trauma has to be grieved if you are a republican who is very excited about our current president great you can't tell other people what traumatized them doesn't work doesn't get it doesn't get rid of it doesn't help actually psychologically speaking makes it worse i know a lot of republicans who grieved for like eight years that barack obama was the president i live in the deep south i mean there were literally people who stayed in the anger phase of grief over the election of barack obama for eight years and i did not like deny their anger they were angry it wouldn't do any any good for me to say your anger has no validity i would usually say tell me about it i mean i'm also a conflict diverse peacemaking personality so part of that's my own like illness but uh i'd say tell me about it so right now first of all like like give yourself there's no you can't do like a project plan for grieving all right so i'm going to take 48 minutes today to grieve 22 minutes tomorrow 11 minutes friday then i'm going to be good it's not how brains work it's not how people work south positions where that's true you have a lot of patience right that's why like therapist model is different it's like i'll see you next week how long is this going to take i don't know when you don't know i'll see you next week i say that as someone who literally goes to therapy i was like so how many sessions do you think here it's up to you it's up to me well i mean it's up to your subconscious how do you know that's a thing it's great to be science mike's therapist i'm gonna need a paper to support that claim um oh man i'm a terrible person anyway so the first thing is sometimes you just like mope around but the other thing is and i understand this through psychology if if your grief is trauma related you have to remove the source of the trauma to start healing and here's what we tend to do right now we read twitter all day long like we still got our work done we're like i do this okay i have eight minutes i have eight seconds to rest i'll check my timeline oh my god he did what and what's happening you're just releasing toxic sludge in neurotransmitters into your brain you're releasing stress hormones and you are deepening and not releasing neurological trauma i don't know if you've checked out at mike mccarg since the election i'm only on twitter like once a day i do all my tweeting then i'm out i'm not continually because i got in this dark place i was like oh my gosh like this is it i in 10 months we're all gonna be dead it's over like i think i'll just stop paying the mortgage why i mean i just you know we'll just go to la i guess when the bombs fall i want to be sitting next to the gungers and yeah okay and that's that's a real helpful place for transformation is resolute conviction that all life is almost over i was like maybe i'm grieving so then the response might be avoidance that's not healthy either i can't just pretend nothing's happening i mean i can i'm a straight white male what's going to happen to me like probably lower taxes you know what i mean that's probably what the next four years have in store for me so i could put my head in the stand but that would be a very not christ energy to embody in my life so i still have to stay informed and i still have to stay active but i have to do so in a way that still keeps me a relatively healthy effective human being because this podcast doesn't help if every week i turn on the microphone and weep into it and do nothing else like ratings just down down down and tell us nothing about other people who cry all the time which like could be cathartic but i mean like how many thousands of people maybe tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of people's minds were shifted because we did a podcast on lgbtq like the people who say the twitter the internet stuff doesn't matter it does it works if you do it well you can actually substantively shift conversations but to do that you got to take care of yourself so i read the news once a day which is plenty like if something happens between when i read the newspaper in the morning and the next morning me not knowing until the next morning doesn't change anything you know what i mean like if some conflict erupts in the middle east i can just know the next day like i want you know people in national security positions get briefed multiple times a day but not me like that doesn't do anything so i'm controlling the cycle with which i consume news and information so i'm removing the source of trauma what am i doing in response i go outside a lot i just walk without my cell phone have you tried this it's incredible now i get it like you might not be able to do that for a few months because you live in michigan but a lot of people in radio land are in the sun belt and like me they can go out all year but my point is i take times and a lot of times i go home i take my iphone and i put it on my nightstand and i'll leave it there like literally all day and oh man so what have i done it's accelerated my grieving process now stuff still happens i go oh my gosh but because i'm not stuck at the bottom of the worst part of the grief cycle my response is not we're doomed my response is how can i help how can i help what can i do here's another thing we're all equipped with gifts and the bible was really smart in describing the church as the body of christ and and giving very lengthy passages to devoting everybody saying no it's best to be an eye or it's best to be a foot or you know if i can't be an i i don't want to be a part of it at all right like this is a smart line of reasoning because we're understanding sociologically that social change movements require multiple approaches some people have to be loud and angry and scary or nothing happens right we have a real tendency especially middle class white people to be like whoa you can't be angry that's not cool because we got angry we got put in time out because like we're super white and right that's just that's a white thing like we don't like you'd go to white church services we all just kind of sit there kind of chill that's what we do right right like that's like that's a really not white thing to do right now like you moved your hands or what don't call attention to yourself you're inviting the devil you know i mean so you know what i'm talking about you guys have all grown up in church or something you have that's why you're here the other viewer didn't grow up in church and wondering what's wrong with the rest of us and that's why you listen so some people have to be the angry ones they have to be the ones who say we will not tolerate this and don't let yourself be the white person telling a person of color their anger doesn't belong in the conversation because their anger is the reason you know what selma alabama is so some people have to be the angry voices but other people need to be the translators i'm way better at talking about racism with people who live in rural america than some of the more outspoken advocates why because i can understand their discomfort because i have felt it before and sometimes feel it today some people need to be the kind of people that hold clipboards and say okay you're good at talking to people you're good at getting press i'm going to get you an interview and they they organize something they make it happen the clipboard people are essential and other people are really good at going into a courthouse with a petition or standing in front of a court of law and getting legal decisions to happen and it takes everybody and the problem is we tend to think whatever approach we do best is the best or right one or worse the one we're comfortable receiving and it takes it all so one of the best things you can do as you move through grief is figure out what your image of god looks like in what way are you uniquely created to go forward and create peace and justice and righteousness in the world if i could lean into my evangelical background a little bit folks that's the gospel that's the good news it's not convincing people to say a speech it's not convincing people to accept a set of propositions it's going out into the world being broken for others as christ was broken for us and i have found sitting in that it's dark sometimes but the realness of a life that first acknowledges and then addresses suffering is gratifying in a way that a comfortable job in advertising and a good salary wasn't i might even say that i feel born again [Music] all right um back when you were talking about infrared so i recently in the last three years started working at a job where i actually clock in with my hand so they utilize infrared i believe but i don't quite understand the process of what that might be i'm wondering first do you have you like do you know about this type of technology are you aware of it just like yeah but it reads your fingerprint or your handprint yeah your handprint yeah okay yeah yeah it's possible i believe like the two first finger like i believe it's certain fingers particularly biometric authentication yeah sure yeah yeah yeah so um i'm wondering what you're pretty easy to trick actually what it's pretty easy to trick but go ahead like you're whoever invested in that was like you know what it's okay if someone tricks the system no big deal they didn't actually but a vendor lied to them anyway go ahead well i was wondering your opinion on the technology and its effects on the human body like the human system as an electrical system as a you know holistic system that all works together and yeah i was wondering your opinion on that okay sure um yeah most biometric systems are harmless they're passive systems that receive data uh so you're gonna emit the photons anyway you know what i mean like it's not like they're stealing some of your photons uh and depending on the system they usually use some sort of camera array and they look for unique markers but like a lot of them can be tricked with like a piece of tape in someone else's finger right like they're not really advanced stuff um pegs that your fingers connect to so it's not like a little window that looks kind of red and you put your finger on it no it's you like stick your hand into it and your palm does meet a platform but i don't believe the platform reads but i think it's the pegs that stick out that's pegs that stick out so they could be doing a capacitive or inductive reading as a biomarker which would be really really imprecise i'm not familiar with that technology it sounds like a terrible idea but i'm not an engineer it won't hurt you i just think it would be really easy to fool or you could drink uh too many electrolytes and it'd say it's not you or you could like gain some weight and it'll say it's not you you know what i mean like any kind of transdermal current analysis tends to yield wildly inconsistent results now i'm puzzled anyway no it should be fine even some of them will run a small current through your body it's it's a very similar amount of current that would your own nerves would generate right uh which leads me to like maybe where we should go with this question what kind of radiation or information harms your body because this is this comes up a lot so a while ago they put all these machines in airports that could take a picture of you naked with your clothes on and a lot of people wouldn't go in them for privacy concerns let's be honest i could use some body shame i don't have any i'll proudly march into a machine that reveals me naked i don't care but i wouldn't go in the machine and so i always opted for the manual pat-down it's a very intimate experience i don't know if you've had this um i mean i've heard it's very similar to like a massage you can get in some kinds of businesses but i was like hey you said you were going to touch my inner thigh that's not my inner thigh you haven't had this i'm the only one i've had it repeatedly anyway so i wouldn't go in the machines but now i go on the machines all the time i don't even i don't care let's do this right what's the difference the wavelength of the radiation when the machines first came out they were blasting you with low doses of x-rays x-ray is a form of radiation that is ionizing what does ionizing mean uh it's a it's a it's a particle that like a cue ball flies through your body and occasionally hits the i'm not a sports guy what do you call the the triangle with the things that the ball is in them the rack yeah it's the rack only now the rack's here dna which is why ionizing radiation increases your risk of cancer it's physics so they're like it's a low dose of x-radiation x-ray risk for cancer is a function of cumulative exposure so i'm like i'm not getting in that and they said no but it's safe and i carried with me a printed letter from uh the american mental association american medal association oh the witchers no uh no the american medical association uh internet i was head banging so the american medalist was said like we don't think this is safe we understand medicine and now now it's millimeter wave radiation which i don't care why it's non-ionizing your cell phone is harmless the sun is dangerous so if you're like not going to hold my cell phone near my head but you go outside and get sunburned you need to learn physics because ultraviolet radiation is ionizing so what are you looking for in systems that could be harmful they use some form of ionizing radiation right i carry my cell phone all the time no worries now i don't climb cell phone towers because at this amplitude those frequencies are no big deal at the amplitude they come out of the cell phone tower they're ionizing right that's all you got to look out for so as long as your biometric systems at work are non-ionizing radiation you're good if they're ionizing radiation use it a couple times and then sue them and retire i'm just kidding all right so as we study what it means to be human especially male and female um i think we find that there is a much greater gray area than there are sharp distinctions and listening to you speak in pastimes i've never heard you reference the idea of genetic adam and eve that all females can trace a genetic a similar genetic ancestor and all men men can trace a similar genetic ancestor both of which lived several thousand miles apart and several hundred thousands of years apart yes i'm curious if you could talk and especially through that data what are helpful ways to talk about the distinction of male and female oh wow most of the time male and female is fine language so that's where i have to start like for most organisms that can mentally understand a concept like male or female of which we know one species that can do that us in case someone's confused which one is it humans can like assign a gender label to themselves other animals don't do that other animals are just like i could use some genital stimulation who's down you know that's kind of how that's kind of how it works they don't have like a social consciousness uh so but we go i'm male and then like we have a bunch of systems that reinforce that right like primary secondary sex characteristics uh tonal voice there's a collection of things and if you if you were to identify those as biological traits and then graph their expression you would find like bell curves of maleness and femaleness and what we understand now is that those bell curves overlap there's an area of ambiguity in the middle and what we've done socially culturally for as long as we've really had cultures if someone's in the gap we uh push them to one end or kill them as social primates we tend to enforce some conformity to norms that we feel benefit the our group our troop i'm not going to go try because we're going to go that far we're talking troop right now chimps do it too if uh if a young champion say is born and expresses some extreme degree of what they would perceive as deformity many male chimps will just go ahead and take care of that right so we are we are primates we're prone to those kind of behaviors but luckily we're hopefully we've been developing morality and ethics which means we have to imagine in any situation how would i feel if that was me right that's the root of ethical systems how would i feel that's me and what we're finding more and more is if i found myself in the middle of those overlapping bell curves i would not like the way society handles that but when we talk genetically male and female we really simplify the data set to x chromosome x chromosome is this data set we call female x chromosome y chromosome is the data that we call male and there there are more options right it has happened that you have people who have two x chromosomes and they develop male features the opposite is also possible but less likely you could have additional you know x x y you have extra y chromosomes there's all sorts of situations this would be a 40-minute answer if i went into all of them let's just admit but those are statistically small enough they don't play a big a big part when we study inheritable genetics because we don't pass them on if you have an ex you only get to like moms get to contribute one chromosome unless something happens dads get to contribute one chromosome and always one unless i'm completely misremembering i'm fairly comfortable i'm 80 comfortable with that claim um and so that's if we're studying the inheritability factor looking at variations from x x and x y isn't helpful because it doesn't follow normal genetic patterns so that's what gets us to looking at genetic ancestry for males and females and when we look at those intersections we are doing big data analysis so we're looking at gene distribution where it occurs sampling as many people as we can get to get a bigger database and then making numerically based assumptions about time period and location and using that when you hear something like this individual here at this time this individual here that's with the data we've got so far as you add more people your data gets better and when you hit the jackpot and you find ancient human remains that still have genetic material it really refines your data set so when you hear a finding like that what you're hearing scientists say is with the data we have with the number of samples we've taken the statistically most likely single point of common ancestry is about this time and about this place and the papers describe that with really great fidelity and the media goes eve lived in montana in 1921 and what because like it's better it's better news like oh that'll be exciting i mean they don't really but it's always you know some part of typically middle east or africa and in a time period but they're not scientists weren't saying like we've got it we found the person they're we've said we found an interesting intersection in our data set and the reason we don't have a common lineage for all men and women is so far we haven't collected dna from every single human being and i'm not sure we should because apparently governments can change direction quickly and i'm just not sure do you want anyone to have all the human dna um you know what never mind no i'll say it because you can do stuff with dna samples right like because if you've got dna we have machines now that can print dna and stuff you know would make the criminal justice system a real bare you'd be like no we have your dna on the murder weapon and this murder weapon and that murder weapon in five countries you're like i've never left my house well we've got the dna like so that's a little bit conspiracy that's a lot conspiracy theorist my point is to get better data i'm not sure it's a cost it would be really expensive to sample everyone's dna wow we'd literally have to like make significant global economic investment in machines to sequence d like it's just a huge problem so that's that's why you see that disparity in the data [Music] long time listener to both liturgists in your signs mike but your black and white racist america liturgist podcast changed a lot for me personally and i've tried to convince other people i know to get in on it and and listen to it as well recently with mlk day on monday i had someone share something on facebook that i you know facebook you're gonna disagree about everything pretty much it's not the place for confrontation that being said how do you respond to somebody and what goes on neurologically and in your brain and what a science say about responding to somebody who says well mlk would have said all lives matter and so would have jesus because that's literally what somebody said and it got to my core because that that's not it i mean i just but can you talk about what goes on in my mind as a social change advocate as someone who who wants social justice but also as somebody who wants to love that other person to help them see maybe the error of their ways or maybe i'm not saying that right but talk about why they feel that way comparative to why i feel that way and where we can meet in the middle awesome thanks for your question i'm not going to go neuroscience because i would have to over generalize neuroscience research to give you a useful answer so we'll go one layer up to cognitive science if that's okay the first thing i remember in all social media interactions is neither god nor evolution designed the human brain to be something that seeks truth there is not a human being alive who is objectively searching for truth half the time not one your brain is a machine that builds a map of the world by throwing stuff away your senses bring in more information than you could possibly handle and make meaningful decisions on so you have tons of systems whose job is to sort out the what five eight percent of what you're perceiving at any moment that gets presented to the parts of the brain that make decisions we call that consciousness my twitter bio says that i'm 86 billion neurons telling a story to themselves that's how i define consciousness your brain's telling a story you're the hero of that story you're the act you're the protagonist you're the action hero like you're the first one on screen and anyone who's against you is what the bad guy then your brain presents the world that way to you why because it wants you to get the food someone wants to stop you from getting the food it's time to go arnold right like i'm getting the food your brain wants you to find shelter and safety which for a social mammal means what finding a community you fit into so our brains are obsessed with our social rank and fitting in with who we identify with and who we feel is like us so why do you and your friends see things differently because you're social animals who identify as part of different groups and then your brain wants you to find sex your brain is a huge fan of sex because your brain is just a tool your dna uses to try to make copies of itself in one model of biology right the only reason you have a brain is to find food the only reason you find food is to make copies of your dna that's the biological impetus so some of us like literally why women look like we won the facebook fight so it looks like we've maintained or grew our social standing so we can replicate our dna like it's that ridiculous that's what's happening on facebook it's it's the human version of this internet i uh impersonated a gorilla okay so like that's what's happening because on the one hand you care about the plight of these people but in their hand you care about the plight of those people because part of the way your brain maps social reality is it realize they're a set of the entities you're attracted to who care about those people it was like i care about those people too how's it going right like i know that's a really cynical view of humanity but sometimes we have to strip away the artifice to see our motivations so confirmation bias is a huge part the cascade uh availability effect is a cognitive bias when you hear things over and over you believe them guess what social media is doing computers are figuring out what you like to hear and telling you over and over and simplifying your view of reality so what's happening so they are literally presented with a different view of the world by machines than you are why do i want to say this because we have to acknowledge that it is happening to them but it's also happening to you there's a great statistic i saw about the prevalence of fake news sharing among people who i self-identify as conservative i don't remember the number it was somewhere in the 45 to 55 percent range of acceptance and re-sharing the same study it said for people identify as liberal it was like 20 or 25 percent and all my liberal friends started sharing it and were like yay liberals i was like hold on one in four is a terrible statistic one in four is a good shot you're one of the people sharing fake news and by the way did you check for the source of that study before you shared it because it might be fake news right that's where we're at in the world it's cognitive science we are trying to fit in socially without losing rank but but yes part of that is sometimes our eyes get open to the plight of the hurt of others why do your eyes get open to the plight of the hurt of others usually you get hurt really bad why am i so nuts about like justice issues mainly because i was bullied so bad as a kid and i know what it's like to be at the bottom of the pyramid it's not because i'm a good person so i've suffered a lot now one thing that can help people see the world from the perspective of another without suffering themselves is a really good story 20 years ago very very very very few people supported the right for someone to marry a person of a gender that they chose very few and then in like three and a half years we hit a tipping point why storytelling how youtube it gets better famous people influential people got on youtube they shared their experience with suffering and how they learned to cope and a bunch of straight people watched it youtube let us see firsthand the stories of other people's experiences why does that matter if your consciousness is a story the brain tells itself science shows us that when you hear a story your brain steps out of your shoes and into the other persons why do you love to read harry potter because for a little while in your brain you are harry potter which is awesome like i really want to like i say i want a wand i have a wand i have two wands i have a i have the elder wand the most powerful wand and then i also have a wand i got at universal studios because it's got a skull on it it's not in the movies but it has a skull on it and it's got this little infrared light and you can walk around universal studios and cast spells and it's awesome i like to go like when gotti and leviosa and do this and like a feather you're like what just happened what a time to be alive and you like that because for a while in the story you were harry potter and studies are showing reading harry potter actually like changes the way people see the world there's a measurable difference in the way harry potter fans relate to justice issues than the general population because stories change people so what do you do on facebook you tell stories like the thing we want to do is to dig in and to win and to convince but instead you go tell me more about how why you feel like that and you really listen and then you ask genuine questions about what they said and then when you feel like you have an understanding of what they said then you say well i have a friend who and their life is and if what you say is true it would mean for them how what would we do about that and you treat them like an expert and when you treat them like an expert their cognitive defenses stay down their amygdala stays quiet and while they're doing that you get to mess with the firmware of their brain to manipulate them to be the person you'd like them to be i have some experience with this i do it every week [Music] hi um so i have kind of maybe a follow-up to that question and to the election question that the woman asked earlier okay um so taking it out of facebook into real life um so i follow you on twitter and i've seen some of the things you posted on twitter and i've heard you and michael gunger talk about the election um since it happened and so my question for you would be i know there are people in this church who voted both ways in the election and i that's not legal they can only vote one way or the other well you know what i mean i'm hoping your question will address people regardless of how they vote in the election yes that's how i'm saying i i hope the last one did too like that would also be a handbook for hacking liberals as much as hacking conservatives but go ahead for sure um so i think just i'm sure there are other people who have experienced this but i this has been like a really difficult election for me personally um and i'm normally an optimistic and cheerful person and i've found that i have become pessimistic and angry and contemptuous towards people who voted differently than me that's something that i've tried to challenge myself about and would like to change but it's difficult so my question for you would be one if you could talk about a little bit about tribalism and the science of tribalism and maybe how you break out of that and two maybe there are some experiences from your own life but for people regardless of how we voted i have close family members and friends who i still have difficulty forgiving for how they voted and the same same towards me um and i i would like to either find a way to compartmentalize or to move past that this is the first election i can really recall that sort of hard line being drawn um and it just made it really challenging and i wondered if you could share any experiences that you've had of being able to sort of transcend and reconnect with people who feel differently than you politically yeah it's really hilarious that you asked me how to transcend and then you reference what i do on twitter which these days i would hardly call transcending i mean i don't know what happens to me on twitter i get pretty like pretty not me honestly and there's a really weird thing where the more not me i am the more little hearts and retweets happen like i don't know my followers on twitter like i work real like okay you've heard me say i work hard like and say all these things that are kind of bumbling do you know i do that on purpose to be approachable that's literally a subroutine i've created in my brain you notice i'm not doing it right now everything i do is so manufactured because since i was a little kid i've trained my consciousness to act like a computer and so it's kind of it's i emulate a lovable goofball which kind of become real in me but it's an emulated thing i've noticed that when on twitter when i turn that off and i unleash the fullness of what i'm capable of in a cutting wit people love it i could make so much money as an angry liberal media mouthpiece like the like the left of the left and coulter which ironically would have to be a guy so um right because it's odd same way in coulter like oh you're against your anyway so i'm a woman who hates feminism cool um so i'd be a man who ate patriarchy oh wow i'm getting really into that but my point is like i caught myself the stakes feel different don't they i was really miffed when gw got the presidency i wasn't like a gore nut though like i just thought like in some ways gore's a bit preferable but i didn't feel like the the country would stop if w won do you know what i mean like it feels different this time even last time like tell me mitt romney wouldn't have been like a super average president just like right down the middle like no one would have been surprised a single time in four years by something mitt romney did or said i don't think would be marching in the streets if mitt romney would have won that election so let's i just feel like we have to acknowledge there is something that feels different this time to an incredible swath of the country i mean i made jokes with my rural relatives about obama romney i stopped talking to my rural relatives over trump how can you support a man like this do you know any black people any one black person do you know any asian americans do you know any latinos or latin or hispanic people do you know any of the people who will be affected by this man's policies do you have a gay friend how can you do this and i became so worried so fearful about what trump would do that i understood my own family is being outside of my tribe here's the thing about tribalism you can't turn it off you are going to be tribal you're a social mammal it's a book i read i really enjoyed called consciousness and the social brain that made it the argument that there's literally no such thing as an individual human consciousness it does not exist how do you know that take a human being and completely isolate them for an extended period of time the consciousness breaks down the system turns in on itself it is not good for man to be alone or woman so the trick is not to turn off tribalism which is an innate part of human consciousness but to ever increase your conception of who the tribe is several years ago i stood on a beach at night and saw an incredibly bright light that surrounded me and made me feel the love of god which was not the best thing the best thing was a moment later when i felt god's love for everyone and in that moment my tribe became every single person and i was different i was literally different i came home and no one knew what had happened but people didn't know me that well would say you're so what has happened you're so different and uh i've been squandering that gift ever since right slowly letting the tribe shrink and shrink and shrink and frankly i can understand how african americans could say i will not stand for this and if you support trump you're against me it's pretty reasonable i can understand how my gay and lesbian bisexual trans and queer friends could say if you support donald trump you deny my right to be who i am and i can't be a part of that but if everyone does that the end of that road is civil war and progressive will lose a civil war none of us know how to fight we don't own guns i mean what do you think 20 minutes i mean if the south rises again we're done i mean i've watched my cousins kill skin and carry whole deer back to their pickup trucks i wouldn't fight any of them so there's got to be another way and that other way is for me to take advantage of my societal position of privilege as a middle-class white straight dare i say protestant male that means there's a lot of rooms where i'm allowed in without changing the dynamic of the room my presence doesn't put anyone on guard and it means i can respond to some things differently because for me it's a matter of empathy and not personal cost that racist joke does not actually affect me personally but that doesn't mean i should take the temptation to say nothing it means i have the luxury to take a moment and calculate what is the most thoughtful effective possible response to that moment i am convicted i don't have the luxury of cutting a single person off not one why because i got a head start in life i didn't have to pull myself up by my bootstraps i was born wearing nice boots you know what i mean i was born standing i was born 10 miles in to an 11 mile race and if i don't if i don't do something with that i'm part of the problem i'm part of the system i'm part of the oppression so i uh i re-followed a bunch of people on facebook and then i went through and hid fox news so i could follow the person and they could share fox news all they want and i don't see it but i still comment on that picture when they're in the yard playing with their son i say miss you guys right you start reestablishing some social dynamic because i'm not a missionary i'm family and then as that happens this holiday season i had more difficult in-person conversations about racism about feminism about lgbtq rights about immigration than i've ever had in my life and i listened a lot did race play a role in this election well of course it did race has played a role in every election since 1776. hillary clinton was just a better adversary for black americans than donald trump she wasn't like someone who would actually get the job of racial justice done in this country i mean i could say george carlin's forbidden words and get less flack for that than if you say the word reparations in america that's a word that'll put a room into total silence for those of us who have the privilege it is our job to continue to expand our conception of tribe but the reason i included that disclaimer is the last thing we should do as people of privilege is to tell someone at a more marginalized intersection that they must also expand their notion of tribe prescriptively right so if you're at the exact same intersection as me able-bodied middle income straight white male i'm talking to you but i'm not actually talking to you because sexism plays a different role in your life than it does mine and there might be some people for whom it is psychologically costly for you to include in your conception of tribe so i'm telling you what i'm up to and whatever you can glean from that that's useful you're welcome to thank you [Applause] [Music] in past episodes when asked by listeners who are wondering why some people have spiritual encounters along the lines of your beach experience while others may desperately want a god encounter but come up empty-handed you briefly mentioned the god gene and the telogen absorption scale i have had spiritual encounters on a fairly frequent basis my whole life and when i hear these questions i freak out and want to know what's happening in my own brain yeah so i was wondering if you could provide a deeper dive into those topics and particularly if life experience can impact intelligent absorption what kind of life events tend to leave that kind of change you can just drop the mic with that question wow no need to hand it back even if i can't get there that's that's a fun question there's multiple types of neurological spiritual experiences first a mystical experience like mine is a state of hyper connection between all different parts most of the brain that is extraordinarily similar to what happens when someone takes mushrooms it just doesn't last nearly as long and you don't take mushrooms but in terms of a brain scan very very very very similar effect but that's kind of like the like the 10.0 on the richter scale of spiritual experiences and they tend to be rare but i'm like you i still have like a lot of spiritual experiences the intelligent absorption scale was originally designed as a system to determine how likely someone uh how yeah if it how easy they were to hypnotize and when evaluated for that purpose it wasn't actually predictive for how easy it is to hypnotize some someone which is hilarious but in further research it has been found to be predictive and your propensity to have spiritual experiences and in research that score can shift over time things that can shift your absorption score frequent prayer and meditation um regular worship experiences liturgical or you know hillsong i was trying to think like a good word for like evangelical liturgy and all i could get was hillsong um heal my heart and make it that's an old song that's why i know it so um that wasn't shade i literally forgot where i was going with the answer and it was good oh yeah and then trauma the recovery from grief can move your absorption scale specifically for example they have found a correlation between men's absorption scale and the amount of warmth women describe those men as having fellas lift your score it helps um so brain hacking that's what i was doing right there so um so yeah if you have a if you if you do things like that you'll increase your score you'll increase your propensity to have more frequent more intense spiritual experiences but some of us start out way ahead so i talk about this in my best-selling book finding god in the waves available on sale here tonight plus every books are sold where you can imagine some people are genetically faster runners than other people so if you're just like a naturally fast runner i'm not if you're a naturally fast runner and we both train the amount same amount we both eat the same amount and we we race the genetically faster person will win but if a genetically fast person is sedentary and a genetically slow person does the work they can beat the natural gazelle uh one of the best moments of my life was when i figured out i'm a runner and that i can run very slowly but consistently for a super long time and i ran a 15k race and this guy whizzed by me and said when are you going to start running i was like oh that's demoralizing but i got some good jams so i'm just going to keep running real slow and 14k into the 15k i saw the gazelle it looked like it'd been mauled by a lion and so i just tortoised so proud because i'd been getting up at like two o'clock in the morning every saturday and running for eight hours oh hold on you're like that's the best thing ever if you run that much you can go home take a shower go to waffle house order everything and lose five pounds it's the best thing 20 000 calorie calorie debt for the day are you kidding me i'm gonna have pancakes and waffles and eggs and hash browns and just keep it coming i'm here to lose weight so i miss marathoning so much but so you might be genetically more prone to spiritual experiences and then you've matched that to practice and when you do that you become what i call a god-eyes person because you see god everywhere just all the time just god's dripping off of everything the light of god is in everyone's face like it's a pretty day and you're just like god is here can you all see it and everybody's like no i don't see it what is wrong with you it's six o'clock in the morning and i haven't had coffee right it's just um so that's telogen and then you had one other thing the god gene so the god jane is uh that's good marketing but a bad name the god genes level expression controls the amount of a particular neurotransmitter you produce which molecularly is similar to uh i could write it out uh but i can't say it silas sila sieben thank you did i say that right okay the stuff in mushrooms um so people have a very high expression of the god gene live their lives on a constant low dose of magic mushrooms i'm serious like neurologically that's what's happening and you can't get arrested for it so go religion right um but we have we theorized that many people that have been like prophets or saints probably had a high expression of god in because they saw god everywhere why because the world's like kind of magical and i also be like i really i keep saying this on the podcast because i know scientists listen to the show i want to be tested for that gene because i suspect i i've got some experience because even when i was a little kid just me and god all the time i don't even play with other kids i'm talking to god right now that's really weird if you think about it so hi mike my name is mike also but unlike you i am an episcopal priest right on i grew up jewish and now i serve my diocese as the ecumenical and interfaith officer i bring quantum physics to my ministry because quantum physics says that we are all one just like the gospel does and i wonder what you think about the discoveries in cosmology gravity waves curve time and space stephen hawking recently posed that the event horizon of a black hole captures all the data of whatever goes into a black hole so i wonder what you think about how these things will inform our spiritual growth cool uh rephrase hey science mike what's your central idea about everything [Laughter] i often tell people that my theology is cosmology that my favorite theologian is carl sagan um which like some crowds like yeah and other crowds are like burn him and um 2017 y'all um cosmology says that if you roll the clock back the expansion of space becomes a contraction if you keep running the numbers backwards the entire observable universe some people just say universe and you get confused about what a universe is so i'm being clear the entire observable universe as far as we can see in the night sky with the best telescopes which happen to look in the microwave spectrum all fits in the space of a sugar cube which is important there is no big bang it's a terrible name because a bang makes you think of like a balloon that pops in a room that's a bang or a firecracker that pops in the sky the universe didn't pop into nothingness the universe which was already spatially infinite started to expand but it was already everywhere so a better name as minutephysics says would be the rapid expansion of the singularity but can you imagine a tv show called the rapid expansion of the singularity those actors would be jobless so big bang theory is good marketing um but when you when you when you roll it back and everything is that compressed math breaks down everything gets weird we find that the four fundamental forces of physics are one singular force we find that there is no division between time and energy and space and matter everything is in a state of mysterious timeless unity with the potential to create everything we see today hi god i look into singularity and i see god hear o israel the lord is one the oneness and yet you cannot say that a singularity has a plan for humanity or a plan for anything or a consciousness or the ability to perceive things because those are all models for processing temporal reality which does not exist in a singularity so a singularity god is kind of deistic a deistic like unconscious like you not even unconscious like that's a ridiculous construct and a singularity consciousness not conscious both those things are temporally and they make temporal assumptions so rapid expansion happens 13.8 billion years later we're all hanging out in grand haven and we what we all feel the presence of god the trinitarian view would call that the holy spirit and i find the holy spirit in a set of innate pre-programmed inclinations for human beings to find god in the world and the cosmos no matter where they look as documented by you know oxford not liberty oxford um so there's a god that creates there's a god that dwells within us and our neurons and our synapses and then there's a more mysterious god to me a christ a christ that invites all of this galaxies and planets and societies and cultures and militaries and economies and baptist and methodists and atheists into reconciliation with its origins we call that the christ and where do i find the christ in science absolutely nowhere i only find the christ in the incarnation through jesus which is why i'm a christian and not just like a new age spiritualist or not just like a mindfully minded atheist like sam harris because what unlocks the mystery of the godhead and the spirit to me is only jesus who was the christ that's a really deeply unscientific idea profoundly unscientific idea so i do a weird thing for a christian i just admit that up front and i don't try to convince skeptics here's why i can prove to you as a historical claim that there's an empty tomb and if you don't agree with that you're going to hell bro like that's not i'm compelled to be an empty tomb like we're we're too often in protestant and american catholicism too obsessed with the like after we die like shiny game show reward you got the big prize and when i read the words of the christ and the gospels he keeps talking about bringing the kingdom of heaven near not going there and so what i find in christianity is not a fascination of what happens when we die but what happens when we live and why do i make that a scientific claim because brain science tells me that when you believe god loves you when you believe that what undergirds reality is not entropy but love you can make irrational choices that are better for the world you can take risks for people that don't pan out and so i can't make a claim that jesus was the christ scientifically but i can make a claim that me believing jesus was the christ changes me in a way that changes the world for the better which is why we the body of christ are called to not only be the body but a body that walks out of a tomb and that tomb is the way evolution has shaped us and trained us to primarily look out for ourselves and our descendants and our tribe but jesus says no it's it's all nations it's all people so go ye therefore [Music] i'm i have an educational background um i mean um early childhood education i'm not a christian ministries person but i've worked a lot in different churches in sunday schools and i've found that oftentimes we have just sort of missed the mark in teaching young children about god like we've we focus on the stories and like one time i had to i was supposed to do a um take a bunch of stuffed animals and do where peter was told to kill and eat and and you know so i was supposed to pretend the crowd oh i love churches and i said okay first of all anyways i didn't do that because all the kids would remember was that i was pretending to kill stuffed animals and uh not that they were supposed to be loving to all people kids can play kids play call of duty they could probably handle it but anyway go ahead they bunny hop i mean you know nevermind that was too nerdy anyway um and as a mom too how do i so i i'm trying to understand how to share my faith journey in a developmentally appropriate way yes with understanding how the brain develops great question uh first of all very soon there will be a continuation of you remember the literature's podcast the other side of the mattress with jenny and lisa any of you hear that okay it was about like how to use your marriage handle deconstruction we did another one where we talked about what we did with our kids and then like my kids are on that program talking about from their perspective so if you're like what kids think about that transition mine would be happy to tell you i don't know where they get that from uh yeah it's so funny i go into church nursery rooms a lot of times like because i talk in churches a lot and uh like i think my contract says i get like a green room so like and churches take like real serious because it's boilerplate from bands really like it doesn't apply but anyway so they make sure i have a green room and a lot of times like in the nursery so like downstairs next to a diaper pal listening to all of you come in before the podcast and like all the time they have noah's ark and they never have the people not on the ark screaming and wailing or drowning i've just noticed that is emitted from there's not like there's not like the ark and the falling rains and then like thousands of corpses floating there's just like a giraffe who's like uh internet i smiled really broadly um so why do we keep telling those stories stories are actually the best way to teach young children that's why we've done it they're also the best way to teach adults but like adults for a while you can talk at layers of abstractions and some of us will follow for a while although one of my favorite things in brain science tells me that adults spend a third of their time daydreaming so at any given moment a third of you are literally off in fantasyland you just come back and check in while another third of you take off and i just try not to worry about that like well at least they're not on their phones um but so stories turn our daydreaming machine off it's the only thing that does and for young children young children can't understand abstractions like democracy if you try to explain democracy to a three-year-old no carrier not happening but you like when my kids were little uh they knew who barack obama was we didn't tell them by the way um aside this one's free has nothing to do with it my youngest would do this thing when she was really little where she would come into a room and run as fast as she could and then yell ashade obama i don't know what that means is like a shade she didn't know obama was someone's name she thought it was a nonsense word and then she would leap in the air and jump on me and i thought it was hilarious so i was like hey by the way that's the president and then one time some friends came over and she comes running out of the nursery and goes ashado bubba and jumps on me and they were like what kind of liberal indoctrination machine is your home but i was like you understand she hasn't anyway but it wasn't before long she realized that was like a person's name and uh so she could they could understand a president and a judge and a policeman and a protester and all the things that make democracy wonderful see what i did there um and but they couldn't understand a word like democracy so we understand neurologically young children cannot understand god without a face and you get to a point where your boxes of god kept falling down until you finally just you embrace this sort of mysterious infinite oneness source of all and then you try to tell that to your toddler and they're like well i think god's a guy with a beard and he likes cupcakes and you're like well that's beautiful but you have to understand god is the mystery that undergirds everything and they're like i think there's probably rainbows and unicorns in heaven my approach was like yes because you love rainbow and unicorns so of course they're with god because god is love and god loves you that's the only message that matters when they're this little and this many i'm about to cry on stage thinking about my little ones i've been touring so much and then i got i've been home for like five weeks the first back out on tour thing and i was cripplingly homesick today because i've been home so long it's so nice like my kids remembered what i looked like and anyway so at first god loves you and then we get into like more specificity more stories the stories help underpin a picture of god that place the child within a religious tradition when you share stories from the bible you're helping them identify with the bible as part of the story of their people later on yes it's indoctrination yes guess what we found religion really is a mind virus and bible stories are like a vaccination here's what i mean the children of secularists are more likely to become religious fundamentalists than to be atheists no matter how i'm not saying they're rebelling as their parents they can love their parents they have a great relationship with their parents they could have never experienced any trauma from their experiences by the way the studies tell us atheists make great parents by the numbers but it's okay to place children within a religious tradition here's why because later they'll ask you about that tradition and why it's worth anything and now you face the interesting choice do i quash their questions or do i celebrate them do i allow myself to appear limited or do i try to pretend that i'm all knowing and so often we're encouraged probably lit not in a presbyterian church honestly but a lot of times in an evangelical church we're encouraged to like present this is the one right story and i decided my kids i've been really wrong about god multiple times i'm just going to tell them what i know and what i don't know so we talked about islam and why people believe islam and we talked about why people don't believe in god at all and i remember my oldest daughter was like wrestling with whether she wanted to go through confirmation not because she wasn't sure if she believed in god or not i don't know where she gets that and uh and like i'm like remember my wife started getting angsty about it and i was like hey babe like i've literally heard you say a couple times last year you weren't sure if god was real like now you're worried like madison doesn't want to go to the ceremony and uh and madison came and had all these questions and i was answering them and i was realized like i have answers these questions written down somewhere oh yeah so i pull out my book so step one write a book open the book wrote an inscription to my daughter i'm not going to tell you the description or i will literally cry and be unable to continue and hand her the book i said read this let's talk some more and uh she read my book and i went back on tour and i was on tour on her confirmation day and her birthday i'm a terrible father anyway so um and she said she called me she said dad i'm i'm doing confirmation i'm like oh really so the book helped and she said the book's really good it's like i that's a non-answer so did my chapter on the church he's like well it was good but i made a different decision and i said what and she said well i was talking to pastor betsy by the way if you've never had a woman pastor you've got to try it it's amazing anyway especially we have daughters right they go and talk to like someone who has a very similar lived experience what a weird idea also i don't know if you know this there are more women christians than men secularization has kind of a gender phenomenon anyway so so she says and pastor betsy said i wasn't saying what i believed about god i was saying i was committed to the church and i knew the church was committed to me well i didn't have that answer anywhere uh and so she got confirmed in a community that celebrates her uncertainty so we pray together every night for bed and we talk about bible stories but we also honor questions and how do i know what stage my children are in by their questions my youngest daughter does not wrestle with existential doubt at all it's not that she's unintelligent it's that i don't think she gives a crap like she's like my wife she's like very concerned with the here and the now and the real i remember one day i heard her and her sister fighting about whether or not hell was a literal place and my oldest daughter was like if god is love then god would not create a place where it's possible to be apart from god and basically goes well the bible says there's a hell that was like that's literally a facebook thread like just happening over there and i stayed out of it i did i didn't go resolve i didn't like you know and when they would come to me like dad is there a hell what do you think oh terrible father right no we're i don't want my kids to ever feel like they can't come to me to talk about the divine i never want them to feel like they have to hide to get my approval because i think if god is real the god we're presented with in the torah said why are you hiding why are you ashamed you're beloved the most important message at every developmental stage god loves you and i love you and i think that will cover up any other mistake you make so can you discuss from um maybe your interpretation of the data but can you discuss our species obsession with accumulating weapons um from a psychological sociological anthropology anthropological and then also a biblical perspective and uh how you interpret um maybe the scriptures as it uh pertains to accumulating weapons okay they're like yep yep yep what yup yup um i'll go and let you know which one of my answers will be the weakest it's weird i've read the bible a lot and the more i read the bible the less qualified i feel to share my opinion about it and the more i hang out with pete ends more i'm like i should never say anything he's a bible scholar like an actual bible scholar anthropologically i got you the most violent species of ape on the planet homo sapiens we got it we're the best we're the best at war we're the most likely to wage war second most war loving species of ape on the planet the chimpanzee number two chimpanzees if there's two populations require a two and a half to three to one differential to rage war not conflict war what's a war we're going to fight until one side is dead why because chimps go if there's one of me and one of you i'll probably there's a there's like a coin toss that will get through this but if there's three of us to one of you we're going to win they're going to lose that's actually pretty reasonable what we found in research human populations will look at a 5 population differential and go we got this five percent mutually assured destruction is in our dna we are all over it so why do we want to accumulate weapons because we all understand a profound truth humans are the most dangerous animal in the world i should just stop there have a good night everybody no um yeah but humans are the most dangerous animals in the world but humans are also the only animal in the world that engages in intentional international aid humans are the only animals in the world that build charitable foundations our incredible capacity for violence is matched by a phenomenal capacity for empathy and action toward relief what flips that switch primatologists would tell us the answer lies in our two nearest genetic relatives the chimpanzee and the bonobo chimpanzees uh fight a lot not just against other troops but within their own troop the leader of a troop of chimps looks for any possible uprising any coup that could occur and viciously puts down all opposition we're nothing like chimps right just any possibility wait you're not with me you're against me let's do this right and chimps they're powerful animals like they're like they're smaller than us but any one chimp can take the best fighter human in the world no contest so a chimp a chimp battle is a truly one-on-one as a dangerous situation but bonobos resolve social anxiety in situations with mutual sexual stimulation they're like would you like some fruits have some fruits i have some fruit you could have some fruits i am sorry we fought let's make out that's how they resolve all conflict two troops of bonobos will have like a little bit of strife and they're like there's only one way to solve this come on people now smile on your brother i mean that's just bonobos right so what's the difference between to these very genetically similar primates how they have such radical differences in behavior bonobos have developed in an environment where food and water is plentiful and chimpanzees have developed in an environment where food and water is scarce how do you domesticate humans food water shelter security ask zookeepers how often they feed the tigers all the time tigers never get a rumble in the tummy they're like man i just ate they're like more steak mr tiger more a steak would you like to drink from a bottle like a baby and be like kind of turned into an infant mentally and the tiger's like yeah whatever that's where you want a tiger because if the tire gets hungry at all those dinner plate sized paws will maul you fast it's a killing machine just like homo sapiens so what is the smartest scientific approach to reducing violence make sure people have access to food water shelter and security full stop it's self-evident but our inner chimpanzee says we need to get a lot of sticks in case things go sideways which is how you end up with what's the us stockpile 2700 warheads something crazy and russia's like 5 000 or 7 000 i could be 2 000 off on either side but it's enough nuclear warheads to destroy all of human civilization many times over i want to dismantle every nuclear weapon every single one why i don't trust a bunch of human beings with nuclear weapons because somebody's got to go chimp once and we're all dead once one time ever and we're all dead we're about to spend a trillion dollars modernizing our nuclear arsenal spend a tenth of that and disassemble it go first i don't care what russia's doing pump all that money into relieving poverty in the united states and abroad and scientifically speaking the world will be safer what does the bible say the bible says a rich man would sit every night in his home and live large every night and every night a poor man would sit outside and beg for the crumbs of his table and he'd say i got this i got this this is my food why don't you go work and uh jesus didn't speak a lot about hell did you know that it's not a common topic of conversation frankly the afterlife was not a freaking copy of discussion but in this parable jesus said that the rich man died and went to a place of suffering where he begged for even a drop of water to relieve his thirst and the bible says that that rich man had a bad eye what a bad eye like like i have astigmatism idioms get lost in translation across millennia to have a bad eye was to care about yourself and your needs when the prophets called us to care for the poor and the orphan and the widow and the immigrant but to have a good eye was to be a person who gave and gave generously but jesus also said i come not to bring peace but a sword how do we reconcile those two energies well i'm going to tell you right now you can make a reasonable biblical interpretation and many people do that god says build aircraft carriers you can you can take texts in the bible and especially old testament texts where the favor of god was equated with military might and make a case for more bombs and more stealth bombers and more aircraft carriers but we have to remember to understand the bible and i am way out of my expertise here we have to read the bible remembering a specific author spoke to a specific audience with a specific agenda and that jesus was a first century palestinian living underneath roman occupation who saw his friends and family brutally oppressed through a system of slavery and economic extraction and frankly a brutal criminal justice system and jesus who constantly spoke of peace said i come to bring not peace but a sword and jesus threw out and lashed the backs of people who sat in the pre in the the court of the nations in the temple and made it a place of exclusive instead of universal access so the peace we see prescribed by jesus some scholars would say is not a negative piece as martin luther king would call an absence of conflict but the presence of justice that sometimes you've got to go into the court with the whip and sometimes you have to turn the other cheek and when asked to walk a mile the legal maximum you walk too to reveal the brutality of a system of inequality i think the bible's message becomes clear when read through the right limbs that god was not with the power of rome but the weakness of jerusalem that in fact when god decided to make a physical presence on earth he came from nazareth in those days the response to jesus of nazareth would be where the hell is nazareth archaeologists tell us that was a community of probably 100 homes that may not have had a well that's like a place today that doesn't have a stoplight you just drive through it if you've ever seen it right where the hell is nazareth that's where god with us came from so i'm just a sword into plowshares guy uh i mean that's a lot of enriched uranium it's built in power plants that don't throw carbon into the sky trillion dollars will go a long way and uh the way of christ the way the truth and the life is not the way of the chimpanzee it's not the biggest most powerful stick but instead to hang from one to reveal a system that's morally bankrupt and cruel and dare i say antichrist i felt thank you [Music] well you've done it you've wasted another perfect block of time in the subway or your car and listen to ask science mike what is wrong with you internet people uh no seriously i appreciate it by the way grant haven oh man that was a lot of fun great questions i want to thank the patrons on patreon who make this show financially possible i want to thank greg nordin who spends a whole lot of time editing the live shows andrew golucky for his work on pre-production and listeners everywhere for well making me not just be a crazy person talking to himself thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week [Applause] [Music]