ASM086 Ask Science Mike LIVE in Nashville, TN

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coming to you from otter creek church in nashville tennessee it's ask science mike live

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i'm a tour supporting my new book finding god in the waves and we're in nashville today on october 14th we'll be in columbus october 18th dunwoody georgia october 25th the clergy gathering in central florida kansas november the 2nd and after that we'll be in savannah 3 los angeles area shows portland seattle tacoma boston grand rapids and many more places but we've got a show to do so let's get it started [Applause] [Music] okay so my name is shay hey and a lot of mystics talk about the body being the barometer for emotional pain and i'm curious through your transformation how did rob bell talk about this a lot how did your pain body speak to you if at all hmm man we started like tough questions okay so a little peek behind the curtain what i people think i'm like real fast and spontaneous answering questions i actually just rehearse an answer to every possible question ahead of time and i haven't rehearsed that one so i'm having to think which is a real weird feeling yeah so i i grew up in the southern baptist tradition which is all about you know what you know right yeah you if you believe with your heart which we actually mean your brain these things then you will be saved and there's this cultural thing not unique to the southern baptist faith by the way that's pretty common across protestantism and even christianity in general is a minimization of emotional the validity of our emotions of our feelings there's also kind of a demonization of things related to the body right like about the same time guys figure out girls don't have cooties they're told like by the way your body is a sin machine so you know what i mean like god is really really disappointed if you experience physical pleasure especially with sex but with food god help you if you dance there is no way to be absolved from that kind of sin like you know what i mean never have sex it could lead to dancing like that's kind of the baptist approach to morality and over time this divorces us from our own bodily sensations the way that we experience our emotional life not only in our minds but physically in our bodies by the way if you listen to the show you know that other than your brain the part of your body that has the most neurons is your gi tract right your stomach and intestines basically have a brain of their own and are intimately involved in emotional formation even your microbiome right so when you're told to ignore that all the time you get this psychosis uh i got to a point in my faith uh collapse and the corresponding grief where i was puzzled by like why did why does my body feel this way why is my stomach hurt a lot like the the feelings of having emotions confused and frightened me and the reason i went to see a therapist was like hey you've got to help me my body keeps feeling weird literally like i get like aches in my shoulders i'm sleepy a lot i have a lot of indigestion but what's going on in your life well i mean nothing really i mean i decided god doesn't exist and my parents are getting divorced but that shouldn't have anything to do with my stomach you see what i mean so what i did in therapy over time was learn to be aware of and accepting non-judgmentally of my own bodily sensations and the way that related to my emotional life a process that is still ongoing i have tremendous jealousy for people who dance i can't get past the like awkwardness of trying to embody a rhythm with my body it just feels wrong and like just the d like it was way easier for me to become affirming of same-sex marriage than to move my own hips on the one and the three right like it's just a weird thing so mystics reclaim a part of cognition that we've cast aside in the enlightenment we worship the left brain now there's a right brain left brain thing in popular culture that's [ \_\_ ] it's just it's not a thing like your right brain is creative and your left brain is analytical that's not really true what's different is the left brain takes things apart and the right brain looks at things holistically and rationalism and the enlightenment is just like lifting up the left brain is the only valid way of thinking oddly enough the road to spirituality tends to live where through holistic thinking so mystics push back against this idea of rationalism and say some things we simply know through presence and someone thinking actually goes that doesn't make any sense and the mystic sibling doesn't have to this by the way was one of the things that fueled the great schism like the first big divorce in the church between the roman catholic church the eastern orthodox church is the greeks said we invented logic it's ours like that's us that's our baby and it's blasphemous to try to apply it to the divine right the divine may only be known through presence and experience and the roman catholics are like no but you gotta know what you know what you know what you know and that's like the for the mutual excommunication that divide started there so to me when you read the desert fathers and mothers when you roll hard richard roar what you're actually doing is returning to the most ancient expression of the christian faith which is embodied in the body where did the incarnation happen god made what flesh yeah mysticism so how do you learn to do that a posture of non-judgmentalism a posture of grace towards yourself a friend of mine was telling me a story she's a female pastor her name is sarah she actually came up with the science mic name which i'm not sure if i'm mad at her about or not and she told me about um what it was like to be shamed for having a female body and be a minister by people in her denomination like it was just so intrinsic to our culture that bodies are bad that bodies are evil the best thing you can do is get out of your body to be close to god but when god wanted to be with humanity god didn't get out of a body god got into one awesome question would that answer it okay good there's a thing like lately i'll answer a question back that answer was really good and somebody'd be like you didn't answer my question i'll be like let's try again okay thank you [Music] um my name is catherine um my question is more on the faith side um i grew up in john mcarthur's church i went to his college and then post all of that i kind of had been going through my own deconstruction my question is how do you open dialogue about um the validity of emotions and experience with people whose systematic theology is locked up so tight and you know the scripture interprets scripture and you know there's an argument for everything i mean you know so many of my friends are language majors and you know all of those kinds of things i mean that's everybody i grew up with so do you have any tips for like opening that dialogue absolutely yes thank you great question uh as you know i'm incredibly popular with people who identify with terms like systematic theology so i'm an expert if you do it my way you stay in the tradition and you start blogging heresy with no warning ahead of time and it does provoke a lot of conversations uh they aren't especially receptive though that's the problem right so your brain i love brains i love brain science you've got a thing called an amygdala if you listen to science mike you know the amygdala well it's the part of the responsible for fear and anger and if you're in an encounter with someone and their amygdala turns on we call that a state of arousal it's a different arousal than the one you might be thinking of your amygdala will mirror theirs right it's just like a natural human thing we respond to someone else's amygdala now it's not like amygdala have wi-fi um our facial expressions our body posture our skin tone all these things signal activity and the amygdala fear and anger but the amygdala is oh it's a hot house it uses a lot of energy and our brains have a very strict energy budget literally uh brains can cook themselves if they if you if you use too many parts your brain at once that's why like seizures can be really life threatening you overheat your brain and your prefrontal cortex is like where your rational thought lives where your analytical brain lives um and you don't have an energy budget to have your prefrontal cortex and your amygdala kind of running at the same time it means you literally can't be analytical and angry simultaneously you're trying to win you're trying to save face you're trying to defend yourself but you sure as hell aren't learning right now twitter makes sense like these people have been shouting at each other for four hours yeah because they're social mammals terrified of losing status in their tribe so the worst thing you can do with people is assume they're rational agents looking to be convinced with good information that's not how human brains work at all at all what are human brains designed to do find food find sex find shelter not get eaten and because we're the most social of the primates the main way we do that is focusing on our social standing it means the main thing that drives our beliefs is social identity so your friend who goes to a very conservative systematic theology seminary or church it's going to be very hard to persuade why because they're going to believe what the people around them believe while convincing themselves that they came up with their positions through rational analysis your brain lies to you it's what it does all the time my twitter bio says 86 billions telling a story to themselves we call that story consciousness so how do you convince people with diametrically opposed viewpoints one you keep their amygdala off i work really hard at this i thought it'd be really fun with a new book out to make another post about um uh lgbtq equality this morning and uh that's a great strategy my publisher i'm sure is thrilled and uh a lot of people like came in that don't follow my work because it got shared so much and some of them were really really angry so i banned them and um but other people came in and they had questions like honest questions that i could answer because i'm not gay and i'm not trans right so i was like just answering their questions hoping it was going okay and someone commented like wow you have such patience no i don't but i'm going to have a conversation i wanted to do something right so what i do what do i do i go listen i understand why you believe that and it's reasonable i i actually give them social standing right yeah it's real tricky and manipulative but it works so i start by getting them standing but here's the thing like i used to hold their position i had a friend in high school come to me and say that he was gay and i told him i'd help him pray through that that was me i did that it wasn't somebody else so i understand that this is a journey for people so i honor their journey i create a sense of empathy instead of a sense of conflict and then this is the real kicker i tell a story i don't even try to like do the debate because like as soon as we're debating over like well scripture says this [Music] yeah you know what i actually debate really effectively but all i'm going to do is turn the amygdala on and they're not going to learn so i tell them the stories of what this belief does to real people and if possible i use names because we're a storytelling animal stories change our beliefs about things in a way rational argument does not make people feel comfortable respect their position even if it's nutty and tell them a story repeat that's the other thing it will never happen in one conversation now this has a cost okay ladies women in the audience have you ever had to try to explain to someone what mansplaining is how many times in a row do you do that before it's super old is it .02 is it two are they especially generous right like there's a cost in that approach so we have this tendency to instead of follow jesus to try to be jesus to climb up on the cross ourselves on golgotha and say i can take on the sins of the world i've tried it you can't one thing i'm learning a lot from justice advocates i talk to is the vital importance of self-care you can't help other people if you don't keep yourself healthy so it's not your mission to reform organizations it's your mission to live a life that leaves the world a bit better than you found it that's it right now if you feel some call to like go and do this grand amazing thing i'm so happy for you i will retweet your work but i find that what i do is much more effective when i know exactly who i'm talking to who am i talking to with the science mic stuff the spiritually homeless and frustrated the people whose boxes have already fallen down so if your boxes haven't fallen down and you come on a facebook page and want to debate me i go your boxes are all still fine um you know go check out so-and-so's page right this is not a good you know what i mean like it's just a waste of my time it's a waste of their time like i know every argument every argument every argument you're gonna make about this lens of scripture i already know like actually occasionally if they give me a fresh argument that's how you draw me and i'm like oh i haven't heard that one like that's fascinating but i've heard them all and so i don't have like the energy to get on the merry ground and just say the same things over and over i'd much rather come hang out with you i also think at some point uh it's okay to set up boundaries and live your life it's okay to move on i mean can you imagine like how i'd be doing if i still went to the same southern baptist church every sunday morning can you imagine would i have the emotional bandwidth to come be fully present with all of you no because it'd be backstage crying that's not hypothetical that was happening when i first started this work right i was still going to baptist church and i would do events and i would like be like trying to work through this week's trauma of so-and-so who told me my children will spend eternal conscious torment in hell because their father's beliefs have changed or whatever and oh it just doesn't work just doesn't work at some point you just knock the dust off your sandals and you walk to the next town and jesus was a badass okay hi mike uh i have a science question for you you had an experience where you heard god and you did an investigation on that you talked about talk about that in your book which everybody should buy but i don't know if i've heard you say what you think scientifically that was what would you say to a science friend happened when you heard god and how do you as a scientist react when somebody says i heard an audible voice not i felt it in my person in my flesh but i heard it really good question i've researched it a lot i have a brain cyst i know that because i got a cat scan and i got a cat scan because i heard god talk to me so okay i know exactly what causes this brain tumors so i got a i got a cat scan they're like you have a brain cyst it's a it's a a large normal cyst i think was the classic any bigger and it's a small abnormal and they go after it with a scalpel so i'm just like let's just keep it right there francis where you and i together forever for gastly you know um but it's nowhere near my auditory cortex or my temporal lobes ah no brain tumor okay uh well there's mental disorders that can cause those kinds of uh conditions so i went to a psychiatrist and took a full battery to see if i might be mentally ill and whatever i am it's not diagnosable so boy you know i kept looking further further like the beach thing i can find that's out there uh that's a pretty normal thing as people who think they've seen god go like what happened to me on the beach the bright light the sense of love that's all a well understood neurological phenomena the auto voice thing is not um now the most amazing thing and probably like the most amazing not an amazing thing but the is i started writing and talking about all these scientists and my platform got big enough their books started selling more and so then they like called me so like i've talked to andrew newberg who's like my favorite neuroscientist who like came up with neurotheology as a discipline and uh he and i are gonna have a conversation about that and record it um so maybe he'll have an idea tanya lerman who i also talked to she blurbed the book she's a anthropologist at stanford she talk to me on the phone for a couple hours what a weird world uh she has this theory that there's these things called sensory overrides that she came up with in conjunction with a neuroscientist that you basically have a little piece of hardware in your brain whose job is to figure out uh if right now is real or not and if right now it's not real you're dreaming so we should not move the legs for real because that could be really dangerous and so she thinks when people have those kind of intense she calls them sensory overrides uh that part of the brain identifies a mental phenomena as objectively real it's like a it's a mislabel that is a hypothesis that's not a tested thing so the real answer i have no idea uh so here's things people say i don't believe you i say that's totally fair i mean i you know i wouldn't believe me either right and that's that's kind of what i try to get out in the book like as powerful as that experience was it doesn't prove anything to someone else and it really doesn't prove anything to me because there are natural naturalistic phenomena that could explain that moment not with precision right now but that doesn't mean forever so i just sit with it i just sit with it i don't i i've stopped trying to it's an improper fraction right now and i just leave it i just leave it i just view it as a gift i mean so in addition to writing that book i i tell that story on stage like every 30 minutes right like constantly and i still cry every time because that moment was so profound and so beautiful and i'm not going to let my prefrontal surgeon cut it to pieces that's mysticism mysticism is you have an experience and you sit with it you embody it you're grateful for it i have had more freaky stuff happen since that day on the beach but i don't give it all away some of it i just sit with as a gift and a grace and uh it's incredibly unscientific on one level on another level brain scientists say it's absolutely the most authentic way to embody that brain state so hashtag neuroscience i don't know yeah hi mike david hey david uh so i had a question about artificial intelligence oh yeah so on one of your previous uh science mike lives you gave an answer about that and directed listeners to the uh wait but why articles on the subject yeah which i read and found fascinating but also had an existential crisis after reading those because i should have that as like a surgeon general's warning on the podcast may cause existential crises yeah exactly because up until that point i pretty much assumed i'll live to be 120 barring some accident yeah with natural progression and after reading that article came to the realization that by about 2040 the median scientists think we'll probably invent artificial general intelligence and very quickly thereafter invent artificial super intelligence which will either be paradise or the end of the world so my question is twofold one is how viable do you think that is and is there any new information in the last couple years since that articles came out that would speed up or slow down that timeline and to how have you grappled with the probability that this would happen in your lifetime and almost certainly in the lifetime of your children great question who has any idea what we're talking about who is so lost right now that's why okay you my friends are biological intelligences uh evolution has been kind of goofing off for a while uh trying this very large brain primate thing it's gone quite well unless we destroy the planet but um so far like we make tools we build very large civilizations language i like language it's a good gig so it took a really long time for you know basic life to develop into human intelligence and scientists don't agree we've had some new information last few weeks that are really monkeying with the timeline of when life appeared on earth but we could say billions of years with confidence billions with a b and then in the 50s we figured out how to make transistors think very basic rudimentary forms but uh the pace of progress of information processing for artificial digital intelligence is way faster than what natural selection has been doing and this has caused some people to freak out um because things we thought computers would maybe never do they're doing uh for example this would be really fun but you can say hey siri and people oh really disappointing usually at least three phones go didding but you're a smart crowd like computers are listening to us all the time right at home like everyone i go alexa what's the weather like today and alex like tells me i'm like how about the news and then she tells me this briefing and i feel like like i'm living in the future and uh but it's more than that like a computer one chest became like the global grand master of chess and then jeopardy okay that's when i was like whoa like a computer one jeopardy watson and now recently uh the computers won a game called go and go is nutty because there are more possible plays in the game of go than there are atoms in the universe so computers are really good at chess why because they predict every possible move that's kind of how they do jeopardy like i do ask science mike very similar to lay watson plays jeopardy i just imagine every question you you all might ask me and like come up with an answer and just memorize it it's no big deal and alphago required an intuitive piece of software or go required alphago which is an intuitive piece of software so what do we do if computers get as smart as us because at the slope of their development they will not be as smart as us for very long artificial intelligence researchers believe that potentially in a matter of days there'll be a bigger difference between humans and ai as there is between humans and ants yeah that that's the right response that piece of information like what do you do with something that smart especially because like we kind of get biological intelligences they all want the same stuff we do they want some food they want to replicate their dna they want to not get eaten so like you meet a bear in the woods you have a decent shot of not getting mauled if you play your cards right through like this evolutionary body language thing where it's like hey you're the big dominant predator and i taste terrible you know what i mean like you just give this energy you're not like come on bear you know what i mean like you know how to respond to a bear but what computers don't have an amygdala you know what i mean like it's such an alien so they'd not only be smarter than us their desires could you even say they have desires their mission we don't have a language for what a computer may want to achieve especially because we may have accidentally created that right so some dot com company is working on ai in secret and they're like it's gonna be amazing we're gonna make an ai that just makes people happy it's gonna like rescue the human race we'll say solve climate change and make us happy and so you know it builds little nano robots that one day we all fall down to the ground and stop polluting and it just like tickles the pleasure of our brain all the time so we feel happy and we just all are putting vats where we're happy all the time with no other cognitive experience paradise right so this is one why stephen hawking and elon musk both agree we need like an international treaty on ai research that's a thing but here's the other thing if there's one topic i'm actually qualified as a person to talk about it's computer science i'm an i'm a legit credentialed nerd like i built large-scale systems for a living for most of my career i've developed software uh i know about large-scale networks and i'm not as worried as many experts are because of moore's law we have really really uh lost the ability to make moore's laws happen so everyone's basing these assumptions on this ever accelerating computer horsepower but if you actually look at what's been happening with chips lately that curve looks more like this so you buy like a your your what's apple doing they haven't updated the mac in three years right well why would they the new chips aren't really any faster that's the problem we're facing as we've made these features on microprocessors smaller and smaller one they're getting atom sized and two they're too hot they put out too much energy so i think that some of like you know kurzweil's assumptions about machine intelligence are based on a curve a supply of information processing that doesn't exist anymore and i also think we may fundamentally be misunderstanding cognition and in science as we look through history our metaphors about consciousness tend to mirror our technology uh so like in the industrial revolution when everything was like powered by steam and hydraulic pressure uh people thought about the brain in terms of fluid dynamics you know like literally um and now we're in the information era so what do we think about the brain apps information processing but like your brain doesn't have a hard drive and a cpu and a graphics card and a network card it just has neurons and as far as we can tell your neurons there's not one neuron that processes and one that remembers it's completely systemically dissimilar in that it's it's a holistic network you don't store process retrieve information at all which this would be really fun if we wanted to i could give out sheets of paper and i could ask everyone to draw a one dollar bill and it's hilarious how like you can picture a dollar bill right now and you feel like it's photorealistic but if you try to draw it you're like well there's a one and there's some flowery stuff i know washington's in the middle which way is he face is he smiling no he had wooden teeth so his lips are you know what i mean like you're not like dollar.jpg go um so that was that any of you got that you are my people uh so i also think the we may fundamentally be overstating the capacity for our current machine architectures to develop into a consciousness except i have been watching what ibm is doing with uh neural net chips my cpu is a neural net processor um so maybe ibm's making skynet and i'm wrong what do we do about it uh i would i would i would lobby for governments to sign that treaty and uh keep reading there's so many things that could wipe out this species right now we're in a real like if we if if humanity was uh like one human i feel like we're toddlers like we finally learned to stand up which is amazing except the room is full of knives and shotguns you know what i mean like it's like oh what's this ah like i didn't know if i touched on my leg it would lop it off right here lightsabers even so climate change real scary we just passed 400 parts per million and stayed there in september that hasn't happened ever with people on the globe ever the last time we had that much carbon in the air there was no ice on the planet anywhere which i don't know if you know this homo sapiens what's up y'all that's us we developed in an ice age we're in an ice age right now why because the planet has ice on it we've never lived in a hot earth scenario can we i don't know nuclear weapons those are real freaky every year the probability of annihilation via nuclear war is pretty low but it's also higher than the chance of someone winning the lottery but people win the lottery all the time why because a lot of people play the lottery and there's a lot of years so a small chance over time grows to an ever increasing chance if we have global nuclear war we don't have to worry about climate change like it's not going to matter because we're definitely not gonna be putting any more carbon um to me this is a gospel issue didn't see that coming did you to me this is a gospel issue what does it mean to be salt and light what does that mean today i think that means earth care uh stopping nuclear proliferation lobbying the government our government which by the way has the second most nukes on the planet to have less ideally zero um and you know so yeah ai is is there i don't worry about ai nearly as much as climate change um but we tend like the church is like what what are we known for like fight about same-sex marriage and uh just is really not existential to the species issues but the problem is there are existential to the species issues right now and i feel what the church should be known for like why do we let the humanists become the ones who are for human flourishing that was jesus's gig you know what i mean he's like you rich people in your palaces you know how hard it's going to be for you to enter into the kingdom of heaven right you don't see what's happening to the least of these blessed are the poor you guys aren't making in the kingdom of heaven we're all pretty rich in this room so ai global thermonuclear war climate change poverty all these things to me are the modern embodiment of the teaching of a crazy galilean from nazareth who tried to knock a whole system down we're supposed to be in that line of work thanks hi mike zachary here hey zachary um so i didn't know who you were until like two weeks ago and i'm sitting in my car most people don't know who i am so i'm sitting in my cubicle at work i've been pressured by my friend to listen to your story on the liturgist podcast and then i'm listening to it and i'm like oh my gosh this is great stuff and i'm thinking i gotta tell the guy in the cube next to me it i don't tell him cause i'm an introvert and stuff uh but joel i'm really good friends with him okay he knows a lot about michael no okay not very not joel osteen he's uh he's an atheist okay uh and he so i'll talk to him about all sorts of stuff and i don't think i'm at a point in my relationship with him where i can be on this high horse and be like oh i'm gonna save you but like he just seems like a really good guy that i care about yes and i want to you know have spiritual deep conversations with them i mean playing video games with them and stuff is fun but okay you mentioned in an earlier answer to a question like you gotta have people's boxes knocked down and his clearly aren't so do i just need to detach from him like be like hey well i guess i just won't ever talk about anything deep with them okay or is there something i can do that's not going to be just like punching them in the face yeah great question i would start by not punching him in the face with the gospel of course with the gospel i'm gonna punch you with some jesus um that's not how i roll at all since i came back to faith not only in god but in christ something has been different as a southern baptist i was an evangelical the purpose of my faith was proselytization did i say that right proselytize yeah i did amazing this prophetization was telling other people the good news so they would not spend eternal conscious torment in hell that was my game it was real important and i don't do that now one i don't have any idea what happens when people die it would be really presumptuous for me to say i got this figured out um now i do have hopes about what happened when we die absolutely do i know what happens when we die i don't have a clue i haven't talked to anybody who's died except jesus [Music] oh man i was in a real good zone to take that answer emotional okay the only thing jesus ever said to me was i was there when you're eight and i'm here now and i forgot to ask him about the afterlife so next time next time i'll get that info and i'll let probably sell a lot of books too uh now if that happens people are gonna think it's a marketing thing oh cause this is recorded i can't deny anyway what do you do with your friend you don't knock his boxes over like never be in the knocking people's boxes over business that's terrible i mean unless people's boxes are like overtly oppressive to another person unless someone's boxes involve active harm to another person then absolutely say hey your box is terrible um but other than that like your atheist friend likes to work with you and play video games sounds awesome i like to work i like to play video games we have a bad reputation as christians of being sales people like p and people are suspicious oh you're christian they're waiting for the pitch they're just waiting what's maybe the most powerful thing you can do is just be their friend it's amazing so i mentioned i don't proselytize anymore and ironically i have more conversations with people about jesus than i ever have had in my life in my life tour i'll be in restaurants by myself talking to the server talking whoever i don't guide the conversation of jesus they do and i'm like you don't talk to me about jesus i'm weird like i actively try to avoid it and then like pull up a chair and sit at the table with me like what do you mean you're weird i'm like well i'm like a non-theistic mystic jesus person like what the hell does that mean and oh yeah i can figure i really love jesus it's maybe the most defining thing about me as a person and it's so strange that people are curious about it and so if people ask me i'd love to talk about it you may notice that when people ask questions and ask science mike say i'm an atheist i don't really want to talk about god there's no question about science i generally just answer a question about science i don't like sneak some jesus in you know what i mean i think we'll be a more powerful life-giving faith the day we stop making the main thing of our faith trying to get other people to take on the same set of propositional ideas that we do that instead we become the good neighbor right how do we love our neighbor as ourselves now we read that story and we think we're supposed to be the samaritan right that's probably not how jesus's audience at the time read that story they identified with either the man on the side of the road remember they were living under roman occupation or they identified with the righteous who walked by how often as a church are we the righteous people who walk by we want to tell healthy people why they need jesus but we don't want to just pick up a broken person on the side of the road clean their wounds take them to an end and say their bill is on me right at no point did the samaritan try to make the wounded man a samaritan and the biggest command the biggest command just ever gave us after loving god with everything we've got was to be a good neighbor to go ye therefore means to go live lives of radical love not lies of radical internet argument and debate it's like that's some enlightenment stuff that got onto the wrath that didn't belong it doesn't belong so what i would say is you play video games and you talk about what he wants to talk about and you talk about things you love and you just be like a normal person and when something terrible happens in his life you're the first one there to help and by that he will know who you are and who you follow oh yeah [Applause] hey mike my name is will i will so i uh recently have been very curious learning about uh social justice social change in our country and i think uh what really jump started it was the black and white racism in america podcast on the liturgists and recently your uh feminism podcast that just came out um but in my delve into research watching a lot of youtube reading a lot of articles i found myself diametrically opposed to a lot of the extreme parts of these social movements like i have empathy for the base ideas of like egalitarianism did i say that correctly i'm not even sure but don't ask me i say eagletarianism okay um you know just basic equal opportunity in our country something i value strongly but in engaging as a straight white cisgender male i realize that in a lot of these circles my opinion is not welcome or valued even if i come from a place of empathy and i wonder what is the best way to engage with these groups if i truly do want to learn but if i do have some sort of disagreement with parts of their cause such as the way they operate uh is my opinion from this people group white male valued and not welcome in the discussion or is there a way to be of some sort of value without being obtrusive or mansplaining yeah amazing question oh i'm so glad you asked that question i also am a straight white cisgendered middle income guy when i was born i got a deck of cards and they're all face cards right i got like like i'm learning disabled so i have a two like one two of spades i just don't deal that one what i mean but because i come from such a position of societal privilege not only societal biological privilege privilege privilege i don't know if you hear this amazing rich baritone of a voice but human brains literally defer to the lowest pitch voice in the room so i want to talk at a meeting at work i just dropped an octave and everyone was quiet right uh people who are taller get paid more do you know that clean correlation between height and income it's amazing 6-1 i wish i was a little bit taller but i'm doing okay so my whole life what have i expected when i speak people will what listen doesn't mean they have to agree with me they just have to listen then we can talk about why they're wrong so we make episode 20 of the allergies podcast lgbt and we're real excited we worked hard on it we wanted to substantively move that conversation in the church we poured our hearts into it not only our hearts but man months of planning recording editing poured our souls into this thing and we were ready for the pushback from conservative people of faith and instead the pushback came from queer people of color who said how are you going to have an episode about this movement that's only has white people on it and i said well that didn't occur to us but we had good intention i gave a thumbs up internet people um what what they were right they were right but my instinct immediately was to justify myself and my position instead of listening to people whose lived experiences are not available to me i will never know what it's like to sit in a room and be the only queer person of color in it i will never know it no amount of research reading rational analysis will put me into those shoes where i understand it so what i've learned that sometimes the best thing i can do to create justice is yield the floor we thought about the woman episode of literature's podcast michael and i weren't even going to be on it that was our original thought and honestly the women involved in the show were like if you don't at least introduce it a lot of people won't listen so we were there literally as bus drivers all aboard everybody and then we just drove the bus right like we kept flowing and just record a great conversation sometimes the best thing for us to do is to just yield our position because the system is set up so no one can take it no one can take my platform from me i have to willingly and intentionally yield it do i agree with everything every justice advocate says no no but i sure as hell won't understand why they believe it and what i might be missing from my position and here's the other thing who made me mr idea policeman like what if they think that and i don't and it just ends there see what i mean like what if we just what if i don't even tell them i disagree because based on my position within the system the minute i open my mouth i bring a lot of stuff into the room that i don't see because it's invisible to me it's invisible to me but it's not invisible to them this is why i'm so big on the tone of conversations you can't isolate the systems people represent and embody you can't isolate that from the conversation even in the most trusted close personal relationship in the world at the end of the day i'm just a lot less likely to be shot by the police than my black friends it's statistics it's indisputable fact that i am safer in the presence of police than they are so even though i'm from a law enforcement family and even though i i feel like i've known a lot of really good decent hard-working police officers i have to understand that my perspective which i view as neutral and unbiased might be loaded and i might slice the data with bias completely unintentionally and i might need someone else to show me a different perspective so maybe this might not be you but what i found in my experience notice what i did i'd make sure your amygdala doesn't turn on what i found in my experience is sometimes all that's required of me is listening and then the best thing i can do is translate that into language that other powerful white straight cisgendered men of privilege can understand and relate to the work of a translator if you follow me you know i'm a huge huge fan of a man named broderick grier and he always talks about how he's not interested in allies he needs accomplices an accomplice if the crime leads to a conviction goes to jail two an ally says well we tried i'm going to dinner uh and i'm just i'm done trying to be an ally the movement of a poor brown-skinned palestinian man who suffered under an oppressive violent system of law and order compels me to believe that my life and my work is that none of us are free until all of us are [Applause] hi first i would just want to say thank you for everything you do and having people like me just giving giving us a safe place to be okay with believing god but not being okay with a lot of other things about the church so thank you so i am uh another thing i want to thank you for is um being very vocal about the need for mental health and advocating for therapy i'm in grad school working towards becoming a counselor myself and i also have this crazy background of being a martial artist and training and and teaching that well no but now i'm in this new thing where i'm learning to be a pacifist um and where counseling and martial arts kind of are colliding in my mind and in my life is i'm doing a lot of research now showing this paradox where people are able to and are consistently gleaning therapeutic benefits from martial arts training and self-defense training especially in in terms of female empowerment um and increasing self-efficacy beliefs and also even going as far as treating um trauma in trauma survivors and so i guess i kind of want to bring that topic to you and hear your thoughts for me being trying to become a pacifist while also [Music] seeing this really remarkable research and this crazy thing where people are becoming healthier human beings and mitigating aggression through pretending how learning how to fight so okay luckily they call me philosophy mike so first of all i don't even know if i'm a pacifist or not i think i'm a pacifist but then if one of you started punching another one of you i would come push you away right that was a form of violence and writ large i don't know where when that stops being a clean line i don't know but i don't think you're anywhere near that line we are physical beings uh one of the most powerful therapies for depression is walking life is so dark like i just i just feel like i'm in this darkness and i mean i'm not being tried here like i've struggled with depression in my life and i just don't know if life is has any meaning uh i don't have any energy i don't feel like doing anything and then someone convinces me to like walk every day and the studies are pretty conclusive like it has a positive therapeutic effect walking so now you're finding another thing that mock aggression is therapeutic to trauma well just because someone learns martial arts doesn't mean they're just going to start mugging people from everything i understand is actually martial arts and i'm not a martial artist i've been in one fight in my life and i lost even though the other person never joined the fight side story because it's hilarious seventh grade i got my lunch tray walking on my table the second least popular kid in the school i was the most least popular he's second so like his whole life is making me miserable so i walked by he's sitting down he's got real arms he reaches out and flips over my lunch tray and says something about my mom so i have this like movie moment of just like the white hot fury right here and i'm like this ends today and like i ball my hand up into a fist and i literally like pull back like really hard like really pull my fist back and swing as hard as i can he's sitting down at the table he does notice he's coming and i glance off his shoulder and completely miss him at which point the entire cafeteria erupts in laughter and i didn't have any money to eat lunch so i just sat at the table alone so i'm probably a pacifist out of necessity and uh i had to make a joke to like stop the heartache in the room i remember the question that's great um so martial arts teaches people to not have moments like mine it's primarily defensive uh and it teaches people to respect the innate power their bodies have and the harm that it can visit i don't see martial arts as incompatible with pacifism in any way especially if it's helping people recover from trauma so you have a really common trick in moral quandaries or philosophical problems jump to past not passivism jump to pragmatism what's the pragmatic thing these people aren't going to go get in fights they're going to feel better go do it and be successful with it right like there's i feel like you're super super good to go i also think you're super thoughtful that you're even concerned about the potential of violence from people who've experienced trauma engaging in martial arts we need more primates like you on the planet have you considered running for president maybe even in 2016. i got a question about auto suggestion and prayer okay so i'm thinking about um you know an experience i had about a year ago when i was having a really you know crappy day and i remembered somebody telling me like hey if you just like look in the mirror and smile for like two minutes and you hold that you hold that smile for two minutes you're actually gonna walk out of there feeling like in a better mood and i'm wondering you know is there any science or is there any research around auto suggestion or saying hey you're gonna be okay or you're gonna have a great day or i'm gonna have a great day and also how is that different if you're an atheist but you still pray is there a difference there or is there a relationship that's the question yeah oh amazing question um we are really suggestible i have this thing in my life now where i go to rooms like this and we sell all the tickets but i go on amazon i'm like why haven't i sold 100 000 books yet that's a real thing that happens in my brain because i'm like just like i play it real cool like i'm just here and i'm genuine but i've also had this like white hot overachiever thing like i really should have been number one on amazon for at least 30 weeks and but it i actually like stress out about it like i'm insufferable with my wife like i come with all of y'all and i'm so present and i'm here and i go home and i'm like jenny we gotta sell more books and she's like the publisher says things are fine i was like yeah but there's other people selling more books than me and i mean who is this jk rowling i am like why is a screenplay such a big deal and i use that trick when i when i realize i'm like making myself miserable even though i'm literally living a fantasy life right now where i'm a published author who dropped out of college who hundreds of thousands of people listen to on the internet who doesn't really get hate mail just people like hey i really love your work and when i get a two-star review on amazon people like i really think he's thoughtful and kind i just disagree with him on these things like that's my life and i get mad about it so i do a trick i read i read a study um it's one thing to smile does this look like a real smile no it looks creepy because a real smile involves crow's feet like this thing so i literally if i if i can't get the zone i go to a mirror and make sure i do a crow's feet smile i just hold it for 45 seconds okay you're like this guy's real strange it's science it works like i feel like my self hostility just melt i feel my sense of gratitude to you know hundreds of people a day who are buying that book hundreds you know what i mean like every day every single that's crazy why am i not smiling more and we can all do that we can all take moments of intent to think positively now does it work it totally works uh it's the secret but the secret is not that the universe wants you to be happy the secret is not that you name it and claim it and it's yours the secret is if you think about it enough in a positive light it becomes a neurocognitive suggestion and then you suddenly change your actions in ways that change your circumstances right so when i writing a book is hard work it's the hardest thing i've ever done and i wanted to give up so many times but i just kept thinking this is going to happen i'm going to get a book deal and the book is going to go on shelves and it's going to happen and because i believed it was going to happen when things happened that like objectively it was time to give up i didn't i foolishly pressed on over and over and over that's what's happening so when people of faith ask god for something over and over and over and over fervently they change their brains they change their brains whether or not god is a conscious being who listens or not let's set that aside for right now when you're asking god's for god for something your brain is listening i still do intercessory prayer all the time now here's the kicker it works for atheists too you pray to a god you don't believe in and do it often tricks your brain exactly so it's not like a slam dunk theological issue luckily i don't care about those um what i care about is the way that faith becomes embodied and a prayer of gratitude a smile and asking for something you really want can work just not for the reasons people usually say probably that was some legalese at the end of the answer okay [Music] hi hi thanks for coming to nashville oh it's my pleasure i love nashville other than the traffic that's fair we would all agree um traffic's terrible so i've heard you talk in different interviews and in your book as well about um leading your daughter to christ as an atheist in the southern baptist church and i can only imagine that the last few years and your new understanding of god and um your place in god's world has also affected the way that you talk to your kids about god and um i would just be curious what does that look like as as you've been parenting and and leading your family in this journey how have those conversations changed and and how do you talk with your girls now okay it's a really good question uh that question happens at every event so i that probably needs to be like a liturgist podcast or something um okay michael if you're listening uh actually you know what we don't have to ask michael the guy who uh makes sure we do everything is here mr corey pig it's not course just make sure we do that it's the hardest job in the world coordinating me and michael gunger oh my gosh i wouldn't do it i tried i failed we didn't have podcasts for months so if i had little kids which i don't anymore i would tell them about a god who walked in a garden with adam and eve oh yeah nice silence i would tell them about that i would tell them about a god who made the world by saying let there be light i would tell all those stories because it turns out they're neurologically appropriate for young children because young children don't understand abstractions uh if you try to tell a three-year-old about democracy no but my three-year-old knew who barack obama was and actually was hilarious when macy was quite small she would come she'd only heard the name obama who that was and so she would come running full speed at me and leap into the air and put her knee out to do like a flying knee wrestling move and she would yell a shade obama like like it was some and people would come over and be like and she's like she doesn't know that's a real word she just think it sounds amazing which it does but later like i was like okay it's not a shade obama it's barack obama and this is this is him this is the person and she got it that's a president what's the president well he's he's leads the whole country well who's his boss like well because who's his boss well we are but like that that's how we describe democracy like the relationship between people same way with little kids how do we describe god faces and relationships what kids need to know about god god loves you god loves you god loves you and has a plan for your life i'm kidding about that second part you ever seen the meme of the christians in the coliseum with the lion it says god loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life oh so good uh so no it's just god loves you okay well then kids get older they ask more questions and when they ask more questions it's a sign that they're neurologically ready for new ideas or advanced ideas about god right the bible does this some of you probably heard me do this the speech so i won't do the whole thing but like basically the bible is an evolving image from a god with a face towards a mystical god it stops making sense so god gets a face again through incarnation and it worked so well we killed god and that's a thing that happened are you denying the crucifixion so god rose from the dead called elon musk on a rocket ship left the atmosphere and then a mystical god returns only now we're the temple oh wait not quite done and then actually god's a trinity historically that's an idea that had a beginning right that's so that this new image this as i love so much the new book the divine dance richard rohr and mike morrell that god exists as relationship okay so which one of those is the right god is it like the burning bush is it the pillar of fire is it the god of the holy of holies that emanated throughout all the earth but had a zip code because by the waters of babylon laid down and wet for zion because god can't hear us here that's what that passage means god had a zip code if you couldn't dial a local area code you couldn't talk to god that's not how we think about god now which ones these are all metaphors that point us to an unspeakably beautiful reality we call god so which one do you tell your kids about the ones they're ready for so after my kids said but wait if god walked in a garden where is he now oh they're ready for something new well god is everywhere well i can't see him well first of all don't use gender pronouns about god that's later that's later no you can't see god uh but you can you can see god in a sunrise you can see god and mom smile because god is love that's right so but then they gonna say well how you know or i would say and i believe that's one of the first things that started saying well i believe that it up and eventually say was everybody believe that no what do other people believe i start telling things other people believe well why do they believe that well their dad is science mike so i usually have an answer like for people that believe different things but then how do you know you're right that's for my 11 year old is it's not where my nine year old is so my my 11 year old and i talk about existentialism and empiricism and just the whole bottle of wax buddy the gloves are off with a nine-year-old we still talk a lot about god loves you right it requires a relationship built on trust and it requires a desire to teach your children how to find a metaphor for god that fits them but by letting that metaphor evolve you actually prepare them better for a walk of faith what do we do so often in the church we give people training wheels that they are still using when they're 50. it is a strange image imagine a 50 year old man with a rolex in a in a you know in a blazer i don't know why i went blazer i love blazers but he's wearing a blazer you know what i mean like he's on his he's always got his bluetooth earpiece like he's that guy and he's on like a little blue bicycle training wheels and he's peddling like this it's an obscene image and yet we tell people that one idea you heard about god when you were seven is the only right one and then we wonder why no religious affiliation is the fastest growing faith in america we gave people no choice but to reject god because we gave a metaphor that didn't fit anymore the best thing you can do for your kids is introduce them to the mystery of a god who meets us where we are over time and in that process sometimes what we once were so sure about falls away but that doesn't mean god is gone it only means that we're growing [Applause] my name is ashley and i am i'm 32 years old and i had this new kind of powerful experience happen in my life about three weeks ago where i've never to this point in my life witnessed anyone die and about three weeks ago within five days of each other i saw my grandfather and a good friend both take their last breath so it's very powerful for me and it brought out a lot of things but one thing that that highlighted was at least in the circle of people that i lived with there was this huge emphasis put on interceding for these people especially my friend who had cancer and while that's great and you talk about the um the positive effect of that there was almost zero emphasis putting on actually walking beside her these people helping them i mean we all die so actually helping her work through that process and she ended up being very fearful and anxious toward the very end and so i'm wondering if you could just talk about how we balance how we can balance prayer and truly walking alongside someone who's dying and and maybe from a neurological perspective what is the best way to do that how do we walk alongside someone and help prepare them first of all i'm sorry for your loss um we are terrible at death in america in the modern era we treat death as a tragedy to be avoided at all cost even though it is inevitable so when people are ending the end of their life we take them out of comfortable environment we put them in sterile rooms with harsh white lighting we attach them to machines that beep constantly we wake them up at regular intervals and we fight like hell to make sure the only guarantee in life doesn't happen is it any wonder we have a strange relationship to people's passage it has not always been this way people used to die in their homes surrounded by their families in times of celebration times of renewal when my meemaw died the whole family gathered in this hospice room regularly and saying gospel hymns because she loved them and maybe maybe my favorite memory with my grandmother was sitting at the side of her bed for four hours holding her hand in silence science is pretty clear when we pray for people it doesn't have any measurable outcome on their recovery rates that's it's statistics now we can talk about methodological flaws or whatever right now studies pretty not universally a very significant majority show that these intense prayer chains don't have any effect on outcomes that doesn't mean people who are being prayed for don't get better they do they just get better at about the same people who aren't prayed for thank you for the laugh for me prayer is about presence prayer is about communing with the source and i rather enjoy life but everything i've studied about death i don't fear it at all neurologically speaking it seems that for most people it is the most peaceful fulfilling moment of their lives that as the brain begins to lose its supply of oxygen that expensive amygdala is the first thing to go fear and anger disappear next the parietal lobe way up in the neocortex responsible for your sense of physical place and presence shuts down and you feel detached from this world then your visual cortex loses its energy and your aperture of vision moves from broad to a single point perhaps even looks like the light at the end of the tunnel deeper into the brain is a structure called the hippocampus it's responsible for your memories and as your conscious awareness moves from the outside of the brain to the inward you find yourself in the presence of the things in your life you thought of the most therefore remember the most whatever happens after death we know during death you're in the presence of your loved ones such a beautiful poetic experience that we all try so hard to avoid what can we do neurologically speaking be present in the room assume people can hear us and feel us when i die i want my family to hold my hand i don't want them to treat me like an unclean object of plague i'd like hugs i'd like someone to scratch my head i'd like to hear people singing i'd like to hear the voices of people i love if my children are kind enough that they have grandchildren i sure would like to hear those voices so that's what i do for other people i try with people i know well to do those things i knew that they loved someone once joked that i'm a freelance internet pastor which i really rebelled against until i realized that people who don't have a church very often reach out to me in a pastoral context and so for friends who aren't churched and occasionally strangers i get invited to the death beds of people i asked them about that time when you were on vacation and something embarrassing happened or to the surviving spouse tell me about when you fell in love i do this in the presence of the one who is departing maybe someday we'll get smarter about carting the terminally ill into cold sterile rooms but until then i think we should bring as much warmth and light and home into those spaces as humanly possible and it's so terrible that when greg edits this there'll be a moment of silence and then dude [Music] you're listening out there i'd love to see you on tour go to finding on the waves.com tour i'm going a lot of places hopefully one is near you also i have a book out it's called finding god in the waves if you don't have it i've heard it actually gives you a healthier whiter smile claim not evaluated by the fda and i also need your questions so if you can't come to a live event but want to ask me a question that's okay go to asksciencemike.com and you can scroll down to the bottom you can fill out a voice question no you can ask a voice question or you can fill out a text question you can also use the hashtag asksciencemike on twitter youtube or facebook and we'll see it and i want to thank all my patrons who make the show possible also give me health insurance i appreciate that a whole lot and pay me money to work the patrons actually pick the questions that make it on the show so thank you for not only supporting the show but doing my job for me and the most amazing thing is at the end of the show i thank some people so greg nordine i love you buddy thank you so much for producing the show jeff bodaford thank you for the theme song but tonight rather amazingly andrew golucky is here right so andrew yeah come up you're on stage all the way on stage um i need yeah andrew picks all the questions that go on the show like he's the one who digs through that incredible sifting pile of incoming questions and the most amazing thing is he emailed me out of the blue and said how can i help and then i said how he could help he just did it and uh the funniest thing to me about the whole show is people who are way too cool to ever talk to me like not only listen but offer to help so andrew is like an accomplished uh singer-songwriter and musician and legit nashville person and like lowers himself to this task of the nerd podcast so andrew thank you so much and uh yeah [Applause] thanks for listening everyone and i'll talk to you next week [Music] [Applause] [Music]