ASM197 Going Small (Again)

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well hello my friends uh this is science mike your host for ask science mike and usually we have a whole ritual for this podcast with a little a little short intro and then a theme song and then a vamp and then some announcements and and we're not doing any of that today because this is a special episode and if you're the kind of person who usually skips forward trying to find the episode you're listening to it now there is no announcements loop on this week's show i've got a lot to share i think that is important and significant basically it's been a tough year for me with my health i've had a heart disease known as pericarditis that i've been treating and following the recommendations of my cardiologist and my primary care doctor and it gets better and then it gets bad again and it gets better and then it gets bad again and what they're telling me is i haven't made enough changes to manage my stress levels and anxiety i basically have to live an almost stress fee free life for some periods of months in order for this condition to get better and you all have been so great about supporting me i mean i think of the gofundme i think about all the cards and letters and tweets and facebook posts saying science might take as much time away as you need and i thought i did but i hadn't so what i've been tasked with doing is to only do things that don't elevate my heart rate other than light physical exercise so if i'm doing something that involves talking in a microphone or standing on stage and it's like ramping my heart rate through the roof that's something i need to not do for now but i can keep doing anything that doesn't ramp my heart rate through the roof and i have really exciting news ask science mike does not send my heart rate through the roof so i'm really going to be focusing on this podcast for a little while this is going to be my main way of talking with all of you just for this season while i try to get my heart in better shape um along with that i've actually dropped all events for the rest of this year except for two which is the christian transhumanist conference october 19th in nashville put on by my friend micah and then of course uh episode 200 of ask science mike which is being recorded in los angeles and i'm really excited about that is sold out but we are regularly as people cancel adding you know three or four tickets a day back into the sales so if you just check every day i bet i bet you can get in i'm sorry that sold out quickly but it's it's a small room and there's a reason it's a small room this is a season for me to get back to my roots a lot of you found me more recently after my first book or found me as a podcaster but believe it or not my work in helping people deal with the fear involved in transitions during life those involving faith and those not didn't start on podcasts or on the internet at all and something has gotten lost at least for me with millions of listeners and big giant rooms with stage lights and security that's not a natural feeling thing for me this whole science mic thing it came from lunch tables it came from people reading my blog and saying i don't feel like i have anyone to talk to and me saying yes i'd love to talk with you and going to lunch with people that's that's where this all started i literally every day would go to lunch with a different person at first friends and then strangers to talk through people's fear and anxiety around their beliefs about god or their understanding of science or their sexuality and i was never acting as anyone's therapist i was just someone who had been heartbroken too and who reads a lot if you kind of pay attention to my work that's really the two dynamics you see i'm someone who reads a lot who has also been heartbroken a lot so when people are sad i know what sadness feels like when people are afraid i know what it's like to be afraid and i don't judge people because they feel lonely or afraid or sad i understand those feelings and it grew from lunch tables to living rooms small groups of people would like invite me to just answer questions about life and faith and science it that's all i did and then somehow i got discovered and i have books and podcasts and management and an events manager and all this these people that surround me and enable the work but my friends i just have to tell you sometimes i miss just sitting in small rooms with all of you and talking about our feelings and sharing the genuine joy i have at learning new things that's that's what gets me out of bed in the morning i think there's something amazing about monitoring curiosity with dignity that saying every sincere question deserves a place to be answered even if sometimes the answers are hard to hear or even hard to find that doesn't mean those questions shouldn't have a place to go so i have lots of ideas about how for this season i can go small again and kind of the first thing i tried in that idea was i got back into a living room so this week's episode you're about to hear is just me sitting in a living room with some friends and some friends of friends talking about our feelings talking about our curiosity you know my heart rate was just steady the whole time i'm not going anywhere by the way i'm not hanging up the microphone i've got a lot more work to do a lot more stories to tell and a lot more of your stories to hear but i wonder if you'd be willing to go with me on a journey for the next few months back to where this all began for me and that seeing your faces and holding your hands and honoring your curiosity and your pain so without further ado i'd just like to share with you what i'd call an original version of ask science mic with no stage no microphones and no pr people just me and some friends [Music] oh gosh and i almost forgot one last thing before we do the show and this is really really really important we're getting ready to send out the early copies of my next book which is called you're a miracle and a pain in your ass and uh it's it's a book about feelings and and growth and pain and suffering and living a good life basically and you can get one of those copies my publisher was asking me who all the people who are in media or have platforms so if you're a social media influencer or you play in a band or you know you're on tv or whatever it is i know i have lots of friends who do those things but the way i see the world that's invisible to me [Laughter] i don't really think of people in terms of what they do and so i don't know who i know who does this kind of thing so if you're a person who is in media if you're a person who has a platform of some kind you can get an early copy of my next book for free you just need to email arc at sciencemikelabs.com that's arc at sciencemikelabs.com just send an email let us know what you do and then you know we'll send that list to the publisher and you get my next book months before anybody else for free you know they're trying to build buzz it's all part of book marketing very exciting i will tell you this book is it's my heart this one feels very very personal in a way that nothing i've ever done before is uh which sounds strange for me as someone who shares their deepest darkest thoughts and feelings for a living but i learned a lot about myself and about life and about emotions and about the things sometimes we have difficulty talking about in the process of writing this book and i really think gosh i really think this book could help a lot of people have new insights about themselves too so if you'd like an early copy just email arc at sciencemikelabs.com and now for sirius for real let's head to the living room for this conversation with some friends my question is uh is there any kind of scientific evidence or an alternative scientific explanation for like a collective subconscious oh man swinging hard right out the gates uh that is such a hard question to answer because the term consciousness is so poorly defined in science that is one of the great unsolved philosophic and scientific questions is what is consciousness and where does it come from in the world of neurology there are two main schools of thought about where human consciousness comes from one is a model called the global neuronal workspace model and basically your consciousness is the convergence of all your structures in your brain where they share awareness so you may not realize this but your brain isn't really a brain your brain is like a house built in california it originally started small and then people just kept adding on to it in a very strange assortment have you ever noticed the interesting floor plans we have here that happened with your brain but over billions of years of evolution so like in the base of your brain you have a structure that's very very similar to a fish's brain and then wrapped around that our structure is very similar to a frog's brain and then wrapped around that is very similar to like a an opossum's brain and then wrapped around that it's like a monkey brain and then finally about the same thickness as a tortilla and actually about the same diameter is the neocortex that's the part of your brain that makes you a person it does language philosophy art all those wonderful things it's it's that thick the part of your brain that controls your agency and willpower is as thick as a tortilla it's right behind your forehead it's about as big around as a quarter the part of your brain that controls your emotions and your impulses is about the size of a brick so this explains why impulse control is really hard like we've got a plate of brownies this is la so i'm pretty impressed but there's been this epic struggle for most people in the room tonight of like the quarter tissue going like no brownies and the brick going yeah brownies given enough time the brick always wins now why do i mention that in the context of consciousness what are we aware of moment by moment the quarter or the brick or as jonathan hate would say the elephant or the rider our subconscious mind being an elephant very powerful not that intelligent the rider more sophisticated but with very little control over the elephant the global neuronal workspace model says that things are pulled from different elements of the brain and your consciousness is just a shared circuit where those things converge and so moment by moment that drifts through your brain so when someone cuts you off in traffic your global neuronal workspace is more associated with your amygdala which is a little almond sized patch of tissue deep in the brain that controls anger and your amygdala says an excellent response is some sort of dominance display and it acts quickly whereas right now everyone's probably in a much more cerebral head space your global neuronal workspace is closer to the surface and this primarily on a available of tissue towards the back of the brain and the neocortex that is where the raw sensation of touch becomes something much more delightful like sensual pleasure those are the two leading schools of thought in neuroscience that's pretty hard to stretch into some kind of collective consciousness but if you look at a model of consciousness more like the physicist michio kaku who says that consciousness is simply a model of reality and a feedback loop with reality itself i'm sure everybody got that the first time in that model a basic consciousness would be a thermostat why because the thermostat knows about what the temperature is and it can respond to it so brent's thermostat right now knows that the house is about 77 degrees and is trying to cool the house to 73 degrees which will probably take about two hours it will stop once the room cools so the thermostat's aware of reality and makes changes response to what it does in reality so it's a loop in kaku's model consciousnesses get more sophisticated with complexity so like a plant is more conscious than a thermostat because a plant knows soil ph and humidity and temperature it knows if an animal is biting it it knows that another plant is trying to hide its sunlight then you get something like a beetle that has to move around it has to know where to find other beetles to make more beetles it has to know where to find smaller bugs to eat you get past that and you get into something like a social mammal like wolves and what's interesting about social mammals is their consciousness has to be aware of other consciousnesses so if you're a wolf you have to know how popular you are with other wolves you have to know if the alpha wolf likes you or not right which means you have to run a model of another brain in your own brain which is why social mammals have such big brains then you get to like what kaku would call the ultimate consciousness on the planet and that's human consciousness which is different than other social mammals in that our model of reality includes time we're aware of the past and the future which is very very rare in the animal kingdom what's interesting to me in that idea of consciousness is you could consider an ant conscious yes but you could also consider an ant colony conscious a super organism you social insects coordinate their actions together in a cohesive wet way with the environment and the only animals i can think of that form larger colonies than bees and ants are in fact homo sapiens so if we take a feedback loop model of consciousness then media culture language amplified empathy all of these things actually in a very real and scientific way produce a collective global consciousness of billions of people which is locked in the same kind of moment by moment debates about policy and religion and economics as our individual brains are about whether or not we should eat a brownie [Music] uh the follow-up question would be how do you feel or where with that really on the topic of like evolution and where we're going yep and where we are with like creative or like uh darwinism versus where we're going next with like you know bionic if we if we ultimately become bionic or if we are ultimately uh interfering and creating new genes and creating almost creating superhumans where do you feel like with that on the back of what you just said where we are in that process of like billions of years of evolution come to our brain but it seems now that we are evolving in the way so much faster than we did and it seems to be going quicker and quicker and quicker so here's a couple of interesting points in the data some studies are showing that the rate of genetic mutation is actually happening faster right now than it ever has which means we are literally evolving faster than we have at least naturally well that's the question right yeah is it naturally we think mutation rates are so high because human populations are interbreeding so voraciously across the globe and we're exposing ourselves to lots and lots of disease because of global travel now that raises an interesting question i've always thought it interesting how we make this divide between like natural and man-made but we were made by nature and like if you're a zoologist and you look at this house like one way of looking at this is like a human nest not some artificial structure uh the question is has an animal ever self-directed its evolution through its behavior as much as we are and i don't think that's the case what's interesting though is we think like ah gene therapy and and bionics and and machine intelligence and all these things what we're actually seeing is since the dawn of agriculture our brains have been getting smaller our teeth have been getting smaller and our bodies have been getting smaller isn't that interesting we got like suddenly all this nutrition and at first we did get a bit bigger in the age of agriculture then we started shrinking and you'll see these kind of macro trends for a while americans have been getting bigger and bigger and not more obese like right now i mean taller more muscle mass that was due to great nutrition right now we're starting to shrink again because americans eat a lot of junk food but when you look at the changes in brain capacity body mass and the ratio of brain capacity to body mass especially the every decreasing size of our teeth you see the same changes happening in our populations that you see in pigs and cows and chickens compared to their pre-agrarian forebears we appear to be self-domesticating which is wonderful in some ways because before we self-domesticated we were the most violent animal on the planet before agrarian societies the most common way for a hominid to die was to be killed by another hominid so us domesticating ourselves i think is actually like a really important and necessary step in potentially keeping the species around for a while the like deeper philosophic questions of now this kind of self-domesticated primate species of hominid homo sapiens beginning to modify and edit their own dna yeah this is um you know when we split the atom we can power cities or level them and i think a lot of scientists agree that genetic power is kind of on that same curve so is it would it be great to like eliminate congenital heart defects in infants absolutely that that would be wonderful would it be great to eliminate down syndrome well that depends on what culture you ask in some cultures in europe people are already doing that and then communities of down down syndrome people around the world find that quite horrific so the thing about science is by its own design it can't tell you what to do with the insights it produces science can't answer questions of beauty science can't address moral concerns and science can't tell you what to do with science you need another moral philosophy laid on top of that what we do know is that once things are discovered through science you can't just make them not happen which means the question is not what is science what will science allow us to do in gene therapy what culture and moral philosophies will we create on top of that and one of the things i like most about myself is i know when to quit and i don't feel qualified to answer where that line is on what we edit and what we don't what i do know is the pattern for our species is we tend to wait too long to examine questions before acting and we don't want to do that with gene therapy we're already seeing in agriculture we're in la right so everybody's like well i don't eat gmo food yeah you do all agriculture is genetically modified that not you couldn't eat a truly wild banana they're they have tough husks they're full of seeds every banana you've ever eaten has been genetically modified over thousands of years and you can through crossbreeding just as selectively placed genes as you can with actual genetic editing but what we have seen already whether or not we're gene splicing in the gmo way our genetic modifications to crops has created these monocultures that make them incredibly susceptible to disease and pestilence we have a lot of crop failures that we didn't used to have because of agricultural monoculture and if certain genes become trendy on i was trying to think of a pun for twitter and use dna but that's beyond me um if there was a genetic social media site where like this week this is the hot new gene for people to have you would not want a genetic monoculture for humanity because all it takes is one virus to come through and wipe about most of the species so in some way our current evolution driven genetic lottery system is well tuned to coexist with the true dominating life force on this planet which is bacteria do you feel like what's what's happening is natural or do you feel like we are intervening and speeding it along that was kind of what i was trying to get at do you feel that our our at the rate we are educating ourselves and the rate we are finding these things out are we are we pushing along what would be naturally happening are we are we way far ahead where we should be or are we is this all are we right where we are because we are evolved as as humans on this earth yeah kind of getting to a place i would say if you thought like an anthropologist and you look at the arc of our species from our emergence you know let's say 150 to 250 000 years ago to today accelerating change is the natural behavior of homo sapien homo sapiens that's what we do we are change accelerators the question is are we capable of being more thoughtful it is it whether it's natural or not for us to slow down i think it's a skill we need to learn because if you look at our population growth curve have you heard of r selected and k selected species anybody no okay that's a deep cut there's basically two strategies for creating new life one is the like lay a bunch of eggs thousands of eggs and take off and the ones that make it make it that's one strategy the other strategy is more like a dolphin or an elephant or humans have few offspring pay a lot of attention to them and see how they do and if you look at the way populations grow there's a difference between our selection and k selection what's weird about us is we have an elephant style nurturing program with almost a bacterial style population explosion curve so what this is terrifying for people to study science is bacteria yeast locus any of these rapid reproducing organisms the way they control their populations is to grow consume everything there is to be consumed and have mass starvation and crash the climate is telling us right now that if we don't learn to slow down our population is going to look a lot more like the growth curve of yeast than of elephants and so whether with natural unnatural there is absolutely a need for us as a species to become slower to become more contemplative and become more aware of the way our lifestyle multiplied by billions affects the very eco webs that support our existence this episode of ask science mike is sponsored by betterhelp and i think it's really fitting because what we're doing on this program by showing our feelings in a vulnerable way and celebrating curiosity is ultimately focusing on mental health and emotional awareness and better help has some amazing tools to help you do that it's an online counseling service that lets you speak with a licensed therapist about issues you could be facing in your own life in an environment that's convenient to you because you can talk on the phone you can video chat you can text or use in-app chat in order to communicate with your therapist they specialize in all areas of mental health and better help is available on a sliding scale so people at all income levels can get therapy at a price they can afford best of all better help is available to science mic listeners for 10 percent off their first month service and you can learn more and sign up by going to betterhelp.com slash science mic where you can fill out a questionnaire and they'll match you with a counselor that you will love again just go to betterhelp.com sciencemike so my question is in in light of the opening global warming crisis do you feel like tell me that the pros and cons of change from a top-down hierarchy like governmental change versus a bottom-up decentralized um like strategy to change hmm neither of them work that's that's the problem we're facing as a civilization right now there's been this really depressing cultural dynamic there's like something beautiful about this like individual responsibility culture that america kind of pioneers it produces a lot of innovation for example but it gets used to distort what our actions are capable of we used to deliver everything we manufactured in like glass and wood casings you know when people would buy food it was in reusable containers then we discovered plastics we made a lot of plastics plastics are durable plastics are cheap and companies started making tons and tons and tons of plastics and there was no socialized behavior of what to do with empty containers because that was never a thing before and so people being people and often relatively thoughtless would just like oh i'm finished with this thing and they would throw it out their car window or they'd throw it on the ground at the park because why would there be trash cans at the park everybody two years ago was bringing a blanket and a basket right and now people are bringing a paper bag full of plastic so everybody just thought that well natural take care of it nature because if people used to throw their food scraps outside why not your immortal plastics and things got disgusting everywhere and so legislation was put forward to start uh fining companies so that they had to pay into systems to clean up all the garbage and the companies i'm because we're recording i'm not naming specific brands because i don't want to have to put this episode through legal review but the specific companies hired advertising and pr firms to come up with an ad campaign to create public service announcements to get rid of all its trash and that's where the term litter bug came from don't be a litter bug who's ever heard that phrase don't be a litter bug right that's an ad slogan and what that ad slogan was meant to do was shift the onus from the people producing the waste to the consumers and to their local governments to provide opportunities for people to throw away their trash in this way as we started creating centralized trash services not just in cities but in suburban ex-urban and rural areas this all connected to an ad campaign which got the legislation out of the way why do i mention that it's a perfect example of shifting the responsibility to the individual we talk about climate change we're like hey you know eat less meat buy less things on amazon we'll use more environmentally friendly package we're taking the same model of pushing things onto the individual and trying to have grassroots advocacy around changing individual actions but if you look at where carbon emissions come from individuals play a pretty small part in the overall picture so if everybody cuts all the meat out of their diet and everybody cuts the energy consumption everybody buys fewer things that is less than a third of all carbon emissions so a few industries are responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions which means that's where the major changes need to happen so it can't be grassroots organizing us do it ourselves it can't be governments mandating to people to change their actions we know that it's not effective from a public policies perspective what we need is grassroots activism to demand that companies and governments change their behaviors um and facilitate ways for us to change ours and they're listen there's gonna be i don't think people have any any idea of based on the current models like how bad how fast the planet is going to get or how dramatic the lifestyle changes that are going to be required are but i'm really excited gosh yesterday was the global climate strike children's strike and he had children all over the world marching on governments and there was this beautiful moment where the congress was talking to this very famous climate advocate named greta and they were saying we're so happy for what you're doing and uh she said basically said i don't need you to patronize me i need you to change what you're doing because we have to live in the world after you're gone and so i'm really excited that i think the next generation actually realizes the stakes what i'm modeling my life around is i don't want if i have great-great-grandchildren to be ashamed of what i didn't do once i knew so that's why i tend to be very involved and very vocal in grassroots advocacy that specifically targets policy makers and companies i think with the political divide in america we get too stuck on politicizing climate change when the easy win is consumers going after companies consum companies are terrified of consumers and if we if we mobilize on mass they don't have to like take it through the senate that you have to convince a ceo that's a danger to their share price and they'll make a change [Music] um have you seen the south park episode about uh man bear pig the climate change i i think i've seen a clip on youtube it's the newest one not the old man bear pig but anyway at the end of the year two man bear baby satan is resurrected from the underworld to defeat uh man bear pig who is the product of climate change okay but in order for the the devil needs everybody to to surrender their their water bottles their plastic water bottles and soy sauce and they won't do it and they're like no wow and that's where i feel like we are is like everybody you know wants to do the right thing for the environment and everyone's very conscious about it there are like some fundamental things it's not us like we live in a bubble like we want all of these things are like we're not talking to us like it's a totally different socioeconomic bracket it's like we are not the masses you know and so it's like it's coming up with a a cheaper alternative to plastic and we haven't found that yet i mean you know i mean and my question is have we and if so like what is that company like who is who is trying to find the economically sound alternative to this stuff because that's how you change it not like getting all of the elites to like yeah to like do that you know what i mean like making it like so people in middle america can be environmentally conscious because they can't afford to be yeah i think there won't be a solution to climate change that is a new product or manufacturing method so like i saw now they're making they're making plastic plastic-like substances from avocados and everybody's like yay i love avocados so if my spoon is made out of avocados it's great for the planet right um avocados are like incredibly water inefficient plants they're so thirsty so just because you're making plastic out of avocado pits one that's less avocados to eat because if you take the time to like just scoop the pit out really nice it's not profitable to make plastics out of it anymore um and two you're still making sure that it doesn't biodegrade super well so when we look at biodegradable plastic alternatives they only biodegrade if they have like fresh air and sunlight and we put them in a landfill and they get buried and then they still last for thousands and hundreds of thousands of years so the the tough thing here is it's not that we have to make a better plastic it's that we have to reorder the global economy fundamentally that's a taller order like this is what's weird if you if you look at it systemically health care and job security and welfare are all connected to climate we have to get out of a consumer-driven economic model completely that's and i'm not talking capitalism versus socialism like the super exciting uh dnc 2020 fight i'm talking about something more fundamental it is possible that the entire economic growth-driven economy that we use now is incompatible with living on a planet um it might be compatible with like colonizing solar systems if we get that level of technology but then what we'll always have to do is expand expand expand expand to keep that economic model going and this is why it's why i think native people are so important i had this opportunity recently to go to the arctic circle that was not a carbon neutral trip flying airplane from la to seattle seattle fairbanks a little prop plane six seater from fairbanks to arctic village which is the home of the gwichen people who've lived in that village and that area for 30 000 years now i've done genealogy i know that you know my family's been here a couple of hundred years but the glitch and have been in this region for 30 000 years then we flew from there in a four-seater plane generous to call it a four-seater generous to call them seats honestly all the way up to the arctic circle northernmost part of alaska eyesight of the arctic ocean and what was interesting about the arctic ocean was it was blue and there was no ice in it this is the first year that's happened i was among the first people to ever look at a completely melted arctic ocean north of alaska so we camped there for a few days camping in the arctic is even in the summer colder than i thought it would be then we flew back down to arctic village and we met with the glitch and people and what was interesting talking to them is we wanted to talk about the trump administration and oil drilling in the arctic village and let's zoom on this issue and they didn't want to just talk about that they wanted to talk about trump and obama and bush and clinton and reagan and lincoln because from their perspective they were here 30 000 years and for the last 300 our growth economy has been destroying the lands that they lived in harmony with for 30 000 years 30 000 years they lived in a symbiotic relationship with the caribou herd that provides most of their substance subsistence they knew when to hunt and when not to hunt by observing the herd they knew when to lean more into plants and when to fish and they did this by observing the natural world and living in harmony with it now i don't want to glamorize native people and say that they have all the answers there's there's a very very problematic thing that white people especially do encountering native cultures is try to emulate everything and almost deify them native communities had their own struggles long before we arrived but there is something about their fundamental approach to being that views themselves as part of the world as part of nature and not set apart from it in a way that i just don't know that the nasdaq index enables us to do so yeah so yeah we need to get better at manufacturing but we also need to get better at being present in the natural world and realizing our interdependence with it and that maybe maybe people in the midwest don't need a better plastic maybe they need to know that their community is committed to making sure that they're fed and safe as they are committed to making sure that everyone else is as well [Music] okay so i didn't have traditions in my family really and i remember hearing of like oh the traditions of like your grandparents passing down like recipes and all that stuff and how that's going away because people just aren't learning to cook and there isn't like homeek in school and that type of stuff that's as far as my brain went of losing out on like generations passing down wisdom and i was at a museum and learned about more so native americans and working with the land and like seasons for like burning the fields or harvesting certain things that i can't even name but i i can't help but think that just the lack of education and these things being passed on to generation generation is really removing us from that first-hand experience of understanding the land and how it works and being able to treat it correctly and honor and all that stuff and i'm wondering if anything i'm saying makes sense and also if you have any thoughts or um ways that you think those things could be solved and or if that could help just us more from like a global standpoint become more invested if we were educated in that way that's a really good question that i am i am literally afraid to answer um and i don't get nervous about answering most questions but that's a juicy one let me start with a sketch let's go back to arctic village in alaska the gwichen people they've been here for 30 000 years they have traditions and culture passed down elder to child elder to child through that entire era when they first encountered europeans they did not have written language at all their entire wisdom tradition was oral and it's dying not because their population is shrinking it isn't but because there is wi-fi at the high school there's no internet there's no cell phone signals there's nothing in arctic village there's no roads i mean in a three-hour flight once you get north of fairbanks there's nothing but trees and lakes and tundra there are no roads there are no buildings there are no signs of humanity until you get to arctic village and when you get to the high school there's a bunch of teenagers standing on the ramp to the front door because it's the only place you can get wi-fi from outside the building and they're on their phones and they're tweeting and they're snapchatting and they're doing all the things that we do and the elders are so frustrated and angry and they said to us as we came in you're turning our children into you with no idea of the earth or the past only the impulse of now where does that impulse come from well it's interesting when i talk to my african-american friends they have tremendous cultural wisdom and tradition passed down from generation to generation when i talk to my my latinx friends in the same way they have rich multi-generational family traditions and awareness the only people i talk to who feel cut off in time are my fellow white people i've been studying that a lot lately at the direction and advice of friends of color in my life and scholars of color climate change generational amnesia capitalism all of these things are linked and related why do we want to forget the past so desperately well because i don't know about you but my family owned people but before my family owned people my family was irish and my family came to america and they were a despised minority at the bottom of the socioeconomic rung and then there were black people in the south who were literally owned and so if you're irish well like at least you weren't a slave yeah you know you know american history you know that didn't go well we fought a war over the right to own people in the south lost and then a strange thing happened the newly emancipated very poor black slaves started to build communities with people like my ancestors poor europeans and they started to lobby together for the for basic rights and that was terrifying to ruling europeans in the united states and so there's always been kind of a european supremacy for some time kind of born out of the roman empire this is old stuff for europeans but america took whiteness and they made a a a contract and they said hey you italians and you irish you're not british you're not french you're not german you're not dutch but you could be white and if you're white well we're not going to give you a social safety net or anything but we will give you the right to vote we'll give you your own water fountains we'll make it the force of law that these currently black neighbors of yours aren't even allowed to be in the same space as you so at some point in my specific ancestry i've looked this up genealogically one of my ancestors decided that we weren't irish we were white americans and once we became white americans all the scots irish traditions of my family were scrubbed from the records all those traditions stopped because there was that association with being irish scott cyrus especially that's the poorest people in scotland and the poorest people in ireland who went back and forth because they couldn't afford to be in either place they came to america a lot because they were literally starving to death at some point they decided to be white and to erase their history and that's after they owned people and then they did horrific things in service of jim crow laws my family split into one half went to pennsylvania in colorado the other half to alabama to the deep south i'm sure if social media existed back then i would be horrified by the actions that my ancestors and lynch mobs and the kkk i think are in the now-ness for white americans is a way of anesthetizing of narcotizing the great and profound dare i say sins that we've committed as a people group against almost every people group on the planet but especially black americans and native americans to remember our traditions is to remember not just defeating the nazis in world war ii but hanging black men from trees in the southeast and the midwest and the northeast even here in southern california as recently as 70 years ago there was a thriving presence of the kkk literal white supremacists do we need the wisdom of generations i absolutely believe that we do but for us as white people to access that wisdom there must be a great reckoning and a great atonement of where all this land and where all this money came from and when we accept that and acknowledge it and do something about it we'll actually also help with plastics and we'll also help with climate change and we'll actually be able to live in harmony with the earth because we can never live in the harmony with the earth until we can also live in harmony with the other people who live on it and there comes a moment in every ass science mic podcast where me going seems like really obscene so i name that first so it's slightly less awkward uh can you scientifically define a soul [Music] can you define a soul scientifically science's job isn't to define things science's job is to test things so part of what you need to do to do science is to define something specifically so if we were to test the idea of a soul scientifically step one would be defining what is a soul step two would be defining an experiment that would allow us to test for the presence or absence of thing that we just defined right um that's how science works there was a time we didn't know what germs were right so we were like we have why is this illness happen could it be this mechanism could be you see what i mean like the whole nature of science is to have these shifting definitions that lead to hypothesis you can test why don't we have a lot of good soul science i think would be an interesting place to take that what i have found as a person who is to religion what a lot of people are to sports or comic books i'm just into religions like even when i was an atheist i was just super into religions because like there's a lot of religious people and there always have been so when i like lost my faith i was like what the hell why are people so into like invisible things that we literally have never seen in any experiment or observation ever it fascinated me and as i was like on this binge research series and believe me when i get like into researching i go hard right so i started studying world religions i studied the i tried to read the sacred text of every major world religion sequentially uh and chronologically i started with the earliest ones we have and uh what i found was when people say god or spirit or soul no two people ever mean the same thing so even like in if they're in the same faith tradition if you if you get a room of people together you say who or what is god they'll like group think to a collective answer in the room especially if there's like an authority figure in the room who can like do kind of orthodoxy chucks if you get people individually you know i said if there's 7 billion people on earth there's like 9 billion ideas about god and i think that's true of souls as well if we mean like what like an immaterial essence of a person that is independent of their physicality and somebody can persist beyond their current arrangement molecules and atoms which itself is like very impermanent you know what i mean like we're all literally trading atoms and molecules right now like we're all going to leave with a little bit of each other that we didn't have when we got here i just think that's kind of cool and weird um it's just hard for me to get my head around scientifically now if i think like kind of mystically yeah souls get really interesting but you got to be able to test and when we try to test souls like some of the other things like scientists tried to weigh a soul and the way they do that is you'd like put someone dying on a scale and wait and then at the moment of their death see if they got lighter right several times they did turns out to be like methodological flaws in the data but it was really exciting for us like whoa a soul weighs a 104 grams wow people tried to photograph souls people have tried all sorts of things anytime we've gotten something that looks like kind of interesting it's turned out there's been wild methodological errors in the experiment so i would say today we don't have a defined enough idea of what a soul could be and therefore don't have rigorous experiments or observation to test for the presence of a soul which means science won't like bail us out and a lot of moral dilemmas involving personhood if we attach souls to it recently or in your career is there a question that was asked of you that you answered that you either regret your answer or you wish you could change and if so what is that what was that topic what was that question that's a tough question i've been on such a journey in therapy about self-acceptance and giving myself grace but i might have to roll back my self-growth clock a little bit to frame that question well i think early on constantly i think there's a reason i start all these by saying just so we're clear i don't know what the hell i'm talking about right it's to lower the stakes like this is entertaining or not and when people ask questions that are like vulnerable and from their lives i think a lot of people have never had someone really listen to them so i just really like sitting in like a room full of people sometimes very big rooms and active listening and watching people see what happens when you just listen to someone share pain without interrupting or correcting and i feel pretty good about all of those we were in sort of a science mike just like this at a university in dublin and um had the book of kells there it was really cool one of the oldest uh bibles in ireland and uh a young man stood up and talked about autism how it impacted his life and asked me for like advice on how to relate to people being a person with autism and what was interesting is like that was not the first or the last time someone asked me about autism and sometimes when people would ask me about autism they would ask me how i dealt with autism and i would always say what i said to this young man is like i can't imagine what it's like for you as an autistic person i wouldn't even want to try i wouldn't want to minimize your perspective by pretending to know i know what it's like to have autism so i just want you to know like i hear you and i appreciate you and thank you for sharing then like last year like i found out i have autism and people would email me a lot and ask me for advice on how to deal with autism assuming i was autistic so i had all these people in the community who were autistic like saying inadvertently like you have autism and every single time i'd be like whoa no not me i really regret reflexively dismissing their insight because by doing that i was like boxing in what an autistic person was in my own mind by saying it could it be me and in doing so i feel like i in my own way like further marginalized autistic people for several years thinking i was being so loving and supporting if i could do it over again i would have sat with it longer i would have paid more attention to the pattern and i would have treated each response with more dignity and less sympathy than i did in those moments i was like how can i how can i comfort this poor person with autism instead of doing what i say is my job and what i say i care about is holding each question with dignity and grace and offering a sincere response yeah i regret those thank you that's a good question [Music] i was talking with a friend recently about um mental health and uh one of the things that we were talking about is to kind of like shift the discussion um in her mind she was arguing that it should be um reframed as mental diversity rather than mental illness or mental health and i thought that was really fascinating because i never thought about it that way and but then talking with somebody who grew up with a parent who had mental illness found that troubling because um you know how do we decide when something needs to be fixed just because it doesn't fit into current models and so i guess it's just like should there be more of a shift in the national discussion you know to talking about it as mental diversity or um you know is it dangerous to start thinking about where we really draw the line between when something needs to be treated and when we should just stop trying to fit everybody into one site size fits all society i have like no distance from this question i've been on a really challenging mental health journey i'd like to say for two years but i i think if i say that i'm flattering myself as a young person i i wrestled constantly with suicidality i tried to die by suicide many times people who make repeat attempts to die by suicide are typically viewed through a lens of mental illness and that illness versus health question is tough when i talk to my friend hillary is a therapist and i say the word healthy whenever she repeats something back to me she'll usually instead say healthy unhealthy say adaptive maladaptive like is this is this helping you thrive or getting in the way of your thriving but she won't use healthy unhealthy very often i think that's an interesting that she never said anything to me i've just noticed that that's the framing she always uses you know i more recently i was having panic attacks and went to a that's when i got diagnosed with autism and then i i was still in trouble and i went to trauma therapy and got diagnosed with cptsd and i was like cptsd ptsd requires like trauma i've never gone to war and then my trauma therapist told me that's not how trauma works your brain doesn't decide whether things are traumatic or not based on the presence of a gun or an explosion but rather how afraid you were as a child i was afraid a lot very afraid and that left marks in my brain um i'm wildly empathetic just because i've hurt so much in my life i tend to be very passive except in matters of suffering where i become very passionate because i know what it's like to suffer and i don't want anyone to hurt as i have hurt i have a job like anybody else actually my job's pretty good i make podcasts for a living but sometimes i get such fear and anxiety over the words i say and how they would affect people that my heart beats so fast it put me in the hospital so am i like mentally ill or am i mentally healthy i think some of the things that would make you most concerned about my mental health are some of the things that make me the best at hearing people i read an anthropologist once who said that schizophrenics in central and south america only hear encouraging voices so they have the same disorder but they never get institutionalized because they basically hear someone saying i love you you're going to do great today but schizophrenic people in the united states and europe are haunted by accusing voices with the same underlying neurological condition somehow our social framing affects people when i look at global mental health if we're to use that term research tells us right now everyone on the world has never been more unhappy than they are now culturally every culture in the world isn't a decline of happiness other than central and south american cultures which have never been happier somehow the way that we frame our lives and frame our experiences words affect us more than we think and i think if you would ask me two years ago i would have said no mental illness is simply those things which clinically impair one's ability to function well in society and that's the diagnostic criteria and i stand by it but now i think maybe i think maybe that's what creates mental illness i went to a trauma therapist to be cured of ptsd what i learned instead is that my job is to learn how to live with it to support myself well in one particularly trying session i passed out on the couch i was so activated by a memory and my trauma therapist told me that when our brains store trauma a snapshot of who we are is kind of wired into the brain in that moment and so this memory i had was of myself as a seven-year-old child being force-fed dog feces on the playground it's been a long time and i still cry about it and i thought when he told me that i said well ron that's my therapist's name our job is to get the get the little boy out of my brain and ron said no our job is for you to learn to protect him because the reason i get so excited about science and curiosity is because that little boy is in there and the reason i get angry when i see the treatment of immigrants in this country is because it makes me see our government as bullies the reason i care so much about feminism is the patriarchy just looks like a bully to me if i were to rip out those painful memories of my past i'd be a different person and the work for me has been learning to have a a generous kind framing my own life and my own pain i wonder if with people encountering all sorts of diagnosable mental conditions in our society we're faced not with how they have the potential to not fit in but instead of a supportive community well actually i think there's a village in the netherlands that's doing just that instead of putting people in asylums they take people with severe debilitating mental conditions and they move in with retired couples and there's no elevated rates of crime or violence in this community there are certainly interesting dinners but somehow when the message is not you're dangerous and they need to be separated but you're different but you're part of us it reframes how all the varieties of brains that function function i think the most poignant example i can think of is every time we have another [ \_\_ ] mass shooting in this country and everyone starts saying mental illness mental illness mental illness if you look at the statistics around mental illness in this country then you understand that people suffering from mental illness are far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators it makes me think that you have shared with us a great wisdom that perhaps the time and the era for the term mental illness really has passed and belongs in the past [Music] so i was raised in the south southern baptist as well and still have family there still have a lot of roots there and i feel like i've been in la for 10 years i've sort of gone through my own am going through my own deconstruction from that um and i feel like this popular kind of thing people come back to when you're talking about was jesus real was like what he said real um is that i think c.s lewis said it was like he was either a liar a lunatic or lord which i know you've heard this um i don't i don't know what the question is i guess it's just like what's your thought on that because i feel like it's a pretty like it's like well that that's real you know like you can go through like what you feel or like your questions are like yeah i get it but like he said he was the son of god so was that real or was he just a crazy person or what and i feel like it's just kind of this nail or something that gets put out there and it's like yeah okay yeah i don't know hmm real easy one who was jesus very easy question [Laughter] um now that's interesting let's first start with the whole forced trichotomy thing like if i were to say to everyone in here you're either my best friend my worst enemy or a terrible person that's pretty manipulative because there's a lot of other options than those three and when i'm setting up that way there's really only one option anyone would be like well i don't want to be his worst enemy i'm not a and i'm not a terrible person i guess i'm his best friend so if you're like liar lunatic lord i feel like it's that same kind i feel like that's really dishonest manipulative language i will tell you that there was a time in my life that jesus was part of the trinity he was god's incarnate son he rose from the grave three days after being crucified he took a three-day post-death vacay to hell and stole the keys to death and just like you do after you die and your god and then i became an atheist which was typified by a meme of jesus knocking on a door and it says knock knock who's there jesus what do you want i want you to let me in so i can save you save me from what from what i'm going to do to you if you don't let me in like that was how i viewed christian theology as an atheist just like what a strange god loves you so much that he killed his son so he doesn't have to kill you that just sounds like abusive gaslighting so then i was like hard no on faith and then uh if some of you might know the story some of you won't uh-huh i was an atheist and i was praying on the beach once and saw god just lost everybody uh i saw us that's what happened though so what i experienced i saw a light moved toward me and then i felt mystical union with the divine and uh the only caveat there would be uh i was an atheist at the time so i thought like i was crying it was beautiful i told jenny she was very excited what i thought was like i have brain cancer like you see lights and feel divine union when there's a tumor pressing on your thalamus so i both like started having spiritual conversations with my friends again and asked about my brain health from a medical professional and uh yeah there's no no tumors or anything so [Applause] what did i do with that here's where i'm at you can view the world scientifically and discover things but no one can sustain a scientific worldview anyone who claims they do are full of [ \_\_ ] everybody has their superstition everybody has their myth everybody has their mystery mine is the jesus thing i remain obsessed with it i remain less controlling over it than i once was but i'm still really into jesus centered spirituality but you know if somebody wants to talk to me about buddha i'm in somebody like has some insights from the quran i love it like i'm not a my way or the highway i'm just like no this is you know some people like star wars some people like harry potter some people like jesus some people like muhammad some people like richard dawkins what i just want everyone to be is honest that nobody has a clue and what we're doing when we talk about spirituality to me what we're talking about is the human experience and in that way it's like beautiful and enlivening and wonderful if you i feel like if anyone knew what happened in the faith tradition they care about it would be disappointing it would be like someone who loves disney working at disneyland and watching mickey mouse take his head off like it's horrible and traumatizing no just let me enjoy the mouse and that might sound dishonest but like my friends are atheists who say they're like empiricists like if i wait long enough i'll catch them in a mythic superstition i've got a friend who's a a physicist at an institution i won't name who um always blows dice before he throws them i'm like you're telling me you think blowing the dice is going to materially affect the outcome he's like well of course not i mean why do you blow the dice i don't know because we're storytelling animals because we need story to navigate the world and so i'm at is like lean into a story that makes you excited about living for me for my life the idea that like god in some way infinite mystery suffered with us is really compelling i like it do i think if we checked forensically that there was this like three-day miracle thing i don't know probably not i'm still into it and i used to think i was weird because of that because i grew up in a really strict fundamentalist faith tradition but what i'm learning by studying sociology is that's the normal thing both in this country and around the world that we have on one hand religious fundamentalists and on the other hand hardcore materialists who are telling us leaning into mystery is bad and something we should be guilty over when in fact it might actually be the single most defining characteristic of our species the thing that makes us us and not dolphins or elephants or chimpanzees is the power of mythic storytelling myth by the way doesn't mean it's not true so in the most disappointing way possible i'm going to say liar lunatic lord i don't know and i don't care but personally i still love that historical figure and the stories around jesus anyway because it makes my life better if god suffered maybe it's not so bad that i do too i don't even know how much uh there is on this topic but as far as sexuality gender um a list of things that would potentially be on a spectrum that we're learning about being on the spectrum um i'm just curious as to your thoughts of as you're maybe digging into your own life and how you've seen that as you've learned more about yourself and as we're kind of collectively i think learning about all those things and analyzing those in ourselves like oh there isn't it's not you know it's not black or white it's all a lot of gray um so yeah i'm curious your thoughts about that that's a very broad question is there any way to drill down anything more specifically i mean i can do critical gender theory for a while queer theory are there are any recommendations on where to read more or dig into that more okay uh it would depend on where you're digging um sexuality sexuality uh yeah that's pretty easy as far as we can tell in the sciences sexual orientation is a socialized construct largely this is gonna this really rubs up against people's fundamental notions of self so it's a little dangerous to wade into sometimes but what humans are born with is not an orientation what humans are born with is a propensity to seek genital stimulation like all sexually reproducing animals what's fascinating is if you look in the entire animal kingdom including our nearest relatives primates apes specifically there's straighter gaze not a thing there's genital stimulation they're all into it um and their their animals are into way genitals get stimulated is a good day and then we put culture on top of it and like have all these prohibitions around general stimulation which is probably good in a lot of ways like there's a whole family of microbes that specialize in reproducing with general contact so we wouldn't want to be wildly indiscriminate about it so some of these in some ways our like cultures around sexuality at times have probably served us biologically but we do have varying propensity to seek genital stimulation in the context of different primary and secondary sex characteristics and presentations that are then reinforced or penalized in our environment and the interaction of those things creates basically a dice role for what you're attracted to a nature plus nurture that is not the same as saying orientation is a choice or has no basis in nature it absolutely does yeah so but the the idea that there are people some people are straight some people are gay that's just how it is in my opinion straight and gay are highly socialized limitations on the underlying biology in the same way that um binary gender doesn't have a biological basis that's a sociological construct on top of the biology gender's actually relatively ambiguous across populations here's the problem if you look at what we associate with men and women are male and female we think there's like there's this or that and what you actually have are two population bell curve distributions that overlap so there actually are a lot of people who in their life experience and their presentation most people fit comfortably in a binary thought of gender but not an overwhelming majority there's a significant group of the population that because of genetic physical neurological features or all three don't fit cleanly into either gender the easiest example of that of course is intersex people people have a mix of classically male and female sex organs but you also have people there are women who have a y chromosome and there are men who have two x chromosomes and what's interesting when you look at those population groups is they often uh are are queer in their orientation so even though they look relatively classically like their corresponding inverted genetic group their attraction layers are more complicated a different set of dna you have people with multiple x chromosomes you have occasionally people with two y chromosomes so that's quite dangerous um when we look at the brains of trans people we find that they have a mix of brain structures from what we would call men or women so for me as a person who loves science and is into biology what we have right now in the queer revolution is our cultural traditions starting to catch up with what's always been biologically true and i think that's important and necessary work because we also have data that tells us that for those people let's spitball this is not a scientific number but let's call it let's call it one in four people roughly who don't fit cleanly in binary orientation or binary gender it has been incredibly detrimental to their mental health to be forced in these categories the whole time and that cultures that don't have such binary notions don't have the same levels of social authorization nor suicidality nor violence against gender ambiguous and orientation mixed orientation people so i think the problem's not nature the problem is the scripts we use and i have a wildly deconstructed notion of gender and sexuality which is very strange for someone who comfortably identifies as a man and is married to a woman but i'm aware of like well no but that's just i just fit in a certain place in a population curve but i should be very careful not to normalize and universalize my experience across all people because the science doesn't support it thank you everybody [Applause] if you'd like to be a part of this discussion that i'm having about what ask science mike becomes in the future and how we make that i'm having that conversation with my patrons on patreon you can go to asksciencemike.com and click the become a patreon link and you'll get directed right to patreon as little as a dollar of them as a month uh as little as one dollar per month uh gets you into that community and uh you can help me decide what i'm doing next in a smaller and more intimate setting i'd like to thank greg nordin for his work editing this episode brent cradle uh for hosting uh this episode's recording session caitlyn hermstad for producing and organizing ask science mike and of course my patrons for making my work possible thank you for listening everyone and i can't wait to talk to you next week