ASM119 Questions, Questions, and Even More Questions (Part 1)

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questions questions and even more

questions

all that and more on this week's episode

of ask

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[Applause]

this is the last episode of ask science mike that will ever be recorded in my home in tallahassee florida we've sold the place for moving out there's boxes everywhere so this week i'm answering questions from my patrons every single one they asked actually with no awareness of what they are before the show starts so this is going to be kind of like a live show but different and let's get it started oh i have never felt so discombobulated and disorganized we're in the middle of a move and as soon as i get done recording this i'm going to pack up my microphone and my desk and put it all in boxes we're headed to la leaving tallahassee where i've lived since i was four years old so this is a really big deal for my family and uh if you've been listening to the show it's been really hard to get a proper uh schedule put together uh but i didn't want to do dead air so we've had a couple of of kind of fireside chat episodes and this show is going to be questions again so it's not just my thoughts on reader mail or feedback or whatever but with a little twist these questions all come from my patrons on patreon and i'm going to answer them all off the top of my head without looking at them first so i don't know what's coming in this show there may be adult themes so for those of you who listen with your kids be careful i don't know what's coming because of that i'm also not going to research the answers so take any figures or facts that i put out there with a grain of salt because they haven't been fact checked as is the normal protocol on ask science mike next week i'll probably do something different for the podcast i'm giving the sermon for both services at 9 30 and 11 15 at my church on july 16th my church is good samaritan united methodist in tallahassee so i'll probably put the sermon up as next week's show because i have some thoughts on this city and my church and what it means to be a person who follows jesus today so that's what i'll be talking about if you're in or around the tallahassee area i'd love to see you at either one of those services you can go to ask sciencemike.com you can go to events and that will give you all the information you need to get there i do want to mention again uh that i've got other things coming up we've got three liturgist gatherings in los angeles boston and seattle and i'm also doing a uk tour so again just go to ask sciencemike.com click the events tab and you can get information about all of that but i suspect this is going to be a long episode with so many questions so i'm going to go ahead and stop yapping about announcements and start answering questions that i've never seen okay first question comes from andrew and the question is are you going to find a church in la or just going to float around float being in quotations probably a reference to the fact that i love to float in century deprivation tanks as a form of meditation uh definitely going to find a church in la andrew that's a big part of my faith i'm a church guy uh in all likelihood i'll be at a methodist church the united methodist church means a lot to me the theology of the church is meaningful to me the practice of the church is even more meaningful uh so yeah that doesn't mean like i think other denominations are are less christian or whatever as you know i'm a mega mega universalist but a church is important to me and to my family so probably the first sunday i'm there i'll try a church and we'll see where we can get sean asks what advice would you give someone who is fully deconstructed but unable to transition out of super conservative ministry work for the immediate future first sean give yourself some grace you're in a tough spot that's a really hard place to be i get emails from people all the time who have gone through a faith transition and a theological change perhaps even transitioned out of faith altogether but get their paycheck in an environment where you can't talk about that so in the short term my advice would be to keep your mouth shut and keep making the paycheck you need to survive in the very short term but this is not like a sustainable thing this is not a career arc you can remain on so as you work through what you believe and it's i think it's relatively unlikely you'll end up where you were so it's time to figure out what else you would like to do to make a living and this is tough but you probably have some skills that can be used in a non-religious context right organizational skills media skills whatever the church has equipped you to do you can probably find a company that would appreciate those skills or you can transition to a faith community that is more palatable or more open to where you are and but i think if you've kind of gone through this this process where you you you've gone through this faith transition as a person on staff it'd probably be really healthy to not be on staff at church for a while if you go to church it'd be great to just be a member you probably have a lot of trauma you have a lot of emotional decompression to do and processing so my advice is protect the paycheck um and then once you transition your income to some other source and believe me i know that is far easier said than done then you can start talking to anyone you want about how you feel now in the in the meantime while you're still working at the church you you need to find a handful of people you can speak openly with uh you're going to feel less lonely you're going to feel less isolated and you're going to start a process of emotional recovery and frankly a therapist is not a terrible idea not a christian counselor but a therapist who is comfortable with you processing your emotions without leading you towards some specific theological destination and many christian counselors do that and and and i appreciate their work but my my point is if you go to the wrong person of faith as your counselor they're going to try to rush you back to some reconstruction of your theology that may ultimately not be helpful okay here's another sean spelled a different way who asks what are the largest theological differences between the southern baptist church and the united methodist church love a fellow united methodist wow uh i should be an expert in this having been a former baptist and a current methodist let me think for a second well baptism is a big one baptists believe in uh baptism is a sacrament a sacrament just like methodists but baptism must happen via immersion full immersion in water whereas method is sprinkle baptist baptism also is called believer's baptism someone has to make a conscious choice to become a christian to accept christ to be baptized whereas through provenient grace methodists will do infant baptisms so sprinkling infants versus dunking adults that's a big difference baptist are real scripture alone folks methodists use a quadrilateral of scripture tradition reason and experience to understand god so the quadrilateral is not a baptist idea let's see um oh methodist practice in open communion anyone can walk into a methodist church and take communion uh baptists have a closed communion they they say you need to be a believer in order to uh take communion or and baptist parliament's the lord's supper um methodists have a church hierarchy a central church structure with bishops who put pastors in congregations and baptist churches are all autonomous they join into a convention but none are under the convention's authority and baptist denominations select and hire and indeed fire their ministers uh baptists have the eternal security of the believer they believe that once you're saved you're always saved that yourself it you can't lose your salvation but methodists believe that someone can choose to be saved but they can also fall from grace they can stop following god and lose their salvation that's all i can remember off the top of my head i'm sure there's more but that's that's the best i can do without any prep qantas asks do you believe all of the things recorded in the gospels are mostly accurate or are there embellishments to further the lore of christ in relation contrast to the roman rulers i think this idea of an objective accurate recording of history is a modernist thing i think pre-enlightenment certainly history was indivisible from narrative and social identity and i so so that's that's not unique to the bible that's all ancient texts are that way so to understand scripture i understand that an author was speaking to an audience with an agenda always every single line of scripture specific author specific audience specific agenda origin does and that many of the um events are filtered through a social identity and an attempt to identify uh with the norms of the audience so some of the gospels seem to speak more to a jewish audience and include more alliteration and illusion no just illusion alliteration is the same same uh word over and over the beginning of words and a phrase avoid alliteration always sorry i have illusions and references to the old testament much more whereas other gospels seem to be written more towards a greco-roman or gentile audience and they include allusions to faith norms and cultural norms of those groups so i think it's kind of a strange question to ask it's a modernist question to say are the things in the gospels mostly accurate because that is a modernist slant on history and that's not what the gospels were intended to be they are meant to describe the divinity of jesus and they also weren't written by the disciples of jesus they were written by folks later on according to most historians great question ryan moore asks i hear pete holmes talk a lot about taking mushrooms dmt etc what are your thoughts and the science on the potential benefit or harm in taking psychedelics related i'd ask the same question about marijuana use boy i get these questions a lot and i um i'm never sure how to answer them one because most of these substances are schedule 1 in our current legal framework so regardless of what any studies might say about their benefits or detriments you can go get in serious legal trouble for using or possessing these substances i grew up in the dare generation so i thought that uh these drugs were all extremely bad with no benefit whatsoever but as i read more clinical literature uh there's some really interesting things psilocybin which is the main active component in mushrooms appears to have some pretty profound effects on the brain many of which are beneficial creates a state of high connection between all the parts of the brain and this can cause emotional processing people can find a therapeutic effect on anxiety and depression from psilocybin they can have an increased sensitivity and increase sense of personal happiness for like 14 months following a single dose of psilocybin and it's not um physiologically addicting like uh some other substances are so it's interesting that psilocybin and indeed lsd which uh has also in clinical studies been shown to have some benefits for the brain uh it's interesting to see these things grouped in with you know uh cocaine or heroin in the same substance control categories when it seems like there are legitimate medical uses for psychedelics you know now if you take them too often they can be bad for you but as as an occasional thing they they appear to not be dangerous so long as dosage is controlled many people the problems they have with these substances is they take too much or take it too often which is why i think this is something that should involve not only research but medical consultation um so i do question our legal framework about those substances dmt often called the spirit molecule there's much less clinical data about dmt so i would i would be incredibly reticent to weigh in on its benefits or harms as it has not been widely studied uh marijuana uh we i think we all know at this point that the science is pretty clear as a pain medicine this is a superior alternative to opioids and that it has great medicinal effects any of these things in fact anything smoked is unhealthy wood smoke from a fire is is bad for you as carcinogenic according to experts i've talked to with research that they cite so smoking marijuana is is not good for you vaping these substances is questionable ingesting them is probably the safest way to go about it but again they're all illegal at the federal level in the united states so you are violating federal law if you consume these substances i would like to see those laws changed i completely support the legalization of medical marijuana i think prohibition is a bad strategy in general so i certainly want to see recreational drugs of all kinds decriminalized but i'd actually like to see recreational marijuana legalized if we're going to have cigarettes and alcohol legal because those substances are more dangerous in my estimation and psychedelics the ones we've studied i'd like to see them decriminalized as well and at least gives scientists and the medical community the opportunity to study more deeply the impacts that these substances have on the brain and the body okay so today probably premature to recreationally consume this stuff but i certainly would support changing the laws to allow research okay so it looks like we are going to mature themes on this one folks josh asks what do you believe the long-term effects of same-sex relationships will be on generations to come i'm accepting and affirming of people that identify as homosexual and that are in same-sex relationships but a recent conversation with a friend has me thinking about the generational impact and what if any responsibility our generation should take for that gosh i don't know um i think people who prognosticate about the future on social issues uh are almost universally wrong uh i hope the generalisation impact is a lot less shame suicide and depression among people of differing gender identities and sexual orientations and a larger more broad cultural acceptance of those folks interracial marriage was once extremely taboo not that long ago and helter skelter the world didn't and as society learned to accept those relationships let's focus on loving each other and health and i think that's far better i think i think heterosexual infidelity faces a much greater threat to family structures and and to marriage than same-sex marriage certainly of course you listen to show you know i already think that great question josh matthew asks could you do another book episode after you move perhaps as you're unpacking i really enjoyed that one yeah we'll do another book episode next time with fewer books discussed more deeply james asks as a person of faith who loves neuroscience what does it mean to you when people use phrases like god's will or god's thoughts or god knows etc does god not not have consciousness or in other words how can we approach having conversations about god's will in a way that is helpful meaningful and authentic uh james i hold my understanding of god's will or consciousness or agency extraordinarily loosely in terms of you know how i epistemologically understand god i'm more like a pantheist or a pantone theist and yet i deal with this this situation where i experience god in a very personal and intimate way and i don't try to resolve that dichotomy i simply because of that i respect people who are uh skeptical of god's awareness or intervention in reality or even god's existence as a being or even a ground of being but i do allow myself to participate in spiritual experiences that involve a personal god and to discuss that with others who also have those experiences so how do i do that how how do i talk about god's will i meet people where they are when they talk about god and respect their right to relate to god in that way as i expect people to do so with myself i'm very reticent to try to correct people on their personal experiences or understandings of god i save any you know discussions like that for when harm is happening to people on earth today or potential people in the future but if someone's if i think when we talk when we talk about god everything we say is metaphor so i'm not going to take someone else's metaphors away from them and i'm comfortable speaking in the context of someone else's metaphor if that makes them more comfortable because i just i just hold loosely all my ideas about god judson asks does it take less more or the same amount of energy to climb stairs two at a time compared to one well the pace you use to climb stairs matters the faster you climb them the more energy you use in einstein's relativity the faster you move towards something uh the further away it is because it takes more energy to get there right so if i if i walk slowly to my neighbor's house versus i sprint then i have to use a lot more energy because i'm crossing a greater distance it's really strange so i would imagine taking stairs two at a time is going to increase your rate of ascension and therefore going to increase your energy output plus i'm gonna think uh your biomechanical efficiency goes down because you're going past a stride length that is efficient so i'd love to hear a physicist or a gosh who would know exercise scientists weigh in here but i'm going to say two at a time is takes more energy could be wrong uh eric asks why peace love entropy what does each one of those mean to you kurt cobain signed his letters peace love empathy and i just thought that was really cool um and so entropy is kind of a word play on empathy to make my email signature sciency i do peace and love are important to me a god is love shalom is peace so that's those those both represent my faith entropy is um what physics says the universe is moving towards that's the kind of the immutable law of physics the one thing that uh causes a temporal movement to any physical equation is that entropy must always increase in a closed system so that's a physical reality so my email signature and my whatever sign letters how i sign books is how we reconcile shalom peace with a universe moving towards entropy and love is that fulcrum great question eric okay josiah asks how do i still believe in jesus when he's recorded as saying things that don't reflect reality i.e healing asking and receiving telling his disciples he'd return before their generation passed away etc you talk to friends josiah and you realize that human testimony is generally unreliable all human testimony is generally unreliable even when people try to tell the truth with no attempt to deceive or meticulously attempt to relay only facts our track record in doing so is terrible and the gospels were written by people jesus didn't write the disciples there was no stenographer there was no voice record recorder these are people generally telling stories they heard from someone else who was there or maybe someone who heard from someone and heard from someone who was there it's a big game of telephone that doesn't mean jesus wasn't a historical figure this is true of every figure in ancient history so you know it's it's not a big leap to believe there was a real person in first century palestine named jesus whose life and teachings led to christianity now the idea that that person was the incarnate son of god who rose from the dead now that is a much tougher thing to believe based on historical evidence and at that point it becomes like does this story matter to you does this resurrection matter to you does the idea that god is love and that god dwells within humanity is that important to you if so how you believe that is you immerse yourself in a social context where people believe it and over time your brain will do the rest for you that's just the social science of the thing uh jordan asks what do we know about the origin of life i understand how life as we know it could evolve from a single cell but i get stuck on how we get from basic matter to reproducing cells thanks you're asking about something called a biogenesis like where does life come from we don't know exactly we do see in our own solar system that several moons have complex organic molecules naturally occurring and mars does on occasion as well so we understand that the soup required to get very close to life happens it's happened multiple times in our solar system how specifically you have that tipping point nobody knows exactly jeremy england has a fascinating theory that's based on mathematics that many people are interested in but that's an unsolved question in the sciences that doesn't by default mean that religion is correct on its claims one there's a lot of competing claims among faith on where life came from and we have no way to you know choose between them uh it simply means it's a thing we don't know yet in science and that's the strength not the weakness of science to be clear about what we don't yet know paul asks first if you haven't read the book series the three body problem i cannot recommend it enough i'll check it out thanks second in the last century or so it seems our futures are built upon the science fiction of the past so it seems reasonable if not probable that we are now either building the projection of reality ar vr nanotechnology genome mapping molecular computing etc or we're already in it with that in mind why would we construct reality with faith belief hope free will pain suffering murder hate etc at all is it a need of human existence like agent smith talks about in the matrix okay that's a pretty deep philosophical question um our universe is moving towards entropy our evolutionary heritage is that resources are scarce suffering comes from by biological systems that are telling us the way things are right now aren't great try something else but in some way the struggle to survive makes us grow literally uh if you never suffer if you if you live a completely pain-free existence well it's not possible right because i hate physical exercise hate it hate it i hate the feeling of my muscles burning and uh but when you don't exercise at all your your muscles atrophy and you get weaker and then you start to have chronic pain right so the question is like what kind of pain do you want to have do you want to go through necessary suffering to grow and be stronger or do you avoid suffering at all costs and then suffer anyway i also don't know like how much how how much age our agency influences the formation of society because it's an emergent phenomenon with so many contributing factors that i'm not sure we can actually completely create a world with our intention even a a memetic world in our minds so i tend to be much more simple in my thinking contribute the best that i can and then let let the chips fall where they do andrew asks how can my wife and i as white people combat implicit racial bias in ourselves when we live in a very homogenous city in oregon with very few non-white people around us i should also mention that we are pretty big introverts okay start by changing your media habits see if you can start watching television shows and movies which a majority of the characters on screen aren't white i particularly enjoyed the netflix show sense8 because of the remarkably diverse casting and incredible acting and dynamic story and great directing and cinematography etc curate your media habits expose your brain to new things train it [Music] that'll help with implicit racial bias and then how can you combat it among other people have the conversations about why it matters to diversify media habits and hopefully that will lead to conversations over time about how to dismantle white supremacy in your community that that's how progress happens but with your dollars support media that supports people of color april williams asks my mother was recently diagnosed with early onset dementia i've noticed along with struggling to remember certain words at times that she has a very hard time picking up on verbal cues for example she seems to take what people say very literally instead of understanding when people are teasing her or joking around she has always been a fun loving person who likes to laugh a lot so observing this change and her hits hard what's going on the brain during the onset of dementia or alzheimer's are there stages like grief that a person passes through any recommendations for further study on how to support a person going through this thanks mike oh boy um i haven't deeply studied dementia or alzheimer's at all first and i'm sorry that you're going through this uh i have experienced that with loved ones myself and it is very very challenging and i wish i would have seen your question on a normal episode of a science mic where i could research it in fact that's what i'll do i'll come back to this one on a normal show i don't want to freelance this and mess it up it looks like someone or a couple people replied to your thread on patreon so check that out and they may have resources there and otherwise listen back i'll cover this question on a later show billy walters asks what is the theoretical maximum limit on the amount of wood a woodchuck could chuck with a pre-existing assumption that woodchuck is capable of chucking said wood i guess that would depend on the mass of the woodchuck and its muscular efficiency in the act of chucking and i i don't know that those are variables i don't have so i can't perform the calculations john asks how common severe of a problem is household mold the info out there strikes me as alarmist but i have a hard time knowing how worried to be about this potential problem in the walls or basement john i have no idea i haven't studied household mold amy asks why is it considered a kindness if a person corrects someone else's math error but when a person corrects someone's grammar error it is considered to be an [ \_\_ ] move using the wrong word spelling or pronunciation is just as wrong as saying that two plus two equals five so why does it carry a different stigma i don't think there's any personal expression in the axiomatic discipline of mathematics i think there's a lot of personal expression in grammar grammar evolves and changes over time as language does at a fundamental level mathematics is uh axiomatically fixed that's probably where that comes from i don't know though for sure aaron asks do you think gravity waves will all have any impact on theology or the way we view god also if you read so much how can you don't put the books on goodreads uh one yeah i think gravity waves could have an impact as they have the potential to let us directly sample information uh going back to the the moment of the big bang they're going to further deepen and solidify our understanding of cosmology which certainly has theological implications any theology that runs counter to the scientific story of creation is going to face an increasing uphill battle i don't put the books on goodreads because i forget that's it i like joined goodreads and i tried to upload as many books as i could and then i i just forget to put them on goodreads robert asks have you watched the netflix show stranger things and what plot development would you like to see season 2 take i did watch stranger things i liked it it was it was fine i kind of ruined it because i i read the seven basic plots and figured out which plot it was and then knew where it was going uh i don't have any preferences on season two whatever the filmmakers want to do sounds fun to me colter davidson asks what do you say to a person who refutes evolution by making the irreducible complexity argument where they say that certain anatomical or cellular features could not function with any lesser degree of complexity things like the eye the flagellum blood clotting area orphan cited is irreducibly complex yeah that's just not true uh let's look at the eye look at a planaria they have eye spots right they work just fine their eyes without lenses if we look across the animal kingdom there's different structures of eye eyes that came from different evolutionary paths we see eyes in different states of evolutionary development across the animal kingdom the evidence we see not even looking at the fossil record at life today supports i evolution uh it's a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution benign things aren't filtered out by natural selection so if you have eye spots and they start to sink a little further into your tissue uh but you they still function you don't get weeded out if that happens long enough guess what now you've got a little lens and now you have the potential for a more complex eye so um yeah there's all kind of stuff out there refuting the irreducible complexity argument against evolution of the arguments against evolution i find that one to be particularly not compelling mike krogan says i identify as a naturalist and a pantheist rather than a supernaturalist and a pan enthist because it seems to me that to posit a supernatural reality including a supernatural god you need to make two claims one that you can identify the limits or boundaries of the natural universe and two that you can identify something real that clearly originates from beyond those limits these seem like rather extraordinary claims to me nonetheless i'm agnostic regarding their potential truth those scientists like sean carroll make a compelling case for the unlikelihood of supernatural forces i'd be interested in any critique you might have of this line of thinking thanks mike i don't have any critique that's basically where i'm at i'm open to supernatural accounts and panentheist thinking because of personal experiences but i don't make those as fact claims by the way naturalists that's someone who believes in natural order of the universe a pantheist is someone who believes that the universe itself is god supernaturalist someone who believes that the supernatural is a thing and a panothest who believes that god is the universe and something beyond the universe at the same time for those who might be confused by those terms uh yeah i don't have any critique there i think just don't be a jerk about it we're good uh stephen and samantha asks i'm curious as to why we're attracted to things that frighten us for example as a kid i was obsessed with those paranormal tv shows both fictional and non-fictional even though i wouldn't be able to sleep and had nightmares because of them i think most people do this to a certain extent that's why horror movies exist i'm just curious what drives us to be infatuated with something that gives us an emotion that no one enjoys having well you do enjoy it to some degree that's why you do it it's called neurological arousal that happens during fear if you are afraid and you survive that's gratifying so you you face these frightening things and you don't die and your brain says good job so you do it again that's it it creates a reward loop and uh i'm a little envious um i don't get scared of scary movies so i i'm not especially drawn to them [Laughter] there's no reward loop for me uh jim asks what are your thoughts on unitarian universalism both in theory as a positive way for people to come together over shared beliefs about right living in the world regardless of any theological beliefs or lack thereof under girding those beliefs and in practice if you happen to have any experiences attending a uu church or talking with uu friends and acquaintances i have lots of unitary universalist friends i tried unitarian universally universal churches during my faith transition was not a fit for me personally that might have come down to some degree to the demographics of those in attendance folks were generally much older than i was in unitarian universalism yeah i mean i'm i like it if it works for people you know me on issues of faith is it working for you is it making you full of love is it helping you help your fellow man then i am all for it mitchell asks i would love some conversation on dialectic philosophy some commentary on the peter rawlin what and way of belief and the ever so popular utilitarianism [Laughter] these are uh philosophical positions um it's interesting to say able to have conversation on dialectic philosophy since that's the basis of dialectic philosophy it's interesting it's fun it's a great way to figure out what to study via empiricism in the scientific method uh as you know i'm i question philosophy's ability to discover truth with a high confidence of belief when compared to the sciences um so i tend to be a philosophical utilitarian not that i don't enjoy philosophical discussions of all kind i just don't think what happens at the end of it is a truth claim it's uh something that warrants further investigation via the sciences hence science mike daniel says i recently read a universe from nothing by lawrence m kraus in it he describes the concept of vacuum energy and how particles just pop into existence because they have a negative potential energy i had a really hard time following the book and understanding the concepts since you do such a good job of breaking down complex subjects for less mathematically inclined individuals like myself could you please explain the concept of vacuum energy and the ideas behind our universe possibly being instanced instantiated from nothing thanks so much for your work um i will say i would highly encourage you now that you've read a universe from nothing to wait a week or two and then read it again and you're gonna find that you understand it much better i did not understand a lot of that book the first time i read it so i waited a while and i read it again some of those chapters i read three or four times in a row that's some heady stuff in there i haven't i haven't prepped so i'm trying to figure out how to do this question justice without a 40-minute answer okay vacuum energy comes from field theory the idea that we have all these fields in physics the idea here is that every particle is a manifestation of a field a field that fluctuates above a certain threshold creates a particle and some of these interactions can be complex so when you get a field interaction that allows an electron to exist that interacts with a second field called the higgs field that allows that particle to have mass so in a vacuum you still have the fields the fields are everywhere and they're fluctuating and occasionally they fluctuate enough to create a particle and based on the way the mathematics of the thing works i don't have a non-mathematical explanation that particle essentially can't be created for free uh so a corresponding appears as well and they annihilate and as long as that happens briefly no laws of physics are broken i don't know that was a particularly much more helpful explanation though okay uh jason swanson says could you explain how you use conversation trees and loops i'd love to know what practical systems you use in order to clarify your own thinking and communication i sometimes can't tell if you're making a clever joke about how your thinking resembles a computer programming or if you actually have a massive database of possible conversations stored in the cloud if this is an actual practice and you use and not just a metaphor any books recommendations or links would be very appreciated and lots of favorites on that one it's not a joke it's not a metaphor i literally draw out trees of directions conversations could take things people could bring up and responses i could make this comes from a discipline i've had my entire life that i haven't read anywhere this is just a thing i do where i spend a lot of time imagining conversations so as a nerdy kid social graces didn't come easy to me so and i'm not especially quick-witted so i just prepare a lot of material ahead of time to try to imagine any way a conversation could go i've done that my whole life so i'm pretty good at it and if it's an especially important conversation like a liturgist podcast i do something called a conversation tree i use some software called mind node and i start the beginning of the conversation and it has these branches with different ways the conversation could go and different things i could say about it because the problem for me as i've read so much i sometimes have difficulty remembering a particular thing that's relevant to a topic so i go ahead of time and think of everything i know relevant to the topic through mind mapping and my mind map just happens to include conversational cues and in my experience a very high percentage of the time 80 or more of the conversation is in my conversation tree and i kind of often know where people are going next i don't have a book or a resource to send you this is a discipline i've developed kind of on my own i've sent them to michael gunger a couple times before we recorded an episode and they were so confusing to him that it kind of paralyzed him for his part of the conversation because he couldn't tell where i was going next because the trees are based on branching probabilities so yeah that's really not helpful that's just that's just the truth i i don't know how to teach you how to do it it's something i've kind of kind of worked on my whole life allison asks as you learn more about the world and the impact of our everyday choices how do you keep anxiety at bay it seems like no choice is ever the right choice in light of increasing knowledge of our actions food is a great example i could eat less meat but then i am eating grains from a monoculture farm that is destroying our soil fertility i could pay more for farmers market food but then am i wasting my very limited monetary resources which could also contribute to charitable causes it seems every decision comes at a cost to our planet our health or our fellow humans and at times it makes me want to stop learning because this all seems so impossibly overwhelming making good choices that is how does someone live their life without succumbing to the anxiety of the knowledge that you're contributing to many of the ills and problems of the world simply by existing and many people hit the favorite button on that question allison so you are not alone i totally get where you're coming from when i started to learn more about racism and white supremacy kind of coming from a colorblind perspective i felt really disempowered for a while i had trouble watching any media because there's so many white lead actors and actresses and supporting roles and then every time i saw a person of color especially a black person they were either a villain or a guide who simply existed to further the the spiritual journey of the white protagonist drove me nuts so i couldn't enjoy media so what are you going to do about that as you said you know what we eat oh man what a choice so the first thing you realize is there's no such thing as a perfect choice absolutely every action you take has pros and cons and you're not smart enough to pick the absolute best choice every time maybe even not most of the time so what can you do your best that's it you can only do your best so don't worry so much about it if at all do your best so there's this beautiful thing you care you're already ahead of so many people you care about your impact on the world take a moment alison pat yourself on the back look at yourself in the mirror and say it's good that i care i'm proud of myself for caring affirm yourself in the action of caring and then realize it's a joy to learn because it helps you make a better choice than you would have made otherwise and that's the best you can do eating less meat is great because if you eat meat what do you think they're feeding the cows a monoculture so by you eating plants you're contributing less to agricultural monoculture than you are when you eat meat simply because less crop land is required you could grow some of your own food if possible you can shop from local farmers and that does cost more money but there's other places you can trim your budget food's important i think i think how you spend on food that's a that's a that's a fine place to splurge especially if you're doing so in ways that help your local economy and support a healthier earth trim somewhere else you know buy less stuff buying stuff from amazon is you know getting it shipped all over all these things are pretty bad for the planet so buy less things and then contribute to charitable causes or donate your time and your energy to charitable causes there are lots of worthwhile organizations in your community that have trouble finding enough hands to get the work done and they would probably appreciate your hands even more than they would appreciate your donation do what you can leave the world better than you found it that's all you can do stop worrying stop worrying enjoy learning and when you feel discouraged when a new insight paralyzes you instead of frees you up simply stop and say i'm learning i'm growing there's a lot to process go for a walk go outside get together with some friends and drink too much red wine do something that makes you appreciate the gift of life that we have on earth like why would we want to protect the planet if it's not worth being on in the first place hey everybody this is greg producer of ask science mike because of the unique format of this week's episode it's running a lot longer than normal almost twice as long so what we decided to do is to break it up into two episodes so you can have more science mike next week as well we'd like to thank you for downloading and listening and we look forward to seeing you next week for more ask science mike [Music]