ASM158 LIVE from Paris, Ontario, Canada

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coming to you live from the skylight festival in paris ontario it's ask sciencemike though we may not understand i'll talk anyway we got problems he won't solve them but he'll talk and talk and talk until he's blue in the face science faith in life welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life and as you heard at the top this is a live episode so the questions are completely unscreened and the answer's on rehearse so please be liberal and fact check me on google well that's enough announcements what do you say let's get it [Music] started [Music] hi mike hi it is so fantastic to have you here in ontario i thought you'd come it is so fun to be here and to see you you have a written question i do we're starting off seriously [Laughter] so my question is about the science of meeting new people and introducing yourself to strangers at a festival like this it's so exciting to be around a group of like-minded people who are all interested to some degree or another in faith art and social justice and part of the point of this gathering is for us to meet each other and learn from each other's experiences but that meeting part can be hard in some ways it's easier for me to sit here in front of literally everybody and ask a question than it is for me to introduce myself to one stranger because there's sort of a defined script for what i'm doing right now there's clear expectations what's what's the deal with that what's the brain science of what's going on in my head when i'm anxiously trying to convince myself to to say hi to someone what what holds me back what pushes me over the edge oh man thank you it is not often i get a never before question on a live science mic first one out of the gate so let me let me i'll do a little sharing first i totally understand what you're saying uh my housemates from over there as if they're if any of them are here i see drew as so they're probably like who's that guy on stage that's not who we just had dinner with who stared awkwardly into his food um who is this person that's very engaged and exciting that's not who we met so i i absolutely understand what you're talking about uh there's a couple of things at play one if you ever heard the terms introvert and extrovert i know groundbreaking stuff oh okay no but then what's fascinating about the introversion extroversion spectrum right you're not an introvert or an extrovert you exist somewhere on a spectrum is it's not just like soft psychology nor is it woo if you haven't heard the term woo that's things people believe that are not scientific in nature like literally anything gwyneth paltrow sells so it's called goop for a reason anyway so introversion extraversion has to do primarily with the brain's sensitivity to stimulus that's it so if your brain is not very sensitive to stimulus you're an extrovert because you literally need other people around to keep the environment dynamic enough and exciting enough for you to stay awake what happens when really really extroverted people are by themselves they get bored they fall asleep they feel depressed why because it's like the world's not happening introverted people on the other hand their brains are super sensitive to stimuli and that means lots of people just make their brains light up like a christmas tree in a bad way so if you at you can use an fmri which is a device that measures brains living brains being active by the distribution of oxygen you can tell who's an introvert and who's an extrovert with a brain scan without asking them any questions i've been an extrovert my whole life until i fell off a motorcycle and scrambled my neurological eggs and suddenly the world was a little harder to deal with and for the first time i had like real empathy for introverts as opposed to like social performative sympathy for introverts because i would go to parties and i'd have like a panic attack what's happening oh my gosh so much i was like oh so there's that at play where you are introversion or extroversion so if you're an extroversion you've associated new people with what an escape from an unpleasant situation if you're an introvert you associate new people with what stress and anxiety now we are all and i mean everyone here are primates 100 of homo sapiens are also primates sometimes people even very progressive christian people get upset when you mention that humans are primates uh i don't know why i do know why i grew up southern baptist i just don't agree with why i guess but we're all primates we're not only primates we are the most social primates that exist our natural group or troop size based on our brain volume is 150 individuals which is much smaller than a city but much larger than you would find a congregation of gorillas for example so we're very very social but we've scaled our world believe it or not beyond that 150. so we have this craving for social interaction but we've built a culture in a society that throws more in our brain than we're equipped to handle so we're balancing these two forces our need to to be known and to have contact with people and to not be neurologically overwhelmed now there is another layer as well and that's that civilization has been pretty great in terms of helping us produce food that's nice i like agriculture it's a good good innovation i think it's helped us get more consistent water supplies and those kind of things but civilization has also brought economics and a lot of scale with that and then incredible amounts of institutionalized oppression and so what i've learned in more recent years that another layer of our interpersonal social dynamics are institutional forces of oppression so at my intersection of identity and a bunch of jordan peterson fans just rolled their eyes but at my intersection of identity that was a real inside joke i apologize for that one um i am straight and i am white and i am male and that means in most cultures a lot of free passes and i've even got one above that i am a southern american straight white male so people are either like kind of afraid of me or pity me enough to be nicer so i'm either like the oppressor or like kind of one of the dumber oppressors that you kind of pity because i talk slower and i've got to draw right but what i've learned is you can be a person of color you can be a woman you can be a more obviously disabled person than i am and then that brings another set of risks involved into every social interaction so like you have some point of um disadvantage and like you have this nervousness interpersonally but then you also disadvantage you were just able to speak in front of a group and that's like the number one fear in western society is speaking to groups people are more afraid of speaking to groups uh than they are of heights or sharks or like reasonable fears don't get me wrong i love the phobia of public speaking it means i make a living someone has to stand on stage as long as everyone else is afraid of it i don't have to be that good of good at it i just have to be willing but you did point to something interesting sometimes it's easier to talk to a group of people than to one and that's the reason for that is if you're not afraid of public speaking i don't have to read a person's social cue right now i get to average out everyone's in the room and if you're uh autistic for example that turns out to be much much easier to figure out the approximate dynamics of a room like there's even we've got kind of some cultural pockets happen some of you are real with me some of you like well i mean i guess this is better than sleeping and it's just like all in the room at the same time but that's still easier than if it was three people and one person was just like i'm not interested in this that's much more like personally affronting than like you know who is this guy uh so all those things kind of get into this big soup and and create our interpersonal interaction so some tips on like how if you want um to make it easier to engage with other people socially the best thing i have learned to recognize is the other person is as stressed and as anxious and as worried about being judged as i am and flipping that script and creating some empathy often lets us skip the small talk and create a foundation for genuine human connection [Music] hey mike so glad you're here in canada we love you here come back i love it um so i've been seeing a lot online recently about pigs and dogs i don't know if anyone else has seen this new i don't know trend we'll call it um you know something might say you know why why do we love one and eat the other um anyways so just wanted to see your take on that okay man this is a real creative crowd uh not one but two questions that i'm not like haven't asked on one i've furiously got to search the database for a record groove to drop into right now i love pigs i really do [Laughter] huge fan they are sensitive they are intelligent they are are caring uh they're strong-willed they're independent and they're bacon and just like all of those things and i know that like i'm that's not a unique quandary because when my youngest daughter macy was a toddler bacon was her favorite food and pigs were her favorite animal and one day she asked me dad where do we get bacon from is it like beans oh we get it from pigs pigs make bacon i mean we make bacon out of pigs and just says so she swore off bacon immediately i know it's so sweet and so weeks later my wife was making bacon on saturday morning and she that's not the first time but i just saw her looking at the plate and her nostrils flaring and she picked up a piece of bacon and tears tears in her eyes she said pigs you're my favorite animal and you're so intelligent and sensitive but you're delicious and she ate the bacon that my friends is the omnivore's dilemma uh the fact that we can relate to animals as fellow conscious beings and eat them spoiler alert the felonids the the cat family of animals they have no moral compulsion about what they do they're not like you know what i hang out with gazelles all day every day they seem like they seem like nice beings you know what i mean they don't like i just really want to bite their necks i don't know why i saw a video clip on the internet which is the high point of human civilization by the way is video clips on the internet um of a family of lions who chased down a baby antelope but then didn't kill it and like cuddled with it and like there's a picture even of like a mother lioness like cleaning this little antelope and i was like are they gonna adopt it are they gonna let it go is this moment of compassion they get hours and then finally they just killed it they kept so my point is no this is important this really is like it's a joke and it's tragic it is going somewhere we are animals and our evolutionary branch does include predators so some of us because we have a capacity to reason and to have empathy start mapping that empathy onto all sentient life and say i'm going to be vegetarian or a vegan it's the only way i can sleep at night it's the only moral way to be they tell all their friends about it and that was a joke i apologize but no really like there's like there's a lot of solid moral reasoning there uh the trick is we're not fundamentally a reasoning animal that's like some recent beta software evolution installed last couple hundred thousand years blink of an eye in the history of life our primary functions come from instinct and from emotions so people are like i just don't i don't i'm in control of my feelings yeah you're in control of your feelings you've got confused about who's the horse and who's the buddy right so it's purely social reasons we don't eat dogs in the west other cultures on the planet do eat dogs we eat cows like crazy like we're literally destroying the planet using cows i'm not kidding one day this globe may be devoid of human civilization and one of the primary drivers will be what cows there are billions of cows on the earth today cows and biomass are in contention for the most biomass of any living macro animal cows but you know what in large parts of india they don't eat cows it completely comes down to cultural conditioning where we do and don't extend empathy i don't know if you know this i come from a place called the united states has slightly elevated race dynamics compared to canada by slightly i mean terrifying and worse right worse the last couple years it's cultural reasons why we decide will extend empathy to some humans and to not others in the united states right now it's not only that white people only want to extend empathy to white people white people only want to extend empathy to white people who share their political affiliation and now we're like really dicing it up it's like well i'm a i'm a liberal yeah i'm an anarchist socialist we can't have coffee go to hell like we're just figuring out like less and less and less and less and less empathy so i think the animus of the question why do we like dogs and eat pigs is maybe the most important question we can be asking right now because we're asking how do we apply empathy to other living beings and the societal era right now is globally moving in the wrong direction and if there's anything that fascinates me or interests me about identifying as a christian because let's be honest i don't have a lot of theology very limited supernatural beliefs like to the point is supernatural thing probably not uh and yet i call myself a christian why because it is animated by this figure whose life was devoted to the expansion of empathy towards those who generally did not receive it by the powerful and that is a story i'm deeply interested in [Applause] [Music] so you mentioned your recent diagnosis with autism and i have been following you through this um and i also follow you through your uh talk around uh being a nine on the enneagram and i'm wondering how if you have noticed any additional reconciliation or kind of moments of clarity in kind of who who you are finding yourself to be through this diagnosis and who you have known yourself to be through your nineness that's a great question super personal uh not a bad thing no hold on that's not about i answer personal things on stage for a living i'm uncommonly even uncomfortably open with my innermost thoughts and experiences in front of large groups um little insider information if you haven't heard of the enneagram it is a system for describing personality as one of nine different types she mentioned that i've told people i am in nine a nine on the enneagram is a peace making personality who is primarily characterized by a total aversion to conflict and to displays of anger especially one's own displays of anger there's a twitter account that is the best way to understand the enneagram is called india dogs where they describe the enneagram using only gifts of dogs and the caption was when you are a nine who is not mad capital not capital mad at someone and they ask you to do something and it showed a bulldog just lying prostrate on the ground and a woman trying to pull it with the leash and it was just like like passive stubborn aggression stubborn passive aggression is like the nine characteristics so uh i never liked the enneagram because i would take the test it would say i was all of them but the eight um but maybe like most prominently the two and the nine and then an enneagram specialist told me well that's how nine score they score is everything i'm like well isn't that convenient is that documented in a peer-reviewed study or is it just woo and then i read more about the nine and i was like nah this is kind of reading my mail it's kind of freaky but you know what so do horoscopes sometimes if you use a certain combination of like vague and prosaic you can really like let the narrative nature of human consciousness fill in the blanks in a way the author did not necessarily intend so anyway i just kind of made peace with the fact i'm benign mainly on the fact that like if anyone gets angry i'm like this is bad and if it i get angry the self-loathing just the instant like this is not okay so my nineness comes down primarily to being like a nerdy southern male just a real contradiction like a southerner who never liked football so i became very uncomfortable with displays of like overt emotion and feeling i never really knew why until i figured out oh i'm autistic i don't understand feelings doesn't mean i don't have feelings i actually have very powerful feelings but uh like this happened the other day i'm about to vomit i'm hungry i'm going to faint and i'm nervous are all the same physical sensation to me i don't know which one of the four it is or maybe if my therapist will explain to me no that's actually a fifth thing you didn't know about my feelings are these mysterious movements in my bodies i have to learn to identify and when other people especially non-autistic people express emotions unless i've taken the time ahead of time to read a book about that feeling and the corresponding physiological signs that doesn't mean anything to me so because i was a very small child people's feelings just confused me so i responded by what having fits which is super appropriate in the south with baptist parents so that usually meant a whipping and crying just i would cry because crying i learned very quickly has a different response than screaming and striking yourself so the the weird thing is like the nine was like oh this is kind of interesting when someone mentioned that they thought i might it was hillary mcbride by the way from the lyrics podcast was like mike i don't know how to say this they were doing a body movement thing at dinner there was some tequila involved and uh they all looked at me to do the body movement thing and i don't really have any control over from here to here except it's like one giant muscle group slash lever so if you're like hey shake your hips i do this right so they were doing the chess shimmy thing that like dancing girls do i don't know what you can call it so i'm sorry this is terrible radio internet but this is for the people here i'm gonna do this what i did at dinner because they all did the thing you know what the thing is this is my honest attempt that's real that's it right because i don't so hillary's like hey can you roll your shoulders i was like yeah she's like no like this you know how to roll your shoulders i was like yeah just like just like this so it took like 25 minutes of hillary putting her hand on my shoulder to get me to and i've been practicing since right so here's the deal finding out i was on the autism spectrum not only just on the autism spectrum but like no you're like autistic and the scores aren't ambiguous it was life changing i know my wife has said i was on the spectrum for like 10 years i'd be like hey i love you so much you're not a clinical psychologist or a neuroscientist and you're not qualified to make that diagnosis and you're minimizing the experience of autistic people and then more recently people at events like these would stand up and they'd say science mike like you i'm autistic and the way that you deal with your autism is very inspiring because you tell me how you deal with blank and being autistic and i'd be like that was so beautiful and so vulnerable and thank you for sharing but i am not autistic right so because why no hold on like there's some key things here one of the the main things for diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder is what difficulty with socialization i'm really pretty good at socialization if i'm on and so so when i went in to get tested for autism no that no this wasn't even that this was when i was talking to hillary she said okay so how do you socialize with people i said well it was really hard for me when i was young but i realized that humor was an opener so i recorded every stand-up comedy special i could on the vcr and i played them back with a stopwatch and graph paper and i timed this is true i timed the amount of time between a setup and a punchline figured out the mean and the average and some other things that would have built a graph pre-computer this is all by hand like a boss and i programmed my brain to be funny by rehearsing in my room alone set up beat beat unexpected answer and so i can walk into a room now and people like is he a stand-up comedian i'm not that funny it's just math by the way i just did it and it worked again so it's like it's so evil so she's like okay and i was like yeah and then i learned that people their feelings matter to them so we don't have the internet back then so i went to the encyclopedia set and i looked up all of people's feelings and body language in the encyclopedia and memorized physiological characteristics in body tone body expression facial expression and vocal tone that indicated different feelings and memorized a database of feelings so i could express empathy at appropriate moments and she goes mike you're not unconvincing me she said but you make eye contact is that comfortable for you i said well i got a real simple thing for eye contact i look someone in the eye sorry you asked the questions you get picked and i just say this in my head looked him in the eyes looked into the eyes what's in the eyes because it makes people think you care and you're listening and i am but it is way easier for me to listen to you like this or like this like you're like somebody's jewelry that's a real natural resting place for me but guess what if i rest my eyes on a woman's jewelry that can be super misinterpreted look them in the eyes while dying a little inside every second so it's tough but like in a kind of a wonderful way growing up in the south in a culture that in no way would tolerate variance from social norms means that the completely artificial persona i put on to make people feel loved because i do care that you feel loved i don't i don't create a personality persona in order to make myself look good i don't give two shits how i look to people but i really care that you and i mean you and you and every person here feel loved and feel known and feel accepted because i didn't know what that was like till i was in my teens it was so weird to have a disorder become the most liberating piece of information i'd ever received it by the way it wasn't only liberating for me my wife was like elated jenny was like oh my oh god yes he's he's autistic because she had learned if you ask me a question while i'm brushing my teeth there's a 100 percent chance i will lock my keys in my car later he broke my routine my entire life is loops and routines and loops and routines she needed to know that if she came into the office and asked me a question while i was researching my my jaw would snap i didn't know i was doing it or i would hit my face no one the guard never came down enough for anyone who didn't live in the same house with me for 20 years to see that but it was so comforting for her so i really wrestled with like do i tell the public that i'm autistic because i don't want to feed the mythos of autism as the lone male genius um so in a lot of ways like i'm like stereotypically autistic in a way that erases the real experiences of people whose autism manifests itself in a different area of focus the clinical psychologist i talked to said that you can imagine if human consciousness existed on a large sheet of paper like normal neurotypical human consciousness an autistic person's consciousness happened on a much smaller sheet of paper that was three-dimensional and so for every autistic person the aperture is a different size mine's relatively broad and also quite deep um but it happens in different places so another autistic person might not be able to speak or have social contact but might have some kind of particular giftedness or not their consciousness may manifest itself in such a way that no person even other autistic people can't really understand and relate to their interior landscape but what ultimately decided me decided to have me be open and honest about the fact that i had received an autism diagnosis was the degree to which people have myself included bad preconceptions about autism because how many times i said no you understand i can't be autistic and in doing so what was i doing i was minimizing who autistic people could be i am very lucky in my life to be a a weird nerdy guy truly deeply weird friends would testify to that who had to get a mailbox for all the cards and and letters that i received people like how do you deal with the hate mail i'm like i don't know what you're talking about i don't get hate mail i get the hate tweets but let's be honest who doesn't but what i get is cards and letters from people thanking me for being honest on stage and on a podcast and the other thing i do is cry on stage for a living uh isn't that just like the like the the whitest patriarchy masculinity thing by the way to apologize for crying there's nothing wrong with crying i gotta quit doing it so um the amount of cards and letters i've gotten from people on the spectrum since i said on the podcast handwritten handmade cards and letters with tips like welcome here's your welcome packet [Laughter] here's how to do life and guess what they are rights like the people who are diagnosed as children and have gone through a lot more than i have like they have all these wonderful tips someone said like hey i noticed you don't stim a lot stimming is a self-soothing behavior like and he said i'm imagining you've gone through great effort to not wave your hands around it's true i have to buy socks all the time because i constantly curl my toes to the point that i put holes in the tops and bottoms of my shoe boxes and tear my socks apart he said when you're feeling tired like you can't go anymore just let your right hand move however it wants to and i was sitting in my office one day and i was tired and i had more work to do and i just i was like what am i gonna do there's the thing i've always done i've spent in my office chair when no one's looking i didn't know that was a thing that's a thing and spinning didn't help so i just let my hand start to go and what do you know after about like a minute and a half had a new lease on life something beautiful happens when we don't let culture make us ashamed of our intersections of identity something beautiful happens when we're honest about who we are because not only can others see us and know us better and us them in return not only can we understand that we all have unique struggles and challenges in life but people who have walked the road that you're just starting can help you understand the territory ahead all right [Applause] [Music] um my question has to do with bullying specifically children in bullying um i know that uh i know that you have some experience with this um i i grew up with some experience and now i'm now we have a son who's dealing with who's dealing with trauma from his bullying and growing up i'm just wondering like nature versus nurture where does that come from this sense of bullying the the weak person bullying the person who's different you know is it something they're learning from from culture from their parents is it something we're ingrained with um and i know we grow up to be bullies as well but like it just it's just weird to me that because i i mean i believe in that all children are born wonderfully innocent and good so i'm just where does that come from first of all i'm sorry i wish my mom was here because i feel like my mom would have way better answers this question than i do because she walked like your road maybe that would be worse when you're a bullied kid like it's really all you know i never had friends until the fat melted and i became a teenager i learned to play the guitar engineer new persona memorized comedy show up in high school making jokes we're like oh he's cool but i mean elementary school was hell and it's a tough road once i started having friends i didn't believe they actually liked me i thought they were setting me up for a big prank uh i finally got over that feeling in my mid 30s i attempted suicide eight or ten times in my teenage years and college age years all try and it all at all it all came from that bullying it's tough it is really re anyone who's like oh kids are going to be kids shut up unless someone has fed you dog [ \_\_ ] out of a plastic bag behind a tree on the playground shut up with kids are going to be kids this is this killing people why what do you think is happening gay teenagers bullying is what's happening 18 years that's why they're suicidal suicide rates are so elevated this stuff is life and death it is not trivial it is not kid stuff air quotes internet you didn't see it um where does it come from i don't think in the sciences today we can ever definitively answer nature nurture especially because i've been thinking a lot lately and reading a lot lately there's no difference stick with me where's all the nurturing coming from nature it's kind of an artificial dividing line what we're asking with that question is like what's the most effective way to change something i think like is is this lung cancer is it smoking is it is it genes we're born with and it turns out the answer in lung cancer is both the there's a genetic fact that increases propensity for risk of lung cancer and then smoking is a contributing factor and a very significant one but if someone has a high genetic resistance to lung cancer they might smoke cigarettes in their lives and never get lung cancer where someone who has like three genes already flipped out of the total six for particular types of lung cancer they may never smoke a single cigarette and get lung cancer in their 40s and die right so i think like our behavior exists in the same kind of intersection of those factors so i don't i don't know like nature versus nurture what i do know is that if smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer then culture is a risk factor for behaviors like bullying right so some people maybe like i was asking a friend of mine oh once again hillary mcbride i should really just start saying in this show brought to you by a conversation with hillary mcbride we were talking about uh sexual assault and patriarchy and i was mentioning her like i've never understood that like if i've assumed a partner was any anything less than extremely enthusiastic and consent i don't know that would physically be able to continue any encounter like like desire is the entire aphrodisiac what the heck and she said well your mom probably hugged you a lot it's like what does that have to do with anything oh i don't need to express my power and intimacy i was nurtured as a child right uh i discovered years later that the bully who made me most miserable of anyone just the cruelest he was the most popular kid in school uh his father beat him he's terrified he's six years old he's not a cope so he sees my like chubby undiagnosed autistic self and i'm the same kind of weak target to him that he was to his father a way to express this rage and in this cycle like and then something in me my response to being bullied is i can't tolerate it where's my justice like thirst come from i'm not a good person to me racism is just a fancy form of systemic bullying and that [ \_\_ ] doesn't fly to a kid who was force-fed out of a bag right it's not going to work so bullying is totally a natural primate behavior watch chimps watch gorillas the bigger ones pick on the smaller ones it's in the dna you know what else is a natural primate behavior rape you know what else is a natural primate behavior assault all the worst stuff that we hate war war is a primate behavior other than human beings who are the masters at war you'll hear more about that in my talk tomorrow morning chimpanzees are the second most warring species alive on the planet they're also our nearest relatives just because something's natural has nothing to do with whether it's okay or not like i'm so over the like is it a choice who gives a [ \_\_ ] if it's a choice what's the impact on others so i think the contributing cultural factors that lead to bullying are primarily patriarchy that we elevate power is important and that hierarchy is important patriarchy warps male behavior it makes intimacy a sign of weakness which means the most powerful humans in human history american white men also have some of the highest suicide rates they don't know how to have friendships they can't appear weak they got to be at the top of the hierarchy they figure out it's lonely up there but patriarchy also warps the behavioral patterns of women in society because it means they have to compete with each other to be a prize for the most powerful male it creates bullying in men and women and just erasure and violence for anyone who dares be non-binary because you don't fit in either competitive set you've got to be eliminated you could mess up the whole game now how much comfort is that to a bullied kid hey it's okay it's just the patriarchy don't worry give us 20 minutes we'll tear the whole thing down right it's only been around since the dawn of agriculture it means i don't think there's a simple solution to bullying other than a complete renegotiation of the social fabric which actually quite delightfully i think we're in the middle of i don't know that the light is winning necessarily but at least we're having the conversation right now um and in your life you are the light for your son the reason i am alive and not dead at least mom loved me and that's a heavy heavy burden but your acceptance and validation and even anger is a lifeline in a very dark place for a bullied child i think the difference between me and the kids who did columbine is my mom i knew my mom loved me it was not an ounce of question because like i get it every time a school shooting happens when i was in high school i constantly fantasized about taking guns on campus not to turn them on other people but to turn them on myself in front of the kids who made my life hell like an ultimate like this is what this does to people and it's not okay but having had a brief conversation with you i think your son's going to be okay and then there's this other thing that happens to that science mike live it gets real and then suddenly that sound effect i made earlier seems blasphemous and profane so in those situations i have a different ritual in loop wherein i announce the awkwardness of making the sound effect to create a transition wherein i can go i never realized this entire podcast is an experiment in autistic relationship dynamics who's next hi mike i'm sarah i my question you've alluded today about how your you for your your career you get really vulnerable you get really personal on stage and i'm wondering i've heard different opinions um from people experts who speak and who write about the process between the diagnosis or the crisis or the really difficult thing the divorce or whatever and then processing that with time or sometimes without time before they exude it to the public and i'm just curious about what your process has been it seems that for example with your recent diagnosis it was pretty pretty quick it seems but but maybe not or maybe quicker than i wanted it to be but yeah yeah yeah just curious about other things or other suggestions is it different for different people is there better is there not as good yes that is a great question i would say one i didn't come up with this phrase and i'm paraphrasing this phrase but speak from scars and not open wounds because you speak from open wounds you share your trauma it is powerful and triggering and re-traumatizing for other people so what i try to get the point in my experience is where my sharing will provide a movement towards healing or closure or progress in someone's life and not just throw them into the dark don't always get it right i have a weird thing with my audience there's a there's a liturgist audience and there's a segment of the science mic audience the science mic audience is mainly evangelicals former evangelicals and atheists it's a strange assortment of people many of whom are many of the people are out of evangelicals or out of evangelicalism because they are women who've experienced extreme discrimination they're lgbtq folks they're in some way they didn't make the evangelical check mark your okay list so they become former evangelicals and others people are just like hey religion is ridiculous but you mainly talk about it in terms of neuroscience and i'm okay with that but it means that when i say things uh i can't just do enough processing where i'm okay with it i have to do enough processing where i imagine how it'll be interpreted by the intersecting spectrums of people that listen to the work when you throw in the entire liturgist audience that gets crazy because non-affirming christians and lgbtq people are almost equal percentages of our total audience so what do i have to tell lgbtq people about their experiences nothing other than i love you i accept you i affirm you that's all i have to say but what do i have to say to people who are not affirming so much why because i used to be them but sometimes in order to have a conversation that is statistically productive with non-affirming people meaning i have a reasonable chance at actually changing some minds i go to territory that is like take your breath away painful for people who are actually lgbtqia in some way so for example we did a podcast uh called the ethics of f star star star ing about sexual ethics and we invited a guy named christopher west on and we invited him on because he's a catholic theologian who we really disagree with but if we don't include for that crowd one of their people and give them a fair shake they shut off and stop listening and my i'm i'm a former marketer i'm an incredibly manipulative person towards strategic goals so i'm going to talk about this on our podcast i'm talking about for two reasons one solidarity with the marginalized but two actually if there's a way i can help things get better i want to do that and i think for people for straight people having the awkward conversation people don't get it that's like a good role for us not to say we're experts we're not but to answer the million questions that are invasive and intrusive and traumatizing for people who actually are a lesbian you know what i mean like that's a different thing to question the validity ethically and spiritually of your existence than it is to be like hey i used to think like you and here's why i changed my mind but when we had christopher west on the show he made this incredibly insensitive he made a bunch of insensitive remarks but he made an especially insensitive remark about uh intersex people and i'm an autistic enneagram nine so when he said that i was so stunned i just like withdrew and was silent and then later recorded like because i just couldn't say anything so like we recorded a follow-up to the conversation i was like i couldn't even talk and then i released this episode and we released the episode and like i can't name the city because i can't blow their cover but five nuns came up to me at an event not like catholic nuns not nuns like no religious affiliation that's believe it or not that that like accidental pun is a problem in my work all the time uh five nuns came up to me and they said you know we heard your christopher west interview on letters podcast we're so glad you included him because i'd never realized how toxic our beliefs are until that catholic nuns check strategic goal accomplished also emails from intersex people listen to the podcast said i couldn't go to work that day because that broke me this stuff is hard um so here's what i say process as much as you possibly can it helps if you're autistic you process quickly but like i didn't want to talk about autism so quick we're going to plan a special literature podcast episode we're gonna have disability advocate experts we have all these people on but don't you know it i i have made some commitments i'll answer any question i'll ask mikey get asked and i don't pick the questions on the show the people the patrons who like send me a dollar five dollars a month they pick the questions and that week they picked a question about autism spectrum disorder and what happens in the brain and i could not i felt like i would be lying to the audience if i didn't say oh by the way i just found out i'm autistic so i ended up doing that like more raw than i wanted to but my point is we have to do the work we can do to make sure we are trying to help provide healing and closure to people when we speak and not simply re-traumatize them you do need to share your painful story in order to heal you need to share it with a therapist or a trusted cherished friend you don't necessarily need to just dump trauma on a room but then also you have to know even doing your best you're still going to hurt people the thing i hate the most about my life right now is too many people listen to me this was so much easier when it was a half million downloads on the literature's podcast once we got to four million a month i did the math hundreds of thousands of people hear me the first time every time we put on an episode they have no context about who i am they have no ongoing relationship with me they don't know the arc of my work i'm just somebody sent them something via email at work it was like you gotta hear this the amount of genuine hurt my work creates in the world breaks my heart to the point that i often want to quit except what about all the bullied kids who like wrote me and said i was going to kill myself and i didn't because i heard your podcast so that means if we're going to speak it means we know our words have the potential to not only remedy harm but to inflict it to paraphrase the the great albus dumbledore by the way i know this is getting heavy in the room so i threw a joke to lighten you up doesn't feel good but it also means we have to be responsive to people's pain so the least healthy thing i could do is go like you know what your pain's not real because that wasn't my intent so that means i just go to talk to therapists a lot and cry because i feel so bad so that i have the emotional fortitude to respond to the tweets and the emails and the cards and the letters and the angry people in the line after events and be able to say in all honesty i am sorry that i hurt you and i own it i don't distance it i don't deflect it because their pain is real and i think part of where we are as a society is a failure to acknowledge that people's pain and fear is real so do your best processing and do your best most sincere apologizing [Music] hi love you love your work this is a hot mic um some of us speak in an octave in which microphones enjoy [Laughter] um my daughter and i this morning were talking my eight-year-old daughter and i were talking this morning about whether inspiration or intuition we're talking about coming to this festival and i was saying well people are going to try to figure out what god might be saying to them and how god wants us to live our lives and she said well how do you know it's god and not just something you're making up and then calling that which i was like that was a great question so we talked about it for a while and she thinks that it's just it's intuition or something like that that then we call something else and she's especially suspicious of it when it's somebody standing on a stage saying god says do this which i think is great i was it made me wonder i go okay by what process in my brain do i think as a believer that this intuition carries x amount of weight but this other kind of intuition i believe carries a divine weight yes is there a difference in that from a functional mri standpoint from the way the brain lights up or is it impossible to judge from the outside the same way that we can't judge whether or not somebody is in love with somebody else from the outside but you know it on the inside you know it when it happens yes great question that i wish i didn't have as good an answer as i do for because on those questions i love to appeal to mystery unfortunately the brain scans did find something you have neurological hardware that has a job and that neurological hardware this network's job is to say is blank really happening why would you need that because your consciousness uh is a story your brain is telling where you're the protagonist people that oppose you are the villains and so when you're daydreaming or you're dreaming your brain needs to know this is not happening out there it's happening in here because if you're dreaming that you're running from a tiger and you start flailing your legs you could injure yourself severely so your brain needs to have some capacity to say there's this stuff out here there's stuff in here i need to be able to model things with very high fidelity in here that's what makes humans humans the ability to imagine situations and rehearse them in our minds and the corresponding parts of our brain light up as it was really happening that's what makes us us we're the daydreaming animal so the theory is that religious people are trained through different rituals worship experience prayer routines discernment to start identifying part of their cognitive process as coming from the exterior world and the hypothesis has been tested as shown in tanya lerman's book when god talks back understanding evangelical america's relationship with god or with the divine basically something happening in your mind gets evaluated by the brain as happening in reality now depending on your epistemological assumptions that's either fascinating or wrecking it's like whoa wait you're saying god's just like a part of my brain no i'm saying god's a network of things in your brain but um no i'm just kidding the joke softens it up that's all that was for just a little softening there's young people here i don't know maybe somebody just gave their life to jesus now there's like mommy what's he saying he's a heretic don't worry um i'm just kidding it's ucc there's no heretics here but uh super inside jokes sorry i was proud of that one though um what i would say is if you're a person for whom the supernatural is an important part of your faith experience you might want to consider that a necessary reconfiguration of an antenna to receive a divine signal right so what's fascinating about when neuroscientists study god they never study god neuroscientists make no attempt to answer objectively does god exist they understand because they're neuroscientists that's kind of a ridiculous question because no two people mean the same thing when they say god anyway what they're looking for is what do beliefs and experiences with god do to the human brain and that's what i just explained to you so if you're an atheist congratulations we just disproved religious experiences and if you're a christian congratulations you understand a little bit more about how god works now that's how i keep both groups buying tickets [Applause] [Music] hi um i know you're like data i ran into some recent pew research data that says 27 of nuns pray regularly why is that why what's the science behind that yeah great that's a fantastic question that's what we call a slow pitch right across the plate when he said 20 percent of percent of nuns that was the n-o-n-e-s nuns not 20 of catholic nuns i assume higher than 27 of them pray regularly uh really interesting things in the data um religious affiliation is falling fastest in north america uh and it is boy it's it's plummeting that is not a growth market folks organized religion in north america right now um among white people important caveat because it this is a unconscious thing we do because there's so many white people we make a statement about white people and then just apply it to all people and often that's factually incorrect there's not actually religious affiliation crisis among people of color in north america even among millennials so then why are uh why are numbers so bad when you include all millennials because numbers are so bad among white millennials so north america let's be precise america and canada not mexico north america top two countries i mean geographically mean it's funny i actually do care about speaking with precision because i don't like to erase human beings um religious identity crash unlike europe canada and the united states are not actually secularizing people who identify as atheists is not skyrocketing people identify as agnostic is growing somewhat america is d and canada are de-religious thing but they're not de-spiritually right so people they have less specific notions about god but they're not that likely to say they don't believe in god at all although that has declined as well but because people believe in some kind of spirituality often ambiguous they still care about praying and ritual and what we're finding by the way is there's a tremendous everybody left church all the white people left church and then they got super lonely and isolated and really sad which means like i accidentally started a podcast at exactly the right time because like we sell tickets and and people come like is that a church i can't go to a church but it's the liturgies i trust them and then like as soon as we get in the room we make sure to f-bomb from stage just if you i know it's a joke about progressive christians saying curse words but it's just like we got to do something blasphemous so everyone stays in the room and so we figured like an f-bomb is like better than like defiling religious images or something so i wish that wasn't an honest-to-god calculated decision so uh so people's longing for a connection with the divine hasn't declined what has declined is their tolerance for institutionalized religious white supremacy patriarchy heterosexism that's the thing that's the i can't do this i can't do by the way a bunch of baby boomers lecturing me about morality about the sanctity of marriage in their fourth marriage i can't handle them saying like sexual purity is important when they have so many sexual partners like an odd thing about like um well even we have the data on this lgbtq millennials have fewer sexual partners than evangelical boomers fascinating then they call me pastors call me science mike why are the young people leaving the church because they're puking in their mouths at your hypocrisy clean the stuff out of your closet man and they might come back you can't preach about the gospel and then ignore the stuff about caring for the widow the orphan the poor and the immigrant because now you're just a hypocrite that's why the wonders are gone it's not because they're angry with god they still pray more often than you do but millennials as a generation have decided i'm just going to be honest about who i am what i'm doing so i'm not i cannot go to a nice cushy country club on sunday mornings and talk about the importance of a first century palestinian and ignore the plight and the blight in my community the rest of the week so the science there is simple spirituality is not in decline in canada or the united states at all like god says the lukewarm being neither hot nor cold will be spit out of god's mouth and so perhaps by rejecting hypocritical organized religious institutions millennials are the most godlike generation that we've seen in a very very long time a little preachy there at the end little preaching thing is i actually uh i actually believed that i thought i was done i'm not i stopped calling myself a christian for years even after like i was an atheist then long story i wrote a book about it met god on the beach like personally me here god here then god from here very cool still couldn't call myself a christian because of western civilization at all uh i just quiz quickest summary i know but then i i noticed that um my friends who are descendants of people who are kidnapped in africa and put on ships and brought here for whom christianity was literally a colonization and exploitation of their culture redeemed christianity and they call themselves christian because they care about the story of liberation and the same was true for my hispanic latino friends and then i noticed that people who were way more rejected by evangelicalism than i've been lgbtq people so many of them identified as christians this faith is only powerful when it is a faith of the marginalized and that's why i love millennials that's why as a gen xer i my work is with millennials and post millennials is because i care that they collectively seem to decided hey like there seems to be some wisdom coming from the people who don't have the keys to all the doors maybe we should listen to them and maybe we should start handing out all these keys and um so i get it i get the like i can't call myself a christian i was there but now i do but the reason i do i call myself a christian in solidarity and support with people who do which by the way like all and i mean all the theologians i read are people of color are queer like either we got plenty of dutch german stuff that i got enough of that for my whole life so i'm listening to people who've experienced lives a lot more like jesus than i ever have yeah there we go [Music] you did it you survived a live episode of ask science mike thank you so much for being here thank you for wonderful questions i'd like to thank andrew gallucki for his work in pre-production math science mike greg nordine for producing ass science mike and as always my lovely patrons who make sure i can pay my rent if you'd like to join them i just need like a buck a month go to sciencemike.com click the patreon button uh that would be super helpful oh and as always thanks jeff otter for the wonderful theme song thanks for listening everybody and i will talk to you next week [Music]