ASM092 Ask Science Mike LIVE in Los Angeles, CA

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coming to you from central avenue church in glendale california it's ask science mike live even though he may not understand he'll talk anyway he got problems he won't solve them but he'll talk and talk and talk until he flew in the face science stays in line welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i'm on tour right now promoting my new book finding god in the waves and coming up this week tonight actually november 21st i'll be in tacoma washington november 26 in the big city of thomasville georgia at the bookshelf for a book signing november 30th in quincy massachusetts uh january 21st in grand haven michigan january 29th in mableton georgia february 15th at northwest nazarene university uh february 19th at science mike live in chapel hill north carolina and march 29th at the christ and creation conference for bio logos in houston texas if you'd like more information about cities i'm going to be in head to finding god the waves.com tour but for now we've got a podcast to do so let's get it started [Music] i got to say i'm nervous asking this question as a white male in a progressive audience i i consider myself very much a progressive but a few months ago i saw you share a video addressing common criticisms of the black lives matter movement which i also shared and i i felt like this video was very concise and level-headed but i saw someone post reaction video that i thought contextualized a lot of the statistics showing a lot of them that convincingly said were incomplete or perhaps even misleading kind of stating that um statistics for crime from the black community when adjusted for population are considerably higher at least triple that of what they say for white people as a whole um and so me as a supporter of black lives matter but also a proponent of truth and honesty i don't know like what to do with this information um i believe a lot of this personally has to do with systemic racism forcing generations of african-americans into desperate circumstances but i also think providing misleading facts is counterproductive to the movement i just get afraid because whenever i bring up statistics that have to do with race it seems like many social justice advocates are like immediately crying that it's racist to even do that whereas i think facts should speak for themselves regardless of your feelings on the issue i guess what i'm getting to is um i think people manipulate these facts but i would i would love to know your thoughts on the statistics um whether you think they're misleading or untrustworthy um so also on that note what in your opinion is the best way to evaluate seemingly conflicting statistics when both narratives seem to have valid sources oh that's a good one okay uh first of all thanks for your question and i hope you don't feel nervous uh the this show is meant to be a safe space for any honest questions so there's a reason like sometimes even though i'm a like over-the-top ally to our lgbtqia plus friends uh i will also take questions from religious conservatives with very basic and almost even offensive content to that group is because someone has to take those questions or people can't move forward so the difficult thing we do in this show is create space for all questions and that means sometimes maybe we'll all take an answer or even a question makes us feel uncomfortable but with the goal of we're all trying to go somewhere together in mutual respect your question is excellent because it reveals a very important point that there's lies damn lies and statistics right um there is an objective reality and i'm just skeptical that people ever know it so what we're talking about is what fidelity can the model we hold of reality which is inevitably biased which is inevitably subjective how close can we get to objective reality with ever actually nailing it and that question is a perfect look at how statistics mislead either intentionally or believe it or not sometimes accidentally it's a big problem in the sciences that most trained scientists are not strain trained statisticians and we have big problems with people doing good research with bad statistical analysis right so you typically don't want to ever trust a statistic from a single source you typically want to see who's analyzed it and look at what pushback there is which means um knowledge is not for the lazy now an idea here so you mentioned that um one way to look at the data and pull a narrative from it because that's what we're doing is that crime and we didn't specify what kind of crime is three times higher among african-american populations than white populations violent crime was three times higher okay so here's some things i want to look at number one did the data adjust for education level income level and household wealth because otherwise you're not you're definitely not comparing apples to apples right we understand that typically uh poverty has a higher correlation with wealth and education level the second thing we understand is are they looking at reported incidents are they looking at convictions because we understand we have a systemic justice issue in this country where it's really easy to pull the data that for the very same transgressions black people are arrested prosecuted and incarcerated at a much higher right than white people for the same crime so if we start to apply those kind of adjustments to the data you begin to see things much closer to parity and is it is it any wonder that people in highly disadvantaged communities highly policed communities i just don't know if there was a violent incident in my neighborhood and i was black if i would ever call the police i would be much more tempted to try to handle someone threatening my property myself than to call the police because all i've got to do is look on youtube to see what happens when black people aren't just confront the police but call the police so you have to look at a gazillion influencing factors and when i've reviewed that kind of data as you begin to apply corrective filters any sort of narrative associated with an intrinsically higher violent rate among african-americans other americans kind of dissolves away but when i do that i will also admit i'm also applying my own narrative from a line of data that i think is statistically valid many statisticians and social scientists would reinforce but others would oppose so how do you know i don't think you ever know and when i reach the end of what i know that's that's when i lean most into my faith and when i lean into my faith and i believe that god is love literally is love that god is the love holding the universe together which interpretation better glorifies the creative the created which uh which better extends grace and healing and peace into the world one that reinforces an ancient trope designed by white supremacy that says black people are stronger faster and more violent than white people or one that seems to work much better with what i understand through dna and neuroscience that all people are basically just people and any disparities that exist are likely culturalized and economic in nature and i feel much more comfortable in in the latter camp than the first one now a book you can check out that i really enjoyed that can help you tease through evaluating statistical claims and other forms of data is a book called the information diet it's a really great book with a very clever cover and then a little bit more deeper into statistics is nate silver's the signal and the noise can also help you watch out for that kind of thing a third book i do love my books is a book called how to not be wrong the power of mathematical thinking it is on my absolute top bookshelf with a little spotlight on it like a shrine great question okay i wrote my question down or else i would go serious business two right out of the gate written down it took me like two hours to get this question so saying it won't take two hours to read no no it's way shorter um okay so my question has to do with suffering um a lot of it has to come from a blog post written by jason miceli or mckelly and doors of the sea author david bentley heart i heard your podcast from the wild goose and talked about how you could use the experience of being bullied and suffering in that way in order to help others deal with that experience and therefore gave meaning to your suffering for me as a recovering calvinist sorry okay yeah just going to go four or five point oh man a moment of grace preston sprinkle was my academic advisor okay okay um so that for me when you said that that gave me to your suffering really triggered for me you know everything happens for a reason god works all things for good his ways are higher than our ways god's sovereign all that good stuff um so heart says to preach a sovereign god of absolute will who causes suffering and tragedy for a greater purpose is not only to preach a god who trusts in suffering an evil but a god who gives meaning to it he says he doesn't want anything to do with that god okay um yeah i'm getting there um i have had three miscarriages i also have a three-year-old son so that's great um so you know what it feels like to suffer and to not want to get out of bed in the morning but i've also been able to help people which is i think it's it's beautiful but i don't like the idea of god orchestrating those things just so i could help others who have gone through suffering that god has also orchestrated um basically if there is indeed a reason for everything there's there's no reason to worship god not because god doesn't exist but because he's not worthy of our worship um so can you speak on the idea that maybe everything doesn't happen for a reason in regards to suffering um or i could be completely off the mark okay let's be real clear what has happened great question ask science mike started because some other recovering fundamentalists were like hey i don't know anything about science so would you start a show where you answer like science questions for recovering fundamentalists i was like that's a great idea and we did that for about two and a half episodes before it became like kind of a dear abby or unanswered questions from the sciences and theology and philosophy sometimes all three at the same time so thank you for an unanswered theological question we call the problem of evil which theologians try to solve with something called theodicy which to me sounds like a really fancy religious vacation package go on theodicy walk where jesus walked and then follow paul through greece uh theodicy sorry i have to start a cruise now called the odyssey uh okay everything absolutely happens for a reason piece of cake uh why do things happen protons gonna proton neutrons gonna neutron right probabilistic waveforms are going to collapse at the point of interaction into a definitive state at least in line with heisenberg's uncertainty principle where we don't get their speed and their position at the same time but other than that determinism is the law of the universe as we understand it today furthermore even if i didn't understand that through particle physics einstein's theory of relativity which is let's say pretty solid and has good data support including uh experiment and observation tells us that all coordinates of space space-time exist right now so the podcast is over and beginning and happening and not thought of yet and the sun has exploded and all those things just exist and we happen to ride along a rail car in one direction through space time and experience it linearly and the sciences provide very little way out of our good friend from calvinism pre-determinism now i am actually a compatibilist which uh the philosopher daniel dennett is as well compatible to say that determinism is compatible with human free will that in fact determinism is the mechanism of free will just don't ask me too closely about that because like all compatibilist i can't explain it um so what does that tell us about god well i think if we imagine god as like a being like a person god even like a personal god who's making like executive decisions at every moment about what email to answer and what to put in the spam box no that's not a god i'm particularly interested in worshiping either but a god like that is actually nonsensical in physics any god that can exist in a universe with general and special relativity in an elastic space time with a variable reference frame that never aligns perfectly between any two given points in the universe over time any god that frankly can embody a state we call singularity what happens when you compress the entire observable universe into something the size of a sugar cube and space and time cease to have any distinction along with the four fundamental forces of physics where everything becomes a mysterious state of unity with the potential to create galaxies through something as small as quantum fluctuations by the way that's real i didn't just make that up any god that can exist in those states or be responsible for those states or even be those states you can't map a term like consciousness or will or agency to a god like that do you know what i mean it's like calling um it's like calling a sunrise bob like you can call a sunrise bob but that's like a ridiculous projection onto a very specific reference frame where you're anthropomorphizing a celestial phenomenon right so that writ large and multi-dimensional is what happens when we apply ideas like free will or predestination to god here's the problem any such god which we would oddly enough probably call an unchangeable god sorry that's just really weird to me like when i read that in physics i actually got pretty pissed off because it messed with my very tenuous theology a god like that is not a god that's like relational at all at all now you know that god is very present because that god is responsible for every wave function collapsing that god is responsible for all of your particles having mass through the higgs field that god is never distant that god is just indifferent to that god the complex physical actions to create a sunrise and the complex physical actions to create a miscarriage are absolutely no different they're both just laws being laws and that's why when i first came back to faith and found that god in physics and my first axiom god is at least the set of forces that created and sustained the universe well it just didn't do a lot for my faith so somehow we experience god somehow we know god somehow god becomes a personal thing to us in science i find that primarily in our brains the way we interpret the events the way we apply a narrative to points of data but oddly enough the thing that's brought me the most comfort recently is trinitarian theology yeah right even before the divine dance which is quite lovely um not to brag but uh michael and i got to hang out with richard rohr and like listen to him talk about the trinity at which point i went this small man is very clever and uh it got me reading a lot about not just his views on the trinity but ancient views on the trinity in the church and i really found like the enlightenment screwed up christian theology like ancient christian theology actually meshes a little bit better with physics than enlightenment theology where we tried to like out science science which is a bad call church okay so in that model you have a godhead traditionally called father thanks to patriarchy uh so you have god the father or god the creator as i prefer or maybe god the father and the mother wherever you want to go this this creative force we would find in a singularity the sustaining force we would find in the higgs field boom but then as part of this relational god you also have a christ what is the christ doing the christ is since the invocation of creation inviting all of creation into a state of reconciliation with the creator right so therefore anything that invites towards peace is a christ energy and anything that doesn't is an anti-christ energy suddenly revelation gets interesting again suddenly the antichrist taking a sword to the head and rising again is every time a dictator rises up and turns a society away from peace hmm it's not timely at all this ancient book so now we have a creator we're throwing fire in los angeles okay right after this we're just gonna go march down anyway so right so we got the creator we've got the christ and then we have another part of the trinity which is the spirit what where's what does the spirit do it dwells in all of the created because of the spirit we can look within and find what god how's that possible a trinity now that makes no scientific sense really other than we're applying metaphors that fit within different lenses of science but when i contemplated god in three things creating sustaining inviting to peace and reconciliation and incarnating or indwelling the created that only exist in relationship to each other and then i contemplate the fact that this room only exists in relationship to its occupants that your matter is in a state of quantum decoherence until it interacts with other matter you're a fuzzy math problem until you're in relationship with something else there's a poetic beauty there that puts me into a posture of gratitude for my existence now i have nowhere to express that gratitude except to god so at that point worship becomes what a position a posture of gratitude and awareness that i exist and i'm aware and i did nothing to achieve or receive that and i can't do anything to guarantee that it continues all i'm faced with is what posture i approach that gift with and for me i choose gratitude therefore worship and therefore as much as i can i choose to make my limited agency in this universe be about a christ energy i do that by following jesus and try to invite the whole world towards a greater state of peace which frankly since last tuesday seems difficult and may be impossible but if 27 septillion atoms can show up every second so i can breathe that seems impossible if eight octillion atoms can exist in relationship to allow my body to exist let's be honest 8 octillion is average i'm probably 10 octillion uh either way i continue to be in this miracle so is it that strange to say maybe i could be a part of the peace and love that could unite all things i don't know if suffering has a reason in the context that you ask but i know that suffering has a response and i find my response to suffering in the trinity through christ um so first this is really serious really important okay i want to know if you can say egalitarian five times fast eagletarian eagletary and tear and eagle terry on an eaglet area perfect so easy okay i also wrote mine down because female brain so all right which is kind of funny all right one of the things i love the most about jesus is his humanity the fact that he left his eternal position in heaven to take on our flesh and experience earth as a human man i can relate so much more to him because as he walked on the same earth as mine and his lungs breathed the same air there's nothing i will feel that he hasn't already felt not only that but jesus called god father and god called jesus son if god is okay with referring to himself as male and since i and many others can relate so easily to his humanity my question is why are gender pronouns about god bad why do we feel the need to dehumanize god when he chose to make himself a very human man great question i love it i don't think gender pronouns about god are bad i don't if you read my book which you definitely should it's awesome um in the beginning of the book i always call god he him father and because i'm exceedingly clever as you move through the book i transition away from male pronouns towards not using pronouns for god because when i and finding on the waves i am always writing in my narrative voice in the perspective of where i was at that point in the story which was harder than it sounds so at some point relating to god as father made god feel affectionate and close and caring and available and wonderful to me for a couple of reasons one i had a great dad not only did i have ha i currently have a great dad he's still a great dad some people were throwing heat at me on facebook this week and my dad commented and said if they weren't quiet he was going to whip all their asses and he's like he's a real strong guy and even though he's had a stroke he could still take those people and i quit getting emails like so so the idea of a good good father is really really resonates with me i also am a father and if i understand that in some way the way i love my children is representative of the way god loves me well that is beautiful and i never want to stop calling god father but some people don't have good fathers for some people their father was so terrible that using language like father makes god angry distant aloof absent violent for some people who have suffered under a system of civilization we call patriarchy it makes god an agent of the thing that has oppressed them and people like them for as long as we've had recorded history for some people the word father has incredible baggage and in the bible a collection of stories i believe were written by people about god feminine imagery is in fact often used for the divine which speaks of god's womb in many forms of greek the holy spirit often takes on a feminine attribute i believe that we find perhaps or even given a metaphor we need to understand god in our specific and unique context and i think for some people for god to be near and dear and close god must be mother and i think for some people for god to not be ridiculous absurdity god must simply be god without gender my friend don miller i think says it best when he says are you telling me god has a penis and that he spread his dna to earth denoting his fatherhood right so this is a cultural metaphor that was appropriate to a specific time now a lot of times when i talk about new metaphors for god many christians most christians go whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa we don't use new metaphors for god and i happen to think that using new metaphors for god is like the most biblical thing you can do god walked with us in a garden and talked with us said that we were his own it's like hey why are you guys hiding make some clothes there what's that about it's a personal god right and then god's like tell you what let's wrestle that's a bible story look it up and then god is this bush that burns with fire and is not consumed who does what spouts existentialist poetry i am that i am i will be that which i will be okay god i'll take off my shoes that's wild and then god is a pillar of fire and cloud that guides a nation out of bondage and into the promised land and god's in a gold box that one really puzzles me [Applause] i mean it does that the law's in the box and god's revealed in the law i'm getting carried into battle but this was a culturally appropriate metaphor because other gods were carried into battle too and then god dwells in a temple and is his god's greatness emanates from this one piece of soil and nowhere else which is why if you're on the local area code your prayers aren't heard which is why we can lie down by the rivers of babylon and weep for these ion because god can't hear us in babylon he can only hear us in zion right exit jesus is awesome so and then that god is too distant and too mysterious it gets to the point where we feel like we can only address god once a year with like a special dude and a big ritual who wears bells on his clothes in case he dies and we pull him out with a rope because god is mysterious and angry so god shows up with a face again this time as jesus and it works so well we killed him so jesus resurrects and achieves escape velocity somehow propels off the surface of the earth going to places unknown maybe he's trying to be ill on musta mars i don't know so now we have this savior that's gone so no problem god comes back as the spirit again only now the temple is our hearts we're not done because after those stories were recorded the church went through a theological process wherein the father son and holy ghost became a three persons god a trinitarian god which is then projected back across the entire ark of scripture so which one of those gods is the right one well they're all metaphors that point the divine that all worked in a specific cultural context and the problem is when we find a new metaphor for god and we say we've i've done it i found god and everybody else is wrong i'm right other people are heretics right i don't think that's helpful i think it's beautiful when in the miracle of the divine we find a metaphor that points us to grace and beauty and peace and love and i think it's not great when we tell other people their metaphor is incredibly wrong and dangerous and they just need to get where we are so i celebrate god the father and i celebrate god our mother and i celebrate the god of physics i celebrate a trinitarian god i celebrate whatever metaphor invites people into the creation of peace and love now i happen to be increasingly comfortably christian so the metaphors that that awaken me the metaphors that bring me hope exist within a particular tradition and interpretation of god we call historical christianity that doesn't mean sometimes i don't like to get down with a little bit of buddhism like there's some pretty strong stuff in buddhist thought and philosophy there's some really powerful ideas in hindu theology but i place myself within historical christianity but because i'm a weirdo i don't make like exclusivist claims about that i don't know if the whole world needs jesus i only know that i do it's an incredibly personal simple trusting act of faith for me so did god elect to call god's self father or is that a cultural interpretation of the divine show me a person who can answer that definitively and and have them show their work i'm just i'm less interested in god the puzzle than ever i'm less interested in mastering god through knowledge than i've ever been and i'm more interested in knowing god through love than i have ever been i would much rather sit in god's presence in delight than write a theological treatise but that's just how i roll because i'm hardcore [Applause] yes mike my question has to do with the self and our self identity as it relates to mirror neurons okay all right that was super succinct okay i thought that was the intro um okay the self this is what i'm talking about someone just asked me what the self is wow okay i actually have an answer it's my twitter bio anybody seen my twitter bio it's really clever my twitter bio says people call me science mike 86 billion neurons telling a story to themselves that is really good as far as we can understand today humble as far as you can tell today we're a storytelling animal and cognitive neuroscientist and neuroscientists believe that we form a model of reality that we're aware of as we form it so we write a story and read it as we write it and that's consciousness that's the self and that story is is composed with particular goals the story is designed to compel you to eat some of us more than others it compels you to find safety some more than others it compels us to mate definitely some more than others um but these are these are these are core things the story is trying to do it's trying to help us create a map of the world to do those things successfully and interesting to the human story is also trying to imagine what the stories of others compose especially pertinent to what paragraphs in their story apply to how they see us because we're a social species and our survival historically has been very dependent on our place within tribe first of all belonging because exile is death and second of all our place in the tribe heavily influences our ability to get food safety sex so there is a somewhat controversial idea in neuroscience that there are a special type of neuron called mirror neurons they have not been definitively proven to exist and mirror neurons job is to achieve a similar state of the mirror neurons and someone you're interacting with now we can see this if you brain scan people having a conversation which is difficult to do in some types of brain imaging and easier to do in others fmris for example you have your head in a metal tube so it's difficult to have like a good natural conversation uh don't move but act natural and we can show you this person's face on a mirror right here so it's just kind of that's kind of wild but other forms of brain imaging will let us and you'll see that people's brain states in conversation you create similar structures and patterns of activity if your amygdala turns on their amygdala turns on if your anterior thing that's you know what i'm saying like so you can either uh get into a talking head style debate or uh you know start playing some um let's get it on whatever both of those involve trying to read the other person's story and merge them so what's most interesting to me about the conception of self and ideas like mirror neurons is it subverts the most fundamental assumption of western philosophy and that is the individual consciousness it is seems to be more accurate to say that you are a piece of a social consciousness a couple of supporting ideas for that hypothesis one what happens if you isolate humans for weeks months or years you make sure their physical needs are taken care of they're not in existential danger but you keep them isolated do those people get healthier or less healthy psychologically less healthy universally they all it often breaks them in fact another supporting data point you don't form beliefs based on examining evidence the the primary driver in what you believe is your sense of social identity boy is social media illustrating that right now if you read someone's bio and then look at the words they use on their tweets you don't see a lot of evidence for an individual consciousness so some of you especially in this crowd will go whoa whoa whoa whoa i don't really agree with anything my tribe has to say congratulations you're a non-conformist so instead of identifying your beliefs based on what your social group believes you create beliefs based on disagreeing with what your social group believes but either way you are still doing what contributing to a social consciousness so in most levels of science the self becomes very illusionary at the quantum physics level you're just a bundle of probabilistic waveforms with no clear delineation between like the last bit of your skin and then the atmosphere right you're all mixing right now septillions of atoms at a time literally exchanging germs and dna kind of gross if you think about it sorry and then at the social science level there's very little little evidence to support the fact that you make individual decisions so on the one hand your 86 billion neurons telling a story to themselves but that story is really one part in a symphony that you consider your tribe [Music] i'm jonathan hey jonathan first of all i just wanted to thank you real quickly for creating these spaces um and having these conversations because i think like was said they're absolutely necessary in changing uh church culture in a positive way um i'm a graphic designer and so it's a part of my like craft and passion to like visually communicate um and my question is about the connection between psychoaesthetics and neuroscience how and a definition of psychoaesthetics is kind of like built into the question um how why and what does the brain respond to in terms of color uh line shape form um things that are like inherently subjective in in meaning in the stories we tell um so for example in like one context red can mean like danger um for evolutionary reasons but in another context it means like reproductive opportunity yeah so like that's my favorite of the two right so how does like how does your brain like what does it do to create those separate um interpretive contexts like what does your brain do uh to not only create those contexts but like also like sometimes it's like create emotional attachments to to them does that make sense it does actually it's a great question um and another unanswered question the sciences but i i can give you some color to your question first of all let's be very very clear this is a common misconception at the top of the question i don't create this safe space you do so thank you for creating this safe space for each other that i get invited to hang out in with you and if we can do it guess what anybody can this doesn't have to be a rare thing right i don't have to be present for a space like this to happen that's the big takeaway that's what we're trying to do with this work but very little about how we process sensory information is independent from cultural context uh some of you have probably heard this if you've been to a live event but i don't think i've done this in the podcast very much so here we go the way you see color literally visually processed has to do with your cultural context specifically your language so if we could imagine i were holding a board with 12 squares on it and 11 were green and one was blue and i said which one is different you would all like say number three is different right it'd be this is a really stupid waste of time but when we do that in certain uh cultures that have limited contact with other cultures they can't tell which one is different why because they don't have a word for blue now we understand blue is probably a pretty recent invented language as recent as ancient greece the sea was referred to as the color of wine have you ever seen the sea be the color of wine no like maybe sometimes dark green but that'd be some nasty wine um but you didn't see any any correlations between water and sky in that literature because there was no word for blue which means the brain just considers it another green now interestingly enough if i had a second board that i held up in which 11 squares were the same sheet of green and then a 12th grade of a slightly different green studies show in america less than a third of you would be able to find which square is different yet if we went to the same cultures with limited contact and showed them the board everyone picks out the special square why because they have many many more words for green so design in many ways is a cultural experience and is especially powerful because i believe design has a unique capacity to shape culture and change the way that people see the world for example in scandinavian countries everyone uses these really great for a long time uh lightweight gothic fonts like helvetica would be one and uh those cultures are amazing and america uses comic sans on official signage and just look at our elections i think these things are related i'm kind of kidding but not now there are some and this gets really tough especially because this is such a rare piece of science i've only read about it once um there's a word for it basically there's a theory by which genetic information influences neurological development to create an innate brain reaction to stimuli these are somewhere above instincts and one of those is how we respond to spiders if you take a child who's never seen a spider and never seen someone react to a spider and you show them a spider or a spider like object they tend to recoil so evolution somehow has rewarded that response to spiders some things just universally give us the heebie-jeebies has anyone ever had a dream where they are covered in spiders oh that's really low i expected a lot higher y'all are some healthy people um maybe you didn't get beat up enough as a kid um you know but there's other things like that that we're discovering that have kind of an innate visceral response and um a response to to sexual stimuli would certainly fit that category uh it's called super normal stimulus it's a design decision if you make a very attractive wooden turkey head that looks like a really cute female turkey and you put it on a stick literally on a stick no body and you put it like in the presence of like just normal nice like attractive female turkeys i don't know how they figure that out scientists are weird and then you introduce a male turkey the male turkey is like what's up stick you know and he'll try to mate with the stick while all the like actual reproductively available female turkeys are just like men oh my god or if you uh create a wooden bird's eggs that are a little bit bigger than a normal bird's egg and a brighter painted blue other birds will sit on those fake eggs while their eggs die uh if you create fake chicks baby birds and with open mouths that are brighter red than the real chicks they'll starve their real babies trying to feed an immobile fake bird stupid animals and yet if one woman elects to smear a red wax on her lips that makes it look like she has increased blood flow in her lips which implies she has increased blood flow in other areas and another woman who would be equally attractive by whatever measures you want to do that elects not to most men will make like a turkey right now hold on women you're just as prone to falling for supernormal stimuli stimuli pizza is a super normal stimuli it's fattier saltier by every metric unnatural and our brains go yeah maybe your brain goes awesome but my brain goes yeah um pornography it's an incredible supernormal stimulus right incredible high definition streamed in 4k not like i know um that was a joke i mean let's be real i would tell you all if i was into porn because that's just who i am but uh it is a super normal stimulus and i'm actually really grateful that i grew up in an age where porn looked like going and then there's this line we go and you just mom don't come out of their bedroom stay in your bedroom mom like so the super the super normal stimulus of my age i know i'm being funny but this is this is a real point um super normal stimulus is getting more intense why design decisions driven by capitalism why do the billboards get bigger and brighter why does google choose their logos by doing sample data samples with millions of people why do they try to exploit the weaknesses of the human brain for the dollar and so design can either be a force of taste making or exploitation so the decisions we make in the design process are actually critical and important and because some people decided and i don't want to demonize porn today but the fact that some people have chosen to try to capture that much attention to sell ads via that medium means that we have a generation where neurological erectile dysfunction is incredibly off the chart common compared to previous generations and that's super normal stimuli and it's a design decision [Music] as someone who's found herself on perhaps the more rough and tumble end of the female spectrum at times i've been engaged in conversations with more fundamentalist folk about biblical emphasis on gender roles and more importantly how that translates into today's culture what importance do you place on what it means to be female or what it means to be male in the eyes of god and taking it a step further how it applies to something like transgenderism if biologic sex can be skewed which can be found in certain genetic conditions like klein felters or turners for example how biblically important is it where on the spectrum male and female fall in terms of both behavior and identity yeah that's a great question i've done this so many shows in a row but it just it's just important like can i be real a second for just a millisecond tell the people how i feel for just a second we do the bible a disservice when we read it like a modernist modernism didn't exist when the bible was written it's so hilarious to me that most evangelicals and atheists read the bible with the same lens and historians are going um it's not if you bring a modernist lens to the epic of gilgamesh or to the iliad you're not reading that text but then we take the bible and we we put it through the modernism spaghetti strainer we read it like an enlightenment book pro-tip world science didn't exist when any word in the bible was written there was no such thing as a mythological physicalism designed to reveal facts about reality through empiricism just you couldn't even translate that into the languages that existed at the time the bible was written and so we start having theological debates that are based on reading the bible poorly in my opinion in my strong yet relatively uninformed opinion so when i read the bible's discussion about gender roles unless i read about the cultural context that historical time period had towards gender roles unless i understand who scholars believe that author was what their agenda was and to what audience am i really engaging the text at all so i very rarely take any part of the bible and simplistically translate it to a modern context that's why i don't ever tweet jesus for president like the historical genius would be like a pretty terrible president i mean i mean unless you're just like if you're not into capitalism maybe jesus would be a great president but if you're into capitalism you don't want jesus for president i mean you think bernie is for redistributional wealth jesus was like hey it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for wall street to enter into the kingdom of heaven i mean whoa [Applause] now that's very clever it's also a a slightly less terrible reading of scripture um because alexander hamilton has been a trader trading market so jesus wouldn't even thought about that so when we get to gender norms the bible often but not always represented socially progressive ideas now why not always because a bunch of people wrote the bible and they didn't agree with each other the bible is like this debate about what god is like and sometimes the bible would say really radical things like when you kill the man and you take his wife as your slave bride you have to let her grieve and if you don't like her and you divorce her then you just have to set her you have to set her free now we're like that's really brutal but before the rule was if you take a woman from a fallen person you can do whatever you want immediately if you don't like her just cut her throat see what i mean so there's if we read it in a modern lens it's terrible if we were in a historic lens it was progress now to modern gender roles what we understand today scientifically is there are two bell curves of genetic potential we call male and female and because they're bell curves a huge part of the population an overwhelming majority of the population exists in a set where male and female never intersect biologically but a minority of the population exists in a set where male and female overlap to the point of ambiguity at a biological level we as a society look at tall women and judge them immediately if you're six foot taller or taller and a woman people are like whoa that's weird either i'm not interested or i'm real interested and either way i've reduced you to a number of inches the top of your head is from the ground because you deviate from the data set this is a natural thing for human brains to do by the way it's also natural to steal your neighbor's food if they're not looking i'm not defending the behavior i'm saying it's something to be aware of so then if we look emotionally and in terms of identity because these are complicated sets these overlapping bell curves they're made of many different data points and we can't actually plot them on a single line we need like a multi-dimensional bell curve that you can only process in software and because of that what denotes male and female for many people is messy and we've had a really clear historical precedent for a while we killed those babies and then once we had the technology we made an arbitrary decision at birth and created a non-elective surgery that put people down the road to a gender identity and sometimes we were wrong so we didn't see testicles because they were internal but we remove the penis and then the little girl starts to grow chest hair and big muscles in a deep voice when we look at people who don't seem to be biologically ambiguous but feel that their gender identity doesn't match what is on the outside they often have brain structures that are similar in arrangement and shape to people of the gender they identify with the animal kingdom doesn't have gender identities and doesn't have sexual orientations most mammals their orientation is this seek genital stimulation i'm it's not ambiguous i can remember when i first started learning about this i was told in sunday school in my middle school years that there was no animal on the earth that engaged in same-sex mating behavior scientists are like i'd like a word with you we have footage there may not be a species of mammal that does not engage to some degree in same-sex sexual behaviors um gender identities i was a gender i mean i'm the biggest gorilla i mate with who i want end of story i'm not the biggest gorilla i want to become the biggest gorilla right you see what i'm saying so when we add language as beautiful as it is sometimes it mucks it up and i think we do an incredible disservice taking a modernist interpretation of ancient literature beautiful and inspiring and about god and use it to make scientific decisions for how people should be described often against their will and often to great harm and frankly can we talk about people like me who comfortably identify as one gender or the other for a second gender roles still hurt i am a deep voiced pretty comfortably masculine person who cries a lot and hates football and the fact that i didn't like football got me beat up a lot and in fact when i was in middle school uh boys called me queer a lot because i didn't like football and would make jokes about how i obviously wanted to fellate them because i didn't like football or i was like say wait you like to watch men in tight spandex pants mount each other sorry a little little pain there to this day but so the pressure of gender norms for me i was told as bad as i need to be a strong head of household and i was like i just want somebody to talk to at night you know what i mean like when i have a bad day at work i'd like someone to be there and my wife was told that she's supposed to be like a submissive like a submissive support in the home if you've met my wife that's hilarious it turns out my wife and i took a test and on this scientifically valid but based on a gender binary assessment i score 70 out of 100 feminine and a 40 out of 100 masculine and she scores exactly the opposite and our life is actually better if i kind of just let her run some things because i don't want to and she really wants to and i remember this was before i became an atheist i was still a southern baptist deacon and like some of my baptist sons like chastise me that let my wife wear the pants so even in more comfortable generosity vacations taking that text reading with the wrong lens and making it prescriptive to modern society i don't think paul would go for it i think paul would say why are you making gentiles follow the torah yeah um i was impressed too um the bible is a book that lets us experience the solidarity of knowing other people struggle just as we do to know love and serve god that's what it's for and the best way to do that is to learn as much as you can about the historical context and not turn it into a cudgel you beat over people's heads because yeah paul would like a word with you my name is joy hey joy thank you for coming to california um so i'm a recovering southern baptist and also a nine on the na gram so we have a few things in common um i grew up in a fundamental conservative southern baptist christian home and my dad was a pastor he still is and i was raised to follow facts not emotions and skepticism was a huge major theme in my home so my whole family voted it's amazing like fundamentalist skeptics yeah um so uh my whole family voted for trump and i've heard you talk a lot about the power of storytelling and its ability to reach people of opposite beliefs as well as the importance of not setting off the brains amygdala so in speaking with my family members or other fundamental christians who probably voted for trump how do i speak to them and appeal to their epistemology or not make them feel like they're being emotionally manipulated simply by sharing a real story or does the power of storytelling totally crumble in the context of someone who is terrified of being emotionally manipulated that is the right question on the right day okay we have a real problem neurocognitively right now in america the best actions we can take to make traditionally marginalized people feel acknowledged and safe are these same actions that galvanize conservatives against that movement just i'm just i'm just being real a second do i want to play a game of which one is more important this is tough here's i'm in a state of reflection right now this is going to be an in-progress answer i realized uh early in the morning on november the 9th that donald trump knows a lot more about human behavior than i do that may be an intuitive knowledge but you don't upset the consensus of global intellectuals comfortably without knowing something that everyone else has missed so right now there's this incredible autopsy going on to figure out what we missed um and a lot of people have different ideas you know bernie he's out there talking michael moore's out there talking everybody's talking um here's what i'm focused on right now to the people who are until trump proves otherwise rightly afraid i will provide comfort i will provide solidarity if uh the word goes out that muslims have to register i'm registering day one i will do whatever it takes if uh if i hear there's a protest happening in my city i will go stand silently in between people of color and lgbt advocates and police officers because it's uh it's bigger news if i get hit in the face especially if i in that moment strategically employ my whiteness by being quiet and compliant if i stand there quiet and compliant and observing and a police officer strikes me on his way to an african-american no one can say well he was rioting and then my face getting hit becomes an act of emotional manipulation for religious conservatives which i will exploit ruthlessly right after deleting this episode of the podcast uh and if you think i'm kidding i will delete this episode of the podcast i would ask you to all go on your computers and delete it as well now with my friends and family and let's be real the overwhelming majority of my blood relatives voted for donald trump my language to them has consisted of this congratulations you were right and i was wrong my family lives in a place called madison county in florida it is a rural agricultural community they work long hours with their hands and they feel completely forgotten and neglected by urban elite globalists like me i've got to hear they're hurt because here's the thing human brains are running software they did not write so my family has been told since the beginning of the jim crow era that the people who are responsible for their loss are black people and immigrants before that it was the irish and the italians now i'm irish so for a while we were the irish but the irish made a deal when the word white was invented that if you become white you're not like the negro anymore if we don't build a coalition around the shared economic need of marginalized people of color and low-income whites the wealthy and the elite will continue to pit us against each other for their gain using social issues so the first step of that mainly for white people is to step across the aisle and hear those stories to let them express their pain and their anger with us as a safe space and once i have done that over and over probably to significant emotional exhaustion on my part because inevitably part of that narrative will include a word like welfare queens but the first time i hear it i'm not going to say anything i'm going to make this time all about them and as i've built trust and as i've rebuilt a relationship i had before i became a hollywood atheist liberal i live in tallahassee oh my gosh then i will start to tell them stories of some of my other friends the hard work is it doesn't happen via facebook posts or tweets facebook posts and tweets are important i like i like to tweet because i have like somehow like tens of thousands of followers now and i want people of color to know that there are white people out there who will lay down our lives for social and economic equality and justice i want that to be a thing that's known i'm not going to be quiet about that but when it comes to reaching across the aisle that way to my poor rural white family that is in person work and it's kingdom building i have been too guilty for too long of going along with everybody else and making fun of poor southern whites you know why because on some level i'm ashamed of my own identity i spent 10 years i was a kid trying to erase my southern accent because i wanted people to believe i was intelligent because to me the south represented ignorance and racism and the south is racist but it is more than that we oversimplify people with labels and that's led to 2016. so our challenge and sorry for my friends of color i speak now to my white friends how are we truly agents of justice how do we avoid either leaving our families behind or on the other hand becoming the white moderate martin luther king said was worse than the kkk it's not easy work but i think it's the gospel thank you [Applause] so this is a much lighter question um i i'm from san diego so i drove up here tonight and on the way here i had a question that came up uh because i sat in a lot of traffic and a lot of things and i was wondering what you know about the science of road rage because i i am a lot i am a generally a calm person and i say things in my car that would be very inappropriate to stay in a church and i find myself on the way up here doing that and i'm generally a pretty reasonable person so what do you know about the science of road rage okay this is an amazing question you don't have one brain you have dozens of structures composed of hundreds of substructures that work together to create your behavior and by work together i mean fight voraciously okay your brain is engaged in an act of consensus building through conflict that would put any congress to shame this is why we feel conflicted this is why we feel cognitive dissonance this is why we want to go down a size in our pants and have a doughnut these are different parts of the brain trying to divide our behavior toward different ends by the way in most people the doughnut brain is dominant you're like what are you talking about i'm thin i don't eat donuts how's your 401k you saving for retirement well it got real quiet so one of the most powerful structures in your brain is the amygdala responsible for fear and anger it has a direct red line to your basal ganglia right on the brain stem and if the two of them decide there's danger your president is the prefrontal cortex and they take the president they grab him by the scruff of his shiny jacket and they put him under a desk and they take over now what we found is nothing brings out the hurting behavior of human beings like lines and traffic what do you do when someone cuts in the queue [Music] or must be nice [ \_\_ ] right like the passive aggressive so someone your your brain is constantly assessing where your relative position of rank is and when someone cuts you off in traffic the amygdala goes danger and then it goes it's not flight i can win this it's fights you didn't make that decision consciously how's your amygdala later your prefrontal cortex comes back out from under the desk and goes my call i did that my choice i chose that why'd i choose that i don't know but i chose it because if i don't the illusion of my conscious the illusion of my consciousness falls apart if i don't make all the decisions i'm not in control it's frightening that's the why of road rage bonus answer how to have road rage less often if you drive with me i never have road rage i don't now i drive like a grandmother but i don't have road rage because i practice mindfulness i'm always watching my cognitive processes which over time influences me to use more neocortical thinking bad news that part of the brain is slower i'm a bad driver i'm incredibly mindful and thoughtful and i almost rear-end people all the time and i go sorry whereas my wife going 92 miles an hour holding up a cup of coffee in one hand and a single finger on the other glides effortlessly through traffic using primarily her limbic system it's a matter of choice um now you would like to do both you would like to drive as good as my wife and as mindfully as me no problem believe in a loving god and meditate on that god six times a week and within a couple years your amygdala will be less responsive [Music] hi my name is ashley and this is similar to the question that was asked about the he she forgot i heard a little bit of the maybe similar situation okay um i'm an attachment-based marriage and family therapist okay and i view growth through the lens of attuned relationships which should occur in a perfect world in the caregiving relationship so mother child fathered child but it often goes awry and so as a therapist i work to repair that through a secure attachment with me through attunement and validation of experience or i do that for the couple like within the couple relationship so my question is related to attachment in god what is your understanding of god as an attachment figure oh wow yeah there's some spin on that fastball um i don't even know that's a real sports thing i just i know i think spin is a bowling thing isn't it i got it no that was a real thing man serendipity okay um we were at wrigley stadium field wrigley field when the cubs won the playoffs and i will say it almost made me a sports person not quite but man where there's some highly aroused apes running around and just incredible excitement just like the cubs so we understand neurologically speaking that god is less associated with idea and language and more associated with feelings and experience people who don't have a felt experience of god have very difficult times fostering spiritual experiences or spiritual practices so they need some footing some toe hold linguistically to then form a bond with an idea that creates a faith in their brain and research has shown us that at different stages of neurological development the toehold may look different like for very young children god has to have a face so if you take the most unitarian universalist kid in the world and they're three and you say draw god god's gonna have a face when they're five god's not gonna have a face god's gonna have like a throne and a crown and a robe and it doesn't matter what their parent said their brain has to latch on to something now oddly enough oxford found that one of the innate biases that leads to beliefs about god is when we're very small children we don't have a separate identity from our mother but we get a little bit older and we form a separate identity which is kind of freaky at first and as soon as we realize that mom is someone else we assume mom is all knowing universally among human infants and then when we realize that mom is no longer all knowing if we are given the suggestion that there's an unseen agent who is all-knowing that creates a permanent toehold in the brain so if you take children of atheists and at the right point in their development tell them that there's an unseen agent in the room that will watch their actions they believe you as we progress that toe hold for god gets increasingly advanced when you ask people to draw god god becomes increasingly abstract mostly unless you're evangelical this is true evangelicals typically if you ask them to draw god will use imagery appropriate for an 11 to 13 year old they'll start to use specific religious imagery like a cross maybe a heart with a cross but for people who are grazed in non-fundamentalist theological traditions when you get people in their 20s and 30s and 50s people draw spirals or light or a mirror or refuse to draw anything because god gets increasingly developed in the brain all this is predicated on a healthy attachment to the original model because if you introduce some trauma with their faith a religious authority or a parent hurt them using faith or they grew up in a culture that was hostile to theistic belief when you ask people to draw god they make mere images of other people's images of god only now they are negative so god is on a throne with his foot on people or god is a heart that's broken or in the case of many atheists god is a face with the words not real under it this experiment has been done hundreds of times i've done it in rooms like this before and i don't tell people that ahead of time and i start talking but before i see the drawings i go through and talk about drawings you don't see people look at their paper like it's real fun because they just kind of assess their neurological development but it's all predicated the way god develops is based on how you're able to attach to an idea and that was reinforced in health or unhealth by your community or your society and this is the interplay but it's absolutely a sense of detachment or attachment and the problem with that sense of attachment is um rational inquiry and skepticism uh act as a dissolving force so if you analyze god over and over and over and question what god is you bias your brain away from that attached experience and push god back towards a now which is not a i'm not judging that activity i'm just telling you what happens this is also true by the way and you can tell me if i'm wrong here but i think i think i'll do a decent job here this is also true for relationships if you have a sense of attachment like secure attach with another person and you begin to question that and move towards an anxious attack if your primary means of trying to return to a secure attach is through an intellectual or excuse me a cognitive defense mechanism called intellectualization you can begin to rationally and analytically dissolve your sense of attachment to the person and then suddenly say i just don't feel in love anymore so the process by which in this model in this neurological theory god is formed is remarkably similar to the way we form attachment bonds with other people the amazing thing about god is if you believe in god god's always present god doesn't judge you and god loves you which is why many studies show people who join a church that they feel like they belong in and feel like god loves them have a shift in happiness that is very similar to what you would see in someone going from the bottom quartile to the top quartile of income so i think you're dead on attachment theory might be one of the best ways to describe what neuroscience is revealing and how we believe in god so this is going to be more or less a follow-up to the question we got earlier about how to like talk to other people um who have different ideas than us so there's this book this ancient book that a lot of people read and towards the end of it it tells the story of this man first name jesus last name christ and at one point he says this thing at least this is what we have recorded he says you have heard it said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth but i say to you do not resist an evil person but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek turn the other also and if anyone sues you for your coat give them your cloak as well and if anyone forces you to go one mile go also another in church i've only ever really heard these things talked about in shallow ways i read this book by shane claiborne and he puts these statements into the context of their ancient jewish culture and it makes it all the more powerful in ancient jewish culture you didn't hit people with your left hand the left hand was reserved for unseemly acts like wiping your butt um so you didn't hit people god's holy creation with your poop hand so when jesus says right cheek he's talking about being backhanded by someone hitting someone like that is something you would do in this culture to show that you were superior to them it's the kind of thing that would happen to a servant or a slave you would only hit someone with an open hand or closed fist if you considered them equal to you so when jesus says turn the other cheek he's saying force them to realize that what they are doing is defiling god's sacred creation or recognize you as an equal force them to see your humanity in the same way nakedness was shameful for those who looked upon it because they could do something about it i'm not for the person who is naked so the only reason someone is going to sue you for your coat is because you have literally nothing else so here jesus is saying confront them with their greed give them all your clothes and shame them with your nakedness and everyone else who allowed it to happen because they could have stopped it or they could have clothed you forced them to see your humanity and romans or similarly romans during this time could force citizens under their occupation to carry their gear for a mile so when jesus is saying you know go an extra mile it was strictly prohibited for them to carry it any farther than that so jesus is saying put this roman soldier in this incredibly awkward situation where they are now in danger of punishment themselves or they have to chase you for your gear and this sounds good and beautiful and holy but in light of this election in light of what we are just now witnessing that people feel they have the license to do how do we do that work how do my fellow women turn the other cheek to people who made the hashtag repeal the 19th trending how do we do this with men who think our bodies do not belong to us how do people of color strip naked to expose the racism of people who are offended by the declaration that black lives matter how do lgbtq people walk an extra mile with people who consider them an abomination how do we build bridges with people who do not believe in our humanity especially when all i feel is rage and fear and grief and i'm not alone in that because this is work that has to be done but how do we do it yeah that's we can clap for a question uh because you know spoiler or that question is going to be way better than any answer i have uh let's start with an acknowledgement of systemic dynamics i am incredibly reticent to prescribe actions or responses to people who are less historically privileged than i am i don't think i'm reticent i think i won't do it as much as as i can i view my work as offering solidarity and becoming an accomplice so i try to get my cues on women's liberation from women and scholars and the movement for black lives from leaders in that movement and i've learned to do that more and more not by bugging them on twitter but by learning about the organizations finding the scholars reading the books myself and not relying on oppressed people to spoon feed me insights and then what do i do with that work i put it on a podcast that a lot of other straight white men listen to now you can look around you can see that this show draws a pretty diverse audience but i think that's mainly because i work so hard at making it a safe space some things i've i've observed turning the other cheek had a real power at the dawn of television when news cameras captured men on horseback with batons striking black americans just for crossing a bridge and they saw that brutality with their own eyes in black and white they became aware of a system they'd never seen before and i mean don't tell me protest doesn't work because if you do you're erasing selma alabama but does that mean like i'm going to prescribe to people of color that they should place themselves in positions where they fall victim to least brutality no i'm not it does mean if i see it with my own eyes i'm going to intervene and record i scan every car with a police car behind it i see when i travel and if the occupant of the car is black i pull over and i pull out my cell phone and i hit record and i wait i don't have the spiritual sophistication to put it in jesus language i have to punt to science for people whose intent is good who ultimately believe they're good people call them out on it give them the opportunity to be tell them your experience and if they are not abusive do so in a way where you avoid arousing their amygdala because it makes them more neurologically receptive to learn but if the intent is abuse if the intent is oppression i don't know i'm a much bigger fan of the block button i'm a much bigger fan of restraining orders i just know for sure i'm not jesus because i'm tired of seeing people's cheeks get struck in the first place and i can't even to answer a question create the emotional distance how hard is it to not hit someone with a baton at a traffic stop how hard is it to not shoot on our men looking after mental health patients how hard is it to respect a woman's body autonomy i saw a man make a hat that said grab her by the brain and why do you have to grab her in the first place the only thing i've got in me right now is paul and some words of jesus too i guess but i'm more in the weep with those who weep face and mourn with those who mourn and lately sometimes i feel a lot more resonance with i come not to bring peace but a sword and i've come to turn brother against brother because i can't stomach more of this i can't for those who are listen we'll listen i'm going to be an agent of love and peace but my whole life i believed a lie and that lie was anger has no place in love i grew up in a culture that told me you cannot ever get angry it's a sin and that belief creates a beautiful nice society full of oppression where if you stand up for your rights and you make a stink and you say god damn it get your boot off my neck you're sinning because you're making a fuss but is it loving to call for order when people are dying is it loving to ask people to be civil when 20 percent of our country is afraid to walk down the street with a police officer i'd turn my other cheek to reveal the brutality of the system but i can no longer idly stand by and watch a woman or a gay man or a black woman be assaulted by an individual or an individual who represents the system that i could stand by and watch the same happen to my own daughter we have got to build a justice system where violence is held accountable and this must include violence perpetuated by police officers and this must include sexual assault it cannot be okay or normalized or locker room talk to invade another person's body autonomy now how do we live that out i don't know i'm listening i'm listening i really am and if you would have asked me that three years ago i would have given some speech about the brilliance of non-violent resistance in the way it reveals brutality but that sure is easy for me to say as a man who knows all i have to do to get to a security checkpoint is smile and politely nod and the illusion has been ripped from my eyes that anyone else feels the same by the way the word on the other crosses next to jesus translated bandit in the bible and we say he hung next to thieves some religious scholars believe that a much better and more accurate translation of that word would be zealot because the cross was only used for acts of treason against the state and the king of the jews was hung next to zealots who wanted to see what jerusalem free from roman occupation jesus represents a movement that stands in opposition to state violence perpetuated against marginalized people and we cannot ever say we are agents of the gospel if we're going to spend our whole lives living as agents of rome we can talk about what the work is but we've waited too long to get started if i have to renounce my roman citizenship to get it done so be it paul tried to have dual citizenship but was ultimately jailed and executed the state does not like that kind of resistance but i can no longer read the gospel and believe that my culture is a metaphor for israel when it's a metaphor for rome so yeah so the end of the question i don't know what to tell women and people of color other than i am with you to the very end of my life but i as a roman centurion will turn the other cheek because i can so you thought you came here to see me and what actually happened is i came here to see you and you came here to meet each other because a common thread among people who follow this work is a resolute belief that it's just me i'm alone so here's what we're going to do now uh we're going to end this podcast and i'm going to walk out to the lobby where i'd be happy to stay around and talk to absolutely anyone who wants to talk to me as long as that takes but what i would also encourage you to do before you leave is get to know your neighbor because as we do this work of living the gospel on roman soil we're going to need friends and neighbors and allies and if you take one thing away tonight in glendale california you are not alone thank you for being my friends good night