ASM187 LIVE at Wild Goose

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coming to you live from the wild goose festival it's ask science mike [Applause] he's live answers 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 faith in life [Music] if you could reach into any science fiction universe you want and pull one piece of tech into 2019 what would it be and why and secondly if you could pick one person in your life to be your patronus who would it be [Applause] [Music] uh if i could pick any tech to make real it would be um the replicators from the star trek next generation universe [Applause] because maybe if our species had definitive proof that life isn't a zero-sum game we'd stop being such cool [ \_\_ ] as each other no question by the way just so we're clear this is real there's actually enough food on the planet for everybody right now it's already there we basically have replicators so yeah i'd be replicators did you say person to be my patronus what's a patronus oh my god are you telling me someone listens to a science mic and doesn't know patronus i'm not shaming you i'm just surprised a patronus is part of a spell in the harry potter universe it is a magical temporary entity that manifests positive emotional energy and primary use is repelling dementors which are emotionally vampiric supernatural entities so typically a patronus is an animal i like to talk about patronuses because white people like to say spirit animal and that's appropriation and pretty [ \_\_ ] up to native communities if you're a white person don't talk about your spirit animal unless it's literally in the context of like a native american person is bringing you into a ritual because you have that deeper relationship otherwise talk about your patronus because that is the whitest thing in the world so uh but now we're doing a little twist where a patronus is my person in my life it would be my daughter macy without question because she has the zeal for life and the unshakable confidence that she is a dear wonderful and beautiful person and my goal for the last few years has been to be more like macy [Applause] hello beloved hey kevin wait it's fine um so you and me we've talked a lot about how we're taking care of ourselves these days because life is hard and you know mental health all the [ \_\_ ] etc what are you what are you doing right now for self-care uh what's your what are your practices if you have any okay yeah that's a really good one i've only had a couple episodes since the hospital um i recently was in the hospital a little heart disease action i've got something called pericarditis it's an inflammation around the membranes of my heart i have very clear instructions from a cardiologist that if something causes me chest pain stop immediately we started talking a lot about that dear and beautiful human rachael held evans in the last session and i realized oh the pericarditis isn't gone um so one of the things i'm doing is paying attention to my body and not pushing through pain yeah kevin where'd you go go good i'm like i'm like trying to talk to you and super no it's okay you said i'm not found you face blindness okay um so i'm listening my body i'm responding the other thing i'm doing is resting since i left the ad world to become a podcaster i never stop working ever ever i'll be like yeah i'm gonna take it real easy this weekend i'm only gonna like record for four hours on sunday and uh a medical professional looked at pictures of my heart and said hey you're going to die unless you rest and i don't mean eventually i mean a couple months right we you have severe enough inflammation that's actually restricting the oxygen supply to your heart and we're getting cardiac stress hormones in your blood results okay so i've been resting but my cardiologist is very smart and she said you strike me as a workaholic so if i tell you to rest you're going to do that for about 20 minutes and then you're going to realize that you can't regulate your feelings resting you're going to need work to escape into she says so i'm going to give you some rest projects number one plant a vegetable garden and by plant i mean be around while your family plants a vegetable garden and then your task is to keep it watered i'm autistic it takes a lot of cpu cycles every day to be like is it time to water is it time to water is it time to water that's one number two is uh i've been bird watching i thought that'd be a huge it might be like yes it turns out it's like kind of obscure hobby for people in their 40s but i try to be ahead of the curve like i honestly think people in their 80s just like know life they just are not performative ever there's like my feet hurt i wear comfortable shoes [ \_\_ ] you i'm hungry for dinner at 4 45 i eat them then i go to bed because who am i trying to impress [ \_\_ ] you so um by the way is there anything more beautiful than women getting old enough to just go like yeah i'm just done with the patriarchy like i'm literally just done uh so i watch birds which for me meant like an unfathomable amount of research into local indigenous and invasive southern california bird species placing the feeders in a way that maximized the benefits to local species while not supporting invasive species and then creating mixtures and different ratios of bird seed to attract the birds i wanted to see because my goal was like pokemon to catch them all so i've had every single specie native species of bird in the san gabriel valley visit my feeders already i log them i i spend hours a day every day looking out my window with the birds i set up a bird fountain with a drip they love it the birds know me so well now that when i walk outside most of them don't fly away anymore and i was out watering my garden which is my other favorite thing and my favorite dove i have a favorite dove who i can recognize to be clear i'm face blind and can't recognize my friends if they show up in the wrong context but i know this dove really well so the dove came and like landed right here which is getting pretty normal because they know like after i put the seed out the little birds come they knock the seed on the ground then the doves eat from the ground but i saw it i was watering that way and i didn't want to wet the dove and scare it so i turned the hose this way and started to spray another plant at which point the dove hopped down and hopped into the water stream but i being a loving and sensitive person said this water stream is too intense for this dust foliage so i switched my handheld sprayer to mister and then missed it a dove for like 20 minutes sex is great but have you ever missed a dove that is like the most fabulous tinder gentile gentile no gentle act tenderness my friends i am killing the patriarchy single-handedly i wash doves by hand [Applause] [Music] hi hi um love your work and um really enjoyed your episode on typology because i'm a fellow enneagram 9. and so i was just listening to your last session and as you were talking about some of the things you've been working through over these past couple years i was curious if the enneagram has played a role in some of the things you're uncovering or if it's helped you to to recognize some of these things that have played a part in the unravelings and the the challenges as i was listening to in the last session some of the things you were saying were resonating with me as as a nine like not yeah you know putting everybody else first and and saying no no go fund me everyone else not me i don't i don't exist that's how i always frame it as like i don't exist yeah so i was just curious if that has played a role in anything in the last couple years i have such a mixed relationship with the enneagram i think it's like helpful i think it's the new like purpose-driven life for progressive post-evangelicals right like it's just we're like well we don't have systematic theology anymore what if i could reduce myself to a number would that be restrictive enough and i've pondered it a lot right like why what is it with white people in the enneagram what in the world my like and i hated it first but i didn't hate it because it's a white person thing i was like there's no clinical evidence to support the validity of the enneagram for diagnosing or treating middle conditions but we grew up in the church and the church was really restrictive and painfully so as we grew but god it gave us some boundaries and i think the church acted as like a leg brace for a lot of us and it like restricted our movement but we also couldn't stand without it so we all took off our leg braces and what do we do now i continue to lie on the stage exclusively for comedic effect uh sometimes the last miss so i think what the enneagram can be in a bad way is a new way to like restrict yourself and be like there we go good okay and i think what that looks like is every person you meet like hi i'm a seven what number are you and that's like a bypass for relational intimacy and hearing stories and learning about people on the other hand lady graham keeps freaking me out because it's like a good predictor of my behaviors so i have this like me like is it [ \_\_ ] is it great where i'm at with the enneagram is like in conjunction with people who've had like a lot of training in the enneagram i really enjoy using it for a tool of personal exploration i don't like living by numbers so when the enneagram says you have a tendency to ignore yourself my goal is to acknowledge that and internalize it so much that i can literally forget the enneagram exists again and not like just live in that systematic number based model and [Music] i'm also really careful to not be like oh she's totally a four that's the thing that concerns me more than when we limit our experiences when we like like haven't we learned post-christians and progressive christians that locking people in categorical boxes is oppression yet that also is true if you make someone a four and everything they do is so four that you just can't even right now so like i go on topology i love topology i you know i've got a friend annie diamond who like whenever she does the in your grandma i'm like yes my friend mickey is like studying the engram like i can't wait because she's gonna be the best at it ever so but in the last few the last year for me has been like what a good therapeutic practices look like for me to improve my health so that i last longer and can engage more productively in fighting the near universal marginalization and oppression of people based on category and the enneagram has been the spice and not the soup in that journey [Music] hey mike my name is parker and my question is do you have any advice for college students college age students in 2019 uh no i don't no no i'm kidding i'm kidding context i'm a data driven person what do i know about college age people today they don't doubt climate change and they're working to fight it regardless of their faith or political orientation they accept universal human equality as a baseline expectation they're the first wave of the gen z who's like gender and orientation labels the [ \_\_ ] is that like my whole platform like started as like hey what if millennials don't suck like what if it's actually boomers that suck and what if it's like gen x apathy as a response to boomers that was a problem and maybe like my platform starts like millennials like you're fine i actually think you're great so college-age students is quite the opposite it's like what do you want us to do my goal is to get out of the way as fast as humanly possible of the generation who will have to deal with the ecological debt in this world team aoc oh my god like can we can we constitutionally switch the requirement for president so that no one over the age of 35 can be president [Applause] i am 41 years old for a significant period of my life i was an active participant in the oppression and marginalization of queer people that's all there is to it and i can try to do better now and boy do i try but none of that erases the fact of how most of my life was spent i am a natural-born consumer oh my god amazon prime so even though i understand like the significant environmental cost of amazon prime i understand the total destruction of the local label labor economy of amazon prime i still get prime now packages every day because i don't want to drive the store like some kind of animal i was raised in a generation where all colors of the rainbow are equal we are in a post-racial utopia called america and i love everybody as long as they act as white as i do um so so i do have a advice for people your age don't listen to a word anyone my age or older says unless those words come from a place of admitting the fault and harm we have caused and are born out of a desire to encourage and empower you as may be the last best hope to rescue human life on this planet so hi my name is holly and i eloped with my wife in march and our wedding has thank you and um our wedding hashtag was hashtag when quant meets qual um which means quantitative or qualitative for people who aren't nerds um so literal mist in my eyes from to explain it to half of the people that came to our like wedding reception in july um so my question is i am i'm i love jesus i love jesus so much and i i love worship music not the like jesus is my boyfriend worship music but like the john mark mcmillan i'm screaming i'm naked like show yourself kind of music and i love like the ecstatic part of it and i'm contemplative and she really likes siddharta but she's not buddhist and she's contemplative but she is amazing and has dug into christian philosophy for my sake because she wants to honor my god and myself so my question for you is i know in your book finding god in the waves you talk about how your wife really struggled with it uh with like finding out that you want a christian anymore and it took her a while and i she seemed to stay like pretty like traditional longer than you did so how did she what was the best way she loved you through finding your own spiritual path without pressuring you to conform to hers like how what was the best way she loved and respected your own journey that is a great question wow i mean that was really hard my wife is the best person i know and she has like all this shame and insecurity because she's like a woman who grew up in the evangelical church and uh and she's plus size so she has like tons and tons and tons of body shame and i'm like how can you have body shame i have no body shame and i'm like more plus size than you oh wait i'm a dude i mean it's like literally a tv trope is like fat comedian character with like very thin beautiful stereotypically presented woman because like i'm not judged on my appearance but she is so it's hard for me to separate like the crisis she felt with my faith transition from the fact that that shift in my epistemological and theological orientation immediately started making me question a lot of social assumptions in our community um and i think the faith stuff was easier for her than like me like hey what if radical feminism is the thing those were like really hard years in our marriage she she did pressure me to like return to faith all the way up until she lost hers and now the shoe is so on the other foot i'm like hey ginny you want to try church this week pass do you want to pray with the girls pass my wife does the same thing yeah it's like over like no interest so the thing ginny did best was never question was never attach the continuation of our relationship to anything i believed like there was a just a subtext we know you go where you're going to go and it stresses me all out and i'm pretty pissed off frankly but that doesn't mean i'm i'm not putting strings on our relationship and she committed to despite incredible mutual discomfort continuing to have a conversation about where we're at and where we were going to talk about the fear she felt we both felt of like if anyone figures out what i believe it's going to be torches and pitchfork time because like you read the book deacon sunday school teacher hey what if god's not real it's just like not a good combo in the evangelical church but it was her like not just resolved to be committed to me but her resolve to communicate that she was committed to me which is what i see most different in all the emails i get from people in internet land who are like my husband my wife my partner said if i don't get a hold of this it's over and uh i'm not the guy who like sets the framework for other people's relationships but that's a hard degree of separation to ever cross again like if you can't be blank we can't be at all i think there's certainly a space for that if you can't respect my human dignity we can't be i think that's great if you can't be with me without emotionally physically verbally abusing me we can't be i think that's great but you know you voted for a democrat candidate so we can't be i mean that's just worship maybe that one just needs to sail anyway um but i think if relationships are really hard and i've i've kind of done with like marriage as an institution i don't even think of it that way what works for me now is like jenny and i have an ongoing negotiated consensus of what the two of us look like and we just talk about it and we don't make assumptions of like well we said this thing on an altar in a church we don't go to anymore 20 years ago so those are the terms right no we talk it out all the time and for us that's led to like jenny and i have never been closer despite i don't think we've agreed fundamentally on what reality is for the last six years just who gives a [ \_\_ ] right like what what's the juice in relationship it is like we agree on the nature and character of god or rochambeau for bedtime with the kids tonight like where's the juice and i think the juice is rochambeau i think the juice is like me saying like for the love of god jenny go home and rest in a bed don't sleep in the chair in the hospital i'll be okay until tomorrow um this like mutual it's not for everybody i just i don't have any question about who i'm going out with friday night and that's the juice for me and i think that's the juice for her and that works for us may or may not work for anybody else okay we break away just for a second from that live recording of wild goose back to my studio in los angeles just to tell you about kiwi co kiwi co is a sponsor of ask science mike and they're a really amazing company that makes learning products for children they do this in the form of these crates that you get in the mail that are centered around learning or about science technology engineering arts and math both of my kids who are 11 excuse me now 12 and 14 love them but they also make great products for kids of all ages i really enjoy the pictures that listeners send me of their children building kiwi crates and as a listener of ask science mike you can get a crate completely for free by going to kiwico.com science again that's kiwico. science where you can learn more and get a crate for your kids completely free hey my name is caitlin and my question is so i have a family member who is on the spectrum and they have co-occurring things going on too and i was just wondering they're kind of coming into the career world now and school is not really an option for them so i know school wasn't really you were like nah not for me um so i was just wondering if there's anything that i could that maybe you think someone should have done for you or something i could do for that person to support them in this new stage and that might be helpful okay thank you that is a really i'm still so scared to talk about issues around autism because i don't think it's been a full year that i've been diagnosed with autism so i'm learning as i learn i'm starting to like refactor a lot of life experiences like oh that's what happened i know that statistically autistic people are much less likely to be able to hold down a job and much less likely to hold down a romantic relationship it's it's much much less and i'm so aware of the ways in which i got to cheat one evangelical patriarchy like as long as i fit like a very predescribed prescriptive role of who i was i was a good husband so not oh boy did i study like i read a bible all the time are you the best biblical husband in the history of biblical husbands and then two like my particular challenges also enable like some pretty incredible strengths i can read a little over 1700 words a minute for non-fiction books and i remember most of what i read and i'm really good with computers and to be clear when i say really good i mean [ \_\_ ] incredible and uh and i'm good at talking on stage and most people are afraid of public speaking but that part of my brain never wired i've always just been like oh i'm more comfortable like you see me now right when in a few minutes when i'm right here my i'm just gonna be like oh hi yes i'm so glad to see you it's for some reason i'm more comfortable here than like at the dinner table with my family it's because i get to aggregate all your social cues into a single blob which is easier for my super computer brain than one person's feelings and what that means is my disability meant that it was economically advantageous for very large corporations to pay for accommodations because they could take my skill set make hundreds of millions of dollars that's not the normative experience for people on the spectrum so the most valuable thing i've learned in conversation and dialogue with leaders and advocates in the autism community is once you've met an autistic person you've met an autistic person there's no like universal this is what you do for autistic people like any other person you get to know them you look at their unique challenges so what does that look like for me i basically don't text or call people ever including people i'm married to and or a father of it's just not a thing that i do so people who like really want to be in a relationship with me just know like okay i'm the one who texts and he'll respond ish might be better call i actually answer calls which is like i know millennials in gen z so backwards and horrifying that i really don't do text-based communication but i'll talk on the phone it triggers your social anxiety that's what happens when disability meets disability folks we just got to come to some consensus i actually think you're in a better position to know what to do than i am all i do know is that something i've heard from myself and a lot of autistic people is we don't know what we need if i'm left alone um to my own devices at some point i begin to shake and i get very angry and uh it's because i don't think to eat so someone in my life has to say hey now is eating time and now if we eat you're gonna feel better and by the time i get like hangry i i [ \_\_ ] hate eating like but we gotta solve all these problems and what is your pro like i become a different person and i think that's why autistic people so often have relationship challenges because like a lot of people aren't willing to carry somebody else's water but i do know that when autistic people are in relationships often there is no one more loyal or faithful or totally [ \_\_ ] obsessed with another person as my friends who are also on the spectrum but i i hope everything goes well [Applause] hi hi hi i'm a seven what's your number no um uh 12. i am a seventh but uh okay so last year at wild goose i met with a spiritual director and it kind of set me on this like trajectory of uh wanting to live authentically myself and not try to be someone else and so i've been really trying to do that and i realized in conversations with my husband just over the last week or so that i struggle a lot with guilt so it mainly comes in my family relationships with the kids and my husband he says you don't have to um you don't have to cook dinner you hate cooking dinner why are you cooking dinner and i'm like yeah yeah you said that but you're not cooking dinner so i guess i have to and we play i play these games i don't mean to but it happens and i'm or like i i should be the one to do homework with the kids because i'm i guess the mom and i should do that but i hate it it's terrible um and i love my kids but i'm trying i feel like i've i just realized that it's it's because i feel really guilty about that or even just being a wife and i'll do things because that's what i think i should do versus just being like no i want to take the kids in adventures and i want to mow the lawn and i like grilling and it's okay my husband doesn't like grilling or anything like that so we have a lot of gender reversal in our marriage too so i've been thinking a lot about it but i'm just not quite sure how to get you know going with i don't know if it's self-talk but do you have any advice for maybe some steps to take of how to not do that does that make i hope it makes sense yeah it makes total sense and i'm going to lean hard into the like i honor questions by always responding to them even if i feel like i'm the last person who should ever respond to them i have some corollary or experience i hate most of the straight white male masculine experience in presentation i think like what we do is remind ourselves for ease of stacking boxes basically the world wants us to be in boxes and we're all we all participate in that you know what i mean i love like the first step of like a formerly non-even a non-affirming evangelical person they become affirming and then it's like the rush for the gay best friend like they just can't wait to have a gay best friend oh my gosh it's going to be so amazing when i have a gay best friend i'm going to be so cool and have such great social signals and then when they like meet a gay person they're like god you don't even talk with a lisp like what is happening i thought i thought we were going to be like a great sitcom together but you're just like a person we all do it fellow white people anybody love to tell your friends of color about how racist thanksgiving was you're not the only one doing that but we're social primates like scripts help us navigate the complexity of life and so we must have a discipline of crumpling up and throwing away the scripts that's it guess what i hate to take out the trash i hate it that is the one part of patriarchy my wife is all for should i take out the trash but as we have started to renegotiate what our marriage looks like in the context of it you don't have to do that because that's a girl thing and i don't have to do this because it's a boy thing we figured out there's some things like jenny really wants to be in charge of a relationship and i don't great great head of household jenny done right no problem it's actually always been that way now we just name it so there's like there's those great things there's the other thing that's like hey i love to cook meaning you literally set pots on fire i think i'm just going to cook even if such a dinner script thing but then there's things both of us are like pass like the trash so the things that neither of us we want to do we share them the things that both of us want to do we share them and then when you have those wonderful serendipitous moments of like i don't want to do that i do want to do that i do the books she doesn't even want to hear about the bills right she doesn't even want like no don't even brief me like that's super unhealthy you need to know you're being disempowered um like if i died you'd be like what bank do we have literally they're actually like hey the kids need to take some cash they got a school trip and i'm like okay go to the atm she's like i don't know where my debit card is and i don't know my pin number cool be right back just do it on purpose there's no like i don't think there's any special practices have to wake up at every day and be like i am who i am and my life will be what i make it that's it um and then sometimes it won't be you're a woman sometimes people are gonna be like hey actually no you can't do that and that's how you know who to cut out of your life it's just that easy you don't have to play footsie with the patriarchy except at work [ \_\_ ] it's almost like marginalized people can't escape systemic life experiences i have a very odd life experience where i'm like aware of the way people like me present they get like a little bit of not a little bit like a lot of a red carpet rolled out so i just like talk about that on stage and it actually feels like kind of shameful for me to even disclose and admit and then i do that and then people come afterwards and they're like i've never heard a white man talk like that i should never [ \_\_ ] hear that again white men in this room part only the girls clapped jesus i hope it's because you're like oh that's true white men we're our own oppressors that's it we do retreats in ken i'm an allergist called ken that's about taking apart masculinity they're very valuable they're led by a woman as they should be we're our own oppressors but we're everybody else's oppressors so we have to show up and take this [ \_\_ ] apart we have to show up and partner in taking it apart which means taking direction from the people who are actually impacted by the oppression we have to do our work we have to go to therapy so we don't panic when somebody says the word toxic masculinity we have to go to therapy so we don't panic when somebody says the words white supremacy if we can't name it we can't do jack [ \_\_ ] about it but guess what i'm brilliant i am so brilliant oh my god i really am i'm only learning this recently but i'm not the person to talk about and figure out how to take apart white supremacy or patriarchy or heterosexism i'm the guy who should take every bit of social capital out of my account and cash the account until it's gone in submission to and under the leadership of the people whose lives are most impacted by mine and that is the conclusion of our live podcast so i want to thank andrew golucky for pre-production uh brent cradle for management i want to thank greg nordine for sound editing jetbotta for the theme song and all of you for being here thanks for being [Applause] [Music]