ASM130 Ask Science Mike LIVE in London, England

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coming to you live from bloomsbury central baptist church in london england it's ask science mike live he's got answers even though he may not understand he'll talk anyway he got problems he won't stop there but he'll talk and talk and talk until he flew in the face science faith [Music] welcome to ask science mike live the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life this week i'm in london england as part of my tour to support finding god in the waves and paperback available in stores all across the united kingdom and there's a whole lot of people watching me while i do this so i feel weird so let's just get it started so we want to start the show tonight with like a legitimately huge announcement if you've heard of the liturgist gathering that we've been doing all over the united states that's an event where michael gunger and i get together and help people create a space for exploring what spirituality looks like today and getting to know other weirdos who are interested in that i'm excited to announce tonight for the very first time that the liturgist gathering is coming to london october 5th and 6 2018 in this very building go to the yeah that's really big news so uh so you can go to the liturgistgathering.com for tickets which went on sale probably and hopefully about 20 seconds ago uh and if you're listening and you're interested in something closer to now by the time internet land hears this i'll be headed to dublin ireland for the rubicon conference go to we rubicon dot com for more information of course the liturgist gathering in seattle is happening october 27th and 28th of this year november 15th i'll be at the ripple effect conference in loris matt lawrence massachusetts and then february 7th of next year orange california i'm headed there for ask science mike live february 10th at science mike live in cincinnato cincinnati cincinnati ohio i don't need a pronunciation email cincinnati sorry uh february 23rd revive 2018 in san diego and if you've thought about bringing me to your college or uh church or conference or whatever kind of event you're having go ahead and book 2018. it's filling up fast of course if you don't have a copy of my book finding god in the waves it's available in paperback in both the united states and the united kingdom now and in this very building the church house bookshop is in the lobby selling copies if you don't have one internet i'm sure it's available in your neighborhood and uh that's all the announcements so let's do a show [Music] hello i'm lucy um so my dad died about a year ago and um i have a question about grief so i basically found that after he died i would wake up in the morning and feel really weird but not necessarily sad like i'd wake up and just feel a bit weird or a bit grumpy and then after like an hour or so i'd just like be in tears and then i'd be thinking about my dad and so my question is is there something chemically in our bodies that means that grief sort of reacts differently to our emotions like does our body respond differently to our emotions does that make sense it makes perfect sense absolutely first of all thank you for your question second of all i'm really sorry for your loss um that's tough and i i you said about a year so for let's start with like a year to still be grieving for your father is not weird at all that's normal and healthy and wonderful so interestingly enough science tells us something fascinating about grief and that's that grief is a form of separation anxiety so we are social species specifically primates who um have an evolutionary expectation that if we're alone we die that's not especially true in the civilized era with you know grocery stores and tube stations and all the like but if you take away all the trappings of civilization that means including agriculture and clothing a solitary human does not fare all that well in the wild which means we're terrified of being separated from people we're close to this is why breakups are hard right when you when you date someone for a while and suddenly they're out of your life and you're like oh maybe i should text and you have a couple of drinks you're like i should really text them this is separation anxiety trying to resolve itself the tough thing about death it's a separation anxiety that cannot possibly be resolved and so the brain has to deal with that and it takes a long time specifically when you find out a loved one has died your higher brain and your linguistic systems realize that really quick but your emotional brains take much much much longer your intellect and your cognition comes from a bit of brain tissue called the neocortex it's about as thick as a tortilla that you would wrap around a burrito it's wrapped around the outer layer of your brain and the whole rest of the brain which is like kind of brick sized is where your emotional and intuitive processing happens and if you think about that brain it's not necessarily all that different from a dog's brain right so what happens when you leave your dog at home your dog panics and if before you leave you say it's okay rover i'll be back in two hours does that like calm rover and he only freaks out on the 122nd minute no he immediately begins to lament the loss of his beloved pac member in the same way that there are vast swaths of your brain that can't process language or abstract thought so you need to imagine like a mammal sitting inside your human brain who's constantly confused and disoriented about the world so the neocortex processes some information dad is gone and that information gets processed into the emotional brain and becomes a sense of well at first denial and later panic and grief and from that point on the emotional brain only knows one thing something is off and it has to be slowly reconditioned that you know what we're going to survive and your your response to that trauma to that grief is part of what shapes how long that process takes so one of the reasons therapy is effective by talking about things over and over and over and over again we let language and conditioning sink down into the emotional centers of our brain and update them on what's going on and by the way this happens constantly in your life have you ever moved and you move to a new place and you just have a constant sense of anxiety that you don't really know where it's coming from it's because your iguana brain just knows it's in the wrong place it has no idea that you've given the postal service a new address and you've handled all the bills and everything's fine it's just like things are different oh and the other thing is and this is really bad the same neurotransmitters that create sadness and anxiety in your neurons up here create a constipation diarrhea and bloating in the neurons of your intestinal tract so your whole body grieves and mourns this is why when the bible uses imagery of your gut responding and they thought the the ancients thought your gut was the seat of your emotions to some degree it is and like your gut is good at a lot of things but understanding death isn't one of them so yes grief causes tremendous sustained emotional chemical changes in the entire body the brain and the rest and it takes a long time for you to accept beyond your cognition a new normal which is a permanent separation anxiety hello my name's steven uh thank you very much for your work and religious work my question's about artificial intelligence there he is okay i just thought of it now um do you think that a learning robot or a machine that uses artificial intelligence would ever get to a position where it wanted to convert to a religion oh okay and how do you think for example the church or a religious institution would respond to that religious robots let's do this it's hard to answer questions about artificial intelligence because right now we have no idea how ai would anything um we know that when we give ai the ability to do things that humans do the way ai gets there even though we designed it systems is quite alien so no human chess player tries to win chess by memorizing every possible move to some degree intuition plays a role great human chess players you know think dozens of moves ahead great computer chess moves think thousands of moves ahead in fact they play every possible game or nearly um for the next you know 20 moves and uh that's how they're so good at chess when we've given ai the ability to commute com communicate via like chat they start creating their own language that we don't understand so i believe it was facebook had to shut down some chat bots that created their own hidden terminology to communicate outside of the bounds of an experiment that the programmers couldn't keep up with are you creeped out yet there's a great image some people use there's a game you can play right now called paper clips have you heard of this oh my gosh so the idea is we might accidentally destroy humanity by creating a super intelligent ai and asking it to make paper clips and assuming we don't give it the right moral bounds it may decide that the way to make the most paper clips is to destroy all life on the planet and convert the entire earth into a giant paperclip factory so there's a game online you can play right now called paperclips where you take on the role of a hyper-intelligent ai trying to make the most possible paper clips and when you convert every atom into paper clips that's still not the end of the game it turns out there's more you can do to make even more paper clips like exploit an understanding never mind i don't want to spoil it you got to figure it out for yourself i will tell you it took me uh about 12 days to get to uh the death of the universe through paper clips because that's just who i am i mean everybody right um so ai fundamentally views the world differently why so much of how we view the world is based on intuition and social identity which is based on having a limbic system sitting beneath a neocortex and basically having a chaotic bio brain that fights itself for everything that you do and by the way that's where our need for religion comes from there's a set of biases that actually locally the folks at oxford figured out three biases by which human beings come to desire to know god and almost generate a belief in god automatically [Music] so we don't know that a.i would do that well let's assume ai wanted to become religious would artificial intelligence have the same self-conception as sin would it be possible that an a.i never did anything it didn't want to do and so if it thought religion was just that it literally never made a moral transgression because an ai is not battling a bunch of biological impulses right and ai isn't like me an ai isn't tempted to do things it shouldn't i mean every time i'm in public and a woman walks by carrying pizza i cannot look away from the pizza like my wife knows if we're out and we're in a restaurant by the way the honey badger jenny mccarrick right here uh and i do this in a restaurant it's a tray of food and i can't look away like i've lost all control i'll start salivating and these are from the survival systems of my brain there's no reason to think ai would do that that said if a.i could think let's get step out of the scientific and into the numinous and mystical i so love what is my understanding of faith well there's a god and part of that god is christ the cosmic christ which extends an invitation to all of creation into reconciliation and what is reconciliation to move the universe towards peace toward shalom is that invitation universal can any thinking creative thing decide to make a more peaceful world and if a.i was able to decide that justice mattered that peace mattered and moved toward that well i'd call commander data my brother in christ [Music] hi mike i'm hannah and i'm hopefully the most excited person in the room here i'm just going to claim it now i'm going to fangirl i'm pretty excited i don't know i did it's pretty high um my first question which i scrapped but i'll say it anyway was what is this yeah do i need a multi-card okay um what do you think the enneagram of alexander hamilton is and like the you know main cast members angela here eliza peggy et cetera um but that's scraps so what i'd really like to say her full name is and peggy oh yeah sorry sorry um i'd love to hear a bit about your writing process um i'm trying to write a novel um and i guess my questions around how you overcome um the fear of stepping out and putting something of yourself out there and obviously you've already done that and i presume you're doing more of that so just love to hear about your process there oh that's a good question the writing process well step one is to stare at the computer and think i can't do this step two is to get the courage and write a sentence and then look at it and then go pick up three of your favorite books off the shelf throw said books turn off the computer in disgust and go for a walk there's this thing if you want to write i've seen almost universally writers are readers and they have favorite authors and they have people they think writes incredibly well and then they start writing and they're not as good as their favorite authors because they just started writing but because you don't measure up and believe me i almost couldn't write up my book because of rachel held evans and donald miller and all these people who who wrote prose so beautifully tadahasi coats every time i read one of his articles i'm like or between the world and me oh my gosh it still makes me want to not write because that's so clear and concise and emotive and beautiful and i could never do that and it's true but i can do something else so the first thing you have to realize is you will never measure up to the people you admire but the only way to find out what you do is by slogging through the process of writing terribly literally making word poop on the screen for weeks and weeks and weeks so when i was working on this book that i knew i had to write this book i got over the fear of writing mainly because if i didn't write i felt like i was going to explode and the step one i had was to write and i'm not kidding a 39 page outline for what was going in the book 39 page not first chapter outline so i send this outline to a friend of mine who's like a best-selling author and he replies wow that would make an excellent encyclopedia right so then i realized oh to write a book you have to have one central idea that you want to communicate that animates the whole book and then i worked on that for months months and months and months and then i sent it to an agent and be careful with agents they're honest and the agent said [Music] this has a long way to go if it can even get there and i died i was inconsolable my dream was over before it began at this point there is no podcast my like entire work is i work in an ad agency during the day and blog at night you remember blogging that was a thing uh and i sat on it and i sat on it and i lamented and i grieved and then i looked at his notes because he gave me notes and he's been involved in the production of hundreds of books this is my first one and i read and internalized every single note and i started a brand new file and i started over and i incorporated every one of his notes and i emailed him again and i think i surprised him because most people send their first round and they get their first real criticism not from your mom your mom says your book is amazing your best friend says your book is amazing from someone who doesn't know you and when i emailed back and i incorporated every change he recommended he gave me more changes but he emailed me back and this one over again and again and again and again and again until finally i launched a podcast and i got an audience and the last time i sent it my sample chapters i said this is as good a work as i'm capable of and if he doesn't bite on this one i'm just putting an e-book out for the podcast listeners for free but this story is getting out and my agent emailed back and said who's now my agent this is the best book proposal i've ever gotten so if you're not willing to face criticism and internalize it and do the hard work of writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and not taking no for an answer but still listening to what professionalism tell you you're not writing a book you shouldn't write a book don't try to write a book in the meantime the thing i left out was i was working full-time in advertising and getting up in the wee hours of the morning and writing before work and writing during lunch so it's not like i didn't have a full plate we had young children and um the only way to write is to write horribly for a long time until you get good enough to get professionals to pay attention at which point they will take you back to feeling like you write horribly and then eventually this may be a process of months years or decades you will write a mid-list book and go to small venues anywhere you want and then it's the dream right it's so glamorous science mike life is so glamorous yes i got really early this morning and did a press tour with my publisher that actually is quite glamorous uh but then i came here and hooked up the sound system myself and then i came in i host my automate you see what i mean it's about the hustle now fiction's a little different because you have the terrible misfortune of having to write an entire manuscript before you get a publishing deal instead of sample chapters and then having someone take this work that's five years of your entire life and just tear it to shreds and they're just the first hurdle you gotta want it last thing every book has to answer two questions in a world where 100 000 books come out every year why does this book need to be written and number two why are you the person to write it if you can answer those two things which takes a lot of therapy you're probably ready to write a book hello i'm alex um would you say it's possible to be absolutely altruistic [Laughter] we found the philosopher is it possible to absolutely altruistic who cares no hold on that's not dismissive i think we have this thing in the west where we think a lot through an individualistic mindset like the individual actor making individual decisions based on individual motives which means from that framework what do we think a lot about what's someone's intention if someone says something and it hurts your feelings and you say oh that hurt my feelings and they say oh i didn't mean it like that you feel better right because there's a little solidarity it's an accident that's much easier to smooth over than i said that on purpose because i hate you right like i said that on purpose because i hate you has a different intent which affects the impact and that's i think that's a fine paradigm for person-to-person interactions um but if you think about puerto rico right now which has been decimated by a natural disaster i don't care if people donate to puerto rico because they want to look good to people or look good to themselves or it's genuine altruism what i care is about puerto rico gets rebuilt and gets aid from the rest of the world for too long we have put intent above action right maybe this isn't a thing here but in america white people often say and do terrible things with great intention to people of color in the united states i didn't mean it that way you know i just thought your hair looked nice and i wanted to touch it my intention was fine but the impact is a destruction of human life of human dignity and human flourishing so i think you could make like a pretty credible neurological argument that ultimately literally every action we make comes down to a psychological sense of self-approval or seeking approval of others and i think that makes all the sense in the world for a social primate you know what i mean do bees make altruistic decisions it doesn't matter they're designed to keep the hive alive now to the heart of your point maybe i think sometimes people make posturing such a part of their actions that they do end up negating the positive impact of what they do like you know like if if if you feel so moved by your need to seek approval that you fly to puerto rico to help build houses but spend most of the time taking selfies in front of impoverished areas maybe we need a little more pure altruism in your life right but i don't know i've gotten stuck in such pragmatism because and i assume you'll relate to this somewhat because you asked the question i'm just like a nihilist most of the time you know what i mean because i spend so much time taking apart and deconstructing ideas which by the way is super easy to do once you learn how you take any worldview you take any moral philosophy i can help you tear it to pieces and as you sit there going like oh my god everything i know is wrong you might naturally ask okay then what is right and i'd go i don't know i'm a nihilist so that's why i like default to this pragmatism of what truly matters to me is what kind of world we're making together is it a world that is supporting universal human justice and equality which i call shalom in christian language fantastic let's do that and if it's not then i have a problem with your worldview and it's the impact of your worldview on the world hi i'm zoe um so a little bit background to my question i was brought up in like a really evangelical pentecostal church and like my experience of god was like very intensely spiritual like getting drunk in the spirit i don't know it's a phrase though it's quite popular yeah yeah that's exactly it this was kind of like how people would show us that like oh god is real and miracles prophesying was knowledge spiritual battles are all very real and my church is in my family's world this is all i ever knew until i was about 18 went to university learned about structuralism post-structuralism all different world views and kind of went for a bit of faith crisis and no one in this room can relate [Laughter] yeah so like i obviously went through this and had these intense experiences which my church was telling me well god and now i'm like what was that like is there any way to reconcile science with that like i don't i'm in this place where i'm like i don't know what's real anymore like so that he could help me yeah i can't well no i can't but i can offer solidarity um i don't know what's real anymore is the inscription i'm putting on my tombstone so i resonate somewhat with that idea um like does god exist that's a big question you know something funny um you may or may not know this scandinavian nations are even less religious in the united kingdom uh and yet more than half of those secular people believe in an afterlife so that again more than half of those secular people non-religious secular people believe in an afterlife of some kind i don't think society has done wrestling with the god question by the way we tend to be a little western-centric religion is not in decline globally christianity is doing just fine in the global east and south islam is really rocking the house everywhere it's only the west that is seeing this secularization movement um here's what i've realized when people say does god exist or god doesn't exist or hears who god is they fail to do something really important and that's describe what they mean by the word god there's 7 billion people which makes me think there's 21 billion different conceptions of god because everyone i've talked to is at least two or three so does the god you used to believe in from a pentecostal perspective a theistic god personally involved in creation who demonstrates his existence and i'm sure it was a he uh through supernatural interactions with humankind can we like prove that with science no can we disprove the science no because science doesn't prove and disprove things the only way you can prove something in math and science is in math you can do a mathematic proof there's no such thing as a scientific proof that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientists science lets you increase or decrease confidence in a belief by gathering objective evidence for or against that belief see what i mean so you never get to 100 you never get to zero percent in science if you gave enough evidence that the world is a fourth dimensional pimple on a giant if you give enough evidence science would be forced to revise our understanding of the universe now that's very low probability but it's not impossible so what do we do with that and it's like i don't know what's real anymore congratulations no one actually does they just delude themselves how much confidence can we put in what belief um i think it's normal to go through a faith transition statistically people do it all the time so maybe the question isn't does god exist but if you crave faith is there another understanding of god i can get behind um i used to be a southern baptist and i believed in a god who leaned down from the majesty of heaven and whispered into human ears every word of the bible god wrote the bible god's self no one else wrote it all those guys in the bible all guys were just like divine secretaries they were just writing down what god said to them and that god told me all kinds of really important things about the world one that it was 6 000 years old two that gay people could never marry in it three that all you have to do to be a good person is say a prayer and it doesn't matter what else you do as long as you say that prayer you're morally justified which is pretty twisted if you think about it and i stopped believing in that god and for a while the best understanding of god for me was no understanding at all god's nonsense and then i had this experience where i heard god with my ears and i saw god with my eyes and i was so deeply moved by that experience that i asked my neurologist for a cat scan because i thought i had brain cancer because that's what an atheist does when they encounter god and then i didn't have brain cancer and i just had to start this search and you'll find that trying to understand a new way of seeing god after crisis is the most biblical christian thing you can do god starts walking with us in a garden and talking with us and right where are you adam and eve this isn't a cosmic deity in the clouds this is like a human figure walking around in the garden and that little intimacy really weirded us out so we put on clothes and fled and then the next time we've kind of approached god here's this burning bush i am that i am it's a burning bush that does existentialist poetry right i don't know if that's the thing here that line kills in the states i'm snapping internet sorry the internet can't see visuals on a podcast so there's this burning bush and then there's this arc and then there's this energy this this this force in the holy of holies but it has a zip code did you know that for a while yahweh was a local god that's why we say by the waters of babylon we laid down and wept for zion because god can't hear our prayers here he can only hear them there and then the temple tears the curtain in the temple and then you have god put on flesh and now god walks with us and talks with us and makes fish for breakfast what's up with that jesus like you came back from the dead and you're like you know what's good for breakfast fish which by the way we so enjoyed this new intimacy with god that we killed god again and then god is uh a spirit again only now we're the temple and then people kind of took that story and they said no god the whole time has meant three and one this is an eight you know we didn't just make that up it's always been a three in one god so the entire arc of the bible is what changing understandings of god based on what the circumstances of the people and we don't think that modernism and global culture is a shift enough that maybe god will show us something new so i say whatever it takes to propel you towards loving your neighbor as yourself is good enough if that's there's no god at all and there's no god at all you own it but if that's i like to pray and i don't know why then own it if that's a new understanding of god then own it because any of those things is the work of christ in the world it's good enough for me to begin with um just wanted to say thank you so much for the work you've done um i first encountered you a few years ago back where i went through deconstruction and my father told me to go to a church i went had a mystical experience tried to understand what it was all about found people like andrew newberg tanya nerman read them and then a cousin of mine said oh have you read science mike cool listen to his podcast to be honest i believe i was on that list it's like famous neuroscientist famous anthropologist community college that's incredible what a world to be honest i was slightly angry you had done my journey before me and better i just felt you copied me um but in in going through your work one of the things that really uh kind of struck home is i uh suffer a lot from sort of social anxiety and one of the ways i deal with that is i'm i'm a liar i'm a pathological liar and it's it's something you've talked about before and i've just gone through a hell of a year me and my wife have lost a baby recently and the week of the funeral my dad had a stroke um i've it's just been a nightmare thing after the other um and i'm looking to out of that rise from it um and so i i was wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about how you went through that process of becoming one of the most honest people on the internet um and whether that was just cognitive behavioral therapy or was there something more that you needed okay uh first and i don't mean to go light but i gotta i'll forget because the rest of your question was too substantive if i'm one of the most honest people on the internet the world is doomed um first i'm really glad you're here and incredibly impressed that in a room full of i assume mostly strangers unless you all came together like in a really big uber um you just shared some serious stuff and that is brave to be that vulnerable in a society that mainly values output and posturing and prestige so you're saying how do i do this and it sounds to me like you've already started just by asking that question just by being here just by admitting to yourself that things people won't admit to themselves we have a psychological cognitive need to believe we are good people this is baked right into the human psyche any any information that says you're not a good person you tend to discard right people um in experiments who are given the opportunity to cheat cheat often if you remind them that morals exist say by reading the ten commandments they'll be a little more moral for a little while and then they go back to cheating on things but as long as the transgression is small enough and infrequent enough people continue to think that they're good people you can take a lot of pins from the copy machine no you can never take a pen from a copy machine you can take a lot of pins from the copy room two at a time and not think it's a big deal but over time you've actually taken a lot of money from the company but you still feel like a good person so that honest look in the mirror here's who i am is the hardest worst first step i mean my gosh some of the yarns i've told jenny over the years that when i finally owned up to them it is literally a miracle that we're married but i had to start by admitting there's something wrong with me in my case i think a combination of a lot of bullying and a dad with a temper made me desperately afraid to appear to be a failure how do i know that so much therapy oh my gosh so much of my income for so long paying a person in a room to just listen and listen and listen and listen to agree that even your best friend could not possibly stomach and part of the process of of growth and healing and recovering after accepting who you are is unpacking some of the motivations uh and then you find something radical everybody's messed up everybody everybody's messed up and there's a lot of people who i think in my head they're not messed up i'm wrong if i were to ask them they answered honestly like are you messed up they'd be like you have no idea and they have their own little thing in their brains closet that's just packed with skeletons so what does that mean i messed up and i love myself anyway i love myself anyway that's a forbidden message in the west pride oh you're prideful get out of here nobody likes you be humble be humble be humble and we think like humility is just kicking the [ \_\_ ] out of ourselves all the time like i'm i'm totally humble i hate myself so much i can't look in the mirror what's more humble than that that's narcissism you're obsessed with your self-image so i figured out one day like i'm great who cares what anybody thinks about me who cares that i have back hair i have so much back hair you guys like i'm like a gorilla and i experienced no shame telling you about my copious back hair why because that stuff filters debris off my skin you know what's filthy people's backs that don't have back hair i pity all you people with just clean backs that look clean but are really disgusting meanwhile this glorious furry body every time i move is just cleaning stuff up i got one spot i gotta take care of that's the belly button that's the collection bin and then i'm fine right is that too vulnerable sometimes i lose the line of what's socially acceptable because i love myself so much and guess what happens when i love myself i love you too unselfconsciously i love you you know what i love seeing people succeed who aren't me i very rarely experience envy or jealousy about success unless it's people writing books and then i get super jealous because i'm insecure as a writer right i didn't do it by myself one thing i'm kind of neglecting is i made a decision a few years ago that i would invest primarily in safe friendships i would invest in people who would admit their [ \_\_ ] and would accept mine and if people needed me to be someone other than who exactly i was today this was not a friendship i invested deeply in anymore and uh it takes that kind of community to get to the point where you can say oh man i just screwed up and i forgive me can any of you forgive yourself as readily as you forgive your friends right your friend doesn't show up for dinner over and over again you get like really annoyed and then texture you're like oh man i'm sorry my cat was puking and you're like wait your cat pukes every week that's super weird but whatever you said i'm sorry it's cool we're best friends again meanwhile you put a typo in a report that goes to your boss and you're like i'm such an idiot you've got to learn to love your neighbor as yourself which is built on the idea that you love you in the first place because right now most of you if you love your neighbor as yourself you're real [ \_\_ ] of friends because you're not nice to you all the time i think self you're killing it every day you're becoming more like love except when you're not then i forgive you and we reset and we keep working on it and mainly what i do is i tell myself i'm doing a great job and then i eat a food item i really love is like a reward like i take myself out for pizza and ice cream which may be a i need to find a new routine because my my whole emotional self is literally killing my physical self and i can't help the world from a hospital bed with a coronary but um yeah you've got to find safe community you've got to learn to accept yourself and when you accept yourself you don't lie to yourself as often because you don't need to like win your approval you've already got it you need to worry about other people's approval because you've focused on safe friendships people are with you through thick and thin people who love you for you and uh and then one day a strange thing happens and i'm i'm dead serious about this like people who don't know you very well start saying things like there's something really different about you recently that i've never noticed before and they might say like i've never noticed in another person because you're finally climbing out of the rat race and um there's this theory that people are like crabs in a bucket and if one crab starts to climb out all the other crabs reach out and pull them down and that might be true in some contexts but what i've seen in my life is um when people see someone living out of their whole selves they just want to do that too you know what i mean you know bob goff you know that is maybe maybe not here he's a friend of mine and he's just one of the most wholehearted people i've ever met and everywhere he goes he's so present and so genuine and so humble he walks out of the room and every person in the room says gosh i want to be like that and just in the process of being a whole person he inspires people to live radically different lives i think forgive me if i get hokey that's what jesus did so the odd thing for me mr secularist atheist ha ha i'm a nihilist the whole thing is me trying to be like my savior my name is nathan um so i grew up in the states um in a very evangelical um conservative family um i've been living in the uk for the past seven years so i originally came as a working with the christian missions organization seven years ago and um long story short had a lot of deconstruction different beliefs about who god is and i come from a very as i said a conservative christian family a lot of pastors in my family and about a year ago i started working for this charity that supports refugees and migrants and it's for me it's been the most important and so proud of what i'm doing now um i don't know how to phrase this question um and i have this my family i feel like don't understand where i'm at now and i feel like i'm almost like out of the camp that i grew up in um and almost almost feel like they were so proud of me when i was doing christian evangelical work and i i think their view of what i'm doing now is i'm um trying to support uh refugees and migrants so i can convert them to christianity which obviously for me isn't what i'm trying to do um and i'm also enneagram nines and i have this um almost conflict in my brain of like wanting to be understood by my family and wanting to be heard and seen but also at the same time not trying to have conflict with them and myself mainly because i'm insecure but also but also yeah just for yeah that i don't have conflict with my family i just wondered um in your journey through deconstruction and where you're at now um did you have similar experience where you didn't feel understood but you also didn't want to have conflict within your family uh not at all both my former church and family universally accept my new call and are completely supportive nobody ever said it might be best if you don't come home for thanksgiving nobody ever said it might be best if you don't come back to this sunday school class for me it was just smooth sailing you can laugh after enough therapy do you hear the theme of how do you do this science mike therapy okay was there somebody at home close to you kind of emotionally volatile in your life not so much really wild a lot of nines the reason we're nines is there was somebody at least one person who something about them was emotionally explosive and so we learned to have an exquisite sensitivity to people's emotional states so we could preemptively calm people down this is the animating energy behind everything i do when i walk in a room and how do i do this i constantly scan around and i'm exhausted afterwards because i'm taking every single one of your emotional temperatures and modifying what i say based on your body language in real time why can i do that because there was someone in my life whose emotional reactions terrified me when i was small and so what was important to me was keeping the peace which i equated peacefulness with a sense of approval and love approval and so sometimes we grow and we change and we're terrified to tell people if we know it could upset the apple cart and for a while we pretend to be someone that we are not only wearing this mask gets tighter and tighter and chafes more and more until the flesh underneath the mask starts to bleed and a little bit of you dies every day because you know what's exhausting lying about your identity why do gay teens commit suicide so often they're afraid that their very sense of identity is unacceptable to the people they love most in the world god what a crime so your family might not be able to handle it but you'll never know unless you're honest two years i never told anyone i didn't believe in god my biggest fear was that my wife would leave me she is sitting in this room tonight however some of my best friends back in tallahassee won't talk to me anymore one of them writes a blog and podcast that exclusively rebuts everything i say publicly it's got to be exhausting by the way i know you're listening right now and i'm not gonna say your name because then it would double or triple your downloads from three to nine so um like at some point when people's only agenda is to keep you in the box you used to be in those are the people who no longer get a seat at the table of your life you control the terms under which people are a part of your life this is not ghosting people this is not rejecting people this is putting up boundaries so that you can be a healthy and effective person in the world how many systems of injustice are powered by our inability to accommodate rejection how many men stay silent while that sexist joke is made in a group of men because they don't want to be rejected and what's the consequence the pay gap what's the consequent rampant sexual harassment of women in professional workplaces i'm not accusing you of that don't be confused my point is we never know what social conditioning is convincing us to do that has unintended consequences of dare i say evil sexism is evil racism is evil both personally and systemically guess what else is evil thinking immigrants aren't people guess what else is less evil but in my opinion still evil saying that it's only worth feeding and clothing the needy if we also hand them the gospel might have hit some toes on the internet on that one but if if you look up the needs for human survival it's not you can survive you know 20 seconds without atmosphere and two minutes without oxygen in two days without water and two weeks without food whatever that is and and and and two years without the gospel it's not on the like survival list of human needs it's not i checked they've run surveys like people have lived their whole lives 80 plus years never heard the gospel they made it they survived the work you're doing matters more than what your family thinks of it i mean people live and die based on your work people's basic quality of life is impacted by your work and it's okay to tell your family the stories of how you've been transformed by encountering people in need how your view has been expanded in the world to the true decadence of western culture by those in need i mean i don't know your family more than likely or not mom's gonna come along right that's just who bomb is mom loves you dad might be a harder sale that's sale you hear that i'm from the south sale um and then the further you get from like the nuclear family or your primary caregivers um i like the more likely people are to say like what happened to you i was we were at the our farm in madison county like one of my young cousins comes up to me and says uh you're like the most famous macarthur which is like not saying a lot have you ever heard the last name mccarg you have not and i was like well i guess he says uh can i ask you a question i said yeah he says are you liberal excuse me am i liberal yeah the family says you've gone to hollywood and got liberal and suddenly i know like what the topic of conversation is when i'm not around like how i've gone liberal and i don't you know support the biblical right to bear arms or whatever and oh i mean second amendment the constitution i keep forgetting the constitution in the united states and the bible aren't the same thing [Applause] [Music] [Applause] don't fear your agency you've been put on this earth to do something no one else can do and it sounds like you're closer to that than most people are and if people can't get it that's their problem but you do you [Music] hi my name is joe um my question is do you think there's any truth to the idea that people get more right-wing as they get older and if so is there any kind of scientific reason that our brains develop that way and should we give all power to the kids because old people are screwing up oh man don't make me preach do not make me preach um generations have typically gotten more conservative as they've gotten older uh that trend has been slowing or stopping in recent years millennials in the united states canada australia and the uk basically like you know the crown and her favorite colonies um have been doing this thing that terrifies power systems generation x did the same thing the boomers did a little later and more cynically but millennials like aren't just waiting later to get married they're like maybe not getting married at all they're not just waiting later to buy houses like maybe not buying houses at all they're not checking in to all the systems we need to maintain a wonderful exploited capitalist economy and uh it's terrifying something you may not know there was a slight generational difference on the brexit vote subtle very small difference it turns out like nana and and her grandson like didn't see eye to eye on brexit and this also happened in rural areas so like there's a bigger gap among urban and rural voters on brexit who are older than younger so i i understand there may be like some animating energy behind that question in contemporary society here that i can't relate to because the trump vote was generationally consistent um just everybody just like yes let's make america great again give me one of those red hats uh what does america need more power for straight white men that's clearly clearly where we got to go uh so no that's just like a thing that happens why does it happen economic incentive and social structure our system is designed to get you to chase a brass ring because that powers the engines of capitalism what else helps power engines of capitalism by the way people are like yeah science mike is a marxist nope i critique all economic systems wealth inequality is a powerful engine for capitalism what helps maintain social order in an economy that increases the wealth gap you take the people not at the top and turn them against each other and every capitalist economy has some variation of like you keep the people not in the elites fighting each other largely using social issues in political platforms i'm sure that doesn't resonate at all um so that they keep fighting about that and not noticing we keep taking more and more of the cake unfortunately i don't think a promised land style just let the old people die system creates utopia i wish it did but um in both our countries the 60s were pretty radical time people like free love lsd you know what i mean like this these were linked but uh everybody thought this generation was going to remake the world and then they were just like oh wait financial markets are great i saw a flat i really like i don't like taking the bus i want a car i got a car okay i want a driver for the car i want a nicer flat um i want to use the word flat correctly and assume that i am um we like us we don't love us we like us and so to try to feed the void uh society said acquire acquire a choir and i think if the old folks just vanished we'd fight over the scraps i think the biggest potential failure of young people is accepting that progress is inevitable and when you accept that progress is inevitable you start fighting for justice when you stop fighting by stop fighting for justice brexit wins and uh you know what i'm done not being political on this guy like a narcissist with dementia controls the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world so you have a vision for a peaceful world never stop fighting for it or else you become the new institution [Music] hello um what is evil and where did it come from oh what is evil the antichrist what is the antichrist well soon there'll be a great tribulation and a monster will rise from the sea and the antichrist will ride through jerusalem on a pig wait that's the left behind series no um that's a lot of copies i know somewhere over here what's christ christ is anything anything that draws people towards peace shalom that's the christ energy the cosmic christ jesus was incarnate of christ christians believe uniquely uh but anything that draws people toward peace is christ so it's antichrist anything that moves the other direction which is why i think like the idea in revelation of the antichrist resurrecting is not nuts we beat the nazis and then we lived happily ever after no antichrist keeps resurrecting why we have a need to take care of us and our own first and because we take of us and our own first charismatic speakers can convince working class people that some group of immigrants is the problem and that there's a final solution to that problem and people can go yeah i can get behind that that's evil i've been reading a lot about colonialism i mean so let's be honest we talk about uh race issues no american can lecture anybody on the globe about race issues no white american can lecture anybody on the globe about issues of race [Music] but this rather small island was super successful in the colonial era and that caused rampant societal disruption and people here who were like otherwise pretty good people were able to go yeah i can get behind that i like all these resources coming here and besides we're educating those savages anti-christ anti-christ where does it come from like objectively like what's the all i don't know i only know it when i see it and i only know that it's my job to oppose it especially when i see it in me the easiest way to work against evil is to point it out in other people and i have much less influence with other people that i have with me like let's be real podcasts literature's podcast couple million downloads a month that's a lot of influence but it's way less influence than i have with me so i start by examining my life for anything that is antichrist and i don't beat myself up about it i recognize it and then i replace it with something that's christ-centered so i become aware of my role in systemic racial injustice in america and i didn't i didn't make that behavior in myself that was indoctrinated into me but i replace it with a christ energy which is expending effort and resources that i have into defeating the very system that's present within me so i don't know where evil comes from i only know that it's our job to fight it hi my name is fiona like a few others that have spoken tonight i've gone through my own faith shift over the last years and we now have two delightful and exasperating kids they're three and 20 months and i'm realizing that oh sorry [Laughter] yeah um i'm realizing that the only blueprint i have for um talking about faith is this one which involves teaching young children genocidal stories with like felt figures and stuff [Laughter] and then god flooded the whole earth i don't know i'm i'm just wondering how i had i had a very happy memories of all the faith i grew up with as a child i don't i don't remember thinking those stories were terrible at the time right but now i've come through this faith shift and deconstructed a lot of those stories and it um freaks me out to even start thinking about talking to noah with my beautiful three-year-old daughter um let alone to start talking about who or what is god um and i just wondered from a scientific point of view how how are how are kids brains dealing with all of the concept of belief in god and how do you maybe help children yeah stay open to something about of the spiritual life when you're still trying to figure out yourself all right thank you that's a great question there's always a risk answering parenting questions when your children still live at home because i don't know how i'm doing like i had angelic children and then they started becoming preteens and so there's like this new tension in our house all the time there's like lots of door slamming and lots of like gosh mom when jenny suggests outrageous things like maybe they put their dishes in the dishwasher it's like i can't believe this injustice the other thing like you gotta acknowledge is this is a stressful time of life uh if you've heard this joke from me before i apologize but new parents need it if babies were adults they would be tried as war criminals in the geneva convention babies are [ \_\_ ] like you you legally can't take a prisoner of war and give them sleep deprivation it's banned and babies just like do that as a matter of routine and then we play societal expectations that parents have to be perfect especially mothers what's a perfect dad makes a great living today what's a great mom makes a great living and does most of the housework did you know that the more a woman makes the more housework they do you know that women who make more money than their husbands do the most housework because they have to deal with like ingrained patriarchy having resentment so the first thing you do is like let the pressure off we used to like carry our babies on our bodies and hold them out when they had to use the bathroom um we would just set them on the ground and like gather food some of them got eaten by tigers you know what i mean like modern baby's a pretty good gig like you're stressing like did i get the rocker with the right speed is it going to cause developmental issues if i let them see the television too many minutes a day your baby has a great you care enough to ask about spiritual formation for your child to minimize the suffering they'll have in therapy later that's amazing but spoiler alert your kid's gonna need therapy and it's gonna be because of you that's just baked into the formula i can't wait in my 30s to hear about like what i did with the best of intentions i'll go yeah you're right man i messed that up but i loved you because that's what your child needs to know the most children need certainty the thing they need certainty of the most is that their parents love them unconditionally unconditionally unconditionally now unconditionally doesn't mean like when you're at a restaurant and they go to another table and take the the people's pasta and you know yell snickers and throw in the air like your unconditional love doesn't have to be like i'm sorry i unconditionally love them you children also need boundaries to be psychologically healthy and they need to be certain of what those boundaries are when they're very little the things they need certainty of are do my parents love me they get like agency what are the boundaries and then part of that i honestly believe for for children to be healthy is also to talk about god secular children are more likely to become religious fundamentalists than uh progressive people of faith much more something about a middle of the road progressive faith inoculates brains against extremism so i think it's okay to tell your children god loves them too and it's okay to tell them stories about god that you were told and you believe except the ones you know really screwed you up so maybe like we're not going to put the ark on the wall of the nursery because the giraffes are cute but they always leave out the dead bodies rolling in the flood i went to one church so i talk at churches and sometimes the green room is like the children's sunday school room and there were bodies in the ark drawing and i was like i don't know if this is awful or i super respect it [Music] your kids let you know when they're ready for the next thing how do they you know they start asking questions about the one story at first it's just we believe this that you say we believe why do you say we believe because eventually they will say well what do other people believe or why do we believe that at this point they've given you a signal that they're neurologically prepared to hear other stories and then you just tell them you just answer the question honestly including gosh i don't know and by doing that you you gently introduce your children to an essential truth that you're not infallible and you're just like trying to make it through life so you can still rest assured that you love them but when they realize like my children and i have talked about islam together we've talked about atheism we've talked about different christian denominations and beliefs so i'll tell them what anybody believes and they want to know why i believe i'll tell them and i'm preparing them to assemble their own world view instead of aping mine which hopefully means they have to blame themselves for some stuff in therapy but it could be my kids turn around and go my dad gave us no sense of religious certainty it's just the wide open what do you think about god he's made a bubble gum i bet god's made a bubble gum good call um you know what i mean like it just research tells us one of the biggest problems in human society right now is we forgot how to play we're real serious we're real serious with our kids they've got to get like into harvard by their excuse me oxford by the time they're nine or with failures as parents and what humans need not just children but adults too is whimsy and play it's the connective tissue of human society and we've been killing it off i don't know for a while i don't feel like churchill was a real playful guy [Music] so like who we elevate in society has been shaping our society and uh just play with your kids and that includes play with god who god is and just you know not putting all the eggs in one basket to use a terribly exhausted metaphor okay i'm gonna be brave hi i'm megan um six months ago i did the bravest thing i think i've ever done and i walked out of my marriage um it was abusive and there was adultery um and faith was used as a big part of that so i'm a psychotherapist um and was told that that was not god's will that i needed to go to central asia and convert people um since uh coming back um i'm finding it really hard to be in church it's like my amygdala triggers the whole time and i'm constantly going into panic um i'm wondering whether i stick that out and that's gonna improve or um or whether it's not i guess and on the days where i believe in jesus which is most of them um he is the bedrock and the thing and he's kind of the source of love in my life um and on the other days where i get quoted bible verses about um women who get divorced and how they're kind of the evil in what in the world i want nothing to do with church and that's correct that's the that's called a healthy reaction to abuse please every single voice listening to me on the internet if someone tells you you have to stay in an abusive relationship they are wrong they are here to hurt you and they are part of the abuse escape be physically safe do whatever you have to do to take care of yourself because abuse is wrong it's not your fault it's got nothing to do with you and everything to do with the abuser no behavior justifies domestic abuse full stop but oh but but the people at my church said [ \_\_ ] them [Music] listen y'all that was a super calculated f-bomb because i understand neurologically only profanity can communicate certain emotions so i use that tactically in a church i'm sorry but if people think jesus wants you to keep getting beat by your husband those people don't know jesus those people know patriarchy and patriarchy is a real jerk so you've done the brave thing and i'm so glad you did we are so glad you're here and we're so glad that you are out of that situation with that jerk and if church paid a part in your abuse the reason you're triggered by it is because your brain's good at keeping you alive your amygdala knows the truth that your religious community did not and that's that this abuse is literally killing me i don't know where you're at if you're at the same church that supported the abuse getting safe probably means getting out of that church and i don't know the depth of your social web i don't know if there's people outside of that community that can support you and lift you up so i understand why that's terrifying if there's a god up there looking down on us if there's a god in this room centimeters nanometers away animating every particle interaction that god's metric of whether you're enough is not sitting while people hold you down in fact the the god portrayed in the bible goes nuts when people perpetuate oppression and abuse goes nuts burns down cities serious stuff i mean that was a joke maybe not the right time go where you can get healthy if that means no church no church if literally every church makes you afraid go heal it's a funny thing every major biblical figure i can think of when things got too tough took some time to recover the prophets would come and speak the truth when the heat really kicked up they'd flee down they'd hide jesus when the crowds he came to minister to were too much got on a boat and noped right out of town literally he's like hey disciples i'm cooked i'm out sorry this is jesus so you've got to get an environment to give yourself the time to process the trauma associated with the abuse and then you can deal with the church question and then you can deal with the jesus question one thing that may help is if some of the christians in your life are decent people meaning they understand that abuse was in no way your fault and the divorce was absolutely the right solution to your problem and in that moment those people might be jesus to you they might be the proxy you need to understand that christianity and following jesus is not about telling women to take another hit or turn the other cheek turn the other cheek by the way is about suffering under roman oppression it's about revealing the brutality of roman behavior on a systemic institutional level it does not literally mean to allow people to beat you senseless or at all you take all the time you need and at that time is the rest of your life let me say this god loves you jesus loves you and both of them want you to be safe and you can believe me i'm a college dropout so i didn't actually know who you were until like two hours ago so this is quite nice um so i'm ben hi you started in the deep end of the pool i just want to apologize on behalf of however you got here yeah um so i'm a gay man but my christian faith is fundamental to my existence okay um so i've grown up as christian um and i suppose i've spent most of my life trying to figure out how the hell do the two reconcile um and i'm constantly in a battle between the church at war on this issue [Music] with the liberal sides which i don't agree with and the conservative side which i also don't agree with and i think where i've i've spent a long time thinking about it um because it's something very personal something that's that's caused a lot of pain um and i think i know where i stand but um it's very alien to the church to both sides i think of the church um but i noticed that you had some thoughts on this subject and um i i'm interested to know where where you're at with this or the subject okay absolutely i'd be happy to tell you my unfounded opinion let's start with something essential and i believe this very deeply my opinion as a straight man ha has absolutely no justification compared to your experience as a gay man so i know you're not asking for it but someone else may be not as far in their journey towards knowing themselves and i want to make sure every gay lesbian trans intersex queer asexual other gender and sexual identity that could be listening knows you do not need my or anyone else's approval you just don't the only reason you need my approval is because there's so many flipping straight people so we keep passing laws and stuff so then that's literally the only reason my opinion holds relevance is because there's so many of me to vote and lobby politically that said i uh looked a friend in the eyes in high school who told me that he was gay basically coming out to me before anyone else and i loved him as a friend and so i told him the truth that if he didn't amend his ways he would spend eternity in hell i'm pretty ashamed of that i it might be the thing i'm most ashamed of but there's some other heavy hitters back there so where i started is where so many conservative religious folks do the bible is clear the bible is clear the bible which bible the protestant bible of the catholic bible because it got different books which translation they were written at different times with different agendas which book of the bible is clear there's a bunch written across 1500 years starting 3 500 years ago how is the bible clear on anything over a hundred authors all just total agreement on every issue and by the way the bible of course was written to people living in the 21st century with a 21st century social context meaning any person can pick up this book and make totally legitimate theological claims with no training whatsoever because after all the original language of the bible is english we pick up the bible we read it as modernists post-modernist post-post-modernist post-structuralist whatever post you want to add is the era we're living on we're we are the post-post-post people and then we project those assumptions back into the biblical times so we take english words that were translated from languages whose cultural context is largely lost and sometimes they invented words you know paul one of the times the word homosexual was translated in the king james bible and surely king james had no agenda regarding sexual orientation he's not trying to hide anything was the word that as far as we could tell paul might have made up no one had ever used it anywhere else literally literally translated it means man bed right so we take gosh almighty this is such a painful answer because it's so long we take like a king james era understanding of english pull it forward do you know when heterosexual was coined it described a disorder did you know that the way we use heterosexual now is different from when the word was coined there's no point there surely and we take all this stuff and we push it backwards and then like what do modern gay people want like the same rights as straight people they want to choose the person they love i want to choose the person that they marry there was not an equivalent to that in the time of paul there just wasn't there was no gender binary in the first century it was a gender monary there was one gender male and it's inferior opposite female it's a different gender construct what was maleness males could penetrate anyone whom they pleased and they were good males they could never be penetrated that's a different sexual ethic than the modern straight versus gay orientation the roman conception was that a man inflamed in lust may penetrate a male servant or in an inferior rank socially male and there was no shame for the penetrator it was only shamed for the penetrated and so when paul says people like those man beds will not inherit the kingdom of heaven it's entirely possible in scholarship that what he was saying is people who allow themselves to be uncontrollably inflamed and lust and exploit others will not be allowed into the kingdom of heaven which is a real problem for men who sexually harass women and not such a problem for men who honor consent but then there's leviticus right then there's the old testament where it clearly says in english that homosexuality is an abomination like mixed fabric and shellfish and i've never seen someone hold a sign that says god hates prawns we're so lazy about the bible because it's easy it's we don't read any other ancient book by ignoring its cultural context we don't read any other ancient book and say you know what all those phds are wrong because i read this text last night so we've got to stop doing that with the bible and we stopped doing the bible we find there are no simple single line proofs or disproves of any behavior across the ark of scripture scripture's point is a library of books assembled by the church about how people have struggled to know and love and serve god just like us and they fought about it too it's right in the pages they fought over the character of god they thought about what was right and wrong and they wrote it down the people in the hebrew scriptures get this go to a synagogue synagogues they debate all the time that's just that's an ongoing thing then we decide no the bible is finished it's done everything's final so what's my stance biblically all love honors god all love honors god as long as like paul says that love is an exploitive or at the expense of another god's love is relational and mutual and edifying and self-sacrificing which means like i don't know and i don't want to offend anybody in the room maybe promiscuity isn't god-filled if it doesn't meet all those things maybe hook-up culture and swiping left isn't the healthiest form of human sexuality but people committing to each other submitting to each other caring for each other that's holy and we need more of it not less so i am unconditionally for every single adult having the right to commit to and marry another adult of their choosing independent of the modern constructs of sexual orientation and gender identity it's none of my business what people do with their lives and i completely affirm not only lgbtq folks in society but also their full inclusion in christian fellowship including the right to marry and the right to be clergy none of us are free until all of us are free [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi i'm ali um it's sort of a little bit related and not um lots of animals mate for life lots of animals have multiple mates over the course of their life or at once when did humans become monogamous um and is that something that's kind of genetically predispositioned or something that's environmentally conditioned all right there we go um to discuss this the only reasonable course of action is to explore the ratio between adult male body mass and testicle mass so i'm not kidding just not kidding the funny thing uh if you take if you pretend there's no such thing as as homo sapiens and you just look at at primates and you can take any subset of primates you want including the great apes again let's ignore people you take a social context out of the picture by removing society and language from the picture and you find something consistent testicle size as a ratio of adult body mass is an excellent predictor for the propensity towards lifelong or not mating for a given primate so if you think about uh gorillas those dudes are huge grills are very very very large mammals tiny balls just the most minuscule little peashooters you can imagine why because that was irreverent i apologize if you imagine the silverback gorilla he's so big he's terrified every other male from the situation he controls access to a group of females he may mate at his leisure his sperm have plenty of time to do what they do they don't have to be especially uh numerous because he'll still end up passing on his genes and turns out both gorillas like to pass on their genes it's a mammal thing mammals are really into passing on their genes when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom super into it i guess bugs have us beat bugs like bugs and plants sometimes i get a little mentally disturbed that like my allergies are going off and it's because of tree group sex but um that's science it's science you can't be offended uh so that's gorillas then you go to like chimpanzees chimpanzees like kind of a smaller animal with huge balls just like these massive knee swingers and why do chimpanzees need to have such large testicles because fidelity rates among chimps are very very very very very very low chimpanzees have to uh mate right after another chimpanzee mated with a female and just produce more sperm so where are uh homo sapiens on this spectrum of primate testicle size almost exactly between gorillas and chimpanzees an odd thing about the human penis it has a scoop on the end you ever notice that you probably you've seen a penis at least a picture and there's this like thing on the end and a lot of biologists assume it's a scoop for removing sperm that might have already been in your mate's vagina that's an odd anatomical feature for an exclusively monogamous animal as are the mid-sized balls so what we've what we're finding removed from social context human beings do pair bond intensely and we seem to exist on a spectrum that goes between pretty rampant infidelity which males and females can both be rampantly uh prone to infidelity and what they call serial monogamy a monogamous relationship followed by a monogamous relationship followed by monogamous relationship most research researchers think humans can be naturally relatively effortlessly monogamous for 8 to 15 years and both men and women have a neurological impetus towards sexual variety this is why pornhub.com is one of the top 10 most trafficked sites on the internet men and women have an innate desire for sexual variety so if you talk to the biology lifelong monogamy in humans is pretty strange uh which means i think i think we have to like invent a new sexual ethic because um we seem to be increasingly less invested in lifelong monogamy as societies and are shaming people mainly just makes people feel guilty about doing what they do and diminishes people to be people's ability to be effective parents so a lot of it is socialized by the way remember i'm in love and i don't care who knows it i'm going to marry a partner i chose i'm going to stay together forever i'm going to exchange rings and there's going to be diamonds on them we have a big ceremony these timeless marriage traditions are like 200 years old before that lifelong marriage was a way to secure property rights cement to relationships between families especially prominent families tribal groupings queen victoria shows historic marriage i have offspring i send them out to cement relationships with other cultures to make sure i'm powerful that's lifelong marriage women are property that's lifelong marriage so i'm kind of a downer on monogamy which is strange for a super committed lifelong monogamist so at the same time i acknowledge the biological and social limitations of lifelong monogamy i'm a huge fan personally it's been 17 years this december i think she's prettier than ever uh i why am i so happy on this trip oh my god thank you jenny came with me i can't stand not being around jenny i just can't i mean the kids aren't here that's fine the kids drive me crazy sometimes that's actually preferred just like a couple weeks with the woman i married and no children and i think a lot about why that is because we've talked and other than like oh surprise i don't believe in god it's been pretty smooth sailing for those 17 years i think some people just like are naturally and comfortably okay with lifelong monogamy we shouldn't judge them either my my grandparents they were together till my grandpa died and now my grandma just is like i i don't know what i'm doing i don't know that i'm not interested in continuing life without him so it's great when you get it but i don't think we should shame people for failing to adhere to a system of relationship that we made like 200 years ago i mean if 300 years ago you go to your parents you're like i'm in love i'm in love and i don't care who knows it they're like shut up that's a fad that's infatuation that's not a thing you don't marry for love you marry for family and we we like changed that didn't we anybody here like be totally cool if their parents picked their spouse just totally down because that's historic let's not lie to ourselves about how long our history goes back [Music] um can i first of all say i'm really blown away and humbled by some of the questions that have been tonight for us allegedly uh emotionally unconnected brits i think it's pretty good night um there's a really good episode of the robcast where rob bell interviews richard brawl and he cites this scientific paper that's that says that the human brain attaches itself to the negative far more easily than the positive we see in society that that people connect around hate far more easily you know donald trump is a testimony to that um what is it about the human brain that makes us connect the negative so much more easily than the positive why is contemplation of focusing on the positive so so important in our lives what's wrong with us okay first of all the very first time i came to the united kingdom was through an event called belong which is a small event with the liturgists and before we got started someone very well intentioned i assume came up to me and said hey i know you americans are very sentimental you just gotta know british people don't laugh as readily and we definitely don't cry when we're in the audience and i said uh thank you he's like i just didn't want you to think you're doing a bad job if we're not as responsive as you're used to i said great and then after the event this guy comes up to me bawling and just uncontrollable weeping and uh i think he said what'd you do to me something like that all people are capable of emotional vulnerability if we cut through the cultural [ \_\_ ] and i think that's important which is why my goal in my work is to be a combination of bill nye and mr rogers because science is awesome and every one of you is special just the way you are right if you listen to my answers it always comes down science is awesome and you are special so why are we so into anger and hate and negativity if you've used a social network you may notice some things get shared more often than other things for a while the internet was ruled by cats do you remember this you remember wall cats lol cats that was amazing like cute kitties were the most guaranteed thing you could share on the internet and then everybody got on the internet not just young people and now anything that causes a sense of moral outrage is the most contagious thing on the internet man do we love moral outrage moral outrage appeals to our most tribalistic notions that i and my tribe are right and the other tribe is wrong because if i'm dealing with how the other people are terrible i don't have to be introspective at all where's that come from the structure of your brain remember the tortilla the neocortex around the outside layer of the brain remember the brick the limbic system the most powerful thing in the limbic system is the amygdala the two most powerful human emotions neurologically speaking are fear and anger why they keep you alive take this beautiful building away and we're all sitting in natural london whatever that looked like it's been like two thousand years since even seen natural london but we're all sitting here it's dark we have one fire and past the fire is just dark and there's like a like a rustle and then another rustle closer by if we all get afraid and start screaming and shrieking and waving our arms at the noise and it leaves it doesn't matter if it was a squirrel because there's no penalty for a false positive for fear or anger the penalty is if we go that's nothing and it's a bear and somebody gets eaten right so over time we got primed to know fear is good and anger's good why because sometimes being angry works at the end of our rope we get red face and we scream we're pretty big mammals and even if your adversary is another intelligent homo sapien that's bigger if you're angry enough fighting you is a real risk because injuries kill you get rid of antibiotics and a good cut will take you down especially from something as filthy as a human so that's it the template is fear and anger win and that's always been a problem in human society but then we introduced a giant memetic accelerator an amplifier called the internet and algorithms designed to literally produce economic value from our attention people get richer when you click on something you're just funneling money somewhere well in our economy money's everything in our society money's everything and outrage is easy to capitalize into revenue so we have a self-sustaining system of the human brain's propensity towards fear and anger and digital systems that exploit it for attention i'm a little concerned that this leads to the end of the world like tuesday you know what i mean is anybody thrilled that donald trump can tweet at north korea is that like a healthy development for our species is anybody thrilled to know aunt patty's thoughts on brexit like is that just a great development no aunt patty used to ask you like how's the city do you like your flat are you making friends because you didn't talk about that stuff ignorance was bliss and now we all have our little megaphones shouting rage into the wind gosh and i'm worse than anybody i get so fired up about social justice and i start dropping bombs on twitter and then people start quote tweeting thread there's nothing better than somebody quoting thread because what you said is so awesome no comment needed you've got to check this out an invariable when someone tweets thread it's because i hit my limit with some justice issue and then i fire up the tribe there's nothing wrong with firing up the tribe people especially oppressed people need a sense of social identity and cohesion to create hope but when i do that at the expense of using my greatest gift empathy to connect with others i reinforce the problem so if i just harp on white supremacy and preach to people who get it at the expense of the people i know in my life who don't i'm not actually helping address the issue and it's my issue to address like how fair is it we have this figure we revere in america dr martin luther king jr why do we revere him he was a black man who fought his own oppression he didn't play any role in rampant systemic oppression of black people in america he was affected by it he had such a stake in the issue and today we expect the people most affected by oppression to do all the work we expect lgbt people to organize into groups and do their own advocacy we expect people of color and refugees to organize into their own groups and do their advocacy whereas we the people with the most privilege are the ones who are causing the problem in the first place it's my job to fight that outrage cycle and engage empathy precisely because i can it's my job to speak up about sexism and sexual harassment precisely because i am so unlikely to be a victim of it if we don't elect with our individual actions and behaviors to buck the system to fight the outrage machine we are going to tweet each other into extinction the stakes may be that high or i could be stimulating your amygdala for fun and profit to find out click here well you've done it you've listened to another week of ask science mike and i hope you enjoyed it i want to thank the folks in this room who have been an excellent and lovely audience and participants in this program i'd also like to thank andrew golucky for his work on pre-production on ask science mike greg nordine for sound design and editing of ask science mike all my patrons on patreon who make this show financially possible and you the listener if you'd like to help the show a little more head over to itunes give me a rating i get nervous about saying that because i'm on this streak where i have a perfect five-star rating so please don't go bomb my five-star rating if you don't like the show and if you do leave a one-star rating do what the only one star rating that's ever appeared did guiltily delete it two days later thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week [Music] [Applause] [Music]