Joe Rogan Experience #1068 - Michael Shermer

four three two one ladies and gentlemen Michael Shermer in Heaven's on earth yeah the scientific search for the afterlife immortality in Utopia did you want anything no sorry nothing well I found interesting journeys that people use to try to get there from both the religious perspective and the scientific perspective so I do deal with the monotheism's versions of the afterlife in heaven you know Judaism Christianity Islam but the core of the book is you know the radical life extension is Kryon assist transhumanist rope Ian's the mind uploaders the people that take all the supplements and all the whole range there I find it incredibly interesting they call it afterlife for atheists you know it is right I mean when you think about some of the people that are really like over the top hope it did you go to that 2045 thing in New York a few years back there was a futurist convention with all these people that for whatever reason they have this arbitrary date of 2045 yes thank you sighs it's been pushed back this is the window singularity come yeah he's gonna cut was twenty thirty then 2014 out 2045 Kurzweil is there as well yeah big he's like the Grand Poobah he is and when he gets on stage now he's not printer naturally dynamic like a preacher but he starts talking about you know we're gonna hit you ain't gonna live forever you're gonna have your mind uploaded and people are just like oh my god we are the generation that's gonna do it this is in first time and the moment you know I used to be religious when in my youth that I thought man this is like being back in church again why don't you stop being religious I started in high school and stopped in graduate school so it was you started being religious in high school yeah so it wasn't something your family introduced my parents were pretty secular they did they weren't anti religious at what that wasn't a thing then but this is 1971 when I was in high school in the in the sort of Nisan born-again movement was starting and there was no religious affiliation it was just like it's me and Jesus that's it it's just you and you and the Lord there's a lot of these very charismatic hip young preachers they're doing sort of a thing like that where they they don't even have their own church to like rent time in the church and I have nice these meetings where it's not it's just nondenominational and they just talk about God and yeah they get a lot of people fired up yep and you know the place I went to this place called the barn in La Crescenta where I grew up and you know they played guitar and that is one of the problems with utopia that the 19th century utopian experiments they always turned into this you know free sex for the leader well it always seems like whenever there's a man that's in a position where people start worshipping them right you know and then they start hanging on his every word he's like I started gonna start some of these people well I do I cover Jim Jones and you know the way I phrased it is that no one joins a cult they join a group that they think is gonna do good save the world can help me improve my life improve the lives of others and there's pictures online you can see if Jim Jones with Jerry Brown Governor Jerry Brown yeah its first round and you know they were man in the soup kitchens he was very liberal open to african-americans being part of the church in San Francisco their gays women you know was a really cutting-edge pioneering thing and at the time it seemed like yeah that that's a cool thing I'm gonna join this group not me but you know the people that did this in the 50s and 60s when he was coming up and then into the 70s and then then yeah he started having sex and then drugs and then the you know the feds started kind of poking around taxes and that's when they went to South America speaking of which I think this week is the spike special it's now the paramount network on wake up awake okay this isn't that right now I think it's Sunday yeah I think it's a six-part series or something along those lines see that's an interesting yeah I'm absolutely convinced most of these guys believe what they say and maybe they're bullshitters at the start or they only partially believe but they repeat their rhetoric their followers give them positive reinforcement they come to believe it and you know David Koresh he was you know I right down the barrel he totally believes willing to died for his beliefs and he also was having sex with everybody yes it's so common yeah and his ex-girlfriend grew up and one of these sort of religious cults and it was the same deal the head guy was having sex with all the women and you know he would have sex with different people's wives and everybody had to let him yeah say the fundamentalist Mormons what's his name that's in jail now Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff Jefferies yeah I'm thinking the Jim Jefferies my friend the comedian but anyway yeah that's you know that's how it gets corrupted I don't know if you ever read John Jon Krakauer's book under the banner of heaven this is the guy the the mountain climber that did into thin air and and and the the one about the Alaskan kid anyway he wrote this book called under the banner of asking kid who died yes yeah when they made that movie about moving into the into the wild yeah so he did into the wild into thin air Krakauer is a great writer so this book he starts to investigate the murder of this polygamous family in Utah just as a journalist he's gonna do a story for The New Yorker or something and then he realizes this takes them down the path of this incredible world of polygamy which still goes on now legally it's not legal but they marry one and then the others are so-called Sister Wives and they're just there and they live on these in these border towns along the border between Colorado and Utah like Colorado City and I've been to some of these places it's like it's like in a Twilight Zone episode you go into this town gas station or whatever it's like oh it feels kind of weird here and so Krakauer discovered this whole world of you know going all the way back to the founding of the religion and what's them Joseph Smith and you know he gets this revelation from God that well basically he's banging the woman down the street he's married and so he gets this revelation from God and Krakauer has this this scenario in the book where he tells his wife now honey I've been talking to God and you're not gonna believe this but he says I have to hit marry this you know so-and-so down the street she's like oh yeah well I I have to start seeing other guy no no God was very specific about this for the guys and and how do I know you talked to go well my buddies they were there they heard it also and this is the the first page of the Book of Mormon is an affidavit these are the people that heard the revelation and there they all sign it and it's like okay so this is how it starts when Joseph Smith started it all off in 1820 he's only 14 yes it's made me a 14 year old is not a liar they just learn that alive it's not even like that they're bad people when you're 14 years old you are a developing entity right you know your frontal lobes not fully formed you don't really know what you did practicing sentences you're doing trying to exert your influence and this guy was just very creative he was and he got chased out of Palmira in New York is where he started and then he moved to Missouri when basically he was in trouble with the law and and other issues and then he got in trouble there and he was killed and and usually this ends a cult when the leader dies now there's a there's a kind of a there's a critical period if you get a new dynamic leader to take over like in the case of Scientology David Miscavige took over after l ron Hubbard passed over to the other side and he managed to keep it going the same thing with bring him young it was bring him young that turned this little cult into a world religion and they just went further west to Utah to get away from federal authorities now how much of a hit is Scientology taking from that Leah Remini say I don't you know I've not seen any data like on memberships and they're all secret about that anyway it's Brian Terry data so who knows I can't imagine they could survive well they could survive because they have tons of money through real estate investments but I can't imagine their numbers or could be doing anything but shrinking yeah between the Lawrence Wright book then the HBO documentary with a feature just called crazy yeah and your dialogue with with alia was incredible and she's just a hero amongst you know secularists that you know fight against cults yeah that's really that's really the only best way to do it not top-down laws against cults unless they're doing something obviously illegal but just bottom-up members speaking out I had David Miscavige's dad on as well right that was that was sad yeah that was sad cuz that feller I was talking to a guy who felt like he wasted his life right and lost his son right and he brought his son into Scientology the whole thing was that was really disturbing yep it's just uh it's just very strange that the United States government is allowing those people to be tax exempt I mean with all the available you just go and look at what they're proposing and what they believe and the thetans and the frozen's entities that were dropped into the volcano all the crazy show the story about there you know this is what really worried me about the IRS I mean I've always thought you know I don't fear hell or the devil but I fear the IRS you know I take I'm pretty careful about that but they're the only major organization I've ever seen that beat the IRS and they did it through thousands of lawsuits I think they sued him like 3,500 times or something well they said every single member that they could get to do it sue them as well they were getting all their members to sue it they were suing I think that was the story isn't that how it worked yeah and eventually the IRS said okay if I get your tax exempt witness I mean if they're letting the Mormons do it and why wouldn't they let the scientists do it sir I really don't think any religion should know that's ridiculous I mean in 2018 with what we know about reality the fact that we let some old voodoo superstitious nonsense right and not have to pay taxes and exert extreme power politically socially right economically it's crazy well so and they like preachers get it they could they can live in a house tax-free they'd have to pay property tax on the on the home that they own you know so there's a lot of these side benefits also that you don't normally hear about so gross so the Freedom From Religion Foundation and some of these other organizations ACLU are you know trying to combat some of this but but legally how do you distinguish that from say a nonprofit like Doctors Without Borders or one of these other groups the Clinton Foundation there was some statistic recently in the Clinton Foundation how much money in 19 2014 they actually donate to charity oh Christ it was like six percent something like extremely low the rest of it what payroll and yeah mostly expenses private and that's what right there's yeah all these things are scams yeah it's just yeah it might be good to just clean house and and just no one gets nonprofit status or tax-free status yeah unless you're just well I mean I think I feel like there is room in the world for compassionate charities that are actual charities yeah really legitimate there's room in the world for them and I think that they should have tax-exempt status but I think we should be really stringent right you know about what we accept yeah well the Supreme Court then they have a problem is where do you draw the line right you know do you you know because somebody says well I have a goofy belief the Janes have some weird beliefs or something but you know but they're but they're man in the soup kitchens they're helping the poor and there's no corruptions right so what's the difference wean them and the Scientologist to say hey you know we have our own religious belief set to use sound goofy but you know to us they're true what's the difference well the Mormons are fascinating to me because they do seem goofy when you look at the idea that Joseph Smith who was a 14 year old found golden tablets that contained a lost work of Jesus and only he could read them because he had a magic seer stone right and then when the the local townspeople came to see well where are these stones oh the angels came and took them away because they did not believe like it's so preposterous but Mormons are really nice people totally nice they are the best cult yeah they're the sweetest nicest well I think they've made the transition from cult to religion to a religious sect yes and most most Christians no longer consider them a cult some evangelicals do because they're pretty far out but most mainstream Christians say yeah yeah other Christians I mean they accept Jesus as their Savior technically that gets you in the club they got to let all that Joseph Smith stuff go yeah the way they treat people is fantastic I mean yeah I'm not a big fan of them going to these poor countries and proselytizing and you know getting these vulnerable people to become a part but I think the way they deal with community yeah and the way they deal with each other it's like over it's a very warm and friendly and family environment and most of the Mormons that I've met that are practicing have been very nice people yeah and they're and they're serious about their tithing and the 10% I mean they they have strict rules about this like capital gains its equivalent companies so if you sell your house and profit you got to get 10% of that to church not just your income I asked your paycheck yeah and they're pretty pretty strict about that and the money as far as I know mostly goes for good causes that really does help poor people things like that so now in your book did you go over near-death experiences what do you think is going on like when people like the ones that have fascinated me are people in the hospital bed that see their body from above and you're dealing with a bunch of chemicals that are released in the body right there's morphine and all sorts of different things you know you know psychedelic chemicals and all the all these different things that are happening while your brain is is basically on the edge of death right so it's important to remember that their near-death experiences you're not actually dead so there's there's a luminal transitional stage there where you're sliding into some other state of consciousness an altered state of consciousness and we know that if you inject or you take hallucinogens you know those are molecular molecules that operate on a lock-and-key mechanism with the synapses in your brain in your neurons so if they these external drugs work in this molecular lock-and-key mechanism there must be natural chemicals similar molecular lis to that in the brain already just in smaller doses so one theory about near-death experiences is that is that this is a way of transitioning from living to dead without feeling anxious and falling apart and upset and depressed or whatever it's kind of a smooth feel good you know better than a morphine drip kind of way of making the transition and but we know for example that this scientist named dr. James whinnery worked for the United States Air Force working with pilots accelerating them in a centrifuge and they would black out as part of their training you know - jeez 3GS 4GS boom ouch ago at some point like 10 G's and most of them have these little dream lit states that he called them which are kind of like I saw a tunnel a white light at the end of the tunnel I felt myself floating out of the seat and having these sort of weird experiences and we know exactly what that is you know the blood is being compressed to the center of the body including the center of the brain the last thing to go is your brain of course keep you alive so the cortex is shutting down from the outside in that would create this kind of tunneling effect on the back of your skull where your visual cortex is that would create some of that open brain surgeries these are on epileptic patients where they cut them open and they poke around to see where the seizures are starting and and so they could you know zap those neurons instead of some big crude attack anyway so while they're doing that they get permission from the patient to wake them up while they're under and the brain is open and they tap around with electrodes so this is one way to map what the brain is doing if you know so what do you report when I tap here oh I just had a vision of my tenth birthday or whatever and it's like okay that's where that that's stored right there well there's another spot right on the temporal lobes just above your ears where you can tap it and the person says oh I'm floating out of my body I'm up by the ceiling now and you tap a little to the left on my left leg is up my right leg is up and my left arm is floating my right arm is floating I'm way up I hear now now I'm coming back down just by you know with a rheostat just controlling how much electricity is going into the neurons in that one particular spot so we know for sure that the near-death experiences are in the brain experiences that the people report are real they have experience but we know it's neurologically based now the counter-argument is yes of course you have to have your brain to have experiences but it's a kind of a like a doors of perception opening into this other realm hmm that these chemicals allow you to do it's like I was by the way I've been talking with Graham Hancock about ayahuasca he's invited me to come join him and rythme a-- in Costa Rica to try this I've never tried this and I'm tempted to go do this to say okay let's I'm gonna write about these things I should experience it and but there's a debate amongst people who do this that you know it is it strictly just in your head and you're not actually going anywhere or does it open some door to some other dimension okay that's kind of the and and so the the near-death experience believers counter that well yes it's in your brain but it still is taking you somewhere else the problem is is that how you tell the difference between I had a personal experience that the only way you can share if you actually go through it yourself for a scientific community that studies it well there has to be some way to test it somehow or tell the difference between that suffering is that the limitations of the scientific method yes yes dealing with consciousness and you're dealing with memories and dreams and ideas like you can't measure those either that's right so I quote to other sources okay so first of all I discuss the most famous example is even Alexander's trip to heaven he wrote a book called proof of heaven now this is a harvard-trained neurologist he knows more about the brain than I do and so he knows all the research I'm talking to you about and there's a lot more so but for him it was so powerful and okay what's it like so he talks about in his book you know he was in a coma in a hospital okay so he takes this trip and the colors were unbelievably intense and rich and I felt just deep personal love for the people I saw and and oneness with the cosmos and you know he goes on and on about this so then I quote from Oliver saxs memoir when he talks about in the 60s when he was dropping acid and you know the colors were incredibly intense and I had this incredible feeling of love and connecting and I quote from Sam Harris's the opening pages of waking up you know I took ecstasy and I'm sitting there on the couch with my buddy and all of a sudden I feel this intense love for my friend in other words that you know the narratives are indistinguishable to an outsider hmm so how do you know that you're actually going to heaven or you're just having a fantastic trip well it's entirely possible it's both well so how do we know don't know that I think the real problem is people saying that they know right right saying that I know that I was in another dimension right no I mean it's entirely possible that your consciousness is capable of going through these chemical doorways that are created by these molecules and that it experiences some frequency on the on the dial like if there's a radio dial maybe we're at ninety five point five you can get to 97 if you take you know X amount of milligrams of dimethyltryptamine and then you go to this new place you know this is still physically here you know Aldous Huxley's book the doors of perception s which supposedly is where the doors got their name but that's something somebody told that's that that's a meme that's not true I don't know anyway but that's the idea yet sounds good so but really what you're getting at is a super core problem of what is truth know what's so mystical experiences are by definition personal and you can't corroborate them through some external scientific method so I mean science is based on the fact that we can falsify a claim we can test it somehow and that it's not just me pointing to something and say I think that's true because I experienced that you know so I wrote a column in Scientific American about this called what is truth is I start off with like well I the truth for me is that dark chocolates better than milk chocolate and maybe you say no milk chocolates better than dark chocolate and it you know there's no way we're gonna resolve that but is that true that's just preference that's just that's an internal state or I say the other example I use is you know stairway to heaven is the greatest rock song of all time then you go no no Free Bird is better than stairway - okay you can't resolve these things right so you slide therefrom into things like these personal experiences we have so you know so what I think Graham is hoping if I go to rythme and try ayahuasca and I say well I report this fantastic experience I had presumably I'll have this and then it'll be well did I Michael Shermer go to this other dimension and now I really kind of as a skeptic need to renounce my pure materialistic monist ik belief and admit there's a dualistic that's another side there's a spirit side or something and I'm not at all sure I could do that because how would I get out of my own head and say I know for sure that I went to this other place because I wouldn't know you must certainly don't know you you know that the experience was a real experience in terms of the fact that you had it like you you felt the things I haven't done ayahuasca but I've done the active ingredient in ayahuasca many times it's dimethyltryptamine and it's more potent in the form that I've done it in it's a shorter lasting much more potent experience and it's undeniably phenomenal really it's very crazy it's it's impossible to describe I would throw some words around and do my best but it won't right the the trip itself what's really bizarre there's a lot of really bizarre aspects of it one of the things that's really bizarre is the feeling that you've been there before mm-hmm and the speculation and Terence Mckenna talked about this pretty much in depth one of the one of the speculations is that when you're in REM sleep you're experiencing some form of dimethyltryptamine in that your brain your liver your they know for a fact that it's produced by your liver in your lungs and now they know these to be anecdotal evidence that was produced by the pineal gland which is of course the third eye in reptiles of certain reptiles that actually has a retina I mean it literally is in the center of your head where the eastern mysticism third eye exists now they know that in rats because of the Cottonwood Research Foundation which is something that dr. rich Rick Strassman who was the guy who wrote the book DMT two-spirit male right it was that the first federally approved tests done on dimethyltryptamine clinical trials and it's an amazing book really really fascinating and he was a part of this Cottonwood Research Foundation and they've now proven that in live rats the pineal gland produces DMT obviously that doesn't produce it in people but it's it's very hopeful do you have other mammals yeah and again if the molecular lock and key mechanism is set up in the brain already for this external drug to work there must be something like that already that's in the brain that evolved for some reason presumably are you aware of the correlation between this and Moses's burning bush well I've heard ideas about that yeah Jerusalem scholars believed now that the burning bush may very well have been the acacia bush is a tree it's rich in dimethyltryptamine all right so then this is well it's sort he's tripping but I think we're getting we have to realize when we're translating things from the Bible you're translating from ancient Hebrew which is incredibly unusual language where letters also double as numbers right and like the letter A is also the number one and there's numerical value to words and it's it's a very weird language to translate to Latin Greek into English so when we're hearing that Moses experienced a burning bush and that this burning bush was God and God gave him these Commandments on how to live your life it's entirely possible that Moses was tripping on DMT and that this burning bush what we're getting is an interpretation of somehow they had a DMT experience from smoking this bush right smoking some aspects of it they figured out how to extract it or how to you know isolate it and they had a dimethyltryptamine experience I love that which pretty much makes sense yeah that totally made sense I mean we we get articles submitted all the time at skeptic magazine of people that attempt to make natural explanations for biblical phenomena you know that the Red Sea party because it was his battalion earthquake or you know the meteor strike caused the skies to turn red and that's what you know that the plagues of frogs you know that kind of thing okay I I like all those that we published one in which the argument was that Jesus was never he never died he was in it like a deep coma on the cross and that one of his followers had you know stabbed you know with when he got stabbed in the side with the wound that it actually had some chemical that put him in this coma and then they this sort of a Dan Brown thing they whisked him off and put him in the cave and then and then and then stole him and he ended up in France or India or something like that okay maybe you know I published it because I thought yeah there might be something to that and I like those kinds of explanations on the other hand if you go into sort of your Joseph Campbell Jordan Peterson role of thinking well maybe these stories are doing something else entirely none of this stuff actually happened the way it's described the stories are there to convey some moral homily or some message about how we should behave or act and that kind of thing so I'm always conflicted about you know do I really want a natural explanation for this do we need to go that path or maybe the stories they didn't actually happen Moses never really existed or the people never lived in the desert for forty years because there's no archaeological evidence that this ever happened maybe didn't happen maybe it's a story that represents you know destruction redemption starting over it's something like that yeah more likely right I'm aware at all of any of the translations from the Dead Sea Scrolls I haven't followed that - there's a fascinating book - fascinating books that were written by a guy named John Marco Allegro and John Marco Allegro was a scholar who was hired to be one of the people to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls and he deciphered them for over 14 years and wrote a book called the sacred mushroom and the cross and his interpretation was that the entire Christian religion was a massive misunderstanding and what it really was that the original what the original religion was based on was the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility cults and all of these ancient parables were really just ways that they could retain the knowledge while hiding it from the Romans so they did it in these store stories and parables and even traces back the word Christ to an ancient Sumeria qward which means a mushroom covered in God semen it's a crazy book it's actually brought out by the Catholic Church and then reprinted recently by a guy named Yann Irvin and he did it like five or six years ago maybe more he reprints he can buy it now but I have two copies of it there were original prints that I bought from a long time ago yeah but they bought it out and yes to get rid of it and then John Marko Allegro wrote a second book called the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian myth after they bought out his first book right so he has two books that are available that are basically supporting this theory but the idea was that rain would come down and the the people at the time we have to consider the fact that infant mortality was incredibly high back then people died all the time and fertility was very unknown no one really understood why people got pregnant or how they got pregnant or what kept people from getting pregnant and so people were constantly concerned with the possibility of them going extinct and they were really were concerned with villages getting wiped out their family getting wiped out so they were very concerned with fertility and they thought that when it rained these mushrooms that came out of the ground they came out of nowhere like you know how quick a mushroom grows it's not like a plant so if there's a Spore which by the way their spores everywhere there's mycelium that's underneath the earth and everywhere you go there's the potential for the growth of these mushrooms so the rain comes down and then almost instantaneously these mushrooms blossom up out of the ground right you eat these mushrooms you have intense psychedelic experiences you you gather them up you hide it from the Romans you hide it from everybody you don't want people to know this is your portal to God and so they had all these stories that they they hid now I don't know if he's right and I'm not a religious scholar nor am I an expert in ancient languages but it's incredibly compelling it's really fascinating stuff interesting yet it was a legit yeah rock solid scholar right you know he was by the way he was also an ordained minister and the only one that was on the Dead Sea Scrolls deciphering group that was agnostic because through his study of religion once he became an ordained minister and then became a scholar through his study of religion he realized like oh these are all like ancient weird stories or and they're all incredibly similar and as you go back in time you find the similarities and Qumran is where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls is the oldest version of the Bible the only one that's written in in I think it's the only one that's written in Aramaic right they they actually had to do DNA tests because the the Qumran scrolls were written on animal skins so they had to do DNA tests on the skins alone so that when they could match up the pieces to the right animal yeah so they had to match up the pieces of the the scroll when they were trying to piece it all together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle right took them forever to do right I do remember a controversy from a few years ago of the the Dead Sea Scrolls committee whoever controls them were not very forthcoming about what they were finding and letting and letting Outsiders look at the originals there's some wacky stuff in there apparently yeah and also you know intellectual groups like that they tend to circle the wagons and you know where the elite special experts and you can't look at these things and I think there's that but I think there's also like if you're gonna go by the way Christianity set up those store these are this is what everything is based on a mini right you know Moses Joseph all these different characters those stories are completely different apparently in the Dead Sea Scrolls and there's a lot of waxers yes right things coming from the sky like alien toys weird we're probably tripping their balls off they're probably I mean that's what I think it's entirely possible that the zeeco story about the the thing in this guy yeah and of course the UF ologist think well that's they were seeing a UFO yeah but no no they were tripping and that's much more likely than we know for a fact that psychedelic mushrooms existed back then right it is the easiest thing in the world to see a mushroom pick it up and eat it right so and people did it all the time they experimented with food all the time there were no books to look up to see which are the good ones to eat it completely makes sense it completely makes sense yeah and there's also in a lot of really ancient religious art there's tremendous mushroom iconic photographs of these paintings there's a tremendous amount of mushroom imagery from an ancient Christian art in fact the actual halo the actual urn used to be different the halo that we see now is like a hula-hoop that's right on guys heads right but the old halo used to look like the bottom of a mushroom cap oh really have you ever seen no see if you can find those images I wrote an article a long time ago called Santa Claus was a mushroom because Santi the Amanita muscaria mushroom that this is all based on looks like santa claus it's a white and red mushroom and a lot of people and it has a micro Reiser relationship with the coniferous tree so that's the that's the mushroom the Amanita muscaria but if you scroll down Jamie there's an image see like there's all those elves like look at the old look at that scroll up to that elves whip up those elves yeah that was it was all Christmas like ancient Christmas images were connected to that mushroom now scroll down to those images of the halo a look at the old halo the old halo looks like the bottom of a mushroom cap it does kind of so the idea was those aren't like markings or letters or numbers chart itself is lines yeah there's a bunch of those though there's a ton of those images of ancient like religious figures with that circle behind them with all those lines that look exactly like the underside of a mushroom candy and the idea was that these enlightened people were under the influence of mushrooms that's why they had the halo on ways to designate like oh this is the guy who was on mushrooms who taught us all this stuff I like that I like that in UFOs we know it's a real thing I mean anybody can look if you think you're brave go eat five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms good luck you you can't tell me they don't work they work on everybody they don't they don't work whether or not you believe or not believe they just work right so it's there's an easy way to to see if you just took them you go oh I see why these people thought this right well my favorite biblical scholar to read is Bart Ehrman do you know barter no he does huh well he started off as a but is a Bible scholar because he was a believer he went to the Moody Bible College he was gonna be a preacher and evangelical in the whole thing and then he went to I think was Princeton Theological and he found out how the book was really written you know it's a wiki it was you know it's an edited volume with lots and lots of people coming in later and modifying this and and debunking some previous Old Testament you know pert in a story or whatever and then ENFP and I he's an atheist or agnostic or something whatever he is he's not believed so this is sort of the atheist favorite biblical scholar cuz he doesn't come at it with a religious belief but he he's got a bunch of teaching company courses where he deconstructing how Jesus be how Jesus became the Messiah or God or whatever and you know the Old Testament the New Testament what these books mean and a little bit like you know again Jordan Peterson you know I'm gonna talk for two hours about Genesis 1:1 how can you talk for so long about just a you know a single chapter in a book you know and well there's there's a lot of historical interpretation so I dunno art historians will look at those palos or the thing in the sky that the UFO well that's a UFO no no actually at that time that artists were putting those things in the sky for this other reason like okay I didn't know that right so it's good to have some historical background to the text or the again I I don't read Hebrew Greek Aramaic or so I'm trusting the King James Bible which I really shouldn't so I rely on people like Bart who can read it in the oldest version we have and no no that word actually means this oh okay yeah I would be I mean if you could get into a time machine and go to any time in history and just see what it was like how people behaved yeah I'd be real tempted to go to ancient Egypt but I'd also really be tempted to go to around the time of Christ I mean I don't necessarily even know if Chrysler's are real human but I would love to see what life was like back then Bart Bart thinks he probably did exist and obviously not the Messiah and not the supernatural stuff but that somebody like that or by that name Yeshua it's not that unusual the name probably did a lot of the stuff he did just as itinerant preacher and so on so I'm on board with that I'm not part of the group the atheist to say he never even existed and really made-up story I don't think so and I actually in heavens on earth I conclude probably erroneously or in the minority position that when he said the kingdom is within or in more famous passage that that there my disciple standing here now will not die before they see the Son of man return and these kinds of things in the Gospels I think his message was there is no place that you're going to when you after you die that heaven is here this is it we have to make the most of it and it's a message that you would give to a people that are suppressed oppressed by the Romans so I call this the oppression Redemption myth you know that it's a story of it's like the Native American Ghost Dance in 1890 you know when they're like an oppressed people they're about to be wiped out and a messiah comes and says you know it's all gonna be great you know it's we're gonna change everything the Buffalo were coming back if you wear this this sweater it'll be impervious to white man's bullets and it was a very christ-like story and and when you start looking at it you see oh this this story comes up a lot in history among oppressed peoples as a way of saying we got to circle the wagons and take care of our own against these oppressors and make a better life here yeah it just makes sense that there'd be so many parallels and you think about history and how many people were impressed and how often these narrative repeated themselves over and over again when people got into power and then invaded others and yeah it's brutal history I was just I'm just reading Neil Ferguson's new book the tower and the square it's about the tension throughout all of human history civilization between hierarchical top-down power structures and horizontal networked power structures and that they're always in tension but mostly throughout history it's the top-down power whoever's and so is this one chapter opens with that scene from the good the bad and the ugly when when Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood are facing off each other in the cemetery and and cleani switch shoots the other guy that really the bad guy and then Eli Wallach tries to shoot his gun in his empty and so Clint Eastwood walks over to him and he says there are two kinds of men in this world those who have loaded revolvers and those who dig you're going to dig if Ferguson uses this story to say basically that's the history of civilization somebody's got the loaded gun and everyone else is gonna dig it's amazing that we made it this far I mean we live in such I mean I know that there's troubles today and I know we have issues in our in our own society and forget about other parts of the world which there's horrific things happening right now but in comparison to just a few thousand years ago you would not want to live back there to be fun to go to visit if you had come back I would want to go in a giant bulletproof hamster bubble like roller and just like maybe that where you could they couldn't see you I just want to be there where they can't see me just I would love to observe and see what because we have all these like I'm watching this show Vikings right and oh man it pissed me off episode 2 this guy puts his feet up on the table and he's got rubber bottom soles of his shoe mic you he has a heel that's clearly made in a factory and there's like this textured plastic bottom to his shoe okay how did no one catch this amazing wardrobe and all these ships and I'll take a picture of it no I'll put it up on my Instagram later it's so dumb it made me angry but I'm watching this and I'm like ha this was how they talked how do we know this is what they did how do we this is some weird interpretation of some historical events really hard to interpret and of course thoughts don't fossilize oh no I start off early in the book about you know who are the first people to figure out we're gonna die right and become aware of our own mortality in a way that well maybe I can conceive of being somewhere else I don't actually die so we know if you know elephants grieve and mammals grieve and you know dissertations dolphins whales and so on and chimps say you know they feel these mothers are just just depressed and almost suicidal when their infants die but that's different from you know conceiving of like well I know I'm going to die because I see people around me gonna die but I can conceive of maybe some other place to go so I start off with something of a paradox that and if I ask you to imagine yourself dead you can't do it because to imagine anything you have to be alive so it's not gonna be like falling asleep and waking up the next morning because you have dreams or whatever it's gonna be more like general anesthesia where it's you know 10 9 8 boom boom lights out and you and but you just never wake up so and we and so we talk about things like well there's nothing after death but but even the word no thing implies there's a thing or you know you're going to this place this nother there's there's nothing well no thing or nowhere it implies that there's aware that you're not going to but there's not even aware that you're not going to and it's like you know with Lawrence Krauss and some of these cosmologists you know with what was there before the Big Bang so when you say well imagine no universe you know no stars or planets or galaxies no light but there's not even any space or time and at some point you just we don't have the words to even say what it is we're trying to talk about there's there's nothing before the Big Bang you can't even actually talk about it well don't they think now though that it's in part it's entirely possible that the Big Bang is like a cycle yes well I think it's something like that it expands and contracts infinitely forever yeah that that's a preferable well again we have to come up with some way to talk about it so we also have this weird biological idea based on our own limitations that there's a birth and a of everything right so I actually have a chapter devoted to Deepak Chopra in the Eastern wisdom we're kind of buddies now yeah I went to his Center down in Carlsbad and spent some time there and I think he's alright he's a good guy ya know he's totally a good guy I mean he's been and at times in the past either misleading or misled yes sometimes that's right you know some of his recommendations for dietary things or whatever perhaps but I know for sure because I've gotten to know him pretty well that he totally believes the stuff he says it sounds like woowoo as I used to call it but a lot of it if you interpret it from a kind of a Buddhist Western Buddhist position you know when he says you know consciousness is the ground of all being it's the ontological primitive these things that sound nonsensical but if you think about it it's sort of from a simple perspective the entire universe is in your brain and when you cease to exist the universe ceases to exist are you but you're in your brain you know I call that the weak consciousness principle it's just sort of true by definition now he goes a little bit further and says you know that consciousness is everything and that we bring into existence material stuff by thinking about or observing it or whatever and here's some quantum physics experiments that are really spooky it's like okay time out you know quantum physics is weird and spooky consciousness is weird and spooky that doesn't mean they're connected he thinks they are so it's a debatable point okay but still the the experience of going and so we did the meditation thing and all the massages and teas and the food and all that stuff and it's you know it's this beachside resort in Carlsbad you can't help but feeling better like yeah this stuff works where's Carlsbad it's down by Antoninus north of San Diego beautiful area totally beautiful yeah he's kind of deep box not done and he's got a good thing going and not just deep buck you know there's other people like sam harris at bob right has a new book out called why buddhism is true okay so it works so we're back to does it work what do you mean by does it work not just for me I had an experience and I felt better we got to do better than that for science so what Deepak and right are talking about is that is that the western version of Buddhism may actually work medically it may you know lower stress hormones in your body the lower blood pressure these kinds of things that are measurable because that's what we want to know from a Western scientific perspective not just do I feel better but 67 percent of the people who did this particular treatment they got better by these measurable criteria okay that's that seems fair enough to me I'm open to that hmm now this idea that there's nothing or no thing that we can't even we can't even wrap our head around nothing because we think of a thing that there's no thing but there's never a thing right right but how do we or why why don't we just say we don't know why don't we speculate on the possibility of consciousness being some sort of ethereal thing or something that exists outside of the Bible we don't know we really don't that's what I say I conclude and you know I don't know if there's an afterlife or not at very end of the book we can come back to this later I just say it doesn't really matter whether there's an afterlife or not because we don't live in the afterlife we live in this life so this is the time you got to do whatever you got to do I called this alvey's error Alvie is Alvy Singer Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall remember the scene early in the movie where he is a flashback as a young boy and as he's in the psychiatrist's office with his mom and you know what's the problem he won't do his homework you won't do your homework why won't you do your homework Alby says the universe is expanding he says the universe is expanding goes the universe is everything there is and if it's expanding one day it's all gonna blow apart so nothing really matters I'm not gonna do my homework it is battery yells a time what does the universe got to do with this we live in Brooklyn Brooklyn is not expanding that's my sort of take-home message we don't live in the afterlife right or before the universe or after the you now that matters I mean it's interesting to talk about but we live in this life yeah so this is what really counts they're fascinating things to contemplate but ultimately really for practicality sake you really should be paying attention to life totally I mean this is why I tell Deepak all the time he says well you know Michael this table is actually made of atoms that are mostly empty space and the quantum physicists but according to Sean Carroll that's not correct oh that right yeah he explained that yeah the idea of empty space he's like that's no that's just a poor way of describing okay and I would defer to him and let him describe it he also described the super positions like particles subatomic particles being a superposition where they're in a state of moving and not moving at the same time okay he explained that in a way that completely my head up to I didn't think I had it figured out but I thought I had a definition that at least was like okay well it's this even though I don't understand and he's like no it's not even that okay yes I refer to be please if you're interested go to the sean carroll podcast well as i understand it anyway that it doesn't really matter because the atoms are jiggling in a way that this is solid you could tell it's solid and this is the level we live at well there's somebody drop this on your head you're in trouble that's right yeah so again we don't live in a quantum world we live in a macro world where it's this kind of stuff does matter okay so you know - so for Deepak the whole Western Way of thinking scientifically there's a beginning and an end time is a linear thing that we can measure and there's birth and death all that is the wrong way to think about it that the Buddhist way is that it's just all consciousness and when you die you return to the conscious state you were before you were in before you were born so so the physical body is just an instantiation of this conscious thing whatever this is and and okay you know I don't know you know I'd be surprised but I'll be pleasantly surprised I'll tell you that if it turns out close my eyes for the last time and I wake up and you know there's Deepak and you know whoever my friends Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould and all the greats as him over there everybody's their hitch is their you know it's like oh boy okay this isn't this isn't hell if that's true you know I'm not against any of this just like I'm not against Ray Kurzweil in these guys figuring out that we can live 200 years or 300 years great if you can do it you know but let's just you know so when they say to me Shermer no you want to live to be 500 it's like just get me 280 without prostate cancer give me the 90 without Alzheimer's you know a hundred give me no 100 so I'm not on a morphine drip in a bed you know just quality of life incrementally by year and if it turns out you solve these problems and we lived 150 200 then we have a bunch of other problems we don't even know about yet okay well I think there's some beauty in temporary things that we for whatever reason we're we're avoiding that concept we were terrified of things ending there's beauty in things being temporary right you don't want to go to see a movie that's a hundred hours long movies a great movie then it's 90 minutes you're in you're out maybe two hours if it's three hours of its Blade Runner or something something crazy like I quote Christopher Hitchens in my book cause I love his analogy first of all you're at the party and and death taps you on the shoulder says you have to leave and worse the party is gonna go on without you and they're gonna all have fun it's like oh no but if the Christian version of heaven and hell is real you're tapping the shoulder at the party until you can never leave the party it's like oh that's even worse I don't I don't want to do anything forever right and imagine the classical version of what heaven is like a guy with harp and there's a bunch of babies with wings like what or even that aside that there that this white hitch called it celestial North Korea you have a dictator that knows all of your thoughts and everything you're gonna do it's like wait a minute that that does not sound like fun to me that seems to me to be the inevitable future though that's one of the things that I'm really nervous about this dystopian version of the technological interference in our lives I'm entirely convinced that we're going to in inside of a hundred years live in a world where all of your thoughts really are documented and there's there's they have access to them the same way no one in their wildest dreams conceived of photographs 400 years ago and 400 years from now we're gonna have the ability to record record thoughts and ideas and they're gonna be able to read the contents of each other's minds right that could be well maybe that maybe we need some regulation there for that then maybe or maybe we just have to accept the fact that most of what goes wrong in the world goes wrong because people can think the secret sneaky up thoughts and when we those no longer exist anymore maybe we'll clean out human being year there was an outer limits episode about that in the 1950s might have been the other one pilot zone Twilight Zone where this guy all of a sudden is able to read the minds of other people and he's at work and he's you know listening all these conversations and you know all this fun stuff but then this is one guy who's really dark like he's kind of he's gonna come in and blow everybody away and so you know sort of climaxes where he you know he comes in and tells the boss everybody and they you know they go in there and it turns out the guy well I was never gonna do that I was just angry and I was just thinking that you know so that's like a minority for poor thing you know you could have these thoughts right we know from research that this is David bus's research on he wrote a book on murders who the murderer next door it's called and so he did the research on asking subjects have you ever thought about killing somebody you didn't like and turns out like 80% of guys and 67% of women have had homicidal fantasies in their life now 99.9 percent of us never act on our homicidal fantasies but we get mad enough we can imagine and he's got the narrative accounts cuz he also asked him tell me what you would do and oh my god they're just incredible to read like I would break every bone in his body and then I would pull out his fingernails and then I would say they go on here you're like holy but that's just fantasies fantasy yes some people have suicidal fantasies yeah that's people their fantasies of jumping off of a giant building right now I mean but they but most don't act on and most don't act on it and there's people that just have these thoughts and they think I'm they look at the edge and they go I could just jump off right now and end this whole thing but I won't and should be punished them no of course the Minority Report scenario it's like okay we found out for that this guy's thinking about robbing the bank so he had a fantasy about it he's not gonna do it I've thought about doing that this is really fleeting I was like what would I do if I had to rob this bank I mean I've never actually considered robbing a bank but I thought okay I'm at the bank what do I just decided to pull out a gun and everybody at the floor where's the cameras where's the security guard you know like right you've seen so many movies it's if you're bored you know but today that's another thing people are rarely bored because when they are they just their phone stare at pictures other babies butts right it's it's like you know you just pull out Facebook or Instagram and no longer bored you know when I was in my religious phase in in college I asked before I went to Pepperdine which is a religious close at Glendale college just get my GED I dove the way and my philosophy professor was an atheist and I was an evangelical so I'm telling her about Jesus and the whole thing in the afterlife and he says anyone oh no are their golf courses and tennis courts in heaven I gotta have something to do I'd be bored I thought I have no idea and then I also quote from Julia Sweeney's and letting go of God monologue she opens this monologue you know Julia from Saturday yeah with the Mormon boys coming by her house in Hollywood and there pitching their story like okay come on in pitch me your story like it's a Hollywood movie script you know what do you got so they tell her the whole thought it's gonna be great you know the blind shall see again the theft she'll hear again and your body will be whole again and so she says well let's see I had uterine cancer so I had my uterus taken out do I get my uterus back when I go to heaven they said yeah she was I don't want it back this is what if you had a nose job and you liked it do I have to get my old nose back that's true right as I opened this little funny story because it gets to the problem of identity who are you so if you're resurrected with Jesus the early earlier Christian cult sex before Descartes introduced dualism they believed that you are when you're resurrected at the you know after your death you are physically there in heaven physically and your soul the whole thing it's just one thing so the question is well how old are you when you're there you know so you're brought up and there you are sitting next to Jesus and God and whatever you know so they okay thirty thirty seems like a good year it's your Jesus was you know it was crucified okay thirty like but wait a minute I'm 63 now so what happens all the memories of my life for the last 33 years oh no you get all those memories okay but the memory the memory of my being 30 now is different from the memory I had when I was 50 of being 30 and 14:30 and even when I was in my 30s being 30 you know that the memories are always changing and edited in and forgotten or modified but particularly based on life experiences that happen afterwards so in your 20s you go to this college you marry this person you take this job or whatever you don't really know what the impact of those decisions are until much later in life which is why I always think its particulars for people to write memoirs in their 20s or 30s because they're celebrities you have no idea what those things actually mean until much later so this is the problem of who you are so first of all we already know that none of your body is the same material it was say a decade ago your cells are all recycled the molecules and atoms are gone there's new ones that replace it's the pattern it's the pattern of information that represents you Joe Rogan this is what you look like these are your memories so somehow that this has to be copied so in the Ray Kurzweil scenario of the singularity we're going to upload the mind they're gonna copy your connectome all your memories in your synapses okay so right away there's the problem of which memories well all of them know there are no fixed set of memories that are you your memories are always changing so the moment you take a snapshot of it that's just a fixed point that's not you really you are this whole you know long continuum that's always kind of flexible and changing so there's that and then there's the problem with the up mind uploading scenario is there's two kinds of cells there's the memory self mem self of all your memories and then there's the point of view self the POV self so when you go to sleep tonight you wake up tomorrow you're still looking at the world through your eyes and there's a continuity a point of view from one day to the next same thing with general anesthesia so like in the Johnny Depp movie transcendence where he's poisoned by these terrorists and he's died and he's got like a week to go he copies his mind connectome equivalent of the genome and puts it in a computer and then he dies and they turned the computer on and he's in the computer looking out through the little camera hole I don't see how this could happen that is if we copied you your connectome everything all your memories so we had a Joe Rogan number two copy ready to go but instead of you dying let's say we had a sophisticated fMRI brain scan machine slid you into it feed your Kinect uploaded into the cloud or whatever and your and then we slide you back out and you're standing there you you're still looking at the world through your eyes that's just Joe Rogan number two a copy and no more do you look at that then a twin looks at its sibling and says well there I am no no you're still standing they go no I'm here that's just a copy of me and so this to me seems a central problem with the mind uploading scenario it's just a copy did you see the thing in National Geographic today about the cloned monkeys no they've they've managed to actually clone monkeys no and yeah Jamie I uh I tweeted it earlier today it's crazy and well we're speculating that if they can do that to monkeys they're going to be able to be able to do that to you yes but again so who is right who is that there's a Michael Shermer is it your twin I mean like when you meet twins it's very weird like ice date a girl was a twin she had a sister looked exactly like her but like a little aw just as something just a few like oh you're not her super super confusing so they weren't the same person but they pretty much were yeah here's the here's the article scroll up there clone monkeys created in the lab now what yeah okay well so you're making copies yeah so it's a copy but it's not the same person because they have their own individual life experience is the moment you and your copy start diverging away and leading different lives or have different memories you should have on your show Nancy Siegel from Cal State Fullerton she's the world's leading twin expert and she has all these great scenario she has a new book out called accidental brothers and she has another book out on switched at birth and Nancy Siegel and and and these are scenarios not only we have the behavior genetics studies because she worked on the famous Minnesota Twins research not the baseball team but the twins research a twin separated at birth and raised in different environments like you know the one raised in a Jewish home the other raised in Nazi Germany they get together they have the same watch they wear the same kind of clothes they use the same toothpaste they married women that look is that pretty pretty similar you know so there's a lot that genetics does that is very subtle there's no gene for like we're Catholic or wearing this kind of clothes but you know if you have Nancy explains it if you have a certain body type which twins are going to have almost the exact same body type certain clothes are going to look better on you and you're more likely to pick those so by chance you're more likely to get similar clothes there's no jeans for clothes but something like that body type or temperament you know you have a certain kind of temperament at least half of which is is heritable so you're more likely to choose certain professions or prefer certain hobbies or activities or pick spouses that are the kind of you know that would gel well with that temperament so this if you make good decisions though well yeah there is that that bullet there's the element of volition the choices you make in life do diverge a little bit so they're twins are a little bit different you know from that but yeah but so a clone you know again the moment you start leading separate lives why the copy of you is not going to be you in heaven and religions have the same problem and you know if God is able to reconstruct your body like like a transporter I got into the world of Star Trek when I was writing this book it's like oh my god they have this whole blood page is devoted to what does the transporter do it's like okay first of all you know there's no transporter we're just it's just science fiction it could be whatever it wants you know but is it copy and paste they just copy you and reconstruct you on some with atoms on the other side or is it cut and paste or is it they actually move the atoms and yeah reconstruct it anyway but it does get to the problem of identity well what what are you really because it's it you don't have to it's not the the matter the material it's really the pattern which is why the singularity people focus on the cloud and uploading the Mike is the information but the information is always changing and how does the point of view go with it see what the cryonics I can at least imagine that if I'm frozen and woken up somehow a thousand years from now that I'd wake up like like do after surgery or sleep I can't see how that would happen if you flip on the switch in the computer or in the cloud or whatever that I'd be there going oh here I am wasn't there also the problem that every what is it seven to ten years every cell in your body essentially it's better place yeah except your neurons there's yet that that's right yeah so are we just our neurons that's the idea that that that's what the signal not your nose job that's right you're not your fake butt or your fake lips that's your neurons only but even there see the transhumanists they imagine this transitional stage where you start wearing contact lenses say they can call up the internet and and the moment I see you Joe Rogan the name pops up your Wikipedia page pops up and IQ no now I have this information so I'm not Bionic but but I'm also not just human I'm trans human ok so then then who are you right so these are the sort of the transitional stages so a cochlear implant is a kind of a brain chip and you know probably I think you know about that research of the paraplegic quadriplegic man who can control his computer cursor and now they he can actually control a fake artificial limb just by thinking about it so they put a chip in his motor cortex that reads the thoughts so he has these thoughts and he's been trained you know pulled the cup of water up to his mouth and drink with the artificial arm at some point you know said 50 years hundred years from now we should we could you have it all mapped and you can control your whole environment just by thinking you know I would like to hear Mozart you just think about it and then music in your house comes on it's Mozart why I freaked out about Siri sometimes like my daughter asked me about a song that she likes and we were in the car and I pressed the Siri button on my phone and I said hey it's some what's that new musical with what's-his-name Hugh Jackman The Wolverine guy some some musical that's based on Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus she wanted the the song I I literally asked Siri to do it and I started playing it instantly like within a couple of seconds like this is crazy yeah that this thing just pulled it out of the sky yep and it's playing in my car yep I did that the other night I wanted to hear Bob Seger's Hollywood nights I'm not sure why I got that in my head and it popped right up there's a YouTube video of him from 1978 just rocking it it's like wow it's amazing I'm just driving on the 101 freeway heading back home to Santa Barbara I'd like to hear Bob Seger Hollywood night Wow there it is yeah so the greatest showman that's okay my daughter loves that movie so she wanted to hear the song but I just talked the phone and it did that when are we gonna get past the talking to the phone right think it yeah because I'm pretty comfortable with looking for it let me hold on honey let me find it online I'm gonna go get it okay let me download it let me pay for them use my thumbprint or whatever and then now it's just talk to your phone right when when is it just pull it I think it it you know I want to hear a Led Zeppelin a whole lot of love I just I just start thinking starts playing when is that gonna happen it's probably coming we're probably all gonna give in to some sort of a chip something that we can get implanted simple easy transdermal device right you know fashionable you go to a club it glows right well you got the new one iPhone 38 yeah I think oh that's far more likely to happen before we get to the point where you could copy an entire brain and put it in a clone of your body I interviewed Kurzweil and I had a really interesting conversation with him for the sci-fi show that I was doing a few years back and I find him to be very interesting he's a fascinating incredibly intelligent guide that has I think he has more than a hundred different patents and think things invented he's a genius he's a bona fide genius but I also found it incredibly sad his motivation like what he's trying to do you know he's trying to recreate his father yeah yeah did you see that the documentary about yes yeah transcended it was kind of sad yeah dark yeah it's very dark he's got all his basement is filled with all his dad's stuff and you know he's always talking about life life life but he's just really kind of obsessed with death this is what I worry about is that again back to the alvey's area you know we don't live in in the next life whatever that is the far future we live now and don't miss it yes you're so focused on death and and how we can solve these problems okay I'm glad somebody's working on and he's head of engineering for all of Google now and they had that company calico a couple hundred million dollars working on Aging problems great again if you can solve the Alzheimer's these things that's great but you know don't be so focused on the next life you miss out I don't necessarily know if he is so focused that he's missing out I don't think he's missing out I think he has extraordinary vision in terms of like what is possible with the exponential increase of Technology sorry I think having a guy like that around is it's helpful it's I think it's beneficial to everybody it's incredibly fascinating you hear him talk about those things you know I'm too dumb to know if he's right you know when I'm hearing I'm talking about you think you really think yes by 2045 they'll be downloading our brain yet and do a computer much I don't know that's a it seems close yeah it's 2018 man I mean when I interviewed him I think it was probably 2013 or somewhere around then although you know to be fair if he says you know a century ago when they had telegram more than a century ago just the invention of the Telegraph you know in a century and a half or so you're gonna be you know pressing a button and just calling out what you want on a little box and be like you're in saying this what are you talking about yeah you know this why science fiction is usually set far enough in advance like a century or two rather than in historical present so that you can postulate these kinds of things this is what science fiction writers tell me if you set it off far enough readers are willing to suspend disbelief because yeah it seems possible look what we've been able to do so ok fair enough if we can do that I'm all for it they'd be great yeah I'm all for it too but boy I don't know I'm I've been very convinced and more so over time that human beings in this form that our time is limited I think yeah when artificial and I think even the word artificial life is a weird word throw around because it's not going to be artificial it's gonna be an actual thing right it's just gonna be non-biological right I think that's I think that's what life is outside of Earth I think that humans what we do with our curiosity if there's other curiosity in in the universe other curious life-forms I think they probably do the same thing they realized well there's a massive limitation in terms of biological tissue and in terms of our ability to evolve like oh I could just reprogram a phone your phone involves way quicker than people right go back to look at your I have an iPhone X right now go back and think about an iPhone one decade SETI scientists or scientists tend to be skeptical of the UFO alien abduction stories because if we do encounter aliens coming here they're not going to be biological yeah they're going to be computers or machines because that's the only thing that can survive the long distances a long time of interstellar space flight yeah I think we're just so wrapped up in the idea of biology being so important that you know like you have to it has to breed the normal way with eggs and sperm otherwise it's I mean we think of it you know biology is you know wet stuff but really they're machines a cell is a machine it's just processing molecules right which is what nanobots are gonna do they're gonna process molecules so it's really just they're all machines yeah there's cellular machines and and you know when they talk about things like quantum computing and if things get really squirrely like whoa whoa wait a minute what are you saying what do you mean by quantum computing right like where is this is this a computer like does this use like a regular motherboard like how does it have a CPU like what what's what's next stage after that like what do you know what what resemblance is it gonna have to anything that we think of today in terms of alien technology that we're accustomed to right you know so makes a point that you know if you say back to the 1950s where you have computers the size of this room down to you know now okay so you just keep the curve going and eventually they'll be the size of blood cells and you just ingest these little computers and then go in there and they fix your mutant DNA and in the bacteria that are in there they repair blood vessels that sort of thing this is what he's envisioning and I can conceive of it in principle I think but I forget whose law it is in any any trend that cannot go on forever won't so right so if it gets to a certain like that like Moore's law the doubling of that can't go on forever now the quantum computing people say oh yes that's right it'll stop but we're gonna do this other thing that is completely different oh yeah okay fine well homeboy I just I mean there's there's so many things to speculate about in terms of our potential future you know and the the this the fear of death is a very odd one it's normal its natural its biological animals have it every human has it everyone's scared to die no one's scared to go to sleep but everyone's scared to die right and it's this idea that this would be the end of the party right but really there's nothing to fear because you won't even know it right the algae as long as you're alive you're sentient and conscious of existence and then not so I mean when you ask people to quote surveys in the book you know how long would you like to live you know it's always about what the average lifespan is now people oh yeah I think I'd like to live in you know 82 or so right but if we fast forward you to you know 80 okay your time's up tomorrow's your day no no wait sit give me another week you know okay here's the okay everybody I need another month you want to run my first marathon yeah exactly yeah I contend that it's a silly argument that you know that do people say well I think we should have a limit on our lifespan and that we we need to die you know but but but you personally are you gonna check out when it's your time no of course they wouldn't as long as we're talking about being healthy and cognitively aware then most people want to continue severely depressed suicide yes that's an issue but most people would want to continue on so I that's a point in favor of the transhumanist said yeah people will want to keep going on as long as they're healthy and happy and leading fulfilled lives yeah as long as everything's healthy my grandmother had a stroke and they gave her 72 hours she wound up living 12 years oh wow and it was it was awful she had an aneurysm oh the 12 years was awful I was off it was horrific okay yeah I was really bad she was bedridden she would moan she was always in pain when she died it was a relief for everyone in the family it wasn't like oh we lost Graham right yeah it was like grandma's in peace now right like because for the longest time she was in agony it was I stayed with them when I first moved to do to New York they lived in New Jersey and I lived with them for a few months while I was saving up money for an apartment and it was horrific and she would be moaning and yeah Rann father had to take care of her and they had a nurse would come over and take care of her as well it was just well I think you Europeans have a more advanced humanist type perspective on that euthanasia yeah physician assisted suicide but they're doing that now in a few states yes but there's still this kind of sort of Christian ethic of you know only God can decide that you can't make those decisions and these are people more like Christian conservatives who otherwise think the government should stay out of your life and you make your own decisions and your take personal responsibility except when it comes to your death like wait a minute why can't I choose that well they worry about abuse okay fine just have rules about you know you have to sign something we have to like Kevorkian used to videotape you know his patients saying I to do this when they could still do it anyway yeah so yeah I mean how we deal with death it's a you know it's a he'd always been a huge problem it makes people uncomfortable and you know how we talk about it matters and I mean one of the motives for me writing this book is like ever written about science and pseudoscience science and religion science and God signed some morality but you know really this is that the big question you know what happens when you die and this is something that you know that people think about a lot or they've thought about a lot for a long time and you know so and nobody knows I contend you know nobody knows for sure and so we write these stories that kind of make us feel better the whole theory called terror management theory that is premise time the idea that fear of death is what drives civilization and creativity and productivity and architects and and artists and scientists are driven by this fear of death but if you ask people do you walk around in the state of fear of death most I don't so it okay it's unconscious okay maybe but how do you know if it's unconscious so we have these experiments where they prime the brain sort of try to trick it out of you and well mostly aren't they most people busy they're busy the fear of death comes when you're laying alone at night right like what there's gonna be a day when I don't wake up right it's gonna maybe I'll die tonight I'm sleeping but you never know yeah you just you just it's just lights out and that's that's the greatest way to die ever right go to sleep and don't wake up that's right yeah yeah I'm dying your bed peacefully yep yep that's good way to go which is why you know Hospice is probably you know a really good thing that we're getting better at it in the West yeah just helping people make that transition which is why back to near-death experiences it could be those brain chemistry chemicals that's what they evolved for was to help that process as your brain is shutting down you feel this sort of glow or this sort of good feeling that you know there's a tunnel you're gonna pass through the sense of transitioning to some other place and this starts off very early in life I cite research by Paul bloom in his lab at Yale with little kids so he presents them with this little puppet show and so you have this little mouse and this alligator and the alligator munches the mouse and he's dead where is the mouse now oh the mouse is at this other in this other place and he misses his mom and he's hungry and he's scared so and this is like preschoolers so it starts pretty young at this dualistic idea that something transcends the physical body there's something else that continues and I contend that that's because you can't conceive of nothing that runs just I don't perceive my own brain operating so it feels like thoughts are floating around up there and I feel like a kind of a set of patterns that would continue beyond the physical body it feels that way so our intuitions I think naturally lead to the idea of some kind of afterlife or something continues it is possible or is it possible that all these different cultures and all these different people have these concepts because maybe something does happen maybe some that's right yeah it could be something could possibly happen to whatever we think of as consciousness that's whatever we think of as you and I think most of our consciousness is weighed down by life experiences and genetics in our environment and all the things that we carry around in our head as memories and I mean this is a big part of what what your life is right you know and at the the core of all that is the self is you really the consciousness whatever that means right it's never been no one's ever been able to take consciousness and we extract it we put this in this beaker and now we wait it right consciousness is 28 grams or whatever they remember that yeah stupid thing right yeah 20 21 grams yeah yeah 21 grams yeah but what imagine if that was the case and before that all happened you went and downloaded your brain into some supercomputer right so you got to use you got one new that lives in hell on earth living forever we're never going to die just one mundane trip to Starbucks after another and you just checked out you're trapped in a computer which is what Ray Kurzweil is saying like what if like you what if they give you the opportunity to be trapped in a computer but you're trapped in an iPhone one essentially once you're in you're in like you can either wait and hang on for a few years and you will get a really good computer we're thinking quantum computers are gonna live around 2030 2032 but we can get you in now I mean you're looking pretty you're coughing a lot Mike right I mean well it's like with the cryonics people and I remind people you know you're being frozen on the worst day of your life you know the day you died yeah and you can't do it earlier because the state treats it as a form of burial legally so you can't be you know can't get the treatment and the throat in the injected with the antifreeze and all that before you're actually dead or they inject you with antifreeze yeah what type of antifreeze and the purpose of that well you're dead so it doesn't really matter but the purpose is to keep the cells from shattering because the freezing process will do that so they've got much better about that and what's actually frozen is this sort of gelatinous mass that's good that's vitrify it's called a vitrification process so it's it's it's a little bit like remember the taurine the bodies would add the dissected bodies and they were they were sort of this hard plastic plasticine yeah so this vitrification is sort of like that yeah and then that's frozen and as far as far as I'm concerned everyone frozen today including Ted Williams in his head in Arizona there will never be brought back isn't Walt Disney frozen no you know that's I try that then turns out they al khor cryonics foundation opened its doors and released a press release the same day Walt Disney died and these two stories Williams one is sad because they didn't have the money for the whole body so I took his head right it actually isn't that expensive because if you the way the way Al Khor and the other words do it is you take out an insurance policy on your life and you make them the the beneficiary of the insurance policy so if you started young you had say a quarter-million dollar insurance policy a few hundred dollars a year premiums you started super late the premiums would be much higher but but it's not like you're shelling out a quarter million dollars right your checkbook right and then when you do die what happens if you get defrosted because that has happened right haven't there known well oh well what happens is you look like a bowl of melted strawberries that were frozen it's just this just mush that happened to one of the companies that does this they had a power outage right yeah you don't want that yeah I'm not sure whether in it Al Gore is in Arizona I mean and there's other deeper issues with this whole idea because if you're gonna be frozen for a thousand years or so what's to say that the state of Arizona is going to be around or the government or the company that keeps the lights on the underwater or anything get anything to transport your body and some sort of one of the big ol electric Tesla trucks big cooler I'll send you to Mars yeah say so new spot yeah and again we'd if they somehow jump-started the body and would you wake up like you just had a long sleep would you still be in there I'm not at all sure that you wouldn't just be something like if the memories weren't preserved very well then you would you just be a zombie you if you don't know who you are there's no point in doing it I think the idea is freeze you and then one day they'll have the technology to thaw you out and everything's gonna be amazing and they'll be able to reverse aging and bring you back to when you're 18 right that's right yeah but here's the thing about memories what like if you do die and say if you do go to heaven you have the memories of your life are those memories just like the memories of today fallible and squirrely and right and if they're not then that's not really you right and if God resurrects you physically what's to stop you from aging and getting Alzheimer's or whatever well God's gonna prevent that by reengineering you well then that's not really me that's up there it's some superhuman transhuman I had a conversation with some friends mind her Mormon and they couldn't believe that I don't have religious feelings and one of the things that this lady said to me I'll never forget she goes you don't believe in an afterlife how do you get up in the morning right what are we what she said right how do you get up oh my god I love life yeah I enjoyed this experience I'm enjoying being here at dinner with you guys I'm gonna do some stuff tomorrow I've got planned out looking forward to it I've got like don't you enjoy your time like does everything have to be for a reward in some place that you're not even totally sure exists after we're done here it's such a weird thing to say cuz I don't think they even think about that I seriously doubt she wakes up in the morning goes okay because there's an afterlife I'm feeling good about life I'm gonna get up I doubt it I think it alleviates the pressure and I think that's a big part of what it what it is for people it alleviates the concern for the future like oh you don't have to worry God's got it God's can't derive it right everything happens for a reason right God's contain everything does happen for a reason after it happens right it's certainly yeah after it's over you can go back and go yeah it happened for a reason you know it became this and that became Who I am so it all happened for a reason that's right okay yeah you're right but of course usually what they mean if somebody's pulling the strings to make it happen yes not just the pathway that you happen to have gone down exactly they always mean that God has some grand very mysterious plan and I can kind of see how that feels good like okay I'm not alone there's somebody watching that after me not just my spouse and my friends and family but that you know somebody out there somewhere I can see what that feels good so this is the problem a theist have you know it Dawkins talks about this you know like what do you say to somebody you know this is it's dying you know it's like the Ricky Gervais smoothie the invention of line you know where he goes tells his mom well you know every you get it you get a mansion everyone who dies gets a mansion a mansion oh yeah it's great and he goes on and I you know no you know ten minutes later in the movie he's the Messiah because this meme got out you know it's a great story and you know so we can't do that you know if you're honest you can't make up a story so what what do you say so in secular humanist circles is those articles about that what do you say and it's hard you know you can't you can't promise it but you know reminding people of what a great life they've had you know how much they've influenced the lives of other people you know and so on that that's really all we have yeah you know use the line from Woody Allen in there you know who said I don't want to live on in my work I want to live on in my apartment and we don't get to do that no we did not and again I want to go back to what I said earlier is that you are enjoying this partially because it's temporary it's part of the thing about a day like right you don't want to stay up forever right you want to enjoy the day right and then at the end it's over and that day is a microcosm of your life yeah it's kind of fun to think okay I got eight hours here before you know it's dinner time and so on so I got to get my workout in and I get a brightens chapter and I get to make these calls and yeah it's kind of fun to kind of see how if you can squeeze it all in well yeah knowing that there's a time if it was a 20 hour window I you know I just start around like I got plenty of time yeah I find I get more done as a person who's very busy with a family and children and all that stuff ready I feel like I get more done it's res I don't have - off that's right I very rarely have time to off yeah I've been distracted to the last six months or a year or so with following Twitter feeds that send interesting articles to read which are interesting artists there's a ton of really good content out there and then podcast your podcast Sam's and Dave Rubin and and and that I've you know it's just like wow this is all good I really want to consume but wait a minute wait I'm not getting my workout in I'm not running this is like okay so it's a good problem that has the first world problem to have as they say and I think what the transhumanists and the Ray Kurzweil think is heaven would be something like that just endless streams of content that you know they could be hell yeah I don't know what he wants I mean I don't the living for everything is very problematic it's like what your be so outdated right you know in a hundred years yes totally I just and they're downloading yourself into a computer thing - what's to stop a guy like kim jeong-hoon from downloading himself a hundred times right or a thousand right or do it every day well every day makes a new Kim Jong Il this is one reason that these cult leaders they do try to do that yeah sex that is kind of what they're doing right yeah they're sending their genes out in the future as much as they can let me ask you this then what is that why does that instinct exist like is that a purely appropriation instead yeah I think so yeah so you think that's the religious cult leader instinctive yeah it's based entirely on some ancient reward system that's designed to get you to Genghis Khan your genes out yeah yeah absolutely yeah you know there's I have a chapter there why we have to die I mean what why can't we just be programmed like infants are and babies that you know the cells divide rapidly and they're super healthy I have a young son now he's 20 months you know he gets a little cut you could practically watch it heal it's just a credible and yet when I get a cut at 63 it takes a couple weeks to heal it's like why can't I can't the system keep going and the answer is twofold and second law of thermodynamics entropy everything is running down and second natural selection programmed us to stay alive long and to keep what get our children's children into the reproductive age after that given that we have limited resources and energy in the system we live in it's better to allocate the resources to the third generation say rather than you you don't need to live 150 200 years right 6070 years your children's children are now in their early 20s and having babies you're done as far as that natural selection is concerned now I say it in a way like there's a czar of or secretary of the Treasury that's allocating resources you know there's nothing like that it's just natural selection selecting things for whatever is best for survival to get the genes into the into the future so this is Dawkins argument in The Selfish Gene that that the gene is the is this is the thing we should be focused on not the body that the natural selection kind of operates on the body the phenotype think it's expressed in a physical body but the bodies are just survival machines that the replicators build to keep going so the replicators are immortal the species is immortal in a sense our genome is immortal that's why the talkin is called that River out of Eden one of his book titles is that the river out of Eden is eternal as long as our species is doesn't go extinct we live forever but you and I as rep as just survival machines we're just the genes way of keeping itself to the next generation so you're really only good for maybe 60 70 years for a human time scale you know your kids kids get to survival age you're done and this is the problem of you know that all the radical life extension is have the whole system starts to fall apart around the same time like mid to late 80s things start falling apart if you can make it into your 90s and you're still reasonably healthy that's really good maybe you had you know Mel Gibson and his doc on you know with the stem cells all that stuff is only going to push us further further more of us to the upper ceiling we're not going to break through that up pursuing about a hundred twenty without something hugely completely re-engineered there may be a CRISPR technology that re-engineers the genome to stop all this stuff from happening but you know we have four billion years well three and a half billion years or so of life of that continuity of the genome and it's all built into there in every single system every cell all parts of your said they're all gonna age and so you know when people like Aubrey de Grey I don't know if you know I've read ahead lon oh yeah yeah he's great I love this guy and I love that that beer is his favorite thing that he thinks is gonna be part of the process okay I'll have a few beers if this is gonna help and even if it doesn't that's okay yeah that's one of the things that may be most skeptical of him was the beer yeah I'm like that's a me no surpise drinking poison yeah I mean it's a mild poison yeah that's really delicious my boy yeah that's like good you drink that all day long I was like this is weird and I was talking to some of the interviewed him and said he was clearly drunk like I was like really and she was like yeah in a Vietnamese drunk drinking beer in his truck and she was like it wasn't it wasn't late in the day either he started started as early he's a fascinating guy too cuz I he's not really much for exercise either no I a lot of these guys that are in this they don't to me they don't look healthy no no and and the one thing we know for sure in terms of longevity to get you closer to the upper ceiling in more of us don't smoke don't drink too much exercise every day especially cardio yes you know and and just eat right healthy foods Whole Foods you know I'm relieved to hear you know that meat and eggs and butter this is all okay now good but yes that always felt like this was a balance with the salads right salads are good too now it's good it's not what's not good sugar yes yeah that's the worst that's right it's it's amazing how I love listening to your podcast with Nyna facials ty Schultz yeah because I totally related to the you know I went through my no meat stage and I just eat downing these huge bowls of Quaker granola mm-hmm which is incredibly addictive because it's sugar mm-hmm and I was cycling a lot and I wasn't not only was I not losing weight I'm putting weight I got a like a you know like carrying around this extra 10 pounds so I got but I'm eating granola it's healthy right no well especially the granola that most people buy that as sugar just laced all over it yeah yeah there's a lot of people that eat things that they think are healthy there's this great bread that my wife brought home looks like Dave's super bread or some like that I forget what it's called but I bit into it and I was like this is this is cake yes this might as well be cake and then I looked at it and there's like massive amounts of sugar absolutely I didn't even realize how much sugar is in bread tell my wife some Cologne Germany Jennifer and they they have real bread in Germany right I mean you pick up a loaf of bread it's like four pounds it's like a thing a lead because it's got nuts and it's super heavy and rich and there's no sugar right and it tastes very different but once you get used to it it's way better well it's also they're dealing with heirloom wheat in most of the European countries what we've done from I guess the early 1900's to slowly change what wheat used to be into my friend Maynard explained it to me because he has a restaurant and he get they grow pasta that's from heirloom wheat and he said that the wheat that you're getting today if you have the same amount of acres you get a much higher yield it's a bigger plant it's a big fluffy thing and it also has much more complex glutens in it so people have more of an issue digesting it you're getting like a lot more gluten insensitivity today than we've ever had before and that's all because of this manipulated wheat so we started buying pasta from Italy you can get heirloom pasta that's grown in Europe and it just it tastes different it makes you feel different when you're Indian it doesn't feel like a brick in your stomach right it's still pasta it's still carbohydrates it's not the best stuff for you but it's certainly better it gives your body a better or feeling right yep bread without sugar pasta without sugar yeah well you're gonna get some yeah it's just it's different it's and you know bread like bread is just bread it's not good for you it's not I love that story from Gary Taubes that you know when they started taking when they started making the transition from eating meat to eating carbohydrates and you know tasted like crap it's people don't want to eat cardboard so we got to put something in there to make it taste good sugar yep he's like all right that was like 1960s ladies after Eisenhower had his heart attack and then that whole meme of the you know dietary fat equals cardiovascular heart disease okay well I'm sure you read the New York Times article about how the sugar industry bribed scientists to say that sugar was the issue with heart disease and to take the blame excuse me to take the blame off sugar and put the blame on saturated fat right it's stunning it's stunning how many people to this day will just parrot that back and think that it's the fact right oh it's saturated fat it's terrible for you right like meanwhile it's no cholesterol terrible for you no it's actually the building block for hormones right it's literally the substrate for hormones right mr. Boddy's made oh that your cell the cell walls are you know you need cholesterol to build those yeah you say that people are like what are you talking about crazy you need electrons gonna kill you it's gonna kill you Michael sure yeah yeah it's weird Nina's book is excellent and there's there's quite a few books Gary Taubes book is excellent as well there's some you know there's a lot of people now that are shifting their diet over to you know me you call it paleo or Mark Sisson calls it primal right primal blueprint you're essentially just eating vegetables and fish and meat and eating healthy things eating avocados and coconut oil and you know and healthy fats and that's what your body craves right and once you get used to it one of the things that's incredibly beneficial I tell people I don't get hungry during the day like most people right I'm not starving right and I don't crash I don't need an I don't need naps like what'd you have for breakfast her before do you eat before a workout or after I eat after workout well I like to do is fasted cardio I usually run in the morning or yoga in the morning with no no food in my stomach so it's like 11:00 well before you eat eggs at eggs for breakfast yeah and avocado and you know like last night I had steak and avocado like I'm eating mostly that'll hold you through the workout about 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning yeah I'm fine now what we have after a workout depends maybe a protein shake you know really depends entirely today I haven't worked out yet so I just had breakfast right but most of what I'm eating is Whole Foods healthy Whole Foods I'd still eat plenty of salad I still yeah you know but I very rarely I'll indulge in carbohydrates like I had a cheeseburger from five guys on Sunday every now and then yeah no no no I bend yeah that's right I think if you're working out a lot you can yeah you can tolerate a little bit more of that yeah just give yourself a little cheat day you feel better about it you don't feel you know you don't feel like you're constantly bribing yourself but overall I feel great yeah we do some long three-hour bike rides up in Santa Barbara where I live now there's a group at pretty serious affected by no no I was just north of that the firearms yeah but I was trapped there you know it was like being on an island the only way out is to go five hours north and around to get to LA really yeah yeah yeah three weeks the only way to get to LA is you had to go up to Santa Maria take the 166 over the five you're practically in Bakersfield and then five South to LA yeah so the 101 was shut down completely shut down and all that there's only like Feud side roads that parallel it and they were all closed because they were covered in mud and also all the trucks and and equipment construction equipment to get the mud out of there they just opened it Sunday night that's incredible yeah so for a while they had ferries at a ferry from Santa Barbara pier to Ventura of course you take the ferry Ventura then you don't have a car then what you know you get it uber to LA or something this is crazy mudslides were insane yeah Oprah was there the next day I think she missed a helicopter din obviously but I missed her house by like 50 feet something course it did magic we may have dungeon sea we may have another Western White House in Santa Barbara right the reagan ranch where he had his western white house is north of santa barbara you think Oprah's gonna win it she's gonna run for president she I don't know if she's gonna run but I the the world we live in now she could win do you think so she's a pretty good speaker she's not bad she's a good speaker yeah just what I always bring up with Oprah do you remember when Oprah was a big supporter of the secret Oh totally yes I know we've debunked her stuff because she's always open to whoop now this was she was super open to that yeah she was we did the calculation she was like 50 then yeah she was a young dumb kid who didn't know any better nope you know and I mean she's a living testimony to what you can do if you put your mind to it use your intelligence and hard work take a bowl and she had a television show that was fun to watch and it was great for women it was like she sort of she filled a niche that wasn't wasn't filled before yeah there's something okay so we have to make a distinction between the kinds of things that say a Tony Robbins or maybe even a Jordan Peterson would say like here here are some things you could do that'll help you be more successful you know set your goals write them down write every morning when you get up you have a plan you know like Jacko says you know have your running your workout clothes ready to go so you're not fumbling around and give up you know it's it's almost like you're betting on your future self house this is what I'm gonna be like in 12 hours so I'm gonna do something now oh that's good you know in Jordan has this book here's the 12 things you got to do yes to do what well to be successful okay so you know Oprah kind of I think did those things intuitively just as a you know just what she did that's how she became successful which has nothing to do with if I tell the universe I want a Lamborghini it's going to appear in my driveway you know and the other deeper problem with that was that this implies that what if I'm not successful you just weren't thinking positive you mean these poor people in Somalia no even worse what about children with diseases right do their thinking wrong yeah yeah it's no good yeah the idea that you your entire existence is based entirely inside of your own imagination it's just preposterous there's a lot of random that's going on in this world right some parts of the world get hit by meteors were they faster people no well how come how come Putin didn't get hit by a meteor assassinating rivals and you know still there's a lot of people out there that are terrible people they just skate through that's right somehow or another problem of evil might have bad things happen to good people and good things happen to best sometimes they do the problem with the the secret is that if you're successful and you know you have this story of I just imagined it and I willed it into being and look here I am you can do it too right Oh sorta how many people also willed it into being it didn't work right let's get the full numbers for how many people were daydreaming all day and they never got that pony you know I call this the biography bias people write biographies of Steve Jobs okay so here's the thing you enroll in a really elite college dropout move back to your parents house and start a startup company in your garage it works actually how many people did this in the 70s yeah and they did startup companies and they went out of business in three months or whenever have to have a good problem no and no one writes a biography of them right yeah you know we only hear the hits forget the misses but at least those people even if they failed they took a shot at something they're trying to make something happen it fails they could try something else and maybe the third fourth fifth one will take right but the idea of the secret is the most preposterous thing ever it was because you're sitting around imagining that you're gonna will into existence the perfect spouse the perfect home the perfect family and you would just sit and dream about it and write it down and put pictures of it up on the wall then you would make it happen right like no you gotta go do things do it do things and it's the it's the one thing that keeps people from achieving things is they're actually going out and doing things right for whatever reason we have this blockade against action right people are terrified of the the unknown just like we're terrified of death right terrified of the unknown yeah the role of chance is huge and you we don't we forget to see the failures I was on a ride the other day with a guy you know what do you do I'm a VC okay venture capitalist so what's the ratio I mean you have that you put in two hundred thousand five hundred thousand you know what half-face what because know ninety percent fail yes I get i I said you nine out of ten companies you invest half a million or whatever it's gone he goes yep but the one you know the one I made twenty million dollars on you know more than makes up for the nine failures like well you know that's a high ratio so there's I know there's research on entrepreneurs and how risk-taking you should be so entrepreneurs score high and risk-taking you know they're they're not risk-averse okay that's good on the other hand some of them have what's called the over optimism bias they just never give but this is this is the idea I'm sticking with it I'm gonna keep pouring money and do it no dude nine out of ten fell just keep trying until you get the one you at some point you got to be a risk-taker but not too crazy you gotta know when to bail you gotta know when to bit yeah yeah well that's a crazy way to make a living yeah betting on other people too oh I know dear Ross shark tank sometimes my wife and I've been binge-watching shark tank the stuff that people come up with you know I mean it's like some of our just ridiculous but I think it's kind of like American Idol where they get let those ridiculous people on entertaining that means half the fun is watching people's preposterous ideas that's true the other night he had a little this little chip thing you put over the computer the camera so that you know the NSA or whoever can't you know watch you otherwise and he's like okay so here's the thing you know I'm gonna sell it for nine ninety five and if we get you know 1% of the market blah blah blah you know we're all gonna be billionaires and and then one of the Sharks said what you just put a piece of tape over there I think I saw Mark Zuckerberg put a piece of duct tape on his yeah and the kid over the carrot oh oh yeah you know or or somebody else said it'd be fun if he had a little thing you put over it and there was an image on the inside that was like this imagine the type of person that would have to be sitting around all day waiting for you to turn your laptop camera on come on they must have algorithms that just look and scan and try to find I don't know okay I can only imagine what's up at stuff that came out over the weekend I'll tell you about that Snowden oh the NSA knows who you are just by the sound of your voice and their tech predates Apple and Amazon a report on the intercept citing documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA has highly refined voice voice recognition software the agency's technology dates back to more than a decade and was instrumental in helping to identify Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Iraq the reports did your voice we're just in the room with your laptop or you need on the phone supposedly it Kannada they can use almost any microphone that's connected to like the Internet obviously so everything every letter available yeah and your voice there the recognition they have is better than a face print or a fingerprint yeah so if they wanted to find young Jamie they could get you favor left already have it wow this is saying or you have had it and don't worry about it like it's almost nothing what is your thoughts on Snowden and yeah then who's the other guy no Sarge Julian I have a I have a bad feeling about Julian Assange I have a good feeling about Snowden do you have everybody had a good feeling about Assange Trump got in the office no no I the stuff before that I didn't care for him but I saw Snowden made an appearance sort of at Ted would the last Ted I went to in Vancouver then they rolled him out on a computer you know big screen and and there he was in Russia or somewhere right but the points he made were similar to that of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers it's like we should know what our governments doing we don't know everything you know we have to share the nuclear codes with you and I but you know at some point you know there's some line there of how much freedom versus security and and you know there's too much stuff going on even in the Obama administration the administration of transparency this is when a lot of this stuff was happening they say wait a minute I thought it was Bush that was doing this kind of stuff but we have to remember that Edward Snowden went into hiding during the Obama administration there one of the worst administration's ever on record for whistleblowers right which is really crazy because if you go look at the hope and change website when it initially existed one of the big promises was protection for whistleblowers exposing illegal activity right and that's just not true yep I think he should be allowed to come back yes I he doesn't have to be worshipped as a hero it's just like just he is a brave person before him we didn't know we were talking about any of this stuff I didn't know about this stuff well there was some there was an NSA contractor from many years ago who brought this stuff up and he was sort of dismissed what is his name he was the original NSA contractor that brought this up I want to say in 2011 um I could see him in my mind I can't remember his name Vinnie that's it bill Benny not sure who that yeah pull that pull that guy up young Jamie I just read he was the original guy bill Benny the original NSA whistleblower on Snowden 9/11 and illegal surveillance this was he became incredibly concerned post 9/11 when they started doing a lot of this and the initial work on computer surveillance and all the stuff they were doing and he bailed and he started talking about it openly and publicly and then Snowden came out after that and this the Snowden thing was where people got Alex but like what we really got a chance to understand oh this is actually happening right now this is a real thing right yeah I do think the government does overreach with their security theater you know we're at orange level today remember that doesn't happen anymore what happened to that and yet the number of Americans that died from foreign terrorism I mean there's some of the domestic terrorists if you want to consider mass public shootings yeah in that category but foreign terrorists coming here to kill Americans I mean what is less than bathtub drownings or no way less and they're like lightning straight double lightning strikes there's just nothing it's like shark attacks yeah all right it's just why are we spending you know billions and billions of dollars on this it's because they put that way they could it's like it's like the the proverbial elephant repellent you know ever since we put the repellent here without a single elephants come in oh yeah okay well Michael Sherman we're Americans we don't get caught with our pants down yeah I understand and you know it's and I just read Daniel Ellsberg's new book the doomsday machine this is on nuclear deterrence he's against nuclear deterrence as a as a rational strategy is a long-term mistake to the possibilities of error yeah which you know it's all good points but he has I'm not sure why it took so long to bring this book out he's got his notes when he worked for the State Department in the 50s and then the RAND Corporation in the early 60s during the Kennedy administration of you know the kinds of calculations that our own government was making about how many people we were willing to kill in defense you know hundreds of millions of Russians just you know so they out it's like the scene from dr. Strangelove where George C Scott you know he's like I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed but 20 30 million tops and that's actually real that's the kind of numbers they were throwing out yeah you can't leave a human being with that much responsibility power no and I think that's the the bottom line when it comes to this NSA surveillance thing is that all these government agencies are populated by human beings and human beings should not have that kind of power over other human beings that are just citizens right because they're just I mean the the ability to check all I mean stoughton talked about people being able to check in on their exes and read their emails and they were doing things like that and this is when Obama's like no no this is just metadata right it wasn't just metadata man yeah they were looking at everything right and it that's that's something we should know about and we didn't until Snowden and now this poor guy has to live in Russia yeah I think he should be brought back for sure but could he be he would have to do something awesome for Trump yeah people it's Putin who's protecting them wait a minute what I know it's weird well he's probably helping Putin but but when he makes if you watch the the Ted TED talk he won't at that interview but Chris Anderson was just talking to him on stage when he from undisclosed location in Russia can't come up totally reasonable yeah this is what democracy here's a democracy this is what we live in citizens need to know some things not everything you know you came off totally rational he did a great podcast with Neil deGrasse Tyson and he came off very rational there as well oh I didn't know Neil interview yeah look we we don't agree to that kind of surveillance that's that's very Orwellian it's not what we want and this is not you're not stopping terrorism no you're just spying on people right and also people are rightly concerned that anything that they find could be used against you if you are a political opponent of theirs or if there's something that you're trying to oppose right they go hey well you know we found out of the year and uh like cut cold porn buddy right you know whatever it is you know yeah it's just there's too much kind of stuff Nixon did with the UM with the Hoover or the FBI well I think Hoover did it on his own yeah I did it pre Nix was a fascinating character yeah you know crossdresser as mine did freak just like spying on everybody right just to try to hide his own secrets yeah really amazing yeah but there's an example of one person yeah flawed human like everyone else and given all this power and magic what Hoover would do today with the internet I mean he Oh God arguably more flawed than normal human beings yeah and I think that goes back to the thing that you were talking about with these cult leaders it's like humans should not have power over other humans right well when they do they do terrible things right and they abuse that power and they mean it's the responsibility that one would have to be able to do that George C Scott thing and say go ahead 20 million 30 million no big deal it was a few people in Chicago right I mean that is that's a crazy thing for a human being to have at their fingertips yep yep and and the other problem is bureaucracy any large organization but especially bureaucracies their tendency is to keep alive we got to keep our cell to keep our jobs yeah and and the moment you set up a government agency it's it's really difficult to shut it off yeah it almost impossible yeah because you have real people with jobs and mortgages and families and I got to keep my job so we have to justify why we need our department and so on and it just always builds that way that is the big issue with big government is it just grows bigger it does it never shrinks they never say oh you know what we don't need the IRS right this is nonsense we just you know we realized that if we don't have the IRS we have to pay so many less people that we can actually get less money in taxes from folks right what yeah yeah no it's yeah it's just a huge pride on't have a good solution to it well it brings me back to the last word of the title of your book the scientific search for the afterlife immortality and utopia yeah utopia yeah we're always looking for yeah totally and it doesn't exist it can't ever exist not even in principle because there is no right society because we have so much variation and our interests and needs and wants and your abilities and you know the idea of programming by Fiat from the top down this is what we're gonna do and it's gonna work or else you're out yeah and and this is the problem with utilitarianism is get you that utilitarian calculus of the greatest good for the greatest number and we know what that is and you are standing in our way you are preventing utopia so we are gonna eliminate you you know this is the famous trolley experiment thought experiment you know the trolley is hurtling down the tracks about to kill the five workers you're at the switch if you throw the switch it'll go down a sidetrack it'll kill one worker would you throw the switch it's kill the one to save the five the five we're gonna die if you don't do anything so we did throw the switch so most people say they would that you can go in a web site and do this yourself hands on who's on it really does right it's rush limbaugh on this one and five school kids yeah but with massive potential for the future but so in this now most people say they would flip the switch but in an interesting twist on that so if if you are standing on a bridge over the track and the train is hurtling down the tracks about to kill the five workers and standing next to you is a great big guy would you hip check him off boom he lands on the tracks splat he's killed by the train but it stops it and saves the five workers now most people say I got to physically grab him and throw him up ya know I couldn't do that so it's something to do with engages the emotional part of the brain that actively killing somebody is way harder than passively killing so if you only have to put in fear at a b-52 bomber 35,000 feet up you only have to press the button to release the bombs not so hard that's even more actively doing it than a drone the drone is currently is a giant issue for the the drone pilots apparently they suffer from really weird really SD yeah even though they're in Arizona doing it and Iraq or whatever yeah the nightmares I mean they're pretty intense interesting I hadn't heard that yeah I mean if you're looking at a screen and you're seeing someone on the other side of the planet you know you're in Nevada right in some military base right and you're hitting that button and you're watching the screen you're seeing some you know infrared or black night vision right missiles slamming into the person that you were just observed a good movie about that that was like the trolley problem it was maybe two years ago where the decision is is to be made well so the this is a setup is we know that the terrorists in making a bomb inside this building and we can get a drone there to hit it and so they're about to do this is toward the beginning but they're about to do this and this little girl walks into the scene and she's selling bread I think it's in Afghanistan in Iraq so she's on the corner so she will be killed and it's like okay maybe we could come around from the other side and then she won't be and they're doing all these calculations but now there's some other people over here so how many people innocents should we kill because we know that the terrorists are gonna if they complete their bomb suicide bomb they're gonna go to a mall and kill 300 people or whatever so they show those you know how these government agencies think about those calculations you know we we got to stop the bad guys but how many good people are we willing to kill to prevent them from killing even more we think maybe if they do this and then it gets murky from there well Mike Baker who's a former bigwig at the CIA have talked him several times on the podcast one of the things that he says that's done by lawyers right that's right Lille that's right because there's there's legal precedents about collateral damage that came from the Nuremberg Laws and they're you know there's some questionable stuff we were doing I mean I think it's justified the Second World War but you know mass bombing of Hamburg and a Dresden this didn't slow the Nazi or machine at all but the idea was that well the citizens will rise up and kill Hitler no they you know you can't and in that kind of society you just don't have that kind of access or power you know and you know this was like when in the first Iraq war you know well we'll stop short you know Bush senior's we're gonna stop short and lets Adams own people take him out and have their own regime change and then we'll support the new regime and it just didn't work out that way so there are the calculations get messy I got kind of sidetracked the problem with utopian idea is that utilitarian calculus if it's if most people will agree that it's okay to kill one to save five why not kill one million to save five million that's genocide and that is the calculated calculations that genocidal mass murderers make you know that our our German society would be great except for those Jews you know the backstab the backstabbers who who ruined us in the first world war now we can just get rid of them it's gonna be great and every genocide is based on that kind of utilitarian calculus however emotional driven it is yeah and it's it's interesting when you look at the numbers from drone attacks it's some high 80 90 percent of innocent people are killed right the casualties when you look at it in terms of like what the actual targets that we're looking for versus the actual people that were killed or a collateral damage there's a tremendous amount of collateral damage and that's not something that we would ever accept from one guy right say if we had one guy with a howitzer and he just went in there and he's just blasting women and children to get to the guy that's in the top of the building right there'd be no way no like that guy's a murderer he's a monster and if one guy in Nevada presses a button and some Hellfire missiles come shooting out of a flying robot and they slam into that building and kill everybody including this one terrorists that we were after accept it right so in game theory there's this problem of this sort of sliding scale that okay I know I'm it's like the Milgram shock experiment of 15 volts at a time you know before you know what you're throwing foreigner' 50 volts into this subject you you couldn't get somebody to do that initially but if you do it incrementally you know that they're kind of hoping well if I hold out and just do one more maybe the experimental end and it's like this with the you know these kind of utilitarian calculus okay I know I probably shouldn't be doing this you know these collateral damage or the but if we can but if we keep going we'll end the war and then that'll stop the other kind of killing we do want to stop but it but it's always so messy that it takes much longer than you think so you can kind of see the logic like okay and if you watch Ken Burns documentary series on the Vietnam War but it kind of felt like that the whole time like this is when you see at the end it's like god this was a catastrophe you know but at every step you know Kennedy then Johnson and Nixon it's like okay we can't give up now you know the sunk cost fallacy you know we put all this in there just one more month and then we'll get out and then then month comes like okay we're not going to another month another year and then before you know you got 58,000 dead and it's like okay this just didn't work and I think that happens more often because it's always Messier yeah that makes sense I mean war in itself is an incredibly messy business do you know it's it's it's outlawed it was outlawed in the Paris peace agreements of 1927 war is illegal it's a great book called the internationalist is the history of how this came about and that and the reason for it so they give the whole history going all the way back to when war became legal and it goes all the way back to this Spanish and Dutch conflict they were having and I forget who did what but a Spanish ship confiscated a Dutch ship and took all its stuff and and then there was a like a legal battle about this and whichever side I think was the Spanish said no no actually we were we're at war and if you're at war it's okay to you know be a pirate and kill people and stuff like that and so this hugo grossest legal scholar wrote all this treatise that got laid down that said this is when war is legal it's perfectly okay to kill other people and take their stuff if you're at war so what does that mean to be a war you know so then legally it's all it's all done by lawyers like okay this is what it is and we have lived with that ever since so in the 1927 Paris peace agreement say okay you know we're gonna stop that war is illegal now obviously this didn't stop Hitler and the Imperial Japan and so on but at least now leaders have to justify it's like you know Bush had to go to the UN and get his Coalition of the Willing and that's when Colin pallid to say oh yes we know about the yellowcake and that Saddam Hussein wants nuclear weapons I mean why would anybody bother with all that stuff the old days they just invade Brian you know I came I saw I conquered it you know took my stuff now you have to say I came I saw I was just standing there minding my own business and he punched me so I invaded him you least have to do that now it's sort of like what we were talking about earlier that the world today I mean they're consciously recognizing that there are more rules and that society is a much more complex and safer place to be and they want to protect that progress in some way that's right and that's what the rules of war in comparison to 2,000 years ago right yeah so that's a good thing yeah I mean it doesn't stop everybody but even kim jeong-hoon I kind of have a feeling that maybe I'm naive that it's just deterrence for him he wants to take a place at the table where he's respected his country is not going to be invaded and this is sort of a Noam Chomsky argument that I don't usually make but if you look at how America treats other countries if they have nukes we leave them alone if they don't we do whatever we kind of feel like right so from his perspective it could be those Americans because you see they make arguments like this these Americans are evil why look they invaded this country they made it they've been in you know a dozen wars and you know just never-ending this is who they are we're gonna get nukes and they're gonna they're not gonna with this ever again and maybe that's maybe he'll just stop I go that's it okay you leave me alone I'll leave you alone I don't agree with Noam Chomsky on everything but I'm I'm very happy there's someone like him out there who's a brilliant guy that's as far left as you can get yeah he's way out there I think it's important to balance these intellectual disagreements and you know you need a super smart far lefty guy wearing a sweater right well yeah I agree you know so that's why we have to have free speech and open dialogue and debate yes so the guy over here to counter that you know so that's why instead of yeah like so authoritarian left well why are they there because there's an authoritarian right yes the problem is we expect that from the right yeah so this is why we're going through or going through now it's kind of a surprise wait a minute the Liberals are doing this well it's fairly recent yeah you know the silencing of people you disagree with and also the really disingenuous labeling of people's Nazis or neo-nazis or white supremacists just because they simply don't line up with your beliefs right and it's a conscious like decision to do that it's this isn't like an accidental mislabelling we don't really know what the person's motives and who they are no you're just trying to diminish whatever position they have so that your side wins mm-hmm and I think a lot of people feel justified by it because of the current administration and it just seems like we're on a goddamn pirate ship and so it seems like yeah it's when you're seeing what's going on with the erosion of the EPA and the decision to start drilling really he made a sweeping decision that you could drill anywhere right just go ahead offshore go ahead just start drilling that ocean fish oil baby come on I'll be my gold bathroom the giant gold chandelier over the toilet that guy's crazy it's just strange time it says like something out of a movie oh it's way crazier than something out of a movie if there was a president that was this nuts in a movie you would say that's too over-the-top yeah we played a video yesterday of Trump but like 224 different things that Trump said he was the best at nobody nobody nobody loves women more than I do nobody loves Mexicans more than I do nobody right it's nobody's better at foreign policy than Trump right uses it himself in the third person I'm sorry that's the one thing about having like Oprah as a president can we just have like professional experts that work in this area yeah that know what they're doing even if they're not celebrities well I'm a firm believer that that position is almost always abused and that what we really need instead of like one person is like a council of war tribunal or something like that that's 18 super smart people that have to write papers on all these different decisions that they make I'd be happy with it with the tribe instead of a president you have three people you elect them and then for anything to happen two of the three have to agree but even three because the FCC they took out net neutrality with only five people five unelected okay that's a good point yeah maybe yeah maybe 18 yeah yeah I don't we need an odd number so you don't have a tie yet have a tiebreaker yeah we had Jessica rosenworcel and I said I lost him from the FCC she was one of the five that voted for net neutrality she wanted to keep it in place and she was on two weeks ago something like that and just describing to us like what the situation is like and how there's only five people and they're not elected and they get to decide how do they get that each other a pointed appointed by the president um I don't know if they're appointed by Trump or maybe they're a holdover so I've really pretty easy to stack yes is that what she said president of by Obama or by Trump there's a complaint by the president confirmed by the Senate for five-year terms hmm okay there you go so these are new folks then okay yeah and they decided yeah let's just give all the money to the corporations let's let them just blog websites and get crazy with throttling and reading right it's a weird time for this yes right so sit back to the Utopia societies are messy and the only the only utopian type system would be one that there is no system you'd have checks just nothing but checks and balances because these catch basins of power again back to the cults they inevitably form and anybody wants more yeah if they can get it it's just human nature right it's human nature is it go back to yes we're all social primate species yeah the alpha male is gonna if he can get the he's gonna stay there for as long as you can and the beta males are gonna try to under undermine him from but if I'm underneath yeah constant struggle again there are two kinds of men those with loaded revolvers and those who dig well that's why you know this again sort of a horizontal you know bottom-up networking systems is one way to try to counter hierarchical power structures it's not it doesn't always work but now as someone who spends so much time looking for actual truth and facts and scientific data how concerned are you about the media today cuz this this term fake news yeah weird world yeah of of attacks on journalism and then even journalism itself falling short and then journalism in many venues trying to keep up with the Internet and putting out these salacious clickbait T headlines even like established media sources yeah are doing some sleazy yeah yeah it's a concern for sure we have to stay on top of it but but there are solutions to this like PolitiFact for example we're and they're not the only sites knope's also you know ranking the factual basis of a speech in real time and you can go on like PolitiFact is trump's giving a speech or during the campaign when they were all giving speeches yeah and they would rank them you know from you know it's true mostly true partially falls mostly false pants on fire love their ranking system and you know Trump Trump got a lot of pants on fire yeah so at least there's a counter to it and now those sites are becoming pretty popular in their kind of a form and clickbait themselves let's go there and find out you know how many times this guy lied in his speech so it would have been nice if we would have had that say in the Nixon administration or the Johnson administration like the Gulf of Tonkin if this could have been you know a whistle blower Dan called and put out there so that we didn't drag ourselves into the Vietnam or even deeper my thought and this is a very paranoid thought is that all this is inevitably opening us to the truth chip to the mind-reading chip if things are gonna get so chaotic that we're gonna say you know what just hit me with the chip I can't take this anymore I don't know I was right Fox News is one thing CNN says another slide it in so I don't want in my forearm right here yes our only solution it might literally be like nature's way of allowing us to slowly accept the symbiotic relationships with this in this new artificial intelligence yeah Webster's just this last week voted it was alternative fax as the word of the year phrase of the Year 2070 for the year before that I was fake fake news was the year Sean Spicer said alternative fax right yeah forced to try to like Kellyanne Conway oh that's for the inaugural size of the audience yeah look at the picture it's not as big as well that's where'd you get that number that was an alternative fact yeah they seem to like he keep her locked up more now she seems to be yeah less she just keeps stuffing her foot in her mouth yeah yeah well they all have to because you know the boss sends them out yeah tell him this okay that's that poor Sean Spicer guy when he talks about it now it's like a guy who's just been freed from prison or you know well he's probably making a lot of money on the lecture circuit now oh I can imagine yeah probably it's probably very lucrative yep but if you look at government's you know centuries past or thousands of years ago they you know there was lying and corrupt always and all that oh that's that's old yeah it's just now it's so blatant the yellow press I mean where did that Kemp come from that was you know the whoever's told no it was Hurst William R and L first yeah yeah yeah you gave me the war and I'll supply you the photographs yeah whatever yeah so you know that that's fake news you know the sinking of the Maine let's go to war well you know what actually happened again yeah and Gulf of Tonkin Gulf of Tonkin yeah yeah that Vietnam War documentary series I just want to put my head in the oven after that and turn the gas I like that you know this went on for you know so long so many years what are we in Afghanistan now 16 years or wasn't quite that long but if you look back to where it started in the 50s when we we weren't at war we were sending advisers there you know this kind of stuff is just it's so depressing we'd like to think of our government as having enough checks and balances I think we need more I would like to think of our civilization as being something that aspires to a higher standard some like something that is more advanced because we've learned from the lessons of the thousands of years of written history and we we aspire to a greater set of values so one of the things I like about Elon Musk's let's go colonize Mars in addition the technological problems how will they set up that there's like a hundred people there are thousand ten thousand what kind of government are they gonna have what kind of economy just maniacs and all those are so crazy will die on Mars yeah it's probably not gonna be your average typical human no no imagine you're gonna take a six-month spaceship visit through through the cosmos to land on a planet that you're going to die on you will never come back coming back unless they're so smart they figure out a way to build a rocket and shoot back which they probably won't no no but but so if you went and you were advising like what kind of government would you set up you know sort of social organization to prevent people from stealing others their other people's stuff or that we got to work cooperatively to plant the potato things how do you do that you know we have thousands of years of experiments but you know it's they're all messy yeah no one's ever done it right which innocent again to utopia yeah I mean it is it different to have you know 10 people 100 people 1,000 10,000 you know if there's a scaling effect yeah where it becomes more efficient the more people you have but on the other hand then you get these power you know catch basins of power that grow and become corrupt that's got to happen on Mars it's gonna happen and also the community gets fractured because you don't know these people anymore you get 5,000 people there's no way you can know 5,000 people you know 500 right there's Mike hey my yeah that's right Sally you know those people all right you get 5,000 you're like who's that guy he's food here he's from Chicago now on Mars but you know even small hunter-gatherer groups they have conflicts all the time they got to sit down in the in the little dirt area in the Commons ground and talk about it and then you stole this pig and the pig died and now you alma Pig okay go get your Pig okay we're gonna settle it but what happens when someone dies you know it's like okay you owe 10 pigs you know they they have these calculations like this is the equivalent of a life is 10 pigs and you know that's gonna happen no matter what planet we live on yeah did you get any personal insight I'm sure you do have to every book you write you read or you write rather but did you get any unique personal insight today that the last chapter is on what does it mean to live a fulfilling inspiring happiness fulfilled life if there's no afterlife there's no God whatever or even if there is it does again it doesn't really matter because we live in this world so it turns out there's research that shows that not striving for happiness is the wrong metric that's the wrong goal that striving to live a purposeful meaningful life is what we should be after and that often entails doing things that don't make you happy they're not fun they're not pleasurable so like for example when you work out you know it's it's not fun and in the sense of like a morphine drip you know I'm getting a lot of pleasure from this afterwards you get you know sense of endorphins and you feel better about yourself and so like there's research showing that and if you go out for drinks with your friends dinner and so on that's fun that's pleasurable but a short-term care taking for a parent for example this shows that you this is not fun at all I've done this two of my four parents I had step parents and this was not fun it wasn't pleasurable I didn't enjoy it slepping my dad around to doctors and hospitals and you know I was just drained by the end of the day doing this but I felt better about myself so it turns out research shows that you know if you have more long-term goals both forward and back forward goals back reflecting on your past what you've done not oriented toward being happy but being you know sort of leading a purposeful driven life that's what makes people feel better about their lives and really that's that's all we can do and it's enough it's enough to you know sort of feel like my life was well worth I mean it's worth getting up in the morning without the promise of an afterlife you don't need that just like this life I can make a difference I can get up this morning do something that I may not enjoy it quite so much but you know working out you know like I do my three-hour bike ride you know it's so good get up it's I got to get up at 6:30 in the morning they roll out at 7:00 it's cold partially dark it's like I got to bundle up and then I got a stripped clothes off as I go so I have to figure this all out it's not fun but you know after after the ride I'm like I really feel great that I did this and yeah I had fun with my buddies but it's not fun like you know I had a drink with my friends and that was fun that's a different kind of fun so and that funs okay too yes it sometimes is balance but it shouldn't all be the fun right yeah I mean there are meaningful right there are people that do that so I talked about Diana Nyad who I knew back in the 1980s when I was doing race across America the Transcontinental bike race and Diana worked for Wide World of Sports and they covered the race so I would talk to her a lot she's in the back of the truck with the camera crew I'm riding along and she's a really interesting person she's an atheist you know she did the Cuba to Florida swim she's a eltra marathon swimmer and she failed to make it back in her 20s and she came back when she turned 60 and said I'm gonna go for this again and it took her four years and I think four tries to do it but she did it so she appears on Oprah's super soul Sunday show she had for a while and and Oprah's asking her well how do you find on and you know and meaning and notes what do you believe well I'm an atheist and she described how awestruck she is about the universe and life and what science has told us and so and Oprah says something like well I don't see how you can be an atheist if you're in if you're inspired and she says I well I don't see why those are in contradiction I mean the whole you know living a meaningful live and being engaged in the world and other people that is spiritual that is awe-inspiring that you know you don't need God for that and it was sort of an interesting exchange Oprah's was reflecting kind of the common theme that people have you need God to have a meaningful life and Diana's pole point was no you don't you just have to be engaged with the world in some meaningful way and that's enough and on that note Michael Shermer heavens on earth the scientific search for the afterlife immortality in Utopia available now Amazon and everywhere else thanks go thank you brother appreciated mathletes [Music]

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 1,822,465

Rating: 4.4613347 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE #1068, 1068, JRE, Joe Rogan, Michael Shermer, Skeptic, UFC, mma, comedy, comedian, jokes, stand up, future, AI, funny, Ultimate Fighting Championship

Id: x2qwRJT4WGY

Length: 141min 57sec (8517 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2018

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[u/JRElibrary]

Books mentioned in this episode:

• Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia by Michael Shermer
• Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer
• Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer
• Into The Wild by John Krakauer
• The Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith Jr. (translator)
• Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright
• Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife by Eben Alexander
• On The Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks
• Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion Reprint Edition by Sam Harris
• The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley
• DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman
• The Bible
• books by Dan Brown
• The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English by Geza Vermes
• The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by John Marco Allegro
• The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth by John Marco Allegro
• The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson
• A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss
• Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by Robert Wright
• The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill by David M. Buss
• Accidental Brothers: The Story of Twins Exchanged at Birth and the Power of Nature and Nurture by Nancy L. Segal & Yesika S. Montoya
• Born Together―Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study by Nancy L. Segal
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
• River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins
• (unspecified book) by Gary Taubes
• The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson
• The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
• 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson
• The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg
• The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway & Scott J. Shapiro

[u/mtbguy1981]

I wish Shermer would challenge Joe's idiotic belief that every historical event or person was influenced by mushrooms or DMT. It wasn't. He just likes those things and is trying to work them into a stoner's revision of history. It comes across as a 13 yo's take on history. "What if Jesus was tripping?"

[u/KlutchAtStraws]

Michael Shermer always reminds me of Agent Coulson from Agents of SHIELD.

[u/ispice]

Going deep with psychedelic lore. Love it!

Good episode.

[u/LLOYD_MOFUGGIN]

great episode. i like it when joe has someone level-headed to shoot the shit with.

[u/SoulSylveon]

Mr. Shermer! A 22-month son at 63??? My man!!

[u/ClinchWork]

Eddie will post another Real or Fake? Post on his instagram after this podcast for sure.

[u/UnitedRD]

Honestly surprised that he's back on given what happened when he was on with Graham Hancock.