In this episode of Heavings On Earth, I sit down with author Michael Shermer to talk about his new book, Heavens On Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, immortality, and utopia. We talk about the cults and cults of the 60s and 70s, and how cults like Waco, Jim Jones, and Jim and Jerry Brown changed the way we look at cults in the 80s and 90s. And we talk about what it was like growing up in a cult, and why cults should be avoided. This episode is brought to you by Gimlet Media and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Used w/ permission from the creator of Heavens on Earth. All rights reserved. This work may not be used without permission. Please do not copy, redistribute, or redistribute this work without permission, and do not do so in any other public place or place where it may be copied or redistributable in any way. We do not own the rights to any of the music used in this work. This work is not intended to be used in place of any other works mentioned in this episode. Thank you for your support, review, or review, review or review. We are not affiliated with any of it. If you like it, share it on your social media platforms, we would greatly appreciate the support. , and we are looking forward to hearing from you! and sharing it on our social media accounts. . Thanks for listening and sharing this with your friends, family, and the rest of the world. - we appreciate your support! - Mentioned in the podcast and the support you are showing us on social media. Mention us on the podcast, and we re listening to this podcast. and we appreciate it! We re listening and reviewing it. We re looking out for your feedback. Please remember to send us your thoughts and reviews and reviews in the next episode thank you. XOXO, and all the best of your feedback, - Mikey, Mikey and the Crew Mikey & the Crew at The Paramount Network. Thanks Mikey & the crew at The Parcast Michael Shermers all the love you're all out there :) Love you, Michael, Kristy, Michael and the crew xoxo
00:00:19.000Well, I found interesting journeys that people use to try to get there from both the religious perspective and the scientific perspective.
00:00:27.000So I do deal with the monotheism's versions of the afterlife in heaven, you know, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
00:00:33.000But the core of the book is, you know, the radical life extensionists, the cryonists, transhumanists, the extropians, the mind uploaders, the people that take all the supplements and all the whole range there.
00:00:50.000I mean, when you think about some of the people that are really like over the top, did you go to that 2045 thing in New York a few years back?
00:00:58.000There was a futurist convention with all these people that, for whatever reason, they have this arbitrary date of 2045. It's been getting pushed back.
00:01:07.000This is when the singularity is going to come.
00:01:09.000It was 2030, then 2040, now 2045. Yeah, Kurzweil is a big...
00:01:19.000And when he gets on stage, now he's not preternaturally dynamic like a preacher, but he starts talking about, you know, we're going to live forever, you're going to have your mind uploaded, and people are just like, oh my God, we are the generation that's going to do it.
00:02:09.000There's a lot of these very charismatic, hip, young preachers that are doing sort of a thing like that, where they don't even have their own church to rent time in a church, and they have these meetings where it's just non-denominational,
00:02:25.000and they just talk about God, and they get a lot of people fired up.
00:04:07.000I'm absolutely convinced most of these guys believe what they say.
00:04:11.000Now, 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.
00:04:20.000And, you know, David Koresh, he was, you know, right down the barrel, he totally believes, willing to die for his beliefs.
00:04:27.000And he also was having sex with everybody.
00:05:56.000You go into this town, gas station or whatever, it's like, oh, it feels kind of weird here.
00:06:01.000And so Krakauer discovered this whole world of, you know, going all the way back to the founding of the religion and, what's his name, Joseph Smith.
00:06:12.000And, you know, he gets this revelation from God that, well, basically he's banging the woman down the street.
00:06:18.000And so he gets this revelation from God, and Krakauer has this scenario in the book where he tells his wife, now, honey, I've been talking to God, and you're not going to believe this, but he says, I have to marry this so-and-so down the street.
00:07:20.000He was, and he got chased out of Palmyra, New York is where he started.
00:07:25.000And then he moved to Missouri when basically he was in trouble with the law and other issues.
00:07:30.000And then he got in trouble there and he was killed.
00:07:32.000And usually this ends a cult when the leader dies.
00:07:36.000Now, there's a critical period if you get a new dynamic leader to take over, like in the case of Scientology, David Miscovich took over after L. Ron Hubbard passed over to the other side.
00:08:12.000Well, they could survive because they have tons of money through real estate investments, but I can't imagine their numbers could be doing anything but shrinking.
00:08:20.000Yeah, between the Lawrence Wright book, then the HBO documentary.
00:09:07.000The United States government is allowing those people to be tax exempt.
00:09:10.000I mean, with all the evidence that's available, you just go and look.
00:09:15.000At what they're proposing and what they believe and the thetans and the frozen entities that were dropped into the volcano, all the crazy shit.
00:09:23.000Well, the story about their—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'm pretty careful about that.
00:09:33.000But they're the only major organization I've ever seen that beat the IRS, and they did it through thousands of lawsuits.
00:09:40.000I think they sued them like 3,500 times or something like this.
00:09:43.000Well, they had every single member that they could get to do it and sue them as well.
00:09:47.000They were getting all their members to sue it.
00:10:07.000I mean, in 2018, with what we know about reality, the fact that we let some old voodoo superstitious nonsense not have to pay taxes and exert extreme power politically, socially, economically, it's crazy.
00:10:22.000Well, and like preachers, they can live in a house tax-free.
00:10:25.000They don't have to pay property tax on the home that they own.
00:10:28.000So there's a lot of these side benefits also that you don't normally hear about.
00:11:39.000Yeah, because somebody says, well, I have a goofy belief.
00:11:41.000The Janes have some weird beliefs or something, but they're manning the soup kitchens, they're helping the poor, and there's no corruption.
00:11:48.000So what's the difference between them and the Scientologists who say, hey, we have our own religious beliefs that to you sound goofy, but to us they're true.
00:11:57.000Well, 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 the lost work of Jesus, and only he could read them because he had a magic seer stone.
00:12:11.000And then when the local townspeople came to see, well, where are these stones?
00:12:15.000Oh, the angels came and took them away because you did not believe.
00:13:48.000You're dealing with a bunch of chemicals that are released in the body, right?
00:13:51.000There's morphine and all sorts of different things, you know, psychedelic chemicals and all these different things that are happening while your brain is basically on the edge of death.
00:14:07.000So there's a liminal transitional stage there where you're sliding into some other state of consciousness, an altered state of consciousness.
00:14:17.000That if you inject or you take hallucinogens, you know, those are molecules that operate on a lock and key mechanism with the synapses in your brain, in your neurons.
00:14:28.000So if these external drugs work in this molecular lock and key mechanism, there must be natural chemicals similar molecularly to that in the brain already, just in smaller doses.
00:14:40.000So one theory about near-death experiences is that this is a way of transitioning from living to dead without feeling anxious and falling apart and upset and depressed or whatever.
00:14:51.000It's kind of a smooth, feel-good, you know, better than a morphine drip kind of way of making the transition.
00:14:57.000But we know, for example, that this scientist named Dr. James Winery 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.
00:15:09.000You know, 2Gs, 3Gs, 4Gs, boom, out you go.
00:15:15.000And most of them have these little dreamlet 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.
00:15:24.000And having these sort of weird experiences.
00:15:46.000These are on epileptic patients where they cut them open and they poke around to see where the seizures are starting and so they could, you know, zap those neurons instead of some big crude attack.
00:15:58.000Anyway, 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.
00:16:06.000So this is one way to map what the brain is doing.
00:16:09.000If, you know, so what do you report when I tap here?
00:16:11.000Oh, I just had a Vision of my 10th birthday or whatever.
00:16:14.000And it's like, okay, that's where that's stored, right there.
00:16:17.000Well, 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.
00:16:34.000Now 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.
00:16:42.000So we know for sure that the near-death experiences are in the brain.
00:16:46.000The experiences that the people report are real.
00:17:34.000And so the near-death experience believers counter that, well, yes, it's in your brain, but it still is taking you somewhere else.
00:17:42.000The problem is, is that how you tell the difference between, I had a personal experience that the only way you can share it is if you actually go through it yourself.
00:17:50.000For a scientific community that studies it, well, there has to be some way to test it somehow or tell the difference between that.
00:18:32.000Okay, 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 oneness with the cosmos, and, you know, he goes on and on about this.
00:18:44.000So then I quote from Oliver Sacks' 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.
00:18:56.000And 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.
00:19:05.000In other words, you know, the narratives are indistinguishable to an outsider.
00:19:09.000So how do you know that you're actually going to heaven or you're just having a fantastic trip?
00:19:14.000Well, it's entirely possible it's both.
00:19:26.000I mean, it's entirely possible that your consciousness is capable of going through these chemical doorways that are created by these molecules.
00:19:35.000And that it experiences some frequency on the dial, like if there's a radio dial.
00:19:42.000Maybe we're at 95.5, but you can get to 97 if you take, you know, X amount of milligrams of dimethyltryptamine.
00:19:50.000And then you go to this new place, you know, but you're still physically here.
00:19:54.000You know, Aldous Huxley's book, The Doors of Perception.
00:21:00.000You can't resolve these things, right?
00:21:01.000So you slide there from into things like these personal experiences we have.
00:21:06.000So, you know, so what I think Graham is hoping, if I go to arrhythmia and try ayahuasca and I say, wow, 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?
00:21:20.000And now I really kind of, as a skeptic, need to renounce my pure materialistic, monistic belief and admit there's a dualistic, there's another side, there's a spirit side or something.
00:21:31.000And 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?
00:22:13.000The trip itself, what's really bizarre, there's a lot of really bizarre aspects of it.
00:22:18.000One of the things that's really bizarre is the feeling that you've been there before.
00:22:22.000And the speculation, and Terence McKenna talked about this pretty much in depth, one of the speculations is that when you're in REM sleep, you're experiencing some form of dimethyltryptamine.
00:22:35.000In that your brain, your liver, they know for a fact that it's produced by your liver and your lungs.
00:22:41.000And now they know, there used to be anecdotal evidence that it was produced by the pineal gland, which is, of course, the third eye.
00:22:47.000In reptiles, certain reptiles, it actually has a retina.
00:22:50.000I mean, it literally is in the center of your head where the Eastern mysticism third eye exists.
00:22:58.000Because of the Cottonwood Research Foundation, which is something that Dr. Rick Strassman, who was the guy who wrote the book DMT, the spirit molecule, he was the guy who got the first federally approved tests done on dimethyltryptamine clinical trials.
00:23:14.000And it's an amazing book, really, really fascinating.
00:23:17.000And 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 very hopeful.
00:23:32.000And 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.
00:23:43.000Are you aware of the correlation between this and Moses' burning bush?
00:23:47.000Well, I've heard ideas about that, yeah.
00:23:50.000Jerusalem scholars believe now that the burning bush may very well have been the acacia bush.
00:23:55.000The acacia bush is a tree that's rich in dimethyltryptomy.
00:24:00.000Well, he's tripping, but I think we're getting...
00:24:03.000We have to realize, when we're translating things from the Bible, you're translating from ancient Hebrew, which is an incredibly unusual language, where letters also double as numbers, and the letter A is also the number one, and there's numerical value to words,
00:24:20.000and it's a very weird language to translate to Latin, then to Greek, and to English.
00:24:26.000So 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...
00:24:41.000What we're getting is an interpretation of somehow they had a DMT experience from smoking this bush, smoking some aspects of it.
00:24:51.000They figured out how to extract it or how to isolate it, and they had a dimethyltryptamine experience.
00:25:00.000I mean, we get articles submitted all the time at Skeptic Magazine of people that attempt to make natural explanations for biblical phenomena.
00:25:08.000You know, the Red Sea parted because there was this giant earthquake or, you know, the meteor strike caused the skies to turn red and that's what, you know, the plagues of frogs, you know, that kind of thing.
00:25:20.000We publish There's one in which the argument was that Jesus was never, he never died.
00:25:25.000He was in like a deep coma on the cross and that one of his followers had stabbed, you know, when he got stabbed in the side with the wound that it actually had some chemical that put him in this coma.
00:25:36.000And then they, this sort of a Dan Brown thing, they whisked him off and put him in the cave and then stole him and he ended up in France or India or something like that.
00:25:46.000I published it because I thought, yeah, there might be something to that, and I like those kinds of explanations.
00:25:50.000On 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.
00:26:02.000The 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.
00:26:10.000So I'm always conflicted about, you know, do I really want a natural explanation for this?
00:26:15.000Or maybe the stories, they didn't actually happen.
00:26:18.000Moses never really existed or the people never lived in the desert for 40 years because there's no archaeological evidence that this ever happened.
00:30:32.000I do remember a controversy from a few years ago of the Dead Sea Scrolls committee, whoever controls them, were not very forthcoming about what they were finding and letting outsiders look at the originals.
00:30:44.000Yeah, there's some wacky stuff in there apparently.
00:30:46.000Yeah, and also, you know, intellectual groups like that, they tend to circle the wagons and, you know, we're the elite special experts and you can't look at these things.
00:30:54.000I think there's that, but I think there's also, like, if you're going to go by the way Christianity is set up, those stories...
00:34:24.000It's an edited volume with lots and lots of people coming in later and modifying this and debunking some previous Old Testament in a story or whatever.
00:34:33.000And then he ended up being, he's an atheist or Agnostic or something, whatever he is, he's a not believer.
00:34:38.000So this is sort of the atheist's favorite biblical scholar, because he doesn't come at it with a religious belief.
00:34:44.000But he's got a bunch of teaching company courses where he deconstructs how Jesus became the Messiah or God or whatever.
00:34:52.000And, you know, the Old Testament, the New Testament, what these books mean.
00:34:55.000And it's a little bit like, you know, again, Jordan Peterson, you know, I'm going to talk for two hours about Genesis 1-1.
00:35:01.000How can you talk for so long about just, you know, a single chapter in a book, you know?
00:35:05.000And, well, there's a lot of historical interpretation.
00:35:08.000So I do know art historians will look at those halos or the thing in the sky that the ufologists, well, that's a UFO. No, no, actually, at that time, that artists were putting those things in the sky for this other reason.
00:35:43.000I mean, if you could get into a time machine and go to any time in mystery and just see what it was like, how people behaved, I would be real tempted to go to ancient Egypt, but I'd also really be tempted to go to around the time of Christ.
00:35:58.000I mean, I don't necessarily even know if Christ was a real human, but I would love to see what life was like back then.
00:36:05.000Bart thinks he probably did exist, obviously not the Messiah, not the supernatural stuff, but that somebody like that or by that name, Yeshua, it's not that unusual a name, probably did a lot of the stuff he did, just his itinerant preacher and so on.
00:36:23.000And 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 a more famous passage, that my disciples standing here now will not die before they see the Son of Man return,
00:36:40.000and these kinds of things in the Gospels.
00:36:42.000I think his message was, there is no place that you're going to after you die.
00:36:52.000And it's a message that you would give to a people that are suppressed, oppressed by the Romans.
00:36:57.000So I call this the oppression-redemption myth, you know, that it's a story of...
00:37:02.000It'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...
00:37:23.000And when you start looking at it, you see, oh, this story comes up a lot in history among oppressed peoples as a way of saying, we've got to circle the wagons and take care of our own against these oppressors and make a better life here.
00:37:36.000Yeah, it just makes sense that there'd be so many parallels.
00:37:38.000And you think about history and how many people were oppressed and how often these narratives repeated themselves over and over again when people got into power and then invaded others.
00:37:52.000Neil Ferguson's new book, The Tower and the Square.
00:37:55.000It's about the tension throughout all of human history, civilization, between hierarchical top-down power structures and horizontal network power structures, and that they're always in tension.
00:38:09.000But mostly throughout history, it's the top-down power.
00:38:12.000And so his one chapter opens with that scene from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, when You're going to dig.
00:38:41.000Ed Ferguson uses this story to say, basically, that's the history of civilization.
00:38:45.000Somebody's got the loaded gun, and everyone else is going to dig.
00:38:49.000Yeah, it's amazing that we made it this far.
00:38:52.000I mean, I know that there's troubles today, and I know we have issues in our own society, and forget about other parts of the world, which there's horrific things happening right now.
00:40:06.000And, of course, thoughts don't fossilize.
00:40:08.000I start off early in the book about, you know, who are the first people to figure out we're going to die and become aware of our own mortality in a way that, well, maybe I can conceive of being somewhere else.
00:40:20.000So we know, you know, elephants grieve and mammals grieve and, you know, cetaceans, dolphins, whales, and so on.
00:40:28.000And chimps, you know, they feel these mothers are just depressed and almost suicidal when their infants die.
00:40:34.000But that's different from, you know, conceiving of like, well, I know I'm going to die because I see people around me going to die, but I conceive of maybe some other place to go.
00:40:43.000So, I start off with something of a paradox that if I ask you to imagine yourself dead, you can't do it, because to imagine anything, you have to be alive.
00:40:52.000So, it's not going to be like falling asleep and waking up the next morning because you have dreams or whatever.
00:40:56.000It's going to be more like general anesthesia, where it's 10, 9, 8, boom, boom, lights out, but you just never wake up.
00:41:04.000So, we talk about things like, well, there's nothing after death.
00:41:09.000But even the word, no thing, implies there's a thing.
00:41:12.000Or, you know, you're going to this place, there's nothing.
00:41:16.000No thing, or nowhere, it implies that there's a where that you're not going to.
00:41:21.000But there's not even a where that you're not going to.
00:41:24.000And it's like, you know, with Lawrence Krauss and some of these cosmologists, you know.
00:42:34.000You know, some of his recommendations for dietary things or whatever, perhaps.
00:42:39.000But I know for sure, because I've gotten to know him pretty well, that he totally believes the stuff he says.
00:42:44.000It sounds like woo-woo, as I used to call it.
00:42:47.000But 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...
00:43:01.000But if you think about it, sort of from a simple perspective, the entire universe is in your brain, and when you cease to exist, the universe ceases to exist, for you, in your brain.
00:43:14.000You know, I call it the weak consciousness principle.
00:43:18.000Now, 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 it or observing it or whatever, and here's some quantum physics experiments that are really spooky.
00:43:40.000But still, the experience of going, and so I did the meditation thing and all the massages and the teas and the food and all that stuff, and it's this beachside resort in Carlsbad.
00:44:49.000Now, this idea that there's nothing, or no thing, that 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.
00:45:23.000I conclude that I don't know if there's an afterlife or not.
00:45:27.000At the 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.
00:45:40.000Alvie is Alvie Singer, Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall.
00:45:43.000I remember the scene early in the movie where he has a flashback as a young boy, and he's in the psychiatrist's office with his mom, and what's the problem?
00:46:23.000They're fascinating things to contemplate, but ultimately you really, for practicality's sake, you really should be paying attention to life.
00:46:32.000I mean, this is what I tell Deepak all the time when he says, well, you know, Michael, this table is actually made of atoms that are mostly empty space and the quantum physicists...
00:46:39.000According to Sean Carroll, that's not correct.
00:46:45.000He's like, no, that's just a poor way of describing it.
00:46:48.000And I would defer to him and let him describe it.
00:46:51.000He also described the superpositions, like particles, subatomic particles being in superposition, where they're in a state of moving and not moving at the same time.
00:47:00.000He explained that in a way that completely fucked my head up, too.
00:47:04.000I'm like, well, I thought I had it figured out, sort of.
00:47:07.000I 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 it.
00:47:39.000You 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.
00:47:48.000All that is the wrong way to think about it.
00:47:51.000The Buddhist way is that it's just all consciousness, and when you die, you return to the conscious state you were before you were born.
00:47:57.000So the physical body is just an instantiation of this conscious thing, whatever this is.
00:48:06.000You know, I'd be surprised, but I'd be pleasantly surprised, I'll tell you, that if it turns out, you know, I'd 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, Asimov are there, everybody's there, Hitch is there, you know,
00:48:21.000it's like, oh boy, okay, this isn't hell.
00:48:24.000If that's true, I'm not against any of this.
00:48:26.000Just like I'm not against Ray Kurzweil and these guys figuring out that we can live 200 years or 300 years.
00:48:32.000Great, if you can do it, but let's just...
00:48:35.000When they say to me, Sherman, don't you want to live to be 500?
00:48:43.000You know, 100. Give me to 100 so I'm not on a morphine drip in a bed.
00:48:47.000You know, just quality of life, incrementally, year by year.
00:48:51.000And if it turns out you solve these problems and we live to 150, 200, and then we have a bunch of other problems we don't even know about yet, okay.
00:48:58.000Well, I think there's some beauty in temporary things that we, for whatever reason, we're avoiding that concept.
00:49:34.000But he said, if the Christian version of Heaven and Hell is real, you're tapped on the shoulder at the party until you can never leave the party.
00:50:08.000That seems to me to be the inevitable future, though.
00:50:10.000That's one of the things that I'm really nervous about, this dystopian version of technological interference in our lives.
00:50:18.000I'm entirely convinced that we're going to...
00:50:22.000Inside of 100 years, live in a world where all of your thoughts really are documented and they have access to them.
00:50:30.000The same way no one in their wildest dreams conceived of photographs 400 years ago.
00:50:36.000And 400 years from now, we're going to have the ability to record thoughts and ideas and they're going to be able to read the contents of each other's minds.
00:50:49.000Or maybe we just have to accept the fact that Most of what goes wrong in the world goes wrong because people can think these secret, sneaky, fucked up thoughts.
00:50:59.000And when those no longer exist anymore, maybe we'll clean out human behavior.
00:51:04.000There was an Outer Limits episode about that in the 1950s.
00:51:13.000This guy all of a sudden is able to read the minds of other people and he's at work and he's listening to all these conversations and all this fun stuff.
00:51:21.000But then there's this one guy who's really dark, like he's going to come in and blow everybody away.
00:51:27.000And so it sort of climaxes where he comes in and tells the boss and everybody and they go in there and it turns out the guy says, well, I was never going to do that.
00:51:36.000I was just angry and I was just thinking that.
00:51:38.000So that's like a minority report thing.
00:52:33.000And there's people that just have these thoughts and they think them, they look at the edge and they go, I could just jump off right now and end this whole thing, but I won't.
00:53:15.000People are rarely bored, because when they are, they just pull out their phone and stare at pictures at other people's butts.
00:53:22.000It's like you just pull out Facebook or Instagram and no longer bored.
00:53:26.000When I was in my religious phase in college, I asked, before I went to Pepperdine, which is a religious school, I was at Glendale College just to get my GE out of the way, and my philosophy professor was an atheist and I was an evangelical, so I'm telling him about Jesus and the whole thing and the afterlife, and he said,
00:53:42.000and he wanted to know, are there golf courses and tennis courts in heaven?
00:53:45.000Because I've got to have something to do.
00:53:58.000And then I also quote from Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God monologue.
00:54:02.000She opens this monologue, you know, Julia from Saturday Night Live, with the Mormon boys coming by her house in Hollywood, and they're 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?
00:54:15.000So they tell her the whole thought, it's going to be great, you know, the blind shall see again, the deaf shall hear again, and your body will be whole again, and so she says, well, See, I had uterine cancer, so I had my uterus taken out.
00:54:27.000Do I get my uterus back when I go to heaven?
00:54:45.000So if you're resurrected with Jesus, see, earlier Christian sex before Descartes, I think?
00:55:11.00030 seems like a good year, it's the year Jesus was crucified, okay, 30. But wait a minute, I'm 63 now, so what happens to all the memories of my life for the last 33 years?
00:55:24.000Okay, but the memory of my being 30 now is different from the memory I had when I was 50 of being 30, and 40 being 30, and even when I was in my 30s being 30. You know, the memories are always changing and edited and forgotten or modified,
00:55:41.000particularly based on life experiences that happen afterwards.
00:55:44.000So in your 20s, you go to this college, you marry this person, you take this job or whatever.
00:55:49.000You don't really know what the impact of those decisions are until much later in life, which is why I always think it's ridiculous for people to write memoirs in their 20s or 30s because they're celebrities.
00:55:59.000You have no idea what those things actually mean until much later.
00:56:03.000So, this is the problem of who you are.
00:56:05.000So, first of all, we already know that none of your body is the same material it was, say, a decade ago.
00:56:53.000And then there's the problem with the mind-uploading scenario is there's two kinds of cells.
00:56:59.000There's the memory cell, mem-cell, of all your memories, and then there's the point-of-view cell, the POV cell.
00:57:04.000So 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 of point-of-view from one day to the next.
00:57:14.000So, like in the Johnny Depp movie, Transcendence, where he's poisoned by these terrorists and he's dying, he's got like a week to go, he copies his mind, his connectome, equivalent of the genome, and puts it into a computer, and then he dies, and they turn the computer on, and he's in the computer looking out through the little camera hole.
00:57:39.000But instead of you dying, let's say we had a sophisticated fMRI brain scan machine, slid you into it, copied your connectome, uploaded it into the cloud or whatever, and then we slide you back out and you're standing there.
00:57:50.000You're still looking at the world through your eyes.
00:59:28.000And these are scenarios, not only do we have the behavior genetics studies, because she worked on the famous Minnesota Twins research, not the baseball team, but the Twins research, of twins separated at birth and raised in different environments.
00:59:41.000Like, you know, the one raised in a Jewish home, the other raised in Nazi Germany.
00:59:44.000They get together, they have the same watch, they wear the same kind of clothes, they use the same toothpaste, they married women that look pretty similar.
00:59:53.000So there's a lot that genetics does that is very subtle.
00:59:57.000There's no gene for, like, we're both Catholic or wearing this kind of clothes.
01:00:01.000But, you know, if you have, as 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.
01:00:11.000So by chance, you're more likely to get similar clothes.
01:00:13.000There's no genes for clothes, but something like that body type or temperament.
01:00:18.000You have a certain kind of temperament, at least half of which is heritable, so you're more likely to choose certain professions or prefer certain hobbies or activities or pick spouses that would gel well with that temperament.
01:00:33.000That's if you make good decisions though.
01:00:35.000Well, yeah, there is that element of volition.
01:00:38.000The choices you make in life do diverge a little bit.
01:00:40.000So twins are a little bit different, you know, from that.
01:00:44.000But so a clone, you know, again, the moment you start leading separate lives of why the copy of you is not going to be you in heaven.
01:01:25.000Because it's not the matter, the material.
01:01:28.000It's really the pattern, which is why the singularity people focus on the cloud and uploading the mind, because it's the information.
01:01:35.000But the information is always changing, and how does the point of view go with it?
01:01:40.000See with 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 I do after surgery or sleep.
01:01:50.000I 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.
01:01:57.000Well isn't there also the problem that Every, what is it, seven to ten years, every cell in your body essentially has been replaced, except your neurons.
01:02:11.000That's what the singularity people do.
01:02:12.000So you're not your nose job, you're not your fake butt or your fake lips, you're neurons only.
01:02:18.000But even there, see, the transhumanists, they imagine this transitional stage where you start wearing contact lenses, say, they can call up the internet, and the moment I see you, Joe Rogan, the name pops up, your Wikipedia page pops up, and now I have this information.
01:02:30.000So I'm not bionic, but I'm also not just human, I'm transhuman.
01:02:37.000So these are sort of the transitional stages.
01:02:40.000So a cochlear implant is a kind of a brain chip.
01:02:43.000And I think you know about that research of the quadriplegic man who can control his computer cursor and now he can actually control an artificial limb just by thinking about it.
01:02:57.000So they put a chip in his motor cortex that reads the thoughts.
01:03:00.000So he has these thoughts and he's been trained to pull the cup of water up to his mouth and drink with the artificial arm.
01:03:06.000At some point, you know, say 50 years, 100 years from now, we could have it all mapped, and you could control your whole environment just by thinking.
01:03:13.000You know, I would like to hear Mozart.
01:03:15.000And you just think about it, and then music in your house comes on, and it's Mozart.
01:03:19.000Well, I freak out about Siri sometimes.
01:03:21.000Like, 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...
01:03:31.000What's that new musical with, what's his name, Hugh Jackman, the Wolverine guy?
01:03:38.000Some musical that's based on Ringling Brothers and Barnum& Bailey Circus.
01:05:09.000You got the iPhone 38. Yeah, I think all 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.
01:05:19.000I interviewed Kurzweil, and I had a really interesting conversation with him for this sci-fi show that I was doing a few years back.
01:05:30.000He's a fascinating, incredibly intelligent guy that has, I think he has more than 100 different patents and different things that he's invented.
01:06:04.000He's always talking about life, life, life, but he's just really kind of obsessed with death.
01:06:08.000This is what I worry about, is that, again, back to the Alvis era, you know, we don't live in the next life, whatever that is, or the far future.
01:06:17.000You know, if you're so focused on death and how we can solve these problems, okay, I'm glad somebody's working on it, and he's head of engineering for all of Google now, and they have that company, Calico.
01:06:27.000A couple hundred million dollars working on aging problems.
01:07:14.000I mean, when I interviewed him, I think it was probably 2013 or somewhere around then.
01:07:18.000Although, you know, to be fair, if you said a century ago when they had telegraph, well, more than a century ago, just the invention of the telegraph, you know, in a century and a half or so, you're going to be pressing a button and just calling out what you want on a little box.
01:07:37.000This is why science fiction is usually set far enough in advance, like a century or two, rather than in the historical present, so that you can postulate these kinds of things.
01:07:48.000This is what science fiction writers tell me.
01:07:50.000If you set it off far enough, readers are willing to suspend disbelief because, yeah, it seems possible.
01:08:02.000Yeah, I'm all for it too, but boy, I don't know.
01:08:05.000I've been very convinced, and more so over time, that human beings in this form, that our time is limited.
01:08:15.000I think when artificial, and I think even the word artificial life is a weird word to throw around, because it's not going to be artificial.
01:08:29.000I think that's what life is outside of Earth.
01:08:33.000I think that humans, what we do with our curiosity, if there's other curiosity in the universe, other curious life forms, I think they probably do the same thing.
01:08:42.000They realize, well, there's a massive limitation in terms of biological tissue and in terms of our ability to evolve.
01:09:07.000You had to go back to that clunky, stupid-looking thing.
01:09:10.000This is why SETI 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.
01:10:10.000How does it have a CPU? Like, what's next stage after that?
01:10:14.000Like, you know, what resemblance is it going to have to anything that we think of today in terms of the kind of technology that we're accustomed to?
01:10:25.000You know, so Ray makes the point that, you know, if you track, 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.
01:10:38.000And you just ingest these little computers and they go in there and they fix your Right,
01:11:07.000Now, the quantum computing people say, oh, yes, that's right, it'll stop, but we're going to do this other thing that is completely different.
01:11:19.000I just, I mean, there's so many things to speculate about in terms of our potential future, you know, and the fear of death is a very odd one.
01:11:30.000It's normal, it's natural, it's biological, animals have it, every human has it, everyone's scared to die.
01:11:36.000No one's scared to go to sleep, but everyone's scared to die.
01:12:39.000I mean, severely depressed, suicide, yes, that's an issue, but most people would want to continue on.
01:12:44.000So that's a point in favor of the transhumanists that, yeah, people will want to keep going on as long as they're healthy and happy and leading fulfilled lives.
01:12:53.000Yeah, as long as everything's healthy.
01:12:56.000My grandmother had a stroke and they gave her 72 hours.
01:14:04.000And 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 you take personal responsibility, except when it comes to your death.
01:15:05.000There's a whole theory called terror management theory that is premised on the idea that fear of death is what drives civilization and creativity and productivity and architects and artists and scientists are driven by this fear of death.
01:15:19.000But if you ask people, do you walk around in a state of fear of death?
01:15:55.000Which is why hospice is probably a really good thing that we're getting better at in the West, of just helping people make that transition, which is why, back to near-death experiences, it could be those brain chemicals, that's what they evolved for, was to help that process.
01:16:11.000As your brain is shutting down, you feel this sort of glow or this sort of good feeling that there's a tunnel, you're going to pass through the sense of transitioning to some other place.
01:16:21.000And this starts off very early in life.
01:16:24.000Sight research by Paul Bloom in his lab at Yale with little kids.
01:16:27.000So he presents them with this little puppet show.
01:16:30.000And so you have this little mouse and this alligator and the alligator munches the mouse and he's dead.
01:17:05.000So our intuitions, I think, naturally lead to the idea of some kind of afterlife, or something continues.
01:17:11.000It is possible Or is it possible that all these different cultures and all these different people have these concepts because maybe something does happen?
01:17:31.000And I think most of our consciousness is weighed down by life experiences and genetics and our environment and All the things that we carry around in our head as memories.
01:17:43.000I mean, this is a big part of what your life is.
01:20:29.000It actually isn't that expensive because the way Alcor and the other orgs do it is you take out an insurance policy on your life and you make them the beneficiary of the insurance policy.
01:20:40.000So if you started young, you had, say, a quarter million dollar insurance policy, a few hundred dollars a year premiums.
01:20:46.000If you started super late, the premiums would be much higher.
01:20:49.000But it's not like you're shelling out a quarter million dollars right out of your checkbook.
01:21:20.000Shouldn't they be like in Antarctica or something?
01:21:22.000And there's other deeper issues with this whole idea.
01:21:25.000Because if you're going to 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?
01:23:24.000Does everything have to be for a reward in some place that you're not even totally sure exists after we're done here?
01:23:32.000It's such a weird thing to say because I don't think they even think about that.
01:23:35.000I seriously doubt she wakes up in the morning and goes, okay, because there's an afterlife, I'm feeling good about life, and I'm going to get up.
01:24:11.000Of course, usually what they mean is somebody's pulling the strings to make it happen, not just the pathway that you happen to have gone down.
01:25:11.000You can't promise it, but reminding people of what a great life they've had, how much they've influenced the lives of other people, and so on.
01:25:53.000And that day is a microcosm of your life.
01:25:56.000Yeah, it's kind of fun to think, well, 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 got to write this chapter and I got to make these calls.
01:28:34.000Second law of thermodynamics, entropy, everything is running down.
01:28:37.000And second, natural selection programmed us to stay alive long enough to get our children's children into the reproductive age.
01:28:45.000After 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.
01:28:56.000You don't need to live 150, 200 years.
01:28:58.000In 60, 70 years, your children's children are now in their early 20s and having babies.
01:29:03.000You're done, as far as natural selection is concerned.
01:29:07.000Now, I say it in a way like there's a czar or a secretary of the treasury that's allocating resources.
01:30:25.000If you can make it into your 90s and you're still reasonably healthy, that's really good.
01:30:29.000Maybe you had, you know, Mel Gibson and his doc on, you know, with the stem cells.
01:30:33.000All that stuff is only going to push us further, further, more of us to the upper ceiling.
01:30:39.000We're not going to break through that upper ceiling, about 120, without something hugely, completely re-engineered, maybe a CRISPR technology that re-engineers the genome to stop all this stuff from happening.
01:30:49.000But, you know, we have four billion years, well, three and a half billion years or so of life Of that continuity of the genome.
01:30:57.000And it's all built into there in every single system.
01:31:01.000Every cell, all parts of your cell, they're all gonna age.
01:31:04.000And so, you know, people like Aubrey de Grey, I don't know if you know Aubrey.
01:32:06.000And the one thing we know for sure, in terms of longevity, to get you closer to the upper ceiling and more of it, is don't smoke, don't drink too much, exercise every day, especially cardio.
01:32:20.000I'm relieved to hear that meat and eggs and butter, this is all okay now, good, because it always felt like this was a balance with the salads.
01:32:42.000Because I totally related to the, you know, I went through my no meat stage and I just eat down in these huge bowls of Quaker granola, which is incredibly addictive because it's sugar.
01:32:54.000And I was cycling a lot and I wasn't, not only was I not losing weight, I'm putting weight on.
01:32:59.000I got like a, you know, like carrying around this extra 10 pounds.
01:35:09.000I love that story from Gary Taubes that, you know, when they started taking...
01:35:15.000Well, when they started making the transition from eating meat to eating carbohydrates, and it tasted like crap, it's like people don't want to eat cardboard, so we've got to put something in there to make it taste good.
01:35:27.000That was like 1960s, late 50s, after Eisenhower had his heart attack, and then that whole meme of the dietary fat equals cardiovascular heart disease.
01:35:38.000Well, 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 off sugar and put the blame on saturated fat.
01:36:50.000And 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 do.
01:38:30.000For about three weeks, the only way to get to L.A. is you had to go up to Santa Maria, take the 166 over the 5. You're practically in Bakersfield, and then 5 south of...
01:38:43.000And there's only a few side roads that parallel it, and they were all closed because they were covered in mud and also all the trucks and construction equipment to get the mud out of there.
01:40:24.000Okay, 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 are some things you could do that'll help you be more successful, et cetera.
01:42:02.000The problem with 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.
01:42:52.000We only hear the hits, forget the missus.
01:42:54.000But 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.
01:43:04.000But the idea of the secret is the most preposterous thing ever because you're sitting around imagining that you're going to 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,
01:46:02.000The NSA knows who you are just by the sound of your voice and their tech predates Apple and Amazon.
01:46:07.000A report on The Intercept citing documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA has highly refined voice recognition software.
01:46:19.000The agency's technology dates back to more than a decade.
01:46:22.000And was instrumental in helping to identify Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Iraq, the reports stated.
01:47:12.000The stuff before that, I didn't care for him.
01:47:15.000But I saw Snowden made an appearance sort of at TED, the last TED I went to in Vancouver, and they rolled him out on a computer, you know, big screen, and there he was in Russia somewhere.
01:47:25.000But the points he made were similar to that of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.
01:47:32.000It's like, we should know what our government's doing.
01:47:35.000We don't 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, you know, there's too much stuff going on, even in the Obama administration, the administration of transparency.
01:47:49.000This is when a lot of this stuff was happening.
01:47:51.000It's like, wait a minute, I thought it was Bush that was doing this kind of stuff, but Well, we have to remember that Edward Snowden went into hiding during the Obama administration.
01:47:58.000They're one of the worst administrations ever on record for whistleblowers.
01:48:02.000Which 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.
01:48:59.000He became incredibly concerned post-9-11 when they started...
01:49:06.000Doing 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 And then Snowden came out after that, and the Snowden thing was where people got all exposed.
01:49:22.000We've really got a chance to understand, oh, this is actually happening right now.
01:49:39.000And yet the number of Americans that die from foreign terrorism, I mean, there's some of the domestic terrorists, if you want to consider mass public shootings in that category, but foreign terrorists coming here to kill Americans, I mean, what is this?
01:49:53.000It's less than bathtub drownings, or no, way less than that, like double lightning strikes or something?
01:50:34.000Which, you know, it's all good points, but he has...
01:50:36.000I'm not sure why it took so long to bring this book out.
01:50:39.000He'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...
01:50:45.000The 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.
01:50:55.000It'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 must, but 20, 30 million tops!
01:51:06.000That's the kind of numbers they were throwing out.
01:51:09.000Yeah, you can't leave a human being with that much responsibility and power.
01:51:13.000And I think that's the bottom line when it comes to this NSA surveillance thing, is that all these government agencies are populated by human beings.
01:51:21.000And human beings should not have that kind of power over other human beings that are just citizens.
01:51:27.000Because they're just – the ability to check all – I mean, Snowden talked about people being able to check in on their exes and read their emails, and they were doing things like that.
01:51:36.000And this is when Obama was like, no, no, this is just metadata.
01:52:10.000But when he makes – if you watch the TED Talk interview, Chris Anderson was just talking to him on stage from an undisclosed location in Russia.
01:52:51.000Also, 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.
01:53:02.000And they go, hey, well, you know, we found out that you're into, like, cuckold porn, buddy.
01:53:58.000I mean, it's the responsibility that one would have to be able to do that George C. Scott thing and say, eh, 20 million, 30 million, no big deal.
01:54:51.000You know, we realize 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.
01:55:18.000It can't ever exist, not even in principle, because there is no right society because we have so much variation in our interests and needs and wants and abilities.
01:55:27.000And, you know, the idea of programming by fiat from the top down, this is what we're going to do and it's going to work or else you're out.
01:55:34.000And the problem with utilitarianism is it gets 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.
01:55:44.000You are preventing utopia, so we are going to eliminate you.
01:55:48.000This is the famous trolley experiment, thought experiment.
01:55:50.000You know, the trolley's hurtling down the tracks about to kill the five workers.
01:56:23.000With massive potential for the future.
01:56:26.000Now, most people said they would flip the switch, but an interesting twist on that, so if you're standing on a bridge over the track, And the train is hurtling down the tracks about to kill the five workers.
01:56:38.000And standing next to you is a great big guy.
01:56:53.000So it's something to do with, it engages the emotional part of the brain that actively killing somebody is way harder than passively killing them.
01:57:01.000So if you're at a B-52 bomber 35,000 feet up, you only have to press the button to release the bombs, not so hard.
01:57:08.000But that's even more actively doing it than a drone.
01:57:11.000The drone one apparently is a giant issue for the drone pilots.
01:57:16.000Apparently they suffer from really weird PTSD. Really?
01:57:58.000Where the decision is to be made, well, the setup is we know that the terrorists are making a bomb inside this building and we can get a drone there to hit it.
01:58:10.000And so they're about to do this, 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.
01:58:18.000So she's on the corner and so she will be killed.
01:58:21.000And it's like, okay, maybe we could come around from the other side and then she won't be.
01:58:26.000And they're doing all these calculations, but now there's some other people over here.
01:58:29.000So how many people, innocents, should we kill?
01:58:32.000Because we know that the terrorists are going to, if they complete their suicide bomb, they're going to go to a mall and kill 300 people or whatever.
01:58:40.000So they show how these government agencies think about those calculations.
01:58:44.000We've 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?
01:59:41.000Bush Senior said, we're going to stop short and let Sodom's own people take him out and have their own regime change, and then we'll support the new regime.
02:00:37.000The casualties, when you look at it, in terms of the actual targets that we're looking for versus the actual people that were killed with collateral damage, there's a tremendous amount of collateral damage.
02:00:51.000And that's not something that we would ever accept from one guy.
02:00:54.000Say 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.
02:01:05.000But 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 terrorist that we were after, we accept it.
02:01:18.000So in game theory, there's this problem of this sort of sliding scale that, okay, I know it's like the Milgram shock experiment of 15 volts at a time.
02:01:27.000You know, before you know it, you're throwing 450 volts into this subject.
02:01:30.000You couldn't get somebody to do that initially, but if you do it incrementally, You know, they're kind of hoping, well, if I hold out and just do one more, maybe the experiment will end.
02:01:40.000And it's like this with these kind of utilitarian calculus.
02:01:43.000Okay, I know I probably shouldn't be doing these collateral damage, 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.
02:01:53.000But it's always so messy that it takes much longer than you think.
02:01:57.000So you can kind of see the logic, like, okay, I don't know if you watch Ken Burns' documentary series on the Vietnam War, but it kind of felt like that the whole time.
02:02:05.000When you see at the end, it's like, God, this was a catastrophe.
02:02:09.000But at every step, you know, Kennedy, then Johnson, then Nixon, it's like, okay, we can't give up now, you know, the sunk cost fallacy.
02:02:16.000You know, we put all this in there, just one more month, and then we'll get out.
02:02:21.000And then the month comes, like, okay, we're not going, another month, another year, and then before you know it, you got 58,000 dead.
02:02:28.000And it's like, okay, this just didn't work.
02:02:30.000And I think that happens more often, because it's always messier.
02:02:41.000It was outlawed in the Paris Peace Agreements of 1927. War is illegal.
02:02:45.000There's a great book called The Internationalists.
02:02:48.000It gives the history of how this came about.
02:02:52.000And 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.
02:03:07.000And took all its stuff, and then there was a legal battle about this, and whichever side, I think it was the Spanish, said, no, no, actually, we're at war, and if you're at war, it's okay to be a pirate and kill people and stuff like that.
02:03:21.000And so this Hugo Grotius, legal scholar, wrote all these treaties that got laid down that said, this is when war is legal.
02:03:30.000It's perfectly okay to kill other people and take their stuff.
02:04:24.000It'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.
02:05:34.000I don't agree with Noam Chomsky on everything, but 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.
02:06:28.000Really disingenuous labeling of people as Nazis or neo-Nazis or white supremacists just because they simply don't line up with your belief system.
02:06:38.000And it's a conscious decision to do that.
02:06:44.000This isn't like an accidental mislabeling where you don't really know what the person's motives and who they are.
02:06:49.000No, you're just trying to diminish whatever position they have so that your side wins.
02:06:54.000And I think a lot of people feel justified Buy it because of the current administration, and it just seems like we're on a goddamn pirate ship now.
02:07:06.000When you're seeing what's going on with the erosion of the EPA and the decision to start drilling, he made a sweeping decision that you could drill anywhere.
02:09:58.000So back to the utopia, societies are messy, and the only utopian-type system would be one that there is no system.
02:10:07.000You 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 power if they can get it.
02:10:57.000Now, as someone who spends so much time looking for actual truth and facts and scientific data, How concerned are you about the media today?
02:11:09.000Because this term fake news and this weird world 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 click-baity headlines.
02:11:29.000Even established media sources are doing some sleazy shit now.
02:11:36.000We have to stay on top of it, but there are solutions to this, like PolitiFact, for example, and they're not the only site, Snopes also, you know, ranking the factual basis of a speech in real time.
02:11:49.000And you can go on, like, PolitiFact, as Trump's giving a speech or during the campaign when they were all giving speeches, and they would rank them, you know, from, you know, true, mostly true, partially false, mostly false, pants on fire.
02:12:16.000You know, how many times this guy lied in his speech.
02:12:19.000So 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, whistleblowered and called and put out there so that we didn't drag ourselves into the Vietnam War even deeper.
02:12:33.000My thought, and this is a very paranoid thought, is that all this is inevitably opening us up to the truth chip.
02:13:13.000I think Webster's just this last week voted, it was alternative facts is the word of the year, phrase of the year for 2017. The year before that was fake news was the year.
02:13:22.000Sean Spicer said alternative facts, right?
02:14:54.000Vietnam War wasn't quite that long, but if you look back to where it started in the 50s when we weren't at war, we were sending advisors there.
02:15:10.000I would like to think of our civilization as being something that aspires to a higher standard, like something that is more advanced because we've learned from the lessons of the thousands of years of written history, and we aspire to a greater set of values.
02:15:28.000It's one of the things I like about Elon Musk's Let's Go Colonize Mars.
02:15:31.000In addition to the technological problems, how will they set up...
02:15:35.000There's like 100 people there, or 1,000, 10,000.
02:15:38.000What kind of government are they going to have?
02:16:33.000I mean, is it different to have 10 people, 100 people, 1,000, 10,000?
02:16:37.000There's a scaling effect where it becomes more efficient the more people you have, but on the other hand, then you get these catch basins of power that grow and become corrupt.
02:17:47.000The 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.
02:17:56.000Or even if there is, again, it doesn't really matter because we live in this world.
02:17:59.000So it turns out there's research that shows that striving for happiness is the wrong metric.
02:18:16.000So, like, for example, when you work out, you know, it's not fun in a sense of, like, a morphine drip, you know, I'm getting a lot of pleasure from this.
02:18:23.000Afterwards, you get, you know, a sense of endorphins and you feel better about yourself.
02:18:29.000And so, like, there's research showing that, you know, if you go out for drinks with your friends, dinner and so on, that's fun, that's pleasurable, but it's short-term.
02:18:38.000Caretaking for a parent, for example, this shows that this is not fun at all.
02:18:42.000I've done this for two of my four parents, I had step-parents.
02:18:56.000So 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.
02:19:10.000That's what makes people feel better about their lives.
02:19:13.000And really, that's all we can do, and it's enough.
02:19:16.000It's enough to, you know, sort of feel like my life is well worth living.
02:19:22.000Without the promise of an afterlife, you don't need that.
02:19:25.000Just 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.
02:19:32.000You know, like I do my three-hour bike ride, you know?
02:19:35.000I've got to get up at 6.30 in the morning.
02:21:16.000You know, you don't need God for that.
02:21:18.000And it was sort of an interesting exchange, because Oprah was reflecting kind of the common theme that people have, you need God to have a meaningful life, and Diana's whole point was, no, you don't.
02:21:27.000You just have to be engaged with the world in some meaningful way, and that's enough.