The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1068 - Michael Shermer

00:00:03.000 Four, three, two, one.

00:00:06.000 Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Shermer.

00:00:08.000 And Heavens on Earth.

00:00:10.000 Yeah.

00:00:10.000 The scientific search for the afterlife, immortality, and utopia.

00:00:15.000 Did you find anything?

00:00:16.000 No.

00:00:17.000 Sorry.

00:00:18.000 Nothing?

00:00:19.000 Well, I found interesting journeys that people use to try to get there from both the religious perspective and the scientific perspective.

00:00:27.000 So I do deal with the monotheism's versions of the afterlife in heaven, you know, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

00:00:33.000 But 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.

00:00:45.000 I find that incredibly interesting.

00:00:46.000 I call it afterlife for atheists, you know. 1.00

00:00:49.000 It is, right?

00:00:50.000 I 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?

00:00:58.000 There 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.

00:01:07.000 This is when the singularity is going to come.

00:01:09.000 It was 2030, then 2040, now 2045. Yeah, Kurzweil is a big...

00:01:15.000 He's like the...

00:01:17.000 The grand poobah.

00:01:18.000 He is.

00:01:19.000 And 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.

00:01:34.000 This is it, first time.

00:01:35.000 In the moment, you know, I used to be religious in my youth, and I thought, man, this is like being back in church again.

00:01:40.000 When did you stop being religious?

00:01:42.000 I started in high school and stopped in graduate school, so it was about seven years.

00:01:46.000 Interesting.

00:01:46.000 You started being religious in high school.

00:01:49.000 Yeah.

00:01:49.000 So it wasn't something that your family introduced you to?

00:01:51.000 No, my parents were pretty secular.

00:01:54.000 They weren't anti-religious.

00:01:55.000 That wasn't a thing then.

00:01:57.000 But this is 1971, when I was in high school, and the sort of nascent, born-again movement was starting.

00:02:03.000 And there was no religious affiliation.

00:02:04.000 It was just like, it's me and Jesus.

00:02:06.000 That's it.

00:02:07.000 It's just you and the Lord.

00:02:09.000 There'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,

00:02:25.000 and they just talk about God, and they get a lot of people fired up.

00:02:29.000 Yep, and, you know, they...

00:02:31.000 The place I went to is this place called The Barn in La Crescenta where I grew up.

00:02:35.000 And, you know, they played guitar and, you know, did all the same.

00:02:38.000 Did it turn into a sex cult?

00:02:40.000 They usually do. 0.97

00:02:41.000 Somebody starts banging people.

00:02:42.000 I was hoping for something like that, but no, no.

00:02:45.000 Yeah, that is one of the problems with utopia, the 19th century utopian experiments.

00:02:50.000 They always turned into this, you know, free sex for the leader.

00:02:53.000 Well, it always seems like whenever there's a man that's in a position where people start worshiping him.

00:02:59.000 Right.

00:02:59.000 You know, and then they start hanging on his every word.

00:03:02.000 He's like, I've got to start fucking some of these people. 0.98

00:03:05.000 Well, I cover Jim Jones, and the way I phrase it is that no one joins a cult. 0.99

00:03:11.000 They join a group that they think is going to do good, save the world, going to help me improve my life, improve the lives of others.

00:03:17.000 And there's pictures online you can see of Jim Jones with Jerry Brown covering We're good to Jerry Brown in his first round.

00:03:23.000 And, you know, they were manning the soup kitchens.

00:03:24.000 He was very liberal, open to African-Americans being part of the church in San Francisco there, gays, women.

00:03:30.000 You know, it was a really cutting-edge, pioneering thing.

00:03:33.000 And at the time, it seemed like, yeah, that's a cool thing.

00:03:35.000 I'm going to join this group.

00:03:36.000 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.

00:03:42.000 And then, yeah, he started having sex and then drugs.

00:03:46.000 And then, you know, the feds started kind of poking around and taxes.

00:03:49.000 And that's when they went to South America.

00:03:51.000 Speaking of which, I think this week is the Spike special.

00:03:54.000 It's now the Paramount Network on Waco.

00:03:56.000 Yeah, Waco, yes.

00:03:57.000 Isn't that going on like right now?

00:03:59.000 I think it started Sunday, yeah.

00:04:02.000 Yeah, I think it's a six-part series or something along those lines.

00:04:06.000 See, that's an interesting...

00:04:07.000 I'm absolutely convinced most of these guys believe what they say.

00:04:11.000 Now, 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.

00:04:20.000 And, you know, David Koresh, he was, you know, right down the barrel, he totally believes, willing to die for his beliefs. 0.99

00:04:27.000 And he also was having sex with everybody. 0.99

00:04:29.000 Yes. 0.87

00:04:31.000 I mean, it's so common.

00:04:33.000 I have a friend and his ex-girlfriend grew up in one of these sort of religious cults, and it was the same deal. 0.98

00:04:39.000 The head guy was having sex with all the women, and he would have sex with different people's wives, and everybody had to let him. 0.98

00:04:47.000 Yeah, same thing with the fundamentalist Mormons. 0.98

00:04:49.000 What's his name that's in jail now?

00:04:51.000 Jeffries.

00:04:52.000 Jeff.

00:04:53.000 Is that it?

00:04:54.000 Jeff.

00:04:55.000 It's not Jeffries?

00:04:56.000 Jeff.

00:04:57.000 Maybe it is Jeffries.

00:04:58.000 Maybe I'm thinking of Jim Jeffries, my friend, the comedian.

00:05:01.000 But anyway, yeah, that's how it gets corrupted.

00:05:03.000 I don't know if you ever read John Krakauer's book, Under the Banner of Heaven.

00:05:08.000 This is the guy, the mountain climber that did Into Thin Air and the one about the Alaskan kid.

00:05:15.000 Anyway, he wrote this book called Under the Banner of Heaven.

00:05:17.000 The Alaskan kid who died?

00:05:18.000 Yes.

00:05:19.000 The one they made that movie about?

00:05:20.000 Yeah.

00:05:21.000 Into the Wild.

00:05:22.000 Into the Wild, yeah.

00:05:23.000 So he did Into the Wild, Into Thin Air.

00:05:24.000 Krakauer's a great writer.

00:05:26.000 So this book, he starts to investigate the murder of this polygamous family in Utah.

00:05:32.000 Just as a journalist, he's going to do a story for The New Yorker or something.

00:05:35.000 And then he realizes this takes him down the path of this incredible world of polygamy, which still goes on.

00:05:41.000 Now, legally, it's not legal, but they marry one, and then the others are so-called sister wives, and they're just there.

00:05:46.000 And they live in these border towns along the border between Colorado and Utah, like Colorado City.

00:05:52.000 I've been to some of these places.

00:05:54.000 It's like a Twilight Zone episode.

00:05:56.000 You go into this town, gas station or whatever, it's like, oh, it feels kind of weird here.

00:06:01.000 And 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.

00:06:12.000 And, you know, he gets this revelation from God that, well, basically he's banging the woman down the street.

00:06:17.000 He's married.

00:06:18.000 And 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.

00:06:31.000 She's like, oh, yeah?

00:06:33.000 Well, I have to start seeing other guys.

00:06:36.000 No, no, God was very specific about this.

00:06:39.000 It's just for the guys.

00:06:40.000 And how do I know you talk to God?

00:06:43.000 Well, my buddies, they were there.

00:06:44.000 They heard it also.

00:06:45.000 And this is the...

00:06:47.000 The first page of the Book of Mormon is an affidavit.

00:06:49.000 These are the people that heard the revelation.

00:06:51.000 They all sign it.

00:06:53.000 And it's like, okay, so this is how it starts.

00:06:55.000 Well, when Joseph Smith started it all off in 1820, he was only 14. Yeah.

00:07:00.000 Name me a 14-year-old that's not a liar.

00:07:02.000 That's right.

00:07:03.000 They just learn how to lie.

00:07:04.000 It's not even like that they're bad people.

00:07:06.000 When you're 14 years old, you are a developing entity.

00:07:09.000 Right.

00:07:09.000 You know, like your frontal lobe's not fully formed.

00:07:12.000 You don't really know what you're...

00:07:13.000 You're practicing sentences.

00:07:14.000 You know what you're doing.

00:07:16.000 Trying to exert your influence.

00:07:18.000 And this guy was just very creative.

00:07:20.000 He was, and he got chased out of Palmyra, New York is where he started.

00:07:25.000 And then he moved to Missouri when basically he was in trouble with the law and other issues.

00:07:30.000 And then he got in trouble there and he was killed.

00:07:32.000 And usually this ends a cult when the leader dies.

00:07:36.000 Now, 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.

00:07:46.000 And he managed to keep it going.

00:07:48.000 Same thing with Brigham Young.

00:07:49.000 It was Brigham Young that turned this little cult into a world religion.

00:07:53.000 And they just went further west to Utah to get away from federal authorities.

00:07:58.000 Now, how much of a hit is Scientology taking from that Leah Remini series?

00:08:03.000 I've not seen any data like on memberships, and they're all secret about that anyway.

00:08:08.000 It's proprietary data, so who knows?

00:08:10.000 I can't imagine they could survive.

00:08:12.000 Well, 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.

00:08:20.000 Yeah, between the Lawrence Wright book, then the HBO documentary.

00:08:24.000 Oh, just gripping stuff.

00:08:26.000 Crazy.

00:08:26.000 Yeah, and your dialogue with Aaliyah was incredible.

00:08:29.000 And she's just a hero amongst, you know, secularists that fight against cults.

00:08:34.000 That's really the best way to do it.

00:08:37.000 Not top-down laws against cults, unless they're doing something obviously illegal, but just bottom-up members speaking out.

00:08:44.000 Yeah.

00:08:44.000 I had David Miskovich's dad on as well.

00:08:48.000 Right.

00:08:48.000 That was sad.

00:08:50.000 Yeah.

00:08:50.000 That was sad because I felt like I was talking to a guy who felt like he wasted his life.

00:08:55.000 Right.

00:08:55.000 And lost his son.

00:08:56.000 Right.

00:08:57.000 And he brought his son into Scientology.

00:09:00.000 The whole thing was...

00:09:00.000 That was really disturbing.

00:09:02.000 Yep.

00:09:03.000 It's just very strange that...

00:09:07.000 The United States government is allowing those people to be tax exempt.

00:09:10.000 I mean, with all the evidence that's available, you just go and look. 0.99

00:09:15.000 At 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. 0.89

00:09:23.000 Well, 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. 0.98

00:09:33.000 But they're the only major organization I've ever seen that beat the IRS, and they did it through thousands of lawsuits.

00:09:40.000 I think they sued them like 3,500 times or something like this.

00:09:43.000 Well, they had every single member that they could get to do it and sue them as well.

00:09:47.000 They were getting all their members to sue it.

00:09:49.000 They were suing.

00:09:50.000 I think that was the story.

00:09:51.000 Isn't that how it worked?

00:09:52.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:09:52.000 And eventually the IRS just said, okay, fuck it. 1.00

00:09:56.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:09:56.000 Your tax exemption. 1.00

00:09:58.000 I mean, if they're letting the Mormons do it, why wouldn't they let the Scientologists do it? 0.99

00:10:03.000 I really don't think any religion should be taxed.

00:10:05.000 No, I agree. 0.99

00:10:06.000 It's ridiculous. 0.96

00:10:06.000 I agree. 0.96

00:10:07.000 I 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. 0.65

00:10:22.000 Well, and like preachers, they can live in a house tax-free.

00:10:25.000 They don't have to pay property tax on the home that they own.

00:10:28.000 So there's a lot of these side benefits also that you don't normally hear about.

00:10:32.000 So gross.

00:10:32.000 So the Freedom From Religion Foundation and some of these other organizations, ACLU, are trying to combat some of this.

00:10:38.000 But legally, how do you distinguish that from, say, a nonprofit like Doctors Without Borders or one of these other groups?

00:10:45.000 Or the Clinton Foundation.

00:10:47.000 Well, yeah.

00:10:49.000 Yeah.

00:10:50.000 Yeah, there was some statistic recently in the Clinton Foundation how much money in 2014 they actually donated to Cherry.

00:10:57.000 Oh, Christ.

00:10:58.000 It was like 6%.

00:11:00.000 Something like extremely low.

00:11:02.000 The rest of it, what, payroll?

00:11:03.000 Yeah, mostly expenses.

00:11:05.000 Private flights.

00:11:05.000 I mean, that's what it is.

00:11:06.000 They're scams.

00:11:07.000 Yeah.

00:11:07.000 All these things are scams.

00:11:08.000 Yeah.

00:11:09.000 It's just...

00:11:10.000 Yeah, it might be good to just clean house and just no one gets non-profit status or tax-free status.

00:11:16.000 Yeah.

00:11:16.000 Unless you're just, well, I don't know.

00:11:18.000 I don't know.

00:11:18.000 I mean, I feel like there is room in the world for compassionate charities that are actual charities that are really legitimate.

00:11:25.000 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.

00:11:31.000 Right.

00:11:31.000 You know, about what we accept.

00:11:34.000 Yeah, well, the Supreme Court, then they have a...

00:11:35.000 The problem is where do you draw the line?

00:11:37.000 Right.

00:11:38.000 Where do you...

00:11:39.000 Yeah, because somebody says, well, I have a goofy belief.

00:11:41.000 The Janes have some weird beliefs or something, but they're manning the soup kitchens, they're helping the poor, and there's no corruption. 0.99

00:11:47.000 Right.

00:11:48.000 So 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.

00:11:56.000 What's the difference?

00:11:57.000 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 the lost work of Jesus, and only he could read them because he had a magic seer stone. 1.00

00:12:11.000 And then when the local townspeople came to see, well, where are these stones?

00:12:15.000 Oh, the angels came and took them away because you did not believe.

00:12:19.000 It's so preposterous.

00:12:22.000 Mormons are really nice people.

00:12:24.000 Totally nice.

00:12:24.000 They are the best cult.

00:12:25.000 They're the sweetest, nicest people.

00:12:27.000 Well, I think they've made the transition from cult to a religious sect.

00:12:32.000 And most Christians no longer consider them a cult.

00:12:35.000 Some evangelicals do because they're pretty far out.

00:12:37.000 But most mainstream Christians say, yeah, yeah, they're Christians.

00:12:40.000 I mean, they accept Jesus as their savior.

00:12:42.000 And technically, that gets you in the club.

00:12:45.000 They just got to let all that Joseph Smith stuff go.

00:12:47.000 Yeah.

00:12:48.000 Because the way they treat people is fantastic.

00:12:51.000 I mean, I'm not a big fan of them going to these poor countries and proselytizing and getting these vulnerable people to become a part.

00:12:59.000 But I think the way they deal with community and the way they deal with each other, it's a very warm and friendly and family environment.

00:13:07.000 And most of the Mormons that I've met that are practicing have been very nice people.

00:13:12.000 Yeah, and they're serious about their tithing and the 10%.

00:13:14.000 I mean, they have strict rules about this, like capital gains.

00:13:18.000 It's equivalent to capital gains.

00:13:19.000 So if you sell your house and make a profit, you've got to give 10% of that to church, not just your income, not just your paycheck.

00:13:25.000 And they're pretty strict about that.

00:13:27.000 And the money, as far as I know, mostly goes for good causes.

00:13:30.000 That really does help poor people, things like that.

00:13:33.000 Now, in your book, did you go over near-death experiences?

00:13:38.000 I do, yeah.

00:13:38.000 I have a chapter on that, yeah.

00:13:39.000 What do you think is going on?

00:13:40.000 The ones that have fascinated me are people in the hospital bed that see their body from above.

00:13:47.000 Right.

00:13:48.000 You're dealing with a bunch of chemicals that are released in the body, right?

00:13:51.000 There'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.

00:14:03.000 Right.

00:14:03.000 So it's important to remember that they're near-death experiences.

00:14:06.000 You're not actually dead.

00:14:07.000 So there's a liminal transitional stage there where you're sliding into some other state of consciousness, an altered state of consciousness.

00:14:16.000 And we know...

00:14:17.000 That 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.

00:14:28.000 So 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.

00:14:40.000 So 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.

00:14:51.000 It's kind of a smooth, feel-good, you know, better than a morphine drip kind of way of making the transition.

00:14:57.000 But 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.

00:15:09.000 You know, 2Gs, 3Gs, 4Gs, boom, out you go.

00:15:13.000 At some point, like 10Gs.

00:15:15.000 And 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.

00:15:24.000 And having these sort of weird experiences.

00:15:27.000 And we know exactly what that is.

00:15:29.000 You know, the blood is being compressed to the center of the body, including the center of the brain.

00:15:33.000 The last thing to go is your brainstem, of course, to keep you alive.

00:15:35.000 So the cortex is shutting down from the outside in.

00:15:38.000 That would create this kind of tunneling effect on the back of your skull where your visual cortex is.

00:15:42.000 That would create some of that.

00:15:45.000 Open brain surgeries.

00:15:46.000 These 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.

00:15:58.000 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.

00:16:06.000 So this is one way to map what the brain is doing.

00:16:09.000 If, you know, so what do you report when I tap here?

00:16:11.000 Oh, I just had a Vision of my 10th birthday or whatever.

00:16:14.000 And it's like, okay, that's where that's stored, right there.

00:16:17.000 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.

00:16:25.000 I'm up by the ceiling now.

00:16:26.000 And you tap a little to the left.

00:16:28.000 Oh, my left leg is up.

00:16:29.000 My right leg is up.

00:16:30.000 My left arm is floating.

00:16:31.000 My right arm is floating.

00:16:32.000 I'm way up here now.

00:16:34.000 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.

00:16:42.000 So we know for sure that the near-death experiences are in the brain.

00:16:46.000 The experiences that the people report are real.

00:16:49.000 They have experience.

00:16:51.000 But we know it's neurologically based.

00:16:53.000 Now, the counter-argument is, yes, of course, you have to have your brain to have experiences.

00:16:57.000 But it's kind of like a doors of perception opening into this other realm that these chemicals allow you to do.

00:17:04.000 It's like...

00:17:05.000 By the way, I've been talking with Graham Hancock about ayahuasca.

00:17:09.000 He's invited me to come join him in Rhythmia in Costa Rica to try this.

00:17:14.000 I've never tried this, and I'm tempted to go do this, to say, okay, if I'm going to write about these things, I should experience it.

00:17:20.000 But there's a debate amongst people who do this that, you know, is it strictly just in your head, and you're not actually going anywhere?

00:17:28.000 Or does it open some door to some other dimension?

00:17:32.000 Okay, that's kind of the...

00:17:34.000 And so the near-death experience believers counter that, well, yes, it's in your brain, but it still is taking you somewhere else.

00:17:42.000 The 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.

00:17:50.000 For a scientific community that studies it, well, there has to be some way to test it somehow or tell the difference between that.

00:17:57.000 So, for example...

00:17:58.000 Is that the limitations of the scientific method, though?

00:18:00.000 Yes, yes, it is.

00:18:00.000 Because we're dealing with consciousness.

00:18:02.000 And you're dealing with memories and dreams and ideas, like you can't measure those either.

00:18:07.000 That's right.

00:18:07.000 So I quote two other sources.

00:18:10.000 First of all, I discussed the most famous example is Eben Alexander's trip to heaven.

00:18:15.000 He wrote a book called Proof of Heaven.

00:18:17.000 Now, this is a Harvard-trained neurologist.

00:18:19.000 He knows more about the brain than I do.

00:18:20.000 And so he knows all the research I'm talking to you about, and there's a lot more.

00:18:24.000 But for him, it was so powerful.

00:18:27.000 Okay, what's it like?

00:18:28.000 So he talks about it in his book.

00:18:30.000 He was in a coma in a hospital.

00:18:32.000 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 oneness with the cosmos, and, you know, he goes on and on about this.

00:18:44.000 So 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.

00:18:56.000 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.

00:19:05.000 In other words, you know, the narratives are indistinguishable to an outsider.

00:19:09.000 So how do you know that you're actually going to heaven or you're just having a fantastic trip?

00:19:14.000 Well, it's entirely possible it's both.

00:19:17.000 Well, so how do we know?

00:19:18.000 We don't know.

00:19:19.000 I think the real problem is people saying that they know.

00:19:23.000 Saying that I know that I was in another dimension.

00:19:26.000 I know.

00:19:26.000 I mean, it's entirely possible that your consciousness is capable of going through these chemical doorways that are created by these molecules.

00:19:35.000 And that it experiences some frequency on the dial, like if there's a radio dial.

00:19:42.000 Maybe we're at 95.5, but you can get to 97 if you take, you know, X amount of milligrams of dimethyltryptamine.

00:19:50.000 And then you go to this new place, you know, but you're still physically here.

00:19:54.000 You know, Aldous Huxley's book, The Doors of Perception.

00:19:56.000 Yes.

00:19:57.000 Which supposedly is where the doors got their name.

00:19:59.000 Oh, really?

00:20:00.000 Somebody told me that's a meme that's not true.

00:20:02.000 I don't know.

00:20:03.000 Anyway, but that's the idea, yeah.

00:20:05.000 Sounds good.

00:20:07.000 So, but really what you're getting at is a super core problem of what is truth.

00:20:12.000 How do you know?

00:20:13.000 So mystical experiences are by definition personal, and you can't corroborate them through some external scientific method.

00:20:23.000 So, I mean, science is based on the act that we can falsify a claim.

00:20:28.000 We can test it somehow.

00:20:29.000 And that it's not just me pointing to something and say, I think that's true because I experienced that.

00:20:35.000 So I wrote a column in Scientific American about this called What is Truth?

00:20:39.000 So I start off with like, well, the truth for me is that dark chocolate's better than milk chocolate.

00:20:44.000 And maybe you say, no, milk chocolate's better than dark chocolate.

00:20:47.000 And there's no way we're going to resolve that.

00:20:49.000 But is that truth or is that that's just preference?

00:20:51.000 That's just, that's an internal stater.

00:20:53.000 I say, the other example I use is, you know, Stairway to Heaven is the greatest rock song of all time.

00:20:57.000 And then you go, No, no, free bird is better than stairway.

00:20:59.000 Okay.

00:21:00.000 You can't resolve these things, right?

00:21:01.000 So you slide there from into things like these personal experiences we have.

00:21:06.000 So, 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?

00:21:20.000 And 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.

00:21:31.000 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?

00:21:38.000 Because I wouldn't know.

00:21:39.000 You most certainly don't know.

00:21:41.000 You know that the experience was a real experience in terms of the fact that you had it, like you felt the things.

00:21:49.000 I haven't done ayahuasca, but I've done the active ingredient in ayahuasca many times.

00:21:54.000 It's dimethyltryptamine, and it's more potent in the form that I've done it in.

00:21:57.000 It's a shorter-lasting, much more potent experience.

00:22:03.000 Undeniably phenomenal.

00:22:04.000 Really?

00:22:05.000 It's very crazy.

00:22:06.000 It's impossible to describe.

00:22:08.000 I would throw some words around and do my best, but it won't work.

00:22:12.000 Right.

00:22:13.000 The trip itself, what's really bizarre, there's a lot of really bizarre aspects of it.

00:22:18.000 One of the things that's really bizarre is the feeling that you've been there before.

00:22:22.000 And 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.

00:22:35.000 In that your brain, your liver, they know for a fact that it's produced by your liver and your lungs.

00:22:41.000 And now they know, there used to be anecdotal evidence that it was produced by the pineal gland, which is, of course, the third eye.

00:22:47.000 In reptiles, certain reptiles, it actually has a retina.

00:22:50.000 I mean, it literally is in the center of your head where the Eastern mysticism third eye exists.

00:22:56.000 Now they know that in rats...

00:22:58.000 Because 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.

00:23:14.000 And it's an amazing book, really, really fascinating.

00:23:17.000 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 very hopeful.

00:23:30.000 Well, they're mammals.

00:23:31.000 Yeah.

00:23:32.000 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.

00:23:43.000 Are you aware of the correlation between this and Moses' burning bush?

00:23:47.000 Well, I've heard ideas about that, yeah.

00:23:50.000 Jerusalem scholars believe now that the burning bush may very well have been the acacia bush.

00:23:55.000 The acacia bush is a tree that's rich in dimethyltryptomy.

00:23:59.000 All right.

00:23:59.000 He was tripping.

00:24:00.000 Well, he's tripping, but I think we're getting...

00:24:03.000 We 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,

00:24:20.000 and it's a very weird language to translate to Latin, then to Greek, and to English.

00:24:26.000 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...

00:24:41.000 What we're getting is an interpretation of somehow they had a DMT experience from smoking this bush, smoking some aspects of it.

00:24:51.000 They figured out how to extract it or how to isolate it, and they had a dimethyltryptamine experience.

00:24:57.000 I love that.

00:24:58.000 Which pretty much makes sense.

00:24:59.000 Yeah, that totally makes sense.

00:25:00.000 I mean, we get articles submitted all the time at Skeptic Magazine of people that attempt to make natural explanations for biblical phenomena.

00:25:08.000 You 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.

00:25:19.000 Okay, I like all those.

00:25:20.000 We publish There's one in which the argument was that Jesus was never, he never died.

00:25:25.000 He 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.

00:25:36.000 And 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.

00:25:44.000 Okay, maybe.

00:25:46.000 I published it because I thought, yeah, there might be something to that, and I like those kinds of explanations.

00:25:50.000 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.

00:26:00.000 None of this stuff actually happened.

00:26:02.000 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.

00:26:10.000 So I'm always conflicted about, you know, do I really want a natural explanation for this?

00:26:14.000 Do we need to go that path?

00:26:15.000 Or maybe the stories, they didn't actually happen.

00:26:18.000 Moses never really existed or the people never lived in the desert for 40 years because there's no archaeological evidence that this ever happened.

00:26:26.000 Maybe it didn't happen.

00:26:27.000 Maybe it's a story that represents, you know, destruction, redemption, starting over, something like that.

00:26:32.000 Yeah, more likely, right?

00:26:33.000 Are you aware at all of any of the translations from the Dead Sea Scrolls?

00:26:38.000 I haven't followed that too terribly.

00:26:39.000 There's a fascinating book, two fascinating books, that were written by a guy named John Marco Allegro.

00:26:45.000 And John Marco Allegro was a scholar who was hired to be one of the people to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls.

00:26:51.000 And he deciphered them for over 14 years and wrote a book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

00:26:57.000 Oh.

00:26:57.000 And his interpretation was that the entire Christian religion was a massive misunderstanding.

00:27:03.000 And what it really was, what the original religion was based on was the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility cults.

00:27:16.000 Oh, my God.

00:27:36.000 Yeah, this is what it's crazy.

00:27:37.000 That's the Messiah.

00:27:37.000 It's a crazy book.

00:27:38.000 It was actually bought out by the Catholic Church and then reprinted recently by a guy named Jan Ervin.

00:27:45.000 And he did it like five or six years ago, maybe more.

00:27:50.000 He reprints.

00:27:51.000 So you can buy it now.

00:27:52.000 But I have two copies of it that were original prints that I bought from a long time ago.

00:27:56.000 Yeah.

00:27:56.000 But they bought it out.

00:27:57.000 They bought it out to get rid of it.

00:27:59.000 Yes, to get rid of it.

00:28:00.000 And then John Marco Allegro wrote a second book called The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth after they bought out his first book.

00:28:07.000 So he has two books that are available that are basically supporting this theory.

00:28:11.000 But the idea was that rain would come down and the people at the time...

00:28:16.000 We have to consider the fact that infant mortality was incredibly high back then.

00:28:20.000 People died all the time and fertility was very unknown.

00:28:24.000 No one really understood why people got pregnant or how they got pregnant or what kept people from getting pregnant.

00:28:29.000 And so people were constantly concerned with the possibility of them going extinct.

00:28:34.000 And they really were concerned with villages getting wiped out, their family getting wiped out.

00:28:38.000 So they were very concerned with fertility.

00:28:40.000 And they thought that when it rained, these mushrooms that came out of the ground, they came out of nowhere.

00:28:46.000 Like, you know how quick a mushroom grows.

00:28:47.000 It's not like a plant.

00:28:49.000 So if there's a spore...

00:28:51.000 Which, by the way, there's spores everywhere.

00:28:53.000 There's mycelium that's underneath the earth and everywhere you go, there's the potential for the growth of these mushrooms.

00:29:00.000 So the rain comes down and then almost instantaneously these mushrooms blossom up out of the ground.

00:29:05.000 You eat these mushrooms, you have intense psychedelic experiences.

00:29:09.000 You gather them up, you hide it from the Romans, you hide it from everybody, you don't want people Right. 1.00

00:29:29.000 He was a legit, rock-solid scholar.

00:29:31.000 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.

00:29:43.000 Because through his study of religion, once he became an ordained minister and then became Right.

00:29:53.000 Right.

00:29:56.000 Right.

00:30:06.000 It's the only one that's written in Aramaic.

00:30:08.000 They actually had to do DNA tests because the Qumran scrolls were written on animal skins.

00:30:15.000 So they had to do DNA tests on the skins so that when they could match up the pieces to the right animal.

00:30:22.000 So they had to match up the pieces of the scroll when they were trying to piece it all together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

00:30:29.000 It took them forever to do.

00:30:31.000 Right.

00:30:32.000 I 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.

00:30:44.000 Yeah, there's some wacky stuff in there apparently.

00:30:46.000 Yeah, 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.

00:30:54.000 I 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...

00:31:03.000 This is what everything's based on.

00:31:05.000 Adam and Eve.

00:31:06.000 Moses.

00:31:07.000 Joseph.

00:31:08.000 All these different characters.

00:31:10.000 Those stories are completely different, apparently, in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

00:31:13.000 And there's a lot of wacky stuff.

00:31:15.000 Things coming from the sky, like alien type stuff. 0.99

00:31:18.000 Weird shit. 0.99

00:31:19.000 People are probably tripping their balls off. 1.00

00:31:21.000 They're probably... 0.91

00:31:22.000 I mean, that's what I think it's entirely possible.

00:31:24.000 Obviously, I don't know.

00:31:25.000 The Ezekiel story about the thing in the sky with the wheels.

00:31:30.000 And, of course, the ufologists think, well, they were seeing a UFO. No, no, they were tripping.

00:31:35.000 It's much more likely they were tripping.

00:31:36.000 We know for a fact that psychedelic mushrooms existed back then.

00:31:41.000 It is the easiest thing in the world to see a mushroom, pick it up, and eat it.

00:31:44.000 And people did it all the time.

00:31:46.000 They experimented with food all the time.

00:31:48.000 There were no books to look up to see which are the good ones to eat.

00:31:50.000 I mean, it completely makes sense.

00:31:52.000 Completely makes sense.

00:31:54.000 And there's also, in a lot of really ancient religious art, there's tremendous mushroom iconic photographs of these paintings.

00:32:03.000 There's a tremendous amount of mushroom imagery in ancient Christian art.

00:32:08.000 In fact, the actual halo The actual halo used to be different.

00:32:13.000 The halo that we see now is like a hula hoop that's around guys' heads.

00:32:16.000 But the old halo used to look like the bottom of a mushroom cap.

00:32:20.000 Oh, really?

00:32:20.000 Have you ever seen it?

00:32:21.000 No.

00:32:21.000 See if you can find those images.

00:32:23.000 I wrote an article a long time ago called Santa Claus was a Mushroom.

00:32:29.000 Because the Amanita muscaria mushroom that this is all based on looks like Santa Claus.

00:32:35.000 It's a white and red mushroom.

00:32:36.000 And it has a mycorrhizal relationship with the coniferous tree.

00:32:41.000 So that's the mushroom, the Amanita muscaria.

00:32:44.000 But if you scroll down, Jamie, there's an image.

00:32:46.000 See, there's all those elves.

00:32:48.000 Look at the old...

00:32:49.000 Scroll up to that elves.

00:32:51.000 Up.

00:32:53.000 Those elves, that was, it was all Christmas, like ancient Christmas images were connected to that mushroom.

00:33:00.000 Now scroll down to those images of the halo.

00:33:03.000 Look at the old halo.

00:33:05.000 The old halo looks like the bottom of a mushroom cap.

00:33:08.000 It does kind of.

00:33:09.000 So the idea was...

00:33:10.000 So those aren't like markings or letters or numbers.

00:33:13.000 Oh no, it's hard to tell.

00:33:14.000 They're just lines, yeah.

00:33:14.000 There's a bunch of those though.

00:33:16.000 There's a ton of those images of ancient, like, Right.

00:33:26.000 Right.

00:33:30.000 Right.

00:33:38.000 I like that.

00:33:39.000 I like that idea.

00:33:40.000 Makes sense.

00:33:40.000 Better than UFOs, yeah.

00:33:41.000 Well, we know it's a real thing.

00:33:42.000 Right.

00:33:42.000 I mean, anybody can...

00:33:43.000 Look, if you think you're brave, go eat five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms.

00:33:48.000 Good luck.

00:33:49.000 You can't tell me they don't work.

00:33:52.000 They work on everybody.

00:33:53.000 They don't work whether or not you believe or not believe.

00:33:56.000 They just work.

00:33:57.000 Right.

00:33:57.000 So there's an easy way to...

00:34:01.000 If you just took them, you go, oh, I see why these people thought this.

00:34:05.000 Right.

00:34:06.000 Well, my favorite biblical scholar to read is Bart Ehrman.

00:34:08.000 Do you know Bart Ehrman?

00:34:09.000 Well, he started off as a Bible scholar because he was a believer.

00:34:14.000 He went to the Moody Bible College.

00:34:16.000 He was going to be a preacher and an evangelical and the whole thing.

00:34:18.000 And then he went to, I think it was Princeton Theological, and he found out how the book was really written.

00:34:23.000 You know, it's a wiki.

00:34:24.000 It'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.

00:34:33.000 And then he ended up being, he's an atheist or Agnostic or something, whatever he is, he's a not believer.

00:34:38.000 So this is sort of the atheist's favorite biblical scholar, because he doesn't come at it with a religious belief.

00:34:44.000 But he's got a bunch of teaching company courses where he deconstructs how Jesus became the Messiah or God or whatever.

00:34:52.000 And, you know, the Old Testament, the New Testament, what these books mean.

00:34:55.000 And 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.

00:35:01.000 How can you talk for so long about just, you know, a single chapter in a book, you know?

00:35:05.000 And, well, there's a lot of historical interpretation.

00:35:08.000 So 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.

00:35:20.000 Like, okay, I didn't know that.

00:35:21.000 Right.

00:35:22.000 So it's good to have some historical background to the text.

00:35:26.000 Again, I don't read Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, or Latin, so I'm trusting the King James Bible, which I really shouldn't.

00:35:33.000 So I rely on people like Bart, who can read it in the oldest version we have.

00:35:37.000 No, no, that word actually means this.

00:35:40.000 Oh, okay.

00:35:41.000 Yeah.

00:35:41.000 I would be...

00:35:43.000 I 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.

00:35:58.000 I 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.

00:36:05.000 Bart 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.

00:36:16.000 So I'm on board with that.

00:36:17.000 I'm not part of the group.

00:36:18.000 The atheists say he never even existed.

00:36:20.000 It's a completely made-up story.

00:36:21.000 I don't think so.

00:36:23.000 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 a more famous passage, that my disciples standing here now will not die before they see the Son of Man return,

00:36:40.000 and these kinds of things in the Gospels.

00:36:42.000 I think his message was, there is no place that you're going to after you die.

00:36:48.000 That heaven is here.

00:36:49.000 This is it.

00:36:50.000 We have to make the most of it.

00:36:52.000 And it's a message that you would give to a people that are suppressed, oppressed by the Romans.

00:36:57.000 So I call this the oppression-redemption myth, you know, that it's a story of...

00:37:02.000 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...

00:37:11.000 It's all going to be great.

00:37:13.000 We're going to change everything.

00:37:14.000 The buffalo are coming back. 0.97

00:37:15.000 If you wear this sweater, it'll be impervious to white man's bullets. 0.85

00:37:20.000 And it was a very Christlike story.

00:37:23.000 And 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.

00:37:36.000 Yeah, it just makes sense that there'd be so many parallels.

00:37:38.000 And 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.

00:37:48.000 Yeah, it's brutal history.

00:37:50.000 I'm just reading...

00:37:52.000 Neil Ferguson's new book, The Tower and the Square.

00:37:55.000 It'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.

00:38:09.000 But mostly throughout history, it's the top-down power.

00:38:12.000 And so his one chapter opens with that scene from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, when You're going to dig.

00:38:41.000 Ed Ferguson uses this story to say, basically, that's the history of civilization.

00:38:45.000 Somebody's got the loaded gun, and everyone else is going to dig.

00:38:49.000 Yeah, it's amazing that we made it this far.

00:38:51.000 I mean, we live in such...

00:38:52.000 I 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.

00:39:01.000 But in comparison...

00:39:03.000 Just a few thousand years ago.

00:39:05.000 No, you would not want to live back then.

00:39:07.000 It'd be fun to go to visit if you could come back.

00:39:09.000 I would want to go in a giant bulletproof hamster bubble.

00:39:13.000 Roll around and watch.

00:39:15.000 Maybe where they couldn't see you.

00:39:18.000 I just want to be there where they can't see me.

00:39:19.000 I would love to observe.

00:39:23.000 I'm watching this show Vikings.

00:39:25.000 Right.

00:39:26.000 And, oh man, it pissed me off.

00:39:28.000 Episode two, this guy puts his feet up on the table and he's got rubber bottom soles of his shoe. 1.00

00:39:33.000 I'm like, you motherfuckers. 0.99

00:39:35.000 He has a heel that's clearly made in a factory and there's like this textured plastic bottom to his shoe. 1.00

00:39:42.000 I'm like...

00:39:42.000 How did no one catch this?

00:39:44.000 You guys have this amazing wardrobe and all these ships, and I'll take a picture of it, and I'll put it up on my Instagram later. 0.99

00:39:50.000 It was so dumb, it made me angry. 0.91

00:39:53.000 But I'm watching this, and I'm like, how do we know this was how they talked? 0.99

00:39:57.000 How do we know this is what they did?

00:39:59.000 This is some weird interpretation of some...

00:40:03.000 historical events.

00:40:04.000 Really hard to interpret.

00:40:06.000 And, of course, thoughts don't fossilize.

00:40:08.000 I 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.

00:40:19.000 I don't actually die.

00:40:20.000 So we know, you know, elephants grieve and mammals grieve and, you know, cetaceans, dolphins, whales, and so on.

00:40:28.000 And chimps, you know, they feel these mothers are just depressed and almost suicidal when their infants die. 0.99

00:40:34.000 But 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.

00:40:43.000 So, 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.

00:40:52.000 So, it's not going to be like falling asleep and waking up the next morning because you have dreams or whatever.

00:40:56.000 It's going to be more like general anesthesia, where it's 10, 9, 8, boom, boom, lights out, but you just never wake up.

00:41:04.000 So, we talk about things like, well, there's nothing after death.

00:41:09.000 But even the word, no thing, implies there's a thing.

00:41:12.000 Or, you know, you're going to this place, there's nothing.

00:41:16.000 No thing, or nowhere, it implies that there's a where that you're not going to.

00:41:21.000 But there's not even a where that you're not going to.

00:41:24.000 And it's like, you know, with Lawrence Krauss and some of these cosmologists, you know.

00:41:28.000 What was there before the Big Bang?

00:41:30.000 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.

00:41:37.000 And at some point, we don't have the words to even say what it is we're trying to talk about.

00:41:42.000 There's nothing before the Big Bang.

00:41:44.000 You can't even actually talk about it.

00:41:47.000 Well, don't they think now, though, that it's entirely possible that the Big Bang is like a cycle?

00:41:52.000 Yes.

00:41:53.000 Well, I think it's something like that.

00:41:55.000 It expands and contracts infinitely forever.

00:41:59.000 That's a preferable...

00:42:00.000 Well, again, we have to come up with some way to talk about it.

00:42:02.000 Don't we also have this weird biological idea, based on our own limitations, that there's a birth and a death of everything?

00:42:10.000 Right.

00:42:10.000 So I actually have a chapter devoted to Deepak Chopra and the Eastern Wisdom traditions.

00:42:14.000 Oh, my friend!

00:42:16.000 We're kind of buddies now.

00:42:18.000 Really?

00:42:18.000 Yeah.

00:42:18.000 I went to his center down in Carlsbad and spent some time there.

00:42:22.000 You think he's all right?

00:42:23.000 He's a good guy.

00:42:23.000 Yeah, no, he's totally a good guy.

00:42:25.000 He's been, at times in the past, either misleading or misled.

00:42:32.000 Yes, sometimes that's right.

00:42:34.000 You know, some of his recommendations for dietary things or whatever, perhaps.

00:42:39.000 But I know for sure, because I've gotten to know him pretty well, that he totally believes the stuff he says.

00:42:44.000 It sounds like woo-woo, as I used to call it.

00:42:47.000 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...

00:43:01.000 But 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.

00:43:14.000 You know, I call it the weak consciousness principle.

00:43:16.000 It's just sort of true by definition.

00:43:18.000 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 it or observing it or whatever, and here's some quantum physics experiments that are really spooky.

00:43:30.000 It's like, okay, time out.

00:43:32.000 Quantum physics is weird and spooky.

00:43:34.000 Consciousness is weird and spooky.

00:43:35.000 That doesn't mean they're connected.

00:43:36.000 He thinks they are.

00:43:37.000 So it's a debatable point, okay?

00:43:40.000 But 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.

00:43:52.000 You can't help but feeling better.

00:43:54.000 Like, yeah, this stuff works.

00:43:56.000 Where is Carlsbad?

00:43:57.000 It's down by Encinitas, north of San Diego.

00:43:59.000 Oh, okay.

00:44:00.000 That's a beautiful area.

00:44:01.000 Totally beautiful, yeah.

00:44:02.000 Deepak's not done, and he's got a good thing going.

00:44:05.000 And not just Deepak, you know, there's other people like Sam Harris.

00:44:08.000 Bob Wright has a new book out called Why Buddhism is True.

00:44:11.000 Okay, so it works.

00:44:13.000 So we're back to does it work?

00:44:15.000 What do you mean by does it work?

00:44:16.000 Not just for me.

00:44:17.000 I had an experience and I felt better.

00:44:19.000 We've got to do better than that for science.

00:44:21.000 So what Deepak and Bob Wright are talking about is that the Western version of Buddhism may actually work medically.

00:44:28.000 It may lower stress hormones in your body, lower blood pressure, these kinds of things that are measurable.

00:44:34.000 Because that's what we want to know from a Western scientific perspective, not just do I feel better.

00:44:38.000 But 67% of the people who did this particular treatment, they got better by these measurable criteria.

00:44:45.000 Okay, that seems fair enough to me.

00:44:47.000 I'm open to that.

00:44:48.000 Hmm.

00:44:49.000 Now, 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.

00:45:02.000 Right.

00:45:03.000 Right.

00:45:03.000 But how do we, or why, why don't we just say we don't know?

00:45:19.000 What exists outside of the Bible?

00:45:21.000 We don't know.

00:45:21.000 We really don't know, right?

00:45:22.000 That's what I say.

00:45:23.000 I conclude that I don't know if there's an afterlife or not.

00:45:27.000 At 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.

00:45:34.000 We live in this life.

00:45:34.000 So this is the time you've got to do whatever you've got to do.

00:45:37.000 I call this Alvie's error.

00:45:40.000 Alvie is Alvie Singer, Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall.

00:45:43.000 I 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?

00:45:50.000 He won't do his homework.

00:45:51.000 You won't do your homework?

00:45:53.000 Why won't you do your homework, Albie?

00:45:54.000 He says, the universe is expanding.

00:45:56.000 He says, the universe is expanding.

00:45:58.000 He goes, the universe is everything there is, and if it's expanding, one day it's all going to blow apart, so nothing really matters.

00:46:03.000 I'm not going to do my homework.

00:46:05.000 And his mother yells at him, what has the universe got to do with this?

00:46:07.000 We live in Brooklyn.

00:46:09.000 Brooklyn is not expanding.

00:46:11.000 So that's my sort of take-home message there.

00:46:14.000 We don't live in the afterlife or before the universe or after the universe.

00:46:17.000 None of that matters.

00:46:18.000 I mean, it's interesting to talk about, but we live in this life.

00:46:22.000 Yeah.

00:46:22.000 So this is what really counts.

00:46:23.000 They're fascinating things to contemplate, but ultimately you really, for practicality's sake, you really should be paying attention to life.

00:46:31.000 Totally.

00:46:32.000 I 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...

00:46:39.000 According to Sean Carroll, that's not correct.

00:46:41.000 Oh, is that right?

00:46:42.000 Yeah, he explained that.

00:46:43.000 Yeah, this idea of empty space.

00:46:45.000 He's like, no, that's just a poor way of describing it.

00:46:48.000 And I would defer to him and let him describe it.

00:46:51.000 He 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.

00:47:00.000 He explained that in a way that completely fucked my head up, too.

00:47:04.000 I'm like, well, I thought I had it figured out, sort of.

00:47:07.000 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 it.

00:47:16.000 He's like, no, it's not even that.

00:47:18.000 Okay.

00:47:19.000 Please, if you're interested, go to the Sean Carroll podcast.

00:47:23.000 Well, as I understand it anyway, that it doesn't really matter because the atoms are jiggling in a way that this is solid.

00:47:28.000 You can tell it's solid.

00:47:29.000 And this is the level we live at.

00:47:30.000 If somebody drops this on your head, you're in trouble.

00:47:33.000 That's right.

00:47:33.000 Yeah.

00:47:33.000 So again, we don't live in a quantum world.

00:47:35.000 We live in a macro world where this kind of stuff doesn't matter.

00:47:38.000 Okay.

00:47:39.000 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.

00:47:48.000 All that is the wrong way to think about it.

00:47:51.000 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 born.

00:47:57.000 So the physical body is just an instantiation of this conscious thing, whatever this is.

00:48:03.000 And, okay, you know, I don't know.

00:48:06.000 You 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,

00:48:21.000 it's like, oh boy, okay, this isn't hell.

00:48:24.000 If that's true, I'm not against any of this.

00:48:26.000 Just like I'm not against Ray Kurzweil and these guys figuring out that we can live 200 years or 300 years.

00:48:32.000 Great, if you can do it, but let's just...

00:48:35.000 When they say to me, Sherman, don't you want to live to be 500?

00:48:38.000 It's like...

00:48:39.000 Just give me to 80 without prostate cancer.

00:48:42.000 Give me to 90 without Alzheimer's.

00:48:43.000 You know, 100. Give me to 100 so I'm not on a morphine drip in a bed.

00:48:47.000 You know, just quality of life, incrementally, year by year.

00:48:51.000 And 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.

00:48:58.000 Well, I think there's some beauty in temporary things that we, for whatever reason, we're avoiding that concept.

00:49:07.000 We're terrified of things ending.

00:49:09.000 But there's beauty in things being temporary.

00:49:12.000 You don't want to go to see a movie that's 100 hours long.

00:49:15.000 That's right.

00:49:15.000 A movie's a great movie when it's 90 minutes.

00:49:18.000 You're in, you're out.

00:49:19.000 Maybe two hours.

00:49:20.000 If it's three hours, if it's Blade Runner or something.

00:49:22.000 Something crazy.

00:49:23.000 I quote Christopher Hitchens in my book because I love his analogy.

00:49:26.000 First of all, you're at the party and death taps you on the shoulder and says, you have to leave.

00:49:30.000 And worse, the party's going to go on without you.

00:49:32.000 And they're going to all have fun.

00:49:33.000 It's like, oh no.

00:49:34.000 But 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.

00:49:41.000 It's like, Oh, that's even worse.

00:49:43.000 I don't want to do anything forever.

00:49:45.000 Right.

00:49:46.000 And imagine the classical version of what heaven is.

00:49:51.000 Like a guy with a harp, and there's a bunch of babies with wings.

00:49:55.000 Like, what?

00:49:56.000 Or even that aside, that's why Hitch called it celestial North Korea.

00:50:00.000 You have a dictator that knows all of your thoughts.

00:50:03.000 Yeah.

00:50:03.000 And everything you're going to do, it's like, wait a minute.

00:50:06.000 That does not sound like fun to me.

00:50:08.000 That seems to me to be the inevitable future, though.

00:50:10.000 That's one of the things that I'm really nervous about, this dystopian version of technological interference in our lives.

00:50:18.000 I'm entirely convinced that we're going to...

00:50:22.000 Inside of 100 years, live in a world where all of your thoughts really are documented and they have access to them.

00:50:30.000 The same way no one in their wildest dreams conceived of photographs 400 years ago.

00:50:36.000 And 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.

00:50:43.000 Right.

00:50:44.000 That could be. 0.99

00:50:44.000 It's going to suck. 0.99

00:50:46.000 Maybe we need some regulation there for that then.

00:50:48.000 Maybe. 0.98

00:50:49.000 Or 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.

00:50:59.000 And when those no longer exist anymore, maybe we'll clean out human behavior.

00:51:04.000 There was an Outer Limits episode about that in the 1950s.

00:51:07.000 It might have been the other one.

00:51:09.000 Twilight Zone?

00:51:13.000 This 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.

00:51:21.000 But then there's this one guy who's really dark, like he's going to come in and blow everybody away.

00:51:27.000 And 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.

00:51:36.000 I was just angry and I was just thinking that.

00:51:38.000 So that's like a minority report thing.

00:51:40.000 You could have these thoughts.

00:51:42.000 We know from research that this is David Buss's research.

00:51:46.000 He wrote a book on murderers, The Murderer Next Door, it's called.

00:51:49.000 And so he did the research on asking subjects, have you ever thought about killing somebody you didn't like?

00:51:55.000 And it turns out like 80% of guys and 67% of women have had homicidal fantasies in their life.

00:52:02.000 99.9% of us never act on our homicidal fantasies.

00:52:06.000 But we get mad enough, we can imagine.

00:52:07.000 And he's got the narrative accounts because he also asked them, tell me what you would do.

00:52:11.000 And oh my god, they're just incredible to read. 0.99

00:52:14.000 Like I would break every bone in his body, and then I would pull out his fingernails, and then they go on and you're like, holy shit! 0.99

00:52:22.000 But it's just fantasy. 1.00

00:52:24.000 It's just fantasy, yeah.

00:52:24.000 Well, some people have suicidal fantasies.

00:52:26.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:52:27.000 There's people that have fantasies of jumping off of a giant building.

00:52:31.000 But most don't act on it.

00:52:32.000 Most don't act on it.

00:52:33.000 And 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.

00:52:41.000 And should we punish them?

00:52:43.000 No, of course not.

00:52:44.000 In the minority report scenario, it's like, okay, we found out that this guy's thinking about robbing the bank.

00:52:50.000 So he had a fantasy about it.

00:52:51.000 He's not going to do it.

00:52:52.000 I've thought about doing that.

00:52:53.000 You have?

00:52:54.000 Not really.

00:52:56.000 Not really.

00:52:57.000 But I was like, what would I do if I had to rob this bank?

00:52:59.000 I mean, I've never actually considered robbing a bank, but I thought, okay, I'm at the bank.

00:53:03.000 When do I just decide to pull out a gun and everybody get the floor?

00:53:06.000 Where's the cameras?

00:53:08.000 Where's the security guard?

00:53:10.000 You've seen so many movies, if you're bored.

00:53:13.000 But today, that's another thing. 0.91

00:53:15.000 People are rarely bored, because when they are, they just pull out their phone and stare at pictures at other people's butts.

00:53:22.000 It's like you just pull out Facebook or Instagram and no longer bored.

00:53:26.000 When 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,

00:53:42.000 and he wanted to know, are there golf courses and tennis courts in heaven?

00:53:45.000 Because I've got to have something to do.

00:53:47.000 I'd be bored.

00:53:48.000 I thought, I have no idea.

00:53:51.000 You won't need that.

00:53:52.000 Yeah, I know.

00:53:53.000 You're going to be with Jesus.

00:53:54.000 No one wants to play golf.

00:53:58.000 God!

00:53:58.000 And then I also quote from Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God monologue.

00:54:02.000 She 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? 0.77

00:54:15.000 So 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.

00:54:27.000 Do I get my uterus back when I go to heaven? 1.00

00:54:29.000 They said, yeah!

00:54:30.000 She goes, I don't want it back!

00:54:33.000 She said, what if you had a nose job and you liked it?

00:54:35.000 Do I have to get my old nose back?

00:54:37.000 That's true, right?

00:54:39.000 So I open this little funny story because it gets to the problem of identity.

00:54:43.000 Who are you? 0.85

00:54:45.000 So if you're resurrected with Jesus, see, earlier Christian sex before Descartes, I think? 0.83

00:55:11.000 30 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?

00:55:22.000 Oh no, you get all those memories.

00:55:24.000 Okay, 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,

00:55:41.000 particularly based on life experiences that happen afterwards.

00:55:44.000 So in your 20s, you go to this college, you marry this person, you take this job or whatever.

00:55:49.000 You 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.

00:55:59.000 You have no idea what those things actually mean until much later.

00:56:03.000 So, this is the problem of who you are.

00:56:05.000 So, first of all, we already know that none of your body is the same material it was, say, a decade ago.

00:56:11.000 Your cells are all recycled.

00:56:13.000 The molecules and atoms are gone.

00:56:15.000 There's new ones that replace it.

00:56:16.000 It's the pattern.

00:56:17.000 It's the pattern of information that represents you, Joe Rogan.

00:56:20.000 This is what you look like.

00:56:21.000 These are your memories.

00:56:22.000 So somehow this has to be copied.

00:56:24.000 So in the Ray Kurzweil scenario of the singularity, we're going to upload the mind.

00:56:29.000 They're going to copy your connectome, all your memories in your synapses.

00:56:33.000 Okay, so right away there's the problem of, well, which memories?

00:56:36.000 Well, all of them.

00:56:37.000 No, there are no fixed set of memories that are you.

00:56:40.000 Your memories are always changing.

00:56:41.000 So the moment you take a snapshot of it, that's just a fixed point.

00:56:45.000 That's not you, really.

00:56:47.000 You are this whole long continuum.

00:56:50.000 That's always kind of flexible and changing.

00:56:52.000 So there's that.

00:56:53.000 And then there's the problem with the mind-uploading scenario is there's two kinds of cells.

00:56:59.000 There's the memory cell, mem-cell, of all your memories, and then there's the point-of-view cell, the POV cell.

00:57:04.000 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 of point-of-view from one day to the next.

00:57:12.000 Same thing with general anesthesia.

00:57:14.000 So, 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.

00:57:29.000 I don't see how this could happen.

00:57:31.000 That is, if we copied you, your connectome, everything, all your memories, So we had a Joe Rogan No.

00:57:37.000 2 copy ready to go.

00:57:39.000 But 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.

00:57:50.000 You're still looking at the world through your eyes.

00:57:53.000 That's just Joe Rogan No.

00:57:54.000 2, a copy.

00:57:56.000 And no more do you look at that than a twin looks at its sibling and says, well, there I am.

00:58:00.000 No, no, you're still standing there.

00:58:01.000 No, no, I'm here.

00:58:02.000 That's just a copy of me.

00:58:05.000 And so this, to me, seems a central problem with the mind uploading scenario.

00:58:10.000 It's just a copy.

00:58:11.000 Did you see the thing in National Geographic today about the cloned monkeys?

00:58:15.000 No.

00:58:15.000 They've managed to actually clone monkeys.

00:58:18.000 No.

00:58:18.000 Yeah, Jamie, I tweeted it earlier today.

00:58:22.000 It's crazy.

00:58:24.000 And they're speculating that if they can do that to monkeys, they're going to be able to do that to humans.

00:58:29.000 But again, so who is that?

00:58:31.000 If there's a Michael Shermer, is it your twin?

00:58:33.000 I mean, like, when you meet twins, it's very weird.

00:58:37.000 Like, I used to date a girl who was a twin.

00:58:39.000 She had a sister who looked exactly like her, but like a little, just a something, just a feel, like, oh, you're not her.

00:58:46.000 You're her sister.

00:58:50.000 Super, super confusing.

00:58:51.000 So they weren't the same person, but they pretty much were.

00:58:55.000 Yeah, here's the article.

00:58:56.000 Scroll up there.

00:58:57.000 Clone monkeys created in the lab.

00:58:58.000 Now what?

00:58:59.000 Yeah.

00:59:00.000 Okay.

00:59:00.000 Well, so you're making copies.

00:59:02.000 Yeah, so it's a copy, but it's not the same person because they have their own individual life experiences.

00:59:06.000 The moment you and your copy start diverging away and leading different lives, you're going to have different memories.

00:59:12.000 You should have on your show Nancy Siegel from Cal State Fullerton. 1.00

00:59:15.000 She's the world's leading twin expert, and she has all these great scenarios.

00:59:20.000 She has a new book out called Accidental Brothers, and she has another book out on Switched at Birth.

00:59:26.000 Nancy Siegel.

00:59:28.000 And 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.

00:59:41.000 Like, you know, the one raised in a Jewish home, the other raised in Nazi Germany.

00:59:44.000 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 pretty similar.

00:59:53.000 So there's a lot that genetics does that is very subtle.

00:59:57.000 There's no gene for, like, we're both Catholic or wearing this kind of clothes.

01:00:01.000 But, 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.

01:00:11.000 So by chance, you're more likely to get similar clothes.

01:00:13.000 There's no genes for clothes, but something like that body type or temperament.

01:00:18.000 You 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.

01:00:33.000 That's if you make good decisions though.

01:00:35.000 Well, yeah, there is that element of volition.

01:00:38.000 The choices you make in life do diverge a little bit.

01:00:40.000 So twins are a little bit different, you know, from that.

01:00:44.000 But 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.

01:00:50.000 And religions have the same problem. 0.95

01:00:52.000 You know, if God is able to reconstruct your body like a transporter...

01:00:57.000 I got into the world of Star Trek when I was writing this book.

01:01:00.000 It's like, oh my god, this whole webpage is devoted to what does the transporter do?

01:01:05.000 It's like, okay, first of all, you know there's no transporter, right?

01:01:07.000 It's just science fiction.

01:01:08.000 It can do whatever it wants.

01:01:09.000 But is it copy and paste?

01:01:11.000 They just copy you and reconstruct you with atoms on the other side.

01:01:15.000 Or is it cut and paste?

01:01:16.000 Or is it they actually move the atoms?

01:01:19.000 Yeah, reconstruct it.

01:01:20.000 Anyway, that's it.

01:01:21.000 But it does get to the problem of identity.

01:01:24.000 Well, what are you really?

01:01:25.000 Because it's not the matter, the material.

01:01:28.000 It's really the pattern, which is why the singularity people focus on the cloud and uploading the mind, because it's the information.

01:01:35.000 But the information is always changing, and how does the point of view go with it?

01:01:40.000 See 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.

01:01:50.000 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.

01:01:57.000 Well 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.

01:02:06.000 That's right, yeah.

01:02:08.000 So are we just our neurons?

01:02:09.000 That's the idea.

01:02:11.000 That's what the singularity people do. 0.99

01:02:12.000 So you're not your nose job, you're not your fake butt or your fake lips, you're neurons only.

01:02:18.000 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 the moment I see you, Joe Rogan, the name pops up, your Wikipedia page pops up, and now I have this information. 0.67

01:02:30.000 So I'm not bionic, but I'm also not just human, I'm transhuman.

01:02:35.000 Okay, so then who are you?

01:02:37.000 So these are sort of the transitional stages.

01:02:40.000 So a cochlear implant is a kind of a brain chip.

01:02:43.000 And 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.

01:02:57.000 So they put a chip in his motor cortex that reads the thoughts.

01:03:00.000 So 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.

01:03:06.000 At 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.

01:03:13.000 You know, I would like to hear Mozart.

01:03:15.000 And you just think about it, and then music in your house comes on, and it's Mozart.

01:03:19.000 Well, I freak out about Siri sometimes.

01:03:21.000 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...

01:03:31.000 What's that new musical with, what's his name, Hugh Jackman, the Wolverine guy?

01:03:38.000 Some musical that's based on Ringling Brothers and Barnum& Bailey Circus.

01:03:43.000 She wanted the song.

01:03:45.000 I literally asked Siri to do it, and it started playing it.

01:03:49.000 Instantly, like within a couple of seconds.

01:03:51.000 I'm like, this is crazy.

01:03:53.000 That this thing just pulled it out of the sky, and it's playing it in my car.

01:03:58.000 Yep.

01:03:59.000 I did that the other night.

01:04:00.000 I wanted to hear Bob Seger's Hollywood Nights.

01:04:02.000 I'm not sure why I got that in my head.

01:04:04.000 And it popped right up.

01:04:05.000 There's a YouTube video of him from 1978 just rocking it.

01:04:08.000 It's like, wow.

01:04:09.000 It's amazing.

01:04:10.000 I'm just driving on the 101 freeway, heading back home to Santa Barbara.

01:04:13.000 I'd like to hear Bob Seger's Hollywood Nights.

01:04:16.000 Wow.

01:04:16.000 Boom, there it is.

01:04:18.000 Yeah.

01:04:18.000 The Greatest Showman.

01:04:20.000 That's the movie.

01:04:20.000 My daughter loves that movie.

01:04:22.000 So she wanted to hear the song, but I just talked to the phone, and it did that.

01:04:27.000 When are we going to get past the talking to the phone?

01:04:29.000 Right, you just think it.

01:04:30.000 Yeah, because I'm pretty comfortable with looking for it.

01:04:34.000 Hold on, honey.

01:04:34.000 Let me find it online.

01:04:36.000 I'm going to go get it.

01:04:37.000 Okay, let me download it.

01:04:38.000 Let me pay for it.

01:04:39.000 Let me use my thumbprint or whatever.

01:04:40.000 And then now it's just talk to your phone.

01:04:43.000 Right.

01:04:43.000 When is it just pull it up?

01:04:45.000 Pick it up.

01:04:45.000 I want to hear a Led Zeppelin whole lot of love.

01:04:48.000 I just start thinking...

01:04:49.000 And it starts playing.

01:04:53.000 When is that going to happen?

01:04:54.000 That's probably coming.

01:04:55.000 We're probably all going to give in to some sort of a chip.

01:04:59.000 Something that we can get implanted.

01:05:02.000 Simple, easy, transdermal device.

01:05:05.000 Fashionable.

01:05:06.000 You go to a club, it glows.

01:05:08.000 Ooh, you got the new one.

01:05:09.000 You 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.

01:05:19.000 I interviewed Kurzweil, and I had a really interesting conversation with him for this sci-fi show that I was doing a few years back.

01:05:28.000 I find him to be very interesting.

01:05:30.000 He's a fascinating, incredibly intelligent guy that has, I think he has more than 100 different patents and different things that he's invented.

01:05:39.000 He's a genius.

01:05:40.000 He's a bona fide genius.

01:05:42.000 But I also found it incredibly interesting.

01:05:47.000 Sad.

01:05:47.000 His motivation, like what he's trying to do.

01:05:49.000 You know, he's trying to recreate his father.

01:05:51.000 Yeah.

01:05:52.000 Did you see that documentary about him?

01:05:54.000 Yes.

01:05:55.000 Yeah.

01:05:55.000 Transcendent.

01:05:55.000 It was kind of sad.

01:05:56.000 Yeah.

01:05:57.000 Yeah.

01:05:57.000 Dark.

01:05:57.000 Yeah.

01:05:58.000 It's very dark.

01:05:59.000 And he's got all his basement is filled with all his dad's stuff.

01:06:02.000 Yeah.

01:06:04.000 He's always talking about life, life, life, but he's just really kind of obsessed with death.

01:06:08.000 This 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.

01:06:15.000 We live now, and don't miss it.

01:06:17.000 You 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.

01:06:27.000 A couple hundred million dollars working on aging problems.

01:06:29.000 Great.

01:06:30.000 Again, if you can solve Alzheimer's or these things, that's great.

01:06:32.000 But don't be so focused on the next life you miss out.

01:06:36.000 Well, I don't necessarily know if he is so focused that he's missing out.

01:06:40.000 I don't think he's missing out.

01:06:42.000 I think he has extraordinary vision in terms of what is possible with the exponential increase of technology.

01:06:49.000 I think having a guy like that around, it's helpful.

01:06:55.000 I think it's beneficial to everybody.

01:06:56.000 It's incredibly fascinating to hear him talk about those things. 0.97

01:07:00.000 You know, I'm too dumb to know if he's right. 0.91

01:07:02.000 You know, when I'm hearing him talk, I'm like, you think? 0.99

01:07:04.000 You really think?

01:07:05.000 Yes, by 2045, we'll be downloading our brain into a computer.

01:07:08.000 I'm like, man, I don't know. 0.99

01:07:10.000 That shit seems close. 0.99

01:07:12.000 It's 2018, man! 1.00

01:07:14.000 I mean, when I interviewed him, I think it was probably 2013 or somewhere around then.

01:07:18.000 Although, 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.

01:07:31.000 It'd be like, you're insane.

01:07:32.000 What are you talking about? 1.00

01:07:33.000 What are you smoking?

01:07:34.000 And here we are.

01:07:37.000 Yeah.

01:07:37.000 This 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.

01:07:48.000 This is what science fiction writers tell me.

01:07:50.000 If you set it off far enough, readers are willing to suspend disbelief because, yeah, it seems possible.

01:07:55.000 Look what we've been able to do.

01:07:57.000 So, okay, fair enough.

01:07:58.000 If we can do that, I'm all for it.

01:08:01.000 That'd be great.

01:08:02.000 Yeah, I'm all for it too, but boy, I don't know.

01:08:05.000 I've been very convinced, and more so over time, that human beings in this form, that our time is limited.

01:08:15.000 I 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.

01:08:23.000 It's going to be an actual thing.

01:08:24.000 It's just going to be non-biological.

01:08:28.000 Right.

01:08:28.000 That's right.

01:08:29.000 I think that's what life is outside of Earth.

01:08:33.000 I 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.

01:08:42.000 They realize, well, there's a massive limitation in terms of biological tissue and in terms of our ability to evolve.

01:08:50.000 I could just reprogram a phone.

01:08:53.000 Your phone evolves way quicker than people do.

01:08:55.000 Right.

01:08:55.000 I mean, go back to look at your, I have an iPhone X, right?

01:08:59.000 Now go back and think about an iPhone 1. That's a piece of shit, you know? 1.00

01:09:04.000 Why'd you have to go back to that? 1.00

01:09:05.000 And that's only a decade.

01:09:06.000 Only a decade! 1.00

01:09:07.000 You had to go back to that clunky, stupid-looking thing. 0.96

01:09:10.000 This 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. 0.98

01:09:18.000 Yeah.

01:09:19.000 They're going to be computers or, you know, machines.

01:09:21.000 Because that's the only thing that can survive the long distances, long time of interstellar spaceflight.

01:09:27.000 Yeah, I think we're just so wrapped up in the idea of biology being so important.

01:09:32.000 That, like, you have to, it has to breed the normal way with eggs and sperm. 0.99

01:09:37.000 Otherwise, it's bullshit. 1.00

01:09:39.000 Right. 0.99

01:09:39.000 I mean, we think of it, you know, biology as, you know, wet stuff, but really they're machines. 0.99

01:09:44.000 A cell is a machine.

01:09:46.000 It's just processing molecules, which is what nanobots are going to do.

01:09:50.000 They're going to process molecules. 0.97

01:09:51.000 So it's really just, they're all machines.

01:09:53.000 Yeah.

01:09:54.000 Cellular machines.

01:09:55.000 And when they talk about things like quantum computing, things get really squirrely.

01:10:01.000 Like, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.

01:10:02.000 What do you mean by quantum computing?

01:10:05.000 Is this a computer?

01:10:07.000 Does this use a regular motherboard?

01:10:10.000 How does it have a CPU? Like, what's next stage after that?

01:10:14.000 Like, 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?

01:10:24.000 Right.

01:10:25.000 You 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.

01:10:38.000 And you just ingest these little computers and they go in there and they fix your Right,

01:10:58.000 so if it gets to a certain...

01:11:03.000 Like Moore's Law, the doubling of computing.

01:11:05.000 That can't go on forever.

01:11:07.000 Now, 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.

01:11:13.000 Okay, fine.

01:11:15.000 Boy.

01:11:19.000 I 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.

01:11:30.000 It's normal, it's natural, it's biological, animals have it, every human has it, everyone's scared to die.

01:11:36.000 No one's scared to go to sleep, but everyone's scared to die.

01:11:38.000 Right.

01:11:39.000 And it's this idea that this would be the end of the party.

01:11:42.000 Right.

01:11:43.000 Right.

01:11:43.000 But really, there's nothing to fear because you won't even know it.

01:11:46.000 Right.

01:11:48.000 As long as you're alive, you're sentient and conscious of existence and then not.

01:11:53.000 So, I mean, when you ask people to quote surveys in the book, you know, how long would you like to live?

01:11:59.000 It's always about what the average lifespan is now.

01:12:02.000 People go, oh, yeah, I think I'd like to live in, you know, 82 or so.

01:12:05.000 Right.

01:12:05.000 But if we fast-forward you to, you know, 80, okay, your time's up, tomorrow's your day.

01:12:09.000 No, wait, give me another week, you know.

01:12:12.000 Okay, here's a week.

01:12:13.000 I want to say goodbye to everybody.

01:12:14.000 I need another month of you.

01:12:15.000 I want to run my first marathon.

01:12:16.000 Yeah, exactly, yeah.

01:12:18.000 I contend that it's a silly argument that, you know, that... 0.91

01:12:21.000 People say, well, I think we should have a limit on our lifespan and that we need to die.

01:12:27.000 But you, personally, are you going to check out when it's your time?

01:12:31.000 No.

01:12:31.000 Of course they wouldn't.

01:12:32.000 As long as we're talking about being healthy and cognitively aware.

01:12:37.000 Then most people want to continue.

01:12:39.000 I mean, severely depressed, suicide, yes, that's an issue, but most people would want to continue on.

01:12:44.000 So 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.

01:12:53.000 Yeah, as long as everything's healthy.

01:12:56.000 My grandmother had a stroke and they gave her 72 hours.

01:13:01.000 She wound up living 12 years.

01:13:03.000 Oh, wow.

01:13:04.000 And it was awful.

01:13:05.000 She had an aneurysm.

01:13:07.000 Oh, the 12 years was awful.

01:13:08.000 Oh, it was awful.

01:13:09.000 Oh, okay.

01:13:09.000 It was horrific.

01:13:10.000 Okay.

01:13:11.000 Yeah, it was really bad.

01:13:12.000 She was bedridden.

01:13:14.000 She would moan.

01:13:15.000 She was always in pain.

01:13:16.000 When she died, it was a relief for everyone in the family.

01:13:20.000 It wasn't like, oh, we lost grandma.

01:13:23.000 Right, yeah.

01:13:23.000 It was like, grandma's in peace now.

01:13:26.000 Right.

01:13:26.000 Because for the longest time, she was in agony.

01:13:29.000 I stayed with them.

01:13:31.000 When I first moved to New York, they lived in New Jersey, and I lived with them for a few months.

01:13:36.000 While I was saving up money for an apartment.

01:13:38.000 And it was horrific.

01:13:40.000 Man, she would be moaning. 0.85

01:13:42.000 And my grandfather had to take care of her and they had a nurse would come over and take care of her as well. 1.00

01:13:46.000 It was just terrible.

01:13:48.000 Well, I think Europeans have a more advanced humanist type perspective on that euthanasia. 0.99

01:13:53.000 Yes.

01:13:54.000 Physician assisted suicide.

01:13:55.000 But they're doing that now.

01:13:56.000 In a few states, yes.

01:13:58.000 But there's still this kind of Christian ethic of only God can decide that.

01:14:02.000 You can't make those decisions.

01:14:04.000 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 you take personal responsibility, except when it comes to your death.

01:14:14.000 Wait a minute.

01:14:15.000 Why can't I choose that?

01:14:17.000 Well, they worry about abuse.

01:14:18.000 Okay, fine.

01:14:18.000 Just have rules about, you know, you have to sign something.

01:14:22.000 Like Kevorkian, he used to videotape his patients saying, I choose to do this when they could still do it.

01:14:28.000 Anyway.

01:14:29.000 Yeah.

01:14:30.000 So, yeah, I mean, how we deal with death, it's always been a huge problem.

01:14:34.000 It makes people uncomfortable.

01:14:38.000 I think?

01:15:05.000 There'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.

01:15:19.000 But if you ask people, do you walk around in a state of fear of death?

01:15:23.000 No, I don't.

01:15:24.000 Okay, it's unconscious.

01:15:26.000 Okay, maybe, but how do you know if it's unconscious?

01:15:28.000 They have these experiments where they prime the brain and sort of try to trick it out of you.

01:15:33.000 Aren't most people busy?

01:15:35.000 They're busy, that's right.

01:15:36.000 The fear of death comes when you're laying alone at night.

01:15:39.000 Right.

01:15:39.000 You're like, there's going to be a day when I don't wake up.

01:15:41.000 Right.

01:15:42.000 Maybe I'll die tonight while I'm sleeping.

01:15:44.000 But you never know.

01:15:45.000 Yeah.

01:15:45.000 It just lights out and that's it.

01:15:47.000 Well, that's the greatest way to die ever.

01:15:49.000 Right.

01:15:49.000 Go to sleep and don't wake up.

01:15:50.000 That's right.

01:15:51.000 Yep. 1.00

01:15:52.000 Yeah, die in your bed peacefully. 1.00

01:15:53.000 Yep. 1.00

01:15:54.000 Yep, that's a good way to go.

01:15:55.000 Which 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.

01:16:11.000 As 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.

01:16:21.000 And this starts off very early in life.

01:16:24.000 Sight research by Paul Bloom in his lab at Yale with little kids.

01:16:27.000 So he presents them with this little puppet show.

01:16:30.000 And so you have this little mouse and this alligator and the alligator munches the mouse and he's dead.

01:16:34.000 Where is the mouse now?

01:16:35.000 Oh, the mouse is in this other place and he misses his mom and he's hungry and he's scared.

01:16:41.000 And this is like preschoolers.

01:16:43.000 So it starts pretty young, this dualistic idea that something transcends the physical body.

01:16:48.000 There's something else that continues.

01:16:50.000 And I contend that that's because you can't conceive of nothing.

01:16:54.000 I don't perceive my own brain operating, so it feels like thoughts are floating around up there.

01:16:59.000 And I feel like a set of patterns that would continue beyond the physical body.

01:17:04.000 It feels that way.

01:17:05.000 So our intuitions, I think, naturally lead to the idea of some kind of afterlife, or something continues.

01:17:11.000 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?

01:17:23.000 That's right.

01:17:24.000 Yeah, it could be.

01:17:25.000 Something could possibly happen to whatever we think of as consciousness.

01:17:29.000 That's right.

01:17:30.000 Whatever we think of as you.

01:17:31.000 And 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.

01:17:43.000 I mean, this is a big part of what your life is.

01:17:46.000 Right.

01:17:47.000 And at the core of all that is the self, is you, our consciousness, whatever that means.

01:17:54.000 Right.

01:17:54.000 No one's ever been able to take consciousness and, well, we extracted it and we put it in this beaker and now we weighed it.

01:18:01.000 Right.

01:18:01.000 Consciousness is 28 grams or whatever.

01:18:03.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:18:04.000 Remember that stupid thing that people used to think when you died? 1.00

01:18:08.000 21 grams, yeah. 1.00

01:18:09.000 That's it, 21 grams.

01:18:11.000 But imagine if that was the case, and before that all happened, you went and downloaded your brain to some supercomputer.

01:18:20.000 Right.

01:18:21.000 So you've got two U's.

01:18:22.000 You've got one U that lives in hell on Earth, living forever, never going to die, just one mundane trip to Starbucks after another.

01:18:32.000 And you're just trapped.

01:18:34.000 You're trapped in a computer, which is what Ray Kurzweil was saying.

01:18:37.000 What if they give you the opportunity to be trapped in a computer, but you're trapped in an iPhone 1, essentially?

01:18:44.000 Once you're in, you're in.

01:18:46.000 You can either wait and hang on for a few years, and you will get a really good computer.

01:18:51.000 We're thinking quantum computers are going to go live around 2030, 2032, but we can get you in now.

01:18:58.000 I mean, you're looking pretty.

01:18:59.000 You're coughing a lot, Mike.

01:19:00.000 Right.

01:19:02.000 I mean...

01:19:03.000 Well, that's like with the cryonics people.

01:19:04.000 I remind people, you know, you're being frozen on the worst day of your life.

01:19:08.000 You know, the day you died.

01:19:10.000 Yeah.

01:19:10.000 And you can't do it earlier because the state treats it as a form of burial legally.

01:19:13.000 So you can't get the treatment injected with the antifreeze and all that before you're actually dead.

01:19:20.000 Is that what they inject you with?

01:19:21.000 Antifreeze?

01:19:22.000 Yeah, a type of antifreeze.

01:19:24.000 And the purpose of that...

01:19:25.000 Well, you're dead, so it doesn't really matter.

01:19:27.000 But the purpose is to keep the cells from shattering, because the freezing process will do that.

01:19:32.000 So they've gotten much better about that.

01:19:33.000 And what's actually frozen is this sort of gelatinous mass that's vitrified.

01:19:39.000 It's called a vitrification process.

01:19:40.000 So it's a little bit like...

01:19:42.000 Remember the Turing, the bodies, where they had the dissected bodies, and they were sort of this hard plastic...

01:19:48.000 Plasticine, right?

01:19:49.000 Plasticine, yeah.

01:19:50.000 So this vitrification is sort of like that, and then that's frozen.

01:19:55.000 And as far as I'm concerned, everyone frozen to date, including Ted Williams and his head in Arizona there, will never be brought back.

01:20:04.000 Isn't Walt Disney Frozen 2?

01:20:05.000 No, I tracked that down.

01:20:06.000 Turns out the Alcor Cryonics Foundation opened its doors and released a press release the same day Walt Disney died.

01:20:14.000 And these two stories got conflated.

01:20:17.000 That makes sense.

01:20:20.000 The Ted Williams one is sad, because they didn't have the money for the whole body, so they just took his head.

01:20:26.000 Right. 1.00

01:20:26.000 Fuck. 1.00

01:20:28.000 Man. 1.00

01:20:29.000 It 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.

01:20:40.000 So if you started young, you had, say, a quarter million dollar insurance policy, a few hundred dollars a year premiums.

01:20:46.000 If you started super late, the premiums would be much higher.

01:20:49.000 But it's not like you're shelling out a quarter million dollars right out of your checkbook.

01:20:53.000 Right.

01:20:53.000 And then when you do die, What happens if you get defrosted?

01:20:58.000 Because that has happened, right?

01:20:59.000 Well, what happens is you look like a bowl of melted strawberries that were frozen.

01:21:05.000 It's just mush.

01:21:07.000 That happened to one of the companies that does this.

01:21:10.000 They had a power outage.

01:21:12.000 Right.

01:21:13.000 Yeah, you don't want that.

01:21:15.000 Yeah, I'm not sure why Alcor is in Arizona.

01:21:18.000 Ooh, that's a terrible place.

01:21:20.000 Shouldn't they be like in Antarctica or something?

01:21:22.000 And there's other deeper issues with this whole idea.

01:21:25.000 Because 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?

01:21:33.000 It might be underwater.

01:21:35.000 Anything could happen.

01:21:36.000 Anything.

01:21:36.000 You'd have to transport your body in some sort of...

01:21:39.000 One of them big old electric Tesla trucks.

01:21:41.000 Big cooler.

01:21:43.000 Send you to Mars.

01:21:44.000 Yeah, send you some new spot.

01:21:46.000 Yeah.

01:21:48.000 And again, if they somehow jump-started the body, would you wake up like you just had a long sleep?

01:21:55.000 Would you still be in there?

01:21:57.000 I'm not at all sure that you wouldn't just be something like...

01:21:59.000 If the memories weren't preserved very well, then you would just be a zombie.

01:22:05.000 If you don't know who you are, there's no point in doing it.

01:22:08.000 I think the idea is freeze you, and then one day they'll have the technology to thaw you out and everything's going to be amazing.

01:22:15.000 And they'll be able to reverse aging and bring you back to when you're 18. Right.

01:22:19.000 That's right.

01:22:20.000 But here's the thing about memories.

01:22:24.000 If you do die, and say if you do go to heaven, you have the memories of your life.

01:22:31.000 Are those memories, just like the memories of today, fallible and squirrely?

01:22:37.000 Right, and if they're not, then that's not really you.

01:22:39.000 And if God resurrects you physically, what's to stop you from aging and getting Alzheimer's or whatever?

01:22:45.000 Well, God's going to prevent that by re-engineering you.

01:22:48.000 Well, then that's not really me that's up there.

01:22:50.000 It's some superhuman, transhuman person.

01:22:53.000 I had a conversation with some friends of mine who are Mormon, and they couldn't believe that I don't have religious feelings.

01:23:00.000 And one of the things that this lady said to me, I'll never forget, she goes, you don't believe in an afterlife.

01:23:06.000 How do you get up in the morning?

01:23:08.000 That's literally what she said.

01:23:09.000 How do you get up?

01:23:11.000 And I go, I love life.

01:23:12.000 I go, I enjoy this experience.

01:23:14.000 I go, I'm enjoying being here at dinner with you guys.

01:23:17.000 I'm going to do some stuff tomorrow I've got planned out.

01:23:20.000 Looking forward to it.

01:23:22.000 Don't you enjoy your time?

01:23:24.000 Does everything have to be for a reward in some place that you're not even totally sure exists after we're done here?

01:23:32.000 It's such a weird thing to say because I don't think they even think about that.

01:23:35.000 I 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.

01:23:41.000 I doubt it.

01:23:42.000 I think it alleviates the pressure.

01:23:44.000 I mean, I think that's a big part of what it is for people.

01:23:47.000 It alleviates the concern for the future.

01:23:50.000 Like, oh, you don't have to worry.

01:23:52.000 God's got it.

01:23:52.000 God's going to take care of it.

01:23:54.000 Everything happens for a reason.

01:23:55.000 That's right, yeah.

01:23:55.000 God's going to take...

01:23:56.000 Everything does happen for a reason after it happens.

01:23:59.000 Right, that's right, yeah.

01:24:00.000 After it's over, you can go back and go, yeah, it happened for a reason.

01:24:03.000 Yeah.

01:24:03.000 It became this, and that became who I am, so it all happened for a reason.

01:24:07.000 That's right.

01:24:07.000 Okay.

01:24:08.000 Yeah, you're right, but...

01:24:11.000 Of 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.

01:24:18.000 Exactly.

01:24:18.000 They always mean that God has some grand, very mysterious plan.

01:24:22.000 And I can kind of see how that feels good.

01:24:25.000 It feels good.

01:24:25.000 Like, okay, I'm not alone.

01:24:26.000 There's somebody watching out after me.

01:24:28.000 Not just my spouse and my friends and family, but somebody out there somewhere.

01:24:33.000 I can see why that feels good.

01:24:35.000 So this is the problem atheists have. 0.97

01:24:37.000 Dawkins talks about this.

01:24:39.000 What do you say to somebody that's dying?

01:24:43.000 It's like the Ricky Gervais movie, The Invention of Lyme, where he tells his mom, well, you get a mansion.

01:24:50.000 Everyone who dies gets a mansion.

01:24:52.000 A mansion?

01:24:53.000 Oh, yeah, it's great.

01:24:54.000 And he goes on and on.

01:24:55.000 And then 10 minutes later in the movie, he's the messiah, because this meme got out.

01:24:59.000 It's a great story.

01:25:01.000 We can't do that.

01:25:02.000 If you're honest, you can't make up a story.

01:25:04.000 So what do you say?

01:25:06.000 In secular humanist circles, there's articles about what do you say.

01:25:10.000 It's hard.

01:25:11.000 You 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.

01:25:20.000 That's really all we have.

01:25:23.000 I used the line from Woody Allen in there, who said, I don't want to live on in my work, I want to live on in my apartment.

01:25:29.000 Okay, I understand.

01:25:32.000 But we don't get to do that.

01:25:34.000 No, we do not.

01:25:35.000 And again, I want to go back to what I said earlier, is that you are enjoying this partially because it's temporary.

01:25:43.000 It's part of the thing about a day.

01:25:46.000 You don't want to stay up forever.

01:25:48.000 You want to enjoy the day.

01:25:50.000 And then at the end, it's over.

01:25:53.000 And that day is a microcosm of your life.

01:25:56.000 Yeah, 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.

01:26:04.000 Yeah.

01:26:04.000 It's kind of fun to kind of see if you can squeeze it all in.

01:26:07.000 Well, yeah, and knowing that there's a time. 0.98

01:26:10.000 If it was a 20-hour window, you know, I'd just start fucking around. 0.88

01:26:14.000 I'm like, eh, got plenty of time. 0.96

01:26:16.000 Yeah.

01:26:17.000 I find I get more done as a person who's very busy with a family and children and all that stuff.

01:26:25.000 Right. 0.99

01:26:25.000 I feel like I get more done because I don't have time to fuck off. 0.99

01:26:28.000 That's right. 1.00

01:26:28.000 I very rarely have time to fuck off. 1.00

01:26:30.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:26:31.000 I've been distracted the last six months or a year or so with...

01:26:35.000 Following Twitter feeds that send interesting articles to read, which are interesting articles.

01:26:40.000 There's a ton of really good content out there.

01:26:42.000 And then podcasts, your podcast, Sam's, and Dave Rubin, and that I'm just like, wow, this is all good.

01:26:48.000 I really want to, but wait a minute.

01:26:50.000 I'm not getting my workout in.

01:26:51.000 I'm not doing this.

01:26:52.000 It's like, okay.

01:26:53.000 So it's a good problem to have.

01:26:55.000 It's the first world problem to have, as they say.

01:26:57.000 And I think what the transhumanists and the Ray Kurzweil think is heaven would be something like that.

01:27:01.000 Just endless streams of content that you can consume.

01:27:06.000 An endless Twitter feed.

01:27:07.000 That's right.

01:27:08.000 Oh, God.

01:27:09.000 Maybe that's not good.

01:27:10.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:27:11.000 That could be hell.

01:27:12.000 Yeah, I don't know what he wants.

01:27:14.000 I mean, I don't...

01:27:15.000 The living for everything is very problematic.

01:27:18.000 It's like, you would be so outdated in a hundred years.

01:27:23.000 Yes, totally.

01:27:26.000 And the downloading yourself into a computer thing, too.

01:27:29.000 What's to stop a guy like Kim Jong-un from downloading himself a hundred times?

01:27:33.000 Right.

01:27:34.000 Or a thousand?

01:27:35.000 Right.

01:27:35.000 Or do it every day?

01:27:36.000 Every day makes a new Kim Jong-un.

01:27:38.000 Well, this is one reason that these cult leaders, they do try to do that.

01:27:41.000 Yes. 0.97

01:27:42.000 Through, you know, lots of sex. 0.66

01:27:45.000 That is kind of what they're doing, right? 0.79

01:27:46.000 Right, yeah.

01:27:47.000 Wow.

01:27:47.000 Sending their genes out in the future as much as they can.

01:27:50.000 Let me ask you this, then.

01:27:53.000 Why does that instinct exist?

01:27:55.000 Like, is that purely a procreation instinct?

01:27:58.000 Yeah, I think so, yeah.

01:27:59.000 So you think that's the religious cult leader instinct?

01:28:02.000 Yeah.

01:28:02.000 It's based entirely on some ancient reward system that's designed to get you to Genghis Khan your genes out throughout the...

01:28:09.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:28:10.000 Oh.

01:28:11.000 Yeah, you know, I have a chapter there on why we have to die.

01:28:14.000 I mean, why can't we just be programmed like infants are and babies?

01:28:18.000 You know, the cells divide rapidly and they're super healthy.

01:28:22.000 I have a young son now.

01:28:23.000 He's 20 months.

01:28:24.000 You know, when he gets a little cut, you can practically watch it heal.

01:28:26.000 It's just incredible.

01:28:27.000 And yet, when I get a cut at 63, it takes a couple weeks to heal.

01:28:30.000 It's like, why can't the system keep going?

01:28:33.000 And the answer is twofold.

01:28:34.000 Second law of thermodynamics, entropy, everything is running down.

01:28:37.000 And second, natural selection programmed us to stay alive long enough to get our children's children into the reproductive age.

01:28:45.000 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.

01:28:56.000 You don't need to live 150, 200 years.

01:28:58.000 In 60, 70 years, your children's children are now in their early 20s and having babies.

01:29:03.000 You're done, as far as natural selection is concerned.

01:29:07.000 Now, I say it in a way like there's a czar or a secretary of the treasury that's allocating resources.

01:29:13.000 You know, there's nothing like that.

01:29:15.000 It's just natural selection, selecting things for whatever's best for survival to get genes into the future.

01:29:22.000 So this is Dawkins' argument in The Selfish Gene that The gene is the thing we should be focused on, not the body.

01:29:31.000 Natural selection kind of operates on the body, the phenotype, that gets expressed in a physical body.

01:29:36.000 But bodies are just survival machines that the replicators build to keep going.

01:29:42.000 So the replicators are immortal.

01:29:44.000 The species is immortal, in a sense.

01:29:46.000 Our genome is immortal.

01:29:47.000 That's why Dawkins called that River Out of Eden.

01:29:51.000 One of his book titles is that the river out of Eden is eternal.

01:29:55.000 As long as our species doesn't go extinct, we live forever.

01:29:59.000 But you and I, as just survival machines, we're just the genes way of keeping itself to the next generation.

01:30:06.000 So you're really only good for maybe 60, 70 years for a human timescale.

01:30:11.000 You know, your kids' kids get to survival age, you're done.

01:30:14.000 And this is the problem of, you know, that all the radical life extensions have.

01:30:19.000 The whole system starts to fall apart around the same time, like mid to late 80s.

01:30:24.000 Things start falling apart.

01:30:25.000 If you can make it into your 90s and you're still reasonably healthy, that's really good.

01:30:29.000 Maybe you had, you know, Mel Gibson and his doc on, you know, with the stem cells.

01:30:33.000 All that stuff is only going to push us further, further, more of us to the upper ceiling.

01:30:39.000 We'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.

01:30:49.000 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.

01:30:57.000 And it's all built into there in every single system.

01:31:01.000 Every cell, all parts of your cell, they're all gonna age.

01:31:04.000 And so, you know, people like Aubrey de Grey, I don't know if you know Aubrey.

01:31:09.000 Yeah, I've had him on.

01:31:09.000 Oh yeah, yeah, he's great.

01:31:10.000 I love this guy.

01:31:11.000 And I love that beer is his favorite thing that he thinks is gonna be part of the process.

01:31:16.000 Okay, I'll have a few beers if this is gonna help.

01:31:18.000 And even if it doesn't, that's okay.

01:31:20.000 Yeah, that was one of the things that made me most skeptical of him.

01:31:23.000 It was the beer.

01:31:24.000 Yeah, I'm like, that's an amino suppressant.

01:31:27.000 You're drinking poison.

01:31:29.000 Yeah.

01:31:29.000 I mean, it's a mild poison.

01:31:31.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:31:32.000 It's a delicious mild poison.

01:31:33.000 That's right, yeah.

01:31:34.000 But that's not good. 1.00

01:31:34.000 You drink that shit all day long? 1.00

01:31:36.000 I was like, this is weird. 1.00

01:31:37.000 Then I was talking to somebody that interviewed him and said he was clearly drunk.

01:31:41.000 I was like, really?

01:31:42.000 And she was like, yeah, I interviewed him and he was drunk.

01:31:44.000 He was drinking beer and he was drunk.

01:31:46.000 And she was like, and it wasn't late in the day either.

01:31:49.000 He started his...

01:31:51.000 He just gets hammered.

01:31:52.000 No science.

01:31:53.000 His fountain of youth very early.

01:31:55.000 Yeah, he's a fascinating guy, too, because he's not really much for exercise, either.

01:32:00.000 Or nutrition.

01:32:01.000 A lot of these guys that are into this, to me, they don't look healthy.

01:32:04.000 No.

01:32:05.000 No.

01:32:06.000 And 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.

01:32:16.000 Yes.

01:32:17.000 Eat right.

01:32:18.000 Eat right.

01:32:18.000 Healthy foods, whole foods.

01:32:20.000 I'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.

01:32:29.000 Right.

01:32:30.000 Well, salads are good, too.

01:32:31.000 Salads are good.

01:32:31.000 Balance it.

01:32:32.000 What's not good is sugar.

01:32:34.000 Sugar's the devil. 0.89

01:32:35.000 That's the worst. 0.98

01:32:36.000 That's right.

01:32:37.000 It's amazing how...

01:32:38.000 Now, I love listening to your podcast with Nina Teicholtz.

01:32:42.000 Teicholtz, yeah. 0.62

01:32:42.000 Because 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. 0.62

01:32:54.000 And I was cycling a lot and I wasn't, not only was I not losing weight, I'm putting weight on.

01:32:59.000 I got like a, you know, like carrying around this extra 10 pounds.

01:33:02.000 It's like, but I'm eating granola.

01:33:04.000 It's healthy.

01:33:05.000 Right.

01:33:06.000 No.

01:33:07.000 Well, especially the granola that most people buy, the sugar just laced all over it.

01:33:12.000 Yeah, there's a lot of people that eat things that they think are healthy.

01:33:15.000 There's this great bread that my wife brought home. 0.98

01:33:18.000 It was like Dave's Super Bread or some shit like that. 0.96

01:33:21.000 I forget what it's called.

01:33:22.000 But I bit into it and I was like, this is...

01:33:26.000 This is cake.

01:33:27.000 Yes.

01:33:27.000 This might as well be cake.

01:33:28.000 And then I looked at it and there's like massive amounts of sugar in it.

01:33:32.000 Absolutely.

01:33:32.000 And I was like, oh, okay.

01:33:34.000 I didn't even realize how much sugar is in bread until my wife's from Cologne, Germany, Jennifer. 0.73

01:33:39.000 And they have real bread in Germany.

01:33:41.000 Right.

01:33:41.000 I mean, you pick up a loaf of bread, it's like four pounds.

01:33:44.000 It's like a thing of lead because it's got nuts and it's super heavy and rich and there's no sugar.

01:33:49.000 Right.

01:33:49.000 And it tastes very different.

01:33:50.000 But once you get used to it, it's way better.

01:33:53.000 Well, it's also they're dealing with heirloom wheat in most of the European countries.

01:33:58.000 What we've done from, I guess, the early 1900s is slowly change what wheat used to be.

01:34:05.000 My friend Maynard explained it to me because he has a restaurant, and they grow pasta that's from heirloom wheat.

01:34:12.000 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.

01:34:19.000 Right.

01:34:19.000 It's a bigger plant.

01:34:21.000 It's a big fluffy thing.

01:34:23.000 And it also has much more complex glutens in it.

01:34:26.000 So people have more of an issue digesting it.

01:34:28.000 You're getting a lot more gluten insensitivity today than we've ever had before.

01:34:34.000 And that's all because of this manipulated wheat. 0.56

01:34:38.000 Right.

01:34:38.000 So we started buying pasta from Italy.

01:34:41.000 You can get heirloom pasta that's grown in Europe, and it tastes different.

01:34:46.000 It makes you feel different when you eat it.

01:34:48.000 It doesn't feel like a brick in your stomach.

01:34:50.000 Right.

01:34:50.000 I mean, it's still pasta.

01:34:51.000 It's still carbohydrates.

01:34:52.000 It's not the best stuff for you, but it's certainly better, and it gives your body a better feeling.

01:34:58.000 Right.

01:34:58.000 Yep.

01:34:59.000 Bread without sugar.

01:35:00.000 Pasta without sugar.

01:35:01.000 Yeah, well, you're going to get some.

01:35:02.000 Yeah.

01:35:03.000 It's different.

01:35:04.000 And, you know, bread...

01:35:06.000 Look, bread is just bread.

01:35:07.000 It's not good for you.

01:35:08.000 It's not.

01:35:09.000 I love that story from Gary Taubes that, you know, when they started taking...

01:35:15.000 Well, 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. 0.84

01:35:25.000 Sugar! 1.00

01:35:25.000 Yep. 1.00

01:35:26.000 It was like, oh, right.

01:35:27.000 That was like 1960s, late 50s, after Eisenhower had his heart attack, and then that whole meme of the dietary fat equals cardiovascular heart disease.

01:35:37.000 Okay.

01:35:38.000 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 off sugar and put the blame on saturated fat.

01:35:52.000 Right.

01:35:52.000 It's stunning.

01:35:53.000 It's stunning how many people to this day will just parrot that back and think that that's the fact.

01:35:58.000 Right.

01:35:58.000 Oh, it's saturated fat.

01:35:59.000 It's terrible for you.

01:36:00.000 Right.

01:36:01.000 Meanwhile, it's no.

01:36:02.000 Cholesterol is terrible for you.

01:36:03.000 No, it's actually the building blocks for hormones. 0.99

01:36:06.000 Right.

01:36:07.000 It's literally the substrate for hormones.

01:36:09.000 Right.

01:36:10.000 That's what your body is made out of.

01:36:11.000 The cell walls.

01:36:13.000 You need cholesterol to build those. 0.98

01:36:15.000 Yeah, you say that to people.

01:36:16.000 They're like, what are you talking about? 0.97

01:36:17.000 You're talking crazy.

01:36:19.000 No, cholesterol is going to kill you. 1.00

01:36:20.000 It's going to kill you, Michael Shermer.

01:36:23.000 Yeah, it's weird.

01:36:25.000 Nina's book is excellent.

01:36:26.000 And there's quite a few books.

01:36:28.000 Gary Taub's book is excellent as well.

01:36:31.000 There's a lot of people now that are shifting their diet over to...

01:36:34.000 You can call it paleo, or Mark Sisson calls it primal.

01:36:37.000 Primal.

01:36:38.000 Primal blueprint.

01:36:39.000 Right.

01:36:39.000 But you're essentially just eating vegetables and fish and meat and eating healthy things.

01:36:44.000 Eating avocados and coconut oil and healthy fats.

01:36:48.000 That's what your body craves.

01:36:50.000 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 do.

01:36:57.000 I'm not starving.

01:36:58.000 And I don't crash.

01:37:00.000 I don't need naps.

01:37:01.000 What do you have for breakfast?

01:37:03.000 Do you eat before a workout or after?

01:37:05.000 I eat after a workout.

01:37:06.000 What I like to do is fasted cardio.

01:37:09.000 I usually run in the morning or do yoga in the morning with no food in my stomach.

01:37:14.000 So it's like 11 or 12 before you eat?

01:37:16.000 Yeah, and then I had eggs.

01:37:17.000 I had eggs for breakfast.

01:37:18.000 Yeah.

01:37:19.000 And avocado.

01:37:20.000 And, you know, like last night I had steak and avocado.

01:37:25.000 Like I'm eating mostly fat and healthy stuff.

01:37:26.000 So that'll hold you through the workout until about 10 or 11 in the morning.

01:37:29.000 Yeah, I'm fine.

01:37:30.000 Now what will you have after a workout?

01:37:33.000 Depends.

01:37:34.000 Maybe a protein shake.

01:37:36.000 You know, really depends entirely.

01:37:38.000 Today I haven't worked out yet, so I just had breakfast.

01:37:41.000 Right.

01:37:42.000 But most of what I'm eating is whole foods.

01:37:44.000 Right.

01:37:45.000 Healthy whole foods.

01:37:46.000 I still eat plenty of salad.

01:37:48.000 I still eat, you know, but I'm very rare.

01:37:51.000 I'll indulge in carbohydrates like I had a cheeseburger from Five Guys on Sunday.

01:37:55.000 Yeah.

01:37:56.000 Every now and then.

01:37:57.000 Every now and then I'll dive in.

01:37:59.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:37:59.000 I think if you're working out a lot, you can tolerate a little bit more of that.

01:38:03.000 Yeah, just give yourself a little cheat day.

01:38:05.000 You feel better about it.

01:38:06.000 You don't feel like you're constantly depriving yourself.

01:38:10.000 But overall, I feel great.

01:38:12.000 Yeah, we do some long three-hour bike rides up in Santa Barbara where I live now.

01:38:16.000 There's a group that's pretty serious.

01:38:17.000 Did you get affected by...

01:38:19.000 No, no, I was just north of that.

01:38:21.000 The fires?

01:38:21.000 Yeah, but I was trapped there.

01:38:23.000 It was like being on an island.

01:38:25.000 The only way out is to go five hours north and around to get to L.A. Really?

01:38:29.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:38:30.000 Wow.

01:38:30.000 For 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...

01:38:39.000 To L.A. So the 101 was shut down?

01:38:42.000 Yeah, completely shut down.

01:38:43.000 And 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.

01:38:55.000 They just opened it Sunday night.

01:38:58.000 That's incredible.

01:38:59.000 Yep.

01:38:59.000 So for a while they had ferries.

01:39:01.000 They had a ferry from Santa Barbara Pier to Ventura.

01:39:04.000 Of course, you take the Faraday of Ventura, then you don't have a car, then you get an Uber to LA or something.

01:39:09.000 This is crazy.

01:39:10.000 Wow.

01:39:11.000 The mudslides were insane.

01:39:13.000 Yeah, you know that Oprah was there the next day.

01:39:18.000 I think she must have helicoptered in, obviously, but it missed her house by like 50 feet, something like that.

01:39:23.000 Of course it did.

01:39:24.000 That Oprah.

01:39:24.000 She used her magic.

01:39:26.000 She conjured it.

01:39:27.000 See, we may have another Western White House in Santa Barbara.

01:39:31.000 Yeah, right.

01:39:32.000 The Reagan Ranch, where he had his Western White House, is north of Santa Barbara.

01:39:35.000 Do you think Oprah's going to win?

01:39:36.000 She's going to run for president? 1.00

01:39:38.000 I don't know if she's going to run, but the world we live in now, she could win.

01:39:42.000 Do you think so?

01:39:42.000 She's a pretty good speaker.

01:39:43.000 She's not bad.

01:39:44.000 She's a good speaker, yeah. 0.99

01:39:46.000 This is what I always bring up with Oprah. 0.69

01:39:47.000 Do you remember when Oprah was the big supporter of The Secret?

01:39:50.000 Yeah.

01:39:51.000 Oh, totally.

01:39:51.000 Yes, I know.

01:39:52.000 We've debunked her stuff because she's always open to this woo-woo stuff.

01:39:56.000 She was super open to that.

01:39:57.000 And we did the calculation.

01:39:59.000 She was like 50 then. 0.99

01:40:01.000 She wasn't a young, dumb kid who didn't know any better. 0.99

01:40:05.000 Nope. 0.98

01:40:06.000 I mean, she's a living testimony to what you can do if you put your mind to it and use your intelligence and hard work.

01:40:12.000 Well, she's likable, and she had a television show that was fun to watch, and it was great for women. 1.00

01:40:17.000 It was like she sort of—she filled a niche that wasn't filled before.

01:40:23.000 Yeah.

01:40:24.000 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 are some things you could do that'll help you be more successful, et cetera.

01:40:36.000 Right.

01:40:53.000 You know, and Jordan has his book.

01:40:55.000 Here's the 12 things you got to do.

01:40:57.000 Yes.

01:40:58.000 To do what?

01:40:58.000 Well, to be successful.

01:40:59.000 Okay.

01:41:00.000 So, you know, Oprah kind of, I think, did those things intuitively.

01:41:03.000 Just as a, you know, just what she did.

01:41:05.000 That's how she became successful. 0.96

01:41:06.000 Which has nothing to do with, if I tell the universe, I want a Lamborghini.

01:41:11.000 It's going to appear in my driveway.

01:41:13.000 You know, and the other deeper problem with that was that...

01:41:17.000 This implies that, what if I'm not successful?

01:41:20.000 You just weren't thinking positive.

01:41:21.000 You mean these poor people in Somalia?

01:41:23.000 Or even worse, what about children with diseases?

01:41:26.000 Right.

01:41:26.000 Were they thinking wrong?

01:41:27.000 Yeah, it's no good.

01:41:28.000 The idea that your entire existence is based entirely inside of your own imagination is just preposterous. 0.99

01:41:35.000 There's a lot of random shit that's going on in this world. 0.99

01:41:38.000 Right. 0.99

01:41:38.000 Some parts of the world get hit by meteors. 0.99

01:41:40.000 Were they bad people?

01:41:41.000 I don't know.

01:41:41.000 Well, how come Putin didn't get hit by a meteor?

01:41:44.000 Right.

01:41:45.000 He's out there assassinating rivals and, you know, how come Assad is still alive?

01:41:51.000 There's just a lot of people out there that are terrible people that just skate through.

01:41:55.000 That's right.

01:41:56.000 Somehow or another.

01:41:57.000 Problem of evil.

01:41:57.000 Why do bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people?

01:42:01.000 Sometimes they do, right?

01:42:02.000 The 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.

01:42:16.000 Right.

01:42:17.000 Sort of.

01:42:18.000 How many people also willed it into being and it didn't work?

01:42:22.000 Right.

01:42:22.000 Like, let's get the full numbers.

01:42:24.000 How many people were just daydreaming all day and they never got that pony?

01:42:28.000 I call this the biography bias.

01:42:31.000 People write biographies of Steve Jobs.

01:42:33.000 Okay, so here's the thing.

01:42:34.000 You enroll in a really elite college, drop out, move back to your parents' house and start a startup company in your garage.

01:42:40.000 It works!

01:42:41.000 Actually, how many people did this in the 70s?

01:42:44.000 And they did startup companies and they went out of business in three months or whatever.

01:42:48.000 You have to have a good product.

01:42:48.000 And no one writes a biography of them.

01:42:51.000 Right.

01:42:52.000 We only hear the hits, forget the missus.

01:42:54.000 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.

01:43:04.000 Right.

01:43:04.000 But 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,

01:43:19.000 and then you would make it happen.

01:43:21.000 Right.

01:43:22.000 Like, no, you gotta go do things.

01:43:23.000 You gotta do it.

01:43:24.000 You gotta do things.

01:43:25.000 And it's the one thing that keeps people from achieving things, is the actually going out and doing things.

01:43:31.000 Right.

01:43:31.000 For whatever reason, we have this blockade against action.

01:43:35.000 Right.

01:43:35.000 People are terrified of the unknown, just like we're terrified of death.

01:43:39.000 Right.

01:43:41.000 Terrified of the unknown.

01:43:42.000 Yeah, the role of chance is huge.

01:43:44.000 Huge.

01:43:45.000 And we forget to see the failures.

01:43:47.000 I was on a ride the other day with a guy, you know, what do you do?

01:43:50.000 I'm a VC, okay, venture capitalist.

01:43:52.000 So what's the ratio?

01:43:53.000 I mean, you put in 200,000, 500,000, you know, half fail or what?

01:43:58.000 He goes, no, 90% fail.

01:44:00.000 I said, nine out of 10 companies, you invest half a million or whatever, it's gone.

01:44:05.000 He goes, yep, but the one.

01:44:06.000 You know, the one I made $20 million on, you know, more than makes up for the nine failures.

01:44:10.000 Like, oh, man.

01:44:13.000 You know, that's a high ratio.

01:44:14.000 So there's, I know there's research on entrepreneurs and how risk-taking you should be.

01:44:19.000 So entrepreneurs score high in risk-taking.

01:44:21.000 You know, they're not risk-averse.

01:44:23.000 Okay, that's good.

01:44:25.000 On the other hand, some of them have what's called the over-optimism bias.

01:44:29.000 This is the idea.

01:44:31.000 I'm sticking with it.

01:44:32.000 I'm going to keep pouring money into it.

01:44:33.000 No, dude.

01:44:34.000 Nine out of ten fail.

01:44:35.000 Just keep trying until you get the one.

01:44:37.000 At some point, you've got to be a risk taker, but not too crazy.

01:44:40.000 You've got to know when to bail.

01:44:41.000 You've got to know when to bail.

01:44:42.000 Boy, that's a crazy way to make a living.

01:44:45.000 Yeah.

01:44:46.000 Betting on other people, too.

01:44:47.000 Oh, I know.

01:44:48.000 Do you ever watch Shark Tank?

01:44:49.000 Sometimes, yeah.

01:44:50.000 My wife and I have been binge-watching Shark Tank. 0.97

01:44:52.000 The stuff that people come up with, you know, I mean, it's like some of them are just ridiculous. 0.98

01:44:55.000 I think it's kind of like American Idol, where they let those ridiculous people on. 0.97

01:44:59.000 Because it's entertaining. 0.97

01:45:00.000 Yeah, I mean, half the fun is watching people's preposterous ideas.

01:45:04.000 That's true.

01:45:04.000 One guy the other night, he had this little chip thing you put over the computer, the camera, so that the NSA or whoever can't watch you.

01:45:14.000 Oh, they're watching.

01:45:15.000 And he's like, okay, so here's the thing.

01:45:17.000 I'm going to sell it for $9.95, and if we get 1% of the market, blah, blah, blah, we're all going to be billionaires.

01:45:22.000 And then one of the sharks said, can you just put a piece of tape over there?

01:45:25.000 I think I saw Mark Zuckerberg put a piece of duct tape over the camera.

01:45:30.000 Yeah.

01:45:33.000 Oh, yeah.

01:45:35.000 Or, somebody else said, it'd be fun if you had a little thing you put over and there was an image on the inside that was like this.

01:45:42.000 Can you imagine the type of person that would have to be sitting around all day waiting for you to turn your laptop camera on?

01:45:48.000 Come on, let me see what you're doing.

01:45:50.000 Come on! 0.61

01:45:50.000 They must have algorithms that just look and scan and try to find it. 0.61

01:45:54.000 I don't know.

01:45:55.000 I could only imagine.

01:46:01.000 What's up?

01:46:02.000 The NSA knows who you are just by the sound of your voice and their tech predates Apple and Amazon.

01:46:07.000 A report on The Intercept citing documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA has highly refined voice recognition software.

01:46:19.000 The agency's technology dates back to more than a decade.

01:46:22.000 And was instrumental in helping to identify Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Iraq, the reports stated.

01:46:28.000 Your voice where?

01:46:30.000 Just in the room with your laptop?

01:46:31.000 Or you mean on the phone?

01:46:32.000 Supposedly they can use almost any microphone that's connected to the internet.

01:46:37.000 Obviously there's new speakers that are available.

01:46:39.000 And your voice, the recognition they have is better than a face print or a fingerprint.

01:46:43.000 So if they wanted to find young Jamie, they could get you from your laptop?

01:46:47.000 They already have it.

01:46:48.000 Wow.

01:46:49.000 That's what this is saying.

01:46:50.000 Already have had it and...

01:46:52.000 Don't worry about it.

01:46:53.000 There's almost nothing you can do to stop it.

01:46:54.000 What is your thoughts on Snowden and all that?

01:46:56.000 Yeah.

01:46:58.000 Who's the other guy?

01:47:00.000 Assange.

01:47:01.000 No, Assange.

01:47:01.000 Julian Assange.

01:47:02.000 I have a bad feeling about Julian Assange.

01:47:05.000 I have a good feeling about Snowden.

01:47:07.000 Everybody had a good feeling about Assange until Trump got into office.

01:47:11.000 No, no.

01:47:12.000 The stuff before that, I didn't care for him.

01:47:15.000 But 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.

01:47:25.000 But the points he made were similar to that of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

01:47:32.000 It's like, we should know what our government's doing.

01:47:34.000 We don't have to know everything.

01:47:35.000 We 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.

01:47:49.000 This is when a lot of this stuff was happening.

01:47:51.000 It'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.

01:47:58.000 They're one of the worst administrations ever on record for whistleblowers.

01:48:01.000 Right.

01:48:02.000 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.

01:48:11.000 Right.

01:48:11.000 They're exposing illegal activity.

01:48:13.000 Right.

01:48:14.000 And that's just not true.

01:48:15.000 Yep.

01:48:16.000 I think he should be allowed to come back.

01:48:17.000 Yes.

01:48:18.000 He doesn't have to be worshipped as a hero.

01:48:21.000 He's a brave person.

01:48:23.000 Before him, we weren't talking about any of this stuff.

01:48:25.000 We didn't know about this stuff.

01:48:27.000 Well, there was an NSA contractor from many years ago who brought this stuff up, and he was sort of dismissed.

01:48:35.000 What is his name?

01:48:37.000 He was the original NSA contractor that brought this up, I want to say, in 2011. Boy, I can see him in my mind.

01:48:45.000 I can't remember his name.

01:48:46.000 Bill Binney.

01:48:47.000 That's it.

01:48:48.000 Bill Binney.

01:48:48.000 I'm not sure who that is.

01:48:49.000 Yeah, pull that guy up, young Jamie.

01:48:51.000 I just read...

01:48:52.000 He was the original guy.

01:48:53.000 Bill Binney, the original NSA whistleblower on Snowden 9-11 and illegal surveillance.

01:48:58.000 This was...

01:48:59.000 He became incredibly concerned post-9-11 when they started...

01:49:06.000 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 And then Snowden came out after that, and the Snowden thing was where people got all exposed.

01:49:22.000 We've really got a chance to understand, oh, this is actually happening right now.

01:49:26.000 This is a real thing.

01:49:27.000 Right.

01:49:28.000 Yeah, I do think the government does overreach with their security theater.

01:49:33.000 You know, we're at orange level today.

01:49:36.000 Remember that?

01:49:37.000 Unbelievable.

01:49:37.000 That doesn't happen anymore.

01:49:38.000 What happened to that?

01:49:39.000 And 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?

01:49:53.000 It's less than bathtub drownings, or no, way less than that, like double lightning strikes or something?

01:49:58.000 I mean, it's just nothing.

01:49:59.000 It's like shark attacks.

01:49:59.000 Yeah.

01:50:00.000 Why are we spending billions and billions of dollars on this?

01:50:04.000 To keep it that way.

01:50:06.000 Because they could.

01:50:07.000 It's like the proverbial elephant repellent.

01:50:10.000 Ever since we put the repellent here, not a single elephant has come in.

01:50:14.000 Well, Michael Sherman, we're Americans.

01:50:16.000 We don't want to get caught with our pants down.

01:50:17.000 Yeah, I understand.

01:50:21.000 I just read Daniel Ellsberg's new book, The Doomsday Machine.

01:50:24.000 This is on nuclear deterrence.

01:50:26.000 He thinks nuclear deterrence as a rational strategy is a long-term mistake because of the possibilities of error.

01:50:33.000 Yeah.

01:50:34.000 Which, you know, it's all good points, but he has...

01:50:36.000 I'm not sure why it took so long to bring this book out.

01:50:39.000 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...

01:50:45.000 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.

01:50:55.000 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 must, but 20, 30 million tops!

01:51:05.000 And that's actually real.

01:51:06.000 That's the kind of numbers they were throwing out.

01:51:09.000 Yeah, you can't leave a human being with that much responsibility and power.

01:51:13.000 And 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.

01:51:21.000 And human beings should not have that kind of power over other human beings that are just citizens.

01:51:26.000 Right.

01:51:27.000 Because 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.

01:51:36.000 And this is when Obama was like, no, no, this is just metadata.

01:51:39.000 Right.

01:51:40.000 No, it wasn't just metadata, man.

01:51:42.000 They were looking at everything.

01:51:44.000 Right.

01:51:46.000 That's something we should know about.

01:51:47.000 And we didn't until Snowden.

01:51:49.000 And now this poor guy has to live in Russia.

01:51:51.000 Yeah.

01:51:52.000 I think he should be brought back for sure.

01:51:54.000 But could he be?

01:51:55.000 He would have to do something awesome for Trump.

01:51:58.000 Well, it might be after Trump.

01:51:59.000 I don't know.

01:52:00.000 I don't know. 1.00

01:52:00.000 Maybe he should be kissing Trump's ass. 1.00

01:52:03.000 I mean, it's disturbing that of all people, it's Putin who's protecting him. 1.00

01:52:05.000 Isn't it crazy?

01:52:06.000 Wait a minute.

01:52:06.000 What?

01:52:07.000 I know.

01:52:07.000 It's weird.

01:52:09.000 Well, he's probably helping Putin.

01:52:10.000 But 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.

01:52:18.000 He came off totally reasonable.

01:52:20.000 This is what democracy – here's a democracy.

01:52:23.000 This is what we live in.

01:52:24.000 Citizens need to know some things, not everything.

01:52:26.000 He came off totally rational.

01:52:29.000 He did a great podcast with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and he came off very rational there as well.

01:52:34.000 Oh, I didn't know Neil interviewed him.

01:52:35.000 Yeah, Neil interviewed him.

01:52:38.000 Look, we don't agree to that kind of surveillance.

01:52:42.000 That's very Orwellian.

01:52:44.000 It's not what we want.

01:52:47.000 You're not stopping terrorism.

01:52:48.000 You're just spying on people.

01:52:50.000 Right.

01:52:51.000 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. 0.98

01:53:02.000 And they go, hey, well, you know, we found out that you're into, like, cuckold porn, buddy. 0.98

01:53:06.000 Right. 0.99

01:53:06.000 Or whatever it is. 0.99

01:53:08.000 It's just, there's too much.

01:53:09.000 The kind of stuff Nixon did with the Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Well, I think Hoover did it on his own.

01:53:15.000 He did it pre-Nixon.

01:53:16.000 Hoover was a fascinating character.

01:53:19.000 He was a cross-dresser, out of his mind, total freak, and just spying on everybody just to try to hide his own secrets. 0.99

01:53:27.000 Really amazing.

01:53:28.000 But there's an example of one person, a flawed human like everyone else, given all this power.

01:53:35.000 Imagine what Hoover would do today with the internet. 0.64

01:53:37.000 I mean, he'd be taking this to an extreme.

01:53:40.000 Well, arguably more flawed than normal human beings.

01:53:42.000 And I think that goes back to the thing that you were talking about with these cult leaders.

01:53:46.000 It's like humans should not have power over other humans.

01:53:51.000 When they do, they do terrible things.

01:53:54.000 Right.

01:53:56.000 They abuse that power and they...

01:53:58.000 I 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.

01:54:07.000 We lose a few people in Chicago.

01:54:09.000 Right.

01:54:09.000 I mean, that is...

01:54:10.000 That's a crazy thing for a human being to have at their fingertips.

01:54:14.000 Yep.

01:54:15.000 And the other problem is bureaucracy, any large organization, but especially bureaucracies, their tendency is to keep alive.

01:54:21.000 We got to keep our jobs.

01:54:23.000 Yeah.

01:54:23.000 And it's...

01:54:25.000 The moment you set up a government agency, it's really difficult to shut it off.

01:54:30.000 Yeah, almost impossible.

01:54:32.000 Yeah.

01:54:32.000 Because you have real people with jobs and mortgages and families, and I've got to keep my job.

01:54:36.000 So we have to justify why we need our department and so on, and it just always builds that way.

01:54:41.000 That is the big issue with big government, is it just grows bigger.

01:54:44.000 It never shrinks.

01:54:46.000 They never say, you know what, we don't need the IRS. Right.

01:54:49.000 This is nonsense.

01:54:51.000 You 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.

01:54:57.000 Right.

01:54:58.000 What?

01:54:59.000 What?

01:54:59.000 Yeah.

01:55:00.000 Yeah, no, it's just a huge problem.

01:55:03.000 I don't have a good solution to it.

01:55:05.000 Well, it brings me back to the last word of the title of your book, The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia.

01:55:14.000 Yeah, Utopia, yeah.

01:55:15.000 Hope is what we're always looking for, right?

01:55:17.000 Yeah, totally.

01:55:17.000 And it doesn't exist.

01:55:18.000 It 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.

01:55:27.000 And, 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.

01:55:34.000 Yeah.

01:55:34.000 And 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.

01:55:44.000 You are preventing utopia, so we are going to eliminate you.

01:55:48.000 This is the famous trolley experiment, thought experiment. 0.99

01:55:50.000 You know, the trolley's hurtling down the tracks about to kill the five workers.

01:55:53.000 You're at the switch.

01:55:55.000 If you throw the switch, it'll go down a side track.

01:55:57.000 It'll kill one worker. 0.97

01:55:58.000 Would you throw the switch? 1.00

01:56:00.000 Kill the one to save the five. 1.00

01:56:02.000 The five are going to die if you don't do anything. 0.99

01:56:04.000 So we did throw the switch.

01:56:07.000 So most people say they would, that you can go on the website and do this yourself.

01:56:11.000 Depends on who's on which side.

01:56:12.000 Depends on which track, yeah.

01:56:13.000 It really does, right?

01:56:15.000 It's Rush Limbaugh on this one track.

01:56:19.000 Can you imagine?

01:56:20.000 And five school kids?

01:56:22.000 Yeah, five school kids.

01:56:23.000 With massive potential for the future.

01:56:26.000 Now, 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.

01:56:38.000 And standing next to you is a great big guy.

01:56:40.000 Would you hip-check him off?

01:56:42.000 Boom! 0.99

01:56:42.000 He lands on the tracks. 0.99

01:56:44.000 Splat! 0.97

01:56:44.000 He's killed by the train, but it stops it and saves the five workers. 0.97

01:56:48.000 Now most people say, I gotta physically grab him and throw him off?

01:56:51.000 Yeah.

01:56:51.000 No, I couldn't do that.

01:56:53.000 So 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.

01:57:01.000 So 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.

01:57:08.000 But that's even more actively doing it than a drone.

01:57:11.000 The drone one apparently is a giant issue for the drone pilots.

01:57:16.000 Apparently they suffer from really weird PTSD. Really?

01:57:19.000 Yeah.

01:57:19.000 Even though they're in Arizona doing it in Iraq or whatever.

01:57:22.000 Yeah, the nightmares are pretty intense.

01:57:25.000 Interesting.

01:57:26.000 I had not heard that.

01:57:27.000 Yeah, I mean, if you're looking at a screen and you're seeing someone on the other side of the planet...

01:57:36.000 You know, you're in Nevada.

01:57:38.000 Right.

01:57:38.000 In some military base.

01:57:40.000 Right.

01:57:40.000 And you're hitting that button and you're watching the screen.

01:57:44.000 You're seeing some, you know, infrared or black night vision.

01:57:48.000 Right.

01:57:48.000 Missiles slamming into the person that you were just observing.

01:57:51.000 There was a good movie about that that was like the trolley problem.

01:57:53.000 That was maybe two years ago.

01:57:58.000 Where 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.

01:58:10.000 And 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.

01:58:16.000 I think it's in Afghanistan or Iraq.

01:58:18.000 So she's on the corner and so she will be killed.

01:58:21.000 And it's like, okay, maybe we could come around from the other side and then she won't be.

01:58:26.000 And they're doing all these calculations, but now there's some other people over here.

01:58:29.000 So how many people, innocents, should we kill? 0.76

01:58:32.000 Because 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.

01:58:40.000 So they show how these government agencies think about those calculations.

01:58:44.000 We'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?

01:58:53.000 And then it gets murky from there.

01:58:55.000 Well, Mike Baker, who's a former bigwig at the CIA, I've talked to him several times on the podcast.

01:59:01.000 One of the things that he says, that's done by lawyers.

01:59:03.000 Right.

01:59:04.000 That's right.

01:59:04.000 Legal.

01:59:05.000 That's right.

01:59:05.000 Because there's legal precedence about collateral damage.

01:59:10.000 That came from the Nuremberg laws.

01:59:12.000 And there, you know, there's some questionable stuff we were doing.

01:59:14.000 I mean, I think it's justified in the Second World War. 0.99

01:59:17.000 But, you know, the mass bombing of Hamburg and Dresden, this didn't slow the Nazi war machine at all.

01:59:26.000 But the idea was that, well, the citizens will rise up and kill Hitler.

01:59:30.000 No, you can't in that kind of society.

01:59:33.000 You just don't have that kind of access or power.

01:59:35.000 And this was like in the first Iraq War.

01:59:39.000 We'll stop short.

01:59:41.000 Bush 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.

01:59:49.000 And it just didn't work out that way.

01:59:50.000 So there are the calculations get messy.

01:59:52.000 I got kind of sidetracked.

01:59:53.000 The problem with the utopian idea is that utilitarian calculus.

01:59:57.000 If most people will agree that it's okay to kill one to save five, why not kill one million to save five million?

02:00:04.000 That's genocide. 0.86

02:00:04.000 And that is the calculations that genocidal mass murderers make. 0.86

02:00:09.000 You know, our German society would be great, except for those Jews, you know, the backstabbers who ruined us in the First World War. 1.00

02:00:18.000 Now we can just get rid of them. 0.99

02:00:19.000 It's going to be great.

02:00:20.000 And every genocide is based on that kind of utilitarian calculus, however emotional-driven it is.

02:00:26.000 And it's interesting when you look at the numbers from drone attacks.

02:00:31.000 It's some high 80%, 90%.

02:00:35.000 Of innocent people that are killed.

02:00:37.000 Right.

02:00:37.000 The 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.

02:00:51.000 And that's not something that we would ever accept from one guy.

02:00:53.000 Right.

02:00:54.000 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.

02:01:01.000 Right. 0.99

02:01:01.000 There'd be no fucking way. 0.99

02:01:02.000 No. 1.00

02:01:03.000 He'd be like, that guy's a murderer. 1.00

02:01:04.000 He's a monster. 1.00

02:01:05.000 Right. 0.99

02:01:05.000 But 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. 0.99

02:01:17.000 Right.

02:01:18.000 So 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.

02:01:27.000 You know, before you know it, you're throwing 450 volts into this subject.

02:01:30.000 You 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.

02:01:40.000 And it's like this with these kind of utilitarian calculus.

02:01:43.000 Okay, 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.

02:01:53.000 But it's always so messy that it takes much longer than you think.

02:01:57.000 So 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.

02:02:05.000 When you see at the end, it's like, God, this was a catastrophe.

02:02:09.000 But 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.

02:02:16.000 You know, we put all this in there, just one more month, and then we'll get out.

02:02:21.000 And 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.

02:02:28.000 And it's like, okay, this just didn't work.

02:02:30.000 And I think that happens more often, because it's always messier.

02:02:33.000 Yeah, that makes sense.

02:02:35.000 I mean, war in itself is an incredibly messy business.

02:02:39.000 Do you know it's outlawed?

02:02:41.000 It was outlawed in the Paris Peace Agreements of 1927. War is illegal.

02:02:45.000 There's a great book called The Internationalists.

02:02:48.000 It gives the history of how this came about.

02:02:52.000 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.

02:03:07.000 And 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.

02:03:21.000 And so this Hugo Grotius, legal scholar, wrote all these treaties that got laid down that said, this is when war is legal.

02:03:30.000 It's perfectly okay to kill other people and take their stuff.

02:03:34.000 If you're at war.

02:03:35.000 So what does that mean to be at war?

02:03:37.000 You know, so then it's all done by lawyers.

02:03:39.000 Like, okay, this is what it is.

02:03:41.000 And we have lived with that ever since.

02:03:43.000 So in the 1927 Paris Peace Agreement, it's like, okay, you know, we're going to stop that.

02:03:47.000 War is illegal now.

02:03:48.000 Obviously, this didn't stop Hitler and the imperial of Japan and so on. 0.88

02:03:52.000 But at least now, leaders have to justify.

02:03:55.000 It's like Bush had to go to the UN and get his Coalition of the Willing.

02:04:00.000 And that's when Colin Powell had to say, oh yes, we know about the yellow cake, and that Saddam Hussein wants nuclear weapons.

02:04:07.000 I mean, why would anybody bother with all that stuff?

02:04:10.000 In the old days, they'd just invade.

02:04:12.000 You know, I came, I saw, I conquered.

02:04:14.000 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.

02:04:22.000 You at least have to do that now.

02:04:24.000 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.

02:04:38.000 That's right.

02:04:39.000 And that's what the rules of war in comparison to 2,000 years ago.

02:04:42.000 Right.

02:04:43.000 Yeah.

02:04:43.000 So that's a good thing.

02:04:44.000 Yeah, ultimately.

02:04:46.000 I mean, it doesn't stop everybody, but even Kim Jong-un, I kind of have a feeling, and maybe I'm naive, that it's just deterrence for him.

02:04:53.000 He wants a place at the table where he's respected, his country is not going to be invaded.

02:04:59.000 And this is sort of a Noam Chomsky argument that I don't usually make, but if you look at...

02:05:04.000 How America treats other countries.

02:05:06.000 If they have nukes, we leave them alone.

02:05:09.000 If they don't, we do whatever we kind of feel like.

02:05:11.000 So from his perspective, it could be those Americans, because you see, they make arguments like this. 0.99

02:05:17.000 These Americans are evil. 1.00

02:05:18.000 Why? 1.00

02:05:19.000 Look, they invaded this country.

02:05:20.000 They invaded that.

02:05:21.000 They've been in, you know, a dozen wars and, you know, just never ending.

02:05:24.000 This is who they are. 0.99

02:05:25.000 We're going to get nukes, and they're not going to fuck with this ever again. 1.00

02:05:29.000 And maybe he'll just stop and go, that's it. 0.99

02:05:32.000 Can you leave me alone?

02:05:33.000 I'll leave you alone.

02:05:34.000 I 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.

02:05:44.000 Yeah.

02:05:45.000 He's way out there.

02:05:46.000 I think it's important to balance these intellectual disagreements.

02:05:51.000 And, you know, you need a super smart, far lefty guy wearing a sweater who talks like this and being very slow.

02:05:59.000 Yeah.

02:06:02.000 Right.

02:06:02.000 Well, I agree.

02:06:04.000 So that's why we have to have free speech and open dialogue and debate.

02:06:07.000 It's so important.

02:06:07.000 So you get the guy over here to counter the guy.

02:06:09.000 So that's why instead of authoritarian left, well, why are they there?

02:06:14.000 Because there's an authoritarian right.

02:06:16.000 The problem is we expect that from the right.

02:06:18.000 So this is why we're going through what we're going through now.

02:06:20.000 It's kind of a surprise.

02:06:21.000 Wait a minute.

02:06:22.000 The liberals are doing this?

02:06:23.000 Well, it's fairly recent.

02:06:24.000 The silencing of people you disagree with.

02:06:27.000 And also the...

02:06:28.000 Really disingenuous labeling of people as Nazis or neo-Nazis or white supremacists just because they simply don't line up with your belief system.

02:06:38.000 And it's a conscious decision to do that.

02:06:44.000 This isn't like an accidental mislabeling where you don't really know what the person's motives and who they are.

02:06:49.000 No, you're just trying to diminish whatever position they have so that your side wins. 0.95

02:06:54.000 And 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. 0.94

02:07:03.000 I mean, that's what it seems like.

02:07:06.000 When 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.

02:07:16.000 He goes, go ahead, offshore.

02:07:17.000 Go ahead.

02:07:18.000 Go just start drilling that ocean. 1.00

02:07:19.000 Fuck the fish. 1.00

02:07:20.000 Let's get that oil, baby. 1.00

02:07:22.000 Come on.

02:07:23.000 I'll be in my gold bathroom with a giant gold chandelier over the toilet. 0.98

02:07:29.000 That guy's crazy.

02:07:30.000 It's a strange time. 1.00

02:07:32.000 It's like something out of a movie.

02:07:34.000 Oh! 0.60

02:07:35.000 It's way crazier than something out of a movie. 0.95

02:07:37.000 If there was a president that was this nuts in a movie, you would say that's too over the top.

02:07:42.000 We played a video yesterday of Trump, like the 24 different things that Trump said he was the best at. 0.53

02:07:50.000 Nobody loves women more than I do.

02:07:53.000 Nobody loves Mexicans more than I do.

02:07:55.000 Nobody's better at foreign policy than Trump.

02:08:00.000 He uses himself in the third person.

02:08:02.000 That's the one thing about having Oprah as a president. 1.00

02:08:05.000 Can we just have professional experts that work in this area, that know what they're doing, even if they're not celebrities?

02:08:13.000 Well, I'm a firm believer that that position...

02:08:16.000 Is almost always abused and that what we really need instead of like one person is like a council of wise people.

02:08:24.000 Yeah, a tribunal or something like that.

02:08:26.000 Yeah, like 18 super smart people that have to write papers on all these different decisions that they make.

02:08:33.000 I'd be happy with a tribe.

02:08:35.000 Instead of a president, you have three people.

02:08:37.000 You elect them, and then for anything to happen, two of the three have to agree.

02:08:41.000 But even three, because the FCC, they took out net neutrality with only five people.

02:08:48.000 Five unelected people.

02:08:49.000 Okay, that's a good point.

02:08:50.000 Yeah, maybe 18. Yeah.

02:08:52.000 Yeah.

02:08:55.000 I don't...

02:08:56.000 Well, you need an odd number so you don't have a tie.

02:08:58.000 You got to have a tiebreaker.

02:08:59.000 Yeah, we had Jessica Rosenworcel, is that how you say her last name?

02:09:03.000 From the FCC. She was one of the five that voted for net neutrality.

02:09:08.000 She wanted to keep it in place.

02:09:09.000 And she was on two weeks ago, something like that.

02:09:12.000 And 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.

02:09:21.000 How do they get that job?

02:09:22.000 They're appointed?

02:09:23.000 Appointed, yeah.

02:09:24.000 By the president?

02:09:25.000 I don't know if they're appointed by Trump or maybe they're a holdover.

02:09:31.000 That'd be pretty easy to stack.

02:09:33.000 Yes!

02:09:34.000 Is that what she said?

02:09:35.000 By Obama or by Trump?

02:09:37.000 It says appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for five-year terms.

02:09:41.000 Okay.

02:09:41.000 There you go.

02:09:42.000 So these are new folks then.

02:09:44.000 Okay.

02:09:44.000 Yeah.

02:09:45.000 And they decided, nah, let's just give all the money to the corporations. 0.97

02:09:48.000 Let's let them just block websites and get crazy with throttling internet. 1.00

02:09:54.000 Right.

02:09:55.000 It's a weird time for this.

02:09:57.000 Yes, right.

02:09:58.000 So back to the utopia, societies are messy, and the only utopian-type system would be one that there is no system.

02:10:07.000 You 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.

02:10:19.000 It's just human nature, right?

02:10:20.000 It's human nature, yeah.

02:10:21.000 Does it go back to just primitive pirates?

02:10:23.000 We're a hierarchical social primate species.

02:10:26.000 Yeah.

02:10:26.000 The alpha male, if he can get there, he's going to stay there for as long as he can.

02:10:29.000 And the beta males are going to try to undermine him from underneath.

02:10:34.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:10:35.000 It's this constant struggle.

02:10:36.000 Again, there are two kinds of men.

02:10:38.000 Those with loaded revolvers and those who dig. 0.87

02:10:45.000 Well, that's why, again, sort of a horizontal, bottom-up networking systems is one way to try to counter hierarchical power structures.

02:10:56.000 It doesn't always work.

02:10:57.000 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?

02:11:09.000 Because 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. 0.92

02:11:29.000 Even established media sources are doing some sleazy shit now. 0.81

02:11:34.000 Yeah, it's a concern, for sure. 0.84

02:11:36.000 We 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.

02:11:49.000 And 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.

02:12:01.000 I love their ranking system.

02:12:03.000 And Trump got a lot of pants on fire.

02:12:07.000 So at least there's a counter to it.

02:12:10.000 And now those sites are becoming pretty popular.

02:12:13.000 They're kind of a form of clickbait themselves.

02:12:15.000 Let's go there and find out.

02:12:16.000 You know, how many times this guy lied in his speech.

02:12:19.000 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, whistleblowered and called and put out there so that we didn't drag ourselves into the Vietnam War even deeper.

02:12:33.000 My thought, and this is a very paranoid thought, is that all this is inevitably opening us up to the truth chip.

02:12:43.000 To the mind-reading chip.

02:12:45.000 But the things are going to get so chaotic that we're going to say, you know what?

02:12:48.000 Just hit me with the chip. 0.98

02:12:49.000 I can't fucking take this anymore. 0.99

02:12:51.000 I don't know who's right. 0.98

02:12:52.000 Fox News says one thing.

02:12:53.000 CNN says another.

02:12:55.000 Slide it in.

02:12:56.000 Slide it in my forearm.

02:12:57.000 Right here.

02:12:57.000 Right here in the forearm.

02:13:00.000 It might be our only solution.

02:13:02.000 It might literally be like nature's way of allowing us to slowly accept the symbiotic relationships with this new artificial intelligence.

02:13:12.000 Yep.

02:13:13.000 I 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.

02:13:22.000 Sean Spicer said alternative facts, right?

02:13:24.000 He wasn't forced to try to like...

02:13:26.000 No, no, it was Kellyanne Conway after the inaugural...

02:13:30.000 Inaugural size of the audience.

02:13:33.000 And he said, look at the picture.

02:13:36.000 It's not as big as...

02:13:37.000 Well, where'd you get that number?

02:13:39.000 That was an alternative fact.

02:13:41.000 Yeah, they seem to keep her locked up more now.

02:13:45.000 She seems to be less... 0.58

02:13:46.000 She just keeps stuffing her foot in her mouth. 1.00

02:13:49.000 Well, they all have to because the boss sends them out to say, tell them this, okay?

02:13:54.000 Can you imagine that poor Sean Spicer guy?

02:13:57.000 When he talks about it now, it's like a guy who's just been freed from prison.

02:14:02.000 Well, he's probably making a lot of money on the lecture circuit now.

02:14:05.000 Oh, I can imagine.

02:14:06.000 Yeah, probably.

02:14:07.000 It's probably very lucrative.

02:14:09.000 Yep.

02:14:09.000 But if you look at governments, you know, centuries past or thousands of years ago, you know, there was lying and corruption and all that.

02:14:16.000 Always.

02:14:16.000 That's old.

02:14:17.000 Yeah.

02:14:18.000 It's just now it's so blatant.

02:14:20.000 The yellow press.

02:14:21.000 I mean, where did that come from?

02:14:22.000 That was, you know, whoever told—no, it was Hearst, William Randolph Hearst.

02:14:26.000 Yes.

02:14:27.000 You know, you give me the war and I'll supply you the photographs or whatever.

02:14:31.000 Yeah.

02:14:31.000 So, you know, that's fake news.

02:14:33.000 Right.

02:14:34.000 Literally fake news.

02:14:35.000 Yeah.

02:14:36.000 The sinking of the main, let's go to war. 0.94

02:14:38.000 What actually happened again?

02:14:40.000 Yeah.

02:14:41.000 Gulf of Tonkin.

02:14:42.000 Gulf of Tonkin, yeah.

02:14:43.000 That Vietnam War documentary series, I just want to put my head in the oven after that and turn the gas on.

02:14:48.000 This went on for so long, so many years.

02:14:51.000 What are we in Afghanistan now?

02:14:53.000 16 years.

02:14:54.000 Vietnam 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.

02:15:02.000 Yeah.

02:15:03.000 This kind of stuff, it's just so depressing.

02:15:06.000 We like to think of our government as having enough checks and balances.

02:15:09.000 I think we need more.

02:15:10.000 I 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.

02:15:28.000 It's one of the things I like about Elon Musk's Let's Go Colonize Mars.

02:15:31.000 In addition to the technological problems, how will they set up...

02:15:35.000 There's like 100 people there, or 1,000, 10,000.

02:15:38.000 What kind of government are they going to have? 0.60

02:15:39.000 What kind of economy? 0.99

02:15:40.000 It's going to be just maniacs. 1.00

02:15:42.000 People that are so crazy they're willing to die on Mars. 1.00

02:15:45.000 Those people are fucking nuts. 1.00

02:15:46.000 It's probably not going to be your average, typical human. 1.00

02:15:49.000 No.

02:15:50.000 Can you imagine you're going to take a six-month spaceship visit...

02:15:55.000 Through the cosmos to land on a planet that you're going to die on.

02:15:59.000 You will never come back.

02:16:00.000 Never coming back.

02:16:01.000 Unless they're so smart they figure out a way to build a rocket and shoot back, which they probably won't.

02:16:07.000 No.

02:16:08.000 No, but so if you went and you were advising, like, what kind of government would you set up?

02:16:13.000 You know, sort of social organization to prevent people from stealing other people's stuff?

02:16:17.000 Or that we've got to work cooperatively to plant the potato things.

02:16:21.000 Right.

02:16:22.000 That's a good question.

02:16:23.000 How do you do that?

02:16:24.000 We have thousands of years of experiments, but they're all messy.

02:16:29.000 Yeah.

02:16:30.000 No one's ever done it right, which leads me again to utopia.

02:16:33.000 Yeah.

02:16:33.000 I mean, is it different to have 10 people, 100 people, 1,000, 10,000?

02:16:37.000 There'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.

02:16:47.000 That's got to happen on Mars.

02:16:49.000 It's going to happen.

02:16:50.000 And also the community gets fractured because you don't know these people anymore.

02:16:53.000 You get 5,000 people.

02:16:55.000 There's no way you can know 5,000 people.

02:16:56.000 You can know 500. Right.

02:16:58.000 There's Mike.

02:16:58.000 Hey, Mike.

02:16:59.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:17:00.000 Hi, Sally.

02:17:01.000 You know those people.

02:17:02.000 Right.

02:17:02.000 You get 5,000.

02:17:03.000 You're like, who's that guy?

02:17:04.000 He just flew here.

02:17:05.000 He's from Chicago.

02:17:06.000 Now he's on Mars.

02:17:08.000 But, you know, even small hunter-gatherer groups, they have conflicts all the time.

02:17:12.000 They've got to sit down in the little dirt area in the commons ground and talk about it. 0.91

02:17:17.000 And then you stole this pig, and the pig died, and now you owe him a pig. 0.98

02:17:21.000 Okay, go get your pig. 1.00

02:17:22.000 Okay, we're going to settle it.

02:17:23.000 But what happens when someone dies? 0.95

02:17:25.000 You know, it's like, okay, you owe ten pigs. 0.97

02:17:27.000 They have these calculations, like this is the equivalent of a life, it's ten pigs.

02:17:32.000 And that's going to happen, no matter what planet we're living on.

02:17:36.000 Yeah.

02:17:36.000 Did you get any personal insight?

02:17:39.000 I'm sure you do after every book you read, or you write rather, but did you get any unique personal insight into this?

02:17:47.000 I did.

02:17:47.000 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.

02:17:56.000 Or even if there is, again, it doesn't really matter because we live in this world.

02:17:59.000 So it turns out there's research that shows that striving for happiness is the wrong metric.

02:18:05.000 That's the wrong goal.

02:18:06.000 That striving to live a purposeful, meaningful life is what we should be after.

02:18:10.000 And that often entails doing things that don't make you happy.

02:18:14.000 They're not fun.

02:18:14.000 They're not pleasurable.

02:18:16.000 So, 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.

02:18:23.000 Afterwards, you get, you know, a sense of endorphins and you feel better about yourself.

02:18:29.000 And 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.

02:18:38.000 Caretaking for a parent, for example, this shows that this is not fun at all.

02:18:42.000 I've done this for two of my four parents, I had step-parents.

02:18:45.000 And this was not fun.

02:18:47.000 It wasn't pleasurable.

02:18:47.000 I didn't enjoy it.

02:18:48.000 You know, schlepping my dad around to doctors and hospitals and, you know, I was just drained by the end of the day doing this.

02:18:54.000 But I felt better about myself.

02:18:56.000 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.

02:19:10.000 That's what makes people feel better about their lives.

02:19:13.000 And really, that's all we can do, and it's enough.

02:19:16.000 It's enough to, you know, sort of feel like my life is well worth living.

02:19:21.000 It's worth getting up in the morning.

02:19:22.000 Without the promise of an afterlife, you don't need that.

02:19:25.000 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.

02:19:32.000 You know, like I do my three-hour bike ride, you know?

02:19:35.000 I've got to get up at 6.30 in the morning.

02:19:37.000 They roll out at 7. It's cold.

02:19:39.000 It's partially dark.

02:19:40.000 I've got to bundle up, and then I've got to strip clothes off as I go, so I have to figure this all out.

02:19:45.000 It's not fun.

02:19:47.000 But after the ride, I'm like, I really feel great that I did this.

02:19:51.000 I had fun with my buddies, but it's not fun like I had a drink with my friends, and that was fun.

02:19:57.000 That's a different kind of fun.

02:19:59.000 And that fun's okay, too.

02:20:01.000 Yes, it's a balance.

02:20:03.000 But it shouldn't all be the fun.

02:20:05.000 Right.

02:20:05.000 A purposeful, meaningful life.

02:20:08.000 There are people that do that.

02:20:09.000 So I talk about Diana Nyad, who I knew back in the 1980s when I was doing Race Across America, the Transcontinental Bike Race.

02:20:16.000 And Diana worked for Wide World of Sports, and they covered the race.

02:20:19.000 So I would talk to her a lot.

02:20:20.000 She's in the back of the truck with the cabin crew.

02:20:21.000 I'm riding along.

02:20:22.000 And she's a really interesting person.

02:20:24.000 She's an atheist.

02:20:26.000 You know, she did the Cuba to Florida swim. 0.99

02:20:28.000 She's an ultramarathon swimmer.

02:20:30.000 And she failed to make it back in her 20s, and she came back when she turned 60 and said, I'm going to go for this again.

02:20:36.000 And it took her four years, and I think four tries to do it, but she did it.

02:20:39.000 So she appears on Oprah's Super Soul Sunday show she had for a while.

02:20:46.000 And Oprah's asking her, well, how do you find awe?

02:20:50.000 No, what do you believe?

02:20:51.000 Well, I'm an atheist.

02:20:54.000 And she described how awestruck she is about the universe and life and what science has told us and so on.

02:21:00.000 And Oprah says something like, well, I don't see how you can be an atheist if you're awe-inspired.

02:21:05.000 And she says, well, I don't see why those are in contradiction.

02:21:08.000 I mean, the whole, you know, living a meaningful life and being engaged in the world and other people, that is spiritual.

02:21:15.000 That is awe-inspiring.

02:21:16.000 You know, you don't need God for that.

02:21:18.000 And 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.

02:21:27.000 You just have to be engaged with the world in some meaningful way, and that's enough.

02:21:32.000 And on that note, Michael Shermer...

02:21:36.000 Heavens on Earth, the scientific search for the afterlife, immortality, and utopia available now on Amazon and everywhere else.

02:21:44.000 Thanks, Joe.

02:21:44.000 Thank you, brother.

02:21:45.000 Appreciate it, man.

02:21:46.000 Thanks.

The Joe Rogan Experience - January 24, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1068 - Michael Shermer

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