The Joe Rogan Experience - #1068 - Michael Shermer

Episode Date: January 24, 2018

Michael Shermer is a science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic. His new book "Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia" is available now.

Four, three, two, one. Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Schirmer. And Heavens on Earth. Yeah. The scientific search for the afterlife, immortality, and utopia. Did you find anything? No, sorry. Nothing? Well, I found interesting journeys that people use to try to get there from both the religious perspective and the scientific perspective. So I do deal

with the monotheism's versions of the afterlife and heaven, you know, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But the core of the book is, you know, the radical life extensionists, the cryonicists, transhumanists, the extropians, the mind uploaders, the people that take all the supplements and all

the whole range there. I find that incredibly interesting. I call it afterlife for atheists. It is, right? I mean, when you think about some of the people that are really like over the top hoping. Did you go to that 2045 thing in New York a few years back? There was a futurist convention with all these people that for whatever reason they have this arbitrary date of 2045. Yes.

It's beginning to push back. This is when the singularity is going to come. all these people that for whatever reason, they have this arbitrary date of 2045. Yes. They've decided. It's beginning to push back. This is when the singularity is going to come. It was 2030, then 2040, now 2045. Yeah, Kurzweil is a big, he's like the grand poobah. He is. Of the download your brain. Yeah, 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. This is it. First time. And the moment, you know, I used to be religious in my youth. And I thought, man, this is like being back in church again. When did you stop being religious? I started in high school and stopped in graduate

school. So it was about seven years. Interesting. You started being religious in high school. Yeah. So it wasn't something that your family introduced you to? My parents were pretty secular. They weren't anti-religious. That wasn't a thing then. But this is 1971 when I was in high school and the sort of nascent born again movement was starting. And there was no religious affiliation. It was just like, it's me and Jesus. That's it. It's just you and the Lord. 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. They like rent time in the church. And they have these meetings where it's just non-denominational. They just talk about God and they get a lot of people fired up. Yeah. And the place I went to, this place called The Barn in La Crescenta where I grew up, and they played guitar. Did it turn into a sex cult?

They usually do. Somebody starts banging people. I was hoping for something like that, but no, no. Yeah, that is one of the problems with utopia, the 19th century utopian experiments. They always turned into this, you know, free sex for the leader. Well, it always seems like whenever there's a man that's in a position where people start worshiping him, you know, and then they start hanging on his every word. He's like, I gotta start fucking some of these people. And then they start hanging on his every word.

He's like, I've got to start fucking some of these people. Well, I cover Jim Jones. And the way I phrase it is that no one joins a cult. 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. And there's pictures online you can see of Jim Jones with Jerry Brown, Governor Jerry Brown in his first round. And they were man in the soup kitchens. He was very liberal, opened to African-Americans being part of the church in San Francisco there, gays, women.

You know, it was a really cutting edge pioneering thing. And at the time, it seemed like, yeah, that's a cool thing. I'm going to join this group. Not me, but, you know, the people that did this in the 50s and 60s when he was coming up and then into the 70s. And then, yeah, he started having sex and then drugs. And then the feds started kind of poking around and taxes. And that's when they went to South America. Speaking of which, I think this week is the Spike special.

It's now the Paramount Network on Waco. Yeah, Waco, yes. Isn't that going on like right now? I think it started Sunday, yeah. Yeah, I think it's a six-part series or something along those lines. See, that's an interesting— That was another one. I'm absolutely convinced most of these guys believe what they say.

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. And, you know, David Koresh, he was right down the barrel. He totally believed, willing to die for his beliefs. And he also was, David Koresh, he was, you know, right down the barrel. He totally believed, willing to die for his beliefs. And he also was having sex with everybody. Yes. It's another one. I mean, it's so common. I have a friend and his ex-girlfriend grew up in one of these sort of religious cults, and it was the same deal. The head guy was having sex with

all the women and, you know, he would have sex with different people's wives and everybody had to let him yeah same thing with the fundamentalist mormons um what's his name that's in jail now jeff jeff jeff jeff jeff is that it jeff jeff jeff uh it's not jeffries yeah maybe it is maybe i'm thinking of jim jeffries my friend the comedian uh but anyway yeah that's you know that's how it corrupted. I don't know if you ever read John Krakauer's book, Under the Banner of Heaven. This is the guy, the mountain climber that did Into Thin Air and the one about the Alaskan kid. Anyway, he wrote this book called Under the Banner of Heaven. The Alaskan kid who died?

Yes. The one they made that movie about? Yeah. What was that movie? Into the Wild. Into the Wild, yeah. So he did Into the Wild, Into Thin Air. Krakauer's a great writer.

So this book, he starts to investigate the murder of this polygamist family in Utah. Just as a journalist, he's going to do a story for The New Yorker or something. And then he realizes this takes him down the path of this incredible world of polygamy, which still goes on. Now legally, it's not legal, but they marry one, and then the others are so-called sister wives and they're just there. And they live on these, in these border towns along the border between Colorado and Utah, like Colorado city. And I've been to some of these places. It's like, it's like a twilight zone episode. You go into this town, gas station or whatever. It's like,

oh, it feels kind of weird here. And, uh, 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. And, you know, he gets this revelation from God that, well, basically he's banging the woman down the street. He's married. And so he gets this revelation from God. And Krakauer has this 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. She's like, oh, yeah? Well, I have to start seeing other guys. No, no, God was very specific about this. It's just for the guys. And how do I know you talk to God? Well, my buddies, they were there. They heard it also.

And this is the first page of the Book of Mormon is an affidavit. These are the people that heard the revelation. And they all sign it. And it's like, okay, so this is how it starts. Well, when Joseph Smith started it all off in 1820, he was only 14. Yeah. Name me a 14-year-old that's not a liar. That's right.

They're just learning how to lie. It's not even like that they're bad people. When you're 14 years old, you are a developing entity. Right. You know, your frontal lobe's not fully formed. You don't really know what you're doing. You're practicing sentences. You know what you're doing. Trying to exert your influence.

And this guy was just very creative. He was, and he got chased out of Palmyra, New York is where he started. And then he moved to Missouri when basically he was in trouble with the law and other issues. And then he got in trouble there and he was killed. And usually this ends a cult when the leader dies. Now there's a kind of a, there's a critical period if you get a new dynamic leader to take over, like in the case of Scientology, David Miskovich took over after L. Ron Hubbard passed over to the other side. And he managed to keep it going. Same thing with Brigham Young. It

was Brigham Young that turned this little cult into a world religion. And they just went further west to Utah to get away from federal authorities. Now, how much of a hit is Scientology taking from that Leah Remini series? I've not seen any't, I've not seen any data, like on memberships, and they're all secret about that anyway. It's proprietary data, so who knows? I can't imagine they could survive, well, they could survive because they have tons of money through real estate investments, but I can't imagine their numbers could be doing anything but shrinking.

Yeah, between the Lawrence Wright book, then the HBO documentary with it featured Carl Haggis and it's crazy. Yeah, and your dialogue with Aaliyah was incredible. And she's just a hero amongst, you know, seculars that fight against cults. That's really the best way to do it. Not top-down laws against cults, unless they're doing something obviously illegal, but just bottom-up members speaking out. I had David Miskovich's dad on as well. Right. That was sad.

Yeah. That was sad because I felt like I was talking to a guy who felt like he wasted his life. Right. And lost his son. Right. And he brought his son into Scientology. The whole thing was, that was really disturbing. Yep.

The whole thing was, that was really disturbing. Yep. It's just, it's just very strange that the United States government is allowing those people to be tax exempt. I mean, with all the evidence that's available, you just go and look 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. 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.

But they're the only major organization I've ever seen that beat the IRS, and they did it through thousands of lawsuits. I think they sued them like 3,500 times or something like this. Well, they had every single member that they could get to do it sue them as well. They were getting all their members to sue it. They were suing.

I think that was the story. Isn't that how it worked? Yeah. And eventually the IRS just said, okay, if I get your tax exemption. I mean, if they're letting the Mormons do it, why wouldn't they let the Scientologists do it? I really don't think any religion should be taxed. It's ridiculous. 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. Well, and they like preachers geters, they can live in a house tax-free. They don't have to pay property tax on the home that they own. So there's a lot of these side benefits also that you don't normally hear about. So gross. So the Freedom from Religion Foundation and some of these other organizations, ACLU, are trying to combat some of this. But legally, how do you distinguish that from, say, a nonprofit like Doctors Without Borders or one of these other groups? Or the Clinton Foundation. Well, yeah.

Yeah. There was some statistic recently in the Clinton Foundation how much money in 2014 they actually donated to Cherry. Oh, Christ. It was like 6%. It was something like extremely low. The rest of it, what, payroll? Yeah, mostly expenses. Private flights. That's what it is. They're scams. Yeah. of it, what, payroll? Yeah, mostly expenses. Private flights.

I mean, that's what it is. They're scams. Yeah. All these things are scams. Yeah. It's just. Yeah, it might be good to just clean house and just no one gets non-profit status or tax-free status. Yeah.

Unless you're just, well, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I feel like there is room in the world for compassionate charities that are actual charities that are really legitimate. There's room in the world for compassionate charities that are actual charities that are really legitimate. There's room in the world for them. And I think that they should have tax exam status. But I think we should be really stringent about what we accept. Yeah, well, the Supreme Court then they have a problem is where do you draw the line? Where do you?

Because somebody says, well, I have a goofy belief that 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. Right. 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. What's the difference? Well, the Mormons are fascinating to me because they do seem goofy when you look at the idea that Joseph Smith, who was a 14 year old found golden

tablets that contained a lost work of Jesus and only he could read them because he had a magic seer stone right and then when The the local townspeople came to see well, where are these stones? all the angels came and took them away because I did not believe like it's so preposterous but Mormons are really nice people totally nice they are the best cult yes they're the sweetest nicest people i think they've made the transition from cult to religion to a religious sect yes and most most christians no longer consider them a cult some evangelicals do because they're pretty far out but most mainstream uh christians say yeah yeah they're christians i mean they accept jesus as their savior and And technically that gets you in the club.

They just got to let all that Joseph Smith stuff go. Yeah. Because the way they treat people is fantastic. 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. 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. And most of the Mormons that I've met that are practicing have been very nice people.

Yeah. And they're serious about their tithing and the 10%. I mean, they have strict rules about this, like capital gains. It's equivalent to capital gains. So if you sell your house and make a profit, you got to give 10% of that to church. Not just your income, not just your paycheck. Yeah. And they're pretty strict about that.

Yeah. And the money, as far as I know, mostly goes for good causes that really does help poor people, things like that. Now, in your book, did you go over near-death experiences? I do, yeah. I have a chapter on that, yeah. What do you think is going on? Like when people, like the ones that have fascinated me are people in the hospital bed that see their body from above and you're dealing with a bunch of chemicals that

are released in the body, right? There's morphine and all sorts of different things, you know, psychedelic chemicals and all the, all these different things that are happening while your brain is, is basically on the edge of death. Right. So it's important to remember that they're, they're near death experiences. You're not actually dead. So it's important to remember that they're near-death experiences. You're not actually dead. So there's a liminal transitional stage there where you're sliding into some other state of consciousness, an altered state of consciousness.

And we know that if you inject or you take hallucinogens, those are molecules that operate on a lock-and-key mechanism with the synapses in your brain, in your neurons. 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. 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. It's kind of a smooth, feel-good, better-than-a-morphine-drip kind of way of making the transition. But we know, for example, that this scientist named Dr. James Winnery worked for the United States Air Force, working with pilots, accelerating them in a centrifuge, and they would black out. This is part of their training. You know, 2Gs, 3Gs, 4Gs, boom, out you go at some point, like 10Gs. 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 and having these sort of weird experiences. And we know exactly what that is. You know, the blood is being compressed to the center of the body, including the center of the brain. The last thing to go is your brain stem, of course, to keep you alive. So the cortex is shutting down from the outside in. And that would create this kind of tunneling effect on the back of your skull where your visual cortex is. That would create some of that. Open brain surgeries. These are on epileptic patients where they cut them open and they poke

around to see where the seizures are starting. And so they could zap those neurons instead of some big crude attack. Anyway, so while they're doing that, they get permission from the patient to wake them up while they're under, and the brain is open and they tap around with electrodes. So this is one way to map what the brain is doing. So what do you report when I tap here? Oh, I just had a vision of my 10th birthday or whatever. And it's like, okay, that's where that's stored, right there. Well, there's another spot right on the temporal lobes just above your ears where you can tap it and the person says, oh, I'm floating out of my body. I'm up by the ceiling now. And you tap a it and the person says, oh, I'm floating out of my body.

I'm up by the ceiling now. And you tap a little to the left. Oh, my left leg is up. My right leg is up. My left arm is floating. My right arm is floating. I'm way up here now. Now I'm coming back down just by, you know, with a rheostat,

just controlling how much electricity is going into the neurons in that one particular spot. So we know for sure that the near-death experiences are in the brain. The experiences that the people report are real. They have experience. But we know it's neurologically based. Now, the counter argument is, yes, of course, you have to have your brain to have experiences. But it's kind of like a doors of perception opening into this other realm that these chemicals allow you to do. It's like, by the way, I've been talking with Graham Hancock about ayahuasca.

He's invited me to come join him in Rhythmia in Costa Rica to try this. 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. 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? Or does it open some door to some other dimension? Okay, that's kind of the... And so the near-death experience believers counter that, well, yes, it's in your brain, but it still is taking you somewhere else. The problem is, is that how you

tell the difference between I had a personal experience that the only way you can share it is if you actually go through it yourself for a scientific community that studies it. Well, there has to be some way to test it somehow or tell the difference between that. So for example- Is that the limitations of the scientific method though? Yes, yes, it is. Because when you're dealing with consciousness and you're dealing with memories and dreams

and ideas, like you can't measure those either. That's right. So I quote two other sources. First of all, I discuss the most famous example is Eben Alexander's trip to heaven. He wrote a book called Proof of Heaven. Now, this is a Harvard-trained neurologist. He knows more about the brain than I do. And so he knows all the research I'm talking to you about, and there's a lot more.

But for him, it was so powerful. Okay, what what's it like? So he talks about in his book, he was in a coma in a hospital. Okay, so he takes this trip and the colors were unbelievably intense and rich. And I felt just deep personal love for the people I saw and oneness with the cosmos. And he goes on and on about this. 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. And I quote from Sam Harris's, the opening pages of Waking Up, you know, I took ecstasy and I'm sitting there on the couch with my buddy and all of a sudden I feel this intense love for my friend.

In other words, the narratives are indistinguishable to an outsider. So how do you know that you're actually going to heaven or you're just having a fantastic trip? Well, it's entirely possible it's both. Well, so how do we know? We don't know. I think the real problem is people saying that they know. Right. Saying that I know that I was in another dimension.

Right. I know. I mean, it's entirely possible that your consciousness is capable of going through these chemical doorways that are created by these molecules. And that it experiences some frequency on the dial. Like if there's a radio dial. Maybe we're at 95.5. But you can get to 97 if you take, you know, X amount of milligrams of dimethyltryptamine, and then you go to

this new place, you know, but you're still physically here. You know, Aldous Huxley's book, The Doors of Perception, which supposedly is where the doors got their name, but no. Oh, really? Somebody told me that's a meme that's not true. I don't know. Anyway, but that's the idea. Yeah. Sounds good. Oh, really? Somebody told me that's a meme that's not true. I don't know. Anyway, but that's the idea, yeah.

Sounds good. But really what you're getting at is a super core problem of what is truth. How do you know? So mystical experiences are by definition personal, and you can't corroborate them through some external scientific method. So, I mean, science is based on the act that we can falsify a claim. We can test it somehow. And that it's not just me pointing to something and say, I think that's true because I experienced that.

You know, so I wrote a column in Scientific American about this called What is Truth? As I start off with like, well, the truth for me is that dark chocolate is better than milk chocolate. And maybe you say, no, milk chocolate's better than milk chocolate then maybe you say no milk chocolate's better than dark chocolate and that you know there's no way we're going to resolve that but is that truth or is that that's just preference that's just that's an internal state or I say the other example I use is you know stairway to heaven is the greatest rock song of all time then you go no no free bird is better than stairway to okay you can't resolve these

things right so you slide there from into things like these personal experiences we have. 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, 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. And I'm not at all sure I could do that because how would I get out of my own head and say, I know for sure that I went to this other place because I wouldn't know. You most certainly don't know. You know that the experience was a real experience in terms of the fact that

you had it, like you felt the things. I haven't done ayahuasca, but I've done the active ingredient in ayahuasca many times. It's dimethyltryptamine. And it's more potent in the form that I've done it in. It's a shorter lasting, much more potent experience. And it's undeniably phenomenal. Really? experience and um it's undeniably phenomenal really it it's very crazy it's it's impossible to describe i would throw some words around and and do my best but it won't work right the the trip itself what's really bizarre there's a lot of really bizarre aspects of it one of the things that's really bizarre is the feeling that you've been there before and the speculation and terence mckinnon talked about this pretty in depth,

one of the speculations is that when you're in REM sleep, you're experiencing some form of dimethyltryptamine in that your brain, your liver, they know for a fact that it's produced by your liver and your lungs. And now they know, there used to be anecdotal evidence that it was produced by the pineal gland, is of course the third eye in reptiles a certain reptiles that actually has a retina I mean it literally is in the center of your head where the Eastern mysticism third eye exists right now

they know that in rats because of the Cottonwood Research Foundation which is something that dr. rich Rick Strassman who was the guy who wrote the book DMT, The Spirit Molecule, he was the guy who got the first federally approved test done on dimethyltryptamine clinical trials. And it's an amazing book, really, really fascinating. And he was a part of this Cottonwood Research Foundation, and they've now proven that in live rats, the pineal gland produces DMT. Obviously, that doesn't produce it in people, but it's very hopeful.

Well, they're mammals. Yeah. And again, if the molecular lock and key mechanism is set up in the brain already for this external drug to work, there must be something like that already that's in the brain that evolved for some reason, presumably. Are you aware of the correlation between this and Moses' burning bush? Oh, I've heard ideas about that, yeah. Jerusalem scholars believe now that the burning bush may very well have been the acacia bush. The acacia bush is a tree that's rich in dimethyltryptamine.

All right. So that this is, well, he's tripping, but I think we're getting, we have to realize when we're translating things from the Bible, you're translating from ancient Hebrew, which is incredibly unusual language where letters also double as numbers. Right. And like the letter A is also the number one and there's numerical value to words. And it's a very weird language to translate to Latin, then to Greek and to English. So when we're hearing that Moses experienced a burning bush and that this burning bush was God and God gave him these commandments on how to live your life, it's entirely possible

that Moses was tripping on DMT and that this burning bush, what we're getting is an interpretation of somehow they had a DMT experience from smoking this bush. Right. Smoking some aspects of it. They figured out how to extract it or how to isolate it, and they had a dimethyltryptamine experience. I love that.

Which pretty much makes sense. Yeah, that totally makes sense. I mean, we get articles submitted all the time at Skeptic Magazine of people that attempt to make natural explanations for biblical phenomenon. 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. Okay, I like all those. We published one in which the argument was that Jesus was never, he never died. 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. 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. Okay. Maybe. You know, I published it because I thought, in France or India or something like that. Okay, maybe. I published it because I thought, yeah, there might be something to that. And I like those kinds of explanations. On the other hand, if you go into sort of your Joseph Campbell, Jordan Peterson role

of thinking, well, maybe these stories are doing something else entirely. None of this stuff actually happened the way it's described. The stories are there to convey some moral homily or some message about how we should behave or act and that kind of thing. So I'm always conflicted about, you know, do I really want a natural explanation for this? Do we need to go that path? Or maybe the stories, they didn't actually happen. Moses never really existed or the people never lived in the desert for 40 years because there's no archaeological evidence that this ever happened. Maybe it didn't happen. Maybe it's a story that represents destruction, redemption, starting over, something like that.

Yeah, more likely, right? Are you aware at all of any of the translations from the Dead Sea Scrolls? I haven't followed that too carefully. There's a fascinating book, two fascinating books that were written by a guy named John Marco Allegro. And John Marco Allegro. And John Marco Allegro was a scholar who was hired to be one of the people to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls. And he deciphered them for over 14 years and wrote a book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. And his interpretation was that the entire Christian religion was a massive misunderstanding. entire Christian religion was a massive misunderstanding. And what it really was,

what the original religion was based on was the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility cults. And all of these ancient parables were really just ways that they could retain the knowledge while hiding it from the Romans. So they did it in these stories and parables. And he even traces back the word Christ to an ancient Sumeric word, which means a mushroom covered in God's semen. Oh, my God. Yeah, this is crazy. That's the Messiah. It's a crazy book.

It was actually bought out by the Catholic Church and then reprinted recently by a guy named Jan Ervin. And he did it like five or six years ago, maybe more. He reprinted. So you can buy it now. But I have two copies of it that were original prints that I bought from a long time ago. Yeah. But they bought it out.

Interesting. So you bought it out to get rid of it. Yes, to get rid of it. 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. So he has two books that are available that are basically supporting this theory. But the idea was that rain would come down and the people at the time, we have to consider the fact that infant mortality was incredibly high back then. People died all the time and fertility was very unknown. No one really understood why people got pregnant or how they got pregnant or what kept people from getting

pregnant. And so people were constantly concerned with the possibility of them going extinct. And they really were concerned with villages getting wiped out, their family getting wiped out. So they were very concerned with fertility. And they thought that when it rained, these mushrooms that came out of the ground, they came out nowhere like you know how quick a mushroom grows it's not like a plant right so if there's a spore which by the way there's spores everywhere there's mycelium that's underneath the earth and everywhere you go there's the potential for the growth of these mushrooms so the rain comes down and then almost instantaneously these mushrooms blossom up out of the ground.

You eat these mushrooms. You have intense psychedelic experiences. You gather them up. You hide it from the Romans. You hide it from everybody. You don't want people to know this is your portal to God. And so they had all these stories that they hid. Now, I don't know if he's right.

And I'm not a religious scholar nor am i an expert in ancient languages but it's incredibly compelling it's really fascinating stuff interesting yeah and he was a legit yeah rock solid scholar right you know he was by the way he was also an ordained minister and the only one that was on the dead sea scrolls uh deciphering group that was agnostic because through his study of religion, once he became an ordained minister and then became a scholar through his study of religion, he realized like, oh, these are all like ancient, weird stories and they're all incredibly similar. And as you go back in time, you find the similarities and Qumran is where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It's the oldest version of the Bible. The only one that's written in, I think it's the only one that's written in Aramaic. They actually had to do DNA tests because the Qumran scrolls were written on animal skins. So they had to do DNA tests on the skins so that when they could match up the pieces to the right animal. 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. Right. It took them forever to do.

Right. 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. Yeah, there's some wacky at the originals. Yeah. There's some wacky stuff in there apparently. Yeah. And also,

you know, intellectual groups like that, they tend to circle the wagons and, you know, we're the elite special experts and you can't look at these things. And I think there's that, but I think there's also like, if you're going to go by the,

the way Christianity is set up, those stories are, this is what everything's based on. Adam and Eve. Right. You know, Moses, Joseph, all these different characters. Right. Those stories are completely different, apparently, in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And there's a lot of wacky stuff. Yes. Right. Things coming from the sky, like alien type stuff. Right. Weird shit. Right. People are probably tripping their balls off.

They're probably, I mean, that's what I think it's entirely possible. Obviously, I don't know. Well, the Zekal story about the thing in the sky with the wheels. The wheel within a wheel. Yeah. And, of course, the ufologists think, well, they were seeing a UFO. Yeah. But no, no, they were tripping.

It's much more likely they were tripping. We know for a fact that psychedelic mushrooms existed back then. Right. It is the easiest thing in the world to see a mushroom, pick it up, and eat it. Right. And people did it all the time. They experimented with food all the time. There were no books to look up to see which are the good ones to eat.

I mean, it completely makes sense. It completely makes sense. Yeah. And there's also, in a lot of really ancient religious art, there's tremendous mushroom iconic photographs of these paintings. There's a tremendous amount of mushroom imagery in ancient Christian art. In fact, the actual halo used to be different. The halo that we see now is like a hula hoop that's around guys' heads.

But the old halo used to look like the bottom of a mushroom cap. Oh, really? Have you ever seen it? See if you can find those images. I wrote an article a long time ago called Santa Claus was a mushroom. Because the Amanita muscaria mushroom that this is all based on looks like Santa Claus. It's a white and red mushroom. And it has a mycorrhizal relationship with the coniferous tree. So that's the mushroom, the Amanita muscaria. But if you scroll down, Jamie, there's an image. See, like, there's all those elves. Like, look at the old, scroll up to that elves. Up.

Those elves. Yeah. That was, it was all Christmas, like, ancient Christmas images were connected to that mushroom. Now scroll down to those images of the halo. Look at the old halo. The old halo looks like the bottom of a mushroom cap. It does kind of.

So the idea was- Those aren't like markings or letters or numbers. Oh no, it's hard to tell. Just lines, yeah. There's a bunch of those though. There's a ton of those images of ancient religious figures with that circle behind them with all those lines that look exactly like the underside of a mushroom cap. Right.

And the idea was that these enlightened people were under the influence of mushrooms. That's why they had the halo on. Right. It was to designate. Like, oh, this is the guy who was on mushrooms who taught us all this stuff. I like that. I like that idea. Makes sense.

It's better than UFOs. Well, we know it's a real thing. Right. I mean, anybody can, look, if you think you're brave, go eat five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms. Good luck. You can't tell me they don't work. They work on everybody.

They don't work whether or not you believe or not believe. They just work. Right. So there's an easy way to, if you just took them, you go, oh, I see why these people thought this. Right. Well, my favorite biblical scholar to read is Bart Ehrman. Do you know Bart Ehrman?

He does. Well, he started off as a Bible scholar because he was a believer. He went to the Moody Bible College. He was going to be a preacher and evangelical and the whole thing. And then he went to, I think it was Princeton Theological, and he found out how the book was really written. You know, it's a wiki. It was, you know, it's an edited volume with lots and lots of people coming in later and modifying this

and debunking some previous Old Testament story or whatever. And then he ended up being an atheist or agnostic or something, whatever he is. He's a non-believer. So this is sort of the atheist's favorite biblical scholar because he doesn't come at it with a religious belief. But he's got a bunch of teaching company courses where he deconstructs how Jesus became the Messiah or God or whatever. And the Old Testament, the New Testament, what these books mean. And it's a little bit like, again, Jordan Peterson, I'm going to talk for two hours about Genesis 1-1. How can you talk for so long about just you know a single chapter in a book you know and well there's there's a lot of historical interpretation so i do know art

historians will look at those halos or the thing in the sky that the ufologist well that's a ufo no no actually at that time that artists were putting those things in the sky for this other reason like okay i didn't know that right so it's good to have some historical background to the text or the again i i don't read hebrew greek aramaic or latin so i'm trusting the king james bible which i really shouldn't so i rely on people like bart who can read it in the oldest version we have and no no that word actually means this oh okay yeah be, I mean, if you could get into a time machine and go to any time in history and just see what it was like, how people behaved. Yeah.

I would be real tempted to go to ancient Egypt, but I'd also really be tempted to go to around the time of Christ. I mean, I don't necessarily even know if Christ was a real human, but I would love to see what life was like back then. 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 as itinerant preacher and so on. So I'm on board with that.

I'm not part of the group, the atheists, to say he never even existed, completely made up story. I don't think so. And I actually, in Heavens on Earth, I conclude, probably erroneously or in the minority position, that when he said, the kingdom is within, or in a more famous passage, that my disciples standing here now will not die before they see the Son of Man return, and these kinds of things in the Gospels, I think his message was, there is no place that

you're going to when you after you die that heaven is here this is it we have to make the most of it and it's it's a message that you would give to a people that are suppressed oppressed by the romans so i call this the oppression redemption myth you know that that it's a story of of it's like the native american ghost dance in 1890, you know, when they're like an oppressed people, they're about to be wiped out, and a Messiah comes and says, you know, it's all going to be great. You know, we're going to change everything. The buffalo are coming back.

If you wear this sweater, it'll be impervious to white man's bullets. And it was a very Christ-like story. 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 got to circle the wagons and take care of our own against these oppressors and make a better life here. Yeah, it just makes sense that there'd be so many parallels. And you think about history and how many people were oppressed and how often these narratives repeated themselves over and over again when people got into power and then invaded others. And yeah, it's brutal history.

I was just I'm just reading Neil Ferguson's new book, The Tower and the Square. It's about the tension throughout all of human history, civilization, between hierarchical top down power structures and horizontal network power structures, and that they're always in tension. But mostly throughout history, it's the top-down power. And so his one chapter opens with that scene from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, when Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood are facing off each other in the cemetery, and Clint Eastwood shoots the other guy, the bad guy.

And then Wallach tries to shoot his gun, and it's empty. And so Clint Eastwood walks over to him, and he says, There are two kinds of men in this world, those who have loaded revolvers and those who dig. You're going to dig. And Ferguson uses this story to say, basically basically that's the history of civilization somebody's got the loaded gun and everyone else is gonna dig yeah it's amazing that we made it this far i mean we live in such i mean i know that there's troubles today and i know we have issues in our in our own society and forget about other parts of the world which there's horrific things happening

right now but in comparison to just a few thousand years ago you would not want to live back there it'd be fun to go to visit if you could come back i would want to go in a giant bulletproof hamster bubble like one of those roll around yeah one of those just like maybe that where you they couldn't see you i just want to be there where they can't see me just i would love to observe and see what because because we have all these, like I'm watching this show Vikings. Right. And, oh man, it pissed me off. Episode two, this guy puts his feet up on the table and he's got rubber bottom soles of his shoe.

I'm like, you motherfuckers. He has a heel that's clearly made in a factory and there's like this textured plastic bottom to his shoe. I'm like, how did no one catch this? You guys have this amazing wardrobe and all these ships. And I'll take a picture of it. No, I'll put it up on my Instagram later. It was so dumb. It made me angry.

But I'm watching this and I'm like, how do we know this was how they talked? How do we know this is what they did? This is some weird interpretation of some historical events. Really hard to interpret. And of course, thoughts don't fossilize. So, you know, I started 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.

I don't actually die. So we know, you know, elephants grieve and mammals grieve and, you know, cetaceans, dolphins, whales, and so on. And chimps, they, you know, they feel these mothers are just, just depressed and almost suicidal when their infants die. But that's different from, you know, conceiving of like, well, I know I'm going to die because I see people around me going to die, but I conceive of maybe some other place to go. 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. So it's not going to be like falling asleep and waking up the next morning

because you have dreams or whatever. It's going to be more like general anesthesia, where it's, you know, 10, 9, 8, boom, boom, lights out, But you just never wake up. So we talk about things like, well, there's nothing after death. But even the word no thing implies there's a thing. Or, you know, you're going to this place, there's nothing. Well, no thing or nowhere, it implies that there's a where that you're not going to. But there's not even a where that you're not going to. And it's like, you know, with Lawrence Krauss and some of these cosmologists, you know, what was there before the Big Bang?

So when you say, well, imagine no universe, you know, no stars or planets or galaxies, no light, but there's not even any space or time. And at some point you just, we don't have the words to even say what it is we're trying to talk about. There's nothing before the Big Bang. You can't even actually talk about it. Well, don't they think now, though, that it's entirely possible that the Big Bang is like a cycle? Yes.

Well, I think it's something like that. It expands and contracts infinitely forever. Yeah, that's a preferable—well, again, we have to come up with some way to talk about it. We also have this weird biological idea based on our own limitations that there's a birth and a death of everything right so i actually have a chapter devoted to deepak chopra in the eastern wisdom traditions i uh we're kind of buddies now and really yeah i went to his center down in carlsbad and spent some time there and you think he's all right he's's a good guy. Yeah, no, he's totally a good guy.

I mean, he's been at times in the past either misleading or misled. Yes, sometimes that's right. You know, some of his recommendations for dietary things or whatever, perhaps. But I know for sure, because I've gotten to know him pretty well, that he totally believes the stuff he says. It sounds like woo-woo, as I used to call it. But a lot of it, if you interpret it from a kind of a Buddhist, Western Buddhist position, you know, when he says, you know, consciousness is the ground of all being, it's the ontological

primitive, these things that sound nonsensical. But if you think about it, 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, but you're in your brain. You know, I call it the weak consciousness principle.

It's just sort of true by definition. Now he goes a little bit further and says, you know, that consciousness is everything and that we bring into existence material stuff by thinking about it or observing it or whatever, and here's some quantum physics experiments that are really spooky. It's like, okay, time out.

Quantum physics is weird and spooky. Consciousness is weird and spooky. That doesn't mean they're connected. He thinks they are. So it's a debatable point, okay. But still, the 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.

You can't help but feeling better. Like, yeah, this stuff works. Where is Carlsbad? It's down by Encinitas, north of San Diego. Oh, okay. That's a beautiful area. Totally beautiful, yeah. Deepak's not done, and he's got a good thing going.

And not just Deepak. You know, there's other people like Sam Harris. Bob Wright has a new book out called Why Buddhism is True. Okay, so it works. So we're back to does it work? What do you mean by does it work? Not just for me. I had an experience, and I felt better.

We've got to do better than that for science. So what Deepak and Bob Wright are talking about is that the Western version of Buddhism may actually work medically. It may lower stress hormones in your body, lower blood pressure, these kinds of things that are measurable. Because that's what we want to know from a Western scientific perspective, not just do I feel better. But 67% of the people who did this particular treatment, they got better by these measurable criteria. Okay. That's, that seems fair enough to me. I'm open to that. Hmm. Now this idea that there's nothing or no thing that we can't even, we can't even wrap our head around nothing because we would think of a thing that there's no thing, but there's never a thing. Right. Right. But how do we, or why, why don't we just say we don't know? Why don't we speculate on the possibility of consciousness being some sort of ethereal

thing or something that exists outside of the Bible? We don't know. We really don't know. That's what I say. I conclude, you know, I don't know. We really don't know. That's what I say. I conclude, you know, I don't know if there's an afterlife or not. 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. We live in this life. So this is the time you've got to do

whatever you've got to do. I call this Alvy's error. Alvy is Alvy Singer, Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall. 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?

He won't do his homework. You won't do your homework? Why won't you do your homework, Alvy? He says, the universe is expanding. He says, the universe is expanding? 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. I'm not going to do my homework.

And his mother yells at him, what has the universe got to do with this? We live in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding. So that's my sort of take-home message there. We don't live in the afterlife or before the universe or after the universe. None of that matters. I mean, it's interesting to talk about, but we live in this life. Yeah.

So this is what really counts. They're fascinating things to contemplate, but ultimately you really, for practicality sake, you really should be paying attention to life. Totally. 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, blah, blah, blah. According to Sean Carroll, that's not correct.

Oh, is that right? Yeah. He explained that. Yeah. This idea of empty space. He's like, that's no, that's just a poor way, is that right? Yeah, he explained that. Yeah, this idea of empty space. He's like, no, that's just a poor way of describing it. Okay. And I would defer to him and let him describe it.

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. Okay. He explained that in a way that completely fucked my head up, too. I'm like, well, I thought I had it figured out, sort of. 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. And he's like, no, it's not even that. I refer to, please, if you're interested, go to the Sean Carroll podcast.

Well, as I understand it anyway, that it doesn't really matter because the atoms are jiggling in a way that this is solid. You can tell it's solid. And this is the level we live at. If somebody drops this on your head, you're in trouble. That's right. Yeah. So, again, we don't live in a quantum world. We live in a macro world where this kind of stuff doesn't matter.

Okay. So, for Deepak, the whole Western way of thinking scientifically, there's a beginning and an end. Time is a linear thing that we can measure, and there's birth and death. All that is the wrong way to think about it. 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. So the physical body is just an instantiation of this conscious thing, whatever this is. And, okay, I don't know. I'd be surprised, but I'd be pleasantly surprised, I'll tell you,

that if it turns out, I close my eyes for the last time and I wake up and there's Deepak and whoever, my friends, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould and all the greats, Asimov are there, everybody's there, Hitch is there. It's like, oh boy, okay, this isn't hell. If that's true, I'm not against any of this. Just like I'm not against Ray Kurzweil and these guys figuring out that we can live 200 years or 300 years. Great.

If you can do it, you know, but let's just, you know, so when they say to me, Shermer, don't you want to live to be 500? It's like, just get me to 80 without prostate cancer. Give me the 90 without Alzheimer's, you know, 100. Give me to 100 so I'm not on a morphine drip in a bed. You know, just quality of life incrementally, year by year. And if it turns out you solve these problems and we lived 150, 200, and then we have a bunch of other problems we don't even know about yet. Okay. Well, I think there's some beauty in temporary things that we, for whatever reason, we're avoiding that concept. We're terrified of

things ending. But there's beauty in things being temporary. You don't want to go to see a movie that's 100 hours long. A movie's a great movie when it's 90 minutes. You're in, you're out, maybe two hours. If it's three hours, if it's Blade Runner or something, something crazy. I quote Christopher Hitchens in my book because I love his analogy. First of all, you're at the party and death taps you on the shoulders as you have to leave. And worse, the party is going to go on without you and they're going to all have fun. It's like, oh, no. But 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.

It's like, oh, that's even worse. I don't want to do anything forever. Right. And imagine the classical version of what heaven is, like a guy with a harp and there's a bunch of babies with wings. Like what? Or even that aside, this is why Hitch called it Celestial North Korea. You have a dictator that knows all of your thoughts

and everything you're going to do. It's like, wait a minute. that does not sound like fun to me. That seems to me to be the inevitable future though. That's one of the things that I'm really nervous about, this dystopian version of technological interference in our lives. I'm entirely convinced that we're going to, inside of a hundred years, live in a world where all of your thoughts really are documented and they have access to them. The same way no one in their wildest dreams conceived of photographs 400 years ago. And 400 years from now, we're 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. Right. That could be. It's going to suck. Maybe we the contents of each other's minds. Right. That could be. Well, it's going to suck. Maybe we need some regulation there for that then. Maybe. Or maybe we just have to accept the fact that most of what goes wrong in the world goes wrong because people can think these secret, sneaky, fucked up thoughts. And when those no longer exist anymore, maybe we'll clean out human behavior.

There was an Outer Limits episode about that in the 1950s. It might have been the other one. Twilight Zone? Twilight Zone, where this guy all of a sudden is able to read the minds of other people. And he's at work and he's listening to all these conversations and all this fun stuff. But then there's this one guy who's really dark. He's going to come in and blow everybody away. 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. I was just angry, and I was just thinking that. So that's like a minority report thing. You could have these thoughts. We know from research that this is David Buss' research. he wrote a book on murderers the murder next door it's called and so he did the research on asking subjects have you ever thought about killing somebody you didn't like and turns out like 80 of guys and 67 of women have had homicidal fantasies in their

life now 99.9 of us never act on our homicidal fantasies but their life. Now, 99.9% of us never act on our homicidal fantasies, but we get mad enough we can imagine. And he's got the narrative accounts because he also asked him, tell me what you would do. And oh my God, they're just incredible to read. Like I would break every bone in his body and then I would pull out his fingernails and then they go on and you're like, holy shit. But it's just fantasy. It's just fantasy, yeah. Well, some people have suicidal fantasies. Yeah, that's right. There's people that have fantasies of jumping off of a giant building. Right.

You know, I mean. But most don't act on it. Most don't act on it. Right. 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. And should we punish them?

No, of course not. Of course not. In the minority report scenario, it's like, okay, we found out that this guy's thinking about robbing the bank. So he had a fantasy about it. He's not going to do it. I've thought about doing that. You have? Not really.

Not really. But just kind of a fleeting. But I was like, what would I do if I had to rob this bank? I mean, I've never actually considered robbing a bank, but I thought, okay, I'm at the bank. What if I just decided to pull out a gun and everybody get the floor. Where's the, where's the cameras? Where's the security guard? You know, like you've seen so many movies.

It's a, if you're bored, you know, but today that's another thing. People are rarely bored because when they are, they just pull out their phone and stare at pictures of other people's butts. Right. It's like, you know, you just pull out Facebook or Instagram and no longer bored. 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 G.E. 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, and he wanted to know, are there golf courses and tennis courts in heaven?

Because I got to have something to do. I'd be bored. And I thought, I have no idea. You won't need that. Yeah, I know. You're going to be with Jesus. No one wants to play golf. God.

And then I also quote from Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God monologue. 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? So they tell her the whole thing, 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, let's see, I had uterine cancer, so I had my uterus taken out. Do I get my uterus back when I go to heaven? They said, yeah. She goes, I don't want it back. She says, what if you had a nose job and you liked it? Do I have to get my old nose back? That's true, right?

So I opened this little funny story because it gets to the problem of identity. Who are you? So if you're resurrected with Jesus, the earlier Christian sects before Descartes introduced dualism, they believe that when you're resurrected after your death, you are physically there in heaven, physically, and your soul, the whole thing. It's just one thing. So the question is, well, how old are you when you're there?

So you're brought up, and there you are sitting next to Jesus and God and whatever. So they, okay, 30. 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?

Oh, no, you get all those memories. of my life for the last 33 years. Oh, no, you get all those memories. 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, the memories are always changing and edited and forgotten or modified,

particularly based on life experiences that happened afterwards. So in your 20s, you go to this college or you marry this person, you take this job or modified, particularly based on life experiences that happen afterwards. So in your 20s, you go to this college or you marry this person or you take this job or whatever, you don't really know what the impact of those decisions are until much later in life, which is why I always think it's ridiculous for people to write memoirs in their 20s or 30s because they're celebrities. You have no idea what those things actually mean until much later. So this is the problem of who you are.

So first of all, we already know that none of your body is the same material it was, say, a decade ago. Your cells are all recycled. The molecules and atoms are gone. There's new ones that replace it. It's the pattern. It's the pattern of information that represents you, Joe Rogan. This is what you look like. These are your memories.

So somehow this has to be copied. So in the Ray Kurzweil scenario of the singularity, we're going to upload the mind. They're going to copy your connectome, all your memories in your synapses. Okay, so right away there's the problem of, well, which memories? Well, all of them. There are no fixed set of memories that are you. Your memories are always changing. So the moment you take a snapshot of it, that's just a fixed point.

That's not you, really. You are this whole long continuum that's always kind of flexible and changing. So there's that. And then there's the problem with the mind-uploading scenario is there's two kinds of cells. There's the memory self, mem-self, of all your memories. And then there's the point-of-view self, the POV self. So when you go to sleep tonight, you wake 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 same thing

with general anesthesia 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 in 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. I don't see how this could happen. That is, if we copied you, your connectome, everything, all your memories. So we had a Joe Rogan number two copy ready to go.

But instead of you dying, let's say we had a sophisticated fMRI brain scan machine, slid you into it, copied your connectome, uploaded it into the cloud or whatever, and then we slide you back out and you're standing there. You're still looking at the world through your eyes. That's just Joe Rogan number two, a copy. And no more do you look at that than a twin looks at its sibling and says, well, there I am. No, no, you're still standing there. No, no, I'm here. That's just a copy of me. him. No, no, you're still standing there.

No, I'm here. That's just a copy of me. And so this to me seems a central problem with the mind-uploading scenario. It's just a copy. Did you see the thing in National Geographic today about the cloned monkeys? No. They've managed to actually clone monkeys? No. And yeah, Jamie,

I tweeted it earlier today. It's crazy. And they're speculating that if they can do that to monkeys, they're going to be able to do that to humans. But again, so who is that? If there's a Michael Shermer, is it your twin? I mean, like when you meet twins, it's very weird. Like I used to date a girl who was a twin. 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. You're her sister. Right. Super, super confusing. So they weren't the same person, but they pretty much were. Yeah. Here's the, here's the article.

Scroll up there. Clone monkeys created in the lab. Now what? Yeah. Okay. Well, so you're making copies. Yeah. So it's a copy, but it's not the same person because they have their own individual life experiences.

The moment you and your copy start diverging away and leading different lives, you're going to have different memories. You should have on your show Nancy Siegel from Cal State Fullerton. She's the world's leading twin expert, and she has all these great scenarios. She has a new book out called Accidental Brothers, and she has another book out on Switched at Birth and Nancy Siegel. 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. Twins separated at birth and raised in different environments. Like, you know, the one raised in a Jewish home, the other raised in Nazi Germany. They get together. They have the same watch. They wear the one raised in a Jewish home, the other raised in Nazi Germany. They get together.

They have the same watch. They wear the same kind of clothes. They use the same toothpaste. They married women that look pretty similar. You know, so there's a lot that genetics does that is very subtle. There's no gene for, like, we're both Catholic or wearing this kind of clothes. 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. So by chance, you're more

likely to get similar clothes. There's no genes for clothes, but something like that body type or temperament, you know, you have a certain kind of temperament, at least half of which is heritable. So you're more likely to choose certain professions or prefer certain hobbies or activities or pick spouses that are kind of, you know, that would gel well with that temperament. That's if you make good decisions, though. Well, yeah, there is that element of volition. The choices you make in life do diverge a little bit. So twins are a little bit different, you know, from that.

But so a clone, you know, from that. But so a clone, you know, again, the moment you start leading separate lives, why the copy of you is not going to be you in heaven. And religions have the same problem. You know, if God is able to reconstruct your body like a transporter, I got into the world of Star Trek when I was writing this book. It's like, oh my God, this whole webpage is devoted to what does the transporter do? It's like, okay, first of all, you know there's no transporter, right? It's just science fiction. It can do whatever it wants. But is it copy and paste? They just copy

you and reconstruct you with atoms on the other side. Or is it cut and paste? Or is it they actually move the atoms and... Yeah, reconstruct it. Anyway, but it does get to the problem of identity. Well, what are you really? Because you don't have to.

It's not the matter, the material. It's really the pattern, which is why the singularity people focus on the cloud and uploading the mind because it's the information. But the information is always changing, and how does the point of view go with it? 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. 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. 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? Yeah, that's right. Except your neurons.

That's right, yeah. So are we just our neurons? That's the idea. That's what the singularity people are. So you're not your nose job. That's right. You're not your fake butt or your fake lips. That's right. You're neurons only.

But even there, see, the transhumanists, they imagine this transitional stage where you start wearing contact lenses, say, they can call up the Internet, and the moment I see you, Joe Rogan, the name pops up, your Wikipedia page pops up, and now I have this information. So I'm not bionic, but I'm also not just human. I'm transhuman. Okay, so then who are you? So these are sort of the transitional stages. So a cochlear implant is kind of a brain chip.

So a cochlear implant is a kind of a brain chip. And, you know, probably I think you know about that research of the paraplegic quadriplegic man who can control his computer cursor. And now they can actually control a fake artificial limb just by thinking about it. So they put a chip in his motor cortex that reads the thoughts. So he has these thoughts and he's been trained to, you know, pull the cup of water up to his mouth and drink with the artificial arm. At some point, say 50 years, 100 years from now, we could have it all mapped and you could control your whole environment just by thinking. I would like to hear Mozart. And you just think about it and then music in your house comes on and it's Mozart.

Well, I freak out about Siri sometimes. My daughter asked me about a song that she likes and we were in the car and I pressed the Siri button on my phone and I said, hey, it's some... What's that new musical with what's his name? Hugh Jackman? The Wolverine guy? Some musical that's based on Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

She wanted the song. I literally asked Siri to do it, and it started playing it. Instantly. Like, within a couple of seconds. I'm like, this is crazy. Yeah. That this thing just pulled it out of the sky.

Yeah. And it's playing it in my car. Yep. I did that the other night. I wanted to hear Bob Seger's Hollywood Nights. I'm not sure why I got that in my head. And it popped right up. There's a YouTube video of him from 1978 just rocking it. It's like hear Bob Seger's Hollywood Nights. I'm not sure why I got that in my head. And it popped right up. There's a YouTube video of him

from 1978 just rocking it. It's like, wow. It's amazing. I'm just driving on the 101 freeway heading back home to Santa Barbara. I was like,

I'd like to hear Bob Seger's Hollywood Nights. Wow. Boom, there it is. Yeah. The Greatest Showman. That's the movie. Oh, okay.

There we go. My daughter loves that movie. So she wanted to hear the song, but I just talked to the phone and it did that. When are we going to get past the talking to the phone? Right. You just think it. Yeah, because I'm pretty comfortable with looking for it.

Let me, hold on, honey. Let me find it online. Right. I'm going to go get it. Okay. Let me download it. Let me pay for it. Let me use my thumbprint or whatever.

And then now it's just talk to your phone. Right. When is it just pull it up? Pick it up. I want to hear Led Zeppelin, Whole Lotta Love. I just start thinking. And it starts playing. When is that going to happen?

That's probably coming. We're probably all going to give in to some sort of a chip, something that we can get implanted, simple, easy, transdermal device. Right. You know, fashionable. You go to a club, it glows. Right. Ooh, you got the new one. 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. 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. And I find him to be very interesting.

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. He's a genius. He's a bona fide genius. But I also found it incredibly sad, his motivation, like what he's trying to do. You know he's trying to recreate his father. His father, yeah. Yeah. Did you see the documentary about him?

Yes. Yeah, Transcendent Man. It was kind of sad. Yeah. Dark. Yes, very dark. And he's got all, his basement is filled with all his dad's stuff. Yeah.

And, you know, he's always talking about life, life, life. But he's just really kind of obsessed with death. This is what I worry about is that, again, back to the Alve's era. You know, we don't live in the next life, whatever that is, or the far future. We live now. And don't miss it. Yes. 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. So a couple hundred million dollars working on 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. So a couple hundred million dollars working on aging problems. Great. Again, if you can solve Alzheimer's or these things, that's great. But don't be so focused on the next life you miss out. Well, I don't necessarily know if he is so focused that he's missing out. I don't think he's missing out.

And I think he has extraordinary vision in terms of what is possible with the exponential increase of technology. So I think having a guy like that around, it's helpful. I think it's beneficial to everybody. It's incredibly fascinating to hear him talk about those things.

I'm too dumb to know if he's right. When I'm hearing him talk, I'm like, you really think? Yes, by 2045, we'll be downloading our brain into a computer. I'm like, man, I'm too dumb to know if he's right. You know, when I'm hearing him talk, I'm like, you really think? Yes, by 2045, we'll be downloading our brain into a computer. I'm like, man, I don't know. That shit seems close. It's 2018, man. I mean, when I interviewed him, I think it was probably 2013 or somewhere around then.

Although, you know, to be fair, if you said a century ago when they had telegraph, well, more than a century ago, just the invention of the telegraph. Well, 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. It'd be like, you're insane. What are you talking about? What are you smoking? And here we are. So 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. This is what science fiction writers tell me. If you set it off far enough, readers are willing to suspend disbelief because, yeah, it seems possible. Look what we've been able to do. So, okay, fair enough. If we can do that, I'm all for it. That'd be great. Yeah, I'm all for it too, but boy, I don't know. I've been very convinced and more so over time that human beings in this form, that our time is limited. 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.

It's going to be an actual thing. It's just going to be non- It's going to be an actual thing. Right. It's just going to be non-biological. Right. And I think it's, I think that's what life is outside of earth. I think that humans, what we do with our curiosity, if there's other curiosity in,

in the universe, other curious life forms, I think they probably do the same thing. They realized that, well, there's a massive limitation in terms of biological tissue and in terms of our ability to evolve. Like, well, I could just reprogram a phone.

Your phone evolves way quicker than people do. Right, right. I mean, go back to look at your, I have an iPhone X, right? Now, go back and think about an iPhone 1. That's a piece of shit, you know? Why'd you have to go back to that? That's only a decade. Only a decade.

You had to go back to that clunky, stupid looking thing. 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. They're going to be computers or machines because that's the only thing that can survive the long distances, long time of interstellar spaceflight.

Yeah, I think we're just so wrapped up in the idea of biology being so important that, like, you have to it has to breed the normal way with eggs and sperm. Otherwise, it's bullshit. I mean, we think of it, you know, biology is, you know, wet stuff. But really, they're machines. A cell is a machine. It's just processing molecules. Right. Which is what nanobots are going to do.

They're going to process molecules. Yes. So it's really just, they're all machines. Yeah, they're cellular machines. And, you know, when they talk about things like quantum computing and things get really squirrely. Like, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. What are you saying? What do you mean by quantum computing?

Right. Like, where is this? Is this a computer? Like, does, whoa, wait a minute. What do you mean by quantum computing? Right. Like, where is this? Is this a computer? Like, does this use, like, a regular motherboard? Like, how does it have a CPU? Like, what's next stage after that? Like, what, 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?

Right. You know, so Ray makes the point that, you know 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 and you just ingest these little computers and they go in there and they fix your mutant DNA and the bacteria that are in there. They repair blood vessels, that sort of thing. This is what he's envisioning. And I can conceive of it in principle, I think, but I forget whose law it is.

Any trend that cannot go on forever won't. Ooh. Right. So if it gets to a certain... Like Moore's law, the doubling of, that can't go on forever. Now the quantum computing people say, Oh yes, that's right. It'll stop.

But we're going to do this other thing that is completely different. Okay. Okay. Fine. Well, boy, I just, I mean, there's, there's so many things to speculate about in terms of our potential future. And the fear of death is a very odd one. It's normal.

It's natural. It's biological. Animals have it. Every human has it. Everyone's scared to die. No one's scared to go to sleep, but everyone's scared to die. Right. And it's this idea that this would be the end of the party.

Right. But really, there's nothing to fear because you won't even know it. Right. As long as you're alive, you're sentient and conscious of existence and then not. So, I mean, when you ask people, quote surveys in the book, you know, how long would you like to live? It's always about what the average lifespan is now. People go, oh, yeah, I think I'd like to live in, you know, 82 or so. Right.

But if we fast forward, you know, 80, okay, your time's up. Tomorrow is your day. No, wait, give me another week, you know. Okay, here's a week. Okay. I want to say goodbye to everybody. I need another month, a year. I want to run my first marathon. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Yeah. I contend that it's a silly argument that, you know, that people say, well, I think we should have a limit on our lifespan and that we need to die, you know, but you personally, are you going to check out when it's your time? No, of course they wouldn't. As long as we're talking about being healthy and cognitively aware, then most people want to continue. I mean, severely depressed, suicide, yes, that's an issue, but most people would want to continue on. 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. Yeah, as long as everything's healthy. My grandmother had a stroke and they gave her 72 hours.

She wound up living 12 years. Oh, wow. And it was awful. She had an aneurysm. Oh, the 12 years was awful? Oh, it was awful. Oh, okay. It was horrific. Okay. Yeah, it was really bad. She was bedridden. She would moan. She was always in pain. When she died, it was a relief for everyone in the family. It wasn't like, oh, we lost grandma. Right, yeah. It was like, grandma's in peace now. Because for the longest time, she was in agony. I stayed with them. When I first moved to New York, they lived

in New Jersey and I lived with them for a few months while I was saving up money for an apartment. And it was horrific, man. She would be moaning. And my grandfather had to take care of her and they had a nurse would come over and take care of her and they had a nurse would come over and take care of her as well it was just well i think europeans have a more uh advanced humanist type perspective on that euthanasia yes physician-assisted suicide but they're doing that now in a few states yes but there's still this kind of sort of christian ethic of you know only god can decide that you can't make those decisions. And these are people more like Christian conservatives who otherwise think the government should stay out of your life and you make your own decisions and you take personal responsibility,

except when it comes to your death. Like, wait a minute. Why can't I choose that? Well, they worry about abuse. Okay, fine. Just have rules about, you know, you have to sign something. You have to, like Kevorkian, he used to videotape, you know, his patients saying, I choose to do this when they could still do it. Anyway.

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, how we deal with death, it's always been a huge problem. It makes people uncomfortable. And, you know, how we talk about it matters. And, I mean, one of the motives for me writing this book is, like, okay, I've written about science and pseudoscience, science and religion, science and God, science and morality. But, you know, really, this is the big question, you know, what happens when you die. And this is something that, you know, that people think about a lot, or they've thought about a lot for a long time. And, you know, so, and nobody knows, I contend, you know, nobody knows for sure. And so we write these stories

that kind of make us feel better. 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. But if you ask people, do you walk around in a state of fear of death? No, I don't. Okay, it's unconscious. Okay, maybe, but how do you know if it's unconscious? We have these experiments where they prime the brain and sort of try to trick it out of you. Well, aren't most people busy? They're busy, that's right.

The fear of death comes when you're laying alone at night. Right. You're like, what, is there going to be a day when I don't wake up? Right. Maybe I'll die tonight while I'm sleeping. But you never know. Yeah. It just lights out and that's it. Well, that's the I don't wake up. Right. Maybe I'll die tonight while I'm sleeping. But you never know. Yeah. It just lights out and that's it.

Well, that's the greatest way to die ever. Right. Go to sleep and don't wake up. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Die in your bed peacefully. Yep.

Yep. That's a good way to go, which is why hospice is probably a really good thing that we're getting better at in the West. Yeah. 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. As your brain is shutting down, you feel this sort of glow or this sort of good feeling

that, you know, there's a tunnel you're going to pass through, the sense of transitioning to some other place. And this starts off very early in life. I cite research by Paul Bloom in his lab at Yale with little kids. So he presents them with this little puppet show. And so you have this little mouse and this alligator, and the alligator munches the mouse, and he's dead. Where is the mouse now?

Oh, the mouse is in this other place, and he misses his mom, and he's hungry, and he's scared. And this is like preschoolers. So it starts pretty young, this dualistic idea that something transcends the physical body. There's something else that continues. And I contend that that's because you can't conceive of nothing. I don't perceive my own brain operating, so it feels like thoughts are floating around up there. And I feel like kind of a set of patterns that would continue beyond the physical body.

It feels that way. So our intuitions, I think, naturally lead to the idea of some kind of afterlife or something continues. It is possible or is it possible that all these different cultures and all these different people have these concepts because maybe something does happen. That's right. Yeah, it could be. Something could possibly happen to whatever we think of as consciousness, whatever we think of as you. 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.

And, I mean, this is a big part of what your life is. Right. You know, and at the core of all that is the self, is you. Right. Our consciousness, whatever that means. Right. It's never been, no one's ever been able to take consciousness and, well, we extracted it and we put it in this beaker and now we weight it.

Right. Consciousness is 28 grams or whatever. Remember that stupid thing that people used to think when you died? Right. Yeah. 21 grams, yeah. That's it, 21 grams. Yeah.

But imagine if that was the case, and before that all happened, you went and downloaded your brain to some supercomputer. Right. So you've got two yous. You've got one you that lives in hell on earth living forever never going to die just one mundane trip to starbucks after another and you're just trapped you're trapped in a computer which is what ray kurzweil was saying like what if like you what if they give you the opportunity to be trapped in a computer but you're trapped in an iphone one

essentially right once you're in you're in, you're in. You can either wait and hang on for a few years, and you will get a really good computer. We're thinking quantum computers. We're going to go live around 2030, 2032, but we can get you in now. I mean, you're looking pretty. You're coughing a lot, Mike.

Right. I mean. Well, that's like with the cryonics people. I remind people you know you're being frozen on the worst day of your life you know the day you died yeah and you can't do it earlier because the state treats it as a form of burial legally so you can't be you know you can't get the treatment in the throat in the injected with the antifreeze and all that before you're actually dead or they inject you with antifreeze yeah a type of antifreeze and the

purpose of that well you're dead so it doesn't really matter. But the purpose is to keep the cells from shattering because the freezing process will do that. So they've gotten much better about that. And what's actually frozen is this sort of gelatinous mass that's vitrified. It's called a vitrification process. So it's a little bit like, remember the touring, the bodies, where they had the dissected bodies and they were sort of this hard plastic. Plasticine, right?

It's a plasticine, yeah. So this vitrification is sort of like that. And then that's frozen. And as far as I'm concerned, everyone frozen today, including Ted Williams and his head in Arizona there, will never be brought back. Isn't Walt Disney frozen too? No, I tracked that down. It turns out the Alcor Cryonics Foundation opened its doors and released a press release the same day Walt Disney died. And these two stories got conflated.

That makes sense. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. The Ted Williams one is sad because they didn't have the money for the whole body, so they just took his head. Right. Fuck. Man.

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. So if you started young, you had, say, a quarter million dollar insurance policy policy a few hundred dollars a year premiums if you started super late the premiums would be much higher but but it's not like you're shelling out a quarter million dollars right out of your checkbook right and then when you do die what happens if you get defrosted because that has happened right haven't there been no well oh well what happens is is you look like a bowl of melted strawberries that were frozen.

It's just mush. That happened to one of the companies that does this. They had a power outage. Right. Yeah, you don't want that. Yeah, I'm not sure why Alcor is in Arizona. Oh, that's a terrible place. Shouldn't they be like in Antarctica or something?

And there's other deeper issues with this whole idea. Shouldn't they be like in Antarctica or something? And there's other deeper issues with this whole idea. Because if you're going to be frozen for 1,000 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? It might be underwater. Anything could happen. Anything. You'd have to transport your body in some sort of one of them big old electric Tesla trucks.

Big cooler. Send you to Mars. Yeah, send you some new spot. Yeah. And again, if they somehow jump-started the body, would you wake up like you just had a long sleep? Would you still be in there? I'm not at all sure that you wouldn't just be something like...

If the memories weren't preserved very well, then you would just be a zombie. If you don't know who you are, there's no point in doing it. I think the idea is freeze you, and then one day they'll have the technology to thaw you out, and everything's going to be amazing. And they'll be able to reverse aging and bring you back to when you're 18. Right. That's right. Yeah.

But here's the thing about memories. But here's the thing about memories. What, like if you do die and say if you do go to heaven, you have the memories of your life. Are those memories just like the memories of today, fallible and squirrely? Right. And if they're not, then that's not really you. Right. And if God resurrects you physically, what's to stop you from aging and getting Alzheimer's or whatever?

Well, God's going to prevent that by reengineering you. Well, then that's not really me that's up there. It's some superhuman, transhuman. I had a conversation with some friends of mine who are Mormon, and they couldn't believe that I don't have religious feelings. And one of the things that this lady said to me, I'll never forget, she goes, you don't believe in an afterlife. How do you get up in the morning? That's literally what she said. How do you get up?

And I go, I love life. I enjoy this experience. I'm enjoying being here at dinner with you guys. I'm going to do some stuff tomorrow I've got planned out, looking forward to it. Don't you enjoy your time? Like, does everything have to be for a reward in some place that you're not even totally sure exists after we're done here? It's such a weird thing to say, because I don't think they even think about that. 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.

I doubt it. I think it alleviates the pressure. I mean, I think that's a big part of what it is for people. It alleviates the concern for the future. Like, oh, you don't have to worry. God's got it. God's going to take care of it. Right.

Everything happens for a reason. That's right. God's going to take... Everything does happen for a reason after it happens. Right. That's right. After it's over, you can go back and go, yeah, it happened for a reason. It became this and that became who I am, so it all happened for a reason. It became this and that became who I am.

So it all happened for a reason. That's right. Okay. Yeah, you're right. But. Of course, usually what they mean is somebody's pulling the strings to make it happen. Not just the pathway that you happen to have gone down. Exactly.

They always mean that God has some grand, very mysterious plan. And I could kind of see how that feels good. It feels good. Like, okay, I'm not alone. There's somebody watching that after me. Not just my spouse and my friends and family, but somebody out there somewhere. I can see why that feels good.

So this is the problem atheists have. Dawkins talks about this, like, what do you say to somebody that's dying? It's like the Ricky Gervais movie, The Invention of Lying, where he tells his mom, well, you get a mansion. Everyone who dies gets a mansion. A mansion? Oh, yeah, it's great. And he goes on and on.

And then 10 minutes later in the movie, he's the Messiah because this meme got out. It's a great story. We can't do that. If you're honest, you can't make up a story. So what do you say? So in secular humanist make up a story. So what do you say? So in secular humanist circles, there's articles about that. What do you say? And it's hard.

You know, you can't promise it. But, you know, reminding people of what a great life they've had, you know, how much they've influenced the lives of other people, you know, and so on. That's really all we have. And, you know, I use the line from Woody Allen in there, you know, who says, I don't want to live on in my work. I want to live on in my apartment. Yeah. Okay. I understand.

But we don't get to do that. No, we do not. And, again, I want to go back to what I said earlier is that you are enjoying this partially because it's temporary. It's part of the thing about a day. Like you don't want to stay up forever. You want to enjoy the day. And then at the end, it's over. And that day is a microcosm of your life. Yeah. It's kind of fun to think, okay, I got eight hours here before 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. And it's kind of fun to kind of see if you can squeeze it all in.

Well, yeah. And knowing that there's a time. If it was a 20 hour window, I, you know, I just start fucking around. Got plenty of time. Yeah. I find I get more done as a person who's very busy with a family and children and all that stuff. Right. I feel like I get more done. That's right's right I don't have time to fuck off that's right I very rarely have time to fuck off yeah I've been distracted the last six months

or a year or so with following Twitter feeds that send interesting articles to read which are interesting articles there's a ton of really good content out there and then podcast your podcast Sam's and Dave Rubin, and just like, wow, this is all good. I really want to consume. But wait a minute. I'm not getting my workout in. I'm not doing this. It's like, okay.

So it's a good problem to have. It's the first world problem to have, as they say. And I think what the transhumanists and the Ray Kurzweil think is heaven would be something like that, just endless streams of content that you can consume. An endless Twitter feed. That's right. Oh, God. Maybe that's not good.

Yeah, I don't know. That could be hell. Yeah, I don't know what he wants. I mean, I don't... The living forever thing is very problematic. It's like, would you be so outdated in 100 years? Yes, totally. I just... And the downloading yourself into a computer thing, too.

What's to stop a guy like Kim Jong-un from downloading himself 100 times? Right. Or 1,000? Right. Or do it every day? Every day makes a new Kim Jong-un. Well, this is one reason that these cult leaders, they do try to do that. Yes.

Through lots of sex. That is kind of what they're doing, right? to do that. Yes. Through, you know, lots of sex. That is kind of what they're doing, right? Right, yeah. Wow. Sending their genes out in the future as much as they can. Let me ask you this then. What is the, why does that instinct exist?

Like, is that a purely a procreation instinct? Yeah, I think so, yeah. So you think that's the religious cult leader instinct? Yeah. It's based entirely on some ancient reward system that's designed to get you to Genghis Khan your genes out throughout the... Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you know, I have a chapter there on why we have to die. I mean, why can't we just be programmed like infants are and babies? You know, the cells divide rapidly and they're super healthy.

I have a young son now. He's 20 months. You know, when he gets a little cut, you can practically watch it heal. It's just incredible. And yet when I get a cut at 63, it takes a couple of weeks to heal. It's like, why can't the system keep going?

And the answer is twofold. Second law of thermodynamics, entropy. Everything is running down. And second, natural selection programmed us to stay alive long enough to get our children's children into the reproductive age. After that, given that we have limited resources and energy in the system we live in,

it's better to allocate the resources to the third generation, say, rather than you. You don't need to live 150, 200 years. In 60, 70 years, your children's children are now in their early 20s and having babies. You're done, as far as natural selection is concerned. Now, I say it in a way like there's a czar or a secretary of the treasury that's allocating resources. You know, there's nothing like that. It's just natural selection, selecting things for whatever's best for survival to get genes into the future. So this is Dawkins' argument in The Selfish Gene, that the gene is the thing we should be focused on, not the body.

Natural selection kind of operates on the body, the phenotype that gets expressed in a physical body. But bodies are just survival machines that the replicators build to keep going. So the replicators are immortal. The species is immortal, in a immortal. The species is immortal in a sense. Our genome is immortal. That's why Dawkins called that river out of Eden. One of his book titles is that the river out of Eden is eternal.

As long as our species doesn't go extinct, we live forever. But you and I, as just survival machines, we're just the gene's way of keeping itself to the next generation. So you're really only good for maybe 60, 70 years for a human timescale. Your kids' kids get to survival age, you're done. And this is the problem that all the radical life extensions have. The whole system starts to fall apart around the same time, like mid to late 80s. Things start falling apart.

If you can make it into your 90s and you're still reasonably healthy, that's really good. Maybe you had Mel Gibson in his dock on, you know, with the stem cells. All that stuff is only going to push us further, further, more of us to the upper ceiling. We're not going to break through that upper ceiling, about 120, without something hugely, completely re-engineering, maybe a CRISPR technology that re-engineers the genome to stop all this stuff from happening. But, you know, we have four billion years, well, three and a half billion years or so of life of that continuity of the genome. And it's all built into there in every single system, every cell, all parts of your cell, they're all going to age. And so, you know, people like Aubrey de Grey.

I don't know if you know Aubrey. Yeah, I've had him on. Oh, yeah, yeah. He's great. I love this guy. And I love that beer is his favorite thing that he thinks is going to be part of the process. Okay, I'll have a few beers if this is going to help. And even if it doesn't, that's okay.

Yeah, that was one of the things that made me most skeptical of him. Was the beer? Yeah. I'm like, that's an amino suppressant. That's right, yeah. You're drinking poison. Yeah, that was one of the things that made me most skeptical of him. Was it the beer? Yeah, I'm like, that's an amino suppressant. You're drinking poison. I mean, it's a mild poison. Yeah, that's right. It's delicious mild poison.

That's right, yeah. That's not good. You drink that shit all day long? I was like, this is weird. Then I was talking to somebody that interviewed him and said he was clearly drunk. I was like, really? And she was like, yeah, I interviewed him, he was drunk. He was drinking beer and he was drunk. And she was like, and it wasn't, it wasn't late in the

day either. Started, started his, uh, his fountain of youth very early. Yeah. He's a fascinating guy too. Cause he's not really much for exercise either. No, uh, nutrition. A lot of these guys that are into this, they don't, to me, they don't look healthy. No. No. And the one thing we know for sure in terms of longevity to get you closer to the upper ceiling and more of is don't smoke, don't drink too much, exercise every day, especially cardio. Yes. You know, and just eat right. Eat right.

Healthy foods, whole foods. Yeah. I'm relieved to hear, you know, that meat and eggs and butter, this is all okay now, good. Because it always felt like this was a balance with the salads. Well, salads are good too. Salads are good. Balance it. What's not good is sugar.

Sugar is the devil. That's the worst. That's right. It's amazing how- Now, I love listening to your podcast with Nina Teicholz. Yes. 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. And I was cycling a lot and I wasn't, not only was I not losing weight, I'm putting weight on. I got like, you know, like carrying around this extra 10 pounds. It's like, but I'm eating granola. It's healthy. Right.

No. Well, especially the granola that most people buy that has sugar just laced all over it. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of people that eat things that they think are healthy. There's this great bread that my wife brought home. It was like Dave's Super Bread or some shit like that. I forget what it's called.

But I bit into it and I was like, this is cake. This might as well be cake. And then I looked at it and there's like massive amounts of sugar in it. I was like, oh, okay. I didn't even realize how much sugar is in bread until my wife's from Cologne, Germany, Jennifer, and they have real bread

in Germany. I mean, you pick up a loaf of bread, it's like four pounds. It's like a thing of lead because it's got nuts and it's super heavy and rich and there's no sugar right and it tastes very different but once you get used to it it's way better well it's also they're dealing with heirloom wheat in most of the european countries what we've done from i guess the early 1900s is slowly change what wheat used to be into. My friend Maynard explained it to me because he has a restaurant, and they grow pasta that's from heirloom wheat. And he said that the wheat that you're getting today,

if you have the same amount of acres, you get a much higher yield. It's a bigger plant. It's a big, fluffy thing. And it also has much more complex glutens in it. So people have more of an issue digesting it. You're getting a lot more gluten insensitivity today than we've ever had before. And that's all because of this manipulated wheat. So we started buying pasta from Italy.

You can get heirloom pasta that's grown in Europe. And it tastes different. It makes you feel different when you eat it. It doesn't feel like a brick in your stomach. I mean, it's still pasta. It's still carbohydrates. It's not the best stuff for you, but it's certainly better and it gives your body a better feeling. Right. Yep. Bread without sugar, pasta without sugar. Yeah. Well, you're going to get some yeah it's just it's different it's and you know bread look bread is just bread it's not good for you it's not i love that story from gary tobs that um you know when they started uh taking um well when they started making the transition from eating meat to eating carbohydrates and it you know tasted like crap it's like people don't

want to eat cardboard so we got to put something in there to make it taste good. Sugar. Yep. It was like, oh, right. 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. Okay. Well, I'm sure you read the New York Times article about how the sugar industry bribed scientists to say that sugar was the issue

with heart disease and to take the blame, excuse me, to take the blame off sugar and put the blame on saturated fat. Right. It's stunning. It's stunning how many people to this day will just parrot that back and think that that's the fact. Right. Oh, it's saturated fat.

It's terrible for you. Right. Like, meanwhile, it's no. Cholesterol is terrible for you. No, it's actually the building blocks for hormones. It's literally the substrate for hormones. Right. Like, meanwhile, it's, no, cholesterol is terrible for you. No, it's actually the building blocks for hormones. Right. It's literally the substrate for hormones. Right.

That's what your body's made out of. The cell walls are, you know, you need cholesterol to build those. Yeah. You say that to people. They're like, what are you talking about? You're talking crazy. No, cholesterol is going to kill you. It's going to kill you, Michael Shermer.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's weird. Nina's book is excellent. And there's quite a few you, Michael Shermer. That's right, yeah. Yeah, it's weird. Nina's book is excellent. And there's quite a few books. Gary Taub's book is excellent as well. There's a lot of people now that are shifting their diet over to, you can call it paleo or Marxism calls it primal.

Primal. Primal blueprint. Right. But you're essentially just eating vegetables and fish and meat and eating healthy things. Eating avocados and coconut oil and healthy fats. And that's what your body craves. Right. And once you get used to it, one of the things that's incredibly beneficial is I tell people I don't get hungry during the day like most people do.

I'm not starving. Right. And I don't crash. I don't need naps. What do you have for breakfast? Do you eat before a workout or after? I eat after a workout. What I like to do is fasted cardio.

I usually run in the morning or do yoga in the morning with no food in my stomach. So it's like 11 or 12 before you eat? I had eggs. I had eggs for breakfast. Yeah. And avocado. And last night I had steak and avocado. I'm eating mostly fat and healthy stuff.

So that will hold you through the workout until about 10 or 11 in the morning. Yeah, I'm fine. Now what will you have after a workout? Depends. Maybe a protein shake. You know, really depends entirely. Today I haven't worked out yet, so I just had breakfast. Right.

But most of what I'm eating is whole foods. Right. Healthy, whole foods. I still eat plenty of salad. I still, you know. But I very rarely, I'll indulge in carbohydrates. Just like I had a cheeseburger from Five Guys on Sunday. Every now and then. Yeah.

Every now and then I'll dive in. Yeah, that's right. I think if you're working out a lot, you can tolerate a little bit more of that. Yeah, just give yourself a little cheat day. You feel better about it. You don't feel, you know, you don't feel like you're working out a lot, you can tolerate a little bit more of that. Yeah, just give yourself a little cheat day. You feel better about it. You don't feel like you're constantly depriving yourself. But overall, I feel great. Yeah, we do some long three-hour bike rides up in Santa Barbara where I live now.

There's a group at pretty serious. Did you get affected by? No, no, I was just north of that. The fires. Yeah, but I was trapped there. It was like being on an island. Right. The only way out is to go five hours north and around to get to L.A. Really?

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, 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 to L.A. Yeah. Whoa.

Yeah. So the 101 was shut down? Yeah, completely shut down. And there's only like 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. They just opened it Sunday night. That's incredible. Yep. So for a while they had ferries.

They had a ferry from Santa Barbara Pier to Ventura. Of course, you take the ferry to Ventura, then you don't have a car. Then what? You know, you get an Uber to L.A. or something. This is crazy. Wow. The mudslides were insane. Yeah, you know that—

In Montecito, which is this incredible neighborhood. Oprah was there the next day. I think she must have helicoptered in, obviously. But it missed her house by like 50 feet, something like that. Of course it did. That Oprah. She used her magic. She conjured it.

See, we may have another Western White House in Santa Barbara. Yeah, right. The Reagan Ranch where he had his Western White House is north of Santa Barbara. Do you think Oprah's going to win? She's going to run for president? I don't know if she's going to run, but the world we live in now, she could win. Do you think so? She's a pretty good speaker.

She's not bad. She's a good speaker, yeah. This is what I always bring up with Oprah. Do you remember when Oprah was the big supporter of The Secret? Oh, totally. Yes, I know. We've debunked her stuff because she's always open to this woo-woo stuff. She was super open to that.

And we did the calculation. She was like 50 then. She wasn't a young, dumb kid who didn't know any better. Nope. You know, and I mean, she's a living testimony to what you can do if you put your mind to it. Sure. Use your intelligence and hard work. Well, she's likable, and she had a television show that was fun to watch, and it was great for women.

It was like she sort of, she filled a niche that wasn't filled before. Yeah. She filled a niche that wasn't filled before. Yeah. 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 will help you be more successful. Set your goals. Write them down. Right.

Every morning when you get up, you have a plan. You know, like Jocko says, you know, have your running, your workout clothes ready to go so you're not fumbling around and give up. You know, it's almost like you're betting on your future self. I know this is what I'm going to be like in 12 hours, so I'm going to do something now. Oh, that's good. You know, and Jordan has his book, here's the 12 things you got to do. Yes. To do what? Well, to be successful.

Okay. So, you know, Oprah kind of, I think, did those things intuitively, just as a, you know, just what she did. That's how she became successful, which has nothing to kind of, I think, did those things intuitively, just what she did. That's how she became successful, which has nothing to do with if I tell the universe I want a Lamborghini, it's going to appear in my driveway. And the other deeper problem with that was that this implies that what if I'm not successful? You just weren't thinking positive. You mean these poor people in Somalia? Or even worse, what about children with diseases?

Right. Are they thinking wrong? Yeah, it's no good. Yeah. The idea that your entire existence is based entirely inside of your own imagination is just preposterous. There's a lot of random shit that's going on in this world. Right. Some parts of the world get hit by meteors.

Were they bad people? I don't know. Well, how come Putin didn't get hit by a meteor? Right. He's out there assassinating rivals. How come Assad is still alive? There's just a lot of people out there that are terrible people that just skate through. That's right.

Somehow or another. Problem of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people? Sometimes they do, right? The problem with the secret is that if you're successful and 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. Sort of. How many people also willed it into being, and it didn't work? Let's get the full numbers Yeah, how many people were daydreaming all day, and they never got that pony. You know I call this the Biography bias people write biographies of Steve Jobs, okay? So here's the thing you enroll in a really elite college drop out move back to your parents house and start a startup company in

Your garage it works Actually how many people did this in the 70s? Yeah, and they did startup companies and they went out of business in three months or whatever. You have to have a good product. And no one writes a biography of them. Right. So, you know, we only hear the hits, forget the misses. But at least those people, even if they failed, they took a shot at something.

They're trying to make something happen. It fails. They could try something else. And maybe the third, fourth, fifth one will take. Right. But the idea of the secret is the most preposterous thing ever, 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, and then you would make it happen. Right. Like, no, you've got to go do things. You've got to do it. You've got to do things. And it's the one thing that keeps people from achieving things is the actually going out and doing things. Right. For whatever reason, we have this blockade against action. Right.

People are terrified of the unknown, just like we're terrified of death. Right. Terrified of the unknown. Yeah, the role of chance is huge. It's huge. And we forget to see the failures. I was on a ride the other day with a guy. What do you do?

I'm a VC, okay, venture capitalist. So what's the ratio? I mean, you put in $200,000, $500,000, half fail or what? He goes, no, 90% fail. I said, nine out of 10 companies you invest half a million or whatever, it's gone. He goes, yep, but the one, you know, the one I made $20 million on, you know, more than makes up for the nine failures. Like, oh, man. You know, that's a high ratio.

So there's, I know there's research on entrepreneurs and how risk-taking you should be. So entrepreneurs score high in risk-taking. You know, they're not risk-averse. Okay, that's good. On the other hand, some of them have what's called the over-optimism bias. They just never give up. This is the idea. I'm sticking with it.

I'm going to keep pouring money into it. No, dude, 9 out of 10 fail. Just keep trying until you get the one. At some point, you've got to be a risk-taker but not too crazy. You've got to know when to bail. You've got to know when to bail. Yeah. Yeah.

Boy, that's a crazy way to make a living. Yeah. Betting on other people too. Oh, I know. Do you ever watch Shark Tank? Sometimes. My wife and I've been binge watching Shark Tank. The stuff that people come up with, you know, I mean, it's like some of them are just ridiculous, but I think it's kind of like American Idol where they get let those ridiculous people on. Cause it's entertaining. Yeah. I mean, half the fun is watching people's preposterous ideas. That's true. 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. Oh, they're watching. And he's like, okay, so here's the thing. 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. And then one of the sharks said, what? He just put a piece of tape over there. I think I saw Mark Zuckerberg put a piece of duct tape over the camera. Oh. Oh. Yeah. Or somebody else said it would be fun if you had a little thing you put over it

and there was an image on the inside that was like this. 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? Come on, let me see what you're doing. Come on. They must have algorithms that just look and scan and try to find it. I don't know. I could only imagine.

What's up? That stuff that came out over the weekend that I was trying to tell you about that Snowden was retweeting. The NSA knows who you are just by the sound of your voice, and their tech predates Apple and Amazon. A report on The Intercept citing documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA has highly refined voice recognition software. The agency's technology dates back to more than a decade

and was instrumental in helping to identify Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Iraq, the report stated. Your voice where? Just in the room with your laptop? Or you mean on the phone? Supposedly they can use almost any microphone that's connected to the internet. Obviously there's new speakers that are available.

And your voice, the recognition they have is better than a face print or a fingerprint. So if they wanted to find young Jamie, they could get you from your laptop. They already have it. Wow. That's what this is saying. Already have had it, and don't worry about it. There's almost nothing you can do to stop it.

What is your thoughts on Snowden and all that? Then who's the other guy? Chelsea Manning? No, Assange. Julian Assange. I have a bad feeling about Julian Assange. I have a bad feeling about Julian Assange. I have a good feeling about Snowden. Everybody had a good feeling about Assange until Trump got into office.

No, no. The stuff before that, I didn't care for him. 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, big screen, and there he was in Russia or somewhere. But the points he made were similar to that of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. It's like we should know what our government's doing. We don't have to know everything. We don't have to share the nuclear codes with you and I.

But at some point, there's some line there of how much freedom versus security. And there's too much stuff going on, even in the Obama administration. The administration of transparency, this is when a lot of this stuff was happening. It's like, wait a minute. I thought it was Bush that was doing this kind of stuff. Well, we have to remember that Edward Snowden went into hiding during the Obama administration. They're one of the worst administrations ever on record for whistleblowers. Right.

Which is really crazy because if you go look at the Hope and Change website when it initially existed, one of the big promises was protection for whistleblowers that are exposing illegal activity. Right. And that's just not true. Yep. I think he should be allowed to come back. Yes. He doesn't have to be worshipped as a hero.

It's just like just he- He's a brave person. Before him, we weren't talking about any of this stuff. We didn't know about this stuff. Well, there was an NSA contractor from many years ago who brought this stuff up, and he was sort of dismissed. What is his name? He was the original NSA contractor that brought this up, I want to say in 2011.

Boy, I can see him in my mind. I can't remember his name. Bill Binney. That's it. Bill Binney. I'm not sure who that is. Yeah, pull that guy up, young Jamie. I just read.

He was the original guy. Bill Binney, the original NSA whistleblower on Snowden 9-11 when they started doing a lot of this and the initial work on computer surveillance and all the stuff they were doing and he bailed you know and he started talking about it openly and publicly and then Snowden came out after that and this the Snowden thing was where people got all exposed but like what we've really got a chance to understand, oh, this is actually happening right now. This is a real thing. Right.

Yeah, I do think the government does overreach with their security theater. You know, we're at orange level today. Remember that? Unbelievable. That doesn't happen anymore. What happened to that? 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? It's less than bathtub drownings. No, way less than that. Like double lightning strikes or something. I mean, it's just nothing. It's like shark attacks. Yeah.

All right. It's just, why are we spending billions and billions of dollars on this? To keep it that way. Because they could. Yeah, it's like the proverbial elephant repellent. Ever since we put the repellent here, not a single elephant has come in. Oh, yeah. Okay.

Well, Michael Sherman, we're Americans. We don't want to get caught with our pants down. Yeah, I understand. I just read Daniel Ellsberg's new book, The Doomsday Machine. This is on nuclear deterrence. He thinks nuclear deterrence as a rational strategy is a long-term mistake because of the possibilities of error. Which, you know, it's all good points. But he has, I'm not sure why he took so long to bring this book out. when he worked for the State Department in the 50s and then the Rand Corporation in the early 60s during the Kennedy administration,

of the kinds of calculations our own government was making about how many people we were willing to kill in defense. Hundreds of millions of Russians. It's like the scene from Dr. Strangelove where George C. Scott, he's like, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair must, but 20, 30 million tops. And that's actually real.

That's the kind of numbers they were throwing out. Yeah. You can't leave a human being with that much responsibility and power. No. 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. Right. And human beings should not have that kind of power over other human beings that are just citizens.

Right. Because they're just, I mean, the 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. And this is when Obama was like, no, no, this is just metadata. Right. No, it wasn't just metadata, man. They were looking at everything.

Right. And that's something we should know about. And we didn't until Snowden. And now this poor guy has to live in Russia. Yeah. I think he should be brought back for sure. But could he be? He would have to do something awesome for Trump.

Yeah. Well, it might be after Trump. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe he should be kissing Trump's ass. I mean, it's disturbing that of all people, it's Putin who's protecting him. Isn't it crazy? Wait a minute.

What? I know. It's weird. Well, he's probably helping Putin. 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. He can't come up totally reasonable. Yes.

This is what democracy, here's a democracy. This is what we live in. Citizens need to know some things, not everything. You know, he came off totally rational. He did a great podcast with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and he came off very rational there as well. Oh, I didn't know Neil interviewed him. Yeah, Neil interviewed him. And look, we don't agree to that kind of surveillance.

That's very Orwellian. It's not what we want. Right. And this is not, you're not stopping terrorism. No. You're just spying on people. Right. And also people are rightly concerned that anything that they find could be used against you if you are a political opponent of theirs or if there's something that you're trying to oppose.

Right. And they go, hey, well, you know, we found out that you're into, like, cuckold porn, buddy. Right. You know, or whatever it is. Yeah. It's just, there's too much. The kind of stuff Nixon did with the Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Well, I think Hoover did it on his own.

Yeah. He did it pre-Nixon. Right. Hoover was a fascinating character. You know, cross-dresser, out of his mind, total freak, and just, like, spying on everybody. Right. Just to try to hide his own secrets. Really amazing.

But there's an example of one person, a flawed human like everyone else, given all this power. And imagine what Hoover would do today with the internet. I mean, he'd be taking this to an extreme. Well, arguably more flawed than normal human beings. And I think that goes back to the thing that you were talking about with these cult leaders. It's like humans should not have power over other humans. Right. And when they do, they do terrible things.

Right. And they abuse that power and they, I mean, it's the responsibility that one would have to be able to do that George C. Scott thing and say, 20 million, 30 million, no big deal. We'll lose a few people in Chicago. I mean, that's a crazy thing for a human being to have at their fingertips. Yep. Yep. And the other problem is bureaucracy, any large organization, but especially bureaucracies, their tendency is to keep alive. We got to keep our jobs.

Yeah. And the moment you set up a government agency, it's really difficult to shut it off. Yeah, almost impossible. Yeah. Yeah. Because you have real people with jobs and mortgages and families, and I've got to keep my job.

So we have to justify why we need our department and so on, and it just always builds that way. That is the big issue with big government is it just grows bigger. It never shrinks. They never say, oh, you know what? We don't need the IRS. Right. It just always builds that way. That is the big issue with big government is it just grows bigger. It never shrinks. They never say, oh, you know what? We don't need the IRS. Right.

This is nonsense. 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. Right. What? What? Yeah. Yeah, no, it's just a huge problem. I don't have a good solution to it. Well, it brings me back to the last word of the title of your book,

The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia. Yeah, utopia, yes. Utopia is what we're always looking for, right? Yeah, totally, and it doesn't exist. It can't ever exist, not even in principle, because there is no right society because we have so much variation in our interests and needs and wants and abilities. 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. And this is the problem with utilitarianism is get you that utilitarian calculus of the greatest good for the greatest number. And we know what that is. And you are standing in our way. You are preventing utopia. So we are going to eliminate you. You know, this is the famous trolley experiment, thought experiment.

You know, the trolley's hurtling down the tracks about to kill the five workers. You're at the switch. If you throw the switch, it'll go down a side track. It'll kill one worker. Would you throw the switch? Kill the one to save the five. The five are going to die if you don't do anything. So would you throw the switch?

So most people say they would. You can go on the website and do this yourself. Depends on who's on which side. Depends on which track, yeah. It really does, right? It's Rush Limbaugh on this one track. Can you imagine? And five school kids.

Yeah, five school kids. With massive potential for the future. 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 and standing next to you is a great big guy, would you hip check him off?

Boom, he lands on the track, splat! He's killed by the train, but it stops it and saves the five workers. Now, most people say, I got to physically grab them and throw them off. Yeah, no, I couldn't do that. So it's something to do with engages the emotional part of the brain that actively killing somebody is way harder than passively killing. So if you only have to put, if you're at a B-5252 bomber 35,000 feet up, you only have to press the button to release the bombs, not so hard. But that's even more actively doing it than a drone. The drone one apparently is a giant issue for the drone pilots.

Apparently they suffer from really weird PTSD. Really? Yeah. Even though they're in Arizona doing it in Iraq or whatever. Yeah, the nightmare is pretty intense. Interesting. it in Iraq or whatever. Yeah, the nightmares, I mean, they're pretty intense. Interesting. I had not heard that. Yeah, I mean, if you're looking at a screen

and you're seeing someone on the other side of the planet, you know, you're in Nevada. Right. In some military base. Right. And you're hitting that button and you're watching the screen and you're seeing some, you know're watching the screen, you're seeing some infrared or black night vision missiles slamming into the person that you were just observing.

There's a good movie about that that was like the trolley problem. It was maybe two years ago 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. 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. I think it's in Afghanistan or Iraq. So she's on the corner, so she will be killed. And it's like, okay, maybe we could come around from the other side and then she won't be. And they're doing all these calculations. But now there's some other people over here.

So how many people, innocents, should we kill? Because we know that the terrorists are going to, if they complete their suicide bomb, they're going to go to a mall and kill 300 people or whatever. So they show those, you know, how these government agencies think about those calculations. You know, we got to stop the bad guys. But how many good people are we willing to kill to prevent them from killing even more, we think, maybe, if they do this. And then it gets murky from there. Well, Mike Baker, who's a former bigwig at the CIA, I've talked to him several times on the podcast. One of the things that he says, that's done by lawyers.

Right. That's right. Legal. That's right. Legal. That's right. Because there's legal precedence about collateral damage. That came from the Nuremberg laws. And there, you know, there's some questionable stuff we were doing. I mean, I think it's justified in the Second World War, but, you know, the mass bombing of Hamburg and Dresden, this didn't slow the Nazi war machine at all. But the idea was that, well, the citizens will rise up and kill Hitler. No, you can't in that kind of society.

You just don't have that kind of access or power. And, you know, this was like when in the first Iraq war, you know, we'll stop short. You know, Bush Sr. said we're going to stop short and let Saddam's own people take him out and have their own regime change, and then we'll support the new regime, and it just didn't work out that way. So there the calculations get messy. I got kind of sidetracked. The problem with utopian idea is that utilitarian calculus. If most people will agree that it's okay to kill one to save five, why not kill one million to save five million?

That's genocide. And that is the calculations that genocidal mass murderers make. Our German society would be great, except for those Jews, the backstabbers who ruined us in the First World War. Now we can just get rid of them. It's going to be great. And every genocide is based on that kind of utilitarian calculus, however emotional driven it is. And it's interesting when you look at the numbers from drone attacks. It's some high 80, 90 percent of innocent people that are killed. Right.

The casualties, when you look at it in terms of like what the actual targets that we're looking for versus the actual people that were killed right collateral damage there's a tremendous amount of collateral damage and that's not something that we would ever accept from one guy right say if we had one guy with a howitzer and he just went in there and he's just blasting women and children to get to the guy that's in the top of the building right there'd be no fucking way no like that guy's a murderer he's a monster. Right, right. 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. Right. 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. Before you know it, you're throwing 450 volts into this subject. You couldn't get somebody to do that initially. But if you do it incrementally, they're kind of hoping, well, if I hold out and just do one more, maybe the experiment will end. And it's like this with these kind of utilitarian calculus.

Okay, I know I probably shouldn't be doing this, you know, 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. But it's always so messy that it takes much longer than you think. 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.

Like this is, when you see at the end, it's like, God, this was a catastrophe. 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. You know, we put all this in there, just one more month, and then we'll get out. And then the month comes, like, okay, we're not going to, another month, another year. And then before you know it, you got 58,000 dead. And it's month comes like, OK, we're not going to another month, another year. And then before you know it, you got 58,000 dead. And it's like, OK, this just didn't work. And I think that happens more often because it's always messier.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, war in itself is an incredibly messy business. Do you know it's outlawed? It was outlawed in the Paris Peace Agreements of 1927. War is illegal. There's a great book called The Internationalist. It gives the history of how this came about. And the reason for it is they give the whole history going all the way back to when war became legal.

And it goes all the way back to this Spanish and Dutch conflict they were having. And I forget who did what, but a Spanish ship confiscated a Dutch ship and took all its stuff. And then there was like 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, you know, be a pirate and kill people and stuff like that. and kill people and stuff like that. And so this Hugo Grotius, legal scholar, wrote all these treaties that got laid down that said, this is when war is legal. It's perfectly okay to kill other people and take their stuff if you're at war.

So what does that mean to be at war? So then it's all done by lawyers. Like, okay, this is what it is. And we have lived with that ever since. So in the 1927 Paris Peace Agreement, it said, okay, you know, we're going to stop that. War is illegal now. Obviously, this didn't stop Hitler and Imperial Japan and so on. But at least now, leaders have to justify.

It's like, you know, Bush had to go to the UN and get his coalition of the willing. And that's when Colin Powell had to say, oh, yes, we know about the yellow cake and that Saddam Hussein wants nuclear weapons. I mean, why would anybody bother with all that stuff? In the old days, they'd just invade. Right. You know, I came, I saw, I conquered. I took my stuff. Now you have to say, I came, I saw, I was just standing there minding my own business, and he punched me. So I invaded him.

You at least have to do that now. So I invaded him. You at least have to do that now. It's sort of like what we were talking about earlier, that the world today, I mean, they're consciously recognizing that there are more rules and that society is a much more complex and safer place to be. And they want to protect that progress in some way. That's right. And that's what the rules of war in comparison to 2000 years ago. Right.

Yeah. So that's a good thing. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So that's a good thing. Yeah, ultimately. 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. He wants a place at the table where he's respected, his country is not going to be invaded. And this is sort of a Noam Chomsky argument that I don't usually make, but if you look at how America treats other countries, if they have nukes, we leave them alone. If they don't, we do whatever we kind of feel like.

So from his perspective, it could be those Americans, because you see, they make arguments like this. These Americans are evil. Why? Look, they invaded this country. They've been in a dozen wars and just never ending. This is who they are. We're going to get nukes and they're not going to fuck with us ever again. And maybe he'll just stop and go, that's it.

Okay, you leave me alone. I'll leave you alone. I don't agree with Noam Chomsky on everything, but I'm very happy there's someone like him out there who's a brilliant guy that's as far left as you can get. Yeah. He's way out there. I think it's important to balance these intellectual disagreements. And, you know, you need a super smart far lefty guy wearing a sweater who talks like this. Yes.

Very slow. Right. Well, I agree. You know, so that's why we have to have free speech and open dialogue and debate it's so important so you get the guy over here to counter the you know so that's why instead of yeah like so authoritarian left well why are they there because there's an authoritarian right yes the problem is we expect that from the right yeah uh so this is why we're going through what we're going through now it's kind of a surprise wait a minute the liberals are doing

this well it's fairly recent. Yeah. You know, the silencing of people you disagree with. And also the really disingenuous labeling of people as Nazis or neo-Nazis or white supremacists just because they simply don't line up with your belief system. And it's a conscious decision to do that. This isn't like an accidental mislabeling where you don't really know what the person's motives and who they are no you're just trying to diminish whatever position they have so that your side wins and i think a lot of people feel justified by it because of the current administration and it just seems like we're on a goddamn pirate ship now i mean

it's what it seems like. I mean, 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. He goes, go ahead offshore. Go ahead. Just start drilling that ocean. Fuck the fish.

Let's get that oil, baby. Come on. I'll be in my gold bathroom with a giant gold chandelier over the toilet. That guy's crazy. It's just a strange time. It's like something out of a movie. Oh. It's way crazier than something out of a movie.

If there was a president that was this nuts in a movie, you would say that's too over the top. Yeah. We played a video yesterday of Trump, like the 24 different things that Trump said he was the best at. Nobody loves women more than I do. Nobody loves Mexicans more than I do. Nobody's better at foreign policy than Trump. Uses himself in the third person.

That's the one thing about having Oprah as a president. Can we just have professional experts that work in this area that know what they're doing, even if they're not celebrities? Well, I'm a firm believer that that position is almost always abused and that what we really need instead of one person is a council of wise people. Yeah, a tribunal or something like that. Instead of like one person is like a council of wise people. Yeah, a tribunal or something like that. Yeah, like 18 super smart people that have to write papers on all these different decisions that they make. I'd be happy with a tribunal. Instead of a president, you have three people.

You elect them. And then for anything to happen, two of the three have to agree. But even three, because the FCC, they took out net neutrality with only five people, five unelected people. Okay. That's a good point. Yeah. Maybe 18. Yeah. Yeah. I don't- Well, you need an odd number so you don't have a tie. You got to have a tiebreaker. Yeah. We had Jessica Rosenworcel, is that how you say her last name, from the FCC. She was one of the five that voted for net neutrality. She wanted to keep it in place, and she was on two weeks ago, something like that, and describing to us what the situation is like and how there's only five people,

and they're not elected, and they get to decide. How do they get that job? They're appointed? Appointed, yeah. By the president? And they get to decide. How do they get that job? They're appointed?

Appointed, yeah. By the president. I don't know if they're appointed by Trump or maybe they're a holdover. I really don't know. That would be pretty easy to stack. Yes. Is that what she said? By the president? By Obama or by Trump?

It says appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for five-year terms. Okay. There you go. So these are new folks then. Okay. Yeah. And they decided, nah, let's just give all the money to the corporations. Let's let them just block websites and get crazy with throttling. Right. Right. It's a weird time for this. Yes. Right. So back to the

utopia, societies are messy and the only utopiantype system would be one that there is no system. 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. It's just human nature, right? It's human nature, yeah. Does it go back to just primitive pites? We're a hierarchical social primate species yeah the alpha male is gonna if he can get there he's gonna stay there for as long as he can

and the beta males are gonna try to under undermine him from about but from underneath yeah that's this constant struggle again there are two kinds of men those with loaded revolvers and those who dig so uh well that's why, you know, this, again, sort of a horizontal, you know, bottom-up networking systems is one way to try to counter hierarchical power structures. It doesn't always work, but... Now, as someone who spends so much time looking for actual truth and facts and scientific data.

How concerned are you about the media today? 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. Even established media sources are doing some sleazy shit now. Yeah, it's a concern for sure. 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. And you can go on like PolitiFact is Trump's given 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. I love their ranking system. And, you know, Trump got a lot of pants on fire. I love their ranking system. And, you know, Trump got a lot of pants on fire. So at least there's a counter to it. And now those sites are becoming pretty popular.

They're kind of a form of clickbait themselves. Let's go there and find out, you know, how many times this guy lied in his speech. So it would have been nice if we would have had that, say, in the Nixon administration or the Johnson administration, like the Gulf of Tonkin, if this could have been whistleblowered and called and put out there so that we didn't drag ourselves into Vietnam War even deeper. My thought, and this is a very paranoid thought, is that all this is inevitably opening us up to the truth chip, to the mind-reading chip, that things are going to get so chaotic that we're going to say, you know what, just hit me with the chip. I can't fucking take this anymore. I don't know who's right.

Fox News says one thing. CNN says another. Slide it in. Slide it. I want it in my forearm, right here, right here in the forearm. Yes. Might be our only solution. It might literally be like nature's way of allowing us to slowly accept the symbiotic relationships with this new artificial intelligence.

Yeah. 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. Fake news was the year. Sean Spicer said alternative facts, right? Yeah.

He wasn't forced to try to like before he resigned. No, no. It was Kellyanne Conway. Oh, that was fake. Fake news was the year. Sean Spicer said alternative facts, right? Yeah. He wasn't forced to try to like before he was on. No, no. It was Kellyanne Conway. Oh, that's right. After the inaugural size of the audience. Yeah. And he said, look at the picture. It's not as big as, well, where'd you get that number?

That was an alternative fact. Yeah. They seem to like keep her locked up more now. She seems to be less. She just keeps stuffing her foot in her mouth. Yeah. Yeah, they seem to keep her locked up more now. She seems to be less. She just keeps stuffing her foot in her mouth. Well, they all have to because the boss sends them out to say, tell him this. Can you imagine

that poor Sean Spicer guy? When he talks about it now, it's like a guy who's just been freed from prison. Well, he's probably making a lot of money on the lecture circuit now. Oh, I can imagine. Yeah, probably, he's probably making a lot of money on the lecture circuit now. Oh, I can imagine. Yeah, probably. It's probably very lucrative.

Yep. But if you look at governments, you know, centuries past or thousands of years ago, you know, there was lying and corruption and all that. That's old. Yeah. It's just now it's so blatant. The yellow press. I mean, where did that come from?

That was, you know, whoever told, no, it was Hearst, William Randolph Hearst. Yes. You know, you give me the war and I'll supply you the photographs or whatever. Yeah. So, you know, that's fake news. Right. Literal fake news. Yeah.

You know, the sinking of the main. Let's go to war. Well, you know, what actually happened again? Yeah. Gulf of Tonkin. Gulf of Tonkin. Yeah. Yeah.

That Vietnam War documentary series, I just wanted to put my head in the oven after that and turn the gas on. I was just like, you know, this went on for, you know, so long, so many years. What are we in Afghanistan now? 16 years. Yeah. 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, you know. Yeah. This kind of stuff, it's just, it's so depressing.

We like to think of our government as having enough checks and balances. I think we need more. I would like to think of our civilization as being something that aspires to a higher standard, 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. That's one of the things I like about Elon Musk's let's go colonize Mars. In addition to the technological problems, how will they set up? There's like 100 people there, or 1,000, 10,000.

What kind of government are they going to have? What kind of an economy? It's going to be just maniacs. People that are so crazy they want to die on Mars. Those people are fucking nuts. It's probably not going to be your average typical human. No. Can you imagine you're going to take a six-month spaceship visit through the cosmos to land on a planet that you're going to die on?

You will never come back. Never coming back. Unless they're so smart they figure out a way to build a rocket and shoot back, which they probably won't. No. No, but so if you went and you were advising, like, what kind of government would you set up? You know, sort of social organization to prevent people from stealing other people's stuff. And we've got to work cooperatively to plant the potato things. Right.

It's a good question. How do you do that? You know, we have thousands of years of experiments, but they're all messy. Yeah. No one's ever done it right, which leads me again to utopia. Yeah. I mean, is it different to have 10 people, 100 people, 1,000, 10,000? There's a scaling effect where it becomes more efficient the more people you have, but

on the other hand, then you get these power, catch basins of power that grow and become corrupt. That's got to happen on Mars. It's going to happen. And also the community gets fractured because you don't know these people anymore. You get 5,000 people. There's no way you can know 5,000 people. You can know 500. Right.

There's Mike. Hey, Mike. Yeah, that's right. Hi, Sally. You know those people. Right. You get 5,000. You're like, who's that guy?

He just flew here. He's from. You know those people. Right. You get 5,000. You're like, who's that guy? He just flew here. He's from Chicago. Now he lives on Mars. But, you know, even small hunter-gatherer groups, they have conflicts all the time. They got to sit down in the little dirt area in the commons ground and talk about it. And then you stole this pig and the pig died and now you owe him a pig. Okay, go get your pig. Okay, we're going to settle it.

But what happens when someone dies? You know, it's like, okay, you owe 10 pigs pig. Okay, go get your pig. Okay, we're going to settle it. But what happens when someone dies? It's like, okay, you owe 10 pigs. They have these calculations. This is the equivalent of a life is 10 pigs. And that's going to happen no matter what planet we're living on. Did you get any personal insight? I'm sure you do after every book you read or you write, rather. But did you get any unique personal insight into this?

I did. The last chapter is on what does it mean to live a fulfilling, inspiring, happiness-fulfilled life if there's no afterlife, there's no God, whatever. Or even if there is, again, it doesn't really matter because we live in this world. So it turns out there's research that shows that striving for happiness is the wrong metric. That's the wrong goal. That striving to live a purposeful, meaningful life is what we should be after. And that often entails doing things that don't make you happy.

They're not fun. They're not pleasurable. So, like, for example, when you work out, you know, it's not fun in a sense of like a morphine drip. You know, I'm getting a lot of pleasure from this. Afterwards, you get, you know, a sense of endorphins and you feel better about yourself. 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. Caretaking for a parent, for example, this shows that this is not fun at all.

I've done this with two of my four parents, I had step parents. And this was not fun. It wasn't pleasurable. I didn't enjoy it, 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. But I felt better about myself. So it turns out, research shows that, you know, if you have more long-term goals, both forward and back, forward goals, back reflecting on your past, what you've done, not oriented toward being happy, but being, you know, sort of leading a purposeful driven life. That's what makes people feel better about their lives. And really that's, that's all we can do. And it's enough. It's enough to, you know, sort of feel like my life was well worth living. It's worth getting up in the morning. Without the promise of an afterlife, you don't need that.

Just like this life, I can make a difference. I can get up this morning, do something that I may not enjoy it quite so much, but, you know, working out. You know, like I do my three-hour bike ride. You know, I got to get up at 6.30 in the morning. They roll out at 7. It's cold. It's partially dark.

It's like I got to bundle up, and then I got to strip clothes off as I go, so I have to figure this all out. It's like I got to bundle up and then I got to strip clothes off as I go. So I have to figure this all out. It's not fun. But you know, after the ride, I'm like, I really feel great that I did this. And I had fun with my buddies, but it's not fun like, you know, I had a drink with my friends and that was fun. That's a different kind of fun. And that fun's okay too. Yes, sometimes. It's a balance. But it shouldn't all be the fun. Right. Yeah.

A purposeful, meaningful life. There are people that do that. So I talk about Diana Nyad, who I knew back in the 1980s when I was doing Race Across America, the transcontinental bike race. And Diana worked for Wide World of Sports, and they covered the race. So I would talk to her a lot. She's in the back of the truck with the camera crew. I'm riding along. And she's a really interesting person.

She's an atheist. You know, she did the Cuba to Florida swim. She's an ultram of the truck with the camera crew. I'm riding along. And she's a really interesting person. She's an atheist. You know, she did the Cuba to Florida swim. She's an ultramarathon swimmer. 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. And it took her four years and I think four tries to do it, but she did it. So she appears on Oprah's Super Soul Sunday show she had for a while. She appears on Oprah's Super Soul Sunday show she had for a while. And Oprah's asking her, well, how do you find awe and meaning?

No, it's what do you believe? Well, I'm an atheist. And she described how awestruck she is about the universe and life and what science has told us and so on. And Oprah says something like, well, I don't see how you can be an atheist if you're awe-inspired. And she says, well, I don't see why those are in contradiction. I mean, the whole living a meaningful life and being engaged in the world and other people, that is spiritual. That is awe-inspiring. You don't need God for that. 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. You just have to be engaged with the world in some meaningful way. And that's enough. And on that note, Michael Shermer, Heavens on Earth, the scientific search for the afterlife, immortality, and utopia available now on Amazon and everywhere else.

Thanks, Joe. Thank you, brother. Appreciate it, man. Thanks. immortality and utopia available now on amazon and everywhere else thanks thank you brother appreciate it man thanks