Michael Shermer examines radical life extension—cryonics, transhumanism, and Kurzweil’s 2045 singularity—calling it "afterlife for atheists" while dismissing mind uploading as flawed due to identity’s dynamic nature. He critiques government surveillance via Snowden’s NSA leaks and Binney’s ignored warnings, linking bureaucratic persistence to abuses like Hoover’s FBI. Shermer argues that fear of death fuels civilization but warns against indefinite lifespans destabilizing society, favoring purpose over happiness. The conversation reveals how science and skepticism can challenge both religious and tech-driven escapism without supernatural claims. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I found interesting journeys that people use to try to get there from both the religious perspective and the scientific perspective.
So I do deal with the monotheism's versions of the afterlife in heaven, you know, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
But the core of the book is, you know, the radical life extensionists, the cryonists, transhumanists, the extropians, the mind uploaders, the people that take all the supplements and all the whole range there.
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.
In the moment, you know, I used to be religious in my youth, and I thought, man, this is like being back in church again.
There's a lot of these very charismatic, hip, young preachers that are doing sort of a thing like that, where they don't even have their own church to rent time in a church, and they have these meetings where it's just non-denominational, and they just talk about God, and they get a lot of people fired up.
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, you know, right down the barrel, he totally believes, willing to die for his beliefs.
So this book, he starts to investigate the murder of this polygamous 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 in these border towns along the border between Colorado and Utah, like Colorado City.
I've been to some of these places.
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 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...
The first page of the Book of Mormon is an affidavit.
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 critical period if you get a new dynamic leader to take over, like in the case of Scientology, David Miscovich took over after L. Ron Hubbard passed over to the other side.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, the Mormons are fascinating to me because they do seem goofy when you look at the idea that Joseph Smith, who was a 14-year-old, found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus, and only he could read them because he had a magic seer stone.
And then when the local townspeople came to see, well, where are these stones?
Oh, the angels came and took them away because you did not believe.
The ones that have fascinated me are people in the hospital bed that see their body from above.
Right.
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 these different things that are happening while your brain is basically on the edge of death.
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, you know, 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, you know, better than a morphine drip kind of way of making the transition.
But we know, for example, that this scientist named Dr. James Winery worked for the United States Air Force, working with pilots, accelerating them in a centrifuge, and they would black out as part of their training.
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 brainstem, of course, to keep you alive.
So the cortex is shutting down from the outside in.
That would create this kind of tunneling effect on the back of your skull where your visual cortex is.
That would create some of that.
Open brain surgeries.
These are on epileptic patients where they cut them open and they poke around to see where the seizures are starting and so they could, you know, zap those neurons instead of some big crude attack.
Anyway, so while they're doing that, they get permission from the patient to wake them up while they're under and the brain is open and they tap around with electrodes.
So this is one way to map what the brain is doing.
If, you know, so what do you report when I tap here?
Oh, I just had a Vision of my 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 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.
First of all, I discussed 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's it like?
So he talks about it 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, you know, 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, you know, 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?
I say, the other example I use is, you know, Stairway to Heaven is the greatest rock song of all time.
And then you go, No, no, free bird is better than stairway.
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?
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 McKenna talked about this pretty much in depth, one of the speculations is that when you're in REM sleep, you're experiencing some form of dimethyltryptamine.
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, which is, of course, the third eye.
In reptiles, certain reptiles, it actually has a retina.
I mean, it literally is in the center of your head where the Eastern mysticism third eye exists.
Now they know that in rats...
Because of the Cottonwood Research Foundation, which is something that Dr. Rick Strassman, who was the guy who wrote the book DMT, the spirit molecule, he was the guy who got the first federally approved tests done on dimethyltryptamine clinical trials.
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.
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.
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 dimethyltryptomy.
All right.
He was tripping.
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 an incredibly unusual language, where letters also double as numbers, and the letter A is also the number one, and there's numerical value to words, 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, smoking some aspects of it.
They figured out how to extract it or how to isolate it, and they had a dimethyltryptamine experience.
I mean, we get articles submitted all the time at Skeptic Magazine of people that attempt to make natural explanations for biblical phenomena.
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 publish There's 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.
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, you know, destruction, redemption, starting over, something like that.
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 of nowhere.
Like, you know how quick a mushroom grows.
It's not like a plant.
So if there's a spore...
Which, by the way, 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 you gather them up you hide it from the Romans you hide it from everybody You don't want people to know this is your portal to God And so they had all these stories that they they hit up 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, he was a legit yeah rock-solid scholar, right?
By the way, he was also an ordained minister, and the only one that was on the Dead Sea Scrolls deciphering group that was agnostic.
Because through his study of religion, once he became an ordained minister and then became Right.
And as you go back in time you find the similarities and Qumran is where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls is the oldest version of the Bible the only one that's written in in I think it's the only one that's written in Aramaic, right?
They 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.
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, 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.
Well, my favorite biblical scholar to read is Bart Ehrman.
Do you know Bart Ehrman?
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 an 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's an edited volume with lots and lots of people coming in later and modifying this and debunking some previous Old Testament in a story or whatever.
And then he ended up being, he's an atheist or Agnostic or something, whatever he is, he's a not 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, you know, the Old Testament, the New Testament, what these books mean.
And it's a little bit like, you know, again, Jordan Peterson, you know, I'm going to talk for two hours about Genesis 1-1.
How can you talk for so long about just, you know, a single chapter in a book, you know?
And, well, 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 ufologists, well, that's a UFO. No, no, actually, at that time, that artists were putting those things in the sky for this other reason.
I mean, if you could get into a time machine and go to any time in mystery and just see what it was like, how people behaved, I would be real tempted to go to ancient Egypt, but I'd also really be tempted to go to around the time of Christ.
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 his itinerant preacher and so on.
So I'm on board with that.
I'm not part of the group.
The atheists say he never even existed.
It's a 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 after you die.
That heaven is here.
This is it.
We have to make the most of it.
And it's a message that you would give to a people that are suppressed, oppressed by the Romans.
So I call this the oppression-redemption myth, you know, that it's a story of...
It's like the Native American ghost dance in 1890, you know, when they're like an oppressed people, they're about to be wiped out, and a messiah comes and says...
It's all going to be great.
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 Christlike 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've 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.
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 You're going to dig.
Ed Ferguson uses this story to say, basically, that's the history of civilization.
Somebody's got the loaded gun, and everyone else is going to dig.
I mean, I know that there's troubles today, and I know we have issues in our own society, and forget about other parts of the world, which there's horrific things happening right now.
I start off early in the book about, you know, who are the first people to figure out we're going to die and become aware of our own mortality in a way that, well, maybe I can conceive of being somewhere else.
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, you know, they feel these mothers are 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 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.
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, we don't have the words to even say what it is we're trying to talk about.
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, 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.
Now, this idea that there's nothing, or no thing, that we can't even wrap our head around nothing, because we think of a thing, that there's no thing, but there's never a thing.
I conclude that 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 Alvie's error.
Alvie is Alvie Singer, Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall.
I remember the scene early in the movie where he has a flashback as a young boy, and he's in the psychiatrist's office with his mom, and what's the problem?
He won't do his homework.
You won't do your homework?
Why won't you do your homework, Albie?
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.
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...
He's like, no, that's just a poor way of describing it.
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.
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.
We live in a macro world where this kind of stuff doesn't matter.
Okay.
You know, so for Deepak, the whole Western way of thinking scientifically, there's a beginning and an end, time is a linear thing that we can measure, and there's birth and death.
All that is the wrong way to think about it.
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, you know, I don't know.
You know, I'd be surprised, but I'd be pleasantly surprised, I'll tell you, that if it turns out, you know, I'd close my eyes for the last time and I wake up and, you know, there's Deepak and, you know, whoever, my friends, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould and all the greats, Asimov are there, everybody's there, Hitch is there, you know, 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, but let's just...
When they say to me, Sherman, don't you want to live to be 500?
It's like...
Just give me to 80 without prostate cancer.
Give me to 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 live to 150, 200, and then we have a bunch of other problems we don't even know about yet, okay.
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 100 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.
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.
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, like 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's research.
He wrote a book on murderers, The Murderer Next Door, it's called.
And so he did the research on asking subjects, have you ever thought about killing somebody you didn't like?
And it turns out like 80% of guys and 67% of women have had homicidal fantasies in their life.
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 them, 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!
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.
When I was in my religious phase in college, I asked, before I went to Pepperdine, which is a religious school, I was at Glendale College just to get my GE out of the way, and my philosophy professor was an atheist and I was an evangelical, so I'm telling him about Jesus and the whole thing and the afterlife, and he said, and he wanted to know, are there golf courses and tennis courts in heaven?
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 thought, it's going to be great, you know, the blind shall see again, the deaf shall hear again, and your body will be whole again, and so she says, well, See, I had uterine cancer, so I had my uterus taken out.
Do I get my uterus back when I go to heaven?
They said, yeah!
She goes, I don't want it back!
She said, what if you had a nose job and you liked it?
So I open this little funny story because it gets to the problem of identity.
Who are you?
So if you're resurrected with Jesus, see, earlier Christian sex before Descartes, I think?
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.
Okay, but the memory of my being 30 now is different from the memory I had when I was 50 of being 30, and 40 being 30, and even when I was in my 30s being 30. You know, the memories are always changing and edited and forgotten or modified, particularly based on life experiences that happen afterwards.
So in your 20s, you go to this college, you marry this person, you take this job or whatever.
You don't really know what the impact of those decisions are until much later in life, which is why I always think 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.
No, 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 cell, mem-cell, of all your memories, and then there's the point-of-view cell, the POV cell.
So when you go to sleep tonight, you wake up tomorrow, you're still looking at the world through your eyes, and there's a continuity of point-of-view from one day to the next.
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 into a computer, and then he dies, and they turn the computer on, and he's in the computer looking out through the little camera hole.
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 No.
2 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 No.
2, 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.
And so this, to me, seems a central problem with the mind uploading scenario.
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.
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, of 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 same kind of clothes, they use the same toothpaste, they married women that look pretty similar.
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 have a certain kind of temperament, at least half of which is heritable, so you're more likely to choose certain professions or prefer certain hobbies or activities or pick spouses that would gel well with that temperament.
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, except your neurons.
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 a kind of a brain chip.
And I think you know about that research of the quadriplegic man who can control his computer cursor and now he can actually control an artificial limb just by thinking about it.
So they put a chip in his motor cortex that reads the thoughts.
So he has these thoughts and he's been trained to pull the cup of water up to his mouth and drink with the artificial arm.
At some point, you know, say 50 years, 100 years from now, we could have it all mapped, and you could control your whole environment just by thinking.
You know, I would like to hear Mozart.
And you just think about it, and then music in your house comes on, and it's Mozart.
Like, my daughter asked me about a song that she likes, and we were in the car, and I pressed the Siri button on my phone, and I said, hey, it's some...
What's that new musical with, what's his name, Hugh Jackman, the Wolverine guy?
Some 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.
That this thing just pulled it out of the sky, and it's playing it in my car.
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.
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 Alvis 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.
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.
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.
Although, you know, to be fair, if you said a century ago when they had telegraph, well, more than a century ago, just the invention of the telegraph, you know, in a century and a half or so, you're going to be pressing a button and just calling out what you want on a little box.
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.
I think that humans, what we do with our curiosity, if there's other curiosity in the universe, other curious life forms, I think they probably do the same thing.
They realize, well, there's a massive limitation in terms of biological tissue and in terms of our ability to evolve.
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.
You know, so Ray makes the point that, you know, if you track, say, back to the 1950s where you have computers the size of this room down to, you know, now, okay, so you just keep the curve going and eventually they'll be the size of blood cells.
And you just ingest these little computers and they go in there and they fix your Right, so if it gets to a certain...
Like Moore's Law, the doubling of computing.
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.
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.
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.
But there's still this kind of Christian ethic of 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.
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.
Like Kevorkian, he used to videotape his patients saying, I choose to do this when they could still do it.
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?
They have these experiments where they prime the brain and sort of try to trick it out of you.
Which is why hospice is probably a really good thing that we're getting better at in the West, of just helping people make that transition, which is why, back to near-death experiences, it could be those brain chemicals, that's what they evolved for, was to help that process.
As your brain is shutting down, you feel this sort of glow or this sort of good feeling that there's a tunnel, you're going to pass through the sense of transitioning to some other place.
And this starts off very early in life.
Sight 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 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?
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.
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, a few hundred dollars a year premiums.
If you started super late, the premiums would be much higher.
But it's not like you're shelling out a quarter million dollars right out of your checkbook.
And there's other deeper issues with this whole idea.
Because if you're going to be frozen for a thousand years or so, what's to say that the state of Arizona is going to be around, or the government, or the company that keeps the lights on?
Yeah, it's kind of fun to think, well, okay, I got eight hours here before, you know, it's dinner time and so on, so I got to get my workout in and I got to write this chapter and I got to make these calls.
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 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 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 genes way of keeping itself to the next generation.
So you're really only good for maybe 60, 70 years for a human timescale.
You know, your kids' kids get to survival age, you're done.
And this is the problem of, you know, that all the radical life 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, you know, Mel Gibson and his doc on, you know, with the stem cells.
All that stuff is only going to push us further, further, more of us to the upper ceiling.
We're not going to break through that upper ceiling, about 120, without something hugely, completely re-engineered, maybe a CRISPR technology that re-engineers the genome to stop all this stuff from happening.
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 gonna age.
And so, you know, people like Aubrey de Grey, I don't know if you know Aubrey.
And the one thing we know for sure, in terms of longevity, to get you closer to the upper ceiling and more of it, is don't smoke, don't drink too much, exercise every day, especially cardio.
Yes.
Eat right.
Eat right.
Healthy foods, whole foods.
I'm relieved to hear that meat and eggs and butter, this is all okay now, good, because it always felt like this was a balance with the salads.
Now, I love listening to your podcast with Nina Teicholtz.
Teicholtz, yeah.
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 a, you know, like carrying around this extra 10 pounds.
I love that story from Gary Taubes that, you know, when they started taking...
Well, when they started making the transition from eating meat to eating carbohydrates, and it tasted like crap, it's like people don't want to eat cardboard, so we've got to put something in there to make it taste good.
Well, I'm sure you read the New York Times article about how the sugar industry bribed scientists to say that sugar was the issue with heart disease and to take the blame off sugar and put the blame on saturated fat.
The only way out is to go five hours north and around to get to L.A. Really?
Yeah, yeah.
Wow.
For about three weeks, the only way to get to L.A. is you had to go up to Santa Maria, take the 166 over the 5. You're practically in Bakersfield, and then 5 south of...
And there's only a few side roads that parallel it, and they were all closed because they were covered in mud and also all the trucks and construction equipment to get the mud out of there.
Okay, so we have to make a distinction between the kinds of things that, say, a Tony Robbins or maybe even a Jordan Peterson would say, like, here are some things you could do that'll help you be more successful, et cetera.
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.
The problem with the secret is that if you're successful, And, you know, you have this story of I just imagined it and I willed it into being and look, here I am, you can do it too.
Right.
Sort of.
How many people also willed it into being and it didn't work?
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.
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.
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 reveal 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 reports stated.
But I saw Snowden made an appearance sort of at TED, the last TED I went to in Vancouver, and they rolled him out on a computer, you know, big screen, and there he was in Russia somewhere.
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, you know, at some point, you know, there's some line there of how much freedom versus security and, you know, there's too much stuff going on, even in the Obama administration, the administration of transparency.
It's like, wait a minute, I thought it was Bush that was doing this kind of stuff, but Well, we have to remember that Edward Snowden went into hiding during the Obama administration.
They're one of the worst administrations ever on record for whistleblowers.
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.
Bill Binney, the original NSA whistleblower on Snowden 9-11 and illegal surveillance.
This was...
He became incredibly concerned post-9-11 when they started...
Doing a lot of this and the initial work on computer surveillance and all the stuff they were doing and he bailed and he started talking about it openly and publicly and And then Snowden came out after that, and the Snowden thing was where people got all exposed.
We've really got a chance to understand, oh, this is actually happening right now.
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, or no, way less than that, like double lightning strikes or something?
Which, you know, it's all good points, but he has...
I'm not sure why it took so long to bring this book out.
He's got his notes when he worked for the State Department in the 50s and then the Rand Corporation in the early 60s during the Kennedy administration of...
The kinds of calculations that our own government was making about how many people we were willing to kill in defense, you know, hundreds of millions of Russians.
It's like the scene from Dr. Strangelove where George C. Scott, you know, he's like, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair must, but 20, 30 million tops!
And that's actually real.
That's the kind of numbers they were throwing out.
Because they're just – the ability to check all – I mean, Snowden talked about people being able to check in on their exes and read their emails, and they were doing things like that.
And this is when Obama was like, no, no, this is just metadata.
Look, we don't agree to that kind of surveillance.
That's very Orwellian.
It's not what we want.
You're not stopping terrorism.
You're just spying on people.
Right.
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.
And they go, hey, well, you know, we found out that you're into, like, cuckold porn, buddy.
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 the problem with utilitarianism is it gets you that utilitarian calculus of the greatest good for the greatest number, and we know what that is, and you are standing in our way.
You are preventing utopia, so we are going to eliminate you.
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 we did throw the switch.
So most people say they would, that you can go on the website and do this yourself.
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 tracks.
Splat!
He's killed by the train, but it stops it and saves the five workers.
Now most people say, I gotta physically grab him and throw him off?
Yeah.
No, I couldn't do that.
So it's something to do with, it engages the emotional part of the brain that actively killing somebody is way harder than passively killing them.
So if you're at a B-52 bomber 35,000 feet up, you only have to press the button to release the bombs, not so hard.
There was a good movie about that that was like the trolley problem.
That 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 and 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 how these government agencies think about those calculations.
We've got to stop the bad guys, but how many good people are we willing to kill to prevent them from killing even more, we think, maybe, if they do this?
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 this was like in the first Iraq War.
We'll stop short.
Bush Senior said, we're going to stop short and let Sodom's own people take him out and have their own regime change, and then we'll support the new regime.
And it just didn't work out that way.
So there are the calculations get messy.
I got kind of sidetracked.
The problem with the 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.
You know, our German society would be great, except for those Jews, you know, 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.
The casualties, when you look at it, in terms of the actual targets that we're looking for versus the actual people that were killed with collateral damage, there's a tremendous amount of collateral damage.
And that's not something that we would ever accept from one guy.
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.
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.
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.
You know, 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, You know, 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 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.
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, another month, another year, and then before you know it, you got 58,000 dead.
And it's like, okay, this just didn't work.
And I think that happens more often, because it's always messier.
It was outlawed in the Paris Peace Agreements of 1927. War is illegal.
There's a great book called The Internationalists.
It gives the history of how this came about.
And the reason for it, so they give the whole history going all the way back to when war became legal, and it goes all the way back to this Spanish and Dutch conflict they were having, and I forget who did what, but a Spanish ship confiscated a Dutch ship.
And took all its stuff, and then there was a legal battle about this, and whichever side, I think it was the Spanish, said, no, no, actually, we're at war, and if you're at war, it's okay to be a pirate and kill people and stuff like that.
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?
You know, 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's like, okay, you know, we're going to stop that.
War is illegal now.
Obviously, this didn't stop Hitler and the imperial of Japan and so on.
But at least now, leaders have to justify.
It's like 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.
You know, I came, I saw, I conquered.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Go 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.
So back to the utopia, societies are messy, and the only utopian-type 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.
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.
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, as Trump's giving a speech or during the campaign when they were all giving speeches, and they would rank them, you know, from, you know, true, mostly true, partially false, mostly false, pants on fire.
I love their ranking system.
And 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, you know, whistleblowered and called and put out there so that we didn't drag ourselves into the Vietnam War even deeper.
I think Webster's just this last week voted, it was alternative facts is the word of the year, phrase of the year for 2017. The year before that was fake news was the year.
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.
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 catch basins of power that grow and become corrupt.
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 for 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 all we can do, and it's enough.
It's enough to, you know, sort of feel like my life is 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've got to get up at 6.30 in the morning.
They roll out at 7. It's cold.
It's partially dark.
I've got to bundle up, and then I've got to strip clothes off as I go, so I have to figure this all out.
It's not fun.
But after the ride, I'm like, I really feel great that I did this.
I had fun with my buddies, but it's not fun like I had a drink with my friends, and that was fun.
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 cabin 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.
And Oprah's asking her, well, how do you find awe?
No, 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, you know, living a meaningful life and being engaged in the world and other people, that is spiritual.
That is awe-inspiring.
You know, 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.