 I would not use divine in the way that most theists use the word. I think if we want to say the universe is divine because it has the laws of nature that gives rise to sentient beings that then become aware of the universe having those laws of nature that give rise to sentience. Is that a thumbs up? If that's divinity, then I'm a believer. Okay, so, okay, cool, okay, cool, cool. Boom. What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. We are on site at TV Santa Barbara in the beautiful Santa Barbara, California. We are now going to be talking about skepticism around spirituality and much more. We have Dr. Michael Schermer joining us on the show. Hello, sir. Thank you for coming back on. Nice to be back on the show. Returning champion. Returning champion, Michael Schermer. So excited. And for those that don't know Michael Schermer's background, he's founder of the Skeptic Society with 55,000 members, editor-in-chief of its magazine Skeptic, a 214-time monthly columnist for Scientific American from 2001-2019, presidential fellow at Chapman University teaching skepticism 101, and a 15-time author with several New York Times bestsellers, most recently The Moral Ark and Heavens on Earth. You can find the links in the bio below, MichaelShermer.com as well as Skeptic.com. Check out the links in the bio. Michael, let's start things off by asking you about skepticism around spirituality. Because we have this beautiful planet that sustains us. That gives us the air we need to breathe, it gives us the water we need to drink, the food we need for nourishment. So many people talk about a spiritual connection to the planet that sustains us and how we have, in a sense, we have disconnected from that spiritual recognition, and that's why we have so many of the issues we have in our society. How do you feel about that? Yeah, let's unpack that a little bit. First of all, most of the resources we have from the planet are not given to us. We have to extract them through labor. So I mean, air and water, okay, that's true. We don't have to do much for that other than breathe deep and dip into the lake or river or desolinate the ocean. Okay, but even that, desolination requires some effort. Anything else is pretty much, resources depend on brain power that is using our intellect to solve certain problems, to carve out a niche of order in the teeth of the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of the world just running down. So it's not like we get a gift and we just sit and take it. We actually have to do something. And most of what life is about, I mean, the purpose of life is entropy, it's to push back against entropy. Other than that, you're dead if you don't do that. So right there I'd say the relationship between us and nature is a very interactive one. It's not like we just receive a gift at all. I think what you're after is more like gratitude that we have this capacity to do this and that we have the resources of a planet that enables us to thrive and flourish for sure. I would say gratitude is the right attitude that we should have. But on the other hand, that's how evolution works. If we evolved on Mars, we would have a different set of physical characteristics to live in that kind of environment or some other planet or moon or something like that. That's about to be tested. We're about to find out what it's like to be a multi-planetary species and what it takes to survive and thrive. But I mean, I see where you're coming from. I understand the Gaia hypothesis and James Lovelock's metaphor, which may be more than a metaphor. He thinks it's more than a metaphor. The planet is actually alive. How do you feel about that? Well, I think that depends on how you define life. The planet is not a living organism in the same way that organisms are that reproduce. For example, the planet doesn't make baby earths. It's not doing that. It's an interesting one. But we do kind of see it breathing with the polar ice caps melting. In that sense, it's cyclical, processes energy, for sure. These kinds of things all turn on linguistic definitions. What do you mean by spirituality? What do you mean by life, that kind of thing? If we don't get lost in the semantics and we stay with this kind of what we feel every time that we breathe, how the planet sustains us, what about that feeling? Yeah, it's a feeling. That's right. It's okay. Again, if you want to remove it from kind of a scientific mechanical analysis and just say, spiritually or emotionally, should we feel gratitude? Yes, absolutely. I'm grateful for every day that I'm alive. I'm an atheist, so I don't think there's an afterlife. If I'm wrong and it turns out there is, okay, well, I'll deal with that when I get there, I guess. But in the meantime, I just feel fortunate that we have this little niche of order for some period of few decades, and that's good enough. Another way to look at it is that the same thing with your body, if something's happening in your liver, that inevitably you're going to have issues within the potential of your kidneys, with your stomach, with other lungs, other areas of your body, and then you may even die. Similarly with our planet, if we're going extremely over the edge with the amount that we're extracting from the planet, the way that we're polluting the ecosystems that we live in, then the planet sees that as part of its organ dysfunctionality and then works its way to potentially even spray us off like a bad case of insects on it. Yes, I think the environmental movement should take more credit than it does for that awareness and not just awareness, but actually let's do something about it. Now I understand most nonprofits, because I run one, kind of have a strong impulse to cry gloom and doom because that's what brings in more donations. If you just say things are great and getting better, people feel like, well then I'm going to find some other cause to donate to where things are bad and getting worse. In fact, I think the environmental movement has had a huge positive effect since the 1960s and 70s of cleaning up the air in most major cities, Los Angeles to south of us here. I mean this is where I was born and raised. In the 60s when I was a kid out playing baseball and in the 80s when I was a cyclist, you had to be done by like 10 or 11 in the morning for say May to September or October, the air was so bad. That's just not an issue anymore. Why? Because we cleaned up the air. Most of the major waterways in America have been cleaned up. That's thanks to the environmental movement. The whole scare about overpopulation, that's a non-issue now. Really I mean the way we're going, underpopulation is going to be a problem in a century or two. And that's because people have decided, okay, we're going to do something about this. And other pressures like the more economically prosperous families are, particularly women, the less likely they are to have more kids, so family size decreases with economic prosperity and political freedom for women, for example. So all those things I think things are good and getting better. And so all the scare stories you see on the news about environmental problems, those have to be put into context. Follow the trend lines, not just the headlines. Yeah. And there definitely is a massive shift towards cleaning up some of the ecosystems that we've been polluting, that type of stuff. Simultaneously, we do see a pretty immediate-ness that we have with staying vigilant with the way that certain businesses are maybe signaling that, hey, things are totally good. Meanwhile, we continue a process of extracting, plundering the earth, selling you things that you may not even really need, that you're just buying to impress people that you don't even like. And then furthermore is the cyclical process of that conspicuous consumption and the disconnection that people have. They're filling potentially some of the fragmentations that they have with their own divine understanding of who they are and what their purpose is with filling those voids with temporary satiations and pleasure that aren't even possible. I'm not so worried about that because that's so subjective. There's nothing wrong with wanting cell phones, for example. I see you have an iPhone. Totally. Cell phones, computers, things like that. This is all great. And you could counter and go, well, but we're using these rare earth metals and they're called rare earth for a reason because they're rare and China has most of them and this is fraught with political implications and tariffs and what do we need these for anyway? Well, you don't need them. I'm old enough to remember a life without any of that stuff. And life was fine then. I feel it's richer and better now, but that's kind of a subjective thing. I'm more worried about more immediate climate denial, for example, on the part of Republicans. This political issue that climate science is a liberal conspiracy against big business or whatever, that's a more immediate problem that has to be countered, which is I'm working on that. We're working. Lots of us are working on that. But again, if a Democrat gets back into the White House in 2020 or 2024, those trends will be reversed. Again, the long-term trend is good at terms in the environment. Immediate problems I think do need to be addressed. I'm still worried about nukes a bit, not a bit, but it's probably even more of a threat I think than climate change, even though things are much better regarding nuclear weapons. Superintelligence, synthetic biology, technology. They're on the list. They're all there. But at the same time, all of these pressing fields of exponential technology and the geopolitical difficulties that we're facing dealing with them, these things stem from the same place. Let's see if we agree on this. Do you feel as though the issues that we have in our society with denying the change in climate and all these things that you listed as well, or maybe the way that we're just not consciously plundering the earth and selling things to people that maybe they don't want or need, maybe that all stems from the same place, which is our lack of understanding of the ecosystem that we are all born from this planet? What do you think? I don't know. That feels a little, seems a little California holistic from the 60s. I think generally most people want more stuff and that if you tell them, well, you don't really need a McMansion to impress the neighbors or whatever. I don't know. That feels a little parental to me that some elitist telling the masses, you don't really need all these things because life can be just as well-lived and happy and satisfying without any of that extra stuff. Meanwhile, the elitist have all their stuff in the Al Gore's fly and private jets or whatever it's like or it's like us telling China and India, you can't have an industrial revolution because look what we did and their attitude is, well, fuck off. We're going to, you had it and we want it and I understand that. So I think instead of thinking like that, let's see where we can cut back and curtail things down. Let's think of it as problems to be solved and keep going forward and let people do whatever they want and just continue to solve the problems. So for example, can't remember if I used this with you last time we talked, but the line, we will never run out of oil. This is never going to happen and that sounds insane because it's a finite planet. At some point you would pull out the last barrel of oil. No, no one's ever going to pull out the last barrel of oil because it'll be too damn expensive. At some point when the supply really does start to dry up and we really do hit peak oil, whenever that is, the price will just become too high and we'll have to find alternatives. So electric cars instead of internal combustion engine cars, that's already happening. By 2050 I don't think, I think internal combustion engines are going to be a thing of hobbies at racetracks you go to to drive for fun. Everybody else is going to be driving electric cars. All right, this is already happening. So rather than saying let's all cut back on the amount of driving we do because internal combustion engines are bad for the environment. No, let's say, let's drive all you want and find a better solution for powering the car. Now eventually this may all solve itself if no one even owns a car and some predictions are that all cars will be like ubers, just people ride sharing and hardly anyone will own a car. Okay, maybe that's another solution, I don't know. You seem to be pointing to the pie. So the pie staying in zero sum territory is yes, potentially can look like an elitist doing whatever they want with however many things they want and telling other people to not purchase those things or not strive to materialistic ownership. At the same time, we agree on a positive sum, pie. Yes, everything is able to be better for as many people as possible. The degrees of freedom that are opening up around the planet for people to endeavor into whatever they find most meaning in pursuing is a beautiful thing to be able to have electricity, to be able to have that, to have enough nutrition, to be able to survive and be able to pursue what you find most meaningful, extremely important at the same time that the recognition at least for people that are birthed into the world of understanding that all of the different things that they have, that they're given, they're given life on this planet, that in itself is such a beautiful thing first and foremost. Are we really, it seems as though all of the ancient traditions are pointing to the same thing that they're pointing towards our disconnection from the planet that sustains us and that our lack of understanding that is why we have both a hyper-functional society in many ways, like we agree on, but also the dysfunctional aspects of it are due to that. Yeah, here I think I might turn to the study of positive psychology, happiness and meaningfulness. So these are two different things, what makes people happy, what makes them feel like they have a meaningful life. And for a while, there was this meme going around that money doesn't make people happier. Well, that's easy to say if you have a lot of money because you have your needs met. Try telling that to the half the population that is below 30,000 a year or whatever the cutoff is. We now know from better studies that actually having more money does make life better and that makes you happier. It gives more degrees of freedom. If I have more money, I don't have to worry about a budget. I can go out to dinner anytime I want. I can buy my kids whatever toys I want. We can take trips whenever we want. I don't have to worry about it. That actually is liberating. And so having more money is good in that respect. That said, you don't have to have that. Because in terms of what makes life meaningful, none of those things that I just described, except for maybe raising your children or something, but that doesn't have to do with the amount of toys they have. To lead a purposeful, meaningful life, it has to do with challenges and meaningful work, purposeful work, family, love, relationships. And the more spiritual things as you might describe them. So here's how I say it. I teach a class at Chapman to freshmen. These are first year students right out of high school. So I give them a whole, basically skepticism 101, how to think. But I also teach them how to think about happiness and meaningfulness. And I tell them, go out and make all the money you want. Money's great. That's fine. But in the long run, that's not really where it's at. I mean, you can lead a perfectly meaningful, happy life without making a lot of money. And there's a lot of people that do that. That is all subjective, right? And so the movement toward making people aware of, you can have a purposeful life without all the trappings. I don't want to tell people you can't have the trappings. Have all the crap you want. But really, in the long run, you can do it or not. And to end up over here, you can give all of that up and still have a meaningful life. And that's OK, too. So really, I'm a big freedom guy. Do whatever you want. Just don't just don't tell me what I can do. And you do what you do. Your thing, I'll do my thing. But it's worth making people aware of. You can do all that without any material things. There's plenty of people that live at, say, middle income or something, and they're perfectly happy and they lead meaningful lives. That's OK, too. And potentially, even some of the most connected humans to what sustains us are the ones that are not pursuing material wealth, pursuing spiritual wealth in abundance in that sense. Now, we've touched on this in the first time that we sat down together. It's this idea that you want to be just skeptical enough to make sure that all of these falsehoods are not coming into your knowledge base in essence, while simultaneously giving enough room to certain theories that you can then go and hypothesize about and prove. And that way, you can gain new knowledge as you do prove those things out. So it seems as though one of the things that is probably really important to give a little bit of room to is spirituality with science. So if science lets spirituality kind of push the edge of knowledge a little bit, and then we make this hypothesis. Something like the Earth is alive. The Earth is an alive ecosystem that is kind of having an allergic reaction to the humans right now. Something like that, let's say. Metaphorically speaking. Metaphorically speaking. But then we scientifically probe it with like, OK, the parts per million of CO2 are now not 300, but over 400. Then we look at some of the ocean areas that are acidified and maybe look at some of the glacial melt systems. There's a lot of variables to take in. Even solar flare intensities, all these types of things is very hard to calculate these things. But once you start giving spirituality a little bit of space and then you poke it scientifically, how can we best do that style of a process? I think maybe what you've described is not really part of science, but the social aspects of science or the metaphysics of science or the spirituality of science, the soul in science. That's all part of it, for sure. The soul of science is in everything. I don't know what you want to call that part. I like the soul of science. The soul of science. Yeah, I wrote a little booklet called The Soul of Science. Or was it Science and the Soul? No, I think it was The Soul of Science. Because Dawkins wrote a book on this, too. Now I'm confusing his title with mine. Anyway, the point is that there are how you interpret the results. And again, I like metaphors, but I don't want us to take them too seriously. The earth is alive, and it's allergic to humans. I think the earth doesn't care whether we're here or not. And I don't think it would make much difference. In a million years, whatever we do, it's going to come bounding back. I mean, look what happened after. You think it's a divine accident that humans end up being on the planet? Not divine. It's just an accident. It's just an accident. So there's no divinity that humans? Yeah, there's no divinity. In other words, I'm with Gould on this. Rewind the tape and tweak the variables a little bit. We wouldn't be here. If the asteroid didn't come, all these types of things. Now, some people argue that there's a certain amount of directionality in evolution. That something like a bipedal primate with tools and a big brain on one end and the waste disposal system at the other end. And so there's only so many ways to structure a land creature that that would have arisen anyway. I'm not sure about that. I'm a little skeptical of that. Bob Wright makes this argument in non-zero. That in his book, Non-zero, that there's a slight advantage to non-zero plane organisms versus zero-sum plane organisms. And the former out-compete the latter just slightly. And that leads to cooperativeness, altruism, love, and things like that. OK, that has happened. If we find life on another planet, that would be a second experiment. Did it happen that way there? And then the more we find other planets with living organisms, we can then see that experiment, how it played out. And simulate our own. Or simulate our own, right, yeah. So but either way, I think it's clear we do play some kind of a role. And so it's not really fair to say, in a million years, it won't matter what we've done, because it'll all come back even if we nuke ourselves. I mean, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, if you go there now, you would never know, except for they left a building left from 1945 just to remind people. They came back, bounding back, actually within weeks, they were rebuilding the city and so on. If you looked at the photographs in 1945 of what Europe looked like, particularly most of the cities in Germany, just rubble. You go to any of those cities now, you would never know this happened, other than they kept that kind of awful 70s architecture, 60s and 70s architecture. But other than that, they're thriving cities. So, I mean, things come back much faster than we think. And after the meteor strike 65 million years ago, that wiped out most of life on Earth, but still here, it's just, they bounced right back. So I think- Which we also only really discovered within the last couple of decades as something that actually happened. Which again, we're so, we have so much amnesia to understanding how we actually got here. And so to be able to go and have the proper archeology, the proper anthropology in order to understand how we got to this point is so important. But is it really just an accident of evolution that we're here? Yeah, I think so. I don't think there's anything. I mean, okay, look, we only have an N of one. So you and I and everybody, we're just talking through our hats, okay? If we, in a hundred years from now, we come back, we're chronically frozen, we come back a thousand years from now or whatever we have this conversation. And it turns out we have an N of 657 inhabited planets with intelligent life and so on. And we see, oh wow, this is a certain inevitability to evolution that leads toward intelligence. Okay, then my accident hypothesis is probably wrong. But does it also potentially give room for a soul to come through in a body into the world and see this, these are the hard questions. I know, these are very tough things. So that could be then like a very Occam's razor-esque approach. Let me point out that consciousness just comes directly from- Like a consciousness, a sentience, consciousness. So sentience either just- That's better than soul. So, okay, we'll go, yes, yes. So we'll go with this idea of just sentience emerging from a complex biological phenomenon that has occurred from the earth to humans reproducing. And when I'm born through my ancestors that I am birthed with sentience because of a complex biological process of perception. I think that's probably very common in the universe. I suspect sentience probably is because it comes on pretty early. It doesn't matter how you define it. You know, all living organisms are sentient in the sense they respond to their environment, they take in information, they process the information, they respond accordingly. At some point, if you wanna throw in self-awareness, then that reduces the end by quite a bit. But there's still, I think my dog is self-aware in a certain level, less than, say, a chimp, less than a human. But, you know, so anyway, I think that once you get complex life rolling, then something like sentience consciousness will arise. You know, just being aware of your environment and responding to it in a general sense, that is probably pretty common. But coming through with something like a spirit is not... See, again, these words, these words you use, what do you mean by spirit? See, but okay, I'm responding, assuming that you're using the word the way the traditional theist uses the word. You know, in a dualistic Cartesian way that there's something beyond the physical body. And how do you feel about that? So, well, I'm skeptical of that. I'm a monist. You know, I don't think there's anything such thing as mind that floats above the brain. It's not, you know, there's the neurons with their synapses and the neural networks all connected. But what the theist thinks is that, you know, that the soul, like upon death, floats off the brain and goes off into the ether or the quantum field state or whatever. Well, where did we all come from? Big Bang. So did we all come from a place of unity? Did we all come from one source? Well, that's it, the singularity that banged, yes. Okay, so if we all come from that one source, is that, could we then subscribe potentially the word God to all that is? Metaphorically, I guess you could. Okay. But again, the average theist Christian is not thinking that you know, the Big Bang singularity. Could then all sentience be the nerve endings of God? Okay, now you're sounding like Deepak Chopra or I don't know what. What do you think about that? You've been spending too much time with these gurus and these psychedelic gurus. They're not psychedelic gurus. Okay, they're not. It's just ancient wisdom. Ancient wisdom, yeah. And you know, I also come from a very deep science background from multiple disciplines. So to be one that can kind of play with both and try and see what edges of knowledge can be pushed, what things we can remember from what we've heard from. So take your friend Ray Kurzweil is there a God not yet but we're working on that. The singularity of this super advanced AI would be God, like that's true. Again, the average person thinks of God as this personal being that brought the universe into being, created us, knows about us, cares about us and is creating an afterlife for us. Okay, I don't think that's what you're talking about. And I think that's actually a pretty straw man argument for God. I think it is. I think God just being all that is from the big bang until now and earth potentially not being just an accident of biological evolution but really something that's profoundly beautiful that has evolved humans that are able to figure out they're supposed to remember in a sense that we all come from the same place and that nature sustains us and that we have to work together across this planet and that when we forget that it makes space for some of the corruptive aspects of our world. So does that, that's maybe more of a straw, a steel man argument on the point of God and spirituality. Sagan famously said, humans or brains or consciousness is a way of the cosmos to know itself because we are stardust. We're just the product of stars that went supernova. You know, we are carbon and so on. Okay, so if that's what you're after, yes, I can see that as a kind of a metaphor. Although it's literally true. We are the way for the cosmos to know itself. But I don't wanna impugn that cosmos with agency. Like it's a thing that is, it itself is aware. We are the cosmos's eyes and ears in that sense. So that's beautiful though, the perception of the big bang of all that is is now in these sentient life forms that are perceiving and experiencing this beautiful experiment that we're in. So but see that right there, science, right, we can link something like Sagan talking about the cosmos observing, experiencing itself as something that spirituality has also been talking about about how we're all children of the cosmos coming through from this experience. So I think by being able to merge that science and spirituality right there, it can actually do really beautiful justice for us understanding why we're here. Yeah. Well, if it motivates people to act in a more healthy way, both for themselves personally and socially, okay, that's fine. I mean, that is kind of the role of myth and metaphor in literature is to motivate people, is to reflect something about the world, not in a scientific way, but in another way, that then motivates people, moves them emotionally. I mean, this is that discussion that I've had with Jordan Peterson, who, you know, he's a big myth guy and the importance of myths and stories in human society and personal lives. Huge, yeah. Yeah, and I think he's right about that. Yes, yes. Now, and there's a body of literature now in evolutionary psych, on evolutionary literature. To what extent do stories actually reflect the true nature of human nature, for example? In other words, the novelists had this figured out before the scientists did. Just by observation, just by looking around and having life experiences, they realize there's certain themes that come up over and over and over in literature. And that's because they're real. They're reflecting something that's real in human nature. Love, relationships, power, deception, and the better angels and the inner demons, all those characteristics we study scientifically, they're there in all the novels centuries ago because they're true in a sense. So that, to that, I'm willing to grant religion myths, that sort of Joseph Campbell, pre Jordan Peterson, Joseph Campbell's, kind of looking for the commonalities amongst world myths. Either they got there through diffusion, cultural diffusion, or they are reinventing the same ideas because it's reflecting something, underlying reality. And these myths that cover such important aspects of the human experience are also ones that indigenous elders are also mentioning with regard to where we all come from and what sustains us. And so by being able to piece these things together, I think it does help us behave in a more healthy and sustainable way moving forward. Some of the things that we maybe are currently deceiving us, so when we come into the world, do we come with a purpose? Do we come with something that we know is going to bring us the most meaning and then it's our responsibility to figure out where that is? I think so, okay. Yeah, I do think so. I mean, again, social scientists that study this, come up with certain things that are true for most people most of the time. Again, having meaningful work, having family, you don't have to be married, but having some kind of loving relationship with another human being, you know, having children and doing something that takes you out of yourself. You work for a nonprofit, you belong to a church, you volunteer in the weekends, you do something with a community of people to some common cause, that leads to spirituality. Some people do meditation or they do long walks on the beach or they go to church. There's lots of ways to get it. No one group has a monopoly on that. Clearly this is more than what science is offering by itself, but science can study it and go, look, these are the things that the happiest people do. Just like in the same way that longevity researchers look for the blue zones, the places where people live the longest. They eat fish or the Mediterranean diet or whatever, but one of the characteristics is a community, a social community where you have friends and people that care about you, that you care about relationships, that kind of thing. And so there, I think to the extent that the ancient wisdoms or religions or myths have talked about that, they probably figured that out through trial and error and observation. I think it's important to make a point because you keep bringing up these wisdom elders and so on. A lot of them came up with crazy ideas that turned out to be just utter nonsense. And we should recognize that just because someone is an ancient elder, doesn't mean they're right. They could be just completely off the rails. So again, you have to check the ideas with reality. So I mean, there was a slew of books in the 70s and 80s, the Dancing Wooly Masters, the Dawa Physics, The Turning Point, Free Job Capra. I read all those books. I loved them. Great stuff. The kind of marriage of Western science with Eastern tradition. And some of it turned out to be, okay, there's a match there. Oh, that's a bunch of nonsense. There's no link there. And so it depends. We can't just say just because it's old, it's true. Yeah, because we can easily be deceived by people that are carrying something that could potentially be deceiving us. And that's a very bad as well. Yet we can also, like a long walk on the beach can be different for someone that is deeply connecting to the ocean and the origins of our life. That is so much different than someone that comes to the beach, takes a selfie of themselves and starts posting it on the internet. And so these are completely different ways of perceiving the world. There's a reason beachfront property is so much more expensive than inland property. Or if you're inland having a spectacular mountain view or being up on a cliff overlooking a valley, those homes are more expensive. And this is not just some random quirk of real estate. I mean, the location, location, location is defined by a very certain characteristics that I think does tap into human nature. Ed Wilson calls this biofilia. We love nature. We love the biosphere. And acacia trees, bodies of water, crashing waves, sand, cliffs and looking down. Now there's much debate in evolutionary psychology about why that is or even if it is because there's criticisms about that. Like certain landscape paintings are rated higher than other kinds of paintings. And yet some of the most revered artwork has nothing to do with nature or anything like that. So I'll admit it's a debated point, whether it's an adaptation or it's just a byproduct. Steve Pinker calls this cheesecake. Like certain kinds of art, maybe just cheesecake. It just tastes good for some other reason not having to do with that particular thing anyway. But the deeper point is that we do, which you're after here, this kind of spirituality connected to the earth. Whether there's evolved adaptive reasons for that or not, clearly it's something in our nature. Oh yeah, we're proving it with science now too where people are walking out into force and now we're calling it force therapy that cortisol levels decrease when you go out in force. Just things like this. Hug a tree. Come on. Do we really need to be probing this so much with science to actually finally understand that me going out into nature will help me decrease my stress levels? It's pretty damn obvious. Yes it is. And then the way that you behave there, are you going there just to take a selfie and immediately start posting it or are you going there to actually connect to the essence of our origins? Completely different take on it. Don't take your cell phone into the forest. Yes, yes. There's this take of, go a day without using the technologies and see how you feel afterwards. It doesn't feel good for the first day. I've done this. So after about day two or so, then the anxiety starts to come down and after like day four you're like, I didn't really need that phone. Life is pretty damn good without it. It was pretty damn good without it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And how much more focused do you have on getting things done that you want to do? But then again also if you were offline for a week during the time that I just figured out a couple of days ago that I was coming down here, we wouldn't have been able to coordinate and make this happen. So the Jews with the Sabbath. Yes. Okay, not just the Jews, but they're the ones that make the biggest deal about it, midnight or sundown, Friday to sundown, Saturday. You know, some of my atheist friends make fun of religious rituals, but really some of them have some grounding on that. You know, it's a way of carving out a niche of time for you and your family and nothing else. And that's good, yeah, that's good. I once made fun of the Mormons wearing the secret underwear, right? And in the audience was a Mormon woman who said, well, okay, Dr. Schumer, come on, that's not very, it's not, I don't really secretly think the underwear is doing something to, it's just a way of my honoring the tradition or my paying respect to the authority of the church or something like that. And I forget her exact words, but I changed my mind about that. I thought, okay, I see that, I get that. Okay, let's tackle this one. So there's a, we gave this example earlier. I think it's a really good one to kind of start things off with. This idea of humans just have a deep amount of amnesia happening with like our origin story, because again, a couple of decades ago, we weren't sure that the extinction event of the dinosaur era was due to astroidal impact. And now we know that and it makes way more sense that that made space for the humans to evolve. You know, very similarly, we can start thinking about these things of things like the goblaclitepe. You know, the site that you were talking about with Graham Hancock. And I think these are actually very profound archeological discoveries of us that holy cow, how many ancient sites are buried in our planet that are slowly like disappearing, but that we need to go and find to piece together our story of how we got here. And I do think, and I'm interested to hear your thoughts about this, I do think there are gatekeepers. I think there are gatekeepers that prevent us from advancing certain aspects of not only our origin story, but even more about things like lobbies. There's lobbies in the pockets of different governments around the planet that are pushing their own personal agendas around pharmaceuticals or around fake foods and fake physicians and fake politicians. And so these types of things, they're gatekeepers that have literally set up different styles of defenses that are preventing the truth. It's being obfuscated in a sense. What are your thoughts about that? Well, in the first point, I think Graham is correct. There's a lot of these sites that are clear that people didn't live there. They went there to do something. And it probably was something like spiritual, religious, whatever that word would have meant to them, 10,000 years ago, say, something like that, Gobekli Tepe, maybe. My archeo-astronomer friend at the Griffith Observatory, his name escapes me now, I'll think of it in a minute. You know, he talks about a lot of these archeo-astronomy sites, they are kind of spiritual sites where you go to kind of pay respect to the cosmos, that kind of thing. And we've kind of lost that. Yeah, he makes a point that he tells a funny story that there was a blackout in Los Angeles one night, I think it was in 1986 or something. And the next day at the Griffith Observatory, got all these calls like, there was something weird about the sky. It's like, yeah, you could see the stars. Oh, we need more of that. We need more of that, yeah, so, yes, I think. But in terms of this amnesia, I do think that this proliferation of channels and science shows has trickled down to where everybody now knows about the Big Bang and the theory of evolution and the Anertals and this and that, and science popularizers they're everywhere now and there's a lot of great material and the CGI is so good on these shows now. The new cosmos reboot, but they all have fantastic CGI. What does a black hole look like? And in that film, Interstellar, they consulted Kip Thorne and he gave them the equations that this is how to portray a black hole. So what you see is what a black hole would actually look like and it's so real, particularly in a theater. I mean, you could almost viscerally feel what it would be like to be near a black hole. So I think that's helped in terms of, like Carl said, Sagan said about cosmos. It is our story. It is an origin story. It's a myth, but it has the benefit of actually also being true. Most religious myths, maybe they're true, maybe they're not. Who knows? There's no mechanism to test it and that wasn't the purpose anyway of the story. But for the modern scientific origin story, it's also true, which to me makes it even more meaningful. So when I go, I visit observatories. I like to go inside those huge domes, like Mount Wilson above Los Angeles, go down to Mount Palomar with the 200 inch. I've been to a bunch of them. And to me it's like going to church. And I've been to the big cathedrals in Europe, the shark cathedral, the big dome in Cologne where my wife is from. Oh, I can really feel the emotional spirituality that believers get even though I'm an atheist because those structures are so impressive. They are so huge. And I can see, let's say 500 years ago when that was the biggest thing anyone will ever see in their life. They transcend people's egos working in cooperation to make these beautiful structures. Centuries long work projects, yes. And... We used to think that it would just be 4,000, 5,000 years ago that we were constructing pyramids and that this is something that is okay, fine. Like it was just that many millennia ago that humans could do that. And then we doubled the time period because Goblekli Tepe is just one example now of being able to move these monolithic pieces of stone into this spiritual location that we're hypothesizing right now, right? That we think that people went there. But to be able to add a serious 5,000 year chunk onto human history and say now we were doing that 5,000 years before that, plus being able to say, okay, we had a designated site where people were worshiping in a sense that we can hypothesize about this, but that they were connecting with the cosmos. They're connecting with what had given them life and that they were here. And now today it seems like we are so much in the metropolis is so disconnected with light pollution from our cosmos. So disconnected from when we take a sip of water to actually be truly grateful for that nourishment that we're receiving. It feels like we're wildly in a sense that the Pinker argument true in so many regards but in terms of spiritual wisdom, Pinker's argument may actually fail in that respect that we, our ancestors may have had the edge of knowledge and spirituality just been pushed way further out. In turn, especially spiritual science. Look at the beautiful structures that were left behind versus now our spiritual science seems like it's we're still scraping pieces together. Like the actual edge of knowledge has rescinded actually over time. What do you think about that? Well, that goes a little too far maybe. In the case I don't think that's what Pinker is talking about. He's talking about something else. Of course. But he's the overall trajectory of the words that he said, the story that he's saying and that you say in the moral arc and whatnot is true in so many regards. But I think to say it's a scientific consensus that this is the best time to be alive. Well, there's possibly actually one little aspect of it let's say for now that spiritual connection today when you're birthed into a metropolis is much more difficult to achieve than when you're born into a part of the world that doesn't have light pollution. We are connected to growing off the land. These types of things. You're walking into a supermarket. You don't even know who the farmers are. Versus when you actually go to a farmer's market you can ask where is your farm? Can I come visit your farm? Big difference. I see where you're going with this. And there's some truth to that in as much as say hunter-gatherers were taller, healthier, had fewer cavities. Their bones were stronger. They had less arthritis than farmers a few thousand years after the agricultural revolution. So it was healthier to live in a hunter-gather environment. And certainly Jared Diamond makes this point in his book the year before, no, the world before yesterday I think it's called. And he talks about the connectedness that everybody in a hunter-gatherer group has with each other. They care about each other. They know each other and they resolve disputes. They just sit in the quad area and they have it out, hash it out. And they apologize, reparations are made, life goes on. And all that, that's true. But we don't have that world. That world's never coming back. And so moving forward, can we recapture some of the positive aspects of that? Let's get rid of the communicable diseases that killed almost everybody that lived by the time they were 40 or 50 and we get to live longer. Can we have the benefits of modern medicine and the spiritual aspects? Yes, we can. And I think there's enough movements. I've been to the Esalen Institute several times. That kind of, what did they call it, personal growth movement, something like that. I forget what they call it. But just getting in touch with the things that matter, I think that helps. Religion is one way to do it. As a reminder, once a week, I mean, that's why do people go to church? They don't go to hear a lecture about the five proofs of God by Thomas Aquinas or what was there before the Big Bang type? They want it to be, to hang out with their friends and fellow community members that think like them. We all need that, but you can get that now in the modern world. Maybe Facebook hangout pages are not quite the right way for everybody. I know a lot of millennials are into that, but not millennials, generation Z, I-geners. Not my thing, but I get it hanging out with my friends, our family, and anyway. I think there's lots of ways to get that. And we shouldn't, but I don't want to idealize the past. I mean, life was, really was, nasty, brutish and short for most people. And if you go back to, people long for the, live in the Middle Ages or before the modern period or something like that, they're envisioning, they're the king in the castle where they have all the goodies. 99.9% of the world lived in abject poverty. No, you'd be living in a mud hut, you'd be dead in no time, no running water, no toilets, no toilet paper, no dentistry. The food was basically just this bland gruel that, and you don't know if you're gonna have it tomorrow. Life today is really better than most of that world. So to not forget exactly what you just described, meanwhile, simultaneously revisiting past time periods where humans may have had certain aspects of their life structured in a way that is quite nice. And so that essence, so to be able to maybe balance some of that, those things of how humans could work together to do things, how humans could have potentially more time that was less distracted, more whole foods at times, all these different types of aspects, less fake foods, fake politicians, fake physicians, all this type of stuff. So the amount of maybe like self-dealing in other aspects of our family values, not scaling over time, are slowly it looks like changing as we decentralize a lot of our aspects of living. And so let's just revisit this one aspect of it, which is, okay, within the gatekeepers, I'm just curious, within gatekeepers, where, because I agree with, I feel like we agree that there's, like you just described earlier, the democratization of being able to spread truth, science, this type of thing is actually really, really helpful and it's awakening more people, super true. At the same time, it's with corporations, with certain groups that it seems as though are setting up purposely obstacles that make it more and more difficult to try and say, hey, is it possible that our origins are actually different than what we say they are, or is it possible that there are oligopoly dynamics happening in corporations? There are gatekeepers for sure, in business and in science. There's a reason for the gatekeepers in a way, science is conservative and you have to kind of jump through the hoops and get the union card. You go to graduate school, get your degree, work with a mentor and so on. There's reasons those are in place. And the reason is, because most of us are wrong about most of the things we think about most of the time. So there has to be some kind of filter to kind of make sure you don't go off the rails down some path that we've already gone down and found out was the wrong line of research. So I'm gonna guide you this way. Now the drawback to that, of course, is you may miss some of the creativity of somebody fresh, new into the field. And yet science does come up with new stuff all the time. So somehow or another, new ideas are not kept out by the gatekeepers. The gatekeeping process works pretty well for filtering out fraud, pseudo-science, bad science. It's not perfect, but it catches enough of the bad stuff and it still lets through enough of the new creative ideas that things march along pretty well. Maybe not as fast as we would like. Something like the FDA is maybe their filter is too tight and maybe you wanna go to a European system where new drugs can come on the market a little faster. Same problem, the gatekeeper thing. But if you had no gatekeepers, then we'd have the quacks on this street corner selling you every quack remedy for everything and people would not benefit from that. So we gotta have something like that. Now people like, back to Graham Hancock, who I like very much. Like twice. He's definitely an outsider. He's not an archeologist. He has no training, but he knows a lot. I mean, he's traveled. He's been up most of these sites. And his point about the gatekeeping is that the gatekeepers kind of keep him out. I'm not sure that's actually true. I mean, he's probably sold more books than all other archeologists combined ever. So it's like, well, Graham, you're not exactly unknown. You're probably the most famous archeologist living today who's not actually an archeologist. So the gatekeepers may keep you out of the peer review journals, but he's not even submitting work to them anyway. So he gets on Joe Rogan pretty much whenever he wants and he has 20 million views of his various appearances there. So it's not like there's no voice for people like Graham Hancock, there is. The problem that he's encountering is that we call this anomaly hunting. So he's really good at plucking out anomalies that don't seem to fit the mainstream theory. Like Clovis first, okay, so when did the first humans come to America? 11,000 years ago, okay, well, that appears to be a little on the short side, maybe it's 13, 15, maybe up to 20,000 years ago, depending on this site, that site, Mesa, not Mesa Verde, anyway, it's escaping me at the moment. And there's a few others. And so Graham points to those ago, you see that the old guards, the gatekeepers, they did not allow in those older dates. Well, actually, yes they did, because now we know about those older dates. The problem when you then jumped to like 130,000 years ago in reference to that find in San Diego of the mammoth bones. Now, that's an interesting study because that was published in Nature, peer review journal by a real archeologist, not some alternative guy. Okay, what do we do with that? We don't have to do anything with it. Let science carry it out and let other people look at the bones and so on. There's since been a paper published being skeptical of that. But if there were humans here 130,000 years ago, and then the next date to that is like, say 19, 20,000 years ago, there should be hundreds, thousands, millions of fossils and tools and bones and various things to fill in that gap. So in time, in the course of the next few years or decades, either that gap will be filled or it'll turn out this was an incorrect anomaly, that it was actually the bones were broken by the construction project trucks and whatnot, not people 130,000 years ago. That's probably gonna be the explanation. That's also, that's very hubristic, I think, because I think that there's so much that is still undiscovered in how we got here that still needs to be uncovered. Yes, maybe, maybe, but okay, but that's kind of like a negative evidence argument that because you can't disprove it at the moment, therefore, this theory is viable. No, how about, it's a Karl Popper's conjecture and refutation. Conjecture all you want, but we're gonna try to refute it and if you can't fill in those gaps. Which over time will likely happen. Maybe, maybe. Our techniques are gonna get better. That's why I go blankly tabling so many of the other ancient sites around the world. It's just like slow down, our tools are gonna get better. We're gonna be able to really do things like, you can actually use interesting radar techniques in order to identify some of the areas in the Amazon or Sahara, Continental Shells. These are very interesting ways of using technology to better understand our origin story. But what about within the other spaces of our world? Like within, let's take other examples like the oligopoly dynamics that may be at play with technology companies or with food companies or with all of the different things that just seem like we don't actually, the truth is being obfuscated purposefully in order for us to not understand what actually is healthy food or what is healthy use of technology, all these types of things. Yes, well, how do we know about that? Because of whistleblowers and outsiders like Gary Tobs and Nina Teicholtz writing books about the food industry, not just them, others have exposed what the chemical and food industry has done over the last 50 years. Well, so in a way, this is what we mean by science is self-correcting, but you have to have a free press, open inquiry, lots of alternative places to publish and get your voices heard. Gary Tobs has been touting this sugar and good calories, bad calories since the 90s. And he was considered a nut job and an outsider at the time pushing against the pyramid food pyramid consensus. And it's looking like he was right. Now, so on the gatekeeper thing, it's like, yeah, see, the gatekeeping didn't work. Didn't it work? I mean, now we all know about this. His books were published, I mean, his first paper was published in the New York Times Magazine. That's not exactly the gatekeepers I've kept him silent, right? But how many decades has it taken for the gatekeepers of certain industries to continue to feel like a parker? Well, the ship turned slowly. The ship turned slowly. The Titanic is moving too slow with the iceberg coming. Okay, it feels like that. And they need to be identified. The gatekeeper lobbyist building processes need to be torn down. I think the names have been named, you know, Naomi Areskes and her co-author, I forget his name, of the merchants of doubt. They named names in there, you know, they named the tobacco lobbyists who were hired by the chemical industry, who were hired by the climate companies to do the same people to plant doubts of seed. If you can do tobacco, you can do flame retardants and global warming and so on. I think it's not a secret. We know which companies, you know, that ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers, we know who's funding these things. So they are part of the gatekeepers, but we're the gatekeepers' keepers. You know, we're watching the keepers. That's why you absolutely have to have a free press to allow that. Yes, our cooperative processes in order to identify those and build things that obsolete those old systems is so critical. And then another example is just that when you take something like things, again, things that we use every single day, these extraordinary pieces of technology that are actually being, that have psychometric profiles of two billion human beings that are then pointing at you all the time watching everything that you do to make it irresistible for you to get off of the device because the business models are tied to the time on screen of you watching advertisements or looking at them in the feeds. So again, these things, can we point out who's in charge? Can we point these things out? Can we say that we need to make it easier? Again, things like, why don't you tell us about with the thing that you just mentioned with the importance of freedom of press and freedom of enterprise? Things that enable us to actually have new perspectives be brought in and then obsolete those old systems because this is something else that you're really passionate about next year. Well, you want to name names, Mark Zuckerberg. Okay, there we go. Mr. Zuckerberg, what are you doing? Remember that moment in his congressional hearing? This congressman is like, how do you make money? Senator, we sell ads, but it's free. It's like we sell the data. Oh, everybody in tech, of course, already knew all this, but you know the general public, that was less than two years ago that this kind of became publicly aware. And it was like Zuckerberg, would you tell us where you stayed last night? And it was like, no. It's like, well, why will you know where we stayed last night? Yeah, well, again, I think the solution to that is just pushback and just awareness in the fact that you don't have to use social media. You don't have to do it. No one's making you do it. So anyway, and then what was the... Overall on the freedom of speech and freedom of free enterprise? Oh, yeah, so again, I'm a big free speech guy for free speech, open inquiry. We got to have it, again, because most of us are wrong about most things, most of the time. And the only way to find out is to interact with other people as much as you can. Just awareness of the fact that we all live in these silos, these bubbles, these echo chambers, pick your metaphor, makes, I think, makes you aware that, well, maybe I should talk to other people that are not Republican or Democrat. Maybe I should read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and then see what other people are saying. Just in case, find your blind spots. And I think the research on the backfire effect is now showing that, in fact, you can talk people out of their beliefs through better arguments and evidence. This can work, it's hard, but de-biasing programs can work by making people aware of their biases. Those things can work. Teaching steel manning instead of straw manning. Yeah, exactly, the kind of stuff we're doing here. So the technology, of course, has its dark side, but this enables us to do like what we're doing right here right now. It does, yes. And there's tons of podcasts. And the studies showing the percentage of people listening to podcasts daily, weekly, monthly, and so on is going up sky-rising. As more people come online too. Yeah, and it's great, it's great. So this is what we're talking about with a free press. This is part of the press. Yes. And so all the mainstream guys are having to scramble to change their business models and so on to keep up. Good, that's good. Yeah, that's good. People were always worried about just a handful of half a dozen companies own all the major media sources. Aren't you worried? No, I'm not because there's all these other platforms out there, Joe Rogan and, I mean, so they can squelch Alex Jones, okay, but it's an open market. People can devise their own platforms and start something new. Yeah, and one of the things also that we have to also be aware of is just that those, the companies that we distribute these pieces of content through are able to have their own, again, oligopoly dynamics of deciding on who they can restrict and who they can't, these types of things, so that's why ThinkSpot, Jordan's platform and all these other things are coming up and we'll see where things move in that direction. I am worried about people like Dave Rubin, Prager, you, videos being censored, censored, whatever they're doing, demonetized the platform for certain venues. So I tweeted the other day, dear team YouTube, I've watched dozens of Prager, you videos, I agree with about 50% of them, I disagree with about 25%, and I'm undecided about the other 25%. Please adjust your algorithm so I only see the ones I agree with, thank you. Yeah. You know, and of course, this is ridiculous. Just let everybody have their say, I understand that they're concerned that they were allowing ISIS people to set up. That's right, yeah. Okay, I get that. Don't wanna find beheadings on you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, those are the, again, this is that sort of lifeboat ethics. What do you do with this most extreme example? And the problem is when you push toward the center where it gets fuzzier, is Milo Yiannopoulos a right wing racist bigot, or is he a performance artist? Or a provocateur, what is he? It's those fuzzy areas where I think that they err on the wrong side. Well, we better cut out all these people. Draw the line here. I think you're drawing the line too far over here. Bring it back closer to the no beheadings videos or something that's much more obvious. And once you get into like, well, PragerU has a video about progressive tax versus a flat tax, come on, really? I mean, these are very debatable questions. Abortion, pro-choice, pro-life. Here's our video in favor of pro-life. That's okay, you know, that's, this is not a beheading video, okay? I think they draw the line too far. Yes, yes. And I think just another last point maybe to finish up on is there's a growing amount of interest in the idea of kind of what we were talking about earlier around about oneness, about how we all from the Big Bang until now are coming from the same place. And we gave these scientific examples of where the cosmos is already experiencing themselves that these types of ways of living on a day-to-day basis connected to that source, connected to this aspect of unity, oneness, that we can remain skeptical of it. And I think there's a healthy amount that can be done while simultaneously understanding that the, almost the faster that we can understand that we all come from the same place, the faster that we can all move towards similar views. I think that's what one of the best things science does for us is it shows us the unity of all life. You know, Darwin's idea is, you know, we all came from the same ancestors, all of us. Not just all humans came from the same pre-human species, but that all living organisms had the same DNA, the same force, you know, the same base pairs and so on. So there was only one genesis moment on earth and it came very early. And that's a pretty amazing thing. So we are all one in that sense. And if you want to push it back to the Big Bang, you know, we don't know why the laws of nature are the way they are and it's balanced the way it is and so on. But instead of going to the, whether it was a fine-tuned or the tuned enough, how about just say we're lucky to be in a universe where this could even happen, where we get to be here and just be thankful for that. I do totally follow on that. Just being grateful for being alive here. At the same time, I'm aware that so much more that, you know, Michael, we are such a, such so small on the timeline. So, you know, 25 years, 50 years, 75 years of life of being able to just, you know, parse all information, try and input in what we think is the best information to make us as intelligent as possible. And even then it's such a tiny little bit of all of the information. And so, you know, to be able to look back at the 100 billion humans that built the world that we live in or to look back at how billions of years of evolution finally got to this pinnacle spot of earth, where we can be birthed and have life and be the cosmos-reserving experiencing itself, that it just, I wanna just note, you feel like it's still potentially more of like just an evolution of sentience rather than a divine purpose that we have. I would not use divine in the way that most theists use the word. I think if we wanna say the universe is divine because it has the laws of nature that gives rise to sentient beings that then become aware of the universe having those laws of nature that give rise to sentience. Is that a thumbs up? If that's divinity, then I'm a believer. Okay, so, okay, cool, okay, cool. Then I think we got on the same page there, because that was a very beautiful way of writing it because I think that is what the wisdoms are pointing at is exactly what was just described. That that is such a blessing that we are here and because of that, if we were able to understand that, if every child born into the world was able to understand that, then it would be easier to eradicate so many of the issues that we see in our world. But because we go to the ocean and we're like selfie posts on Instagram, rather than be grateful for the fact that we get life from this, this is our life force, that that disconnect is the reason why we have so many of the issues. So that in itself, this idea of the unity, this idea of all that is, or God or divine purpose that we have here. Yeah, Michael, I'm sure that this idea of skepticism around spirituality, I think, is very beautiful. We spent a lot of time, last time we talked, on talking about skepticism around science as well, and also scientific advancements that have brought us here, all these types of things. So I think this has been a really solid piecing together on a second conversation, and I'm very grateful that you joined us. You're welcome, thanks for coming to Santa Barbara. Yeah, it was such a pleasure. You're super fun to talk to. Huge thank you to everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on this episode. Do let us know what you think about skepticism around spirituality around the topics that we talked about. To have more conversations with your friends, your coworkers, people online on social media, your family, about spirituality, about skepticism around spirituality. Have more of these conversations around the world. And also check out the links in the bio below to Michael's work, his website, MichaelShermer.com, as well as skeptic.com. Also, the links to the moral arc in Heavens on Earth are below as well. Do check out the books. And everyone, support the artists, entrepreneurs, the organizations around the world that you believe in. Support them, help them grow. If you believe in us, help support us so we can continue doing cool things like coming on site to Santa Barbara to interview great people like Michael. All of our links are below to our Patreon, our cryptocurrency link, our PayPal link, support us, help us grow. And go and build the future, everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we will see you soon. Peace. He he he he he. Would you say we did a good job on skepticism around spirituality? 100%, no, this was great. We're the best conversations I've had on this subject. Seriously. Wait, wait, wait, wait, what? You just said that? Wait, come back, come back, come back. Wait, come back and say that into the mic. Okay, okay, all right, all right. Oh, I love that, that's huge, Michael. The fact that you just said that is, is massive. I'm very grateful that you just said that.