Joe Rogan Experience #1068 - Michael Shermer

Joe Rogan 0:03 Four, three, two, one. Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Shermer. And Heavens on Earth.

Michael Shermer 0:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:10 The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia. Did you find-

Michael Shermer 0:15 L- ... anything? (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:16 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 0:17 No. (laughs) Sorry.

Joe Rogan 0:18 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 0:18 Nothing? Well, I found interesting, uh, journeys that people use to try to get there, from both the religious perspective and the scientific perspective. Um, so I do deal with, uh, the monotheism's versions of the afterlife and heaven, you know, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but the core of the book is, you know, the radical life extensionists, the cryonicists, trans-humanists-

Joe Rogan 0:38 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 0:38 ... the extropians, the mind uploaders, the people that take all the supplements and all, all the, the whole range there. I find it incredibly interesting. I call it afterlife for atheists, you know?

Joe Rogan 0:49 It is, right?

Michael Shermer 0:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:50 I mean, when, when you think about some of the people that are really, like, over the top hope... Did you go to that 2045 thing in New York a few years back? There was a futurist convention with all these people that, for whatever reason, they have this arbitrary date of 2045.

Michael Shermer 1:04 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:04 They decided-

Michael Shermer 1:05 Like you s- It's been getting pushed back. This is the-

Joe Rogan 1:07 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 1:07 ... when the singularity come-

Joe Rogan 1:08 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:08 ... is gonna co... Was 2030, then 2040, now 2045, um-

Joe Rogan 1:13 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:13 Y-

Joe Rogan 1:13 Kurzweil is a-

Michael Shermer 1:14 Ray Kurzweil, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:15 ... big... He's like the, the Grand Poobah-

Michael Shermer 1:18 He is. No, a- a- and, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:19 ... of the download your brain.

Michael Shermer 1:20 And when he gets on stage, now he's not preternaturally dynamic like a preacher, but he starts talking about, you know, "We're gonna h- You are gonna live forever, you're gonna have your mind uploaded." And people are just like, "Oh my God, we are the generation that's gonna do it."

Joe Rogan 1:34 Hmm.

Michael Shermer 1:34 "This is it, first time." And the moment, you know, I used to be religious when, in my youth, and I thought, "Man, this is like being back in church again."

Joe Rogan 1:41 When did you stop being religious?

Michael Shermer 1:42 Uh, I started in high school and stopped in graduate school, so it was-

Joe Rogan 1:46 Interesting.

Michael Shermer 1:46 ... about seven years.

Joe Rogan 1:46 You started being religious in high school?

Michael Shermer 1:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:49 So it wasn't something that your family introduced you to?

Michael Shermer 1:51 No, my, my parents were, um, pretty secular. They, uh, d- they weren't anti-religious, it wa- that wasn't a thing then. Uh, but this is 1971 when I was in high school when the, in the sort of nascent born again movement was starting. And there was no religious affiliation, it was just like, "It's me and Jesus." That's it. It's just-

Joe Rogan 2:07 Hmm.

Michael Shermer 2:07 ... you and, you and the Lord.

Joe Rogan 2:09 There's a lot of these, um, very charismatic, hip, young preachers that are doing sort of a thing like that, where they, they don't even have their own church, they'll like rent time in a church and-

Michael Shermer 2:19 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 2:19 ... they have these, these meetings where it's n- it's just non-denominational.

Michael Shermer 2:25 Right.

Joe Rogan 2:26 They just talk about God and-

Michael Shermer 2:28 Yep.

Joe Rogan 2:28 ... they get a lot of people fired up.

Michael Shermer 2:30 Yep, and, uh, you know, they, they, the-

Joe Rogan 2:31 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 2:31 ... place I went to s- this place called The Barn in La Crescenta where I grew up and, uh, you know, they played guitar and, uh, s-

Joe Rogan 2:37 Right.

Michael Shermer 2:38 You know, s- you know, s- still the same-

Joe Rogan 2:38 Did it turn into a sex cult? They usually do.

Michael Shermer 2:41 No, I was kinda hope-

Joe Rogan 2:41 Somebody starts banging people. (laughs)

Michael Shermer 2:42 I w- I was hoping for something like that-

Joe Rogan 2:44 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 2:44 ... but no, no. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 2:45 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 2:46 Yeah, that, that, uh, that is one of the problems with utopia, the, the 19th century utopian experiments, they always turned into this, you know, free sex for the leader.

Joe Rogan 2:53 Well, it always seems like whenever there's a man that's in a position where people start worshiping him-

Michael Shermer 2:59 Right.

Joe Rogan 2:59 ... you know, and then they s- they start l- hanging on his every word, he's like, "I start, gotta start fucking some of these people." (laughs)

Michael Shermer 3:05 (laughs) Well, I do, I covered Jim Jones and, uh-

Joe Rogan 3:08 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 3:08 ... you know, the way I, I, I phrase it is that no one joins a cult. They join a group that they think is gonna do good, save the-

Joe Rogan 3:14 Right.

Michael Shermer 3:14 ... world, gonna help me improve my life, improve the lives of others. And there's pictures online you can see of Jim Jones with Jerry Brown, Governor Jerry Brown-

Joe Rogan 3:22 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 3:22 ... in his first round and, you know, they were manning the soup kitchens, he was very liberal, open to African-Americans being part of the church in San Francisco, they're gays, women. Uh, you know, it was a really cutting edge pioneering thing. A- at the time it seemed like, "Yeah, th- that, that's a cool thing. I'm gonna join this group." N- not me, but you know, the people that did this i- in the, uh, '50s and '60s when he was coming up and then into the '70s. And then, then yeah, he started having sex and then drugs and then the-

Joe Rogan 3:46 Hmm.

Michael Shermer 3:46 ... you know, the feds started kind of poking around at taxes and that's when they went to South America.

Joe Rogan 3:51 Speaking of which, I think this week is the Spike special, it's now the Paramount Network on Waco.

Michael Shermer 3:56 Yeah, Waco.

Joe Rogan 3:57 Right?

Michael Shermer 3:57 Yes, right.

Joe Rogan 3:57 Isn't that-

Michael Shermer 3:58 Yeah, that's right.

Joe Rogan 3:58 ... isn't that going on like right now? I think it's like a six-

Michael Shermer 4:00 I think it start, I think it started Sunday, yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:02 Yeah, I think it's a six part series or something along those lines.

Michael Shermer 4:06 See, that's an interesting-

Joe Rogan 4:07 That was another one.

Michael Shermer 4:07 ... yet, uh, I'm, I'm absolutely convinced most of these guys believe what they say. Now may- maybe they're bullshitters at the start or they only partially believe but they, they repeat their rhetoric, their followers give them positive-

Joe Rogan 4:18 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 4:18 ... reinforcement, they come to believe it. And, uh, you know, David Koresh, he was, you know, right down the barrel he t- totally believed. Willing to die for his beliefs.

Joe Rogan 4:27 And he also was having sex with everybody.

Michael Shermer 4:29 Yes. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 4:29 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 4:30 Yes, yes. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 4:30 It's another o- I mean, it's so common, it's-

Michael Shermer 4:32 Yeah, almost cliche.

Joe Rogan 4:33 ... uh, I have a friend and his ex-girlfriend grew up in one of these sort of religious cults and it was the same deal. The head guy was having sex with all the women and, you know, he would have sex with different peoples' wives and everybody had to let him.

Michael Shermer 4:47 Yeah, same thing with the, the fundamentalist Mormons, um, what's his name that's in jail now? Je- Je- Jeff-

Joe Rogan 4:51 Jeffreys.

Michael Shermer 4:52 ... Jeff, Jeff.

Joe Rogan 4:53 Jeffreys?

Michael Shermer 4:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:53 Is that it?

Michael Shermer 4:54 Jeff, Jeffrey, Jeff, uh-

Joe Rogan 4:56 It's not Jeffreys?

Michael Shermer 4:57 Yeah, maybe it is Jeffreys.

Joe Rogan 4:57 Maybe I'm thinking of Jim Jeffreys, my friend the comedian.

Michael Shermer 4:59 (laughs) Uh, but anyway, yeah that's, you know, that's how it gets corrupted. I don't know if you ever read, uh, Jon, um, Jon Krakauer's book, Under the Banner of Heaven. This is the guy, the, the mountain climber that did, uh, Into Thin Air and, and, uh, and the, um, the one about the Alaskan kid. Um, anyway, he wrote this book called Under the Banner of Heaven-

Joe Rogan 5:17 The Alaskan kid who died?

Michael Shermer 5:18 Yes, yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:19 Um, the one they made that movie about?

Michael Shermer 5:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:20 What was that movie? Uh-

Michael Shermer 5:21 Into the Wild.

Joe Rogan 5:22 ... Into the Wild, yeah.

Michael Shermer 5:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:23 So he did Into the Wild, Into Thin Air. Krakauer's a great writer. So this book, um, he starts to investigate the murder of this, um, polygamist family in Utah just as a journalist, he's gonna 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 illegal, but they marry one and then the others are so-called sister wives and they're just there and they live on these, in these border towns along the border between Colorado and Utah, like Colorado City and all that. I've been to some of these places, it's like, uh, it's like a Twilight Zone episode, you go into this town, gas station or whatever, it's like, "Ugh, feels kinda weird here." And, uh, so Krakauer discovered this whole world of, you know, going all the way back to, um, the founding of the religion and, um-

Michael Shermer 6:09 ... uh, what's his name, Joseph Smith-

Joe Rogan 6:12 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 6:12 ... and you know, he gets this revelation from God that, uh... Well, basically, he's banging the woman down the street. He's married. And so he gets this revelation from God and, and Krakauer has this, this scenario in the book where he, he tells his wife, "Now, honey, I've been talking to God, and you're not gonna believe this, but he says I have to ha- marry this," you know, "so-and-so down the street." And she's like, "Oh, yeah? Well, I, I have to start seeing other guys." "No, no. Uh, G- God was very specific about this. It's just for the guys."

Joe Rogan 6:40 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 6:41 And, uh, uh, uh, uh, "How, how do I know you talked to God?" "Well, my buddies, they were there. They heard it also."

Joe Rogan 6:46 Hmm.

Michael Shermer 6:46 A- and this is the, the first page of the Book of Mormon is an affidavit. These are the people that heard the revelation and they're, they all sign it and it's like, "Okay." So this is how it starts.

Joe Rogan 6:55 Well, when Joseph Smith started it all off in 1820, he was only 14.

Michael Shermer 6:59 Yeah, that's what's so-

Joe Rogan 7:00 You name me a 14-year-old that's not a liar.

Michael Shermer 7:02 (laughs) That's right.

Joe Rogan 7:03 They just learn how to lie.

Michael Shermer 7:04 Right.

Joe Rogan 7:04 Th- it's not even like that they're bad people. When you're 14 years old, you are a developing entity.

Michael Shermer 7:09 Right.

Joe Rogan 7:09 Your, you know, like your frontal lobe's not fully formed. You don't really know what you're... You're practicing sentences.

Michael Shermer 7:14 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 7:15 You know what you're doing, trying to exert your influence, and this guy was just very creative.

Michael Shermer 7:20 He was and he got chased out of, uh, Palmyra, New York is where he started, and then he moved to Missouri when basically he was in trouble with the law and, and other issues and, uh, then he got in trouble there and he was killed. And, and usually this ends a cult, when the leader dies.

Joe Rogan 7:35 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 7:36 Now, there's a, there's a, kind of a, a, there's a critical period if you get a new dynamic leader to take over, like in the case of Scientology, um, David Miscavige took over after L. Ron Hubbard passed over to the other side, and, uh, he managed to keep it going. Same thing with Brigham Young. It was Brigham Young that t- turned this little cult into a, a world religion, and they just went further west to Utah to get away from federal authorities.

Joe Rogan 7:58 Now, how much of a hit is Scientology taking from that Leah Remini series?

Michael Shermer 8:02 I think, uh, uh, I don't... We don't have- 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, uh, real estate investments, but I can't imagine their numbers are, are- could be doing anything but shrinking.

Joe Rogan 8:20 Yeah, between the Lawrence Wright book, then the HBO documentary with it, featured Girl Hags is crazy.

Michael Shermer 8:25 Oh, just quirky stuff. Yeah, and your dialogue with, with Leah was incredible. And she's just a hero amongst, you know, secularists that fight against cults.

Joe Rogan 8:34 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 8:34 That's really, that's really the on- the best way to do it. Not top-down laws against cults, unless they're doing something ill- obviously illegal, but just bottom-up, members speaking out.

Joe Rogan 8:43 Yeah. I had, uh, David Miscavige's dad on as well.

Michael Shermer 8:48 Right.

Joe Rogan 8:48 That was, that was sad. That was sad because I felt like I was talking to a guy who felt like he wasted his life.

Michael Shermer 8:55 Right.

Joe Rogan 8:55 And lost his son.

Michael Shermer 8:56 Right.

Joe Rogan 8:57 And he brought his son into Scientology. The whole thing was... That was really disturbing.

Michael Shermer 9:02 Yep.

Joe Rogan 9:03 It's just, uh, it's just v- very strange that the United States government is allowing those people to be tax-exempt. I mean with all the evidence that's available.

Michael Shermer 9:13 Yes. I know. I know.

Joe Rogan 9:13 You just go and look at what they're proposing and what they believe and the thetans and the frozen entities-

Michael Shermer 9:21 (laughs) Right.

Joe Rogan 9:21 ... that were dropped into the volcano. All the crazy shit out there.

Michael Shermer 9:23 Well, the story about their... This is what, uh, really worried me about, um, the IRS. I mean, I've always thought, you know, I don't fear, um, uh, Hell or the devil, but I fear the IRS, you know? I take... 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, uh, thousands of lawsuits.

Joe Rogan 9:40 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 9:40 I think they sued them like 3500 times or something like this, and-

Joe Rogan 9:42 Well, they had every single member that they could get to do it-

Michael Shermer 9:46 Right.

Joe Rogan 9:46 ... sue them as well. They were getting all their members to sue it. They were suing.

Michael Shermer 9:50 Right.

Joe Rogan 9:50 I think that was the story. Isn't that how it worked?

Michael Shermer 9:52 Yeah, and event- eventually, the IRS just said, "Okay, fuck it. Uh, you're t- you're tax-exempt."

Joe Rogan 9:57 But s- I mean, if they're letting the Mormons do it, then why wouldn't they let the Scientologists do it?

Michael Shermer 10:03 Right. Right.

Joe Rogan 10:03 Because se- I really don't think any religion should be tax-exempt.

Michael Shermer 10:05 No, I agree. I agree.

Joe Rogan 10:06 It's ridiculous. I mean, in 2018, with what we know about reality-

Michael Shermer 10:10 Right.

Joe Rogan 10:10 ... the fact that we let some old voodoo, superstitious nonsense-

Michael Shermer 10:14 Right.

Joe Rogan 10:15 ... not have to pay taxes and exert extreme power politically, socially-

Michael Shermer 10:19 Right.

Joe Rogan 10:20 ... economically. It's crazy.

Michael Shermer 10:22 Well, so, and they, like, preachers get a... They can, they can live in a house tax-free. They don't have to pay property tax on the h- on the home that they own. You know, so there's a lot of these side benefits also that you d- don't normally hear about.

Joe Rogan 10:32 So gross.

Michael Shermer 10:33 So the Freedom From Religion Foundation and some of these other organizations, ACLU are, you know, trying to combat some of this, but, but legally, how do you distinguish that from, say, a n- nonprofit like Doctors Without Borders or one of these other groups that are-

Joe Rogan 10:45 Or the Clinton Foundation.

Michael Shermer 10:47 (laughs) Well, (laughs) yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:50 Yeah. Yeah, there was some statistic recently on the Clinton Foundation, how much money in y- in 2014 did they actually donated to charity. Oh, Christ. It was like 6% or something like extremely low.

Michael Shermer 11:02 The rest of it, what, payroll and-

Joe Rogan 11:03 Well, yeah, mostly expenses.

Michael Shermer 11:05 ... private flights and-

Joe Rogan 11:05 And that's what it is. They're scams.

Michael Shermer 11:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:07 All these things are scams.

Michael Shermer 11:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:09 It's just...

Michael Shermer 11:10 Yeah, it might be good to just clean house and, and just no one gets, uh, n- nonprofit sta- or tax-free status.

Joe Rogan 11:16 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 11:16 Unless you're just comp- Well, I don't know.

Joe Rogan 11:18 I don't know. I mean, I think, I feel like there is room in the world for compassionate charities that are actual charities-

Michael Shermer 11:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:24 ... that are really legitimate. There's room in the world for them and I think that they should have tax-exempt status, but I think we should be really stringent-

Michael Shermer 11:31 Right.

Joe Rogan 11:31 ... you know, about what we accept.

Michael Shermer 11:33 Um, yeah, well, the Supreme Court then, they have a hu- The problem is where do you draw the line?

Joe Rogan 11:37 Right. Where do you-

Michael Shermer 11:39 You know, if s- You know, 'cause somebody says, "Well, I have a goofy belief. The Jains have some weird beliefs or something, but, you know, but they're, but they're manning the soup kitchens, they're helping the poor, and there's no corruption."

Joe Rogan 11:48 Mm-hmm. Right.

Michael Shermer 11:48 So w- w- what's the difference between them and the Scientologists who say, "Hey, w- you know, we have our own religious beliefs that to you sound goofy, but, you know, to us, they're true"? What's the difference?

Joe Rogan 11:57 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.

Michael Shermer 12:11 Right.

Joe Rogan 12:12 And then when the, the local townspeople came to see, "Well, where are these stones?" "Oh, the angels came and took them away because you did not believe."

Michael Shermer 12:19 (laughs) Right.

Joe Rogan 12:19 Like, it's so preposterous, but-... Mormons are really nice people.

Michael Shermer 12:23 Totally nice.

Joe Rogan 12:24 They are the-

Michael Shermer 12:24 Yes.

Joe Rogan 12:24 ... best cult.

Michael Shermer 12:25 Yes. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 12:26 They are the sweetest, nicest people.

Michael Shermer 12:27 Well, I think they've made the transition from cult to-

Joe Rogan 12:30 Religion.

Michael Shermer 12:30 ... to, to a religious sect.

Joe Rogan 12:32 Yes.

Michael Shermer 12:32 And most, most Christians no longer consider them a cult. Some Evangelicals do 'cause they're pretty far out, but most mainstream, uh, Christians say, "Yeah, yeah, they're Christians. I mean, they accept Jesus as their savior."

Joe Rogan 12:42 Right. Right.

Michael Shermer 12:42 And that technically, that gets you in the club, so- They just gotta let all that Joseph Smith stuff go. Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 12:48 'Cause they're, the way they treat people is fantastic. I mean-

Michael Shermer 12:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:51 ... I'm not a big fan of them going to these poor countries and proselytizing and, you know, getting these vulnerable people to b- become part, but I think the way they deal with community-

Michael Shermer 13:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:02 ... and the way they deal with each other, it's like a v- it's a very warm and friendly and family environment, and most of the Mormons that I've met that are practicing have been very nice people.

Michael Shermer 13:12 Yeah, and they're, and they're serious about their tithing and the 10%.

Joe Rogan 13:14 Yes.

Michael Shermer 13:14 I mean, they, they have r- strict rules about this, like capital gains.

Joe Rogan 13:18 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 13:18 I- it's equivalent to capital gains. So if you sell your house and make a profit, you gotta give 10% of that to church, not just your income-

Joe Rogan 13:23 Yes.

Michael Shermer 13:23 ... not just your paycheck.

Joe Rogan 13:24 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 13:25 And- and they, they're pretty, pretty strict about that.

Joe Rogan 13:27 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 13:27 And the m- and the money, as far as I know, mostly goes for good causes that really does help poor people, things like that, so...

Joe Rogan 13:33 Now, in your book, did you go over near-death experiences? What-

Michael Shermer 13:38 I do, yeah, I have a chapter on that, yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:39 What do you think is going on? Like, when people, like, the ones that have fascinated me are people in the hospital bed that see their body-

Michael Shermer 13:46 Mm-hmm. Right.

Joe Rogan 13:47 ... from above and you're dealing with a bunch of chemicals that are released in the body, right? There's morphine and all sorts of different things-

Michael Shermer 13:54 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:54 ... uh, uh, you know, psychedelic chemicals and all the, all these different things that are happening while your brain is-

Michael Shermer 14:00 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 14:00 ... is basically on the edge of death.

Michael Shermer 14:03 Right. So it's important to remember that they're, they're near-death experiences. You're not actually dead.

Joe Rogan 14:07 Right.

Michael Shermer 14:07 So there's, there's a liminal transitional, uh, 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 d- take hallucinogens, you know, those are molec- those are molecules that operate on a, a lock and key mechanism with the synapses in your brain, in your neurons. So if they, these external drugs work, uh, in this molecular lock and key mechanism, there must be natural, uh, chemicals similar molecularly to that in the brain already, just in smaller doses. So one theory about near-death experiences is that, uh, 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-

Joe Rogan 14:55 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 14:55 ... way of making the transition. And, uh, but we know, f- f- for example, that, um, this, uh, scientist, uh, named Dr. James Whinnery worked for the United States Air Force working with pilots, accelerating them in a centrifuge and they would black out. It was part of their training. You know, 2Gs, 3Gs, 4Gs, boom, out you go at, at some point, like, 10Gs. And most of them have these little dreamlet states that he called them, which are kind of like, "I s- I, I, 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 kn- know exactly what that is. You know, the, the, the blood is being compressed to the center of the body, including the center of the brain. The last thing to go is your brain stem, of course, to keep you alive. So the cortex is shutting down from the outside in. 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. Uh, open brain surgeries, these are on, um, epileptic patients where they cut them open, uh, and they poke around to see where the seizures are starting, um, and, and so they could, you know, zap those neurons instead of some big crude, uh, attack. A- and anyway, so while they're doing that, they get permission from the patient to wake them up while they're under, uh, 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 tenth birthday," or whatever, and it's like, "Okay, that's where that, that's stored, right there." (laughs) Well, there's another spot right on the, um, 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, 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. You know, the experiences that the people report are real. They have an experience. Um, but we know it's neurologically based. Now, the counterargument is yes, of

Michael Shermer 16:56 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-

Joe Rogan 17:02 Mm.

Michael Shermer 17:02 ... that these chemicals allow you to do. It's like, it was... A- and by the way, I've been talking with Graham Hancock about ayahuasca.

Joe Rogan 17:09 Mm.

Michael Shermer 17:09 He's invited me to come join him in, uh, Arrhythmia in Costa Rica to try this. You know, I've never tried this and I'm tempted to go do this, to say, "Okay, let's, if I'm gonna write about these things, I should, you know, experience it." And, 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, um, a- 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 sci- scientific community that studies it, well, there has to be some way to test it somehow or tell the difference between that. So for example-

Joe Rogan 17:57 Isn't that the limitations of the scientific method, though?

Michael Shermer 18:00 Yes, yes, it is.

Joe Rogan 18:00 Because when you're dealing with consciousness and you're dealing with memories and dreams and ideas, like, you can't measure those either.

Michael Shermer 18:07 That's right. So, um, I, I quote, uh, two other sources. Uh, so first of all, I discuss the most famous example is Eben Alexander's, uh, 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. So, but for him, it was so powerful and, okay, what's it like? So he talks about it in his book. You know, he was in a coma in, 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, and oneness with the cosmos, and all... You know, he goes on and on about this. So then I quote from Oliver Sacks's 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 connect and... 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.

Joe Rogan 19:09 Hmm.

Michael Shermer 19:10 So how do you know that you're actually going to heaven or you're just having a fantastic trip?

Joe Rogan 19:14 Well, it's entirely possible it's both.

Michael Shermer 19:17 Well, so how do we know? So this is-

Joe Rogan 19:19 Yeah, we don't know. The... I think the real problem is people saying that they know.

Michael Shermer 19:23 Right. Right.

Joe Rogan 19:23 Saying that "I know that I was in another dimension."

Michael Shermer 19:26 Right.

Joe Rogan 19:26 You know? I mean, it's entirely possible that your consciousness is capable of going through these chemical doorways that are created by these molecules and that it, it, it experiences some frequency on the s- on the dial, like if there's a radio dial. Maybe we're at 95.5-

Michael Shermer 19:44 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 19:45 ... but you can get to 97 if you take, you know, X amount of-

Michael Shermer 19:48 Right. Right.

Joe Rogan 19:48 ... milligrams of dimethyltryptamine, and then you go to this new place. You know-

Michael Shermer 19:52 But this is a-

Joe Rogan 19:52 ... but you're still physically here.

Michael Shermer 19:54 You know, Aldous Huxley's book, The Doors of Perception-

Joe Rogan 19:56 Yes.

Michael Shermer 19:57 ... which supposedly is where the doors got their name but no. It's a-

Joe Rogan 20:00 Oh, really?

Michael Shermer 20:00 Somebody told me that, that's, that, that's a meme, that that's not true, but I don't know. Anyway, but that's the idea. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 20:05 Sounds good.

Michael Shermer 20:05 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 20:06 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 20:07 So but, but really what you're getting at is a, a super core problem of what is truth.

Joe Rogan 20:12 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 20:12 How do you know? That it... What's it... So mystical experiences are, by definition, personal and you can't corroborate them through some external scientific, um, method. So I mean, science is based on the p- on the, on the, on the ac- that we can falsify a claim, we can test it somehow, and that it's not just me pointing to something and say, "I think that's true because I experienced that." You know, so I, I wrote a column in Scientific American about this called What Is Truth? Is I start off with, like, well, I, I... The truth for me is that dark chocolate's better than milk chocolate. Then maybe you say, "No, milk chocolate's better than dark chocolate." And then, you know, there, there's no way we're gonna resolve that. There's not-

Joe Rogan 20:49 But is that truth or is that, that's just preference?

Michael Shermer 20:51 That's just, that's an internal state, or I-

Joe Rogan 20:53 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 20:53 ... say... The other example I use is, you know, Stairway to Heaven is the greatest rock song of all time, then you go, "No, no, Free Bird is better than Stairway to..." Okay. You can't resolve these things, right? So you slide there from into things like these personal experiences we have. So, you know, so what I think Graham is hoping if I go to ry- with me 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, 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, uh, belief and, and, and, and admit there's a dualistic, there's another side, there's a spirit side or something? And I, 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," 'cause I wouldn't know.

Joe Rogan 21:39 You most certainly don't know. You, you, you know that the experience was a real experience in terms of the fact that you had it, like you, you felt the things. I haven't done ayahuasca but I've done the active ingredient in ayahuasca many times, it's dimethyltryptamine.

Michael Shermer 21:55 Right.

Joe Rogan 21:55 And it's more potent in the form that I've done it in. It's a shorter lasting, much more potent experience. And, um, it, it's undeniably phenomenal.

Michael Shermer 22:04 Really?

Joe Rogan 22:05 I mean, it, it, it's very crazy. It's, it's impossible to describe. I would throw some words around and, and do my best but it won't work.

Michael Shermer 22:13 Right.

Joe Rogan 22:13 The, the trip itself, what's really bizarre, there's a lot of really bizarre aspects of it, but one of the things that's really bizarre is the feeling that you've been there before.

Michael Shermer 22:22 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 22:22 And the speculation, and Terence McKenna talked about this pretty m- in depth, one of the, 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, your... 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, in certain reptiles, it actually has a retina.

Michael Shermer 22:50 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 22:51 It literally is in the center of your head where the Eastern mysticism third eye exists.

Michael Shermer 22:55 Right.

Joe Rogan 22:56 Um, now they know that in rats, because of the Cottonwood Research Foundation, which is something that Dr. Rich- Rick Strassman who was the guy who wrote the book DMT: The Spirit Molecule-

Michael Shermer 23:07 Oh, right. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:08 He was the guy who got the first, uh, federally approved tests done on-

Michael Shermer 23:12 Nice.

Joe Rogan 23:12 ... dimethyltryptamine clinical-

Michael Shermer 23:14 Great.

Joe Rogan 23:14 ... trials. And, uh, it's an amazing book, really, really fascinating, and he, uh, was part of this Cottonwood Research Foundation and they've now proven that in live rats, the pineal gland produces DMT. Obviously, it doesn't produce it in people but it's, it's very hopeful that the evidence-

Michael Shermer 23:30 Well, they're mammals.

Joe Rogan 23:31 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 23:32 And again, if, 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.

Joe Rogan 23:43 Are you aware of the correlation between this and Moses' burning bush?

Michael Shermer 23:47 (laughs) Well, I've heard ideas about that, yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:49 Jerusalem scholars believe now that the burning bush may very well have been the acacia bush.

Michael Shermer 23:55 Right. Right. Oh, yes, yes.

Joe Rogan 23:55 The acacia bush is a tree-

Michael Shermer 23:57 Right.

Joe Rogan 23:57 ... that's rich in dimethyltryptamine.

Michael Shermer 23:59 Right. So he was tripping-

Joe Rogan 24:00 So the... This is... Well, it's sort- 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.

Michael Shermer 24:15 Right.

Joe Rogan 24:15 And like the letter A is also the number one and there's numerical value to words and it's, it's a very weird language to translate to Latin then to Greek-

Michael Shermer 24:25 Greek and then-

Joe Rogan 24:26 ... into English.

Michael Shermer 24:26 Right.

Joe Rogan 24:26 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-

Michael Shermer 24:45 Right.

Joe Rogan 24:45 ... they had a DMT experience from smoking this bush.

Michael Shermer 24:49 Right.

Joe Rogan 24:50 Smoking some aspects of it, they figured out how to extract it or how to, you know, isolate it, and they had-

Michael Shermer 24:56 Right.

Joe Rogan 24:56 ... a dimethyltryptamine experience.

Michael Shermer 24:57 I love that.

Joe Rogan 24:58 Which pretty much makes sense.

Michael Shermer 24:59 Yeah, that totally makes sense. I mean, we get, uh, we get articles submitted all the time at Skeptic, uh, Magazine, uh, of people that attempt to make natural explanations for Biblical phenomena.

Joe Rogan 25:08 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 25:08 You know, the- the Red Sea parted 'cause there was this giant earthquake or, you know, the meteor strike caused the- the skies to turn red, and that's what, you know, the- the plagues-

Joe Rogan 25:17 Sure.

Michael Shermer 25:17 ... of frogs, you know, that-

Joe Rogan 25:18 (coughs)

Michael Shermer 25:18 ... kind of thing. Okay, I- I like all those.

Joe Rogan 25:21 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 25:21 We, we published one in which the argument was that Jesus was never... He never died. He was in a, like a, a deep coma on the cross, and that one of his followers had s- stabbed, you know? Right.

Joe Rogan 25:32 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-

Michael Shermer 25:40 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 25:40 ... and then, and then stole him and he ended up in France or India or something like that. Okay. Maybe. You know? I, I published it 'cause I thought, "Yeah, there might be something to that." And, and I like those kinds of explanations. On the other hand, if you go into sort of your Joseph Campbell, um, Jordan Peterson role, uh, of thinking, "Well, maybe these stories are doing something else entirely. None of this stuff actually happened i- in 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, and that kind of thing." So I'm always conflicted about, you know, do I really want a natural explanation for this? Right.

Michael Shermer 26:14 Do we, do we need to go that path? Or maybe the stories, they didn't actually happen. Moses never really e- existed or the people never lived in the desert for 40 years 'cause there's no archeological evidence that this ever happened. Maybe it didn't happen. Maybe it's a story that represents, you know, destruction, redemption, starting over-

Joe Rogan 26:31 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 26:31 ... something like that.

Joe Rogan 26:32 Yeah, more likely, right? Um, are you aware at all of, uh, any of the translations from the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Michael Shermer 26:38 I, I haven't followed that t- too carefully.

Joe Rogan 26:39 There's a fascinating book, two fascinating books, that were written by a guy named John Marco Allegro. And John Marco Allegro was a scholar who was hired to be one of the people to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls, and he deciphered them for over 14 years-

Michael Shermer 26:54 Oh, all right.

Joe Rogan 26:54 ... and wrote a book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

Michael Shermer 26:57 Oh, really?

Joe Rogan 26:57 And his interpretation was that the entire Christian religion was a massive misunderstanding, and what it really was, th- or the original re- what the original religion was based on was the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms-

Michael Shermer 27:11 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 27:12 ... and fertility cults. And all of these ancient parables were really just ways that they could retain the knowledge while hiding it from the Romans, so they did it in these stor- stories and parables.

Michael Shermer 27:27 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 27:27 And he even traces back the word Christ to an ancient Sumeric word which means a mushroom covered in God's semen.

Michael Shermer 27:35 Oh my God. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 27:36 Yeah. This is what, it's crazy.

Michael Shermer 27:37 That's the Messiah.

Joe Rogan 27:38 It's a crazy book.

Michael Shermer 27:38 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:38 It was actually bought out by the Catholic Church-

Michael Shermer 27:41 Oh.

Joe Rogan 27:41 ... and then reprinted recently by a guy named Jan Erven. And, uh, he did it, like, uh, five or six years ago, maybe more, he, he reprinted. So you can buy it now. But I have two copies of it that were original prints that I bought from a long time ago.

Michael Shermer 27:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:56 But they bought it out, and, and, and so then-

Michael Shermer 27:58 Interesting. Yeah, they bought it out to get rid of it.

Joe Rogan 27:59 Yes.

Michael Shermer 27:59 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 27:59 To get rid of it. And then John Marco Allegro wrote a second book called The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth after they bought out his first book.

Michael Shermer 28:07 Right.

Joe Rogan 28:08 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, 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.

Michael Shermer 28:24 Right.

Joe Rogan 28:24 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. I mean, they were 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?

Michael Shermer 28:47 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 28:47 It's not like a plant.

Michael Shermer 28:49 Right.

Joe Rogan 28:49 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, uh, 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.

Michael Shermer 29:05 Right.

Joe Rogan 29:06 You eat these mushrooms, you have intense psychedelic experiences. You, you gather them up, you hide it from the Romans.

Michael Shermer 29:12 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 29:12 You hide it from everybody. You don't want people to know-

Michael Shermer 29:14 Right.

Joe Rogan 29:14 ... this is your portal to God. And so they had all these stories that they, they hi-... Now, I don't know if he's right, and I'm not a, a religious scholar nor am I-

Michael Shermer 29:23 Right.

Joe Rogan 29:23 ... uh, an expert in ancient languages, but it's incredibly compelling. It's really fascinating stuff.

Michael Shermer 29:28 Interesting, yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:28 And he was a legit-

Michael Shermer 29:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:30 ... rock solid scholar.

Michael Shermer 29:31 Right.

Joe Rogan 29:32 You know? He was... By the way, he was also an ordained minister and the only one that was on the Dead Sea Scrolls, uh, deciphering g- group that was agnostic. Because through his study of religion, once he became an ordained minister and then f- became, um, a scholar, through his study of religion, he realized like, "Oh, these are all, like, ancient weird stories."

Michael Shermer 29:54 Right.

Joe Rogan 29:54 And they're all incredibly similar. And as you go back in time you find the similarities and Qumran is where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Michael Shermer 30:02 Right.

Joe Rogan 30:02 It's 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.

Michael Shermer 30:08 Right.

Joe Rogan 30:08 They, they actually had to do DNA tests because the, the Qumran Scrolls were written on animal skins. So they had to do DNA tests on the skins to-

Michael Shermer 30:17 Oh, wow.

Joe Rogan 30:18 ... so the- when they could match up the pieces to the right animal.

Michael Shermer 30:22 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:23 So they had to match up the pieces of the, the scroll when they were trying to piece it all together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

Michael Shermer 30:29 Right.

Joe Rogan 30:30 It took them forever to do.

Michael Shermer 30:31 Right. I do remember a controversy from a few years ago of the, the Dead Sea Scrolls Committee, whoever controls them, were not very forthcoming about, uh, what they were finding and letting-

Joe Rogan 30:42 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 30:42 ... and letting outsiders look at the originals.

Joe Rogan 30:44 Yeah, there's some wacky stuff in there, apparently.

Michael Shermer 30:47 Yeah, and also, you know, intellectual groups like that, they tend to circle the wagons and, you know, "We're the elite special, uh-"

Joe Rogan 30:52 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 30:52 "... experts and you can't look at these things." And-

Joe Rogan 30:54 I think there's that, but I think there's also, like, if you're gonna go by the, the way Christianity is set up, those stories...... are, this is what everything's based on.

Michael Shermer 31:05 Right.

Joe Rogan 31:05 Adam and Eve.

Michael Shermer 31:06 Right.

Joe Rogan 31:06 You know, Moses, Joseph, all these different characters.

Michael Shermer 31:10 Right.

Joe Rogan 31:10 Th- those stories are completely different, apparently, in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And there's a lot of wacky stuff.

Michael Shermer 31:14 They're very good, yes. Right.

Joe Rogan 31:15 Things coming from the sky, like alien-type stuff.

Michael Shermer 31:18 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 31:18 And weird shit.

Michael Shermer 31:19 Yeah, right.

Joe Rogan 31:20 People were probably tripping their balls off.

Michael Shermer 31:21 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 31:21 They were probably-

Michael Shermer 31:22 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:22 I mean, that's what I think. It's entirely possible. Honestly, I don't know.

Michael Shermer 31:25 Well, th- the Ezekiel story about the- the- the thing in the sky-

Joe Rogan 31:29 The wheel within a wheel.

Michael Shermer 31:30 ... with the wheels and the... Yeah. And, of course, the ufologists think, well, that... they were seeing a UFO.

Joe Rogan 31:33 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 31:33 But other... No, no, they were tripping and-

Joe Rogan 31:35 It's much more likely they were tripping.

Michael Shermer 31:36 Yeah, for sure.

Joe Rogan 31:37 We know for a fact that psychedelic mushrooms existed back then.

Michael Shermer 31:40 Right.

Joe Rogan 31:41 It is the easiest thing in the world to see a mushroom, pick it up, and eat it.

Michael Shermer 31:44 Right.

Joe Rogan 31:44 So... And people did it all the time.

Michael Shermer 31:46 Right.

Joe Rogan 31:46 They experimented with food all the time.

Michael Shermer 31:48 There were no books to look up-

Joe Rogan 31:49 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 31:49 ... to see which are the good ones to eat.

Joe Rogan 31:50 Oh, of course. I mean, it totally makes sense.

Michael Shermer 31:52 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:52 Completely makes sense.

Michael Shermer 31:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:54 And there's also, in a lot of really ancient religious art, there's tremendous, uh, mushroom iconic photographs of, uh, these, uh, paintings. Uh, there's a tremes- tremendous amount of mushroom imagery-

Michael Shermer 32:07 Right.

Joe Rogan 32:07 ... in ancient Christian art. In fact, the actual halo-

Michael Shermer 32:11 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 32:12 The actual halo used to be different. The halo that we see now is like a hula hoop that's around guys' heads.

Michael Shermer 32:16 Right, right, right.

Joe Rogan 32:16 But the old halo used to look like the bottom of a mushroom cap.

Michael Shermer 32:20 Oh, really? Okay.

Joe Rogan 32:20 Have you ever seen it?

Michael Shermer 32:21 No. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 32:21 See if you can find those images. I- I wrote an article a long time ago called Santa Claus Was a Mushroom.

Michael Shermer 32:28 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 32:29 Because Sant- the- the Amanita muscaria mushroom that this is all based on looks like Santa Claus. It's a white and red mushroom.

Michael Shermer 32:36 Mm, mm.

Joe Rogan 32:37 And a lot of people... And it has a mycorrhizal relationship with the coniferous tree. So, that's the, that's the mushroom, the Amanita muscaria.

Michael Shermer 32:44 Okay.

Joe Rogan 32:44 But if you scroll down, Jamie, there's an image of... See, like, there's all those elves.

Michael Shermer 32:48 Oh, okay.

Joe Rogan 32:48 Like, look at the old... Look at that. Scroll up to that elves. W- up.

Narrator 32:52 I'm sorry.

Joe Rogan 32:53 Th- those elves.

Michael Shermer 32:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:54 That was... It was all Christmas. Like, ancient-

Michael Shermer 32:58 Okay.

Joe Rogan 32:58 ... Christmas images were connected-

Michael Shermer 33:00 Right.

Joe Rogan 33:00 ... to that mushroom. Now scroll down to those images of the halo. Now look at the old halo.

Michael Shermer 33:05 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 33:05 The old halo looks like the bottom of a mushroom cap.

Michael Shermer 33:08 It does, kind of.

Joe Rogan 33:09 So, the idea was-

Michael Shermer 33:09 So, those aren't, those aren't, uh, like markings or letters or numbers?

Joe Rogan 33:13 I don't know. It's hard to tell.

Michael Shermer 33:14 They're just, just lines, yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:15 There's a bunch of those, though. There's a ton of those images of ancient, like, religious figures with that circle behind them with all those lines that look exactly like the underside of a mushroom cap.

Michael Shermer 33:26 Right.

Joe Rogan 33:26 And the idea was that these enlightened people were under the influence of mushrooms. That's why they had the halo on.

Michael Shermer 33:32 Right.

Joe Rogan 33:32 It was to designate, like, "Oh, this is the guy who was on mushrooms who taught us all this stuff."

Michael Shermer 33:38 I like that. I like that idea.

Joe Rogan 33:39 Makes sense.

Michael Shermer 33:40 It's better than UFOs, yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:41 Well, we know it's a real thing.

Michael Shermer 33:42 Right, yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:42 I mean, anybody can... Look, if you think you're brave, go eat five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms. Good luck.

Michael Shermer 33:49 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 33:50 You- you- you can't tell me they don't work. They work-

Michael Shermer 33:52 Right.

Joe Rogan 33:52 ... on everybody. They don't-

Michael Shermer 33:53 Everybody.

Joe Rogan 33:53 They don't work whether or not you believe or not believe. They just work.

Michael Shermer 33:57 Right.

Joe Rogan 33:57 So, it's... There's an easy way to, to s-... If you just took them, you go, "Oh, I see why these people thought this."

Michael Shermer 34:05 Right. Well, my favorite biblical scholar to read is Bart Ehrman. Do you know Bart Ehrman?

Joe Rogan 34:09 No.

Michael Shermer 34:09 He, he does all the... Well, he started off as a Bi- as a Bible scholar because he was a believer. He went to the Moody Bible College. He was gonna 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 was, you know, it's an edited volume with lots and lots of people coming in later and modifying this and, and, and debunking some previous Old Testament, you know, per- you know, story or whatever. And, uh, then he ended up being a, he's an atheist or agnostic or something, whatever he is. He- he does not believe. So, this is sort of, um, the atheist favorite biblical scholar, 'cause he doesn't come at it with a religious belief. But he- he's got a bunch of Teaching Company courses where he deconstructs, you know, how Jesus be- 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, uh, you know, again, Jordan Peterson, you know, "I'm gonna talk for two hours about Genesis 1:1."

Joe Rogan 35:01 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 35:01 You know, how can you talk for so long about just a, you know, a- a single chapter in a book, you know? And, well, there's- there's a lot of historical interpretations. 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." Like, "Okay, I didn't know that." So-

Joe Rogan 35:21 Right.

Michael Shermer 35:22 ... so it's good to have some historical background to the text or the... Again, I- I don't read Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, or Latin, so I'm trusting the King James Bible, which I really shouldn't. So I rely on people like Bart who can read it in the oldest version we have. And, "No, no, that word actually means this." "Oh, okay."

Joe Rogan 35:41 Yeah. I would be... I mean, if- if you could get into a time machine and go to any time in history and just see what it was like, how people behaved-

Michael Shermer 35:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:51 ... 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- don't necessarily even know if Christ was a real human, but I would love to see what life was like back then.

Michael Shermer 36:05 Bart- Bart thinks he probably did exist, obviously not the Messiah, not the supernatural stuff, but that somebody like that or by that name... Yeshua, it's not that unusual a name, probably did a lot of the stuff he did, just as an itinerant preacher and so on. So I'm on board with that. I'm not par- part of the group, the atheists that say you never even existed. It's a completely made-up story. I don't think so. Uh, and I actually, in Heavens on Earth, I- I conclude, probably erroneously or- or in the minority position, that when he said, "The kingdom is within," or a more famous passage that, um, that, "There- my disciple standing here now will not die before they see the Son of Man return," and th- these kinds of th- things in the Gospels, I think his message was w-... there is no place that you're going to when you, after you die. Th- that heaven is here, this is it.

Joe Rogan 36:50 Mmm.

Michael Shermer 36:50 We have to make the most of it. And it's, it's a message that you would give to a people that are suppressed, oppressed by the Romans.

Joe Rogan 36:57 Mmm.

Michael Shermer 36:57 So I call this the oppression redemption myth, you know, that, that it's a story of a, of, it's like the Native American Ghost Dance in 1890, you know, when they're like an oppressed people, they're about to be wiped out and a messiah comes and says, you know, "It's all gonna be great." You know, it's, "We're gonna change everything, the buffalo are coming back, if you wear this, this sweater y- y- it'll be impervious to white man's bullets." And it was a very Christ-like, uh, story. Uh, and, uh, and when you start looking at it you see, oh, this, this story comes up a lot in history among oppressed peoples as a way of saying, "We gotta circle the wagons and take care of our own against these oppressors and make a better life here."

Joe Rogan 37:36 Yeah, it just makes sense that there'd be so many parallels when you think about history and how many people were impr- oppressed, and how often these narratives repeated themselves over and over again when people got into power and then invaded others, and...

Michael Shermer 37:48 Yeah, it's brutal history. I was just, I'm just reading, uh, um, Niall Ferguson's new book, The Tower and the Square. It's about the, the tension throughout all of human history, uh, civilization, uh, between hierarchical top-down power structures and horizontal network, uh, power structures, and that they're always in tension. But mostly throughout history it's the top-down power, whoever's ... And so his, his one chapter opens with that scene from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when, um, when Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood are facing off each other in the cemetery and, uh, and Clint Eastwood shoots the other guy, the real, the bad guy. And then Eli Wall- Wallach tries to shoot his gun and it's empty, and so Clint Eastwood walks over to him and he says, "There are two kinds of men in this world: those who have loaded revolvers and those who dig. You're going to dig." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 38:41 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 38:41 And Ferguson uses this story to say basically that's the history of civilization. Somebody's got the loaded gun-

Joe Rogan 38:47 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 38:47 ... and everyone else is gonna dig.

Joe Rogan 38:49 Yeah, it's amazing that we made it this far, uh, I mean, we live in such a, I mean, I know that there's troubles today and I know we have issues in our, in our own society, and forget about other parts of the world which there's horrific things happening right now. But in comparison to just a few thousand years ago...

Michael Shermer 39:05 Oh, you would not wanna live back then. It'd be fun to go, to visit-

Joe Rogan 39:08 Yeah, yeah.

Michael Shermer 39:08 ... if you could come back.

Joe Rogan 39:10 I would wanna go in a giant bulletproof hamster bubble.

Michael Shermer 39:12 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:13 Like one of those-

Michael Shermer 39:13 Roll around and watch.

Joe Rogan 39:14 Yeah, one of those, well, just like maybe the, where you c- they couldn't see you. I just wanna be there-

Michael Shermer 39:19 Right.

Joe Rogan 39:19 ... where they can't see me, just I would love to observe and see what... 'Cause we have all these, like I'm watching this show Vikings-

Michael Shermer 39:25 Great.

Joe Rogan 39:26 And, uh, oh man it pissed me off, episode two, this guy puts his feet up on the table and he's got rubber bottom soles of a shoe. I'm like, "You motherfuckers." He has a heel that's clearly made in a factory and there's like this textured-

Michael Shermer 39:39 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 39:39 ... plastic bottom to his shoe. I'm like-

Michael Shermer 39:42 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 39:42 ... "How did no one catch this? You guys have this amazing-"

Michael Shermer 39:45 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 39:45 "... wardrobe and all these ships and I'll take a picture of it and I'll, I'll put it up on my Instagram later."

Michael Shermer 39:51 It's funny.

Joe Rogan 39:51 Because it was so dumb it made me angry, but I'm watching this and I'm like, "How do we know this was how they talked? How do we know-

Michael Shermer 39:57 Right.

Joe Rogan 39:57 ... this is what they did?"

Michael Shermer 39:59 Right.

Joe Rogan 39:59 How do we ... This is some weird interpretation of some-

Michael Shermer 40:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:03 ... historical events.

Michael Shermer 40:05 Really hard to interpret and, of course, thoughts don't fossilize, so-

Joe Rogan 40:08 No.

Michael Shermer 40:08 You know, I s- I start off early in the book about, you know, who were the first people to figure out we're gonna die?

Joe Rogan 40:13 Right.

Michael Shermer 40:13 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, we know f- uh, you know, an- elephants grieve and mammals grieve and, you know, the cetaceans, dolphins, whales and so on and, and chimps they, you know, they feel, y- these mothers are just, just depressed and, 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 'cause I see people around me gonna die, but I c- conceive of maybe some other place to go." So, uh, I start off with something of a paradox that, you know, if I ask you to imagine yourself dead you can't do it, because to imagine anything you have to be alive. So i- it's not gonna be like falling asleep and waking up the next morning because you have dreams or whatever, it's gonna be more like general anesthesia where it's, you know, ten, nine, eight, boom, boom, lights out and y- and, but you just never wake up, so. A- and we, and so we talk about things like, "Well, there's no thing after death," but, but even the word no thing implies there's a thing, or you know, you're going to this place, this nother, there's, there's nothing. Well, no thing or no where, 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, w- 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 a- and at some point you just, we don't have the words to even say what it is we're trying to talk about. There's n- there's nothing before the Big Bang, you can't even ac- actually talk about it.

Joe Rogan 41:47 Well, don't they think now though that it's entir- it's entirely possible that the Big Bang is like a cycle? I mean-

Michael Shermer 41:52 Yes, well I think that-

Joe Rogan 41:53 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 41:53 ... it's something like that. I think that-

Joe Rogan 41:55 Expands and contracts infinitely forever.

Michael Shermer 41:58 Yeah, that, th- that's a preferable th- well, again we have to come up with some way to talk about it, so.

Joe Rogan 42:03 Don't we also have this weird biological idea based on our own limitations that there's a birth and a death of everything?

Michael Shermer 42:10 Right, so I actually have a chapter devoted to Deepak Chopra and the Eastern wisdom traditions.

Joe Rogan 42:14 Oh, my friend.

Michael Shermer 42:14 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 42:15 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 42:16 Uh, uh, we're, we're kinda buddies now, and-

Joe Rogan 42:18 Really?

Michael Shermer 42:18 Yeah, I went to his center down in Carlsbad and spent some time there and...

Joe Rogan 42:22 You think he's all right?

Michael Shermer 42:23 He's a good guy, yeah, no, he's totally a good guy. I mean he-

Joe Rogan 42:26 He's, do you, he's been and at times in the past, uh, either misleading or misled.

Michael Shermer 42:33 Yes, sometimes that's right, um, you know some of his recommendations for dietary things or whatever, perhaps. But I know for sure 'cause I've gotten to know him pretty well, that he totally believes the stuff he says. Uh, it sounds like woo-woo as I used to call it.

Joe Rogan 42:46 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 42:47 Uh, but a lot of it if you interpret it from a, a kind of a Buddhist, Western Buddhist position, you know, when he says, uh, you know, "Consciousness is the ground of all being, it's the ontological primitive," these things that sound nonsensical, um, but if you think about it 'um, uh, it s- sort of from a simple perspective the, the entire universe is in your brain and when you cease to exist the universe ceases to exist, for you.

Joe Rogan 43:12 Right.

Michael Shermer 43:12 ... but you're in your brain.

Joe Rogan 43:13 Hmm.

Michael Shermer 43:14 You know, and I, I call that 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. And it's like, okay, timeout. You know, quantum physics is weird and spooky. Consciousness is weird and spooky. That doesn't mean they're connected. Now, he thinks they are, so, uh, it's a debatable point, okay? Uh, but still, um, the, the experience of going and, and so we'd ... I did the meditation thing and all the massages and the teas and the food and all that stuff, and it's, uh, you know, it's this beachside resort in Carlsbad. You can't help but feeling better. Like, "Yeah, this stuff works."

Joe Rogan 43:56 (laughs) Where, where is Carlsbad?

Michael Shermer 43:57 It's down by Encinitas.

Joe Rogan 43:58 Oh, okay.

Michael Shermer 43:58 North of San Diego.

Joe Rogan 43:59 Oh, okay.

Michael Shermer 44:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:00 That's a beautiful area. (laughs)

Michael Shermer 44:01 Totally beautiful, yeah. He's got a ... Deepak's not done. I mean, he's got a good thing going. Uh, s-

Joe Rogan 44:05 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 44:05 And not just Deepak, you know, there's other people like Sam Harris, uh, uh, Bob Wright has a new book out called Why Buddhism is True. Uh, okay, so it works. So we're back to does it work? What do you mean by does it work? Not just for me. I had an experience and I felt better. We gotta do better than that for science, so what Deepak and Bob Wright are talking about is that, is that the Western version of Buddhism may actually work medically. It may, you know, lower stress hormones in your body, lower blood pressure, these kinds of things that are measurable, 'cause that's what we wanna know from a Western scientific perspective, not just do I feel better. But 67% of the people who did this particular treatment, they got better by these measurable criteria. Okay. That's, that seems fair enough to me. I'm open to that.

Joe Rogan 44:49 Hmm. Now, this idea that there's nothing or no thing, that we can't even, we can't even wrap our head around nothing because we would think of a thing-

Michael Shermer 45:00 Right.

Joe Rogan 45:00 ... that there's no thing, but there's never a thing.

Michael Shermer 45:03 Right.

Joe Rogan 45:03 Right.

Michael Shermer 45:03 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 45:04 But how do we ... Or why, why don't we just say we don't know? Why don't we speculate on the possibility of consciousness being some sort of ethereal thing or something that exists outside of the body, but we don't know. We really don't know, right?

Michael Shermer 45:22 That's what I say. I, I conclude in ... you know, that I don't know-

Joe Rogan 45:26 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 45:26 ... if there's an afterlife or not. In the, uh, 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 'cause we don't live in the afterlife. We live in this life.

Joe Rogan 45:34 Mm.

Michael Shermer 45:35 So this is the time you gotta do whatever you gotta do. I call this Alvy's error. Uh, Alvy is Alvy Singer, Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall.

Joe Rogan 45:43 Ah.

Michael Shermer 45:43 Remember the scene early in the movie where he has a flashback as a young boy and as ... he's in this psychiatrist's office with his mom and, you know, "What's the problem?" "He won't do his homework." "He won't do your homework? Why won't you do your homework, Alvy?" He says, "The universe is expanding." And he says, "The universe is expanding?" He goes, "The universe is everything there is and if it's expanding, one day it's all gonna blow apart, so nothing really matters. I'm not gonna do my homework."

Joe Rogan 46:04 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 46:05 And his mother yells at him, "What does the universe got to do with this? We live in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding."

Joe Rogan 46:10 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 46:11 So that's my sorta take home message there, it ... We don't live in the afterlife.

Joe Rogan 46:15 Right.

Michael Shermer 46:16 Uh, or, or before the universe or after the u- ... None of that matters. I mean, it's interesting to talk about, but we live in this life.

Joe Rogan 46:22 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 46:22 So this is what really counts.

Joe Rogan 46:23 There are fascinating things to contemplate, but ultimately, you really, for practicality's sake, you really should be paying attention to life.

Michael Shermer 46:31 Totally. I mean, this is what I tell Deepak all the time when he says, "Well, you know, Michael, this table is actually made of atoms that are mostly empty space and the quantum physicists blah, blah-"

Joe Rogan 46:39 Accordin- according to Sean Carroll, that's not correct.

Michael Shermer 46:41 Oh, is that right?

Joe Rogan 46:42 Yeah. He explained that. Yeah.

Michael Shermer 46:43 Oh, okay.

Joe Rogan 46:43 This idea of empty space, he's like, "That's ... No. That's just a poor way of describing it."

Michael Shermer 46:48 Oh, okay. All right.

Joe Rogan 46:48 And I would defer to him-

Michael Shermer 46:50 Okay.

Joe Rogan 46:50 ... and let him describe it.

Michael Shermer 46:51 All right.

Joe Rogan 46:51 He also described the superpositions like, uh, particles, subatomic particles being in superposition where they're in a state of moving and not moving at the same time.

Michael Shermer 47:00 Okay.

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

Michael Shermer 47:04 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 47:05 I'm like, "Well, I thought I had it figured out, sort of."

Michael Shermer 47:07 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 47:07 I thought I had n- ... I didn't think I had it figured out, but I thought I had a definition that at least was like, okay, well the ... it's this even though I don't understand it. And he's like, "No, it's not even that."

Michael Shermer 47:18 Okay.

Joe Rogan 47:18 So.

Michael Shermer 47:19 Yeah, so th-

Joe Rogan 47:19 I refer to ... And please, if you're interested, go to the-

Michael Shermer 47:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:22 ... Sean Carroll podcast.

Michael Shermer 47:23 Well, as I understand it anyway, that it, it doesn't really matter because the atoms are jiggling in a way that this is solid.

Joe Rogan 47:28 Yes.

Michael Shermer 47:28 You can tell it's solid and this is the level we live at, solid-

Joe Rogan 47:31 Yeah, if somebody drops this-

Michael Shermer 47:31 ... yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:31 ... on your head, you're, you're in trouble.

Michael Shermer 47:33 That's right. Yeah, so again, we don't live in a quantum world. We live in a macro world where-

Joe Rogan 47:37 Yes.

Michael Shermer 47:37 ... this kinda stuff does matter. Okay, so, um, you know, to, to ... so for Deepak, uh, the whole Western way of thinking scientifically, there's a beginning and an end, time is a linear, uh, thing that we can measure and there's birth and death, all that is, uh, the wrong way to think about it, that 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 in ... before you were born. So, so the physical body is just an instantiation of this conscious thing, whatever this is. And, and, okay, uh, you know, I don't know. Uh, you know, I'd be surprised, but I'll be pleasantly surprised, (laughs) I'll tell you, that if it turns out, you know, I 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.

Joe Rogan 48:20 Right.

Michael Shermer 48:20 Hitch, Hitch is there, you know, it's like, "Oh, boy, okay. This isn't ... this isn't hell." Uh, if that's true, you know, I'm not against any of this just like I'm not against Ray Kurzweil and these guys figuring out that we can live 200 years or 300 years. Great, if you can do it, you know, but let's just, you know ... So when they say to me, "Schurman, don't you wanna live to be 500?" It's like, "Just get me to 80 without prostate cancer."

Joe Rogan 48:42 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 48:42 "Get me to 90 without Alzheimer's." You know, 100-

Joe Rogan 48:44 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 48:44 "Uh, get me to 100 so I, I'm not on a morphine drip in a bed." You know, just quality of life, incrementally, year by year, and it- ... and if it turns out you solved 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.

Joe Rogan 48:58 Well, I think there's some beauty in temporary things that we, for whatever reason, w- we're, we're avoiding that concept. We, we're terrified of things ending.

Michael Shermer 49:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:09 You know, there, there's beauty in things being temporary.

Michael Shermer 49:12 Right.

Joe Rogan 49:12 Like, you don't wanna go to see a movie that's 100 hours long.

Michael Shermer 49:15 (laughs) That's right.

Joe Rogan 49:15 A, a movie's a great movie when it's 90 minutes. You're in, you're out. Maybe two hours if it's-

Michael Shermer 49:20 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 49:20 ... three hours if it's Bl- Blade Runner or something.

Michael Shermer 49:22 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 49:22 Something crazy.

Michael Shermer 49:23 I, I quote Christopher Hitchens in my book 'cause I love his analogy. First of all, you're at the party and, and Death taps you on the shoulder and says, "You have to leave. And worse, the party's gonna go on without you and they're gonna all have fun." It's like, "Oh, no."

Joe Rogan 49:34 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 49:34 But he says if, if the Christian version of, of, of heaven and hell is real, you're tapped on the shoulder at the party and told, "You can never leave the party." It's like, "Oh, that's even worse."

Joe Rogan 49:43 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 49:43 "I don't wanna, I don't wanna do anything forever."

Joe Rogan 49:46 Right. And imagine the classical version of what-... heaven is, like a guy with a harp, and there's a bunch of babies with wings. Like, what?

Michael Shermer 49:56 Or even that aside, that there're, uh, that this is why Hitch called it, um, celestial North Korea. You have a dictator that knows all of your thoughts-

Joe Rogan 50:03 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 50:04 ... and everything you're gonna do. It's like, w- wait a minute. Tha- that does not sound like fun to me.

Joe Rogan 50:08 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, uh, technological interference in our lives. I'm en- entirely convinced that we're going to, in- inside of 100 years, live in a world where all of your thoughts really are documented, and there's, there's, eh, they have access to them. The same way no one, in their wildest dreams, conceived of photographs 400 years ago.

Michael Shermer 50:35 Right.

Joe Rogan 50:36 And 400 years from now, we're gonna have the ability to recar- record thoughts and ideas, and they're gonna be able to read the contents of each other's minds.

Michael Shermer 50:43 Right. They could be. Well, so-

Joe Rogan 50:45 It's gonna suck.

Michael Shermer 50:46 Maybe w- that, maybe we need some regulation there for that, then. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 50:48 Maybe, or maybe we just have to accept the fact that most of what goes wrong in the world goes wrong because people can think these secret, sneaky, fucked up thoughts.

Michael Shermer 51:00 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 51:00 And when we, those no longer exist anymore, maybe we'll clean out human behavior.

Michael Shermer 51:04 There was an Ou- Outer Limits episode about that in the 1950s. It might have been, um, the other one. Um-

Joe Rogan 51:09 Twilight Zone?

Michael Shermer 51:11 ... Twilight Zone, where, um, this guy all of a sudden is able to read the minds of other people. And he's at work, and he's, you know, listening to all these conversations and, you know, all this fun, fun stuff. But then, there's this one guy who's really dark. Like, he's gonna, he's gonna come in and blow everybody away. And so, you know, he sort of climaxes where he, you know, he comes in and tells the boss, everybody, and, a- and they, you know, they go in there, and i- it turns out the guy says, "Well, I was never gonna do that. I was just angry. I was just thinking that." You know, so that's like a Minority Report thing, you know?

Joe Rogan 51:40 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 51:40 You can have these thoughts.

Joe Rogan 51:42 Right.

Michael Shermer 51:42 We know from research that ... This is, uh, David, uh, Buss's research on ... Uh, 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. Now, 99.9% of us never act on our homicidal fantasies, but we get mad enough we can imagine. And he's got the narrative accounts, 'cause 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 I would," t- they go on-

Joe Rogan 52:20 Oh.

Michael Shermer 52:20 ... and you're like, holy shit. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 52:22 But it's just fantasies.

Michael Shermer 52:24 Just fantasy. Yes.

Joe Rogan 52:24 Well, some people have suicidal fantasies.

Michael Shermer 52:26 Yep, that's right. Right.

Joe Rogan 52:27 There's people that have fantasies of jumping off of a giant building.

Michael Shermer 52:30 Right.

Joe Rogan 52:30 You know? I mean, uh-

Michael Shermer 52:31 But they, but, but most don't act on it.

Joe Rogan 52:32 Most don't act on it.

Michael Shermer 52:33 Right.

Joe Rogan 52:34 And there's people that just have these thoughts, and they think 'em. They look at the edge, and they go, "I could just jump off right now and end this whole thing, but I won't." And-

Michael Shermer 52:42 Right. So-

Joe Rogan 52:42 ... should we punish them?

Michael Shermer 52:43 Y- no, of course not.

Joe Rogan 52:44 No, of course not.

Michael Shermer 52:44 You know, in the Minority Report scenario, it's like, okay, we found out for, that this guy's thinking about robbing the bank, so he had a fantasy about it. He's-

Joe Rogan 52:51 Right.

Michael Shermer 52:52 ... not gonna do it.

Joe Rogan 52:52 I've thought about doing that.

Michael Shermer 52:54 You h- you have? (laughs)

Joe Rogan 52:55 Not really. Not really.

Michael Shermer 52:56 But just kind of a fleeting-

Joe Rogan 52:57 But I was like, what would I do if I had to rob this bank? I mean, I've never r- actually considered robbing a bank, but-

Michael Shermer 53:02 Right.

Joe Rogan 53:02 ... I thought, "Okay, I'm at the bank. What do I just decide? To pull out a gun and everybody hit the floor!"

Michael Shermer 53:07 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 53:07 "Where's the, where's the cameras? Where's the security guard?" You know, like ... (laughs)

Michael Shermer 53:10 Right.

Joe Rogan 53:10 You've seen so many movies. It's a, if you're bored, you know? But today, that's another thing. People are rarely bored, 'cause when they are, they just pull out their phone and stare at pictures of other peoples' butts.

Michael Shermer 53:20 Right. (laughs) Right.

Joe Rogan 53:20 I mean, it's just ... (laughs) It's, it's like, you know, you just pull out Facebook or Instagram and no longer bored, you know?

Michael Shermer 53:26 When I, when I was, uh, in my religious phase, in, in, uh, in college, I asked, I was g- ... 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 evangelical, so I'm telling him about Jesus and the whole thing and the afterlife. And he says, and he wanted to know, "Are there golf courses and tennis courts in heaven?"

Joe Rogan 53:44 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 53:45 "'Cause I gotta have something to do. I'd be bored." And I thought, "I have no idea." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 53:50 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 53:51 And-

Joe Rogan 53:51 "You won't need that."

Michael Shermer 53:53 (laughs) Yeah, I know, but-

Joe Rogan 53:53 "You're gonna be with Jesus."

Michael Shermer 53:54 I know.

Joe Rogan 53:54 "No one wants to play golf."

Michael Shermer 53:56 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 53:56 God. (laughs)

Michael Shermer 53:58 And then I also quote from, uh, Julia Sweeney's, uh, Letting Go of God monologue. She opens this monologue ... Well, you know, Julia from Saturday Night Live?

Joe Rogan 54:05 Sure. Yeah.

Michael Shermer 54:05 ... uh, with the Mormon boys coming by her, her house in, in Hollywood, and they're pitching their story. Like, "Okay, come on in. Pitch me your story like it's a Hollywood, you know, movie script, you know? What do you got?" So they tell her the whole thing. "Oh, it's gonna 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, now see, um, 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." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 54:33 S-

Michael Shermer 54:33 And she says, "What if you got a nose job and you liked it? Do I have to get my old nose back?"

Joe Rogan 54:37 That's true, right?

Michael Shermer 54:39 And so I opened this, uh ... A little funny story because it gets to the problem of, of identity. Who are you? So if you're resurrected, uh, with Jesus ... See, early, earlier, um, Christian cult- uh, sects before Descartes introduced dualism, they believe that you are ... When you're resurrected at the, you know, after your death, you are physically there in heaven. Physically, and your soul, the whole thing. It's just one thing. So the question is, well how old are you when you're there? You know, so you're brought up and there you are sitting next to Jesus and God and, and whatever. You know, so they, okay, 30. 30 seems like a good year. It's the h- year Jesus was, you know, was crucified. Okay, 30. Like, 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 mem- uh, 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, the memories are always changing and edited and, and, and, um, and- and forgotten or modified, uh, particularly based on life experiences that happen afterwards. So in your 20s you go to this college or you marry this person or you take this job or whatever. You don't really know-... what the influ- 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, 'cause they're celebrities. Like, you have no idea-

Joe Rogan 56:00 Right.

Michael Shermer 56:00 ... what, what those things actually mean until much later. So, this is the problem of who you are. So first of all, w- we already know that n- 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 th- this has to be copied. So, in the Ray Kurzweil scenario of the singularity, we're gonna upload the mind. They're gonna 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, 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, you know, long continuum, uh, that's always kind of flexible and changing. So, there's that, and then there's the problem with the up- mind uploading scenario is, there's two kinds of selves. There's the, uh, memory self, mem-self, of all your memories, and then there's the point-of-view self, the POV self. So, when you go to sleep tonight, you wake up tomorrow, you're still looking at the world through your eyes, and there's a, 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's connectome, equivalent of the genome, and puts it in a computer and then he dies, and they turn the computer on and he's in the computer looking out through the little camera hole. I don't see how this could happen. That is, if we copied you, your connectome, everything, all your memories, so we had a Joe Rogan number two copy ready to go, but instead of you dying, let's say we had a sophisticated fMRI brain scan machine, slid you into it, copied your connectome, uploaded it into the cloud or whatever, and you're, and then we slide you back out and you're standing there, you, you're still looking at the world through your eyes. That's just Joe Rogan number two, a copy. And no more do you look at that than a twin looks at its sibling and says, "Well, there I am." No, no, no. You're still standing there going, "No, no, I'm here. That's just a copy of me." And so this, to me, seems a- a- a central problem with the mind uploading scenario. It's just a copy.

Joe Rogan 58:11 Did you see the thing in National Geographic today about the cloned monkeys?

Michael Shermer 58:15 No.

Joe Rogan 58:15 Th- they've, they've m- managed to actually clone monkeys.

Michael Shermer 58:18 No.

Joe Rogan 58:18 And, yeah. S- Jamie, I, uh, I tweeted it earlier today. It's crazy. And they're-

Michael Shermer 58:25 Well-

Joe Rogan 58:25 ... speculating that if they can do that to monkeys, they're going to be able to be able-

Michael Shermer 58:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:28 ... to do that to humans.

Michael Shermer 58:29 Yes. But again, so who is-

Joe Rogan 58:30 Right, who is-

Michael Shermer 58:31 ... who is that? Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:31 Like, if there's a Michael Shermer, is it your twin?

Michael Shermer 58:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:34 I mean, like, when you meet twins, they- it's very weird. Like, I used to date a girl who was a twin. She had a sister who looked exactly like her, but, like, a little o- just a something-

Michael Shermer 58:44 Yeah, right.

Joe Rogan 58:44 ... just a feel, like-

Michael Shermer 58:45 Right.

Joe Rogan 58:45 ... "Oh, you're not her."

Michael Shermer 58:46 Right.

Joe Rogan 58:46 "You're her s- sister. Uh."

Michael Shermer 58:50 Right.

Joe Rogan 58:50 Super, super confusing.

Michael Shermer 58:52 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 58:52 So, they weren't the same person, but they pretty much were. Yeah, here's the, here's the article. Scroll up there. Cloned monkeys created in a lab. Now what? Yeah.

Michael Shermer 59:00 Okay. Well, so you're making copies. Okay.

Joe Rogan 59:02 Yeah, so it's a copy, but it's not the same person because they have-

Michael Shermer 59:05 Now-

Joe Rogan 59:05 ... their own individual life experiences and-

Michael Shermer 59:07 Y- the, the moment you and your copy start diverging away and l- leading different lives, you're gonna have different memories.

Joe Rogan 59:12 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 59:13 You should have on your show, uh, Nancy Segal from Cal State Fullerton.

Joe Rogan 59:15 Okay.

Michael Shermer 59:15 Uh, 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. A- Nancy Segal, and, and, and these are scenarios, uh, not only do we have the behavior genetics studies, 'cause she worked on the famous Minnesota Twins research, not the baseball team but the twins research, um, of, of twins separated at birth and raised in different environments, like, you know, the one raised in a Jewish home, the other r- 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 marry women that look exa- pretty, pretty similar, you know, so there's a lot that genetics does that, uh, is very subtle. There's no gene for, like, y- we're both Catholic or wearing this kind of clothes, but, you know, if you have, uh, as Nancy explains it, if you have a certain body type, which twins are gonna have almost the exact same body type, y- certain clothes are gonna look better on you and you're more likely to pick those, so by chance, you're more likely to get similar clothes. There's no genes for clothes, but something like that, body type or temperament, you know. If you have a certain kind of temperament, at least half of which is, is heritable, so you're more likely to choose certain professions or prefer certain h- hobbies or activities or pick spouses that are the kind of, you know, that would gel well with that temperament. So, this-

Joe Rogan 1:00:33 That's if you make good decisions, though.

Michael Shermer 1:00:35 Well, yeah. There is the, that, that voli- there's the element of volition, the choices you make in life do diverge a little bit, so their twins are a little bit different, you know, from that. But-

Joe Rogan 1:00:43 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:00:44 ... um, but, so a clone, you know, again, the moment you start leading separate lives, so why the copy o- of you is not gonna be you in heaven. And religions have the same problem. You know, if God is able to reconstruct your body i- in, like, like a transporter, uh, I got into the world of Star Trek when I was writing this book. It's like, oh my God, they have, it's, this whole webpage is devoted to, what does the transporter do? It's like, okay, first of all, you know there's no transporter, right? (laughs) We're just, this, this science fiction. It can be whatever it wants. You know, but is it copy and paste? They just copy you and reconstruct you on so- with atoms on the other side-

Joe Rogan 1:01:15 Or, is it cut and paste?

Michael Shermer 1:01:16 ... or is it they, they actually move the atoms and, and, okay.

Joe Rogan 1:01:19 Yeah, reconstruct it.

Michael Shermer 1:01:20 Anyway, it's, d- it's-

Joe Rogan 1:01:21 (coughs)

Michael Shermer 1:01:22 But it, it does get to the problem of identity. Well, what, what are you really? 'Cause it, you don't have to, it's not the, the, the matter, the material. It's really the pattern, which is why the singularity people focus on the cloud and uploading the mind, 'cause 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, like people 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, I'd be there going, "Oh, here I am."

Joe Rogan 1:01:57 Well, isn't there also the problem that-... every, what is it? Seven to 10 years, every cell in your body essentially-

Michael Shermer 1:02:03 Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Joe Rogan 1:02:03 ... is being replaced.

Michael Shermer 1:02:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:04 Except your neurons.

Michael Shermer 1:02:05 There's, yeah, that, r- that's right. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:08 So, are we just our neurons?

Michael Shermer 1:02:09 That's the idea. That, that, that's what the singularity will be like.

Joe Rogan 1:02:12 So you're not your nose job.

Michael Shermer 1:02:13 That's right. Right.

Joe Rogan 1:02:14 You're, you're not your fake butt or your fake lips.

Michael Shermer 1:02:16 Right. That's right.

Joe Rogan 1:02:16 You're, you're neurons only.

Michael Shermer 1:02:18 But even there, see, the transhumanists, they imagine this transitional stage where you start wearing contact lenses, say, that can call up the internet, and-

Joe Rogan 1:02:25 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:02:25 ... and the moment I see you, Joe Rogan, the name pops up, your Wikipedia page pops up-

Joe Rogan 1:02:29 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:02:29 ... and I, you know, now I have this information. So I'm not bionic, uh, but, uh, but I'm also not just human, I'm transhuman. Okay, so then, then who are you? Right? So these are the-

Joe Rogan 1:02:38 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:02:38 ... sort of the transitional stages. So a coc- cochlear implant is a kind of a brain chip. And, you know, probably, y- I think you know about that research of the paraplegic, um, quadriplegic, uh, man who can control his computer, uh, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:02:52 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 1:02:52 ... cursor and now they, he can actually control a fake, uh, uh, artificial, uh, limb, just by thinking about it. So they put a chip in his motor cortex that reads the thoughts. So he has these thoughts and he's been trained to, you know, pull the, uh, 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 should, we could, uh, have it all mapped and you could control your whole environment just by thinking. You know, I, I, I would like to hear Mozart, and you just think about it, and then music in your house comes on and it's Mozart.

Joe Rogan 1:03:19 Well, I, I freak out about Siri sometimes. Like, um, my daughter asked me about a song that she likes when 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, uh, what's his name? Hugh Jackman, the W- The Wolverine guy? Some, some musical that's based on Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Michael Shermer 1:03:42 All right. ... um, something like that.

Joe Rogan 1:03:43 She wanted the, the song. I, I, 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."

Michael Shermer 1:03:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:54 That this thing just pulled it out of the sky-

Michael Shermer 1:03:56 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:03:56 ... and it's playing it in my car.

Michael Shermer 1:03:58 Yep. I did that the other night. I wanted to hear Bob Seger's Hollywood Nights. I'm not sure why I got that in my head.

Joe Rogan 1:04:04 Ooh.

Michael Shermer 1:04:04 And it popped right up. There's a YouTube video of him from 1978 just rocking it, and it, it's like, wow.

Joe Rogan 1:04:09 It's amazing.

Michael Shermer 1:04:09 And I- I'm just driving on the 101 freeway heading back home to Santa Barbara, like, "I'd like to hear Bob, uh, Seger, Hollywood Nights."

Joe Rogan 1:04:16 Wow.

Michael Shermer 1:04:16 Boom, there it is. (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:18 So, The Greatest Showman, that's the movie.

Michael Shermer 1:04:20 Oh, okay. There we go.

Joe Rogan 1:04:21 My daughter loves that movie. So-

Michael Shermer 1:04:22 S-

Joe Rogan 1:04:22 ... she wanted to hear the song, but, uh-

Michael Shermer 1:04:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:24 ... I just talked to the phone and it did that. When are we gonna get past the talking to the phone?

Michael Shermer 1:04:29 Right, you just think it.

Joe Rogan 1:04:30 Instead of ... Yeah, because it, uh, I'm pretty comfortable with looking for it. "Let me, h- hold on, honey, let me find it online."

Michael Shermer 1:04:36 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:04:36 "I'm gonna go get it. Okay, let me download it. Let me pay for it. Let me use my thumbprint or whatever." And then now, it's just talk to your phone.

Michael Shermer 1:04:43 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:04:44 When, when is it just pull it up?

Michael Shermer 1:04:45 Pick it up.

Joe Rogan 1:04:46 You know-

Michael Shermer 1:04:46 Pick it up.

Joe Rogan 1:04:46 ... I want to hear Led Zeppelin, Whole Lotta Love.

Michael Shermer 1:04:48 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:04:48 I just, I just start thinking (singing) .

Michael Shermer 1:04:49 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:52 And he starts playing. When is that gonna happen?

Michael Shermer 1:04:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:54 That's probably coming. We're, we're probably all gonna give in to some sort of a chip, something that we can get implanted, simple, easy, transdermal device.

Michael Shermer 1:05:04 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:05:05 You know, fashionable. You go to a club, it glows.

Michael Shermer 1:05:08 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:05:08 Ooh, you got the new one.

Michael Shermer 1:05:09 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:05:09 You got the iPhone 38.

Michael Shermer 1:05:12 Yeah, I think all that's far more likely to happen-

Joe Rogan 1:05:14 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:05:14 ... uh, before we get to the point where you could copy an entire brain and, and, and put it in a, a clone of your body.

Joe Rogan 1:05:20 I interviewed Kurzweil and, uh, I had a really interesting conversation with him for this sci-fi show that I was doing a few years back, and, uh, I find him to be very interesting. He's a fascinating, incredibly intelligent guy that has ... I think he has more than 100 different patents, something-

Michael Shermer 1:05:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:38 ... different things that he's invented.

Michael Shermer 1:05:39 Yeah, he's, he's a genius.

Joe Rogan 1:05:40 He's a bona fide genius. But, but I also found it incredibly, uh, sad, his motivation, like what he's trying to do. You know he's trying to recreate his father-

Michael Shermer 1:05:51 His father, yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:52 Yeah, his father-

Michael Shermer 1:05:52 Did you see that, uh, the documentary about him?

Joe Rogan 1:05:54 Yes. Yeah, Transcendent Man.

Michael Shermer 1:05:55 It was kinda sad.

Joe Rogan 1:05:56 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:05:57 You know, it was dark.

Joe Rogan 1:05:57 Yeah, it was very dark.

Michael Shermer 1:05:59 And he's got all ... His basement is filled with all his dad's stuff and-

Joe Rogan 1:06:02 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:06:02 ... um, you know, he's, he's always talking about life, life, life, but he's just really kind of obsessed with death.

Joe Rogan 1:06:08 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 1:06:08 This is what I worry about, is that, again, back to the Alves era. You know, we don't live in, uh, in the next life, whatever that is, or the far future. We live now and don't miss it.

Joe Rogan 1:06:17 Yes.

Michael Shermer 1:06:17 You know, if you're so focused on death and, 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.

Joe Rogan 1:06:26 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 1:06:26 So a couple hundred million dollars working on aging problems. Great. Again, if you can solve Alzheimer's or these things-

Joe Rogan 1:06:32 Sure.

Michael Shermer 1:06:32 ... that's great, but, you know, don't be so focused on the next life you miss out.

Joe Rogan 1:06:37 Well, I don't necessarily know if he is so focused that he's missing out. I don't think he's missing out, uh, and I think he has extraordinary vision in terms of, like, what is possible with the exponential increase of technology. So-

Michael Shermer 1:06:50 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:50 ... I think having a guy like that around is ... It's helpful, it's ... I think it's beneficial to everybody. It's incredibly-

Michael Shermer 1:06:57 Totally.

Joe Rogan 1:06:57 ... fascinating to hear him talk about those things.

Michael Shermer 1:06:59 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:07:00 You know, I'm too dumb to know if he's right, you know, and I'm hearing him talk, I'm like, "You think? You really think?" Y- "Yes, by 2045 we'll be downloading our brain-"

Michael Shermer 1:07:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:08 "... into a computer." I'm like, "Man, I don't know."

Michael Shermer 1:07:10 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:07:10 "That sh- That shit seems close."

Michael Shermer 1:07:12 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:07:12 It's 2018, man. I mean, when I interviewed him, I think it was probably 2013 or somewhere around then.

Michael Shermer 1:07:18 Although, you know, uh, to be fair, if you said s- you know, a century ago, when they had telegraph ... Well, more than