Michael Shermer and Joe Rogan: Would Heaven Be Heavenly?

When you die, what's going to happen is you don't know. You don't know. And the reality is, look, maybe there is an afterlife. Maybe when we stop living, something happens and our essential energy goes into another dimension. It's possible, but you don't know. Look, being alive is so titanically bizarre. Just being a human being, looking through eyeballs at each other across from this wooden table that was cut down from living organisms that turn into hard surfaces, sand them and saw them, and then you put it in a building and it's got electricity's rolling through the walls. And if you stuck a fork in there, you die. All of it is crazy. The fact that we're on a planet, I mean, the fact that the universe is, at least as far as we can tell, infinite, all that stuff is crazy. The idea that your essential energy doesn't transfer into some other state, why not? The whole thing's crazy, but you don't know. The thing is, you don't know. Whenever you say something that you're not sure of and you say, this is what's going to happen, but you don't really know, you're a huckster. That's right. Yep. Absolutely. No one knows. No one knows. And that's the conclusion of Heavens on Earth. I don't know. And you don't either. I saw a bumper sticker that said, militant agnostic. I don't know. And you don't either. So I mean, we have to... Okay, so here's my bottom line on this. Yeah. I don't know. No one knows for sure. I'm happy to wake up in some great place and there's my friends. It'll be awesome. Unless God was mad that you didn't follow the rules of the Earth. Well, that's right. Christopher Hitchens called the Christian Heaven Celestial North Korea. It's like, here's this dictator that knows everything you do and controls everything forever. That's hilarious. Yeah. Celestial North Korea. But he doesn't tell you anymore. I told you already. I told you 2000 years ago, this dude wrote it down. Pay attention to that. Right. But then it's not even that, right? It's like one guy might have wrote it down a long time ago, but then a bunch of other dudes got together and had to revise it. They had like a new draft and the new draft, they get to decide, people got to decide what goes in and what doesn't go in. And some of the stories are based on accounts from hundreds of years after Jesus's death. The Bible is a wiki. It is like a wiki. Yeah. It's just the people contributed to over the years and so on. Hitchens had a great analogy with when he was dying. He wrote a series of essays for Vanity Fair, his column, which you can get as a book now. I think it's called Mortality or something like that. Anyway, one of them was people think dying is like you're at a party and someone taps you on the shoulder and says, you have to leave now. And worse, the party's going to go on without you. It's like, oh no. He goes, okay, so let's play this out. You're at the party and you get tapped on the shoulder and said, you can never leave the party. You have to stay here forever with these people. Like one of Julia's funny lines is the Mormon boys were telling her like, in heaven, it's going to be great. You're made whole again. Like the blind shall see and the deaf shall hear again and the crippled shall be whole again. And she said, well, I had uterine cancer and I had my uterus taken out. Do I get my uterus back? And they're like, you can imagine these 18 year old guys, what's a uterus again? And they're like, yeah, you get your uterus back. She goes, I don't want it back. And then she said, what if you had a nose job and you liked it? Do I have to have my old nose back in heaven? That's a good point. Yeah. And then they said, Anne, you get to spend the rest of eternity with your family. And she went, oh, no, that would not be good in my case. Maybe they'll be cured though. They'll realize the errors of their way. So they'll be all enlightened. Well, here's the problem. So this is called the problem of identity. Who are you? And the Theseus' ship, the Greek Minotaur slayer Theseus comes back and is a hero and they preserve his ship in the museum forever. But the wood rots and they replace the ship and over the centuries, there's no wood left from the original, but it's still cherished as, so I call this Shermer's Mustang because my first car was a 66 Ford Mustang, a classic. And I had it for 19 years. Love those cars. It was a great car, but I banged it up so much. I replaced this and that, pretty much by the time I sold it as a classic and made it a nice little chunk of change on it, there was very little of the original left, but it's the pattern, not the material that counts. So this whole debate about when you're resurrected in heaven with Jesus, what's up there? Is it your physical body? Because some Christian sects say, yeah, it's like, okay, how old are you when you're in heaven? 30. This is the year they came up with, because that's the year age Jesus was when he was crucified. Okay, but if Joe Rogan, I don't know how old, 40 something? 51. You're 51. Okay, so if you're resurrected at 30 year old Joe Rogan, what happened to the last 21 years of Joe Rogan's body, memories? I don't want to go back to that dude. That dude was dumb with me. You don't? You don't? No. You're happy where you are in your life at this point. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Well, that means you well live life. So what's up there with Jesus? I wouldn't mind having that body. 30 year old body had less problems. P.P. or injuries. Yeah. I've been beating on it for 21 years since then. Right. That's like when I was 30s when I got hardcore into jiu-jitsu. So that's 20 years of getting choked. But of course, the Christian would say, well, God makes you whole again, you'll have no injuries. But that's not really part of you. Part of you is your injuries, your muscles. Yeah, what I was going to say though is, but all those, all the stuff that I did that hurt me, I also learned from. That's right. Made you stronger. Well, not just that, like, learned the, I think through incremental struggle. Whether it's like rigorous exercise or learning something or, I think everything that I do that's difficult makes me just a little bit more aware, a little bit better at other things, just a little bit, a little bit better to talk to, a little bit easier to deal with, a little more friendly and all those things. I think I wouldn't give up for anything. I think that's more important than whatever injuries I've got with. I think, you know, I wonder how you're going to feel when you're 80. I wonder if you'll feel like that. Like, there's got to be a point of diminishing returns. Like, I'd rather be stupid in 40 than to be enlightened and can't get out of bed very well. My older athletic friends tell me it's about mid 80s when things drop off fairly quickly. You know, they could stay pretty fit into their 70s, maybe still racing, bike racing at 80, but 85 or so things drop off pretty quick. That's where you got to go to hormone replacement. Yeah, or whatever. Yeah. Or the ice plunges or the, the young person's blood or something. Okay. So I deal with, you know, there's no breakthrough miracles yet. But again, I'm not against any of these things happening. You know, when, when Someone Life Jeff Bezos puts a hundred million dollars into an aging company, I hope he's successful. Does he have a hundred million dollars in an aging company? He and Peter Thiel and the Google guys through Calico and a few others have invested many hundreds of millions of dollars into, like Calico, for example. These are companies that are trying to, their big goal is to defeat aging through re-engineering cells. Okay. And the sort of philosophical goal behind it is we have to defeat aging so people can live for centuries or forever. To which I say, let's not worry about living 500 years. Let's, let's worry about like prostate cancer and breast cancer and Alzheimer's and dementia and so on. Just the little incremental medical problems that people have. Quality of life things. Worry about things that take people out young. Yeah. And so that you can live a longer, higher quality life. But you imagine Michael Shermer at 300 years old. If you can keep this body, if you can keep the body that you have now, you're moving around great, everything's well, you look really healthy. How smart would you be? How much, how much more enlightened would you be? Or wise maybe is the way to think of it. Yeah. Wise is the best way to live. I'm not against that. I'm happy to live as long as I possibly can. There are people that go, well that's not right. It's not natural. It's like, okay, what's natural? There's surveys on this people and people's answer is whatever the current average lifespan is. So well, 80 seems about right. Okay. Fast forward to your, the day before your 80th birthday, tomorrow you're going to go. You want another week? Yeah. I'll take another week. Okay. Fast forward six days. Would you like another month? I'll take another month. Thank you. And that would never end. So of course, if you're healthy and happy and you don't want to off yourself or whatever, cause you're super, super depressed or something like that. Yes. You're just going to want to keep going. Nothing wrong with that. If we can do that. But what if you die and it's way better? What if you die and you really do, you leave your physical body. There's no need for emotions and all of the entanglements of human existence. And you go to this beautiful place of bliss and life and love. And it's just pure love without a body, unembodied, unhindered. I don't know. Would that be fun? I don't know. Is that what we're here for? We're here for fun. We're here for fun. We're doing a shitty job. We should be going crazy right now. Should be in a party van on the way to Vegas. I had a college professor when I was in my Christian days who asked me when I was pitching him the Christian story. He says, are there golf courses and tennis courts in heaven? Because I like physical challenges. I want to get out there and push myself. I don't know. So I mean, would heaven be no challenges, no working out, no physical tensions. True, right? Yeah. Maybe you don't need it. So you'd have to remove that part of humanity that we'd no longer want challenges and to be pushed to better ourselves. Do they play chess in heaven? That's right. Right? Do you get to win? Right. Do you get to win in heaven or is everybody a winner? Everybody gets a gold medal and a Nobel prize and whatever.