===TRANSCRIPT START=== Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Hey everybody, happy new year, and welcome back to Scared All The Time. It's 2026, I unfortunately am still Chris Cullari, and I remain Ed, and he remains Ed, and today, we are gonna get fucked up forever style. That's right, we are kicking off the new year thinking about time. Why is there so much of it?

That seems like not enough, honestly.

Why does it just keep going?

Without us.

What if it just keeps going on and on and on and on, and what if you could experience all of it? What if you never died and you could live forever? That's the promise of the afterlife for many world religions and cults, but what if eternity isn't all it's cracked up to be? In this episode, we're going to explore eternity from every angle. We'll look at how ancient cultures and major religions deal with eternal life, and discuss how different philosophers, from ancient scholars to modern thinkers, grappled with the idea of endless existence. And then, then things will get really weird. So let's stare into the infinite abyss together, listener. What could go wrong?

What are we scared? When are we all the time? Now it is time for, time for Scared All The Time.

Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. It is 2026. This is the first episode of Scared All The Time for the new year. We are excited to be back. We have so much planned for this year. 80% of it's not going to come to fruition. But it's planned. It's planned and we're planning more. This year, our resolutions revolve a lot around doing things in advance, booking guests with more notice, things that you would see happening on a bigger podcast. We're gonna wear the, what's it called? You wanna dress for the job you want.

Already failed at that. This is a video podcast now.

We wanna dress for the job of being the biggest fear-based podcast in the world.

Yeah.

We're already well on our way.

We've already taken over America.

Anyway, this is housekeeping. You know it, you love it. Ed, you had something you wanted to kick us off with?

I wanted to kick us off with if this is your first time ever listening to this show, this is not, yeah.

Weird episode to come in on.

This is a weird episode, that's what I was gonna say. This is a little bit unusual for us. This is a little bit more stoner philosophy and not the stuff you're more used to, which is, it's still a great episode, but I just, in case this is someone's first time listening to it, they'll be like, what the fuck are these guys?

It's a very existential fear. We were not stoned while recording the episode, but it does sound a lot like you're listening to, I think we maybe even say in the episode, a stoned freshman dorm conversation. But it is, for me, it's a very valid fear. I mean, this is a fear I've wanted to cover for a long time, and I think, you know, we did a pretty good job of it.

Yeah, I like it, it's similar to going to hell.

If people listened to our part twos, we would do a part two for this.

Love part twos.

But the audience doesn't stick around for a part two.

They don't stick around for a part one, maybe, after they hear this.

We'll see.

Alright, back to housekeeping.

So, back to housekeeping. One of the things that we want to start the year letting you guys know about is we owe you a make up live show. If you were part of the Patreon, we owe you a live show because we missed it in December because of the holidays. So we have two coming up this month. We have one the 21st of January and one the 30th. Six to eight Pacific time.

If they're lucky.

Starts at 9 p.m. East Coast time.

Alright, so starts 6 p.m. Pacific or 9 p.m. Eastern.

You'll get a notification in your email if you're signed up for the Patreon. If you are not signed up for the Patreon and you want to come hang out at the live shows, do it. They're a great time. It's a great group of people who come and hang. We mostly just talk about the news a little bit. We talk about what people are up to. We do round of applause where we celebrate people's good news.

Drink checks.

Drink checks to see what you're imbibing with us.

Sometimes, but not always, I'll be on Discord after doing a little live chat. Kind of post live chat as well.

It's a good time. So if you're not signed up, sign up. If you are signed up, keep an eye out for the link. They'll be hitting your inbox soon.

Alright, so let's hit some 5-star reviews from people who love us enough to be signed up, probably. And if they're not, what are you doing?

Yeah, you know them, you love them. If you leave a 5-star review for us, we might read it on the show. So we've got some new ones for you guys. One left on Christmas Day, December 25th by Satire Chef. Great handle. 5-stars, this is a podcast, in all caps. He says, or she says, or they say, 5-stars being the widely accepted lowest rating. Correct. I was disappointed upon opening my Apple Podcast app to realize that this is not a college mathematics textbook.

Is that something you said once?

No, I think the joke is that he's afraid of college mathematics.

Oh.

I think. Which I am too. It's a very, it's a valid fear.

I love that you saw they were bad at math and you now defaulted back to it being a guy, maybe. After all that correction.

I don't know. Whoever Satire Chef is, it seems like they were disappointed to discover what this show was not, but happy enough about what it is to leave a five star review. So I think we're off to a good start with Satire Chef.

I think so too.

Wanna hit the next one here?

Sure, yeah. I'm still trying to feel like, I feel like it's a reference I'm not getting, but either way, maybe you're right. Sure, next one, very similar subject line. This podcast. And then it looks like a crying face emoji. Oh, okay. Well, you say cry laughing. It's a very different.

Yeah, it's cry laughing.

No, I know, but I realize I said cry face, and maybe I would be perceived as something different. I'm saying I didn't.

You can throw it up on the screen for whoever's watching.

I have no time for that. I have no time for that. Bing. Okay, great. Now he's on two bings with his hands, which means it's definitely gonna fucking be there. Alrighty, this podcast, crying laughing face emoji. I absolutely love these guys. Y'all are scared of almost everything, and I'm scared of pretty much nothing.

Well, good for fucking you, Buffy Beth.

Buffy Beth, you should hang out with Merwood, dude. All right, so, concerned, okay. Scared of pretty much nothing. Concerned, sure. Healthy, respect, absolutely. Maybe someday y'all find something I give a 10. Can't wait. Heart emoji is four of them, but an interesting one I've never seen before.

It's like heart over a dot.

Heart over a dot.

I don't know what that means. Braille?

I don't know.

Is it braille?

It's tough to do over the digital screen, but yeah. Well, thank you. Hopefully, we do find something that will give you a 10.

Maybe it'll be Eternity.

I... Yeah.

Buffy Beth, do you smoke a lot of weed and think too much? You'll love this episode.

Yeah, which took an eternity to edit, by the way. If you're watching...

And record. It took us three days to record the fucking episode.

This is our fourth time sitting on this couch. That's true. This part we're doing right now is our fourth time sitting on the couch. And if you watch this episode, you will very much see four very distinctly different... Some of it's animated. That's not untrue.

We went through multiple eras of Scared All The Time just recording this episode.

Eons, bro.

Eons.

Anyway, let's not make housekeeping an eternity. Thanks so much for the five star reviews. Go listen to our more traditional episodes after this. Definitely listen to Going To Hell, I think. We talk about it in this episode. It's a great companion piece. So yeah, anyway, without further ado.

Eternity.

Eternity.

So, Ed, I think I want to start this episode by saying if the listeners have not checked out our Going To Hell episode, that actually might be a good place to start, a good primer or companion piece after you listen to this. This episode isn't technically going to heaven, but we do do some heaven discussion. And I think, together, these two episodes will work really well together as a little mini marathon of Scared All The Time episodes.

Good flavor profile, these two together.

Yeah. There's less violent torture in this episode and more existential dread.

Okay, sure.

Because almost worse than Going To Hell, I think, is the pleasant eternity that we are sold as the best case scenario for our souls after we pass. We're told to long for it. And if you ask me, eternal life is a nightmare.

Yeah. I mean, I haven't seen it represented well on screen. It always just seems to be like a bus station or like a small neighborhood. You're stuck there forever.

Well, I think a good place to start is with a potentially apocryphal quote from Isaac Asimov. I could not find. I've heard this quote for decades. And then I went to go look it up for this episode, and I couldn't actually find a primary source for where he said it or wrote it. So, listener, if you know, let me know. But Isaac Asimov put it pretty succinctly. He said, I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse. And I know that this quote has been around for a long time because the first time I heard it sometime in high school, I felt, to use an overused term, I felt seen because that is how I felt.

He's a good writer. I read a lot of his books at this point and they're all really good.

He's a great writer and he encapsulated how I felt about eternity because everyone else in my life talked about heaven as a place to look forward to and strive for, but I just could never get excited about the idea of heaven outside. Obviously, I'm afraid to die. I was very afraid to die then, but the idea of eternal heaven seemed not fun, especially because-

What about that song that says heaven is a place on earth?

Well, I don't get too deeply into it. There are some Christian scholars who will point to lines in the Bible that suggest that heaven will actually be something that is built on earth by Christ after he returns.

So we got like six weeks for this to happen. We're doing this at a perfect time.

But we'll get there when we get there. You and I have talked a lot on this show about how we grew up Catholic, and I spent much of my Catholic upbringing, I would guess somewhere between 30-40 percent of my time in the church pew, trying to imagine what it would feel like to live forever in the clouds in heaven. If I wasn't thinking about that, I was probably thinking about what it would feel like to kiss a girl. Did you think about that in church ever?

No.

I would sometimes in church see girls that I went to school with and I'd be like, I wonder what it would be like to kiss her.

That is insane.

That's all I could do in church.

You should have. Did you go to confession as well? To confess these?

I should have. I should have.

Because you're like, oh, I don't know how many Hail Marys you need to give for this line of thinking during church.

The other thing that I would often think about was there was a Catholic church in Hershey.

It's made of chocolate.

Shout out St. John's. It's a fairly big Catholic church and it had a very tall space over the altar where there was a big cross with Jesus on it. And there was this little way up where the lights were above the crucifix above the altar. There was this panel that looked kind of like an electric, not an electrical panel, but a panel that you could open and climb in and out of to get up to something up there.

Okay, and you think that's where they were hiding all the girls to kiss? In Hershey Kisses, it's all tracks now.

The other thing that I would think about in church was a highly trained SWAT team kicking that door open and rappelling down into the church and having a gun battle with satanic cult leaders or demons and stuff.

Wow, so they were amongst you. Otherwise, I'd be like, everyone get out. We're gonna now start a battle.

I mean, I hadn't taken it that far. It was just this little action sequence I would imagine I got bored in church.

It sounds like church felt like an eternity for you, and so you had to fill the time to bring it back to what we're talking about.

Yeah, it did. I mean, it did feel eternal. Neither of those daydreams, I guess, are really particularly relevant to this episode. What is relevant is the reason that I thought heaven sounded kind of like it sucks and is boring is that the Bible is filled with verses like Revelations 4, 8, which says, Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under its wings. Day and night, they never stopped saying, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty who was and is and is to come.

Who was this?

Now, the creatures in Revelations 4, 8.

Yeah, but they're...

They say this in heaven.

They say this in heaven.

They say this in heaven. Now, the creatures sound cool. The creature's not what my... I don't know.

It sounds like Big Brother. I don't like all those eyes. Why do you need to see everything around you?

That's the biblical angels being described here.

No, I know, but it seems like I don't know what they...

It's a lot of eyes. It's a lot of eyes.

It's a lot of eyes. It's a lot of eyes stuff. Windows to the soul, we get it.

They can see every girl in church at the same time.

Better not be kissing, they said.

So, I have no quarrel with the description of the creatures. That sounds cool, but...

So, they're in heaven prior to Revelation starting, kicking off?

Well, I'm just using this as an example to show that the description of what happens in heaven, just this constant, endless worship, being in church forever.

Sure.

Sounds...

That sounds not great.

It sounds really boring.

It sounds like... I was already doing this. I was giving up a Sunday.

Yeah.

Now, I got to give up every day.

I can't get through an hour of being in church.

So... I don't know, maybe they're cool. Maybe the multi-eyed beings are also fun hangs. Maybe you don't know. Maybe they only show that part in the Bible. Maybe when they're done saying, holy, holy, holy, they go to a pizza party or something.

They might, that's true. That would be cool. I would appreciate them a lot more if, it doesn't say anything about them having mouths. So maybe they eat with their eyes.

A lot of us do.

Well, I guess if they're singing, they probably. We should be doing it more. I do remember also, here's another thing I thought about in church. I remember thinking one time, is sitting in church thinking about how boring heaven and eternity would be, and having an idea for a story that I wanted to write about a bunch of people who go to heaven and get so bored that they decide they want to go to hell. But when they try to go to leave heaven, they find out that they're trapped there because there's a delicate balance between good and evil. If they go to hell, it'll throw the balance off, and so then they have to break out of heaven to try to break into hell.

Well, why wouldn't-

I told my mom about it and she said I couldn't write that story.

I just feel like the story is a delicate balance. Just be like, make it like a foreign exchange student. Be like, hey, we need four guys from hell to be up here while we take the afternoon down there.

Sure. I guess I didn't get too far into figuring this story out, but yeah, that would be I guess a reasonable way to solve things. But Ed, before we get too deep into it, how much did you think about eternity as a kid?

Not often.

Did you think about dying at all?

No.

Okay. So you were just-

I was just out here living.

You were out here living?

Then I was also just doing what was told. You know what I mean? Hey, I also went to Catholic school through high school. So I had mass and stuff for that too. I just kind of dealt with it.

So when you heard about heaven, you never tried to picture what that would be like?

No, never, not once. To this day, I don't think about it.

Interesting.

I don't know if I'm in the majority or the minority on this. Once you just asked me, I don't know. I don't know what everyone's thinking, but I don't ever think about it.

I mean, there's certainly lots of religious people who think a lot about where they're gonna go after they die, and I imagine that.

And a lot of people who think about where I'm gonna go after, and then they talk to me for a super long time about it. And I'm like, hey bud, don't worry about it. I understand this isn't very important to you. I understand that you think, like, if I go to hell, that's gonna be a bummer. And you're not wrong, but leave me alone.

Oh, these are people who think that you should not go to hell. I was gonna say, most people I imagine assume that you're gonna go to hell.

No, yeah, but I think that's why they're always trying to, like, trying to save you, because they was trying to save you from that life in hell. And I was like, you know what? It's like that song we said earlier, heaven is a place on earth. Hell is a place on earth when they're trying to convince you to not go there. I'm like, I don't wanna be in this conversation one minute longer.

True, true. Well, and I guess I should say too, that we're gonna go a lot of places in this episode. We already have gone a lot of places in this episode. But I should say that, as with all of our episodes that touch on religion, whatever your bag is for eternal life, eternal afterlife, eternal glory, that's awesome. We've got no quarrel with whatever your beliefs are. By the way, this is a fear that I'd love to be wrong about. I'd love nothing more than for an eternal afterlife, whether it's heaven or something else, to be enjoyable.

Or just even to be. Because we don't get to spend a lot of time here. And so if it's just blank after, which is actually for me more difficult to conceive than a heaven or hell.

It's hard for our brains to conceive of non-existence. And again, part of, I guess I should say too, that this episode.

I mean, we do it every night though. Well. Every night we non-exist for a while.

But you dream.

Sometimes.

I dream sometimes.

And if I don't wake up, I will never know.

Right.

Unless there's a heaven or hell.

Right, you've never not woken up.

I've never not woken up. Yeah.

Which we'll get to at the end of this episode.

Okay, great. Are you gonna give me like a Kool-Aid at the end of this episode?

Yeah, yeah, I'm just mixing a large bowl of powdered drink off to the side.

What are you doing with that cauldron?

No, I think to also just to kind of to set the table here a little bit. This episode is as much about the idea, the concept, the existential fear of just what forever is. As much as it is any particular heaven or any continued, particularly religious existence, it's just about that idea of impossibly long time scales and the kind of existential fear that that strikes in my heart at least.

Yeah, no, I'm more afraid of that than I am of hell.

Most people culturally in the United States really only encounter the idea of eternity through unless you're a cosmologist or something. The DMV. No, at church, but I guess also.

Although I will say California for all of its faults. It's not even an earthquake joke, by the way. That is, you know, for us, they got a lot of shit wrong all the time. The DMV never been a problem for me. It's like I make an appointment. I'm in and out in like you got it.

You got to make the appointment. If you don't make the appointment, you're fucked.

But that's on you. It's free for anyone to make the appointment.

But you got to make the appointment.

DMV and waste management, I think, are both primo city of Los Angeles. Primo like I do bulk item pick up the night before. It rules.

You know, we need a little soundboard so you can give a little round of applause to the one time we round up of Los California. People have been worrying and thinking about and trying to comprehend eternity for basically as long as there's been language. The earliest thinkers in this space wrestled with the idea of whether or not time itself was eternal or if there was a starting point somewhere long before they, being the thinkers, existed.

Starting point meaning like a giant hourglass was turned over, like way before they got there. And where do we sit in the falling of these sand pieces? Sand pieces. What do you call them?

Sand.

Just sand, I guess.

Sand, grains of sand.

Grains, that's what I'm looking for.

This beach is covered in sand pieces.

God, there's so much sand pieces in my shoe.

We're really just gonna cover Plato and Aristotle here. And Plato and-

Back again, these boys.

They're back again, and Plato in particular had a theory on this that I think is a little bit difficult to wrap your head around, but I think I've done a pretty good job of summarizing it. I know many of our listeners are smarter than we are, so if I really fucked this up, definitely let us know and maybe we'll run a correction in a future episode. So Plato, in thinking about time and eternity, actually split the idea of time off from eternity. He theorized that a divine craftsman known as the Demiurge created the universe that we know by imitating an eternal model of perfection that exists elsewhere.

Interesting.

So he theorized that there's this eternal place, or in his words, he says, time itself came into being along with the cosmos as an image of eternity.

He's a Greek guy, a Greek gentleman? I'm saying they got a lot of that in their lives. They have like myths to draw from too. They're very comfortable with that. He, like Kronos, there's some shit.

He proposed that essentially there are two worlds, the eternal, which is a timeless realm of like perfect forms with a capital F, that everything there is the eternal perfect best form of the world that we know, and that the world that we know is sort of a bullshit imitation of that eternal.

It's gone from memory, basically. It's why we only have two eyes.

Yeah. The Demiurge left off our wings and all the eyeballs on our armpits.

He was like, I barely remember the dream I just had of a perfect place.

So Plato splits time and eternity into these two separate things, and he believed that time in our universe has a beginning. Before our universe, there was no ticking clock because there was no before. There was just the timeless eternity.

Sure.

But once the Demiurge shaped chaos into order, the cosmic clock in our universe started and it's been ticking ever since.

Do you think it's because we can only sustain this realm they've made for a certain amount of time and the ticking clock is not ticking up, but it's in fact ticking down to when chaos unravels again?

When chaos reigns once more?

Yeah.

I think the clock is just Plato's way of theorizing that time and our universe will move forever forward, but that our universe is sort of a, even though it is a forward moving eternity, we are still sort of like a second class eternity to the true eternal.

Sure, yeah, as it should be.

Of the eternity of the forms, I think he calls it, that always has and always will exist. So that's sort of a brain warper. Aristotle came along and put forth a different idea, and I think perhaps a simpler idea, that the universe has no beginning and no end, time has just been going for eternity and will never stop.

Okay.

In fact, Aristotle argued that the idea, like the very idea of a first moment of time is kind of a ridiculous concept because for a moment to be time, it must have a moment before it and after it.

Oh, okay.

Sure. So by that logic, there could not be a first moment.

So even the Big Bang Theory, like that bang had to happen, there was nothing. Even God in the book was like, first there was nothing.

Yeah.

But even he was there. Well, he already had like a Casio on, going, I think at two, I'm gonna start this universe.

Well, right, and I think that's one of the questions. I mean, I guess I should say, much of this episode is focused on the eternity that lies before us, but in a true eternity, there was an equal amount of eternity behind us.

Yeah, I don't think we're ever gonna get to the bottom of how it started.

No, and I don't plan to. In case anyone's listening to this episode, thinking that we're gonna get the answer. We are not. So in Aristotle's vision of the universe, time has always existed and will always exist in both directions with no creation or apocalypse to bookend it. Now, obviously, Aristotle and Plato did not know about the Big Bang. Seemingly, Plato, you know, if you're grading these as closer to what we now know, Plato would be a little bit closer in the sense that, like you said, there was nothing before the Big Bang, though it does seem like there must have been something in the nothing.

Exactly, which is why we're not gonna get to the bottom of it on this podcast.

Correct. So in other words, the Cosmos in Aristotle's view have always existed and will always exist with no creation event or apocalypse to bookend either side. Now, of course, we know about the Big Bang, though, so physicists and philosophers are faced with the question of what came before that, which is a scary thought, because then that puts you back into the world of complete eternity with no beginning and no end. And it is, in fact, so scary that there is a phobia, a fear of eternity that has been cataloged, known as a paraphobia.

Okay, sounds like there's two phobias in that.

It's just the one, it's just the one. And it could affect anyone, whether they are religious or not. And that's because the root fear here doesn't really have anything to do with what eternity looks like or has to offer and whether or not eternity itself is good or bad. Eternity itself, in this case, is neutral. And the fear is just based on the idea, the idea that it is impossible to have an idea of infinity, that it's impossible to grasp. And in fact, that no matter how wonderful you may imagine eternity to be, it's going to lose its luster after a while.

A million percent, yeah. I've never met a vampire who's like, this is going great.

I think for me, some of my fear of eternity probably comes from the fact that even my favorite things in the world get boring after a couple hours.

I think you need a real compulsion. You need a real addiction to something that you literally can't wean off of or wane off of whatever the word is to keep that going. You need an engine that's outside of your control to stay interested in something that long.

Yeah, and especially to stay interested in anything for forever. But the problem for me is that I'm also not a person who does well with being unproductive or having time off. I do real well with that.

I'm always fucking busy, but when I'm not, I love it and I can easily just lay there.

Whether I'm being productive or unproductive, I am feeling like I want to or need to be doing something else. So I don't want anything to last forever because the finite experience of something is what makes it enjoyable.

Yeah, it's not a party if you do it every night.

No, and I'm not the only one who feels this way. I found an article in Philosopher Magazine called Life Is Good. It takes a look.

Question mark.

So big lie right off the bat. The article is called Life Is Good. It takes a look at modern philosophers who have made this same argument, that anything, no matter how enjoyable for experience for eternity, would be misery. The article examines philosopher Bernard Williams' landmark philosophy paper from 1973, The Macropoulos Case, Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality, in which Williams reasons that even in the best conditions, a life unending would become intolerably boring and alienating, which I think, as you just said, you never hear about a happy vampire. I think generally any kind of immortal creature being what have you portrayed in any kind of popular culture tends to be a pretty miserable being.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not smiling. I guess if they do, they'd reveal their fangs and so. It's better for them to not.

Maybe they smile, they're in the dark a lot, maybe you just can't see them smiling.

Yeah, yeah. I feel like all the best vampire movies have a conversation about it.

Yes.

Like whether Near Dark or that one that had Tilda Swinton.

Only Lovers Left Alive.

Yeah, it's just like people who will have long conversations about like, it sucks, huh?

Just being alive a long time. Bernard Williams invents his own vampire or perhaps just a woman named Alina Makropoulos. I don't know why he insists on such a hard to pronounce name. He could have just called her Susan Smith.

So it's not based on anyone.

I don't think.

He invented this person.

Yeah.

Like Chuck Schumer and that weird family always talks about.

Who's Chuck Schumer's family?

No, he never saw, well, post a link in the thing. I'm not going to get into it. We don't have time to edit this. But yeah, I'll post a link. He constantly references this family that helps him guide his decisions he makes politically, and then they're not real.

Is it like a focused group example of a family that he represents?

You'd think, but no, it's literally like Helena and whatever? Stevens from whatever Pennsylvania.

He's been caught inventing these people.

Oh, they're 100% invented. And I think he still uses it. It's crazy. It's crazy.

Well, I just learned something about Chuck Schumer. I think he should go.

He should definitely not be there anymore.

Well, Elena Makropoulos is not real, but she also has no power in our government. She took an elixir in this example to live 300 years. And after 300 years, she finds life so tedious and empty that she chooses not to continue it. And Williams generalizes this. He says, for creatures like us, part of what makes life meaningful is that it is finite. We have projects, goals, desires, what he calls categorical desires, the big things that give us a reason to get up in the morning.

Sure.

In an infinite life, he argues, eventually you'll fulfill all your goals or they'd cease to motivate you. You'd run out of meaningful things.

Groundhog Day, you'd just try killing yourself.

Yeah, you'd remember and repeat everything a billion times and inevitably, tedium would set in. You wouldn't even be the same person after long enough. Either you'd change so much that you effectively die.

Well, I guess I need to know about Malaka Babalos or whatever this person's name is. I need to know more about this invented Schumer family because that this guy has... Like, could you not die in the sense that like in Groundhog Day, even if he dies, he just wakes up again?

Right.

Can this person not die in the sense that they never get old or like they have some sort of X-Men mutant power because I feel like the way I'd live my life would maybe be very different if when I died, I continued to live versus I just couldn't, I wouldn't succumb to old age.

So you're saying the difference between when you say, if you died, you continued to live, you mean that you would continue your life from a point in the past and it would repeat?

Or even just from that moment, or you're just Wolverine and you have a healing factor. Just something where she took an elixir, she gets 300 years, but what decisions would I not make if I think I might not climb that mountain or I might not, there's a series of goals I won't do if I think I'm gonna die doing that. I'm not saying I would do evil or bad things that I would be punished for, but I just was, I think there's such a difference psychologically knowing that the 300 years you get is invulnerable, like I'm in god mode, versus just like, I don't know, I still have to go to work, I still have to make money.

Well, I'm not sure of the context for this particular invented person.

Because if I get 300 years, it will take me more than 300 years just to probably have it, like half of that will be working at a job. And then the next half will be having to find a second job, because everything is so unaffordable. And so it's like, yeah, it's once a-

So your major concern for immortality and eternity would really be inflation.

Yeah.

Sort of the issue that you're facing.

Because also, you know, it's like, I just, because I feel like in heaven, no one's like, that'll be eight bucks.

Well, sure, I don't think-

And that's why I feel like you can hang out for 300 years in heaven, do all the things you want to do.

Yeah, I don't think heaven really has an economy.

If heaven is, if it's eight bucks, if it's like airport prices for shit, like in heaven, I will be-

Yeah, where else are you gonna go?

If I have to go to heaven and, like, if I go to heaven and I have to get a job, I will be so mad. It's one of my favorite lines in all of cinema. There's a movie that wasn't the strongest film by any means called Risk Cutters for a bunch of years ago. And it's got one-

At least by After Dark Films.

There you go. It's got one of my favorite opening lines of a movie, and I might be misquoting it, but essentially the line, it's like the opening line of the movie is, shortly after I killed myself, I got a job here at whatever the pizza place was called. It's like shortly after I killed myself, I got a job here at, you know, Round Pie Pizza.

It's a great opening line.

It's just a great opening line.

Yeah. Yeah. I do like his argument here that after long enough of living, you would not be the same person, that you would change so much over the course- I mean, think how much we've changed since we were 10 years old, over the course of the past 30 years. He's arguing that if you lived forever, that the person you are, that you as you would be yourself would die.

Well, you would have wisdom, I guess. You would have, well, yeah, you'd Benjamin Button that shit.

What do you mean? You wouldn't age backwards.

That's a, I think I'll add more. This guy's thing sucks, I guess. Is he not gonna get more questions? Am I gonna be old for a lot of it? Am I gonna get to 100 and then be 100 years old for 200 more years?

We should see if we can have this guy on the podcast.

We gotta get him on the pod. Cause then at least Benjamin Button, it makes sense you get, you know, it's that, it's the reverse of the-

Yeah, aging backwards has nothing to do. You're aging forwards if you're aging at all.

Exactly, I think I need aging to stop. I need vampire rules. I need aging to stop, I need to be stronger than everyone. I need to not be able to get a job. These are things that will maybe get me through 300 years. But if I'm 300 years, you know, you only get 80 halfway decent years.

Well, I also don't know that these philosophers are necessarily overly concerned with the practical results of this kind of aging so much there, the thought experiment of...

See, they should have called me.

Well, other... So Williams' argument is the infinite life, the eternal life sucks. Other contemporary philosophers like John Martin Fisher have pushed back on Williams. In the same article, Life is Good, that I found exploring Williams' ideas, they explore this John Martin Fisher guy's theory as a counterpoint. He imagines that with an infinite lifespan, we could, what he says, what he calls, rotate our crops of pursuits and projects. Take breaks, find new hobbies, dive into endless learning. Essentially, you'd adjust and keep life meaningful by continuously discovering or creating novelty.

See, I feel like we're gonna, you can't do that unless you give me a series of things that afford me that right. I need to be young, I need to have cash.

That's true. Now, that argument I don't fully resonate with because I feel like over an infinite period of time, you would definitely run out of things to rotate. I mean, how many years would it take you to read every book in existence?

I think it would be a while.

300, 400?

At minimum, if you're really holding an ass.

Yeah, but if you're talking infinity, you know, I don't know how many crops you're gonna rotate. But let me present you with this. Another philosopher, Thomas Nagel, presented a thought experiment in which at the end of each week you were offered the choice of living another week. Now, John Martin Fisher says he would always choose life, which is basically choosing immortality, just one finite slice.

You always choose life, then just choose immortality. Like, pay for the annual subscription.

I do think it's interesting, though, the idea of...

I love the pull cord aspect of this. The rip cord, excuse me.

Yeah, you can just be like, I'm out. Because then after 300 years or 3,000 years or 3,000 years...

I've done everything I want to do.

Yeah, you're like...

Also, we don't know, because if you do have the thing that I'm requesting, which is live forever no matter what, then you're like, well, nuclear war happened four years into this process. Now it's just me and the cockroaches hanging out. Hey, anybody hear me up there? I'm done with this elixir dude.

You also are requesting immortality so long as you are hot, young and rich the entire time.

I think, look at the way the world is behaving right now. I'm not the only one trying to preserve hot, rich and live forever.

No, of course not.

I mean, I don't have any of those things now, currently. I'd have to first order them on a mid six, seven months to get that kind of shit. I don't know.

Fisher argues that most of us would keep choosing the extra week because in the moment that we must make that choice, we would still have things that we care about. He dubs Mr. Williams an immortality curmudgeon and thinks that an endless life could be worth living if managed well.

I mean, you do need to do things. I mean, I think old people, they rapidly decline after retirement. They rapidly decline when their friends die. Like you need to have something to do.

I will say the physical aspect is not brought up in many of these arguments, nor is it something that I've necessarily thought about. I've been approaching it pretty much just from the sort of like intellectual thought exercise perspective, the physical degradation of the body.

I don't even mean that. I mean, rapidly decline mentally anything. I just think you need, I think you're always gonna choose one more week if you got something on the calendar.

But part of the reason they're declining, If you got nothing. Part of the reason that older people decline so quickly mentally is because their bodies are in a state where they can't do a lot of the things that they would like to do. Even something as simple as like driving, if they can't see very well and they can't drive and they can't go anywhere. So I think that's what I'm saying about part of the decline aspect that I'm not sure any of these guys are thinking about. But this is a good point to pause for a moment. We've been talking as if most people listening to this podcast have attempted to imagine eternity. And I don't know that everyone who is listening necessarily has. So I found an example that might help you wrap your mind around what forever really is and then make you want to throw up when you start to wrap your head around it.

It's going to be the exact same stuff when they tell you like, how much a billion dollars is.

The Earth has been around for over four and a half billion years.

Not according to the book I believe in.

And the book you believe in called Young Hot and Eternal.

Yeah, no, no, it's not eternal. That's the sequel. Mine is called Young Hot and 2000 years old.

The Earth has been around for over four and a half billion years, and the universe has existed for three times as long as that give or take. So imagine living as long as that, but then imagine living as long as that again. And that would just be the first second of the first minute of the first hour of the first day of the first week of the first month of the first year of your eternal life. But even using that comparison, the time I just outlined would still be just the first second of your eternal life. And then that first eternity would be the first second of your eternal life.

I'm so confused. Why didn't you just find that thing that Carl Sagan said that one time?

There is no frame of reference. There is no frame of reference, no scope, no words you can use to define how long eternity will be. After all the stars have burned out and all the planets have turned to dust and all of the life throughout the vast expanse of space, both known and unknown has died. That will still be just the first moment of the rest of eternity.

Yeah, I mean, it's not-

So rotate your fucking crops through that, Brad.

Yeah, it's tough.

What the fuck his name was?

It's tough.

John Fisher.

You'd have to, the only way you can rotate your crops through that, I think, is you have to read all the books, watch all the movies, watch all the TV shows, talk to all the people, then murder them all, burn all the books, destroy the movies, and then I think you have a pretty good shot of trying to build it all over again on your own. That'll give you something to do. Like, what happened in the third chapter of Moby Dick? Well, now he's not a whale anymore, whatever. I don't know if Tanya remembered that. You know what I mean? Something where, if you burn it all, whatever the Matrix thing was, which is like, this is our fourth attempt at the Matrix, that would help with the eternity. But yeah, just reading all the books is not gonna get through everything you just said.

The thought of something lasting that long, the thought of the 15 billion years of existence just being the first second of the first minute of the first Well, it's always gonna be because existence goes on forever. Right, but that thought, that vastness, is where the fear and where the horror of it really starts to creep in for me.

But don't you feel some comfort knowing that that's not gonna happen? Well, like it's scary to think about how big the ocean is or how long time is, but just if you don't go in the water, you're not gonna drown. And if you don't, and you're not gonna live long enough to be a problem.

Well, right, but that's where the idea of eternity itself, while many people find it hopeful, the idea that they might live forever.

Oh, I need more time for sure. Well, I already need more time.

And I think that's a big question of what it means to be human. Like, we all want more time, but if you think about endless time, it's like where, when would enough be enough? I don't know.

Here's a question for you. Would you rather live forever alone, meaning you're the only person who lives forever on this planet, or wherever we end up in the next couple of centuries, or would you rather be one of two or three people who live forever? Because I almost feel like I'd rather be alone, do my own thing, meet new people, than have somebody who's always with me.

You're saying you wouldn't be alone in the universe. You're saying you'd just be the only one who lives with me.

You'd be the only one who lives forever, or you and someone else. Because I don't care who you choose. Your best friend in the world, your wife, whatever. Holy shit. A thousand years in, I'd be like, don't even fucking talk to me.

Well, they'd be a different person by then.

Yeah, they'd be a different place. Because I'd be like, I'm going to be on this side of the planet, you're going to be on that side of the planet. Get the fuck out of here. I can't listen to you one more day.

Well with all these thoughts of eternity, which would I like more?

Yeah.

I don't know. I guess.

In the beginning, you'd want to bud, but then I feel like you definitely would.

You'd want to bud, but there's also, you're not saying that I have to be with that eternal person all the time.

That's true. I didn't think I should have added that. Fuck. Yes, I guess you can just check in once every.

Thousand years.

Whatever that Hancock, whatever that movie was.

Is that what Hancock's about?

I think it might be.

The Will Smith superhero movie?

Yeah, I think they're like immortal beings and they forgot. He forgot that he was an immortal being and then he like runs into Charlize Theron who's like spend 2000 years since last time we spoke.

That's actually a really great idea. Someone who lives for so long that they forget that they live.

He's forgot he was immortal. Yeah.

Huh. I don't think I've ever seen that movie.

It's real bad, but there's some big ideas, some fun ideas.

Didn't Vince Gilligan write that movie?

I doubt it, but I really feel like that's not the case, but it had some big ideas.

All right. Well, back to a paraphobia, the fear of forever. I found an article from 2016 in the Pages of the Atlantic, in which writer Bobby Azarian discusses how frightening it can be to face the infinite. It begins like this. The first time I thought about heaven, it terrified me. I was four years old and my grandfather had just passed away after a drawn out battle with cancer. My family tried to console me by explaining that he went to a beautiful, calm, and happy place where he would be united with all his loved ones forever and ever. That night, I lay in bed in pitch darkness and tried to grasp what they had told me. But every time I thought I had a grip on eternity, it slipped further away. The largest number of years I could imagine failed to make a dent in infinity. My primitive brain filled with an existential angst. The idea of living forever was even more unsettling than the idea of no longer existing after death. That's pretty much exactly what I remember experiencing as a kid.

Did you get there the same way? Like somebody died and then your family gave you some run-of-bullshit about how that took the same thing you say when the dog went to a different farm?

No, it was just from the idea of heaven at church. Seemed like, you know, it seemed, I couldn't wrap my head around what that would mean.

It sounds to me like you were less, it's less that you could wrap your head around it and that you just, it felt like you couldn't let yourself experience happiness.

Maybe.

Because you looked at this as like, how miserable is this gonna be? I think some people who were like, man, I can't even imagine how happy I'll be when I have all this time, when I'm with all my friends, blah, blah, blah, and you looked at it as like, this prison sentence.

Well, I just couldn't imagine the time span. That's what I keep coming back to.

No, but you keep saying that, but I think you'd only give a fuck about the time span because you're like, I'm gonna be miserable for that long. And so, that's why I worry for young Chris, couldn't picture a world in which he's happy for any amount of time. Oh, I mean also. And so, when you thought of the most time, you're like, fuck.

Well, this article quotes a woman named Kelly who says, I remember the first time it hit me. I was around eight years old. Now I'm in my 30s and the thought of eternity still freaks me out. It usually hits at night when I'm trying to sleep. I've learned to push it out of my mind, but sometimes I can't. And when that happens, I start pacing the room and thinking I might have to go to the emergency room or else I might kill myself.

Wow.

So I never thought about killing myself.

No, not from this.

In regards to not being able to wrap my head around infinity, but this is a real thing that bothers a lot of people. The writer of the article, Azarian, says that a search for a paraphobia on Google comes up with hundreds, if not thousands, of message board posts and comments, similar to this one on places like Reddit, Quora, and Yahoo Answers. Websites dedicated to phobia help and support all have comment threads on a paraphobia too. But despite all this discussion, there is very little research on a paraphobia, and it lacks its own Wikipedia entry, which this article was from 2016, and I went to go check, and sure enough, it still lacks a Wikipedia entry.

Did you start one?

It's, maybe I should. It is not explicitly recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM-V.

That's five, I think. Five, DSM-V.

Five, yeah. It does meet their criteria for a specific phobia, which is classified as an anxiety disorder, and it is still absent from the websites of the Mayo Clinic and the National Institute of Mental Health, as well as WebMD. So, the writer of the article, Azarian, was like, huh, it seems like there's a lot of evidence out there from people posting, but not a lot of scientific evidence. So he posted on Facebook, asking if anybody wanted to come forward with their experience with a paraphobia, and he got a bunch of responses, including one friend who said he used to get so overwhelmed during sermons in early adolescence that he felt physically ill, and another person who said, the thought of eternity still fills me with anxiety when I wake up from naps. My solution, I stopped napping.

Oh, shit.

Now, this podcast, one hot tip from Scared All The Time, if something interferes with your napping, you're gonna wanna cut that right out of your life.

Yeah.

I think, so, stop thinking about eternity would be my thought, don't.

You know, he decided to go the other way with it and let thinking about eternity fuck up the rest of his life.

Apparently, apparently. Now, Martin Weiner, a researcher at George Mason University who studies the neural underpinnings of time perception, notes that the brain region hypothesis.

Fuck him, I can't find a job. What'd you just describe as a fucking job?

Well, I don't know that that's the title of his job, but he's a researcher at George Mason University.

Getting paid to do it, sounds like.

This was in the before times, Ed. Yeah, this was in 2016.

Okay, sure.

Get paid to do anything.

Yeah, yeah, different time.

But he says that he thinks that part of what might be going on here is that in adolescence, there is a dawning realization that occurs where one realizes they will become an adult. I suspect that in a paraphobia, one comes to the realization that after death, you will live forever if you believe this, and in simulating that experience in your mind, one realizes that there is no way to project head to forever, and that is inherently anxiety provoking. So as such, he says the anxiety these folks are feeling may not really be much different than the fear of growing up, getting old or death, because the anxiety is simply an inability to imagine, not particularly an anxiety of eternity.

Yeah, because I have the first one. My anxieties are all midlife crisis based that the feeling the pressure cooker that is a finite amount of time on this planet gives me, you know, I don't take naps, but it might interrupt my naps if I did. And so like, yeah, it's crazy how different I am than these people.

Well, I think, you know, I would argue that the temporary nature of life is what makes it good.

No, it was, it was until I got older and older and now it's the worst and we'll do an episode on that. I have no problem talking about that.

Getting older?

Yeah, A, getting older. Yeah, B, just getting to the end.

Put it on the calendar for 2026. We'll do an episode on getting older.

Yeah.

Weiner also offers a second theory that the fear of the eternal afterlife is simply a manifestation of a fear of death that is inherent in everyone. He references terror management theory, TMT, not TMNT, which would be the Ninja Turtles.

Those would be Ninja Turtles.

And a lot more fun. TMT.

They also manage terror.

They do.

The shredder comes to town, they take care of it. They manage it.

The terror management theories derive from Ernest Becker's 1973 Pulitzer Prize winning work of philosophy and psychology, The Denial of Death, which essentially says that people in modern civilization are walking around in denial of our mortality and that culture, religion and entertainment all exist for the purpose of distraction.

Well, yeah.

The idea is that these things-

You want a Pulitzer for saying what everyone knows?

Well, I think we all know that now because he said it.

No way. Get out of here.

Now I've never studied the denial of death or-

You don't have to. It sounds like we already know this shit.

Or a terror management theory too deeply, but it rings true to me because when I was having my wild panic attacks back in like 2015-

Oh, and you could have had a job doing anything. What the fuck were you panicking over? You should be panicking now.

Feeling like I was going to die. I think some of our listeners have a running joke from this show of a night that my brain screamed at me not to fall asleep or I might die. Yes, they do.

Yeah.

Back in that Chris era, I remember having a few nights where I felt like I confronted the idea of death in a truly visceral way and it did not feel much more comforting than the idea of living forever. It scared me so much that I remember wondering how I would ever function as a person. I remember laying in bed.

After that evening.

Yeah, I remember laying in bed. It was probably like three or four in the morning and I remember feeling like I had come face to face with the idea that I would cease to exist and I remember googling, how do people do anything knowing that they're going to die? Oh, wow. Because it seemed like such a useless attempt to try to function knowing that that was waiting for me.

Thank God it was 2016 or whatever, 2015 and not now, because now you would just chachi BT that and chachi BT be like, you want to find out tonight?

Great question, Chris.

Great question. This is really smart to be thinking that you should die tonight.

But terror management theory is literally the answer to how do people do anything knowing that they're going to die. The theory proposes that individuals are motivated to develop close relationships within their own cultural groups in order to convince themselves that they will somehow live on, if only symbolically.

Oh man, they won't.

After their inevitable death. And an article on verywellmind.com elaborates that there are many ways that terror management theory can be applied to real life. Some examples include religion. People will turn to religion to alleviate existential anxiety and find solace in the idea of an afterlife. But also the feeling of belonging to a nation that provides a sense of identity and belonging can help people feel connected to something. They may strive to achieve success, create meaningful relationships or contribute to society in ways that leave a lasting impact. Basically, we will do anything to avoid thinking about the end, including things like build civilization.

I mean, people keep having fucking kids. I mean, what other purpose than to keep the name going or something?

Well, because honestly, I think there's something to be said for the fact that, you know, terror management theory argues that we do all these things, we write books, we create relationships, we create government, we build society, we do everything to avoid thinking about death. I think for a lot of people, yes, having a child is both passing along your genetic information and its survival of the species, but as someone who has recently had a kid, you know, everything else does kind of fall away. You wake up in the morning thinking about the stuff you have to do that day to make sure that your kid is going to be safe and taken care of and comforted, and you don't really have time to think about death or the end. And so I think having a kid...

But if you did die now, especially with a boy like Felix, you get that Cullari name going further.

Yeah.

It's pretty good to get all sisters, right?

What's that?

You have all sisters?

I have sisters, yeah.

They're all sisters, though.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So this is the only Cullari name zipping on from you.

Oh, yes.

So that's why you got to do that.

Anyway, this episode isn't about the fear of death. It's about the fear of eternity, which many people encounter for the first time when terror management theory drives them to religion. So there's no good way out of this.

No, nope, nope, nope, nope.

One way or another, you're going to be stuck being scared of something after we die.

Yeah, that's rough. I mean, terror management is a very fun, I don't even know about this TMT.

I do think the TMNT would be a great book.

Yeah, it would be hard to ask for it at the front desk, and I get TMNT, TMNT, TMNT, and they're like, what the fuck's wrong with you, buddy?

They bring you a barrel of TMNT, and you're like, no!

Also, why do you have this? This is a borders. Why do you have this here?

In our Going To Hell episode, we looked at what the major world religions say about eternal damnation. And so I thought that in this episode, it might be a good idea to take a quick look at how the major world religions portray eternal reward to see if any of them sound good enough to allay our fears about experiencing them forever.

I mean, I'm sure as a couple of these, it'll be interesting to me.

We'll start with Christian Heaven, since that's what we're most familiar with.

It's the one we push the most.

It's spoken about in the Bible as a place of eternal rest and peace, with all of life's wrinkles ironed out.

I feel like they said Eden was going to be pretty tight too. That turned to shit real fast.

Well, the problem is they let snakes in.

No, yeah.

I don't know if there's any snakes allowed in Heaven.

Well, now we're gonna get emails, but who love animals?

That's true.

All dogs go to Heaven.

We're not even touching. All dogs! We're not even touching on the idea of whether or not animals experience eternity or not.

Okay, well, someone will tell us.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which I know does not speak for all of Christianity, but I thought this is a pretty relevant quote, heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme definitive happiness. God will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. Now, like you mentioned earlier, the first four attempts at The Matrix tried this.

And they did and they realized that they needed.

That they needed it.

They needed some imperfection.

You need imperfection, that's what I'm saying.

Yeah.

I don't know that an eternity of happiness can exist because you can't have light without the dark.

That's why I think we're gonna have to get fucking jobs up there, it's gonna suck.

Yeah.

There's gonna be, there's gonna be, I just feel it in my bones that I'm gonna, in heaven, have to tell someone I can't tonight. I just, I got something, I got something in the morning, whatever.

Look, yeah, at the very least, if you're not allowed to cancel plans in heaven, is it really heaven?

Yeah, exactly.

Like, now look, again, we're being, we're gonna, we're being a little facetious with a lot of this. A lot of Christian scholars will tell you that, you know, obviously it is impossible as a human to imagine the perfection of heaven and were you to experience it, it would be every bit as wonderful as it is said to be. And we're throwing that right out the window.

Yeah, I know. I can only anthropomorphize things. I can't, I haven't been to heaven.

We only know what we know.

Yeah.

What we also know is that I think, no offense, heaven's described as very tacky.

Okay.

I think.

Tell me more.

Revelation chapters 21 and 22 depict it as a stunningly beautiful city coming down from God. It's described as having streets of gold.

Sure.

Gates of pearl.

Sure.

And walls made of precious stones, specifically in the foundations. The list is as such. The first foundation was Jasper, the second Sapphire, the third Chalcedony, the fourth Emerald, the fifth Sardonyx, the sixth Sardius, the seventh Chrysolite, the eighth Barrel, the ninth Topaz, the tenth Chrysoprace, the eleventh Jacinth, and the twelfth Amethyst.

Okay.

So the walls have 12 layers of gemstones to them.

Every wall.

Apparently.

This is wasteful, but also...

In addition to Streets of Gold, Gates of Pearl...

I mean, this is a lot of the language they used to get people to come build the railroads. Like it was like, ah, it's just gonna be, you know, it's like that old saying, right? They said America had Streets paved in gold, but they never told us we'd be the ones paving it.

Except the difference is, America was Streets paved of gold and walls made from hamburgers.

No, no, that was later. That was after we made that street money.

The city is said to be brilliantly illuminated by the glory of God, obviating the need for the sun or the moon. There is also the river of the water of life, as clear as a crystal flowing from the throne of God and the lamb through the middle of the city's main street.

What's in the river? We got animals?

Is it crystal light?

I'm saying like, what's the point of a river? I guess we're going to drink from it?

It's the water of life.

I guess we'll drink from it.

I mean, look.

It's weird that we're not going to get access to that until after we die. That's ironic.

A lot of this is probably metaphor, but I do find it.

I know one of those was not metaphor. They literally gave us building instructions.

I know, right? I do find it odd that there is such a focus, and I'm sure other-

On materials?

Yeah, I'm sure that not every translation of the Bible is exactly the same, but at least in some of these translations, yes, the physical, practical, opulent material that the city is built from feels really at odds with the idea of-

Of an immaterial life, of priests not having worldly possessions.

Yeah.

It's very fucking Wizard of Oz, which they reveal at the end of that, he's bullshit.

Yes.

Including Emerald, by the way, there's an Emerald walkway.

Yeah, I mean, yes. When you pair this aesthetic-

Also, I didn't hear once you said practical, which is wrong word. I didn't hear one piece of public transit in this. So we're just walking everywhere. I guess we have the time now. We have the time to walk.

You got the time. It must be a big city because it has all the souls of everyone.

Because in Dante's Inferno, the Divine Comedy or whatever, everyone knows the hell part. But there's also parts for heaven and there's other parts of the poem for-

Purgatory.

Purgatory and stuff. And they get, it's fucked up. They get to hell, I'm sorry, they get to heaven and it's like, hey, you can't come in here, man. You're actually not good enough yet.

Right.

And they make you like sit outside, like in the stocks with like birds land on your head for like another hundred and fifty years before you're like then allowed to enter heaven. And so-

Do you think heaven is like Raya?

I think heaven is gate kept. Yeah. It's the most gate kept. It has the pearly gates.

Yes. True, true, true, true. Yeah, you know, I feel like if you're, if you're trying to live a good Christian life to experience an eternal oneness with God, that's one thing, but if you're doing it because you want to eat a velvet potato chip or something when you get up there, that seems, I don't know, it just seems like it's kind of missing the point a little bit.

Yeah.

So try to imagine forever of that.

In the club?

Well, yeah, I guess you might be eternally proud of the fact that you made it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Judaism is much more up my alley. It's much more focused on living in the here and now than it is on what happens after you die. But there are a few tantalizing mentions of an eternal afterlife, or olam haba in ancient Jewish texts. But the question of what olam haba is remains way up for debate. The term means the world to come, and it isn't found at all in the Torah. It is pulled from the Talmud, which is a collection of Jewish law and ethics and philosophy and lore. The pertinent Talmudic quote is, all of the Jewish people have a share in the world to come. Some scholars interpret that to mean a heavenly realm where souls can go to basque after death. Others say it is a future perfected world on earth after the Messiah arrives. Either way, the pressing question for us isn't really what olam haba is, but more how terrible it would be to spend eternity there.

Sure, okay.

Now, this sounds like a fucking drag. The Talmud says in the world to come, there is no eating, no drinking, no procreation, no jealousy, hatred, and no competition. Rather, the righteous sit with crowns upon their heads, enjoying the splendor of the divine presence.

All right, so I guess you don't need any of that other stuff because you are sustained by the presence of the Lord.

More than half the stuff on that list is stuff that I quite like.

Yeah, which is why you're going to hell and this won't be a problem for you. I do like that it's not gate kept. Everybody's invited.

Everybody's invited.

To sit on this fucking Lord Heat Rock.

Ain't no crown fitting on your head or my head.

What does that mean?

We both got lumpy Italian heads.

They're gonna let us in. Well, not this one. This is the Jewish one, but other ones will, I don't know.

I also think it kind of sounds like lounging around in an opium den. You're not eating. You're not drinking. There's no feelings. You're just sitting and enjoying the splendor.

I will say this. The only people who have ever described a feeling quite like heaven here and the previous heavens we've looked at describe are heroin addicts. They are literally the only people who are that level of content and feeling that good.

Yeah.

So yeah, I mean, if it's a drug, I guess it's but a drug that won't kill you because you live forever.

Could you get addicted to heaven?

I think some people already are. The Sackler family had to pay millions of dollars for all that heaven they made.

What about Islamic heaven?

I'm ready.

In Islam, the eternal reward is Jannah, often translated as paradise, which is the opposite of their hell, Jahnam, which we talked about in our hell episode.

Yes, we did.

This paradise, honestly, this one sounded pretty good to me. It's depicted like the ultimate kind of like luxury resort almost for the soul.

Lot of resorts going on.

The Quran tells us these details. Lush gardens with sweet shade, rivers of milk, honey, wine and water on tap, heaps of delicious fruits always in season, comfy couches and beautiful companions.

Okay, well, it's pretty good.

Sounds a little bit like the studio space we're trying to build, I think.

We'll never look, if anyone's watching this video, if it even exists.

Delicious fruits always in season.

We are not there yet.

Not there yet. Comfy couch, though. We've got one of...

Pretty comfy.

One of 15 things here.

I mean, it is interesting that all these places came out of the birthplace, like the cradle of civilization, like the Middle East. So if you're going to get a lot of like waters, they put a premium on water, they put a premium on shade.

Yeah.

They put a premium on a lot of stuff.

Yeah. Shade is a big deal.

Yeah.

Every believer in Jeanne, male or female, enjoys perfected spouses and friends without any of the annoyances.

Okay. Why do we got to be married up there? We can't just enjoy life without a spouse?

No sickness. No. Well, I guess it's if you want a spouse or if you have a spouse.

Or if you've been betrothed to someone. I think a lot of these things also started with like, you get a lady or you get a, well, I don't think anyone got a guy back then, but there's like the dowery aspect, I think, was when all these books were first thought up.

There's no sickness, no old age, no boredom, just youth and vigor. But even with all these joys.

Hell yeah, like that youth, I like that.

There you go, they're addressing this.

Hell yeah.

Even with all these joys, Islam makes it clear that the greatest reward in Jannah is spiritual. The Quran says that some faces will be shining, radiant and gazing at their Lord, and the greatest of all rewards in paradise, surpassing every fig and shade tree, is the chance to behold God and bask in his presence. It is described as a joy so overwhelming that it makes everything else look like an appetizer.

Here's the thing about that. How long do you get in that? Because with the Jewish one, it's like you get forever, but here, first off here, it sounded like not everybody got to bask in it.

Not everybody gets to be some people if they weren't religious enough.

No, I just mean even here, it sounded like. Also, if it's the best thing in the world and you're like, well, that's your one minute, please keep moving, well, then you're having a horrible time the rest of the time. You're like, oh, I saw God and it was awesome.

Yeah.

And now I'm just feeling empty since that was my one minute I got with them.

Yeah, I think it's forever. I don't think you get a minute.

But if you're there forever, then this is a little bit the same problem as the Jewish one, which is I'm in eternity as a moth to a flame. I'm just sitting there bouncing against a light bulb. I'm just going bop bop bop bop. You know what I mean? I'm not really enjoying my time up there because I'm so, I'm in this tractor beam of, I don't know, good feelings. In which case, how's that any different than me scrolling on my phone for 10 hours? Which is like, I wish I wasn't doing this, but the dopamine is great. And so, the solution to that is go touch grass, but in heaven, the solution I guess is just look longer and further?

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean.

For eternity?

I think, again.

I didn't have a problem with this till now. Now I'm afraid of it. I wasn't afraid of it till I found out I was gonna become a moth.

Suddenly, Ed has no problem with any of this, but you ask him to stare into the face of God for one minute, now it's a problem.

I thought only getting him in it was a problem, but I realized a bigger problem is getting all the time.

I'll say this, the aesthetics of Jena sound nicer than Christian Heaven.

Oh, Christian Heaven, how big are those buildings? I mean, everything's got 33 fucking levels of sheets of rock.

Of glowing, gaudy baubles and this just sounds-

I can't even imagine how cold and echoey everywhere is in Heaven.

This kind of sounds like the resort I visited when I went to Greece.

Okay, let's hear it.

It sounds nice.

Oh, you're saying the thing you already told us?

Yeah, the shade trees and the milk and honey and wine and lush gardens.

It's very nice.

Yeah, it seems a lot nicer than-

All expense is paid.

You've paid with your soul, but even still, forever, it's a long time. Now, that brings me to Buddhism.

Now, they had a vibe for hell, if I remember correctly.

They had a real rough vibe for hell. They had a nasty one.

Oh, did they?

You got to go listen.

Am I thinking of Islam? Which was the one that was like, you just had to show up long enough where you're a vibe again. Like, they think you're cool and then you can get out of here. And you only had to do specific things that you fucked up. I thought that was Buddhism or maybe Islam. They were both, I thought, surprisingly good.

No, I think that might have been Hinduism. You had to take your lashing and then you could move on.

And then you can keep moving.

I think it might have been Hinduism.

Okay, well, either way, there was some people who seemed reasonable, so let's just say this one is not.

Well, no, Buddhism is interesting in the sense that these three other world religions, they place a premium on two things when it comes to the afterlife. One is that it's eternal, and two is that you are still you. That's the whole point of whether or not it's a reward or a punishment. Your soul continues on.

You're saying it's not, I guess, Buddhism, if it's a reincarnation situation, then I guess there's no afterlife.

Well, in Buddhism, things work differently. It's not about the eternal soul continuing on to reward or punishment. The eternity in Buddhism is actually the cycle of death and rebirth called samsara that we are all currently experiencing. The goal of Buddhism isn't to get to a place like heaven, but a state called nirvana. It's not about getting somewhere or gaining something. It's really about losing all the causes that would keep you here. Yeah, everything that makes you suffer. Nirvana, actually, I didn't know this. It literally means blowing out or extinguishing, like blowing out a flame. It's often said to be the unconditioned state, beyond time, beyond space, beyond birth or death. In nirvana, nothing arises or passes away. It's just eternal peace. Some people shy away from this because they think it sounds nihilistic, the idea that the goal is to ultimately become nothing. But Buddha was pretty careful about describing nirvana as anything, really, because it's beyond human concepts. It's not a heaven, it's not a place where you go to enjoy the fruits of having been good your whole life. It's the cessation of suffering and the end of individuality as we think of it.

Sure.

And that's, you know, honestly, the idea of nirvana resonates with me more than the idea of heaven, but I am spooked by the idea of ego death.

Oh, yeah, I mean, we talked about that in the LSD episode.

The idea that I would no longer be me, A, is beyond my ability to imagine, because you can't imagine Being something else. Being nothing, yeah.

Or being a rock.

But I do think, I mean, some people seek ego death through Drugs. Drugs, through LSD, through mushrooms, and I do think, you know, it's something that I'm sort of interested in experiencing while I'm alive, because most people who come back from it come back with a much smaller or a much less loud fear of death, because they experience that ego death, they experience dissolving into nothing, and they're able to come back from it and go, I get it, you know, like.

I'm thinking maybe I'll just wait till the main attraction on that one.

So you're not thinking ego death is something you would seek?

Not while I'm around.

Yeah, it's a tough question. I think I would be very, very scared to do it.

Yeah.

But it does seem like people benefit so much from experiencing it.

Things are coming. Many people do those ayahuasca trips and shit too.

Yeah.

And they come back. I don't know. I'm not that interested in it. But maybe now because there's nothing else going on in the world. Like fucking college kids are, you know, going to class over Zoom.

Yeah.

Nobody's got internships. Nobody's dating. I'm saying like, I'm sort of lose now. You're mainly just sitting around your house scrolling.

Couple of brain cells.

Yeah. You're sitting around scrolling. Fuck it. Go try and get some ego. Not suggesting this to the audience. I was just saying, you know, thinking aloud. Don't do this. We didn't say to do it. I'm just saying that we are looking at a more insular world than we've ever seen of people looking at screens, people not going out, people don't date, Gen Z doesn't drink.

Yeah.

So what else are you gonna do, I guess?

Kill your ego, brother.

Kill it, but we didn't tell you to.

This is where science and philosophy start to enter the realm of the eternal conversation. What forever feels like is not a question that is just relegated to the realm of religion. Although I think any discussion of eternity probably takes on some kind of a spiritual dimension because it is beyond our imagination.

Unless you're a vampire, which is to say a terrestrial, like forever right here, walking around, then you have to take on a spiritual element, yeah.

The only way to really contemplate eternity is to engage in some pretty wild thought experiments. I found a really interesting one on Reddit that explains eternity in a way that I think makes a lot of sense and isn't too hard to follow. It's a theory for maybe what happens when we die and why there are so many stories that have been for so many thousands of years that there is some eternal beyond here. This person posits this and they do also caveat they're probably not the first person to ever think of this.

Oh yeah, no kidding, in the year 20 whatever.

2026?

Yeah, no you didn't fucking think of nothing. There's nothing new under the sun also written in the Bible.

This person says, it starts with something pretty basic. The idea that time is subjective. Our perception of it changes depending on our mental state. We've all experienced this. Time slowing down in a car crash.

Experiencing time is subjective. Time is not subjective.

Well, right, but the way in which we experience time is very subjective. There's people who take mushrooms or whatever and say-

Well, we did the cave woman on New Fear Unlocked.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She experienced time differently underground. So time can be experienced subjectively. And if you take that idea and mix it with something like the xenon paradox, which is the idea that between any two moments in time, you can divide that interval infinitely.

What?

So between any two moments in time, you can divide that moment infinitely.

It's like FM radio.

Kind of. I don't know if there's an infinite number of FM radio.

No, but there's a lot more than we thought.

But that, so that says, this guy says, that got me thinking. What if the final milliseconds before death, with the brain's last bursts of activity, are subjectively stretched out into an eternal experience? So the theory goes like this. Right before death, the brain enters a state of extreme activity or dissociation. We've seen evidence of this in studies, including a rat study that was done in 2013 at the University of Michigan. In that final moment, your consciousness might fragment that tiny slice of time into an endless loop that feels like a subjective eternity. A final continuous thought or experience that never ends from your point of view.

Yeah, so you're in the ground, but somehow you're just doing this forever?

Well, that's what I can't quite figure out because...

So it has to remove time, actual in your time from the equation?

I don't know how it works after the last neuron shut off.

So you're saying that like someone's crying over you if you're lucky enough to have anybody in your life when you die. And in that five minutes that they're like, they pulled the plug, you experience what seems like 2000 years of the same day. And then they throw you in the ground, and then all that's done. It doesn't explain what happens after you die. It just says that maybe you get to watch your favorite movie a million times as a final request.

Kind of, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I understand the idea of the eternal moment in the context of a psychonaut who's like, I took 50 grams of mushrooms and I lived long enough to see the heat death of the universe or whatever, because the hardware that that experience is firing on still exists when they come back to tell us about it. The eternal moment happening as your neurons actually shut off, I don't know that it explains what happens when those last neurons turn off. I guess, I guess...

Unless it happens and then someone gets, you know, flatlined and then they come back, and then we have enough people who came back from the edge saying something similar enough.

Right, right. But I also guess if this theory were to hold, people who die suddenly are robbed of this eternally blissful moment, which maybe explains why ghosts are so often reported to be the spirits of people who died suddenly. Like maybe they don't get that eternal moment of peace, and so something else happens to them. They get stuck, they stick around.

We haven't even gotten into what eternity as a ghost is.

Miserable.

They seem unhappy with whatever they're seeing. They're always booing it.

Or maybe once you die, especially if it's suddenly, Ed, maybe you don't really die at all.

I feel a little familiar with this concept.

We are about to dive in to the wild and wacky world of quantum immortality, which we have touched on in our previous episode on sudden death.

Correct. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of.

I think it is worth revisiting here because it is such an interesting topic. I find myself turning it over in my mind all the time. And I do think it is particularly relevant to the fear of eternity because it posits an entirely different type of eternity to be afraid of. So what is quantum immortality? And how might it make it so that you never die?

All right.

Put on your pop physics hat.

Okay.

And we're going to talk about quantum physics, which is something you should never trust a not quantum physicist to talk about, but we're going to do it in the simplest terms possible. So quantum physics says that certain events are probabilistic. For example, whether a particular atom decays at any given moment is a matter of probability. How likely it is that that atom will decay at that moment.

Adam Decay? Sounds like an alternate universe, Adam McKay.

Probably not as funny as Adam McKay, though. Adam Decay sounds like his goth twin.

Yeah, I almost want the goth twin to come back, because all he does are like serious movies now.

Yeah, well, but maybe that is Adam Decay is all his goth serious movies, and Adam McKay, we want the not goth twin to come back and make Talladega Nights 2.

Talladega Nights, oh boy, I'm trying to think of a goth version of that, but I couldn't, so fuck it.

The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics takes this idea of probability and says whenever a quantum event has multiple possible outcomes, the universe branches into multiple different universes, one for each outcome. So reality is constantly branching into a multiverse of possibilities that allows for each outcome of any given quantum circumstance to play out.

Yeah, no, it's a nightmare. It's a nightmare. I can't even imagine how big of a piece of graph paper you would need for this.

Well, this is another way, if you're looking to break your brain, besides imagining the multiverse from everyone's favorite, the Marvel films. Another way to try to imagine infinity or infinite universes is something that I think I do sometimes that really wigs me out. I'm going to try to explain it, Ed. See if you can follow me here. And I want listeners to try this and see if it bothers them as much as it bothers me. So when I try to think about the infinite number of worlds that would exist in a many world situation, I start by just looking at everything that's around me. Doesn't matter if you're outside, inside, driving, whatever. Just look at everything around you. Every object, every animal, plant, whatever.

Okay, did it.

That's already a lot of things. Like you right now in your, in our studio, you're surrounded by books, you're surrounded by laptop, table, sound blankets, carpet, a knocked over water glass that I knocked over earlier and is still making your floor wet, which could have gone in any different direction. We don't know in a quantum world.

I mean, that's like in The Matrix when she's like, would it really fry your noodle or what the fuck she says is like, would you have knocked it over if I didn't say anything?

It'll really bake your bean.

Maybe it's something, maybe it was bake your bean. I know it's definitely, it was a colloquialism of some kind.

Okay, so now you've looked at every object around you, right? Now, try to consider every single detail on every single object that you see, color, shape, size, texture, position, what have you. There's probably too much for you to catalog about all these things all at once, but go with me here. So now that you've cataloged every object around you and every little thing about it, everything about it, every feature, every feature, let's start with this. Let's say the first thing that you see is you're looking at your laptop and it's black. In another universe, maybe it's white. And in that universe, maybe everything else in the history of infinite time is exactly the same except the color of your laptop. That is its own universe. Now realize that every single detail of every single object you see could be different in another universe and that could be the only difference in that universe. Those differences continue down to the atoms of each of those individual things and there are probably billions of universes that these objects could exist slightly differently in with nothing else being different. And then for each of those universes, there is a version of that universe where your laptop is white and your phone is black. And then you could do that again for every single item that you see on and on and on and on and on.

I love sliders, but this is too much.

It will break your brain if you stay up at night trying to think about it. And for those of you who are listening to this while you're trying to fall asleep, I'm sorry.

And if Chris' voice has changed, because we had to change locations, it sounds like Felix is sleeping four inches from him now.

He is.

Yeah, you're very different sounding. Yeah.

Anyway, quantum immortality is the idea that in this many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, no matter how likely you are to die in a given situation, there is always a greater than zero percentage of future worlds in which you survive. So another way to think about this is something that Ed, you might want to have Mr. Disclaimer pop in. I forget if he did in our Sudden Death episode, but we should express it.

Don't try and kill yourself.

Yeah.

Don't go looking for a new world this way.

Well, there is a thought experiment called quantum suicide that we have to stress is a thought experiment only and not something you should try. I'm going to say that again. This is a thought experiment only and not something you should try. In fact, there are some philosophers who believe that the idea of this experiment is so dangerous that it should never even be talked about. But that's just how we do here. We like to live on the edge. So think of it this way. Suppose you set up an experiment where you place your head next to a gun that has a 50-50 chance of firing each minute that passes. So every minute on the minute, there's a 50-50 chance that that gun goes off. You place your head next to the barrel. According to the Many Worlds Theory, every time the trigger is pulled, in one branch, the gun fires and you die. And in another branch, the gun miraculously doesn't fire and you live. From an outside perspective, half the branches of those universes find you dead. But from your subjective perspective, you can only be in the branches where you're still alive because dead you isn't conscious to observe anything. So what would you experience? The argument goes that you would experience never getting shot. Every time the trigger clicks, it either misfires or jams in your observed reality because any branch where it kills you is a branch that you cannot observe.

Well, what if you did it twice? Three times or five times or 20 times or 40 times? Like, does that mean that every timeline, someone died in the first one, but then the next person didn't die for five more as the people in different timelines died?

Yes. If you run the experiment indefinitely, it follows that you will somehow survive every time in at least one branch. So to you, it appears that you are immortal because you always end up in the surviving branch.

Like, you just quantum leap, like the show Quantum Leap, into yourself in a branch you survive. Or it's just the person living in that branch. Like, you die. Like, you and I. Let's call it Alpha Chris and Beta Chris and whatever the C would be.

Don't call me Beta Chris.

I mean, enough people do in the comments. You should be used to it by now. So, let's say you're that, right? Well, fine. We'll call it Alpha Bravo Charlie. We'll use the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, which was neither invented by NATO nor is it phonetic. It's just true. All that I just said is true. So, let's say like Alpha Chris, you're living in this timeline. Bravo Chris, you are in another timeline. Charlie Chris, third timeline. Alpha Chris pulls the trigger, dies. Alpha Chris does not move forward, but at the exact same time, Charlie and Bravo Chris also pulled the trigger and did not die?

Well, so there's two things. Adding a third guy is complicating things a little bit.

Okay, let's just say, but I had to add a third because in my mind, if Alpha Chris pulls the trigger and dies, like ceases to exist, you don't transfer over to Bravo Chris. Bravo Chris just pulls the trigger and doesn't die.

Right, there's no transferring.

But what I'm getting at is then, if Bravo pulls the trigger again, now we need to branch off to a Charlie Chris, who the second pull doesn't also kill, then a Charlie Chris will try a third time, but then Delta Chris will survive, well, Charlie Chris dies. Ooh, I like Delta Chris.

Delta Chris sounds like he's in Delta Force.

Well, it's a Greek letter. And then Echo Chris, same thing. So you would need infinite Chris's in order to pull the trigger 50 times.

Sort of, but I think what you're skipping past is the idea that what this experiment really suggests is that consciousness is a constant, that consciousness, theoretically, runs through each of those timelines, and that the person who is surviving is never really changing. You're not quantum leaping into another body. The version of you that's surviving is surviving consistently through multiple different branching quantum timelines, and the others are dropping like flies off to the side.

Yeah, it just seems like one person who seems lucky, like in that one universe, they're lucky.

I think the most succinct definition is that no matter how likely you are to die, there's always a non-zero chance you survive, and since you can't experience non-existence, you will always find yourself in the branch where you lived.

When I got in my car accident after we recorded Sudden Death, you're saying there's a version of me that died on the 5 freeway that same night.

Yes.

That one sucks to suck, you know?

Now, no one will ever know if this experiment works, because no one ever has or ever will try it, because it is way too dangerous and unethical, because everybody else in the timeline where you died just sees your head explode. Yeah. They don't follow you into the timeline where you live.

And it's not time travel, so you can't have Western Union deliver something 200 years later and been like, right, Marty, I'm alive in the 1800s.

And there's really no way to test it any other way because it is a fully subjective experience that we're talking about. No one has ever figured out a way to test an idea like this that involves an observer.

I mean, no one should.

No, no one should.

But I don't think people should get grant money for this.

It is a fascinating idea.

Yeah, it's a cool idea, but it's science fiction. I mean, it's a legion of superheroes. It's that other group whose name I can't remember where they build these teams. I think I talked about it probably in the last time we talked about this, but DC and Marvel over their history have both had teams that are built from the moment they're supposed to die and then they're taken from that moment, the exact moment they're supposed to die so that timeline is still protected because they were supposed to die. They're not supposed to continue on in this timeline. Then they bring them into another timeline where they're part of a team of all people who were supposed to have died.

You did bring this up.

It's a fucking great idea.

I think the reason that this ties in so well to this episode and I think is a great place to end it is because it presents the creepy idea that if consciousness is a constant, it suggests that we potentially are all eternal and just don't know it.

No one walking around right now has ever died.

Right, that our consciousness at least has ever died.

I mean, there's a version where I guess every time someone dies, even of old age, there's a version that they survived that pneumonia.

Well, right, I think on the last time we talked about this, we talked about, you know, this is a very easy concept to understand when you're talking about sudden death, when you're talking about like gunshots or car accidents, lights out kind of deaths. It's a lot harder to imagine or explain if you're thinking about a prolonged, slow death.

Yeah, but even if it's not slow, let's say it's just an old person dying of old age and not like a long drawn out cancerous thing.

Well, I mean, more than an instant.

Oh yeah, but I'm saying I do like the idea that, you know, over the years, life expectancy has gotten longer. And so just the idea that there's a universe where people are 300, 400 years old. And they're not, you know, 400 and decrepit. Like they're like a strong, sexy 400.

Well, I think there's also a question if you follow this thread of like, perhaps there is a version in all those universes where the body does die, but the consciousness that we would, I guess, call a soul would persist.

I guess I would rather just have it persist in heaven than in some fucking computer or something.

Well, right, I mean, we don't really know where it would persist. Again, maybe that's what ghosts are. Maybe ghosts are the consciousness persisting after the body passes. Like, there is a theory, we'll do a whole episode on consciousness, but there's a theory that consciousness isn't something that, it's not an emergent property. It's not something that is the result of the way that our brains function. There's this theory that perhaps there's something about our brains that almost, the consciousness is almost more like a radio wave, and something about our brains allows us to tune into it, and kind of capture consciousness, and experience consciousness. But then after the body and the brain pass, the consciousness is still there, it's just not being tuned into by anything. So, we don't know what it's experiencing.

All right, yeah, so we should, that's pretty wild. I mean, no one knows, right? Nobody knows what, like, when we hear ourselves talk in our head, like, nobody knows how that happens. I feel like people pretty confidently said, we have no idea after all these years of looking into it.

And some people don't hear anything in their heads.

There's no way.

Really? That's what they say. That's what they say.

I mean, that's terrible.

Yeah.

Does that just mean, like, you're a big dummy?

I don't know.

Like, you're not thinking about anything?

Some people say they can't visualize anything either, which is extra crazy to me.

Well, that one might be true. I mean, I don't know. I don't do that. I don't try and visualize things off, and I can visualize what might happen, but in terms of thinking of what's going to come down the hill, but I don't know if I see it in my head. But then again, I'm the dumber one, so I don't know. Maybe it's...

Well, like, I know that I'm constantly thinking about things and trying things, but when I stop to try to think, like, hmm, do I hear a voice in my head when I think to myself? I don't know. I can't, like, capture it. It's probably there.

Yeah. I think if you hear a voice that seems distinctly different than what you are actively working on at that moment, then you have a problem, like, genuinely a psychosis of some kind. Like, I don't think you're supposed to hear like a venom symbiote, like, talking differently than you're thinking.

No, I don't think, but that's what I mean, like, I can't ever quite...

For me, I feel like when I think, it's almost like a nudge. It's like, if I realize, oh, I forgot something or where did I put that thing? It's less that I hear myself say the words, Ed, where did you put that thing? Or like, or where was that thing? And more of like, just a nudge, something that pushes me in the direction of remembering. And if I have to think longer about where it might be, it's still like, I feel like I'm still kind of flipping through the pages, but not in a way that seems meaningful, just in a like, in the way that your computer does things in the background. We're not looking at the lines of code, we're just sitting there looking at our screen, knowing that in a moment it's gonna open the folder.

Right.

So yeah, I don't know, but I could definitely, I talk in my own head all the time though.

Right, right.

Like I talk in my head all the time, but that's not the same thing necessarily, I feel like, as thinking.

I also think as professional writers and talkers, I think whatever is going on in our heads, we've kind of honed over the years to the point that we're not thinking about it so much that it's hard to think about when we stop to try to think about it.

Yeah, well, this episode.

It's like breathing.

Oh my God, breathing. Breathing's out of control. Your heart is out of control.

Yeah guys, being talented is like breathing.

Oh my God.

It's just something some of us can do.

Yeah, and just like breathing, you don't get paid for doing it.

Well, that's a good place to end this episode, Ed. So the only thing we have left to talk about is, where do you place eternity on your fear tier?

Not as high as a finite life, a one finite life, still higher. But eternity, I think I've probably talked about it at some point. I think it's a Stanislav Lem book, and I can't remember which one it was, but I don't like being in my own head, and I don't like any characters being in their head when I read hard sci-fi or something. And there was some book where a guy was put in some sort of demolition man frozen prison, you know what I mean, like an ice box prison. You know what I'm talking about, that can freeze you?

Yeah, like a deep freeze, a cyrogenic prison.

Some sort of thing like that, and I just remember that there was a huge part of the book, or at least it felt long to me, about a guy who like when he's frozen in ice, like he's still thinking, and he could still like, he still experiences the passing of time.

Right.

And it, to me that was so scary, like just so scary, like that is such a nightmare. And that is how I feel, you know, that's an excruciating eternity. And I don't know if the fear is being frozen, or the fear is being, not being able to speak, so this might actually not translate at all, I'll just do eternity. But I don't like the idea of, I also don't like. If I didn't cut all of my rambling, then all of that I would put at a two.

Okay.

And if I did cut it, then there's a bunch of stuff you guys didn't hear, and I think it's gonna be a two or three.

Okay, so if it doesn't, if it's the same number, whether they hear it or not, I would just cut all of it, and we'll just call it a two or a three.

Okay.

I am gonna put eternity, this is interesting, we don't usually disagree that much. I feel like we're usually kind of in the same zone, but I'm gonna put eternity in an eight. I am, I am, there is no good version of it. Non-existence is the best option.

But let's say you took eternity, you dialed it back a bit. Let's just say eternity is like, we just call it a long time.

That's not, that's called eternity, not a long time.

I know, but I'm trying to get a point out here.

Okay.

I, on a daily basis, a genuine daily basis, probably once I entered my 30s, it really started to kick off. Like, I genuinely don't feel like there's enough time in the fucking day. And so part of me wants to dip my toe in eternity for sure. Like it's just the idea that there will be time suddenly is so exciting to me. And so you don't have even a little bit of that.

Well, I have a little bit of wanting to live longer. I have a little bit of wanting to have more time in the day, but neither of those things comes anywhere close to wanting to experience eternity.

Yeah, I mean.

I don't want to experience infinity. I think it would be, I don't even know how to describe it. I think it would be an awful experience by five to 6,000 years into it.

I mean, that's why you gotta have that every week. You can back out.

Well, right. That person actually, I think that thought experiment, the idea of each week you get asked if you want another week, I think that actually is a phenomenal. If I could experience that eternity, I'd put it in like a two.

Yeah, one or two.

Yeah.

I'd pay for that eternity.

Yeah, that sounds great. Although if you're a person who's really indecisive and you're like, I really would just like four days, then you're fucked. Then you're going to have a problem every week.

Yeah, I guess I raise the number if it's an eternity. I guess for me, it's just so dependent on so many things. You know what I mean? Like eternity is a vibe for me, unless like I said earlier, I joked about a bunch of nuclear bombs go off five seconds later, and now it's just me in that Twilight Zone episode where I finally have time to read and my glasses break.

Yeah. I mean, I think that would be a guarantee at some point in your eternity, whether it's nuclear bombs or the sun swallowing the planet or what have you, something bad would happen. Anyway, yeah, so we're going to call it a three for you and eight for me.

That's crazy. That's such a big difference. But yeah, that's fine. This is what the show is. The show is sometimes going to be these episodes.

This is very much a freshman year dorm room getting stoned experience.

But we had no drugs and it took us three fucking installments to do this.

I think the listeners will appreciate it. But we're coming back at you hard and heavy this year. We've got all new Scared All The Time every other week. If you hit up the Patreon, patreon.com/scared all the time, you get no backslash, just slash.

Backslash is a totally different slash. It would actually take you to a website that doesn't work.

If you hit up.

Go to Patreon, Scared All The Time. We have a ton of shit, which is a lot less heady and a lot more fun. New Fear Unlocked is a blast. We've put two on the main feed so far, and if people didn't love them, they're out of their fucking minds, because they're really, I love doing New Fear Unlocked.

It's a little, it's a little. And we've got live shows once a month. We've got two coming this.

Twice this month.

Twice this month, because we missed December, which we rarely do. But hey, you guys know how it is. You got Family, you got Ed, Obligations. You got shit to do around the holidays. So we're making it up to you this month. Anyway, that is this week's Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And this has felt like an eternity.

And we will see you next time. Bye bye.

Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Fifle.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is BEEP BEEP BEEP.

And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon. You can get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access and exclusive merch.

So go sign up for our Patreon at scaredallthetimepodcast.com.

Don't worry, full Scaredycats welcome. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission.

Copyright Astonishing Legends production.

Tonight, we are in this together. Together. Together.

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