 You're pausing one. Hello and welcome to the let's chat podcast or the digital free thought radio hour podcast or mine pirates extravaganza for blasphemy and piratism. You have turned into the right. You have turned into the right place for the right show. This is one or three point nine FM wozo radio all day, all long, low power. Just for you, a special show about science, scientism, the philosophies of nature, religion, Possepharianism, fallacies, some cause fallacies. We're going to be talking about all those in this show today. And we have a great cast of people to talk about them. We have our own Boudreaux all the way from Kentucky. How you been? I've been well. Are you guys fantastic? That's so good. And we're going to get into it. And we, of course, have our own Dread Pirate Higgs. Er, cool. And I'm let's chat. Your Tyrone Wells, feel free to contact me at my channel. We'll plug him at the end of the show. But before we get into the meat and potatoes today, and we're going to do a full roundup, I want to say welcome back Dread Pirate Higgs. And would you please welcome us through a noodling invocation? Absolutely. Come be my captain. I shall not want. He makes me to float in salt water. He stirs me through glassy seas. He filleth me bowl. He stirs me through the straits of noodlingness for good to sake. I, though I sail through the heaving of tempestuous waters, I will fear not sinking. For thou art with me. Thy mast and thy rudder, they comfort me. Thou prepares the feast before me in the presence of me mates. Thou quenches my thirst with grog, my goblet runneth over. Truly, pasta and grog shall abide with me all the days of my life. And I shall dwell in the galley of the quab forever. Well, speaking of like spending some time in the valley of the quab, Dread Pirate, you've been deep in the in the in a weird environment, but finally back safe and sound, happy to see it. Well, you've been and how you been. Well, yeah, so I was up for St. John and then we got burned out of there. So they shut literally burned out, literally burned out. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it was smoky work. We were kind of on the border between the evacuation alert zone and the evacuation order zone. So they just decided to shut the camp down, kick us out. So, yeah, so I took the opportunity to, you know, scoot on down home. I made it here on Wednesday. And then yesterday got the call to go up again because they need medics to provide service for the firefighters on the front lines there. So I'm going to be their guy, Dread. I have no idea how to follow that up with a topic more manly than that. Like I feel I feel emasculated. You want to talk about working out and football? Yeah, you know, how's your progressive overload coming this, you know, I got my getting a Jeep Wrangler. I actually started driving up. I started driving up right after the show here. Yeah. Wow. I'll stop and I'll drive for eight hours today. And then I'll I'll do the remaining six hour drive to Fort St. John tomorrow. Very cool. And we would appreciate the work. We've been seeing smoke even in the U.S. Like if anyone wonders what's going on there, Dread Pirates making sure it doesn't get too bad. That's that's it is. Well, you know, it was Pothafarians in action. Yeah, that's right. When I left Fort St. John, I you couldn't see a hundred feet in front of you. And it took me driving self for four hours before I was out of the smoke. Wow, wow, wow, wow, yeah, it was crazy. Wow. Think about that. That's crazy. Yeah. Crazy, crazy. Speaking of half a million hectares in this one fire. It's the largest fire ever in BC's history. Half a million hectares. You could fit two and a half cities the size of London, England inside this area. Wow. And you know, the crazy thing is I work in a site that deals with nothing but filtration. And when we hear like driving with smoke, alarm bells go off in our head of just like particle size. What kind of a suit? What can what can we do to like help them out? We've had issues before where we had volunteers, not volunteers. Consumers buy up all face masks during our covid crisis and hospitals and hospices and teachers couldn't get access to them. And so we said to us, we have assembly lines here. We have means of making not only face masks, but making better. Let's just produce them. So that way, you know, we can help our, you know, our community. But also we can it was either make stuff for free for everybody or wait at home and scared as everybody else and not being able to do work. So what we said is, hey, we can do critical work. Let us go to jobs. Let's keep these machines running. And we can make stuff for the tri-state area. And that's what we did like quickly. And there's no other site like ours that's capable of completely switching all of our processing lines and doing stuff like that. We have a very flexible architecture, but so you don't have to do a lot of retooling. No, we don't. We don't. We're like very broad with what we can do. We're a very high level and nothing specialized. And so we can move and modular everything out. But when we have that fire crisis of warning, like, is this something that we can get onto? Is it something we can get onto? There's other sites in, I don't know if I can say, but like in Washington area that is probably better suited for distribution. But like we're we're still we're still making face masks. Like it's kind of a crazy thing, but we're trying to do whatever we can help. What's interesting, the main point is dread as a fire guy and an emergency responder and even in my capacity as like a science engineer where all of our jobs are dedicated towards even civil engineering because you need roads, you need roads to move all this stuff around, right? And that's what Boudreau represents. All of our jobs are meant to counteract whatever God's plan is. God says I have a plan. It's up to us to be like, we got to stop it. We got to we will thwart this plan for the interests of mankind. That's that's the I'm ready to get this clipped up. That's the true purpose of science is just thwarting God's plan at any cost. Boudreau, speaking of traveling, how you been my world travel buddy? I've been well. Well, I talked about Mexico last last time I was blast. But I'm back and trying to get back into the swing of things. It's been an adjustment. But yeah, it's been an adjustment, like in terms of like being able to flush a toilet or I mean, being able to put toilet paper in a toilet and drink water. What is this? Is this water? Oh, I can just drink. Yeah. Bizarre. Brush my teeth with it. Go. But Dredd, I got I got I got to ask you and maybe maybe Ty would know. But are you going to change out your air filter in your car? Oh, I do mine regularly. I have a scheduled PM for that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I have mine on a scheduled thing, too. OK. But I should think about it because, yeah, that's a good idea. I get that. And thankfully, the smoke is in so bad here in Tennessee, typically what warrants it is when Kentucky goes all of their bluegrass pollen down to our state and just becomes unbearable to breathe. So I wait until the beginning of winter as part of my six month rotation to swap it out that way. I don't replace it red spring because a filter needs to have sort of like a dust cake on top of it to be really effective. And if you swap it out when it gets really bad, it's going to be a while while stuff is just flaring through it before it actually builds up to its efficiency. It's really bad. Your bluegrass is bad. And we've put them on to an SEM like a microscope to look at them and say, like, what does this pollen look like? And let me tell you something pollen from like a pine tree is like a beach ball. It's beautiful. It's colorful. It's got little little segments on them, but it's nice and smooth. You get pollen from like other kinds of grass. And it's like, OK, it's more like rod like, but it's not it's OK. Bluegrass is like a spiky, angry pineapple that just sticks to everything. And it's like, wow, that's what's getting in my eye. That's why my eyes so irritated. That's what's getting on my shirt. So if I touch it and then brush my shirt and then accidentally do this, that gets in my eyeball, too. It's like, yeah, pollen is bluegrass pollen is very evil. Come on. I'm blaming Eric for that one. It's going with God's wrath. Just blame God. It's like, yeah, if you can take credit, if you can give God credit, you can give God blame as well, too. Right? That's right. So we are going to catch up on an interesting topic that I had. Science versus scientists. And the reason why I bring that up is because it's always an interesting thing to talk to religious people. I've had more conversations face to face with people. I'm just not recording them, but I have some friends who I've helped. And they've done the bulk of the work, but I've had some friends who I talked to on a regular basis who recently come out as atheists, despite being religious before I met them. And all I'm giving them is like a good space to give questions to me or feedback on. And one of the things I now that we're more comfortable talking about, like atheism, what does it mean, and they have no shame with it is I go back to some of their excuses before when we had our conversations and they'll say, you know, I was more willing to just say science is proof of God. Because when I look at science, it seems to do nothing but support a grand plan. And when I asked in more clarity in those conversations, what did you mean when you said that they say, you know what? Now that I think about it more, I don't mean the science was proving it. I meant scientists were saying that it was a connection. And I thought what a what a great epiphany for them to reach on their own merit, because there's a big difference between saying, well, science says this versus, well, this scientist said this because you can have Christian scientists. And I want to know, have you guys ran into situations where people have made those claims? Have you made those claims in the past? And what do you think is the new wants difference between the two? Dred, I'll throw this up to you. Is there a difference between a scientist saying something versus science saying something? Of course, right? Because science is a methodology for discovery, right? Whereas scientists, you know, you take James Watson for, you know, for example, you know, Watson and Crick frame, who, you know, was, you know, one day walking in some trail, he came upon a frozen waterfall, fell to his knees and accepted the Lord. You know, that that is not critical thinking. That's not thinking like a scientist, right? That's just somewhere else, right? So I mean, you know, and yeah, so being a scientist doesn't give you 100% protection against crazy ideas, right? And I'd say dial it back a couple of thousand years. You would have scientists who first discovered how to make telescopes, right? And they would look at the stars and they'd be like, wow, look at all, look at this giant carpet with pinpricks in it, right? Pinpricks behind it are our heaven. And I'm just using everything I'm aware of and the biases of my culture to try to interpret the world around me, right? And I have such a heavy bias towards this omnipotent power, omnipotent power, this like all powerful being that everything I'm seeing is contextualized with that without me being aware of my own bias. And so when Watson Crick, when he sees that waterfall, he's like, oh, God. But like, if he was in Egypt, he'd be like, oh, raw. It'd just be a different thing, right? Which is really important why we have to make sure we don't necessarily drive. I think I would say this. We need to drive culture away from being indoctrinated into religion because we start out without that bias but are given to us during our upbringing. So it's important to realize that we have all the faculties of having like this unbiased view of the world if we were just to hold on to it or and train it and develop it rather than being indoctrinated with like the starter pack of how the world works. That isn't something to begin with. And religion and science are at odds. I mean, they're not just non-overlapping magisteria. They are the antithesis of one to the other by virtue of the fact that in religion, you already have the answer. Right, right. Whereas in science, you're trying to discover it, right? So if you already start with the answer as in religion, then that is how you will formulate your methodology for discovery because you've already got the answer. So I think those things are just fundamentally at odds with one another. I don't know, like, you know, call yourself a Christian scientist. That doesn't work for me. Yeah. Oh, my gosh, Boudreau, I'd like to get your thoughts on this. I'm going to put you on the hot seat a bit. You know, religion and science has two different methods to figuring out stuff. The religious method, as told by other religious people, it's simpler because one, you already have the answer and the answer is God. Why isn't that the better method? If you follow Occam's razor, you have the simplest answer. Right. I mean, yeah, you took the words out of my mouth. I was going to pull up Occam's razor, which I think it's kind of a stretch to use it in this case. But yeah, you know, I agree with the dread part that, you know, you're really talking about already having the answer and backing it up with, you know, interpretation of text, turning the page and just saying, well, I already know the answer. So when this was written, this is what it means. Right. Whereas, yeah, science and the scientists that do it, I mean, are are constantly improving and in some cases, disproving what someone else had thought. Right. You know, the pinpricks in a blanket, you know, understanding, you know, what is the center of the universe and all that. I mean, the kind of the science goalpost keeps moving, but it's moving in the right direction. Right. Right. And it's based on, yeah, yeah, progress. And it's based on evidence and it's based on our understanding, the tools we have. Whereas the other side has, you know, this kind of ironclad protection called faith, where you, you know, you can't doubt it. In fact, doubting it gets you in trouble. Right. Right. So, yeah, it's not a very good standard, as you said before the show, to use to get to truth. It's a good point. Good point. Yeah. Dred, I want to throw it out at you. I also, I was just going to say just quickly that it seems curious that that people would even try to justify religion through science. Because, you know, you remember Hebrews 11-1. Right. It says, now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. So the whole premise of faith is the exact opposite of what the discovery is through sciences. So why even bother? I can explain that. I can explain that. I can explain that, but I want to just make one point clear before I leave this YouTube comment bait still in the water. And that is that there's sort of a misinformation campaign that religion has against science. And it goes with even the principles that science uses to determine good arguments and bad arguments are summarized and flanderized to the point where they're just absurd when they're put into religious hands and then used to explain to the general public how science argumentation works. And one of them is Occam's razor, which is not a creed for the simplest answer is the best answer. And this goes without saying that God is a simple answer. In fact, he's the most complex thing you can bring up in a conversation. Right. But Occam's razor has never been the simplest answer is the most correct. It's the one that makes the least assumptions is the correct answer. And what you have with religion is a multitude of assumptions of, well, it's my God. It's this text. It's this being is this powerful. It's this. This was the miracle and doesn't matter if you can't test it. It does. It is what it is. And I'm right. And everyone else who says otherwise is wrong. And we don't have to test it when we're just assuming all of that is true versus science is just like, I'm not making assumptions. I'm just only making the claim up to the amount the empirical evidence can support. And between those two methods, you have a system that makes very little assumptions, if any at all, if anything, it's a hypothesis that we can test and we're testing the hypothesis itself versus our entire castle, entire house of cards built where every card is an assumption from the very foundation to the very top. That's one of the things I hate about Occam's razor. And then you ask Dredpar, why is it that religion cares about proving things with science is because religion chases trends. And we know this. It borrows to other people's holidays. It changes that power dynamics. It will always go towards the path towards most popularity, because that gets the more people on the pews or more people joining your congregation. And what's been cool back in the Mesopotamia area? Not science. No one cared about science back then. People were eating poop off the ground and giving babies without washing their hands. They were just like, I don't believe in germs. I don't believe in this. And then science came along. It's like, oh, medicine, oh, shelter. Oh, OK. There's cool things that come with this that increases our quality of life that's so good that we can't ignore it. And now we have this thing where now religion needs to be supported by science, because they're one and the same thing, right? Like God must want us to have electricity and telescopes and warm houses and MP3 players. And all this stuff. And we have to now broadcast our message on websites, because God needs a TikTok account. You're absolutely right, Ty, that religion will so often take credit for social advances that were accomplished through secularism. You know what I mean? And just unabashedly just take credit for it, you know? But like, you know, accepting homosexuals or ending slavery. You know, whatever. And they say, well, you know, it's because we're a Christian nature and we're all about love. And no, right, right, right, right. So there was a I remember when I was in Knoxville and the Atheist Society showed up at I think it was a gay pride parade. And we were just like supporting and helping everybody there. And there was in front of us a Christian organization that was also supporting the gay pride parade. And they had posters of just like, just be kind and love everybody. And then besides, there was another Christian organization holding up signs saying, all of you guys are going to hell. All of you guys are going to hell. And they had citations. And in my head, I was like, these guys are a better representation of the faith that they are followers of. But the people in front of us are a better representation of people, right? And and while you can have that faith and be a good person, why have the faith in the first place? Because that the people on the sidelines are the best representation of that. And if anything, they just need to like get over that hang up. But if there was ever a question, these guys have citations. You guys don't. There's no phrase in the Bible that says, just be kind and love everybody. Like that's going to be a hard thing to find. I would dare people to find that. But I can say you can find the phrases where you guys are going to hell. If you sweep with another man, these people are my chosen people. You guys aren't like that. That's well, that's well cited. It's cherry, it's cherry picking. It's like using the New Testament instead of the Old Testament. Yeah, exactly. It's even worse than that, right? Because, you know, religious people are good by virtue of the reward they get for the punishment. Right. Whereas people otherwise, you know, saccubarists and humanists are good for its own sake, right? You know, we're like, I think, I think the latter is more virtuous quality than the former by by that. I do want to bring up what I think is the tragic situation behind this because we can, it's always fun talking to other atheists about like, isn't this silly? It is silly, it is silly, it is silly, but there's a sad component too in that the we've lost every single person that's a scientist that becomes a Christian scientist. Right. Or someone that's truly interested in STEM but isn't able to fully utilize their critical thinking capabilities because they've just been so inundated with this bad dogmatic thinking style or holding on to these terrible methodologies that give them this cognitive bias that interferes with their ability to come up with true conclusions because they're holding on to the conclusions that are comfortable or the ones that they want to have or they're so popular that they can expouse, unfortunately, misinformation people because they want this thing to be true. I find that to be tragic because we lose an opportunity to have, in my mind, more luminaries in this world and as a result, we just lose the capacity of what they could share with the world. I can make an analogy behind this. There's a lady named Helen Keller. If you don't remember her, she's a lady who had meningitis when she was like 19 months old. Became deaf and blind and everybody wrote her off and said, you know what, she's already a woman in the early 1900s. Like who cares what she's going to do? But she worked really hard. She learned how to read. She learned how to write. She learned how to speak. And her books are so eloquently made and she wrote plays. Like she had dictates on political matters. Like she wrote on like very heavy subjects in a very well mannered tone. And her biggest regret that she says in a lot of her speeches, I just wish I could speak well. Like it's not even, I wish I could write better. I could see more books or I can do, or I could hear. She's just, I wish more people would have the capability of hearing what I had to say in a manner that they could appreciate it because I understand that there's a detriment between how I communicate and how other people can appreciate that. And I thought how tragic is that to extend that to scientists who could have a lot to say but have this religious rhetoric is their communication standard and can't espouse true science because they are inhibited by Jesus walking on water and they're a physicist because it's like you can't, you can't have those two in the same park. What's up? What do you think, Dred? Yeah, no, I agree. It's having a filter that everything goes through that does not conform with reality, right? It's wishful thinking. I think wishful thinking, yes. I think Dawkins even referred to it as kind of like a form of schizophrenia, you know, where, you know, Monday through Friday they go in, they are critical thinking, they are doing, you know, the good science and then, you know, Sunday, it's almost like the show Severance, something in their brain switches and now all of a sudden they suspend. And the shame is, Dred and Eric, you both can do this. Like you can watch Star Trek and enjoy Star Trek, right? You can watch a Star Wars movie and enjoy a Star Wars movie. Like we can suspend our disbelief. It's a suspension of disbelief, yeah, yeah. And at least I know I'm doing it. At least I know I'm doing it. I'm not saying, I'm not saying Dada is a real guy or Captain Picard is a real guy, you know. We're going to transport down, you know, I get it. And that's the scary thing. It's still scary and it's both tragic because you can train a person in such a way that they don't realize how to turn on or off their disbelief, right? You can train them to, but always basically have it sort of in this halfway state where it's kind of half on and off and flickering and you just think, man, I wish I could help you out and just like look that thing off and show you, you have control of this. You don't lose, you don't lose anything in your religion by realizing that it's fiction, right? You can still appreciate it. I still love Christian music. I still think there's something to be said about public speaking that we can learn from pastors. I still think that there's really good morals that we could learn from how people back in the day thought they should treat each other. But I don't consider it real gospel from a God given to us. Like in fact, I find that to be more empowering because it means we can take that as a template and approve upon it. And we can use the scientific method to improve about a lot of these rules that we came up with how to treat each other. We can make that better. In fact, we already do now, but until we recognize that we're stuck at a certain pace and I want to be able to accelerate how we treat each other rather than stay in the stay at pace. Like let's get rid of the fat and get back to being better people. Exactly. And that's for me, it's the appeal of postipharianism is the eight I'd rather you didn't see. You know, it's not dogmatic. It's guidelines. And you know, if you can do them all the time, well, do them as best you can when you can. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I really did like that list. That was a really, really good list. I've always liked structuring morals as don't force yourself to be good. Just don't be bad. Like don't purposely hold, slow us down, but you don't have to push us forward. Right. Like, because if it's morally, if you have to morally push me forward, then you're just being obedient when you're being good. Right. Rather, and I don't want obedience. I want people to generally leads to hypocrisy as well. Right. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Because then you, when you do things that are contrary to the commandments. Yes. And yeah, you're, you're a sinner now. Right. You want to make a quick mention before we do. Is it, what's the timer on? Do you have to do a half show? Yeah. We're going to do a half show right now, but I just wanted to wish both you and Boudreaux happy Father's Day. I hope you guys enjoy. Enjoy your time off. Tomorrow we also got Juneteenth. Enjoy that holiday as well. Well deserved. I don't know if you got Juneteenth in Canada. Maybe not. Yeah. It's the Emancipation of Slaves Day for U.S. Yeah. That was finally made a federal holiday. We'll take a break. Coming right back after this show, we're going to be talking about sunk costs and sunk ships on the Digital Freethought Radio Hour 103.9 FM all day long, low power. Welcome back to the show. This is the Digital Freethought Radio Hour 103.9 FM. You're listening to this in Knoxville, and we are here to talk about science, religion, superstitions, pacifarianism, truths and facts and fallacies. And we're going to be jumping into a topic called sunk cost fallacy. Now, Bujo, I'd love to hear what you think about this. Have you ever heard of the sunk cost fallacy before? I've heard of sunk cost. Okay. In economics. But no, I'm not familiar with this. At least I don't remember. I'm familiar with this. Have you heard about it? They also call it the Concord fallacy. Oh, okay. I'm interested in this story. Talk to me. You remember the big plane, the Concord? Okay. So they put a lot of money into it. They kept putting money into it over years and years and years. And it still didn't succeed. And when that finally, that big crash happened, they finally put an end to it. But that was a sunk cost, where they just kept throwing good money after bad money to no good end. And so that's why the sunk cost fallacy is that shared name, the Concord fallacy. I have a real-world example I'll share as well. And thank you for that. Because mine's also economic. Boudreau and Eric. So I like a game called Dance Dance Revolution. Have you ever heard of that game before? Yeah. Yeah. Dred, have you ever seen Dance Dance Revolution before? Boudreau, you want to describe it? Yeah. Well, and I've never owned it, but don't you have a pad on the ground that acts as a controller, right? Yes. You step on it and you have to hit the buttons and a... So it's exercise, but it's a game. It's like exercise, yeah. And they'll have music and they'll have arrows and you're supposed to time your button presses with your feet on the pad with what's on the screen. So it's almost like you're dancing. And the game gets progressively more complicated as you get better at it to the point where if you're in high school, that's like the coolest thing. Like the only way you can score cool points is being like, I beat this game on this difficulty and people will be like, this guy is a cool guy. And so that was my high school experience. And so I am unpacking stuff from underneath my bed. I've opened up a suitcase and nothing but old games and old consoles are in this suitcase. And I'm thinking, wow, fantastic. I even have an old dance pad and a dance dance revolution disc. And I put it into this old console I have called a PS3. And it says it can't read the game because it needs a PS2 to play. And I have a PS3 and it's not backwards compatible. So I'm like, OK, that's fine. Let me just see if I can download the game on PC. And it should be for free, right? So I download Step Mania, which is the free version of Dance Dance Revolution now. But my dance pad is for a PlayStation. It's not for a PC. So I said, OK, let me just buy a converter. So I buy a converter. That converter didn't work. And I waited like two days for it to come in and I'm still excited to play the game. I'm like, OK, that's fine. I'll just try a different converter. I buy a different converter. That one doesn't work. And I'm like, OK, I'm not like 20 bucks in. What do I need? It's like, I need to buy a dance pad that's USB compatible so I can connect it to my PC. So I buy one. Turns out it's the wrong kind of pad because my pad has foam in it and it has a USB or it has a PS2 dongle. And I'm like, I still don't have a PS2. I bought the wrong thing. OK, what do I need to buy now? I need to buy a USB pad for my PC. So I bought another pad. I'm now like 140 bucks into this whim of playing a game. I didn't even want to play in the first place that much. And now I'm kind of upset because I had to buy the pad without the foam. So in order for me to get the same kind of rugged quality, I have to go buy foam. So now I'm like in Durham's, which is like this sports fitness place that sells yoga mat foam. And I'm thinking like, oh, this is like 40 bucks for just foam. I'm just like, but I need it for the dance pad and I already bought two adapters and I already got it on my USB stick. So I'm just like, OK, all right. Maybe I should just buy a PlayStation 2 because at this point I've already spent enough money that I'm just like, let me just get the PlayStation. So I go online and they don't sell PlayStation 2s for cheap. You have to buy basically full prices. It was like 2008. And I'm just like, you know what? I don't even like the music that much. I'd rather just learn how to actually dance using YouTube. I'm kind of done. I'm kind of done. And I can't return any of these things. I have three dance pads in my home now. I have three dance pads and I can't use any of them. I have two PS2 to USB adapters that I have nothing to use for. And Amazon's not taking them back. They're like, we don't, we haven't sold these things in the last 20 years, sir. Just like fair enough, I guess I'll just donate them or give them to one of my co-workers who has a working PlayStation 2. But that's some cost. Can I contribute to your? Absolutely. Absolutely. I just, I might have you go down another rabbit. My brother formed a company that makes adapters for old gaming systems. Don't you dare. Don't you convert some to USB. No, I'm serious. I have one here. I, he seriously, my brother, at least it's worth me asking him the question of what's the most reliable way of doing this. And my brother might tell me, you know, this or that, but seriously, he is in the game. People know him for it. He makes the bliss box and the foreplay. And they both convert basically every Atari all the way down. I don't know how, how newer systems he's gone, but something you need to know about Eric is he's an enabler. And if you haven't seen behind his office, he's like, oh, you just got off a heroin. Oh, I have a cousin who's like just doing a discount on heroin. It's, it's amazing. You should, I should get you in touch with them. I was like, no, I got off. I was like, no, let me just, I think I can, I can help you out here. I can help you out here. First one's free. Let me get you hooked up. Yeah. So why do I bring up some cost fallacy? Because I think there is a really big connection between it and religion, or at least how people can buy into, well, I've already done this my entire life. Why, why give this up now, right? What harm would it be if I just like, instead of like staying in this pool, just go down a little bit deeper because it's just one more inch, right? And so one of my friends who I talked to who's 44 years old now has been a Christian since he was 42, right? For 42 years and only in the last two years since I've known him has been willing to like step away from that. Him and his wife, him and his wife. One of the biggest things he has a hard time doing is recognizing the labels that he has to give up are like some of the hardest things for him to do because he knows he's not a Christian, but he doesn't want to call himself not a Christian or irreligious or definitely the A word, even though he knows there's nothing inherently wrong with them. And he recognizes on an intellectual level that I am these things. I am an agnostic atheist, but it feels terrible because his entire life, he was thinking these are worse than the devil, right? And the cost for him to give up the comfortable labels that he has that he doesn't feel like he even has a place in is too great for him. And so he just thinks, what would be the harm if I just maintain, if I'm not an atheist, I'm not religious, but I am an atheist, but I'm going to still keep calling myself a Christian in this sense because I've already came all this way. It's hard for me to pull a some cost tie to this without taking up like an extra 10 minutes. But the other idea is you can't just step away from it because you've bought into the system so greatly your entire life that it's really difficult to walk away from. And even when you realize that the thing that you bought is snake oil, you're just like, well, I'm already here. You could actually just shift that a little bit. I smoked for 34 years. Now, if I were in the sunk cost fallacy thing, well, I've been smoking all this time. Why give it up now? Like I'm one of those, you know, I'm the kind of person, if I'm sitting in a movie theater and the movie sucks, I mean, I'm reading a book and I don't get into the book. I put the book down and I never go back to it. Right? I mean, those are those mental training that people have to get themselves used to, right? Because it trains you to give up on things that you don't want to invest in anymore, right? Right. I wish more people would do that. Buju, are you also a quitter? Like, are you a quitter? Yeah. Are you good at quitting? Yeah. Yeah. I've thought about that with TV shows. Like, I mean, there's so much streaming content out there that you can't watch it all. Right. You shouldn't watch it. Absolutely. So I've been very stingy with, you know, kind of my rules. I'll start a show and I'll just be like, no, not feeling it. Yeah. Yeah. There's a praying sort of capitalistic nature that sort of takes advantage of the sunk cost fallacy to keep people hooked in. And it's one of the reasons why I checked out of the MCU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Like, I'm done with it now since Endgame. Like, I'm like, that was like my ticket to leave. And they're like, stay tuned for M&M 2. It's like, no, no, no. You did all the things. There's no more bad guys out in this world. I don't care about them anymore. Like, you took the biggest one down. I'm sure you guys have it handled from here on out. It's like, well, we have Shang-Chi and we have the next Spider-Man movie. And we have this like, dude, no, like you. Don't you realize that you ended it? It's called Endgame. So like, when that happened, I spent 17 years hooked on this soap opera of superheroes since Iron Man all the way to Endgame. And I'm like, I'm done now. And I can't be bought back in. However, every single time a new Marvel movie comes up, there's the zeitgeist of YouTube thumbnails and commercials coming about and people saying, you got to watch this. You got to check it out. And I could see maybe this is pretty close to how it is when someone steps out of religion. And maybe it's like, oh, when my friend's doing on Sunday, they're busy. I can't play with them. Or it's like, okay, so I'd have to get new friends. Or I drive down the road and I see the billboards on the churches and they're all saying, Jesus loves you still. Jesus wants to save you. Or when Easter comes by and it's like, oh, this is a holiday. Can I celebrate this holiday? What's going on? Or Christmas comes. How, which songs am I supposed to sing? Like everything is reminding me of religion when I have that religious mindset or context that it's like the hooks that keep pulling me back in because I'd have to completely re-adopt an entirely new world view if I was religious and I had to leave it. And that takes a lot of effort. So it hasn't harmed me. As Boudrette says, as far as I can see, it hasn't harmed me at all. Why don't I just keep sticking with it, especially if all these hooks and enablers are nearby me. The culture that I'm in can really dictate how hard it is to leave religion. And I feel like some costs is like a very apparent swamp to get stuck in when it comes to like, dogmatic thinking, right? So it's not just a matter of just realizing you're wrong. It's like, it's beyond that. It's just you live in a culture that's maintaining a momentum, right? And it takes a lot of effort to fight against it. So silly. And like you say, I mean, it isn't just sunk costs, but it certainly factors huge in that whole scheme of things, right? Because like you say, it's your friends all of a sudden aren't around because they're doing their religious stuff. So there's a lot of kind of cultural factors that are working together there to make it difficult for a lot of people to leave their religions. I mean, you think about the clergy project, where pastors and priests are so ensconced in their milieu that it's virtually impossible to believe and without the assistance of like-minded individuals, they would probably never do it. They would just continue down that road by virtue of the fact that that's all they've ever known. Right. Right. I mean, that's their career, right? I mean, they've studied. That's their career, exactly. Yeah, I've heard. So they bought their house and they'll put their kids through Christian school and all the way. What about a spouse, though, too? I mean, you want to leave, but then you think about, well, I'm going to get divorced or I'm going to leave. Or how do you, I've heard a lot of stories of people struggling with that. And I mean, that's pretty hard. Yeah. And what a terrible situation to be in where it's like, you would think a God if it existed would help with that. Right? It's like, oh, no, by the way, you don't have to destroy your marriage. I'm here. I was like, oh, okay, thanks for sending me that email, God. I really appreciate it. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, my bad, my bad. Anyway, back to my other important things I got to do. It's just I'm being intellectually honest, and that might destroy my marriage. Like I'm not even cheating. I'm not even, I'm not even doing any of the evil commandment things that you're saying that I shouldn't do. Like I'm just being intellectually honest, and that could be what could jeopardize this long-term arrangement that I set up with a person that I love more than anyone else in the world. What a terrible situation to find yourself in. It's the devil testing you, Ty. It's the devil testing you. On God's command. It's just, it's just, it's just the weird thing. It's just like, God, devil, stop testing me. It's like, God wants me to do this. I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry. He plays bets. You're feeling like Joe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just doing what God is allowing me to do. Like if I couldn't do it, if God didn't want me to do this, I wouldn't be able to do it. It was like, okay, what a terrible situation. God, you're still the manager in this situation. I want to, next time the devil tempts you, just say, I want to talk to your manager. And get on the line with God and be able to help you out. Guys, I wanted to bring up that one extra point that you said where you mentioned, Dred, that when you are watching a movie and you don't like it, you walk out of the movie. When you're reading a book, you stop reading the book and you walk out. What would it take for a Christian to read the Bible from beginning to end and put down the Bible and be like, no, this isn't the God who I thought. Because when you think about it, a lot of atheists become atheists because they read the Bible. I'm not sure if that's a similar story for people on this call. But for me, the kicking, I was already on the, ooh, I'm not really sure about this religion thing. And I was taking a class in ethics in college and I was a very hardcore Christian back then. And like my first test was, how do you know good things or bad things? And I'm just putting down Bible quotes and I'm very confident with what I'm doing. And I've been poorly on the test. And so I said, how dare you fail me on this test? Let me just look in the Bible and pull out these quotes. And in the quotes themselves, yes, I felt justified. But the context that they're in, I was like, ooh, let me find a better quote. Let me find a better story of error parable. And I'm like, let me just read this from beginning to end. And I'm like, oh, no, there's like a lot of things because at that point in now had a fundamental understanding of what it meant to treat people well and consequences of my actions. And I'm realizing God's going about this all wrong. And I'm like, why am I thinking that? You know, like, how can I, as a human being think, maybe drowning all the people in the world isn't the best way to go about spreading a message of how good and kind you think a certain group of family is. Maybe you could just talk to them. Drowning babies is never a good reason. It should never be your A-plan, God. And I thought, you know, I couldn't, I read through the whole Bible. I read it, I read it again. And then I stopped after I realized, like I can only cherry pick certain chapters and I couldn't appreciate it at all. But what would it take for a Christian to read the Bible and do the same thing that Dred, you did when you're watching a bad movie? And how good would it be if we could all be quitters in that regard? So Dred on that. I mean, it's a stigma, right, to be a quitter. And I think people are just tied up in this idea that you got to follow through on something at all costs, regardless of your happiness or your joy, you know, that once you made a commitment, it's like, you know, you have to follow through it. No, you don't. And that's what you got to learn. It's just, no, no, no. You can actually look out for your own self-interest. You don't have to be an altruist about your time or your interest or your dedication or anything like that. You get to, I mean, you're here once. You get to pick the stuff you'd like. The people you want to be with, the things you want to do. And yeah, that's where you should be at. I'm glad I'm spending this time with you because this is where I want to be, at least on my Sunday mornings. Bujo, what do you think about the idea of value of being a quitter? Yeah, well, I think, well, the first thing I'll point out, I don't know if you guys noticed, but I got a hook from my daughter and father staying on Cambridge. So that was great. Oh, that's it. Yeah, I got a friend on. I do think it's important to make a distinction here because I made the joke, oh, you're a quitter. But I'm just like you, Dredd. I quit smoking cigarettes too. I've smoked for 10 years. Best decision I've ever made. We do have to frame it though a little bit because I think there is a whole other side of this of finishing high school. Sitting in freshman class going, you know what, I don't love this. So you frame it in such a way, if we're talking about something that is truly entertainment or truly something just for your free time. Yes, absolutely. Like you're saying, no one to just say, I can be doing something better. Don't feel like you're bought into it. But obviously, when we're talking about career-minded things and trying to run a certain distance or speed or something like that, yeah, here's where you flip it. And now don't be the quitter. But so those are very different. And I think it's obvious probably to everyone. And from this context, picking up contextualization, I hear when someone says, I quit, I'm what I'm hearing is I have a standard for my time. And this falls below that standard. And like you said, Buccio, I can do better things that are more rewarding to me, as as Dredd says, with my time, with the things that I enjoy doing, the things that I appreciate more, than spending on this. And I can say the equivalent would be like, I could eat junk food all day, or I can actually have a meal, you know? That's like nutritious, healthy. I can cook it myself. And it could be more filling for me. I'd rather do that than eat a 40th bag of Cheetos, you know? I got a certain day, one's flak and the other one's fire. And I'd rather have the fire. I would appreciate it if there were more quitters, or people who had more standards for their empathy and how they treat people and what they allow to go into their minds that help them dictate true things from false things. And we need more quitters of that capacity, more people who have high standards of that capacity, particularly in the religious sector. And I would say, although atheists can learn it too, but scientists and science, that would be my first distinction that people should start to be aware of. Has nothing to do with religion. Just be aware that there are scientists that say thing, and then there's science, the science model that indicates something, because it's not an anthropomorphic size being. It's a model that suggests something or works in a certain way, and we can come up with better models. And nothing's ever definitive, but it does help us progressively get to more useful understandings of the world that we live in. And that's the distinction between the two. It's not just someone talking. It's a model that anyone can appreciate and work in, and we need more people to work in that model. Any last words? It's also about being more conscious of the choices you make and taking responsibility for the choices you make. If you just say, well, that's the way I was raised, or I've been doing this forever. That's not making a choice. That's not even acknowledging you have one. When you take the responsibility and say, I may be where I am now, but I make a decision on where I'm going to put my foot next. Right. Taking accountability of your own life. And Boudreau, finishing high school. Finishing high school. Yeah. So what we came up with was a really cool model of like, hey, you should learn how to quit more. And Boudreau was like, actually, let's take that model and refine it. And we're like, oh, let's take that model and refine it. Let's talk more about standards. We got closer to a better explanation of how we should treat other people and how to take control of our lives. Like that's science. Imagine if that was a process that was going on for thousands of thousands of years. It has been. Let's use that process more than the one that hasn't changed. And it was just like, don't quit. I put it in a book and I gave it to you on a golden piece of mail. I was like, no, we can do better than that. We did better than that in like a five minute conversation. We can take any of those commandments, come with better versions of it, lickety split. So science is good. It's in our interest because we can improve upon it. That's the whole value of it. So it's not perfect to begin with. It won't be perfect maybe ever, but it will get better. And we're already at a state where it's better than the dogmatic rules that we have already. So why not use them? Why not use the best tools that we have available to us? And listen to the science rather than the scientists because we can all be scientists. And so we should all be cooperating with each other and arguing against each other using science, right? All right. Butch, anything we should check out before next week? Yeah. Can I share a quick little example of how scientists can fail? Go for it. Go for it. Go for it. Yeah. So this particular data scientist, which is something I'm seeing in my world of engineering where everyone loves data and they love spreadsheets and pivot tables and they want to make graphics and all this. Someone put a graphic together for fatal crashes in the United States, about 40,000 or so fatal crashes every year. And they found that half of the fatal crashes every year, about half, they were traveling, a vehicle was traveling 91 miles an hour or faster. Okay. Think about that. Okay. Safest, safest highways in the United, safest roads in the United States or interstates. And those are about the only places where you can even go 91 miles an hour. And we're saying half of all people, half of all fatal crashes are happening 91 miles an hour faster. This bounced around a bunch of my colleagues and everyone was like, this can't be right. And within a few minutes, a guy went in, William, some of a guy, went in and just did some checking on the database. Turns out there are two codes in the database for speed. 998 and 999, which means something like none detected or unknown. So this data scientist was including all of the unknown speeds in this graph. Because they were greater than 91, they were just codes for something else. Cool. Know your data, understand the metadata. Sorry, that was a little long-winded. No, that's a great example. It's a great example because we figured out what the problem was and we didn't use religion to solve it. Like we didn't pray in a circle and figure that out. We use science to figure out a scientific problem. And that is what makes science so good because you can use it to fix itself. It's like designed for that. It's a self-correcting mechanism. Yes, it's exactly that. And so when we have a problem with scientific data, we analyze it scientifically. We talk about it in a scientific nature and we fix it using more science. And we're like, oh, it's now better. And we can test that. Fantastic. Isn't science awesome? It's not a weird obelisk that just stands in the middle of a pyramid somewhere. It's a process that we can all work on together. And it's multifaceted. And it's just so cool. It's innovative. It's interesting. It's intriguing. And Dread Pirate, do you have any words that you'd like to share with us? Well, if anyone's interested, you can check out my YouTube channel, MinePirate, M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-A-T. I've been doing weekly benedictions on there through the church. I've also been exploring somological fallacies and cognitive biases. I just recently did a short video on confirmation bias. And then previously I'd done one on ad hominem versus argument or challenging belief, the difference between going after somebody or going after what they believe. So yeah, yeah. So I've been up in my content a little bit and spending more time on the channel, getting lots of subscribers. So I feel good about that. So yeah, check it out. Congratulations. And any of my subscribers, feel free to subscribe to MinePirate. His quality content has always been great. And happy Father's Day for today. Happy Juneteenth for tomorrow. And everybody have the opportunity to celebrate, get outdoors and appreciate this one life that we might actually have. And until then, I'll see you guys later. Thank you so much for coming to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour. This is 103.9 FM Low Power Knoxville. Bye, guys. Love it. Say it.