 Our next speaker is along the lines of outreach, how to get the message of critical thinking out to those that perhaps haven't absorbed it or even been exposed to it. Jeffrey Westin comes to us from Seattle, Washington, where he is a cartoonist and software engineer, interesting combination. And this morning he will discuss the communication of the skeptical point of view to a wider audience through his comic strip, which uses both humor and cuddly animals to get the point across. So today, please welcome accessible skepticism through comics. So I've been a skeptic for a while, and some of the main influences that shape my world view are when I read Michael Shermer's Why People Wear Things, but also Franz Deval's Our Inner Ape, which taught me really a lot about how chimpanzees and bonobos act and behave and how that reflects back on how we act and behave. And so I've always been cartooning for a while and I wanted to combine these two interests. And so I created a comic strip called Ape Not Monkey. And the goal of the comic strip is really to sort of reach out to promote scientific and critical thinking beyond the skeptical and traditional atheist communities and hopefully reach a wider audience. And so how I do that is the comic strip is based on characters. And I really try and create fully developed characters with backstories. And so for example, Toby, who's the main character of The Ape, he's sort of based off of kind of like Michael Shermer and Carl Sagan. And he's kind of, he just loves discovering and understanding science and learning about the material world. But then I have another character whose name is Pastor Bear. And he is a Christian. And his background is that he just really loves Christianity. And the best way to explain it is he just thinks it's a really good thing. And the best way I can explain it is like if you've ever listened to a song or a new band and you're just like, this is just the greatest song I've ever heard. And you want to share it with all your friends. That's his motivation to want to share that stuff. So that's sort of where he gets his motivation to go around and do things. There's other characters. So Wilbur, he's a dog. And coming from Seattle, he's kind of more like sort of into spirituality and environmentalism and sort of the leftist kind of view of that world. But there's other characters as well. So there's Clemens, who's a monkey. And he's kind of like the Christopher Hitchens. He'll never convince anybody. He'll never convert anybody. But he goes around and causes trouble. And like Chris Hitchens, he's probably not going to convince a lot of people, but you're kind of like rooting for him. Like, yeah. And but the one thing I love about skepticism, there's so many different topics to explore. And so conspiracy theories is an interest of mine. And so I created a character named Arlen. And he's sort of based off of Alex Jones, who's a right wing radio host. Alex actually has gotten really popular in the last year or so. And so Arlen believes in everything, Luminati, New World Order, eugenics, fluoridation in the water, all that stuff. And again, his motivation is really good. From his point of view, he wants to warn people about this stuff. This is how he sees the world. And he wants to tell people about it and warn them about it. And that's where his worldview and motivation comes from. Then there is kind of the bad guy. There's sort of the con artist. His name is HR, kind of based off of HR Halderman. I'm a bit of a Watergate, Nixon Buff. And so he's kind of like, he's actually a skeptic, but he kind of uses his skeptical powers for bad. So he tries to make money and do long cons and sort of like kind of think Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting is kind of his, or kind of his heroes and inspiration. And so yeah, so like he'll go and dress up as psychics as a psychic and try and get people's money out of by doing like seances and things like that. And so like Alternative Medicine is covered in the comic strip, Different Topics. There's a character who's a pig and he's really into Alternative Medicine and homeopathy and he got really depressed after Andrew Wakefield's paper got retracted. And so he was gonna commit suicide but because he's into homeopathy, it didn't quite work because he used homeopathic sleepers. So organic food is sort of another topic. So Wilbrea, he's the dog, he's sort of the leftist. So he's really being into organic food and whole foods. And so there's lots of areas to sort of explore and that is to like, you know, there's a lot of misconceptions around that area too. And so sometimes there's celebrities they'll stop by. So a couple of years ago, if you remember, there was sort of controversy around Bill Maher receiving the Richard Dawkins Award. So Bill Maher-Masette came to the zoo and so you had a character who was a really, you know, you know, a strong atheist but he, you know, he has these other views that don't quite match up the skeptical viewpoint. And Joe Olstein, who I find kind of interesting because he gets flack from both sides. He gets flack from the right wing because he doesn't put enough Bible quotes in his sermons and he gets flack from the skeptical and religious communities for his prosperity gospel world point. So holidays. So Halloween is a fun time, you know, in the comic strip where the characters dress up as what they think would be the most scary thing they can do. So Arlen, the conspiracy theorist, dresses up as the Federal Reserve, the most evil institution that, you know, you could come up with for conspiracy theorists. You know, the pig dresses up as a vaccine and then you've got Wilbur who is who, you know, dressed up as a genetically modified food. Valentine's Day, I like to do Valentine's Day cards, you know, as well, you know. So I think that's true. That's true, right? And so, but what are the other things I do? I really like doing, you know, research and so this comic strip gives me, you know, an outlet to sort of understand, learn about new, learn about new topics. So this was an example where Deepak Chopra was talking a lot about his quantum mind and trying to use quantum mechanics to explain certain things, how the brain works and so how they link up to the universe. So I work to sort of create a longer type of comic strip that works to try and explain what Deepak Chopra's worldview is and then try and show, here's how it doesn't quite actually, you know, work. And so there's a character, his name is Deepak Chopra. Quack because he's a duck, that's why. And so the comic strip goes to trying, you know, really trying to explain the difference between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics and why that matters in explaining how the brain works. And so, you know, another example was, I read Mark Garner's Fats and Fallacies and I was really interested in, he, you know, he did a chapter on Dianetics and it was really interesting, I thought it was interesting because the book was published in 1952 and so he sort of just explained and sort of debunked what Dianetics was right before, you know, the whole church of Scientology actually started. And so there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of stuff out there now about how the church is and works but I just thought it was so interesting that he just went debunked, you know, sort of the origin of Scientology and then that was it, that's all you need to do, right? Everything else afterwards is. And so I did sort of like a comic strip where I kind of call it Eight Nut Monkey Theater where the animals sort of dress up as characters and they sort of explain and they sort of tell the story of the early days of Scientology and, you know, and what happened there. And again, sort of trying to explain, you know, through graphics, what were the claims being made and why they don't quite make sense or what were some of the sketchy events in the history of the early days of that, you know, religion. And again, like conspiracy theories. So when I try and tell the longer stories, I really try and think about a human character and I find some sort of interesting story to tell there rather than just straight, you know, conspiracy theory versus just the science. I try and put some human face on it and I thought the story of Stephen E. Jones was really interesting. He was, by my accounts, from what I could tell, you know, a respectable, a respectable, respectable, I forget. Physicist who actually did, you know, who did some, my understanding, you know, decent work. He was an early skeptic of the Fleshman Ponds, cold fusion stuff. And then he got into the whole 9-11 truth or conspiracy movement and I just thought that was a really interesting, you know, story of how someone who had a career sort of goes down this different path. And so I tell sort of that story but then it gives me a chance to go and explain and his main focus is on World Trade Center 7 and so it gave me a chance to go in and try and explain, well, here's how he thinks World Trade Center 7 fell and here's actually what the NIST report actually explains and here, which is, and it's actually sort of really complicated. It took NIST years to do the research to figure out just how this building collapsed. But, you know, trying to explain that to a wider audience and say, you know, here is kind of, you know, the structural engineering way of how the building collapsed and if more people can just kind of have a sort of understanding of that viewpoint, then, you know, if that's sort of the first point that they see is the scientific reasons for collapsing rather than the conspiracy reasons, you know, hopefully we can, hopefully that can just get people more on the right track. And then the last case was, the other interesting story I saw was there was two really, really popular books about near-death experiences. One, you know, New York Times bestseller, one was about a child who, he had an appendectomy and he claims to have gone to heaven and his father, who was a pastor of the church, wrote a book about it, you know, what the child says and that was a big, you know, bestseller. And then also on the other side, you have Evan Alexander who's a neurosurgeon who also claims to have gone to heaven. And so in my comic strip, I could tell sort of two different stories. I could tell the story from, you know, a child who thinks that they went to heaven and a very non-critically thinking, you know, person who sort of just believes kind of what they say and tries to take their vague, try to find patterns in their sort of vague statements to establish that as fact. And then Evan Alexander, you know, was an interesting story because he tried to explain, you know, his near-death experience, you know, using his scientific background and so it goes on to explain, you know, here's what he believed, here's what he thought happened and then here's some viewpoints of what could actually have happened. And actually there was just really, a really interesting Esquire article that goes into deeper, the backstory of Dr. Evan Alexander which was quite interesting. So I'm pretty much terrible at marketing. I don't, I really just kind of work in my hole and put the comic strip out there and so it really only spreads through word of mouth or people telling each other about it. But I get a lot of new hits and new users you know, proportionally. And so there's some, so in terms of like, so I was shocked to find out that, you know, it was on one day it was like on the front page of Reddit and I think probably I don't know for 15 minutes, I don't know how long things last on Reddit. And so a colleague at work was like, hey, your comic's on Reddit. And I was like, great, what's a Reddit? And then I found out and I was very excited about that. And then actually just recently, just a couple weeks ago, I got an email from a, he's like a management consultant and he wanted to use my comic strip, this particular strip because he does management consulting for Christian business owners and he wants to help Christian business owners sort of follow Christian business principles from the Bible in some way. And he's like, I'm doing this newsletter and it's gonna go out to a whole bunch of pastors around the country. Can I use your comic strip in my newsletter? And I said, yes, sure you can, you certainly can. And so to me that's really, to me that's kind of rewarding where somebody who has a completely different viewpoint for me can at least pick up or find some humor in the stuff that I create. And so yeah, so that's the comic strip. So yeah, it's ApeNotMonkey, ApeNotMonkey.com, and I'm on Twitter as well and I gotta figure out how to, what the next comic is gonna be for Monday because I haven't done that yet. So we'll figure that out. So awesome, thanks a lot. Any questions for Jeffrey? Just real quick, how many strips do you have and how often do you update? So I've been doing, I don't know, I've got a couple hundred at least. And then so, and I try and update three times a week. Yeah, so Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, yep. Any other questions? What's your Twitter handle? The Twitter handle is ApeNotMonkey, thanks. You plan to put it in a printed form or compile it in like a book or something? Yeah, that's, I have that idea. Unfortunately, my terrible marketing skills have yet to figure it out, but I eventually wanna try and get them into a compendium in some way for people to download or look at, yeah. All right, if there's no more questions, thank you very much. Thank you.