 This would be great. Are you recording this, by the way? No, I wasn't, but now I am. I just pushed the record button. Okay, perfect. Do you want to permission to record as well? Yeah. Sure, I just gave you a loud record. There's three ellipses at the bottom of the screen. One of them says more. And if you click that, you'll see your options to be able to record on your screen. Perfect. Great, thank you. Perfect, looks like you're recording nice. And for anyone else, is generally everyone somewhat familiar with Zoom? Has anyone ever had a Zoom call before in the past? Yeah, seems like it's the season. No, the only thing I've had was that Collaborate Ultra that Dr. McKee uses. So this is brand new. Cool, cool, cool. Oh, Dr. McKee, my bad, my bad. Thank you, Dr. McKee, for bringing me here. I appreciate that. Very, very cool. Thank you, Dr. Welles, for your comment. You're welcome, you're welcome, you're welcome. So let me just make some points clear. This is a presentation, but it's also a conversation that we'll have. It's a fairly short presentation. There's some videos. If you guys have problems hearing audio or anything like that, there's a chat function in Zoom. Feel free to type a private message to me saying like, hey, can you turn the volume up? Or I've noticed that you may have disconnected. If you ever hear me like just straight up all my audio's gone, just raise your hand and tell me like, hey, stop and rewind and I'll go back and talk a bit. That tends to be a common problem with Zoom. But for the most part, I'm really happy to be here. This is my second time talking for Dr. McKee to his class. And I really appreciate the first time. Appreciate the second time too. Thank you guys for this opportunity. It's interesting times that we live in, isn't it? So particularly in this year, we have this weird thing where a lot of people are staying socially distant away from each other. And it's made in a sense, hard-boiled ideas or opinions or even beliefs do one of two things. One, further insulate themselves or two, make it such that people are even more willing to tell you they're deeply held beliefs when they have the opportunity to like just randomly talk with you. I remember I was talking to you. I even know if I should share this story. I was talking to my, I was re-knowing my lease and my landlord was like, we're just talking, we're just doing stuff as I'm signing some stuff. And I'm like, yep, are you all done signing that stuff? He told me that. And I'm like, yep, I like it. I love it. I want more of it or something like that. It was just a random Garth Brooks country lyric. And he hears that and immediately transitions to like some of the most hard-boiled beliefs that he has about country music, about how skateboard shouldn't wear t-shirts, about how the Washington football team shouldn't have to change their name. And he's just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I understand that we're all kind of like pressure cookers at this point because we're tired of sitting at home and not having like conversations with people, particularly you may not even have the same beliefs that we do. And so what I want to share today is a really cool hobby that I've been taking part in over the last two years. Here, I'll show my screen with you guys. We'll start this presentation up. The, where is my share screen button? There it is. And then I'm going to optimize. So the hobby is called street epistemology. And in a sense, it is how to talk to anyone about anything. That's what my hobby is, is talking to people about whatever they want to talk about. The hobby's name is called street epistemology. And I want to know, has anyone ever heard of street epistemology before? Is that like a new concept for anyone? It's it, I can't see anybody when I do a full screen mode. Isn't that a shame? Let me see if I can figure something out. How do I change my viewing options so that I can see you guys while I show video panel? There you are. Perfect. Does this block everything? Can you guys still see the screen behind me? It blocks everything? Or can you not see the screen behind me? We cannot. What comes up for us is, I think essentially exactly what you see. Perfect. Thank you for that correction. Okay. So I'm going to take a quick glimpse at everybody. Has anyone ever heard of street epistemology? No, yes. No, perfect. Great, great, great. So in my opinion, and I'm just going to, I'm just going to put this little window up right up here just so I can see you guys if need be. Oh, Christian says he's heard of the concept, but not the name. That's fantastic. So street epistemology is a really complicated term for a really simple idea. And what I want us to do is focus on the idea because the idea is talking to people without sounding like a jerk. That's basically it in a nutshell. It's really, really, really that simple. And so what I want to share is why that's important and basically how to do it. And we'll go over some examples of how it's done and why I think it's important, particularly for me is I'm an atheist and I am aware that atheists have a very bad reputation with talking to people of different faiths and other kinds of religions. In fact, if you go on YouTube and you look for like atheists and Christians have a conversation, you're going to find people having arguments. You're going to find people having debates. And I think the same goes for even if you look for like Christians talking to Hindus, Hindus talking to pagans, there's not as many videos as that on the internet, but even those are hardly amicable by the stretch of imagination. And so what there is is a problem because we have arguing in debates which have their place sometimes, but the issue with an argument is you're really not trying to come to a deeper understanding about your perspective. You're really just trying to assault someone else's conclusion. And you might do that through a humiliating way, maybe throw impersonal barbs out which might make the person that you're talking to even more regressive and think about like holding onto the conclusions even more tightly. Likewise, with a debate, you're not really having a one-on-one conversation with the person that you're talking to, your opponent. You're really talking to an audience and besides the person that you're talking to, and you're trying to convince the audience that you're correct, but you're not really having a one-on-one conversation with someone you're having a conversation with. And so you're debating them. And so what SE is is a really good additional option to have a one-on-one conversation with someone. In fact, in my opinion, I think it's the best way to have a one-on-one conversation with someone because, and we'll go into this, what you find out in an SE conversation is that both sides are open-minded. Both sides are willing to learn from each other, perhaps even change their positions and come to a deeper understanding through critical thinking about how someone arrived at their conclusion and whether or not they did so in a reliable way. And I wanna start by showing an example of what SE looks like just so that we're all on the same page. I do this hobby in parks, college campuses, churches, protest rallies, and political conventions. And I have a friend of my name, Breed Niswunder, who's in California. He also does setups in similar places as well. And what you're about to see is a series of clips from our conversations from about a year ago. Okay, let's go into it. Yeah, so yeah, just have this hobby where I chat with people about anything. Is there a particular belief you wanna shout about? Is there what? A particular belief that you wanna shout about. Something you really think is true. Christianity. All right, anyway, yeah. TIE is my name. I've got a five minute timer. Okay. If any two people can talk about, sorry. Anything, is there anything that strongly motivates you? Anything that you think is true? God? Yeah. That's a heavy topic. You wanna talk about that for five minutes? Sure. Yeah? Yeah, I can talk about, I mean, I was, my background is Christianity. I was raised Southern Baptist. I believe in God. That would be the thing I'm the most certain about. Okay. First, gotta get a sense of your confidence that God exists, say on a scale from one to 10. Aha, 10, 10 for sure. 10 for the good. I mean, I am 100% certain that the higher power exists. Okay. 95. 95. All right. Very confident. From like zero to 100%. 100%. 100%, you don't need any more evidence. You're absolutely closed on the position. You think that's absolutely true? Yeah. Okay, 100%. What got you to that 100%? Really, well. So I go to a Christian school and I've learned, I've taken a bunch of classes on theories and all these different things and it just makes sense to me, it kinda like hits home. I, and for me, it's just a meditation thing that I realized that it's just, it's just a full on total goodness of the earth, all the plant. I believe that there is something that has been working on my behalf. In this universe. Whatever is here had to come from somewhere. Okay. It's hard to imagine coming from somewhere without some sort of first cause. Okay, yeah, I know it's hard to think that, yeah. Okay. Okay. How does something making sense to you relate to the actual truth of it? Like, could someone actually be mistaken about a belief that makes sense to them? Yeah, I think they could. Okay. That is a very good point. I would say, hmm. So you, oh, that's an interesting perspective. So you believe that, wow, I've never ever heard that before. That's an interesting, you know, we've come around to an interesting point that I never verbalized to myself before, but I do see that, you know, I'm starting to see just from this discussion. And the benefits I get from it? Right, right, right. That's good. That's a good perspective. I would like to believe it if it's true. Right, but because nobody can question it, nobody can prove it, you can't prove faith, you can't prove any of these things, it's like, why am I believing this? Hmm, you may be onto something, man. Yeah, so. That's powerful stuff, man. Thanks, yeah, it's just stuff to think about, man. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. That's really enlightening. I never thought about it like that. That's right. Right. That's a good way to look at it. I like to think about it that way. And anything that puts you in a more reasonable position. I try, I try. Well, thanks. Yeah? All right, have a good evening. It was good chatting with you. Good chatting with you as well. All right, have a good evening. Have a good one. How was the audio on that? Was everybody able to hear that more or less? Good? Great. Yeah, that was good. Did anyone see the difference between that? By the way, that's just a general background. Did anyone see the difference between that and, say, argument or debate? Let me see. I'll throw some questions out. Zach, what would you say would be the big difference between that and an argument? He's going to search for the mute button. Is he going to find it if you count it? Yeah, I got it. Yeah, I guess the biggest thing is that both parties seem to actually listen to each other. Somebody wasn't trying to prove a point, but explain a point. They were just explaining a position rather than trying to change somebody's mind to theirs. Right. There's no selling, basically. Yeah, it's not a salesman persuasion technique. It's more of like, let's talk about what you believe and see if you have a good reason to believe it. Cool, you have a good reason to believe it. Now, I believe it too. Or maybe that wasn't as good a reason. Maybe we can think about that some more. And that's basically it. That's where the conversation more or less naturally ends. There's an important reason why we end it, more or less there. But I think main distinction between that and another argument that I've seen on the internet, there's no fist punching, no drop kicks into each other, no table flips. There's no logical traps. There's no, like, aha, I asked you a set of binary yes or no questions, and now you're in my flowchart of doom. There's no such thing as that. Most of the questions just open-minded, and it's a conversation between the two. I'd like to get one more feedback from this. Rosa, would you mind letting me know? We're going to be talking about SE tips in the future on the next slide. But from the example that I just showed, is there anything that particularly stood out between that as a contrast to, like, say a debate? I think nobody tried to overpower the conversation. I feel like you gave time for the other person to respond and to think. I feel like, well, actually, I don't know. Yeah, actually, that wasn't a debate. You guys were just having a conversation. I guess I'd have, I guess, I guess I've never really seen somebody, like, truly sit there and debate, so I really can't say I can, like, see the difference. I mean, you guys, like, were responsible and, like, mature, and nobody was angry at each other, like you said, so. That's, these are all really great points, because I will have a video example at the end of this, and I would highly recommend, if anyone's interested in seeing other examples, that they can check out a link that I'll provide. Later on in the conversation, it's se-playlist.com, but it'll be up on this PowerPoint slide. And I highly recommend that if you have some time, subscribe to at least the playlist, because it's everybody's attempts at SE, good or bad, I mean, some are rough with others, but it shows that we're trying to make a good attempt. And it shows, like, the general vibe of SE, of just people being like, hey, I'm not, I really am interested in having a really good conversation with you and just figuring out how you're right, rather than trying to trick you into thinking that you're wrong. And I think just through an honest conversation with people where you try to help them understand how they arrived at the conclusion, and you're working with them to see how they're right, you get way better progress, particularly if you reach a good conclusion together, because now you have something that you can believe in a reasonable fashion too, but if you're working with someone trying to figure out how they're right, and you can't get to a conclusion together, even though that you're working with each other, that says way more when you reach that dead end than, hey, you're wrong, because now it's like, hey, I was trying to, I was generally trying to help you and work with you to figure out how you're right, but we can't get there together. There might be a problem here. Maybe we should reduce our confidence in this conclusion or find a better way to reach this conclusion than this reasoning that we have right now. And both of those are really great options. We'll move on just quick and check out some of the tips for how to do SE. Let me minimize this video. So there's three major tips that I would offer for anyone that's gonna try to do this, and things that you should look for when you see other people do this. These three tips. Give me a second. How do I move this? Here we go. These three tips are really important. Keep it positive, making a conversation, let them think. The first one I would say absolutely is keep it positive. The reason why it's important to keep a conversation positive, particularly when you do SE or otherwise, is when you finish an SE conversation and they typically are on the order of about five minutes, the person's gonna reflect back on the conversation that they just had. They'll think about the answers that they gave, the tenor of the conversation, maybe where they rationaled when they were answering some of the questions that you may have had. And it's really important for them to do so in a mindset that has minimal bias. And it's very easy to dismiss epiphanies or progress or conclusions that they've realized may not necessarily be held with the best reasonable thinking. It's easy to dismiss all the epiphanies that they've made by just saying, oh, well, the guy I was talking to was a jerk or she wasn't really nice to me. She didn't let me talk. So I'm just gonna forget anything that she said, right? That's very easy to do. And so what you wanna do is have a conversation with them such that they'll be eager to have follow-ups with friends and loved ones and they can have a conversation with you, maybe a very short one. And then they go to like maybe a coworker there like, hey, I met this guy in a park and or an elevator where we're just standing in line and he was asking me some really cool things. And I was like, can I throw these answers that I gave him back to you and we'll just see? Like, does that make sense? Or should I think about this more? Like, you want them to be inspired to have these kinds of conversations even after they're done talking with you. And that only happens when it's a positive experience. And that's why I think it's really positive or really important. And along with that is it's really important to make it a conversation between two people. It's very easy to go into conversations with the mindset of, hey, I'm right, you're wrong. Let me tell you why you're wrong and why I'm right. Because when you do that, the conversations tend not to go really anywhere because you're going to reflect or that person, you're going to reflect your vibe on the other person. And they're going to think they're right, you're wrong and they're going to wait for you to finish telling you why you're wrong and they're going to tell you what, well, you're wrong. And then it's just like no one's really getting anywhere. And so you have to go into it with an open mind that you're there to learn as much from the person as you are to figure out how they write to the conclusion if they did it reasonably, but you're there to learn from the person. SE is not like a teaching technique. It is very much just a conversational tool where you guys both talk about the same thing, which is how that person arrived at their conclusion. And so there's no teacher-student dynamic. There's no I know things, you don't know things. And let me feed this to you. It's really just a, can we just focus the conversation on the methodology that you're using to arrive at your conclusion? That methodology, by the way, is called epistemology. It's where street epistemology comes from. But like how you come to reach your conclusions is what I really wanna focus the conversation on. Because if that's reasonable, I don't care where it leads. I will believe whatever is at the end of that reasonable rainbow. I just wanna know a good way to come to a conclusion. And we can work on that together. And I think the third most important thing on this list, maybe even the first one, is let them do the thinking. The whole point of SC is to give someone an opportunity that they may not have been given by a friend, or their parents, or by a pastor, or a congregation. It's an opportunity to think critically about something that means a lot to them. And a lot of people are born with the idea that as we discussed earlier in the class, that everyone believes the same thing they do. Or that they are right. And that because their beliefs give them comfort, they don't have to really offer a lot of introspection or critical assessment on things that got them to where they are. And the unfortunate thing about that is we can often convince ourselves of things that aren't true or be convinced of things that aren't true, particularly at a young age. And it's always important to assess the beliefs that we refuse the question. Or assess the beliefs that a lot of people are like, hey, just don't question that. Like those are the first things we should question. And we can't do that questioning for someone. We can only inspire someone to do that questioning themselves. So the process of SC is not to undermine, it's to get them to think about how to gently challenge their conclusions. And ask questions that let them do the thinking to assess how they arrived at their conclusions. And if they were using a reliable way to get there or not. And it is not a final line to walk because really you're just asking, how'd you figure that out? Is that reliable? And it could be that simple. I'd actually like to show an example of that in this conversation right here. This is, oh, I'm sorry. This is just one more slide. This is a picture of me with the flash turned up too high. Oh, we gotta laugh. I'm happy, I'm happy about that. Okay, cool. It's always a gamble. Cause you always like, people are always like, can I laugh at that? Am I allowed to laugh at that? They'll always look at each other uncomfortable. All right, so this is a picture of a guy holding a balloon. And this is how I see SC. This is SC in a nutshell for me. You have basically a person, you have a string and a balloon. And we tend to hold onto our deeply held beliefs like we do hold onto a balloon. Such that like, if I were to ask pointed questions, targeting the balloon, a person's first response is to grab that balloon and hold it tighter to themselves and be like, hey, don't try to pop my balloon. I need this balloon to be a good person. Or I have a deep and personal relationship with the balloon. Or my pastor tells me I need to have this balloon. I only feel comfortable if I have this balloon. I had someone in my family die and I don't know where they would go if I didn't have this balloon. Like there's a lot of personal investment that people put into your conclusions. And so if you target them with questions, people are only gonna hold onto them more tightly. Likewise, people don't like having personal questions targeted at them because they invest a lot of ego in themselves. They're gonna see that as a, they're gonna respond to that personally and maybe even get defensive. And so what I found to be a greater place to ask questions or to target my questions towards is that string that connects a person with their conclusions because there's far less ego invested in a person's methodology that they use to arrive at a conclusion compared to their conclusion itself or them personally. And so the value of that is you can ask questions about the methodology, the reasoning that they use to arrive at a conclusion and actually get their help, get the help of the person who's using that method to assess critically if whether or not that methodology is reasonable or not. And it's easy enough for someone to say like, hey, I believe XYZ because of a gut instinct and I believe it to 100% certainty. And you can look at that methodology and be like, are gut instincts 100% reliable? It's like, no, you can be wrong with a gut instinct all the time. So it's like, okay, well then that's not justifying 100% certainty. What else is getting you to that 100% certainty if it's not gut instincts? That is a reasonable enough thing for most people to hear that they'll cut that gut instinct string and then reassess what's connecting them to their conclusion. They'll look for other reasons. They'll look for something that's probably even better. And that process of getting rid of bad reasonings and looking for good reasonings is really, really valuable. That is a great outcome in a short of a five minute SC conversation. They can get rid of bad reasoning and get good reasonings or they can reduce their confidence in a conclusion that they can't find good reasoning to hold, which is also a good conclusion. And the third other outcome that can happen is they reach that conclusion using completely reasonable methodologies. And now you as the SC practitioner know a really good reasonable way to reach their conclusion. So you have three outcomes that are fantastic. All of them are gonna happen in an SC conversation. They'll either reduce their confidence, come up with a better reasoning, or you now know a really good reasoning practice to reach a conclusion. All of those are really positive outcomes and there's basically no risk of really anything bad happening when you're doing SC because all of those outcomes are great. You're gonna learn something new or help someone figure out a better way to come to conclusions. And I think in a sense, that's generally the great thing about SC compared to say an argument where you might leave with a black eye or debate or you might leave with like a really bored audience. With SC, you're always gonna have a benefit or help someone improve their thinking process. And so what I wanna do is share a video of doing SC from beginning to end. This is a conversation I had at Nanocon where I met Dr. McKay. I have never called you by your last name. What is it? How do I say it? McKee? How do you say it? McKee, McKee, Dr. McKee, right? All right, so this was at Nanocon. Nanocon is a convention of really a lot of different kinds of people, free thinkers, atheists, some religious people as well, show up as well. And this guy had the belief that we were all living in a simulation. That was a shared dream experience. Maybe you guys have heard that mindset before. Two things I wanna point out is this is my YouTube channel. You can find these and many, many, many other talks on youtube.com slash let's chat. I typically post about once a week. And sc-playlist.com is where you can find everyone who does SC upload their videos and it shows up in one playlist. And we've separated the playlist now based on language. So like there's Spanish, SC videos, Dutch, SB videos, English, of course, ASL. There's like sign language videos now up too. I'm really excited about that. So anyway, let's see the video. Some things I wanna help point out is try to catch where I'm not asking questions that are trying to dismantle the conclusion or attack the person who's holding them. I'm really asking about the methodology he's using. I'm trying to keep the conversation positive. I'm trying to make it a conversation. And I'm having him do the thinking for the most part. All right, so let's go into it. And then I can even close my eyes and go like that and toss a bottle up and it'll land exactly where I want it to. And like oven mitts, I throw oven mitts and I just visualize them falling in a certain way and they fall that certain way. And just little things here and there throughout the day. Hi, I'm Ty, it's nice to meet you. I'm Stephen, nice to meet you. Your name's Stephen. How do you spell that? With a V, S-T-E-L-E. Good, because if there was a pH, we were doomed to be enemies. I've noticed that there's a bulk curve for names that I actually get along with. Like everyone always thinks it's with a pH and I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. No. No, I'm one of them. My boss is like, my boss is right, my name with a pH and I'm just like, I'm so used to it. I don't even correct them anymore. Okay, okay. Whatever, you know? All right, so what are we talking about today? All right, it's a little bit of two different things that kind of go hand in hand. I feel like, so first, I've recently, you know, started thinking a little bit differently and I feel like we all live in a shared dream. I think that's just real. I did that hoodie back then. Yeah, that's the guy that gave me the idea. What is it called? Mod Sun. Mod Sun. The music artist. All right, so we're all living in a safe, we're all living in a dream. Yeah, I think we're all living in a dream. Like The Matrix, The Matrix is real. But less so, I think it's less about like technology and computers. I think it's more so like spiritual. Like I think we're all dreaming and we just can't wake up. And what we perceive as death, that's when we wake up into our real life. Do we die in the real life as well? Yeah, like it's kind of like a, my own personal form of like green carnation, I guess. Like I don't really believe we wake up into another body or reality or whatever. But I think like when we die, what we perceive as death, I think like we wake up into another reality, like another life. And we have multiple lives. You think when we die, we just wake up in another reality? Yeah, like another life. What's this other belief that you have? And the other thing I was thinking of kind of goes hand in hand with that is like, I'm recording, I noticed you had a red lantern. I feel like, That means you don't want to be recording. Yeah, that's right. Cool. Sorry. You know, I'm the same page right there. So I'm like, if we are dreaming, If we are dreaming, If we're dreaming. Yeah, if we're dreaming. So this second belief is dependent on the first one? Yes. If we're dreaming, then theoretically, we are all gods. We can do anything we want to. I would get that. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, and that's my thing is like, you know, I've thought about that and I'm like, you know, even scientifically, they've found something that's like small. I think they said they found something smaller than like an atom. And they called it the God particle. There are a lot of things smaller than atoms. Yeah. But you know, you get what I'm getting at, like the smallest thing. They call it the God particle. You triggered me. Yeah, triggered me. But yeah, there's like a bunch of stuff that's smaller than atoms. And one of them is something that they call the Pocca particle pigs. So you have heard of it. Yeah, there's lots of stuff. Okay, and I'm like, you know, so scientifically. Scientifically. They're saying that we're all God. It's been proven by science. Okay, so let me ask two questions then. Okay. I get if we're all dreaming, we're all gods because to an extent we can control our dreams. Yeah. If this was a dream and I'm choosing to lift this, then yeah, yeah. But how do we know, so let's take a step back. How do we know that when we were actually dreaming? That is actually what I wanted to get into next. Yeah, that's what I wanted to get into actually. So like, if you can demonstrate that, then everything else follows. So how do you get the first part? I actually have a couple of examples as to why I think that we're all dreaming. How confident are you that we're dreaming? About 90 to 95%, I would say. Oh, that's pretty high, 95%. Do you think you could be wrong? I could be, yeah. Okay, okay, if you were wrong, would you want to know? Yes. Okay, that sounds pretty, so you're still high, but you're not like to the point where you're closed-minded on it. Okay. What's some of the, what's the best evidence that you have that's proof that we're dreaming? Here's what I think. I think that... Can I ask, sorry, I normally like to define things. Okay. When you say we're dreaming, do you mean I'm dreaming, you're dreaming, we're sharing the same dream? I feel like... Like when you log into the same server of dreams? Okay, let me try to explain this. I feel like society as a whole, like everyone that is alive, is inside of the same dream. Controlling an avatar in the same dream? Yes, controlling an avatar in the same dream. So it's not like actual dreaming, it's more like logging into a simulation? Yeah, kind of like a simulation almost. Okay. And then we're all dreaming our own stuff. And as we're dreaming, as far as I'm aware, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm personally aware, I don't think there's any way to scientifically prove whether we're awake or asleep. So how do you know? How I know is theoretically, even if you could scientifically prove that you were awake or asleep, even what we know as science and what we know as fact is only fact because that's what society says, because the majority of society agrees on something, and that's what makes it fact. I understand that there are systems where people agree to things being true based on popular opinion, but how did you determine that we were facturing? Not how other models are faulty, but how did you determine that? I feel like... What's the best method that you use to determine that we are dreaming? The best method I used to determine that is I started testing stuff with my mind. Okay. So here's how I look at it. If we are dreaming, the theory is most people are not capable... This pen sucks. Yeah, most people are not capable of quote, unquote, lucid dreaming. Could I make this pen not suck? Yes. With my mind? Yes. I could? If you have your head disinfected. You gotta have faith. I gotta have faith. All right, so let's back up a little bit. Sorry for taking me out on tangent. I'm gonna use a pen that doesn't suck. Oh my gosh. I hate pens that suck, it's not as just like, what am I supposed to do with it? You can't even use it. I can't even use it anymore. Okay, so basically we're trying to figure out what's making you so confident on the first part that we're all dreaming. You said you know you're dreaming because you can test stuff with your mind. Yeah. So he made an example of some of the best tests that you do. Okay, so like, not this hoodie, but I got a shirt in the mail, and it had been a few months since I ordered it, so I sent an email asking about it, and they said it was gonna be shipping out in like three or four days. Like that Monday. It was like a Thursday that I had asked about it, and they said it wouldn't even be shipping out, like leaving the factories until Monday. And I was like, you know what? I'm gonna get that shirt tomorrow. I came home after work the next day. The shirt was in my mailbox. Nice. About three days before they were even shipping it out from the factory. Is that your best evidence that we're dreaming of? No, I've got more. What I'm saying is that your best one. I know you have more, but would you say that's your best? I would say no. What's your best one? Okay, if I had to pick one, what's the one that if it turned out not to be the case, then you would actually go down from like maybe a 90 to an 89. Okay, right now I feel like it's just little things in general. But what's the best, I mean? Well, whenever I do anything at all, I just think about it and I can do it, like meditation, like I meditate on something, and then just immediately, I just think about it for a few minutes, and then I can even close my eyes and go like that and toss a bottle up and it'll land exactly where I want it to. And like oven mitts, I throw oven mitts and I just visualize them falling in a certain way and they fall that certain way. And just little things here and there throughout the day. Is that the best proof for this? That is the best proof I have. If it turned out that you meditated and you were gonna throw a bottle in a certain way and it turned out not to fall that way. Even after you meditated? Yes, then I believe that I didn't meditate enough. I didn't have enough faith and I let doubt cloud my mind. Oh, do you only find out afterwards? Yes. Is it falsifiable? Is it what? Is it falsifiable? Yes, it is. I don't know how, like I'm open to it. Could you ever do it? Oh, you don't know how, but you're open to it, yeah. If you don't know how, so here's the thing. If I didn't know what it would look like, so when I say falsifying, do you know what it looks like when you're wrong? Okay, yeah. If you don't know what it looks like when you're wrong, could you really be so justified to 95% confident that you're right? No, I don't think that's a good way to put it, because if you're so sure that you're right, then you have to know what the opposite would be. Let's work on a way to know what we can test, because if I am dreaming, I wanna know about it too. What's a better test that we could do rather than just meditating and seeing if it's wrong and if it turns out wrong, I say, hey, I'll blame it on not having that. What's a better test that we can do? Think about something that you really want in life, like something that seems absurd, ridiculous. Absurd? Yes. Ridiculous? The most crazy thing you can think of. Can I tell you when we just walk it out? Yeah, if you want to. I want a purple, semi-sonic. All right. RS, LTZ, full-trim, back disc brakes, preferably with the cold air. Is it too much detail? I want a really fancy purple car. The more details, the better. Okay, okay, that's what I want. Yeah, okay. All right, I just want a fancy car. I want a fancy, usable car. Okay, now what you want to do is think about that as often as you can. Okay. And you're not going to be able to control when you get it, but just have faith that before you die, you will get it. You will do that before you die. And if I don't get it? And if you don't get it before you die, then at least you tried. And even if you don't get it, then you can still have faith that you tried your best. And if you die- So it sounds like a motivational thing. And even if you die, you won't know that you didn't get it because you'll be dead. But I'm interested in the means of determining if something's true or not. Not so much just being motivated by it. What's a way that we can test this to know if it's true or not? I really don't know. I think it's more my philosophical thing. I think I don't know is a perfectly good answer when you don't have enough conclusive information for something. I also don't think you're absolute, but I would also consider that if you don't know what it looks like when you're wrong and you don't know what it would- Sorry about that. Let's see, it just reset. More or less the way I was going to conclude that. Can you guys still hear me? Yep. Cool. The way I was going to conclude that is if you don't know what it looks like if you're wrong, how can you be so confident that you're certain? Can we have a conversation about that? And I think his final point was like, no, you're right. If I don't know if I'm wrong, I should figure out conditions for where I'm wrong and adjust my confidence to reflect that. And I was like, yeah, it's like sort of like if you flip a coin and it's on the back of your hand, it could be heads or tails, right? And I know the options are heads or tails, but I don't know if this coin is heads or tails. And I can go to science and I can flip a thousand coins and 500 of them can be heads, 500 of them can be tails. And that's an inconclusive result. I still don't know if it's heads or tails. And it turns out that saying I don't know is actually the best answer, is actually the intellectually honest answer until I do have more conclusive information. And so there's nothing wrong with saying you don't know until you do know. And there's nothing wrong with that. And he was like, yeah, that's cool. And that more or less ended the conversation. We shook hands and it was really cool. And I felt like overall we had a really positive chat about something that he deeply believed to be true and that he left with some considerations that he can reflect on. And it wasn't me trying to teach him like, hey, you're wrong. It's more of like, hey, maybe you should think about this more if it means a lot to you. And if you actually care if it's true, maybe we should think about better methods to get to that conclusion. I'd love to get your guys' feedback, but I'll throw out one last thing. There was a point where he realized that, hey, just because I throw oven mitts or a water bottle in the place and it lands exactly how I thought it would, that's proof that we live in a simulation. Or he realized that's bad, faulty reasoning. And immediately, instead of going like, yeah, you shouldn't believe that anymore, I instead asked, okay, so what's a better reasoning? Like now that we know that's not good, let's look for a better methodology to support this belief. SC is not about just like crushing beliefs. It's about looking for good reasons to believe stuff. And so as long as he was game, I was game to try to figure out, okay, let's look for a good reason to believe what you believe. Cause I'm not here to try to show you you're wrong. I'm trying to figure out how you're right. And we're gonna genuinely try to get there together. And I think we had generally a really good conversation in there. There's a lot of other examples on my YouTube channel, but I'd love to get feedback. I'm gonna put some hot seats on here. I hope you guys are cool with that. Let's see. Jeff, if you saw that video that I just shared, do you have any thoughts on that? Do you think what could I do better? What could I, what would you have done differently? Stuff like that. Oh, that's a tough one. That's a tough one. And honest conversation, that's how we get better at this, right? It's almost like talking to somebody with who subscribed to a really far out conspiracy theory. Okay, yeah. Because you can't, you can't disprove it, okay? There's, by definition, you can't disprove it. Which in my mind sounds like the problem. I can't disprove something. That's like, it's not false survival. So how do I know, how can I recognize if it's right? If I have no way to recognize what it looks like if it's wrong. Exactly, and like as conspiracy theory, there's always a grain of truth. Because for example, for example, powerful people, we know powerful people do bad things. Right. So I've got a powerful person here and he's doing something bad. You know, there's always a grain of truth in it. Right. It's like Spider-Man takes place in New York. New York exists, but that doesn't mean Spider-Man is a real superhero, right? Right, right. But you know, I'm thinking, this method would take a lot of practice. And I, Yeah. I get the impression that this seems like, seems more tasking than it actually is. But the fact is, we do this already without even really thinking about it. Is if anyone's ever said, if you've ever said in your life, how'd you figure that out? You've done SE. And that is SE. Just asking like, how did you verify that? Like who said that? Like where did you get that information from? That's SE. What I'm doing is that plus a bunch of other follow-ups, but in the nature of what was that method that you used to come to that conclusion and is that method reliable? Is the two punch combo of SE? And we might change the way how we answer or phrase those questions, but it's generally just, I believe this. Why do you believe that? Okay, cool. How did you reach that conclusion? Oh, okay. Is that a reliable way? No? Okay, well then how did you reach the conclusion? Oh, is that reliable? No? Oh, cool. Then how'd you reach the conclusion? Sorry, Jeff. As a teacher, I guess I've used that method to the extent that kids will do their artwork. And I don't critique it. I'll say, that's really interesting. Tell me about this. Right. Tell me, what is this? Yeah, define things, let them think. Yeah. Yeah, anything you can do to help someone critically assess stuff is valuable, yeah? Yeah. Travis, would you mind if I throw out some extra questions or are we running short on time? No, no, no, we're good. We got 20 minutes. Fantastic. Jasmine, I love your name. I love how you spell that. That's so cool. Would you mind if I ask you a question? Like, have you ever engaged with people who have maybe different beliefs than you? And do you see this as being valuable, or if you could modify it or improve it, what would you do to improve this approach to reach out to people and talk to people? Hey, yeah, I have, can you hear me? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so yeah, because I'm an atheist, so I do come and I live in Dalton, Georgia, so there are a lot of people. Yeah, so I do come around a lot of people that are not, that don't share the same beliefs as me, but this, I actually like this video because you kind of showed me how I could talk to people without making it seem like, oh, your idea is dumb or something like that, you know, because you're actually, because it's more of like an open-minded discussion. Yes. Thank you for that feedback, I appreciate it. There's a really cool thing when you see just a couple of SC videos, you'll find that there are some things that some people do that you like and some things that other people do that you like, plus the things that you are already naturally like and are comfortable with, so it's that you can combine everything to make your own personal approach to doing SC. And if you look at the people on the sc-playlist.com, you'll find people who are like, who really, really love, what's the right word? Mind, what's the word? Thought experiments? Travis, or Dr. McKay, you know, there's a guy named Deep Discussions, he has a YouTube channel, and the whole thing he does is just thought experiments, like, so what if I had a play to Jumbalaya and I put some spicy stuff in it and then I took the spicy stuff out? Would it be as spicy? It was just like, what are you talking about? But it's fun, it's fun, because he's keeping the people engaged and he just, he likes to work on like, thought experiments, sort of like that coin flip example. And he comes up with some good ones and then other people can borrow them too. There's a guy named Anthony Magdabosco, he has, he is a dad and he operates very much like someone's dad. So like, he'll go out in like short pants and crocs and maybe even like an eye patch or whatever. And he's just like, hey, what's going on? Let me talk to this person. Oh, I'm really proud of you, good job. You want a cookie? Like he'll give out little toys when he's done talking with people at the end of it. And I was just like, okay, that's cool. I try to do it my own way where I just like have conversations, I would like if I was talking about Pokemon or Marvel movies or whatever. And I will just try to have like a tone that's similar to like how I naturally talk with people. I find like a lot of improvement comes from being myself. And if you see SC videos, you will see that you can do that yourself. So if you're watching this thinking, man, this is so hard, it's like, no, one, you're already doing SC and two, it's only a couple of steps from what you're already naturally doing to refine how you're doing and optimize it. And you can do it in a realm where you're comfortable performing SC yourself or doing SC yourself. Again, it's just a conversation about how someone reached a conclusion. And if it's easier for you, what I started out with was not on religion. I started off my SC with Marvel movies or like comic books. I'd be like, hey, what's your favorite comic book guy? Apple or Windows or Epic Game Stores or Steam? Like why do you hate one over the other? Can we like figure out how you reach that conclusion? And with less charged, with less politically or religiously charged talking topics, I found the tone that I like, the speed that I like to talk in. And then it was just an easy progression to like say, okay, hey, can we talk or would you be cool if we talk about God or like God's really important to you? I'm happy talking about that, let's go for it. And we can keep that same tone of voice, that same jovial nature of the conversation and still have a really productive conversation where both sides are comfortable and we can get to really, really, really deep understandings about the nature of that reasoning that they use to reach their conclusion and whether or not they did so in a reliable way. I'm gonna throw one last, let's see, let's see, who else is here? Emmy, can I ask you a question? As you mute. Yes. Is there anything else that you'd like to know about SE that I haven't answered in this presentation that I could probably improve for talks in the future? I was curious, like, whenever you're writing your notes, what do you write down? Oh my gosh, that's so great. That is a great question. That's such a great question. Okay, so I have, there's tools of my trade. So I'm Coda, which means I'm a child of a deaf adult or a child of a deaf parent. And so when I talk, I use my hands a lot. And so typically, if my hands are out of frame, I'm doing this, because if not, I'm talking with you guys with my hands, right? So what I need to do to keep my nervous energy in place, see, I'm already doing it already right now, to keep my nervous energy in place, I put a pen in one hand and a notebook in the other hand. And that gives me functionally something to like anchor myself and hold on to. That way, when I'm sitting in front of a table, I'm not signing in front of the person that I'm talking to, right? And what helps too is it shows that I care about what the person's telling me when I'm taking like, you know, brief opportunities to write down keywords. Cause I'm trying to exude through my body language that what you're saying to me is important. There's also another benefit of using the marker board and clipboard. It helps to control the pace of a conversation. Because sometimes you're talking to people who have a lot of nervous energy too. And they may rifle out 14 different reasons why they believe in God, when they only really care about one of those 14 reasons. Or they might tell you like a lot of really big terminology. And it's really easy to just be like transcendental, transcendental dentalism, like, let me write that out. T-R-A, and like that just slows everything down to just like, oh, okay, well, T-R-A-D-A-C. Actually, I don't really care about transcendentalism. I'm really, really, really just into God cause I love Jesus's abs. I hear something like that and you're like, oh, okay, I'll just cross that out and I'll just write down Jesus's abs. All right, let's talk about these pretty good abs. What's up with Jesus's abs then? So like, it just helps to like frame the conversation. It helps to control the pace of the conversation. It shows that I care about what I'm being told. And it helps to keep my nervous energy in check as well. I also have another thing on my desk. It's an hourglass. It's a five minute hourglass. I like the classical look of it, but it's also there to show that, hey, I'm not here to waste your time. Like, I'm only really asking for five minutes. And the real timer is someone's patience with wanting to sit down and talk with me. But if I show at the beginning of the conversation like, hey, I care about your time. I'm only here for five minutes. I'm flipping an hourglass. You're free to walk away whenever you want, but I will ask you permission if we reach time and we wanna keep talking. And I think, what are the tools? You might've seen that we were talking at a table. Some people do SE standing up, with like maybe just a clipboard and a GoPro on their chest or whatever. I like to sit down when I do my SE because that naturally invites people who wanna sit down and talk with me. And so I don't have to worry about engaging someone who wants to like walk away and like dealing with that in the back of my mind. People are like, we'll see the booth and be like, let's chat about whatever you want. What's going on here? And they'll already be sitting down as they're asking you that. It's like, fantastic, great. We're gonna have a good conversation. And that's less stress on me. The main thing is you can find things that make you more comfortable, like props or tools or whatever. But the most important thing is you don't need any of these things to do SE. You don't need table, hourglass, a clipboard. You don't need cameras. You don't need a YouTube channel. You just have to have the willingness to go out and have these conversations with people. The only SE is an incredibly useful tool to get people to think critically about how they arrive at their conclusions. And it's a great way in general to get to talk to people or really anybody about anything. You can talk to anyone about anything. And the only thing left to do it is to do it. And it's gonna be a really easy process because like I said, you guys are already doing it. All right, Dr. McKee, any other questions? I just have a, yeah, I had a kind of question that as you were talking about this, you know, I know that you're a scientist. And, you know, so I think the way of thinking in SE aligns well with that model. So I was kind of wondering if you use SE in your professional role, like when you're talking to colleagues or people that are supervising, you know, those kind of things. Yeah, so I work in an environment where we have machinery, chemicals, sharp objects, bacteria-related specimens that have to be kept. The last job I was in was dealing with removing chemical weapons, the last stockpile of chemical weapons in the US. And now I'm working in filtration and we're helping to produce the filtration needs for medical industries that are going because of the current pandemic that we're in right now. But my major thing is safety, absolutely 100% safety. And so I will often engage with people who are taking or recommending unsafe practices. And what I need to do is figure out, okay, how can I quickly and efficiently talk to this person in such a way that I don't trigger like an ego or a personal defense, a personally defensive response when I see them doing something that's not safe or if I have a boss recommending something that's unsafe to me. And it's easy enough for me to ask, okay, let's get on both sides. Let's both get on the same side of this issue and figure out what's the best path forward for both of us to eliminate needless harm or needless potential risk in the laboratory. Yeah, some things have intrinsic risk, like if you're cutting with a pair of scissors you might cut a finger, but we can do things to eliminate needless risks or potential harms in the laboratory. We can minimize our intrinsic risk but we can completely eliminate needless risk. And so let's do everything we can to do that together. And some people have different approaches, but it's really interesting to find that when you frame the conversation less on, hey, you're doing something bad or hey, this idea you had was bad, which is attacking the collusion or attacking them personally, but it's like, what's a better way we can do this? Or hey, I wanna work together with you to figure out what's the best way we can eliminate or improve this process? What ideas do you have? And you can literally come to someone with the idea of let's improve our methodology, let's improve our reasoning and come out with a safer work environment so that everybody can come home the same way they came to work. That benefits everyone. And I feel like mutual benefit is always gonna be the driving motivator for a lot of things, whether it's just getting up in the morning, paying your bills or coming to work safely. And so everyone can immediately understand like, hey, yeah, if I improve my methodology, this benefits me, why not do it, right? Why not eliminate the risk? And I found that that's been really, really crucial. I've of course also talked to really, really boneheaded IT dudes. Guys are like, hey, man, I can't connect to my computer. Can you just click the button on your side to make me connect to my computer? I can't click it. I have, I've worked here for 30 years. I'm like, oh my gosh, like, what can we do to work together to get this button clicked? Well, I guess I could click the button. It's like, yeah. And then it works. And I'm like, why are you always like, ooh, okay, thank you very much for your time. But like, there are so many times where Etsy has just been like a useful way for me to get work done. In fact, I'll probably have to use it today too. But yeah, can I, can I fill the question out at you? When has Etsy, or when I was asking someone, how did you do the, or how versus like, what or who has helped you? I mean, I think all the time, I mean, my day job is as a professor. And so rather than, you know, you kind of talked about the different role of SE, where the relationship is different, right? And I do try as a professor to be somebody that's more in an even playing field, and that, hey, we're gonna figure this stuff out together, rather than, hey, I'm talking to Atchie kind of thing. So I think just kind of the Socratic method, and one I think that aligns well with SE and has, you know, the ancestry I think of SE really. So I think, you know, getting on that same playing field, so rather than saying, hey, you're wrong about this, which, you know, I think inherently, you know, creates this power differential, saying is like, hey, how did you get to that conclusion? You know, then we're trying to do this together type of thing. But I think also, like I said, my day job as a professor, my night job, I'm a counselor as well. So I use it when I'm talking with individuals, you know, when we try to figure out like, hey, you know, you're experiencing this problem in your life. So I would even say that I use this in counseling and say, hey, you know, what's the method that you got to that, you know, and people have reasons for why they are the way that they are, why they do what they do. But when we talk through it in that process, people are able to figure out it's like, oh gosh, I don't really have a good reason. And now I can be more open to change. Right. That is fit, that's perfectly framed. Yeah, you're not there to change someone's mind, you're there to give them the opportunity to do it themselves. And for the most part, you can do it by just going through their reasoning process with them, sort of like if you're going over a math problem together. And they're like, I'm very confident that this is the answer. It's like, yeah, but bro, you divide it here when you should have subtracted. She's like, oh, geez. Okay, okay, okay, okay, let me fix that. And I'll come up maybe to a different answer, but at least I'll be more right. I'm like, fantastic, because I want to be right too. So yeah, let's work together. Jeff, I saw you raising your hand. Yeah, I was thinking about again, going back to conspiracy theories, without listening to somebody and saying to know exactly what their ideas are, what are some quick, what are three quick questions that you would ask to tease out them to reflect more on where they're at? Okay. So as a basic level, I would say how confident, okay, so what do you believe? Try to get your definitions ahead of time, just try to understand where they're coming from. So like I asked the what, like what's the nature of the belief that you have? They'll take some time to explain it, that's great. Then I ask, how confident are you that that's actually true? They can give a number if they want to, I don't force a scale on them if they don't want to answer based on like 100 to zero or something like that, just get an impression of are they close-minded? Like, hey, are you so absolute that you're not even questioning if you could be wrong? How confident are you? That's the second major question. So like, what do you believe? How confident are you that that's actually true? And then the third one would be, how did you figure that out? Because that's where the street epistemology begins. And in my opinion, it's like, listen to the reasoning and then the follow-up question would be like, hey, is that a reasonable way to come to a conclusion? You could either ask that internally or ask that to your partner. But in this process of understanding what they believe and giving them the opportunity to express it, not me telling them what they believe, but for them to process what their belief is and push it out of their mouth so that they can hear what they're actually saying that they believe, that does fundamentally huge things for a person because a lot of times they're just told what they believe, but for them to express it themselves, that's a huge task. And then secondly, for them to actually gauge honestly how confident they are, knee-jerk reactions typically are 100%. Like, I have a moral obligation to be 100% confident in this. But oftentimes, people who are 100% confident are closed-minded and it's enough to ask, hey, are you so confident that you're not questioning this anymore? Like, you're absolute about this? I don't know if I'm absolute, maybe I'm not absolute. Maybe I am questioning a little bit. They might go down to like 95. They might go down to like 90. They might say like, yeah, I'm really sure but I can accept that if I'm wrong, I would just need to see some proof of that. Stuff like that. That is great momentum or at least good reasoning on their part to say, hey, I'm not closed-minded. Sometimes you will meet the people who say, I believe in this and I am closed-minded. I'm proud to be closed-minded. And that just gives you so much material to work with as an SE guy, because there's just so many fun little questions you can ask to make them be like, oh no, I shouldn't have said I'm closed-minded. Of course you shouldn't. No one wants to be closed-minded, right? Ideally not, don't be closed-minded about anything, right? And then the last thing would be is I asked like, how'd you figure that out? Because that's the question where I'm not telling them my list counter apologetics. I'm giving them the opportunity to express to me their best proof to justify the confidence that they said they have. And if they give me something that's say supernatural, I would love to know a means to determine things that are supernatural, because right now I'm not aware of any, I'm a scientist, right? And if you have a good proof for showing something supernatural, fantastic, but if not, that's something they can recognize on their own. I don't have to tell them that. And if they tell me something really mundane like, hey man, I think pretzels are better than pop tarts. Oh, that's blasphemy. I think pop tarts are better than pretzels. Oh my gosh, yeah? I'll be like, okay, yeah. If it's a very, how do I put it? Extraordinary, only extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So if they tell you something really mundane, lower your expectations for the amount of evidence that they give you. You don't have to question everything. You can, all right, how to put this. You don't have to question everything as vigorously as you would an outrageous statement. And so if someone says, hey, I believe we're all living in a shared dream. You might want to ask some questions behind that. But if they're like, hey, man, I think this hoodie's pretty tight. I'll be like, yeah, man, that's pretty cool. I might agree with them straight up. I'll be like, no dude, I can see that too. That's a pretty cool eddy. I don't have to press you further on that. I agree with you. So just gauging your head like how much evidence it takes for you to be satisfied by something. And just because the two of you agree that it's true, doesn't necessarily mean that it's true. But you can at least have that conversation and figure out where you go from that. And I think just the conversation itself of asking someone what they believe, how confident they are, and how they arrived at their conclusion does a worth while of good. And it's some things that we should be asking more of our friends and our loved ones, particularly if we care if our beliefs are true. I really appreciate it. We are officially out of class time. Fair enough. So if you got to go, you can go. But no, thank you very much for this talk, for the class. We'll talk about this. We'll keep this conversation going on Monday. I can't remember what I had on the schedule for Monday, but if I had something different, we'll make sure that we take some time to talk about this. And all your discussion posts about what your experiences have been with talking about religion. But yeah, thanks again so much Ty for sharing your passion with the class. And I think giving us maybe some tools to engage in meaningful conversations. I really appreciate it. Cool. Thank you anytime. And I'm glad everyone was able to participate, yeah? So have a good day everybody. Have some good conversation. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. Bye everybody. Bye. Bye.