 Hello everybody, welcome to the panel discussion on street epistemology. I'm really glad to have you here. My name is Anthony Magnobosco, and I've been a practitioner of street epistemology for a while, five or six years, and going out on the street and having conversations. Of course, you don't have to do that. You can use this method in a variety of different places, and I'm very happy to have people here that practice this method in a variety of different venues. I'm from San Antonio, Texas. One of my quirky facts about myself is I absolutely love lemon heads. So if anyone has those, bring them by the street epistemology table. I'd love to have some. That would be great. I'd like to introduce our panelists here. We've got Nicole Terry. Nicole is from Atlanta, Georgia. She's been practicing SE for 48 months. Her venue is Twitter. She's an animal on Twitter. Skeptic Nikki. Check her out. And her quirky fact is that she has two Sanskrit tattoos. Maybe she'll disclose where they're at today. I don't know. We also have Todd Yoder. Todd is from Nashville, Tennessee. No applause. I thought for sure we'd get some applause for that. He's been doing street epistemology for 31 months, and interestingly, he finds himself using this tool and he's a volunteer for recovering from religion. Isn't that cool? So I think he's got some explaining to do while he's using street epistemology there, and he'll get into that. His quirky fact is that he's Amish once removed. Bob Swanson is also our panelist. He's from Tupelo, Mississippi. He's been doing street epistemology. Oh, some applause. Good. He uses it in the classroom with students, and he plays the piano accordion. And then we have Dr. Tyrone Wallace. He gave the presentation earlier this morning. Who was here for that? Tyrone just moved to Nashville, Tennessee. He's been doing street epistemology for 15 months and primarily in parks and campuses. His quirky fact. Is this true? He uses ASL with his cat. We do have five questions or so. Oh, look at this. He's doing it. That's neat. We solicited questions from the street epistemology community to see what they wanted to hear these folks answer. But it's not limited to that. In fact, I'd like to encourage you to get on Twitter, use that hashtag nano con 19. I'll be checking it and this will be your opportunity to submit your question to us. So you don't have to walk up and publicly ask it or anything like that. You can just submit it to us. This is the definition that we're using for street epistemology. So in case there's anybody here that's not aware of this term, or maybe you're working off a different definition, this is what we're going with. A conversational tool that helps people reflect on the reliability of the methods they're using to arrive at their deeply held beliefs. That's from the street epistemology website. What do you think panel is required for a street epistemology talk to be effective or successful? And I'm going to try to limit the responses to about five minutes so we can get through all the questions and maybe yours. So who wants to take that one? Yeah, go for time. I found there's a lot of aspects that make a successful talk. But if I can end the talk positively where the person feels happy that they had a conversation with me, I find that to be a really good sticking point with any points that we brought up in the conversation. Typically, when we end the conversation, I will play the conversation on loop in my head and I imagine they will do the same as well. And if they think, oh, well, he was a jerk, it biases all the points that we came together or came to together. So if they think, hey, that was a really positive talk, he brought us some points, let me play that through my head. It just has less bias if it's a positive conversation rather than one that ends on the negative note. So I consider positive talks to be a really good sign of success. I think that, yeah, I forget, remove SC out of there, a talk to be successful. We want people to find a feeling like they got something out of it. And so part of it is also on the SC practitioners part, you know, have some goals in mind when you go into the conversation. I think we're going to probably talk about what are the goals when you enter into a conversation. But if you've achieved those goals, then it's been a successful talk. But if you didn't, then it hasn't been a successful talk. I would like to add that it's so important to listen. Listen to what the person is saying and really pay attention and don't be thinking ahead of the conversation. I would like to add to your emotions from it. Anybody who engages in SE is doing it for a purpose. Obviously you guys mentioned having goals, we set goals because there's something we want to accomplish. And something that we want to accomplish means something to us and there's emotional value there or else we wouldn't be doing it. But we have to remember that when we're engaging people in discussions like this, these are about beliefs in which they use to define their identity. And your beliefs about them or the topic in hand, you also use to define your identity. So with that being said, when you engage in these conversations, do the best you can to be as objective as possible. Don't try to fend off thoughts of, oh, this person's an idiot. How could this person think this way? It's your fault. I have to do this in the first place because everybody's just so dumb. Do the best you can to just hold off on those thoughts and hold off on your emotions and just kind of let the conversation flow and be as objective as possible. I think empathy is key. You want them to come back for another conversation. How many return customers have you had? I've had a couple. One of them actually turned out being my neighbor later down the road and we weren't even aware of it. But I've had a couple of return talks and I did find when you try to make that conversation positive as the main thing and then everything else is just like, how deep can we go? Can I have you reflect? But positive conversations as a number one, they will seek you out and be like, hey, I saw your YouTube videos in between. Can we do that again? Can we talk that? Can we try that again? I'll be like, yeah, absolutely. I'll be at the park at XYZ. Check this out. I'm like, yeah. I do feel like sometimes you run into people who have a lot of defensive mechanisms to obscure their beliefs or reasons why they believe things and I'd be really frustrated to deal with. But I would not wear my frustration on my sleeve and I would try to be aware of what kind of defense mechanisms I'm facing. That way the next time I see them or the next time I face those kinds of defense mechanisms, I have a better approach for that. But what I'm really just trying to do is stay in the moment and be a positive coach for critical thinking. People are pretty inculcated in their beliefs. So patience is a really important factor when doing street epistemology. Of course, we do have goals that we want to accomplish of trying to get individuals to maybe think a little bit more broadly. But remember that the people you're talking to probably aren't children, so they've probably held these beliefs for a pretty long time. So with that being said, be empathetic to the fact that humans navigate their world based on their beliefs and they don't change them very often because if they do that, then they have to change the way they navigate the world and that's really stressful. So when trying to get somebody to think more broadly on a topic like religion or politics or something that we're encouraged not to speak about at Thanksgiving, do the best you can just to be patient with them. So just like you were saying, empathy is key, patience is key. Be a person that people want to talk to and then after that, a lot of things become much easier. And one more thing we got 20 seconds left is to define definitions on meanings of words. So that way we are talking about the same things because your definition of faith might be different from what I'm thinking. So to clarify what the person means by a certain word is really important. So we're not talking past each other. Great advance. Okay. Next question. What is your underlying goal when having a street epistemology talk? We're cozying up now. Okay. Good. Nice and worn. It is cold in here. Let's get closer. Okay. What is your underlying goal when having a street epistemology talk? Who wants to take that one? What's your goal? What's your objective? It depends on the person. The prince on the interlocutor is that's the terminology we use for the person you're having your conversation with. I've been recently engaging with a minister at the church that I attend with my family. My goal there is just to continue a conversation. I don't know. He's a minister. I'm not expecting him to really show any change in his level of belief. It's more of a challenge on my part. How can I continue to have him engaged in this conversation? Show him or try to work with him in developing critical thinking skills about some of these really core subjects. And I don't expect to see any kind of wiggle in his level of belief. There it's an internal goal for myself. Can we continue to have this conversation cordially? Bob, you tend to use street epistemology in classrooms. Do you not? Are your goals different in that venue compared to dealing with a pastor or something? Yes. I do far less. For those who are familiar with street epistemology is just being what Anthony does, which is going out on the street and engaging with strangers using cameras and doing a formal interview. I use street epistemology techniques with my students. I have developed some lectures about various science topics, and mostly they just stress critical thinking. And so I start my students out each semester with a pre-test about critical thinking, where their critical thinking skills are, and then I give them a series of lectures during the course of the semester introducing them to critical thinking skills. Of course, just by virtue of taking my science classes, they're being introduced to critical thinking skills. And then actually test them at the end of the semester to see whether they've picked up on any of those things and perhaps made them part of their own thinking. I'm not going to lie. My goal is to change people's minds. When we talk about these subjects, we're doing it because we believe that the person's belief is in some way harmful. I don't engage in a religious subject unless my goal is to change the person's mind. It didn't take much for me to understand that the religions that people believe in are false. It shouldn't take much for anybody. But for some reason, and as much research as I've done, I can't quite figure it out, humans are prone to believe the most insane things. They're absurd. We're irrational. And we go throughout life with this inability to really look outside of what's happening in our lives, which I understand life is important, but you can't just grab onto a dogma and expect it to work for everything. You have to be able to think critically. And my goal is to change people's minds. I do not understand religious adherence. I don't think it makes sense. And people use their religious adherence to make choices that affect me and others based on their voting preferences, based on how they may choose to make decisions about how their city is run or other factors that affect more than just them. And in addition to that, they probably have people around them who listen to them as well. So with that being said, my goal is to try to persuade as many people as possible to reconsider their religious beliefs and at least move away from Abrahamic religion. I mean, you don't have to become an atheist, but please at least move to something awkward like some spiritual weird thing. So I'll just add one quick thing. I can't change people's minds, but I can convince them that there's a need for them to change their own mind. And what I'm trying to do is inspire them to have that moment where they realize that they don't really have a good reason to hold the beliefs that they do. And it's up to them to make that choice for themselves. So especially when you inspire other people to make that decision for themselves, they will be, that positional change will stick with them a lot more. And my reasons, my goal or my underlying goal is sort of selfish. It's actually entirely selfish. I'm trying to make SE better. And there are routes of questions that you can take when you get presented a certain belief, kind of like flow charts. And I'm trying to abandon using flow charts when I'm having these conversations because... Thank you for that. Oh, thanks. Yeah. Flow charts. I'm just trying to dodge those and trust in asking honest questions and seeing where that takes us in a conversation and reporting on whether it worked or what didn't work and learning from that. That's my underlying goal, just learning as much as I can from this process. Excellent. Excellent. Okay, question number three. What's the worst that could happen? And again, these are questions that were given to us from members of the street epistemology community. These are answers that they want to hear. What is the worst that could happen from a street epistemology conversation? I mean, aside from getting punched, you can just like dodge left. A physical confrontation maybe? Uh, worse. So, um, worse that can happen. Yeah. I think a lot of us have turned to SE because we've seen the worst that can happen in some of the other formats. When you don't do it. When you don't do it. Yeah. I've burned bridges and lost relationships because I've debated with people, participated in counter apologetics and did it very inelegantly. And it left me looking for other options. You know, I've actually, I started kind of down this road dealing with a student, a student who nearly dropped my class because from her fundamentalist background, she didn't want to learn about the big bang. And I modified her and told her, well, okay, just learn the material, you know, get through the tests and, you know, and I essentially taught her a very bad lesson. I've kicked myself as a teacher for doing so. I essentially told her that when you encounter something in life that does not mesh with your own beliefs that you may have been brought up in, that it's okay to ignore those new ideas, that new information and stick to what you've already always believed in. And I realized that was a mistake of the teacher. It was a blown opportunity. And so I started looking for ways. How can I, when I see a student like that or engaging with a student in the future who comes to me with those kind of concerns, how can I do a better job of guiding them, not telling them what to believe, but how can I better get them to examine their own beliefs and see whether their level of confidence really matches the evidence that they have to support that? I got a really good one. And you guys might know this. Knowing when to stop talking. Like, have you ever had a point where you reached that, he's figured it out. He knows what's going on. And then you keep talking. Why didn't I end this 20 minutes ago? Yeah, well, I'm still talking. No, please. And then it's just like, I'm tired. I don't know how to talk to you anymore. It's like, dang it, opportunity missed. But yeah. The only one to shut up is really important. The question is, what would you say to the student now? Is that directed to Bob? Yeah, that would be a difficult thing to do, like in the middle of class. Yeah, certainly it would be something that I have to ask the student. Outside of class, how would you address that? Outside of class, how would you address that? Right. So I had essentially said, well, how do you believe that things came to, how did it all get started? And then she would probably go down the fundamentalist path and say that God did it and this and that. And I would have to then just start drilling down, OK, why do you believe that? And how did you come to be confident that that's the way it is? We just have to kind of go in that direction. Could you ever have a parent contact you afterwards about the dialogue that you're having with the students and wondering why you're asking these questions? Are these older kids? What's the age range that we're talking about here? That student was just a regular kind of college student, but I have a variety of ages. I have nontraditional students and regular students. One thing I guess I wanted to kind of talk about is it kind of goes back to the goals sort of thing. But one of my goals is just to make people less certain. I think that's one of the my goals of the students. One of the problems in this world, I think, is that so many people are essentially smugly certain or overly confident in their own, in the certainty and their beliefs. And they've never really examined why or how they arrived at such a high level of confidence. And that's really one of the goals of street epistemology is to drill down and say, OK, does the information or the methods that you've used to arrive at that certainty really match your level? Regarding that student, do you think there's a backup means of making a goal-oriented approach? So instead of saying like, I think this is important and you should know it, set it up as, maybe you should at least know what it is that you don't like. And we can both agree that you don't like it and you don't believe it, but you should at least be educated on what it is that we're talking about and work on that towards a goal together. And just like, I know you don't believe it, but this is at least what it is. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. OK, good. Hashtag two. If you guys have questions, hashtag nanocon19, I'll be checking Twitter here in a sec. Panel question four. How do you respond when your interlocutor says something wildly inaccurate? I love it. I get this question all the time. I love it. I'm dying to know what you guys think on this. Friday I was talking to a guy who thought he saw an owl that grew in the dark. And I was just like, yeah, I want to talk to this guy. Because I get tired of talking about the religious question all the time. So my channel has a mix of religious talks and the just straight oddball conversations. And it's the oddball conversations I love. There was a guy named Dred Pirate. He, that's his handle. He posted videos on YouTube. His first talk was with a flat earther, anti-vaxxer, Illuminati believing, everything. Just all mixed up in one guy. And I'm like, I'm so envious. I want to talk to this person too. These are the guys I want to talk to more than just the standard religious talks. Because I know how those talks go and how to break those down. So I'm wondering like, I want the people who surprise me. Those are like the great ways to test the method and learn the most I can from it. What do you guys think? From my teaching experience, every semester in astronomy I wind up with some sort of a conspiracy theorist. Students ask me about moon hoax or flat earthers. I met a student a couple of semesters ago who wanted to know about this thing. There's a book he read called The Ring Makers of Saturn. Where some guy thought that the rings of Saturn were being replenished by alien spacecraft. And he wanted to know what I thought about it. And after several semesters, I kind of was playing whack-a-mole. I'd look into these things. I'd research them a little bit. I'd develop a little lecture about it. And I actually started to record these lectures and put them up on YouTube. And those become now resources. Rather than playing whack-a-mole every semester with one brand new conspiracy theory, I started to kind of tie in street epistemology with it and kind of show my students how I would interrogate these sort of questions so that if I can sort of model the skills of critical thinking that perhaps they can start to answer these questions on their own instead of looking to me to answer them every time. Those are skills. Those critical thinking skills will benefit them down the road. I have to admit I don't do a very good job of controlling my facial expressions. Is that why you're on Twitter mostly? Is that why you're on Twitter mostly? Yes. I've seen the wars. I've seen the wars on Twitter. Yes. They're great. It's difficult sometimes for me when I'm in person to control my expressions. For example, I had a co-worker a couple of years ago who I was just walking past him and he said, Hallelujah, something. And I used to be an alcoholic, but now I'm drunk on Jesus. And I was just like, what? You know, I just kind of looked down. I was like, okay. He was like, well, I mean, you know, Jesus is everything to me. And I was like, okay, drunk on Jesus. And he was like, well, I, you know, he felt uncomfortable because I mean people feel uncomfortable with my facial expressions. What facial expressions were you using? Impredulity. I'm just kind of confused. But so on Twitter, which is my main platform, it gives me some time to laugh and just kind of chuckle and come back with a question that is kinder. And I just asked simply, well, how do you know that? It's a very straightforward question. And then they attempt to explain it. And when they explain it, it was something that's outrageous even more. So I just continue to ask them that. I really respect the people who do it face to face. And I mean, when you started doing it, I was just like, wow, he's good because, man, you know, I have a lot of respect for that. When you get those questions, just try to control your emotion. If they are putting out something in an inaccurate fact, at least from your perspective, for them it's probably an accurate fact. But I think one of the key things that I've seen you do it a number of times, I've seen Anthony do it a number of times, is quite often that inaccurate fact, even if you were to correct it, wouldn't change their belief. So don't chase down that rabbit trail. And of course, you want to avoid that my facts versus your facts kind of thing. Because then you're in debate mode. So I'm not good at keeping a straight face on most of my channels, but I treat even the most outlandish things as an opportunity. And I'll treat it with the same enthusiasm and genuineness as it would for any other claim. So I might momentarily laugh, but I still want to know why they believe that. And it's the same paths moving forward. Yeah, I was thinking that thing that they said that's wildly inaccurate. You can give them evidence, they may not change their mind, but it may not also be the reason why they think that something else is true. Okay, panel question number five is, would you share one of your most interesting talks with us? You guys have been doing this for a while. What's your most interesting talk? I can do this one real quick. It's the Marvel talk. I'm going to publish this one soon. It was a five hour conversation. I set up in a park and a guy was like, what are you doing? And I was like, I'll talk to you about anything. And he's like, I want to talk about Marvel movies. And I was like, I'm very serious about Marvel movies. And he was like, I am too. So we sat down and I think from 5.30pm to like 11 o'clock at night, I have my cell phone on my flashlight on my cell phone lit just to keep the lights on. And I'm bouncing it off things just so we can stay lit up. But we organized from best to worst all 17 MCU movies. And we're the only people in the parks. We had security guards come up to us twice and we're like, and that's the best. It's all about small states. And the security is like, are you guys all right? It's like, yes, sir. We're okay. But he left from the table like around 11.30pm and I got home at midnight and I've never seen him again. And it's like one of the saddest things as well to like, know a guy that well and just disappear into the ether. But we did come up with a list and I'm happy to publish that suit. Nikki on Twitter. Any interesting talks or Todd? One of my very first ones. This is back in 2016. I'm a retired firefighter and we were asked to go out to a community service one time to take our firetrap out to a Catholic football field. And the Roman Catholic priests cannot bless the water and we sprayed the field down. And it was kind of a ceremony. Well, the next spring they called and asked us to come back and do it again because the grass all died the year before. And so I, my question was, how could we determine whether you blessing the water or not is actually doing any good. And so that was a good one. That was one of my very first conversations. Well, one of my current most interesting is actually, it's not mine, it's Anthony's, Anthony's latest video. If you haven't watched it, I strongly encourage you to do so. It's a video entitled, I am my mother's daughter. Yeah. Or if you've seen it, I love it because first of all, it's this young woman whose, her claim, her belief is that she is her mother's daughter. The woman she calls mom is indeed her biological mother. A claim we would all make too. More than likely. And yet he is able to get her to go from 100% certainty and move down. Right? And that's, like I said, that's my goal with my students. And even for myself is all those things that I would never have thought to question again. Why not? I'm a musician. I play children's music about science to kids. Do you? Do you? And I've got labels on my guitar that says, this machine surrounds certainty and forces it to think again. I think it's just one of the greatest things you can do for yourself and one of the greatest gifts you can give to somebody else if you're able to get them to do that. So I think it's a fascinating talk. Well, thanks for the plug. Appreciate that. Yeah, that was fun. We are seeing some questions rolling in on Twitter. I think it is nanocon19. There's a couple of questions here for Nikki. Nikki, how do you think it is different for a woman to do street epistemology? Okay, so I'm assuming this is being positive because most people doing this are male. I don't necessarily, I wouldn't know if there was a difference between me doing it in a male, only because I've never experienced it as a male, so I can't compare the... Such a logical answer. I wish there were more women doing street epistemology. There was a talk that Anthony gave, I forget what the woman's name was, a mother, and her children, her adult children no longer believed. And she really felt guilty about that. Her husband, they had been divorced, her husband had been the breadwinner, and she felt like the only thing she had to give to her children was her faith, and the fact that none of her, the faith did not grow in any of her children, she felt like a real failure. And as Anthony, and Anthony did a great job with the questions he asked, but I thought, I wonder if a woman was doing the questioning. What questions would a woman ask that other woman that a man wouldn't think? There's gotta be other questions there, and I wish that was... And the only way to find that out is if we see more women getting into street epistemology, and you don't have to initiate the chats and film them and do that, but you can have these conversations, report them back to the communities that are out there, and give us your feedback. I've always suspected that females might actually be better at this, because men would probably open up a little bit more, and females might feel a little bit more comfortable than a man in the woods with a camera. So if you're on the fence about doing street epistemology, I'd urge you to consider doing it. I want to give a quick shout-out to Linda Mako, who's also doing street epistemology up in the Nordic country of Finland. We've got one more panel question here that was submitted, and we'll jump back to Twitter. I know I'm seeing lots of questions rolling in. It's great. What criteria, if any, do you use to decide who to speak with, who to talk to? I post things on Twitter that are thought-provoking and emotion-provoking. Yes, she does. But I do that purposefully, because I want to shock people into thinking, and it works, and it attracts a lot of people who don't agree with me. So they come to me. And that's really nice, because I don't have to go out and looking for them. But I never go after anybody else. I mean, I get a lot of comments, but if somebody makes a statement that's demonstrably false, then I do feel the need to engage with them. Being part of Recovering from Religion, I'm in a unique position, kind of like Nick, that people are coming to me asking questions, and I use that opportunity. With Recovering from Religion, we're not about de-converting anybody. We're there to help, offer help and support and community. And when people come to me and they say, I no longer believe, but I still have this fear of hell, and what do I do with it? And that's a great opportunity to peel back the layers of why they still have this fear. Or they may say, without a God-belief, how am I supposed to find meaning in my life? And we can use SE for that to kind of peel back the layers and help them look for themselves and use critical thinking to solve some of the problems. When I use SE, primarily, like I said, I use it on my teaching, I do occasionally do direct messaging with people on Facebook. And there I am relatively selective, where I tend to, if I'm going to engage with somebody, it's typically someone who is a thought influencer, perhaps, typically it's preachers. My former college roommate is a Catholic priest in New York, and I SE with him. Because these are people, I'm a teacher, and to me it's very important that I teach my students true things, but I don't teach my students false things. And so I'm very sensitive when I see other adults, people who are in positions of authority, who are presenting as true things that may not be true and are influencing children. So I'm more likely to engage with ministers, teachers, those sort of people. The only time I've done a face-to-face street epistemology interview was with a Gideon, a campus, we chatted a little bit. Did you have the tiny Bible with him? He did, yes. Nice. We have about 15 minutes left and several questions rolling in. We'll cruise through these here. This is a good one. It says, I am sometimes guilty of being the angry atheist in online debates. Is there any benefit to this? Perhaps the third parties, or does the harm outweigh any benefit? What do you guys think? Well, the benefit is to you, primarily, because you are able to direct your anger to people and kind of vent that. Real time. Real time. That's how skeptic Nikki got started, to be honest with you. Twitter is a great place to just unload your emotions. If you have somebody to unload your stresses on, you live longer. Did you know that? Yes, my favorite scientist is Dr. Robert Sapolsky. I mentioned him frequently. He's amazing. He's a neuroendocrinologist and primatologist at Stanford. He's an incredible doctor. He studies baboons, and he says that the baboons that live the longest have somebody to unload on, basically. Excellent. Well done. Now, if you want to change people's minds, that's a totally different story. You may want to dial it back on the anger. I don't think it's really going to do much good as far as, you know, if your goal is to change minds, but I think if you want to release some of that stress and emotion in your immediate environment, I think it's excellent. It's easy to be angry. It's easy to be angry. You know, I'm 57, and I didn't leave my religion tower as 50. And you look back and you think of all these people that you loved and trust, and you realize you've been taught something that wasn't true, and so it's easy to get angry at that. So that's a natural feeling. There's nothing wrong with being angry. But we need to somehow get past that and debating and stuff like we've been saying, it's not going to change people's minds. But helping people to think and ask questions for themselves, because that's how I came out, is by giving myself permission to ask. And that's what we're doing. We're giving people permission to ask questions to themselves. If I scream at you for like hours at end, you can walk away at least even more reinforced just by the fact that you were able to survive a really angry tirade. But if I can show you that and convince you that the reasons why you believe something aren't justified, that's something you can't just shove off or pretend it didn't happen. That's going to stick with you. And it doesn't necessarily take an angry tone to get that across, which saves you energy. So there's options. That's the main reason why we're doing SC. We're trying to talk to people than debating and arguments or being in an angry person. Most of us are trying to get away from the polarized nature of many things. So I think most of us acknowledge that just getting angry is just going to further polarize. Also, some people just aren't naturally angry. I'm a jolly guy. That might be true. This approach might be more appealing to people who are maybe a little bit more controlled with their emotions or you're just maybe naturally a little bit more empathetic to people and you've always listened to people to begin with. You might find this approach more up your alley, I don't know. But then again, I get messages from people who were those angry atheists arguing and debating with people that have adopted this approach. Good question here. Do you have any advice for political SC talks? It seems like a key point in religious SC talks, street epistemology talks, faith, and breaking that methodology down. Is there a similar key point or backbone to political discussions? I had a conversation with a lady at the last Sunday Sunday I went to so she might be here and I asked her what was her deeply held belief and she said Bernie Sanders. And I was like, so what's the belief behind it, Bernie Sanders? I was like, okay, so it took about a while to massage that into an actual belief claim, but I think just the process of formulating Bernie Sanders to, I really care about health care and this guy's going to do it for me. It was helpful. What I find really good about political beliefs is you can still get a really good objective claim out of that where you can work on figuring out what's the best way to get stuff done or who's the best candidate for this or if you really are supporting this candidate for this particular platform. But when you get out of the labels like the trigger words, it's a little bit more difficult compared to, it's a different difficulty realm because the mind fields are a little bit different on political issues. I think you can use SE probably similar, whether it's Confederate battle statues, should they be removed or not. All too often people, if you were to ask them, they would say, well, it's always been there. Tradition, that's the method. It's traditional. It's traditional. One thing I do see in politics that needs to be scrutinized is the certainty aspect. People who, we had a senate race in Mississippi not long ago, Cindy Hyde-Smith who did any number of missteps during the course of the campaign that really should have cost her the campaign and she would never walk it back. If she made mistakes, never would acknowledge it, never would apologize for it and yet she won the race and that to me is very frustrating. And this seems to be rewarded in any number of, choose your politician. There seems to be a lot of them that will push on completely certain that they're correct without acknowledging missteps. I'm loving the questions that are coming in here. This is awesome. I'm curious to get your stance on it. Do these techniques work as well with close friends or family or do you think being an impartial stranger helps? The techniques work with family. The problem is that they still don't change their minds. My mother fully admitted that she had no proof or evidence for her beliefs. She just wanted to believe them. They're comfortable to her and that's kind of where we ended up. With family and friends it's a little different than it is with a complete stranger because with a complete stranger you guys don't know each other outside of the context of that conversation so the conversation tends to remain on topic. When it comes to family and friends when you're discussing especially issues like this, you guys have history together so there's a lot of opportunity to kind of branch off on the things that happened in the past. Especially emotional occurrences especially if you're talking to someone close to you like a brother, sister, mother, father. I would say there's a difference. A lot of times the religion topic will be taboo. You can say like you have a spouse that's still a believer and you want to talk to them. You can actually start asking them SD questions about other things in life and not religion. To help them to start learning how to ask questions to themselves. Giving them permission to ask questions about why is this car better than Florida or whatever and ask SD questions on everyday things and then they will slowly roll into their religion. A difference with friends and families is that they're pretty much guaranteed to be repeat customers. Whereas with a stranger it's most likely going to be a one off except for once you've had a couple. Back that goal and they'll come back to it. That's where you want to nibble. You know, like Anthony mentioned, you don't have to attack the entire your whole church upbringing in one conversation taking it very, very slowly. Also an interesting route, teach a friend how to do SD who's not someone that's a family or relative of the person you want to have that conversation with and invite them to have that conversation. I think that avoids that problem as well. But be careful with family not to bang your head against the wall. If you know that your mother isn't going to change her mind and you know that she raised she's going to always tell you I raised you in church, I'm not deviating then just I haven't seen my family since Thanksgiving because they overwhelm me. So sometimes you have to take a step back after things don't work. We know if you're attempting to try to relate to them and you know the problem that happened at Thanksgiving is my dad said that Tiger Stripes came from Jesus and I was like no they didn't. And you know and then he can be incredibly difficult and I'm just like there are facts and there's fiction and your shirt's black right? He's like it's a shade of gray and I'm like I can't do this you know I'm not going to do this you know your shirt is black you're just being obstinate so if you're interacting with somebody like that 32 years of stress is enough you know are 33 years of last week damn it. Thank you for that by the way. So just be careful with your family and friends just limited if it gets too stressful if it's pleasant with my mom conversations are more pleasant so we talk a little bit more but with my father never again. Alright we got less than two minutes here we'll do one more question and then we'll wrap it up and then if we didn't answer your question we have a table for street epistemology stop by for free t-shirts sticker et cetera we also have a seminar they're calling them it's a workshop hands-on workshop for almost an hour and a half I'm also doing interviews at the gymnasium for anyone that's interested feel free to drop by. Have your belief challenged too okay last question real quick we got like a minute has anyone in an SE session ever challenged you to change your belief about something or doubt your settled belief? One of my lectures that's up on my youtube channel Mortgage Hill Musings it's entitled I can't believe I believe that facts and fallacies and physics and astronomy where I actually give several examples of things that I believed at one point actually I taught to students only to later realize oh I'm either completely incorrect or I'm at least incomplete in my explanations and I go through the process of how I discovered that and then how I continue to dig down to find a better answer or better explanation and I use that mainly because I hope that my students and watching that will realize oh you know that I'm the patsy there I'm just as susceptible for confirmation bias and all the various things that can trip you up in proper critical thinking and I hope that helps them along the way. Well I have Sanskrit tattoos on me so I have chakras tattooed on me I was going through my books and I have all kinds of books by Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle and all those people so yeah I used to be wrong and I tell people that you know it's okay to be wrong just do your best to correct yourself I used to believe in a God I think we'll end it on that note thank you all so much thank you guys