 103.9 FM, WZO Radio, Knoxville. Ladies and gentlemen, Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WZO Radio, 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, October 24th, 2021. I'm Larry Rhodes, or Douter 5. And as usual, we have our co-host, Wombat, on the line with us. Hello, Wombat. It's 2021. Can I still say this? Who let the dogs out? Yeah, you can still say that. I can still say that. Okay, Gary, Gary. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Our guests today are George Brown, the second and a half from Brooklyn. Hello. We have Dred Pirate Higgs, Gary from Canada. Oh, hey there. And the John Richards, all the way from England. Hello. Hello. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstition. And if you think you're the only non-believer in town, you know, you're just not. In Knoxville, we have a group of over a hundred, I mean, a thousand, obviously. Yeah. And we'll tell you more about that after the mid-show break. Wombat, where are we going in the talk today? We're going to be talking about the physics of unreality and all that pertains to it. But before we get into that subject, which should be really fun today, we're going to throw it up to our own Dred Pirate Higgs with our weekly invocation. Our noodley Lord, who art in a colander, I'll taunt a be thy noodles. Thy blood be rum, thy sauce be yum with meat as it is with vegetables. Give us this day our garlic bread, and forgive us our cussing, as we forgive those who cuss against us. And lead us not into ketoism, but deliver us some carbs. For thine are the noodles and the sauces and the grog whenever and ever. You know, I really love how it always sticks big at ketoism. Hey, Dred, why don't we introduce the topic of the show? All right. Well, yeah, I was interested in talking about the physics of unreality. And it's how media, you know, particular movies and television shows presents a distorted view of how the world works and how there may be a tendency of some to actually believe it works that way. And, you know, in the absence of critical thinking, you know, it could lead to issues where the way we imagine the world working is in direct conflict with the way it actually works and leads to some pretty bad outcomes. And you know, it's weird. You actually worked on movie sets, haven't you? So you actually have like the full scope of seeing the strings, the director. Oh, yeah. Okay, swap out the stunt guys, people. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Stand still. Yeah, yeah. Put in the grenade. Yeah. Step out. Put the dummy. Blow him up. Yeah, exactly. The holy grenade. And this is actually going to be a topic previously, but I unfortunately missed the memo and got too excited about something else. But what do you find so irksome? Like what's an example that you want to talk about that so irksome? Well, you know, I think with the prevalence of, you know, these superhero TV shows and movies that we really get a distorted view of certainly what the body can take. Sure. The human body is capable of withstanding. You know, you think about the flash, for instance, that instantaneous motion, you know, from zero to 110, you know, it's the same as hitting a brick wall, traveling at 110. You know, the fact that, you know, your internal organs, of course, would just be, you know, a big pile of mush inside your body is, you know, something that you sort of have to recognize is the case. Or even, you know, where you see Superman, you know, somebody's falling off a building and he, you know, flies underneath them and scoops them, you know, it's like, right, well, you know, I mean, if somebody fell into somebody's arms traveling at a terminal velocity with the man of steel, his arms would, in fact, cut them into three nice pieces, bloody pieces at that. So. Larry, go ahead. Yeah, I always was interested in those pictures. I thought they were funny where like Superman was lifting up like an aircraft carrier. And I mean, you think about the size of his hands, you know, and even if it was the most powerful thing in the world. And there was an aircraft carrier above him. He would have just flown right on through it because the weight of the aircraft carrier, he would have just pressed down. Yeah. And just, you know, he would have been supporting an elephant on a toothpick. Yeah. There is an interesting scene in the superhero show called The Boys, which is on Amazon, where they fly into a plane that has both of its engines like blown off or something. And the superhero type character is like, okay, I guess we're, we can't do anything. We're going to have to fly away. And then there's another super is like, can't you lift this plane up? He's like, don't you know how physics work? I have to press some off something to be able to push up. If I'm flying in the air, I can't push off of anything. So we can't save this plane. We're done. Well, that's also the thing about Superman. What's he pushing against? I can understand it. Like if he had wings, then, you know, he's pushing against the air, but without any kind of jet. And what's the motive propulsion? Like, you know, John Richards, listen, I know you might be feeling left out with a superhero discussion, but you gave us Harry Potter. Like, I think eventually we're going to be going into the realm of, you know, it's all just magic at the end of the day, like the superhero, the force that controls the flash. All these like, you know, tensilizing aspects are magic. And I feel like who does magic better than like Tolkien? Who does magic better than, you know, the Harry Potter universe and stuff like that? But do you find anything? I have my wand right here. Do you find anything particularly irksome about like the concepts of magic and like, why do you still have these problems if you can levitate anything or anything like that? Oh, yeah. Well, it may surprise you to hear that Marvel Comics made it across the Atlantic. No way. No way. How do you get a comic book to fly that far? That's crazy. Yes. But the problem is, if it was presented realistically, a movie would be intensely boring, wouldn't it? I mean, unless something happened like somebody put a live bullet in the prop gun. Right. Yeah. That was there. Baldwin thing that just happened recently. Yeah. Oh, that happened recently? Yeah. Just like days ago. Yeah. The assistant director or something or the director of photography. Photography. Yeah. That can't study happening. That's crazy. She died just maybe two or three days ago. Yeah. That's what we call a topical reference. But if we weren't expected to suspend our imagination as we walked into the movie theater, imagine how long we'd have to be there to get any events to happen, you know? I mean, it takes five minutes to get beyond the Earth's atmosphere as Captain Cook found out recently, William Shatner, and five minutes to come back again. But to go any further than that is intensely boring. I mean, how many days did it take for them to get to the moon in 69? I think it was four. And that's traveling at way supersonic speed. Absolutely. I mean, really, really, really fast. Yes, absolutely. So we've really got to put up with some exaggeration. Otherwise, we don't get the entertainment. Right. I've got to wonder, you know, if Jesus or Muhammad left the world, you know, like floating up or on a winged horse. Yes. We know that there's no heaven right above the clouds. Right, right, right, right. They didn't know that, though. They didn't know that. So if you could actually, and Dred, I'm just going to just pick. If Jesus flew out and people saw it, he's traveling at least speed of light. Let's just give him speed of light. I'll give it to him. Even though we could see him, I'll give it to him. The universe observable is like 14 trillion light years across. He's still going to have a couple thousand years ago. He's still going like we're lucky if he's out of the galaxy right now. It's crazy. Yeah. How's he going to get to the speed of light? That's the problem because unless he accelerates very, very slowly, it's rough. If he does accelerate fast, then he's going to leave his brain behind, isn't he? Of course, there's time dilation. Dred, go ahead. Yeah. So I understand, of course, like everyone that the suspension of belief or disbelief is critical in appreciating some fictions. I guess the concern I have is that some people tend to carry that over into their real life and that it has real life impacts. In fact, it almost supports religious belief because it's a continued suspension of disbelief. You open the book of Genesis and you really do have to suspend your disbelief in order to appreciate that Moses parted the Red Sea, that kind of thing. And that's why I think it has the potential of negatively impacting people who don't have those critical thinking skills to parse that out. George, I want to throw this out. I want to throw a question out at you and see how you were raised in atheists so you never had the religious indoctrination. But did you ever fall into any sci-fi series or serial or book series where you're like, yeah, I never had a chance to believe in Jesus. But you know, Dick Tracy could totally punch one guy in the face and knock him out, whatever your cup of tea was back then. Were you able to suspend your sense of disbelief for any form of media? Well, I have a confession to all of you and our listening audience and all the ships at sea. I am a science fiction junkie. Nice. You know, if I could put it in a syringe and inject it into my aorta, I would do that. So it's science fiction and chocolate. So yes, I grew up reading science fiction and enjoying it. But I could see bad writing. I can't handle bad writing. And a lot of science fiction is really cruddy writing. Yeah, especially now, when everyone's talking about it. But I had a great love for Ray Bradbury. And he wrote Junk too. Sure. Even Isaac Asimov had some stinkers, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know what else to say. I mean, the concept of what if. But unlike, well, in a way, it's like I have experience that sort of parallels dead pirates in that I was working in the record industry back in the early 60s. And, you know, could witness all the artifice of that, you know, the top 40 situation. It seems like the thought that was coming to me from our discussion so far is that the human race, maybe, you know, the audience at large keeps suffering from technology fatigue in the special effects. And so we need more and more whiz bang, you know, some. We get more. Yeah, so we get desensitized to like the level of CGI that's put into shows. People decide to go on top of it and on top of the top. So, you know, now it's like we have to be entertained by news on TV. And, you know, no news story will get aired now unless it is accompanied by music. Think about it. And you go on YouTube and everybody's YouTube's, you know, you're going to fix your engine on your car. It's accompanied by music. It's all shit. It's all theater. Can I have a rant about that too? Because even a documentary, which you might consider to be similar to a lecture, has to have a background music, doesn't it? I can imagine. I can imagine when I was a teacher having to put a record on to do a lesson to. Even documentaries about ants have to be like, and this ants name was Jerry. And then here comes the evil ant. And now they're fighting gets each other's action cuts and stuff is just like, what are you guys doing? Larry, I saw you with your hands of what's up. Yeah. You know how I go on about the soul, you know, and before. He's still on the soul. I knew I couldn't get it through. I couldn't get through. I knew. Well, let's talk about the physics of the soul. I mean, sure, sure, sure. Why is it that whenever somebody reports a soul, you know, it's not naked. It's got clothes on. It's like ethereal clothes. And they're always like floating just above the ground or standing on the floor. Does gravity have effect? There's a, there's an ethereal H and M where everybody gets their soul clothes from. Yeah. Okay. And then they come up tiny little platform shoes with the polycarbonate heels that you can like stand three feet off the ground with. Yeah. One of the things though, let's say that a person died in a castle and the ghost haunts the castle. Well, if the ghost is not affected by material things, he wouldn't be affected by gravity. If, if he's not affected by gravity, then how is he still in the on earth and the castle? Yeah. Well, the earth would have left a long time ago. Right. Right. It just makes no sense. I'm going to dress my soul at gap. I'm sorry. I'd like to read the label on the jacket of a ghost. Yeah. See where, where he shops. Yeah. Oh, there you go. Okay. Dred, what's up? Well, anyway, I was going to say, um, there are, I mean, I've seen some really good films where, you know, it's science fiction. It's informed by science. Um, when movie I'm actually looking forward to is, uh, is doomed because that is that science fiction. That's true science fiction. Yeah. So there's, there's technology. There's, uh, you know, there's politics. There's, uh, ecology. It's a space opera, but it's, it's informed by science. Yeah. Yeah. It has a real basis in the physical world and the physics of the universe. And we can appreciate the spectacle without having to employ to such a great extent, the suspension of disbelief. I agree. I mean, when you look at Godzilla and okra or whatever the two monsters are, I mean, it's just, it was good when it was in the 1950s sci-fi genre. But the stuff that comes out now is just, I don't know. I just, I don't watch it and just, I just bulk at it. Just to clarify, did you say Godzilla and okra? Did I miss something? Is there an opera? Opera? Oh, opera? No, I'm just kidding. I don't know. So whatever the monster is, Megatron or. Okay. Okay. Okay. I love science fiction movies. I put them in two categories. One where there's like one scientific thing and everyone's freaking out about that scientific thing. Those are the ones I don't like. Those are the ones that are like your time travel or I came up with a MacGuffin. Everyone's talking about the MacGuffin and I get tired of talking about it for like half an hour. And then there's ones that are like Dune or ones like interstellar is the, that example of we have this new weird thing and everyone's going to keep talking about it from the rest of the whole movie. Or movies where there's already an established world that has science that's futuristic in it. And no one's talking about it because you really care about the story and everyone's already jaded about this technology. And you see beautiful things, but no one's like, eh, it's not a big deal. No one cares about it. So like the original Star Wars movies where like people have lightsabers and people aren't like, your sword is a laser. Now the Star Wars movies are like, I have a special laser sword and they're very explicit about it. But it's like, it was cooler when you didn't talk about it because that was just part of the world. And I feel like science fiction is good job in coloring worlds and how people appreciate it. Because we have technology here that we don't talk about every single conversation. And it just goes to make the world. In my head, the reality of a conversation more interesting when people take things, certain things are granted. And my head is like, ah, that's because it's already a part of the natural world. John Rutgers, what's up? Sorry for that. I got a confession. Talk to me, talk to me. This is unreal. I know. No, it is a place you could get there. You could. I am helpful. I took the photo. Yes. Yes. It's my copyright. It's not in my bedroom at the moment where I am. Right. It does worry me that sometimes some people who maybe haven't had such a good scientific education, or maybe they are predisposed to believing things because they see them. Right. And it does have an effect like, for example, thanks to Jaws, sharks are unreasonably feared. You know, the numbers of deaths caused by sharks every year, I think it's vastly else exceeded by the number of deaths caused by spiders. Or coconuts. Right. Yes. But I don't want to be the guy who gets killed. I didn't say they were harmless. No, but if Jaws was about mosquitoes, people would be like, oh, these are the things that are killing way more people than anything else. Right. It's a good point. I think Jurassic Park has probably set back paleontology by at least 40 years. Yes. Yes. And what about Planet of the Apes? Surely that reinforces the idea that we're descended from them. Yeah, it does make the conversation more complicated when you're like it's not a descendant. It's like a bifurcation off a common ancestor. It's complicated. It's nuanced. Though I have found this, and I'll say this, I think, okay, I'll say this. Similar to how lies will always be more delicious than the truth. I found that nuance is always going to be more elusive than ego. Yes. I don't believe things that appeal to our ego more, even if the thing is counterintuitive and just flatly wrong or unsupported with any evidence. If it makes me feel good, I'll believe it. And nuance is all about letting you know, maybe you don't know as much as you think you do. And there might be more colors to this particular topic than we're willing to let on. And I find like movies are really good at just appealing to ego, but not about nuance. And I would love to see someone take an attempt, even with documentaries, which people are skewing more towards entertainment and ego, but a discussion in a movie format about the lack of knowing things and always being willing to have more openness to nuance. And to be honest with you, I only get that from like obscure dramas or things that have more time to spend on subjects and not for movies itself. George, what's up? Well, I have a movie for you. Talk to me. Talk to me. It was shot in Mongolia. And the name of the movie is the Cave of the Yellow Dog. The Cave of the Yellow Dog. And I'm not going to say anything more about it, because there was a surprise. And I don't want to blow the surprise. And I don't want to say what it is. I'm going to check that out. Not even a synopsis? Nothing, nothing, nothing. I love it. I'm definitely checking it out right now. That's good. Cave of the Yellow Dog, if you're interested, look it up. Also, Twilight Zone in my head is one of the best shows that was ever on television. If you watch every single one of those episodes, they've done more than a half hour, 20 minute format than most people have done with an entire movie series in terms of just punctuating a point about the human condition. It's never about the technology. It's never about the twist. It's never about whatever monster or the week is there. It's about the human condition and realizing we are a complicated species that are controlled by our vulnerabilities until we recognize them. That's when we have power to overcome them. It's just a beautiful thing. John, what's up? John, what's up? I don't know whether this will travel, but I'll try it. If your theory about nuance is correct, Ty. Talk to me. Then the problem of unreality being convincing, excessively convincing, should have been worse when movies were in black and white. Is there a joke in here? I'm always listening for the pun. I didn't think it would travel. Somewhere between here and across the Atlantic, the sense got garbled. It's okay. I'm ready to catch the next one. I'm ready to catch the next one. I was trying. I was trying. Dred, what's up? What's up? I was going to mention that you had mentioned that you had mentioned Twilight Zone. Another one was Electric Dreams, which was an anthology of Philip K. Dix's writings. He's a well-known science fiction writer. But again, along the lines of revealing the frailties of the human condition as opposed to superhuman feats of strength and all that kind of stuff. Right. It's amazing. It's amazing. I wish they make television like that today. I think they're trying to. I think Twilight Zone has a reboot. I have not checked out yet. I know Black Mirror exists. Funny thing about Black Mirror. I didn't know it was made in England until the fourth episode. I literally thought everyone was just speaking like a gibberish language. And you weren't supposed to understand what anyone was saying. Until it was like, oh, is this English? I thought so much. I was like, I don't understand what they're saying. Now I understand it. I was like, there's captions here. There's English posters in the background. They have to be speaking a language. I'm sorry about that. That's me personally. I didn't realize there's a variety of so many intricate accents in England. It's not just posh or scouse. It's like 40 other languages. They can vary. It's nuts. It was nuts. It was nuts. I wasn't ready for it. We kind of understand each other. It's crazy. Larry. Final comments before we go out for the break. I'm ready to go for it, I guess. Let's do it. All right. This is the digital free thought radio hour and WOZ radio 103.9 LP FM right here in New York. And we'll be right back after this short break. Nice. Let's do countdown. Five, four, three, two. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm doubter five. And we're on WOZ radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Now let's talk about the eighth year. It was founded in 2002. We're in our 19th year. We have over a thousand members. And we have weekly in person meetings in Knoxville's old city at Barley's tap room in Pizzeria. Look for us out on the patio. If you'd like to join our Tuesday evening zoom meetup, you can email us at askanatheist at Knoxvilleatheist.org. We'll be right back after this short break. If you'd like to join our Tuesday evening zoom meetup, you can email us at askanatheist at Knoxvilleatheist.org or let's chat SE at gmail.com. You can find us online. That's Knoxville Atheists on Facebook, meetup.com or at Knoxvilleatheist.org or Google Knoxville Atheist. It's just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you're a town. Don't find one. Star. Alright. Where do you want to pick up? We were talking about the Physics of Unexplained Reality, and I almost want to make a point that I appreciate it when shows do make the effort to show how boring it is to show how frail human beings actually are in a sci-fi setting. And one of my favorite examples is Star Trek, the old school versions, where they would take, if you listen to a conversation when they're an elevator, elevator they will go down a series of floors that is always a consistent number of floors in their world because the sound engineer has a map of what floor they're going from in their in their ship down to the next their location and will chime as they're speaking to represent the exact number of floors they're going and if it takes a whole minute for them to get there he will do seven times throughout their conversation in the background and it will be a minute long conversation in the elevator before they come out and i'm like i love that level of detail george you had some star trek what's up well you reminded me uh my favorite old original star trek effect is the um the tractor beam okay which has specific music that goes with it and i really like the way the whole thing goes together it's the tractor beams sure so um i was i was going to tell this little story about um how i on my job at the time i i was um i ordered a tricorder and i i had to find a tricorder and so i called the store you're gonna have to start with a tricorder in cal yeah well the tricorder is okay it's a little handheld device that spock the science and technology engineer i think on star trek he carried around he carried it around with him and and the captain would say spock tricorder readings and spock would look at his tricorder and twiddle the dials a little bit and he would say there are five life form readings on the other side of that hill or what the the environment has made out of or the the oxygen and the and the atmosphere anything that that it takes a reading it will take a reading on the it should have been a multi-quarter not a tricorder yeah well it was called a tricorder so i called up i called up this star trek store in los angeles and i said i said i'd like to buy a tricorder and the fellow promptly said do you want do you want a dummy tricorder or you want a working tricorder okay that's my joke yeah the truck working when i assume you just had blinking lights and maybe some sound no so some other time i'll i'll tell you all the the real context of this story but that's enough dread what's up i think 103.9 fm w o z o radio i think that we're we're we're living in a world of schtick you know and schtick is a word that's really hard to explain do you know what dread pirate have you ever heard it i do i don't know what schtick is it it's kind of your modus operandi really it's kind of a modus operandi but it's your modus operandi hmm yeah well of your stage business you know you're as an actor let's say it's you know like you're a comedian and you play the violin like jack then yeah yeah that's right yeah it's sort of the thing you pull back on tonal gimmick too yeah it's kind of saying oh i see this i see this rap it's what you rap you're acting but dread what are you going to and of course it it can also mean like stage business it's a word that's not quite defined all all the time but you know there's there's a schtick that happens like on youtube for instance it's schtick for people to start their youtube video by saying what's up youtube i mean what a stupid question that is but it's schtick everybody does it yeah can we say what's up alexa you could drip hi what's up so uh extending on our extending our topic i i was uh it carries over into some of the the stuff you see on television particularly on discovery channel like discovery in history and another one called detour where they're you know there's ancient ancient aliens and you know ghost hunters and yeah and it and it really is it's i think it draws the gullibility of people who are are set up to okay to buy into this stuff right and all of a sudden discovery channel which originally was touted as a science forum i know you're hurting me so far right now it's been totally debased um by uh by all these uh television shows that you know appeal to the lowest it is you're right you're absolutely correct how we how the great has fallen it's amazing totally true it's totally history channel is even worse you use history stuff right now it's just game of thrones it is romans it's so bad as about as much biking as music tv to music yeah mtvs no longer showing music videos discoveries not discovering anything history doesn't have history aim c is showing things like home alone it's just like the third one not even like the first one it's like that's these aren't even american classics no one watches the third home alone would be no one likes no no i so agree it's a terrible shame that discovery and history channels have gone that way but as as you said dred they are appealing to the lowest common denominator because that's the market isn't it and the manufacturers of entertainment are very keen to commercialize as far as possible so i blame for all of the imaginary monsters i blame the manufacturers of monster munch i will throw this out i think reverse engineering yeah physics of reality on reality like when a show like myth busters got very popular i was concerned as a scientist because they were making definitive claims off of one test that largely in most cases weren't repeatable they and we call that in science an n of one you did one test right and that is not conclusive of anything there's no statistical points that you can make on an n of one so if you did a test and you're like ha myth busted it's like no you got to do that like 15 times at least just get like an approximate average and even then you can say my test as i've designed it shows that it's not feasible here i know people would look at that test and say okay well what can we do to improve it it's constant discussion but they are marketing basically television entertainment as science and got rich off of doing it and at the detriment of it's changing the way how people think about science and so you go on youtube i'm sorry i'm the last my last part of my right you go on youtube and you find people are like i'm blank blank blank on youtube what's up all right and then they do one dumb test that's terrible and they're like and that's how you break ipod phones and that's why mic microsoft zune is better than the ipod i was like no no you have to do more tests than that to come with the definitive conclusions so so another issue that has come up in recent months also is the replication error the replication crisis right so a lot of these uh you know peer reviewed studies uh out there have not been replicated and yet they're being touted as uh the definitive answer of whatever they you know scientists happen to be uh trying to research and the scary thing on top of that or is it replicated only by one person in one lab right and that's what i mean is that you know it's it's the test is done the hypothesis is demonstrated you know they've done the experiment but nobody has gone to replicate the experiment in order to verify that the experimental process is done correctly that there weren't confounding variables uh yadda yadda yadda so um it puts it it actually puts science on a very uh thin ice in some respects that yes you know the rigor of verification falsifiability you know carl popper and all that kind of stuff is not being followed through on and that is really leading that's giving science a bad wrap let let me back up yes it's giving science a bad wrap it's not putting science on thin ice it's putting people's appreciation for science yes if any science is putting that on high alert and which is why we're talking about it now john i couldn't agree more you know you're speaking my worst dread i think because it's this misrepresentation of anecdotes in one as having significance that has devalued science over the decade so i i just like the what i call the dignification of society right oh that's so good and and this is really why i wanted to talk about the physics on reality because that is really is lending it all this support and people are just gobbling it up so let me let me focus on that why can i just finish this yeah go for it go for it thank you that's that's why we were in such a mess at the beginning of the pandemic oh yeah absolutely oh absolutely we've got absolutely we've actually got to thank the virus for giving real science a platform right um also another one out that always bothered me is whenever you have like a csi crime scene investigation show where they go they take the evidence and they take them to the lab and the lab is always as a lab manager it always irks me when people aren't wearing their lab coats or ppp we have a great good lab people maintain safety standards but the ones on tv should be shut down immediately because you have people with open lab coats and like gel frost hair no ppe no gloves very poor lighting very very lighting and in the background there's like neon lining and bubble ling urlmeyer flasks just on tables with food coloring and that's labeled and it's like what is going on and why is there one bottle pumping liquid into this bottle what's going on there why isn't that that's right what kind of the only thing they're missing are triples like why do you need to do that to show that something scientific like in a real science lab it should just be everything's like you know crystalline and clear and white that's right it's put away if you're not using it and put away if it's not using it like what is all this stuff and there's people walking around on laptops and they're not watching where they're going makes me so upset i know it's not a physics issue but it says policy well it is it's reality or unreality really bothers me and you can count you can count the number of liquids chemical liquids that are actually colored on the fingers of one hand yeah it's like bright primary colors green blue red and yellow and it's just like is this all mountain dew what's going on here you who george you know i if i may be so bold as to assume a an undertone to this whole discussion it's that as a civilization as i know it we are always confusing theater with reality yes yes yeah absolutely right and i think one of the biggest is that our undertone i mean oh yeah absolutely and and and the people who present the artifice of the theater that we're hooked on are very very good at it yes and that's nothing new you know the ancient what is it the ancient Greeks were great at this too at their theater george i'm going to throw out the perfect example i think you have to touch on and i believe it is um wwe it is the absolute john that is uh worldwide wrestling don't at enterprise or generation you know okay okay great there's no better example of live suspension of disbelief than watching a guy get slapped on a chest and being like oh he stopped his heart for five seconds he's on the ground he's and then he walks up and he gets away it's like he died but the worries brought him back to life so we can do the next match and everyone's like well that's what happened that's what happened i know that because he did that last time undertaker he dies all the time every episode larry what's up i'm sorry yeah well that's a good example but i mean consider the state of the art of special effects in movies nowadays it's getting harder and harder to tell what's actually true i mean what's actually true in real and what you can expect from what they portray is possible using special effects larry i hear you but the thing is you can actually make something convincing with a special effect whereas with worldwide wrestling that's just two sweaty guys in underwear slapping each other and people will still eat popcorn believe people will go home and think i know how to fight because i saw that guy jump off a rope as long as there's a folding chair nearby yeah and it won't hurt because i saw a guy do it and he didn't get hurt so i won't hurt me either and then you need to have people get injured and hurt backyard wrestling all the time dread what's up well i was i made a reference last week to the allegory of the cave um you all remember that from philosophy yeah socrates the allegory of the cave so i kind of likened science as to that one person that ventured out and and then came back to tell everyone hey man you're just watching these images being uh you know held before the fire yeah amen and and film is putting people back in the cave yeah science science got everyone out and now film is putting people back in okay i'll i'll take a i'll take a little counter stab at that because i do feel like there's a uh an issue of consent when i'm watching a movie sometimes i do it for an escape sometimes i want a good story right and so i am purposely putting my critical thinking here so that i can be more open to experiencing and enjoying whatever i'm seeing in front of me but i want people to have accountability i don't want this to say films are making you less critical i want people to be like when you are it's your fault if you aren't turning your critical back on yeah like if you're critical thinking back on after you walk out of a movie theater like you need to be able to do that so it's not the movies fault it's your fault if you're not doing that and that's what we got to make sure people engage their critical thinking not all times then if you have to turn it off to have fun go for it but turn it back on when you come back to interactive human society and i think the little the little knob there that data has right yeah click off click on dread i was thinking of things that you were saying way back like even last week with like how great would it be if we could turn off pain because like our brain's like hey right we're in pain we're in pain it's like i get it i get it can we can we please focus on whatever i also got to get done like how can we improve evolution in a way or improve our bodies i would also love for there to be like a little meter for your critical thinking gauge yeah like if it goes down to below certain level it's like red leds but if it's in green you're like okay this guy's thinking critically it's great turn it off turn it back on notifications are on all right this guy's trying to fill your money just hey what's up Larry yeah one thing though that you may or may not be have in mind is that you're a well-trained scientist you're you're the critical standards are very high there are a lot of people out there they're not so high and they go into the theater and they don't exactly know where to draw that line of what's real what's not real and that's one of the things I was trying to bring up earlier and what's worse is they have the vote yeah yeah you know and again it is about the response there is a responsibility and I think part of it falls upon the producers of film in order to you know make sure that they're not misleading whole you know populations with these really outlandish notions about how the world works because it I really seriously believe it does have a real-world impact when people walk out of theaters don't have that switch go home and jump off their roof thinking that they can fly or right don't try this don't try that yeah don't try this at all I mean the fact that they've got to put these claimers like that yeah yeah it's telling in itself because you know now they're just covering their butts in order not to be sued you know for you know gross negligence and misrepresenting you know something that can't happen that they depicted could happen you know right yeah George well um Facebook is is in the hot seat right now I don't know where to go people you know I bump into people here where I live who tell me certain political realities that they believe and I say that's BS where did you hear that they say oh I heard it on Facebook that's how I know it's true yeah but the other thing yeah the other thing that that I'm gonna throw out is you know mega churches presents spectacle and those are they doing the same thing you know they're presenting their physics of reading no and they're doing it because they know it works like that's why they become even more theatrical because they know that works they know that's appealing I when you think about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the pictures that you have versus how it probably happened in reality in the theater version there's people lining the streets because everybody heard this is happening and there's roman soldiers in the front and there's roman soldiers in the back and there's Jesus Christ carrying this giant lumber piece of wood with his sweaty abs and he's just like oh this is so heavy but I'm doing it anyway for your sins and everyone's just like why being like I can't believe this is happening to such a good man probably in reality who knows it could have happened at midnight no one even knew there was probably no crimes there was no internet there was you know how hard it is to get 16 people even just to show up at like a either at like a party or like a volunteer shelter or a suitcase people aren't doing that people aren't leaving their homes to watch some guy carry a piece of wood it's not that boring come on I I just you know the drama of how we like to envision history versus the way how it may have actually been is always going to be desperately different from the two of each other and I feel like we like to color and romance because we love the theatrics and christians know that pastors know that people in charge know that and they will do the same thing whether it's George Washington on a boat looking very proud and regal in that picture or people sign in the Declaration of Independence and they're all wearing their super wades and stuff like that in a perfectly well-lit room even though it's like the 1700s how do you even get that right we we fall subject to that every single time John Richards uh get ready to take us out what's up well I just want to say of course science is an embarrassing way of making unreality come true I mean I have a much better communicator than captain Kirk has sure you do listen I'll throw that out too have you ever seen quantum leap there was a show where a guy was literally jumping people's bodies I got to explain it for everybody else on the show scott bacula for the millennials scott bacula he jumps into people's bodies and he helps them out and then he jumps into another body but he's never doing it for profit he's just trying to get back to his original body and meanwhile he has a friend that can find him through spacetime and show up to his coordinates as a hologram and he will tell him what happens in the future to help scott bacula try to help that person's life so that he can jump into the next life it's like a whole karma situation but the thing is that that little I forgot what it was even called but that device that his friend had was yeah it was death it was basically an iPhone it was basically just a smartphone even though it was like this huge huge piece of the thing it's like a giant thing in his hand he's like it says here tomorrow the stock market's gonna go up 2% and that was like the biggest technology advance for like back then but it's like of course like anyone can do that anyone can totally do that it's like it's gonna rain tomorrow let me push it into these buttons like yo that's just a weather it's a weather app we know we know what those things are the latest thing of course is there's there's a girl being born I think in the States whose genome was completely red while she was an embryo and the decision was made to let her go to term and get born okay I think about that because it means that in future you can have a little bit of cell taken out of your embryo and you can have it read and you can decide hmm this baby's got blue eyes I don't want that give it to the abortion man yeah it's just change it they could change it yeah they could also change it too that's yes yes that's right give a red anime eyes we got five minutes left let's do some hot takes um let's see John final words what do you think about this topic before we head out we won't plug yet but what's your final words on the subject yeah okay well it does worry me because for example our girls watch a cartoon show it's um an internet cartoon show and the the characters have all got very huge eyes yeah and they're all females and they all are obsessed with their appearance and make it up and walk on the model catwalk and it's giving my children an impression that the only thing that matters for girls is the external appearance sure sure sure you know uh maybe a bit of real talk but when I was growing up black beauty standards were never on tv you and and whenever they were it's a black person trying to straighten out their hair or blank their hair blonde or bleach their skin or be you know closer to the white conventional beauty so yeah those affect people definitely growing up larry's um and yeah it's important to know outside of the physics outside of the echo chamber of media that there's a whole real world out there that's subject to real physics where real things matter and real things have an impact and we should highly value that more than what's being told to us through a particular agenda or a particular form of media but but larry uh final thoughts on the physics of unreality well i think they're unreal as it is or i mean you can one more last stab at souls uh no i don't want to go there again but uh again you know you can't have uh Muhammad splitting the moon i mean how how would he do it moon's a huge object um but it in case we think that unreality is something that's that's come up with special effects in the current day no they've been going on forever i mean think of um paul bunion and blue ox any legend is uh unreality and generally when they do things that are magical or um you know prophetic you know it's all it all peters out when you look at it with the eye of science sure i i'll fill one thing out there is something called a rule of cool whereas if it looks cool you're willing to let it slide and there's no better example you guys won't know about this but a show called because it makes a good story right there's a show called dragon ball z where there's an evil villain who uses the power of the moon to get stronger and so the good guys destroy the moon using energy blasts and that worked for one enemy and then two seasons later than another anyone and they're like we got to blow up the moon and they blew up the moon again but it was on earth and there was only one moon and they blew it up two seasons ago but we let it slide because it looked cool right because it looked cool it's like they blew up the moon again i loved it the first time so let's let's just let it happen again george would love to know your final thoughts on the physics of unreality um i it's this is there a one of us in this room right now who don't love well-done artifice because i do i did no matter how much i know what's going on behind the scrim that's a special kind of a curtain in theater i love it when it's done well i was entertaining yeah sometimes if a car crash doesn't explode five times yeah how bad would it be if the secret agent was just pushing bullets into a car and it wasn't exploding for like the whole movie you're just like this used to work what's going on here i shot these red barrels nothing's going on uh dread final thoughts first time you know it's funny you say that because i think it was um what's that jump street the third one where the two main characters there they encounter several situations on a car chase where an explosion should have happened right didn't they go wow that didn't happen and then it was finally a a truck full of chickens or something and that exploded so so that was kind of you know a funny twist on the physics of unreality i love it i love it but um i i did want to just before we close out i wanted to just mention a petition that i had started which you can find at change.org and it's world truth 2021 and it's an it's an appeal for something similar to the 1914 christmas day truce but an intentional appeal to the un to um have a break from hostilities as a step towards uh more reasonable discourse towards uh peaceful resolution in a world of peace so i just wanted to push that i love it um man now i can't transition back to exploiting cars my head a whole story you ended on world peace joe a direct part where can we find your stuff at well you can find me i live stream this uh on sunday mornings at eight a.m pacific standard time my channel is m-i-n-d-p-y-r-a-t-e mine pirate then text me out and subscribe please it's cool uh john richards where can we find you i'm on free thought productions channel please like subscribe set notifications all that sort of thing but last night not only did i launch um well launch it's a regular thing it's not the first global atheist news which i know we're maybe going to talk about another time because of the uh ai priests and pastors but i also had a very interesting conversation with ex christian erin who is one of the presenters for the aca and she's a she's a great conversationalist take a look it is it is good to find people who are still good at you know even if it's over zoom just a face-to-face conversation it's such a rewarding experience and as we step out of what is aca atheists uh mean it's austin yeah yeah and uh i would not recommend that you subscribe to my channel i would recommend that you check out global atheist news hosted by john richards it is a fantastic weekly update of everything going on the world next week i want to talk about one of the stories that he brought up with ai being taking over the church and whether or not more people are congregating in front of an ai pastor than live flesh and blood pastors and why the flesh and blood pastors are getting upset about it it's the most bizarre thing but it's the thing that's actually happened i'd love to delve in more dread i want to go ahead i want to see the i want to see the plasters replaced by dollyx oh man okay i just wanted to point out that uh data straightie or no loma uh put in here that uh always at the end of the movie of course everyone's walked out is the story all names characters and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious the disclaimer of course is always at the end after you're all left and unless it's the marvel movie then you're sending through it and enjoying the soundtrack larry what is atheism i have no idea i think we're done with the show since nobody knows what atheism is and no one's talking about it so yeah souls exist atheism doesn't mean anything end of the show right right uh sure souls don't exist at least that's what i understand my book and since you asked is called atheism what's it all about and that's available on amazon thanks everybody for joining us on the digital freethought radio hour remember you can find this show on apple items pocketcast amazon and podcasts everywhere just search for digital freethought radio hour you can find uh my content at uh digital freethought dot com be sure to click on the blog button for our radio show archives atheist songs and many articles on the subject if you have any questions for you the show you can send them to us at ask an atheist at noxvilleatheist.org by the way if you're a member of a clergy a preacher an imam pastor or priest who no longer believes in the claims of religion there's help for you at the clergy project it's clergyproject.org online go for it if you're watching this on youtube be sure to like and subscribe remember everybody is going to somebody else's hell the time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real until then don't sweat it enjoy your life and we'll see you next week say bye everybody bye bye bye