 103.9 FM, WZO Radio, Knoxville. Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Hello and welcome to Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, July 5th, 2020. I'm Larry Rhodes, our Doubter 5. And as usual, we have our co-host, Wombat on the phone with us. Hello, Wombat. Everyone stand for our special July 4th representation. Ready? That was yesterday. God bless America, our home, sweet home. That's a nice Obama face there. Our guests today are Dreadpired Higgs, our leader, and George Wachmall. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we also talk about religion, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstition. And if you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in Knoxville while you're just not, there are several atheist, freethinking, rationalist groups that exist right here in Knoxville and we'll be telling you how you can connect with them right after the mid-show break. And I also want to interject that some of us are not in Knoxville. Oh, that's true. You know, like we got me, who's halfway to Chattanooga, and we've got Dreadpired Higgs, who's with us all the way from British Columbia. Very good. This is a radio show going out on the Knoxville airway, so I always want to hit that note, that if they listen to this on the car radio, home radio, whatever, then their groups here are available, but they can join and have a community of freethinkers. Also, did you know that there was a streaming atheist calling video show, like a TV show, and then broadcasting here in Knoxville for over 10 years? Listen, I'll check it out. I know it's got good ratings. I know it's got good actors, and people have been talking about it, and it was great, but like, I'll get the fleabag on Amazon Prime when I'm ready for it. Right now, I'm just waiting to like get through Boy Season 2. There's like a new season of Harley Quinn, hopefully coming out. I'll get the fleabag. I'll watch it. Trust me, I'll get to it. But like, if I was going to watch a bunch of comedians pretend, or actors pretend to be comedians, I'd rather just watch comedians. In fact, if you really want to watch them comedians, check out Amazon Last One Laughing. It's a bunch of Australian comedians together. And Rubble, I don't know if you're going to stop me anytime soon. I'll just keep going. No, I was just going to let you go. See where it went down the road. It goes nowhere. Every single time. No, it's broadcasting at least on streaming here in Knoxville now. It used to be on TV. We switched to an internet format. We can have a little more leeway in what we say. So check out it. We'll tell you more about how to find it on YouTube right after the show breaks or stick around. If you'd like to interact with us during the show, go to Facebook and search for our digital Freethought Radio Hour page and use the messaging function to set up questions for us or comments and we'll try to get to them on the show. Wambat, what do you have for us today? I think we should open up with a really cool talk on congratulating Dred Pirate on becoming a professor. We're going to talk about that more. Before we get into that, let's open up with our weekly invocation by our own Dred Pirate Higgs. An atheist's outlook is sunny because so much of life can be funny. Without a hereafter, we cherish the laughter and savor each moment like honey. Oh, Rahman. Rahman. Alright, so we are going to work on that because I am totally about high-energy gaze a little bit. Dred, why don't you open this up? What happened to you recently? Well, yeah, I was just talking to a college administrator for our local college, Selkirk College. It's a small community college that has a number of campuses around southern interior here and I spoke to them about the possibility of teaching a critical thinking course. And so after we kind of went back and forth a little bit, there's a huge amount of interest from their point of view and I'm looking at developing some curriculum and getting this thing out there coming up in probably October. So what exactly are you teaching? Well, so the course would be called Skepticism 1.0, Adventures in Critical Thinking. So it would really just be around developing critical thinking skills, learning methodology for examining evidence and for discriminating between what is justified in terms of belief and what isn't and how you discern the two and how to engage in SE, Street Epistemology. So I thought that would be an interesting element so that students each could at some point during the course be the interviewer and the interlocutor. So again, teaching them a real world skill to examine beliefs. I think that's really cool. And feel free to use my media or anyone else's to help exemplify good and bad. I can even give you some special bad views I never published. This will show you how this doesn't work sometimes. I mean, it would actually be great to have some guest speakers because it's going to be run virtually. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Tell me when. Yeah. I'm knocking on that door already. All right. George, what do you think is critical thinking a real world skill that should be taught in school? Should we waste time on that? Hold on. Hold on. Let me put my right face on. Should we waste time on this? You got the libertarians. You got them all over the place. They want to get in our faces, use our tax dollars. I say no, we got to stop this. What do you think? Are you with me? Are you a patriot like me? What? What do you got to say? Well, my brain doesn't go as fast as your mouth. I'm not a high speed thinker. I'm more of a reflective type person. So I was only half in just when I said my brain doesn't go as fast as your mouth. However, I do think that. Yeah, it would be very good to teach this in school. And my God, how do we do it? You know, having moved to the south of the US. From coastal places. I feel like I'm in another world. I'm on another planet here. And it has taken me four years to realize that it has not been easy. And it's like, I have to understand. Yeah. A lot of people around here really do not think the way that I do. How do I bridge the gap? You know, I mean, people automatically make assumptions about me that are not true. They believe that I believe in God, for instance. Yeah. You get that by default here a lot. What's that? You get that by default, just being here. Yes, exactly. I'm just learning that. And, you know, people assume not only that I believe in God, but they assume that I'm a Christian. Yeah. Or that there's your member of their church that just never showed up on Sunday for the last couple of years. You're a Presbyterian of Third Street Baptist, right? Or like, what? What does that even make? Don't those conflicts each other? It's like, what do you mean the conflict? My religion is entirely rational. Larry, has anyone ever assumed anything about you just from the look of it? Oh, yeah. I'm sure most of my life. I've been an atheist since like 1973. And I didn't come out of the closet for nearly 30 years. So people assume all kinds of things about me, I guess. And I guess they still do. Strange use on the street. You know, seeing me go by again, just assume I'm a Christian. Yeah. Because that's the default position in the south, especially in the Bible Belt. But that's one of the reasons I think it's very important for people to come out of the atheist closet. They're going to, or the deist closet as it is, as it were. But until you do, people make assumptions about you, that you're religious, that you buy into all this stuff. And even the other atheists in your community will think that you're religious, and that's all. So help me out. How does critical thinking help you? Critical thinking helps me get to reality. It helps me shave away the supernatural aspects of things that have never been proven or been demonstrated. It helps me in a myriad of ways and on day to day, especially when you watch TV and see all these claims that we're making about the world that you're not using critical thinking you know is not true. I want to tell you the news cycle is one of the most lying things. It's all fake news. It's all fake news. It's the worst news ever. It's all fake. You got to make sure you get the right news. Whatever I tell you is the truth. You got to remember that. All right. Boudreau, I got a question for you. Do you think that we should spend our good Canadian tax money on critical thinking in college? Is there a place for that? I guess the first question is will they accept their fake money? Well, I mean, there's no American presidents on the money, so I don't know. I don't know if it's real or not. Looks like my options. I heard it's plastic. I heard it's plastic. I heard Canadian money is plastic and smells like maple syrup. That can't be real. Don't leave it on your dash. It'll melt. No way. That's terrible. Yeah. I think absolutely. Gosh, I wish it was something we do here in the States. I mean, how could you not use those tools for anything great? You know, science, so history, just, I mean, it's a universal tool that will apply to just about anything. So, yeah, I apologize about my video here. I'm at the social distance pool and social distance pool. Yeah. We're all the water molecules are six feet apart from each other. Exactly. I didn't really answer your question. And I wanted to get back to that. This is George and what I. And what was leading up to was. Well, to teach it in school. Yeah, absolutely. But how do we get it into the curriculum? When all those people who are on the school board are going to fight it. Right. Especially in the lower grades, what gets me is like, we don't really teach evolution and anywhere, anything short of college. Right. And but a lot of people don't even go to college. Right. It doesn't get to the general public. So true. Basic concepts of evolution. So true. I mean, if we can't get that there, how can you expect to get critical thinking there? Yeah, I'm so lucky. I just watched PBS shows growing up or else I would have been completely unprepared going to college. Evolution scientific reasoning is like, what is all this? I only have my Bible. It's weird. Would you mind if I got feedback from Dale? Dale, do you think we should teach critical thinking in schools? Do you think it's worth the money and what kind of benefit do you see from a society that teaches that regularly as part of a curriculum? Well, I guess ignorance would be the alternative and that we know that's expensive. However, there was one political party that during their, their platform in 2000. I forgot what year. They had a thing in their platform about teaching critical thinking. And they were addressing that because they apparently this party has control of the school books in America. And they did not want critical thinking as part of the curriculum because specifically it engendered a, children questioning their parents and a rejection of tradition. And consequently, if you're going to have someone that doesn't object to a lot of things, if you probably don't want them thinking critically, but a dread pirate, you're the one that's doing the court in critical thinking. Yeah. Then I would recommend hats. Now, recommend what has to think responsibly. Please, please think responsibly. Exactly. You can't force someone to do it. Maybe you can request, but that'll make it cool. By the way, there's an excellent show on TV that is all about critical thinking and a more practical basis. And it's by Pin and Teller and it's called Bull Feathers. Close. Though I do be in broadcast. It's on Hulu. We get it on. You can find it. I do like when seeing magicians break down their tricks. Only one, I don't like, I love the mystique of how magic works, but I also love how much skill is involved in trying to make it look like you're doing magic. So there's like two different parts in my brain that get tickled when I watch a magic show or watch a magician break down the trick because I'm like, wow, that's so technical. There's so much small details here that involved with making the magic. Tyrone, you're an artist and you're thinking analytically, which I really like. I'm an artist myself and I have done that from an early age. We respond emotionally to the good work of other artists. We're drawn in. We're hypnotized like any other member of the audience, but we're also analyzing at the same time. How did he do that? Right. And then like do that too. And I think the biggest thing is regardless of whatever I saw in the magic trick, whenever I understand how a trick works, it's always, how do I put it? Less of a jump of impossibility compared to how, what I saw at first. So if I saw a guy like pull a quarter of a guy's ear, I'll be like, he just pulled a quarter of a guy's ear. But then he's like, no, I just put it in my plan and I pulled it out. I'm like, oh, well now I can't see that trick for what it is anymore. But my skepticism is now like at a healthy level. Because now I know people can't pull coins out of people's ears and that there's techniques to do it. And that's cool. And I can use that so that the next time I see a magic trick that fools me, I'll be like, well, he's not doing the car trick. He's not doing the lady behind the curtains. That's not a false mirror. How is he doing this? How is she doing this? That's incredible. Like in my head it's like, I know this is a trick, but I'm also really impressed by the fact that you still managed to fool me. Exactly. We admire his skill. Right. And pulling it off. Knowing how the trick works doesn't ruin the magic trick. It just makes it more impressive the next time I get fooled. And I feel like college can, the curriculum that Dred Harris is teaching me, the worst thing that can happen is that people's standard of evidence increase and that the next time they need to believe something, they're applying more critical thought and that the, the only thing that'll come from that is a better world in my opinion. My God. I mean, let's say if we have a minister who has a way of working the crowd and we can analyze the shtick that he's using, that's a Yiddish word. Yeah. Dick and I, boy, I don't know how to translate this word. May the Schwartz be with you. His act. You know, it's, it's like it's stage business. It's stage craft. Yeah. Stage craft. It's, it's, it's a calculated method of working the, working the crowd. Right. Just thinking of, you know, there are ways that Adolf Hitler worked the crowd the same way that a Southern preacher works the crowd, you know, they start off real slow and reasonable and rational and very, very slowly increase the pace, increase the pace, increase the intensity like a DJ, intensity volume. And by the end of the speech, the guys are screaming. And the audience is just eating up everything that he's putting out and cheering, you know, Trump Trump before we get to Trump, because I know you want to get to Trump. Sorry. Do you think you'll teach in that capacity? Will you start slow and go fast? Have you thought this out like you have a syllabus in the head of time? No, no, no. And it's not. I have used Gary, Gary, Gary, what do you think? What do you think? Okay. So you're questioning anti. Yeah. So what's the class? Well, it's going to be over probably 15 weeks. We do two sessions a week at an hour and a half and then break those, those hour and a half further down so that each, you know, during each session, there's a time dedicated to the SE part. So applying practical, you know, applying the skills practically in a, sort of virtual class setting. So, you know, it's about, you know, and I think it would have to go at, you know, a general speed in order to keep people's interest. You don't want to start out slow with the idea that, you know, you're going to grab someone's attention and keep it. You got to come out guns blazing essentially, talking about, you know, logical fallacies, you know, biases, cognitive biases and all that kind of stuff really to sort of build the crude toolkit in order to finesse and discover nuance and all that as you move further into the material. Hmm. What kind of material are you going to have? And yeah, basically like that, like, Well, I've got, you know, I've got a couple of good texts that I can refer to and, you know, certainly some online resources. I mean, I'm not creating anything new. It's all out there. It's just a matter of putting it into a package. That's, you know, not only palatable, it's interesting and tasty. Dale, you said you looked like you had something to want to say. What's up? I was wanting to ask, when the person after goes through this, what do you hope that this person will use in a practical day to day thing? I mean, we do a lot of dealing with the splitting hairs and right down to the minutia of religion, but how might someone use it? Let's say in, I don't know, car buying or the practical daily exercises. Absolutely. Scam products that are being sold perhaps. Yeah. And that's exactly what I see the benefit on a very practical, pragmatic level is, you know, examining some of the claims that we are constantly bombarded with in media of all kinds. Pardon me. And, you know, if, you know, if it turns out we have younger people that show up to, you know, participate, that would be great. But if we can get, you know, some of the older generation as well, who have children to whom then they can impart these newfound skills, then, you know, it's carrying it into the generational thing where, you know, we might not be teaching critical thinking in school, but if you teach parents critical thinking that trickles down into the family and then translates into, you know, a younger generation. I feel like Dredd's just doing his small part to make Canadians even more better than the rest of Americans. Go, Dredd! We're going to make sure someone's surprised. What is the political or religious climate like where you are? Oh, it's very Christian. So in the newspaper, every second week, it advertises religious services offered in and around Grand Forks. And 12 of the 14 are Christian. One of them is Buddhist. And the other is the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. We managed to get in there. Nice! Very good. I would like to mention something about this, getting back to the previous topic where we're talking about the speaker using a way to manipulate their audience. There's a term that goes in churches nowadays is called spiritual manipulation, where the preachers, like a director in a movie, knows how to manipulate the emotions of their audience so that by the end of his standing and sitting in music and soft talking, leading to loud talking and emotional movement, get the people at the end to think that they've actually got the spirit of God moving inside them. I mean, it's nothing more than manipulating the emotions of the audience that they're talking to. It's embodied in that phrase, spiritual manipulation. If a person listening to this broadcast might want to Google it and look at it. I've also heard a flashpoint of gaslighting. Gaslighting is sort of like subtly lying to a person and making them believe something that's not true for a long period of time. But flashpoint of gaslighting is getting one person in a crowd of people who all tell them the same lie and just through peer pressure, they accept that it's true. And if you're like the lone non-believer and a group of believers and they're all saying, you've just been consumed by the spirit of God. You can stand up. You feel like you're good. You might feel something where it's just like, oh, I guess I am. I guess if you don't have a rational basis. I've written an article on my blog about the movie Old Yeller. Did you ever see that movie? I read the book. Well, did you cry at the end? I did not cry at the end. Well, most people, when they see the movie, they cry at the end. And what was the director's point? What was he wanting you to do? He's wanting you to manipulate your emotions over the course of a couple of hours so that at the end you have this great cathartic moment. That's what preachers do every Sunday. They manipulate your emotions to try to do it as much as the director would. There's also just like in the standard way of talking slowly but very confidently makes people listen to you. It's very, very weird. And it's not just used by preachers. It's used by salesmen, politicians. Anyone that's trying to convey or sell an idea is using techniques to make you appreciate them more than you maybe should. And once you have that information, you can go on with critical thinking. As you spoke, I was thinking the phrase popped into my head, church as theater. Right. It's a performance. It is. Especially in these big mega-churches where they have music and video and dancing a lot of times. Dancing? Yes. I actually had an interpretive dance come to a Baptist church I was at one time. Really? I can imagine that. Wow, how times have changed. I've been out of church so much and been reading about the history of churches so much that I've been getting into puritanical ages where there was no dancing, no frolicking between genders and you can't eat certain foods and you have to wear certain clothes. So the fact that we can now have churches accepting dancers in a Baptist place is like history is like pulling over itself. Well, it was a lone dancer. There weren't two of them. There's a cat. Hey, we're at the bottom of the half hour. Larry, why don't you take a seat? Okay, this is digital free-thought radio R and WZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back. Stick around. Hello and welcome back to the second half of the show. I'm Dodder Five and this is the digital free-thought radio hour and WZO radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, July 5th, 2020 and let's talk about the free-thought groups you can join here in Knoxville. First, there's the Atheist Society of Knoxville, founded in 2002. We're in our 18th year. ASK has over a thousand members and you can find us at KnoxvilleAtheist.org By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start one. No, we do it again and we all say start one. Larry, do it again. I'm ready. If you don't find one in your town, start one. That's right. Another large free-thinking group here in Knoxville, the rationalists of East Tennessee, they've been around for more than 20 years and you can find them at rationalist.org. Go to their page and click on upcoming events to find out what they're up to. We talked about the Atheist Call-In TV show. Wait a second. There's an Atheist Call-In TV show? Yes, yes. Why didn't you tell me? Don't get mad. Don't get heated. Now, you can go to YouTube and find it by looking up Free Thinkers United Coalition of Knoxville. We've got 10 years of archives of shows under Free Thinkers United Coalition or Free Thought Forum. Knoxville, you can look at it and find it either way. With us on the show, we have the Wombat and we have guest Boudreaux, Dredpiret Hicks and Red Leader and George. Boudreaux dropped out, apparently. He was with us. That's all fine. Where are we going now? We were talking before about how Dredpiret is going to be teaching critical thought in schools, which I think is absolutely fantastic and any indifferent that he's going through with that. Also going to be doing some SE and also talking about the benefits of doing that and then also how he's going to teach it. How about this? The idea of talking in front of people is always one of those scary situations, but also the idea, the weighted burden of these people aren't going to like what I'm going to tell them is like an additional weight, especially if you're like in a predominately Christian area and you're talking about things like critical thinking and people are like, let me question my faith. I'm not allowed to do that. I'm just going to not like this guy. Do you have any like from you as the human side of a teacher who's trying to do in his best effort teach what is actually a useful skill for like adults? Do you have any apprehensions and what are your current concerns at the moment? Well, certainly the apprehension is that no one wants to sign up for it. So that would put an end to it real quick. But in discussion the college administrator the fact that this is going to be on a virtual platform opens up the audience considerably so that we're not taking simply from the sort of 8,000 people locally, that might attend the local college, but now from 100,000 people spread over a number of communities through a pretty large geographical area. That eases the sort of apprehension I have of having no one interested in it. I think, you know... Will you also be able to record the classes? Yeah, I think that would be a reasonable thing. Dude, if you did that and made it like a curriculum on YouTube, that would be fantastic. Yeah, yeah, and I mean, I've seen some other courses a couple of college professors down in I believe in Seattle have a bolge What? Of course. It's called calling bolge you know It's a French thing. I don't want to swear on I appreciate it. That's what the course is called and they advertised they just put up everything all their courses on YouTube and that's even a course I'll be taking some material from. Yeah, no, I mean, if people are interested in, you know, paying the fee to get a credit so they can hang a little certificate on their wall and say I'm a critical thinker, that's great. But, you know, it's certainly something I would like to see everyone have access to and as many different formats and as many different people willing to teach the subject as there are might be out there, all the better I think in the long term. Well, slash red leader, let me throw something that we're going to go back in our time machine we're going to go back in the way way back machine and you're back machine. Yeah, you're now a young a vibrant adult at the start of his life right after high school. What would this class need to tell you to make you interested in Hoppedon like how what would it need for you to be like, okay, I'll check this out When I was in the military, I did psychiatric work and in our training one of the things that at that time the most popular things going on was transactional analysis I'm okay, you're okay, the games people play, these were fairly well understood concepts and one of the things we did is for an exercise was we watched soap operas. You would call out you would label the things that people said, the interactions and what we found was is that in soap operas very very little of the dialogue is on an adult basis for the most part it's someone telling someone oh you've got to do this or someone blaming somebody for their kind of ills now that would be a practical application but I might suggest watching Fox News and I believe there would be a lot of world feathers called if the class had sessions where they were going to say we're going to watch the news or we're going to watch the soap opera and we're going to break down how these people are talking with each other you'd be like that would be a practical application plus you might want to consider the commercials on TV they know why is this person saying this where are they getting this information from check it out yeah and that would be certainly an element I'd like to employ is bringing you know the 30 second or one minute commercials and then just having the class around table discussion to break down what the message is how they're trying to get it across what they're trying to sell and the manipulative the manipulations that they're employing to do it you know I'm thinking about categorizing the techniques yeah you know putting these techniques into containers you know like incognitive behavioral therapy as I as I know it I really would like to come back to this transactional analysis it's day came and went for a while but it's a really great concept and I would recommend that the viewers take a minute to google transactional analysis especially on youtube and watch a few videos on it just to get that tool in your tool chest so I don't really know what transactional analysis is maybe I've done it but I don't know what the term means what does it mean like the last two or three things we said to each other was a verbal transaction oh my gosh where's my receipt Larry I know you've been I know you've been taking things from me and I got my taxes to pay too but if you analyze those as Dale was saying you find out that you're talking to each other like grownups or they're talking to like an adult to a child when you're telling them that they should do something that they're not doing there's other ways of breaking it down too but that's the basis of it is to analyze the transactions that you're going to and the best thing to do is keep it in mind when the transaction is transpiring so you can see what the person is trying to manipulate you into oh man that's so much I love that yeah go ahead Dale I might suggest also as far as critical thinking to look at some of these political commercials that go on now we know that these commercials work or they would not be doing them but we've got people on TV now that are saying that they are 100% for you know who and that they're against this and they're against that and it's just obviously a way to attack someone's emotions the voice that's very dramatic this is going to be the end of our civilization support and so on I'm really sorry that with we having this zoom and all that we don't have our political candidates doing Lincoln Douglas debate with the time period and all of that and then just let them fight it out back and forth instead of having moderators but I was trying to say that critical thinking political voting would be a great way to apply it that would benefit not only the person but your community at large you know one thing that occurs to me in this discussion is that here in the US in the state of Indiana I believe we have one or two politicians who are attacking academia for teaching critical thinking say it isn't so well do we have to combat this on a larger scale I wonder what the benefit on their side is is just to appease voters who look who may have a chip on their shoulder from a perceived idea that people who go through college or critical thinking courses look down on them and they're trying to you know or threaten them or is it more of like a conspiratorial you know gray men sort of like a hey the dumber we can keep these sheep the longer we can keep them dumb the better like the less questions they ask the more fruit we get maybe it's a bit of both I don't know I feel like I definitely do feel that there is idea of a us versus them mentality regardless of whatever your classification is if you're a plumber you might look down on like people who are as specific as a career path because you in your head think well we're plumbers they're scientists they they aren't us and they might even look down on us maybe it just takes one interaction for you to color all scientists as people who hate plumbers but everybody needs plumbers dude everyone has toilets I was talking on discord with a guy who was like I'm a plumber and I don't and I I don't think that's a bad career way and I know there's scientists out there who look down on me I was like scientists don't look down on you we need plumbers too like everybody needs a plumber like job is the one that could be like chopped off the block but like we need plumbers and stuff like that we need minors we know that stuff so blue collar people might have the idea of like hey critical thought not that important and people who have it may not like us as much and that's very easy for us to be like okay well that's the case we're just me a block of voting block and we're waiting for the politician to be like I hate people who ask questions and think critically and they're like we're gonna vote for this guy and I'm like how's that a thing yeah how is that a thing yeah you know dread there's a couple other videos out there that you might be interested in including in your course Peter Popov you know the the healer there's a great video out there where who was it the amazing Randy the amazing yeah great radio signals in his as a year another one is Marjo Gortner you ever heard him he was a child preacher of prodigy that his parents raised him to be a preacher I mean from the very earliest age and he they trained him basically to manipulate the crowd and what's interesting about Marjo Gortner was when he got to be about 30 he he realized that he was really hurting people doing this he was taking advantage of them basically robbing them using their emotion instead of a gun and he turned and did an expose of all of it so you might be able to find that and what's his name Marjo M-A-R-J-O-E Marjo Gortner G-O-R-T-N-E-R actually there's a link I'm looking at that I'll put the link in our chat so you can get to it cool if you're doing this class in a brick and mortar building it would have also been cool to have like a taste test with Coca-Cola versus like the generic store brand and you put them in like just undisclosed cups we're just gonna do a taste test with 10 people who volunteer who can drink soda and we're gonna see which ones you guys like better or which one you actually think is Coca-Cola like the brand and more than likely it's gonna be a 50-50 split more or less because they are the same ingredients it's mostly water plus some sugar right and so the idea is how is it that people are willing to spend upwards of eight times more for this sugary water than this and then you can look at all the advertisements that people have been exposed to since they were youth to Coca-Cola being branded alongside Olympic athletes in the background of American Idol songs like connotated with very successful people throughout a youthful age and how people understand the jingles and how they like attach it to their national identity and it's like you are buying a brand that has been substantially incepting ideas of you wanting it since you're young like you have to realize that like a lot of the things that we're talking about in this classroom isn't stuff that's happening to you right now it's stuff that's already happened to you you've come into this class with bias right and it's important for you to recognize what that is yeah I don't know I've always been fun that's awesome you know one thing interesting is back when drinks were like five cents Coke and Pepsi Coke and Pepsi had a war this is history no no no I do I do remember when they were six cents I remember going so this is how old I am I once in my entire life bought something with a nickel and so I can say I've done that at least one time and it was a tutsi roll pop so I remember that I remember that walking back I remember you'd be able to put a penny and a nickel on a drink machine and get a coke if it was one time ago Coke raised their price from five cents to six cents at this time and Pepsi decided not to save everybody 20% of the price of it but people interpreted it differently they interpreted that they're buying the better stuff the more expensive stuff the stuff that costs more the premium stuff and it backfired on Pepsi and I bet that was Coca-Cola's hand and making sure that that perception skewed that way because they wouldn't just be like oh we're so lucky people think our expensive products most like let's twist this spinning it spin super important there's so much to talk about there's no shortage of stuff to cover I will bring up this though kind of an important thing there are of course things that we might be bonded to through personal identification like our religion and stuff like that but there are also recent events that might make us critical thinking more emotionally charged than others for example people who get falsely accused of doing crimes like in the news for something like for example there have been sexual allegations that have happened and while there are definitely people who have committed them and I'm happy for the victims to be speaking out which support them there have also been false accusations as well and people caught on those crossfires if someone had a good basis for critical thought I think what their most important thing would be is a tweet good enough to condemn someone or should there be a more substantial means of figuring out how we can figure out if something's true or not and how we can actually go about applying consequences accordingly without just one tweet and you're done it's hard to talk about things like that in this particular political environment this particular age especially as everyone's been sequestered at home for a while you got protests going on this heightened sense of I've only known social media for the last eight months or something like that how do you start bridging that kind of gap across that emotional divide because I think most people can think most people are keen with the idea of this is going to benefit me if I can think more clearly but if it starts going to an emotional mind field how do you start to separate I've been thinking about how do I talk with my neighbor across the street who is a you know I've mentioned him to you guys before I think he's an ardent Trump supporter he feels that Fox News is too far to the left and he's a nice guy you know how do I talk with him how do I bring this man around how do you get past the emotions how do you do that what my intention is and let me know if you think I'm all wet or I thought that the way I will work with him is that I will tell him I stories in other words I will tell him about me and I will be honest because I've got to start somewhere if I tell him you should this this this this he's going to turn off how can I bridge the gap yeah Dredd what do you think how can we bridge that gap that's tough I guess is just about tone and composure connecting you know I guess just if you're reading the room essentially and you get a sense that someone's escalating or getting triggered is just you know bring it back by tone and composure I don't know if there's any really good formula outside of that Larry I want to I want to make a confession here okay wait you're actually a Trump supporter I am as much a hypocrite as anybody else you know at the advanced stage that I am now I can look back over my life and see whoops I've made this mistake I've made that mistake and the other thing is that even though I I think of myself as a critical thinker I can be suckered like anybody else absolutely I can fall for it that doesn't make you like emotions are behind it yeah that doesn't make you hypocrite like the path of critical thinking is in destination it's the pursuit it's a process yeah and it's true too that we're all we're all subject to the Dunning Kruger effect at some point you know scientists are experts in their fields but they can be absolute dummies in some unrelated without recognizing it yes yes I shouldn't say that there could be women that try to ask men out who are scientists and do a terrible job at that too so it goes both ways Larry what do you think about dealing with people who are emotionally charged on a subject and you're trying to convey like some sort of critical thinking principles like well I'm not the best person to you're married what's going on here you have a daughter every man should pay for my dinner whenever we go on a day you're like daughter I love no we should really go to Wombat for that street epistemology is the answer to that I would think me I'm confrontational I mean when it comes to you know somebody using their emotions to justify their beliefs I'm just going to start throwing facts out I'm going to start throwing questions at them it has its place for sure but I think even though I don't use it as much as I should street epistemology is where it would be at on that yeah you know using the Socratic method to get them to examine their own positions Larry what is street epistemology we talked about this just talking to people we have to define this for newcomers epistemology is the study of how we learn things how we know things and taking it to the street and talking to people one on one is what Wombat does a lot and it's using the Socratic method to examine the methods to which they reach their conclusions rather than attacking the conclusions themselves and I want to throw this out Adele do you think there's a better process to getting to people without emotions getting in the way like what is a good way to talk to someone about an emotionally charged subject I don't really have much of an answer but I do know that Fox News let's take that show for that channel for example they have the regular straight news but then they have their editorials and they'll find that one of the things they want to do is emotionally charge their audience and the best way to move a population is not by appealing to their sense of fair play and decency or love for their fellow man the best way to move a population is by fear and hate and revenge and protecting yourselves so consequently you will find people that watch shows like O'Reilly and the Judge Jeanine and all of that by the time they're through with their show they actually have their adrenaline levels up the old Yeller tried was a movie that tried to tug at your emotions Fox News for the most part tries to hit him with a sledgehammer so if you can be aware that people are lying to you and they're manipulating you for that you might have somebody who says yeah I'm a Christian and this politician over here is talking about how he was saved after his father died and stuff like that he might just be trying to manipulate me surprising how almost glaringly obvious some of these manipulative tactics become once you sort of become accustomed to the onslaught that they are in these different media forms and what not you know sometimes I kind of shake my head at my own past at having been you know having been you know entranced essentially put in a fog of you know these erroneous beliefs and then now sort of having that veil lifted looking back and thinking how did I ever get there so that's an interesting trip I also think it goes back to what Nathan had said before is there's never a bad time to stand up for true things and it's always to your benefit to have a good method to parse true things from false things and if someone says for example hey I think tweets should be all the proof you need to attack and condemn and get people fired and all this like okay sure I hear that as a method but wouldn't it not also benefit you to have a better method in the event that someone does a tweet and they end up attacking someone who's innocent and we find out they're innocent and the next time someone wants to speak out and they only have twitter they can't use it because when they do people won't believe them because we've used that system to attack innocent people before it's not in your benefit to just have to end and sit on it you always should try to improve it even if you have something that kind of works now what science is is a system that's always trying to improve itself and it never just says hey we're done we figured it out so like what I would just say is we should always take every moment as a learning opportunity to improve the methods that we have to determine true things and false things good advice we got at the end of the show already Dred Pirate where can we find your stuff at now we are streaming live on my facebook page at Mind Pirate that's P-Y-R-A-T-E very cool very cool Dale do you have anything that you would recommend people check out maybe future students of Dred's the pin and teller show both feathers we'll check that out they talk about all of these different ways that people get lied to and I took a psychology course and one of the fellows in the class mentioned that he was a mechanic and he would say things to people like now children do children ride in this car sure yes well in other words I want to do this huge repair and why would you ask children ride in it evokes the idea oh I get it I get it I get it it's like triggering parental responses to right George check out bull feathers it's like BS look for BS George what would you recommend people check out I have nothing fair enough two weeks in a row and going strong I don't challenge nothing I believe in it alright so Larry you want to bet let's chat YouTube you're already here if you're watching this have a good time also hope you had a good fourth of July yeah that's about it we're on podcast people listen to us on podcast you're on the less chat podcast right now go to YouTube and look for let's chat there you go that's one bet's channel and for myself I have a book out there it's called atheism what's it all about go to Amazon and look it up under Larry Rhodes Larry s Rhodes be sure to check out my blog which is at digital free thought dot com and our radio show archives and atheist songs and other articles are on that page if you have any questions for the show send them to ask an atheist at KnoxvilleAtheist.org and we'll try to get to them in future shows and if you're listening to podcasts like them go to itunesditcherilluminarypodcast.com et cetera et cetera and you'll find us under digital free thought radio hour and to wind up the show I'd like to remind everybody that 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 join us again next week Wednesday night 7 o'clock on WOZO Radio 103.9 LPFM right here in Knoxville Tennessee so goodbye everybody goodbye everybody goodbye