 Okay, so just going around the room again, we had Casey, Cameron, River, William, Dave, Travis, right? And then the professor in the background. Hi, what's up? How are you doing? Okay, so this is just a really cool meet and greet session that Travis and I set up. I've always wanted to come down to Dalton and talk to you guys, but we found this is way more convenient. But hey, if this works out well, I'll be also happy, you know, make the drive down there too. I think this is a really cool opportunity to be able to talk with you guys. I just want to thank you, you know, coming here and being willing to give me your time. I appreciate it. My name is Dr. Tyrone Knowles. You guys can just call me Ty. I got my PhD at Georgia Tech and my whole thing is street epistemology, which is just a fancy word for learning how to talk to people without sounding like a jerk. Trying to have conversations about really sensitive things without turning it into an argument or a debate. Really trying to have an engaging fun chat with people. My YouTube channel is called Let's Chat, and I will literally set up in the middle of parks or in churches, KKK rallies, if you will, political events, science fairs. And I have a sign, I think I just showed it to you guys, but I'll show it to you guys again later on. It's literally just a sign that says, let's chat about whatever you want. And I mean that. So people look at the sign and they're like, what's going on here? I'm like, I got a five minute timer. If you want to stay longer, that's cool. But I'm just here to talk about anything that you really strongly believe about. When you open up the door that way, most of the time people will come to you with the thing that they are deeply passionate about. And one of the major topics they bring up, I would say on the order of like 90% of the time is a religious belief. And personally, I don't subscribe to any religion. I don't believe in any God because I don't believe that calls me an atheist. I also don't know that any God exists. So I'm also at agnostic. So I have the agnostic atheist position. And I will talk to a lot of Gnostic theists, those being people who know that a God exists and also believe that a God exists. And I'll say, it seems like you have a very high level of confidence that you know that this God exists. Can we talk about the methodology that you use to get to that conclusion? And what I found was a really interesting way to have these really deep conversations about God beliefs for other people, such that when we get away, when we come like we dig down into the belief and we come right back up in about five minutes or so. And by the end of the talk, the people are much less confident about the methodology that they're using to arrive at their God. If it turns out they're using a reliable methodology, I'm totally fine for it because I want to know true things. But in the event that we both realize that the method that they're using to reach their God conclusion is not true, valid or fallacious, they are willing to disband that belief. Substantially so. I've had people completely change the agnostic position by the end of the conversations. I've had repeat talks where people were willing to say, you know what, I'm going to stop believing in this for now, but I'm going to keep looking. And in my opinion, that's one of the best ways to go. Like I said, I don't have the answer. I don't know. But I am willing to say that I want to have good reasons to believe in things that I do believe in. And I can help people to at least realize when they have bad reasons. And just as a quick overview, I guess this is like the preamble to the intro. Sorry about that. I'm kind of long winded. But if you guys want to interrupt me, if you guys want to say anything, this is a back and forth conversation. I'm totally fine with it. Feel free to say anything. I'm literally just in my living room right now. My cat's playing with some cat toys I just got from. We're chilling right now. I got Pete's in the background where I'm ready to go. But like I said, my name's Ty. I have a hobby where I want to talk to anyone about anything. The reason why I had that hobby or reason why I developed it was when I was at Georgia Tech getting my doctorate in biochemistry. I went through this really weird transition because I started grad school as a theist. It's definitely a diehard Christian. But when I was going through my academic experiences, I was realizing I was getting better answers for things that I believed in rather than just statements that I had to believe. Like, how would I put it? Explanations. I was getting explanations for the things that I believed to be true rather than just answers. And these explanations were beginning to raise my standard of evidence that I required for stuff. So it wasn't just a matter of taking things on faith. I began to start having a lower appreciation for taking things on faith and a bigger appreciation for saying, hey, I don't know the answer for this. I think that's the best answer for right now until I have better conclusive evidence. When I applied that to my religious belief, that was a bit of a struggle because I had my entire life of just, hey, don't question this. This is your insurance card. You're good to go. You're going to heaven, baby. It's going to be great. It's cake and ice cream for the rest of eternity with all your family and stuff. But I'm like, let me look at the back of that card. Let me see what that thing says. And I'm like, oh, there's no back on the card. It's blank. There's no card. Let me look through this. So basically through the process of beginning to question how I come to understand things and rising my level of standard of evidence, I realized that the standard of evidence that I have for my religious beliefs were lacking. And that was a foundational change for me because I'm like, oh my gosh, I need to tell everybody, right? And I was surrounded by a lot of Christians and other kinds of theists in my research group as well. And they were not necessarily as receptive to the first ways of explaining that. I was like, hey, guys, you know, this is a completely fake. Look at this. Can you believe that? They didn't like that. It's like, look at the evidence. Boom. There you go. They didn't like that either. You know, I tried, I had some shows I was watching on YouTube, like Atheist Experience. There was like, you guys know about the Atheist Experience? Okay, great. Turns out when you corner someone on a logical fallacy about something that's really important to them, it's not a very good way to convince that person. Maybe some audience members, sure. But that person will more or less just say, I'm not going to deal with you anymore and just walk away. So when that happened enough times, I started to feel like there was a wall between myself and the people around me, loved ones, family members, colleagues at work, even strangers. It just felt like there was this unapproachable wall that was just keeping me from having meaningful communications with other people. And I was looking for a method to be able to talk to anyone about anything. And that's when I found out about street cosmology. The way I heard about it was during a meet-up group. I joined a local Atheist group. I highly recommend social groups like the ones you guys are in right now. But I joined Atheist Society of Knoxville, Ask. And I was there at the meeting, and I was talking to some of the Atheists, and I always had this hobby of like, when someone says, oh, I turned into an Atheist, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, why did you turn? When did you turn? What was the thing that convinced you? And they're like, hey, all these questions that you're asking is kind of like this guy on YouTube who's just like asking people why they transition out of faith. And I'm like, what does this guy do? He literally just approaches people on the street and asks them why they believe in God. I'm like, that stresses me out. I don't want to have anything to do with that. But I did check out the videos. And it turned out this guy was working on a non-conferential way to do that. And when I saw enough of his videos, I was thinking, OK, there's a really cool methodology or a mindset to having these really important conversations with people in a way that doesn't turn the conversation into an argument or a debate. And that was one of the key things that I was messing up all the time. I was wondering, what is it that I am doing that I can modify so that I could be more closely aligned with having a more productive conversation? And the thing that I figured out, oh, my cat's in the background. Can you guys hear it? His name's Vinny, by the way. He's a really great cat. He can walk. He can shake my hand. He can roll over. He's a really great cat. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I got videos. You're on my YouTube channel. You can see them all. But basically, when I'm having a conversation, the thing's called street epistemology. What does street epistemology mean? Street and street epistemology just means an informal process. You can do everything on the street. You can do it indoors. You can do it over the internet. Epistemology, though, is more of a reference for the study of how we come to know things. So if you want to think about it, like, I might know that it will rain tomorrow, but the manner of how I got that knowledge is the epistemology of the belief. Did I open up a fortune cookie and just read the fortune and it said it was going to rain tomorrow? Did I look at a weather report? Did I have a dream and just came to the belief that, hey, it's going to rain tomorrow based on that? There are different kinds of epistemologies to arrive to what we would claim knowledge or a knowledge claim. And the question is, which of those is more reliable? And shouldn't we take the most reliable method to get to our mostly important beliefs, the beliefs that are most important to us? And so what I found was that there's three different aspects. If you want to think about it, think of like three different circles, one, two, three, one, two, three in a line. The first is like the person. The last circle is the conclusion that they have or the conclusion that they reached. And there's a circle in the middle that connects the two, and that's the method that they use. That's the method that the person uses to arrive at their conclusion. The cool thing is, if I ask questions about the person or if I targeted my questions toward the person, well, why do you believe that? Why do you think that's so important? Don't you know that this could be wrong? When you do that, you strap the conversation down because people invest a lot of ego in themselves, and they'll take those questions personally as they should. But when you ask questions that target the method or the conclusion, the conclusion that they have directly, they will also respond in very much the same way as a personal attack. And that's because it's not a straight line those three circles are in. It's really an overlapping of those first two circles and then maybe like a circle where the methodology is at the bottom. I'm going to try to explain that one more time visually just so we're all caught up. But like that line where you have the person and the conclusion, overlap those two because they're basically the same thing in the person's mind, whereas the methodology is sort of just in this realm all by itself. And the reason why you know the person and the conclusion are so closely related is because of how people explain their conclusions with a tightly related identification of saying things like, well, I'm a Baptist, I'm Baptist. Like you'll hear that before you even know the person's name. I'm Jeffrey. No, it's like now I'm Baptist, right? I'm a Yankees fan. I'm a knucklehead. There's a lot of different ways that people identify with their conclusions to the point where if you challenge the conclusion, they'll actually be responding in a way as if you had targeted them personally. And that shuts the conversation down, sets up all their personal guards, makes them less willing to consider critically how they arrived at the conclusion. What's interesting is that methodology at the bottom, that lone methodology, if you talk about that, if you target your questions toward the methodology, there's much less ego invested there. And as a result, you have this opportunity to actually have a person slowly think about how they arrived at their conclusion. And if it turns out that the methodology is not reliable, one of two things will happen. One, they'll either completely get rid of that methodology and replace it with a better methodology. And I think if there's other atheists in the room, if there's atheists in the room, wherever you are, that's a good thing because we should always be on the lookout for better methodologies to arrive at our conclusions. But in the event that they can't find a better methodology, what they'll end up doing is get rid of the methodology altogether. And what you end up doing is disconnecting that connection between the person and the conclusion. And they will naturally get rid of the conclusion entirely on their own. Street epistemology is about changing people's minds. You don't have the ability to do that. But you can empower them to realize that they need to change their own mind. And when they don't have a methodology to arrive at their conclusion anymore, it happens automatically. It happens maybe in a couple of days, maybe in a minute. But it's something that is what we call a pebble in their shoe. It is something that they will be walking around with until they figure that out. When they realize, hey, I don't have a good reason to believe this. That is way more impactful than, oh, this guy doesn't like my belief or this guy doesn't like me. When he says, hey, he showed me that this reason that I have to hold this belief isn't valid anymore, that is foundationally changing to a lot of people. And what we would encourage, the only thing that we're, what I'm looking for is I guess more people who are aware of that method of talking to people such that someone who's just had a conversation with a person who without a camera set up, without a table set up, without a YouTube channel, just had that conversation with them, maybe at a party, maybe at work, maybe, you know, just like in an elevator, whatever. When they go to the next person to talk to, that person will kind of be aware of the situation and maybe continue to help them fruitfully consider their questions as well. There are people who are like, I guess, maybe religious who will try to like reinvest them back into the faith if they were walked away from the faith. But it turns out to be the case that if you are willing to allow the person to think on their own and let them utilize their own faculties to realize, hey, I don't have a good reason to believe this. When they go to the religious person and they ask those same kind of questions, they're going to get unsatisfying answers. And what you want to do is help them just realize what good answers look like, what bad answers look like. Don't tell them what the good answers are. Don't tell them what the bad ones are. Just say this is what the standard is for the thing that you believe to be true. You should keep looking for stuff until you meet that. And until we meet it, maybe I don't know it's the best answer. And that's totally fine. It might exist. The God might exist. But you should at least be open-minded to the idea that this is the most important belief that you have. You should at least have a good standard of evidence for that. Let me do, I guess, two more quick things. There's a really, really, really cool video that I'd love to show you. That's also my YouTube video that shows an example of what street epistemology looks like when you use it versus when you don't use it. Travis, if I sent you that via a tech... I'd be a lot freer if people like you were put in prison as retaliation for the collective crime of racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia. God blesses me. You're judgmental. How do you deal with shame in your life? Perpetrate this every day by telling people what their rights are and what they aren't. People like you start to ruin this world. You're judgmental. Christians are responsible for slavery. You know why you're getting upset about it? I'm getting upset because you are stepping on the right. There are thousands of miracles. This is a freedom to me. You're judgmental. You are lost in a fantasy. It's an appreach to word. Preach what? It's a gay people camp. Sir, you can't spit on me, sir. Well, I know this. I could look at that sun, I could look at the sky, I could see the trees, and I know there is life. So if there is life, there has to be a creator of life. No, there doesn't. All you have to do is provide evidence. Can you provide evidence? I'm about to. Okay, right here. That's me. Bob was about evidence. Bob was about evidence. Who caused it? Listen, that's the key point. I can set you right. I know what you're saying. I can set you every time. But of course you know what I'm saying. But you're arrogant as a Christian. You know that how old are you? You don't have to believe it if you don't know it. If you don't know it, then think about it. Do you think God gave you the right to do it? Again, how do you deal with the new breaking the law of God? How do you deal with that? How do you deal with this delusion of yours? There's some invisible man in the sky sitting on a cloud of dry down bolts of lightning. Well, it's not just that. So you don't believe that Jesus walked the earth? No! The precious are responsible for slavery! Absolutely. It's a mock. Yes, that's exactly what I mean. Mock your religion into extinction. That's exactly what it should be. There's no way you're going to be able to do it. It's already happening. It's already happening. So you have to. It's not a fairy tale. It's a fairy tale. I'm a born-again Christian. Oh, born-again. Baptizing Jesus' name. Who do you? Phil with the Holy Ghost. Jesus, who? It's God who works in me. Jesus, who? It's a false law. It's not true. It is wrong. Is he right next to you, or are you holding his hand? Yes, I am. Oh, you need some medication, my friend. Hitler! Who designed God? You're caught in a trap now. It's a logical trap where you would listen. I'm the ignorant one. You're ignorant, man. I use reason and logic. Can I take it? The Bible is no more proof than God exists, then a comic book is no more proof than Superman exists. You are sick. You need Jesus. You're a sick person. Thank you very much. You're welcome. You're judgmental. It's not going to be a two-way conversation. There's no point. Why? Why? It's easy as a turnover. What is interesting here actually is that we've got people from different faiths and who all believe in some kind of heaven in a different sense. But every single one of them believes in this heaven on the basis of faith. And faith, by definition, is believing in things without evidence. And personally, I don't do that because I'm not an idiot. Whoa! Ouch! Okay. So that was a lot. Those clips that you saw kind of very much mirror the conversations that I was having before I learned how to have these productive conversations with people. Some things to note. There are a lot of different philosophies with regard to how to communicate with people, particularly on faith. There's like the whole, well, I have the facts deal with it, you know, attitude. A lot of times though, the way how those guys were talking to people was always a personal attack, or could be interpreted as a personal attack, rather than one that's focused on that methodology that I was referring to before. And so you'll see that I was like, how do you, how can you believe this? People like you are the problem. People like you and your stuff, your morals are wrong. Those are those accusational terms that when a person hears that, they shut up. And they don't want to have a productive conversation with someone anymore. And you can still get them to think about how they arrived at their conclusion, still get them to leave the bad methodologies or like bad fallacious arguments that arrive. But there's a good way to do that. The other guy, for example, was like, haha, I use a logical trap on you, and now you're caught. And do you see how you're caught? People don't care. And they have a faith that they, when they're using faith or basically magic or like meditation or whatever, it feels good to them. They're not going to care about the logical argument that you're presenting. They're using a different sets of their minds to like arrive at that conclusion. You're going to have to like help them to see it. You can't just present it to them. You have to like work with them to get there. And that is only possible when they're open-minded on that idea. Yes, so yeah, just have this hobby where I chat with people about anything. Is there a particular belief you want to chat about? Is there what? A particular belief that you want to chat about. Something you really think is true. Christianity. Yeah. All right, anyway. Yeah. TIE is my name. I've got a five-minute timer. We can talk about anything. Is there anything that strongly motivates you? Anything that you think is true? God. God? Yeah. That's a heavy topic. You want to talk about that for five minutes? Sure. Yeah? Yeah, I can talk about. I mean, my background is Christianity. I was raised Southern Baptist. I believe in God, so that would be the thing I'm the most certain about. Okay. First, got to get a sense of your confidence that God exists, setting a scale from one to ten? Ten, ten for sure. Ten. I mean, I am 100% certain that higher power exists. Okay. 95. 95. All right. Very confident. From, like, zero to 100%. 100%. 100%. You don't need any more evidence. You're absolutely closed on the position. You think that's absolutely true? Yep. Okay. 100%. What got you to that 100%? Really, well... So, I go to a Christian school, and I've learned, I've taken a bunch of classes on theories and all these different things, and it just makes sense to me. It kind of, like, hits home. I, and for me, it's just a meditation thing that I realize that it's just a full-on total goodness of the earth, all the plants. I believe that there is something that has been working on my behalf in this universe. Whatever is here had to come from somewhere. Okay. It's hard to imagine coming from somewhere without some sort of first cause. Okay. Yeah. I know it's hard to think that, yeah. Okay. Okay. How does something making sense to you relate to the actual truth of it? Like, could someone actually be mistaken about a belief that makes sense to them? Yeah, I think they could. Okay. That is a very good point. I would say... So you, oh, that's an interesting perspective. So you believe that, wow, I've never ever heard that before. Well, that's an interesting, you know, we've come around to an interesting point that I never verbalized to myself before, but I do see that, you know, I'm starting to see just from this discussion. And the benefits I get from it? Right, right, right. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. That's a good perspective. I would like to believe it if it's true. Right. But because nobody can question it, nobody can prove it. You can't prove faith. You can't prove any of these things. It's like, why am I believing this? Hmm. You may be onto something, man. Yeah, so... That's powerful stuff, man. Yeah, it's just stuff to think about maybe. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. That's really enlightening. I never thought about it like that. That's true. Right. That's a good way to look at it. I like to think about it that way. Anything that puts you in a more reasonable position. Good try. Hmm. Well, thanks. Yeah? All right. Have a good evening. It was good chatting with you. Good chatting with you as well. All right. Have a good evening. Have a good one. I think you're really, really good at this. I'm just worried that, you know, there's going to be a learning curve to it. Is this something I'd love to do for a while now, actually? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm interested in doing it ever since, but it's like, you got to be pretty quick on your feet. Yeah. Be ready with those questions. You know, I don't know. You know what? How do you go out and do this for the first time? How did you get up the nerve to actually do that for the first time? So when I first set out, my goal wasn't even the time. So when I first set out, my goal wasn't even to talk about religion. I was literally there to just talk about in kind of like a, have you ever heard a story course from NPR or like people of New York? You're just there to get the vibe and set up in a place and see who's willing to talk to you, see whatever's on their mind. And when I, when I saw Anthony Magnobosco's videos and when I saw, I read Nice Wonders videos, I was like, I got to go out there. I got a challenge atheism step one, but I found that I'm actually really, I found that like one of my skill sets is just having really fun chats about people with people and I'll do it in a really friendly way about a lot of different things. And so I'll put all those up on my channel. And what I found was the conversations that I have that are not religious, the ones that I have that are religious have the same vibe to them. And I thought that could be a really interesting thing because you don't need to enter an SE mode to have like really good SE style dialogue. You can still talk as if you're talking about sports or Pokemon or I love Pokemon by the way, but yeah, or music or skateboarding or anything like that. And when I first set up, the goal was I'm just going to talk to people about whatever they want to talk about. And so I got a lot of talks about fitness, about jobs, about maybe some insecurities they had with regard to the state of humanity like pollution and all that. And then when you get comfortable, you can start to say, hey, I'm the next conversation. I really like to talk about something that you absolutely know you're very confident about, something you know you can't be wrong about. I think that'd be a really interesting conversation. I just had a conversation with like three other people about skateboarding, nursing, sickness, whatever. And I'm like, well, you know, I'm a Christian and just stay calm. And you could talk about that in more or less the same way you did with all the other ones because you have that backup, you have that confidence. And I found that that's a great way to build up the sense of calm and the fast thinking necessary to have like a really good conversation. And really, you're not there to like disarm a bomb. Your only goal is to be like, how'd you figure that out? Oh, I don't know what that is. Explain it to me. Here's this thing that you just said to me that I'm just going to say right back to you. What do you think about that? Let them do the heavy lifting. Your only goal is to try to find the foundation of their belief and question whether or not that foundation is reliable. And if you could do at least those two things and help them do that, that is more than you've done than any pastor or any other kind of like religious leaders ever let them to do. And if you could do that, that's an incredible thing. So, you know, have a month. Really, that's the best way to start. What do you guys think? Or what other, I'd love critiques, by the way, I'm a great lover of critical feedback. Is there anything that you think I could improve on? I was surprised that you ended the conversation when you did. It seemed like it was just heating, just starting to get, you know, really hot. But that's something that you made ahead of time, where you're five minutes up or why'd you do that? Ah, so yeah, that's, it's a, there are a lot of different theories behind it. But when I, like I said, my goal is I'm a cheerleader for I don't know. I'm trying to show that I don't know is a good answer, particularly when you don't know something. We have kind of like a culture where people are afraid to say that. And when I can get people to appreciate I don't know just a little bit more at the end of a conversation than what they did when they started. I'm like, in my mindset, that's my goal. My mission accomplished. And so I think he started the conversation with, I believe in God, my Nana is a really nice lady. And that's all the proof I need. We broke apart the Nana belief. We broke apart the belief that was underneath it, which I believe was like, that's just how I was raised to his personal research. We broke that down to his faith. We got to faith and we broke that down as well. And then at the end, you heard him say things like, yeah, you really don't know it. And that's why I guess you shouldn't say you know things if you don't know it. But yeah, I can definitely see that. That's a good point. That's it. That is exactly what anyone could be able to do in 10 minutes. And I think we started that conversation, started getting to the heat of it around six minutes in. So it was only around five minutes or so. But if he got up and moved to another person and was like, hey, I just talked to that guy over there. He was talking to me about my faith or stuff like that. He was like, yeah, he's a weird dude. So what did he say to you? Like what, why do you believe in it? Oh, well, you know, you can't believe in that because I just had a conversation with him and I realized that that's not a good reason. What do you think about the more people are thinking about this and having a kind of conversation where they're beginning to like critically assess how they arrived at their conclusions, the better. And the more that we can show that it's easy. It doesn't take a lot of effort. It's not adversarial. I think that's an improvement. But yeah, I set up really, really simple goals when I have my conversations. I have like 14 points that I want to hit. But now it's just like, yeah, you like I don't know as an answer. Great. That's great. That's the agnostic position. That's the default. Welcome to a more rational mindset. Travis, it looked like you wanted to say something. Well, do you have anything on your mind? I thought it was pretty good. Yeah, I was thinking about that. Where you where you ended with that pause. And I mean, I think those are such great moments because folks are starting to reflect on what they believe. And it's like my fear would be like, if I continue talking at this point, am I going to distract that salient moment? Oh, that's a great point. I think Casey brought up something really great too, just combining your points. If you end the conversation on a bad note, or if you were antagonistic to them, it's very easy for them to dismiss everything you said at them by just saying, oh, well, they're a jerk. I don't have to think about it. But if you're having a really good talk, you reach a really great level and you're like, let's learn to adhere because I guarantee you when I stop, he's going to play that conversation over in his head and over and over again. If it's short, it's very helpful. And if you like the conversation and we had a fun chat, he's going to think of it with less bias than he would if he saw me as an antagonist. And I think those are really good things to walk away with. Yeah. And if you guys don't disagree, don't. That's totally fine. I don't think there's one right way to do SC. And like I said, I have an SC that's very much molded to my style of talking to people normally. Anthony Mag Bosco has his style as well. He stands up and talks to people. And he's a very, very, what do you call it? Charming. Nice guy. And he has the daddy voice the entire time. It's like, I just want to make sure you're all right. Would you like some water? Are you okay? Read. Nice wonder. He's very unflappable. And that's great to live in California. You're thrown by hippies and crystal and alien believers and tinfoil. I've been, I was raised in California. That's where my accent comes from. And they're like 10,000% every single person in this video is like my neighbors and stuff like that. So I know, I understand the, oh, so you think you were invaded by aliens in your mind left ear? Okay, that's great. Talk to me more about it. Like he's very, very neutral on everything. I don't think you can surprise him with anything. And mine is like very much just, hey, I'm having a fun time with you. I want to talk, but everyone, there's, there's more than just the three of us. There's a lady named Linda Mako. She's from Finland. She's going to start upling of her videos on Super Curious or YouTube channels called Super Curious. There's a guy in South Africa named Ben Diesel. Brilliant name, by the way, Ben Diesel, that's such awesome name, right? He, since it's South Africa, he mostly just talks to black people like the heartland, right? And it's a completely different culture there. So it's just really interesting to see the apologetics that they use to convince themselves that their beliefs are true and the dynamic of like, how do you, how do you have these kinds of conversations with a completely different set of cultural and racial divides there? It's just really interesting. The more people that do it though, the better we get a resolution of what works and what doesn't. And I think even if you had initial failures, I put them up on my YouTube channel. I hope people learn from them. I recommend that you guys do the same thing too. How hard do you think it is to set up a table at Dalton State and have these kinds of conversations with someone? It'd be that hard to just, you know, it'd be like something similar to the Ask A P.S. event. Yeah, I mean, there's a portion that you wouldn't have to like get permission for. We have, we have an area of that. You can just sit down. Nice. Yeah, I set up in the Free Speech Center at UK and there's a park that's open to the public that I sit down to. That's a lot of foot traffic. I highly recommend it. And it doesn't even just be one person, but, you know, anyone who's, and like I said, you don't even need the setup. You don't even need the table, the chairs, camera, mic, anyone just willing to have that conversation. So the sign, what I found the benefit to the sign-in is people who want to talk will approach you. And if you have a sign that says let's talk about whatever you want and you're reading a book in front of the table, I guarantee you if you're set up in the right place, you won't even get past the first page before someone's like, what's going on over here? What are you doing over here? You got a sign that says you want to talk? Nope. I've had like a Kindle open and people asked that while simultaneously sitting down in front of me at the same time, like, I guess you want to talk. What do you want to talk about today? Well, let's talk about Jesus Christ. I'm like, perfect. Perfect. Start this kind of conversation with. It's a fun way to just be outside too. It's a perfect excuse to just be out and read nice books. And like I said, you don't need any setup to do that. See, there's very little budget involved to just ask questions. And I'd highly recommend it as a great way to break down the walls, set out some really good examples of how to have communication and explore a really cool way to get people to critically assess how they come to their decisions. I think, I mean, it sounds like you were pretty personal about beforehand, but as a way to just practice your conversational skills I bet doing a few of these would make you much more comfortable. Yeah, it definitely seems like it's taking a lot of practice for me anyway. But you know, I think the beauty of what the way Ty described it is that you're just asking questions. There's not really a way to screw that up too bad. No. And it's never hard to just say, hey, I don't know what that is. Do you mind explaining that to me? Yeah. Just showing that you're open and willing to learn. A lot of times just having people explain what their beliefs are instead of the words in their head formulating them into like actual mouth sounds and pushing them out and then hearing someone listen or watching someone hear what they're saying makes them way more critical of the things that are coming out of their head in a way that's very beneficial. And if you respond back the same words that they're saying, it's like, so let me just get this straight as a summary. You believe XYZ, ABC? Hearing what they just said is a completely different phenomenon for them. Because they believe it in their head, they've internalized it, but when they hear someone else repeat that back to them, they're like, ooh, well, let me try to clarify that with them. You're already working with them at that point. And that is beyond just therapeutic. It's very, very beneficial for a society to be able to do stuff like that. I think it's definitely easy to do at least that. And if you set up the goal of like, hey, let's talk about movies. You can do the exact same kind of SE style of questions. So really what's your favorite movie? Thor Dark World? What's your criteria for that? Do you have a good objective basis to say that? Why do you think, oh, you like actors? Well, if they had different actors, would you still believe the same thing? No? Okay, well, it doesn't seem like you... But you could have it really about any topic. And if you explore with it and try to make something new with it, you will help figure out this really cool way of talking to people that I think with the benefit of technology that we had that we've never had before, can be part of like this brand new wave of communication that a lot of people will see examples of and realize, oh, there's a great way to have these kinds of thoughts that I've always been afraid to have. This is a lot easier than I ever expected it to be. This person looks like me and she's doing this where he's doing it and I can finally find someone that has a role model to follow up in that kind of way of talking to and morph it into my own way. So I highly recommend it. It's not as hard as it looks and it gets funner every time you do it. Yeah? I think, Ty, I think I saw one of your earlier videos about a year ago when it just started. And he just put it out there. He'd be like, hey, I'm just starting this. What do you all think? And I mean, you went really public with it, which I thought was pretty awesome. But yeah, I mean, like you said, he's been doing it for less than a year now. Yeah. And, you know, he just got feedback and was asking those kind of questions what do you all think? I think the group can do that for you if you choose to record it. I asked your participants, hey, did you like this chat? Yeah, it's really cool. I have these business cards now that I hand out and I get emails from people like maybe a week or so after the fact and I've done interviews with atheists before and it's always really interesting when I get an email back from another atheist that's like, hey, you really made me think because before I was just like, God, no big deal but you actually challenged me to consider why I don't believe in God and I found that really, really useful and so I came up with these reasons why and I just want to thank you for making me think about that. So it works for everybody. Three things. SE is not a Jedi mind trick for atheists to play on Christians. It's a critical thinking tool. It's a tool, one of many other tools to apply in a conversation to help someone think about why they believe something to be true and it can work in solos, it can work in groups, but it can also be something that can work on you. You can go through a thought process and be like, why am I angry right now? Let me think about this. Why am I confused about this certain thing or why do I believe this? Can I do SCM myself? You totally can. And it works on any age. I've had a talk with an 11-year-old named Connor at a park. No, he was an 11, he was 6. He was 6 years old. His mom was there and he came to me at the table and his belief was, I saw someone survive a 100-foot drop. I'm like, whoa, that's pretty graphic for a 6-year-old kid. But I was like, whoa, okay. So why didn't he talk to me about that? And he's like, he survived 100 feet and he survived. I'm like, is that normal? Is that something that normally happens? No, because it was from a movie. I'm like, oh, so why do you think it happened in the movie? He's like, whoa, it was a pretend film is what he said. I'm like, okay, so it was pretend. Why would make him survive? He's like, well, he fell into snow. I'm like, if the snow wasn't there and you think you would get hurt, he's like, yeah, what if it was cotton candy instead of snow? I was like, oh, I love cotton candy. And we ended up talking for candy for about two minutes. But asking questions to help people engage in critical thinking is something that can be done for anybody. Literally anyone about any topic. And Essie's just a really good way to have those kinds of talks. And I think the more you do it, the more comfortable you get with it. And it's definitely something that helps with interviews, helps with making friends. It's just a really great way to talk to people. All right. Thank you so much for doing this and maybe we'll, you know, focus on following our questions. Yeah, definitely. I got an email address. I don't know what you'd like, but it's tyrone.wells.phd at gmail.com. If you don't like that, it's too long. Let's chat Essie at gmail.com. I also have that YouTube channel. If you leave a comment there, say, hey, this is me. I'll be happy to reply back to you. Those two emails were let's chat Essie at gmail.com. Let's chat Essie one word. And then tyrone.wells.phd at gmail.com. You're one of those I'll be happy to reply to you. And like I said, if you guys ever need any help or more like tips, I'll be happy to do something like this again. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Cool, cool, cool. All right, thank you guys. All right, see you.