 103.9 FM, WOZO Radio, Knoxville. Ladies and gentlemen, digital free thought radio hour. Hello and welcome to the digital free thought radio hour on WOZO radio, 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, August 29th, 2021. I'm Larry Rhodes or a Doubter 5 and as usual we have our co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello Wombat. So the trick to a hyzer throw is you got to lean over it and then it'll flip up and then it'll fade. That's how you get the distance. That's how you get the distance. I hope to start calling that the Wombat throw that you'll perfect it. Nice. And with us today we have Gary or the Dreadfire team. That's right. Hoey there. George Brown, the two and a half. Hello George. And Dreadfire, welcome. You're on mute. Both of you. Digital free thought radio hours, talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faiths, God's holy books and superstition. Wombat, what are we starting off with today or invocation? Yeah, absolutely. But we're going to be doing a show on music and I think who better can lead us into such a wonderful, what is it? What are those things called pirate shanties? Who better to lead us into? Well, I don't quite have a shanty as it were, but I do have a prayer. Okay, we'll leave it up to you. Our newly Lord, who art in a colander, I'll Dante 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 put up with 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. Hey, we're starting to get that nice and coordinated there. Yeah, like I said, we need to have our own little shanties set up. Speaking of which, are you telling me for real that you don't know any shanties? I'm pressed to not believe this. Oh, that one. I don't know what to do with the drunken sailor, though. It's over a moment. Dred, how you been? I'm happy that you don't look singed. You look like you're in one piece. How you been? What's going on with you? Yeah, not too bad. I got back on Thursday. So I'll in all likelihood be deployed again because we still have, I think it's 239 fires happening here in British Columbia. So yeah, it'll be well into October. So I've been doing day shifts. So that's why it was not it was not last week because it's a seven to seven shift. And, you know, in a remote area, there's no signal. All right. Now, how many are these like controlled fires or are these complete wildfires are out of control? They're wildfires. So, and of course, they they do a lot of control back burns and and all that kind of stuff to get these things under control. So yeah, it's it's a big deal. We were up at I was up at a place called Hunter Milehouse where they've taken over the airport and set up the fire camp right on the airstrip. So yeah, it's a pretty big deal. Wow, geez. I'm sorry about that. What what's the outlook like? Is this something that we can actually, you know, hope to maintain is like a like a human? Well, it's the new normal, right? You know, like global warming is going to keep these temperatures up. We had we had a heat bubble here where it was 44 degrees Celsius, the hottest temperatures in one place that actually burned down completely. The community burned down called Lytton. They had temperatures of 47 degrees. Wow. That's that's really, really hot. Really, really hot. So without the fire. So what is that? What is that in Fahrenheit for us? I don't know what you Americans call it. So. So like room temperature in Celsius is 23 degrees. That's standard. Yeah. This is like twice as hot as that, which is like, you know, one degree over a hundred well over a hundred. Yeah, this is very, very hot. This is very, very, very, very hot. It hurts to go outside basically. Right. Yeah, it sucks. You know, I always think, okay, so here's my one morbid thought before we move on. Global warming is sort of like the earth having a fever where it's like, oh, I had a bad case of the humans for 10,000 years, but now. Yes, right. Got to be vaccinated against the human species. I'm going to be okay. I just have a little fever. Just going to wait it out for 30,000 years. I'll be a blink of the eye. So we got to either get our act together or figure out how to make rocket ships that work very, very well. And not just for billionaires that own big companies. George Brown, speaking of money, speaking of big companies, speaking of the man watching us. How you been and how have you been under this under the watchful eye of big tech? Well, I don't know how to answer that this morning, but I have something very unique to share. The way I'm wired mentally, I have to try things and use them extensively in order to understand whether I want to have them in my life or not. So I have a little goodie that I bought that I want to share with you all. Absolutely. This is a timer that's timing our show right now for me. Nice. And it's came from Amazon. It's overpriced at about $15. It's a piece of junk. And there are about 30 of these things. They're all coming out of the same factory. Every one of them has a different brand name. It's all the same product. One of them goes around in the opposite direction. Another one has a light instead of a beep. But what it does is it shows you the passage of time and your remaining time as a disappearing pie. Nice. How nice that is. If you happen to have ADD, this is going to help you relate to time. That is very useful. I should have one of those for the radio show. Now you're giving me... When I was in radio, I used a darkroom timer in front of me. Because I had holes in programs that were exactly one minute long within which to read a commercial. That was exactly one minute long. A visual analog clock face can work wonders. I'm going to throw this question at you. Do you have any tapes of your recorded broadcasts like any of the commercials that you did? Do you still have any access to that? I do have a few. I don't know where they are. The only thing is I listened to one. This was over 50 years ago. I listened to one recently and I thought, God, do I sound young? I'm at the point now where because of COVID, when I watched my old SC videos, I think to myself, who's this cool guy and how does he know the answer for everything? I don't know how to do that. I never want to try this again. My past self has made me too intimidated. Scott, I want to throw this out at you. Beautiful head of hair. I barely recognize you, my friend. What's going on? Yeah. Deciding to grow it back in a little bit. This is what happens when Scott finally releases a huge major project. Is all the stress gone? Scott, why don't you tell me what's the big news? Oh, yeah. The EP that I've been working on for about a year now called Up to Us has finally completed and released, so it's all on Spotify, every major outlet. It has been, it's up for a Grammy nomination this year. So I'm hoping that it's going to win the best in club and dance for that particular genre. So that's the big hope. And just to let you guys know, it's Deborah McGone and Dub Shine. That's my moniker. And it's a, I like to think of it as my project towards secular humanism because it's a pop, you know, it's a very positive message about how to reach our goals collectively and individually. That's all the songs run off that major theme. But yeah, it's a positive message. I have a lot of hope for it. You know, a lot of work went into it. I think Lady Gaga's engineer worked on mixing it down and stuff. So that's pretty. It sounds crisp. It sounds really nice. Scott, how do we put that link in? Yeah, I'll put the link in no problem at all. Yeah, absolutely. I'll put in the YouTube comments as well. But like engineering music has become my new favorite thing about making music. And, and you're such a good engineer already. Like I can hear that throughout the song, there's one thing or one or two things that you want me to hear or listen to the entire way through. And it changes and you always take my attention to one thing. And then you come right back to the hook and then there's compliments to it, but nothing over overpowers each other. And it's just like, this is such like I developed the ear for it now to really appreciate the music that you make. It's really great. Yeah, thank you so much. It's kind of like a conversation. You know, it's like if there's a point you want to highlight, I'm trying to figure out ways to really accentuate that particular point without it getting boring or too magnified in that area. But yeah, it's an art form to that stuff. We're going to be talking about music way more into the show and we're going to get back to this album. But I do want to touch faces with Larry. We're going to start with the segment that I'm going to call What's on the shirt? What's on the shirt? What's on the shirt? Larry, tell me what's on the shirt. Well, this is just your typical Hawaiian shirt. I've got palm trees and witties and sailing ships and things like that. So it's just white. Larry, I don't know if you've ever worn the same shirt twice on this show. We've done this. You look still left it up when he says that. That's classic lies. We've got to remember that. We've got to read the body language here. But I love that. What have you been up to, my friend? Nothing, not a lot. I'm on computer most of the time. Playing games or arguing with people on Facebook or just making points and posts. I need to do some more writing, but I haven't done that much lately. But I'm hoping to get back into it somewhat. I've got some topics I'd like to get back into from my blog. Very, very nice. I'm hoping when you say you're playing games, you don't just mean like Candy Crush on mobile. Like you're playing something. Oh, no, these are first person shooters pretty much. Far Cry 5. Nice. Nice. I saw you on Wow last night. Oh, did you? Yeah. We were on Wow this morning too. Yeah. Wow. I tried hooking up with you, but I guess you weren't, you weren't, didn't have your chat on it or something. I just thought. I played a really disappointing video game myself. Just some insight on me called 12 Minutes. It's a game where you're caught in a time loop and you're trying to stop a hitman from coming into your home and killing your wife and unborn child. And it's like, oh my gosh, the stakes are very, very high. And you're caught in a 12 minute loop. So you fail, but you wake up at the beginning before the hitman shows up at your front door. So you can like move things around and you can try to convince your wife to hide. But she's like, what are you talking about? You're crazy. It's like, oh, how do I get you to listen to me? How do I get you to pay attention? It's a whole ground hard to pay, but it's short. And it's very grounded for the first two acts. Then the third act completely goes crazy because you figure out, you need to get information from a hitman. So you have to sort of become friends with him and you find out your wife was a killer. And it's just like, everything falls apart. The whole plot. What's the name of this? It's called 12 Minutes. They try to do too much. It ends, I'll throw out spoilers, but it ends with you finding it out that you're actually your wife's brother and your mutual father was a hypnotist who made you forget that you married your wife, who was also your sister because the hitman had a daughter who had cancer, but she doesn't matter. Oh, it's so crazy. They had such a simple idea. Keep your idea simple, guys. I missed out on something, I think. What exactly is it that you're talking about? It's a bad video game in my head. Oh, bad video game. It's more frustrating for me when a good story ends poorly than when I just watch a bad thing from beginning to end. I like to do so much potential there. Speaking there. I agree. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. We are talking about music today. Something that I rarely get disappointed with is music because, you know, you got my attention for three and a half minutes. I'm listening to you. I'm having a good time. And if I don't like it, I can always hit that skip or thumbs down button. But I'll tend to find algorithms have gotten so good these days of just finding music that makes me feel spiritually fulfilled in the most secular sense of I can put it. Like I definitely feel that there's like something pushing a button in me that's making me groove in a way that spoken word or a piece of visual art can't do. And I feel like that music does tap into something very special. I also feel like religious people know that and they can use it to their benefit in a lot of ways. And so when I listen to music, especially since I've been making music, I'm very keenly aware about what is being done to manipulate my sense of awareness. Like are they using particular chords that are just done just to try to make me happy? Are they doing that whole thing where they build up and then kill all the momentum just to like tell me the name of the song and then they broke back into the thing again? Like I'm listening to that kind of stuff. George, what do you got? What's your story back there? Simply this. Talk to me. With my background in music, I want to answer all of your questions with one word. The word is yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. So I want to talk about what music does to us, how we can be vulnerable to it, and how can we empower ourselves? Maybe as atheists, maybe we can find secular means of expressing ourselves through music that might be more advantageous than the rocks that we're using right now. And I'll throw that up to Scott first, since he just came out with a secular album. Scott, you said that there was a lot of secular aspects to the music that you're making. Would you mind talking about that and why that's important? Yeah, that's right. So, you know, the weird thing about it is the paradigm usually, at least when you talk to some people, is that religious music is positive and it's all about, you know, God, and it's all about, you know, behaving good, good, you know, according to religious, I guess, ideals and things of that nature, and even humanistic sort of ideas play into that. Well, oftentimes when you think about secular music, especially from the viewpoint of religious folks, and believe me, I grew up around it and been around it for a large portion of my young life, is that secular music is looked at as music of the world or music that is in the hands of the wicked one, you know, the devil, or depending on where you come at, your religion, specifically in Christianity, is what I'm referring to. So secular music has a bad rap in the mind of a lot of people. And so what I wanted to do was kind of highlight that secular music can also be just as positive and play on humanistic themes and be sort of a causal force for good, hopefully. Like you mentioned, the music, if it feels good, then it sort of creates meaning in the mind of people. And so just like with religious music, if you can strike a nice little chord progression or a nice little bass line that is jumping, makes you feel positive, makes you feel good, and then you can kind of, in concert with that, you know, add some really positive messages and lyrical content, then it can be a full package of positive music for you that resonates within you. So that's what I was... That's right, that's right. And so we can use those same tools. Anybody can use those same tools. There's nothing magical about it. It's just a matter of figuring that out. Dred, would you like to weigh in? Yeah, I just remember years and years ago I was hanging out with a bunch of Christians at one point in my life, and they referred to Christian music as Sackrock. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. Sackrock? Sackrock. Sacred. Sacred rock. Sacred rock. So they call it Sackrock. I didn't care for it. Yeah, the idea is kind of weird. So I do like the idea of music pulling you into a mind space. So like for a lot of people who may feel like, you know, they are born with original sin, and they may not be good enough unless, you know, they open their souls up to Jesus and God, and that there's something wrong with them, and that they will constantly be, you know, impure until God helps them out. Like the way how Christianity is formatted is you have a problem and only we can fix it, right? So you have to live your life with this idea of there's something wrong with me. What I feel like Christianity music does is reinforce the idea that you're loved, that you can be in the mind space that maybe things are going to be okay, that there is a being that does love you, that you do have some control, that you do have some power, that you do deserve to feel happy. And for a brief respite, you don't have to think about the fact that, oh, I am a sinner. Oh, I am going to hell if I don't repent. Oh, I do have sins that are unaccounted for. Oh, Jesus had to die for me to feel good. Like I feel like Christian music puts you in a, that mindset where that doesn't have to matter as much. Blair, do you think that's valid? Well, I think that Christian music does do that for sure, but it does an awful lot of other things. But the main thing that gets me about it is that you can pass off your sin to somebody else. You can get Jesus to take responsibility for every bad thing you've ever done. That makes no sense. And we were talking about being good a minute ago with air quotes around it. It's not really being good, it's being obedient. Right. That's the main thing about the Bible is you have to obey and obedience is not morality. Right. It's a short jump there, but it's the case. Yeah, I just wanted to add something to that, which kind of reminded me of a conversation I had a few years ago. When I lived in Irvine, California, my wife and I and a friend of ours, they lived, well, the friend of ours lived next to a church. And of course, he wasn't necessarily a believer, but he invited us to go to the church. And knowing full well that we're unbelievers, we're atheists and not really, but he was saying that it was, well, forget about that. It's the music. Come check it out. And we actually went to the church and I'll be really honest with you. The music was just great. I mean, it sounded like going to a nightclub. Like it was like thumping 125 beats per minute baseline. And I mean, for me, I was in, I was sold. Like you got me like, okay, I understand now. And we used to go to this thing all the time and just enjoy the music. And it made us feel good. It really resonated. Now nothing changed with our beliefs at all. But the friend of ours was kind of like saying, well, his thought after a while was like, wait a minute, this music is really great. It makes us feel good positive. I mean, isn't this kind of like showing us that maybe there's something to this church stuff that we should believe it. And of course I didn't agree with all that and we had a conversation, but it's just the idea that musical feeling, that music can influence people to believe things. And it's weird. Like I didn't get that from it. Maybe it's because I kind of understand a lot of this stuff, this whole topic a little better. But for my friend who really didn't care too much about these kind of conversations and philosophy, he was just kind of open to say, oh, it feels good. It's church. It's making something different. So yeah, why not? It's great for us. I think there's absolutely something really true because I feel like there is a potential vulnerability that comes from not understanding how music works on a physiological level or a mental level and being exposed to it maybe for one of the first times at a certain intensity and realizing that you don't have the muscle memory or the understanding to understand what's happening to you and why it's happening to you. And music in my head has been around long enough for us to break it down into a science. And so we know what works good for our gummy little brains to be like, hey, endorphins, I like that pattern of noise signals. And because there is a strict pattern that makes our brains go like, yeah. And it almost seems to be universal. It seems magical. Yeah. It seems magical. And unless if we have the understanding to be like, oh, this is just what's going on. Exactly. I think it sounds good on a pentatonic. Exactly. Exactly. And they're mathematically sound. It can fool you. It can fool you. It can fool you. And you ask someone. So like the weird thing is like you can ask someone to like name like four or five of their favorite songs. And if they sing the melody back, they're all the same scale. Like 10, they'll tend to be the most part the same scale or same chord progression or same little pentatonic. Just like, look, I can play all your favorite songs on the piano right now. There's like a guy who's on Twitch. And there's people who do this all the time. They'll play on a piano and they'll take requests from people in a chat room and they'll be like, I can play Firefly by Owl City or play this. And they're playing it and they just bust it out. And it's like, how did you learn how to play that song? It's like, because it's the same song. Because all these songs follow more or less the same, very simple rules. And as long as I know the key that I need to play in, I know where all the chords are. Because our brains are just like, if you just transpose it by one note, I'll pretend it's a new thing and give you all these new hormones again. George, sorry for talking to George 2.5. What's up? Well, I'm sorry. I missed some of the conversation I had to read from my computer. First of all, I want to share a realization with everybody, which is that during my lifetime, virtually all popular music is now rock music. In other words, every piece of popular music that you hear has the same beat. It's rock beat. It's accent on two and four in before time. This is so incredible. So this really isolates and shrinks down the landscape in popular music to one particular beat. And that's incredible to me. I also believe that rock music is hypnotic. And now I like the hypnotic element in music because it carries the feeling, the emotion, the message with it. It is a container for what we want to communicate. But having it only one form is almost distressing to me. It's almost like we are advertising our way down to just this is the most effective way to sell a song or a product or whatever the idea is here. And if we need people to go to war, we'll just do this, but make the song. Yeah, exactly. In the warehouses and to push buttons for our machines, we'll make it about love so that we'll have more babies. Like we have pulling leather. It's four-four time with accents on two and four. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Three versus one break and a pre-chorus and then an outro and you're done. Yeah. Scott. Now, when I was in radio, we had... Sorry, but we're at the half... We're at the half of the show. We'll come right back after this. Sorry about that. Larry. Sure. This is the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio, 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. And we'll be right back to this short break. 103.9 FM, WOZO Radio, Knoxville. Welcome back to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour, second half on Douter 5. And we're on WOZO Radio, 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, August 29th, 2021. Let's talk about the Atheist Society of Knoxville for a second. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in our 19th year. We have over a thousand members now and we have weekly Zoom meetings during this COVID outbreak. But we're also meeting in person for those who got their shots vaccinated. Out of Barley's Tap Room and Pizzeria Deck in the Old City on the patio there. You can find us online also on Facebook, meetup.com, or you can just go to KnoxvilleAtheist.org. Can just Google Knoxville Atheist. For that matter, it's just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you can still go to Meetup, search for an Atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start one. Okay, where do we want to pick up that one, Matt? Hey, we're picking up right with George 2.5. You were saying something. Yes. When I worked in radio, we transmitted classical music. However, we also transmitted a competing service to Muzak on a sub-channel. And that program ran all the time. Our salespeople advertised that we gave different subscribers different kinds of music that would be motivational to their customers. So dentists got different music than doctors did, than restaurants did, than elevators got. Oh, interesting. It was all the same music. We didn't have one channel of sound. Furthermore, I happened to have dealing's reason to visit the official Muzak station, which was in Middletown, Connecticut, or actually it was in Meredith, Connecticut. And they had a big display of tape machines in the entryway to their storefront. And what I noticed was that among all these tape machines that were in the window, only one of them was running. So their people all got the same music, too. But the idea was that I think at that time, Muzak was kind of this pablam mush that was very low-key. It was all specially recorded. Ours was, too. And the purpose was kind of like to lull you into a state of, I don't know, mental nothingness. Now it's exactly the opposite. You go into the supermarket and it's top 40 music. It's all top 40 music that you're going to hear. And the purpose of that is to distract you from making decisions. Correct. And I think this is the nail on the head maybe for me. I think music has a lot. Music is essentially information. We digest it differently. But because it's information, we need to know how, it's worthwhile to know how to interpret it correctly because it could be misused by people and turn it into misinformation. Oh, absolutely. Easily. Well, then isn't that really what, you know, if we're talking about Christian music, isn't that, you know, sort of the object of it is to, you know, lull you or lure you into that sort of sense of well, you know, like a false sense of well-being, I think. So here's my thing in the sense, yes, but I am an atheist and I love Christian music because I just like the patterns that they use. I like the chimerae-chipper feeling. And I will listen to it knowing very well that I don't believe anything they're saying, but I like the songs. Like there's, I can name like 40 different Christian songs right now that are pop standard that I love. And I think as long as you know what you're getting and you inform yourself to know how music works, it's okay because music in my head is okay. Scott. Yeah. I was just going to piggyback on that and what you and George were saying is that it's not like this stuff is a big mystery anymore. It's like right now in the industry and you and anybody can pick it up. I mean, you could go on YouTube. I think I've maybe sent you a few things, Tyrone. You can go anywhere to any sort of musical teacher organization university and they'll tell you. One of the things that strikes you is that really with pop music, there's as much as four chord progressions. That's the rule because that's what people respond to and it gets, you don't want to go past that because you sort of muddy the water so to speak with too much with real underground dance music. You know, you have maybe just one chord or maybe two chord progressions at the most with my music. I'm kind of keeping it at two chord progressions through most of it, but then in a break, you'll notice I'll go into the four chord progression to kind of expand it out and let it breathe a little bit and then go back into the little tight two chord progression groove to keep you locked in because that little two chord progression is where the magic happens. That's where the gospel records are. They're in those two chord progressions. They don't go any more than that because they know that that's where you kind of keep people in that little groove and where that little excitement resonates and it's kind of hypnotic and trippy and the brain really likes that. The brain loves consistency, that little loop, that little four four loop going throughout. The chord progression just kind of dances around that little tight little groove and then when you get into a break, you kind of expand out into maybe four chord progressions or maybe even more. It seems really complicated to the human brain, but it's really not complicated at all because if you go to the third chord progression or the fourth, it's just a different chord than your first chord. That's all it is and you're just adding it into it. So it's kind of like having a conversation. You're adding words into your sentences. It's nothing complicated about that. You're just doing it, but it's really scientific. It's just like George was saying with pop music, they have a formula and it works and until it doesn't work anymore, they're just going to stick to it and that's just the way it goes. And it's important to know what that formula is. That's what I'm saying because then all the bad stuff that can come from it doesn't have as much effect. You know, when I was working in the recording industry, one studio I worked at, maybe more than any other, was a place called Bell Sound and Bell Sound produced about one third of all the records that hit the top 10. Now, as Scott was saying, it's formulaic and these people at Bell Sound had the formula down pat. So record companies that had their own recording studios would send their rock stuff over to Bell Sound because they had the magic. So it's been doing, that was 50, 60 years ago, I'm talking about. Jeff Hart, what do you got? Well, I was going to say maybe Christian Rock needs its own weird L Yankevich, you know, and I'm up to the task. I mean, if we can translate some of the stuff into Christian sea shanties for the Flying Strait and Monster. I'm all out of that. So way back when Larry and I, when we were on the radio, we did a show for a band called The Quiet Company, A Quiet Company is the name of the band. And what's great about them is they were a former Christian rock band whose lead singer became an atheist, explained it to the rest of the group and the rest of the group became atheists as well. Wow. So it was like a very good, like it was during the time when the lead singer had a kid and he realized that all of his concerns about his religion, he couldn't just put onto this kid because like he had a lot of unresolved issues, hashed them out, realized he didn't have a good reason to believe anymore, couldn't believe anymore as a result, explained to his group and they're like, yeah, we have a problem with that too. We're not going to believe either. And they kept making music. A Quiet Company, A Quiet Company. What was the name of that album that we did? Easy Confidence or something? Oh man, we did three different albums I think on that show. And so A Quiet Company, they released their stuff on YouTube as well. It's very widely available. But the thing is it sounds just like Christian music. Yet it is all secular driven. In fact, some of it's very much like, hey, here's a matter of fact how I became an atheist as a result of losing my religion. And so it's just as beautiful, sweet, just as painful. George, you want? Oh, go for it. Go for it, Larry. I was just going to say real quick, somebody mentioned or asked me on the Facebook the other day, says, what good has atheism done for the world? What have they ever done? And I said, anything that's not particularly religious, you can mark up to atheism, you know, because it's secularism, which is like what you're talking about now. Any song that's not particularly religious is a secular song. It's a beautiful album. It's a beautiful set of albums. They still make music. Dre, would you mind standing up and showing our visual audience, like more stuff that science came up with? You can thank us for, let's see, DNA, the laws of physics, relativity, P-pods for genetic outlining, Punnett squares, whole bunch of stuff. Schrodinger's cat, we're going to have a conversation about. You guys know that's like a pet peeve, but Madam Curie's with X-rays, Evolutions, electricity, so many things. All right, that's it. Sorry about that. Fuminacci's number is on there. That's awesome. You look like you want to see some things. Fuminacci. I have a few things. I mean, one thing that we have going for us is that we have refrained from starting religious wars. Mm-hmm. That's good. That's really good. Boy, what was I going to say? You know, the alternative to popular music is, you know, like classical music, for instance, or jazz, where the players have engaged in long form. And, you know, development of ideas, complexity. That's the world I live in. Nice. And religious music. In the Renaissance, the Christian music, the Catholic church stuff, you know, composers like Akigam, Palestrina, DeLasso's, they wrote incredible music. Almost free-form counterpoint, the way I see it. And then once John Luther came in, the Germans went to town with contrapontalism and wrote wonderful religious music that I as an atheist really resonate with and it presents me with terrible paradoxes because my favorite composer set a little bit of anti-Semitic text here and there and my background is Jewish. So it puts me in a world of terrible paradox and actually I like paradoxes. I'll tell you this, I'll tell you this because I get that same vibe because for me, it's like I like the moral teachings of David Hume, but he was an avid proponent for slavery, right? And so what I got is people who come up with good things that I like, those things tend to exist before those people had said them, right? Like people come up even with good music. That music was probably already around, like in bits and pieces maybe, and some guy inspired and put them together, but like those notes were already existing before some guy who maybe was anti-Semitic decided to publish them. So like good things can still exist even if knuckleheads are the ones to be the ones distributing it. So you can still like the good things. They are not the same thing as life. That would be a great topic for a show actually. Yeah. People's background, you know? Can we forgive their bad points and celebrate their good points? Yeah. I don't think we even have to forgive the bad points. We can just appreciate the work apart from the person. I'd like to finish what I was saying because it's important to me that after the Baroque period in music about 1750, it deteriorated. The religious music got much simpler and planer and became melody and a complement and all music did. I mean classical music did. The religious music and the spark went out of religious music as I've experienced it. You know, formal, let's say the white Christian church. It's just lost it. It's been pablum ever since. Man, there's so many different directions I can take this. George, I will touch on something you had said earlier. I do think that there is scientifically a song you can play while you're holding for someone on the phone that is mathematically guaranteed to make you listen to them, the hold music longer and stay on the phone longer than it would if there were no music or some other song. I feel like we figured out the song that makes a person stay on the line and then I'll also throw this out. I think, like I said, music is information but it also can be formatted like a language. Languages are interesting because they can follow different standards based on your geolocation and how much access you have to other different kinds of cultures. When I hear music from Japan, like rock music that's in Japan compared to rock music in America, it's almost startling because they follow completely different and the music that's reached sort of like a homogeneity or a pablum here in the US and so it's refreshing to listen to rock from Sweden that's like original rock or original rock in China or original rock in Japan because it's just the right instrumentation but completely different understanding of what chords sound good together what notes go good together and so when I was a kid I used to listen to a lot of music to bring it up to my friends but actually just turned out that I just needed like a refreshing point of new perspective to help me continue to evolve musically and I think that's the key for a lot of people who feel like music is sort of becoming the same thing it's the same thing with atheists like you can't just be an atheist in a room expose yourself to new ideas and realize why you're an atheist and same thing with music expose yourself to new different kinds of music and then form with what you like and maybe can take some of that stuff from other people and then form or enhance your bouquet of different sounds and chord progressions that you turn to appreciate Scott, tell me about some of your inspirations for your music and do any of them come from overseas? Yeah, so of course like I lived in Germany for quite a while but I was kind of always into the electronic dance music scene but actually a lot of my inspiration comes from a lot of classic rock music and I still do love the classics this classic rock stuff and that feel kind of resonates with me so it comes through in my own music it's just like you said you kind of combine a lot of different things like I like funk music like R&B and soul and hip hop, classic rock a lot of stuff jazz and you'll hear a lot of that influence in different tracks of mine in different songs and so I think I'm no different than anybody else in that regard like everything that you kind of create doesn't come out of a vacuum it comes from your history of what influenced you it's kind of unavoidable even the things we say, the things we believe all of that stuff is just an effect of a cause that goes all the way down the line I agree I'd agree with you 100% I feel like George made another comment too he said like white church music and I've gone to a lot of churches we're military, we're moving around all the times we need people to help us move but I've seen Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist not Baptists, Baptists are my black church but I've seen white black Baptist churches and they have the same song book and like I know those songs very well it's like very very but I've been to black churches where it's like holy crap the music that is playing out here is not even like I can't even break it down into forms or a template it's just constant improvisation on top of improvisations on top of each other and loud and like funky but then also like almost chaotic and I'm like do people get what I get out of like the white church this is like yes because when we do this music our culture is like the music that you can't necessarily play on every radio station like it's not about the four by four emphasis on two and a four because that's what sells to white demographics this is about us and what our culture represents and here's our funk here's our jazz, here's our R&B here's our drum and bass here's our technically proficient standards for music and this is what we've infused our religious spiritual music with because that's what connects us the sense of pride and belonging to that like whoa and your ears are ringing as you walk up and you're like man that was super fun you know I have to comment on this to me if I can trust the what my experience is of white Christian church music with black Christian church music it's like I walked into a restaurant one day and I had the ultimate sandwich it was white bread with white turkey on with white gravy some people that's their jam and there's nothing wrong with that right well like that church in California when I went to that church in California it was a black band playing and it just gets to the point where the music sort of is very emotional and it gets to a point where it's just kind of chaotic where it's like and everybody's getting into it and it's like very hypnotic and it's emotional and it's like you're tired after it like after it's done you're like wow what a journey that was yeah you're exhausted and it's different but you take that idea and you go back to drum circles in Nambia or you go to Nigeria and you listen to their old chanting that's what you do at a drum circle that's what you do when you're chanting with friends it's not about learning 14 different verses and singing them one after the other it's about getting exhausted together to feel like you got something out of you sounds like a Grateful Dad show yeah I've been to a few and it's a real experience Larry what's up you got a puppy he's on mute my friend you're on mute still on mute you're on mute on zoom oh it's okay we'll give him some time to figure that out I never used that on there musta backs did not really turn to none no I was saying especially in church there's a choreography that brings you to a peak of excitement and lets you down there's a technical term called spiritual manipulation where they can then manipulate you to a point where you feel like this feeling of relief release and you're more willing to give put into the plate as we're it's spiking the sound waves with ayahuasca yeah same sort of thing you just put some drips into the air conditioning that's how it happens but yeah music like I said my takeaways here is music is a good thing it totally is but it's also in my head just as powerful as a language or any sort of other communication tool which means that the more educated you are about how it works the more it can do for you in terms of making it yourself or keeping you from getting manipulated by people who might know the system better than you and if you think that you are above manipulation and if you think that you are above any sort of coercion through music you are the prime target for coercion and manipulation by people who already know it better than you so is it like critical listening it is like just like that that's how I work it's being able to you can still enjoy music with a critical ear I enjoy it even more now that I criticize it and think about it more I was listening to music when I was just going out doing my work out this morning and I'm like listen to certain songs and it's like love song love song love song and it's like ooh I'm so tired of the way you're setting this up and like the standards like this singer probably doesn't know the band and the engineer probably doesn't know the instruments like this just sounds like there's so many different ideas put together and you got people who are featured in this song who probably just didn't even hear the final track before they wrote the lyrics nothing about this is and then you get that one song that's like you know what this is great and you add that in and you thumbs it up and it becomes a part of your soundtrack and it's from my head it's like a meditation of myself of what I appreciate because I'm willing to listen to music more than just at base value I'm willing to let it become my headspace and I think if we just take a little bit more caution with that at least with our music with how we talk to people with how we garner information we could be so much better as a people so much better as a community there's potential there at least Dredd final words what do you think um well more shanties more shanties world needs more shanties I'm not actually going to have a look at a couple of Christian songs and see if I can't rework some lyrics I've done a little singing in my own time and maybe we work with you guys nice nice nice I'll be down I'll be down it's a work for tiktok it can work for us I think I just want to mention that since you got me here that I do broadcast this on my youtube channel it's called mine pirate and I do that Sunday mornings at 8am pacific standard time so check it out mine pirate p y r a t and I've got 92 92 followers I need 100 so I can modify my channel so like me and follow me nice fast words because that's so morrid but what's your final thoughts well I have two things I want to mention if you'd like to hear something with a little more depth then you need a catharsis I would like to recommend the song cycles any song cycle by Gustav Mahler and have the libretto on hand the text translated from German to English for yourself it'll be a profound experience the other one I want to say is Frankie Lyman why do fools fall in love one of the happiest pieces of music I've ever heard in my life I love it oh man there's so much beautiful music that I could recommend I would highly recommend Claire DeLune not by Debussy actually because he's dead and there's no actual tracks from him playing it but Hiromi Japanese pianist but also modern I don't even know what you would describe it as but she it's progressive jazz and she's done a rendition on Claire DeLune, Hiromi and I think her three piece ensemble probably nails that essence of that song more than any other rendition of that song ever done there's points where all three of them are playing and straining together and they're sweating and they're so happy when they're playing the song and then so sad together at the same time that you can't even tell that it's three different instruments playing it sounds like one thing just moving up and swelling and and moving up and down but Hiromi so who is this? Hiromi, H-I-R-O-M-I Hiromi and then Claire DeLune is her rendition it's a three part ensemble all of them so good anyway Scott last words before we head out for this week my friend please, please, please, please I beg you check out the new EP that I put out man I'm really trying to promote it really trying to bring awareness to it it's up to us Deborah Magone and Dub Shine up to us it's EP I posted it on my youtube channel thank you sir repeat that please could you it's Deborah Magone how do you spell it? D-E-B-O-R-A-H Magone is spelled M-A-G-O-N-E and Dub Shine which is two words D-U-B-S-H-I-N-E and the name of the EP is up to us and you can see it on Spotify Spotify and all major you know outlets like Amazon iTunes you name it up to us Larry, I'm a little jealous because if I try to keep my cat on my lap for that long I'm going to walk away with stitches my doggy is 21 years old not very active so he's not going to give me any kind of problem or she did want it down though so I had to let her down a second ago last words Larry we're talking about concerts and music and recommendations if you like pieces that feature concert violinists I recommend Vaughn Williams The Lark Ascending L-A-K The Lark Ascending I second that, that is a beautiful piece of music it is a great piece my own content with atheism is on digitalfreethought.com be sure to click on the blog button there are radio show archives atheists songs and many articles on the subject of atheism I have a book that's called atheism what's it all about it's available on Amazon and you can find my youtube channel by searching for doubter 5 or Larry Rhodes if you have any questions for the show send them by email to askanatheist at Knoxvilleatheist.org we'll answer them on future shows if you're having any trouble leaving religious beliefs behind so do struggle with that you can get help by visiting recoveringfromreligion.org if you're watching this on youtube be sure to like and subscribe this has been the digital freethought radio hour remember 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 we'll see you next week say bye everybody so I heard a voice in my head that told me atheism is true ah