103.9 FM, WOZO Radio, Knoxville. Ladies and gentlemen, Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is the 4th of July, Sunday morning, and I'm 2021 by the way. I'm Larry Rhodes, or Daughter 5, and as usual we have our co-host Wombat on the line. Hello Wombat. Hello, I want to have fireworks in the background. Let me see if I can even make that happen. Fireworks. There we go. Taking a gamble. Yay! There we go. Go, go, go. Sorry for the radio audience, but it looks pretty cool. Check it out on YouTube. Yep. We're live streaming this. With us today, we have Dred Pirate Higgs. Hello, Dred. How are you? George Brown, the two and a half. Good morning, everybody. And John Richards, all the way from England. The John Richards. How are you? Hello, I'm fine. Thank you. Yeah. Very good. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religions, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstition. Wombat, what are we talking about today? What's your topic? All right. So as I try to get my camera back working again, we actually have a topic that's going to be really, really heavy to unpack. Most likely we're going to be dealing with spirits, free will, and how are they combined if they are at all? But before we get into the meat and potatoes of it, I'm going to throw it up to our own Dred Pirate Higgs for our weekly invocation. All right. I'm taking off my headset for this. What be me, Captain? I shall not want he maketh me to float on saltwater. He stireth me through glassy seas. He filleth my bowl. He stireth me through the straits of noodleiness for goodness' sake. I, though I sail through the heaving of tempestuous waters, I will fear not sinking. For thou art with me, by mast and thy rudder, they comfort me. Thou preparest a feast before me in the presence of me mates. Thou quenches my thirst with grog. My goblet runneth over. Truly, past and grog shall follow me all the days of me life, and I will dwell in the galley of the quav forever. Robin! Guys, I want to apologize for the initial awkwardness. Today is July 4th, and we do have someone from England here. And so everything's fine. Everything's good.  Everything's fine. Everything's okay. John, can we just disclaimer? We're all friends here. Everything's okay? Well, I forgive you for unilaterally declaring independence, and I will have you back in the Commonwealth as soon as you like. No, he's called in reinforcements. We've got Moudreau over there from England as well. Moudreau, looking tanned, looking good. How have you been? How was your vacation? Good, good. I've been great. I'm playing music out live again. Nice. Drums and bass or like a little bit of everything? What do you got? Just bass right now. Not bad. Not bad. The heart of the band is what people would call it. Dread, that noodle thing, you finally got it eye contact with the camera. We appreciate that. That's really good focal points right there. What's your shirt say? So it's got a picture of something. I-8-5. There you go. I-8-5. It's a square root of a little one. It's real proud. Good job. With two to the third and the symbol for some and the symbol for pie. Yeah. And it was delicious. And good for you, Moudreau, for getting that. It's a nice t-shirt. All in symbols. There are going to be people from Greece who are like, wait a second. No, no, no. Those are our letters. We know what that means. How are you surviving the heat in British Columbia? Well, we managed. I've got very good air conditioning. And I know where the local pub is. Oh, you need. That's a quick one too. George, thanks for your concern. Lots of libations. George, thanks for your concern. Why have you been? Have you been? Well, I'm doing good. I'm looking into, I'm ready to look into the issue of whether psychopaths have been ruling the world for the last 40,000 centuries. 40,000 centuries. 40,000 centuries? That's a lot of centuries. At least during all the centuries that I'm aware of. That's four million years. Well, you have to go to Star Wars too, because that counts now, right? I'm pretty human. And in that case, yes, still. I will refer to the book about this much later in the program that I'm intending on reading. I must have misheard. I was sure he said 40,000 centimeters. 40,000 centimeters? Well, how far is that? And someone's going to have to do the kilometer conversion for me for that. But I still feel like I could find someone that's crazy within that standard. Oh, absolutely. Larry, I like the shirt. You always have these festive moments. But I'm noticing a distinct lack of red in this blue and white shirt that you got going on. What's going on here? Why do you hate America? Red, white, and blue with stars and all that stuff. But I think it's outgrown it. OK. Fair enough. But no, it's a nautical shirt. It's got sailing stuff on it. Very cool. And you spent time in the Navy too, right? I did. Yeah, we appreciate that. I went to a baseball game yesterday just to get some good vibes and got some disc golf in me. Did 18 holes yesterday. Did the best score that I've done in my life. Now I'm going to go out with another friend and do nine holes at a different course. Went to another course this morning. I have a disc catcher in my living room. I am officially hooked. Like I got too many discs coming in from Amazon. I don't know what to do with my free time. They're almost going to put, listen, they did a poll at my job and they're saying, hey, do you guys want a pizza party or a disc golf course installed in the back? And I was like, disc golf course. And guess what they chose? Pizza party. And I'm like, you know, you can buy pizza, right? Like you can just buy pizza. You eat it and it's gone. It's gone. You flush it down a toilet. We could have had a disc golf course. It was heartbreak. It was heartbreak. Lost by one vote. Anyway, speaking of things that break my heart. Do spirits have free will? Jared fire. I want to actually have you introduce the topic that we'll go over today. Sure.  Is there any free will in heaven? Can you say, God damn it. I don't like this place after all. So if you're deemed good enough to be in heaven by God and now you're in heaven, do you have like a out clause as part of your like heaven residency contract? Where you could be like, I'm tired of these harps. Can I, can we turn up the temperature a little bit? No, okay. Is there any, is there any opportunity to sin? Does sin exist in heaven? John, what do you got? That's another question. Is heaven hotel California? Oh, yeah. You can check in, but you can never check in, but you can check out. They sound it with their steely knives. Yeah. So maybe we should take a step back. Obviously, we have some interesting topics to impact even in this one question. Like one, is there heaven?  Are spirits real or souls real? I know Larry wants to dig into that. And then the whole nature free will, right? So like there's a little bit of cheese for everybody, but I just want to take it from the very, very top heaven and hell in my head. We'll do a quick round table on that and then we'll do souls and then free will. I think that'd be pretty good, but heaven and hell in my head.  And in my head, I couldn't imagine heaven filled with anybody who's okay with the concept of hell, right? Like the people who are in heaven in my head would probably be some of the most egregiously privileged and ignorant. Willingfully this human people who are like, yeah, I get, I get all these really nice things, but I don't care about the people who are suffering for all eternity. It's like, how'd you get here? This is for good people. What's going on here? Heaven's either empty or something's crazy. If there is a heaven and hell, which I'm not convinced that there is. Larry, what do you think about that idea? Can heaven be filled with anybody? If someone who goes to heaven has to be okay with the concept of hell, like Sam. Oh yeah. You know, it depends. To me, you know, they always say you'd have to be good to go to heaven. Well, that's not what Christianity teaches. You have to accept Jesus to go to heaven. You have to believe and accept. And, and once you do that, you can go to heaven. It doesn't matter what heinous crimes you've done, heinous crimes you've done in the world. John, I mean, I don't know if his first name is John, but Dahmer, the guy who ate people killed in eight people. He was a homosexual and all that. While he theoretically accepted Jesus in prison and he's in heaven now. So it's not about being good. Being good has nothing to do with it, according to this dogma of Christianity. Interesting flip. Yeah. Dread pirate. Well, one other point says I've also talked to Christians and asked them if there's sin in heaven unless I know, you know, to, to be, to sin, you have to trespass against God and you can't do that in heaven. Well, that's right there. It tells me that there's a limited free will at best. Hey, you're skipping, you're skipping. We're skipping. We got to keep in the lanes because Eric is going to take this and just say bye guys for the next half hour. Yeah. Yeah. Go save it. Just save it. Just say, we'll get there. We'll get there. Dread pirate. What do you, what do you think of the idea of heaven and hell? Actually, I was just going to comment on Larry's latest point here about Jeffrey Dahmer. And it's funny because I just posted a meme on our church Facebook page. It asks the question, how many communions do you have to do before you've eaten a whole Jesus? And it shows a picture of Jeffrey Dahmer. Oh man. And then underneath it says my son now calls him Jeffrey Dahmer, the people nommer. Yeah. I remember doing communion at a Baptist church. And the idea was we're eating crackers and grape juice, because all the kids were doing it too. But then I knew in some churches they literally give kids wine as well. And then I also know that there are some people in the church who are like, no, this isn't crackers and juice.  This is the actual blood and body of Jesus that's been transformed. Transubstantiated. And I'm like. Transubstantiation. We have the receipts. What are we talking about here? It's true. It's also cannibalism. Absolutely. Absolutely. Wayne. I won't be able to do the details of the joke, but for anyone that wants to follow up later, there's a fantastic David Cross bit about, you know, grandma going through the communion line and getting the body of Christ. And if you do the math, you got to have all body parts. So I'll leave it there. Wow. Wow. Yeah. John. Wayne. So the question is how heavy was Jesus? We could work out how many crackers he is. Oh, there's some math there. Dread. Yeah. While I was researching this meme that I posted, there is actually somebody that's done the done the math. And that the average weight and the average height and all that kind of stuff at the time. And you, if you broke it down into wafers, if you ate one a day for 643 years, that would be enough to eat Jesus. One a day for 364 years, 300. You said 300. Was that the biggest? No, it was 643 years. 600 years. Okay. Okay. It's weird math. Or every Sunday, maybe every Sunday for 644 years. Oh, you can't just make up math. But yeah, okay. Okay. I'm sure the math evens out, but still it's just like, what's the value of this model? John, where are we going? Well, I was just going to say, Methuselah could have done it. Then he would be old enough to be able to do it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And who was that other guy who was very old in the Bible, 800 year old? Abraham? Noah? Noah was like 600. Noah? Noah, that's right. Yeah. Methuselah. Yeah. Maybe he could have done it as well. Noah was brave too. Noah was really brave. Getting back to the topic, I'm trying to stay in your tram lines. Appreciate it. Ty. The question is, which heaven is it? Right. Is it the Valhalla of the Norse people, the Nordic people? Is it the paradise of the Muslims, where there's 72 virgins waiting for us all? Or is it the Jews? Didn't they have seven heavens? So which tier do we enter? Can we travel up and down? Can we get promoted? I found something always very saddening about the 72 version heaven, because one, I'm asexual and two, I would run out. Eventually, right? Like there's a guarantee you would run out. And that's, that's, that's what is it 99 problems times 72. Oh man. They're bottle renewal renewing virgins. Yeah. Oh, okay. Well, then that's just unlimited virgins. What's going on there? There's a card there. They need 72. It's a very weird disclaimer. It's a big numbers. That's why Larry. Isn't that actually a mistranslation? It wasn't an actually 72 raisins. That's what I heard. Raisins. I've heard that. Yeah. That's the case. That's, oh man, that's, that would be really unfortunate for some people. It's like, what? Like, oh man. Hey, what's up, John? Does it specify the sex of the virgins? Good question. Very good question. Oh, so like 72 people from geek squad just show up at your door. And you're like, ah, dang it. Hey, let's land party that. That's land party in my head. Okay. So if that's the case, I've had more fun with 72 virgins in that capacity. That's like game night. That's a fun, fun game. We can play board games. There's all of these great. George Brown, the idea of like Jewish heaven is like laying with your father. At least, you know, that's how it's transcribed in the Torah. There is no like harps or clouds or right sitting beside God or worshiping everlasting in this attorney.  And if you did have a heaven concept, was it the Jewish concept of heaven or was it something else? Um, Ty, talk to me. It's completely alien to me. Whoa. The whole concept is alien to me. I can't understand why people can give it credence. In fact, it just makes absolutely no sense to me. Yeah, it's a silly thing when you think about it outside of the theist blanket or circle for a while. Well, I mean, it just is far. The whole idea is foreign to me. But, but of course, one of my neighbors here in the Bible is has has told me very emphatically that if I believe onto Jesus that I'm going to get into heaven, of course, I would want to write from the onset. Who am I going to be in heaven with and do a question around these people? Yeah. Or would I rather go somewhere else where it's warmer and have a better time with my fellows there?  Did Hitler adopt Jesus before he died? Yeah. He was always a Christian, wasn't he? Theoretically, he was always a Catholic Christian. He was always a Christian. Yeah. And he probably got communion or whatever just before he was suicide, didn't he? Yeah. Cool. I'll tell you this, too. There's this really great play called, I forgot what it was called now, actually, but it's three people in a room and it's the afterlife. And basically, they all get in each other's nerves. And the famous quote is, hell is other people. Because all you have to do is just have one person and another person in the same room with each other. And there you go.  Because eventually they'll find something to be annoyed about with each other. And I'm like, isn't that marriage? It's like, maybe you can play a little bit with it, but hell is other people. If you don't get along with them, maybe you can then find some good people. John, George, what's up? This is, since I've been here, I've been wondering about the predominance of all these different Baptist churches where I live. And so I've gotten, see, fundamentalist Christianity is also a bit alien to me because I come from New York, which is a very Catholic city. And there aren't that many Protestants. I mean, they do exist for sure, but there aren't that many Protestants in New York.  So I forgot what I was going to say. No, I think you're on the right note. There are a lot of different denominations in Christianity, which lead to a lot of different kinds of heavens. So here I am in the Bible. Almost. Go ahead, George. Yeah, here I am in the Bible Belt, which is very fundamentalist. And there are all these, I think what they are, they're all Baptist spin-off churches, as well as the Baptists themselves. So here in this county where I live, now let me see, this is, we've got something like 57,000 people in this county. And I counted up, there are 167 official Baptist churches. Wow. In this county and the little tiny county. You'd have to do churches by square mileage or square kilometers. See how many there are in every block. These are the official Baptist churches. And then there are the unofficial Baptist churches. So there's about 35 of them. And then there's the church of God, church of Christ, church of this, church of that, church of the other thing. And the way it's been explained to me is that these all split, that each community, what do you call it, congregation. The people find that they're in disagreement with each other, as in our heaven, maybe. And so they split the church apart and it becomes a church of something else. And that's why I've got 167. I mean, that's essentially how Protestantism happened too. And there's still people up in arms about that, right? Like, that's not uncommon. Hey, John, what do you got? And if you disregard all the immigrants into the USA, and I'm talking about you lot, you know, because you came from Europe and look at the... Not me. Okay. And if you just focus on the natives of America, each tribe had its own religion, with presumably its own afterlife heaven. Very true, very true, very true. Great spirits and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, and they just called all that, they blanket termed it as paganism or heathenism, but that just meant you're not a Christian. And that's so many different things. Eric, I'd actually like to get some feedback on you. You had mentioned Valhalla. You had heard about, like, Jewish God, Christian God, and the various different sects. Or Catholic gods and how that might work. Did you have a favorite heaven, at least, that appealed to you? Even if you went to, like, Jediism or anything like that, did you actually have a favorite heaven? No, I was raised Catholic. So, you know, to me, it was this Catholic picture of a heaven, which I think the really all I got out of it was, you know, see your relatives that have passed away. Wow.  You know, that wasn't really, that wasn't a carrot for me, I guess. So I don't know that, I didn't see, I mean, heaven, the idea of, like, ending and never, you know, I think that was probably the scariest part is you die, it's nothing. And that was scary to me as a kid. So I guess the idea to continue on was maybe the most intriguing part of it. But obviously as I got older and as I kind of moved out of religion, gosh, eternity is kind of scary. Yeah. That's forever. Yeah. And it seems so weird that it's like, why do you, why do you exist at a moment in time and then live for 80, 90 years here and then live on for eternity, but you never did anything before. Right. And it seems like, you know, every soul has a different starting point. Just that all seems just weird to me. Alien. As George put it. It does seem bizarre. Yeah. So many questions. And what do you got? Well, and just along that line, the more I think about it, certainly as I was transitioning out of belief, those were those, those thoughts just dominated my head. And thinking about just how absurd. There's so many facets of religious belief are, you know, even in terms of thinking about afterlife. Like you, like you say thinking about, well, I wasn't here before I was born. What is this crazy notion of living on forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. Just everything that's packed into that, that expectation is, it's just, I don't know, the more I think about the crazier it seems. Yeah. I mean, I'm a finite being. The idea that anything about me could be infinite doesn't comprehend or identify with who I am as a person. And especially when you think of, you know, what we understand of the universe as a whole. Yeah. You know, even the universe is finite. And it will have an end, right? You know, as far as we understand. So yeah, it's just so counterintuitive to think that, you know, there's a different existence that goes on forever and ever and ever. It's got to be boring. How many reruns or how many seasons of Seinfeld could you have in heaven? Like, I get bored of these after a while. Larry, what was the thing that you were mentioning? Or you wanted to ask? Oh, not only that, we're put on here for a finite amount of time. Every single one of us faces different tests here. And I mean, some people have it easy. Like, you know, they're born with a silver spoon in their mouth. Some people born into abject poverty. They have to steal and lie just to survive. But we all have to accept Jesus to get into heaven, because apparently, morality has nothing to do with it, no matter what they tell you.  It's just all too strange. It's all too contradictory to make any sense. Yeah, if you want to have fair judging, have a fair playing field of some sort, or some sort of standardized test. But right now you have people who are born to parents who are billionaires and people who are born in abject poverty in places where there's no access to even vaccines for the black plague, right? It's like, how are these two people accepting Jesus and both being treated fairly?  Ooh, someone's sick. I hope they're okay. John, what's up?  Bless you.  So, yeah, the only test for getting into heaven is whether you've accepted Jesus, isn't it? Which is a bit unfair on all those people who were born in, you know, a Muslim country. Oh, yeah. A Hindu country, but they're all condemned, aren't they? Yeah, well, maybe Dredd has something to say, and then we've got to take a break and then we'll come back in Georgia. Yeah, well, I was just going to say that, you know, again, going back to Jeffrey Dahmer. If all the eight were atheists, are all the atheists going to hell? And is Jeffrey now in heaven? Yeah, crazy. What a bizarre question, Dredd. Why don't you leave it on that? All right. Tasty. Larry, why don't we take a break and we'll come right back. Okay, this is the Digital Freethought Radio Hour. We're on WZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. And we'll be right back after this short break. 103.9 FM, WZO Radio, Knoxville. Welcome back to the second half of the Digital Freethought Radio Hour. I'm Dauder 5 and we're on WZO Radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, July 4th, 2021. Let's talk about the Atheist Society of Knoxville, or ASK. Founded in 2002, we're in our 19th year. ASK has over 1,000 members and we have weekly Zoom meetings during COVID, but we also have started meeting in person again at Barley's Taproom and Pizzeria in the Old City every Tuesday night around 5.30, out on the patio. So come on down and meet other atheists in your area. You can find us online on Facebook, meetup.com, or go to KnoxvilleAtheist.org, or just Google KnoxvilleAtheist. It's just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to Meetup and search for an atheist in your town. Don't find one. Start one and get vaccinated. That's right. I'm good. You want to talk about souls? So we were talking today about, if spirits go to heaven, do they have free will? And so we want to talk about, we'll take a step back and look at the idea of like Heaven and Hell, we'll look at the idea of souls, and then we'll talk about free will and work our way down. And so for the quick, do souls exist update? I'm going to go to our own Larry Rhodes, who's an expert on the subject, so I've heard. Larry, do souls exist? Well, I do say a lot about it. I don't know how much of an expert I am. How can you be an expert on something that doesn't exist? But the whole point is whether God exists or Heaven or Hell or religions or whatever, it all depends on whether souls are real or not. And in the entire history of humanity, there's been a lot of stories of souls, but never have we ever captured one, put it in a lab, be able to test what attributes it has. It's all stories. There's nothing, no proof of anything that continues after we die. Our mind is a product of a working brain. The brain dies, the mind dies. There's nothing to say that anything continues after that. So why would we continue believing all of these incredible stories these religions are telling us about the afterlife when there's really nobody who's an expert on the afterlife at all? Also, I need my body. I like my body. If you put me in a computer, I may not be the same person. John, what do you think? Well, Larry makes a good point. You see, speaking as a retired biology teacher, the first question I want to know about the soul is, is it in the abdomen or the thorax? It's in your big toe. But we have people who don't have those or have them surgically removed, and they would still pay attention. Is that why I get gout all the time? I have an inflamed soul. Too much information, Dredd. As Larry says, nobody's ever found one. Out of in the professional ghost hunters after how many seasons? So then the question arises, is it actually a material thing? And if it's not a material thing, then of course there's no way we can even start looking for it, because all of our instruments of detection are made to detect material things. Oh, or emissions or, you know. I was going on to say, or radiations, forms of the electromagnetic spectrum, or other emissions like, you know, gravity, for example. But the point is that once we get into immateriality, then we're into the spirit world of womb. And at that point, I want to push us on to free will, because can a spirit have free will? Oh my gosh. Would you guys be okay if we head on to free will? George, did you have anything you'd like to comment on the idea of souls? Yes. Before we move back on to free will, I want to talk about the seductiveness of the concept of heaven for a moment. The seductiveness of it, which I think comes out of a very basic fear of death that we have as children, so that the church gives us the solution for that.  Now you have a choice. Are you going to be good or going to be bad? Because if you're good, and especially if you believe in this guy, up there you're going to go and stay there forever. And George, I'd say that seductive point makes a lot of sense, because yes it is, and then the soul is like, here's your ticket to the awesome place, right? And so now... And so we are really afraid of death as children.  It's very seductive. The antithesis of survival and all of biology is about survival, like from a fundamental genomic perspective, like survive. I mean, from my perspective as an atheist, originally, this may be the root of the whole thing is the fear of death. Are there any religions that don't have a concept of heaven? Let's talk about that in a future show. Dredd, what do you got hopefully on the nature of souls? What do you got? Well, my mother has Alzheimer's and she's moving into a more advanced state. So I think in terms of, you know, if souls do exist and they go to heaven, if you're accepted Jesus, in her case, you know, what does go? Does she go in her pristine, unaffected state? Or is she there as she is currently? I mean, just the idea that when you're born, does your soul learn stuff? Does it become more like you as you get older?  I find that kind of disturbing. Yeah. How does the soul represent you, John? There's so much to unpack there, isn't there? Is a soul like a hard drive that keeps updating and dumping the trash? Right. Yeah. And what kind of cookies or ads are the best way to target souls or things too? Sorry for interrupting. You have to shut down for updates. Okay. Here's the real question. Do souls have free will? And obviously we're working on the idea of we don't know souls exist yet because we haven't had a good way to confirm that scientifically or, you know, any reasonable approach towards it. So we're not definitive claiming they don't exist. We are definitive claiming that there's no good reason to believe it. And so if that's the case, show us a good reason to believe it and then we will be assuming that they have. But until then, do souls and would they have free will? I actually throw this out to Eric since he's been sitting patiently, arms crossed, waiting to go out. Eric, what do you mean by free will? First of all, probably the best question and then go from there. Yeah. Yeah. So I appreciate your team it up, Ty. No. So for this conversation, just be on the same page free will being that you're able to choose something of your own volition, right? You're able to make a choice between the blue or the red pill without biology controlling it. You were able to do it. And I suppose since Eric backup, we've had this conversation so many times.  What's the difference if I'm not so if without biology doing it, we already know souls don't have biology. So then if souls make any choice whatsoever, that would inherently mean that they are by definition, at least by the definition you're using using free will. So instead of perhaps that definition where it's like making a choice without biology, dictating it since we know souls aren't biological, maybe we can make it just choosing things on their own volition without outside influences or being able to I was actually going to step into it a little differently and say even if this soul is making that decision from the outside. Well, you didn't choose your soul to summon my inner Sam Harris. Oh, he's making all the references. Go ahead. If you don't choose your soul, so even if that soul is controlling you, you didn't you didn't have any authorship in that decision. So now you're just a puppet. So so I think whether it's biology, whether it's a soul or whether your decisions are randomly made by the universe, none of that, I think to me invites the concept of free will. So then I was going to kind of tee it up to the rest of the group and say, okay, now we have a soul. Does this soul, regardless of how it controls us humans, does this soul have free will? And I think somebody made a really good point about heaven being free of sin. And if it's free of sin, I don't think there's any room for free will in a soul. I think. Okay. Yeah. So if you can't sin in heaven, if you literally cannot sin, not in the sense of we would appreciate it if you didn't, but actually you are physically incapable of doing even if you choose you want to as a soul, you just cannot do it. Is that a, is that a rejection of your free will? Or I'll throw this bone in the race. What if it is like, Hey, I can't fly. Is it against my free will that I can't fly? It's like, no, it's just physics just works such that I don't have wings more or less, right? Or I can't levitate maybe in heaven. That's just how the physics work. It's just, you know, you just can't do it. It's not an issue of choice. It's just the issue of what heaven is. Like it's not a reasonable question. Even asked to sin. And then that's in that case more beats more of a mechanical can't rather than a willful can't. What do you think about that? Larry? Well, I mean, there's so many religions with so many different heavens. We, we have, you know, what's the chances of your particular heaven being the correct one in the first place?  Oh, the Mormon heaven. Oh man. I don't have enough. Right. The third rung of the Mormon heaven dread. What do you got? Can you, can you be a martyr in heaven? Can you be it? Oh, oh, Judd Pirate with the weird. Can you lift up? Make a rock so big that you can't lift it.  It's like, it's like Sisyphus, right? Yeah. Yeah. Where's that rock up the hill? Where would you go if you were a martyr in heaven? Good question. Well, you get to, you get 72 more virgins, right? Oh, I see. That's right. Once you're, once you're out, once you're out of virgins, raisins, raisins, raisins, raisins. Right. Well, you know, some, some people are raisin lovers, right? George, what's up? You want to say something? Very simple.  You're going to have a LAN party and play board games. That's what I was saying at the beginning. It's going to be fun.  It'll be awesome. How old are these virgins? Another question. Raisins, raisins, George. Larry, Larry, what's up? Well, the raisins, my question is moot. But what gets me is the men get 72 virgins. What do the women get? Right. And 170 seconds of a man. Are there virgins in the Muslim heaven? Are they actual women's souls that lived here on earth that are just made virgin and then, you know, shared with the men?  It's just, again, more contradictions, more questions and answers. To be perfectly honest with you, I find of all the silly things about. So like 72 versions thing, if it is 72 versions, it's such a small aspect of Islamic culture and that particular heaven that if you were to look at just the little craziness and just the Christian heaven, like the seals being unlocked and the existence of dragons and floating eyeballs with wings all over is like, that's way more psychedelic craziness than the 72 versions. Like that's tame. That's just, you know, Metallica album number one self titled. This is like the stuff they're coming out with now. We're going to talk about that. George, I'm sorry. John, you wanted to say something. What's going on? Yeah. Well, now it's back to whether the soul is material or immaterial or not because the one definition of free will. I mean, I accept Eric's definition, but I do not. But okay. There's two ways of looking at this. Could you have done something different? You've made a different choice. Historically. Yeah. Or can you now going forward make his personal choice? Do you have that option? Yeah. And I'm not sure where free will fits into that because the argument that Sam Harris comes up with, is it him? Yes, it is. Who thinks that there is no free will. Right. That argues that you could never recreate this exact same circumstances. Sure. That where you made that choice historically because the universe has moved on and all the particles are in a different place. So from that point of view, there is no free will. But that doesn't say much about, you know, making choices going forward. Okay. So I was going to say as for whether you can use your soul to commit sin in heaven. Well, and we're told that you can't. Well, is this because it's like one of those lead line rooms where you go into and your phone doesn't work? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. All the wicked thoughts are kept out. More or less. Yeah. It's a really bizarre concept because the source of all sin is God too, because he made everything. Right. So like, if God is in heaven, then the source of sinning is still present. If he's the one who made it, it's a weird thing. I have an idea that judgment day, and I have been looking at this with the Christian lens, maybe even Egyptian polytheist lens, but like there's a concept of judgment day where your sins will be weighed against, you know, the deeds that you have.  Like there's going to be a process. And at that process, is there a chance for you to disagree with the result? Like Eric would allude to, is there a voice of your opinion to say, hey, I know you're sending me here, but based on this record, I think I have enough credibility to go there, and I want to go there. Please don't send me there. My will is to go here and you're sending me here. And my judgment record, I think is, you know, I want an appeal, basically. Larry, what do you think? Oh, yeah, you have to fill out 10-17, 4034. I can imagine you at the gates being like, yeah, it's a whole process over here. You won't believe it. You want two umbrellas? Oh, my gosh. Where's that form? There's another form. Yeah, George, what do you have? I saw your head. Well, you know, we were talking about all the virgins before in this. We're a boys club here.  I think we need some girls in our boys club at this point to get the female perspective and just, if nothing else, about all those virgins, you know, and I think we better duck for cover. First step to getting girls club, stop calling them girls. There you go. Well, I mean, I'm just, because I'm saying that we're the boys, they'll believe the girls. But we're going to have to duck for cover, you know. Dred, what was your feed in? Well, I was just, I can't remember, did you mention the Egyptian? Yeah. So Anubis would literally take a heart and weigh it. Right. Against the feather, the feather of truth. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Okay. I thought that's what you were talking about. Which does lead the idea that there could be times where they're even with each other because that's an analog measurement. So if it is even, whether you do in that situation, can someone voice an opinion at that point and be like, hey, listen, I know it's even, but look, I'm not bad. I'm not lower than. Because I don't want to go there. I want to go there. Of course. Of course. That reminds me of that, that is the scene in Monty Python's life of Brian. Yeah. You know, where they're weighing the witch against the duck.  You mentioned Monty Python. So of course our resident Brett will have to weigh in on this. John, what is your, your thoughts? Well, I wasn't going to do a Monty Python reference, but I'm going to do a Monty Python reference. But I'm going to say this. Dread raises the interest. No, you did tie. You raised the interesting possibility that somebody might be. Neither bad nor good. In the weighing of the song. And of course there's a place for that, which is purgatory.  Then there's another place for you. Limbo. Oh, wow. The, the last. Was it the last? It was Benedict. I think the last Pope, but. Two. No, it was pretty. It was Benedict. But before he was Pope, he abolished limbo saying it's just an idea. Well, he said that in, in Catholic terms, but effectively that's what he said. Wow. I never learned to do the limbo. Okay. But it's just the banding all those people who have loved ones, babies or whatever in limbo. It's, you know, too bad. We, you know, we don't do that anymore. That's why. Yeah. There's no more rush limbo. Eric, what do you got? Yeah. So Ty, you made the really good, good point when you're talking about how did you put it with you? You the physics don't allow you to to sin, right? Yeah, maybe it's like that. Yeah. So and I like that.   So you can't do this. Again, free will doesn't seem to have a place in any of this. If, if, if you, if you can't fly, obviously that physics, that makes sense. But if you're able to sin on earth, but then you go to this other place and now you no longer can sin I still don't see room for that free will. It's Eric. Can I throw out a small, I don't know if this is a challenge or not, but I just want to see what you think about it. Like right now I can call you on my cell phone, right? But if I were to go to, I don't know, Alaska, new point, new hope or some, some wilderness place, I wouldn't be able to call you because I don't have cell phone access. Is that denying my free will to place a phone call to you? Or is that just the mechanics of the place that I'm in? Stopping me from being able to do that. Well, the difference is you have a desire in both cases. Yeah. But is one breaking my free will? Technically, no. You're still free to try to call me. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I just won't be able to make the place the call, right? Well, whether or not the call goes, whether or not I pick up is, you know, that too. Yeah. Yeah, so maybe it is maybe it's an issue of a tent. So like, are you saying in heaven, I can't even intend to send because if that's the case, then that's your lobotomy, right? Yeah. But if I can intend to send and just mechanically can't, that's also, I would see is like, that's a good point. That's good. Not in a weird quiet zone movie. John, John, you're about to book. What's up? What's up? I'm about to burst a plug in. Here's my theory of what happens as you go through the pearly gates lasers are focused on the evil part of your brain. Oh my gosh. So don't go through. So don't go through the pearly gates. There's lasers. John Richard. I love that quote. I love that quote. You have a great t-shirt quote every day. Every time, every time. What was it? What was the one from last week? It was a belief is just faith on steroids, right? Yeah. And then this week it's don't go through the pearly gates. There's lasers. You got last week's one that's just belief on steroids. Boom. There we go. Faith is just belief on steroids. I love it. George, did you want to say something? What's up? I forgot what I was going to say. Totally good. Totally good. We got 60 people on the call. I can't always wait. So many, so many so many people. You've been laser. You've been laser. So how I was thinking about men in black a while back ago and they have this they flash you and they make you forget you even seen the organization. Right. If they have to come and do a clean up spell and I never really considered like the moral implications of choosing to wipe other people's memory. Right.  And so maybe you did some bad things. Maybe you did some sins but you got them absolved. Do you go into heaven with those memories of the fun times you had sinning and right. Or are they memory flashed at the pearly gates along with the lasers as you walk through the door and you'll be like what what sin I have no idea what you're talking about and is that acceptable. So many questions so many questions how do you even get a person prepared for heaven. So how about this we'll do a final round table thumbs up thumbs down and you can say some things too but like is do spirits have free will and and what do you think about that dread sense you brought the topic what do you think well I I clearly think that even if spirits did exist they wouldn't have free will by virtue of some of the things we've discussed here. So I would I would thumbs down on spirits having free will thumbs down on spirits having free will there's so many questions involved with this but I can't imagine a scenario where spirit is in heaven able to do everything they want to do without having some intention or memory wiped or laser beam on their persona so I'm going to say thumbs down on free will Eric what do you got spirit I'm gonna go curveball on everyone and say hey if we're inventing a spirit anyway and we're making it out of magic it could totally have free will that's a magic no rules magic okay John Richard's spirits free will do you see a connection I agree with Eric I mean if spirits are immaterial then of course they don't obey the laws of the universe that's true so they can make historic alternative choices except if it's sinning if they're in heaven right well of course there's the lead lining isn't there's that lead lining around it okay so we got a thumbs up from John oh we're too too Larry oh no there's no souls no free will he said fight me he put his race down like no souls no heaven no souls no heaven no free if there's no souls they can't be free will and I think I understand Larry's point of view like his whole thing is there's no soul so can spirits have souls no because there's no souls there for no free will I understand the logic George the idea that spirits have free will what do you think thumbs up well as the as the organic Jewish atheist in the room it's all BS I feel like that's I feel like he's sounds like a thumbs down sounds like a thumbs down to me a thumbs down no the thumbs up had some really really good points to George is there something that you'd recommend we check out before next week oh we doing our final round here yes absolutely well you know I'm thinking about what are the motives of the people who sell us religion and that's a good topic I think for for another show but I stumbled on a book that I'm going to buy and read and the name of the book is the psychopath epidemic and the the poll quote on this is a timely analysis of why so many of our institutions have failed us this is a book by a fellow named Cameron Riley he's in Australia so I'm intending on reading this book because for many years I've been thinking that the leaders the movers and shakers of our whole society for many centuries have been psychopaths and I want to understand yeah there's something that calls a person into that level of power though sometimes it falls in their lap and those are the really interesting stories let me get let me give you the web address for this thing it's it's just all one word the psychopath epidemic dot com nice George that was a that was great because a lot of people I was worried that you're going to be like HTTP and then you got two dots backslash oh it's another backslash maybe three backslashes I don't know in my browser I know about your browser but in my browser you don't have to put all that stuff okay cool it's a relevant you put in the name the name of the URL that's Eric is there something that you'd recommend that we check out before next? I have something fantastic and I'm so glad I went before John because I think everyone should tune in at least I believe in eastern time it's three o'clock on Wednesday July 7 because England is playing Denmark if anybody's been watching they're all the England did really well against Ukraine they did it's good soccer it's a lot of fun and I'm pulling for I'm pulling for you guys John very very cool it's coming home yeah they're playing Wimbley right football's coming home alright John Richers is there something that you would recommend that we check out before the end of next week yeah sure we were talking about girls earlier okay we decided not to call what I'm gonna say is I had a very fun conversation with a female last night in my free thought hour which is available on free thought productions YouTube likewise I'm going to recommend that you check out free thought productions on YouTube and subscribe to that channel there's quality interviews that happen at least once a week plus there's global atheists updates which I think is kinda interesting so I'm subscribed to two niche news channels on YouTube one for deaf news and then one for global atheists news and it's really really good to get both Dredd what's your update for this week well you can find my stuff on Mind Pirate M-I-N-D P-Y-R-A-T-E I livestreamed this show on Sunday mornings at 8 a.m. P-S-P I'm also the new test-carrying correspondent for global atheists news thank you John nice nice and so I look forward to a lot of fun a lot of fun cool and Larry I keep having this same problem I know you keep telling me about this thing called atheism but you know what I don't know what it's about maybe you have like some sort of manual or description about it can you just break it down and like I don't know maybe something like a reading format or something like that I don't know what's going on he's on mute see that's the problem I can't you talk and I can't hear you so if you just put it down in like a book then I would know yeah yeah yeah just like atheism let's all about or something like that do you have anything like that what's it all about to be able on Amazon either in softback or kindle actually if you want it there you can read most of the content from that book on my blog digitalfreethought.com be sure to click the blog button we have a radio show archives there Atheist songs and many articles on the subject of atheism you can find me on my YouTube channel search for Daughter 5 or Larry Rhodes if you have a question for the show you can call or I mean email askanatheistatnoxwellatheist.org and we'll answer them on future shows if you are a member of a clergy or preacher pastor or priest but no longer believe in the claims of religion there is help for you to convert to a secular job they do job training and counseling at clergyproject.org if you are watching the show on YouTube be sure to like and subscribe this has been the digital freethought radio hour remember everybody is going to somebody else's hell the time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real until then don't sweat it enjoy your life and we will see you next week say bye everybody bye everybody bye everybody bye


Ireland's winning in the Rupi 9-6. Ireland is winning in the Rupi 9-6. Firstly, it's time to read the email. Ladies and gentlemen, we've come to the last lecture of Genetic Genealogy Ireland's 2015, and it gives me great pleasure to welcome back Brad Larkin, to talk to us about the future of genetic genealogy. Now, Brad is editor of the CERNM DNA Journal, the 1970s was inspired by watching Alex Haley's television series Roots and thought, if Alex Haley can do it, why can't I? He is now editor of the CERNM DNA Journal, founder of genetichomeland.com, a DNA Project Administrator, a member of ISOG, and the Southern California Genealogy Society. He isn't on that, Liam, but I'm expecting he will be in some stage in the near future. Please give a warm welcome, Brad Larkin. Thank you, Morris. Coincidentally, I run several CERNM DNA projects, and we see similar results to what James and Morris are talking about. It is the combination, the truest insight comes from the combination of SMPs with STRs. One alone isn't going to do it until we really get the full sample, in which case we'll have the STRs just in one test. So I felt this way similarly for a couple of years now. So again, some companies that are only testing autosomal and not offering STRs, that's probably not a good place to put your sample if you're interested in this kind of family tree of things. Today we're going to talk to you about the future of genetic genealogy. I did a similar presentation last year. It was pretty well received. This is my 2015 forecast. And so it kind of builds on what Morris was talking about there, with all the work he's doing trying to make this tree that is the true family tree of the Gleasons, which is to say combining SMPs, STRs, historical information, named people, representing people that you don't know their names by their genetic markers. And so I think there's some exciting possibilities, because sampling coverage is going to approach 100% of the genetic lineages in the British Isles. We're going to continue to see an expansion of the number markers commercially feasible to test. And we're going to continue to have more reference databases with phased results of people, which is sort of what Morris is showing there. So these elements in combination will make it such that one day people will be able to get that answer instantly as some people come to the conference to expect. They can take a test, find out a great deal of information about their genealogical heritage. So sampling can coverage and convergence. So when you look at all these trees and all these table of numbers, it's easy to think, God, Lee, how are we ever going to do this? You know, we've gone from, this feel really commercial genetic genealogy really started in 2000 or so. And so it seemed like there were so many people to sample, we're never going to get it. But because of so many hard-working genetic genealogists that are represented in this room, we're getting close to covering all the lineages. We probably need to upgrade the number of markers covered. But just think about that. There's only a fixed population of people in, say, the British Isles. And within the population of people, there's actually only so many genetic variations, right? We're all descended from a fairly small number of people that lived, let's say, 2,000 years ago. So this tree was done a long time ago in 2006. It shows the insights when we were first starting to figure out the why R1B diagrams, John McEwen of New Zealand came up with that. But the point here for the future is that we are going to cover all the lineages. It's not an impossible task. It's not even going to take that much longer. Here we're going to talk about lineage variation just a little bit. A very brief history of Ireland. 8,000 BC first humans. 2,000 BC probably the arrival of R1B. 1,000 the Viking era. 2,000 AD genetic genealogy. So in the big picture of Irish history, those are the big eras, and 2,000 probably starts this era of genetic genealogy. So the question I thought coming into preparing for this presentation was how close are we to getting 100% wide DNA lineage coverage? Anybody want to take any guesses? Is James Irvin still in here? No? Anybody want to take any guesses? No? 60%. Okay. So of course there's no, I can't give you any, you know, there's no set answer, but from what I could tell, I gave it more thought than other people I had seen just in trying to get ready. And I looked at it a few ways. I looked at it like how many, the matches, the coverage that we have in the databases, how complete is that? So I did some things around a screen set of people from the British Isles. And one thing, this histogram shows you that most of the samples have come in in the last few years, even though genetic genealogy has sort of since 2000, most of the samples have come in in just the last few years. So we're little, the tsunami of SNPs is exploding, but also the number of people tested is exploding. And so to think about how close are we to coverage, I said, let's look at match count distribution. And so I just, to kind of use something that I could get some figures for, I looked at Y25 STR samples, how many of them matched and how many people they matched with those Y25 markers. And what we saw was this kind of very bimodal distribution. There are some people, about 15%, who have over 1,000 Y marker matches at the 25 marker level in the Family Tree DNA database. That's a lot of matches. Then you have a few people here that have none. And then you have a lot of people here that have just a few. Very large percentage. You overall, 13% have three or fewer matches. And 27% have 500 or warming, 500. That's a lot of matches, right? When you get that many matches, you probably sort of tune out to thinking you're going to get some insight out of that list. So the bottom line here is if my hypothesis that the lineages that we may not have tested is probably maybe the same of those that don't have any matches at all, then we're probably at 95% lineage coverage. So just a hypothesis. But it gives you a theory and it also helps to look at the lineages we've tested. So that's how we've done on Y. Y is easier to do right because we know it only comes from one of our paternal lineages. But autosomal convergence is going to happen the same way. As more commercially, more tests are commercially available, more people get tested, then all those many lines of heritage, we're going to get those converged too. We're going to have tested every variant kind of, or every set of shared DNA, we'll probably be able to identify. In Morris's slide, he had like a number, A255. With autosomal, it'll probably be a shared segment that has a certain pattern. And we maybe have to give them numerical designations for that pattern, whether we do or not anyway. That pattern you'll be able to see back through your different ancestors. So sampling coverage is going to converge to 100% for autosomal too one day. What Bennett Greenspan, the president of FTDNA calls, moving from survey to census, counting every single person a variation. And that leads us to something we call phasing. Phasing is where we look at our autosomal DNA and we figure out where did I get that particular piece on chromosome 8 from grandfather Waldron, grandmother Leary, whatever. And it's done by testing multiple persons with the shared segment and figuring out the ancestor in common. So there's some good references here with AT, Dr. Tim Janssen, and the ISOG Wiki. And you've been seeing the concept of phasing and a lot of the stuff Morris has done as well. And if you've taken on the family tree DNA, the chromosome browser, this is a simple form of phasing. I call it kind of impressionist phasing because it's not going by every marker, but it's kind of painting the picture of where, in this case we have a mother, a son, and a grandmother, where they share, right? So we're kind of at the beginning days with that. Real phasing is like this here where we'll look at individual markers and the patterns and be able to see which came from dad, which came from mom, and so forth. And Witt's paper here was where he was solving the problem of, and he wrote a paper on it, he had an autosomal sample from his mother himself and I think two siblings. And what his paper said was that when you have one parent missing because his father was passed away, he could go back with enough siblings, with two siblings, he could compute all of his father's DNA. So we do that in small bits when we triangulate in our family finder and when we do that, matches in common with on the family finder test, but if you take it to another level, you could actually impute all of his father's DNA, even though his father was passed away. Tim Janssen's done a really good job of doing his whole tree. And so you can see here, he knows his ancestor Gustav Janssen, he got these pieces of DNA from him, he got these from this other fellow, he got these from Peter's. He got this from Peter Peter's, right? So that's when we say we want to know, who are we, where are we from? By working this phasing and getting a lot of his cousins tested so that together they could get that inference, he's done tremendous work on phasing his own autosomal results. So right now it's still early days because Tim Janssen obviously is a pioneer, I mean he is like a Columbus out there. But eventually we're going to be able to do universal human phasing. So this is the future. So as the number of people tested and we can impute more individuals, then they help us impute the DNA of other individuals, to be able to have, actually predict everybody what their DNA was. And especially we can accelerate this if we had laws where every child born was mandated to get a full genetic sequence sometime near their birth, which I call universal phasing. If we were able to get everybody new tested by replicating this process of imputation, we'd be able to know the DNA sequence, basically phase everybody who's ever lived that has living descendants. So everybody on your family tree would be identified. So the thing Morris showed you by showing numbers for his ancestors because he doesn't know their names, you'd be able to do that with their whole autosomal picture. I believe that's going to happen. Now of course some people say universal human phasing, there'll be laws against that. Well maybe there will be, but there are some drivers that are outside of genealogy that argue that maybe there's a lot of health problems in the public policy. Healthcare cost savings, genetically targeted medications and vaccines, integration with wearable real-time health informatics, the Apple Watch, so forth. And so it's going to happen in phases probably where first we're going to get people tested, then we're going to get people phased, and then we're going to have phased databases. But you can see you reach a critical mass because once you have enough people you can impute his father. In the same way we'll be able to impute all our fathers. So this is kind of what I said before. Traditional genealogical pedigrees become better informed. They're a key part in linking our phased results to our ancestors' names. We have a lot of names on our trees, often we may have a name and we don't know where exactly it fits. When you get enough of this going on you'll actually know where it fits because the autosomal piece that you got from that person can only be here on your mutual tree. That is their DNA. You'll know their DNA name whether you know their traditional English name or not. So the power becomes tremendous. In the same way we've talked about ancient DNA. Ancient DNA becomes important too because it gives us milestones when we look up. We're going to shift gears now and talk about technology. The feature of genetic genealogy, technology, Moore's Law. Anybody here that's not familiar with Moore's Law? Pretty well talked about. Last year Spencer Wells talked about it. It was a man named Moore who was electronics engineer who wrote an article, I love this title, cramming more components onto integrated circuits. This is considered one of the most important articles in technology in the last 50 years and it starts with the word cramming. So basically his thing was that we're going to keep putting more circuits onto the same space and essentially often you hear it related as doubling the power of computers for the next two years. That's how it's most often paraphrased to you. But what he actually was saying was we're cramming more into a smaller space. And so I put a little analysis together here of when genetic genealogy kind of got started a lot of it was using this AB370 machine. You hear about the cost. You hear about the yield. If you think about it in terms of space it could be 12 bases per square inch per day. In case you needed that's about the yield you got out there. What's your next generation big Y tester done with an alumina high sec 2000 machines? These are different synthesis. They're about like that. They're about the size of a large room. They do about 14,000 bases per square inch per day. So it's come a long way but chances are that the future will get even more and we're actually outpacing Moore's law with this rate of growth. So that's the technology. We've got the technique, the phasing. We've got the technology. We also need reference databases and that's where maybe in some ways we're weakest now because this stuff is so new. We have some from the government and they're trying to keep up and some for genealogy we see them evolving we're going to have to develop them for ourselves as Morris did an excellent sort of preview on this which is to say we need the SNPs, we need the STRs we need the shared segments which are the autosomal pieces that you have in common with others that are illustrated on the chromosome browser. We need to know our matches. We need the phasing analysis. We need the geography. Where do I come from? And of course probably people that really use it they want it on a mobile platform. So that's part of what we're trying to do on geneticomeland.com is put the where along with the genetic genealogy patterns and combine them into one thing. So where this is going to lead to is what I'm going to dub the instant ancestry field meter and I have to give credit to Tyrone Bose who kind of crystallized this which is to basically say you'd carry around a small device you'd meet somebody, test them it would take the sample, do the critical analysis go online to compare it to the databases of people we already know that most people in this room are helping build and then it would email you out a report that would say oh, glad to meet you. Your ancestors were in 9-temporary in 1867 they were lived in Laura 1585 they lived in East Galway. Thank you, have a good day. So that's where it's going but you can see it takes the combination of markers knowledge, database it has to pull all that together and into a small space So I got all this ready before our meeting last year about two weeks before somebody came out with something getting kind of close which was the Freedom 4 this is the DNA sequencer it's not the size of the table over there it's about that size of a book and it's a PCR based sequencer which means it's pretty flexible and in the past year they're not available for commercial use yet they have to go through the FDA process but they did use them because they were obviously had a very dire situation with Ebola in Africa they did bring some of these into Africa because the best way to diagnose Ebola was to do DNA tests to go oh, Ebola virus because viruses are basically little pieces of DNA so they did pretty well there we think and they're going to, they are applying for FDA permits now so they're just one of several there's several other competitors and there's much larger companies trying to these are some kind of upstarts that came out of the University of New Zealand that are doing it so anyway, some of the future is getting here and we kind of talked about the the tsunamis and the SNP tsunamis and so forth so the future is more DNA sequencing performed faster on smaller machines sampling coverage approaching 100% remember in your big Y they're trying to do these how can we put it they're trying to do potentially millions of base pairs that still takes a lot of DNA processing time in the lab today I mean they work on your big Y sample at least a day and I think they run it probably for a week that they have your sample, your individual sample on the machine but as the sampling coverage goes up and through this process of identifying the important markers where we have about a 100 SNP panel now they'll get to something like 500 or 700 a thousand and they'll be able to put that on a much smaller device to run much faster because they'll say these are the ones that are genealogically significant at least in Ireland, maybe they'll be in Ireland packet that they go out into the field with that field meter and do that's going to do most of it so that's going to help they'll be testing faster but also they'll be testing smarter and with bigger databases more integrated you would be able to hand that person those results that fast so with that said questions Any questions for Brad? Jerry will take you first There are a few reasons about that firstly on the Oxford Nanopore they all use the the size of a memory state and they cost about $1 they use the sequence over during the emergency and it's successful and it works now on the few developments recently Illumina and Felix which will sequence the genome for $250 it will be a shared genome that means you get part of the genome information the sequence once and the next time you go the sequence will pay maybe $100 to get so it's bring down the cost and the second one with great vendors venture and they're also offering the $2,250 excellent half of it paid by the consumer and half paid by the insurance so it's moving in the right direction Super Any questions here if you want more? Actually Gerard mostly answered my question I was going to ask about the cost of the machines and how fast they produce results but in analogy I'd use this would be great if we could get like a machine with the size of an expressive machine or smaller and it could produce results within a minute or two just like you do at Starbucks and pay the cost of a cup of coffee for your results Right but see that it actually points out in a way although you're pointing at the progress I would say you're also pointing at the paradox which is that for genetic genealogy especially tables of numbers results don't mean anything we already have enough numbers to confuse all the new people so one of the challenges is that we need the database development we need the integration and so far what I've heard is it's mostly being done by it's not being done by the big companies it's mostly being done by small entrepreneurs and hobbyists which is fine but if I could do anything I would try to create a public policy where we kind of move those things in tandem together, database and technology and I'm not sure how to do that because it's a political question but we get to the future better when we go technology, database like that, yes John Yeah, thanks for that and the development of what we can but we will be able to do in the future because for most genetic genealogists the other big dimension is what's going to cost them so how soon do you do you foresee the cost of big tests like a whole wide read or even a whole genome read coming down to be low enough to be attempting to most people to feel it before doing that and making the best we can do if they really really want to so how soon will it be simple and easy to do? I would say two to three years would be my guess just because it will happen when the manufacturer has a new machine that costs a trillion quid to sell them and then they want to get rid of all the old machines that do the job we need better, perhaps So for example, like big wide $575 how much will that come down to and why will it come down to price because presumably is the machine going to change to a more efficient machine that will bring down the price or will they use a new technology other than the next generation a new type of next generation sequencing that will actually allow greater efficiency are they going to improve what they already have or are they going to have something different that will bring the price down? I think it's likely to be some of both they're definitely going to incrementally there's revolutionary change and evolutionary there will definitely be evolutionary changes in the testing machines to make them double, triple, quadruple faster because this, that high stick 2000 is from what I can tell is basically a first of its generation machine so it's going to go through lots of renovations the other thing is the number of machines they're making is going up I believe when Bennett, Greenspan and FTDNA started buying those machines there was no way they were going to be able to support them on your genetic genealogy dollars and I think they launched some initiatives around using the machines also to do medical related testing to help cover the cost of the machine so I know that there's more medical testing going on so I just think there's more competition and as they make more machines the price of those machines will go down just like all our other consumer electronics do and in terms of DNA projects on Tamatree DNA so quite a few of us here are running certain projects or part of certain projects happen with projects do you think that happen with projects what's going to happen do you think in terms of the way that we manage these projects or report these projects where do you see that going I see it going I've been impressed with the tool development I'm a software engineer so I look for tools and I'm impressed with the tool development I've seen in the last year I think that will continue to accelerate and it's already you know it's already consolidating some in certain tools so I see some of those tools getting better some will die some will you know go on some might get acquired by bigger companies and what about the interface between academia and large scale genomic testing and what we do because for example in the UK they have the 100,000 genome project so we've gone from the human genome project which was just to sequence one human being now we've got 100,000 and Barack Obama in the US has also recently announced that he's going to have a massive genomic screening project as well so this is going to create huge reference databases how are we going to interface with these academic and governmental initiatives well you know it's about our personal opinion my personal opinion is that we won't we won't get much useful information out of it I think this community driving the innovation and creating some commercial viability for testing companies that's what's going to drive to solve the genetic genealogy part of this I wouldn't my advice would be don't wait for them to save us because they're not going to they have constraints around privacy you know Dan Bradley was here when that Trinity study first came out I wrote him to find out this certain group of people certain members of that first study had similar pattern to me and so I wrote him privately to say you know hey could you give me any clues on where to look for Larkins you know and of course he couldn't answer me because they have confidentiality so I don't look for that to be very fruitful but I hope I'm wrong I'm just thinking about how long it might take to get from the one in a thousand coverage that James Irvin mentioned earlier today to 100% coverage you're aspiring to to take it back to when I got my first results two years ago I think I had about 450 autosilver matches and there were about 900 so I think the databases are doubling about every two years so that continues for the next 20 years 20 years to get to 100% coverage but I think the great innovation I've seen today is Ancestry offering buy one kit, get one free I think if everybody in this room goes out and recruits three more family members to submit DNA within the next 12 months before we come back next year we can get that growth rate to increase and bring 100% coverage maybe from 20 years time back to 5 years time but we all really need to recruit other people into the databases my number one match turns out to be my fourth cousin my first cousin's number one match I know we both have at least 1,000 people more closely related to us than that still living but they're not in the databases yet so to bring the future closer we need to go out and recruit more people to test oh well I have no argument there no argument there and another thing in the whole world scheme you know I mentioned the British Isles because of the enthusiasm here in America and stuff we're a way ahead of most of the rest of the world in terms of genetic genealogy sampling you know I think the coverage here is going to get to 100% I would say certainly in the next 3-4-5 years of lineages not population but lineages the rest of the world is not getting necessarily the same I think we have to do a better job also of promoting genetic genealogy I mean these type of conferences are great but it's amazing how how few people you know a lot of people come up and say oh we never knew this was on or never heard it was there the Irish Times or the Irish Independent or any of the national newspapers is difficult I wrote 33 radio stations before the events of two of them got me on from this little interview but it's because we don't have that kind of commercial backing behind us it's very very difficult to do this as volunteers and to get the word out there and I think you're absolutely right Patty one of the biggest things we have to do is DNA outreach work and word is mouth and running people one at a time is going to be a way forward I would love to see maybe in 10 years time in Ireland that instead of having inborn errors of the metabolism tested for by the helicric test in newborn babies we actually have whole genome sequencing and the the parents get a list of their ancestors at the same time question for you it's a slightly unfair question because you're American but it appears to be there are various EU programs which could offer an opportunity to create in these major relational databases because that seems to be at the heart of being able to advance this we've got the live program Horizon 2020 and so on I don't know if I saw the evidence of this or considered it I've been in terms of the inside center of big analytics they have about funded by 80 million from the Horizon 2020 and those others if you come to them with a project I'm really close to that and you provide one part of the funding they will match it with three months and we specifically talked about genomics I think they are rapidly becoming aware of the importance of genomics obviously for healthcare in Ireland it's capital genomics the the government just signed the $350 million deal with the Irish Capital Leaders Association to sequence two million capital followed by one million per year per year so we're going to get the capital over there so I hope that by this and next year we should have I will have x stolen or borrowed the one quarter funding so that they can give us three quarters matching funding and kickstart some something like that it brings up the it brings up the question in my mind and I was listening to Brian Swan's talk about the compilation of those Welsh pedigrees Brian that fellow that I'm sorry I've lost his name he basically did that himself through his own drive and determination right exactly so two models for progress one is the government decides they're going to do this they're going to mobilize these large resources and it's official there's going to be press releases and it's going to be great and you as the individual don't have to do anything sometimes that works space program but I think more often in things like this it's individuals or small groups of people highly motivated that drive it craftsmen explorers, thinkers, tinkerers and I personally think that's what's going to produce the databases that are going to be used remember email was an accident it was one guy in a cube that wanted to send a message to his friend over in the other cube it was too lazy to walk yeah exactly so now we have one more question over here it's political politics and how they could feed sensitivity of people to collect the material I have a cross-sand experience of that my father's family I know a little bit about the Atari in different jobs I was spending about a year of my mother's family and certainly things I do often because they got over-sensitive to the information and the problem might not use it if they thought that about their relation not particularly about the American government or the British government giving money which I'm going to say to do various things here in Ireland I'll give my own pinnipot pinnipot it was a political attitude to have side opinions emerge here in sensitivity of people who are interested in information which could be used as people take for parents' reasons discrimination etc is that being considered or am I am I on the one way? I mean even ancestry wasn't here last year because I don't think ancestry could legally sell a test in Ireland last year they just had to sort out the legal analysis of it but now they're setting it up and we got shut down in the United States for releasing medical information all of a sudden they just started taking the kids they received and throwing them in the garbage because they could have gotten prosecuted for testing them so we have to certainly find the balance you have to be advocates on both sides I would just say don't be afraid of information and if you're an advocate for this be vocal, let the other side be heard because I think sometimes the people that want to close down the theater the Shakespearean theater we'd never have Shakespeare if we let certain people close down all the theaters in 1610 or whatever year that was roughly in there to me it's the same since close the theaters it's dangerous to have people together watching plays with crazy ideas in them so I say okay but you don't come to the theater but I want to go to the theater and I want to see the play you're absolutely right a lot of sensitivity is China does not allow DNA testing France will put you in prison for 12 months and find you 15,000 euro if you do a DNA test so it's very very different approaches in different countries with 100,000 genome projects in the UK they are actually having a series of public meetings for a year and a half before the project actually gets up the way to get feedback from the members of the public about what their concerns are and what kind of issues this type of project raises for them because certainly when we first started doing the genetic testing for health matters in the US for example I think was George Bush probably called out the Gina law which was the genetic discrimination law so that insurance companies could not discriminate against you on the basis of your genetic profile and that was very very important I think here in Ireland I'm not sure what the legal status is I think it's similar to the UK where there is a moratorium on insurance companies using your genetic data to decide what your insurance premiums could be because you've got a higher risk for that and a lower risk for that these are really important questions that we as a community and we as a nation need to address so these kinds of things do exist but it's great to raise that question I know that's a country in which British islands need institutional approach to this would cause a certain amount of power it's an Irish one it's a British one perhaps but to use the words of British islands is not very acceptable in various levels of society in Ireland but we're not British and that's it shows that the sensitivity perhaps in a matter which would be pretty sensitive that's true that comment has been made before as well I think a lot of the ethnic and mixture results that you see are talking about British Isles and it's just a big blob over Britain Island even exist in Ireland it would be better to say Britain and Ireland or Britain Slash Ireland would be more more diplomatic I'm hoping the Irish genetic Atlas will change that to any map or others on their origins map to where it doesn't look like it's entirely over the Irish sea that it could be kind of like one color for Ireland for that matter England, Wales and Scotland certainly what the came to me is that one of the things we need to do is change public attitudes about either getting their DNA testing done and sharing their family trees as many of you have noted speakers during the time we've been here have said while I've tested that when you go and look to see how you match there's no listing of their closest ancestor there's no family tree there so it's really hard to connect and that's certainly been one of my goals I've got these second and fourth cousins I'm sure are related to it's right about the threshold of the 1840s and I really would feel wonderful by kind of moving how closely related I am to them whether they are second or third and we'd all achieve a much more fuzzy feeling at the end of it very, very true and I think no matter how advanced we become in terms of the technology we are still going to need to address the basics every single day, every single month, every single year so this conference when it comes back year after year it will always start with DNA for absolute beginners or the basics of DNA which test is best for you because we will need to have a constant program of education to bring people's level of knowledge up to DNA and what we can actually do for genealogy Patrick would you like to comment here on that? As we finish here today I would hope that we would leave with a positive note and I'd like to bring to your attention I've been in the senate for 20 years huge developments have taken place in the area of information the public servant is no longer affected in these ways and so on so there's absolutely huge changes now there are changes in relation to data protection legislation I'm set to practice in Ballester and I think you use the key word for me is balance we should not keep the wrong impression as we leave here and that's why I wanted to say these few words I can also tell you that the minister of state of this country a minister with a very special relationship with Tisha Jimmy Deanin has been appointed with special responsibility so on special responsibility of the diaspora his door is always there anytime I go to functions around the country Jimmy Deanin is there he started with little speeches with knowledge and so on and so on and so on he does his own thing and his door is there and I'm sure my experience is he's open for all new ideas and will be supported so get your ideas ready because there's going to be a massive submission of new ideas to Jimmy Deanin in the very near future and Jared will be your contact man in that regard thank you Jared and welcome to your welcome to your son good advice great well listen it's been a wonderful genetic genealogy Ireland 2015 thank you Brad for a fabulous talk and a very interesting discussion afterwards so a round of applause for Brad thank Family Tree DNA for sponsoring these series of DNA lectures we would not it would not be possible to actually sit here and listen to the wonderful speakers all of whom are voluntary they haven't been paid for coming here it's the love of the topic and the love of the hobby that actually brings people out here so I want to give a very very heartfelt thanks to all of the speakers who devoted their time and energy to prepare this wonderful set of DNA lectures that we've had the pleasure of listening to over the last three days the other people I want to thank are all of the volunteers who have been out there on the Family Tree DNA stand again a lot of them have paid their own way from America to be here because of their passion and enthusiasm for genetic genealogy I really appreciate that effort and time and money that they've put into that initiative and they've been working hard for the last three days getting the DNA that we all need to match with and discover who are our cousins and how do we break through those brick walls so a big thank you to them as well and lastly I'd like to thank everybody in the audience I know a lot of you have come to many of the lectures some of you have come to all of the lectures so it's because of people like you that we get sponsorship from Family Tree DNA to come back and deliver a new set of lectures every year so thank you for being the members of the audience that inspire us to keep doing what we do so on that note I would like to officially close genetic genealogy Ireland 2015 thank you have a safe trip I hope Ireland are still winning and hopefully see you next year God bless and thank you


Go ball. Go. Carry. Carry. That's got to be arguably the biggest ball I've hit on camera. Wow. Oh my word. Today's video is absolutely mind blowing. That's huge. That's huge. Oh my word.  This is one incredible head to head seriously. This is awesome right now. My word. I cannot believe these two are doing this. Yet this video is absolutely ridiculous what's gone on so far and we'll see how this pans out. I'll be on the course very very shortly but what are we doing? Well we've got arguably what I've been mulling over which is two drivers. The Stealth, the standard Stealth product from Taylor Made with a 44.5 in shaft in it and the Rogue from Callaway Max product and again I've got the shorter length shaft in it. The numbers that we are producing are absolutely phenomenal. Wait till you see what we've recorded in terms of data and we'll also get out on the course and see if these kind of things ring true out there but right now my mind is blown. So if you've seen last week's video you'll know that a driver that I got fit for back in November, December time in terms of Taylor Made Stealth. The shaft that I've been waiting for for a couple of months actually eventually arrived as a Pro4's V2. It's a high launch shaft. It was a regular and it's shortened down to 44.5 inch. I did say in the initial video that it was stiff but this is a regular version. Now a lot of you asked for a shorter shaft into the Rogue and would it make the same sort of differences in terms of performance as what we've seen in the Stealth. Now I can't get the exact shaft for the Callaway product but what I have got is the RCH 45g regular 44.5 inch shaft that I used really favourably in the B21 drive which was a huge fan of. So they're both exactly the same length of shaft. They're both regular shaft. There's a slight difference in the weight of them but I'm really interested to see just how these two perform with these shafts in and believe me it's very impressive. Now I hit one of these two drivers an incredible 265 yards. Yes 265 yards with a 44.5 inch length shaft. Work that one out.  Question was Trackman set an altitude which it's not and all other reason as to why on earth this ball has not carried 265 yards. My answer to that is quite simple. Take from it what from it what you will. All things are relative and if you want to take 5, 10, 15, 20 yards off of each of the drives and come to a conclusion that you're more comfortable with the difference between the two they will still be the same. Right let's come clean early in this video and be clear that the club that hit the drive 265 yards and by far the longest I've ever recorded on a video on Trackman full stop was in fact the Callaway Rogue yet Rogue hit the ball 265 yards carry. The stealth by comparison the longest ball it was stealth was 256 yards carry and either way they're phenomenal numbers for me. They are really really impressive numbers and what I want to see and I'll give you the full data as I always do at the very end for people who want to go through it and scrutinise it but every ball was hit pretty solid dispersion was good carry was good I put everything down to this 44 and a half inch shaft what I want to see is out here on the golf course can I replicate those kind of numbers and also what happens out here in reality in terms of that dispersion. So for the record round one will certainly go to the Rogue which is this ball here and then down on the other side of the fairway hopefully you can see that one is the stealth. We all know that 10-15 yards in terms of distance means very little because the average golfer well my strike has got plenty of variables in it so round one to Rogue we'll see what happens on the next one shall we? You see the thing is for me the biggest thing I take from this is the length of shaft has been the most important factor in this test and the biggest I open that I've seen in the last three or four years of testing because it's made huge huge differences and clearly is a key factor in both of these drivers performances at least in my hands. Right so next up was our second drive and as you can see nothing to split them both slightly weaker drives not my best trying to avoid the water which is the other side of that black and white marker where you see the ball rushes and they're not quite on the fairway but there's nothing to split them in terms of yardage. Has he got it? Has he got it? He's only gone and got it and ultimately the end of this video the questions will remain exactly the same. Did the average golfer really at that ball out there at 265 yards?  How many takes was it to get that put in the hole? But ultimately one more question is stealth better than road? Are any of them any good? But ultimately none of it makes a jot of difference because the only thing that matters is that you go out and try these drivers and see for yourself or one more question can a 44 and a half inch driver really help an average golfer? A lot of questions in there but only you have the answers. Right next two shots you're going to see me hit first of all with the stealth as good as I've got absolutely nailed this one really really long big high carry arguably in softer conditions this one would have reached the green and I'll show you that very very shortly. Rogue again really good strike but a clear difference between the two in terms of ball flight and that resulted in these two balls where they finished. Right in front of us there is the ball of the rogue which was okay finished yours of that bunker that's the green we're going to but if you can see in the distance and I mean in the distance there's probably a good 30 yards extra carry on stealth and like I said if you're in drier conditions that one's bouncing onto the green put it into perspective and to take our 265 yard carry from the track man that flag was just over 300 yards to the green I reckon we've carried that pretty much well we've definitely carried at least 265 on the fly track man's never too far off you know sit down sit down oh that's a decent birdie chance and not a bad wedge in more than happy with that and we could go all day long comparing shot for shot here out in the course and the likelihood is the outcome would be the same when I put a good swing on one club and a bad swing on another the results will end up being invariably different and that's what we're keeping on seeing the only thing that is definite is that these two clubs perform incredibly well and they both perform incredibly well with a shorter shaft on right so video ends here in the warmth in the van a little bit cold today in the UK but my evaluation and summary of these two clubs is I'm a fan of both of them I can't hide the fact I know sometimes there's very much a sort of tailor-made camp and a Callaway camp I sit in neither really because I could arguably quite comfortably game either of these and I wouldn't complain the one shining light for me like I said in these recent tests and again I did it in last years as well was the shorter length shaft and greater control finding the middle of that club phase is ultimately where the ball speed is yes they're more forgiving than they used to be but right out the middle is where it's all about and that shorter length shaft for me seems to be that I find the centre a little bit more often a little bit more control when you get out in the fairways you've seen today that are not banging it down the middle of the fairway there's some left there's some right that's always going to be down to the quality of your capabilities and your swing let's not kid ourselves but they just both perform really really well and you're going to choose one or the other if you're in the market that is for a driver based on some personal preferences as they always saying that would be to do with the way it looks the way it sits at address those kind of things and and which camp you sort of sit in because I know that sometimes that's the way it goes but anyway I hope you enjoyed that test I did too if you've been watching the last few weeks videos I am very much chopping and changing between these two drivers and I probably still will do to be honest with you for the foreseeable future until I can decide on ultimately which one I think is the best suited for me on a personal level right as ever thank you for watching both have been available for quite some time now in in retail so I want to know who's got them who's tried both what were your differences who's into this idea of 44 and a half in shafts give me all the feedback you want and as ever I appreciate you watching and getting involved with the channel see yw'l sy'n