You're pausing one. Hello and welcome to the let's chat podcast or the digital free thought radio hour podcast or mine pirates extravaganza for blasphemy and piratism. You have turned into the right. You have turned into the right place for the right show. This is one or three point nine FM wozo radio all day, all long, low power. Just for you, a special show about science, scientism, the philosophies of nature, religion, Possepharianism, fallacies, some cause fallacies. We're going to be talking about all those in this show today. And we have a great cast of people to talk about them. We have our own Boudreaux all the way from Kentucky. How you been? I've been well. Are you guys fantastic? That's so good. And we're going to get into it. And we, of course, have our own Dread Pirate Higgs. Er, cool. And I'm let's chat. Your Tyrone Wells, feel free to contact me at my channel. We'll plug him at the end of the show. But before we get into the meat and potatoes today, and we're going to do a full roundup, I want to say welcome back Dread Pirate Higgs. And would you please welcome us through a noodling invocation? Absolutely. Come be my captain. I shall not want. He makes me to float in salt water. He stirs me through glassy seas. He filleth me bowl. He stirs me through the straits of noodlingness for good to sake. I, though I sail through the heaving of tempestuous waters, I will fear not sinking. For thou art with me. Thy mast and thy rudder, they comfort me. Thou prepares the feast before me in the presence of me mates. Thou quenches my thirst with grog, my goblet runneth over. Truly, pasta and grog shall abide with me all the days of my life. And I shall dwell in the galley of the quab forever. Well, speaking of like spending some time in the valley of the quab, Dread Pirate, you've been deep in the in the in a weird environment, but finally back safe and sound, happy to see it. Well, you've been and how you been. Well, yeah, so I was up for St. John and then we got burned out of there.  Well, I mean, it was smoky work. We were kind of on the border between the evacuation alert zone and the evacuation order zone. So they just decided to shut the camp down, kick us out. So, yeah, so I took the opportunity to, you know, scoot on down home. I made it here on Wednesday. And then yesterday got the call to go up again because they need medics to provide service for the firefighters on the front lines there. So I'm going to be their guy, Dread. I have no idea how to follow that up with a topic more manly than that. Like I feel I feel emasculated. You want to talk about working out and football?  I actually started driving up. I started driving up right after the show here. Yeah. Wow. I'll stop and I'll drive for eight hours today. And then I'll I'll do the remaining six hour drive to Fort St. John tomorrow. Very cool. And we would appreciate the work. We've been seeing smoke even in the U.S. Like if anyone wonders what's going on there, Dread Pirates making sure it doesn't get too bad. That's that's it is. Well, you know, it was Pothafarians in action. Yeah, that's right. When I left Fort St. John, I you couldn't see a hundred feet in front of you. And it took me driving self for four hours before I was out of the smoke. Wow, wow, wow, wow, yeah, it was crazy. Wow. Think about that. That's crazy. Yeah. Crazy, crazy. Speaking of half a million hectares in this one fire. It's the largest fire ever in BC's history. Half a million hectares. You could fit two and a half cities the size of London, England inside this area. Wow.  And when we hear like driving with smoke, alarm bells go off in our head of just like particle size. What kind of a suit? What can what can we do to like help them out? We've had issues before where we had volunteers, not volunteers. Consumers buy up all face masks during our covid crisis and hospitals and hospices and teachers couldn't get access to them. And so we said to us, we have assembly lines here. We have means of making not only face masks, but making better. Let's just produce them. So that way, you know, we can help our, you know, our community. But also we can it was either make stuff for free for everybody or wait at home and scared as everybody else and not being able to do work. So what we said is, hey, we can do critical work. Let us go to jobs. Let's keep these machines running. And we can make stuff for the tri-state area. And that's what we did like quickly. And there's no other site like ours that's capable of completely switching all of our processing lines and doing stuff like that. We have a very flexible architecture, but so you don't have to do a lot of retooling. No, we don't. We don't. We're like very broad with what we can do. We're a very high level and nothing specialized. And so we can move and modular everything out. But when we have that fire crisis of warning, like, is this something that we can get onto? Is it something we can get onto? There's other sites in, I don't know if I can say, but like in Washington area that is probably better suited for distribution. But like we're we're still we're still making face masks. Like it's kind of a crazy thing, but we're trying to do whatever we can help. What's interesting, the main point is dread as a fire guy and an emergency responder and even in my capacity as like a science engineer where all of our jobs are dedicated towards even civil engineering because you need roads, you need roads to move all this stuff around, right? And that's what Boudreau represents. All of our jobs are meant to counteract whatever God's plan is. God says I have a plan. It's up to us to be like, we got to stop it. We got to we will thwart this plan for the interests of mankind. That's that's the I'm ready to get this clipped up. That's the true purpose of science is just thwarting God's plan at any cost. Boudreau, speaking of traveling, how you been my world travel buddy? I've been well. Well, I talked about Mexico last last time I was blast. But I'm back and trying to get back into the swing of things. It's been an adjustment. But yeah, it's been an adjustment, like in terms of like being able to flush a toilet or I mean, being able to put toilet paper in a toilet and drink water. What is this? Is this water? Oh, I can just drink. Yeah. Bizarre. Brush my teeth with it. Go. But Dredd, I got I got I got to ask you and maybe maybe Ty would know. But are you going to change out your air filter in your car? Oh, I do mine regularly. I have a scheduled PM for that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I have mine on a scheduled thing, too. OK. But I should think about it because, yeah, that's a good idea. I get that. And thankfully, the smoke is in so bad here in Tennessee, typically what warrants it is when Kentucky goes all of their bluegrass pollen down to our state and just becomes unbearable to breathe. So I wait until the beginning of winter as part of my six month rotation to swap it out that way. I don't replace it red spring because a filter needs to have sort of like a dust cake on top of it to be really effective. And if you swap it out when it gets really bad, it's going to be a while while stuff is just flaring through it before it actually builds up to its efficiency. It's really bad. Your bluegrass is bad. And we've put them on to an SEM like a microscope to look at them and say, like, what does this pollen look like? And let me tell you something pollen from like a pine tree is like a beach ball. It's beautiful. It's colorful. It's got little little segments on them, but it's nice and smooth. You get pollen from like other kinds of grass. And it's like, OK, it's more like rod like, but it's not it's OK. Bluegrass is like a spiky, angry pineapple that just sticks to everything. And it's like, wow, that's what's getting in my eye. That's why my eyes so irritated. That's what's getting on my shirt. So if I touch it and then brush my shirt and then accidentally do this, that gets in my eyeball, too. It's like, yeah, pollen is bluegrass pollen is very evil. Come on. I'm blaming Eric for that one. It's going with God's wrath. Just blame God. It's like, yeah, if you can take credit, if you can give God credit, you can give God blame as well, too. Right? That's right. So we are going to catch up on an interesting topic that I had. Science versus scientists. And the reason why I bring that up is because it's always an interesting thing to talk to religious people. I've had more conversations face to face with people. I'm just not recording them, but I have some friends who I've helped. And they've done the bulk of the work, but I've had some friends who I talked to on a regular basis who recently come out as atheists, despite being religious before I met them. And all I'm giving them is like a good space to give questions to me or feedback on. And one of the things I now that we're more comfortable talking about, like atheism, what does it mean, and they have no shame with it is I go back to some of their excuses before when we had our conversations and they'll say, you know, I was more willing to just say science is proof of God. Because when I look at science, it seems to do nothing but support a grand plan. And when I asked in more clarity in those conversations, what did you mean when you said that they say, you know what? Now that I think about it more, I don't mean the science was proving it. I meant scientists were saying that it was a connection. And I thought what a what a great epiphany for them to reach on their own merit, because there's a big difference between saying, well, science says this versus, well, this scientist said this because you can have Christian scientists. And I want to know, have you guys ran into situations where people have made those claims? Have you made those claims in the past? And what do you think is the new wants difference between the two? Dred, I'll throw this up to you. Is there a difference between a scientist saying something versus science saying something? Of course, right? Because science is a methodology for discovery, right?  You know, that that is not critical thinking. That's not thinking like a scientist, right? That's just somewhere else, right?  And I'd say dial it back a couple of thousand years. You would have scientists who first discovered how to make telescopes, right? And they would look at the stars and they'd be like, wow, look at all, look at this giant carpet with pinpricks in it, right? Pinpricks behind it are our heaven. And I'm just using everything I'm aware of and the biases of my culture to try to interpret the world around me, right? And I have such a heavy bias towards this omnipotent power, omnipotent power, this like all powerful being that everything I'm seeing is contextualized with that without me being aware of my own bias. And so when Watson Crick, when he sees that waterfall, he's like, oh, God. But like, if he was in Egypt, he'd be like, oh, raw. It'd just be a different thing, right? Which is really important why we have to make sure we don't necessarily drive. I think I would say this. We need to drive culture away from being indoctrinated into religion because we start out without that bias but are given to us during our upbringing. So it's important to realize that we have all the faculties of having like this unbiased view of the world if we were just to hold on to it or and train it and develop it rather than being indoctrinated with like the starter pack of how the world works. That isn't something to begin with. And religion and science are at odds. I mean, they're not just non-overlapping magisteria. They are the antithesis of one to the other by virtue of the fact that in religion, you already have the answer. Right, right. Whereas in science, you're trying to discover it, right? So if you already start with the answer as in religion, then that is how you will formulate your methodology for discovery because you've already got the answer. So I think those things are just fundamentally at odds with one another.   I'm going to put you on the hot seat a bit. You know, religion and science has two different methods to figuring out stuff. The religious method, as told by other religious people, it's simpler because one, you already have the answer and the answer is God. Why isn't that the better method? If you follow Occam's razor, you have the simplest answer. Right.  I was going to pull up Occam's razor, which I think it's kind of a stretch to use it in this case. But yeah, you know, I agree with the dread part that, you know, you're really talking about already having the answer and backing it up with, you know, interpretation of text, turning the page and just saying, well, I already know the answer. So when this was written, this is what it means. Right. Whereas, yeah, science and the scientists that do it, I mean, are are constantly improving and in some cases, disproving what someone else had thought. Right.  I mean, the kind of the science goalpost keeps moving, but it's moving in the right direction. Right. Right. And it's based on, yeah, yeah, progress. And it's based on evidence and it's based on our understanding, the tools we have.  In fact, doubting it gets you in trouble. Right. Right. So, yeah, it's not a very good standard, as you said before the show, to use to get to truth. It's a good point. Good point. Yeah. Dred, I want to throw it out at you. I also, I was just going to say just quickly that it seems curious that that people would even try to justify religion through science.  Right. It says, now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. So the whole premise of faith is the exact opposite of what the discovery is through sciences. So why even bother? I can explain that. I can explain that. I can explain that, but I want to just make one point clear before I leave this YouTube comment bait still in the water. And that is that there's sort of a misinformation campaign that religion has against science. And it goes with even the principles that science uses to determine good arguments and bad arguments are summarized and flanderized to the point where they're just absurd when they're put into religious hands and then used to explain to the general public how science argumentation works. And one of them is Occam's razor, which is not a creed for the simplest answer is the best answer. And this goes without saying that God is a simple answer. In fact, he's the most complex thing you can bring up in a conversation. Right. But Occam's razor has never been the simplest answer is the most correct. It's the one that makes the least assumptions is the correct answer. And what you have with religion is a multitude of assumptions of, well, it's my God. It's this text. It's this being is this powerful. It's this. This was the miracle and doesn't matter if you can't test it. It does. It is what it is. And I'm right. And everyone else who says otherwise is wrong. And we don't have to test it when we're just assuming all of that is true versus science is just like, I'm not making assumptions. I'm just only making the claim up to the amount the empirical evidence can support. And between those two methods, you have a system that makes very little assumptions, if any at all, if anything, it's a hypothesis that we can test and we're testing the hypothesis itself versus our entire castle, entire house of cards built where every card is an assumption from the very foundation to the very top.  And then you ask Dredpar, why is it that religion cares about proving things with science is because religion chases trends. And we know this. It borrows to other people's holidays. It changes that power dynamics. It will always go towards the path towards most popularity, because that gets the more people on the pews or more people joining your congregation. And what's been cool back in the Mesopotamia area? Not science. No one cared about science back then. People were eating poop off the ground and giving babies without washing their hands. They were just like, I don't believe in germs. I don't believe in this. And then science came along.  Oh, OK. There's cool things that come with this that increases our quality of life that's so good that we can't ignore it. And now we have this thing where now religion needs to be supported by science, because they're one and the same thing, right? Like God must want us to have electricity and telescopes and warm houses and MP3 players. And all this stuff. And we have to now broadcast our message on websites, because God needs a TikTok account. You're absolutely right, Ty, that religion will so often take credit for social advances that were accomplished through secularism. You know what I mean? And just unabashedly just take credit for it, you know?  You know, whatever.  And no, right, right, right, right. So there was a I remember when I was in Knoxville and the Atheist Society showed up at I think it was a gay pride parade. And we were just like supporting and helping everybody there.  And they had posters of just like, just be kind and love everybody.   And they had citations. And in my head, I was like, these guys are a better representation of the faith that they are followers of. But the people in front of us are a better representation of people, right? And and while you can have that faith and be a good person, why have the faith in the first place? Because that the people on the sidelines are the best representation of that. And if anything, they just need to like get over that hang up. But if there was ever a question, these guys have citations. You guys don't. There's no phrase in the Bible that says, just be kind and love everybody. Like that's going to be a hard thing to find. I would dare people to find that. But I can say you can find the phrases where you guys are going to hell. If you sweep with another man, these people are my chosen people. You guys aren't like that. That's well, that's well cited. It's cherry, it's cherry picking. It's like using the New Testament instead of the Old Testament. Yeah, exactly. It's even worse than that, right? Because, you know, religious people are good by virtue of the reward they get for the punishment. Right. Whereas people otherwise, you know, saccubarists and humanists are good for its own sake, right? You know, we're like, I think, I think the latter is more virtuous quality than the former by by that. I do want to bring up what I think is the tragic situation behind this because we can, it's always fun talking to other atheists about like, isn't this silly?  Right. Or someone that's truly interested in STEM but isn't able to fully utilize their critical thinking capabilities because they've just been so inundated with this bad dogmatic thinking style or holding on to these terrible methodologies that give them this cognitive bias that interferes with their ability to come up with true conclusions because they're holding on to the conclusions that are comfortable or the ones that they want to have or they're so popular that they can expouse, unfortunately, misinformation people because they want this thing to be true. I find that to be tragic because we lose an opportunity to have, in my mind, more luminaries in this world and as a result, we just lose the capacity of what they could share with the world. I can make an analogy behind this. There's a lady named Helen Keller. If you don't remember her, she's a lady who had meningitis when she was like 19 months old.  Like who cares what she's going to do? But she worked really hard. She learned how to read. She learned how to write. She learned how to speak. And her books are so eloquently made and she wrote plays. Like she had dictates on political matters. Like she wrote on like very heavy subjects in a very well mannered tone. And her biggest regret that she says in a lot of her speeches, I just wish I could speak well. Like it's not even, I wish I could write better. I could see more books or I can do, or I could hear. She's just, I wish more people would have the capability of hearing what I had to say in a manner that they could appreciate it because I understand that there's a detriment between how I communicate and how other people can appreciate that. And I thought how tragic is that to extend that to scientists who could have a lot to say but have this religious rhetoric is their communication standard and can't espouse true science because they are inhibited by Jesus walking on water and they're a physicist because it's like you can't, you can't have those two in the same park. What's up? What do you think, Dred? Yeah, no, I agree. It's having a filter that everything goes through that does not conform with reality, right? It's wishful thinking. I think wishful thinking, yes. I think Dawkins even referred to it as kind of like a form of schizophrenia, you know, where, you know, Monday through Friday they go in, they are critical thinking, they are doing, you know, the good science and then, you know, Sunday, it's almost like the show Severance, something in their brain switches and now all of a sudden they suspend. And the shame is, Dred and Eric, you both can do this. Like you can watch Star Trek and enjoy Star Trek, right? You can watch a Star Wars movie and enjoy a Star Wars movie. Like we can suspend our disbelief. It's a suspension of disbelief, yeah, yeah. And at least I know I'm doing it. At least I know I'm doing it. I'm not saying, I'm not saying Dada is a real guy or Captain Picard is a real guy, you know. We're going to transport down, you know, I get it. And that's the scary thing. It's still scary and it's both tragic because you can train a person in such a way that they don't realize how to turn on or off their disbelief, right? You can train them to, but always basically have it sort of in this halfway state where it's kind of half on and off and flickering and you just think, man, I wish I could help you out and just like look that thing off and show you, you have control of this. You don't lose, you don't lose anything in your religion by realizing that it's fiction, right? You can still appreciate it. I still love Christian music. I still think there's something to be said about public speaking that we can learn from pastors. I still think that there's really good morals that we could learn from how people back in the day thought they should treat each other. But I don't consider it real gospel from a God given to us. Like in fact, I find that to be more empowering because it means we can take that as a template and approve upon it. And we can use the scientific method to improve about a lot of these rules that we came up with how to treat each other. We can make that better. In fact, we already do now, but until we recognize that we're stuck at a certain pace and I want to be able to accelerate how we treat each other rather than stay in the stay at pace. Like let's get rid of the fat and get back to being better people. Exactly. And that's for me, it's the appeal of postipharianism is the eight I'd rather you didn't see. You know, it's not dogmatic. It's guidelines. And you know, if you can do them all the time, well, do them as best you can when you can. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I really did like that list. That was a really, really good list. I've always liked structuring morals as don't force yourself to be good. Just don't be bad. Like don't purposely hold, slow us down, but you don't have to push us forward. Right. Like, because if it's morally, if you have to morally push me forward, then you're just being obedient when you're being good. Right. Rather, and I don't want obedience. I want people to generally leads to hypocrisy as well. Right. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Because then you, when you do things that are contrary to the commandments. Yes. And yeah, you're, you're a sinner now. Right. You want to make a quick mention before we do. Is it, what's the timer on? Do you have to do a half show? Yeah. We're going to do a half show right now, but I just wanted to wish both you and Boudreaux happy Father's Day. I hope you guys enjoy. Enjoy your time off. Tomorrow we also got Juneteenth. Enjoy that holiday as well. Well deserved. I don't know if you got Juneteenth in Canada. Maybe not. Yeah. It's the Emancipation of Slaves Day for U.S. Yeah. That was finally made a federal holiday. We'll take a break. Coming right back after this show, we're going to be talking about sunk costs and sunk ships on the Digital Freethought Radio Hour 103.9 FM all day long, low power. Welcome back to the show. This is the Digital Freethought Radio Hour 103.9 FM. You're listening to this in Knoxville, and we are here to talk about science, religion, superstitions, pacifarianism, truths and facts and fallacies. And we're going to be jumping into a topic called sunk cost fallacy. Now, Bujo, I'd love to hear what you think about this. Have you ever heard of the sunk cost fallacy before? I've heard of sunk cost. Okay. In economics. But no, I'm not familiar with this. At least I don't remember. I'm familiar with this. Have you heard about it? They also call it the Concord fallacy. Oh, okay. I'm interested in this story. Talk to me. You remember the big plane, the Concord? Okay. So they put a lot of money into it. They kept putting money into it over years and years and years. And it still didn't succeed. And when that finally, that big crash happened, they finally put an end to it. But that was a sunk cost, where they just kept throwing good money after bad money to no good end. And so that's why the sunk cost fallacy is that shared name, the Concord fallacy. I have a real-world example I'll share as well. And thank you for that. Because mine's also economic. Boudreau and Eric.  Have you ever heard of that game before? Yeah. Yeah. Dred, have you ever seen Dance Dance Revolution before? Boudreau, you want to describe it? Yeah. Well, and I've never owned it, but don't you have a pad on the ground that acts as a controller, right? Yes. You step on it and you have to hit the buttons and a... So it's exercise, but it's a game. It's like exercise, yeah. And they'll have music and they'll have arrows and you're supposed to time your button presses with your feet on the pad with what's on the screen. So it's almost like you're dancing. And the game gets progressively more complicated as you get better at it to the point where if you're in high school, that's like the coolest thing. Like the only way you can score cool points is being like, I beat this game on this difficulty and people will be like, this guy is a cool guy. And so that was my high school experience. And so I am unpacking stuff from underneath my bed. I've opened up a suitcase and nothing but old games and old consoles are in this suitcase. And I'm thinking, wow, fantastic. I even have an old dance pad and a dance dance revolution disc. And I put it into this old console I have called a PS3. And it says it can't read the game because it needs a PS2 to play. And I have a PS3 and it's not backwards compatible. So I'm like, OK, that's fine. Let me just see if I can download the game on PC. And it should be for free, right? So I download Step Mania, which is the free version of Dance Dance Revolution now. But my dance pad is for a PlayStation. It's not for a PC. So I said, OK, let me just buy a converter. So I buy a converter. That converter didn't work. And I waited like two days for it to come in and I'm still excited to play the game. I'm like, OK, that's fine. I'll just try a different converter. I buy a different converter. That one doesn't work. And I'm like, OK, I'm not like 20 bucks in. What do I need? It's like, I need to buy a dance pad that's USB compatible so I can connect it to my PC. So I buy one. Turns out it's the wrong kind of pad because my pad has foam in it and it has a USB or it has a PS2 dongle. And I'm like, I still don't have a PS2. I bought the wrong thing. OK, what do I need to buy now? I need to buy a USB pad for my PC. So I bought another pad. I'm now like 140 bucks into this whim of playing a game. I didn't even want to play in the first place that much. And now I'm kind of upset because I had to buy the pad without the foam. So in order for me to get the same kind of rugged quality, I have to go buy foam. So now I'm like in Durham's, which is like this sports fitness place that sells yoga mat foam. And I'm thinking like, oh, this is like 40 bucks for just foam. I'm just like, but I need it for the dance pad and I already bought two adapters and I already got it on my USB stick. So I'm just like, OK, all right. Maybe I should just buy a PlayStation 2 because at this point I've already spent enough money that I'm just like, let me just get the PlayStation. So I go online and they don't sell PlayStation 2s for cheap. You have to buy basically full prices. It was like 2008. And I'm just like, you know what? I don't even like the music that much. I'd rather just learn how to actually dance using YouTube. I'm kind of done. I'm kind of done. And I can't return any of these things. I have three dance pads in my home now. I have three dance pads and I can't use any of them. I have two PS2 to USB adapters that I have nothing to use for. And Amazon's not taking them back. They're like, we don't, we haven't sold these things in the last 20 years, sir. Just like fair enough, I guess I'll just donate them or give them to one of my co-workers who has a working PlayStation 2. But that's some cost. Can I contribute to your? Absolutely. Absolutely. I just, I might have you go down another rabbit. My brother formed a company that makes adapters for old gaming systems. Don't you dare. Don't you convert some to USB. No, I'm serious. I have one here. I, he seriously, my brother, at least it's worth me asking him the question of what's the most reliable way of doing this. And my brother might tell me, you know, this or that, but seriously, he is in the game. People know him for it. He makes the bliss box and the foreplay. And they both convert basically every Atari all the way down. I don't know how, how newer systems he's gone, but something you need to know about Eric is he's an enabler.  Oh, I have a cousin who's like just doing a discount on heroin. It's, it's amazing. You should, I should get you in touch with them. I was like, no, I got off. I was like, no, let me just, I think I can, I can help you out here. I can help you out here. First one's free. Let me get you hooked up. Yeah. So why do I bring up some cost fallacy? Because I think there is a really big connection between it and religion, or at least how people can buy into, well, I've already done this my entire life. Why, why give this up now, right? What harm would it be if I just like, instead of like staying in this pool, just go down a little bit deeper because it's just one more inch, right? And so one of my friends who I talked to who's 44 years old now has been a Christian since he was 42, right? For 42 years and only in the last two years since I've known him has been willing to like step away from that. Him and his wife, him and his wife. One of the biggest things he has a hard time doing is recognizing the labels that he has to give up are like some of the hardest things for him to do because he knows he's not a Christian, but he doesn't want to call himself not a Christian or irreligious or definitely the A word, even though he knows there's nothing inherently wrong with them. And he recognizes on an intellectual level that I am these things. I am an agnostic atheist, but it feels terrible because his entire life, he was thinking these are worse than the devil, right? And the cost for him to give up the comfortable labels that he has that he doesn't feel like he even has a place in is too great for him. And so he just thinks, what would be the harm if I just maintain, if I'm not an atheist, I'm not religious, but I am an atheist, but I'm going to still keep calling myself a Christian in this sense because I've already came all this way. It's hard for me to pull a some cost tie to this without taking up like an extra 10 minutes. But the other idea is you can't just step away from it because you've bought into the system so greatly your entire life that it's really difficult to walk away from. And even when you realize that the thing that you bought is snake oil, you're just like, well, I'm already here. You could actually just shift that a little bit. I smoked for 34 years. Now, if I were in the sunk cost fallacy thing, well, I've been smoking all this time. Why give it up now? Like I'm one of those, you know, I'm the kind of person, if I'm sitting in a movie theater and the movie sucks, I mean, I'm reading a book and I don't get into the book. I put the book down and I never go back to it. Right? I mean, those are those mental training that people have to get themselves used to, right? Because it trains you to give up on things that you don't want to invest in anymore, right? Right. I wish more people would do that. Buju, are you also a quitter? Like, are you a quitter? Yeah. Are you good at quitting? Yeah. Yeah. I've thought about that with TV shows. Like, I mean, there's so much streaming content out there that you can't watch it all. Right. You shouldn't watch it. Absolutely. So I've been very stingy with, you know, kind of my rules. I'll start a show and I'll just be like, no, not feeling it. Yeah. Yeah. There's a praying sort of capitalistic nature that sort of takes advantage of the sunk cost fallacy to keep people hooked in. And it's one of the reasons why I checked out of the MCU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Like, I'm done with it now since Endgame. Like, I'm like, that was like my ticket to leave. And they're like, stay tuned for M&M 2. It's like, no, no, no. You did all the things. There's no more bad guys out in this world. I don't care about them anymore. Like, you took the biggest one down. I'm sure you guys have it handled from here on out. It's like, well, we have Shang-Chi and we have the next Spider-Man movie.  Don't you realize that you ended it? It's called Endgame. So like, when that happened, I spent 17 years hooked on this soap opera of superheroes since Iron Man all the way to Endgame. And I'm like, I'm done now. And I can't be bought back in. However, every single time a new Marvel movie comes up, there's the zeitgeist of YouTube thumbnails and commercials coming about and people saying, you got to watch this. You got to check it out. And I could see maybe this is pretty close to how it is when someone steps out of religion. And maybe it's like, oh, when my friend's doing on Sunday, they're busy. I can't play with them. Or it's like, okay, so I'd have to get new friends. Or I drive down the road and I see the billboards on the churches and they're all saying, Jesus loves you still. Jesus wants to save you. Or when Easter comes by and it's like, oh, this is a holiday. Can I celebrate this holiday? What's going on? Or Christmas comes. How, which songs am I supposed to sing? Like everything is reminding me of religion when I have that religious mindset or context that it's like the hooks that keep pulling me back in because I'd have to completely re-adopt an entirely new world view if I was religious and I had to leave it. And that takes a lot of effort. So it hasn't harmed me. As Boudrette says, as far as I can see, it hasn't harmed me at all. Why don't I just keep sticking with it, especially if all these hooks and enablers are nearby me. The culture that I'm in can really dictate how hard it is to leave religion. And I feel like some costs is like a very apparent swamp to get stuck in when it comes to like, dogmatic thinking, right? So it's not just a matter of just realizing you're wrong. It's like, it's beyond that. It's just you live in a culture that's maintaining a momentum, right? And it takes a lot of effort to fight against it. So silly. And like you say, I mean, it isn't just sunk costs, but it certainly factors huge in that whole scheme of things, right? Because like you say, it's your friends all of a sudden aren't around because they're doing their religious stuff. So there's a lot of kind of cultural factors that are working together there to make it difficult for a lot of people to leave their religions. I mean, you think about the clergy project, where pastors and priests are so ensconced in their milieu that it's virtually impossible to believe and without the assistance of like-minded individuals, they would probably never do it. They would just continue down that road by virtue of the fact that that's all they've ever known. Right. Right. I mean, that's their career, right? I mean, they've studied. That's their career, exactly. Yeah, I've heard. So they bought their house and they'll put their kids through Christian school and all the way. What about a spouse, though, too?  Or how do you, I've heard a lot of stories of people struggling with that. And I mean, that's pretty hard. Yeah. And what a terrible situation to be in where it's like, you would think a God if it existed would help with that. Right?  I'm here. I was like, oh, okay, thanks for sending me that email, God. I really appreciate it. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, my bad, my bad. Anyway, back to my other important things I got to do. It's just I'm being intellectually honest, and that might destroy my marriage. Like I'm not even cheating. I'm not even, I'm not even doing any of the evil commandment things that you're saying that I shouldn't do. Like I'm just being intellectually honest, and that could be what could jeopardize this long-term arrangement that I set up with a person that I love more than anyone else in the world. What a terrible situation to find yourself in. It's the devil testing you, Ty. It's the devil testing you. On God's command. It's just, it's just, it's just the weird thing. It's just like, God, devil, stop testing me. It's like, God wants me to do this. I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry. He plays bets. You're feeling like Joe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just doing what God is allowing me to do. Like if I couldn't do it, if God didn't want me to do this, I wouldn't be able to do it.  God, you're still the manager in this situation. I want to, next time the devil tempts you, just say, I want to talk to your manager. And get on the line with God and be able to help you out. Guys, I wanted to bring up that one extra point that you said where you mentioned, Dred, that when you are watching a movie and you don't like it, you walk out of the movie. When you're reading a book, you stop reading the book and you walk out. What would it take for a Christian to read the Bible from beginning to end and put down the Bible and be like, no, this isn't the God who I thought. Because when you think about it, a lot of atheists become atheists because they read the Bible. I'm not sure if that's a similar story for people on this call. But for me, the kicking, I was already on the, ooh, I'm not really sure about this religion thing. And I was taking a class in ethics in college and I was a very hardcore Christian back then. And like my first test was, how do you know good things or bad things? And I'm just putting down Bible quotes and I'm very confident with what I'm doing. And I've been poorly on the test. And so I said, how dare you fail me on this test? Let me just look in the Bible and pull out these quotes. And in the quotes themselves, yes, I felt justified. But the context that they're in, I was like, ooh, let me find a better quote. Let me find a better story of error parable. And I'm like, let me just read this from beginning to end. And I'm like, oh, no, there's like a lot of things because at that point in now had a fundamental understanding of what it meant to treat people well and consequences of my actions. And I'm realizing God's going about this all wrong. And I'm like, why am I thinking that? You know, like, how can I, as a human being think, maybe drowning all the people in the world isn't the best way to go about spreading a message of how good and kind you think a certain group of family is. Maybe you could just talk to them. Drowning babies is never a good reason. It should never be your A-plan, God. And I thought, you know, I couldn't, I read through the whole Bible. I read it, I read it again. And then I stopped after I realized, like I can only cherry pick certain chapters and I couldn't appreciate it at all. But what would it take for a Christian to read the Bible and do the same thing that Dred, you did when you're watching a bad movie? And how good would it be if we could all be quitters in that regard? So Dred on that. I mean, it's a stigma, right, to be a quitter. And I think people are just tied up in this idea that you got to follow through on something at all costs, regardless of your happiness or your joy, you know, that once you made a commitment, it's like, you know, you have to follow through it. No, you don't. And that's what you got to learn. It's just, no, no, no. You can actually look out for your own self-interest. You don't have to be an altruist about your time or your interest or your dedication or anything like that.  You get to pick the stuff you'd like. The people you want to be with, the things you want to do. And yeah, that's where you should be at. I'm glad I'm spending this time with you because this is where I want to be, at least on my Sunday mornings. Bujo, what do you think about the idea of value of being a quitter? Yeah, well, I think, well, the first thing I'll point out, I don't know if you guys noticed, but I got a hook from my daughter and father staying on Cambridge. So that was great. Oh, that's it. Yeah, I got a friend on.  But I'm just like you, Dredd. I quit smoking cigarettes too. I've smoked for 10 years. Best decision I've ever made. We do have to frame it though a little bit because I think there is a whole other side of this of finishing high school. Sitting in freshman class going, you know what, I don't love this. So you frame it in such a way, if we're talking about something that is truly entertainment or truly something just for your free time. Yes, absolutely. Like you're saying, no one to just say, I can be doing something better. Don't feel like you're bought into it. But obviously, when we're talking about career-minded things and trying to run a certain distance or speed or something like that, yeah, here's where you flip it. And now don't be the quitter. But so those are very different. And I think it's obvious probably to everyone. And from this context, picking up contextualization, I hear when someone says, I quit, I'm what I'm hearing is I have a standard for my time. And this falls below that standard. And like you said, Buccio, I can do better things that are more rewarding to me, as as Dredd says, with my time, with the things that I enjoy doing, the things that I appreciate more, than spending on this. And I can say the equivalent would be like, I could eat junk food all day, or I can actually have a meal, you know? That's like nutritious, healthy. I can cook it myself. And it could be more filling for me.  I got a certain day, one's flak and the other one's fire. And I'd rather have the fire. I would appreciate it if there were more quitters, or people who had more standards for their empathy and how they treat people and what they allow to go into their minds that help them dictate true things from false things. And we need more quitters of that capacity, more people who have high standards of that capacity, particularly in the religious sector. And I would say, although atheists can learn it too, but scientists and science, that would be my first distinction that people should start to be aware of. Has nothing to do with religion. Just be aware that there are scientists that say thing, and then there's science, the science model that indicates something, because it's not an anthropomorphic size being. It's a model that suggests something or works in a certain way, and we can come up with better models. And nothing's ever definitive, but it does help us progressively get to more useful understandings of the world that we live in. And that's the distinction between the two. It's not just someone talking. It's a model that anyone can appreciate and work in, and we need more people to work in that model. Any last words? It's also about being more conscious of the choices you make and taking responsibility for the choices you make. If you just say, well, that's the way I was raised, or I've been doing this forever. That's not making a choice. That's not even acknowledging you have one. When you take the responsibility and say, I may be where I am now, but I make a decision on where I'm going to put my foot next. Right.  And Boudreau, finishing high school. Finishing high school. Yeah. So what we came up with was a really cool model of like, hey, you should learn how to quit more. And Boudreau was like, actually, let's take that model and refine it. And we're like, oh, let's take that model and refine it. Let's talk more about standards. We got closer to a better explanation of how we should treat other people and how to take control of our lives. Like that's science. Imagine if that was a process that was going on for thousands of thousands of years. It has been. Let's use that process more than the one that hasn't changed. And it was just like, don't quit. I put it in a book and I gave it to you on a golden piece of mail. I was like, no, we can do better than that. We did better than that in like a five minute conversation. We can take any of those commandments, come with better versions of it, lickety split. So science is good. It's in our interest because we can improve upon it. That's the whole value of it. So it's not perfect to begin with. It won't be perfect maybe ever, but it will get better. And we're already at a state where it's better than the dogmatic rules that we have already. So why not use them? Why not use the best tools that we have available to us? And listen to the science rather than the scientists because we can all be scientists. And so we should all be cooperating with each other and arguing against each other using science, right? All right. Butch, anything we should check out before next week? Yeah. Can I share a quick little example of how scientists can fail? Go for it. Go for it. Go for it. Yeah. So this particular data scientist, which is something I'm seeing in my world of engineering where everyone loves data and they love spreadsheets and pivot tables and they want to make graphics and all this. Someone put a graphic together for fatal crashes in the United States, about 40,000 or so fatal crashes every year. And they found that half of the fatal crashes every year, about half, they were traveling, a vehicle was traveling 91 miles an hour or faster. Okay. Think about that. Okay. Safest, safest highways in the United, safest roads in the United States or interstates. And those are about the only places where you can even go 91 miles an hour. And we're saying half of all people, half of all fatal crashes are happening 91 miles an hour faster.  And within a few minutes, a guy went in, William, some of a guy, went in and just did some checking on the database. Turns out there are two codes in the database for speed. 998 and 999, which means something like none detected or unknown. So this data scientist was including all of the unknown speeds in this graph. Because they were greater than 91, they were just codes for something else. Cool. Know your data, understand the metadata. Sorry, that was a little long-winded. No, that's a great example. It's a great example because we figured out what the problem was and we didn't use religion to solve it. Like we didn't pray in a circle and figure that out. We use science to figure out a scientific problem. And that is what makes science so good because you can use it to fix itself. It's like designed for that.  Yes, it's exactly that. And so when we have a problem with scientific data, we analyze it scientifically. We talk about it in a scientific nature and we fix it using more science. And we're like, oh, it's now better. And we can test that. Fantastic. Isn't science awesome? It's not a weird obelisk that just stands in the middle of a pyramid somewhere. It's a process that we can all work on together. And it's multifaceted. And it's just so cool. It's innovative. It's interesting. It's intriguing. And Dread Pirate, do you have any words that you'd like to share with us? Well, if anyone's interested, you can check out my YouTube channel, MinePirate, M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-A-T. I've been doing weekly benedictions on there through the church. I've also been exploring somological fallacies and cognitive biases. I just recently did a short video on confirmation bias. And then previously I'd done one on ad hominem versus argument or challenging belief, the difference between going after somebody or going after what they believe. So yeah, yeah. So I've been up in my content a little bit and spending more time on the channel, getting lots of subscribers. So I feel good about that. So yeah, check it out. Congratulations. And any of my subscribers, feel free to subscribe to MinePirate. His quality content has always been great. And happy Father's Day for today. Happy Juneteenth for tomorrow. And everybody have the opportunity to celebrate, get outdoors and appreciate this one life that we might actually have. And until then, I'll see you guys later. Thank you so much for coming to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour. This is 103.9 FM Low Power Knoxville. Bye, guys. Love it. Say it.


When God says he has chosen the foolish to confound the wise, this is not what he meant. When? Now. Okay. Okay. Go in. Go in. Go in. Go in. Look at that. Please. Look at that. Hey smart Christians, you'll see this brought up from time to time when someone will say that what they're doing, though is unconventional, is the things that God would use to, as he would say, confound the wise. It's something that we use to try to demean the people who would actually decide to read the scriptures, and they'll make it as though that we're leaning on our own intellect, which we're not. All we're doing is reading the scriptures.  If you learn the Hebrew, if you learn the Greek, if you learn how to just walk through the scriptures, well, then you're trying to be wise. You're trying to use knowledge. No, we're trying to literally use what God gave us. And to prove this point, we will go to the very same passage that they go to and show you how anyone that thinks some of the foolishness that we're seeing is what God is using, they have one misunderstood the text, but also place themselves in the wrong category. They place themselves in opposition to what God is trying to do. Here we go. In 1 Corinthians chapter 1, let's start in verse 26. He says, for consider your calling, now Paul is writing to these believers, consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, many wise what? Noble what? People. What does he say? Remember, he's talking about people, but God has chosen. Now, this version, this ENASB says the foolish things. I want to go over to the side and look at this. This is why someone might have a problem with us actually using the Greek, but it says God has chosen the foolish.  It should not really say the foolish things, but the foolish. It is he has chosen the foolish what? We're speaking about people. The foolish people. Is he really saying that these people are actually fools or foolish? No, but in terms of how they're looked upon, the foolish of the world to shame the wise what? The wise people, the saffos, the saffoos people, those who are thinking that they are wise, and God has chosen the weak, the weak, which is that not weak things, but weak people of the world to shame the things which are strong. Let's say the word things that are strong just says to shame the strong. And so the point is he's using the foolish, or those that are considered to be foolish, or the lowly to confound those who are considered to be wise. But notice they don't ever really point to the next part of it. They don't say that God has chosen the weak people or the weak things. They rarely quote that point, but he's chosen the weak to put to shame those who are strong. The base things, those who are insignificant inferior, they rarely would tell you that they are inferior or weak. They don't use that, but God has chosen the weak amongst the people of the world, and the despised God has chosen the things that are not so that he may nullify the things that are, so that no man, again, we're speaking about people, not the activities or the things so that no man, no person can boast before God. So when someone is acting in a way that goes against Scripture, one, don't tell us that we are putting God in a box. No, God has stated to us what he's going to do, and he's not the author of confusion. He is not going to all of a sudden go around his word that he gave us to read and say, no, no, no, no, no, do what you want, but then blame God. Say that that's God. No, God has given us his word so we can learn of it, which is why he tells us to teach what comports will sound doctrine and to teach people to live that way. So when someone is acting in ways that are clearly ungodly or at the very least seems unorthodox, you can know for a fact that those foolish things is not what God had in mind. Amen.


Hey everyone, Dr. O here. I'm going to teach you how to use Chronometer, which is my favorite diet tracking tool. So you see at the top of the screen that we are at chronometer.com slash signup. And here we have the create your free account screen. So you're going to put your email address and you're going to put your password and confirm it. Obviously I've blocked them because they're mine.  So I'll leave it here January 1st, 1985, your height. I have it at six feet. It also gives it in centimeters. And then you have your weight, which can be in pounds or kilograms. Then you have to check all the boxes, you know, make sure you read all these things. But then you click on, well I go down there, click on create an account. All right, so the next, next you're going to get this screen that's going to tell you to check your email for an email verification. And then you're going to need to open the link to validate your account. So we'll do that and then we'll come back. And I am back. So I went and I validated it. I had to click continue and now it's allowing me in. So how do you use it? You can see we're on the diary page first. So here you see the day and you're going to see where you can add food, add exercise, add biometrics and add notes. It's already showing me. So based on the information that I told it earlier, it is showing how many calories it thinks I should be burning in a day. And it's given me some other, other kind of recommendations here or at least the targets, which you could, which you can set. And then here you see a nutrition score. And then down here you see the, you see weight change as well. And then you see these highlighted nutrients. So when you start to add in food, it's going to tell you how many calories are in the foods you're eating, alcohol, caffeine, water, then you're just going to break it down by carbs, lipids and proteins. And then on the side, you're going to get vitamins and minerals. So you can use this as a tool, not just to see if you're hitting your calorie targets and your macro targets, but also are you consistently deficient in, in different nutrients. And then you can try to find foods to, to bolster those numbers. And you see kind of the little, the highlighted nutrients there at the top. So lots of things you can learn on, on just this screen here. So then let's go, let's look at a few other areas though, and then we'll come back and learn how to add food. So trends, once you add information here, you're going to start to see trends on calories consumed, body weight, those are going to be big ones there. Then we go to foods. You can actually put in custom recipes and add things like that. That's perfectly fine. You have custom recipes, custom foods. So if you eat a food on a regular basis and you can't find it in chronometers database, you can, you can, you can look, look for foods here. And then you can search for, search for foods as well. So lots of ways to try to find the food that you're going to enter into chronometer when you're mapping out your diet. And you have the settings section here. It's going to show your email and password and all those kind of things. So you can, again, you can go through all of this. It's not what I'm here to teach you today. And then you have the plans. This is going to be just if you wanted to spend money on the chronometer plan. I think the basic plan works really good, but you'll see the reasons to choose others. And there is a help section here as well, which is great. So let's go back to what we're really going to focus on though, which is back to our diary. So let's look at adding food.  Let's just put in that we had a pop tart and see what happens. I don't know. I'm looked, but oh, so let's see a frosted strawberry pop tart. But either way, whatever foods you choose, and if you can't find the exact food you ate, I generally recommend just getting picking the thing that looks the closest. But let's say you had a pop tart here and you can you can scroll down. And it's going to tell you, so did you have a, so how much did you have as far as you're serving? You can even put here time of day. So you could it'll tell you what time you ate it, especially really important if you're doing fasting and stuff. But you can measure it in grams, ounces or ounces.  And let's say we had two servings and it changed the numbers over here on the left and you see the listed nutrients and I click add. So now I've consumed 400 calories of my supposed 1,973. So again, this isn't me. This is just a, so I added a food and you can do that. You can do that for everything you eat and it's going to give you all the information. So notice how it started to fill things in here. So this is what, I mean, this is why I love chronometer. There's other great tools out there, but this is my favorite. You can do the same thing with exercise. So let's say because we had a, we had a pop tart for breakfast, we should probably do some physical activity. So let's just say running in general and effort lever level. You have light, moderate and hard. You can choose how long you did it and it's going to tell you how much energy you burn based on your size that you told it earlier. So you can't do some of these features, but that's fine. We're going to add that to our diary. So now notice that the energy burn has gone up because that 1,973 number was just my basal energy expenditure without physical activity. So there you go. You can, I'll click on, you can add notes, but then adding biometric things you can do on top of it, especially if you get into their higher level plans, but not a big deal. I just use it for adding food. I only use it for that. I exercise, I use things like Apple Watch or I just, or I don't even track those most of the time. So that is how you can get started using chronometer. I do want to take you back to the help page real quickly because if that's not enough, you can go to Chronometer University. I send all my students there if they're still having questions. Chronometer University is free. It's on YouTube videos that are tutorials and then they have a user's manual as well. So that is Chronometer. I hope that this helps you track your food intake, track your activity if you wanted to and helps you progress in the right direction. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.


Hey Academy, this is a take two of my post run. I had some problems of a couple technical issues on my first one So basically, I'm just doing a quick one this morning Just thought I'd give a shout out to the Electric Academy group here and let you know that I'm planning on doing a Livestream once a week. I've been doing podcasts which have not always been the most consistent and I'm trying to up my game And I'm finding I'm not getting a ton of engagement on podcast and doing okay But I know that video is the place to go with these days So I thought I'd try out Facebook live and see how that goes So this is going to be my first video. I'm going to be doing one on Wednesday I'm gonna set up a poll later on tonight to see what time works for you guys I'll be setting one up in this group also on my Facebook fan page and I think this morning or on Wednesday I'll be talking about my morning routine and this would be a great one to talk about this morning because I just got back from a run on a cross train and That's why I'm glistening and I'm unshaven. Let me show you my running partner Molly There's Molly. She loves to go running as well and back to me She's not the greatest runner, but neither am I so We're good team. She loves it when we go to the park though Because I could I run to the park and I do a little cross training circuit at the playground there And she loves it because she can just finally sit down lie down and chase rabbits and all the fun stuff So she loves to run With that said I have not prepared anything and I know I don't want to continue to battle on and I need to shave And I need to shower because I've got to go do a walkthrough final walk through on a job So I can get paid and then I also got to get a quote out today So I can get the next project on the go. So if you guys like this give it a thumbs up I would appreciate that share it if you will remember starting this Wednesday depending on you guys What time I'm gonna be doing a live show. So it'll be this week on my morning routine Alright, thanks for watching guys and we'll see you on Wednesday. Peace. Stay classy


Hello everyone, I'm delighted to be here with the wonderful Students of Bridging once again. And as always, these students are in community connections and they are learning about the ability for everyday people to come in and make their own TV show and tell their own story. So without further ado, I'm going to have the dream seekers introduce themselves to you. My name and kingdom is that the high school I go to is M.M.U. Awesome. My name is Ryan and I'm going to M.M.U. I'm Claire and I go to see us. I'm Claire and I go to see a death. Awesome. And then we have one more student in the dream seekers. I study. I study. Yes. I'm So, they're going to be here today. I'm sorry I'm not here today, but I wanted to make sure everyone saw the artwork that he's been creating at Bridging that is starting to fill these two walls. So what's going to happen today is the dream seekers are going to interview and be interviewed by renowned activist, disability activist David Fry. So we'll introduce him in a moment and then, and this will happen. Each student will have some time with David. So and they'll be talking about advocacy. They will also be talking about the artwork, the works of art that they created with Topaz Weiss over at Expressive Arts, Burlington. So without further ado, we're going to snap out the dream seekers. But we need to get, but we need to see, um, Nervousness. Yeah. So we're all going to snap one, two, three. And now I'd like to take a moment and introduce our guest of the morning, David Fry. David, it's so wonderful to have you here again to talk to these young potential future advocates.  No, I guess, you know, I'm really, really thankful to be on the show and to show them a little inspiration that, hey, I'm such a great advocate and to teach them that they can be too. So I'm bring me aboard on them. Okay, awesome. Great. So we will snap in Clara. Hey, Clara. Hey. Okay, you've got some questions for David. What does self-advocacy mean to you? Mean to you. What self-advocacy means to me is speaking up for myself, speaking up for others that cannot be speak, that cannot speak up for themselves. And to be part of the table. When decisions are being made for us or being, being made for me, I want to be at that table. And I want other advocates to be at that table too. So we need to be at the table when decisions are being made for us. Awesome. Where is your day going? Oh, yes, she has a second question. Did you hear that? I didn't hear it. How is your day going? My day is going great so far. And I'm really, really glad to be on this program, to give you advice, to hopefully that you will take my advice, because being a strong advocate for you, being yourself, it's very important. And if you want to speak up for others, it's important as well. Cool. So, yeah, do you want to talk to David about your artwork? Yes, I made this with Topaz in Bresson Art Studio, we have cards and thumbs down.  This is my inside. Is this the back? What's on the back here is your inside? I realized. Yeah, let's show that, because I don't think I took a picture of that for the thing. So there's, what is that, there's a man and woman talking next to a sort of romantic night scene. And I realized, and then on the outside, cars. And I heard that that was inspired by a movie. You love movies. That's in there yet. That's great. David, do you have some questions for Clara about her artwork, her work of art? What inspired you to do that beautiful artwork and what is in it that could mean a little bit of self-advocacy in it? Thumbs down. Is that, is that a way to share that you don't like something? I don't like. A way to speak up for yourself? Yeah. You get your opinion out? Yeah. That's wonderful. Can I be done? Are you, are you feeling finished? I'm finished. Okay. Awesome. Great job, Clara. Clara, do you want to snap out? Oh, come back so we can snap you out, because you'll love it when it happens. So take a seat and say, well, Clara, so wonderful for you to have a chance to chat with David. Let's snap out. One, two, three. And here I am with Ryan, Ryan David. Ryan, do you have a question to ask David? Hey, David. Hello. And Ryan, remember you can just relax, share your, do you have your question? Yeah. Dave, my name is my name. And today, I have a, from this one, what have you gotten out of being a self-advocate in Champlain Voices? What does it mean to be an advocate for Champlain Voices? Yeah. Well, I think what it means is to bring my voice to be heard at a table where we're all self-advocates and we're all working on great things for one another. And I bring things that are important to me, which should be important to other self-advocates as well. And I think that's what it means for me. I think bettering ourselves and being great advocates, that's the name of the game. All right. What I made today was this poster, was that, Ryan, Ryan, if you touch it, it makes it really normal in there. So, yeah. So, Ryan. Okay. Ryan. What I did is meet with poster with Topaz, and I'm going to turn out some expressive arts, Burnington. So Ms. Art was made and inspired me because I was just really glad because I'm sort of excited to show the art. So, next. Well, maybe do you want to say, David, do you have a question for Ryan? That is wonderful artwork. And what inspired you to do this artwork? Well, well, it inspired me from magazines because of Brenda. And, no, actually, it inspired me from magazines and I was sort of excited. Because I got inspired to make a cut, I had a cut in glue and I'm just excited. So, thanks, Dave. You know what I love about, can I share something that I love about this?   Yeah. Which is great. She saw that you and Ryan, you do expand and need space. That's what I'm all about. I'm in the band and we the man. You're in between the same. Yes. So you take space. And how did that feel when she didn't say, oh no, no, sorry, Ryan. You have to stay in the small space. I'm sorry. She said, no, I see you want to expand. Okay.  Thanks. How did that feel? Oh, it felt great. And it felt good. You ready to rock on? You want to thank David? Thanks, Dave, for meeting me for a minute. I'm going to add Kaden's snacks because I'm going to say it with words. One, two, three. And now here's Kaden's welcome. Thanks. You a question for David? I do. Tell us a story about a time you broke up for yourself. There's a lot of times that I spoke up for myself because I feel if you don't speak up for yourself, your voice will never be heard. And so there was a time where I was in a home care environment. And my home care provider was a vegan. And I didn't like vegan food. And I just said, I can't eat this stuff. It's not me. And I told my case manager at the time, I said, you've put me into a home that they're all vegan. And I can't eat. I'm not going to eat vegan food. I like regular food. And so I got to tell you when there's a situation that arrives in your life and you don't like it. I hope you can speak up for yourself or speak up for others because it is so important for others to listen to your voice. Oh, thanks, David. Thanks. David, do you have some questions about Kaden's collage? Yes. I'd like to know more about your collage and what's inspired in it for you? Wow. I was inspired in me because I went to the ocean and the clouds. And I see, like, the heart aprons. When we are, like, in the car or something, I see the heart aprons. So you think that you love, like the ocean, like being in different places, things that you love to do. Yeah. And dreams. I love. Your dream. Kaden is a big part of how the dream seekers got named the dream seekers. Yeah. She's on a mission. Do you want to ask Kaden any questions about her dreams? What are your dreams, Kaden? Would you like to be a self advocate and be part of Champlain Voices? I'm a dream. I don't really know at the moment. But do you like the idea that if you have dreams, you can seek them? Yeah. So you love that idea that one can have dreams. Yeah. Sometimes you don't, yeah, you don't know what they are yet. Do you want to ask him if David has had a dream that he has sought, that he went after? I have so many dreams. And dreams, they're important to keep because sometimes your dreams do come true. Like seeking a different job profession. I've always thought about that. I've been in food service for such a long, long time that I'd like to do something more meaningful in my life, more something that is more important to me. And that's working with self advocates. And I'm starting to do that. So seek your dream when you have a dream because dreams are important. Yeah. And I'll add, I mean, something that's happened in the work we've been doing in Champlain Voices. David, you were interested in, you know, you all being more at the table. And David invited a friend who's a researcher, kind of like Sephakor is a researcher. She's a doctor of study. And so this woman, Amanda Miller, is, I'm not sure exactly what her doctorate is in, but it's in disability studies. And David brought her in just to meet Champlain Voices. And now Champlain Voices are working on a research project. So they are the researchers, which means they are the ones at the table deciding what this project is. And so David, that was a dream I've been hearing you talk about, let's be at the table. And you don't always know how it's going to happen, but that's such a cool thing to see that it's happening. It's happening. So the project has a kind of a premier date where they're just going to talk a little bit about it, but it will be in a national conference online. Yeah, so our big thing is March 8th. March 8th at 2 p.m. a webinar. And I'm so excited. Yeah. It's just the tip of the iceberg. That's just the beginning.  And it's a lot to take in. It can make you a little tired. Yeah. Shall we get the other dream seekers back? Yeah. Okay. So we're going to snap in the dream seeker.  So, oh, yeah. So we're snapping you in. Hello, Dave. Hello, Dave. You just have to talk louder in the room so he can hear you. Hello, Dave. Hi. My name's Ryan. And I'm going to say a big, we've had a lovely time today, Dave. And with Ryan, thank you very much. But it's a thing. For dream seekers, I'm going to say a big, let's all wave. Thank you. Thanks for seeing. They're referring to one. Bye-bye, David. Bye, Dave. Bye, Dave. Thank you. Bye, senior. Bye, Dave. Bye-bye for my dream seekers, David. Bye-bye. Bye. And do you want to say goodbye to our audience? Goodbye to everyone. Bye. Everyone. What's up? We talked about it a little bit, but should we, should we acknowledge Gray? Yes. For a dream seeker. Here we go. Ray Sterling was a huge part of the lives. And I also want to say a big thank you to Ray Sterling because I'm going to miss him. Well, he's still with us. He's just, he's just not here today. All right. He's not here, not here today. But he's here on this, he's here with us. Put his hair on the screen. Today, I'm making some delightful artwork for us to share. So, good luck, Ray Sterling, from Ryan. Clara and Katie. From the dream seekers. Ready? Ready? From the dream seekers. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.


Okay, welcome back everyone. This is Silicon Angle and theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, expect a significant noise. We're here live in San Francisco for AWS Summit, Amazon Web Services there. They go out and they go out all the different major areas and do their learning and training. It's all free, thousands of attendees learning about Amazon Web Services. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm Joe McCose, Jeff Frick with theCUBE, General Manager of theCUBE and co-host Jeff. Welcome back to our next segment with Luis Arez, Director of Tech Alliances, Al Fresco. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much and it's Luis Salah by the way, but that's it. I won't tell anybody. It's a good safe with me. Okay. We have Luis on last year at AWS Summit 2013. So I guess first off, what's really changed in the marketplace in the last year? Well, so last year I spent a lot of time talking about well a little bit about Al Fresco with you guys telling you how Al Fresco manages documents and both on-prem and in the cloud with hybrid technology and so forth. And what's changed since then is that while we've been building a very good business, we've been around for a long time, but a very good business with Amazon and collaborating with Amazon on joint sales, joint deals and basically delivering the value of the cloud and the value of open source document management to our customers. And this has just yielded tremendous results over the last year. It's been really incredible. So talk a little bit, because you guys didn't start out on Amazon. Like I said, you've been around for a while, so talk a little bit about kind of how the Amazon relationship got started and then how it's really grown and what that's been to your business. Sure, so we started off as a commercial open source technology, so people would download our product, install it on-prem and use it to manage their mission critical, business critical documents, workflows, metadata and those types of things. And what we've been discovering over time is that number one, our architecture lent itself very nicely to being deployed to AWS. And number two, people were catching on to the idea of deploying our product to AWS. Here's what's beautiful about AWS. We've got compute, your servers, right? You've got storage like S3 and you've got the database, right? Those are the three main things that Al fresco requires to function. So- As do all applications. Right, exactly, as do all applications and that's the beauty of it, right? And just happens to be that our product works really well there. So great, so what we've been able to accomplish is we realize that we can easily integrate S3, which has its own proprietary interface, right? We started demonstrating this to customers, people started deploying this and it just took off like wildfire. Now did you have any type of a SaaS offering before? No, we built our SaaS offering using these same cloud technology. So we built it and run it on top of AWS, but what we're seeing is a mix of customers that use our SaaS offering and others that deploy our product, whether on-prem behind the firewall or more commonly now, AWS. Right, and don't tell me anything that you've been in trouble for, but in terms of growth within your business, the on-prem versus the SaaS offering, what can you share with us in terms of market uptick and market adoption or are there specific types of customers that prefer one over the other? So customers, the customers that tend to use our product are the ones that care about the security and privacy of the data. And they want to be very selective about how this data gets exposed outside of their environment. And so what we need to do is build a lot of credibility and best practices in order to demonstrate that a customer can go to the cloud while still respecting those policies. And so our business has been a lot, has involved a lot of that, right? So it has grown our SaaS customers do tend to use us primarily for more lightweight collaboration nowadays, but we're building a whole new suite of SaaS products that are going to deliver specific business functionality. And I'm going to use contracts management as an example here that will be delivered explicitly through the cloud, but also work on-prem and behind the firewall. Interesting. So you're happy with the 42nd price decrease that Andy announced earlier at the keynote? It's incredible. I mean, this helps us, it helps our customers, right? Now we have a secure place to store the data that is even more affordable than it was before, right? And it's just incredible. And you know what? I expect to see this happening two to three times a year. We're going to keep seeing more price drops. Amazon is about the only technology company that I'm aware of that drops prices, right? Even our own product, I hate to say it, sometimes goes up in price, so yeah.  And what's neat about Alfresco is you're kind of at the intersection between technology and kind of the new age and old school paper, right? And how that is transitioning. And the specific example that we talked about involved the oldest of the old, which is government with stacks of paper. Exactly. So I wonder if you could share a little bit about that application. You know, we know that government is, there's a bureaucracy, there's a lot of, there are a lot of paper based processes out there. And this one example, there was a large government organization that handles certain classes of claims and benefits and whatnot for citizens and other constituencies. And they had a very, very tedious paper based process that would take over a year to process a claim and deliver the service to the citizen that required it. And so this. A year. A year, a year to do the process. And it got so bad that Comedy Central's John Stuart got into the picture. And I mean, this was all over the news, but John Stuart basically did a whole series where he would, where he was essentially pointing out these problems with paper and a lot of processes and how it could benefit from the digitization, right? And that's what we're good at. And guess what? They're now using a fresco to solve this problem. The situation was so bad. John Stuart was making fun of this, but they had stacks of boxes that were weighing down the floors on their warehouses where you could take a leveler and see that the floor was sagging. But putting all the humor and sarcasm aside, this organization clearly wanted to deliver better service and better value to the constituents. And so they invested in this and they are deploying a fresco along with, scanners to scan documents into a fresco. They get stored inside AWS's GovCloud, so it's secure, it's safe, right? And the whole idea here is that as this deployment continues to progress, we're going to shorten, excuse me, that lengthy one-year process down to three months and eventually lessen that. And this is the government trying to do the right thing and I think they're succeeding at it. So I want to ask you about the joke on Twitter right now on our crowd chat is, Amazon is a price drop as a service, which is great, right? I mean, who doesn't like price? That's a new one. We heard that. Exactly. I brought it up. Always adding new stuff here in the queue. So obviously that's cool. They're lowering prices, they're adding new stuff, seeing the SSDs finally come on board. So that's all great. We're a big customer of Amazon. We love it 100% on Amazon on our crowd chat. But the question that everyone's asking is, where are they in the enterprise? So you start to see that now all in with in four, you've got these guys going crazy now. They're changing the game. So they're not going to put the lipstick on the pig and say we're going to be enterprise like the other guys. You seeing them do things a little bit differently. That's their style. So I got to ask you, as someone who's out there on the cutting edge on the cloud side, as well as having a peek into legacy business structures, you're dealing with a lot of legacy, which is enterprise. What is Amazon doing right and what do they need to do better to be enterprise ready? Because they're not there yet, but they're getting there. Yeah, I think we know that Amazon, when they started, when AWS first launched, they were doing a pretty thriving business, building a thriving business on startups, right? But the problem with startups is that they're much like the restaurant business. Nine and 10 are going to fail. And so in order to build a long-term sustainable business, you need to start looking at traditional enterprises. And as an Amazon partner, I have firsthand knowledge and observations of how Amazon's whole organization is oriented towards building a stronger enterprise business. So let's- And that train is coming down the track, but the question is, when and how long will it take? They're pretty fast. Oh, they've essentially done it now, but I was president at their sales kickoff this last January. And I can tell you that, that this is what's coming out of their executive leadership. They've hired like crazy. Their team has effectively tripled in the last several years. So I think they have the field organization to support the customers that they're going after. And I think the technology is very, very credible, right? It's ready for these kinds of use cases. They take security so seriously, and that's a big thing for enterprises. The price model, CapEx versus OpEx, right? That's also very appealing to large organizations. So it's working. It's happening now. One of the things about Amazon has been impressive is that, and this is a double-edged sword for them, right? I mean, at one level, and they don't do a lot of grandstanding. They pretty much stick to their knitting, their geeks, they're working on stuff, the cloud, it speaks for itself on the product side. But now you have competition. The war for the developer has been full swing. Not just like startup developer, enterprise, cloud operations, you got IBM with BlueMix in the cloud. You got HP trying to copy Amazon. Cisco just launched a billion dollar cloud initiative.  It's basically Internet of Things. So you get the DevOps culture going on, and you got all the big guys trying to put that sea wall off to stop that wave in the enterprise. Some say, I say, it's going to be hard to do. But now you have Amazon has to compete. What do they have to do? I mean, do you think they're going to change course in terms of how they do things to react to the competition? Do you think it just heads down and just keep the rear view, everyone in the rear view mirror? It would be falling out to react, right? I think, but they're so far ahead that that gives them certainly that first mover advantage. Now, I would say that they need to keep an eye on the competition. They need to continue to innovate. They need to listen to the customers, which once again, they demonstrated consistently that they listened to the customers. And I think they will always have that leg up in terms of scale, which leads to the economies of scale, right, those are the cost factor, that innovation keeps coming from them. And they just have that advantage. And as long as they keep doing what they're doing and demonstrating those, that ability, that flexibility to adjust with changing market conditions, I think they're going to continue to be in a very good position. So Jeff, you've got IBM, Oracle, HP, all that cloud, Pivotal VM, where it's the enterprise cloud, never mind the Google stuff we saw yesterday, and you got Microsoft. I mean, that is some significant. These aren't like, they're saying startups. Right, right. It's like bottom resort. This is like IBM's all in on the cloud. They got the big data thing going on. I mean, they got to be scared. There's telltale signs on this. Yeah, but what's interesting on Jassy's keynote, they had the Gardner Magic Quadrant with 14 cloud providers. And he said they've got five x according to Gardner computing power of the other 13 combined. The other thing I thought was really interesting in terms of listening to customers and changing their business is he talked about adding people resources, a phone number, somebody to call when you need support. Exactly. There's a couple of names in that list that you mentioned where you can find a phone number. They're not in the yellow pages. So that's interesting in that it's a different model for them, but if you look at the tremendous customer service in terms of a culture that you get with Amazon from the consumer side and to really take that point of view and just constantly listening to their customers, I don't know that they're looking at the competition as tightly as they might, but they certainly listen to their customers, sounds like, and keep responding to those needs. I agree. I agree wholeheartedly. But they continue to innovate, they continue to do what they're doing. I think they're doing okay. Yeah, it's just not a lot of talk about test and dev. They've got 14 of these summits shows, John. 14 summits, there's 4,000 people here and it's free. And it's really just about coming in, learning about the applications and learning about the infrastructure, hearing about best practices from the Amazon people as well as your peer group. So they're pretty much heads down, they look at customers. Yeah, I mean, to me what's impressive about Amazon is that they're launching so much new stuff at a rate that's alarmingly amazing.  And it's almost two over the top. I mean, I'm sitting there listening to Jassy. It's just like, we have this, we have this. We have containers on EEC to optimize for the government, for the security. So you're seeing, you're seeing cash container with elastic bean stuff. It's phenomenal, elastic cash, the Redis stuff, the Node.js stuff. I mean, the DevOps culture is the new modern era that's the printing press kind of impact. It really is so phenomenal. And I'm not sure the other guys can compete. And I got to ask you, Louise, what do you think is the big disruption? Is it the app side of it? Is it the code agility? The fact that they're interested in new stuff? Is it that they're constantly changing the game and moving the goalpost, if you will, every day on the competition? What is the key thing? Agility is at the core of everything that they're doing, right? And it's agility to a variety of different constituents. So there's the DevOps, the CIS admins, et cetera, who are deploying infrastructure using Amazon's virtualized infrastructure, right? Capabilities. They're the actual engineers who are writing the code, writing the applications and need a quick way to develop, test, iterate, write, fix bugs, et cetera, and then push it off to the DevOps guys who then deploy to production, right? So I think it all hinges on making sure that these audiences are agile while still addressing the other factors, as I said before, cost. The other one is the scale, right? I mean, what made X86 win over everything is that Intel had such massive scale on the PC side that that just pulled the development and the pricing, which is going to be interesting as X86 goes against the sea of arm processors that are now in phones, but Amazon's got such scale that they can leverage. What they're also doing is they're bolting on an ecosystem, and I think that's critical. If you look at all the success you need to have on a platform, you mentioned the X86, you had some scale, you had an ecosystem up and down the stack from chips to apps. Now it's the same thing you've seen with Amazon. Just the uptake and breadth of customer base is impressive, but I got to ask, at least about OpenStack and these other alternatives, because one thing that OpenStack has provided great hope for enterprise guys is the composite capability of this cataloging, you know, where you're about cataloging APIs and finally getting to service architectures, finally, right? Or will that lose to you? So people want to go where the signal is, right? So what's your take on OpenStack? So OpenStack is, it's formidable what they've accomplished over the last few years. The problem with OpenStack is it's only half of the equation, right? You don't get the scale, if you don't have the, well, the data centers to deploy this to, right? You don't have, you can only create essentially many clouds, at least this is the way I see that small organizations or more traditional enterprises are going to be able to leverage the technology. Will they be able to derive a benefit from this? Absolutely, they can, because the fact is that programmatic virtualization essentially, right? The ability to, for a few lines of code, deploy your infrastructure is beneficial no matter whether you're doing it in your own data center or in a public cloud like AWS. But the long-term prospects, I, at this moment, I'm not particularly done whole about it. But you see many clouds certainly as the future environment, you know, having multiple clouds, cloud for this, cloud for that. Well, I think we overuse the term cloud, I'm sure you would all agree, right? But, yeah, there's going to be, you know, Resources. Yeah, exactly, I mean, it's, these are resources as a service, you're right. It is overused word, so. Exactly, it's very much so. So, yeah, I think it's got a life and we're going to see a lot of, you know, vendors in there. I would put my money on, of course, Microsoft and AWS and Google for sure. I think IBM, you know, with SoftLayer, et cetera, they're going to make an impact. Rackspace is, of course, a player in here. So. What about Pivotal and Cloud Foundry, normal and real? Yeah, I don't know yet. I like the idea behind Pivotal. It's kind of a fat-pass layer. People are complaining. It's kind of bloated. It's bloated. Yes, I agree. You know, and I'm just not a fan at the moment, but that doesn't mean I couldn't be converted. I love new technology. So I'm going to try out whatever they give me and at least try to be as objective as possible with it. Yeah, and you want to see the meat on the bone, right? Exactly. You want to sizzle and steak, right? Exactly. Here's sizzle. Let's see if it's on the grill. Exactly. So what are we going to be talking about next year when we have young? What do you think is the big delta between now and then? Can you see that far in the future, or is it just way too scary? It is a little scary. But, you know, I know that for Al fresco, it's going to be more sass and more hybrid technologies that bridge the on-prem, behind-the-fire, while stuffed with the cloud in a sane way, in a way that makes sense. I mean, we hear a lot of people talk about hybrid and I just don't think they're executing on it in a way that actually is practical for the customers. So that's what I hope to be able to talk to you about is show and demonstrate that customers are using AWS, using our technology at Al fresco for document management collaboration to enable a real hybrid use case where data just seamlessly flows back and forth and work gets done, right? And that's what I hope to talk about. The end of the day, we're getting done. What do you think about the Google pressure yesterday of being a fly? What's your take on Google? They've been pretty quiet, very focused on their cloud, very high-end. They're doing the right things. And I was fortunate to attend the Google partner summit two weeks, three weeks ago, something like that. And I'm very, very impressed at what they're doing. They're building a credible business around not just Compute Engine, but App, what is it, App Engine and Google Apps in general. They're coming at it from a more platform angle, I would say, as in platform as a service stack of angle. And I think it's very commendable. And I like it. I still am not ready to deploy my workloads to Google yet, because I think they're still doing the kinds of things that AWS were doing in the earlier days. So the kinds of things that are interesting more to the startups. But I hope that in a year's time, they should be able to demonstrate that enterprises will be delivering, or excuse me, taking advantage of Google's platform, just as well as they're taking advantage of Amazon's. Okay, final thoughts from you, Luis, on this show. Why is it important to share to folks out there? What is going on? Why is this show so hot? What's the big deal about Amazon's summit this week? I'm gonna take, I'm gonna focus on education. You know, the best way to get in mind share is by educating your audiences. And this is what's great about these shows. They're worldwide, they're happening, well, you know, they're happening in the US, two locations in the US, London, Europe, I'm in Sydney, you know, we're gonna be in Sydney. So it's this opportunity to educate the potential users after how to take advantage of this technology and doing it for free. It's a great thing. And that's what I'm gonna. It's really putting the money where your mouth is. It's going after the development community, right? You should not charge them. They got a free lunch out here and there's a huge crowd that people can't see at home, but this is a packed pack. Yeah, I mean, it's a war for the developers, right? I mean, you're seeing all those names you mentioned with the IBM event. They're all wanting the developers, but it's the developer world's change. DevOps is the new way and the new breed of developers, whether you're old school, getting on the new school, or just pure, born on the stack, integrated stack model is no one downloads stuff anymore. No one wants to push patches. They want auto correction, they want auto scale and they want revision control, push it to GitHub, push it to the cloud, I'm good. And that's infrastructure is good. This is the new way. You don't see that stopping. No, I don't see that stopping. I mean, as an open source vendor, our business model initially started with the idea of encouraging people to download our product, take an hour to install it and configure it and then test it. Well, when SaaS came around, started really becoming popular, it essentially replaced that model, right? Now you get instant gratification. Take 30 seconds to fill in a registration form and boom, you're using that application. And so that just, it's a simple example of the kind of flexibility and power of basically cloud delivered applications and solutions. And that's not going to stop. I really is not going to stop. And I think what we're going to see is more workloads moving to the cloud and very few workloads remain behind the firewall. Right, and you brought that up in the keynote, right? Not which should go to the cloud, but which shouldn't. Essentially, yes. Luis Sala, thank you for coming on theCUBE. We got it right. Spreadsheet was updated. I apologize earlier on, usually. I never really blow all the news here. This is theCUBE. We are live in San Francisco. Doing what we do, we go out to the events. We extract the synlifers. We go where the action is. And here in our hometown backyard of San Francisco, all the actions about cloud, Google putting the pressure on yesterday with price drops. Huge competition lined up chasing Amazon, trying to copy Amazon. And boy, it's going to be very difficult if they keep on moving the goalpost, changing the game. That's going to be very hard to meet that kind of trajectory for these other competitors. But you know what? The enterprise is wide open and that's where the action is going. This is SiliconANG. We'll be covering it right back with our next guest at the short break.