Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 716: DATA OVER DOGMA

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Thank you to Dan and Dan from Data Over Dogma podcast. Check them out wherever fine podcasts are cast. Show Notes

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. recording live from glory hole studios in chicago beyond. This is Cognitive Distance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome mat.

Today is Thursday, September the 14th. And today we've got guests. Cecil, it's been a while. We're going to have the Dad over the Dogma podcast on Dan and Dan. Dan, he used to be from How To Heretic, teamed up with another Dan. And so they'll be on at the end of the show.

And so we're going to do a couple of stories between now and then, but stay tuned because at the end, we're going to do a couple stories between now and then, but stay tuned because at the end, we're going to interview them. Cecil. Yeah. It's Mexican alien day. Is it? It's Mexican alien day. I thought it was earlier in the week. I thought. Look, It's Mexican Alien Day. Is it?

It's Mexican Alien Day. I thought it was earlier in the week. I thought. Look, here's the thing. First of all, every day is Mexican Alien Day. It sounds, it sounds really.

It sounds like an immigration thing. Can I just say, it sounds really, really, really anti-immigration when you say it. But that's not what we're talking about. When you say it like that, it sounds really anti-immigration. Nope, that's not what we're talking about. I'm say it like that, it sounds really anti-immigration.

No, that's not what we're talking about. I'm just saying, I want to put this on the big screen because I just want to talk about this. So this last week, the Congress, I guess, down there, or the Senate, viewed these papier-mâché dummy aliens

that they brought in. So one of these hucksters is latching on to the, the guy who came out in the United States who said that there was aliens. Like once one of these people pops up their head, it's like, they're like locusts, right?

They sleep for 17 years. And then finally somebody is like aliens. And then all these jackasses, exactly. They just pop up out of the fucking ground, and then finally somebody's like aliens. And then all these jackasses, exactly, they just pop up out of the fucking ground like the fucking ghouls that they are. And then they immediately try to fucking make money off this. That's immediately what they're trying to do.

So inside of the parliament, or I don't know the Mexican government. I don't know what they call it, right? But like the Senate or whatever, their Congress, they had this guy come with these two fucking star chambers

and he set them in the middle of the thing and then he opened them up and they're little paper mache aliens from fucking Spirit Halloween. They are.

They do, look, here's the thing, guys. If you're listening and not watching, there is nothing remotely real looking about this. Like if you're

fooled by this and also, this guy has been caught lying about this exact shit before're formed by this, and also this guy has been caught lying about this exact shit before. There's like nothing new under the sun. It's like, here's a guy whose credibility is shot on this specific

issue. It's not like he got caught lying on his taxes, but he has an alien in his back pocket or whatever. Remember that guy who wrote that doctor book who was a tax fraud? He was also lying about the doctor stuff. Right. But one didn't correlate to the other.

It doesn't necessarily mean he's lying about the doctor stuff. But this is a guy who's caught lying about this exact thing. He got caught lying about fake relics that he claimed previously were evidence of aliens. And now here's the same guy walking up, knocking on your door, being like, I got more alien relics. And like there's credulous dipshits who are like, really?

Welcome to Congress, bro. And then the worst part is, is when you read what happens online, immediately people are falling for this. I just want to play. Now I can't, I'm going to explain it to the people who aren't watching, but the people who are watching, I just want to play. Now, I can't, I'm going to explain it to the people who aren't watching, but the people who are watching,

I just want to play this guy. Set this fucking alien on this scale. So this is him setting it on there. Look at how he's holding the alien. So, okay, imagine, imagine you have, let's say it's a two foot long alien, right? It's like a fucking,

it looks like E.T. It's literally a fucking, it looks like E.T. It's literally, it's literally modeled after E.T. except for the legs aren't short. The legs are like human bipedal type legs, right? Right. Well, this guy is holding this precious alien artifact of a fucking mummy of an alien like you would a prop from Spirit Halloween.

He's holding it with his two fingers on the waist. And it's like, it clearly has no density to it whatsoever because it's made of papier-mâché and he's setting it on, like who holds something that is precious like a fucking, like a hot dog you're taking on a hot water? Who holds it like that? Nobody does that.

No, no. And like, I do want to emphasize the preciousness. Like imagine, because it's not real. It's not real. It's not real. It's super crazy. Wildly not real.

But setting that aside, let's pretend for a moment that it was real. Sure. There would literally be nothing more precious. No. Possible on earth to exist.

Yeah. So here you have something. And also, you would have no, there would be no reason for you to think that you understood how delicate it was. Because there's no analog for you to attach this to.

So you have in front of you, have in your possession, possibly the most precious possible thing to have. That is some units of delicacy. You don't know how delicate it is. Not delicacy. Some units of delicacy. Nom, nom, nom delicate it is. Not delicacy. Some units of delicacy. Nom, nom, nom. This is a sushi tray they're putting on. You got to eat it on a naked lady.

No, it's like a bigger naked alien. And you're just going to like paw at this thing. He's like, he happens to be wearing like ye cheapy rubber gloves. This is a rubber glove you would wear to the deli. Right, exactly. This is like he's going to cut some pastrami or he's going to handle the most delicate single thing that the world in all of its time in history has ever had.

It's unobtainium. It might as well be unobtainium or whatever the fuck. And he's just like, I don't know, I'm not even. Look, I didn't even like my kids and I held them more delicately than this. You know what I mean? And also they zoom in on the face of this thing. Look at that thing.

Okay, guys, if that doesn't look like papier-mâché, it 100% looks like somebody made, it doesn't even look like somebody good tried to make an ET replica with papier-mâché. It looks like somebody who genuinely never has worked in that medium before ever in their life. For real.

They had it described to them too. They've never seen anybody do it. They'd had it described to them and then they made an ETV replica. This is a bad fourth grade arts and crafts project. Absolutely. This is Mrs. Johnson's

fourth grade class. Like seriously, this would be a more believable replica if it was made out of macaroni elbows. If your kid brought this home, you would hit him with it and then throw it away.

That's how ugly it is. There's like, also, you have to, you cannot capture, you cannot possibly capture how shockingly unimaginative this is as like. Oh, I know, I know. So here we are supposing that there is alien life form. Wow, what would it look like? What about if it looked like a person, but smaller? supposing that there is alien life form. Wow. What would it look like?

What about if it looked like a person, but smaller with a different ish head, literally just a slightly bigger head than normal, but two eyes, a regular mouth, a regular nose, five fingers, five toes,

two arms, two legs, symmetrical down the center. It just looks like a fucking tiny person. Yeah. This is it. I would be more, if somebody was like, look, I found a gnome. I'd be like, whoa, a gnome skeleton.

That's also not real, but maybe it would look like that. If you're like, hey, found an alien. I'd be like, like there's weirder shit under the sea. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, no. In the bottom of a trench somewhere. A platypus is weirder. Yeah.

Like earth already produces more unlikely shit. When you move off of the evolutionary pressures of Earth and add in the timeline of, like, billions of years, and you're like,

whoa, isn't it crazy to just produce, like, a person, but it's a foot tall? It's the exact thing. It's fucking the exact thing. You're like, yeah, they just happen to live

on a planet that is exactly like ours, that has the same pressures as ours. Also, and, like, maybe this isn't true, so I they just happen to live on a planet that is exactly like ours, that has the same pressures as ours. Also, and like maybe this isn't true, so I'm just going to spitball here and say shit because this is a show where you shouldn't believe the things we say. We're not experts. But this thing looks to be about 12 inches tall. Yeah. that any advanced race that can produce a fucking interstellar spaceship could possibly perform the labor

necessary to mine the materials and be 12 inches tall. This thing looks like, don't you think there'd be some minimum size necessary, genuinely necessary, to carry around the body that

you would need in order to do the work on the raw materials to transform those materials substantively enough to create a civilization. I just don't believe some scrawny little 12 inch tall thing. Like do they live on a planet where nothing the size of a house cat ever ate them? They would be eaten by a house cat. Sizest. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. I'm a fucking evolutionary size king.

I am on your side, little people of the world. It's absurd. Did they evolute back down? Can we look at this thing right now? Evolute. Evolute is my new favorite word. Evolute is a great sauce. Evolute.

This is my favorite thing. It looks, it genuinely looks, it looks like fucking somebody threw this in their crawl space for a little while to get sort of the stuff that sits in a crawl space on there. And then they pulled it out. It's so fucking fake. I mean, look at this thing. And look me in the face

and be like, no, bro, that's an alien. Get the fuck out of here. Did he say how he came by and I can't remember. Did he say how? Did he say space? I don't know. I don't remember because I fucking don't remember. But imagine two. You just

got to picture this series of fucking lemony snicket level unlikely events that have to happen in order for this to come into one person's private possession. Yeah. Right. Like you're just like out in your, I don't know, you're like your backyard or something. You're digging up your garden. You're like, holy fucking shit.

There's a guy, Martha, get over here. Yeah. No, the carrots look fine. That's not what I'm talking about. Yeah, I'll get you a carrot. Look, come over. Bring the small shovel. There's a goddamn tiny alien buried in the past.

What the fuck? Yeah. And you don't call somebody immediately? No, you excavate it, Tom, and then you put it in your own little star chamber so you can... And you take it on like what? You take it on tour.

Like little like showing tours? Yeah, on tour. And the government's like, yeah, you keep it. Private properties, private properties. This is literally the freak show shit

they used to have in like the early 1900s where they'd have like a fucking octopus or something and they'd be like, yeah, he's the fucking octopus boy. He was like aborted

or whatever. And then they'd just have like a part of an octopus and a thing. Right. And then you'd pay $2 or whatever or the equivalent at the time

to go see it. Yep. Two bits ahead. Come and see the octopus, boy. Google it, like, some shit in formaldehyde for a few minutes and then leave

in a dark room. One of the most spectacularly underfunded countries that I have been to is the country of Belize. Wonderful, beautiful country. They don't have any money at all for anything, right? But even in Belize. Wonderful, beautiful country. They don't have any money at all for

anything, right? But even in Belize, Cecil, if you are on your property and you find a Mayan ruin of any kind, right? Of any kind. And this happens fairly frequently from what we were told when we were there. Like if you find some Mayan shit immediately by order of law that's the government's now like the government's like yeah you know what like our ancestry belongs to all of us so that's just ours now i have a hard time believing some guys like uh this will pretty much fundamentally change uh all of our understandings of biology and physics and astrophysics and cosmology and But it's my private property. And everyone's just like, well, I mean, we're just the government.

We can't take it from them. He put a cone on it. Right. I can't come near it. It did call dibsies. He had two chairs and a shovel next to it. The government is literally powerless against that. That's a Chicago joke, by the way.

If you're a house. He's shoveling off your street in front of your house. They shovel off for their street and then they'll cordon it off and they call it dibs in Chicago. It's a crazy thing that people fist fight over. It is a crazy thing people fist fight over. Also, if your

house is in the way of an expanded freeway, the government's just like, neat, that's our house now. They knock it down and build their freeway. I just, again, nobody has a private property space alien. Say it out loud. This is my private property space alien. This guy, like,

what, put this in his Toyota Corolla and drove it over to the Congress? Yeah, because it's paper mache time. Yeah, I know, man. God, he probably has like a fucking mold-a-rama machine in his house that just churns them out. It's so fucking fake.

God. It's so believable. I'll fake it. And the worst part is, is the people online, whenever you read, and I don't know if it's rage bait or not, right? I don't know if they're just trolling

and saying, I can't believe this stuff. It's all coming out now or whatever. You know, those comments you read. Oh, it's all hitting the fan now. I'm like, come on, man. One guy said he saw aliens. He had no proof.

And then another guy has a paper mache alien that he brings to a government body. Nothing has happened, man. And I'm going to tell you straight up, like, of all the things in the world, I wish were true. Yeah. This is something I wish were true. I wish we were visited by aliens of some kind. I wish that there were some creatures from another place that we could communicate with.

That would be amazing. That would be, I mean, I would literally dedicate my life to understanding that. I would probably try to go to school again just to try to get something, to try to work in that field if possible. It's that try to go to school again just to try to get something to try to work in that field if possible. It's that exciting to me, right? I want it to be true. Yeah. More than anything. But there's no fucking evidence it's true. There's none. Not a bit of

evidence. And even that guy who testified to our Congress, he wasn't like, yeah, I saw the aliens. He's like, I know a guy who saw the aliens. Yeah. It's like everybody's Kevin Bacon. Like how many degrees of how many Kevin Bacon's are we away from ET? We're always at least two. It's so fucking embarrassing that people think this is, this is a truth. Wait for real evidence. Like I'm, like I say, I'm all for it to be real, but I am going to fucking wait until it's like, there's an alien there and he's like, hey. And I'm like, fuck, you look like you're made out of papier-mâché, bro. Jim!

I can't believe you committed I cannot believe you committed How could you have done this? How could you have committed? I can't help you out of this one, Jim. With all we've been through, I can't pull you out of this one. This is an opinion piece from CNN, but I did want to read part of this.

New Texas law deprives families of religious liberty rights. I just thought this was an interesting framing. A new Texas law allows public schools to replace counselors with chaplains and to use funds earmarked for school safety and mental health to pay them. So we've talked about this on the show before. And I like the way that was framed that like this actually like limits religious liberty because it absolutely does limit religious liberty. Right. Because a chaplain is not a,

if you're a chaplain, you're not a simultaneously secular Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu chaplain. Like you're a, you're a Christian chaplain. That's a Christian job.

Right. Yeah. Or you can be a Muslim chaplain, but there should still be called a chaplain. So at the religious instance, I used to go to a Catholic institution. Right. And they did. It would be called a chaplain.

Oh, that's my mistake. I thought that was specifically- So Muslim chaplain. Okay. And then there was a Protestant chaplain. There was the Catholic chaplain that was there. They also had a Jewish chaplain they also had a Jewish chaplain. They had a Jewish chaplain.

Oh, okay. So I didn't realize. So they had chaplains from different religions. That's what they called them there. I have no idea what they call them anywhere else. But definitely at the place where I went to school, they had them. But you can be in something else, right? So you could be a Christian chaplain, but you could be a Protestant chaplain, right?

Right. Or a Catholic chaplain, right? Which is very different from a lot of what these people want. And that's what I think is missed by them, is that this is a single religion that you're saying can be this person in this school. Also, these people are doing work that has been carved out and should be done by experts. Yes. And they literally have no expertise. I want to read this piece from the article because it's

fucking unbelievable. Each of Texas' more than 1,000 school districts now has six months to vote on whether or not to create chaplain programs. There are no requirements to be called a chaplain outside of passing a background check. People allowed to serve as chaplains in this program are not barred from proselytizing. Hold on. Before you continue, in order to get our concealed carry, we had to pass background checks. Yes, we did. Are we chaplains? We could be Texas chaplains.

Are we chaplains? Yes. I'm a chaplain now. I'm Charlie. Oh, don't get the mustache. Real awkward now. Real awkward. Super awkward mustache. Bad. No, I'm Charlie. Oh! Don't get the mustache. Real awkward now. Real awkward. Super awkward mustache.

Bad. No, I'm not doing that one. I was thinking silent film era, guys. God damn it. People allowed to serve as chaplains in this program are not barred from proselytizing and do not have to have any chaplaincy training or expertise in working with children. Or people from different faith traditions. So here's the thing.

It's just some fucking guy. And they're doing, first of all, chaplains should not be doing work that mental health professionals should be doing. And then to make it worse, they're not even real chaplains. They're nothing. You could show up and be like, I literally don't know anything. And you're like, great, here's the mental health of my children. I would like to entrust you with it. This is what happens when we entrust education

and the future of your children to the right. This is what happens. And they have made it a point over the last several years to work their way up from the bottom. So these school boards, controlled by them.

These small government institutions all around, controlled by them. The next level up in the state government, controlled by them. And that whole, so that entire state is, I mean, I'm sure there's blue places, but it's certainly controlled

at a lot of different levels by the Republicans. And they are doing this purposefully. They want to make sure, because very much what some MAGA person wants is another MAGA person and to get them the job via nepotism, right? They want to be able to look at somebody and say, hey, I know Tony.

He can just go get a background check. Me a chaplain in this school. We don't have to have a counselor anymore. We don't have to have these people who are teaching your kids about the LGBTQ. We can have some fucking jackass yokel who lives down the road and they don't know fuck all and they'll be in the school. And this is an indoctrination attempt. Like there's a right-wing ideological indoctrination because also, and they've said as much,

the right feels like mental health care is woke. Yes. Like proper, genuine, evidence-based mental health care is woke. So this is a way for them to fulfill a requirement in a school to have mental health services and then to not fill those services because these services like it you it'd be like it's like having instead of like oh we're going to have a mechanics program uh at the so we're going to replace all the mechanics

in your town with the new mechanics program and to be a mechanic uh all you have to do is pass a background check and now you're a mechanic and you never have to have held a wrench a day in your life and the thing is like people are going to show up in need of mental health services and instead they're going to get some fucking guy and maybe best case scenario best case they'll get some good person who's nice to them and has a fucking theocracy degree yeah or a religious studies degree that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is, like you said, it's somebody's cousin's fucking uncle. Yeah. Well, and they want to punish people that are in the margins. Right. Right. So the people who need those kinds of services very often are trans people, LGBT people, people who don't fit a regular mold. People who face discrimination. Very face discrimination.

Face discrimination. All those people are going to go looking for help. And who are they going to look to? They're going to have to look to some jackass who wants to expose them, who wants to hurt them, who doesn't like them. People they don't feel safe with. They want to put those people in those places so that they

can essentially, I mean, monitor the people they don't like. Yeah, man, that's very true. There's a surveillance element to this that feels like really fucking nefarious that I hadn't thought about. Also, it just occurs to me too that like, depending on like, if you're a mental health professional, in many cases, you're bound to certain confidentiality. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. If you're fucking some schmuck playing the fucking cosplay role of chaplain instead of somebody whose license would be on the line if they divulged certain information.

You know what I mean? Like, there's real problems. There's your background check on the line. Yeah, right. Yeah, my background check. Who the fuck cares? Now I can't pretend to be chaplain as your fucking... And then to expose those people, right? Because they my background check. Who the fuck cares? Now I can't pretend to be chaplain as your fucking...

And then to expose those people, right? Because they can. Because they can. And because there's no repercussions. I mean, this is a shit. You're absolutely right. And the people who are religious should be upset because this is the way they're framing it

is to frame it as if they're saying, look, your religion isn't represented here. It's not represented here. What we need is no religion represented here. That way everyone can be equal. What you're doing is favoring one religion over another. A hundred percent. The thing is that with the right, what they have come to understand, I think, and they're not wrong, is that there is a sort of like new american brand of christianity yeah which just

they can just sort of layer it over everything and while it won't suit the baptists and it won't suit the catholics it'll suit them all well enough yeah that they'd prefer that to some degree over uh over secularism yeah and like and at the end of the day, none of them have any pretense toward giving a shit about the Jews or Muslims or Hindus or Sikh or any of the rest of them. They just hand wave all those people away.

Like, I don't know if anyone cares about them. We're not even going to pretend we do. Yeah. And if you ever leave me waiting outside again so you can talk about a goddamn fishing trip i will walk right in here and i will punch you right in the fucking teeth tyler so stories from salon uh which i don't usually grab i don't like salon very much but this from salon not a bad return on investment aoc calls out justice alito for luxury fishing trip with

gop donor all right let's play it this This is AOC in Congress. She is talking. She's questioning Kathleen Clark, a Washington University, St. Louis, in St. Louis, law professor. So, Kath, it's a law professor that

AOC is asking these questions of. So, behind her is a picture of Alito with a fish. With a fish. A pretty big fish. Pretty big fish. I got to hand it to him.

Admittedly, they had a good trip. I mean, when you're a billionaire, you can find good fish, I guess. Do you think if you're that rich, so there's a scuba diver putting it on the hook? There's just some jackass underneath. You got to pay somebody to do it. All right, so here we go.

I believe he did not. He did not recuse himself from this case. And in fact, he used his seat on the Supreme Court after all of this to rule in Singer's favor. And following the decision, Mr. Singer's hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion because of this ruling. Not a bad return on investment for a fishing trip there. Now, Professor Clark, would a federal judge in a lower court be required to recuse themselves? The generality of the time has expired.

May I answer the question, sir? I think the discretion of the chair, yes. You can answer the question. Thank you, sir. Yes, there's a federal statute. I believe it's 28 U.S.C. 455, that does require recusal by both justices and judges under certain circumstances. So that part's really important, actually, I think.

So all the other judges in lower courts, if presented with the same conflict of interest, would be required to recuse themselves. But the Supreme Court has no higher supreme. There's no like the Supremes Court. Although there should be. There should be. There should be. They just plays their music all the time.

There should just be a Supremes Court. Why isn't there that? There should, since there's no Supremorist Court. Supremorists. Double extra supreme with cheese court or whatever. Like there's no accountability.

So it's like, hey, you know, all the other lower court guys would have to's no accountability. So it's like, hey, you know, all the other lower court guys would have to recuse themselves. And it's like, yeah, but I don't have to do anything I don't want to do. And there's no one. We've basically created the court of na-na-na-na-na-na, you can't make me.

And what is so crazy is there is literally not anything anybody can do about it. There is no rules. No one has any power over them. Every opportunity that has been taken in the last 10 months to shame them about this,

they have not a bit of it, not a tiny bit of shame. And, you know, there was a time where I think that some of the things that are happening in government, if they were to happen back then, it would have been a huge fucking scandal.

Yeah. It would have been a huge fucking, huge scandal. That person would have just been thrown out. There would have been like, you know, people running around with just, they'd be clutching other people's pearls. Not only theirs. They would be freaking the fuck out. But we have gotten to the point now where I think people understand that there's no power anywhere.

There's no, there's nothing that can make these people who are in power, uh, do anything that you don't, they don't want to do. So they can just look you in the face when you'll wield the entire power of Congress or something else. And they can be like,

I mean this, go fuck yourself. And, and when they do that. And they can be like, I mean this, go fuck yourself. Yeah. Oh yeah. And, and when they do that, everybody else is just like, well, he got me boys. Yeah, I know. It's like, we were beaten by the best. Yeah.

It's, it's nuts that like, we've gotten to a point where they figured out it's, you know, there's when you're, when you've got kids, the fear as a parent is that like your kids are going to realize you can't actually make them do anything without beating them. So like, unless you're willing to like beat your kid into submission, you can't make them really do like you, you, you govern entirely through a social contract that everybody agrees to. that everybody agrees to. And our government is built on a series of social contracts that we all have sort of tended to and agreed to. And like, if you were an awful, corrupt, shitty, lying scumbag, that used to ruin your career.

Sure. And now it doesn't seem to have, now it can advance your career. It doesn't do anything. You know, like, it's like these justices are absolutely bona fide corrupt. There's no way.

You can't be, you can't do those things and not, and still have some kind of integrity. You're a shit bag. If the word corruption means anything, it has to apply

to Alito and Thomas. Yeah. It just has to. It'd be like if, it'd be like if Keith from Modest Needs was my cousin. And he's pocketing the money

or something. And you're sending him all the money and he's like, turns out I had a modest need. And he's pocketing it or something. You know, that would be the level. All the money would send to Immodest Needs. That's genuinely the level that we're at though. Where it's like, nobody cares. It doesn't matter. I mean, it's

as close to fraud as you can get without being fraud, without being prosecuted. You can't prosecute it. And it's like before, and not that long before, this would ruin careers. People's reputations would be ruined. But I think something has changed where violating the social contract has become such a new normal. Yeah. And that I think we're like living in a world where we have this constant tragedy fatigue

and we're just sort of exhausted at the idea of yet another scandal. And it's like, you can't even put them all in one place and hold them all in your mind together. And you can't maintain that level of outrage in a way that's safe for you. And so it's almost like the politicians have figured out that if one of us is corrupt, there's a problem. But if we're all corrupt- Then it doesn't matter.

Then you can suck our dick and fucking like it. Like it. And if I were to read to you, go to Donald Trump's scandals wiki page and just read them off, you would have, you would have forgotten. I guarantee you have forgotten 85% of the things that happened while he was in office that were genuinely a scandal. You forgot 85% of them. Which is insane to think about because one, I know for a dead certainty that that's true.

And two, I feel like you and I are more plugged in than the average Joe. So if I've forgotten and I make a show about this, I make content every week. I spend my time pretty diligently like being a news hound to prep for this show specifically. And because it's an interest, but like, what's the rest of the world? They're 10 times more tuned out of that shit. Yeah. You know, 20 times more tuned out of that shit. I was born in Clifton, New Jersey,

which was not at that time a federal offense. So this story comes from The Guardian. Anti-choice states aren't satisfied. Now they want to punish traveling for abortions. We knew that was going to happen. We absolutely knew. We knew, 100% knew it was going to happen before it even started. Yep. You knew that the States that were gonna, uh, outlaw abortions when we're then going to,

cause we saw it before it actually, uh, before the Supreme court even ruled on it in Texas. Yep. We saw it in Texas because they had very, very strict rules there already. We saw it in Texas because they had very, very strict rules there already. And if you left the state, they weaponized their populace to sue people. And so we saw it beforehand and we knew it was going to happen, but now it's starting to happen in all these different places. Yeah. And like the state that they're talking about in this article specifically is Alabama, right? the state that they're talking about in this article specifically is Alabama. Right. And so it's especially distressing because it, it,

it purports an instance where somebody is lucky enough to leave Alabama. They have the good fucking fortune to get the fuck out of Alabama, which like they should be celebrated for. I would think everybody in Alabama would like appreciate the necessity of wanting to leave Alabama. Right. Right. Like, but they would leave Alabama. And appreciate the necessity of wanting to leave Alabama. Right, right, right. Like, but they would leave Alabama and then the, you know, the attorney general or whatever down there is like, look, you know, you can't just, you can't just like form a conspiracy

to break an Alabama law and then leave Alabama and then do the thing that's illegal and not be prosecuted. And it's sort of, when you hear it said in those terms, there is a sort of sense to that in the sense that like the very Georgia Rico case does say, look, it didn't have to happen in Georgia in order for it to be a crime

that relates back to a Georgia crime. But they're committing a crime in Georgia with those things. That's the point I wanted to make. But they're missing the most important key element of stringing that together. And I was trying to think of another analogy

and I was thinking like, all right, here in Illinois, fireworks are illegal. I was going to do weed, but... Oh, there you go. Yeah. Weed's a better example. Because it's legal...

We can smoke weed in Illinois. ...in different states all over. Like, it's not legal in Indiana. So if somebody came to my house from Indiana and smoked some pot and went home and they found out because they did a drug test or something should they be able to be prosecuted

because they committed a crime in Indiana right to take it the form of conspiracy step further if you were to say hey man come to my house this weekend let's hang out and smoke weed and then somebody

was like, cool, I'm going to drive you to Cecil's house so you can hang out and smoke weed. That's essentially the same thing as the abortion. Pretty much the same thing. We don't do that. We don't do that. We allow states to have what exactly the fucking Supreme Court was jerking off, states' rights. The whole reason that the rationale the Supreme Court used to throw this back, to get rid of Roe versus Wade, was to say, look, let's give this back to the states. And then some states said yes, and some states said no. But what you can't do is create a system where one state says no, and it creates a de facto no by proxy to the other states. To everybody else at that point.

That's an atrocity. Yeah. Either the states have some amount of self-governance or they don't. And the problem is, is that they're going to be now prosecuting or going after these people. And then the worst part is, is that this is a corner, this is all sewn up for them in the Supreme Court. So if somebody does try to sue them and say,

hey, you can't do that, I guarantee the Supreme Court's gonna- I think the Supreme Court rule on favor of Alabama. They're gonna be like, no, we wanted to basically have abortions across the board. And they can basically say that any Alabaman is not allowed to have an abortion, period. Like, it just seems like the whole thing is so wrong. It's so deeply fucking wrong. Deeply wrong. There's some major

problems with states as it is, right? States in general in our country, there's some major problems with it, but this highlights the real problem with states' rights. Yeah. And this is always what the right wanted, right? The right never wanted to respect the will of the local people. No, no, no, no. Because in every state, and then, like, in every state where abortion is on the ballot,

abortion wins. Yeah. Abortion rights win. Every time. So we are joined by Dan and Dan from the Data Over Dogma podcast, or Data. Is it Data or Data? That was my hard-hitting question,

you motherfucker! Goddamn, I literally wrote it down! That's the one thing! Son of a bitch! That was my hard-hitting question, you motherfucker. God damn it, I literally wrote it down. That's the one thing. Son of a bitch. That was my only question. That's my whole prep work for this fucking episode. Son of a bitch.

All right, I'm out of here. You know what? Fuck it, I'm out of here. We're doing it live. Blew the load kind of quick there. Yeah. All right. It's over now now what are you my wife well when you get the now it's that sort of that's that slide down into nothingness every time

give me a sandwich in 20 minutes i'll disappoint you again welcome to the show thanks for joining us tonight thank you thanks thank you for the invitation we appreciate it so uh so your new podcast uh i'm to say data because that's what I say. Data over dogma. Well, then I'm going to say data. Okay. So your new podcast, can you explain what the premise is to us? Yeah.

Dan, why don't you take that? You're the one who says it at the top of every show. But you're both Dan. That's got to be very confusing handoff, actually. Well, yeah. Every time we are prepping a guest for a show, they're like, what do I call you? We keep each other pretty straight. It's pretty easy for us. If I say Dan, I'm pretty sure Dan knows which one I'm talking to. We've only screwed it up a handful of times and we just get

rid of it in post. So nobody knows. So what I say at the beginning of every show is that we are seeking to increase the public's access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and also combat the spread of misinformation about the same. ago on social media, on TikTok, addressing misinformation that's being spread by conspiracy theorists, by apologists, by all different kinds of folks, combating that misinformation and then sharing more info so that people have more up-to-date access to what's actually going on with the scholarly study of the Bible. Can you just give me an example of what some of that misinformation might be? Oh, yeah. These days, the most popular type of misinformation has to do with the end times, Book of Revelation stuff. Last year, we had a lot of concern about lowering water levels at the Euphrates River. And so a bunch of nonsense starts getting spread on social media about how,

oh, the Book of Revelation says there are these angels that are bound under the Euphrates. And once it dries up, they're going to be released and then they're going to kill a third. Are you fucking serious? Hold on a minute. I'm sorry. This is the least crazy stuff that is coming out of Revelation. You guys, that's gentle. That is baby talk right there.

There are angels in their minds that are now in the muck under the river. They're like those salamanders that come up every 15 years when the rains come in on the plains or whatever.

And it's like, man, if these supernatural beings of celestial origin ever dry out. Yeah. Woo! We're in trouble now,

motherfuckers! I'm trapped under the water. I don't have supernatural power. I just, I'm all wet. I can't, I just,

I'm not, is it time to end the world? Nah, my pants are wet. I'm not in any shit. with a guy who had long hair and then he got his hair cut short and then he lost all his power you're not wrong yeah so fucking yeah okay the premise is pretty thin you can't really take too hard about it or it just falls apart but there was

even there was even audio that was um kind of put together with a video uh that where you hear like clanging and chains amazing and stuff underwater chains Well, it was showing like an excavated area. And so they're like, this is the dried up riverbed. But with 90 seconds of Googling, you can find out that this video was first published like seven years ago. And then it was supposed to be the grave of this Pakistani cleric.

And so this was supposed to be in Pakistan and it was supposed to be him groaning and rattling his chains in a very Marley-esque way. I was going to ask if this was Christmas past or future. I didn't know which. It's the Muppet version, really. Oh, and you guys are the two old men grousing at the thing. I get it. I get the shtick. I get it. Yeah. old man grousing at the thing i get it i get the strip i get it yeah i just like that that dan just said look if if all that we did was actually just google the things that everyone should just be fact checking by googling we would have a show like i don't know why we bothered to get dan who

has a like master's degree from oxford and a and aeter University. Like, why do we need all this? All we need, as you like to say, Dan, is like a little bit of competent Googling. Yeah. I said something in a video once. I said, we need more people who can think critically and Google competently. And immediately everybody's like, that needs to be a shirt. You know, I have like, I have some merch. And so I went in and I tried to make a shirt. I have some merch. And so I went in

and I tried to make a shirt out of it. And then they were like, you can't use Google. That's trademarked. You immediately get a knock on your door. Like, no, no, no. You're not allowed to do that. Weirdly though,

you can say Bing competently. Nobody cares. Yeah, nobody cares. Also, no one would understand what you're saying. That's true. It doesn't work. They might pay you

to do it web crawler competently just ask geez my um my academic friends and i like we kind of laugh about this because like i'm not a specialist in all things i have i have a my area of specialization and i'm trying to kind of become a generalist, but really all you need to do is know how to Google. Like if you can recognize good sources and not good sources, and you know, kind of have a sense for what scholars are, you know, know what they're talking about and what scholars don't. I mean, you can navigate your way through this and figure out what's good info and what's not. So that's, that's the biggest secret is just, I'm really good at Googling stuff. Is it your hope? TM.

Is it your hope you think to, you're saying trying to combat this sort of misinformation. A lot of people that are, you know, that believe the Bible or that follow the Bible, the dogma is too powerful, right? The dogma is the thing that they believe, and really, genuinely, no matter what the data says, it's not really going to convince them. Are you thinking that when you make a show, the audience for you is going to be those people,

or is it going to be the people who have the conversations with them? It's going to be the people who have the conversations with them, the people who are suffering and struggling because either they're wrestling with these things right now, where they've, you know, the critical thinking, they have a little bit of cognitive dissonance and they're trying to figure out how to move forward, how to better understand this. I get a lot of messages from folks who say that they were raised with this. They're not there anymore, but this is therapeutic. It is healing for them to learn that the things that happened to me when I was young, when I was growing up,

are based on these dogmas and not necessarily on the data. So I think there's research out there that suggests that the two things that have the most, the highest chance of success in getting people to think critically about these dogmas are close personal relationships and personal experiences. And so I can't offer that in my videos, but the more we can spread the message and the more people are educated on, on these kinds of approaches and understand a lot of these frameworks and methodologies, the more opportunities there will be for people out there to have personal relationships with people who can help them begin to think critically and they can have personal relations or personal experiences to help them break down those defenses and begin to think critically. So it's, it's, you know,

to help them break down those defenses and begin to think critically. So it's never going to be totally successful. We can't win this battle, but I think we can move the needle. I see signs that it's already happening to some degree right now. And so I'm hopeful for the future. I love the fact, one of the things that I love about our show is that it's split pretty evenly among atheists like me and believers like Dan. So the atheists come because obviously a lot of us have wanted a place to learn about the Bible that isn't devotional, that isn't going to try and convince you of its truth or its worth, but also isn't going to try and tell you that it's like, ha ha, this is bullshit.

Like there's plenty of places to go to find like, oh, look at how stupid all this is. And that's fine. It has its place. But also when I read the Bible, I didn't understand an excessive amount of it. I didn't feel like I had enough background to understand it. And I didn't feel like I understood the era and the culture that it was coming from. And I didn't feel like there was anything I could do to gain that. So having someone who actually understands that who's willing to do a show that is not devotional where it's, you know,

this isn't, uh, it's, it's not about faith promotion and half the time, you's, you know, this isn't, uh, it's, it's not about faith promotion and half the time, you know, we have plenty of people who hate, uh, what we do because it, because it, you know, we're telling truths that they're not ready for that. They're not, or, or that they're unwilling to look at, but all we're doing is really examining what's in the Bible, what it is, why it exists, what it actually says, what it doesn't say. And, you know, we recently did an episode about abortion in the Bible.

And there is no abortion. Abortion isn't in the Bible. The Bible doesn't actually take a stand on abortion. But we went through arguments on both sides and really explored what that is and what the data show about it. So, Dan, this question is for you, but Dan, if you want to step in, that's fine too.

I was just thinking about this a second ago, but like, you know, you have this intense scholarship in biblical and religious literacy, like up to the point of a PhD in it. Bible require a level of context and linguistics and historicity in order to really understand it properly? And if it does, does that negate its value as a book for the people to understand themselves and their religious beliefs? I think that has to do with what someone is hoping to get out of it, because people read the Bible for a lot of different reasons. There's some folks who just want to commune with deity, their concept of deity. And so reading the Bible helps them feel whatever it is that they think reading the Bible brings. And so I don't think they need to scratch too far into the surface for it to achieve the function for which they've come to the Bible. There are a lot of folks who want to deploy the Bible

to structure power. They want to understand better the history and what's going on here. And for a lot of that, I think somewhere along the line, someone has to have that kind of education, that kind of access to those data in order to report back to them. If one is just reading it on their own in isolation from the research and the contextualization and the history and everything, they're primarily going to be, I use the metaphor of it's like a bucket of Legos. Some people say it's like a jigsaw puzzle. Oh, you got to look at the picture on the box. There's no box. There's no picture. If to the degree somebody thinks there's a picture, that's just their tradition that is providing them an authoritative understanding of what

they should be arriving at. I think a bucket of Legos is more apt because we don't have the instructions, we don't have a box, we don't have a picture, and Legos have a lot more flexibility with what you're making with them. And so somebody who's approaching the Bible independent of the scholarship and the research and everything is going to make whatever they want to make with it. Sometimes that's harmful. Sometimes it with it. Sometimes that's harmful. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's therapeutic. Sometimes it's helping them with relationships with their family or with others. So somewhere along the line, you're trusting somebody else's scholarship. If you're reading the Bible in English, you are relying on someone who has a PhD.

If you want to try to drill down and say, well, in this context, this kind of terminology is used to achieve these kinds of things. So this author who's writing to this audience for this reason is, if you want to be able to understand it at that level, you have to either get that education yourself, or you have to trust the words of someone else who has that level of education. So it's got to be in there somewhere for, I think, most reasons that people read the Bible. But at the same time, there are some folks who approach the Bible for other reasons that I don't think need all of that data research. They still usually need a translation though. Do you think that learning deeply about the Bible strips the veneer of mysticism away from it? I think it's more common that the veneer of mysticism is gone,

but there are also folks who are very well-educated on it who find more significance. I don't know about mysticism, but at least they find more meaning and more utility on a spiritual level for the Bible because it does, it can become even more flexible, a tool for engaging spirituality. And so I think the level of spirituality lessens, but for the folks who are still there, who are still plugged into the spirituality end of things, I think it can be more dynamic for them. Uh, but yeah, for, for more people, it's, uh, it does kind of, uh, rob that mystique. Yeah. When I was writing my dissertation, my supervisor, uh, would say it's a strip show. You don't want to, um, you

know, show everything at first. You're kind of going piece by piece, but once everything's gone, you're kind of like, and so that's what the Bible is for a lot of folks. But yeah, I still think there are, there's so much mystery left in it. How people using it what uh what authors were writing certain things to mean how poetry was used all that kind of stuff i think is those are questions that we're going to be spending centuries trying to answer and so i i still think there's a lot that's fascinating about it uh with with all you guys have had 2 000 years you're still not almost 3 000 years for some of this stuff. But, you know, we discover new stuff all the time.

Like the Ugaritic texts in 1920. Which I also know what those are. I was hoping you'd bring them up. I'm about to say. So there was a farmer in Syria in 1929, hit a big rock with a plow. An angel flew right out. It was crazy.

But go on, say it. I'm glad I'm not underwater. I'd be trapped. It wasn't by the coast. But dug this thing out and was like, whoa, this is something man-made. And it turned out to be a large sarcophagus. A bunch of archaeologists descend on this area. They uncover an entire city called Ugarit with about a thousand texts written in a cuneiform script that no one

had ever seen before. Turns out it is an alphabetic cuneiform script closely related to Hebrew. They are able to decipher it. And now we have the Ugaritic texts, which have ritual texts, there's letters, there's receipts, there's mythology. And we started seeing stuff that's mentioning, like there's stuff that is quoted in the Bible, in the Ugaritic literature. And so like this totally revolutionized our study of the Hebrew Bible because it gave us another set of texts that were doing a lot of the same things that the Hebrew Bible was doing, but in a very closely related language. And it was other deities that were involved. And so there are always new things being discovered that help us put new,

shine new light on what's going on here and understand things in different ways. So I think it's a very exciting field. Most of the folks I talk to, it bores them to tears. So I think there's an interesting, I know I touched on it in my last question, but it just keeps occurring to me differently. But I do think there's an interesting point of tension between what you're describing, which is this really intensely intellectual examination that's based on history and language, etc. that's based on history and language, et cetera. And then like the practical day-to-day actual use by lay people of the Bible. It's like, there's the you guys

and you guys are this like sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the people that are looking at the Bible and using the Bible as a tool, as a tool to either engage themselves intellectually, philosophically, spiritually, politically. It's almost all not what you're doing. Like what you're doing is like, is this like super niche kind of like use of this tool. And everybody else, all the lay people have this same tool, right?

Or at least they think they do. I understand that they don't, they fundamentally don't have the same tool, but like, it just seems like such a bad tool if this came from God, right? If this came from God in any way, in any divinely inspired way, even a littlest bit, it seems like the worst possible tool because like almost nobody is you. It'd be like, if God came down and was like, I strongly suggest a hammer and like a tiny fraction of people can barely see out of the corner of their eye, the shape of a hammer and everybody else is like flipping burgers with it. It seems that far apart to me. So I just, I'm curious, like as a scholar of this, how you think of, or whether you reject that tension or, you know, where you're at with

that. No, I think there's definitely tension. And in fact, this was a discussion that some of my friends I was in graduate school with many years ago, we had frequently over lunch and outside the classroom that what we're learning, what we're studying is not something like, how can we communicate about this stuff to folks in the pews in a way that will help them operationalize this knowledge and do something useful with it? And whether that is to correct things that they've done wrong with the text, whether that is to deepen their understanding, how can we communicate this downstream? Because there is so much, there's not just a disconnect, but there's a lot of active pushing us away on that side of things as well. And so it is a problem. It is an issue

that we're trying to address. And this is one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing, because I want people to be able to at least have access to the data, whatever they want to do with it. I want them to have access to the data. And I have other colleagues, friends that are hoping to get started in similar social media projects. But yeah, it does not seem like the most efficient and effective tool. It causes far more problems than it seems to solve, which seems counterintuitive if this is something that's supposed to be a solution to all of the problems, it is a liability. I would suggest most of the time it is being deployed. It does seem weird that the divinely inspired communicative tool doesn't have any self-correcting properties to it at all.

What are you talking about? The thing corrects itself constantly. All through it. at all that like what are you talking about the thing corrects itself constantly his verse is completely rejecting the last verse it happens all the time the first two books of the bible are literally contradictions of each other or a correction of each other like if you yeah i think that's pretty i just i think that i think the the the academic study of it is genuinely like it is fascinating and i think it's important right because like massive amounts of of our culture have been shaped by it so i'm not throwing the baby out with the bath water like i think that this is important necessary historical work that has significance on how like our government fucking operates like i absolutely do oh gosh and

i'm but at the same time i'm like struck that like this is just the worst tool like it just is i can't kind of get because like if in order for me to respect the education that you have and the time and effort and energy that went into getting that i have to also recognize that none of that should be necessary for a divinely inspired book intended for people at the mass lay people level to read, to commune with God. Do you know what I mean? You'd be surprised. One of the things that I think is amazing. I feel like too dumb to understand this.

this. One of the things that I have found amazing about the feedback that we've gotten is that so many of the people that so many people have written into us or comment on Dan's TikToks or whatever, who say, I went to Bible school. I went to four years of Bible school and I didn't learn any of this stuff. Because there's a difference between Liberty University and what they teach to pastors. Right. Which isn't this and what the academic, the actual real academic world is looking at. Like it's, it's worlds apart. And it's, that's, I find that to be really fascinating. It also occurs to me too, you know, Tom mentioned Christian nation.

I find that to be really fascinating. It also occurs to me too, you know, Tom mentioned Christian nation. I mean, we have many, many politicians who talk about the Bible all the time and talk about what it says. Do you find that they are just wrong about the things that they're saying? Do you find that they're misquoting something

or they're saying something that really isn't there? Overwhelmingly. Okay. I didn't expect that answer, but okay, all right. So I'm in Utah and Mitt Romney just announced that he's not gonna run for reelection, which means we're gonna get some stooge who's gonna be our other Senator who is going to be,

and some people think it's this Tim Ballard guy who- Oh God. used to run Operation Underground Railroad and write awful pseudo scholarship about history. And I'm just, I'm not ready for that. But yeah, I actually- We may have to move. Do you guys have a guest room? Come on out. Come on out. We'll put you up. Chicago's a welcoming city. So I ran for the state legislature here in Utah twice in 2018 and 2020 in a deep red district. Like I didn't really have a chance of winning, but I moved the needle quite a bit. And so I have a lot of friends who are in politics and I have, to the degree I can speak about having an enemy, and I have a,

to the degree I can speak about having an enemy, they're all in politics and they're mostly on Twitter. And I get people from the Democratic Party and even, I forget exactly what, she's a campaign manager for a Republican Utah politician who's a friend of mine. But they will send me clips all the time

and say, so-and-so just quoted this, or so-and-so said this about the Book of Mormon, or so-and-so did this, is that right? And overwhelmingly, I have to say that has absolutely no relationship with the truth at all. Because if anybody is going to misuse the text in the service of their own structuring of power and values, it's going to be a politician. Sure.

That's VMO. And so it's inevitable. And so there are some folks I think use it more responsibly than others. And they tend to be the folks who are advocating for the minoritized or the oppressed or the marginalized groups. That tends to be a more responsible deployment of the Bible, but that is not the majority of the political deployments that we see in the public discourse today. I'm curious if through this show, people that respond to you and interact with you, that have spent their lives engaged in some kind of, whether it's liberty to you or whether it's

having gone to Sunday school their whole lives, something that approaches study of the Bible. They've gone to Bible study at their friend's house, their pastor's. they've got to feel like tricked, right? Like they've got to feel like hoodwinked when they listen to the show and they come to realize like, what? Like I spent like years of my life reading these passages and being told they meant this and referencing back to the other thing and scooting around and bopping or booping. And like, I thought I had a real grasp on it. And I gave it a real effort.

And I put the real work into trying. And I read these things and I prayed over it. And I read my kids the fucking golden book of Noah or whatever fucking things that I read when I was a kid. You know what I mean? And then they find out, they come to your show and it's like, well, this show is actually called, well, actually, the Bible edition.

And like, you know, your whole life is based on a series of mistranslations and lies, you know, like that's got to feel very destabilizing. Do you encounter that with your conversations with listeners? folks for whom it would be the most destabilizing are the folks who have the most, uh, kind of defenses up and our show is, is not going to just drop them immediately. Uh, and the folks who are willing to think critically, I think they, uh, from what I have seen their engagement with these data, they, uh, think about it in terms of their own experience. Uh, cause most of the folks who've gone to Bible college and stuff like that, they've had opportunities to share that information as well.

They've shared it on, they've paid it forward. And they think, well, I was doing it based on what I thought was the best information available. And so they don't feel like they're lying to anyone, they're intentionally misleading. And the folks that I've had that deep of a conversation about this stuff with generally, I think, can extend that charity to the folks who passed it on to them and think, I was misled. I was not fully informed. I think the same is probably true with the people who, uh,

who were teaching it to be now the prosperity gospel preachers and the mega church folks, they're the ones that are like, they're straight up lying. So, um, I don't think there is upset with their professors and Bible colleges and things like that. Um, but, uh, But yeah, I think the folks who probably were directly lied to, I don't think they have, I think their defenses are probably too strong right now to take it too seriously. Although I do think that one of my goals with this show is to get a needle in to those people, the people who have their defenses up. I, you know, I've had atheists friends ask me if my goal with this show was to create more atheists, which I would have no problem with it doing. I would be very happy with that outcome, but far more important to me

is I want our show to be anti, to, to be the, the thing that takes down people's fundamentalism, people's Bible literalism, all of this stuff that is, you know, that is used in ways, deployed, as Dan says, in ways to hurt marginalized communities, to, you know, to structure power. you know, to structure power, people who think that their way, that there's only one narrow way to interpret the Bible and it has to be our way and blah, blah, blah. That's where it gets really dangerous when it becomes that narrow, ugly, rule-based, dogmatic nonsense. ugly, rule-based, dogmatic nonsense. And hopefully, my hope is that our show is able to dismantle fundamentalism. Even if people remain believers, I'm fine with that. As long as they have a more realistic view of what this thing is. Yeah, I get, I get, uh, people give me a hard time a lot. Uh, the came up with this motto data over dogma and it's aspirational. Nobody's perfect. Nobody had, you know, there's no such thing as true objectivity, but people are always like, you should call it data plus

dogma over dogma. Like, uh, because you're not, you're not free from any of this. I'm like, I never claimed to be free from any of it. And from the very beginning, I've always said, the one dogma that I will own every single time is that all other things being equal, and that's an important caveat that a lot of people overlook when I say this, all other things being equal, I will always give the benefit of the work that we do, where a lot of times we are advocating for the rights and the experiences of minoritized, marginalized, you're being dogmatic too, I guarantee there's a MAGA hat somewhere on their social media account because it always gets reduced to that. Somebody's upset with me because they're a right-wing authoritarian and they're mired in social dominance orientation. And I piss them off because I am saying that their worldview is a knuckle-dragging worldview. So, I'm happy to do that. Obviously, in that marginalized group, you heavily include straight white men, right?

Because that's... That's the main one. The most hated group, by the way. I could shorthand that to say podcasters. I could shorthand that to say podcasters. I was going to say straight, white, bearded man. There we go. There we go.

You know, because I'm really feeling the pressure lately. Guys, guys, if people were going to find your show, where would they look? I mean, everywhere that you find podcasts. We are on YouTube as well. So we've got that. You should definitely follow Dan's TikTok account if you want to, or Dan on any of the other places. It's McClellan, but you're going to have to figure it. Tell them how to follow you.

So my username is rather unique. It's a phonetic spelling of my last name that I used when I was living in South America because they don't like names that start with four consonants in a row down there. So it's M-A-K-L-E-L-A-N. So that's my handle on TikTok, on Twitter, on Instagram, on YouTube. So all over the place. But yeah, Data Over Dogma on any on any of those, uh, you know, the pod blasters of your choice, uh, we should, we should be there. We'll make sure wherever there is injustice, we'll make sure to link it in this week's show notes, guys.

Thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate it and we look forward to, uh, to talking to you guys again. It'd be great. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having us. Thanks so much, guys. So we want to thank Dan and Dan from the Data Over Dogma podcast. You can check it out. We're going to have all the links in the show notes. Just search Data Over Dogma and the podcast comes up right away. Also, their YouTube page comes up. And be sure to follow Dan on all the social medias, the TikToks and all that stuff. So this upcoming Thursday is our live stream.

So be sure to be there. It's going to be on the 21st at 9 p.m. Central. So check us out on YouTube and Twitch. We had a great time last time. These monthly live streams seem to be a hoot. So come on by and hang out with us we also want to thank all our patrons and at the end of the month so on the 28th we'll be releasing

a patron only show specifically for them so if you want to get in on that you can go become a patron of the show at a per episode basis at dissonancepod.com or at patreon.com slash dissonancepod we love all our patrons of course,

and the patrons actually pay my salary. So please, if you are on the fence, you can help pay my salary if you enjoy this show. You can go become a patron and that's where that money goes, along with two other salaries and a lot of expenses that go into the show. And we would, of course, if you enjoy the show, we would appreciate it if you became a patron. All right, that's going to wrap it up for this week. We're going to leave you like we always do with the Skeptic's Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quasi-alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, oil and trouble, pseudo, quasi, alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water, downward spiral,

brain dead, pan, sales pitch, late night info docutainment. Leo, Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death in towers, tarot cards, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues. Temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts. Shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, doublespeak, stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands.

Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands. Bloody. Evidential. Conclusive. Doubt even this. The opinions and information provided on this podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. All opinions are solely that of Glory Hole Studios, LLC. Cognitive dissonance makes no representations as to accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information and will not be liable for any errors, damages, or butthurt arising from consumption. All information is provided on an as-is basis. No refunds.

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