Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Massimo Baluchi, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Well, Masimo, a number of recent conversations we've been having on our blog, rationally speaking, have started coming back to the question of when is it appropriate for nonexperts to defer to the opinion of experts?

So that's the question we're going to ask today.

And in doing so, we're also going to look at a few case studies of fields and sciences, social sciences, maybe even philosophy, and ask, are there some fields that don't actually have expertise or are there fields that have pretend?

Experts think that they're experts, but they're not.

Right. So, for instance, let me give you a quote from an expert in the field, George Carlin, who once said, I have as much authority as the pope. I just don't have as many people who believe it.

Right. So this would be a good example of a case in which a consensus in a field is not enough to make it appropriate for us to conclude that they're correct.

So this is something that I want to talk about. And you raise the issue of expert consensus in talk that you gave at the amazing meeting last month in which.

Well, would you like to sort of summarize your argument?

Sure. The idea was that.

I noticed that sometimes I don't want to I was about to say often, but in fact, sometimes I don't actually have statistics. But sometimes it seems that the skeptic community or some members of the skeptic community fall into this problem where they pronounce and make pronouncements, usually along the lines of skepticism, as I don't believe it or I doubt it about topics or issues for which they don't actually have expertise.

I happen to think that the skeptic community does have expertise in a particular area of inquiry, and that's the area of classic pseudoscience. What skeptics are good and, you know, like people like Judge Rendi or, you know, any pretty much anybody who writes for Skeptical Inquirer or Skeptic magazine in their area of expertise is in fact the classic pseudoscience. So things like parapsychology, astrology, UFO, UFO and things like that, um, in fact, I claimed that there really is no expertise outside the skeptic community in those areas because there is no scientific study of parapsychology.

There's no scientific study of UFOs and so on. And so what we've a couple of minor exceptions.

So there is where skeptics really do have expertise. And when they curved out, what I think actually is an important area to talk about. On the other hand, one cannot be a skeptic as a member, as a member of the skeptic community and also make pronouncements about things such as, oh, I don't know, let's pick a random topic, global warming, as some skeptics have, in fact, known to do. Now, why do I say that?

Because global warming, warming or climate change is an area of technical scientific expertise where there is an established, recognized community of scientists that work on it. And therefore, in my opinion, unless you actually either are working climate scientist or have done enough work to warrant the same level or a comparable level of expertise, as a climate scientist, you should simply not pronounced yourself on climate warming, climate change, or you should simply provisionally go with whatever the consensus within the scientific, relevant scientific community is.

Right. So I thought this was an interesting case study because it raises the question of when do we accept the consensus in a field in which in which things are so technical that we just don't have any hope of actually understanding how the experts got to their conclusions. And the reason that I wrote the blog post that I did, I actually think you and I probably didn't disagree that much in the end. But I just wanted to sort of tease out one of the nuances that you didn't get to touch on very much in your talk, which is how do we decide whether to accept the scientific consensus?

And this is separate from the issue of whether we are skeptics should publicly comment on it. But just as an individual wanting to evaluate this consensus, how do we do that if we're if we don't have the expertise?

And so what I was saying is that I think we need these external criteria to judge the field and the fact that the experts in the field accept the premises that lead to their conclusions, such as in climate science, the idea that their models can use past data to predict the future behavior of incredibly complex systems. That's a sort of a starting premise of climate science.

And given that we don't have the expertise in that, how do we decide whether that premise is valid? And the fact that the experts in the field think it's valid is not in itself evidence that it's valid. And I actually think it is valid. But the reason I think that is not that the climate scientists say so. And I could point to other fields in which, for example, macroeconomics, they have complex models which try to predict the future behavior of complex systems using past data.

And and that seems much less valid. In that case. We can actually sort of confirm there or not confirm their predictions as the case may be. But imagine that we couldn't do that, such as, you know, in climate science, it's much harder to test their predictions, how they judge.

But let's take the case of of economics, for instance. So I think that the best criticism of economic upstander, macroeconomic theory comes from two areas and they're both areas of expertise except that. So it's not like, you know, an average person goes around and say, well, you know, I think these economies really are wrong. And so you can have that opinion. But it's not an informed opinion. It's just an opinion. The best criticism of standard macroeconomic theory.

And I'm referring to the theory that assumes rational agents with optimal amount of information to make decisions about the about to make economic decisions. There are two kinds of criticisms. One is internal to economics, there is, in fact a separate branch or a separate school of economic thought that often is referred to as behavioral economics, where that assumption is questioned or in fact is abandoned, the assumption of rational agents with optimal amount of information, access to information, and instead what those economists are doing.

There are there are minority at this point in the field. That's my understanding. But it is an increasingly vocal minority and particularly relevant minority. What behavioral economists do is they actually import information from the social sciences. And the cognitive science is about the way in which human beings actually do think and behave more or less rational and so on and so forth. And they incorporate that into their modelling of economic economic parameters. That's one type of criticism. The second type of criticism comes from philosophers of economics.

There is an entire discipline within philosophy similar to philosophy of science, where philosophers have training in economics. Do that kind of meta analysis that philosophers typically do.

There is they they start by questioning the assumptions underlying a particular field or try to figure out how those assumptions are justified and to what extent they work and so on and so forth.

So it seems to me that that's a very good case where, yes, there is good reason to question some of the experts judgment. But the most convincing questioning is, in fact done by other experts, except, you know, the experts in either very closely related fields or in fact, even internal to the field itself.

Right. So that's very similar to the conclusion that I the sort of provisional conclusion I came to after thinking about this, that, well, one of our commenters on the blog pointed out that fields aren't all separate from each other and there are these overlaps and chains of related fields. And so you can actually check the validity of the starting assumptions of a field based on the opinions of people in related fields who don't necessarily have the same stake in the field that the experts in that field do.

But it's not a perfect criterion.

So, for example, I think string theory would be a good case study to look at here, because you have physicists who are not string theorists who are clearly in a very related field.

And you still have disagreement between the physicists and the string theorists on whether string theory is even a valid field.

So, I mean, we had Peter White on as a guest in one of our earlier episodes arguing that string theory has so many free parameters that it's literally unfalsifiable and therefore not even wrong.

And I've talked to string theorists about that accusation and they argue that he's missing, that he and people who make similar accusations are missing some of the finer points of how string theory actually works and that there are things that would, if not confirm or falsify, at least point in the direction of string theory being true or false. And it's just I sort of throw up my hands after a lot of this back and forth because I wasn't sure who to believe.

I think that throwing up one's ends in that case is perfectly reasonable, because what you have there is a situation where there is obviously disagreement within the field of experts. That disagreement, by the way, is to be expected in science. I mean, that's the way science works, right? I mean, string theory we're talking about we're not talking about an elementary component of physics. You know, there's no disagreement on the status of, say, Newtonian mechanics among physicists.

We're talking about cutting edge fundamental physics. So I would expect there to be disagreement and I would expect experts to battle it out for a certain number of years, possibly a certain number of decades until they figure it out.

So what is the rational thing to do for somebody who doesn't understand string theory, quantum mechanics and so on and so forth is simply to be agnostic and say, hey, there's a discussion going on there, let him talk about it and then we'll figure out when and if expert consensus is achieved. I want to point out one thing. There is actually scientific research on expertise, which is very interesting. Yes. Yes.

And so in you know, the topic for this discussion came out because when we did an episode a few a few episodes ago on my book, A Nonsense on Stilts, as you know, there is an entire chapter devoted to expertise because in fact, it is an important issue if we're talking about the general public trying to make sense of different experts, telling them different things about climate change or about evolution or about vaccines and autism or anything that you can think of, then the question is, well, how do we know?

What do we know about expertise itself? And there is some research and some of it is detailed in the book. But there's one interesting piece of research that I wanted to bring up bring about, because it's it gives us a clue about how to go about these things, and that is research into chess, the game.

So it turns out that chess is easy to start, easier to study than other kinds of expertise because it's pretty clear who is good and who is not good at it. You can measure it, obviously, by the number of times. Wins games and how quickly wins games and so on, and so there's research by two social scientist, Erickson and Smith, who published this study that shows that, you know, broadly speaking, you can think of people who play chess and divide them into three general categories.

Now, this is, you know, people that are beginning or they do that. They play chess sort of occasionally. Then you can you can talk about experts in some level and then you can talk about masters. So really, really high level experts.

It turns out that Erickson and Smith found that it takes about 3000 hours of playing experience to become an expert and it takes about 30000 hours of playing experience to become a master. Now, time is not the only component. Obviously, you can if you don't have aptitude for four chess, you can play as many thousand hours as you like and you're going to stay stuck in the same place. But the idea is that you don't get to the next level of expertise unless you get you put at least three thousand hours of effort and you don't get to the highest levels until you get thirty thousand.

Why are these numbers interesting? They seem to be valued, roughly speaking, as a sort of order of magnitude across fields.

But how are they judging expertise in fields where you don't have the nice, clean case like chess, where you can actually confirm there?

The other studies that are typical about about expertise are things that also you can measure fairly, fairly easily, such as, for instance, nurse practitioners. I see.

And, you know, there's another study that I looked at about teaching mathematics. And so there are parameters you can use. They're not quite as clear cut as chess. That's why chess is the best example.

But the interesting thing, it seems to cut across the board in terms of a number of hours. Now, the interesting thing is that thirty thousand hours is more or less the length of a Ph.D. So that worked out nicely.

So in other words, now this is not to say, of course, and some commentators have taken me to say that unless you have a Ph.D., you should shut up about certain text. That is most certainly not what I'm saying. That will be an appeal to authority.

What I'm saying is that if you want to talk about things that do require technical expertise, either you put the time to actually get a degree or official recognition, all that sort of stuff, because that guarantees you jumping through certain hoops to become an expert or you had to put the equivalent number of hours or effort to develop a similar kind of understanding and knowledge of the field.

It doesn't it's not a matter of formal degrees. It's a matter of do you really understand what's going on there or not?

Right. So this is a perfect lead-in to a question that some of our commenters raised in response to the teaser, which is whether for philosophers can be considered to have expertise in their field. Is there such a thing as expertise in philosophy?

And how do we judge whether a philosopher is an expert? And I think the problem, based on what the commenters were saying and which I can see some merit to, is that there isn't an external check of whether the conclusions philosophers come to are correct the way there are in forecasting daily weather or in making medical diagnoses about what's going to happen to someone.

And there isn't even that much of a consensus on most of the issues that philosophers work on.

I actually found a recent survey of about 30 issues that philosophers that are major in philosophy and the authors of the study polled a bunch of philosophy professors and students.

That's the Chalmers. Oh, OK. It was the David Chalmers one. And and so when it's an unfortunate example, I think.

But go ahead. Well, I went down the list of topics and there were some really fundamental issues like are there objective moral truths and will science ever be able to explain consciousness? And the highest percentage of philosophers committing to any one particular view on an issue with 70 percent? I think the men looked like it was probably around 50 to 60 percent, which is not a very strong consensus.

Actually, I would disagree. I think that that is a pretty strong consensus considering the kinds of things we're talking about. I mean, that's more than 60 percent of people in the field.

Think something. You think that's enough consensus for outsiders to say? Well, that must be the right answer.

First of all, I said that the trauma study is unfortunately, it's an unfortunate example because it's definitely not well done from the point of view of statistical sampling. I mean, this is not a random statistical sampling of the community of philosophers. It's incredibly self selected.

It does square with my anecdotal experience talking to philosophers, though, I've just haven't found consensus on, you know, anecdotal experience.

Also, statistics does doesn't do well.

But let me go back to your general question, because I think that is that's interesting question. First of all, what is the area of expertise, of philosophy and how do we tell whether there is consensus or not? Um, I would say that, first of all, yes, there is an.

Our expertise, at least in certain certain aspects of philosophy, for instance, to be a philosopher, professional philosopher, you have to be trained in formal logic, and that is something that almost nobody else does. I mean, you know, you don't take courses in formal logic if you training almost any other field except mathematics. And it is easy to verify. I mean, I think and when one of my philosophy, I took a course in advanced logic and I can tell you that the exam was very difficult and it was very easy for the professor to tell whether we understood logic or not, because those kind of problems are formally equivalent to solving mathematical problems.

I mean, you either solve it or you don't. And you either you either work your way through a table of logical possibilities or you don't.

So those are things that actually are easier to work to verify. That clearly is a type of expertise and is an expertise that in which you get trained as a philosopher more broadly.

However, what what happens is that, you know, let me let me take the second aspect of your question, which was what if what if philosophers disagree on even major issues?

Well, there are plenty of other fields where I don't think people would question the existence of expertise. And yet where experts disagree fundamentally. For instance, historians, you know, I'm sure you agree that there is such a thing as a historian, as an expert in history. But nevertheless, if you probably if you ask certain historians, this is my my time to make up statistics at this point. But if you ask them and historians what was the cause of of Napoleon's loss of Waterloo, I'm sure you get one hypothesis, which is the JOCHEM philosophy.

So you figure if you ask them philosophers a particular question, you get 11 answers, right?

I think they stole that from The Economist. So it applies to a lot of fields. So what I'm saying is, first of all, consensus within a field is not actually necessarily it's not a necessity to show that there is a field of expertise to be had. But in increase of history, for instance, shows unless you're willing to say that there is no expertise in history or there is no expertise in political science.

Well, there's clearly expertise in history about what happened. And there's not that much disagreement over facts about what happened. I'm sure there's a lot of disagreement about causal hypotheses which are, I suppose, logically impossible to actually verify, but. Right.

Bringing it back to philosophy.

Well, actually, both history and philosophy, the examples you brought up when someone makes a claim about either a historian making a causal claim or a philosopher making a claim about submission philosophy, I don't understand how you could say, well, because they're an expert, I'm going to give more weight to that claim because you can find an equal number or an almost equal number of experts in the same field making the opposite claim.

So you would, by the same logic, have to give greater weight to that claim because it's being made by experts. So how can that hold up?

Well, here's how it works. I think that that that perception is because people focus like that, like the Chalmers survey on things on which philosophers actually disagree. Now, the thing is, in any field where there is ongoing research or scholarship, you will find experts disagreeing as your example of string theory, for instance, was showing earlier on.

But there is a large number of issues and notions on which philosophers actually do agree.

You know, so so, you know, there is there is a lot of consensus about, for instance, what the structure of an argument is supposed to be. There is a lot of concern.

In fact, that's the meta consensus, universal meta issue. Well, it's not really right now.

It's about logic again. So the structure of an argument is a part of logic and there is no disagreement on what that's going to be, how that's going to work.

I don't I can come up with a counter example. Actually, I've encountered a lot of philosophers. Well, OK, at least two philosophers who argue that our intuitions are a good guide to what exists in the world.

So, for example, our moral intuitions are strong evidence that there are objective moral truths and that you can make a principle reasoning which many people, including me, think is wrong.

Right. I actually think that that may be something to it, but that's not the point, because the point is you cannot use that as an argument. You can say you can use that as part of an argument or as a premise to your argument and deduce certain conclusions. And so what's going to happen is that other ethical philosophers are going to disagree with that premise. But there isn't going to be any disagreement on how you put together the actual argument.

What you're going to be disagreeing on is what you actually derive from the argument or what the premise is, how reliable the premise of that argument are.

But the structure of inference to me that, like, if you have this intuition and that allows you to conclude the existence of such a thing, but rules of inference are one of the areas of expertise, of philosophy.

They don't agree on that. That's what they do.

I mean, there is a whole classification of logical fallacies is about rules of inference. Right. And that's and philosophers came up with that and not other people.

And they stick to it, I mean, there's there's no disagreement on one of logical fallacies are for as far as I know, so so I think that the interpretation, the sense that philosophy has is a lot has a lot more disagreement or is a lot more, I don't know, unsettled than other fields.

I think it's a false impression being seeing it from the inside. I think it's it's a it's you will get exactly the same impression and a lot of the field.

And I think actually you will get a similar impression even in many fields in science, for instance, especially the social sciences, a lot of research in psychology and research in sociology will probably give you the same impression, but that's part of the game. So but even so, whether any psychology or in social science and if any in economics, I suspect that there are a lot of things that the experts do agree on. And then we tend to focus as outsiders on the disagreements, because that's what's interesting.

That's what's going on. But a lot of the other stuff is sort of in the background.

So before we wrap up, I want to just touch on one question I asked in the podcast, Tuzer, which is if someone, an expert in a field, lays out an argument for you, that's a purely logical one. So they're saying, I believe X and I will explain to you all my reasons for believing X. So it doesn't the argument doesn't rely on factual evidence that you don't have access to because you're not an expert. And this would seem to be what philosophy does if you disagree with their reasoning, should you be less confident in the fact that you're actually right and they're wrong because they're an expert and you're not?

Well, you may have simply misunderstood or not understood the logic of the argument.

And should you be more willing to think that that may be the case if the argument is being put forth by an expert as opposed to a non expert?

Yes, because one expert is familiar with the way in which arguments are constructed in that field.

So in something like math, that seems obviously true. Exactly. And that's a great example. Right. But that's because math is much harder for non mathematicians to reason about then than philosophy. Well, it's also because the consensus in math, mathematicians all agree for the most part about what is actually the right answer.

But if there isn't consensus in the field, then why should the fact that the person making the argument is an expert?

Actually, you'd be surprised how much disagreement there is among professional mathematicians on things that are not settled. Of course, there is agreement on the Pythagorean theorem, for instance. But again, there are similar kinds of agreements in philosophy, in history, in any other field. The disagreement is always at the cutting edge. And in mathematics, there's just as much disagreement among experts on things at the cutting edge as you find in any other field.

And yes, what you need to do is to look at the structure of the argument in philosophy or the structure of the proof, for instance, in mathematics. And yes, the best people to look at that structure are philosophers or mathematicians, respectively.

Now, I don't want, however, all of these to be taken as an argument that, well, only experts are right and in fact, they are consistently right. Of course not.

Do these large a long history of blunders by experts. Interestingly, in science in particular, I mean, the science, the state of science is full of people changing their mind, making blunders right and left. The question is not that science or philosophy or mathematics is always right. The question is, if you do not have the expertise to engage in a given discussion at that level, you're most rational bet is to go with the expert consensus.

If there is one and if there isn't one, then your best bet is to say, I don't know.

OK, for now we're going to have to agree to disagree about disagreement and we'll move on to the rationally speaking text.

Welcome back. Every episode, Julie and I pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our rational fancy. Let's start with Julia Spik.

Thanks, Massimo. I've been on a psychology kick recently. You might remember my last picks were How Pleasure Works and 50 Great Myths in Popular Psychology. And one of my recent favorite reads is an old classic that somehow I'd never gotten around to reading. It's called Influenced by Robert Cialdini. He is a psychologist who spent years carefully studying the tricks used by people whose job it is to persuade and manipulate us. So salespeople, telemarketers, lobbyists, advertisers and so on.

Politicians. But I don't know if you looked at that, I'm not sure.

But when I was studying, I mean, he actually infiltrated their ranks like he would get a job in that industry and learn how they how they work.

So the book is great, not just from the perspective of, oh, this is interesting how humans behave, but also I've found as a very practical self-defense manual in becoming more aware of the triggers that manipulate people that helps me guard against them. Or at least that's the theory I'm working with.

So I'll give you an example. In one section of the book, he explains how people seem to have this innate need to maintain a consistent self-image.

So people take advantage of that by getting us to make a very minor commitment so minor that we really don't mind making it and that it almost seems rude to refuse.

And then later they'll ask for a more substantive commitment to that same cause. And we're much more likely to say yes. So, for example, asking us to sign a petition in favor of the cause, that's that's easy doesn't really cost us anything. But then later, the same organization will ask us to donate money. And on some level, it seems like our brains reasoned, well, I signed the petition, so that must mean that I'm really committed to this cause.

And so then we're much more inclined to give the money. And when psychologists have asked people to endorse some statement in exchange for some small amount of money as part of a study, then later on, people are much more willing to endorse that same belief, that same view just of their own accord. So what this drove home to me is how important it is for me to never say things that I don't truly believe. Good. Um, well, you know, it's an ideal to aspire towards.

Yes. But it's frightening that even apparently the act of making a statement, even one that you think you don't believe, can then change the way you think about the issue. And Soldini himself seems to have sort of the same reaction to the research. He says, it scares me enough that I'm rarely willing to sign a petition anymore, even for a position I support. Such an action has the potential to influence not only my future behavior, but also my self-image in ways I may not want.

Good point. Although, of course, if he actually is in favor of the of the petition, that seems like it won't matter that influence is influencing himself.

Yeah, well, maybe he had sort of a gray position on the issue that tends towards favoring it, but he doesn't want to influence it.

But that you do need to consider carefully before signing on a petition. If you remember, we were talking at some point about the famous episode of bullshit, the Penn and Teller show, where they get a bunch of environmental activists to sign up a petition to ban water because they present water as Doddridge and monoxide. And is these dangerous chemical that is all over the place.

Okay, that's funny.

That is funny. But, you know, people did sign up on it very gladly.

OK, my pick is a book. The book is entitled Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes. It is by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein and that it is exactly what it sounds like, meaning that it is an exploration of major areas of philosophy, from metaphysics to us to aesthetics, from science to to ethics through jokes. Now, some of the jokes are funnier than others, of course. But but the point is that I think the underlying idea is that there is, in fact, a similarity between jokes and philosophy and good philosophy and good philosophical reasoning.

Well, we don't take them seriously.

No, that's not the minority. In fact, I've take jokes very seriously, depending on who tells them and what the joke is. Now, the idea is that a joke works in a way more or less in this way, that that the person tells the joke, leads you to think in a certain direction, and then it gives you a punch line that all of a sudden turns upside down or in a completely different direction. What you were thinking so is the punch line works.

It's because all of a sudden the conclusion of the joke is in a completely different direction from what you expected. And the idea is that good philosophy is the same way that you start out reasoning in a certain direction and you think that you go that the guy knows what he's. You know what, he's going and then all of a sudden, if the if the reasoning is well constructed, you actually reach a conclusion that is counterintuitive, that is not commonsensical, and therefore it makes you think, now, I couldn't possibly talk about a book about George without telling a joke, although I picked one that it's not actually particularly it's from the book, but it's not particularly relevant to any particular philosophy.

I figured that some of our listeners and perhaps you would actually take it as good advice on how to deal with arguments. So here goes.

The idea is that a philosopher once had the following dream. First, Aristotle appeared in the dream and the philosopher said to him, Could you give me a 15 minute capsule sketch of your entire philosophy? To the philosopher surprise, Aristotle gave him an excellent exposition in which he compressed an enormous amount of material into a mere 15 minutes. But then the philosopher who was dreaming raised a certain objection, which Aristotle couldn't answer. Confound it, Aristotle disappeared. So the philosopher was very happy that he had an argument that trumped Aristotle.

You woke up and he said, Gosh, I had this argument that beat it and beat Aristotle. Unfortunately, couldn't remember what the argument was. So he figured the following night, maybe if you concentrate hard enough, you can have a similar dream and try to figure out what what the what the argument is. So Plato appears, in fact, sure enough, in his next dream, the same thing happens again. And the philosophers objection to Plato was the same as his objection to Aristotle.

Plato also couldn't answer it and can't answer it and disappeared.

But the philosopher wakes up in a sweat and can't remember what the argument is.

This thing goes on for quite a few nights.

All the famous philosophers have used to be a one by one, and our philosophy refuted every single one of them with the same exact objection on the edge of my seat. Exactly.

And what happens next is, of course, that he says, well, I really have to figure out what these argument is.

So it puts paper and pencil next to the bed. And he says, as soon as I wake up tonight, I'm going to write down whatever it is that passes through my mind and then we'll figure it out in the morning.

So after the dream happens one more time, the philosopher said to himself, I know I'm asleep and dreaming all this, yet I have found a universal refutation for all philosophical systems. Tomorrow when I wake up, I would probably have forgotten in and the world would really miss something. So with this Iren effort, the philosopher faucet's himself to wake up, rush over to his desk, write down his universal reputation, and then he jumps back into bed with a sigh of relief.

The next morning, of course, your work, you went over to the desk to see what he had written. The note said, Well, that's your opinion.

So that's a universal refutation of any at all. If that made philosophers disappear, there would be no philosophy department.

That's all right. That was my pick for the episode. Great.

Well, that wraps up another episode of Rationally Speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.