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 am your host, Massimo Pierluisi, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today, Massimo?

Today, we're going to dive into the world of fluffy thinking by which we mean talk. That sounds profound to a lot of people, but is actually, when you examine it a little more closely, wrong at best and nonsense at worst. So we're going to talk about what makes Fluffy thinking fluffy. Why does it appeal to so many people and why do so many smart and educated people who should know better engage in it?

So I guess in some sense, I've been thinking about this topic as sort of a counterbalance to a recent podcast that we've done. So recently. We talked about how some rational skeptic or perhaps even hyper rational skeptics, such as hard core defenders of Azman, hard core credit, critics of religious thinking, perhaps overdo it in terms of overstretch, the limits of rational thinking, and particularly in scientific thinking.

This time we're going to sort of take a look at the opposite end of the spectrum, where we're going to take a look at what it is that makes some otherwise intelligent people say things that almost literally make no sense.

And if I'm not talking about the easy stuff, right, we're not talking about creationism or denial of that or global warming or denial of the fact that there is no connection between vaccines and autism. We're not talking about a simple pseudo science, the kind of stuff that is factually, clearly, you know, wrong, or at least that there is a lot of empirical evidence. And so we can talk about the evidence. We're talking about something much more, as you say, fluffy.

Right. So who do you think are the worst offenders?

Oh, boy. Mean one of the worst offenders, I would have to say is it's a couple of physicists that I that I, I have several quotes from them and I'm going to bring up in the next few minutes. One extreme, Anderson, and the other one is Paul Davis. They're both very smart guys. I mean, there's no question about the fact that these people. There's no excuse exactly. Makes it even worse. There is there's no excuse for it.

So Freeman Dyson is a very well known theoretical physicist. He's made major contributions, the theoretical physics over the last several decades.

And then later in his career, he started writing things that are more the borderline between science and religion. You won the Templeton Prize a few years ago, which, of course, in most people's books is not exactly a positive, because as most of our listeners probably know, Templeton Foundation is this interesting out.

But that gives out a prize that is now heftier than Nobel to scientists who write something along the lines of for the for the understanding, the scientific understanding of religion.

This prize was set up by John Templeton to further a scientific understanding of religion.

But clearly, the Templar Foundation clearly has an agenda that he sort of broke through religion. Now, interestingly, in fact, both Dyson and Davies won the Templeton Prize. So that might be a connection here that if you're worth exploring.

Well, I think what's so interesting about the group of people that are sort of the really prominent fluffy thinkers, the promoters of Luppi thinking is that they use their fluffy thinker's website.

I mean, maybe we should we should start one.

So some of them come from the world of either religion or mysticism and are trying to make what they say sound more scientific.

And then some of them come from the world of science and are trying to make what they say sound more mystical. So there's this blurring of boundaries between science and mysticism, but it's coming from both both ends. That's right.

I mean, it reminds me of the absolute worst offender of this germ. I think it's not a person, but is an alleged documentary. What the Bleep Do We Know, which came out a few years ago and which allegedly is an exploration of the relevance of quantum mechanics and in neurobiology to issues of faith and spirituality and so on and so forth. And first of all, as we all know, as soon as you hear the word quantum mechanics, unless it is a physicist, we are doing the word your baloney detector should go up at least to orange alert.

But that movie documented, which, by the way, is one of the largest grossing documentaries ever and has been followed then by a DVD series and called, I think something like Down the Rabbit Hole. It's really bad stuff. I mean, you go through this thing is more than a couple of hours and initially starts out with alleged scientist and alleged experts. Talk about these things and then you more you get into it and the more you realize that they're not, they're talking about nothing in particular.

It's just they're making up stuff as they go.

Right. So quantum theory is one of those scientific fields that seems to have spawned a whole lot of fluffy, fluffy thinking. I mean, there have been. Scientific fields in the past that have been particularly ripe for the the mining by New Age types and mistakes, but quantum theory really I mean, it's just it's so weird and so mysterious. And so I think the thinking goes something like, hey, my idea is weird. Mysterious to Urgo. That's right.

It's a gold mine. Exactly. It is a gold mine. And I think that's partly it is a gold mine because most people, as Richard Feynman usually famously said, and he knew what he was talking about when it came to quantum physics, he said if you if you think you understand quantum quantum mechanics, you probably don't understand quantum mechanics. There really are very few people who are smart enough to confuse and know and talk about these things.

But the interesting thing about quantum mechanics, of course, is that although it is allegedly or I wouldn't even say allegedly, it is definitely probably the most successful scientific theory ever produced in terms of the accuracy of accuracy.

That's right. Because your predictions in terms of, you know, the beauty of the mathematical results, the match between them and the medical results and empirical evidence, but still, we don't know what it means because even quantum physicists don't really know what exactly it is in terms of physics that this stuff is telling us.

So, let alone people like Deepak Chopra who claim that they have a quantum elixir of life and things of that sort. All right.

Well, Deepak Chopra is a really interesting case that I wanted to bring up, because I think he well, he exemplifies a lot of the strands of Luppi thinking.

But in particular, there's a strand that I think is the key to a lot of its appeal to people and the reason that it works so well in people. And that's the deliberate use of ambiguity in so many of their statements, especially what I would call ambiguously metaphorical statements. So essentially, you say something that could be either interpreted as a literal and really extraordinary claim or as a metaphor and. Right. Deepak Chopra does this with quantum theory a lot.

So he's published several bestselling books about how quantum theory, quantum mechanics can alter your reality and heal your diseases. One of them is called Quantum Healing, which articulates the theory that a shift in consciousness causes a shift in biology. And so you might be forgiven for thinking that he is actually claiming that quantum mechanics somehow allows you to think your way to health, which would be pretty astonishing if it were true. But then I've seen him cornered in an interview and asked how exactly that works, by what mechanisms, and he says, oh, it's just a metaphor.

This is a quote from from Chopra. It's just a metaphor. Just like an electron or a photon is an individual, indivisible unit of information and energy. A thought is an indivisible unit of consciousness. And this was, by the way, in an interview with Richard Dawkins.

So he must have been. Yeah, he says, oh, so you're just using it metaphorically. And then Chopra immediately reverts back to his original position and says, oh, no, no. I think quantum theory has a lot to say about observer effect. And so I think this is a great example. What this does, this sort of ambiguous, metaphorical talk is it allows the speaker to have it both ways.

That's right. You can make these really extraordinary and sexy claims. And then if you're ever challenged, you can always fall back on. Oh, well, I was I was speaking metaphorically. Yes.

Which does sound a lot like sort of, again, mystical and religious talk of some sort, because, again, you know, if you take the standard criticism of scriptures, for instance. Right. If you say, well, do you really believe that the earth is 6000 years old? And if you say yes, well, then you're easily dismissed as somebody who just doesn't understand geology, physics and so on. But if you say no and he said, well, then what do you mean?

Well, it's a it's a metaphor. It's a story. Right?

Well, if it is a metaphor and it's a story, then on the one hand, you're not actually telling me anything factually interesting. And on the other hand, you can pretty much interpret your metaphor, a story, however you like it, which means that, again, you're not really telling me anything interesting.

Now, Deepak Chopra, of course, is you know, it's an easy offender to to to highlight.

But as I said, I want to go back for a minute to these physicists who are, you know, you really ought to know better. I mean, after all, Chopra is making money out of this. And he's not he doesn't actually have credentials as a scientist. But these guys are serious scientists.

And a couple of quotes that I'm going to bring up for for this discussion are actually out of the transcripts of a recent episode of National Public Radio show, an outlet normally known for a series shows with a few exceptions.

One of the exceptions is Krista Tippett. Speaking of Faith, which unfortunately ruins all my Sunday mornings on NPR. And it's like a car crash, right?

Just so terrible. You can't look away. Right. And it is, you know, one of those people who tries really hard and I'm sure in very good faith to reconcile science and religion, to find good stuff about mysticism and spiritualism and. And so forth, and, you know, good for her. She's she's got a right to do that, of course, but she often goes into these sort of high speed fluffing thinking mode.

And she's just her latest book is That is just out and it's called Einstein's God, where she once again picks up this idea that Einstein, in some sense or another had some religious belief, which is highly questionable.

I think Einstein was speaking metaphorically when he talked about God or figuratively. I think it's true. I think that's clearly the case.

Buxley, sorry if I can just interject. This reminds me that another reason I think that this this ambiguous, metaphorical talk about the fluffy things work so well is that science does speak metaphorically a lot of the time.

And it's a really useful way to talk about really abstract or complicated processes. So scientists will say things like nature abhors a vacuum or this gene wants to want you to procreate.

It's just a natural way to talk about these things.

And so maybe people get used to that kind of language and then when they hear it, they sort of forget on some level that these metaphors are only legitimate if they're referring to actual scientific processes.

So then it sounds logic to them in the context in which sold a lot of books, but also got into a lot of trouble for entirely. One of his you know, he's arguably the most famous book, The Selfish Gene. It's a metaphor.

I mean, he never meant it as anything other than a metaphor, but he got in a lot of trouble and I think actually rightly so, because you got to be careful when you use a metaphor. There are some implications, especially if you're talking not to other scientists, but to the general public. So let me bring up this a couple of quotes from this transcript from Chris Tippett's show, where she had in order to launch her book, she had both Paul Davies on and Freeman DaiShin.

And so, for instance.

At some point days and said and this is a direct quote, Science is full of mysteries. Every time we discover something, we find two more questions to ask and so that there is no end of mysteries in science. That's what it's all about. And the same is true for religion.

Unquote. Now, first of all, this idea that every every time we find an answer, there is two questions that's completely made up of thin air. I mean, that's clearly not the case. Sometimes you get an answer and that's it. That's the end of the road. Right? Sometimes you get an answer and there are 10 more questions that are brought up.

But I'm not going to quibble too much on that.

Quite clearly, the minute literally, you didn't you hadn't done the calculations of how many new questions arise from any every answer. The part that bothers me is the last one where he says and that is the same for religion, really. When was the last time the religion actually answered a question to begin with?

And what are the additional questions that come out of a typical religion, religious answer to say that when a scientist, especially scientist of that caliber, says that, you know, that that is the same as for religion by making a direct parallel between science, which is the by far the most successful enterprise that human beings have ever devised to discover things about human nature and religion, which is by far the most unsuccessful enterprise that human beings have devised to find out things about nature.

And in fact, which allegedly is not really about finding things about nature.

That puzzles me. You know, why would you say that out of them? Because you're being nice to Krista Tippett.

Right. That that reminds me of another tactic that people used to make science sound more like mysticism, which is or to create the sort of false equivalency between science and mysticism.

Paul Davies in a New York Times opinion piece a couple of years ago said that science proceed on faith, essentially the faith that there are these ordered laws in in nature.

But he says, you know, where do these laws come from and why do they have the form that they do? Scientists don't know. And clearly, he says, both religion and science are founded on faith, namely on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws that slip that in there.

They're really equivalent. It's just that is the kind of thing that really raises my blood pressure to an uncomfortably unhealthy level.

I mean, why would you say something like that?

First of all, it's definitely not true. Right? So science is not based on anything like faith.

It is based on assumptions. Some of these assumptions can actually be tested and other other assumptions are simply reasonable based on what we know about the world. So let's let's talk about, for instance, natural laws, existence and natural laws.

There's a lot of discussions in philosophy, actually, about what what exactly is on natural law.

But you one reasonable way to think about it is that a natural law is simply a regularity in the in the behavior of the universe for which we had never seen an exception.

OK, now, great. Do we have faith in natural laws? No.

What we have is a large, very, very large number of observations that confirm the fact that what we fought so far is natural laws.

Let's say the law of gravity keeps, in fact working.

And guess what? One of these days the law of gravity not work anymore. I don't think that any scientist would say, well, no, I'm just going to keep going on and march forward as if we still had a law gravity.

Now, the scientists, when in fact not act at all as a person of faith who would say, oh, darn, the law of gravity changed. Now we got to change our way of thinking about it.

So I think we should probably try to do try to explain why this kind of thinking happens now that we've sort of established what it is and the tricks that it uses. And I think the Davie's and some courts are really good examples of of one explanation that that I find plausible and that a couple of our commenters brought up. Let me quote one named John Drager who says, I think the main answer as to why such people use fluffy language and vacuous arguments is that they're trying to rationalize an irrational belief.

They've accepted the conclusion that God or spirits or souls exist, and then they're just trying to find a compelling argument to support that belief. And this is actually really similar to the point that Michael Shermer makes in his article. Why do smart people believe weird things?

The answer is smart. People are particularly good at defending beliefs, at coming up with elaborate rationalizations for beliefs that they arrived at. Non smart reasons that you really do have to if you're going to try to defend something completely false or unsupported and you're going to try to do it in an intellectual sounding way, you really do have to tie yourself in to really elaborate.

Not that's an excellent that's an excellent point. And by the way, of course, we shouldn't we should dispel immediately one possible objection about what we're saying, which is the two of us are certainly not exceptions, smart people in general.

In fact, people in general, we know from neurobiological research are very good at rationalizing beliefs.

And as Michael Shermer pointed out, smart people are particularly good at rationalizing beliefs because that's what it means to be smart. And you find interesting ways of sort of reconciling your views of the world with the fact. So what does make what is then therefore the point of criticizing? Somebody else is bluffing. The point is that in in an open society, we learn from each other precisely because other smart people will criticize what we say.

OK, I have no doubt that I am perfectly capable of going to live on on a deserted island, for instance, and rationalize all sorts of things and come up with a completely bizarre view of the world that I would be completely convinced it's true.

The reason that doesn't happen is because I open myself as much as possible to criticism by a bunch of people, including the readers of our of our blog, that, as you know, are particularly vociferous whenever we write something.

And that's how the dialogue works. So so the point I'm trying to make is that this is not just about ranting about fluffy thinking and it's not about picking on Paul Davies or whoever else or Krista Tippett and so on.

It's about the idea that critical thinking and therefore criticism of other people's reasoning is the only way that can get you out of rationalizing.

Because because if you're left to your own devices, everybody does it, including ourselves, right?

Oh, another commenter had a theory that I liked a lot, which is that there might be a natural selection bias in favor of sloppy thinking.

A commenter named Teatime pointed out that bad ideas stated clearly are easy targets to decimate, but that ideas camouflaged and fluffiness are harder to spot so they can survive to the next generation and perpetuate themselves. That that's actually a good point.

Of course, we do have examples of really bad ideas that are easy to debunk and they still around like, say, astrology, for instance.

But but I think that's a good point. The more the more the idea is couched in fuzzy terms and terms are difficult to pin down, the more it it becomes difficult to actually mount a reasonable criticism. This is true in other areas as well. If our listeners go to our blog, they'll see several entries scattered here and there on postmodernism, for instance, you've written about it and I've written about it. And there is the same problem.

There are postmodernist, philosophical or I would say pseudo philosophical pronouncements following the one one of two categories, which are very similar to the ones that you brought up at the beginning of this podcast, which is either the pronouncement sounds deep, but in fact is completely mistaken or sounds deep. And in fact, it is completely superficial.

Yeah, actually, we should probably mention that there's a word for this which was popularized by Dan Dennett. It's called a Deepti. Yes. I love that. You want to explain what it is.

It's a great word. Yeah. So he he mentioned it in a lecture a couple of years ago, and he defined it as a proposition that seems to be profound because it is actually logically ill formed.

So it has at least two readings that it bounces precariously between them on one reading. It's true but trivial, and on another reading it's false, but would be earth shattering if true.

So this actually leads into another tactic which sloppy thinkers use either intentionally or unintentionally. So the example that Dan then it gave was the phrase love is just a word answer.

He said, OK, yes. On one level this is true literally, legally. Right. Like the word love is just a word. It has four letters. It begins with an L. That's really not all that earthshattering.

Just like the word cow is just a word on another level, if you remove the quotes and say love the phenomenon, I mean, people mean different things about it, as I blogged about.

But but they're referring to some kind of feeling or emotion or state. And that's not the same of the word. It's a feeling, not a word.

So that's not true and obviously not true. Right. So I'm often accused of not giving philosophers enough credit. But there is an argument that philosophers or a fallacy that philosophers have pointed out, and that's the use mention distinction. Right. So this is I think this is at the core of a lot of fluffy thinking, which is confusing the concept with the word describing that concept. So this happens a lot with talk about God. There's a book that came out a year or two ago by Robert Reich called The Evolution of God.

And it's not about that. It's about the evolution of the concept of God and people's ideas about God. It's not actually about the evolution of God himself.

Right. And it comes up a lot. Yeah. And actually, I'm glad that you struck a good one for philosophers.

And there is a good reason for that, because, in fact, philosophy at its best, at its worst, it can really be damaging, fluffy thinking itself. As we mentioned earlier, there's a lot of, although not all postmodernism or deconstruction, deconstructive thinking and running, that is really bad stuff and a perfectly good example of a fluffy finking or obscure thinking.

But at its best, that is one of the major things the philosophy is supposed to do to analyze what we say, to analyze the concepts and, you know, as philosophers often say, to unpack our concepts and look, look what it's inside.

And sometimes you don't find anything in science and then you have exposed some fluffy thinking.

Right. So to wrap up, because we're we're quickly running out of time, I'd like to just refer back to the Deepak Chopra interview with Dawkins that I mentioned earlier, because this is illustrative of of one of my biggest pet peeves and fluffy. Which is redefining words to mean whatever you want and coopting words from science to mean something completely different, words like wave or energy or uncertainty. That's like crack to the fluffy thinker. And so Deepak Chopra uses this word quantum, which he tosses around and pretends that it means something else.

And what was most striking striking about this interview is that he actually accused quantum physicists of coopting the word quantum.

So he says the afficionados in the world world of quantum physics have somehow hijacked the word for their own use, which I mean, Dawkins's is a pretty unflappable guy, but he was pretty flat, you said.

Oh, so they've hijacked your word for their own. Deepak Chopra said, yes, that's right.

And now I have another example, actually, before we close, because it's one of my favorite. I don't remember the other of this, but it is a physicist, actually, a fairly well-known faces, as well as an Anglican priest and a minister, I should say. And at one point he presented these serious paper where he said that there is a deep analogy between religious texts, in particular the New Testament and quantum mechanics, because you see, light has a dual nature particle and wave, which is just like the dual nature of Jesus, divine and human.

And so when exactly, it sounds very deep.

Right. And then you say, wait a minute, what do you mean? Just like do you mean that Jesus is a photon or.

And what does he mean? It doesn't mean anything. It just sounds very deep and it sounds very comforting to people, as you mentioned earlier, who want at all costs to to to reconcile their religious beliefs, to which, of course, they are entitled. I mean, you know, we're all entitled to believe whatever we believe as long as we don't claim by the people to death, if they don't have that kind of belief, the same belief.

But so this is not about about having a right to believe in one thing or another.

It is about, you know, if you actually want to justified that belief rationally, then you open yourself to rational criticism. You know, as you know, I've debated creationists quite a bit. And one of the interesting things that happened with creationists often, not always, but often is that you get into this debate. It goes on for hours and hours, especially if it is a one on one, not in not in public, but sort of personal on a personal level.

And at some point or another that would say, OK, well, you got some good arguments to think about it. But, you know, I have faith.

And as soon as they put out these trump card, my response is, OK, but but that's unfair because you just changed the rules of the game until a minute ago. We were in the same box, in the same ring, playing by the same rules. You were arguing one way? I was arguing. Either way, we were using the rules of logic and evidence.

As soon as I trumped your logic and evidence, you jumped out of the ring and he said, nope, sorry. I still believe. All right, you can do that.

But but but now you have to at least admit that you're not using rational thinking every time you bring up another egregious example.

I just want to vent about ten more, so I'm going to have to cut it off right now. Sounds good. We're going to move on to the rationally speaking PEX.

Welcome back. Every episode, Juliani pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever he calls our irrational fancy, let's start as usual with Julius Pick.

Thanks, Massimo. And my pick is a book that came out last year, and I'm a little late to the party, but it's by our Krumm, who's a famous underground cartoonists.

Well, he's famous now, but he started out as a real sort of underground counter-culture type, and it's called The Illustrated Book of Genesis. So he literally illustrated the entire book of Genesis. Every word is in there. And there was a lot of hype surrounding this book before it came out because he's known to be so counterculture and he's not religious at all. And his stuff is really pretty subversive. So so people were expecting basically a subversion of the Bible.

And it's not that it's actually he played it surprisingly straight.

He really illustrates everything that happens in Genesis pretty much earnestly. And it's actually a pleasure to read the outcome. Style is famously fleshy and earthy and hairy, and it really humanizes the stories.

And I think as an atheist, it's easy to just dismiss the Bible and not pay any attention to it. And as a Christian, I would imagine any way that these stories would become so familiar and so canon that you stop really thinking about them.

And so what's interesting about outcomes take on Genesis is that he sort of treats it as a historical taxes, as an interesting window into what life would have been like for these people and what the mindset of of living in this time would be like.

And the illustrations help flesh out some of the more interesting details that are hidden but not obvious in the stories like in the story where Joseph is thrown into the pit by his brother is the story just says. And he was thrown into the pit and there was no water in the pit. But then in the illustration, you can actually see his grief and it's it's really moving.

And and then in the story in which in the later part of the story in which his brothers reunite with him, the story says they don't recognize him. And it's not really clear why that is. But with the with outcomes illustration, you can see that that's because now he's dressed as an Egyptian nobleman. And so that's why they don't recognize him.

So really, it really makes these stories more realistic. Although I do have to quibble with the basically the liner notes. Essentially, I wrote this essay trying to analyze the story of Genesis and and put it in historical context.

That sounds like trouble. It it kind of is.

It's not pseudoscience. It's pseudo history, I would have to say. So he has this whole theory about how he tried to interpret Genesis in terms of the end of matriarchal societies in Egypt and Mesopotamia and the rise of patriarchal societies. And when I read that, it took me a back because I didn't know there were matriarchal societies. And so I spent forever Googling around trying to figure out where he got that from. And there's like this one source by this very discredited scholar arguing that there were these matriarchal societies in Egypt, in Mesopotamia around this time.

And so I come take that idea and just run with it and it makes no sense. Well, that's really enjoyable.

The best commentary I've ever read about the Bible actually was by Isaac Asimov, obviously written years ago since he's been dead for a while.

But that's not my pick. My book for today is it's from a website called Rational Wiki Dotcom in particular. If you go to that website and you search for the omnipotence paradox, there's a nice little entry about one one of those a little intellectual puzzles that I think is very interesting and might have consequences for your way of looking at the world. So the omnipotence paradox, which I just happened very recently by chance to to actually teach in one of my philosophy classes is this it comes in a variety of examples.

But the typical example is and I'm quoting from the from the website, which is in turn quoting from Homer Simpson, that clearly the clear giant of philosophy, the quote is, could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot day himself could not eat it.

And that is a funny take on it. But it is. But that is, in fact, the essence of the paradox. That is the idea is, well, if God is, in fact omnipotent, can God do something that you cannot undo?

And it comes you know, the idea comes in a variety of of particular examples. You know, could could God make a mountain that he cannot move? Could he make a stone that he cannot move and so on and so forth.

So, yeah, I think I like the British. And the idea is this, that, of course, if you answer yes, you can, then what that means is that God is in fact capable of doing something that he cannot then undo, which seems to impose some limits to his omnipotence. But if you answer no, he cannot make something, then he can undo that. Also clearly seem to be posing a problem for is for the idea of omnipotence.

So either way, you answered the question. It would seem that God cannot possibly be omnipotent, since this is a logical puzzle, not a matter of factual information, and we're not we're not measuring the degree of omnipotence of God. Obviously, this is not an empirical matter. It's a logical problem.

And if it is a logical problem and typically when you when you run into paradoxes, one of the possibilities, the very good possibility is that the concept itself that generates the paradox is, in fact, intrinsically incoherent. So this may point out to the possibility that the whole idea of omnipotence, which, as you know, is pretty widespread among religious believers, is in fact incoherent.

It is not logical. If that should be the case, then it would follow that there cannot possibly be such a thing as an omnipotent God, which, of course, it has all sorts of interesting theological consequences.

Interesting. So that's my pick for this episode.

Are there going to be any other examples of you actually resolving a paradox in favor of the theists? Are you setting a precedent that we're setting a precedent?

Yes. We'll see what happens. Interesting.

OK, this has been 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.