So I'm here today speaking with Alex O'Connor who's flown in from London. I'm in LA.

He's known also as Cosmic Skeptic and he runs a podcast within reason and so you can

subscribe to and listen to that podcast watch it on YouTube.

Alex was recommended to me by a friend of mine, John Verveke, who was a professor along with me at the University of Toronto.

I've done a lot of different public events

with John, many conversations. And Alex has interviewed many of the people that I'm interested

in, including Richard Richard Dawkins and he is very interested in religious matters

although he's not a Christian and we believed jointly that it would be useful for us to meet and to hash out our differences in viewpoint and similarities and see if we could get together and move together. and

move together somewhere valuable and enlightening. And so that's what we're trying to do.

That's what we're trying to do.

That's what we try to do with the conversation. It focuses mostly on the nature of belief, I suppose. That's probably the easiest way to sum it up. What it means to believe something, what it means to have a religious belief,

what it means to be committed to a belief.

We talk fair about two, a fair bit about the distinction between, let's say,

the distinction between fact and fiction

and the idea that fact reflects the real, but so does fiction and so welcome to the discussion of all that.

So first of all, thank you for coming here. It's a long way from London. We're in LA, and so that's a long ways. And so, and insofar as you're going to disagree with me, I'm pleased that you're exhausted from the flight because

that'll slow you down and that'll be helpful. So anyways, seriously, thank you for coming.

So let's start with this. Cosmic Skeptic. Right, okay, so how do you come up with this cosmic skeptic. Right, okay, so how do you come up with the name and and

why the conjunction and what's what what do you think the advantages any, in relationship to the emphasis on skepticism?

I'll give you the official and the unofficial story.

The official story is that cosmic sort of implies universe, space, big thinking, and Skeptic sort of

of situates me within a tradition of people who are interested in

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