Abhijit: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Rationable and Rationable interviews. And today, we have Rob Palmer on again. And this time, he wants to talk about another organization he works with, which is Recovering from Religion. Now, this is an organization I have heard a lot about over the years over Atheist podcasts from Seth Andrews and Dogma Debate and others very similar to that.

And they're doing a lot of good work in the US, and I think it's very good to be aware of organizations like this and try and support their work if we can. So if you're listening in the US and you haven't heard of them before, or you have heard of them, and haven't managed to help out in any way, this could be your chance to get, know, get to know more about it.

 Hey Rob, welcome back.

Rob Palmer: Thank you for having me on behalf of recovering from religion.

Abhijit: Always a pleasure, sir. Always a pleasure.

Rob Palmer: Let me say one thing right up front. We're an international organization, so yes, we started in America and most of our volunteers and clients here, but we do have people from around the world. So I

Abhijit: really, what are some of the countries that

Rob Palmer: I do wanna make that clear. So we actually have a helpline is one of the things we'll talk about where people can either phone call or chat in to us. But we have in several European countries Australia North America, so Mexico, Canada. Yeah. There is currently no support group per se in Asia, unless you count Australia as Asia. I guess not. There's not but still, we will support people from anywhere. We have several phone lines. They're all in English from different English-speaking countries. , but anyone can contact us and we'll talk about what we do through the web. You just get to our web page and you can chat to us or you can make a web-based phone call for free. So yeah, we will talk to people from anywhere in the world.

Abhijit: That's wonderful. Have you had any contact with this part of the world, whether India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Nepal?

Rob Palmer: Yes, we do. And they're mostly people who chat. They chat in so yeah, we have a text chat that's available from our page or as I said, you can either call with a phone, can do one of the numbers that we have from those countries, or you can do a web call. Actually, what's interesting is, because we're based in the US and probably because we're, most of our advertisements, however, are in English, we get mostly people who are ex Christian, leaving Christianity. We get a fair number of people from Islam. In my two and a half years of working, I have had one Hindu person call at. Out of the 500 calls I've taken, one was Hindu.

Abhijit: Oh my. All right. But at least if we, at least we've got one.

Rob Palmer: And they were in America.

Abhijit: That's either way because Hinduism, as I spoke with Vimoh, who I was telling you a moment before we started the show Hinduism is a very slippery religion in terms that it is, it's got quite a wide range of belief systems and there's no one central text.

They don't, we don't have the Bible or the Quran, et cetera. We have the Upanishads, and we have the Mahabharata, which is one of the epic myths. We have the Ramayan, and we have the Bhagavad Gita, which is I think the most popular, at least.

Rob Palmer: Yeah, that's the only one I've heard of.

Abhijit: That's what people mainly refer to as the central text, but a lot of people refer to these, some of the other books as the central text. And the belief system really changes drastically from person to person, from family to family. Some people believe in one specific aspect of it, or one particular God that they're most attached to, and somebody else. So it's very confusing and one argument or one set of arguments or positions is impossible to have.

So whoever would take care of callers from Hinduism, is commendable. They're gonna have a, they're gonna have a task on their hands, but I think, but at the same time, Hinduism is a religion at the end of the day, it is based on supernatural beliefs.

Rob Palmer: We've had discussions amongst ourselves, why don't we get Hindus calling and I'd like to ask your opinion on it. America's mostly Christian, but there are certainly a lot of people who originated in India here. And you would think we would have some substantive. We've had, Jews are not a large part of the population, but we get a significant number for, from them.

But like I said, I've had one and so we're spec, we speculate that the Judeo-Christian, and I'll throw Islam in there too, religions, have, especially Christianity and Islam, have this big thing about hell, right? There's this awful punishment. If you make a mistake, if you don't believe the right thing, if you don't do the right thing, in some cases it's always different.

As you said with Hinduism, there are all different bullets. There are so many sects of Christianity and they all think differently about how you get to heaven or what sends you to hell. But in general, it's like there's this fear that's put into you. And we spoke, maybe Hinduism does not do that because we get a lot of callers who have rationally, rationably, decided that no, their doctrine is wrong. It doesn't make any sense. It was all made up. But the emotional part of their being, which was programmed as a child with this hell thing, they can't let go of. So we speculate. And what are your thoughts on that, that maybe Hinduism doesn't do that as bad?

Abhijit: We don't have a part. We do have a place called Hell. There is a, there is, the narak is the hellish, analogy is still, is, it does exist in our religion, but as far as I know, the primary thing is about reincarnation. And as we call it Karm or as it is known in English-speaking countries, karma.

And that is the primary engine we want freedom from. So it is an eternal cycle of reincarnation. Anyway, so reincarnation is the primary thing. So if we do bad things, if we are evil in this life, or we've done horrible, sinful things in this life, we essentially get reincarnated as something bad or a person who is probably of a lower cast or as an animal of some sort, like a cockroach or to some degree that's essentially what people are worried about when it comes to their duties through life. But there isn't any form of damnation, per se, and the exact, thing that we all want to achieve is Freedom from this eternal cycle of reincarnation, which is essentially called nirvana or moksha, which is freedom from this reincarnation. Don't quote me on this, I am not the expert. I would definitely suggest you get Vimoh to have this conversation.

Rob Palmer: Wait, so if you do something bad as a human, you become a cockroach. As the

Abhijit: or, or as or some other lowly.

Rob Palmer: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So hypothetically in this situation, you became a cockroach, which has a very short lifespan as I understand it. What can you do good or bad to make you not a cockroach the next time, to, to climb up the ladder of, better, better organisms? How does that work?

Abhijit: Oh you just gotta be less cockroachy about life. Be good to other cockroaches. I guess I'm really not sure I've, I really brush up on this. I've got a couple of books on Vimoh's recommendation. If you want to, if you guys wondering who Vimoh is, I just published his interview a short while back and I'll link the interview in the description or you can find it on the website. Be rationable dot com.

Rob Palmer: Looking forward to listening to that.

Abhijit: Oh, absolutely. He's very interesting and he is definitely a lot more knowledgeable than I am in these matters.

Rob Palmer: because after I joined recovering from religion, I learned a lot about other forms of Christianity that exist that I didn't know anything but their name maybe. And also Islam and some other religions too. And like I said, Hinduism is not one that came up a lot. The one thing that came up, I'll tell you what the discussion was with the person who was Hindu or ex-Hindu who called, she was not actually worried about her beliefs cuz she didn't believe.

She considered herself at least an agnostic, maybe an atheist, but she actually, while she was in America, was trying to fight back on the residual understanding or discrimination because of the caste system.

Abhijit: Yes.

Rob Palmer: Of her fellow Indians. She said people come to this country, they changed their last name to try to get away from that if they're a lower cast and still people from India know who they are because of where their family was from or what their history was or whatever. And like she was trying to fight that with an organization. I don't remember the name of the organization. So she was actually calling to see if they could work with us, and I put her in touch with our management. I don't know what happened,

Abhijit: but that is a very deep-rooted systemic problem that it has that is essentially at every single aspect of Indian life, let alone Hindu life, because there is an amazing film that one can watch called Untouchable. It is a documentary, but there is no narration. The entire story is told purely through the interviews that the person has done, and those interviews are lined up into a narrative. And it is very clear that a lot of people think that casteism isn't the thing anymore. And people believe that it's completely left our everyday life. But it still, every day in the newspaper you have you have stories about low people working in multinational companies, in worldwide organizations who are disrespected, who've had, who've been fired, who have been basically made to work in a very uncomfortable situation so that maybe they quit themselves or they've been openly discriminated against in the workplace. And not just at that level, but every level below that, if you are getting married, the bride or groom’s parents will ask you what cast you are. And a lot of the time people do not marry outside the caste. People don't marry outside, even in the originating village where they're from. Of course, that's an entirely different problem. The caste system has basically pervades all the way from the smallest of villages where the lowest caste people are literally untouchable. You said that you cannot touch them. You cannot be under their shadow, you will

Rob Palmer: whoa

Abhijit: eat anything, any food that has been touched by them or any water that has been touched by them. They have completely different wells, whether they have to go to ponds, or wherever they have to go to get the water that they need to survive. Because if they dip their bucket into a well of an upper caste of the upper caste tribespeople or the villagers, then they can be severely beaten up or even killed.

Rob Palmer: Wow. So this sounds like America prior to the civil rights movement, where how people of colour or, had to use different facilities, and couldn't even drink out of the same water fountains and whatever. And then it finally came to the point where laws were made to stop that, to try to stop it.

And, there's still people who are racist obviously, but at least in the, in the official laws of the country, anything like that is totally illegal. So India's not at that stage or are people disobeying the law to still do this discrimination?

Abhijit: There are laws in place to which are basically talking about equality, but even the government officials many government officials, many police persons, Even they still believe in the caste system. They believe in it strongly enough that, okay, maybe if you're none of the upper, if you're, maybe it doesn't happen too much if you are in one of the upper cast. So there are several cast categories. There are kshatrias, there are Brahmins of course, are the top of the crop. But there usually isn't too much discrimination among the top cast.

But the untouchable casts, which are called the Dalits, the Adivas is they are the ones who are the most subjugated and they are kept, they're supposed to live in a different part of the village. They're supposed to not mix with anybody, anybody else in the village. They can't go to school. If they go to school, they have to either sit outside the classroom or in the absolute back of the class, a good distance away from the rest of the children.

They don't get lunch during the lunch break or anything of that sort that the other kids get in their schools. And of course this goes all the way up to city levels because if they, if people find out your caste, you will be discriminated against.

You'll be maybe not allowed to rent an apartment. Maybe somebody will make life a little bit harder for you when you won't get a loan or something of that sort or get a job somewhere. Maybe you'll get the job, but that you'll be treated badly, as I mentioned earlier. So it is extremely deeply ingrained, so much so that law enforcement can't really do anything about it or are unwilling to do anything about it.

It is still something that a lot of us are fighting.

Rob Palmer: That's amazing—21st century.

Abhijit: Exactly. And the funny thing is that we, the, it is the atheist community in India who are essentially the ones who are the most aggravated by this kind of discrimination, because people who are a part of the religion, they still might be completely oblivious to the situation.

They might be aware of the situation, but they say, oh, but this is just the way things are. The caste system has been here forever and it's just a part of the religion, and that's the way we have to live. And that's the act. They're not really willing to do anything about it. But when the caste system is ridiculed or opposed, then you get a lot of pushback.

So it is it is still a, we have a very long road ahead of us when it comes to, dismantling that system even though we,

Rob Palmer: so that, that would be very good for, that would be very good for RFR agents to understand this, in the event they, we do get people who are affected by this sort of thing to call. Yeah. Cuz a lot of our people who contact us and become our clients it, it's not so much that, sometimes it is that they're trying to understand, since they started doubting and they have questions about things," how could this be true? I was taught this, but now I don't understand it". But a lot of times it's because of societal issues.

And so what you're talking about is a specific societal issue regarding Hinduism, and people who are leaving other faiths have others. Basically, all humans are tribal. There's a thing that you don't wanna be kicked out of your community or tribe. It's a, it's a problem.

Abhijit: It is, and in this film that I mentioned earlier, Untouchable, these, there are people who are from the lower castes who have changed their religion. They have left Hinduism and converted to Islam. They have converted to Sikhism, they've converted to Christianity, but the same systems exist in those versions of the religions in India.

Rob Palmer: Whoa,

Abhijit: they can all sit together in the church, but as soon as you leave the church, you will go your separate ways. And

Rob Palmer: Wow. So did you mention Christianity? If you convert to Christianity,

Abhijit: even if you convert to Christianity,

Rob Palmer: even for Christians

Abhijit: Yeah.

Rob Palmer: Hypothetically at the core of Christianity is that we're all God's children and everyone should be equal.

Abhijit: And they believe that in the church. But as soon as you leave the church,

Rob Palmer: wow.

Abhijit: They stay away from you. It comes to Islam as well, and Sikhism. So even when you have people who have left the Hindu religion and have become Sikh, even then when you get the Langar, which is what you get at the Gurudwara, which is a gift of either milk or some sort of a sweet called hava or food that people are given. Anyone who comes to a Gurudwara basically is given food if they need it. So that's a, it's a beautiful tradition, but unfortunately, there are many places where the people who have come from a lower caste, from an untouchable caste, are asked to sit elsewhere or get their food from a different entrance or something of that sort. It's all pervasive. It's incredibly, deeply ingrained in our culture.

Rob Palmer: That's so sad.

Abhijit: And I heard about from recovering from religion, you have many different subsections and one of them was for mental health, right?

Rob Palmer: Yeah. Yeah. So to give you like the quick elevator speech long elevator speech, about the whole organization. So we were founded something like 13 years ago. And initially it was just support groups and where people met in a, some rented hall or whatever periodically to, get help with things. And then it branched out in 2015 to what we call the helpline project. And that's the phone numbers or chat line that I was talking about, where you can do over the internet or a regular phone in some cases. When the pandemic started, we started this thing called RFRX Meetings and we've been holding those over Zoom, and you can access those even without an application. Just click on our link on the website from anywhere in the world.

Those are eight o'clock eastern time on Monday. We have professionals come in and they talk about all sorts of different things, different religions, religious trauma syndrome issues, purity culture, which affects people in religions we're told about, things about, about sex and attraction and gender.

We have people talk about all sorts of things and those are Monday and they're all recorded and put up on YouTube and on our podcast so people can even find those if they can't make the meetings. But the interesting thing is if you can make the meetings after the professional's done talking, we turn on the cameras and microphones and everyone chats to one another.

And it starts with something like 60 to a hundred people. It dwindles down after four or five hours to maybe 10. And it's a really nice way to meet other people, talk about your similar or different issues. We also have a blog, which we encourage our clients to tell their own stories on. And we have the online community, which is one of the newest things. We have about 2300 clients. There's 25 channels where people chat, text chat about subjects of interest. They've broken up into ex religion, ex-Mormon, ex Christian, ex Hindu is not there, ex-Muslim is. There's no Hindu channel cuz we don't have enough people. But yeah. And then there's topics like LGBTQ family issues, general religion, so anyone can join any of those and talk about things.

And those are all moderated by volunteers like me. So it's very private, it's very controlled. You don't, there's no trolls. And then the one you were talking about, all those last is the secular therapy project. So this is when people contact us and they need more than our peer to peer help. These are professional therapists, they're trained and licensed in whatever country they're from. We have 650 therapists. And at this point we have helped 28,000 clients, I looked this up, since 2012. We match, let people match up with a therapist who is not going to use religion or alternative medicine. So we have a vetting process, they have to be secular and they can't be into crystal healing and stuff like that. It has to be people who are science based and secular to give the therapy. You cannot believe how many times I have talked to a person who said, they went to a therapist, an official licensed psychotherapist in their state and after four or five meetings where they're pouring out the heart and telling the story, the therapists, okay, now we're gonna start working on this. Open your bible. It's what? If you're a nonbeliever that crushes your trust in this person and hope and you just wasted all your money and you gotta go find somebody else.

Abhijit: Yeah. Because that, I heard about this in a lot of podcasts and Seth Andrew's podcast being one of them, the Thinking Atheist, where people go for therapy to a psychotherapist and get turned to religion. It just, it boggles the mind. I don't even understand how that happens or how these therapists have been trained, like , where is that what something they learned in school. It's just,

Rob Palmer: yeah, it's one of these, weird things of the human mind. I worked with, we might have talked about this last time, I work with people with PhDs in engineering subject matter. And yet they believe Jesus is coming back, this year.

You can be brilliant in a specific thing you study and still have this part of your mind, which refuses to rationably think about religion and it's just you learn that as a kid, and that's true, and that's it. So you can be a psychotherapist and go through and get the degrees and certifications for that and understand all what you're supposed to do, but still in the back of your mind, you know religion's true, your God is real and he can help people.

Abhijit: It's like becoming a doctor, like a medical doctor and just telling your patients it's time to get to God and, stop taking a medication.

Rob Palmer: Well, We had a doctor who's African American name escapes me at the moment. Ran for president, I think in 2016 on the Republican side. Either heart surgeon or neurosurgeon.

I think he was a neurosurgeon and he was lambasted all over the media because he was a young earth creationist and bible literalist and yeah,

Abhijit: the sleepy fella

Rob Palmer: I don't know. The

Abhijit: he used to be a neuro neurosurgeon.

Rob Palmer: Yeah. That's what I was thinking. Yeah.

Abhijit: Yeah. I know what you're talking about. He just very slowly.

Rob Palmer: Yes, that is true. That is true. But, you can't be a dummy to become a neurosurgeon and apparently had a reputation, and yet, Nope, Bible's true. Bible's literal, young Earth and and all that. I, it was something, I remember it made the news that he, he said the pyramids of Egypt were giant grain silos for Joseph or something. It's wow,

Abhijit: wow. That's a new one. I haven't heard that one before. Yeah.

Rob Palmer: Yeah, imagine the guy, you're on the surgery, you're on the table for brain surgery, and he's about to put you under, and he starts, going on about his religious beliefs to you. , no, stop, stop. They're

Abhijit: truly reaching into your brain.

Rob Palmer: I remember having conversations when that happened about okay, how important is that? Would you know, do you care if he's getting on an airplane? And the pilot, who's very good pilot, never had an accident, great reviews and whatever, but he's also a young earth creationist, believes in, Jesus coming back next month, you know

Abhijit: you're crashing. He'll just throw his hands up and said, Jesus, help us!

Rob Palmer: I but m so most people are able to keep their, professional work life, responsibility is what they've learned to separate. But it becomes a problem with therapy. It absolutely becomes a problem with therapy.

Abhijit: Absolutely. It's a serious,

Rob Palmer: this is a psychological thing. You're trying to help people. And if you believe Jesus is the way to help people, no matter what you learned in school with your degree, that's might come into it.

Abhijit: And I heard about Alcoholics Anonymous also being a very deeply religious organization, which also blew my mind, which was like,

Rob Palmer: absolutely. We we get a lot of people have sobriety issues. We have a lot of calls from people dealing with that as well as, religious trauma. And yeah, we always recommend secular sobriety programs. You can Google that just with that term or SOS there's a lot of organizations that do the same things but better cuz they don't make you give yourself to a higher authority cuz that's the only way you can be helped cuz that's the AA model it's no, you can help yourself and will teach you how. You don't have to rely on a, this hypothetical higher power.

Abhijit: This is the kinda stuff that makes me, makes my brain go

Rob Palmer: And for those who are not seeing the video,

Abhijit: yeah. I've got the, I manage to get this brain stress ball. I think looks like a brain. Looks like a brain, which I got from, I think this was the Natural History Museum in New York.

Rob Palmer: Nice.

Abhijit: So amazing. If I squeeze it and it goes whoop this big red bulb.

Rob Palmer: See, I'm not a neurosurgeon, but I see there's a problem with that brain. It looks like

Abhijit: it sounds funky too. I love it. Every time. My brain, every time I get my I, I say that my mind is blown. I'll do this. Boom

Rob Palmer: so for people who are listening to this podcast, who are, able to take advantage of the STP that's great. Most therapists can only serve people in their jurisdiction where they were licensed, so that makes it somewhat limiting. But one good thing that you can do is you can go to, so our website is recovering from religion.org. And then there's a bunch of things on that page. And standing towards the bottom it says seeking professional help. I'll actually scroll there. It says, Secular Therapy Project Professional Support. So if you click on that, it says, register as a client or register as a therapist. Now most people to find therapy, you register as a client.

You basically sign in, you make an account and you put where you are and you can contact a certain number of therapists a month, but, If you're not, you can use this as a workaround to, to do some therapist shopping on your own. If you're not in an area where we have therapists, I would suggest you click on register as a therapist, and then what is the very first thing is therapist registration, statement of agreement, first, second, third.

So this is what the therapist who is going to start the process of registering with us has to agree to, right? So you can use this, print it out, PDF or hard copy and use this when your therapist shopping, right? Before you waste your time, send this along and say, "Hey, I need to find somebody. Are you able to agree to all these things before I start paying you anything?"

And that's, the perfectly appropriate way to interview a therapist.

Abhijit: Absolutely. Hell, I didn't even know you could interview a therapist. The psychotherapy environment in India is extremely wanting. Fortunately, I've got a very good therapist. They're very hard come by as far as I've heard, and it's usually through word of mouth.

And because we just, the whole idea of mental health problems is seriously stigmatized in this country. We don't have most people think, I never go to a therapist because I'm not crazy. And it's right. And the fact is that, no one is really crazy. We have mental health issues, which somewhat,

Rob Palmer: some people are crazy

Abhijit: some people, but they're not usually in need of mental health. Health. Those yeah I know who you mean, but it's, it's very stigmatized. It's if you're depressed, well, just talk to somebody, watch some comedy, you'll be fine.

Rob Palmer: Yeah.

Abhijit: That's just not how it works. And so there's a deep misunderstanding and a very, big gap in how much therapy is needed. How much, first of all, mental health needs to be understood in this country. How much people need to be aware of it, and definitely the kind of people who are able to treat it are extremely low in number. Every hospital has these people, but we don't really know how good they are, how much practice they've had, how much experience they've had, and if they've been subjected to any sort of pseudo scientific ideas. So we really don't know. Otherwise it can,

Rob Palmer: yeah, it's tough. But that's why, that's why if you contact somebody before you start paying them and telling them all your problems, it's just like anybody, car mechanic, you can say, okay, what kind of experience have you had? Do you know how to work in this kind of an engine or whatever.

That's, those are fair questions.

Abhijit: Yeah.

Rob Palmer: And you should be able to, before sitting down with the actual first session with a therapist, talk to them. And they should wanna do that. They should wanna see what your issues are. If it's something they're experienced with. My wife is actually a psychotherapist.

She doesn't deal with certain categories of people because she didn't have any special training in it , and it's not, it's not the one she's been practicing with now for 30 years. So it's like she referred them to people who are experienced with those. And, so if she, someone calls her, she'll ask, what are your issues? Generally what are we gonna talk about? And, it's just as fair for the person calling to say, what is your experience treating my kind of issues. And if you're somebody who's got religious issues, it's certainly fair to ask these questions.

Abhijit: So we'll put the link to this section particularly do send it to me and I'll put that link in there. So anybody, anywhere in the world, if you're looking for a psychotherapist, just have a look through this. Take printout, copy it down into a notebook or into a, into a word file or something of that sort. And if whenever you're interviewing someone or whenever you're seeking help from someone, just send it to them and say, can we agree to all of these terms?

Rob Palmer: Sure.

Abhijit: I think that will definitely help out a lot of people.

Rob Palmer: I hope so. And the other thing that is directly accessible, let me tell you about this, is I mentioned before RFR started just with support groups. And those used to be, as I said, you went into some, rented basement of a church or school or something, and you just had a meeting with somebody from our group who was running the meeting. When the pandemic happened, they all went online. Everyone learned to use Zoom.

Abhijit: Yeah.

Rob Palmer: And all of these organizations just now made it. Now, for some people that was bad. I talk to people who don't wanna do that. They want to meet in person with people face to faces, is not the same for them as, the realities of the world is we had these, we had 60, some of them, there are 50 US states and some of them are in another country.

So maybe you had one in your state. You can drive 10 hours from one side of Texas to the other. So that didn't help you. That there, there's a group in Texas, if it was 10 hours away, now not only can you zoom into that meeting, but you can zoom into any meeting. You don't have to go to the one in your state or within driving distance.

 I've heard people who are New York, but their work schedule makes it more sense for them to join the one that's in Los Angeles and vice versa. And there are some of these in Europe, in Eastern Europe. And certainly if someone in India wants to join any of these, you can find out what the schedules are. See if it works with your daily schedule, and you could try one or more of them. And there's no charge for this. This is not like when you're contacting a therapist, you're gonna pay them however, you normally pay a therapist, but this is a free service from Recovering From Religion.

Abhijit: Wow. And this is, and you can take this on a regular basis? Like you can have scheduled sessions? Or is this

Rob Palmer: Yeah. So each group has its own scheduled sessions. I think usually it's twice a month. I'm not positive about that, but you can check each one out and find out what that is. These are support groups. Each one is run by a set of people. And there would tend to be the same people joining it all the time. And you might join one and not like what the discussions are about and maybe not like the moderators and hey, you try one of the other 60 something. So the, or if you could do more than one at a time, right? One, one week and one another week.

So it's a really good way for anyone from around the world to get its peer support service about, religious issues and let me tell you where to find that if you're interested.

Abhijit: Yeah, please do.

Rob Palmer: Okay. So again, our main page recovering from religion.org and you scroll down to where it says group meeting calendar. Right? That pops open. Another page with the calendar, which is adjusted to your time zone, and it will show you from that date and time what is available when, and then you just click on any of them for the fine details. It might use meetup.com and you might have to, register for that and you'll get an email with a link.

Some of them are just direct RFR, like the RFRX Monday talks are all there. It just directly tells you what the link is at that time, and that's how they work.

Abhijit: Lovely!

Rob Palmer: I'm looking at the one right now. My time, so this is Thursday, December 1st, we're doing this talk. It says 3:00 AM my time.

Have to do the math to figure out what that is. And Sydney, Australia, there's a meeting, then there's one at 7:00 PM in New Haven, Connecticut, 8:00 PM in Kansas. If I go on Saturday, there's an 8:00 PM in Mexico. It's a Mexican one. They might be doing it in Spanish. I don't know. There's one Sunday in the Baltics, which is, a cool way that's in the middle of Eastern Europe.

Yeah, so they're scattered around the world and all at different times. That should be accessible to people from all over the world.

Abhijit: So, this is the one which goes to secular therapy.org?

Rob Palmer: No, no. This is the button on our page is the group meeting calendar from the main page of Recovering from religion.org.

Abhijit: Yeah. Got it. All right. Okay. I can see the calendar and everything. I'll put this up on I'll put the video up so that people can have a look through this and. See how they can join.

Rob Palmer: And, the third way to get support, and I mentioned it before, was through our online community. So this is where you cannot find this with a click of a link.

We keep this very private because it's heavily moderated. We do not allow any religious proselytizing. We don't want any trolls. So you, this is the only thing we do that you can't click on a link somewhere and find it.

Abhijit: Ah,

Rob Palmer: you have to either call in or chat in. You could use, as I said, the phone or the web. You can click on it and make a web call or a web chat and talk to one of our agents about your situation. If you're appropriate, they will invite you and then you send them an email, you'll get an invitation, it tells you how you know to get to the place, and then you can join our 2300 other members and in these chats and talk about things.

That also, by the way, gives you access to some other things that started with the pandemic, which is we now do periodic virtual hangouts, call them. There's no speaker or anything. It's just zoom sessions where we all just meet and talk to each other. And there are usually its small groups, 12 people or so at any one time on average.

And we do several of those two or three of those weekly. And so you can only find those from being in the online community.

Abhijit: All right. That's a little hard work for people. If you wanna get into that, that is. And what else does recovering from, oh, one thing I wanted to ask is you must have met Jerry Dewitt.

Rob Palmer: I never have. I know who he is. I never have.

Abhijit: Yeah. Because, I found him an extremely interesting character. I used to listen to this podcast called Dogma Debate while back.

Rob Palmer: Yeah. David C Smalley.

Abhijit: David C Smalley, that's the one. So I haven't been on that for a very long time. But I did encounter Jerry Dewitt on that, and he's extremely charming, and his story is very heartwarming and in, in the way that, what he had to fight against to get out of his religion.

He was a pastor, I think, from what I understand. And he is also a part of Recovering From Religion. At least he's participating at some capacity from what I hear. And he was always very proud of his hair.

Rob Palmer: What's with it there?

Abhijit: Apparently he had a glorious head of hair and he had it all well styled and oiled and gelled and I dunno what else he put into it, but it always looked fantastic from the pictures that I could see. And of course on the podcast he'd always talk about his hair and David C Smalley would always make fun of it. But yeah, he was a very, he was a delightful character and I was, I really connected with him in many ways, but,

Rob Palmer: so I think he's the one who does atheist church, but he also does The Clergy Project, right? Yeah. So that's how I know his name. So The Clergy Project is a sister thing of Recovering From Religion, right? It's not ours, but yeah, we definitely work with them. In fact, one of the channels they're called in our online community is Clergy Project.

Abhijit: Ah,

Rob Palmer: So we have an overlap. There are people who joined The Clergy Project, and there are people who, from The Clergy Project, who also are being helped by us in Recovering From Religion. And for people who don't know, The Clergy Project is, if you're just an average person who decides, you don't believe in your religion anymore, you get a whole set of problems.

Depending on your circumstances with, now if you're gonna tell your family, they're gonna disown you, whatever, that sort of thing, you're gonna lose your, maybe you were buried in the religion. That's all you ever did. You work for something, a pastor, and now you're gonna lose all that, right?

So that, that's right. But if you're a clergyman of any religion, I'm using that term. Generally, you can be an imam, you could be a rabbi, you could be a priest, whatever, and you decide you don't believe any more than what do you do? That's your livelihood. That's the only thing you've ever been trained for. Maybe you have a Theologic degree. You were a youth pastor, and now you're the minister of your church and that's how you get paid. So what you do with your life

Abhijit: that's what Jerry Dewitt was

Rob Palmer: Yeah, exactly. So what do you do with your life once you decide, if you keep preaching from the pulpit, what you used to preach, you're a hypocrite.

A lot of people keep doing it cuz like they got, they feel they have no choice, but some people reach out to The Clergy Project and it helps them get out of that situation.

Abhijit: That's wonderful. That is some, that is a kind of help that really one needs because I'm sure it feel very lost, especially in a highly religious country like like the US where you lose your belief. In the middle of your job and your job is to help people who believe.

Rob Palmer: Yep.

Abhijit: And to preach the Bible and to preach the things that you don't believe anymore.

Rob Palmer: Yeah.

Abhijit: That would be extremely traumatic. Every day in and day out. I'm sure people would be driven mad with this sort of thing.

Rob Palmer: I remember seeing a survey quite a long time ago of; it was, from my recollection, it was an anonymous survey of people who have a ministerial job. And, some of the questions were about what they believe in. And one big one was, do you actually believe in God? And I think the number was close to 10% who said, no, I don't. It's like, wow. Yeah, I always think about that in regards to that's somebody who was raised to teach this, this is what they've studied, this is what they're doing with their lives. If that's 10%, what must be the per cent of just an average person in any kind of setting of a temple or a church or a shrine, who's just going there because that's part of what you were raised as a, to do. It's gotta be way higher than that, that you're just staying in it because your circumstances don't easily permit you to leave. It'll embarrass your family or you'll lose your community or whatever. So that's something to think about too. Looking around in any religious setting, at least 10% and probably a lot more than that, don't actually believe any of the stuff that they're supposedly listening to and believing.

Abhijit: Yeah. And even in the Indian setting and among people I know who are brought initially up as Hindus, There are a surprising number of people who don't really believe, they don't really consider anything that they're, they don't really believe in a higher power, but they go through, they go to the temples, they go to family rituals, et cetera, et cetera, just to keep their parents or there, the rest of the families appeased. And they, not a kick up a fuss or anything of the sort, because it really doesn't affect them one way or the other. They go through the motions just to keep them happy, but they don't really believe in anything. So it's actually surprising. It's a surprisingly large number of people.

And from the census and the research that has been done. It's only about 10% of Indians probably don't have a religious belief system. It's still an extremely large number of people, but I have a feeling it's much, much larger than that who

Rob Palmer: Yeah, me too

Abhijit: I believe because a lot of the youngsters, especially people of my generation and younger. I'm 40 years old, so I'm not very young, but

Rob Palmer: all relative

Abhijit: it's all relative. And younger people are very often I've seen, are not very religious. They don't believe in any gods God or gods, and they just go about their lives, but they're not very vocal about it. They're not out there as outspoken atheists or become a part of an organization because it doesn't have that serious, an effect in your in their lives.

Rob Palmer: So the word for that I learned in Recovering From Religion is Apatheist.

Abhijit: Apatheist, exactly. That's the right word.

Rob Palmer: They're apathetic about their theism or lack thereof.

Abhijit: But I have known that apatheism is not a direct line towards atheism. It can often lead backwards.

Rob Palmer: Yeah.

Abhijit: I had a very close friend of mine who claimed to be an apatheist and ended up joining a Hindu cult. So that was surprising, but, and very unfortunate.

Rob Palmer: But yeah, it really just means you, you weren't raised with one generally, and therefore you weren't programmed with it. But it does not remove the human inclination to be programmed into something that sounds good.

Abhijit: Exactly.

Rob Palmer: You caught up into something later. So if you've not thought about it either way, and then all of a sudden you're bombarded with this information, that seems reasonable. Yeah. It's not a, it's not a minority of people that would jump on that and say, oh, that sounds good. Okay, I'll join.

Abhijit: Exactly. So it's not even equivalent to being an agnostic, I think because one is still very susceptible to bad thinking during those periods. But hopefully, most of them will try and take a stand and find a position that they can stick with, and hopefully, it'll be on the (unintelligible) side of things.

Rob Palmer: And do you ever discuss what the difference between agnosticism and atheism is?

Abhijit: Oh yeah.

Rob Palmer: It comes a lot on people who call in cuz they don't know what they are, so we talk about it.

Abhijit: Yeah. In fact, just the other day, somebody had posted a comment on this video of when I was talking to Vimoh and he was talking about the difference between being an agnostic and being an atheist.

And I said, most atheists are agnostic atheists because gnosticism is the claim of knowing while theism is a claim of believing in a higher power. So we are an agnostic atheist that we don't really know if there is a God or not for certain, but we don't believe in one because there isn't enough evidence.

Rob Palmer: Yeah, I'm on exactly the same page with that. And a lot of people think the word agnostic is in between. I, you go from theism to agnosticism to atheism. No,

Abhijit: I, I distinguish it by saying that this is the colloquial usage of agnosticism and the colloquial usage of atheism, whereas they're both words related, talking about the same thing.

So I think there's a colloquial usage and there is a more specific usage, which,

Rob Palmer: yeah, kind of like the word theory in science.

Abhijit: I was about to bring that up – theory and hypothesis.

Rob Palmer: I even heard scientists say that, "oh, I have a theory about this". But no, you just, you shouldn't do that.

Abhijit: I, in fact, I was I was watching an episode of the Atheist Experience actually, and they had a caller and who was sprouting all sorts of strange ideas and one of the hosts of atheist experience said I think this is just a theory. Is it just a theory that you're talking about? I was like, no, it's not even a hypothesis. And then the other host says, I think he's just, this is just conjecture.

Rob Palmer: That's good.

Abhijit: That's a better word. That's a better.

Rob Palmer: So a lot of people would, and I did this too, it's hard to remember so long ago. I came out as a teenager out of my religion, but and I'm way older than you but , so it's a long time ago in the distant past when I had to worry about velociraptors outside.

I remember thinking, "oh, I'm an agnostic". First of all, there was no internet. That's how long ago it was. So you couldn't even look up a word like that easily and see what videos, people talking about it, it was just, I just thought that meant you weren't sure.

So therefore, that was what I was, and then, and then eventually, oh no, I guess I really, I'm an atheist, right? It took a while. So that word has come to have, and maybe it always has, I don't know, in, in, in my understanding, Bad taste in people's mouths.

Abhijit: Yeah, absolutely.

Rob Palmer: Especially if you're a theist who's, keeps hearing atheists eat children and they have their killers and rapists

Abhijit: I think came from

Rob Palmer: right? Yeah, the eating children's, especially strange because, Catholics, eat the flesh of Jesus at mass every week. I used to be a Catholic. I was okay with that; body of Christ. Yum.

Abhijit: And it blood,

Rob Palmer: yeah. But so people who were coming out of a religion who have been programmed at atheism is bad. And even though they're not believing in their God anymore, they don't want to call themselves that.

And that's fine. We don't, atheism is not a religion. We don't make people believe in certain things. We don't even make you use a certain word. We're fine with you not using that label if you don't feel you want to for a lot of reasons.

Abhijit: Yeah. Neil DeGrasse Tyson doesn't use it. I

Rob Palmer: absolutely,

Abhijit: I don't believe he's got the right reasons, but he's got his own reasons and that's fine. Like he told me at the meeting, he said that I don't use it because when I did use it for a very short period of time, I'd have people coming up to me after a talk and saying if you're an atheist, you wouldn't believe this. Or you won't say it like this. But I was like, who are they to be the gatekeepers of atheism? Your belief system, or lack thereof is your own to do with as you wish. If you wanna say God bless or Godspeed to somebody without actually literally meaning it, that's fine. Like I still, when people sneeze, I still say, bless you,

Rob Palmer: Yeah. If I stub my toe, it might still be godammit,

Abhijit: exactly.

Rob Palmer: Don't believe in God or any place you can damn somebody to.

Abhijit: Exactly. And if you say something unbelievable, which not unbelievable, but rather incredible, which you have over this interview and the previous one, I will say, oh my God.

Rob Palmer: Mm-hmm.

Abhijit: I don't literally mean it. It's,

Rob Palmer: and, and I just go there sometimes if I think, realize that and it's a proper circumstance, I'll say may you be touched by his noodly appendage.

Abhijit: Oh, I love that. I love that.

Rob Palmer: I'll tell you about it, a funny conversation I had regarding religion with a flying spaghetti monster with a friend of mine.

Abhijit: Yeah.

Rob Palmer: Very well, I won't even say, I'll say nominally religious Christian. Not preachy about it or whatever, but definitely believes the basics like I used to as a teenager. And I, one of the things I do is I edit Wikipedia with a team that adds science and tries to fight pseudoscience on the encyclopedia.

And one of the articles I had recently worked on was the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. That's a Wikipedia article, right? All about the history of it and whatever.

Abhijit: Oh yeah.

Rob Palmer: So I was, we were in a group, I think we were at dinner with some friends and people, "what have you been doing?" And I mentioned, "oh, I got to edit that page. It was really interesting." And so this friend of mine goes, what's, what are you talking about? What's that about? What is the flying spaghetti monster? So I described, that is the most awful thing I have ever heard of. How could Wikipedia allow that kind of blasphemy ? And I go, oh wait. And so then I decided to poke the bear.

"Wait. What blasphemy? How do you know that's not true? There are people who believe this."

"That is ridiculous. A God who looks like that."

And then of course I had to bring up Hinduism and their gods. "Oh, do you know about the Hindu gods? Do you know what? Some of them look like an elephant with blue, and there are people with a bunch of arms. How do you feel about that?"

"That's different. That's an ancient religion. Oh, wait a minute. Is that, does that mean, and that one's true. No, that's not true. And then we actually got to the point, but I said, but she said Christianity is true. She thought it was older than Hinduism, which a lot of Christians say they're just wrong.

They think the Bible is the oldest book ever written, and therefore, that's the oldest. Judaism is the oldest religion and same God in Christianity. But she actually used two logical fallacies in one sentence, of course, without realizing it and thinking she made her point. She said, "I know Christianity is true because it's been believed by billions of people for thousands of years."

oh, you got the argument from popularity and from antiquity in one sentence. And no, that's not a good reason. And I turned it around. "Actually, Hinduism is older and there are also like billions of Hindus. So is that one true also?"

Abhijit: Absolutely. We got a lot of Hindus around here. We've made a lot and the whole pastafarian thing is amazing. But then there's this other religion called Dudeism. Have you heard of that?

Rob Palmer: Hey dude. Yeah. and Jediism. Jediism. I love that one.

Abhijit: Jediism. Oh I'd love to be a Jedi for sure. Go around wearing those big flowy coats and little,

Rob Palmer: So we've never gotten a call from, somebody leaving that, that group. We've never got anybody a dude. And, but the one that really surprises me, we've never gotten a call from, at least I have never, in the 500 or so calls I had is Scientology. No scientology.

Abhijit: Oh yeah. That's still a cult. That's still very much,

Rob Palmer: oh yeah. Oh, whoa.

Abhijit: No Buddhist? Ever got a call from any Buddhists?

Rob Palmer: No. I imagine that's even more of a reason than I was talking at the beginning about why we don't get Hindu callers. It's more of a philosophy. Many of them don't even at think that.

Abhijit: And honestly, there is there is there's a university in Orange County, which a friend of mine went to, which is a part of a Buddhist organization or group. And they've been trying to popularize themselves in, it's called Soka Gai. And they've been trying to popularize themselves in India as being a place about life philosophy, except they have congregation spaces. They have chanting, which very few of them know exactly what they're saying. They chant to this mahogany cabinet of sorts.

There are some, there's some scriptures, et cetera, kept inside such things. And they have congregations and they have lots of talks, et cetera, et cetera. And there are lots of sects of Buddhism who actually have their monasteries and they worship the Buddha and in fact, we've been to a couple of them where you're not even allowed to take pictures of the statue of Budha because the image would then be considered holy.

Rob Palmer: So there's a lot of supernatural beliefs in this.

Abhijit: Oh, absolutely. It is an offshoot of Hinduism. It did originate from Hinduism, but it is and it still has the reincarnation and the the Nirvana concepts, but but yeah it's but now they are worshiping Buddha. As far as I know the Buddha never wanted to be worshiped. It was, it started off as a completely atheistic religion, which was supposed to be a life philosophy, which was supposed to be a way of life and supported by certain supernatural ideas. But it's become a full blown religion. Taken over a lot of India South East Asia, far east, China, Japan, Korea.

Rob Palmer: I guess that shouldn't surprise me. It's like people just want to believe in something bigger than, or the real world For some reason. It's some reason it goes into religion, it goes into paranormal, it goes into alternative medicine. It's just, the X-Files TV series, Fox Mulder, who was the believer, had the poster behind him, I want to believe, and that's what it's all about. And all of this, it's people want to, reality is not enough for some people, for some reason.

Abhijit: Exactly. And it, it, a lot of it is is all about in incredulity. A lot of it is that, It's an argument from incredulity because they can't explain everything that happens in the universe or the strange things that have happened in their lives.

Rob Palmer: Even the not so strange things that they, miscalculations because humans are bad with probability and statistics and things like that. Yeah. And we see patterns where there aren't patterns, so they're not really strange, but to people, they just come across as, oh, this is special. This is a sign, this is intentional. There's something behind it that is not obvious from the real world. Yeah.

Abhijit: Yeah, exactly. They wanna make sense of the chaos because they, otherwise it doesn't make any sense to them. And this is something I found myself repeating quite often over the last couple of weeks when I've been doing these a lot of these interviews.

And it's just that there is, the world is chaotic, the life is chaos. We have over 8 billion people now, each on their own trajectories in life, on a path which they have found thanks to their life experiences, thanks to their parents and upbringing, thanks to their peers and friends, and everybody's on their own trajectory and everybody's crossing paths and meeting one another. Nothing is predetermined, but we want to make sense of the, this is how it all originated. We wanted to make sense of a thunderstorm, of a flood, of an earthquake, of a volcanic eruption and find some reason why it would happen and how we could possibly stop it. So we assigned agencies to it, we assigned meanings to it and tried to appease those gods.

And in the same way, that's the same reason why we believe in psychics. I had this conversation with Susan Gerbic just a few days ago, and she, and the, there's a reason why they want to make sense of death that we can speak to those who have left us because they want that to make sense. They want the death of a loved one to make sense, and they're not ready to believe that death is a part of life.

So we all wish that we all have this wishful thinking and we all have the urge to believe in something beyond ourselves, because then it might make the world feel a little bit more sensible or less chaotic. And chaos is scary. It's

Rob Palmer: yeah. And

Abhijit: Don't know what's gonna happen next.

Rob Palmer: Being on the other side of it sometimes surprises me. And when I get to, talk to people who are coming out of their religions and they've had doubts and they're trying to reconstruct what they believe it, it actually sometimes surprises me that. At least the Christian Point worldview to them is better than the not, because in the Christian worldview, there's this all loving God who designed the universe to be the way it is.

Yet the reality is, in, in theological arguments, it's called the problem of evil. Things like that. Then why is there evil and why do natural disasters happen that's not even caused by humans. Why was there a tsunami, in the Indian ocean that killed a quarter of a million people?

Some of them Christians hypothetically, were praying to on their stand, the right God. Why would that happen? But yet for some reason they can get beyond that and ignore that problem. I don't know where, to me, okay, shit happens. It's a t-shirt, the world is chaotic. There is no person who could have prevented it, who didn't. There's just not nothing about, it's just, it's a random thing. And as humans we do our best to try to prevent those things from happening and avoiding bad things from happening. Not tsunamis, whatever.

And so that's the best we can do. Not praying that it's not gonna happen to me, that the tornado that hit touchdown a mile away isn't gonna hit my house. It's just gonna destroy all the other ones around me. And if I'm saved, God helped. God did it, but he didn't care about the other people, cuz I prayed harder or something.

It even goes down to people pray for their football teams, and some, on some level believe that's gonna make a difference. It always astounds me that people, think that is, Better than, no, there is nothing good or evil out there with an intention. It's just the way the universe is.

Abhijit: Exactly. That's exactly the way it is. And there's nothing we can do about it. We are completely helpless in the path of the chaos that is before us. And yeah,

Rob Palmer: Certainly as humans we try to do our best to prevent things from happening and making things safer and things like that. But as George Hraab, he is the person who sometimes MCs CSICon, he's a musician and he has a song out there called the Least that You Can Do, and it's wonderful. I was at the CSICon where he premiered it on stage live, and the refrain is it's all about how useless thoughts and prayers are in the face of disaster.

Abhijit: I remember this one

Rob Palmer: it's a wonderful dig at religious people who, who, you know, thoughts and prayer. That's gonna solve everything. And we get a lot of people calling. And one of the things keeping them in religion is I know my prayers have been answered in the past, so how could that not be from God? Or God sent me a sign, it was clear, I wanted a job. And then I drove down the block a week later and I saw an advertisement for a job, and I, I applied and I got the job a month later.

So that was clearly, a sign from God, yeah. And it is it's what we're saying, people want to believe these things. So sometimes if people are we don't deconvert people, by the way, in recovering from religion, right? We meet them where they're at. If they're trying to step out of religion and looking for answers, we will try to help them think about the reasons.

And one of the things in these cases, one of the do you think that people from other religions don't have their prayers answered? They certainly think they do, right? And do think their prayers are answered. Muslims think their prayers are answered. Jews think the prayers are answered.

People from ancient Greece who had shrines in their house to Athena and the Greek gods and the Romans and going back to the Egyptians, Torah, they thought the prayers were being answered. Why were they wrong? Or is it that we just all think our prayers are answered and it's just random chance, and that makes people think that, "oh, okay, maybe I'm interpreting what happened to me wrong, and that's not a, that's not the final reason I should stay in this religion."

Abhijit: Yeah. Man, you guys should this again, reminds me about talking about Anthony Magnabosco who I unfortunately...

Rob Palmer: oh, yeah, yeah. He's part of our organization.

Abhijit: Yeah.

Rob Palmer: He interviews new volunteers. Yeah. Yeah. And he has. I talked about the Monday meetings. He was one of the speakers and he talked about his thing, which is street epistemology.

Yeah, you can find that. By the way, you can find all of our videos. If you go to our main site, there's a button, a top, it says RFRX videos. At the top it says see our YouTube playlist. And there's 90 something of them at this recording. And then you can just do your browser search and find, Anthony Magnasco or Street Epistemology and find his, it was a very good talk outlining how important that is.

And we are trained in that on RFR. Now we don't do it on everybody. I, we're not the atheist experience. We don't argue with people who are calling to profess their God. It is to support people who are already doubting or coming out. They're want, they're wanting to know they're not crazy, that kind of a thing.

But Street Epistemology is a good tool to help people understand why they believe what they believe, and maybe change their mind about things.

Abhijit: Absolutely. So if there's anybody watching right now who is maybe questioning their beliefs, so coming out of their beliefs, whether you are Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Jain, whatever it may be that you're coming out from check out their website and see if you can get on a call with them and have a discussion.

Or you can contact you can even come to berationable to the website and you can drop in a message and I will point you in the right direction and how you can do it. If you didn't pick up all the details, I will put everything down in the description below, so don't worry about that.

Rob Palmer: Thank you, Abhijit.

Abhijit: But it's been a pleasure to have you on again, Robert. Is there anything else that you'd wanted to put down about RFR?

Rob Palmer: No, a fascinating discussion with you. And I'm certainly appreciative on behalf of the organization that you had me on to talk about it.

Abhijit: Oh, it's always a pleasure, and I'm always here to help in any way that I can, especially for an organization like RFR, which is doing a lot of wonderful work for you guys.

Rob Palmer: Thank you. And maybe we'll get, maybe we'll get you on to talk to our clients on one of those Monday meetings.

Abhijit: Yeah, sure. I'd love that . And maybe you'll get a few more people from the Hindu side of things after this video. I hope. I hope you do. But maybe we can set up a call center in India if there are enough people. Let's see.

Rob Palmer: That would be great. We are expanding. So the latest place we're trying to expand into is Australia.

Abhijit: Wonderful.

Rob Palmer: We have two ex Jehovah's Witnesses who are Australian and they're very active, building up our organization there. And we actually have a woman who moved from, I forgot what country, somewhere in South America. Her her native language is Spanish, but speaks a lot of other languages and she's living somewhere in, I think it's Germany at this point, it's in central Europe, and she's trying to build up our Spanish presence, which is a very important lot of Spanish speakers in the world. So yeah we're a, a still growing organization trying to reach out wherever we can to help people with religious issues.

Abhijit: It's a very noble line of work for sure. And I'm glad you guys are around. I've been hearing about it for ages about RFR for ages, and I'm so glad I finally got to get into understanding the inner workings of it. And guys, if you have any more questions about recovering from religion just drop them in the comments. I'll pass them along to Rob and we can we can continue the conversation. If there are a lot of other questions, we'll have you out again, no biggie.

Rob Palmer: Great. Thank you.

Abhijit: Great. Thanks a ton Rob and have a great weekend ahead. Everybody else, have a great weekend ahead and I will catch you all later.

And if you guys want to know more about Rationable go to www.berationable.com, I would greatly appreciate it. You can check out The Rationable Podcast and the YouTube channel, which is called Rationable very simply, where all these interviews are also put up in video form.

And if you want the transcripts, again, berationable.com. And if you have any questions you can send them to me, at Abhijit@berationable.com, or you can just go to the website and throw in a comment or fill out the form. So thanks again. See you guys in the next episode.