Latest / Bedtime Stories / Joe Rogan Experience 2562 Dan McClellan

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Joe Rogan Experience 2562 Dan McClellan · Bedtime Stories

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: by night, all day.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: All right, we're up. What's up, man? Good to meet you, man.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Good to meet you, too. Thank you so much for
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: having me on.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: It's always weird when you watch a bunch of a
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: guy's content and.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Then you meet him.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: It's very odd.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: There's a parasocial relationship thing there that's a little off-putting
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: at first. I remember I had a long time ago,
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: I got a notification I was being followed on Instagram
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: by Joel McHale.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: And I was like, sweet.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: I texted my family. And then a couple weeks later,
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: I got a message from him.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: And he was like, hey, man, big fan.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Loves your stuff. We've got to hang out sometime.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: And I was like, all right, cool. He's a really
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: nice guy. He's incredible.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: He's a wonderful guy. He's got a lovely family. And
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: he was coming out to Salt Lake City to do
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: FanX a couple years ago, which is our version of Comic-Con.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: And I was like, hey, let's do dinner.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you're a giant comic freak. I am, yeah.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: And I was like, let's do dinner. He's like, it's
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: a date, but I'm a, what did he call himself?
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: An arrogant foodie. So he was like, so I got
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: to pick the restaurant. But he's like, let's get on
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: the phone and chat for a minute. And I called him.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: He picked up the phone. He's like, Dan McClellan, Joel McHale.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: He's like, this is so weird.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: Talking to you.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: I was like, Joel, I promise you it's a lot
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: weirder for me. So I know exactly what that's like.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: It's very odd. I try to give people as much
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: grace as possible when they meet me because I've probably
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: been in their head more than, you know, headphones and
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: shit for thousands of, it's odd. It's odd for me.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: So I'm sure it's odd for other people too.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: And I'm kind of like, I don't even recall if
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: I'm proud of everything I've ever said. But so I
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: don't know what kind of impression somebody has of me.
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: Oh, I have a great impression of you.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: Well, I appreciate that.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: And I'm certainly not proud of everything I've said. We're
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: all good. We're all good.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: Because I don't really watch my stuff back. I don't
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: even remember a lot of the stuff I've said.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's a real problem with me. There's people that
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: I forget I talk to.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: And then we bring them up in the podcast. I'm like, oh,
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: I should have that guy on. And Jamie's like, we
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: actually had him on three years ago. It happens. It
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: happens once every six months.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: We deal with that when we're like, what should we
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: talk about today?
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: I'm like, I don't know.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: We talk about this. And they're like, two weeks ago,
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: we talked about that.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that is an issue with you, I would imagine,
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: more because you're dealing with very specific structure and texts.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: And it's also something that you have this incredible deep
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: knowledge of. So there's probably no way you can remember
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: the specific instances in which you talked about it.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. It's an issue. But it's also, I think,
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: something that's kind of baked into the reason my channel
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: is so beneficial to a lot of people because... I
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: can repeat stuff over and over again because as my
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: audience grows, there are always new people who haven't been
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: exposed to a lot of things. So there are actually
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: a handful of things I kind of, not programmatically, but
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: every six months or so, I'll be like, yeah, it's
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: probably time to talk about this again. And then I
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: already have the foundation there. I can recall most of
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: what I said. But yeah, I do have to go
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: refresh my memory. What was that manuscript called? I got
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: to figure out, you know, translate that again, something like that.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: So it is both a blessing and a curse because
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: it means I can If I'm having a slow day,
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: can't think of something to talk about, maybe I just
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: recycle something I did six months ago. And there are
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: going to be thousands of people who hadn't seen it before.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: At least. Yeah, you have an enormous library. How many
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: videos have you put out, all told?
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: Around 4,000.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: Eee!
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: Which is, I see people who put out that many
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: podcast episodes.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: And I'm like, well, that's rarefied air.
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: I think we're at 2,600. Almost 2,900. Almost 2,900 plus.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Oh, it's including all the other ones.
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: Oh, is that including all of them? Yeah. So almost 3,000,
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: including Fight Companions. MMA podcasts, things of those like.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but that's two to three hours or more each too.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: Cooks the brain, Dan. I don't know if it's good.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: My memory is so weird. It's very good sometimes and
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: also terrible other times. And I think my hard drive
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: is overwhelmed.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: I'm the same way, particularly when I'm on the spot.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: I lose names like crazy. My kids were like, you
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: should try it for Jeopardy. And I got through the
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: first phase, and then they were like this, not like
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: an in-person thing, but a live online thing. And I
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: just froze up. Everything, I was like, I can see
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: his face. I know the dude inside. I can't remember
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: the name. I freeze up a lot.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: Do you do anything to enhance your memory in terms
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: of vitamins or nootropics? Or nootropics. I don't know how
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: to pronounce it.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: There is some research that is suggesting creatine might be
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: a little more helpful for brain function. So I actually,
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: I do 10 things. I don't even know if there's grams. Yeah,
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: 10 grams of creatine every day.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: Excellent.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Definitely, that's a choice that I've made. I try to
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: minimize all the different stuff I'm putting in my body,
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: but I have a slew of vitamins and things like
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: that that I'm taking in addition. I've got to get
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: the fiber because I'm of a certain age.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: That's debatable. Yeah, oddly enough. Yeah. I mean, I don't
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: know where I stand, honestly, because I take in fiber,
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: mostly in the form of fermented vegetables. I'm a big
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: kimchi fan.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: But there's quite a few people that have zero fiber
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: and that exist on a carnivore diet. And I think
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: a lot of these people are people with autoimmune issues
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: that tend to have problems with plant-based chemicals, like chemicals
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: that are in plants. And And then there's a real
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: problem with the American diet, which is glyphosate and herbicides.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of different herbicides and chemicals used in
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: industrial fertilizer that get into your food. And a lot
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: of people have extreme sensitivities to those things. Yeah. Perhaps
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: due to prolonged exposure. It's very difficult to parse out.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: You have to talk to a bunch of different people.
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: And a bunch of different people have like different takes
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: on it. But I know quite a few very healthy
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: people that don't eat any fiber. Yeah. They just eat
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: like eggs and chicken and meat and fish and that's it.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Well, for me, it was definitely, I noticed when I
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: took it, things were easier for me in the morning.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, for sure.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: And that was where I was like, okay, then done.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: That's what I'm going to do from here on out.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: There's a transitionary period. I did the carnivore diet strictly
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: once for 60 days. I've never done it for more
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: than that. But for 30 days when I did it,
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: the first four or five, the diarrhea, my friend Tom
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: Segura described it as remarkable.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: Breathtaking.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: It's just derping. It's like, what is happening to me?
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: But that settles down after a while. And then your
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: bowel movements are not as frequent, but very easy. It's
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: just like, bloop, it's like not much. And that's it
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: because there's no fiber. So it's like what is left
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: after you chew all the meat and swallow it. It's
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: like that stuff comes out in the wash and that's
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: a wrap. I'm not an expert in health and nutrition.
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: I'm not. Not either. I've absorbed a lot of information,
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: but some of it contradicts. It's very hard to know
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: who's right and who's wrong. And I think it's also,
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: it varies biologically. It varies genetically. It varies depending upon
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: where your ancestors are from. There's a lot of people
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: that I know that have real problems with red meat
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: and real problems with, you know, certain... Like, I have
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: friends that are vegan that exist healthy. They have no
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: problem with that diet. And then I know friends who've
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: tried it for ethical reasons and their health fell apart.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: And they're like, well, fuck it. I can't do this.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I've... The thing I try to pay attention to
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: is something called FODMAPS. I'm sorry. Have you heard of.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: No.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: It's... And now I don't even remember what it stands for,
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: the acronym. But basically, it's... There are certain kinds of.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Substances and foods the acronym is FODMAP, but they occur
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: a lot in breads and a lot of a lot
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: of things with a lot of carbohydrates in them, but
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: they There we.
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: Go Short-term three-step eating plan to temporary restrict specific poorly
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: absorbed sugars to help manage digestive distress like bloating gas
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: and abdominal pain So.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: I started noticing if I was eating certain things throughout
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: the day, I was a lot more bloated and uncomfortable
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: by the time night came around. And I did all
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: kinds of investigating. And I figured out when I was
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: avoiding things that are high in FODMAPs, I was just–
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: I felt better.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: And what was the word again, Jamie, when FOD's broken
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: down again? It is a– the word is fermentable– Boy, oligosaccharides, disaccharides,
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: and monosaccharides, and polys. Polyols. Polyols? Polyols? Short-chain carbohydrates and
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: sugar alcohols that small intestines absorb poorly. Huh. What's in
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: that category of those things?
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: That's what I was trying to get to a picture of.
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: Does it say?
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: I guess there's low and high.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: Uh-huh. Yeah, the more some things are higher in those
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: things and some things are lower. Yeah.
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: Suitable on a low FODMAP diet. Fruit, obviously, vegetables, cereals, milk, tofu,
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: and then the bad ones, excessive fructose, lactose, fructans, galactans? Hmm, legumes. Oh, wow,
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: you can't eat beans? How weird.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: Well, I think they're... that's the category. And then there
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: are certain members of that category that are high in
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: certain members of that category.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it has your baked beans, chickpeas, kidney beans, lentils, soybeans.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: And what I really noticed, there was one day I had,
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: we got a watermelon and I had like half of it.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: My wife's like, chill out, man. And I like, within
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: a couple hours, I was really, really gassy and bloated. Really?
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: From the watermelon? Yeah, and I was like, that has
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: to be the watermelon doing it Cause I haven't had
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: anything else out of the, out of the ordinary. And,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: and so I started looking at that. And so I'm
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: sensitive to that kind of stuff, but that's just my
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: own biological makeup. Some people are genetically gifted in other ways.
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: Well, it also depends on what you've done that day.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: Like if you've gone a long hike through the mountains
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: and you're exhausted, like high carbohydrates and high sugar diet,
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: Or a meal is actually good for you.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: There are times when I'm definitely craving it and I'm like,
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: got to listen to my body.
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: I think there's a reason. Yeah. Especially when you're worn out,
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: like hiking in particular. Like, you know, you think about
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: if you're at altitude and you do like a three
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: or four mile hike and you're climbing. At the end
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: of it, you're fucking spent. You have no sugar in
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: your body. You have a real issue. And your body
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: needs something to replenish your muscles.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I got plenty of fat stores so that when
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: I go out for my run, I can last a
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: little longer. But I run at altitude by Salt Lake, so.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: So whenever I travel elsewhere, like I go to San
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: Diego a couple times a year or I'm on the
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: East Coast or here, the altitude here is.
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: Not very high. No. I don't even think it's 1,000 feet.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: And I can run 10 times as far.
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: It's so nice. I enjoy running a lot more because
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: the lack of oxygen, it doesn't take it out of
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: me nearly as quickly.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: We have a hypoxia chamber in the studio.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Oh, really?
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we have a gym that's connected to the studio.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: And in the gym is this thing called a hypoxia.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: It's called a... I forgot the name of it. Exalt.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: Exalt XP is the company. I forget the name of this.
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: But this thing brings you to, you could vary the altitude.
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: And I put it at 14,000 feet. Oh, wow. So
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: I do these cardio workouts at 14,000 feet. They're very
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: specific depending upon what you're trying to do. Like there's
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: a VO. I killed myself yesterday because I do this
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: VO2 max one where you're doing four minutes of hard
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: cardio at 14,000 feet above sea level and then You
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: have like a two-minute recovery period, and then you get
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: back on it again. You do it again, and you
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: do a cycle of four of those, and it's fucking hell.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's pretty intense. I do the HIIT high-end intensity
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: interval training from time to time, but I don't have
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: the discipline to do it at 14,000 feet.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: It's not fun, but it has a giant impact though.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: So if you do go somewhere, like if I had
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: to go to Utah and I'm in the mountains, it's
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: a giant benefit.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Because I know I've seen people, they'll wear the
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: masks that are supposed to kind of reduce the oxygen.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: So it's a similar training. It's probably not as effective.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah. The mask thing is controversial. I don't know about that. Yeah.
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: There's some devices that you can use that actually strengthen
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: the diaphragm muscles and you breathe through them and you
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: do breathing exercises. But those restrictive masks, I don't know
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: about those. I would imagine they would have the same
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: similar function. It reduces the amount of oxygen you get.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: But they were a thing, the training mask. It was
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: a thing among MMA fighters for a while. They've all
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: abandoned it. At least most of them that I know.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: Maybe they got tired of it. Maybe it was too
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: hard already. What was that thing you brought in, that
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: big piece of pottery?
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so I brought in a couple of things. Show
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: and tell.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: Bust it out.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: So this is a gift for you.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: This is a replica. of my favorite artifact from the
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: ancient world. A friend of mine named Robert Algott runs
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: this website called relics3d. com, and he makes these. And this
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: is what's called the Kuntillidajrud.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: Can I take a guess as to where it came from?
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, go ahead. Turkey. No. No. Damn. It came from Kuntillidajrud,
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: oddly enough, which is down near the Sinai Peninsula.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: Oh, okay.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: And so this was a part of a large jar
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: called a pithos. And this is just one fragment of it. Well,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: it's a bunch of fragments that were brought together that
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: were discovered that dates to about 800 BCE. And it's
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: one of my favorite artifacts because we have an inscription
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: over top and then a drawing of a male and
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: a female deity. And the inscription talks about somebody asking
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: for or thanking somebody for blessings and by Adonai of Shomron,
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: or Jehovah of Samaria, the Lord of Samaria, and his Asherah.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: And so I think the majority of scholars agree this
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: is probably intended to reflect the interpretation of these two
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: deities as the God of Israel and God's wife, Asherah.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: Very weird looking.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, they kind of look almost bovine. And this
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: is probably because they're appealing to some iconographic motifs associated
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: with deities Bess and Besset, which are Egyptian deities that.
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: That appears bovine, do you?
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: Just the face a little bit. Like, the body's more anthropomorphic.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: Can you put an image of that on the screen, Jamie?
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: So we could maybe perhaps see a little... I've been
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: trying to figure out how.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: To spell that.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: I was trying to find the website.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: I can spell it for you. K-U-N-T... Damn it, hold on.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: That's K.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: Pause. Go ahead. I-L-L-E-T.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: I-L-L-E-T.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: And then the next word.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: I think I got it now.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: Okay. A-R-A-J-J-R-E-D. Mm-hmm.
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: And then like relic?
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: Inscription.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: There are actually a.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: Bunch of inscriptions.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: Now I see the bovine now. I'm looking at it.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: And there's the actual.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So this is.
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: Now I see it. It's hard to look at that thing.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: It looked almost like the. Go back to the other image. Yeah. Yeah.
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: I thought the lines, I thought the head was where
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: the mouth or the nose is. I thought that's what
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: the eyes and the other thing was like a crown
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: he was wearing. Yeah.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: Well, you've got the headdresses on top that are supposed
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: to indicate their deities.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: How fucking weird. It's all the old ancient depictions of deities.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: You're like, what were they doing? This, to me, is
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: the most fascinating thing about pretty much all religious texts.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: It's like, what was the original thing that they were
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: trying to document, whether it was through oral tradition, then
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: eventually written down? Like, what was the original event? That
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: fascinates me the most about the Bible. It fascinates me
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: the most about the ancient Sumerian writings. I'm just... I
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: don't think all of it is fiction, but I don't
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: think all of it is literal. I think you're also
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: dealing with an enormous amount of time between these events
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: and then the writing down. And then you've highlighted this
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: very much in some of your videos. There's a lot
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: of weirdness when you compare some of these stories, like
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: the story of Moses and Sargon of Akkad. They seem
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: incredibly similar, like almost too similar.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 17:01
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• 18:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there's definitely some kind of genetic relationship
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: between the two. And specifically, it's the story of him
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: as a baby being placed into a container and set
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: adrift in a river. That is Sargon the Great, who
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: dates to long before historical Moses. But that tradition, I
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: think the earliest version of it we've found in the
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: Akkadian literature, dates to maybe 9th or 8th century BCE,
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: which is around the time that people think that or
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: at least scholars think that the tradition of Moses and
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: the narrative of the Exodus was beginning to come together.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: So it makes sense that they would draw from that tradition.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: And I think there are a couple of different reasons
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: for it. One of the reasons is because that already
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: has some purchase in the zeitgeist. And so if you
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: kind of reflect something that people already are aware of,
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: it kind of makes it a little easier to incorporate
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: into their worldview. And then also it can also be
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: kind of a challenge to the other tradition. It's like, well,
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: you got your guy, we got ours. Our guy did
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: it better. And this is a lot of what's going
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: on with the representation of Jesus in the New Testament,
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: because there are certain turns of phrase, there are certain
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: things that Jesus does in the New Testament that reflect
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: what the Greco-Roman world expected from their emperors and their godmen.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: And so in the New Testament, it's kind of a
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: way to do both of those things, to say we
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: got one of those two, only ours did it better.
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: Oh, interesting.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: So I think one of the key things to keep
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: in mind is every text, whether it's a text that's
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: inscribed on a piece of pottery or something that wound
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: up in the Bible, every author wrote it down because
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: they wanted to achieve something. We tend to think of
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: language as just about communicating information, but nothing... happens in
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: a vacuum. It's all happening in circumstances, in context where
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: they're trying to achieve something. And so scholars go to
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: great lengths to try to figure out, well, what precisely
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: would have been achieved by writing this down or by
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: writing any of the texts in the Hebrew Bible or
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: in the New Testament? And the best way to figure
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: that out is to try to situate the composition within
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: whatever historical period makes the most sense, whatever we can
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: make the best case for and figure out how it
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: would have worked in that period, which is why there
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: are some texts that we think were intended as propaganda.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: There are texts that we think were intended to kind
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: of place one person struggling for power over another person
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: struggling for power. There's a lot of political propaganda going on.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: And then there are other texts that are intended to
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: try to make people feel better about why things aren't
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: going well for them, why bad things are happening to
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: good people and good things aren't happening to bad people.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: So there are tons of different reasons that people are
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: writing texts. But a good illustration of this is genre.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: So all texts have a genre of some kind. And
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: that's basically just a conventionalized set of things that are
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: in the text that help cue people to what kind
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: of text they're looking at. So if I start a
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: story once upon a time, you already know it's going
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: to be a specific type of text. So without even
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: knowing that you're aware of genre, you're aware of the
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: genre of a text. And if you found a piece
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: of paper in a parking lot and it said, dozen eggs,
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: pound of ground beef, you know, prophylaxis, stuff like that,
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: prophylactics actually would be the plural. you know you found
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: a grocery list, a shopping list. And so that's a
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: genre of text as well. So just by being aware
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: of these conventions, we can say, oh, well, I know
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: exactly what this text was trying to do because it
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: has all these markers of a given genre. And that's
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: a big cue to helping us figure out what texts
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: are trying to do. And when people wrote on pottery,
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: generally this was a little more ritual. This was something
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: that was intended to be like a votive offering, which
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: might be an offering to a deity so that the
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: deity will then bless you, or it might be something
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: that people are intended to come in and read out
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: loud so that they invoke the presence of the deity
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: in the space, and then the drawing the deity would
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: also be a way of doing that. So there are
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: a lot of different reasons for what's going on, and
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: that's the big mystery is what were they trying to accomplish.
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: And cattle worship was very common. It was Choctaw Hiyuk.
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: There was like the Hindus. There's a lot of cattle worship. Yeah.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: There are a lot of, there's worship of a lot
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: of different animals or the sacralization of a lot of
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: different animals in a lot of different places. And this
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: is probably drawing from Egyptian iconography. So yeah, this is,
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: the Sinai Peninsula is right in between Syria, Palestine, and Egypt.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: And there was an awful lot of Egyptian influence on things.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: So even if you look at, for instance, Hezekiah, there's
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: a bulla that was discovered, which is something that was
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: left from an impression, a signet ring or something like that,
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: that has the name Hezekiah on it. And there's an
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: Egyptian drawing of a winged, I think it's a winged
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: scarab or something like that, which is directly from Egypt
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: because Israel was under Egyptian hegemony for a long, long time.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: That's right next to her. Yeah.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: You were talking about Jesus and the New Testament and
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: that some of it seems to have been like the
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: way it was done to appease the people that lived
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: in the same era?
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, some of it was a way to, I think,
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: make people feel better about themselves. For instance, so the
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: texts were written long after Jesus was dead. The Gospels,
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: Mark was probably written 69, 70, 71-ish CE. Matthew's probably five,
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: 10 years after that. Luke's probably five, ten years or
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: more after that. John's a little after that. And at
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: this time period, there's already a following that is developing.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: And so the people who are writing these texts are
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: writing them for a literary audience, but they also want
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: them to speak to the experiences of the people who
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: are followers of Jesus. So, for instance, there's a part
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: where Jesus says, you know, I did not come to
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: bring peace, but a sword. And, you know, I will
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: set father against son and mother against daughter and all
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: this kind of stuff. And people have wondered, well, what
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: on earth is going on here? And there are scholars
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: who suggest that the point of that would have been
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: to make it sound like to people who are struggling
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: with inner family relationships. You know, I'm a follower of
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: Jesus now and I got kicked out of my house.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: Or I'm a follower of Jesus now and I constantly
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: fight with my wife or with my brother or something
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: like that. Am I doing something wrong? And this text
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: has Jesus saying, no, no. I came to cause that.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: So that means things are working. And that's a way
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: to make people feel, okay, well, then I'm okay because
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: I got kicked out of my parents' house or something
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: like that.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: But isn't that crazy, someone putting words into Jesus' mouth
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: just so that people of the time feel okay?
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: I think that's... probably an awful lot of what's going on.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: It's either to make them feel okay or to try
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: to push them to agree with living a certain way
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: or something like that, or try to make them feel
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: like this is what's coming up for us.
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: Which is a problem with taking everything literally and like
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: people deciding that all of it is the word of
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: God when some of it is just like, okay, would
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: God really tell you to do that? Like, why? Why
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: is God telling you to rape? Why is God telling
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: you to kill women and children? Yeah.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah. That's something that.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: Commanding you to. Yeah.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: And people have been struggling with that for the entire
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: history of the circulation of those texts. And I think
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: there are... Yeah. The word of God thing is interesting
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: because that phrase is never used anywhere in the Bible
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: to refer to texts specifically as the texts that are
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: in circulation. So word of God is always a reference
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: to just the message. However, it's circulating, whether it's oral
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: or whatever, or to Jesus in the new Testament, Jesus
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: is the word, but it's never used to refer to
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: a specific textual manifestation of the message. And so there's a,
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: there's not really a case to make that any author
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: of any Texas in the Bible use that phrase to
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: refer to the scriptures or the Bible. And so even
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: in 1 Corinthians and a couple of places in Paul,
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: he says, this is not coming from the Lord. This
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: is just coming from me. And then we take it
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: and say, okay, wink, wink, we know what you mean.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: This is coming from the Lord.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: Paul's a weird one. The more I get into Paul,
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: the more I'm like, this guy, first of all, killed
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: a bunch of Christians, right? Lit churches on fire, at
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: least ordered the death of Christians.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, according to what he said.
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: And then says... He met Jesus in a vision. And
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: then all this stuff written down, he also says that
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: a lot of it is coming from him, but we
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: attribute it to Jesus. It gets super squirrely when you
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: start reading Paul. You're like, who? What?
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: He never even met him?
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: 20 years later, he's writing all this?
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: And there are a couple of different stories about how
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: exactly he did meet him. What are the different ones?
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: There's the road to Damascus.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, it's the vision, but it's told in a
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: couple of different ways. You've got a couple of tellings
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: of the story in Acts and in the Pauline literature.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: And it really has to do with who heard a
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: voice or saw something or anything like that. There are
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: minor differences, but there are still some differences. But I
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: think it's really interesting. A lot of people treat all
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: the Pauline texts as... as equally one inspired and two
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: from Paul, but scholars are in pretty widespread agreement that
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: there are several of those texts that weren't written by Paul.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: They were written decades after he was dead. Really? Yeah,
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: so 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus are called the
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: pastoral epistles, and they are widely agreed to have been
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: written toward the end of the 1st century or beginning
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: of the 2nd century, maybe 30 years after Paul was
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: dead or more.
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: Oh, how complicated.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: And then you've got Colossians... Second Thessalonians and Ephesians are
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: a little more debated, but it's, there is a good
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: solid core of scholars who would argue that they were
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: not written by Paul. And one of the things, one
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: of the interesting things that happens when you divide up
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: the letters between the genuine Pauline epistles and then what
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: are called the disputed and then the spurious Pauline epistles
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: is Paul's message in the genuine Pauline epistles is different
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: from the message in the, in the others. And for instance,
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: in the genuine Pauline epistles, Paul was like, you know,
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: Jesus is coming back any day now. So don't change
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: your situation in life. Don't get married if you're not married.
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: If you're married, don't get divorced. And he suggests that
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: everybody should be celibate. And unless you just can't hack celibacy,
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: in which case.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: Even while married? Because you're waiting for Jesus to return.
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: Because in this time period, I think Paul fancied himself
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: a philosopher. but he's kind of cobbling together a bunch
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: of different philosophical movements.
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: Where have we heard that before?
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: Where have we heard that before? Somebody fancied themselves a philosopher?
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: Well, cobbling together things from different.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. That's how everybody does it.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: Every guru of today.
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. But it's... the time, sexual desire was thought
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: of as something that was part of the baser urges
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: of the flesh. And if you could overcome that, then
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: you obviously were.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: A real one. Which is why Roman statues had little penises. Yeah.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: I'm sure that's the main reason.
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's supposedly what it was. Really? Yeah. I had
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: a wonderful guide when I did a tour of the Vatican.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: This guy who was a university professor who he moonlights,
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: you know, makes extra money in the summertime as a guide.
• 30:12
  Speaker 2: And he took us on this tour. And this guy
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: was fantastic. And he loved that I was so into it.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: So we had this great conversation.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: Nice.
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: And eventually I had to get to little dicks. I'm like,
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: why are these guys? They have these incredible bodies, but
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: they have these tiny penises. And he explained that it
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: was like, it was gauche. Like you didn't want to
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: have a big, giant dick. A big, giant dick was
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: like a symbol of like a brutish, barbarian type person.
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: That it was better to depict these gods with tiny penises.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: And then eventually they started covering them with leaves. Yeah, yeah.
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: Well, and the early... Greek and Roman gods, you know,
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: they kind of went to town with the sexual stuff.
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: Well, it seems like they were getting their freak on
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: quite a bit, those people.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: In a lot of different ways and with a lot
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: of different species. But anyway, Paul was, he suggests that, yeah,
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: even married folks should just avoid it. And we see
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: this in Matthew as well. There's a part in Matthew
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: in 19 when he's talking about divorce and then his
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: followers are like, it would be better for somebody not
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: to get married. And then he goes, hey, man, there
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: are those who are born eunuchs, there are those who
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: are made eunuchs by men, and then there are those
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. And
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: he says, that's a difficult saying, but for those who
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: can accept it, they should accept it. Basically saying, you know,
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: the higher law is to be celibate because they thought
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: Jesus was coming back so soon that having a kid
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: would be a waste of time. And so there was
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: no other reason for intercourse, really. And so the idea was, okay,
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: be celibate. And Paul says, you know, if you can't
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: hack it, then go ahead and have occasional sex with
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: your spouse. But it should be basically for keeping down
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: the urges. Because if trying to remain celibate is just
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: driving you nuts, the risk that you might engage in
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: some kind of sexual immorality is so great that you
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: need to have that little valve to.
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: Keep down the urges.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: Imagine if you're on death's door and you listen to
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: him and you decide to stay celibate. And you're like,
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: Jesus didn't even come back. What all the sex I missed.
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: Well, and you kind of see, yeah, that would certainly
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: be on the list of regrets.
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: This is the problem with not just, you know, biblical,
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: but contemporary people that claim to know what's happening. We're
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: all lost in this weird world that we're living in.
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: Where there's so much uncertainty and there's so many different
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: versions of truth in terms of like the origin of
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: mankind and the universe. And we want someone to come
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: along and say, I know, I know. And it's so
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: compelling when someone does, when they say it with authority,
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: when they say it with confidence, it's like, oh, finally,
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: a guy who knows. And this is how all cults
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: get started. This is how everything, you know, I mean,
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: this is how a lot of political leaders wind up
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: taking control. It's like someone who pretends to know and
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: has this deep understanding that's far beyond anything you're ever
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: going to have. Trust me, you got to stay celibate.
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: Jesus is on the way.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And that didn't really work out.
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: It never works out. They're never right, which is so
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: crazy that people keep listening to them.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: And this is one of the things that scholars see
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: when they separate out the genuine Pauline epistles from the
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: later ones, because in the later ones, you have Paul
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: saying stuff like, oh, There's going to be a delay.
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: Jesus is stuck in traffic.
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And this is because it's written by folks
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: who are, you know, they're decades down the road. Now
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: it's like if we don't have kids, our movement is
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: dying out. Right. So we kind of got to have kids.
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: And so you've got one of these spurious Pauline epistles
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: that say women will be saved in childbearing. So now
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: it's like your salvation is dependent on you having kids,
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: even though the real Paul was like, put it away.
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: Now we're living celibate lives now. And so you have,
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: and this pops up in Matthew as well, and elsewhere,
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: where we've got this, what they call delay of the parousia,
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: or the second coming. We expected it any day now.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: Turns out it might be a little longer. Traffic's bad. And,
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: you know, you have this man of sin that's supposed
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: to show up or they're supposed to be this falling
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: away or there's supposed to be something that gets in
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: the way. And that causes a delay in Jesus's return
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: and 2000 years down the road. We're still wondering when
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: that delay is going to.
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: So we get to the oldest stuff. We get to like,
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: like the Old Testament. Like if we get to Genesis,
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: what are the, what are the oldest versions of that story?
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: Is it the Enuma Elish?
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: So there are a bunch of different versions of Enuma Elish,
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: but we probably go back to Sumerian stuff because you
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: actually have a— we have these king lists from long, long
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: ago written in Sumerian. There's no flood story yet in
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: these king lists, but they talk about these kings that
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: reigned for 10,000 years at a time.
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: What's your take on all that?
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: My take on all that? These are traditions. You see
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: a lot of different traditions that developed. in the ancient
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: world to account for how creation happened. The weirdest one
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: has got to be, there's an Egyptian one where the
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: head god masturbated all of existence. So that's a great
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: one for some bedtime reading. It's pretty short, but these
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: texts are intended to serve purposes for these authors long,
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: long ago. And this is when writing is just starting
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: to come to be. And so it hadn't been around
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: for a very long time. You don't have a lot
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: of mythical narratives and things like that, but you have
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: these poems that tell stories and that talk about the
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: reign of kings and that's political propaganda.
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: But the king's list, the weird thing about the king's
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: list is the older ones are the ones that live forever.
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: They live enormous lifespans. And then when it gets to
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: not closer to contemporary times.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, their rules become less and less until they're more human.
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: And the same thing is in Genesis. And it happens
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: in the later versions of the story. They go from 10,000
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: years to just a few thousand years. But in one
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: of the secondary versions of the king list, suddenly there's
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: a flood that happens.
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: Secondary version.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's something that's added to the king list.
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: It's not in our oldest king list.
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: Do we know when that was added?
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: No.
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: Roughly?
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: We probably have a rough estimate of the date. I
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: don't remember off the top of my head. It's probably
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: somewhere in the early third millennium BCE. So maybe somewhere
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: mid-2000s BCE.
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: I don't remember exactly. So it's probably contemporary to the
• 37:04
  Speaker 2: oral traditions of Genesis?
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: So I think the oral traditions of Genesis actually are
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: much later than that.
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: Really? Yeah.
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: Because Genesis was probably written between around the 8th century
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: BCE down to the 5th century BCE. And a lot
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: of it is riffing on the literature that's circulating within
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: Babylon during the exile. Or it's literature that's circulating within
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: Assyria when Assyria is beaten up on Israel. And so,
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: for instance, the Tower of Babel. That's a famous story
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: from Genesis. There's a tower called the Tower of Etemenanchi.
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: that is just outside of Babylon, that was famous because
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: it was built by, I want to say old Babylonian.
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: Don't quote me on that though. But it was later
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: destroyed when the Assyrians came in to take over. They
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: kind of decommissioned it and destroyed it partly. And then
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: for like 80 years, another Assyrian emperor had a restoration project,
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: was trying to rebuild the tower, but it took forever.
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: It took like 80 years. And that was right in
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: the eighth century. And so there are a lot of
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: scholars who suggest that the story of this tower that
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: was supposed to be built to heaven that was left
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: unfinished is a reflection of the unfinished tower of Atamananki.
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: And so that would put it in the right date.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: And there's also this problem when we look at historical
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: narratives in the Hebrew Bible. They're written in ancient Hebrew.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: and a somewhat developed form of ancient Hebrew. And we
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: can chart the developments of the Semitic languages fairly well.
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: And there's no historical narrative prose in any alphabetic script,
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: any language that was written in an alphabetic script until
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: the middle of the 9th century BCE. And that first
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: happens in like Moabites and Aramaic and some other languages
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: like that. And so most likely... Our ancient narrative prose
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: in biblical Hebrew was written around that time or shortly after.
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: And the stuff that's older than that is written in poetry.
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: And so the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible are
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: not the creation account in Genesis. There are some poems
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: that we find in like Judges 5. So this is
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: a fascinating story about... Deborah, the general who goes and
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: defeats Sisera. And we have stories in Exodus 15, the
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: Song of the Sea. Some scholars think that's a very,
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: very old poem. which is basically a shortened version of
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: the Exodus story. And then Genesis 49 has some blessings
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: that Jacob gives to his children that might be really,
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: really old. And Psalm 68, there are a handful of
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: poems that may go back to around 1000 BC. So
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: when Genesis is talking about the things that we think
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: are related to Enuma Elish, the closest connections are actually
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: two versions of that story that were in circulation in
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: Babylon around 600 BCE. So that's probably where Genesis is
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: getting that from, not directly from Sumerian tablets, not directly
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: from oral traditions that are a thousand years older. The
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: scholars who are looking at that, I think have made
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: a good case that the closest connections are eighth to
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: sixth century BCE. That's probably where the traditions that were
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: recorded in Genesis were mainly borrowed or mainly adopted and
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: adapted to serve the interests of the Judeans who were
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: around in that time period.
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: So what is the oldest creation story that we're aware of?
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: I think it's probably got to be an Egyptian one,
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: or it's either Sumerian or Egyptian. That's the two places
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: where writing was invented. And I would have to go
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: back and look. There's a wonderful set of texts called
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: The Contexts of Scripture, a three-volume set published by this
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: very expensive publisher called Brill, that they have translations of
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: all of the texts that we have from ancient Egypt,
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: from ancient Anatolia, from ancient Assyria, Babylon, from the cultures
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: of ancient Canaan that are not in the Bible. And
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: so they have one of the volumes, the first third
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: of it is creation accounts.
• 41:32
  Speaker 2: And so.
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: It may be the masturbation one. I can't say for sure.
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: I don't remember off the top of my head.
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: I hope that's not the OG. It could be. It
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: could be. Well, the Egyptian language by itself is very bizarre.
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: It kind of emerges out of nowhere. Like hieroglyphs emerge
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: sort of fully formed.
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: There's a development in the way hieroglyphs are used. But
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: we first start seeing inscriptions popping up, like monumental inscriptions.
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: Like most of the early writing probably took place on
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: materials that deteriorated really quickly. And so what we have
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: is the stuff that was written in stone, which is
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: where like the language has got to be a little
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: more developed for us to start, you know, taking all
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: day to inscribe something in stone. So I think there's...
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: I don't think there's a good case to make that
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: it just popped out of nowhere. Like the ancient alien
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: stuff is fun, but we don't have a lot of
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: evidence that gets us to that being really even a
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: plausible solution to the problem. There is definitely a mystery
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: about why in similar time periods people in different parts
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: of the world came up with very similar ideas all
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: at the same time that might have something to do
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: with the evolution of the brain or something like that.
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: It's also, we're probably underestimating the amount of travel people
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: were capable of doing back then.
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so. I think so. But the writing
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: tent seems to develop from receipts or from counting. You
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: counted up stuff and this is your receipt for how
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: many goats you bought or whatever. And so as, As
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: your needs develop and your economy is growing, I think
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: you begin to develop labels for things. You begin to
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: develop characters for things. And then it goes from there.
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: There are a bunch of really good academic discussions about
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: the origins of language and the origins of the alphabet.
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: And even the stuff that we see, ancient Hebrew ultimately
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: derives from Egyptian.
• 43:44
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, in the Sinai. That is where we have some
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: inscriptions from around 1700 to 1900 BCE where they look
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: like Egyptian hieroglyphs, but they're not doing what Egyptian hieroglyphs
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: do because they are either syllabic or ideographic or logographic
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: where one sign represents a syllable, so a consonant and
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: a vowel, or one sign represents a word or one
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: sign represents an idea. And they change them. so that
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: each sign represents just a single sound. And the sound
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: is whatever sound is at the start of the word
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: that the symbol represents. So, for instance, the word for house, bait,
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: and that starts with a buh. And so if you
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: drew a house, that meant the buh sound. And this
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: is the development of the alphabets, because to learn ancient Egyptian,
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: you had to memorize hundreds and hundreds of signs. And
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: to learn Sumerian or... Akkadian or something like that, hundreds
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: of signs. But an alphabet is 22 to 30 letters.
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: So it's a lot easier to memorize. And then that becomes,
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: that gets taken to Phoenicia. And from Phoenicia, it gets
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: spread all over the place. And so apart from Hangul,
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: which is the Korean script, I think virtually every other
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: alphabet on earth is descended from the Phoenician.
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: Well, the Korean script is fairly recent, right?
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, fairly recent. And they take a few different
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: symbols and they group them together to create syllables. But
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: each symbol on its own represents a sound very similar
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: to the way our alphabet works.
• 45:27
  Speaker 2: I don't know much about Korean, but I've heard it
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: described as the most complete language. Like it's the most
• 45:33
  Speaker 2: structurally logic, logical language.
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: There are ways that I think it is. There are
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: other ways that a language like Russian might be more systematic,
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: or even ways like ancient Latin might be more systematic.
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: So when you started learning religion, we start studying religion,
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: did you start studying languages concurrently? How did you do it?
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: So I joined the LDS Church when I was 20
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: years old. And a year later, I went to serve
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: a two-year proselytizing mission in Uruguay. And I fell in
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: love with studying the Bible. when I was doing that.
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: I love the stories. I love learning about the history,
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: the culture, and I wanted to better understand the languages
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: so I could try to engage the texts as they
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: were originally written. So I tried to start teaching myself
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: Hebrew when I was down there. I didn't have a
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: ton of time, and I wasn't very good at it.
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: It's a task. Yeah, it's a tall order. And when
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: I came home, I found out that you could get
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: a degree in biblical studies and be a Bible scholar,
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: and I was like, that would be about the coolest thing.
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: career in the world for me. And so I went
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: to school to do that. I wanted to learn ancient Hebrew.
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: I wanted to learn ancient Greek. I wanted to learn
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: about the literature. I wanted to learn about the history.
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: I wanted to learn about the archaeology. And so I
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: started off not really having a narrow focus, but just
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: I want to try and get as much of it
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: in as I could. And over the course of getting
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: these degrees, you kind of have to narrow your focus
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: on stuff. And so as I progressed, I decided I
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: wanted to learn not only what was going on with
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: the languages, but I wanted to focus on how people
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: thought about God and gods. And so my PhD is
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: actually using biblical studies and then something called the cognitive
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: science of religion to put those two together to try
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: to figure out what we can know about how the
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: authors of the Hebrew Bible would have thought about and
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: interacted with gods as they understood them. And that's using
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: a lot of experimental research on living informants, so interviews
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: and experiments and things like that to figure out how
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: the brain works and how we come up with ideas
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: about deities, ideas about rituals, ideas about religious identity and
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: stuff like that. So I find that fascinating. So I
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: would say my main focus is now on conceptualizations of deity,
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: of scripture, and religious identity. And cognitive science of religion
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: is one of the main tools that I use. But
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: But yeah, it all started with having to learn the languages.
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: What such an enormous field of study.
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: There is so much to learn, especially when you're talking
• 48:17
  Speaker 2: about these different translations and different languages, which is what
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: I've always felt like is the weirdest part about all
• 48:24
  Speaker 2: this is it's very difficult to translate languages to something
• 48:29
  Speaker 2: that makes sense in whatever language you're currently using. Like
• 48:33
  Speaker 2: there's certain concepts that we use that if you tried
• 48:36
  Speaker 2: to use them You know, and if you try to, like,
• 48:40
  Speaker 2: I'm sure you've seen Russian translated to English. And you're like,
• 48:44
  Speaker 2: what are they even, what are they saying? It gets weird. Yeah.
• 48:49
  Speaker 2: Because it's not, languages aren't, it's not direct. It's not like, oh,
• 48:55
  Speaker 2: this is their word for cow. This is their word
• 48:57
  Speaker 2: for drive. This is their word for truck. Oh, the
• 48:59
  Speaker 2: cow drove a truck. It's not that simple. It's dependent.
• 49:03
  Speaker 2: Like the way they talk about things is very different.
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: The way to describe time is very different.
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. And that when you get into more minority languages,
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: languages that are spoken in tiny little islands like Yap
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: or Kiribati or something like that, it can get very,
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: very alien to someone who has only spoken English their
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: entire life. Because learning Spanish, there are ways it's difficult.
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: Learning any language is difficult. And there are But there
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: are a lot of ways that is very, very close
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: to English, including even some of the words sound very,
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: very similar. But there are other languages that you learn
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: that are just, yeah, you have to restructure how you
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: are thinking about things and how you communicate things. And
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: it's not just like in German, oh, you got to
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: put all the verbs at the end. There are very,
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: very different ways to go about.
• 49:56
  Speaker 2: So how complicated is that when you're reading an English
• 50:00
  Speaker 2: translation of the Bible? Like that's when things must get
• 50:04
  Speaker 2: very strange if you're, especially Old Testament, right? Yeah. Or
• 50:09
  Speaker 2: even crazier, Dead Sea Scrolls, right? So you're going Aramaic
• 50:13
  Speaker 2: to English.
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a lot of people think that it's a
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: simple matter translating from ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek into English.
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: And they imagine that because they have an English translation, they,
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: you know, have all the insights they need. And this
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: is why a lot of people will go out and
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: they'll get an interlinear or they'll go on a website
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: that provides, you know, the Hebrew to English or something
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: like that. And imagine that they now understand when the
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: reality is that there is a lot more under the
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: hood of that relationship between the Hebrew and the English
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: translation that they don't have any idea about. And so
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: there's a saying that somebody who, you know, goes online
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: and uses an interlinear or something like that, they know
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: just enough Greek to be dangerous. Meaning they imagine that
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: they know a lot more than they do. And when
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: they go out and try to use that knowledge to
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: try to go make videos on social media or something
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: like that, they end up stepping in it because they
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: really don't know what they're talking about. Or the main
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: reason I'm on social media and the main thing I'm
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: trying to combat, they will spread misinformation. Right. Falsehoods that
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: other people are going to eat up because they might
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: have a platform with millions of followers.
• 51:24
  Speaker 2: That sounds like me. Yeah.
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: I won't say too much about the misinformation, but yeah, no,
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: there's a lot of it out there. I try not
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: to be someone who does that because I can't be a.
• 51:37
  Speaker 2: No, you're really good at it. You're very good at
• 51:40
  Speaker 2: breaking down where things go wrong with translations as well.
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: Well, I appreciate that. And I can't be a specialist
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: in all things, which is why I rely on the
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: consensus of the academic world so much.
• 51:50
  Speaker 2: Do you speak ancient Hebrew? Can you read it?
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: Nobody speaks ancient Hebrew. Oh, really? It's not a spoken language. Obviously,
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: modern Hebrew is spoken. Right. But it's not a language
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: that anyone would ever grow up learning by speaking with
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: their mother.
• 52:05
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• 52:48
  Speaker 1: Is there a way to learn how to speak? Or
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: is it open to interpretation? Yeah, you have to reconstruct
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: some stuff. And so there are absolutely, like, speakers of
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: modern Hebrew can look at a text and read it
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: perfectly fluently. To understand it, they have to have a
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: knowledge of the difference between modern Hebrew and ancient Hebrew.
• 53:08
  Speaker 2: But they're saying it the correct way? Mostly.
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: There are some differences in the way they pronounce things
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: anciently from the way they pronounce things now.
• 53:17
  Speaker 2: Today.
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: But most scholars who are looking at the biblical Hebrew,
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: ancient Hebrew, are going to adopt a modern pronunciation system.
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: So there are absolutely scholars out there who advocate for
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: or have a reconstructed way of pronouncing ancient Hebrew. But
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: for the most part, if I go to a conference
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: and I read a text in Hebrew, I'm going to
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: use something approximating a modern Hebrew pronunciation. And I'm not
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: awesome at it, but, you know, someone who speaks modern
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: Hebrew should understand what, what I'm saying. Uh, but I,
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: I read it fairly well. It's been a while since, uh,
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: I've been, I've got a translation of the Hebrew Bible. I'm,
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: I'm working on them. Uh, I haven't been able to
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: touch it for, uh, almost two years now. So, uh, my,
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: my Hebrew ebbs and flows depending on how frequently I'm
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: in the texts working on translation and stuff like that. But,
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: but yeah, I've got, I'm better at Hebrew than I
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: am at Greek. But there are a handful of languages
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: we have to get some competency in to do this.
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: Aramaic is one of them. Another fun one is called Ugaritic,
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: which is considered somewhat of a precursor to Hebrew. It
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: was spoken a little further north on the Syrian coast.
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: You've never heard of Ugaritic?
• 54:30
  Speaker 2: No.
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: This is a fascinating story. 1929, a guy is plowing
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: a field along the coast of Syria, and he hits
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: a big rock that he can't move. And he digs
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: it up. and basically discovers an entire ancient city. Calls
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: out the archaeologists, they all come descend on this field,
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: and they discover the ancient city of Ugarit, which we
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: knew from some texts that referred to this city called Ugarit.
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: And they found around a thousand or so texts, but
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: nobody recognized the language because it was written in cuneiform,
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: but there were only 30 cuneiform signs. So that means
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: it's got to be alphabetic and not the other way
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: they use cuneiform signs. And they decided, okay, the most
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: common Semitic consonant is mem, the equivalent of our M.
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: And they said, so let's take the most common sign
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: that we see and let's designate that mem. And then
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: let's look at all the two letter words. And there
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: are only a handful of words that can be two
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: letters and have the mem in one position or another.
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: And let's try to decode from there. This language. And
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: now we have, we've decoded Ugaritic. And now we, a
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: lot of people who go and learn biblical Hebrew and
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: Aramaic will also learn Ugaritic because some of these mythical
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: texts mention things that are in the Bible. And so
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: they talk about deities like El and Baal and Asherah.
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: And so Asherah, the one right there. So, and there
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: are some things that are in there that help us
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: better understand biblical Hebrew. There are some things that are
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: in there that help us understand some of the cultic
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: rituals that would go on in relation to El and
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: Baal and Asherah. And there's one text that's almost directly
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: quoted in the Bible. And the thing is, Ugarit was
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: destroyed around 1200 BCE, so with what's called the Late
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: Bronze Age Collapse. And there's a wonderful book by Eric Klein,
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: 1177 BCE. Have you ever heard that book title?
• 56:36
  Speaker 2: No.
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: Phenomenal book on how the late Bronze Age collapse happened.
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: So the destruction of Ugarit happens before the invention of Hebrew.
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: So Hebrew didn't even exist in this time period. But
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: this helps us recover what the languages that were being
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: spoken in that region were like as Hebrew began to develop.
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: But there's a passage, there's a reference to Baal is
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: fighting a deity named Mot, and Mot means death. So
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: this is the god of death that's fighting Baal, who
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: is the the storm god. And Mote is like, I
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: know you won some battles in the past. You're going
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: to lose this one. But he says, I know you
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: slew Lotan, which is the Ugaritic version of Leviathan, the
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: wriggling serpent, the twisting serpent, the dragon with seven heads.
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: And what's funny is in Isaiah 27.1, we have Isaiah
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: talking about Adonai, the God of Israel, and says, on
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: that day, so now it's off in the future, on
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: that day, you will strike Leviathan, the wriggling serpent, Leviathan,
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: the twisting serpent, the dragon that lives in the sea.
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: And the words for wriggling and twisting serpent are identical
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: to the Ugaritic. And Lotan and Leviathan are both the
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: same word, just in two different languages. And so this
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: passage in Isaiah was probably written somewhere before 700 BCE,
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: but that's coming 500 years after. the Ugaritic text that
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: says almost the exact same thing.
• 58:09
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: So it's not that Isaiah had access to this text
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: and was quoting it, but it was probably kind of
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: a poetic saying that was just transmitted all around the area.
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: And at some point, Isaiah decided to write it down.
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: And while the Ugaritic one makes reference to seven heads,
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: Isaiah doesn't say anything about seven heads. But we do
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: have in Psalm 74 a reference to Leviathan's multiple heads,
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: that God crushed the heads of Leviathan and the seven-headed
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: serpent dragon is kind of a pretty common motif in
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: that time period. Just recently in Tel Hatzor in a
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: little north in Israel, they discovered a little inscription with
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: a drawing that shows a warrior fighting a seven-headed serpent
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: dragon beast. So the Ugaritic literature, helps us an awful
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: lot with understanding what was going on before the Bible happened,
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: but also helps us better understand the Hebrew of the Bible.
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: and also the relationship of these gods to one another.
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: And yeah, the tradition that was inherited by the Israelites
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: and then how they engaged with it as they passed
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: it on down the line historically.
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: Why so many references to dragons? So they didn't have
• 59:28
  Speaker 2: a word for lizard, right? And they didn't have a
• 59:30
  Speaker 2: word for reptile. And dinosaurs. That was very contemporary. Just
• 59:36
  Speaker 2: even the description of it in that way. But the
• 59:40
  Speaker 2: term dragon referred to all of these scaly beasts, right?
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was all of them. Crocodiles. A crocodile, yeah.
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: It was a sea monster. The thing is they were
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: very conscious of.
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: The ever-present threat of chaos, and particularly on the waters.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: So the land was safe, the waters were dangerous. Right.
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: And the chaos of the waters became kind of personified
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: as a deity who could be represented as a dragon,
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: just because that's where the sea monsters live. That's where
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: the giant fish and the alligators and stuff like that.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: And so you get traditions that develop about the monster
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: that lives in the sea. And then our God tames
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: that monster as a way to show that our God
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: has power over chaos. Our God can bring order to chaos.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: And you talked about creation stories earlier. A lot of
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: the original creation stories were mainly about overcoming the chaos
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: to create order. Order is what allows us to live
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: in harmony. Order is what allows civilization to develop. order
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: is what we're going for. So God is the one
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: that brings that order. And so the battle between chaos
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: and order becomes a battle between a dragon and our deity,
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: who is a warrior, who is going to protect us.
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 2: How much of these stories do you think the way
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 2: they're compiled is to give structure to civilization and to
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 2: establish rules in order for people to live together harmoniously?
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 2: Like older, wiser people realize like these These folks have
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 2: to have something to believe in. One of the best
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 2: ways to get a hold of this is say someone's
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 2: watching all the time. Eye in the sky.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you touched on a couple of different things because
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: the something someone's watching all the time is definitely a
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: central feature of how scholars think that religion dominated the
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: development of civilization. And there's a wonderful book by a
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: scholar named Ara Norin Sayan called Big Gods. which is
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: all about this. But the idea there is that gods
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: develop in a variety of different ways, but it's rooted
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: in the fact that our minds, because evolution has conditioned
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: us to be very sensitive to the presence of agents
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: and agency in the world around us. Anciently, the primate
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: that interpreted the rustling in the bushes as something that
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: might have teeth rather than as just the wind survived longer.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: than the one who didn't. And so our minds became very,
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: very sensitive to the presence of agency in the world
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: around us. And so anyone who's ever watched a horror
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: movie and then has gone up the bed, the basement
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: stairs and a little quicker than normal, or, you know,
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: you don't close your eyes at night because you feel
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: like there's something there that is a product of this
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: evolutionarily installed sensitivity to agency. And, um, as this kind
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: of plays out through human sociality, we curate relationships with
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: deceased relatives. We interpret certain events as the work of
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: some kind of entity that we can't see, whether an
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: animal or something more human like that. And one of
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: the things that interactions with these entities then allows us
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: to do is it allows us to suggests there is
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: an eye in the sky. There is someone out there
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: who is, the phrase is covertly monitoring us. And once
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: you become in charge of the relationship between the people
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: and the covert monitor, you then have an awful lot
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: of power to say, well, it turns out we're all
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: supposed to do this. And the deity is watching us.
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: And anybody who is not doing this is going to
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: be punished by the deity. And that exerts a lot
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: of influence over people, but it also allows societies to
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: grow and get larger and more complex without descending into
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: chaos because we have kind of this social superstructure that
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: allows us to trust other people that we may not know.
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: This is one of the weird things about human evolution
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: is if you're in a family, you know your family,
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: your kin, important to you and so you can cooperate
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: with your kin but if you happen to run into
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: somebody that you don't know you have no idea if
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: they're gonna kill you or what and as societies grow
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: beyond kinship units you need signs and signals to be
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: able to let other people know that you you're okay
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: we're a part of the same social group we can
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: trust each other and so These days, you know, it's
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: things like shaking somebody's hand might be a way to
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: do that. Wearing a cross. Wearing a cross is a
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: way to— it' s called costly signaling. It's a way to incur
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: some kind of cost in order to signal to others
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: that you are part of the in-group. But these rituals
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: go far beyond religious things, just even secularly. There are
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: a lot of things that we expect— In a normal
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: interaction with a stranger.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 2: You expect certain things. Good morning. Good morning. How are
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 2: you doing?
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: Shaking of the hand. I'm looking you in the eye.
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: I'm doing all the things to let you know that
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: I can be trusted. And so that's kind of an
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: outcome of just being a part of a human society.
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: And gods, these covert monitors, are very effective rule setters,
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: only they're not there to directly set the rules. Somebody
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: has to mediate between the deity and the people. And
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: that's where we get religious experts and we get priests
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: and things like that. And so so, you know, it
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: would be the elders in very, very archaic human societies
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: who would be the ones to say this. These are
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: the stories that we're going to tell that we're going
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: to share so that our kids grow up adopting these
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: expectations about about how they live their life and who
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: the good guys are and who the bad guys are.
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: And that's one of the big problems in this. is
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: that empathy is something that we develop in human evolution,
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: but empathy frequently only goes so far. There's frequently a
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: boundary to empathy, and that's called parochial empathy. I'm very
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: empathetic for anyone in my in-group. Their pain is my pain.
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: I see that pain. I feel that pain. And then
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: somebody who I perceive to be the other, frequently I'm
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: not going to have any empathy for. In fact, it
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: may make me feel good.
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 2: Which is very convenient during war.
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Yeah, and that's one of the... One of the
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: reasons that empathy, you know, we hear a lot about
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: toxic empathy these days, or at least I do because
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: the algorithm hates me. But the idea that we shouldn't
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: extend our empathy beyond a particular in-group boundary is the
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: most toxic kind of empathy. Because that is the empathy
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: that others, someone else, and says, no, I care about
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: my people and I dislike others. or am apathetic to
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: someone who's not part of the in-group.
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 2: It's so weird because that extends to, well, in this
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 2: country particularly, it extends to ideologies and politics. Yeah. And
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 2: to the point where left versus right, one is the enemy,
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 2: depending on which side you're on, and they need to
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 2: be eliminated.
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and the more you can dehumanize them and other
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: them and make it seem like they are just so
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: alien and so corrupt... The more you can do that,
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: the easier it is to justify not just treating them bad,
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: not just voting for the other guy, but even imprisoning them.
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 2: Or celebrating their death, like Charlie Kirk.
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a wonderful example. Something just atrocious that happened.
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: Nobody deserves that kind of treatment. Your town. But a
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: little south of my town.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 2: Not your fault.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: I was actually on the golf course and I got
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: a text from somebody when that happened. And I just,
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: I got a chill. But yeah, this is one of
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: the outcomes of just being human, is that we tend
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: to draw a line around those who congregate around the
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: social identities that are most important to us. And that's
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: what politics is frequently trying to exploit. And that's why
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: the more we can paint somebody on the other side
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: of the aisle as so other as to be evil
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: and even not human, the easier it is to justify
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: torturing them, killing them, a genocide, the easier that becomes.
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: And so that's So I think of toxic empathy as
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: parochial empathy rather than the global empathy that I think
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: we should all be striving for, which is a phenomenally
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: difficult thing to do and it's phenomenally complex. But yeah,
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: the more we can humanize people, I think the more
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: we can learn to get along. That's what allowed human
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: civilization to flourish. In fact, I'll share one more detail
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: about this. Have you ever heard of Shanidar 1?
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 2: I think so.
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: So it's an ancient Neanderthal remains. It's a skull and
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: a few other scattered bones. And the skull shows some
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: deformities that indicate that this was a person who was profound. deaf,
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: probably mostly blind as well, and had other disabilities that
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: would have made it so they could not have survived
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: very long. But the skull aged to pretty old age
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: for a Neanderthal, which indicates that. That was only possible
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: if they had a social support group around them that
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: did things for them that they couldn't do for themselves.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: And it almost certainly would have been kind of a
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: social in-group, so it's not a lesson about global empathy.
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: But if we understand humanity to be defined by, and
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: I don't like definitions, but to be defined by the
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: way we're most different from the animals that are closest
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: to us, I think sacrificing our own efforts, time, resources,
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: things like that to care for someone who can't care
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: for themselves. I think if that's about the closest, I
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: think we can get to a necessary and sufficient feature
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: of what it means to be human.
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 2: And one of the most universally admired qualities. Yeah. Amongst,
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 2: I think, all cultures.
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And this is something that we believe these ancient
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: Neanderthal remains preserve in, in, uh, in the injuries and
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: the disabilities that are very clearly present in that, uh,
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: in that individual. So I, so, you know, you could
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: say Chanadar one is the oldest human, uh, if you
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: want it to, because I, I think it shows that
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: this was someone who grew up in a society that
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: was like, we're going to, we'll take care of you.
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: You can't do these things for you. We'll take that
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: burden on ourselves.
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 2: Well, we have some very weird ideas of what Neanderthals
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 2: were and how intelligent they are. Their brains were larger
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 2: than ours, which is really weird. And they keep finding
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 2: older hominins that have larger brains than us. The latest
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 2: one is this one from China, Homo, I think they're
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 2: calling it Juluensis. Larger brain capacity by, I think, 20-plus percent.
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 2: Than ours. Yeah. And like, okay, what was their society?
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 2: Did they have empathy? Did they have culture? Did they
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 2: have language? Did they have oral tradition? What did they have?
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 2: We don't know. Yeah. We only have bones. Yeah. We
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 2: have bones and we have this prejudice distinct. We have
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 2: this idea in our head that anything old must have
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 2: been dumber than us. Yeah. And we might not make it. Okay.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 2: We might not make it.
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 2: Human beings could go extinct. Right. Like we were just
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 2: having this conversation yesterday with my friend Sam Murrell. We
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 2: were talking about this AI threat that a lot of
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 2: these CEOs have said there's a 10% chance it could
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 2: wipe out humanity. Like that's crazy. So if we got
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 2: wiped out and then millions and millions of years from now,
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 2: you know, whatever, natural catastrophe happens, AI gets wiped out,
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 2: and then primates evolve. Slowly over time. I mean, and
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 2: then they find human brains. Or a human skull. Like,
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 2: what the fuck was this thing?
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: Isn't there like a whole series of movies about this?
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 2: Planet of the Apes. Planet of the Apes. Yeah, well,
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 2: it's probably, you know, I mean, I think the Earth
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 2: has had numerous, enormous natural disasters. And there's a lot
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 2: of evidence of that. The Toba volcano knocked us down
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 2: to a few thousand people 70 plus thousand years ago.
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 2: I think that's happened a ton of times and I
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 2: think it's super possible that it could happen where there's
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 2: zero and you gotta start from scratch.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: Which is scary. I think I just saw something on
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: my phone earlier today. I saw a headline. It was
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: like some AI group said that their AI has ignored
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: their commands or something like that.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: And I'm like, this is how Terminator starts.
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 2: Exactly. It's exactly how it starts. It's so weird. But
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 2: yet we trudge on. Yeah. Full steam ahead. Yeah. Because
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 2: we have to.
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: Allegedly.
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 2: I wonder if that's in the Bible. I've always wondered
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 2: what the original stories were based on. I keep going
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 2: to the origin story because like Adam and Eve being
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 2: the one that the Christians share. Is there a similar
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 2: Adam and Eve story in other older stories?
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of them have the early humans. They're
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: usually not individuals. They're usually groups.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 2: Well, that makes a little more sense. Yeah.
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: But we do have– there is an Adapa tale that
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: is somewhat related. And some people think that features of
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: the Adam and Eve story were borrowed from Adapa.
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 2: But it is– Sounds similar.
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, the name sounds similar. Yeah. And there are
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: some folks who try to find inspiration for the Garden
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: of Eden story in other later traditions, even going down
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: to Nordic traditions and things like that, that weren't copied
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: down until only a thousand years or more ago. I
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: don't know that we can hunt down a single source
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: for inspiration. the story because it's primarily, it's cobbling together
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: a bunch of different things, but overwhelmingly it's an etiology
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: and an etiology is an origin story for something that
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: is going on today. It's similar to Aesop's fables. You've probably,
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: I don't know how many you can remember, but I
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: used to know all the, you know, this is how
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: the elephant got its long nose. And this is how, uh,
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: this is why the ants are industrious and there are
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: all kinds of these stories. But when you look at
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: the Adam and Eve story, when you, and particularly the
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: curses in Genesis 3, It's like, oh, this is why
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: childbirth is painful. This is why men have to work
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: hard to make plants grow. Oh, this is why we
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: hate snakes. And this is why snakes oddly don't have legs.
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: Like this little guy right here doesn't have any legs.
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: In an odd way, it's kind of an ideology for
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: how the world got to be the way it was.
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: And then, you know, you don't need a whole lot
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: of inspiration from other traditions to do that. But certainly
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: the idea... that humanity or the gods created humanity because
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: they wanted to do something with humanity, uh, comes from, uh,
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: other tales. And the Epic of Gilgamesh is an interesting one. Uh,
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: I don't know how much you've read of, of Gilgamesh.
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 2: A little bit. Yeah. It's, it's difficult. It's difficult to absorb.
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: There's a, and, and part of the beginning, you've got, uh,
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: Enkidu is, is his bud, uh, and, and, Maybe more.
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: But there's a story about basically they have to kind
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: of grow up and become civilized. Initially, they're running around naked.
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: And then there's a sex worker who shows up. And
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: that intercourse is what kind of catalyzes a maturation. And
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: now they're going to wear clothes and they're going to
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: not run around in the nude like an animal. And
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: that's very similar to what I think we've got going
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: on in Adam and Eve because they're innocent. They are
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: naked and they don't care. And then when they eat
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: the fruit, their eyes are open. Suddenly they're like, oh,
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: I'm ashamed of being naked in public. I'm going to,
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: you know, we're going to have clothing now. And so
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: the fact that we've got this maturation going on in
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: the early history of humanity where we go from more
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: like an animal to more like a civilized human.
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 2: What is your take on the origin for this concept
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 2: that we were better off ignorant? Because that seems like
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 2: you're eating from the tree of the knowledge of good
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 2: and evil. Yeah. Well, that seems like a good thing
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 2: to be able to know what's good and evil. But
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 2: the idea is that all that is the original sin
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 2: and all of our issues happen because we People ate
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 2: from the knowledge of the tree of good and evil.
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 2: And if they didn't, we would be in paradise still.
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: Well, I think that's a Christian interpretation.
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: Because in the Hebrew Bible, one interesting thing about the
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: story of Adam and Eve, specifically Adam and Eve, their
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: story is never mentioned once again anywhere in the Hebrew Bible.
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: You have in one.
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 2: You would think that would be kind of important.
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you would think. Nobody talks about it until we
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: get to the New Testament. There's a reference to Adam
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: at the very beginning of a big genealogy in Chronicles.
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: And in Ezekiel 28, there's a reference to the mountain
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: of Eden, which you would imagine would be the same thing,
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: but there's no mountain in the story in Genesis 2
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: and 3. So it's a different tradition. Whatever's going on
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: in Ezekiel 28 is not just They're aware of much
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: more than just what's in Genesis 2 and 3. But
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: so throughout the Hebrew Bible and even in Greco-Roman period
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: Judaism and down into some parts of the New Testament,
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: it's not Adam's and Eve's fault that evil exists. That's
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: not the main story that they use to understand why
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: evil exists. The main story that they use is from
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: Genesis 6, where the angels, well, they're angels in later interpretation,
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: but they're second tier deities. They come down and they
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: have children with the human women. And this is what
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: causes God to send the flood. But you're familiar with
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: the book of 1 Enoch. And so that is a
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: version of that story where that is what caused evil
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: to be on the earth. The angels came down and
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: brought all of this knowledge and gave it to the humans,
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: including how to make weapons of war. And makeup is
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: listed as one of the evil things. that the angels
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: taught humanity. And so I think that up until the
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: New Testament was written, that was probably the dominant tradition
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: about where evil came from. And then in the New Testament,
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: we kind of see both of them. Paul talks about
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: Adam and Eve.
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 2: But in.
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: other parts of the New Testament. In Jude, for instance,
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: they quote directly from the book of 1 Enoch, calling
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: it a prophecy. But they also talk about the angels
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: who left their first estate and engaged in all this wickedness.
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: And so it seems like these are competing traditions about
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: where evil came from. And the 1 Enoch tradition was
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: probably the dominant one. And then because of Paul and
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: the New Testament, we can kind of see traces of
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: both of them in there. But I think Christianity later
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: decided to just go with the one that was in
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: their canon. which was the Genesis one.
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 2: And blame the woman for everything.
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: And well, yeah, you do have.
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 2: Which by the way, I want to let women off
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 2: the hook. Adam talked to God.
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: Eve did not.
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 2: So maybe Adam forgot to tell Eve to not eat
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 2: the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 2: and evil. It's never specified that he did.
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And that's an interesting part of the story because
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: what Eve says is the rule is not what God
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: told Adam. It's different. Now, you know, ultimately it's still
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: don't eat the fruit. But she says we shouldn't even
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: touch it or we'll die. And there are a couple
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: of details that— and so this has puzzled people for centuries.
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: Where did Eve get her idea of why they weren't
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: supposed to eat the fruit? So did Adam report it
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: to her and get it wrong? Did God show up
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: off camera? Yeah. offstage and tell Eve the same command,
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 1: but in a slightly different way. Now, now this is probably,
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: you know, this is a literary creation, but for the
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: earliest audience who heard someone sharing this story, they would
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: have probably thought the same. That's not the same thing
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: that God said to Adam. So the author probably had
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: something in mind about how to account for why Eve's
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: story was different. And we don't have any access to that.
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: So we have no idea. And, and this is actually
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: something that scholars talk about. Did, Did the author want
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: you to imagine that Adam is the one who passed
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: it on to Eve and just amplified things?
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 2: You would think that would be specified.
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: You would think, but it's not. And is it the
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: accident of preservation? Do we just have a much shorter
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: version of a story that was originally much longer? Or
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: is that how it was originally written? It seems to
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: be at least based on our earliest manuscripts. It doesn't
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: seem to have changed much since as far back as
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: we can go.
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 2: So.
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: These are the kinds of questions that keep us up
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: at night.
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 2: Well, it's so fascinating because if you just imagine our
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 2: version of the Bible today, and if we continue to
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 2: exist as a society a thousand years from now, most
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 2: likely it would be the exact same version because we're
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 2: really good at keeping records now, right?
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: I think there would be versions that are very close,
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: if not exact, but I think at the same time
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: there would be versions that are very different because the
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: King James Version is the, I think it's probably still
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: the highest selling Bible translation. I don't think it's the
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: most read. I think the NIV might be the most read,
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: but NIV, New International Version, or Not Inspired Version is
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: another reference that I think is kind of funny. Most
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: modern translations of the New Testament have taken out more
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: than a dozen verses that are in the King James Version.
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: Because since the King James Version was translated, we have
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: discovered hundreds more manuscripts and we have been able to
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: do a lot more study and a lot better study
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: on those manuscripts to figure out what most likely these
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: manuscripts originally said. Originally is a complicated term in academics,
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: but our ability to reconstruct the text as it was
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: in its earliest stage... And we know that some of
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: the passages that are in the King James version were
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: added later on, that were not written by the author.
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: And so now when we publish these translations of the
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: New Testament, we just omit the verse. And because versification
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: is kind of complex to just redo, we just leave
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: the verse out entirely. So if you look in Matthew 17,
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: for instance, you'll see verse 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24.
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: And there'll be a footnote at the end of verse 20.
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: That'll say, some ancient manuscripts add, and then it'll quote
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: a translation of verse 21. And this freaks people out
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: when they discover this, if they don't know the history,
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: the reason that these passages were taken out. There are
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: about 16 passages in the New Testament that have been
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: taken out.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 2: Is there any debate about whether or not they should
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 2: have been taken out?
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: Among scholars, not really. So, for instance, the passage in
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: Matthew 17, 21, we have.
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: Some very, very old manuscripts that don't have it at all.
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: It's just not in there. And then we have like
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: Codex Sinaiticus, which is mid-fourth century CE. So this text,
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: this Codex was probably transcribed a little after the Council
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: of Nicaea. And it's not in the main body of text,
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: but there's a little star in the margin. And then
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: up at the top, somebody scribbled in this passage. And
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: then in manuscripts after Sinaiticus, it's in the main body
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: of text. And so we can see in action the
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: verse being added to the manuscripts.
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 2: What is the verse?
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: It says, this is where the disciples are coming back
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: to Jesus and saying, yeah, we've forgiven sins. We've cast
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: out demons. And there's this one demon we can't cast out.
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: And Jesus says, yeah, that kind doesn't come out except
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: by prayer and fasting. Now, this is actually being borrowed
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: from a similar story in Mark 9. And so what
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: most scholars think happened was an early scribe was like, okay,
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: this is the same story. This detail is in Mark,
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: but it's omitted in Matthew. I'm going to scratch it
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: into the manuscript there. And then later on gets worked
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: right into the body of the text. So most modern
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: translations of the New Testament, there are about 16 verses
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: that are commonly just omitted. And they're included in footnotes.
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: But also the ending of Mark, the whole story of
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 1: Jesus' post-resurrection appearance at the end of Mark, scholars agree
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: that's not original. That was something that was added. So
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: chapter 16, verses 9 through 20, a lot of translations
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: will put them in brackets and a footnote will say,
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 1: you know, this comes from later manuscripts. It's not in
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: the original version. And there are a handful of stories
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: like that. And then with the Dead Sea Scrolls, we
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: have a better idea of how some verses read. We
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: have a better idea of what verses might have been added.
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: We even have a whole paragraph that was omitted that
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: we didn't really know. We knew something was supposed to
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: be there, but we had no idea what, and we
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: found out what was supposed to be there in the
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: Dead Sea Scrolls. So maybe we discover another cache of
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: ancient manuscripts of the Bible, and maybe they're earlier than
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 2: Boy, that would be exciting.
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: Oh, it would be phenomenal. I would love that so much.
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: But A thousand years down the road, who knows what
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: the Bible will look like. Now, there are still people
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: who are like, no, it's the KJV or nothing. And
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: I think people like that will be around a thousand
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: years as well. But I think we will just multiply
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: the available versions of the Bible. And some of them
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: will probably be closer to what was originally written. Originally. Originally.
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: And some of them will be people trying to hold
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: on to their favorite translation or their favorite version.
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 2: It's just such an insane story that a sheep herder
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 2: or a goat herder threw a rock into a cave
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 2: and hit a clay vessel. Yeah. And heard it shatter
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 2: and then realized there was something in there and decided
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 2: to go look. Yeah. If not for that, how long? Oh, yeah.
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 2: Who knows?
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: We still wouldn't know.
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 2: I mean, it might mean that. cave might not have
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 2: ever been discovered. I mean, who knows? That was 1947.
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: Actually, I think it probably would have been discovered because
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: that's right around the time that Israel became a state.
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 1: When Israel became a state, it now had state funding
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: for archaeological research. And so excavations- So they started going
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: looking around. They started going looking all over the place.
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: And so by the 60s or 70s, there would have
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: been enough excavations ongoing at Qumran that they would, I've
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: been to Qumran a couple of times. You can see
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: the caves like not far away. It's like, that's going
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 1: to be a trip to kind of get to it.
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 2: How insane is it that that cave sat undisturbed for
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 2: 2000 years? Yeah.
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: You had to.
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 2: That is so nuts. Is that it?
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 2: Right there?
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: Well, there are a bunch of caves, but that's one
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: of them.
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 2: I mean, imagine if somebody decided not to store it
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 2: there and just leave it out somewhere. Or they died.
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 2: They were going to go store it there and they
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 2: got killed in a raid.
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: This is one of the kind of tragic things about
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: archaeology is when a lot of people are getting killed
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: at the same time, that's good for us.
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 2: Because we find the bodies.
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: Well, not just the bodies, but that's the circumstance that's
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 1: most likely to preserve stuff. Because when they burn things
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: to the ground, particularly if you have things on clay tablets,
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: that bakes the clay tablets and they stay exactly as
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: they are until we find them. So some of our
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: best discoveries have been because somebody burnt a building down
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: and it happened to be an archive or a library
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: or the palace where the king stored all the annals
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: or something like that. And then the reason that we
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: have all of the— pointing at a blank screen— the reason that
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: we have all of the Qumran stuff is because that
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: whole community was destroyed by the Romans around 68-ish CE.
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: And nobody was alive to come back and get all
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: the stuff that they had stuffed in those caves for safekeeping.
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 2: Who knows how long people were living there writing things
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 2: down that we haven't found yet. The weirdest shit is—
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 2: You know the megalithic architecture underneath the West Wall?
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: The stones?
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the enormous stones. Like, who the fuck put those there?
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 2: You know what I mean? Like, what were those guys doing?
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 2: And imagine if they find something, you know, with ground-penetrating radar,
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 2: some new cache of texts and scrolls or tablets or something.
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: Oh, we'd have a field day.
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 2: Oh, my goodness. I mean, it's so interesting trying— or
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 2: not me, archaeologists, trying to piece together this understanding of
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 2: human civilization just based on what's left over and knowing
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 2: that in a lot of places there's not going to
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 2: be anything left over. You're just guessing.
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: That's called the accident of preservation. And it results in
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: a problem because we gather all the data that we
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: might get and we think that this is everything. And
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: we have to constantly remind ourselves, no, this is like
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: only what we're finding in tombs. We try to reconstruct...
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: so much stuff from just what we find in a tomb.
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: And it's like a tomb is not a representation of
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: an entire, even household, much less society. And a lot
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: of our stuff has what we call a mortuary bias
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: precisely because we tend to find stuff when it gets buried.
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: And usually tombs are the things that tend to get buried.
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: Or we find stuff when cities are destroyed in what
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: we call a conflagration.
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 2: What is this here, Jeremy?
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: I went to Google Maps to the Qumran caves, and
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: this is a video.
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 1: That's what it looks like when they're digging. And that's
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: being taken from a little ridge. Yeah, they've got walkways
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: there now. And those are the remains of the community
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: that they built there at Qumran. Most likely.
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 2: Imagine going in a time machine and just being able
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 2: to gaze upon these people just for fucking 10 minutes. Yeah.
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 2: What was life like?
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: This is something that I've always found fascinating. The more
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: I've done research in cognitive science of religion and learned
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: more about why our brains work the way they do,
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: it's helped me understand some of the things that I've
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: experienced myself in relation to ancient stuff like that. I
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: did one of my master's degrees at the University of Oxford,
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: and the Bodleian libraries are just unreal. But I held
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: a tablet. that was thousands of years old and looked
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: at the bottom and there was a thumbprint on the bottom.
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: It was like, I'm looking at the fingerprint of whoever
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 1: did this. They just happened to leave a fingerprint on
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: that when they were creating this tablet and that is
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: frozen in time. And it kind of, uh, and, and
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: I have the like cognitive explanation for this, but it
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: kind of gins up a sense of their, of their presence. It, it,
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: there's a sense in which you kind of feel the,
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: the presence of, uh, of those people when you have
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: such a clear, uh, kind of cue to human involvement.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: And that kind of stuff, I live for that kind
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: of stuff. And so I love archaeology. I love going
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: in and seeing, you know, the domestic stuff where it's like, oh,
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: this is where a kid played with toys in the
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: corner of this house or something like that.
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 2: You get a weird feeling when you go to old places. Yeah.
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 2: And it's hard to understand what you're feeling. Is your
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 2: brain playing a trick? Like, what is it? Is it
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 2: because you've attached significance to this site Or I would
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 2: like to go to somewhere that's like really sacred, ignorant.
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 2: Like someone take me. Hey, we're going to take you around.
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: How are you feeling? Well, I think we see people
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: doing that a lot when they go travel and visit
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: places they don't know a whole lot. ton about, but
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: they might visit one of their sacred sites and frequently
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: not treat it very sacredly at all.
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 2: That's true. Well, especially if it's an opposing ideology or religion.
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 2: That's a real problem. Like when the Taliban blew up
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 2: those statues. That's horrific. Yeah. But there's something about some
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 2: certain sites. You know, I went to Eleusis, is that
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 2: how you say it? Eleusis? Close enough. And, you know,
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 2: you get to be at the actual ground where they
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 2: have those Eleusinian mystery ceremonies. It just feels weird. It
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 2: feels really weird.
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. When you understand the import.
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 2: Yes, but that's the problem is I understood it. And
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 2: I was actually there with Brian Murorescu. which is really cool.
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: So you were feeling it in more way than one.
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 2: Oh, for sure. Because he was explaining to me, like,
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 2: what I'm looking at. And it just feels super weird. But,
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 2: you know, there's that thing where you're like, okay, am
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 2: I adding meaning to this?
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: Well, I'll tell you about a place that I visited
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: that I'm probably the only person on earth who thinks
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: of this as a particularly sacred site. But there's, in
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: the southern Negev, there's a site called Arad, which is...
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: Where's the southern... Negev, the desert in the south of Judea.
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 1: So Arad is a place where they've got a tell,
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: a big hill. And there was a bronze age village there.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 1: But on the very top, there are the remains of
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: a fortress that existed in the 8th century BCE. And
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: in the corner of the fortress is an Israelite temple.
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: And they've got the remains of the walls. They've got
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: the three different rooms. the, uh, the courtyard, the broad
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: room and, uh, the Debir or the, um, the Holy
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: of Holies. And they found a standing stone, which would
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: have represented the God of Israel. They found, they have
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: the altar. They had discovered a bunch of inscriptions, talks
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: about the house of Adonai, the God of Israel. And
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: they also found a couple of incense altars that were
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: on the steps of the Holy of Holies. And so I,
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: I go there and that's where, uh, because I'm fascinated
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: by the fact that, you know, the biblical story that
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: there was just one temple in Jerusalem is just not accurate.
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: There were temples scattered all around. We found a handful
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: of them. In fact, just like 10 to 15 years ago,
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: we found another one only a few miles outside of
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem at a place called Tel Motsah. So they had
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: temples operating all over the place. And because of propaganda,
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: like the book of Deuteronomy, a lot of scholars believe
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: was written so that the king in Jerusalem could say,
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: close down all the temples. Mine's the only one that
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: gets to stay open now. And this might've been one
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: of the ones that was closed down as a result
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: of that. But interestingly enough, people ask me a lot
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: about narcotics in the Bible and stuff like that. But
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: this is one where they tested the burnt residue that
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 1: was on top of the incense altars. And one of
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 1: them had three different kinds of cannabis. on it. So
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: we know for a fact they were using cannabis in
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: their worship practices in ancient Israel.
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 2: Which completely makes sense. Yeah. That that's what you would
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 2: use as incense. Yeah. I mean, if you want to
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 2: get a contact high going for the entire crowd and
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 2: you sing those songs, they have so much more meaning
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 2: to them.
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And that's certainly going to make you feel like
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: you're in the presence of something unworldly. If you're going
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: in there, the room's filled with smoke, you're not seeing much,
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 1: but you feel good.
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 2: Did you ever get into any of John Marco Allegro's stuff?
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: I'm aware of the sacred mushroom and the cross, but
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: it's mainly etymological. That's the main argument, and it has
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: been just torn to shreds.
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 2: Has it been?
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Since it came out, like back when it
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: came out, there were a handful of some of the
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: leading linguists of ancient Hebrew, of Sumerian, Thorkell Jacobson is
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: a Sumerologist, and James Barr was one of the leading
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: Hebrew Semiticists in the world. And the argument is basically
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: that the Hebrew and the Greek all goes back to
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: these Sumerian words that have to do with semen, with mushrooms,
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: and all this kind of stuff. The problem is Hebrew
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: and Greek are not descended from Sumerian, and there's not
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: a lot of contact. Sumerian was overwhelmingly gone by the
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: time that Hebrew started existing. There were just a handful
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: of liturgical uses and words and things like that. But
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: the connections that are made are just not considered plausible
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: by linguists today. And so, yeah, it's not been well
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: received by scholars ever since it originally came out. In fact,
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: I think that some of those scholars who were friends
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 1: of Allegro's, because he was a, phenomenal textual critic. When
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: it came to the Dead Sea Scrolls, a lot of
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: the scholars who were assigned fragments of the Dead Sea
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: Scrolls just sat on them for years and years and years.
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: And they were doing research, but it was so slow
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: getting out. Allegro was the first one to get research
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: out the door. So he was a phenomenal scroll scholar.
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: But what I understand, some of his friends tried to
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: urge him not to publish that book because they thought
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: it would be pretty detrimental to his career. And my
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: understanding is that it was, unfortunately.
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 2: Well, it seems like the book was removed from circulation.
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 2: And then only within the last decade or so, someone
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 2: brought it back.
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 1: I think it was a couple of decades ago. I'd
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 1: have to verify that because I know I've seen scans
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: of the book for a while now.
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 2: I bought it online. You could buy old versions of it.
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 2: But a guy named Jan Ervin, I think, was the
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 2: guy who– I think he's responsible for republishing it. I
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 2: think that was in the– I want to say the
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 2: early 2000s, somewhere around then. Okay. But I think it
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 2: might have been purchased by the Catholic Church or something
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 2: like that.
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: I have heard a lot of people say that the
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: Catholic Church tried to shut it down.
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 2: Because he wrote another book afterwards called The Dead Sea
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 2: Scrolls and the Christian Myth. Mm-hmm. That was covered similar topics. Yeah.
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: I think it was kind of a mythicist take that
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: Jesus never existed. Yeah.
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah. He likened the word Christ to an ancient Sumerian
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 2: word that made a mushroom covered in God's semen.
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 2: Which is yo.
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 1: And the problem is that when you... I remember reading
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: that part of the book a couple of years ago
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: and it was like, okay, the Basically taking, recreating a
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: Sumerian word that we have no evidence ever existed and
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: saying that that recreated Sumerian word was the etymological origin
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 1: of the word Christ. And the connection there is, as
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: far as any scholars can tell, entirely imaginary. There's no
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: real plausible link. There's no real chain of custody. There's
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 1: no real way that knowledge of that etymology could have
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: made it down a thousand years down the road without
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 1: anybody finding out about it. So it's not that it's impossible.
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 2: Implausible.
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: But it's not plausible, right? It's implausible, and it's certainly
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: not most likely.
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 2: It's just so fascinating that by the time this is written,
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 2: the Sumerian language is gone, which is weird. Like the
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 2: idea of these languages just come and go is so strange.
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: And Sumerian is a language isolate too, which means it's
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: not directly connected to any other languages that are still
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: around or that were even around anciently.
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 2: Which is really weird when you get into the ancient
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 2: Sumerian stories and how they're similar to some of the
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 2: stories that are in the Bible, like the Epic of Gilgamesh. Right.
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 2: The Epic of Gilgamesh is so strange and interesting. So
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 2: the flood versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh, are they
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 2: inspired by other flood versions?
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: So you've got a few different stories of the flood.
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 1: And in the Epic of Gilgamesh, he's going to find Utnapishtim,
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: who was the one who survived the flood. So the
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: flood has already happened in the Gilgamesh epic. But like
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: Atrahasis is another version of that story. But if you
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: go all the way back to the Sumerian king lists,
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 1: we have king lists that predate the introduction of a
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: flood story. And in fact, a lot of scholars think
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 1: that Genesis actually was circulating in a version that didn't
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: have a flood story.
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, until someone put it in there.
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 2: And when do they think that happened?
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: That's a great question. They probably date it to somewhere
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: around the 6th to 5th century BCE, because Noah is
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: a horticulturist in the oldest tales of what's going on here.
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: And there's no indication of a flood. In fact, if
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: you go in Genesis four, you have some patriarchs who
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: are mentioned and it's like, and this was the progenitor
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: of those who live in tents. And this was the
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: progenitor of those who play the lyre and the harp.
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: And this is the progenitor of those who work in
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: all kinds of metals. And it's like the progenitor of
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 1: nothing because they and all their lines would have died
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: just a couple chapters down the road. So whoever's writing
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 1: this doesn't know that they're supposed to all die. Because
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 1: he's talking about, you know, look around, we got all
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 1: these people living in tents and their ancestor is this guy.
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 1: And it's like, what about the flood?
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 2: So where do you think that story comes from? How
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 2: does it get introduced?
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 1: That's a big question a lot of scholars have been
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 1: trying to solve for a long time. But some people
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: think that Genesis 6, the story of the B'nai Elohim,
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 1: the children of God, they come down and have children
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: with human women. And that ticks God off.
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 2: And.
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: So that seems like an original catalyst for sending the flood.
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: I'm sending the flood to kill all of these folks
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: because that's, ooh, that's gross. These gods had demigod children.
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: But that's not the reason that's given in the text
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: for why the flood came. The reason it's given in
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: the text is there was violence everywhere. And so that's like,
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: it's kind of a different story. And if you look
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: in 1 Enoch, that kind of fills in some of
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 1: the gaps. Because in the story of 1 Enoch, there's
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: violence everywhere because the children of this divine human mating
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 1: are giants, and then the Nephilim are their children. And
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 1: then when the Nephilim die, their souls become the demons
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: that haunt the world. And so that kind of better
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: fits what's going on in Genesis, but the story of
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 1: first Enoch was probably written down somewhere around 300 BCE.
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: It comes much later. And we don't know if that
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: story is actually maybe earlier than the story of the
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: flood that we have in Genesis. So, uh, it's how
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: it came together is something that I don't think we're
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: ever going to be really, really sure about. We just
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: got a bunch of speculation. that is based on the
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: observation that some things don't seem to fit together quite right.
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: And then we have other versions of the story that
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: would fit much better. And, you know, the same is
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: true of the book of Daniel. There are some fragments
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: in the Dead Sea Scrolls that talk about Nabonidus and
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: talk about these stories related to Daniel, but they're not
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: in the book of Daniel. And so some scholars wonder
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: if the book of Daniel was being cobbled together around
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 1: that time period. And we have some of what was
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: left on the editing room floor in these references to
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: Nabonidus and things like that. So how it all came
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: together is phenomenally complex. And there's constantly a debate between
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: how much we can say, how much we can speculate
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: or hypothesize about versus how much we should be limiting
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: ourselves to saying because we can speculate about all kinds
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 1: of stuff. But until we have enough data to to
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: be confident, it's not really much more than speculation.
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 2: What is the earliest date of the Ethiopian Bible? What
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 2: is the origin of that?
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: So the Ethiopian Bible, we have a couple of manuscripts
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: of gospels called the Garma Gospels that date to between
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: the fourth and the sixth centuries CE. And the Ethiopian
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: Bible descends probably from some people who probably brought a
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: version of the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Bible,
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: down to the kingdom of Aksum, probably late 3rd or
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: early 4th century CE. And so this is right around
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: the time of the Council of Nicaea. So this would
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 1: have been something that looked similar to what we have
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: in Codex Sinaiticus. And that collection of Septuagint texts, which
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: included 1 Enoch, Jubilees, a bunch of other apocryphal and
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: pseudepigraphical texts, It seems like down there in Ethiopia, they
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: were just content to keep on keeping on with what
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: they had, just ignoring all of the canon debates that
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: were going on up north.
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 2: Were they just not in contact?
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: There was definitely contact, but I think they didn't feel
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: any obligation to honor the authority of the folks who
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: were arguing in Constantinople and Rome and stuff like that.
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: So as they were figuring out their canon up north,
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 1: down south, they were happy to continue to transmit their texts.
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: So today, the earliest manuscript of any kind we have
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: translated into Ge'ez, the ancient Ethiopic languages, or the Garima
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: Gospels from 4th to 6th century CE. Most of our
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 1: manuscripts come from the medieval period, around the 11th century
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 1: or later. And so it's popular to say that the
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: Ethiopian Bible is the earliest Bible, but it is based
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 1: on the ancient Greek translation. And while the ancient Greek
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: translation probably does preserve some earlier readings than our later
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 1: Hebrew does, we have better ways of sussing that out.
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: The Dead Sea Scrolls help us an awful lot. And
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: so text critically, in trying to reconstruct the earliest possible Bible,
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: the Ethiopian manuscripts are of very little value. They're of
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: inestimable value in trying to understand how Christianity evolved in
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 1: Ethiopia and how the texts that they were using evolved
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 1: in Ethiopia. And then since the world became aware of
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: the Ethiopian Bible and texts like First Enoch and Jubilees
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: and things like that, because we didn't have the whole
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: of First Enoch until we had those Ethiopian manuscripts.
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 2: That's crazy. So they were getting it from an early
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 2: Greek translation. So First Enoch was in the earlier Greek translation. Yes.
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 2: So when did 1 Enoch get removed from the canon?
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: So 1 Enoch probably fell out of favor before the
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 1: canon was formalized. Because if the people... bringing the Septuagint
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: down to the kingdom of Aksum did so, end of
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 1: 3rd century, beginning of 4th century CE, it seems quite
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: likely that 1 Enoch was still considered, if not an
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: inspired text, at least an important text. And particularly because
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: we have in the the letter of Jude in the
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 1: New Testament, this direct quotation introduced by saying, Enoch, the
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 1: seventh from Adam prophesied, saying. So this is something that
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 1: the author of the epistle of Jude recognizes as inspired prophecy.
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 1: So we have scholars arguing over the canonicity, the inspired
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: nature of first Enoch. In early Christianity, there's one guy
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 1: in particular named Tertullian, who's toward the end of the
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: second century CE, who defends the authenticity and the canonicity
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 1: of 1 Enoch. So this is like 175-ish CE. He
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 1: writes a text called On the Apparel of Women, because,
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 1: you know, he's gonna. And one of the chapters is
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: entirely defending the authenticity of 1 Enoch. And because the
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: criticisms were It seems unlikely that this text survived the
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: flood and has been faithfully transmitted ever since then. And
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: it seems to contradict itself in a variety of places.
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: The stories get told over and over in slightly different ways.
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 1: And then also it contradicts a lot of the stuff
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 1: that Christians are finding in the New Testament and in
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 1: their Hebrew Bible. And so it was becoming unpopular in
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: the second and into the third century. But by the
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: time we get to our Codex Sinaiticus and our Codex
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 1: Vaticanus in the fourth century, in the middle to the
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: late fourth century, there's no sign of First Enoch.
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 2: How does First Enoch contradict itself?
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 1: The stories about the angels coming down gets repeated a
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: couple different times because it's actually not a single narrative.
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: It's a collection of five different books, traditions. You have
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 1: the Book of the Watchers. You have the Parables of Enoch.
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: You have the animal apocalypse, which is basically retelling the story,
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 1: but everybody's an animal. So like the star falls from
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: heaven and then these other stars come down and then they, uh,
• 1:50:40
  Speaker 1: they breed and they're cows. And then they, they, um,
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: their offspring are a certain color. And these are like
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: different social groups that, that they're supposed to represent. And
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: it's kind of a compressed history of Israel being told.
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 1: as if everybody was an animal. So, yeah, the vibe is.
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 2: Weird.
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of a willow vibe when everybody's turning
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: into pigs. Like, I get that vibe when I read that.
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: So it's a collection of five different stories, and the
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: five different stories, and they're not all telling the exact
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: same story, but where there is overlap, they don't align perfectly, so...
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: It is internally inconsistent.
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 2: The Book of the Watchers is one of the weirdest
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 2: things I've ever read. It's like, what were these people
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 2: trying to say? This is my frustration and fascination with
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 2: all this stuff. It's like, what was the original story?
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 2: What were they trying to convey? Are they trying to
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 2: convey a historical moment or are they trying to explain
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 2: something in a way that makes sense Why is the
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 2: sky blue, Dad? You know what I mean? Are they
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 2: coming up with an explanation just to stop questions?
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: And I think there's a reason that it pops up
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: in the time that it does, because this is where
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: we're getting a lot of suffering on the part of
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: the people of Israel and Judah, because they've gone through
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 1: the Babylonian exile. They're basically going to be under the
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: boot of some larger empire from then on, except for
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: a little slice of time later. they're going to be
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 1: subordinate to larger empires that are going to be beating
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 1: up on them. And so this is the time when
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 1: a lot of them are wondering, why is all of
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 1: this going on? Where is our God who loves us
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 1: so much? And this is where the idea of, okay,
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 1: where are we going to see our justice? Where's the
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 1: punishment for the bad people? Where's the reward for the
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: good people? That's probably what gives rise to the idea that, oh,
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: it's probably in the afterlife where this is going to happen.
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: And so we first see concepts of heaven and hell
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 1: in Enoch and in this time period, and they develop
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 1: as we get into the New Testament. And so I
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: think it's trying to accomplish a lot of those bigger questions.
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 1: What is the meaning of all this? Why do good
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 1: people suffer? Why are wicked people so successful? And one
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: of the things that it's doing is trying to suggest
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 1: that evil was introduced to the world by these wicked
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 1: angels who came down to earth and taught women how
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: to put on makeup. Yeah. There's a woman involved in
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: whether you like the Adam and Eve story or you
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: like the first Enoch story. For some reason, they like
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 1: to blame women.
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was written by men.
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: That's a big part of it.
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 2: Probably the root of it. It's so complicated to try
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 2: to figure out what they were trying to do when
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 2: they're explaining certain concepts. And there's certain... things that get
• 1:53:46
  Speaker 2: explained today that aren't necessarily really in the Bible. So
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 2: the concept of hell, let's get into that. Because when
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 2: is that? So it's first introduced in Enoch?
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's the first time we get something
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: like that. I think you get inklings of it at
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: the very end, like the very last verse of the
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 1: book of Isaiah. And maybe in Daniel 12.
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 2: Inklings.
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: Inklings, yeah. So there's a.
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 1: The passage ends by talking about, uh, uh, a fire
• 1:54:19
  Speaker 1: that a flame that doesn't go out and a worm
• 1:54:21
  Speaker 1: that never dies. And this is, uh, what scholars would
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 1: suggest is that the idea here is, uh, it's talking
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: about some place where the wicked are going. And the
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: idea is this, uh, the, the fire is never going
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 1: out because there's always more fuel to add to it
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 1: because more People are going into it. And the worm
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 1: never dies because it always has more food being thrown
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 1: into it. And that gets reinterpreted later on as the
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: fire is eternal and the punishment is eternal. It probably
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 1: wasn't intended to say that. But these are, and then
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 1: we have in Daniel 12, a notion of the wicked
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: being punished.
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 2: How is this described in ancient Hebrew versus the English translations?
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 1: It's pretty straightforward. It's not incredibly different.
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 2: Is there something potentially that could have been lost in
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 2: the translation?
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 1: Probably not. I think we've got a lot of different
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 1: translations of Isaiah and a lot of different scholars have
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: done a lot of good work. And there's not really
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 1: much that's going to be much different. But also we
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: have that idea that is repeated a few times in
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: the New Testament where they're referring to Gehenna. as the
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 1: place where the fire doesn't die and the worm doesn't,
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 1: or the fire never goes out and the worm doesn't die.
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: And so whoever wrote the New Testament passages in that
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: time period, they understood it in pretty much the same
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 1: way we understand it now.
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 2: One of the most disturbing ideas that a lot of
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 2: secular people have is this notion that Christians like to
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 2: project that if you do not follow Jesus, you're going
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 2: to burn in hell forever, no matter how good of
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 2: a person you are. Yeah. Where's that come from?
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 1: Uh, not it's, that's not something that's ever stated anywhere
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: in the Bible. That is an interpretation.
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: Because when we, just like, just like first Enoch, it's
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: a collection of five different books. If you look back
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 1: on it and you say, this all has to mean
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 1: the same thing, you basically have to create a new
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 1: sixth narrative that harmonizes it all, that makes it all fit.
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 1: And that's what we did with the new Testament. Once
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: we got it all together, we decided this is all inspired.
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 1: It all has to mean the same thing. More or less.
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 1: They weren't as strict about it as we are today
• 1:56:35
  Speaker 1: about it. But that means you have to create ways
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: to harmonize problematic passages. You have to come up with
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 1: a way to interpret two passages that conflict in a
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 1: way that allows them to not conflict anymore. And so
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 1: you're generating a kind of second order story. And that
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: is what is authoritative. It's not the text itself that's authoritative.
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 1: It's the interpretation that is authoritative. The interpretation that allows
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 1: the text to all be consistent. And the word I
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 1: use is univocal. It speaks with one single consistent unified
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: voice from one single unified and consistent perspective. So when
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: we get to hell in the New Testament, scholars suggest
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 1: there are three different ideas about post-mortem divine punishment that
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: seem to be represented there. One is annihilation, that the
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 1: wicked just cease to exist. One is temporary conscious torment
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 1: followed by either salvation or annihilation. So You go somewhere,
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: you're punished for a little bit, and then you cease
• 1:57:34
  Speaker 1: to exist. Or you go somewhere, you're punished for a
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: little bit, you've paid your price, you now go on
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 1: to salvation. And then the third idea is eternal conscious torment,
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 1: which is where you are tortured forever. Now, in my opinion,
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: and there are scholars who have done a lot more
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 1: work on the development of the concept of hell than
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 1: I have. Candida Moss is a wonderful example. But in
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 1: my opinion, hell originally developed as a way to feel
• 1:57:58
  Speaker 1: good about the fact that these these huge empires and
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: these wicked emperors, they're going to get theirs. So I
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 1: think that hell probably initially developed as a way to
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: feel like God's justice is going to have its day
• 1:58:14
  Speaker 1: on the truly wicked people of the world. But the
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: distance between your average Judean and hell probably got smaller
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: and smaller over time because the threat of hell became
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 1: a useful stick in the hands of people who wanted
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 1: to influence behavior. And so by the time we get
• 1:58:36
  Speaker 1: to Augustine in the fourth, fifth century CE, and Christianity
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 1: is trying to nail down its doctrines, I think we
• 1:58:45
  Speaker 1: probably get to the point where everybody is under threat
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 1: of going to hell, unless you do the thing. Because
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: originally it probably wasn't, you have to do the thing
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 1: or you go to hell. Originally it was, we're good
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 1: over here, The wicked people over there who are beating
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: up on us, they're going to go to hell. We're
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 1: going to be saved. And then it became everybody's potentially
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 1: going to hell unless you do the thing. So I
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: think the gap closed over time. I think in the
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: New Testament, you have inconsistent ideas about what postmortem divine
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 1: punishment is going to be like. And I think it
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 1: becomes formalized and systematized by the Christian church. excuse me,
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 1: by the Christian church in the centuries after the completion
• 1:59:29
  Speaker 1: of the New Testament.
• 1:59:30
  Speaker 2: And that also tracks with human ideology and, you know,
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 2: what we know about people today, moving goalposts.
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 1: A hundred percent. Because something I'm fond of saying is
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 1: that the, what is authoritative changes. It always changes based
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 1: on our reception of the received tradition, which we then
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 1: have to negotiate with in light of our social, historical,
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 1: rhetorical circumstances and what we want for the future. And
• 2:00:00
  Speaker 1: so there are, you know, hard-won and really deeply held
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 1: beliefs that people will abandon in a moment if their
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 1: circumstances change enough to incentivize them to abandon those beliefs.
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: And as groups pass through time and their circumstances changes
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 1: and their needs change, They're constantly renegotiating their tradition. And yeah,
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: and that results in things like everybody's under threat of
• 2:00:31
  Speaker 1: hell and, oh, Jesus is the only way. Therefore, you
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 1: have to follow Jesus or you're going to hell. And
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 1: I think that's a post-biblical thing. Certainly some folks who
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: wrote the New Testament, I'm sure that if they were
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 1: asked that, they would have been like, yeah, I would
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: agree with that. But it's not something that's ever stated
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 1: anywhere in the New Testament, at least not in those words.
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 1: I think it's something that we have to read into
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 1: the text afterwards.
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 2: Well, it's very disturbing to people today. It doesn't even
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 2: make sense. Because the idea that secular people can't be
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 2: good people seems absurd.
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm kind of... The fact that there are an
• 2:01:10
  Speaker 1: awful lot of folks within Christianity who are trying to
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 1: draw a harder line between the believers and the non-believers.
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 2: Including biblical scholars, which is really weird. It's really weird
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 2: when you study it, but yet you find things to
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 2: sort of reinforce your beliefs instead of being objective about
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 2: the interpretations and how complex this all is.
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 1: Well, and it's phenomenally difficult to be objective because we
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 1: are experiencing the world. We're not experiencing it directly in
• 2:01:43
  Speaker 1: an unmediated way. Our intuitive cognition is governing everything. And
• 2:01:49
  Speaker 1: so- When we're reading a text that's supposed to be
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 1: important to our in-group, the set of identities that are mine,
• 2:01:57
  Speaker 1: it's phenomenally difficult to read it in a way that crosses,
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 1: goes against the grain of what our groups tell us.
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 1: In fact, I wonder if I can illustrate how our
• 2:02:08
  Speaker 1: intuitive cognition is governing everything. Could you pull up an image?
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 1: Could you Google corn sweet illusion? So it's one word,
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 1: corn sweet. Sweet like candy? S-W-E-E-T, yeah. And this is
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 1: an illusion I use a lot because it's going to
• 2:02:28
  Speaker 1: demonstrate that there's somebody at the controls that we don't
• 2:02:33
  Speaker 1: know about and that we can't control. Okay, that one
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: right there. So it looks like a dark object on
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 1: top of a light object.
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 1: But if you use your hand, cover up the shadows
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 1: and the highlight in the middle and.
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 2: You in the center?
• 2:02:48
  Speaker 1: Oh, I was trying to... Yeah, like, if you just
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 1: hold up your hand and cover up the shadows and
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 1: the highlight.
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's crazy.
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: They're the exact same shade of gray.
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 2: That is fucking nuts.
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 1: And so what's going on.
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 2: That's the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life. That's... Jamie,
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 2: try it. I've seen.
• 2:03:04
  Speaker 1: I know... Yeah, I've done this before.
• 2:03:06
  Speaker 2: That's literally crazy, though.
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 1: And we know why this happens.
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: It happens because your mind thinks it's looking at an
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 1: object in space. And objects in space, as we know
• 2:03:16
  Speaker 1: from a whole lifetime of experience, when they're in the sun,
• 2:03:20
  Speaker 1: they're lighter. And when they're in the shade, they're darker.
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 1: And so this is toying with us by making them
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 1: the exact same shade of gray. So the part of
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: our brain that is in charge of how we perceive
• 2:03:31
  Speaker 1: things is saying, this does not compute. Okay, I'm just
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: going to make it look like.
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 2: Just keep it big, please. Okay. Trying to... That is
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 2: so insane. If you go halfway through, it starts to change.
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 2: Like if you put your finger over it, just a
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 2: little bit of it, it stays white and dark. And
• 2:03:50
  Speaker 2: then as you move it across, you can see it change.
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 1: And there are a lot of people for whom it's
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 1: slightly different. It depends on your experiences. But basically, you
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 1: have someone rifling through the mail of your senses.
• 2:04:05
  Speaker 2: Someone?
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 1: Well, our intuitive cognition, our mind. And this mind is saying,
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 1: this does not match what I expect, so I'm changing
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 1: what you're going to experience. So this is true of
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 1: all of our senses. There's a fascinating story. There's a neuroscientist, V.S. Ramachandran.
• 2:04:26
  Speaker 1: He's written some wonderful books. One of them is called
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 1: The Phantoms in the Brain. The other is called The
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 1: Telltale Brain. But he shares this story about when he
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: was working with people who had phantom limb pain. And
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 1: there's a particular type of phantom limb pain for folks
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 1: who are missing the bottom part of their arm, where
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 1: they would report feeling like their fist was clenched so
• 2:04:48
  Speaker 1: tightly that their fingernails were digging through the flesh of
• 2:04:51
  Speaker 1: their palm. And it was just excruciating pain, but there
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 1: was nothing there. And he devised an instrument to try
• 2:04:59
  Speaker 1: to treat this. He got a box and cut some
• 2:05:02
  Speaker 1: holes in the box and put a mirror inside. So
• 2:05:05
  Speaker 1: that when the person put their existing hand in one
• 2:05:08
  Speaker 1: hole and then their absent hand in the other, they
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 1: would look at the mirror and they would see two hands.
• 2:05:14
  Speaker 1: And then he would say, clench your fist. And they
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 1: would see two fists clench. And then he'd say, release
• 2:05:21
  Speaker 1: your fist. And then the pain would go away for
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 1: some of the people.
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I've heard of this.
• 2:05:26
  Speaker 1: And the idea there is that, yeah, your brain is
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 1: creating that pain because of something not going right. And
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 1: even though you know you're fooling your brain, you're tricking
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 1: your senses into believing that your phantom limb that is
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 1: in so much pain is actually now releasing that fist.
• 2:05:48
  Speaker 1: And there's just so much about the way the brain
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 1: works that shows we are not experiencing the world in
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 1: an unmediated way. Evolution has given us lenses that that
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 1: help us experience it in a way that is going
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: to make it more likely for us to live long
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 1: enough to pass on our genes. But also a big
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 1: part of that is survival within a society. And so
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 1: our identity politics are also a big part of how
• 2:06:13
  Speaker 1: we not only experience the world, but think about things
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 1: and particularly things like values and things like that. So
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 1: there's a wonderful book by a guy named Jonathan Haidt. called,
• 2:06:23
  Speaker 1: have you heard of?
• 2:06:25
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 2:06:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So you probably talked about his book, The Righteous
• 2:06:28
  Speaker 1: Mind at some point. Yeah. And he talks quite a
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 1: bit about that. He uses a metaphor of an elephant
• 2:06:33
  Speaker 1: and a rider where you have this quick kind of
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 1: intuitive mind that we're not in control of. And then
• 2:06:41
  Speaker 1: you have the, or the quick intuitive one is, it's
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 1: been a while since I've read his metaphor, but his
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: particular metaphor is, distinguishes our intuitive cognition which we don't
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 1: really have control over and usually we're not even aware
• 2:06:54
  Speaker 1: it's happening and our conscious what we call reflective cognition
• 2:06:58
  Speaker 1: which is where we're reasoning and frequently our intuitive cognition
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 1: kind of influences our reflective reasoning so that if we
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 1: like something if we like a political candidate if we
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 1: like a particular interpretation of the Bible because that serves
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 1: our interests within the communities that are important to us
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 1: we're going to be loath to accept that a different
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 1: interpretation that complicates things for us. And that's, that's our
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 1: intuitive cognition trying to protect us socially. And it causes
• 2:07:26
  Speaker 1: all kinds of problems and everybody has it. Nobody's immune.
• 2:07:30
  Speaker 2: Well, I think a good example of that is this
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 2: Lindsay Clancy thing. Yeah. This woman who killed her kids. Yeah.
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 2: That there's people that sympathize with her and want to
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 2: visit her at the courthouse and say she didn't get
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 2: enough care and they were, They're wearing the pink T-shirts
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 2: and there's people who think she's a monster and she
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 2: should be killed.
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 2: And the people that believe that that one juror was
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 2: wrong and not released. her or not convicting her by
• 2:08:02
  Speaker 2: reasons of insanity, that those people are so firmly entrenched
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 2: in this ideology that they are incapable of seeing other
• 2:08:11
  Speaker 2: people's positions.
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 1: And this is one of the reasons that We try
• 2:08:14
  Speaker 1: so hard to ensure that when we put people on
• 2:08:17
  Speaker 1: a jury that they're not already deeply entrenched in one
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 1: side or another because they then become so impossible to
• 2:08:25
  Speaker 1: convince of whatever may or may not be the truth. So, yeah,
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 1: it is problematic. But we all experience the world in
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 1: different ways. And nobody is in charge of how we
• 2:08:35
  Speaker 1: experience the world.
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 2: Right. And there's no way you could really truly understand
• 2:08:39
  Speaker 2: how another person is seeing the world. Yeah. You're guessing.
• 2:08:42
  Speaker 2: I'm guessing you see the world the way I do.
• 2:08:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's a common assumption, that I experience it
• 2:08:47
  Speaker 1: a certain way, therefore everybody else is going to experience it.
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 2: A certain way. And an arrogance that people love to pursue,
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 2: that you should experience the world the way I do.
• 2:08:55
  Speaker 1: And that's where a lot of projection comes in. That's
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 1: where we draw conclusions about somebody else's motivations because it
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 1: might be our motivations. Of course. And sometimes... Yeah, that
• 2:09:07
  Speaker 1: causes an awful lot of problems. And again, nobody's immune
• 2:09:10
  Speaker 1: to it. We all are susceptible to our intuitive cognition
• 2:09:14
  Speaker 1: and we just have to try to, at least what
• 2:09:16
  Speaker 1: I try to do is become aware of when it's
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: led me wrong and then try to correct for that.
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 1: You can only be fixing it looking back. You can't really,
• 2:09:25
  Speaker 1: like the illusion, you can't turn that off. You can't say,
• 2:09:28
  Speaker 1: I'm now going to stop seeing it that way. It
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 1: doesn't work like that.
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you can make attempts, but then you have to
• 2:09:33
  Speaker 2: also make sure that you don't defend faulty thinking. And
• 2:09:39
  Speaker 2: that's a thing that people love to do. They love
• 2:09:42
  Speaker 2: to go back and, no, no, no, and come up
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 2: with some reason why.
• 2:09:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. In cognitive science, there are two ways that
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 1: we refer to what happens when our intuitive cognition conflicts
• 2:09:54
  Speaker 1: with our reflective cognition. You've got decoupling, which is where
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 1: your reflective cognition overrules the intuitive. So if you're asleep
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 1: at night and you hear a bang, And then you realize, okay,
• 2:10:06
  Speaker 1: that's probably just the furnace kicking on or something like that.
• 2:10:09
  Speaker 1: That's your reflective cognition saying, go back to bed, intuitive cognition.
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 1: And then the other is rationalization. And that's where you
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 1: use your reflective cognition to try to defend and rationalize
• 2:10:20
  Speaker 1: the intuitive cognition, even though it may be entirely wrong.
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 2: Which is something we really should have all been taught
• 2:10:26
  Speaker 2: in school. Yeah.
• 2:10:28
  Speaker 1: They're still doing so much research on it. It changes
• 2:10:31
  Speaker 1: so much that.
• 2:10:32
  Speaker 2: Uh, that yeah, every, every, at least the concepts of
• 2:10:34
  Speaker 2: understanding why you form decisions and why you have, why
• 2:10:39
  Speaker 2: we're so, um, vulnerable to falling into the smooth grooves
• 2:10:44
  Speaker 2: of ideology.
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 1: And, and I think one of the big problems is
• 2:10:47
  Speaker 1: frequently ideology is what put people who make those decisions
• 2:10:51
  Speaker 1: where they are.
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 2: Yes. Yes. And then again, when we talked about before
• 2:10:55
  Speaker 2: charisma and confidence and, Your decisions, when most people don't,
• 2:10:59
  Speaker 2: have confidence in their version of the world. It's so chaotic.
• 2:11:04
  Speaker 2: You are a religious man. I am. So I find
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 2: that interesting because you study all this stuff and you're
• 2:11:13
  Speaker 2: trying to get to the root of it all. What
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 2: is your version of this?
• 2:11:18
  Speaker 1: My version of this is kind of like what Russell
• 2:11:21
  Speaker 1: Crowe says in Gladiator. That's for me and my wife. No,
• 2:11:27
  Speaker 1: I don't talk publicly about my own personal faith just
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 1: because I try to keep it compartmentalized from what I'm
• 2:11:33
  Speaker 1: doing professionally and online so that I can keep the
• 2:11:37
  Speaker 1: main thing the main thing because an awful lot of
• 2:11:40
  Speaker 1: people just want to tear into... whatever it is going
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 1: on in here that allows me to share these things
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 1: while actively practicing.
• 2:11:49
  Speaker 2: Oh, for sure. They want to dismiss you. Yeah.
• 2:11:52
  Speaker 1: And so I've said from the very beginning, that's off limits.
• 2:11:55
  Speaker 1: I just don't talk about that. And in no small part,
• 2:11:58
  Speaker 1: because I do believe that it is, as Jesus in
• 2:12:02
  Speaker 1: the New Testament says, when you pray... go into your
• 2:12:05
  Speaker 1: closet and pray in secret and your father will reward
• 2:12:08
  Speaker 1: you openly. And don't pray as the hypocrites who are
• 2:12:11
  Speaker 1: on the street corner to be seen of men because
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 1: they have their reward. And the more I study religion
• 2:12:18
  Speaker 1: and how it functions and the fact that those costly
• 2:12:21
  Speaker 1: signals are such an important elements of lived religion, the
• 2:12:27
  Speaker 1: less I want to be involved in going out there
• 2:12:30
  Speaker 1: and shouting on the street corner.
• 2:12:32
  Speaker 2: About my faith.
• 2:12:33
  Speaker 1: So, So I've kind of leaned into, I'm keeping this
• 2:12:37
  Speaker 1: for me because I think it makes me more effective
• 2:12:41
  Speaker 1: as a scholar who is trying to communicate publicly about religion.
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 1: And it also has become a more meaningful way for
• 2:12:48
  Speaker 1: me to live it privately where I could be out
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 1: in public influencing a lot of things religiously. And I
• 2:12:57
  Speaker 1: think that would be an abuse of the platform that
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to build here.
• 2:13:03
  Speaker 2: That's a very admirable position in my perspective.
• 2:13:06
  Speaker 1: I am glad I've made it sound that way.
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 2: No, I think– I do. I think it's very admirable
• 2:13:11
  Speaker 2: because I have a real problem with the proselytizing. And
• 2:13:16
  Speaker 2: not just that, but the real issue is the hypocritical
• 2:13:19
  Speaker 2: nature of a lot of the humans that are involved
• 2:13:23
  Speaker 2: in promoting whatever their version or projecting in a very
• 2:13:27
  Speaker 2: performative way whatever their version of– whatever religion it is,
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 2: that they wear it like a shield of virtue.
• 2:13:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And that's really when we get into the New Testament,
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 1: that's precisely what Jesus was criticizing. And there's a concept
• 2:13:46
  Speaker 1: called the prophetic critique that we find in some of
• 2:13:50
  Speaker 1: the prophetic literature in the Hebrew Bible that's kind of
• 2:13:52
  Speaker 1: picked up again in the New Testament. And while there
• 2:13:54
  Speaker 1: are definitely... problems with the authors who are responsible for
• 2:14:00
  Speaker 1: spreading this, because they are somewhat hypocritical themselves. I think
• 2:14:03
  Speaker 1: the message is an interesting one, because the prophetic critique
• 2:14:06
  Speaker 1: is basically God saying, I hate your worship. I hate
• 2:14:10
  Speaker 1: your new moons and your Sabbaths, and I don't delight
• 2:14:13
  Speaker 1: in the blood of bulls, and I will have mercy
• 2:14:15
  Speaker 1: and not sacrifice. And that's what gets quoted twice in Matthew.
• 2:14:20
  Speaker 1: And there's a whole series of passages from Isaiah and
• 2:14:23
  Speaker 1: from Micah and from Amos and from elsewhere, where it
• 2:14:26
  Speaker 1: sounds like God is saying, I hate all the stuff
• 2:14:29
  Speaker 1: I commanded you to do. And so scholars for a
• 2:14:31
  Speaker 1: while have been like, why would God hate the rituals
• 2:14:34
  Speaker 1: that God commanded? And I think the best answer to
• 2:14:37
  Speaker 1: that is that what they then go on to say is,
• 2:14:41
  Speaker 1: I want justice and I want mercy and I want righteousness.
• 2:14:45
  Speaker 1: And what seems to be in the crosshairs is people
• 2:14:52
  Speaker 1: who go out and put on display their piety and
• 2:14:56
  Speaker 1: so that they can benefit from publicly being pious. But
• 2:15:00
  Speaker 1: then behind everybody's back, in secret, they're actually undermining what
• 2:15:04
  Speaker 1: their religion demands of them, whether that be kindness to
• 2:15:08
  Speaker 1: the immigrants or supporting the poor or whatever it is.
• 2:15:12
  Speaker 1: And in the Hebrew Bible, you have talk about grinding
• 2:15:15
  Speaker 1: the faces of the poor and you multiply your houses,
• 2:15:18
  Speaker 1: which is talking about land consolidation, basically exploiting poor people
• 2:15:21
  Speaker 1: and stealing their land and And all kinds of different
• 2:15:24
  Speaker 1: ways that they exploit the economic system and the justice
• 2:15:26
  Speaker 1: system and all this stuff. And then they go offer
• 2:15:29
  Speaker 1: sacrifices to show everybody that they're following God. And Jesus says,
• 2:15:34
  Speaker 1: one of the things that Jesus says that I think
• 2:15:36
  Speaker 1: kind of puts on display what's going on here is
• 2:15:41
  Speaker 1: he accuses some people of tithing mint and dill and
• 2:15:44
  Speaker 1: then says, but you neglect the weightier matters of the law.
• 2:15:47
  Speaker 1: And he says you should be doing both. And the
• 2:15:49
  Speaker 1: weightier matters of the law are mercy, justice, righteousness, basically
• 2:15:53
  Speaker 1: ensuring that we live in a righteous society where people
• 2:15:57
  Speaker 1: are not killed, are not underprivileged, are not facing additional
• 2:16:03
  Speaker 1: obstacles only because of the circumstances that they were born into.
• 2:16:09
  Speaker 1: And this is a negotiation with the text as well.
• 2:16:13
  Speaker 1: Like I'm kind of interpreting all these passages for you,
• 2:16:17
  Speaker 1: but I think the idea there is Don't practice your
• 2:16:21
  Speaker 1: religion in public to serve your own benefit, your own needs,
• 2:16:25
  Speaker 1: while then going around screwing over all the people around
• 2:16:27
  Speaker 1: you when your religion actually expects you to be taking
• 2:16:32
  Speaker 1: care of them as well. In fact, if Jesus is right,
• 2:16:35
  Speaker 1: those are the weightier matters. That's more important. You should
• 2:16:38
  Speaker 1: be concerned more about what's going on with the people
• 2:16:40
  Speaker 1: around you than with, you know, getting more clicks, more views,
• 2:16:46
  Speaker 1: more money, more power, more influence. From going out and
• 2:16:51
  Speaker 1: publicly saying the right thing or doing the right ritual
• 2:16:56
  Speaker 1: or whatever.
• 2:16:57
  Speaker 2: Which is one of the weirdest aspects of us being
• 2:17:00
  Speaker 2: supposedly a Christian nation but not developing any of our
• 2:17:05
  Speaker 2: inner cities, not taking care of any of these areas
• 2:17:09
  Speaker 2: that we've had in this country that have been crime-ridden
• 2:17:12
  Speaker 2: and impoverished for decade upon decade and give it no attention.
• 2:17:17
  Speaker 1: And we kind of designed the inner cities specifically to
• 2:17:21
  Speaker 1: trap certain people in them.
• 2:17:22
  Speaker 2: Redlining.
• 2:17:23
  Speaker 1: And then we now are saying, well, you got there yourself.
• 2:17:26
  Speaker 1: You deal with it. We're not going to. And redlining
• 2:17:29
  Speaker 1: continues to this day. There are lawsuits active right now
• 2:17:32
  Speaker 1: related to redlining. So, yeah, I think a lot of
• 2:17:34
  Speaker 1: people want to ignore that there are systems in play
• 2:17:37
  Speaker 1: that benefit certain people and that don't benefit other folks.
• 2:17:41
  Speaker 1: And the folks who benefit from these systems are like, oh,
• 2:17:44
  Speaker 1: I don't.
• 2:17:44
  Speaker 2: See no systems.
• 2:17:45
  Speaker 1: We're all just we're all just individuals here Yeah, I
• 2:17:47
  Speaker 1: don't harbor any hate in my heart, but I'm not
• 2:17:49
  Speaker 1: changing that system Right.
• 2:17:51
  Speaker 2: Right and did the idea of a meritocracy meritocracy be
• 2:17:54
  Speaker 2: great if everybody started the same finished starting line. Yeah, absolutely,
• 2:17:57
  Speaker 2: but to Take into consideration the fact that there's people
• 2:18:02
  Speaker 2: in in our country forget about let's fix the rest
• 2:18:04
  Speaker 2: of the world like we haven't even started in our
• 2:18:07
  Speaker 2: country and To take care of these areas.
• 2:18:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I don't know how much you travel internationally.
• 2:18:13
  Speaker 2: A little bit.
• 2:18:14
  Speaker 1: A little bit. I frequently will go someplace new and
• 2:18:18
  Speaker 1: come back like, wow, they do this thing so well
• 2:18:20
  Speaker 1: over there.
• 2:18:20
  Speaker 2: Like what?
• 2:18:21
  Speaker 1: And I wish I could. Right now my big thing
• 2:18:23
  Speaker 1: is walkability. Like go into a village in the English
• 2:18:28
  Speaker 1: countryside or something like that where, or even some of
• 2:18:31
  Speaker 1: their cities, some of their bigger cities, you can walk around. Like,
• 2:18:37
  Speaker 1: the place is not set up for cars. Oh, yeah,
• 2:18:40
  Speaker 1: we also better put a sidewalk in there. They're designed
• 2:18:43
  Speaker 1: around people walking, riding bikes.
• 2:18:46
  Speaker 2: Well, it's probably a lot older.
• 2:18:47
  Speaker 1: It's a lot older. And we have some old places
• 2:18:49
  Speaker 1: in the U.S. that are very much like that. But
• 2:18:52
  Speaker 1: more and more, our new cities that are popping up are,
• 2:18:57
  Speaker 1: you know, they're not designed for people to walk around in.
• 2:19:00
  Speaker 1: They're designed for people to drive around in. And if
• 2:19:02
  Speaker 1: you're walking, you've got to be careful because you're going
• 2:19:04
  Speaker 1: to get hit by a car. Or, you know, or
• 2:19:07
  Speaker 1: you've got a.
• 2:19:07
  Speaker 2: Well, Los Angeles is the best example of that. Los
• 2:19:10
  Speaker 2: Angeles is really hard walking.
• 2:19:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It's not a walking city.
• 2:19:15
  Speaker 2: New York City is very much a walking city, which
• 2:19:17
  Speaker 2: is really crazy because it's more congested. Yeah. More compressed,
• 2:19:21
  Speaker 2: I should say. More people in a smaller area, but
• 2:19:24
  Speaker 2: yet much easier to get around walking. Yeah.
• 2:19:26
  Speaker 1: And when I lived in, I lived just outside of
• 2:19:30
  Speaker 1: Oxford when I was going to school there. Walking around
• 2:19:32
  Speaker 1: that city is a completely different experience from any place
• 2:19:36
  Speaker 1: I've been in the U.S., which is why I think
• 2:19:38
  Speaker 1: they designed Yale after it to try to mimic that.
• 2:19:43
  Speaker 1: But that's just one example of I'll come back from
• 2:19:46
  Speaker 1: somewhere and be like, man, I wish we could do
• 2:19:48
  Speaker 1: this here. And there are so many things I think
• 2:19:51
  Speaker 1: we could do here. We have the capacity to do here.
• 2:19:54
  Speaker 1: We just don't have the desire.
• 2:19:55
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:19:56
  Speaker 1: Because they get too caught up in the wrangling over power.
• 2:20:00
  Speaker 2: Well, not only that, they're allocating so much money to
• 2:20:03
  Speaker 2: other things. The idea of saying like, well, let's cut
• 2:20:06
  Speaker 2: the Pentagon's budget, but let's dump all this money into
• 2:20:09
  Speaker 2: Detroit and Baltimore and fill in the blank, whether impoverished
• 2:20:13
  Speaker 2: city you have and have a systematic sort of a
• 2:20:19
  Speaker 2: plan from A to B of how we are going
• 2:20:23
  Speaker 2: to change the economic outcomes of all the people that
• 2:20:25
  Speaker 2: live there. how we're going to improve the education, stop
• 2:20:28
  Speaker 2: the crime, what we're going to do to provide more opportunities,
• 2:20:32
  Speaker 2: more safety. Like, what are we going to do?
• 2:20:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I think so many of the debates are really
• 2:20:37
  Speaker 1: over symptoms. And really we need to be treating the
• 2:20:41
  Speaker 1: root cause. That's a great way to put it. And
• 2:20:44
  Speaker 1: that is systemic. That is something that we've got to.
• 2:20:47
  Speaker 1: But I'm not a politician.
• 2:20:48
  Speaker 2: No.
• 2:20:48
  Speaker 1: Or a city planner.
• 2:20:50
  Speaker 2: I'm not either. One of those either. Yeah.
• 2:20:52
  Speaker 1: It's probably a good thing.
• 2:20:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Thank God. It's very complicated though. I mean, and it's,
• 2:20:57
  Speaker 2: it's just, it's weird how we, you know, we consider
• 2:21:03
  Speaker 2: ourselves a Christian nation, but we don't do those things
• 2:21:06
  Speaker 2: and that no one never holds you to task for that.
• 2:21:09
  Speaker 2: No one's never, never says that. Like that's never a
• 2:21:11
  Speaker 2: talking point for someone running for election saying there's an
• 2:21:15
  Speaker 2: issue that we can take care of in this country
• 2:21:17
  Speaker 2: that will radically transform our What this entire society looks
• 2:21:23
  Speaker 2: like in a hundred years like for the better and
• 2:21:26
  Speaker 2: my perspective has always been if you want to make
• 2:21:28
  Speaker 2: America great again What's the best way well less losers?
• 2:21:33
  Speaker 2: So what's the best way to have less losers have
• 2:21:36
  Speaker 2: more people have more opportunities more education and more safety?
• 2:21:40
  Speaker 2: So then you would automatically have more people succeed more
• 2:21:43
  Speaker 2: people contribute who knows how many more inventions more innovation
• 2:21:48
  Speaker 2: More ideas, more art, more fill in the blank.
• 2:21:51
  Speaker 1: I think I sometimes wonder how many Isaac Newtons or
• 2:21:56
  Speaker 1: Thomas Edison's lived and died in poverty in an inner
• 2:22:00
  Speaker 1: city somewhere because they were never given the opportunity to
• 2:22:03
  Speaker 1: go gain the resources and the access to the resources
• 2:22:08
  Speaker 1: that they needed to flourish. And it's because we... Yeah,
• 2:22:14
  Speaker 1: it's a big problem that unfortunately we... There was a
• 2:22:20
  Speaker 1: saying that I thought was apropos there, and I completely
• 2:22:23
  Speaker 1: forgot it, so that's not helpful. But yeah, this is
• 2:22:28
  Speaker 1: a problem I think a lot of people recognize, but unfortunately,
• 2:22:32
  Speaker 1: when it comes to actually trying to do something about it,
• 2:22:34
  Speaker 1: we have to get past the problem of the people
• 2:22:39
  Speaker 1: in power are really there to be in power more
• 2:22:42
  Speaker 1: commonly than they're there to fix problems.
• 2:22:43
  Speaker 2: And their motivation is to keep us at each other's throats,
• 2:22:46
  Speaker 2: and they would like like us to keep arguing and
• 2:22:48
  Speaker 2: fighting with each other and to keep looking at each
• 2:22:50
  Speaker 2: other as the other so that they don't have to
• 2:22:52
  Speaker 2: change anything really and just offer these fake solutions. And
• 2:22:55
  Speaker 2: then when they get in the office, they don't do
• 2:22:57
  Speaker 2: anything to change it. Yeah. Fun. But in the meanwhile,
• 2:23:02
  Speaker 2: there's your YouTube channel. There's plenty of things that are
• 2:23:06
  Speaker 2: interesting and beautiful in the world today. And I think it's,
• 2:23:10
  Speaker 2: you know, I was just talking about this yesterday. I'm
• 2:23:12
  Speaker 2: reading this Alan Watts book from 1952. And it's so
• 2:23:19
  Speaker 2: interesting because he's talking about the age of anxiety in 1952,
• 2:23:23
  Speaker 2: about how much things are changing, how much the world
• 2:23:27
  Speaker 2: is changing. And it sounds like he's talking about 2026.
• 2:23:29
  Speaker 2: And like, this is constant. This never ends. And it's
• 2:23:35
  Speaker 2: a slow sort of like two steps up, one step back,
• 2:23:39
  Speaker 2: three steps up, two steps back. There's this constant changing
• 2:23:45
  Speaker 2: of what we are and the culture. And generally, like
• 2:23:48
  Speaker 2: if you look at Pinker's work and a lot of those,
• 2:23:50
  Speaker 2: generally seems to be for the better. But while you're
• 2:23:53
  Speaker 2: in the middle of it, it seems helpless. And you
• 2:23:56
  Speaker 2: seem confused and scattered. Meanwhile, if you ask people, especially
• 2:24:01
  Speaker 2: like boomers, like when was a time when everything made sense?
• 2:24:04
  Speaker 2: Boys are in the 1950s. We all knew what a
• 2:24:07
  Speaker 2: man was and a woman was. And you went and
• 2:24:10
  Speaker 2: you did your job and you raised your kids and
• 2:24:12
  Speaker 2: the guy delivered milk. And they had this rose-colored glasses
• 2:24:17
  Speaker 2: perspective of the past. But meanwhile, Alan's writing this book
• 2:24:21
  Speaker 2: in 1952 about how it's the age of anxiety. And
• 2:24:25
  Speaker 2: it's fascinating. It's a time machine into this– This particular
• 2:24:30
  Speaker 2: period in history that at least in terms of the
• 2:24:34
  Speaker 2: things that he's describing mirror some of the issues we're
• 2:24:38
  Speaker 2: dealing with today. He's like literally talking about technology and
• 2:24:41
  Speaker 2: improvement of society and all these different things that are
• 2:24:43
  Speaker 2: like the changing of the family and what it means.
• 2:24:46
  Speaker 2: And it's like, this is wild. It's literally, he's literally
• 2:24:49
  Speaker 2: talking like it never ends. It never ends. It just
• 2:24:51
  Speaker 2: has a different title. It just looks different. Smells different.
• 2:24:55
  Speaker 2: It dances different. It's the same animal.
• 2:24:56
  Speaker 1: And I'm sure in 75 years, there will be people
• 2:24:59
  Speaker 1: look back on, on now and be like, we sure
• 2:25:01
  Speaker 1: made a ton of money off of AI or off
• 2:25:05
  Speaker 1: of exploiting this or that resource. Perhaps. And there will be,
• 2:25:08
  Speaker 1: there are a lot of people look back and be like,
• 2:25:10
  Speaker 1: I remember it differently. And, you know, we were not
• 2:25:13
  Speaker 1: the recipients of all that funding that the government was
• 2:25:16
  Speaker 1: handing out, just like there were a lot of people
• 2:25:17
  Speaker 1: who were not the recipients of funding back in post-World
• 2:25:21
  Speaker 1: War II America.
• 2:25:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:25:23
  Speaker 1: And there were others who were the recipients of an
• 2:25:25
  Speaker 1: awful lot of funding. So, yeah, I think it goes
• 2:25:28
  Speaker 1: back to the systemic issues that we have with our
• 2:25:33
  Speaker 1: goals and who's making those decisions and goes back to
• 2:25:37
  Speaker 1: why I am not a politician or a city planner. Yeah.
• 2:25:42
  Speaker 1: Even though I did run for my state legislature twice.
• 2:25:44
  Speaker 2: Did you? Yeah. What were you trying to?
• 2:25:47
  Speaker 1: Well, I was trying to mainly annoy the two incumbents
• 2:25:54
  Speaker 1: and also just try to move the needle a little bit.
• 2:25:57
  Speaker 1: I live in a very, very conservative part of Salt
• 2:26:00
  Speaker 1: Lake County. And I had, I think, a 50-point deficit
• 2:26:03
  Speaker 1: to make up against the state rep and then a
• 2:26:06
  Speaker 1: 40-point deficit to make up against the state senator. And
• 2:26:09
  Speaker 1: I think I took around 16 points off of both
• 2:26:12
  Speaker 1: of them. So I did make a little bit of progress.
• 2:26:14
  Speaker 1: But that was a bizarre experience. And now I think
• 2:26:21
  Speaker 1: both of them are gone. One of them resigned, I think,
• 2:26:26
  Speaker 1: the term after that election. And the other resigned just,
• 2:26:29
  Speaker 1: I believe, last year or so. And now we just
• 2:26:31
  Speaker 1: had another state senator who had some felony charges against
• 2:26:37
  Speaker 1: him for fraud.
• 2:26:38
  Speaker 2: Oh, fun. Yeah. Well, that is the real problem is
• 2:26:41
  Speaker 2: the type of people that want to run for office
• 2:26:43
  Speaker 2: are almost all out of their fucking minds. For the
• 2:26:47
  Speaker 2: most part. Other than people that are just trying to
• 2:26:49
  Speaker 2: shake things up like yourself.
• 2:26:51
  Speaker 1: I think the people who are doing it for reasons
• 2:26:54
  Speaker 1: that are going to be beneficial to others are in
• 2:26:58
  Speaker 1: the minority for sure.
• 2:26:59
  Speaker 2: Unfortunately.
• 2:27:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:27:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, maybe that'll change over time. You know, maybe...
• 2:27:05
  Speaker 2: with more conversations like this and more people realizing that
• 2:27:10
  Speaker 2: if we keep going in the same direction that we're
• 2:27:11
  Speaker 2: going now, we're not going to ever improve. But it's
• 2:27:14
  Speaker 2: always there. It's always available. There are people out there
• 2:27:16
  Speaker 2: that think differently. It's not like these are alien ideas
• 2:27:20
  Speaker 2: that most people are not willing to even consider. Most
• 2:27:23
  Speaker 2: people listen to what you're saying, what I'm saying, and
• 2:27:26
  Speaker 2: they're probably thinking, yeah, that would probably be better for
• 2:27:28
  Speaker 2: everybody except the incredibly rich people that control the defense
• 2:27:33
  Speaker 2: contracting companies.
• 2:27:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and also it's one thing to be sitting down
• 2:27:37
  Speaker 1: and wherever you listen to this podcast, and hear these ideas,
• 2:27:41
  Speaker 1: it's another when you're in the thick of things and
• 2:27:44
  Speaker 1: suddenly you're getting defensive about your position.
• 2:27:47
  Speaker 2: Of course.
• 2:27:47
  Speaker 1: Or you're getting critical of another's position. Once the rubber
• 2:27:50
  Speaker 1: hits the road, that's where it becomes difficult. And where
• 2:27:54
  Speaker 1: it becomes a lot harder than it is to sit
• 2:27:56
  Speaker 1: across the table and say, yeah, we agree on this.
• 2:27:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's also like you and I, I could tell
• 2:28:02
  Speaker 2: from you, you're very careful with the way you think
• 2:28:05
  Speaker 2: about things. And you're very objective and you try to
• 2:28:08
  Speaker 2: analyze things and find out why you think about things.
• 2:28:10
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of people that have not learned that skill.
• 2:28:14
  Speaker 2: It's unfortunate. Yeah. And again, it's not really taught. And
• 2:28:18
  Speaker 2: you might grow up in an environment within a family
• 2:28:21
  Speaker 2: that is like very rigid and In their belief system
• 2:28:25
  Speaker 2: and very angry if you deviate from that. And it's
• 2:28:28
  Speaker 2: a lot of times people just to fit in. They just,
• 2:28:32
  Speaker 2: they adhere.
• 2:28:33
  Speaker 1: And it's easier to get the Ten Commandments in a
• 2:28:35
  Speaker 1: school than a critical thinking class. Yes.
• 2:28:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I had Tallarico on and we were talking about that.
• 2:28:41
  Speaker 2: And he made a very good point, I think, that
• 2:28:43
  Speaker 2: that's going to push people away from Christianity. And, you know,
• 2:28:47
  Speaker 2: and people have resisted that. I'm like, but no one
• 2:28:50
  Speaker 2: wants to be told. like in a school that's supposed to,
• 2:28:53
  Speaker 2: we're supposed to separate school. Like you don't want them
• 2:28:58
  Speaker 2: teaching Islamic tenets in your school, right? Right. Because, well,
• 2:29:03
  Speaker 2: this is a Christian nation.
• 2:29:04
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 2:29:06
  Speaker 2: It's also, well, it's not. It's a nation of humans, okay?
• 2:29:10
  Speaker 2: And freedom is supposed to be one of the things
• 2:29:12
  Speaker 2: that the right in particular is supposed to hold dear. Freedom.
• 2:29:17
  Speaker 2: They love to say that. Well, freedom also means freedom
• 2:29:20
  Speaker 2: to not be indoctrinated with other people's ideology. Even if
• 2:29:24
  Speaker 2: you believe that this is the truth, this is the light,
• 2:29:27
  Speaker 2: they need to learn this. Well, make your argument, make
• 2:29:30
  Speaker 2: it very compelling and do it by example also. Be
• 2:29:34
  Speaker 2: someone who is admirable in the way you behave and
• 2:29:37
  Speaker 2: think and talk and the way you live.
• 2:29:39
  Speaker 1: Something that when I went a year after I had
• 2:29:43
  Speaker 1: been baptized as a Latter-day Saint. I went out on
• 2:29:45
  Speaker 1: my mission. I got a set of scriptures. And the
• 2:29:48
  Speaker 1: first thing I wrote in the inside cover was a
• 2:29:50
  Speaker 1: quote that I've always loved. A good example is the
• 2:29:53
  Speaker 1: best preacher. And I've always tried to live by that.
• 2:29:57
  Speaker 1: And when it comes to the U.S. as a Christian nation,
• 2:30:01
  Speaker 1: I can understand Tallarico's concern for what that's going to
• 2:30:05
  Speaker 1: do to Christianity. And absolutely, I understand that we don't
• 2:30:09
  Speaker 1: want the state indoctrinating our children. And one concern I
• 2:30:13
  Speaker 1: see getting brought up less is what it does to
• 2:30:16
  Speaker 1: someone who's in the minority for them to go to
• 2:30:20
  Speaker 1: state-sponsored education and have the states tell them, you are
• 2:30:25
  Speaker 1: unwanted here. We are this. You are not that. We're
• 2:30:29
  Speaker 1: going to let you be here, but know that you're
• 2:30:31
  Speaker 1: a second-class citizen. And I don't think that is certainly
• 2:30:36
  Speaker 1: not a comfortable situation to be attending school. And probably
• 2:30:40
  Speaker 1: not a safe situation in a lot of ways for
• 2:30:42
  Speaker 1: attending school. And at the same time, if people are
• 2:30:44
  Speaker 1: indoctrinated and do adopt Christianity as a result of that,
• 2:30:49
  Speaker 1: that's not really a desirable conversion in my mind. Oh,
• 2:30:53
  Speaker 1: the state wants me to be Christian, so I'm going
• 2:30:55
  Speaker 1: to be a Christian because I'm doing what the state
• 2:30:57
  Speaker 1: wants me to do.
• 2:30:57
  Speaker 2: For your own safety, you adopted it.
• 2:30:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you've adopted it so that you can benefit from
• 2:31:03
  Speaker 1: the resources that you are given access to.
• 2:31:05
  Speaker 2: Or just to stay safe. Yeah. And this is the
• 2:31:07
  Speaker 2: same argument they would make. If you were in a
• 2:31:11
  Speaker 2: school district that adopted an Islamic education system and was
• 2:31:15
  Speaker 2: under Sharia law, you'd be like, no, this is not freedom.
• 2:31:18
  Speaker 1: And I think the Confederate statues, these came up in
• 2:31:21
  Speaker 1: the early 20th century, and we know explicitly the goal
• 2:31:25
  Speaker 1: was to terrorize. the black population, to let them know
• 2:31:29
  Speaker 1: who was in charge around here.
• 2:31:31
  Speaker 2: Not only that, there were shitty statues. This is the thing.
• 2:31:34
  Speaker 2: People were defending it. I don't think they should be removed,
• 2:31:38
  Speaker 2: but I think people should understand why they were put
• 2:31:39
  Speaker 2: there in the first place.
• 2:31:41
  Speaker 1: But they wanted kids walking to school, little black children
• 2:31:43
  Speaker 1: walking to school and seeing this explicitly white supremacist statue
• 2:31:47
  Speaker 1: so that they knew, we honor this, or this is
• 2:31:51
  Speaker 1: at least who we are, just so you know for
• 2:31:54
  Speaker 1: the future. Just keep that in mind. as you grow
• 2:31:57
  Speaker 1: up in our state.
• 2:31:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that conversation was lost in the outrage over the
• 2:32:03
  Speaker 2: removal of the statues.
• 2:32:04
  Speaker 1: Well, it had to be for the removal to be defended.
• 2:32:08
  Speaker 1: They couldn't allow that conversation to happen.
• 2:32:12
  Speaker 2: But listen, man, I really love your channel.
• 2:32:15
  Speaker 1: It's fucking awesome.
• 2:32:16
  Speaker 2: I've had countless hours listening to you and watching you.
• 2:32:19
  Speaker 2: So I really appreciate what you're doing. I know it's
• 2:32:23
  Speaker 2: a long road to learn all the shit that you've learned.
• 2:32:27
  Speaker 1: It has been, but it's been a lot of fun.
• 2:32:28
  Speaker 1: And I wanted to give you this as well. This
• 2:32:30
  Speaker 1: is a book that I published last year. It's called
• 2:32:32
  Speaker 1: The Bible Says So, What We Get Right and Wrong
• 2:32:34
  Speaker 1: About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues. It's basically a greatest hits
• 2:32:39
  Speaker 1: of what I've done on my channel. I don't know
• 2:32:43
  Speaker 1: how much you enjoy reading hard copies of books.
• 2:32:46
  Speaker 2: I do. It's great to put me to bed. There's
• 2:32:50
  Speaker 2: nothing like reading a book that makes you sleepy. Yeah.
• 2:32:53
  Speaker 1: When Joel McHale gave me one of the blurbs for
• 2:32:57
  Speaker 1: my book and I was like, you want a hard copy?
• 2:32:59
  Speaker 1: He's like, I'll take the audio book. Yeah.
• 2:33:01
  Speaker 2: Did you read the audio book?
• 2:33:03
  Speaker 1: I did.
• 2:33:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:33:04
  Speaker 1: Oh, excellent. So I recorded that. I'm working on another
• 2:33:06
  Speaker 1: one right now that's going to be, it's going, it's Basically,
• 2:33:10
  Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about how the God of the
• 2:33:11
  Speaker 1: Bible changes from the earliest parts of the Bible to
• 2:33:14
  Speaker 1: the latest parts of the Bible. So right now we're
• 2:33:16
  Speaker 1: going with God's biography of biblical history. But I'm really
• 2:33:20
  Speaker 1: enjoying writing. Well, what little I've been able to write
• 2:33:22
  Speaker 1: of it, I've.
• 2:33:23
  Speaker 2: Really been enjoying. How far out do you think this
• 2:33:25
  Speaker 2: one is?
• 2:33:27
  Speaker 1: Further out than my contract wants it to be, probably.
• 2:33:30
  Speaker 1: Isn't that always the case? We've been dealing with a
• 2:33:34
  Speaker 1: lot of stuff in my household, medical stuff, school stuff,
• 2:33:38
  Speaker 1: and we're also finishing our basement right now. And so
• 2:33:42
  Speaker 1: I haven't had as much time as I would like to.
• 2:33:44
  Speaker 1: And this is for my publisher. So when I come
• 2:33:47
  Speaker 1: and say, I don't know if I'm going to be
• 2:33:49
  Speaker 1: on time, I have reasons. But hopefully it should be
• 2:33:52
  Speaker 1: out the beginning of 2028.
• 2:33:55
  Speaker 2: Okay. That's, yeah. Beautiful.
• 2:33:58
  Speaker 1: And it's another book I think that's going to blow
• 2:34:00
  Speaker 1: a lot of people's minds if they sit down and
• 2:34:02
  Speaker 1: give it a chance. Because the more we, like you
• 2:34:06
  Speaker 1: talk about how that book about 1950s and how it
• 2:34:11
  Speaker 1: was Age of Anxiety. It's unlike how we picture things.
• 2:34:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, just so people know what I'm talking about, I'll
• 2:34:17
  Speaker 2: give you the title of the book. But the. It's
• 2:34:22
  Speaker 2: called The Wisdom of Insecurity. Okay.
• 2:34:23
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 2:34:25
  Speaker 2: A message for an age of anxiety.
• 2:34:27
  Speaker 1: And the point I want to make is that, you know,
• 2:34:30
  Speaker 1: there are people who lived that, who are still around,
• 2:34:32
  Speaker 1: who can talk about it. But that's not how we
• 2:34:34
  Speaker 1: tend to represent that time period. That's not how we
• 2:34:38
  Speaker 1: tend to think about it. And if we go back
• 2:34:42
  Speaker 1: to 2,500 years, our reconstruction of that history is even
• 2:34:47
  Speaker 1: further removed from how we tend to think about it.
• 2:34:49
  Speaker 1: And the digger we... The digger we deep. The deeper
• 2:34:53
  Speaker 1: we dig... into the data, the more information we have
• 2:34:57
  Speaker 1: to understand what was going on. And anybody who wants
• 2:35:00
  Speaker 1: to actually try to understand what's going on, you have to,
• 2:35:02
  Speaker 1: to let these, these kinds of things inform your reconstruction.
• 2:35:06
  Speaker 1: Otherwise it's just ideology. Otherwise it's just dogma. And that's,
• 2:35:12
  Speaker 1: and that's what, that's the name of my podcast, Data
• 2:35:15
  Speaker 1: Over Dogma, which is all about trying to ensure that
• 2:35:20
  Speaker 1: we're letting the data set the terms for the discussion
• 2:35:23
  Speaker 1: rather than the ideologies, the things that we want to happen,
• 2:35:26
  Speaker 1: the dogmas that we bring to it, rather than ensuring
• 2:35:29
  Speaker 1: that they're setting the terms for the discussion. Awesome.
• 2:35:32
  Speaker 2: Hey, thank you very much. Thanks for all you do.
• 2:35:34
  Speaker 2: And I really enjoyed this conversation.
• 2:35:35
  Speaker 1: Thank you. I appreciate it.
• 2:35:37
  Speaker 2: Bye.