Transcript of #2562 - Dan McClellan

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All right, we're up. What's up, Dan? Good to meet you, man.

Good to meet you too. Thank you so much for having me out.

It's always weird when you watch a bunch of a guy's content and then you meet him. You know, it's very odd.

It is. There's a, there's a parasocial relationship thing there that, that's a little, it's a little, uh, off-putting at first. I I remember I had a long time ago, I got a notification I was being followed on Instagram by Joel McHale, and I was like, sweet! Like, texted my family. And then like a couple weeks later, I got a message from him. He's like, hey man, big fan, love your stuff, we got to hang out sometime. And I was like, all right, cool.

He's a really nice guy.

He's incredible. He's a wonderful guy, got a lovely family, and he was coming out to Salt Lake City to do FanX a couple years ago, which is our version of Comic-Con. And I was like, hey, let's do dinner.

Yeah, you're a giant comic freak.

I am, yeah. And he— I was like, let's do dinner. He's like, it's a date, but I'm a— what did he call himself? An arrogant foodie. So he was like, so I gotta pick the restaurant. But he's like, let's get on the phone and chat for a minute. And I called him, he picked up the phone, he's like, Dan McClown. Joel McHale. He's like, this is so weird talking to you. I was like, Joel, I promise you it's a lot weirder for me. So I know exactly what that's like, but—

It's very odd. I try to give people as much grace as possible when they meet me because I've probably been in their head more than, you know, with headphones and shit for thousands of— it's odd. It's odd for me, so I'm sure it's odd for other people too.

And I'm kind of like, I don't even recall if I'm proud of everything I've ever said, but so I don't know what kind of impression somebody has of me.

Oh, I have a great impression of you.

Well, I appreciate that because I'm certainly not proud of everything I've said.

We're all good. We're all good.

Because I don't really watch my stuff. I don't even remember a lot of stuff I've said.

Oh, that's a real problem with me. There's people that I forget I talked to.

Okay.

And then we bring them up on the podcast. I'm like, gosh, you have that guy on? And Jamie's like, we actually had him on 3 years ago. It happens. It happens once every 6 months.

Yeah, we deal with that when we're like, what should we talk about today? I'm like, I don't know, we talk about this? And they're like, 2 weeks ago, we talked about that.

Yeah, that is an issue with you, I would imagine, more because you're dealing with very specific structure and texts. And it's also something that you have this incredible deep knowledge of. So there's probably no way you can remember the specific instances in which you talked about it.

Yeah, definitely. It's an issue. But it's also, I think, something that's kind of baked into the reason my channel is so beneficial to a lot of people because I can repeat stuff over and over again because as my audience grows, there are always new people who haven't been exposed to a lot of things. So there are actually a handful of things I kind of— not programmatically, but every 6 months or so, I'll be like, it's probably time to talk about this again. And then I already have the foundation there. I can recall most of what I said. But yeah, I do have to go refresh my memory. What was that manuscript called? I've got to figure out, you know, translate that again, something like that. So, it is both a blessing and a curse because it means I can, if I'm having a slow day, can't think of something to talk about, maybe I just recycle something I did 6 months ago and there are going to be thousands of people who hadn't seen it before.

At least, yeah, you have an enormous library. Like how many videos have you put out all told?

Around 4,000, which is— I see people who put out that many podcast episodes. Yeah, that's, that's rarefied air.

I think we're at 2,600, almost 2,900, almost 2,900 plus.

Oh, it's including all the other ones.

Oh, is that including all of them? Yeah, so almost 3,000 including Fight Companions, MMA podcasts, things of those likes.

Yeah, but that's You know, 2 to 3 hours or more each too.

So that cooks the brain, Dan. I don't know if it's good. My memory is so weird. It's very good sometimes and also terrible other times. And I think my hard drive is overwhelmed.

I'm the same way, particularly when I'm on the spot. Like, I lose names.

Yeah.

Like, like crazy. I went— my kids were like, you should try out for Jeopardy. And I went through the— I got through the first phase, and then there were like this, uh, not like an in-person thing, but a live online thing, and I just froze up. Everything, I was like, I can see his face. I know the dude inside out. I can't remember the name. I freeze up a lot.

Do you do anything to enhance your memory in terms of vitamins or nootropics?

Um, I—

or nootropics, I don't know how to pronounce it.

There is, there is some research that is suggesting, uh, creatine might be a little more helpful for, for brain function. So I actually, I do 10 I don't even know if this is grams or milligrams. Yeah, 10 grams of creatine every day. So I'm—

Excellent.

Definitely, that's a choice that I've made. I try to minimize all the different stuff I'm putting in my body, but I have a slew of vitamins and things like that that I'm taking in addition. I've got to get the fiber because I'm of a certain age.

That's debatable. Yeah, oddly enough. Yeah, I mean, I don't know where I stand honestly because I take in fiber mostly in the form of fermented vegetables. I'm a big kimchi fan.

Okay.

But there's quite a few people that have zero fiber and that exist on a carnivore diet. And I think a lot of these people are people with autoimmune issues that tend to have problems with plant-based chemicals, like chemicals that are in plants. And then there's a real problem with the American diet, which is glyphosate and herbicides. There's a lot of different herbicides and chemicals used in industrial fertilizer that get into your food. And a lot of people have extreme sensitivities to those things.

Yeah.

Perhaps due to prolonged exposure. It's very difficult to parse out. You have to talk to a bunch of different people, and a bunch of different people have like different takes on it. But I know quite a few very healthy people that don't eat any fiber.

Yeah.

They just eat like eggs and chicken and meat and fish, and that's it.

Well, for me, it was definitely— I noticed when I took it, Things were easier for me in the morning.

Oh yeah, for sure.

And that was where I was like, okay, then done. That's what I'm gonna do from now on.

There's a transitionary period. I did the carnivore diet strictly once for 60 days. I've never done it for more than that. But for 30 days when I did it, the first 4 or 5, the diarrhea, my friend Tom Segura described it as remarkable.

Breathtaking.

It's disturbing. It's like, what is happening to me? But that settles down after a while and then your bowel movements are, Not as frequent, but very easy. It's just like, boop, it's like not much, and that's it, because there's no fiber. So it's like what is left after you chew all the meat and swallow it. It's like that stuff comes out in the wash, and that's a wrap. I'm not an expert in health and nutrition. I'm not.

Not either.

I've absorbed a lot of information, but some of it contradicts. It's very hard to know who's right and who's wrong, and I think it's also It varies biologically. It varies genetically. It varies depending upon where your ancestors are from. There's a lot of people that I know that have real problems with red meat and real problems with certain— I have friends that are vegan that exist healthy. They have no problem with that diet. Then I know friends who've tried it for ethical reasons and their health fell apart and they're like, well, fuck it. I can't do this.

Yeah. The thing I try to pay attention to is something called FODMAPs. Have you heard of—

No.

I can't remember what it stands for, the acronym, but basically it's— there are certain kinds of substances in foods. The acronym is FODMAP, but they occur a lot in breads and a lot of things with a lot of carbohydrates in them. But they—

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Oh, there we go.

Short-term 3-step eating plan to temporarily restrict specific poorly absorbed sugars to help manage digestive distress like bloating, gas, and abdominal pain. Okay.

So I, I started noticing if I was eating certain things throughout the day, I was a lot more bloated and uncomfortable by the time night came around. And, and I did all kinds of investigating, and, and I figured out when I was avoiding things that are high in FODMAPs, my— I was just— I felt better.

And what was the word again, Jamie, when FODMAPs broken down again? It is a— the word is fermentable Boy, oligosaccharides, disaccharides, and monosaccharides, and polys— polyols— polyols— polyols— short-chain carbohydrates and sugar alcohols that small intestines absorb poorly. Huh. What's in that category of those things?

That's what I was trying to get to a picture of. Does it say? I guess there's low and high.

Yeah.

Yeah, the more— some things have— are higher in those things and some things are lower.

Uh, suitable on a low FODMAP diet: fruit, obviously vegetables, cereals, milk, tofu. And then the bad ones: excessive fructose, lactose, fructans, galactans, legumes. Oh wow, you can't eat beans? How weird.

Well, I think that's the category, and then there are certain members of that category that are high and certain members of that category that are low.

Yeah, it has here baked beans, chickpeas, kidney beans, lentils, soybeans.

And what I really noticed, there was one day I had— we got a watermelon and I ate like half of it. My wife's like, chill out, man. And I like, within a couple hours, I was really, really gassy and bloated. Really?

From watermelon?

Yeah, and I was like, that has to be the watermelon doing it, because I haven't had anything else out of the ordinary. And so I started looking at that. And so I'm sensitive to that kind of stuff, but that's just my own biological makeup. Some people are genetically gifted in other ways.

Well, it also depends on what you've done that day. Like, if you've gone a long hike through the mountains and you're exhausted, like, high carbohydrates and high sugar diet or something, a meal is actually good for you.

I— there are times when I'm definitely craving it, and I'm like, gotta listen to my body.

I think there's a reason. Yeah, especially when you're worn out, like hiking in particular. Like, you know, you think about if you're at altitude and you do like a 3 or 4 mile hike and you're climbing, that's— at the end of it, you're fucking spent. You have no sugar in your body. You have a real issue and your body needs something to replenish your muscles.

Yeah, I got plenty of fat stores so that when I go out for my run, I can last a little longer. But I run at altitude by Salt Lake, so whenever I come— whenever I travel elsewhere, like I go to San Diego couple times a year, or I'm on the East Coast or here— what, the altitude here is not very high.

No, so I don't even think it's 1,000 feet.

And it's— I can run 10 times as far. Yeah, it's so nice. I enjoy running a lot more because the lack of oxygen, it doesn't take it out of me nearly as quickly.

We have a hypoxia chamber in the studio.

Oh, really?

Yeah, we have a gym that's connected to the studio, and in the gym is this thing called a hypoxia— it's called the I forgot the name of it. Exalt. Exalt XP is the company. I forget the name of this, but this thing brings you to— you could vary the altitude, and I put it at 14,000 feet.

Oh wow.

So I do these cardio workouts at 14,000 feet. They're very specific depending upon what you're trying to do. Like, there's a VO2— I killed myself yesterday because I do this VO2 max one.

Yeah.

Where you're doing 4 minutes of hard cardio and at 14,000 feet above sea level, and then you have like a 2-minute recovery period, and then you get back on it again. You do it again, and you do a cycle of 4 of those, and it's fucking hell.

Yeah, that's, that's pretty intense. I do, I do the HIIT, high-intensity interval training, from time to time, but I don't have the discipline to, to do it at 14,000 feet.

It's not fun, but it has, it has a giant impact though. So if you do go somewhere, like if I had to go to Utah and I'm in the mountains, It's a giant benefit.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, because I know I've seen people, they'll wear the masks that are supposed to kind of reduce the oxygen. So it's a similar training. It's probably not as effective.

Yeah, the mask thing is controversial. I don't know about that. Yeah, there's some devices that you can use that actually strengthen the diaphragm muscles, and you breathe through them and you do breathing exercises. But those restrictive masks, I don't know about those. I would imagine they would do the same. They would have the same similar function. It reduces the amount of oxygen you get. But they were a thing, the training mask. It was a thing among MMA fighters for a while. They've all abandoned it. At least most of them that I know.

Hmm. I don't know.

Maybe they got tired of it. Maybe it was too hard already. Yeah. Um, what was that thing you brought in, that big piece of pottery?

Yeah, so I brought in a couple of things.

Show and tell.

Well, I busted out So this is a gift for, for you. Ooh, thank you. This is a replica of my favorite artifact from the ancient world. A friend of mine named Robert Algot runs this website called relics3d.com, and he makes these. And this is, this is what's called the Kuntiladajrud.

Can I take a guess as to where it came from?

Yeah, go ahead.

Turkey.

No.

No, damn.

It came, came from Kuntiladajrud, oddly enough, which is a It's down near the Sinai Peninsula.

Oh, okay.

And so, this was a part of a large jar called a pithos. And this is just one fragment of it. Well, it's a bunch of fragments that were brought together that were discovered that dates to about 800 BCE. And it's one of my favorite artifacts because we have an inscription over top and then a drawing of a male and a female deity. And the inscription talks about somebody asking for or thanking somebody for blessings by Adonai of Shomron, or Jehovah of Samaria, the Lord of Samaria and his Asherah. And so, I think the majority of scholars agree this is probably intended to reflect the interpretation of these 2 deities as the God of Israel and God's wife, Asherah.

Very weird looking.

Yeah, well, they're kind of— they kind of look almost bovine, And this is probably because they're appealing to some iconographic motifs associated with deities Bes and Beset, which are Egyptian deities that—

That appears bovine to you?

Just the face a little bit. Like, the body's more anthropomorphic.

Can you put an image of that on the screen, Jamie? So we could maybe perhaps see what it looks like?

I'm trying to figure out how to spell that. Should I find the website? I can spell it for you. K-U-N-T—

Hold on.

That's K— pause. Go ahead.

I-L-L-E-T.

I-L-L-E-T.

And then the next word.

I think I got it now.

Okay. A-J-J-E-R-U-D. And then like relic.

Inscription.

Yeah.

There are actually a bunch of inscriptions.

Okay. Now I see the bovine. Now I'm looking at it.

And there's the actual—

yeah.

Yeah.

So this is Now I see it. It's hard to look at that thing. It looked almost like the— go back to the other image. Yeah, get me that. Yeah, I thought the lines— I thought the head was where the mouth or the nose is. I thought that's what the eyes and the other thing was like a crown he was wearing.

Yeah, well, you've got, you've got the, the headdresses on top that are, that are supposed to indicate they're deities.

How fucking weird. It's all the old ancient depictions of deities. You're like, oh, what were they doing? This is— this to me is the most fascinating thing about pretty much all religious texts is like, what was the original thing that they were trying to document?

Yeah.

Whether it was through oral tradition, then eventually written down, like, what was the original event? That fascinates me the most about the Bible. It fascinates me the most about the ancient Sumerian writings. I'm just— I I don't think all of it is fiction, but I don't think all of it is literal. I think you're also dealing with an enormous amount of time between these events and then the writing down. And then you've highlighted this very much in some of your videos. There's a lot of weirdness when you compare some of these stories, like the story of Moses and Sargon of Akkad. They seem incredibly similar.

Yeah.

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Yeah, I think, I think there's definitely some kind of genetic relationship between the two. And specifically, it's the story of him as a baby being placed into a container and set adrift in, in a river. That is Sargon the Great, who dates to long before a historical Moses, but that Tradition, I think the earliest version of it we've found in the Akkadian literature dates to maybe 9th or 8th century BCE, which is around the time that people think that, or at least scholars think that, the tradition of Moses and the narrative of the Exodus was beginning to come together. So, it makes sense that they would draw from that tradition. And I think there are a couple of different reasons for it. One of the reasons is to Because that already has some purchase in the zeitgeist. And so, if you kind of reflect something that people already are aware of, it kind of makes it a little easier to incorporate into their worldview. And then also, it can also be kind of a challenge to the other tradition. It's like, well, you got your guy, we got ours. Our guy did it better.

Interesting.

And so, and this is a lot of what's going on with the representation of Jesus in the New Testament. Because there are certain turns of phrase, there are certain things that Jesus does in the New Testament that reflect what the Greco-Roman world expected from their emperors and their god-men. And so, in the New Testament, it's kind of a way to do both of those things, to say we got one of those too, only ours did it better.

Oh, interesting.

So, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is every text, whether it's a text that's inscribed on a piece of pottery or something that wound up in the Bible, every author wrote it down because they wanted to achieve something.

Hmm.

We tend to think of language as just about communicating information. But nothing happens in a vacuum. It's all happening in circumstances, in contexts where they're trying to achieve something. And so, scholars go to great lengths to try to figure out, well, what precisely would have been achieved by writing this down or by writing any of the texts in the Hebrew Bible or in the New Testament? And The best way to figure that out is to try to situate the composition within, you know, whatever historical period makes the most sense, whatever we can make the best case for and figure out how it would have worked in that period, which is why there are some texts that we think were intended as propaganda. There are texts that we think were intended to kind of place one person struggling for power over another person struggling for power. There's a lot of political— Propaganda going on. And then there are other texts that are intended to try to make people feel better about why things aren't going well for them, why bad things are happening to good people and good things aren't happening to bad people. So, there are tons of different reasons that people are writing texts.

But a good illustration of this is genre. So, all texts have a genre of some kind. And that's basically just a conventionalized set of things that are in the text that help cue people to what kind of text they're looking at. So if I start a story, once upon a time, you already know it's going to be a specific type of text. So without even knowing that you're aware of genre, you're aware of the genre of a text. And if you found a piece of paper in a parking lot, and it said, dozen eggs, pound of ground beef, you know, prophylaxis, stuff like that, prophylactics actually would be the plural. You know, you found a grocery list, a shopping list. And so that's a genre of text as well. So just by being aware of these conventions, we can say, oh, well, I know exactly what this text was trying to do, because it has all these markers of a given genre. And that's a big cue to helping us figure out what texts are trying to do. And when people wrote on pottery, generally, this was a little more ritual. This was something that was intended to be like a votive offering, which might be an offering to a deity so that the deity will then bless you, or it might be something that people are intended to come in and read out loud so that they invoke the presence of the deity in the space.

And then the drawing the deity would also be a way of doing that. So, there are a lot of different reasons for what's going on. And that's the big mystery is, what were they trying to accomplish?

And cattle worship was very common. It was Choctawhiuk. It was— there was like the Hindus. There's a lot of cattle worship.

Yeah, there are a lot of— there's worship of a lot of different animals or the sacralization of a lot of different animals in a lot of different places. And this is probably drawing from Egyptian iconography. So, yeah, this is— the Sinai Peninsula is right in between Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. And there was an awful lot of Egyptian influence on things. So even if you look at, for instance, Hezekiah, there's a bulla that was discovered, which is something that was left from an impression, a signet ring or something like that, that has the name Hezekiah on it. And there's an Egyptian drawing of a winged— I think it's a winged scarab or something like that. Which is directly from Egypt because Israel was under Egyptian hegemony for a long, long time.

So, it's right next door.

Yeah. Yeah.

So— You were talking about Jesus and the New Testament and that some of it seems to have been like the way it was done to appease the people that lived in the same era?

Yeah, some of it was a way to, I think, make people feel better about themselves. For instance, So, the texts were written long after Jesus was dead.

Right.

The Gospels, Mark was probably written 69, 70, 71-ish CE. Matthew's probably 5, 10 years after that. Luke's probably 5, 10 years or more after that. John's a little after that. And at this time period, there's already a following that is developing. And so, the people who are writing these texts are writing them for a literary audience, but they also want them to speak to the experiences of the people who are followers of Jesus. So, for instance, there's a part where Jesus says, you know, I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. And, you know, I will set father against son and mother against daughter and all this kind of stuff. And people have wondered, well, what on earth is going on here? And there are scholars who suggest that the point of that would have been to make it sound like, to people who are struggling with inner family relationships, you know, I'm a follower of Jesus now and I got kicked out of my house, or I'm a follower of Jesus now and I constantly fight with my wife or with my brother or something like that. Am I doing something wrong?

And this text has Jesus saying, no, no, I came to cause that. So, that means things are working. And that's a way to make people feel, okay, well, then I'm okay, because I got kicked out of, you know, my parents' house or something like that.

But isn't that crazy? Someone putting words into Jesus's mouth just so that people of the time feel okay?

I think that's probably an awful lot of what's going on. It's either to make them feel okay or to try to push them to Agree with living a certain way, or something like that, or try to make them feel like this is what's coming up for us.

Which is a problem with taking everything literally and like people deciding that all of it is the Word of God, when some of it is just like, okay, would God really tell you to do that? Like, why? Why is God telling you to rape? Why is God telling you to kill women and children?

Yeah, yeah, that's something that—

Commanding you to.

Yeah, and people have been struggling with that for the entire history of the circulation of those texts. And And I think there are— yeah, the Word of God thing is interesting because that phrase is never used anywhere in the Bible to refer to texts specifically as the texts that are in circulation. So, Word of God is always a reference to just the message, however it's circulating, whether it's oral or whatever.

Right.

Or to Jesus. In the New Testament, Jesus is the Word, but it's never used to refer to a specific Textual manifestation of the message. And so, there's not really a case to make that any author of any text that's in the Bible used that phrase to refer to the Scriptures or the Bible. And so, even in 1 Corinthians, in a couple of places, Paul, he says, this is not coming from the Lord, this is just coming from me. And then we take it and say, okay, wink wink, we know what you mean. Well, Paul knew.

This is coming from the Word. Paul's a weird one.

Paul's a—

The more I get into Paul, the more I'm like, this guy, first of all, killed a bunch of Christians, right? Lit churches on fire, at least ordered the death of Christians.

Yeah, according to what he said.

And then says he met Jesus in a vision. And then all this stuff written down, he also says that a lot of it is coming from him. But we attribute it to Jesus. It's all— it gets super squirrely when you start reading Paul. You're like, who the— what?

Well, here's the thing.

He never even met him. 20 years later, he's writing all this?

And there are a couple of different stories about how exactly he did meet him. And then, but, and an interesting—

What are the different ones? There's the road to Damascus.

Well, yeah, it's the vision, but it's told in a couple of different ways. You've got a couple of tellings. of the story in Acts and then in the Pauline literature.

Hmm.

And it really has to do with who heard a voice or saw something or anything like that. There are minor differences, but there are still some differences. But I think it's really interesting. A lot of people treat all the Pauline texts as equally, one, inspired and two, from Paul, but scholars are in pretty widespread agreement that there are several of those texts that weren't written by Paul. They were written decades after he was dead.

Really?

Yeah. So, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus are called the Pastoral Epistles, and they are widely agreed to have been written toward the end of the 1st century or beginning of the 2nd century, maybe 30 years after Paul was dead or more.

Oh, how complicated.

And then, and then you've got Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, and Ephesians are a little more debated. But it's— there is a good solid core of scholars who would argue that they were not written by Paul. And one of the things, one of the interesting things that happens when you divide up the letters between the genuine Pauline epistles and then what are called the disputed and then the spurious Pauline epistles is Paul's message in the genuine Pauline epistles is different from the message in the others. And for instance, in the genuine Pauline epistles, Paul was like, You know, Jesus is coming back any day now. So, don't change your situation in life. Don't get married if you're not married. If you're married, don't get divorced. And he suggests that everybody should be celibate. And unless you just can't hack celibacy, in which case—

Wait a minute, even while married? Because you're waiting for Jesus to return?

Yeah. Because in this time period, the— I think Paul fancied himself a philosopher. But he's kind of cobbling together a bunch of different philosophical movements.

Where have we heard that before?

Where have we heard that before? Somebody fancied themselves a philosopher?

Well, cobbling together things from different—

Oh, yeah. That's how everybody does it.

That's every guru of today.

Yeah, yeah. And— but at the time, sexual desire was thought of as something that was part of the baser urges of the flesh. And if you could overcome that, then you obviously were a real one.

Which is why Roman statues had little penises.

I'm sure that's the main reason. Yeah, that's supposedly what it was.

Really? Yeah, I had, I had a wonderful guide when I did a tour of the Vatican. This guy who was a university professor who, he moonlights, you know, makes extra money in the summertime as a guide. And he took us on this tour and this guy was fantastic. And he loved that I was so into it. So we had this great conversation. And eventually I had to get to little dicks. Like, why these guys, they have these incredible bodies, but they have these tiny penises. And he explained that it was like, That was— it was gauche. Like, you didn't want to have a big giant dick. A big giant dick was like a symbol of like a brutish barbarian type person. That it was better to depict these gods with tiny penises. And then eventually they started covering them with leaves. Yeah, yeah.

Well, and the early Greek and Roman gods, you know, they kind of went to town with the sexual stuff.

Well, it seems like they were getting their freak on quite a bit, those people.

in a lot of different ways and with a lot of different species. But—

Yeah.

But anyway, Paul was— he suggests that, yeah, even married folks should just avoid it. And we see this in Matthew as well. There's a part in Matthew in 19 when he's talking about divorce. And then his followers are like, it would be better for somebody not to get married. And then he goes, hey, man, there are those who are born eunuchs, there are those who are made eunuchs by men, and then there are those who make themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. And he says, that's a difficult saying, but for those who can accept it, they should accept it. Basically saying, you know, the higher law is to be celibate.

Hmm.

Because they thought Jesus was coming back so soon that having a kid would be a waste of time. And so, there was no other reason for intercourse, really. And so, the idea was, okay, be celibate. And Paul says, you know, if you can't hack it, then go ahead and have occasional sex with your spouse, But it should be basically for keeping down the urges, because if trying to remain celibate is just driving you nuts, the risk that you might engage in some kind of sexual immorality is so great that you need to have that little valve to keep down the urges.

Imagine if you're on death's door and you listen to him and decide to stay celibate and you're like, Jesus didn't even come back.

Yeah.

Look at all the sex I missed.

Well, and you kind of see, yeah, that would certainly be on the list of regrets.

This is the problem with not just, you know, biblical, but contemporary people that claim to know what's happening. This is what— we're all lost in this weird world that we're living in, where there's so much uncertainty, and there's so many different versions of truth in terms of like the origin of mankind in the universe and we want someone to come along and say, I know, I know. And it's so compelling when someone does, when they say it with authority, when they say it with confidence. It's like, oh, finally, a guy who knows. And this is how all cults get started. This is how everything, you know, I mean, this is how a lot of political leaders wind up taking control.

Yeah.

It's like someone who pretends to know and has this like deep understanding of that's far beyond anything you're ever going to have. Trust me, you got to stay celibate. Jesus is on the way.

Yeah. And that didn't really work out.

It never works out. They're never right, which is so crazy that people keep listening to them.

And this is one of the things that scholars see when they separate out the genuine Pauline epistles from the later ones, because in the later ones, you have Paul saying stuff like, oh, there's going to be a delay.

Jesus is stuck in traffic.

Yeah, yeah. And this is because it's written by folks who are, you know, they're decades down the road. Now it's like, if we don't have kids, our movement is dying out.

Right.

So, we kind of got to have kids. And so, you've got one of these spurious Pauline epistles that say, women will be saved in childbearing. So, now it's like, your salvation is dependent on you having kids, even though the real Paul was like, put it away. No, we're living celibately. bit lives now. And so, you have— and this pops up in Matthew as well, where— and elsewhere, where we've got this, what they call delay of the Parousia, or the Second Coming. We expected it any day now. Turns out it might be a little longer. Traffic's bad. And, you know, you have this man of sin that's supposed to show up, or there's supposed to be this falling away, or there's supposed to be something that gets in the way, and that causes a delay in Jesus's return. And 2,000 years down the road, We're still wondering when that delay is going to—

So, we get to the oldest stuff, we get to like, the Old Testament, like, if we get to Genesis, what are the oldest versions of that story? Is it the Enuma Elish?

So, there are a bunch of different versions of Enuma Elish, but we probably go back to Sumerian stuff. Because you actually have a We have these king lists from long, long ago and written in Sumerian. There's no flood story yet in these king lists, but they talk about these kings that reigned for 10,000 years at a time.

What's your take on all that?

My take on all that?

Yeah.

These are traditions. You see a lot of different traditions that develop in the ancient world to account for how creation happened. The weirdest one has got to be— there's an Egyptian one where the head god masturbated all of existence. So, that's a great one for some bedtime reading. It's pretty short. But there's just— these texts are intended to serve purposes for these authors long, long ago. And this is when writing is just starting to come to be.

Right.

And so, it hadn't been around for a very long time. You don't have a lot of mythical narratives and things like that, but you have these poems that tell stories and that talk about the reign of kings. And that's Political propaganda.

But the King's List, the weird thing about the King's List is the older ones are the ones that live forever. They have enormous lifespans. And then when it gets to not, you know, closer to contemporary times, they're—

Yeah, their rules become less and less until they're more human. And the same thing is in Genesis. And it happens in the later versions of the story. They go from 10,000 years to just a few thousand years. So, but in one of the secondary versions of the King List, suddenly, There's a flood that happens.

Secondary version. Yeah.

So, it's something that's added to the King List. It's not in our oldest King List.

Do we know when that was added? Roughly?

We probably have a rough estimate of the date. I don't remember off the top of my head. It's probably somewhere in the early 3rd millennium BCE. So, maybe somewhere mid-2000s BCE.

I don't remember exactly. So, it's probably contemporary to the oral traditions of Genesis?

So, I think the oral traditions of Genesis actually are much later than that.

Really?

Yeah, because Genesis was probably written between around the 8th century BCE down to the, like, the 5th century BCE. And a lot of it is riffing on the literature that's circulating within Babylon during the exile, or it's literature that's circulating within Assyria when Assyria is is beaten up on Israel. And so, for instance, the Tower of Babel, that's a famous story from Genesis. There's a tower called the Tower of Etemenanki that is just outside of Babylon that was famous because it was built by, I want to say, Old Babylonian. Don't quote me on that, though. But it was later destroyed when the Assyrians came in to take over. They kind of— Burned it down. Decommissioned it and destroyed it partly. And then for like 80 years, another Assyrian emperor had a restoration project, was trying to rebuild the tower, but it took forever. It took like 80 years. And that was right in the 8th century. And so, there are a lot of scholars who suggest that the story of this tower that was supposed to be built to heaven that was left unfinished is a reflection of— The fall of Babylon. The unfinished tower of Etemenanki.

And so, that would put it in the right date. And there's also this problem when we look at historical narratives in the Hebrew Bible. They're written in ancient Hebrew and a somewhat developed form of ancient Hebrew, and we can chart the developments of the Semitic languages fairly well. And there's no historical narrative prose in any alphabetic script, any language that was written in an alphabetic script until the middle of the 9th century BCE. And that first happens in like Moabite and Aramaic and some other languages like that. And so, most likely, our ancient narrative prose in Biblical Hebrew was written around that time or shortly after. And the stuff that's older than that is written in poetry. And so, the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible are not the creation account in Genesis. There are some poems that we find in like Judges 5. So, this is a fascinating story about Deborah, the general who goes and defeats Sisera. And we have stories in Exodus 15, the Song of the Sea. Some scholars think that's a very, very old poem, which is basically a shortened version of the Exodus story. And then Genesis 49 has some blessings that Jacob gives to his children that might be really, really old.

And Psalm 68. There are a handful of poems that May go back to around 1000 BC. So, when Genesis is talking about the things that we think are related to Enuma Elish, the closest connections are actually to versions of that story that were in circulation in Babylon around 600 BCE. So, that's probably where Genesis is getting that from, not directly from Sumerian tablets.

Hmm.

Not directly from oral traditions that are 1000 years older. The scholars who are looking at that, I think, have made a good case that the closest connections are 8th to 6th century BCE. That's probably where the traditions that were recorded in Genesis were mainly borrowed or mainly adopted and adapted to serve the interests of the Judeans who were around in that time period.

So, what is the oldest creation story that we're aware of?

I think it's probably got to be an Egyptian one, or it's either Sumerian or Egyptian. That's the 2 places where writing were invented, where writing was invented. And I would have to go back and look. There's a wonderful set of texts called The Contexts of Scripture, a 3-volume set published by this very expensive publisher called Brill, that they have translations of all of the texts that we have from ancient Egypt, from ancient Anatolia, from ancient Assyria, Babylon, from the cultures of ancient Canaan that are not in the Bible. And so, they have one of the volumes, the first third of it is creation accounts. And so, it may be the masturbation one. I can't say for sure. I don't remember off the top of my head. But, you know, that's—

Oh, that's not the OG. It could be.

It could be.

Well, the Egyptian language by itself is very bizarre.

Yeah.

It kind of emerges out of nowhere. Like, hieroglyphs emerge sort of fully formed.

You could— there's a development in the way hieroglyphs are used. But we first start seeing inscriptions popping up, like monumental inscriptions. Like, most of the early writing probably took place on materials that deteriorated really quickly. And so, what we have is the stuff that was written in stone, which is where, like, the language has got to be a little more developed for us to start, you know, taking all day to inscribe something in stone. So I think there's— I don't think there's a good case to make that it just popped out of nowhere. Like the ancient alien stuff is fun, but we don't have a lot of evidence that gets us to that being really even a plausible solution to the problem. There is definitely a mystery about why In similar time periods, people in different parts of the world came up with very similar ideas all at the same time. That might have something to do with the evolution of the brain or something like that.

It's also— we're probably underestimating the amount of travel people were capable of doing back then.

Yeah, I think so. I think so. But the writing seems to develop from receipts or from counting. You counted up stuff. And this is your receipt for how many goats you bought or whatever. Right. It makes sense. And so as your needs develop in, you know, your economy is growing, I think you begin to develop labels for things. You begin to develop characters for things and then it goes from there. There are a bunch of really good academic discussions about the origins of language and the origins of the alphabet. And even the stuff that we see, ancient Hebrew ultimately derives from Egyptian.

Really?

Yeah, in the Sinai. That is where you have— we have some inscriptions from around 1700 to 1900 BCE, where they look like Egyptian hieroglyphs, but they're not doing what Egyptian hieroglyphs do, because they are either syllabic or ideographic or logographic, where one sign represents a syllable, so a consonant and a vowel, or one sign represents a word, or one sign represents an idea. and they change them so that each sign represents just a single sound. And the sound is whatever sound is at the start of the word that the symbol represents. So, for instance, the word for house, bayt, and that starts with a b. And so, if you drew a house, that meant the b sound.

Oh.

And this is the development of the alphabets, because to learn ancient Egyptian, you had to memorize hundreds and hundreds of signs. And to learn Sumerian or Akkadian or something like that, hundreds of signs. But an alphabet is 22 to 30 letters. So it's a lot easier to memorize. And then that becomes— that gets taken to Phoenicia. And from Phoenicia, it gets spread all over the place. And so apart from Hangul, which is the Korean script, I think virtually every other alphabet on Earth is descended from Well, the Korean script is fairly recent, right? Yeah, yeah, fairly recent. And they take a few different symbols and they group them together to create syllables. But each symbol on its own represents a sound very similar to the way our alphabet works.

I don't know much about Korean, but I've heard it described as the most complete language. Like, it's the most structurally logic. Logical language.

There are ways that I think it is. There are other ways that a language like Russian might be more systematic, or even ways like ancient Latin might be more systematic.

But— So, when you started learning religion, you started studying religion, did you start studying languages concurrently?

How did you do it? I was So I joined the LDS Church when I was 20 years old. And a year later, I went to serve a 2-year proselytizing mission in Uruguay. And I fell in love with studying the Bible when I was doing that. I love the stories. I love learning about the history, the culture. And I wanted to better understand the languages so I could try to engage the texts as they were originally written. So I tried to start teaching myself Hebrew when I was down there. I didn't have a ton of time and I wasn't very good at it. But when I—

That's a task.

Yeah, it's a tall order. And when I came home, I found out that you could get a degree in biblical studies and be a Bible scholar. And I was like, that would be about the coolest career in the world for me. And so, I went to school to do that. I wanted to learn ancient Hebrew. I wanted to learn ancient Greek. I wanted to learn about the literature. I wanted to learn about the history. I wanted to learn about the archaeology. And so, I started off not really having a narrow focus, but just, I want to try and get as much of it in as I could.

Hmm.

And over the course of getting these degrees, you know, you kind of have to narrow your focus on stuff. And so, as I progressed, I decided I wanted to learn what was— not only what was going on with the languages, but I wanted to focus on how people thought about God and gods. And so, my PhD is actually using biblical studies and then something called the cognitive science of religion to put those two together to try to figure out what we can know about how the authors of the Hebrew Bible would have thought about and interacted with gods as they understood them.

Hmm.

And that's using a lot of experimental research on living informants. So, interviews and experiments and things like that to figure out how the brain works and how we come up with ideas about deities, ideas about rituals, ideas about religious identity and stuff like that. So, I find that fascinating. So, I would say my main focuses now on conceptualizations of deity, of Scripture, and religious identity. And cognitive science of religion is one of the main tools that I use. But yeah, it all started with having to learn the languages.

But such an enormous field of study.

Yeah.

There is so much to learn, especially when you're talking about these different translations and different languages, which is what I've always felt like is the weirdest part about all this is it's very difficult to translate languages to something that makes sense in whatever language you're currently using. Like, there, there's certain concepts that we use that if you tried to use them, you know, and if you try to— like, I'm sure you've seen Russian translated to English and you're like, what are they even— what are they saying? It gets weird.

Yeah.

Because it's not— languages aren't— it's not direct. It's not like, oh, this is their word for cow. This is their word for drive. This is their word for truck. Oh, the cow drove a truck. It's not that simple. It's dependent— like the way they talk about things is very different. The way they describe time is very different.

Yeah, yeah. And that— when you get into more minority languages, languages that are spoken in, you know, tiny little islands like Yap or Kiribati or something like that. It can get very, very alien to someone who has only spoken English their entire life. Because learning Spanish, like, there are, you know, there are ways it's difficult. Learning any language is difficult. And there are— but there are a lot of ways it is very, very close to English, including even some of the words sound very, very similar. But there are other languages that you learn that are just— yeah, you have to restructure how you are thinking about things and how you communicate things. And it's not just like in German, oh, you got to put all the verbs at the end. There are very, very different ways to go about it.

So, how complicated is that when you're reading an English translation of the Bible? Like, that's when things must get very strange if you're— especially Old Testament, right?

Yeah.

Or even crazier, Dead Sea Scrolls, right? So, you're going Aramaic to English.

Yeah, it's— a lot of people think that it's a simple matter translating from ancient Hebrew or ancient Greek into English. And they imagine that because they have an English translation, they, you know, have all the insights they need. And this is why a lot of people will go out and they'll get an interlinear, or they'll go on a website that provides, you know, the Hebrew to English or something like that and imagine that they now understand. When the reality is that there is a lot more under the hood of that relationship between the Hebrew and the English translation that they don't have any idea about. And so, there's a saying that somebody who, you know, goes online and uses an interlinear or something like that, they know just enough Greek to be dangerous. Meaning, they really— they imagine that they know a lot more than they do.

Right.

And when they go out and try to use that knowledge to try to, you know, go make videos on social media or something like that, they end up stepping in it because they really don't know what they're talking about. Or the main reason I'm on social media, the main thing I'm trying to combat, they will spread misinformation, falsehoods that other people are going to eat up because they might have a platform with millions of followers.

That sounds like me.

I won't say too much about the misinformation. But yeah, no, there's a lot of it out there. I try not to be someone who does that because I can't be a—

No, you're really good at it. I can't be— at breaking down where things go wrong with translations as well.

Well, I appreciate that. And I can't be a specialist in all things, which is why I rely on the consensus of the academic world so much.

Do you speak ancient Hebrew?

Do you read it? Nobody speaks ancient Hebrew.

Oh, really?

It's not a spoken language. Obviously, modern Hebrew is spoken. But it's not a language that anyone would ever grow up learning by speaking with their mother.

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Um, yeah, people—

Or is it open to interpretation?

Yeah, you, you have to reconstruct some stuff, and so there, there are absolutely like Like, speakers of modern Hebrew can look at a text and read it perfectly fluently. They, to understand it, they have to have a knowledge of the difference between modern Hebrew and ancient Hebrew.

But they're saying it the correct way?

Mostly. There are some differences in the way they pronounce things anciently from the way they pronounce things today. But most scholars who are looking at the biblical Hebrew, ancient Hebrew, are going to adopt a modern pronunciation system. So, there are absolutely scholars out there who advocate for, or have a reconstructed way of pronouncing ancient Hebrew. But for the most part, if I go to a conference and I read a text in Hebrew, I'm going to use something approximating a modern Hebrew pronunciation. And I'm not awesome at it. But, you know, someone who speaks modern Hebrew should understand what I'm saying. But I read it fairly well. It's been a while since I've been— I've got a translation of the Hebrew Bible I'm working on. I haven't been able to touch it for almost 2 years now. So, my Hebrew ebbs and flows depending on how frequently I'm in the text working on translation and stuff like that. But yeah, I've got— I'm better at Hebrew than I am at Greek. But there are a handful of languages we have to get some competency in to do this. Aramaic is one of them. Another fun one is called Ugaritic, which is considered somewhat of a precursor to Hebrew.

It was spoken a little further north on the Syrian coast.

Hmm.

You've never heard of Ugaritic?

No.

This is a fascinating story. 1929, a guy is plowing a field in— along the coast of Syria, and he hits a big rock that he can't move. And he digs it up and basically discovers an entire ancient city. Calls out the archaeologists. They all come descend on this field, and they discover the ancient city of Ugarit, which we knew from some texts that referred to this city called Ugarit. And they found around 1,000 or so texts, but nobody recognized the language because it was written in cuneiform, but there were only 30 cuneiform signs. So, that means it's got to be alphabetic and not the other way they use cuneiform signs.

Hmm.

And they decided, okay, The most common Semitic consonant is mem, the equivalent of our M. And they said, so, let's take the most common sign that we see, and let's designate that mem. And then let's look at all the 2-letter words, and there are only a handful of words that can be 2 letters and have the mem in one position or another. And let's try to decode from there this language. And now we have— we've decoded Ugaritic. Oh, boy!

And now we—

a lot of people who go and learn Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic will also learn Ugaritic because Some of these mythical texts mention things that are in the Bible. And so, they talk about deities like El and Baal and Asherah.

Oh.

And so, Asherah, the one right there. So, and there are some things that are in there that help us better understand biblical Hebrew. There are some things that are in there that help us understand some of the cultic rituals that would go on in relation to El and Baal and Asherah. And there's even— there's one text that's almost directly quoted in the Bible. And the thing is, Ugarit was destroyed around 1200 BCE. So, with the— what's called the Late Bronze Age collapse. And there's a wonderful book by Eric Cline, 1177 BC. Have you ever heard that book title?

No.

Phenomenal book on how the Late Bronze Age collapse happened. But So, the destruction of Ugarit happens before the invention of Hebrew. So, Hebrew didn't even exist in this time period. And— but this helps us recover what the languages that were being spoken in that region were like, as Hebrew began to develop. But there's a passage, there's a reference to Baal is fighting a deity named Mot, and Mot means death. So, this is the god of death that's fighting Baal, who is the storm god. And Mot is like, I know you're— you've won some battles in the past, you're going to lose this one. But he says, I know you slew Lotan, which is the Ugaritic version of Leviathan, the wriggling serpent, the twisting serpent, the dragon with 7 heads. And what's funny is in Isaiah 27:1, we have Isaiah talking about Adonai, the God of Israel, and says, on that day— so now it's off in the future— on that day, you will strike Leviathan, the wriggling serpent, Leviathan, the twisting serpent, the dragon that lives in the sea. And so, the words for wriggling and twisting serpent are identical to the Ugaritic, and Lotan and Leviathan are both the same word, just in 2 different languages.

Wow.

And so, this passage in Isaiah was probably written somewhere before 700 BCE, but that's coming 500 years after the Ugaritic text that says almost the exact same thing.

Wow.

So, it's not that Isaiah had access to this text and was quoting it, but it was probably kind of a poetic saying that was just transmitted all around the area. And at some point, Isaiah decided to write it down. And while the Ugaritic one makes reference to 7 heads, Isaiah doesn't say anything about 7 heads. heads. But we do have in Psalm 74 a reference to Leviathan's multiple heads, that God crushed the heads of Leviathan, and the 7-headed serpent dragon is kind of a pretty common motif in that time period. Just recently, in Tel Hazor, a little north in Israel, they discovered a little inscription with a drawing that shows a warrior fighting a 7-headed serpent dragon beast. So, the Ugaritic literature helps us an awful lot with understanding what was going on before the Bible happened, but also helps us better understand the Hebrew of the Bible and also the relationship of these gods to one another. And yeah, what the tradition that was inherited by the Israelites and then how they engaged with it as they passed it on down the line historically.

Why so many references to dragons? So, they didn't have a word for lizard, right? And they didn't have a word for reptile, like, and dinosaurs. That was very— all that's very contemporary, right? Just even the description of it in that way.

Yeah.

But the term dragon referred to all of these scaly beasts, right?

Yeah, it was It was all of these—

Crocodiles.

A crocodile. Yeah, it was a sea monster. The thing is, they were very conscious of the ever-present threat of chaos, and particularly on the waters. So, the land was safe, the waters were dangerous.

Right.

And the chaos of the waters became kind of personified as a deity who could be represented as a dragon, just because that's where the sea monsters live. That's where the giant fish and the the alligators and stuff like that. And so you get traditions that develop about the monster that lives in the sea, and then our God tames that monster as a way to show that our God has power over chaos, our God can bring order to chaos. And you talked about creation stories earlier. A lot of the original creation stories were mainly about overcoming the chaos to create order. Order is what allows us to live in harmony. Order is what allows civilization to develop Order is what we're going for. So God is the one that brings that order. And so the battle between chaos and order becomes a battle between a dragon and our deity, who is a warrior who is going to protect us.

How much of these stories do you think the way they're compiled is to give structure to civilization and to establish rules in order for people to live together harmoniously? Like older, wiser people realize like these folks have to have something to believe in. And one of the best ways to get a hold of this is say someone's watching all the time.

So—

Eye in the sky.

Yeah, you've touched on a couple of different things because the something— someone's watching all the time is definitely a central feature of how scholars think that religion dominated the development of civilization because— and there's a wonderful book by a scholar named Ara Norenzayan called Big Gods, which is all about this. But But the idea there is that gods develop in a variety of different ways. But it's rooted in the fact that our minds, because evolution has conditioned us to be very sensitive to the presence of agents and agency in the world around us. Anciently, the primate that interpreted the rustling in the bushes as something that might have teeth rather than as just the wind survived longer than the one who didn't. And so our minds became very, very sensitive to the presence of agency in the world around us. movie, and then has gone up the basement stairs a little quicker than normal, or, you know, you don't close your eyes at night because you feel like there's something there, that is a product of this evolutionarily installed sensitivity to agency. And as this kind of plays out through human sociality, we curate relationships with deceased Relatives.

We interpret certain events as the work of some kind of entity that we can't see, whether an animal or something more human like that. And one of the things that interactions with these entities then allows us to do is it allows us to suggest there is an eye in the sky. There is someone out there who is— the phrase is covertly monitoring us.

Right.

And once you become in charge of the relationship between the people and the COVID monitor, you then have an awful lot of power to say, well, it turns out we're all supposed to do this.

Mm-hmm.

And the deity is watching us and anybody who is not doing this is going to be punished by the deity. And that exerts a lot of influence over people. But it also allows societies to grow and get larger and more complex without descending into chaos because we have kind of this social superstructure. structure that allows us to trust other people that we may not know. This is one of the weird things about human evolution is if you're in a family, you know your family, your kin are important to you and so you can cooperate with your kin. But if you happen to run into somebody that you don't know, you have no idea if they're going to kill you or what. And as societies grow beyond kinship units, You need signs and signals to be able to let other people know that you're okay, we're part of the same social group, we can trust each other. And so, these days, you know, it's things like shaking somebody's hand might be a way to do that.

Wearing a cross.

Wearing a cross is a way to— it's called costly signaling. It's a way to incur some kind of cost in order to signal to others that you are part of the in-group. And but these rituals go far beyond religious things, just even secularly. There are a lot of things that we expect in a normal interaction with a stranger. You expect—

Good morning.

Good morning. How are you doing? Shaking the hand. I'm looking you in the eye. I'm doing all the things to let you know that I can be trusted. And so, that's kind of an outcome of just being a part of a human society. And gods, these covert monitors, are very effective rule setters. Only they're not there to directly set the rules. Somebody has to mediate between the deity and the people and that's where we get religious experts and we get priests and we get things like that.

Yeah.

And so, you know, it would be the elders in very, very archaic human societies who would be the ones to say, these are the stories that we're going to tell, that we're going to share so that our kids grow up adopting these expectations about how they live their life and who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

Mm-hmm.

And that's one of the big problems in this is that empathy is something that we develop in human evolution, but empathy frequently only goes so far. There's frequently a boundary to empathy, and that's called parochial empathy. I'm very empathetic for anyone in my in-group, Their pain is my pain. I see that pain, I feel that pain. And then somebody who I perceive to be the other, frequently I'm not going to have any empathy for. In fact, it may make me feel good.

Which is very convenient during war.

Exactly. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons that empathy, you know, we hear a lot about toxic empathy these days, or at least I do, because the algorithm hates me. But The idea that we shouldn't extend our empathy beyond a particular in-group boundary is the most toxic kind of empathy.

Right.

Because that is the empathy that others someone else and says, no, I care about my people and I dislike or am apathetic to someone who's not part of the in-group.

But it's so weird because that extends to well, in this country particularly, extends to ideologies and politics.

Yeah.

And to the point where left versus right, one is the enemy, depending on which side you're on.

Yeah.

And they need to be eliminated.

Yeah. And the more you can dehumanize them and other them and make it seem like they are just so alien and so corrupt, the more you can do that, the easier it is to justify, not just treating them bad, not just just voting for the other guy, but even imprisoning them.

Or celebrating their deaths.

Celebrating their deaths.

Like Charlie Kirk.

Yeah, that's a wonderful example. Something just atrocious that happened. Nobody deserves that kind of treatment. In your town. But a little south of my town. Not your fault. I was actually on the golf course and I got a text from somebody when that happened. And I just, I got a chill. But yeah, this is This is one of the outcomes of just being human, is that we tend to draw a line around those who congregate around the social interact— or the social interact— the social identities that are most important to us. And that's what politics is frequently trying to exploit.

Yes.

And that's why the more we can paint somebody on the other side of the aisle as so other as to be evil, and even not human, then the easier it is to justify torturing them, killing them, a genocide, the easier that becomes. And so that's— so I think of toxic empathy as parochial empathy rather than the global empathy that I think we should all be striving for, which is a phenomenally difficult thing to do. And it's phenomenally complex. But yeah, the more we can humanize people, I think the more we can learn to get along. That's allowed human civilization to flourish. In fact, one— I'll share one more detail about this. Have you ever heard of Shanidar 1?

I think so.

So it's an ancient Neanderthal remains. It's a skull and a few other scattered bones. And the skull shows some deformities that indicate that this was a person who was profoundly deaf, Probably mostly blind as well and had other disabilities that would have made it so they could not have survived very long. But the skull aged to pretty old age for a Neanderthal, which indicates that that was only possible if they had a social support group around them that did things for them that they couldn't do for themselves. It almost certainly would have been kind of a social in-group. So it's not a lesson about global empathy. But if we understand humanity to be defined by— and I don't like definitions— but to be defined by the way we're most different from the animals that are closest to us, I think sacrificing our own efforts, time, resources, things like that to care for someone who can't care for themselves, I think if— That's about the closest I think we can get to a necessary and sufficient feature of what it means to be human.

And one of the most universally admired qualities amongst, I think, all cultures.

Yeah. And this is something that we believe these ancient Neanderthal remains preserve in the injuries and the disabilities that are very clearly present in that individual. So, you know, you could say Chanidar 1 is the oldest human. If you wanted to, because I think it shows that this was someone who grew up in a society that was like, we're gonna— we'll take care of you. You can't do these things for you, we'll take that burden on ourselves.

Well, we have some very weird ideas of what Neanderthals were and how intelligent they are. Their brains were larger than ours, which is really weird. And they keep finding older hominins that have larger brains than us. The latest one is this one from China, Homo, I think they're calling julensis, larger brain capacity by I think 20-plus percent than ours. And like, okay, what was their society? Did they have empathy? Did they have culture? Did they have language? Did they have oral tradition? What did they have? We don't know.

Yeah.

We only have bones. We have bones and we have this prejudice distinct— we have this idea in our head that anything old must have been dumber than us.

Yeah.

We might not make it. We might not make it, right? Human beings could go extinct. We were just having this conversation yesterday with my friend Sam Morrill. We were talking about this AI threat that a lot of these CEOs have said there's a 10% chance it could wipe out humanity. That's crazy. So if we got wiped out and then millions and millions of years from now, you know, whatever natural catastrophe happens, AI gets wiped out, and then primates evolve slowly over time. I mean, and then they find human brains like, what? Or a human skull, like, what the fuck was this thing?

Isn't there like a whole series of movies about that?

Planet of the Apes.

Planet of the Apes, yeah.

Well, it's probably, you know, I mean, I mean, I think the Earth has had numerous enormous natural disasters, and there's a lot of evidence of that. The Toba volcano knocked us down to a few thousand people 70,000-plus years ago. I think that's happened a ton of times, and I think it's super possible that it could happen where there's zero and you got to start from scratch.

Yeah, I think—

It's scary, but—

I think I just saw something on my phone earlier today. I saw a headline. Like some AI group said that their AI has ignored their commands or something like that.

Oh, yeah.

And I'm like, this is how Terminator starts. This is—

Exactly. It's exactly how it starts. It's so weird. But yet, we trudge on.

Yeah.

Full steam ahead.

Yeah.

Because we have to.

Allegedly.

I wonder if that's in the Bible. You know, I've always wondered what the original stories were based on? The— I keep going to the origin story because like Adam and Eve being the one that the Christians share. Is there a similar Adam and Eve story in other older—

Yeah, a lot of them have the early humans. They're usually not individuals. They're usually groups.

Well, that makes a little more sense.

Yeah. But we do have There is an Adapa tale that is somewhat related, and some people think that features of the Adam and Eve story were borrowed from Adapa. But it is—

Sounds similar.

Well, yeah, the name sounds similar. And there are some folks who try to find inspiration for the Garden of Eden story in other, like, later traditions. Even going down to like Nordic traditions and things like that, that weren't copied down until only, you know, 1,000 years or more ago. I don't know that we can hunt down a single source for the story because it's primarily— it's cobbling together a bunch of different things. But overwhelmingly, it's an etiology. And an etiology is an origin story for something that is going on today. It's similar to Aesop's Fables. You've Probably, I don't know how many you can remember, but I used to know all the, you know, this is how the elephant got its long nose. And this is how— this is why the ants are industrious. And there are all kinds of these stories. But when you look at the Adam and Eve story, when you— and particularly the curses in Genesis 3, it's like, oh, this is why childbirth is painful. This is why men have to work hard to make plants grow. Oh, this is why We hate snakes. And this is why snakes oddly don't have legs.

Like this little guy right here doesn't have any legs. In an odd way, it's kind of an etiology for how the world got to be the way it was. And then, you know, you don't need a whole lot of inspiration from other traditions to do that. But certainly the idea that humanity or the gods created humanity because they wanted to do something with humanity.

Yeah.

comes from other tales and the Epic of Gilgamesh is an interesting one. I don't know how much you've read of Gilgamesh.

A little bit. Yeah, it's difficult. It's difficult to absorb.

There's a— and part of the beginning, you've got Enkidu as his bud and maybe more. But there's a story about basically, they have to kind of grow up and become civilized. Initially, they're running around naked. And then there's a sex worker who shows up. And that intercourse is what kind of catalyzes a maturation. And now they're going to wear clothes, and they're going to not run around in the nude like an animal. And that's very similar to what I think we've got going on in Adam and Eve, because they're They're innocent, they are naked and they don't care. And then when they eat the fruit, their eyes are opened. Suddenly, they're like, oh, I'm ashamed of being naked in public. I'm going to, you know, we're going to have clothing now. And so, the fact that we've got this maturation going on in the early history of humanity where we go from more like an animal to more like a civilized human.

What is your take on the origin for this concept that we were better off ignorant? Because that seems like you're eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Yeah.

Well, that seems like a good thing, to be able to know what's good and evil. But the idea is that all that is the original sin, and all of our issues happen because people ate from the knowledge of the Tree of Good and Evil. And if they didn't, we would be in paradise still.

Well, I think that's a Christian interpretation.

Right.

Because in the Hebrew Bible, here's One interesting thing about the story of Adam and Eve, specifically Adam and Eve, their story is never mentioned once again anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. You have in one—

You would think that would be kind of important.

Yeah, you would think. Nobody talks about it until we get to the New Testament. There's a reference to Adam at the very beginning of a big genealogy in Chronicles. And in Ezekiel 28, there's a reference to the mountain of Eden, which you would imagine would be the same thing, but there's no mountain in the story in Genesis 2 and 3. So, it's a different tradition. Whatever's going on in Ezekiel 28 is not just— they're aware of much more than just what's in Genesis 2 and 3.

Hmm.

But so, throughout the Hebrew Bible, and even in Greco-Roman period Judaism, and down into some parts of the New Testament, it's not Adam's and Eve's fault that evil exists. That's not the main story that they use to understand why evil exists. The main story that they use is from Genesis 6, where the angels— well, they're angels in later interpretation, but they're second-tier deities. They come down and they have children with the human women. And this is what causes God to send the flood. But you're familiar with the Book of 1 Enoch?

Mm-hmm.

And so, that is a version of that story, where that is what caused evil to be on the earth. The angels came down and brought all of this knowledge and gave it to the humans, including how to make weapons of war, and makeup is listed as one of the evil things that the angels taught humanity. And so, I think that up until the New Testament was written, that was probably the dominant tradition about where evil came from.

Yeah.

And then in the New Testament, we kind of see both of them. Paul talks about Adam and Eve. But in other parts of the New Testament, in Jude, for instance, they quote directly from the Book of 1 Enoch, calling it a prophecy. But they also talk about the angels who left their first estate and engaged in all this wickedness.

Hmm.

And so, it seems like these are competing traditions about where evil came from. And the 1 Enoch tradition was probably the dominant one. And then because of Paul and the New Testament, we can kind of see traces of both of them in there. But I think Christianity later decided to just go with the one that was in their canon, which was the Genesis one.

And blame the woman for everything.

And well, yeah, you do have— you do have—

Which, by the way, I want to let women off the hook. Adam talked to God. Eve did not. So, maybe Adam forgot to tell Eve to not eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It's never specified that he did.

Yeah, and that's an interesting part of the story. Because what Eve says is the rule is not what God told Adam. It's different. Now, you know, ultimately, it's still don't eat the fruit. But she says, we shouldn't even touch it, or we'll die. And there are a couple of details that— and so, this has puzzled people for centuries. Where did Eve get her idea of why they weren't supposed to eat the fruit?

Right.

So, did Adam report it to her and get it wrong? Did God show up off camera, offstage, and tell Eve the same command, but in a slightly different way? Now, this is probably, you know, this is a literary creation. But for the earliest audience who heard someone sharing this story, they would have probably thought the same. That's not the same thing that God said to Adam.

Right.

So, the author probably had something in mind about how to account for why Eve's story was different, and we don't have any access to that. So, we have no idea. And this is actually something that scholars talk about. Did the author want you to imagine that Adam is the one who passed it on to Eve and just amplified things?

You would think that would be specified.

You would think, but it's not. And is it the accident of preservation? Do we just have a much shorter version of a story that was originally much longer? Or is that how it was originally written? It seems to be, at least based on our earliest manuscripts, it doesn't seem to have changed much. Since as far back as we can go. So, these are the kinds of questions that keep us up at night.

Well, it's so fascinating, because if you just imagine our version of the Bible today, and if we continue to exist as a society 1,000 years from now, most likely it would be the exact same version, because we're really good at keeping records now, right?

I think there would be versions that are very close, if not exact, but I think at the same time, there would be versions that are very different because The— so, the King James Version is the— I think it's probably still the highest-selling Bible translation. I don't think it's the most read. I think the NIV might be the most read, but—

NIV?

What does that stand for? NIV, New International Version, or Not Inspired Version is another reference that I think is kind of funny. Most modern translations of the New Testament have taken out more than a dozen verses. that are in the King James Version.

Why?

Because since the King James Version was translated, we have discovered hundreds more manuscripts. And we have been able to do a lot more study and a lot better study on those manuscripts to figure out what most likely these manuscripts originally said. Originally is a complicated term in academics. But the early— our ability to reconstruct the text as it was in its earliest state, And we know that some of the passages that were in the King James Version were added later on, that were not written by the author. And so, now, when we publish these translations of the New Testament, we just omit the verse. And because versification is kind of complex to just redo, Mm-hmm. we just leave the verse out entirely. So, if you look in Matthew 17, for instance, you'll see verse 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, and there'll be a footnote at the end of verse 20, that'll say, some ancient manuscripts add, and then it'll quote a translation of verse 21. And this freaks people out when they discover this, if they don't know the history, the reason that these passages were taken out. There are about 16 passages in the New Testament that get— have been taken out.

Is there any debate about whether or not they should have been taken out?

Among scholars, not really. So, for instance, the passage in Matthew 17:9, 21. We have some very, very old manuscripts that don't have it at all. It's just not in there. And then we have like Codex Sinaiticus, which is mid-4th century CE. So, this text, this codex was probably transcribed a little after the Council of Nicaea. And it's not in the main body of text, but there's a little star in the margins And then up at the top, somebody scribbled in this passage. And then in manuscripts after Sinaiticus, it's in the main body of text. And so, we can see in action the verse being added to the manuscripts.

What is the verse?

It says, this is where the disciples are coming back to Jesus and saying, yeah, we've forgiven sins, we've cast out demons, and there's this one demon we can't cast out. And Jesus says, yeah, that kind doesn't come out except by prayer and fasting. Now, this is actually being borrowed from a similar story in Mark 9. And so, what most scholars think happened was an early scribe was like, okay, this is the same story. This detail is in Mark, but it's omitted in Matthew. I'm going to scratch it into the manuscript there.

Oh, wow.

And then later on gets worked right into the body of the text. So, Yeah. Most modern translations of the New Testament, there are about 16 verses that are commonly just omitted, and they're included in footnotes. But also the ending of Mark, the whole story of Jesus's post-resurrection appearance at the end of Mark, scholars agree that's not original. That was something that was added. So, chapter 16, verses 9 through 20, a lot of translations will put them in brackets, and a footnote will say, You know, this comes from later manuscripts. It's not in the original version.

Hmm.

And there are a handful of stories like that. And then with the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have a better idea of how some verses read. We have a better idea of what verses might have been added. We even have a whole paragraph that was omitted that we didn't really know. We knew something was supposed to be there, but we had no idea what, and we found out what was supposed to be there in the Dead Sea Scrolls. So, maybe we discover another cache of ancient manuscripts of the Bible. And maybe they're earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so—

Boy, that would be exciting.

Oh, it would be phenomenal. I would love that so much. But 1,000 years down the road, who knows what the Bible will look like? Now, there are still people who are like, no, it's the KJV or nothing. And I think people like that will be around 1,000 years as well. So, but I think we will just multiply the available versions of the Bible, and some of them will probably be closer to what was originally written, originally. And some of them will be people trying to hold on to their favorite translation or their favorite version.

It's just such an insane story that a sheepherder or a goat herder threw a rock into a cave and hit a clay vessel and heard it shatter, and then realized there was something in there. and decided to go look.

Yeah.

If not for that, how long?

Who knows? Oh, yeah, we still wouldn't know.

I mean, it might— I mean, that cave might not have ever been discovered. I mean, who knows? That was 1947. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it actually, I think it probably would have been discovered because this, that's right around the time that Israel became a state. When Israel became a state, it now had state funding for archaeological research. And so excavations—

So, they started going looking around.

They started going looking all over the place. And so, within And by the '60s or '70s, there would have been enough excavations ongoing at Qumran that they would have— I've been to Qumran a couple of times. You can see the cave's like not far away. It's like, that's going to be a trip to kind of get to it.

How insane is it that that cave sat undisturbed for 2,000 years?

Yeah, you had to—

That is so nuts. Is that it right there where you're cursing?

Well, there are a bunch of caves, but that's one of them.

I mean, imagine if somebody decided not to store it there and just leave it out somewhere, or they died. They were going to go store it there and they got killed in a raid.

This is one of the kind of tragic things about archaeology is when a lot of people are getting killed at the same time, that's good for us. Like it—

Because we find the bodies.

Well, not just the bodies, but that's the circumstance that's most likely to preserve stuff. Because when they burn things to the ground, particularly if you have things on clay tablets, that bakes the clay tablets and they stay exactly as they are until we find them. So, some of our best discoveries have been because somebody burnt a building down.

Really?

And it happened to be an archive or a library or the palace where the king stored all the annals or something like that. And then the reason that we have all of the— pointing at a blank screen— the reason that we have all of the Qumran stuff is because that whole community was destroyed by the Romans around 68-ish CE. And nobody was alive to come back and get all the stuff that they had stuffed in those caves for safekeeping.

Who knows how long people were living there writing things down that we haven't found yet. The weirdest shit is, you know, the megalithic architecture underneath the West Wall?

The stones?

Yeah, the enormous stones. Like, who the fuck put those there? You know what I mean? Like, what were those guys doing?

Yeah.

And imagine if they find something, you know, with ground-penetrating radar, some new cache of texts and scrolls or tablets or something.

Oh, we'd have a field day.

Oh, my goodness. I mean, it's so interesting trying, you know, or not me, you know, archaeologists trying to piece together this understanding of human civilization just based on what's left over. And knowing that in a lot of places, there's not going to be anything left over.

Yeah.

You're just guessing.

That's called the accident of preservation.

Yeah.

And it results in a problem because we gather all the data that we might get, and we think that this is everything.

Right.

And we have to constantly remind ourselves, no, this is like only what we're finding in tombs. We try to reconstruct so much stuff from just what we find in a tomb.

Yeah.

And it's like a tomb is not a representation of an entire even household, much less society. And a lot of our stuff has what we call a mortuary bias, precisely because we tend to find stuff when it gets buried. And usually, tombs are the things that tend to get buried, or we find stuff when cities are destroyed in what we call a conflagration.

And— What is this here, Jeremy?

I went to Google Maps to the Qumran caves, and this is a video. Oh, wow. What it looks like when they're digging. And that's, that's being taken from a little ridge. Yeah, they've got, they've got walkways there now. And that— and those are the remains of the, the community that they built there at Qumran, most likely.

Imagine going in a time machine and just being able to gaze upon these people.

Oh yeah.

Just for fucking 10 minutes.

Yeah.

What was life like?

This, this is something that, that I've always found fascinating. The more I've done research in cognitive science of religion and learned more about, you know, why our brains work the way they do, it's helped me understand some of the things that I've experienced myself in relation to ancient stuff like that. Like I was in— I did one of my master's degrees at the University of Oxford, and the Bodleian Libraries are just unreal. But I held a tablet that was thousands of years old and looked at the bottom and there was a thumbprint on the bottom.

Whoa.

It was like, I'm looking at the fingerprint of whoever did this. They just happened to leave a fingerprint on that when they were creating this tablet, and that is frozen in time. And it kind of— and I have the, like, cognitive explanation for this, but it kind of gins up a sense of their presence. There's a sense in which you kind of feel the the presence of those people when you have such a clear kind of cue to human involvement and that kind of stuff. I live for that kind of stuff. And so, I love archaeology. I love going in and seeing, you know, the domestic stuff where it's like, oh, this is where a kid played with toys in the corner of this house or something like that.

You get a weird feeling when you go to old places.

Yeah.

And it's hard to understand what you're feeling. Is this your brain playing a trick? Is like, what is it? Is it because you've attached significance to this site? Or is— would— I would like to go to somewhere that's like really sacred, ignorant. Like someone take me, hey, we're gonna take you around. How you feeling?

Well, I think we see people doing that a lot when they go travel and visit places they don't know a whole ton about, but they might visit one of their sacred sites and frequently not treat it very sacredly. That's true.

Well, especially if it's an opposing ideology or religion. Yeah, that's a real problem. Like when the Taliban blew up those statues, it's horrific.

Yeah.

But there's something about some certain sites. You know, I went to Eleusis. Is that how you say it? Eleusis in Greece. And You know, you get to be at the actual ground where they had those Eleusinian mystery ceremonies. It just feels weird. It feels really weird.

Yeah, yeah. When you understand the import of that.

Yes, but that's the problem is I understood it and I had a, you know, and I was actually there with Brian Murarescu, which was really cool.

So, you were feeling it in more than one way.

Oh, for sure, because he was explaining to me like what I'm looking at and it just feels super weird. But, you know, there's that thing where you're like, okay, am I adding meaning to this? Like—

Well, I'll tell you about a place that I visited that I'm probably the only person on earth who thinks of this as a particularly sacred site. But there's, in the southern Negev, there's a site called Arad, which is—

Where's the southern—

Negev, the desert in the south of Judea.

Okay.

So, Arad is a place where they've got a tel, a big hill, and there was a there was a Bronze Age village there, but on the very top, there are the remains of a fortress that existed in the 8th century BCE.

Ooh.

And in the corner of the fortress is an Israelite temple. And in— they've got the remains of the walls. They've got the 3 different rooms, the courtyard, the broad room, and the Deir, or the Holy of Holies. And they found a standing stone, which would have represented the God of Israel, They found— they have the altar. They had discovered a bunch of inscriptions, talks about the house of Adonai, the God of Israel. And they also found a couple of incense altars that were on the steps of the Holy of Holies. And so, I go there and that's where— because I'm fascinated by the fact that, you know, the biblical story that there was just one temple in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is just not accurate. There were temples scattered all around. We found a handful of them. In fact, just like 10 to 15 years ago, we found another one only a few miles outside of Jerusalem at a place called Tel Motsah. So, they had temples operating all over the place. And because of propaganda, like the Book of Deuteronomy, a lot of scholars believe, was written so that the king in Jerusalem could say, they closed down all the temples.

Mine's the only one that gets to stay open now.

Hmm.

And this might have been one of the ones that was closed down as a result of that. But interestingly enough, people ask me a lot about narcotics in the Bible and stuff like that. But this is one where they tested the burnt residue that was on top of the incense altars, and one of them had 3 different kinds of cannabis on it. So, we know for a fact they were using cannabis in their worship practices in ancient Israel.

Which completely makes sense.

Yeah.

That's what you would use as incense.

Yeah.

I mean, if you want to get a contact high going for the entire crowd, and you sing those songs, they have so much more meaning to them. Yeah.

And that's certainly going to make you feel like you're in the presence of something unworldly. If you're going in there, the room's filled with smoke, you're not seeing much, but you feel good.

Did you ever get into any of John Marco Allegro's stuff?

I'm aware of the sacred mushroom and the cross. But there's— it's mainly etymological. That's the main argument. And it has been just torn to shreds. Has it been?

Yeah, yeah.

Since it came out, like, back when it came out, there were a handful of some of the leading linguists of ancient Hebrew, of Sumerian. Thorkild Jacobsen is a Sumerologist. And Barr, James Barr, was one of the leading Hebrew Semiticists in the world. And the argument is basically that the Hebrew and the Greek all goes back to these Sumerian words that have to do with semen, with—

Mushrooms.

Mushrooms, and all this kind of stuff. The problem is, Hebrew and Greek are not descended from Sumerian, and there's not a lot of contact. Sumerian was overwhelmingly gone by the time that Hebrew started existing. There were just a handful of liturgical uses and words and things like that. But the connections that are made are just not considered plausible by linguists today. And so, yeah, it's not been well received by scholars ever since it originally came out. In fact, I think that some of those scholars who were friends of Allegros, because he was a phenomenal textual critic, when it came to the Dead Sea Scrolls, A lot of the scholars who were assigned fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls just sat on them for years and years and years. And they were doing research, but it was so slow getting out. Allegro was the first one to get research out the door. So, he was a phenomenal scroll scholar. But what I understand, some of his friends tried to urge him not to publish that book because they thought it would be pretty detrimental to his career. And my understanding is that it was, unfortunately.

Well, it seems like the book was removed from circulation. And then only within the last decade or so, someone brought it back.

I'd have to—

I think it was a couple of decades ago.

I'd have to verify that because I know I've seen scans of the book for a while now, but—

Yeah, I bought it online. You could buy old versions of it.

Yeah.

But a guy named Jan Ervin, I think, was the guy who— I think he's responsible for republishing it. I think that was in the— I want to say the early 2000s. Somewhere around then.

Okay.

Yeah, but I think it might have been purchased by the Catholic Church or something like that.

I have heard a lot of people say that the Catholic Church tried to shut it down.

Because he wrote another book afterwards called The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth that covered similar topics.

Yeah, I think it was kind of a mythicist take that Jesus never existed or—

Yeah, yeah, he likened the word Christ to an ancient Sumerian word that made a mushroom covered in Yeah, yeah. Which is, yo!

And the problem is that when you— I remember reading that part of the book a couple years ago. And it was like, okay, basically taking, recreating a Sumerian word that we have no evidence ever existed, and saying that that recreated Sumerian word was the etymological origin of the word Christ. And the connection there is, as far as any scholars can tell, entirely imaginary. There's no real plausible link. There's no real chain of custody. There's no real way that knowledge of that etymology could have made it down 1,000 years down the road without anybody finding out about it. So it's not that it's impossible.

Implausible.

But it's not plausible, right. It's implausible and it's certainly not most likely.

It's just so fascinating that by the time this is written, the Sumerian language is gone, which is weird. Like, this is like the idea of these languages just come and go is so strange.

And Sumerian is a language isolate, too, which means it's not directly connected to any other languages that are still around, or that were even around anciently.

Which is really weird when you get into the ancient Sumerian stories and how they're similar to some of the stories that are in the Bible. Like, Like the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Right.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is so strange. And the— so, the flood versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh, are they inspired by other flood versions?

So, you've got a few different stories of the flood. And in the Epic of Gilgamesh, he's going to find Utnapishtim, who was the one who survived the flood. So, the flood has already happened in the Gilgamesh Epic. But like Atrahasis is another version of that story. But if you go all the way back to the Sumerian king lists, we have king lists that predate the introduction of a flood story. And in fact, a lot of scholars think that Genesis actually was circulating in a version that didn't have a flood story.

Really?

Until, yeah, until someone put it in there.

And when do they think that happened?

That's a great question. They probably date it to somewhere around the 6th to 5th century BCE. Because Noah is a horticulturist in the oldest tales of what's going on here. And there's no indication of a flood. In fact, if you go in Genesis 4, you have some patriarchs who are mentioned. And it's like, and this was the progenitor of those who live in tents. And this was the progenitor of those who play the lyre and the harp. And this is the progenitor of those who work in all kinds of metals. And it's like, well, they're progenitor of nothing. Because they and all their lines would have died just a couple chapters down the road. So, whoever's writing this doesn't know that they're supposed to all die. Because he's talking about, you know, look around, we got all these people living in tents, and their ancestor is this guy. And it's like, what about the flood? And so—

And where do you think that story comes from? How does it get introduced?

That's a big question. question a lot of scholars have been trying to solve for a long time. But some people think that Genesis 6, the story of the Bene Elohim, the children of God, they come down and have children with human women, and that ticks God off. And so, that seems like an original catalyst for sending the flood. I'm sending the flood to kill all of these folks because that's— ew, that's gross. These gods had demigod children. But that's not the reason that's given in the text for why the flood came. The reason that's given in the text is there was violence everywhere.

Hmm.

And so, that's like, it's kind of a different story. And if you look in 1 Enoch, that kind of fills in some of the gaps, because in the story of 1 Enoch, there's violence everywhere because the children of this divine-human mating are giants, and then the Nephilim are their children. And then when the Nephilim die, their souls become the demons that haunt the world. And so, that kind of better fits what's going on in Genesis. But the story of 1 Enoch was probably written down somewhere around 300 BCE. It comes much later. And we don't know if that story is actually maybe earlier than the story of the flood that we have in Genesis. So, it's how it came together is something that I don't think we're ever going to be really, really sure about. We just got a bunch of speculation that is based on the observation that some things don't seem to fit together quite right. And then we have other versions of the story that would fit much better.

Hmm.

And, you know, the same is true of the Book of Daniel. There are some fragments in the Dead Sea Scrolls that talk about Nabonidus, and talk about these stories related to Daniel, but they're not in the Book of Daniel. And so, some scholars wonder if the Book of Daniel was being cobbled together around that time period. And we have some of what was left on the editing room floor.

Oh, wow.

In these references to Nabonidus and things like that. So, it's— how it all came together is phenomenally complex. And there's constantly a debate between how much we can say, how much we can speculate or hypothesize about versus how much we should be limiting ourselves to saying, because, you know, we can speculate about all kinds of stuff. But until we have enough data to be confident, it's not really much more than speculation.

What is the earliest date of the Ethiopian Bible? Like, what is the origin of that?

So, the Ethiopian Bible, we have a couple of manuscripts of Gospels, called the Garima Gospels that date to between the 4th and the 6th centuries CE. And the Ethiopian Bible descends probably from some people who probably brought a version of the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Bible, down to the Kingdom of Aksum, probably late 3rd or early 4th century CE. And so this is right around the time of the Council of Nicaea. So this would have been something that looked similar to what we have in Codex Sinaiticus. And that collection of Septuagint texts, which included 1 Enoch, Jubilees, a bunch of other apocryphal and pseudepigraphical texts, it seems like down there in Ethiopia, they were just content to keep on keeping on with what they had, just ignoring all of the canon debates that were going on up north.

Were they just not in contact?

There was definitely contact, but I think they were— they didn't feel any obligation to honor the authority of the folks who were arguing in Constantinople and Rome and stuff like that.

Right.

So, as they were figuring out their canon up north, down south, they were happy to continue to transmit their texts. So, today, the earliest manuscript of any kind we have translated into Ge'ez, the ancient Ethiopic languages, are the Garima Gospels from 4th to 6th century CE. Most of our manuscripts come from the medieval period around the 11th century or later, and so there's a—it's popular to say that the Ethiopian Bible is the earliest Bible, but it is based on the ancient Greek translation. And while the ancient Greek translation probably does preserve some earlier readings than our later Hebrew does, we have better ways of sussing that out. The Dead Sea Scrolls help us an awful lot, and so text critically. Absolutely. In trying to reconstruct the earliest possible Bible, the Ethiopian manuscripts are of very little value. They're of inestimable value in trying to understand how Christianity evolved in Ethiopia and how the texts that they were using evolved in Ethiopia. And then since the world became aware of the Ethiopian Bible and texts like 1 Enoch and Jubilees—

Yeah.

And things like that, because we didn't have the whole of 1 Enoch until we had those Ethiopian manuscripts.

That's crazy. So, they were getting it from an early Greek translation. So, 1 Enoch was in the earlier Greek translation.

Yes.

So, when did 1 Enoch get removed from the canon?

So, 1 Enoch probably fell out of favor before the canon was formalized. Because if Yeah. If the people bringing the Septuagint down to the Kingdom of Aksum did so, end of 3rd century, beginning of 4th century CE, it seems quite likely that 1 Enoch was still considered, if not an inspired text, at least an important text. And particularly because we have in the letter of Jude in the New Testament, this direct quotation introduced by saying, Enoch, the 7th from Adam, prophesied. saying. So, this is something that the author of the Epistle of Jude recognizes as inspired prophecy. So, we have scholars arguing over the canonicity, the inspired nature of 1 Enoch in early Christianity. There's one guy in particular named Tertullian, who's toward the end of the 2nd century CE, who defends the authenticity and the canonicity of Of 1 Enoch. So, this is like 175-ish CE. He writes a text called On the Apparel of Women, because, you know, he's gonna. And one of the chapters is entirely defending the authenticity of 1 Enoch. And because the criticisms were, it seems unlikely that this text survived the flood and has been faithfully transmitted ever since then.

And it seems to contradict itself in a variety of places. The stories get told over and over in slightly different ways. And then also, it contradicts a lot of the stuff that Christians are finding in the New Testament and in their Hebrew Bible. And so, it was becoming unpopular in the 2nd and into the 3rd century. But by the time we get to our Codex Sinaiticus and our Codex Vaticanus in the 4th century, in the middle to the late 4th century, there's no sign of 1 Enoch.

How does 1 Enoch contradict itself?

The stories about the angels coming down gets repeated a couple different times, because it's actually not a single narrative. It's a collection of 5 different books, traditions. You have the Book of the Watchers, you have the Parables of Enoch, you have the Animal Apocalypse, which is basically retelling the story, but everybody's an animal. So, like the star falls from heaven and and then these other stars come down. And then they breed, and they're cows. And then their offspring are a certain color. And these are like different social groups that they're supposed to represent. And it's kind of a compressed history of Israel being told as if everybody was an animal. So, yeah, it's— the vibe is—

Weird.

Yeah, it's kind of a Willow vibe when everybody's turning into pigs. Like, I get that vibe when I read that. But so, it's a collection of 5 different stories. And the 5 different stories, and they're not all telling the exact same story, but where there is overlap, they don't align perfectly. So, it is internally inconsistent.

The Book of the Watchers is one of the weirdest things I've ever read.

Yeah.

It's like, what were these people trying to say? Like, I just, this is my frustration with all— and fascination with all this stuff is like, what was the original story? What were they trying to convey? Are they trying to convey a historical moment? Or are they trying to explain something in a way that makes sense? Why is the sky blue, Dad? You know what I mean? Are they— you know what I mean? Are they coming up with an explanation just to stop questions?

And I think there's a reason that Yeah. It pops up in the time that it does, because this is where we're getting a lot of suffering on the part of the people of Israel and Judah, because they've gone through the Babylonian exile. They're basically going to be under the boot of some larger empire from then on, except for a little slice of time. They're going to be subordinate to larger empires that are going to be beating up on them. And so, this is the time when a lot of them are wondering, why is all of this going on? Where is our God who loves us so much? And this is where the idea of, okay, where are we going to see our justice? Where's the punishment for the bad people? Where's the reward for the good people? That's probably what gives rise to the idea that, oh, it's probably in the afterlife where this is going to happen.

Hmm.

And so, we first see concepts of heaven and hell in Enoch, and in this time period, and they develop as we get into the New Testament. And so, I think it's trying to accomplish a lot of those bigger questions. What is the meaning of all this? Why do good people suffer? Why are wicked people so successful? And one of the things that it's doing is trying to suggest that evil was introduced to the world by these wicked angels who came down to earth and taught women how to put on makeup. And, you know, there's a woman involved in— whether you like the Adam and Eve story or you like the 1 Enoch story, for some reason, they like to blame women.

Well, it's framed by men.

Yeah, it was written by men. That's a big part of it.

That's probably the root of it.

Yeah.

It's so complicated to try to figure out what they were trying to do when they were explaining certain concepts. And there's certain things that get explained today that aren't necessarily really in the Bible. So, the concept of hell, let's get into that. Because like, when is that? So, it's first introduced in Enoch?

Yeah, I think that's the first time we get something like that. I think you get inklings of it at the very end, like the very last verse of the Book of Isaiah, and maybe in Daniel 12.

Inklings.

Inklings, yeah. So, there's a— the passage ends by talking about a fire that— a flame that doesn't go out and a worm that never dies. And this is what scholars would suggest is that the idea here is, it's talking about someplace where the wicked are going. And the idea is this, the fire is never going out because there's always more fuel to add to it because more people are going into it.

Hmm.

And the worm never dies because it always has more food. being thrown into it. And that gets reinterpreted later on as the fire is eternal, and the punishment is eternal. It probably wasn't intended to say that. But these are— and then we have in Daniel 12, a notion of the wicked being punished in that way.

How is this described in ancient Hebrew versus the English translations?

It's pretty straightforward.

It's not incredibly Is there something potentially that could have been lost in the translation?

Probably not. I think we've got a lot of different translations of Isaiah and a lot of different scholars have done a lot of good work. And there's not really much that's going to be much different. But also, we have that idea that is repeated a few times in the New Testament, where they're referring to Gehenna as the place where the fire doesn't die and the worm doesn't Or the fire never goes out and the worm doesn't die. And so, whoever wrote the New Testament passages in that time period, they understood it in pretty much the same way we understand it now.

One of the most disturbing ideas that a lot of secular people have is this notion that Christians like to project that if you do not follow Jesus, you're going to burn in hell forever, no matter how good of a person you are.

Yeah.

Where's that come from?

Not— it's— that's not something that's ever stated anywhere in the Bible. Yeah, that's what I thought. That is an interpretation. Yeah, because when we— just like 1 Enoch, it's a collection of 5 different books. If you look back on it, and you say this all has to mean the same thing, you basically have to create a new 6th narrative that harmonizes it all, that makes it all fit. And that's what we did with the New Testament. Once we got it all together, we decided this is all inspired. It all has to mean the same thing, more or less. They weren't as strict about it as we are today about it. But that means you have to create ways to harmonize problematic passages. You have to come up with a way to interpret 2 passages that conflict in a way that allows them to not conflict anymore. And so you're generating a kind of second-order story. And that is what is authoritative. It's not the text itself that's authoritative. It's the interpretation that is authoritative, the interpretation that allows the text to all be consistent. consistent, and the word I use is univocal. It speaks with one single consistent unified voice from one single unified and consistent perspective.

So, when we get to hell in the New Testament, scholars suggest there are 3 different ideas about postmortem divine punishment that seem to be represented there. One is annihilation, that the wicked just cease to exist. One is temporary conscious torment followed by either salvation or annihilation. So you go somewhere, you're punished for a little bit, and then you cease to exist, or you go somewhere, you're punished for a little bit, you've paid your price, you now go on to salvation. And then the third idea is eternal conscious torment, which is where you are tortured forever. Now, in my opinion, and there are scholars who have done a lot more work on the development of the concept of hell than I have, Candida Moss is a wonderful example, but in my opinion, hell originally developed Yeah. As a way to feel good about the fact that these huge empires and these wicked emperors, they're going to get theirs. So, I think that hell probably initially developed as a way to feel like God's justice is going to have its day on the truly wicked people of the world. But the distance between your average Judean and hell probably got smaller and smaller over time because the threat of hell became a useful stick in the hands of people who wanted to influence behavior.

Mm-hmm.

And so, by the time we get to Augustine in the 4th, 5th century CE, and Christianity is trying to nail down its doctrines, I think we probably get to the point where everybody is under threat of going to hell. unless you do the thing. Because originally, it probably wasn't you have to do the thing or you go to hell. Originally, it was, we're good over here. The wicked people over there who are beating up on us, they're going to go to hell. We're going to be saved. And then it became everybody's potentially going to hell unless you do the thing. So, I think the gap closed over time. I think in the New Testament, you have inconsistent ideas about what postmortem divine punishment punishment is going to be like. And I think it becomes formalized and systematized by the Christian— excuse me, by the Christian church in the centuries after the completion of the New Testament.

And that also tracks with human ideology and, you know, what we know about people today moving goalposts.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. 100%. Because something I'm fond of saying is that the— what is authoritative?

Yeah.

Changes. It always changes based on our reception of the received tradition, which we then have to negotiate with in light of our social, historical, rhetorical circumstances and what we want for the future. And so there are, you know, hard-won and really deeply held beliefs that people will abandon in a moment if their circumstances change enough. to incentivize them to abandon those beliefs. And as groups pass through time and their circumstances change and their needs change, they're constantly renegotiating their tradition. And yeah, something that results in things like everybody's under threat of hell and, oh, Jesus is the only way, therefore, you have to follow Jesus or you're going to hell. And I think that's a post-biblical thing. Certainly, The folks who wrote the New Testament, I'm sure that if they were asked that, they would have been like, yeah, I would agree with that. But it's not something that's ever stated anywhere in the New Testament, at least not in those words. I think it's something that we have to read into the text afterwards.

Well, it's very disturbing to people today. It doesn't even make sense. Like, what if I'm— because the idea that secular people can't be good people seems absurd.

Yeah, I'm kind of the fact that there are an awful lot of folks within Christianity who are trying to draw a harder line between the believers and the nonbelievers.

Including biblical scholars, which is really weird. It's really weird when you study it, but yet you find things to sort of reinforce your beliefs instead of being objective about the interpretations and how complex this all is.

Well, and it's phenomenally difficult to be objective. perspective, because we are experiencing the world. We're not experiencing it directly in an unmediated way. Our intuitive cognition is governing everything.

Mm-hmm.

And so, when we're reading a text that's supposed to be important to our in-group, my, you know, the set of identities that are mine, it's phenomenally difficult to read it in a way that crosses, goes against the grain of of what our groups tell us. In fact, I wonder if I can illustrate how our intuitive cognition is governing everything. Could you pull up an image? Could you Google cornsweet illusion? So it's one word, cornsweet. Sweet like candy? S-W-E-E-T, yeah. And this is an illusion I use a lot because it's going to demonstrate that there's somebody at the controls that we don't know about and that we can't control. Okay, right, that one right there. So it looks like a dark object on top of a light object, right? But if you use your hand, cover up the shadows and the highlight in the middle, and you will— Oh, I was trying to— Yeah, like, just if, if you just hold up your hand and cover up the shadows and the highlight—

Oh, that's crazy.

They're the exact same shade of That is fucking nuts. And so what's going on?

That's the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life. That's cr— Jamie, try it.

I've seen— I know, I've— yeah, I've done this before.

That's literally crazy though.

And, and we know why this happens.

Why?

It happens because your mind thinks it's looking at an object in space, and objects in space, as we know from a whole lifetime of experience, when they're in the sun they're lighter, and when they're in the shade they're darker. And so, this is toying with us by making them the exact same shade of gray. So, the part of our brain that is in charge of how we perceive things is saying, this does not compute. Okay, I'm just going to make it look like—

Just keep it big, please. Okay. I'm trying to— that is so insane. If you go halfway through, it starts to change. Like, if you put your finger over it—

Yeah.

Just a little bit of it, it stays white and dark. And then as you move it across, You could see it change.

And it's— there are a lot of people for whom it's slightly different. It depends on your experiences. But basically, you have someone rifling through the mail of your senses. And this person—

Someone?

Well, our intuitive cognition, our mind.

Okay.

And this mind is saying, this does not match what I expect, so I'm changing what you're going to experience.

Whew.

So, this is true of all of our senses. There's a fascinating story of— there's a neuroscientist, V.S. Ramachandran. He's written some wonderful books. One of them is called Phantoms in the Brain. The other is called The Telltale Brain. But he shares this story about when he was working with people who had phantom limb pain. And there's a particular type of phantom limb pain for folks who are missing the bottom part of their arm. arm, where they would report feeling like their fist was clenched so tightly that their fingernails were digging through the flesh of their palm. And it was just excruciating pain, but there was nothing there. And he devised an instrument to try to treat this. He got a box and cut some holes in the box and put a mirror inside, so that when the person put their existing hand in one hole and then their absent hand in the other, they would look at the mirror and they would see 2 hands. And then he said, he would say, clench your fist, and they would see 2 fists clench. And then he'd say, release your fist, and then the pain would go away for some of the people.

Yeah, I've heard of this.

And the idea there is that, yeah, your brain is creating that pain because of something not going right. And even though you know you're fooling your brain, you're tricking your senses into believing that you're phantom limb that is in so much pain is actually now releasing that fist. And there's just so much about the way the brain works that shows we are not experiencing the world in an unmediated way. Evolution has given us lenses that help us experience it in a way that is going to make it more likely for us to live long enough to pass on our genes. But also, a big part of that is survival within a society. And so our identity politics are also a big part of how we not only experience the world but think about things and particularly things like values and things like that. So there's a wonderful book by a guy named Jonathan Haidt called— have you heard of—

Sure, I've had him on a few times.

Okay, yeah. So you probably talked about his book, The Righteous Mind, at some point.

Yes.

Yeah. And he talks quite a bit about that. He uses a metaphor of an elephant and a rider. where you have this quick kind of intuitive mind that we're not in control of and then you have the— or the quick intuitive one is— it's been a while since I've read his metaphor, but his particular metaphor distinguishes our intuitive cognition, which we don't really have control over and usually we're not even aware it's happening, and our conscious, what we call reflective cognition, which is where we're reasoning And frequently, our intuitive cognition kind of influences our reflective reasoning so that if we like something, if we like a political candidate, if we like a particular interpretation of the Bible because that serves our interests within the communities that are important to us, we're going to be loath to accept a different interpretation that complicates things for us.

Yes.

And that's our intuitive cognition trying to protect us socially. And it causes all kinds of problems. And everybody has it. Nobody's immune to it.

Well, I think a good example of that is this Lindsay Clancy thing.

Yeah.

This woman who killed her kids.

Yeah.

That there's people that sympathize with her and want to visit her at the courthouse and say she didn't get enough care. And they're wearing the pink t-shirts. And then there's people that think she's a monster and she should be killed.

killed. Yeah.

And the people that believe that that one juror was wrong in not releasing her or not convicting her by reasons of insanity, that those people are so firmly entrenched in this ideology that they are incapable of seeing other people's positions.

And this is one of the reasons that we try so hard to ensure that we're— when we put people on a jury, that they're not already deeply entrenched in one side or another because they then become so impossible to convince of whatever may or may not be the truth. So, yeah, it is problematic, but we all experience the world in different ways. And nobody is in charge of how we experience the world.

Right. And there's no way you could really truly understand how another person's seeing the world.

Yeah.

You're guessing. I'm guessing you see the world the way I do.

Yeah. And that's a common assumption that I experience it a certain way, therefore, everybody else is going to experience it a certain way.

And an arrogance that people love to pursue that you should experience the the world the way I do.

And that's where a lot of projection comes in.

Yeah.

That's where we draw conclusions about somebody else's motivations because it might be our motivations.

Of course.

And sometimes, yeah, that causes an awful lot of problems. And again, nobody's immune to it. We all are susceptible to our intuitive cognition and we just have to try to— at least what I try to do is become aware of when it's led me wrong and then try to correct for that. fixing it looking back. You can't really— like the illusion, you can't turn that off.

Right.

You can't say, I'm now going to stop seeing it that way. It doesn't work like that.

Yeah, you can make attempts, but then you have to also make sure that you don't defend faulty thinking. And that's a thing that people love to do. They love to go back and, no, no, no, and come up with some reason why.

Yeah, yeah. There's— in cognitive science, There are 2 ways that we refer to what happens when our intuitive cognition conflicts with our reflective cognition. You've got decoupling, which is where your reflective cognition overrules the intuitive. So if you're asleep at night and you hear a bang and you're— and then you realize, okay, that's probably just the furnace kicking on or something like that. That's your reflective cognition saying, go back to bed, intuitive cognition. And then the other is rationalization. And that's where you use your reflective cognition to try to defend and rationalize the intuitive cognition, even though it may be entirely wrong.

Which is something we really should have all been taught in school.

They're still doing so much research on it. It changes so much that, yeah, every—

At least the concepts of understanding why you form decisions. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And why you have— why we're so vulnerable to falling into the smooth grooves of ideology.

And I think one of the big problems is frequently ideology is what put people who make those decisions where they are.

Yes. Yes. And then again, what we talked about before, charisma and confidence in your decisions when most people don't have confidence in their version of the world. So chaotic. You are a religious man. So that— I find that interesting, because you study all this stuff and you're trying to get to the root of it all. What is your version of this?

My version of this is kind of like what Russell Crowe says in Gladiator. That's for me and my wife. No, I don't talk publicly about my own personal faith just because I try to keep it compartmentalized from what I'm doing professionally and online so that I can keep the main thing the main thing, because an awful lot of people just want to tear into whatever it is going on in here that allows me to share these things while actively practicing.

Oh, for sure. They want to dismiss you.

Yeah. And so, I've said from the very beginning, that's off limits. I just don't talk about that. And in no small part, because I do believe that it is as Jesus in the New Testament says, when you pray, go into your closet and pray in secret, and your Father will reward you openly. And don't pray as the hypocrites who are on the street corner to be seen of men because they have their reward. Hmm. And the more I study religion and how it functions, and the fact that those costly signals are such important elements of lived religion, the less I want to be involved in going out there and shouting on the street corner about my faith.

Hmm.

So, I've kind of leaned into— I'm keeping this for me because I think it makes me more effective as a scholar who is trying to communicate publicly about religion. And it also has become a more meaningful way for me to live it privately where I could be out in public influencing a lot of things religiously. And I think that would be an abuse of the platform that I'm trying to build here.

That's a very admirable position, in my perspective.

I am glad I've made it sound that way.

No, I think— I do. I really think it's very admirable because I have a real problem with the proselytizing. And not just that, but The real issue is the hypocritical nature of a lot of the humans that are involved in promoting whatever their version or projecting in a very performative way, whatever their version of whatever religion it is, you know, that they wear it like a shield of virtue.

Yeah. And that's really when we get into the New Testament, that's precisely what Jesus was criticizing. And it goes— there's a Yeah. There's a concept called the prophetic critique that we find in some of the prophetic literature in the Hebrew Bible that's kind of picked up again in the New Testament. And while there are definitely problems with the authors who are responsible for spreading this, because they are somewhat hypocritical themselves, I think the message is an interesting one. Because the prophetic critique is basically God saying, I hate your worship. I hate your new moons and your Sabbaths, and I don't delight in the blood of bulls. and I will have mercy and not sacrifice. And that's what gets quoted twice in Matthew. And there's a whole series of passages from Isaiah and from Micah and from Amos and from elsewhere, where it sounds like God is saying, I hate all the stuff I commanded you to do. And so scholars for a while have been like, well, why would God hate the rituals that God commanded? And I think the best answer to that is that what they then go on to say is, I want justice and I want mercy and I want righteousness.

And what seems to be in the crosshairs is people who go out and put on display their piety so that they can benefit from publicly being pious. But then behind everybody's back in secret, they're actually undermining what their religion demands of them, whether that be kindness to the immigrants or— supporting the poor, or whatever it is. And in the Hebrew Bible, you have talk about grinding the faces of the poor and you multiply your houses, which is talking about land consolidation, basically exploiting poor people and stealing their land and all kinds of different ways that they exploit the economic system and the justice system and all this stuff. And then they go offer sacrifices to show everybody that they're following God. And Jesus says— one of the things that Jesus says that I think kind of puts on display what's going on here is he accuses some people of tithing mint and dill and then says, but you neglect the weightier matters of the law. And he says you should be doing both. And the weightier matters of the law are mercy, justice, righteousness, basically ensuring that we live in a righteous society where people are not killed, are not underprivileged, are not facing additional obstacles only because of the circumstances that they were born into.

And this is a negotiation with the text as well. Like, I'm kind of interpreting all these passages for you. But I think the idea there is, don't practice your religion in public to serve your own benefit, your own needs, while then going around screwing over all the people around you.

Right.

When your religion actually expects you to be taking care of them as well. In fact, if Jesus is right, those are the weightier matters. That's more important. You should be concerned more about what's going on with the people around you than with, you know, getting more clicks, more views, more money, more power, more influence from going out and publicly saying the right thing or doing the right ritual or whatever. So—

Which is one of the weirdest aspects of us being supposedly a Christian nation. but not developing any of our inner cities, not taking care of any of our— these areas that we've had in this country that have been crime-ridden and impoverished for decade upon decade, and give it no attention.

And we kind of designed the inner cities specifically to trap certain people in them.

Yeah, redlining.

And then we now are saying, well, you got there yourself, you deal with it, we're not gonna— and redlining continues to this day. There are lawsuits active right now Related to redlining. So yeah, I think a lot of people want to ignore that there are systems in play that benefit certain people and that don't benefit other folks. And the folks who benefit from these systems are like, oh, I don't see no systems. We're all just individuals here. And I don't harbor any hate in my heart, but I'm not changing that system.

Right, right. And the idea of a meritocracy. Meritocracy would be great if everybody started at the same starting line.

Yeah, absolutely.

But to take into consideration the fact that there's people in our country, forget about let's fix the rest of the world. Like we haven't even started in our country to take care of these areas.

Yeah. I don't know how much you travel internationally. A little bit. A little bit? I frequently will go someplace new and come back like, wow, they do this thing so well over there.

Like what?

And I wish I could— right now, my big thing is walkability. But like, go into a village in the English countryside or something like that, where— or even some of their cities, some of their bigger cities, you can walk around. Like, it's— the place is not set up for cars. Oh, yeah, we also better put a sidewalk in there. It's— they're designed around people walking, riding bikes.

Well, it's probably a lot older.

It's a lot older. And we have some old places in the US that are very much like that. But more and more, our new cities that are popping up are, you know, they're not designed for people to walk around in. They're designed for people to drive around in, and if you're walking, you got to be careful because you're gonna get hit by a car. Or, you know, or you've got a—

Well, Los Angeles is the best example of that. Los Angeles is really hard to walk in.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not a walking city. New York City is very much a walking city, which is really crazy because it's more congested.

Yeah.

More compressed, I should say. More people in a smaller area, but yet much easier to get around walking.

Yeah. And when I lived in— I lived just outside of Oxford when I was going to school there. Like, that's— walking around that city is a completely different experience from any place I've been in the US, which is why I think they designed Yale after it to try to mimic that. But that's just one example of I'll come back from somewhere and be like, man, I wish we could do this here. And there are so many things I think we could do here. We have the capacity to do here. We just don't have the desire.

Right.

Because they get too caught up in the wrangling over power.

Well, not only that, they're allocating so much money to other things. The idea of saying like, well, let's cut the Pentagon's budget, but let's dump all this money into Detroit and Baltimore and and, you know, fill in the blank, whether impoverished city you have and have a systematic sort of a plan from A to B of how we are going to change the economic outcomes of all the people that live there, how we're going to improve the education, stop the crime, what we're going to do to provide more opportunities, more safety, like what are we going to do?

Yeah. I think so many of the debates are really over over symptoms. And really, we need to be treating the root cause. Right.

That's a great way to put it.

And that is systemic. That is something that we gotta— but I'm not a politician or a city planner.

I'm not either one of those either. Yeah, it's probably a good thing. Yeah, thank God. It's very complicated, though. I mean, and it's just, it's weird how we, you know, we consider ourselves a Christian nation, but we don't do those things and that no one ever holds you to task for that. No one never says that. Like that's never a talking point for someone running for election saying there's an issue that we can take care of in this country that will radically transform the— what this entire society looks like in 100 years.

Uh-huh.

Like for the better. And my perspective has always been if you want to make America great again, what's the best Well, less losers. So what's the best way to have less losers? Have more people have more opportunities, more education, and more safety. So then you would automatically have more people succeed, more people contribute. Who knows how many more inventions, more innovation, more ideas, more art, more fill in the blank.

I think I sometimes wonder how many Isaac Newtons or Thomas Edisons lived and died in poverty in an inner city somewhere because they were never given the opportunity to go gain the resources and the access to the resources that they needed to flourish.

Yeah.

And it's because we— yeah, it's a big problem that unfortunately we— what is the— there was a saying that I thought was apropos there and I completely forget it. So that's— or I completely forgot it, so that's not helpful. But yeah, this is a problem I think a lot of people recognize, but unfortunately, when it comes to actually trying to do something about it, we have to get back— we have to get past the problem of the people in power are really there to be in power more commonly than they're there to fix problems.

And their motivation is to keep us at each other's throats, and they would like us to keep arguing and fighting with each other and to keep looking at each other as the other. so that they don't have to change anything really and just offer these fake solutions. And then when they get in office, they don't do anything to change it.

Yeah.

Fun. But in the meanwhile, there's your YouTube channel. There's plenty of things that are interesting and beautiful in the world today. And I think, I think it's, you know, I was just talking about this yesterday. I'm reading this Alan Watts book from 1952. And it's so interesting because he's talking about the age of anxiety in 1952, about how much things are changing, how much the world's changing. And it sounds like he's talking about 2026.

Yeah.

And like, this is constant. This, this never ends.

Yeah.

And it's a slow sort of like 2 steps up, 1 step back, 3 steps up, 2 steps back. There's this constant changing of what we are in the culture. And generally, like, if you look at Pinker's work and a lot of his— generally seems to be for the better. But while you're in the middle of it, it seems helpless, and you seem confused and scattered. And meanwhile, if you ask people, especially like boomers, like, when was a time when everything made sense? Boy, during the 1950s, we all knew what a man was and a woman was and and you went and you did your job and you raised your kids and the guy delivered milk. And they had this rose-colored glasses perspective of the past. But meanwhile, Alan's writing this book in 1952 about how it's the age of anxiety. And it's fascinating.

Yeah.

It's a time machine into this particular period in history that at least in terms of the things that he's describing, Mirroring some of the issues we're dealing with today. He's like literally talking about technology and improvement of society and all these different things that are like the changing of the family and what it means. And it's like, this is wild. It's literally— he's literally talking like it never ends. It never ends. It just has a different title. It just looks different, smells different. It dances different. It's the same animal.

And I'm sure in 75 years there will be people look back on, on now and be like, we sure made a ton of money off of AI. or off of exploiting this or that resource.

Perhaps.

And there will be— there are a lot of people who look back and be like, I remember it differently. And, you know, we were not the recipients of all that funding that the government was handing out, just like there were a lot of people who were not the recipients of funding back in post-World War II America.

Yeah.

And there are others who were the recipients of an awful lot of funding. So yeah, I think it goes back to the system issues that we have with our goals and who's making those decisions. And goes back to why I am not a politician or a city planner. Even though I did run for my state legislature twice.

Did you?

Yeah.

What was your— what were you trying to—

Well, I was trying to mainly annoy the 2 incumbents and also just try to move the needle a little bit. I live in a very, very conservative part of Salt Lake County. And I had, I think, a 50-point deficit to make up against the state rep, and then a 40-point deficit to make up against the state senator. And I think I took around 16 points off of both of them. So I did make a little bit of progress. But that was a bizarre experience. And now I think both of those— I think both of them are gone. One of them resigned, I think, the term after that election, and the other resigned just, I believe, last year or so. And now we just had another state senator who had some felony charges against him for fraud.

Oh, fun.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, that is the real problem, is the type of people that want to run for office are almost all out of their fucking minds, for the most part, other than people that are just trying to shake things up like yourself.

I think the people who are doing it for reasons that are are gonna be beneficial to others are in the minority for sure.

Unfortunately.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, maybe that'll change over time. You know, maybe with more conversations like this and more people realizing that if we keep going in the same direction that we're going now, we're not gonna ever improve. But it's always there. It's always available. There are people out there that think differently. It's not— it's not like these are alien ideas that most people are not willing to even consider. Most people listen to what you're saying, what I'm saying, they're probably thinking, yeah, that would probably be better for everybody, except the incredibly rich people that control the defense contracting companies.

Yeah, and also, it's one thing to be sitting down and wherever you listen to this podcast and hear these ideas, it's another when you're in the thick of things and suddenly you're getting defensive about your position or getting critical of another Yes. It's once the rubber hits the road, that's where it becomes difficult and where it becomes a lot harder than it is to sit across the table and say, yeah, we agree on this.

Yeah, it's also like you and I, well, I could tell from you, you're very careful with the way you think about things. And you're very objective and you try to analyze things and find out why you think about things. There's a lot of people that have not learned that skill. It's unfortunate.

Yeah.

not really taught. And you might grow up in an environment within a family that is like very rigid in their belief system and very angry if you deviate from that. And it's a lot of times people just to fit in, they just, they adhere.

And it's easier to get the 10 Commandments in a school than a critical thinking class.

Yeah. I had Talarico on and we were talking about that. And he made a very good point. I think think that that's going to push people away from Christianity. And, you know, and people have resisted that. I'm like, but no one wants to be told, like, in a school that's supposed to— we're supposed to separate school. Like, you don't want them teaching Islamic tenets in your school, right?

Right.

Because, well, this is a Christian nation. Okay. It's also— it's not. It's a nation of humans. Okay? And freedom is supposed to be one of the things that the right in particular is supposed to hold dear. Freedom! That's— they love to say that. Well, freedom also means freedom to not be indoctrinated with other people's ideology. Even if you believe that this is the truth, this is the light, they need to learn this, well, make your argument. Make it very compelling and do it by example also. Be someone who is admirable in the way you behave and think and talk and the way you live.

Something that, uh, when I went a year after I'd been baptized as a Latter-day Saint, I went out on my mission, I got a set of scriptures. And the first thing I wrote in the inside cover was a quote that I've always loved. A good example is the best preacher.

Yeah.

And I've always tried to live by that. And when it comes to the US as a Christian nation, like I can understand Talarico's concern for what that's going to do to Christianity. And absolutely, I understand that we don't want the state indoctrinating our children. And one concern I see getting brought up less is what it does to someone who's in the minority for them to go to state-sponsored education and have the states tell them, you are unwanted here.

Right.

We are this.

Right.

You are not that. We're going to let you be here, but know that you're a second-class citizen.

Right.

And I don't think that is a— certainly not a comfortable situation to be attending school and probably not a safe situation in a lot of ways for attending school. And at the same time, if people are indoctrinated and do adopt Christianity as a result of that, that's not really a desirable conversion in my mind. Oh, the state wants me to be Christian, so I'm going to be a Christian because I'm doing what the state—

For your own safety you adopted it.

Yeah, you've adopted it so that you can benefit from the resources that you are given access to.

Or just to stay safe.

Yeah.

And this is the same argument they would make if you were in a school district that adopted an Islamic education system.

Yeah.

And was under Sharia law. You'd be like, no, this is not freedom.

And I think the Confederate statues, these came up in the early 20th century. And we know explicitly the goal was to terrorize the Black population, to let them know who was in charge around here.

Not only that, they were shitty statues. They weren't even— this is the thing, like, people were defending it, like the removal. I don't think they should be removed. But I think people should understand why they were put there in the first place.

But they wanted kids walking to school, little Black children walking to school and seeing this explicitly white supremacist statue so that they knew, we honor this, or this is at least who we are, just so you know, for the future. Just keep that in mind as you grow up in our state. So—

Yeah, that conversation was lost in the outrage over the removal of the statues.

Well, it had to be for the removal to be defended. They couldn't allow that conversation to happen.

Right, right. Well, listen, man, I really love your channel. It's fucking awesome.

Well, thanks so much.

I've had countless hours listening to you and watching you, so I really appreciate what you're doing. Well, I appreciate that. I know it's a long road to learn all the shit that you've learned.

It has been, but it's been a lot of fun, and I wanted to give you this as well. This is a book that I published last year. It's called The Bible Says So. What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues. It's basically a greatest hits of what I've done on my channel. So, I don't know how much you enjoy reading hard copies of books.

I do. It's great to put me to bed. There's nothing like reading a book that makes you sleepy.

Yeah, when Joel McHale gave me one of the blurbs for my book, and I was like, you want a hard copy? He's like, I'll take the audiobook.

Yeah, did you read the audiobook?

I did. Yeah. So, I recorded that. I'm working on another one right now that's going to be— it's going— basically, I'm going to talk about how the God of the Bible changes from the earliest parts of the Bible to the latest parts of the Bible. So, right now, we're going with God's Biography: A Biblical History, but I'm really enjoying writing. Well, what little I've been able to write of it, I've really been enjoying. How far out do you think this will Further out than my contract wants it to be, probably.

Isn't that always the case?

Yeah, I've got— we've been dealing with a lot of stuff in my household, medical stuff, school stuff, and we're also finishing our basement right now. And so I haven't had as much time as I would like to. And this is for my publisher. So when I come and say, I don't know if I'm going to be on time, I have reasons. But hopefully it should be out the beginning of 2028.

Okay.

That's, yeah. And I'm— it's another book I think that's going to blow a lot of people's minds if they sit down and give it a chance. Because the more we— like, you talk about how that book about 1950s and how it was age of anxiety, it's unlike how we picture things.

Yeah, just so people know what I'm talking about, I'll give you the title of the book.

But the—

it's called The Wisdom of Insecurity.

Okay.

A message for an age of anxiety.

And the point I want to make is that, you know, there are people who lived that who are still around, who can talk about it. But that's not how we tend to represent that time period. That's not how we tend to think about it. And if we go back 2,000, 2,500 years, our reconstruction of that history history is even further removed from how we tend to think about it. And the digger we— the digger we deep. The deeper we dig into the data, the more information we have to understand what was going on. And anybody who wants to actually try to understand what's going on, you have to let these kinds of things inform your reconstruction. Otherwise, it's just ideology. Otherwise, it's just dogma. And that's That's the name of my podcast, Data Over Dogma, which is all about trying to ensure that we're letting the data set the terms for the discussion rather than the ideologies, the things that we want to happen, the dogmas that we bring to it rather than ensuring that they're setting the terms for the discussion.

Awesome. Hey, thank you very much. Thanks for all you do, and I really enjoyed this conversation.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you too. All right. Bye, everybody.