#23 Gnostic Informant | Neal Sendlak. Finding God in Prison… Losing Him in Church

[Music] When did you become a Christian to the point where you really cared to know if it's true? When I went to prison. Wait, did you say they were doing drug deals? At at the church services. At the church services. And he went to the mess hall and which is where you eat. And as they were walking out of the messaul, someone was jealous of him leaving and walked up and tried to stab him with a with a blade. I could have been the guy on the cross going to heaven, going to paradise with Jesus for no reason. What did you do to violate your parole? Today on the Austin and Matt podcast, we get to sit down with Neil Sendlac of the Gnostic Informant YouTube channel. As of the time of this recording, he has a couple hundred thousand subscribers and he's been featured on multiple other podcasts that are much larger than ours like the Danny Jones podcast as an expert in ancient Christian scripture and ancient Christianity. And so, one of the things that I really like to do is I if you're getting a lot of information from somebody, the next question I have is, well, who are you? Who are you that I should listen to this information? Right? the the medium is the message sometimes. And so with Neil, I just wanted to know his life. And he comes from being incarcerated and being on hard drugs and then finding Jesus while in prison and then getting into debates with a lot of pastors and and and experts on Christianity and continuing to move on and figure out what this whole life thing is about. And it is so fascinating. He knows so many stories about early church fathers from the first, second, third, fourth centuries. He will just rattle these names off to the point where we were trying to do B-roll for this episode and he says them so fast that like you got you almost can't keep up. You can't keep up. He he's just he I asked him off camera how much scripture he reads, how much like ancient texts and he said at least 5 to 10 hours a week. He has a habit of at night time when he goes to bed he just reads for 1 to two hours and he's been doing it for 15 years. So, I mean, he is a wealth of information to the point where he doesn't have a PhD, but he regularly has PhDs listening to his channel and pinging him for information and for advice because he's so well-versed. So, you're going to hear a bunch of really amazing stories from early church fathers in the first, second, third, fourth century that I never knew existed. And I really appreciate it because he paints this nuance. Like I think we all like to think that the church has been this one mono thing that has moved through history always in agreement but I think the the reality is it's always been fighting and like there's different different groups splitting off and he he knows about so many of these groups and so we get to hear a lot of that those stories all under the framework of his life and so I'm grateful that he came on the show and this is a second part of a three-part series that we're doing on the Austin and Matt podcast where we had Derek Last week of Myth Vision, we have Neil of the Noskin informant this time and next week we have the fireside chat with all of us sitting down together. So these are standalone episodes. You don't have to listen to all of them sequentially or anything, but if you like ancient Christianity, ancient scriptures, then you'll want to check out all three. Thank you so much for listening and I really hope you enjoy it. Welcome to the Austin and Matt podcast. Why are these things the things that you were interested in? Like of all the things in the universe be interested in, why do you think this hooked you? I when I was a when I was a Christian, I wanted to know if it was true. I wanted to know if am I really following this path because it's true or am I doing this because I want it to be true. When did uh when did you become a Christian to the point where you really cared to know if it's true? When I went to prison. Oh, really? Yeah. In 2011, I went to prison for possession and drug use and all that stuff. And uh and then I started reading the Bible cover to cover when I was in there. And then I started going to the library and reading other religious stuff like stuff about Buddhism, Upanishads, Vadas. And I was like comparing them and kind of like looking at both and which one of these is true. But then when I I didn't really answer that question in prison. I became a Christian. I thought Christianity was the best. thought the Bible was the most like complete and the other ones were like eh JV. Yeah, exactly. And then when I got out, I had nosed a nose dive deep into the church. Went to church twice a week. Uh was the first one there. I had I had the key to the church. I got there before the pastor. Sometimes I started that's how I learned how to edit videos. cuz I was he wanted to he wanted to record all of his sermons and I would edit them upload them on his YouTube channel. That's how I got editing from that. Why did you start reading about all of these things in prison? Because I really wanted to at first I was trying to find out if if the Bible was historically accurate, if it matched up with what like science is saying about like evolution and old earth and round like all that stuff. And I was trying I remember like trying to make it fit. Like I remember reading the Bible and going, "All right, it says right here that the earth is 6,000 years old because it's, you know, we're putting Adam is only this many years before Jesus or like 4,000 BC." And I was like, "But maybe this is like an allegory. Maybe Adam represents the first civilized human. Maybe there's like some sort of allegorical thing behind all this." And I started thinking like that and uh that's kind of how I got into narcissism too because the gnostics were very much interpreting everything allegorically. Was there anyone coming to prison that was like uh helping you along think about there were they were outside churches coming in. Okay. They were doing like baptisms and all types of stuff Sundays. Was that was everybody pretty responsive to that in church in in prison? Yeah. I don't know. It seemed like everybody was either a Muslim or a Christian or some some faith because it gave it it was like a free get out of the unit for an hour. Everyone took advantage of it. Oh. Everyone wanted to go and it was like it was a nice way to see people from the other units. There's drug deals going on there. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. People would go to church just so they can see their friend from a different unit that they're never going to see unless they go there and they would pass things along to each other. Um Whoa. Yeah. So, it was like everyone did it. There was there was only one Jewish person I met in jail. He didn't have a He was having a rough time. Wait, did you say they were doing drug deals at at the church services? At the church services. How are people sourcing drugs in prison? Are people just they so they what they would do was they would have their a visit come in and the visitor if there was a if it was a this girlfriend they would like kiss them and transfer it through the mouth and sometimes they would swallow it or some people they would go in the bathroom and put it up their ass and bring it back to the unit that way. But they did it that is the main method of getting into either swallow it or boof it. No, that's how you do it. Yeah. And you'd be surprised they did it. They did it because they it was if whoever had the bag was the man. You were the king. You had currency. You had everything. Yeah. You were the You were absolutely That was It was the imperative. There was a lot of drugs there. Tons of it. Wow. Did the guards not care? They Is it kind of like look the other way, kind of keep it down? Number one, it depends on the guards. Some of them are less Some of them are just trying to do their time. Yeah. Yeah. Trying to get in there, do their 8 hours, go home. They're just doing their job. They're like, "Just don't kill each other." Then there's other ones that are like, you know, they got the badge, they got the power trip, then they they're the ones looking. So you So as an inmate, you knew which guards to Okay, this guy's on a shift. Everyone chill out for the next eight hours. Yeah. And the next guy comes in. All right, now we're free again. So you knew based on who the CO was, what to do, how to act. You guys are taking me back now thinking about, oh, this is pretty crazy. How did have you what what happens when you review being in prison? How did that psychologically affect you? Oh man, it's a different world in there. Like you stay with your kind. And I don't mean that like not proud of it, but it's just the way it was. Like you go when you It's the rules. It's rules. Like in the county jail, a lot of people watch this probably said, "I've been to county jail. It's not like that. I played chess with a black guy and I'm white." Yeah. In the county, it's like that. Once you get into state, it's different. The rules change, you cannot sit with person of a different race or you will be targeted or you will be something bad will happen to you. You have to go like the white people are called we call themselves the woods, pecker woods. And that's who that's why I hung around with cuz that's how I got to be comfortable and not die or that's how you survive. Yeah, it's how I survived, you know. So that's psychologically it kind of it's it's like a it's crazy because when you get out you realize how how what of a doggy dog world that was. Like I remember it would be commissary day and everybody would go and get their commissary and it was like it was like the people had the the big bags of commissary. They were like, you know, they're walking around like like, excuse me, like Santa Claus with a big bag around them like kind of showing it off like you know how a dog has a bone in its mouth and it's showing off. Look, I got a bone. Look how cool I am. This is how people in prison were. They were like, it was like a race to see to like show the other person, I'm loved in the outside. I'm matter to people on the outside and you don't. Look how big my commissary bag is. Look how much money I have in my account. look how long I can go on the phones for because I can get my people on the outside to pay my phone bill. And it was like this weird arms race, psychological arms race of people trying to outdo each other as far as looking out like how they look or status or power status or power all that. That's cuz you I guess you can't really think long term while you're in it's just like you're the only thing you have to to do in there is like just compare like compare each other to each other. They're all you're all in prison so you're all on the bottom of society. So what happens is we're all on the bottom of society and we're all trying to convince ourselves but we're not really like everyone else. Like I look look I had a visit today. My girlfriend came. See how good I am compared to you? When was the last time you had a visit? Six weeks ago. You're rough. I'm not like you. So, there was like a big It was That was a big I'm I'm telling you, if anyone's been in prison, they're going to know exactly what I'm talking about. It was a really weird dark world of people just trying to It's dog eat dog world. It's It's whoever you could take advantage of, you're taking advantage of. Whoever can take advantage of you, you're staying out of their out of their way. You're trying to play this weird game of like like a game of it's like Game of Thrones in prison. Like you're trying to everyone's trying to gain more power as much as possible and it has real ramifications. Like was there was there a lot of physical violence? Yeah. Yes. And there were I just you just reminded me one of the one of I I had one of the people right next to me unit bunk right next to me was leaving the next day. He had 24 hours left and he went to the mess hall and that's where you eat. And as they were walking out of the messaul, someone was jealous of him leaving and walked up and tried to stab him with a with a blade. Got he got into a big fight. He got thrown in the box. I think he caught a new charge and had to stay in time longer because someone else attacked him and he fought back. And I don't know how he got taken away from the unit. So he might have beat the case and they might have let him out. But the point is like that was a reality in there. People are trying to get you to not go home because they're jealous. That was another thing. Like if I knew when I knew I was going home soon, I only did 18 months. My period was one one and one third of four years was the bit. So I did 16 months. Sorry, not 18 months. Uh after when I was in the last month, I um I didn't tell anyone. I was going to do they know unless if can you keep that? My close friends knew. Okay. But I wasn't I wasn't going around going I got one day left. Yeah. I was just pretending that I just it was like I just got there. Yeah. like you just don't say nothing and then when they call your name to leave, it's too late. They're they don't have a blade. They're not ready to like they're not doing nothing to you. You're leaving. So like but like I saw people mess that up and talk about them leaving and I'm leaving in 24 hours. You ain't going to do nothing to me and then all of a sudden next thing you know they're getting in a fight. They're going to the box. They have doing more time now. So it was a we it's psychologically crazy. And then Christianity speaks to people in those places because you go to these churches, you go to these Sunday or you're reading the Bible in yourself and the Bible has a message for people who are on the who are the on the down the downtrodden. Like Jesus is on the cross with two people who are criminals and he saves them with them. I remember reading that passage and being like, "Wow, that could have been me. I could have been the guy on the cross going to heaven, going to paradise with Jesus for no reason, just because he wants me to. Or there's like the parable of the um the only of the uh prodigal son, which is there's two sons of a vineyard owner, and the one son is good son. He does everything right. He listens to his father. He works on the field. Doesn't mess up. He doesn't spend his money on uh prostitutes. doesn't do anything wrong. The other son is a is a screw-up. He spends all his money on prostitutes. He goes, he doesn't work for his father. He leaves. He goes to another land. He spends all of his money. And then he comes back with his tail between his legs. And the father welcomes him home and throws a party for him. And the other son's like, "I never got a party thrown for me. I didn't do anything wrong." And he was like, "No, you don't understand. This is the greatest day ever." And I just remember thinking of this parable and being like, that's me. I'm the prodigal son. I'm the one that's supposed to mess up and get it all back together through grace of of God's grace. So when you're in those dark places of like this hell world of prison, Christianity saves you. It does. It I can say that for myself. That's how I got so into Christianity for it because I it had that it does have the redeeming power for people like myself. It's pretty it's it's a powerful thing. I I'll I'll never deny that about Christianity. So, what happened once you got out? So, as soon as I got out, I started meeting up with friends who I knew were Christians who I reached out to and said, "Hey, I just got out of prison. Which church do you go to?" And they was going, "I go to this church over here." And I started following them. There's a couple of churches that I bounced around to. Some of them are evangelical Zionist type churches, very Christian or very conservative like Pentecostal, charismatic. That's another one. That's another one I went to. I went to another church that was Pentecostal, charismatic, more liberal, but more uh more like they spoke different languages. One there was a there was a Spanish pastor, an English pastor. People were speaking in tongues. That was one of the churches that I I did for a little while. Signs and Wonders. Signs and Wonders. Yeah. And then the other church that I mentioned that I went to was the uh Baptist evangelical bornagain, you know, very conservative, very Zionist, right-wing church. I tried that one. I was at for a long time, too. So, I I tried a different and I, like I said, I grew up Catholic. You would think I would go back to being a Catholic again, but I didn't. I just wanted I thought I got like I got convinced by the rhetoric that the Catholic Church was like not the real church. I got convinced by that rhetoric. Um, but so I never went back to Catholicism, but I did all I tried other churches out and then then left. What are you doing for work right now? Uh, when you get out. Oh, so for I was doing construction for a little bit, pouring concrete, concrete finisher. Uh, I did I worked other sales jobs. Uh, I did car I sold cars, was a car dealer. And the last job I had was at a factory, a tire factory, Sumotoma Rubber. That was the job I was working at when I started doing YouTube and that was the job I left when YouTube started to take off. Wow. So, I did a lot of jobs. Concrete finisher, asbestous removal, demolition, selling selling cars, sales, and factories. Are you trying to stay out of prison at this point? Are you trying to What's the point of life in the in this moment for you? Is it going to church and serving God and Jesus? I'm on parole. So, I had a couple years of parole. Um, I didn't I actually messed up for a little bit. I started uh started like relapsing and went back to prison for not even six months and they went they put me in a boot camp, a shot camp, military shot camp. Yes. For parole violators. This was in 2012. So I did the bid in 2011, got out 2012 towards the end of 2012. It was it was getting it was like October, November, December, I think it was. I think. Yeah. I got out in December, actually, right before Christmas. What did you do to violate your parole? Piss dirty. Oh, okay. Yeah. So I was like, got it. What do they do in shock cams? What the heck is that? This is crazy. This place got closed down. It's called Willard New It's in New York State. It's a New York State prison boot camp for paroleies. And you would go there and it's 97 to six months. 97 days to six months depending on how you do. I got out the 97 days. I did that. I did. Got out quick. Didn't motivated. Yeah. Motivated. They wake you up at 5:00 a.m. You go outside. No matter what the weather is like, you go outside. You run three three miles. You get in get on the grass. You do push-ups, sit-ups, all types of uh aesthetics and jumping jacks until like you're all doing it. You have a drill instructor. Then you march like a military march in step. Uh you do like the about phases, all the stuff you learn in military boot camp. Like I I I can show you how to do like the the correct stance and the about phase like a military person does. They check your They check your uh your your locker. Make sure your all your stuff is exactly where it should be. The toothbrush has got to be facing to the left. Your books got to be stacked on top of each other. Your clothes have to be folded perfectly. You have to iron your clothes. You have to have your boots shined. You have to shine them every single day. If they're not shined, they're going to they do these they do crazy [ __ ] to you. Like they, for example, you get caught talking. You can't talk. You get caught talking to somebody. can't talk all day. You're caught all day. And then and then around 7:00 p.m. or 6:00 p.m. after after the last messaul visit, then they then they say, "Okay, now everyone can relax and talk, but you got to be quiet. You got to talk like this. You have to say, "Hey, how's how's your day today? My day was good." Like that's how you talk. You're like that the whole time for the whole 97 days. So the bulk of the day every day, you're not allowed to speak. No, you're just programming unless you're unless unless they like ask you, unless they talk to you. Unless like like you're programming. If you get caught talking during program, they will make you hold hands with the person you were talking to as a punishment all day. So there was inmates in there, like you know, gangster [ __ ] in there holding hands with other people. So just so they because they didn't want to go to prison cuz you're they're they're hanging your bid. My bid was four years max. I did one and a third. I did hanging your bid. So what does that mean? when I got out of prison in 16 months on a four-year bid. Oh. Which means if I they could have said, "Go do the rest of your four years. Get back. Go back in or do this shock camp." Got it. So, everyone in there has some number over their head. Some of them are 15. Some of them are 20 and they're all they don't want to go back. So, they're going to hold that person's hand all day. If you get caught taking too much food in the messaul, they put food they make you wear the food. Put it in your pockets. Wear it the rest of the day. can't take it out until the day is over. Um, there were people who were not having their bed made right. If their bed wasn't made correctly, they took your bed and threw it out the window. No. Yes. The mattress. The mattress. Everything out the window and you had to go get it and they would Yeah. They would make you go get it and do it all over again and remake your whole bed. Yeah. What's the social like situ Because you said in prison it's a lot. That place is closed down now because it was so bad. Really? Yeah. No. If you look it up right now, it there's still a website for it, but it's they changed the program. They took all the boot camp stuff out. It's now just like a rehab program. Oh, it's called Willard W I L. Did you guys form like bonds? Was it like stronger bonds or less strong? Oh, yeah. I still talk to some of the people. Really? Yeah. I got their numbers and talked to them on Facebook and stuff like that. Looking back, do you think it was It was all from people from New York City, from Syracuse and uh Brooklyn, the Bronx because it's just a New York State thing. So, people from all over New York. I met people from all over New York that I still talk to that I uh one of them I even visited when I was in New York to one friend. Was it that that was a crazy experience? And I never went back to prison ever again after that. Yeah. Does it feel punitive while you're there? Is it kind of like there are they there too? It was hell while I was there. When I finished it, it was one it felt like the greatest accomplishment I ever did. Yeah. I felt Yes. I came out with like a six-pack. Yeah. Great. could was able I could do like 20 pull-ups when I got out of there. Best shape I've ever been in my life. And it did sort of work as far as it gave me structure. Like when I got home, I caught myself doing my laundry correctly and I started I was like actually like doing things right. It built habits. It built habits. Yeah. Um and it made you never want to go back to prison. Never want to go back again. Never went back after that. That was the last that was my last ever um entrance into anything. Like that was the last thing I did any any time any time I did actually. It was effective. It was effective. Did it like I I don't I don't know what sort of drugs you were into, but did it did it like keep you off of like cigarette everything? Did Did the idea of even putting something in your body kind of I still smoke cigarettes for a while after that? I don't smoke anymore, but I did smoke cigarettes for that. But no, I stopped opiates, which was my downfall, which was Oxycottton, and even even got into heroin towards the end. Um they stopped all that stuff. So that's Man, that's awesome. I mean, that that part's awesome. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's been years since I've had any any type of any Oh, that's great. Like that. Congrats. Thanks. Before getting into prison, after the shock camp, I know there's a gap in there for a while. Did Did it like instill a sense of hustle in you? Because it seems like you've got a lot of hustle. Like you just know how to I think so. I think it definitely definitely did some something on my on my mindset of getting things done. doing things right, doing things correctly, being being uh precise, that type of thing, you know. Yeah. So, how did you start getting into early Christianity? How did that bring in the texts that you're learning? Because that's I mean that your whole channel is around Gnostic informant. How did that go into this? So I one of the churches that I that I wound up in years down the road was an evangelical Baptist church that was teaching that the King James Bible in English was the only divinely inspired Bible. It's the original version, I think. Yeah, that's what they that's what they say. That's what they say. Yeah. Yeah. This is the original English Bible, which is weird because it's in 1611. Like I wait I thought Jesus was born in English. and they say, "Well, you know, we this so they'll try to explain it and they'll say the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts are correctly translated through the King James and they're this is the per only perfect Bible you can read in English." And I was like, "Okay, I wanted to know if that was correct. They're making claims that I can finally check here because a lot of times you can't like Jesus rose from the dead. How do I check if that happened?" Right? I kind of you just you want it to be true when you're a Christian, but you can't really go back. you unless you can have time machine you can't check to see if it happened. Finally that my church that I'm at is making a claim that I can actually do the work. This is how I started getting into like the sort of scholarly mindset because I started looking up online the whole manuscript traditions. I started I learned about who Bart Airman was. He's a textual critic. He's big into this stuff. I started looking finding finding academic videos on the textual inherency question or the you know textual criticism and I'm looking up manuscripts and I found out that the King James Bible does not have the perfect translations. It actually uses a lot of the the Latin manuscripts that we find in like 400s AD. So it's not it's going through a different transmission of biblical of of of uh manuscripts. It's not lined up perfectly. There are there are some cases where the King James does go accordingly to some of these older ancient manuscripts, but not always. It's not perfect. And I found that out pretty pretty quickly. For example, in the letter called First John, not the Gospel of John, the letter called First John, um, verses 5-7, there is a passage about the Trinity in the King James Bible, and it says, "For these three are one, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." And they'll go, "See, the the Trinity is right there in 1 John 5:7." But then you actually compare that to the oldest textual like they call it the received text the hexus receptus it's it's like the majority of the manuscripts that go back as far as possible second third century those don't have that those just have for these three are one it does not then say the father the son and the holy spirit those that those verses were added by the Latin writer Jerome the Jerome St. I think it's St. Jerome um 4th century writer who wrote the Latin Bible to call the Vulgate. He added those verses. So the King James is using added verses. And I remember my pastor used to say this. He used to say these modern Bibles that these scholars are putting out, they're taking verses out. They're demonic. This is Satan's Bible. And I thought that's interesting. And I looked and I go, "Holy crap, he's right. The King James has more verses and these Bibles have less verses. Sounds like he's right. But really, they were using added verses, not taking out verses. So these modern Bibles were actually more correct. The people that had gone from Greek to Latin, Jerome had added some Latin verses in there. And then when it went from Latin to English, they those got carried over, right? So the reason why you and you asked how I got into early Christianity, this sort of opened me up to look at things more scholarly. So then the next question I then I realized I'm at a church that's wrong. So I was like I have to find another church. So I started bouncing around and as I'm bouncing around from church to church. Did you try and ask your f that church? Did you show that to them and say what guest? And they gaslit me. They gas lit you. I had a So I had a meeting after the church was over after the I didn't do it in the middle of church. Not right. Sure. And it was just me the pastor privately. Hey I want to talk to you about something. Yeah. Yeah. me, the pastor, my friend, and another church guy. It was just the four of us. We were sitting down, and I showed him what I found. Showed him the Greek. He said to me, actually, it wasn't even him. It was the other guy. Cuz he brought the other guy cuz he thought the other guy would be able to explain it good. The other guy said to me, "No, you're you're whatever you're getting this information from is lying to you. We know that these manuscripts exist." And I said, "Okay, can you show it to me?" He I'm not kidding. He pulled up a website called 1611Kingjames.com. So I go, "Okay, let's hear it out." He shows me, the website points to Jerome's Bible in Latin. I go, "That's what I just said." He looked at it and goes, "Oh, Jerome had Greek manuscripts that we've lost." And I go, "Well, we don't have that, so I can't check to see if you're right." He's like, "If you believe in the Holy Spirit, you will know that this is telling us the truth because we are in the true church." It was circular reasoning. And I saw it and I just remember just being like, "How are you not seeing this? You're begging the question right now. You just assumed that Jerome had Greek manuscripts because you want there to be manuscript. We don't have those though." And Jerome doesn't even say that. And any of his, right? He didn't say, "I got He doesn't say I have Greek manuscripts." Nothing. they're just inserting this in there to make themselves make it right to make it right. So I realized, wow, these people are never going to there's they're they're stuck in this way of thinking. There's nothing I can do or say. So I that that was it. I left. Did you have friends there? Did you have to leave friends? This is so It was ugly. Yeah, it was ugly. There were I was getting text messages from people saying, "Why are you leaving over this? The you're the devil's guiding you." And I I had just said I said this isn't it's just not correct. And I just remember I remember trying to trying to debate it with people and it was just a lost cause. There was nothing I can say. They were convinced that this Bible was perfect and that was the end of it. And that opened me up to sport sort of looking at things more objectively and looking for evidence of things looking for me like and when I started looking at early Christianity itself cuz then I started asking myself is it true that maybe the Protestants were wrong and maybe the Catholics/Orthodoxy is the true church and I really I entertained this question for a little bit and that's when I started looking up okay what is the oldest text that I can find about the early about the early church and I discovered St. Hippolitus, St. Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, St. Epipanius and these four church fathers wrote extensively on the schisms of the first century and second century church. They wrote about Simon Maggus verse Peter. They wrote about Saturnius. They wrote about um uh Kerinus. They wrote about um EP what's what's his name? Um Basilis, another Gnostic. They wrote about this Nasine preacher. They wrote about Valentinus and uh Harpocrates. And these are names of people who were part of the church in the late 1st to early second century, the middle of the second century, who were called heretics for some reason. and you read these texts and I wanted to know why. I wanted to know why. What were they I want to know what the I don't care if they're heretic or not. I want to know what every single Christian wrote and what they thought and what they said. So I I started digging into all these like Gnostic texts and all these all these different um these uh what do they call the um there's a group called the uh Elkites. They were like Jewish Parththeians. Then there was the um hell was the name of them? Ebianites. Ebianites were like they're followers of the Mosaic law. They still circumcised. They followed the Torah, but they also thought Jesus was the Messiah, but not God. I wanted to hear their arguments. I wanted to hear all different types of Christians. And I was just looking at these early Christian groups and comparing and contrasting. And then I thought to myself that was the earliest Christians were way different than the Christians of the fourth, fifth, sixth century. And that's when I started getting into the the whole question of maybe the Gnostics are the original Christians. In what way were they different? How do they differ the first century from the fourth, fifth century? So depending on what group we're looking at, for example, these Ebianites or these followers of John the Baptist called the Mandans, they had a different doctrine. Whereas they felt like like the let's stick with the Ebianites. Sure. The Ebianites were a group of early Christians who did not neglect what the Old Testament was saying. They took very seriously Deuteronomy and and Numbers, Leviticus, and Exodus and the laws that were in there. and they but they thought Jesus was the Messiah. And I just thought to myself, that is interesting because what they're saying sort of lines up with Old Testament theology better than Christians today. Christians today make up this they had this story in the book of Acts where Peter had a dream randomly and this dream says that you can eat whatever you want. God made food for everybody. And but that's interesting because that contradicts what mo what God tells Moses in Exodus. God strictly forbids pork, shellfish, certain acts of acts of um strangulation of of of food, like if you strangle the animal before you cook it, preparation stuff. Now, why would God be so strict with Moses about how to make food and what foods to eat, what foods not to eat, make sure you circumcise on the eighth day? um all this stuff. Why would he be so very strict about this? And then all of a sudden, this guy named Peter gets a dream and that all gets canceled out. And I just remember thinking to myself, that's that something's not right here. This this particular book right here in Exodus is coming from the words of God himself telling Moses to do these things and not do these things. This book over here in Acts, it's not even in Hebrew. It's in Greek. And it's not even from the words of mouth. It's from some guy who had a dream. Now think about I'm thinking like an Ebianite now. I'm thinking if I was Jewish. Who am I going to listen to? The word of God to Moses or some random guy who had a dream? I'm going with Moses. And so I started thinking maybe the Ebianites were on to something. And I also started reading Christians on a whole other side of the spectrum. For example, these basilans or these carpration gnostics who had a different doctrine where they thought maybe that Jesus was this guy who became who became so enlightened that he was able to think like God and actually act in the world according to what God would do. So he became begotten by God through this sort of enlightenment tuned in. Tuned in. Right. So he became an apotheiois and they've taught that the baptism was the birth that his flesh didn't matter. He was spiritually on par with God. And I thought that's an interesting way of looking at it. And I started I just started comparing and contrasting all these groups and got really fascinated with these early Christian groups called the Gnostics, Ebianites. And I sort of like what it did was it sort of gave me something to look at Christianity in a different light. And I took it very seriously for about a year or two where I thought that the early Christian early Christian history was not what we're taught. And I still think that, but I stopped I ended up just stopped believing in Christianity altogether at some point. Well, I would think studying all these different Christianities that are around during the first and second century at the end eventually you've got to take one step back and go, "Wait, how many of y'all how many groups are there and you all believe in these different things?" And that was so close to the time of Jesus and you guys are fighting and it's like, "What are we doing here?" That's right. What are we doing here? That's exactly where my head was at. It was like, when we look at early Christianity, it's it's it's chaotic. Like we think I've said this a bunch of times in different different in different parts of the internet, but I'll say it again because this is this is important. We we like to think that today Christians are more divided than ever. That you have the Mormons over here, the Catholics over here, evangelicals over there, orthodoxy over there, uh Calvinists over there, Calvinists, right? They're all they all disagree on major theological things, but really Christians today, Mormons and Catholics today have more in common than the earliest Christians did. Closest closer you get to Jesus. The closer you get to Jesus, the more far apart Christians actually are. There are some Christians who thought the God of the Old Testament was evil. Marion, right? Marcion thought there was two gods. Yeah. Yeah, that there was the God that Jesus was the son of who was good and perfect and all knowing. And then there was this other God called the demi the creator God who who who was given power to create matter. He has power over matter but he's he's jealous and angry and commits genocide. Yeah. All that stuff. So you have all these Didn't he make the Old Testament and New Testament? He's the first Christian on record to put together an actual Bible. A canon. A canon. Marian was Marc and I think he divided it by saying the Old Testament was the old God and the New Testament was the new God. Is that right? That's that's one theory. Yeah. Okay. Or one theory at least. There's a lot because we lost Marc's text. All we have are people what people say about him are the critiques. Like we have to like piece together these guys, right? Yeah. We have to piece it together using what we think is likely, what we think is not likely. And some people come to that conclusion that we don't know that for sure though. Yeah. And when did you said Marson was the first Christian to put together like a New Testament basically? It was Luke. When was that? It was early first early second century. So it's like over a hundred years after Jesus died. Yes. Is right around there. Exact probably exactly 100 years right in the 130 or something like that. And uh before that though what you had was you had individual gospels floating around. So you might go to a church in Ephesus and they might have the Gospel of John with some prophets. So maybe they have Isaiah scroll, maybe they have something else and they would be in Greek, too. Or you went to another church and they might have the Epistle to the Hebrews with, I don't know, Luke and maybe some other letters that aren't in our canon. Yeah, exactly. Some sort of some sort of apocryphal story. Maybe they had a Gnostic text floating in there. Those were floating around early on. Um, so depending on where you went, like in Rome, Valentinus was one of these Gnostics. In the year 136 AD, Valentinus was in Rome and he was running for bishop of Rome, which would have made him a pope under our definition of what pope is, bishop of Rome. He was the second highest votes. He was very close according to Epiphanius he lost a very slim election to another saint or another pope bishop and um I think it's Anesus I think his name was Bishop Anetus and he uh he would have been on our list of popes. Now this is one of these heretic gnostics who have all these crazy theological differences that we find today. For example, V Valentinus thought that God was a triad called the father, the logos and Sophia. And he he also taught that all this like geatria numerology. He thought Pythagoras was divinely inspired. He considered Pythagoras one of the prophets, one of the old prophets. He had all these wild insane theological ideas that are not are not Christian are not Catholic today. Yeah. But he was in Rome. He was almost a pope. He was almost the pope. He had some votes to be a pope. And exactly. So that tells you that these Gnostics were not different from the Christians. They were part of the church. They were voting. Yeah. Up until right around 150. I would say I would say the first church schism happens around 150. And that's when Justin Martyr starts debating these Gnostics and they start to spread split up. And then by the end of the second century, then you have a clear separation between Gnostic and Orthodox by then. Can you give me a definition of Gnostic? Yeah. Where did it start? What do they believe? Yeah. The Gnostics are it's an umbrella term because you can't really use that term for everybody. But what it means is what I mean by that is they the term gnostic gets thrown around at every heretic. It's applied to everywhere. Yeah. It's like if you're a heretic, you're a gnostic. But really what an actual gnostic is, it means knower. Nosis in Greek to is knower. No to know. Um and so there were there were Christians who thought Bilades was one of them. Basil said that nosis was higher than pistus. Histus means faith in Greek. So they thought that salvation didn't come through faith. It came from divine knowledge of God. To know God is to become higher and become like God. There was a very important doctrine for certain groups. Facilities was one of them. Carpocrates was one of them. There's a guy named the Nasine preacher who called them who styled himself as a Gnostic. It's almost like Eastern. It's almost like Buddhists a little bit. Enlightenment. Yes. Enlightenment. Exactly. It's it's almost like a Buddhist version of Christianity. Yeah, very much. In a way, there's a lot of overlap between the Buddhists and the Gnostics. Very much. People have written about this, too. Um, and even Paul, even in Paul's epistles, you get a lot of t talk about Nosis. He he compares Nosis to the gifts of spirit and the revelation, and he put he puts Nosis up on a high level of salvation. So, even Paul is big into that. Then there's another letter from Paul. It's attributed to Paul, but scholars think someone else wrote it. It's in letters of Timothy, first and second Timothy, where all of a sudden Paul is antossis. So in in some of his letters, you get all this like in Corinthians and Romans, you get all this like positive stuff about Nosis. Then all of a sudden in the letters of Timothy, he's saying puffed up with nosis. Look at these. Get away from these people who are puffed up with nosis. So what h what scholars think and I I agree with them they think that Paul is or somebody was writing in Paul's name to do anti-nostic propaganda and we even think we know who wrote it. We think it's Irenaeus because the the the exact same five words in a row that they use Irenaeus uses another text. It looks word for word the same sentence. Um I don't I can't remember exactly off the top of my head what words he uses. That is so crazy to think about one man 2,000 years ago just writing letters and in Paul's name Paul's name with and through styometry or like analyzing writing styles just he wrote two different letters and now 2,000 years later we're kind of like I think that guy wrote both of those and it makes sense. It tracks. Yeah. Yeah. And so, so Gnostics, people who really thought that salvation came from knowledge rather than faith. Now, the term gets applied to a lot of different groups of Christians who didn't call themselves Gnostic. Um, the Valentinians didn't call themselves Gnostics. They get called Gnostic because they have some doctrines that align with what other people call Gnostic. So, the term basically gets thrown around for anyone who's a heretic. But when you look at the history, you find out that some of these so-called gnostics while they were alive were not heretics. When when Valentinis died, I want to say he died around, I don't know, probably 150s, 160, something like that. When he died, he didn't think I'm a heretic and everyone hates me. He went to his grave thinking he was saved on in Christ going to heaven as a Christian and then decades later people start writing about him as a heretic and then he gets condemned. Isn't that interesting? Like he Yeah. He dies thinking I did everything right. I'm a good Christian. I'm going to heaven. But then now we we look in the modern times we're all looking back at him and going that that heretic. It's like no he was well loved in his circles. Same with the carprations. They were in Alexandria. This was a big school in Alexandria and Christianity where people would go and learn Christianity from Carpocrates or Basilities. Um, and so another one is Simon Maggus. It looks like his whole history gets subverted in the book of Acts because Simon Maggus is a weird story. You hear all the sources that talk about him. He's like this big Christian mystic from Samaria who goes to Alexandria. He goes to Rome and he sets up his different schools of Christianity. And then in the book of Acts, it portrays him like not evil, but it portrays him as like very greedy trying to buy the Holy Spirit with money. And he gets saved and everything's fine. And it's like, but it's a weird it's a weird portrayal of Simon Maggus. He gets saved by Peter. And there's another text that was written a little bit later in like the late 2nd century, maybe even the early third century where all of a sudden he's just completely evil, wicked. They're comparing him to Satan. They say that him and Peter had a duel where Simon Magnus flew up in the air and was like, "Look, I'm so I have the Holy Spirit. Look how good I am. I can fly. That's how good I am. That's how good of a Christian I am." And and St. Peter just takes his uh I think he I think he's holding a wand and he uh zaps him down and kills him because like no my powers are better than you. They have like a magic duel in this story and like so now they're betraying Simon Maggus as like the epitome of evil. So what it looks like what happened is it looks like over time and by the way when you look at these early Christians like like Clement Clement of Rome and um and Papius um some of these early 2n century Christians they don't say anything about Simon Maggus being evil or bad. It's all after the late 2nd early third century when all of a sudden Simon Magus is evil. And it looks to me, it looks to me that people as Christianity progressed, Christians decided to sort of like hone in on what doctrines they wanted to be important to them, which doctrines are going to be palatable to have it for a church that's going to be big. And some of these gnostic ideas lost. And then they start writing these pmics against these gnostics, Irenaeus, uh, Hippolitus and so forth, Epitheus. And they start writing these PMICS against the Gnostics. And now we look back at history as the Gnostics were bad and Orthodoxy was good. And it's a very skewed way of looking at it's a very it's a very um, like revisionist history. Revisionist history. And it's like we're looking back and going in hindsight and seeing looking through the eyes of the victor and letting them tell us what happened instead of letting the evidence tell us what happened. A reverse pardon. Yeah. It's like rather than saying it's all good after they die, like actually actually be condemned for this. They were pretty terrible. Yeah. Even though everyone loved him all the way up to the end. Yeah. When you're digging into all this early church history, what did you come to the conclusion on of like whether or not Jesus existed? I have a weird view on that because that's another thing that sort of guided me out of Christianity was looking at the evidence for Jesus. And what I found was there's not a lot of evidence for him at all. So he supposedly lived from around 4 BC to around 30 CE AD. And we have Jewish authors from that time period. Not only do we have Jewish authors from that time period, we they wrote about stuff that was going on in that time period. They wrote about people from Jerusalem. They wrote about governors of Syria, governors of the Galilee. Prime examples. Pho of Alexandria. He was born around 20 B.CE. He lived all the way to around 50 AD. So his whole lifespan surrounds engulfves the life of Jesus. He was he was already 20 years old when Jesus was born. And he lived 20 years after the death of Jesus. And he was writing in the 40s. So he's writing about Caligula who was the emperor of the Romans in the 40s. He writes about Caligula coming to Jerusalem, coming to coming to Alexandria. He writes about the various governors of Judea. He mentions him by name. He mentions political events happening in Jerusalem. He's talking about all this stuff. He's Jewish himself. He even believes in the idea of a son of God. He t so Pho writes about the son of God will be the Messiah and he will be the logos, the word of God. He says all this stuff. You're like, he almost sounds like a Christian. So if anybody anybody would know about Jesus, it's him. If there were really was a guy who was going around performing miracles and died and resurrected and then in Matthew's account when Jesus is on the cross, there's it's it says that zombies came out of the ground. says that the graves were opened up and the dead were raised up and they were walking around Jerusalem for the whole night while Jesus was on the cross. That's if that happened, this guy would know about it. He doesn't say anything about Jesus. Wait, where is that written? The zombies. Pho of Alexandria. Uh he Oh, no. In Matthew, it talks about the zombies. Oh, he's talking about Oh, he's talking about the zombies. Oh, right. Yeah. Matthew Matthew's Gospel. The only gospel that mentions this. So, it's like, okay, now that does this is an argument from silence. I know. I get this. This does not mean Jesus didn't exist, but it definitely points to the fact that he probably didn't do these miracles. He wasn't well known. His fame didn't reach far and wide. He wasn't blessing 5,000 people and giving them food and and miracle uh fishes and bread. That didn't happen because this would have been picked up by writers like Pho. Did Pho write about other messianic figures or other like what did he write about? He does. He does. He writes about the Essenes. He writes about like people in Israel doing specific things and things. Actually, he's writing about the events in the time period. He just doesn't mention Jesus. He writes about the Essenes. He writes about the Pharisees. He writes about the Sadducees. He writes about the different governors. The Herod Grippa who was the governor of the Galilee where Jesus lived. He writes about He writes about everybody that's from that period except for Jesus. That's a problem. Like I said, it doesn't mean he didn't exist, but it definitely points to the idea that this stuff probably didn't happen. You also have another writer named Ply the Elder who traveled that part of the world all the way until the 70s and he met with the Essenes and he writes about miracle workers. He writes about people who were deified as god men. Doesn't mention Jesus. Forgets about that one. So again, these are arguments from silence, but they they attest to that this was not this probably he probably wasn't this super famous miracle working sage that the gospels make him out to be. Which makes me think if he did exist, the gospels are kind of legendary. They're kind of taking a real person and then they're applying all these legends to him because this is normal of the time period. The the stories of Alexander the Great have him doing miracles, being the son of God, doing all these wonderful things and flying up at the air and meeting dragons and drinking from the from the fountain of youth. That's part of the Alexander story. All these legends that didn't happen, but Alexander is still a real person. Um, same with Caesar Augustus, stories about Caesar Augustus healing the sick and uh fighting against nature and stopping all the storms and winds and uh you know he was when he was born there was a star in the sky that signified the king of the world was born. That's in the stories of Augustus in the first century. So there's a genre of literature in the time period of real people who really lived with legendary lives attached to them. Magical realism kind of that to me is probably what happened with Jesus, but I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't exist at all. I'm not saying he didn't exist at all, but I'm but I I don't think there's enough to go to to to conclude he's all made up. I think it's possible that there was a guy named Jesus. But yeah, if you had to steal that, if you had to try to defend the position that there was a real Jesus, what would be the best argument you could put forward? I would say I would say that there was a guy born in the Galilee who from the Galilee who got a lot of people to his political faction was crucified by the Romans and then when he died people applied the suffering motif from Isaiah's gospel Isaiah's book in the Old Testament which has this whole suffering Messiah thing and they applied these motifs from the Old Testament to him. Another one is in the Old Testament in Genesis, Isaac carries his cross to his own death where his father sacrifices him and then he he gets saved in the end. But the point is you got Jesus carrying his cross to his own death where he's going to be sacrificed for the father. So you find you what you see is you see like all these motifs from the Old Testament being applied to Jesus. But as far as trying to steal man, why I know he existed, there's no physical evidence. There's no archaeological evidence. He didn't write anything down. The the apostles didn't write anything down. First letter, first Peter, First John, those are written by other people in their names. Scholars think this. Now, you might ask a Christian, they'll go, "Of course, Peter wrote Peter." But the the scholarly consensus is no. These are written by people in the second century. So, if we go by the scholarly consensus, none of the apostles wrote anything down. None of the Paul says there were 500 eyewitnesses to Jesus's resurrection in his letter Corinthians. Um, none of those 500 people, we have no, we don't know any of their names. None of them wrote down, "Yes, I saw this today." It's just Paul telling you 500 people saw it. Paul wasn't there himself. So, we have a secondary account mentioning primary witnesses. That's not a primary source. Secondary. All we have to go off of for Jesus's life are secondary accounts who weren't there. Nobody who was actually there wrote a thing down. And we don't have a single piece of physical archaeological evidence, an artifact, a piece of wood from the cross. All of that is all stuff from medieval periods, medieval Christians coming up with. We have a the true cross. No, I had the true cross. They had a whole market of fores skins in medieval Europe that they thought was the foreskin of Jesus. Whole market of them. Hundreds of these fores floating around Europe that they thought was Jesus's foreskin from him being circumcised on the eighth day. And but the the point the the the fact of the matter is none of this is legit. It's all people later writing about this stuff. So again, it doesn't mean he didn't exist, but it means we're dealing with really shoddy evidence about him being a real person. Yeah, I can see why people in the church are so keen on the shroud of Turin right now. Yeah, they really want that to prove something. They want that to be real and most most scholar and 99% of scholars do reject it. There's a few that think oh and then if you when you look into these few that do think it's real. They're Christians. They they're involved in churches. They're scholars too but they're Christians and they're biased and it's fine. Everyone's biased. But the point of the the fact of the matter is that shroud of Turin does not show up in any primary source until the 13th century and then it just pops up in the sources. We have the shroud. It's called we have it in it's in Turin, but there's no one no one mentions shrouds before that. The shroud is like a thing that happened in the medieval period and there was hundreds of these shrouds floating around. That one was the was the best done though. The one that we call the shroud of Turin, you got to hand them credit. Whoever put that together did a good job. They made it very convincing. Yeah. Well, maybe it came off someone that was flogged. Like maybe it came off somebody that Yeah. suffered like that, you know. Yeah. It's very possible that someone else had this thing happened to them and they just kind of Hey, that looks Look at that shroud. What looks like he looks like Jesus or something like, you know, maybe something like that happened. I don't know. Do you remember the moment that you were doing all of this research and a thought came into your mind or whatever that kind of like you said it's not true? Yes. Oh my god. Surprised you asked me that. The last time I ever went to church, well, actually, I went to church recently when I was in Greece to to film for an Orthodox church for a documentary I'm doing. Before that, the last time I went to church as a Christian, I was at a Pentecostal church. And the the weekend before that, I was hanging out with the pastor and I was asking him stuff we're talking about right now. I was asking about the Gnostics in the first century and the evidence for Jesus and I was we're talking and I was like I just don't know man. Why how how do we know we have the right one? And he goes what was he's like will you have you been baptized in this new church yet? I was like no I was baptized in a different church. He's like maybe you just need to calm down and stop thinking about all this stuff and just get baptized. I was like okay this Sunday we're going to get baptized. I go to church on Sunday. He takes me. I go on the water with this pastor. He baptizes me. And as I'm coming up from the water, I remember thinking to myself, I don't believe in this anymore. As you're coming out of coming out of the water of a baptism. That was your moment. That was my moment. Oh my gosh. It was the weirdest, most awkward feeling I've ever had because I felt like I was forcing myself to believe it and I realized that I didn't right then and there. It's like the moment the Holy Spirit's supposed to set in, it left you. It was the opposite. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. And I just remember thinking like because I I because I went in it was a very awkward day and I remember getting in there and going I'm going to make I'm going to make myself believe this again. I know it's true. It's got to be I want it to be true so bad. I was like please I remember praying being like God just make me believe again. Got in the water, jumped in, did the baptism, came out of the water. I put my hands up like yeah. Like everyone's cheering for me. But in the back of my head I was like I don't believe this. I was like, I just don't I do not think this is true anymore. Never went back. Did you lose more friends then? Yeah. What is that like? What were the what was what was that? What do they just ostracize you? What was the Because you when you start talking, you go, "Hey man, are you going to come to church this week?" And no. And then it's like it's like just got baptized again. You're not going to come. And then after a couple weeks of not showing up, you start getting those messages. Hey man, are you are you are you coming anymore? And then you're finally I'm honest and say no, I don't believe it. And then it's like you the it's a weird position because I'm trying to be nice to them and I don't want to like drag them with me cuz I know that I know this makes them happy. I know like I'm talking to people who I know this brings them joy and you had benefited from the belief and I benefited from it too. So I know this. So I don't want to I want to go no it's not true and you should believe what I think. You're not proitizing your your unbelief. I'm not doing that to them. And I remember just being like this this conversation was so awkward because I want I don't want them to think what I'm thinking, but I want them to know that I don't believe it either. I want to be honest. So, it's a weird and I remember just being like, "Hey, man. I know I know you love this and I I get it. I think there might be some truth to it, but I'm just not into it right now." Like something something like that, you know? I I tried to bow out tried to Yeah. I tried to just be nice and um and that was it. So, did you make new friends? Is that how it works? Like what what did you I guess your community fell away and Yeah, I started to I started to get into started watching a lot of skeptics like um like YouTube skeptic channels. Yeah. Like flirted up with atheism for a while. Uh and then I really dug deep into ancient Greek mythology, Greek religion, Roman religion. became very fascinated by the idea of the muse which is like the divine inspiration of the poets and all that stuff and music and art and literature. Reading Nietze, reading Carl Young, reading Alan Watts and I sort of got my spirituality back if you call it that. I'm not an atheist. So, but I did end up becoming friends with a lot of people online who were in the skeptic communities who were fighting against Christianity publicly. met Derek through D I started watching Mythvision and uh I became a Patreon for MythVision and I was I started then I started I saw what he was doing and I was like I want to start doing my own channel like this and I started my own channel and then it started it started taking off pretty quick and then I ended up you know so I became friends with like the whole skeptic online movement of people who are mixtures of pagans and atheists type of that type of corner of the internet. There's a weird overlap of pagans and atheists online really because Yeah. because they're unified by the idea that this world that we're in is dominated by Christianity and Islam. The enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of idea. Yeah. without such harsh language. But well, it's true because the atheists and the agnostics also see the problem of having a world that's just dominated by this dogma of biblical theology, whether it's Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. And these pagans who want who who want their ancestral cults back they want their you know pagans living in England they want their Anglo-Saxon paganism back or Nordic mythology they want their Odin and their Freya and then pagans living in Italy or Greece they want their Greek myth they want their Greek temples back they want their uh Roman temples back but we're dominated by Christian thought and the they're looked at as demon worshippers So the atheists are demonic atheists sacrificing to Satan babies or whatever and the pagans are getting the same charges at them too. So they sort of become united as in we're all heathens together. We're all outlaws. We're all, you know, we're the heathens. Like that's kind of what that's kind of what happened. So I kind of black sheep kind of it's a black it's a crew of black sheep. Yeah. So I kind of went into I started becoming friends with a lot of people who were pagan who were heathens and who were atheists and who were skeptical of the Bible that type of stuff. I also started talking to a lot of scholars because I'm interviewing scholars for my channel. Became friends with a lot of scholars too. So that became the new friends. Why do you have to This is maybe a dumb question. Why do you have to stop going to a church just cuz you stop believing? If the community and the people are your friends, isn't that valuable enough without the belief? I think I didn't stop believing instantly at that moment that I mentioned. I think I was already kind of checking out slowly and I was continuing to go because I did like I liked it. So, I do think there's probably a lot of people who can who can say that they go to church because they like the benefits of it, but they probably deep down know there's something not right here. Like, they probably don't think it's all 100% correct. Or maybe Jesus didn't rise from the dead. And maybe they just don't believe in it, but they do like the idea of going to church and having community. Fine. I don't have a problem with that. I think I think people should get their community wherever they can get it. You know, where do you go search for it outside of the church after you leave? For me, I mean, in my brain, it's like the bars. You go to the bars. Yeah, basically. That's a big one for people. But I think if you can't do that, you go to the internet. You go online. That's kind of what I did. I went online. We found all these internet communities and Discords and YouTube channels and Patreon groups. That's one thing about today is the internet brings people to their community pretty quickly. You know what did you learn about Greek and Roman religions? So I started to realize through wor through worshiping through studying the Gnostics that they were a lot of these gnostics were attributing a lot of the ideas of Christianity for example the Valentinians attribute the Christian thinking to Greek thought. So the Valentinians, the Carpatians and a few other groups thought that Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Thaileles, those guys, these are prescratics and post postplato thinkers who were teaching ideas about theology and philosophy. And there's a there's a whole unified branch of philosophy called middle platonism. And it's basically stoicism plus platonism. And it's like this universal thought of philosophy that is dominating the first century. And Christianity seems to come out of that way of thinking. Um so when I started to think about Christianity, why is it why is it so popular? What's so good about it? When I started to take apart the look under the hood and look on look what are the nuts and bolts of Christianity, you find that it's not just this Jewish fulfillment of messianic promises. There's a lot of Greek thought interwoven in it. Uh you know ideas of salvation of sin you find that in orphism. The orphix taught that in the beginning of time Zeus was going to impregnate a um this the the queen of the underworld named Pphanie. So you have Zeus who's the king of the heavens of Olympus and Pphanie who is the queen of the underworld. And there's going to be a a royal marriage between the underworld and the heavens. This is the the start of a new golden age, if you will. And he gets her pregnant. And Pphanie gives birth to this child called Zagrias. And Zagrias is a fruit god. It's basically it's baby Dianisis. He is a fruit god, a vegetation god, a god of life, a god of the growing and swelling of fruits. That's what Zagrias is. The word zagar means life. Zagrias. And he's the prince of Olympus. He's going to be the next king of Olympus after Zeus. He's next in line. His mother's the queen of the underworld and his father's the queen of Olymp king of Olympus. He is he has it all in his hands. He's the divine child. He's the heir. The Titans under the behest of Hera. Now Hera is the jealous h wife of Zeus who's jealous of Pphanie. She tells the Titans to go and kill Zagrias. And they go and they they they first they entice him with little toys like he's a baby. And they show him toys and he's looking at the toys and he gets enticed by them. And they rip him apart limb from limb. And they ritually eat him and sacrifice him. And they eat they eat the fruit of knowledge. He's the fruit god. And they eat this is the beginning of time. And these titans eat the fruit. And then Zeus gets so angry that they ate the fruit god that he sends a deluge and wipes out all of the cosmos. And he takes the bodies of these titans who just ate the fruit and he rips them apart and he uses them to construct the material world because this is a pre this is a pre-spiritual world that I'm talking about. So he then he takes the titans and he creates this the material world and because of this everything that lives on this on this world that we live in has titan flesh. Our flesh is all titan and our spirit is Zagrias or Dianisis. So we are half spirit and half flesh and because of our flesh we have eternal sin um um primordial sin and the only way to be saved from our primordial sin is to be initiated into the mysteries of Dianisis. The Dianician rituals. Yes. And then Dian Isis is reborn after the cosmos is re is redone. He's reborn through another mother, Semile, and becomes Dian Isis. Because after the Titans killed Zagrias, Athena took the heart of Zagrias. They didn't eat his heart. And she takes it and she brings it to Zeus. Zeus turns it into a potion, gives it to Semile. She gives birth to Dianisis. He's he's a resurrected god. He's resurrected. So the reason why I brought all this up is because what you can see you can see this in Christianity. You have a resurrected God who gives you salvation if you believe in him. You have we are in we inherit the sins of Adam and Eve who ate the fruit. In Greek mythology in orphanism you inherit the sins of the titans who ate the fruit god. But our way out of this mess of matter this world that we we're we're condemned to die because we're all you know we're mortal. The way out of it is to have be initiated in Dianisis. Be saved by Dionis. So I thought I turned this on silent. It's all good. That's weird. All right, you can cut that part out. So because of that, I can see Christianity not just borrowing from Old Testament motifs, but I can see them borrowing from the greater Greek and Roman world of theology. this idea of salvation and sin and all this weird stuff that you find in in New Testament that's not really in the Old Testament. You find it in the Greek world. Um so I that's when I started realizing Christianity is not just coming out of Judaism, it's coming out of the broader Greco Roman millu cultural millu. And so that's there's a whole bunch of stuff about that like the ideas of heaven and hell and purgatory. You find that in Roman Roman paganism. Romans have in Roman paganism you have these this idea of the of the uh the genius where it's just like your ancestral spirits and they go up into the heavens. And then you have the lemurs who go down into the underworld. And then there's another group called the um oh I'm sorry the lemurs who are spirits of like the uh middle ground. They're like in like a purgatory state. And then there's another group called the inferno inferni de inferni. And they're down into the underworld because they're being punished. So you can see there's three states. The infernal, the middle ground, and then the the the heaven realm. So Christianity is is not just taking Old Testament and making a new testament out of it. It's also incorporating the broader broader Greco Roman culture itself. It's trying to fulfill everything. In fact, there's a there's a Christian, one of these Gnostics called the Nasine preacher who was really famous in the second century, early middle 2 century around 150 AD. And he was basically mixing paganism with Christianity. And he was saying that Jesus is Jesus was the true version of Addis, Adonis, Osiris, and Dianisis. and that he was the those gods are all mythology and but but they weren't they weren't in vain. They were pointing to Jesus. They were pro just like the Old Testament prophecies Jesus. Greek mythology also prophecies Jesus. And that was what the Nazian preacher taught. That was in his theology. You can see this reflected in later church thought too. Ucibius, church historian of the 4th century, wrote a book called the preparation for the gospel. And in this book called the preparation for the gospel, he goes through various mythologies, Phoenician mythology, Zorastrian mythology, Egyptian mythology, Greek mythology, Roman mythology. And he says that they were all they were all divinely inspired by the muse. But what the muse was trying to do, it was trying to get everyone ready for Christ. So this that that this idea of paganism being incorporated into the whole story of Christianity was in orthodox Christian thought in the 4th century and um and yeah so trying to think of any any other examples of this being oh uh rich what's his name? trying to think of the author from the 20th century. Um, Lewis uh CS Lewis CS Lewis CS Lewis was another example of a Christian who thought this way. He thought that the Greeks and the Romans and the Egyptians and the the early pagans also had a little spark of divinely inspired messages that were pointing to Jesus. So this this idea is not that crazy or heretical. when you see that this was kind of a common common idea that you find all throughout history. So what how is your do you have peace now? Yeah, I do. I I believe in the muse. I believe that we are inspired. I think there is a purpose to all this. And I don't claim to know exactly what it all is. I'm not dogmatic. I'm all I'm always changing my my ideas of the world. I'm not stuck on this has to be true because this one book said so. So now I'm going to try to find everything I can and discard everything that I don't like to make this true. I'm constantly updating my my software. I'm constantly updating when I get new information. My political views are always changing. My my views on science are always changing. My views on history are always changing as I'm growing and learning more and more. And in a way, in a lot of ways, I am an Gnostic. I am a knower. And I do think you're saved by knowledge. I do think the more we know, the better we can be. I think in a Prometheian way as humanity keeps building more knowledge to our previous knowledge base and we build every scholar that comes along and new newly minted PhD comes along and they write a dissertation and that dissertation is challenging the status quo in some way. I don't know if people know this, but in order to get a PhD and be a doctor, you have to write a dissertation that challenges a previously thought idea. So, academia, I think, is good. And I think people need to give academia more credit, even though I do challenge a lot of stuff in academia, but it's constantly updating what we know all the time. It's constantly growing and growing and growing. And I do think eventually humans are going to reach a place almost like godhood in a way. I do think that humans are reaching towards some sort of some sort of place in the in in the in the far future that and I think this is what we're meant to do. Like I think we're supposed to do this. I think humans are supposed to keep building and keep growing and keep enduring and keep persevering and keep building our knowledge for whatever reason. We'll find out. Humans will find out. I might not be there to see it, but at least I was part of the whole mission. I was part of We're all part of it. We're all just kind of building and building and building until something eventually something will some people will figure it out whether it's a million years from now or something. Hopefully, we don't get wiped out on the way. Yeah, that's right. Cataclysms. Yeah, I mean that I mean but I I think it's all meant to be. I think there's something to all this and I think there is something out there that inspires people to do things and I and I and I don't think it's one particular force behind everything. I think there's multiple forces. I believe in the multiplicity of the world. That's why I think polytheism makes a lot of sense. I do think there's multiple forces at bay that are kind of contradicting each other. Which if you think about it, the whole problem of evil does not make any sense under monotheism. Because if there's one God in control of everything, then evil is is his fault, too. Like, it doesn't make any sense. But if you have multiple forces at work, then all of a sudden, you don't there's nothing to really blame, but the the multiplicity of things is is is doing it what it does. Have you ever had any sort of like mystical experience or ego death or whatever term you'd like to use? Yeah. I had a big um I had a really big phase of DMT. Oh. For about a couple years. I used to make DMT a lot. You made it? I used to make it. Yeah. Whoa. And um Yeah. I uh had a lot of very spiritual experiences on DMT, which is probably why I'm not an atheist is because of DMT. DMT sort of opens you up to something that's so remarkable. It's so hard to explain. It's so bizarre. Like, it's like the the Overton window of reality gets shifted and you're just like it it just makes you think like is this all just in my head? Like I don't know. The point is I've had a couple experiences on DMT where I've met what what what I can only describe as some sort of divine entity. Yeah. And um have you been following that research that's come out where they take that that laser cross? Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes, I tried that. Did you? So for those who haven't heard it, there's a you buy a laser that kind of makes a cross and you can make it blurry to make it wider. And apparently if you take DMT and look at this laser, you can see code behind it. And everybody, 100% of the people everywhere, whether you've done DMT, never done DMT, whether you know this information that I'm saying right now, or whether someone just says, "Hey, smoke this and look at that." Everyone sees the exact same thing. And it's some sort of like everybody's thinking it's maybe like the code behind our universe. I was in Tampa Bay with Danny Jones, Steve, and Jason Resa Grojani was also there, too. They just got they just wrapped up filming for Jason Georgian's podcast. Oh. And I just got there. We were going to go go out for dinner. He pulled out the laser. Pulled out the laser. He filmed it, too. He pulled out the laser and he told me to take three or four good rips of DMT and look at the laser. And I did. And it looked like the only way I can describe it, it looked like sunrit mixed with elf, you know, like the Lord of the Rings text. It looked like that. And I was I couldn't read it, but I can see it moving across the whole and I can see through the wall. It felt like into another dimension. Yeah. They say it's behind it. It's behind the laser. It's like inches behind the laser. And I remember when it wore off, I'm looking at the same laser that I just looked at for the last five minutes. That's how long it lasts for, five minutes. Sure. The last five minutes I'm seeing through the wall into another dimension. Then the DMT wears off and all of a sudden I'm just looking at a little red laser again with nothing there. It's gone. It's gone. And I was like, "What the hell? Why was that laser so different five minutes ago?" Something the DMT like put does something to your brain where that laser looks like a dimension. Looks like you're looking through a dimension. It's It's true. I can tell you what what they're saying about the laser is true. It was a wild crazy experience that I tried right there. Can you remember? Would it be possible to go see some of that Elvish script, remember it, and then be able to write it down after DMT trip? No. Because DM the thing about DMT is it's like when you ever wake up from a dream and you had a crazy dream that was very felt really real. It felt like you remembered a bunch of things but then as your day goes you forget what the dream you you remember like one little split second of your day shakes off. It shakes off like an etch sketch. That's what DMT does. You experience it. It's amazing. It's mindblowingly amazing. And then once you're done, you forget. It's like you forgot it even happened. That's wild. It's really it's it's it's it's like dreaming while you're awake. Yeah. I think it's the best way to describe it. But that sort of gave you Okay. So that's where you've had any some of some mystical experiences and that's affected how you see the world, I guess. I mean, it takes you to a new dimension, a new reality, a new something. Yeah. And gives you this idea that this is not all that there is. Yeah, I do believe that. And I do think like we once you once I think once I realized that or became to that came to that place in my mind the like the idea of dying or you know not being super successful in life. Not saying I gave up or anything but I don't necessarily like dread on those things anymore because I was I'm so lucky to be here. Like we we nobody like just think about how crazy it is that there's something rather than nothing. Like the idea like why is this all happening? Totally. It doesn't make any sense. And once you once you start to wrap your head around that, it's easier to to stay content in life to stay at is it's something about that knowledge that just makes people more peaceful, I think. And you think that the experience with DMT and the shifting of your like reality overton window had something to do with helping you realize how lucky you are to be here? Yeah, absolutely. I think so. Do you think that that's what was going on in the Dian rituals? Because they always talked about because they did psychedelics and you'd go you'd go to die before you die is what they would say. And so they take this pilgrimage and do this ritual and it's all secretive. But it seems like it was probably a psychedelic something. Yeah, we know what it was called. Oh, it's called Kukon or Kikon. Kikon. That's right. They drank this drink. It was a fermented fermented um some sort of had like mushrooms in it. It had a fermented uh grain or wheat. Urgot. Urgot. Yeah, I think. And they used urgot and there's like little mushrooms growing off of it and they put it in the drink. Sometimes they make it with wine, sometimes they make it with a different um liquid, honey or something like that. And um they would it was a psychedelic experience. And the the we don't know much about it because it was secret. It was a secret experience. But we know some people wrote Cicero, Plato, uh different authors from they all did it. They all got initiated. They all did it. Yeah. And they say they all said the same thing that your your fear of death was gone because you knew that there was something after it made it the what what the Eloinian mystery successfully did for for society in antiquity was give people salvation from death before Christianity did that. Christianity comes along and claims that they brought that to the world. They already had that and it's called the Elisanian mysteries or the Sanithration mysteries as well did the same thing and they did an exper they had an experience they had drank some took some type of Eucharist did some sort of baptism and they came out of there feeling like something they experienced something that no longer led them to fear death. That's salvation. When you stop fearing death you're saved. That's it. You're saved. That's what it means to be saved is from death. Exactly. So when you don't fear it anymore, you're saved from it. Yep. And I remember I read remember reading Cicero saying like I could not imagine a world without these ele without these mysteries. That's how good they are. And we we're we live in a world without them. But we have I mean we have Christianity now. But like I don't know. I think there's other I think this the idea of salvation is not just a not just a Jewish type of myth. I think it's more of a psychological and I think it's I think it's beyond belief. I think it's it's I think it's beyond a set of facts that happen in the ancient. If you believe this X, Y, and Z happened about Jesus, then you'll go to eternal life. No, I don't think so. I think it's more about like attaining a level of of uh knowledge, nosis, awareness. Yeah. Awareness. And I think I I don't know. I think if if god if the gods are good, I don't think anyone's going to be damned. I don't think I I just don't think that makes sense. Like eternity is so unbe. Nobody can grasp how long eternity is. Imagine a god who's all knowing and all good condemning somebody to to perish in fire because they picked the wrong religion. I remember asking this question. That's not a wise good God. I remember asking this question in seventh grade and I just thought, man, like how long does a human live? 80 years, I don't know, 100 years, and you make some bad choices and you're a terrible person, and you got to go to hell forever. And I was like, imagine being in hell for 10,000 years and then you're like, can I leave? This sucks. I spent 99.9%. Remember 10,000 years ago when you spent 80 years being a when you were a little baby and then a million years goes by and you go, "Hey, please." Let's extract that out. Imagine a little baby who doesn't know anything makes a mistake and they spill their food on the ground. Imagine that they had to sit in one room for their entire hundred-year life. And once they start getting older and becoming aware of what they did when they were a baby, imagine how messed up that would be. No, when you were a baby, you spilled your your your food on the you sp you spilled your milk on the ground. You don't deserve to live. That that's what they're basically saying about this this God that when we were little babies who had no idea what we were doing, we just get thrust into this universe and we pick the wrong one. Imagine a Muslim who's dedicated to Allah their entire life and they pray every day and they don't do anything wrong and they go to the Cabba and they're praying to the Cabba and they think in their heart of hearts that Allah is the one true God. and then the Christian God's the real one and they didn't believe in Christ and they go to hell for eternity picking the it's so it doesn't make any sense or or let's let's do the other way around. Imagine if Islam is the true religion. Islam is the true religion and all these Christians that are going to church every week and they feel in the heart of their hearts that they're doing the right thing and they're like, "Okay, I'm going to church and I believe in God. I should go to heaven, right?" Nope. You picked the wrong one. you deserve it per you deserve to perish in hell for eternity because you picked it does not make sense. I think we I think somewhere we we made the wrong choice with with religion by doing it as a way of choosing the right one whereas the ancients didn't do that. The ancients had all these different mystery cults and there all these different flavors of religion and they found salvation through different paths because nobody really knows. We're just trying. We're all trying to get there. And I think it's the I think it's the attempt of trying to get there is what matters. It's one thing about Christianity I agree with. If God Jesus says that it's in your heart that you're measured, not what you do and like not like how much you donate to the church, but how much is in your heart that you get measured. If that's true, if he if Jesus is right about that, then if the God if if we do have we if we just happen to live in a in a in a reality where God is good and God is forgiving, then no one should have to worry about anything because at the end of the day, if a God is good and loving, there will be corrections in the next life. There will be things will be fixed. People will be people will learn how to fix themselves. That type of thing. Like if you're raising a child, you don't condemn them for eternity for doing the wrong thing. You fix them. You teach them. You go, "This is wrong. Let's do it better this time." And you never give up on them. You don't give up on them at some certain point. If you don't get it right by 10 years old, after you turn 10, the day you turn 10, like the day you die, you're done. There's no more forgiveness. Like, that's silly to me. Yeah. I like to ask any parent, when when when do you give up on your child? Right. What at what age? If your kid's a screw-up, at what age do you say never? If you were to come to me from this point forward and you say, "I'm so sorry for being a screw-up," you would go, "Sorry, nope." And I've never had a parent, not a single, and this is anecdotal, but you know, I've never had a parent go, "Yeah, like no." Like they go, "No, I'd always forever. You always take your kid back. Always." Yeah. And what's even crazier about that is we're talking about the God who created us this way to begin with. Yeah. Who's all knowing that knew we were going to do all this. So, it just doesn't make sense. And I think that's why I think people shouldn't worry too much about all that stuff and just try to be good. Try to do the right thing and things will work itself out and realize how dumb you're going to be. Cuz like if the universe is billions of years old, I mean billion, you can't even imagine the word billion. You live a hundred years. I think if you live 10,000 years, you're going to be an idiot. Like like in the universal sense like how smart would you be after 200 years a thousand years 10,000 years I'm still going to be an infant universally I'm not going to know anything billions of years we don't have any context for that and we're judging people they're like 40 right as if they know something that's hilarious to me yeah I chalk it up to ignorance I would say to the anybody it takes the blame off it's a it takes the judgment away I go if you of course name think of any person that you think is a bad person and you go if they only knew knew if they only knew who God was. If they only knew that how much he loved them, if they only knew love, universal love, if they only knew that, they wouldn't do all of those things. And so, they must not know cuz if they knew, they wouldn't do it, which is their burden to carry. I mean, totally. Hell they don't know what love is like. Like, poor them. I should be for sure. Well, you said you're constantly updating your software and I, man, I really appreciate how much you study stuff. like you clearly don't give up on stuff. You're like a dog just going after it. Where what is your software currently saying about the origin of humanity? Like where did humans actually come from? I mean I think the evolution models are very much they make a lot of sense like you know the evidence and all that. I'm not an expert, but I do think that there's truth to evolution and how we came about. And I think there's we live in a natural world. But as far as the natural world goes, I think that the world is governed naturally for a reason, too. So even though things are natural and random and chaotic, I do think it's meant to be. So I think I think we can I think two things can be true at the same time. We can have a universe that's natural and random and has, you know, survival of the fittest and all that stuff, but at the same time, it can be special, unique, uh, divinely inspired, divine, that all I think two things I think they can be true at the same time. So yeah, as far as where we came from, it's I think in fact I think evolution is more fascinating than creationism because like there's this long lineage of life coming from the most simple thing to this that is fascinating rather than like poof we we're here Adam and Eve like that's that's not that's not impressive really. What is impressive is knowing that life emerged from the waters from nothing from little little tiny single-sellled organisms and just kept growing and kept like some some fish decided that it wanted to try to get out of the water at some point or whatever. You know what I mean? Had and like over time it grows into something that has like feet and or an amphibian. That's that's mind-blowing. There's something about that alone that makes me think that there's a guiding hand there. You know what I mean? Like there's some sort of like purpose to everything that life can continue to to thrive against all odds. It's pretty it's pretty amazing, I think. Yeah. Like the fact that life seems to want to go on. I mean, we have central nervous systems. We have reproductive organs that really want to be plugged in to other reproductive organs. Yeah. We can kind of explain why we reproduce, but like I always think of a sea sponge. Sea sponge doesn't seem to have a central nervous system or a wiener, you know? Why is it why is it going on? Like what honestly why is it reproduce? What's the point? I don't get it. Yeah. What is what is the end goal of the sea sponge lineage? I don't know. But it's doing it. It's a mystery. And it it given the opportunity will always choose to multiply. Where is that coming from? Yes. It's like that's right there. What you just said, it shows you that there's something there's some sort of force within us that wants us to survive. So there's some there to me that that tells me that there's some endgame to all this that there is some finish line somewhere that that the some some spirit within us is trying to get there and I don't know what it is but it I I just know there's something about it. Sounds like you still have faith in a lot of ways. Yeah. I think I think faith is natural. I think we have to have faith in in in everything. You have to have this this little level of faith for life itself or faith that I'll I'll make it in life or faith that I'll be able to pay my bills or faith that I'll be able to find somebody all that stuff. Without that, we'd be lost. I think faith is part of our evolutionary mechanisms. So, I think that's I think that's why it became so central to these these do these religions because it is a powerful thing. It's like a magical thing we can do is to have faith. It does something. It it can take us from one mindset to another mindset very fast. There's something about faith that works. It can take this like take something off your eyes unless you see a new perspective out of nowhere that you shouldn't have necessarily been able to like concoct on your own. But now you can see this new perspective. Yeah. Draws you into a better future kind of. Yeah. The stoics were like this too. The sto the ancient stoics were mind wizards. their their whole their whole philosophy revolved around your mind, controlling your mindset, controlling hunger, not overeing, um not things you can't control in life, not getting upset when somebody cuts you off. That's stoicism. And that's there's some there's there's a power to that. There's something about that. It's like a it's like a it's almost like a mental magic if you think about it. If you could control your mind and control how you think and control your emotions, that's powerful. What's so interesting is like how much we're studying meditation now. And when you get into deep deeper and deeper states of meditation, the brain waves that we're putting off, they go from alpha to beta to theta to gamma. And we're actually showing this physiological response. But it's hard to do because you have to you have to be able to turn off parts of your brain. And if you've never done it, and most people never have because we've never learned, that's a magic power right there. You don't And and so the practice of meditation, if you want to think about it from a materialist standpoint, is the ability to drop your frequency that your brain is in down into a theta state. And that's measurable. You can actually buy all those things that it'll measure it for you. It'll tell you your outputs. And the there's marked differences in all the other hormonal cascades of releases by getting into that theta state. And that's where the muse is. It turns out in a lot of ways that access to that creativity or that inspiration or that that moment because you a lot of guys they they doze right and they sleep and that's when the ideas come to them because in sleep your brain drops into a different wave state. And so there is this ability to actually I think that when we think of control your mind, we think of it in some like mental way. But if you you could actually also think of it in a control the your brain actually turn it down because it's hard it's hard to stop thinking thoughts. They seem to just keep coming all the time. And there's an ability that you can build on. It's really interesting because it's sort of being validated by research now in showing these like meditative states. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's why people have been doing that for thousands of years. Yeah. I mean the Dowists, the Buddhists, the Hindus, they're into meditation. The Greeks were into meditation. There's there's a reason why there it's true, you know. But speaking of thoughts that are always coming at you, what do you think of the Anunnaki? Um, I think the it's interesting when you find the Anunnaki and these Sumerian and Babylonian sources. A lot of it's they seem to be analogous to the Greek Titans and the Nephilim in the Old Testament. And I think there's like this there's this idea in ancient thought and ancient mythologies and you know and ancient wisdom that there was a class of beings that existed before humans that were closer to God but also mortal maybe and the Anunnaki definitely kind of fit that mold. And some of the sources though it doesn't get talked about as much because you get like Zechariah Sitchin who will say stuff like the Anunnaki came from the outer space and came here. And I think it's true in some sources that it does portray the Anunnaki as coming from the sky in the heavens. But a lot of sources especially the older ones the Anunnaki are judges in the underworld. So then so that doesn't get as much air time I think is that they're underground coming up instead of so I don't know it depends on the source though but yeah anunnaki is fascinating because Anu means heaven and ki means earth so and there they are the sons of heaven and earth they're the anunnaki are coming from the god Anu who's the god of heaven and they're also the children of ki the uh mother of of the earth. So they're the Anunnaki, the sons of heaven and earth. So and that's what that's how the Nephilim are described. The Nephilim are described or the sons of the angels and the women from earth. And then the Titans are also in Greek mythology are also very similar. The the Titans of Greek mythology are sons of Urronos and Gaia. Urinos is the god of heaven. Gaia is the earth mother. So you can see in all the different mythologies that there's this group of people who are sons of heaven and sons of earth. They're like they're like hybrids of humans and gods. Man, it just makes me think of cargo cults a little bit. Like in Vietnam when we would land in the Vietnam War and we'd land at a random island on the way over and we'd give the natives that these that had never had contact with other humans. We'd give them cigarettes and supplies and whatever and then take off and we'd come back like three years later and they had built little models of our planes. They had tattooed USA on their chests and they were praying to the gods that the gods would come back and because they just had it just blew their minds that some group of gods flew in, gave them these like tobacco that they had never smoked before. all of these strange things that were new to them and then took off into the sky. And I think that's so interesting. I don't know. You look at I think in one sense I want to look at that and go, I would never do that. But like also I guess if an alien spaceship came out of the sky and landed and gave me technology that I'd never seen before and then left. You might go that kind of felt like a god and I don't know, you know, but the other what's the difference? Right? What's the difference? I mean it's just a word we're using to describe some out of this world thing, right? you know, and so maybe there was I don't know. It's fun to think about. Maybe there was something other than the proof that there is no other a lot of evidence elsewhere other than all of these myths continuing on from different people groups for thousands of years. Maybe it started that way and for some reason they left and have never come back, but it's turned into these I mean mythologies. If there was a contact of aliens and humans in the deep past, then I wouldn't be surprised that it made its way into our mythologies that it was there's some sort of remembered shared memory of this time where there was because we're look the universe is so vast. It's infinite. We're not alone. There's going to be and there's going to be people there's going to be life out there smarter than us. We're not we didn't just we're not on the frontier of knowledge. I mean, if we were that would be that would be dark. That'd be messed up. It were the peak. Yeah. Like like with all with our Twitter right now, like that's it. Like Andrew Tate and like welcome to the town. Trump. Yeah. That would be sad. You ever consider your gods were idiots? Yeah. So I think there's something out there that's smarter than more capable more advanced more travel faster maybe maybe can f maybe at the speed of light and maybe that's what happened in the stone age that got humans to develop so much faster was there was some sort of content. I'm not opposed to that idea. I don't think it's fun to think about. It's fun to think about and it does make sense. It does make sense that that could have happened. It's just the way academics are. They're not looking for theories. They're looking for what the evidence h says. Sure. So, we have to be in two different ways of looking at it, you know. You have to be able to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. But it's it's definitely I think it's definitely plausible. You know, I think there's I wouldn't be shocked if that's what that that actually happened, you know. Yeah. How wild. And if the idea of gods came from some sort of shared or memory shared memory of some sort of ET contact I mean if they came down and gave some technology I mean we we I guess the only thing that I just we have cargo cults from Vietnam. We've seen it on a step down like like instead of gods to humans go humans to humans that don't have that are primitive and they that's what they did right. That's a good point. That's what they did. They they created these little figurines of the planes and these little they they were it it changed their whole life. I think that's a really good sample of what could have happened in the past. Well, I if it's happened once and the Hindus write about these vimmanas flying ships. Look, it's pro it's I think it's very plausible. I don't I don't I'm not a very I don't hate on that theory at all. It was just a long time ago. But you can even think then let's say that happens right in this in Vietnam and there's these islands and then the next generation gets born and they get told by the people who saw the plane. Yeah, there's these gods. And then four generations later, you got a bunch of people that never saw the plane, but they're like, "Yeah, my great-grandfather saw the plane." And you know, whatever. The god came down. And then you get like five more generations down. And you see how the story would just they're like, "We have to remember. We have to." And it turns into this ritualistic thing, but no one's ever actually seen the god anymore because it's been a hundred years or 200 years or whatever. And like what does that morph into? It morphs into mythology. Yeah. Does eventually just everyone just go, you know, that's just an old wives tale. We shouldn't think about that anymore. But everyone's like, but we've all heard it and it's been in our culture for 200 years and we all have been listening to this and like it's this dissipating memory. I got an example of that. Santa Claus. Santa Claus real kind of uh I'm not I'm not going to answer that here nor there. Most people think he's not, but it turns out there really is a St. Nicholas who lived in Constantinople and he and there's stories written about him of throwing bags of money into people's houses and there so there was a guy named St. Nicholas, who's a real person. He might have did some acts of charity. And then over time, he ends up as Santa Claus, the guy with the reindeer, flying house to house. And you can see how real events can morph into something that people think is just silly, right? But like there was a guy named St. Nicholas. He's a real person. And now now we just now when you when you say Santa Claus, people go Santa Claus. Nothing to it. Yeah. you know, and I was like, well, actually, there was a guy. I think the same thing might have happened with Jesus. There might have been a guy who maybe did some things and got some people on his side and he was well loved and then after 40 years, 50, 60 years, his whole story is like this, oh, he was the son of God. He did all these miracles and like, okay, you know, well, that would be so I guess I can see it happening. The idea that a human gets deified over time because politics comes in of there's all these waring factions of who believes what and my story of Jesus is better than your story of Jesus and know my story of Jesus is better than because my g you know you keep writing about Jesus and so you have there's this oneupsmanship and then next thing you know you have a thousand stories about this one guy and it just keeps getting you know well here's what we believe and he fed 5,000. Well, here's what he we believe and he walked on water or here's what we believed and you know I don't know if that's what happened or not but humans have done that in other areas and you know it's it's easy to see how that could be the incentives could be there to embellish and to bring that over to alien contact it could have been a simple look there's some inter intergalactic technology and they're going from galaxy to galaxy and they don't have a lot of time they can't stay here but they find life they found these homminids here and like look, we're gonna plant some ideas in their head and hopefully they can pick up on it and when we come back in 10,000, I don't know, whatever, 20,000 years, maybe they'll be able to we can be able to actually like teach them more things because they'll be smarter. And then they go and there was just a simple contact, a simple they taught them a couple mathematical equations, something a little simple, right? And they left. And then that gets glorified and the gods came and they they they came here. They actually ruled for a little bit. They did. They told us to do this and they add all these legends that didn't actually have it. It was a simple contact and then it got morphed into this big mythological war in the heavens and these gods did this and these gods like like you said all this oneupmanship and then it becomes that didn't happen at all. None of that is true. It's all mythology, right? But it could have been very simple. It could have been just a simple contact. It could have been cargo cult in Vietnam. We just needed to land and reprovision and get out of here. Exactly. It could have been something and they just thought what did I just There were some people who came from up there and they give me this thing and I smoke it and then I feel weird and like you're like this is magic that's magic that's magic that's and then they lose those artifacts because people fight over them destroy they're like this was proof the Ark of the Covenant might have been some sort of like you know nuclear reactor. Yeah. Like but it's all lost now. So now it's all we're just it's all mythology that I look I'm open to that idea. It's so interesting. It is interesting. Yeah. I mean no proof, you know, whatever. But it's but it's it's not it's one of those like creative constructions of the past that lends some sort of idea to why things are they are, right? It's explanatory other than the alternative explanation of mythology is just they made it up. What? What? They they just made it up? Oh, and there's a bunch of cultures that have similarish stories and like, well, it's in our subconscious. And you're like, maybe. I mean, maybe it's just a subconscious story that we all tell and it's just emergent as a species. It's like a it's part of our DNA or something that we all tell these similar stories. Maybe. I mean, maybe there's a gene for that that we could find. I don't know. But and to to sort of play that card, I think when you look at beavers across the world building similar dams, you go humans are across the world building similar ideas. Sure. That's one way to look at it. Totally. And the other way to look at it is maybe they do remember something. But why? You know, beavers build dams because it's a home that they have to build. Like why would we tell these things? It's true. Why would it emerge randomly? Mythology is a little different than dams. I guess I guess you're right about that. It's a little different. I mean, it is sim I like there is something maybe it is in our code. Yeah. Right. But like why why is that in there? For a species that that can create such high abstractions and delusions that it can believe in. Maybe it's part of the control mechanism in order for us to like self-organize and stay and not just kill each other. We all have to come to some core belief, some core delusion that we all believe. And so maybe it's just something we have to Plato. Plato talks about this in the Republic. He says, "In order to keep a a republic in line where there's not chaos and crime and and and complete uh corruption, you have to have the people believe that the laws were given by the gods from antiquity. If you don't have that, you're done because it's optional. If it wasn't given by someone who's not here anymore, yeah, if it was given by you, if it's given by humans, then I get to go, why would I why do you make the rules?" But if you're like, "I didn't make the rules. These are these are old past. The gods that created you did this. It's the separation of authority. The executive and the operator have to be I'm just the messenger. Don't kill me. That's right. The board voted and I'm just the guy doing this. Right. Look, just doing my job. The executives did that. And if the executives are in the past and you can't even talk to them anymore, you just following orders. Wow. That is powerful. It is. Especially when you have them believe that these are divine laws that came down. That's different. It's a whole different that people start to really listen to those things because they they're like, "What if I'm wrong? I don't want to be I better be this. This I might as well just go past school's wager, you know." Yeah. So, they end up just accepting it, you know? Yeah, man. This was awesome. Good place to rap. This is great, dude. It's so fun. This is so fun getting to know you. Yeah, man. Thanks for telling your story, too. I love your content. You might have some some exclusive stuff here that I haven't told anyone yet. So, right on. I think there's a few things I mentioned in here that I haven't mentioned anywhere else. So Oh, that's great. I love your channel. Thanks for making what you've been making and thanks for taking an interest in thinking critically and thinking rationally and and and carrying things forward. You know so much about a lot that I feel like you've forgotten more about first and second century text than I know about first and second century texts. So thanks for all the work that you do. Yeah, man. Appreciate that. Cool. It's been good. Thanks a lot. Yeah. Awesome. See you everybody.