Dr. Justin Sledge is a professor of philosophy and religion focused in Western Esotericism. His popular YouTube channel Esoterica is an amazing collection of lectures exploring the origins and evolution of arcane history, religion, magic, mysticism, alchemy, and the occult. | Esoterica on YouTube | Website | Bookstore | In The Keep | Support ITK On Patreon |

at least the vampire I think as we as we understand it now has its Origins and and U Slavic mythology I think

particularly Balkan mythology um I think one of the interesting things about that whole question is that we actually don't

know because there's a ton of Records actually preserved uh for from when um

the those those areas were actually in the Ottoman Empire and those records are all preserved in Turkish and uh no one's

ever done that archival work or it's not published in English I should say and so the the first answer is that we don't know um or at least it's not

widely published in English because so much of that stuff is is like I said preserved in in the uh the the

bureaucratic records of uh of the Ottoman Empire um but the the idea of

the vampire as we have it now is totally disconnected from from the origins of of the vampire and the the earliest stories

that we have from vampires that at least make their way to to the west and again you have to understand that what's

happened is that the the borders of the Ottoman Empire had had receded and those

areas had come under Western European control and once they come under Western European control then you begin to get

these um these stories coming out of the the Far West or the Far East of the

Borderlands really of of the European world and it's in those regions that you start to get these stories of of uh not

just people coming back from the dead but government bureaucrats having to deal with it uh which is to

people having to go and like dig them up and um and doctors getting involved and

so the earliest records we have are mostly accounts from government

officials doctors and soldiers who are basically attending people digging up a

grave and then you know these Proto scientists or early scientists uh trying

to do the scientific thing which is describe what they're seeing and um what

were what they're and most of these accounts happen in in the winter and what they're describing are

basically bloated uh bodies of recently dead people uh typically quite pale a

little bit reddish around the face blood in the mouth uh the kind of stuff you'd expect actually from the normal uh

process of of decomposition apparently I'm not a pathologist so I should be very careful about about what I say and

what I don't say because again I'm not I'm not a pathologist but what I've heard from Pathologists is that this is

what you would expect from uh the typical process of Decay and these

stories which um were very shocking to the to the attitudes of Europeans

especially theologians and U and and doctors you have to remember this is a the high period of of uh the

enlightenment but also this is the high period of sort of a kind of rationalizing Christianity as well and

both Christian theologians and medical doctors enlightenment doctors were in

some sense equally horrified at these prex because from a theological point of

view people shouldn't be coming back from the dead that only happens at the end of the world with the resurrection

according to the theologians and of course also uh from the point of view of Enlightenment doctors people shouldn't

be coming back from the dead and so these these stories coming from the Hinterlands of Europe of people coming

back to the dead to uh uh predate on the living were just horrifying and uh they

were the object of of endless interest and so you get these anecdotes that are first published in German and then you

get the the big book that's published in in uh in in France in the 18th century

and that really begins the so-called vampire craze which really Burns through the through the 18th century so those

that's the origin is it's a political change um when the Ottoman Empire

recedes it's uh stories where these dead bodies are coming back to life and and eating and predating on people what's

also interesting is that in the earlier Stories the uh the vampires never actually physically attack people

they're able to feed on them somehow remotely which is interesting it's a quite a different uh kind of vampirism

that we typically think of now but um but yeah and the stories getting back in the 17th in the 18th

century and uh like you know shocking and and and u g falling Renaissance or

not Renaissance Enlightenment doctors and and theologians I find it interesting in

that you even mentioned it yourself that the the concept of maybe it wasn't called this but an energy vampire seems

to be much older even than like the the concept that we have now of what a you know your your blood sucking or glittery

skinned daylight vampire maybe um and I think that's even the ones that were

doing it remotely were still drinking blood they somehow could do it remotely somehow they could do it through some other mechanism

um because one of the things they had to contend with the fact is these vampires are still in their graves and the graves

were undisturbed so how exactly the vampires are some somehow able to project

their their s out of the grave and then physically or somehow drink with

blood although never leaving the actual grave um and it's only later that you

get the idea that they're actually physically coming out of the grave and actually attacking people that's a that's a later idea but the earliest

vampires um they were somehow able to attack people

spectrally um but still drink blood they're still harvesting people's blood and um and they could also turn other

people into vampires so that that level that that story is also there um and typically it's family members often it's

a dead family member attacking other members of their family um so it's not just a random vampire attack it's often

a an uncle who's attacking members of of the family um

and mostly peasants so this is also a big difference between the vampire Legend um we typically imagine vampires

as aristocratic and handsome but almost always these vampires are U peasants

they're they're physically bloated uh they're they have the power of death

their mouth is covered with blood um they're they're hideous uh in a way that

you know the classic bellosi aristocratic vampires nothing nothing like that it's uh there's this

video game series it's also a tabletop game series called vampire the Masquerade are you familiar with that I

know the I know from the 90s I know the the RP the RPG from way back in the 90s

but I've never played the video games but I know there's different kinds of vampires right there's naratu and

there's a clans of vampires and stuff like that yeah yes and it's sort of you know based on different cultures

mythologies and and such but uh the key is that it actually has its own Canon which which seems to me as I I've

studied some of this stuff it seems that some people have actually adopted the cannon from that story as if it is like

uh real history or at least real mythology in in terms of what vampires are but one of the the key things is

that all vampires are the sons of Cain and that when Cain is banished from the Garden of Eden he's you know condemned

to walk the earth forever and that's where vampires become immortal and then later he meets and this can tie into

another topic that I wanted to cover with you is a Lilith and then she sort

of like teaches him how to use his curse so to speak and then all of the sons of

Cain become uh what we now call vampires night Walkers that sort of thing um but

who is Lilith and what is it that she contributes to uh not just the biblical stories but also like mythology in

general so Lilith is a character that uh first appears in a in a um early

medieval Jew text uh but who's based on much earlier um going back to ancient

Sumeria there are these Spirits called the the Le or the lelu which apparently are wind Spirits U malevolent wind

spirits and at some point they become um assimilated to another demoness named

lashu Who U is unable to have children and predates upon uh human children she

kills children she's responsible primarily for crib death and it seems

like this mashup of this demones lashu or goddess lamashtu and these lelu

Spirits um at some point maybe late Bronze Age AR age uh they get combined

into a kind of a a general uh demoness that is named Lilith coming from the

general semetic word meaning the Knight Lite just means Knight and Aramaic and

Hebrew and Arabic um and we first get a story about about her in uh text called

the alphabet of Bin s and in the alphabet of Bin s we get a story that uh

Adam had a wife before Eve and this wife before Eve um wanted to be on top during

sex she wanted to uh she wanted to uh cowgir apparently and um and Adam

refused this he didn't want to be on bottom uh and uh he refused her and uh

he she fled and when she fled uh she vowed basically to kill all the children

uh made with with Eve and this begins a dramatic highly developed mythology that

goes into Jewish mysticism and in cabala and it becomes this incredibly Rich story and uh in Jewish

mythology Lilith is a demon responsible for for killing children and crib death

uh so much so that people still put anti- anti- Lilith amulets in their in their children's room we have them in

our kids' room um I I don't really believe in in Lilith but I'm also not going to not going to risk it and so um

Jewish dream catcher say yeah it's something like that um but yeah that's

the idea that um that yeah you don't want Lilith uh playing with your children in fact there's old legends

that say that if your child's playing Alone by themselves and laughing it's Lilith uh Lilith is playing with your

kids and and she's going to kill them and uh she's like luring them to their death so there's a long mythology

associated with um with Lilith in fact in the cabala she's kind of a primordial

evil force that's been there um that was uncreated even even she's co-eternal in

some sense even as old as God um so she's becomes a major character in

Jewish mythology in the cabala but um yeah she has her origins in these

Sumerian stories about these uh lelu demons and the wind demons and this

lashu character who is a killer of children but I think that one of the things that's important to note about

Lilith is that the text that she first appears in where this whole story of

she's the first wife of Adam that story was meant to make fun of rabinal wisdom

it it was it was meant to be like a joke it was like it was somebody who knew rabinal wisdom very well but they were

trolling the rabbis they were making fun of the rabbis and people it's always

funny to me when in history jokes are become taken seriously but what what end

up happening is that what effectively is a joke uh text a text meant to make fun

of rabbis got taken seriously by the rabbis and so this story which was

basically meant to make fun of them has now become in some sense uh canonized

and so this story of Lilith as the first wife of U of uh of Adam was its origin

was a joke it was meant to make fun of rabinal lure and wisdom and now it's

become its its own thing entirely is there any Credence

to I've I've read all of Zechariah sit's work and I know that that's not

necessarily what it says in the Samaran tablets so to speak but just to clear it

up he he sort of asserts that Adam or adapa I believe is the way that that

it's used in the book and the the idea that they were making multiple wives for

what they want to be the prototypical human um in the sort of promethian story that they have um is there any Credence

to the idea that there were multiple EES or like multiple iterations of EES or is

that something that we just don't know going back before the the early biblical text I mean I think Zacharias San is a

pseudo scholar so I wouldn't respond to anything he has to say I think he's not really a serious scholar okay um I think

that uh it's mythology there's lots of versions of these of these narratives that uh

where we have multiple versions of them even in the Hebrew Bible there are at least three different creation stories

uh in in in just in the Hebrew Bible there's two in Genesis and one in Psalm 74 and then in in the Sumerian

literature there uh there three or four there's anuma Alish and and various other texts but um you know it's myth

it's mythology and because we have the accretion of thousands of years of Mythology there are lots of different um

variations of of that mythology which have which have developed and um of

course none of them are true they're they're great myths but they're they're just myths we're gonna have a lot of people

who were into the ancient astronaut theory and I find it at least fun you know at the very at least it's a really

interesting story but like with with people like Von dankin and Zachariah sit can you explain from your scholarly

perspective why they're pseudos Scholars there's no evidence to support the things that they suggest they don't

take seriously the the actual literature Theon astronaut theories I mean it's basically ridiculous on the face of it

there's no evidence I mean it's there's no physics imaginable that at this point

that uh human beings have been that the Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials I don't think that

it's physically possible um so I think that um yeah they they basically

systematically misread the literature there's no evidence they have a deep knowledge of Hebrew or Sumerian or Acadian so yeah I think it's the

theories are um laughable at best okay yeah so

from a linguistic standpoint I think that's what a lot of people struggle with is they depend on other people to translate it for them I've seen you've

you've studied a lot of languages um like Aramaic and he Hebrew obviously and

Latin Greek a lot of things going on there did did you if I remember correctly you studied in uh

Amsterdam okay um and I remember something about you were talking about

how you you like the way that they do things over there I've spent some time in the Netherlands myself and all over Europe but I do like how direct they are

it's one of my favorite things about Dutch culture is just like the Dutch the Dutch are correct I one time I was on I

was on a I was on a tram and and a and Uma a grandma lady an older lady um uh

said something to me in Dutch and I didn't quite understand it but I heard the word haircut uh canopen or whatever

I think it is in duton and I I was like I'm sorry I don't understand she's like you need a haircut yeah caps Salon yeah yeah

decided to tell me that I needed a haircut uh to my face on a tram didn't know me from

Adam Well for now at least your hair looks nice and yeah I just got a haircut too like just literally yesterday so uh

no no Dutch old no Dutch lady is going to tell me I need a haircut uh maybe they will though maybe I but in terms of

of the language of all of these ancient texts and everything uh even in the modern translations that we have in

English you know there are different just just take the the Bible for instance like it you have 50 different

English translations of it some of them are meant to be you know metaphorically correct some of them are meant to be

literally correct uh so I think that you have a recommended one on your book but

what would you say for someone who's uh not able to take the time to learn a language but wants to get as close as

possible to the Source language what what would you say like they should look at I mean no no translation is going to

get you closer to the source text you just have to learn the language um I say

that if you want the Poetry of the Hebrew Bible the King James version is the best poetic version uh you know the

uh there other really good poetic translations if you want a good scholarly Edition I always recommend the

NOA the NOAB the new Ox annotated Bible that's that's one of the better scholarly uh versions of of the of the

Hebrew Bible but there's just no way to translate especially a language like Hebrew directly into English

because um there there things that just don't translate I'll give an example

um uh in in the Genesis creation story with the Adam and Eve and the snake and

all that there's a pun that happens in Hebrew the the pun is that the the snake

is clever arum and that the people are naked arim and this pun happens over and

over again the the snake is clever arum the people are naked arim and the the

writer of that text is clearly they're they're using a a literary device it's a pun they're they're playing with a word

and in English the word clever and the word naked have nothing to do with each other they don't sound at all alike but

in Hebrew they are similar and to a Hebrew reader and to someone who's who's

writing this language they're they're being funny like there's something about the story that's meant to be comical and

if you read it in Hebrew the the the fall of Man is meant to be funny it's actually they're they're it's a it's a

comical story but in English especially under the the Aegis of Christianity where we have this whole story of the

fall of Man and all this it's not funny it's a huge tragedy and Paradise Lost and all this but clearly the writer of

that text was intending it to be comical and that's completely lost in

the translation so um um you know the basic words in Hebrew

there's no good translations for them toou uh the idea that the word the world was unformed and void it's not clear

what those words actually mean to V so um so I would say that if people

really want to get close to a text whether it's reading the anuma Alish in in Acadian or some text in Sumerian or

in Hebrew or whatever you got to learn the languages and Sumerian Hebrew they're

not that hard you can learn to read you could have a basic literacy in Sumerian

Acadian Hebrew basically in 15 weeks if you spend an hour a day on the languages and

you you could be I wouldn't say fluent because I'm not sure what fluent means in a dead language but you can be

competent to read some degree of of literature in

those languages and so I think that people often have um they often have an idea that these languages are impossible

to learn but in 15 weeks you could have

a reading knowledge of Hebrew such that you could read

75% of of of the Bible you could do the same thing with a Cadian you could do the same thing with Sumerian these

languages aren't terribly aren't terribly difficult they're nothing like you know trying to learn to read Chinese

Chinese is a legitimately difficult language because you're having to you you need to memorize I think in Japanese

you need to memorize 2,000 kanji to even be as literate as an elementary school

child it's extraordinarily difficult but Hebrew Acadian Samarian they're not that

when I was uh when I was in the Air Force I studied at the Defense Language Institute and they they rate languages

categorically essentially on how far away it is from your native language and at the top of that list you're going to

be you know Arabic Chinese Korean um and it it gets worse when

you're talking about different dialects even within a language so I mean there's a there's a huge difference between uh

learning Modern Standard Arabic and learning like the Arabic that's spoken in southern Iraq for example um or or

Syria right yeah I can I can I can understand FSA like you know like TV Arabic but you know you get some you go

you take me and drop me in the middle of uh Morocco and I you know the dialect is going to be impenetrable oh

yeah Iraq is the Alabama of uh of as Alabama is to English so is Iraq too

Arabic the the words get all strong together you're from Mississippi right that's right yeah I'm from Mississippi

where at Jackson I born south Jackson yeah the the the working class um part

of of Jackson Mississippi I'm from mobile so yeah I think that the way that

people interface with with religion and the Bible in that area from from a scholarly perspective when you're when

you're so well studied and you understand the source materials to a certain degree and you're talking to

your average person who has never even considered the idea that the anything older than the King James is exists you

know is very interesting to me it's something that I think even as a little kid I was so confused by like how how do

you take this so literally like how how do you know that that's is what it says it says and the

the the generational Gap I believe between people who either had access to

a lot of books and studied or the internet now versus and I was speaking to my father about this you know because

he grew up in the 70s 80s and he was he sat me down one day because he was kind of frustrated by how much of a smartass

I was being and he was like look I don't I don't think that you're crazy or anything but what I want you to

understand when you're talking to us about this is that you know for the longest time all we had was what they

taught us in school and what they told us on Sunday and that's it there was no like extra way to

learn about anything so you have this expectation as someone who grew up in the internet age of you know us to have

all of the same stuff in your head so when you're talking to someone you're kind of putting them down but from your perspective as a scholar uh is it do you

ever find it frustrating really to like to have to like kind of dumb it down for the sake of making it make sense or even

just like having that conversation I'll give you an example if you're talking to chat GPT or AI or

something like that and you're having a conversation or if you're talking to another scholar at the same level as you

are you you don't have to explain a lot of Concepts you know you you don't have

to stop and be like answer a question in the middle of what you were just saying or to to explain the idea behind a word

that you just said it will just know what you mean either the the ability to look that up on the Internet or the fact

that the other person has the same amount of study as you do um so so from your perspective as an

educator on YouTube what is it that you get as a daily interaction like you must see so many different versions of what

people's Regional points of views are it's a huge range I mean the on on the

channel I the channel is an academic Channel and so I gear it to a certain level and that level is basically upper

level undergraduates uh with a someone someone in in uh in college uh basically getting

a major in in religion or philosophy right so that's who I I gear it to so

it's I'm not gearing like if if people want introductory level religious study stuff there's other channels to do that

really well religion for breakfast um with uh with Andrew or let's talk

religion with Phillip so I don't I just don't do introductory level material and that's not because introductory level

material is like me or whatever it's something like that it's just that I've decided to make a a channel that runs a

little bit deeper um and when I'm talking to people you

know I I I don't I I I've always said that if you can't explain a concept to

someone on a bus you probably don't understand it okay and my position is

always meet people where they're at um and and again this is talking about people who

are who are uh genuinely interested in a topic and who just don't know the

scholarship because most people don't know the scholarship because the Ivory Tower that is Academia has made it such

that you have to go to thousands of dollars in debt to get access to this which should should never be a thing that people have to

do um but yeah I think that I come at this from a point of view of I want to be a an educator and that means that

that I want to meet people where they're at and um that's what I try to do I try to

assume that at least for my AUD that there's some basic background knowledge that they have and then I go from there

um but again when that comes to things like uh pseudo science or or pseudo

scholarship or pseudo archaeology the you know the Graham Hancock stuff I just don't have any patience for it uh just

it's not um you know I think that in the same way that I wouldn't deal with a a

race realist someone who really believes that their Aryan you

Ary and over men that's pseudo science it's pseudo I'm not going to deal with that or you know the same with um you

know these other kinds of things I'm also you know people are like why don't you want to deal with the idea that all

the white people came from Atlantis or something I'm like I'm not dealing with I'm not going to interface with nonsense

but uh people who are genuinely coming to get access to the scholarship I'm

absolutely there for them and I want to be there to facilitate that process

I'm not going to say I like it but I I do have a certain part of me that enjoys when someone has a crazy idea trying to

understand how they arrived at their conclusions if that makes sense so when it comes to like Graham Hancock for

example you don't have to interface with it but I'm like how how did you arrive at this conclusion like because

obviously he seems to believe what he believes right oh I definitely I think

he I think he does I don't think he's a grifter or anything like that I I think he he he genuinely does believe it

believes his his ideas but um people genuinely believe in all kinds of of of

nonsense unfortunately but you you study the things that people genuinely believe

throughout history so for you is it more about finding some semblance of Truth or

is it just more about like the understanding of what people believe um it depends on what hat I'm

wearing if I'm doing my historian hat I I'm more interested in what people believed and why they believed it if I'm

doing you know I have degrees in both philosophy and religion and so I'm if I'm if I'm wearing a historian hat I'm

much more interested like I said in what people believed and why they believed it if I'm wearing my philosophy hat then

I'm interested in what the actual truth is and so I think that you know if

ancient Gnostic people believed in the Demi urge I want to come to understand why they believe that that's a very interesting idea

why how did they come to believe that what was the nature of their beliefs why did their beliefs make sense in the context and why did why did these texts

survive in the way that they did U so that's one question and I'm I'm and I try to always lean

into from a historical point of view trying to make those people like Steelman them really make them make sense because I do think that there's

they're not unreasonable and but if I'm wearing a philosophy hat uh which typically I

don't on the channel my my channel is mostly a historically oriented Channel right but if I'm if I'm you know if I'm

wearing my philosophy hat then I'm like what is the actual reason to believe this and I don't think me I it seems

conceivable to me actually that the gnostics may have been right that the world was created by an evil Creator um

at least vis a human beings the universe seems quite inhospitable to human beings

so that seems right the idea that you could get out of it and there's anything other than it that seems unreasonable to me um so I'm I'm much more interested in

trying to sort out why they believe what they believed um but if someone asked me my my opinion about that that's a

totally different question you're listening to kwp in the

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[Music]

keep there there's such a there's such a tendency for people to

sort of ReDiscover what they consider to be old knowledge and then create an entirely new sect of what the beliefs

were that are disconnected from that original belief I think I've heard you sort of speak on like the V Victor

era of studying uh Magic and then you'll have people with they're like kind of

trying to get there but then they're you know putting backwards Hebrew symbols all over stuff and and you have aliser

Crowley and and that kind of stuff and then I'm wondering you know in 400 years

is there going to be a you know a great great great grandson of Dr Sledge who's

studying the same thing and looking at oh in the 19th and 20th centuries people became uh convinced events that ancient

saman and Hebrew texts were telling them that the world was created by aliens and it and then that was a whole you know

pseudo religious moov um and then from the historical standpoint I feel like that's going to be a topic that's going

to be one of those things like where why did people believe that well it's it's already a topic I mean they're already Scholars studying it now is a called UF

UFO religion their whole Scholars who who study UFO religion as a as an

academic U as an academic thing that they do yeah that's already happening wow um um so yeah it doesn't take it

won't take 400 years from now there are already Scholars out there doing it it's uh it's it's really incredible just just

the depth of the human mind and how people can become completely convinced of something uh that they have no

evidence for in general I mean that's you've you've made a whole Channel pretty much covering all of the different instances in history where

that's happened uh yeah so or it's to me it's interesting I sometimes I get

comments on the channel like why would people believe in magic when it doesn't work work and my response is always

billions of people pray y like I don't think that there

there are no space deities there are no deities in the sky answering people's prayers I don't think that's true and

yet people pray all the time and I think that belief in Magic and belief in the

efficacy for instance of prayer are equal and so it's always interesting to

me like that I I will have religious people look down their nose at historical people who practice magic and

yet they'll walk into a mosque or a synagogue or a church and ask for a a sky deity to fix their marriage or their

disease or I'm like this is all in the same field of play and it's just interesting to me what people think of

as unusual uh or when I hear people make fun of scientologists or Mormons oh the

Mormons are ridiculous they believe in this that and the other and I'm like you might the same people saying that

the Mormons are ridiculous are also people who also believe in a talking snake tricked a woman made from her rib

to eat fruit and then that meant that 2,000 years later a Jewish rabbi had to be executed by the Romans and to fix

that problem it's all or or again from my religion that uh some guy went up on

a mountain and got a bunch of rules about what you can it can't eat um uh I think when you're pointing fingers about

what's ridiculous uh there's uh you have to point that finger back at yourself and be like hold on the

mythology that I accept uh as the mythology that's most meaningful to me is also pretty ridiculous on the face of

it I try to think about everything that I learn uh as if I'm looking at an old

school like overhead projector with the clear sheets of paper and I'm like okay if I could just take everybody's ideas

and stack them on top of each other wherever they intersect this these are interesting places yeah I think that's

true yeah yeah I agree with you um yeah but I

think that you know there's also a tendency among people to what I call parallel parallel Mania the idea that

the intersections are cause are are evidence of causation that um because

two things intersect doesn't mean that they actually have anything to do with each other they just happen to cause you know the the fact that lots of cultures

come up with storm deities or flood stories uh it doesn't mean that there are storm deities or that there are

flood that actual flood happened it means that human beings have to deal with storms and floods um so it's no it's no it's not

actually evidence for uh anything other than the fact that human beings have to deal with storms and

floods one of the interesting factors going back to our good friend Graham

Hancock the a lot of these people seem like they're what they're searching for is a common origin for everything so

that the fact that there are storm deities and all these different cultures or the fact that there appear to be trees of life and all these different

cultures and they interface you know or the mapping of cabala to Roman deities

and planets you know the fact that that coincidence exists seems to point in their opinion to okay well we all must

have a common origin that we don't remember or at least have a historical record for it and that's why everything

seems to overlap um but then I think about the that I've had very similar conversations with like a crazy guy in

Walmart who's explaining to me how hit was the second coming of Christ and the

the need for people to establish that everything is connected and has one point of

reference do you think that's a natural like just human fallacy or is there any

evidence at all that there's a like a common element to all belief systems not just abrahamic belief systems I mean

we're all the same species and we all have the same origin story in Southeastern Africa so I think that in

so far as we're all the same species we're going to and we live on the same planet we all have the same Hardware we

have the same software we all have the same brains we all the same bodies we live in roughly similar environments but

um yeah I wonder how much stories about trees of Life the Inuit have I wonder I

bet I bet not many I mean in fact I know they don't um because they don't live in

anywhere where there are trees of life you know it's it's again it's it's the I think that the more that you study these

stories in Deep Way the more they become dissimilar um and so I think that part

of what we have to do as Scholars is really dive deep into this because from a superficial point of view everything

looks very similar but as you get deeper into it I'll give an example of the tree

of life and kabala the tree of life and cabala is not one thing the kabalists don't agree

in even in kabalistic texts about how it's supposed to be made even how many numbers of Cote there are supposed to be

in it there are other schools of cabalist who actually had as many as 13 Sphero not 10 some had 11 some had 13

some had three and so even among kabalists there is an agreement but if

you have a a superficial understanding of cabala ah so it's this specific arrangement of these 10 in this

way and then you can take that and put it over to the chakras or whatever but even in Indian literature when you start

to study the chakras you're like hold on in this text it says they're different in this text it says it's different than

that and so when you get into the weeds of it you realize what superficially looks like agreement is not agreement at

all that's exactly how you arrive at the idea that there must be a 12th Planet if you have to fill out the whole chart

right yeah because you believe that there has to be a because this has to be 12 and that has to be this and and so um

I think there's a deep desire on the part of the human being for things to make sense I mean we we suffer from

paradia we Evolution has developed Us in such a way that part of what makes human

beings pretty good at surviving is that we recognize patterns we're really good at recognizing patterns the problem is

is that we are too good at it we see patterns there aren't patterns we look at a light socket and see a face and

because we we we overcompensate we overcorrect we see patterns where there aren't patterns and this leads I mean

I'm sure we many people have met people who suffer from various versions of mental health problems where they

they're seeing pattern conspiracy theories where they're seeing patterns that aren't really there and so I think

that we have to be careful because we need to see we need to recognize patterns especially in mythology and and

literature where there in fact are patterns and the only way to do that is by studying these texts very very deeply

and again what we find is the deeper we study them the less internally they are

the less coherent they are internally and so um again cabala or other kinds of

texts um now magical text for instance in in Europe um people think oh there's one

History of Magic the truth of the matter is there's at least 150 different manuscripts of the key of Solomon none

of which totally agree with each other and that that that's the we history is a

mess and the more that history begins to the the closer you look at it with the higher resolution you look at history

the more of a mess it is it's only from a very high level very low resolution

point of you that it it starts to make sense but in the weeds it's mostly a

mess what do you think of the the cthul Mythos and some of the sources that HP

Lovecraft Drew from how that how that has influenced culture in general like because I'm not sure that there's

anybody out there who there might be people who literally worship like love crafty and deities or whatever but just

chaos magicians I'm sure yeah yeah um I mean I think that the the the the culum

is actually an examp a great example of this is that to what degree actually is there a cthulu Mythos as a as a coherent

thing because Lovecraft stories don't all agree with each other um you know

what is exactly the relationship of the old ones and the Deep ones and a and Y

lotep and um and and then does August derth does he get to add to it and you

know and August ath really made it sort of like good versus evil he made it so that the that the the Elder gods the old

ones are some of them are good and some of them are bad but Lovecraft never did that for Lovecraft he was an a moralist for him

he was a scientific materialist and these are just aliens these are just Primal forces and they're not good or

evil they're just there and so I think that again part of what's interesting about the the Lovecraft um and again

that's just Lovecraft in August derith there are lots of people who come since then Tomas lagotti added to it and um

they're almost like the cists of lovecrafts works too where they're interpreting it in all these different

ways and and coming up with these new ideas yeah riing on it and making new stories and and um so yeah I think that

what's fascinating to me about that about that particular um mythology and

of course Lovecraft doesn't developed that stuff in a vacuum he's he's he's reading Lord duny he's reading um he he

he you know people forget that we often have the idea that Lovecraft was a a bit of a

recluse and but Lovecraft wasn't a recluse at all his you read his correspondence he has dozens of volumes

of Correspondence he's writing five six letters a day and all he and all of his friends are all making this up as they

go yeah and that he's riffing on on on this guy and this guy's riing on him and

so U I think that it's bit of a bit of jazz uh in some sense of how he's doing

it and um and also I think Lovecraft just he was a guy who experienced the world through the lens of a great of uh

xenophobia and anxiety and uh physical health problems Y and I think that uh he

had bad nightmares and ISU yeah yeah he had yeah yeah yeah fraan stuff there as

well um um you know yeah he he he did not get along terribly well with women

um or seemingly any anybody other than people like him in many ways um so yeah

he's you know at one time I was in Rhode Island and I went up to uh near Brown where he used to live and uh you can do

a walking tour of kind of the area around Brown kind of Lovecraft country and you can go to the uh shund house one

of the stories that he wrote called the shund house it's a it's there near Brown It's a yellow house and it has a

somewhat exposed basement so it's sort of built on a hill so you can kind of see the basement as you walk past it and

I think Lovecraft lived there with one of his aunts or something and there was something about the fact that that you could see the basement from the street

that so unnerved him right um that he wrote a story about it and um and

so um yeah I think that the interesting thing about the about the so-called uh

love crafty and cthulu Mythos is that it's gotten this life of its own and it

it it's become kind of a world of fanfiction and and even magical practice among I think chaos magicians or the

Simon Necronomicon and you see something like that happen in the world too you get all this apocryphal stories about the life

of Jesus where Jesus as a kid is you know killing his teacher and turning rocks into clay into Birds it's

fanfiction it's fanfiction and there's ancient fanfiction about Jesus and now there's modern fanfiction about cthulu

but at some level it's um it's it's all it's it's all

fanfiction uh yeah it's really interesting how the fanfiction in general always comes up so a perfect

example would be the video game Doom I was brought into a a podcast that was like exploring lore of video games and

and different like pop culture stuff one time for whatever reason as an expert on the the cannon of that game

and I I was really fascinated because in general people kind of had this expectation that there is something

written down ahead of time and then extrapolated upon from there but the truth is that in the original game and

the people who were making it they didn't really have a planed they were just kind of throwing stuff together riffing and then all you really get

story-wise is some set pieces and then these little messages that pop up in between the sets of levels you know the

episodes and the conclusion that I had to really bring to the table was like there isn't one the fans made all this

[ __ ] up after the fact like the the people who played this you know all they're all on the internet just like oh

well you know the part where he goes back to his old home this must be you know and and then you end up with the

modern iteration of the Doom series that is drawing upon fanfiction and making a

lot of that either Canon or coming up with their own fanfiction in a way and doing the same and people treat this

stuff sort of like they treat a religion um so something like the nagadi and

talking about the go uh the Gnostic Gospels or gnosticism in general how do you sort in your on your side of things

what is fanfiction from what is a what is consider Ed to be an authoritative

text I think that it's it's all fanfiction from from my point of view I

think that Authority what people claimed or claim as authoritative text says more

about um about their desires and wishes than about reality to me I don't treat

Matthew Mark Luke and John any different than I treat the apocryphon of John it's all Jesus fanfiction because there was a

historical person who was Jesus but the the texts that we have about him are written you know 40 years after he was

dead and so um so it's all to me it's all as a historian it's all fanfiction

whether it's Moses or Muhammad or Jesus um nothing's more or less

authoritative um what's authoritative is things like archaeology and we have

basically no archaeological um we have yeah we have no archaeological data about for

instance Jesus it simply doesn't exist so from a historical perspective

even like defining what isn't isn't a primary source we we struggle with this in in the study of Rome in general like

you know if you have Caesar asking his his buddy to write a a

book about him or some text about him or whatever you don't know what he decided himself to lie about much less what

other people thought or observed so yeah it's very interesting to try to like

come up with a way to establish these are what we can reasonably assume might

have actually happened versus this is just some [ __ ] somebody else made up years later yeah yeah I mean certainly

you know when Caesar tells when Caesar tells you that he was uh fighting against a bunch of guys painted blue and

he was outnumbered 10 to one and still beat him you're like who is Caesar really what is he's up to right right

and ditto when when the gospel writers write stories right we have we have examples in the gospel what EX the

gospels where in one gospel Jesus does a miracle one way and another gospel he does it another way and and you can see

the story changing the the gospel writers are changing them and so yeah how much of the Golic Wars is cesarian

propaganda and how much of it really happened well we don't we'll never know to a to a perfect degree

but um you know when we look at the sources we try to tease out what we seem to what seems to be historically

accurate and what doesn't but yeah there's there's it's always going to be the case that we're never going to to

fully know I mean this leads some people to believe things like mythicism that Jesus didn't exist at all I think that's

unlikely I think he probably did exist um um but then we had to reconstruct like all right what do we think from

these texts or reasonable things to believe about this historical person you know it's didto with Caesar didto with

Alexander the Great you know didto with ram II or Abraham Lincoln for that

matter um you know did he you know these guys really chop down charry like George Washington or what you know

right so um yeah teasing out what what is myth and what is history and also

just being comfortable with the gray area where the gray area being we don't know and we're not going to know probably I think that's also a mark of

good scholarship I I always say that you can um you can Merit a scholar by

basically saying what we know what we don't know and U any scholar worth their

salt should be pretty comfortable saying we don't know and maybe we're not going to know or that we don't have evidence

you know uh for certain kinds of things and trust me I think Scholars desperately want evidence for all kinds

of things but um history is often not forthcoming

interesting as you studied uh like the the expansion of of religion Abraham at

religion into Europe and then how that interfaced with all of the indigenous or

pseudo indigenous release beliefs that were held in that area so this is from my understanding and please correct me

and and the entire audience if we're wrong about this but this is essentially where you start to see the beginnings of

of people just calling everyone who's a pagan a witch I I think that the the idea of of

calling people witches doesn't really begin until the 15th century that's okay the the con the legal concept of malium

is a 15th century concept mostly pioneered by U Scholars like Johan

and um um insor the author of malth malarum but by then uh Europe had been

Christian for 500 years right at least at least the last area to convert you

know people place like Iceland had converted by Scandinavia Iceland had converted by by by about a thousand

Scandinavia before that um so no I this is the old idea of um Margaret Murray

the so-called witch Cult of Europe where the idea that the The Witches were in fact the survivals of older versions of

So-Cal Pagan religions right but uh the evidence doesn't bear that out um and in

fact we don't have any evidence there actually were witches at all in Europe unfortunately those women were just

Christians who were murdered um after being tortured in many cases but uh

paganism um again I don't like that term paganism because it's a Christian term to other the the the religions of of of

of Europe of which there were lots or Heathen yeah Heathen yeah none of these terms are terms these are terms that

were developed by Christians to to demote and demean um the the

pre-christian religions that that existed in Europe which again there were many the idea that there was one religion of Europe prior to the arrival

of Christianity it doesn't make any sense um but we definitely we basically know nothing about those religions um

for instance what we can say about The Druids um you can you can basically write in one page we don't know

effectively anything about them I would be deeply interested to hear like a conversation between you and say Jackson

Crawford who did the uh the most or at least that I'm aware of the most recent solid English translations of the uh of

the edas because it it it does seem that PE

he does a great job of explaining this in a way that at least I can understand it but when a lot of people who are sort

of your uh your neopagan uh you know modern Heathen Believers right and they

they look at this stuff and you have to understand that not only do we not really have the sources on this it's

just these are like Catholic monks writing in mostly

Latin down the ideas of what people are telling them mostly from an oral tradition and then putting it into text

and now we are Translating that into other languages to try to understand what it is that these folks believed in

and there are some sort of through lines at least in northern and western Europe from what I can tell you know with the

and a lot of it comes from Viking ideas of you know this is Odin this is Thor

they have different names somewhat across different Germanic languages but

I I do want I do I do Wonder like what that conversation would look like because from your your idea that there

there is not one unified uh looking religion in that area um maybe not but

maybe there were a lot of different people exchanging Gods the same way that you know in your videos about the the

Demi Orin and yahwism that they're borrowing a god from another culture or at least a name for a god from another

culture and then kind of pushing that into what what they're carrying with them and how they adapt their own

mythology their own bully system I mean Dr Crawford is certainly much more Dr

Crawford is in fact an expert on this and I'm very much not but I think Dr Crawford would point to the fact that uh

while some of the texts that we have from uh that are in Old Norse the the the sagas and Volo and other texts um

yeah those texts were written by Christians a couple hundred years after they had converted to to Christianity

and so they do probably represent a memory of a pre-christian period but um but yeah they're they're

text written by Christians and probably edited by Christians in in ways that uh I'm I imagine would perhaps be

um maybe they wouldn't even like the the pre-christian people wouldn't even like the way the the the Volo pod that we

have now or the the haval we have now maybe the you know the old the the

actual North pagans wouldn't wouldn't agree with the version we have now but again you know what Norse what Norse

vengance believed in in the in the 600s uh Proto Norse religion protog Germanic

religion it's probably quite different than you know what the Goths believed prior to their conversion to Christianity so

yeah I think that um the idea that there was some kind of unified paganism that existed throughout

Europe uh who knows what the Basque believed who knows what the Slavs they had their own mythologies um and they're

all sort of existing in in in Europe you know prior to the arrival of Christianity so yeah I don't think that

we we know very little about it because they they wrote very little and what

they and what they did write it's very brief um and so we know basically we

know incredibly little about those pre-christian uh beliefs and by the time

that people do write anything down it's it's hundreds of years after the conversion to Christianity very interesting you're

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[Music]

tuned okay so you're a at least you're on your your merchandise you seem to

have have a lot of fun with the toying around with the black metal logos and everything like that do you actually listen to that kind of music oh yeah

yeah I'm a big friend of black metal yeah okay yeah I listen to you I'll be in you know cooking you know dinner and

listening to wolves in the throne room or weakling or cace and that's typically

definitely when I'm at the gym and you know in my car that's definitely the kind of music I listen to although these

days it's funny I've been listening to the the new record by The Cure which is the opposite of black metal

um yes yeah uh it's like all feelings and sadness and I don't know I don't

know what it's got into me but yeah but yeah I definitely love I love black metal and I love that I love that aesthetic um I like some of the old

Scandinavian stuff I know it's you're not supposed to like bism or whatever because VAR vicer is a a bigot or

whatever but I'm like still pretty good music I really like his music I don't agree with his uh his thoughts and yeah

again like people people kind of get their uh they get on tizzy about oh you

can't like the music because the person's a bad person I'm like look I don't think that Thomas aquinus would

have had a particularly high opinion of me but I still like Thomas aquus I still think he's a genius and his books are

worth reading even if you would have considered me a you know a you know

heretic or whatever um so yeah I think that one can separate the art from the

artist and appreciate the the art uh even if you think that the artists

themselves is is um not especially a good guy I don't think I want to hang

around you know a lot of historical people but I think they're the what they

produced is worthy of Merit and the idea that we should cancel histori cancel

history or cancel people in history because they they had ideas that we find on Savory is

U it's not just stupid it's self-defeating you basically don't get you won't be able to do any history um

and expecting historical people or even modern people to to line up with all of our values in order to appreciate what

they produced it's just just that seems patly ridiculous to me I I really like

black metal in that especially in in the 90s when there's this sort of Renaissance of black metal and they are

pretty much exploring the idea that there is there is all this uh ancient

you know European religion and we've been lied to about it and a lot of the music is sort of sort of this attempt to

recreate the spiritual music of whatever it is that they believe people believed in their area was before I mean you get

you know the Irish version of black metal you get the Scandinavian version of black metal all of that stuff it it's

so f fascinating and VAR V kernis since you brought him up is a purveyor I mean you can go read his blog if you really

want to of the idea that all of Europe was one one pre unified you know Pagan

religion and we all believed in the same things essentially and then the evil and

he he gets real bad with it you know oh yeah he's he's an anti-mite by far by far yeah yeah yeah yeah I don't think he

would he would think he would gladly admit to that he would gladly admit to that he he probably would yeah so with

the uh W with these folks in in the music they're creating and all all of their individual studies into that

they've sort of created their own mythology surrounding the indigenous

beliefs of European culture uh and then you mentioned wolves in the throne room also and that's like the Western

American nature you know religion version of the same thing it it's very

fascinating but it makes for excellent music um what do you think of what do you think of like the way that it's adapted over the past 30 years

even I mean I think that uh you know there there's a weird idea that you

can't make up religion you can't make up spirituality it has to be ancient and I'm like everything ancient was made up at some point right you know it's not

like you know Antiquity is no vou safe for truth just because something's old

doesn't make it true and tradition is often just peer pressure from dead people so it doesn't it's it's not like

any of that matters I think that if you find something spiritual

impactful um then I think that's that's enough I don't think that you need to

have more than that and I think that if these if uh black metal is a medium by

which one can have a connection to one's spirituality and again whether that's

North paganism or Northwestern Cascadia or whatever great I mean this world is a

hard world we live in a hard world we live in a world that very much uh can strike us as meaningless and very much

can strike us as as bereft of of value and Val bereft of meaning and if you

find a connection in meaning and I don't know

four great that's fantastic it's far better than nihilism and you know other

kinds of things so yeah I'm I I think that I'm not I'm not uh there to

police uh meaning I don't I don't I'm not a Roman the Romans have this idea that for religion to be true it had to

be old and I don't buy that I think that spirituality can be uh completely brand

new and completely authentic at the same time or even just individual in a lot of cases like what whatever you believe man

that's fine that's cool yeah yeah I think it's as long as people believe things that you know uh again for me

it's it's it's one people say it's one thing to say look I believe in X Y and Z I'm like great fine it's another thing

people say and also there's this evidence that I'm right and often it's the evidence that I'm right is often

incredibly spous um and I I I point to I point to

my own example you I meet Jewish people all the time we say yeah like we're we're Jews and also our religion goes

back 3,000 years I'm like your religion go through through back 3,00 years there are people that that were probably

believing in some deity like your deity um 3,000 years ago but the religion that

exists now and the religion that existed 3,000 years ago are unrecognizable if you compare them and

so and also the idea there was one Judaism that went back 3,000 years ago it's ridiculous the data doesn't bear

that out at all my understanding is that largely the the Canon that we accept now

was created because Cypress the great or Cyrus the Great I'm sorry was was essentially telling people like y'all

have to come to a conclusion like you can believe whatever you want with dra all going to basically have to

have an idea of what that is I think we don't know the the recent scholarship by people like Johan oddler and God Bera

make it pretty clear that Judaism as a religious practice we don't have a lot of evidence for it prior to Fourth

Century third Century BC right and then in ysm as a religion was clearly

syncretistic there were people that worshiped Yahweh at the same time they were woring or ashar so this is a again

it's history is a very messy place and what we have our incredibly fluid

syncretistic practices and it doesn't seem like Judaism as a religion that we would recognize now probably came into

existence fully until um you know the helenistic

period do you do you feel that there are sort of qualities of a religion that

make it permeate the test of time or is it more like a is is abrahamic religion

just the the flavor of the Aon so to speak I mean I imagine that there are

some aspects of there must be some aspects of any

Meme and I use the word meme in the the do the Dawkin sense right that um there

must be some aspect of them that are more adaptable or not so for instance if you

if Part Of Your Meme is you can't have um if if Part Of Your Meme is you

have to be completely secretive about your belief and you can't publicize them your religion is not going to grow um

you can sort of esoteric your way out of a religion uh or if you have very strict rules about exogamy who you can marry

you're going to your religion G to get pretty small pretty fast and this is what's happening to the Samaritans mendians the raans so I think that there

are there are aspects of any meme that are adaptable and their aspects

maladaptive or pro- adaptive and I imagine that um belief systems are pro- adaptive

Will Survive longer um for instance if Judaism had remained a religion in which

you had to have a central Temple and and do sacrifices at that Temple it have died because the Romans destroyed that

Temple and that was the end of that but it turns out Judaism was adaptable it was like oh yeah we don't have to have

that Temple we can we can do something else um and so I think that that's an

example where a religion can be can be adaptable or or not adaptable it it seems like in many ways other religions

were less adaptable and they they perished they U they're they an they

converted to different religions they um uh Christianity is is a question of how

adaptable will be Judaism also is a very tiny religion so so um so it's yeah I

think that there must be some some some aspect of the degree to which a a religion is adaptable in terms of

whether it will survive uh the more dogmatic the more rigid a religion is I think that it will Christianity early on

was extremely adaptable yeah it's amazing how much syncretism happened um

in in Christianity early on of course Christians won't they don't believe that but Christianity was was a highly

adaptive religion early on do you reckon that uh like America as a as a country

is part of what created like a sort of a safety net for the survival of the Christian religion in certain aspects

because if if you go to Europe even now it seems that though there is a lot of cultural stuff that keeps it that you

know ingrained in the in society it's largely like not a belief the way that

it is amongst a lot of uh you know American Protestants so to speak America

has definitely been a an important place where Christianity has has has survived

but I think that Christianity's future is definitely going to be in in Africa that's where Christian is growing

Christian is growing the fastest so I think you know Christianity will be in Africa it'll be in Central America be in

um places like that so yeah I think that um um that the kind of protestantism

that exists in America is um is interesting of course but I I I think

that that um Africa and Islam are both growing Rapid or Christianity and Islam

are both growing rapidly in Africa and most Americans have no sense of how huge

Africa is as a yeah it I mean you can fit three or four United States inside

of inside of the continent of Africa at least you could whole China three or four Chinas in there it's a massive

continent and um and so I think most Americans don't have any sense of that

and uh yeah it's Christianity is growing most rapidly uh in Africa um relig like

Mormonism Mormonism is not growing in America but is growing rapidly in Central and South America and

Africa uh that is crazy how wherever Christianity goes it seems to map pretty

well onto whatever religion exists there before it so a good example at least in

my you know where we grew up right if you're talking to someone who's like a voodoo practitioner like or or even

talking you know go going back to uh Marie Lavo this idea that uh Voodoo in

whatever form that it exists at the time you can sort of take all of the the ideas that they have and then map that

on to the Catholic saints and then just sort of interface them and this happens also with uh you know basically every

single one of the you know helenistic religion the whole way through Boulder and his association with Jesus Christ uh

do you think that's a unique quality of Christianity or do you see patterns of that throughout different uh religions

moving through different areas yeah I don't know of any religion that doesn't have some degree of syncretism no

successful religion is going to is is is going to be devoid of syncretism I think there's a there's a Stave Church in um

in Sweden I think where on the on the altar there is a depiction of the end of

the world and it's it's Armageddon where Jesus is you know coming back and fighting the devil but right alongside

him is is clearly an image of Thor like fighting finer or whatever whoever carved that believed

clearly in Christianity it's in a church but they also were like oh yeah also

Ragnarok yeah it's like it's the same thing and I think that's true for most U

for most the way that religion goes is that most people are kind of blending

and mixing and in developing religion on their own again I think if you imagine if you imagine if you talk to most

people across the table about what they really believe it's going to be some mish mash of all kind of stuff now what

they're supposed to believe is a totally different thing right but when you get into the brass TX of do you really

believe X Y and Z people like eh I don't know maybe I believe some version of it makes you feel better yeah yeah whatever

I me I think this is a huge range but yeah Christianity is was you was um you

know Christianity was interesting in that on the one hand it was heavily syncretistic and on the other hand it it

said it wasn't um but this is also true if you go into the to the to to the east

you go to Japan you could have a Shino wedding a Confucian uh burial and practice as a

Buddhist um and they don't see the least weirdness about that to then that's very

normal uh that you would sort of uh move between religions and I think that

that's typical um of most people actually that most people kind

of um uh have have some degree of of movement in their religious

belief so you spend a look just you know anybody who watches your YouTube videos

would see the same scene that I'm seeing but you you spend a lot of time reading books what is a what is the process of reading

specifically for you are you a fast reader slow reader does it depend on what you're what you're looking at um

and how do you digest so much information it depends on what I'm reading some stuff is really easy some

stuff is you know a slog you really have to read it lots of times right um I tend to read I tend to read uh these days I

tend to read one book at a time and I tend to read it and reread it uh it used to be the kind kind of person that was reading three or four books at once now

I tend to tear through a book well once I sort of read a book really quickly once then I go back and mark it up and

then I go back and mark it up again okay um that's typically the way that I'm most books are going to get at least you

know three passes uh especially if they're technical

um but yeah I'm a I'm a fast reader I think that you you have to be a fast reader I produce content pretty quickly

I produce it basically an episode a week and so that requires a lot of really quick reading but um but also you know I

think I'm used to reading philosophy I my my PhD is in philosophy and philosophy is extremely technical you

have to very carefully follow the argument of that text and if you get used to reading stuff like Kant or Hegel

or whatever you get everything else is pretty easy after that um and so I'm you know

I'm I'm I'm really happy that when I can sit down and you know the I don't try to

give a good example like the nagam library if you read something like the apocryphon of John that text is weird

there's no doubt about the fact that it's weird but it's not technically difficult um and in the same way that U

that uh lots of texts that I read are not technically difficult uh compared to something like again like K or Thomas

acquaintance or something and so it's it's mostly saying okay the text is strange but it's not hard and so that

makes it a lot easier but yeah I spent you know many years and still do read a lot of philosophy and uh that stuff is much

harder than even very weird text I mean think of something like P Sophia which is probably one of the most

unusual uh so-called Gnostic texts that I know of that text is really strange

but it's not it's not technically uh all that difficult it's just weird you're listening to kwp in the key

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Steam so do how many hours in a week do you think you put into books oh I don't

even know I don't want to think about that more than 40 uh it's a good question I mean

I'm um I've never tracked it I'm reading at least

two three hours a day um you know and I read books I don't typically read stuff

on the internet so if I even I'm reading articles I to print them out so yeah yeah I'm typically

reading two three hours a day and again it depends on what language I'm reading in you know if I'm reading having to

read something in Latin that's a lot slower obviously than reading something in English um some languages I'm much

stronger in than others and some are a bit you know much more difficult um so

yeah it depends on a lot of what I'm reading what language I'm having to read it in

um how well it's written you know it's often easier for me to read something in Latin than it is for me to read

something in early modern English I'd much rather read um much rather read um uh I think a

grippa because I'm just recently we did a translation of a grippa much rather read gria in Latin than reading him in early modern English so it it all

depends on what I'm reading but yeah I tend to read pretty pretty quickly and

that's like a skill that that I I picked up in uh in graduate school we just had to you know you had to read 200 pages of

of uh Kant or Hegel or you know Jean Paul sart you said and that was just the daily you had to do it and that was just

a thing you had learn to do and and um also having to read them in original languages you know reading hottiger in

German so it's just a thing you had to learn to do and that's you get good at it if you do it do you feel like you

have like a a solid ability to concentrate or do you need to be in like a quiet space to get your reading done

it depends yeah it depends I I I I definitely like to read early in the morning that's where my my brain is the

most on so often I'll I'll do a model of my more difficult reading and writing early in the morning I'm useless in the

afternoons I can't get anything done in the afternoons I just like uh and then I kind of turn back on in the evening um

but no I it's sometimes I I'll go to like a bar and like I'll read just in a

bar like I just like the the background noise or I can I can listen to Black metal and read so yeah I don't need um

yeah I don't need quiet but there definitely is it's very much the time of the day um that's why you know 2 o'clock

3 o'clock I'm just at the gym I can't concentrate I can't read I can't really get much done so let's go to the gym and

move heavy stuff around I gotta so I'm I'm expecting my first child um within

the next several months and something that I'm similar sort of career path

here where it's like we're spending a lot of our time at the desk in the in the home office and doing the work

during the day and then I'm going to have another split there where I have to like also be a dad yeah um so you're not

like six o'clock in the afternoon with a book open in the living room you're you're doing that stuff in the

morning oh yeah I typically get I wake up before my I have two kids I have two small children six and 14 and um yeah I

you know when when they were really little you just had to get the work done when you get it done and that meant getting up at you know basically my rule

when they were little was that if they wake up anytime after 4 I'm just awake

but that's the day is the day is starting and so I'm you know um I just

that's the way that I rolled and uh these days my kids wake up 6:45 7 and uh you know I get up 5:45

5:30 basically every day and get a cup of coffee and read and write and work

until they wake up and then you know they go off to school or whatever and I I usually work

until 1 um then eat some lunch and go to the

gym or go walk the dog or whatever until they get ready to come on from school so

yeah I think that um one of the best things about having children at least in my experience was um if you want to get

things done the clock is always ticking once they go down for a nap you know you have exactly an hour or whatever yeah uh

and if you want to get it done you need to get it done and um you know these things you know these these things are

the the devil the time burglers cell phones yeah yeah and uh you know I I I I

have a book business and uh I for the book business I had uh we have an Instagram and I put the Instagram app on

my phone phone and the other morning I found myself just scrolling and I I looked at the clock 30 minutes had

passed I deleted the app like done like this is a Time burglar like uh of all

the things that you will never get back is time and anything that steals your time is uh I don't believe in demons but

I believe that anything steals your time is the closest thing that exists to a demon because of all the things that I I

can always find a way to read a book but I can never get my time back and all these apps and all this stuff that

engineered um to keep us locked on these devices I just

like it's um yeah not for me I I I try to try to

be far away from it it's it's crazy how successful your YouTube channel is

despite the fact that you don't carry a lot of social media because the The Narrative that's sold to content

creators is that you need to do this stuff it's absolutely par out you you won't be successful if you're not

engaging with people on x.com every day and all that sort of thing and I I try to do what I can but I'm sort of in the

same boat as you where I was like I don't have time for this crap like it's just it's just such a Time suck yeah

it's and it seems like it's bad for mental health I I just I just don't the data indicates like the the data

indicates is bad for us like every data point indicates that it's bad for us it doesn't make us more connected it makes us feel sad anxious we become dopamine

addicted to like click stuff uh I just don't see any data to indicate that's actually good for us and

and to your point when I when I first started the YouTube channel people were like yeah you have to you're G have to

get on X and Facebook get on Instagram and I'm like I'm not doing any of that I don't want to I don't want to be on any

social media and even the Instagram accounts mostly U that we have for the book business is just the book business

it's mostly um it's almost totally moderated by my business partner and

yeah they told me if you don't do social media you will uh your YouTube channel

will never be successful and I mean I got news for you you can

run a successful YouTube channel and have zero social media because I have zero social media yeah you're you were a

proof of it and I I actually deeply admire it I'm considering just deleting everything myself now just just seeing

how how successful you've been in the past what like four or five years Channel's about five years old um

and yeah I just and again I can't speak for anything else I'm not expert in this I don't know I don't know from all this

stuff but I just again I try to be a great data driven person I try to look

at the actual studies and the actual science and I looked at that and I'm like I don't know this is good for me I

don't you know I don't want to be on my phone scrolling insta I just don't it

doesn't seem I don't I don't I'm or getting into arguments with people on the internet that seems what mostly X is

it's just like arguing with people on the internet and like I don't every minute I spend arguing with someone on

the Internet is a minute I don't get back it's a minute I could be doing content creation it's a minute I could be reading it's a minute I could be I

could literally just be doing absolutely nothing I could just be lying down and I think I would be better off literally

just lying down on a bed uh taking a minute to relax than like arguing with

someone about you know whatever on Facebook it just I just don't see any I don't see

the argument that it's good for that's good for me I I can speak for

me I just don't see where I benefit from that and I don't see how my my my

pedological project this project of making content I don't see how it would it would overwhelmingly benefit from

it do you uh so you have this amazing list uh that's connected to your YouTube

channel it's essentially like a starter kit you know here's all the books you should read if you want to get into these subjects and I actually went

through and added every one of them to a list and put it out to my listeners and be like hey buy these

books for me so I hope they do now I'm really really

uh I'm interested in general in this entire subject it's one of my great passions and it always has been in life

uh so I I definitely want to Deep dive into that and I I intend to I don't know how long it's going to take me but yeah

finding time to read is is definitely going to be my my battle I think um yeah

you gota you know you'll do it or you won't I mean you know I think about like the gem you know the the hardest thing

about the gym is walking through the front door everything else is easy compared to walking through the front door and that's true of a book the

hardest part about a book is opening it as long as you can get the moment to open it um give yourself the time and

the the Leisure to do it the people again that we talked about learning languages earlier people often have this

idea that learning these old dead languages is really difficult I'm like it's think about how much music lyrics

you have stored inside your brain how much lure from television shows how much

people know about Game of Thrones characters or Lovecraft monsters or the

NFL draft like how much people know about this quarterback and this game and

this people have enormous mental capacity enormous mental capacity and

it's all about how you allocate it it's all about how you allocate it and um if you allocate it for studying

Coptic you'll learn Coptic you will do it if you do it an hour a day over the course of 15 weeks you will do it and

it's all a question of what we prioritize it's all a question of what we of of what we put front and center

and that's just a question of how we prioritize what matters to us thank you and uh I think we've taken

up enough of your time for today because we're already uh kind of gone past the agreed upon period but I do want to say

thank you very much man this has been uh as a fan great pleasure to get to talk to you but also just uh to learn from

you yeah I appreciate appreciate you having me on it's a great conversation thank you for your patience as a weird

internet thing was going on so yeah great to talk no worries Let's uh let's try to do it again sometime later down

the road yeah yeah feel free to reach out anytime thank you take take care Justin you too man thank you have a

great day

Happy New Year I said it first thanks for listening uh just want to say thank you

to Dr Sledge for coming on the show man uh what a dream come true for me huge fan uh definitely going to try to do

that again sometime in in the future thank you to our supporters over on

patreon Michael Fred an Shannon Brad y'all rule I am eternally grateful for

better the music that you're listening to right now is by John of the shred

check out Scythe Dev team that's where he lingers and he's uh he's one of the

best out there that's that's why I asked him to do this them song and if you really really love this show

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