How Gnostic Informant Turned Prison Lessons into Lifelong Wisdom

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 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 text, 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.