#08 Inside the World of occult, Mysticism and Dead Languages with Dr. Justin Sledge

If you only see the pyramids, then you're like, "Oh, aliens did that." That Bible translation is lying to you. You feel crazy. Like you feel like the like you feel like this book is gaslighting you. But I have to be off today because my mom's getting mummified. Today on the Austin Matt podcast, we get to talk to Professor Justin Sledge. Professor Sledge runs a YouTube channel called Esoterica, and he's on his way to a million followers. It's one of the most interesting channels I've gotten to follow in the last few years. And the reason that I like it is that Professor Sledge brings um a a real balance to a lot of topics. So, here on the Austin podcast, we like to interview people that have hot takes, right? You see a bunch of different maybe collections and try and fill in the gaps. And we love that. We love speculating. But Professor Sledge is the exact opposite of that. He'll point out all the speculative things and he'll say, "Well, here's all the texts that we have. here's what they all say. So, I just don't think you can interpret that. And I appreciate how much balance he brings to where you can go listen to his episode on the Gospel of Mary. And he's not interpreting it from a religious context. He's educating you on all the different texts we have, the different languages that they're in and the implications with of of how that could mean of how it spread and what it meant. And it's just an amazing uh perspective on history because at the end of the day, all we have with history, especially thousands of years ago, are texts and that's it. We just have a lot of things written down. And so he will actually go and read all of the texts on a topic and present them. And we asked them, he said he reads, he reads up to thousands of pages for every single episode that he puts out. And the he's one of the hardest working YouTubers that I've ever come across. He does it all himself. It's all incredibly academic, but he presents it in such a way that you'll listen to an episode and it'll be 30, 40 minutes in and you're captivated. Uh it's like your favorite college professor if you ever had one. Uh that you just could listen to all he he gets you interested in all these esoteric topics. He even goes into the fact that now he's kind of one of the main uh forefigures in esoteric knowledge, which basically means anything not mainstream. So thousands of years ago if it was Western Europe and the church is kind of running everything and there's the government and the church esotericism is anything outside of those two organizations. So it really is a broad range and he is dropping words like uh what's he he's dropping words like orphic hymns and hidingers permenities and you can tell that this guy has forgotten more ancient texts than I've or you've ever even looked into. So, it was a really fascinating conversation both because one, we got to talk to him about his YouTube channel and he came from an entrepreneurial background. He knows how to run it. He knows his metrics and he has a real business plan for it. So, we got to talk to him about different points in his YouTube uh journey and how that's going with him and his family. And then we also get to dive into some of his favorite topics. Um he's so down to earth and uh like one of the things that he taught me that I didn't know is he said if you want to know if your Bible is lying to you and he he's not for or against anything he's just really presenting things but he said if you want to know if your Bible translation is lying to you then go to the book of Job and if at the bottom of every page there isn't an asterisk somewhere that says meaning of Hebrew uncertain then that's not a good translation. He said 15% of the words in the book of Job we do not have a translation for. So it just has to be interpreted and he wants to be honest about that interpretation and say this section was interpreted and it could mean this or this or this and scholars lean this way and I probably lean this way but you know he'll just he'll outline sort of the academic uh he'll he'll show you the academic rigor that goes into interpreting these and even he's feel comfortable saying here we don't know and so it could be this or it could be something else. So, I really hope you enjoy it. I hope you follow his YouTube channel. It's just I've learned so much from being there and um I'm really grateful that he came on the show. Thank you so much for watching. Please hit like and subscribe and we are in the hundreds of followers at this point. So, you have no idea how much it helps for us to get those likes and subscribes in the in the YouTube algorithm. Um but I really appreciate it. Now, without further ado, here is Professor Sledge on the Austin and Matt podcast. Well, Justin, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, you know, I've been following you for I think I've been in your Patreon for over a year and I think I've been on the Essoterica YouTube channel for over a year. I mean, I it's awesome. I've seen and and you just hit like 750,000 subscribers. Yeah. Well, one, I appreciate you supporting the channel and being a viewer. And yeah, the this channel's really gotten larger than I imagined that it would. It it really seems completely bizarre at some level that uh that a channel that covered such extremely niche topics. Uh you know, I think last week I covered a really obscure colonial governor of Connecticut. Um not many people are are jazzed to listen to some guy talk for half an hour about a alchemist governor of colonial Connecticut. But you know, uh here here we are. Here we are. You know, again, I you should never you know, it's one of the laws of film making, right? They say never never doubt your audience and you know always assume that your audience is pretty smart and um luckily the audience that as a ter has attracted has been enormously intelligent folks and it's been really an honor and a privilege to be able to produce this content. What made you want to start the channel? Um my brother my brother is completely responsible for for the channel. My brother Jonathan uh he was urging me for years to start a YouTube channel and uh Oh yeah. And I, you know, it's this academia kind of arrogant, you know, YouTube is for like cat videos kind of attitude. And um, you know, and that only that only really changed when I realized I literally got off the phone with my brother and he had called me and I had paused what I was watching on YouTube. And uh, he was like, "Hey man, I'm telling you, you got to do this YouTube thing telling you." And uh, I I was like, "Okay, Jonathan, I'll think about it." And I, you know, hung the phone up and unpaused my video and sure enough, I was watching academic content on YouTube. Yeah. So it was just a moment where you know sometimes those kind of performative contradictions become so apparent uh not just performative contradiction hypocrisy really and um and eventually it was like that and on top of it you know I just couldn't get an academic job. Academic jobs are extremely difficult to get these days and with a an incredible uh you know religious studies is already pretty niche. there are not many religious studies departments in the country and when you're sort of a niche within a niche within a niche, you know, like getting getting them to give you a budgetary line to to do your thing is is uh vanishingly uh rare. And so it was also born out of the fact that I just could not find a place to teach what I was interested in and what I was passionate about. And luckily the two things came together in the form of being able to to do that teaching in YouTube. And you know, and again, every educator's ultimate goal is to reach as many people as possible. and you go from basically begging for a classroom of 40 to a classroom of 40,000. It's really a a really wonderful outcome. I'm very grateful. Have you gotten any feedback from the academic community about your channel? Anything? I have. So I've had junior faculty not be terribly happy with the channel. No, you know, the idea that the fact that it's been successful is kind of irksome to them because they're not getting jobs, you know. And so I've had junior faculty not be uh super happy. I've had lots of other faculty use the channel in their classroom. So they'll cover I don't know something about alchemy and then they'll you know and uh they'll use they'll use it as content in the in their classroom which is great. Um what I have I've been really grateful for is a lot of my teachers and people like professor Valhanagraph who really is a founder in this field. Um he was very enthusiastic about the channel and really had great things to say about it which of course as a you know as a student of his I'm I'm I'm thrilled positively thrilled and to have his respect. It's a big it's a big thing for me. Um but also got a bit of warning where he's like look you know you're whether you like it or not you are now the largest repository of education online or really at all about western esotericism and and he runs you know they run the the really the only one of the only academic institutions dedicated to studying western esotericism there at the University of Amsterdam and basically told me he's like look um just don't muck this up because if you if you muck it up by the time they get to us They're all kind of we have to undo everything you've done. So, you know, so far so good, but um you know um what is it Spider-Man with great power comes great responsibility and um that's true. You know, when you have an audience of of tens of thousands of people, you have to take that seriously. And I think there's a lot of people in the podcast world that that that don't, you know, they for them the numbers don't matter and they don't feel a a sense of social responsibility about, you know, communicating clearly and putting out good information and vetting information. And um, you know, that I I really do that does concern me a lot and I really want to, you know, cross my my tees and dot my eyes uh when I put out an episode out. When you were first starting, did you what was the strategy? Did you know YouTube? Did you know like, oh, I have to put out a 100 videos or did you have a cadence like actually approaching it? How like how much material did you think, well, let me put out this much or did you have a goal you wanted to hit? Did you have a walk away point where like, well, if this, you know, I would if you do it for two years and you have two views, you walk away. But what was your approach like what were you, you know, what was your approach going into YouTube? So, it' be interesting to go look back on some of those notes. So, before I was in academia, I was in I was in the private sector. I worked in the entrepreneurial world and so I I it was not my first rodeo when it came to to doing entrepreneurial work and I I look at the channel that's effectively it's a it's a business and a brand. Now it just so happens that what I'm dealing is education and you need to be dealing the best version of that and there are different you know it's a very different thing than if I were doing a gaming channel or something um or a political channel where I'm expressing my opinions which is pretty rare but yeah I had certain metrics that I wanted to hit along a certain timeline. I had certain expectations of I wanted I had a certain I had a certain vision about what I wanted it to look like. Um that's why the channel hasn't changed a whole lot in terms of of that. Um it has gotten better I think and hopefully it will continue to get better. But um yeah, I had I had metrics and those metrics really were you know that I'm going to be dumping x amount of time into it that needs to transform into it needs to over time need to transform into some kind of uh of uh financial return otherwise it just becomes totally upside down. I mean again we're living in the real world. I got kids and stuff. Um, and so yeah, so I had that was all, you know, gained out and luckily the those goals uh were hit and exceeded really rapidly and basically every goal that I've hit so far uh has been exceeded um well before I thought it would. Um but I will say that the the first two or three years of the channel uh the cadence was extremely high level. And that's just because I think that's how you have to do YouTube. you have to you have to produce a lot to get the algorithm's attention or get lucky or whatever or do controversial stuff which I don't really do. Um and I don't think that's sustainable. I think that that cadence has to get walked back and you have to at some level change it. So, I think after we pass a million, which, you know, hopefully will be in the next year and a half or so, um, I want to rethink that cadence in order to basically make it sustainable because I think we've all seen the wave of YouTube retirements and, you know, some of my favorite YouTubers have retired and um, and um, yeah, I don't want to be in that situation. I don't want to burn myself out and I'm going to keep doing this because I I really love to do it. And I think the the key to doing that is to develop a a a balanced way of producing content where the rigor stays high, the content continues to be consistent, but you know, I'm not pumping out 45minute episodes every week. That's just that's that that's just ultimately not going to be sustainable. And how do you what guides your process for choosing topics? Is it mostly audienceled or is it just like interest that you have that you dive into? So, there's kind of a a three-way tier the way I do it. Um it's led by Patreon folks. I'm pretty I pretty often ask Patreon people what they're interested in and try to really lean into into that because at the end of the day the folks that are paying my bills are keeping the lights on and I really want to be serving that community. Um and also their interests folks interest is not going to be at odds with the larger interest. It's just going to be about priority not about either or. Uh and then sometimes it is just I get a wild hair and I just really want to do an episode on that. And sometimes it's just like I look over and I'm like, "Okay, what this week?" And I have a kind of master list of a bunch of stuff that I want to hit eventually. And then sometimes it's just, you know, I like wake up in the middle of the night and you think, "Ah, this week it's going to be about uh the sixth volume of the Nagamati library for some reason, you know." So it it really is there's a range of things. I And also I I do try to be mindful of u some combination of how do you serve the god that is the algorithm? you need to be doing stuff that's going to appeal to a broader audience and bring a broader bring bring a broader audience in, but also I really want to be able to do those things like I did this week where I'm just diving into like an extremely obscure figure from 17th century colonial Connecticut and um and I want to be sort of bouncing up and down between those two wavelengths where I'm doing something that's more broad and more a bit user friendly and then really plunging folks into stuff that's pretty off the beaten path because you know if I'm if I'm just doing videos on what the algorithm wants which I'll be I'd just be doing videos about demons and the Antichrist and all this edgy stuff. And and while that is it's some level interesting, uh you can really box yourself in if you're not careful by trying to repeat successes over and over and over again. Yeah. And um I don't want to do that. I want to maintain a pretty broad um array of things. And I, you know, I make episodes on alchemy, kaval, magic, a pretty wide range of of things. They're all quite specialized. they require a lot of specialized research. Uh sometimes reading and translating things from the original languages. That's not a thing that's not totally uncommon now in my life. But uh yeah, those are the kind of that's the kind of broad thing I want to do. I don't want to be, you know, I' I've made it, you know, I don't do any debunking videos. I don't do any videos where I'm like chasing the big thing in the news, you know. Um, and I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with doing debunking videos or following the news, but I I don't want to be beholdened to um, sensationalism or controversy for the sake of controversy or, you know, that kind those kinds of things cuz I think those are, you know, um, yeah, it's not a good look. It's not a look I want to I want to follow to be led by my passion and led by my the passion of my audience rather than led by the new cycle or something like that. Do what was the first I'd love to know sort of on the growth of the YouTube channel. What was the first do you remember the first moment that to you like you got 10,000 views or you know like something where you got some feedback some real feedback where you were like it just made you realize this is going to work or this is starting to work you know that that first bit of like I went from six views and I got 6,000 views or do do you have a moment like that that happened? Yeah, I do. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I do remember um it was I made an episode on the Greek magical papyrie and there at that point there wasn't any great content on the Greek magical papyrie. Now there is really great content. There's whole channels now based on that kind of stuff run by a colleague of mine, Dr. Christian Switzer, who makes fantastic content in that direction, far better than anything I'd make. And um yeah, I remember like waking up one Sunday morning and uh you know the little graph that shows you you know how how much people are watching your video. Uh typically those you know they're relatively you know it's kind of up and down but it's not crazy. It just it's the the bar had gone up such that everything else was like basically invisible and so you know it went viral or whatever. I mean again viral relative you know not viral. Yeah. Whatever that means. Yeah. Not even you know but yeah it picked up it was the kind of thing where typically I was picking up um 500,000 views and it's just picking up 50,000 views on one night. So yeah it was one of those kind of you know inflection points and there's been a couple of those in the channel. Um, are there are there any videos that you would consider like sleeper videos that didn't get a lot of views, but they're some of your favorite ones personally, and you think they're just like well done? Yeah, I think there's a great one of my favorite artifacts in history. It's called the Dervini Papyrus. Um, it was a This is crazy. It's a um it's a orphic hymn which are the orphic hymns are associated with the afterlife but it's a philosophical commentary on an Orphic hymn that was literally placed on top of a human body in Macedonia as part of their funeral p. The body was incinerated, but the papyrus was not totally burned, but it was dried enough by the incineration of the body that when it was eventually interred with that person in a what's called a cater, a big funeral earn, the fragments of the papyrus sat underground in this tomb for 2400 years until a road crew was basically widening a road and busted into the tomb on accident. And sure enough, inside of uh effectively a a completely intact sealed tomb um was a the oldest man surviving manuscript in European history that was meant to be burned on this guy's funeral p and survived at least partially survived. It's from Dervini in and what is now Macedonium and the text itself is incredibly interesting and weird and just to think it's the oldest European manuscript that we have. It survived under extraordinarily weird circumstances. Papyrus does not survive in Greece. It's very humid there. And the very thing that you would suspect to have destroyed it being literally set on fire saved it. And so it's just a fas it's a fascinating document. There's a lot of scholarship about it. But I think most people have never heard of the Danny Papyrus, but we know the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nagamati Library. And um you know Europeans contend to be pretty proud of their stuff. They're all about like we were the first to do this and the first to do that. But I'm like most Europeans and most Americans have no idea this is the old it's the oldest surviving a papyr or text manuscript from Europe. It's also a good example. It was also an instructive example for me because um I you know this is why you cannot rest on your laurels in terms of scholarship. I I I pretty well thought that I knew about the papyrus pretty well and I think I thought that I had knew known about most of the literature about it and always I do a literary check before I uh make an episode just to make sure I'm up on the up on the scholarship. And uh that week for whatever reason I was you know bit too arrogant and just did not do the lit check. And then halfway through the week I was like let me just check. And sure enough a 400page monograph had come out since I had last studied the divinity papyrus and I had to stop everything order the book fly through the book. Luckily the guy that wrote it teaches down here at the University of Michigan. So I literally got him on the phone and was like hey uh can we just like talk about your book for half an hour? Is that is that cool? Kind of just did we do that? And uh I was able to still get the episode out that Friday. Um so again, you you have to this this stuff is you have to be, you know, crazy careful about what you think you know and um how caught up you are and all this. But yeah, that was a fun, you know, as a sleeper episode. That's an episode that I've always had a lot of fun, learned a lot of lessons. Uh, it's a fascinating story, you know, and um, yeah, I think it's one, again, it's one of the the one of the lesser known aspects of the history of of books and manuscripts and stuff in European history. How much do you think you read on average per episode in preparation? It's got to be a ton. It ranges enormously. It ranges enormously. Sometimes I'm just reading the same six pages over and over and over again because I'm just really working on a primary text and then I might be working on secondary text in addition to that and sometimes I'm reading like three or four books. So, it depends on how much background knowledge I have. It depends on, you know, a lot of the episodes that are very painstaking require translation work and those are the ones where I'm really having to go to medieval sources or scanned manuscripts at the Bibliotech National website are, you know, antique books that I have and I'm just really I'm just really keen on this one alchemical book or alchemical text and like there's just no addition and I'm it's me. Um, so it ranges a lot, but yeah, sometimes hundreds of pages, maybe thousands of pages, and sometimes if I if I have a lot of background, then I I can pretty quickly get through the material. Which of the dead languages are you most comfortable with when it comes to like translation? So these days, my comfort level with Latin is pretty solid. Now, that depends on the Latin, right? U Lat there's a lot of versions of Latin. So medieval Latin, Renaissance Latin I feel pretty comfortable in. Um, I've gotten a lot better at Coptic. My Greek has suffered enormously. I used to be pretty good in Greek and now my Greek has gotten really bad. Um, and I don't know why because it's not like I don't use it. Like maybe I'm just reading weird stuff and it's just harder than reading. That's likely. Yeah. It's like, you know, I, you know, if I'm reading something normal and normal, you know, Plato or whatever, it's not that bad. But, you know, some of these texts are really out there and kind of psychedelic and so the Greek is pretty difficult. Um, but yeah, Hebrew's pretty competent, you know, I'm pretty confident in those. You know, Coptic, I'm not as confident as Latin. Um, in the Hebrew also just depends. It's the kind of thing where, you know, you can read competently in a language. And just because you can read the language doesn't mean you understand what in the world they're talking about. I mean, I read English as a first language, but if you if I go try to read a Faulner novel, I have no idea what he's talking about half the time. So, just because you read a language doesn't mean you understand what they're talking about. And so it could be the case where not only is the language itself a difficult task is to read the language, but then you're reading something that's inherently weird. And and also a lot of these authors are intentionally like, you know, they're they're mucking with you. They're they're messing with you. They're they're they're doing things that they're using language in extremely unconventional ways. And so um sometimes you think you think to yourself like, look, am I am I just incompetent or is this person just crazy? Um you know, and the answer is probably some degree of both. Have you have you used any like chat GBT or Claude and tested their sort of knowledge of dead languages and translations or any like I know how does that compare to sort of you who've studied it and and know them. You're you've forgotten more Greek than I've ever learned. So, you know, how does it compare? You know, it it ranges enormously. Um Chad GBT and a lot of the other like um LLMs and stuff are pretty good with Latin. Uh classical Latin. They're pretty good with classical Latin. Um, medieval Latin, they do really poorly with medieval Latin. They're they garble it pretty badly. In Renaissance Latin, they get better again because the Latin gets a bit crisper. Uh, Hebrew, they just butcher Hebrew. Just like they render it completely unintelligible. I did it with Aramaic. They could butcher it. Um, I have never tried Coptic, but um, the more the language is, like this is unsurprising, right? The more the language is grammatically structured, the better the language learning models are. And so, um, Latin is a really highly inflected, highly structured language. Um, medieval Latin, part of what makes medieval Latin so difficult is that they're they're not they're not talking in this language natively. They're not learning this language on their mother's bosom or whatever. Um, it's an artificial language and they don't really understand it all that well. Often, um, I don't know for folks who've ever learned a second language, often what you do when you can't express yourself is you just start throwing words in there, uh, in the hopes that it will clarify things and it never does. And they do that. they just throw demonstratives and other things in there and it just further offiscates what in the world they're talking about. So it it it has a lot to do with the quality of the original language, but um uh modern languages it does fine with. You know, I don't read Italian and I've definitely read entire articles. The Bing browser, for instance, is not really good at being a browser, but it is good at reading PDFs. It's one of my favorite PDF viewers. And uh one of the great things about the PDF viewer in Bing. Yeah. um or Edge, Microsoft Edge, uh in Microsoft Edge, it has a really good in-built uh really smart quick PDF viewer. And one of the things you can do is just select things and hit right click and hit translate. And they have a built-in AI that does uh totally serviceable translations of uh most modern languages. And so I've read whole articles in Italian and using the the Edge translator. Now, I wouldn't say that I've read them in the sense that I would die on a hill of having full comprehension, but if you want to get gist of them, I I found that the that it it it tends to render them totally confidently. That's awesome. As someone who's like studied languages, I'm kind of curious, what's the hardest what's been your darkest day? Like dark night of the souls type stuff, trying to learn a language. Which language and like what was so hard about it? Um I think that the the the more the time where I was just like really struggling with the languages. I was learning German in graduate school. Um and um we had we had we you had to pass two exams to to to start your PhD and they had to be languages that you were doing research in. So I was learning German for some research and um they the way they the way that they do the test basically is they just go the professor of that language of that language just goes to their shelf and pulls something off and gives it to you. you know, they xerox three pages or whatever and hand it to you. And um I watched him sort of like go to his shelf and he's looking at this. He's looking at you know Hegel and I was like, "Oh god." And then he's looking at um you know you know whoever and you know then he gets to Hideiger and he pulls Haidiger off the shelf and I was like okay maybe it's being in time but maybe it's a lecture of Hideiger. Those are basically comprehensible. And I was like, "Oh god, it's the permenities." And so he just pul it was it was Javier's commentary on the permenities which is just incomprehensible. Like and and so I translated the thing and it was such um and this was a test, right? I could fail this. It was imminently failable. And you can reset for it, but you don't want to do that. But the German to my knowledge was all grammatically correct, but I had no idea what any of it meant. And so it was the the moment where like I'm fairly confident this is all grammatically vocabulary, right? But but you know remember those moments when you're like we're doing a test like on like Scantron or whatever and then you get like three B's in a row and then the next one's B and you're like it can't all be B. Yeah. But you've like done the math like five times and it's like they can't all be B. It's not something's wrong. And so it's like it's like the the error wasn't grammatical and it wasn't really about me. the the problem was like um like the text itself is incomprehensible at least as far as I'm concerned. So yeah, it was like a moment where like you feel crazy like you feel like like you feel like this book is gaslighting you. Um and and it's funny because I've talked to native German speakers and they're like, "Yeah, that's all of us, too. Don't feel bad." We also have no idea what that dude's talking about. But yeah, there's always cases like that where you're like working on a language and yeah, you hit a wall. you're just like, I have no idea what this construction means or I have no idea what what's happening here. Um, and you know, and again, we've inherited texts over the course of several thousand years in many cases. And the a telephone effect where a copist has copied something and they've copied it and they made a mistake and they didn't really understand it either, so they tried to fix it and make it worse. Um, uh, the most famous example of this is in the corpusum and corpusum 3. Um there's just an entire section there that the Greek doesn't make any sense. And like no one no one knows what they're talking about. Like and if you read it literally it reads like and the this is a such of a have with the 'the' and the and you're like this just doesn't it this is just not and people are like no there's deep mystical meaning there. I'm like no I think there's just a bunch of scribal errors. I think someone just like legit mucked this whole section up. Uh, and then it just got copied and you get this like telephone game where it's been like that. Um, and I always tell people if you want to know whether or not your Bible is lying to you or not is your Bible translation is open it up to the book of Job. And if you open up the Bible to the book of Job and you look at the bottom of the page and you don't see the phrase meaning of Hebrew uncertain on every single page, that Bible translation is lying to you because there are 15% of the words in Job. We have no idea what those words mean. No one knows what they mean. And I've never heard that before. Job is a Job is a book where um the writer of that book was using and we've gotten we've unlocked some of them because we now have cognate languages like Aadian where we were like oh that word actually is a weird poetic use of an archaic word that's closer to this ara this Aadian word one of the names for gods like that El Shadai El Shadai god is referred to as El Shadai and no one had any idea what this word Shadai meant until we've discovered Aadian and we know that the Aadian word for mountain is shad and you're like ah mountain god okay that makes some that's cognitive makes some sense But Job is full of these. There are whole verbs that we don't know what in the word the verb means. There are lots of nouns and adjectives that we don't know what they mean. Um Job is linguistically the most obscure book of the entire Bible. And um any person who's translating Job and can tell you that they they can render that whole section that whole book without uh obscurity is just flatly lying to you. Is it really unintelligible without making um libert liberty taking liberties to kind of assume one way or the other or is that 15% spattered around enough to where really a lot of the story is interpretive more than known as yeah I mean we could concern it I mean we can basically know the gist of what they're talking about. It's just like they this it's like an they'll be making a comparison and it's like this is like a a blah of a blah and you don't know what the the second blah is. The other word doesn't make any sense. Like you just don't know what that and it's just a word that never occurs anyone anywhere else. We have a a phrase in language when a word is a hapox lina it means that it occurs only once in an entire text. And if a tech if a word occurs only once in an entire text, you can't quite be sure what it means because all you have is context clues or something. And Job has a higher concentration of those than any other book of the Bible. Uh and again, it's poetry. And poetry is often where people show out. They like they improvise. They kind of jazz and they they they even make words up. And so um so it's just a place where the poetry is extremely obscure. Um but yeah, it's it's that's a legitimately obscure book of the Bible. And like I said, if you crack open a Bible translation and if he does if it doesn't say meaning of Hebrew in certain on every single page several times, they're not being honest. If there were a language that could possibly have been passed down from like a higher race or intelligence or something, which language strikes you as as one that's just kind of like, dang, that's welldesigned or that's that's tricky. I mean, they're all complex. I mean, they're all complex in their own ways. I don't know if if again, it sort of cuts in two ways, right? If I when I think about God or something, I I tend to think about simplicity. Uh that deities don't do things that should be more complex than they need to be. I always think of, you know, Marie Condo theology. It's like whatever. Like they're real simple. If that's the case, and you know, there's a lot of languages that are super simple in some ways grammatically. Ch, you know, Chinese is a relatively grammatically simple language that achieves a lot. uh then you have languages like Sanskrit that are extraordinarily technical with their Sunday rules and lots of declenions and lots of conjugations. So, I don't know. It all it would depend on um I don't know how malevolent that deity is. If they're just like really trolling us, uh that we have some really hard language. But yeah, when people say things like the Bible is originally, you know, written in, you know, Hebrew and therefore Hebrew is a divine language, there's all kinds of quirks about Hebrew that make it clear that it's just like a u it's not that it's not a special not a special language. And in fact, if you read Hebrew, you you in the read the Bible, you'll you can see the fact that there and this is what you lose in a translation. uh you don't lose sense in a translation typically what what you lose is the fact that the the the Hebrew Bible is written over a long period of time and you can see on the page often where there's like a very archaic section buried between two sections that are more recent equivalent of like reading through a novel and all of a sudden it switches like Shakespeare and English you would know something had happened right if you're reading a modern Stephen King novel and all a sudden they're talking about who who art thou be like hold on that's not that's a more archaic version of English things like that happen with the Hebrew of the Bible but you don't see that in translation And we know that certain sections of the Bible are much more archaic than other sections and some sections are much later because they have inence Persian words. And we know that there's only a certain time period when Persian existed as a language. So that's the kind of stuff that you often miss. You know, like if you're reading a novel and someone started speaking, you know, modern Mexican slang, you'd be like, "Yeah, that's that that tells you kind of when it happened." And so you get stuff like that in the Hebrew Bible that translations obliterate. But I mean again, if you have a good Bible, they'll tell you that in the notes. So there'll be an indicator that something like that is happening. I was wondering if there's any topics that you're you are you would love to do videos about, but you feel like there's not quite enough research for and you're just kind of like waiting for the domino to fall on that. Yeah, there's a lot of things like that. Um, so the vast majority of alchemical literature is not translated yet. So if you think just like Latin literature, I'm not talking about the Arabic literature. Uh, the Arabic literature is a totally different animal. I don't have Arabic uh enough to to to say but of the Latin literature 90% of it's not translated. Um there's an enormous amount of of stuff. Also Christian Cababala, Renaissance Kabala, there's most of that's not translated. Huge books, thousand page several thousandpage books are not are not translated yet. Wow. So um yeah, don't even have modern editions. You can't even get you have to look at them in 17th 16th century editions usually. Wow. And so why what is what's going on with that? Isn't it like why just you know it's hard you know you know oh someone's got to do the work some you have to have someone who you know let's say you want to translate alchemical texts you you need to know you need to know the Latin you need to know the alchemy which means you know the history and so the skill set required to do that just like dramatically shrinks until the amount of people in the world that can do that shrinks to like three like within within a few categories. Yeah. And then you know institutions academia doesn't really uh respect translation translation work in many cases academically it doesn't even count to your publications. So if you're on the tenure track and you're trying to publish um they won't count translations as actual um so there there's they're disincentivized and then you know the question is what audience is there for this stuff? How many people out there really jonesing to read some 16th century alchemical stuff? And the answer is probably not many frankly. Um and and there's a sort of in a law of like inverse proportions here where as texts become more obscure, the likelihood of you wanting to read them means you probably have picked up the skill sets to read them in the original language anyway. So there's sort of a a collective action problem where everyone assumes that everyone can read them and no one can. Um and then everyone assumes that someone else will pick the ball up and no one does. Right. Uh you know it's it's the trash you walk past. Every everyone thinks that someone else will pick it up, right? Well, no, there the you know um I could go grab off my shelf the six volume Theatum Chemicalum which is the largest collection of alchemical literature produced during the early modern period. Six huge volumes, big thick hunky volumes. 95% of that is not translated. So the the the big question is just there aren't modern editions, there aren't translations, and there aren't secondary literature. And I'm happy to translate them and I'm happy to do episodes about them, but you know there is no peer review. There is no other scholar out there checking me. there is no, you know, and I don't want it to be just like trust me, bro. Like that that can't be the the the standard. But at the same time, I'm not so gunshy that I won't do that if I feel like there's a good reason to do it. And you know, we recently trans published a translation. Dr. Dan Trell and I did a translation of some of Grippa's uh material that has not been translated. And we didn't run it through peer review or anything either, but we did provide a new edition of of the Latin original. And basically, we're like, look, we're not running it by peer review, but we're going to put a second edition of this out, and if you have complaints, considerations, or you know, whatever, let us know. I love that. I think you should keep doing that. I I think I think you've been around for long enough and your audience knows you well enough that you're authentic enough or you like you you've you've you say it all the time. You said it here. It's like you don't cut corners. And so I would think that for you to then give a hey I did this so it's not peer reviewviewed but check it out. I think it I think it carries more weight than maybe you're assuming just because of the work you've put in into esoteric I mean you you know your whole history of what you're doing exists on the internet now. So I think you I think you're more of an authority figure than than maybe some peer review might be actually to people. Yeah. you know, it all it's all about like there there are a lot of competing concerns and it's just about like how do you navigate those competing concerns. Yeah. And um yeah, also I think another thing that motivates and I've talked to some other people in the field behind the scenes and they've expressed concerns about you know what happens when you translate stuff and you there's no one checking you. I'm like, I don't know, guys. Like, there are a lot of people out there whose entire social model is trying to embarrass smart people on the internet on purpose to like get social cred by like punching up. And trust me, there's a lot of people that want me to be wrong. A lot. And when you put your name out there on something, uh, you know that you're there's going to be 50,000 eyes on it. And some of those eyes are not charitable. And so, are the comments, okay, the negative comments? How do you take them? You don't care. I mean, I think that if the way I treat it is I treat it like a my classroom that uh a critical comment is like totally fine and welcome. I mean, you know, someone has if someone thinks I make a mistake, which I do. I'm I'll spoonerize a date instead of being 176, I'll say something wrong and be like, "Yeah, you got that date wrong, whatever." Like, "Yep, yeah, that's that's totally fine." Or, "You forgot this interpretation of this." And that's totally fine. Um, but yeah, when it's such like hateful, trollish comments, no, I don't I don't In the same way, I wouldn't tolerate that in my classroom. um I'm not going to tolerate that either. And so I I'm you know, yeah, I'm just not going to have that because what ends up happening is if you if you allow those kinds of comments to really dominate the YouTube page, it just become comments become accessessful and people don't feel like they want to they don't want to be part of that community. I wouldn't blame them. And so I want people to feel like they can be part of a community where we can discuss stuff, joke, have fun, you know, but I'm not going to take someone saying like misogynistic stuff or, you know, whatever. That's not Yeah. I'm not going to have that. Yeah. So, it's like basically I treat it like my common decency rule. Yeah. Yeah. Just like don't be a don't be a bastard and and you know like but also like if you want to tell jokes in the comments like great. There's always like a class clown and that's like you I don't trust any class that doesn't have a good class clown. So yeah, that's fair. I always take someone who's going to do translation to be someone who needs to be like disciplined and empathetic maybe because they need to get hopefully into the mind of the author a little bit which should require some level of empathy. I was curious like where did your where did your work ethic come from because it seems like you're in a pretty hard field uh relatively speaking. I'm just curious like where your personal sense of self-discipline came from. I guess one thing is that it came from just being really passionate about the topic. It's really not that difficult to be self-disciplined when you really care about something and you want to do it well like you'll do it because you want to. Um also I think I treat YouTube like a job. It's like esoterica is a business. Whether you and again if you think of it as something other than that you're just not being true. you're not being honest about with yourself. And so I treat it like a job. You know, I I punch the clock. I I'm I'm waking up tomorrow morning um at I'll get up at a little after 5:30 and I'll do my admin work. Usually up at 5:30 or so, I'll get up. I'll do admin until my kids wake up and then when my kids are off of school, like I'm at the desk and I'm at the desk until um until, you know, time to get to the gym or pick the kids up and you know, it's just it's a full day. And um and also I I I made decisions in my life that um yeah that I think facilitate having a better work ethic you know like I don't have social media just don't have any social media whatsoever and that probably is not the best thing in terms of pro promoting the esoterica brand but it also is like one of the data is very strongly indicates that it social media is a pretty significant time sync and it's not super good for people's mental health especially women and girls. Um, and I'm just like I don't the the ratio that I see people putting into it versus what they seem to be getting out of it doesn't seem to it seems upside down to me. And I just like I it's not for me. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm not saying it's that it's not worthwhile. But um, you know, if I'm going to be arguing with people on Twitter for 15 minutes every day, you do that math, you've been ar arguing with people on the internet over the course of a week or a month for hours of your life. That's hours I could be putting into doing anything else. anything else. Um and so I just like opted out of that early on and have remained opted out of it. Um yeah, and also it's just like um I have even despite the fact that I'm my own boss, I guess, as much as one is um I have deadlines. I I I treat you know I treat deadlines like deadlines. The episode has to be written at the end of Monday. And if that means like getting up at 5 am on Monday and writing until I'm done and writing until I'm exhausted and coming back that evening and writing some more, waking up Tuesday, like the episode's getting shot Tuesday is getting edited on Wednesday and it will be available for patrons of the channel by Wednesday at 1 p.m. Like that's just not it's it's a non-negotiable. And so unless there's something catastrophic where I just literally can't and it's only happened literally twice or something has intervened to the point where I just could not get what I needed to get done done. But um to me it's just like you if you treat it like a job and you're responsible for the for the for the product you want to do right by it. At least I do. And that just means like getting your metrics and doing your thing and and getting it done and um knowing and also knowing what you can deliver on. You know if I if I set for a goal myself I'm going to translate you know a major par work of paraselis and in two two days that's just not a realistic goal. Um you just got to set realistic goals and and be able to deliver upon Like I said, I used to work in the before I worked in academia, I worked in the entrepreneurial space in in tech. And um what did you do? I did worked in like did some like my all of my friends grew up in on in in tech and so we all grew up you know early days of like BBS's and then you know transitioned over to programming like I remember when we you know we were learning C we're teaching ourselves C and we you know when C++ dropped and uh you know I remember like oh wow we have objects now like I'll never have to program a random number generator ever again you know and just like oh my god and so like they all went into tech and now they work for huge companies in tech you know they work for you the big the big names games. Um, and so I was adjacent to that world for a long time, working mostly in security and some in like data management and stuff. And um, yeah, just like I got a that tech world, especially this was the late 90s, early 2000s, that world was a world in which like you had to be on fire because you were competing with a bunch of super smart people. And you you learned, at least I did, that if you want to get things done and deliver on what you say, you have to have a a work ethic that will that will get it done. And you sitting on your hands is not going to get it done. What was the worst job you ever had? I guess it wasn't the job that was so bad. Well, I quit my first job like basically the second day there. I was like worked at like a grocery store and like the manager just was like really mean and I was like, I don't want to do that. So, I quit that job. Um, I used to work at the cafe at the at like the Barnes & Noble, like you know the Barnes & Noble has like a little Starbucks inside of it. At that time we were the only Starbucks in the state and so um this is in Mississippi and I don't bookstores attract like psychos like just like you know like we had like oh there there's the flasher guy and there's like the lady who like brings her cat in when the cat is not supposed to come in the store and just like a you know just a steady stream of like crazy people and it also like entitled people like smart people often also become sort of pretty narcissistic I've seen and bookstore people, people who come to bookstores at least think of themselves as being relatively intelligent and maybe they are, I don't know, on average, I don't know. But there was like just like a lot of entitled people that you had to cowtow to and the management often, you know, you know, I'm sure you guys have worked for the same thing where the management always takes a side of the customer and rarely the side of the the uh the worker, but there was a moment where a guy came in and I guess he was in a hurry or something and he like ordered a coffee and he basically threw money at me and it like landed all behind the the Oh, to like pay for it. He's like Yeah. to pay for it. He's just like here. I was like, "Here, I got to go." And it just landed everywhere. And I was like, "I'm not picking that up, dude." And he was like, "What?" And I'm like, "Yeah, you can't leave with that. If you leave with that, I'm going to call security." And like, I'm not picking this up. Like, you can come back here and pick this up. And he's like, "I'm going to get the manager." I'm like, "You do that, dude." Uh, and the manager took his side and I was like, and this guy was named Mark. Like, Mark, I'm not picking that up. Like, I'm just not like there's just a line, dude. Like, people can't throw money at you. Yeah. He's not Jesus trying to flip flip tables over in the temple. Yeah. He doesn't doesn't get that pass. Yeah, he doesn't get that pass. He's like, I'm a human being. Like, I get he's in a hurry, but he could, you know, there's lots of ways of and so the money never got picked up and I I didn't get fired, but um and the guy was allowed to leave with his free coffee. But yeah. Yeah. So it's not I think it wasn't so much the job cuz I actually like that job but it was mostly like incidents within the job where you know so much about retail work just like we learn to treat people in these extremely transactional ways that doesn't really u appreciate the humanity behind the person who's you know checking you out at Target or whatever. And so, um, yeah, having having been a victim is a strong word, but, um, I tell my wife, the my wife and sister-in-law that everyone should be required to work at least, uh, either you have to work in the service industry or in retail at least one Christmas season. Everybody should have to do it. I think in Germany, you have to serve in the military. Uh, you should have to serve in the retail army at least once. My that makes a lot of sense since we might be the most consumerist nation. And the United States might be the most consumerous nation. Yeah, you should have to serve in the in the the salt mines of, you know, whatever. I guess now the Amazon workers or whatever, but yeah. So, so I know you're not I know you're not into debunking. Um, and that's okay. Uh, but I think you're a pretty big authority figure because of you how much you value the the the the texts and like the actual artifacts that we have. And I just wanted to ask you to indulge me a little bit because I like the research that you've done. I want to ask about the the emerald tablets. It feels like it feels like those things were like made like made from in like adamantium from Wolverine. Like I don't like those things feel like so embellished by everything I see around them. And maybe it's just cuz they're called the Emerald Tablets. And so that's just very alluring. But can what do you what's what what can you shed some light on that a little bit or just like help dissipate some of that because I feel like I see those things are like from aliens or I don't know you know what I mean and stuff. Yeah. Atlantis like what are what are the emerald tablets in that you know in that as far as you're concerned. Yeah. I don't think they ever written on emeralds just because you can't get emeralds that big. I mean it would be written real little and no one could read it. I mean I guess we could write them on emeralds now. We have lasers and stuff. Maybe the aliens did too. time. Um, this is a this is a pretty common trope in ancient literature where people would inscribe things on precious stones of like spectacular size. So this is not so another example of this is another piece of hermetic literature where Hermes Tresmeist tells Tot inscribe them on a turquoise stila. So the idea of inscribing sacred texts on special tablet I mean the button the Moses story right it comes down off the mountain with like the laws all written on these like stone tablets. This was in that the tablets of destiny were a big part of ancient neareastern um mythology. So the idea of writing things down on stones and precious stones was just a common literary trope. It was just it just meant like write this on something that you know adamantium is a great example, right? Write this on something that basically can't get destroyed. And so when we read about the uh the emerald tablets of Hermes Mgistus, it's just the idea that this this document which we the earliest version of it we have is actually in Arabic and it was probably a translation from either from Syriak or from Syriak from Greek originally. Um there's just the idea that it should be inscribed on something that's imperishable. And so um the use of emeralds as just a precious stone is just we have that kind of language with tablets of gold. I mean often um there these Orphic hymns which were basically passports to the underworld and they were written on gold. Uh you would write things on silver. You would write things on lead and throw them into into curse tablets written on lead and rolled up. I have one over there actually. So the idea of writing things on on imperishable surfaces was just a common literary trope. And so it's just a function of the literature. And if you've never heard of somebody writing something on a precious stone, it sounds really exotic until you've just read more of the actual historical literature and you realize everyone talks like that. Whether it's turquoise stones or the tablets of the of Moses in the Bible or the tablets of destiny in ancient Sumeriia, common, it's a it's a really common literary motif. And so it's a literary thing more than it is a physical uh description of an artifact. I mean, I don't know how big emeralds get. I don't I'm sure there's some pretty big emeralds. But I mean, you're not going to be able to write the entire, you know, history of something. Yeah. Whatever on an emerald uh or piece of turquoise for that matter. But it's just it's a literary thing. And it was a pretty common it was a relatively common motif. And even like I said, even other hermetic literature talks about things being written on steelies or tablets of turquoise. Does it does it seem like you've read because of all that you've read from so many different cultures? What do you have an opinion on where all this comes from? Like is it just pure mythology that pure, you know, Graham Hancock on Netflix is saying it's ancient aliens? Yeah. Or at least civilizations, sorry. Or pre-dolivian civilizations, I think, is what Graham Hancock would say. There are there are other people who would say ancient aliens. I think both are equally both are wrong for different reasons, but yeah. But like you you've really seen the source text from so many different things. Like what is your imprint on that like what's your it's just a guess, you know, because no one knows. Yeah, we don't know. I mean I I I think that they I don't think they come from aliens. I don't think they come from some anti-delivian civilization. Um the the quickest way to disabuse oneself of believing those sort of things is just to read the literature in its literary context. None of this stuff was written in a vacuum. It was all written within culture of writing other things. Um, and think about something like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. If you never have read any other piece of political theory and the only thing you've read is the Declaration of Independence in the Constitution, it looks really outstanding. Like, oh my god, how in the world could anybody have just sat down and wrote this? This is crazy. until you read like, oh yeah, there was a first draft of the Declaration of Independence written in 1774 by Thomas Jefferson called the Declarations of the Rights of British Americans and the Constitution's based on the Constitution of Virginia, which is in turn based on constitutional documents that have been composed by John Lockach. And so when you when you only see those documents, right, they look really unusual, but when you zoom out and you see them in the context of other political documents written at that time, you're like, "Ah, this led to this. This led to that, this led to this." And so I would tell people that if you want to look at the emerald tablets of herpismus was an example or or another document like this, the Bible's a great example. Um the the Bible, we look at the laws of the Bible and think, "Oh, wow. They really have all these laws kind of figured out until you read other Middle Assyrian legal literature, the code of Hammari, and literally the Bible is lifting things from the code of Hamarapi and sticking it into the book of Deuteronomy or whatever, or Exodus, rather. So, the quickest way to disabuse yourself of the extreme specialness of these documents. Not to say they're not special. They are special, but they're but they're not without precedent. Well, they're not without context. And so, it's not a question of debunking them, which is again, it's not really what I want to do. is also what I want to do is show people there's a wider context here and in that context they fit even if they're works of genius. I mean it doesn't just to say that yeah Mozart was writing in the context of lots of people that doesn't make Mozart less of a genius but it wasn't like certos just appeared out of nowhere by Mozart he was building on a musical tradition that stretched back for centuries and so when you take if you listen to the ninth symphony by Beethoven it's just like a shockingly amazing piece of music and it is it's one of the great pieces of world music that ever existed but it has a it has a historical and a social context musical context and that's true of this literature as well it's just that this literature has an extra halo effect because it's so weird. Um, and and and it's it survived in very mysterious circumstances. And because it survived in those those relatively mysterious circumstances, most people don't have any handle on it whatsoever. And so, what's interesting to me is that it's so unusual that the closest thing they have to a handle is like, well, aliens made it. Uh, it becomes plausible. Plausible. Yeah. It's so unusual to them. It's so unusual. like this could come from me. This is Yeah. And I'm like, well, it's not it's it's unusual until you until you're get until you dig a little deeper and you realize that uh you know the the emerald tablets there are documents like that that were being produced at the same time um that are pretty similar to that and um say the same things like there should be written on emerald tablets or whatever. So, a lot of what I try to do is not debunk these other bizarre claims that aliens wrote them or they came from some anti-dolivian civilization, but to show that um they have a context. And again, another great example of this is like something like the pyramids. The pyramids are obviously an outstanding piece of architecture. And if you've ever seen them in person, I mean, just shocking. But then I tell people, look, when you go through the pyramids, make sure you go to area C because area C is where the workers barracks were. That's where the people that lived where they were building them. And go to Sakara and go see the oldest pyramids and go see the ones that's a step pyramid where they're learning to build pyramids. See the one that's bent where they go up and they realize the angle's bad. So they change the angle and it goes like this. It's like they made a mistake. And then you see the development of the pyramids and then you can see the actual documents where they're like we have documents where like they're like calling off sick. The workers are like my mom got stung by a scorpion and I can't come to work to help build the pyramids today. Um, and you know, you see the the request for granite coming in from Aswan, and you see you see the mines down in Aswan, where that granite's coming from in the in the king's chamber, and you see the the foremen at that site complaining about the fact that the workers aren't showing it because they're all drunk today. Um, and so they got stung by a scorpion, whatever. And so when you when you zoom out from the pyramids and you see like, ah, there's a context to these buildings, there's a history of them. You can see them learning to do it. you can see where they messed it up. It becomes if you only see the pyramids, then you're like, "Oh, aliens did that." But when you see them in their architectural historical context in Egypt, you're like, "Oh, like you can see them learning to do it. You can see them messing it up. You can see the literary you can see the barracks where they built the things. You can see the tombs of some of the workers. You can see the mustabas of other people that were buried at the Giza Plateau." Um and and then it it you know and then at that point you're like not only did aliens not build this, but we even know the names of the human beings involved with it. And so it's not de it's not debunking so much as it is demystifying what is otherwise extraordinary and it is extraordinary but demystifying it by contextualizing it. And the contextualizing it shouldn't diminish its importance. The pyramids are spectacular no matter what. Yeah. But contextually they they they cease to be so mysterious that we can come to believe that you know aliens will I mean if you look at them actually like you could see they're just rubble infill in places. You're like so perfect. I'm like they just poured rocks on this part. They just like they just like cheated it. Like did the aliens cheat mode it or did a bunch of like workers do that? Cuz I've cheated stuff a lot of times in my life. Yeah. Um no. They just like they just got tired and they just dumped a bunch of rocks in there. Um, do you think do you think you have enough material to do like a historical uh sick days excuses like sick day notes video? Yeah, it'd be funny just to do one on the on the uh uh the Egyptian stuff. Yeah, I wonder I don't know if I have enough material on that. Um, one of my favorite ones is I mentioned the the getting bit by a scorpion. That is an actual historical example. The other one is uh he there's a guy who says, "I have to be off today because my mom's getting mummified." Oh my gosh. I'm like, "Do you feel bad for that guy?" You're like, "Damn, of course he needs a day off. Give the guy the I hope he gets paid day off." I mean, they were it was Levy and Mass, but he's like, "Yeah, I can't come into work. My mom's getting mummified." Um, and it just like for me that just like clicked. They're like, "Of course." It's like they're getting mom's getting mummified. Like ancient Egypt. Makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. Good. It's a good, you know, you use the same excuse for the fourth time. It's like, "Hey, my mom's getting mummified. Didn't your mom get mummified last month?" Yeah. If your dog starts getting mummified, then it's it's a stretch. But as long as family member. Yeah. So yeah. So it to me and this is also a point that I try to make about all this material is that this is done by people and people are kind of always people and they're extraordinary people of course but they're just they're often just people and it's in their humanity that I feel like we can at least me that I can appreciate them the most deeply. And you know, I don't want to I I want I always want to take the material very seriously, but also history is often just hilarious and you know, a comedy of errors. And letting it just be a ridiculous comedy of errors is also just part of letting history be history. And we shouldn't we should it should not become so sacred that we can't, you know, point and laugh because they certainly pointed and laughed. Um and also again, these texts are sometimes just messing with us. They're intentionally written to to show off I like let me show you how smart I am. And yeah, you got to indulge them sometimes. And you see Reddit was like Reddit. Yeah, of course. Yeah. You know that I know that I'm we were both in on the same joke and like so much of that esoteric stuff is like winking across the room through time. Um and most of what I want to do is put people in on the joke and there's no reason why you're no there's a reason why anyone's not smart enough to be in on the joke. Uh it's just a question of like realizing this is what uh this is what they were up to. What is it about this topic that so fascinates you because like you don't share your actual personal beliefs that often uh on the channel and which is great you know I think everybody you know it's it's it's amazing to see you kind of take that hat off and be able to present in a professorial kind of way and I appreciate that. But so what makes you so interested in all the different texts and what what keeps you going on it? I I think the thing that's to me the most interesting is that uh I mean first it's just like this material has been in many ways purposely suppressed, repressed, hidden. And so at some level just the band book is always worth reading. I mean you know if the Inquisition told me that I couldn't read it, well by god we're reading it. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that we like to tell ourselves a myth about the history of the West. Like that we've always been sort of like rational um logical democratic civilization and that's just not true. Like this is not good history. And secondly or thirdly I guess is that this material just isn't a hugely important part of our history. It's it's a hugely important part of our philosophical history uh of our intellectual history, our spiritual history. And to pretend that it's not there is just bad. It's just like not doing the job. 100% agree. And it doesn't really matter whether I believe in magic or believe that the Emerald Tablet tells us the secrets of alchemy or or my beliefs are utterly inconsequential. What matters is this is an important part of history that has not had its day in the sun. And everyone seems to know it, but also no one seems to be able to um to to to teach it. And that's just a a function of the fact that um we've done ourselves a double a double misduty here. And maybe it's something we can get into more if you want to. But by attempting to forget it, we it's the same way that if you like leave a gap in a piece of paper, you can cut out the piece of paper and then not know was written there, but the gap is still there and you can clearly see it. Definitely. So what you've just done is just shot yourself in the foot. Uh you've tried to forget it, but the very act of trying to forget it has made sure that you can't. And now you've lost the information. Yeah. And so, um, like I was told repeatedly in graduate school that figures that I wanted to study weren't important. I wanted to write papers on people like Cornelius Agria and stuff and they're like, you can't write on that because he's not he's not an important figure in the history of philosophy. I'm like, okay, so why is he not one? He's like, because I don't know anything about him. What the crazy kind of anti-intellectualism is that? Cuz you don't know. Because you didn't learn about him. He isn't important and therefore learning about him doesn't matter. like what kind of vicious circle that's terrible. It's a completely silly, laughable kind of I am and uh I became so infuriated with it that I was like look this is a part of what we it's a part of our history and let's just like cover it and I don't pretend that esotericism is the most important part of history. It's not the you know yeah big battles and stuff are also hugely important parts of history but there are 50,000 channels on YouTube covering battles in history. Uh, how many episodes of Napoleon can you find on YouTube? Um, plenty. But there's this this this little domain of history um that doesn't really get, you know, everyone knows it's there. And yet not many people are able to um let it speak and I try to be the voice that says, "Look, um, here's my slice of the pie. It's not the most important slice. It's not the only slice, but it's a slice and it matters. And if we don't, you know, learn about it, then we're not really we're really not doing history. Uh I guess the last thing I'll say is that it's just interesting. I mean, who isn't interested at some level with magic and mystery and monsters and and it's just inherently fascinating in the same way that horror movies and stuff are fascinating. And so, um the material just like sometimes just teaches itself. I I don't have to do a lot of curating. You know, when you have John D talking to angels and the angels are telling him to swap wives with his scrier dude and you're just like, what in the actual like this is just gonzo crazy stuff and it's just like anyone I mean again even if I I don't believe it. I don't really believe they were talking to angels and it doesn't really matter what I believe but it doesn't really they believe they were. Yeah. And so like I I take them I try to take people at at face value. It's not about what I believe, it's about what they believed. And for me, the responsible thing as a intellectual historian is to treat them with all the respect I would treat any person and treat anyone's beliefs with respect and try to tell it as they would have experienced it, not by me looking down my nose. Um, oh, silly superstitious people talk angels. I think if you adopt that kind of arrogant attitude, you're just totally going to miss the mark and when you're doing history. Um because that kind of arrogance is completely blinding and you see it con I see it constantly and I it's not the kind of thing I want to indulge in. I I've been living in Mexico for a long time and I always ask people if they've seen if they've had any like paranormal encounters and I feel that people in Latin America in general are a little more open to that. Have you have you ever come across anyone or have you had any sort of experiences yourself that that kind of turned your eyes to say wow maybe there is more to reality than what it seems? It's it's two parts of the question I think are interesting. One is the cultural part, right? Where I think like you said people maybe in Latin America, Central America are more likely to report having seen it. That's the thing. More likely to report it. Um I I'll I'll give you an I'll give I'll tell a story and I'll come back to the second part of the question. One of the things that the there there's a branch in psychology now sometimes referred to as like uh alterations of consciousness studies. Um and one of the things that's interesting is that uh grief can induce hallucinations. And most people who are grieving will often in the most intense period of the grief experience uh their loved one in some form. They will see them, they'll hear them, they'll smell them, they'll sense their presence. Um now in psychology they call those hallucinations. I don't know what they are. I'm just not it's not for me to say. It could be they could be dead people coming back. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is a word that it's because they're academics and they're not they can't say it's ghost, but they can say look these grief based and if you ask most people if they've ever had a griefbased hallucination they in public they'll say no because hallucinations are what we associate with crazy people. Yeah. But in private virtually everybody will say yeah like my uncle died and I swear to God I heard him laughing in the next room or something. I've experienced it. Right. Um, and so this is a place where it's very important to say that what gets reported and what is like what happens often widely divergent. And again, we tell ourselves a story about how we're rational, sane people. And because we've told ourselves a story over and over again, we block ourselves off to the possibility of a huge range of experiences. And we live in this sort of schizophrenic, I'm experiencing something, but I'm not a crazy person. Therefore, I'm not really experiencing it. I definitely can't talk about it. And so we've gotten ourselves into a weird situation where everyone's having these experiences and none of us can talk to each other about them. And that just seems like mentally very toxic. Yeah. So, so that's the one the one thing I'll say. The other thing I'll say is, you know, I I'm surrounded constantly by really weird old occult books. I live in an old 1915 home in Detroit. I I'm I'm constantly being asked to come uh to, you know, go ghost hunting and stuff like this. At least in my adult life, I've never experienced anything that has uh like shook me enough that I would like second take it. Second take it. Now, I I did have experience when I was a kid. Um and I've told the story so many times now that I'm not sure whether I'm whether I'm actually remembering the memory or remember the story that I've told myself over. So, I'm I'm I'm not sure I'm a totally reliable narrator where I think as a kid I think I may have seen a ghost, but I'm not sure. for and like I said that children aren't having now the father of small children they're not terribly reliable narrators so um their memories aren't aren't the most the solidest yeah solid yeah so there there's that but you know I've I've talked to people who are you know who claim to be clairvoyant and they've like come into my office and you know they put a book in their hand that's like a you know malas mifific car and witch hunters manual from the 16th century um people like stop at the door like I can't go in there like there's like there's like bad mojo in there, man. You got a lot of old weird bad stuff. Um, wow. And you know, and I I I try to be as like clear in my beliefs, but also I try to be humble enough in my beliefs that imagine you're arguing with a person who's sight impaired, a blind person, and the blind person just screams at you that there's no such thing as colors. We would find that to be pretty ridiculous. They're like, "Yeah, like you can't see colors because you're you have a a disability. The color, trust me, I'm seeing colors right now. You just can't see them." I think it's totally possible that I might just have like a the equivalent of a spiritual disability where other people who are clairvoyant or or psychic or whatever, they experience that stuff just with the same vividness I see colors in my my room and that for whatever reason I'm, you know, I'm the spiritual equivalent of being tonedeaf. Uh I don't know. Um, so I try to be open to those possibilities and I try to be open to the possibility that that there is a world much stranger and broader than the world that I've experienced. Uh, and I've been in the room with people that, you know, they say, "Look, I saw a ghost in this room right now." And I'm like, "I I just didn't see it." But, you know, if I if I said like, "You're a fool because you see this," it would be it could be the equivalent of the blind person telling them, "Look, you're a fool because you think you see colors." So I I try to balance on the one hand um a pretty hardbidden skepticism but also that skepticism being underwritten by an intellectual humility that says that my experience of the world is not the world. The map is not the territory. And just because I haven't experience something doesn't mean it's not there. And that lots of people experience a lot of things. and it would be uh just arrogant and hubristic to write those people off as deluded or superstitious or crazy or whatever. So, I don't I don't Yeah, I don't I want to somehow hold both. And, you know, uh the degree to which I hold both, I'm sure I fail at that. But, if I can hold both of those, I think that that makes me in a healthy position to talk about the text as objectively as possible while at the same time remaining open to the possibility that these aren't just texts. They're actually like a window into another aspect of reality that I that I don't have access to. And that's may say way more about me than it does about anything else. Well, do you have like a creative outlet for I imagine there's a part of you that kind of wants magic to be real. I feel like there's a part of all of us where that's kind of true. Do you have like a creative outlet where you get to go and kind of play I don't know like video games or Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah. Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah. I used to DM a lot. Yeah. Agra playing Dungeons and Dragons and I I I DM'd a lot before COVID hit and that was also a fun place because I can take a lot of this magical no knowledge I have and basically making turning into game mechanics which makes for Yeah. makes for pretty good storytelling. Yeah. Um, and so that's a place. Um, also I have little kids, you know, and little kids ask questions about magic and ghosts and, you know, they're my they're both old enough now to ask questions about God and um, and it's a fun place to like, at least game out what what might be real, what might not be real. Um, but yeah. Um, and also I just try to when I'm working through this stuff, I really do try to take these arguments seriously. I try to be like look is it the case that you know it is conspicuous that our mind while it basically evolved to produce children has this ability to pick up on patterns and the patterns seem to be intelligible by our minds. Um that's interesting. Why is the world intelligible at all? What makes the world follow? Why does cause and effect always happen the way that it does? Yeah. What about the metaphysical structure of the universe? Is that that weird meat thing inside of our heads is is somehow allowed to interact under that's extremely interesting and weird. Like we are a region of nature thinking about itself. Yeah. You know, we are a we are a region of nature walking around thinking about itself in a way that you know like that hourglass is probably not thinking about itself, but we are part of nature thinking about itself. And I think anyone who again just try to tries to be honest, they must admit the extreme strangeness of of our predicament and um and try to tease out the implications of that. And I have a PhD in philosophy, so it's not hard for me to to to play that game. And I'm I'm more than willing to do it. Um but I try to do it pretty rigorously. You know, I'm not a very credulous person. And um you know if the radiators in my house creek and someone says it's a ghost and then they're like yeah but that's the most logical explanation. I'm like well how does a non-physical being interact with the physical world? Are photons bouncing off ghosts? Like how do they how do they question how do they open how do they open and close cabinets if they have chains? Like why do the chains vibrate the air and that's how we hear them? Like, you know, it seems like a simple answer, but until you think about it a little bit, then you're like, hold on, it's actually introducing them into the world actually makes the world frightfully more complicated. Um, so yeah, you know, the thing you said earlier about we want there to be magic. On the one hand, I kind of agree. On the other hand, there's nothing more, you know, there'd be nothing more terrifying than the idea that there'd be people out there who could wield bend reality to their wills, you know, in in this way that uh other others of us couldn't. And this is always a it's it's a half joke that you know if there really were magic uh the best proof of it would be the DoD would be on it. Um there'd be the army, the navy, the marines and the sorcerers and they'd be over there like you know throwing fireballs with their mind, you know, at at terrorists or whatever. And they did try. I mean there were experiments they were experiments with remote viewing and stuff by the CIA. Um, so yeah, I, you know, I take all comers at least the best I can. And, um, yeah, someone tells me they could do magic, I'm always like, "Look, if you could do magic, great. But you need to be at like St. Jude's Hospital curing those kids of cancer." That's right. Um, like, look, I'm I'm about it. If you got the magic powers, like, there's a bunch of hurting people out there. Like, let's just like get you to work fixing, you know, kids with, god forbid, cancer. like uh if if the best thing you got is angels told you to swap wives with your weird medium buddy. I'm like this is pretty unimpressive magic in the end. It's just weird and kinky like and that's cool. I'm not like I'm not I'm not like you know I'm not down your kink but this is a pretty like expect more. It's not what I hoped for out of imag not this is really uh surprising outcomes. I think that's one of the things that I when I found your channel, I think you're you the way you approach things is so balanced. You're always looking for balance. And I think that I remember I was watching you had a few on uh I guess it was the Gospel of Mary and a couple of the like and I you said some fragment in there. I can hear you saying it where you said for the first 300 years there were many there were many Christianities and you just kind of kept going and it it wasn't you know you were just talking and I was like wow like man I've never for whatever it's worth it just hit me where I was like gosh you even got like oh right there was a budding like a ton of Christianities were like spreading and going in her I don't know something about the way you said it I just it was so much more matter of fact cuz here's all these texts from all these different Christianities of what they all different beliefs And I just really appreciated that because uh you also I think you defined esotericism or maybe I read it somewhere else is it it was pretty much anything non- mainstream which like that's that's broad that's that's everything but like pop music if you know if this is the '9s and it's like no like everything esoteric it's just whatever the main people in charge weren't saying and doing. And I think that it's like how we always say the history is written by the winners and it's like well this is all the other history that the non-winners or the people who aren't in charge didn't get to talk about and that's so interesting like I think that's where the the interesting stuff is because it's usually where the truth is often times you know or at least we're not going to get to the truth without having all those voices at the table. We have to take them all. You have to take what was mainstream and you can take who wins an election and you're like look they freaking crushed it. you're like, well, 48% of the country was like the other way. And so, you know, in hindsight, you're like, yeah, everybody loves this candidate. It doesn't matter what election we're talking about, you know, but then you look at you're like, actually, the nation was was definitely not all on board one way or the other. And I think that's really I appreciate the balance. I guess I just saw you approaching topics with balance and I I don't know. I just it really struck me. I subscribe though. And it makes me wonder like in in all of the books that you've read in the ancient texts, have any of them like sort of stuck to you and affected your spiritual practice, your own personal beliefs in any way that you didn't expect would? Yeah, I I think that um I appreciate the the comment about the balance. I really Yeah, that's a that's a a goal I try to achieve. Um and just also because I don't have an axe to grind. I'm not trying to convince anyone that the gospel of Mary Magdalene is like the thing at it. Yeah, here it is. Like Yeah. What's a better It exists and it exists and you like you got to do what you got to you got to sort yourself out. I'm not I can't tell you what the truth is on my job. God. Um Thank God. That's right. God. Yeah. Who wants that job? Not the ministry of truth. Thank God. Yeah. I'm not Yeah. I don't want any part of that job. Yeah. Um so I think that the one of the things that I will say and I'll I'll I'll answer the question by dodging it or zooming out maybe a little bit. um is that it's very often not the particular things that strike me as something that's very challenging to my belief system or something like that. You I'm not ever like, "Oh, the Gnostics were really right." Although I think that sometimes I feel like they're more right than they than they weren't right. That you maybe reality is made by an evil creator. Um when you think that most of the universe is like most of the planet's saltwater that we can't live in and most of the rest of the universe is a radiationfilled vacuum uh that would kill us in seconds. I'm like, "Yeah, this doesn't seem like a good dude made this hostile." did not Yeah. did not have our best interest in mind and the creation of the vast majority of this outfit. Yeah. Imagine if I said I I designed and built an an apartment building and 99.999% of it was a literal death trap. You would not assume benevolence on the part of that architect. And even the last bit, everybody always talks about how beautiful nature is, and I'm like, nature will rip you apart. Rip you apart. Even the trees eat you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I so sometimes I think the Gnostics are more right than than we're willing to give them credit for or that we don't take them seriously for psychological reasons, not for not for reasons of truth. We just can't bear the idea that they might be right or something. Um, but to to go back to your question to to answer it a bit a bit more directly, the the one of the things that a lot of these writers share in common is that the world the way the world is apparently is not the way the world is really. And the these are people that share an experience of having some fundamental insight into the way the world is really. Whether they've had a gnostic experience or a mystical experience or they've seen the underlying magical structure of the universe or God has revealed themselves or the angels, whatever. There's al there's lots of flavors of this obviously, but they all shave. Yeah. Play. Yeah. And that's sort of the classic instructive version of it, right? That that most of what we're seeing is shadows on the wall. And these writers all share in common that they've that they've seen the shadows in the wall and they've walked out of the light. And I don't know if they really have or haven't. That's not for me to judge. But I do think that that that insight um is somehow fundamentally right that the way that we experience the world I mean again it is in a very simple scientific sense. The vast majority of atoms that are just empty space. We don't experience the world as empty space. like the way the world is and the way the world the way we experience the world are not the same thing. And I think that one of the things I always come away from reading a lot of this literature is the insistence that we should not take experience for granted because experience simply gives us what is apparent to us. That underneath all of those appearances there's some other world. And I think that leaves me with a profound sense of mystery, a profound sense of awe, uh a profound sense that like you need to scratch beyond the surface of things. You need to think deeper. You need to reflect longer. you need to take seriously that what you're experiencing is not really what's objectively going on. Um that we're often as individuals not the best arbiter of truth and reality. Um you know and I think that I I spend so much time in this literature. Yeah. I live with a pretty pervasive sense of like awe and mystery that the world is actually extremely unusual and the more that it becomes usual the more that we've gone to sleep. It's kind of awaking. It's a sleepwalking. And the more the world is usual and boring and normal is not an indicator of what's going on in the world indicate that you're not trying. You're just you're not thinking deeply. You're you're trusting what is apparent for what is you're confusing what is apparent for what is real. And um I think that's a I think that's a um intellectually, spiritually, I think it's a a I think it's a dead end. And these texts inspire me even if I don't agree with them in the particulars. They inspire me to try to resist that that um that kind of blind alley sort of not to let your assumptions get crusty. It's like they keep prying them all up and making you look underneath again. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're constantly telling you. They're constantly telling you like, "Yeah, I was a normal I was a cobbler. I was a normal guy fixing shoes and then I looked over and I saw a shiny piece of pewtor and I saw literal god in that piece of puter and he showed me the fundamental structure of the universe. And here's the book about it. And that literally happened to a dude named Yakob Burma. And he invented a form of Christian mysticism called Theosophy. And you know when you're when you're reading that, there are two ways that you can or a couple ways you can take it. One is, oh, he's just a crazy person. And I think that's exactly the wrong way of taking it. The real way I think the better way of taking it is he had a fundamental experience that altered the course of his life in a moment in a in a split-second moment where he experienced the divine in shiny metal. And we should be we should be open to the possibility of transcendence and awe in moments that we would never expect it because Yakob did not expect to wake up that day and see the divine structure of the universe and a piece of polished pewtor. And so we should all I think or rather I should see for myself I want to be open to the possibility of being fundamentally transformed in a random way. And I think the only way for that to happen is if you're constantly at least open to that possibility. And I think these texts remind me to remain intellectually and spiritually humble enough that that remains a real possibility. That's awesome. Yeah, I love that. I totally agree. Again, I mean, balance is like the main thing I think about your channel and what you're saying. Everything you're saying is so balanced. It's incredible. I don't think I think it's why I subscribe to it. I mean, cuz it's not just like it's not sensationalist. You're really trying to just have that viewpoint. It's a little Buddhist, too, isn't it? a little smell of Buddhism on on there for some of that. Sure. I'm sure there is. I mean, I'm sure. I mean, a little. Yeah. I mean, that's like, you know, um Yeah. And Yeah. But it's also like not being incredulous. You know, you'd be surprised or rather you would not be surprised at the amount of people that I hear from every single day who write me long dissertations of how they discovered the truth of all reality and they're really the third incarnation of Jesus and I need to follow their teachings otherwise I'm going to be reincarnated as a bug or whatever. Um, you know, I'm like, I bet you're a magnet for that sort of thing. Oh man, you the the the amount of emails and they range enormously. Some of them are quite sad actually. It's I get emails from guys being like, "My wife is divorcing me. Do you have a a spell for her falling back in love with me?" I'm like, "No." And uh if you're trying to use magic to fix your marriage, you have pretty good ideas about why your marriage is failing. Um you're trying to use a magic hack and game genie code to fix your marriage. I bet I bet I know why your marriage isn't working in the first I mean Vanessa King. I can't respond to that kind of stuff and I feel bad for those people. But and also this the intersection of mental illness and this material as you can imagine is quite high. I was going to say just print out the email on papyrus and be and burn it alive with a guy and bury it that stored away somewhere and people will think it's a revelation 2,000 years. You know the old joke about what a religion is, right? Uh a religion is a cult plus time. Um, and what you know if David Cares and those guys or whatever hadn't burned to death in Waco, Texas, and you know, give them a thousand years and they're just they're just down the street Protestants. Uh, and so yeah, but you know, I I get a lot of people who are suffering from pretty significant mental health crises. And also, navigating how's it been navigating your channel with your wife and then also have you started to get recognized in public? Yeah, it's kind of it's a little bit ridiculous to we were we were at we're like fixing my sister-in-law and I were fixing a fence a few weeks ago. We're at Home Depot and u you know some young lady walks up and she looks at me and she gives me a weird look and I'm like oh god was I like looking at her inappropriately or something and she comes back a few minutes later and she's like you're the esoterica guy huh? I'm like yeah like hold on can I FaceTime you with my boyfriend? He we really love your channel. So I'm like, you know, we're like getting wood cut and, you know, facetiming with these lovely people about, you know. So yeah. Yeah, it definitely is. It's funny, you know. It's Yeah, it's funny. I don't mind it. It's like, you know, as long as it's never been creepy or anything, but I'll report back if it, you know, if it gets creepy or something. Um yeah, you know, um my wife is a congregational rabbi and so um yeah, people have people have like, you know, when they come to Detroit and they have to pick a synagogue to go to, people have been like, "We have to go to, you know, Rabbi Alana Synagogue because like that's where Ezerica guy is." Um and so yeah, it's sort of funny that way. Um yeah, is up. Yeah. Yeah. Tennis is up. Yeah. By three people or whatever. But yeah, so um yeah, so it's you know, it's it's an interesting thing. again this channel I never imagined this channel would become as big as it has and so um you become a public figure and that that just that's just a fact of life and public figure is a strong term you become a big fish in a small pond um and you know regardless of whether you know again it's just the way it is and you have to like own it and be responsible for it and try to negotiate it in ways that are respectful um and then will this have you gotten a handle um like any of the like uh you know like the Dead Sea Scrolls or like do you think have you started to get invitations or anything like that to kind of inspect source source documents? Has anybody reached out? Nothing like the Dead Sea Scrolls, but yeah, I've I've definitely gotten, you know, calls from libraries who want me to identify a book or a manuscript and, you know, or artifact that that they that's in their holdings where they're like, "Hey, we have this weird amulet. Can you help us out with what this is?" Yeah, I'm usually happy, you know. I was happy to, you know, get on a Zoom call and someone's like using their phone to show me something in the archives like, "What is this?" I'm like, it's a solommonic magic textbook or whatever. So, that's kind of yeah, that's a lot of fun. And yeah, I've been in invited in lots of prestig pretty prestigious settings to to give talks and stuff. And so, um, yeah, it's a great honor. It's a thing I don't take for granted. You know, it's not a thing I expected, but now that it's happened, it's a really it's a thing that is really it's just a lot of fun and I try to Yeah. try to have fun doing it and I'm always glad to get invitations. And do you ever get the second invitation that you really want to get? The first one could be a one-off and they're like, "Oh god, this guy's a freak." Um, you got to get the second invitation, right? Do you ever get um invited to ancient sites? Are there any sites that you would like to get invited to if you could? Yeah, I mean, I've been invited, you know, I've, you know, got invited to lots of stuff. It's just a question of like, you know, can I book out a lot of time to fly to, you know, to Macedonia to go see, you know, this tomb or whatever. Um, one of the more the one of the more great examples is uh I sent I used a picture of a um uh toe ste. These are human sacrifice uh steellies used in Carthaginian sites. And I used a a picture of one that was found in Malta um on an episode and the curator of that ste commented on the episode being like, I curate that exact ste in the National Museum of Malta. Do you want to come to Malta and wow give a talk? I'm like, yeah, I would love to come to Malta and give a talk. Um, with what budget and with what time and Yeah. Yeah. Are there any direct flights? Yeah. Yeah. And so it's like the kind of thing where if I could teleport over to Malta, of course I would do that, but then logistically it's quite challenging. Um, and then also I've gotten to do really fun stuff that has nothing to do with academia or very little to do with academia. Um, like I've done a thing where I show off a bunch of old books with uh Bruce Campbell from the Evil Dead movies. So it's like, you know, fun stuff where you're hanging out with, you know, horror movie actors that you grew up on watching. And so that's like a funny, you know, thing or comic cons or these other kinds of things or I've like done stuff like that. So it's it has all kinds of funny fringe benefits not the right word, but yeah, maybe fringe benefit. It's like um and sometimes they they're scared to email me because they're like, "Oh, you're an academic." But I'm like, "Yeah, I also like to have fun and do weird stuff." So like, yeah, like I'm not just trying to like be stuffy dude and tweed. I also like, you know, want to go hang out with people that watch scary movies or whatever. But yeah, I'm teaching a class in Egypt next year. So I'm teaching that class in Egypt and so I'll be on the ground uh in Egypt with the with the tour folks. And so yeah, that'll be a lot of fun. Um, and I think I want to do eventually is take as a terra like as on the road like we're in very early talks with um with like kind of a a Netflix style eight episode thing where we go to places and talk about the history of this stuff and artifacts and books and kind of do sort of like Graham Hancock but like actual history. Um, you know, it's good to ask if you were thinking about speaking speaking traveling speaking engagements because I think I think audience Yeah, something like that. Um, you know, there's always a question of how YouTube trans translates into on the ground stuff and I've done a little bit of that. Um, so yeah, you know, it's all about um seeing what modalities this can take and you know, re reaching people where they're at and and building up communities of folks who are interested in this material and again doing the work of providing them reliable and scholarly access to to to history. And that's just that's what every scholar wants to do. They want to be able to connect people to the past in a way that's reliable and do that in a way that uh is fun and engaging for for for for audiences. And so I'm absolutely shared that desire. Have you ever heard of the great courses? Yep. I used to listen to those a lot and Yeah, those are great. Yeah, they were awesome. And then I slowly transitioned to YouTube because it was free and people like you were putting out content that was as good if not better than the great courses. It's like you can find, you know, academic level education on YouTube. And so I kind of think you're ahead. I think you're leading the the charge on that because, you know, academ academia I think has some issues and I think that everybody but people really like learning if it's presented well and it's interesting information. And so I think I think you go where the people are. I I I really love your channel. I really do. I appreciate that. Yeah. I appreciate you being willing to come on. This is this was so fun. Like I appreciate it. I agree with you. I think that it's it's all about again it's all about getting access to this stuff in a way that also doesn't plunge people into a bunch of debt. I mean, people are willing to support the work like you're doing with Patreon, which I really really I really appreciate. And, you know, I don't I make all my content freely available, you know, because I have people writing in from Brazil who say like, "Look, I love your content, but $5 is like what I make in like five hours." You know, people in the developing world here in Mexico City, you know, people in the developing world just don't make a lot of money. And I have viewers in Africa, I have, viewers in India, I have viewers in in in the the global south. And I I want to create as little barriers as possible because I remember being a working-class kid in like Jackson, Mississippi, and never imagining I would have access to world-class libraries and and college education cuz I was a poor kid. I grew up in a 700 foot house with me and my two brothers and mom and dad was that was a pipe fitter. And so I remember the days of being poor and not thinking things were possible. And I don't want people for instance in the global south not to have access to this material too. And everything I everything I do I try to do you know completely open access where there's literally no payw wall. Um and that's possible because of you know support I get on things like Patreon. And that's a commitment that's important to me because I also like know that there's a broader world than affluent Americans who want access to this stuff. There's just working-class people in Ohio who are just interested in learning about this stuff to make good D and D games. And I want them to have it just as much as anybody else. And that you do that by by uh yeah making it intellectually accessible but also not making it paywalled. Um because again otherwise you're just creating you're just being another form of gatekeeper and I just don't want to I remember facing those people and not liking it. I don't want to become one of those people. And I appreciate how the you do long form. It's like oftentimes can be up to an hour sometimes. And you know when when I'm driving or doing a job, then it's nice to just put something in your ears and not have to change it, not have to like pick the next thing. Not and you're like, "Oh, this is I'm good for an hour with what's in my ears." And I can just now go about working out or whatever I'm doing. And I and I appreciate that. And so it's all of a sudden I get a what feels like a college lecture just for an hour while I'm doing some meaningless, you know, something that doesn't require my brain. So I appreciate that. Yeah. No way. And again, this is the great thing about YouTube is that that um it takes as long as it takes. If an episode makes takes me 15 minutes to explain it, I can do it in 15 minutes. If it takes me an hour, it's going to take me an hour. That's right. And so it's really like it's not like a, you know, college situation where I have to go for 50 minutes or I have to go for an hour and 15 or uh it takes what it takes. You know, I've definitely started episode thinking I'm gonna get this done in 20 minutes and it's like, all right, so I'm 45 minutes in and I'm halfway done, so this is going to have to be a two-parter or whatever. Um, and what matters to me in the in terms of the content creation is just that, um, I walk away from it feeling like I I hit I hit all the things I needed to hit and I hit them in a way that is is, you know, uh, accurate. And if it takes 20 minutes, it takes 20 minutes, it takes an hour, it takes an hour. It's just like the great thing about about the platform is that there's no one telling me what I have to do or not do. Yeah. If you get if you get a chance to kick back, what do you like to listen to? What sorts of things do you just chill out on? Like music-wise or like content wise? Well, yeah. I was thinking YouTube, but also music. Like I think YouTube I watch I like to watch like like restoration videos like people like restoring like old broken stuff like old radios. I like a lot of technical stuff like this is the thing I think sometimes people are surprised like I've I I I have been slowly learning um 6502 assembly which is the microprocessor that the like the NES was ran on. Oh cool. Oh. And so uh and lots of stuff ran on 6502. Um uh um again this goes back to my days as a kid programmer. Like I always wanted to write in really low-level code. So I watch a lot of like you know 6502 assembly videos. Uh I like cooking or building cabins. I like you know a lot also like I try to up my chops when it comes to my like scientific stuff. Like I was a liberal arts major and so I didn't take as many science courses as I wanted to. And luckily in the same way that you know there's Esoterica doing this weird stuff there's also fantastic science educators out there who are doing long form stuff on like you know 10 part series on like linear algebra and I'm never going to become an expert in linear algebra right but it something like I can better myself and have a better understanding of differential equations by you know learning this stuff. So, it's also it's also just like knowing that I'm I'm not a know-it-all and there's all there's big gaps in my knowledge and I like filling those in whether it's uh technical stuff or you know just relaxing like literally watching you know a guy build a log cabin or something. Do you have any prepper inside of you? Oh, yeah. Um uh I think anyone who lives in Detroit needs to um are in it. Yeah, I I mean I like the idea of, you know, um being in independent. You know, I I I work on my own car. I have an old car. I have like a 2000 Corolla that I just like refuse to get rid of. And I I and I work on I can work on it. And you know, my mother-in-law who you know, from Southern California and um I'll go I don't know, I think the other day I think I changed the spark plugs or something in it. Um and uh she was just mind was boggled that I could change the spark plugs, which is like nothing. And she's like, "Where did you learn to to do that?" And I'm like, "My I grew up poor. Like we didn't quit could pay anyone to do it. We had to learn to do it." And um so yeah, I like the idea of being self-reliant. You know, we have like a wood stove in our main room and I have like seven cords of wood outside. And you know, this is something about like I I live a lot in my head as you can imagine. And so getting to the gym is an absolute necessity. I got to get to the gym uh you know, at least three or four times a week. And then just like cutting wood like the most physically mindless thing. Um it's just good for you. I think you can we can be in our heads to the point where um it's not healthy. Yeah. Was it a blink? You said chop chop your own wood and it warms you twice. Yeah, that's Yep. A lot of variations on that. It's definitely true. But yeah. Yeah. I I like that kind of physical kind of stuff, you know. Um, I trust an intellectual not based on how um many books they read or languages they understand, but how much that what their dead lift look like. There it is. Yeah, that's right. That's good. That's a good That's really That's great. You know, ancient Greek. What's your des? Uh yeah. Um Yeah. Again, it's like then I know they're taking care of themselves. They're just in their head the entire time and I'm like, h I'm not sure that you're not sure that's you're in a you're in a good like healthy spot in terms of like Yeah. uh balance balance in terms Yeah. In terms of like, you know, your whether you like it or not, your brain's side of a body. Yep. That's right. You sound like the right guy to start a translation and esoteric revolution because it sounds like there needs to be more young people getting involved. Do you could you see yourself um doing like in-person Dungeons and Dragons so people can play with Professor Sledge as as a dungeon master? You know, I've thought about doing it as like a I've had so many requests to like do to like critical role or that kind of thing. And I've had a couple invitations to do uh some public DMing. And I would do it, but I think I'd do it as like a fundraiser for like Yeah. Oh, that's cool. like Afghan women, girls education or something like that. Like I don't think I'd want to do it I think I don't want to do it if I were doing it as like a celebrity thing. I don't want to do it as a way of like getting some raising some money to like, you know, build schools in Afghanistan or help people, you know, whatever. So, yeah, I could easily see myself doing that and have a lot of fun, but I'd want to do it in a way that if it were if it were just entertainment without education, I want to be doing something good in the world aside from just education or entertainment. Yeah, I think just the knowledge you would drop in that session would be worth would be worth doing it. I think you teach people a lot of stuff. It would be fun. You know, I I've like I said, I I've DM'd um I grew up on second second edition AD and D and uh switched over to 5e. I haven't seen the 5D refresh. I haven't heard good things about it, unfortunately. But I I really um I remember when D20 came out, I was like, I got to get back into playing D and D. D20. D20 system is fantastic. It's really a genius. Uh because basically every Well, that's not true. A lot of people to this day still think you should be looking up charts to see whether you kick a door in or not. Um but um but yeah, I I it'd be fun to like go do like old school D and D. Uh like when I had my D and D crew before co um we did a candle lit all night uh run of Tomb of Horrors and we dated the entire we ran the ent the entire Tomb of Horrors over the course of one night. Wow. It was a blast. It's like just knowing they were getting they they could all roll in I think 10th level characters and just watching them get slaughtered was just so much fun. And they enjoyed it too, you They're just like, "Yeah, of course. What is what is what I This is not a question of whether I die. It's what gets me." That's right. How do I uh so it was so much fun, you know. And again, this is this is the thing then it's not really it's sort of on point to esoterica, but it's a little bit of a secondary point is that adults the you know, this is a joke about Jesus, right? That Jesus's most impressive miracle that he had 12 close friends when he was 30. Um yeah, that you know that uh that men uh and men men's mental health is a thing we don't talk about enough but men in their late 20s and 30s and 40s are suffering from a serious crisis of loneliness and uh we need avenues of connection and and and community as much as anyone. Um, I think men especially need that. Absolutely. Um, and also that we live in a world where our imaginations are probably the most bereft aspects of us. Imagination where our imagination in so far as it's actually put to work is mostly it's put to work making money for someone else. Yep. and um and storytelling. You know, the idea of men around a fire in antiquity, that was just a thing that happened on the daily. And most of us don't get to sit around and like do that storytelling and use the imagination and do that connection. And I think Dungeons and Dragons again is a is an excellent one of the This is where I'm not down on gaming and stuff. I think some people individuals get down on gamers and gaming culture and I think there are toxic aspects of it, but there's toxic aspects of academia and everything else. But um I think these are places where storytelling, imagination, community can become uh things that become possible in a way that they otherwise like culture tries to not allow us to have that. I think Dungeons and Dragons is a cool place where that can be that spell can be broken. What I love about that is, and you know, I know this is talking in broad broad strokes, but I think men usually need something to do with each other, like sit around a fire, smoke a pipe, play a sport, play golf, like, and generally they just can't sit around and look at each other and talk. It's very challenging to just sit there and do nothing and talk. And so having something like Dungeons and Dragons or anything to get into, it's really just the the chip. It's the medium for the salsa. It's just Yeah, it's just a poking of the fire, you know, like you It's just a bunch of guys sitting around fire. It's just there. Everyone's poking the fire. It doesn't, like you said, has anything. That's right. So, but if fire wasn't there, everyone feels super awkward just sitting in a circle looking at each other. Yeah, I totally agree. It's something about it that creating to your point events or something to to attach on to I think that that's crucially missing because right now it's just the phone. It's just it's so isolating. There's so atomizing. Yeah. So atomizing. So yeah, I think it's Yeah, I think it's an important antidote to that kind of thing. Um but um or at least a partial antidote. I think it's that you know, I got to fix this problem with Dungeons and Dragons or some [ __ ] Um but um yeah, but I think it's at least a part of the antidote. But yeah, I uh but yeah, it is one of the fun things about doing D and D from this perspective is that uh I'm just basically incorporating all this historical stuff into it. Um making crazy puzzles based on it or whatever. And um yeah, I think it gives it some kind of air of similitude. So it's not me making up stuff. It's Oh, no one knows. No one knows whether you're pulling stuff out of like some scroll you've read or whether you're throwing five together to create like some new character or something. No one No one knows when you're Yeah. It's Sometimes it's funny because I'll be DMing and people like someone at the table will get it. They're like, "Hold on." Oh, that's cool. this puzzle is just a some version of, you know, Pythagorean, you know, thing or whatever. So, they'll they'll get it. But those are fun moments, right? It's like, you know, little Easter egg. It's like see how the sauce is made kind of thing. So, that's awesome. And Dustin, this has been amazing. I think I think it's a good place to cut it. I mean, I I've I've really enjoyed this and you are Thank you for saying yes to chatting with us. This has been so fun. Of course, man. It's been It's cool to get a glimpse of of the guy behind these videos. It's really cool. and it seems like you're a good guy. It's fun to hang out, man. Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, I know. I wish you guys the best on the podcast. Sometimes, you know, younger like fresher podcasts, they're they're kind of worried about asking um bigger channels to be on. And I try to always remind my other people who have big channels. I'm like, look, you started off with like no subscribers, you know, when you have people who are trying to to get out there, support the community of people trying to do that. So, yeah. I wish you guys the best with the podcast. We really appreciate it. And everybody go to Esoterica YouTube. Are you anywhere else? I I just follow you on YouTube. S YouTube, right? Yeah. I don't have any other social media. I think I mentioned earlier it's like, you know, the joke I tell as much as it's a joke is that if if they were literally demons, I would know what to do with them. Um but it with social media, it scares me because I have no idea what to do with it. It's like it's like an evil that I can't fight. Uh you know, if if a demon showed up at my door, I'd be like, "Okay, I I got some solutions to this." Things I got um but Instagram, I got nothing. Yeah. Well, everybody go check out Esoteric on YouTube because you're you're marching towards that gold button. I mean, you'll have a million soon, I would imagine, in next year. I would hope. Hey, you know, I hope so, you know, but also like the numbers are just the numbers and, you know, I want to it's more an indication of you and all the effort that you've put in. Not necessarily that it's, you know, but I I truly I mean I found you over a year ago and I I love seeing the stuff you come out with because it is so balanced and just appreciate hearing from the source material and and the way that you say, "Hey, here's what it says and this is me interpreting a little bit or this is this is totally made up because no one agrees on this. So this is the thing I'm going to say, but it could be nine other things." You just you really do a great job of presenting complex information that I've never heard before that's ancient. I just can't I'm so grateful that your channel exists. So, thank you for doing it. Yeah, thank you. It's that's again that's what every educator wants to hear is that we're we're getting the information out there and people are people are engaging with it. That's what ultimately what I think every educator wants. Yeah. Cool. All right. Maybe we'll have to do it again if you you know in the next six months, year or something like that. We'll get back together. Yeah, absolutely. Feel free to reach out. Thanks, man. It's been a pleasure meeting you. Absolutely. Cool. See you.