Welcome to Roon Soup, a podcast about Magic, Culture and the Paranormal, coming to you from Sunny West London.

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host. Enjoy.

Today on Roon Soup it is my inestimable pleasure to welcome Dr. Jeffrey Cripple, Rice University Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought, author, speaker, and academic trailblazer. Dr. Cripel, thank you so much for your time.

Oh no, it's the pleasure. Thanks for having me. No, absolutely. I reached out because I absolutely devoured your latest book The Supernatural

I was something of a something of a fan boy but thinking thinking back to I guess how you tend to write in general there's you bring a lot of

yourself there's a lot of personality to to your books published which is why I have

high hopes for question one.

Jeff, were you a weird kid?

Was I a weird kid?

I was not a weird kid, but I was a very weird teenager.

Puberty was the break with the normal and the entrance into the weird, so yes.

And you think that was actually a chemical thing or was there just some, was there an image where

you go, do you know what?

I'm going to be weird.

I'm going to go to India and maybe join a seminary and all that.

You know, so I've written about this a lot.

So I will tell you, I will now tell you some seemingly intimate things which are not really intimate

because I've written them in my published work. I was a very normal kid I grew up in a

small farming community in Nebraska, which is right in the

center of the country. And I grew up in a very happy, kind of healthy family and I hit puberty and everything went to hell

basically I quit eating. I became anorexic. I became super,

super pious. I began on a quest to become a saint, essentially. I grew up Roman Catholic,

...