Hello and Chicken Saints. It is so good to see you, or at least good to envision you somewhere

behind the screen. I'm grateful that you come and join me today. It's funny though, every once

and a while I'll meet you and you'll tell me, you know, you speak a lot slower in person.

And I know exactly what you mean by that. It means you've been speeding me up on the computer

and I'm and I totally respect that. Okay, I do the speeding me up on the computer and I'm, and I totally respect

that. Okay. I do the same thing. I listen to audiobooks often at double speed. My wife, in fact,

sometimes worries that I'm looking for a dial on her somewhere where I can speed up the conversation,

which I'm not, honey. I'm not, okay? But I had an experience years ago when I wanted to listen to Edward Gibbons' masterful

decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

That is a massive volume, multi-volume work.

And on audiobook, it's 126 hours.

And you thought I was long-winded. Well, when I first saw that, I'm like,

I really want to read it, or at least listen to it. I bet I can get it done in 60 hours. And that's

about how long it took for me. But that story is so depressing, especially if you're a Christian,

because Gibbon was not very kind to believers.

He basically laid the blame for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire at the feet of the Christians.

And all kinds of little snarky skepticism and little subtle hints that, I mean, Gibbon was a skeptic and he's trying to insinuate some skepticism in the, trying to plant some seeds of doubt, I should say,

in the hearts of his hearers. Well, it didn't work for me, but I did make it through the book.

And that whole story of decline and fall gets us to where we are today in the book of ether.

This is the decline and fall of the Jaredite nation. Just like

Moronite has come to the end of the decline and fall of the Nephite nation, and he's looking

to the Gentile day, our day, hoping it won't be a decline and fall of the latter day nation.

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