So when I started talking about Faust and science and technology and magic, I definitely did not think I was going to end up doing an episode about IVF and designer babies. But here we go, we're doing it live. One of the questions I get a lot about this show is how much I prepare like I might just talking like off the cuff off the top of my head or am I writing stuff out or what?

And I don't write scripts out.

I haven't done that since the very beginning really of the show, but I do prepare a lot. I mean obviously there's a lot of reading that goes into the show and I make sure I have all the

Passages ready that I want to talk about and the dates of things and all that kind of written down in my notes.

But, but part of the magic, not just of doing this show, but of reading great literature more generally is that one of the things that makes a book

truly great, truly enduring, is that when you open it,

no matter how many times you've read it, no matter how familiar you think you are

with the historical context, no matter what else you know about the period and the work and all

of that, you never know what it's going to say to you, what it's going to reveal to you.

That's why great literature, truly great literature, is an adventure.

It's because by looking so deeply into the heart of

someone human experience, a great artist can actually capture more than he understands. That's why Plato was on to something

when he suggested that great singers like Ion are really conduits of something else of a divine insight or a divine

knowledge if there anything at all I mean Plato was obviously very skeptical of art and

wary of its powers but not because he didn't take it seriously it's

because he thought most people didn't take it seriously enough and that art at

its best but also at its most potent, is like this opening for pure divine light to shine through.

And divine light, divine wisdom, divine knowledge is not like human knowledge.

We know things in this specific propositional way

because we're bounded in time.

And so we have to make these either-or statements and think in propositional logic. But when we do that,

what we're really doing is unfolding a unitary, pure divine wisdom. And sometimes when an artist is really inspired that is breathed into by God and by heaven,

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