This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick.

And today we're coming back to revisit a series that we started a few weeks ago.

We ended up going off and doing some other stuff in the meantime.

But today we're coming back.

This series was called The Thing Before the Beginning.

That's right. What existed before the beginning. That's right.

What existed before the creation or emergence of the universe, of reality itself?

It's a big one.

So this is one of the reasons we figured, hey, even after a couple of weeks, folks are still going to be interested in this.

Lord knows we are.

Sorry if I was just looking around all over the place. I realized we started recording without me popping Rob out into the little window that I put you in. Folks at home, I don't know if you know that we have to arrange things on our screens just right. Just right. So I was just messing around with that. Okay, now everything's where it should be.

You have two screens, though, right?

I do, but I only look at one while I'm recording.

Oh, okay. I mean, if I look at the other one, it's going to be really weird. I'm like down here. Yeah, I guess I technically have two screens because there's also the little camera screen, but that's just me. I don't want to look at that.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

No, I'm looking at you up here, got my notes here, so I think we're all good now.

But yeah, anyway, so we are talking about what existed before the creation event in creation stories. Now, this might seem like a paradoxical question because like how can there be something before the creation of the world? But it's really not paradoxical because as we talked about in the last couple of episodes, most creation narratives

actually do not describe a universe being brought into existence from a state of total nothingness.

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