Hey, this is Leo, for Actualize.org.

And in this episode, I'm going to talk about the dirty hidden secret behind all human knowledge. In 10th grade, I made a new friend named Tiago who would forever change the trajectory of my entire life.

This guy was very charming, he was very intelligent. He was in the same great as I was.

He was in many of the same classes that I was in.

But what struck me about him and what really changed my entire worldview and led to all the happenings that I'm going to describe to you going forward was that he was very religious.

He was extremely devoutly religious. Not in the kind of puritanical

sense, but in the kind of like passionate modern Christian sense. Like he was really passionate about God. He was really into it.

And this blew my mind because at that point I hadn't encountered people like that before.

And I didn't understand why he was that way and I

had to reconcile in my mind what was going on there because I grew up in Southern California, which is a rather liberal place and it's not a very conservative, not a very religious place.

And this guy was kind of the antithesis of all that.

What was interesting, in in fact this guy was so

religious that he would walk around carrying a Bible under his arm in high school.

Imagine that and I didn't know that for a long time. I just thought he was

carrying around a dictionary. And one day I asked him, hey, why are you carrying a dictionary around all the time?

Why do you really need that? And he said, no, dude, this is an addiction. this is a Bible, which again just kind of blew my mind.

Because I grew up in a rather secular household, we didn't really go to church or believe in anything particular. We were just kind of like very pragmatic about how we live life and that's how I approached life as I approach it coming from a scientific point of view.

Basically my cosmology was that what I see before me and what science tells me is what's true and what's accurate.

I'm not going to posit supernatural entities and gods because I don't experience them and they seem like there are myths or fictions from the past that people take on as traditions and as dogmas.

So that was kind of my position.

But now what started to happen was I started having debates and arguments, intellectual

discussions with Tiago and also his friends who are also kind of in his social circle of religious

...