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I'm Christa Tippett and this is On Being's Unheard Cuts. Up next, my unedited conversation with

social psychologist, Mazarin Benaji, a pioneer of the science of implicit bias. There is a shorter

produced version of this conversation at Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen.

This is actually interesting. I think I'm actually making a worse

problem because it's creating a whistle. Okay. All right, sorry, we tried. Thank you, Graham.

Christa has all kinds of fancy buttons that he can try to fade out there. All right, well,

this is fun, so let's get going. I don't want to actually, I don't want to do much more substantive

until we really get into this. I don't know if you know this, but I start on my interviews by

inquiring about the religious or spiritual background of your childhood. And I wonder how,

you know, however you would, however you would define that now. Oh, I didn't know that, but that's

that will take us an hour, but because I come from, can I speak? Yes, yes. Okay. I come from

the world's, one of the world's minority religions, but that also happens to be of great interest,

interest to scholars of religion. I was born and raised as a restaurant.

Yes. So restaurantism is probably the world's oldest monotheistic religion.

It predates Judaism by about 1500 years. Some scholars will argue. And it's a religion that

actually dominated much of Central Asia for many centuries. And when the Islamic invasions of

Central Asia occurred, and most people were converted to Islam, those folks who lived in what was

then Persia and wished to continue to practice their original religion left Persia and traveled

...