Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. Great Courses, yes. There was one particular professor. His name is Bob Brier, and he was—he’s an Egyptologist, lives on Long Island where I’m from, and he—I mean, it’s a massive thing. It’s like 24 hours- of lectures about the entire history of Egypt, and it was fascinating, ’cause he’s such a good storyteller. And I was reading… As a kid I could never figure out if I liked the medieval period better or the Roman period better. I was constantly going back and forth, and I stumbled across a book which referred to the medieval Roman Empire, and it was a bit like discovering your favorite TV show had 12 extra seasons you didn’t know about. And they were just as good. So I… It really was a labor of love. I would not shut up about The Byzantine Empire. So my older brother, we would go on walks together and I would be like, “And then Justinian, you know, da, da, da.” And he stopped me, he said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I have no idea, like, I need a framework. Give me a framework for this.” So I went home and I recorded myself giving a framework, which turned out to be episode one, but I think I did it in a British accent, a really bad British accent. I was just messing around. And I gave him the… Luckily, I did it in my regular voice as well as this goofy accent, and I gave it to him and then I forgot about it. And that summer I was on a dig in Petra excavating the Temple of the Winged Lions, which was like a dream come true for me. And I get this email from my brother and he said, “Oh, I just submitted it as a podcast.” So he had to tell me what that was. But I was going for, to the extent that I had put thought into it, I was going for kind of a longer form lecture Great Courses series on the Byzantines. And then a bunch of people started emailing me saying, “When’s episode two coming out?” Oh, okay. So I guess there has to be an episode two. And then the thing kinda snowballed from there. I had no idea what I was doing. Your brother, by the way, is super tech savvy.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.