Presenting: Book Keeper

0:02Hello, this is Andy Mills, Editor-in-Chief here at Longview, and I'm here today with a couple of announcements and with something special that we wanted to share. You've likely noticed that it's been a few weeks since we published any follow-up episodes to The Last Invention, and that's because we are right now in the midst of working on a brand new series that we hope to have ready by this fall. It is a complicated and tricky story about one specific way that the AI revolution underway right now is likely to reshape one of the most fundamental aspects of human life. Yes, I know that that is a bit vague, but we're keeping a tight lid on things while we're still busy out there reporting.

0:46But then this leads me to the second thing I wanted to share today, which is the first episode of a new podcast that our team has cooked up called Bookkeeper. And this is a show that with no hyperbole I can say is unlike anything you've heard before. And that is in part because it is hosted by Megan Phelps Roper. Megan Phelps Roper is an author. She was the host of our series, The Witch Drowns of J.K. Rowling. and she is a former member of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. I bet there's at least a few people who are listening to this who are like, hang on, the last invention was produced in part by a former member of that God Hates Fags church?

1:32And the answer is yes, you are correct. And she left that church over 10 years ago at this point. And right now, she's not even what you would traditionally think of as a believer or as a religious person, but she's been thinking a lot about the stories of the Bible, the stories that she was raised with, the stories that have shaped so much of Western culture. She's been thinking a lot about the power that they still hold on her as an individual, but also on our society, on our world. And so in Bookkeeper, Megan is going to tell a different story from the Bible each episode and grapple with what, if any wisdom there is, to be gleaned from these ancient stories.

2:20Now, I know that some of you are saying, I don't get it. I came here to learn more about AGI, the AI revolution, what's up with all this Bible stuff. But I really hope that you'll give it a chance because this project that Megan is experimenting with, I think the timing of it is really powerful. You know, one of the reasons that our company, Longview, exists is because we really believe that we need stories that help us take the long view. Too much of the media is focused on what happened five minutes ago and what might happen in the next election cycle. And all the work that we do is attempting to help pull back from this moment to understand it in its broader context.

3:03Take the long view of history to understand the backstory to all the conflicts that we're engaged in right now and also to take a long view forward with the knowledge that it is the values that we hold. It's the decisions that we make today that are going to shape the world to come. I think that's especially necessary when it comes to how we think of creating a powerful artificial intelligence. And so I think that Megan's project of lovingly, thoughtfully looking at these ancient stories from the Bible and trying in good faith to grapple with what values are in there, what wisdom is in there, really no matter what you believe about God, about religion, about AGI, I think you'll also come to see it as really timely and welcomed.

3:50And so now, without further ado, Megan Phelps Roper, the bookkeeper.

3:59Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas presents the Old School Baptist Hour with Pastor Fred Phelps. Scripture teaches, and therefore we believe and preach, that most of mankind is doomed and damned and predestinated to split hell wide open the instant they die.

4:23Megan Phelps-Roper:Proverbs 1 says, How long, you simpletons? Will you love simplicity? And you fools hate knowledge, and you scorners delight in your scorning. That is the message that we have to these people. Obey God or destruction. God hates me, but only because I'm a heathen. That's it. Those are your choices.

4:44Megan Phelps-Roper:When I was 26 years old, I found myself sitting alongside my sister across the table from someone I'd been fighting with for years. This was a person I had wholeheartedly believed was on the opposite side of this epic battle between good and evil. I had been, until very recently, a zealous member of the Westboro Baptist Church. God hates the world And all her people Known around the world for our condemnation of everyone. one who wasn't part of our community. If they're offended by the judgments that we make, that we make according to God's standard, then that is a clear indication that they hate God's word, obviously, and that they're headed for hell.

5:33Megan Phelps-Roper:And this man across the table, his name was David, and I'd been certain that he was evil. He was a well-known Jewish blogger, and since he had rejected Jesus, I knew he was going to hell. For years, I had told him so, on Twitter, by email, and later in person, where I would protest events where he was speaking. One of the signs I held said, simply and directly, you're going to hell. Meanwhile, my sisters said, a little more colorfully, your rabbi is a whore. But then, in what remains the most difficult decision I have ever had to make in my life, I left the church alongside my sister. I left knowing that my family, who had been my entire world, who I loved so much, who I still love so much, would cut us off forever.

6:28Megan Phelps-Roper:And we didn't know where to go or what to do with our lives. But David, despite all the vile things I had said to him and about him, he invited us into his community. He fed us. He hugged us. He invited us to sit down with him at this table where, with all we had in us, we wept. We had left the Westboro Baptist Church because we had come to believe that the church was wrong about many things, that we had been wrong about many things, that we had been needlessly cruel and belligerent. And we wept because of what it cost us to leave. the siblings who had been our best friends, the parents with seemingly boundless energy, the mom who would greet me with a huge smile and a hi doll, singing 70s love songs to us while she made breakfast, the father who'd scooped us into his arms as children, zooming us around the house for a helicopter ride that landed in our beds, where he would perform nighttime stories like one man plays.

7:38And now, sitting here with David,

7:41Megan Phelps-Roper:We mourned that we would be cut off from them for the rest of our days, left in a world we had spent our whole lives antagonizing. What hope was there for people like us? I felt like I was stepping into an abyss. We had betrayed our family and everyone we cared about. We had forsaken every principle that our parents had dedicated their lives to teaching us. The sense of loss was so profound, I couldn't breathe. But our new friend had a different view of what my sister and I had just done. You left out a principle, David said, pretty much the same principles you were raised with. And your departure was both a rejection and an affirmation of everything you were taught.

8:24You are your parents' children. In a way, he said, leaving Westboro Baptist Church was the most Westboro Baptist Church thing you could have done. They're the ones who taught you to stand up for what you believe in, no matter what it cost you. They taught you that. They just never imagined you'd be standing up to them. It shocked me, in the most hopeful way, to hear those words. I was still filled with uncertainty and grief and doubt. But David gave me the first inkling that, in spite of all we'd lost, there were still aspects of our old lives beautiful, important, valuable ones that we could keep.

9:15It's been over a decade since I sat at that table but I've never stopped exploring that idea. When it comes to my past to that place, to those people to the lessons I learned from them What exactly can I keep? What traditions and family routines can I give to my two young children? What do I tell them about that life?

9:44Megan Phelps-Roper:But lately, another question has come into focus for me. What about the Bible? It was the backbone of my life for so long. My family gathered together every day for as far back as I can remember to read its stories aloud together. We memorized its verses. We modeled our every action and belief on what we believed it demanded. Its characters were our heroes and our villains. Its lessons were our wisdom. And I also just loved it. And yet it's that same book and my family's very rigid, very sincere beliefs about that book that is the source of our estrangement and my deepest heartache. I also share many of the objections that have led others away from their churches in droves over the past century.

10:41Megan Phelps-Roper:People who dislike intolerance, who are skeptical of the authority claimed by religious institutions that have abused it. People who resist being told in absolute terms how to live, what to believe, and who to be. And even though I'm not a Christian in the traditional sense, not a believer in that way, in spite of myself, I can't seem to give up on the Bible. Its language and ideas and stories are so deeply embedded in my psyche that they still come to me unbidden all the time as I make my way through life. I have a daughter now, a little girl, who is seven years old and full of questions about the world and about life and about me and my past and my family, who she doesn't know.

11:32Megan Phelps-Roper:And when I reach for the words to answer her questions, I find that so many of the ideas come directly from the Bible. A source of grief for me, yes, but also strength. It's a book that has given me understanding and insight about what people are capable of, these figures who embody both moral goodness and depravity, a framework for reckoning with the human condition. And I find myself compelled to revisit these pages and search for answers, which parts belong to the life I left behind, and which parts carry a wisdom that I never want to lose. And of course, while I understand the ways in which my story is unique to me, I also know that we've all been handed a history by our families and our communities and our countries that we did not choose.

12:30And each of us must decide what to carry forward and what to leave behind. And this grappling with the past? That is universal.

13:11One of my favorite things about the Bible is that it is full of characters of all kinds. Sometimes an entire life is reduced to a single scene, like the young man who falls asleep during an extra long sermon and, since he happens to be sitting in a third-story window, falls out and dies, is miraculously brought back to life by the preacher, who then goes right back to talking until dawn. Eutychus is the name of the kid who falls out of the window, by the way. And this story is all we know about him. But then there are characters like Joseph, a man whose life story unfolds in vivid detail across many chapters with a lot of depth and nuance and color.

13:54We witness him from youth to old age through these incredible plot twists, through triumph and anguish. And he He is a person who, even though he has much cause for despair throughout his life, somehow never seems to succumb to it. He never seems to become warped by the unjust suffering he is subjected to. First and foremost, by people who should have been his protectors, his family, but who become his abusers instead.

14:24Megan Phelps-Roper:So, Joseph. His story is found in the very first book of the Bible, Genesis. It comes at the very end of that book, and it tells the story of how one family, this family that will become the nation of Israel, comes to be living in Egypt. And that matters because the next book of the Bible, Exodus, is the story of their descendants being enslaved in Egypt and eventually led out of there by Moses in this grand narrative, the Ten Plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, which is a story that a lot of people are at least vaguely familiar with. So Joseph's story is the bridge. He explains how this family came to be in Egypt, and Moses explains how they got out.

15:10Megan Phelps-Roper:And just to help orient us in time a little bit, this was the world of the ancient Near East, nearly 4 ,000 years ago in the Bronze Age. This was more than 1 ,000 years before Plato and democracy in Athens, more than 1 ,500 years before the Roman Empire. In Joseph's time, people tended to live close to the land, herding sheep and goats, tending small plots of grain. But there were also cities by then, and over the course of Joseph's story, he goes from being one of those animal herders living in a small village to an accidental leader in a great city. But to really understand the story of Joseph, you have to begin with the family that he's born into, a family that is full of strife.

15:55Megan Phelps-Roper:Joseph's father is the patriarch Jacob, and Joseph is one of 12 sons. And those 12 sons come from four different women, most importantly from two sisters who are locked in a long, painful rivalry. How these two sisters come to be married to the same man is its own drama-filled story that maybe we'll dive into another time. But what's important to know now is that Jacob only marries the older sister, Leah, because he's tricked into it. He doesn't love her. He loves Rachel, the younger sister, who is strikingly beautiful. But as the years go by, it's Leah who gives birth to son after son after son, while the beloved Rachel remains barren, unable to conceive.

16:46And this is a source of great suffering for her. At one point, she cries out to her husband, give me children or else I die. Her anguish is visible and humiliating. And then finally, after Jacob has 10 sons already, the Bible says that God has mercy on Rachel and causes her to bear a son. And that son is Joseph.

17:14Megan Phelps-Roper:His father, Jacob, is thrilled about this boy and makes no attempt to hide it. He loves Joseph more than all of his other sons, and he even gives him a special garment, this coat of many colors, that is an unmistakable sign of his favoritism. Now, you may have heard of this coat. It's probably among the more well-known coats in coat history.

17:45Megan Phelps-Roper:It has inspired a hit Broadway musical.

17:53Megan Phelps-Roper:And it's featured in songs by artists like Dolly Parton.

17:59In this story, it's meant to be a symbol of a father's love for his son. But for Joseph's brothers, this coat is a reminder of their visceral hatred of him. And then, when Joseph is 17, he makes it worse when he tells his brothers about this dream that he has.

18:20Megan Phelps-Roper:And it's good to remember that at this time and place in history, society gave great weight to dreams. They were widely believed to be messages from the divine world. And it was a time when, as we'll hear later in the story, one simple dream could impact the future of a whole civilization. In Joseph's dream, all his brothers are working in the field, bundling wheat. And Joseph's bundle stands up straight, while those of his brothers fall to the ground and bow down to Joseph's. Now again, Joseph is the 11th son. All these brothers are older than him. And by custom, that means he's presumed to be kind of lesser than them.

19:02You presume less inheritance, that sort of thing. So you can read Joseph sharing this dream as naivete or youthful foolishness or maybe arrogance. We don't actually know. What matters, though, is that this family has no capacity to hold a dream like this. It only makes his brothers hate him all the more. Now, not long after the dream, Joseph's brothers have to travel to another city to feed their father's animals, and Joseph is sent to check on them. So he goes, and as his brothers see him approaching, wearing that coat, they mock him among themselves. Behold, this dreamer cometh. And they decide that they are going to kill him.

19:53Then they're going to throw his lifeless body down into a pit, and they're going to blame his absence on some wild beast overtaking him. And you can see how here, in this place, far from home with no one looking over their shoulder, they might think that they can just get away with it. But at the last moment, one brother intervenes. No, don't kill him. just throw him into this pit and be done with him. Because he secretly plans to rescue Joseph later and bring him back to their father. The others agree. So when Joseph arrives, they seize him, they strip that colorful coat off of him, and they cast him into this pit.

20:39But that planned rescue, it never happens. Because not long after, they see a group of slave traders passing by, which gives one of the brothers an idea. Why kill Joseph, he argues, when we can profit off of him? So they sell Joseph as a slave for 20 pieces of silver, and the slavers take him to Egypt.

21:03Megan Phelps-Roper:Once Joseph is gone, the brothers take that coat of many colors, the symbol of everything they hate about Joseph. They smear it with animal blood. They return home, and they say to their father, we found this. Is this your son's coat or not? And Jacob buys this story. He weeps and mourns for a long time. He says that he will go to his grave mourning his son. For all he knows, Joseph is dead, and now his brothers are forever free of him. Or so they believe.

21:57As for Joseph, he has suddenly gone from being the favorite son to being betrayed, captured, and enslaved. He is taken from his homeland and brought to Egypt, where he is sold to a rich man named Potiphar, who is Pharaoh's captain of the guard. But he doesn't despair. Instead, the Bible says that he serves his master well.

22:25Megan Phelps-Roper:And over the course of weeks and months, or maybe years, Joseph's work and his commitment are rewarded. He becomes his master's confidant, and he is charged with running all of his affairs. The Bible says that Potiphar trusts Joseph so implicitly that he doesn't even know what he owns or what he possesses, except the food that he's eating on the plate in front of him. Everything seems to be going as well as it can for Joseph, until Potiphar's wife casts her eye upon him, and time and time again, she tries to seduce him. He repeatedly rebuffs her, and he says to her, listen, my master has put everything that he owns into my hands, and he has not held anything back from me except you.

23:18How could I possibly repay him with a betrayal like this? Or, to quote the Bible directly, how then can I do this great wickedness? But Potiphar's wife, she wants that wickedness. And she keeps pushing, day after day after day, for him to sleep with her. And then one day, they're alone in the house together. And this time, she catches him by his garment and demands that he sleep with her. Lie with me, she says. And he gets away so fast that his garment is still in her hand as he flees, a piece of evidence that she then uses to accuse him of trying to rape her. And when Potiphar hears this accusation, he takes his wife at her word, and he throws Joseph into prison.

24:11Joseph's act of integrity costs him all of the favor that he's worked so hard to earn back. And he's gone from being cast into a pit to being cast into a dungeon. But the pattern persists. Because even in prison, Joseph finds a way to prosper. The keeper of the prison notices exactly what Potiphar noticed before him, that Joseph can be relied upon. And soon, Joseph is placed in charge of the other prisoners. The keeper concerns himself with nothing under Joseph's supervision. And it's here, still imprisoned, still unjustly accused, still forgotten, that Joseph begins to interpret dreams. Two of Pharaoh's officials come to be jailed alongside him, and each has a troubling dream that he can't understand.

25:07Joseph interprets their dreams correctly. And, exactly as he predicts, one man is executed for his crimes, and the other is restored to his position. Before that man is released, Joseph asks for one thing, that he be remembered, that his name be mentioned to Pharaoh, that someone finally speak the truth of what happened to him, stolen out of the land of the Hebrews, sold into slavery, and unjustly imprisoned in a dungeon, having done nothing to deserve this treatment. The man agrees. But once he's restored to Pharaoh's house, he forgets Joseph entirely.

25:48Megan Phelps-Roper:Two full years pass, and Joseph remains in prison all that time. Until Pharaoh himself has a dream. And I want to pause here, because if we rush past this moment, we miss what I think is the heart of the story. Joseph has now spent years in what I think of as the long middle, the part of his life where nothing is resolved, where there is no moral arc yet. There's no visible redemption. He is stuck in this prison, cut off from the only world he's ever known. He has no family, no legal standing, no power. And what's striking to me is not just that Joseph survives it, but how he does. He's operating within these very narrow and difficult confines of a life that he did not choose.