"Heaven is for Real" with Adrian Daub

If your four-year-old told you about a trip to heaven, would you believe them? For a pastor named Todd Burpo, the answer was yes. In 2010, his book Heaven Is For Real—co-authored by Lynn Vincent—became a runaway bestseller. This week, Sarah tells In Bed with the Right co-host Adrian Daub the story of this strange little book, and how it reveals more about us than it does the afterlife. Digressions include Shakerism, The Big Lebowski, and the ongoing debate around pets in heaven. Send your submissions for our Halloween Listener Spectacular (scary stories or Halloween nostalgia) to [email protected] before August 31st! More Adrian Daub: http://www.adriandaub.com Adrian’s new book What Tech Calls Governing comes out August 18th Listen to In Bed with the Right Produced + edited by ⁠⁠Miranda Zickler⁠⁠ More You're Wrong About: ⁠⁠Bonus Episodes on Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠ Buy cute merch⁠⁠ ⁠⁠YWA on Instagram⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

  Well, God wanted to make an angel look like what your son would expect and not one that's continuously on fire, as described in the literature of your religion.

• 0:18Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we're talking about the 2010 book and runaway bestseller, Heaven is for Real. And yes, it was published as nonfiction. We were talking about it with Adrian Daub, co-host of the In Bed with the Right podcast. Adrian also teaches comparative literature at Stanford, and he also has a new book coming out called What Tech Calls Governing. It's out on August 18th, and this critic is calling it the nonfiction horror hit of the summer. If you want to listen to our bonus episodes, we have a new one coming out this month where I do a little book club with our beloved friend Jamie Loftus, and we talk about Mary Jo Batafuoco's memoir,

• 1:01Sarah Marshall?

  which is called Getting It Through My Thick Skull. We talked about it a little bit in my lightning round episode with Chelsea last month, and after I bought it up, I knew that it was time to read it. And if I want to understand anything better, then the best thing for me to do is talk about it with Jamie. And so we did. I also wanted to tell you that later on in this episode, at about 56 minutes, we talk a little bit about pregnancy loss as it pertains to the story in the book we're discussing. And that conversation goes until about the hour mark, and then we're back talking about Christian movie making and inevitably Kevin Sorbo. So if that's something you want to skip, that is where

• 1:42Sarah Marshall?

  you can skip it. Also, we have another listener special episode coming out in October, and we're asking for your Halloween memories and your scary stories for it. You can send a voice memo about three minutes or less to [email protected]. And I will tell you my favorite Halloween memory, which is that when I was in, I think, first grade, I was going to go as a monarch butterfly. I had been given some butterfly wings, I think, by one of my brothers. And I wanted to wear a black bodysuit so I could be a beautiful sleek monarch butterfly. And because it was late October in Oregon, and we were going to be trick or treating after dark on a houseboat mortgage, my mom, I think

• 2:24Sarah Marshall?

  reasonably at this point in my life, wanted me to wear a black ski suit instead so that I could stay warm. And somehow, I got my way and got to wear a unitard and be what I felt to be a theatrically appropriate butterfly. And the thrill of getting my way that night is something that has never entirely left me. So that's my Halloween memory. We want your scary stories. We want your not so scary stories. We want to just hear your memories of Halloween. And so if you have some you want to share with us and perhaps

• 3:00Sarah Marshall?

  hear in our Halloween episode, send them on to us at [email protected], S-L-O-P-P-Y-A-N-D-A-L-I-V-E at gmail.com. And if you haven't watched The Stepford Wives, which is the movie of the book that that quote is from, then that's my recommendation for your Halloween viewing, too. I know we're a little early, but it's Halloween in my heart. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for listening. Thank you for continuing through these lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer with us. And now, here's your episode. Adrian, how are you doing?

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Doing good, doing good. We had a couple of cold days in San Francisco, but now it's beautiful out, and I'm feeling summery and ready to embark on a journey with you that I'm not entirely sure where we're going.

• 3:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I'm bringing you in for a surprise topic, AKA, I wasn't sure which idea I could commit to in the time I had to prepare. And I'm bringing you a total surprise today, and I hope you like it.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  I'm excited.

• 4:10Sarah Marshall?

  I feel like it's also, it suddenly just now occurring to me that you might have talked about it on your own show, but it's too late to worry about that now. And what is your show, by the way?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  I'm not worried. My show is In Bed with the Right.

• 4:22Sarah Marshall?

  Which is a very triggering title.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Yes, it's true.

• 4:26Sarah Marshall?

  By the way.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  I co-hosted it with the indomitable, the amazing Maura Donigan.

• 4:29Sarah Marshall?

  The luminous.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  We usually talk about sex and gender and right wing conceptions thereof, and how those conceptions really continue to fuck up our lives. And it's a lot of fun, and you've been on it a couple of times. And each time, we've told you, you don't have to prepare.

• 4:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I had such a good time.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  And every time I've been on your show, I've come like, super prepared. And so this is new for me. And I'm, I'm not handling it all together well, if I can be honest.

• 5:01Sarah Marshall?

  I love to freak people out on this show.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:05Sarah Marshall?

  Well, okay, well, let me, should I just tell you, or should I give you a hint? Which would you like?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  No, no, just tell me. Just tear off that Band-Aid. I'm like, just so I can, if you don't want a guest to have a nervous breakdown, live on air.

• 5:16Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, Adrian, do you remember perhaps being in an airport or a Barnes and Noble in the year of our Lord 2010, even more so 2011, and seeing a book with a smiling toddler on it? And the book was called Heaven is for Real.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Yes, I do. And I must admit, I haven't thought of it since 2011. Like, for a brief moment, I was like, oh, shit, I haven't. And then like, no, no, no, no, no. Yes, it's coming back. I can picture the cover.

• 5:49Sarah Marshall?

  You probably saw it while on your way to a destination wedding that took place in a barn.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  In a barn, probably Poconos or Catskills.

• 5:56Sarah Marshall?

  We were obsessed with getting married in barns back then. I think it was in response to the Great Recession, as so many of our trends are as millennials. We're like, well, let's get married in a fucking barn.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  But not in like, a cool rural area, but in like, a rural area where you're like, why are we here?

• 6:13Sarah Marshall?

  Where you're like, giving your friends the deliverance experience.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:17Sarah Marshall?

  There should be more wedding-related horror movies. It's a very underexploited corner of the market.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  It is true. It is true. Sort of a Midsommar, but with like, more corduroy pants.

• 6:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, Midsommar is pretty wedding-y.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:29Sarah Marshall?

  But, okay, this is a book I've been thinking about for a while. I first read it in, I think, 2019, and I was kind of considering it as a show topic. And I remember thinking like, okay, but isn't this like, a bit thin for a show where it's a book called Heaven is for Real, and your argument is what, that we're wrong about that heaven is for real? And I kind of nagged myself out of it. But revisiting it now.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Big if true.

• 6:55Sarah Marshall?

  Huge if true. And who can say, is the thing. Apparently, this kid, allegedly. But when I was just thinking about like, stuff that I felt sufficiently passionate about and had thought about enough in my life to talk about with you today, and also trying to narrow it down to like, something kind of like The Hitler Diaries, which we talked about when you came on not too long ago, is like, a hoax memoir and a narrative that people really like, had a strong desire for, and a desire to be real. This really came to mind.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  So this is basically Michelle Remembers, in brackets, Heaven?

• 7:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it is very much like Michelle Remembers. That really struck me a couple times revisiting this. And one of the reasons is that the publisher has this approach of like, well, you know, I believe that the people who are talking to me, in this case, this kid who's 11 when the book comes out, his name is Colton Burpo. And I'm not going to make fun of that name.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  No.

• 7:56Sarah Marshall?

  But it's hard to say it in a way that doesn't make it sound like I am. But I'm going to do my best. Because it's just like, it's just cute. It can't help but be. But it's the Burpo family. They live in Nebraska. They live in like, the southwest-ish corner of Nebraska, where you're basically in Colorado. And it's just like, you know, a lot of fields.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:19Sarah Marshall?

  A lot of grain. And they live in a town of about 2,000. And Colton's dad, Todd, is the author of the book, along with a kind of co-writer, ghostwriter, Lynn Vincent, who at the time, probably her biggest book aside from this, was Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Wow, okay.

• 8:42Sarah Marshall?

  Another time capsule.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Wait, can I just ask you, so now that, when you said Todd Burpo?

• 8:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  I was picturing Greg Kinnear. Was this made into a movie?

• 8:52Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, it was made into a movie, and it was Greg Kinnear.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Fuck, because I have seen this. I remember it was sort of in my world as a curio, like in bookstores, you know, on bookshelves at airports. I'm sure I saw people reading it. But like, yeah, like, I don't think this is one of those books where anyone was like, oh, you gotta check it out. Like, even like, someone's parent.

• 9:17Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And yet, it also did sell by a lot of word of mouth, because maybe not, you know, the word of mouth that you and I were experiencing at the time. Nobody told me to read it. And, and what was I reading in 2011? I was in an MFA program, so I was reading a lot of Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Of course, gotta.

• 9:34Sarah Marshall?

  Or Flannery O'Carver, as a friend of mine called them, and was learning to write great short stories about, you know, a preacher stealing a girl's wooden leg. You know, that was, that's the world of literary fiction. And some figures for you, this book was published in November of 2010. It had an initial print run of 40,000. It was published by a Christian publisher, which may make you think, it made me think that, you know, this is probably like, some small underdog press. No, there are some pretty big Christian publishers.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:09Sarah Marshall?

  The way that Heaven is for Real becomes a book is that Todd is connected through a friend to a Christian literary agent who works at a Christian agency. And this is just something that my brain hadn't computed. But Christian publishing was, in 2024, an $820 million industry.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 10:32Sarah Marshall?

  And then another figure I have is that in 2025, according to Publishers Weekly Religion Books, which is, in the United States, is mostly Christian publishing, was a $926 million industry. So very close to a billion. And do you want to guess what the total sales in 2025 for print books were in the United States?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  For all of them?

• 10:53Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Or, you know, for like, trade print books, basically.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, no idea.

• 10:58Sarah Marshall?

  $762 million.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 11:02Sarah Marshall?

  So a smaller market than, than religious publishing, and a smaller market than Christian publishing specifically, based on that previous figure. So Heaven is for Real comes out with an initial print run of 40,000. And how many copies do you think it's sold by 2014? It's published in late 2010.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  I mean, given what you've just told me about the Christian bookmark and what I know about the Christian bookmark, that books I've never heard of, like weird parenting manuals by James Dobbs or whatever, sell millions of copies. And also the fact that I think a lot of this stuff is bulk buying by mega churches.

• 11:36Sarah Marshall?

  Very good point. Yeah, there is a lot of that.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go for five to 10 million. Does that sound right?

• 11:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it's 10 million.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 11:45Sarah Marshall?

  So there you go.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that I think there's something about, you know, the copies of these kinds of books that you encounter in the wild tend to be not the moneymakers. I think it's very frequently like, these are institutional buyers, like a lot of right wing publishing. And, you know, the same way that the movies sort of tend to do well, like I think that movie also did well. And I think the movies tend to do well because people are driven there by their congregations. It's not like individual ticket buyers being like, should I watch Final Destination 5 or whatever would have been out in 2011? Or Heaven is For Real? It's like, no, like, we're going as a group, like, our church group is going, or the youth pastor is taking the youths, so whatever.

• 12:26Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and yeah, and with this idea that like, there's a culture war going on. And so you have to

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:31Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, organize in that sense as consumers. And I think there was also, I think it was a combination of that, of kind of organic word of mouth, and also, yeah, what you're talking about, the sort of like, cultural astroturfing that churches and mega churches and a lot of Christian cultural institutions take part in.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically, like, people like, go to these movies to make a point, which is that like, Heaven is For Real is, you know, a godly movie, but then like, you know, Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit or whatever else came out like 2014, was like, is too woke, or is like, too secular in its energy.

• 13:08Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  So you're also trying to make a point, sort of pushing that up in the charts.

• 13:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and there's, there's an interesting, well, I mean, there's a lot behind its appeal. And one of them is that there are actually a ton of books written by people who claim to have gone to heaven briefly.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  I was just gonna ask you that, because I feel like I can't name one, but that feels like a genre I've encountered before.

• 13:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. Well, do you read a lot of kind of like, religious, you know, grifting or on the bubble of grifting type literature?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Only if it's highly political for the podcast, but not otherwise, yeah.

• 13:39Sarah Marshall?

  Not for your leisure time?

• 13:41Speaker 01

  No, no, not usually a near death experience kind of guy. I mean, I'd be open to it, but I just don't read much about it.

• 13:48Sarah Marshall?

  No, me either. And I'm surprised by this being such a big subgenre, I guess, really. And so this is a list of titles from a New York Times Book Review article by Robert Gottlieb in 2014. These are all heaven books. Heaven is For Real, Proof of Heaven, To Heaven and Back, Nine Days in Heaven, 90 Minutes in Heaven, A Glimpse of Heaven, My Time in Heaven.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Okay, that just sounds dirty. I'm sorry. 90 Minutes in Heaven just sounds dirty.

• 14:18Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah, now that you say that. 90 minutes, honey. When will the heaven begin? I like that one. Waking Up in Heaven, Afterlife, What You Really Want to Know About Heaven, The Hereafter, and Near Death Experiences. A Vision from Heaven, My Journey to Heaven, Flight to Heaven, Appointments with Heaven, Hello from Heaven, The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, Revealing Heaven. And then he goes on, others whose titles don't include the H-word, I Saw the Lights, Saved by the Light, Embraced by the Light, and so on and so forth.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  There's a secular version of this, too, or attempts to kind of secularize this. One book I do remember, which also I think was adapted into a film, is What Dreams May Come.

• 15:04Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Right?

• 15:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Who's that by? Oh, by Richard Matheson.

• 15:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, yeah, I love Richard Matheson. I still haven't seen that one.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  It's, it's not good.

• 15:13Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Like, I think the attempts to, like, they probably don't go far enough to detheologize the book and end up with this kind of absolute tearjerker.

• 15:25Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, and so, and this line between secular and religious entertainment is very interesting in this book, which is like a crossover mainstream success, right? Like, it's put out by a religious publisher. But it really, it makes a big splash, and it's adapted into like, a legit movie, made by people who know how to operate their cameras and sound equipment. And it doesn't even have Kirk Cameron in it, which is hard to get him to not be in your movie, I feel like, especially at this time period.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 15:54Sarah Marshall?

  And makes over $100 million. So, you know, pretty good.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  $100 million?

• 16:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, around 100 million, or a tiny bit over. I saw 101 was the figure.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Jesus. Wait, that's like, like, is that normal for these movies? Or is this the, the most ever?

• 16:11Sarah Marshall?

  That's like, the second highest grossing Christian movie, according to one review I read.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  After The Passion of the Christ, I'm guessing, if that counts.

• 16:19Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, I know. Yeah, I couldn't actually find the number one. And then I wonder how that's classified based on like, which studio made it and stuff. But like, yeah, I certainly hope it's classified as a religious film. Haven't seen that one. I like the Saw movies, but I have my limits, you know?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  So who's in this thing?

• 16:39Sarah Marshall?

  Well, the movie has Greg Kinnear, as discussed.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:42Sarah Marshall?

  And

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Is Todd Burpo?

• 16:44Sarah Marshall?

  It also contrives a storyline as Todd Burpo, and it contrives a storyline as well, where there's like, some conflict, which there isn't really in the book. And so the, the basics of the book are that Todd's son, Colton, has appendicitis. He has a burst appendix, which is misdiagnosed initially for quite a while. He's three years old.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Another anxiety of a parent.

• 17:04Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And so by the time it's, I mean, it's like, it's a horrifying story, because by the time he's correctly diagnosed, I think it takes several days for the right diagnosis. So he's, you know, according to the book, and this seems completely credible to me, the medical staff where he's being treated have extremely low expectations of his survival and are not trying to give the parents, you know, really, any hope, according to Todd.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  False or otherwise, yeah.

• 17:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, exactly. Right. Because it's, because the, you know, the situation is, is extremely dire. And yet he does survive. And months later, according to Todd, he starts gradually talking about going to heaven while he was being worked on by doctors. And he initially says that he saw himself being worked on by doctors, and he saw Todd and his mother, Sonia, Colton's mother, Sonia, in two different rooms. And Todd is, according to the book, immediately amazed by this, because how could Colton know that they were in two separate rooms, and that Todd was praying at the time?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 18:13Sarah Marshall?

  And a lot of these things, this happens like, probably 30 times in the book, where Colton will say something, and Todd will be like, there's no way he could have known that, or no way he could have guessed that. And I'm like, well, there are some ways that he could have guessed that.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. A pastor praying during a high pressure situation? Like, yeah.

• 18:33Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Like, the odds are actually very good on that one.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:36Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And this gets back to the satanic panic, because, and to Michelle Remembers, because there's this idea, and Michelle Remembers, and in this book, put forth by its publisher of like, well, these people seem like good, sensible people, and they clearly believe what they're saying. So, ah. And then when people want to defend it more than that, the approach is to say, well, you know, this is a, a pure, innocent soul who visited heaven, and clearly is telling the truth, and couldn't possibly be lying. So we have to trust this account as, as the truth. It's interesting that this sort of pure, simple person argument gets applied to both a three-year-old boy and a woman in her twenties, in the case of Michelle Remembers, but you know, whatever.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:20Sarah Marshall?

  But it's, also, you know, it gets described by Todd gradually in the book as sort of something that gives comfort to people once they start to hear about it, as proof that heaven really does exist, that it really is for real. And that's how, what the book is sold on. And the book basically details. And it's like, and Lynn Vincent is good at her job. Like, she, according to a New Yorker piece I read about her by Ariel Levy, she learned from James Patterson to make every scene into its own chapter. And so the book is like, 35 really short chapters.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 19:53Sarah Marshall?

  Where something interesting happens every chapter. And you're like, well, I might as well read another chapter.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:58Sarah Marshall?

  And according to Lynn in that article, you know, she's had fans come up to her and tell her, you know, my husband read your book, and he's never read a book before, you know? Because it's just like, it's extremely accessible in that way. And it gets to the point immediately, or pretty immediately.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  It also, I mean, like, the, the idea of having, like, or a book sort of telling you that its own message has all these salubrious effects, and that's why it needs to be told, right?

• 20:25Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Like, the, the hearing of the story sort of being included in it, it's a real, it's a real feature of self-help stories, and of self-help books, where it is like, you know, and I told him this simple fable, and then he turned his life around. Now I'm gonna print it for you, and you can buy it 10 million times.

• 20:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it is pretty, it's kind of, it's self-helpy, right? Because it's like, you will read this book, and this book will have a function in your life. And in this case, it's to teach you that heaven is real. And, you know, the response to the book really gets into this, as it goes out into the world and people read it. And also, as, you know, some Christians read it and begin to push back on it. And, you know, Todd Burpo is an evangelical Protestant, and other evangelicals are like, well, you know, a lot of what your son is saying is not actually in the Bible. Like, he mentions angels having wings, and angels actually don't have wings in the Bible. They didn't start having wings in our depictions of them until I think about the fourth sanctuary.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Oh, did not know that.

• 21:26Sarah Marshall?

  Of the common era, I think. And at that same time, it was just as common, if not more common, to show demons with wings. For a while, it was kind of like, an equal opportunity accoutrement. You might recall that Pazuzu, who is the guy who caused all that trouble in The Exorcist, is a, is a, he's a little winged guy.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:48Sarah Marshall?

  With a big penis.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Got to have that.

• 21:53Sarah Marshall?

  You gotta have wings, so you can, you know, you can

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Swing brain.

• 22:00Sarah Marshall?

  That's what demons are really up to, you know? They're not really trying to cause that much trouble. They're just rude, probably. But yeah, wings have not always been like a particularly godly thing to have. You can just as well have them if you're like a demon of the wind. But then, you know, they become something that we now totally associate with angels. And of course, you know, you'll also recall that we have like kind of different descriptions of biblical angels, right? Like they can show up and give you news, but they're not depicted as like cute, baby-faced human beings typically. They don't have wings, they use ladders. And as far as I know, they're not ever depicted in the Bible remotely, the way that we kind of now make them an ornament and trinket form.

• 22:46Sarah Marshall?

  And yet, you know, you have a child who has seen this version of angels coming back from heaven and talking about seeing angels that way. And so people rightly point out as a matter of faith, hey, you know, that part's inaccurate. And according to the Bible, this thing and this other thing. And there are people who get really into the technicalities of it, like as believers, which I think is meaningful and kind of, I don't know, I would have, it would have been nice if that got more attention at the time.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  It's different from the Satanic Panic 2, which really had a kind of yes and energy where, right, like it just felt like, sure, why not? Right? And like, it's good when, I always, I always like it when, when evangelicals get persnickety and they're like, um, or Catholics too, for that matter, right? Where they're like, the point of order, that's not, literally, that's not canon. And literally, that's not what it says. And quit making things up.

• 23:39Sarah Marshall?

  Right. I mean, if you've learned that much about something, it's kind of painful to see someone openly misunderstand it on such a grand stage. And something that people also point out is that we shouldn't actually need a child's testimony to prove that heaven exists because surely the tenets of the religion you follow should be enough.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:03Sarah Marshall?

  And your faith should be enough. And that's a really interesting thing that didn't occur to me until I was thinking about it to talk about with you, that like, this book was such a huge bestseller. And I think we, I certainly saw it at the time as like, well, you know, there's a lot of fairly right wing Christians in the United States, which is who I was assumed was mostly buying it. That has to be a very good sized chunk of the audience, you know? And, and people who, I, you know, just are interested in faith-based literature in a way that I'm not, was how I saw it. And what occurs to me now, and having read it a couple of times, is that this is actually sort of performing a really interesting function and successful for, you know, many reasons. But I think one of them is that maybe this reveals that this was a moment when a lot of people really were struggling with faith and needed a book that just in very clear,

• 24:48Sarah Marshall?

  slightly convincing terms was like, yes, no, please keep believing. You, I promise you, it's like, we have this kid and he went there and he saw it and he said some stuff. So there you go. And the fact that people needed that is very interesting.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, it does, I mean, I think you're right that it does contradict the very nature of faith, which is, you know?

• 25:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  It's a little bit like when, when very religious people sort of point to the fact that their health benefits to their prescriptions and prescriptions. And you're like, no, wait, hang on. Like even if this made you very sick, if God commands it, surely your faith would tell you to do it, right? And like, that's what faith is. Like, I think, I think it's Soren Kierkegaard who sort of always points to the, the Akedah, the, you know, the binding of Isaac in the Old Testament, to sort of say like, that's the essence of faith, right? Like if God asks you to do something that's easy and comes easily, like it's not actually that interesting a moment of faith. The moment of faith is the one that is stupefying in and of its, by itself, without the element

• 25:50Speaker 01

  of faith, that you almost can't account for, like outside of the, the religious element or the religious conviction behind it. And yeah, like the whole, like, don't worry, guys, here's an MRI that shows it's real. Feels like you're misunderstanding the very nature of faith. I can see why theologians would be a little annoyed at this.

• 26:10Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Cause it is, it's sort of, I don't know, it's like, feels like a very American instant gratification kind of approach.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  It's also like, I mean, not, not to like, obviously like, I am thrilled that the boy was okay, but also like, who went to heaven and made him sort of the, the boss messenger? Right? Like.

• 26:27Sarah Marshall?

  The Lord did, Adrian, you silly goose.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that's, I'm sorry, but that's like, not to play the sacrilegious, not to play the S card here, but like, isn't that kind of sacrilegious? Like surely with eight billion people on the planet, like chance visits to heaven where someone's like, oh, sorry, um, we got, we got mixed up, like go back would be somewhat frequent. And like, so why, why this, this kid who I'm sure is nice, but like, um, like just because what, God knew his dad?

• 27:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it was a nepotism thing.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. This is how Zozia Mamet ended up in Girls.

• 27:06Sarah Marshall?

  I think Zozia Mamet, uh, however she got there, she, she certainly earned her, her place at the, at the table yet.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. So how does the movie handle heaven? Oh, are we going to get there?

• 27:17Sarah Marshall?

  So I haven't watched the movie to prep for this. I wonder if people would want to, we could maybe like do, do a bonus episode talking about it or do like a commentary track. But so what's interesting about the movie is that it adds a plot element where this happens, you know, in the book and in reality, as far as we know, that it's this gradual process for Colton to start talking about heaven and what he saw there. And his dad starts asking him questions. And Todd claims many times in the book that he, you know, was very careful to ask questions where he did not lead his son. And then you will immediately see him asking a very leading question. And you're like, well, you tried.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Another Satanic Panic alert, yes.

• 27:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, but yeah, exactly. It's the very much Satanic Panic DNA. And early on, he's like, so Colton, when you were in heaven, what did it look like? And it's like, yeah, well, do you see how that's a leading question and that you're presupposing and reinforcing this earlier claim that he was in heaven? And this is now the opening premise of your question. And he has to like, you know, he's starting with that. And, um, I mean, what, what questions would you have for this and the credibility of this story?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  I don't even know how I'd begin to assess the credibility of it.

• 28:31Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Cause you're kind of like, well, it's, I don't believe any of it even a little bit. So why, where, what detail do I begin with?

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Well, also, I mean, like the fact that his dad is in the biz, right?

• 28:42Sarah Marshall?

  Yep. He's, he's a pastor.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  He's a pastor.

• 28:45Sarah Marshall?

  And also a garage door salesman guy.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Oh, well, look, this is a one stop shop. You can find out heaven is for real and, you know, get that weird thing fixed where the garage kind of jams right before it closes. Yeah, I think one of the problems is of course that like famously Christians have not agreed on visions of heaven and have in fact, kind of killed each other over like what heaven is going to look like or does look like.

• 29:11Sarah Marshall?

  They love that move. It's wild.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, I mean, so it would feel like if Mr. Burpo were to then reveal like, actually, we were wrong about some parts of this. And like, I don't know, the Mormons had it right or something like that. Like, okay, then I'd be like, well, that's interesting. That's not, that's an unusual thing for a man like that to say. But if I had to guess the, like with that kind of Christian entertainment, you get one of two things, right? Either they abstract so much from anything specific in order to make sure that it can be seen by any kind of congregation, right? Even though it might have a very specific bend.

• 29:49Sarah Marshall?

  That's an interesting point.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  To kind of, right? The wings might well be on the angels just because like it's what, what everyone can sort of agree on.

• 29:58Sarah Marshall?

  And they're like, well, God wanted to make an angel look like what your son would expect and not one that's continuously on fire, as described in the literature of your religion.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  And then the other thing, of course, that I would expect is that like, it's much more likely is that it all sort of conforms very closely to whatever narrow vision of the afterlife, this particular branch of Christianity has, right?

• 30:20Sarah Marshall?

  Completely, yeah.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  That's something that I feel like we see so much in the Satanic Panic, that like, there's a kind of specificity to the imagination that actually sort of like belies its theological foundations and shows that like, people have seen The Exorcist.

• 30:34Sarah Marshall?

  Oh yeah. Michelle certainly had seen The Exorcist.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that this is essentially like what you're getting is religion as filtered through or as melded with American pop culture. You're not getting what, I don't know, Hildegard of Bingen or St. Teresa of Avila would have seen, right? Like, you know, scripturally versed and based mystics.

• 30:55Sarah Marshall?

  Right. You're getting like a hamburger aggregate.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. But right. And that's another thing too, is that there have been a lot of like cool mystics in history. And it was like a great job for women in the Middle Ages, if you could get it especially. And it's interesting that this is the person who people responded to. And it does remind me of talking about the spiritualist movement with Chelsea Weber Smith. And a topic that they bring up a lot is that the spiritualist movement also really benefited women because it allowed them to claim that they were channeling men, which then meant that people would listen to them because they were like, well, I'm listening to a man.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:30Sarah Marshall?

  And that, you know, a woman was so pure vessel and so kind of like, you know, had so little brain activity, according to this view of gender, you know, like Frye and Futurama, that, um, she wouldn't interfere with like the spirit that was trying to talk through her. And that, that way that we sort of choose mediums who we don't believe to be capable of inventing anything is interesting.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:54Sarah Marshall?

  And that's true here too, where we're talking about a toddler who's, you know, three, when he has this near death experience, um, which is extremely traumatic for everybody in the family. And then is four, when he starts to talk about sort of this idea of having seen himself being operated on and then of, of having visited heaven. And, you know, his dad, according to the book, you know, they keep kind of talking about it every so often. And his dad will ask him questions and he always has an answer. And why, why don't we look at some of that dialogue?

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:23Sarah Marshall?

  If you will.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  So the book is just, just to, I, as a literature professor can like, I should mention maybe also that in my day job, I'm a literature professor. So I'd love to, like, so this is set up as a, as a dialogue throughout? Or is it just like they're, it's kind of told?

• 32:40Sarah Marshall?

  The book, yeah. That they kind of keep, you know? And that is also something that I think you could use to claim that it is either more or less credible, that they keep coming back to this topic over a period of like a couple of years. And Colton is, you know, 11 when, when they publish it. I also like, when I read this a few years ago, I was really aghast. And then when I started reading it again to talk about it with you, I was like, oh, maybe I was too hard on it. And then I, I'm going to share with you a section that I got to that made me go, no, I was not too hard on this book.

• 33:14Sarah Marshall?

  I'm gonna have you start reading underneath the pink line.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Okay, yep.

• 33:18Sarah Marshall?

  All right, let's hear it.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Back downstairs, Colton was still on his knees bombing aliens. I sat down beside him. Hey, Colton, can I ask you something else about Jesus? He nodded, but didn't look up from his devastating attack on a little pile of X-Men. What did Jesus look like, I said. Abruptly, Colton put down his toys and looked up at me. Jesus has markers. What? Markers, Daddy. Jesus has markers. And he has brown hair and he has hair on his face, he said, running his tiny palm around on his chin. I guessed that he hadn't, that he didn't yet know the word beard. And his eyes, oh Dad, his eyes are so pretty. As he said this, Colton's face grew dreamy and far away, as if enjoying a particularly sweet memory. What about his clothes? Colton snapped back into the room and smiled at me. He had purple on.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  As he said this, Colton put his hand on his left shoulder, moved it across his body, down to his right hip, then repeated the motion. His clothes were white, but it was purple from here to there. Another word he didn't know: sash. More?

• 34:15Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, let's keep going.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Jesus was the only one in heaven who had purple on, Dad. Did you know that? In Scripture, purple is the color of kings. A verse from the Gospel of Mark flashed through my mind. His clothes came dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. And he had this gold thing on his head, Colton chirped on enthusiastically. He put both hands on top of his head in the shape of a circle, like a crown? Yeah, a crown, and it had this, this diamond thing in the middle of it, and it was kind of pink. And he has markers, Dad. My mind reeled. Here I thought I was leading my child gently down this conversational path. Yeah, I bet. But instead, he grabbed the reins and galloped away.

• 34:54Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, blame the toddler.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Images from Scripture tumbled through my mind. The Christophany, or manifestation of Christ, in the book of Daniel, the appearance of the King of Kings in Revelation. I was amazed that my son was describing Jesus in pretty much human terms. Then amazed that I was amazed, since our whole faith revolves around the idea that man is made in God's image, and Jesus both came to earth and returned to heaven as a man. I knew by heart all the Bible stories we'd read him over the years, many from the arch-series Bible storybooks I'd had as a child. And I knew our church's Sunday school lessons and how simplified they are in the preschool years. Jesus loves you, be kind to others, God is good. If you could get a preschooler to take away just one, three, or four-word concept on Sunday mornings, that was a huge accomplishment.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Now he was my kid in his matter-of-fact preschooler voice, telling me things that were not only astonishing on their face, but that also matched Scripture in every detail, right down to the rainbow colors described in the book of Revelation, which is hardly preschool material. And as he babbled, Colton asked me, his pastor Dad, every so often, did you know that? And I'm thinking, yeah, but how do you know it?

• 36:02Sarah Marshall?

  Thoughts?

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so first of, Mr. Burpo is doing, he's doing biblical exegesis on what his son is doing, isn't he? The same way that in a sermon, you'll do kind of, at least, you know, I think in a lot of, sort of, what we're familiar with from evangelical pastors, do kind of an almost associative reading of a passage where you're like, oh, that doesn't seem like strictly what this passage means.

• 36:29Sarah Marshall?

  Don't you sometimes feel like pastors can be, it's kind of like being an op-ed writer, or like, you know, like being David Brooks, or having like a weekly column where you kind of have to think of like, something to say every week, but it doesn't, you might, you sometimes just don't have anything, and sometimes you're like, you know, the loaves and fishes are like this thing I saw at the DMV, and it's like, are they?

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I always think of that line in The Big Lebowski where Walter Sobchak's trying to make a connection to Vietnam. And when, when the dude calls him out, and he's like, well, maybe not a literal connection, then the dude says, "Face it, Walter, there's no connection." I was like, yeah. Face it, pastor, there's no connection.

• 37:09Sarah Marshall?

  Right. It's like, you can, you can just say pass this week. Yeah.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there is that. The other thing is, he's definitely leading this boy on, right, in ways that,

• 37:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  in this case, frankly, are pretty benign, but like, you know, in the McMartin trial, became much less so, right? Like, this is

• 37:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  the way you do not talk to a child who's been through something traumatic. If you care about the truth.

• 37:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Right? If you care about whether what they're gonna give you back is genuine experience, or what you and your anxieties and your projections are putting into their heads and onto them right now. The third thing I'd point out is, there's something here. You know, I'm a, I'm a, I'm the father to a child that is a little bit older than this boy. But there is also, of course, a moment at which your kid knows things and you don't know how they know it. And that's kind of an uncanny moment. There is really an experience of like, early childhood, where if they say something, you know, like, kids do say the darnedest things.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  And when they say it, and people sort of look at you in astonishment, you're like, oh, she got that from, or he got that from, right? And then there's a moment when that stops being possible, and it is a profoundly uncanny moment. I do also think that the way, you know, the good Reverend sort of tells the story here, it does occur to me that like, maybe, A, in Christian fundamentalist circles, that moment arrives later, because they expose their children just to a whole lot less, you know? They do tend to protect them quite a bit. So like, they may still be able to say, like, I mean, when he says, like, I knew everything that he'd ever been told at Sunday school, I'm like, whoa, okay. Do you know everything he's talked to with his friends and like, their friends' parents, his friends' parents, et cetera, et cetera?

• 39:03Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  And the answer, of course, is possibly maybe. It could be that it's a very restricted world that these people circulate in. But sooner or later, that moment comes in the life of a parent, where they're like, where the fuck did this come from? Right? And sometimes it's cute, and sometimes it's really not, right? Like, sometimes it's deeply uncanny. And it seems like, on some level, like, this is what he's encountering here, that like, his child's, you know, spiritual life, such as it is for a, you know, very young kid, is clearly shaped by his own religion, but also has gone beyond that, right? And, and is to some extent, a universe of Colton's own.

• 39:44Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. Yeah, and I thought, I found that so interesting, what you're talking about, this idea of, you know, I mean, so much within that of this current culture war that we're in, culture wars, whatever it is, being, you know, partly, I think so much about the idea of parents wanting to control the kind of information that their children can access, and thereby to control, or to believe that they can control the forms of identity that their children have access to. And this idea also, that, yeah, that also really struck me as odd when I read this, that a child who, you know, whose dad is a pastor, and whose mom is also very involved in their church, and who, whose whole world really revolves around Christianity,

• 40:27Sarah Marshall?

  and around church duties as well, and who's, you know, just like, in that world spiritually, as well as just in terms of time, and like, time in church, time in Sunday school, time with his dad. It's so interesting to sort of, to have to kind of thread this needle narratively, between, you know, we're in this, like, we had built this life that was very focused on our religion, and on ministering to people, and teaching people about Jesus. And also, my son could not possibly have known this very obvious thing about Jesus, because one of the

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:58Sarah Marshall?

  main arguments he makes is that his son said that Jesus had markers, and that what he meant by that, and this is also very satanic, panicky, where you like, hear something that kind of sounds like something, and you're like, draw a very specific conclusion from it. Yeah, and he's, he sees it as, you know, nails and stigmata, and decides that his son could not possibly have seen a crucifix or a depiction of, of Jesus on the cross, and therefore, it's proof that he went to heaven and actually saw that. And I mean, I feel like the first thought of me and you and a lot of people is like, I feel like he would have seen that in his day-to-day life, and it's incredible to me that a person would argue that he hadn't.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  But there's also a fantasy of control and of innocence here, right? That like, he's like, I know what he's seen in his life.

• 41:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's such a good point.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, your house must be by the, by dint of the job that you have besides a garage door salesman, awash in religious imagery.

• 41:58Sarah Marshall?

  And if your house isn't, then like, other people's houses are. You have older female relatives, surely. You know, we all have seen white Jesus.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Which books have, has he pulled off the shelf because he's interested? Which picture books has he checked out at the, well, I guess you don't let him go to the public library, but like, you know, I mean, the church has a library, you know?

• 42:17Sarah Marshall?

  But yeah, it's like a really interesting fact of, just, you know, the way the world is now, that by the time you're four years old, you are encountering media that your parents aren't aware of, and you're seeing things that they don't know about. And also, you know, just as crucial to this, you have a whole life of the mind that they can't necessarily interpret, and I think that freaks people out as well.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, this child seems almost like a sock puppet, right? Like, he's repeating back what his dad says, and, and as far, I mean, I'm sure, I don't want to impugn his love for this kid, but at the same time, he, he does give him awful little credit, right? Like, this could have been a moment of like, I guess I won't know, right? Like, is this a genuine experience that the kid had, or a sign of just how varied already his religious experience is at this age? But no, it has to be like, what goes on in that little head of his is mine to know and cannot exceed that, and it's like, I have some bad news for you about children, my friend.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  They exceed what we put into them and what we can account for.

• 43:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Pretty, pretty, pretty early.

• 43:27Sarah Marshall?

  And also, that's really, it's good news in disguise, right?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, totally. Well, maybe not to that kind of person. I do think that like, I mean, Tal Avon has like done such a great job on like, in that new book about, about Christian, what is that called? Wild Faith, where the argument really is that like, the Christian right really has this emphasis on, on children reproducing their parents and like, really like, any kind of difference being almost violently like extirpated. And, and I think that there's something, like, this is not a violent book, but what I just read, sounds to me like a little Daffy, but perfectly innocent, except in that one thing, which is like that he really seems to not be able to countenance this kind of, the fact that kids are different, that

• 44:12Speaker 01

  that's beautiful, right? Like, he doesn't think that that's beautiful, right? He, for him, deviance from parental fiat is a, is a threat, is dangerous, right?

• 44:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, right. And that's kind of, yeah, returning to this book and thinking about, you know, being in the United States in 2011, the feeling that I had after Sarah Palin, very narrowly, well, depends on, I guess, electoral versus popular vote. I feel like those are pretty different. But where Sarah Palin seemed to be coming pretty close to getting in the White House and then didn't. And I remember this feeling personally of like, talk to bullet. And then the sort of eerie silence from the Tea Party, right? And I remember at a certain point, I was like, what happened to that? What happened with all the Sarah Palin stuff? Surely that didn't evaporate, did it? And no, it did not. And I feel like there's something eerie about reading something that is, you know,

• 45:07Sarah Marshall?

  I think from everything we know, you know, from the contents of this book and from, you know, the media appearances that they've made and, you know, everything that I've been able to find, these are, you know, this seems to be just like a perfectly lovely, loving family who are very sincere about their religion and who, you know, seem to totally believe the story and have never recanted any of it. And who also appear to be making like, a pretty good living on it after all these years. And that doesn't mean that that was their goal, but it did happen. And it happened for a lot of other people who, you know, who published this book, who sold this book. It made a lot of money for a good number of people. And is that good or bad? I don't know. One of the things that comes up in the

• 45:50Sarah Marshall?

  book is that this being America, after Colton has this near death experience where, you know, it's, everybody in the family goes through this incredible trauma of, you know, not knowing for days whether he's going to make it. And, you know, having a child who,

• 46:09Sarah Marshall?

  you know, had such a serious health emergency that was misdiagnosed for such a long time and having feeling like the very near brush with death that comes from that. They then, you know, come home to realize that they need to find $23,000 somewhere because of all the bills that they have and the work that they've missed.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 46:27Sarah Marshall?

  You know, so that, and that's not to accuse this book of having a financial motive, just to say that everyone in America has to have a financial motive most of the day, or else, you know, we're not going to make it.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Especially after a health crisis.

• 46:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And during.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:43Sarah Marshall?

  You got, you got, it's like when they were like, wow, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is working after, you know, having treatment for her cancer while she's in a bed in the hospital. Isn't that inspiring? And I was like, no, no.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  What could be more American than that? Yeah.

• 46:59Sarah Marshall?

  What could be more American than a very old woman who must keep showing up to her work? Because if she doesn't, then all hell will break loose, just like Doris down at the Quick Trip. It's like a very low friction story. It's basically kind of, Todd keeps talking to his son about what heaven is like, and Colton keeps saying answers and Todd keeps being like, well, I'll be, I don't know how you would have heard of rainbows, except from the Book of Revelation. And it's like, I, I fear rainbows are quite popular.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:29Sarah Marshall?

  And I don't, I don't know, I don't want to be mean to these people specifically. I want to be mean to the larger industrial, cultural forces that they are enriching and, you know, serving as kind of a sign of the times of the cultural takeover that we're now living in. But I think, you know, I can't tell people what to believe. This is a good point in time for me to say that my own personal belief about the afterlife, and this is just like, something I felt, is that when you die, you have a three week walking trip where you kind of, you get a little packed lunch and you walk over to death. And I don't know what happens after that. But that's what I think happens for the three weeks after

• 48:11Sarah Marshall?

  you die. And I realize that sounds over the top. I would not, you know, put a lot of energy into defending it. It's not a logical idea. It's just a feeling that I've had in my life. And it brings me a lot of comfort. And I'm not going to try and impose it on anybody.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:29Sarah Marshall?

  Do you have afterlife feelings? Have you ever?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Not really.

• 48:32Sarah Marshall?

  Met God or anything?

• 48:34Speaker 01

  No, not really. I've been, it's always fascinated me. At the same time, it's the question of imposing it on others, where my understand, my comprehension really just kind of falters. It's like, you, if you have this kind of conviction, that's wonderful and is beautiful. If you have an experience that's, sounds really transformative, at the same time, it feels like telling other people about it and expecting them to

• 49:07Sarah Marshall?

  Care.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Change their lives based on it. Well, care, okay, they might care that you had this experience.

• 49:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, maybe a little. But it's like telling someone about a dream that you had.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Exactly, right? Where you're just like, what, what am I, what am I supposed to do with this? Right? Like, there is always a chance that it's not true, you know, then in that which case it's just, you know, you're using people or you're making them listen to this stuff for, for personal gain or whatever. Or it's super personal and like, there's no way to do it justice, right? To be like, to treat it with this, with the seriousness that it deserves in the teller's own mind. And it's like, well, I just feel like, I'm going to be an asshole here, right? And not because of how I am, but because of the way.

• 49:59Sarah Marshall?

  The asshole time of our conversation. And then on Fox News, they can have a story that says, Lefty Thornback mocks toddler.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Right, exactly, right? And like, but the thing is, like, how else are you supposed to react to this story, right? Like, you can either be like, okay, cool, right? And just kind of swallow hook, line and sinker. Or any kind of like, okay, like, I don't know what to do with this, is basically like, well, you're cheapening it, like, compared to what it feels like to the person who's experiencing, you know?

• 50:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's a really good point.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Feels the same with like, alien abduction. It's very clear that people have their lives chained by these experiences. And then you're like, well, like, how am I, like, what's the generous way of dealing with this? Like, there really isn't one, right? And, I mean, I am interested, like, I mean, you say that you don't blame these people, you blame, or you get, you are a little annoyed at the people who make money off of them.

• 50:52Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Or, you know, I blame the whole industry, really, I guess. The industries of Christianity.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  And I'm interested in like, like, one of the virtues of the way Colton's story seems to be told, from what we've just looked at in the book, is that it's not particularly dramatic. There are no bad guys here, right? Like, it's just, and I can't imagine this is a super long book, if I can just venture a wild guess.

• 51:17Sarah Marshall?

  No, it's, it's quite short and it's already pretty padded at the length that it is.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Something about airport bestseller told me that.

• 51:25Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah, I mean, you got to finish it before you touchdown in Albany.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so basically, I think that there's a, the, the structure of what we just got, where like, Colton says something, and then his dad says, kazzooks, like, that's in Daniel, right? Like, it's inherently undynamic. And that's, and that's fine, right? I mean, like, in fact, the, the fact that it is so undynamic sort of makes it a religious text. I mean, it's not told to you as a thriller, it's told to you as a religious kind of revelation, which, as you said, like, telling someone your dreams is far more fascinating to the person doing the telling than the person being told to. But now I'm wondering, like, what the fuck did, like, the movie do with this? And like, that feels like the moment when like, you have to invent, like, I don't know, a dastardly, like, CNN host who doubts it all, or like.

• 52:12Sarah Marshall?

  They did, a little bit.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Or a parishioner who's like the doubting Thomas. And you're like, I'm happy you're so sincere about this. But like, why do you have to invent enemies to get mad at in order to experience that sincerity?

• 52:24Sarah Marshall?

  It's a very good question, Adrian. Why, why, what is that about?

• 52:29Speaker 01

  What is that about? To me, this is the, the Sully problem. Like, I have never seen the Clint Eastwood movie about the Miracle on the Hudson.

• 52:37Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  But like, the trailer might be, made me so mad, because like, in the trailer, it's very clear that like, the, what do they call it? The, the people who do the airline investigation, the FAA, that the FAA basically is cast as the villains who like, try to bring, like, heroic Sully down. And I'm like, What the fuck are you talking about Clint Eastwood? Like, everyone was falling all over themselves, like, justifiably so, over the friggin' miracle on the friggin' Hudson, because like, we were all pretty blown away by what had happened.

• 53:05Sarah Marshall?

  And also, why must we turn this into a story about federal deregulation?

• 53:09Speaker 01

  There's that, but also, like, why do we need to have people to be mad at, right? Like, if you're really impressed with what Sullivan did, fine. But like, yeah, you're gonna make a somewhat boring movie where a guy does his job for two and a half minutes, or however long it was, does something pretty incredible, and then, nothing, I guess, right? But like, no, you had to invent villains, you had, and it's the villains that like, confirm your priors as the same people that everyone's always mad at, right? Like, yeah, the evil feds, the evil bureaucrats, the deep state, blah, blah, blah, right? And it's like, okay, Clint Eastwood, like, if I were like, an FAA agent, I'd be like, pretty pissed at that, and be like, we fucking like, glad handed this guy, and now we're

• 53:53Speaker 01

  like, here in like, a pretty big movie, getting like, you know, shat on by Clint fucking Eastwood, right? And like, I'm just gonna go out on a limb and assume that like, there is gonna be something like that in this movie, because like, the movie has to movie somehow, right? Like, being like, tell me more, Colton. I mean, that's a cool, like, experimental film, and I'm sure, you know, South by Southwest would like a word, but if this thing made a hundred million dollars, like, there's a doubting Thomas here, there's a bad guy here, right?

• 54:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, there's gotta, right, there's gotta be like, the part 20 minutes from the end, when you're like, oh no, things are bad, yeah.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:28Sarah Marshall?

  It's, uh, this also reminds me, I probably have even said this on the show before this year, but I, because I'm such an evangelist for this movie, haha, but I really loved The Testament of Anne Lee, which is about Amanda Seyfried founding the Shaker movement. It's great, I loved it.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:43Sarah Marshall?

  And I was really expecting there to be a part where someone was like, you've taken things too far, Anne Lee, your founding a religion has made you overly confident in your own ideas. Like, that never happens, it's just like, she starts a religious act, some people don't like it, it's not her problem, the end, basically. Like, she just does a great job, and there's never a part where it's like, has, has success spoiled Anne Lee? It's like, no, I mean, she's gotta deal with, you know, with like, various, you know, colonial violence in terms of Shakers being conscientious objectors, if such a term could be said to exist back then.

• 55:23Sarah Marshall?

  Um, you know, but the idea that someone can, um, that someone's life can be meaningful and heroic if they don't have to like, defeat somebody. And also, The Testament of Anne Lee was directed by a Norwegian director, which made me go, of course, no American could possibly conceive of not having a part where someone's like, you're drunk with power, Anne Lee, you've made too many chairs.

• 55:50Sarah Marshall?

  It used to be about the love, and now it's about the chairs. My mom loves Shaker furniture, so I was taken to a lot of like, Shaker sites when I was growing up, so it was like, a very nostalgic experience, that movie. And now, I love Shaker furniture, because, and also, Shaker design is very ADHD friendly, I think, because you can see all of your stuff.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  That is true.

• 56:12Sarah Marshall?

  But anyway, so in the Hollywood version of Heaven is for Real, they have to kind of invent this final act, that people start hearing about Colton, and people are coming to the town, and the church tries to oust Todd, I think, um, and he has to give like, a really rousing sermon, and he has to just pastor like he's never pastored before, and it works, and the end, you know? So it's like, it kind of, in a way, it also is based on giving him something to do, as opposed to just, you know, talking to his son. Oh, and the other, there's another thing too, that the book argues is very convincing, and this relates to pregnancy loss, and it's that, previously, to, before they had Colton,

• 56:57Sarah Marshall?

  um, the Burpos lost a pregnancy, and Colton comes down and says,

• 57:02Speaker 01

  I met my sister or brother.

• 57:04Sarah Marshall?

  That he has two sisters, and they say, no, you have one sister, and he says, no, I met my sister in heaven. And the parents are, you know, very, very moved by this.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Oh, god.

• 57:13Sarah Marshall?

  And I feel, and again, there's this sort of return to this idea of like, there's no way that Colton could have found out about this any other way but going to heaven, and again, I return to my, my own doubting Thomas-ness, and I, and I don't take offense at that. If, if the leader of my, the movement I'm in says that he's come back from the dead, I wanna stick my finger inside of whatever wounds he has to offer, I need to be sure, and I'm not.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  You're like, doubting Thomas here, may I?

• 57:41Sarah Marshall?

  I'm fine with that, mhm.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:44Sarah Marshall?

  Someone's gotta do it, and, um,

• 57:45Speaker 01

  You don't mind, right? Just ask for consent first, yeah.

• 57:49Sarah Marshall?

  He's like, no, it's cool, I've, I've been through worse this week, but, um, but in this case, I, I feel like, you know, my response to that is, you know, that, there are some ways he could have heard about it, you know? He could have, kids, you know, and this is with, you know, another Satanic Panic parallel, where there's this idea of, how could my child have heard about this thing, either, you know, from parents talking, or about the media, or conceived these images, if not through this very specific scenario that we're trying to confirm? And the answer is, you know, that little pictures have big ears, and kids hear a lot, and they see things.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, a million ways is the answer, a million ways.

• 58:27Sarah Marshall?

  And even if you don't tell them about things, other people will, and other adults will, other kids will, other family members will, but I, I feel like this is probably a section of the book that readers really responded to, and I, my own kind of personal feeling and opinion about it is that this was, and it, you know, and they, the language of the book does touch on this, that, that this was a loss that they had kind of felt that they had already dealt with, and then having Colton talking, um, about a sister made them able to sort of bring their miscarriage back into their idea of their family, I think.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:05Sarah Marshall?

  And to sort of have this kind of healing experience of grief, and I, and I guess that's kind of one of the big things that separates this as well from the Satanic Panic literature, is that, you know, everything we see is a positive outcome, you know? Once it becomes this big publishing phenomenon, you could argue, and I, and I probably would, that like, this kind of helped push the needle into us as Americans not wondering on a larger cultural scale about facts, and not asking the questions that we needed to be asking, you know? Because when this book starts, you know, selling millions of copies, it becomes kind of this genuine news story, how well it's doing is something that was published without really conventional publicity, at least of the secular variety, and so there's this

• 59:50Sarah Marshall?

  very odd interview on the Today Show where Matt Lauer is talking to Todd and Sonia and Colton, and, you know, is in this very odd position of saying, so, Colton, when you went to heaven, and you saw your grandfather, what did he look like? And it's like, why are we framing the interview like this? Why is, you know, because there's, I, I think that perhaps as a country, you can't come back from a major news outlet, multiple major news outlets, and secular outlets, treating as documentary truth, an account of a religious experience, simply because it's a bestseller, I guess. What, what do you think about the idea of that Matt Lauer interview existing? It's a very strange thing to see.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, in a, in a previous episode that we did on the D and D Panic, like, we talked about a 60 Minutes interview where like, basically,

• 1:00:42Sarah Marshall?

  Why do I have such high expectations of these people? They're always disappointing us.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Well, but I mean, like, but I think you're right, that like, there is, there is an original sin here, right? There is an element, like, the, the fact that like, people are talking about something, and something religious is motivating and moving people, like, there has to be a very careful way of framing that, and I think that like, stipulating to too much of that experience is, especially in a country as vast and as, you know, religiously diverse as the United States, is like, gonna get you into these weird situations, where you're sitting across from someone who is either grifting you, or very likely delusional, or trying to push apart as an agenda, and you're kind of unprepared for it, you're, you're,

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  like, you probably shouldn't be in the position where you either have to be, you know, confronting a kid with his account of a near-death experience, or go along with something that, that's essentially Christian propaganda, right?

• 1:01:42Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and you end up in this impossible position, um, similar to the Satanic Panic, right? Whereas you were kind of hogtied as a major news outlet, because you had to, You know, it like required too much nuance to get into in a 90 second spot. And even if you had that kind of time as a, you know, a member of the media or someone in kind of, you know, with some kind of expertise. It was so difficult, I think, for a lot of people to say, no, I'm taking child abuse very seriously, but I just have some grave concerns about whether this kind is actually happening or not.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Right. Can I ask who, who directed the movie? You said it was pretty well directed.

• 1:02:20Sarah Marshall?

  Well, so I haven't, I haven't watched it, so it might, you know, but I mean, it's, but I mean, it's like, it's a movie movie. It's not, you know, because I, I'm consistently annoyed by the quality of filmmaking. Right. And stuff like Left Behind and God's Not Dead, where it's like, if you're going to glorify God with your filmmaking, shouldn't you learn how to do it better? I don't know.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, stop using a camcorder to record these people.

• 1:02:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Learn how to color correct, something.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  And get someone other than Thomas Hayden Church or something like that.

• 1:02:52Sarah Marshall?

  Thomas Hayden Church is in this movie.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:02:54Sarah Marshall?

  By the way, yeah.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 1:02:56Sarah Marshall?

  Although Kevin Sorbo, to me, is the real, you know, aside from Kirk Cameron, who of course is the-

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  He and Jennifer Garner have become the Kevin Sorbos of, of the post-God is Not Dead.

• 1:03:06Sarah Marshall?

  That is like a funny thing to do is to watch like a mainstream or like, you know, A-list or former A-list actor kind of like sidling into a very Christian movie, like, hey, no one's going to notice I'm in this thing, right? Or possibly, I am very serious about my faith and I don't feel weird at all. I, you know, who's to say? Probably a mix. Okay. The director is a guy named Randall Wallace.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:03:33Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, do you know of him? Oh, wow. And he directed, great, wait, wait.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  No, he's the writer of, he's the, Randall Wallace is the writer, is a, is a very frequent Mel Gibson collaborator. He's the writer of Braveheart. I believe nominated for an Oscar at the time. He also did Secretariat.

• 1:03:49Sarah Marshall?

  Ah, yes.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  He did, what else did he do? Oh, he did, um, he did that Mel Gibson Vietnam movie, We Were Soldiers, We Were Heroes or something like that.

• 1:03:59Sarah Marshall?

  This is incredible recall.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  He may have made that DiCaprio Man in the Iron Mask movie too.

• 1:04:04Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I remember that one. That was disappointing if you were a DiCaprio head when you were 12, I have to say.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  I know. That, and see the Titanic at the box office, I think. And then you're like, for this?

• 1:04:14Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  Anyway, but, but so like that, he's a, like, so he's not a journeyman.

• 1:04:20Sarah Marshall?

  He's a Gibsoner.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know much about him, but I think his filmography to me always read sort of John Millius-ish. Like this is a, this is not a guy who's just chasing a paycheck. Like, you know, the way Peter O'Toole was in the, um, in the, oh, fuck, what's the painter of light name?

• 1:04:37Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, Kincaid? Was there a Thomas Kincaid movie with Peter O'Toole in it?

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's not, it's not like Peter O'Toole, it's not like Peter O'Toole being in the Thomas Kincaid movie, uh, where it's just like, you know, this is what dipsomania and money problems will get you. Um, this is, I think, someone who I think like makes like very deliberately right wing coded choices. And I believe, like, I think he's supposed to be writing The Resurrection of the Christ, Mel Gibson's follow-up.

• 1:05:04Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, they're going to do a sequel to The Passion of the Christ.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Because you know, he comes back, right?

• 1:05:07Sarah Marshall?

  It should be called The, don't spoil it for me. It should be called The Passion of the Christ, colon, The Morning After.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:05:15Sarah Marshall?

  Or arguably just The Hangover.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Too Passion to Christ. Tokyo Drift coming any, any minute now.

• 1:05:21Sarah Marshall?

  The Passion of the Christ Two, Electric Boogaloo, the inevitable.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Sarah Marshall?

  Electric Boogaloo joke. I think that those have been out of style for, I guess, long enough that we can start making them again, actually. I'm going to bring back Electric Boogaloo's.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33Sarah Marshall?

  So, yeah, so, you know, it just, it becomes, um, by the time it's a movie, kind of a media juggernaut. And it's interesting to see something that, you know, if you can compare it to Michelle Remembers, there's a lot of commonalities. And, you know, you have someone saying pretty general things and having someone who has a lot of interests and a lot of knowledge and assumptions, taking fairly ambiguous descriptions and using them to confirm an extremely specific worldview. And then what's, what's interesting too, is that this, you know, before it's a book, um, which we'll get to in a second, you know, they have this, you know, these ongoing heaven

• 1:06:16Sarah Marshall?

  dialogues within the family that it seems like are a really meaningful experience, um, for this family and for the people in it. And then it kind of becomes near the end of the book, Todd seems to see it as an opportunity to kind of, you know, while protecting his son and caring about that. And there's also kind of repeated this, this idea of like, despite these things, we're a pretty normal family. And it's like, no, you are a normal family. But anyway, um, but, you know, he, I think that he also kind of sees Colton as a resource for like, taking people's questions about what heaven is like, based on what he's seen. And so it sort of becomes like, less sort of this broader spiritual experience than like, a chance to get facts, you know?

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:03Sarah Marshall?

  And so they have an FAQ page on, uh, the, the Burpo website, which I've pulled up for us.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  Is it burpo.com?

• 1:07:12Sarah Marshall?

  Their URL is heavenlive.org. It's Heaven is for Real Ministries, founded in 2011. So I'm going to read some of this to you. Questions about heaven. How big is heaven? Answer, a four-year-old does not have a great understanding of measurement, but Colton describes heaven as a city that keeps getting bigger and bigger. What does heaven look like? Answer, heaven is a very beautiful place with lots of intensely bright colors. More details are included in the children's book, Heaven is Real, for kids. Always be closing. What type of animals did you see? Colton saw many different kinds of animals. It seemed to him that most all of the animals we have here on earth are also in heaven. Did it appear to Colton that the dogs in heaven had once belonged to someone?

• 1:07:58Sarah Marshall?

  Colton remembers playing with animals, but doesn't know how they got there or who they were connected with. How big is Jesus?

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 1:08:06Sarah Marshall?

  Colton describes Jesus as being of normal human height. Gabriel is about one and a half times as tall as a man, and Michael is at least two times taller. Even though these angels are taller than Jesus, according to Colton, Jesus is way more powerful.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 1:08:24Sarah Marshall?

  So I, I don't know. I just, I, I think that putting that kind of pressure on a toddler is a bit much. I think that's probably my takeaway here.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I also think that according to Colton, according to Colton, according to Colton becomes like, I, I know they still make the rounds. I, you know, like, I, I think I once saw like, um, a YouTube video advertising that like, the, like, they had an interview with the two of them. But it's like, you're defined by this thing that you said at age four, and that by now must be fuzzy in your mind, that probably was fuzzy in your mind at the time and has since gotten fuzzier. And you're kind of locked into that. It's, it's on the one hand, I'm glad that this family was able to make out like bandits. I, doesn't, doesn't seem like anyone got hurt, but it does feel like, you know, yeah,

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  you've turned your son into a kind of figurehead for this kind of culture war.

• 1:09:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Which is impossible to do safely.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's going to be that for quite some, it's going to be that probably for the foreseeable future.

• 1:09:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And it is also in a more prosaic way, kind of the influencer parent dilemma, where it's like, if you use your child to sort of-

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:35Sarah Marshall?

  -create a career or a lifestyle for yourself, then like, you know, by definition, they can't consent to or understand that, maybe even more importantly. And, you know, this book comes out when he's 11 and it becomes this bestseller over the years and his picture is on the front cover. And, you know, it, we don't really know very much about what his life is like, which is good, because we shouldn't.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:57Sarah Marshall?

  But that's a strange thing to think about growing up with.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Sarah Marshall?

  And so the postscript to this is that, uh, one of the books I mentioned in the many, many books, uh, that I mentioned that are other memoirs of people who say they've gone to heaven and, uh, checked it out and then are coming back to tell us about it. One of these books, which is called The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Sarah Marshall?

  Is written allegedly by and about, uh, this boy named Alex Malarkey.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:10:26Sarah Marshall?

  Whose name everyone brought up in a punchline inevitably when the story came out.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:10:31Sarah Marshall?

  Who was in a, an accident when he was six, a car accident that left him quadriplegic.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 1:10:38Sarah Marshall?

  And who said that he had been to heaven and his parents, um, especially his dad, kind of ran with that. And, uh, that ended up becoming a book. And Alex and his mom both recanted that story. And Alex made a post on his own blog saying that it was Malarkey, basically.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. What made them do that? I mean, it seems like, that's the thing, like, you can just keep going with this. Did they just grow tired of it?

• 1:11:05Sarah Marshall?

  Well, that's, yeah, that's the problem. Well, I think it was something that it seemed like the, uh, Alex's dad was kind of the driving force in his parents' marriage disintegrated at a certain point.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:20Sarah Marshall?

  And, you know, he and his mom also found themselves in like pretty dire financial straits, having been involved in a book and credited with a book that had made a lot of money.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:31Sarah Marshall?

  For a lot of people, you know? And that's another aspect of this, is that if you create a story that can make money for people, then that won't necessarily keep you safe. And in fact, it, it probably won't.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, wow.

• 1:11:45Sarah Marshall?

  So Alex writes on his blog, "I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. I did not die. I did not go to heaven. When I made the claims, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough."

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, hard to argue with that.

• 1:12:04Sarah Marshall?

  He's, he's 16 when he writes this.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, uh, that's more growth than a lot of people in America these days. But, uh, yeah, that's, so, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think that's, that's the fundamental question I sort of started with when you first reminded me of this book. Like, why is it necessary if you do believe in it? Someone having gone there just raises questions of this kind of silly nature, like, you know, how big is heaven? Like, come on. Like, you're going to have a heaven FAQ?

• 1:12:35Sarah Marshall?

  How tall is Gabriel? Well, he's one and a half-

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:12:38Sarah Marshall?

  -times, he's 1.5 times the height of Jesus, so.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. It just feels, I mean, like, if, like, I can see that, why people of faith would have been just offended by this. So like, why is it necessary? It will not, it will not convince, you know, the non-believers. And I'm, it, it sort of risks cheapening belief for the believers. So there's something kind of rotten at the core of that project. And I guess the only way I can, I can think to justify it is that- You know, they sincerely believe this and that like it's, it's just a shared kind of experience that they don't want to put too much pressure on. But like, I mean, I think that like a 16 year old saying, "Don't read my thing, read the Bible." Like, yeah, that's, that strikes me as like-

• 1:13:24Sarah Marshall?

  But don't listen to that kid. Listen to the other kid with the shorter book.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. He's got a movie and everything.

• 1:13:32Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that other kid, he didn't get a movie. So when, you know, when you think about it, yeah, Print the Legend. Yeah. And it also, it's, um, I, I find it interesting to think about just the number of people who were drawn to this story for, I'm sure, a lot of different reasons. And also, I think maybe the hair I'm trying to split here is that like, I, you know, I, I don't want to mock anyone's beliefs unless, you know, they're like, pretty terrible people, in which case I will make fun of them. But, you know, it's, the line is wobbly. But I also, I think there's something, there's like, two different things happening here, right? There's having kind of like a mystical experience. And also, in this, um, this Robert Gottlieb article in the New York Review of Books, talking about

• 1:14:15Sarah Marshall?

  heaven memoirs, also touches on a piece by Oliver Sacks, talking about basically, his argument being that hallucination is like a natural part of the processes of the human brain. And that when we have an out of body experience, or a near death experience, that feels real to us because it's using the same parts of the brain as our perceptions of reality are, you know? And then it is real to us in the sense that hallucination is part of what the brain's capabilities are, I guess, is my summary of that, which makes sense to me. And I think that there's, I think, like, something we keep coming back to with, like, talking about religion, talking about the satanic panic, talking about, you

• 1:14:57Sarah Marshall?

  know, I don't know, varieties of religious experience, is the question of, can something be meaningful if it's an experience you have that doesn't point to a documentary truth outside of your experience of yourself?

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Sarah Marshall?

  And I think that it can be very meaningful. But I think a lot of people think that it's very insulting to say that, you know, they didn't literally see the angel Gabriel and he was nine feet tall.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, it seems to me that, like, there, there's something about this kind of genre where like, it's why mysticism is just such a hard thing to do in modernity, because it's not like entirely clear which genre a mystical experience falls under and what people are supposed to do with it, right? Like, that is, I think, a sense that we've just historically lost about like, why it would be interesting, suggestive-

• 1:15:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  -or even instructive to hear what is either someone's, right? Like, the, the big question around medieval mystics, right? It's either someone coming into contact with the divine, or being seduced by Satan, or, you know, tripping balls on some ergot or whatever, right? Like, um, and, and the whole point is it's undecided. And like, in the Middle Ages, this was something that people took great interest in. It's not that there's no inherent literary value or no inherent value to it. It's just that it's really hard to figure out on what, in what register to make people care about it, and what, what you're expecting an audience to take away from it and bring to it. And, um, yeah, I don't think this book, it doesn't sound like this book really solved that problem. It

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  more like, put a gigantic exclamation point behind it.

• 1:16:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And possibly made us sillier as a nation, I worry. Although, a lot of things, we're working on that. But I think-

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, Sarah Palin, for one.

• 1:16:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, she certainly did a lot more work in that regard. Yeah. But it's, you know, it's also just, um, it's another testament to the fact that we need to care about what kids are talking about when they're not confirming our worldview for us the whole time. Because the second they stop saying things that we can use to prop up the ideas that we want to be true, and the second we can stop treating them as oracles of the things that we want to believe, we kind of start ignoring them, you know? And I think that kids deserve better than that.

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  Is your child texting about the undiscovered country?

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  Here's what the abbreviations really mean.

• 1:17:18Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, I also, I think that, you know, when people tell stories about, you know, "Oh, my kid said something uncanny," or "My kid said something really creepy," or "My kid said something to suggest that, you know, he'd been to heaven, or he'd had a past life as a ice delivery man," or something, you know? I always think like, "Well, sure, maybe." But also, don't you think that little kids just say off the wall stuff constantly every day? And it's just kind of what they do? And it's sort of one of the most charming things about them is the stuff that they say to you, where you're like, "What are you talking about? And where did you get that? And also, where did you get this casual understanding of death from exactly?" And then you're like, cartoons.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, also, as a, as a parent, as a, you know, I, I've spent, I spent a lot of time around my child for a long time. And, you know, you're, you're dealing with someone who, as you say, says a bunch of off the wall shit. And they're often the person you're talking to, I mean, regularly, the person you talk to the most in a day. Sometimes, there are no adults you talk to. In a day, you talk to them. Meaning, you're gonna fall back into attributing meaning the way you would if that was your neighbor, or your spouse, or a work colleague, or whatever. But that is a wrong way to look at it.

• 1:18:39Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  They're testing things out, they're trying stuff out, they're learning how to use language, they're repeating things, but also giving them their own spin. And there is a lot of subjectivity there, there's a lot of creativity there, there's a lot of personality there already. But it's not yet the way that we as adults communicate. And I think it can be easy to, you know, when you focus strongly on your child, which is commendable, and which I'm sure this family did, right after he'd gone through this harrowing experience, like, you can slip in the register you're communicating in, right? And you can sort of have them say things that are far more, they have import, right? They are, what they say is important. But it's not important in the way that if an

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  adult said the same thing to you, right, would be important.

• 1:19:29Sarah Marshall?

  Right, yeah. I guess that it's, it's important in a, in a different way, where you're kind of, you're learning about their inner world, but they're still learning how to describe the world as it's happening around them, maybe partly.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:41Sarah Marshall?

  So ultimately, the you're wrong about in this, in case anybody was worried, is, I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong and heaven isn't for real, because that is above our pay grade, and we could not possibly comment on it. But there is one last funny you're wrong about, which is that Colton didn't actually die, he just was under anesthesia-

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:20:03Sarah Marshall?

  -which I think is a really neat trick to get past that. Because he usually-

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:20:08Sarah Marshall?

  -has some sort of, "Well, he flatlined," or "He, he was dead on the table, we thought we'd lost it, but then we had him back." That never happened, he just was being operated on. It was very, you know, people were pessimistic, it was pretty, touch and go. But, um-

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:23Sarah Marshall?

  They encountered this problem in the book, and Todd is like, "Well, who am I to say that he can't get to heaven without dying?" Whatever. He, he, I, I'm not going to stand in the way of, of that having happened. And we guess move on.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Okay. That's big. Uh, it's, that's very, that's very broad minded of him.

• 1:20:40Sarah Marshall?

  And as to whether pets are in heaven, this remains a very hotly contested topic. Obviously, if heaven exists, the pets are there. And that is-

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:50Sarah Marshall?

  -my closing statement. Adrian, uh, thank you so much for joining me on this strange journey. Have you, I love everything that you make and do. You do a great show. Have you written any great books lately?

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  I, I, well, I have written a book. Uh, I, it's coming out right around now, it's on, on August 18th. Um, my book, What Tech Calls Governing, is coming out. And, uh, you know, it's about a very different thing, as, um, somewhat less death and less afterlife, but some theology in it, uh, because it's about sort of what our tech overlords mean by being in charge of all our lives. We all know they're in charge, but, um, what do they actually mean by that? And that actually ends up with like, questions of political theology more often than you think. Like, a lot of times, right, like, when, when they start to describe both the future they envision, the future they fear, or the way they kind of justify their own authority, um, you're like, "Wait, this is no longer a political

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  theory. You're just talking about God now."

• 1:21:53Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. Well, I love horror, so I'll read it.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:21:57Sarah Marshall?

  And I'm very excited.

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  And like, uh, Heaven is for Real, uh, it is also very short. Uh, it's, uh, let me check, actually, they'll know, it's 124 pages. So it's like, shorter. I shouldn't have ragged on that poor family.

• 1:22:08Sarah Marshall?

  That's much shorter than Heaven is for Real.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, so my apologies-

• 1:22:13Sarah Marshall?

  And I'm sure that you perhaps have even more ideas in it.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  I, I will say that it has 0% of the, uh, conversations with toddlers, uh, than, than, uh, compared to, um, Heaven is for Real.

• 1:22:27Sarah Marshall?

  You should have a toddler dialogue in your next book, though. That's a good, you know, if, if you're testing out a theory, you need to get the toddler vote.

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  Maybe, yes. So if that is what you're in the market for, this book may not be for you, I'm sorry.

• 1:22:38Sarah Marshall?

  But otherwise, it probably is.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  Otherwise, pick it up.

• 1:22:43Sarah Marshall?

  What is something, like a fact, that you learned while writing or researching it, that you just, like, want to tell people?

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  Um, just the regularity with which these, you know, free speech absolutists in the tech industry, like, sue people for defamation, and, you know, like, uh, come after people who, like, were mean to them on Twitter. It's, it's very, very funny. I mean, like, it's, won't come as a surprise to anyone, but it's, it's pretty, the, the intensity and the dedication to the bit did kind of shock me. I'm like, "Seriously? Again? This time?"

• 1:23:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  "For that?"

• 1:23:17Sarah Marshall?

  It's hard to believe that a person could be that embarrassing, and yet there are so many of them. And they just keep-

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:22Sarah Marshall?

  They just keep doing it.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  There's a new guy every week that's like that.

• 1:23:28Sarah Marshall?

  Well, thank you for writing about topics that I find very scary and also very necessary to learn about, because if we don't understand these people, then, you know, we're more likely to get absorbed into a cloud one of these days. And I like being right out here in the sun.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, or, you know, walking towards the pearly gates, hand in hand, two podcasters-

• 1:23:51Sarah Marshall?

  Nah.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  -join-

• 1:23:52Sarah Marshall?

  Going to find all of our pets.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  Going to find our pets and find out how large an archangel is. And then coming back and telling you, the audience, all about it.

• 1:24:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. The people deserve to know.

• 1:24:13Sarah Marshall?

  And that is our episode. Thank you to the people who helped make this show. Miranda Ziegler is our producer and editor, and Nicole Ortiz is our administrative assistant. We'll see you in two weeks.