YouSaid · the spoken record

Irving Finkel

lines on the record: 163
first: 2025-12-12
most recent: 2025-12-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think so. But the paradoxical thing about Tom Larry is when he's talking about... The bomb and all that, and devices and International trouble. It's so unchanged. And same with Dr. Strangelove, it's just very remarkable. Anyway, next time you'll hear when you're here, you should come and see me in the museum and I'll show you.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he's such a way he plays the piano is fantastic. I think my dad recorded them off the radio on a reeltor tape recorder, and I learned them all by hark. They were so fantastic. But I knew a Harvard professor who I stayed with once, who was a sumerologist, and his wife said that she knew Tom Nero when he was in the math department. And they used to have parties and he always played the piano in the corner of the room. He's just amazing.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, do you like Tong Leara? Okay, that's good. That's good. I once went to America on a lecture tour, and I ended up in a town doctor Werner von Ended up running the American. Industry”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are one that I can remember. Fly or no, mosquito lands on the back of an elephant consists Am I too heavy for you or something like that? You wouldn't use it in the cardboard.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. I must say I think it is a pity if having produced such wonderful languages in the world that they don't, that their use is so inhibited.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You might have to turn several pages before you find a single word you've ever heard before, because English is unimaginably rich. I grew up in a house where everybody read literature all the time. I had three sisters and then a brother, and we all read literature, went to the library every week, read lots and lots and lots of books. So we all had really good vocabulary. That's how you get vocabulary. Otherwise, you don't, because in conversation do you want more tea or this sort of stuff, you don't learn your vocabulary. You have to get it from reading and listening to proper stuff.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing is, you have to moderate your vocabulary. Of a certain age because they don't know what the fuck you're talking about if you use language exactly. And the thing which is so exquisite about English is like with a barrister you can make a case which is absolutely wonderful because it says exactly what it means and there's no wriggle room and that conversation should be like that with no wriggle room. It's not just a matter of spelling but the basic vocabulary. You know something very interesting people say they know English or they speak English. Have you ever in your life opened a full size volume of the Oxford English dictionary? It's about that like this fat. I have a whole set. I love them. So this is it. You take a volume off the shelf and you open the book and you run your forefinger down the various columns.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's difficult to define that grammatically, difficult like I should have gone. Where I went, or I should have gone means to speak. Now, how would it be if when we see the verb to go in Sumerian, it actually meant to speak? Where would we be? Where would we be?”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world in which we live. I mean, if you do live in a rustic environment or by the sea or you're a fisherman, I mean, all those normal, real kind of things, then it's probably all right. But most people who live crammed in the cities live a very, very artificial life where the principles which they regard as ineluctably crucial are not ineluctably crucial. They're not in, you know, one example is this ghastly thing on mobiles where you get a short clip from a real program. I think it's utterly, utterly wicked. So you have children all over the world who cannot articulate spell or make meaning clear using the best, most literary and most beneficial language that's ever been created, which is English, to save their lives. And they use a word, I'll give you an example. Like I went.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things about the ancient world was that people never went anywhere unless they were merchants or soldiers. They never went anywhere. Probably people born and died in a village and then their children born and died in their village. And they never knew anything about the outside world. Maybe very little. Sometimes there'd be a message. But in principle, they had no idea about other countries, other languages, or how big they were on it. I don't think they had wisdom in a way that you could type out following precepts will make life better. Because they told lies and they esteem the truth, and they fell in love and they committed adultery and they did murder and they did all the things. I think in a way the ancient world allowed human beings to behave more naturally than it does now.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Well, I think it's a hard question to answer. But one of the things is that they were spared Things which have cluttered up the essence of humanity because I think that the modern adherence to the electronic universe is disastrous for humans because it reduces the vitality of the human component. I think it's restrictive in a way that people don't realize until it's too late, like drugs if you take drugs now and again you think, oh, it's fine, it's fine. Then suddenly you realize you're addicted to heroin. It's a bit like that. People use the electronic world like an addictive drug and they can't get through without it. And I think this is a very recent thing, but I suppose it's not I'm a Luddite and say we shouldn't have railway engines and we shouldn't have kettles. But I think”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and they measured them and they make calculations. And when the Greeks went to Babylon, they think, hey, man, this is really cool. Wrote it all down and went home.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you are a clever journalist or a clever thinker, you can write essays about it, you can talk about it, and you can see it, but you can only see it from the perspective from which you operate. And with the passage of time, the significance of objects, what they stand for, what they meant and what they can still mean shifts. And the further back you go, the sharper you can understand things, especially in terms of their own precedent and their own modern contemporary parallels. The benefit of distance, storage, and contemplation is inestimable.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Precisely so. And it's not a valid criticism to say to us that most of the stuff is not on exhibition, which is what everybody says it should go there, it should go there because it's not on exhibition. But we're not doing it for any other reason than stockpiling for future examination. See, this is the important perspective that nobody considers because the thing is, when you have something which is contemporary,”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could do if, for example, a whole load of Martians arrived in the great court and burst through the front door and said to us, tell us all about this place, tell us about the world. Can you do it fast? Because we got to leave. And if you took them round and said, look at this, look at this, look at this, look at this, they'd get some picture which wasn't insane. The only thing they wouldn't get is a recording of Johnny Be Good by Chuck Berry, but apparently one's been put into space.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And those are the things which are important. So I think it's people say, oh, you say this because you work there and you're a curator, you would say that, that the British Museum is a special place. It's nothing to do with that. It is actually a special place because you cannot point to another museum in the world with the same tasks. For example, the Louvre is basically a museum of art, basically a museum of art, not a museum of ideas. And the Met is definitely a museum of art. It's called the Museum of Art. And that's their priority, design and color and shape to us, to my mind, is the British Museum. This is one factor among many others. And we are not an art museum and we're not a local museum. We're not a museum of the history of the bicycle. We're not a celebration of evil. We are, as it were, doing, as I see it, the best.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perhaps less with a less acerbity and less criticism than I would if I was the director, I would try to put them down the wrong end of a microscope and look at them for what they are and what they have done and what's been done in the names of religion, you probably would never get away with that, but maybe one day that will be an important part because it's a major contributive factor to what's happened to the human race, which is never really articulated sharply about what religion has done to us and where we might have been without it. Because not having religion does not mean not having law or morality or sensitivity or consideration or love or any of those things, none of those things depends on religion.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's one of the places in the world where you can talk about truth and beauty and elegance and intelligence without it being an affront to people who have none of those qualities and without it being a kind of speech that people shudder or they think you're being naive about it because those are the crucial things. And also About religion, that we don't favor a religion and we don't sponsor a religion. We try to look them. what they are and to assess Relationships and what they offer.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So babies yet to be born and their children and their children and their children. And it seems to me that the task of the museum is of such cultural significance and such, so to speak, sacred validity that it shouldn't have to put up with people carping about this or that or saying the museums are sinful and wicked and should be demolished because the people who say these things don't really have any idea of actually what it really does stand for. And it's a kind of lighthouse in a universe where we are surrounded by darkness, ignorance, stupidity, Uninterest, disinterest, skepticism. Ignorance, and so forth about the very issues that we're interested in.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As discernible in objects. So it means that we serve two very important horizons. One is that we represent as far as we can the whole world with no injudicious attention paid to any one or other culture that they owe to us one. So there's no favoring any religious group, any country group, anything of the kind. It's the human species. We try to tell the narrative of in its own right and how it overlaps with the Its neighbors and what it's learnt from what came before, all those features together is really what the concern of the museum is. And of course, to collect everything has been to collect everything we can to tell those narratives and also to look after them according to scientific principle. So all those things at once are the task of the British Museum. And the second horizon it serves is the unborn.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the British Museum is a mathical place and it's a special case because there's a lot of flurry and dispute now about what museums are and what they're for and why they exist and whether they should ever have existed and all these sorts of issues which people go on about. But the British Museum is unlike almost all museums in the world because it's to do with the achievements of mankind from the beginning onwards. So it's a kind of celebration of art and more, but it's not an art museum. It's to do with the struggle of the human race against all the things that beset it and how it has triumphed and how marvelous it is and the things that have happened and not turning a blind eye to all the contrasting horrible things that have happened. But it's the narrative of the human race as I see it.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even though they weren't coins, because I think you're right that it's a natural thing to fit to accrue. And also, maybe men and women play differently because there are some games which were played in Harims among girls on a hot afternoon where nobody was going to win anything. But the rules tablet, which gives this kind of backhanded information about it, is couched in such a way that it talks about people in a bar. Because the movement of the PC is calculated in terms of food and drink and women, what you win. So, the landscape in which the rules account for credibility adjusts exactly that set up.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Involved here? I think so, but probably only late on, because money as such. Course, that doesn't appear till quite late, but there are We know in Mesopotamia. It's rather interesting thing. There's a school tablet with three or four lines quoted from one literary thing and three or four from another literary thing. And one of them has this. O my Astragal O my Astragal, woe is me, woe is me. And that's all we have. And I think this is an example of a genre of literature called the Gambler's Lent. Because they use knuckle bones or astrogals as dice, and I'm sure there were people who bet sack of this or a room full of that and on the throw of the knucklebones. And this extract in the school text is probably from a literary tablet in which somebody... Lost everything”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Catch all phrase for the existence of board games, and in India, there are many board games. Chess, of course, is the famous one, but they're quite a lot of three in a row type games or Fox Against Geese games and wolves against sheep and all those sorts of things which come out of the landscape in miniature and were playful or pleasure. in the kind of way it doesn't really matter who wins because you might play and goes around and round and round eventually somebody wins and then they have another game. So it's a sort of that kind of rather graceful, valid function for not wasting time doing something which is stimulating and beneficial without it being Overpowering in either way. So I think it is a human matter.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can nevertheless get angry, but it's not like that. That's one thing. But more significantly, I believe is the question of what in India people call time pass. Is not quite the same as pastime. Time pass is the question of what you do when it's too hot to do anything. Which is true, a good part of the day and a good part of the year. And grandmothers sit under trees with their grandchildren and they tell stories and they do this and they do that. And time passes a very useful”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I do, yes. I think... You can say that in communities you have rivalry, hostility, and who's the best, who's the fastest, who's the strongest and things. And if you play a board game like that, all the reality of it is sublimated into a safe terrain.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When somebody had escaped at the last minute, cleaned up, but just when they thought they were going to get. Pre rogues that salutary, benevolent fury and rage in the players Which all good board games do, and they were happily married couples who were at the end of the afternoon phoning their respective lawyers to discuss the future, that kind of thing. Beautiful matter.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It works out rather well. And once I was in California in the Getty, and I had to give a talk about this with all the information, there's lots of things to say about it. And the lady who ran the Friends of the Getty had a brilliant idea. So she bought in 20 or so commercial copies of this game and they had small tables with chairs. And after the lecture, I was supposed to say to everybody, okay, this is what you have to do. This is how you play because you can get the rules down in like three minutes like this. So I said, okay, first you have to do this, first you have to do that. So off you go. So there was silence. And then after a while, someone said, I hate you. I never playing your screen with you again when they never played it before.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you have a good balance between chance and strategy, And it's a fair game and doesn't take four days to play like modern board games. So you can have a go and if you're lucky you win fast and then you have another go, maybe best of three or something like that.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rules were to do with a game which was derived from this simple early game, and that working backwards from it you could reconstruct the game in accordance with its later incarnation that might be workable, and it jolly well turned out to be workable because people play this all over the world now. And they even play it in Iraq in cafes.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So most games are either just probability like snakes and ladders, snakes, shoots and ladders Thing like that, or you have a game like chess which is pure strategy And the grown-up game in the modern world, where fortuity or chance and strategy have a good balance is backgammon, which is a sort of grown up version of this sort of game, where, nevertheless, if you play, according to the most rational interpretation, its strategy is a major factor. So what happened was that many people had ideas how it was played and the route followed, and I did too. And then I discovered this tablet in the British Museum, which was written at a very late period in the 2nd century BC. So 2300 years after this object existed, and it had on it the names of the pieces and what the pieces were like and various things about the throes, and it was obvious that it was”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is the thing it makes you wonder what would be about it that would fit so well with a wide appetite from different persons, different types of person. And the thing is, Although it's a race game where you're at the mercy of dice and lucky squares and unlucky squares, that the process of getting your pieces on and off the board as a winner is primarily fortuitous. But it has, built within it, it's the way I understand the game plays, a measurable quota of strategy.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, all the boards after the period of Ur have 12 squares down the middle and then four on each side at one end. So it meant then that when you play the game you have dice to move the pieces, you have pieces all the same, and you obviously put them on your first corner and you turn the corner, you go up the middle and off the end. And it was a race game of the kind that everybody knows from their own childhood and some squares which had rosettes on were either safe squares or you had another throw and you could maybe put two on one square. We don't know you could try and block people and but anyway the crucial thing is that the widespread distribution of this idiosyncratic shape and its lasting thing shows it must have been a very good game if people more or less played the same thing on it everywhere. I mean it may be that there were completely different games but probably not.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then a bridge of two, and then a second three by two thing at the end. So it's difficult to describe the actual shape. But what happened was after about 2000 BC, the squares at the far end, which there were two on one flank and two on the other were all put at the end of the central avenue. So you end up with 12 squares down the middle”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very early time, and this game was so widespread, you know, Tutung Kamun, for example, in his tomb there were two or three boards for it with the pieces. So it arrived in the middle of the second millennium in Egypt. And even the pharaoh played it. So you have a game which the interesting point about it is that it spread across the gnome world without written rules and without people necessarily knowing the same language. So a merchant would go End up in a bar. You know, come from India, or I don't know where, start planting these guys playing Have a Go himself. It looks rather interesting. You go home and try and remember what it looked like and try and work out how to, you know, it would be transported this way and the other. So you can see that the board has 20 squares, so you have a block of four by one.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Across space and time. So it lasts you for nearly 3,000 years. And it was played all over the place. So it's one of those games which is like... Chess or backgammon, which you can say are world conquerors because the way I see that the issue is that human beings for a very long time have been, shall we say, hungry for Things to do because all through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age there was no television. They wouldn't know nothing and kids play with pull along things and adults had board games and they're kind of embedded in culture.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, that was one thing. And we had the number of pieces and some dice, so lots of people had ideas about how it might have been played. And that went on like that for a very long time. And thereafter, boards for this game turned up in most of the countries of the Middle East, sometimes quite a lot of them. And the one from Ur dates to about 2600 BC. From then down to the end of the first millennium, there's examples of boards from Mesopotamia itself and from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Crete, all over the place. And when you put all the boards together, You realize that you're dealing with a board game, which was extremely widespread and extremely popular.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the Royal Game of Ore is a board of 20 squares in a rather idiosyncratic form. And it was pretty much unknown until the 1920s when Sir Leonard Woolley was digging at the site of ore. And in the graves of the royal family, the Sumerian rulers, they found four or five boards of this pattern. Together with dice and pieces, which showed that it was popular among them at this time, and also that wherever they were going in the world to come, they would want to be playing it.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it can't really be noisy. I tell you what the explanation is. It's something quite different. Before the flood, the gods had not created death. So, I think the noise was a reflex of the fact there were just too many animals, too many people, and they had to do something about it. So it's a sort of euphemism, so to speak, because after the flood, at the end of the tablet, not my tablet, but the other ones, where it's still broken, it says there's a tantalizing thing where they create barren women who can't have children and men who can't have children and people who don't have children. They institute in society some figures who will not reproduce the species. So it's actually a rather sophisticated Malthusian kind of philosophical position. It's remarkable. So that the noise means there's so many of them. They're actually so noisy that we can't hear ourselves think.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually regarding your question, it's on the cusp of purely oral literature to purely literary literature. It's actually there because you can see that it was molded in the environment when people were still talking.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when they got to the question of the boat, they'd say something like this. And Enki said, you've got to build the biggest coracle you've ever seen like that, right? Well, I mean, if you do this in cinema in Guildford, people will say, well, that's fine. But if you do it to a whole load of river people who use coracles and make build, they're not going to take that. So how big was it then? Come on, how big was it? So what do they do? They go to a coracle place and they work out the proportions of material and then they bump it up so that the actor who reads this for the first few times he has in his pocket how much it is. But after a while, he knows it by heart so that none of these people get angry and you can't expect us big enough for all this. So then you'd have all the stuff and they'd do it this way and you need all this and all this and they'd all be hypnotized by it. That I think is.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they bumped them up So that it worked And I know why that is. Because he goes back to your question about oral literature, because there must have been times when people went to villages and told them about the flood.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can read it. Yeah. But the thing is this the proportions of the material were accurate. Is the crucial thing that what had happened was Is they took the information about how you make a real coricle, which is usually enough to people in the few sheep and goats.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am saying this some inaccurate things. Yes, somebody in the rock said, oh, it couldn't have been that. They probably had lots of little coricles all tied together. Did they fuck? I mean, you know, he couldn't read the stuff. I mean, it's really, really, really annoying. I mean, you should have a chance, should you? You know, if you're going to have a fencing match, you both have to have a rapier, wouldn't you say?”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely right. We had such an adventure with that thing. They made a documentary film. In various languages. And you know what they did? You know, I was in it a bit. And they had people saying, oh, I don't think it was this, I don't think it was that. And they didn't let me go back and say, what the hell are you talking about? I did it. I know. I can reconnect form. Can you? They didn't, they didn't do it. I couldn't get my own back. I was really annoyed. Really furious.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a leak. Water had to be bailed out. So I was like, you see, I said, okay, it's in sunshine. I said to this producer, you ever been in a rowing boat without water in the bottom? Excuse me.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they could get wood ribs. They worked out by computer, the maximum size they could do it when it would work. Beyond it, it would be impossible because once they built the curved ribs and then the stuff woven all around it, it had to be covered in bitumen, which is also very heavy to make it waterproof. So they calculated the size and it worked. So they built this thing on rollers and it was pushed out into the, it was just the most unbelievable. I went out there with my dear wife for the last few days and was on the maiden voyage. And they had trouble with the bitumen because Indian bitumen is really not up to scratch. And they couldn't get Iraqi bitumen because it's cultural property. It's carcinogenic. They wouldn't export a tank a load of Iraqis. So we had to use India stuff. But the thing is this, the bitumen, which they coated it with, was okay, but it wasn't perfect. When it went out into the waters, there was a”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were three blokes who did it. And they were specialists in reconstructing medieval Arab boats because quite often they found in the mud or bits or they have information and they were at home in it. And we built it on a small lagoon in Kerala. It was just the most unbelievably wonderful thing because they used the instructions as a blueprint. They made it about a third of the size of the original. Pretty huge thing. But they made it because it had wooden ribs, you see.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of great potency, of irresistible potency, because everybody identifies with the idea of being in bed and someone knocks on the door and says, get up, you've got to build a boat. And this is what you're going to need. And you've got to get on with it, sunshine, or we're all sunk. I mean, what are you going to do? The most interesting thing is that this Atrajis in the 1700 text, he wasn't a king and he wasn't a sailor or a boat builder. So how comes this clever God who wants to find someone to build? Wouldn't you go for a look in the yellow pages for boat building company and say, listen, fella, I've got to deal with, no, he had to tell him, this is the blueprint, this is the shape, you need all this, you need all that, you've got to measure it and all that. It's a very interesting thing.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say negligible because I regard it as a literary matter, which is not predicated on the existence of flood in people's minds, but I do believe that the story in Mesopotamia owes its inception to a disastrous flood, but nothing global, nothing that touched America. China or Birmingham. So I don't have any sympathy with that. But people have made drilled cause in the, I don't know, all over. I'm not interested in all that stuff. To my mind. It's a literary topos.”
2025-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source