Sergio DeSoto The Counterintuitive Podcast

About Sergio DeSoto The Counterintuitive Podcast

This podcast delves into the lessons drawn from personal and professional journeys, examining human nature, counterintuitive thinking, and the principles of adaptability for a richer, more fulfilling life. With a deep exploration of biblical topics, it offers thoughtful insights for navigating the complexities of existence. substack.sergiodesoto.com (https://substack.sergiodesoto.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Sergio DeSoto

Category

business · religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

17 Jan 2025

Latest episode

26 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

112 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   26 Aug 2026

   I Have Been Screaming the Wrong Word

   Rome mediated, and burned the men who handed out keys. Protestants gatekeep. For years I aimed the first charge at the second church, and I could not work out why it kept sliding off the people I most wanted it to land on. Say no mediation to a Protestant and he agrees with you. He doesn’t squirm — he quotes 1 Timothy 2:5 back at you before you finish the sentence, and he means it. His tradition was founded on saying it out loud against Rome. I was walking into rooms and prosecuting a count the jury had returned five hundred years earlier. A charge that costs the hearer nothing isn’t a charge. It’s a compliment he has learned to receive politely. So I went back to look at who Yeshua was hardest on — not corrected, not warned, but pronounced woe over. Read Matthew 23 and Luke 11 and notice who is standing there. It is not the priesthood. The kohanim ran the sacrificial system; they were the mediating class by definition. The scribes and Pharisees were the interpreters — the teaching class. And that is where the woes fall: you have taken away the key of knowledge (Luke 11:52); you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces (Matthew 23:13). Not you inserted yourselves between men and atonement. You took the key. You shut the door. The episode works through: * A key is named for opening. Hebrew mafteach is built on patach, to open — the object named after the act. There is no Hebrew word for key meaning the thing that keeps you out. Greek splits the same root against itself: kleis in Luke, kleio, to shut, in Matthew. And the key was to gnosis — da’at underneath, the knowing of Hoshea 4:6 and the knowing Yirmeyahu 31:34 promised to everyone, least to greatest. They confiscated the key to the exact thing the covenant had just promised every child in the room. * Rome’s two crimes. It mediated, and it also gatekept — the loud way. The Vulgate in a Europe that didn’t speak Latin. Arundel’s Constitutions of 1408 making English Scripture a crime. Hus burned in 1415, Wycliffe’s bones dug up and burned in 1428, Tyndale strangled and burned at Vilvoorde in 1536 for wanting a ploughboy to know more Scripture than the prelates. A gate that obvious trains your eye for locks and flames — and leaves you unequipped to see the second gate, which has neither. * What the Reformation kept. Mediation went. Sola scriptura, the priesthood of all believers, the book in the vernacular. The custody did not go. Tyndale’s heirs inherited what he bought: the ploughboy has the book, in his own language, on his nightstand — and still waits until Sunday to be told what it means. * The sanctuary is the gate. The sign says sanctuary — mikdash, chartered in one sentence: let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst (Shemot 25:8). Then look at what the room does with the middle. Chairs bolted one direction, a raised platform, one microphone among four hundred people, one name on the printed schedule — and the thing nobody wrote down: stand up mid-sermon and ask how did you get that out of the Hebrew, and it is not a question, it is an incident. The gate is not the opinion. It is the opinion plus the impossibility of testing it in the moment it is handed to you. * He could be interrupted. At twelve, in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions (Luke 2:46). Both verbs. Four men tearing a hole in a roof over His head, and no rebuke for the interruption. Luke’s verb for Sha’ul in the synagogues is dialegomai — argument running both directions — nine times in Acts. And 1 Corinthians 14:29-31, where the man speaking is ordered to stop so a seated man can speak, and the congregation is given a job: let the others weigh what is said. Prophecy was on the floor when he commanded it. Kal v’chomer — if the room must weigh a prophet, how much more a man explaining a passage. * The narrow exception. Five marks of a teacher this doesn’t describe, including the two that decide it: he teaches you how to dig without handing you the conclusion, and you can stop him on the spot without it being a scandal. There is another key, and it is not in anybody’s pocket. He opens and no one shuts (Yeshayahu 22:22; Revelation 3:7-8). The actual key was never in the building, because it was never theirs to hold. You were never locked out. You were told to wait in the lobby, and you believed it, because a good man told you gently and every chair in the room was pointed at him. Shalom v’shalvah. To hear more, visit substack.sergiodesoto.com (https://substack.sergiodesoto.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=show-notes-spotify-open-access)

2. 

   26 Aug 2026

   The Heart Hires the Mind

   This one started with a book. Reading David Robson’s The Intelligence Trap — a study of how smart people end up believing foolish things — I kept seeing educated minds use their full horsepower to rationalize attachments they had already formed. Robson was not writing about romance. He was describing why people attend the systems of Western Christianity, and why pastors and churches curate them. Nobody reasons his way into love. The attachment arrives first, uninvited, and then the mind goes to work — cataloging virtues, explaining away warnings, building a case that sounds airtight to everyone except the friends watching from outside. The conclusion was never on trial. The heart decided, and then the heart hired the mind. The episode works through: * The word behind the word. Your English Bible splits you in two — heart feels, head thinks, and the cool head polices the hot heart. Hebrew refuses the split. The lev is where a man thinks, plans, and talks to himself. Which is why Yirmeyahu 17:9 lands harder than the English carries it: the lev is aqov — crooked, uneven, heel-grabbing ground, from the same root that named Ya’akov. The organ that reasons is the organ that deceives. And the next verse names the only examiner left: I, YHWH, search the lev. * Private logic. Adler’s term for reasoning built in service of a goal already chosen. Sha’ul filed the same finding without a laboratory — people “will accumulate teachers to suit their passions” (2 Timothy 4:3). Read the order of operations. Desire first. Teachers after. * The same engine, dressed in robes. Roman courtroom vocabulary entering through Tertullian’s Latin. Anselm proving the atonement remoto Christo and discovering, to the letter, the necessities of the feudal honor system outside his window. Calvin arguing like the lawyer he was trained to be at Orléans and Bourges. The brilliance is the tell, not the defense — coherence measures investment, not truth. And the tell inside the tell: a tradition that teaches the fall corrupted every human faculty, then exempts the faculty that built the system. * Where the two logics part. The lover eventually wakes up next to the actual person; reality keeps the breakfast appointment. An institution never has to. It writes conclusions into creeds before the questions arrive. The lover at least chose his beloved — yours was handed to you in the crib along with the finished arguments. And a person can surprise you back into the truth; a frame cannot speak. * What keeps you hooked. The lights come down, the band swells, the music climbs for twenty minutes, and the lev files the feeling as evidence. The feeling is real. The filing is the fraud. The first-century assembly sang — a psalm at a table, a hymn before walking out into the night (Matthew 26:30). What it did not have was the maintenance schedule. The Berean answer is not a colder heart. Luke praises the assembly at Berea for two things in one breath: they received the word with all eagerness, and they examined the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so (Acts 17:11). Eagerness honestly owned, carried to the text and put under oath. The intellect is not fired; it is reassigned — no longer counsel for the defense, now a witness. And the audit Yirmeyahu warned about becomes something David asks for: Search me, El, and know my lev (Tehillim 139:23-24). One honest test closes the episode, and it is neither the quality of your defenses nor the depth of what you felt on Sunday: has the text ever overruled one of your loves? If your Bible has never cost you a conclusion you cherished, consider that you may not be reading it. You may be courting it, and it has been answering in your own voice. Shalom v’shalvah. To hear more, visit substack.sergiodesoto.com (https://substack.sergiodesoto.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=show-notes-spotify-open-access)

3. 

   26 Aug 2026

   There Were No Jews at Nicea

   There were no Jews at the Council of Nicea. The men who walked with Yeshua were Jews. The men who ratified the empire’s Christianity were not. That absence is not a footnote to church history — it is the story. This episode walks the sequence in order: * 135 CE — Hadrian bans Jews from Jerusalem after the Bar Kokhba revolt. The city is rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina, and the unbroken line of fifteen Jerusalem bishops “of the circumcision,” running back to Ya’akov (James), ends. The next bishop is a gentile. * 325 CE — The same empire that severed the root convenes the council that defines the faith without it. Macarius of Jerusalem attends — a gentile holding the seat of Ya’akov in a city no Jew could lawfully enter. * The Notzrim — the Torah-keeping Jewish believers whose communities descended from the apostles’ own — could not sit at all, and within two generations were filed under heresy by Epiphanius for practicing what Ya’akov practiced. * The Pascha ruling — the resurrection festival is detached from the fourteenth of Nisan. Constantine’s own circulated letter gives the reason: so that Christians might have “nothing in common” with the Jews. The stated ground was not exegesis. It was distance. Along the way: the shape of Acts 15 against the shape of Nicea, and why a seating chart is a creed. The torn veil of Matthew 27 read against the covenant terms of Yirmeyahu 31 — Torah relocated, knowledge distributed, the mediating caste retired — and what it means that at Nicea the office came back enthroned, funded, and armed. The question of jurisdiction: the moedim are called mo’adei YHWH in Vayikra 23, fixed by His own word, and the only justification on record for moving one is an emperor’s motive standing where a text should be. And the counterintuitive turn at the center: this ugly history is evidence for Yeshua, not against him. Rome spent three centuries failing to kill the movement, then absorbed it. Execution, then co-option. Institutions do not mobilize against nothing. The episode closes where the essay closes — with Revelation 12:17 and the offspring the dragon makes war on: those who keep the commandments of God and hold the testimony of Yeshua. Both clauses, one people. Rome kept minutes. HaShem kept a remnant. For the wild branch tempted to feel superior, and for the reader halfway out the church door, there is a word here for both. Primary sources cited so you can check every date yourself: Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 4.5–6 and 5.23–25; Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.18–19; Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 1.9; Justin Martyr, First Apology31 and Dialogue with Trypho 11, 123, 135; Epiphanius, Panarion 29; Theodosian Code 16.1.2 and 16.2. Shalom v’shalvah. To hear more, visit substack.sergiodesoto.com (https://substack.sergiodesoto.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=show-notes-spotify-open-access)

Contact Sergio DeSoto The Counterintuitive Podcast

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.