Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
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Jeff Childers, welcome back to the studio.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Good to be here.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: As you walked in, we were starting to see the breaking news on X today. It's flooding my stream. I don't know about yours, but it's flooding my stream is that the Department of War has released its first round of images and videos, videos related to UFOs, UAPs.
I've read some of your thoughts on.
Doesn't seem like you're highly, highly concerned about this shaking the world as we know it. Is that accurate or what do you, what do you say?
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Well, one of the most fascinating things about the UFO disclosure phenomenon, let's call it that, which started back during the Biden era with some Republicans in Congress and you probably Matt Gaetz and all those folks. And so what is just astonishing to me is how little reaction it's like after everything we've been through, right, we got self driving cars now and chatbots that talk to you and robots coming off the assembly line and aliens and blah blah blah.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: It kind of feeds into the coffee and Covid vibe pretty pretty well. I was looking at some of your titles.
You've got Terminator, Independence Day. You got a few things that you've kind of pulled out of cinematic history there to frame the storyline. It does kind of seem like an 80s movie sometimes.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Well, Hollywood's been anticipating this moment for a long time. You know, all the arrival and ET you can go on and on. I mean you got friendly aliens and the mean aliens and, and everything in between.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Do you think in a year from now that when all of the files that are going to come out, when they all come out, do you think it's going to be an earth shattering disclosure or do you think it's going to be the kind of issue where we don't know any more about it then than we do now?
[00:03:12] Speaker A: Well, how did the JFK files turn out for you?
[00:03:14] Speaker B: It wasn't quite as satisfying. Yeah.
And several of the disclosures haven't gone the way that we thought they would. And so what's behind all that?
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Well, maybe real life just isn't as fascinating as Hollywood is.
So there's that, there's that.
And you can go as far down the alien disclosure rabbit hole as you want. Right. I mean, there's the people who say they're preparing to fool everybody and that's going to be the, the trigger for clamping down on us and taking away our privacy and everything because we're all going to be so terrified about the aliens. We'll do whatever they want. Right. So you got those, those guys. And then on the other side is the, it's, it's a demonic plan that, you know, when the rapture happens, they're going to blame all the disappeared Christians on the, the aliens. And so they're getting everybody ready for the idea that the aliens are all around us all the time.
So you tell me, where do you want to, you know, on that spectrum?
Yeah.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: And it's probably the least fascinating of the bunch. It may be. At the end of the day, there's just some things we can't explain, you know, that happen, phenomenon that happen in this universe that are somewhat inexplicable, at least to us. They're always explainable. But to us, we may look at it and go, it's going to take us a while to figure this out. Why do certain things float through the atmosphere and move in ways that seem impossible to our understanding of physics? And so it can expand our thinking, it can expand our understanding to some degree, perhaps.
[00:05:00] Speaker A: Yeah. The question is, is anybody ever going to be satisfied? So I watched a sitting US Senator this morning looking through my feed who was talking about, with Joe Rogan about whether there's a recovered craft or not, right beyond the, the pictures that are just little blurry dots.
And you look at that, what is that?
[00:05:24] Speaker B: What do you do with that?
[00:05:25] Speaker A: Right. Come on. But is, is there some physical, tangible evidence somewhere? And I don't think they're ever going to tell us that even if they had it, they're not going to tell us that it's too valuable for national security.
You don't want your enemies knowing you've got a hold of something like that. You don't want them looking for it.
But anyway, so the, the hardcore UFO people will not be satisfied no matter what comes out. I don't think the idea that they're going to just put up on a website something that changes our whole understanding of our place in the cosmos, that doesn't seem realistic.
They wouldn't do it. That way, if they were going to do something like that, I think they would do it differently. It wouldn't be in batch number seven, you know what I mean? Right?
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
Probably less than a week ago.
A prominent televangelist, Perry Stone, that's kind of been off the radar for some time. Perry was big in the 90s. He had a growing ministry and when TBN was at its height, he was one of the players on tbn.
Perry Stone came out and announced that a group of pastors were taken to an undisclosed location and they got to see all the material that's coming and that soon this earth shattering religion shaking information would be released.
The irony of it was it was none of the pastors that you've ever heard of and it's none of the pastors who are in the loop in the administration.
So I think maybe six or seven guys have come out and said, I was in that meeting. And it's like, okay, who are you again? You've got less followers than I've got. I've never heard of you before.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: How'd they pick you?
[00:07:13] Speaker B: Yeah, how did you get in this meeting and why were you invited? And we know who the spiritual advisors are that's around Trump and who they recognize as key movers and that sort of thing. It's none of those people.
It was a strange group, which I don't say that to say that this didn't happen. I'm just saying it may have been a non official meeting with someone who was affiliated with the government to some degree, who happened to know a guy and pull his buddies together. That's what it felt like when I saw it.
But the bigger story was that ministers and churches have to prepare because this changes everything.
And what I would suggest is maybe, maybe not. Maybe it doesn't change everything. Maybe let's just follow the thought experiment that there are these beings and they have modes of transportation that break the laws of physics as we understand them and they're out there. What do we do with that? Scripturally?
Scripturally, I would say first of all, not to say this is what's happening. I'm just recognizing this is a possible plausible explanation. When you look at Ezekiel and you see some of these vehicles that he's describing, wheels within a wheel that are turning in all directions.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: Sounds just like a ufo.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: It does sound familiar. But you look at it and you see the beings with foreheads and different things.
There are times where people have encountered visions and, and dreams of things that were beyond anything in the natural. That they seemed to have trouble in their language explaining.
So the worst case scenario, I would say if, let's say if this comes out and there are these beings, there are these vehicles, the worst case scenario is I would say we need to broaden our understanding of angels and demons. And we typically have a kind of an elementary idea that an angel dressed in white, blonde hair, blue eyes, whatever.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: Wings.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: Yeah, wings. And little naked babies on the front of the Bible, you know, and that demons are the same thing, they're just fallen, basically, is what the scriptures teach.
However, you see a huge range of categories.
Speaking of demons is like speaking of mammals.
They come in all shapes and size. Or speaking of angels, speaking of fish, there's not a one size fit, they're not all bass. In other words, you've got all different types and sizes and appearances.
And who is to say that they don't need some mode of transportation at times?
Who is to say that they don't use some form of, of technology from time to time? I'm thinking in Daniel, when the angel was sent in answer to his prayer. But somehow or another, the Prince of Persia, there seems to be another angelic being, a fallen angel hindered him from coming to Daniel to bring the answer to his prayer. So it's not necessarily that they can beam up and beam down the way that we would expect.
So it could broaden our understanding of these other angelic beings, which biblically speaking, that's the only categories we've got. We've got the divine, we've got angels, fallen angels, and we've got humans intelligence within the universe. That's what scriptures told us about.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, another sort of surprising trend on social media, at least surprising to me, was the resurgence of the Book of Enoch.
[00:10:56] Speaker B: It's been for several months now, it's been chattered about.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Yeah. And you can go back, it's probably been through the pandemic era, building slowly to kind of a current crescendo.
And that's the extra biblical text.
But it is mentioned in several places in the Bible. So it's in a sort of a gray zone.
[00:11:18] Speaker B: It's a strange category. It was not in any way that we can tell.
It's not the language, the framing of it was not old enough to have been written by Enoch. It was someone years later who penned it under that pen name and gave it that title. It was common for them to do that to get a larger reading. But it did cover a lot of information that aligns with the Bible but is not in the Bible.
[00:11:44] Speaker A: It's like filling in the gaps.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: It is.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: And so for people who aren't familiar, and correct me if I summarize this inaccurately, but it tells the story of angels who fell and they made a pact to all do it together so that if, you know, none of them would get singled out for punishment. And their plan was to go and marry human women.
And that ties to Genesis and explains that. But for our discussion this morning, the other thing is that it talks about how those fallen angels who were immediately condemned by God and sentenced to live
[00:12:32] Speaker B: on the earth forever, they were held in bondage to the day of Judgment, right?
[00:12:36] Speaker A: But they gave humans advanced technology.
And then other scholars like Michael Heiser, who's just recently passed, but he's a very well respected biblical scholar who's published, you know, in the journals tons of times, he did, he tied it to ancient traditions like the Apkallu from Mesopotamian lore, who were these beings that arrived on the shores and gave technology to humans and so on. So he was able to find some connections that confirmed the story from Enoch.
So what you see is a picture of angels who really understand technology very well, way better than humans do.
And if you want to play another fun thought experiment, you can look back in human history for these sudden developments where some massive technological revolution occurs mysteriously out of nowhere. And for the most recent example, I would point to AI.
Right. Where does that come from?
The. The. And I don't want to make too much of a conspiracy theory out of this, I'm not married to it or anything, but these. The conventional story is some Google engineers were trying to make a word predicting algorithm and they created A.I. okay, well, who gave them that idea, what happened there, and so on. So you could easily imagine that if these demons or fallen angels have access to advanced technologies, they can use them to trade with humans to get something that they want.
They can reward humans for service by giving them ways to become incredibly wealthy.
And they can build themselves, themselves modes of transportation, like you were talking about, to get around more conveniently maybe than whatever they have access to in the natural.
[00:14:32] Speaker B: Well, all of those concepts and ideas are not implausible or impossible theologically. I think probably a category I left out earlier when I said there's the divine, there's angels, fallen angels and humans. The other category that you brought up would be the Nephilim, would be this hybrid, angelic, hybrid mix that according to Genesis was on the Earth in those days.
I would hold that they were wiped out during the flood. However, the Jewish community would suggest that what we consider demons today, Whether it's, you know, the paranormal, the.
The possession, that sort of thing, it's not actually the fallen angel that's doing the possession, but it's the departed spirits of the nephilim.
So if they were killed in the flood, that hybrid offspring, they had a soul, but the soul, would it go to heaven, hell, or would it haunt the earth?
And Jewish theologians would suggest that it would haunt the earth.
And so what Jesus was encountering when he was casting out demons, it was not actually the fallen angels. It was the spirits of those nephilim beings. And so angelic intelligence would by any stretch of the imagination be far greater than anything that any human could ever conceive of. They've been around since the beginning. They don't die.
And so, you know, understanding of technology and that sort of thing would obviously be far beyond what we've conceived of so far. So, you know, and even things like genetic engineering, could they produce a physical body? Could they produce a clone?
Could they do these things? One would presume that they could. And so how far would God let them go? And I think that's the important thing to remember is that God.
This isn't like a Ying yang, where you've got the devil on one side and God on the other, and they're fighting it out. God is infinitely more powerful. Infinitely. This is not even a fair fight in any stretch of the imagination.
So whatever Satan can do is what God allows him to do because it fits into his perfect plan for him to receive ultimate glory in the end of all things.
And, you know, as we look into eschatology, when you see an image that comes to life that deceives mankind, that does sound something like AI. It does seem something that, you know, that was at one time just an image on a screen that now seems to come alive
[00:17:28] Speaker A: and just wait, right?
[00:17:30] Speaker B: And every generation, every generation sees these things and tries to make sense is the helicopter, the grasshopper, and revelation, you know, every generation does that. And I don't think that's wrong. I think it's given to us for some reason there's something we're to do with it.
And it's, you know, as we face revelations of things that we may not be able to understand, I think it's good and helpful to lean into the scripture to trust that God's given us what we need for life and godliness and try to connect the dots the best we can. And admit you have a measure of humility that maybe we've got some things Wrong as it comes to our categories for what an angel is, what a demon is, what nephilim are, all these things.
It's going to be exciting theologically to see how the world processes all these things going forward.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: I guess it depends on what they give us. If it's just more of these same videos with a speck flying around like a gnat on the camera, it may not go very far at all.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Well, that's true. And you know, when you look at some of the other leaked videos that, you know, being an Area 51 or whatever, it's really hard for me to think that our cameras aren't any better than that, that those are legit videos.
[00:18:49] Speaker A: Man.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: How is his neck so little and his head so big? I just don't understand some of these things, but time will tell. Well, let's get back to Earth for a little bit and talk about some of the things that this may be distracting us from, that the aliens may be distracting us from.
You've been speaking some about Iran, Israel, the Strait of Hormuz.
He started chaperoning the with the US Military. We were taking the oil tankers in, protecting them from attack.
Then he stopped.
You've suggested on Coffee and Covid that this is a larger checkmate against Lloyd's of London. I want you to unpack that a little bit and tell me, tell me how you came to that conclusion.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Okay, so first of all, you have to understand one thing about warfare, and especially about modern warfare, is that it's all about propaganda.
And every side does is recognized as a perfectly legitimate tool of war.
So what that means for us is that when one of our officials comes out and makes an announcement, whether it's the Department of War or whether it's Trump posted a, you know, post untruth social in the middle of the night about Iran. It doesn't matter.
We don't know what's propaganda and what's true.
Nor should we.
That's not our business.
That when the. When the Department of War puts out a piece of information, if it's false, they did it for a reason. They're there. For example, they might be trying to get the enemy to come out of its hiding hole because it thinks it's winning or something.
Or they may be taunting. Like there was this thing they were talking about how the new ayatollah was really gay. Did you see that? No, I didn't saw that.
Now that went away. But I think that I believe that was propaganda to provoke him into responding so they could help find out where he was or if he was alive or, or whatever. And he didn't take the bait. So now you don't hear about how gay he is anymore unless he was really gay.
Again, how would you know?
It could be propaganda. It could be true.
So everything that we see when we're watching war unfold is through a glass darkly. Right? So we only know about the things that happen. So we have to extrapolate from the things that happen, and then we have to apply some principles.
So one interpretive principle that I have is that the purpose of a system is what it does.
Okay. So people can talk about their NGO or their nonprofit, but if it always winds up with more illegals coming over the border, even though they claim that the purpose of the organization is to provide food to the hungry, well, let's just look at what the system does, and that's what its intention is. Okay, so what's Trump up to with the Iran war? And the original media narrative was, oh, he doesn't know, he's just reckless, he was in a bad mood and he or Israel's manipulating him to fight this war for Israel.
He doesn't have a plan.
Well, I don't think anybody's buying that anymore. It's pretty clear that we're already seeing a lot of benefits from that war.
But I have suggested, and this is, I still believe this and to your point, that Trump wants the strait closed.
And so.
[00:22:33] Speaker B: And your reasoning is. Because we've got the Venezuela oil now, we've got American oil, and he wants to up the value by lowering the supply. Is that your thought process on it or.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: Yeah. When I look at the globe, I see the Trump administration basically taking control of every choke point, every naval choke point on the earth. And the Strait of Hormuza is a big one. But the Panama Canal, there's one in Indonesia that hasn't gotten a lot of press that were making military deals and trade deals down there, which. The Strait of Malacca, it's another little choke point, just like the Strait of Hormuz. Most Chinese oil, 80% of it, that's, that's shipped by boat, goes through that Indonesian Strait.
20% goes through the Strait of Hormuz.
Who does it hurt if the strait is closed? It doesn't hurt us.
Trump's already brought our domestic oil production to the level we're self sufficient and more, we're now shipping it to the Europeans and now the Asians.
So if the strait is closed, we don't get any oil from there.
But everybody has to buy our oil.
So our domestic producers and refiners and everybody in that whole stack of industry is better off with straight closed.
Who's getting it the worst? The Europeans, because they went green and they stop produce, they shut down their nuclear plants, they stop their coal production, and they put up windmills and solar panels. And they've been buying oil from who? Russia. Well, now they got in a war with Russia. But what was Trump complaining about last year? The Europeans are still buying Russian oil, so he put pressure on them to stop buying Russian oil. So they're getting most of their oil, believe it or not, through Iran, through cutouts. Even though Iran's under sanctions and nobody's supposed to buy Iranian oil, tons of it still gets out.
So what if the whole thing was just to shut down the Strait of Hormuz?
What if that 45 day hot war was just to reduce Iran's fighting capability to the point where it couldn't threaten our naval assets in the Strait while we kept it closed?
[00:24:57] Speaker B: What's the future hold?
[00:25:00] Speaker A: Well, so politically, Trump can't say I'm closing the Strait of Hormuz, right? Everybody would be up in arms, the UN Security Council would go nuts, and he'd be condemned everywhere.
And this is classic Trump, right? So he keeps saying, I'm trying to get it open, but it never opens.
Right. So every week it's a new initiative. We have Project Operation Freedom. And Operation Freedom is going to escort, you know, these tankers through and we're going to de mine it, but it might take a few months and somehow we just never get there. Even though the Iranians don't have any ability to fight anymore.
So I think the Strait is going to stay closed as long as Trump wants it to. Now, how long is this that? Well, that depends on what his plan is. And he hasn't told me the plan, and I don't want to know the plan.
There's the midterms are coming up.
So everybody thinks that Trump wants it wrapped up before the midterms so that oil prices come back down.
Well, that could be true. We're paying, what, four bucks a gallon now here in Florida? So it's up a dollar.
That's not catastrophic.
Uncomfortable.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: Well, and with the redistricting maps that are passing all over key states, at least I don't know that the midterms are as threatening as they once were.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: That's where I was just about to go. Which is, what if Trump has other ways to deal with the midterms and he doesn't need three dollar gas. He might let it stay that way for another year. What if the strait is closed for so and, and listen, think about this energy. Talked about this in the blog.
What does AI need more than everything else?
[00:26:49] Speaker B: Energy.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: Energy, Right.
So if we are now in a global race to build AI data centers and whoever gets the most sophisticated and the, the biggest and the most capacity and the largest number of data centers first is going to have an advantage for what, the next hundred years?
Well, what if this energy crisis that is now in Europe because they're not getting gas from Russia or through the Strait anymore sets them back two years just as a guess?
They'll never catch up. It goes too fast.
What if China is having the same thing right now? China is drawing down on, they have vast strategic reserves of oil.
They're drawing those down.
What if Trump keeps the straight closed long enough for China to run out of strategic oil reserves and start to have to make concessions? That's going to hurt their AI projects.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: So you look at, you look at, did you watch the California governor debates?
Did you see any of that?
[00:27:55] Speaker A: Just a little bit.
[00:27:57] Speaker B: It was pretty predictable. But the gas prices were the biggest issue that they talked about throughout it.
And they were all running against Trump, who's not on the ballot in California, but they're all running against Trump.
And you've got, I think Hilton is the leading Republican right now and he did a fantastic job. He just pretty much sat back and smiled and said, Trump's not on the ballot. This is not about Trump. He did a fantastic job.
The mayday protests have broken out.
My son, who the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, works for a campaign consultant in Nashville. And so part of his job this week was to go in video and to capture some of the mayday protests and tell me how these things fit together.
If the oil prices are not going to move the needle as much as we may fear as conservatives, why is this something that they're so latching onto? Why is this the main platform that the left is standing on for winning the governor's race in California?
How do all these things connect?
[00:29:08] Speaker A: Well, the first thing I would say is what makes me laugh the hardest about California politicians complaining about Trump's gas prices is that poor Californians are paying like $7 a gallon. Well, we're in Florida, we're paying $4
[00:29:23] Speaker B: and we're all under the same president
[00:29:24] Speaker A: and it's the same oil.
[00:29:26] Speaker B: Right.
[00:29:27] Speaker A: So it's starting to make people say, well, what's different about California than Florida. Why is it so much more expensive in California than it is in Florida? And the answer is there's $3 a center, state taxes, so.
And who's the guy that's running for LA mayor?
Have you seen any of his commercials?
[00:29:53] Speaker B: Republican or Democrat?
[00:29:56] Speaker A: You know, I don't, I haven't seen his party affiliation published very much, but I would guess he's a Republican Platner, I think.
Anyway, he's going after LA Mayor Karen Bass over the fires. He, he's a former Hollywood actor. He's been on, on some show that I didn't, I wasn't familiar with, but apparently it was pretty popular. Anyway, his house burned down in the Palisades fire and so now he's going great guns after him and people are going nuts. I think he could win just out of nowhere, never run for an office before and he's just straight talking, you know, he shows. Here's my lot. He's got a trailer on it now. That's my trailer. I still can't build my house back.
So there's something going on in California right now.
[00:30:52] Speaker B: There is Hilton. I'm telling you, just by the coverage it was on cnn and just by the coverage they consider him a legitimate contender. You look at Victor Mar in Colorado, same kind of thing.
He spoke at our recent Florida family gala and man, this guy was just a raging conservative, you know, solid man's man kind of guy. Have you followed any of his work?
And you know, who would think that this guy could stand a chance of becoming governor of Colorado? But just fantastic polling, he's neck and neck. It's within the margin of error that he could win.
So, you know, if the west changed, if the west swung right, that would be a massive game changer. Have you seen, I'm trying to think of the podcast that released it, that there was a legal route for Trump to have a third term.
Have you seen the coverage of it?
[00:31:56] Speaker A: I mean, I've seen those discussions all over the place.
[00:31:58] Speaker B: Well, there's a new one where this guy, he's a far left Harvard lawyer that came out and said, oh no, no, he could legally do this. He could put Donald Jr up on the ticket and Trump run as the VP and then Jr steps down and they said it would be perfectly legal for him to do that and it was plausible. Do you think that could be on his radar at all?
[00:32:25] Speaker A: Well, so first of all, I agree that he could enjoy. He wouldn't. The prohibition is running for election more than twice.
He can't run for president. More than two times. But could he get to the presidency some other way? Such as? By. I mean, he could be nominated as speaker of the House. People don't know this, but the speaker of the House doesn't have to be a representative.
Yeah. It could be somebody else. So they could make Trump the speaker and then the president, Vice president, resign, and Trump will become president that way. So that's another pathway. Or like you said, he could run as vice president and something happens that the president steps down and Trump could become the president again.
So, you know, that's all very exciting.
And it would drive the Democrats crazy.
[00:33:20] Speaker B: Oh, I know. Yeah.
[00:33:21] Speaker A: Imagine. But.
[00:33:23] Speaker B: And I wouldn't put it past him just to have fun with it either way, to float the idea.
[00:33:27] Speaker A: Well, he constantly talks about his third term, but he's going to be old. Yeah, he's going to be getting up there. So.
[00:33:37] Speaker B: And Rubio's been rocking these. Have you seen him at the press briefings?
[00:33:40] Speaker A: Trump is grooming his replacement.
[00:33:43] Speaker B: Who do you think Send the lead right now between he and Vance?
[00:33:46] Speaker A: Well, right now it's Rubio, but I mean, we're years away, so there's. It's way too early to start making calls.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: He's taken so many jobs.
[00:33:56] Speaker A: People love my.
[00:33:57] Speaker B: That's kind of the running meme right now.
[00:33:59] Speaker A: Now it's depressing.
[00:34:01] Speaker B: So, yeah, Press secretary, he did a fantastic job at it.
[00:34:04] Speaker A: That's great.
[00:34:05] Speaker B: You know, the tenor of the conversation was if he is running, nobody stands a chance he could carry it. Which you're right. We're a long way away from that.
[00:34:15] Speaker A: Well, the Democrats will call him Hitler and he'll be even worse than Trump probably by the time he runs. Don't worry.
[00:34:21] Speaker B: Probably. So tell us about the Mayday protests. 600 affiliated nonprofits with about $2 billion combined annual revenue.
You don't think these are just good people trying to save their country and totally organic.
[00:34:36] Speaker A: Totally organic. Yeah.
Not Astroturf at all.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: What are you suggesting is going on?
[00:34:47] Speaker A: So I don't know about you, but I'm seeing a pattern already. Right. So this whole no Kings thing, it's like they do it every six months, six months to get it together. And then they have their little, you know, weekend where they have people come out and hold signs and. And whatever.
So it's. First of all, I'd say, look, this is America. First Amendment, protest your heart out. I honk at those people and wave at them when I pass them on the street. I love to see all the crazy things, stuff they put on Their signs. It's just like, I can't believe people actually believe that stuff. It's really something.
It reminds me of the mental health crisis in this state.
[00:35:30] Speaker B: In Nashville, they were putting on Klan hoods and marching around calling all the conservatives Klansmen, neo Nazis. And how that message sells by putting on Klan hoods, I'm not sure, but it was interesting to watch.
[00:35:44] Speaker A: Well, with the Southern Poverty Law center indictment or.
Yeah, the indictment, which alleges that they've been funding the Ku Klux Klan, it sort of puts it all in a different perspective. Right.
[00:35:57] Speaker B: You know, but that didn't totally shock me when I heard that. And so they're basically creating their enemy by funding the Klan.
There are, and I'm hesitant to say this, but it's true. It's a reality.
There are industries built around things like abortion.
So we would think, shouldn't we share the common goal of abolishing abortion? Well, there's multi, multi million dollar industries that would go out of business that exist just to fight abortion.
And if, you know, we've seen it, we saw it in Louisiana when a bill was put on the table that would pretty much make it absolutely illegal in Louisiana to get an abortion.
There were strange bedfellows who came out against that bill that were supposed to be advocates for life that came out attacking it. So for the Southern Poverty Law center that exists, if they don't have an enemy, how are they going to raise any money? And how are they going to have a reason to be there?
So it seems like they were building their own enemy.
[00:37:04] Speaker A: And so just to draw that line, you've got Democrats dressing up as Klansmen and walking around.
And by the way, where do they get those outfits?
[00:37:14] Speaker B: I know.
[00:37:14] Speaker A: Are there sewing patterns on Etsy or something?
So anyway, and the reason they're doing it is because there aren't any at the Republican rallies. Right.
[00:37:24] Speaker B: There aren't any anywhere.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: They're frustrated, so they're making their own Klansmen.
[00:37:28] Speaker B: It's been a while since I've seen a Klan rally. I've seen one, but it's been a long time. It's been the 80s.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
But the point is that, you know, now they're. They're cosplaying as Klansmen. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. It's like, I don't even. I don't even. I don't want to say it on a family podcast, but that's, you know, what? Crazy.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: Well, in the midst of all of this, where are we at on the Epstein files. Do you think there's more information coming? You think we've gone as far as it's going to go?
Is it old news now?
[00:38:07] Speaker A: Well, I mean, I've been surprised before at how the Epstein case has played out, but it feels to me like we're at a stasis point on that.
There's 3 million pages out.
People have, by now, they pretty much dug through all that stuff. It has. You know, we were talking about this before. You know, it's that same thing where some air has been let out of the wildest conspiracy theories. Now there's still unanswered questions. They sure talked about pizza a lot, you know, and I think Epstein was smarter than he let on. There's. There's some emails where he says, don't put this in an email. So he clearly knew that some things you shouldn't put in email. So I don't think we've seen the whole story, but we have a much better idea now about what was going on and how easy it was. It's. It's not a. It's not less of a scandal.
It's a different kind of scandal, the Epstein story. And I don't think people have really absorbed this yet.
And maybe that's what this next phase is about. People to understand how corrupt are elite superstructure is.
I mean, they literally don't care how awful you are. If you can get them an introduction to somebody, give them a free ride on your plane. So they don't have to. Why? So they don't have to travel commercial. So they're gonna hang around with notorious pedophiles to save the cost of a couple of, you know, Delta first class tickets.
I mean, what is wrong with these people?
[00:39:46] Speaker B: I know you've seen the senator we mentioned earlier of his own, Rogan. That was Congressman Is Burchett Congressman or senator in Tennessee? I think he's a congressman. And he's playing for Senator Burchett. Yeah, he's playing for that. Is it a senator seat that if Marsha Blackburn becomes governor, he would be positioned to be appointed? I don't remember if it's a Senate seat. I would think it would be.
[00:40:12] Speaker A: Yes. Senator Blackburn said he would take her spot.
[00:40:15] Speaker B: Gotcha. Okay. So, yeah, so currently I think he's a representative.
I believe either way, he was talking about on Rogan, how that espionage game has shifted and what they're using to blackmail people, how it's different than it used to be. Have you seen the episode yet, by any chance? It's there are clips all over the place. Probably you can get the best parts of it that way.
But he was talking about how at one time it would be more of setting somebody up with a lady in a different country and then getting it on film and using that against them. And he said today there's so much information out there that they've got knowing what search histories are and you know, all of those things. He said it's pretty easy to blackmail anybody you wanted to these days and that that whole game has shifted. And you don't necessarily use it to say, hey, go vote for this or I'm going to take you out or release the information.
It's hey, your wife could be an employee for this organization, which would give us leverage there. It was just an interesting dynamic in the espionage world.
I know you're a huge believer and use the tool of AI as do I.
We've talked about that before we went on the air today and we both like Claude Anthropic has been in the news in the recent days where the CEO came out, found it interesting that on one hand the CEO released a document saying that this is going to end just thousands of white collar jobs.
At the same time, he's in the news for trying to work out something with the US Government to get their safety levels up to a level that it can be used by the Pentagon and the Department of War. Again, what's your insight as to what's happening with Anthropic?
[00:42:19] Speaker A: Well, the other piece that was just announced this week is that they've made a deal with Xai to use.
[00:42:28] Speaker B: Who are they?
[00:42:29] Speaker A: That's Elon Musk's AI division Grok.
[00:42:32] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:42:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
So Elon's given them basically one data center to add to their capacity. So the commenters that I've seen in the AI community feel like that's a sign that Anthropic was suffering from a lack of capacity.
I'm very curious about that whole dust up that went down with the Department of War.
And for people who aren't familiar, Anthropic claim that the Department of War told Department of War not to use Claude anymore because they were using it inappropriately violating the terms of service. And Department of War said you can't tell us how to use it. That's our job is to make those kinds of calls, not, you know, the end user license agreement.
And so that wound up with Anthropic temporarily getting debarred from the entire federal government, put on blacklist. And then I think there was some litigation and the court put a hold on that, and that's where it sits. But I wonder what I've seen time and again is Trump having these manufactured conflicts with people whenever it's helpful. So, for example, the big falling out with Elon Musk right after he was done with Doge.
So that gave Elon some separation from, from Trump, made the, you know, liberals stopped burning down his car dealerships and things like that.
Well, we know for a fact that the Department of War extensively used Claude in the Iran operation, probably for helping pick targets.
And that could be the death knell for a company like Anthropic, which has a big Democrat, progressive, un user base.
It's probably one of the more liberal leaning of the AI chatbots.
[00:44:33] Speaker B: What do you mean by that?
[00:44:35] Speaker A: I mean that the guardrails, they've relaxed it a lot, but the guardrails that it uses are very left leaning.
[00:44:43] Speaker B: So I'm thinking if you're using Grok, if you're using ChatGPT and you're asking it to give you data on a particular issue, you're saying that Claude would lean more left in its response or right.
[00:45:01] Speaker A: So this might be a little stale. They may have patched this up so it's not as obvious. But if you were to ask all those chatbots the question of how does IQ interact with race?
And the correct answer is that it's highly controversial, but that there were a number of studies showing a correlation between IQ and race, for whatever that's worth. And it, and some people say it's just how the test is written and, you know, there's lots of ways to interpret it. But the fact is that those studies exist and liberals don't like to talk about those studies or admit that they even exist. So if you ask Claude, you're going to have a lot of trouble surfacing the fact that there's some real science behind it.
GROK will probably tell you on the first answer it would be included, it'll qualify it, but it'll include that as
[00:45:53] Speaker B: we, you know, we're on a podcast, we're talking about these things.
There's a lot happening. Daily Wire just laid off, I think somewhere 50 to 60% of their employees.
They've almost become the network news of podcasting and they're taking some serious hits. And everything I can tell is that people are leaving those platforms, going to something that fits their niche more and leaning into more local programming, like what we're doing here.
Tucker did a massive New York Times interview on their podcast where he continued to kind of bring break ties with Trump, but at the same time regretted some of the things that he had said in the past and interviews that he had hosted.
Do you think that there's a reshuffling of the deck to take over maga, or do you think that there is a new thing emerging in the midst of this podcast world and information wars that are taking place?
[00:47:05] Speaker A: Well, I don't want to pass too quickly past the Tucker story, because the question that got the most airtime that the New York Times reporter asked him was, did you call or did you ask whether Trump could be the Antichrist? Tucker denied that he said it, and then she played the clip of him saying it.
So that's very interesting that those kinds of ideas are even in Tucker's head.
But there is absolutely a winnowing separation. I don't know what you want to call it happening in conservative podcast media right now. Look what's happened to Candace Owens, who was a Daily Wire contributor.
[00:47:52] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:47:53] Speaker A: So Daily Wires had some internal problems, things like the Candace problem beyond some of these other market forces that you're talking about. Nick Fuentes came out as a Democrat this week.
[00:48:10] Speaker B: Laura Loomer's emerging in the midst of all of it. She's beginning to get a huge following, picking up some of the Candace and Tucker crowd that is not ready to kind of go down that rabbit hole yet.
[00:48:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, you know, say what you I like Tucker, but it's pretty bold to start musing about whether Trump's the Antichrist on your podcast because you're going to alienate probably the majority of your view. I mean, he appeals to conservatives.
[00:48:41] Speaker B: Do you think?
And let's talk. You're in a written format. Coffee and Covid. And you've come over to this video format with me and you've seen this, I've seen this. Certain things we'll produce will spark a conversation, and it's not always healthy the way that it works. You really have to guard your heart to do what we're doing.
If you're getting any attention at all, and you're getting far more than we're getting. So your audience, they're an engaged audience.
They like to. To go back and forth and get little subsets of conversations going. It is fascinating to watch. But there's a spiritual, emotional jet fuel that that can produce for somebody that I see this in our peers and people in that space.
If they begin to get less, if their numbers start to plateau, if they start trickling down in the responses, suddenly they'll say the most chaotic, weird things. What does that do? That gives a jolt of conversation and jet fuel. You're the center of the storm again. And I think if a person is not grounded morally, ethically, spiritually, in every way, it's a dangerous place to be.
And it can, whether it's Nick Fuentes or Candace, with all the stuff with Erica, Kirk and Tucker, that seems to be such a gifted, intelligent journalist that it does seem at times kind of starts to believe his own press and stir the pot to keep the storm circling around him more and more.
And I think there's a human nature element to it that I felt, you know, probably the, the least area, the least space where I get interaction is on X.
It almost feels like I'm blacklisted on X because that's not my audience. I get a great response on Facebook or Instagram. But if I say something that stirs the pot on X, that gets this huge conversation going, that may happen two or three times a year, usually around the Southern Baptist Convention, it does produce this excitement of you're constantly looking at your phone, kind of jumping back into it. Have you experienced that? I know you've just seen just tremendous growth of your blog. Have you experienced that vibe or that feeling or has it just not affected you the same way?
[00:51:16] Speaker A: Yeah. So as a quote unquote influencer.
And having been in the influencer business, quote unquote now for six plus years, years, undoubtedly you become sensitive to your followers responses, right? So if you say something, you suddenly lose 200 subscribers that day, then you feel stung.
Maybe I should have said that a different way.
And with that comes a horrible, terrible temptation to either self censor or modify your message because you know that on the other hand, you'll get 200 subscribers today if you say it this way and it's not what you really believe.
So I have navigated that by constructing a series of blog values or something, right. So I lead with my faith and I don't compromise on that. That's one of them. So if I'm, you know, tempted sometimes they're salacious stories, right? With these, you know, some bosomy bikini model with a picture that I know would be just get a lot of views, but it's not consistent with my, my Christian values. So I have to pass that by many times, regretfully, I'm working on it.
Then I don't punch, right.
So you know, I don't.
[00:52:49] Speaker B: Is there anybody right of you?
That's what I think Doug Wilson said If you. If you feel the need to punch right, perhaps you should move further right.
[00:53:01] Speaker A: That's a good one.
But I don't. I don't punch toward the right. So either way. And you know, so people want me. I know my followers would, like, love it if I just criticize John Thune constantly. But I'm not. He's good, bad, indifferent, whatever. I'm. Because he's on the right. He's one of our team. I give him the benefit of the doubt that he's making decisions based on the information that he has that we don't have.
I punch left.
That's how I run my blog. And, you know, will I ever make a.
An exception? I criticized Trump once for his Jesus picture, and I did it delicately and respectfully, and I didn't make demands and I didn't threaten to rage, quit.
You know, I'm going to keep supporting you.
[00:53:50] Speaker B: You're not moving out of the United States.
[00:53:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm not moving to France.
So there are little exceptions. But, you know, I try to keep myself on level ground with those principles and those values.
I think that's the only way you can do it.
[00:54:09] Speaker B: And that's a good. I think that used to be a common.
What is the 11th commandment, Reagan's 11th commandment of supporting our base, Supporting people on the right, not punching right.
That's wiltered a lot in recent years, it seems, and it is a quick way to engage with a new audience that, whether it's the Tucker or whoever it may be, that if you take those positions, it will get you a fan base quickly, suddenly. And you feel that jet fuel that you once felt.
[00:54:46] Speaker A: Yeah, because the media will promote you if you start punching right.
[00:54:49] Speaker B: Right. In the Christian community, that's what people don't understand. So often when you have these people who skyrocket up in popularity, these megachurch pastors, there's always a plateau. We all hit a wall. We all have those seasons where, oh, there's another guy over here. That's the shiny new thing that is interesting in the moment. When that happens, the temptation is for these household names to suddenly go far left, and suddenly they're open to gay marriage. Suddenly they're open to all these things that they've never.
[00:55:22] Speaker A: How does that happen?
[00:55:23] Speaker B: How does it happen? It happens because they're losing their audience and they're losing the jet fuel, and it's incredibly addictive. And I think there's just so much more that could be said about that. But when I see it in young people who are coming along the same that don't have the years under their belt, that don't have the emotional maturity.
I can see it in their eyes when they start to get that attention.
There's not a drug like it.
It's crack.
It's everything just, you know, you're affirmed, you're energized, and it can be incredibly tempting to do whatever it takes to keep that trip coming. And I do think filters and principles like you're talking about for long term sustainability have got to be there, in spite of whether or not it feeds the audience or helps the numbers. You just can't survive as a human without it.
I think we've seen it in the arts. You watch Hollywood, you see it a lot in comedy. I think comedians, the way that their mind works, they're given to depression, but there's this constant sense of ratcheting up that emotional pleasure in that moment. That's their job. They're a living drug in a sense, and they're very good at it.
But what happens is your physiology is going to correct for that. And you have a Robin Williams, who's the funniest guy making the world laugh, but he doesn't want to live anymore. And I think you're going to see some of that in the podcast world. I predict you'll see some of that in the podcast world probably within the next two to three years that you'll see some very popular people that just don't want to get up in the morning anymore and they'll burn out. And hopefully, hopefully they get help before then, you know, but hopefully they get some parameters like you're talking about to keep it safe and take care of themselves.
[00:57:23] Speaker A: Yeah, like, take the.
I feel like Candace Owens is in some kind of a meltdown right now.
She's gotten so far out on the conspiracy theory verge between, you know, the fight that she's having with the French president over his handsome wife and, you know, whatever that that is. And. And maybe it is exactly what she says and it's been covered up and everything, but is it worth an existential fight to prove it?
[00:57:59] Speaker B: Is it worth losing your soul over?
[00:58:01] Speaker A: I mean, do we even care who's the French president is?
[00:58:04] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:58:05] Speaker A: And so what's going on there, you know, and since I don't punch right, I haven't been punching at Candace, but I feel like she's having some kind of a crisis as a human being.
[00:58:19] Speaker B: Well, and the scary thing about it, I think when you see these major layoffs at some of the major Networks, especially the conservative networks. And you see the base of unknown podcasters, unknown influencers, growing dramatically. And suddenly the thing I would watch for is unhealthy commenters developing a higher than usual influence over the audience.
And maybe that's just the same reason we want to. You watch a car crash on nascar.
I'm not sure if it's the meltdown that attracts the audience or what, but they're leaving Daily Wire. You're seeing.
Who's the Jewish guy on Daily Wire.
[00:59:10] Speaker A: Ben Shapiro.
[00:59:10] Speaker B: Shapiro's audience is tanking. I mean, it's just tanking. And he's a sharp dude. He's a brilliant guy.
[00:59:18] Speaker A: He talks too fast for me, but I love him.
[00:59:20] Speaker B: Other than that, yeah, you got to listen at half speed. But other than. Than that, he's a brilliant guy. And why do you see this? You're Matt Walts.
You're guys who've made intelligent arguments and produced good material for so long.
It's no longer the good argument that's winning.
It's the train wreck.
[00:59:41] Speaker A: Well, I don't think this is unprecedented, though. I mean, look at Hollywood.
How often is an actor, an actress, flame out?
[00:59:50] Speaker B: Right?
[00:59:51] Speaker A: Joaquin Phoenix.
[00:59:52] Speaker B: It's predictable, but you go back to, like, the Limbaugh days. You take a Rush, and you look at the difference between, like, a Rush and an Alex Jones.
I'm not worried about Rush going down some goofy rabbit hole and burning out.
Alex Jones, maybe, you know, he's been down a few.
And so the difference in those two personalities and today, if you put them side by side, I don't know that Rush may be experiencing what Shapiro's experiencing. Now that the reasoned, good communicator, awesome communicator, can hold his own in a debate, can he keep the audience against the train wreck that's supposedly on the same team?
[01:00:47] Speaker A: Well, all of us are human beings, and we have seasons, and we're not. We're all imperfect. Rush, as you may recall, had an opioid addiction. It cost him his hearing.
[01:01:00] Speaker B: I forgot about that.
[01:01:02] Speaker A: And that was weaponized against him by a Democrat administration.
And they went after him for pill shopping. I don't know if you remember that. And they were going to lock him up.
And so he got saved at the last minute by a Republican administration that came in and dropped the Lawfare, which was outrageous and was probably the beginning of the Lawfare that eventually caught up to President Trump.
But even Rush had his problems. That's the point.
And so we all have stuff going on in our lives. We've got Wives and families and, you know, investments and bad investments and good investments and all these things going on. And you don't know how that spills over into, you know, like what Alex Jones is going through. He's the the Sandy Hook plaintiffs won massive judgments against him in liberal courts.
They bankrupted him. They've taken his radio show and bless him, he's still out there. You know, he's got different micro. They can't stop him from talking. That's the one thing they can't do.
[01:02:15] Speaker B: And, you know, I think it's a cautionary tale. I mean, you look back at like a Hunter Thompson back in the day, one of the most influential journalists of all time, but at the same time, he was a loose cannon and had a lot of things going on physically, emotionally. And so you see that there's something about that personality type that is drawn to commentary and journalism that's very gifted and effective at it, the way their mind works. And I think it's just a word of caution to our friends in this space to just be careful, to take care of ourselves, to keep ourselves centered. You know, as we're going into Mother's Day this week, I think it's just a good reminder, let's get re centered. Let's make sure that we're staying healthy. Because the things that we're speaking about, discussions that need to be had and we need guys like you, we need guys who are on the right, who are strong.
I think that's why right now you've got a very strong conservative movement that's taking place because the argument's been made and people aren't ignorant. They're listening. So we need these guys to stay healthy. We don't need them burning out, you know, in the middle of the winds.
If you were a pastor and you're apart from Mother's Day, out of all the things that we've talked about, what would you say to a Christian audience right now who's facing the rising gas prices, the midterm elections, the anthropic news, all of the things aliens floating around suddenly.
What would you say to a Christian audience in conclusion as we're wrapping up this episode?
[01:04:06] Speaker A: Well, it's funny you asked that question.
I feel like I wrote the answer this morning in my blog today, which is I talked. Well, first I talked about the New York Times, ran a couple of stories about the fertility crisis.
And the fertility crisis is twice as bad among Democrats as conservatives. But I transitioned from there into what I think is the problem.
One of the times Stories tried to answer the question of why is there a fertility crisis? And it landed on people feel uncertain about everything that's going on. Aliens, gas prices, wars in Iran, you know, whatever, you name it.
And that's, to me, that's just a little euphemism for anxiety. So people are feeling a lot. Uncertainty, anxiety, synonymous, right?
Well, when you look at the statistics on anxiety, you find that twice as many Democrats as conservatives are anxious and report that they have been diagnosed with at least one mental health condition. Twice as many.
And that's true not just in the US by the way. So there was an international study that I cited where they found that 5 out of 92 countries had liberals reporting being happier than conservatives. Only 5 out of 92.
So it's something to do with the ideology. And what is the problem with the ideology? Well, the answer that I proposed is that progressives feel that being happy is sinful in a secular sense because there's so much injustice in the world. So what right do you have to be happy while all these other people are suffering?
And if you tell your friends you that you're feeling happy today, they're going to say, well, what about climate change?
Did you forget? Did you forget about the salamanders in El Salvador?
So they've incorporated into their identity a need to be constantly anxious to virtue signal to their friends that they are awake to all of these injustices. And so they're not having kids, because kids is the ultimate expression of optimism, optimism for the future. Right? If you really believe that things are, you know, going to be terrible, you don't want to bring a child into that world. And so that's how they virtue signal to each other. I'm putting off having kids until, you know, this problem with the Middle east gets straightened out, until we get a handle on climate change, so we get a, you know, Trump out of the White House, whatever, fill in the blank.
And so that's sinful. The Bible could not be more clear.
Our Savior himself spoke about it on numerous occasions that worrying is a sin.
Worrying is the opposite of faith. If you have faith, you're not worried.
When you worry, you leave no room for faith.
So to Christians, I say, you mustn't worry.
And if you find that you're worrying, that's a little red flag lag of an area you need to focus on.
So whatever happens, whatever happens with AI, whatever happens with the aliens, you know, whatever the Democrats get up to as they fight to win the midterms, it doesn't matter, right? We have. We look at a horizon much further beyond any of those things. Amen. So test yourself. If you're feeling anxious, then that's a spiritual issue you need to take care of. You should be happy, Christian. You have nothing to worry about.
[01:07:42] Speaker B: And you should make babies.
[01:07:44] Speaker A: It's even fun doing it.
[01:07:46] Speaker B: That's right.
Well, thank you for joining us today.
[01:07:49] Speaker A: You're welcome. Good to be here.
