Episode 32: Testimonies, Hot Takes, And World War III
In the thirty-second episode of The Babylon Bee podcast, editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle discuss this week's stories like the outbreak of World War III, CNN settling a lawsuit for defaming a teenager, and the recent geriatric beef between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Producer Dan Coats joins them to tell our stories about how we all became Christians. So, tune in to get to know the Bee boys. In the premium subscriber portion, Kyle and Ethan discuss Epstein conspiracy theories, Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes, and the internet not having it with Vince Vaughn shaking the President's hand. Pre-order the new Babylon Bee Best-Of Coffee Table Book coming in 2020! Show Outline Introduction - Kyle and Ethan discuss how instagram is designed for the kids, the new format where going forward there will now be two separate podcast shows (one for the news stories and one for our exclusive interviews), and how Kyle wasn't murdered by an internet stalker. We also take a moment to mark the death of Sir Roger Scruton. Story 1 - As Part Of Settlement With Nick Sandmann, CNN Hosts Must Wear MAGA Hats During All Broadcasts Story 2 - Everyone On The Internet Awarded Honorary Degree In International Affairs Story 3 - Warren, Sanders Settle Campaign Dispute By Playing Chicken On Mobility Scooters Topic of the Week - Kyle, Ethan, and Dan talk about their stories and how they became Christians. LOVE MAIL - An email from a listener warmed all of our hearts and encouraged us to keep going. Paid-subscriber portion Story 1 - Tragic: Footage Of Epstein Suicide Found Hanging In Cell Story 2 - Man Driving Alone In Carpool Lane Informs Officer His Preferred Pronoun Is 'They' (From Babylon Bee Subscriber Robert Johnson) Story 3 - Hollywood Celebs Shocked To Learn Some People Do Not Adore Them Become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
In a world of fake news, this is news you can trust.
Exposing cancel culture through doxing and dog piles.
You're listening to the Babylon Bee with your hosts, Kyle Mann and Ethan Nicole.
Yes, I am Kyle Mann.
And I am Ethan Nicole.
As always.
We have not changed who we are.
I was thinking about changing my name this week, but then it's like, man, that's a lot of work.
Yeah, and then everybody would be so confused.
We'd have to explain.
Yeah, you got to change all your Facebook and your Twitter.
And then I don't even know about Instagram.
I was on Instagram this morning.
And did you, you know, like how Instagram instantly starts a video up as you're scrolling?
It just starts to play, but it's on mute.
And you're like, oh, that looks interesting.
So you unmute it.
Then there's no controls to rewind it.
And so I'll try pushing.
I try doing all these different swipes to think what the kids do, you know?
Like how they program it so that it works.
I've seen the kids do the camera.
The kids do the swiping things they do and it just works.
I can't figure it out.
So I just turn off Instagram.
I'm going to go, why am I on Instagram?
Why would they set it up like that?
Your only option is to hear five seconds into the video.
You can't hear the beginning.
I want to hear the beginning of things.
But doesn't it just keep cycling?
So you're supposed to like.
You have to wait for the whole minute and then you get all the spoilers and go back to the beginning.
I don't like it.
I feel like, as I was saying, it's like, oh, this is so okay, boomer, right here.
My plight.
It reminds me.
We were watching Toy Story 2 the other day and when the pig is changing the channels and he passes the channel they want.
Go back, go back.
It's like it's too late.
Got to go all the way around now.
That's like, oh, this is really old school when you're listening.
When you're like, your car is automatically searching for stations, you know, it like plays each station for like five seconds.
The scan.
And you hear when it sounds good and you miss it.
And you're like, oh, I got to go all the way back through.
I'm just going to wait.
Yep.
Got to wait through all the evangelists and the tuba playing Mexican stations.
So there you have it, guys.
Instagram is the scan button of the young people.
It is the scan button.
I do not understand the obsession with apps and social networks that simply take away features.
Yeah, like they're trying to really slim down.
That's what the push is towards these minimalistic apps.
You had Vine, which is like, hey, you know how you guys like to share videos?
Well, now you can share videos, but only seven seconds worth.
It's just weird.
And Instagram always struck me, and Instagram got huge, but for me, it always struck me as...
And I'll start with Twitter, right?
So you can only access it on your phone, right?
Yeah.
And all you can do is share like a square picture.
Yeah.
But I guess maybe there's something where it focuses what you share or it shapes the content.
People must like.
It's probably like the same kind of thing as like when you, if you get a store in a little shopping strip mall and they make you use like the same font and like trim color as everybody else, they want to like format so everybody knows what they're getting when they come to your Instagram to Instagram.
Right.
So maybe you're it's addition by subtraction.
Yeah.
So everybody, this podcast is The Simpsons Old Man Yells at Cloud meme.
But it just goes on for like an hour.
And they were changing and simplifying.
Yeah.
And we, so we are, we are also adding by subtracting to the Babylon B podcast because this is our first episode where we are trying a new format where we're going to move all of our interviews to separate episodes.
Which basically means we're going to be doing two episodes a week.
At least this one will be the for now.
Right now, our discussion has been that this news show, quote unquote news, because we're really not journalists at all.
We're just telling you stuff you can already Google.
We're just talking about it.
Will be a standalone episode.
That's me and Kyle most of the time.
We might have guests come in for like a 15-minute segment or something or a co-host to come on, but the interviews will now be moved to their own special episodes.
There will still be subscriber portions on all of them, but in a lot of ways, it'll be more content and it'll kind of make it cleaner.
So I think some people might not want to wait through me and Kyle giggling like homeschoolers before they get to the interview.
But most people will want that.
Most people want that, yeah.
Just that.
Or most people will be like, I mean, I wish it was just Ethan and Kyle and none of this Dave Rubin and Candace Owens and people like that.
Yeah, not that I think that anybody actually thinks that, but I kind of agree.
And that there's a few podcasts I listen to where they just have their normal chatting format.
And then if they do a guest or a weird thing or an interview, it's like, to me, it feels like something separate.
So we want you to be able to kind of pick and choose what you want to listen to.
We're basically copying Ben Shapiro.
He does his talking one and he does it where he talks to someone else.
Every business decision.
Yeah, every business copies other businesses.
Well, every business decision that we make at the Babylon Beat, we basically just Google, what does this other site do?
What do other people do?
And then we say, oh, yeah.
We're all just copying each other.
Exactly.
Anyway, so.
How was your week, Kyle?
My week was good, I think.
How many times did you go to Disneyland this week?
Twice.
Really?
That's great.
Yeah, just twice.
I think you're getting more quiet about it.
Well, then you post on social, so I guess it's not that quiet.
So we got the season pass, and in Southern California, you get a decent discount from moving in Southern California.
But it blacks out all the weekends.
So you can only go on the weekdays.
And since, you know, I can kind of go over the weekend.
No, so it was my birthday this weekend.
Oh, yeah.
Big 33.
Oh, you were in San Diego.
we went to san diego and did a lot of fun stuff there and then we came back up and then what sea world um Well, actually, we basically just went to a bunch of thrift stores.
Okay.
My wife would love that.
It's just her favorite thing.
My dream.
You know, I just love.
San Diego has great thrift stores.
They also have a huge Swap Meet on the coast that's on Coke Swap.
I hope you guys have a Swap Meet.
And I found some good stuff.
I'm a board gamer.
I found some discount board games.
I was very excited about it.
I found some books.
I got Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the ultimate compendium giant hardcover version for a few bucks.
But I got it for full price.
Yeah, well, you're a sucker.
So I had a good weekend.
And then my wife yesterday, I was working.
It was like one or two or something.
And she's like, do you want to go to Disneyland?
And I was like, okay.
So we went to Disneyland.
I can't imagine that.
You guys, you're so youthful.
I would just lose my mind on that.
I'm definitely not as often as you guys.
I'm getting to the point of like, I'm tired.
Like, I got less than eight hours of sleep over the last two nights combined because of.
Well, last night my child was sick and coughing that weird sounding cough, you know, and they get like a real kind of, well, they call it croup.
It's like, comes from deep in the throat.
So it was really scary.
So I'm trying to just hold him.
Anyway, the night before that I was playing Redhead Redemption.
So that's on me.
But I'm tired right now, but I'm not nearly as tired as I would be if I went to Disneyland as often as you guys do.
Yeah, my wife's really into it.
The kids love it, obviously.
Kids love it, yeah.
And it's nice to have something just after work, head over for a few hours.
There's a lot of pressure when you go to a theme park.
Like if you go somewhere else and it's like, we're going to spend two days at Disney World, and you're like, we have to see everything.
Yeah, there's a lot of pressure.
We've got to be there at openings, staying in the middle of the day.
Every time there's a line, you're thinking like, oh, gosh.
Yeah.
My best experience at Disneyland is I took my daughter, who was, I think, four at the time, three or four.
And she's really into Disney princesses.
And just the two of us went for the whole day.
And it was just all about her.
Yeah, that's great.
And oh man, that was the it was so magical for her.
Like when she walked up and met Snow White, I have the video of it.
She's just like in shock.
It was like, she couldn't believe it.
She's hugging Snow White and she's just silent.
What is happening right now?
My son was huge into Tangled and they had just built like the Tangled Tower, Rapunzel's Tower, and you can meet Rapunzel.
You know, this was, I don't know, this was 10 years ago or something.
And we brought him, when he was three, we brought him to Disneyland.
And that's what he wanted to do.
I want to meet Rapunzel.
So we stood in line for like an hour and a half.
Wow.
Yeah.
We say like that for like frozen.
So forever to meet Frozen Earl.
So it was similar to that, but not as crazy because Frozen is crazier.
But we get up to the front of the line.
We walk in and he just complete deer in headlights and will not talk to her.
Just puts his head.
Yeah.
It won't even look at her.
Just puts his head in Destiny's chest.
She tried to coax him out.
It's okay.
Nothing.
So I've got all these pictures of him just shoving his head into the Destiny.
It's just so funny.
Destiny's my wife.
Those kids really fall for that whole thing.
They're clearly not the characters from the movie.
Oh, I also met I met a Babylon B fan yesterday.
So the guy on Twitter noticed I was at Disneyland.
He texted me.
He said, hey, are you here?
Oh, yeah, I saw that.
With Jason Mobbs.
He's kind of a Twitter buddy.
One of those guys that you can exchange with Twitter back and forth.
He's like, we're by the Millennium Falcon.
So we wrote the Millennium Falcon.
One of the ones that don't scare you.
Yeah.
So we flew the Millennium Falcon together.
Our kids got along and went and flew their own Millennium Falcon, and we wrote the adults, flew our own Millennium Falcon.
Nice.
That's a spaceship from the Star Wars.
It's nice when you get a nice story out of Twitter.
Yeah.
So he didn't kill me.
He wasn't an ex-murderer, which is always a good thing.
That is good.
I hate that happens.
So on this episode, we're going to cover three stories as usual.
Yeah.
And then we have a topic of the week, which is kind of how we're going to do it now: try to do it.
We may switch it up a bit, but we're going to try to do stories, a topic that we discuss.
And then in the subscriber portion, we have longer discussion and more stories.
So our topic this week is we're going to talk about our testimonies.
Yeah, get to know us a little better.
We have Dan on for that part too.
Yeah, Dan gets to produce Dan.
He didn't set up his mic right now, but he'll be on that part.
And we talk about, you know, how we got saved and stuff.
Yeah.
So that's good.
But let's go into the stories of the week.
Every week there are stories.
These are some of them.
Well, this isn't actually one of our stories, but I just wanted to mention Roger Scruton, which I don't even know if I'm saying his name right, died this week.
And he was a great thinker and philosopher.
Really defended classical thinking.
And kind of the main thing I saw is he did a video series about the effect modernism had on art.
So I just thought we'd read a couple quotes of his just to honor his passing.
He said, a writer who says that there are no truths or that all truth is merely relative is asking you not to believe him, so don't.
From my point of view, the Jedi are evil.
You're going to turn it all into Star Wars.
Only a Sith deals in episodes.
He's just urinating on his grave already.
Too soon.
And one more.
It is not enough to be nice.
You have to be good.
We are attracted by nice people, but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.
Great stuff.
Thank you, Roger Scruton.
I feel like a slideshow should be playing.
Yeah, in the background.
Like at the Oscars.
I feel wholly unqualified to bring that up, but I just, I think what bothered me is how little attention it got that he passed.
I did feel like he was a really important voice, and I always feel like I should have read more of him.
And so.
That's the great thing about books, though, right?
Yeah, they're still there.
I can read them.
Yeah.
But we could have, if I had been reading, I could have been like, oh, we got to have him on the podcast.
late too late That sounded like a joke.
No, he wasn't even joking.
We all get it.
We all get it.
It was a joke at my expense.
Okay.
First story.
That was story zero.
Yeah, that was the pre-story.
Here is story one.
As part of settlement with Nick Sandman, CNN hosts must wear MAGA hats during all broadcasts.
So as a refresher, Nick Sandman is not a character created by Neil Gaiman.
He is not a Spider-Man villain.
He is a kid who wore a MAGA hat.
He's not a Metallica song.
And he is not an old 50s song.
Mr. Sandman.
Anything else?
I was trying to combine the Metallica song and the old song in my head.
There's probably a good mashup on this.
Is it Inner Sandman or Enter Sandman?
Enter.
Inter Sandman.
that song always takes me back to junior high the news that they would play on the like they play like bulldog news Like that was our school mascot.
And then they'd play that over some 80s effects.
That's hilarious.
My mom would let me listen to BitHock.
I'm like, they're playing it on the school news.
I wonder if they bought the rights to play.
I'm sure they did.
Big money.
So who is Nick Sandman?
We know who he is.
If you recall that video that went all over the place, at least on Twitter, which nobody's actually on.
We'll talk about that in a bit.
Him and some other high school buddies were in front of, they were in Washington, D.C., right?
He was in front of the White House?
Yep.
And they were Ethan.
Our New Year's resolution is to know the story.
Declare the facts of the story and not ask.
We always criticize it.
We're hard on ourselves, but we're always like, Dan's the guy.
Okay.
You know how talk show guys always have that guy in the background?
They're like, was it blah, blah, blah.
And then you hear like, and they're like, oh, yes, yes.
It's the Charlie Brown.
Wah, wah, wah, wah.
Yeah.
In the back.
So Dan's the wah wah wah.
Yeah, so they were on a school trip with Covington Catholic.
That's right, Covington is the school name.
And they just kind of had this short video clip of him standing there face to face with an American Native American guy banging a drum.
He's banging a drum and he's smirking.
He looks like he's smirking at him.
And based on about a tenth of a second of the video.
Yeah.
Almost like a snapshot.
Really a screen grab, right?
Of that, people rushed to all kinds of judgment about what it was.
And you always hear women are always talking about this whole conspiracy of, how do I say this?
The Alban B podcast?
Resting B face.
Yeah.
Like they feel like you can't judge a person by their resting face or whatever.
So I think this Nick Salmon guy, he has a.
He's kind of got to watch.
He's.
He's got a nervous.
When he's nervous, he smiles.
He has kind of squinty eyes and a wide smile, and it looks like...
And he's trying to just be cool, but it's weird.
If you watch the whole thing, this is all review for most people.
This Indian guy, I can't remember his name.
Are you doing the smile on an audio podcast?
I do.
Kyle is doing the smile.
Let it be known.
This guy, they came up to him, right?
There was this whole thing going on, and he was just this nervous hypothesis.
The assumption people made was that they assumed that the kids ganged up an Indian guy, right?
The kids basically gathered around him and chanted at him.
Yeah, they're chanting the wall or something.
They were doing their school chant, and then he walked in and got right in this kid's face.
And he started banging his drum in this kid's face.
And he's just kind of standing there.
And based on that, one thing.
And there was another group right off camera, right?
Or this black power group or something that was yelling things at him.
Right.
I think these kids were a little nervous.
They look nervous.
When you reframe it and you look at Nick Salmon, and then he has no idea that he's about to become national.
That image is going to be nice.
He's about to become a multi-millionaire.
Okay, so that's the story we're at now.
The settlement.
Yeah, so apparently he has sued multiple news organizations over this, and CNN, at least, has now settled with him.
So I assume some of the others will follow suit, but at this point, CNN settled with him.
And you know, these lawsuits, they always name a ridiculous number.
Yeah.
And it's kind of to scare the organization into not be a little more careful.
It's punitive.
I fully support it, honestly.
I'm not always supportive of these big lawsuits, but this is one where I'm like, it was so careless what happened with that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was really reckless.
And there is like this attitude that because he has that red hat on, it's okay that you can get away with anything and get away with murder.
And it's just not okay.
So, yeah, take that, CNN.
Except for none of us know how much CNN actually had to pay because they did a settlement, right?
Yeah, it was a settlement.
You know, if he was asking for 500 million or whatever, you've got to figure it's a decent percentage of that.
Percentage of that, right?
Yeah.
So that's my expert legal analysis.
That's what we're here for.
We highly recommend you Google Real News if you want to know more.
You think it's a lot of money and you think, okay, that's ridiculous.
Just let it go.
But this kid was absolutely being thrashed.
We have some of the original comments people were making about him.
There was a guy named Reza Aslan.
No relation to the true Aslan.
True Aslan?
He gives Aslan a bad name.
And he said, honest question, have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid's?
And this kid's like, what, 15 or 16 or something?
Even if the kid was being a jerk.
Yeah.
What is that?
Yeah, you're an adult talking about punching a kid in the face.
So, Dan, was that tweet ever deleted?
Or did you pull that up?
So this tweet is still up.
He stands by it.
Man.
Do you want to read Alyssa Milano?
Your favorite actress?
Oh, I love Alyssa Milano.
It's fun to say.
Is she your favorite of the charmed actresses?
If you were to have to rank them all?
She's the only one I know because you just told me that she was on it.
Oh, it is now deleted.
Okay.
Oh, Reza's is now?
Aslan deleted.
Deleted, okay.
Aslan deleted the deep magic before the...
And did you say that this Alyssa Milano one was after they found out it was fake?
No, no.
We don't know.
I'll just read it.
Let's not forget.
This entire event happened because a group of boys went on a school-sanctioned trip to protest against a woman's right to her own body and reproductive health care.
It is not debatable that bigotry was at play from the start.
Yeah, so this sounds like she's backpedaling from basically because they were protesting abortion.
Yeah.
Anything goes.
Right.
Yeah, so she's doubling down on original choppers.
She should be doxxed.
Even though the kid was, you know, even though it wasn't the details we thought, you know, it's like, yeah, morally true, is basically what this tweet is.
I'm disappointed that that wasn't written like a kip from Napoleon Dynamite voice.
I don't really do a kip because I'm afraid, I don't know.
It just sounds gay, and then I feel like someone's going to be like, are you mocking gay people?
I still don't want to even dip my coin.
Kip is not gay.
Kip married.
He appropriates gay culture.
What the heck was Kip's wife?
What's the name?
I forget.
I can't remember.
Okay.
Shanique or something.
See, now you're going to be in trouble.
Kathy Griffin.
Names, please.
And stories from people who can identify them and vouch for their identity.
Oh, I just can't read this normal.
Names, please.
And stories from people who can identify them and vouch for their identity.
Thank you.
I don't get the context of that one.
Names, please.
She has the image of all these guys on the red hats, and she's saying, she wants people to give them their names.
She wants to call them for them to be Dominican doxed them.
Got it.
That's a psycho.
That is an image of these people.
Greta Thunberg and her friends or something or something on the left.
And to say, like, I want all these kids' names and addresses.
Post them publicly.
Yeah, what is that?
What are you going to do?
Psycho.
Wow.
Names, please.
So we got Chris Evans, aka Captain America.
This is appalling.
The ignorance, the gall, the disrespect.
It's shameful.
And sadly, on brand.
When something like this isn't even surprising, it's evidence to our place in the cycle of recreating our darker chapters.
That Native American man showed incredible strength and dignity.
Wow.
And he read so much into that.
That's what I'm saying.
It's like hot takes on Twitter.
We'll talk about this in a second here, but the hot takes on Twitter just like wait for a couple of details.
Yeah.
You know, maybe a fact or two.
Watch the whole video, you know, at least.
That's just.
It is wild.
It's so careless.
This is a kid, a random anonymous child.
And it makes sense to me that the lawsuit makes sense.
The massive, you've got Chris Evans writing a commentary on your face on Twitter.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
Can you imagine if somebody just snapped a picture of a random facial expression you made and suddenly like Chris Evans is reading into it on Twitter?
Right.
Life would change forever just in that.
And that's why the lawsuit makes sense is because these organizations like the Washington Post and CNN were pushing that narrative before they were even any fat.
And they pushed it for like a week.
Yeah, it went on and on.
They were really driving that news cycle.
When the other video came out, they doubled down even harder.
Man.
All right.
So good for you, Chris Salmon.
We just want to stay for the record that Nick Salmon is an Nick Salmon.
You are an upstanding individual.
You want to come on the Babylon B and tell us your side of story?
If you're not hateful at all, please do not sue us.
Our second story of the week.
Everyone on the internet awarded honorary degree in international affairs.
Nice.
That's good.
Greeted.
It's a printable diploma.
Yeah.
So good job, everybody.
Good job, everybody.
I guess World War III was announced.
World War III was announced.
I think we talked about the bombing of or is it called bombing or missling?
Or what do you call it when you take out that guy?
Bombing or missiling.
Is it missilizing?
You sound like Trump.
Like, I think Trump would like to.
Thank you.
He's very, a lot of people like him.
If we were in this meeting, like they're in this intelligence meeting and he's like, what's it called again?
Missling?
Bombing?
Take care of it.
You do it.
You with the buzz cut.
Do the missling.
I do the best missling.
The strike.
I guess it was a drone strike.
A drone strike on Suleimani.
Do we figure out Aku Saysman?
No, but I'm going to say it with confidence.
Suleimani.
And the suckers who listen to our podcast will just eat it up.
Yeah.
But believe that we're authoritative.
So on the Babylon B podcast, they say the missling of Suleimani.
That's like a book you could write.
The missling of Suleimani.
Terror in the Middle East.
the hot take yeah so when this uh sulimani was exploded which i believe we probably should apologize for the very loud office that we live in with very loud people we don't live here You might.
I don't know.
I sleep here.
I like to hear how you described this bombing before the podcast.
What was the analogy you made?
I was thinking it was like a surprise party.
But because he doesn't know, nobody knew it was coming, right?
Like anybody.
Surprise.
Except for like intelligence.
Like I think there was a CIA ex-CIA guy that was on Ruben's show.
I was watching to kind of catch up when we interview him.
And he said that there's no way this guy saw it coming.
He had done things against the U.S.
He had a whole list he went down of all these things this guy had done.
So the money.
And, you know, he'd done all this missling and stuff.
And he paid no price.
So he just had no idea that he was probably just walking around in his house in his bathrobe.
It was at an airstrip.
Oh, he's walking around in the air, stripping a bathrobe.
So this is when...
Pouring a glass of wine.
This is why the surprise party thing cracked me up when you said that.
Like they pull up and he gets off the plane and he sees this banner and he's like, guys, you shouldn't have.
Yeah.
You know the thing, this is a sidetrack thing, but with the whole surprise party thing, Jerry Seinfeld has that bit about how when you walk into a room and the lights automatically come on, it's like a little mini surprise party.
Yeah, well, it was his bit about airplanes because he says you go into the bathroom.
The bathroom of the airplane.
And the automatic comes on.
It's like your own little surprise party.
But anytime I walk into a bathroom where the lights do that, I immediately think of Jerry Seinfeld.
It's so weird.
So almost every time I go to the bathroom, because the cigar shop has that light.
Jerry Seinfeld on yourself.
I'm thinking of Jerry Seinfeld every time I go to the bathroom.
It's weird.
Sorry.
We got to have him on.
Yeah.
If you don't know who Jerry Seinfeld is, he's a comedian.
Yeah, for the homeschoolers.
Actually, for anybody age 31 younger.
Yeah.
One of the funniest jokes.
Do you think Seinfeld?
Yeah.
I think it's hilarious.
I was about to ask you.
There's that effect called the Seinfeld is unfunny effect.
Have you heard of that?
Because Seinfeld invented so many structures that they use in sitcoms now and plotlines.
People will go back and watch it and say, oh, this isn't funny.
Like it's derivative.
Yeah.
Well, it was inventing that.
Yeah.
That's a lot of old comedy.
You see, like, if you watch even like the old Chaplin movies, like, they're full of all these jokes that everybody recycles like crazy now.
Not the Babylon P.
We make up everything from scratch.
Totally.
Organic, cage-free.
Cage-free writers.
Cage-free Babylon B writers.
So yeah, everybody was kind of saying that World War III was about to break out.
I saw one guy that gave a list that was saying, like, here's what's about to happen over the next week.
Republicans will beat the drums of war.
We will invade Tehran within the month, you know.
And everybody will drop impeachment out of the news cycle.
This is all a plan, you know.
Yeah.
And none of it happened.
Everybody, yeah, everybody's like, oh, here it is.
Everyone is expecting Donald Trump to start the next World War.
We've all been waiting for it.
I remember that was even my fear that kept me from wanting to vote for him.
It's like, he seems like this guy who's very takes things very personally.
I could see him getting a little behind hurt in a Twitter dispute and calling for nukes.
I don't know.
And that was everybody's fear.
And he so far has not really been that way.
In the end, I mean, we all don't have the intelligence that a lot of officials have.
And I'm not saying that means that they make good decisions, but it does mean that I can't really comment.
Yeah, I always feel like such a yes man when it comes to military stuff, but like I don't know the, like you can get into the philosophy of his right or wrong to go to war, but like on the intelligence, I don't understand people that act like they have all the facts.
Like there's just no way you do.
So you don't really know like what is actually being prevented or done.
It feels like such a just like a fool's errand to sit there talking and opining on these details.
What's this quote we have?
Michael pregnant?
A former prejud, pregant.
You leave me hanging here.
A former intelligence.
Is this on point of what we're talking about, about missiling?
A former intelligence officer who studied the Middle East at the Hudson Institute posited that Iran launched missiles at U.S. bases in Iraq in an intentionally non-lethal manner in order to save face after killing of General Soleimani while attempting to avoid several retaliation, severe retaliation from Washington.
I see.
That was a struggle of a sense.
That was hard.
We got that off the CERN, by the way.
Yeah, that's from Decern brought to you by Adam Ford.
Real news.
It does seem like that, though.
It does seem like Suleimani called, or not Soleimani, he couldn't have made any phone calls at the time.
It does seem that Iran's leaders called Washington and they were like, hey, we've got to do something here.
We're looking really bad.
We're going to launch some rockets.
Can you guys maybe just pull your troops out?
Just stay home tonight and play some D ⁇ D.
Yeah.
Play some Dungeons and Dragons.
We're launching the missiles.
Well, shoot him at that ugly wall you guys got that you're going to tear down anyway.
And then they're like, well, because that was one of my headlines that I pitched was that Iran in response to Soleimani missling.
That's just the new word I have to use now.
Iran steps on 3,000 rakes.
Which is kind of a horrible joke in the sense that they blew up a plane full of innocent people.
That seemed like a mistake.
Yeah, that definitely took any elation that I had that war wasn't about to break out down a notch when he was.
Sad there.
Civilian plane got missled.
But the fascinating whole thing that's happening with Iran, which I haven't followed very closely, you probably have more than me, but the protests breaking out.
It really, because I guess the government really kind of covered it up.
Apparently.
I didn't read.
Yeah, Dan's nodding.
They covered up the what?
What happened with the plane?
Like, I guess they kind of lied about what actually happened at first, and then the truth came out.
Right, yes.
Because they blew up a plane of innocent people.
I guess were they paranoid or something?
They thought it was a drone or something.
What was their explanation for that?
They claimed that the plane took a sharp and unexpected turn towards one of their military bases.
But evidence later on from the flight path suggested that that was completely not true.
It was a sharp and it was a sharp straight line.
Yeah, they basically thought, oh, there's a bomber coming to get us.
How does a big plane do a sharp, unexpected turn?
I don't know.
Yeah, they claimed it deviated from ghost riding the whip up there in the sky.
Ghost riding the whip.
I'm using my little bit of street jargon, I don't know.
Ghost riding the whip.
Isn't that where you get out of your car?
Exactly.
I know it has to do with the car going, woo!
That's all I know.
Well, you.
Okay.
It'd be harder in a plane, I think.
But yeah, so.
Because didn't you say there's something where the understatement of the it would be harder to ghost ride a plane than a whip?
That's going to be all over YouTube now.
Ghost riding the plane.
Oh, boy.
You were saying something about there was there's a school or something in Iran where there's like American flag on the ground and they're encouraged to walk over it, but then the kids are actually going around it.
Was that you that told me that?
No.
Really?
Oh, it's damn.
Dan told me that.
That's interesting, right?
Because I actually saw a guy on Twitter, Ian Bremer, who's generally left-leaning.
And he was like, we have to admit that this is kind of a win for Trump on this whole Soleimani thing because if this is all of Iran's response and then this whole new thing with the protests going on, it's, I don't know, it's fascinating to me that this is all kind of playing out the way it is.
It's not the way it's been predicted at all.
Yeah, it actually surprised me.
You know, I'm probably more suspicious of foreign intervention and stuff than you are.
You know?
Yeah, you're like the pacifist, right?
We never really gotten into it, but we should have an episode on this.
It'd be interesting.
Yeah, I'm kind of fuzzy, but I would lean towards, eh, let's get the troops on.
You know, that would kind of be my.
So when I hear, oh, we bombed somebody and now Iran's firing rocket.
I'm leaning towards the side that's like, oh, this is horrible.
This is World War III.
I actually woke up at like 4 in the morning and checked Twitter for some stupid reason.
And I saw all this happening.
And I'm like, this is it.
And so I kind of fell for it in a way.
And I wonder how much fear.
I was leaning that way too.
I was thinking, oh, yeah, this has got to be MSNBC ran with Iranian state propaganda that was saying that 30 U.S. soldiers had been killed.
They started running on TV.
They said, we can't confirm this, but it sounds like 30 U.S. soldiers were killed.
That's what Iran TV is saying.
I mean, you're thinking, this is it, you know, because if they killed 30 soldiers, you got to imagine you're not backing down.
Yep, we're going to bring our next big.
And it's the weird thing.
And we talked about this last week, the weird thing where Trump said, wait, there's 52 sites we have targeted or whatever.
You retaliate, we'll retaliate.
He's so just saying things.
It feels like a Batman story.
It's like the Riddler.
52.
Guess which of the 52 stories will be bombed next?
Here are your clues.
He's leaving clues.
Solve the puzzle.
Velcro, Polka Dot, 93.
Those are your clues.
And then Jack Ryan has to solve it.
Yeah.
I guess he's on our side.
Jack Ryan's on Batman?
Yeah, I don't know.
Maybe he's on Iran's side.
I don't know.
I'm sure in the new DC Comics universe, Batman's on Iran's side.
I have this Batman comic where he advocates for gun control in this whole, there's like two pages where he just talks about how great gun control is.
Batman does?
Well, I actually think it's him and Catwoman.
Well, he's anti-gun, right?
He only punches.
Well, it depends on which throws batarangs.
Depends on which Batman writer, you know, which era.
He was originally kind of a detective that just shot people back in the day.
Batman?
Yeah.
Yeah, he got way woke, I guess.
Something happened to him.
Get woke, go broke.
Next story?
Warren Sanders settle campaign dispute by playing chicken on mobility scooters.
The joke is they are old.
I was wondering.
Do either of them really ride mobility scooters in real life?
The old people?
No, either of Warren or Sanders in real life.
Probably not.
Because I was trying, because obviously I have to do the Photoshop when these ideas are proposed.
You're trying to find an actual video of Sanders.
I'm just trying to find somebody the same body shape as theirs riding a mobility scooter because finding a picture of them like they're sitting in one and putting it over somebody that's in one is going to be hard.
I got really lucky with, if you look at the picture, it'll be in the show notes.
You can click on the story.
I found a picture of a guy from behind whose head looks so much like Bernie Sanders, I didn't touch it.
He didn't change his colour.
It's crazy.
It's like balding and then just these crazy tough surgeries.
Tufts of white hair shooting out.
Yeah, definitely.
Almost every person I found, their body was much more obese.
So I think that there's a bit of obesity that comes hand in hand with the mobility scooter.
I think there might be some skinny people that ride them, but it's not very common.
A lot of the politicians are like could have that body type, too.
Yeah.
I think you just, I don't know, sitting in an office all day.
But Moran and Sanders are pretty skinny.
I actually had to go in and try to roughly skinny up the legs on that lady that Warren was sitting.
I put her because I just put her top half on this other lady.
Yeah.
So, yeah, thanks for the challenge.
No problem.
This is a Frank Fleming article.
Yeah.
Any good poll quotes from it?
I don't know.
Who knows?
Yes, actually, there are some great poll quotes from it.
It's gotta be.
It's a Frank Fleming article.
Thank you for asking.
It says.
Who will get to it first?
I'm here.
Oh, yeah, I put Bernie's face in the rearview mirror.
Isn't that perfect?
Okay, so by the way, this came about because of a real story that now the gloves are coming off between Warren and Sanders.
Okay.
They are a bunch of people have dropped out, right?
Corey Booker's gone.
Yeah.
So they had kind of had this truce to not attack each other.
And I think now that they're realizing we're down to the wire with the Iowa caucuses coming up, it's like, no, now I'm going to savage you.
And so I think Warren said in a private meeting, Sanders had told her, like, a woman will never be president.
Like, nobody's going to vote for a woman.
He said something to that effect.
And so now she's like, well, he's a sexist.
So you can vote for him if you want, if you're a sexist.
Feel like guys that hate women.
Attack me as anti-feminist, Sanders shouted as he revved his scooter.
I'll show you, toots.
My butler informed me you called me elitist, yelled Warren from her blue high-end scooter.
I'm going to toss you in the trash like day-old caviar.
I think, you know what?
I think I'll have a beer.
Mobility scooters can reach speeds of up to five miles per hour, and a collision at that speed could break all their feeble old people bones.
Also, if they wreck their scooters, they would be forced to walk around, and then they'd need even more naps on the campaign trail.
Every line is insulting all old people.
Every line is a classic with Frank Fleming.
That's true.
That is true.
I always wonder if I'll be one of the, whenever I see one of those people, I try not to laugh at them because I wonder if that'll be me.
Well, guys, if you want to.
Whoa, what is that noise?
If you want to be part of the party of love and diversity, vote for these old white people.
It's a loud day here at the office.
I think somebody's like talking on us.
Someone's talking on a speakerphone right outside our door.
Right outside our door.
This is fantastic.
Quality.
Don't you see the big on-the-air sign that we have?
We should put a sign on there.
At least it says yeah.
I'd like to get a big glowing one on air.
Recording, please shut up.
Like Frasier Crane has adding it to the list.
Dan's got it on.
Let's go to our topic of the week and talk about how we found Jesus.
Or rather, how Jesus found us.
That's very good information.
I put some sizzle on that.
And now, the Babylon Bees topic of the week.
So let's do this.
Let's start out.
And we'll just do kind of a rapid fire.
Did you grow up in a Christian home, Dan?
Not really.
So my dad is kind of.
It's rapid fire.
Well, okay, not really.
No.
We will have complicated answers.
It's complicated.
It's complicated, yeah.
But I would say no.
Your dad.
So you can go ahead.
I was just being funny.
Your dad, what?
Yeah.
So I would say my dad's more of a, or at least right now, more of a bitter agnostic, I guess, atheist, maybe.
You know, if you talk to him, he'll start talking about aliens and stuff.
So.
Let's get him on.
Yeah.
And then, you know, on my mom's side, they were raised Catholic, Roman Catholic.
So I was actually baptized in the Roman Catholic Church.
Oh, wow.
But, you know, I remember going to church a handful of times as a kid.
So it wasn't really.
Maybe nominal token.
No, just in the background.
Did your dad listen to Art Bell?
Was that the guy's name that used to broadcast like 10 p.m.
He probably would.
Yeah, he probably would.
He's passed on, hasn't he?
Has he?
Hurt Bell?
I thought he did.
No, no.
No?
I don't think so.
He's retired, though.
Oh, maybe he retired.
Maybe that's what I heard.
Arthur William Bell III was an American broadcaster, author, and conspiracy theorist who died April 13th, 2018, at age 72.
Since he was made of flesh, which is perishable.
Okay, so aliens, Ethan, what's your answer?
I've talked some about this in past episodes, but my mom was Catholic.
My dad was very Pentecostal.
And they went kind of a, went to, I think it was a Nazarene church, maybe?
Church of the Nazarene or something.
And it's a small town.
When they divorced, they both went their separate ways.
So my mom went full-on Catholic, putting us through everything.
My dad was a homeless charismatic.
And he was also an ex-oper singer.
I don't know if I mentioned this, but a charismatic with a trained opera singer voice who prayed and sang in tongues.
Did you say it was wild if they told me he had to stop singing that loudly?
Yeah, well, there's one time we went to church and the pastor came out and met him and goes, Tom, you're so loud in there that no one else can hear themselves.
That's brutal.
Yeah.
He's just, I need you to tone it down.
And my dad was like, I think he may have left that church at that point.
He really thought because he felt like the spirit was leading him to just, and you could hear him outside the church.
Everyone else is just going like, oh, and he's like at the back there.
The little plastic communion cups are shattering.
Yeah, just crumbling.
Kyle, you.
Kyle.
Yes, I grew up.
You raised in a Christian home?
Yes, I grew up at a large mainline Baptist church.
Okay.
And not nominal.
We were like every Sunday, every Wednesday, the whole time.
No dancing?
We were fine on dancing.
No drinking.
Definitely was a kind of no drinking culture.
Kind of went the other way on that one.
My parents listened to this.
I remember our pastor growing up.
He preached the sermon on social drinking.
And he said, one in six kids of people who drink socially become alcoholics.
And he said, so you can drink socially, but it's the same thing as taking a revolver, putting a bullet in it, putting it to your kid's head, and firing a shot.
Really?
That's intense.
That's pretty intense.
I remember this.
Maybe I made this entirely up, but I feel like he said this.
I feel like you could make that argument with a lot of things.
Yeah, it's like, right, isn't everything kind of a risk?
Sitting in a blue chair as opposed to sitting in a black chair.
Let's find out what the stats are on that.
All right.
So everybody has a come to Jesus.
Every Christian has their come to Jesus like moment, right?
Right.
So from a spiritual perspective, we'd say that's when God saved you.
You know, that's when you were regenerated or whatever you want to say.
Did either of you guys ever, as kids, decide you didn't believe in God?
Did you ever go through like an atheist period?
No, I had doubts when I was like early teens.
I had doubts, you know, I'd worry about thinking, what if I go to hell?
Or, you know, what if this is a lie?
And actually a lot of apologetics and a lot of just reading the Bible and having good Bible teachers.
I had a especially good Bible teacher in high school that just really helped.
But yeah, I never had like I am an atheist moment.
Dan.
Yeah, I guess I kind of always felt like, well, obviously there's some kind of God.
So if you asked me when I was a kid, I'd probably say I'm agnostic.
I don't think I'd ever be a militant atheist.
I remember when as a kid, I was going through hard times.
I think I'd get mad at God.
Like, how can you allow this?
How can you be good if this is going on?
But I don't think I ever went through like, oh, yeah, obviously there's no God.
I think he's just always in the background.
I think that I came, I went atheist for a period of junior high and high school because my two parents, one, you know, for my mom, I think it was a tradition and kind of a thing that just kind of kept order for things, but it wasn't neither of them could, if you sat them down and asked them how they know there's a God or why they believe, like, I don't think it'd really give a very good answer.
For my dad, it was very emotion-based, and their two versions of God were so different that it just made me think that clearly God's made up because look at how different their two versions are, you know.
And I think I was just trying to be rebellious and shocking.
So I went full atheist for probably about four years from like age like 11 or 12 to like 16.
So there, so if there's a if there's like a conversion moment, right?
If there's a I feel like there's a lot of people who say, you know, I know the date and the hour.
Like I was saved.
I committed my life to Christ at 6.05 p.m.
Yeah.
On October 11th, 1972 or whatever, you know.
And I, my, my story is not like that.
Like I can't really point to a day.
Boring.
Yeah, exactly.
I have one of those testimonies.
You start telling it at testimony night or whatever.
And people are just like, okay, time to go fill up the coffee cups and get some dumps.
Can we get another ex-gang member up here, please?
Yeah, exactly.
I don't have, you know, I have like a couple small tattoos, but nothing, obviously not like a anywhere you were grazed by bullets.
No, no bullet holes.
When you hear the voice of God, I don't have like marks for my heroin needles on my arms, you know.
I'm sure you could get some of those.
You can probably order like decals.
I was like the total white suburban kid.
And I drove a 1978 Buick Park Avenue and I bought the bullet hole stickers for it.
So that was in high school driving around, which is just nice.
Some people get anxiety or they're made to feel anxious.
Like they don't have this dramatic conversion.
That's what I'm trying to get at.
This moment, I committed my life to Christ.
And so then they're made to feel like, well, maybe I'm not a Christian.
Maybe I didn't say the prayer.
Maybe I didn't say the prayer the right way.
Maybe, you know, you get this anxiety about your salvation because you're made to feel like you're supposed to have this dramatic moment.
And Christian culture pushes that because, I mean, even in the front of your Bible, it's like, I gave my life to Christ on this day.
And there's like a line in it, you know, and you're supposed to, you're like, I don't know.
I don't remember.
So I don't know.
I think my story was kind of, I don't know what, there was definitely a moment that God saved me and I was unregenerate at one moment and I was regenerate the next moment.
There's definitely a time where I was spiritually dead and then I was spiritually alive.
But I couldn't point to you to that night or that day or that hour.
But I do see God progressively working, you know, on my heart all the way through.
I would say it's probably like early high school.
That's when I got serious.
Like, okay, and I don't know if that was a recommitting or if that was the moment that God saved me.
But I got baptized in ninth grade.
And I would say that's kind of the time I was like, this isn't my parents' religion anymore.
You know, this is mine.
And so that, to me, that was my moment of.
And I'll talk a little bit more about like theologically and what drove that decision.
But what about you guys?
Did you guys have a did you guys sign the Bible with the date or are you a little more a vague like me?
Well, the short version for me is I was a young life camp convert, but there's a lot that led up to that for me.
So you like walked forward?
I didn't walk forward.
There was one night where they tell you to go out and find a spot all your own.
Like out in the woods.
So I just found a spot out in this field and just laid and looked at the stars.
And I remember the moment I prayed the prayer.
And it was a very significant moment for me for sure.
But I do think it's all part of a process.
I mean, you know, that was a moment that changed my life.
But I've gone through all sorts of periods of doubt since.
And I've done a lot of wrestling.
And there's all sorts of other areas you have to, you know, some people can just ride on that moment for their entire life.
And sometimes I wish I was like that.
I think that lofty expectation can be discouraging.
We're like, you commit your life and now I'm going to be different forever.
Like there's ups and downs after that.
I have to be willing to say that that all could have been an emotional moment for me and something I created.
People do that all the time.
I mean, every other emotional moment in my life is generally wrong.
So I don't want that to be all I go on, I guess.
But what led me to that moment, it's kind of interesting.
It's kind of sad.
So I had a best friend, this amazing artist in junior high, all through junior high, a kid named Kevin.
Just one of those guys who he could paint traditional.
He was so young to even know how to do it.
He didn't have me teaching him how.
He just figured it out.
He listened to really good music rather than like what everybody else listened to, the Pearl Jab and Nirvana and stuff like that, and kind of heading down that path.
Just this like wholesome guy.
Lived in a complete horrible house of drugs and abuse.
His mom was constantly getting taken away by the police, fights with random boyfriends, gun holes in the walls.
Just the worst life you could imagine.
So the decals or the actual ones?
Real ones, yeah.
Yeah, abuse, like I said, drugs.
And I lived in an area where that was really common.
I was actually, I was one of the rare ones where I didn't have abuse and drugs and alcoholism in my life.
But I was near suicidal.
There was actually moments where I considered suicide.
So depressed and mopey about my life and Mr. Generation X, you know, like, so anyway, through high school, and I'd really gone full on Kirk Cobain and I had, you know, I thought that I was like, I had grown my hair out.
All I did was write dark poetry.
And I thought all I did was talk about how horrible I was.
Yeah.
How horrible my life was.
And when I turned 16, I think it was 16, it was like the summer after, maybe after my freshman year.
We came home from a family camping trip and found the newspaper.
My friend Kevin had drowned.
And we'd missed the funeral.
We'd missed everything because we'd been gone through the whole thing.
It had all happened.
Kevin was gone.
It's not like social media age where you'd see it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We didn't find it until we got home and found the newspaper.
And we found as we flipped through the newspapers, we're like, oh my gosh, that's Kevin.
He drowned.
The next newspaper, there's an interview with his family.
Oh, there's the funeral.
Like, you know, the stack of papers that built up over the two weeks were gone.
So I was pretty devastated by that.
But it had, you know, a lot of times when somebody dies, it leaves like an empty spot in the world.
And the interesting thing is I don't think Kevin was a Christian.
I don't even know if he would have been.
But the fact that he had such a positive way about him in life, despite his circumstances, really made me rethink myself.
Because over that year, I did a lot of thinking.
And that was when I just cut my hair.
And I stopped trying to identify in this.
It just sent me on this path, which I believe that was what set me on my path towards my faith was when I lost him.
So I don't know.
It's interesting how a loss can create something like that.
I don't know what I'd be like if that hadn't happened because it really was a turning point for me.
It's interesting looking back and saying, these are the moments.
You know, I feel God really was pushing me.
And at the time, you don't know it.
Because I look at my daughter's 13 and she's going through all this real negative stuff, looking at herself the way she's so much like I was at 13.
And I'm like, if I never had that, I don't want any of her friends to die, but what's going to wake her up?
I hope something wakes her up, you know, from this.
I've just read, I read my boy's The Horse and This Boy, the Narnia book.
And the whole time, Aslan is like directing where the boy goes.
And at one point, like a lion comes up and scratches him, and it causes him to run faster to get where he needs to go.
You know, so then the big reveal, and you can see it coming if you're an adult, but as a kid, you don't, you know, is that Aslan says, I was the lion.
You know, the whole time he was like the cat that curls up with him when he's scared.
And he was the lion who chased him here and directed him.
And it's kind of definitely how I see my life.
It's like, I look back at terrible mistakes I could have made.
Yeah.
You know, or places I could have gone or, you know, forks in the road where I could have gone left and I went right.
And you definitely see God in retrospect in all of those.
Even through tragedy like that.
Yeah.
Damn.
Dan, any thoughts?
I already forgot what the original question was.
I was talking about the moment of having your moment of conversion.
Ethan said he had kind of the campfire or mountaintop.
As a young life, yeah, as a young life woodleaf camp and kind of saw things building up to that.
I had a baptized in the woods, you know, with a church camp, which I would say was kind of the moment that I committed myself.
Yeah, so I think for me, I was in high school already.
I think I would have been a sophomore, maybe I was a junior by then.
And one of my good friends was a Christian.
And I really looked up to this guy and I, you know, was really proud.
Like, hey, he's my buddy.
He's my friend.
He just seemed to always have everything together.
And I knew he was a Christian.
And I think his mom in prior years had tried to hand me a Bible and invite me to Bible studies and things like that.
And so I think they were an influence on me.
And I remember in high school, they were talking about a high school group that they were going to.
And it was all the way out in Riverside, which for our listeners, they might not know the geography of SoCal, but it's like a 30-minute drive from where we were.
And so we started going to Harvest Christian Fellowship out in Riverside for every Wednesday night.
They had a high school group that met out there.
And I remember standing up during one of the services, you know, doing the altar call type deal.
And then I started going to another church and that was more close by.
And yeah, so I think.
So you had to walk forward and accept Christian.
The whole Calvary Chapel experience.
The t-shirt and the free book.
I might have got a gift bag or something.
Yeah, a gift bag of goodies.
Yeah.
I slam on that a lot, but I'll bet there are.
I mean, obviously it's a tool, right?
Like using something like that.
I think my main criticism of the altar call stuff is mostly just the overuse.
We emphasize it a lot.
It's one method among many, but we know a lot of people that have gotten saved that way, obviously.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's interesting for me, at least my story, is that I had that experience in high school, started going to church.
This is all new to me in high school.
It's like, what is a college?
What is a high school group?
What is a pastor?
What do they do?
I had no idea what church even was or what do you do in a church.
I spent a couple years kind of backsliding and struggling.
When you become a Christian, you learn about your sin.
And then it's almost like I became a Christian right at the time when you start being able to explore life and kind of do what you want to do.
So I spent a lot of years kind of struggling.
And then later on, it's like a lot of those things I was starting to hear about as a high schooler, they started to catch me where I was like, oh, yeah, I need to, I need to start actually living this now.
Yeah.
Let me read a little bit out of Philippians 3.
I always, if I have to give my testimony or whatever, I always read to Philippians 3 because there's probably a lot of people listening now too who are, you know, grew up in the church and you feel like you don't have a great conversion story.
Like, you know, you don't have the cool, like, I was an atheist and you don't have the cool road to Damascus story.
But I think Paul's story in Philippians 3 is just as powerful.
So he talks about how he has the most reason to trust himself for his salvation out of anybody because of all his credentials in Jewish culture.
And then he says, but whatever were gains to me, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.
What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.
I consider them garbage that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.
So that that's always my conversion story.
Isn't like, I don't believe in God, and then someone comes along and, oh, now I believe in God.
It's like I already did, and I already in God, I already believe in Jesus.
But like growing up in a church culture, you like, you start to feel like you're earning your salvation.
Like not, you wouldn't put it in those terms.
You wouldn't say, yes, I earned my salvation.
And you might answer the question about salvation by grace.
You might answer that correctly.
But you start to feel like by going to church every Sunday and being on the worship band and going to all the Bible studies, I'm earning God's favor.
You start to fall into that trap.
So I think at some point I had to like, and it was probably after I got saved, but this is the lesson that Christ taught me through those first few years of actually being a Christian was that I had to, I almost had to, I almost had to turn my back and repent from Christian culture.
And say, like, because I would judge my non-Christian friends, you listen to, you listen to secular music, you know, you smoke, you drink.
Like, that was like, I can't believe it.
You know, I can't associate with you.
And I was like, I was so proud of myself.
Yeah.
So to be able to turn my back on that and say, I repent of Christian culture and I accept Christ.
You know, that's my story.
So I don't know if you guys have something similar in terms of what you had to turn from.
But for me, I don't know.
I just wanted to offer a word of encouragement to people who think they have boring testimonies because what God has done in your life is a miracle.
Well, yeah, and I think that the process of struggling with your belief in God or finding it becoming more real over time.
Your true testimony is an ongoing thing, I think.
Amen.
And yeah, because my next step, that was one of the interesting things about being part of Young Life was that my next step as a Christian almost immediately after I became one, I was kind of influential among kids.
I was also an entertainer.
You know, I was good at doing music and stuff.
So I was put into the leadership position almost immediately after becoming a Christian.
And which was great, but it did become very insular.
And like you said, I became very judgmental, but I also hit it.
I hit this point where I was giving, I was the minister.
And I was only a few years into my faith.
And I wasn't, you know, people were asking me to help them with their problems.
I mean, I'm hitting this age.
I'm like 19 or whatever.
That's a volatile age, you know, 18, 19.
And yeah, I'd be curious.
I think I'd be interested in doing a show about this topic maybe at some point.
But I think a lot of people in ministry hit like a, I don't know if a nervous breakdown is the right word, but like you hit a if you if you don't properly have accountability and people who are you know not seeing you as in that high up position, you know, it's almost kind of the way a celebrity is like you get you get put on a different level.
Yeah.
Yeah, I just it blindsided me, but I had like a I don't know if a nervous, I just had one day where I just cried the entire day.
Like I was just like a mess.
I just, and it wasn't long after that that I just I realized that my entire faith had been part of being part of young life.
And yeah.
And I didn't know how to be a Christian outside of that context.
I started realizing that like we weren't, you know, can I live my faith in a normal life like day to day, like living among normal people.
And I started realizing how important that ability is and that a lot of people can't.
Like they either, you know, we're very we compartmentalize things.
And so that became a big challenge for me to do that.
And I did it.
It shook my faith a lot to try to make that journey.
There's like weird when I left Young Life, there was like weird rumors that went out around about me.
Like some girl said that I was doing heroin.
I saw even doing heroin at a party.
I just stopped going.
All I did was stop going young life.
I'm not going now I'm doing heroin.
But also that it's scary to like step out of your club or whatever, your little group when you're in some kind of a religious group.
God has a way of breaking down idols, you know, and that'll happen.
I mean, I grew up the same church for 18 years and through a painful series of events, I had to leave it.
And this now I realize that this is the standard in the Christian life.
It's like nothing's constant except for Christ.
So you have to make him your commitment.
I'm not saying it's obviously if you can find a solid church and stay there for a very long time, do that.
Be faithful to the local church.
But you have to understand that there are human organizations and to like put your faith in that is so I guess let's transition there.
Let's talk about that.
What is God teaching you now?
Like lessons you've learned recently or lessons that you're working on in the coming years.
I can answer first if you guys don't want to.
I'll ask the questions and I'll get well I think for me I'm a new father.
My daughter's almost two and I feel like if you want God to sanctify you and start changing you, then getting married and having kids is one of the biggest tools he probably uses is because there's just a lot of growth there where a lot of dying to myself.
It's like, well, I'm going to learn how to be a dad and be a husband.
Yeah, although I will say like sometimes people will say that you know you get married to grow and I don't know that that's true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it kind of clarifies and it separates the wheat from the chaff.
Yeah.
You may not grow or die.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm saying that if your character is very flawed and you get married.
Same with kids.
I mean, I'm not saying you're saying this, but I've just, I've heard people use the other one.
Yeah.
If you're dense enough to have kids and not grow from it, then you just shouldn't have insisted.
You shouldn't have it.
You should just go out.
But Dan, you should exist.
So Debbie Good.
Sorry, Dan.
Tell us some more about your.
And then about the time that I got married, we've been married for seven years now.
We started attending a reformed church.
So getting kind of plugged into the historic creeds and confessions of the church and really getting rooted in the gospel, rooted in Christ, that our identities and, you know, our only comfort is that we belong to Jesus.
He's our high priest.
He's our king.
He's our prophet.
He teaches us what God wants us to know, How to live our life and what our lives are supposed to be about.
So I just been getting really rooted in that historic church tradition.
And I feel like that's, you know, I guess your tradition could be good or bad.
I mean, it's not about the tradition, but I've just been really growing on the vine.
I guess.
Let me ask you a question.
Yeah.
What is your only comfort in life and in death?
That I'm not my own, but that I belong body and soul, life and in death, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
You want to read the whole thing or some kind of inside joke?
He's reform.
This is the Heidelberg Catechism.
Question one.
Question one.
Wow.
I didn't know you guys had.
So it kind of hangs the whole catechism is like, what's your comfort?
And so ultimately your comfort.
I do love that the belong to Jesus.
The catechism starts like that.
What is your only comfort?
It doesn't start with us theological.
I mean, it is theological, but it starts with a very personal.
Yeah.
And then the whole structure of that catechism is guilt, grace, gratitude.
It's the whole Christian life is like you're guilty.
You're a sinner.
God's grace comes to you and you're saved.
And then how you live your life, a lot of Christians put the law as like what's weighing you down.
And really in the catechism, how we live in God's will is by obeying his commands in the power of the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ.
So it helps clarify having all those categories and things that people have done already in history.
You don't have to reinvent the wheel that I'm able to go by, okay, here's how, here's how I live now.
So yeah, I think there's that classic Babylon B article of like armed with just his Bible, man invents several new heresies.
Yeah.
The guy going, I have this crazy new idea that I discovered.
And you're like, well, it's probably heresy.
Well, Ethan, what's uh what's the Lord teaching you?
Yeah, I mean, I think I've been on a process from after when, like I, when I, you know, just talked about post-young life life, uh, I really have to rebuild my faith at that point.
And I went through a how long ago was that?
I was like my early 20s.
So it's a long time ago now.
But uh, but I went through this whole, like I started asking all these questions, all the questions I hadn't actually asked.
And so I got into this whole debating atheism thing and all the apologetic stuff.
And that did send me kind of down a dark path where I started realizing you can, you can almost make an argument for almost anything if you're fancy enough with your words.
And so I went through a period of doubt of pretty strong doubt for a while.
And but I just couldn't, I couldn't get away.
Like even though I was trying to, I almost had an agnostic point of view for a while, and I just couldn't, I couldn't anymore.
It's almost like God was too real to me that I, but I think that for me now, I think that I'm having to I'm I'm, I'm doing my best to find.
You know that there there is a.
I got very dubious about the personal relationship thing because it gets easy to play around with and you know, we used to always make fun of the whole.
Christianity's not a religion, it's a relationship.
Well, it kind of is religion.
Yeah right, like that.
You know that's.
That was like the marketing of right we always use in young life and stuff.
There may be a few rules.
Yeah, I always thought I was silly, because then a lot of people really are having a relationship with kind of an imaginary thing in their head.
It's kind of disturbing, but I and I, just I So I was so cynical about that for so long.
And I do think part of it has been being a father and getting married and stuff too.
God speaks to us those things so much.
But finding the true relationship.
Like I find that I don't know what the best way to put this is.
I demand all this evidence from God constantly.
But I don't demand the same level of evidence from myself for my opinions and my views.
And I think that I've realized that there's some things I go out on a limb on or I just accept them because it's just I'm better off if I do.
And I think that's one of them.
I'm just starting to realize that there's an importance to just embracing that like, you know, I don't have all the every jot and tittle figured out when it comes to like how God works.
We have to bleep tittle.
De bleep tittle.
I'm quoting Jesus.
Are you drawing Jesus?
This is Kevin Max.
Okay.
I'm listening, though.
He's totally listening.
Of course.
What are you doing?
Do you find that you listen to sermons better while you doodle?
Yeah.
I do.
I don't doodle though.
I'm a professional.
That's true.
But you can't match my Carmen doodle.
Yeah, you did a great Carmen.
Thanks.
Sorry, continue.
Anyway.
Just that.
I think that's been it.
I'm trying to open myself up to I've been too cerebral.
I'm trying to open myself back up to, you know, the Lord does speak to us.
There is a, at least living, there's a living relationship there.
And I've had a cynicism about that for a long time.
Anyway, does that make me sound not faithful enough?
That sounds very unfaithful.
I guess for me, I've had to learn about ordinary faithfulness, like, and just perseverance.
And that sometimes God is okay with me just getting through the day and being a dad to my kids and being a husband to my wife.
I was actually a pastor of a church in San Diego for a while, for several years.
And due to some crazy things, I had to end up leaving, coming up here.
And that's when we, that's basically, it all worked at God's timing.
It was perfect.
I was able to get hired on at the Babylon B full time right at the time all that happened.
So I came here and it was like, if you've ever been in ministry and then not, and it's kind of what you were talking about with young life.
It's like this answer.
I feel like you're sinning, right?
Like you feel like, I don't know.
And I feel like I need to accept that God is, God is pleased with me because his son, Jesus, lived a completely righteous life on my behalf and died for my sins.
And he's pleased with me.
And I don't need to sit here and go, you know, well, how many, you know, I need to volunteer for the worship band or else I'm not, you know, good enough or something.
It's weird to like plan a whole church service every week for years and then all of a sudden just be like, you know, showing up 20 minutes late because your kids are crazy.
And so I think sometimes, I don't know, I feel like a lot of people are pushed into this radical ministry direction and we have to go out and be missionaries.
We have to go out and do that.
And that's good.
I mean, that's not a bad thing.
But I think sometimes like God calls you to be faithful to your neighbors and to the people that he's put in your life and to what he's given you.
And I'm okay with that season.
I'm okay with this season.
So that's kind of what I'm learning.
It's just this ordinary faithfulness.
Not always radical faithfulness.
Michael Horton might agree about that.
I mean, that was an idea that dawned on me at one point after a young life was that I was like, wait, what would the world look like If there hadn't been a fall or whatever, or what was God's intended world, like there wouldn't be any ministries and preachers and stuff, like because it would just be life.
We wouldn't have conversion wouldn't be this big thing.
So, there's a whole life that we're supposed to live that God intended for us that doesn't have anything to do with any of that stuff.
And that's almost like damage control.
So, that kind of fascinated me, the idea that there's a whole life God had for us outside of converting people.
And we put so much emphasis on it, which is very obviously important.
Christ brought it up.
Right.
Christ said, do it.
But it's not de-emphasizing.
Yeah, it's not de-emphasizing.
It's just that there's a whole rich part of a whole.
It's a part of it.
Yeah, it's a piece of things.
And it's actually a consequence.
Like, we have to, we have to engage in it because it's a consequence of the fall.
But God had a whole creation besides that and a life for us to live that would be, I mean, I assume is holy, if not more.
Yeah, that's good.
Yeah, God designed the family.
God designed us to have vocations and work and Adam and Eve in the garden.
Adam still worked.
So, I mean, all that stuff is made good.
Yeah.
So it is good.
Yeah, he said that.
All the ordinary stuff of life is good.
I wish that when I created things, I said it is good as often as God did when He was creating the heavens and the earth.
This drawing of Kevin Max.
Kyle hooked up this drawing of Kevin Max and said it was good.
Well, you guys want to hug it out?
Okay.
You get to get to know us a little better there, Babylon B listeners.
If you guys have testimonies that you want to share, send them in.
Yeah.
We'd love to read them.
We'll read them all.
Well, that was a good conversation.
I really enjoyed that.
Yeah.
Yeah, like literally, I think it was one of our best segments.
And people, you know, they probably come for the big interviews or whatever, but I thought that was one of our better.
I felt like it got a little.
It got transcendent.
Transcendent.
As Godawa would say.
Brian Gadawa.
If you haven't gone back and listened to our movie episodes, he is a smart guy.
Yeah.
Got to listen to those.
So we do our hate mailing every week.
But because this is such a deep and touching and heartwarming episode, we didn't want to drag it down with hate.
Yeah.
So instead, we are going to do Love Mail.
Love Mail, baby.
That's so creepy.
Very, very white.
We're going to have Dave on soon, too.
We're going to little interview with him.
Maybe in the subscriber portion.
I don't know yet.
Yeah, at some point, we're going to have him on a little chat.
You guys got to meet him.
He's great.
Something like that.
This is actually a very long email we got, but it was like a really good one.
It made us both feel so happy.
It is too much.
Let me sum up.
Okay, Kyle will sum up because I can not get at summing up.
This is by a fan of ours, a recent fan, I think.
But I love that her last name is Love It.
Jessica Lovett.
We were trying to debate if she wanted her name read on air, but we're just going to do it.
Too late.
Because her name really has to do with the email because she loves it.
Jessica, love it.
Thank you for this kind email.
So a lot of what we do, you know, we tell jokes on the internet.
We pour a lot of our heart and creativity into it.
With our podcast now, that's sucking up a lot of our time.
Putting it into this, we talk to people, and we're like, I think we, I think she wrote this because we had said something in response to the Greg Cochle episode, I think.
To the effect, like, we don't really know what kind of an effect we're having.
Yeah, I feel like I don't, I feel like I don't share my faith enough or I don't.
I feel like when I look at my life, I don't think of my keynote shares.
If I don't share the gospel with the Denny's waitress, have I done anything?
So she says, she said she wanted to address that.
She said, you have no idea how incredibly encouraging it is, faith-wise, to have the Bee and to have the Babylon Bee podcast.
Those of us who are more INTJ-ish Christians, I think it's kind of introverted.
It's one of those Myers-Briggs.
Gotcha.
Myers-Briggs was a thing before Enneagram became a thing.
Those of us who are more INTJ Christians never had an outlet before like this.
You make people who feel lost in the sea of absurd, crazy leftism-ness feel understood and validated, which is no small thing.
That's very encouraging.
I know that's kind of the podcast I was looking for.
Like, I wanted somebody coming from that Christian worldview, but it seems like you're either get like the really polished guys who are like, yeah, they know exactly what to say, and they're like prepared remarks, which is great for a certain audience or people that just kind of think like me, but also they don't have all the answers.
You know, I don't know.
So I guess I do appreciate that.
I don't think about the idea that it's easy to forget that around 20,000 people are hearing what we're saying right now.
You just try and think about it.
It's just weird.
And we feel down sometimes.
It's like, oh, you know, no one's sharing our articles.
That episode didn't get as many downloads.
So it's easy for us to be like, okay, well, we're not really having any effect.
And I think we try to have it, we try to see our work in perspective.
We think there are people out there who are doing really good work, like apologists, Christian writers.
And for us, we're like, well, we're telling jokes.
Well, and also, it's a weird, it's a weird thing.
I mean, our job all day long is we're interacting with thousands, if not millions of people, but we aren't really.
I mean, we work in this little office and we see people around.
And there's a couple people nearby us that actually know what the Babylon Bee is and know that we do it.
But in general, it's not, you know, it's such a quiet existence, really, right?
Like you don't go out, nobody knows about it.
So it's bizarre.
It's just bizarre to like be reaching so many people, but then really not.
And we both are actually kind of generally more quiet.
I don't know if we would both count as introverts or not.
I think I would probably count myself as an introvert.
Yeah, I'd say I'm an introvert.
It was weird because when I lived in my old hometown and I was like in a band and stuff, I thought of myself as an extrovert.
But then once I moved away and out of that, once I didn't have a band anymore, I was a total introvert.
It was actually really hard to adjust.
Yeah, I think people misunderstand the introvert extrovert thing because I feel like an extrovert sometimes, but it's with people that I know and trust or environments I know and trust.
It's like, I'm the life of the party here.
But then I go to McDonald's and I'm like, I don't know any of these people.
You're a wallflower at McDonald's.
I just go hide in the slide and hide in the balls.
I don't know why I thought of McDonald's.
So Love It says, God has blessed you with an outlet to encourage and lift up others with humor and wisdom.
And you are doing a wonderful job spreading light into the universe.
She also says, you make Christianity cool.
I don't know about that.
Yeah, I don't know about that one.
But we appreciate the sentiment anyway.
So anyway, thank you, Jessica.
Yeah, thanks so much.
That letter touched us both very deeply.
Yeah, everybody at the Babylon Bee was, we have our little app where you can comment on emails and is commenting on it and saying, wow, this is encouraging.
Wow.
We don't really get that much of that kind of message.
And this is long, too.
That was just snippets.
And that's not us begging for more because we don't really need affirmation all the time.
We don't need big hits.
We're not fragile snowflakes, but it is nice.
So thank you, Jessica.
All right.
Well, for the rest of the show, we're going to be doing subscriber exclusive stuff.
We're going to be talking about a little more Epstein stuff.
Jokes about Epstein, apparently.
I always love suicide jokes.
And then we're going to be talking about a guy driving in a carpool lane.
It's actually beautiful.
We've got an Epstein joke.
We have a pronoun joke.
Yeah, it's a pronoun.
We have jokes about Hollywood celebrities.
So honestly, this whole Golden Globes thing, Richard Bass, all that stuff.
It's good.
But that's in the subscriber portion, and you got to pay for that.
Everybody else, talk to you later.
The rest of this podcast is in our super exclusive premium subscriber lounge.
If you're not a Babylon Bee Premium subscriber, go to BabylonB.com slash plans for full-length ad-free podcasts.
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Feedback and love mail go to podcast at babylonbee.com.
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Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dylan for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.