Wesley Huff joins Patrick Bet-David on the PBD Podcast to discuss his explosive debate with Billy Carson, diving into faith, historical accuracy, and cultural shifts. They explore the growth of Islam, the challenges facing Christianity, and the impact of theological debates on modern society.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
People like Billy are very confident in the way that they say things, but that confidence isn't always backed up with the reality of the evidence.
The sources you used were not primary.
We're still talking over and over again.
There's so much more we can talk about here.
We're wasting a lot of time.
Confidence and competence are not the same thing.
And I thought what was surprising to me about my interaction with Billy was that I was expecting some sort of rebuttal.
Billy went to Mark's house with a handwritten cease and desist letter.
People would never expect to go there.
What happened after you guys were done with the podcast?
Well, we did the podcast and then it was very clear that Billy did not want the podcast to air.
Why?
Because a genius solves problems before they happen.
And I'm going to drop the mic on that.
Some weird people are going to become Christians next two years.
And if you watch the interaction I had with him, it's on my YouTube channel.
There was no rebuttal.
So, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, go on.
We gave you a follow-up.
I really appreciate it, Billy.
Thanks so much for interacting.
Mark is here.
I didn't even know Mark was going to be here, right?
Mark is the fellow that you did a podcast with Billy.
Would you have done it if you knew what it was going to turn into?
Would you have done it now?
Welcome back.
I found out about my guest today, Wes Huff, by a debate that he did with Billy Carson.
And Billy Carson, who's been on our podcast before, they had a sit-down together, which afterwards, there was a bunch of commotion.
And, you know, don't release it.
He contacts the host, Mark Minnard, which, by the way, today was the first day that Mark Minnard, the host of, I think it's called Elevating Beyond or some name like that of a podcast.
It was the first time he and Wes met each other.
And I even brought Mark at the end of the podcast to speak for a few minutes about his experience with Billy.
And it was very interesting watching him.
But Wes, what an interesting guy, young guy who we talked about the difference between how many times you read the book of Quran?
He's read, I think, three times, and the difference between the book of Quran and Christianity, he broke down his views on Mormonism.
And then I asked the question, I said, so if Quran is what you say it is, why is the religion of Islam growing at the pace that it is faster than Christian church?
And why is attendance in Christian church declining?
And he gave his argument at the scrolling in different places.
I said, why is it not growing in America?
And we talked about a handful of different things that I wrote down here, which why are people, you know, it was a very interesting conversation.
We talked about Andrew Tate, his conversion to Islam, and Justin Trudeau, Canada, his discomfort on talking about politics, which we got into a little bit at the end with what's going on.
I asked him a technical question.
I said, hey, you yourself, you know, a Christian man, his struggles as a young bandit, you know, what did you deal with, right?
We talked about biblical times when Jesus came and what was the only fans of that time with the amount of sins that we have today, OnlyFans, porn, all this other stuff.
Are we at a point where he's making a return?
It was just an incredible conversation with somebody who was very qualified to speak on this topic.
And I really enjoyed it.
And I think you will as well with Wes Huff.
30 seconds.
Did you ever think you would make it?
I feel I'm so excited to take sweet victory.
I know this life meant for me.
Adam, what's your point?
The future looks bright.
My handshake is better than anything I ever saw.
It's right here.
You are a one-of-one.
My son's right, Doug.
I don't think I've ever said this before.
Okay, so we've got a special guest in the house.
This guy decides to sit down and do a podcast with Billy Carson.
And two hours later, it's explosive.
Everybody in the Christian community and the community that's had Billy Carson on whether it's us, whether it's Rogan, whether it's Andrew Schultz, oh my God, who is this West guy?
You know, and he was just recently on Rogan.
And I don't know if that's been released yet or not.
I'm sure it's fantastic.
So the timing is great.
And then I reached out IDM to them.
I said, listen, great work.
Good for you.
I enjoyed the conversation.
Would love to have you on.
And boom, now he's here with us.
So it's great to have you on.
Yeah, it's a pleasure.
And so when you went in, and obviously today, I want to kind of get to know your background a little bit because it's very interesting.
You just told me your grandfather used to sell Bibles in Iran.
He worked for the Iranian Bible Society.
Iranian Bible Society in 1979, you said?
Yeah, 1979 to 1980.
Okay, so that's post-revolution.
Yeah, me.
You used to live in Pakistan and you went to school in Pakistan.
Well, I was born in Pakistan.
And did you go to school there?
No, we left during the Gulf War.
My parents were accused of the crime of proselytizing, giving a Bible to a Muslim.
And then we came back from overseas to Toronto, where my parents lived.
And then a year after that, went out and for a very short stint of my childhood, we were in Jordan in the Middle East.
How long was that?
Between, like in the 90s for a few years.
You're young.
So how old were you at that time?
Oh, I was quite young.
We came back when I was like six or seven.
Do you have any memories of yeah, yeah, definitely.
And I went back after I graduated high school.
I went back and worked more rurally.
I worked with Bedouin.
Whereas when I was really young, we were in Amman, which was much more of the city.
But when I went back after I graduated high school, I did some work with a Bedouin in an area just north of Aqaba.
So tell me about your family lineage.
Like, you know, your father, who's a, is it everybody was a my pastor, Dudley Rutherford, his father was a pastor, his uncles were all pastors, his brothers were all pastors, like everybody was a pastor, Biola University or APU or Ozark or all this other stuff.
What, I mean, the way you were breaking things down with Billy was very obvious.
You've been, you know, taught the right way.
You went to the school, but tell me about the family lineage.
Yeah, so my dad is a pastor.
You know, he was a missionary, was a pastor.
He's retired now.
Not a long lineage necessarily of pastors, but my middle name is Livingston, and my dad's name is Livingston.
And that's the family name going back to a guy named David Livingston, who was a missionary who was the first, I believe, European to go into Central Africa.
So, and we're related to him.
So since there was like the, because I believe it was his niece married outside of the family.
The firstborn male since then has been named Livingston.
So my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather.
But it's my middle name and it's my son's middle name as well.
Very cool.
Yeah.
So there's a lineage going back into like the heritage of Christian ministry and missionaries going back that far.
And then, yeah.
So did you go on a mission ever yourself or no?
By myself?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I did a, I've done some trips.
When I was in Jordan, I was working doing that kind of stuff.
I've done some short-term mission trips to.
As an adult?
Yeah, yeah.
Just after I graduated high school, like between high school and going to university, I had a couple, yeah, a couple trips was in Rwanda.
I was in Mexico and I was quite a bit younger.
But yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I watched the interview with you and the podcast that the fellow who was on there, his name is Mark.
I want to say his last name correctly, Menard, right, if I'm not mistaken.
And his podcast is called Elevation Beyond.
I think it's called Elevation Beyond Beyond.
Elevating Beyond.
Elevating Beyond, right, with Mark Minard.
And so walk me through how this whole thing happened with you and Billy Carson.
Because when you watch Billy, Billy's been at it for 14, 15 years.
I think the first time if you search up his material, you will hear he started in 2010.
And he's gotten tens, if not hundreds of millions of views on many different interviews.
I think even if you include TikTok, you know, Instagram and everything combined, it's probably in the billions of views that he's gotten until he sat down with you.
But walk me through the invitation.
Did Mark invite you?
Did Billy invite you?
How did that happen?
Yeah.
So Mark invited me.
He sent me a DM on Instagram the day before.
So as far as I understand it, the plan was actually for Mark and Billy to interact.
Mark's a Christian.
So he has Christian faith and conviction and had talked to Billy because they had been friends, talked a lot about business together and different things like that.
And so they were setting up, which had sort of been in the ether for a while, to have a conversation about some of the disagreements that they had about what Billy said about Christianity, how Mark feels about Christianity.
And Anton, who is Mark's media manager, had compiled a bunch of different sources that Mark could look at and kind of review in plan for this.
And I'd done in some of my social media videos, just some short response videos to some things that Billy had said on your podcast when you had him in, when Andrew Schultz had him on, when Joe Rogan had him on, just quick, you know, two-minute things, just kind of correcting some of those errors.
And so Anton put together a Google Doc of some of this stuff, me, a few other people.
And how I understand it is that Mark just kind of said to Anton right before, what happens if we just reach out to Wes?
Like, what happens if we just see if he can come and interact?
So he reached out to me the day before.
I saw, I was out at a lunch meeting with a friend and saw the message and, you know, couldn't get down to Florida to actually do it in person, but said, I'll jump on a call.
And I'm more than willing to do that and interact with Billy and kind of go back and forth with some of the claims that he's made about Christianity.
And what was your biggest takeaway when you sat down with him?
What did you see that was maybe different than you had seen him on different podcasts when he's speaking?
What did you sense?
I think people like Billy are very confident in the way that they say things, but that confidence isn't always backed up with the reality of the evidence.
And so confidence and competence are not the same thing.
And I thought what was surprising to me about my interaction with Billy was that I was expecting some sort of rebuttal.
And if you watch the interaction I had with him, it's on my YouTube channel.
There was no rebuttal.
So we get into the topics.
He claims that Jesus wasn't crucified.
He kind of has these sources that he uses.
He brought those up predictably, as I thought he might.
And I addressed why those sources don't work for his claim.
And then he collapsed.
He just said, you know, well, the first claim was that it was from the Sinai Bible, which is Codex Sinaiticus.
And I happened to have a facsimile, a photocopy of Codex Sinaiticus on my shelf.
So I simply pulled it off my shelf and said, well, do you mind telling me where you think it denies the crucifixion or that the crucifixion isn't there?
Because this is a fourth century Greek Bible.
It has the crucifixion.
And so he kind of pivoted to saying, well, no, that's, I misspoke.
I actually meant the gospel of Barnabas, which is a known forgery.
And so I think my surprise was that he didn't try to double down.
He just completely capitulated and then tried to move the topics onward.
So, you're asking him questions because I'm watching the back and forth.
You're not being aggressive and disrespectful.
You kept posing questions.
So, may I ask where you got this source from?
You know, if you don't mind me asking, can you break this thing down for me?
And he's giving his rebuttal and what do you know about this, this, this, and that.
And he would pause and you would go and say, Well, actually, I wrote a thesis on this.
And the approach that you're going back and forth with him.
What happened after you guys were done with the podcast?
Well, we did the podcast, and then it was very clear that Billy did not want the podcast to air.
So, he got in contact with Mark and he said, This thing can't go out.
And he had a couple of different reasons which he verbalized, but the reasons did kind of shift.
There was some talk of a debate.
Well, at first, he said, You know, I didn't really understand that this was going to be as of a debate as it turned out to be.
And I typically ask a fee.
So, he says he, you know, asked 50 grand for a debate.
That was never put forth.
And so it was unfair because this is his kind of standard practice: it costs $50,000 to debate Billy Carson.
And then he brought forward that there was some sort of interaction, formal debate that was being set up with another Christian that this was interfering with.
Now, I doubt that that was the case.
I've been part of events where debates have taken place.
And why this conversation would have truly impinged on a later debate is unclear to me, but that was what he said.
And so at this point, Mark and Billy are friends.
They've known each other for years.
They live in the same neighborhood.
And so for the good faith of their friendship, Mark decides to do Billy a solid and holds on to the footage.
But Mark contacted me only a couple of days later and said, you know, here's the situation, Wes.
It's not going to go out.
Billy doesn't want me to put it out.
And I think Mark was a little bit uncomfortable with the fact that Billy didn't want it put out.
And so I simply said, you know, that's fine.
It's your podcast.
But I'm going to make a video and simply say that this event happened.
And so that's what I did.
And as things transpired, it was clear that not everything was adding up on Billy's side.
But then also a lot of people were accusing me of actually making up the interaction.
And so as that kind of took away.
What percentage?
Your own audience?
No, just people online.
Okay.
Yeah.
So go ahead.
So you're saying, here's what happened.
Some people are saying, I don't know.
You're just making things up.
That would have never happened.
Billy's strong.
He would never be able to, you know, you would never be able to hang with somebody like Billy.
Yeah.
And then I just kind of say to Mark as we're talking back and forth, because we're communicating throughout, you know, the course of the aftermath of this.
And I said, you know, hey, people are accusing me of lying, of making this up.
And Mark was quite uncomfortable with that.
Mark was quite uncomfortable with the fact that people are accusing me of dishonesty.
And so then he made a video where he said that it did happen.
And in that video, he included a number of clips of the actual interaction.
But not the whole podcast.
No, he held on to the podcast for over a month.
So let me get this straight.
So when, so this thing, when was the actual interview?
October 18th.
On my birthday, October 18th.
And he released it when.
Because on your channel, it says December 9th.
Yes.
And I don't see it on his channel anymore.
No.
So what transpired was that Mark released it in November and he released it and it was up for less than 24 hours.
In fact, I don't even think it was up for more than six hours.
Okay.
Because Billy showed up to Mark's house with a cease and desist letter at 2.30 in the morning.
Okay, so is this the part where there's a video of it with the ring camera?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So if people are interested in this, I would recommend two sources.
Anton put out a video where he kind of he chronologically lays out some of the things that led up to it.
And then Mark himself, just a couple of weeks ago, put out a video where he, from his side, put out, you know, here's my side of the story of the things happened that happened because Billy went to Mark's house with a handwritten cease and desist letter and a handwritten at 2.30 in the morning.
Yeah.
And then what does Mark do?
Mark takes it down.
So Mark took the video down.
It was less, I think, in regards to Billy, more that this was just turning into something that was, because of the complexity of Mark's situation, you know, he lives in the same neighborhood.
Billy's wife is friends with Mark's wife.
Their boys play basketball together.
Like, this is messy.
This is messy for Mark on a different level than it's messy for me.
For sure.
Yeah, that's tough because you're going to practice.
I can't believe you did this.
Kids are now having conflicts.
Yeah.
Yeah, especially if you're that, that doesn't help.
So during this time when it's up six hours, I'm assuming you get the file and you say, I'm going to put it on my channel.
Well, so I had the file.
One of the things that I did do when Mark said, hey, you know, I'm just going to hold on to this.
Billy's asked me to, and so I'm going to do this for the moment is I said, you know, two things.
I'm going to put out a video.
I'm going to say that this happened.
And I would like you to send me a copy of it.
So Mark actually did send me a copy of it, which I said, I will not put out without your permission.
Now, certain things transpired where, you know, it kind of came to light that Mark, because of the complexities of his situation, wasn't going to repost the video.
But I decided to repost the video on my end on early December.
And you guys spoke and he said, I'm going to go live with it.
I said, I'm going to go live with it.
Okay.
And what was his reaction when he said that?
He was fine with it.
Mark has been pretty behind the scenes.
I think on purpose and for good reasons.
He's gotten a lot of flack because of some of the way that the conversation transpired with Billy.
But if you ask Mark, he will say, and I think he says in his video, he was so surprised during the interaction.
He's in the room with Billy and he's just, he's very surprised that Billy, who is Mr. Confidence, Mr. Ancient Evidence, is completely collapsing.
So for Billy, who usually always has the monologue to say, well, okay, well, that's fair.
Let's move on to the next topic.
I think Mark was not to speak for him, but I think he was genuinely a little bit confused.
And so felt like he, to a certain degree, needed to come to Billy's aid in the course of this conversation because he just felt the kind of secondhand embarrassment that was going on in the room because Billy was really not acting in the way that Billy usually does.
Now, let me ask you, in 14 years since he's been creating content, or he's been out there, Billy, and he's been sharing his stories that he has.
Why do you think this hasn't happened for 14 years?
I mean, I think you can strategically put yourself in positions where you're not going to be put on the defense.
The thing is with the internet, and I'm sure you know this as well as anybody, Patrick, that like people love sensationalism.
And we live in a world where we know a little about a lot, but we don't know a lot about a little.
And so we live in this Wikipedia world, right?
You can just hop online.
You don't really need to know information.
You can kind of, you can, you can Shed that out to someone else, right?
You can and the someone else being basically the supercomputer in your pocket.
And so, and people love sensationalism.
People like to hear the crazy story, the conspiracy theory, for you know, sometimes I think genuine reasons.
Some conspiracy theories are true sometimes.
But I think when you have people who are saying pretty outrageous things, people like to be entertained and people like the more sensationalistic theory than the mundane one.
So, I mean, in one sense, it is sensationalistic that you have this first-century itinerant Jewish preacher in the backwaters of Roman-occupied Judea who predicts his own death and resurrection and then pulls it off.
But I think people are so used to the biblical narrative about the historical Jesus that they want something else.
It's the same reason the Da Vinci Code got so popular, even though there really wasn't anything historical behind the Da Vinci Code.
But people like these kind of under-the-table conversations that are sensationalistic and make you feel like you know something special now.
And so, I think people exposing somebody, oh my God, Christianity is finally being exposed, that there was another guy in the past, that Jesus replicated his story because there was this person that in India, and exact same story that this so finally Christians are being exposed.
Is that kind of what you're yeah, or I mean, every Christmas and Easter, it seems that there's some news article about this lost or missing gospel that has this story about Jesus.
Well, I remember the Da Vinci Code was massive, even the movie with who was Tom Hanks in the Da Vinci Code?
Yeah, there was a one and a two, if I'm not mistaken.
There was a couple of them, yeah.
And for a person that's not in that world, you can really get caught up in it.
Now, have you had a follow-up with Billy?
Like, did you guys speak?
Has he reached out to you directly?
No, not to me, um, other than his lawyer sending me a cease and desist letter.
But was that handwritten or was that title?
No, that was it.
That was an actual result.
Well, at least he paid you respect.
I know, I guess.
Yeah, that's a level of respect.
You're not getting a handwritten one.
I mean, I think he eventually did send actual cease and desist letters to Mark.
That's fair.
He has to pay respect to both people, right?
So, now, if there was a possibility of a part two, right, with the two of you guys, maybe he had a bad day, maybe he was sick that day, maybe he had a lot on his mind, maybe he had challenges with family, siblings, kids, other things that's going on.
Sometimes people have a bad day.
Yeah.
Would you be open to the idea of another one, the two of you guys together, long form, and maybe he brings somebody with him?
Yeah, I would be open to it.
I mean, that was the original plan was that this interaction that we had online would be kind of a precursor to ideally an in-person thing with Billy.
And I actually said when Billy sent me the cease and desist letter, I made a video where I said, I will actually adhere to all of the terms and conditions of this letter if you decide to run it back with me and we do it in person.
Because I think Billy has a lot of claims about the Bible.
And I hope that our conversation kind of made him think twice about a lot of the claims he's made about the Bible, especially the ones that are patently false and can be verified even with just a quick Google search.
But I think there are still things that Billy has said about the history of Christianity, about biblical languages, that do need to be corrected, not because I have some sort of vendetta against Billy, but because I want people to know what is true.
And as someone who has studied this stuff formally and does, you know, read Hebrew and Greek, and I want people to actually know what the reality of what these things concerning the historical reliability and the truthfulness and the verisimilitude of the Bible actually are.
Wes, let me ask you.
I'm on your channel right now, and I'm just kind of wondering who else you react to, right?
Who else would be somebody where you would say, is like a Billy Carson dad, you know, shares certain stories that, you know, has caught some traction?
Who else would you say?
Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question.
I'm actually scheduled to do an online event with a guy named Aaron Abke, who is a growing individual within.
I think Aaron has more kind of – his repertoire is a little bit more than Billy's.
But my friend Stephen Boyce, who has a PhD and is brilliant on church history and I think his PhD researcher is actually on Gnostic Gospels.
Him and I are going to do an interaction with Aaron and another individual as well.
But I mean, off the top of my head, no one necessarily comes to mind, but there are, I mean, the internet is kind of a wild, wild west with this stuff and just claims that are made.
I mean, I think it's emblematic in this conversation.
We live in this world, but we live in a world where social media has kind of designed it where we're so used to claims being thrown out, but claims are not actual evidence.
And so you can make a claim where you say something, and because it's in 140 characters, and we're so used to that, we think that that's actually rationale, but that's not rationale.
That's an assertion.
An assertion is kind of like the roof of the building.
You don't start building the building by the roof.
That's the last thing to go on top.
The foundation, the walls, everything internal, that's the rationale and the evidence.
And then you put the assertion on top.
But we live in this world where everybody's throwing out assertions and we've actually forgotten how to articulate what evidence and reasons and rationale actually are.
So that's what we see online.
A question about, like, you know, I remember back in the days when a friend of mine who we went to high school with, I go to the army, I come out.
This is a guy that was a PCP guy, troublemaker.
All of a sudden, he's no longer cursing.
He's not drinking.
He's not going to the clubs.
I said, what's going on with you?
And him and I both had a 1.8 GP in high school.
Both of us were troubled teenagers.
We were just, you couldn't, we had a hard time.
And I went to the military.
He went a different route.
And he says, Pat, I found Jesus.
I said, you found who?
He says, I found Jesus.
I said, there's no way you found Jesus.
He said, I found Jesus.
I'm laughing at him.
Thinking like, what do you mean you found Jesus?
He said, well, what are you doing next Friday?
I says, I'm at the club.
What are you doing next?
You want to go to the club?
Let's go.
He said, no, I want to take you a different club.
What's that?
Church of the Pasnaz of Pasadena, California.
I'm like, oh, give me a break, dude.
I'm not in.
I'm busy.
And he keeps trying.
Finally, I go on a Friday night and it's a Bible study with five of us from six to two o'clock in the morning, Friday night.
And we start kind of going through this process.
And the teacher was a guy that knew a lot about philosophy.
So he can go philosophy.
You know, he can talk maybe on the philosophy side on the business side, and he can talk on the spiritual side.
So different religions, denominations, what questions you got?
What are you struggling?
What are you battling with?
And it was very interesting to see, you got the FAQs that you go through, typical objections that have come up about, you know, if God is real, you know, how can he have something like this happen?
How can so many innocent, you know, the most innocent objections, like in every business jury, innocent objections that comes up.
And then eventually it gets deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper.
And only somebody that went to school and maybe has studied this like a, you know, for many, many years then realizes, okay, now you're asking some real heavy questions that we got to sit there and process with.
How many people you think of somebody that went to school and got their, you know, degree from certain universities that we have in America could have sat down with Billy and not exposed, but revealed the number of leaks in his arguments.
How many people would be able to do something like that?
Somebody that studied theology?
Oh, I think quite a few.
And what's that number like?
it in the tens of thousands oh was it things that was not level of depth that anybody could have overcame that's 100 okay yeah Yeah, yeah.
I don't think the accusations that Billy was making, they're not unusual in the sense of, and I'm not really sure where Billy got a lot of the arguments that he actually articulates from.
Because like I said, Wikipedia articles could debunk him.
Like you look on, he uses something like the Gospel of the Holy 12 for his evidence.
Well, the Gospel of the Holy 12 on the Wikipedia article will tell you this is a 20th century forgery.
Like we don't have any evidence.
Before the 20th century, it was designed by a group that was trying to prove that Jesus was a vegetarian.
But it's not a historical document.
And so if we're going off of something like the Gospel of the Holy 12 or the Gospel of Barnabas, which is the one he uses for the denial of the 19th century, let's start with the first one, Rob, if you want to go through this.
So the Gospel of the Holy 12.
Yeah.
So there you go.
So the Gospel of the Holy 12, first serialized in the Lindsay and Lincolnshire Star newspaper between July 30th, 1898 and March 10th, 1901, presents vegetarian versions of traditional teachings and events described in the canonical New Testament.
So this isn't something that has historical provenance.
So it's not something that has kind of a paper trail going back into the ancient world.
There are ancient apocryphal documents that you could capitalize on, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Peter, but this is not one of them.
So to choose this as your document to prove something, I'm just not entirely sure why you would go about that particular route.
Or the other one is the Gospel of Barnabas, which is the one that Billy brought up with me, which is a clear middle-aged forgery.
It's not, and that's not a contested fact.
It paraphrases Dante's Inferno.
It has glaring historical inaccuracies.
It has geographical mistakes.
It says that Jesus is the Messiah, but he's not the Christ, indicating that the author had no idea what those two words meant and that they were the same words in different languages.
So did you actually, did you yourself, do you actually try to go when you hear him say these things, let me see where he got these things from?
Is that where you go?
Are you going and saying, I don't know how he came up to the conclusion of this.
Is it this book?
Is it this fiction book?
Did you go that route yourself?
Or how do you try to break down his arguments?
Yeah, I think it's a both and situation.
I think Billy's unusual in that he has brought forward arguments that I've never seen before.
So usually you get kind of the typical arguments that are repeated and sometimes it's repeated ad nauseum.
Accusations of the Council of Nicaea in 325 inventing the books of the Bible as the canon of scripture.
That's the sort of Da Vinci code-esque argument.
And you can trace where the paper trail of that goes to, because you can see that Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code got it from a previous book called Holy Blood and Holy Grail.
And Holy Blood and Holy Grail appears to have got it from Voltaire, who used a document called the Sinaticon Vetis.
So, there's actual like links to where, okay, this is a false statement, but where's the false statement coming from?
And you can see the dawson connect them with something like using the Gospel of the Holy 12 or the accusation that Billy uses for the Sinai Bible, Codex Sinaticus, denying the crucifixion.
I think I can come up with a theory as to how he developed that, which is based on a misunderstanding of a textual variant at the end of the Gospel of Mark that is in Codex Vaticanus, or sorry, not Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus.
But to then repeat this constantly and say that the crucifixion isn't in the Codex Sinaticus entirely, I'm not sure why he would go about that or where kind of the reasoning came from.
As far as I can tell, a lot of these are original to Billy and they sound sensationalistic.
And a lot of people don't have the repertoire or the background to know what something like Codex Sinaticus is.
And so when he's throwing that out to you, or he's throwing that out to Andrew Schultz, or he's throwing that out to Joe Rogan, it's not in your categories of information that you just kind of have off the top of your head.
So you just kind of take it at face value, right?
But if you take a seminary Greek class, it wouldn't be unusual to even open up Codex Sinaiticus because it's all digitized.
You can go to codexinaticus.org and see the document and actually practice translating some Greek from Codex Sinaiticus because it is a prominent Greek manuscript.
So it's a combination of a few things where you have certain arguments that are repeated often enough and loud enough online that they kind of people in their minds, it becomes true.
And then you have other arguments that are more novel.
And I find Billy's arguments are more novel than they're not.
He does kind of throw in the, you know, Vatican is behind everything and the Counts of Nicaea and the books of the Bible.
And, you know, Constantine is another one that kind of gets everything gets pegged on Constantine for some reason.
But there are other things like a lot of what he talked about with you that I think are, as far as I can tell, Billy originals.
Billy originals.
I think so.
In as far as I.
I mean, nobody else talked about it.
It's just his own assumption that I think this is what's going on.
Or the way that they're formulated.
So I think like Muslims have capitalized on the Gospel of Barnabas because the Gospel of Barnabas appears to actually have been influenced by Islam in the Middle Ages and uses some sort of typical later Islamic arguments from the Middle Ages and does deny the crucifixion.
So it has been capitalized on that way.
But the way that it's been used by someone like Billy, I think at minimum, it's novel because I haven't seen it in the same way that Billy has articulated it.
And did you, you know, how sometimes you see someone and they, like, in football, this guy was an assistant coach under this coach.
Anyway, I don't know if you're a sports guy.
This guy was an assistant coach under the other coach.
So he's come through these two lineage.
And that guy's a run offense.
This guy's a defense.
So I kind of know what his schemes are going to be when he's going to be playing against me because that's who taught him, right?
Okay, I'm playing against these two coaches.
So when you're prepping forward, you're watching tape.
This is kind of how you do it.
Were you able to find out who was his teacher that gave him this?
Were you able to figure that part out when you were speaking with him?
No, not necessarily.
Okay.
Got it.
Yeah, I wonder because, you know, when you and I were talking offline, a part of my, when I interviewed him and we had him on a podcast at one time, and I asked him the question about what happened to you as a youth?
You know, what happened?
Did you have a bad experience for you to kind of get to this point?
Did somebody disappoint you?
Did somebody hurt you?
Does something happen here where you automatically became super skeptical about all the stuff that's going on?
Because what causes someone to get here?
Is it just success, money?
Is it just eyeballs?
Is it just accolades and recognition?
Or is it, I'm going to get even to a person like this?
That's what I was wondering.
I want to know what he made the claims and he said, well, he said, Jesus is an alien.
Right.
How was that for you when you heard that?
I mean, that's a non-falsifiable claim.
You can't prove or disprove that Jesus was an alien.
I can prove a lot of things I think about the historical Jesus, but claims about aliens are claims that have no falsification.
So they're kind of perfect for conspiratorial arguments because they have no ability to be debunked or to be proven or disproven.
So we, I mean, in terms of what do I think of that, I mean, I don't know.
Jesus wasn't an alien.
So I mean, I, of what we know about what Jesus was.
And I think this gets to the heart of the issue in terms of, I can't speak to trying to get into Billy's head or psychologizing why he does something.
But at the end of the day, I am two things, right?
I am an aspiring biblical scholar and historian, and I am a Christian.
And so I'm very concerned with a good history and articulating and using proper methodologies to derive good history.
And I believe that Jesus was who he actually claimed to be, that when he predicted his own death and resurrection and then pulled it off, that people who rise from the dead have more credibility and authority than people who don't rise from the dead.
And so I think that should be taken seriously.
And I think the claims that Billy articulates, they lead people astray to doubt that in a way that I don't think is credible philosophically or historically and are easily debunked.
And so my first priority is: okay, I want people when I make a video, any video, you know, a response video or, you know, when I'm talking about manuscripts on my Instagram page or whatever it is, different levels of kind of nerdy on that scale.
It's because I want people to, A, get interested in doing good history and how that's actually performed.
And B, I want to show them that the truth claims of Christianity are actually not just defensible, but are backed up by evidence in what we can look at in the timeframe of history.
Wes, let me ask you, you know, again, some of this stuff is conviction, faith.
Some of it is thousands of hours of studying, writing papers and research and all this stuff.
How many total hours would you say you've put in this, in learning this?
I mean, I don't know the hours, years.
I mean, there's a whole thousand hours thing, right?
That if you devote 10,000 hours, yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, at minimum, I've definitely done that in terms of my original motivation.
And I work for an organization called Apologetics Canada, which is a national not-for-profit organization in Canada.
And our goal is that we want to pursue and communicate a biblically sound and intellectually robust and a culturally engaged faith.
We want to come alongside Christians and help them know what it is they believe and why they should believe it.
And so alongside that, I put in the time, not just because I'm interested in becoming an expert, not because I want to kind of gain some sort of credibility intellectually, although I do want to, you know, derive a level of expertise where I can speak knowledgeably on the topic, but ultimately because I think these topics are important and I think that they have ramifications that go beyond simply historical inferences,
that Jesus is no less than a historical character, but he's also so much more than a historical character.
And so my motivation and my interest is ultimately because I think that these things are true and I adhere to a scripture, a set of scriptures that calls me to love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength.
And part of that is loving God with my mind.
And so I'm going to try to do, to the best of my ability, dive into that in order to be able to communicate what I believe is ultimately the truthfulness of the Christian worldview.
While you're going through your faith, did you ever hit a wall?
And if you did, what was the topic you hit a wall?
Because you know how you study Billy Graham when Billy before went on his crusade, he went and met with, I think it's Henrietta Mears, if I'm not mistaken.
I don't know if you know the story or not.
No, I don't.
Yeah, he goes, Rob, can you type in Henrietta Mears, M-E-A-R-S, and Billy Graham?
I think I'm getting the name right.
Woman's history of Henrietta Mears.
Can you zoom in a little bit for me to read on zoom in?
Okay, let's meet the woman who inspired Billy Graham, Bill Bright and more.
I'm a motivational whisperer.
Allow me to introduce Henri Miru who blessed countless people, young and old, who crossed their path.
And she was the most intentional, spiritual, perpetual disciple that I've ever read about.
She was also never met a stranger, never judged her students, even when they misbehave.
She loved on them just as Jesus would do.
I learned about her thanks to a friend.
This is the book that was her story, Dream Big.
What's the quote at the top, Rob?
Rob, top of the book.
She is certainly one of the greatest Christians I have ever known.
Billy Graham.
Meet the woman who shaped the lives of some of the most influential Christians of our lifetime.
Go a little lower, Rob.
Henrietta was born in 1890 to 1963.
You cannot fathom all she did in her lifetime.
I'm part of She had Last Bridge.
You'll get a first-hand glimpse as you read this book.
Go a little lower.
First of Generation of the Christian.
So there's a story about her.
I read this 20 years ago, a while back, where he hit a wall, where it's kind of like you're questioning certain things.
You know, what about this?
I hit a wall with my faith at one point.
And I was, you know, going through it.
And there was multiple people that played a very important role for me.
And there's different levels of wall.
The first one was when I'm living in Iran, I'm getting kicked out of Bible study in this Assyrian church that my dad used to take me on Sundays.
And I'm like, you want to tell me about there's a Jesus and a God?
Look at all the bombs that we got from Iraq.
You want me to believe this?
No.
And then the pastor eventually has a conversation with my parents and they kick me out.
And then later on, you're going through the next one and the next one.
I'm like, ah, you know, the Bible, it's a lot of, this was written at a time that you have to find a way to control the populace.
And people's level of naivete was so, they were so naive that it was easier to control people back then.
Most people were not educated.
Most people don't know how to read.
So they wanted to kind of, you know, believe in something that made their lives easier.
Somebody else is doing the thinking for me.
I'm going to be protected.
But for you, did you ever have a moment where you hit a wall where you had to go to somebody to help you with your faith?
Oh, definitely.
I mean, there have been lots of people who have been mentors in my life.
Not necessarily mentors.
What I'm looking at is like you, a breaking point for you.
You know, like this is tough for Billy Carson, but this could also be good for Billy Carson.
I actually think Billy Carsons are net positive for the world.
And let me explain why.
Because I think eventually they're going to run into somebody like you who is gentle.
You were very respectful.
You were not condescending.
You didn't use that opportunity to embarrass him.
You didn't use that opportunity to undermine him.
And I think you showed grace versus nowadays, there's a lot of people that are debating that want to make the other person look like they're dumb.
You didn't do that.
I think that's a great example.
That shows, wow, you can win an argument.
And, you know, I looked at your YouTube channel, what it did after your podcast with Mark when it was released.
22,000 subs, 20,000.
You got 100,000 subs within the next week after that podcast was released.
And now you're at 252,000 subs and you went on the biggest podcast on the world.
And this is not even close to what's about to happen to you today.
I mean, the number one podcast that beat Joe Rogan's podcast became number one because Joe Rogan told the world to go watch your podcast.
So do you understand like Joe beat himself because Joe told everybody else to go?
What was his podcast?
Teller to teleport telepathy tapes?
Yeah.
Telepathy.
Telepathy tapes.
So Joe Rogan says, guys, I just watch his podcast.
Everyone goes watch the podcast.
It's beating Joe Rogan.
Oh my God, Joe Rogan's losing to this podcast.
No, he's not.
He promoted that podcast, right?
But, you know, these moments of a fighter, George Foreman loses, steps away for three years, comes back stronger.
Michael Jordan takes a hit, comes back.
Billy Graham had to step away, breaking point, comes back, baptizes 210 million people.
Then he's on Johnny Carson, baptizing other people, Woody Allen, all these other things that's happening.
What were some of those moments for you, for someone that's putting thousands of hours of studying this topic?
Yeah, yeah.
I think that's a good way of putting it.
I mean, so when I was young, just before my 11th birthday, I was diagnosed with, or my 12th birthday, I was 11, just before my 12th birthday, I was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition that left me paralyzed from the waist down.
So it was, it's called acute transverse myelitis.
And what basically happened was that my, I had the flu and my body's immune system, instead of attacking the flu, attacked the nerves ending, nerve endings at the base of my spinal cord, the myelin sheath, causing inflammation and cutting off the communication between my brain and my legs.
And so that was a condition which the prognosis was that I was almost certainly most likely going to be paralyzed for the rest of my life.
And I experienced what I believe is a supernatural healing in that one month from the day, January 8th, when I woke up and I couldn't feel my legs, I woke up on February 8th, woke up, got out of bed, walked over to my wheelchair and sat down.
And that it was the doctors who first used the word miracle because they couldn't explain ultimately the factors that were going on in terms of there being no evidence of the swelling on the base of my spinal cord and also the fact that there was just no muscle atrophy in those 90 days.
And so that marked a powerful supernatural experience in my life in that something happened that was non-explainable, unexplainable from a natural, materialistic sense of kind of looking at the world.
And so although that marked that powerful supernatural experience, later in my teen years, I still really, and maybe this is what you're referring to in terms of hitting a wall, is I was really wrestling with other questions in that, okay, something happened when I was a kid.
I'm not sure really how to get around that.
But I have these intellectual questions, questions about whether what I believe or what I've been taught to believe is actually true.
And so that started a period of time.
That's exactly where I'm going.
This is great.
Yeah, yeah, where I investigated.
And, you know, I lived in a home where we had the Quran on the shelf.
And so I pulled it off and I read it at that point in time.
Now, I've read it multiple times since then, but the first time reading it through and thinking, okay, could this actually answer the ultimate?
How was you the first time you read it?
I was 16.
And at that time, how many times had you read the Bible?
Oh, at that point, I probably read the Bible about two or three times.
Okay.
So I read the Quran, cover to cover.
I've read it multiple times since, but I also read the Bhagavad Gita.
I think it was at the time it was a shorter version.
It wasn't the entire Bhagavad Gita.
And I read the Book of Mormon and digging into some of these pieces of worldview literature to try to figure out, okay, I know what my parents raised me to believe, but is believing it because they raised me to it the best reason to believe it?
It's not a bad reason.
I don't think it is.
But is it the best reason?
And so exploring some of these questions as much as I could at that age in looking at these sources, going online, trying to interact with people who held these worldview perspectives.
And that was really the process that I think God used that set the foundation for what I do now in terms of actually wrestling with, because I think there are good objections to the Christian worldview.
I don't think they're true, but that doesn't mean that there aren't good ones.
And so I think we have a duty if we are pursuing the truth.
And ultimately, I think that Jesus is the truth with a capital T, that we have a duty to pursue what is true, even above, say, in allegiance to Jesus.
Now, I don't think that that is in competition to each other because I think that Jesus is the truth, but we should ultimately be asking the question, what if this could be false?
And looking at the objections from the other side and saying, well, are there any actual reasonable objections that invalidate what I believe to the point that I need to rethink this?
When this happened at 11 years old to 12 years old, January 8th to February 8th, when you got up and walked up to your wheelchair, were you still an old soul prior to that?
Were you always a pretty old soul, you know, like a 10-year-old, 11-year-old walking around like you're 25, 30 years old?
Were you that person?
Oh, I don't think so.
I was a bit of a slacker.
Okay, so you were a bit of a slacker.
But were you still interested?
Were you personally reading?
Were you personally curious in the Bible?
And were your parents like, you got to read every morning, you got to wake up, reading the Bible, you got to start off with prayer, end the days with prayer every day, read this book.
Was it something in the family tradition that you're reading no matter what, every day?
No, not necessarily.
Not regimental like that.
Like it wasn't.
Meaning at 12 years old, had you already finished the Bible once?
I think, yeah, most likely.
Most people have not finished it first.
Yeah, I mean, we would read every evening.
We would read the Bible together as a family.
We would pray for the people in our church.
So there were kind of those disciplines that were put in place, but I don't think that they were like militaristic in the sense that I had to read my devotions.
My parents were checking up on me on how much I was actually getting through or anything like that.
I think that it was much more of an organic kind of just attitude.
These three siblings of yours, have they all read the Bible pre-12 years old?
I don't know.
Was it something where you guys collectively would sit down?
Was it a family tradition Bible?
So that was a— Yeah, yeah.
We would do evening devotions kind of thing.
So after 12, after that event that happened to you, were you a different person afterwards and people could tell?
Was there a certain level of urgency where you felt like you owe it to God that I'm going to commit my life to you?
Was there that kind of a moment for you?
In some ways, but maybe not in overt ways in other areas.
I was very invested in athletics as a kid because of that, because I felt like I had experienced something where God had given me this exposure to understanding what it was like to take advantage of walking in and out of a room.
You have something in your Twitter profile that says something athlete, right?
Athlete wannabe?
Athlete wannabe.
I was really involved in track and field as a kid.
And then I ended up competing all throughout high school and went to university and competed varsity, track and field.
And I felt very passionately that that was, and probably to what you're saying, there being a conviction, like this is something that I need to take seriously because A, it gives me a structure for my life, but also I needed to constantly be reminded that I had been in a situation where this was just a complete impossibility.
Okay, so let me get into maybe some of the issues here with you.
Since you read the Quran, you said two or three times at this point, right?
And you read the book of Mormon, and we'll get to that because I'm curious to know where you're going to go with that.
The Quran.
After you read the book the first time, what was your impression?
Did you say, oh, wow, complete different understanding than what I thought was going to be in a book of Quran?
This is actually a great book.
I actually enjoyed this.
I actually learned this.
What was your impression at the end?
I mean, have you ever read the Quran?
I've never read the book.
Okay, so the Quran is interesting in that when you come to it, especially if you're a Christian and you're expecting things to be chronological.
And when you open up a Bible, Genesis.
It's structured.
Right.
Genesis says in the beginning, and that's in the beginning.
And by the time you get to the end, Revelation is the end, right?
The Quran is structured differently in that the biggest chapters are at the beginning and the smallest chapters are at the end.
So there's 114 surahs or chapters in the Quran.
And the way that it's been put together and structured is very, very different than something like the Bible, in that it's not in a narrative theme or a chronological theme, but it's on the basis of the chapters.
And there are various reasons for that in terms of the overall way that the Quran eventually got codified.
Because during Muhammad's lifetime, the Quran was oral.
And actually, there was a hesitancy after Muhammad died in 632, I believe it was.
Muhammad dies.
I could be wrong on that date.
I'm just going off the top of my head.
Muhammad dies.
And actually, the Muslims who are following him have a hesitancy to write it down because Muhammad never told them to write it down.
But there's this process that eventually gets put into place because Muhammad's successors in the caliphs realize that people have memorized the Quran differently.
And so there's what does that mean?
Memorize the Quran differently?
Yeah.
So you had these individuals who were following Muhammad around and they were memorizing everything he was saying.
And so part of this process is that people were remembering things slightly differently.
And I believe it was when, so Abu Bakr, who I think is the second rightly guided caliph in the succession after Muhammad, he's the person who starts the process of kind of bringing together all of these recitations of the Quran.
And then that's finalized under a later caliph by the name of Uthman.
And Uthman, I think when they come to Abu Bakr, the statement literally that they say is, save us before we differ like the Christians and the Jews before us.
And that they saw that there were some things that the Christians and the Jews were disagreeing on between their written texts, and they didn't want that to happen with the Quran.
And so there's a period of time under Uthman where it's called the Uthmanic Revision, where he gathers all of these documents together, all of these different recitations, and he codifies it into one document and he destroys all of the differing ones.
So in that sense, you do have a standardized version, but it's what's in terms of like the history of how texts are produced and disseminated.
It's what's called a controlled transmission.
And it's essentially a government oversight of it, right?
So the great thing about having only one version is that you don't have any disagreements.
But if you only have one version, you have to trust that the guy who compiled that one version got it right.
And there were actually companions of Muhammad within the oral or within the traditional sources of Islamic literature called the Hadith that talk about the fact that there were particular individuals who were very close to Muhammad during his lifetime who did not want to give their Quran.
kind of versions to Uthman because they knew that theirs was going to differ with Uthman's and he would probably destroy it.
And so you have these.
These are not, I mean, controversial in the sense that these are part of the traditional Islamic sources in the Hadith.
But I think within the history of how the Quran gets put together, you see something very different than what you see in the Bible.
And so when you're reading it, especially if what I did, you know, open up the front and then read all the way through, there are parts of the Quran that are confusing because they don't necessarily follow what would be considered a like overly rational order in terms of the flow of the text.
So I open it up, I read it.
Some things sound familiar in some ways and that it's talking about Moses and Noah and even, you know, Jesus, Mary are in there.
But there are components of it that just, they're so far from what the biblical narrative is that it just seems off.
And I think there's a very often in a sense that it's not chronological, you know, chronological.
Chronological, it's not an is that what you mean that's off or well, the stories are very different a lot of the time.
So what I think we can derive from the historical record is basically that if you take the traditional Islamic narrative, Muhammad was illiterate.
So he's not said to have been a learned individual.
And so he is, if we take the traditional narrative once again, he's a caravanner in seventh century Arabia.
And so he is going around Arabia in the Arabian Peninsula.
You know, he's going up into countries like what are today modern day Jordan.
What is this, Rob?
Is this Chad GBT you pulled up?
No, this was just Google.
Oh, okay.
Got it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So if we go by that traditional narrative, he's a caravanner.
He's going around.
He's being exposed to Christians and Jews because they're all over the place and in Syria and in Jordan and in Iraq.
Like these were Christian countries a lot of the time.
And he's hearing these stories about who the Christians and the Jews believe are their prophets and individuals within that are part of the religion.
But he's not able to discern between the difference between an actual historical source like, say, the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and say, apocryphal Christian tales that are floating around the Arabian Peninsula.
And so because there is this inability to actually discern between those sources, some of those things get incorporated into the Quran.
So, and we can trace this.
A friend of mine, Andy Bannister, did his PhD dissertation, and then he published a book on this.
It's called the Oral Formulaic Construction of the Quran, where we can actually tie certain stories in the Quran to apocryphal sources that were floating around in the subsequent centuries after Jesus.
So there's a document called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, not to be confused with the Gospel of Thomas, which is very different.
But the Arab Infancy Gospel of Thomas has a story where Jesus, the childhood Jesus, is making clay birds beside a riverbank.
And the Jewish officials get mad at him because he's doing this on the Sabbath.
He's breaking the Sabbath.
They go off to get his parents to get him into trouble.
And Jesus breathes on the birds.
They turn into real birds and they fly away.
So this is an apocryphal story.
It comes centuries after the actual historical Jesus.
It has no historical ties to the historical Jesus, but it's a popular story that's being incorporated into this infancy narrative.
In the Quran.
So the Quran adopts it.
So we can trace it to the infancy gospel of Thomas and then the later Arab infancy gospel of Thomas.
The Quran borrows it and incorporates it, but we know that it's not an actual historical story of Jesus.
So when I say that there were stories that, like, they're familiar— So what's your point with that?
What's your point with that?
That there are stories that are familiar and that you're seeing the name Jesus.
You're seeing the name John the Baptist.
You're seeing the name Mary.
But when you're reading these stories about them in the Quran, they're not stories that they're not echoing biblical stories as much as they're talking about these characters in very different ways.
That if you don't know about, say, you know, where these sources are coming from, if you're not looking into the infancy narratives, then you're like, well, what is this?
Like, this is confusing.
Is this more information?
Is this right information?
And so now later in life, in my formal education, digging into some of those things and figuring out, okay, well, here's how we trace those sources.
Here's the paper trail.
Here's how we can connect those dots between where potentially the author of the Quran was actually getting them from.
That's when I did a lot of that legwork.
But originally, I was reading the Quran and I just, I found it unusual, but I also found it it did not accurately reflect things that I was looking for to answer the ultimate questions, questions of like meaning and purpose and morality.
While you're going through it the first, second, or third time, are you sitting down with a Muslim scholar to debate and ask questions?
Have you gone through that yourself?
And if you did, what did you learn?
Did you see contradictions?
Did you see, okay, I understand this part.
Yeah, I would routinely meet with Muslims, especially in like my university years.
There were times where every Ramadan, my Muslim friends were reading the Quran.
And so I would read the Quran alongside them.
So we would read the entirety of the Quran during the time of Ramadan.
And I would use that as an opportunity both to learn, but also to, I kind of, I wanted to be an example to them.
So when you were talking about my attitude in the way that I approached my conversation with Billy, that's been my attitude all along in that I'm part of an organization that does Christian apologetics.
And apologetics is – That's the organization in Toronto you were talking about.
Yeah.
Yeah, so it's in Canada, Apologetics Canada.
But apologetics is just a word that means to give it a reason or to give a defense.
And it comes from a passage in 1 Peter 3.15, which says, but in your hearts, revere Christ as Lord, always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.
But then it's the last part in that verse that I think is just as important.
Not just be prepared to give an answer, but Peter says, but in your hearts, revere Christ as Lord, always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks for the reason for the hope that you have, but do so with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ will be ashamed of their slander.
And I think when we approach these conversations, whether we're talking to, you know, agnostics, atheists, Mormons, Muslims, for someone like myself who claims to be a Christian, if I'm only giving answers,
but I'm not revering Christ as Lord in my heart, and those answers aren't done so with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, then I'm not actually obeying that command in scripture to give an answer because it needs to be sandwiched in between those two things.
Yeah, I love that.
So, you know, let me go a little bit deeper with this.
So question for you.
Somebody may say, okay, so the Quran, you know, and the illiterate prophet Muhammad, right?
And, you know, inconsistencies in the book that was written, not like the Bible where you're kind of going through it and it's a Old Testament, New Testament.
I kind of feel like, okay, when I'm going through letters or Matthew, Luke, you know, I'm kind of feeling, you know, he's given his testimony, he's given it.
Maybe there's a little bit of differences, but for the most part, I can see how their point of view while they're walking with Jesus, they see this.
Okay.
Why do you think the religion, you know, 610, 632, common era, Quran is done from 632 to today, why do you think it's become the fastest grown religion in the world?
And now they have, I don't know what the number is, one and a half billion.
Maybe I'm 1.4 billion.
I don't know the exact number, but it's somewhere around there, 1.9 billion.
Why do you think it's grown exponentially that at this point they're saying in the next 30 years, it's going to be the biggest religion in the world?
And some even say we're 30% of House or Senate in America could be run by Muslims.
Why do you think it's grown so big?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I have an exact prognosis.
I mean, Islam is a very different religion than something like Christianity in that it's it has a socio-political component to it that Christianity doesn't, in that it is a political religious system and it was designed that way from its beginning.
In that Muhammad if once again we're assuming that the traditional Islamic sources are correct he was a warlord.
And so if from its inception there's been a different attitude, Jesus was the crucified Messiah.
In that he was.
He said, I've come to not be served but to serve.
And so when we see the beginnings of Christianity, we see an attitude where people are motivated by love your neighbor, you know.
Pray for those who persecute you.
Love those who hate you, you know.
If a Roman soldier asks for your tunic, you give him.
You know, your your undercoat also.
And so there's a different attitude when we look at the substance of something like Christianity, in that Christians were willing to be persecuted and die because they believed that Jesus had already won, that he was sitting at the right hand of the father, and so their battle cries were, pray and pray, evangelize and be willing to lose your life for this message,
whereas with Islam there was much more of a, a system where it was designed, where to subjugate the entire world under Islam.
So you have the Da' Al-Islam, the House Of Islam, and then you have the the rest of the world, and so I think there's a political component to Islam that is very different than Christianity.
I think there's also, especially in the West we're not, we're we're basically uh, being outbred in that traditional, Traditional Muslim homes have more kids.
I mean, there's also the component of having more wives within majority of Muslim countries that's allowed, but having more kids.
And so you have more kids and you have a system that allows for certain things.
And so there's that, that's going to grow faster than a society which is dissuading families from growing, is maybe even demonizing the growth of a household for various reasons, whether that be, you know, political or environmental or otherwise.
And so you just have very different worldview foundations for something like Christianity than you do for something like Christian.
Do you think the world's a better place based on one faith or the other?
Meaning when you're speaking with Muslims, there is a pride for them to, you know, we're going to outgrow you and we're going to be the dominant religion in the world.
And, you know, it's going to be the way we run things, cities, like right now with what's going on with the UK.
You know, I don't know if you're following the challenges that UK is going through, where the most common name given, 30%, I think, I don't know what it was, the most common name given to kids in 2024 was Muhammad.
And this is UK, right?
You're talking about.
Do you think Christians, the goal is to what?
You know, in your mind, is it if the faith that we have today, it's the same it was yesterday, it's the same it's going to be 100 years from now, you know, where some criticism may be like, well, look, the Christianity, the church is beginning smaller.
Some data that we have, if you're avoiding if you want to pull it up, you see this with Pew Research and they'll show it and say, well, here's what's going on.
And, you know, it used to be church attendance used to be higher.
I don't know how many mega churches in America are empty today.
And I've gone to many of them.
And you name them.
I've been to a lot of mega churches in America today, but because you're going places, you're like, I want to see how this guy preaches.
I want to see how that guy preaches.
I want to see what this is like.
You know, like, wait a minute, why is it so empty here?
Why, why do we build a facility that's a $50 million facility, but 80% of the place is empty?
Why did you build this place?
Why do you think on one side, you know, one religion is growing and the other one isn't?
Like, this is the number right here, if you look at it, right?
From 1940, church memberships amongst U.S. adults, 73, 76, 73.
So we're on 70% for about 45 years.
Then it drops.
Still at 70% in 2000.
But in the last 20 years, 70, 64, 61, 57, 55, 50, 47.
And I don't know what that number is today.
Why do you think this is happening?
So I think we do need to be careful with the statistics because we used to live in a culture that was much more culturally Christian than it is today.
And sometimes I look at these numbers and I often wonder: okay, yes, you see this kind of downward trajectory, but I wonder-I mean, in Canada, in not that long ago, only a few decades ago, you had something like the Lord's Day Act, where you were not allowed to have a business open on Sunday because it was the Lord's Day.
And there was just more of a cultural zeitgeist that was not necessarily, I think, Christian in, it was Christian out of convenience, not Christian out of conviction.
And so I think a lot of people used to go to church because maybe they were just following along in the society and that that's just part of what you did.
And the culture shifted, and now the culture is not saying that going to church is necessarily something that you should do or need to do.
And so I'm always curious as to how many of these people who used to, you know, fill out the little tick box and say, I'm a Christian, I go to church on Sunday, how many of them were doing so because it was just par for the course for their culture?
And the culture shifted and they weren't really necessarily convictionally Christian then.
And they were following the stream of the flow of the culture and the stream of the flow shifted.
And so now it's just more culturally accepted to not go to church.
And so I wonder whether the people who are going to church now are actually those that choose to go to church convictionally and are what you would refer to as the actual Christians that feel that conviction that Jesus is their Lord and Savior.
You know what I would say to that?
So in the insurance company I built, we're a high-volume recruiting insurance agency and we grew from 60 agents to 60,000 agents.
And I knew when I went to an office, they used to have 100 agents coming to meetings on Saturdays, okay, or Tuesday nights.
And then I'd come back a year later and they're down to 20.
And I would say, hey, what happened to attendance?
A year ago, you guys had 100.
Splits was fired up.
You're down to 20.
And then I would see the broker running the office.
Let's just say he's a senior pastor.
He would say, well, it's not about quantity.
It's about quality.
We have quality attendees where a year ago, we didn't have quality.
We had quantity.
I'm solving for quantity, quality.
And it was always for me a sign of lack of enthusiasm in the leader, lack of conviction in the leader, lack of aggressiveness and assertiveness to go out there and baptize, bring people in and baptize them later, bring them in and share the story with them, share the testimony of what we've done, how this business works, why it's effective.
And I'll go to church and I'll see a fired up pastor at the top and you notice, boom, you know, wall to wall.
Good for you, right?
But, you know, and I hear what you're saying.
I hear what you're saying because I don't think the same can be said about the Mormon church.
I think Mormonism is growing.
When you look at their data, they're doing.
And by the way, you're not.
I'm not convinced about that.
Well, you can say that, but data when it's shown to me.
Sure.
And let me tell you where I'm going with this.
You're talking to a guy that's a evangelical, non-denominational.
You're a Baptist, right?
And I think it'd be good.
One of our guys asked the question, say, hey, can you tell me the difference between Presbyterian and Orthodox?
And I said, you know, I'm going to ask what I think that's a good thing for you to break down.
I'll go there in a minute, but let's just kind of stay on this topic here.
This is kind of where I'm going to here right now.
Andrew Tate and I are speaking.
And I'm sure you know who Andrew Tate is.
Year and a half ago, he gets out of jail.
I'm there, the first person to interview him.
He had an issue with BBC.
We're sitting there talking.
And he says, when I was in jail, I decided to convert to being a Muslim, religion of Islam.
Okay.
Tell me why.
I don't know if you know his reason or not.
Have you heard his reason?
Yeah, I have.
And he says, you know, when I was there, how many Christian friends of mine and fans wrote me a letter?
None.
Do you know how many Muslims wrote me a letter?
I can't even tell you.
And to me, when I saw that, boom.
Okay.
So while we're talking, I'm writing this thing down and I'm writing why people convert because I'm actually curious.
So this wasn't prepared.
I'm literally, when you're talking, I'm writing this stuff.
I'm telling while we're having a conversation, why do people convert to Christianity or Muslim or Jehovah or Seven Day or Mormonism or Scientology or whatever it may be, right?
And I've been through all of these guys.
I used to go debate Scientologists all the time to know what they're thinking about, right, in LA at their main Scientology Center.
So one is through your example, testimony, the way you live.
Like you showed grace with Billy Carson.
I walked away and I said, my son should watch this guy because men would benefit from having grace, especially when you can be a bully and you show grace.
That's even more honorable.
Right.
When somebody knows how to fight and beat you up and they don't, and they say, look, it's just not a good idea.
Can we not fight?
And walks away.
You know this guy can whoop this guy's tail, but he doesn't.
That's grace.
Good for you, right?
Versus God, let me go beat them up, show him the fact that I know Taekwondo or whatever.
So to me, one is example testimony.
Okay.
Was that set there for Andrew?
I don't know.
Two, the actual content, what's in the book of Quran, what's in the book of, you know, what's in the Bible, what's in the book of Maroney, you know, what's in L. Ron Hubbard's, what's the book called?
Dianetics, right?
I've found, in my experience, less than 10% of the time is the content because most people don't read the Bible.
Most people don't read the whole book.
It's the example, somebody in their lives.
Third one I wrote down is disappointment, heartbreak, hurt.
Hey, you hurt me.
You weren't there.
You're a Christian.
And because of that, for the rest of my life, I'm going to be against you.
Maybe Billy Carson.
I don't know.
I'm not trying to psychoanalyze.
I'm just kind of watching maybe for myself, for yourself, for everybody.
You had a great example.
You know, your family, your background, you're coming from a place, organized structure.
A lot of people don't have that.
They're coming from a different background.
And the next one I wrote down is they were there for you.
Hey, you have nobody for Thanksgiving?
Come over.
Yeah.
Hey, what are you doing this Sunday?
You got to know, hey, come spend some time with it.
We'll go to Bible.
We'll go to church together.
Come with me to go to Mecca.
Come with me to go to this.
Come with me to go with that, right?
So for somebody like Andrew Tate today, whose brother's still a Christian, by the way, Tristan is, and he's been going through, Andrew's been going through some challenging times right now because he announced he wants to run for prime minister of UK and all this other stuff.
And, you know, he's saying, if you're not for the British way, get out.
If you're not for this, and indirectly is calling out many of the things that's going on with the Muslims in the UK, the criticism isn't towards Christians or Jews or Scientologists or Catholics.
That's a lot of criticism towards Muslims that they're getting.
Going back to it, okay?
Why isn't the church, the Christian church, the non-denominational church, even some of the other sects you put in it, why isn't it growing at the pace that Islam is?
Yeah, I mean, I think what we see globally is that we're seeing a shift in the demographics in that for a long time, the Western world was Christianized.
Maybe it wasn't necessarily Christian, but it was Christianized.
And I actually think we're seeing a shift statistically in that's moving to the global south.
That if you look at the continents of Africa and Asia, that the church is growing at a rapid rate in those countries.
And I think there are various reasons for that.
But I think we are genuinely seeing that.
Can I give a rebuttal to that?
Sure.
Okay.
So, again, I'm going to take you back to my example of running an insurance company.
Somebody could say, well, look, you know, yes, we're not growing in California, but I can tell you, we're growing in Florida and we're growing in Texas and we're growing in Tennessee.
That's because we were never in Texas, Florida, and Tennessee.
We just moved into that market, right?
Sure.
Somebody may say, well, that's because we're just breaking into that market in Asia or in, you know, South America, whatever, you know, Africa or some of these places or even the Middle East.
By the way, Christianity is grown in Iran in ways that most people don't know.
The percentage is exponential in Iran that's grown.
The stories I get in the testimonies, it's unbelievable when I see some of this data that comes back.
And I'm glad you're saying that because my main focus is really the West.
Yeah.
Because West is the one that's got a black eye.
UK is West.
Us, you know, West.
Sure.
You know, Canada, West.
Yeah.
Why do you think the West has taken a hit when it comes on to attendance, the church?
Why do you think?
Yeah, I'm going to back up.
I'm going to answer that question, but I'm going to back up and say that to the kind of rebuttal of, well, we're introducing Christianity into those places.
I would actually say that Christianity was there long before it was ever in the West.
In that North Africa was where a lot of the major church historians come from.
Apart from the Apostle Paul, you have individuals like Athanasius of Alexandria.
You know, these are people who are Augustine.
Saint Augustine was a North African.
Like some of the most prominent individuals within early church history were from the Middle East, were from Africa.
And Christianity was in Asia and Africa long before it was anywhere remotely close to places like North America.
And so I think what we're seeing actually is not an introduction, but the revival of a lot of those countries.
I think that's a fair.
And I think it could be both, right?
Because some places it is a revival.
Hey, let's revive, right?
Let's get the attendance going again.
Let's get excitement there again.
But some of it is also because it was a smaller percentage of it there.
Sure.
In Iran, if you look at what percentage is Muslim, you will see a 98% number all over the place, right?
If you go in Asia, you will see some high numbers as well.
So I can see that part.
Like if you're going to go into Indonesia, I think Indonesia is 99%, if I'm not mistaken.
It's some big number.
Yeah.
We're the biggest Muslim country in the world.
Right, exactly.
That's what I'm saying.
So biggest Muslim country in the world.
But the West.
Yes.
The West.
You have no idea how excited I get when I see people like you.
I can't tell you how much it excites me when I see guys like you.
When I saw that, I'm like, you know what?
I think you were good for Billy because Billy can't hate you, walk away from you.
Billy has to walk away and like you.
We need that.
We need those.
I have a theory.
I'm trying to see from you that this is your world.
What theories do you have?
Because you're doing your part.
It's not like you're not doing it.
This isn't criticism towards you.
You understand what I'm saying?
You're doing your part.
You're going out there.
You're sharing your testimony.
You're doing it in a graceful way.
You're setting the right example.
You're growing your family.
You have three kids.
You're trying to, you know, set the example.
But I'm again, responsibility of everybody else.
One side, 1.9 billion, growing faster than us.
The other side, flatline with churches declining.
Yeah.
I think there have been a number of things that have happened in the West.
In the last few decades, I think we want to hold on to the fruit of our Judeo-Christian values, but we want to ignore the roots that actually grew that fruit.
And so I think you can look at individuals like there's a historian named Tom Holland.
He's not the Spider-Man actor.
That guy is also named Tom Holland.
Not this Tom Holland.
He wrote a book called Dominion.
He's out in the UK.
Now he's an agnostic, but he this giant like brick of a book, Dominion, and talks about the fact that a lot of the things that we assume within our society that we consider good, even things like just the idea that humans have intrinsic worth by nature of being human, that that is fundamentally a Christian value because it comes from the biblical testimony of humans being created in the image of God.
Now, a friend of mine, Glenn Scrivener out in the UK, he runs an organization called Speak Life, wrote an excellent book that you, Patrick, need to make sure that you get your hands on called The Air We Breathe.
And in the air we breathe, he takes a lot of this stuff that Tom Holland kind of encapsulates and he synthesizes it into a more bite-sized kind of portion.
And in the air we breathe, he goes through these qualities that we look at in the West in particular.
Things like if you, yeah, so the subheading is how we all came to believe in freedom, kindness, progress, and equality.
And that he traces those roots directly back to Christianity.
And I think one thing that's happened in the West in particular is we want to hold on to these values that are inherent to building the West that are fundamentally Christian values, but we want to then also strip God from them.
And what we're seeing, I think, in a lot of the Confusion in the West is that that doesn't work in that the ability to stripping the actual foundations of where those things came from.
So you can say, okay, humans have value and we should take care of people who are weaker than.
Sure.
But where does that come from?
Because if all you are is matter in motion, if you're just the product of time plus matter plus chance, then survival of the fittest actually should mandate that, no, not all people have intrinsic value.
In fact, some people have extrinsic value in that what they can contribute to society is actually how we should ascribe their worth.
And so say if they're, and we're seeing this in Canada with maid medical assistance and dying, if they're elderly and they can no longer contribute, if they're sick, then the best option for them is actually to be eliminated.
Because although we're going to dress this up in language like care and dignity, ultimately what it's saying is that this person no longer has enough to contribute to society.
So we should remove them from society.
And so I think our world wants to hold two things at the exact same time, which are fundamentally contradictory, in that it wants to say values, freedom, you know, unity, purpose, kindness, progress, equality.
These are things that built the West.
But we also want to say, well, no, all that God stuff.
We want to get rid of that.
And once you start to do that, you run into issues with foundation.
Where are you getting your actual reasoning to say?
So Glenn Scrivener, my friend who I mentioned, who wrote the book, The Air We Breathe, he always.
Great.
I'll make sure I let him know.
You got him a sale.
He did.
I might even get him to sign up for you.
One of the things he says is, you know, when people say that morality, like where you get your morality from, and I've done this with, you know, atheists who want to ascribe, say that rape is wrong.
Now, rape is wrong.
Rape is objectively wrong.
And I say, okay, why is rape wrong?
Where do you get the objective morality to say that something like rape is wrong?
And they say, how dare you say I don't have any morality?
I'm saying, no, no, no.
I'm not saying you don't have morality.
I'm saying where do you get that from?
And Glenn has this analogy where he says, it's like saying, where did you get your pants from?
Where did you buy them?
And you're saying, how dare you say I don't have any pants on?
Like, no, no, no, I'm not saying you don't have any pants.
Where's the source that your pants came from, Patrick?
Where did you purchase them from?
And so I think when we look at something like equality or morality or freedom, and we say, okay, where is the standard by which we can actually ground these things in order to use them as the objective goods that they are for our society?
Where's that coming from?
Now, I can ground that as a Christian in the objectivity of scripture and in a God who does not change.
And that's, you know, where a lot of the founders of Western civilization got it from.
Even if they weren't necessarily sold on Christianity wholesale, they're borrowing that from Christianity.
It's the infrastructure that builds these things.
And so I think we – I get that.
And okay, so I understand where, you know, there's a book out there called How to Start a Country.
Okay.
And we'll play a game.
And I'll say, okay, if you start a country, what religion is going to attract the types of people you want where they want to raise their kids there to have the most opportunity to build as big of a business that you choose to have safety, security, what would it be?
And we'll have that debate back and forth.
Well, you know what?
I would want it to be Christian.
Okay, great.
Why is that?
And then you'll kind of go through the values and principles and grace, you know, that we're talking about.
Okay, great.
I understand that.
Meaning, even a Bill Maher says the values and principles, America was founded on a Judeo-Christian.
Oh, stop saying that, Judeo-Christian.
I'm so sick and tired of hearing the fact that it was like, that was not really true.
Thomas Jefferson, when you think about this, that whole debate that takes place.
But the reality of it is, you're right.
Where did those values come from?
So now I'm going to keep going back to it because this is your world.
Yeah.
I agree.
It has been proven that a country based on Christian values can have Muslims living there and feel safe, can have Jews living there feeling safe, can have Scientologists living there, feel safe, and produce a good environment that produces results and allow us to coexist 340 million of us in one place.
Fair.
Why isn't it doing better?
Why isn't it growing?
Yeah, I mean, why has it flatlined?
What has caused that?
I think that should be a conviction to us who are Christians to say, well, maybe we have done a complacent job in our actually communicating to people why they should be, you know, submitting their lives to Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
I think a number of things are going on at the same time.
I think I agree with you 100%.
People need to be convictionally motivated to be examples, right?
I've said in a number of my presentations that there are five gospels.
You know, we've talked about the first four: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
But the fifth is actually the life of the believer.
In that, if you are a Christian, you are claiming your identity in Christ, and that is good news, you and Geleon.
It's the gospel.
And if people are seeing you, they should be encouraged to then go back and read the other four gospels because that's where that source is going to come from.
And so I think that we as Christians need to be doing a better job.
And so many people are.
And I'm actually, I'm optimistic about the church in the West.
I'm optimistic about the churches I see that are doing good things.
Now, that's aside from maybe the mainstream church or like larger denominational churches that are capitulating on certain issues that have been true within historical Christianity.
But at the exact same time, Patrick, I think one of the other factors that needs to be incorporated in this conversation is that a worldview can be true even if all of its adherents are terrible examples of it.
In that, I don't think they should be terrible examples, but if you brought in a cello into this room and told me to play Beethoven and I start squeaking away on it, your conclusion shouldn't be, wow, Beethoven, man, that music is terrible.
I understand what you're saying.
I mean, I understand that analogy.
Yeah.
You know, there's plenty of other examples for me to see it to say, okay, well, that guy can play it.
Yeah.
You know, like I listen to this guy's YouTube channel, Jacob's Piano.
I love the way he plays piano.
Right.
I don't know how many millions of subscribers he's got.
He doesn't know me.
I don't know him, but I love listening to the way he goes to videos and go to most viewed.
And I can tell you, go to popular.
That right there, that first one that's got 141 million views, I've probably don't play it because it will.
I've probably listened to this.
Yeah.
I don't know how many hundreds of hours I've just put it on repeat and he plays.
Right.
And it's just, it's four songs and it's so phenomenal.
So there's examples for me to be able to go to somebody, say, great.
Just like we have it right now, we got plenty of great examples of guys like you.
We got it.
We got plenty of examples.
All I'm sitting there while I'm going through this is which one of these areas is our league?
Right.
Are Muslims beating us in a better example testimony, Christians?
Is that why they got Tate?
And a lot of young people nowadays are converting because of that.
Is it because of our content?
Is it because the structure the Quran is written better than the Bible?
Okay.
Is it because of, you see where I'm going with this?
Is it because of their disappointed, heartbreak, hurt?
We, too many letdowns.
Is it because of, you know, they're there for them more than we are?
Or maybe it's because somebody's stepping up that's vocal, that's got conviction, that's willing to, you know, be a little bit out there.
And, you know, when I'm sitting there the other day watching Billy Grandma, Johnny Carson, I don't know if you've seen Billy Grandma, Johnny Carson, or not.
If you haven't, I think it's worth you watching to see what he does.
You know, this guy goes on his mission and, you know, he does what he does.
Sometimes Christians right now, you know, walking on eggshells, you see the Muslim religion.
I'm just right while we're talking, you know, and you know this better than I do.
This is your world, is what happens if I choose to leave the Christian church?
What if I say I'm done?
I don't want to be a Christian anymore.
What does the church do to me?
Well, if they're a good church, I think they should follow up with you.
They should pursue you.
But will anything happen to me?
Am I in trouble?
Oh, no, no, you're not in danger.
I'm not in danger.
No.
Is somebody sending me a write-up?
Is the senior pastor going to write me up?
And I'm going to have to go see HR department at the church.
No.
Now, what happens if I leave the religion of Islam?
Well, the penalty could be death.
The penalty could be death, right?
And we've had that debate here on the podcast ourselves.
So is it the fact that the fear-based and the tough, intense structure is working, but then that would not work in a country like U.S.?
Because when you look at the number of people in America that have converted to Muslim, I don't know if you've seen the number or not.
Do you know what the number is?
No.
What do you think?
I'm actually curious because it's your world.
What do you think the number is?
That I've converted to Islam?
Not you.
Like, how many Christians in America converted to Islam in America?
Oh, I have no idea.
What do you think the number is?
I'm terrible at numbers.
I'm a history guy, not a master.
Let me guess.
340 million people living here.
What do you think the number is?
340 million people.
In America.
How many do you think have converted?
From Christianity.
To Muslim.
To Islam.
Yeah, Islam.
You're getting deep.
So you are a numbers guy.
If you think about it.
No, I'm not.
I'm not.
I'm trying to figure out how to not make a fool out of myself.
Two million.
What's the number, Rob?
Look at that.
It's a small number.
Okay.
And by the way, Huffington Post says it's only 20,000, but it's annually.
Right.
So, you know, 20,000 annually.
Yeah, no, I don't think Islam is necessarily a religion where we're seeing converts.
I think Islam is a religion where we're seeing importation.
Yes.
In that we're seeing a lot of people come from other countries and we're seeing families grow.
And so I think that, I mean, when you mentioned the Mormon church, I think the back door of the Mormon church is a lot bigger than the front door.
I think a lot more people are leaving the Mormon church than are actually going to be.
I don't disagree.
Yeah.
I don't disagree.
I can't tell you how many people I meet where they tell me I used to be and they almost apologize.
And I say, you know, I'm from Bountiful or I'm from, you know, Salt Lake.
And, you know, I used to be.
I'm no longer right now.
But also, I think they're very systematic.
I think they're very structured.
I think they're very systematized.
I think they lift each other up and they support each other.
I don't know how many times I've been told to go watch Napoleon Dynamite, one of the worst movies of all time, but the actor was more.
Oh, well, we need to have a debate on that.
That's the real debate.
Stop it.
Napoleon Dynamite is one of the best pieces of film of all time.
We're going to have a problem here right now together if you go there.
But you see, so for me, think about, I'll give you another example here, and then we'll go change the topic here to go somewhere else.
And I want to see if you have a message for Andrew Tate.
So for me, during COVID, COVID happens.
And a lot of big companies, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Chase and all these guys, Morgan Stanley, we are not going to go see our investors and private equity money.
You have to only Zoom because we have to be COVID protected.
Right.
You know, and David Solomon's going and sitting down with people on the jet and he's talking to guys.
Jamie Diamond is going out there and talking to guys.
A bunch of other guys are flying a meeting with the guys, right?
So what happens?
They got the business during those four years.
A lot of people didn't.
What happens four years later?
Some of them grew.
Some of them went out of business.
Guess what?
You're not going there to them during a time like that.
You know, I think there's got to be the, you know how the league every 10 or 20 years needs a new superstar.
Sometimes baseball or sports go through a flat time where they don't have the next Brady, the next Mahomes, the next whatever that they're going through.
I think this is a big opportunity for, like, when I watch what Charlie Kirk did in the last 12 months on TikTok, it's like, whoa, amazing.
You know, the other day Trump's talking about, why would I want to shut down TikTok?
I think one of the things I give Charlie Kirk a lot of credit for, Charlie Kirk goes on school campuses and sits there and says, ask me anything.
Is this the one, Rob?
Zoom in a little bit on the data with this.
It's cut off.
I have to go find the original.
Yeah, but just zoom in on the bottom.
I'll show that shows how many views on the bottom.
2.4 billion views.
Team Trump.
Donald Trump, 1.4 billion.
Kamala Harris, 1.3 billion.
Charlie Kirk, 1.3 billion.
And then you see at the bottom, Taylor Swift, 251 million.
You know, Beyonce, 131 million.
Kardashian, 121 million.
So why would we take down TikTok?
I think today, believe it or not, I think it's the season where a bigger Billy Graham is going to come that's using the tools.
I'm actually very optimistic about the future.
And by the way, here's a crazy prediction I'll make to you with us being here right now as well.
I think some weird people are going to become Christians next two years.
Oh, and I agree with you.
And I think we're already starting to see that with the Iron Hersey LE's and others where we're seeing a resurgence.
Oh, I'm talking bigger.
Yeah.
I'm talking bigger.
I'm talking some guys that people would never expect to go there.
I think that's happening next two years.
No, I think you're right.
And I think we're in a particularly interesting age where you had the new atheism with the Richard Dawkins and the Daniel Dennetts and the Sam Harris's.
And I think we saw those seeds planted and they grew into dead trees.
And people realize that if you tell individuals that they're just a product of time plus matter plus chance, that they have no ultimate meaning, then they're going to struggle in finding purpose and drive.
What do you think happened with Sam Harris?
You think that's what it is?
No, I think the new atheism, as it was articulated in the early 2000s, was a movement that was largely motivated in print and was theoretical, but actually the practical implications were dangerous and that people, even people like Sam Harris, have realized that they are inefficient to actually be applied in real life.
And so that's why you see, I think, people becoming the quote-unquote spiritual, but not religious.
And the new age becoming far more popular than I don't run into atheists in the like Richard Dawkin types anymore.
I don't.
I run into a lot of people who are into manifestation and meditation and Christ consciousness and all of this kind of esoteric, very vague, I want the, I want the things I like about religion, but I don't actually want to be held accountable to anyone or anything.
I'm finding that more and more.
And that's also empty.
And so I think you're 100% right in that we live in a particular age where the clarity that's going to be spoken into the confusion, I think, is the truth of the gospel message and Christianity.
Because ultimately, in what you were saying before, when you're looking at this meta-analysis in terms of, okay, well, where are the leaks?
Where are the problems that we're seeing in terms of why, say, something like Islam is outgrowing us?
Well, I think if you look at the Christian worldview, it's different than religions like Islam in that Islam spread largely by occupation, where Christianity was a grassroots movement because it looked at Jesus, the crucified Messiah, the Lord of eternity who stepped out of his throne into humanity in the second person of the Trinity in Jesus and then died the death that we deserve.
And then said that your goal is to stand before the Father and hear good and faithful, well done, good and faithful servant.
Faithful, not influential, not, you know, world shifting, not, you know, everybody wants to have a presence online.
No, it's, it's, it's, you, you just need to be faithful and you need to be a servant in that faithfulness.
And God is going to do great things with that.
God's going to produce the Martin Luthors and the Billy Grahams and these individuals who change the world fundamentally through faithfulness, not through occupation, not through militaristic movements, but if we're faithful to the gospel message, that's really going to— I think Billy Graham was faithful.
Oh, Billy Graham is definitely faithful.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When we see these people and I mean, I have slight disagreements with some of the things that Billy Graham believed, but ultimately you see a testimony of someone.
Like what?
Specifics?
Is it like theological?
Very minor theological issues.
I mean, I think later in his life, he became a lot more soft to things like universalism and where he kind of was more open to people not confessing Jesus Christ, but there being an aspect of they could be saved.
And I ultimately, I don't think that's compatible with biblical Christianity.
But I mean, talk about a guy who was faithful in his Christian witness, in his proclamation, was zealous.
And I think, you know, just because I'm saying you need to be a faithful servant doesn't mean you don't need to be bold.
I mean, Paul was bold.
Paul was, his life was threatened.
He was beaten.
He was shipwrecked.
He ultimately died for his profession of faith.
So we don't need to be wallflowers.
We need to be bold.
We just need to make sure that we're doing, as I quoted before, that doing so with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience.
Yeah.
So today, 2025, okay, we see some of the stuff that's happened the last five years.
Yeah, you know, LGBTQ, totally fine.
Hey, school, kids, transgender, totally fine.
Hey, totally fine.
Everything is like totally fine.
Comparing today to when you read about the city of Corinth and how immoral it was, and you see many times a comparison being made of Corinth with the modern day Las Vegas or whatever, some of these other cities that we have in America.
And of course, you don't know the definite question, you know, when I make this comparison.
I'm just curious to know what you're going to be saying about this.
What caused Jesus to, you know, what was the level of immorality where God says, hey, man, we got to go handle this right now.
And then he comes down and wait a minute.
Is the world today at that level of immorality where God's sitting up there saying, I think it's time.
So, how do you compare today's times to biblical times, Corinth, that era?
Oh, I think the time period that we live in is much more emblematic of the early church in those first few centuries of its existence, in that you have a culture that was very much accepting of, say, promiscuous sexual ethics and idolatry and was open to things and misrepresented and misunderstood Christianity fundamentally.
In that, you know, there was a common practice within ancient Rome called exposure, where if you had a baby and you didn't want it, you would put it outside the city gates.
You would put it in the garbage dumps.
And Christians were notorious for going and saving these babies.
And so the Christian movement actually grew in part because they were against this form of abortion in the ancient world.
And so they would collect these babies and they would raise them.
And a lot of these babies were girls, which actually meant that the early Christian movements became astatistically predominantly women because a lot of these women, these little girls were exposed in this.
Now, the society around them heard about these strange Christians who were talking about, you know, with the Lord's Supper, drinking blood and eating flesh.
And then they knew that they were going out and they were taking these babies from the garbage dumps.
And so they started to develop rumors that Christians were cannibals.
And yet, despite what is a pretty heinous accusation, complete misunderstanding of what's going on, Christianity still grew.
And some of the earliest critics of Christianity referred to Christianity as the religion of slaves and women because it gave agency to these groups that were marginalized within society.
So funny, the mob's been around always and it confuses and gaslights people all the time.
Definitely.
And Christianity, we're accused of, Christians were accused of being atheists, A being the negative participle and then theos meaning God because they denied that the gods existed and antisocial because they wouldn't participate in the goings on within society that were inherently religious.
And so it's in this context that Christianity, grassroots from the bottom up, eventually goes from 11 scared disciples hiding in an upper room when Jesus is crucified to fundamentally taking over the Roman world within, you know, half a century, half a millennium.
And it's because of the faithful witness of the Christians who were being persecuted and yet were still proclaiming Jesus as Lord and were fundamentally speaking into the society that they lived in with a message that overturned the norms because it gave people purpose and ultimately it gave them truth.
That the idea of God stepping out of eternity changes the paradigm.
I mentioned Glenn Scribner.
He has this really good illustration where he talks about all worldviews are some version of survival of the fittest.
I'm paraphrasing him here, but what he says is all worldviews are some version of survival of the fittest in that you need to do right, you need to Think right or you need to feel right.
And Christianity is different in that the fittest steps down and sacrifices himself for the survival of the weakest.
And that message, you know, we just, we're just over the Christmas season, right?
The Christmas message of God becoming a baby and becoming vulnerable is both an example to us of humility and how we should live, but ultimately in worlds where might and power in a very abusive way are often seen as the way to go, Christianity subverts that.
In that Jesus could have taken cues from all the rulers of his day, of Caesar and of Herod and later on during his earthly ministry of Pilate, right?
He doesn't do that.
He comes down, he humbles himself, he lives a life of a servant, and he gets murdered.
And that changes the narrative.
And then he rises from the dead and conquers sin and death.
And so because of that, those 11 scared disciples are now willing to go out into the world and suffer persecution and beating and death for the sake of this message that ultimately spreads out through all the ancient world and gets us to where we are today, where we're talking about things like freedom.
Yeah.
And that's because of the Christian revolution.
Now, if I'm, Tom, Rob, can you Google this?
Did they have OnlyFans back in the days?
You almost Googled it, Rob.
What are you talking about?
Because there are OnlyFans back then.
I mean, was there, what was the quality of porn back in the biblical times?
What was the quality of all the other things that they had?
I guess where I'm going to right now is, okay, Jesus is coming back to those people.
I'm a Christian, faith, I'm there.
To those that are saying, oh, really?
He's going to come back.
He's going to return.
I mean, how much worse does it need to get than where we are today, than what we've seen the last few years?
Are we less immoral?
Are we less, you know, than what happened back then that caused, you know, you're telling the story about the infant.
It was a form of abortion where it's kind of like, hey, here you go.
Somebody's going to come and pick him up and Christians would come into cannibalism.
What a weird thing to accuse Christians of that other people started believing in.
Is it worse today?
Or are we not there at the level of sins that we used to commit 2,000 years ago?
Oh, I mean, I think sin has always been heinous and terrible.
And, you know, we're worse than we assume we are.
I mean, the biblical message is that we're always going to overestimate how good we are and undervalue how truly heinous and terrible sin is.
And that sin is always a cosmic rebellion against our creator.
So that doesn't mean that some sins aren't worse than others.
Of course, murder is worse than lying.
And Jesus even says this when he gets handed over to Pilate.
He says, you know, the one who handed you over to me has committed the greater sin.
So all sin is sin in that it is a rebellion against our creator.
And it's that cosmic treason.
But some sins are worse than others.
I mean, I don't know if I can stratify, okay, this is a period of time when it seems worse than others.
I mean, at the end of the day, I think we're always worried with the evil out there, and we forget about the evil in here.
And the Christian message is that the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus.
And so I think it goes, It starts with you and me, Patrick, submitting our lives to Christ and realizing that our hearts are sinful.
John Calvin described our hearts as a factory of idols.
We're always going to look for a way because we're stuck in this world that's beautiful yet broken to find the loophole.
And this is why rules aren't going to save us.
And this is what I think is interesting about, I've talked to atheists and Muslims in the same room about this, like, how do we create a good society?
And my Muslim friends and my atheist friends and my agnostic friends, a lot of the time, basically it devolves down to, well, we need to make better rules.
Like we need to make sure people are obeying the rules, right?
That's that's what Islam is all about.
And I think what Christianity says is that doesn't work because everybody's always going to try to find the loophole.
They're either going to obey out of fear and obligation or they're going to try to find the loopholes.
And so the Christian message is not obey the rules.
It's that you can't obey the rules.
You need to submit to Christ because he can do what you can't.
And it's not about how much you can do.
It's about what Christ has done.
And so we don't need to come up with better rules.
We need to change people's hearts.
And that's ultimately what God can do.
So was there an ancient version of OnlyFans?
Well, yeah.
I mean, there was this concept within the ancient world that you had 25 different ways to say prostitute in Latin, but male virgin was, you can't really, in classical Latin, write male virgin.
It's an awkward phrase because it was assumed that if you were a male and particularly a Roman male, you would not be a virgin because you would have had access to sex with anyone at any time, whenever you wanted, with whoever you wanted.
And so when Paul in particular, but Jesus also kind of hints at this when he talks about marriage as well, but when Paul says that husbands need to submit to their wives and wives need to submit to their husbands, in that society, that would have been holding the male in the relationship to the standard that the female was expected to, but the male was never expected to.
And that was countercultural.
And that was seen as foolish in that sexual promiscuity was the norm and was expected.
I mean, brothels were everywhere in ancient Rome.
And they weren't considered, you know, seedy.
You could find brothels in archaeologically in relatively high Roman neighborhoods.
And it's because that was what you were owed.
And so when Jesus says, one man, one woman for all time, that's it.
And if you don't like that, well, there isn't another option.
You can become a eunuch for the kingdom.
You can submit yourself to celibacy.
Those are the options.
That's countercultural in the day in a world that is prolifically sexual and doesn't see sex as something that is sacred.
Whereas Christianity says sex is sacred because bodies are sacred and image bearers are sacred.
And there's a respect and an accountability.
And so these concepts that we have in modern society about sex, I think they're confused because in one sense, we want to say like, you know, only fans, you can give your body to whoever you want.
It doesn't matter.
It's just, it's just, you know, bodies rubbing together.
And at the exact same time, we also realize that rape is a terrible violation.
Well, which is it?
Is sex just something you can give away at any time?
Or do you realize that this is something that holds a pretty significant intrinsic value?
That when it's violated, it goes beyond the physical.
I think that's where our society is confused.
And that's where we need to speak into these situations and show that some of these things are actually sacred.
Yeah.
How old are you, by the way?
33.
Oh, wow.
What an age.
Really?
You're 33.
It's Alexander and Jesus 33.
Yeah, right, right, right.
That's a double age.
I just got to get over this because you got what?
Six more weeks, right?
Seven more weeks, February 24th until you're protected.
So we got to hurry up.
February 25th's got to come around the corner.
But, okay, so did you go to a private school?
Were you homeschooled or did you went to public?
So when we were overseas, I was raised in the British school system when I was really young.
That's why Canadians think I have an accent because a lot of people here assume this is a Canadian accent.
It's not.
It's the leftovers from being like a few years in the British school system overseas.
And then I was in the public school in Canada and then, yeah, public all the way along.
Were you ever exposed to porn?
Oh, of course.
Yeah.
I mean, I think fortunately, I'm not your typical guy in that that is not my struggle and proclivity.
And I think I'm very blessed.
I have other vices that I need to submit to the cross of Christ.
But that one in particular isn't the one that I struggle with, but it is prolific in our world today.
Yeah.
A lot of people deal with that.
And, you know, it's when I was, again, military, we had a guy in the corner that had a thousand VHS tapes of all the different kinds of porns in the military.
He was the coolest guy on campus.
Everybody wanted to go find this big sergeant that we put up and you would hear the craziest noise.
You always knew he had something going on.
And he was a rock star for a lot of guys at that time.
And then I come out and I run an insurance company and a business nationally.
And I hear, hey, man, I'm really dealing with porn.
I'm having a hard time with porn.
I'm having a hard time with porn.
What do I do with this?
What do I do with that?
And it was kind of like weird for you to, and a lot of people right now, the level of accessibility, what you're seeing, expectation.
How does somebody that's a young man, maybe it's the how and maybe it's also the why.
How does somebody fight it and why should somebody fight it?
You know, if you were to talk to a young 16-year-old boy, you know, 14-year-old boy, an 18-year-old man, what would you say to him on, you know, the negative effects of porn on them and why should they do whatever they can to not consume it?
Yeah, I mean, I think there are multiple layers to that in that the scientific data on porn changing your brain is hugely problematic in that it changes your dopamine receptors and that you, it's very easy to become addicted.
I think especially in our day, day and age.
I think it was a little bit different, you know, when you were growing up, Patrick, and then when I was younger, where before the onslaught of the internet, porn was something that you kind of had to pursue in a way that was a little bit shameful.
You know, the magazines or the video shops.
We had LA Express, we had Hustler, we had Playboy Magazine.
I'm trying to see what we had.
That's really like we had, that's what we had.
Well, and I think the difference between that and what we're dealing with now is that there's just so much now.
It's so accessible and it's designed in a way where it's quick.
So it's designed to, you know, I once heard porn described as it's like the highlight reel on ESPN.
You know, you see soccer, for example, and the crazy moves and the kicks, and you just watch that and you go, wow, soccer, soccer is an exciting sport.
And then you go and you go to a match and you're like, why isn't anybody scored in two hours?
And so it gives you an unrealistic expectation of what sex should actually be because sex is something that's good and something that's beautiful and something that is God ordained.
But when we're given this kind of faulty, very dramatized perspective on what sex is in pornography, it changes the way that we understand ourselves and others in a very dangerous and not just problematic, but actual, actually harmful way in shaping how you view other people.
You know, I've talked to young men who struggle with porn and a lot of them struggle with looking at women as not being objects because the way it tunes your brain.
That's a terrible thing to look at someone else as an object.
You know, we used to use things and love people.
And now we use people and we love things.
And I think that's, that's a dangerous shift in our society.
In that there are, apart from the fact that I think that, you know, sin is, or sorry, porn is sinful.
Lust is sinful and is going to have implications that are going to harm you spiritually, that are going to have echoes that go into eternity.
I think even if you move that aside, although I think that that's the most important part of the conversation, the health aspects of the way it's going to shape your thinking as a young man, the way it's going to shape your perspectives on discipline and how you view the people around you, how you're going to respect them.
I think that that's dangerous.
And we see in our society in that like a lot of, I mean, I think this is a problem in places like Asia a little bit more.
I don't know if you've seen the statistics on places like Korea where like sexless society is.
Sexless society.
Yeah.
And part of that is porn, is that they're getting this like dopamine hit.
They're getting the highlight reel.
And so they don't feel like they need to get, they don't need to pursue the actual connection.
And sex is a spiritual thing.
And so it's meant to be created.
Like the first promise, the first covenant that God made when he created humanity was that he gave woman to man and man to woman to be unified, to become one, to reflect that image of God.
You know, both men and women are symbols of the image of God.
And when they come together in unity, that's the perfect reflection of what the image of God is.
And so there's a spiritual component that I think we understand And what I was talking about before with rape, there's something that's that's sacred about that that we know is when you see these OnlyFans models talk on these podcasts and they're just talking about their body count and how many times they're having sex with different guys.
Is that one girl that didn't?
Isn't there a girl that just said a thousand or a hundred?
I don't know what she we may have talked about on the podcast.
Yeah.
Slept with a hundred men.
Lily Phillips.
Yeah, I mean, this is, I mean, this kind of thing breaks my heart because this is someone who is an image bearer.
And this is defilement, right?
And I think even I saw a clip of afterwards they were trying to interview her and she just breaks down crying.
If sex is just like any other thing you can just give away, why would it impact her?
Do you remember what she cried about?
No.
Yeah, she was crying.
It was such a weird thing on why she was crying.
It was, it was a Rob, just make sure you're not playing a clip like last time.
You know, we is this a safe video?
Yes, I believe there's no new.
Go ahead, Rob.
Oh, oh, dear.
I think somehow it's like feeling so like robotic.
Like by the, I think like the 30th, you know, like when we're getting on a bit, I've got like a routine of like, how we're going to do this.
And like it just sometimes you'd like disassociate and be like, you know, like it's not like normal sex at all.
In my head right now, I can think of like five, six guys, ten guys that I remember.
That's unbelievable.
And that's it.
Do you know what Hitchi should be?
I don't know.
It's just weird, isn't it?
Out of the hundred guys.
How do you remember five or six of them?
Keep playing it?
I wouldn't have known I've done 100, you know.
But yeah.
I think that was kind of the hard part is like conversing with them and like when they'd kind of be like, oh, like we've only had two minutes or three minutes and you said five on the message.
Yeah, I mean, you see that emptiness.
You see that in her demeanor, in her voice.
Like this is a publicity stunt, but it has ramifications for her as a person, which are sad, which are a picture of brokenness.
Because you shouldn't, this isn't sex.
This isn't what sex is meant to be.
This is an abuse of what the goodness of something is meant to be.
And we all understand when something is abused, right?
Like whether it's a worldview system or an idea or when other people are taken advantage of, this is not what it's meant to be.
And you can see that very starkly in the way that she is reacting.
Yeah, I mean, it's tough when you see this.
I think one of the best breakdowns I saw on porn was from somebody that you least expect me quoting was Pamela Anderson.
Pamela Anderson explains to her this interview she's doing and she says, look, when I talk to my boys, I prepare them about porn.
Says, because it gives you an expectation.
Says, I used to, because she says, I'm guilty of it.
Some may say, I come from that.
I maybe even started that because of my tape or whatever she talks about.
And then she says, I can't tell you how many times I was with man.
I'm like, why are you doing this?
This is not what I want.
It just gave you a different image of it.
And Pamela Anderson is not a pastor, by the way.
If you're wondering, like, she's not preaching out this.
I don't think I was confused on that.
No, I just want to make sure qualified for you so you don't go out there and seeing what she has to say.
But okay, I want to bring up Mark, but before I do, there's one question I want you to answer, which is from Humberto, if you remember.
If you could simplify for the average person to say, oh, okay, I don't know that.
Okay, I know that.
What's the difference between those different sects under Christianity?
Yeah, so I think you have different categories in that you have like Christianity broadly in the statistic sense where you have the major Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, Toledo, Ethiopic, and then what's the Oriental Orthodox.
So Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox are not the same thing, but they're similar.
Oriental just means Eastern.
So that's a little bit confusing.
But those are kind of the overarching umbrellas in terms of what we're talking about, global Christianity.
I mean, inside, I'm a Protestant, and I'm a Protestant out of conviction, not out of convenience or complacency, in that I truly believe that the tenants of historical Protestantism coming out of the Protestant Reformation of individuals like Martin Luther, John Calvin, Zwingli, Melanchthon, Knox, these are guys who reformed the church back to what it was meant to be.
And so in that, there's a smaller conversation under the umbrella in, okay, well, now you have all these denominations.
Now, I actually think denominations are a good thing because humanity is very different, right?
Patrick, you and I don't look like each other, right?
I can't wear my skin after Labor Day.
I'm so white.
There's problems with that, right?
So we're different in that people think differently, they look differently.
I live in Toronto.
It's a multicultural city.
The amount of different cultures represented in my church is phenomenal.
And so I think there is something to say of if we agree on the centrality of the gospel and the message of who is Jesus and what he came to do to be saved.
Now, there's obviously caveats to that.
If it's just that, then I mean, it is just that in one sense, but if it was only that, then you have a lot of people in the New Testament writing a lot of letters and wasting their time.
So there's obviously more to that.
But I work for an organization, Apologetics Canada, where I'm a Baptist, and all the other individuals who are on my speaking team along with me are not Baptists.
So my colleague Steve is Anglican.
Andy is, I believe, is Mennonite Brethren.
And then Troy is non-denominational charismatic.
And we work fine.
In fact, I think we complement each other in a lot of ways in that we have our disagreements theologically, but the disagreements are always on secondary issues.
And I think there's room for that.
There's room to disagree on secondary issues as long as when we are coming down to what matters, when we are going out and we articulating what is ultimately true with the capital T in the gospel, we all do agree on that.
So I am actually a fan of denominations because I think it gives an opportunity for people to be reflective of the diversity within the kingdom of God.
And unity does not always mean uniformity.
And that's a good thing.
Unity doesn't always mean uniformity.
Yes.
Okay.
I like that.
I actually, by the way, as a Canadian, do you have any opinions on Justin Trudeau or no?
No opinions whatsoever on Justin Trudeau.
I mean, I have to be careful what I say politically, but let's just say I'm not mad that he's resigning.
Okay.
Got it.
Got it.
Interesting.
Well, actually, we can skip that.
Billy actually, in his response video, said that I was part of the NDP, which is the new Democratic Party in Canada, which is a left-leaning party.
That was one of his accusations against me.
And I have had people reach out and say, Wes, why do you support the NDP?
They're obviously not in favor of lots of things you adhere to with Christianity.
And I could say definitively, I'm not part of the NDP.
I don't know where Billy got that.
Would you consider yourself a conservative?
Yes, definitely.
Okay.
So politically, you would be.
Oh, politically, I would be conservative.
Yeah.
Whether that means that the Conservative Party of Canada or there are others, the People's Party of Canada, like there are.
But yes, politically.
What do you think about this Pierre guy?
Pierre Polyev?
Yes.
I like him.
Yeah, yeah.
I think he's good.
I think he's bright.
I think he's intelligent.
He, I believe, was the finance minister under Stephen Harper.
And so he knows what he's doing.
And Canada is in a very dire situation right now in terms of its housing market, in terms of its economy.
I think it needs a lot of help.
And if Pierre is going to do the things he says he is, I'm all for it.
I like it.
You know, he's pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ marriage.
I don't know if you knew that or not.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not, I obviously have caveats.
Right.
And I'm never going to find a political party that's going to agree with me on everything because I think, you know, the problem with politics is it's full of politicians.
And so based on that, you're never going to find anybody who agrees with everything you say.
I think he's a 10 times better candidate than who Trudeau did the last few years.
I can't tell you how many people I run into here in school, kids whose parents escaped Canada to come down here to Florida because they're not comfortable with the politics that's in Canada.
Maybe that's a different thing.
Yeah, I mean, I'm encouraged by the things that Polyev says he's going to incorporate.
I hope that those play out well because as a young person living in one of the most expensive cities, not just in Canada, but in the world, and looking at our housing market, looking at our economy, I want my family to grow.
I don't want it, you know, I'm only planning on having more kids.
And so there's a trickiness to that right now in Canada with everything that's going on.
What do you think about Trump?
Any opinions on him?
Once again, need to be careful politically.
Why do you say that?
I work for a national not-for-profit that has charitable status.
And so within the way that that works in Canada, advocating overtly for a political candidate could compromise our charitable status.
Is that a law?
Yes.
You can have your charitable status revoked if you're advocating for politicians too overtly.
Wow.
And that has happened in Canada.
How do you feel about that?
I don't love it.
Are you going to be in Canada the next 20 years?
Yeah.
I mean, I work.
I love my country.
I'm a Canadian.
I'm proud to be a Canadian.
I wish Canada would sort itself out.
Would you want to be the 51st state?
No, and I don't think Canadians want that either.
I mean, I think the partnership with the U.S. should grow more.
We are the biggest trading partners in the world.
We have the, what, is it the longest border?
Is it unmanned border?
That's probably not the right way to describe it.
I don't know about unmanned border, but it's the largest border.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, I think Americans and Canadians are probably more similar than either of us want to admit.
And I think that's a good thing.
We're a little bit more British because of our colonial heritage and the fact that we still have the monarch on our money.
But I think both countries can only benefit from more open trade, more open border, more open, you know, in the right ways.
Yeah, it's going to be so interesting when he said the tariffs.
It's like, you can't put the tariffs there.
It's really going to hurt our society and our country.
And boom.
And then the other financier, whatever her name was, and then she stepped down.
And then he's stepping down and Trump's going to do what Trump's going to do.
By the way, you were right.
It's the world's longest undefended border.
I don't want to get you in trouble.
I want you to keep your charity status where you're at.
So what I'd want to do, and we talked about this earlier, and you seem like you were open to the idea of Mark is here.
I didn't even know Mark was going to be here, right?
Mark is the fellow that you did a podcast with Billy Carson.
Rob, if we can bring him in here, and by the way, this is going to be very short, five, 10 minutes is what it'll be.
And he's got a beautiful white jacket representing Miami.
Mark, if you want to grab a seat there.
So Mark, you're the guy that got everybody in trouble, man.
I mean, if you can grab that if you put it on, Mark.
While he's doing that, let me just say, like, Mark's gotten a lot of flack online.
And I think, you know, I have nothing but good things to say about this guy.
His work in his business is so good and noteworthy.
And he's a great guy.
We've become good friends over the last, however many, three months.
Mark was saying when he drove me over here, like, it feels like it's longer.
It feels like we've known each other longer because of what's taken place and transpired.
And so I think it's really good for people to see that in this whole crazy situation, Mark and I are, we're not just advocates for one another, but we're friends.
You know, Rob, can you pull up so everybody knows, pull up the podcast that took place so everybody knows.
Mark's got his own channel as well.
Mark Minnard, actually, yeah, 242,000 subs.
That's not easy to get to 100,000 subs later on, 242.
So good for him.
If you can go to the podcast to show West Huff and Billy Carson, so Mark's the one that set this up.
So if you go to Wes Huffs right there, and if you let Neil deGrasse Tyson give us a wonderful commercial here on his masterclass, so that's Mark right there in the middle.
Now, Mark, if you guys can fix his audio because I can't hear him.
So if you're, if Mark, can you speak?
Okay, we got Mark.
Mark is officially live.
Mark, did you know when you set this up that it was going to turn into what it turned into?
If I knew it was going to turn into what it turned into, you should be hiring me as like the biggest marketing genius.
I wish I could say I was that smart.
Would you have done it if you knew what it was going to turn into?
Would you have done it now?
Looking back.
So, yes, and I'm going to tell you why.
First of all, going through this whole process, Billy being a good friend of mine, this whole situation has been just insanity.
But what I didn't realize, like through all the attacks and everything that was going on, now that this has gone as viral as it has, I've started to receive hundreds of messages a day from people telling me this like chokes me, like this.
This podcast has brought them from a dark spot back to God and I didn't realize, I didn't have a clue, how many people had been so steered away from their beliefs in God and were just falling into darkness from.
I mean, I've had so many.
You know, what's interesting is it looks like when you're doing it, you and Billy are friends.
Like I was saying earlier, we are, you are friends.
Well, we were.
Yeah, you were friends.
What it?
Maybe give us your version and again, I want to keep this less than five minutes because we got to wrap up.
Maybe give us your version while it's going on, after it's done.
Conversation with Billy and what happened with that and you made a video reaction to it and every time you said the word Billy, you bleeped yourself out.
So maybe just give us your perspective.
Try to keep it in five minutes.
So I've been on Billy's show, he's been on mine, we've known each other for business and we talked for a while about you know, I'm a Christian.
It'd be cool to have you on and just be able to talk about your beliefs and mine and let people see we can still respect each other and that we have similar core values.
And then, as we got closer to it, I'm like I don't know anything about, like the Emerald tablets and all that good stuff.
So that led me to Wes.
24 hours notice had got a hold of Wes to be on.
Then I let Billy know hey, I got, I gave him his name, I said he's a historian, a linguist, gave all his credentials.
I'm like would that be cool if he joined us?
Because I don't know anything about that stuff.
I can talk about my faith, why I believe in God, but when it comes to that, like I'm not shy to say I'm clueless.
And he's like, oh oh yeah bro, like it'll be cool, like I'm used to doing that.
So I went into this thinking we're just gonna have a great and amazing conversation as usual.
And in all honesty, you came off as very humble and Billy and honestly I thought Billy did the the one that gets the most flack, that looks like an idiot, is me.
That's overly interrupting throughout it and people thought I was a moderator and I got thrown off when you started having your responses.
I'm used to talking to my good man Billy, as a great friend and we're sitting in my backyard by my pool and he's talking about aliens and stuff and it's just fascinating and he's like here's where we found it in the Pyramids.
So when you started doing the first rebuttal and you gave your response, I was sitting back and I was totally ready for Billy to be like and have this full.
And when he was just like, fair enough, I'm sitting there and there's, it's different when you're in room than when you're online and I'm just like like, like what is happening right now?
Like I was really caught off guard from that past.
You seemed very uncomfortable, that's what I. You seem very uncomfortable now.
When you made the reaction video, why were you?
What happened afterwards?
It ends and I think that's the one part I want to address like in an exercise sure sure, what happened afterwards?
You know uh, when you guys ended the podcast.
So I got a call from a message from him and his wife asking me to call them.
I talked to them and They had asked me not to, they had requested, not, I didn't get anything and write anything.
They're like, Can you not air that right now?
Because his wife said, We're planning on having another debate set up.
And she's like, I didn't realize you guys were having a debate, even though we talked about this for some months.
Um, and I don't want it to interfere with that, is what I was told.
And Billy chimed in, love you to death, Billy.
Kind of had a different version of how he felt it went some behind-the-scenes stuff.
I explained, I thought Billy Wesley was very respectful, had tons of knowledge.
And I said, and I thought you came out respectful, but anyway, for now, we won't air it.
Wesley did the response video.
People found out the show was done, that it wasn't, they requested it to not be aired.
They found out it was on my show.
I continued to get attacked for like a month on every level about this.
I made time to meet with Billy and try to mediate about: can we do like a follow-up show, like something?
You know, if you want to even prepare more, we could do it and have it more structured.
And he's like, I don't, I don't know.
I don't want to have anything to do with that.
Wes guy, the attacks, everything just continued at a certain point.
I finally made a decision a month later to go live with it to release it.
And I wrote a long explanation as to why.
To Billy.
Yep.
Okay.
And it explained how I was having attacks, defamation of my character, and everything.
Anyway, we released it.
I think it was like at 9 p.m. on Friday.
And 2:30 in the morning, got a knock on the door.
I went to bed after we released it.
I guess he started texting me, calling me 2:30 in the morning.
My teenage daughter wakes me up.
She's 17, turns 18 today, actually.
Happy birthday.
Happy birthday, Nevea.
And she's like, Dad, dad, someone's at our door.
I'm really scared.
And I'm like, what?
And I look on my phone.
We have the video and I see it's Billy.
I mean, he's dressed up, holding a paper.
And I'm like, then I see my text and he's sending me, and I told him, I'm like, just, it's going to be okay.
Let's just not answer it right now.
I didn't see anything good out of coming from answering the door, any type of good conversation.
So you never opened a door at 2:30 2:30 a.m.
I said, honey, it's Nevea.
Let's just.
My wife was out of the country.
They started calling my wife in a different time zone.
My wife calls me not knowing what's going on.
And she's like, Mark, I don't know what this is.
You released it.
They're asking to take it down.
She's like, I'm exhausted.
Let's just take it down, honey.
Like, I don't want drama.
I said, okay.
For my wife, I took it down.
And my wife flew back in.
I'm trying to sum this up the best I can, Pat.
I mean, people can watch my response video.
I really go through like the whole thing.
No, we'll give that.
The whole thing.
Have you and Billy spoken since that date?
No.
My wife actually flew in after she talked with them.
We thought it would be a mediation to move onward.
And they still had their lawyer right, I think, the following Monday.
We followed up.
Everything, listen to me, I would just say this very clearly.
Everything I took down, I chose out of good faith to take it down.
My lawyer made it clear this was a frivolous claim.
I hadn't done anything wrong.
There's First Amendment rights in the state of Florida, and he willfully came on to be on the show at my house.
But in good conscience, I think she wrote in good faith, Mark is choosing to take this down.
I took the previous show when he was on my podcast down, everything they requested, because my wife and I just wanted to make peace and move forward.
Have you guys seen each other yet or no?
Have you guys had, you know, because kids, sports, all that stuff.
Have you guys been in the same?
Yeah, we're in a private gated neighborhood.
I see each other all the time.
You just are not.
I haven't seen them.
Okay.
I see their son.
And of course, we're going to be loving to each other's sons.
Our kids, there's a basketball hoop there.
They play.
It got nastier.
Then they did this live stream that I couldn't even watch the whole thing.
People shared clips with me.
A lot of terrible things were said.
About you.
Yeah.
That just about all three of us.
Yeah.
Mark, Anton, and myself.
Anton.
Anton is the social media manager.
Oh, okay.
Social media manager.
Who said it out?
It's been crazy.
Well, you know what I would say?
Here's what I would say.
I wish the best for him.
Look, we watch, I don't know, you guys watch UFC.
Are you a fighting fan at all?
Okay.
What's more embarrassing than getting publicly knocked out?
Think about it.
I mean, it's very embarrassing.
Right.
But what's more respectful than when Kobe Bryant loses, goes out in the first game, misses all those shots and comes back and says, I'm going to get better.
Right.
And so the point is.
And owns it.
Right.
The point is, but, you know, for a person that that happens to, that's been winning, and you're not used to it.
It's not easy for anybody.
So I understand your heart.
And by the way, I don't, you seem like a straight up guy in what you've done.
We don't have a relationship.
You came in and just said the guy who had him on something.
I'm like, no way.
I brought you and introduced myself.
So maybe at the end, we bring you on here.
Fair enough.
The fact that you did it, I applaud you.
I applaud Billy who did it.
And, you know, now that it's up, of course, I'm sure they're not too happy about it.
We learn about Wes.
I love the fact that I learned about Wes.
I'm so happy that he was on Rogan.
I'm so happy that we're having a conversation right now.
And for the people that are going to see this as well, and a part of it, you made that happen.
So good for you for doing that.
What I would like to see happen is the following.
I'd like to see a part two with Billy and yourself.
And you've already said you're open to it.
And whether it's going to be with you, whether it's going to be with anybody, whether it's going to be anywhere, that could be another one to be taking place.
And I think at the end of the day, when I watch discussions and we've had a lot of heated debates, I think you should do it.
You should moderate it.
We would be more than happy to do it.
I'm going to read the comments of people thinking I'm a moderator and that got some.
Well, again, I think the audience wins.
That's who's important to win.
And we'll have that conversation with Billy.
We have a good relationship with Billy.
Same, you know, that we're having a conversation with guests at here.
But having said that, I appreciate you guys for coming.
Obviously, the last few minutes I wanted to bring you here to kind of give your story.
I appreciate you for doing that.
Yes.
Wes, you already know how I feel about the way you handled yourself.
And I think you're a class act.
You're 33 years old soon to be 34 on February 24th.
So you've got to hurry up, bro, because this is a tricky age you're at.
But more than anything else, I love seeing men like you having a lot of kids.
Because what does the world look like if more kids like you are turning into adults that you are today?
That gives me optimism about the future.
And I applaud you for it, your family, for raising somebody like you.
And what are you working on?
Where should people go look?
Is there anything you're working on that maybe you want to share with the audience?
Yeah, you know what?
So at Apologetics Canada, we've been doing a series, which is kind of my baby, that is called Can I Trust the Bible?
And so there are two episodes out right now on the Apologetics Canada YouTube channel.
You can also go WesHuff on YouTube is mine and WesleyHuff.com is mine.
But Can I Trust the Bible is a series that we are doing where we go to the places.
So two years ago, we flew over to Egypt and we went to the places where the majority of our biblical manuscripts come from.
I explain those discoveries.
We went to Nag Hammadi.
We visited the Coptic Museum in Cairo and we looked at the Gospel of Thomas.
We went where the Gospel of Thomas was discovered and talked about, you know, okay, we have these books in our Bible.
Why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and not Thomas.
And so this upcoming year, well, it is 2025.
This year, we're going to be producing.
I'm heading off to overseas again.
We're going to be going to a number of countries and we're going to be filming more.
Why we can have historical, solid truth in terms of the historicity and the content of the Bible.
Histra.
Historicity.
Histracity.
I know he dropped some words.
Morality.
Can I say one thing on that?
Wesley, I said if Wesley and Billy could join forces, because I know Billy well.
He does work hard.
He's always traveling.
They both kind of remind me of Indiana Jones in like two different ways.
If they could collaborate, I got to tell you very, very interesting.
That would be a beautiful thing.
You're very interesting.
Wes, we're going to put the link below to Can I Trust the Bible for people to find.
We'll also put the channel there as well.
And Wes, this was a blast.
Yeah, it was great.
Thank you so much for coming out.
I know you got to go on an international flight, so I want to make sure you make your flight as well.
