July 13, 2023 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:06:03
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| We got major breaking news. | ||
| Joe Biden has called up U.S. | ||
| military reserves, the Selective Reserves and the Ready Reserves. | ||
| It's a big deal for deployment to Europe over the war in Ukraine. | ||
| We don't exactly know what that means other than people are quite worried that two different | ||
| reserve groups are being called up for deployment into Europe. | ||
| I don't know if this means we should be prepared for war, but certainly it's a very big deal. | ||
| So we'll definitely be talking about that. | ||
| We've got some other big news that may or may not come up. | ||
| Twitter is now paying people. | ||
| Yeah, I abruptly got a notification saying they are paying me six grand. | ||
| And I'm not that active on Twitter. | ||
| One of the... | ||
| This is huge! | ||
| Because with this move of paid partnerships, Twitter is going to become a very dominant platform on social media. | ||
| One of the only other platforms to offer people a way to monetize their social media presence. | ||
| Instagram sort of does, but for most people it doesn't really work. | ||
| But most importantly, what we're going to be talking about quite a bit today is the film Sound of Freedom. | ||
| Because we're being joined by the people behind Sound of Freedom. | ||
| Before we get into all of that, however, head over to castbrew.com to support our work by buying our coffee. | ||
| I gotta be honest, Cast Brew Coffee is the best coffee I've ever had. | ||
| We formulated these blends, they're fantastic. | ||
| Rise with Roberto Jr., Breakfast Blend, The Light Roast, Appalachian Nights, and Dark Roast. | ||
| Check these out. | ||
| They're available in ground or whole bean. | ||
| You can join the Cast Brew Coffee Club. | ||
| Buying our coffee helps support the work that we do here. | ||
| We decided we're going to sponsor ourselves with our own company so we have more control and we don't have to worry about any kinds of cancellations or people getting mad at us. | ||
| And actually, one of the hopes we have with Casper, aside from the physical locations, is we want to start sponsoring other channels that we believe in. | ||
| One, so we can sell more coffee, but actually to provide a guarantee like, hey, if you do this deal with us and we buy sponsorship with you, we will never, never cancel over any kind of weird press stuff or angry activists. | ||
| But you know, if we can't sponsor you in the future, it might be normal. | ||
| But we're never gonna cancel somebody. | ||
| So go to Casper.com, support us. | ||
| Also, head over to TimCast.com, click join us, become a member, because we're gonna have a members-only uncensored show. | ||
| And more importantly, if you've been a member for at least six months, or you sign up today... | ||
| For at least $25 a month, you can submit questions and potentially call into the show to talk to us and our guests, and I think that one's gonna be amazing. | ||
| I'm really excited for this. | ||
| Smash the like button, subscribe to this channel, share this show with your friends, because today, we are being joined by Tim Ballard and Eduardo Vrastegui. | ||
| I got it! | ||
| You nailed it! | ||
| I was like, in my head, trying to make sure I could get it. | ||
| Very few get this. | ||
| Very good, man. | ||
| You're better than me. | ||
| Better than I, sir. | ||
| Tim! | ||
| Yes, sir? | ||
| I think everybody knows who you are. | ||
| Do you want to introduce yourself? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Thanks so much for having us on the show. | ||
| So I'm the subject of Sound of Freedom. | ||
| I spent 12 years as a special agent undercover operator for the U.S. | ||
| government. | ||
| 10 of those years on the border, you see that there's an important scene in Sound of Freedom where a little kid is rescued at the border. | ||
| True story. | ||
| But it kind of kicks off the rest of the narrative, right? | ||
| And then, you know, in 2012, 2013, I started discovering something. | ||
| Well, let me go back to 2006. | ||
| In 2006, the laws changed in the United States. | ||
| With the passage of something called the Adam Walsh Child Protect Act. | ||
| What it did was it allowed U.S. | ||
| agents for the first time to go overseas and we could, if we found Americans engaging in sex with kids, we could hold them accountable as if they'd committed that sex crime in the U.S. | ||
| So that kind of opened up like international operations and about that time I went to undercover school and they sent me in. | ||
| I'd play the role of a pedophile, a purveyor of child sex, trafficker, whatever. | ||
| And we'd go in. | ||
| But what happened though, the U.S. | ||
| government didn't mean to do this, but they kind of tortured me because, you know, here's the problem. | ||
| Child trafficking knows no borders and boundaries, but bureaucracies do. | ||
| And so if I'm down there and I find a kid, I don't care what nationality, I don't care what anything, it's a kid, a kid's a kid. | ||
| But the laws in the U.S. | ||
| needed me to find the American. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| And so I'd be like, guys, let me finish the case and then we'll find the Americans later. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| That's too creative for a bureaucracy. | ||
| Come home. | ||
| Several times this happened, it's breaking my heart, and in 2013, I was actually working two cases. | ||
| One in Haiti, crazy story, this little boy named Gardi Marti, U.S. | ||
| citizen of Haitian descent, two years old, the family moves him back to Haiti. | ||
| He is kidnapped out of the church where his father's the pastor. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh my gosh. | |
| Kidnapped, trafficked. | ||
| I learned about this story. | ||
| I meet the father. | ||
| I'm thinking, this is a US citizen. | ||
| I can go find this kid. | ||
| He was born in Utah and I had been transferred to Utah recently at that point. | ||
| So I'm working this case. | ||
| I'm told, come home. | ||
| This is a Haitian crime. | ||
| But I promised the father! | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| I promised the father I would never stop! | ||
| At the same time, I'm down in Colombia, and this is the part you see in Sound of Freedom, consulting, and I was given permission, if you listen to the film it's accurate, I was given permission to consult. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And as you see in the film, I went beyond that. | ||
| And then, so then they said, hey, where's the American? | ||
| Where's the leads? | ||
| I said, I feel it, it's here. | ||
| Come home. | ||
| So that was two in 2013 and I called my wife and I was like, what do I do? | ||
| Like my heart is breaking. | ||
| Like these kids will be rescued. | ||
| These kids will be rescued. | ||
| But if I leave, I mean, I'm the bait. | ||
| You know, I'm the, I'm the, I'm the point on this case. | ||
| And, um, and, and she, you see in the movie, right? | ||
| Where, is this okay? | ||
| I'm just going? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| But in the movie, Mira Cervino, who plays my wife, Academy Award winning, amazing actress, and it's one of my favorite lines in the film because it's so powerful. | ||
| It's much more powerful in real life. | ||
| But she says, just quit your job and rescue those kids, right? | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna do it. | ||
| But that's not what really happened. | ||
| Okay, Eduardo and the team didn't want me to show the true cowardice that I actually manifested at this time in late 2013 because it was my idea. | ||
| I said, well, Catherine, if I come home, you know, it's over. | ||
| But I keep my job. | ||
| I have to quit my job to do this. | ||
| I talked to, I mean, I was calling the DHS, like, ethics office. | ||
| Can I do both? | ||
| Like, no, you can't do both. | ||
| You can't moonlight. | ||
| You got to quit, you know, or do the case. | ||
| And she said, and so her line was supposed to be, Well, get your butt home because we got six kids and we have no money. | ||
| We have a couple thousand stocked away in the bank or something. | ||
| And she didn't say that. | ||
| She didn't say that. | ||
| She said, could you save the kids if you stayed there? | ||
| I said, yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| She's like, why? | ||
| It was almost like embarrassing. | ||
| Like, why are you even asking me this question? | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| She said, we have a meeting with our maker. | ||
| We will be dead in 50 years anyway. | ||
| And she said, I don't care if we live in a tent. | ||
| These are exactly her words. | ||
| I don't care if we're in a tent! | ||
| Because we lose our house. | ||
| You have to do this. | ||
| You have to try. | ||
| And I fought back like a coward. | ||
| Like, are you kidding me? | ||
| What about my own kids? | ||
| I gotta take care of my own six kids. | ||
| Like, they'll be fine. | ||
| She finally got to the point where she just gave it to me in one line. | ||
| That didn't make it in the movie because, again, it would have manifested my cowardice. | ||
| But one line that, this is verbatim, it ended the debate. | ||
| It shook me to my core because she's usually very sweet. | ||
| And she said, and this is a quote, I will not let you jeopardize my salvation by not doing this. | ||
| And I remember my whole body just kind of shook. | ||
| I was just like, Oh my gosh. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| That is an incredible woman. | ||
| There is so much. | ||
| We were already talking before the show and there's going to be more spoilers. | ||
| So, um, Somewhat conveniently, we'll talk a little bit about what's going on with Europe, which will give us a little buffer zone so I can warn everybody and say, there's going to be spoilers. | ||
| We're not going to go crazy with it, but I think we definitely need to talk about some of the elements of the film, because it was so good. | ||
| Stories like that, the feeling that I got watching this was, I could not believe it. | ||
| I thought it was just good writing. | ||
| And then you tell me, actually those were true. | ||
| So thank you for joining us. | ||
| We also have Eduardo here. | ||
| Do you want to introduce yourself as well? | ||
| Yes, I am Eduardo Verástegui. | ||
| Very grateful to be here with all of you. | ||
| Thank you so much for supporting Sound of Freedom. | ||
| Thank you so much for this interview. | ||
| And I'm the producer of the film. | ||
| Eight years of work. | ||
| Eight years of work since I met Tim Ballard. | ||
| I met him in Los Angeles, California. | ||
| Eight years of work for two hours of your time, which is what the movie lasts, and I hope this film keep touching millions of hearts. | ||
| Five million people already, can you believe it? | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Five million people show up in the last ten days. | ||
| Fifty-four million dollars about so far, and we're hearing more and more theaters are starting to get packed, word of mouth is spreading. | ||
| This is, the story is that, the story you just told. | ||
| The stories in the film, this feels like more than a movie. | ||
| This is something more powerful. | ||
| I mean, I will not let you, what did you say? | ||
| Jeopardize my salvation by not doing this. | ||
| This is amazing. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| Thank you guys for coming. | ||
| We're going to be, I would say for the most part, we're going to be talking all about this. | ||
| But for the time being, we got Seamus hanging out. | ||
| I'm a cartoonist and animator. | ||
| I don't do anything that impressive. | ||
| I write jokes and do comedy. | ||
| I have a YouTube channel called Freedom Tunes, and I am really excited to be joined by both of you. | ||
| This film was incredible. | ||
| I've been recommending it to my audience and to Tim's audience non-stop. | ||
| What you've built is incredible, and Tim, the work you've done is unbelievably inspiring. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| It is, man. | ||
| And that same conversation, for whatever reason, that was when I broke down the first time in that movie when she said, do it, like, go, go, you know? | ||
| I mean, it's a moment. | ||
| Let's keep moving this along, baby. | ||
| Thank you for coming, Tim. | ||
|
unidentified
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We're gonna do like a 10-minute buffer before we get in all this footage. | |
| Okay, let's go. | ||
| Serge Dupria! | ||
| Yes, I am Serge.com. | ||
| I'm excited to hear you guys just tell us kind of more about the story in general. | ||
| And yeah, let's just get into it. | ||
| We're going to take a quick 10 minute little buffer to give you guys some breaking news. | ||
| This is from the Post Millennial. | ||
| Biden calls up U.S. | ||
| military reserve units to deploy to active duty in Europe in Operation Atlantic Resolve. | ||
| Atlantic Resolve is the official name of the unofficial operation supporting the war in Ukraine. | ||
| That is to say, reserve military... Actually, let me just pull up the executive order we have right here from the WhiteHouse.gov. | ||
| Selected reserve and the individual ready reserve of the armed forces are being called to active duty to be deployed into Europe. | ||
| The official WhiteHouse.gov statement is by the authority vested in me as President, etc, etc, and he lists everything I hereby determine is necessary to augment the active armed force of the U.S. | ||
| for the effective conduct of Operation Atlantic Resolve in and around the United States European Command's area of responsibility. | ||
| Now, I'm not a military guy. | ||
| I don't know exactly what this means. | ||
| But it certainly sounds like we are inching closer to a major conflict related to Russia, potentially a World War III scenario. | ||
| I don't know what else to say other than, what do you guys think about it? | ||
| Do you guys have any knowledge, experience? | ||
| What do you guys think? | ||
| Yeah, I'm certainly frightened by the news. | ||
| I'm probably not the person here who has the most expertise on military and foreign policy, but I think there's real reason to be concerned. | ||
| Let's pray for this country and hope that we don't get dragged into a third world war, that this doesn't escalate into something that it doesn't need to be. | ||
| It's like, I believe that there is God. | ||
| It's like a real... | ||
| structure, something that's happening that's vibrating and causing things to form like they're happening like climatic cymatics, you see where sound can cause matter to change shape. | ||
| And that maybe we're here to talk about this movie because this war stuff is out of our hands. | ||
| We can only explain it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a crazy time. | ||
| Yeah, I'll tell you this. | ||
| I've been in Ukraine several times last year. | ||
| So my perspective is a little different. | ||
| I actually like what Trump said about, I want people to stop dying. | ||
| Like, let's de-escalate, not escalate. | ||
| I spent time out there. | ||
| Crazy story. | ||
| Again, my wife, again, February 23rd, I think it was, last year, Russia invades Ukraine. | ||
| My wife comes up to me in tears. | ||
| Oh my gosh, you got to go to Ukraine and get those kids out. | ||
| Like, what kids? | ||
| Well, we adopt children out of Ukraine as part of one of the foundations that she runs called Children Need Families. | ||
| We had seven kids on the way out. | ||
| And she's like, go get them. | ||
| I'm like, I'll call the team. | ||
| She's like, no, you have to go. | ||
| I'm like, Catherine, like, the bombs are dropping. | ||
| Like, she's like, I know, and she's crying as she's saying it, because she's very deliberate. | ||
| So when she's irrational, it's God. | ||
| I know that's God when she's saying, and I kid you not, and he can verify this story. | ||
| Three hours later, after Catherine's telling me this, I get a phone call from Mel Gibson. | ||
| And Mel Gibson says, hey, I got these kids in Ukraine, these orphans who are, I think they're in the war zone. | ||
| Can you go get them out? | ||
| And I'm like, what? | ||
| Those signs right there. | ||
| I've always been brought up with the notion that if your wife and Mel Gibson both tell you | ||
| to do something, you know, you probably should. | ||
| You better listen, yeah. | ||
| You better listen. | ||
| Anyway, we went out there, worked with a group called Aerial Recovery, I'm on their board, amazing group. | ||
| 6,000 women and children got out. | ||
| So the suffering that we saw, and by the way, I won't get into this except we found a pedophile group | ||
| that was trafficking children out of Ukraine into Mexico, into Ecuador. | ||
| Crazy case. | ||
| Tony Robbins produced a docuseries about it. | ||
| He's gonna be a producer as well, but that's a different story. | ||
| But my point is, stop de-escalating this thing. | ||
| The pain that we're seeing, the suffering that we're seeing on the ground, the part that no one remembers. | ||
| Traffickers call this harvest time. | ||
| A war, a hurricane, an earthquake, in the aftermath. | ||
| Harvest time. | ||
| How is it a 150 billion dollar business, human trafficking, how do you get that many kids into that black market? | ||
| Harvest time. | ||
| Wars. | ||
| Hurricanes, earthquakes, and it's happening and that's the least reported thing. | ||
| Kids losing their parents. | ||
| Kids losing their parents. | ||
| Displaced. | ||
| Displaced. | ||
| A nice van pulls up. | ||
| Hey sweetie, get in the car, we'll take care of you. | ||
| Next thing they wake up in the Caribbean. | ||
| Like in Haiti. | ||
| I mean, tell the story when you went to save this little kid. | ||
| What happened in the orphanage? | ||
| I mean, that's crazy, man, how, you know, volunteers from all over the world going to Haiti to, you know, find children that they love their parents because in one night, thousands of children lost their parents, right? | ||
| These traffickers just write, they just write orphanage on the wall. | ||
| This is, whether you think literally or figuratively, demonic. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| And it is crazy to hear you're telling the story. | ||
| Here we are, you know, we're going to talk about the film and your background. | ||
| We're talking about the war. | ||
| And here you are telling the story where your wife and Mel Gibson both call you and say, go save these kids. | ||
| You know, part of me is like, I'm thinking there's a lot of people who wish they would have some kind of the purpose being laid right before them. | ||
| You have a job. | ||
| And I have to wonder, because I would imagine it's kind of scary. | ||
| But it's also a situation where you can't say no. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Both. | ||
| Both of those. | ||
| You know, people... I'm just as scared as anyone else going into Ukraine or going into these places. | ||
| I'll say this, though. | ||
| God is real and he loves children because every time, once we're on the ground and looking and there, it goes away. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I can't explain it. | ||
| It goes away. | ||
| And I'm clear-minded. | ||
| I'm not worried. | ||
| I'm not afraid to die in that moment. | ||
| Then afterwards, I come back. | ||
| I just told you I can't watch Shadow Freedom. | ||
| It triggers me. | ||
| I'm scared to get after, you know? | ||
| It's like God will bless you in the moment you're doing what he wants you to do, but then you've got to deal with it before and after. | ||
| What made you decide in the beginning to get involved rescuing kids? | ||
| Well, my first job was the CIA. | ||
| I was there through 9-11. | ||
| And when I learned about Mohammed Atta, who was a terrorist that crossed over the border of Mexico into the U.S. | ||
| and then launched his attack, I wanted to be on that border. | ||
| So I trained anti-terrorism stuff. | ||
| I have a graduate degree and a certificate in anti-terrorism. | ||
| So I got put on that border. | ||
| That's where I wanted to be. | ||
| I speak Spanish. | ||
| Six months later, they asked me to be in the group. | ||
| Child crimes. | ||
| I said no. | ||
| I said, there's no way I'm going to go in that group. | ||
| And my wife agreed with me, and then the next morning before I said no, she didn't sleep all night. | ||
| She was crying, and she said, we have to say yes. | ||
| Oh my gosh, how can we be so fearful of our own pain that we would disregard severe pain beyond our comprehension of these children? | ||
| So, geez, this is all about my wife today. | ||
| She's an amazing woman. | ||
| This woman's dragging you to heaven, man. | ||
| And I'm going kicking and screaming. | ||
| Hopefully I'm going. | ||
| If, you know, I don't know, maybe it's inappropriate to say, but if ever there was someone with some kind of divine purpose, the story that you've told already, I'm like, man, how many people just wish they knew they had that mission, whether they were fearful of it or not. | ||
| Like I said, it's probably scary, but you tell these stories and so much of it sounds unreal. | ||
| The line from your wife, the story from the... We'll get into the film story in a minute, but... Man, it really does feel like you have a purpose here that you are fulfilling. | ||
| I have to think, I think so. | ||
| I feel that. | ||
| I feel that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you're a humble man, and you're saying these things about the fact that you were afraid, and your wife encouraged you, and surely she did, but there are many men whose wives would say, save those children, who'd go, we're not talking about this, honey. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| Yeah, that's, like I said, her script was supposed to read, get your ass home, because I got too many kids here. | ||
| What would be like, in the future, what would be your ideal outcome? | ||
| For you. | ||
| I, whatever I'm going to do, it'll be attached always to this cause. | ||
| Because once you see, it's like you can't unring a bell, right? | ||
| Once you see it, and I'm hoping people are having this experience with Sound of Freedom now, because once you see it, you cannot unsee it. | ||
| And to the depths I've gone, it would be like I could never walk away from this work, you know, in some capacity. | ||
| My undercover days are shot for sure. | ||
| That's, you know, thanks to this guy. | ||
| He ruined my undercover career. | ||
| But maybe we'll inspire many more people. | ||
| That's what we hope. | ||
| Tenfold. | ||
| Hundredfold. | ||
| I mean, outside of that, we talk about the great work you've done. | ||
| The film was masterfully done. | ||
| I thought it was one of the best films I've seen in a very, very long time. | ||
| Just in terms of the production, the pacing, the story, everything. | ||
| I think you guys nailed it. | ||
| If you take a great story and you do it wrong, the story doesn't make it. | ||
| You make a great film, you hit it out of the park, now that story, that mission, makes it somewhere. | ||
| I think people often underestimate the importance of filmmaking and making sure people feel that emotion in that story. | ||
| You know, I think for me as a producer, the number one thing that you need to have is the story. | ||
| The story is like the soul of the movie. | ||
| Without a good story, you have nothing, right? | ||
| So when I met Tim Ballard eight years ago in Los Angeles, California, I was with Alejandro Monteverde, my business partner. | ||
| He's the director of the film and he's the writer of the film as well, along with Rod. | ||
| And when we met him and he told us what he does around the world, him and his friends, his team, they travel around the world undercover rescuing children that are kidnapped for sexual exploitation. | ||
| Kids that are being abused 10 to 15 times a day for many years. | ||
| And then after that, sometimes they don't want them anymore because they're not fresh meat anymore. | ||
| That's the vocabulary that they use, right? | ||
| So, they go to this second business, which is organs traffic. | ||
| They open them and they sell their organs. | ||
| So, when you heard things like this, man, you cannot look the other way around anymore. | ||
| You have to do something. | ||
| And I remember like yesterday when Tim Ballard looked at me and he said, Eduardo, Alejandro, I know it's very sad what I'm telling you. | ||
| I know that it's very sad what I'm telling you about these children, the pain that they're going through. | ||
| But it's more sad now that you know it if you do nothing. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| And I knew at that time in Alejandro as well that we had to do something. | ||
| Well, we're filmmakers. | ||
| We have a weapon of mass instruction and inspiration, right? | ||
| Well, let's make a movie because movies move people and media influence how people think. | ||
| But let me ask you a few questions first. | ||
| This is a global problem, right? | ||
| Yes, especially U.S. | ||
| and Mexico. | ||
| U.S. | ||
| is the number one consumer of child sex. | ||
| Mexico, number one provider. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| Tim, you live in the most powerful country in the world. | ||
| You have the technology, the intelligence, the money, the army, the police, everything. | ||
| How come we don't finish this problem in the United States? | ||
| And he said, because it's not a priority. | ||
| It's not a priority. | ||
| We are not the solution, Eduardo. | ||
| I can be the solution for one child, for 1,000, for 3,000. | ||
| We're talking about millions of children around the world that are kidnapped for sexual exploitation. | ||
| We need a movement. | ||
| And that's when I realized, hold on a second. | ||
| A movie has the potential to start a movement. | ||
| So let's make a movie. | ||
| Tell us what's the most difficult rescue mission you've ever done in your life. | ||
| The most dangerous, the most successful one. | ||
| He said Cartagena, Colombia, the first one. | ||
| Tell me the story. | ||
| And he tells the story. | ||
| And then we ask him, what happened when the kids were rescued? | ||
| Oh man, they were crying. | ||
| There were tears in their eyes. | ||
| They were celebrating their freedom by singing. | ||
| It was like this sound of freedom. | ||
| That's the title and that's the story. | ||
| Then Alejandro, right after he started writing the script for three years, three years of Alejandro's life, and you know what happened to him? | ||
| Right before he started writing the script, man, his father and his older brother got kidnapped in Mexico and they killed him. | ||
| Alejandro Monteverde wrote Sound of Freedom with so much pain, man. | ||
| He put his soul, his blood, his suffering in that movie. | ||
| And I know when people see this movie, Sound of Freedom, they feel the pain of the kids. | ||
| They feel the sacrifice of Tim Ballard. | ||
| They feel the pain of the writer, Alejandro Monteverde. | ||
| And we are honoring his father and his son with this film, too, as well, who are in heaven, along with my father who passed away last year. | ||
| I want to jump to this right here from Box Office Mojo. | ||
| Sound of Freedom, though it's been attacked relentlessly by many in the media, it has cracked $50 million with a current domestic box office of $53,922,551, a massive success. | ||
| Through word of mouth, more and more people are starting to see this film. | ||
| It looks like the amount of gross revenue being generated is increasing, whereas most films have their big Blockbuster Weekend, it goes down, this is the inverse. | ||
| I think this film really is potentially starting a movement. | ||
| More and more people are getting active, focusing on the issue, more people care about the issue. | ||
| There are creepy people in the media that are smearing it as QAnon and other weird things, but get this. | ||
| Even with that, on Rotten Tomatoes, the Tomato Meter, which is the official corporate press reviewers, give it a 75%. | ||
| That surprised me. | ||
| The audience gives it a 100% with over 10,000 verified ratings. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I gotta say, we have been praising this film. | ||
| I think not only was it masterfully done, it is an entertaining film. | ||
| It captures you. | ||
| It makes you feel. | ||
| At the same time, that feeling matters. | ||
| I watch movies every day. | ||
| I watch a different movie every day. | ||
| I've gone to the theaters. | ||
| Yeah, I might get a tear in the eye or something for a good scene. | ||
| I might get excited for a good scene, but none of it matters. | ||
| You know, I know that Captain America fighting somebody is just fun. | ||
| But when I watch a film that's based on a true story, and I see a scene in that film that I couldn't believe was real, and I'm tearing up. | ||
| I was... Let me put it this way, because we're going to start getting into spoilers now. | ||
| There is a part of the film, so a warning to all of you who still want to go see the movie and don't want to hear spoilers. | ||
| We're telling you right now. | ||
| But for everyone else who did, we're going to start getting into some of the finer details so we can better understand this. | ||
| Because I want to talk about one of the most powerful things I've made reference to a week or so ago. | ||
| It is when you rescue this kid on the border. | ||
| So again, spoilers. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| You are talking to this child. | ||
| You tell the child your name, and the kid looks up at you, and he says, Timoteo, he has a necklace that was given to him by his sister, with Saint Timothy, I believe is the, what was it, First Timothy? | ||
| First Timothy 611, scripture reference, yeah. | ||
| And when I saw that, first of all, my name's Tim, so I was just like, Whoa! | ||
| Like, that's crazy for me to hear! | ||
| And your name's Tim too, I know, but like, I'm watching this movie, this kid is being rescued from this evil, evil man and this organization. | ||
| You say, this is my name, and then he pauses, and it seems to be some kind of, like, divine intervention when he says, look what I have, as if you were sent specifically to save him. | ||
| I was on the verge of tears when I saw that happen. | ||
| I said, I'm like, yeah, but I wish that really happened. | ||
| And then you told me it did. | ||
| It happened. | ||
| And I told Alejandro, I said, because I have the necklace. | ||
| I mean, I have it. | ||
| It's like priceless to me. | ||
| I have it in a vault, you know, and I took it out for my podcast and things. | ||
| I should have brought it here, but I said, don't put this in because no one's going to believe it. | ||
| Then it's going to come off weird. | ||
| And what are the chances? | ||
| And people still don't think it's real, but they still like it. | ||
| So he was right. | ||
| But it's great to be able to say it actually happened. | ||
| And it was a strange moment where He, you know, and it's very accurate. | ||
| It didn't happen in the garage like you see in the film. | ||
| It happened in a different room in the aftercare center. | ||
| But he runs to me and he hugs me and the part that they didn't pick up in the film is we're sobbing. | ||
| I'm shaking and he's shaking and that's before I got the necklace. | ||
| That's before. | ||
| He just starts grabbing me and he says to me, and I think This was the kind of transformational moment for me, because I didn't know if I was going to stay in this work, especially after this. | ||
| This was the first kid I ever saw, by the way, who was in a video. | ||
| Before that time, I'd only done videos, like end-user, you know, possession cases of child exploitation material. | ||
| This was the first time when I saw this kid, I knew him. | ||
| I recognized him. | ||
| I had seen him being raped. | ||
| Full, like, 30-minute video. | ||
| And his captor was the guy in the video. | ||
| So I'm already unheightened like, oh my gosh, it's a real kid. | ||
| This is, you know, I'd never seen it. | ||
| And so I'm coloring with him, okay? | ||
| Prager U, you know Prager U? | ||
| Oh yeah, Dennis Prager. | ||
| Today, Prager U launched a series called Light in the Darkness, where they have me telling | ||
| some of these stories. | ||
| This story is told and is dramatized in a really cool way and it's more accurate. | ||
| And we're sitting there and we're coloring and I'm trying to get him to talk because where's your sister? | ||
| Where are the other kids? | ||
| He's five years old, right? | ||
| and and up until that point we've just been kind of friendly we got close he started trusting me and it was like just like this like something just turned on in him and he just ran over to me and jumped into my arms like almost like again it was like An angel said go or something like he was he didn't ease into it we're just coloring and then boom he gets up and runs to me and he jumps into my arms and he starts shaking crying and I'm crying like I just lose it you know I've got kids his age you know you start picturing your own kids you superimpose your kids faces in the moment right um and he says these words to me | ||
| And it's just, I knew at that time that the stats were millions of kids. | ||
| So I heard him say this. | ||
| It's like I heard echoed millions of kids saying this. | ||
| And it's a simple phrase, but a five-year-old should never have to say it. | ||
| And he just said, I don't belong here. | ||
| Can you imagine a five-year-old kid saying, I don't belong here? | ||
| No five-year-old kid would even think to say that. | ||
| And he knew he belonged with his family, and that's when he pulled the necklace. | ||
| And he said, my sister gave me this. | ||
| And I didn't take it. | ||
| I was like, oh, no, no, no, you keep it. | ||
| He gave me a little card, too. | ||
| You see the card in the movie? | ||
| He gave me the card, too. | ||
| And I took it home. | ||
| And I was so broken up, I went home, and PragerU gets into this in the series as well. | ||
| They just launched it today. | ||
| And I go home and I fall down. | ||
| I live 12 minutes from the border. | ||
| It's a small town. | ||
| And I fall down, and the dichotomy of the whole, I walk into my house, my kids are happy, and they're playing, and they're 10 minutes away from this kid who has spent the first five years of his life being sexually assaulted and videotaped. | ||
| And my kids are happy, and they're only 10 minutes away, and I couldn't deal with it. | ||
| It was like the underbelly of my own town, and that's everybody's town. | ||
| And it was so hard for me. | ||
| Remember, this is the first kid that I've seen, and I collapsed on the floor, and Catherine thought I was having a heart attack, because I'd never had this happen. | ||
| I was exhausted, too. | ||
| It was 48 hours or longer I hadn't slept because the case was so intense. | ||
| And she didn't know details, but she kind of cradled me, kind of held me, you know? | ||
| And she was like, what is going on? | ||
| And I tried to get it out, and that's when I made the decision. | ||
| I said, Catherine, I'm either in 1,000% or I'm 1,000% out. | ||
| I have to make a decision right now, because this is too much. | ||
| Then my other kid, who's about the same age as this little boy, Miguel's not his real name, but in the film, my kid who's his age takes the necklace. | ||
| He's like, what's this? | ||
| My kid's Jimmy. | ||
| And he says, what's this? | ||
| And I said, oh, this kid gave it to me. | ||
| I can't tell Jimmy what's going on, you know? | ||
| This kid I just helped. | ||
| He's like, oh, cool. | ||
| He's looking at it. | ||
| We call him Curious Jim. | ||
| He's a very curious kid. | ||
| He's very touchy. | ||
| He looks at everything. | ||
| He's like, oh, the kid put your name on it. | ||
| I didn't see it before! | ||
| It says, Man of God on one side, on the other side it says, First Timothy 611, with that scripture. | ||
| And he's like, how did you put your name on it, Dad? | ||
| I'm like, oh, he didn't. | ||
| No, no, he didn't. | ||
| And then he shows it to me, and then it's like, boom! | ||
| There's my decision. | ||
| It's a thousand percent in. | ||
| I know that for the sake of filmmaking, you guys had to do it the way you did, and it was masterfully done, but that story, I'm sorry, is just Told naturally is a bet it's better here You are not realizing what you've been given you go home and you're saying we make this decision and then your kids like He gave you your name tag. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, I don't I just want to say as I'm hearing all this I I I don't follow any particular religion. | ||
| I do believe in God and I Atheists or whatever can call me naive, they can scoff, but | ||
| I don't know how you hear a story like this, how you watch a film like this, how you hear about the work | ||
| that you've done, how you see a movement like this and believe that there's not something out there, something | ||
| more powerful. | ||
| This I can only describe as, and I'm not, maybe it's not for me to say, but... | ||
| I can say it. | ||
| Divine intervention. | ||
| I can say it, brother. I mean, all glory to God. | ||
| I'm hugging the American dream right now as a Mexican filmmaker. | ||
| Eight years of work. | ||
| So many obstacles. | ||
| So many people saying, you can't do this. | ||
| This is too dangerous. | ||
| Team telling me, brother, before you guys commit to do this, I need to tell you something. | ||
| We have a lot of friends. | ||
| But we have a lot of enemies too, and those enemies will be yours. | ||
| Are you sure you want to do this? | ||
| And I closed my eyes for a second. | ||
| I said, what if this is my son? | ||
| What if this is my daughter? | ||
| What if this is my niece, my nephew? | ||
| What would I do? | ||
| You know, it was like, just imagine that. | ||
| I will stop everything that I'm doing. | ||
| I will hope that the entire world will stop everything they're doing so they can help me to find my son, my daughter, my niece, my nephew, right? | ||
| Okay, so that's my motivation. | ||
| Don't wait until this tragedy happens to you for you to wake up, right? | ||
| Wake up now, do something, and I can't believe that, you know, Angel Studios is the smallest distribution company in America. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So after three years of everyone passing, like, no, this is not for us. | ||
| No, this movie is not a business for us. | ||
| This is not a good business for us. | ||
| This is not for us. | ||
| So three years of doors being closed and closed and closed and closed. | ||
| And you have two options. | ||
| Either you give up or you don't give up. | ||
| We choose the second one. | ||
| We don't give up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| Because it's about saving children. | ||
| What if this is your son? | ||
| What happened after? | ||
| I'm praying for God to send an angel to rescue this film. | ||
| And I got a phone call from Angel Studios. | ||
| Hey, we're very interested in your movie. | ||
| Do you have any other options? | ||
| No, you're my only option. | ||
| Okay, well, let's close the deal. | ||
| Five days later, we sign the contract and, okay, this is three and a half months ago, right? | ||
| Three and a half months ago. | ||
| And then, okay, when are we coming out? | ||
| July 4th. | ||
| What? | ||
| Brother, we don't have, I mean, we don't have, like, money for publicity or marketing. | ||
| The biggest films in the world are gonna come out July 4th, week before and week after. | ||
| Mission Impossible. | ||
| Indiana Jones, competing with the biggest company in the world. | ||
| They have hundreds of millions of dollars. | ||
| Are you kidding? | ||
| Eduardo, it's very important July 4th, because it's Independence Day. | ||
| Freedom. | ||
| We need to shake the conscience of America, because yes, let's celebrate freedom in one hand, but let's do something else so we can bring freedom back to those children that are not free, brother. | ||
| Let's do something. | ||
| We never thought that July 4th, Sound of Freedom was number one movie in America. | ||
| This is a miracle. | ||
| All glory to God. | ||
| People like to make jokes that we live in a simulation. | ||
| And it's because reality seems to be too absurd. | ||
| We've had so many weird goings-on in politics of President Donald Trump, and so you'll see many of these individuals who are secular atheists tweet things like, I hope the writers of this season, you know, do X, Y, or Z, as if to imply there is someone with greater power over us that they're starting to believe. | ||
| Yeah, I always find it funny that they could entertain such an idea without realizing, like, you're literally talking about divine purpose or God. | ||
| I bring that up because Seeing the movie, hearing the stories, it feels, like I mentioned, the Timoteo necklace thing, I'm like, that was masterful writing, I wish it was real. | ||
| Well, it was real. | ||
| And then you start to realize that some things in life are so miraculous that you would assume it was written to be a story, that it never could really happen, but these things do happen. | ||
| When that kid, when you told the story of the little kid saying, I don't belong here. | ||
| No five-year-old should say that. | ||
| My thought was, why would a five-year-old say that? | ||
| Unless what was happening was so out of alignment with the law of nature, whatever you want to call it, with God's plan or whatever, that there was direct intervention to correct this evil and set it right. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And little did I know, you know, like when you get into the Columbia scene and I remember being in Columbia and I'm meeting these guys and this is after I've left the government and it's one of our first big operations and I remember thinking, Man, like, no one believes me. | ||
| Like, I go home and tell them, my family and friends, I have a very small audience at this time, right? | ||
| This isn't real. | ||
| Like, 11-year-old kids, people want to have sex with an 11-year-old? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| And I remember thinking, I was going through a whole island scene, and you see the whole Columbia scene, most of the movie, it's filmed on location, by the way, where these things happened, including this van scene with the kid at the port of entry. | ||
| They filmed it, Homeland Security gave us permission to film right in the very place where it happened. | ||
| That's why I can't watch the film. | ||
| It's too much for me. | ||
| But I remember thinking, I wish I had cameras in my eyes. | ||
| I remember having that thought, is that millions of people could watch what I'm seeing because they don't believe it. | ||
| And so who would have thought, like I said, another miracle that eight, nine years later, literally millions of people would see it through my eyes because of this guy. | ||
| Thanks for that, man, and to you for your sacrifice, Tim, because meeting a hero, a true hero, it changed your life. | ||
| No, but here's the thing, I'm not that, because I love history, okay? | ||
| We had slavery in this country at a time, horrific, nothing worse than the transatlantic slave trade. | ||
| How did it end? | ||
| You know, we can rescue 100,000, whatever, just like Harriet Tubman, who's my hero of all time. | ||
| But who ended it? | ||
| And it wasn't even Lincoln. | ||
| When Lincoln met Harry Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, for the first time in the middle of the Civil War, he said to her, so you're the little lady that wrote the big book. | ||
| that started this war. Wow. What he was saying was, because he at that point in 1862, he had | ||
| changed the purpose of the Civil War to just bring in the Union back to, no, we're gonna use this to | ||
| liberate the captive. And it was Harry Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, all | ||
| the great abolitionists, they changed it. They converted him to the true cause. | ||
| And so he, I'm so tired of you calling me like a hero or whatever because like what's going to end this thing is you and you and you like the storytellers are going to end this. | ||
| I can't do it. | ||
| I can, the storytellers change culture. | ||
| And this, I mean, look at the screen. | ||
| It's a $53 million in 10 days, 5 million people in 10 days. | ||
| Like this could change history. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And this could change it. | ||
| More films. | ||
| More movies, more culture building, more change. | ||
| This is beyond just this one story. | ||
| One of the reasons I'm so adamant about telling people to go see this is that Hollywood is some dark, dark stuff, man. | ||
| We've seen these actors come out and talk about what happened to them in Hollywood. | ||
| There have been some recent stories of celebrities, when they were kids, how they were abused and exploited. | ||
| That's an evil place. | ||
| And not everybody there, I know, I know people who work there, but there's gotta be a way that we can build something else. | ||
| And this is a path towards that as well. | ||
| I wanted to add, though, I'll say a couple things. | ||
| In the beginning of the film, Jim Caviezel and you, obviously, in real life, had to watch these videos. | ||
| I don't know how you do it. | ||
| That scene where the other agent says, I don't think I can do this, I'm thinking to myself, how is a job like this possible? | ||
| Because, spoilers, I know I warned you. | ||
| In the film, I don't know how true to life the direct lines are or whatever, but Your character, you know, you go to this pedophile and you say that in watching these films, you can't help but be attracted to it. | ||
| And I'm watching this thinking like, I don't see that as being a physical, mental possibility for me. | ||
| I imagine that if I was in a circumstance, I'd quit on the spot. | ||
| The moment anyone tried to bring anything up, I'd punch the monitor. | ||
| And I got to be completely honest. | ||
| Watching this film, I'm in the middle of it, and I'm thinking, am I wrong about the death penalty? | ||
| That's how seriously I was moved by this. | ||
| I'm very anti-death penalty, but seeing this message made me really just start to think about what the Founding Fathers meant, how they went through this, what does it really mean, and it really challenged my moral views on how we deal with crimes like this. | ||
| That's how I'll phrase it. | ||
| And ultimately I would say I'm still very much opposed to death penalty, but when you watch this... It challenged you. | ||
| It challenged me. | ||
| These people and the crimes they have committed against children is the most heinous thing in my mind imaginable. | ||
| You talk about passion murders and things like that, and those are at the top. | ||
| Murder being one of the worst possible things you can do. | ||
| But you know, when it comes to a lot of these crimes of passion and planning, there is some underlying purpose about greed. | ||
| There's some, you know, sin, one of the seven deadly sins associated with it, and that's why it's near the top. | ||
| But this abuse of children, I think, the worst crime imaginable. | ||
| And my view is, if murder of an individual warrants the death penalty, why would not this, the most heinous of all crimes imaginable? | ||
| And that's a deep challenge for me. | ||
| Ultimately, where I land the death penalty is I just don't trust the government enough to accurately deal out justice. | ||
| Minimum 100 years of jail. | ||
| Minimum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| For anybody who steals the innocence and the purity of a child. | ||
| Locked up forever. | ||
| Minimum. | ||
| Minimum. | ||
| There are people who have abused children who have been convicted of abusing children in a court of law and have served their sentences and now they're just out in public. | ||
| How can you serve a sentence for that crime? | ||
| Doing the same thing. | ||
| Exactly, that's one of the highest recidivism rates. | ||
| That's true with sex crimes generally speaking and they just let these people back out on the streets. | ||
| Would you like someone like that to be your neighbor if you have a child? | ||
| Yeah, well this happened too. | ||
| I've talked about this before. | ||
| Brian Peck, he was convicted of abusing a child and then after he was released from prison, what the court said is he was not allowed to work with children. | ||
| He previously worked at Disney Channel. | ||
| The Disney Channel hired him back, but to speak to them over the phone and consult over the phone so he wouldn't be around children. | ||
| Why is this man out of prison? | ||
| Why does this man have a job? | ||
| Why would these networks want to continue working with him? | ||
| It's sickening. | ||
| So, what I want to ask, and I actually do think it would be, I'd like to bring Ian into this one. | ||
| I don't even know how to ask it, but you mentioned that before you rescued this kid, you have to watch these videos. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How could you possibly? | ||
| So I'll tell you, I have a million holes burned in my brain, that's how I describe it. | ||
| And yes, one of the hardest scenes for me to watch is in fact the scene where you were, you know, Jim's crying. | ||
| It's, I can't tell you how real that is. | ||
| I don't know, a couple thousand hours maybe, over 10 years, having to watch these videos. | ||
| And these aren't, you know, I remember talking to my friend once and they're like, oh come on, I mean, how can you tell the difference between a 17 year old and an 18 year old? | ||
| I'm like, you think that's what child porn is? | ||
| Child exploitation material we got? | ||
| Bro, we're talking seven, six, five. | ||
| We don't have time to get into like adolescent minors. | ||
| There's been a 5,000% increase in those kind of sex videos in the last decade. | ||
| And it's only going up. | ||
| And so that burns a hole in your brain. | ||
| And the other thing that burns a hole in your brain is undercover work. | ||
| And that is true. | ||
| The story is true. | ||
| The Olshansky character. | ||
| Very real case. | ||
| I provided Alejandro with a 1 hour and 20 minute interview. | ||
| Where I'm talking to this guy, Special Agent Tim Ballard, talking to Olshansky, and he won't break. | ||
| And he is a pedophile, like, extraordinary. | ||
| He's got two million pieces of child exploitation material, videos, everything, categorized, cataloged, just like you see in the film. | ||
| And he won't break. | ||
| He won't tell me where he was hiding it. | ||
| He was hiding it in his house, in the floorboards. | ||
| We ended up finding it. | ||
| How I broke him, I kicked the agent out. | ||
| I said, hey, let me try this. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Crazy idea. | ||
| I'm wired up and I start going into what his literature is. | ||
| I read his books and stuff online. | ||
| Every man is a pedophile, but the puritanical society has crushed the human spirit of sexuality and blah blah blah blah blah. | ||
| So I'm like, okay, let's test it. | ||
| And I went in. | ||
| I went in and tried to convince him that I am... | ||
| You know, it's easier when I'm Brian Black. | ||
| That's one of the undercover names I once used. | ||
| Or, you know, you get to be a different person. | ||
| This was me being undercover as me. | ||
| Tim Ballard, Special Agent, Closet Pedophile. | ||
| And how can I help myself? | ||
| Because I have the largest collection of child exploitation material on the planet in the evidence vault. | ||
| He fell for it. | ||
| He fell for it. | ||
| And I showed Alejandro, I said, listen to this. | ||
| He called me freaking out. | ||
| He was shaking. | ||
| He was like, bro, I can't believe how sick this guy is and how dark you had to get. | ||
| And he's like, I gotta figure out how to take an hour and 20 minute interview and reduce it to like two minutes. | ||
| And you see how he does it in the movie. | ||
| He does a pretty good job with the cigarette. | ||
| I won't say more, but that's a very real thing. | ||
| That burned another million holes in my brain. | ||
| I walked out of that, and it shows Jim splashing water. | ||
| I walked around the side of the house and I vomited. | ||
| Right by the tire of my car, I remember. | ||
| I vomited. | ||
| There's a line that Jim Caviezel says, you mentioned, was ad-libbed. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| That scene was absolutely incredible. | ||
| When people are cheering for the good guys in that, I'm... But Ian, the reason I wanted to bring you into this is Ian used to moderate for a social media website. | ||
| I don't know the degree to the awful things you saw in doing moderation. | ||
| Did not even hold a candle to what you've been through, man, or what you've seen. | ||
| I'd see every once in a while, I'd see a leg get blown off. | ||
| I didn't ever see a little kid naked. | ||
| And I don't ever want to. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| But it was, I had to, it broke me after, and I kept doing it and it kept breaking me and then I, I just kept doing it because it was one, I had to, someone had to do it. | ||
| I don't think human minds are supposed to be able to look at that stuff. | ||
| No way. | ||
| They say that people who work at Facebook and these social media platforms, this kind of stuff gets uploaded, you know, to varying degrees. | ||
| I'm not saying just one kind of awful content. | ||
| There's varying degrees of really bad stuff from someone just getting mercilessly attacked, to murdered, to child exploitation. | ||
| And there are stories about these Facebook employees who are completely traumatized from working this job where they're trying to remove this stuff and I think people should realize that that was one of the reasons I think the film is so good because that issue right there like understand man there there are people who if If you don't watch it, how do you stop these guys? | ||
| You've got to prove in a court of law, you've got to have them arrested, you have to have them stand trial, and the evidence has to be shown. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| You want to share, like, for example, this is not in the movie because, I mean, it's very difficult to make a movie about this guy when he's telling you, like, so many beautiful, powerful, like, stories, you know, about saving children, and you have only two hours. | ||
| He said, brother, we need to do a TV series because I need like 200 episodes to tell your story, you know? | ||
| So that's why it's very difficult. | ||
| But that, when someone asks you, what is the hardest thing ever happened to you? | ||
| And you said, well, smiling, smile to the face of evil. | ||
| Can you explain? | ||
| Because that happened there, but it's not in the movie. | ||
| But that is like, man, when you shared that story, I was like, I would have killed the guy. | ||
| Well, that's the part about the other million holes in your brain. | ||
| It's one thing to see the images, but then you've got to hang with these guys. | ||
| And you've got to hang with them for months sometimes. | ||
| And you hang out all day, all night. | ||
| You're their buddies, your business partners. | ||
| And how do you do it? | ||
| This messes with your brain. | ||
| Because there's chemistry with the brain connection, right? | ||
| You can't fake it. | ||
| So you have to dig down hard and find the humanity in them. | ||
| There's something good redeeming in their heart and there's usually something and you gotta like grab it and try to love it. | ||
| Because you can't fake it that long. | ||
| There's a scene in the film where you're on the island and the Don, I think his name was right, tries taking one of the kids and you intervene, your character intervenes. | ||
| It's the scene where you're trying to sting these guys, save these kids. | ||
| Law enforcement is ready. | ||
| But before the rest of the kids arrive, because you don't know where they're at, this guy tries to rape a child. | ||
| Your character, I don't know if this is absolutely true as to how it happened or whatever, but your character intervenes and says, no, this one's mine. | ||
| And the guy puts a gun to his head and says, step out of the way. | ||
| And that's a scary thought that, I don't know, you can answer to this, circumstances where you have to collect information to shut these guys down. | ||
| But if you stop them in the moment, you jeopardize the whole mission, and it could put a hundred kids' lives at risk. | ||
| But that kid right there needs saving now. | ||
| I could not imagine what you do in a moment like this other than, I would assume, just save that kid. | ||
| It's tough, man. | ||
| What you have to do is, ahead of time, set it up so you don't find yourself in those situations. | ||
| So in full transparency, that scene was fictionalized. | ||
| It was a cool scene, right? | ||
| Because it brought this intensity and it showed me and Vampiro working together, which is true in spirit. | ||
| We worked together. | ||
| He's a very real guy. | ||
| The Vampiro character, very real. | ||
| But we plan out ahead of time to where on that operation and others like that, we would never let them be in the same space. | ||
| So we put the kids somewhere else. | ||
| Candy games. | ||
| We have female operators who are nurses pretending to be the groomers. | ||
| That's what traffickers think. | ||
| Getting the kids ready and then we separate. | ||
| We lure them with the money. | ||
| If you want the money, you better come over here. | ||
| One time we did an op where we put a yacht out off the coast. | ||
| You gotta come to the yacht, and we're gonna do the deal out there. | ||
| That's how far, we'll separate them. | ||
| So those kind of things never actually have to happen. | ||
| Did you, having spent time with, like, pedophiles, pederasts, because phile means love, like familial love, philia is like love of friend, but it's eros, it's erotic love. | ||
| Correct, yeah. | ||
| Pederasts. | ||
| Pederasts, is that what they call it? | ||
| Well, they don't, but they should. | ||
| You're right, yeah. | ||
| Do you find that there is a road to redemption for people that have gone through that? | ||
| I want to say yes, because I love redemption stories, but I've never seen it. | ||
| Vampiro, a little bit. | ||
| Well, Vampiro actually didn't rape a child. | ||
| He was involved with a prostitute who was selling her child, and when he saw that... | ||
| Alejandro played with that a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| He thought it was like an older, and then he found out that she was like 13 years old, and that's when he said, oh my gosh, I'm gonna kill myself. | ||
| But I don't think he actually was with somebody who was underage. | ||
| No, he was actually never with someone underage. | ||
| So this, for those that haven't seen it, you know, for context, I know it is spoilers, but this is someone you were working with to try and stop the exploitation of kids. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| The reason I ask if there's a road to redemption, or you would think, is because, like, Tim, you mentioned it tested your morality, your Your thoughts of the death penalty started creeping in. | ||
| And when I was watching the movie, I was thinking, surveillance state. | ||
| Why don't we have a surveillance state to watch for these and to take to prevent this stuff? | ||
| And like, because a surveillance state would be horrific. | ||
| And you were saying you wish that you had cameras in your eyes like they can do that. | ||
| That could be the future. | ||
| But I don't think that's better. | ||
| I'll tell you why. | ||
| Because Epstein was a real guy. | ||
| And when we make laws, and we give power to government under the assumption it will always be good, bad people find a way to exploit that power in some way in very, very awful and dangerous ways, to the point where Epstein was actually, I think he was caught early on, and he got some kind of sweetheart deal, and then was released. | ||
| Now you've got, well Epstein's no longer here but he's arrested, Maxwell was convicted, and so we think that we enact these laws of surveillance state, for instance, we'll stop them, no. | ||
| Sooner or later, a bad person exploits the system, takes advantage of it, and now we're underneath them wielding that power against us, which makes it very difficult. | ||
| So there's got to be some balance. | ||
| I'm not going to pretend to be the expert on how we do it or how it should be done, but we have to be careful about giving too much power to one institution or organization unless it be wielded in negative ways. | ||
| Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself because I think what a big part of the solution is, like you were saying, it's the storytelling. | ||
| It's letting people know that it happened. | ||
| But what I'm chomping at the bit, is it just more undercover sting operations? | ||
| It is, and I'll tell you why. | ||
| After that operation in Columbia happened, again, I wish the film were 10 hours so you could see everything that happened. | ||
| We went back. | ||
| That was such a big hit. | ||
| In fact, it was under-reported in the film, 54 rescues. | ||
| It was 120 rescues in two different locations. | ||
| And there's a documentary, DNA Films, it's an Emmy-winning documentary. | ||
| No one's seen it yet. | ||
| Angel Studios is putting it out called Triple Take, and it dissects everything that happened on that island. | ||
| But after we did those three hits, 120 rescues, 15 traffickers down, we went back under different undercover faces we've sent them in and asked the same people who otherwise would have introduced you to the traffickers and everyone was like, don't even talk about that. | ||
| Don't you know what happened? | ||
| These Americans came down. | ||
| You gotta see the papers. | ||
| And we're just inside going, it's working! | ||
| Yes! | ||
| It's working for the first time! | ||
| These guys are looking over their shoulder. | ||
| For the first time, there's some kind of a consequence that can make the barrier to entry into this black market of child slavery, you know, too high to entry. | ||
| I do love them saying the Americans came down. | ||
| They're scared. | ||
| They know that there are people who will stop them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I love this story, man. | ||
| The idea of some kind of divine intervention and the idea of just the plain old physical reality in which you are saving kids, you are telling this story, gives me hope, makes me believe in the good, makes me feel like, you know, I don't understand how someone out there could be a nihilist. | ||
| Someone out there could be pessimistic about where we're headed. | ||
| There are bad people out there, but these are the stories that give you hope. | ||
| And I hope people, for one, go see this movie right now. | ||
| Well, as soon as possible. | ||
| Bring your friends and family. | ||
| But I hope people are moved by this to the point where they, in some way, get involved. | ||
| The message at the end of the film from Jim, and from you guys, about this could maybe inspire people the way Uncle Tom's Cabin did, I love it. | ||
| This, this, uh, the issue of trafficking often comes up, uh, in the film Nefarious. | ||
| Have you guys seen Nefarious? | ||
| No, yeah. | ||
|
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I recommend it. | |
| You gotta see it. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| More of like a talking piece, but there's an excellent line, spoiler alert, it's been out for a little while, where, you know, this guy, this, this psychiatrist thinks he's this virtuous dude, And then the demon says there are more people in slavery today than when slavery was legal. | ||
| And then he says, I don't know how many, a large portion or like more of them, most of them are sex slaves. | ||
| And you sit here thinking that you're doing good, that humans have improved. | ||
| And that's the kind of stuff where I'm just like... | ||
| We need to stop. | ||
| We need to figure out how we put an end to this. | ||
| And it's only gonna happen if people are moved to believe in something. | ||
| I often talk about why there's crime, we talk about rising crime in cities, and I say it's not the laws necessarily, it's our moral, it's our cultures, it's our moral framework. | ||
| If people who live in these cities don't care, if they're gonna stand by and just watch the crimes happen, if the police aren't going to intervene to arrest people, if laws are actually being put in place or precedent that stops people from saving the day, you will continue to see this stuff degrade. | ||
| But if more and more people hold in their hearts that certain things should not be there, unthinkable, and we will do something to stop it, it becomes normal. | ||
| And then you stop it. | ||
| There will always be evil, but... I think we've, for the longest time, at least in my life, so much of what we've seen in big cities especially with the rise in crime is... | ||
| Not my problem. | ||
| Leave me out of it. | ||
| I hope this film has the effect of making people not feel that way and say, we're going to be active. | ||
| We're going to do something. | ||
| It's happening. | ||
| It's happening. | ||
| I mean, I have never seen in my life so many people that they go, they go to see Sound of Freedom and when they leave the theater, they videotape themselves and they share their testimony with tears, crying, their heart are speaking. | ||
| And then they share that with all their, you know, their followers. | ||
| Those are our posters, because we don't have a budget for posters, but we have millions of people talking about this film, and that's the movement. | ||
| No one can stop this movement anymore. | ||
| They can stop Tim. | ||
| They can stop me. | ||
| They can stop millions of people that are just watching the film, and it's going to be just more and more. | ||
| This is a global movement, brother. | ||
| This is just the beginning. | ||
| This movie is coming out all over the world. | ||
| And we're providing an opportunity right now. | ||
| So something interesting happened at the end of the film. | ||
| It used to say, and then they created Operation Underground Railroad. | ||
| And again, I also became the CEO of the Nazarene Fund. | ||
| I told Angel Studios, take the logo off of where you are. | ||
| That's my baby. | ||
| I made it. | ||
| Take it off. | ||
| Because so many organizations out there are doing such great work. | ||
| And we're not the solution to every kid. | ||
| For many we are. | ||
| Neither is the Nazarene Fund. | ||
| And so, I actually, before the film came out, I stepped down from both. | ||
| So that I could create something brand new. | ||
| It's the only scalable approach. | ||
| And it supports Nazarene and OUR. | ||
| It's called the Spear Fund. | ||
| I'm actually announcing it for the first time right now on your show. | ||
| The Spear Fund, tip of the spear. | ||
| And what it is, it's a scalable approach to ending this. | ||
| Because every kid deserves the best rescuer, the best rescue organization, the best group, | ||
| whatever it is, and it's not just one organization. | ||
| So what we're doing is me and the co-founder of it is Jessica Munoz, who's one of the most | ||
| significant aftercare specialists in the United States. | ||
| She built something in Hawaii that was amazing called Pearl Haven. | ||
| And we are getting funds together so that we can then identify, | ||
| it's a capitalistic kind of approach where it's like, if you're the best, | ||
| you're getting the funding. | ||
| Because you're the best option for that kid, and you're the best option for that kid. | ||
| Every kid's going to get the best rescue. | ||
| So if people can support that, it's the spearfund.org. | ||
| Go there. | ||
| It's the fastest approach, the most effective approach to rescuing kids, and we're super excited to get people turned on to that. | ||
| In the movie, your character, Will You, needed funding. | ||
| So is this like you're now the one that's funding? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| My undercover days are done, okay? | ||
| But OUR, we're one of the first. | ||
| There's been many others, but to do what we do and the way we do it, but that's changed. | ||
| In the last 10 years, lots of vet groups and former law enforcement guys have built these amazing organizations. | ||
| So my goal now, I've left the two organizations that I love, and I still love, and I will still support, so that I can support all the others, because that's what the kids deserve. | ||
| I mean, again, if I'm being honest, I'm not going to say that the one I built is the end-all for everybody. | ||
| But there is an end-all for that one or that one. | ||
| And I want them all to rise. | ||
| With the energy of this film, I want there to be a solution. | ||
| And if people want to get involved, thespearfund.org, give us what you can, resources that way, and we'll return stories. | ||
| And we'll introduce you to people who are rescuing kids. | ||
| Better than I can do it. | ||
| And so it's exciting. | ||
| It's an exciting time because I think we can maybe end this thing. | ||
| I imagine there's multiple tiers of reasoning why it's happening. | ||
| It's like a financial reason for the people at the very top, and then it's like a sexual reason for the depraved that are purchasing into it. | ||
| But how do you disincentivize the financial aspect? | ||
| Do you just make them terrified that everyone around them is going to turn them in next? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's the deterrent effect that we saw in Columbia. | ||
| These guys have been working with impunity throughout the world. | ||
| They're abusing children, selling them, and there's no consequence. | ||
| Now there is. | ||
| And this movie proves that. | ||
| I hope every pedophile and trafficker is scared out of their mind right now because they know that it's not just OUR, it's not just the Nazarene Fund, but it's going to be every other group that's going to be empowered now through this film, through the Spirit Fund, and I want them to be looking over their shoulders and thinking twice before they put their hand on a kid. | ||
| Why do you think it is so many media outlets were attacking the film, insulting it, saying QAnon or paranoid? | ||
| Well, first I'll say this. | ||
| It's so bizarre because this film was made, produced, written five, six years ago before QAnon was even a thing, so it's impossible what they're saying. | ||
| Why are they saying it? | ||
| Here's my theory. | ||
| I think I'm right. | ||
| There's an agenda out there, and there's a conversation to be had, and these outlets don't want to have it. | ||
| By the way, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, they all praised this operation when it happened. | ||
| They don't remember, it was eight years ago, but I have the articles. | ||
| Look at these guys rescuing these kids in Columbia! | ||
| And now, eight years later, oh, it's QAnon, it didn't even happen, blah blah. | ||
| There's a conversation they don't want to have. | ||
| They don't want to talk about the fact that there's 85,000 unaccompanied minors who came to our border and were released and lost in a country that's the highest consumer for child sex material. | ||
| That's scary. | ||
| They don't want to talk about the fact that teachers unions are providing what we would call pornography. | ||
| To third graders, right? | ||
| I used to be able to arrest people for providing the material to children that teachers are currently giving to kids under the guise of sex education. | ||
| They don't want to talk about 13-year-old girls being able to consent. | ||
| And I'm very libertarian when it comes to all these things for an adult, right? | ||
| Oh, I'll go get the books, yeah. | ||
| I think I got a couple of the books you're talking about. | ||
| We have a book. | ||
| That they have in grade schools. | ||
| Oh, I know that one! | ||
| Yes! | ||
| That teaches children how to use adult sex apps. | ||
| Yes, I'm very familiar. | ||
| I just posted on this. | ||
| There was a teacher who gave middle schoolers, 10 to 12 years old, a book called This Book is Gay. | ||
| It's the title of the book. | ||
| And in it, it explains how to use Grindr. | ||
| On page 182. | ||
| Now that one we can't show either. | ||
| You can't show some of these pictures! | ||
| I'm telling you, I could have arrested people for giving this to kids back in the early 2000s. | ||
| As it should be. | ||
| And now teachers are giving it to kids. | ||
| They don't want to talk about this. | ||
| And then you know what it leads to? | ||
| Consent. | ||
| Pedophiles have been pushing consent. | ||
| Kids should be able to consent. | ||
| I've studied pedophiles. | ||
| I've hunted them for two decades, right? | ||
| And they have platforms. | ||
| They have literature. | ||
| Kids should be able to make decisions for voting, for whatever they want to do. | ||
| Why are they saying this? | ||
| Well, because they want them to have legal consent to have sex with a 12-year-old, 11-year-old, whatever. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| This whole trans voice, and again, I'm libertarian for adults. | ||
| Do what you want to do. | ||
| I will fight for your right to choose to do that. | ||
| But these are children. | ||
| And when you let a kid consent to gender mutilation or consent to puberty blockers, you're an inch away from allowing them to consent. | ||
| You've lost the argument. | ||
| But this quite literally is one of their big arguments. | ||
| There have been numerous writers in what they call the queer movement who have talked about children consenting. | ||
| There are prominent activists who are making this argument and in fact tomorrow we're actually going to be having a debate about, I'll keep it vague for a little bit because I don't want to Spoil it or scare off the people who are coming on the show, but there's going to be a conversation about what is or isn't appropriate for kids. | ||
| I think it's fairly obvious. | ||
| When we ask the question... | ||
| We have people come on and debate various ideas, and I'll show these books to people and say, for what reason should children be shown these books? | ||
| And they just blindly defend it. | ||
| I just want to say, the real question is not, why do kids need to see this? | ||
| It's, why do you need to show this to a child? | ||
| Why are you so obsessed with ensuring that a child will have their innocence destroyed by this perverse content? | ||
| Let me ask you. | ||
| I mean, you're the expert. | ||
| Can you break down how would you describe grooming? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| First... | ||
| The pedophiles want a kid who's sexualized, who will participate and choose to have sex with them. | ||
| That's what they want. | ||
| But you gotta get a kid sexualized first. | ||
| You know what porn does to an adult brain? | ||
| I mean, I've talked to porn addicts. | ||
| An adult brain. | ||
| It changes the chemistry of the brain. | ||
| It actually creates a damage of the brain. | ||
| Kids whose brains are just crystallizing still, they're little sponges. | ||
| So you give a third grader this, and they're giving third graders this stuff. | ||
| And then you expose them to TikTok and let them have that. | ||
| I mean, these kids, by the time they're 13, they're sex robots. | ||
| They're teaching kids to masturbate, too, in some schools. | ||
| That's part of it. | ||
| Go to your special corner and touch yourself while you look at this. | ||
| So these kids are already sexualized to the point where, and again, pedophiles are salivating. | ||
| Like, hey, they're doing our job for us. | ||
| These groups, the leftists out there, they're doing our job for us. | ||
| They're laughing, they're laughing right now. | ||
| They're salivating. | ||
| But you say they are doing the job for us, why not they are doing the job? | ||
| The groups are one and the same. | ||
| I made this argument. | ||
| I can't remember exactly what the story was, but I was critical of literal grooming. | ||
| In fact, let's go back to pre-Elon Musk Twitter. | ||
| There was an image of adult men showing graphic adult images to children. | ||
| And I said, this is grooming. | ||
| I got suspended. | ||
| They deleted the tweet and they said, you can't post this kind of stuff. | ||
| And I'm like, I can't call out the abuse. | ||
| They said it was offensive. | ||
| It was hate speech. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| So I criticize a story and I get these leftist publications Attacking me for it. | ||
| My response was, if my position is that child abusers are bad and you rush to their defense and attack me over it, my only assumption is you're a child abuser or you are in support of child abuse. | ||
| Both are wrong. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They get so angry about it, but I'm like, there's no legitimate reason to defend what they're doing in these schools. | ||
| And for the same reason, no legitimate reason, to attack Sound of Freedom! | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| It's the same motive. | ||
| And these guys also, every one of them, most of these publications, by the way, you're gonna find they're also promoting this, stop calling them pedophiles, that's mean! | ||
| Call them minor attracted persons. | ||
| And add them to the LGBTQ... I'm going to call them perverts. | ||
| I will absolutely not. | ||
| Make it worse, right? | ||
| Perverts. | ||
| Do you think that, I've heard yesterday, I think you mentioned, the average age of a child that sees pornography on the internet is 7 years old. | ||
|
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Average first exposure by some statistics is 7. | |
| And also 5,000% increase in child trafficking. | ||
| Are they somehow related? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Is this the grooming? | ||
| Absolutely! | ||
| Because they want willing victims. | ||
| They want willing victims. | ||
| Let me ask you something about, we've been talking about this for the past couple weeks. | ||
| If someone goes out in the public, holding up a graphic image of adults engaging in adult activities, that person gets arrested. | ||
|
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No question. | |
| Cop comes and arrests them. | ||
| The internet is a publicly accessible space, in much the same way. | ||
| But for some reason, we have not enforced laws preventing people from posting obscene, lewd, lascivious images in places children have access to. | ||
| Why? | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| Now I know there's a lot of libertarians who are like, oh, you're talking dangerous talk, Tim. | ||
| We gotta have freedom here. | ||
| And I'm like, we don't have the freedom to go and take an advertising truck with a TV on it, park it in the middle of Times Square, and play porn. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| They will come and tow that vehicle and arrest you on the spot. | ||
| So how is it that you can go on a social media platform children use and do the exact same thing? | ||
| That's a question I have. | ||
| Perhaps I don't have the moral authority or the understanding to say what we should or shouldn't do. | ||
| I lean towards maybe we should enforce it as illegal as it should be. | ||
| I'm wondering if you would agree or what your thoughts would be on that. | ||
| I mean, it's this weird double standard. | ||
| I'd say the same thing. | ||
| If you see what kids are doing, you're going to talk about this tomorrow on your show. | ||
| But what adults are doing to kids in these forums, in these parades they're doing, or the drag queen shows, I mean, you've seen the videos. | ||
| They're exposing themselves. | ||
| If that same person walked to a school playground and did that same thing, they'd be arrested. | ||
| But again, they're still kids. | ||
| They're kids in both places. | ||
| And here we are again, and there are states, I think Tennessee, who are trying to create laws that protect kids from that material. | ||
| You can't just post whatever, there's certain barriers, there's ID requirements that have to be verified for a kid to get through a certain wall in the internet. | ||
| I think that's important, to protect kids. | ||
| Yeah, one thing I want to mention here, you were sort of talking about genderqueer and a lot of this perverse literature that they're putting into the school system. | ||
| One thing that a lot of people aren't aware of is that this isn't something on the fringes, and even what you were talking about with respect to the pedophile who's depicted at the beginning of Sound of Freedom, who has written about how he thinks these are natural impulses and society's puritanical. | ||
| This person, unfortunately, is part of a movement which is much broader and more mainstream than people realize. | ||
| Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, all of the premier sex researchers who we are told to look to as experts and pioneers said similar things. | ||
| Kinsey wrote in his book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, that the reason a girl is traumatized when she's abused when she's underage is because the parents made a big deal out of it and not because of what actually happened. | ||
| This is in his published work. | ||
| This is the person who's credited as being the first person to scientifically study sex. | ||
| His first book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, was published in 1948 and sold several hundred thousand copies. | ||
| This was a textbook. | ||
| People were reading it. | ||
| And there's a table, infamously, titled Table 34, that includes data tables. | ||
| Which only could have been collected through the abuse of children. | ||
| I'm not gonna graphically explain what those data tables purport to measure, but it's hundreds and hundreds of boys under the age of 15 who had to have been raped for him to get that information. | ||
| This is mainstream. | ||
| It's public knowledge. | ||
| His co-author, author Wardell Pomeroy, was in Time Magazine in the 1980s saying out loud that he thinks incest between adults and children can be, in his words, beneficial. | ||
| This is not even hiding under the rug. | ||
| There's an interview on the Phil Donahue Show with people from the Kinsey Institute and Judith Riesman, and they're defending all of this, saying that it was okay. | ||
| So these aren't fringe weirdos here and there. | ||
| This stuff is way more mainstream than people realize. | ||
|
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It is. | |
| It's just taken this long. | ||
| But he's the father, by the way, not only of our modern sex education programs, like this stuff, he's also the father of the pedophile movement. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It all derives from the same sick, you know, backwards falsehoods. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So thank you for that. | ||
| I mean, you clearly know your stuff on that. | ||
| You're talking about this pedophile at the beginning of the film and also a real guy that you studied who made that claim that all men have these predilections or whatever. | ||
| And he thinks everyone steals. | ||
| It's it's exactly like it's the projection. | ||
| It's the world must be the way I see it Everyone must see the world the way I do. | ||
| There's no other explanation certainly You know, I'll put it this way. | ||
| I don't think I was ever accused these people of being smart something's clearly wrong with them but It's like, my dude, every country on the planet is, to varying degrees, wants to stop you. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The United States is actively in the process of trying to stop you. | ||
| Clearly, the world thinks what you are doing is wrong. | ||
| To believe otherwise is insanity. | ||
| But like I said, I don't know. | ||
| I wouldn't accuse people of being smart. | ||
| Even Epstein was not smart enough, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I gotta know, man. | ||
| After having experienced the last 20 years and making the movie and everything, how do you... And do you have kids too? | ||
| I don't know if you want to talk about it or not. | ||
| But how do you educate your children about sexuality now? | ||
| Do they need to be educated younger? | ||
| Do they just need the words to understand the body parts so that if they see something, they can tell you? | ||
| The idea of saying, no, go away, I just don't know that that can ever work. | ||
| Let me elaborate a little bit on that. | ||
| If there's a kid who doesn't understand what's happening to them and they can't articulate it, how do you navigate that problem? | ||
| So, my wife's in charge of that. | ||
| I try to support, but what she does, and this requires actual parenting to do this. | ||
| You have to know your kids intuitively, and moms have a gift. | ||
| My wife certainly does. | ||
| Gifts I wish I had, but I don't. | ||
| And so it's interesting, each of my kids have the conversation at a different age. | ||
| Some it's seven, some it's 10. | ||
| Some wasn't, they weren't ready until 12 or 13. | ||
| My wife literally prays over when it's time to say what, And what to say and what details to give. | ||
| Also, listen to your kids ask questions. | ||
| So you've got to give them the basics at a certain point, right? | ||
| Like you said, they have to have the vocabulary to be able to understand where dangers come in. | ||
| But the kids will ask and satisfy their curiosity. | ||
| Otherwise, the playground will. | ||
| And you don't want the playground to satisfy their curiosity. | ||
| So Catherine listens. | ||
| Okay, you're going somewhere. | ||
| Let's sit down. | ||
| I will be the one that gives you the answer before somebody else does. | ||
| Did you give them internet access when they were younger? | ||
| It's the same process. | ||
| Some of my kids were ready at 10 to begin monitored. | ||
| Some not until they're 13. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| It depends. | ||
| It's customized, you know? | ||
| It's got to be monitored. | ||
| Because I want people... I don't know where this culture came from, this idea of like, the kid can go online, have fun. | ||
| You're basically saying, you are giving your kid a private jet to go anywhere in the world and see whatever they want. | ||
| Clearly you would never allow that. | ||
| You're not gonna let your kid go down to the, you know... | ||
| You can't go north of this street, you can't go four blocks out. | ||
| We tell our kids, you know, when I'm growing up, it's like, don't go past this street, don't go past this street. | ||
| And we'd listen for the most part. | ||
| Come home when the lights come on. | ||
| There were limitations on how far we could go. | ||
| If you went too far and you got lost, you got kidnapped, something bad happened to you, how are your parents going to find out? | ||
| The internet may not be the exact same thing in terms of physical space, but you can access literally anything. | ||
| That's ridiculous to allow a kid to do whatever you... Imagine if you were like, you're allowed to go wherever you want, son. | ||
| Even the adult bookstore down the street. | ||
| Go... No way! | ||
| And not only that, they wouldn't let you in. | ||
| It would be... It's illegal. | ||
| But the internet is different. | ||
| They let kids do whatever they want. | ||
| They don't think about it. | ||
| Parents really need to understand... | ||
| It's not just, quote-unquote, the internet. | ||
| It's unrestrained access to some of the worst and the best things humanity has created. | ||
| Not every kid is ready for all of that. | ||
| I would say there is a large quantity of things on the internet no one could handle seeing, let alone children. | ||
| With one click. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's videos of murder. | ||
| I remember back in the day there was a viral video of three guys murdering someone that was going around. | ||
| And if you were just some kid and your parents gave you a phone or a computer, you saw a graphic and brutal murder take place. | ||
| Children should not be watching that stuff. | ||
| Well, you made this point about the fact that you wouldn't be allowed in an adult bookstore if you were just walking down the street or a place that sells pornography. | ||
| I shouldn't use euphemisms. | ||
| And not only that, but Pornhub banned access in the state of Utah because Utah passed a law saying we need to have stricter methods of verifying people's ages so that kids don't end up viewing porn on this website. | ||
| That made Pornhub very upset. | ||
| So not only is it the case that kids are allowed into these like digital establishments, the companies actually throw a fit when they aren't. | ||
| And I'll also mention this. | ||
| My dad made this point when I was a kid, and he was referring to television, and I think it's even more pressing with the internet today. | ||
| But he said, this is the first time in human history where parents allow complete strangers into their home to teach their children. | ||
| And now, it's two-way. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Your kid has an exchange with them. | ||
| The Trevor Project posted this interface that they were advertising to talk to somebody about your sexual identity, and if you hit the escape button three times, it deletes all of your browser history, and they were advertising that. | ||
| They were advertising that. | ||
| So if an adult walks in the room, hit escape three times, all of it's cleared. | ||
| Now what would you say about an adult who goes to a kid, tries to talk to them about sex, and says, don't tell your parents? | ||
| Horrifying. | ||
| It's like textbook. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's horrifying, it's grooming, and it's part of, again, the pedophile movement. | ||
| They've been saying it for years. | ||
| Separate kids from the parents. | ||
| They have NAMBLA, you know, the North American Man Boy Love Association, other organizations in Europe that I've hunted. | ||
| They have literature that teach the pedophile how to separate parents from kids. | ||
| How to get them alone, or how to even groom the parent to become friendly with them. | ||
| So, I mean, these are pedo-tactics. | ||
| So, we didn't actually get into it, and I see someone, we got a super chat, someone was asking, Mike Spencer, why did it take so long for this film to come out? | ||
| I mean, you said you started making it, what, eight years ago? | ||
| Eight years ago, that's when I met Tim Mallert. | ||
| Yeah, five years to get it released after that? | ||
| Well, actually, it was three years of writing the script. | ||
| It was two years of pre-production, production, and post-production. | ||
| So I finished the film three years ago. | ||
| And at that time it was owned by Fox, Fox Latin America. | ||
| But then Disney bought Fox. | ||
| So now the film was owned by Disney. | ||
| So I negotiated with him after they told me, this is not for us. | ||
| So it took us a year to rescue the rights of the film. | ||
| After I had the rights back, I knocked, you know, the doors of Netflix and Amazon and many others and they were not interested. | ||
| They said, this is not for us. | ||
| This is not for us. | ||
| This is not for us. | ||
| So for three years, until I was again, you have two options. | ||
| You give up, you don't give up. | ||
| And next thing you know, it was like, Tim, I mean, should we put this on YouTube for free? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, we need to save children, but we need to raise awareness. | |
| I mean, I was about to call my investors, like, hey, you know, we did everything, but it seems like someone doesn't want this movie to be in theaters. | ||
| And it's done. | ||
| Disney has it, they're like, the movie's done, and they go... | ||
| We don't want to go with that. | ||
| Actually, I went to Argentina because the new headquarters of Disney Latin America were in Argentina. | ||
| So I went there. | ||
| Very nice people. | ||
| I want to make something very clear. | ||
| When I say that Disney is trying to corrupt your children, I'm talking about the cupola, the elite, | ||
| the people who are very, very high level. | ||
| There's a lot of good people working in Disney, they just, they have no other options. | ||
| So I met very good people in Argentina and they saw the movie. | ||
| They told me, well, we need to have a meeting and I'll get back to you. | ||
| So I went back to Mexico. | ||
| Like a week later, they told me, this is not for us, this is not for Disney. | ||
| Okay, well, give it back to me. | ||
| Yeah, but you owe money to us right now. | ||
| I know, but you promised me, well, not you, but Fox promised me that they were going to do a documentary and a TV series. | ||
| Well, we're not going to do that. | ||
| Okay, well, let's negotiate. | ||
| So, one year negotiating until finally, a lot of things happened, but, you know, okay, well, here's your movie. | ||
| So when I got the movie back, I was like, OK, so Tim, what should we do? | ||
| You know, well, Netflix. | ||
| OK, well, let's go to Netflix. | ||
| I don't know, I sent like a hundred messages. | ||
| I know people that they know, the CEO of Netflix and everything, and they try and they try and they try and nothing, nothing, nothing until I just, you know what? | ||
| I don't want to force something. | ||
| Maybe God has a different plan. | ||
| And he did. | ||
| And so, what I did in Mexico at that time, because Alejandro was calling me. | ||
| He was Alejandro Monteverde, my business partner, the director of the film. | ||
| He said, Eduardo, the kids cannot wait any longer. | ||
| We need to do something. | ||
| We cannot wait until this revision happens. | ||
| And that's when I had this idea of, why don't we do a tour in Mexico? | ||
| Where we invite every governor of each state to host a screening, to invite all the leaders from every single sector of our society in each state, and then we show the movie to a thousand people, and then at the end we sign an agreement where we commit to end child trafficking in that state. | ||
| And we did like 20 states, and I was about to finish the other 12 states when I received the phone call from Angel Studios. | ||
| And here we are, you know. | ||
| Again, I'm living, we're living this beautiful dream, man. | ||
| I mean, I'm just, we're broken souls and when you, the feeling of knowing that you're being used by God to save children. | ||
| I mean, I've been crying every day, brother. | ||
| I feel like it's more than that. | ||
| We've seen, you mentioned Disney. | ||
| I boycotted Disney a long time ago. | ||
| So, when Disney Plus comes out, I buy the year plan. | ||
| And then, I think it was when Mulan came out, they thanked the security forces who are holding Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps. | ||
| And people are furious about it. | ||
| I mean, the stories are coming out of there horrifying. | ||
| I said, I'm done with Disney Plus. | ||
| I'm not going to sign back up for it. | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| I'm not going to. | ||
| I think it's more than just saving kids. | ||
| That's the immediate. | ||
| But also understand the cultural ramifications of a successful film to this degree. | ||
| Who do you think got fired at Disney? | ||
| Somebody turned this film down and now someone's saying $54 million in 10 days? | ||
| What did we do? | ||
| Actually, you know what happened? | ||
| I just got a phone call today and someone told me, hey, did you read this article where Disney is denying that they used to own the rights of the film? | ||
| I said, well, I have the contract. | ||
| I mean, I have two contracts, actually, signed by them, so should I put that on my Twitter? | ||
| Well, we should, so I'm going to put that, because now they're lying. | ||
| Can you imagine? | ||
| They're denying that they used to own this film. | ||
| They don't want to look. | ||
| They're humiliated, because can you imagine? | ||
| This is like the Goliath, David and Goliath, right? | ||
| We're the little David here fighting this big monster who is corrupting your children. | ||
| Son of Freedom wants to save your children, And then the only message we gave to the people, thanks be to God for the media who are supporting us like you guys, this is what we said. | ||
| A. In order for us to be David, we need you. | ||
| So if we all come together as one voice, we can be that David that will defeat Goliath. | ||
| If that happens, we know the end of the story. | ||
| We defeated Goliath, at least, on July 4th. | ||
| And you know what happened normally? | ||
| The first week of the film, let's say you have 2,000 theaters, right? | ||
| The second week, you go to 1,500 theaters, and then 500 theaters, and then you die, right? | ||
| So this is the opposite. | ||
| The second week we have 400 theaters more and I just heard that we have three more hundred theaters. | ||
| So this thing is growing and growing because of the people are, and you know why too, the people are very generous. | ||
| When they go to angel.com slash freedom, People can buy tickets for themselves, for their family, but they can buy through Pay It Forward to other people, other families that they cannot afford to go to bring their family to the theaters. | ||
| And because of their generosity, these other people can see the film for free. | ||
| That is changing the entire, you know, I mean, we're breaking the establishment, brother. | ||
| I just, I hope that there's some executive or some like mid-level guy who is like, we don't want to do this film. | ||
| The media says that it's a faith-based film or whatever, a conservative, and I'm like, I don't understand. | ||
| It's because you didn't why the film was done Five years angel three is angel.com slash freedom. Yes | ||
| I'm gonna I'm gonna pay a thousand bucks for this. This is the funny thing to the other | ||
| Nation man the media says that it's a faith-based film or whatever a conservative and I'm like, I don't understand | ||
| I used to watch Law & Order SVU all the time I'm like this is just like if you took if you made a movie | ||
| that was like in a similar fashion They say, you know, sexual crimes are considered especially heinous. | ||
| Dun dun, law and order. | ||
| That show was on the air for decades. | ||
| People love it. | ||
| This film, it's like in the same genre. | ||
| It's a drama, thriller, crime, law enforcement. | ||
| It's like Life is Beautiful. | ||
| Can you imagine saying Life is Beautiful is a Jewish film? | ||
| No, you never say that. | ||
| Or Schindler's List, one of my favorite films, you know, especially when he talks about this list is life. | ||
| This is the same thing. | ||
| Sound of Freedom is live. | ||
| Angel Studios had a trailer in the beginning of the movie that was like a sci-fi movie. | ||
| I'm like, good. I want Angel Studios to succeed. I want them to make more films. | ||
| They're not overtly like... it's not like every movie is in some way got this through line of religion or anything. | ||
| It's for everyone. | ||
| It's for everyone. | ||
| It's a part of the story. | ||
| It's a true story. | ||
| I mean... You know what I like, though? | ||
| It's like the subtlety of the light versus the subtlety of the dark. | ||
| Hollywood has the subtlety of darkness in a lot of what they do. | ||
| Weird, creepy things you might notice in the background that you don't want your kids to know. | ||
| You don't want your kids to watch or ask questions about. | ||
| You know, they've got in, I think it was Blue's Clues, there was a beaver with mastectomy scars. | ||
| And now by all means, if you want to talk about cancer survivors and how they have mastectomy, we get that, right? | ||
| We're compassionate. | ||
| But to show... | ||
| A beaver, in this way, we know it wasn't about cancer survivor because they'd be wearing a shirt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It was about giving these gender ideology ideas to little kids without you noticing. | ||
| That's the subtlety of darkness. | ||
| Angel Studios can make a sci-fi film that's not overly religious or whatever thing, but then there's subtlety of light in those films. | ||
| So if all they're doing is making movies that's entertaining, we're winning. | ||
| I said this about the Daily Wire, why I'm excited to see them succeed. | ||
| They make a movie that's a Western. | ||
| It's not a conservative film, it's just a film. | ||
| And I'm like, that's what needs to happen. | ||
| Because if the bare minimum of what we do is we end the weird subtlety of darkness and this erosion, and we just course correct and start working towards things that inspire people to be more virtuous or moral, we're winning. | ||
| You said the word inspired. | ||
| Media influence how people think. | ||
| You know, what's the average percentage between parents and children having meaningful conversations every day in America? | ||
| And I think now it's in the whole world, three to six minutes a day. | ||
| But in front of the media, social media, movies, videos, radio, whatever, more than 10 hours a day. | ||
| So who is educating their children? | ||
| It's not parents, neither schools, it's the media. | ||
| So media, I mean, it's good or bad, whatever. | ||
| It's just, it's just a mean, you know, how you use it is what changed everything, right? | ||
| So Art has the power to change people's hearts. | ||
| Plato said, if I have to choose between art or politics to govern a nation, he said I would choose art, because art has the power to touch people's hearts and change their minds, therefore how they think, how they live, how they behave. | ||
| So this is powerful. | ||
| Media influences how people think. | ||
| And young people, they have this tendency to imitate art. | ||
| When they go and see the movie, they imitate what they see. | ||
| So can you imagine if we just lead by example? | ||
| That's why Tim Ballard in the movie, Gene Caviezel, he speaks very little. | ||
| Everything is just actions, actions, actions, because action speaks a thousand words, right? | ||
| And our hope is that when people see this movie, Sound of Freedom, they will live not only entertained, but they will live inspired, wanting to love more, wanting to forgive more, wanting to become the best version of yourself. | ||
| The best version of yourself. | ||
| Wanting to become more like Tim Ballard, you know? | ||
| This is a true hero. | ||
| This is not like Superman or Spider-Man, you know? | ||
| This is about a true hero, and we all can become heroes. | ||
| We are called to be heroes, actually. | ||
| And my goal as a filmmaker is that when people leave the theater, they will love to become ambassadors of freedom. | ||
| And I hope they will ask the same question I asked myself eight years ago. | ||
| What can I do to end this? | ||
| I want to join the army. | ||
| I want to join the army. | ||
| And I think we have an army of more than 5 million people now in America. | ||
| This is amazing. | ||
| You know what I do hope? | ||
| I hope you guys get $50 million penthouses with infinity pools, a couple Corvettes, some Ferraris, some Lamborghinis. | ||
| I hope. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| And I genuinely mean this. | ||
| Who deserves luxury more than those who are doing good to benefit the world? | ||
| Is it the celebrity or the music, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I've always thought this when I was younger, like, why is it that a firefighter gets paid a lower salary but a baseball player is a multi-millionaire? | ||
| And so, of course, I'm being a bit facetious and I don't really expect you guys to buy those things, but I hope that The younger generation sees success of this movie, the millions of dollars, they see the movement, and they think the path to success is being a good, moral person who fights for the betterment of the world. | ||
| And I want Tim Ballard to roll up in a nice car with a nice suit and the kids to be like, how do I be like him? | ||
| It's like, oh, you save children's lives. | ||
| Instead, what do we get? | ||
| You know, be hard, be street, be a celebrity, make songs about lewd and lascivious behaviors. | ||
| We gotta switch that around. | ||
| You know, Ben Shapiro famously rapping, you know, that song, WAP. | ||
| We won't get into it. | ||
| Sam Smith doing the satanic dances. | ||
| How do we shift that to the guy walking on stage with the nice suit and the gold chains is the guy who saves children for a living? | ||
| Well, thank you for that, but at the same time, you may agree with me, you may not agree with me, but I have to say it, and that's how I feel. | ||
| Mother Teresa said we are not called to be successful. | ||
| We are called to be faithful to God. | ||
| That is our success. | ||
| Now, if by being faithful to God, by being faithful to our values, success comes, it's a blessing. | ||
| Thanks be to God. | ||
| Let's use that success to make a difference in people's lives. | ||
| Because you know what? | ||
| We're going to die one day. | ||
| Life is too short, brother. | ||
| And we're taking nothing, nothing with us, except for our actions. | ||
| Nothing's wrong with success, as long as you don't compromise your values. | ||
| But if success doesn't come after being faithful, never compromise. | ||
| Never compromise. | ||
| It's not worth it. | ||
| Beauty does not come from outward adornment. | ||
| We have a big advantage in this culture war. | ||
| And that is, I think, a higher degree of selflessness. | ||
| The left has collectivism. | ||
| They fall in line, they march in lockstep. | ||
| But if a movie like this, and the profits from it go towards the mission, and expanding that mission, that's something they don't have. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| These people, many of these leftists are virtue signalers, they'll say whatever they have to say just to make money for themselves so they can buy themselves a mansion. | ||
| If the money generated from people seeing this movie doesn't go towards Lamborghinis and infinity pools, and in fact goes towards making more culture building, making more movies, inspiring more people to do better, That passion and that drive and that mission is something they don't have. | ||
| Because this is a mission. | ||
| Exactly what you just said. | ||
| This is not just... This is a movement. | ||
| This is a mission. | ||
| This is a vision. | ||
| This is like our... I mean, we made a promise that we would dedicate our entire life to child trafficking and this is not gonna be, you know, ended with one movie. | ||
| This is just the beginning. | ||
| You know when the movie starts, brother? | ||
| The movie starts for the people when the movie finished. | ||
| That's the beginning of the movement when the film finished. | ||
| That's how I felt when I saw it. | ||
| Like I was like a different person. | ||
| It was hard to watch kinda. | ||
| I was like breaking apart. | ||
| And then I was rebuilt at the end. | ||
| I really want to thank Jim Caviezel, man. | ||
| I wouldn't talk about him for a second, because he deserved that. | ||
| You said earlier, he didn't have a lot of lines. | ||
| And I noticed that, and it was his eyes, man. | ||
| You can see his brain. | ||
| The eyes are connected to the brain. | ||
| Did you spend a lot of time with him? | ||
| Yeah, we did. | ||
| We're super good friends, and he spent time with me. | ||
| And Alejandro said something in the beginning. | ||
| He says, whoever plays this role, Has to say way more with his eyes than he does with his mouth. | ||
| That was before Jim even agreed. | ||
| And that's exactly what Caviezel pulls off. | ||
| That was his idea, this crazy Tim Buttard. | ||
| Because I was thinking about someone else, you know, someone that looks like him, younger and everything. | ||
| And when I asked him, brother, 20 people passed, so who do you want to play you? | ||
| And he looked at me and he said, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Brother, come on, I'm not kidding. | ||
| He's too expensive. | ||
| No, I'm talking about the guy who played Jesus Christ in The Passion of Christ of Mel Gibson. | ||
| Oh, man, I thought for a second you went crazy. | ||
| And do you know him? | ||
| Yeah, I know him. | ||
| But why him? | ||
| Because he's brave. | ||
| He's a godly man. | ||
| And I know he's going to be an actor who is not going to be coming here You know, play the role, go to the premiere, and then next movie. | ||
| He will stay with us until the end, right? | ||
| So I text him, I say, brother, I have something for you. | ||
| When can I see you? | ||
| In two hours, in this coffee. | ||
| So Alejandro and I went to meet with him. | ||
| We pitched the story to him, and he starts crying. | ||
| He said, brother, this is too personal to me. | ||
| And he shared a very personal story. | ||
| And I was like, wow, OK, this is your story, brother. | ||
| I mean, this is it. | ||
| So the next day, he calls me, and he tells me, I have good news and a challenge. | ||
| What is the good news? | ||
| I'm in. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Tell Tim Ballard, tell Alejandro that I'm in. | ||
| What is the bad news? | ||
| What is the challenge? | ||
| Well, you know, my wife saw Narcos Colombia on Netflix and she's afraid for me to go to Colombia to film this movie. | ||
| Oh man, I hated that because, you know, again, media influence how people think. | ||
| Latinos, we have been stereotyped in a very negative way since the footage on Tuesday. | ||
| And a lot of people here in this country, they think Latinos, we are a threat to the democracy of this country because they think that we are what they see on film or television, all the negative stereotypes. | ||
| So, and these TV series, they do a lot of damage. | ||
| And here you have this Gene Caviezel's wife saying he's not going to Colombia. | ||
| I said, well, hold on a second. | ||
| Let me just call Tim Butler. | ||
| I'll call you right back. | ||
| Tim, I have good news and bad news, brother. | ||
| Good news, Gene Caviezel is in. | ||
| Bad news, his wife saw Narcos Colombia on Netflix and she doesn't want him to go there. | ||
| What can we do? | ||
| And he's thinking and thinking. | ||
| He said, tell them if 30 ex-Navy SEALs, 30 ex-Navy SEALs will be enough to protect him. | ||
| I called them. | ||
| I passed a message. | ||
| Green light! | ||
| We're in Colombia filming, right? | ||
| But look what happened. | ||
| 30 of these guys were on set. | ||
| A week later, half of them are not on set anymore. | ||
| And I'm like, okay, I'm not going to say anything. | ||
| As a producer, I know who's on set. | ||
| We have 200 people, extras, actors, whatever, you know? | ||
| And I noticed that half of them were not there. | ||
| So, One month and a half later, I'm reading this local newspaper from Colombia that it says that the federal police arrested some traffickers and rescued more than 200 children in Cartagena, Colombia, who were kidnapped for sexual exploitation. | ||
| And more details, like in the movie, very similar story to the movie. | ||
| So I run to see Tim Ballard and I said, brother, look, like in the movie. | ||
| And he smiled and he said, that was us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| That was us. | ||
| Half of the guys who were not on set, they were walking on the Cartagena streets on Saturday, and these people came and approached them. | ||
| Hey amigo, gringo, you want señoritas? | ||
| Young ladies, how many you want? | ||
| They thought they were tourists looking for action, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Next thing you know, they didn't know that these guys were experts on rescue children, right? | ||
| So they say, well, can I call you tomorrow? | ||
| Because there's more Americans coming and we need more girls. | ||
| Do you have like really young girls? | ||
| Brother, we have everything you need. | ||
| Okay, we have chickens. | ||
| Chickens means like very little boys and girls, right? | ||
| So anyway, so they rescue these children. | ||
| They started this undercover operation with the help of the police, Columbia police. | ||
| So I'm thinking like, hold on a second. | ||
| While you're filming the movie? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| I mean, the second week, brother, of filming, half of these guys were rescuing 200 children, and I'm thinking, wait a second. | ||
| Thank God for Gene Caviezel's wife, who said no in the beginning. | ||
| Because of that no, he was inspired, Tim Butler, to bring Teddy, ex-Navy SEALs, and because of those Teddy, ex-Navy SEALs, half of them rescued 200 children before the film was even finished. | ||
| Sound of Freedom 2. | ||
| Can you imagine? | ||
| I mean, this is... | ||
| Brother, I'm just, there's so many miracles. | ||
| I remember saying this, I was in tears. | ||
| Let's focus on this film first. | ||
| I'm in tears, I'm crying. | ||
| I mean the story just wrote itself, that's amazing. | ||
| I'm telling Tim, brother, even if this film Never see the light. | ||
| Even if tomorrow there's an earthquake and the entire film is buried, right? | ||
| The fact that we were used to save 200 children, it's all worth it, man. | ||
| I can die in peace. | ||
| Never imagine that eight years later, 5 million people are watching this film in America. | ||
| Come on! | ||
| I mean, if this is not the American dream for me, for a Mexican filmmaker who moved to this country 20 years ago without speaking English, I'm hugging the American dream. | ||
| I'm so grateful to this nation for opening the door to my dreams. | ||
| God bless this wonderful nation. | ||
| God bless America. | ||
| God bless Mexico. | ||
| Let's make Mexico and America free again. | ||
| Yeah, let's. | ||
| We're going to go to Super Chats, but do you want to give one more question? | ||
| Does Jim's wife know that she inspired them? | ||
| Of course, man. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, she saved 200 children just by that note. | |
| By her concern for her husband. | ||
| She said yes, and later 200 children are free. | ||
| Maybe the reason she had that feeling that she needed people there wasn't so much to protect Jim, but because something was calling her to send in the troops to save his kids. | ||
| That's how God works. | ||
| That's how God works. | ||
| We don't understand the beginning. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Bad news? | ||
| That bad news was the best news ever. | ||
| It seems, stories like this, they seem impossible. | ||
| They seem like miracles, but they happen. | ||
| Let's read Super Chats. | ||
| If you haven't already, would you kindly smash that like button, subscribe to this channel, share the show with your friends, and head over to TimCast.com, become a member by clicking join us. | ||
| We're going to have a members only segment. | ||
| If you guys have been a member for at least six months, you can submit questions and potentially call into the show to talk to us and ask questions, and of our guests. | ||
| And if you sign up right now, at least at the $25 per month level, you can immediately submit to ask questions. | ||
| We have to have this gate to keep out nefarious actors who want to come in and screw with us, and then we have a screening process. | ||
| And I do want to be honest, at this point, many of the callers may have already been chosen, so I don't want to, you know, get your hopes up if you've not signed up yet, but come and watch the Members Only After Show, which will be up in about 25 minutes, but for now, we'll read your Super Chats. | ||
| Let's grab... I want to try and find the best superchats directly asking questions of you guys so we can get into that. | ||
| Spencer Jones says, Tim, I met you a few years ago via Marisol Nichols. | ||
| Been donating to OUR ever since. | ||
| Keep it up. | ||
| God bless. | ||
| Not sure if you know who that is. | ||
| Well, Marisol Nichols is one of my best friends. | ||
| She's an actress. | ||
| If you watch Riverdale, No, I know of it. | ||
| Yeah, she's a very successful actress and she actually done undercover work with us as an actor. | ||
| I mean, undercover operators are first and foremost actors, right? | ||
| And she's phenomenal. | ||
| She's rescued dozens and dozens of kids using her undercover skills. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| Thanks for mentioning Marisol and thanks for your support. | ||
| Shadow's Hand says, I saw Sound of Freedom earlier today. | ||
| Thank you, Tim B, for your continued efforts on that front. | ||
| Definitely a film everyone needs to see. | ||
| How can one join your cause in person in Operation Underground Railroad? | ||
| Check out the website info at OUIRescue.org and send in your resume. | ||
| But you did step down. | ||
| Are you still involved in any way? | ||
| I'm still the founder, always the founder. | ||
| I'll always support and send money. | ||
| Oh, the website name again? | ||
| OURrescue.org. | ||
| But yeah, I stepped down from both, in any official capacity. | ||
| I just, like I said, I want to help the whole cause, all the organizations. | ||
| Let's grab some more Super Chats. | ||
| I'm taking my time because I'm trying to find good questions pertaining to the film. | ||
| And Eric CK asked early on, Tim Ballard, you're a true hero. | ||
| What do you know about the human trafficking in Ukraine? | ||
| I know we did mention it a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know if there's anything else to elaborate on there. | ||
| Well, I'll say this. | ||
| The docu-series called Hidden War, you can check out the trailer actually online. | ||
| Just Google DNA Films Hidden War. | ||
| It's an amazing trailer. | ||
| Mel Gibson's involved with that. | ||
| Tony Robbins is a producer. | ||
| And you're going to see a crazy story, a four-part series early next year, Hidden War. | ||
| Check it out. | ||
| Alright, uh, what is it? | ||
| Spoon Stealing Irishman says, I'm under your house. | ||
| I'm in your walls. | ||
| I cannot be stopped. | ||
| I will not stop. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Your spoons were just the beginning. | ||
| Soon I will take your host chair and the endgame will be in motion. | ||
| Do you see this? | ||
| My hands are right here. | ||
| There's no way I could have possibly typed that. | ||
| This exonerates me. | ||
| No, hold on a second. | ||
| He stole ten spoons like four days ago. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| I have been falsely accused of stealing spoons from this man and hiding them under his house. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| Listen, you guys know me. | ||
| You know I wouldn't do that. | ||
| You know I wouldn't do something like that. | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| I'm being maligned. | ||
| Smeared by the liberal press once again. | ||
| Let's grab some Super Chat. | ||
| Saddle F'ing Tramp says, I've been donating monthly since I heard of Tim Ballad and OUR. | ||
| Seven years now. | ||
| Tim, you are doing the Lord's work. | ||
| One question. | ||
| Who does Tim walk around with those massive steel anchors he has? | ||
| How does he? | ||
| Hahaha. | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| Yeah, I have to ask though, did you really infiltrate a Colombian rebel camp? | ||
| Okay, so we did a podcast on this as well. | ||
| So the original script had it where we actually did go and it was a camp that was all sorts of kids, slave, sex trafficking. | ||
| It looked very much like that. | ||
| It was not in Columbia. | ||
| It was in another place on the border between Dominican Republic and Haiti. | ||
| We were accosted with men with guns, gangsters and machetes. | ||
| I didn't go by myself and, you know, you've never given me problems. | ||
| Some of your executive producers are like, don't ruin the illusion! | ||
| Oh, no, no, that's why we say base it on a true story. | ||
| I said I'll always be honest, I'll always be honest. | ||
| It's a true story because again, when you have someone like him who does rescue missions | ||
| every two weeks, man, he's telling you like a hundred stories and the challenge is that | ||
| you have two hours. | ||
| It's like, brother, there's so many elements. | ||
| I need to bring elements of every single rescue mission so we can tell one story. | ||
| But in reality, it's more dangerous what this guy is going through. | ||
| The movie, I mean... This is a poetry, what Alejandro wrote. | ||
| It's a poetry with a lot of light and darkness, you know, fighting light and dark with the music and everything. | ||
| The innocence and the purity of the children, the actors on set, were like... These kids, they never knew what this film is about. | ||
| The parents were there. | ||
| It was a family environment. | ||
| Except for the one little girl, you've got to tell that story. | ||
| Yeah, but that was an accident, brother. | ||
| I know, but you've got to tell that story because it's beautiful. | ||
| Well, you know, this is what happened. | ||
| So we have the parents of the children, the children on this island, and we have like these two coaches. | ||
| They were like the acting teachers, right? | ||
| So Alejandro was communicating with them and with their parents to get the emotions. | ||
| But that day, The two teachers, you know, they had to go somewhere else, so they sent a new teacher, a new coach, and Alejandro didn't know about that, the director. | ||
| So, next thing you know, we're doing a very important scene, which is, you know, the scene where they close the curtains. | ||
| I don't want to say a lot, you know, because I don't want to spoil this, but anyway, she's supposed to be crying because before that scene, she was abused, sexually abused by an adult, right? | ||
| So then, OK, well, let's let's film. | ||
| So Alejandro talked to the coach. | ||
| So I just want her to cry a little bit. | ||
| It's going to be just five seconds, 10 seconds. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| It's going to be a very simple scene. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| OK, right. | ||
| We start filming. | ||
| First take, Alejandro's like, wow, we have it. | ||
| Cut. | ||
| Alejandro's walking to rehearse for the next scene and he noticed that she's still crying. | ||
| And she's still crying. | ||
| Alejandro called, you know, he called the coach. | ||
| Why is she still crying? | ||
| Oh, you told me that you needed like the emotions. | ||
| Yeah, but this is like 30 minutes later, she's still crying. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Well, I have to tell her that what happened to her, you know, and what? | ||
| Oh, what do you mean? | ||
| So she told her. | ||
| that she was abused before. She never heard about these things ever in her life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| She cried for days. We couldn't fire that teacher only because we were in this island where if we | ||
| fire her we don't have a coaching for the kids for the next scenes, right? But man, | ||
| we got very angry because that was the number one rule. | ||
| The children cannot know what this film is about because we cannot put thoughts in their minds. | ||
| We need to protect their innocence and their purity on set. | ||
| It's like if my son is in a movie like this, I want to be with him. | ||
| I want to read the script. | ||
| I want to talk to the director. | ||
| I want to make sure that his innocence and purity is intact, right? | ||
| And it was just an accident here, but that scene, when you see that scene, when you see the film again, because when you watch this film for the second time and the third time it's even better. | ||
| I have seen the film like a thousand times as a producer and I cry like every single time and it speaks to me in a different way. | ||
| But that scene breaks my heart because I know, I know what happened. | ||
| It was one take and that's what they used. | ||
| Is that the main girl? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The main girl. | |
| She's amazing. | ||
| But when you, when you watch that scene again. | ||
| In the top. | ||
| Go back and see the movie again just for that scene and you're realizing you're seeing a real emotion. | ||
| Real, real emotion of a little girl who just found out what she wasn't supposed to know of the role she was actually playing. | ||
| Let's read this one. | ||
| Adolfo says, Tim Ballard, what are your thoughts on the 85,000 kids missing from the USA custody at the border? | ||
| Do you believe that a significant portion of those children are being trafficked? | ||
| I absolutely do. | ||
| I spent 10 years on that border, and what the cartels make $14 million a day, they take these kids. | ||
| Health and Human Services policy, they have to get the kids within like 24 hours once they're there. | ||
| 85,000 unaccompanied. | ||
| CBP tells us that thousands of them were under five years old. | ||
| What they do is they deliver them to Health and Human Services. | ||
| The little kids come with a name. | ||
| Sometimes it's a safety pin to their shirts or in their pockets, and the name's the sponsor. | ||
| George Smith for the phone number. | ||
| They call that number. | ||
| Hey, we have a little Jose Gonzalez here. | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah, send him to this address. | ||
| They used to have to go pick him up. | ||
| And it's easier to adopt a cat out of a shelter than it is to come down and take one of these kids out of the custody of the U.S. | ||
| government. | ||
| But now your taxpayer dollars will send the child by plane or bus. | ||
| In what will likely be, or many times at least, be the very last leg of a child trafficking event. | ||
| Can you imagine this? | ||
| Imagine if a little child was found in New York City, or I don't care where, DC, Salt Lake City. | ||
| That child would be treated like a precious thing that it is. | ||
| You're not going to deliver that kid to any person who shows up. | ||
| There'll be background checks, DNA tests, documents. | ||
| Whole thing. | ||
| And yet we're not affording the same thing to foreign kids. | ||
| They like to call Trump, like, careless or doesn't care about the foreign kids or whatever. | ||
| Well, what are you doing? | ||
| You care nothing about these kids to let them be released without any kind of background check just to whoever claims them. | ||
| And that's the reality of what's going on. | ||
| And I'll remind you, the United States is the number one consumer of child sex material. | ||
| So it's not a safe place for kids to disappear. | ||
| My friend Jorge Ventura gave me this. | ||
| He was on the border. | ||
| It says Entregas. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I know exactly what that is. | ||
| This is number 4,186. | ||
| Wrapped around a kid. | ||
| Kid's little wrist. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| This is slavery. | ||
| This is branding for slavery. | ||
| To identify kids. | ||
| To count them and keep track of them. | ||
| Did you see the exchange with Senator Cruz and Secretary Mayorkas? | ||
| Senator Cruz brought these bracelets. | ||
| And Mayorkas says, I have no idea what you're talking about. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I talked to Cruz later about it. | ||
| He said, I was shocked! | ||
| I thought for sure he was going to know about it and I was going to talk to him about it. | ||
| He's like, I don't even know what that is. | ||
| This is the brand of slavery. | ||
| This is the sign of slavery. | ||
| And I think the fake IDs too. | ||
| I think we have one of those. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| What time is it right now, for example? | ||
| 9.45. | ||
| So what time we started this interview? | ||
|
unidentified
|
8. | |
| So it's like almost two hours. | ||
| Almost, yeah. | ||
| Seven children disappeared in Mexico. | ||
| Right now, in this interview. | ||
| Every 20 minutes, one more, and then another one, and another one, and another one. | ||
| 57 a day, 21,000 a year. | ||
| These are official numbers from the government. | ||
| I think that's a lot more. | ||
| I read a story out of, I think it was Austin, Texas. | ||
| It may have been further south. | ||
| And it was on Reddit. | ||
| Some woman said that she was at a bar with her boyfriend and two of their friends. | ||
| They were all drinking, having a good time. | ||
| They got pretty drunk. | ||
| And she's like, I think she said she was in her early 20s. | ||
| They walk outside and she's, I think what the story was that she was texting on her phone and her boyfriend and his two friends were about 10 feet in front of her laughing and you know, joking and stuff. | ||
| She's lagging behind when a car pulls up They pop the door open, run out, grab her, and try and pull her into the car. | ||
| She screams. | ||
| Her boyfriend and their friends run back, grab the door, grab her leg as the car tries speeding off, and they pull her out. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And apparently there's tons of stories like this. | ||
| People don't realize because they don't make the press. | ||
| Well, like in the movie, we have real footage. | ||
| Real footage of that. | ||
| In the beginning of the movie, just like that. | ||
| And it's really horrifying, man. | ||
| Is it mostly just off the street? | ||
| Sorry to interrupt if you don't know. | ||
| No, it's like one of them is like kids are playing outside, a car pulls up, snatches a kid, and the other kids are just like, what do we do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy, man. | ||
| Is it like the majority of the disappearances are kids just being snatched off the street, or is it? | ||
| Sometimes, but you know what? | ||
| Sometimes they just do it in your own house, you know? | ||
| Their innocence and their purity are being stolen forever when your kid is having a smartphone. | ||
| and start talking to strangers to another kid who is being kidnapped by someone else and they use him as a hook to connect with your child. | ||
| Next thing you know, they start... That happened to my niece in Mexico the other day. | ||
| My cousin calls me, Eduardo, your niece. | ||
| I mean, I've been following you and because of the whole movement now, I'm like more alert as a parent, you know? | ||
| And I noticed that she was acting weird, you know? | ||
| My daughter, she's eight years old, eight years old. | ||
| And she happens to be, for the last six months, she was talking to these strangers and she was sharing pictures of her, you know, of her body. | ||
| I mean, if she wouldn't caught her on time, God knows what next. | ||
| What will happen next, you know? | ||
| Meet me in the corner, you know? | ||
| So, I mean, the whole message of Sound of Freedom is for parents, too. | ||
| You need to pay attention to your children. | ||
| You need to protect your children. | ||
| You need to watch what they're watching. | ||
| You need to observe what they're watching on the internet. | ||
| There's apps out there where you can actually see what they're looking at, so you can control them. | ||
| presence because you know the other day my even my sister eight years ago when | ||
| she noticed that that she told me what's the next project and I said well you | ||
| know this move about child I don't I don't want to know I don't want to know | ||
| I don't want to know I said Daniela if if someone needs to know is you because | ||
| you have children and they are the target you need to know the more | ||
| information the more prevention what do you mean What do you mean? | ||
| And now she's like a lion, like she's like protecting her children. | ||
| She's a volunteer. | ||
| She's an ambassador of freedom. | ||
| So parents, they need to know that this is real. | ||
| This is not in Bangladesh, Thailand, you know, far away. | ||
| This is next door. | ||
| This is everywhere. | ||
| And it's growing because of child pornography. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of new clients because they get hooked with pornography. | ||
| Next thing you know, they're looking at child pornography. | ||
| Now they're addicted. | ||
| And now they want the real deal. | ||
| This is interesting. | ||
| Beatriz Arena says they have censored the movie in Colombia. | ||
| They won't allow it to show. | ||
| Have you heard that? | ||
| No, but we're going to show it. | ||
| After the success in United States, no one can stop this movement. | ||
| It's going to be in Mexico, August 31st, and then the rest of Latin America. | ||
| It's going to be everywhere. | ||
| No one can stop this. | ||
| It's too late. | ||
| The movement is growing big time. | ||
| Gigi Izzy asks, was making it PG-13 an intentional choice? | ||
| Because I absolutely love the fact that it's not too explicit and that it can reach a wider audience. | ||
| Yeah, of course, that was the whole goal. | ||
| We want everyone to watch this movie. | ||
| The integrity and the purity of the film is right there so everyone can see it and it can be digestible, you know? | ||
| The first part of the movie is the problem, the second part of the movie is the solution and the hope, because we want people to live with hope. | ||
| Yes, tears because this is real, but with hope. | ||
| Okay, I want to do something. | ||
| I want to join the army. | ||
| I will do something. | ||
| And again, as I said before, I hope they will ask themselves, what can I do? | ||
| Well, the first thing they need to do is just tell everyone what you saw in the movie. | ||
| Tell more people to go and see the movie because if the movie continue with this success, | ||
| then the media, secular media, mainstream media, everybody's obligated to talk about the success of the film. | ||
| More important about the topic of the film. | ||
| And then millions of people will hear about this, and then there's no more excuses of, oh, I didn't know. | ||
| Now you know. | ||
| What are you going to do about it? | ||
| Do you think that parents should bring their kids if they're 13 and up, or is that just like a parent by parent decision? | ||
| Thirteen up, I think they should because you're not going to see anything that you have to cover your eyes or you have to cover the eyes of your kid. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| I make movies. | ||
| I made that promise to God one day and I made a promise to my mother and to my father 20 years ago when I promised together I would never use my talents to do anything that would offend my faith, my family, or my Latino culture. | ||
| After I made that promise I ended up not working for 4 years and I lost everything. | ||
| That's why I became a producer because as an actor I was tired of waiting for a role that would portray a man as a real man. | ||
| So I was led to open a production company so I could have the power to control the message. | ||
| And I told my mother, you know, I'm going to make a promise to you that every film that Alejandro Monteverdi and I will do, you don't have to cover your eyes in any scene. | ||
| You can watch everything. | ||
| And I've been, you know, faithful to that promise. | ||
| My first movie was Bella, then Little Boy, now Sound of Freedom. | ||
| And even this, Sound of Freedom movie, as hard as it is, as heavy as it is, it's a poetry | ||
| that everyone can see it and you don't have to cover your eyes in any scene. | ||
| Sweet Potato Night says, will there be a Blu-ray DVD, Sound of Freedom, Director's Cut, Extended Edition? | ||
| Eventually, yes. | ||
| Because you know, when COVID, when this plandemia, plandemic, I don't know how to say it in English. | ||
| Plandemic, that movie? | ||
| Plandemia, not when the COVID hit. | ||
| Oh, when COVID? | ||
| Pandemic. | ||
| Pandemic, yeah. | ||
| In Spanish we call it plandemia. | ||
| It was planned. | ||
| Anyway, it's a joke. | ||
| But when Theaters were closed, right? | ||
| Remember? | ||
| And then when they opened, the theaters was only 20%. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we thought, forget about theaters. | ||
| Let's talk about, you know, platform release, right? | ||
| So the original cut was then two hours, 35 minutes, because you can launch movies like that in platforms and you don't have to like, you know, the one hour, 45 minutes or two hours rule for theaters. | ||
| So we have a cut that is one hour, I mean, two hours, 35 minutes, that is like a meditation, man. | ||
| It's a meditation. | ||
| And of course we want to launch that later. | ||
| I actually thought, I wondered if you were going to have it for streaming, like 10 bucks to download it from your website, but there was something special about being in the theater. | ||
| Jim even talked about it at the end of the movie. | ||
| I mean, I remember the vision of seeing the people in front of me as we're talking about it. | ||
| I can feel them. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because you have to understand, That's why movies are so amazing and so important when you are watching a movie in a theater. | ||
| This is a big room with a big screen. | ||
| It's all dark. | ||
| No distractions, no cell phones, no nothing. | ||
| And for two hours, you're going to open your heart and the director is going to tell you something. | ||
| That's why it's so dangerous, though. | ||
| Because when the director wants to manipulate you and give you the wrong message, it can have a huge impact in your life, too. | ||
| And then you leave confused. | ||
| But when you use it with truth, You change people's lives. | ||
| I mean, you inspire people. | ||
| That's my goal, to inspire people so they can leave the theater inspired. | ||
| Like, I want to become a hero. | ||
| And that's the most beautiful thing, when you hear testimonies of people like, your movie changed my life. | ||
| Your movie inspired me to protect my children. | ||
| I hug my children. | ||
| I want to spend more time with them. | ||
| It feels amazing, brother. | ||
| All right, let's grab some more. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| There's one we did. | ||
| Mike Spencer, shout out. | ||
| We did ask about why it took so long to make the movie, but that's your Super Chat, so we do appreciate it. | ||
| Atherin Zala says the movie was great and reminded me of Proof of Life. | ||
| I was wondering if you going into the jungle near the end of the film was true, and do you think that part might put doctors doing that in any danger? | ||
| So, we just addressed this a little bit, but I was thinking it would be a good chance to clarify. | ||
| The camp you did go to, first I guess, it was not in Columbia, you did go to a camp. | ||
| Did you go to more than one? | ||
| Was it a common thing you had done? | ||
| Yeah, that tactic's been used enough times that we won't use it again anyway. | ||
| There's certain places on the planet that you just can't... it's like the film depicts, you know, that you can't get into. | ||
| But I didn't go alone. | ||
| You know, I had several people with me, but we didn't pose as that. | ||
| Yeah, in terms of would that put doctors at risk because they think that they go in there, they think they might be... | ||
| Someone who's there to do them harm. | ||
| I mean, of course it's dangerous. | ||
| I mean, what we're doing is dangerous, too. | ||
| I mean, we don't have to go to the jungle. | ||
| What we're doing right now, just going into Mexico, showing this movie in 32 states, telling the people this is real and we're going to end it, is dangerous. | ||
| Because when you are confronting, when you're fighting with this more than $150 billion industry, That's not a small thing, right? | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| Yes, it's dangerous, but it's more dangerous not to do it in the long term. | ||
| And as I said before, we're going to die one day. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| My prayer every day to God is, okay, when it's my time, when you knock at my door and it's time to go, please find me working for you. | ||
| And I feel that we're working for For God, by saving children. | ||
| That's why I always say God's children are not for sale and that's my motivation every day to wake up and to give my life for a cause, for a mission, for something that is bigger than myself. | ||
| Kim McKersie says, it ain't much Timbo, but please if possible forward these super chat funds to Tim Ballard's cause. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Uh, I'll one up that. | ||
| I will, I will donate all of the chat revenue to the, uh, to the Spear. | ||
| Is that the best way to put it? | ||
| And I'll put 10,000 towards the pay it forward for the film. | ||
| God bless you. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Easy, easy, easy, easy for me to do. | ||
| Easy for me to say. | ||
| It's not that, you know, I don't like we can do it. | ||
| We're going to do it. | ||
| Let me tell you why this is so important. | ||
| There's a lot of families that are listening to interviews that they have four children, five, five children. | ||
| They cannot afford to bring everyone to the experience because Sound of Freedom is cinematic, cinematic experience, right? | ||
| That you cannot see that on TV or on, on, on social media. | ||
| Film is different. | ||
| Film change your life, right? | ||
| So because of your generosity, your generosity, thousands of people will go and see the film for free. | ||
| And we're saving lives right there. | ||
| And the movement is growing, and more people in media are talking about the success of the film, so you put pressure. | ||
| We're going to show the movie on the 25th, brother, on the Capitol Hill. | ||
| Can you imagine that? | ||
| That's powerful because you're going to have Congress from both sides, Republicans and Democrats, right? | ||
| They're going to see the film and then a panel with Jim, Tim, and myself. | ||
| Can you imagine moving the hearts of the most important decision makers in the world who are living here in Washington D.C.? | ||
| This is a huge opportunity. | ||
| You know the only reason why they're doing that? | ||
| The only reason why they're doing that is because of the success of the film. | ||
| I mean, we can change the world if more people see this film. | ||
| We're competing with Mission Impossible right now. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| As much as I like Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible, That movie won't save lives. | ||
| Sound of Freedom is changing the culture, is saving lives, and is inspiring so many people to become ambassadors of freedom. | ||
| So thank you for your generosity, and I hope a lot of people that are listening to this interview, this podcast, they go right now, when this interview finishes, to angel.com slash freedom, angel.com slash freedom, and pay it forward so somebody else can see the movie for free because of your generosity. | ||
| I should have said this at the start of the show, but I will elaborate too. | ||
| So, the way it works, we have this meter here on YouTube that shows us the total amount of Super Chats that came in during the show. | ||
| What happens is YouTube takes 35%, we get the rest. | ||
| Forget the 35%. | ||
| The total number that's there, I'm going to donate to your organization, and then $10,000 towards the Pay It Forward for people to be able to watch this movie, to be able to go see it if they can. | ||
| You're going to love it. | ||
| And so, now everyone's dumping in the Super Chats, and that was the intended position. | ||
| So basically, I'll cover that 35% cut that YouTube takes to make sure the full amount of the chat revenue goes to your organization. | ||
| We're currently at $3,600. | ||
| We'll wrap up the show from here because we're going to go to the members-only portion of the show over at TimCast.com. | ||
| So as we're closing out, if you'd like to contribute to the Super Chats, I will immediately, as we're on the members-only, I will be making that contribution in the full amount of all of our Super Chat revenue, plus the donation to the movie. | ||
| We've been talking about doing this thing where we give $10,000 every month to someone engaged in a cultural effort that's going to be a positive impact. | ||
| I won't consider this that. | ||
| We'll still try and find someone that we can give, you know, who needs the money to get their project going, but I will absolutely see to it that, you know, we'll do that, because... See, you guys, you're the guys, you're the movement. | ||
| You're changing culture, because we did our part, you know, we made a movie. | ||
| But without the people, without you, we go nowhere. | ||
| So it's amazing how we're coming together and I believe that together we will end this nightmare. | ||
| We will bring freedom to the children that are not free right now. | ||
| I just realized a mistake with everything I was just saying. | ||
| I can't give the total amount of Super Chats to your organization because people could just do that on their own. | ||
| They could literally just go to your organization and make the donation. | ||
| I'm gonna double it. | ||
| Whatever you guys do in Super Chats, by the end of the show, I'm going to match it. | ||
| Oh, Super Chats are flying in. | ||
| Super Chats. | ||
| I was just thinking, why should I ask people to give me money for my show and then just give it to you when they could do that themselves? | ||
| I'll match it one for one. | ||
| Thank you so much, man. | ||
| No, easy. | ||
| Easy for me to do. | ||
| Look at this, man. | ||
| Those are the ambassadors of freedom right there, brother. | ||
| I'm going to match it 100%. | ||
| That's the movement. | ||
| You think they're going to stop this movement? | ||
| Who's going to stop this movement, brother? | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| I wanna say, we gotta go with members only, and I wanna say one final thing before we do the outros, and give people an opportunity to send in those superchats, I will match them. | ||
| The Timoteo scene in that film, it made me feel something indescribable. | ||
| I call it divine intervention, but it's indescribable. | ||
| That moment where you rescue a kid who gives you a name tag with your own name on it, I have no words, but for me, it makes me believe that everything we're doing has a purpose, has a reason. | ||
| We are here for something bigger than us, something better than us, that will make everything better, that will improve things, that will lead us to Whatever the plan is, we are instruments of it. | ||
| The work you guys have done. | ||
| So, thank you so much for what you're doing. | ||
| Guys, TimCast.com. | ||
| Become a member. | ||
| We have that members-only show coming up in a minute. | ||
| But if you guys want to shout anything out as we wrap up. | ||
| Tim? | ||
| Just gratitude. | ||
| Thank you guys so much. | ||
| I can't believe that there's this many people. | ||
| The silent majority has risen. | ||
| I never dreamed it would happen. | ||
| I have hope. | ||
| For the first time, I have hope that we can actually make an enormous impact in the fight against child slavery. | ||
| Gratitude is how we felt. | ||
| You know, I'm from Mexico. | ||
| I'm Catholic. | ||
| I believe in the power of prayer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to ask permission. | |
| Can I say Hail Mary for all the kids around the world? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. | ||
| Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. | ||
| Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for our sinners, now and at the hour of our death. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| Our Lady Guadalupe, pray for us. | ||
| In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| Long live freedom! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Thank you guys so much for being here. | ||
| Your film's an inspiration. | ||
| It was an amazing film. | ||
| I was entertained. | ||
| I was moved. | ||
| This has been amazing, so thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Seamus, do you want to say anything? | ||
| I want to shout out everything that you guys are doing, and Tim, you've been very humble in saying things like, oh, the storytellers are the people starting the movement, and we're a part of this movement, and I do believe there's power in story, but Sir, what you are doing and what you are saying about yourself, it's such a massive understatement. | ||
| You have changed so many lives, and to go after just one lost child is such a beautiful imitation of Christ, and I want to thank you for that. | ||
| I want to thank you for being that example in the world, and I want to thank you for all of the work you're doing and the work that you've done. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Really appreciate that. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| People are going to follow you guys on Twitter. | ||
| We got at Tim Ballard. | ||
| We have at Everastegui. | ||
| Let me spell that out. | ||
| It's E-V-E-R-A-S-T-E-G-U-I. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| e that us to be let me spell that out it's e v e are a s t | ||
|
unidentified
|
e g u i there you go he'd better speak | |
| on a side note and someone told me that you work with uh... | ||
| tim kennedy Is that true? | ||
| Have you ever worked with Tim Kennedy before? | ||
| No. | ||
| Someone told me a lie. | ||
| Well, maybe you will in the future. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love that man. | |
| He went over to Afghanistan during the surrender and was pulling people out over the course of a week and just freaking inspiration after inspiration. | ||
| Thank you guys so much. | ||
| No, thank you. | ||
| Let's make American Mexico free again. | ||
| Together we're stronger. | ||
| I would love... I fully agree. | ||
| And last thing, of course, it's spearfund.org and hourrescue.org. | ||
| All right, let's move this along. | ||
| Serge, you've been the man tonight. | ||
| Yeah, I... Tim is calling. | ||
| You guys are destroying the chat revenue. | ||
| It's sweet. | ||
| It's great to see. | ||
| I'm watching this whole, like, right in front of me. | ||
| That was really heavy. | ||
| I've been trying to see the film this week, but I've been moving, so it's been a little bit difficult for me to get in between everything edgewise, but I will be seeing it on Saturday. | ||
| So, appreciate it, guys. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| Surge.com. | ||
| Not important. | ||
| It's all good. | ||
| This is going to wrap up the live portion of the show as we go to the members only, and When I said I would give you the Super Chat revenue, we had $3,000 in Super Chats. | ||
| We now have $21,000 in Super Chats. | ||
| So I'm going to click end stream, and we're going to go to TimCast.com. | ||
| But I just asked my girlfriend to bring up a personal check, so I'm going to be writing you guys a check for $42,000. | ||
| At least, because now it's $44,000. | ||
| All right, we're going to go to TimCast.com. | ||
| This has been amazing. | ||
| We'll see you guys over there. |
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