#241 Ruslan KD - Ex-Atheist Breaks Down Israel, End Times & Why 48% of Gen Z is Jesus Curious

Ruslan Karaoglanov, known professionally as Ruslan KD, is a Christian hip-hop artist, entrepreneur, podcaster, and influencer of Armenian descent. Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, to Armenian parents, he immigrated to the U. S. as a child in 1990 to escape anti-Armenian pogroms, a harrowing journey that included dramatic escapes. A refugee who embraced Christianity in his teens, Ruslan channels his experiences into positive, spiritually-minded music and content, blending hip-hop with cultural and faith-based commentary. As CEO of Kings Dream Entertainment, he produces albums, hosts the Ruslan KD YouTube channel—covering topics like the manosphere, podcast breakdowns, and Christian apologetics—and co-hosts podcasts exploring politics, culture, and the Gospel. A former member of the group theBreax, he has opened for artists like Lecrae and advocates for godly ambition, mental health in faith communities, and bridging secular and Christian worlds through storytelling and entrepreneurship. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: ⁠https://americanfinancing.net/srs⁠ NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.327% for well qualified borrowers. Call 866-781-8900, for details about credit costs and terms. ⁠https://bunkr.life⁠ – USE CODE SRS Go to https://bunkr.life/SRS and use code “SRS” to get 25% off your family plan. ⁠https://shawnlikesgold.com⁠ ⁠https://ROKA.com⁠ – USE CODE SRS ⁠https://simplisafe.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://USCCA.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://ziprecruiter.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://gemini.com/srs⁠ Sign up for the Gemini Credit Card: https://Gemini.com/SRS #GeminiCreditCard #CryptoRewards #Advertisement This video is sponsored by Gemini. All opinions expressed by the content creator are their own and not influenced or endorsed by Gemini. The Bitcoin Credit Card™ is a trademark of Gemini used in connection with the Gemini Credit Card®, which is issued by WebBank. For more information regarding fees, interest, and other cost information, see Rates & Fees: gemini.com/legal/cardholder-agreement. Some exclusions apply to instant rewards; these are deposited when the transaction posts. 4% back is available on up to $300 in spend per month for a year (then 1% on all other Gas, EV charging, and transit purchases that month). Spend cycle will refresh on the 1st of each calendar month. See Rewards Program Terms for details: gemini.com/legal/credit-card-rewards-agreement. Checking if you’re eligible will not impact your credit score. If you’re eligible and choose to proceed, a hard credit inquiry will be conducted that can impact your credit score. Eligibility does not guarantee approval. The appreciation of cardholder rewards reflects a subset of Gemini Cardholders from 10/08/2021 to 04/06/2025 who held Bitcoin rewards for at least one year. Individual results will vary based on spending, selected crypto, and market performance. Cryptocurrency is highly volatile and may result in gains or losses. This information is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Consult with your tax or financial professional before investing. Ruslan KD Links: YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/ruslankd X - https://x.com/RuslanKD Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ruslankd My Godly Ambition - http://mygodlyambition.com Buy Godly Ambition - https://a.co/d/d7fgvlB Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Ruslan KD, welcome to the show, man.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  Sean Ryan, thanks for having me. This is incredible.

• 1:10Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  You're a great host.

• 1:12Shawn Ryan?

  Well, thank you. So I saw a video about, that you had posted out. I had a bunch of people text it to me. The first one was Darren Tyler, you know who?

• 1:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, Pastor Dan Tyler, shout out.

• 1:24Shawn Ryan?

  He texted me about my Nathan, Nathan Appel interview.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:29Shawn Ryan?

  So that went crazy and, um, yeah. You know, I was like really, we talked a lot about doing that interview because I did not, I did not want to, you know, lean people away from Christ. And, uh, but, you know, it, um, I thought he had some good points. I didn't agree with everything, but. Man, we got some backlash from that one, buddy.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 1:54Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  I didn't look at any of the comments or the feedback.

• 1:57Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah. We got all kinds of texts and emails and from friends of mine, Darren, you know, and it definitely, I would say, absolutely sparked a conversation. I mean, obviously, you're a big part of that. So, um, so, yeah, I thought it would be, I thought it would be good to maybe get the other side of the coin here and, and, um, so thank you for coming.

• 2:18Speaker 03

  Man, thank you for having me. This is great. And you got a great team here, by the way. Everyone's so hospitable and kind and friendly and you guys got something special here.

• 2:25Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you, man. Thank you. But, um, yeah, so that's, that's, uh, I want to do, you know, some of your backstories. Sounds very interesting and, and, um, and, you know, but the real reason is to cover, you know, what I talked about with Nathan on here and, and, and kind of get the other perspective here. So, but, uh, yeah, everybody starts off with an introduction here. So, Ruslan KD, a Christian hip hop artist, podcaster, and YouTuber, founder of King's, of King's Dream Entertainment with releases including your Indy Jones series and collaborations with artists like John Keith and Paul Russell.

• 3:07Shawn Ryan?

  Originally from Baku, Azerbaijan, and came to the United States as a refugee at age six due to religious persecution and conflict. A former gang member who converted to Christianity in high school after exploring evidence for faith, moving away and moving away from atheism. A husband, a father, and all in for Jesus. So, sorry I missed a lot here, but, um, but, uh, yeah, I, you know, I was, I was talking with Jeremy and we'll get into this. Uh, now I know, you know, why, uh, I think I know why he became an atheist, but I was like, wait a minute, this guy, this guy was a, um, refugee from getting persecuted from Christianity,

• 3:50Shawn Ryan?

  but he's an atheist? And then, then I dug in more and found the rest out. But, um, But this is gonna be an awesome discussion, bro. Yeah. So, I got something for you. Okay. Uh, you know, I'm fairly new to Christianity. I have not read all of the Bible. Most of it I don't understand. Uh, but you know, one thing I do quite often is in the mornings, especially if I'm troubled with something, you know, or something's on my mind, I'm in a dark place, I'll open it up, hoping for some inspiration that I'll understand. And a lot of times I get it. And the last time I did it was, uh, a couple of days ago, I think it was Monday morning.

• 4:32Shawn Ryan?

  And all this Charlie Kirk, you know, the assassination Charlie Kirk's been on my mind. I mean, you know, maybe yours too. Yeah, absolutely. Both have big, uh, big audience. And, uh, so I flip it open, hoping, hoping for some inspiration. And, uh, I don't know the verse. I know it was, it was Matthew. Okay. It was in Matthew. And I opened it up and it's, it's, it's about the end of the world. Uh huh. And I'm like, well, this isn't the inspiration I was hoping for. Abomination, desolation and all that. And it, it was talking about, he was talking about, you know, in the end, there will be, uh, rumors of wars and earthquakes and all these things will happen.

• 5:17Shawn Ryan?

  And I don't want anybody to think I am mocking the Bible, cause I look at that, you know, to, I mean, that is, you know, even though I haven't read it all, but I, you know, I have given my life to Christ and that's the way I try to live, you know, the best, uh, best that I can, I guess, right? But, you know, I'm reading that and I started thinking about it and a lot of the guys on my team, uh, are very, uh, a lot more educated on the Bible than I am, you know, from their up grooming and stuff. And so I, I, I called Darren, he's, he's, uh, my lead editor.

• 5:52Shawn Ryan?

  And, or I didn't call him, I was texting him and I was like, you know, man, I was like,

• 5:58Shawn Ryan?

  This almost sounds like some conspiracy that was put together. And you know, the reason I say that is I was, you know, it's just in my lifetime. We have always been at war. And so, you know, rumors of wars and wars. There's, you know, very young, we had Desert Storm. I spent, we spent, the US spent 20 something years, you know, in Afghanistan, Iraq. We've been to Somalia, we've been to Panama, we've been to Colombia, you know, and, and, and I was just, I was like, I don't even remember a time where there wasn't war. And those are just wars that the US were involved in. That's not, you know, all the civil wars that are going on in Africa, the Middle East,

• 6:43Shawn Ryan?

  and, and Israel, and South America, you know, and, and then I, I was thinking even more and I was like, this is, there's, I don't think there's ever been a, a time of peace in human existence. I mean, the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, Alexander the Great, you know, um, China, I mean, it's, there's always, the Greeks, there's always, always been war, civil war, Native Americans, I mean, and so, you know, I, I kind of thought about that and I was like, and there's always been earthquakes too, right? There's always, there's always been war, there's always been earthquakes.

• 7:24Shawn Ryan?

  And I was like, well, this is almost like convenient, you know, to say that, like, like a good conspiracy theorist would take a pattern and say, when you see these things, this is what it means and this is what's gonna happen. And, you know, I, I feel like that would be like me saying, you know, when the end times come, you'll start to see men cheating on their wives, you know what I mean? And it's like, men have been cheating on their wives since the beginning of the time, not all men, but, and so I just wanna, you know, I mean, this is fresh in my mind.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:57Shawn Ryan?

  You're obviously very studied on this stuff, so I just wanna get your take on, on what I'm feeling.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think what you're feeling is the angst that a lot of people are feeling right now. Uh, not sure if you know this, but there's an actual conspiracy rumor. Prophecy that like today is supposed to be the rapture that's going viral all over Tik Tok. And so there's a ton of people like the day we're shooting this, I don't know when this is coming out. Is that this is gonna be like it's all gonna be gone either yesterday or today, right? So that that's happening in real time and I think that that's a real angst that people feel. Wait a minute, the rapture is supposed to happen today? Yeah, like we. I guess me and you got the shit in the stick huh?

• 8:38Speaker 03

  So so there's been a long history of people reading and trying to interpret and trying to say what is and isn't supposed to happen and how it's supposed to go down. The beautiful part about Matthew, you're talking about Matthew 24 is the end of Matthew 24. Jesus says in verse 36, but about that day or hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven nor the son, but only the father, as it was written in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the son of man. And then he goes on to explain craziness and all this, all this insane stuff that's going to be happening. But the beautiful part about everything you're describing is that from here, from that passage of like rumors of wars and all the abomination to all this scary stuff.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  Jesus then goes into Matthew 25, which is one of my favorite chapters in the Bible. And there's two parables and one story. I'll try to convince it for you because I don't want to. I don't want to get you too into weeds, but he opens up with the parable of the 10 virgins, the wise and the foolish virgins. Waiting for the bridegroom to come back. Jesus is the bridegroom. There's virgins that are wise. They had oil to keep the light on for the bridegroom. And then there's virgins that weren't paying attention and they got left out. So now he's talking about the end of days and he's giving you a parable, a story with these with these virgins and there's a ton of context with the bridegroom and the virgins and all this sort of stuff. So he's like, hey, basically. I can come back whenever, like live with the eminency of Jesus as if he's going to come back at any moment, right? Which is yes and amen. But then something interesting happens.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  From the parable of the virgins, Jesus is coming back at any time, right? He goes into the parable of the bags of gold, or the parable of the talents. There's one person, he gave five talents to, one person he gave three talents to, one person he gave one talent to. There's a master that's going on a, on a, on a mission. He leaves some, some money with his servants. The guy who has five, takes the five, invests it, doubles up. The guy who has three, doubles up. The guy who has one hides his talent, right? He's afraid. He's scarce. He doesn't wanna, he doesn't wanna engage. And so something interesting is that the, the guys who doubled up, Jesus says, well done, my good and faithful servant. You've been faithful with little things. Now you'll be faithful with more, right? And so, end of days, Jesus is coming back. It's gonna get scary.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  He goes into stewardship of resources. How are you managing the time, the talent, the treasure, the things I've entrusted you with, right? So, in light of the whole conversation of the end of days, it goes right into, hey, what are you doing with what you've been given, right? What have you been doing with the time, talent, and treasure that you've been, you've been given? And the person that doubles up, he's rewarded, he's celebrated. The person that doesn't, he's rebuked, and it says, verse, verse 26, this is the person that had to one and buried it. He was afraid. He didn't wanna try. Verse 26 in Matthew 25 says, "His master replied, 'You wicked, lazy servant. So you knew that I have harvest where I've not sown and gather where I've not scattered seed. Well, then you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned, I would have received it back with interest.'"

• 11:36Speaker 03

  So that, that, that lazy one, he rebukes him. But this is the, this is the crazy part about all this. End of days, all this, wars of war. Live as if Jesus is gonna come back, make the most of your time, talent, and treasure. And the end of Matthew 25 is about the sheep and the goats. And Jesus goes on, so I'll just read it to you, cuz I'm, I'm trying to paraphrase, but I'll just read it to you. It says, "When a son of man comes in his glory," the end of days. And all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, "Come you who are blessed by my Father, take your inheritance. The kingdom prepare for you since the creation of the world."

• 12:18Speaker 03

  Verse thirty-five, "For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me in. I needed clothes, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you looked after me. I was in prison, and you came to visit me." Then the righteous will answer him and say, "Lord, when did we see you hungry? And when did we, and, and, and feed you, or thirsty, and give you something to drink? When did we see you, a stranger, and invite you in, or needing clothes? When did we see you sick or in person, or go visit you?" Verse forty, "And the king replies, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did to me.'" So, from, when we read all of this in context, I think that, the, the, the big idea from Matthew twenty-four and twenty-five is, "Hey, Jesus is coming back.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  The world is gonna get dark. However, as people of the book, as, as followers of Jesus, as people of the way, our job is to utilize our time, our talent, our treasure, our platform, our personalities, to usher in the most amount of good, so that we can help the least of these. And the least of these might be the widow and the orphan. The least of these might be the persecuted Christians overseas. The least of these might be those folks in our own country that, that have a distorted worldview. But ultimately, as, as followers of Jesus, regardless when the end comes, we're called to care for the least of these. We're called to utilize and be faithful with what's in front of us, and in that, be a blessing to other people." So that, that, like, the end of days stuff, all, every single talk on the end of days in the, in the, in the New Testament, all goes back to,

• 13:46Speaker 03

  "And live such good lives among the pagans, that though they accuse you of doing wrong, they see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits." Right? That's the beautiful part about this gospel, this story of God coming in the flesh, living the life we couldn't live, dying to death we should have died, on the cross, in, in our place for our sins. And doesn't just give us hell insurance, and goes, "Man, well, I was gonna go to hell in a handbasket, but I got you in the afterlife." No, no, no, he sends and allows us to experience a piece of heaven on earth, to usher in his kingdom. And, uh, that's, that's what I love about that, that entire sequence of events, you know, of Matthew twenty-four and twenty-five, is it lands at, man, we, we, we, we get to do good. Like, we got good work to do on this side of eternity. Well, yeah, sorry. That was a whole lot, man.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  We just had a Bible study. I'm not even sure if this is gonna be in the pod or not.

• 14:32Shawn Ryan?

  It's gonna be. But, um, yeah, and I wanna, I wanna talk a little bit more about end of days, uh, maybe towards the end of the podcast. But, um, but to kick it off, I thought, um, we kick it off with a prayer.

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Let's do it.

• 14:46Shawn Ryan?

  You wanna lead it?

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Yes, please.

• 14:47Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Oh, Father God, thank you so much, Lord.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Lord, have mercy on us, Father. For sometimes we drift and sometimes our, our ways are not aligned with your ways, Lord. So have mercy on us, Lord.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Father, would you just extend your grace in this moment, Lord, to this conversation? That it would be covered by your Spirit, by your presence?

• 15:15Speaker 03

  That you would move in ways that impact people and encourage them and inspire them and empower them to do good here and now, Lord. I thank you for Sean. I thank you for his amazing team. I thank you for every person behind the scenes and the logistics and the cameras and the editing. I, I, I thank you for just what he's built, Lord, and how you've used him thus far. And Father, I, I would just pray, would you just use this conversation? Would you just let this be a conversation to bless people, Lord, that it, as we're looking at the world and it seems like it's getting darker, Lord, that a little bit of light can shine bright? And so would you let Sean's light shine? Would you speak and shine through me, Lord God? And would you, would you equip others to be encouraged and to shine their light in a dark world, Lord?

• 15:59Speaker 03

  I thank you, Lord. We pray these things in Jesus's name. Amen.

• 16:02Shawn Ryan?

  Amen. Beautiful. Yeah. Thank you. Well, we always start every podcast off with a gift, so.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Oh, my goodness.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Let's go.

• 16:14Shawn Ryan?

  Vigilance League gummy bears, legal in all 50 states, made in the USA. Of course, you don't have to worry about that, you know, in California, right?

• 16:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, no. California. Do you know gummy worms is like my favorite candy?

• 16:27Shawn Ryan?

  Is it really?

• 16:28Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 16:29Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we'll load you up.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  How serendipitous. This is incredible.

• 16:31Shawn Ryan?

  Try them out.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  I want to open one, but I'm not going to. I'm going to, I'm going to practice restraint.

• 16:35Shawn Ryan?

  We'll, we'll load you up before he leave.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  That's awesome.

• 16:37Shawn Ryan?

  And then one other thing. So I have a Patreon account. And, uh, you know, it's a subscription account. We've turned it into quite the community. They've been here since the beginning and so, um, they're the reason I get to sit here with you today. So one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Oh, cool. Shout out to Patreon. We got our own community too. So it's beautiful.

• 16:57Shawn Ryan?

  Cool.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:59Shawn Ryan?

  Are you on Patreon?

• 16:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:00Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man. This is from Kirk Powers. What were the driving factors that contributed to your period of atheism and eventually led you back to Christianity with an even stronger level of faith?

• 17:13Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, you, your, your Patreon got the coolest names because we did some out there and Kirk Powers sounds like a superhero. So props to Kirk Powers. Atheism to me was a direct correlation to the problem of evil, which I think is a tough thing to work through. From a

• 17:32Speaker 03

  apologetics, polemics, human level is like, why does evil exist? Why do bad things happen? And that's what led me to atheism. Um, when I was a child, I had to have been the youngest atheist walking around. Uh, and what, what led me to Jesus was starting to see the providential hand of God over my life, even in the areas where I suffered and even in the areas where things did not go good. And the more I saw that, it was, it was as if my life was a movie and God kind of orchestrated even the evil things. And he somehow used it for good. So I started seeing that as I kind of drew more to, to Jesus and then it all clicked.

• 18:12Shawn Ryan?

  Nice. Yeah. Nice. I mean, it's, it's, uh, takes a lot of energy to be an atheist, right?

• 18:17Speaker 03

  You gotta do a lot of mental gymnastics. Yeah.

• 18:21Shawn Ryan?

  Talked to Lee Strobel quite a bit about it, uh, on one of his interviews and, uh, yeah, it seems, I mean, you're still, you're forcing like, it's, it's still a faith in not believing, correct?

• 18:32Speaker 03

  I think it requires more faith to not believe.

• 18:34Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 18:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. I think so. Cause I think just from nature, you know, the There's miracle atheists have to believe miracles too. So you have to believe that everything came from nothing. You have to believe that mindless matter made matter and and mindless matter made mind and consciousness, something that doesn't have a mind makes a mind.

• 18:57Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Right, order from chaos. How do you get order from chaos? So the miracles that atheists have to acknowledge, in my opinion, are way more preposterous than the virgin birth. And so I have a line where we say like virgin birth or virgin universe, like you decide. Because you the virgin birth starts sounding a lot more sensible when you consider the virgin universe as a like that sounds realistic to you, you know, there's a man that came, lived, died, rose. That sounds a lot more sensitive than everything came from nothing.

• 19:30Shawn Ryan?

  That's a good point. I've never thought of it like that.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:33Shawn Ryan?

  That's a good point. But let's move into let's move into your story a little bit. So you obviously grew up in Azerbaijan. What was going on there when you when you, you know, made the made the trip back to or not back to to America?

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'm ethnically Armenian. My father's Armenian. My mother was adopted by an Armenian family. I think I did my 23 and me and she's either like Ukrainian or Russian. She was adopted by an Armenian family as a little girl. And that region of the world, I'm sure as you know, north of Iran, right, Armenia is splat in between Turkey and Azerbaijan. They kind of refer to themselves as, you know, two, two states, one nation, two, two, two nations, one group of people. And so you have Armenia, which is the oldest Christian nation in the world. Ethiopians and Armenians always argue who is the first Christian nation. And you have this really rich history of Christianity.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  And all of this is on the backdrop of communism and the Soviet Union. So you remove God, you remove faith, the government becomes God, communism becomes the religion. And in this weird.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  Post 1915 Armenian genocide with the Turks and Armenians. The Soviet Union decided to drop these weird parameters within Azerbaijan. So you got Armenian, you got Azerbaijan, and then there's this little region called the Naborokaragak region. And it's right on eastern Azerbaijan, but it's predominantly an Armenian strip of land. And I don't know how, you know, the theory is like sometimes the quote superpowers does this intentionally to maintain instability in the region. And so what started happening was there became rumors of ARZs getting displaced from that region. And then the ARZ supposedly getting displaced from Armenia. And then that led to this mass ethnic cleansing of all Armenians from the city of Baku. In the late eighties called the pogroms of Baku.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  So half a million Armenians are displaced and ethnically cleansed from the capital. About 500 of them brutally murdered. And we, as a family, end up applying for refugee status. We applied for Australia, we applied for Israel, and we applied for Armenia. Excuse me, America, we applied for America. America were the first people that accepted us. Now, my dad and everyone had to already leave because they appear more ethnically Armenian. Me and my mom were more fair skinned. So we stayed, kind of handling the affairs. And it ended up taking a little bit longer. And then we ended up transitioning, coming to the United States in 1991, May of 1991, a few months before the fall of communism. Wow, how old were you? I was six. Six years old. Yeah, so I remember, I remember food rations, lining up to get a box of food. I remember.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  No kidding? Yeah, yeah, lining up. I remember, I remember there was, looking into our bathroom as a kid, and there was a tub of water. And I asked, what is that about? And they were like that, we get water rationed for the family to bathe with. So you get water and that's your water for the week to bathe with. Yeah, so very different. My first memory in America was coming from the airport and then pulling up. To this beautiful, shiny, amazing store. And I thought to myself, oh, how kind. My parents took me to replenish my toys. I don't have any toys. They took me here to buy toys, right? Never seen anything like it. It looked like a toy store. It was a Lucky's grocery store off of El Cajon Avenue in the eight oh five freeway.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  The grocery store in America looked like an like an imaginary toy store. That's how colorful and beautiful it was. And it was like, they weren't coming to give me toys. They were just going grocery shopping because we didn't have any food. And so come to the United States. Um, mom and dad see a lot of stuff. I I don't have a lot of crazy memories. There's a memory that my mom tells me this this this might be a bit graphic, but I I'll share the story with you anyway. I've only shared it once or twice. Um, so. Arzis are ethnically Muslim. Muslims get circumcised. Armenians don't get circumcised. Uh, because we are like, hey, Galatian says you don't got to get circumcised. So culturally, not part of the world. No circumcision. So. We were the last ones there because we were fair skinned. And everyone left.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  And they're starting to swarm in and they have reports of where where there are Armenian families. And they're going in and they're beating people up. They're harming people. This is explored um in a movie recently released actually called Beyond Borders. This conflict specifically, it stars Elizabeth from um The Chosen. So people are coming in our house, right? And as a kid, this is probably going to be TMI, but I'm just gonna I'm gonna go for it. We're gonna full send it. Uh, as a kid, I end up having like a weird UTI infection as a kid. So they end up getting me circumcised, right? And then when they come in and they're about to bring harm to me and my mom, my mom actually is like, no, no, no, no, no. We're not Armenians. We're not Armenians. We're not Armenians. Armenians are circumcised.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Look, my son is not circumcised. So she literally shows them my penis. And that is what makes them say, okay, these are Russians. They're not Armenians.

• 24:33Shawn Ryan?

  Holy.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  And they leave.

• 24:34Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  So my penis saved me and my family's life.

• 24:38Shawn Ryan?

  Good for you. Family jewels, buddy. But but um.

• 24:45Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, so I'm just curious. I don't know much about this. I don't know. I don't know anything about this. So, I mean,

• 24:54Shawn Ryan?

  if communism is cleansing, you know, were they just cleansing Christians? Because communism is the religion.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  So, so.

• 25:00Shawn Ryan?

  Were they persecuting just Christians or was it any religion?

• 25:04Speaker 03

  So it wasn't that it was communism or the Soviet Union. It was the ARZs who had their own nation state within the communistic Soviet Union and the Soviet Union just kind of stood back and were like, we're gonna let this play out. They didn't want to interfere too much. So what they should have done is said, hey, you can't kill 500 Armenians in the streets. Like, can't do that. But they waited and waited and waited until it really hit the fan. And then at the end, they stepped in in January. So it wasn't the Soviet Union was doing it. It was that the people and like they were looting and rioting and killing and you could, people can pull up footage of all this. It's horrific, the stuff that happened. And that area, that Naboro Karabakh region, that area just recently got ethnically cleansed.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Two weeks before October 7th, the last 120,000 Armenians in that autonomous Armenian region within Azerbaijan just got pushed out. Uh, September 2023. So the last 100,000 Armenian Christians just got cleansed, ethnically cleansed from Azerbaijan. No one talked about it because two weeks later, you had October 7th and then, but people can pull up videos and there's just, I mean, there's like a mountain of just Armenians trying to leave that region.

• 26:12Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And so Trump recently just is trying to negotiate a peace treaty and is trying to normalize relations between the two countries. Like, maybe a month or two ago. Yeah.

• 26:23Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, man. It seems like, you know, we're seeing, I don't know if it's because of the internet or if it was always happening, but I mean, you know, I've read about, you know, they're crucifying Christians today in Syria.

• 26:35Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's happening all over. Israel has bombed several Catholic churches. Probably an accident, maybe, but there's been no repercussions for that. And and so, I mean, you're probably a lot more tuned into this than I am. I mean, how how how common is this in that part of the world?

• 26:52Speaker 03

  It's it's very common in parts of Africa right now. Yeah, what they're doing to African Christians is just absolutely horrific. They're shoot they're shooting up churches. They're killing kill women and children. It's it's really dark right now. And I from my understanding, Africa is is probably the worst. I know North Korea sentenced a family to life in prison, a family with a two-year-old in it in their concentration camp. Yeah, we just covered it on the channel because the bibles are illegal in North Korea. And so, yeah, that that, you know, this is this is several years ago, but there was a two-year-old in the family and they're sentenced to life for just owning a Bible.

• 27:28Shawn Ryan?

  What do you do about this? I mean, what what do you do about this as a Christian? I mean, as a believer, when you're seeing your people be killed, persecuted, you know, for their beliefs? I mean, what goes through your head?

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Well, one, I pray. I pray. I pray that justice will prevail. I pray that that Jesus would make all things right. So, one, I pray. Two, I I look at what's in front of me right now, and I say, well, how can I be faithful with what's in front of me? And and can and can I contribute to relief in those parts of the world? Can I send bibles there? Can can can I help get messaging out there? Can I fund folks that are willing to go out there and and do the some of the humanitarian work? So I think that. And then, three, I think, I think awareness, like just bringing awareness to it, because it's not a it's not a trendy thing to talk about Christians being persecuted and killed, right? It's not. It's there's not. There's not a there's not a good story arc to it. There's not an oppressor oppressed narrative to it. It's just, this is really sad, right?

• 28:22Speaker 03

  But I think bringing awareness to it is also helpful.

• 28:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, the I interviewed this guy. I'm not going to say his name because he didn't want to talk about this on the interview. But, you know, at his, they were doing missionary work at a very young age and going into parts of China. And we're, you know, we're preaching the word and and and they would have people, they would have, you know, the Chinese Communist Party coming in and kicking at the door and looking for bibles and what are you doing here? And very, it's, it sounds like special operation shit. I was like fascinated when we were talking offline about it. And I mean, Are there, are we, are Christians, I mean, are there missionaries embedded in North Korea

• 29:09Shawn Ryan?

  that are, you know, in places like that still today?

• 29:12Speaker 03

  I would definitely say China, for sure, for a fact, China, a hundred percent. I don't, I can't speak to North Korea, but there's a lot of amazing underground churches in China. There's some, like, churches that are kind of tolerated by the government in China, but they gotta be connected to the state, but the underground church revival is huge. It's not, it's not just China, I mean, it's parts of Pakistan, parts of Afghanistan. They're, they're broadcasting Bible teaching to Iran over the airwaves, and people are hearing it, getting saved, getting baptized. And there's tons of revival happening in parts of the world. It's like when you try to suppress the movement of Jesus, it flourishes, ironically enough. And then when here, when we have all this freedom to practice our faith in America, we're kind of taking for granted.

• 29:54Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm. I just think that's, I mean, that's like, that's, that is throwing it all on the line right there, doing that, you know? I mean, usually, you know, there's lots of Christians doing good things in places like Haiti, and they go all over the place, right? But, I mean, to do that, that's a, that is a, that is a, you're not doing a field trip there, you know what I mean? And I, I'm just, I was just curious if you knew of any of that going on.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, my, my wife went to China for like a month-long mission trip, maybe six months before we got married, as a English teacher. They weren't, they weren't as locked down back then, so she went there, and she said even just going there as like an English teacher, they had people following them around and keeping tabs on them, and it's kind of scary.

• 30:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

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• 32:10Shawn Ryan?

  So you get to the US. What happens?

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Get to the US. This is amazing. It's a fresh start. It's beautiful. I'm in San Diego. You know, awesome. Don't know the language, don't know anything. My only context of anything related to America, my dad would smuggle in video cassettes into into our house when we were kids. We had a BCR. He was like a bootleg smuggler. You know, he's always a hustler. And he, uh, my only context for American culture was Michael Jackson and American Ninja.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 32:46Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  That's, and so I end up trying to learn English through cartoons. Michael Jackson, American Ninja. A few months into being out, out here. So my mother and my father had a tumultuous relationship because they, they had to, he had to leave early. And so he's living in Moscow, kind of trying to go back and forth because, because again, we're fair skin, so he stayed behind the longest. Long story short, I find these letters with kissy marks on them. Then I'm like, oh, these are sweet. And I take them to my dad. I'm like, look, mom wrote you. These like beautiful letters. There's like she lipstick on them. Well, they weren't to my dad. They were to her boyfriend back in Baku. So that was the straw that broke the camel's back. They were kind of had a fresh start. They're starting over. He was like, I'm done, you know, and he had also a relationship back in Moscow. And so long story short, a couple of months into being here.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  My mother and my father split. My mother's dad dies. My grandfather dies. He fought in World War Two. Uh, with, with, with for the Soviets, right? Um, awesome dude, English teacher. He dies. Um, and my mom just goes down this dark spiral of the depression, despair, anxiety. She's a single mom now. We're on welfare. I remember our check was six hundred and fifty dollars a month and our rent was four hundred and fifty dollars a month. And so we had to stretch that two hundred dollars a month on food. So no car. Um, my dad tries to come around, but my mom had a very toxic, uh, taste in men. So he'd come around.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  The, the dudes that were there would fight him multiple times, fights. One time my mom like jumped in and grabbed like a heel and scraped his face. The cops had to get called and she told me like, don't say I did it when the cops came. Um, and my dad tried to be in my life, but he, you know, she made it very difficult for him. And this, we had this conversation as like men, like we're like, what happened, dude? Like, where were you? Kind of explained his side. Um. At the same time, we start going to the Armenian Apostolic Church, which again, I don't have any God. I don't have any Jesus as a child. I don't know anything about God. I've never heard anything about the Bible, the gospel, anything. But we come to America and there's this beautiful diaspora of Armenians and the Armenian Apostolic Church. So this is the Oriental arm of the church. A beautiful liturgy, beautiful art.

• 34:54Speaker 03

  So simultaneously, I'm becoming an altar boy. I'm like, this is, this is awesome. I mean, I love being an altar boy. We got to light the incense. They, when there was, this is people may not find this appropriate, but when there was leftover communion wine. You can't discard the communion wine. That's, that's holy. So guess who they had finish off the communion wine?

• 35:16Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  This guy right here. So I'm like, man, this is great. I love this. That that that hired is awesome. There's a there's a picture that I that I when I do talks, I put up as me getting kind of christened as a little six, seven year old kid. And then there's some older kids that are also altar boys and they're thirteen, fourteen ish. They were like the senior altar boys. I was a junior altar boy. Long story short, they end up sexually assaulting me like repeatedly sexually assaulting me. Uh, starting from showing gay porn and then doing the acts on me. And then in the midst of all that, it was framed as if I as a seven year old would initiate.

• 35:53Shawn Ryan?

  Seven years old?

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Seven years old, seven, seven, eight years old, that I was the one that like initiated this stuff. So even in a way, it was framed was very twisted. The church didn't didn't do much. They didn't do anything. Um, at the same time, my dad remarries and my mom was bitter at the church because they remarried and they shouldn't have remarried technically according to her because they were, I guess, not divorced. This is according to her. So she's angry at the church because they remarried my dad. I'm like, this happened by these guys I met at the church and you guys didn't do anything. And so like I was done. I was like, there, there is no God. And and if there is a God, he he does not like me. So I had to have been the youngest self-professed atheist.

• 36:37Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  Walking around. Yeah.

• 36:40Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, man.

• 36:43Shawn Ryan?

  What do you? I mean, there's a lot of kids go through this, a lot more than I'd like to, you know, think about. And, uh, I mean, just on the show that we've had so many, you know, people that have been sexually abused, physically abused

• 37:00Shawn Ryan?

  by family, by neighbors, by whoever. And, um, so I'm just, you know, what's your advice to kids that are going through that?

• 37:08Speaker 03

  It's gonna be all right.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  It's gonna be okay.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  The grace and the mercy of God can do wonders in transforming our hearts and reorienting us back into a healthy place. There's gonna be some work. I had to go to therapy. I discovered as an adult that I had onset PTSD that I got. I didn't know that, you know, as a child, I didn't know, I didn't know why I was the way I was. But as an adult, now married with a family and I'm like, I gotta figure this stuff out. Like, why, why do I have these weird patterns and conflict? And go to therapy, get good treatment, get counseling, get around people that are, that are gonna call you to more. And you could either allow those things to defy you, or you could persevere despite,

• 37:58Speaker 03

  you know, Dave Ramsey has this quote, he says, "The only difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is there's a pile of poop all of us have to deal with. But those of us that are successful are just figured out a way to stand on top of all the poop." And so that would, that would be my advice.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  How'd you get yourself out of it?

• 38:19Speaker 03

  I, um, so something interesting happened. I, um, growing up in San Diego, predominantly black neighborhood. My, uh, my mom and me, and then it was another Armenian refugee family in the complexes. It was like a eight-unit complex. And I, uh, so I get into music, I get into hip-hop. I love hip-hop, I love the graffiti. This is the early 90s, so this is a little different than, than it is, but you talk about LL Cool J, Public Enemy, um, just a different time in, in hip-hop. And then the gangster rap came on the scene. And so I end up going down like just Doggy Style, The Chronic, like this is who's discipling me at this point.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Eight, nine years old, I'm listening to Doggy Style, The Chronic. Fourth grade, I got my ear pierced. And I remember going back to the Armenian church and they had nothing to say about the sexual abuse that happened to me, but they were concerned that I got my ear pierced and I was listening to, to rap music now, right? Which is like, we're the Just Scales. So I get into gangster rap. The manager of our apartment complex, her name's Cherie Jackson, I'm still in touch with her to this day. Cherie, um...

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Me and her son were best friends. His name's Steven. And Cherie was involved in some street activities. One night when Steven stayed the night at my house, we would do sleepovers back and forth. One night he stayed at my house. There's a drive by and bullet holes on his side of the building. So this is, I'm just painting a picture of who Cherie was. And took me to my first concert. I was like nine years old, definitely one of the only kids in the audience, one of the only white kids in the audience. I saw Dr. Dre and Snoop in concert live. This is 93. And Cherie ends up getting arrested for going to jail for moving, trying to move cocaine through the airport or a Greyhound or something. She goes to jail, gets radically saved in

• 40:11Speaker 03

  prison, like on fire for the Lord, loves Jesus, comes out and everyone in our apartment complex starts coming to church with her because clearly there's a night and day shift. And I, at the same time, I'm just, I'm just completely unraveling. I'm now in a gang, like I'm smoking weed, I'm drinking. This is all in for, I'm breaking into my schools and stealing karaoke machines because I want to be a rapper, like just a complete derelict of a kid. And I get arrested at the age of 11 for breaking into a house. My, our gang leader.

• 40:44Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, at 11?

• 40:45Speaker 03

  At 11, yeah, yeah. Our, our gang leader was in jail and we wanted to bail him out. And so we found out the same girl he was messing with told us she was messing with another dude and he had money and stuff in his, in his house. So we're like, we can break into here and take the money to go bail him out. That was, that was the plan. Well, in the midst of that, I'm the smallest one. I'm in the window, the bathroom window, you know, the little small little ba, I'm like in the window and our lookout gets put into this arm bar. It's like UFC arm bar and he wasn't a great lookout at all. So it is an ex-police officer that saw everything that was happening. So I get arrested and go to jail for the night. My mom has to come bail me out and I knew at that point, like I'm not built for this life. Like I am not a tough guy. We weren't, thankfully we weren't

• 41:30Speaker 03

  playing with guns and that sort of stuff, but I knew like this is, this is not for me. At the same time, Cherie is coming to faith. People were getting saved in our apartment complex. And now I have to do community service as a part of my probation. I wait till the last minute, of course. And the only way I can get the hours done is if I start doing it with, at Sharie's church and with Charles and Willie, who live next door to me. Blue collar guys, Charles had some kids that I was friends with, Willie was single. And in that, I'm starting to hear about Jesus and I'm getting softened to the idea of Jesus. I'm getting softened to the idea of God. I'm not, I'm not a Christian, I'm still, I'm still saying I'm an atheist. But they're just, they're just talking and just saying, like, man, like, and it was this beautiful balance of like, we're gonna accept you right where you are, but we're gonna tell you the truth about yourself.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  Like, we love you and you're welcome, but you have some issues and you need to get your life in order. And they were, they were just talking to me like I was a grown man. They weren't, they weren't coddling me, they weren't talking to me like I was a kid. And so through Sharie, through Charles, through Willie, I start hearing about Jesus. And they, and it was weird because they would tell me stuff like, man, God's gonna use you to do great things someday. You're gonna reach millions of people for Jesus. And I'm, I'm like sixth and seventh grade, and this is now the environment I'm in. At the same time, I end up, um, I'm in seventh grade. I'm like, I'm a 1.0 GPA student. My mom sees all this stuff. Now we're getting a reputation as the kids that are breaking into houses and doing stuff, even after I got arrested. And my mom sees this, she wants to relocate us to North County, Oceanside Vista area.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  And at the same time, there was, um, there was a kid who brought a gun to school and told me about it. And then when he got caught with it, told the police it was my gun. So the police bring me in to the principal's office and they're like interrogating me. And I'm like, I don't, I didn't see the gun. He said he had a gun, I didn't see the gun. And they're like, well, he's saying it's your gun. And I'm like, it's not my gun. They're like, well, we're gonna run the fingerprints. And if it's your gun, like, you're going down for this, you're already on probation. And I'm like, scan the effing fingerprints, like, this is not my gun. Do it. And so they're like, we're gonna do it. And so it's just the weirdest sequence of events. Long story short, the kid who brought the gun is expelled. One day I'm walking home. This is like the week I'm moving. I'm walking home.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  And this kid, this kid's walking towards me and Samoan kid. And I see him and I'm like, hey, like, what was up with the with the gun? Why are you telling them that it was my gun? Right? And he and I look and he has a knife in his hand. And he he says, why did you effing snitch on me? And I'm like, snitch on you? And so as he's walking and lunging towards me, thankfully, he was a fat Samoan kid. I just jetted and ran for my life down Alcoa Boulevard with everything I had. A couple of days later, we moved to North County and I get a now I got a clean start. I I escape this kid attempting to stab me. I escape going to jail. I escape all the craziness in my life.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  No, okay, this is a clean start. I'm not gonna smoke weed. I'm not gonna drink. I'm not gonna break into houses. This is a fresh start. And so I end up discovering basketball. I thought I want to be a professional basketball player. Like, this is my path now. That's my purpose in life. This is Michael Jordan's last season with the Chicago Bulls. Uh, that era. And I'm like, I'm gonna be a basketball player. And then I I start doing better in school. GPA goes from like a 1.0. I didn't think they would take me into the eighth grade, but I went from like a 1.0 to like a 3.8. My first year in eighth grade, just a different environment. And then more and more people around me are telling me about Jesus, right? And I end up meeting a girl. My freshman year, I did a talent show. Where I rapped and I won this talent show at Ringo Terrace Park and met this girl.

• 45:10Speaker 03

  And the only way I could see her is if I went to church with her and her family on Sundays over the summer. School year was done. I couldn't see her. So I'm like, why not? Might as might as well, right? And I start going to this this kind of seeker friendly church and they're talking about Jesus and they're telling me about the gospel and I'm slowly softening to it. Now I'm still one foot in, one foot out. I'm still sleeping with her. I'm still kind of smoking weed a little bit on the down low, right? But I then start asking the questions. Is Jesus God? Is Jesus is Jesus the only way to God? How do I know this? And me and a girl break up. I'm dating a Jehovah's Witness girl. I got Muslim friends. I got I got Mormon friends. I got all these different friends.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  And I'm just confused, trying to sort out the the the truth claims. My

• 46:00Speaker 03

  Manager at Pizza Hut and the lead delivery driver, both devoted Christians. And I'm asking them like, cause I'm talking to this Jehovah's Witness girl, they don't believe Jesus is God. They believe he's a God. So I'm still going to church. And so they hand me a book and it was the new evidence that demands a verdict, a book this thick by Josh McDowell. And as a sophomore in high school, I just devour this entire book and I'm just, it's like an academic textbook, right? Like, and now, English is my second language. I'm not a great reader. But all of a sudden, the light just starts going off and all my answers, my apologetics questions, all those answers I got from just reading and researching. And so another year or so of wrestling and then like my junior year, I'm like, all right, I'm done. I'm gonna, I'm gonna surrender my life to the Lord. I'm gonna do it his way. I'm not gonna have one foot in, one foot out.

• 46:45Speaker 03

  But it was a messy four or five years of going from atheist to deist to theist to Christian. I'd say that was about a four or five year process for me.

• 46:55Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, at that young of age.

• 46:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:58Shawn Ryan?

  How did you? Thank you for sharing that. How did you? What I meant to ask was, and we were gonna get there, but how did you remove yourself from the sexual abuse within the church?

• 47:14Speaker 03

  I just stopped going to church. Yeah, I just was like, I'm not, I can't be around these dudes anymore. Like this is, it's just weird. It's awkward. Again, the way it was framed was that it was my fault and I initiated it.

• 47:25Shawn Ryan?

  How did they frame that? I mean, a seven year old?

• 47:27Speaker 03

  They, I, I had people, I had other people in the neighborhood come up to me and start asking me if I was gay. Like I remember the word gay in Russian, that's my first language, sounds similar to the word baby blue. And so I remember someone coming up and asking me like, are you, are you gay? The gula boy, the gula boy. And I was like, gula boy, that sounds like, what are you, what are you asking me? And then they had to explain it to me. And so that, so they, they framed this whole thing as if it was me, a gay kid trying to initiate relationship, relations with these older, older boys. And so that made me very upset.

• 48:02Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Damn. What did, I mean, what did they, did you guys approach him? Did your mother approach him?

• 48:08Speaker 03

  There was like this kind of like, community town hall meeting, almost, in someone's house. And I remember, they were screaming and crying and saying, "It was me, it was all my fault, I was the one that did it." And I, I just kind of froze. I didn't, I couldn't, I didn't know what to say. Like, I just cried and was like, "No," you know, and that's all I remember from that day. But yeah, it was like, all the Armenian families in the neighborhood kind of got together, or maybe, maybe it was the other kids' parents, and maybe my mom. I don't think my dad was there. And it was this big meeting, and they just made me look like I was the initiator.

• 48:40Shawn Ryan?

  Did they ostracize you guys?

• 48:42Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, now I'm the quote-unquote gay kid.

• 48:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 48:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:45Shawn Ryan?

  So, yes.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:47Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  My mom doesn't have, is, is, is a single mom, so that's, there's already, that's already kind of frowned upon. And now, I'm the, I'm the, I'm the kid that, you know, they're, they're viewing as the gay kid.

• 49:01Shawn Ryan?

  That's him raging, man.

• 49:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:03Shawn Ryan?

  I'm sorry that happened to him.

• 49:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:06Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. Is this the, is this the same church that Nathan went to?

• 49:12Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no. So this is Armenian Apostolic, a part of the Oriental arm of the church. So, uh, this is, Oriental Orthodoxy is, the Armenian Apostolic, the Ethiopian Orthodox, this is that arm of the church. So this is very high, high church, liturgical, um, Apostolic succession. This is, this is what their, their, their connection is pretty deep to the, the early church.

• 49:36Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:37Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. And you, you had mentioned, um, maybe, maybe you didn't mention, maybe I was in the online, but, you know, that, that you found a lot of darkness in, in the music industry that you were in. Is that, is that the darkness about the gangs and stuff, or is there more?

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's, one, there's the, there's the practical, what is going to sell? I, I, I was talking to, um, Dr. Anthony Bradley, and he said this point, he said, "Free markets without virtue get us OnlyFans." Right? And so if you have free markets and anything goes, what is going to sell? It's going to be lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, pride of life. So what was, what would sell is in music? Lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, pride of life. So the music that I was consuming was very dark. You know, I, I couldn't imagine being, I couldn't, my son is 10 years old now. I couldn't imagine him listening to Doggy Style by Snoop. You know, listening to The Chronic by, by Dr. Dre. It, it is just so, so, so dark. The content is so dark.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  Even when I started becoming a theist, listening to DMX, it's dark and hell is hot. 13 songs are all about just the most horrendous murders, the most terrible things. And then there was like a song about Jesus at the end of the album, right? This was like DMX's thing. And so there's, you're, you're talking about people that have been traumatized, making traumatizing music over and over. And then I am trying to do it for the Lord. And as I'm building this thing out, then long, you know, I'm jumping way ahead. But we end up working with Interscope Records on a project for an artist that was signed to me. And so going from these meetings, um, from all the major record labels, you, you start, you, you, they, they say they want to do something positive. They like what we're doing as Christians, because at this point I'm jumping ahead, I'm a Christian now.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  But at the same time, um, there is just a heaviness to the environment. That even people who are trying to do the, the, "Hey, we like you guys, you guys doing Christian music." There's a heaviness to it. And then there's a, uh, um, "Hey, we're going to kind of curate this in a way that we can monetize it and make as much money from it as possible." So we can kind of feel better about ourselves, because the other stuff we know we're selling to the public is just utter debauchery and, and is harmful to people.

• 51:50Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 51:54Shawn Ryan?

  Quite the childhood.

• 51:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, quite the, quite the childhood.

• 51:59Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, dude. What was it like going to church? I mean, when you, that had to be, that had to be quite the hurdle to get over with what you experienced as a seven year old. And then you're back in a church.

• 52:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think.

• 52:15Shawn Ryan?

  Did you have any fear?

• 52:16Speaker 03

  No, uh, people, people make fun of like evangelical churches and are like, hey, you know, this is, there's no reverence, there's no art, whatever the critique is. And for, for someone like me that came from a quote unquote high church setting, one, I didn't really understand anything. It was like beautiful paintings and art, but I didn't, I didn't get it. And, and so stepping into an environment that like they're speaking to me plainly. We're not doing the liturgy in Armenian. We're doing it in English. You could understand what the message is about. And not only can you understand, it's actually relevant to you. Like it's, they're talking about, hey, you could take this biblical principle and apply it to your day to day life.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  And then the, the illumination of the, the gospel message was like, oh, man, like even though I'm a sinner and even though I'm clearly broken, I knew I was broken, that, that Jesus offers me an invitation to something better, to something transcendent. That really resonated with me. And so it was as simple as like, man, I don't know about this whole church thing, but like, Jesus, if you're real, reveal yourself to me. And it was, it just, it was that simple. If you're real, reveal yourself to me and I'll, and I'll do whatever you want me to do. So it just started there. And because the environment was so different, it, it wasn't a challenge, but it was a challenge intellectually, trying to ask all the questions. It was a challenge in that regard.

• 53:36Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting. Let's move into Nathan's interview.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  All right, let's do it.

• 53:43Shawn Ryan?

  So a lot of people, a lot of people upset about that. Like I, like I had mentioned, I didn't necessarily agree with everything he said. I do, I do like the end message that is, I think that, you know, he, he wants transparency within the churches. I think, I think that's, I think that's a good thing. They should be transparent. But, you know, he's, there was a lot of, you know, outlandish claims in there. Um, according to your, your talk on your, on your YouTube channel and such. Let's start.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, one, I mean, again, my, my, my, my life experience, that is my life experience, the experience of a lot of my friends. You're coming from an environment where your father's not in the home, you're broken, uh, there's trauma. And then you step into a church context that now I, I, I don't, I'm not just hearing good information. I actually have access to pastors and men who believe in me and are speaking life into me. And not only that, but I, I, I get to serve and learn stuff like expensive cameras and microphones. I, I, I, I'm being called to lead and teach other people as I'm now walking with the Lord. And so all of this is culminated, like, like the local church has culminated into me becoming who I am today, the husband I am today.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  I mean, I discovered Dave Ramsey in the local church. I, I got out of debt because of Dave Ramsey, because of I was going to a local church, me and my wife, for a hundred thousand dollars in debt. And in 18 months, we were debt free. This is before I was doing YouTube, before I was doing music. So I am a testament of the local church and the, and the goodness of what most local churches are. So to me, when I'm, when I'm hearing Nathan, I would say, yeah, man, there's abuse and we should absolutely call that out. And I do call that out regularly. At the same time, when you start wanting to, uh,

• 55:33Speaker 03

  attack the institution, when you start wanting to say that anyone who's ever taken money as a pastor is not corrupt. Then I start taking issue with that because I know hundreds, if not thousands of pastors. And I see these men and I see most of them, um, aren't, aren't getting rich. You know, 47% of pastors are bivocational. The, the medium pastor's salary in the United States is $61,000 a year.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  The average public school teacher's salary is seventy two thousand dollars a year. So this this notion that like most pastors are getting rich and mo. I I I think I think it's harmful because now what's happening is now we're we're utilizing very broad strokes and it's impacting people like myself twenty years ago that that really needed the church like the church was my lifeline to to to everything to to to manhood, to masculinity, biblical masculinity, to to financial literacy, to developing my my my skills, my giftings, to doing a life with someone a season ahead of me that can that can speak into my life, right? There's so many incredible like practical aspects of of a of a good local church community.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  And the the way we're going, the way he spoke about it was, in my opinion, the epitome of a hasty generalization fallacy, where you're spotlighting things that are true, but you you don't have enough of the data to understand that that's not reflecting of everybody. Mm hmm. So I paralleled it to police brutality, which if any anyone should look and say, hey, police brutality is bad, white people, black people, bad, police should not misbehave. However, when you look at the data and you go, well, how prevalent is police brutality? Some studies say that you're more likely to get stung by lightning than you are to be killed by a police officer. Mm hmm. Some say you're more likely to die uh uh die of a bee sting than you are to die of a police officer.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  So now we take the police brutality thing and we said, defund the police, abolish the police. And what happened when that happened in major cities, when you mess up with the institution, when you mess with the institution and you start defunding stuff, there's there's ramifications to that. Are all police officers racist? No. Are there some bad apples? Yes. Should those people be held accountable? Absolutely. And so I think that that same mindset of, hey, the system is corrupt, policing is corrupt.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  You're tinkering with things that are gonna have ramifications and they're not and that and they're not good. And so we saw it in major cities with with law enforcement, the defund the police movement. And now everyone's kind of coming around now and going, ah, we probably shouldn't have funded the police. We probably should better fund the police. And when you look at the data, most people in in black and brown neighborhoods, actually, I want to say that 70% of them prefer more police in their neighborhoods. They want more order and and protection from the bad guys, not less, right? And so I think, again, you you you you're tinkering and you're messing with stuff, but you don't understand the ramifications of what you're really saying. And so, bad police, they should be held accountable. They should they they should go to jail if they misbehave, absolutely. Bad pastors, they should be held accountable. If they break the law, they should go to jail. But how prevalent

• 58:38Speaker 03

  is it? How pervasive is it? That's my concern. And I don't think the data supports that it is as pervasive as Nathan has laid out.

• 58:46Shawn Ryan?

  Do you, I mean, do you, do you disagree with his end message that churches and pastors should be transparent with their finances if they're receiving donations to run their church?

• 58:58Speaker 03

  Yes, I think pastors and churches should be transparent, and I think most are. The question is, what do we mean by transparent? I worked with adults with developmental disabilities from 2010 to 2012. It was one of the most fulfilling jobs I had. I had to pick up a group of three folks. One of them had high functioning autism, one of them had high functioning Down syndrome, take them to, take them to the gym, take them to school, take them, just kind of do their day with them, right? It was such a fun job. And I remember we had an all staff meeting. I remember we had an all staff meeting and our president and our vice president was there. And I remember finding out that the president of this organization

• 59:42Speaker 03

  or the CEO of this this nonprofit organization made like 150 grand a year and the the vice president made like 100 grand a year. And as a 25 year old kid that was struggling on the front lines doing this work, I was pissed. Like, what do you mean he's making 150k? Or we're doing the work on the on the front lines, right? Now, I didn't have to see those people again. I didn't, I didn't have to see, I saw them once a year and that was it, right? Now imagine if I as a 25 year old kid had to do life with that person every single week and hear them preach every single week and have to and get counsel from them every single week knowing exactly what they made. I don't think that's a healthy dynamic. So should churches be transparent and accountable?

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  Absolutely, and most are. What Nathan is asking for is he wants to know what every pastor makes to the dollar. Because if he's a giving member and and and it's just a different dynamic than in the nonprofit world. Right? And so no, I don't think pastors need to reveal what they make. I don't think every staff member needs to reveal what they make. I don't think that's helpful. I don't think when you're doing life on life for people is helpful. People naturally are going to deal with envy and jealousy depending on what season of life they're in, especially if you're young and you feel like the world's against you. So no, so I think there's transparency, but there's not, you know, I don't need to know everything about your life. You know, um, our church, Rhythm Church in Oceanside, you met my pastor earlier. We put out a book, like a magazine every year where you get to see exactly how much came in.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  You get to see exactly where the money went. You get to know how much was spent on staff, how much was spent on on buildings, how much we give away to missions, how much we give away to the community. Every single thing is, but you're not going to find, you're not going to walk in and find out exactly what my pastor makes. You're not going to find out what the what the what the admin makes.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  It's lumped in as a group. It's lumped in as a group. Yeah, it's lumped in as a group. And I and I think that, by the way, the bigger the churches are, usually the more transparent they are. Because they have external audits. They spend less money on staffing. They spend less money on um, building because just sheer volume. And they spend way more money on uh, giving and missions and serving the community. So and if people and if a church doesn't provide that sort of data, people have the agency to go to a different church. Right? There are churches right now, the pastor who married me and my wife, the deacons and the elders vote on his salary. Everything is transparent. You you know, he has a parsonage onsite next to the church. Everything is full. So there are churches like that. And I would say if you want a church like that, praise God, go find a church like that.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  If you want to know where every dollar is going and you want the deacons to approve every stapler that gets bought, like, cool, man, might as well talk, like, go do it. But when you're, when you give a, and this really happened, when you give a $20 donation to a church and then you email them or call them and say, hey, I want all your financial records and I want to know what your pastor makes. I think I think you're a little out of pocket at that point.

• 1:02:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, I don't disagree with that. And that's something that I thought about after after that interview. You know, when he was talking about, I donated to that church and I, you know, it's it's like, okay, but did you donate a dollar? And now you're demanding all these answers, maybe showing up at somebody's house with a camera crew.

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  Blasting and saying they're not transparent.

• 1:02:54Shawn Ryan?

  Demanding transparency. I mean, I don't, you know, I mean, I run a for-profit business, but if somebody was at my front in my front yard with a bunch of cameras and a microphone and demanding my financials, uh, probably would have ended a lot worse. Yeah. With wherever he was, but um, but you know, but I do, I mean, I don't, I don't know how you would do that. I mean, I don't, I don't know exactly how you would do the transparency. I like, I like that, you know, the grouping it in, you know, is the all of the staff. This is how much staff we have, and this is how much is allocated to that.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  And again, most, most bigger churches do that. They and they get external audits. They do that. You know, and the funny thing is with Nate, like what happened to him was awful, man. What, what he went through with the pastor that mentored him? And that dude being convicted of, you know, sexual assault against his own daughter that that they adopted, um, that rocked our entire region where we live, like everyone was devastated by that because that's a good church. Like that was in the north, I don't even want to say the name of the church, but anyone from the region knows what church I'm talking about. Um, that's a good church and the pastor was a good pastor. And my friend there is still one of the pastors there and they do an amazing job

• 1:04:07Speaker 03

  of reaching the community and helping people. And they have one of the best mental health counseling programs in the area. That's like Christian counseling where you can go to them. But what happened in May and the pastor that that then committed that is, is, is awful and it rocked our entire area. But what happens is when something bad happens to you, like to me as a kid, we develop a schema for seeing everything through that lens. So like I had a schema of like church is bad, church is evil, church, church, church just wants to harm me. This is all BS. This is all nonsense. I had the same schema. And it takes a while to, to detangle that schema and say, Well, let me not generalize and say all churches are this way. No, this was my, my experience. And what's the general data and the general consensus on it?

• 1:04:50Speaker 03

  And when you, when you, when you, when you look at the data, the data just doesn't reflect this conclusion that churches are all stealing. Churches are all unethical. Churches are right, or not, not all, but most. And I think that the, the distinguishment is any abuse is bad. Any abuse is bad and any abuse should be called out. And I'll lock arms with Nate in a heartbeat and say, man, if Kenneth Copeland owns a $19,000 personage and like, like, no, that's not, that's not good. Right? But then what, what he's doing is now that's impacting young men who really need the church. And now they're looking at their pastor side eye and they're looking at the institution side eye. Not understanding that, man, Jesus established the church, like Jesus established both in a, where two or three are gathered, I'm with them.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  And in the local gathering and sometimes in large gatherings. We see all the above. We see home churches in the New Testament and we see them gathering in Acts and there's thousands of people there. So this idea that, you know, this is good, this is bad. It's like bad is bad. Good is good. There are big churches that are doing great, great work. There, there are small churches that are, they're not doing great work that, that don't have accountability. They rewrote the bylaws, right? And so the, how we speak about these things has ripple effects. And if you want to tear down the institution, that's got a couple of consequences.

• 1:06:04Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I'm with it. Minor correction, our 19,000 square foot home, not $19,000 home.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  Excuse me, that, sorry, thinking 19,000 square foot.

• 1:06:13Shawn Ryan?

  Minor difference there.

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  Big difference.

• 1:06:14Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, but, um, you know, you know, another thing that I don't think that, um, Nathan didn't highlight it. I think this may have been, I probably should have picked up on it. I should have picked up on it quicker, but you know, one of the things that he had said is that, you know, the 14, I think he said it was a 14 point guideline on the IRS. Uh, that, you know, that they go into it.

• 1:06:40Shawn Ryan?

  You know, something that we didn't discuss is, and he said it, but we didn't dive into it, is that it attracts criminals to open churches as a facade. You know, and I should have gone down that rabbit hole more. I didn't really broach it at all. Sometimes it just doesn't hit me until the interview's over. But, you know, I think one of the things, and I do think this is an important point, that the guidelines are so lenient and allow, you know, no transparency, that it actually, and that's why I think where he was going with the Hells Angels, is that it can attract criminals to build their organization,

• 1:07:26Shawn Ryan?

  and the church is actually a facade. You know, and so that alleviates having to be transparent about where funding's coming, you know, if it's from, who knows, drugs, whatever.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  Money laundering.

• 1:07:38Shawn Ryan?

  Exactly. Oh, yeah. Great money laundering way, or a great way to launder money. And we did not highlight that enough. And it should have been highlighted enough. But, you know, what other, like I said, I've gotten a ton of texts from people, emails, a lot of from people that I actually, that I really respect. And so I just, you know, I really want to dive in and get, you know, the other side of the coin here. So what other, what other things to eat?

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  Can I read some data to you?

• 1:08:09Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  Okay, so here's some, here's some data. So I already said this to you, average full-time pastor's salary in America is 58,000. That's the median, right? Average teacher's salary is 74,000. So most pastors are making less than public school teachers.

• 1:08:26Speaker 03

  I love public school teachers, God bless public school teachers. I prefer pastors to get paid more than public school teachers.

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  Lifeway Research reports that nearly half, 47% of evangelical pastors are bi-vocational, according to a national congregant study done in 2021.

• 1:08:43Speaker 03

  Being a pastor is hard, man. Forty-two percent of US pastors said they've seriously considered leaving full-time ministry in the past year. So this is a study that was just released by Lifeway Research, Relevant Magazine just reported on it. Now, here's the pros of church that don't get talked about enough. And again, as a kid that like, if it wasn't for the local church, I would not be sitting here with you right now. I don't even know if I'd be alive right now, right? Harvard's Nurses Health Study followed seventy-four thousand women for sixteen years and found those who went to church more than once a week had a thirty-three percent lower risk of dying. Wow. It's a bigger effect than many medicines, showing that faith actually adds years to your life. Wow.

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  So, me growing up poor, on welfare, single-parent home, right? Man, the church gave me the framework for the healthy rhythms in my life, right? Here's another one. Harvard also found that women who went weekly were five times less likely to die by suicide. And both men and women had dramatically fewer deaths from despair, up to sixty-eight percent lower risk. So, in a world where we know deaths of despair is rising, especially you're connected to a lot of the SEAL community and, right? Man, there's a strong connection to deaths of despair and suicide being mitigated by people who go to church regularly, right? And for me, I had a lot of despair and I needed hope as a kid, and that church was

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  a segue for that. You can interrupt on any of these if you want. Twenty-sixteen study in the American Journal of Psychiatry showed that attending church reduces the risk of developing depression later in life, even after adjusting for prior mental health issues. Wow. Right? How many young people are dealing with incredible levels of anxiety right now? Astronomical, no.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  Forty-two percent of Gen Z say that they feel hopeless about the future. Forty-seven percent of Gen Z, uh, is higher amongst women, say that they constantly feel anxiety almost all the time.

• 1:10:46Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, forty-seven percent.

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  And I can send all this data to you guys, too, if you guys want to link it below. Um, anxiety is at all-time high, man, and, and, and there's a, I'm not saying these are causations. I'm not saying there's a one-to-one, but I'm saying there's very, very clear correlations of people who are going to church, having less rates of depression, less rates of, of despair, less likely to commit suicide, you know?

• 1:11:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, that, that, that is, I mean, all these things, you know, when, when I was saying I had a, it was a big decision for me to, to do that, to conduct that interview. These are the things that I didn't want to take away from people.

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:11:22Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and it, it, those are, you know, not to call them minor things, you know, the major one being I don't want to steer anybody away from Christ, because I think that's where a lot of people find Christ, you know, and, and, um, and that's where they learn, and, and, and, you know, another thing is regardless of, you know, regardless of the pastor's motives and, and, and what they're doing, it's still, you know, I think it's still a good message that they put out, whether they're, you know, overspending, or overpaid, or buying jets, or living a nineteen thousand square foot home or not, like, people are, you know, they are being rejuvenated, they are turning into better people, they are leaning

• 1:12:05Shawn Ryan?

  into Christ, you know, going to church, and, and so, you know, with his, you know, we had a discussion about, you know, what is the church? And I'm with him, you know, that, and, uh, and, uh, I had mentioned, uh, one of my mentors, Todd Bell, you know, he lives here, we do, we, uh, we haven't done it for a while, but we do a home Bible study, and that was one of the first things that I learned, is that the church is, you know... According to him, I agree with him, the church is the living body of believers, not a brick and mortar.

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:12:37Shawn Ryan?

  But, you know, Nathan doesn't, he doesn't, you know, I don't think he steps foot in a church.

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I think Nathan actually does go, go to church. Uh, from a conversation he had with my friend, I want to say Jeff from Church Disrupted. So I think he goes to church like once or twice a month. Um, I'm not sure if he goes regularly, but the, the idea about the building is, is, is interesting. It's the building, you're right, churches, the community, churches, the, the, the camaraderie. But church is also the local ecclesia, where church means local gathering. It's, it's, it's almost like a governmental term in the original Greek. So the church gathered in big groups on Solomon's porch outside of the temple and they gathered in homes. And then the moment they could gather in church, in buildings, they did. And that's around 175 AD. And this is not according to me, this is, I'm going to butcher his name, but David Guzec,

• 1:13:25Speaker 03

  um, did a whole lecture series on church history. And people can look up his series and I could send that over to you guys as well. But he, it breaks down the eras of the church. And so around 150 to 200, the moment that it got a little more relaxed under Roman occupation and the church couldn't meet in buildings, they did meet in buildings for, for pragmatic reasons. You, we, we meet in the home, but we also meet in large groups and we come together for corporate worship, liturgy, the reading of the scriptures, encouragement, so communion, right? Those things, the sacraments. So I think, I think it's am both. I don't think it's either or. I think the home church is where you're known and where you're connected. But I think the bigger gathering, there's nothing like worshiping with hundreds of other people, you know? Uh, we saw Charlie Kirk's memorial, you know? And how beautiful was it to see Chris Tomlin up there and my buddy Phil Wickham up there leading worship?

• 1:14:10Speaker 03

  And 100,000 people singing to Jesus. There's a beautiful part about corporate gatherings and worship, you know? Just again, just because it's big, doesn't mean it's bad. Yeah. Can I keep you on to some of these stats?

• 1:14:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, keep going.

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  Harvard's human, this is Harvard. Harvard's Human Flourishing Program found that people who attend church weekly are 30 to 50% less likely to get divorced. And couples who go together are the most stable. Coming from a broken family, coming from a single parent home, my wife comes from a single parent home. The 2008 recession, we got married in 2008, in the middle of the recession. The church was absolutely the backbone to help us build a stable marriage, coming from utter dysfunction. People talk a lot about the divorce rate, right? We know the number one correlation to young men going down a dark path is not having a father in the home, right? And what you see amongst churchgoers is they're more likely to stay married, to get married,

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  to stay married, to have healthy marriages. And I think that's so crucial, you know, is just fathers in the homes with their kids and building solid families. And 30 to 50% less likely to get divorced. Lot of good coming out of there. Yeah. The National Ad Health Study used advanced methods to show that teens who go to church are less likely to use marijuana, drink, or smoke. Strong, strong decline in that. Long-term US household data shows that regular attenders give three to four times more to charity each year than non-attenders, around $3,000 versus $700 a year.

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

  So church ends up shaping our generosity. You become a more generous person. You keep that open hand mentality because you're trained to be generous, you're trained to give. We look at the gospel stories, Jesus gave everything, gave his life for us. And so there's a byproduct, so folks who are in church are way more generous. 700 for the average person, 3,000 a year in charitable donation for the churchgoer. 2022 study in the journal Nature found that communities with more cross-class friendships, and this is me, like, poor, and I'm around folks that are wealthy, poor, and I'm around men that are stable. So communities with more cross-class friendships, often built in churches, have much higher

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  rates of upward mobility for poor kids. So just access to a mentor, just access to a Bible study leader that's financially stable and I'm coming from welfare, more and more opportunities for upward mobility.

• 1:16:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  I could, I could keep going, man. There's so many.

• 1:16:55Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about tithing.

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's talk about tithing.

• 1:16:57Shawn Ryan?

  That's, that's, that's, that's something I didn't know about until Nathan came here.

• 1:17:02Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:17:02Shawn Ryan?

  And you talked about that in that video as well. So what is it, where did it come from? Should we be doing it?

• 1:17:09Speaker 03

  Yep. So, so the tithe is an Old Testament law primarily around agriculture and it wasn't just 10%, it was probably around 23%. And it's talking about, hey, the first, the first fruits that are coming in, you should be giving to those.

• 1:17:23Shawn Ryan?

  The what groups?

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  The, the first fruits that are from your crops. You're talking about agricultural society. So as they're getting grain and all that sort of stuff, they're tithing off of their grain. And they're also, they're, it also took care of the priests. There was a component to it of like a, almost like a civic use for sometimes infrastructure and stuff like that as well. So it's to take care of the Levites, but then there was also stuff to take care of just the, the, the society as a whole.

• 1:17:50Shawn Ryan?

  Who are the Levites?

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  The priests in the Old Testament.

• 1:17:52Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the Levites are the priests. They would minister in the temple. And so the tithe would go to them to care for them. And so it's an old, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, one of the commandments in the Old Testament and it was, had multiple utilities to it. In our modern day context, we as followers of Jesus, we don't follow the letter of the law for the Levitical law, but we do extract principles from it, right? And there are certain laws that are moral. There's certain laws that are civic. There's certain laws that are identifying markers for the Jewish people, right? Tithing, those sorts of things. And so today, in our context, New Testament Christianity with the letters of Paul, we're

• 1:18:35Speaker 03

  called to radical generosity. We're called to give and be, and be generous, open-handed, not under compulsion. But to be consistent in our giving. And so when, when most people are talking about tithing, they're not saying you have to give a literal 10% or God's gonna curse you. Generally speaking, there are, there are some people that do that, but generally speaking, when we're talking about tithing, we're using a shorthand for saying, hey, this is a great principle for you to walk out. There's something to this. In the same way, we would say Sabbath is good for you, right? Most of us, we believe in Sabbath. I'm, I'm assuming you probably take a day off at least once a week. Maybe, maybe you might turn your phone off. Maybe you may not turn your phone off. Maybe you don't do any work, but you practice the principle of Sabbath.

• 1:19:19Speaker 03

  Now, in the Old Testament, they got really gnarly with the Sabbath laws, right? Like you couldn't do any work. You couldn't do this. And so we take Sabbath and we say, yeah, taking a day off is good. Yes and amen. Every, every single person should take a day off. And so in the same way, we, we use to tithe, we use it as a short form. We're not saying, hey, if you don't give a 10, 10%, you are cursed and you're disobedient. We're saying, hey, this is a great financial principle to live by. Learn to live on 90 and give 10. And for me and my wife, man, we've consistently given above 10% for decades. While we were struggling, we just said, hey, we're always, we're gonna carve out generosity. That is a value of ours. And we're gonna consistently give at least 10%. It's a rule of thumb. It's not a law. No one's saying you're gonna go to hell if you don't give 10%.

• 1:20:03Speaker 03

  But it's a good benchmark to say, hey, you know, I'm, I, it, none of it is mine anyway. It's all God. It's God's giving me money and letting me steward it, manage it for him. So we're gonna give 10. We're gonna look for opportunities to give to other charities. We're gonna give the, the, the, the single mom in our community and take, try to take care of them as well. And we're gonna save and we're gonna invest. And then we're gonna enjoy the fruits of our labor as well. And I think if you look at any financial, financial expert, they, they would put together those, those four things. Save, give, invest, enjoy. This is whether it's Dave Ramsey or, or secular psychology would tell you there's, there's something to giving. In the Christian world, we just says, hey, we're gonna use shorthand where tithe. And we're gonna say, that's a good principle to live by, but we're not gonna condemn you to hell for it.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  If you don't give, okay, we understand, right? And so, but we've practiced it. We practiced it when we were in debt. We practiced it while we were getting out of debt. We practice it now and we give above 10% now. And then if you factor in all the charities and all the other stuff. Because I think. We give what we value too. So if I value my local church, if I value the communication of the gospel, I'm gonna give to it. I wanna support it. If people value your show, they partner with you on Patreon, as they should, because they value you. And so this idea of like, giving is somehow bad, or it's evil, or it's, you don't, you're not supposed to do it. I would agree with Nathan, I would say, yeah, I don't, I don't think it's a literal 10%. I think it's a principle that most of us say, that's a good principle to live by.

• 1:21:31Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, does it always have to do with money? Or, I mean, can you give time? Can you give?

• 1:21:36Speaker 03

  I think you can give everything. I think you give time, I think you give resource, I think you can, you can, you can be generous with so many different things. For us, it is money, because I don't, I don't want, you know, there's a joke we always say, like, the last part of a man to get saved is his wallet. You know, we're so attached to our money, we're so attached to our finances. And so I think it can be multiple things, but I think when you're willing to sacrifice financially and say, hey, these are my values, this is what I believe in, and I'm willing to contribute in this way, something unlocks. And, and I don't, I don't, I can't even put words to it, but something unlocks, and as always unlocks for me. Can I, can I give you a quick tithing story? This is gonna sound so cheesy. Okay, so, I come to faith, I'm trying to live this stuff out. This is like, I'm surrendered to Jesus.

• 1:22:20Speaker 03

  I had this 1987 Toyota Celica. It's back in the day, I don't know if you had any friends like me, but we would put the big 10-inch subs in the trunk, and drive around, boom, boom, right? And I had this Celica, and one day, I come out, and someone broke into my car. And all of my sound system is jacked, it's all gone, right? And I'm like, man, this sucks. I call the police, the police come. The police run fingerprints, and they do this whole investigation, right? This whole thing. So, I forget about it. I start going to church, I start giving, I'm just, I'm working at Pizza Hut. Like, I'm not making any money. My little $250 check, I'm, I'm just, I'm in faith.

• 1:23:02Speaker 03

  I'm gonna practice this principle, cuz I, I think there's something to the principle of giving. In faith, I'm not lying to you. A year and a half later, but it was the first month I started giving to my church, started, started being generous. I get a check in the mail for $800. They had caught the kid doing something else that broke into my car, threw the fingerprints, made him pay restitution, and sent me the money, didn't call me nothing, and I got a random check in the mail for $800.

• 1:23:30Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  As a kid, to me, and, and I, and I'm like, I just started doing this. And I'm not saying every time you give, God's gonna send magic fairy money from heaven. Like, that, that's not the point. But for me, it was like, I'm just gonna be faithful with this little bit I got. And all of a sudden, that same week, I get a $800 check, you know? And the weird part is, man, the more I'm generous, the more I give money away, the more I'm, I'm just willing to just go, "Lord, it's yours anyway. What do you want me to do with this? Like, I'm gonna provide for my family, I'm gonna save, I'm gonna invest, I'm gonna do all that stuff. Or what do you want me to do with this, man? Is it, is it, is it being generous to that waitress that, man, you could, you could tell she's had a rough week? And let me, let me just be radically generous with her and just blow her mind, you know?

• 1:24:11Speaker 03

  And, and then, and then, like, do that, and they run, chase you out, the, the restaurant are crying, like, cuz they, that mattered so much. I think that's the heart posture.

• 1:24:18Shawn Ryan?

  See, that's, that's how I like to give.

• 1:24:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21Shawn Ryan?

  I like to, I mean, I'm very, I'm very choosy on who I give to, both time and money. But, you know, I mean, we, we, a lot of times where the interview will go to breakfast, stuff like that. And, and I always, always overtip, because, I mean, I know where we live. It's hard to get by here as a, as a waitress, you know? And, and so, I always do that, I'm always looking, but I, I just, you know? I love to give, almost, you know, I've been told by numerous people that, you know, I, I over give and that causes, that, that can cause resentment. I, I struggle with that sometimes, but, but, you know, I'm very, I'm very choosy because I want to know

• 1:25:05Shawn Ryan?

  that whatever I'm giving, whether that's time or money, that it's not going to be wasted, you know, and, and so I'm always, I'm looking for somebody that's gonna, that's going to, that's gonna use what I give them in the right way to better their life, you know, and, and you don't always see that with a church or a nonprofit, or, you know, and I'm not picking on those because there's a lot of good ones, you know, there's a lot of good nonprofits out there, a lot of good churches out there, I've given to both, but, you know, I like to see the direct impact and I like to see the, you know, I, even with, you know, a lot of the people that I bring on the show, I mean, there's, there's, there's guys that I've been watching and women, you know, for years, like, are they

• 1:25:48Shawn Ryan?

  really trying to do what they say they're doing, you know, are they, you know, are they on the hamster wheel and they're not getting any traction, you know, are they gonna give up, you know, is, is, is the money gonna get to them, you know, when they do make it, are they gonna be, you know, flaunting all kinds of, you know, erotic shit all over the internet, you know, and that's, that's, that's not who I want to give to, I want to give to the person that's gonna appreciate it, use it, better their life, better their family life, better the world, you know, and so, I mean, and in God's eyes, you know, does it matter who you give to, does it have to be to the church, can it be to anybody, can it just be generosity in, in general?

• 1:26:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I, I think, yes, I think it's ASN, I think you get, you, you're a generous person, you know how fun it is to give, I think for me, man, I'm so in love with my local church and I'm so in love how God is using us, we do a thing called Bless Local, where we just, just give a lot away to our community and, and go above and beyond to be generous to the single mom, to be generous to those who are struggling, we give a lot away to missions, we do a lot with disaster relief in other parts of the world. And I want my pastors to do well. I want them to be able to afford a home and buy a home in the city they live in. I want them to be able to, um, I want them to be able to send their kids to college without worrying about finances. I want them to do well because I, I value them. We value public school teachers. I value my pastor a lot.

• 1:27:12Speaker 03

  And I value the men and women that are like, this is, this is, they're, they're laying their life down, they're preaching. And this is, this is their service. This is their contribution. I want them to be well taken care of. And so I, I have a church that I'm, I'm, I'm so in love with and I love everything that's happening at Rhythm Church. And I would encourage people, um, if you're at a church and they're not transparent with the finance. Like I just had a buddy that hit me up and was like, hey man, like, I, like, my friend called this church and he gives there and they wouldn't share any of the information with him, you know? And I was like, oh, well, that sounds a little weird. Most churches do. But if that's the case, he might want to look for another church. If they're not, if they're not willing to offer what, anything they're doing with the money, I wouldn't want to give either.

• 1:27:51Speaker 03

  And so I think the, the gathering of the local believers every week with the preaching and the teaching and the discipleship and, and the community that's happening, uh, I value that. And I think the scriptures call us to value that. And I think we should give to that. Does it have to be a, a percentage and some legalistic thing? I don't think it has to, but to me, man, I'm, I, I have it by the grace of God. And generosity is the antidote to greed. And I think we have a lot of consumerism and self-centeredness in America. And if I could be generous. And, and by the way, I give, I give beyond just churches, just amazing nonprofits I partner with every month, as missionaries I partner with every month.

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  I, I give beyond just my local church, but I get to see the impact of what happens in my local church. I get to see the young men. We're next to Camp Pendleton, big marine base right there in Oceanside. Men coming in, they're broken, they're, they're, they're hurting. They start coming to church, they start getting discipled. People are pouring into them and within six months, they're totally different people, you know? Like I value that and I'm, I'm going to go above and beyond. My, my goal, and I'm not, I'm not trying to like brag or flex and, and maybe we, we need to cut this out, but like my goal is to They're not taking it that way. Yeah. Didn't, didn't come off that way. My goal is to be the single biggest giver in my church. Like I want to be the single biggest giver in my church. And that, and that, and that's what I'm shooting for. I'm not there yet. I'm not there yet. But that's, that's, I work hard because I value these things.

• 1:29:13Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that churches can overemphasize growth instead of spirit of the message?

• 1:29:19Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I think churches can do all sorts of goofy things. I think overemphasizing growth, I think overemphasizing, um, maybe overemphasizing politics. You know, I think overemphasizing, um, the social programs. I think there's all sorts of things they can do. The, the idea is, how many people can you be faithful with? Is it a thousand? Is it fourteen hundred? Is it ten thousand? Is it five thousand, right? What, what are people doing, you know, in, in our church? In our, the church that planted my church is a church called North Coast Vista. Ironically enough, when I had Nate, when I had a conversation with Nathan in January, I would love to hear if Nathan would acknowledge that he said this to me. When I told him the circles I'm in and I said, hey, my, this is who my pastor is. This is the pastor who pastors him and, and plants it, helped plant our church.

• 1:30:04Speaker 03

  He told me, oh, bro, you're, you're connected to the gold standard of, of this stuff. These are these, you're around guys that are doing the best at this when it comes to transparency. I wonder if he would say that now, but I, I used to think growth is bad. Big church is bad. And then I went to North Coast and I met Pastor Chris Brown. And what happened was, man, um, one of my close friends, he lived in my studio. I used to rent two condos next to each other. I, me and my family lived out of one. I had my studio kind of like this, not as nice as this, but in, in the downstairs of the other. And upstairs, we'd always have rooms, different rappers, creative people. Sometimes family would stay in the rooms. And one of my friends, um, his name was Tanner, Tanner Ross. He, um, he got leukemia.

• 1:30:47Speaker 03

  And, uh, he, um, I was downstairs. He came down and told me he was going to the hospital. We thought it was nothing. He got leukemia and he beat it the first time. But the second time, um, on Thanksgiving Day of November, November twenty twenty two, Thanksgiving Day, he ended up, he, he came back and, and he died. And I watched for those several years, how North Coast Church wrapped their arms, not just around Tanner, but around his wife, around his family, around his friends, how they, how they showed up for them. And I got to see a big church disciple and love and lead and pay and take care of and sacrifice for a dear friend of mine. And so my, I was critical of churches up until that point, I was critical of big churches.

• 1:31:32Speaker 03

  And now my scheme has shifted where I said, okay, yes, I'm a local church guy. But like, man, big, big churches aren't bad. They're, they're doing good. And when I saw that and I saw Chris Brown and

• 1:31:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, I just, I saw it up close, you know, I saw the mercy and the craze. I felt good for even crying about it because it's a good thing. It's a good thing to see churches do good things. And it's the biggest church in our city. It's a thirty million dollar budget. And Pastor Chris Miles was one of the most transparent people I've ever sat with. And I seen him be generous to my pastor and plan us and take care of rhythm church. And I seen him be generous to me. And that's when my mind, like, it shifted, like, big is not bad. Oftentimes, they have more resources. And to see them lock arms and be there for this

• 1:32:34Speaker 03

  family, and I'm still, I just saw Tanner's parents. His dad just came to my book launch event. And they're still hurting. But the church is still with them. They're still next to them. And we did a vlog on the church because I said, I gotta, I gotta highlight what God's doing here. We did a vlog, and it was like investigating the biggest mega church in my area. You know, we're being spicy with the title. And while we're doing the vlog, his mom is there, and she's just there, and they're just taking care of her and loving on her, giving her something to do, giving her dignity after burying a child. You know, this is years later at this point. So I got to see it up front. Like, I got to see it up front and go. And they showed up. They showed up for my friend.

• 1:33:15Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Want to take a break?

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:20Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a break.

• 1:34:00Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:35:17Shawn Ryan?

  All right, we're back from the break. I want to move into, you know, we're seeing this, at least I think we're seeing it. The internet makes it look like that, right? But it seems like, actually, it is happening. You know, I've got tons, I told you the story about Eddie Penny earlier. You know, a big part of my journey to Christ and a mentor of mine. And, you know, we're seeing this big wave of

• 1:35:46Shawn Ryan?

  the revival of Christianity. You know, and, you know, one of the things that I always bring up that's, that's, that's like a public display of all this is, I think it was University of Georgia where, you know, they were, they showed this tailgate party and all these kids, these college kids are getting baptized in the back of it. It looks like a kegger. Looks like a fraternity party. And then, and then, and then you look and it's people getting baptized. And, you know, I'd mentioned, you know, Eddie came on my show and shared how he got saved. And then, I mean, it was at least a year, every single person that came in here on the show had brought up Jesus Christ and coming to the Holy Spirit and getting into the Bible and all that stuff.

• 1:36:30Shawn Ryan?

  And these are, you know, these are, these type of individuals that I'm talking about on the show. I mean, a lot of them have seen, you know, I mean, you've seen the worst of humanity as a seven year old, you know, but these guys are coming back from war. They've seen, they have seen a lot of carnage, you know, and, and so for that kind of revival to happen, you know, amongst that, it takes a lot. And, I mean, we're seeing it through the veteran community. We're seeing it in, in, in Generation Z where, I mean, my parents went back. I mean, a lot of, I'm, I don't go to church, but I'm very, I'm very into it. I want to learn. That's one of the reasons you're here, I want to learn from you.

• 1:37:11Shawn Ryan?

  And I'm bringing on people like John Burke, Lee Strobel, priests.

• 1:37:16Speaker 03

  Lee Strobel's awesome, man. I've read Case for Christ, it's back for me, so good.

• 1:37:20Shawn Ryan?

  He's one of my favorite people in the world. But he's got a new book coming out called The Case for Christmas this year.

• 1:37:25Speaker 03

  Oh, duh.

• 1:37:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, but, um, but anyways, we're seeing, you know, I think we're seeing this huge revival in Christianity, not just in the country, but worldwide, you know, and I wanted to, you know, get your thoughts on that.

• 1:37:39Speaker 03

  Well, I think people have been faced with evil and discovered darkness. And when you face and you see darkness, you see COVID, post-COVID, you see how dark the world gets. I think that the natural reaction is, well, if there's evil, there has to be good. And I think it's honestly just walking through that, that paradigm. For me, I was coming to faith around the time of nine 11. So it was like, man, you see those towers go down, you see that sort of stuff. You see celebrating in parts of the world and you go, oof, there's some evil in this world. There has to be good, there has to be light. So I'd say that's what you're describing, I think that would be my first assessment, especially folks who've gone to war

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  and seen the, the evil of, of all of it, the darkness of all of it. I think you see that and you go, there has to be, it has to be the opposite of this.

• 1:38:29Shawn Ryan?

  And done it, and done it too. I mean, you know, I've talked a lot about this on the show, but I don't agree with all the reasons that we're over there. One of the reasons I left the agency is I didn't understand the mission anymore. You know, and I think that a lot of things that went down were, there was a lot of nuance to them. And maybe we shouldn't have been in parts of the world. But not only, you know, I don't think it's just the fact that people see evil. I think it's also the fact that it is so hard to find actual truth these days. I mean, in everything with the, with, I think it stemmed from COVID.

• 1:39:11Shawn Ryan?

  But I mean, everything, I mean, right now, the big thing, right, is Charlie Kirk's assassination. Who did it? What was it? What killed him? Lot of, lot of, you know, lot of conspiracy type stuff around the sniper shop that may or may not be conspiracy. But, and so what I'm getting at is, I mean, it's with all these big events that happen, you know? COVID, the wars, Israel, Charlie Kirk's assassination. I mean, the list, the list goes on and on and on, right? I mean, whatever, and there's multiple narratives around each one of these things, right? And so whatever narrative that you want to buy into, you can convince yourself that's what happened.

• 1:39:55Shawn Ryan?

  And I mean, do you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. Like Charlie Kirk's assassination, right? It was the far left, it was the far right, it was a trans person, it was Israel. It, you know, I mean, it's, it's, and there are very compelling factors in each one of those different

• 1:40:21Shawn Ryan?

  avenues of what may have happened, right? And so I think, I think that for me, I'm extremely confused. You know, it's, it's like, fuck, man, all these guys have very compelling arguments on what happened. And there's a lot of compelling arguments on COVID and there's a lot, all of these things. And so it becomes almost impossible to find actual truth.

• 1:40:46Shawn Ryan?

  Jesus says, you know, I am the truth, right? So I think that I think that plays that the confusion on finding truth also plays a big role in why people are coming back. I mean, would you agree with that?

• 1:40:59Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I think I love that you pointed to that verse, right? John, Jesus says, I am the way, the truth and the life. And that that word for truth, the way of Jesus in the Christian worldview is the only thing that makes sense of reality. Because if you don't have Jesus, you don't have anything to anchor reality on. How do we know we're not in a simulation right now? Because I believe Jesus is the way and the truth and the life. Like, so I think like, everything is anchored in Jesus being the truth. And then what we can know is I know through who Jesus is, through his time on earth, and then the good that's impacted that. And I think that's crucial, because to your point, we're living in alternate universes, it seems.

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  It's like you can frame either anything the way you want to. Now, here's my deeper theory, and then I want to do want to come back to the idea of revival. This is what I think. I think post-social media, so many people have seen, you've dealt with this personally, but so many people now on so chronically online that they're consuming the most traumatic stuff that most people are not accustomed to seeing. The death of George Floyd, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the crazy lockdowns with COVID, the deaths of despair, and increases the is the is the medicine worse than the than the disease, right? In terms of the byproducts of the lockdowns from COVID, potential vaccine injury, all of these different things.

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  And what I think has happened is we've consumed so much trauma that people's brains are cooked. Like, they can no longer decipher. Reality and so everything is black and white. Everything is binary. Everything is so polarized and so charged. And you're either deifying Charlie or you're demonizing Charlie. And it's like, dude, like, hey, let's turn the temperature down. But I think this generation is cooked, man. I think they've consumed so much media and they've seen so many traumatic things that their, the cognitive distortion is binary, black and white, all or nothing thinking about every issue. Name an issue, it's black or white. Israel's either the heroes or they're the villain. That's it. No nuance, right?

• 1:43:10Speaker 03

  And you, in your work, your line of work and in my life as well, you start traveling and seeing, you're like, wait, there's, there's more nuance to some of these things, that these things are complicated. They're not binary. That people are complicated, that we all have struggles and internal wars within our hearts that need to be redeemed and rescued, right? And so I think that's where we're at as a, as a, as a, as a people. Like, I think as a people, we're just cooked, dude. Chronically online, average American spends seven hours a day passively consuming media.

• 1:43:39Shawn Ryan?

  Seven hours?

• 1:43:40Speaker 03

  A day. That's not working. That's not, that's not learning. That's just passively consuming media, right? Whether that's YouTube, Netflix, fill in a blank, right? That, that's almost 50 hours a week. And so you could find any story you want to tell to yourself. But to your point, what, what story is true? G C S Lewis says how the Christian story is the myth that's true. That, that it's, that it's transcends everything, right? By myth, he just means the story that's true. Like, it is, it is transcendent in the story of Jesus and what it's done to shape history and the good that it's caused. I, I don't think there's anything like it. So if you're not anchoring yourself in Jesus, you have no way to make sense of anything. There's, there's no epistemic basis for any, you can't know anything, right?

• 1:44:25Speaker 03

  Because that could be a deep fake, that could be a, that could be misinformation or whatever, like. And so I think that's where we're at. And so I think people rightfully so are going, I'm so disillusioned with all this. I need something more. I need something deeper. I need something ancient. I need something transcendent. I think that's what we're seeing with, especially young men are coming back to church. They say this is the first time, I want to say within modern history, that men are coming to church more than women are.

• 1:44:51Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 1:44:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Young men are attending church at higher rates than young women. And this is the first time within modern history that this has happened.

• 1:44:57Shawn Ryan?

  That's fascinating.

• 1:44:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:59Shawn Ryan?

  I did not know that.

• 1:45:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:00Shawn Ryan?

  Is, I mean, is the biggest, do you have any insight? Is Gen Z the biggest? Generation that's being revived back into the church?

• 1:45:08Speaker 03

  So Gen Z, from the data I've looked at.

• 1:45:09Shawn Ryan?

  Out of the church into Christianity?

• 1:45:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, from that I've looked at, I wanna say forty-eight percent of Gen Z, non-Christian Gen Z, is Jesus curious. So they're very open to Jesus, they're very open to church, they're very open, because I think they, I think we've came to the conclusion in society that like new atheism and secularism completely failed us. It's incoherent, right? Because the very same folks with new atheism, Richard Dawkins and these guys, that were, they were the elites and they were the smart people, now they're getting cancelled for saying a man is a man and a woman is a woman. Like, the worldview that you champion has imploded on itself, and they've turned on you and they said, "You're a bigot now for making biological statements about gender." Like, so I think we've come to the place of like, yeah, it, we're, it's, it's, new atheism and secularism, it doesn't work.

• 1:45:56Speaker 03

  It doesn't work. And so now people want something else. And I think that that is Jesus.

• 1:46:01Shawn Ryan?

  Do you, do you find yourself thinking about spiritual warfare often?

• 1:46:09Speaker 03

  All the time.

• 1:46:10Shawn Ryan?

  What, is that what's going on with this search for, I mean, it's impossible to find, it's not impossible, but it's very, very hard to find truth these days in anything.

• 1:46:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:21Shawn Ryan?

  And so is that, do you think that spiritual warfare plays a part in that confusion?

• 1:46:26Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mean, you know, Ephesians 6 says, "We don't wrestle against flesh and blood, we wrestle against principalities." And power is in an unseen world, that there's a realm beyond this world. That, that, that is, I think, is acknowledged by every civilization throughout all of society. There is something beyond this life, there's a realm beyond this life. And so if we're talking everything from this, this phenomenon of UFOs, to just this utter complete darkness of some people getting a hold, it's like there's a dark passenger in them to do what that man did to Charlie Kirk. Like, there's an unseen realm that we don't see, and it is real, and it's, it manifests itself in different ways.

• 1:47:10Speaker 03

  And oftentimes it needs prayer, it needs fasting, it needs deliverance. And there's a spiritual world that like people are uncomfortable acknowledging, but I think we all sense it.

• 1:47:18Shawn Ryan?

  Why does it need fasting? What does that do?

• 1:47:21Speaker 03

  Well, Jesus said that they were trying to cast out demons, the disciples were trying to cast out demons in the Gospels. And they couldn't. And Jesus said, some only come by fasting, some only come out by fasting. There's something to, again, the spirit realm where sometimes Jesus was casting out demons and the disciples were just casting out demons. Boom, it'd go. Other times Jesus said, no, sometimes this requires fasting. He said, there's a deeper stronghold. That requires more to lift this darkness.

• 1:47:49Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have any idea on how demons manifest in Search for Truth? I mean, is it a possession and social media influencers? I mean, even with the Charlie Kirk stuff, I mean, the day, probably two or three days after that happened, it was like every single time I would scroll through X or IG, it's a slow-mo shot, you know, a slow-mo video of him being shot in the neck. And I mean, and that desensitizes, it desensitizes everybody who sees that. And it's over. And it's almost like a, it's like a fucking brainwashing.

• 1:48:32Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I mean, it's literally every post. And

• 1:48:39Shawn Ryan?

  people shouldn't be seeing stuff like that, you know, in, I mean, especially kids. You know, and I mean, to desensitize a kid that's on there, like, I mean, my kids won't be on social when they're on either. But, but there are a lot of kids that are, it's desensitizing them. It's making it, it's becoming normal to see that stuff. I mean, and the week before that happened, or maybe it was two weeks, you know, it was the Ukrainian girl that got stabbed in the neck on the subway. And before that, there was, there was something else. I can't remember what it was at this point in time. But, I mean, it's just, I mean, so I'm asking, you know, how does this, how does this happen? How is it manifesting? Why is it allowed to happen?

• 1:49:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that, I'm not an expert in the spiritual realm, but from my understanding, like, I definitely think there's demonic elements that are often

• 1:49:31Speaker 03

  Hijacking people when they open themselves up to darkness to then cause harm against other people. I would say what happened to me as a child, experiencing sexual assault was a demonic thing that distorted my brain and my identity and my self-image. And I think when we're seeing the horrendous nature of certain things, I think there's a demonic component to then go out and harm someone or even to send something like that to someone. Like I was getting videos of the Charlie Kirk thing from Christians, you know? And I'm like, why, I don't, I don't want to see that. Like I, and I was just alarmed, like, why are we passing this around? And so I think there's something demonic that happens when someone is causing sin, like harming someone else.

• 1:50:15Speaker 03

  And then that is then propagated and passed around. And then now we're consuming it, we're becoming, like you said, desensitized to it. How it all is connected, I don't know. There's, there's, there's men like Michael Heiser that have done amazing research on the unseen realm, and he has a great, a great series on that. And it's evident though, it's everywhere that there's something happening. And what happens, I think, from my limited experience is that you take, you take these forces, someone then sins against someone else that then causes consistent issues and trauma in their life, they then pass it on to someone else. And then that could even affect people's epigenetics, like your genetics can then, you could be more predisposed to being an alcoholic, right?

• 1:50:59Speaker 03

  You could be more predisposed to being an addict. All of that is passed around and you're walking through this stuff. And so, and Jesus can break those curses, right? Jesus can lift those things, yet we still have work to do, you know? And I don't think it's a coincidence that both my mother and my father committed adultery on each other, both my mother and my father, my mother more so than my dad, struggled with alcoholism, and then like I have sexual assault committed against me. And then I'm smoking weed at a young age. Like I, I think the enemy is crafty and I don't think that stuff's a coincidence.

• 1:51:31Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I mean, here's another question I have, you know? I mean, with how prevalent all this is and the search for truth and, I mean, you could find yourself totally...

• 1:51:47Shawn Ryan?

  Incaged in this kind of stuff by, you know, what the algorithm is serving you. And you mentioned, you know, a lot of averages, what, seven hours a day?

• 1:51:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:56Shawn Ryan?

  Consuming.

• 1:51:57Speaker 03

  In the United States, yeah.

• 1:51:58Shawn Ryan?

  Social media. And I mean, it's so, you know, for those, you know, couple of days and the week, week or two before that, every post I saw, it's Ukrainian girl getting stabbed in the neck. A week later, it's Charlie, you know? And I mean, so you can, you can, it would be very easy to entrap yourself in that dynamic for a long period of time, forever, possibly, right? And so, you know, one of my questions I have for you is, I mean, to get to heaven, the only way to heaven is through, you know, Jesus, right?

• 1:52:29Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:52:30Shawn Ryan?

  And so, it, it, it's on my mind on if somebody has not come to faith yet, you know? How could they be judged for not believing when they are entrapped in all of that? Everywhere, you know, it, it, it would be like being put in a room and that's all you're shown all the time, you know? And so, you know, I don't, it, it's, I mean, when I see that and, and how often it's, you know, you're exposed to these things. I don't know how he could blame you for not believing. I'm just being honest.

• 1:53:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, that's, that's a great point.

• 1:53:10Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about that?

• 1:53:11Speaker 03

  I, I think that, that is a point that is often raised of like, how could a good God send people that have never heard or maybe have heard and just haven't understood? How could he send them to hell, right?

• 1:53:22Shawn Ryan?

  When they're entrenched in that.

• 1:53:24Speaker 03

  When they're entrenched in that.

• 1:53:25Shawn Ryan?

  It's almost, it's, we, we, we, we, you know, we have free will, right? But, I mean, when you're entrenched in that, that can be.

• 1:53:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I think it's.

• 1:53:35Shawn Ryan?

  Very misleading.

• 1:53:36Speaker 03

  I think it's a very valid question.

• 1:53:37Shawn Ryan?

  It's a trap.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  I think the way, I look at it in a few different ways. One, Romans 3:23 says, "For the wages of sin is death." So every single person has a degree of contributing with their own sinfulness, right? And the good news is that Jesus then comes and deals with that sin. Now, when it comes to the issue of hell and who's going to hell and how was all that work, right? I prefer C.S. Lewis's view on this. And if you've never read Mere Christianity, you would absolutely love Mere Christianity. It's timeless as ever, man. You read that, it was written during World War II and it's just like, oh my gosh, it's like he's writing about it in our time. It's so trippy. But C.S. Lewis has this quote where he says,

• 1:54:20Speaker 03

  "The gates of hell are locked from the inside."

• 1:54:24Speaker 03

  The gates of hell are locked from the inside. So the people that are going to hell are going to hell because they want nothing to do with the light and they want nothing to do with Jesus and they want nothing to do with goodness and beauty. The gates of hell are locked by people who are saying, "I want nothing to do with this God." The question is, and this is a very deep question, is how many people are actually, that's their heart posture? And how many people are misguided? And how many people haven't heard yet? And how many people is God going to redeem in my life, man? Like, I feel like God just kind of scooped me up. Like, man, I was spinning my own wheels and though it was four years of wrestling, he just kind of scooped me up. And I don't have the answer to that. I don't know. I don't know how many people are like middle finger to Jesus.

• 1:55:09Speaker 03

  I think those people definitely exist. Like, I think when you go down the rabbit hole of like the debates with atheists and then you start getting to the bottom of it and they're like, they're judging God. Like, their position is, "I'm judging God." And I think that's a very dark place to be because you have no basis for good or evil if there is no God. How can you judge God? Based on what standard is God good or evil if there is no God, right? Objective morality comes downstream of an objective standard. And you're an atheist, so there is no objective standard. So it's all subjective. Based on your subjective standard, you're going to judge God. That's a dark place to be because you have no basis for making any of those claims. There's no truth claims that there's no God. So I don't know how many people are like middle finger to God. I want nothing to do with God. How many people are deceived?

• 1:55:51Speaker 03

  How many people are, man, they've been sinning against so much that they're just stuck in a pattern of addiction, right? I do know that the wages of sin is death. I do know that God loves the world so much that he gave his one unbegotten Son. And Jesus comes. And he doesn't run from the mess. And he doesn't run from the darkness. He steps right into it. And he comes in the form of a human body, a physical, material body. And he lives amongst us. And he eats food like us. And he's tempted like us. And he works like us. And he experiences the full human experience. And then through that, ends up dealing with that issue of sin. Right? That issue of, hey, man, on our own, like, we're all cooked.

• 1:56:34Speaker 03

  With our own devices, every single one of us is cooked. But there's something to this grace and this mercy that he creates a pathway to heaven. And again, not just heaven and the afterlife, but helps us usher in a peace of heaven on earth. Helps us usher in his kingdom here and now.

• 1:56:50Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I think everybody's been deceived to one degree or another on the planet. But, you know, another question for you is, you know, the reward, the going to heaven. I mean, are there, and do you believe that there are levels of heaven? Or are you rewarded more for being faithful your entire life? You know, what do you think about that? I mean, somebody that's been deceived, that isn't given the middle finger to God and Jesus. I mean, but lived a very, very sinful life versus, you know, somebody that has been revived and is doing good and pumping good into the world and donating to good causes

• 1:57:35Shawn Ryan?

  and spending time with people in need and all, you know what I mean? Those don't balance out, to me.

• 1:57:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think, this is such a great question. I think, one, there's rewards here and now, generally speaking, especially in the West, for living out God's ways. So if you Take the Christian worldview and you apply it to your life. And you practice the faith, you practice loving your enemies, you practice prayer. You practice reading the scriptures, you practice the principles on what it means to handle your money, God's way, to lead your marriage, God's way. That there's rewards here and now, you will have, generally speaking, in the West, in a state that's not oppressing Christians, and it's not, we're not under Roman occupation. Generally speaking, there's a lot of fruit here now that we get to experience by aligning our lives with God's ways.

• 1:58:26Speaker 03

  Okay, so I'd say that's generally true. Then there's real persecutions of Christians getting beheaded for the name of Jesus in other parts of the world for doing the same things, right? So it's this weird dichotomy there that's tough to deal with. Now, when it comes to good works, I believe we're saved by grace through faith to good works. And meaning that faith is a confidence. I'm placing my confidence, I'm placing my trust, I'm placing that when me and you are organizing this conversation, my confidence is that it's happening, we're gonna meet up, it's right, like I have a trust in you, even though I've never met you. I trust that you are who you say you are, that your team is who they say they are. So I'm placing my trust, my confidence, and then by grace, it is a gift, that means grace means gift. You didn't do anything to deserve it.

• 1:59:10Speaker 03

  I can't do anything to make God love me anymore, and I can't do anything to make God love me any less. In the same way, my 10-year-old, who's about to enter puberty, he can't do anything to make me love him any less. He can't do anything to make me love him anymore, he's my son, he belongs in my family. It's in his best interest to be obedient. It's in his best interest to live out his father's ways, because I'm a good father and I have his best interest in mind. That doesn't make sense to a 10-year-old's brain or an 11-year-old's brain. I think sometimes we're the same way. And so with regards to the works aspect, saved by grace, it's a gift through faith, a confidence and a trust, I'm gonna trust Jesus's ways even though they don't make sense. When I got saved, I was like, I can't have sex with my girlfriend? Like, why can't I have sex with my girlfriend?

• 1:59:54Speaker 03

  I like having sex with my girlfriend, it's like, nope, there's a standard and there's an ethic to how I am to treat my body, my body's not my own. It didn't make sense at the time, but goodness, it makes sense in hindsight on why I shouldn't have been sleeping around, right? So there are then good works that I'm supposed to do here and now. And I do believe that those good works provide different rewards in heaven. Right? How that looks, I have.

• 2:00:16Shawn Ryan?

  You do?

• 2:00:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think there's different, I'm not, not different levels of heaven.

• 2:00:19Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:00:20Speaker 03

  But he was faithful with little, will be entrusted with much. So that Matthew twenty five passage, we see that that is a, that is a foreshadowing towards heaven. This is a, this is the pilot, like this is the test pilot, this is the test drive. That we get to try and, and see how we're faithful, and then in heaven, we get opportunities to serve in different ways. And I think people think heaven is gonna be this like, we're in the clouds floating like angel. Angels, heaven's gonna be more real than this, and there's gonna be a new heaven and a new earth. And there's gonna be a reality that feels and tastes and smells even more real. And it's not just gonna be, uh, you know, floating in the clouds like angels and, and diapers. Like, there's gonna be a real new reality that we're gonna get to walk in.

• 2:01:01Speaker 03

  And, and, and there are then rewards for faithfulness here on earth. How, how that works, I don't know.

• 2:01:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that's, I thought where you were going is the rewards happen during your lifetime.

• 2:01:13Speaker 03

  They do too.

• 2:01:13Shawn Ryan?

  And I think that, you know, that's a perspective that I not, that I've not thought of, that if you lead a, a good faithful life, then you'll be rewarded in this life, and then maybe everybody's equal, you know, when they get, when they get to heaven.

• 2:01:28Speaker 03

  I think it's them both. I think, I think rewards in this life and rewards in the, in the next life.

• 2:01:31Shawn Ryan?

  You know, the funny thing is, I think everybody in the West ties, ties rewards with money and possessions. But, you know, what, what comes to my mind is, ever since I've come to faith, I've had a, a much clearer conscience and, and less, less, what, how do I say, less mental suffering.

• 2:01:51Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:01:52Shawn Ryan?

  Whereas a.

• 2:01:53Speaker 03

  More peace?

• 2:01:54Shawn Ryan?

  More peace.

• 2:01:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01:55Shawn Ryan?

  Great way to put it. More peace, your peace of mind. And then I think back about when I was sleeping around, doing drugs, boozing, fighting, you know, all that kinda stuff. I mean, that, that does not create a clear conscience, a clear mind, that does not bring you peace.

• 2:02:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:02:14Shawn Ryan?

  That brings you.

• 2:02:16Shawn Ryan?

  Mental suffering.

• 2:02:17Speaker 03

  And and consequences to that, consequences to your body, right, from alcohol. Consequences, I mean, I've had a like, to me, I think of the cool kids in high school. You know, my buddies in high school, they're not doing so well in their thirties and forties. You know, they got a couple of different kids with a couple of different women. They didn't develop any useful skills, they partied a little hard, their bodies are starting to break down. There's, there's, there's consequences, man. And they look at my life and they're now coming around to the faith. You know, I was like, I was telling you guys about this 25 years ago, man, we could have saved so much heartache and headache by just getting aligned with Jesus back then. But that's the beautiful part about the grace of God, like every moment passing is another chance to turn it all around.

• 2:02:58Speaker 03

  Every moment passing, God's grace is extended and mercy is extended and we don't, we don't deserve it, but he gives it anyway.

• 2:03:05Shawn Ryan?

  You had mentioned earlier, just a couple of minutes earlier, a new earth. What is, what do you mean a new earth?

• 2:03:10Speaker 03

  So in Revelation, when you're reading through the end days and how it's all going to play out, talks about a new heaven and a new earth, that this earth will be made new. And there's a new heaven that's going to be, and it's going to be more real than anything we're experiencing. Paradise on earth, paradise in heaven. I don't know if we're going to be flying back and forth in some sort of spaceship. I don't know how that's going to work, but that's how the scriptures describe a new heaven and new earth. Randy Alcorn did a lot of really good work on the idea of heaven and really digging deep. And he has short books and long books and the way he describes heaven. It's, it's, it's nothing like, uh, we've, we've, we've been conditioned to think about heaven.

• 2:03:53Shawn Ryan?

  What does he say?

• 2:03:54Speaker 03

  Well, he saw it's, it's more real than this, it's physical, there's probably going to be food, there's all the things about this life and some in heaven, right? Like it's, it's going to be better and more real and more transcendent. And there won't be any sin, there won't be any crying, there won't be any death, there, there won't be any despair. We'll be, we'll be physically in the presence of God, right? And I, I don't know, I mean, I'm going to have some questions, you know, for, for Jesus when I get there. But I think, I think it's going to be even more magnificent than we can imagine.

• 2:04:23Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, you think that?

• 2:04:25Speaker 03

  I believe that, yeah, I believe that.

• 2:04:29Speaker 03

  I believe that, but I don't, I don't, I don't then become so heavenly minded and I'm of no earthly good. Cause I think that's the, that's the dangerous part is then you can really start thinking about heaven, that you, you, you become disoriented with here and now. And then here and now, I think, man, this is, what an opportunity. As much as there's delusion and confusion and despair, what an opportunity that we get to, to communicate through these devices. What an opportunity that we get to have a conversation like this and it goes out to millions of people that then will sit here and, and, and think deeply and ask questions. There's never been a time like this in history. Yes, there's a lot of dark stuff, right?

• 2:05:08Speaker 03

  Un-restrained capitalism leads to stuff like OnlyFans and just the most dark stuff on the internet. And then you have goodness and beauty. You have transcendence. You have conversations that are pointing people towards something different, aiming at something more beautiful. That I think we take for granted as well. I think we forget what a, what a stellar opportunity do we have to, to just do so much good in the world?

• 2:05:34Shawn Ryan?

  You know, one of the reasons that I,

• 2:05:38Shawn Ryan?

  like the, the, the home church or Bible study or whatever, whatever you want to call it, is that it, it, it gives you the opportunity, if you're with the right group, to ask questions with zero judgment. And that's, that's something that I think that a lot of churches have wrong is, you know, that I don't think that there should be a, you should never be offended by a question, a real question.

• 2:06:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:04Shawn Ryan?

  And I've asked, I've asked a lot of tough questions and to Todd, in my Bible study. And, you know, questions that I would never feel comfortable asking at church in front of people or putting a, putting a pastor, priest, minister, or whatever, you know, on the spot like that. Because it's become, it's become, I mean, it's like a line that you can't cross. You know, I mean, do you think that, do you think that most churches are open to all questions? The tough, tough, tough questions?

• 2:06:36Speaker 03

  I think, I think most churches are.

• 2:06:39Shawn Ryan?

  You do?

• 2:06:39Speaker 03

  I do, I do. And I, and I, and I think that because the churches I'm connected to, the pastor's not hiding out in the green room in between services. He's out meeting people. He's, he's conversing. He's having conversations with people. He's answering hard questions in between the services. So you met, you met my pastor. Every single week, there's guys asking him questions in between every service. Every single week, he's talking to people, you know? Every single week, we're engaging with the felt needs of what's happening in our church. I think one of the things about what I get to do that's amazing is like, I'll do live events now, and we'll do kind of like a conversations like this in a live podcast format. I might give a talk, and then we're going to their questions. Ask us anything. I'm not ashamed of anything. Ask me anything.

• 2:07:23Speaker 03

  And the quick answer might be, I don't know. I don't know how heaven works, and I don't know. But I have hope and I have trust and I have confidence. I think the hard part, though, is people want answers for everything. And the reality is, there's a degree of tension that we get to walk through in life. There's a degree of tension we get to walk through in faith. I don't have all the answers. I could only have confidence and trust. And I think this is how the world works, because this seems to be the most clear explanation of reality.

• 2:07:53Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into end times. I mean, we kind of touched on at the beginning of the podcast, you know, brought up the verse or the, what I read in Matthew. And, I mean, it sounds like today. You know, there's another one, shit, I can't even remember what it was. Is it, I can't remember the chapter. But it's basically talking about, oh, it's Romans. And it was talking about the fall of the Roman Empire. And, you know, confusion of genders, all that kind of stuff.

• 2:08:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It's a crazy passage. Man, I love your Bible recall. You say you're new, but you've got some good recall, because you're citing books. And I might find a chapter for you, but you've got some great recall. You're describing Romans 1.

• 2:08:47Shawn Ryan?

  You know, we wrote scripture on every exterior stud in this entire.

• 2:08:52Speaker 03

  I heard about that. Yeah, you guys, it was the Bibles that you guys put in the cornerstones of the?

• 2:08:56Shawn Ryan?

  We put a Bible in each corner. And then we, as a team, we wrote scripture on every single exterior stud.

• 2:09:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's so good. So you're referencing Romans. You want to finish your thought, and I can read it?

• 2:09:09Shawn Ryan?

  Go ahead. I'll finish.

• 2:09:11Speaker 03

  Romans 1:18. "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness. Since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them." So that's that question of do they know, do they not know? It says God has made it plain to them through nature, through our mind, right? "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have already been seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God, nor gave thanks to Him, but thinking, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

• 2:09:54Speaker 03

  Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being, and birds, and animals, and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over, in the sinful desires of their hearts, to sexual impurity, for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things, rather than the Creator, who is forever praised in men." Because of this, God gave them over to shameful acts. Even their women exchanged natural or sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women, and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

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• 2:11:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:40Shawn Ryan?

  What does that mean?

• 2:11:41Speaker 03

  It's it. I mean, it means what what it says, which is like, man, they they instead of worshiping God as God, they started worshiping creation. And if you don't, if you if you aren't aligned with Creator, you will always worship creation. And worshiping creation could look like like actually making idols out of stuff. Worshiping creation can look like worshiping the human body, worshiping sex, worshiping pleasure. That can then look like what we see now with some of this wild ideology that says you were born in the wrong body. God didn't make you this way. And and those are deeply theological statements that if you think about it, um, it's not that the my pastor said this a couple of weeks ago. It's not that the churches became more political. It's that politics have became more religious and theological.

• 2:12:24Speaker 03

  Now we're talking about gender. Now we're talking about marriage. Now we're talking about is that a baby in there? Or is that not a baby in there? Right? Well, it's a baby if you feel like it's a baby. And if you don't feel like it's a baby, then you can kill it. Like, this is this is what happens when you don't put Creator in his in his proper place, and you start worshiping creation.

• 2:12:41Shawn Ryan?

  So is is is that going to happen again? Is that is that what that's saying?

• 2:12:46Speaker 03

  I think that's happening now. I think this is

• 2:12:47Shawn Ryan?

  I do too.

• 2:12:48Speaker 03

  the state of humanity for

• 2:12:49Shawn Ryan?

  What is the I'm what I'm asking is what is is Romans saying that this is going to happen again? Or is this strictly talking about the past?

• 2:12:56Speaker 03

  Well, this says this is what this is really saying is that because this is happening, that's evidence that God is he's letting people do what they want, right? This is the fact that this God's just handing them over to their own sinful desires, right? And their own crazy, selfish, sinful, carnal base instincts, right? And if you if you think about like materialism and secularism, like at the end of the day, what are they telling people? They're not telling people, you're created in a in a in an image of God, you have value, dignity, worth, uh, there's sexual standards for you, there's life standards for you. No, they're telling young people, you're in a highly evolved animal in heat. So wear protection and have at it. It's like,

• 2:13:37Speaker 03

  that's the worst advice you can give to young people. This is terrible. Anyone that's ever participated in hookup culture will tell you that it leaves you so empty and depleted. But that's the that's the spear of the air, you know?

• 2:13:51Shawn Ryan?

  And so back to Matthew. I mean, we have that happening right now, all over the world. And then, you know, like I said, rumors of wars, earthquakes, all these things.

• 2:14:05Shawn Ryan?

  So what I'm asking is, I mean, are we, in your opinion, are we approaching end times?

• 2:14:14Speaker 03

  One, I don't know. So let me, let me, because no man knows the day or the hour. Two, there's, there's an argument that could be made that we've been in the last days since Jesus ascended to heaven. Now we're patiently waiting for his return. Um, three, is it possible that these are all signs of the times? I think there's some other things that have to happen first. I think there's a, there's a strong argument that the third temple needs to be built in Jerusalem. I think there's a, there's a strong argument that the gospel has to go forth to every nation and tongue. It hasn't happened yet. There's still unreached people groups. So I think there's some, there's still some room to go in terms of my understanding of the end times. So you got their temple. We're not, we're not anywhere near having a third temple built.

• 2:14:59Speaker 03

  The Temple Mount in, in Israel, as I'm sure you know, is controlled by the Muslims. They're not letting Jews build a third temple up there. Now there's talks of red heifers being brought to Israel from Texas and they're waiting to do the sacrifice of the red heifers to usher in this moment of the, their Messiah. But the third temple is nowhere near being built. They could, they could personify it and talk about it a lot, but we're not there yet. And the gospel hasn't gone forth to every nation, language and tongue. There's still unreached people. There's still people on earth today that have never heard about Jesus. Yeah.

• 2:15:31Shawn Ryan?

  You know, also, I mean, I think it did, you know, I called

• 2:15:38Shawn Ryan?

  a really good friend of mine, Congressman Eli Crane, about a lot of the stuff that's going on in Israel right now. And, you know, and I had a conversation with him about, you know, I'm not, I'm not interested in what people think. I'm interested in what the scriptures say. And I'm confused by a lot of the scriptures. And he'd brought up, uh, I believe it's Ezekiel 38, 39, several times to me. Read it. Didn't really understand it. I don't know if he's talking about at the time, or this is going to happen in the future, but it basically says that all the nations will rise against Israel. We see a lot of that happening right now. I am not happy with what's going on over there at all. October 7th was horrible. Gaza looks like a dumpster.

• 2:16:25Shawn Ryan?

  60,000 people killed. That's several months old, probably a lot more now, you know, bombed Catholic churches in Libya.

• 2:16:33Shawn Ryan?

  In Gaza, rumors of one in Syria. I mean, I'm not happy with what's going on over there. But, you know, at the same time, when we see this, the rise against Israel, and it's, once again, it's everywhere in my feed. You click on one thing, you want to hear what somebody says, the next thing you know, that's your entire feed. You know, and it is in every comment section, doesn't matter what the post is, you know, everything, you know, there are people out there that claim everything is Israel's fault. In Ezekiel 38, 39, it talks about these, I think it's 12 nations that rise up against Israel, that's where the

• 2:17:15Shawn Ryan?

  Antichrist will come from. And so, you know, I'm curious about, what are your thoughts on this?

• 2:17:22Speaker 03

  So you're right in that Ezekiel, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel are being written, at the same time, they're all contemporaries of each other, and they're being written to and about the children of Israel who are exiled in Babylon. So that's the backdrop of those three books. And so it's very wild stuff, right? Now, Babylon was the enemy, and they were held captive, taken out of the land. And in those books, there's apocalyptic stuff in all of them. Daniel has some really wild stuff about the Son of Man, he's coming back, and there's all kinds of really cryptic stuff in there that is prophetic, but it's also serving two purposes. It's also speaking about stuff that's happening there now, right?

• 2:18:05Speaker 03

  And so, my thoughts on all of it, man, is, I think October 7th was awful. I love Israel, I love the people of Israel, but on the night that happened, and I got in a lot of trouble for this, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the night that happened, I said, man, this October 7th is so bad, I said, but I'm nervous because the IDF can be heavy-handed with how they respond.

• 2:18:32Speaker 03

  And I got torched by the Christians. What do you mean? You're a Christian? How dare you say the IDF can be heavy handed? And like, I just got back from Israel, less than a year ago. And we landed the day Benjamin Netanyahu got reelected. And it was tense because they don't have a two party system. He had to, he had to connect with the far right, the ultra orthodox folks to build a coalition. And they don't have a, you know, two party system. There's multiple parties. So he already wasn't popular. And you align yourself with the far right in Israel. I'm not sure how much you know about the far right in Israel. It's a lot of the ultra orthodox. They don't work. They don't serve in the military. They just read Torah and pray all day. And that's their service to Israel. Everyone else in Israel has to serve two years in IDF.

• 2:19:14Speaker 03

  So they're already not, the coalition he made was already not popular. And I'm, and I could sense it. And I, and I, and I got friends in there in Israel that are Armenian. I got friends in Israel that are Christian. I got friends in Israel that are Palestinian. I'm hearing all of their different takes. Some folks that love Israel that are Palestinian, some folks that dislike Israel that are Palestinian. And so back then it was, it was clear as day that, oh, like something's about to go down. Like it's, there's, there was a weight to that. And they were trying to explain all this to me. And I'm just like, I don't under, like, I don't understand Israeli politics, right? But what we're seeing, I think, is the overflow of a government that is heavy handed. And they also have the backdrop of the Holocaust over their legacy. So it's never again, we're going scorched earth.

• 2:19:59Speaker 03

  And it's like, wait a minute, there's churches. We're going scorched earth. Wait a minute, there's civilians. We're going scorched earth. Now, if I give them the benefit of the doubt, are they intentionally blowing up churches? Are they intentionally blowing up civilians? Are they intentionally bringing harm? I, I, I really would like to say no. I would, I would like to believe they aren't. I would like to believe there's more checks and balances in place. Do they have a right to defend themselves? Yes. Do they need to clean it up and fix it? Yes. You guys got to clean that up. And so I, you know, I, I've been to Israel one time. I get emails all the time about going back to Israel. Ministries, Kufi, Israeli government, they want me to, I'm not, I gotta clean that up. Like, I'm not going. Clean it up. Figure it out. Like, it's been two years.

• 2:20:39Speaker 03

  This was supposed to be this like uh the the when we declared victory in Iraq and it stayed another twenty years. It's like, is this indefinite now? You know, what how how long is this gonna go on? And so I say all that to say with, I don't I can't speak to the policies of the IDF and if they're intentionally doing things. I don't know.

• 2:20:59Shawn Ryan?

  What I'm what I'm asking is from a scriptural standpoint.

• 2:21:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:03Shawn Ryan?

  You know, the we we hear that there, you know, they're God's chosen people. Are they God's chosen people? I thought there was a new covenant.

• 2:21:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:21:11Shawn Ryan?

  That encompassed all of us. Am I wrong about that?

• 2:21:15Speaker 03

  I think uh so so what we're getting at is is dispensationalism, which is a which is a view amongst many Christians. I do not identify as a dispensationalist. So dispensationalists will believe that Israel and Jewish people are under a different dispensational period and Christians are under a different period, right?

• 2:21:32Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 2:21:33Speaker 03

  Um, I had somebody on recently to really go deep on dispensationalism and to say, hey, like, is this stuff accurate? Is is Israel under a different period? So like Andrew Clavain from the Daily Wire uh will say stuff like, I don't think Ben Shapiro Andrew Clavain is a Christian. I don't think Ben Shapiro needs to come to faith in Jesus because he's doing great as a Jew, right? And it's like, no, no, no, Ben Shapiro needs to come to faith in Jesus. I want Ben Shapiro to be a Christian. I'm not I'm not gonna water that down. He needs Jesus. Um, so you're you're getting at dispensationalism. Um, I hold to the view that the church is the continuation of Israel and God has something planned for Israel and I I don't know how it's all gonna work out. There's some there seems to be a lot with the prophecies and a lot with just establishment of them as a nation, a

• 2:22:17Speaker 03

  lot with these things. And so we we we've had these debates on my channel before. We've wrestled through the scriptures before and and there's a lot in here about uh all Israel will come to faith in Jesus at some point in Romans. I think it's Romans 10. I'm trying to find the verse for you right now. How it all plays out? It sure does seem like, man, everyone's rising up against Israel, but is Israel being sloppy? Those are questions someone like you is way more equipped to answer than than me. I don't understand the geopolitics. I don't understand just war theory the way you do. Um, but it seems like, man, the church is a church. I would say it's the continuation of New Israel and God has some sort of plan for us as as original people. And that's in scripture. That's in

• 2:22:58Speaker 03

  Romans. How that works? Oh, I wish I knew. I don't know. I don't know.

• 2:23:06Speaker 03

  So Romans, Romans 10, I'm trying to find the verse for you. But not all Israel accepted the good news, for Isaiah said, Lord, who has believed our message? Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the faith is heard through the word about Christ. But I did ask, did it not hear? So this is talking about Israel hearing but not accepting. Paul is talking about how he's so distraught that his people, Israel, aren't coming to faith. And then there's a verse that says, and all Israel will be saved. And I don't, I don't, I don't know what to do with that. Like, I don't know how that all works. I, I would like to believe that there's going to be some sort of revival where the Jews will come back to faith. Right?

• 2:23:50Speaker 03

  Here it is, Romans 11:25, it says, I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not be conceited. Israel has experienced rehardening, in part, until the full number of Gentiles has come in. So Paul's going out to the Gentiles, the Jews, they don't like that. He's writing to a mixed church in Rome, both Gentiles and Jews. Gentiles are just non-Jewish people, non-Jewish Christians. Verse 26, and in this way, all Israel will be saved. As it is written, the Deliverer will come from Zion. He will turn godlessness away from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them when I, when I take away their sins. As far as the gospel is concerned, they're enemies for your sake.

• 2:24:32Speaker 03

  But as far as election is concerned, they are loved on accounts of the patriarchs. For God's gifts are irrevocable. That's, that there's a lot of tension there. It says all Israel will be saved. It says they're hardened right now, but it says that because of the patriarchs, because of Abraham, because of Jacob, that at some point, it sounds like God's gonna, God's gonna turn Israel to him, back to Jesus. I don't know how that works.

• 2:24:59Shawn Ryan?

  Me neither. I don't know how it works either. I mean, you know, and then there's the other hand where you hear, you know, the only way to the Father is through me. Well, if they don't believe in him. How did they get there?

• 2:25:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:12Shawn Ryan?

  And what happens to all of the Gentiles who didn't believe? I mean, is it a different? Is we done a different, you know, system?

• 2:25:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:23Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean by a different timeline?

• 2:25:25Speaker 03

  Dispensationalism is the view that there's different dispensational periods and that God interacts with his people in different agreements. And so the Jews are under a different dispensational period. And we as Christians are under a new one. So sometimes that can look real wonky and saying, like Christians are like really into Israeli stuff and just give Israel a blank check to do anything. That's how that can look, right? And I don't want to name names on here. We've talked about this on my channel extensively. I had my friend on who's a dispensationalist and we were trying to kind of hash this out, you know? Cause he was like, you sound like a dispensationalist. I'm like, I'm not a dispensationalist. You need to believe in Jesus, right? Whereas covenantal theology, which would be, hey,

• 2:26:08Speaker 03

  there are different covenants that God has and we are under the new covenant and the church has replaced Israel as the new Israel. So I'm kind of in between both positions. I think God is going to save Israel and I think God has a plan for Israel. I don't know how that works. At the same time, I believe the church is the new Israel and I believe the church is God's people.

• 2:26:28Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, okay. Well, I appreciate that. It's a tough conversation to have.

• 2:26:32Speaker 03

  I took a stab at it. I took a stab at it.

• 2:26:35Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about your new book, Godly Ambition.

• 2:26:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:26:38Shawn Ryan?

  What are you discussing in there?

• 2:26:41Speaker 03

  I think right now we're in a time where men and young women are conflicted about should they go after the things that they believe God's put on their heart? How do I get out of this despair, this quiet quitting, this hustle culture? All of this tension. And when I look at the scriptures, oftentimes Christians see the word ambition and they view it as a nasty word. Ambition, ew, right? But when I look at the scriptures, I found out there's two words for the word ambition. One is edithia, which in the Greek is like a, it's a selfish clobbering by any means necessary ambition. And it's forbidden in the scripture. But there's a second word for ambition and it's found three times in the New Testament and it's feliotiome. My buddy Wes Huff tried to help me with the Greek on this.

• 2:27:24Speaker 03

  And that word for ambition is found three times. And Philo- Philo is where we get the etymology for the word like Philadelphia, brotherly love. And, and Philo T, time, it's like, there's a time in there. So it's an ambition that out of a brotherly love, I am going to be faithful to aim and get after the things that God has for me. And that word ambition is used three times in the New Testament. I make it my ambition to preach the gospel where others haven't. Paul says that. Paul also writes and says, I make it my ambition to do what pleases God. And then in 1 Thessalonians 4:11, Paul writes, make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, working with your own hands, minding your own business, so that you will not be dependent

• 2:28:06Speaker 03

  on anybody, and so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders. And so I'm really trying to orient people to say, hey, man, hustle culture left us burnt out, work your face off 18 hours a day. That, that just swung people to the other side of quiet quitting, and I'm just checking out, and I don't care anymore, and the apathy and the nihilism, and that there's a better way in the scriptures, and it's, and it's called godly ambition. And it, and I'm trying to reorient people and say, hey, how do we get men, and women, but men specifically, to see their time, their talent, their treasure, not as their own, their ambition is not their own, but it's to be managed and stewarded. That this is like, th- this is not mine's anyway. Let me manage it onto the glory of God. And so we open up with discovering your calling and your purpose, the difference between

• 2:28:50Speaker 03

  purpose, assignment, and calling. We talk about talent stacking, how to, how to develop your skill sets. And we really are trying to get to the brass tacks because, you know, we were talking about church and what should the church do? One of the scariest passages in scripture is 1 Timothy 5. And, and, and it's not about the end times, but it is a very high call. And the passage is talking about widows in the church and who's to care for certain widows in the church. And in, in that context, widows in the church were the most destitute, most vulnerable people. And Paul says something interesting. He says, hey, those widows that are young enough to get remarried, they should get remarried, because if they don't get remarried, they're going to be busy bodies and they're going to be causing a fuss.

• 2:29:31Speaker 03

  The widows that don't have anyone to care for them, that's who the church should be taken care of. And then he has like a caveat, he's like, as long as they've been faithful to washing the apostles' feet and they've been, you know, serving in the church. He adds a caveat to the charity, which is really interesting. And then he says, but those widows that have family? The family is supposed to take care of those widows. And then he makes this, this, this, this bombshell statement and says, "For he who does not provide for the needs of his family, specifically his immediate family, is worse than a non-believer and is denied the faith." That's a, oof, that's a gut punch.

• 2:30:07Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:30:08Speaker 03

  In light of the economy, in light of all the uncertainty, the wealth inequality, all these issues. We're still called to provide for the needs of our family, specifically our immediate family. So what does that look like? That means we don't ship grandma away when she's old. We don't, we don't, we don't wipe our hands of the, of the, the person that's, that's, that's down on their luck. No, no, no, we have to take care of our own. How do we take care of our own? We gotta have some godly ambition for that. We gotta get our life in order. We gotta get our finances in order. And, and, and again, men are struggling, man. They're, they're, they're chronically online. They wanna play video games. They're being told by the left and the right that they're victims. There's a system out to get them. They/them are gonna destroy you. Israel's bad. These people are bad. The left is bad. Everyone's bad. The police are bad. And they're just, they're, they're, they're just, they're growing in despair and nihilism.

• 2:30:52Speaker 03

  And I'm, and I'm, I'm saying, man, there's a biblical framework on how we can get after it. And you don't gotta lose your soul, but you can, you can, you can get after it and serve God while serving your family and building some stability to do good for others.

• 2:31:06Shawn Ryan?

  You had mentioned, you just mentioned, we were talking, you were talking about single mothers.

• 2:31:09Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:31:10Shawn Ryan?

  And you said, "The way I took it is that they need to be in the church to be taken care of." Did I hear that correctly?

• 2:31:17Speaker 03

  That, that's what, um, 1 Timothy 5 lays out, yeah.

• 2:31:20Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so wouldn't that be somewhat of a contradiction? And I mean, earlier you just said, I don't, I don't know who it was, but you said that you should be preaching the Bible where it's not preached.

• 2:31:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:31:32Shawn Ryan?

  Correct?

• 2:31:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:31:33Shawn Ryan?

  So why would it be bad to not take care of a single mom who is not in the church? Cause wouldn't that also come with preaching the Bible?

• 2:31:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. You're right, it's not bad to take care of a single mother that's not in the church. You're absolutely right. The, what we run into is a pri- a hierarchy of priorities. Right, so that there's a, there's a hierarchy in scripture of values. Right, so a lot of people, as an example, loyalty, loyalty, loyalty. How a lot of these pastors get in trouble, they start calling for unmitigated loyalty. And loyalty submits to truth. Loyalty is not the highest value, truth is the highest value. Right, love, goodness. So what happens is we, we conflate our values. And so we're more concerned about the single mother out there or what's going on in that country over there than we are within our own home. And so you're right, it is good to care for the single mother.

• 2:32:25Speaker 03

  But there's a hierarchy of priorities. So what are those hierarchies? Galatians says, hey, do good to all people as you can, as opportunity presents itself, but especially those in the house of faith. So what we see in scripture is that first and foremost, there's, there's us now, me and my household, you and your household. We have to first take care of our own. Your immediate family, then it's your extended family. Then it's your local church family. Then it's your community. Then it's the nations. And what we do is, we do the opposite. We want to go and worry about what's going on in other nations, other parts of the community, stuff we can't even really control if we're honest. And then we neglect the things we can control. And it creates this weird upside down inversion of, of values. And the reality is, we should care for those single mothers. But I should care for the single mothers in my church first.

• 2:33:10Speaker 03

  And then when I have means and when opportunities present themselves, I'm absolutely going to bless the single mothers that aren't in the church. And I'm going to preach them the gospel as well. Okay, so it's a priority list. It's a priority list, yeah. And that's uncomfortable to talk about because people think that the church is exclusively a charity. And the church does, does charity, but the church primarily exists to preach and teach the gospel, make disciples, and cultivate godly community. And the overflow of that is charity. Right, and so I think we, we inflate these things and we say, no, no, no, the church is just supposed to give all their money away. It's like, no, no, the church is supposed to preach and disciple people and care for the widow and the orphan within the context of the church. And then we go on beyond the church. But my big idea is if we just apply godly ambition and everyone just takes care of their household and then their extended family.

• 2:33:54Speaker 03

  That will solve a lot of our societal ills. If men say, "I'm gonna step up. I'm gonna be the priest, provider, protector of my home. I'm gonna figure it out." It's hard. Finances, job market, AI. Who knows where the world's going? It's hard. But I'm gonna figure this out. I'm gonna figure out how to take care of my family and my extended family. If that just happened in the next five years, all these men that are coming to faith, all these Gen Z, if they just said, "I'm gonna figure this out. I'm gonna figure out a way to take care of my own, take care of my extended family, and then be generous through my church." Because I don't just give to my church. I give through my church, right? I think we will see a radical change in society by men just showing up, being fathers, and then being father figures to folks in their family and their communities that don't have fathers.

• 2:34:37Speaker 03

  The world changes within a short amount of time, in my opinion.

• 2:34:41Shawn Ryan?

  I love that message.

• 2:34:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:43Shawn Ryan?

  Nice work.

• 2:34:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think you're right, though. I think we should live for something bigger than ourselves. And I think the poor and the marginalized need help and need resources. I think that the tricky part is, you've heard of toxic charity. You've heard how sometimes charity can do more enablement than helping people, right? And so, one of my favorite charities that I've partnered with is a company called Charity Water, where 100% of what they get goes towards the actual mission of bringing clean water filtration systems in parts of the world that need it. So, we donated my birthday a couple of years ago, and we were able to build a water filtration system in a part of the world that, when you bring clean water to people, it changes everything.

• 2:35:28Speaker 03

  It's actually the best ROI, because now they can farm. Now they have clean water. Now they have better hygiene. Just that alone, right? And so, like, we should absolutely be doing that, right? But not at the expense of my family, not at the expense of my in-laws, right? So, it's "and both," but there has to be a hierarchy. There has to be priorities to that.

• 2:35:46Shawn Ryan?

  Great point. Great point. Well, man, this was a fascinating conversation.

• 2:35:51Speaker 03

  Man, thank you so much. This was great. You asked great questions.

• 2:35:54Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for coming.

• 2:35:55Speaker 03

  I got questions for you, but maybe we can talk.

• 2:35:56Shawn Ryan?

  What do you got?

• 2:35:57Speaker 03

  Can I really ask?

• 2:35:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:59Speaker 03

  All right.

• 2:36:03Speaker 03

  The war on drugs in nineteen eighties.

• 2:36:05Shawn Ryan?

  The war on drugs in the nineteen eighties?

• 2:36:08Speaker 03

  CIA.

• 2:36:09Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 2:36:11Speaker 03

  Was the CIA complicit in bringing over cheap cocaine to pay the Nicaraguers to fight communism? Is that verified? Because I've heard they've admitted it, but I haven't been able to find anything recent. And then the whistleblower who, uh, you know, self deleted himself by shooting himself twice in the face.

• 2:36:35Speaker 03

  And then the turnaround and punish and have this crazy war on drugs and this hundred to one coke to crack disparity, which was supported by liberals and Republicans and Democrats. So this isn't a, you know, a partisan thing. But that ended up causing a lot of harm to a lot of communities. So I was curious, as a guy that, you know, is very connected and aware, is there, did the CIA do that? There's been movies and documentaries to fight those wars at the expense of poor communities.

• 2:37:03Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, that is not my expertise and, you know, I think a lot of people think that I was a lot deeper within the agency than I actually was. But, I mean, so I don't know. I would say there's a, there's a high probability that that is probably true. Um, you know,

• 2:37:26Shawn Ryan?

  something that kind of skirts the line on that. I had this interview with this guy Roger Reeves. He was the, uh, most prolific drug smuggler out of Colombia. Um, just lots of trips back and forth. He connected with this guy called Barry Seal. Do you know about this?

• 2:37:45Speaker 03

  Barry Seal sounds familiar.

• 2:37:46Shawn Ryan?

  Barry Seal supposedly worked for CIA.

• 2:37:50Speaker 03

  He was, he was, he was the plug. He was the connect, right?

• 2:37:52Shawn Ryan?

  If I, if I remember this correctly, Roger was, was flying cocaine out of, out of Colombia. A lot of cocaine out of Colombia. Went to jail for a long time. He came in for an interview. He had met this pilot named Barry Seal and, and some of this may be off. So you have to re-reference my interview with him, uh, in case I'm, you know, I'm off on some things. But he, so Roger would fly the cocaine into Louisiana, right?

• 2:38:19Shawn Ryan?

  And he would land on highways that are under construction. Well, when Barry went to work with him, he told him that, you know, that that that's the plan would land on the highways in Louisiana. Well, Barry said, no, I don't fly into Louisiana. I fly into Arkansas. Bill Clinton was the governor at the time. Um, so maybe there's some ties there.

• 2:38:42Shawn Ryan?

  But what I'm saying is he was protected by either state government or federal government or both to fly in the cocaine to Arkansas, you know, for dispersion. And so, you know, I think there's, there's something maybe there to explore, but,

• 2:39:03Shawn Ryan?

  I was born in nineteen eighty-two, so that's a little, you know, before my time there. And, you know, the other thing about the agency is, you know, you don't, you don't get access to everything. Everything is very compartmentalized, segmented. They call it a need to know basis. And if you don't need to know, then you don't get any information. So that is, that is, that's not something that I've been read into. Uh, not something that I've spent a lot of time exploring, but I'm sorry, I don't have.

• 2:39:30Speaker 03

  No, it's all right. I've always thought about it. My, my, my wife's parents were both caught up in the war on drugs. My, uh, my, my mother-in-law was working at a company, sliced her finger. Like the tip of her finger got cut off and she ended up, um, getting a settlement. And man, they partied hard. They partied a little too hard and they both ended up going to prison. And then because of the, the drug laws back then and the war on drugs, they got some pretty harsh sentences. And then, you know, you just, then the cycle starts of like now my sister-in-law is trying to raise the girls at twelve. She's robbing and stealing. She gets arrested. She then gets pregnant at fifteen.

• 2:40:14Speaker 03

  So the cycle just continues of despair and, and fatherlessness, you know.

• 2:40:19Shawn Ryan?

  Generational trauma.

• 2:40:20Speaker 03

  Generational trauma. Yeah. Yeah. My wife, by the grace of God, like she ended up going to live with her best friend when she was, um, In high school and that's how we met. We met in high school and the best friend, you know, Y evangelical Christian family, mother and father in the home. They weren't perfect, but they were great. And, uh, and that kind of like removed her from, um, a lot of like being in these pretty rough environments. And we met after that and we got married. And when we got married, we knew it's like, hey, we are not going to repeat these cycles. You know, we're not going to continue the fatherlessness. Like we're gonna, we're gonna figure this thing out. You guys broke it together. Yeah. Yeah. So we've been married 17 years now, together 21. Congratulations. I think she's the one.

• 2:41:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's great. My wife is great, man. Yeah, she's, we've got two kids. Levi is 10. Um, Zoe's four and we got one on the way in November. Yeah. Congratulations. Another boy. Oh, man, that's awesome. Yeah. How many kids you got? Two. Two, how old are they? Two and four. Two and four. Oh, man. My, my, my, I got a four year old. It's such a funny age. Boy, girl? Boy, girl. Boy, girl? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's kids are the best, man. They are. They are. They definitely change your perspective on the world. And how, how you, how you carry yourself. A, a, a lot like the, the men I'm speaking to are coming from, you know, similar backgrounds, struggling and a lot of what I'm trying to get them to understand is like, dude, like you're gonna get married one day and like your wife is gonna want to stay home and just be

• 2:41:46Speaker 03

  a mom and be with her babies. And the data supports that too. You know, uh, Forbes did a study about a decade ago. Eighty-six percent of working women prefer to stay home if they were given the opportunity, you know, and then, and then this is not Christian. Eighty-six percent. This is a little dated. It's probably around 75 now. Want to stay home for a season when they have kids. This is working women with kids. They prefer to stay home if they were given an opportunity to. And, uh, some women grow resentment if they aren't. And, uh, that conversation is very unpopular, you know? So my, my advice to young men is like, bro, there's a future version of you. That's like depending on this version of you to make good decisions. And if you don't make good decisions, like you're gonna pay for it later.

• 2:42:30Speaker 03

  That's a great, that's a, I love that. There's a future version of you. Yeah. Depending on what you do. You know, no one told me this stuff. Like when I was 20, new to the faith, like no one sat me down. I was like, hey, man, like you gotta go make some money, bro. Like you, you can't, and you gotta stop getting into debt. Like you gotta clean this stuff up because at 28, 29, like your wife's gonna want to have kids and. She's gonna wanna stay home. You know, she's not gonna wanna be a boss babe in 12 weeks. You know, again, like after pushing out a human. No one told me these things. And again, by the grace of God, and really through Dave Ramsey's stuff, like, we were able to clean up our finances and got out of debt. And it was so life-giving, you know, to have that stability and then transition into music full-time and then YouTube. Yeah.

• 2:43:10Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome, man.

• 2:43:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:43:12Shawn Ryan?

  That's, I'm gonna steal that.

• 2:43:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's a good line, right?

• 2:43:15Shawn Ryan?

  I love that.

• 2:43:16Speaker 03

  You could sauce it up. You could talk about sci-fi movies. Sometimes I'll talk about like my favorite movies or sci-fi movies, time travel movies and, you know, the timeline continuum, you know? And so you could really sauce it up. But yeah, it's, it's, it's a, I think it's so real. Because when you don't have the motivation, you have all the time in the world. When you have the motivation, kids, a wife, people depending on you to provide, you don't have a lot of time. And so if I can say, hey, man, why do you have the time? Let's make you, let's make you an asset to your current employer. Let's, let's make you, let, let's not go in and try to get the most amount of money for the least amount of work. No, no, no, no, no. You're gonna show up and you're gonna be the best dude. You're gonna be the first to come, last to leave, most competent, working your face off.

• 2:43:59Speaker 03

  And in that, you're gonna be a greater asset to your current employer. And I'm sure you appreciate that. You have an amazing team here of just studs that are crushing it. Those people end up being amazing in an organization, but they could also go on and do their own thing if they want to. Because they're competent, they're stable, they're confident. And people don't understand that. Like, they don't understand that, like, man, you got a window of time from 25, from 20 to 25 before you're married with kids. Like, figure this out, figure this stuff out, you know? Yeah.

• 2:44:28Shawn Ryan?

  Well, man, awesome interview.

• 2:44:31Speaker 03

  Man, thank you so much. Thank you so much. This is a copy for you, so maybe you could take a peek sometime.

• 2:44:35Shawn Ryan?

  I will, I will. And I just, I wanna say congratulations on, to you and your wife on breaking generational trauma.

• 2:44:40Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:44:41Shawn Ryan?

  And that's, that's a huge thing. We talk a lot about that here, so.

• 2:44:46Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:44:47Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. Thank you for being here. I learned a lot.

• 2:44:49Speaker 03

  All right.