0:01

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I have the pleasure

0:03

of speaking to two people.

0:22

Someone you most likely know for his

0:24

portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth

0:27

in Passion of the Christ, Jim

0:29

Caviezel. And also someone

0:31

you should know if you don't already,

0:33

the man behind Operation

0:36

Underground Railroad, Tim

0:38

Ballard. We discussed the new

0:41

film, The Sound of Freedom, wherein

0:44

Mr. Caviezel plays Tim Ballard

0:46

in the telling of his real life story,

0:49

detailing his fight against the increasingly

0:52

worldwide and pervasive childhood

0:54

sex trade. The

0:56

film, The Sound of Freedom,

0:59

releases on July 4th. So

1:02

about a week and a half ago I got a text message

1:04

from Tony Robbins suggesting

1:06

that I watch a new film called The Sound

1:08

of Freedom. And I did that

1:10

about four days ago with my wife Tammy

1:13

and was quite struck by the movie.

1:15

And I decided to follow up

1:17

on it. It details out

1:20

the efforts of one man, Tim Ballard,

1:23

to investigate the

1:26

child sexual slavery and

1:28

to rescue the children that were associated

1:30

with that. But it also points to a broader

1:33

social problem, which is the spread of

1:37

sexual and slave trafficking worldwide

1:40

abetted by the

1:41

net, which is a great

1:43

avenue for psychopathic criminals

1:45

to

1:46

pursue their darkest

1:49

desires with very little risk

1:51

of being caught, especially on the multinational

1:54

basis. So I've decided

1:56

to reach out to Tim

1:59

Ballard. who is the man

2:03

who the movie is about, and to Jim Caviezel,

2:05

who's the actor that plays him, to

2:07

talk about what all this signifies.

2:10

And so Tim, let's start with you. I

2:12

mean, the movie makes

2:15

the case that there is a widely

2:17

expanding network of

2:20

slavery, essentially, making itself

2:22

manifest worldwide, concentrating

2:24

in no small part on very young children

2:27

who are being sold repeatedly

2:29

to pedophilic psychopaths

2:35

to have at their will,

2:38

and of course can be sold repeatedly

2:40

for that purpose. And the

2:42

movie makes the case that this is now an operation

2:45

that's rivaling the drug trade in magnitude.

2:47

So, you know, it sounds like yet

2:50

another right-wing conspiracy. So

2:53

please, why don't you walk us through what

2:55

you know and help me

2:57

understand, and everybody watching and listening, exactly

2:59

what you think is going on.

3:01

Yeah, thank you so much, Jordan.

3:04

We're so grateful you take your time to do this

3:07

with us. So I spent 12 years as a special

3:09

agent undercover operator with the Department of Homeland

3:11

Security. Most of my time, 90% of

3:14

that time was spent investigating

3:16

these cases, child crimes, child trafficking.

3:19

And in fact, those numbers are correct. That

3:22

are being, these are Department of Labor, UN, these

3:25

are sources that, you know, the

3:27

best we have that say that there's close

3:29

to 6 million children or more who are forced

3:31

into sex slavery, labor

3:34

slavery, or organ harvesting. And I

3:36

can attest that I have been involved in cases

3:39

involving all three of those forms of slavery multiple

3:41

times and is absolutely is a real

3:44

thing. It's not even

3:46

far, far from home. It's the

3:48

United States is the number one consumer year

3:50

after year of child rape material.

3:54

And oftentimes we're close to number one

3:56

in production and it's

3:58

a serious matter, you know, the case. the

4:01

story in Sound of Freedom kicks off

4:03

with the rescue of a little boy at the port

4:05

of entry at the Southern border. That's

4:07

a real story, a real boy, that

4:10

I was on that port of entry. I was 10 years on the Southern border.

4:13

So when you have 85,000 unaccompanied minors showing

4:16

up in the last two years being let into the

4:18

country without the sponsor

4:20

being vetted, DNA checked, background

4:22

checked, I call it the economy

4:25

of pedophilia. At the United States, where the

4:27

demand, 85,000 children, thousands

4:29

of them are under five years old, are let into

4:31

the country. So we have a serious,

4:34

serious problem and it's

4:36

not being addressed as it should be. Hopefully this film can

4:38

do that.

4:39

Have,

4:40

what has been your experience with

4:43

regard to so-called mainstream

4:45

media or legacy media coverage? How much

4:47

attention has been paid to this? And if

4:49

not much, why? And if reasonably,

4:52

who and how?

4:53

Well, I think not

4:56

very much has been, attention

4:59

has been given by mainstream media. Oftentimes

5:01

it's more innocent than cynical, perhaps,

5:04

where it's just, this is too dark. I don't wanna

5:06

expose our audience to this horrific

5:08

thing. You know,

5:11

we film our operations. I mean, I'm

5:13

gonna post today another operation in

5:16

West Africa of a baby factory. I

5:18

mean, these are real cases where they've kidnapped

5:21

women, they've done this 13

5:23

year olds and children and they impregnate them,

5:25

they rape them and they make babies and they take these babies

5:27

and sell them for their organs, sell them for sex, sell

5:30

them for a satanic ritual abuse.

5:32

Like it does sound crazy.

5:35

That's why I film it. Our operations, we film our

5:37

operations so that we can show the world

5:39

this is very real. It's really happening. And

5:42

I think

5:42

if there's 2 million children forced into commercial

5:45

sex, which is the most kind

5:47

of credible statistic that we can find, a lot

5:50

of people are involved. So there is a more cynical

5:53

answer to your question, which may be there's

5:55

people that don't want this exposed because

5:57

they're involved in it.

5:58

So I'm going to... I want to harass

6:00

you a bit here from

6:02

the Wikipedia page. There

6:05

is some, not that I'm particular

6:08

fan of Wikipedia pages, depending

6:11

on the circumstances, but there

6:13

are some criticisms of what

6:15

you're doing. And I thought we might as well address

6:18

them right off the bat, because

6:22

people who are watching are going

6:24

to be, look, man, if I was coming

6:26

across this for the first time, and in some ways I

6:29

am, I've got two choices

6:31

in front of me, don't I? I can either presume that you've

6:34

discovered something that's ongoing

6:36

and of tremendous significance, that's

6:39

terribly dark, or I can assume

6:41

that the difficult work that

6:43

you had done for a decade, genuinely

6:47

addressing these problems, has made

6:49

you hypersensitive to a threat

6:51

and willing to magnify it, and

6:54

it

6:54

would be easier just to ignore you as a consequence.

6:56

Now, that would be the preferable outcome

6:58

to such

7:01

an investigation, wouldn't it? So you can, as

7:03

you said, you can understand why people might

7:05

want to avert their eyes from such a thing. So

7:08

I'm gonna walk through these criticisms and maybe you

7:10

could,

7:10

you know, you can respond to them and we

7:13

can get that out of the way before we go deeper

7:15

into the film and your operations.

7:22

So your group,

7:24

and this is Operation Underground Rail, and

7:26

tell me if I get anything wrong here, says

7:29

it devours conspiracy theories, though founder

7:31

Tom Ballard was criticized for refusing

7:33

to condemn the QAnon conspiracy

7:36

theory. I have no

7:38

idea what the hell that means. Do you know what that's referring

7:40

to?

7:41

Yeah, absolutely. We, that's

7:43

a lie in Wikipedia. We have absolutely,

7:46

and RFAQs for years, have condemned

7:49

the majority of what we see with

7:53

conspiracy theories. So

7:55

they like to attribute me to the QAnon movement.

7:59

There may be some truth.

7:59

but there's so many falsehoods on top of

8:02

that. So our FAQs refute

8:04

that immediately because

8:06

it discredits the

8:08

movement. In fact, I would go so far as to

8:10

consider that maybe certain people

8:13

who don't want this known are responsible

8:15

for some of the conspiracy theories

8:18

in order to discredit the movement. And

8:22

they go too far. They go too far in

8:24

their assessment of things. But yeah, we actually have this

8:26

disavowed,

8:28

what is generally coming out of QAnon.

8:31

Yeah, well, it says, you know, it's very vague

8:33

on Wikipedia. It says to condemn the

8:36

QAnon conspiracy theory. Well,

8:38

I know perfectly well that there are more than one

8:41

conspiracy theories, let's say on QAnon.

8:43

So I'm not even exactly sure what it's referring

8:45

to. Is there a particular

8:48

conspiracy theory that

8:50

you were criticized for refusing

8:52

to condemn? Do you have any more specific

8:55

details about that?

8:56

I mean, I'm not sure what exactly they're

8:59

talking about. They might be

9:02

referring to the fact that there's something

9:04

called adrenal chrome where

9:07

they're taking children's blood and devouring it and so

9:09

forth. And I've

9:11

explained my experience with that. And

9:14

I just did in West Africa and other places.

9:17

We've seen this in several parts of the continent

9:19

of Africa. And it's very real. It's very

9:21

real. This witch doctory, they take these children.

9:25

They take their organs. They take their blood. They

9:28

drink it. They take the genitalia

9:30

of children and hang it over the rooftop

9:32

of their businesses thinking that the

9:34

dark gods will bless them. These are real things.

9:37

And so I might say something like that. And then they

9:39

connect it to something that

9:42

a QAnon person says about a

9:44

celebrity

9:46

who must be doing this too, but there's no evidence

9:48

to back that. And they make

9:50

a false connection there. And

9:53

so that's the only example I can think of.

9:56

Okay, got it. Well, the next thing it says

9:58

is that the... Operation

10:00

Underground Railway falsely claimed

10:02

that it had entered a partnership with American Airlines.

10:05

That was in 2022. So what

10:07

do you have to say about that? Oh,

10:10

that's a great one. So a PR

10:12

firm who represented us

10:14

made a deal with American Airlines. It

10:17

came to us and said, shoot the video. They're gonna put

10:19

this video on your, we're

10:22

gonna put this video on the airlines. They

10:24

shot the video of me. I just get a call from our PR company,

10:26

put me in a studio. I give a video that

10:29

I think I'm talking to the passengers for

10:31

one month on American Airlines.

10:34

Apparently the deal fell through. The PR

10:36

company didn't tell us that. And

10:38

our marketing company, our marketing team put out,

10:41

hey, we're gonna be on American Airlines. The PR

10:43

company apologized. We

10:45

fired them. They said, we can't believe

10:47

we didn't get the message to you. And that was it. And

10:49

of course there's people that want so badly for

10:51

us to be wrong or us to not do

10:54

what we say we do. So they exploited

10:56

that. I think that was a Vice magazine, very

10:58

incredibly dishonest journal.

11:01

I can't even call them journalists. The Vice

11:03

magazine, they've done a series of hit

11:05

pieces on us. And I

11:07

encourage people to read it, read Vice. Read

11:09

Vice because everything they say is so ridiculous

11:12

and so dishonest.

11:14

Right, right, yes. Well, and I do believe if

11:16

I remember correctly that Vice has also declared

11:18

bankruptcy in the last few weeks. And I can't

11:20

imagine an organization more richly deserving

11:24

precisely what they've got. I've heard from behind

11:26

the scenes just exactly what it was like to

11:28

work for the narcissists and psychopaths who

11:30

ran that operation. So I think we can dispense

11:32

with that.

11:33

So there was a 2021 followup

11:36

article from Vice, but I don't think we're

11:38

going to, I'll just read part of it because it's

11:40

so ridiculous. Conflating consensual

11:43

sex work with sex trafficking.

11:45

Yeah, well, that's exactly the kind of Weasley,

11:48

what would you call it, criticism that I'd expect from

11:50

people who are trying to justify the sorts of

11:53

behaviors that you are attempting to expose.

11:56

Then there's a 2021 article in Slate. criticizing

12:01

a 2014 raid conducted by

12:03

Operation Underground Railway in the Dominican

12:06

Republic, saying that it was likely to have

12:08

traumatized the traffic children. Anne

12:11

Gallagher, an authority on human trafficking, wrote

12:13

in 2015 that OUR had an alarming lack of understanding

12:18

about how sophisticated criminal trafficking

12:20

networks must be approached and dismantled

12:22

and called the work of OUR arrogant,

12:25

unethical and illegal.

12:27

So Anne, have a way of that.

12:30

Oh, thank you. I'm grateful for this opportunity.

12:32

So someone like Anne Gallagher, who lives 3000 miles

12:35

away from any operation we've ever done, is

12:37

not qualified to talk about what our operations.

12:40

She can't give any details.

12:42

She can't give any examples.

12:46

The Slate article is a fun one to address.

12:48

I've addressed it several times. We,

12:51

early on, we brought a blogger down to

12:54

watch our operations. We invite people

12:56

down. Like Tony Robbins has been down. We

12:59

invite politicians.

13:00

The attorney general of Utah has come in our operations. If

13:02

we're hiding something, that's the last thing we would, of course,

13:05

do. So we bring this journalist, this blogger,

13:07

I won't call her a journalist, and

13:09

we thought she was a friend. And she came and

13:12

watched a legitimate operation happen in

13:15

Dominican Republic. There were seven

13:17

traffickers who showed up, seven traffickers

13:20

arrested. There were 20

13:23

plus people rescued.

13:26

Nine of them were children. You can't always control who shows

13:30

up to the sting party. The traffickers bring

13:32

who they will. But nine children showed

13:35

up. They were all liberated from

13:40

the control of their captors.

13:43

This blogger then wrote two glowing stories

13:45

about it, that she witnessed this.

13:47

She had very minimal exposure to the operation

13:50

itself. She witnessed it. Some

13:52

seven years later, she decides

13:55

to use it, in my opinion, to somehow increase

13:58

her social media following as our founder.

13:59

and she writes a story that it's in slate.

14:02

Now here's the key thing.

14:06

Nine children rescued and nine children had three

14:08

years of aftercare services in this operation provided

14:11

by International Justice Mission, one

14:14

of the top authorities in aftercare and

14:18

fighting human trafficking. Seven

14:20

traffickers were not only arrested, but all

14:23

seven were convicted. So she

14:25

chose the wrong case to criticize. Now,

14:27

tellingly, if anyone's

14:29

gonna write a story about that operation,

14:31

good, bad, or otherwise, and

14:33

they leave out the part

14:35

that says seven traffickers were arrested and

14:38

seven traffickers were convicted and

14:40

nine children were liberated and have three years

14:43

of aftercare to heal them,

14:45

if you leave that part out, either

14:47

you are extremely incompetent

14:50

as a researcher and writer, or you're a liar.

14:53

Either way, the story has zero credibility.

14:56

On that fact alone, because she

14:59

doesn't even report on those two

15:02

essential elements.

15:03

All right, well, we've hypothetically dispensed

15:05

with Vice, which of course is a,

15:09

yeah, well, it's pretty funny that that's what they named their organization

15:11

as far as I'm concerned, and we'll leave the slate

15:13

issue

15:14

aside. Jim, let me ask you a couple

15:17

of questions, if you don't mind. Do you wanna first of all

15:19

tell people about your

15:21

involvement with Angel Studios, a little bit about

15:23

your career and why this particular movie,

15:25

Sound of Freedom, it's opening

15:28

in early July, when does it come out?

15:31

It comes out July

15:33

4th week, so next week. Next week it's

15:35

out in theaters nationwide.

15:38

So let me turn to Jim. Jim, can you hear me? Yes,

15:41

yes.

15:43

All right, so yeah, do you wanna detail out your

15:45

association with Angel Studios? Tell everybody first

15:48

who Angel Studios are, what

15:50

they've done, and I've watched a lot

15:52

of the shows, and by the way, which I thought was extremely

15:55

high quality. Tell

15:57

us about the studio, tell us about your involvement

15:59

with Angel Studios.

15:59

about your career and then about your

16:02

attraction to this particular movie?

16:06

Well, let's start with the movie first. I

16:11

have three adopted

16:13

children from China. I

16:15

became aware of the dangers that

16:17

go on with

16:20

children around the world and through

16:22

that process. Then

16:25

I became aware of Tim Ballard. Coincidentally,

16:29

then my friend, Eduardo

16:31

Verastagi, brought

16:34

me this script because many

16:37

of the actors that they had

16:39

offered it to didn't want

16:41

to get involved in this particular project.

16:45

I read the script, I loved

16:47

the movie Taken, and I thought this

16:50

is like Taken, but with a much bigger heart.

16:53

Then Tim Ballard came to

16:56

the meeting. He had seen two films that I did.

16:59

One was called The Count of Monte Cristo, and

17:01

then the other one was The Passion of the Christ, and

17:04

he felt that I'd be the right guy to play him.

17:07

Angel Studios, I had no

17:10

connection to them until

17:12

a few months ago when they wanted

17:15

to do this movie. And

17:18

they wanted, their idea was to

17:21

sell two million tickets for these two million

17:24

trafficked children. So

17:27

why is it that a

17:29

number of actors, why in your estimation

17:32

did a number of actors turn down the opportunity

17:34

to play the role? And

17:37

why did you decide to forego that risk

17:40

and to climb aboard? I

17:43

foregoed the risk because when

17:46

you have three children

17:49

that you loved and you'd give your life

17:51

for, it kind of connects

17:53

into Tim Ballard. And Tim did

17:56

this for this little girl

17:59

and the children that I loved. that he saves,

18:01

something is a greater

18:03

purpose that even

18:05

your career, you know,

18:08

like I went through this with Mel Gibson

18:11

when we did the Passion, that my

18:14

career was the last thing I thought

18:16

of. What I thought about was the God

18:18

I love. And I

18:21

put this, and how

18:23

I look at it is, is that this God

18:25

that I love, He loves me

18:28

and He deserved to be loved back.

18:30

And so I would

18:33

be nothing without Him. He gave me my

18:35

purpose in this life. So, the

18:40

Tim Ballard, I was very fortunate that he had seen

18:43

those films. And

18:46

when I looked at, and I think

18:48

Tim made this comparison, Schindler's

18:51

List was a very powerful

18:55

weapon, but it came 50 years

18:57

too late. This film is

19:00

now, this is

19:02

exposing it now during that time.

19:04

And I believe that is probably why. It's

19:07

easier to get an actor to do a movie 50 years

19:10

later. There's no controversy, it's

19:12

over. But the individuals,

19:15

imagine if Rwanda, if that story

19:17

had been made, that movie had been made

19:19

during that time, or they could

19:21

see it. You know, you have to look

19:24

at these situations

19:26

and

19:27

understand that

19:30

good people sit back and do nothing and

19:33

allow this evil to occur.

19:35

There's got to be people that stand

19:37

up in the time that it occurs. And

19:40

that's what drew me to the whole story in the first

19:43

place.

19:44

And how do you

19:46

feel about the movie? Now you've seen the

19:48

movie in its entirety, it's about to be released. It's

19:51

a fully fledged, high quality production.

19:53

I was particularly impressed by the cinematography.

19:57

It's also extraordinarily well edited.

20:00

the acting, I don't want to flatter

20:02

you, but the acting is extremely high quality. It's

20:04

very realistic movie. How

20:07

do you feel about your involvement now that everything is

20:09

done? And how do you feel about the,

20:12

what would you say, the production capacity of

20:14

Angel Studios, which is a relatively new, a

20:17

relative newcomer on the mass

20:20

entertainment block?

20:22

When I was sitting next to Tim Ballard and

20:24

he leaned over and he started to

20:27

weep heavily, I

20:29

knew I did my job.

20:32

So do you want to run us briefly through? I

20:34

don't want to give away the entire plot because that

20:36

would obviously be pointless, but do you want to just

20:39

run us briefly through Jim, the

20:42

plot of the movie, and then I'll turn to Tim and fill

20:44

in some of the background details of his life?

20:47

So I play Tim Ballard. He's

20:50

a Homeland Security. He sets

20:53

up these

20:55

sting operations to take

20:57

down these very, very bad men

21:00

to save traffic children. And one particular

21:03

case, one

21:05

of the traffickers that he takes down, Ernst

21:07

Lipicinski,

21:08

he

21:11

rescues this boy and the little boy

21:13

turns to him and says, will you

21:16

save my sister?

21:18

And Tim goes back, gets

21:20

the direction from above and from

21:22

his wife and goes back

21:24

and he sells everything to find this

21:27

little girl. So what

21:29

I liked about the script,

21:31

so I've noticed that one of the most

21:34

effective ways of communicating complex

21:36

ideas

21:37

effectively

21:39

is to particularize the problem.

21:42

And so what happens in this movie is

21:44

that the broad problem of slavery

21:46

and human trafficking and

21:50

the somewhat narrower problem of sexual

21:53

trafficking of children is zeroed,

21:58

is what focused on a particular. And

22:00

so that gives the movie a very powerful narrative

22:03

underpinning, right? Because

22:05

when a problem is particularized and you can

22:07

see how it affects actual specific people's

22:10

lives, it becomes much more realistic

22:12

and much more palpable. And I thought the movie

22:14

did a good job of that. Tim,

22:17

do you want to walk everybody listening through? Let's

22:20

go back into the details of your life. Now,

22:22

you worked for the, you worked,

22:24

we worked for the special forces per

22:26

se. And who are you working for before

22:29

you decided to forego your career and to

22:31

pursue this case that we're describing?

22:34

So I worked for 12 years as a special

22:36

agent and undercover operator

22:38

for the Department of Homeland Security, the

22:40

investigative division called Homeland Security

22:43

Investigations. 10 of those years

22:45

were spent on the border, tracking

22:47

child traffickers, people who would exploit

22:50

children with child exploitation material.

22:52

So I really learned a lot. In 2006, the

22:55

laws changed in the United States. And

22:57

for the first time, US agents were permitted

23:00

and encouraged to go overseas and

23:02

find children who Americans were abusing.

23:05

And we can now hold those Americans accountable as

23:08

if they had committed that crime on US soil.

23:11

That's what really changed my life because I started, I speak Spanish

23:13

fluently and they sent me overseas, south

23:16

of the border. That's when my eyes opened up and

23:18

I started seeing the children that I used

23:20

to only see mostly on the

23:22

pornographic, on the child exploitation material

23:25

cases. But it was

23:27

tormenting me, the

23:29

US government unwittingly was because if

23:32

I couldn't find that connection back to the United

23:34

States, the American kid or the American

23:36

pedophile, I had to come home. But

23:38

the problem is I've already been exposed to the children,

23:41

I've already been exposed to the problem

23:44

and oftentimes have made myself the bait. And

23:47

in 2012, I had enough on

23:49

this case. I kind of went more, I went further

23:52

than otherwise, I probably should

23:54

have. The movie didn't have time to tell you that

23:56

there was another case in Haiti at the same

23:58

time that I was working. thinking

24:00

there was a US nexus. And I was told

24:02

in both instances to come home and you couldn't

24:04

work these cases. And that's

24:07

when I had a very consequential conversation

24:09

with my wife. And I said, if I

24:12

stay here, if I do this operation

24:15

with or without my badge, it doesn't matter at this point,

24:17

I can do the work. We

24:20

will save kids. But

24:23

I have to lose my job and we

24:25

have six children. And this

24:27

is a moral dilemma like I've never faced in my life.

24:30

And I was hoping my wife would have responded

24:33

with get your ass

24:35

home. You can't abandon

24:38

us. First

24:40

of all, you're gonna die without the

24:43

top cover of the US government if you continue this.

24:45

And who's gonna pay the bills and feed

24:48

the kids? She

24:50

didn't say that. She said to me,

24:52

you have to quit your job. It

24:54

was that easy for her. It

24:57

became spiritual for her even. She felt a

24:59

calling and a responsibility

25:02

that she might have to reckon with one day when

25:04

she meets her maker. And I

25:06

knew that she felt that way when she told me this

25:09

in the crucial moment of decision

25:13

about two days before I ended up turning my badge

25:15

and gun over and went private.

25:18

She said to me, I will not let

25:20

you jeopardize my salvation

25:23

by not doing this.

25:25

And when she said those words and I knew she meant

25:27

those words, that changed everything for me.

25:30

And we jumped into really

25:32

just an irrational

25:35

act of service, I might call it, because

25:37

it wasn't rational in many ways. But

25:41

ultimately it ended in the operation you

25:43

see depicted in the film, which shows 54 children.

25:46

Some adult, young

25:48

adult women were in that group as well rescued

25:51

on that island. But what the movie doesn't have

25:54

the time to report is that in actuality

25:56

was 120. There was two

25:58

other locations being taken. down at the same

26:00

time. And there's a documentary that's going to

26:02

follow in the wake of Sound

26:04

of Freedom called Triple Take. Angel Studios

26:07

will put it out, documenting the entire

26:09

story. And so in the end, it was successful

26:12

and we were able to build upon that success. And I founded

26:14

Operation Underground Railroad. I run another

26:18

foundation that was founded by Glenn Beck called the Nazarene

26:20

Fund. And we're doing these kinds of operations

26:22

all over the world today.

26:24

So how, let's go back

26:26

in time to before you worked as a security

26:29

agent for the homeless, or

26:32

an agent for the Homeland Security Investigations

26:35

Unit. How were you

26:37

trained to

26:38

do that? Like what was your background

26:41

before you became employed as an agent? And what

26:44

was it about you that made you capable of

26:46

engaging in this sort of operation?

26:49

So I got a graduate degree

26:52

in international politics

26:55

and I always wanted to be in federal law enforcement. My first

26:57

job was CIA. I was there

26:59

doing 9-11, working in the operation center.

27:02

In the wake of 9-11, I found

27:04

out that I studied terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

27:07

That was actually the degree I got

27:09

at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. And

27:12

so

27:14

it was an easy recruit into the CIA because

27:16

9-11 had just happened.

27:19

When I found out that one of the terrorists, Muhammad Atra

27:21

had staged his attack from

27:24

Mexicali, Mexico and crossed the border, and

27:26

I speak Spanish, I wanted to go fight terrorism

27:28

on the southern border. So I ended up jumping

27:31

ship from CIA and I joined the newly created

27:34

Homeland Security Department and

27:37

became a special agent. For six months,

27:39

I was tracking those kind of

27:41

movements, not

27:44

human trafficking or child exploitation, but money,

27:47

guns, terrorism. Six

27:49

months into that endeavor, I was called into the

27:51

office

27:52

of a supervisor and they asked me

27:54

if I would please

27:55

forgo everything that I wanted to do with my career

27:57

and help them start a child crimes unit. I

28:00

do not know why they asked me. One

28:02

thing he did say to me was, you're a young

28:04

agent, but you're a person of faith. And

28:07

we know that about you. And that's a requirement

28:09

or your soul will be crushed.

28:13

I would like you, if you would, to tell

28:16

us

28:17

to the degree that you can

28:20

what you were typically dealing with when

28:22

you started working for the child

28:24

sex crimes unit. Let us

28:26

know what you saw.

28:29

Let us know what that did

28:31

to you. Cause that sort of thing, that changes

28:33

people's conceptions

28:35

of humanity per se.

28:37

Let's say the nature of the cosmos and

28:39

what it means to be human, right? I mean, when

28:42

you're in contact with people

28:44

who are capable of that level of darkness,

28:46

you start to understand something about the nature of the

28:48

human soul that you can't understand any other

28:50

way. And that can be, I mean, that's the sort of thing that

28:52

gives people post-traumatic stress disorder when they're

28:55

soldiers. And now you

28:57

said also, your supervisor had an inkling

28:59

that you might be protected against that,

29:01

at least to some degree because of your faith. So

29:04

let's walk through

29:05

what you learned and encountered first.

29:07

What did you see when you were working as

29:10

part of this child sex crimes unit?

29:13

What I saw was so shocking, Jordan.

29:16

I thought child sex crimes would be 15 year

29:18

olds, 16 year olds.

29:20

My brain couldn't comprehend

29:23

something more evil than

29:25

abusing that age. The very first

29:27

case I worked in 2002, I believe, I

29:30

was given a bunch of VHS

29:33

videos, some hard drives to look at that had been

29:35

seized and it weren't. The very first image

29:38

I saw were,

29:45

there were three little boys

29:48

that

29:51

were

29:52

probably seven, five and three.

29:54

And they looked like my children. They

29:58

had,

29:58

you know, they had blonde. blonde hair,

30:01

blue eyes. And they were being just

30:03

raped, raped these three little boys

30:05

by this pedophile. And

30:07

I

30:08

was so shocked. I fell to my knees. I dry

30:10

heaved thinking I was going to throw

30:13

up into the waste basket. I jumped into

30:15

my car. I drove to my children's

30:17

school, my three oldest kids. I

30:20

checked them out. I still remember in my mind, I can still

30:22

see dentist, dentist, dentist appointment

30:24

I wrote. And I grabbed them. I took them home

30:26

and just sobbed on the floor.

30:28

My wife came in and I just, I wouldn't let the kids go

30:31

just holding them and shaking.

30:34

That was my very first experience. You

30:36

talk about PTSD. I absolutely deal

30:38

with PTSD to this day. I

30:41

took too long to actually deal with it. That's another

30:43

story.

30:46

And I thought, I can't do this. I can't

30:48

do this. I started getting

30:50

help immediately because I

30:52

didn't want to quit. And

30:54

that's what this is.

30:57

That's what this is. And those kinds

31:00

of videos have increased over the last couple

31:02

of years by 5,000%.

31:05

Yeah, well, in Canada,

31:09

we just had a report from an organization

31:12

called the Western Standard that 1

31:14

million child sexual exploitation

31:17

photos and videos have been identified

31:20

in an Alberta child porn investigation.

31:23

1 million photos, eight arrests

31:25

made. Okay, so that's some indication

31:28

of the widespread nature of the problem. Now,

31:31

you said that when you first encountered

31:33

this material, it made you physically ill and

31:36

also terrified for the safety of your children.

31:38

But then also, it necessitated

31:41

you seeking help,

31:43

I suppose, or aid. I've

31:45

worked with people who've had

31:47

post-traumatic stress disorder. Generally,

31:50

what happens is that tragedy

31:52

is not enough to give someone post-traumatic stress

31:54

disorder, even if it's rather severe. It

31:57

has to be a combination of tragedy and malevolence.

32:00

And the real trauma

32:02

comes as a

32:03

consequence of contact with evil,

32:06

with malevolence.

32:07

And what people generally have to

32:09

do in order to recover from that is

32:12

to develop a rather profound philosophy

32:15

of evil. And, you know, a religious

32:17

faith in its most fundamental essence

32:20

is a philosophy of good and evil. It

32:22

does detail out the heart

32:25

of darkness among human beings.

32:28

Point out to people, this is particularly,

32:30

although you're not uniquely true of

32:32

the Christian tradition, but particularly true,

32:34

that that capacity for evil

32:37

lurks in the heart of everyone and that our fundamental

32:41

moral obligation as we sojourn

32:43

here on earth is to

32:45

overcome that proclivity within

32:47

and also to stand up against it in

32:50

the external world. And so you said

32:52

you received some aid after

32:54

you had been exposed to this first set

32:56

of videos.

32:58

What is it about the way

33:00

you looked at the world that had to change in

33:03

order for you to adapt to what you were

33:05

encountering? Well,

33:07

I had to come to grips with an

33:10

idea that I had never been confronted with before,

33:12

that there are people and not a few, but

33:15

millions of people,

33:16

only millions of pedophiles

33:19

could justify a demand of

33:22

millions of child exploitation

33:25

material, videos and so forth.

33:28

The first person you see arrested in the movie

33:30

is a real person named Ernst Lupolstensky

33:33

in Sound of Freedom. He had over two million pieces

33:35

of child rape material

33:37

in his house. So to

33:40

be confronted with the reality that

33:43

there are people on this planet, and like

33:45

I said, not a few, but millions who

33:48

want to indulge in watching

33:51

five-year-old children be raped

33:53

and sexually assaulted in ways that,

33:56

and I'm sorry to be so raw, but I feel comfortable with you,

33:58

Dr. Peterson, but...

33:59

to watch

34:03

children's bodies actually break

34:05

in the act of sexual assault. Acts

34:08

that your mind couldn't conjure up

34:10

if you tried to conjure it up

34:12

and that it's real. That is so

34:15

shocking to the system.

34:16

It changes your life forever.

34:19

I tell people, I feel like I've had a

34:22

million holes burned into my brain because

34:24

I've watched thousands of hours of

34:27

that kind of material, not only watch

34:29

it. And I love the scene

34:31

that Jim depicts where he's, that's

34:33

very real. I break, I can't watch, I got to watch

34:35

the movie, but the movie is very good. The movie

34:37

doesn't show any of this, by the way. It doesn't show anything

34:40

like this. I don't want people to run away and be scared,

34:43

but you see the scene where the camera flashes

34:47

a closeup into Jim's eyes. And

34:49

that was me for 10 years, not

34:52

only watching, but writing, writing it

34:55

in details for the court to see, for

34:58

the prosecutors to see. And raising

35:00

children at the same time that are the

35:02

very same age. And fortunately or

35:04

unfortunately for me, I have now have nine

35:06

children. At the time I left

35:09

the government at six. And so I can always

35:12

identify the age of a child with one of my own

35:14

children. And what my mind was almost

35:17

automatically doing is I would superimpose

35:19

my own children's faces and persons

35:21

onto these children. And that

35:24

led to the

35:25

PTSD, I'll be honest, and

35:29

almost a paranoia about what would

35:31

happen to my children and watching my children.

35:34

And I've come a long ways and

35:36

I'm able to deal with it, but I

35:39

was determined never to quit. And so

35:41

I just sought more help and I

35:43

won't quit.

35:45

Okay, so Tim, I'm

35:47

gonna walk you through what I

35:49

know about how people turn

35:52

into the sort of pedophile that you

35:56

find so you and everyone else,

35:58

I suppose, or virtually everyone else. find so mysterious.

36:02

So I'm going to refer

36:04

first to the story of Cain and Abel because it

36:06

actually puts its finger on the process in

36:09

a stunning manner. So

36:12

what happens in that story is that two different

36:14

pathways to adaptation are

36:17

detailed out and

36:18

they become the cardinal pathways of adaptation

36:21

that characterize the whole human race immersed

36:24

as it is from that point onward in

36:26

history instead of in the Garden of

36:28

Eden. And one is the pathway

36:30

of Cain and the other is the pathway of Abel.

36:33

Now Abel makes high quality

36:35

sacrifices. He's all in, right?

36:38

He puts himself on the line and he does

36:40

the real thing. And as a consequence,

36:43

God finds favor

36:45

with God and his sacrifices

36:49

are rewarded. He does well and everyone

36:51

loves him and he thrives. And Cain,

36:55

his sacrifices are not of the same quality.

36:57

He tries to cut the corners and to

37:00

pull the wool over his eyes and God's

37:02

eyes and everyone else's eyes. And as

37:05

a consequence, his sacrifices are rejected.

37:08

And instead of pluing

37:10

the hell in and waking up and taking responsibility

37:13

for his failure, he decides

37:15

that he's going to call out God for

37:18

creating a cosmos that's cosmically

37:20

unfair and unjust.

37:22

And the evidence for that is Cain's

37:24

failure and

37:26

Abel's success.

37:27

And so he has a little chat with God and he basically

37:30

calls him out and says, you know, I'm breaking

37:32

myself in half here and nothing's going

37:34

my way and Abel gets everything he wants.

37:37

And,

37:37

you know, how dare you make a cosmos so

37:40

radically

37:41

unjust and improper and why

37:43

don't you just straighten yourself out? And

37:45

God says, if you did well,

37:47

you would be rewarded for it and you

37:49

should look to yourself. And then he says

37:51

something even worse. And this is very subtle

37:54

because

37:55

it's complicated to understand

37:57

it unless you look at multiple translations

37:59

or potentially. the original Hebrew, which

38:01

I can't read, but I read the multiple translations.

38:04

God says to Cain, "'The

38:07

spirit of sin crouches at

38:09

your doorstep "'like a sexually

38:12

aroused predatory animal, "'and

38:15

you have invited it in to

38:18

have its way with you.'"

38:21

And so now, if you study the

38:24

development of the fantasies of

38:26

very, very dark people,

38:29

you see that they brood and fantasize

38:32

in isolation for years,

38:35

and the fantasies get darker and darker

38:37

and darker. So they're bitter and resentful

38:39

to begin with.

38:41

And then they start fantasizing about,

38:44

well, what they would want. That can take a sexual

38:46

end, or it can take a very violent end, or it can take

38:48

both. And what they're really after is

38:50

the ultimate revenge. And

38:53

on the sexual front, they find a kick

38:55

in extending the, what

38:57

would you call it, unacceptability of the

38:59

fantasy one stage at a time.

39:01

The

39:05

famous and extremely attractive

39:07

sexual serial killer, what

39:10

was his name? It's a famous photograph

39:12

of him like this, very attractive

39:14

man.

39:15

Do you remember his name? Ted Bundy. Ted

39:18

Bundy. Ted Bundy detailed out

39:20

exactly how his fantasies progressed as

39:22

he became more and more involved with pornography.

39:24

And what happens in some sense is that

39:27

these people who are nursing these terrible

39:29

fantasies want to stay on the edge

39:31

of novelty. And so their fantasies

39:33

get darker and darker and darker as they

39:35

progress down that road. And

39:37

so after a thousand such micro-progressions,

39:40

they end up in exactly the sort of pit that you're

39:42

describing. And some of that is pure sexual

39:45

kick because of the novelty. But

39:47

it's got this sadistic and perverse,

39:50

vengeful twist. And you could

39:52

think about it this way. I think it says in the gospels

39:55

that, it would

39:57

be better that a most millstone was hung

39:59

around your neck. that you were cast into the

40:01

abyss than to do harm to any of God's

40:03

children, let's say. And

40:06

that's actually where the perverse delight comes

40:09

because the most egregious

40:11

possible sin, let's say, is the

40:13

violent sexual abuse of the most innocent

40:15

possible person. And the perverse

40:18

novelty kick is highest at exactly that

40:20

point. And then that just goes from bad

40:22

to worse. And there's a thousand or even 10,000 micro-decisions

40:26

that go along with that. There's also a great book

40:28

called Ordinary Men. This is well worth

40:31

reading, although it's a bloody catastrophe to read,

40:33

I'll tell ya. It details out

40:35

how a group of German

40:37

policemen who were moved to Poland

40:41

during World War II

40:42

were transformed from ordinary middle-class

40:45

working class, or sorry, ordinary working

40:47

class men, old

40:50

enough to not have been raised under the

40:52

Nazi regime, by the way, and so not

40:55

propagandized into a kind of mindless

40:57

obedience, how they went from being

41:00

perfectly ordinary policemen to

41:02

the sort of people who could take naked, pregnant

41:05

women out into the middle of the field and shoot them in the

41:07

back of the head. And it isn't like

41:09

they had an easy time with that. Some of them reported

41:11

the same sort of thing that you reported when you first

41:14

watched that video. What

41:16

they were being called upon to do stage

41:18

by stage made them physically ill. And

41:20

they had a commander who actually had told them

41:22

that they could leave the service if

41:24

they didn't want to continue with

41:27

their duties. But they felt duty-bound

41:29

not to leave their comrades having

41:31

to mop up the terrible situation. But it

41:34

does a lovely job of detailing out how

41:37

your movement from normality to

41:39

absolute perversity is a consequence

41:42

of 10,000 micro,

41:45

what would you say, micro violations of

41:47

your own conscience. Not all of them micro,

41:49

obviously. So you need to know about

41:51

the vengefulness. You need to know about the

41:54

kick of sadism. That's that novelty

41:56

kick that produces a dopaminergic kick

41:59

that heightens sexual.

41:59

and sexual satisfaction. And so there's

42:02

an element of sadistic misery

42:05

that can add novelty to

42:07

sex. That's particularly attractive

42:09

to people who are bitter and resentful because they actually

42:11

can't find any willing sexual partners.

42:14

And so they're angry at the world and shake their

42:16

fist at God because of it.

42:18

And so anyways, that's a bit of the

42:20

developmental course of such

42:23

a lovely descent into hell. And

42:25

the interesting thing about it is that people brood.

42:28

You don't get to the point where you're watching pornographic

42:31

videos of children being raped without hundreds

42:34

or even thousands of hours of increasingly

42:37

demented voluntary fantasy.

42:39

And that's that

42:40

allowing the spirit of sin

42:42

that would otherwise crouch on your doorstep

42:45

to enter your house and have its

42:47

way with you, right? It's like a collaborative

42:49

venture with Satan himself. That's

42:51

the most straightforward way of describing it. And

42:54

so,

42:54

well, so that's, I don't know

42:56

what you have to say about that, but I'll let you have at

42:59

her.

42:59

I'll say this, that everything you're saying absolutely

43:02

resonates with my anecdotal experiences

43:05

dealing with these people. I

43:07

look into their eyes and what you're describing

43:09

is what I see, though I've never been able to

43:12

articulate it like you just have.

43:14

So I appreciate being armed with

43:16

an understanding that

43:18

it will help me evangelize

43:20

more clearly to others about the dangers

43:24

of

43:25

overstimulation and overuse

43:27

of pornography and shaking hands

43:29

with the devil. So thank you for that. That was very insightful.

43:33

So I spent a bit

43:35

of time, not a lot, but

43:37

a bit of time inside a maximum security

43:39

prison.

43:40

When I was a kid, I worked

43:42

with a very strange psychologist that was there. And

43:44

one of the things that really shocked me, and I think

43:47

this shocked me enough to change my whole life was

43:49

I met this

43:51

one prisoner who was a pretty nondescript

43:53

looking character. He took me for a walk

43:56

out in the yard away from a gym full

43:58

of weightlifting. axe

44:00

murderer, monsters and rapists. And we

44:02

went for a walk out in the yard and the

44:05

psychologist called us back and told

44:07

me later in the office that this guy

44:09

who's about five to pretty non-prepossessing

44:12

guy had

44:14

made two policemen kneel in

44:17

front of them, beg

44:19

for their lives

44:21

in reference to their families and

44:23

then shot them both in the back of the head

44:25

and kicked them aside. And the

44:28

shocking thing to me was,

44:30

you kind of think that if

44:32

you met pure evil, it

44:34

would have a monstrous form. And

44:37

the thing that shocked me about that was the

44:39

nondescript nature of this guy,

44:41

his absolutely banal

44:44

ordinariness, the fact that you could just walk

44:46

past him on the street and you'd never know, he wasn't some

44:48

monster, the monstrous character

44:50

of Satan in your imagination

44:52

is a figure that's terrifying

44:55

to behold instead of someone

44:58

normal, you know what I mean, normal in that

45:00

cringing sense. These people that you've

45:02

interacted with, like

45:05

what's your reaction to them when

45:07

you talk to them, the pedophiles, when you talk

45:09

to them and when you arrest them?

45:11

My experience is very similar to what you just

45:13

described, very nondescript, people of

45:15

all walks of life. We've

45:18

arrested and I've interrogated educators,

45:21

lawyers, law enforcement, clergymen.

45:26

And sitting across

45:28

from them, but with no

45:30

apparent physicality that would tell

45:32

you who they are, but I will say this, when they

45:34

start talking and I look into their eyes,

45:37

that's when I sense something that

45:41

really scares the hell out of me.

45:44

And the way they talk about

45:47

children when they get there and

45:49

it's something that they've been able to normalize

45:52

and they're speaking to me about children almost

45:55

like they're talking about the

45:56

weather or

45:59

talking about the weather. talking about buying and selling children,

46:01

like you talk about buying and selling computer parts

46:04

or an automobile or something. And

46:06

that's where I thought, something

46:08

has taken over you. Something non-human

46:11

has made you less human. And

46:14

I've never been able to figure it out, only

46:17

that it creeps me out. And

46:19

I usually end up getting them to confess because

46:22

they have brought themselves to a place where

46:24

they think they're okay. They think that it's somehow

46:27

normal.

46:28

I don't know if that makes sense. Well, the degree of rationalization

46:30

that has to, with

46:36

each step forward in the progress

46:38

of the fantasy,

46:40

there has to be a step forward in the self-deception

46:43

with regards to self-description,

46:45

right? So imagine that you're attempting

46:48

to cling to a sense of yourself, at

46:51

least as normal, but even maybe as

46:53

a moral agent. I mean, the more forthright

46:56

pedophiles claim that they're only

46:58

allowing children to express their true

47:01

sexual desires, and that what they're actually

47:03

doing is forming the best relationship with

47:05

the children that they've ever had. Now, of course, there's

47:07

part of them that knows that that's an absolutely

47:09

bloody, screaming hellish lie. But

47:12

you get to that lie, like I said,

47:14

with a thousand micro-lies, right? And you're

47:16

modifying your self-conception

47:18

along the way. I mean, have

47:20

you had these people justify themselves

47:23

to you? And if so, by

47:25

what means do they attempt to do that?

47:29

So one person that comes to mind, absolutely

47:31

the answer is yes. And one person that comes to mind is the

47:33

person depicted in the film, Oshensky.

47:36

This person had written articles,

47:39

self-published, of course. He had a book that

47:41

he actually sold on Amazon, and his

47:44

understanding or his justification

47:46

was that the puritanical

47:49

society of this country

47:51

has crushed the true and beautiful

47:55

and righteous sexual experience,

47:58

which the most... the most natural would

48:01

be between a man and a child,

48:03

a prepubescent child. A prepubescent

48:05

child is the

48:08

most beautiful form of humanity and

48:13

why take that away from a child? Children would be

48:15

well conditioned to

48:18

confront the challenges of life. If only they

48:20

could experience orgasmic pleasure, even

48:23

in their prepubescence. This

48:25

is how they talk. Right, right. And

48:27

this is how they work. Well, you saw echoes of that. There

48:29

was attempts

48:29

made in the 1970s by French

48:32

intellectuals, surprise, surprise,

48:35

to have the age of consent reduced

48:37

radically. And that was always the rationale.

48:39

It was an extension of the patriarchal oppression

48:42

theory in some sense, right? That all sexual

48:44

expression is essentially pure

48:46

and good in its most fundamental form.

48:49

And it's all warped by social pressure.

48:51

And if we were just allowed to express ourselves

48:53

in every manner that we saw fit, then

48:55

everyone would be free and we wouldn't suffer

48:57

anymore from the constraints of

48:59

tyrannical society, right? And

49:02

it's just convenient for the bloody pedophiles

49:04

that that happens to justify them doing whatever

49:06

the hell they want to children who

49:08

are obviously too young to consent.

49:11

Right, so he is a good example. I forgot about

49:13

that in the book. Jim, let me ask you. So

49:16

now you didn't have to go through the

49:18

same things that Tim did, and you obviously

49:20

weren't subject to the same

49:22

kind of exposure, but you had to play

49:25

this role and you had to act

49:27

out in your imagination

49:29

the darkness that characterized the

49:31

people who

49:32

played your enemies, let's say on the screen.

49:35

What were the consequences for you of

49:38

having to delve

49:40

even on the fictional landscape

49:42

into this entire,

49:44

what would you say, underworld

49:45

domain? Well,

49:47

let's start with

49:50

your story initially when

49:52

you brought up Cain and Abel. In

49:55

my years of working with

49:57

agents like Tim, and

49:59

I actually I've probably worked with other agents because Tim

50:01

was very busy doing missions

50:04

at the time. And I got to go into

50:06

a lot of his world. I mean, those are the guys that

50:08

I play. So I don't imitate

50:11

other actors. I go and

50:13

meet these guys and really learn

50:15

and study what they do. Cain

50:18

and Abel, for example, Abel

50:20

is doing good

50:22

things for God. How would Cain

50:25

hurt God by killing Abel,

50:27

by wounding

50:28

him? When

50:31

I go and play, for example,

50:33

a serial killer or

50:35

a man that you mentioned earlier, Ted Bundy,

50:38

who my friend

50:39

broke that case and

50:42

found out who he was, Mike

50:44

Tando. So you're

50:47

the beast that comes in you. He

50:49

comes in and he deceives

50:52

you and

50:56

starts with the ego and the whole thing. And

50:59

then eventually the turn

51:01

is, is how that you're

51:04

eventually not fair on non-servium

51:07

becomes

51:09

one who,

51:10

how can I wound God the most by killing

51:13

the most innocent child? And

51:15

it wounds God in the greatest way.

51:18

When you take these innocent children

51:20

who've done nothing and have no

51:22

sin, and these guys have

51:25

the attitude which

51:29

you were mentioning earlier, all the cutting of

51:31

the corners and whatnot, and

51:34

ultimately they can kill

51:36

the most

51:37

innocent

51:38

and effectively

51:42

wounds God's heart the most.

51:45

I

51:47

spent a great deal of time. I did this movie,

51:50

Deja Vu, and I played a unibomber.

51:54

And I was on the phone with a friend

51:58

of mine who,

51:59

who broke the case and Ted

52:02

Bundy. And I talked to him a lot about

52:05

serial killers. And then I

52:07

got to look at the,

52:09

what the FBI and the ATF

52:11

gave me through Jerry

52:13

Bruckheimer and Tony Scott. I got all

52:16

these videos to look at.

52:18

And the, I

52:21

was looking at unibombers,

52:24

guys that blow things up

52:26

and actual serial killers,

52:28

but it was written more like Ted Bundy

52:32

and not a man who

52:34

was writing destiny and all

52:37

of these things that he exchanged his

52:39

life to take out whoever

52:42

they want to take out. And, but

52:45

the voice

52:47

was very similar. And so

52:49

I don't go to Satan to

52:51

play.

52:54

In this particular story, I

52:56

play this guy, this bomber. And

53:02

I don't go

53:04

to the devil to play the devil. I

53:07

think many actors make that mistake.

53:10

Go to God to tell you who the devil is.

53:12

That's what I do. And it also

53:15

gives me a protection.

53:17

What's the difference? What's the difference, Jim?

53:20

Because that also bears on how you protect yourself

53:22

from such things.

53:26

The different, and are you

53:28

saying the difference in the,

53:31

the difference is that I play

53:33

the truth. So if you go and

53:35

play, go to the devil to play the devil,

53:38

the devil will deceive you and put something

53:40

up there that deceives the public.

53:43

He'll always try to hide in the shadow. He'll

53:45

always try, because he doesn't like the light, even though

53:47

he's called the light, the illuminator, Lucifer.

53:53

And he tries to mimic God.

53:56

He tries to be like God. So there's

53:58

always like, If God

54:00

has love and what we see as love,

54:03

he creates lust. So he's trying

54:05

to be like that. It's like Cain

54:08

trying to rip off Abel, cutting the corners.

54:10

And so

54:13

committing to- Well, there's a tendency

54:16

even in Milton's Paradise Lost,

54:20

there's

54:20

been two readings of that forever.

54:23

And

54:24

one of them is that Milton's

54:26

Satan is an

54:29

antihero of the most profound sort, really

54:32

the embodiment of evil.

54:34

And the other reading is that

54:36

Milton's Satan is

54:38

a disguised hero and the eternal,

54:41

what would you say? The

54:43

eternal rebel against established order

54:46

and

54:47

someone to emulate

54:49

in consequence. And that Milton somehow

54:51

knew that and was coding

54:53

that, not precisely secretly, but subtly.

54:56

And I think that's a huge mistake. I mean, I've familiarized

54:58

myself with Paradise Lost and I think that Milton

55:01

was an extraordinarily subtle writer and that he

55:03

got everything as right

55:05

as anyone ever has. But the reason

55:08

I'm bringing that up is because, so this is,

55:10

okay, this is a complicated thing to

55:13

untangle. But

55:14

one of the things you see in Hollywood portrayals

55:17

of villains, you saw this in The

55:19

Silence of the Lambs, you see

55:21

it frequently in mafia portrayals, is

55:23

that the villain is inadvertently

55:26

or even sometimes purposefully glorified.

55:29

And it's partly because he's a rule breaker

55:31

and has the attraction that goes along with that. But

55:34

I also wonder too, if

55:36

it has something to do with what you were describing,

55:38

is that the writers and the actors

55:41

find themselves,

55:43

when they're trying to portray evil,

55:45

pulled

55:47

towards falseness in that representation

55:50

as part of the proclivity

55:52

of evil to hide itself. And

55:55

the danger in that is twofold. And

55:57

one is the danger of deceiving the public.

55:59

as to the true nature of evil, because there's

56:02

nothing heroic about it quite the contrary.

56:04

And the second danger I wonder about, there's

56:07

all this speculation about Heath

56:09

Ledger and the consequences for

56:11

him of having played the Joker

56:13

in such a dark manner. And I

56:15

don't know what to make of that, although I do think there

56:18

is some danger in having to journey

56:20

down a

56:21

path of emulating evil in order to

56:23

represent it. Now you said that you

56:25

turned to God, so to speak, to

56:28

protect yourself against false representations

56:31

of evil, but also in some ways to shield yourself.

56:33

And it sounds to me reminiscent of what

56:36

Tim's superiors

56:38

mentioned to him when they said to him that

56:40

his faith might protect him from what was...

56:44

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57:01

This is the best interview I've ever had in

57:03

my life. I love

57:05

your line of questioning and

57:08

getting to what is real. My

57:10

job

57:11

is to

57:14

give what I know to be

57:16

absolutely certain and real.

57:18

I hooked into Tim, has a childlike

57:21

quality

57:22

to him,

57:23

and I stay with that innocence. And

57:25

don't take that innocence as weakness.

57:30

So

57:31

when I read the scripture,

57:33

I feel truth,

57:36

good, evil, and I

57:38

find the good.

57:40

And let that just

57:42

pierce the darkness. And it has

57:44

to pierce. And I know what that light

57:46

is. And I know that deception that

57:49

when I start hearing about, for

57:51

example, in your life, there's

57:53

two masters here. One is from

57:55

the evil, wicked side, but it comes in through

57:58

your ego. And the other one is the life. the

58:00

light side that tells you what

58:02

you might not want to hear but you ought to hear.

58:04

And it's not manipulative,

58:06

it's truth. So I go to that side,

58:09

then I pray, then I go through it. Like

58:12

the Passion of the Christ, I looked at the

58:14

Shroud of Turin.

58:15

And there were two men, Christian

58:17

Tinsley and Keith Vanderlyn, who

58:20

were experts in makeup. And

58:22

the first, both of these men were agnostic.

58:25

And they looked at the Shroud that

58:28

Mel Gibson presented to them. And one

58:30

particular way, the way it is through

58:32

the

58:33

negative,

58:34

however they were

58:37

able to show it, you can see the track

58:39

lines of Jesus.

58:40

You can see the actual

58:44

bamboo sticks that they used to

58:46

initially hit them. And then you see the Cat

58:48

of Nine tails, the track lines. They look like the

58:50

Grand Canyon in your skin and

58:52

it shocked them. Now these guys look

58:55

at

58:56

everything from decapitations, murders

58:58

and everything.

59:00

Prior to this, I did a movie a long

59:02

time ago in New York

59:04

and I was with homicide. And

59:06

I got to see the contortion of

59:08

a face when someone gets murdered. And

59:11

it's hard to watch. But when you

59:13

start going into this, which is

59:15

children, there is something

59:17

that I can't even fathom,

59:20

even with the protection of Almighty God because

59:22

it took me two years to get

59:24

over this. Two years, a friend

59:26

of mine, Debbie, came into the room

59:29

and at around three o'clock

59:31

in the middle of the night, I was in a chair

59:34

and she heard me just weeping. Now I would

59:36

go into these black holes and I have no idea,

59:38

I don't remember it, but this

59:41

was all of the screaming that I had

59:43

to hear. I didn't wanna hear it, but

59:45

I had to hear it. And then I was

59:47

able to transform that into the movie

59:50

that you just saw when I asked

59:53

Alejandro Monteverdi to move our

59:55

DP to take it and show him my eyeball

59:58

so you would see a 20 foot eye. eye to

1:00:00

see what

1:00:01

Tim goes through to rip his heart

1:00:03

out. Now, it's not like

1:00:06

this is what I want to experience any more than

1:00:08

I want to get on a cross

1:00:09

and have my heart

1:00:12

broken. I went through hypothermia.

1:00:15

I had to have open heart surgery.

1:00:17

I was electrocuted, struck by lightning.

1:00:20

I understand that

1:00:21

the necessity of what I was gonna

1:00:23

have to go

1:00:25

through could help

1:00:27

bring people back to God to wake

1:00:29

them up. And quite

1:00:31

frankly, more people now, Jordan,

1:00:34

are more afraid of the devil than they are

1:00:36

of God because they want a happy

1:00:38

Jesus. And the problem is

1:00:40

that eventually, Jordan, we all are going

1:00:42

to die. Eventually, that that

1:00:45

is going to happen. But people, the

1:00:48

power of the devil deceives to say,

1:00:50

no, no, you're gonna be around for a long, long time. And

1:00:53

they never wake up. And eventually, there

1:00:55

is a judgment and then you have to decide,

1:00:58

or God decides, not how

1:01:00

you want to see yourself

1:01:01

anymore, but how God sees you and

1:01:03

how God sees you is who you really are.

1:01:06

And so

1:01:07

that's how I chose

1:01:09

to go at this particular case. I

1:01:12

had no choice but to go in. And

1:01:14

I hear the screams in my heart. I

1:01:16

hear the screams because of the agents that I

1:01:18

got to work with, got to show me things.

1:01:20

And they, one particular time, he says, are you

1:01:22

sure you want to go further? But I was

1:01:25

weeping so hard. I said, this is what Tim

1:01:27

goes through. This is what I got. I got

1:01:29

to see it in order to go into there, to

1:01:32

take people to a level of, will you

1:01:35

do something? Will you do something?

1:01:37

At some point, it ends

1:01:39

for all of us. And so the

1:01:41

pain in my heart is

1:01:44

much better than the pain in the future.

1:01:46

And if I have to see that to save my children,

1:01:50

to motivate me to save my niece, to

1:01:52

tell my sister, no, walking

1:01:54

home at 13 years old from school is

1:01:58

not a good choice, not a good choice.

1:01:59

My sister says to me, no,

1:02:02

I want my sister, my daughter, excuse

1:02:05

me, to have the same kind of experience I

1:02:07

have. And I said, no,

1:02:09

not until this changes. You need to understand.

1:02:12

So Anne, my sister, is a good,

1:02:14

great mother, but she wasn't aware because

1:02:17

the media that's supposed to do a good job to

1:02:19

tell the truth, well, they're going into that

1:02:21

direction, which is let's kind of twist

1:02:24

it and change it and not talk about

1:02:26

it. Or the three letter agencies that aren't

1:02:28

telling the truth. Go ahead, Jordan.

1:02:30

How has this changed you? How

1:02:33

is experiencing that material and having to play

1:02:35

it out changed you? I'd

1:02:37

give my life

1:02:39

at a heartbeat. Changed me. I'm

1:02:42

less concerned

1:02:43

about myself than I am about hurting.

1:02:46

I will tell you this right

1:02:48

now. I would absolutely die.

1:02:51

If this were to change the world

1:02:56

and get rid of trafficking and

1:02:58

pornography and all of the eight

1:03:01

arms of this octopus that has to be destroyed,

1:03:04

the only way you can destroy it is take the head out. If that

1:03:06

hit, I'd give my life for it in a heartbeat.

1:03:08

Tim, let me ask you a question. Jim

1:03:11

referred to, this is an awkward question.

1:03:14

I don't know how to progress with it exactly right, but he

1:03:16

said that he tried to play you with a certain kind

1:03:18

of innocence. And

1:03:20

there's a gospel line and the line

1:03:22

is,

1:03:23

unless you become as a little child, you will in no

1:03:25

way enter the kingdom of heaven. And

1:03:27

it's a very, very subtle line because it

1:03:30

doesn't say

1:03:32

unless you stay as a child, right?

1:03:35

It

1:03:35

says, unless you become as a child. And

1:03:38

that's a very, it's

1:03:39

a very paradoxical injunction.

1:03:42

And it means something like this. It means

1:03:45

if you rediscover

1:03:47

the innocence and humility and

1:03:50

capacity for play and wonder

1:03:53

and open ended trust

1:03:55

that you had as a child,

1:03:57

but you still have all the wisdom that

1:03:59

you have.

1:03:59

as an adult after having seen

1:04:02

the world, then you have

1:04:04

entered into, you might say, a

1:04:06

new domain and a more elevated form

1:04:08

of being. And

1:04:10

Jim said that he was struck when

1:04:12

talking to you about

1:04:15

it with regard to this childlike

1:04:17

innocence that he saw in you, which is very peculiar

1:04:20

thing to observe in someone

1:04:23

who's had to expose himself to all the terrible

1:04:25

things that you've encountered. And so

1:04:28

I don't have a more fully

1:04:30

developed question than that. I guess I just like

1:04:32

your response to that set of observations.

1:04:35

I do think, I think I know

1:04:37

what Jim's talking about.

1:04:41

When we're doing operations, as you see depicted

1:04:44

in Sound of Freedom, it's some crazy

1:04:46

stuff. We're going into crazy places.

1:04:48

We're talking to monsters

1:04:51

and demons. And if I were

1:04:53

to apply all the things, I

1:04:55

know the things that take me down, the images

1:04:57

of children, I could be jaded

1:05:00

and less innocent. I

1:05:02

think this might go back to the boss

1:05:05

who asked me to start this work back

1:05:08

in 2002 by

1:05:10

saying that we think you can handle this because of your

1:05:12

faith. So when I

1:05:14

do try to be childlike when

1:05:17

it comes to my relationship with God, and

1:05:20

there's a scripture that I

1:05:22

repeat in my head constantly as

1:05:25

I am going into these dark places. And

1:05:27

that's where I become like a child through that recitation

1:05:30

and my relationship with God, or even more particularly

1:05:32

with Jesus, because

1:05:35

it's Jesus who says the line and you've already

1:05:37

quoted it, Jordan, better that

1:05:39

a millstone be placed around

1:05:41

your neck and you toss to the bottom of the season that you

1:05:43

should hurt one of these little ones. That's

1:05:46

so powerful to me because

1:05:49

it's so, it allows

1:05:51

me to reduce

1:05:52

everything to

1:05:54

just an innocent,

1:05:56

I hope childlike relationship

1:05:59

with my safety. with my God, because

1:06:02

I know where he stands on this. And I might not know everything.

1:06:04

And I don't know how this is gonna resolve in my

1:06:06

head. I don't know how I'm gonna heal the

1:06:08

millions of holes burned into my brain.

1:06:11

But I do know that if I subject myself completely

1:06:15

to an understanding and a testimony that Jesus

1:06:18

believes something, he gets

1:06:21

mafioso. This is cement shoes kind of

1:06:23

talk. It's not

1:06:25

flipping tables outside the temple. I mean, he's talking

1:06:27

about violence. He's speaking violence,

1:06:30

but it's righteous. And that's where

1:06:32

he stands on children

1:06:34

being abused. And that's where I find- So

1:06:37

there's another idea. There's another idea that

1:06:39

lurks in the passion account,

1:06:42

that's really quite stunning and horrible.

1:06:45

So the passion

1:06:47

story is an archetypal

1:06:49

tragedy. And

1:06:51

the reason for that is that

1:06:53

a tragedy is when something terrible happens

1:06:55

to someone, but

1:06:57

a more profound tragedy is

1:06:59

when the worst possible thing happens to the

1:07:01

least deserving person.

1:07:04

And so that's the passion story in

1:07:06

some ways in a nutshell, right? You have a man

1:07:08

who by universal

1:07:11

admission, even on the part of his enemies,

1:07:14

is at minimum a very

1:07:16

good man who undergoes the worst possible

1:07:19

sequence of betrayal and punishment.

1:07:21

And so that's

1:07:23

the story of the tragedy of human life writ

1:07:25

large, but there's more to it than that because

1:07:27

there's a

1:07:28

mythological insistence along with

1:07:30

that that Christ was not only crucified,

1:07:33

but that he had to descend into the depths of

1:07:35

hell itself and harrow

1:07:37

it. And what that means to me,

1:07:39

psychologically speaking, let's say, is that

1:07:42

you're called upon before

1:07:45

rebirth,

1:07:45

that's a good way of thinking about it, to

1:07:47

not only bear the brunt

1:07:50

of the tragedy of existence, but to face

1:07:52

malevolence head on, right? To go

1:07:54

into the deepest and darkest possible

1:07:57

places.

1:07:58

And what you say,

1:07:59

and

1:08:01

well redeeming them to the

1:08:03

degree that that's possible,

1:08:06

simultaneously redeem yourself. And

1:08:08

so the notion there is that the

1:08:10

brightest possible light is only possible

1:08:13

through the descent into the darkest possible

1:08:16

realm of blackness. And

1:08:18

that actually goes beyond death into malevolence

1:08:21

itself. Now, Jim said,

1:08:23

because you might say, well, there's nothing that you

1:08:25

should be more afraid of than death, but Jim

1:08:27

said, he's appalled enough about

1:08:30

the existence of malevolence that

1:08:32

he would be willing to give his life to eradicate

1:08:34

it. And so that obviously means that

1:08:36

for Jim,

1:08:38

malevolence itself is a more terrifying

1:08:40

spectre than mere death

1:08:42

or even mere suffering. And then there

1:08:45

is this gospel notion that

1:08:47

unless you're willing to take the weight of hell onto

1:08:50

yourself, essentially, voluntarily,

1:08:53

that you can't go through that process

1:08:55

of descent and rebirth, and that is associated

1:08:58

in the gospel accounts,

1:09:00

let's say, with that rebirth into the spirit

1:09:03

of childhood.

1:09:04

And so you have done

1:09:06

what you could

1:09:10

to face

1:09:12

the ultimate reaches of darkness

1:09:15

itself.

1:09:16

What has that done for you? And then also,

1:09:19

you made some very interesting comments

1:09:21

about your wife. You said that in

1:09:23

some ways you were hoping she would tell you to

1:09:26

be sensible and come home, but she didn't.

1:09:28

She told you to go put yourself on the line. And

1:09:30

there's a huge story there that's touched on in

1:09:32

the movie, but not delved into

1:09:35

any great regard.

1:09:37

How has your

1:09:39

encounter with the

1:09:42

darkness that you've seen made you

1:09:44

a better person? And what has that done

1:09:46

with your relationship with your wife?

1:09:49

I think it's made me a better person

1:09:51

because the weight that

1:09:53

you speak of that is on your

1:09:55

back is unbearable,

1:09:58

unless you can...

1:09:59

give it

1:10:01

to some other power in this

1:10:03

case, in my case to Jesus himself.

1:10:06

And that's what, to subject myself completely

1:10:09

and repeat his words in my mind, because I know where

1:10:11

he stands on it, he'll take it from me. And I

1:10:13

felt that. I have felt that in ways I can't

1:10:15

even articulate that don't make any

1:10:17

sense on a scientific level. The

1:10:20

burden is lifted. And that's what gives

1:10:22

me clarity and courage to do

1:10:24

things I otherwise wouldn't dream of doing

1:10:27

in order to help children. And

1:10:29

it's a concept that my wife understands.

1:10:32

In fact, I'll tell you this, it's like she

1:10:34

morphed into some kind of a therapist in

1:10:36

that moment, after she told me

1:10:39

that her salvation might be on the

1:10:41

line. She's much more advanced than I am in

1:10:43

every way, and especially spiritually. And

1:10:46

she helped me to see that very

1:10:48

thing that give the burden to God. And

1:10:51

then you can be, but you have to subject yourself

1:10:53

like a child in order to do that and

1:10:55

recognize you can't on your own do it. But

1:10:58

she ran me through this exercise. I don't know where she got

1:11:00

it. Maybe it was a download from heaven, but she

1:11:03

said, do you see the two paths you're going

1:11:05

on? Either you go into Columbia and you do this operation,

1:11:08

and what does that look like? And I said, it looks

1:11:10

horrifying. It's scary, it's dark. There's

1:11:13

cobwebs. I mean, I was literally imagining

1:11:15

this. There's spiders, there's evil things.

1:11:18

And she said, what's the other path? And I said,

1:11:20

well, the other path is light. I

1:11:25

can see it at 50, I get to retire. And

1:11:27

then I don't have to, I'm paid a

1:11:29

federal government salary my whole life and benefits

1:11:32

and that seems secure to me. And that seems

1:11:34

comfortable. Then she says, close your

1:11:36

eyes.

1:11:37

And you're with your maker, you've passed

1:11:39

through this life and you're talking to your maker. And

1:11:42

he has two questions for you.

1:11:43

One, could you have saved the kids?

1:11:46

And two, did you do it? That's

1:11:49

your interview.

1:11:50

It shocked

1:11:52

me. I thought, oh, that's gonna be a bad interview if

1:11:55

I don't have the right answer. If I don't make

1:11:57

the right decision here. And then she says, okay, now

1:11:59

go back to those. what do you see?

1:12:02

And I'm telling you the cobwebs

1:12:04

and creepy things were now on the path

1:12:06

of staying in my federal government comfortable

1:12:08

job. I thought, what might I lose? What

1:12:11

blessings might not come? And then she said,

1:12:13

what do you see down the path of Columbia?

1:12:15

And she said, I see,

1:12:17

I'd said, I see warmth. I

1:12:19

see, I can't see everything, but that's the path

1:12:21

I want. And I think that's what that means is

1:12:23

I will give it to God and do the right

1:12:26

thing and subject myself like a child.

1:12:28

I hope that made sense. Well,

1:12:31

you know, look, the

1:12:34

reason that people lie

1:12:37

and the reason they remain silent

1:12:40

is because they think that things will be

1:12:43

easier for them and better, at

1:12:46

least in the short term. But

1:12:48

the psychological literature on this is pretty

1:12:50

damn clear, I think clearer

1:12:53

than any other element of the clinical psychology

1:12:56

literature, which is that

1:12:58

you avoid things that stand in

1:13:00

your way that frighten you at your

1:13:02

great peril.

1:13:04

If you power from them in silence,

1:13:07

or you turn away seeking security

1:13:09

even, or even sensible security,

1:13:12

you violate the principle of your own strength.

1:13:15

And if you violate the principle of your own strength,

1:13:17

you become weak. And if you're weak,

1:13:20

there is no security.

1:13:22

Like if you're weak and you have a pension,

1:13:24

you're weak with a pension. All that'll mean is

1:13:26

that you'll live longer in terror. That's

1:13:28

not helpful. And the alternative,

1:13:31

and there's also an ethos

1:13:34

in the biblical stories in particular, and it's a

1:13:36

very interesting ethos.

1:13:38

It's very much worth knowing. And one is that

1:13:41

if you say the

1:13:43

truth and nothing else,

1:13:46

you'll have an immense adventure

1:13:49

as a consequence. You won't know what's

1:13:51

going to happen to you. And you have to let go

1:13:53

of your clinging to

1:13:56

the outcome. You have to let go. But

1:13:58

the truth...

1:13:59

will reveal the world the way it's

1:14:02

intended to be revealed.

1:14:04

And the consequence for you will be that

1:14:06

you'll have the adventure of your life.

1:14:08

And the other part of that ethos is this, and

1:14:11

it makes perfect sense to me. I can't

1:14:13

see how it can be any other way, which is that

1:14:16

whatever makes itself manifest

1:14:18

as a consequence of the truth

1:14:20

is the best possible reality that could

1:14:23

be manifest, even if you can't see

1:14:25

it.

1:14:25

And in my own life, I've

1:14:27

been attacked many times by

1:14:30

people who were attempting to demolish my reputation

1:14:32

and take me out, and that's put my family

1:14:35

at risk. And many times, we've

1:14:37

gone through this a lot. And

1:14:39

what we have observed is that if we stick to our

1:14:41

guns and we say what we believe to be the

1:14:43

case, and I say we because it's a collaborative

1:14:45

enterprise, I'm always discussing things with

1:14:48

my family, that there's

1:14:50

a period of intense discomfort,

1:14:53

but in the aftermath

1:14:56

of that, and that's often several months or sometimes

1:14:58

even several years later, things switch

1:15:00

around and reverse in a manner

1:15:02

that brings benefits that can't even be

1:15:05

fathomed.

1:15:06

So, and it is a matter of

1:15:08

faith, right? So the faith is something like this, like

1:15:11

are you gonna make your way through life with silence

1:15:13

and falsehoods, or are you gonna make your

1:15:15

way through life with truth? And there's gonna be

1:15:17

a price for the truth, but your vision

1:15:19

showed you there was a price for the security too,

1:15:22

right? Once you allowed your imagination

1:15:24

to manifest itself, you saw that the

1:15:26

pathway of security was actually the one that

1:15:29

was covered with spider webs, demons

1:15:31

and snakes.

1:15:32

And I see that, I saw that with faculty

1:15:35

members at the university over and

1:15:37

over, they would take the so-called secure

1:15:39

path forward.

1:15:40

And all they did was violate the integrity

1:15:42

of their own souls,

1:15:44

right? All that security is false. And obviously

1:15:46

your wife for some reason, it's quite

1:15:48

the miraculous part of that story, I would say,

1:15:50

that your wife was behind you like

1:15:53

that, especially because you said you had six

1:15:55

kids at the time. So how

1:15:57

do you think she knew this?

1:15:59

You said her faith was false. that faith is more developed than yours

1:16:01

and that she knows things you don't. But what was

1:16:03

it about her life, do you think that enabled her

1:16:05

to stand behind you and this crazy

1:16:08

venture you went on when she

1:16:10

had

1:16:11

every reason to make, you know,

1:16:13

I mean, you were, the movie says you were within what?

1:16:15

Months of vesting your pension. How

1:16:17

many, 12 weeks, something like that?

1:16:20

I can't, I don't, I don't, I can't remember the exact

1:16:22

time, but yeah, that was the, my

1:16:24

accountant came to me and showed me how much, how

1:16:26

many millions of dollars this would amount

1:16:29

to that I was walking away from. It was ridiculous,

1:16:31

I want to say $12 million or something,

1:16:34

a number I couldn't even fathom, you're walking away

1:16:36

from that. And that really tossed me. And

1:16:39

that's the thing that led me to Catherine and said,

1:16:41

this is what we'd be walking away from. Why

1:16:44

does she have this thing?

1:16:47

It's a mystery to me. I

1:16:50

can say this, having given

1:16:52

birth and raised six children,

1:16:54

I've watched that process.

1:16:56

There's something I think that

1:16:58

happens to women, at least

1:17:00

in the case of my wife,

1:17:02

that there's some insight

1:17:04

that comes from that process

1:17:07

and childbirth and rearing a child

1:17:10

that she's had to rely on God just

1:17:12

to get through that process and then have this little

1:17:15

creature that you're in charge of. I

1:17:17

think her relationship with God allowed,

1:17:20

through motherhood, allowed her to have insights

1:17:23

that I didn't have. I think she came

1:17:25

with certain gifts as well before

1:17:29

this life. But whatever

1:17:32

it was, she saw immediately and

1:17:34

on the spot was able to run me through that exercise

1:17:37

that really is consistent with

1:17:39

your understanding of that process, Dr.

1:17:41

Peterson. So I don't know, she's a miracle.

1:17:44

She's a miracle to me. And none of this would have happened

1:17:46

without her.

1:17:46

Well, okay, so you quit

1:17:48

your job and

1:17:51

you put your pension on the line and

1:17:53

your wife was not only fully on board with

1:17:55

that, but perversely enough, encouraged you

1:17:57

to do so.

1:17:58

How has it... how has the

1:18:01

financial support that made your

1:18:03

continued existence and also

1:18:06

the operations that you've undertaken,

1:18:09

how has that manifested itself since?

1:18:11

Like you don't have your pension and the government

1:18:13

behind you, but obviously you've gathered resources

1:18:16

around you

1:18:17

personally and practically. Tell

1:18:20

me how that came about.

1:18:22

Well, I'll add this piece because that

1:18:24

was my big concern. And Catherine said to me,

1:18:26

and she believed it. This was

1:18:28

all in that same conversation. She said, I don't care

1:18:31

if we end up living in a tent.

1:18:33

We will not go back to our maker. Instead, we didn't try

1:18:36

to help these children. So that helped

1:18:38

ease my mind because I thought, well, then okay,

1:18:40

if we lose our house. Now

1:18:44

the blessings did come. Glenn

1:18:47

Beck was the person who actually funded

1:18:50

the rescue operation that you see depicted

1:18:52

in the film, that very first one, he

1:18:54

got us started, put a huge amount

1:18:56

of faith and frankly, risk in

1:18:59

doing that. But that was gonna get

1:19:01

us only about six to eight months before

1:19:03

we would be in trouble. But what happened was

1:19:06

the success happened. The piece that

1:19:08

I felt in making the decision

1:19:10

to go was that new path that

1:19:12

I couldn't see everything, but it felt right,

1:19:14

it felt good, it felt godly, and I knew

1:19:17

we'd be okay. And we've never had a worse

1:19:19

month than the month before. We've only grown with

1:19:22

success, bread, success, donations start

1:19:24

coming in, opportunities come in. And frankly,

1:19:26

I think I'll be better off financially

1:19:29

as I look at my future than I would have been

1:19:31

otherwise. Right now, we should just

1:19:34

dwell on that for a minute. So we just won't

1:19:36

dwell on how unlikely that is, say. So

1:19:38

let's just go through this. So you

1:19:40

make this crazy decision to quit your job

1:19:42

and to forego your pension, even though you've basically

1:19:44

vested it. And you're well into your career,

1:19:47

you're to the point where in principle, you could have contemplated

1:19:50

retiring and sitting to drink Mai Tai's

1:19:52

on the beach in the Caribbean, which I wouldn't recommend,

1:19:54

by the way, as a retirement plan. And

1:19:57

instead you decide that, and with

1:19:59

your right,

1:19:59

that you guys are willing to

1:20:02

risk living in a tent with your kids, but you're

1:20:04

gonna do this come hell or high water. And

1:20:06

the consequence of that is that perversely

1:20:08

enough, you're actually more financially secure

1:20:11

and you have more opportunities than you would have otherwise

1:20:13

had by a lot.

1:20:16

Right, so that's worth thinking about, right?

1:20:18

That's really worth thinking about because you threw

1:20:20

yourself all in, which is what you're supposed to do.

1:20:23

And not only did that work on the fight

1:20:25

side because you have been able to rescue these

1:20:27

children and to continue this endeavor, but

1:20:30

none of the things that you thought you would lose, you

1:20:32

actually ended up losing.

1:20:34

That's correct. And I'm thinking of the

1:20:36

words you just said five minutes ago about when

1:20:38

you take on the challenges, you

1:20:41

lose that weakness that you otherwise would have. I'd

1:20:43

rather, I don't wanna

1:20:45

be weak with a pension. And

1:20:48

like you said, I was able to be stronger

1:20:50

and that strength is the thing that frankly allowed

1:20:53

me to expand my possibility

1:20:55

of making more income and

1:20:57

doing more things. In fact, I often

1:20:59

journal, Jordan, often when I have the

1:21:02

biggest challenges of my life that come and I hit

1:21:04

in the face with this or that, I take

1:21:06

note what blessings came, what good things came.

1:21:09

And sometimes it's 90% of the good things before

1:21:11

me sprung out of that horrific

1:21:14

challenge that the darts thrown at me,

1:21:16

whatever it was. And so the principle that

1:21:18

you're teaching really has played

1:21:21

out accurately in my life over

1:21:23

and over again.

1:21:24

Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, I think that's, well,

1:21:27

it makes sense in some sense. Look, I mean, if

1:21:29

we wanna just think about it practically, I

1:21:32

mean, you're going to become stronger,

1:21:35

more confident,

1:21:36

more credible and a better communicator

1:21:39

in precise proportion

1:21:41

to the burdens that you decide

1:21:43

voluntarily to confront and master.

1:21:46

Like obviously, because how could it be any

1:21:48

other way? And then what that's gonna mean

1:21:50

is that when you go communicate with people

1:21:53

and you tell them what you're doing, they're

1:21:55

much more likely to jump on board because you

1:21:57

have the charisma that goes along

1:21:59

with. having the stories to tell and those

1:22:02

encounters to relate and

1:22:04

the success you've generated. And

1:22:06

so then people are going to offer

1:22:09

to help. You're not even gonna have to ask them. And

1:22:11

so let me ask you

1:22:13

about that. You talked about Glenn Beck. Who

1:22:15

else has been instrumental in helping

1:22:19

your operation grow and providing you with

1:22:21

support? You mentioned Tony Robbins as well. And I've

1:22:23

got to know Tony a bit over the last year or so.

1:22:25

I mean, he's an absolutely remarkable person.

1:22:27

And I think he might be the most charismatic

1:22:29

person I've ever met, which is really

1:22:32

saying something because I've met some very charismatic

1:22:34

people and he's quite the monster

1:22:36

in the world and he's done an awful lot of good. And

1:22:39

he's obviously supporting,

1:22:41

he's supporting you as well and is on board with

1:22:43

this project. And so how did that come about? Well,

1:22:46

Tony Robbins is in fact, the

1:22:48

single largest donor to our operation.

1:22:51

I'm super, super close with him. His wife

1:22:53

as well, Sage, beautiful people, beautiful

1:22:55

souls. And it came about in the most

1:22:58

amazing way during one

1:23:00

of his big mastermind conferences and a

1:23:03

convention center of some sort. There was

1:23:05

a woman who raised her hand when

1:23:07

Tony asked about bucket list projects.

1:23:10

If you had an excess of whatever, what

1:23:12

would you do with it? She raised her hand and said, I'd

1:23:14

support a group called Operation Underground Railroad. Tony

1:23:17

says, what is that? Three minutes later, he

1:23:19

says, I'll donate, I'll match whatever someone

1:23:21

gives me right now to help rescue children. And

1:23:24

that's the relationship was born. He called me

1:23:27

a few days later and said, is this real? I

1:23:29

said, I felt it was. I said, why don't you come down to Haiti

1:23:32

with me? We're about to do an operation and you can see

1:23:34

how very real it is. And he

1:23:36

did and he saw, and that converted him

1:23:38

to our cause.

1:23:39

So what's on your plate next?

1:23:42

Where is this going as far as

1:23:44

you're concerned? And

1:23:46

what sort of impact have you had in

1:23:49

sheer numbers?

1:23:50

Why do you think you're not gonna get taken

1:23:52

out? Because it seems to me that you're in

1:23:55

a situation where that's of reasonable high

1:23:57

probability given who you're dealing with. And

1:23:59

what do you hope?

1:23:59

What do you hope to accomplish over the next while? And

1:24:03

what can people do to help?

1:24:05

Well, so I've changed quite

1:24:07

a bit of how I look at the playing

1:24:10

field of human trafficking. I can no longer do

1:24:12

operations. I've been in the media too much, especially

1:24:14

with this film. I've turned a lot of my attention

1:24:16

to the fact that what I call

1:24:18

spiritual warfare, children are targeted like

1:24:21

never before. I was on

1:24:23

the Capitol Hill last week and this

1:24:25

Congressman was telling me, how do we wake people

1:24:27

up to the fact that all these unaccompanied minors are

1:24:29

being shoved into America and we don't know where they are. And

1:24:32

I said, well, your problem is you're not connecting all

1:24:34

the dots, all the ways in which

1:24:36

children are being hurt. Not only these 85,000 missing children

1:24:39

that are now in the belly of the largest

1:24:42

potentially child sex market in the world, but

1:24:45

at the same time that's happening, you have groups trying to

1:24:48

get rid of the name pedophile and call them minor

1:24:50

attracted persons. At the same time, you're

1:24:52

sexualizing children, giving them what I

1:24:55

used to be able to arrest you for giving children.

1:24:57

Now teachers in California and other states are giving this

1:24:59

in the name of liberating

1:25:02

children sexually or sex education. And

1:25:04

now a 13 year old can

1:25:05

consent to gender mutilation and

1:25:08

have themselves injected with all sorts of chemicals

1:25:10

that might ruin their reproductive system. Well,

1:25:12

what are you doing? Consent to do that equals

1:25:15

consent eventually to

1:25:17

sex with a 50 year old pedophile. And

1:25:19

so you got to connect all these things.

1:25:22

And so for the first time in my life, Jordan,

1:25:24

I'm looking at the United States of America and I'm saying,

1:25:26

look, I used to think I might be out of a job

1:25:28

because we eradicated human trafficking. I

1:25:31

am now thinking I might be out of a job because the very

1:25:33

laws that protect children and allow

1:25:35

us to go after

1:25:35

their captors are being and will

1:25:38

be decaying and eroded with this crazy culture

1:25:43

that is taking children and the name of liberating

1:25:46

them and in fact is enslaving them.

1:25:48

So, you know, I interviewed this

1:25:51

girl, Chloe Cole,

1:25:53

who had a double mastectomy when she was 15

1:25:57

and who had puberty blockers and went

1:25:59

through the whole bloody.

1:25:59

a gamut of

1:26:02

incompetent lying therapists and

1:26:04

sadistic butchering surgeons,

1:26:07

and they

1:26:09

transformed her sexually.

1:26:11

And then she talked to me about her dating experiences

1:26:14

in high school. Now you can just imagine this,

1:26:16

you know, it's complicated enough for

1:26:18

a young man or a young woman in high school

1:26:21

to navigate the sexual

1:26:23

shoals, let's say, and establish a reasonable

1:26:25

relationship or even a reasonable

1:26:28

sequence of relationships

1:26:29

if everything is roughly

1:26:32

normal or something approximating ideal.

1:26:34

But Chloe put herself way

1:26:36

out on the fringes having done what

1:26:39

she did. And that took her out

1:26:41

of the dating pool in high school for

1:26:43

her compatriots. And so she turned

1:26:45

to online dating.

1:26:47

And you can imagine the sort of people

1:26:50

who attempted to

1:26:51

pick her up.

1:26:53

And she didn't refer to that an awful

1:26:55

lot in our interview, but she referred to it enough

1:26:58

so that I got a real flavor of the sort

1:27:00

of people who were more

1:27:02

than perversely willing to strike up

1:27:05

a relationship with her, often much older

1:27:07

as you've pointed out. And so, you know,

1:27:09

that freedom that she was hypothetically

1:27:12

offered

1:27:13

that only required the sacrifice of her breasts,

1:27:16

let's say, the wounds of which,

1:27:18

by the way, have never completely healed. So that's

1:27:21

perfectly goddamn delightful. And,

1:27:23

you know, she talked about her descent into that

1:27:26

perverse underworld of deviant

1:27:28

sexual attraction. And so,

1:27:30

yeah, there's not a lot of freedom on

1:27:32

that front. Jim, what

1:27:35

are you up to next? Like, you finished

1:27:37

this movie, it's gonna open up on July 4th. What's

1:27:41

next for you on the project front and

1:27:44

also on the personal front in terms of

1:27:46

your commitment to continuing the work that

1:27:48

you're starting with this movie?

1:27:51

Well, it goes to the next chapter, which

1:27:55

is on Haiti. And that's the next part

1:27:57

of Tim, when they went down and...

1:28:00

did this Haiti mission and this

1:28:01

is a much better script

1:28:03

than the first one written by the same

1:28:06

director and

1:28:08

Rod Barr, Alejandro Monteverde wrote this.

1:28:11

So I plan to do that

1:28:13

film.

1:28:14

And then

1:28:16

of course I'm doing The Resurrection of

1:28:18

the Christ with Mel Gibson.

1:28:20

So I think that's gonna be, I think

1:28:23

for sure it's one film but it might be

1:28:25

two films, I think.

1:28:28

So, and what do you foresee happening on

1:28:31

the

1:28:32

theatrical release front? I mean,

1:28:35

have the typical companies

1:28:37

that are involved in theatrical

1:28:40

release in movies been on

1:28:42

board with the release of Sound of Freedom

1:28:44

or have you run into like enthusiastic

1:28:47

reception or resistance, what's happened on that

1:28:50

front? Well, we had a lot of resistance. It

1:28:52

took us four years to get where we're at right

1:28:55

now.

1:28:56

Like The Passion of the Christ, nobody

1:28:59

saw that as a

1:29:01

financially feasible film. Same

1:29:04

thing with this. Who's gonna wanna watch a

1:29:06

film about traffic children? That's why

1:29:08

it wasn't about that. It points

1:29:11

in that direction,

1:29:13

but it's really in the face of

1:29:15

evil,

1:29:16

can good still triumph? And

1:29:18

that's what this film is. So it's quite

1:29:21

inspirational. You know?

1:29:24

Well, it is a classic in many ways. It

1:29:26

is a classic action adventure film.

1:29:28

I mean, it's based on a true story but it's

1:29:31

got a very solid

1:29:32

narrative driving line. I mean,

1:29:35

it's not fundamentally making

1:29:37

its appeal

1:29:38

on the moral side. I mean, there is an

1:29:40

appeal on the moral side, don't get me wrong, but that's

1:29:43

not good enough for a movie. Like a movie has

1:29:45

to carry its own weight as an artistic

1:29:47

endeavor and it has to be well plotted and well

1:29:50

acted and or just degenerates

1:29:52

into kind of moralistic propaganda. I

1:29:55

don't think this movie does that at all. I also didn't

1:29:57

think that The Chosen did that, Angel

1:29:59

Studios, other.

1:29:59

It never degenerated

1:30:02

into sentimental moralizing, thank God. Because something

1:30:05

like that will just flop at the box office anyways. And

1:30:08

I certainly couldn't see any reason after having watched

1:30:10

this movie not to think

1:30:12

that this could be a commercial success. I mean, it's a very exciting

1:30:15

movie. We're selling out right now. Our

1:30:21

biggest

1:30:22

war right now is to get more theaters. The

1:30:24

big studios control

1:30:26

those, and the distributors have to decide whether

1:30:28

or not, and

1:30:31

this happened on the Passion of the Christ, whether

1:30:33

to go and go

1:30:35

where the people are. And

1:30:38

so the people are calling in right now to

1:30:40

ask for these theaters. They're not

1:30:42

just going to ageldotcom. I've known

1:30:44

many people that have gone in and literally

1:30:47

bought out all theaters

1:30:49

to do this. And so we're

1:30:52

hoping that this continues

1:30:53

because

1:30:55

we won't be able to serve the public. We

1:30:57

just don't have enough theaters right now. Well,

1:31:00

that's a good problem to have,

1:31:02

I would say. And that should also

1:31:04

get you the kind of publicity that should

1:31:07

also further distribution of the film. And of course,

1:31:09

there's alternative routes now too. I

1:31:11

mean, Matt Walsh had tremendous success distributing

1:31:14

What is a Woman on Twitter. I think they

1:31:16

got 170 million views. And

1:31:19

I don't know how successful that was commercially. And of course,

1:31:21

that's a problem, because financial issues

1:31:23

matter. But there's definitely multiple

1:31:26

venues now where a

1:31:28

film like this can be distributed. And

1:31:31

of course, Angel Studios had a hell of

1:31:33

a success distributing what they produced

1:31:35

on the chosen front using

1:31:38

rather unorthodox channels online. We

1:31:40

were fortunate enough, Jordan,

1:31:42

to get Elon Musk. He actually

1:31:45

tweeted out a couple of weeks ago with

1:31:47

the trailer and opened up Twitter as

1:31:49

a free home for distribution and

1:31:53

we're going to see a Twitter

1:31:55

release, I think mid-July.

1:31:58

So that will be the end of the show. It'll be fun

1:32:00

to see what happens there.

1:32:01

Oh, so that's already in play. All

1:32:03

right, well, all right. Well, look gentlemen,

1:32:06

we're running out of time on the YouTube

1:32:08

front. As everybody watching and listening,

1:32:10

or at least to some people watching and listening, no, I

1:32:12

do add another half an hour of interview

1:32:14

on the Dailyware Plus side. And so I

1:32:16

think we'll turn our attention to that. I'm gonna find out

1:32:19

from Tim

1:32:19

and Jim

1:32:21

what developmental

1:32:23

route they took to the destination

1:32:27

that they arrived at. I

1:32:29

haven't done that with two people before, but I think that

1:32:31

will be quite entertaining. And so I'm

1:32:33

interested in how people's destinies make

1:32:35

themselves manifest across time. Or you might

1:32:38

say how their calling makes

1:32:40

itself,

1:32:41

makes its appearance in their life because

1:32:43

things do call to people.

1:32:45

Everybody has problems that beset

1:32:47

them that are their problems. And everybody has

1:32:49

opportunities that beckon to them that

1:32:52

are their opportunities. And that's kind of a mysterious,

1:32:55

what would you say, bargain and interplay between

1:32:57

the psyche and the world?

1:33:00

And I'm endlessly curious

1:33:02

about how that happens. And so we're gonna follow down

1:33:04

that road as we

1:33:06

continue this conversation on the Dailyware Plus

1:33:08

side. By the way,

1:33:10

for those of you who are watching and listening, if

1:33:13

you're thinking about

1:33:14

throwing some support the

1:33:16

Dailyware Plus way, it's probably a good

1:33:18

time to think about doing that because they

1:33:22

and I, for that matter, have been under a fair

1:33:24

bit of pressure from YouTube in the last

1:33:26

month. I've had three of my

1:33:28

interviews taken down. And I suspect

1:33:32

there's a couple in the pipelines that

1:33:34

are also going to raise the hackles of the wrong

1:33:36

people, whoever the hell they are

1:33:39

lurking behind the scenes. And

1:33:41

so,

1:33:42

yeah, yeah, well, you never know, right? You can't tell

1:33:44

what rules you broke and you can't tell who's enforcing

1:33:47

the censorship rules, which

1:33:49

is really

1:33:50

not good on any front. So

1:33:53

anyways, we're gonna turn our attention over there. Thank

1:33:56

you to Jim Caviezel and

1:33:58

Tim Bellard for talking today. I

1:34:00

really enjoyed your film. I'm

1:34:02

looking forward to watching how the public will receive

1:34:05

it and what the consequences will be

1:34:07

and wish you both luck in your future endeavors.

1:34:10

And yeah,

1:34:11

and Tim Miles, I will hook

1:34:13

up,

1:34:13

hook your wife up with my wife

1:34:16

and it'd be real interesting to have them talk

1:34:18

about, you know, how she saw what you were

1:34:20

doing

1:34:21

and why she threw her weight behind it because there's

1:34:23

quite a story there as well as far as I can tell.

1:34:26

I'm very much looking forward to watching that interview.

1:34:28

All right, gentlemen, it

1:34:31

was good to talk to both of you and

1:34:33

to everyone watching and listening. Thanks

1:34:36

for your time and attention. Pay some attention

1:34:38

to this movie if you're inclined. You bet

1:34:40

guys, you bet. Good to meet you both.