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Media Bias, the Met Gala, gorilla vs man debate & an Alcatraz theory | Ep. 18 | Denison Forum

Media Bias, the Met Gala, gorilla vs man debate & an Alcatraz theory | Ep. 18

This week, we’re starting with a hard look at media bias. How does slanted coverage shape public trust—and are we part of the problem? Then it’s off to the red carpet (sort of) for a deep dive into the Met Gala. From its origins to its over-the-top outfits, we’re unpacking what this annual fashion spectacle says about our culture’s values.

And yes, we tackle the viral question the internet didn’t know it needed: Could a gorilla take on 100 unarmed men?

Add in quick hits on the India–Pakistan conflict, Trump’s announcements, rumors about Alcatraz reopening, and a closing challenge to rethink your media habits through a biblical lens. Tune in and enjoy a full episode of news, pop culture, and thoughtful Christian insight.

Topics

(00:28): Media bias: Are we to blame?
(05:54): The decline of trust in media
(08:44): Balanced news sources and recommendations
(13:04): The Met Gala: What is it?
(21:32): Vanity and Ecclesiastes
(25:33): Gorilla vs. 100 men debate
(27:09): Check-in: Global and national updates
(30:18): Tune-in: Upcoming events & Alactraz

Resources

About Micah Tomasella

Micah Tomasella is the Advancement Officer at Denison Ministries and co-hosts Denison Forum’s “Culture Brief” podcast. A graduate of Dallas Baptist University, Micah is married to Emily, and together they are the proud parents of two daughters. With an extensive background in nonprofit work, finance, and real estate, Micah also brings experience from his years in pastoral church ministry.

About Conner Jones

Conner Jones is the Director of Performance Marketing at Denison Ministries and Co-Hosts Denison Forum’s “Culture Brief” podcast. He graduated from Dallas Baptist University in 2019 with a degree in Business Management. Conner passionately follows politics, sports, pop-culture, entertainment, and current events. He enjoys fishing, movie-going, and traveling the world with his wife and son.

About Denison Forum

Denison Forum exists to thoughtfully engage the issues of the day from a biblical perspective through The Daily Article email newsletter and podcast, The Denison Forum Podcast, as well as many books and additional resources.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

NOTE: This transcript was AI-generated and has not been fully edited.

Conner Jones: [00:00:00] Hi, I’m Conner Jones.

Micah Tomasella: I’m Micah Tomasella,

Conner Jones: and this is Culture Brief, a Denison Forum podcast where we navigate the constant stream of top stories and news, politics, sports, pop culture and technology. And we’re doing it all from a Christian perspective. And Micah, I’m just feeling good today because you know what?

The Cowboys finally did something. They got a wide receiver. That’s right. So life is good.

Micah Tomasella: That’s right. We have a wide receiver to pair with CD Lamb. Here we come. NFL! Go Cowboys. All right, so I want to give you guys a rundown of what we’re gonna talk about today. Question. Are we to blame for the bias in the media that we see today?

That’s rhetorical. Hmm. I’m gonna answer it in a minute. The Met Gala just happened. What’s it about? What’s the history of the Met Gala? What do they even do? Connor’s gonna break that down for us. Today we’re gonna talk about Alcatraz, Gorilla versus 100 Men Debate that has taken social media by stor,m and so much more.

So let’s jump into the brief.

Conner Jones: The brief. [00:01:00]

Micah Tomasella: Alright. The bias in the media is a huge issue. But are we getting what we deserve? That’s my question for us today. Are we experiencing what we deserve? Have we, are we reaping what we’ve sown for so long so Americans don’t trust the media, Connor, and it’s, it’s not just a hunch, but here’s the harder truth.

I think that we might be a part of the problem, and I’m gonna break that down today. I wanna unpack why trust has dropped so far and how bias plays into it, and why our own preferences. Consciously and subconsciously are fueling the divide that we see today. So let’s talk about the landscape of media bias.

Let’s be honest, most people have a gut feeling that today’s media isn’t neutral, but it’s not. Like I said, it’s not just a hunch anymore. We’ve got hard data that points to something more troubling, a systematic. A systemic, systematic, maybe both imbalance in how news is covered today. So a recent study by the Media Research [00:02:00] Center, MRC, analyzed 899 stories aired during evening news broadcasts from January 20th to April 9th, 2025 on A-B-C-C-B-S and NBC.

So three of the five largest. Kind of traditional media conglomerates. The study found that 92% of the coverage about Donald Trump during his first 100 days was negative 92%. In contrast during President Joe Biden’s first 100 days in 2021, Connor, the same organization found. That when they studied those same organizations that only 41% of the coverage was negative.

So 59% of the coverage on Joe Biden’s first 100 days was positive compared to only 8% of the news coverage for Donald Trump’s first 100 days was positive. 92% of it was negative. Now, this doesn’t mean Trump was flawless or that Biden gets a free pass, but the contrast speaks volumes about selective [00:03:00] emphasis.

Narrative framing. It’s not just about what said, it’s about what gets covered and what gets ignored and how stories are told. So how the stories that are being picked are the more negative ones or the more headline grabbing ones, which which are, you know, are just typically more negative. And when the public sees those disparities, especially over time, it’s no wonder Trust in the media is at historic lows now.

So again, this isn’t about Trump’s bad. Trump’s great. Biden’s bad. Biden’s great. This is about clear data. That shows there is obvious bias and this is just one small part of it, honestly. So Connor, what do you think about this in general, and then how do you think we stay above the fray of this specific issue at Denison Forum?

What makes us different?

Conner Jones: Yeah. I would say, I think the general consensus is bad news cells. That’s the way a lot of these networks and you know, sources. Provide their yeah. Information. They think through profits. They think through how are we gonna get viewership, how are we gonna get readership, whatever it is.

And [00:04:00] so they know that bad news sell, and if they can hit an audience and focus on the negative, people will read it. They’ll digest it, they’ll watch it, whatever it is. So one thing that I know sets us apart here at Dentist Forum is we don’t just focus on the bad news. We focus on the truth. And so if that’s a headline that introduces bad news, we’re gonna turn it into a way of seeing it through the lens of scripture and hopefully provide a hope induced perspective on that.

We also have good news. Yeah, I mean, if you go to our website right now and look at the articles that have been written this week, you’re gonna see some good news articles, which is something a lot of news sources do not publish. That’s right. Or at least if they’re publishing it, they’re certainly not advertising it.

So we will focus on the things that are happening in this world that are good, that Christ is behind, and we’re gonna always provide that hopeful perspective. We also, we’re not journalists here, we’re not exactly in the weeds of reporting things. We’re not finding sources and trying to get information.

We’re just seeing what’s going on in the world and we’re trying to help listeners, readers, whoever it is, digest it and take it from a hope-filled perspective and, and apply scripture to it.

Micah Tomasella: Yep. [00:05:00] That’s an important distinction, Connor and two here at Dentist and Forum, and Dentist and Ministries as a whole, we are donor funded, so we are not, you know, we don’t have those clickbait things.

We don’t have those paywalls. We’re not dependent upon people clicking a certain amount of times on something to make a certain amount of dollars. See, that’s the problem is these news organizations, and I’m about to get into this, they make money by clicks, by views, while what’s getting clicks and views.

The negative things, the sensational things. So

Conner Jones: And we, we also don’t have corporate sponsors. Yep. So we don’t have to bow to whatever a big, if it’s a big pharma company, we don’t have to try to support whatever they are saying we should support. ’cause they fund us, you know, lot of, yeah, yeah. We stand, we stand independent.

We’re separate from that. We’re truly only responding to God in the Bible, what he says,

Micah Tomasella: independent. But we also stand on God’s word. That’s. That’s what we’re held accountable to, and we’re thankful for that to be a part of something like that. And we’re thankful that all of you are along on this journey with us.

So there is declining, trusted media, right? And so the result is a trust crisis. According to a [00:06:00] September of 2024 Gallup poll, only 31% of Americans say they have a great deal or even a fair amount of trust in mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. That’s the second lowest number that Gallup has produced on this subject since 1972.

In short, the media’s credibility isn’t just being questioned. It has significantly eroded. This isn’t just an idea anymore. It has eroded. The trust in it has eroded, and there’s a reason for that. But let’s turn the mirror back on ourselves for a second. Let’s talk about the role of audience preferences.

Now, here’s where the mirror turns back on us, because while it’s easy to blame the media, we also have to acknowledge how our own behavior shapes what the media becomes. The digital age has made it easier than ever to customize our content diet. Right algorithms, whether on Facebook, YouTube, X or even Google, our preferences feed us what we already like.

The algorithms know it. Yep. What we already prefer, and for most of us, that means being served, headlines being served, [00:07:00] commentary that confirms to our worldview and rarely challenges it. Pew Research found that 54% of US adults say they sometimes are often get news from social media. That’s a problem. But here’s the issue.

Those platforms are not designed to inform. They’re designed to keep you scrolling. To continue to affirm you in what you already believe. It’s not journalism, Connor. It’s a dopamine loop that a lot of us are stuck in and it gets worse when we click on outrage. When we click on partisan framing media companies, they take note, they chase those clicks, and before long the incentives have shifted.

News organizations, you know, many of whom are fighting for survival, start prioritizing engagement. Over truth or objectivity. What news organizations should be standing their ground on controversy becomes their currency, I guess you could say. And division is what makes them profitable. So in some ways, the media bias we complain about is the media diet we keep choosing.

Any thoughts on that?

Conner Jones: [00:08:00] Yeah. I, to be fair, I, I mean, I am on social media following a lot of different Yeah. People on there. I think you can do social media correctly. You just need to be smart about how you go about, yeah. No judgment. Yeah. I’m on social media too. Don’t put yourself in an, don’t put yourself in an echo chamber, like only following one side.

Try to gather opinions and thoughts and follow journalists or news sources. Yes, follow your sports people. Whatever it is, whatever your interests are, that’s, that’s what’s cool about social media is you can kind of curate it to yourself, but also they’re trying to curate it to you as well. Great segue there.

There’s an inherent danger there, but you know what, it’s. It’s an opportunity to see lots of different things. Yeah, and I, I personally like, I like X because I follow a lot of people there. It’s fast. It’s, you can keep up with things going on, but I, I try to make sure to follow people on both sides.

Micah Tomasella: Yep.

Great segue, Connor. So here’s some good news. We can sync balanced news sources. We just have to look a little bit harder so it doesn’t have to be this way. We do have to be intentional with it. So there are legitimate outlets. That strive to present a more balanced and fact-based view [00:09:00] of the world, and they often get drowned out by the noise, by the larger organizations out there, all the people out there just giving their opinions.

So here are a few that are worth your time, so we want to equip you with a few that we feel like are actually balanced. So all sides.com, one of the best tools out there for understanding bias, it rates all the news outlets from left center to give that a look. The flyover. It’s a newer site that aggregates news from various sources, and it strips out all the.

Editorializing, I guess you could say. Yeah, it’s just straight, all the opinion. It’s just straight fact and news. Really enjoy that one. So check that out. At the flyover. The Wall Street Journal, while its opinion section does lean right, it’s newsroom, so specifically Wall Street Journal News is consistently rated as centrist, and then Reuters, you can check out Reuters.

They may not be flashy, but they’re reliable, focused on facts. Largely not all the time free of ideological tilt. And then finally, these are two suggestions ’cause I asked Dr. Ryan Denison and I asked Connor [00:10:00] for their personal selections. Dr. Ryan Denison suggested the Tangle by Isaac Saul Tangle presents top arguments from both sides of the political spectrum.

And it adds this guy Isaac Saul’s analysis and includes reader feedback and then ground news, ground news. Connor’s suggestion. They give you the ability to read the news from multiple perspectives. See through media bias with reliable news from local and international sources. Are these sources perfect, Connor?

No. No, but they’re much different in a far cry from what you often see scrolling on social media and from these large institutional media organizations. So as I wrap this up, I want to give you a scripture. Galatians six, seven says this, do not be deceived. God is not mocked. For whatever one sows, he will also reap.

That holds true in our relationships, our work, our faith, and yes guys, I. Our media habits. I think oftentimes we wanna apply this verse to everything that it naturally applies to, but [00:11:00] actually think about. It does apply to what you consume, it applies to what you click on. So what we choose to consume each day shapes us more than we realize the headlines we believe, the voices we listen to and even promote, and the content we scroll through, all form the lens through which we see the world.

Here’s the danger if we keep feeding ourselves outrage. Division. We’ll eventually start thinking, speaking, and living that way, but scripture calls us to something deeper. Philippians four, eight tells us this. Finally, brothers, whatever’s true, whatever’s honorable, whatever’s just whatever’s pure, whatever’s lovely, whatever is commendable.

If there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Seek those things out. That’s not just a. Filter for our personal devotion time, that time that you spend with God every day. It’s a standard for how we should engage with the culture around us, with the media that we consume.

So this week I wanna make it practical for all of us. Okay? Ask yourself these questions this week. Is this headline [00:12:00] stirring up wisdom or just anger? Is this post helping me love my neighbor? Or just trying to win a debate. Is this source feeding my spirit positively or just reinforcing my bias, just reinforcing what I already believe.

Romans 12, two says this, and then, and then I’m done. Promise. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. That’s a continuous renewal, not a weekly renewal, not even a daily renewal, a continuous renewal of your mind that includes what we read. What we watch and what we share.

So we may not be able to fix all the media overnight, but we can choose to be different. And we can be people of truth, people of discernment, and people of grace in a world that is desperate for all three of those.

Conner Jones: Mm. Great stuff Micah. Thank you for that. Thank you brother. And yeah, there’s a lot out there with media and there’s a lot to watch for and a lot to take part in.

And I think media is [00:13:00] a great thing, but can also be dangerous. Yep. So thank you for that. That’s awesome. Hey, let’s talk about something a little more light. The MET Gala. Yeah. Which, you know, if you’re wondering what is the Met Gala, why are we talking about this? I, I guess that’s what I’m gonna tell you about, because honestly I learned a lot this week as I was kind of researching the Met Gala because it, here’s the deal, every year I see all the stuff I’m sure a lot of us do.

You’re on social media and you see, boom, here’s this celebrity in a big, crazy outfit. Yeah. What is this Met Gala thing? Why is everyone here? Here’s the deal. The Met Gala. It is short for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute. Gala. That is a lot of words. Yeah. Yeah. Long one. That’s, you can see why they call it the MET Gala.

Basically, it’s a big annual fundraising event for the Costume Institute at the Met in New York City. That’s obviously the big art museum there. If you’ve seen Night at the museum, you’ve seen some of that, you know. This began in 1948, and it’s traditionally held on the first Monday in May, so it was this Monday a couple days ago, and it’s always [00:14:00] hosted since, I think like 95 or something like that by Anna Wintour.

She’s obviously the most powerful person in fashion. I’m not a fashion guy, but even I know that name. She’s the editor. People. You’re clearly a

Micah Tomasella: fashion guy, Connor. Come on, baby. Yeah.

Conner Jones: Says, yeah. I’m sitting here in a golf polo in a hat. That’s, yeah, I’m right up the fashion alley. Yeah, same. Anyway, Anna.

People know Anna Wintour. Literally, why do people care about fashion from the two of us? Yeah. I don’t know, but here we are. I don’t think they do. Don’t worry. Anna Wintour is the inspiration behind Meryl Streep’s character in the movie The Devil Wears Prada, so a lot of people understand that. Okay. Yeah.

There you go. There you go. This is fashion’s biggest night. Apparently. I always thought it was gonna be like, you know, a Paris show or something where they walk down Yeah. A thing. No, it’s, it’s, it’s the MET Gala. This is the biggest night. All the designers are a part of this. All these celebrities come in.

Each year there’s a theme given, and this year’s theme was. Super fine tailoring black style, which they said is a reflection of the tailoring politics in history of the way black men dress. So that was the theme for this year. And if [00:15:00] you go look at the pictures of all these celebrities who were there and what they’re wearing, you can kind of see that theme coming out.

Okay. But every year there’s some, there’s something that they base all their outfits and. I guess costumes around and you know, it’s always very extravagant and highly creative. I would really venture to say outrageous outfits at times inspired by this theme. If you just, you can type in to Google most outrageous Met Gala outfits, and you will just be shocked by what some of these people wore, and some of you, even, I know you’re listening, you’re like, oh, I, I know some of these outfits you’re thinking of.

I would say. It is a who’s who of who’s there it is all the A-list celebrities you can think of. You get designers, musicians, actors, athletes, royals, other cultural icons like I guess the Kardashians. Those people who don’t really fit into any of those categories, but somehow they’re just famous. They are all there.

They’ve all worn iconic outfits. Some are hard to forget. For better and for worse. For instance, Jared Leto, he usually comes out to this thing. He’s an actor. A lot of people would know him. He comes outta this thing. He wears the [00:16:00] weirdest thing. A couple years ago, he wore a big cat costume. It was very bizarre.

Go look up a picture of that. I, I don’t how to explain it, but even more bizarrely, he, he walked in with a replica of his own head, lifelike head. A few years ago, if that was odd. This year, I would say one of the weirdest ones was Andre 3000. He’s a, he’s a musical artist. He walked in with a, an entire piano on his back and not like a keyboard, like a, a full, like piano.

Piano. I don’t, I don’t know the word for it, but Wow, this guy’s strong. Yeah. You know, just people, people go way out there with these outfits, man. So who else was there? I, you would recognize these people. Zendaya, Rihanna, Sabrina Carpenter, athlete Side, Jalen Hurt, Joe Burrow. On the acting side, Demi Moore, politics side, Kamala Harris, usher.

Nick Jonas, dude, everyone is there. Like pretty much everybody except for Blake Lily. She did not show up this year for undisclosed reasons, but I think you can assume Oh.

Micah Tomasella: Oh,

Conner Jones: okay. Yeah. Micah, the ticket price for this thing to get into this fundraising event, [00:17:00] $75,000. Whoa. Per person, per head. That’s insane, right?

And it has tripled over the last decade, so it just keeps going up. ’cause everybody wants to be at this thing. So it’s $75,000 for a seat this year. They raised $31 million at this Met Gala and just saying these outfits can cost up to six digits, six figures on these costumes or outfits, whatever you wanna call ’em.

Don’t surprise me at all. I’ll tell you this. As I was researching this, I was like, do these celebrities really pay for all this themselves? For the most part, they do not actually. They are paid for by fashion companies typically who want them to wear their outfits. It, you know, improves the brand of the fashion company.

And these stars are typically invited by brands who buy their tickets. And their seats at a table, in addition to making their costume looks, they’re gonna fly them into New York. They put them up in a nice hotel. So these fashion companies are the ones fronting the bill for all of this. The celebrities, they can make their own donations and that some of them probably do, and other corporate sponsors such as TikTok and Instagram typically make their own donations.

They know that this is a big social media thing, that they are very much involved in this. This event [00:18:00] does cost more than $6 million to host, which is just an insane number to me. Micah, what do you think actually happens inside the Met Gallup? Because if you follow this at all, all we ever see are pictures of the outside of what happens on the red carpet and, and all these outfits, but no one ever talks about the inside of this thing.

Micah Tomasella: I actually have no idea what happens, but that’s why I’m interested to kind of hear you explain a little bit more about it.

Conner Jones: Yeah. Okay. So I had no idea. It is a secretive thing. They have a cocktail hour, but they’re not allowed to have their phones on in there. You know, it’s always kind of secretive.

But what we do know is there’s a dinner cocktail hour and then typically an A-list performer. Last year that was Ariana Grande and Cynthia ar Vo, the stars of Wicked Performed. Anyways, Micah, this whole Met Gala thing, it’s a big show. What? What do you think of it in general?

Micah Tomasella: I think it’s the time of the year that you see the most outrageous outfits.

If anything, I think I almost kind of assumed it was like an awards thing, almost like the Oscars or the Grammys, but this is not that. As I’m learning more about it.

Conner Jones: No, it’s definitely weird. No one gets an [00:19:00] award, no one’s presented or anything. It, it is truly just a dinner and fundraiser. Anyways, Rachel Feinberg, she’s a gala consultant in New York and I, I wanted to share this quote ’cause it’s leading me right into where I think we are all going.

She noted that the sheer spectacle of the MET Gala is what the people are there for. She said it’s gone beyond what a fundraising event usually is. It’s not necessarily the cause that everyone’s coming for, it’s to be part of the event. Which brings the who’s, who leads to my main point to be important.

It’s a who’s who. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s the attention. It’s the pictures. Look at me. It’s the, yeah. There are thousands of paparazzi. I mean, it’s just insane. I mean, yeah. Michael, what, what if it’s everyone’s there not for the cause, what are they there for? What’s the purpose of a celebrity’s attendance and what’s.

The culture’s fixation with this event? If not the cause, then what? What’s the whole point of this? Met Gala defenders, I, I, I’ll tell you this. Defenders would say the gala allows top designers to express ideas, history, cultural identity, provoke thought, emotion, creativity. And in doing so, they raise millions of dollars for this cause that they’re all believing in.

And if you view fashion as like a form of cultural [00:20:00] storytelling or artistic expression, then you may say the gala is fascinating, maybe even important. I think the majority of people would say it’s maybe a little bit out of touch. It’s a little elitist, an event that is more like a big costume party rather than a fashion show, given that most of the outfits.

They’re not really wearable outside of this event. Yeah. Like they’re not gonna wear it out and about. It’s not really fashion. You’re not gonna typically

Micah Tomasella: wear a piano on your back, like an entire piano on your back typically.

Conner Jones: Yeah. And all these outfits, they’re just not, they’re not really feasible to wear.

They’re not practical outfits. I personally tend to agree with this kind of assessment that it’s maybe a little. Much. It’s a little out of touch. It comes across to me as really like a celebration of celebrity and wealth. Yeah. Maybe a hint of this culture in art, if you Google the Met Gala right now, or search it on social media, most of the results will be about the celebrities, not the artists, not the exhibits, not even the money raised.

You’re hard pressed to actually find how much was raised at this thing. Yeah. It’s always about the outfits and the celebrities. I’m just a little baffled that with. All the like, [00:21:00] big issues happening in the world right now. This is where all these people wanna put their time, energy, and finances. You know, I, I can’t judge anybody for how they wanna donate money or whatnot, but it’s just interesting.

Here’s the deal. The MET Gala is actually a way for attendees, brands, and designers to build their own profile. By showing up, they only grow their attention factor and subsequently their own wealth and celebrity. Like Ms. Feinberg said, who I quoted a a minute ago, they’re there for the event. I do not think that everybody is really there for the cause.

Yeah. All the attention seeking leads me to focus on one word as a general theme of this whole event, Micah Vanity. Hmm. And when I think of vanity, I couldn’t help but think of Ecclesiastes in terms of this whole thing. King Solomon, wealthiest man known in history, and that’s because God bless him with enormous wisdom and wealth and power.

But man, he, he really worked hard in Ecclesiastes to warn that those things do not bring the happiness that people think it will, and in [00:22:00] fact, they can be destructive. In verses two and three of chapter one, he starts off the book with saying, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever, which is reminiscent of James four 14, which is like saying that life is but a vapor.

We come and we go. What do we do with our time here on Earth? And he even said, I have seen everything that is done under the sun and behold all his vanity into striving after wind.

Micah Tomasella: Mm-hmm.

Conner Jones: Solomon, I think he’s trying to tell us, man, he’s indicating that wealth and power and honor, those are fickle things.

They’re not always evil, right? You can have money, you can be successful. God may bless you in that way. And it’s not necessarily evil, but they’re not our end all be all in. In chapter 12 verses 13 and 14, he says. Fear God. And when I say he, I’m talking about King Solomon of Ecclesiastes. Fear God and keep his commandments.

For this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment with every secret thing, whether good or [00:23:00] evil, that Micah is our real purpose. God will take us many places in this life, and he may even bless us with those things. Wealth, power of fame, whatever it is. But we have to be careful not to place our worth and value and hope in that.

Because that is vanity. When we care more about what others think than what God thinks, that’s vanity. When we want all eyes on us and not on the Lord, that’s vanity. Yeah. When we make generosity about ourselves, such as going to a fundraiser for the event and not for the cause. That’s Vanity. I’m not saying everybody that was at the Met Gala is vain.

There are people there with good intentions, I’m sure, and they’ve been invited to this thing and they want to go. It’s a big thing. But if you’re at something like that, and most of us listeners will not be going to a MET Gala anytime soon, but when we’re at something similar, are we there for ourselves or for the cause?

And more importantly, are we doing things in this life for ourselves or for God?

Micah Tomasella: Mm-hmm.

Conner Jones: Yeah, that, that’s, that’s just, [00:24:00] I, I think that’s a great lesson we can take from the Met Gala. Anyways, I’m gonna, I’m gonna post some links of the most outrageous outfits from previous years, so if you want to check those out, I’ll tune in for that.

Be in some

Micah Tomasella: boats. Tune in for that. Connor. Thank you for that story. You know, I think oftentimes it’s hard to relate to stories like this, but. Vanity comes out in your environment, so the rich and the powerful, this is their version of vanity. What’s your version of vanity? How are you prioritizing self over others?

How often are you thinking about how you’re viewed or how you look or you know, all those different things. Mm-hmm. I’m not saying those things on the surface are necessarily bad, but. You clearly laid out what vanity is, and so that’s how we can apply a story like that to our own lives and our own hearts.

Connor, thank you for that. I wanna talk about the mailbag for a second. We wanna continue to hear from you all. Please send us your questions, your thoughts, your topic, ideas to culture brief@dentistandforum.org, and follow us on Instagram at the Culture Brief Podcast. So at Culture Brief Podcast is the tagline, send us.

Things [00:25:00] like what was the craziest Met Gala outfit that you saw that was just unreal. Send us what your favorite news source is. How do you find your information? How do you find your news? All that, send us all those types of suggestions. Anything that you want us to cover, send it to us.

Conner Jones: Send us your funny, embarrassing story.

We’ve had fun getting those in and reading here on the please and those Yes,

Micah Tomasella: actually, please. And those, yeah, absolutely.

Conner Jones: Okay, Micah. We gotta just hit this real fast because yeah. This is the story that has taken over social media still. Everything we’ve talked about, it’s still News Met Gala and this.

Now, the question that has generated from Reddit to TikTok to now every social media source is, can a gorilla fight 100 men and win? Who wins in that case a gorilla or the 100 men? Who do you think?

Micah Tomasella: Connor, the rules are that the men don’t have weapons. Right?

Conner Jones: Sorry. Yes, that’s correct. Yeah. 100 unarmed men just, and I don’t know their size.

Are they all the size of joining the Rock Johnson, or are they all the size of an average male? I

Micah Tomasella: [00:26:00] don’t know. For the sake of this debate, let’s just say it’s a hundred average males, average American males versus a gorilla. I’m gonna say something that’s probably pretty controversial. I think if the men work together, they can defeat the gorilla.

That’s all I’m gonna say. Okay.

Conner Jones: Yep. I will say I, I can see that happening because the men would probably outsmart the gorilla gorillas are smart, but I think. Are just, I think so too. They’re of a higher iq, so could they make a plan? I don’t know. I actually lean though the opposite. I think a gorilla win just from full force.

Yeah. I, it would be incredibly difficult. But that’s the, that’s the whole point of this question is we don’t really have an answer. So I did see Mr. Beast is trying to see if he can get a bunch of people to participate in something like this. In spite a gorilla actually test. Oh man. Get a, that’d be so interesting.

Trying to get a hundred volunteers to, to basically fight a gorilla. I also, and I’m like, this sounds stupid.

Micah Tomasella: I also saw a video. ’cause there’s like all these videos, these. People create these CGI gaming simulators where basically it was like I just kept seeing one Chuck Norris versus a hundred thousand gorillas, [00:27:00] and it’s just this loop of Chuck Norris just, I mean, let’s just cut to it.

Chuck Norris won. He beat all those gorillas, right? So of course he did. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we’re gonna jump into the check-in section. The purpose of this is to check in on things that we’ve previously talked about and just kind of give you an update on them. So last week we mentioned something was brewing between India and Pakistan.

They exchanged missile fire on Tuesday. I. May 6th. Okay. There are only nine countries in the world who have nuclear warhead capabilities. Oddly enough, two of those countries are neighboring countries, India and Pakistan. It might seem random and it might seem like this has nothing to do with us. Why does it matter?

I understand that initial reaction, but at the same time, there’s already a lot of regional wars breaking out, and so this is not great news. So prayers for all of those involved.

Conner Jones: Yeah, there’s been several dozen deaths over the last few hours here where they’ve been exchanging fire. Praying for this region.

There’s a bunch of people who just get caught in the crossfire. I know a mosque was hit that killed a bunch of innocent people who were just in [00:28:00] their place of worship, and that’s just really tragic. Yeah. So yeah, join us in prayer for this conflict that it would come to a resolution very quickly.

Quickly. Yep. Micah, Canada. It’s still not for sale. Okay. According to the new Prime Minister, Mark Carney. Okay. He was at the Oval Office this week with Trump and they were talking about it and they were on camera, and I gotta say, Carney looked so uncomfortable. He did in this whole interview process.

He did, because Trump just keeps laying threats out, but in front of the whole media, just he was like nicely laying

Micah Tomasella: them out, you know? He was, he’s nice,

Conner Jones: Yeah, we kinda still want Canada. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The party said, no, Canada won’t be for sale. Ever. Mm-hmm. But then maybe this is funny, maybe it’s not, it’s funny to me.

But then Trump responded that he said, time will tell, never say never. Just yeah, what is the what’s the end goal here? I don’t know. But anyways, keep your, keep your eyes on that. Another thing. Yeah. We forgot to mention this last week, Mike. We didn’t mention that the Kentucky Derby was, oh, I felt like this was interesting coming off the topic you just said.

The horse that won its name was Sovereignty. Amen. It won the Kentucky Derby. [00:29:00] Congratulations to sovereignty. Amen. And it told team, but the second place horse that was in the lead and then sovereignty took over was named journalism. Hallelujah. So of course, Halleh, this felt like a big metaphor and all of social media was like, ah, is sovereignty.

Yes. Is this a metaphor for where we are in life? I don’t know. Oh, okay. Sovereignty versus journalism. Who knew that would end up in the horse racing world?

Micah Tomasella: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, I love that. Okay, a couple more things on the check-in section. We’re now entering the second rounds of the NBA and NHL playoffs.

Got a shout out to stars here for a second. Our Dallas Stars for an insane game, seven win comeback to move on and win, and so they’re heading into the second round with the Winnipeg Jets and man, they, that was a dominating performance really, especially there at the end. That was wonderful to see that they won that.

But also one more thing. Skype is dead. Skype’s gone. Skype’s done. The service that lets you video call anyone in the world for free, shut down after an awesome 23 year run. Microsoft, which bought Skype for 8.5 billion in 2011 is [00:30:00] encouraging users to go ahead and move on over.

Conner Jones: To teams instead. It’s kind of crazy to me that even with Covid, Skype did not take advantage of the fact that everybody was trying to do video calls.

Yeah. Everybody jumped into Zoom.

Micah Tomasella: Skype was like the first one in the game and I’m, you know, I’m thinking back like people weren’t really talking about Skype. That was a missed opportunity there.

Conner Jones: Yeah. Big, big one. Okay, Michael, let’s talk about things to tune into this week. ’cause we’ve got several big stories that have come about.

Actually, first off, it’s not even a story, but it’s just a reminder to all of our listeners. This Sunday is Mother’s Day. Yeah. So go get your mom a gift. Go get your wife a gift if she’s a mother. Yeah. Happy Mother’s Day to all of our moms out there to shout mother day to my mom. Shout out to all the

Micah Tomasella: moms.

Shout out to my beautiful wife and mother of our children. Love you. So Happy Mother’s Day.

Conner Jones: So many great moms in our lives, and I’m sure in yours too, the conclave, Micah It. Mm-hmm. It began. It is going. We’re gonna see how long it takes to choose a pope. Maybe by the time you’re listening to this, a pope’s been chosen and the white smoke has come out.

Started today

Micah Tomasella: or yesterday. So we’re recording on Wednesday as we released on Thursday morning. Started today, starting today

Conner Jones: on [00:31:00] Wednesday. So by the time you’re listening to this, the Cardinals, they’re locked up in the Sistine Chapel and they have no phones, no contact with the outside world, and they are in the process of electing a new pope.

Micah Tomasella: Let’s talk about a secretive meeting. Goodness. No kidding? Yeah. Okay, so we’ve got some trade deals coming soon. Maybe do we? So the world may never know, but Trump has been busy this week, guys. He announced that NFL draft in 2027 is coming to Washington, DC. Hollywood may face tariffs on movies made outside of the United States.

Not sure how that would work since they’re not physical products going in through a shipping port. Again, this has kind of been clarified. This is just kind of more of a, more of a statement right now. And then lastly, as Trump has stayed busy, Alcatraz might reopen. You know, this is this is a really interesting concept, you know, because people are scared about it or upset about it because we’re.

Thinking about reviving this prison, which I’ve actually been to that I think was discontinued. Oh yeah. In the 1960s out in California. They shut it down a long time ago. So [00:32:00] we’ll see what happens. Yeah. They shut it down a long time ago. Think about that.

Conner Jones: I gotta mention this, Micah. There’s a, there’s a theory that’s running out there about why Trump just randomly posted on truth social that he wants to reopen Alca Addresss.

Okay. And that’s because this past weekend he was in Mar-a-Lago. He typically goes down to Mar-a-Lago in South Florida. Yeah. His home down there every weekend. Okay. On Saturday night, there was a South Florida cable channel that was airing a rerun of Clint Eastwood’s 1979 classic movie Escape from Alcatraz.

This would have aired at Mar-a-Lago where Trump was staying just hours later after it aired. Trump posts this. Thing saying he wants Alcatraz to reopen. So the theory is that movie was on cable. He had it on, it inspired him to wanna, you know, reopen the, the in Infa prison. Oh. So who knows? I believe that a lot of people say believe if you wanna get through to Trump, you gotta put it on tv.

That’s why a lot of, a lot of these people trying to get through to him, they can’t get him on the phone or whatnot. They just go straight onto Fox News or another news network and just, they basically speak directly to him through the camera. They’re, they’re in front of millions, but they’re really [00:33:00] talking to somebody watches one he watches and

Micah Tomasella: he.

He lets people know that he watches, he knows that he gets communicated to in that way. Wow. Wow.

Conner Jones: So if you were trying to communicate directly to Trump, go on tv, he might see you and bring him a Diet Coke. I don’t know.

Micah Tomasella: Yep.

Conner Jones: Anyways, awesome guys. This was a fun episode. Lots happening this week.

Stay tuned in to all these other things going on, and we will catch you next week. Thank you for joining us. Today on the Culture Brief, a Dentist and Forum podcast, all the articles that we mentioned, any videos that we mentioned, pictures of Matt Gala outfits that I mentioned, we will link those in the show notes.

We’ll also link up the sources that Micah mentioned that are great middle ground sources. And if you enjoyed today’s episode, please subscribe and rate, review the show and share it with a friend, and we will see you next Thursday. Bye-bye.

The post Media Bias, the Met Gala, gorilla vs man debate & an Alcatraz theory | Ep. 18 appeared first on Denison Forum.

The White House Launches Revolutionary “Podcast Row” — ‘We Welcome New Media Voices and Podcasters from Across the Country’ and ‘You Have Far More Viewers Than CNN and the Legacy Media’ | The Gateway Pundit

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The White House Launches Revolutionary “Podcast Row” — ‘We Welcome New Media Voices and Podcasters from Across the Country’ and ‘You Have Far More Viewers Than CNN and the Legacy Media’

On Thursday, March 27, The White House launched its revolutionary new media gateway called “Podcast Row,” embracing dozens of well-known political podcasters.

“We are so proud to welcome new media voices and podcasters from around the country who have massive audiences and are talking to everyday Americans like you.”

“This is what’s it’s all about – new media, new voices, and getting the president’s message out to all Americans. These podcasters are speaking to administration officials, cabinet secretaries, White House officials, and we are having a lot of fun,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a formal White House greeting.

🎙️Podcast Row at The White House was a HUGE success!

We were proud to welcome new media voices and podcasters from across the country to the People’s House. pic.twitter.com/RRfBrveGRG
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 28, 2025

“I bet you the people in that room have a lot more viewers than CNN and the legacy media. We are proud to welcome them to the White House,” Leavitt said in another formal White House greeting.

Welcome to The White House Podcast Row—where the viewership crushes CNN and the legacy media. @PressSec pic.twitter.com/ZpvFflOSCm
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 27, 2025

On the heels of Thursday’s inaugural Podcast Row event, emerging superstar Executive Editor and White House Correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Natalie Winters, thanked the president and his press secretary for inviting her to Podcast Row, teasing that she had found her legacy media-free safe space.

A legacy media-free safe space 🤣

Thanks again for inviting the War Room! pic.twitter.com/ZZ1uPLsnSc
— Natalie Winters (@nataliegwinters) March 29, 2025

The Gateway Pundit recently reported that the White House continues to make adjustments in kind with the evolving media landscape by relinquishing the far-left White House Correspondents’ Association’s iron grip over the White House Press Briefing Room seating chart.

Now, the White House will itself determine the Press Briefing Room seating chart – along with the press pool rotation in the Oval Office, Air Force One, and further distinguished locations.

Evidently, recent polling data suggests that the White House Correspondents’ Association has proven itself unfit to execute frontline journalistic duty for the American public in 2025, which no longer favors the dying mainstream media pool pushed by this Association.

In its wake, a revolutionary New Media headlined by podcasters have earned the right to serve as America’s chief political news correspondents.

Any preliminary research concerning the viral popularity of podcasts in America likely underestimates the ever-increasing podcast listenership. Still, the Pew Research Center determined in 2023 that 49% of Americans had listened to podcasts during the previous year.

Among the nearly half of all Americans who listened to podcasts, 67% of those respondents said the news was discussed on those podcasts, while 54% reported that they expected to hear political opinions on podcasts.

87% of respondents who claimed they listened to podcasts for news also said they expected to hear accurate news on those podcasts.

Markedly, 46% of lean-Republican respondents said they expected the news to be more accurate on podcasts than the news found elsewhere, while only 19% of lean-Democrat respondents believed podcasts to provide the most accurate news.

Still, 43% of the remaining lean-Republican respondents and 63% of the remaining lean-Democrat respondents agreed that podcasts provide news equal in accuracy to news found elsewhere.

Notably, 67% of respondents age 18-29 had listened to podcasts during the previous year, while only 28% of respondents age 65+ had listened to podcasts during the previous year.

This data suggests that a majority of American young adults and a majority of Republicans prefer the more uncensored podcast news to the traditional mass media replete with teleprompters and editors.

Moreover, Gallup reported in 2024 that Americans’ confidence in mass media had maintained a record low of 31% – strikingly low, compared to Americans’ 72% confidence in mass media circa 1976, and Americans’ 54% confidence in mass media as recently as 2003.

In 2024, President Trump expanded his support with voters age 18-29 to a whopping 46%, compared to his 35% mark with voters age 18-29 in 2020.

On the 2024 campaign trail, President Trump famously tapped into the upper echelon of the podcast circuit – an effort spearheaded in part by Barron Trump, who urged the president to expand his message to millions of listeners on certain viral podcasts.

Today with the advent of Podcast Row, the White House will help usher in our modern media landscape.

The post The White House Launches Revolutionary “Podcast Row” — ‘We Welcome New Media Voices and Podcasters from Across the Country’ and ‘You Have Far More Viewers Than CNN and the Legacy Media’ appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

The post Artificial Intelligence: Tool or threat? appeared first on Denison Forum. | Denison Forum

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Artificial Intelligence: Tool or threat?

Join the Denison Forum podcast with host Mark as he discusses the complexities of Artificial Intelligence with Dr. Katie Frugé, the director of the Center for Cultural Engagement with Texas Baptist. This episode examines AI’s potential as both a tool and a risk in our daily lives, the ethical concerns it raises, and its possible benefits in ministry and Bible translation. Explore how AI has evolved, its current applications, and how Christians can thoughtfully integrate and regulate this technology in society.

Topics

(00:17): Exploring Artificial Intelligence: Tool or terrorist?
(00:48): Meet Dr. Katie Frugé: AI enthusiast
(02:23): The evolution of AI: From hypothetical to everyday use
(06:41): AI in our daily lives: Integration and impact
(19:41): Generative AI: Creating new content
(22:08): Ethical concerns and human bias in AI
(27:58): Human intelligence vs. AI
(30:20): The Tower of Babel analogy
(33:32): Regulating AI development
(37:14): Global AI race
(39:10): AI in ministry
(50:46): Learning about AI
(55:47): The impact of AI on society
(59:17): Concluding thoughts

Resources

About Dr. Katie Frugé

Katie Frugé, Ph.D., earned her Master of Divinity degree and Ph.D. in systematic theology from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Katie Frugé has been named director of Texas Baptists’ Center for Cultural Engagement and the Christian Life Commission. Frugé began her service with the Baptist General Convention of Texas in 2019 as the hunger and human care specialist with the CLC. She later took on the role of associate director of the CLC.

About Dr. Mark Turman

Dr. Mark Turman is the Executive Director of Denison Forum and Vice President of Denison Ministries. Among his many duties, Turman is most notably the host of The Denison Forum Podcast. He is also the chief strategist for DF Pastors, which equips pastors and church leaders to understand and transform today’s culture.

About Denison Forum

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

NOTE: This transcript was AI-generated and has not been fully edited.

[00:00:00] Dr. Mark Turman: This is the Denison Forum podcast. I’m Mark, your host for today’s conversation as we continue to try to equip you with clarity in a world that’s cloudy, confusing, sometimes corrupt, and in many ways very uncertain. And that’s gonna probably be the feel of the conversation today as we jump in and try to learn a little bit more about this wonderful thing you see in the news almost every day called artificial intelligence or ai.

And I’ve kind of subtitled this. I. Thunder tool or terrorist. Because I have all of those different kinds of impressions when I start to get into this boat around artificial intelligence. And what does it mean? How does it work and what is it for? Our conversation partner today is familiar to many of you.

Dr. Katie Frugé is the director of the Center for Cultural Engagement with Texas Baptist, which represents 5,000 churches across the state of Texas. And she and her department help to equip and to serve believers and particularly Texas Baptist churches in a myriad of ways. So welcome back, Katie. We’re glad to have you with us.

[00:01:14] Dr. Katie Frugé: Thank you for having me. I’m glad to be here.

[00:01:16] Dr. Mark Turman: So you are the resident expert in the state of Texas for Baptist churches on AI. That’s what we need to tell everybody, right?

[00:01:25] Dr. Katie Frugé: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely not. That’s gonna be my big caveat is I’m a curious listener to this. I really kind of started getting AI curious starting in about 2020, 2021 when then executive director, Dr. David Hardid, asked me to do a presentation at a conference called Future Church. And I believe you were one of the speakers there as well. And the assignment was. Tell me what’s coming that I need to know about, that I don’t know about. And so that’s really where the whole thing started is I was just kind of looking out there, seeing what, what’s out there, what are people talking about.

Started by looking at just online resources and different things. Talked about the metaverse in that particular presentation, RIP Metaverse, that actually died a couple years later. But that’s really what put me on the journey of trying to figure out what, what’s out there and what do Christians need to be aware of.

And really kind of started taking off bigger, and I know we’ll go into this later, but started in 2022 when chat GPT became available to the public. It just exploded.

[00:02:22] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And so how would you over the last five years, how would you describe what your perspective has become, kind of from where it started to where it is now?

[00:02:32] Dr. Katie Frugé: In some ways where it started was more of a, could be hypothetical situation. There was a lot of unknowns about it. It felt very futuristic. It felt kind of more like something we’d seen in a movie versus a reality. And what we’ve really seen over the past couple of years is this thing is coming and it’s real, and we’re starting to see it integrate into our lives some helpful ways, some confusing ways, some ways we don’t even know AI is touching our lives.

But we’re still using it every day. And it’s a pa, it’s a piece to what we’re doing and just our day-to-day functions now. And so now what I’m looking at is a reality where we’re probably utilizing ai daily without our even being aware of it. And I think that’s gonna continue to grow even professionally.

I use it. Regularly now as well as a tool. And I think you’ll see more people doing that, is finding ways to utilize it, to make their lives more effective, efficient for better, for worse.

[00:03:24] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And there’s just so many things to look at here and, and so many resources, so many different voices in this conversation.

Yeah. And it just seems to be growing more and more coming out of places like Silicon Valley and other places where there’s just a lot of attention, a lot of research, and a lot of development going on. So I just was thinking about how to have this conversation with you, with you, Katie, and trying to do some of my own research.

And I, I went back to those middle school English class questions of who, what, when, where, why, and how. As maybe just a way to try to frame this for people who are like they hear different things. They may be super excited about it. They may be learning, like you’ve been learning. Some people are just going, oh, what now?

Yeah. And thinking about it in those terms but let’s just start with a little bit of the who. Is it even appropriate to say who invented ai? Where did it come from?

[00:04:21] Dr. Katie Frugé: Yeah, not really. I think the way that you could really think about AI is it’s more of a tapestry that’s been coming together for a long time.

It feels really new, but it’s not these conversations. If you wanna take a philosophical approach, we’ve had conversations about this for a long time, thinking about what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to think, how do we understand knowledge? And so that goes. Back centuries. But really this conversation, a lot of, a lot of people would point to the mathematician, Alan turning as kind of the beginning of this whole conversation about actual artificial intelligence.

There’s a thing called the turning test, which is a machine capable of learning. If you’ve seen the movie, the Imitation Game it’s a great movie but it’s the true story of kind of how the beginning of computers started can a, can a machine think. And that was really the beginning of it. And that was in the 1940s and fifties.

And then you had, I believe it was in 1956, the, a formal idea of artificial intelligence officially launched. So this is not a new idea, it’s something that’s been around for over half a century now, but it’s just kind of continuously, you kind of saw it growing in very small baby steps along the way where we started with a hypothetical we had a mach, you know, we know that machines can learn.

We see the growth of the computers and different things like that. What’s happening now, and the reason it feels like it’s kind of. Breakneck, you know, just kind of hitting us all at the same time is because we’ve really seen a, a jump in it, especially the last couple of years that really where we used to see incremental growth, we’re seeing growth at paces that are even surprising.

The researchers themselves.

[00:05:53] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, I was doing some work with this, had a conversation I mentioned before we started recording. A friend of mine named Dr. Hamus Ott, who is an Iranian born believer, has an active ministry even today that stretches from Texas to Iran. And he came to the United States in the early eighties from Iran to study, went to the University of California, and he actually holds a PhD in artificial intelligence.

So I thought he’s the expert, a big good person to talk to. He’s not actively engaged in that kind of research now, but was back in the mid eighties, he was writing papers, presenting papers. So he gave me a little bit of a, a sense of the, of the history, uh mm-hmm. That as you said, you kind of take this back to the late forties, 1950s, the idea of art, artificial intelligence.

Which we commonly call today, just the computer in some ways. But the idea of something that we created as a machine, being able to process and think and do calculations and, and other types of activities, that there is a sense in which it’s been around a while. But then I learned from other writers like Thomas Friedman and others that when you get into the sixties companies like Texas Instruments and others stumbled on or came upon the discovery of what’s called Moore’s Law.

The ability basically of a computer to process enormous amounts of inver, of information. Yeah. Many of the technologies that we walk around in our pockets with our cell phones are driven by Moore’s Law. And then like you said, in recent days, there’s been just a massive kind of acceleration in super computing.

And that’s enabling some of these technologies and applications and, and some of the things that now have brought it to the forefront as well as the fact that it’s big business. I mean, there are huge companies, not just Google and others, but there are huge companies making huge investments Meta’s doing that and, and others are doing that.

And so there’s a lot on the line from an economic and business standpoint. Absolutely. But, but I gotta tell you, it’s a little bit comforting to me to hear you and others say, Hey, this didn’t show up. You know? On the heels of Covid, it feels a little bit,

[00:08:08] Dr. Katie Frugé: it feels, it feels like it. It suddenly, we just woke up and we all knew chat GPT.

We didn’t know.

[00:08:13] Dr. Mark Turman: It feels like we woke up in the spring of, of 2020 and this, this thing called a pandemic. And, you know, we started seeing things that we’d never seen before, and then just about the time we thought we could take a breath, then somebody said, oh, and there’s this thing called ai. Yeah.

Yes. Anyway, if you’ve, if you’ve ever dealt with a computer or a phone, or you’ve talked to your Google Home or your Alexa mm-hmm. You’re probably talking to some form of AI or engaging with some form of ai Absolutely. Or your

[00:08:41] Dr. Katie Frugé: Siri on your smartphone, anything like that. Mm-hmm.

[00:08:44] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. All of those things are powered by.

Supercomputing around this big umbrella called ai. But you mentioned chat, GBT and there are some others that are becoming more and more commonplace all the time. Yes. And we’ll get, we’ll get to guidelines, boundaries, parameters that, that you and others might recommend. But like even here at Denison Ministries, we’re using a couple of these tools like Gemini and that type of thing.

A lot of times we’ll turn those tools on to record a meeting where there might be 5, 6, 7 people in that meeting. We might discuss various things for an hour. We get through and we hit a button and that tool gives us a one paragraph summary of what this meeting was about, and then we’ll give us bullet points and even assign task as they were talked about in the meeting.

Isn’t that incredible? Wow, that’s, that’s an, you know, our administrative assistants are like, wow, this is fabulous. I hope it doesn’t take away my job. Totally. Yes. But it really helps. So those, those kinds of tools, Katie, are built on. What I have come to understand under this banner of large language model.

Yeah. Can you kind of give us an explanation of what that means?

[00:10:03] Dr. Katie Frugé: Yes. I’m gonna give you the kindergarten definition of this. Okay. Because Thank you. That’s about where I go. Thank you. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll default to the other experts if they need more technical things. But basically what these LLMs are doing is it’s, it’s programming that’s intended to mimic human thought patterns.

It is looked at all of the words that are, you know, available on the internet, and it’s scrubbed all of them. And it’s looking for predictive text so that it can try to emulate or sim stimulate, simulate what a human’s doing. And we do this all the time without even realizing it. When I give my workshops on this, the example I give all the time is when I say Twinkle twinkle little star.

Immediately in your head, you’ve already pre-programmed how I wonder what you are. That’s basically what predictive text is doing, is it’s looking at the most likely word to come after the one that you’ve just said. And that’s what these LLMs are doing. So you give it a prompt and it’s going to, you know, for lack of a better word, think it’s not thinking, but it’s looking at all those things and making mathematical calculations to figure out what’s the most predictive thing I need to put out next after this.

And so it’s essentially, it’s trying to mimic human-like thought patterns in a very interesting way.

[00:11:13] Dr. Mark Turman: Okay. And so now I’m, I’m really concerned that I have to learn acrostics and that type of thing because you refer to it as an LLM, so

[00:11:22] Dr. Katie Frugé: Yeah, yeah. Large, large language models. Yes.

[00:11:25] Dr. Mark Turman: So yeah, in this wonderful world, and like I’ve listened to a few podcasts, read some articles, and all of a sudden you’re like, oh, there’s a whole language.

It’s yes. That the the developers and people that are, are creating these technologies, they’re using an entire language that takes a while for the for the learner to catch up to, right?

[00:11:44] Dr. Katie Frugé: Yeah. And some of it is just even learning through intuition. A lot of times people just go on and you just start kind of talking back and forth with the chat bot or something like that.

Mm-hmm. So you go to chat GPT, you can go to Gemini, and the better you are at communicating with it, the better it is at coming back at you then. So it’s, it’s learning you in real time too. It’s a fascinating experiment just to go on and practice. And you can almost see from my perspective, I see. I’ll also just own this in my family, I see a generational difference.

It’s more intuitive to my 13-year-old than it feels to me. She’s much better at prompting and getting the information that she wants out of it. Yeah, when you’re talking with these models, the more you can give it feedback, the better it is at learning what predictions to make to give you information back.

[00:12:25] Dr. Mark Turman: Okay. Can, and this is a curious curiosity I have, why are they calling them models?

[00:12:32] Dr. Katie Frugé: Oh I actually don’t know the answer to that. I would assume because it’s I don’t know. We could, we could actually chat GPT.

[00:12:40] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, we could. Yeah. It’s and again, that’s just part of this terminology. Yeah. When you get, when you start swimming in this in this pool, you’ll find out very quickly that it’s pretty deep and it’s getting larger by the day.

And I think it brings

[00:12:55] Dr. Katie Frugé: up an important piece though. I I think that we need to be careful as this becomes more of the zeitgeist of our day. The, the language we use even is, is anthropomorphic. That these aren’t human things. And I think it is, from a Christian perspective, it makes me think about what does it mean to be human?

I think we need to have answers and robust conversations about humanity itself. And what does it mean to be a human? What, what gives human value? What gives human, its distinctiveness? Because we are increasingly seeing these programs that are using humanlike. Language, but they’re models, right? Like they’re based off of what we are.

And I think that, that we’re gonna start seeing a blurring of the lines between what’s real and what’s not real. And I, I think it’s gonna cause some concern for a lot of people. I think people will be tempted. I think there will be a, a, we’re gonna lose touch with reality times. You already are seeing tragic stories of people who are quote unquote, falling in love with these models.

It’s not a real human, it’s not a real relationship. And somehow they know that in their head, but they, they’re, they’re still being deceived into that. Even the New York Times came out with a story think it was a week or two ago of a, of a woman who’s married to a, a real man, but has a partner that she’s in love with on chat, GPT.

And I think we’re gonna see more stories like this. So I think the bigger issue in some of this related to just your question about models and things like that, is just the, the question of language itself. We need to be careful not to over anthropomorphize using human words to apply to a unhuman thing.

Yeah. Because I think we’re gonna see that a lot.

[00:14:35] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And that’s a, a really, you know, and that’s a good call out that words matter, right? Yeah. Words and definitions really matter. In terms of our understanding and comprehension of just about everything, they, they are a great deal and interesting you brought that up.

I was talking again to my friend yesterday and he said, you know, people, you, you’re able to develop an emotional attachment to this thing. Hmm. And I said how in the world? He, he, he like, how in the world could that happen? He said just think about your pet. If you have a dog or a cat, particularly a dog, and you develop an emotional attachment.

To your pet, right? Mm-hmm. And you think that your pet at some level thinks about you, quote unquote. Okay? And when you come home and your dog runs and greets you and you know, and you give the dog commands and he responds, and that type of thing, that builds, you know, there, there’s thousands of people that would testify, you know, that their pets are like family members and they treat them as such, right?

[00:15:36] Dr. Katie Frugé: They call ’em fur babies, right?

[00:15:37] Dr. Mark Turman: They call ’em fur babies, right? And and we all know that it’s really tragic when your pet comes to the end of his life. And, and that, and then those kinds of things that, you know, have been a part of your life. So we have some we said, he said, but imagine that with a a chatbot or even an actual robot of some kind being in your house that actually knows you better than your pet does.

Knows you better because it can acquire more knowledge and data points about you. Which kind of bring me, so anyway bring this around to this way. So Katie when you’re sitting there typing a text message on your phone and it auto corrects your text message or gives you a suggestion of what your next couple of words would be, that is an AI generated tool, right?

That’s creating, that’s correct. Those auto corrections and that, and those word suggestions. So one of, one of the terms in here, especially around a large language model, is that it quote unquote scrubs the internet for mm-hmm. Data points or for what are called data sets out of which it does its work.

It does. Its guessing as to, you know, how do you finish Twinkle Twinkle little spa star? Talk a little bit about what it means for these tools to quote unquote scrub information from the internet so that it, it gets smarter that way. What does that mean to scrub the internet?

[00:17:07] Dr. Katie Frugé: Yeah, it, that’s one of the more controversial parts to this as well, because you have these programs that are digging into areas where people did not give consent, right?

That maybe they posted something online intended for a very specific audience with no intention of allowing an algorithm than to go in. Study it and now it knows me and it’s targeting me to manipulate me maybe, or to provide something that it thinks, you know, it might, I might want. And so that’s what it’s really doing is it’s, it’s, it’s going onto all these available resources, sometimes going through paywalls.

I even yesterday I was able to get chat JPT to get behind a paywall, just using different prompts just to see if I could Wow. And so there’s some securities concerns with that as well of, you know, these programs that are growing in their ability to you know, we can say manipulate me. You could say, read me better.

You could, you know what, pick your poison. But they’re, they’re looking at all the different information and that’s how they’re quote unquote learning. And that’s where a lot of the transparency and. Concerns that people have there is the lack of transparency. How are they getting access to this?

Are people giving consent to this information? What information are they being trained on? We don’t know the answers to a lot of that. This is just a kind of a fun side anecdote, but the reason TikTok is so popular is because of the algorithms. They are uniquely good at tailoring and scrubbing and learning its user really fast, and being able to put con customized content in front of you very quickly.

And their algorithm is the kind of the secret sauce that makes it successful. And so that’s the big back and forth with do we sell? Are we gonna ban it? And all those things. The apparent company didn’t wanna sell the algorithms that would go along with the app itself. Pla TikTok. And so that’s, that’s what we’re talking about when you say scrub the internet and things like that.

It’s, it’s searching through certain things to be able to create a better product, but you could also say to be able to manipulate you more effectively.

[00:19:03] Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm. Yeah. So if you’ve ever had that experience, like my wife and I did a couple of days ago where you ask your computer or you ask your phone on the internet to tell you about a certain product or a certain place, and then all of a sudden you start getting emails.

That sounds, sounds, look, oh yeah, we’ve all had

[00:19:22] Dr. Katie Frugé: that.

[00:19:23] Dr. Mark Turman: If you, if you’ve ever had that experience, that’s because there was an algorithm that scrubbed the internet based off of your question or your search, or your purchase. Mm-hmm. And then started feeding you a lot more stuff in that same idea or category.

That’s, that’s what this is doing. Right?

[00:19:40] Dr. Katie Frugé: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:19:41] Dr. Mark Turman: Katie, how is that, so go a little bit further into the mysterious part of this, even further, which is, so you’ve got things like chat, GBT and other large language models. But every now and then you’ll, in these conversations, hear this term generative ai.

And that automatically starts feeling like a step further and a step deeper into the activity of artificial intelligence. I. Give us another kindergarten definition of generative AI as being distinctive from quote unquote normal ai.

[00:20:14] Dr. Katie Frugé: Yeah, I think generative ai, I think it’s even in the name itself, it’s generating, it’s able to create new content.

That’s your chat. GPT, maybe you’re gonna use Gemini or I love Claude. That’s the anthropic version. It’s it’s chat, it’s the chat bots, it’s content creation. It can create code. My daughter likes to use Dolly to create AI art, things like that. It’s creating these new things, so it’s generating within a specific, you know, data set that it’s been trained within.

So it’s gonna be language or it’s gonna be art, it’s gonna, but it’s been trained on a certain thing. And within the lanes that it’s programmer created, it, it can continue to create new things over and over again. Versus the traditional ai that’s gonna be more like. Patterns, making predictions and automating decisions.

It could be as simple as a spam filter. It’s the algorithms on Netflix or Amazon that gives you those programs. Like we said, when Amazon makes that recommendation to you, that’s, that’s more of the normal ai. It’s just kind of looking through something and saying, what’s, you know, how can I predict this in front of you?

Versus the generative ai, which is thinking ahead saying, if you like this, I’m gonna go and take you over to this next level now too. So it’s generating new things versus the normal ai, which is more pattern automating.

[00:21:28] Dr. Mark Turman: Okay. So we might, we might say that that’s like a higher level of thinking when, when you get to generative ai.

[00:21:35] Dr. Katie Frugé: So I actually asked chat, GPT how it would define this in preparation for this. And here here’s how it defined itself. It said generative AI creates something new. Traditional AI analyzes or classifies existing data.

[00:21:50] Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm. Okay, great. Yeah, and

[00:21:52] Dr. Katie Frugé: then it go, it went a little bit further. This is so impressive.

It said generative AI is like an artist, traditional AI is like a judge. So there you go. Oh wow.

[00:21:59] Dr. Mark Turman: Okay. Yeah. That very helpful metaphor for sure. Yeah. That’s really, really helpful and gives us a, a better way of framing this conversation. I want go back to what part of what you just said in a moment as a comment, which is based on its training, which leads to the question in my mind of who is training ai?

[00:22:18] Dr. Katie Frugé: I love that question

[00:22:19] Dr. Mark Turman: and tell me if I’m on the right track here. So there are software developers. There are for lack of a better term, computer nerds somewhere in the word world working for these companies. And they are creating what we generally term as an algorithm that then tells this software.

Like in, if it’s a judge, it tells it where to go look for information and what kind of information it should be looking for. Yes. And if it was in the generative area, it would be an algorithm telling that that program, that computer program to go and create things in these categories or in these boundaries.

Am I, am I thinking about that in terms of the initial. Trainer is a human being that is creating Yes. A computer program algorithm to direct these processes.

[00:23:12] Dr. Katie Frugé: Absolutely. And that’s one of the biggest challenges I think we’re we face from an ethical perspective is that there’s, there’s a human element to this that just cannot be overlooked and it is imposing.

Even unknowingly biases beliefs, value systems and things like that. If you remember, I think it was last summer Google got in a lot of trouble because their, their Gemini. I don’t think it was Gemini at the time. Maybe it was barred. I don’t remember when they changed it, but it was, it got in all sorts of trouble because it was creating all these wonky outputs be it were, it made the founding Fathers of America ethnically diverse or something like that.

Mm-hmm. It wouldn’t give value systems it wouldn’t say that Hitler was worse than Elon Musk. And if you asked for a job description of a lobbyist for oil and gas, it lectured you on why oil and gas is bad and stuff like that. Just bizarre things. Yeah. And people were really bothered by that because their, the argument was, look, this is exposing some very deep biases that were put into this program, and this is exposing at a really ridiculous level.

What I think happens subtly all the time where the programmers. Maybe unknown value systems are getting put into these systems and, and it’s gonna input or impact what happens when you say Twinkle twinkle Little star. Another example, I think that helps highlight this, keeping it at the kindergartner level.

I am I’m a mom and I make sandwiches all the time, and our family regularly makes you know, different types of sandwiches with peanut butter as and as a part of it. So normally when you hear the word peanut butter, you are gonna say peanut butter and jelly, right? Mm-hmm. Because that’s the most common, that’s the value system.

My family have a just my family has a different value system. My kids don’t have peanut butter and jelly. They love peanut butter and honey, and that is their favorite thing. I know it’s kind of weird. Yeah. But, but because of the value system, if you ask my 5-year-old, what kind of sandwich is it? She would say peanut butter and.

Honey versus, you know, somebody else who would say jelly. That’s a simple definition of it, but that’s what I’m talking about, where your own val values are going to impact what the training is gonna give for the next predictive word. You can even expand that out a little bit more. I grew up in a foam home with five other kids.

I’d five. Five brothers and sisters, and my mom made a dollar stretch really far. And so we didn’t have peanut butter and jelly or peanut butter. We had peanut butter and banana. Okay. That’s right. So that’s what I had as a snack growing up. So there’s just multiple different value systems that are going to impact these predictive models.

And at the very least. I think there should be transparency in what’s the constitution, what value systems are getting put in. And that’s one of the biggest challenges when we’re talking about regulations and things like that, is that we don’t have, that, we don’t have a unified agreement on what ethical AI even is.

What standards are we going to hold these companies to? What standards, you know, do we say we’re not gonna go past this? If you asked an LLM from that was developed in China versus one in Silicon Valley, they’re gonna have very different definitions if you asked what happened in Tmn Square. And so those are the real world implications where you almost can start seeing people living with their own realities.

You know, that based on what they’re consuming, based on the value system that’s getting embedded by a human into a computer program.

[00:26:29] Dr. Mark Turman: Right, and just, yeah, so much to think about because there’s no way that a, a single human being doesn’t have those biases and those life experiences and that type of thing, and there’s no way that that doesn’t come into the work and the training that they’re giving to these algorithms.

And so that is a, a massive area. Which kind of brings me around to this question I wanted to ask, which is, from your perspective, Katie, is AI dangerous and in what sense is it dangerous? What are there other ethical concerns other than the ones that you just laid out that we need to be thinking about and praying about and aware of?

[00:27:07] Dr. Katie Frugé: It’s a great question. And the funny thing is, we were talking before we started recording that question really depends on who you ask, depending on is it dangerous or not? There is a very funny term that’s kind of getting floated around in the tech world right now called P Doom, which is your probability of existential threat for artificial intelligence.

What, to what level do you think that, you know, artificial intelligence is an existential threat to humanity? And so if somebody’s p doom, if it’s really high, it means yes, I think we’re all doomed and the terminator’s coming next year. Hmm. Or if below P dm, it’s like, it’s not that big of a deal.

It just means series of basically everybody’s gonna have a personal assistant in the, in the future. There’s definitely a conversation to be had depending on who you ask, depending on what their P doom is and things like that. Think everybody agrees. Yes. This is a serious issue that we need to think carefully about.

For how many thousands of years humans have been the most intelligent creature walking on the earth? Mountain gorillas exist. They’re more powerful than us, but because we have higher intelligence, they live at the mercy of the humans surrounding them in some ways. Mm-hmm.

[00:28:12] Dr. Mark Turman: Right.

[00:28:13] Dr. Katie Frugé: We are looking at a possibility of a world where we are no longer the most intelligent creature thing being, I’m not sure the right word for it, but we’re looking at a hypothetical situation where there will be a higher intelligence on the planet and the implications of that.

Do we turn into the mountain grills? We don’t know. That would be a high P doom, but those are the issues at big level. That’s the meta big concern is what do we do with that? I think that there’s other concerns as well. Just going back to the, the value systems and things like that, I, I have a deep concern that we need to be very clear and hold fast to a, a robust understanding of the image of God and what does it mean to be human, especially in light of this conversation about artificial intelligence.

If humans are no longer the most intelligent being on the planet, does that impact what it means to be human? I don’t think it does, but I think we need to have a very clear and firm grasp on humanity because we’re gonna see those lines starting to get really blurred. And so that’s, that’s for me as a Christian, one of my bigger concerns is just having a healthy anthropology and understanding of what it means to be human itself and how are we going to navigate these challenges.

When, when those waters start to get a little bit muddied, what if we have a robot who can think for himself? I think there was a movie with Robin Williams years ago where he was a robot that slowly over a period of years turned into a human or something like that. Mm-hmm. I’ll have to look that up.

But I mean, that’s not a dystopian possibility anymore. So what do we do if you have a robot that has artificial or even artificial general intelligence that starts taking on human form and things like that? So those are, go ahead.

[00:29:59] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. It, it just reminds me a movie of a number of years ago, I think, called Eagle Eye I believe was in the same genre of computers becoming smarter than us.

And Okay. I’m, I’m, I’m gonna just go full disclosure and tell you, Katie, I’m gonna throw you a curve ball, okay? Oh,

[00:30:14] Dr. Katie Frugé: no. Okay.

[00:30:14] Dr. Mark Turman: And here’s my curve ball. Just listen to you promised no

[00:30:16] Dr. Katie Frugé: curve balls. Yeah,

[00:30:17] Dr. Mark Turman: just listen to you talk about gorillas, that type of thing. I, I just started thinking to myself, what Bible passenger story might, in some way inform here.

And I’m just like, something about the Tower of Babel just starts jumping up in my brain at this point. Oh yes. So is is there anything about the Tower of Babel that seems to apply here in your mind?

[00:30:40] Dr. Katie Frugé: Let’s not get too prideful and have a you know, I, I would not limit God in intervening in some level.

It’s, you know, I, I do worry that there will even be false religions that could start popping up if you’ve got a, if you’ve got a, you know, a, a, a program that’s claiming to be God and have secret information. And I just think the Bible shows that God doesn’t take too kindly when people start claiming his territory.

And so I do think that there would be a spiritual element of. You know, I don’t, I don’t, I’m, I’m not a prophet and, and I don’t wanna pretend like I, I know the future. But there definitely does feel like there’s a kind of a Babel type situation where we’re kind of, are we, are we building our own towers?

Trying to become God ourselves?

[00:31:26] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Trying to, trying to make a name for ourselves, as it says about the people in the Tower of Bowel. But it just, you know, ’cause some of the things I’ve been reading and listening to recently, there’s a, there’s a big conversation in the AI world about opportunity versus risk, as you said even, even this terminology of a p doom scale almost feels flippant when I heard a few people talking about it that oh yeah, this could be the end of the world or the end of humanity, but we know that’s just a factor that we have here.

It just, it almost sounded flippant to me. Mm-hmm. But there’s a big conversation going on of, Hey, this is. There’s a lot of people, or, or there are at least some people I should say in this conversation who say, this is what we were always destined to be able to do. And that this is just human beings being at their best and being able to invent and create technologies that make life better.

Yeah. And then there’s a whole other group of people who are saying, I don’t know about that. They, you know, we sometimes have this tendency as we somewhat have learned with social media of if we can do it, we should, or we of course have to do it. Without really thinking about important ethical questions and big considerations.

We I think we’ve learned and continue to learn big lessons in the social media world about unintended consequences. And some people are raising those kinds of flags saying, Hey, we need to slow down. Yes. And we need to ask very deep and profound questions about, as you said, about what it means to be a human being and how this could change or affect our lives in detrimental ways.

And so that’s, obviously, as Christians, that’s one of the things we want to bring into this conversation is, Hey, we really need to ask the best questions we can, knowing that we can never know all of the implications of how these technologies are impacting our lives and that type of thing, but we at least ought to try.

And keep a framework in there. And that, that, so that leads me to this next question, which is who is from what you can see right now, this is very much an evolving thing, but who is it that you see might be monitoring slash possibly regulating the, the development and, and proliferation of ai? I listened to a podcast a couple of days ago in which one of the guys that is the CEO of one of the major companies in this environment said, oh, we’ll tell you.

Yeah. That’s what I was gonna, I, I thought you’re going to tell me when your invention is potentially going to be destructive to my life, even though you’re. Possibly making millions or billions of dollars, but I should trust you to tell me when it’s going to be bad.

[00:34:20] Dr. Katie Frugé: Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, it’s definitely a billions I think too, on there, just to be clear, like these, we are profits for a lot of these people.

That’s one of the big concerns, to be honest. Mark I. It’s not clear who’s regulating this. The US government has come in to try to do some it took 15 years for the first congressional hearing after social media became available to the public for them to call the CEOs in and ask them questions.

Within six months of chat, GPT being available to the public, they were having them come in and give testimony. So I do think that the US government is paying attention, which is good. We’re not regulating necessarily, and there’s some tension even within. The groups right now of who, who is gonna set the, the lines and, you know, what are the boundaries gonna be?

The companies wanna self-regulate for, by and large you do have some whistleblowers who are saying, these people are bending their own rules. You know, they’ve, they say that they have these rules and then they go and bend them, and there’s no third party agency or group that is kind of the watchdog that would call you out for something like that.

And so that’s one area that I do think that we’re still early enough in the game that this is, this is an area where we need to be involved. Writing our legislators, writing our, our, our elected officials saying we want better transparency and regulations on these things, that we see the opportunity and the potential that this thing has.

But we also see the dangers and we think people need accountability. And so we’re asking, you know, this impacts all of our lives. And so we want there to be some meaningful guardrails put on this.

[00:35:48] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, I think that’s exactly the way it needs to be. And, and there all are, are already lawsuits When chat GBT came out.

You know, there are newspapers like the New York Times and others that immediately started filing, um mm-hmm. Lawsuits relative to copyright infringement, that type of thing, because of what these large language models could do. That’s really just the tip of the iceberg of where this is going. And, and, and not to go too far down this road because there’s, there’s just so much that we could talk about, but Katie, if you look at AI as a tool.

I’ve heard significant leaders both in the local context of Dallas, where we live and, and in other places, particularly around concerns relative to medicine and AI and warfare and ai. Do you think that those things are likely to, to accelerate to the point where like you would be seeing potential treaties between governments relative to how AI is handled and how, you know, we, you, like we have we have the international criminal court, we have, you know, international statements even that have to do with what, what, what might be defined as just war or ethical war.

If you want to get into some of those very deep conversations, do you think aspects of AI will roll up to be on a scale that global.

[00:37:14] Dr. Katie Frugé: I think there definitely is the potential to, what I’m really seeing right now is kind of our own version of a, of a space race of who is going to control ai. That’s part of the big, you know, the arguments over chips and manufacturing.

There’s a huge push. Whoever, whatever country or nation is able to achieve what they call a GI, artificial general intelligence probably will control the game by and large. And so there’s a lot of concern over, I mean, it’s a very different world if China gets it before the US does or if we Russia gets it, or, you know, pick your country.

And so I think there’s a huge interest globally to all say, Hey, can we all get on the same page here and work together? Because of the oppor, especially more vulnerable countries, smaller countries there, there could be some impact that will really kind of. Even countries that are low tech will be impacted by whoever gets to a GI first.

And so I, I, that’s a definite concern and I think that’s why you see such a race right now and push, especially on the US front to try to get there before other countries. And so that’s why you see, you know, these. Countries and these big tech people that are trying to have a prominent role within even the current administration.

There’s actually a long game to that, and that’s why they’re there trying to advocate and do these things because there’s a vested interest that have your country be the first one at, at, at this race. So it’s kind of a, it’s a hard balance too, because they’re all saying, we need to slow down, we need to be careful.

We need to know what we’re doing. But also we don’t wanna be the second one there, so we wanna be the first one there.

[00:38:46] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. We don’t wanna be second. We certainly don’t wanna be fifth and right. But there, you know, and, and we all know or we should know from our history, I guess I would say, say that there’s a very thin line at times between a space race and an arms race.

A very thin line and so there are real concerns there. Katie, let me see if I can bring this back a little bit round to where maybe you and I are a little bit more comfortable, which is Okay. The potential benefit of AI related to ministry, local church ministry, how pastors do their work, how children’s ministers do their work, how a Sunday school teacher goes about their lesson for the coming Sunday.

What are some of the things you’re seeing that might be exciting for us as believers that serve and participate in church life and that type of thing. And also try to be a blessing to the communities in which we live. Where do you see some real opportunity for us in this?

[00:39:43] Dr. Katie Frugé: I, I love that you asked that because there are opportunities too.

I don’t wanna seem like the sky is falling here. And so going from the, the dark tight, or the heavier side to the slider side is great. Even using your own example earlier, how Denison uses Gemini to be able to be more effective and efficient and speedy in some of the work. I think of the benefits for especially these mid to small-sized churches that maybe only have a few paid staff.

You could really see AI being able to take a tremendous level of that administrative work. Maybe you can’t afford to have a full-time admin, or you can’t afford to, you know, be able to do all these things. You’re gonna be able to see AI really even able to do it right now. But even more so in the coming years as you have this new development called agents that you can assign a task and it’s like having a digital employee for you know.

Pennies for what you would pay a, a human to do. And they’ll be more or less very effective. You can give them assignments to even plan the community outreach event. And they know they can go ahead and make the reservations, call the places, make all the, all the detail work so that you can focus on that relationship gospel building opportunities.

And so they’ll be able to help partner alongside the churches, especially churches that are resource scarce or need some extra volunteer support or things like that. I think AI’s got some great opportunity there to be able to enhance your ministry so that you can focus more on that gospel relationships that you’re trying to cultivate and grow within your church community and kind of let the AI take some of the other boring work.

None of us like doing receipts and expense reports, right? And so let’s let AI go and take that and so we can kind of focus on some of the other things. And then also you can train these LLMs, these large language models. You can I, I’ve met pastors who have their favorite theologians and their favorite resources and have built their own kind of sub chatbot and use it for sermon preparation for research to be able to do that.

And it’s all trained on the virtue system or the value system that that pastor has kind of put into it so he can trust it and know that, you know, this is, I’m getting information from, you know, BK or, you know, Bart who pick, pick your theologian. And so you can utilize that as well as a more effective research tool to be able to do preparation for, you know, writing anything like that.

I find it incredibly helpful to get through writer’s block. I’ve used that a couple of times. If I’m in the process and I just can’t get through something, I’ll share with the large language model what I’m doing and offer and, and have it offer suggestions. And I, I found it to be very helpful for that.

Different language models have different. Again, I don’t like using these words, but personalities, if you’ll, that they help. It’s not a personality, but it’s the, you know, it’s the flavor that the programmer gave it. I, we wanna say something like that. And some of ’em, I think Claude from Anthropic is just, I love the tone and the way it, it gets me better, I would guess I could say.

And, and I found it it to be a helpful aid in my writing project. Sometimes not to write for me, but to enhance what I’m doing.

[00:42:43] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And that’s, that, that is a very nuanced conversation. Yes. That is developing, especially on the creative side of anything. You know, whether it’s writing a story, writing a sermon, writing a song, writing a poem, creating a drawing.

There’s a big conversation here about. The, the legitimacy or not legitimacy of AI tools. But, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of opportunity. I just, the idea as you were talking about, wait a minute, I could train my own robot to help me. Mm-hmm. And I could train it on my values. I could train it on, you know, my theologians, you know, many of us love the work of John Stot.

He, you know, you could say, Hey, AI tell me everything that John Stot thinks or wrote about this particular doctrine or topic.

[00:43:32] Dr. Katie Frugé: Exactly.

[00:43:33] Dr. Mark Turman: And I’m building my case for my sermon and that type of thing. And there’s ways that you can quote, quote, unquote, control it by training your own sub. Version of AI to help you in that way.

Which, let me I bring you around to this. So I asked Gemini, the, the large language model, Gemini. We asked it this question. We wanted to know what it would tell us about how ai, here’s the, here’s the prompt. When you’re dealing with ai, some of these models, you give it a prompt or a question.

Here’s the prompt that we gave Gemini. What cautions, if any, would you have for a Christian minister wishing to use AI in their ministry? Research, writing and crafting responses to church members? Members? It created a five page bullet point answer around four primary concerns. Let me just give them to you.

Theological concerns. Pastoral relational concerns, ethical, practical concerns, and spiritual discernment and wisdom. And then it broke it down even further. It, it could be its own presentation, and it took, it took around 30 seconds for it to produce all of that information but is enormously helpful in the best sense.

Sure. But I, I, I’m a little bit concerned. I know other people are concerned. We’ve, we’ve seen Katie a lot of stories, particularly in the last five years around plagiarism, around colleges and universities being very concerned that their students are just letting things like Gemini and other chatbots write their their papers for their classes.

What sense of of boundary would you want like church leaders to be thinking about right now? I know I was with some people from lifeway, the publishing arm of many of the churches that we deal with. They kind of have a lockdown policy when it comes to writing new material that they would publish.

When it comes to the use of ai, any thought that you have on kind of a boundary, particularly on the creative side or the ministry side, that, that Christians need to think about?

[00:45:52] Dr. Katie Frugé: Yeah, I have three kind of principles that I follow myself, and I try to hold them loosely knowing that, you know, depending on the Lord for wisdom, if I ever need to add more or less.

But this is more or less my, my guidance right now. Number one, I use AI to be a support, not to be synthetic. So that means everything originates with me, that I’m not allowing AI to generate synthetic things that aren’t authentic to what the Lord has given me, which is a brain that can think, that can create things.

And as I pray that the Lord give me wisdom as a content creator, as I’m putting out information to people I wanna make sure that I’m utilizing AI as a support. I’ve heard people talk about it as, think about it as a, you know, a, a research assistant or something like that. So you can go tell it.

Go, go get this information, help me do this, but I’m not going to let it write it for me and synthetically. Present something that’s not authentic to me. That’s bearing false witness also, at the end of the day, right? That it’s presenting something that’s not mine, that I’m claiming to be authentic to me.

So it’s gonna be a support, not a synthetic use for me. And then similar, but just kind of building on that, I, I think we should use it as a resource. Not so much as just our primary research arm. AI can hallucinate. And what that is, is it’s basically where it doesn’t know the answer, so it just makes it up and we have no idea why it does that.

I catch AI hallucinating. All the time. And so I think, at least for right now I, I don’t think it, AI should be completely utilized only for re you’ve gotta use your brain at the end of the day. Okay. That we can’t

[00:47:27] Dr. Mark Turman: So you’re telling me that AI has a pride problem?

[00:47:30] Dr. Katie Frugé: It does.

[00:47:31] Dr. Mark Turman: It never wants to, it just like human beings.

It never wants to stop, pause, and say, sorry. I don’t know.

[00:47:37] Dr. Katie Frugé: I don’t know. It doesn’t, and it’s so funny, I, I, I should send you screenshots. We could put in the show notes or something of where I’ve, I literally will just say, you just made that up, didn’t you? And it just, I’m sorry. Yes, I did. It looks, do it.

And it’s, it’s pretty humorous when you catch it doing that, but because of the possibility of hallucination and because we don’t know. Why the machines hallucinate sometimes. I just think it, you know, consider it a good resource. Let it, you know, help be a good support for the work you’re doing.

But it should not be your primary research arm, right? That there’s Okay. Books. Yeah. There’s other things out there that we wanna cross reference just because it came out of, you know, chat GPT. Don’t take it for granted that it’s the gospel truth.

[00:48:22] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. You need, you need to check it. Number one, you need to check it.

And just, just

[00:48:27] Dr. Katie Frugé: I would check my research assistant to make sure they did good research. You need to make sure this right. And

[00:48:32] Dr. Mark Turman: it’s, and, and, and even just, just listening to you talk about that, it just kind of blows my mind that we would say that this machine is hallucinating again, the word that’s an anthropological term, right?

Mm-hmm. We like no humans hallucinate. Animals don’t hallucinate, and computers certainly don’t hallucinate. But here we are talking about computers hallucinating.

[00:48:58] Dr. Katie Frugé: It’s the words, we’ve got it. It’s so funny. But yeah. But to those that, so support, you know, resource, and then also I just think it’s important to have your own awareness of what your boundaries and benefits are gonna be for ai.

Where do you see it being helpful and where do you see it being a hindrance to ministry and really being intentional and making those decisions and sticking to it, I think is, IM, some of times I think the evils that we do or the, the problems aren’t done intentionally. It’s stunned because we just didn’t, Nope, somebody didn’t think about it or somebody just didn’t think to ask the question.

And so even just being aware of what your boundaries are gonna be for ai and what benefits do you think that are appropriate, I think would go far.

[00:49:42] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And some of those things that you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation about what does it really mean to be human, to be incarnation, um mm-hmm.

To be relational. Those are things that are distinctive to human beings. And just that idea of as a someone that’s serving others in ministry from a, a Christian motivated perspective of that idea of I could call this person or text this person, which one of these would be better? A call would probably be better.

I know that this is going on in somebody’s life. I could call them or I could go see them. Which one would be more meaningful? Probably going to see them. Yeah. And working through thought process, thought process like that, that really make a difference in the way ministry actually happens because it’s the way we help people, the way we serve people, the way we disciple people is life, on life, not machine, on machine or yes.

You know, technology to technology or technology to human being. Katie, what would you say to somebody who just bumped into you in the elevator and said, Katie, I don’t know anything. Where do I start learning about AI and how to use it?

[00:50:52] Dr. Katie Frugé: It really kind of depends on how you like consuming information, right?

So a couple of different resources that you could go to. The Washington Post has a tech brief that’s super easy to read and they just send that out regularly. If you are just wanna read a news article or something like that just to kind of get updated. I love, there’s a podcast called Hard Fork and it’s produced by the New York Times.

Those guys do a great job explaining the technology of the day in a very understandable, digestible way. They’re brilliant reporters and they understand at a very high level what’s going on with ai, but explain it in a, in a easy to follow under way. And then also I wanted to plug real quick if we wanted to go into more of a, philosophical conversation about humanity and what does it mean to be human? And how does that intersect intersect with artificial intelligence? I, I would plug the book The Artifice of Intelligence by Noreen Hertz Field and Ted Peters. I read that earlier this year, and it was a really beautiful intersection between trying to understand a Christian anthropological understanding of, of humanity and how that, how artificial intelligence is going to challenge us to think deeper about it.

[00:52:00] Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm. Yeah. And we’ll include all of those things in the show notes. And Kay, also, I mentioned, wanted to call this out earlier, but you had recommended I look at the website, AI and Faith.

[00:52:10] Dr. Katie Frugé: Oh yes. AI and Faith. Mm-hmm.

[00:52:11] Dr. Mark Turman: Talk about that website for a moment.

[00:52:14] Dr. Katie Frugé: It’s a great, it’s a, it, I believe it is interfaith, isn’t it?

It’s, it’s not just Christianity. But it’s faith, faith leaders across a whole spectrum of religions that all kind of agree saying, we believe that there’s a space for us to speak into this issue. That there’s important issues that, you know, impact all of us. And yeah, it’s a, it’s a e ecumenical group of different, right?

Mm-hmm. Faith groups all talking about different, different issues related to ai. Some of them use AI to write stories and share their stories with that. And so it’s a really great resource, especially for faith leaders who wanna see what other conversations might be happening in that, the realm of artificial intelligence and faith.

[00:52:56] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And, and a, a great opportunity for us as the church, both individually and collectively. There is a role for us to be, I mean, we desire the flourishing of our communities as the Bible would teach us to do the promotion of biblical righteousness in every way. And, and a part of that is something of what I might call a prophetic role or a being the conscience of Yes of our communities.

I know part of your work has to do with speaking biblical truth into places of power, be that in government legislation, that type of thing. But that’s every Christian’s role is to say, wait a minute. What does the Bible and the Holy Spirit of God say about these things? And just because we as human beings sometimes can do something, it doesn’t mean we should do it or we should do it in a certain way.

And that’s a role in a place that we need to hold out and stake. Claim to I think this website, AI and Faith is an expression of that across a very broad understanding of faith, but is still something that can be useful to us. Katie, are there, are there one or two or even three names in this world where you say, okay, if this person’s talking about ai, I want to hear what they say?

Some people would say of course you gotta listen to Elon Musk, or you’ll hear names like Sam Altman. Yeah, the guy I was referring to earlier is the chairman, CEO, founder of Anthropic named Dorio a Modi, I believe. Is the way you say his name. Are those names or other, are there other names like, Hey, if this guy’s talking about it, I want to know what he is saying about it.

[00:54:31] Dr. Katie Frugé: I, I, I, I love all the ones you just listed on there, particularly Sam Altman is an interesting figure to follow. He and Elon Musk have crossed paths several times over the past decade or more, I would say. And even last year there was some funny back and forth with what was happening over there and some of his work at OpenAI.

Yeah, Sam Waltman is an interesting one. And again, that’s another conversation where the issue of integrity legislation and transparency he has a very large voice in that. And yeah, it’s interesting to hear what he has to say sometimes.

[00:55:05] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And, and just tell you that it’s, it’s important to, to know these voices.

And as somebody who is, now, I guess in the fall season of my life at 60 years old I would just say to those listening to our podcast, get ready for a lot of young faces and voices because a lot of this technology is coming out of the generations that are behind us and that are emerging and very much our kids and certainly our grandkids.

If you’re a grandparent like I am, this is going to be a significant aspect of their world on a scale larger than what other things have have been in our world and have become you normal to our lives. Katie, I don’t, I I know we’ve gone a little bit long here, but I just wanted to see if you could give us a metaphor because I, I’ve been thinking through this, have asked people about this.

Thomas Friedman wrote in one of his books a couple of years ago that, the advent and arrival of cloud computing, which is a part of this conversation as well, which is the ability for computers to gather, store and retrieve information very rapidly on a very large scale that makes the internet possible, that makes the way you use your cell phone right now possible.

He likened that to man’s discovery of fire. So people talk about things like the Gutenberg press being in that way. They talk about the internet that way. Sometimes they talk about cell phones that way. Do you think that AI is like unto the invention of the wheel, the discovery of fire the arrival of the television or is it closer to the phenomenon?

Previously known as Y 2K. If you were trying, if you were trying to align this in some way, if you don’t know what Y 2K is, you just need to go look that up and ask AI to explain it to you. How, what kind of a frame would you put this in right now?

[00:57:07] Dr. Katie Frugé: I appreciate that and, and I do just have to give a shout out to my mom because we definitely filled our tubs with water on December 31st, 1999.

And I think she still has tubs with like grain that she was going to use for yes, making bread. So anyways, I appreciate the Y 2K reference. I honestly, I’m gonna, I’m gonna make this, I’m gonna call it fire. It’s going to have the potential to enhance and make things a lot easier for a lot of people, but it’s not gonna be without danger as well.

That there’s significant possibilities of it being used for good and for for evil. So that’s, that’s, yeah, that’s what I’m gonna go with.

[00:57:47] Dr. Mark Turman: Okay. And that’s, that’s an important idea and, and the, the way to think about it is, is that something like fire or the wheel, or even the Gutenberg press it so substantially changes the way that we experience and engage in life.

That’s that’s where those kind of hu huge pivot points come in our world and mm-hmm. And there’s a lot to think about, and a lot we just won’t know in some ways until we get further into it and, and we are going to make some mistakes. There’s no question that there’s going to be some there’ll be some bad actors, as there always is when you have tools and technologies like this.

And we don’t know what those will be, but they, there the potential of good particularly in the research of medicine and the, the diagnosis and, and treatment of diseases, that type of thing. What, what would it mean? What would we say if AI was actually. God’s gift and God’s path for overcoming cancer.

Yeah. How would you know we, and

[00:58:45] Dr. Katie Frugé: can I add another one? Yeah, sure. That is huge. Bible translations. My brother works Yeah. For a Bible translation company. And AI has been a game changer. We may be hundreds of years ahead of schedule because of some of the work that AI’s gonna be able to accomplish.

[00:59:01] Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. You and you think about Wow. Every person in the world being able to have the Bible in their own heart. Native language. Yes. In a matter of a, a decade or two, maybe rather than a few centuries. That’s, that’s just phenomenal. Yeah. Just absolutely phenomenal. So more to come, more to watch. Yeah.

We’ll check back in with you as you learn more and we’ll just see if we can keep following this conversation in every good way. Wanna thank you Katie. Always a pleasure to get to have a talk with you about things and to be a partner with you and with the folks at Texas Baptist. Wanna thank our audience for listening with us and staying a part of this.

We’ll bring you more at Denison Forum. We’re planning a series of ongoing conversations about AI as it continues to develop, to try to equip you to be up to speed and to be a part of what God’s doing in this way. And again, thank you for being a part of our conversation with us today. If it’s been helpful, rate review us and share this with others as well, and we’ll see you next time on the Denison Forum Podcast.

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Astronauts return, Democrat party turmoil, JFK files, & March Madness | Ep. 11 | Denison Forum

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Join Conner Jones and Micah Tomasella on Culture Brief as they break down the week’s biggest headlines through a Christian lens. This week they discuss the newly released JFK files and the insights they may reveal, the extended mission of astronauts who were stranded for nine months aboard the ISS, the ongoing turmoil within the Democratic Party, the latest developments in the Russia-Ukraine peace talks, and wrap up with March Madness predictions and a related basketball hot take. And the guys offer eternal perspective and biblical wisdom for maintaining spiritual peace in tumultuous times.

Topics

(00:16): Breaking news: JFK files released
(00:49): Astronauts’ unexpected nine-month mission
(01:19): Russia-Ukraine peace talks update
(03:06): Astronauts’ return: Challenges and triumphs
(13:58): Democratic party in turmoil
(24:18): Democratic party’s internal struggles
(30:52): Israel-Gaza conflict update
(33:02): JFK files released
(36:51): March Madness excitement
(38:50): College Basketball vs. NBA
(41:05): Listener engagement and conclusion

Resources

About Micah Tomasella

About Conner Jones

About Denison Forum

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

NOTE: This transcript was AI-generated and has not been fully edited.

[00:00:00] Conner Jones: Hi, I’m Connor Jones.

[00:00:03] Micah Tomasella: Hi, I’m Micah Tomasella.

[00:00:03] Conner Jones: And this is Culture Brief. A Denison Forum podcast where we navigate the constant stream of top stories in news, politics, sports, pop culture, technology, basically everything happening in culture, and we’re doing it all from a Christian perspective. And Micah, it happened yesterday.

The JFK files, they finally came out, so maybe we need to discuss that in a little bit. I mean, what are you thinking?

[00:00:25] Micah Tomasella: Hey, man, I have not had the chance to read all 80, 000 pages yet, but I’m just kind of hoping some people who are fast readers Maybe the utilization of AI we can figure out what we didn’t know, but I haven’t seen a lot of Breaking news about this big bombshell. But anyway, we’ll talk about that

[00:00:45] Conner Jones: Good. Sweet. Yeah. We’ll, share some thoughts, but what else are we going to be talking about today, Micah?

[00:00:49] Micah Tomasella: Yeah. So we’re going to talk about astronauts returning after being stranded. An eight day mission turns into a nine month mission and they just crash landed back on earth, technically in the ocean.

This week, the Civil War and the Democratic Party not really seeming to have a unified strategy. We’re going to give you updates on the latest negotiations with Russia and Ukraine and the U. S. brokering those talks. Then we’re going to talk March Madness and so much more. So let’s jump into The Brief.

The Brief. All right. So before we jump into our first official story today, I want to kind of give a quick hit a quick overview and update on the Russia Ukraine peace talks and the ceasefire that they’re shooting for right now. So Trump and Putin had a more than two hour phone call on Tuesday and they laid out a possible path to the end of the war in Ukraine.

First 30 day ceasefire as well as technical negotiations on the implementation of a maritime ceasefire in the black sea, full ceasefire, and then permanent. Peace. So these negotiations will begin immediately in the Middle East. So there has been a framework agreed to specifically on Russia is going to stop attacking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure for the next 30 days.

And then the goal is, and the hope is, is that everybody will be able to come to the table and negotiate something further in that to actually be able to negotiate a full full ceasefire, not just on that one specific thing. So this story is ever evolving and we’ll give you some updates on this next week when more things come to light and more things are set in stone.

[00:02:18] Conner Jones: Yeah, for sure. Hopefully we do see a ceasefire come about. I think it’s going to be a step by step process. Stop shooting at these type of things like energy infrastructure. Then it’s going to move into like ports and technological sections of their countries. And so we’ll just see Zelensky is getting brought in to the conversations.

Now this goes back to what we talked about a few weeks ago. So the U. S. and Russia are kind of doing this on their own and without Ukraine in there. So the Ukrainians are hopeful to actually be a part of the conversations going forward. Yes.

[00:02:44] Micah Tomasella: Yes. I mean, they’re going to bring Ukraine in and then they’re going to bring the European Union in and NATO in.

And then, you know, obviously these middle Eastern countries as well. You know, the goal is, is to, to put all the pieces of the puzzle together to hopefully bring about a lasting peace. I mean, and that’s something. Definitely worth praying about for peace of what’s happening over there in the end to that war.

Okay, Connor. Let’s jump into our first official story. Astronauts returning home. So let me just explain to you what happened because I think we’ve all heard at least something about these astronauts. Barry Butch Wilmore and Sunita or Suni Williams. So their mission was extended beyond expectation with NASA.

So they have returned to earth. Yeah, that’s an understatement, right? They’ve returned to earth after an unplanned nine month stay aboard the. International Space Station, or ISS for you space nerds out there. They originally launched in June 2024 aboard Boeing Starliner for what was supposed to be an 8 day test flight.

Okay? An 8 day test flight. But technical issues with the spacecraft prolonged their mission indefinitely. They didn’t know when they were coming home. This unexpected delay forced the astronauts to adjust to an extended stay in space while awaiting a safe return plan. So We were hearing updates about this corner, you know, okay.

They were initially stranded. Okay. We’ll get them back in 30 days instead of eight days. Okay. We’ll get them back in 60 days, 90 days. And then before you know it, it’s a nine month stay. And it’s actually just kind of crazy to think about. There were definitely some difficulties for them, but just the foresight to Plan ahead like that, you know to to be up there for that long and to actually have the sustenance that you need and to Be able to to take what you thought if I was gonna take an eight day trip I might be like, okay, I’ll pack an extra pair of socks, you know what I mean?

But like

[00:04:40] Conner Jones: I’m not preparing for

[00:04:41] Micah Tomasella: nine months.

[00:04:43] Conner Jones: Yeah grabs grab some Klondike bars and just okay Yeah, you know we got to stay one extra night What’s the jingle for

[00:04:49] Micah Tomasella: Klondike? Connor, can you sing it? Do you remember? I actually genuinely have no idea. What would you do for a Klondike bar? Oh, yeah. You remember that?

Kind of. Anyway, what were you going to say? I don’t watch

[00:05:00] Conner Jones: commercials. That’s a different conversation. Did you interrupt

[00:05:03] Micah Tomasella: me or did I interrupt you? What happened there? I think. I’m

[00:05:05] Conner Jones: honestly not sure. What I was going to say is, yeah, I mean, they sort of had the foresight. They thought there’s a potential they could have to be there longer.

Because this was the first time this Boeing Aircraft or spacecraft was used. So there was a potential that something could go wrong They could get to the space station and for whatever reason the spacecraft would not be adequate to bring back to earth At least not with them on board because it did come back.

I think they brought the spacecraft back in like september Yeah, just without them because there was too much risk of it Essentially exploding on the return to earth So they knew there was potential. I don’t think they ever thought, Hey, this could end up being a whole pregnancy worth of staying in space.

First, second and third

[00:05:48] Micah Tomasella: trimester. Yeah, good, good good analogy there, Connor. So let me talk to you about the life that they had aboard the ISS aboard the International Space Station. So during their time on the ISS, Wilmore and Williams contributed to ongoing scientific research, station maintenance and other critical operations.

So if you’re worried about where our taxpayer dollars are going. you know, to NASA, they were up there working. Okay. They weren’t just sitting around floating around having a good time. They endured the physical toll of long duration space flight, including potential muscle atrophy, bone density loss, vision impairment, and fluid buildup in the head due to prolonged exposure to microgravity.

So this is like from my research, like What happens when you’re in space for a long time, right? And those are kind of the symptoms of what can happen. So despite these challenges, they remained in good spirits, adapting to the circumstances and appreciating the rare opportunity to experience. extended space flight and extended time in space.

But here’s a fun fact that I read this morning, actually, Connor, during their nine month trip, Wilmore and Williams orbited the earth 4, 576 times, and they traveled 120 million. One hundred and twenty one million miles total. So how’s that for a road trip, right? Yeah, I mean,

[00:07:04] Conner Jones: a road trip where you don’t even get to go outside.

I mean, you’re just

[00:07:06] Micah Tomasella: Stuck in the car the whole time. Yeah. So here’s, here’s their return journey and what happened. For the long awaited return, Wilmore and Williams were joined by NASA astronaut Nick Hague and then Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov. The crew departed the ISS aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule undocking at 1.

05 a. m. on March 18th and then they re entered Earth’s atmosphere and they safely splashed down off the coast of Florida at 5. 57 p. m. marking the successful completion of the mission. of their prolonged mission. You were telling me earlier, Connor, I didn’t see this part of the video. What happened when the pod landed in the ocean?

[00:07:44] Conner Jones: Man, these dolphins came up and just started like jumping up and down right around. It was cool. It was like a welcome back to earth type of thing. Like there were, there was just some dolphins. They were hanging out, you know? My goodness. Yeah. They said, Hey, welcome back.

[00:07:57] Micah Tomasella: Yep. So here’s, here’s what this means for future space flight.

You know, when a mission goes from. Eight days to nine months. That’s no small thing, right? So their extended stay highlights both the unpredictability of space travel and the resilience of astronauts in the face of, I don’t know, an unforeseen prolonged challenge there. It also talk, you know, it kind of underscores the importance of commercial partnerships.

Boeing and SpaceX playing crucial roles in crewed space missions, so working together as NASA and its partners continue developing spacecraft for future deep space exploration. Lessons from this mission will refine procedures for trips to the moon and Mars and beyond. Connor, what would your first reaction be if you knew?

That your eight day mission to space was going to turn into a whole lot longer, maybe nine months. What would your, what would your first reaction to that be?

[00:08:52] Conner Jones: Honestly, Micah, this sounds like my worst nightmare. I mean, I’m sure that these two were like, okay, you know, but they kept getting extended at first.

It was like, you guys are going to be there an extra week. They’re probably like, that’s fine. We’ve waited our whole lives to be in space. We’ll take the extra week, you know, and a lot of astronauts, they long for that time up in space. Good for them. Not me, man. I, this is my worst nightmare being. stuck on something so far away from home and just I would be just thinking about my family.

I would be thinking about my couch and my TV. Like, how do you, like how do you keep up with all the popular shows going on when you’re in space? You know, I don’t think I would do well, but I’m happy that they, you know, had good spirits all the time. They had the opportunity to have full on meltdowns.

This is what sci fi movies are made of where people get stuck in conditions like this. And then they like start to feel

[00:09:36] Micah Tomasella: claustrophobic and all that stuff. And I’m sure. That, you know, I mean, Connor, I, I feel the same way, like it, it would freak me out, but there’s, there’s a I mean, I’m sure whenever they kind of get their strength back and they acclimate back to life on literal planet earth, that there’s going to be a lot of interviews that they give, but we’re going to be able to gain more context of how was this, what was this like, how you feel and all that stuff.

So I’m definitely looking forward to that, but Dr. Oh, no, go ahead. I

[00:10:04] Conner Jones: was just saying maybe in the back of their head, they’re like. cha-Ching. Like they’re gonna get like book deals and documentaries and you know? Yes. I doubt that’s what came to their mind, but it’s probably gonna happen. Yes. They’re just gonna get more exposure from this.

[00:10:16] Micah Tomasella: I saw this article that was talking about how the astronauts aren’t gonna get like any bonus. or like overtime pay from NASA because they were just going to get paid their regular salary. And I was like, okay, I mean, maybe give him a little, you know, like a, like a little Christmas bonus early or something.

That’s right. Crack down on him. All right. So Dr. Jim Denison, who’s the co founder and the CEO of Denison ministries. He’s a cultural theologian, brilliant guy. Great guy. He compares the return of astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to our own journey through life and into eternity in one of his daily articles this week, you know, Connor, I read this daily article and it really struck me.

So I’m just going to kind of give an overview of what the daily article said and how this mission to space is unexpected journey can kind of apply to our lives. So just like the International Space Station isn’t They’re true home isn’t the astronauts true home. This world isn’t ours either. As Christians, we’re here for a short period of time, right?

But convincing people of an unseen eternity isn’t easy. Just like it would be tough to persuade someone born on the ISS that earth exists. So it’s this concept of you’re told that there is this eternity, but all you know, your reality is earth. So just like somebody born on the International Space Station, they can be told earth is real, but maybe they haven’t seen it.

And so Dr. Denison gives three reasons why faith in eternity makes sense, even beyond just saying eternity is real. Number one, Jesus came to earth and gave us real historical proof, verified proof outside of scripture. You know, you can stack it stories and stories high. The accounts of Jesus’s death, burial, but most importantly, his resurrection, appearing to his disciples, appearing to those 500 people, defeating death, defeating the grave.

So Jesus came and said, I came to give you life and give it to the fullest. He came and he said, That eternal life will only come through me. You will only come to the father, but by me. And he proved it by defeating death, by raising himself from the dead. And so when somebody pulls that off, we need to listen to their words.

And then secondly, the Holy spirit is still at work and he’s transforming lives. So us as believers taking the. the commission. Seriously. I think that sometimes we psych ourselves up or psych ourselves out about evangelism, but we need to make sure that we’re doing our job as believers to bring as many people to heaven with us as we can.

And it all starts with being open about your story. Here’s where I was. Here’s where I am here. Here was my desire. Here’s where my desire is now. This is what the world is telling us all to do, but this is what I believe that I’m called to do. And that is such a powerful way to evangelize. And then thirdly, living for eternity actually makes life better now.

gives you perspective now, gives you hope and peace and comfort and direction now, knowing that all of the trials and the beauty that we face while here on earth, it’s leading to something far greater eternity in heaven with Jesus. What are your thoughts on that Connor?

[00:13:28] Conner Jones: And that’s just good truth. It’s, it’s where our hope lies, right?

We know what lies on the other side. Yeah, it’s something that we cannot see, but we know that it’s real, we know that it’s true, and I’m so grateful for that. Yeah, thanks for that word, Micah. That’s, that’s good stuff. Yep. And you know, glad the astronauts are back, glad that we have a hope in heaven, knowing that that’s real, and just keeping the word going, the gospel going.

Yeah. That’s what we’re called to do, so thank you for that. Okay, let’s move into something that’s just kind of been taken DC by storm this week and that is yeah, man, the democrats are just lost at sea They are completely directionless, they don’t have a captain right now to guide them through the storm in the sea.

They are just in a world of hurt, and some people are calling it a democratic civil war within their own party. Which, to be clear, the Republicans have gone through this in the past themselves. In fact, over the last decade, it’s felt like a Republican civil war as the old school McCain Romney Republican Party.

Transferred into this kind of Trump driven MAGA Republican Party. So now it’s almost like it’s the Democrats turn and they are just in a world of hurt and it has gotten worse and worse seemingly every week since the 2024 election where they got beat pretty handedly and lost their majorities in the House and Senate and obviously the presidential election as well.

So all that to say, here’s what’s been happening last week. We talked about the government potentially shutting down. That was averted, which is, I think, a good thing. The government did not shut down at midnight on Friday, but that’s only because Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Came out and said he was going to vote to keep the government open and that opened the floodgates Yeah of the Democratic Party just coming out against him.

They turned on him They have been saying he’s a bad leader that he should never have done this He caved to the Trump administration and to the Republicans But really honestly Mike Johnson the Speaker of the House Kind of handed it off to him because they he was able to push through the bill keeping the government open in the house Just barely but he did And that was where people thought maybe it wouldn’t pass the house.

But when it passed the House, it became the Senate’s problem. And that is where Chuck Schumer had to step in and say what he was going to do. And he was kind of between a rock and a hard place. Because if he said, let’s shut the government down, then that also makes the Democrats look bad. They’re the ones who put the government in this position and shut it down.

And then that might harm the economy and all of that. But then his own party is we wanted to shut down because we don’t want Trump to have all the power specifically with those and everything that this bill allows to go on. You know, enough Senate Democrats did vote to keep it open. So it wasn’t just Schumer.

There were, I think, 8 other Democrats, maybe 9 others that stuck with him and voted to keep it open, and you know, now Democrats are saying this is going to further empower Trump and damage the party. A lot of them consider Schumer’s decision to be so heinous that they are questioning whether he should step down as their leader.

And he’s kind of the de facto leader of the party right now because they are just, they don’t have a real leader. And the Hill. Had an article saying that they are, you know, Schumer started this quote unquote civil war within the party Representative Jim McGovern who’s a Democratic congressman out of Massachusetts said he was extremely disappointed After he heard the news and he noted that it gives them the ability Elon Musk Specifically the ability to go through and continue to do expletive what he’s doing Yeah, so they’re just mad.

I mean, what are your initial thoughts there Micah?

[00:16:58] Micah Tomasella: Yeah. I mean, I think Chuck Schumer wouldn’t have come out because he made this statement and he said, we’re, we’re going to support this funding bill. I’m supporting this funding bill. He didn’t implicate anybody. And so right when he came out and said that Chuck Schumer has been doing this for a long time.

He’s got a lot of experience. So Chuck Schumer is not going to come out and make that statement without already having the vote secure. So whenever he came out and made that statement, I knew that he had at least 10 Democrats. In the Senate that we’re going to vote for this bill. But I mean, obviously, the Republicans were able to unite.

They have what a four seat majority in the House, which is tiny because there’s a lot more members of the House than there is the Senate. And it’s all about Mike Johnson’s ability to be able to unite the Republican vote around what they’re doing. So they were able to pass it through the house without any democratic support whatsoever, which is actually kind of rare, okay, to be able to have that type of unity within your party.

But you made such a good point earlier, Connor, when you said that it’s a truly, it’s weird to see this happen to the Democrats because that has been one of their biggest strong suits. They have been unified. They have been unified really since. Oh, wait, since Obama, you know what I mean? And then everything kind of has changed with the Republican Party and it’s been all this infighting within the Republican Party, but the Republican Party is pretty unified right now.

Now you could argue if they want to be or not, but they’re choosing to be right now. And it’s just interesting to see this happen within the Democratic Party right now.

[00:18:32] Conner Jones: Yeah, it definitely is. It’s an interesting time. So 10 minute speech on the Senate floor, kind of defending his Yes. Afterwards. Yeah. He published an opinion article in the New York Times this past week titled Trump and Musk would love a shutdown.

We must not give them one. So he’s standing behind his convictions. He’s yeah, I want to keep the government open because if, if we shut it down. It gives them all the fire in the world to come back and hit them with you guys are the reason the government shut down. That’s right. Republican house passed it.

Trump was ready to sign the bill to keep the government open and it’s the Democrats keeping the government closed.

[00:19:05] Micah Tomasella: It was a lose lose for Democrats. It really was. Yeah.

[00:19:09] Conner Jones: That’s why I don’t know. The Democrat party turning on Schumer is I don’t know what you guys were expecting. Like what, what, what did you want to happen anyways?

Activist organizations that are democratic activist organizations. Such as the organization called indivisible have called for Schumer’s resignation and advocated for a more assertive leadership to oppose the Republican initiative, Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, who just ran with Kamala Harris as her vice president pick.

Came out and criticized Schumer’s decision and suggested that it compromised this party’s leverage and could lead to negative consequences for Americans. And then a representative, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, many call her AOC. She is also from New York, like Schumer has argued that Schumer’s quote, almost unthinkable move caused a deep sense of outrage and betrayal across the Democrats ideological spectrum.

And she notably did not rule out a primary challenge against him. So she could come for his seat in the Senate if she would like. She’s very

[00:20:02] Micah Tomasella: popular. And she’s very popular, especially with younger, more progressive wing of the democratic party. She’s very popular. She’s the future of the party.

[00:20:10] Conner Jones: Yes, she, she very well could be.

She might be that leader that the Democrats need. I think she’s. almost too progressive for a lot of their tastes. So we’ll see what happens there. But yeah, meanwhile, Michael, while all of this is happening, a poll came out, literally Schumer, I think it was on Wednesday said he’s going to vote to keep the government open.

And on Thursday, this CNN poll came out showing that the Democrat party’s favorability rating among Americans is at a record low. They are just in a sea of hurt. And so that obviously that followed the 2024 election that really kind of highlighted the party’s total misread of the just. General American public and the average American life and their party now obviously is embroiled in a debate over whether to adopt a more combative stance against Republicans and their policies or to strategically choose their battles.

Should they ditch DEI and quote woke policies completely or stand behind those policies? Should they go even harder on those? We’ll just see what they do. But right now, like I said, there’s no real like identifiable leader or there’s not even like a rising star. Maybe you could say A. O. C. There’s, there’s just not that person in the wings like Barack Obama was in like 2006.

People were like, okay, that’s our guy. Somebody will emerge. We’re just not seeing him right now. It’s just, there’s no one who’s out there right now that’s that’s their future party leader, their future presidential pick, all of that. And that’s particularly bad right now because JD Vance. It seems to be the heir apparent in the MAGA world and in the Republican world.

So they’ve got that already set up on the right side of the aisle. So what about the left side? Anyways, any other thoughts on that, Micah?

[00:21:43] Micah Tomasella: No, I mean, what, what was interesting is, did you see Gavin Newsome? I think we talked about his, his new podcast, but I mean, he’s having, he’s, he’s really, I mean, his new podcast is.

is interesting because he’s inviting guys like Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk. There was another conservative type person that he invited. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s an interesting approach because what he’s doing is you know, the, the right has kind of dominated the podcast platforms. And then Gavin Newsom is getting on there and.

You know, agreeing with some of their points and it’s really infuriating the Democratic Party and, and, you know, oddly enough it, it really does kind of seem like Gavin Newsom is, is kind of changing up his strategy a little bit and trying to reach across the aisle. And you know, you talk about a rising star.

I think if Gavin kind of. Sticks to that over the next few years, he could change his image because he’s just seemed so far left as, as the, as the governor of California. But if he can kind of come more to the middle, cause he is a very good speaker and he is very strong in his approach to leadership. I think that he could be a rising star in the democratic party.

Could eventually take it over.

[00:22:54] Conner Jones: Yeah, he could be. And I think he is kind of a star already. In a sense, I just think Democrats have been wary about him because California gets hit so hard as being the most progressive state. And I think that this is super strategic on his part to try to rebrand. It’s smart to cross the aisle, which yeah, yeah, maybe, but also is it him just trying to almost just distance himself from everything that he is known as the bright.

He doesn’t want to repeat what Kamala Harris just went through where she was identified with all these progressive ideologies and it’s easy to, to hit him with that. But yeah, he did have that super viral clip go out from his very first episode with Charlie Kirk, who’s like a right winged commentator and influencer big in Trump world.

And he essentially pushed back. Against having transgenders in sports, and he said it was let me find the quote here. Deeply

[00:23:43] Micah Tomasella: unfair.

[00:23:44] Conner Jones: Deeply unfair. That

[00:23:45] Micah Tomasella: biological males would be competing in women’s sports. And that, that was a firestorm. Not like that. Firestorm. They were like,

[00:23:53] Conner Jones: what are you talking about?

You’ve been so pro LGBTQ policies and transgender policies. And this was, this was like his first step. This was the very first episode and that clip went viral. And then I, I mean, I listen, I’ve listened to most of these episodes so far. They have been interesting conversations just to hear. And it’s a very clear step of him trying to get in, in the minds of people just trying to kind of already set himself up for a run in 2028.

[00:24:18] Micah Tomasella: You know, this is the thing, the democratic party knows that they need to change, that they need a shift. The argument comes down to what do we shift to? How do we change? You know, you talked about D. E. I. What people will call woke policies, open border type policies, which don’t pull well for them. So they all know they need a change, but the argument within the party, the civil war, a lot of it has to do with the old guard versus the new guard.

But it’s really just the ideology of what are we going to leave behind? And what are we going to push as a party? Yeah. So we’ll see how it goes.

[00:24:53] Conner Jones: Yeah, we will. I don’t know. Anyways, so just when you hear all of this, you might feel one or two different ways, depending on what side of the aisle you tend to land on.

Maybe you’re an independent and you’re like, this is just chaos. I don’t really care that much. But if you’re a Republican, maybe you’re celebrating. If you’re a Democrat, maybe you’re feeling tormented. Like you’re just like, Oh, this is awful to watch from afar as my party just eats itself alive. And like I said, independence might just be sitting there wait, Okay, it’s actually good to have two strong parties because it’s in a way a checks and balance system, right?

You’ve got a party cycle that tends to happen. It’s usually Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican, House, Senate, and Presidents in the elections. And you know, it’s just an interesting time for the Democrats, but. In today’s online environment, it’s very easy for us to express our own positions and oppose anyone who has a different ideology or thought, and we can easily, you know, have increased rhetorical extremes, name calling, all of that, and as a result, Micah, I think opposing sides view each other as evil enemies more than ever before, and might even feel justified in doing anything to defeat them, so this could be true within a party or against parties, so there’s people in the Democrat Party who, they see Chuck Schumer as just in and now they might consider him like evil in a sense.

Yeah. I don’t think that’s, I don’t think it’s that extreme, but you know, it could go that way. And Abraham Lincoln actually sent a warning to us hundreds of years ago. This is how nations die by suicide. He said, when we’re so divided, And obviously he saw the nation divided at its worst in the Civil War, and it almost took the entire country down.

So we need biblical wisdom to guide our own autonomy and community to preserve our democracy. Exodus 22 commands us, Micah, that you shall not revile God nor curse a ruler of your people. And Ecclesiastes 10 actually takes it even further and it says, Even in your thoughts do not curse the king, nor in your bedroom curse the rich, for a bird of the air will carry your voice, or some winged creature tell the matter.

Today, I would say, and actually this is something that came from Dr. Jim Denison, another article he wrote this week too, and he noted that your cell phone, in a way, is a bird of the air in that. How do we respond to these political leaders? He noted that we should refuse to slander, and the Bible specifically actually forbids slander of all kinds.

It says in 1 Peter 2, 1, put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. If we’re going to have a, if we’re in a conflict with someone, we’re really called to go directly to them. It says that in Matthew 18, 15. And if we know that they are in conflict with us. We are to do the same.

Yeah. So Micah, if you and I have a beef, we need to go to each other. We don’t need to be slandering each other behind one another’s back. That’s, that’s not the best way to handle that. And think about just how much anger and animosity and damage could be avoided if that’s how we spoke with others and with.

People that are are kind of great application in our lives, you know respectfully I disagree type of situation It doesn’t it doesn’t help to slander. It’s better to have conversations and then Paul, you know, he taught us Romans 13 1 let everyone let sorry let every person be subject to the governing authorities For there is no authority except from God and those who exist have been instituted by God and accordingly pay to all What is owed to them?

Taxes to whom taxes are owed. Revenue to whom revenue is owed. Respect to whom respect is owed. Honor to whom honor is owed. And Peter agreed with that too in 1 Peter 2 13 and 14. And he even said we’re to honor everyone and love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the emperor. And so even when we can’t necessarily respect the position, or sorry, the person, we are to respect the position.

The apostles taught us early on that kind of concept with the governing authorities. Because the emperor at the time was Nero, and he was awful. He was just a horrible, horrific, immoral ruler. But the apostles knew they had to honor the position, even when they could not honor the person. And so one way to do that is through just intercession.

And that’s one of the things we can take is 1st Timothy 2, 1 and 2 that says, I urge the supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people. For kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. And so Micah, just as a final note here, it is difficult to slander people when we’re praying for them.

Oh, amen. So that is an encouragement to pray for anyone in your life that you may have conflict with. Pray for the leaders of opposing parties in your own country, in your own just state, city, whatever it is. If you’re a Republican, pray for the Democrats. If you’re a Democrat Pray for the Republicans. The leaders are there for a reason.

We respect the position, even if we struggle to respect the person.

[00:29:50] Micah Tomasella: Yeah. Good stuff, Connor. Amen, brother. I’m in total agreement with you. And I think that this is one way that we can encourage each other, even as we’re having this conversation. But our audience who listens and Denison Ministries, specifically Denison Forum, seeking to discern the news differently, is how do we take the overwhelming news?

And boil it down to where we can take it off in bite sized pieces and say, God, what would you have me do with this? Yeah. And I think that we can glean so many lessons from the overwhelming nature in the news and really just see the destructive nature of it. Just the destruction from what’s happening in this story that you just talked about.

How can we apply it to our own lives? And when there’s not peace in Washington, let’s have peace in our homes. Let’s have peace in our hearts. Let’s have peace in our families and in our relationship. So good stuff, Connor. Thank you for that. So we’re going to jump straight into a tune in section and we’re going to give you Quite a few things to tune into and to pay attention to in what’s coming up.

So the first thing that we want to update you on is the Israel Gaza war has been reignited. I don’t think any of us wanted to see this. I think to a certain extent you can see why it had to happen, but at the same time you hate to see it and you hate to see all the suffering and this. potentially being reignited.

Hopefully peace can come back to this situation. But Hamas has refused to hand over the remaining hostages. This has been happening for weeks, right? And the original ceasefire deal did expire. So Israel executed airstrikes on Gaza. I’m going to say this real quick when you’re reading news on this and, you know, obviously our ministry.

Denison Forum does support Israel to a point as, as much as we can of what lines up with God’s word. But I’ll just say this, I’ve seen a lot of outlets report on this and they bury the fact that the ceasefire expired and they bury the fact that some of those hostages have not been released. And it’s just jumped straight to all these people have been killed.

There’s all this carnage, almost as if there’s, there’s no reason for it. So I’m just going to point that out. I’ve, I’ve noticed that I don’t, I don’t know if you’ve noticed that Connor, the U S has been launching airstrikes at. Hhy locations in Yemen who have in turn launched missiles at the US and Israel.

So these Houthis rebels that are supported by Iran, they’re basically breaking up all of these trade routes in the Red Sea and stuff like that. And so it’s disrupting all of the international trade. And so Trump is stepping in and bombing the Houthis. And then you see Israel is now bombing Hamas again.

So I, I mean, it seems as though war is erupting again in the Middle East when there seem to be this, this. short pause. And so prayerfully, peace can come back to that region. But this story will be ever evolving and we’ll do our best to keep you in the loop.

[00:32:30] Conner Jones: Yeah, there’s, there’s just a lot happening. It felt like there was a good pause for a while on both the Houthi front and the Israel Gaza front.

And also to clarify, they’re launching missiles at U. S. ships. Yes, sorry. Directly. Yes. Yeah, yes, no. Yes. I don’t think they have that capability. But anyways, that would be. A totally different ballgame, but they are launching at us ships. So they are attacking the U S Navy, which is not cool. Anyways, we’ll stay up to date with what’s going on there, but it is heartbreaking.

I mean, we don’t want to see innocent people dying and any sort of airstrikes or in hostage tunnels, whatever it is. So continuing to pray there. Okay. Micah, this is what we talked about at the beginning, the JFK files, they did get released this week. Trump promised when he got reelected that he would release all the remaining documents.

I mean, we’re trusting that this is all the remaining documents, but 80, 000 pages, I’m currently sifting through those. I’m on page one and trying to go through, trying to go through, honestly, no, we’ll just see who the historians have come out, honestly, and said that it’s going to take several days to parse through everything and really try to understand what is out there that in these documents that we don’t already know, there is a lot of just repetitive things, which is to be expected.

But is there anything in there that is. been buried all this time. So far, I was reading, they dropped last night and this morning I was reading up on just what potentially has been discovered. Nothing of significance. I mean, it sounds like the KGB was on to Oswald when he was in Russia and said he was a bad shot.

So people are clinging to that. Okay, was he even able to shoot JFK? Was he that bad of a shot? How would he ever be able to hit? JFK in the head from the distance that he was at and the angle that he was at and all that. So I don’t know. We’ll just see what comes out of that. But historians do expect to take several days and we’ll see if they find any major revelations.

And we’ll just see. I think a lot of Americans are eager to find out. So next we’re going to be waiting on the RFK files because JFK’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy was killed a few years later and assassinated. And then the MLK files, there’s always been questions around his assassination. Nothing’s been as high profile as JFK’s killing, but there’s always been suspicions that there was potential government interference or weird foul play.

Yeah, some things that we don’t know. Like whether foreign entities behind those, all that. So we will just see.

[00:34:43] Micah Tomasella: Yeah, I think we should have more updates when we record next week. on this. I mean, we’re obviously waiting idly by to see if there’s any bombshells drop. Trump did say nothing is being redacted from those reports.

So we’ll, I mean, we’ll see what happens, but I, there is at least a hundred thousand people yesterday, today, and for the next week that have probably taken off of work and they’ve printed out all 80, 000 pages. Yeah. I’m just imagining somebody in a dark library with a lamp, just sifting through all of it, like trying to find that one thing.

Somebody will find something. It might not be as much of a revelation as some are hoping, but somebody will find something because I feel like there’s a lot of sleuths on the case right now. So let me jump into the other thing that we should be tuning into. So Trump is pushing the boundaries here, specifically when it comes to the relationship between the executive and the judicial branch, Trump being a part of the executive branch.

And then all of these judges, the circuit Judges that are, you know, in SCOTUS that are a part of the judicial branch. So Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare public statement. He rarely issues public statements and he’s, he rebukes Trump and basically rebuked Trump’s call to impeach a federal judge who ruled against him over the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members.

So let’s keep an eye on the story as the judicial and executive branches are becoming increasingly at odds. And so as Trump is pushing the boundaries with these executive orders. It’s just going to be interesting to see how this plays out and what the actual legality is as the system gets tested.

[00:36:17] Conner Jones: Yeah, I don’t know man.

This this is just very interesting Different judges are coming out against different things that trump’s trying to push through And he’s not happy about it So again, neither are a lot of republicans and even elon musk is on x every day saying we need to get rid of these judges They have too much power So it it seems like it’s going to come to Ahead and at some point somebody’s going to step in and yeah chief justice Robert’s doesn’t really rebuke.

That is a very rare thing now. He did not use Trump’s name in the statement, but it was very clear who is who he was talking about. Aimed towards. Yeah. So anyways, here’s the next big thing. This is what’s going to be taken over the full weekend ahead, Micah. What it’s time March madness, March madness, baby.

Let’s go. Let’s go. Get your brackets submitted. Get your brackets submitted if you’re listening to this on Thursday morning, you may still have a few hours left to get that in. I think the first game is at 1115 Central Time, 1215 Eastern. So you’ve got a few hours to get that bracket in if you if you’re in.

You know bracket game we’re on the Denison ministries bracket challenge Mike and I will be competing in that I’ve got five brackets I have to fill out tonight. Honestly, so we’ll just see Who do you who do you think right now? Micah is gonna take take home the championship, you know I’m gonna go with

[00:37:31] Micah Tomasella: a local Texas team the University of Houston has four losses or something like that all year And they’re a number one seed.

And how about kind of a Cinderella story of a number one seed of a basketball program that doesn’t have. A ton of historical success. Just historically it’s, if, if they win at all, it is kind of a Cinderella story. It’s not, it’s not a blue chip program for college basketball. So Houston being as successful as they’ve been this year at let’s say them, why not?

[00:38:00] Conner Jones: Okay. I’m going to, I guess I’ll go the opposite direction and take a blue chip program and I’m just going to go ahead and stick with Duke. I think that they, you know, they look good. They’ve got Cooper flag. He’s like the future. He’s going to be the NBA

[00:38:13] Micah Tomasella: draft.

[00:38:13] Conner Jones: Very good player. He’s, he’s great. So we’ll just see we do love a Cinderella story.

I love seeing the schools that I’ve never heard of just take, take, take the tournament by storm and win two games that are totally unexpected. I cannot wait, man. What was this? What was the school a few years ago? They were, they were, the Peacocks was there. Mass. Oh gosh. What was saint something.

Anyways, they were totally unheard of. They were like a 15 seat and made it all the way to the elite eight or sweet 16 school on the map. These schools will just get on the map, man. It’s awesome. Okay, but before we move on from that, I’ve got to say a quick, a quick hot take, or maybe you agree with me here.

I personally think it’s more fun to watch and more fun to just be a part of college basketball than it is the NBA, at least right now in the current basketball environment. And so I’m going to say it, college basketball is better than the NBA. Okay.

[00:39:05] Micah Tomasella: I was going to say, say your hot take with your chest, with your full chest, stand on all 10 toes.

I’m, I’m saying and say it. Okay. So you’re saying college basketball is better than the NBA. I don’t know how I feel about this hot take. Here’s here’s how I would frame it. If you are more of an individual fan. Then I see why you would enjoy the NBA more because these players have long careers in the NBA, right?

And the NBA gets more media coverage all that stuff. So I mean you have LeBron James I mean, he’s been playing for like over 20 years or whatever and you know, many would argue he’s the greatest of all time It’s either him or Michael Jordan. So People like that. I mean if if you’re more of an individual fan, you’re probably gonna be a bigger NBA fan but if you’re a fan of team basketball, then I totally understand why you would enjoy college basketball more because players only stay at their schools for a year or two, really a year if they’re good.

And so it is, it is these systems that these coaches implement that keep churning out great basketball. And so if you’re more of a fan of team basketball, I could totally see how you would enjoy the college basketball more than the NBA.

[00:40:11] Conner Jones: Yeah. And I just, I honestly think the NBA has completely changed the way that they play the game.

It’s not as, in my opinion, fun as it used to be to watch the game is. It’s almost a mess. It’s just, you know, they’ve, they’re trying to adjust that because a lot of people have been calling it out as the game is no longer as physical. It’s mostly three pointers, all of that. Whereas college basketball still seems to be fast paced and energetic and just all over the place.

I mean, even last night in the first four, which is kind of like the pre tournament tournament. There was a buzzer beater at the end. You just don’t think that in the NBA as much and you just see these awesome endings and competitive games in college basketball. So it’s fun. I don’t know. So anyways, yeah, it’s going to be a fun weekend watching that.

And we hopefully we’ll have brackets that are not completely busted by next week. That’s right.

[00:40:57] Micah Tomasella: That’s right. Everybody get your brackets filled out. Connor. Thank you for the impromptu hot take. Think I might agree with you. I have to think about it. Guys, thank

[00:41:05] Conner Jones: you. Let me say this I’ll drop a poll on Spotify and on the culture brief Instagram find us on Instagram culture brief podcast Or shoot us your hot take on that or response to that at culture brief at denison form or and we’ll catch your email And let us know what your thoughts are, but I want to see your votes too on Spotify and on our Instagram We’ll have a poll if you think the NBA or college basketball is better

[00:41:26] Micah Tomasella: Yes.

Thank you for that, Connor. Good call out. I almost forgot that part. Thank you. Yes. Please send us your emails or topic ideas or discussion ideas to again, culturebrief at denisonforum. org. We love them. We appreciate them and we do our best to implement them into our show. So thank you for joining us for this week’s episode of Culture Brief, a Denison Forum podcast.

All articles and videos mentioned will be linked in the show notes. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please please subscribe and rate and review the show and share with a friend. We’ll see you next Thursday.

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‘This Is Why Trump Won the Election” Joe Rogan Explains How Democrats and Their Pet Issues and Monstrous Spending Turned Off Voters in 2024 (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit

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‘This Is Why Trump Won the Election” Joe Rogan Explains How Democrats and Their Pet Issues and Monstrous Spending Turned Off Voters in 2024 (VIDEO)

Writer and comedian Bridget Phetasy joined Joe Rogan on his hugely popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast this week.

During their conversation Joe broke down why Democrats lost and the tricks they play to toy with the American public.

Bridget Phetasy: It shouldn’t be controversial to want to audit our budget.

Joe Rogan: No. Americans have wanted this forever. Because it’s not just the money being spent. It’s what it’s being spent for and what’s going on, which is an enormous propaganda machine. A big part of the whole left-wing narrative that has overlaid our country over the last, whatever, eight years, 10 years, is all propaganda funded by our own government.

That’s right. This is why Trump won the election. People don’t really believe in these things. The amount of people that think that transgender biological males should be competing against your daughter in sports is so fucking small. But yet our own government was propping it up. Why are they propping it up? Because it’s a fucking beach ball at a concert. You keep it tossing up in the air and everybody’s distracted. As long as you can keep a few things going, here’s the things you’re going to keep going.

Abortion. Overturning Roe v Wade is so great for business because now it’s like a battle, the battlegrounds and women’s rights and their lives are at stake. Okay, that’s one.

Gay marriage. That’s a huge one. Now they’re going to take away gay marriage. Oh, my God. Bounce that fucking beach ball. That’s a gigantic one.

War is a giant one. All these different things are just fucking beach balls, and they toss them around every now and again. In the meanwhile, they’re just siphoning billions of dollars. Zelenski just said he’s missing $100 billion in the $177 billion that we supposedly sent there.

Bridget Phetasy: That was something weird, too, about Haiti, where it’s like only 2% of the money actually went there. It’s crazy. Americans give away a lot of their hard-earned money because they are actually kind-hearted and want to donate to countries that are… Then you find out it’s like some trans performance. There is a lot of nonsense.

Joe Rogan: A lot of nonsense in the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars of nonsense.

Bridget Phetasy: And then they talk about it like, Oh, who cares? It’s only $10 billion. You’re like, You guys are out of your fucking minds if you think that’s going to be the argument that resonates with Americans.

Joe Rogan: Not only that, how are you going to say that?

https://twitter.com/AutismCapital/status/1889026808114455007

The post ‘This Is Why Trump Won the Election” Joe Rogan Explains How Democrats and Their Pet Issues and Monstrous Spending Turned Off Voters in 2024 (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Joe Rogan interviews Wesley Huff, a Christian apologist | Denison Forum

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Joe Rogan interviews Wesley Huff, a Christian apologist

Wesley Huff. Image courtesy of https://www.wesleyhuff.com/

Wesley Huff, a Christian apologist and researcher, appeared on Tuesday’s episode of the Joe Rogan Experience. Over the course of three hours and fifteen minutes, the two talked extensively about the authenticity of the Bible and the importance of the historical person of Jesus, his death, and his resurrection.

According to data from October 2024, The Joe Rogan Experience is the most listened-to podcast in the world. While the exact number of listeners per episode is difficult to track, the show, which launched in 2009, has 14.5 million Spotify followers and 19 million YouTube subscribers. It is possible that this will serve as the single-widest reaching broadcast of the gospel message in history.

Joe Rogan has built his podcast platform around having long-form conversations with comedians, celebrities, and experts in unique fields. Rogan does not profess to be part of a particular religion, though he does not shy away from the topic. At times, Rogan has openly mocked Christianity, but in recent years there has been a slow progression of openness to the tenets of the Christian faith. Very few of Rogan’s guests are practicing Christians, and none of them have made an appearance for the sake of a topic so blunt as the Bible itself–until now. Though I would encourage listening to his episode with Christian scientist, Dr. Stephen Meyer and our own interview with Dr. Meyer on the Denison Forum Podcast where he presents a compelling case for the compatibility of faith and science..

What did they discuss?

Wesley Huff is the Central Canada Director for Apologetics Canada and a New Testament PhD candidate at Wycliffe College in Toronto. Among a career of writing, speaking, and debating, Huff maintains an online presence through social media and his website through which he produces helpful content related to the Bible.

Rogan discovered Huff and invited him on the show after he listened to Huff articulate the evidence for why the Bible can be trusted in a debate with notable skeptic Billy Carson. While the Bible was repeatedly referenced at the beginning of the conversation between Rogan and Huff, much of the interview initially centered around the Carson debate, Huff’s background, and Rogan’s interest in ancient languages and religions.

About halfway through the episode, the conversation shifted to a more intentional discussion of the Bible and the authenticity of its manuscripts. Huff provided extensive evidence for why the Bible is trustworthy and how it compares to other ancient documents.

Later, Rogan and Huff really honed in on the topic of Jesus, his ministry, and his resurrection.

Rogan, skeptical of the resurrection account, asked Huff if Jesus could have possibly survived the crucifixion, nullifying the significance of the empty tomb. Huff responded with strong evidence to support the physical resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The 15-minute resurrection discussion was clipped and can be found here.

In the final 40 minutes of the episode, the conversation covered early church history, the creation of a biblical canon, and the methods by which scholars discern which gospel accounts are true. To give an example of the criteria that historians look for, Huff shared a video (watch below) from his social media account that explained how the frequency and patterns of names within a book help verify the time period and geolocation in which the book was written. Of all the “gospels” that claim to tell the story of Jesus, only four pass this simple name test: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. At the conclusion of the video, Joe expressed his amazement: “Wow, that is interesting! That is so interesting…and it totally makes sense, too!”

https://twitter.com/WesleyLHuff/status/1868860782227997091

A clear presentation of the gospel

After over three hours of conversation deriving from Rogan’s questions to Huff, Huff finally asked a question of his own: “What do you think of the historical person of Jesus?” Rogan responded by sharing his understanding that the “concept of this person that died for our sins, that’s the Son of God, but you have to believe in a bunch of stuff to go that way” fascinates him and seems to provide hope for a lot of people. He argued that truly following Christianity can have a lot of moral value. However, Rogan did not express his own intent or desire to follow Jesus.

Huff followed up on Rogan’s response by sharing core aspects of the gospel in a unique and intentional way that he knew would appeal to Rogan and much of his audience. He criticized the perspective that Jesus is simply a great moral example and replaced it with the perspective that he is a Savior for an inherently immoral people. The video below includes a portion of Huff’s gospel presentation.

https://twitter.com/JonnyRoot_/status/1876735871912669613

While Huff did not use a traditional evangelism tactic in his efforts to shepherd Rogan and the audience closer to Jesus, he clearly presented the truth of the crucifixion and resurrection, as well as humanity’s need for a savior, throughout the episode.

The podcast represents a pinnacle moment in the relationship between the culture and the church. As Christians, we must petition God diligently, asking that he would transform lives through this content. Here are three prayer points:

Pray for the audience. The listenership is guaranteed to be diverse, so we must pray that unbelievers will listen with open hearts and minds. Consider who in your life might benefit from listening to this critical conversation. And pray that the audience will listen to the end, where Huff’s presentation of the gospel message is stated most directly.
Pray for Wesley Huff. His name recognition just shot through the roof, which means he will be intently analyzed by those seeking to discredit him. He will also have the added pressure of living above reproach as a prominent Christian figure. Pray that his faith would remain pure and his platform would grow so that more will come to Jesus.
Pray for Joe Rogan. Pray specifically that he would surrender himself to Jesus. He has heard the gospel and he has received a strong case for why he should trust the Bible, but he must decide to step out in faith. Pray that God would use Rogan’s influence to make waves in our culture, drawing lost and dying people to the giver of salvation.

Lastly, there is a lot that Christians can glean from Wesley Huff’s work. Being proficient in apologetics not only strengthens the faith of the individual believer but brings confidence in sharing that faith with others. In an age where everyone is seeking their own version of truth, we must grow firm in our understanding of the only truth that matters for eternity–the truth of Jesus Christ.

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Rogan Episode Likely to be Furthest Reaching Gospel Broadcast in History | Protestia

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Rogan Episode Likely to be Furthest Reaching Gospel Broadcast in History

“It marks the greatest cultural and spiritual shift of our lifetimes, and likely, humankind. Pull up those stats, Jaimie.”

Joe Rogan did the broadcasting, but Wesley Huff did the preaching. Or perhaps, explaining. Or, conveying.

Whatever it was, Huff’s message went out to Joe Rogan’s 14 million regular listeners. Even moderately popular episodes enjoy over 11 million downloads, and some far more. In a month’s time, Rogan’s downloads exceed 190 million in the course of a month (which is more than the number of Americans who watched the moon landing).

BIGGER THAN THE BEATLES

It’s more than those who watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. It’s more than those who watched Nixon’s resignation speech. It’s more than those who watched the Chiefs beat the Eagles at ‘23 Super Bowl. It’s more than those watched the O.J. Simpson verdict. It’s more than those who watched JFK’s funeral, or the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Granted, those stats are for a month of podcast listens, and not a singular event. But these numbers reflect a 3 hour-long podcast discussing the brute strength of chimpanzees, moon landing hoaxes, and a gaggle of comedians talking about topics ranging from Sasquatch to UFOs, with constant interjections by Rogan of, “Jamie, pull that up” (referencing his producer, who is quick on his keyboard to pull up obscure facts and clips of dumb things the ladies say on The View).

But far from mindless entertainment, Rogan’s podcast was christened by many as “the ultimate political kingmaker,” crediting him with pulling a sea of young men into Trump’s electoral camp. And that was before he hosted the upcoming president, because it was pretty clear for a while that Rogan had moved away from the typical leftist perspectives of Hollywood, only augmented by his actual move from Hollywood to Austin in 2020. Austin has since become a hub of American comedy, with a pile of prominent comedians moving with him.

But Trump isn’t the only world-changer who has pined for a seat in Rogan’s studio. Elon Musk has visited his studios three times. Robert F. Kennedy, Bernie Sanders, and Tulsi Gabbard all enjoyed sizable spikes in their popularity after spending a few hours on air with him. It’s also where people go to tell their stories when nobody else will listen, from Edward Snowden to Rod Blagojevich.

It’s not an overstatement to say that Joe Rogan is not only one of the central figures in media in the last ten years but perhaps ever. At the least, he is emblematic of a seismic shift in how world citizens – not just Americans – consume their media. They no longer endure soundbites or news in 3-minute increments between commercial breaks but in hours-long, long-form discussions that are more conversations than interviews. The old media gate-keepers have been killed off by direct streaming, the way monopolistic publishing houses were killed off by the Internet. But unlike how video never quite killed off the radio star, network news anchors have been left in the dust by Rogan, who dwarfs them by comparison.

NOTICING ROGAN

I’ve been listening to Rogan extensively for about ten years now. Largely, that had nothing to do with Rogan, but his guests. I would pass up the podcasts with UFC fighters and comedians, opting for intellectual fare with hosts ranging from Jordan Peterson to Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Over time, I figured out that UFC fighters and comedians have thoughts often as enlightening (if not more so) than Tyson and Peterson). In fact, I’ve heard more profundity from Sean Strickland lately than Peterson.

But at first, it was hard to listen for a pastor only slightly less rightwing than…ok, I can’t think of anyone more rightwing than me…to listen to Rogan on the topic of religion or politics. I enjoyed his discussions with characters like Ted Nugent, talking about why vegans are dumb, but often “changed the channel” (boomer-speak) rather than hear Rogan condescend people of faith or regularly blaspheme Christ. He gave no more respect to orthodox Christianity than he gave the Mormons or the Scientologists, which was none at all. He was belittling of us, and frankly, hateful to Jesus. And between that and his incessant advocacy for legalizing drugs, he had to grow on me.

But, over time, I noticed something changing in Rogan. At some point, he stopped mocking proponents of faith, and started listening to them. He also stopped attacking rightwing politics, and started hearing it out. The latter, I can trace to Covid. Rogan noticed some things, the very things that prompted him to leave California, and red-pilled himself like so many did during that tumultuous scam of a pandemic. The transgender issue was probably another turning point. I watch Rogan go from berating people for not using preferred pronouns to now mocking the transgender delusion; it seemed that men in women’s sports changed all that for Rogan, who as an athlete and sports commentator, understood the stark physical differences between the sexes. Suddenly, for Rogan, it was no laughing matter.

I’ve said for about three years now that Joe Rogan embodies the transformation that’s possible in a person when they have conversations, particularly deeply meaningful and lengthy conversations. Liberals shut people down; they don’t allow conversations to go on for long, in the same way that the emperor only wore his new clothes in a parade. They have to keep moving. But conversing with other humans, when the goal is determination of truth, usually leads to an embrace of it.

RILEY GAINES AND SHIFTING WORLDVIEWS

What I’ve described at Insight to Incite, from my earliest articles, is what I call the Populist Social Revival. It is something that the Holy Ghost is doing, that is changing the world around us. The Architect of the Ages has designed something quite beautiful. Americans have wanted a world without him, and God gave us a taste.

Of course, God only rested once and that on the seventh day of creation. He’s always in charge. But America, and indeed the whole world, has gone through a very dark period of time the last four years. And what started that period of immense darkness was not Covid, but the closing of the world’s churches for fear of the Rider on the Black Horse, who name is pestilence and death. To the shame of many, churches closed their doors, and darkness set in on the world. And after it, came riots and mobs, wicked kings, famine, natural disasters, great confusions, and mass hysteria.

But God in his magnificent greatness used that to wake up many people, who just like Joe Rogan, are awakening to discover that the worldview of realism and hard facts, objective truth and supernaturality, happen to align almost perfectly with a peculiar group of people known as Christians. And as Joe’s worldview began to slowly merge with ours, his interest in conversing with Christians grew, and with it, his interest in Christ.

Not that many months ago, I listened to Rogan’s conversation with Riley Gaines, the collegiate swimmer who lost her place to a man who pretended to be a woman. She did a good job of trying to steer the conversation toward Christ (and in coming days, when you see Wesley Huff commended, as he should be, remember that Gaines attempted it first). But even then, while Rogan was eager to hear her perspective on biology and fairness in competition, he was less eager to hear Riley’s professions of faith. In several moments, Rogan – although polite – changed the subject.

However, I teared-up when listening to Gaines on Rogan, and had to step out of my workplace office lest any see it. For the first time, in my many years of listening to Rogan, he wasn’t skeptical or argumentative when a guest brought up Jesus Christ. He was respectful. He was listening. He was, on some level, open. The Joe Rogan I knew from 2015 would not have been hostile, but certainly would have been dismissive. I knew – listening then – that God the Holy Ghost was doing something amazing in our culture, with Rogan as an exemplar. His holy wind was blowing.

THE SHIFT SINCE RILEY GAINES

Since Gaines was on Rogan’s program in March of 2024, it seems as though Rogan’s podcast guests have repeatedly brought up Jesus, and Rogan not only listened, but began to respect their sincerity and his curiosity seemed to grow. And then, Rogan began to ask questions about their faith, and he was trying to get to the bottom of it.

Sometimes, it’s painful to watch. I indeed wanted to swerve my pickup into a tree, listening to Kid Rock profess Christ a few moments after dropping a string of F-bombs like it was Hiroshima. Or, when Rogan asked him how he knew for sure God was real, Rock told him that God had allowed him forgive Bud Light for being so gay.

Soon though, on Rogan’s program, discussions of religion and Christ, in particular, became common even in his conversations even with UFC fighters and crass comedians. Rogan was indeed getting closer, and closer, and closer to a full-out confrontation with a legitimate Christian in the octagon of his podcast ring, but despite knowing it was coming, had no idea who it would be.

Will God save Joe Rogan? I’ve no idea. When I say that God has moved in him, I’m not implying special revelation to determine the purposes of God’s election. Rather, I’m say that God has moved in Joe Rogan to manufacture an opportunity for the Gospel to go out in broadcast media like it has never gone out before.

WESLEY HUFF

Huff was born in Pakistan, and spent significant time as a child in the Middle East. From his Canadian accent and lily-white skin, it’s pretty clear he’s not natively from there. But as a child, it seems as though God saw fit to bestow him with paralysis. And then, God saw fit to remove it.

Now an impressive physical specimen, Huff is married and lives in Toronto with his wife and family. He’s earning a doctorate degree in the New Testament from the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College. He earned his B.A. in Sociology from New York University and Masters of Theological Studies at Tyndale University.

Huff has gained some small popularity as an exceptionally bright mind, and bright enough that – unlike many theologians – he is extremely relatable to normal human beings. He’s got some affiliation with The Gospel Coalition Canada and CRU in Canada, which after his performance on the Joe Rogan Experience, I’m willing to forgive.

Huff has done some podcasts that share an over-lap with our audience at Protestia, and some of my own readers, and so we are vaguely familiar with his work.

And all of that…every last bit of it, is from this point forward absolutely and totally irrelevant compared to his place in history to watch what God did through him on Joe Rogan’s program. I’m sure that Huff, as a human, is splendid. But the Gospel that he proclaimed at such length and with such elegant simplicity, far surpasses his flesh and bones, or his previous accomplishments, or anything else associated with the wares of mortality. God did something through him, with legitimately eternal significance.

You can watch his three hour and fifteen minute conversation with Rogan (long by even Rogan standards) about Jesus below. But you might want to wait until later, and skip to my brief commentary just underneath it.

I dare not add a word to the unction-spoken explanations of Huff. He did well. The gospel was articulated, and it was juxtaposed against the moralism of Jordan Peterson in a way that few have been given the mic to say. Let me be clear; until Peterson is brought to the saving faith of Jesus Christ, his contributions to global Biblical discussions are tragically misdirecting.

Huff articulated very well the difference between Jesus as Savior, and Jesus as Example. He did well at articulating the difference between Christianity and Moralism. He was superb in his explanations of Jesus as a literal God-Man who died a physical death, who was buried in a literal tomb, and who factually rose again from the dead.

Peterson’s Jesus is little more than an object lesson, a grandiose and religiousy version of Aesop and his fables. Peterson’s Jesus is little more than an exemplar, as much myth as fact, who came to Earth as a tourist, passing through to give us object lessons. But Huff’s Jesus, who’s the Nazarene, came to offer payment for our sins and be our propitiation to appease the wrath of a Holy God, and redeem our souls and bodies from death.

Every preacher of low estate, the men who toil away in their studies on their second-hand commentary sets – the ones who have to apologize at the pulpit to visitors because the congregants all seem to be traveling this Sunday – they all dream of this opportunity. To have the world’s attention, to be given a podcast mic bigger than the even the Golden EIB Microphone, and to have three full hours to expand upon the excellent mercies of His kindness that they spend their lives trying to accurately convey…mercy, what a blessing.

God did that.

God did that. God did that. God did that. God did that. God…did…that.

GOD DID THAT

We live in amazing times. Every generation of Christians thought they we’re living in the Last Days. But I don’t know, man. It seems like it all adds up. Surely these are the days of amazing things that God is doing.

What we witnessed in that podcast is very likely, the most widely-reaching (legitimate) gospel presentation in human history. That’s not an exaggeration. I think that’s a defendable position from the data, as I previously laid out.

It’s a given that more people will have watched the Christian(ish) ads during the Super Bowl, if we presume that they aren’t phasing out for nachos. But can you compare the “He Gets Us” ads to what was presented by Huff? It’s not really a comparison, in that one was a 30 second ad for Liberation Jesus and the other was a three-hour explanation of God’s plan of redemption.

Or, it might be, if the Pope kissed to the crowd from his tower in the Palais des Papes, and fell out of it, 11 million people might watch. But not even Billy Graham could have hoped for the numbers that will watch this episode.

And in the most humbling way possible, let me point out, neither could have Whitefield, or Edwards, or Zwingly, or Knox, or Calvin, or Paul Washer or Charles Spurgeon.

God is doing something. He just is.

I’ll leave you with two comments left, just this second – one of many – on my X account thread where I posted an excerpt of this episode from Protestia. I think they both speak, more succinctly than me, about what this accomplishes. But after you read the brief comments, I want you to then magnify those sentiments by the millions.

This was originally published at Insight to Incite, which you can subscribe to here.

The post Rogan Episode Likely to be Furthest Reaching Gospel Broadcast in History appeared first on Protestia.

Joe Rogan Slams Democrats, Media, Deep State, for ‘Insanely Dangerous Precedent’ of Using Judicial System Against Trump (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit

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Joe Rogan Slams Democrats, Media, Deep State, for ‘Insanely Dangerous Precedent’ of Using Judicial System Against Trump (VIDEO)

During a recent episode of his podcast, Joe Rogan spoke to former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, about the way Democrats, the media, and the deep state, used the judicial system against Trump, noting that had it worked, would have set a dangerous precedent for the country.

You could easily make a case that it set a dangerous precedent even though it didn’t work, but Rogan’s point is well made.

He correctly points out that Democrats and the left in general, were willing to burn down everything that makes America what it is, just because they didn’t want Trump to win again.

For his part, Blagojevich, who is a Democrat and spent some time in prison on corruption charges, claims that he was like an early test case.

Partial transcript via Kanekoa the Great on Twitter/X:

“If the weaponizing of the justice system worked, that is such an insanely dangerous precedent.”

“The most disgusting one was pretending someone was a victim because he overvalued Mar a Lago even though he paid those loans back and the banks profited. There was no victim at all, and yet they fined him this insane amount of money and tried to say Mar a Lago was worth $18 million.”

“No pushback from the media at all. They went along with it as if these 34 felonies for a bookkeeping error that is essentially a misdemeanor past the statute of limitations, and now you’re marking it up as a felony. You can’t even identify the felony.”

“Do you want us to be a banana republic because you don’t like Trump? It shows how many people were willing to sacrifice their ethics, what the Bill of Rights stands for, and what the Constitution stands for because they don’t want this guy to win.”

“It’s mind-boggling how short-sighted people are in the name of wanting their side to win.”

Watch the video below:

https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1869470632649629774

Hopefully, in the coming years we will see some of the people responsible for all of this brought to justice.

The post Joe Rogan Slams Democrats, Media, Deep State, for ‘Insanely Dangerous Precedent’ of Using Judicial System Against Trump (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Joe Rogan Says PSYOP by Media Against Donald Trump Has ‘Distorted’ Who Trump Really Is (Video) | The Gateway Pundit

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Joe Rogan Says PSYOP by Media Against Donald Trump Has ‘Distorted’ Who Trump Really Is (Video)

Former President Donald Trump appeared on comedian Joe Rogan's podcast on Friday. — Former President Donald Trump appeared on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast. (@PowerfulJRE / YouTube Screen Shot)

On the latest episode of his podcast “Joe Rogan Experience,” Rogan discussed the PSYOP in play against President Donald Trump.

Rogan was not always a fan of Trump, but he has developed a reputation for being open-minded and letting people speak for themselves.

Just before election day, Trump spent three hours speaking with Rogan for his podcast in a no-holds-barred discussion. The duo smashed records with 26 million views in just 24 hours.

Ultimately, Rogan endorsed President Trump on Election Eve.

For the latest episode, Rogan was joined by stand-up comics, writers, and podcasters Shane Gillis, Mark Normand, and Ari Shaffir.

Rogan shared his thoughts on Trump being the target of a PSYOP.

Joe Rogan: What you’re seeing with Trump, regardless of his flaws, what you’re seeing with Trump, regardless of his flaws, is a massive concentrated PSYOP. They’ve distorted who he is to the point where most people think that way. Most people think that way. They’ve had narratives.

Mark Normand: “What is a PSYOP? I keep hearing that.”

Joe Rogan: Psychological operation, where they’ve decided to distort people’s perceptions of things.

Ari Shaffir: When you tell an older liberal that the Obama deportations were higher than the Trump deportations. They go, ‘What? No.’ And you go, ‘No, let me just Google deportations of Obama versus Trump.’ And you go, ‘It’s lower.’

They go, ‘Wait, what?’ ‘Here’s 19 straight articles saying that I’m right.’ And they go, ‘That doesn’t make sense.’ And you go, ‘Right, focus on what’s giving you the reality of the world.’

Joe Rogan: Check this out. Jamie, go to that Hillary Clinton thing that I texted you today. This one is wild. This is Hillary Clinton in 2008. And Hillary Clinton saying some wild MAGA-type sh** about-

Ari Shaffir: She used to say the wildest sh**…

Joe Rogan: Wildest sh** about illegal immigrants. Hold on. Go back from the beginning. Do it from the beginning. That’s the beginning. It’s okay. Do it from the beginning. But I want to hear it.

(Clip of Hillary Clinton) I think we’ve got to have tough conditions. Tell people to come out of the shadows. If they’ve committed a crime, deport them. No questions asked. They’re gone.

Ari Shaffir: She’s a Republican.

(Clip of Hillary Clinton)If they’ve been working and are law-abiding, we should say, Here are the conditions for you staying. You have to pay a stiff fine because you came here illegally. You have to pay back taxes, and you have to try to learn English. You have to wait in line.

Joe Rogan: You have to wait in line. You have to wait in line, and everybody’s cheering. 2008, Hillary Clinton was more MAGA than Trump. But how about that? More MAGA than Trump.

Ari Shaffir: You couldn’t believe that if you watched the news.

Joe Rogan: It’s all a fu**ing illusion. It’s all a fu**ing illusion.

Watch:

Here is the Hillary Clinton clip Rogan played on the podcast:

You can listen to the full episode here.

The post Joe Rogan Says PSYOP by Media Against Donald Trump Has ‘Distorted’ Who Trump Really Is (Video) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Joe Rogan Explains Why Liberal Media Ratings Are Collapsing: ‘Not Accurate, Delusional’ (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit

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Joe Rogan Explains Why Liberal Media Ratings Are Collapsing: ‘Not Accurate, Delusional’ (VIDEO)

During a recent episode of his podcast, Joe Rogan talked about the fact that liberal media outlets are in freefall.

He offered one very specific example of a story in the New York Times about RFK Jr. in which the Times was trying to ‘fact check’ Kennedy about chemicals in Froot Loops cereal, then ended up proving that RFK was right but still claimed he was wrong.

Rogan said that these outlets are essentially digging their own graves while criticizing independent journalists for not doing the same.

FOX News reports:

“I was just reading something about CNN’s ratings and MSNBC’s ratings post-election – they’ve crashed,” Rogan said on Wednesday’s episode. “All these left-wing kooks on YouTube are hemorrhaging subscribers. Where people go, ‘You guys are out of touch, you’re not accurate, you’re delusional.’ And people are speaking with their subscriptions and they’re speaking with their purchasing of the Washington Post and their purchasing of the New York Times.”

He then recalled how the New York Times published a baffling fact-check this week of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claim that a popular breakfast cereal contains several artificial ingredients in the United States that are not used in other countries.

“The New York Times just debunked – in the most insane way – debunked RFK Jr’s assertion that the ingredients in Froot Loops are different in Canada than they are in the United States. They fact-checked it, while saying he was accurate, so their fact-check – it’s so dumb when you see the fact – I tweeted it.”

He then read the fact-check, adding his own commentary at the end that these are “f—ing dangerous chemicals that are banned in Canada that we’re trying to get rid of in America. So, they’re literally saying he was wrong, but he was right.”

The video below is cued to start at the right moment, so just press play:

The left wing press has painted themselves into a corner. They catered to a hard left audience and that’s all they have now. If they suddenly change, they’ll lose that audience share too. It’s a death spiral.

The post Joe Rogan Explains Why Liberal Media Ratings Are Collapsing: ‘Not Accurate, Delusional’ (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Trump Victory Cemented by TikTok and Podcast Viewers, Not MSNBC Neanderthals

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11-09-2024 • https://mishtalk.com, By Mish

New Media Is Leaving the Old Guard Behind

Podcasts are exploding, TikTok is a news source, and traditional media is shrinking in reach and influence.

Please consider the Wall Street Journal report Trump’s Win Cemented It: New Media Is Leaving the Old Guard Behind

Two weeks ago, Donald Trump sat down with the podcaster Joe Rogan for three hours, an episode that drew more than 45 million views on YouTube and over 25 million listens across Spotify and other platforms. On election night, Rogan was among several podcast hosts who got shout-outs in Trump’s victory celebration.

It underscored what the 2024 presidential race made clear: A new media landscape has emerged. The traditional gatekeepers of political discourse—TV networks and newspapers—are shrinking in influence as Americans turn to many more outlets for information.

The percentage of people listening to podcasts in a given month has more than tripled in a decade. In the social-media realm, more than half of TikTok’s users say they regularly get news on the platform, according to the Pew Research Center. Elon Musk’s takeover of X has had a major impact, with political content, especially right-leaning posts, blanketing new users’ feeds.

The main three cable channels were down 32% in viewership collectively compared with 2020, to around 21 million, with CNN losing almost half its audience.

Some 47% of people in the U.S. have listened to a podcast in the past month, including nearly 60% of people who are under 35, according to Edison Research. And 54% of podcast listeners say getting news or political analysis is an important benefit of the medium, according to the industry advisory and data tracker Sounds Profitable. [Mish Note: This is the key age group, not 30 and under. I explain why below].

Cable news viewership overall is down from its recent peaks during Covid. Fox News is the leader, averaging 2.7 million prime-time viewers in October; MSNBC is second, with 1.3 million; and CNN, which has had the steepest drop-off in recent years, is averaging 792,000.

Religious Experience as Evidence (Podcast) | Cold Case Christianity

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https://coldcasechristianity.com/podcasts/religious-experience-as-evidence-podcast/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=religious-experience-as-evidence-podcast

In this episode of the Cold-Case Christianity Podcast, J. Warner examines the nature of religious experience. Can experiences such as these serve as evidence for the existence of God? Can we trust our experiences? Is there some way to test such experiences to make sure they are from God?

https://play.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/32870297/height/128/theme/modern/size/standard/thumbnail/no/custom-color/174dbd/time-start/00:00:00/playlist-height/200/direction/backward/download/yes/font-color/FFFFFF

Subscribe to the Cold-Case Christianity Weekly Podcast on iTunes, or add the podcast from our RSS Feed. Subscribe to the Cold-Case Christianity Radio Interview Podcast on iTunes, or add the podcast from our RSS Feed.

For more information about the nature of Biblical faith and a strategy for communicating the truth of Christianity, please read Forensic Faith: A Homicide Detective Makes the Case for a More Reasonable, Evidential Christian Faith. This book teaches readers four reasonable, evidential characteristics of Christianity and provides a strategy for sharing Christianity with others. The book is accompanied by an eight-session Forensic Faith DVD Set (and Participant’s Guide) to help individuals or small groups examine the evidence and make the case.

The post Religious Experience as Evidence (Podcast) first appeared on Cold Case Christianity.

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About Micah Tomasella

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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About Dr. Katie Frugé

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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What did they discuss?

A clear presentation of the gospel

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“It marks the greatest cultural and spiritual shift of our lifetimes, and likely, humankind. Pull up those stats, Jaimie.”

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