372. The Fight Against Worldwide Child Slavery & the Sex Trade ｜ Jim Caviezel and Tim Ballard
Summary
Jim Caviezel and Tim Ballard, the man behind Operation Underground Railroad, join us to discuss the new film, The Sound of Freedom, detailing the story of a young boy rescued from a child sex slave ring. The movie details the efforts of Tim Ballard to find and rescue the children involved, but it also points to a broader social problem which is the spread of sexual and slave trafficking worldwide, abetted by the net, which is a great avenue for psychopathic criminals to pursue their darkest desires with very little risk of being caught, especially on a multinational basis. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and a roadmap towards healing. In his new series, he provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson s new series on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. - Dr. P.B. Peterson - Let This Be the First Step towards the Bright Future You Deserve. Dr. Phyllis D. Peterson, MD, PhD, PhD and Dr. Larry Hopkins, MD Join our FB group . to learn more about our new series and become a supporter of our new podcast, The Dark Side of the Dark Side Project Subscribe to our newest podcast, Dark Side Of on all social media platforms including Insta- and join our FB groups, , , and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Subscribe, rate and review our new ad choices, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, wherever you re listening to our new episodes are available. We post polls, and we post them on your favorite podcasting platform, and other links on social media! We post them to our social media accounts! Subscribe and review the podcast! Thank you for your thoughts and comments on the podcast and reviews in the podcast you leave us on your thoughts, reviews, and your thoughts on our podcast? We are looking forward to hearing from you!
Transcript
00:00:00.960
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480
Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740
We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100
With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420
He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360
If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780
Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460
Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:01:11.420
Today I have the pleasure of speaking to two people.
00:01:15.840
Someone you most likely know for his portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth in Passion of the Christ, Jim Caviezel.
00:01:23.860
And also someone you should know, if you don't already, the man behind Operation Underground Railroad, Tim Ballard.
00:01:33.520
We discuss the new film, The Sound of Freedom, wherein Mr. Caviezel plays Tim Ballard in the telling of his real-life story,
00:01:43.660
detailing his fight against the increasingly worldwide and pervasive childhood sex trade.
00:01:49.740
The film, The Sound of Freedom, releases on July 4th.
00:01:55.700
So about a week and a half ago, I got a text message from Tony Robbins suggesting that I watch a new film called The Sound of Freedom.
00:02:03.560
And I did that about four days ago with my wife Tammy and was quite struck by the movie.
00:02:12.740
It details out the efforts of one man, Tim Ballard, to investigate a child's sexual slavery ring and to rescue the children that were associated with that.
00:02:25.240
But it also points to a broader social problem, which is the spread of sexual and slave trafficking worldwide, abetted by the net,
00:02:35.860
which is a great avenue for psychopathic criminals to pursue their darkest desires with very little risk of being caught,
00:02:48.300
So I've decided to reach out to Tim Ballard, who is the man who the movie is about,
00:02:58.200
and to Jim Caviezel, who's the actor that plays him, to talk about what all this signifies.
00:03:06.100
I mean, the movie makes the case that there is a widely expanding network of slavery, essentially,
00:03:15.560
making itself manifest worldwide, concentrating in no small part on very young children
00:03:20.900
who are being sold repeatedly to pedophilic psychopaths to have at their will,
00:03:31.900
and, of course, can be sold repeatedly for that purpose.
00:03:35.540
And the movie makes the case that this is now an operation that's rivaling the drug trade in magnitude.
00:03:41.340
So, you know, it sounds like yet another right-wing conspiracy.
00:03:46.500
So, please, why don't you walk us through what you know and help me understand and everybody watching and listening
00:03:58.400
We're so grateful you take your time to do this with us.
00:04:01.580
So, I spent 12 years as a special agent, undercover operator, with the Department of Homeland Security.
00:04:06.620
Most of my time, 90% of that time, was spent investigating these cases, child crimes, child trafficking.
00:04:19.080
These are sources that, you know, the best we have, that say that there's close to 6 million children or more
00:04:25.040
who are forced into sex slavery, labor slavery, or organ harvesting.
00:04:30.080
And I can attest that I have been involved in cases involving all three of those forms of slavery multiple times.
00:04:42.040
The United States is the number one consumer year after year of child rape material.
00:04:47.800
And oftentimes, we're close to number one in production.
00:04:53.520
You know, the case, the story in Sound of Freedom kicks off with the rescue of a little boy at the port of entry
00:05:01.640
That's a real story, a real boy, that I was on that port of entry.
00:05:07.300
So, when you have 85,000 unaccompanied minors showing up in the last two years,
00:05:11.280
being let into the country without the sponsor being vetted, DNA checked, background checked,
00:05:22.100
85,000 children, thousands of them are under five years old, are let into the country.
00:05:33.720
Have, what has been your experience with regard to so-called mainstream media or legacy media coverage?
00:05:47.100
Well, I think not very much has been, you know, attention has been given by mainstream media.
00:05:55.240
Oftentimes, it's more innocent than cynical, perhaps, where it's just, this is too dark.
00:05:59.720
I don't want to expose our audience to this horrific thing.
00:06:07.000
I mean, I'm going to post today another operation in West Africa of a baby factory.
00:06:11.880
I mean, these are real cases where they've kidnapped women, youngest 13-year-old children, and they impregnate them.
00:06:19.460
They rape them, and they make babies, and they take these babies and sell them for their organs, sell them for sex, sell them for satanic ritual abuse.
00:06:30.020
Our operations, we film our operations so that we can show the world this is very real.
00:06:35.180
And I think if there's 2 million children forced into commercial sex, which is the most kind of credible statistic that we can find, a lot of people are involved.
00:06:45.600
So there is a more cynical answer to your question, which may be there's people that don't want this exposed because they're involved in it.
00:06:52.640
So I'm going to harass you a bit here from the Wikipedia page.
00:06:58.280
There is some, not that I'm a particular fan of Wikipedia pages, depending on the circumstances, but there are some criticisms of what you're doing.
00:07:10.360
And I thought we might as well address them right off the bat because people who are watching are going to be, look, man, if I was coming across this for the first time, and in some ways I am, I've got two choices in front of me, don't I?
00:07:26.580
I can either presume that you've discovered something that's ongoing and of tremendous significance that's terribly dark, or I can assume that the difficult work that you had done for a decade genuinely addressing these problems has made you hypersensitive to a threat and willing to magnify it, and it would be easier just to ignore you as a consequence.
00:07:50.560
Now, that would be the preferable outcome to such an investigation, wouldn't it?
00:07:56.580
So you can, as you said, you can understand why people might want to avert their eyes from such a thing.
00:08:01.700
So I'm going to walk through these criticisms, and maybe you could, you know, you can respond to them, and we can get that out of the way before we go deeper into the film and your operations.
00:08:15.200
So your group, and this is Operation Underground Railroad, and tell me if I get anything wrong here, says it devours conspiracy theories, though founder Tom Bellard was criticized for refusing to condemn the QAnon conspiracy theory.
00:08:39.520
We have absolutely, and our FAQs for years have condemned the majority of what we see with conspiracy theories.
00:08:48.680
So they like to attribute me to the QAnon movement.
00:08:52.740
There may be some truths in there, but there's so many falsehoods on top of that.
00:08:56.380
So our FAQs refute that immediately because it discredits the movement.
00:09:03.540
In fact, I would go so far as to consider that maybe certain people who don't want this known are responsible for some of the conspiracy theories in order to discredit the movement, and they go too far.
00:09:19.260
But yeah, we absolutely have disavowed what's generally coming out of QAnon.
00:09:24.680
Yeah, well, it says, you know, it's very vague on Wikipedia.
00:09:28.260
It says to condemn the QAnon conspiracy theory.
00:09:32.140
Well, I know perfectly well that there are more than one conspiracy theories, let's say, on QAnon, so I'm not even exactly sure what it's referring to.
00:09:40.380
Is there a particular conspiracy theory that you were criticized for refusing to condemn?
00:09:47.660
Do you have any more specific details about that?
00:09:50.860
I mean, I'm not sure what exactly they're talking about.
00:09:53.860
They might be referring to the fact that there's something called adrenalchrome where they're taking children's blood and devouring it and so forth.
00:10:04.920
And I've explained my experience with that, and I just did in West Africa and other places.
00:10:10.960
We've seen this in several parts of the continent of Africa.
00:10:22.880
They take the genitalia of children and hang it over the rooftop of their businesses, thinking that the dark gods will bless them.
00:10:31.420
And so I might say something like that, and then they connect it to something that a QAnon person says about, you know, a celebrity who must be doing this too, but there's no evidence to back that.
00:10:51.160
Well, the next thing it says is that the Operation Underground Railway falsely claimed that it had entered a partnership with American Airlines.
00:11:05.200
So a PR firm who represented us made a deal with American Airlines, came to us and said, shoot the video.
00:11:13.320
They're going to put this video on your, we're going to put this video on their airlines.
00:11:19.060
I just get a call from our PR company, put me in a studio.
00:11:21.680
I give a video that I think I'm talking to the passengers for one month on American Airlines.
00:11:31.980
And our marketing company, our marketing team put out, hey, we're going to be on American Airlines.
00:11:40.340
They said, we can't believe we didn't get the message to you.
00:11:43.220
And of course, there's people that want so badly for us to be wrong or us to not do what we say we do.
00:11:50.400
I think that was a Vice magazine, very incredibly dishonest journal.
00:11:56.260
The Vice magazine, they've done a series of hit pieces on us.
00:12:00.140
And I encourage people, I encourage people to read it.
00:12:03.640
Read Vice because everything they say is so ridiculous and so dishonest.
00:12:09.100
Well, and I do believe, if I remember correctly, that Vice has also declared bankruptcy in the last few weeks.
00:12:14.120
And I can't imagine an organization more richly deserving precisely what they've got.
00:12:19.420
I've heard from behind the scenes just exactly what it was like to work for the narcissists and psychopaths who ran that operation.
00:12:27.940
So there was a 2021 follow-up article from Vice, but I don't think we're going to.
00:12:32.880
I'll just read part of it because it's so ridiculous.
00:12:34.800
Yeah, well, that's exactly the kind of Weasley, what would you call it, criticism that I'd expect from people who are trying to justify the sorts of behaviors that you are attempting to expose.
00:12:49.460
Then there's a 2021 article in Slate criticizing a 2014 raid conducted by Operation Underground Railway in the Dominican Republic, saying that it was likely to have traumatized the trafficked children.
00:13:04.140
Ann Gallagher, an authority on human trafficking, wrote in 2015 that OUR had an alarming lack of understanding about how sophisticated criminal trafficking networks must be approached and dismantled and called the work of OUR arrogant, unethical, and illegal.
00:13:26.360
So someone like Ann Gallagher, who lives 3,000 miles away from any operation we've ever done, is not qualified to talk about our operations.
00:13:44.920
Early on, we brought a blogger down to watch our operations.
00:13:54.020
The Attorney General of Utah has come in our operations.
00:13:56.360
If we're hiding something, that's the last thing we would, of course, do.
00:14:05.180
And she came and watched a legitimate operation happen in Dominican Republic.
00:14:21.000
You can't always control who shows up to the sting party.
00:14:30.440
They were all liberated from the control of their captors.
00:14:37.200
This blogger then wrote two glowing stories about it, that she witnessed this.
00:14:41.860
She had very minimal exposure to the operation itself.
00:14:46.220
Some seven years later, she decides to use it, in my opinion, to somehow increase her social media following as our foundation grew.
00:15:02.240
And nine children had three years of aftercare services in this operation provided by International Justice Mission, one of the top authorities in aftercare and fighting human trafficking.
00:15:13.800
Seven traffickers were not only arrested, but all seven were convicted.
00:15:20.600
Now, tellingly, if anyone's going to write a story about that operation, good, bad, or otherwise, and they leave out the part that says seven traffickers were arrested and seven traffickers were convicted, and nine children were liberated and have three years of aftercare to heal them, if you leave that part out, either you are extremely incompetent as a researcher and writer, or you're a liar.
00:15:50.600
On that fact alone, because she doesn't even report on those two essential elements.
00:15:58.120
Well, we've hypothetically dispensed with Vice, which, of course, is a—yeah, well, it's pretty funny that that's what they named their organization, as far as I'm concerned.
00:16:09.320
Jim, let me ask you a couple of questions, if you don't mind.
00:16:12.180
Do you want to, first of all, tell people about your involvement with Angel Studios, a little bit about your career, and why this particular movie, Sound of Freedom?
00:16:37.980
Do you want to detail out your association with Angel Studios?
00:16:41.400
Tell everybody first who Angel Studios are, what they've done.
00:16:45.780
And I've watched a lot of The Chosen, by the way, which I thought was extremely high quality.
00:16:49.620
Um, do you, tell us about the studio, tell us about your involvement with them, about your career, and then about your attraction to this particular movie.
00:16:59.380
Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:17:04.780
Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:17:12.600
In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury, it's a fundamental right.
00:17:17.560
Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with the technical know-how to intercept it.
00:17:27.060
And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:17:30.260
With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:17:41.300
Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.
00:17:45.920
That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.
00:17:51.720
It's like a digital fortress, creating an encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet.
00:17:56.420
Their encryption is so robust that it would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to crack it.
00:18:05.880
With just one click, you're protected across all your devices.
00:18:11.340
That's why I use ExpressVPN whenever I'm traveling or working from a coffee shop.
00:18:15.560
It gives me peace of mind knowing that my research, communications, and personal data are shielded from prying eyes.
00:18:21.540
Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash jordan.
00:18:26.300
That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash jordan.
00:18:47.500
I became aware of the dangers that go on with children around the world and through that process.
00:19:00.620
And coincidentally, then my friend, Eduardo Verostegui, brought me this script because many of the actors that they had offered it to didn't want to get involved in this particular project.
00:19:20.880
And I thought, this is like Taken, but with a much bigger heart.
00:19:34.040
And then the other one was The Passion of the Christ.
00:19:36.840
And he felt that I'd be the right guy to play him.
00:19:40.000
Angel Studios, I had no connection to them until a few months ago when they wanted to do this movie.
00:19:50.800
And their idea was to sell two million tickets for these two million trafficked children.
00:19:59.360
So why is it that a number of actors, why in your estimation did a number of actors turn down the opportunity to play the role?
00:20:07.600
And why did you decide to forego that risk and to climb aboard?
00:20:14.120
I foregoed the risk because when you have three children that you loved and you'd give your life for, it kind of connects into Tim Ballard.
00:20:27.720
And Tim did this for this little girl and the children that he saves.
00:20:33.480
It's something, it's a greater purpose that even your career, you know, like I went through this with Mel Gibson when we did The Passion, that my career was the last thing I thought of.
00:20:51.480
And I put this, and how I look at it is, is that this God that I love, that he loves me and he deserved to be loved back.
00:21:09.040
So Tim Ballard, I was very fortunate that he had seen those films.
00:21:17.820
And when I looked at, and I think Tim made this comparison, Schindler's List was a very powerful weapon, but it came 50 years too late.
00:21:31.680
This film is now, this is exposing it now during that time.
00:21:36.960
And I believe that is probably why it's easier to get an actor to do a movie 50 years later.
00:21:45.600
But the individuals, imagine if Rwanda, if that story had been made, that movie had been made during that time, or they could see it.
00:21:54.820
You have to look at these situations and understand that good people sit back and do nothing and allow this evil to occur.
00:22:08.040
There's got to be people that stand up in the time that it occurs.
00:22:12.900
And that's what drew me to the whole story in the first place.
00:22:20.120
Now you've seen the movie in its entirety, it's about to be released.
00:22:26.180
I was particularly impressed by the cinematography.
00:22:32.480
The acting, I don't want to flatter you, but the acting is extremely high quality.
00:22:37.760
How do you feel about your involvement now that everything is done?
00:22:42.860
And how do you feel about the, what would you say, the production capacity of Angel Studios, which is a relatively, you know, it's a relatively new, a relative newcomer on the mass entertainment block?
00:22:54.760
When I was sitting next to Tim Ballard and he leaned over and he started to weep heavily, I knew I did my job.
00:23:06.440
I don't want to give away the entire plot because that would obviously be pointless.
00:23:10.340
But do you want to just run us briefly through, Jim, the plot of the movie?
00:23:15.580
And then I'll turn to Tim and fill in some of the background details of his life.
00:23:24.980
He sets up these sting operations to take down these very, very bad men to save trafficked children.
00:23:34.460
And in one particular case, one of the traffickers that he takes down, Ernst Lipczynski, he rescues this boy.
00:23:45.300
And the little boy turns to him and says, will you save my sister?
00:23:50.980
And Tim goes back, gets the direction from above and from his wife and goes back.
00:23:57.340
And he sells everything to find this little girl.
00:24:01.080
So what I liked about the script, so I've noticed that one of the most effective ways of communicating complex ideas effectively is to particularize the problem.
00:24:13.980
And so what happens in this movie is that the broad problem of slavery and human trafficking and the somewhat narrower problem of sexual trafficking of children is zeroed, is what focused on a particular case.
00:24:32.940
And so that gives the movie a very powerful narrative underpinning, right?
00:24:36.900
Because when a problem is particularized and you can see how it affects actual specific people's lives, it becomes much more realistic and much more palpable.
00:24:46.460
And I thought the movie did a good job of that.
00:24:49.180
Tim, do you want to walk everybody listening through?
00:24:54.580
Now, you worked for the special forces per se, and who were you working for before you decided to forego your career and to pursue the case that we're describing?
00:25:06.500
So I worked for 12 years as a special agent and undercover operator for the Department of Homeland Security, the investigative division called Homeland Security Investigations.
00:25:16.440
Ten of those years were spent on the border, tracking child traffickers, people who would exploit children with child exploitation material.
00:25:26.220
In 2006, the laws changed in the United States.
00:25:29.480
And for the first time, U.S. agents were permitted and encouraged to go overseas and find children who Americans were abusing.
00:25:37.820
And we can now hold those Americans accountable as if they had committed that crime on U.S. soil.
00:25:42.820
That's what really changed my life because I speak Spanish fluently, and they sent me overseas, south of the border.
00:25:49.420
That's when my eyes opened up, and I started seeing the children that I used to only see mostly on the child exploitation material cases.
00:26:01.820
The U.S. government unwittingly was because if I couldn't find that connection back to the United States, the American kid or the American pedophile, I had to come home.
00:26:10.740
But the problem is I've already been exposed to the children.
00:26:14.080
I've already been exposed to the problem and oftentimes have made myself the bait.
00:26:22.880
I kind of went further than otherwise I probably should have.
00:26:27.300
The movie didn't have time to tell you that there was another case in Haiti at the same time that I was working thinking there was a U.S. nexus.
00:26:34.020
And I was told in both instances to come home, and you couldn't work these cases.
00:26:38.920
And that's when I had a very consequential conversation with my wife.
00:26:42.720
And I said, if I stay here, if I do this operation with or without my badge, it doesn't matter at this point.
00:26:59.500
And this is a moral dilemma like I've never faced in my life.
00:27:02.700
And I was hoping my wife would have responded with, get your ass home.
00:27:12.980
You know, first of all, you're going to die without the top cover of the U.S. government if you continue this.
00:27:18.280
And who's going to pay the bills and feed the kids?
00:27:31.380
She felt a calling and a responsibility that she might have to reckon with one day when she meets her maker.
00:27:38.300
And I knew that she felt that way when she told me this in the crucial moment of decision.
00:27:45.440
About two days before I ended up turning my badge and gun over and went private.
00:27:51.040
She said to me, I will not let you jeopardize my salvation by not doing this.
00:27:56.900
And when she said those words, and I knew she meant those words, that changed everything for me.
00:28:02.680
And we jumped into really just an irrational act of service, I might call it.
00:28:12.880
But ultimately, it ended in the operation you see depicted in the film, which shows 54 children.
00:28:19.220
Some young, young adult women were in that group as well, rescued on that island.
00:28:24.440
But what the movie doesn't have the time to report is that in actuality, it was 120.
00:28:30.340
There were two other locations being taken down at the same time.
00:28:33.360
And there's a documentary that's going to follow in the wake of Sound of Freedom called Triple Take.
00:28:39.000
Angel Studios will put it out, documenting the entire story.
00:28:48.480
But I run another foundation that was founded by Glenn Beck called the Nazarene Fund.
00:28:53.540
And we're doing these kind of operations all over the world today.
00:28:57.040
So how, let's go back in time to before you worked as a security agent for the Homeland Security Investigations Unit.
00:29:08.200
But how did you, how were you trained to do that?
00:29:12.540
Like, what was your background before you became employed as an agent?
00:29:15.360
And what was it about you that made you capable of engaging in this sort of operation?
00:29:22.120
So I got a graduate degree in international politics.
00:29:27.260
And I always wanted to be in federal law enforcement.
00:29:30.780
I was there doing 9-11, working in the operations center.
00:29:34.240
In the wake of 9-11, I found out that—I studied terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
00:29:39.700
That was actually the degree I got at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
00:29:44.720
And so it was an easy recruit into the CIA because, you know, 9-11 had just happened.
00:29:51.600
When I found out that one of the terrorists, Mohamed Atra, had staged his attack from Mexicali, Mexico, and crossed the border, and I speak Spanish,
00:29:59.760
I wanted to go fight terrorism on the southern border.
00:30:02.120
So I ended up jumping ship from CIA, and I joined the newly created Homeland Security Department and became a special agent.
00:30:11.220
For six months, I was tracking those kind of movements, you know, not human trafficking or child exploitation, but money, guns, terrorism.
00:30:21.320
Six months into that endeavor, I was called into the office of a supervisor,
00:30:25.640
and they asked me if I would please forego everything that I wanted to do with my career and help them start a child crimes unit.
00:30:36.920
you're a young agent, but you're a person of faith, and we know that about you, and that's a requirement, or your soul will be crushed.
00:30:44.180
I would like you, if you would, to tell us, to the degree that you can, what you were typically dealing with when you started working for the Child Sex Crimes Unit.
00:31:04.120
Because that sort of thing, that changes people's conceptions of humanity, per se, let's say, the nature of the cosmos and what it means to be human, right?
00:31:13.820
I mean, when you're in contact with people who are capable of that level of darkness,
00:31:19.100
you start to understand something about the nature of the human soul that you can't understand any other way.
00:31:23.660
And that can be, I mean, that's the sort of thing that gives people post-traumatic stress disorder when they're soldiers.
00:31:27.900
So, and now you said also your supervisors had an inkling that you might be protected against that, at least to some degree, because of your faith.
00:31:36.000
So, let's walk through what you learned and encountered first.
00:31:40.200
What did you see when you were working as part of this Child Sex Crimes Unit?
00:31:48.460
I thought Child Sex Crimes would be 15-year-olds, 16-year-olds.
00:31:52.640
My brain couldn't comprehend something more evil than abusing that age.
00:31:59.200
The very first case I worked in 2002, I believe, I was given a bunch of VHS videos, some hard drives to look at that had been seized and it weren't.
00:32:09.160
The very first image I saw were, there were three little boys.
00:32:26.640
And they looked like, they looked like my children.
00:32:29.960
They had, you know, they had blonde, blonde eye, blonde hair, blue eyes.
00:32:34.380
And they were being just raped, raped, these three little boys, by this pedophile.
00:32:43.020
I dry heaved, thinking I was going to throw up into the wastebasket.
00:32:48.280
I drove to my children's school, my three oldest kids.
00:32:53.220
I still remember in my mind, I can still see dentist, dentist, dentist appointment I wrote.
00:33:01.380
My wife came in and I just, I wouldn't let the kids go.
00:33:22.060
I started getting help immediately because I didn't want to quit.
00:33:31.360
And those kind of videos have increased over the last couple of years by 5,000%.
00:33:36.920
Yeah, well, in Canada, we just had a report from an organization called the Western Standard
00:33:45.720
that one million child sexual exploitation photos and videos have been identified in an
00:33:58.860
Okay, so that's some indication of the widespread nature of the problem.
00:34:02.820
Now, you said that when you first encountered this material, it made you physically ill and
00:34:08.480
also terrified for the safety of your children.
00:34:10.620
But then also, it necessitated you seeking help, I suppose, or aid.
00:34:17.960
I mean, I've worked with people who've had post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:34:22.300
Generally, what happens is that tragedy is not enough to give someone post-traumatic stress
00:34:28.860
It has to be a combination of tragedy and malevolence.
00:34:32.780
And the real trauma comes as a consequence of contact with evil, with malevolence.
00:34:39.920
And what people generally have to do in order to recover from that is to develop a rather
00:34:48.360
And a religious faith, in its most fundamental essence, is a philosophy of good and evil.
00:34:54.700
It does detail out the heart of darkness among human beings.
00:35:00.720
Point out to people, this is particularly, although not uniquely true of the Christian
00:35:05.680
tradition, but particularly true, that that capacity for evil lurks in the heart of everyone
00:35:11.160
and that our fundamental moral obligation as we sojourn here on earth is to overcome that
00:35:18.560
proclivity within and also to stand up against it in the external world.
00:35:23.520
And so you said you received some aid after you had been exposed to this first set of
00:35:31.000
What is it about the way you looked at the world that had to change in order for you to
00:35:38.720
Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is
00:35:46.280
Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business,
00:35:50.520
from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million
00:35:57.700
Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it
00:36:01.960
is to add more items, ship products and track conversions.
00:36:04.900
With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful
00:36:10.200
tools, alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps like on-demand printing,
00:36:17.140
Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout,
00:36:21.420
up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.
00:36:25.500
No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control
00:36:31.920
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.
00:36:37.880
Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in.
00:36:48.240
Well, I had to come to grips with an idea that I had never been confronted with before,
00:36:53.900
that there are people, and not a few, but millions of people, only millions of pedophiles
00:37:00.460
could justify a demand of millions of child exploitation material, videos, and so forth.
00:37:09.600
The first person you see arrested in the movie is a real person named Ernst Luposchensky
00:37:15.080
He had over 2 million pieces of child rape material in his house.
00:37:20.020
So, to be confronted with the reality that there are people on this planet, and like
00:37:26.880
I said, not a few, but millions, who want to indulge in watching five-year-old children
00:37:33.420
be raped and sexually assaulted in ways that, and I'm sorry to be so raw, but I feel comfortable
00:37:39.600
with you, Dr. Peterson, but to watch children's bodies actually break in the act of sexual assault,
00:37:48.620
acts that your mind couldn't conjure up if you tried to conjure it up, and that it's
00:38:00.900
I tell people, I feel like I've had a million holes burned into my brain because I've watched
00:38:10.420
Not only watch it, and I love the scene that Jim depicts where he's, that's very real.
00:38:15.560
I break, I can't watch, I can't watch the movie, but the movie's very good.
00:38:19.120
The movie doesn't show any of this, by the way.
00:38:22.220
I don't want people to run away and be scared, but you see the scene where the camera flashes
00:38:26.980
a close-up into Jim's eyes, and that was me for 10 years, not only watching, but writing,
00:38:35.080
writing it in details for the court to see, for the prosecutors to see, and raising children
00:38:42.080
at the same time that are the very same age, and fortunately or unfortunately for me, I
00:38:48.640
At the time, I left the government at six, and so I can always identify the age of a child
00:38:54.960
with one of my own children, and what my mind was almost automatically doing is I would superimpose
00:39:00.740
my own children's faces and persons onto these children, and that led to the PTSD, I'll be honest,
00:39:10.260
and almost a paranoia about what would happen to my children and watching my children, and I've come
00:39:16.380
a long ways, and I'm able to deal with it, but I was determined never to quit, and so I just sought
00:39:23.300
more help, and I won't quit, so. Okay, so Tim, I'm going to walk you through what I know about how
00:39:32.480
people turn into the sort of pedophile that you find so, you and everyone else, I suppose,
00:39:40.660
or virtually everyone else find so mysterious. So I'm going to refer first to the story of Cain
00:39:47.160
and Abel because it actually puts its finger on the process in a stunning manner. So what happens
00:39:54.020
in that story is that two different pathways to adaptation are detailed out, and they become the
00:40:01.040
cardinal pathways of adaptation that characterize the whole human race, immersed as it is from that
00:40:06.900
point onward in history instead of in the Garden of Eden, and one is the pathway of Cain, and the other
00:40:13.420
is the pathway of Abel. Now, Abel makes high-quality sacrifices. He's all in, right? He puts himself
00:40:20.520
on the line, and he does the real thing, and as a consequence, God finds, he finds favor with God,
00:40:29.500
and his sacrifices are rewarded. He does well, and everyone loves him, and he thrives, and Cain,
00:40:36.240
his sacrifices are not of the same quality. He tries to cut corners and to pull the wool over his eyes
00:40:43.380
and God's eyes and everyone else's eyes, and as a consequence, his sacrifices are rejected.
00:40:50.060
And instead of cluing the hell in and waking up and taking responsibility for his failure,
00:40:55.880
he decides that he's going to call out God for creating a cosmos that's cosmically unfair and
00:41:03.040
unjust, and the evidence for that is Cain's failure and Abel's success. And so he has a little chat with
00:41:10.360
God, and he basically calls him out and says, you know, I'm breaking myself in half here, and
00:41:15.220
nothing's going my way, and Abel gets everything he wants, and you know, how dare you make a cosmos so
00:41:21.540
radically unjust and improper, and why don't you just straighten yourself out? And God says, if you did
00:41:28.660
well, you would be rewarded for it, and you should look to yourself. And then he says something even
00:41:34.000
worse, and this is very subtle because it's complicated to understand it unless you look
00:41:39.660
at multiple translations or potentially the original Hebrew, which I can't read, but I read the
00:41:44.400
multiple translations. God says to Cain, the spirit of sin crouches at your doorstep like a sexually aroused
00:41:54.280
predatory animal, and you have invited it in to have its way with you. And so now, if you study
00:42:04.680
the development of the fantasies of very, very dark people, you see that they brood and fantasize
00:42:13.540
in isolation for years, and the fantasies get darker and darker and darker. So they're bitter and resentful
00:42:21.120
to begin with. And then they start fantasizing about, well, what they would want. That can take
00:42:27.300
a sexual end, or it can take a very violent end, or it can take both. And what they're really after
00:42:32.100
is the ultimate in revenge. And on the sexual front, they find a kick in extending the, what would you
00:42:39.220
call it, unacceptability of the fantasy one stage at a time. The famous and extremely attractive
00:42:48.760
sexual serial killer, what was his name? It's a famous photograph of him like this, very attractive
00:42:55.980
man. Do you remember his name? Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy detailed out exactly how his fantasies
00:43:03.300
progressed as he became more and more involved with pornography. And what happens in some sense is
00:43:08.300
that these people who are nursing these terrible fantasies want to stay on the edge of novelty. And so
00:43:14.440
their fantasies get darker and darker and darker as they progress down that road. And so after a
00:43:20.340
thousand such micro progressions, they end up in exactly the sort of pit that you're describing.
00:43:24.940
And some of that is pure sexual kick because of the novelty. And, but it's got this sadistic and
00:43:30.400
perverse, vengeful twist. And you can think about it this way. You know, I think it says in the Gospels
00:43:36.480
that, you know, it would be better that, that a millstone was hung around your neck and that you
00:43:41.640
were cast into the abyss than to do harm to any of God's children, let's say. And the, that's actually
00:43:48.800
where the perverse delight comes because the most egregious possible sin, let's say, is the violent
00:43:55.480
sexual abuse of the most innocent possible person. And the perverse novelty kick is highest at exactly
00:44:01.560
that point. And then that just goes from bad to worse. And there's a thousand or even 10,000 micro
00:44:07.280
decisions that go along with that. There's also a great book called Ordinary Men. This is well worth
00:44:12.380
reading, although it's a bloody catastrophe to read, I'll tell you. It details out how a group of
00:44:18.380
German policemen who were moved to Poland during World War II were transformed from ordinary middle
00:44:26.440
class, working class, or sorry, ordinary working class men, old enough to not have been raised under
00:44:33.840
the Nazi regime, by the way, and so not propagandized into a kind of mindless obedience, how they went from
00:44:41.180
being perfectly ordinary policemen to the sort of people who could take naked pregnant women out into
00:44:47.120
the middle of the field and shoot them in the back of the head. And it isn't like they had an easy
00:44:51.300
time with that. Some of them reported the same sort of thing that you reported when you first
00:44:55.240
watched that video. What they were being called upon to do stage by stage made them physically
00:45:01.180
ill. And they had a commander who actually had told them that they could leave the service if they
00:45:06.560
didn't want to continue with their duties. But they felt duty bound not to leave their comrades having
00:45:13.020
to mop up the terrible situation. But it does a lovely job of detailing out how your movement from
00:45:19.880
normality to absolute perversity is a consequence of 10,000 micro, what would you say, micro violations
00:45:28.460
of your own conscience. Not all of the micro, obviously. So you need to know about the vengefulness,
00:45:34.560
you need to know about the kick of sadism. That's that novelty kick that produces a dopaminergic kick
00:45:40.140
that heightens sexual satisfaction. And so there's an element of sadistic misery that can add novelty
00:45:48.260
to sex. That's particularly attractive to people who are bitter and resentful because they actually
00:45:53.260
can't find any willing sexual partners. And so they're angry at the world and shake their fist at
00:45:58.260
God because of it. And so anyways, that's a bit of the developmental course of such a lovely descent
00:46:05.420
into hell. And the interesting thing about it is that people brood, eh? Like you don't get to the
00:46:10.900
point where you're watching pornographic videos of children being raped without hundreds or even
00:46:15.820
thousands of hours of increasingly demented voluntary fantasy. And that's that allowing the spirit of sin
00:46:24.240
that would otherwise crouch on your doorstep to enter your house and have its way with you, right?
00:46:30.040
It's like a collaborative venture with Satan himself. That's the most straightforward way of
00:46:34.720
describing it. And so, well, so that's, I don't know what you have to say about that, but I'll let you have
00:46:40.300
at her. I'll say this, that everything you're saying absolutely resonates with my anecdotal experiences
00:46:46.380
dealing with these people. I look into their eyes and what you're describing is what I see, though I've never
00:46:52.340
been able to articulate it like you just have. So I appreciate being armed with an understanding that it will
00:47:00.220
help me evangelize more clearly to others about the dangers of overstimulation and overuse of pornography
00:47:09.840
and shaking hands with the devil. So thank you for that. That was very insightful.
00:47:14.640
So I spent a bit of time, not a lot, but a bit of time inside a maximum security prison when I was a kid.
00:47:22.880
I worked with a very strange psychologist that was there. And one of the things that really shocked
00:47:27.540
me, and I think this shocked me enough to change my whole life, was I met these, I met this one
00:47:33.460
prisoner who was a pretty nondescript looking character. He took me for a walk out in the yard
00:47:38.320
away from a gym full of like weightlifting, axe murderer monsters and rapists. And we went for a
00:47:44.840
walk out in the yard and the psychologist called us back and told me later in the office that this
00:47:50.020
guy who was about 5'2", pretty non-prepossessing guy, had made two policemen kneel in front of him,
00:48:01.120
beg for their lives in reference to their families, and then shot them both in the back of the head
00:48:06.600
and kicked them aside. And the shocking thing to me was, you know, you kind of think that if you met
00:48:14.120
pure evil, it would have a monstrous form. And, you know, the thing that shocked me about that was
00:48:20.700
the nondescript nature of this guy. You know, his absolutely banal ordinariness, the fact that you
00:48:26.980
could just walk past him on the street and you'd never know. He wasn't some monster, you know, the
00:48:31.040
monstrous character of Satan in your imagination is, you know, a figure that's terrifying to behold
00:48:37.660
instead of someone normal. You know what I mean? Normal in that cringing sense. These people that
00:48:43.660
you've interacted with, like, what's your reaction to them when you talk to them, the pedophiles,
00:48:50.160
when you talk to them and when you arrest them? My experience is very similar to what you just
00:48:54.880
described. Very nondescript, people of all walks of life. We've arrested and I've interrogated
00:49:01.100
educators, lawyers, law enforcement, clergymen, and sitting across from them with no apparent
00:49:12.260
physicality that would tell you who they are. But I will say this, when they start talking and I look
00:49:17.580
into their eyes, that's when I sense something that really scares the hell out of me. And the way
00:49:26.660
they talk about children when they get there and it's something that they've been able to normalize
00:49:33.560
and they're speaking to me about children almost like they're talking about, you know, the weather
00:49:40.180
or, you know, talking about buying and selling children like you talk about buying and selling
00:49:44.340
computer parts or an automobile or something. And that's where I thought you, something has taken
00:49:50.680
over you. Something non-human has made you less human. And I've never been able to figure it out,
00:49:57.760
only that it creeps me out. And I usually end up getting them to confess because they have brought
00:50:04.440
themselves to a place where they think they're okay. They think that it's somehow normal. I don't
00:50:11.980
Well, the degree of rationalization that has to, with each step forward in the progress of the
00:50:20.560
fantasy, there has to be a step forward in the self-deception with regards to self-description,
00:50:27.240
right? So imagine that you're attempting to cling to a sense of yourself at least as normal,
00:50:33.820
but even maybe as a moral agent. I mean, the more forthright pedophiles claim that they're only
00:50:40.160
allowing children to express their true sexual desires, and that what they're actually doing is
00:50:45.120
forming the best relationship with the children that they've ever had. Now, of course, there's
00:50:48.960
part of them that knows that that's an absolutely bloody, screaming, hellish lie. But you get to that
00:50:54.900
lie, like I said, with a thousand micro-lies, right? And you're modifying your self-conception
00:50:59.760
along the way. I mean, have you had these people justify themselves to you? And if so,
00:51:06.660
by what means do they attempt to do that? So one person that comes to mind, absolutely,
00:51:12.680
the answer is yes. And one person that comes to mind is the person depicted in the film
00:51:15.900
Oshensky. This person had written articles, self-published, of course. He had a book that
00:51:23.320
he actually sold on Amazon. And his understanding or his justification was that the puritanical
00:51:30.080
society of this country has crushed the true and beautiful and righteous sexual experience,
00:51:40.060
which the most natural would be between a man and a child, a prepubescent child. A prepubescent
00:51:46.940
child is the most beautiful form of humanity. And why take that away from a child? Children would be
00:51:56.760
well-conditioned to confront the challenges of life. If only they could experience orgasmic pleasure,
00:52:03.960
even in their prepubescence. This is how they talk.
00:52:07.740
Right, right, right. Well, you saw echoes of that. There was attempts made in the 1970s by French
00:52:13.580
intellectuals, surprise, surprise, to have the age of consent reduced radically. And that was always the
00:52:20.740
rationale. It was an extension of the patriarchal oppression theory in some sense, right? That all sexual
00:52:26.060
expression is essentially pure and good in its most fundamental form. And it's all warped by social
00:52:32.500
pressure. And if we were just allowed to express ourselves in every manner that we saw fit, then
00:52:37.180
everyone would be free and we wouldn't suffer anymore from the constraints of tyrannical society,
00:52:43.040
right? And it's just convenient for the bloody pedophiles that that happens to justify them doing
00:52:47.680
whatever the hell they want to children who are obviously too young to consent.
00:52:51.760
Right. So he is a good example. I forgot about that in the book. Jim, let me ask you. So now you
00:52:57.880
didn't have to go through the same things that Tim did, and you obviously weren't subject to the same
00:53:04.280
kind of exposure, but you had to play this role and you had to act out in your imagination the darkness
00:53:11.900
that characterized the people who played your enemies, let's say, on the screen. What were the
00:53:17.860
consequences for you of having to delve even on the fictional landscape into this entire, what would
00:53:26.400
you say, underworld domain? Well, let's start with your story initially when you brought up Cain and
00:53:34.540
Abel. In my years of working with agents like Tim, and I actually worked with other agents because Tim
00:53:43.240
was very busy doing missions at the time, and I got to go into a lot of his world. I mean, those are
00:53:49.580
the guys that I play, so I don't imitate other actors. I go and meet these guys and really learn
00:53:56.740
and study what they do. Cain and Abel, for example. Abel is doing good things for God. How would Cain
00:54:06.380
hurt God by killing Abel, by wounding him? When I go and play, for example, a serial killer or a man that you
00:54:17.640
mentioned earlier, Ted Bundy, who my friend broke that case and found out who he was, Mike Tando. So, you're the
00:54:29.140
beast that comes in you. He comes in and he deceives you and starts with the ego and the whole thing.
00:54:41.060
And then eventually, the turn is how that you're eventually not fair. A non-servium becomes
00:54:49.520
one who, how can I wound God the most by killing the most innocent child. And it wounds God in the
00:54:58.160
greatest way when you take these innocent children who've done nothing and have no sin. And these guys
00:55:05.900
have the attitude, which you were mentioning earlier, all the cutting of the corners and whatnot,
00:55:14.020
and ultimately, they can kill the most innocent and effectively wounds God's heart the most.
00:55:27.380
I spent a great deal of time, I did this movie, Deja Vu, and I played a Unabomber. And I was on the
00:55:36.660
phone with a friend of mine who broke the case, Ted Bundy, and I talked to him a lot about serial
00:55:47.460
killers. And then I got to look at the FBI and the ATF gave me through Jerry Bruckheimer and Tony Scott,
00:55:56.820
I got all these videos to look at. And I was looking at Unabombers, guys that
00:56:06.660
blow things up and an actual serial killers, but it was written more like a Ted Bundy.
00:56:13.860
And not a man who is writing destiny and all of these things that he would exchange his life
00:56:21.460
to take out whoever they want to take out. And but the but the voice was very similar. And so I don't go to
00:56:32.020
Satan to play. In this particular story, I play this this guy, this bomber. And I don't go to the
00:56:46.820
devil to play the devil. I think many actors make that mistake, go to God to tell you who the devil
00:56:53.460
is. That's what I do. And it also gives me a protection. What's the difference? What's the
00:57:00.340
difference, Jim? Like, because that also bears on how you protect yourself from such things.
00:57:06.260
Um, the different and are you saying the difference in the the differences is that I play the truth.
00:57:15.860
So if you go and play go to the devil to play the devil, the devil will deceive you and put something
00:57:21.780
up there that deceives the public. He'll always try to hide in the shadow. He'll always try because
00:57:27.620
he doesn't like the light, even though he's called the light, the illuminator, the Lucifer.
00:57:34.020
Um, and he tries to mimic God. He tries to be like God. So there's always like, um,
00:57:41.540
if God has love and what we see is love, he creates lust. It's always trying to be like that.
00:57:48.180
It's like a cane trying to rip off Abel, cutting the corners. And, um, so committing to,
00:57:55.460
well, there's, well, there's a tendency, even in Milton's, uh, in, in, in Milton's paradise lost,
00:58:01.540
there's been two readings of that forever. And one of them is that Milton's Satan is, um,
00:58:10.580
an, an antihero of the most profound sort, really the embodiment of evil. And the other reading is that,
00:58:16.900
um, Milton's Satan is, uh, a disguised hero and the eternal, what would you say? The
00:58:25.060
eternal rebel against established order and someone to emulate in consequence. And that
00:58:31.860
Milton somehow knew that and was coding that not precisely secretly, but subtly. And I think
00:58:38.100
that's a huge mistake. I mean, I've familiarized myself with paradise lost and I think that Milton
00:58:42.660
was an extraordinarily subtle writer and that he got everything as right as anyone ever has. But
00:58:48.980
the reason I'm bringing that up is because, so this is okay. This is a complicated thing to untangle.
00:58:55.060
But one of the things you see in Hollywood portrayals of villains, you saw this in the
00:59:00.980
Silence of the Lambs. You see it frequently in mafia portrayals is that the villain is inadvertently
00:59:07.460
or even sometimes purposefully glorified. And it's partly because he's a rule breaker and has the
00:59:13.460
attraction that goes along with that. But I also wonder too, if it's, it has something to do with
00:59:18.980
what you were describing is that the writers and the actors find themselves when they're trying to
00:59:25.380
portray evil, pulled towards falseness in that representation as part of the proclivity of evil
00:59:34.660
to hide itself. And the danger in that is twofold. And one is the danger of deceiving the public as to
00:59:41.940
the true nature of evil because there's nothing heroic about it, quite the contrary. And the
00:59:46.500
second danger I wonder about, you know, there's all this speculation about Heath Ledger and the
00:59:51.700
consequences that for him of having played the Joker in such a dark manner. And, you know, I don't know
00:59:57.540
what to make of that, although I do think there is some danger in having to journey down a path of
01:00:03.220
emulating evil in order to represent it. Now, you said that you turned to God, so to speak, to
01:00:09.620
protect yourself against false representations of evil, but also in some ways to shield yourself. And
01:00:15.220
it sounds to me reminiscent of what Tim's superiors mentioned to him when they said to him that his
01:00:21.940
faith might protect him from what was... I love his question. Okay, go ahead, man.
01:00:26.980
Tim? This is the best interview I've ever had in my life. I love your line of questioning and getting
01:00:34.500
to what is real. My job is to give what I know to be absolutely certain and real. I hooked into Tim
01:00:46.180
as a childlike quality to him, and I stay with that innocence. And don't take that innocence as weakness.
01:00:53.780
And so, when I read the scripture, I feel truth, good, evil, and I find the good,
01:01:06.340
and let that just pierce the darkness. And it has to pierce. And I know what that light is. And I know
01:01:14.020
that deception that when I start hearing about, for example, in your life when you... There's two masters
01:01:20.740
here. One is from the evil, wicked side, but it comes in through your ego. And the other one is the
01:01:26.260
light side that tells you what you might not want to hear, but you ought to hear. And it's not
01:01:31.300
manipulative. It's truth. So, I go to that side. Then I pray. Then I go through it. Like the passion
01:01:38.740
of the Christ, I looked at the Shroud of Turin. And there were two men, Christian Tinsley and Keith
01:01:45.460
Vanderlyn, who are experts in makeup. And the first, both of these men were agnostic. And they
01:01:52.580
looked at the Shroud that Mel Gibson presented to them. And one particular way, the way it is
01:02:01.220
through the negative, however they were able to show it, you can see the track lines of Jesus.
01:02:06.900
You can see the actual bamboo sticks that they used to initially hit them. And then you see the
01:02:14.340
cat of nine tails, the track lines. They look like the Grand Canyon in your skin. And it shocked them.
01:02:20.100
Now, these guys look at everything from decapitations, murders, and everything. Prior to this,
01:02:27.700
I did a movie a long time ago in New York, and I was with Homicide. And I got to see
01:02:33.780
the contortion of a face when someone gets murdered. And it's hard to watch. But when you
01:02:39.380
start going into this, which is children, there is something that I can't even fathom,
01:02:46.260
even with the protection of Almighty God, because it took me two years to get over this. Two years,
01:02:51.940
and a friend of mine, Debbie, came into the room. And at around three o'clock in the middle of the night,
01:02:58.580
she, I was in a chair, and she heard me just weeping. Now, I would go into these black holes,
01:03:03.780
and I have no idea. I don't remember it. But this was all of the screaming that I had to hear.
01:03:10.260
I didn't want to hear it, but I had to hear it. And then I was able to transform that into the movie
01:03:16.740
that you just saw. When I took, asked Alejandro Monteverdi to move our DP to take it and show him
01:03:23.780
my eyeball so you would see a 20-foot eye to see what Tim goes through to rip his heart out. Now,
01:03:30.500
it's not like this is what I want to experience any more than I want to get on a cross and have
01:03:37.460
my heart broken. I went through hypothermia. I had to have open heart surgery. I was electrocuted,
01:03:45.300
struck by lightning. I understand that the necessity of what I was going to have to go through could help
01:03:52.980
bring people back to God to wake them up. And quite frankly, more people now,
01:03:59.860
Jordan, are more afraid of the devil than they are of God because they want a happy Jesus. And
01:04:05.940
the problem is, is that eventually, Jordan, we all are going to die. Eventually that that is going to
01:04:11.780
happen. But people, the power of the devil deceives to say, no, no, you're going to be around for a long,
01:04:17.780
long time. And they never wake up. And eventually there is a judgment. And then you have to decide,
01:04:24.420
or God decides, not how you want to see yourself anymore, but how God sees you. And how God sees
01:04:30.900
you is who you really are. And so that's how I chose to go at this particular case. I had no choice
01:04:39.380
but to go in. And I hear the screams in my heart. I hear the screams because of the agents that I got to
01:04:45.060
work with, got to show me things. And they, one particular time he says, are you sure you want
01:04:49.540
to go further? But I was weeping so hard. I said, this is what Tim goes through. This is what I got.
01:04:55.380
I got to see it in order to go into there, to take people to a level of, will you do something?
01:05:02.260
Will you do something? At some point it ends for all of us. And so the pain in my heart
01:05:09.140
is much better than the pain in the future. And if I have to see that to save my children,
01:05:16.420
to motivate me, to save my niece, to tell my sister, no, walking home at 13 years old from
01:05:23.860
school is not a good choice. Not a good choice. My sister says to me, no, I want my sister,
01:05:30.340
my daughter, excuse me, to have the same kind of experience I have. And I said, no,
01:05:35.460
not until this changes. You need to understand. So, and my sister is a good, great mother,
01:05:41.540
but she wasn't aware because the media that's supposed to do a good job to tell the truth.
01:05:46.820
Well, they're going into that direction, which is let's kind of twist it and change it and not
01:05:52.100
talk about it. Or the three letter agencies that aren't telling the truth. Go ahead, Jordan.
01:05:56.980
How has this changed you? How is, how is experiencing that material and having to play it out changed you?
01:06:02.580
I'd give my life in a heartbeat. Changed me. I'm less concerned about myself than I am about
01:06:13.220
hurting. I will tell you this right now. I would absolutely die. If this were to change the world
01:06:23.060
and get rid of trafficking and pornography and all of the eight arms of this octopus that has to be
01:06:29.780
destroyed, the only way you can destroy is take the head out. If that hit, I'd give my life for it
01:06:33.780
in a heartbeat. Tim, let me ask you a question. Jim referred to, this is an awkward question. I don't
01:06:40.420
know how to progress with it exactly right, but he said that he tried to play you with a certain kind
01:06:44.500
of innocence. And you know, there's a gospel line and the line is, unless you become as a little child,
01:06:51.140
you will in no way enter the kingdom of heaven. And it's a very, very subtle line because it doesn't
01:06:56.980
say, unless you stay as a child, right? It says, unless you become as a child. And that's a very,
01:07:06.020
it's a very paradoxical injunction. And it means something like this. It means
01:07:11.540
if you rediscover the innocence and humility and capacity for play and wonder and open-ended trust
01:07:21.300
that you had as a child, but you still have all the wisdom that you have as an adult after having
01:07:27.940
seen the world, then you have entered into, you might say, a new domain and a more elevated
01:07:34.820
form of being. And Jim said that he was struck when talking to you about it with regard to this
01:07:43.380
childlike innocence that he saw in you, which is very peculiar thing to observe in someone who's had
01:07:49.620
to expose himself to all the terrible things that you've encountered. And so I don't have a more
01:07:56.420
fully developed question than that. I guess I just like your response to that set of observations.
01:08:02.660
I do think, I think I know what Jim's talking about.
01:08:08.020
When we're doing operations, as you see depicted in Sound of Freedom, it's some crazy stuff. We're
01:08:13.860
going into crazy places. We're talking to monsters and demons. And if I were to apply all the things I
01:08:21.380
know, the things that take me down, the images of children, I could be jaded and less innocent.
01:08:28.900
I think this might go back to the boss who asked me to start this work back in 2002 by saying that
01:08:37.060
we think you can handle this because of your faith. So I do try to be childlike when it comes to my
01:08:44.500
relationship with God. And there's a scripture that I repeat in my head constantly as I am going
01:08:52.820
into these dark places. And that's where I become like a child through that recitation
01:08:56.740
and my relationship with God, or even more particularly with Jesus, because it's Jesus
01:09:01.940
who says the line, and you've already quoted it, Jordan, better that a millstone be placed around
01:09:07.860
your neck and you toss to the bottom of the sea than that you should hurt one of these little ones.
01:09:11.220
Um, that's so powerful to me because it's, it's so, it allows me to read, to read, reduce everything
01:09:20.580
to just an innocent, I hope childlike relationship with, with my savior, with my God. Um, because I
01:09:28.660
know where he stands on this and I might not know everything. And I don't know how this is going to
01:09:32.420
resolve in my head. I don't know how I'm going to heal the millions of, of, of holes burned into my
01:09:37.200
brain. But I do know that if I subject myself completely to, to an understanding and a testimony
01:09:43.040
that, that Jesus believes something, he gets mafioso. This is cement shoes kind of talk. Uh,
01:09:50.400
it's not, it's not, it's not flipping tables outside the temple. I mean, he's talking about
01:09:54.260
violence. He's speaking violence, but it's, it's righteous. And that's where he stands on children
01:10:00.380
being abused. And that's where I find. So there's an, there's another idea. There's another idea that
01:10:05.680
lurks in the passion account. Hey, that that's really quite stunning and horrible. So the, the
01:10:13.520
passion story is an archetypal tragedy. And the reason for that is that a tragedy is when something
01:10:20.920
terrible happens to someone, but, uh, a more profound tragedy is when the worst possible thing
01:10:27.140
happens to the least deserving person. And so that's the passion story in some ways, in a nutshell,
01:10:33.500
right? You have a man who by universal, um, admission, even on the part of his enemies is at
01:10:41.260
minimum, a very good man who undergoes the worst possible sequence of betrayal and punishment. And so
01:10:48.360
that's the story of the tragedy of human life writ large, but there's more to it than that because
01:10:54.180
there's a mythological insistence along with that, that Christ was not only crucified, but that he had
01:11:00.020
to descend into the depths of hell itself and harrow it. And what that means to me, psychologically
01:11:06.820
speaking, let's say, is that you're called upon before rebirth. That's a good way of thinking about
01:11:13.580
it to not only bear the brunt of the tragedy of existence, but to face malevolence head on, right?
01:11:20.320
To go into the deepest and darkest possible places and what, what you say it's, it's, and, and well
01:11:28.520
redeeming them to the degree that that's possible, simultaneously redeem yourself. And so the notion
01:11:35.080
there is that the brightest possible light is only possible through the descent into the darkest
01:11:41.300
possible realm of, of blackness. And that actually goes beyond death into malevolence itself. Now,
01:11:48.260
Jim said, you know, because you might say, well, there's nothing that you should be more afraid
01:11:52.980
of than death. But Jim said, you know, he's appalled enough about the existence of malevolence
01:11:57.960
that he would be willing to give his life to eradicate it. And so that obviously means that for
01:12:03.460
Jim, malevolence itself is a more terrifying specter than, than mere death or even mere suffering.
01:12:10.660
And then there is this gospel notion that unless you're willing to take the weight of hell onto yourself,
01:12:16.720
essentially voluntarily, that you can't go through that process of descent and rebirth. And that is
01:12:23.620
associated in the, in the gospel accounts, let's say with that rebirth into the spirit of childhood.
01:12:30.000
And so you, you have done what you could to face the ultimate reaches of darkness itself.
01:12:42.740
What has that done for you? And then also you made some very interesting comments about your wife. You
01:12:48.540
know, you said that in some ways you were hoping she would tell you to, you know, be sensible and come
01:12:53.800
home, but she didn't. She told you to go put yourself on the line. And there's a huge story there that's
01:12:58.540
touched on in the movie, but, but not delved into in any, to any great regard. How has your encounter
01:13:06.700
with the darkness that you've seen made you a better person? And, and what has that done with
01:13:12.920
your relationship with your wife? I think it's, it's made me a better person because the, the weight
01:13:19.180
that you speak of that, that is on your back is unbearable unless you can give it to some other
01:13:29.140
power. In this case, in my case, to Jesus himself. And that's what, to subject myself completely and
01:13:35.640
repeat his words in my mind, because I know where he stands on it, he'll take it from me. And I felt
01:13:39.920
that. I have felt that in ways I can't even articulate that don't make any sense on a scientific
01:13:44.820
level. I, the burden is lifted and that's what gives me clarity and courage to do things I
01:13:51.020
otherwise wouldn't dream of doing in order to help children. And it's, it's a concept that my wife
01:13:57.780
understands. In fact, I'll tell you this, she, it's like she morphed into some kind of a therapist in
01:14:03.220
that moment after she told me that her, her salvation might be on the line. She's much more advanced than I
01:14:09.320
am in every way, and especially spiritually. And she helped me to see that very thing that give the
01:14:15.780
burden to, to God. And then you can be, but you have to subject yourself like a child in order to do
01:14:21.360
that and recognize you can't on your own do it. But she, she ran me through this exercise. I don't
01:14:26.340
know where she got it. Maybe it was a download from heaven, but she said, do you see the two paths
01:14:31.140
you're going on? Either you go into Columbia and you do this operation. And what does that look like?
01:14:36.060
And, and I said, it looks horrifying. It's scary. It's dark. There's, there's cobwebs. I, I, I mean,
01:14:41.320
I was literally imagining this. There's, there's spiders, there's evil things. And she said, what's
01:14:45.380
the other path? And I said, well, the other path is, is, is light. It's, you know, I, I can see at 50,
01:14:52.420
I get to retire and then I don't have to, you know, I, I'm, I'm paid a federal government salary my
01:14:57.380
whole life and benefits. And that seems secure to me. And I, that seems comfortable. Then she says,
01:15:02.360
close your eyes and, and, and you're with your maker. You've passed through this life and you're
01:15:06.840
talking to your maker and he has two questions for you. One, could you have saved the kids?
01:15:12.220
And two, did you do it? That's your interview. And she's, and, and, and I got, it shocked me.
01:15:19.220
I thought, oh, that's going to be a bad interview. Uh, if I don't have the right answer, if I don't make
01:15:23.320
the right decision here. And then she says, okay, now go back to those two paths. What do you see?
01:15:27.900
And I'm telling you the, the cobwebs and creepy things were now on the path of staying in my
01:15:34.320
federal government, comfortable job. I thought, what might I lose? What blessings might not come?
01:15:38.980
And then she said, what do you see down the path of Columbia? And she said, I see, I said, I see
01:15:44.820
warmth. I see, I can't see everything, but that's the path I want. And I think that's what that means
01:15:49.760
is I will give it to God and do the right thing and subject myself like a child. I hope that made sense.
01:15:56.160
Well, well, you know, look, the reason that people lie and the reason they remain silent
01:16:05.860
is because they think that things will be easier for them and better, at least in the short term.
01:16:14.460
But the psychological literature on this is pretty damn clear. I think, I think clearer than any other
01:16:20.580
element of the clinical psychology literature, which is that you avoid things that stand in your way
01:16:27.200
that frighten you at your great peril. If you cower from them in silence, or you turn away seeking
01:16:35.100
security even, or even sensible security, you violate the principle of your own strength.
01:16:41.840
And if you violate the principle of your own strength, you become weak.
01:16:45.120
And if you're weak, there is no security. Like if you're weak and you have a pension,
01:16:50.560
you're weak with a pension. All that'll mean is that you'll live longer in terror.
01:16:54.780
That's not helpful. And the alternative, and there's also an ethos in the biblical stories
01:17:01.580
in particular, and it's a very interesting ethos. It's very much worth knowing. And one is that
01:17:06.760
if you say the truth and nothing else, you'll have an immense adventure as a consequence.
01:17:16.580
You won't know what's going to happen to you, and you have to let go of your clinging to the
01:17:21.280
outcome. You have to let go. But the truth will reveal the world the way it's intended to be revealed,
01:17:30.200
and the consequence for you will be that you'll have the adventure of your life.
01:17:34.080
And the other part of that ethos is this, and it makes perfect sense to me. I can't see how it can
01:17:40.040
be any other way, which is that whatever makes itself manifest as a consequence of the truth
01:17:46.700
is the best possible reality that could be manifest, even if you can't see it. And, you know, in my own
01:17:52.980
life, I've been attacked many times by people who were attempting to demolish my reputation and
01:17:59.100
take me out. And that's put my family at risk. And many times we've gone through this a lot. And
01:18:05.060
what we have observed is that if we stick to our guns and we say what we believe to be the case,
01:18:10.400
and I say we, because it's a collaborative enterprise, I'm always discussing things with
01:18:14.260
my family, that there's a period of intense discomfort. But in the aftermath of that, and that's
01:18:23.180
often several months or sometimes even several years later, things switch around and reverse in
01:18:28.420
a manner that brings benefits that can't even be fathomed. So, and it is a matter of faith, right?
01:18:35.700
So the faith is something like this, like, are you going to make your way through life with silence
01:18:39.640
and falsehoods? Are you going to make your life, your way through life with truth? And there's going
01:18:43.720
to be a price for the truth, but your vision showed you there was a price for the security too,
01:18:48.380
right? Once you allowed your imagination to manifest itself, you saw that the pathway of
01:18:53.800
security was actually the one that was covered with spider webs, demons, and snakes. And, you know,
01:18:59.720
I see that, I saw that with faculty members at the university over and over. They would take the
01:19:04.760
so-called secure path forward. And all they did was violate the integrity of their own souls,
01:19:10.620
right? All that security is false. And obviously your wife, for some reason, it's quite the miraculous
01:19:15.660
part of that story, I would say, that your wife was behind you like that, especially because you
01:19:20.820
said you had six kids at the time, you know? So how do you think she knew this? You said her faith
01:19:26.520
is more developed than yours and that she knows things you don't. But what was it about her life,
01:19:31.020
do you think, that enabled her to stand behind you and this crazy venture you went on when she had
01:19:36.620
every reason to make, I mean, you were, the movie says you were within what, months of vesting your
01:19:43.140
pension? How many, 12 weeks, something like that? I can't, I, yeah, I don't, I don't, I can't remember
01:19:48.320
the exact time, but yeah, that was the, my accountant came to me and showed me how much,
01:19:53.140
how many millions of dollars this would amount to that I was walking away from. It was ridiculous.
01:19:57.600
I want to say $12 million or something, a number I couldn't even fathom, but you're walking away from
01:20:02.620
that. And that really tossed me. And that's the thing that led me to Catherine and said,
01:20:07.280
this is what we'd be walking away from. Why does she have this thing? It's a mystery to me.
01:20:15.800
I can say this, having given birth and raised six children, I've watched that process.
01:20:22.660
It's, there's something I think that happens to women, at least in the case of my wife,
01:20:28.300
that there's some insight that comes from that process and childbirth and rearing a child
01:20:36.440
that she's had to rely on God just to get through that process and then have this little creature
01:20:41.600
that you're in charge of. I think her relationship with God allowed, through motherhood, allowed her
01:20:47.820
to have insights that I didn't have. I think she came with certain gifts as well before this life,
01:20:56.680
but whatever it was, she saw immediately and on the spot was able to run me through that exercise
01:21:03.100
that really is consistent with your understanding of that process, Dr. Peterson. So, I don't know.
01:21:09.600
She's a miracle. She's a miracle to me. And none of this would have happened without her.
01:21:13.240
Well, okay. So, you quit your job and you put your pension on the line and your wife was not only
01:21:20.600
fully on board with that, but perversely enough, encouraged you to do so. How has it,
01:21:25.980
how has the financial support that made your continued existence and also the operations that
01:21:33.380
you've undertaken, how has that manifested itself since? Like, you don't have your pension and the
01:21:39.740
government behind you, but obviously you've gathered resources around you personally and
01:21:44.740
practically. Tell me how that came about. Well, I'll add this piece because that was my big concern
01:21:51.800
and Catherine said to me, and she believed it. This was all in that same conversation. She said,
01:21:56.760
I don't care if we end up living in a tent. We will not go back to our maker. Instead, we didn't
01:22:02.200
try to help these children. So, that helped ease my mind because I thought, well, then okay,
01:22:07.140
if we lose our house. Now, the blessings did come. Glenn Beck was the person who actually funded
01:22:15.960
the rescue operation that you see depicted in the film, that very first one. He got us started,
01:22:21.980
put a huge amount of faith and frankly risk in doing that. But that was going to get us only about
01:22:28.600
six to eight months before we would be in trouble. But what happened was the success happened. The
01:22:34.060
peace that I felt in making the decision to go was that new path that I couldn't see everything,
01:22:40.420
but it felt right. It felt good. It felt godly. And I knew we'd be okay. And we've never had
01:22:45.160
a worse month than the month before. We've only grown. Success spreads, success. Donations start
01:22:50.820
coming in. Opportunities come in. And frankly, I think I'll be better off financially as I look at
01:22:56.640
my future than I would have been otherwise. Right now, we should just dwell on that for a minute.
01:23:01.580
So, we just want to dwell on how unlikely that is. So, let's just go through this. So, you make this
01:23:07.420
crazy decision to quit your job and to forgo your pension, even though you've basically vested it.
01:23:11.900
And you're well into your career. You're to the point where, in principle, you could have contemplated
01:23:16.240
retiring and sitting to drink Mai Tais on the beach in the Caribbean, which I wouldn't recommend,
01:23:20.720
by the way, as a retirement plan. And instead, you decide that, and with your wife, that you guys are
01:23:27.340
willing to, you know, risk living in a tent with your kids, but you're going to do this come hell or
01:23:31.640
high water. And the consequence of that is that, perversely enough, you're actually more
01:23:36.600
financially secure and you have more opportunities than you would have otherwise had by a lot.
01:23:41.900
Right. So, that's worth thinking about, right? That's really worth thinking about because you
01:23:46.400
threw yourself all in, which is what you're supposed to do. And not only did that work on
01:23:51.140
the fight side, because you have been able to rescue these children and to continue this endeavor,
01:23:55.840
but none of the things that you thought you would lose, you actually ended up losing.
01:24:00.580
That's correct. And I'm thinking of the words you just said five minutes ago about
01:24:04.360
when you take on the challenges, you lose that weakness that you otherwise would have. I'd rather,
01:24:10.340
you know, I don't want to be weak with a pension. And like you said, I was able to be stronger and
01:24:17.060
that strength is the thing that frankly allowed me to expand my possibility of making more income
01:24:23.400
and doing more things. In fact, I often journal, Jordan, often when I have the biggest challenges
01:24:29.040
in my life that come and I hit in the face with this or that, I take note what blessings came,
01:24:34.060
what good things came. And sometimes it's 90% of the good things before me sprung out of that
01:24:40.060
horrific challenge that the darts thrown at me, whatever it was. And so, the principle that you're
01:24:45.400
teaching really has played out accurately in my life over and over again.
01:24:51.280
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's, well, it makes sense in some sense. Look, I mean,
01:24:55.880
if we wanted to just think about it practically, I mean, you're going to become stronger,
01:25:01.400
more confident, more credible, and a better communicator in precise proportion to the burdens
01:25:08.320
that you decide voluntarily to confront and master. Like, obviously, because how could it be any other
01:25:14.620
way? And then what that's going to mean is that when you go communicate with people and you tell
01:25:20.120
them what you're doing, they're much more likely to jump on board because you have the charisma that
01:25:25.500
goes along with having the stories to tell and those encounters to relate and the success you've
01:25:31.780
generated. And so, then people are going to offer to help. You're not even going to have to ask them.
01:25:37.380
And so, let me ask you about that. You talked about Glenn Beck. Who else has been instrumental in
01:25:44.060
helping your operation grow and providing you with support? You mentioned Tony Robbins as well. And
01:25:49.300
I've got to know Tony a bit over the last year or so. I mean, he's an absolutely remarkable person.
01:25:54.080
And I think he might be the most charismatic person I've ever met, which is really saying
01:25:58.600
something because I've met some very charismatic people. And he's quite the monster in the world.
01:26:03.060
And he's done an awful lot of good. And he's obviously supporting you as well and is on board
01:26:09.440
with this project. And so, how did that come about? Well, Tony Robbins is, in fact, the single
01:26:15.500
largest donor to our operation. I'm super, super close with him, his wife as well, Sage.
01:26:21.060
Beautiful people, beautiful souls. It came about in the most amazing way. During one of his big
01:26:27.260
mastermind conferences in a convention center of some sort, there was a woman who raised her hand
01:26:33.680
when Tony asked about bucket list projects. If you had an excess of whatever, what would you do with it?
01:26:39.860
She raised her hand and said, I'd support a group called Operation Underground Railroad.
01:26:42.880
Tony says, what is that? Three minutes later, he says, I'll donate, I'll match whatever someone
01:26:47.860
gives me right now to help rescue children. And the relationship was born. He called me a few days
01:26:53.700
later and said, is this real? He said, I felt it was. I said, why don't you come down to Haiti with
01:26:58.600
me? We're about to do an operation and you can see how very real it is. And he did and he saw,
01:27:03.880
and that converted him to our cause. So, what's on your plate next? Where is this going as far as
01:27:10.600
you're concerned? And what sort of impact have you had in sheer numbers? Why do you think you're not
01:27:18.340
going to get taken out? Because it seems to me that you're in a situation where that's, you know,
01:27:22.740
of reasonable high probability, given who you're dealing with. And what do you hope to accomplish
01:27:27.040
over the next, what do you hope to accomplish over the next while? And what can people do to help?
01:27:32.480
Well, so I've changed quite a bit of how I look at the playing field of human trafficking. I can no
01:27:38.200
longer do operations. I've been in the media too much, especially with this film. I've turned a
01:27:42.300
lot of my attention to the fact that in what I call spiritual warfare, children are targeted
01:27:46.800
like never before. I was on the Capitol Hill last week and this congressman was telling me,
01:27:53.240
how do we wake people up to the fact that all these unaccompanied minors are being shoved into
01:27:56.800
America and we don't know where they are? And I said, well, your problem is you're not connecting
01:28:00.340
all the dots, all the ways in which children are being hurt. Not only these 85,000 missing children
01:28:06.000
that are now in the belly of the largest potentially child sex market in the world,
01:28:11.320
but at the same time that's happening, you have groups trying to get rid of the name pedophile
01:28:15.480
and call them minor attracted persons. At the same time, you're sexualizing children,
01:28:20.260
giving them what I used to be able to arrest you for giving children. Now teachers in California and
01:28:25.180
other states are giving this in the name of liberating children sexually or sex education.
01:28:30.560
And now a 13-year-old can consent to gender mutilation and have themselves injected with
01:28:35.720
all sorts of chemicals that might ruin their reproductive system. Well, what are you doing?
01:28:40.040
Consent to do that equals consent eventually to sex with a 50-year-old pedophile. And so you've
01:28:46.980
got to connect all these things. And so for the first time in my life, Jordan, I'm looking at the
01:28:51.220
United States of America and I'm saying, look, I used to think I might be out of a job because
01:28:55.360
we eradicated human trafficking. I am now thinking I might be out of a job because the very laws
01:29:00.020
that protect children and allow us to go after their captors are being and will be
01:29:05.240
decaying and eroded with this crazy culture that is taking children in the name of liberating them
01:29:12.760
and in fact is enslaving them. So, you know, I interviewed this girl, Chloe Cole, who had a
01:29:20.040
double mastectomy when she was 15 and who had puberty blockers and went through the whole bloody
01:29:26.440
gamut of incompetent lying therapists and sadistic butchering surgeons. And they transformed her
01:29:37.060
sexually. And then she talked to me about her dating experiences in high school. Now, you can
01:29:41.920
just imagine this, you know, it's complicated enough for a young man or a young woman in high school
01:29:47.220
to navigate the sexual shoals, let's say, and establish a reasonable relationship or even
01:29:53.100
a reasonable sequence of relationships if everything is roughly normal or something approximating ideal.
01:30:00.680
But Chloe put herself way out on the fringes having done what she did. And that made, that took her out
01:30:07.640
of the dating pool in high school for her compatriots. And so she turned to online dating. And you can
01:30:14.680
imagine the sort of people who attempted to pick her up. And she didn't refer to that an awful lot in our
01:30:22.680
interview. But she referred to it enough so that I got a real flavor of the sort of people who
01:30:27.820
were more than perversely willing to strike up a relationship with her, often much older, as you
01:30:34.020
pointed out. And so, you know, that freedom that she was hypothetically offered that only required the
01:30:40.940
sacrifice of her breasts, let's say, the wounds of which, by the way, have never completely healed. So
01:30:47.100
that's perfectly goddamn delightful. And, you know, she talked about her descent into that perverse
01:30:52.880
underworld of deviant sexual attraction. And so, yeah, there's not a lot of freedom on that front.
01:30:59.480
Jim, what are you up to next? Like, you've finished this movie. It's going to open up on July 4th.
01:31:07.360
What's next for you on the project front and also on the personal front in terms of your commitment to
01:31:13.920
continuing the work that you're starting with this movie? Well, it goes to the next chapter,
01:31:19.860
which is on Haiti. And that's the next part of Tim, when they went down and did this Haiti mission.
01:31:27.560
And this is a much better script than the first one, written by the same director. And Rod Bar,
01:31:35.240
Alejandro Monteverdi wrote this. So I plan to do that film. And then, of course,
01:31:43.920
I'm doing The Resurrection of the Christ with Mel Gibson. So I think that's going to be—I think
01:31:50.100
for sure it's one film, but it might be two films, I think.
01:31:54.080
And when—so and what do you see—what do you foresee happening on the theatrical release front?
01:32:00.860
I mean, have the typical companies that are involved in theatrical release in movies
01:32:07.520
being on board with the release of Sound of Freedom? Or have you run into, like, enthusiastic
01:32:13.760
reception or resistance? What's happened on that front?
01:32:17.060
Well, we had a lot of resistance. It took us four years to get where we're at right now.
01:32:22.780
You know, like The Passion of the Christ, nobody saw that as a financially feasible film.
01:32:29.520
Same thing with this. Who's going to want to watch a film about trafficked children?
01:32:34.380
And that's why it wasn't about that. It was—it points in that direction.
01:32:39.500
But it's really, in the face of evil, can good still triumph?
01:32:44.700
And that's what this film is. So it's quite inspirational, you know.
01:32:49.660
Well, it is a classic—in many ways, it is a classic action-adventure film.
01:32:55.020
I mean, it's based on a true story, but it's got a very solid narrative driving line.
01:33:00.880
I mean, it's not fundamentally making its appeal on the moral side.
01:33:06.260
I mean, there is an appeal on the moral side, don't get me wrong, but that's not good enough
01:33:10.520
for a movie. Like, a movie has to carry its own weight as an artistic endeavor,
01:33:14.580
and it has to be well-plotted and well-acted and—or just degenerates into kind of moralistic
01:33:20.180
propaganda. I don't think this movie does that at all. I also didn't think that The Chosen did that,
01:33:25.480
Angel Studios' other major production. It never degenerated into sentimental moralizing,
01:33:30.480
thank God. Because something like that will just flop at the box office anyways. And
01:33:34.460
I certainly couldn't see any reason, after having watched this movie,
01:33:38.260
not to think that this could be a commercial success. I mean, it's a very exciting movie.
01:33:43.440
We're selling out right now. Our biggest war right now is to get more theaters. The big
01:33:52.100
studios control those, and the distributors have to decide whether or not—and this happened on
01:33:58.320
The Passion of the Christ—whether to go and go where the people are. And so the people are calling
01:34:05.360
in right now to ask for these theaters. They're not just going to angel.com. I've known many people
01:34:12.180
that have gone in and literally bought out all theaters to do this. And so we're hoping that
01:34:19.140
this continues because we won't be able to serve the public. We just don't have enough theaters right
01:34:25.620
now. Well, that's a good problem to have, I would say. And that should also get you the kind of
01:34:31.940
publicity that should also further distribution of the film. And of course, there's alternative routes
01:34:36.980
now, too. I mean, Matt Walsh had tremendous success distributing What is a Woman on Twitter. I think
01:34:43.000
they got 170 million views. And, you know, I don't know how successful that was commercially. And of
01:34:48.120
course, that's a problem because financial issues matter. But there's definitely multiple venues now
01:34:54.080
where a film like this can be distributed. And of course, Angel Studios had a hell of a success
01:35:00.460
distributing what they produced on the chosen front using rather unorthodox channels online.
01:35:06.800
And we were fortunate enough, Jordan, to get Elon Musk. He actually tweeted out a couple weeks ago
01:35:13.380
with the trailer and opened up Twitter as a free home for distribution. And we're going to see a
01:35:21.300
Twitter release, I think, mid-July. So that will be fun to see what happens there.
01:35:27.680
Oh, so that's already in play. All right. Well, look, gentlemen, we're running out of time on the
01:35:34.120
YouTube front. As everybody watching and listening, or at least as some people watching and listening
01:35:38.480
know, I do add another half an hour of interview on the Daily Wire Plus side. And so I think we'll
01:35:43.600
turn our attention to that. I'm going to find out from Tim and Jim what developmental route they took
01:35:51.160
to the destination that they arrived at. I haven't done that with two people before,
01:35:56.980
but I think that will be quite entertaining. And so I'm interested in how people's destinies make
01:36:02.140
themselves manifest across time. Or you might say how their calling makes itself, makes its appearance
01:36:08.660
in their life because things do call to people. You know, everybody has problems that beset them that
01:36:14.480
are their problems. And everybody has opportunities that beckon to them that are their opportunities.
01:36:19.300
And that's kind of a mysterious, what would you say, bargain and interplay between the psyche
01:36:24.720
and the world. And I'm endlessly curious about how that happens. And so we're going to follow down
01:36:30.560
that road as we continue this conversation on the Daily Wire Plus side. By the way, for those of you
01:36:37.620
who are watching and listening, if you're thinking about throwing some support the Daily Wire Plus way,
01:36:44.380
it's probably a good time to think about doing that because they and I, for that matter, have been
01:36:49.980
under a fair bit of pressure from YouTube in the last month. I've had three of my interviews taken
01:36:55.840
down. And I suspect there's a couple in the pipelines that are also going to raise the hackles of the
01:37:02.620
wrong people, whoever the hell they are, lurking behind the scenes. And so, yeah, yeah. Well,
01:37:09.780
you never know, right? You can't tell what rules you broke and you can't tell who's enforcing the
01:37:13.820
censorship rules, which is really not good on any front. So anyways, we're going to turn our
01:37:20.720
attention over there. Thank you to Jim Caviezel and Tim Bellard for talking today. I really enjoyed
01:37:27.400
your film. I'm looking forward to watching how the public will receive it and what the
01:37:32.500
consequences will be and wish you both luck in your future endeavors. And yeah, and Tim, I will hook
01:37:39.640
up, hook you, your wife up with my wife and it'd be real interesting to have them talk about, you know,
01:37:45.440
how she saw what you were doing and why she threw her weight behind it because there's quite a story
01:37:50.100
there as well, as far as I can tell. I'm very much looking forward to watching that interview.
01:37:54.300
All right, gentlemen, it was good to talk to both of you and to everyone watching and listening,
01:38:01.360
you know, thanks for your time and attention. Pay some attention to this movie if you're inclined.