Rene Girard and Our Current Apocalypse (THINGS HIDDEN 213)
01:20:03 Share

Well, it's good to have a good old-fashioned Things Hidden, isn't it? Barnstormer of the Things Hidden. Are you ready for Things Hidden?

Yep, always ready for things hidden. Always ready to unveil the things that are hidden since the foundation of the world. That's right. So Surat, you're our guest today. We're glad to have you. Surat Dasgupta joins us. How are you doing? I'm doing fine. What about you? Good. I'm doing well. And, you know, we haven't done a things hidden in a while, so I thought it'd be good to do one. It's been getting a little hidden, so we're going to pull this thing out.

and reveal it, right? That's what people come for. And unfortunately, we've had to deal with a lot of not so hidden things like current events and so forth in recent times, but we had to get back to the basics. So for those of you who have missed out on things hidden, this is a sign of things to come, more things hidden on the way. And it's not hidden things. That's the off-brand podcast. It's things hidden.

There's a Hidden Things podcast, which is kind of a generic store brand version of what we do. And we're things hidden. You got to get it really tongue tied to get it right. So, Sura, what's new with you? What have you been cooking lately? Not much. Just pretty much observing current events, as you said.

and been working on a few pieces, few articles where I hope to expand on Gerard's work on culture even more. So that's why I felt like I haven't been focusing on Gerard nearly enough and

And I plan to rectify that because Gerard really is the most underrated Christian apologist you could ever find. And in my opinion, the best apologetics that you could ever hope to come across. Well, hopefully not to hope to come across. We want to go beyond and build on it. Yeah, that's what makes it.

Yep, that's what makes his work so special. It's like you don't need to parrot his stuff. It's an invitation to play. Yeah, it's an invitation to play. Yeah, yeah. It opens up a very exciting, open-ended journey for Christians and people who are not even Christian to go and find out what's going on here in this Christian revelation in history. What happened, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. And it's such a special avenue that you can go across, you can come across because Girard is so underrated, as I've mentioned. And also, if you pick up any of his books, like David, as you mentioned, it's an open invitation to play. His books are basically dialogues with his co-authors or people who are

you know, participating in the discovery with him. And it was, I mean, if you pick up any of Gerard's books, most of them are written in the 60s, 70s. And if you go through them, it's as if like you're reading podcast before podcast even became a thing, before even technology was invented.

So it's like Gerard was ahead of the curve with so many levels. And also you can build upon his work, as you mentioned, David, and that's what we've been trying to do. Yeah, we've done it for years now, but we've got to double down on the basics of what we've pioneered for years, applying mimetic theory to current events and touching it to biblical texts and touching it to mythology and letting everything play.

is exciting, you know, and it's so more, it's so much more interesting than treating Christianity as a, as a museum or a mausoleum that cannot be touched. You just got to look at it and there's a red rope around everything. Do not touch this. This is already set in stone. There's nothing you could possibly do to participate in this other than to be in awe. Right. But you know, I don't think we were made to be in the garden to just sit and stare at the trees and,

Where we were meant to do something with it, right, to build upon it. And so, you know, that's a kind of a theological thing. But bringing bringing the garden back to life, but going further and building a city is the story of the book of Revelation. Right. And the city of God is what emerges from the work of being renewed in the new Adam.

the anthropological archetype for us to imitate to get past the old order of sacrificial violence. So we're in the already-not-yet tension that theologians talk about, where Christ has already come, but it's not yet complete, his work of completely demystifying and desacralizing mythic violence and the violence of

runaway mimetic envy and individualism. All of those things are on the docket for being deconstructed. But Christ relies very much on the radical free choice of his followers. And so we're kind of a lousy team that are slow to get our act together on the field and do our work, right? And it kind of happens and fits and starts. We're the kind of team through history that'll run a Hail Mary and then just kind of take a nap on the grass for a while.

while the other team's doing a lot of evil and using our map to do evil with it. And then we wake up and do something really good, and then we fall back down. But that's okay. We've got the greatest animus behind us, which is the personhood revolution of Jesus that he inaugurated and that the prophets foretold and foreshadowed, right? So I think...

You know, I don't know why, but I just keep visualizing. I think, sir, you perhaps with Jayant could create like a claymation retelling of Hinduism and just deconstruct it from a Girardian standpoint. I think that'd be fascinating. Like a stop motion experience. Get Jayant to do some commentary or, you know, voiceovers or something. I think that'd be fabulous, you know?

You know, it's time to let the old gods know that they're not needed anymore. But we can't allow the old gods to be vanquished by, you know, microwave cheap ripoffs that are still the old gods. Right. So we don't want that. And we're always we're always on a razor's edge of humanity losing its ever loving mind in catastrophic ways.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting you mentioned Jayant. Hopefully he does come around to, you know, to recognizing the radicalness that is found in Christianity. And I'm afraid like there's so many, there's this, you know,

major movement towards Christianity that's taking place. A lot of young guys, you know, are really finding the faith, especially the post-pandemic times.

And they have seen the bleakness that a Christianity-less world offers them and they are not satisfied with it.

So they are therefore moving towards Christianity and a lot of, you know, you hear in the news a lot of celebrities are coming to Christ, you know, a lot of big names, a lot of big influencers on social media.

But at the same time, and this is going to be part of my next article, is at the same time, we are not really seeing a radical movement within Christianity as well, which hopefully, you know, what we talk about, hopefully, you know, that will provide an impetus for such a radical movement forward.

And I think, as you mentioned, David, most people are looking for which team that they can be a part of so that they can strike down the opposing team. But that's not what Jesus came to our planet to teach about or provide a model for. What he came to do on this planet is to

give us a way out of this memetic, endless memetic rivalry, where, and you know, as Girardians, memetic rivalries always end up with violent scapegoating, it always ends up with placing the blame, passing the blame on to others. And that's no real solution. So even if

you become Christian, you still have to reckon with the anthropology found within the gospel. Yeah, there's so much tribalism within folks who are converting to Christianity because they want to fight, like you said, and defeat another team, or they want to

slay their former self in some public way of saying, I'm not like I used to be. But all of those things, you know, we don't want to judge what people's motives are for why they want to be around in proximity to Jesus. But ultimately, the tell of what it means to be a Christian, it goes back to the basics. Christian means a little Jesus, a little imitator of Jesus.

And if you're not willing to put the imitation of Jesus as your goal every day, then you're not doing Christianity. You can believe whatever you want. You can believe about angels. You can believe about all these things. And ultimately, that's a mental ascent if there's no imitation of the example of Jesus. Everything we see in the Bible,

The Gospels, when it talks about Jesus saying things like, those who live by the sword die by the sword, he's talking about the end of the sacrificial cycle. You know, it's one team, and then they defeat the bad guys. But then what Christianity has done is it's put that a little bit more complicated, right? Because it's revealed that the bad guys are not always...

Clearly, the black and white bad guys, it's muddled that picture, which has scrambled the efficacy of the sacrificial cycle, right?

And so therefore, it's allowed for folks to be able to say, well, I'm the victim team and therefore I get to have vengeance on the people who used to call us the monsters. But now we're the victim team. So we've got the moral indignation and the moral righteous fervor to be able to say, you know, in the past we were vilified as monsters or or others. And now we are the righteous vindicators of victims and we can slay you with impunity.

But what's lost in all of that, of course, is that do not resist evil with violence is the future, right? And so Christians are supposed to be ambassadors to what the future will look like for everybody. We're supposed to be the taste forerunners. We're the ones who are, we get the picture, we see far into the distance, and we start to emulate that.

That picture, which everybody will emulate on Earth at some point, we're going to emulate it now. And as the better we emulate it, the more it comes about. It comes about. The more it hastens its arrival. So it's really a win-win situation, although it's very challenging. And because there's, you know, if you look at the biological or other levels, scarcity causes people to have, you know, hormonal issues.

signaling molecules and all kinds of other things that end up creating incentives to not keep your eye on the big picture of the kingdom of heaven coming to earth. And you see what it looks like in the future. And you represent because you participate in the resurrection of Christ and

By joining in him, you participate in the divine knowledge of God. You participate in that, and therefore, even still, you're still human and you're not able to get it perfectly downloaded. You get to participate in that opportunity of creativity. That was what's so important about your great piece you had on a neighborschoice.com. Can you tell us the title of that?

Yeah, the title of that piece is Creative Bankruptcy Leads to Political Idolatry. So what I mean by that is...

for example how you mentioned scarcity right so like why do we have rivalries we have rivalries because we think the object that we are fighting for it exists in very low quantities and we think that there's not really enough to go around for everybody and uh gerard mentions this all the time in his book books and uh

what this means is like, for example, you can apply that concept, that basic concept to basically every other part of every part of your daily life. That includes politics. So, for example, there is only one presidency. There is only one Oval Office or there's only like one parliament or whatever. So everybody is like

you know, fighting with one another, they entrench themselves in groups and they take pot shots at one another and it creates chaos. It creates rivalrous chaos. It creates a contagion of, you know, rivalry all around.

so what that does is it degrades all of that what's supposed to be a perfect process all of that degrades into a kind of paganism if you will not exactly paganism but you know the same methodology so like

the one guy who ends up winning the contest becomes a kind of like a demigod of sorts and if you read Gerard demigod basically means a scapegoat in waiting so what that not fully sacralized yet yeah not fully sacralized yeah that's what politicians are

Isn't it interesting that demigod and demigog are very similar in their sound? Yeah, yeah. Both are very connected to one another. Demigod is kind of like overt religious word. And demigog is like what you have when you take the garment of religiosity off of it. But it's still very much religion.

Yeah, The Rock, Dwayne Johnson plays a demigod character in the new movie Moana. And it tells that his origin story is that of an abandoned orphan, actually. And he becomes a god from that process. But yet he's a demigod. He's not fully a god.

And he's kind of an in-between state where he's human, but yet somewhat God-like and the gods don't know what to do with them. And the humans don't know what to do with them. So he's, he's on the way to being scapegoated in that, in that story. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's basically what every like, uh, that's, that's like the, basically the story of every election, isn't it? So like a new scapegoat is elected like, uh, by the crowd. And, uh,

for four years or depending on which country you live in, for four years or eight years or more than that, you're just the guy who got elected is basically trying to avert the eventual sacrifice. And in ancient societies, it would literally be a human sacrifice that eventually occurs. But thanks to

the sacrifice of Christ, we are no longer able to sacrifice our leaders overtly. So we try to, you know, impeach them, you know, get them out of us, shame them, you know, put all kinds of scandals upon them as a kind of like a nuanced way of sacrificing them. So this is like what happens when human beings look

towards uh scapegoats for uh solving problems they're never going to solve problems they're only going to you know put the problem a step back or two they're never going to uh get to the root of the cause but the purpose of of again imitating jesus is to participate in the divine act of creative of creativity non-violent creativity i can't stress that enough

You have gratitude. Here's the two choices, a neighbor's choice, right? That's another show that we know of. But on ThingsHitter, we're going to explain it this way. There's gratitude or there's envy. There's thankfulness or there's envy. If your heart is saturated with the spirit of gratitude, that means you're not in that scarcity mindset. And if your heart is saturated with that spirit of gratitude mimetically,

you have the ability to advance your life and those around you and society in a win-win situation through nonviolent creativity. Now, the other side of the coin, which is the destructive side, is envy and competitiveness, which when frustrated because of mimetic rivalry and one-upmanship and never-ending games, ends up needing to be spilled into a commonplace environment.

of derision, hate, shame, slander, what have you. And that energy gets built up into sacrificial violent attempts, which still are happening all around us, but not all of them, and certainly none of them really, provide the level of peace and cathartic release that

that the sacrificial mechanism that humans unconsciously stumbled onto used to. It does not provide the same unity, nor does it provide the same discharge of anger and aggression, which means when you sacrifice, you get a little bit of cathartic, but not enough cathartic energy to satisfy you, which means it's an impotence, it's a breakdown, and that violent aggression spills back into the community with more violence

competition, more rivalry, more blame games, more shame games, more alienation, and more attempts to check out with Gnostic ideologies. Gnostic ideologies are the false form of Christianity that the world offers because they don't want us to have incarnational Christianity, which is going to point us right back to gratitude and nonviolent creativity as our purpose.

Nonviolent creativity does not mean you have to be exactly an artist. Your life is an art. It's a living piece of art. So even starting there and artfully living is enough for anybody can do. If you're a person who's in a nursing home and you're bedridden, you can do that artfully. There are ways to live artfully as a living piece of art for the Lord. As clay, as we're told. We are molded as clay, right? So that art, our life, can be a clay that is a sign of

of divine love and nonviolent creativity. That comes from gratitude. Envy is the other side of the coin where you are driven by a scarcity mindset. And that scarcity mindset is not always over specific possessions. It can be over statuses, like with a feeling that love is scarce.

So if you're a lot of people have a zero sum mindset about love, if you're loving that person or being affectionate to that person or kind of that person, that means I'm threatened and I have to hurt you. And that kind of mindset, again, animate so much of the energy that we're in today.

So I don't want to get too much into the weeds of current events today, but I did want to recall something that I've talked about in the past, but I just want to bring it back to our attention to help us kind of understand where we're at in history. And that is looking at the story of Daniel's prophecy, a vision.

of this different eras of empires, right? There's different, there's this big statue that's got all these different types of metals representing different eras of state or what we would call empires or powers in the world that, you know, that history was going to be unfolding through. And the last one is iron mixed with clay.

Now, I think this is interesting, right? I've talked about this again before, but I want to refresh this for folks who are new or missed that episode. It's been a while back. Maybe we'll link to it in the show notes or description. But the statue, I've got little notes here from Daniel chapter 2, represents different kingdoms, gold, silver, bronze, iron, and iron mixed with clay. And so Daniel

I see this as very interesting because if you think about it, sir, we're talking about the golden age lately. You ever heard of that? The golden age, right? The golden age is to come, right? Some people say it's here. That's not quite yet, but it's here insofar as how we want to play it out, right? We're invited to have nonviolent creative reciprocity right now. We don't have to have

rivalry and hate and aggression and one-upmanship govern our relationships. We choose to mimetically keep that going. But the golden age is considered something to come. This is a Christian thing, right? Because if you look at that statue thing, gold is the first

And it's the one farthest back in history. It's the one that is least desacralized. By the way, the reason why it's gold, well, there's a lot of reasons, but one reason why the golden age in the past is still gold is because it's the least desacralized. And that's just if you're not familiar with that word, that means the violence of 5,000 B.C. or 7,000 B.C. is the least on your mind.

You are not concerned about the plight of how the Persians treated their prisoners of war. You don't think about it from 7,000 BC or whatever. You don't think about it. It's not on your mind. 5,000 BC, whatever. You're not thinking about it. It's not bothering your conscience, and therefore it's golden. It looks shiny. All we see are pyramids and really shiny stuff, right?

Yeah, it's so funny how nobody talks about how the Egyptians built their pyramids supposedly, you know, with so many thousands of slaves. Nobody is exactly speaking up about the plight of those slaves in the ancient world.

which were not really undertaken by white people. So it's so funny how it's like, and I'm not just trying to be provocative here, but just it's an interesting fact here. When people talk about slavery, they always start history from a certain point of view.

And that's a very Christ-haunted method. The people who are complaining about slavery or asking for reparations and so forth are

are always, they're always directed at Western societies, which are the most Christian saturated, but rarely do they talk about the slavery that existed in Asian countries or the Middle Eastern countries or African countries, you know, and

And that's like a very sneaky way to, you know, point your, it's like Gerard said, it's a radicalized form, you know, a Christian radicalized wing of Christian culture, hyper-Christianity, I think he called it.

Right. Yeah. I know you're rereading evolution and conversion by Renee Gerard, but I don't know if you saw that part where he talks about the burial ritual they do for the Kings. Did you get to that? Where he said there's a ritual where they run away as if they've done something very awful. All when they're burying the King's body, when they're entombing him, there's a part where they all flee as if they've done something really bad.

And he says, you know, this is a holdover from when the kind of collective guilt remembrance right through the years that not every pharaoh is murdered or sacrificed. Right. But in the earliest days of the what became the pharaoh dynasty, right.

these things would be more transparently seen as a candidate for sacrifice at some point when he irritated the gods because he didn't dance right, right? So to speak, he didn't assuage the crowd. The gods being here, the wrath of the people, right? And so there's a ritual holdover from the vestige of the Pharaoh role, which again is this beautiful gold-capped, you know, speaking of golden age, gold-capped pyramid. That's the way these pyramids were.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, just staying on the topic of Egypt and of course a bigger topic of the golden age, you know, like,

There's a very leftward appreciation for ancient Egypt, for example. A lot of people say the ancient Egyptian pharaohs were the black people, the weavers, kings, those kind of thoughts. I think, wait a minute, hold on a second, because if they were pharaohs,

They were also building the pyramids and all of these great monuments using slave labor. So what do you mean by that? Do you mean by that black people also practice slavery?

And they also engaged in warfare with neighboring countries. So that means they would have slaves of different ethnicities as well. So these things are often like if we're going to talk about and that is why Girard is such a crucial element in Christianity because Girard doesn't go back just to the Enlightenment era or whatever. He goes back as he says since the foundation of the world

and these fallenness these uh scapegoating this violence that human beings have carried out have carried out universally not in certain uh areas not in certain uh regions or whatever is it's uh we we are all guilty of it yeah we all of us are guilty of it yeah so um

So that progression of this statue here, I just want to make it, try to show people what's happening here. The gold is the oldest, then silver, bronze, iron, and then iron mixed with clay. Okay? So this is symbolizing the progression of different eras of human power structures. This is what Ephesians 6.12 talks about. We wrestle against...

Flesh and not against flesh and blood, but against principalities. These are the print. This is the progression of the principalities and how they're being dissolved by the personhood revolution of Jesus. Right. So you got gold. That's the farthest back in time. Then you get silver, not quite as pretty bronze, not quite as good, not quite as lofty and transcendent. So remember what you're seeing here, folks. It's really interesting.

This is what it looks like when Satan falls like lightning, okay? Gold is lofty. It's rare. It's precious. It's hard to come by, and it's beautiful and dazzling, and that kind of invokes the celestial up-in-the-sky spot that gods that accused people like Satan, the accuser, is.

But that conception of God is going to progressively erode to the point where we're at today, which we're going to build on. So that violence of the old ancient past is all hazy in our eyes. We don't see it. It's farther back. And we call that golden age. Then we get the silver age, bronze age. The violence is a little bit easier to see, a little bit more mucky, a little bit more messy. Bronze, a little bit more messy. Iron. Now, iron...

is just representative. Nothing glossy, nothing shiny, nothing precious. Iron's just pure power. That shows that at the time that the iron age is coming about, now humanity is starting to see power for what it is. It's just brute power. We've got the might. We're going to make it right because we got the might. But then the final age, which is what we're in now, is the iron mixed with clay.

Now, I think clay is interesting here because clay is often associated in the Bible, as I mentioned earlier with you, with the notion of humanness. Clay is fragile. It's malleable. And it's used in various different ways to represent humanity. In fact, in the Garden of Eden, it is said that, you know, the breath of life is

is breathed into the dust of the earth, which is how you get clay. So human is almost associated with dust creatures with the spirit of God, right? Clay. Now, I think it's interesting here because if we're in the Iron Age, that's not the Iron Age, but the iron mixed with clay, the final stage of political power in humanity, right?

Then the text goes on to say that a stone cut out, but not by human hands, strikes the statue at its feet of iron and clay, causing it to crumble, after which the stone grows into a mountain that fills the whole earth. Now, sir, this is very David Lynch to the great late David Lynch. A stone, like a stone hits this clay iron mixture. This statue is so weird already.

And it hits it, and then it like falls, and it goes, and it starts turning into a mountain. So it's very almost, you know, psychedelic doesn't do it justice, but this is very weird. You know, you get some kind of a stone that starts turning into a mountain, right? But I want us to see, and we've talked about the stone the builders rejected. That's the stone that's striking it. The stone the builders rejected is Christ, and it is the sign of the innocent victim that Christ represents to the powers of the world.

And it grows bigger and bigger. Right. It grows bigger and bigger because once it breaks the ability of the iron and clay era of political power, it can only grow from there because the cat's out of the bag. So in other words, now the question is, well, what's iron and clay mixed in?

Well, first, you know, the simplest way is to say it's a divided kingdom, which is what Jesus says, a house against itself cannot stand, right? A house divided against itself. So Satan casts out Satan in order to create unity by which he can maintain his way of divinity, which is violent sacrifice and hierarchy mediated by the imposition of violence against those who have power and those who don't.

And everything falls into a mimetic art around that. Everything we do, the way we do our businesses, the way we conduct our families is emulated by that same spirit of the principalities and that same force.

Well, yeah, what you're basically saying is that the iron and clay is our current state of civilization, right? It's fragile because Christ has made it fragile. But I would also like to add to that, it also works in the opposite way. Think of the statue as like civilization.

And what's at the foundation of civilization? It's the foundational murder. It's the murder from which all other, you know, things are made. So along comes Christ and he smashes the myths surrounding that foundational murder, you know, truly revealing the thing that is laying hidden. So, right. So once that, so that's the whole, so once this process continues, what you're saying,

And you strike at the place we're at because you have to enter the gospel awareness at some point. And you're going to enter it into the era in which you're at first. You're going to see the sins of your forefathers before you see the sins of those from 10,000 years ago. Because it's literally, it just happened. It's fresh on everybody's collective memory.

So but but you're right. Once you hit the feet and then the whole thing falls and then you can see the whole the whole thing is a disaster. The whole thing was always built on that lie. And the clay mixed with iron, to me, it symbolizes polarization. Right. Because gold's pretty. Everybody wants gold. Silver is pretty, not as pretty, but it's nice and it's precious and it's shiny and it reflects the sun, you know.

Bronze, again, it has a celestial quality to it. But time you get to iron, oh, that's just heavy, hard power. But then you get to iron and clay, and it's like, well, where did the clay show up? What kind of empire would be symbolized by iron and clay? Polarization.

We're the good guys. You're the monsters. No, we're the good guys. You're the monsters. No, we're innocent. That's why we get to colonize you. And no, we're innocent. You killed our children. No, you killed our children. I see a lot of clay in those symbols. I see a lot of humanness popping up on the surface. I don't see it hidden by the whitewashed tombs that Jesus talks about of religion, which is going to be ensconced in gold and silver and in bronze. Right? Right.

You're seeing the power and you're seeing the humanness in that era of power, right? Yeah, you're right. The clay symbology is very strong. It definitely, like if you are reading the biblical text,

clay definitely stands for humanity. We are made from clay and from dust we come and to dust we shall return like the poetic scripture, the poetic literature and everything within the Bible speaks about that as well as it also shows us the fragility as you mentioned David. It's like a bunch of duct tape

holding different parts together, you know, like it may fall apart at any moment. So that's basically how our, like Gerard talks about the state as a sacrificial institution. People, a lot of Gerardians think this is like a libertarian interpolation of something, but Gerard himself says it is

in evolution and conversion but in the very first chapter literally says the state is a sacrificial institution and we can see that the state is so fragile is because in a world that exists after the coming of Christ, after Christ unveiled everything to us such sacrificial institutions will have to

struggle a lot to stay intact and that's why we are like don't want to get into current events so too much but you can see all of these things coming out like all of these money laundering all of these you know overspending on things that are ridiculous like spending on

trans surgeries or some faraway country like billions of dollars being poured in so like all of these things are coming to light in in the ancient world the debauchery and all of that would not be coming to light so easily and if they did come to light like there would be no uh

there would be no stopping the emperor from killing that person outright and saying, I want to do what I want to do. But in today's society, because of the effect that Christ has had on us, because of the non-violence message that we have been saturated by, nobody can get away with anything. They're always exposed by some whistleblower or something or the other.

It's only a matter of time before, you know, the violence behind every, the theft, the violence, the murder behind every institution is revealed to the masses. Yeah. So that's what's going on. You know, we've had this recent era where

The old order that was established around the world after World War II is now starting to fall apart, and it's shaking at its foundations. And so a lot of the institutions that have used power, they call it soft power. That's not hard power. See, here's the thing. Look, I mean, it's right in front of you. Right.

We talk about it all the time. See, these people talk about elite theory and all this stuff. It's like, man, you're missing out. If you use the biblical anthropology, it's so much more rich to get to the big picture of what's happening. You're just getting a little microcosm when you get caught up in some of the weeds here and current thought. But you take a big picture look. I mean, look at how we talk about Western powers having to use soft power to stay legitimate. Right?

Versus hard power, right? Whereas in other cultures that are not as gospel infected, you can still do hard power where you, you know, do brute force stonings in the public square or canings or, you know, different forms of what we call hard power, right? Crackdowns on speech.

Whereas soft power has to always come in the name of victims, right? And so it's this attempt to say, well, we have to do a little bit of coercion here, but don't you worry about it because we've anesthetized the pain because we care about the victims here. So all the people that suffered under that pandemic, it was always in the name of victims. We're protecting grandma, but we're hurting her. Why? But it was soft power. And that got exposed because people are becoming more and more aware of

And again, this is another original thing. I don't think anybody's really fully articulated this, but this program, which is the media technology. The gospel works with evolution of media. The media and the gospel, they work together. The ages and the eras of media, the gospel comes in, whether it's media technology of

oral tradition or, you know, phonetic texts like the gospel spread in, or if it becomes something more closer to home like radio or telephony or cell phones and HD videos and Internet, all these things are rapidly increasing the ability of people to expose soft power as just another form of hard iron, right?

Not clay. So we exposed on this show the clay being ground to a pulp by the iron of that pandemic response. And we've been vindicated. They deleted my channel. They did all that stuff. But who's still in my channel's back? I don't even use it yet. We're going to have to figure out what we're going to do with it. You know, but, you know, you see what I mean? It's like, who's really who's really moving things forward? The people who impose iron or the people who stand with the clay?

than the solidarity of the clay. Now, you could say, and it's not a one-to-one, because humans are still enraptured with a, I think you call them political idols. We're still adulterous. We still cling to our political violence as well. I want a little bit of that with this. But you have to give it to Trump. Talking about cutting military 50%,

Talking about making peace with China and Russia and getting rid of our nukes altogether. Let's all get rid of our nukes as much as possible. I mean, that's a man who looks like he experienced a close encounter with death, and he's got a changed heart. God be praised. That's wonderful. But he's a human being. He can go the wrong choice anytime if he gets the wrong gut microbiota or whatever goes on. You don't know what's going to happen. He'd go in a bad direction.

Because we're all human. We're all caught up with very confusing choices. And it's very easy to go with sacrificial violence and imposition of force. And, you know, you can't do that. Because Jesus says, I got to say this, Habakkuk chapter 2, which Jesus quotes when he's heading into Jerusalem. And he quotes it to the people who tell his followers to be silent. And he says, when these stones cry out, you know, when these people are silent, the stones will cry out. But Habakkuk chapter 2, which he's quoting from,

Goes on to say, woe to him who founds a city on bloodshed. That includes New Gaza.

You cannot displace people and then put up a beautiful resort there and say, hey, honey, it's beautiful, wonderful. Wow, no, no, no, no. That doesn't work that way. That's going to destroy. That will be a stone lobbed at the iron and clay feet of that project. Guaranteed. Take it to the bank. You heard it here first. Breaking news for tomorrow. Hope that doesn't happen. I hope they find a better way.

because it needs to be in the same spirit of cutting this military by 50%. You know, the emperors that were ruling over Jesus' time did not say that stuff. So we've come a little bit away, you know? I mean, we're not doing crucifixions. You know, the emperors, if they were dealing with the kind of opponents that Jesus was battling, or if the emperors were dealing with the kind of political...

gamemanship that Trump's facing, the USAID people would be crucified by the emperors of Rome. Today, they just get fired with a nice furlough back pay. That's because Jesus is demystifying the justification of sacred violence

and ruining our appetite for it. And I don't care what these little online, you know, anonymous right-wing kids say, they don't have an appetite for crucifixions, okay? That's their little Jeffrey Dahmers in the making. There's probably a couple. But most people do not have, you know, a desire to see their worst opponents, you know, crucified live on C-SPAN.

So I don't care, you know, this fear about this emerging new right. I think it's a tepid paper tiger of impotent little children who never got out in the real world and incarnated anything. But maybe they've got time. They're still young. Yeah, just to give a couple of examples, David, of why you're right. I mean, and I sent this article to you one time. You've been talking about it for a long time, but it just...

asserts what you've been saying. It just vindicates you because this article was from Russia Today RT and it was on the Middle East conflict and it was talking about how both sides in the conflict are vying for, are trying to, you know, grab the, I don't know exactly what was the terminology that they used, but it was trying, like both sides were trying to

Jesus' name. Both sides are trying to... One side was saying, we are doing this because they hurt us and the other side is saying, we are doing this because we have killed our children. And both sides are trying to appeal to the Christians. The Christian ethics, the Christian standards is the dominant dominant

dominant standard in the world.

Nobody appeals to Gautam Buddha, nobody appeals to any Hindu demigod, nobody appeals to anything at all. But everybody do appeal to Christ. So when both of them are trying to say our violence is justified, they are trying to do so in the name of Jesus Christ because Christ is going to be the final judge of who is right or who is wrong.

And in addition to that, you brought up Donald Trump. Donald Trump is looked at as someone who is like a strong man right now. But compare him to the strongmans of yesteryears. He is very libertarian in comparison. I don't think Ronald Reagan would dare, or anybody else for that matter, who would dare

ran on fiscal, you know, limited government during the 80s or 70s or and all of that, any libertarian or whoever would really, they would pale in comparison to the things that Donald Trump is doing, which is very, very paradoxical because

He and I'm not claiming that he is some kind of radical libertarian thinker, but compared but he is definitely radically libertarian compared to the strongmans of decades prior. So I think it's just he's beyond. I think he's beyond. I mean, I know what you're saying, but I think he's beyond libertarian. He's he's he's a radically Christian figure, even though he may not even fully be Christian yet himself.

And I think God uses a guy because think about it. The crowd still wants a strong man. So what would God's humor do? He would take a strong man, get his ear nicked like splinter from Ninja Turtles where his piece of his ear is missing and then bring him back to the stage as calling for 50 percent cuts in military.

Now, let me tell you something. Whether he fulfills that or not, he is moving—here we go, we've got to use this word, I hate it—the Overton window of normalcy, political discourse, to normalize on the party of macho guys to cut the military by half and to denuke, to denuke. So you see how God confounds the wise? The wise want to build a party of macho militarism called the Republican Party, and

And then he takes a macho guy who's more macho than any of those guys, and he runs them up the field of history as the most peaceful dove-type guy we've ever had, who says, I want the killing to stop. That's what he says. I want the killing to stop. He says that about Ukraine and Russia, and he says it about Gaza, and he says it about a lot of stuff. I want the killing to stop. USAID, regardless of what your NPR brain friend says,

was doing a lot of killing around the world by creating all kinds of covert operations to destabilize people and turn people against each other where there was peace. So in that regard, this is an apocalyptic unveiling of that which was pretending to be clay to be just another imposition of iron. And that which looks like another shield of iron can have a little clay sympathy called Donald Trump calling for 50% cuts and stop the killing.

So it's really mixed up right now. But that's what it looks like when you have a polarized society that's not protected by sacrificial unity anymore. Because what has happened? The podcast world that we're in right now has dethroned the TV era and the newspaper era. It's beaten it. That won't go back the other way. And guess what? There's a lot more voices like mine talking about peace and nonviolence in the podcast world than there is in the TV and the newspaper world.

So the media world, which helps human beings process what's happening in the world and break through mythology, is rapidly being desacralized and Christianized as we speak. But our temptations to go back to the old gods is always there. So we're always, oh, well, but we got to do this or that.

It's a temptation. The intention is there but it's really a very flaccid kind of intention which really no desire to follow through on that intention like you said David. And the other thing I want to mention is that

Like you mentioned Trump saying that I want the killing to stop. It's not just the guy at the top. It's like he won. He literally won. The Republicans won because of that message. And the Democrats slipped back into, they literally backslid back into paganism. And that's why they lost. We used to be the only radio show that would criticize the war that were going on, the endless wars.

And in the next segment, talk about how seed oils are sacrificing our children. And that ticket just won the White House. And Kennedy is talking about how seed oils are sacrificing our children and how wars are killing people and hurting people. Trump's talking about that. Pete Hegseth's talking about that. They even got little Marco Rubio to talk about that. I don't know how long that's going to last, but that's okay. We'll take whatever. If he's converted, then God bless him. But the point is, is

That's a whole other world than when I started this show. We're in a whole other world that fast. And we're young people still, you know. I still get carded for alcohol. I don't drink alcohol, but when I do, you know, they card me. We got a long way to go, especially when we're getting bioenergetic with glowing skin. I see yours glowing.

You know, the problem is God bless us with health because the work is still to be done. You know, there's so much work to do. We've only had such a small period of time and it's a whole nother world, man. I'm telling you, you know this and my audience knows this. Those who've been with me from the beginning,

No one talked about seed oils in a political context. There were podcasts talking about seed oils before me. Ray Peet talked about seed oils. And to be fair, he did connect it to a broader political view. That's true. But nobody was talking about it on a contemporary, current events driven, news driven political issue like we did on this program many years ago.

to a broadcast, FM and AM normie. That means everyday people who are not really drilling into these topics, but they catch it on the radio and they listen to it. We hit that thing every day. And then we connected the best scientists and thinkers together, like Ray Peet, to have these really deep dive conversations. We gave a broadcast seed oil discourse for politics, and we gave a very deep podcast discourse for the top science stuff about the seed oil thing. And now the HHS secretary-general

is exposing that chemical and many others as the metabolic destroyers that they are, sacrificing children for the gods of these principalities. And it's going to go further. It's only going to go further. They've lied about, for example, estrogen as the female hormone because so many toxins and foods and seed oils and PUFAs in our bodies are estrogenic.

So they've lied about the natural state of what femininity is to be estrogen dominant as opposed to progesterone. That's called principalities. When you've literally convinced human beings to normalize disease states of mind, not that estrogen is evil, but that in excess, as it is now normalized to be because of all the toxins in our systems,

They've normalized estrogenic type behavior in men and women as normal. Estrogen tends to masculinize women and it tends to feminize men. So when you get to the gender dysphoria moment, it's a long process that got us there that was decades in the making of poisoning. That's called principalities. You see, principalities are these connected webs of mimetic lies and delusions.

All mythologized, right? Where your own doctor, oh, your estrogen levels are fine. So that can't be anything related to, you know, the mood swings or the mental illnesses that are so rife in this country and around the world, wherever these modern toxins of pesticides and dyes and emulsifiers and PUFAs and all these things are spreading, they come with an estrogenic effect, right? Right.

And they've demonized things like testosterone. Oh, testosterone, high testosterone means you're aggressive. No, it's not. Men with high estrogen are more aggressive, chemically. Men with higher testosterone levels tend to be more relaxed, calm, and assertive, and tell the truth even when society pressures them against telling the truth. Isn't that convenient for principalities to tell you testosterone? Don't touch that, you'll become a violent, evil man. But it actually makes you less likely to tell the truth under social pressure.

I just want my audience to understand how principalities work in your everyday life all around you. And these principalities are also fast disappearing because of the effect of

Christ. Like you mentioned earlier in this conversation that we Christians are supposed to be the ambassadors from the future, right? And that is what basically what we are showing the audience in real time when David talks about getting rid of seed oils. That's literally like imitation of and that's what real creativity is, imitation of Christ.

It's a performance art, as you mentioned, David. It isn't necessarily literature or anything specific. It is as broadened as it can be. And what is creativity? Creativity is what Jesus did, the signs and wonders. He rid our body, he rid bodies from illnesses. He exercised evil spirits. And that is what...

future signs and wonders looks like. It looks like technological innovation, cheap energy and transformative energy, the bioenergetics of Ray Peet, where your body is continuously brimming with energy and brimming with creativity as a result of that.

So getting rid of seed oils is literally like the 21st century sign and wonder of...

getting rid of leprosy. Leprosy is like, it's a both are can be very similar, both destroy the immunity, the immune system, both destroy your body's potential to fight against dangerous, you know, entities. So all of these things, these are like, this is ever evolving, like a lot of people mistake miracles

for something very specific that's oddly very ancient. Like for example, oh he's healed of blindness, therefore that's a miracle. But if he's healed from blindness, that is a miracle. But at the same time, if the person is healed from let's say seed oil inflicted in diabetes, which causes blindness.

Yeah, and that is a mental block in Christians a lot of the time. Because if they hear that word, that special scientific designated word like diabetes or like, you know, whatever it is, you know, like a special like cancer or, you know, whatever the special scientific words, all of a sudden their minds explode.

Exit the miracle department It all of a sudden They exit the miracle department And they enter the world of statins You know Chemotherapy and all of that Because they've been taught Disembodied theological Jesus That deals with your little secret spiritual spot But doesn't really deal with everything else Because your body is kind of a secondary thing That's not Jesus though

Well, it's as if Jesus is oddly restricted, you know, put into a small little office like that, like that guy in office space, you know, people put into the basement and he only deals with those funky diseases like leprosy. Yeah. He don't deal with like, like really sophisticated modern diseases, you know? Right. Yeah. You know, what is this?

Yeah. Or if he like, like, let's expand on that. Oh, Jesus, you know, his miracles are like really like like you said, these ancient kind of mythic feeling things. But it's like he helps these guys catch ever loads of fish. Right. One time. Right. So what's the difference between that?

And what I'm talking about, where we put aside our violent competitive spirit for money, money, money, money, money, and fitting in, and we be wild and fun, and let's create energy too cheap to meter that's decentralized off the grid. Is that not the same as basically allowing you to catch units of energy that are brimming out of your net of your life? Is it not the same? It's a sign that the scarcity mindset

has been liberated by Christ. That's the whole point. When we talk about setting creation free from its bondage to decay, we are supposed to show how that looks, that there's plenty of fish for everybody, and there's plenty of energy for everybody. How many people in Jesus' day killed people over fish? Probably a lot. If you looked at the grand total of the whole world,

People fighting over fish or, you know, or food, whatever it is. Lots of people. Right. And, you know, a lot of people kill and maybe they killed over food, but they didn't know it. But they were angry because they were hangry and grilling was kicking up high and they were grouchy. Sugar was dropping. They were hungry and they killed somebody. They didn't do it thinking they did it over food, but they really did. They just needed to eat first.

Right. Yeah. That's what I'm trying to say. You know, when you have energy too cheap to meter for your home, that is that not allowing you to stop fighting over another country's energy deposits?

Right? Yep. Yep. And more energy means abundant life, right? And more ability to see the impotence of the gods of the state, right? That's important. It's not just the abundance. It's the ability of the people to recognize that the state and its little oligarchic corporations was not the end-all, be-all that they needed to be in awe of, that Christ always had something for them right under their noses if they just believe in it.

and practice it and be bold in that, right? Yeah, and the fish thing is very important because if you read the work of James Jordan or Peter Lightheart,

The fish is in the sea, right? The sea represents, in Old Testament language, the sea represents chaos. So fish is, in a way, representing death. So when Jesus multiplies the fish, he is essentially saying that death has been conquered, which is death, which is the ultimate scarcity, right? What's the first thing he eats? To add to your point, what's the first thing he eats when he's resurrected, when he beats death?

Fish. Okay, there you go. Yeah, that's like... Maybe he didn't kill the fish. He resurrected after he ate it. I don't know.

Well, I mean, he did kill death. And he calls for us, like you can hear this chanting in many traditional churches, you know, trampling down death by death. He literally does an Aikido move on death, swallows, let death swallow itself up. Isn't that the same sign of a man who uses killing machismo empires by taking Mr. Machismo Donald and doing it with him?

Yep. Yep. Yeah. That's the beauty of the cross. Trampling machismo power by machismo power, right? Yeah. Yeah. That is creativity. That is why if we are to embark on creativity, we have to have an abundant mindset. We have to get rid of the scarcity. Like all of these things which are dependent. There's a reason why the guys that are against my ideology are about a foot and a half smaller than me and can't put a headlock.

or a sleeper hold like me, okay? It takes sometimes, some of us have a special calling to be extra nonviolent in our creativity, don't we? The ones that want to be so violent.

They got something they're trying to compensate for. There's, you know what I mean? And some of them are just the Napoleon complex puts it well, you know, or Chihuahua syndrome, whatever it is. There are a lot of folks that are, yeah, I'm going to show them, you know, I'm going to show them where we're going to get those guys. I'm going to tear them up. We're going to ban their speech and get them. And if they hurt me, I'm going to get them back. That mindset brought to you by, you know, little Peters, just like St. Peter.

He had the same mindset, didn't he? I'm going to show you, you know, God bless him because he transformed his life. Right. But he had that same mindset going, don't you tell me I'm going to get him. But he was he was selling out Jesus the whole time that spirit was going in him. Right. Yep. Yep. That's right. And he was following Jesus for the wrong way. Just like so many folks today, you know, like you were going to write in your new article. Look forward to seeing it.

following Jesus for the wrong thing. He was following Jesus. Jesus, don't say you're going to die on the cross. He's like, you don't even know what spirit you're speaking of right now. Get behind me, Satan. You don't know the things of God. I'm trying to save humanity. You're trying to vanquish humanity by stopping me from going to the cross. So what? I can be another William Wallace? You can make a movie about me in Hollywood one day? That's it? That's all you want me to do, Peter? You know?

I'm trying to actually save humanity. You're just trying to keep it in the eternal cycle, right? That's why he said, you don't know the things of God. From Peter's mindset, he thought he knew the things of God. He thought that Jesus' dad wanted to really terrorize the others that were persecuting his people. He didn't realize that Jesus' dad did not want that cycle to keep going.

That's why Jesus said, you don't know what God is about here. You don't know what this is about. When you say, don't die on the cross, you want another political revolution. You want vengeance, right? Yeah. Yeah. And to attest to like, like if anybody is thinking like we're being spooky and all like,

The Shroud of Turin for example, that's like that became a big thing in recent times like that news thing came out like that's proof of Jesus' resurrection and so forth. But like if you really look into the imprint of the Shroud, if you really look into the evidence like the this is of course given if it's authentic.

if that imprint on the shroud is what we think it is, it's literally energy bursting forth from Jesus' body. It's like his resurrection, like literally giving us what the future of humanity look like. Bursting energy, energy bursting forth from our deified bodies.

from our bodies that no longer has sickness, no longer has illness, no longer has cancer, no longer in need of chemotherapy, no longer in need of all of these mind-numbing drugs that drive people crazy, young guys crazy to do horrible acts, criminal activities.

Our body will literally glow forth with energy. And this is not some Pentecostal thing or anything. This is not some charismatic thing or some health and prosperity thing, as many people put it. Because this is literally Jesus resurrecting from the grave and bursting forth with energy. His face was shiny, his disciples said, when he rose from the grave.

And you saw at the end of the Gospel, His face and body was shining as He ascends, as He resurrects and then ascends. And then at the end of the Book of Revelation, it's not just Jesus that shines, it's literally the entire city, the entire society of humanity.

which shines like gold, like sweets made up of gold and, you know, silver and all of that stuff. River flowing with milk and honey. It's like brimming with radiance and, you know, uh,

All of that. Yeah. So this is like, yeah, that's what I wanted to add. I want to go back to these notes here about Daniel and wrap this piece up because we're going to tie it in. We're going to talk about the future. We're ambassadors from the future. That's what we're called to be. And, you know, people say, oh, don't be so bold. And yet they want to imitate a guy who says, get out and walk on water like me. You know, don't be so bold. Don't try.

subversion of sacrificial violence. The Gospels, by elevating and redeeming victims, fundamentally challenges the integrity of sacrificial violence. This is like a recap of what we said. It shows that the violence directed at scapegoats is not only unjust, but also unnecessary for societal cohesion.

This subversion can be seen as making the clay of human society more visible, right? Highlighting its vulnerability, but also its potential for transformation through love and forgiveness rather than violence. It's a good point. Clay can be molded into something different. Those other metals are a little bit tougher to mold, but clay can be actively molded.

by human hands. In the context of Daniel's vision, the clay mixed with iron at the statue's feet can be interpreted as the point of greatest weakness in a society built on violence. The gospel's message could be seen as the stone that strikes at this very point, not with more violence, but with the truth about human dignity and the innocence of victims.

This truth destabilizes empires or systems that depend on scapegoating as it invites empathy, understanding, and a reevaluation of how societies resolve conflict. In the modern era, the demystification of sacrificial violence means that societies are increasingly aware of the injustices inherent in scapegoating. Movements for human rights, justice, and the recognition of individual dignity can be seen as part of this progress.

where the clay of human solidarity and empathy becomes more pronounced, leading to the crumbling of oppressive structures. The stone that grows into a mountain filling the earth could symbolize a new order where human societies are built on principles of justice, peace, and mutual respect, rather than on the violence of scapegoating. This aligns with the gospel's vision of the kingdom of God, where the last are first and the oppressed are liberated.

So looking at some passages, again, let's go back to Daniel chapter 2, 44 through 45. In the times of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever. This is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands.

So this passage directly supports the idea of a divine intervention that contrasts with human political systems, suggesting a new order that does not rely on violence or human power. Isaiah 2, 2-4, Isaiah's vision of the mountain of the Lord's house being established as the highest of the mountains where nations flow to it for peace, mirrors the stone in Daniel's vision growing into a mountain.

This suggests a universal peace and reconciliation and an end to the cycles of violence. Revelation 18.21, the fall of Babylon, where a mighty angel throws a stone into the sea, saying, With such violence the great city of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again, can be seen as a parallel to the stone in Daniel, symbolizing the end of oppressive systems through divine judgment, which is a mythic expression of the revelation of scapegoating.

Go on to Jesus' teachings like we talked about, turning of the cheek. This nonviolence is going to be what transforms the world. You can look at this practice taking place throughout history where Christianity has spread in fits and starts and failures and ignorances, deviations, falling back. It still progresses into a positive direction. I want to go into the book of Revelation for a second.

Revelation chapter 5 verse 6 and then 12 through 13. Then I saw a lamb looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne. Worthy is the lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise. The lamb identified as Jesus is central to the narrative, symbolizing the ultimate scapegoat whose death reveals the truth of sacrificial violence.

Unlike traditional myths where the scapegoat's death is justified or hidden, here the victim is exalted, subverting the usual sacrificial system. This aligns with the idea that the Gospels expose the innocence of victims, transforming the meaning of sacrifice from violence to redemption. Then you go on to the kings of the earth, Revelation 17, 14 and 19, 16 through 19.

Quote, they will wage war against the Lamb, but the Lamb will triumph over them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings, and with him will be his called, chosen, and faithful followers. I want to say something real quick. You're not a chosen follower of Christ when you are advocating for more violence. If you're advocating calling people Amalekites and wanting to wipe them off the face of the earth,

Because you don't understand them and you're easily duped by propaganda to make it black or white when good and evil resides in every human heart. If you're still calling people less than and they need to be cleansed and all this stuff, I don't care what conflict it is. If you're still calling for more Ukrainians and Russians to die to achieve some god called Demos or EU or whatever your big other god is.

You're not getting it. You're not getting what this means to be a part of the sign of the slain lamb, right? The slain lamb is like a magnet pulling history towards it, okay? That's why Jesus calls himself the Alpha and the Omega. He's the first sacrifice and the last sacrifice, symbolized as the slain lamb. On his robe and on his thigh, he has this name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

And I saw an angel standing in the sun who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, come gather together for the great supper of God so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and the mighty of horses and their riders and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small. Here the kings and rulers, symbols of earthly power, often maintained through violence and scapegoating, are depicted as being defeated by the Lamb.

This signifies not just a change in rulership, but a complete inversion of power dynamics where the victim, the lamb, triumphs over the perpetrators of violence. This connects to Daniel's vision. Both texts illustrate divine intervention where traditional models of power and sacrifice are overturned.

In Daniel, this is symbolized by the stone that destroys the statue. In Revelation, it's the slain lamb who defeats the kings of the earth. Both suggest that the power of love, sacrifice, and redemption embodied by the lamb will ultimately prevail over coercive and violent structures of human kingdoms.

The slain lamb in Revelation mirrors the stone in Daniel, both being unexpected agents of change. The lamb, by being slain yet reigning, reflects the gospel's message of victory through victimhood, which destabilizes the traditional scapegoat mechanism by showing that true power is found in suffering love, not in domination. I'll leave it there. Any thoughts? I didn't see your face. I had the screen up reading that, so if you wanted to interject, I didn't see it.

No, I think it's an excellently articulated piece. And definitely like what we always have in mind. And I definitely praise you for that, David, for bringing this perspective, bringing this element of Christianity forward because Christianity is so much more. Christ is so much more than what we make him out to be.

And he really is the key to history. You can unlock the mystery of history through Christ. Right? And it's an ever-ongoing puzzle. I mean, I think you're going to continue to impact people all over the world. And I think that there's a lot of people hungry to see the sign of the slain lamb. And you're going to continue to be a vessel in depicting that symbol. So thank you for what you're doing. Very good.

That's it for our Things Hidden episode. You can email me, hello, at theneighborstoys.com. I'm David Gronowski, here with Surrett. Godspeed. ♪