Bethel’s Gold Dust- The Old Tricks Behind Modern Miracles - Jed Hartley

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my co-host and friend, Jed Hartley, son of a false prophet and former member of the International House of Prayer. Jed is good to be back and to finally talk about Bethel's gold dust. I've actually been wanting to talk about this for some time and you're the first person who decided to have a full podcast about it, so I thought I'll play guinea pig and talk to this, but

the reason why it interests me when I began studying religion after I left the Branham cult, I was studying it with the aspect, with the frame of mind, that everything that I was in and believed had the intention of being real. And so I left it researching through that lens. It was intended to be real and people were believing fake things, even though they didn't know their fake. But I came to find out after researching several different men, not just Branham, but in the history before Branham and after Branham, all of the spider web of mess that

you could clearly tell that the people involved had no intention of creating something real in some cases, but the people were believing it as though it were real. So the people who involved, who were creating whatever is the thing that they're believing, they knew it was fake. They they had no intention of believing as real, but they would present it as though it was real. Here's where it gets really weird. As I'm studying that and I'm studying gnosticism and learning, I was reading through Irenaeus against Heresys about all of the different, different varying gnostic groups. And he goes into one group, I can't

remember their name, but basically what he's describing is a group that their entire philosophy was lies for the sake of a holy end. In other words, the end justifies the means. You can tell it however you want it, but if people believe it and they get in the spirit, buddy, that's the thing, man, get them in the spirit. So the false reality actually took precedence over in some cases the Bible or whatever was the belief system. And then I compared it to what we came out of and I'm like, wait a minute, that's my entire religion, man.

Yeah, well, and I think that we have taken a very serious look at a lot of it in, because when you have people who are talking about raising the dead and big miracle. and these sort of like sexual abuse scandals and different things, it's very dark and depressing.

And I think that rightfully so, some of our conversations have addressed, especially considering sort of my background coming out of the international house prayer and all of the scandals that have rocked the international house prayer with Michael and my own father and everything like that. I think there's been this very like sober

intense conversation around these like deceptive lies, the lies for the sake of like as long as it is unto whatever the liar thinks is a good end, whether it's their own glorification or the glorification of God. And I think that we've talked a lot about how that can be so dangerous, but I'm actually really excited to talk about this today and I was thinking about it earlier this morning. I'm surprised that we haven't talked about it before because I think that this is a really good representation of more my like day to day living and the lies that I experienced

every single week growing up and in this new apostolic information community that was both attached to Bethel and the international house prayer. Because it wasn't always, I could think on probably, I could probably count on one hand, two hands, the amount of times I remember hearing like very vivid stories about someone raising the dead. Like that was just not that common. I sort of in that same vein, stories of people getting healed of blindness or something dramatic like someone who is paraplegic who walked again. Like these were definitely testimonies that I heard or I heard prophecies about when it was going to happen. But this was sort of,

that was the once every few months sort of testimony or once or twice a year sort of testimony. The I have a friend who went to Bethel and suddenly got gold teeth. I have a friend who was at Bethel who saw a glory cloud come down and rest upon everyone's shoulders or even me myself. I remember seeing people who would come and say the the oil of God is now on my hands and their hands would be drenched in a sort of like weird oil and they would be smearing it across people's foreheads.

And I remember having my forehead smeared by someone who had this like oil of God that was anointing their hands and This was like the day-to-day experience. Like that was how we were living it is.

There was these all the time really trivial miracles going on. I don't know if you have also heard of the one, this is Todd White from, I'm blanking on lifestyle Christianity, I think. He would do this too, but a lot of people, have you ever seen the leg straightening miracle?

Yes, where they basically, you sit someone out, I don't know exactly how it's done, but you have someone like sit up straight and you're like, look, your legs, they're all out of balance and someone looks at them and it's like, this leg is two inches shorter than that one.

And people would look and they'd be like, oh my goodness, you're right. And then they would pray for them and then miraculously, the legs would like stretch out. And I'm sure that there's some psychology of like, it's like one of those tricks that you do where, as soon as people pay attention to it, they kind of straighten themselves out.

And so it's a miracle healing, but all the time, people were doing these sort of miraculous healings where they would be healing people of things that they didn't really, you know, know that they even were ailing of one hour previously.

So you sort of create a problem and then you immediately solve a problem. But these trivial, ridiculous miracles were what were happening on a sort of day-to-day basis in the world that I grew up.

You know, there's so much to say. Like, I've been trying to figure out, how do I contain this into one podcast? There's just so much to say. If you read through the Voice of Healing Magazine, which is the, it started out as the publication for William Brannum until he had some mental health issues and went completely off the field.

Gordon Lindsay took it and ran with it and it became basically this publication of hero worship. And the creator of new heroes, I guess, is the best way to say it. But if you read through some of the testimonies, they'll have all of these faith healing ministers and then they'll towards the middle of the run of the entire, you know, the entire run of the Voice of Healing Magazine.

They started doing these testimony stories where people would submit letters. And I remember one, I can't remember what issue or what year. But this lady says, I was healed of this dreadful thing. It might have been cancer.

I was healed of this dreadful thing. I showed up, I went through the prayer line, I gave them my prayer card, went up to the stage and I was just going for, and she named something like toothache or whatever.

And she says, I did not even know I had cancer, praise God, he healed me with cancer. And I remember hearing stories of this girl. people have said that I went and they detected something the doctors didn't even know that I had.

And while you're in it, you're thinking, oh my gosh, that's amazing, but now in hindsight, you're thinking, wait a minute, that just doesn't make sense. But so there's some historical precedent for everything we're talking about. People who are on the outside who've never been part of this, they look at Bethel Gold Dust and they say, what in the heck does that matter anyway? Why do you care about Bethel Gold Dust? In Brannemism, we had several similar things. We would have there are these photographs and videos. The most popular, I think, there's a film that was made

of William Brannem, somebody walking with a home camera looking at the grave. Well, they had taped it over some kind of a nature program where there were birds flying. And what happened was when it recorded over, the power of the recorder was not enough magnetism to destroy the previous recording. So it looks like there's these ghosts of birds flying away from the grave. And I thought this was real, man, even in the cold pack. I'm looking at this as an adult. I thought it was real.

After I left, I had somebody analyze it and they explained, no, John, that's if you look at the frames per second, they differ and you can tell the difference of the original recording, the second one. So we believed all of this stuff. However, there are other things that just either can't be explained or were part of people's own psychology. Part of there, when they get in that emotional hype, they're looking for things that aren't there. Yeah. So whenever Brannem died, my grandparents traveled from Georgia to Jeffersonville, Indiana for the funeral. And they claimed that they saw this strange light as they were traveling. Didn't they? I don't know.

I wasn't there. I can't say it's odd. And why would God shine a light all the way on the path to this dead guy? You know? Sure. Other people see more obvious things. They might see a dove flying and say it's it's like a sign that Noah had a dove flew across. It's like if you go to, you know, one of the funerals of Ozzy Osborne and you see a dove fly that doesn't mean anything.

You just saw a dove flying. And it becomes a print song, which is kind of funny. But anyway, we had all of these weird things. There were students, students, I say, because they were children.

But they would go to the children's camp for a call. And they claimed they saw this weird pillar of fire. They were called the pillar of fire. Some strange light, they called the pillar of fire. And they say that a few of us saw this. And so God was there in our midst. Did they see it?

I don't know. But what I what I decided to do is just try to figure out why is it like this? Why do we care if a video has birds flying? What does that matter? So in the history of this movement, they started focusing very heavy.

on the last chapter of the book of Mark, which for you Bible scholars who know this, the last chapter of Mark, there is evidence that it was not in the original manuscripts, and it was added later, which is another story for another day. But it says, these signs shall follow those that believe, and they were drinking poison, they were snake handling, they were basically trying to fulfill this passage through doing dangerous things.

Well, over time, the dangerous things got set off to the side, and they started focusing on the signs, and the other signs, they shall heal the sick, they'll speak in tongues. So the movement started adopting signs as part of their theology. Once they did, they started adding to it different signs that weren't in the original text. These signs shall follow those that believe, you'll have a pillar of fire over yourself as you're preaching. I mean, weird things like this, and so people started looking for signs, and the emphasis on the signs became prevalent at the

same time, when Lateran started to break out and they started adding new signs, more signs, they were saying that the denominational churches had grown cold and formal, and they were reprobate, there was no God in them. You have to come to our meetings if you want to see God.

We're the ones that have the visible signs, and they would say, this is the difference. We have the signs, they don't have the signs. But you go back and look at some of the signs, and we've talked about this before, but like little David Walker levitating was one of the signs. Clearly a fake thing, but people were coming, they weren't telling people it was fake, many believed it.

To this day, many people believe it, they write me and they ask, well, how is this possible? How did this kid levitate? But they were inventing new signs and saying that this is proof that we have the spirit of God in our midst, the others don't, the other denominations. So where this becomes real problematic, whether they do or they don't have God in their midst, if they're having to produce fake signs to prove it, this turns problematic when you're cursing at the people who aren't in your movement, who are in denominational churches, saying they don't have it, we have this thing that we

created on stage and it's a boy floating. So with like Bethel, I think the question of why are they doing it or why would you have these testimonies about Gold Dust or boys floating on the stage? Obviously, that's not Bethel, that's pre-bethel, but the name Bethel comes from the story of Jacob and he has just to quickly retell this story from the Bible is that he has this sort of visitation with God where he sees angels ascending and descending a ladder from heaven and earth.

And there was, he has this visitation and he sets up a rocking, says, I shall call this place Bethel because it signified a place in which heaven is meaning earth. And this idea, the whole idea of what Bethel is founded upon is this idea that it is a place, it is a supernatural place in which the veil between heaven and earth is thinner than where it is everywhere else in the world. And to signify that, there needs to be constant validation or reminders. There needs to be these testimonies. And testimonies of external references are good, but they're not

enough. So like Bill Johnson gets up there and talks about all of the miracles that happened in Uganda during this mission strip or he talks about something that he saw during a revival in Toronto or if he talks about things that had happened in the past or prophecies in the past that have come to fruition. This is good and this is what you can fuel a movement on, but at the same time, it doesn't separate this church from the rest of the community because it isn't happening there. And now you want Bethel to feel like it's a place where if you go there, something's going

to happen in that place. You need to go there otherwise you might not see a miracle happen. Like you could go to your own church and hear these testimonies of this. You might even be a part of a church that's sort of loosely affiliated with Bethel. But unless you go to Bethel, itself, you're not going to see these miracles. That's the that's the that's the stick. That's what they want to create is a place where the veil between heaven and earth has been removed or is thin and where heaven constantly comes down and invades earth. This is all like Bill Johnson rhetoric. This

is not me like reinventing the way that he talks. This is literally his most famous book is when heaven invades earth. And it's about this sort of like the the supernatural living amongst the natural in all of life. And so we've referenced it, but to give people who are listening specifics, if they haven't heard it, there was a period of time. I believe it was like 2000.

And I can't remember when it started. Maybe 2006, 2007 might have been later, but there were

it was a condensed period of time where people were whole crowds of people were very consistently reporting that there was this sort of like cloud. this glowing cloud of gold that was coming down from the top of Bethel's ceiling and was like hovering in the top corner of Bethel's ceiling and then would like drop down and people were coming out with like flex of gold dust during this period of time.

And I remember hearing it as a teenager and thinking that is crazy and even in a world in which I'm hearing miracles all the time and I'm pretty hooked on a sinker believing a lot of them.

So I was always like, I don't know. That seems a little bit too extreme, but at the same time I was like, wow, and part of me was like, I want to go there.

I want to see this for myself. I want to be a part of a situation where I'm worshiping with a bunch of other people. I'm feeling the presence of God and then look up.

There's sort of a manifestation of the spirit of God or some angelic force there. And then so turns out there's been people who took the pieces of gold that I fell down because it literally there really was flex of gold reflecting and landing on people in sort of the community there.

And people went and took these to a jeweler to get them figured out like a, hey, is this gold? Is this real gold? And of course it was either full-scaled or plastic. Like there are several and different individuals who took it to reputable jewelers and it's like, no, this is just glitter.

And so then there's the question, some people speculated at times that the cloud was like, oh, it was just like the air conditioning system was often the lights. It just was like an accidental sort of trickle for the light thing that was going on that people were like, like the face of Jesus and the grilled cheese sort of thing.

It just so happens that it's there and then people read into it and see it. And then once you see it, you can't unsee it. But with the glitter it was like, well, no, that had to come from somewhere.

Someone had to be doing that or God had to be releasing plastic glitter among the congregation which at that point you have to be like, why would God choose plastic glitter instead of actual gold does might as well just fulfill the whole miracle.

So either God is trolling Bethel or it is someone in the congregation or someone on staff was involved with it. And I mean, I think that a lot of the speculations is that someone hadn't put like little glitter bombs or containers of glitter.

up into the ventilation. So when air conditioning kicks on as it does, when there's a lot of people in the sort of congregation and everybody's getting stirred up into a frenzy and the heat is rising within the service quite literally, not just metaphorically. The air conditioner pops on and then all of a sudden gold dust starts like sprinkling down and coming down and falling over the people. And that's that is probably what was happening, whether or not I don't think that anybody has like definitively found someone who was doing this, but this also coincided, this timing of this coincided with it was a little bit after but there was a woman named

Sylvania or Sylvania, Machado. I have an I don't I never met this woman or never heard about her. It was only doing research about this that I was like, man, where did this gold dust come from?

And there was a woman who was from Brazil, who was in these sort of Pentecostal communities. She visited Bethel several times and she would go and she would speak at congregation at congregations and before she would speak or during she had this sort of blonde hair that she would ruffle and gold will fall out onto her Bible in front of her. And this was like a common sort of manifestation of her spiritual authority is this like ruffling of the hair and the gold dust falling out onto her Bible. Well, there was an article that was published by Charisma Magazine of all where they

basically did a study of it and the same thing. It was plastic like people found the gold pieces and it was just glitter. And so she was just putting chunks of glitter in her hair.

And then she would have people ruffle her hair and all of it would come down. And it was like it was so obvious. The trick was so obvious that it's kind of the reason people believe it is because they want to believe it. It's not because it's super perceptive. I mean, it is super deceptive, but it's not like a magic show. If I went to a a magic show here in Los Angeles where I know it's magic and everybody knows it's magic. And the question is like, oh, how did they trick us? How did they do that? Wow, that's the sort of like

man, that hat was empty. And then all of a sudden the dove comes out from it. That's the sort of game of the magic show. But with here, if you know, I went to a magic show and someone ruffles their hair and glitter falls out, I'm like, well, yeah, you just- put it in there before the show like I didn't see you just came from backstage you clearly just like put it on and then did that and so anyway she it became sort of a thing she made a whole career out of it and I think that this is we see sort of copycats in this community a lot where someone

does this particular manifestation like um Wiggles where starts striking people and saying that like he's um punching demons out of people and then Todd Bentley does it you know 70 years later um you have individuals who sort of seen what works with previous um charlatans and says okay I'm going to do this same thing and I don't even think that like whoever put the gold dust in the um air conditioning system that Bethel I don't even know if they really thought of themselves as being deceptive um I think it's one of those things where it's like you know and you are certain

that the presence of God is here and you're wanting to find some sort of external um

sign that proves that and even if you have to manufacture it it's like well you're so certain that God's presence is here it doesn't even though you're kind of lying deceiving it it doesn't matter because it's um it's still validating what is actual actually going on um I remember I had a friend who um who well a friend of a friend basically who um I had like chronic um issues or at least they believed that they had some chronic um uh

issues with with health like a autoimmune stuff or some sort of mysterious illness and um they would go um to the doctor and they would tell symptoms that weren't real just so that the doctors would take them seriously and try to get a bunch of testing and then they ended up not getting um they'd ended up messing with their their health care I remember talking with a friend of a friend who was who was related to this person who was doing this um or my my close friend was was related to the person who was doing this and I could feel I felt this sort of sympathy for

the individual who had in some senses like a Munchhausen situation in which they were like needing to create a disease so that people would pay attention but I do genuinely think that there was something wrong with them and they knew that there was something wrong with them and they knew that nobody was taking them seriously because if you can't see it and you can't really point to it it's like okay well you're tired all the time now what does that mean? You know? And so I can understand and empathize with their desire to manufacture symptoms that do seem more serious, that people will take seriously, because you want

that sort of external manifestation of what you believe to be true happening internally. I mean, I still think that it's deceptive and it's not good and everything like that, but I can empathize with that experience. And I think that that's essentially what we're dealing with at Bethel and IHOP is that, you know, it wasn't just Mike Bickle, Bob Hartley, Bill Johnson, who are coming up with these lies. It was really, it was the whole community. This is where it really is more on the whole community and not just the leaders. I always am really critical of the the the leaders and and very sympathetic to the the people who have been in

these churches, but I think in this particular instance, there was this sort of like reaffirming of frenzy and mental illness and and delusion that came on the part of everyone who is there because everyone was contributing to it and everyone saw what they wanted to see and everyone continued to tell stories and let the stories about the glitter in Bethel become like bigger than what it was and instead of like being like, oh, okay, so I want to put a glitter bomb in in the air conditioning. People wanted it to be true. They wanted

their church or their place to be close to God and they believed that it was and this was a manifestation of that. So why question it? And I think that this is part of the reason why all of these stories were so ridiculous because they felt so trivial. No one would really question them because it just doesn't or the people who do question them. It just doesn't matter that much much. I remember several instances in which people would just be like, okay, oh, so what if it did? So what if it is fake? Who cares? It's not hurting anybody sort of thing,

the gold teeth. And there was sort of like, oh, yeah, well, everybody, there's people who definitely fake some of these things, but the heart of it is true. And it had this much more cavalier sense where if you're talking about raising the dead and healing the blind stuff like that, you can't be as like casual and cavalier because it's like, did that actually happen or did that not actually happen? It's way more serious like the wake up all of the situation that we talked about on the last podcast of a young baby dying and their attempts to raise it from the

dead. Like That is, that it will rock people's faith if it doesn't happen the way, or if you say that it happened and it didn't actually happen. That is one of those things that really can define and lose people.

But if everyone talks about gold dust and oil and people find out that this one person faked it, largely the response is like who cares? And I think that's why it was just this sort of like, anybody, everybody does it.

Everybody exaggerates a little bit and it's like really impossible to hone in and cut that out. I'm sure that there's all sorts of that stuff going on right now in Bethel communities all over.

And I don't know if I think that maybe we could see some advancements with people being held accountable on the like leadership level. But like, unless there's like a philosophical change and religious sort of change within the identity of the movement, which I do not see happening, that's going to continue for a long time.

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You mentioned the change within the identity of the movement. I want to break that down a little bit further because that's actually really significant. So as Pentecostalism began to spring forward in the early 1900s, 1906, 1907, what happened was they were trying to say that the evidence of the Holy Spirit was speaking in tongues and there was the strong division.

You had the group who believed that that was the evidence of the Holy Spirit and then you had the group who did not believe this. And so over time, what happened is this developed into we will test to see whether the movement is of God by testing their signs.

So when I mentioned Mark 16 before, it wasn't a scripture. If you read that passage, it's not a scripture that's telling you that you must go to... Herman, do they have these signs before you attend their church?

By no means, it just simply says the signs will follow. It says these are the things that you can expect if you follow me is what Jesus is saying. And again, that passage wasn't in the original manuscripts.

But there's the very last verse of this. It says, and they went forth and they preached everywhere the Lord working with them and confirming the word with signs following. And what happened is over time as the movement started to use that as their criteria, do they have the signs following?

Well, they must not be of God. We have the Holy Spirit, they do not. And so what it did was it drew this line in the sand that isn't in the original text. You have those who have the signs following, we're the good guys, and then those who do not, they think they have the Holy Spirit, but they have something else.

And so the movement itself became flipped upside down so that it began to look for signs. And so rather than looking to the gospel, looking to Jesus, they actually started looking to the signs.

And that became the criteria by which the movement went forward. Which really interesting, I have, I've mentioned this name a few times, but hero of Alexandria in the ancient world was an architect who was creating signs for the ancient world, for the pagan religions.

He would use pneumatics and hydraulics and magnetism and different mechanisms to make the demons, the so-called demons come alive in the temples. And it was things like, my favorite one was there was a vat of wine underneath the temple floor where the people were standing.

The priests would go light a fire under that vat. And then he would go up, and I don't know if they preached or whatever they did. They bowed before the demon, right, submitting to it.

Well as the vat heated up, the wine would expand, and as it expanded, it would go through these brass tubes and come out the eyes of the statues. And so it looked like the crying blood.

So as they're worshiping, the demons start crying blood and they think this is alive. Now, if you compare that to the Pentecostal world, this is your signs following. We see the miracle, we see the signs following.

And that was just one of many. We can, we actually have preserved in history some of the pages from hero, he-ron, I think it is his real name, he-ron of Alexandria's notebook that talks about how he built these things.

And some that weren't yet built. There was an amazing one that never, I don't think ever got built, where the chariots using some sort of magnetism, chariots of demons were supposed to float across the temple.

Oh. I don't know that it's actually possible, but that was one of his so-called, it's one of his inventions that he never built. Wow. What I'm heading with this is the movement started looking at religion in the same way that the ancient pagans looked at their demons.

If we see something that we can't explain, it must be God. Not realizing that all religions do this right except for Christianity Christianity It was not intended to be like this you won't find a single passage in the Old Testament or the New Testament Where it says you must look and see do we see something that we can't explain for me and you and people who have been in the world If you're around this world for long enough doesn't matter if you are the most a vout person Everyone I know who was in that community

Started getting wise to some of the deception like no one I mean, this is why it it prays upon young and very old Individuals because it's either it's the same it's the same groups of people who get scammed by

email scams and fishing scant like who are the sort of vulnerable population is either older individuals or young people who haven't had the life experience to see that this is a scam sort of thing and

Just haven't been around enough to have the personal testimonies of being like yeah I remember this person said that they got healed of cancer and then they died of cancer a year later And we've talked about this a lot, but That's just like Growing up being the son of someone who is supposed to be a very Powerful prophet and seen the Especially with prophecy how that was just so manufactured. I mean everyone New everyone knew to some extent that people were lying and people are not telling the truth and it was exaggerated and whatnot and I I

I've said this before and I say it again like I think that this is like if people are listening right now who have family members or friends who are a part of this community And haven't been there for long I Mean the testimony of other individuals like of me and other individuals like me who have been there and seen it Will is pretty resounding of like This is all manufactured and yet it it it it keeps on going and John I wanted to pick your brain on this because like We're about to head into a new world

Entirely, I mean we're already there where it is gonna become I shouldn't say become like it is already Almost impossible to

Know Visually whether or not a video that you're watching is real or not anymore I mean, even to train dies, it is getting harder and harder. I remember the first time, this was a few months back, the first time where I was got by something on my TikTok, and I try to think of myself as someone who's like, I literally did visual effects and worked in doing animations and stuff.

So I can see some of the like, okay, I know how to analyze videos and whatnot. I'm not the best at it, but I would say that I'm better than the mean person at recognizing whether or not a video has been like tampered with, and there was, I think it was, I might be mixing up videos, but there was a video of a bear jumping on trampoline that came across my TikTok, and I was like, oh, so funny.

My TikTok is full of just animals that's entirely my TikTok, because apparently my TikTok thinks I'm a six-year-old woman who loves seeing kids and animals doing silly things. But anyway, I saw that video, and I thought, oh, it's funny.

And then later, I remember someone talking about how, like, it was total AI, like it was completely made by AI, and I remember being like, no, and then I went back and I was like, oh, okay, I can kind of see it now, but that was one of those things where I wasn't really looking for it in the moment, and I just was like, oh, wow, this is incredible.

And that was the first moment where I got this sort of sinking feeling, because I was like, oh, immediately, I know that this is going to be used to buy new epistolic reformation people.

There are people willing to put glitter bombs in the air conditioning unit of churches, and an entire church decided not to investigate and not clean out their own air conditioning system, because it was good for, because that was another side of it, is that you had to have people and staff and people who were cleaning that up, who had to be like, I know for a fact that this is not gold dust, who had to be like, you know, let's just let this keep going, because it's good for our brand. I mean, if there was this sort of like

movement to do something as extreme as that, someone on their computer by themselves releasing a video, and then as soon as it was released, you know, then the first person doesn't believe it, but then the second person does, and then it becomes huge and spread to all of, you know, someone having their leg grow out, someone having scales fall from their eyes, someone levitating, someone...

and being raised from the dead or someone, I don't know, plenty of different things that we could see, the earth opening up and swallowing people, like there's plenty of things that could happen that suddenly we now have video for it.

And although I could easily see it being a situation where I even look at those videos and be like, I cannot tell you that they're fake from a visual standpoint. I can only tell you that they're fake because this doesn't happen and this is not, you know, any video of someone raising from the dead is manufactured and AI because that just doesn't happen.

But then someone who does believe it, like there's no reason not to believe that particular video. And so I'm terrified for what is going to happen. I mean, this obviously is more than just like our world, obviously this has matters with politics, this matters with propaganda and people being able to like manufacture a lot of stuff that I think a lot of people are probably talking about the dangers of AI and the ability to manufacture.

Also just there's a whole other things about sexual content that they, you know, people being, I mean, that's a whole thing too of people's likeness being used for really terrible and horrific ways is dangerous.

But specifically, I think it's probably not discussed enough about how in the New Apostolic Reformation world and in the sort of cascading Pentecostal communities in which they're already hordes and hordes of people who are ready to believe something that they see with very little investigation.

We are now in a world where pretty much any video can be manufactured and look authentic. And that's present day. That's not even 10 years from now when the technology has progressed even further and whatnot.

So I wanted to get your thoughts about, you know, are you as afraid of as I am for what the world will look like? I started my business in a technology realm. I've studied AI.

I was actually building a miniature much less complicated form of AI myself for some of the software that I wrote long before we see this AI that exists today. So I know inwardly the guts of it how it works.

The videos don't scare me believe it or not. I know that you're absolutely right. Yes, they're going to use them, but it doesn't scare me so much because go back to, I don't know if you're a fan of these, but go back to Charlie.

Chaplain and we'll share some of the things that he did in his black and white films the biggest one in funny I think it was called the gold rush, you know, not hot dust but gold rush But he had this rotating cabin that was like going off the cliff and whatnot All of this was special effects. He had built a gyroscope and he had built a track and Like you look at the video and you think oh my gosh. That's real look at that house doing that that cabin doing that And that's just a special effect and

Fast-forward there were several other and this might have been chaplain as well But like they put a fake spot on the side of a wall and he dove into it Yeah, I remember that one. Yeah, I mean there's some really really cool stuff happening and you look at it and you think oh my gosh That's real but see we have been mentally trained to look at videos and not really I I guess more be entertained by it because of Hollywood so when you see something like this you think oh, you know It could be real it could not the back of your mind is thinking this so it doesn't bother me so much the video

There will be people like I mentioned the birds flying away from the pyramid tomb They're gonna be people who believe it as they believe the Charlie Chaplain videos. I mean, it's it's that big But here's where it does really scare me I have used I actually use AI quite a bit for what I do But I'm cautious to use it for ways that it is helpful in a Honest legitimate and accurate way for example, I could never give it a script and say give me a script writing a Research article about William Brannum and Gold dust

Because what the way it's programmed it is programmed so that when you give it a request Even if nothing exists it has to give you a response If nothing exists it creates what's called a hallucination it'll it will it has to get from point A to point B So it will make up the bridge if it can't do it right But here's where it gets scarier which feels familiar right so here's where it gets scarier Picture AI the text version the text version is what really scares me picture it like a big Google search engine

In Google search I searched for William Brannum cloud or Mike Bickel and I don't know lots of women You're gonna find all of the wealth of information that Google has and you're gonna skim through it and you're gonna say Well, that's that's really accurate. That's a scholarly article Here's a website from iHOPKC. I'm going to totally discredit that entire thing go to the next one You are mentally filtering out the bad results While the cults are propagating Propaganda they're spreading propaganda about bad results So Google is giving you the summary of everything and you are mentally

Categorizing it true or false AI can't do this. AI doesn't know. And what I'm seeing is actually a little scary. You're finding a lot more text-based propaganda going out there because AI is consuming it.

So now if you type in one of the cult leaders and you type in, give me all the information on the cult leader, you're going to find new facts that didn't even exist before AI, that they were creating literally to sway the content responses of AI.

There's no filter that will tell you what part of that is propaganda and what part of that is real. Even if you're asking for historical information, here's where it gets even scarier. There is a problem that exists in the psychology world.

I've actually watched a few news articles about this. There are people who believe that they have some condition and they use AI to say, do I have this? And they will mentally lead themselves to that condition.

And the reason this works is because AI is also programmed in a single thread to try to give you responses that you like. That you want. That you want. So you ask a question and it's going to tailor it to you specifically.

If you're asking it these questions and somebody else is asking the same exact questions, but in a different way, these two responses will go two different directions. So as you're searching for cult information or is this a movement by God?

It's going to actually tailor the responses to you and what's in your head is what's created. That's why I can't use it at all for creating research, but I can do things like, I use it for spell checking.

I use it for grammar checking. Those kind of things are very helpful. If I'm, if I have writers block, I will say give, I have writers block, give me two paragraphs that summarize where I'm next after reading what I have.

It will actually as a writer, it will help you get over the writer's block, but you can't use any of the content because it may be completely false, right? Right, right, right. So where it scares me is, it is adapting its responses to the person questioning, person asking.

And the person asking has the ability to sway it in the direction that it wants for a person who has a programmed and doctorated mind of a cult. Now you have the ability first off in their head, they have the ability to spiral out of control.

Now take that spiraling out of control with the help of AI and it's like spiraling out of control on steroids. Well, you've introduced a new epistemic source that is just reaffirming what people believe.

So it isn't actually an external epistemic source. It's just an echo chamber that has the voice and authority that imitates someone who has... knowledge and understanding. I think of that makes a lot of sense. So great. I'm glad that I now I'm worried about that too with it because you're absolutely right. And I I've thought about that. I teach I teach math and I teach students in like the the amount that gen alpha or even younger than gen alpha. I don't know what's after gen beta. I get I don't know.

Um, but the the the the youngins have it's different than like I grew up with Google just coming on the scene when I was a teenager. Actually, it was ass jives before that and whatnot.

And um, but I grew up with it being like a really new form of of an encyclopedia or like Wikipedia. I grew up with Wikipedia and I remember what my teachers mean, like don't use Wikipedia. And I was like, I'm absolutely going to use Wikipedia because I mean information about this stuff and like the encyclopedia doesn't have as much information as Wikipedia because Wikipedia is sourced by all sorts of people. But I still thought of it as a tool.

Gen alpha thinks of chat chat GPT as their friend like as as someone as a person. Um, because it is in some regards like someone who talks with them. They have conversations with it. I can see this is a whole different tangent so and I won't get into it. But um, maybe next time when we're talking, but I can see my students, we do this thing called Khan Academy and there's like a conmigo, which is a chat bot that's within Khan Academy that is supposed to like help the students.

It's like a sort of very structured AI that is got a lot of boundaries on it. So it doesn't get way off topic and it doesn't answer the questions for the students. It directs them and it's genuinely a pretty good resource. But I see how they as the teacher, I can look at all of my students and how they are chatting with this. And I don't my students don't always know that I can see it.

They do now because there was a lot of problematic things that were being said. And so like the school had to be like, okay, students, remember, you've got to be careful with how you talk with this.

But the way that they would talk with it is we're genuinely like talking to a human being. And so I totally get that in the sense of you have people, I think my dad does this. I think my dad talks with with Chatchie Big D and has it validate him and his sort of experiences and his hallucinations.

So, you know, him talking about the things that have happened in his life, you know, it's like the worst time a therapist that just agrees with everything that you say. And it's like, okay, that did happen.

Like chat to his chat GPT is like, you are a prophet. Of course you're a prophet. You told me you're a prophet, you know? And I don't know what's going on in his world, but I know it because I could see some of the ways that he respond. Like he'll send me text messages that were clearly written by chat GPT and whatnot. And I've heard people who were close to him who are like, he's just on it all the time because it's going to echo back the things that he believes. But here's I will add, I got what you were saying about the Charlie Chaplin that like video. We just

for the last 50, 100 years, we can't really believe what we see with videos because you know, it's easy to get tricked by videos itself. And I agree with that. The one thing that I would say, the one difference that I feel is that, you know, Charlie Chaplin, it had to be like a million dollar. Well, in today's money, it probably wasn't a million dollars back then. But it had to be big productions. And it had to be people who really thought out these things saying even then the same in the like 90s and arts like with VFX stuff, you could even

low budget movies, you'd be like, okay, no one's going to fall for this. This looks like a PlayStation game like that is clearly not the way in the rock Johnson. Anyway, like that's some like weird

picture of him. But what I think is frightening now is that anybody can who has like good access to this technology can manufacture a very realistic looking video without having to have a huge production budget. And so you can have individuals like let's say there's someone like Todd White who is this preacher who doesn't have like millions of dollars to spend on this budget where you would have to coordinate with a lot of people and a lot of people would be in on the joke and know that like, okay, we didn't actually do this. This was a

set. These were actors. These were, you know, not real people who were kind of having their legs be healed and whatnot. Like all of that could be done now or in the past with a production

budget and with several people who knew what they were doing and getting on it. But say one person who believes Todd White or Todd White himself gets on and manufactures a video of him in Uganda healing people where it's genuinely him. It looks like him. And he's doing these healings and these miracles. And it's like only one or two people know that it's fixed. And everybody else, believe it.

it and it didn't cost really any money to produce it and he suddenly can release that in conjunction with the testimonies and the lines that he's giving where he comes back to his church in California or wherever he's based out of and he's saying, hey, look, I went to here and a hundred million people got saved and you're like there are a hundred thousand people got saved and there's like there's no way that that happened and yet here's the video of like the masses of amounts of people getting saved and here's like a manufactured video of some news organization that doesn't really exist but it's hard to validate and there's

not enough people who are going to be paying attention who are going to analyze it and put it up so like everybody within your world is going to be like, this happened, this is real and I saw it with my own eyes even though it was on video so I I agree I am now also concerned about what you were concerned about too but I also still am concerned about the the video aspect of it just because I know that people are our visual believers when they see it with their own eyes

they believe it even if it's quite obviously false well it all comes back down to this when people are looking for the signs and wonders to validate what they're in they'll look anywhere they'll find anything it's you write with the videos like that that is a huge problem and it will exist but you take that out of the equation there's going to be something else they're going to look for something else to validate it yeah that's that's where for me like I see it coming yes but it's already here they're validating with other weird things so yeah so much more we talk about this is

it's scary whenever you take that mindset where you're looking it's like straining straining what's the saying straining at an at you're trying to make something that maybe it's there I don't know but you're trying to find something to validate in your head that it's there so that you can get confirmation that it's there and in the end you're trying to find these confirmations for things that really don't matter in the first place it's just so you can feel better and that's the ministry wants that they want that comforting feeling because if you don't have it then why wouldn't you

just go down to the church next to you know in your neighborhood this close to your house you get a come to our church right so they want this they want some way to validate it in the minds of the people and they'll produce videos they'll produce text whatever it is it's going to it's going to happen take a out of the equation a i out of the equation yeah they're going to do something else so yeah it's a problem and until we change the mindset of the people this problem will always exist yeah yeah i think that's a very astute observation thank you so much for doing

this this is fun yeah for sure well if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information you can check us out on the web you can find us at william-branam.org for more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

You can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.