The Holy Con: Word of Knowledge - Exposing Modern Prophetic Grifts

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 profit and former member of the International House of Prayer. Jed, it's good to be back and today we have a bit of overlap. I don't know if you've been catching it or not, but almost every single time I talk to Bob, he wants to go towards discussing what made all of this mess. That's his big theme and we've been hitting

narcissism pretty hard. I don't know in the relationship of when this is recording and his is recording, which will come out first, but we've got a couple episodes from him on narcissism and it's a really good topic because I don't think people recognize whenever the term is used. It's used so loosely in today's world that you can brand somebody a narcissist who isn't a narcissist because they do something that you don't like, but there are true narcissists that are wreaking havoc in church and work and everywhere. Even in leadership, I read in Bob's book and I knew this before but he was talking about

how some of the most respected leaders in world history have been narcissists because that's what motivates them and that's their ambition and some of them turn out to be good leadership, although they have this personality disorder which is horrific. So there's some interesting things to talk to there, but as it relates to the church world, a narcissist really has no place behind a pulpit, yet we've created this world where that seems to be what it attracts. Yeah, I can't remember if I've ever given this metaphor to you before, but I very much believe that well, my dad was diagnosed with

narcissistic personality disorder and I do think that the term is used by a lot of people and a lot of it became like a pop psychology term, which I understand, you know, like people I get that it makes sense, but people think of it as this like someone who's just self-obsessed and it's like a lot of people are self-assessed, a lot of people are selfish, a lot of people have like that measure of self-folk.

and sort of myopic views of themselves, but when describing my dad, and I apologize if I've done this before, but, you know, if I'm repeating myself, but I think that there's the metaphor that I've sort of latched on to is imagine you're in a world where you run a foul of some magician or wizard and he curses you so that your entire existence and your life is dependent on someone, some person other than yourself always thinking about you or always like noticing you. Have I given this metaphor before with you? Okay, great. Imagine, yeah, so imagine you are cursed so that you

were very existences dependent on someone else thinking about you or having, um, noticing you at in some way. Um, and think about how you would then live your life and how you would bluster through all of life, just attempting him to grab attention of the people who are around you and making sure that you fix yourself in the sort of mindset of of anyone who interacts with you, whether or not people like you or whether or not people, you know, um, think positively with you is like secondary to whether they're just thinking about you at all. And I think that this is a very good description

of like you now, if you can put yourself in that mentality, you have a little bit of an idea of like what I think was going on and still goes on in the mind of Bob Hartley is that like he would go into situations and go into, um, just like like we would be at coffee shops and he would walk in and he would start making jokes to everyone or he would start preaching the gospel to people but like in a very weird way or he would prophesy to someone or he would, you know, um, make conversation

with everyone around him, which like to some extent that was like a fun, exciting thing if you didn't know him very well and you didn't have to like travel with him and live with him, you know, it was just like he was a very, um, interesting and engaging person because he had what seemed to be like zero shame, um, but where it became really toxic and where I think that this is similar like not all narcissistic personality, um, people manifest their narcissism in the same way but I've seen some parallels of this with a lot of, um, I mean, specifically,

they are leaders, is they would, there's just this need to be at the center of every conversation, a need to be at the center of like specifically prophetic conversations and to like wrestle for different mantles and different authorities so that they could be the person that was being elevated in this grand story. And like with my dad, like they're just no story could be told without his involvement like he had to be at the center of everything that was happening and everything that was being talked about and it required everyone else to buy into the same story.

Everyone else around him had to preach the same message, had to be echoing the same narratives that he was saying himself. And it was, I mean, obviously as a child growing up, that's absolutely exhausting. Like you can't live and have your own independent life.

But beyond it too, like it was truly dysfunctional. And I think that's what people don't necessarily always realize too is like it was problematic to him too. Like he would get in his own way. He wouldn't have the patience to allow his story to be told in the right way. Like he had to jump the gun on everything that he was doing and had to insert himself into conversations that just like weren't about him. And so like I can totally see how people look at like these grand leaders and we're like they probably had narcissism. And it's like the few instances where

narcissism actually like works for these people where it gets them in places of power and authority. But most people who have narcissistic personality disorder like are just destroying their own lives. Their own worse enemy. And that certainly was the case with my dad. And I think that it's, I don't think that people have a like unless you've lived with someone who truly has narcissistic personality disorder where like every moment of the day you're like why are you even doing this? This isn't even benefit you. It doesn't. People aren't thinking of you more positively.

You're just like causing chaos for the sake of chaos. I think that that's a hard thing to wrap your head around. I don't know that I've talked too deeply about this. We've mentioned narcissism and narcissists because if you have a central figure of a cult usually they're a narcissist.

But there's one aspect as it relates to narcissism that is very interesting in the Christian world. Whenever you can go online you can find these. Anybody can look them up. Find the tip top in signs of a narcissist or 15 what you know there's different lists out there and they'll give you the list and one of the commonalities between all narcissists most of them lack empathy you can be you can be different points on the scale of narcissism but most of them are going to lack empathy but because that's one of the characteristic traits characteristic

traits but in the form of a Christian leader narcissist this gets very interesting because if you're under if you're in a high control group and your narcissist your leader is a narcissist and you escape many times the people who escape have trouble labeling their central figure that they left as having lacking empathy because he's giving he's you know this is a charitable person he's giving to the poor etc etc and he's a narcissist though they'll usually say this but what you don't understand what many people don't understand when they leave is that what looks like empathy sometimes is also narcissism because there are people who give so that people will

recognize their great power of giving I give better than anybody else can give that kind of thing right so they they will give sometimes just to have their name on a list of giving they'll give so that whenever not many of them are very open with their financials but those that are those that print the papers they can look on the financials and say oh wow he's a giver this must be a great guy but it can still be a trait of narcissism where it gets very very difficult when you're escaping one of these high demand groups or cults is that their lack of empathy manifests itself

in the way in which they betray the people who they're leading they they will do whatever they can to just rip somebody up and even cause divisions among their own crowd so that they can rise above the division and show themselves as a hero to the division and they have no empathy whatsoever on their audience and the the deeper you go with that we could do probably a whole podcast on just the lack of empathy but it's one of the characteristic traits that if you're in a if you're in a leadership like this and you recognize that somebody's doing this it's best to

get out absolutely like I don't the fact that it's so commonplace in I mean I've met probably five or six people who I'm like these are true narcissists in my life like and four out of like the six of them were all religious leaders including like my dad and Mike Bickle and you know others well and actually I wouldn't even put Mike Bickle in that because I didn't I didn't see that first hand enough but like I think that I think that others who have seen his stuff Like, I definitely saw some of the traits of it, you know, sort of in the stories about

him and kind of second hand, but yeah, like it just is, it's amazing that the people who are supposed to be our religious leaders who are closest to God who, I mean, in the IHOP and Bethelworld and they're literally the people who are talking with God are the individuals who truly do not have empathy or concern for other individuals lives.

Like it is the only way in which you can have tried to appeal to the better sense of these individuals is that you have to package whatever you're trying to get them to care about.

You have to package it into their own identity. So this is something that I had to do with my dad all the time is that I would, I would talk with him about like, is this the person that you want to be?

And sometimes you would, I would see some like genuine reflection in him where he would be like, no, like this is not who God's calling me to be. I'm not supposed to be like, my dad was extremely cruel to a lot of his staff and where he would just berate them like they would come in and someone did something wrong and usually it was his fault that things weren't happening the way that he wanted to because he was disorganized and he would not give people clear objectives or goals or something like that.

He would just kind of talk about his wins of like, like for I think five years, he kept always talking about like a database. He was always like, oh, we need to make sure that the database is like put together.

And I still don't even know what the database was like he had email lists and stuff like that, but he, I don't even know if he knew he just needed, he wanted to make sure that he had all of the information and it makes sense when he's a prophetic, you know, evangelist who is trying to prophesy to all different people.

And he's cheating and using phone numbers that he's gotten offline and all of this information. Like I think he probably, I think probably what he was wanting is like a database so that he could go prophesy to anywhere and anyone he could look up their name and have all their information about him.

But because he wasn't ever explicitly telling people that's what he was doing, he just would be like, oh, we got to have a database so that I can get in contact with these people.

And it's like, well, all your friends are already in your phone. Like I don't know what you're talking about. Like you have those emails, but it just was, it was this constant thing where he was like, he would get mad at me or get mad at his staff members that he was working for that he would kind of give them the vision of what he wanted and then they would try to do it and then they would come back and be like, okay, I have this master list of all of these things and he was like, that's

not what I asked you for and this is not what you're doing and he would attack like their purse very like identity as people. It wasn't like, man, you didn't do this. It was like, because he would pick people who are in vulnerable states.

It was a lot of conversations about like, you know, he would get on them for like addiction or spiritual, like not being dedicated enough to God or for being disorganized or, you know, this just like pull at the character traits of these people who attempted to do something for him that he never actually explained in detail and anyway, all this to say is that like this, the only way that I could get him to feel empathy for the people that he was abusing, well, I couldn't get him to feel empathy for the people that he was abusing

or even for me or my sisters, like his very children, it would have to be like, is this the father that you want to be? Or do you want to be a father who's like yelling at his children?

Do you want to be a boss who's like yelling at his staff members? Do you want to be known for like always getting angry at your staff? And I wouldn't, of course, I couldn't say it even that extreme.

It would be like, you'd have to say the positive. Don't you want to be known as a father who is kind to his children? Do you want to be known as a leader who led people with kindness and compassion?

And that's where he would be like, yes, I do. And so to talk with him and to engage with him, I had to drop all notions of empathy. If I was, if you, you know, I was talking with you or a friend of mine and I was like upset because you would yell at me during the, I've been like, hey, that hurt my feelings that hurt, you know, like I would talk about me.

I would talk about, or I would talk about whoever was hurt. I would talk about the person that they did the wrong to, like you hurt this individual. That's wrong. But you can't talk to a narcissist about the fact that they had on people, you have to talk about them.

And then what happens is when you have ministries that revolve around the narcissist is that everyone learns whether they're doing this consciously or not, they learn to do the same thing. They learn to talk about the narcissist and to make everything about them.

You have then unentire... that the ecosystem of the ministry starts to be reflecting the ego and narcissism of the person leading the ministry. This is 100% that what happened at IHOP is that you had many Mike Pickles who had this sort of narcissistic traits themselves, but then they would also sort of lead into the narcissism of Mike Pickles.

So you would talk with someone and they would kind of be like, well, it always kind of led back to Mike. It always led back to the cult leader or whoever. And it was, but then one of the funny things with this is that when they're in power and when they're in leadership, they kind of can build an ecosystem around their ego.

They can kind of have these worlds around them. But then what happens when they don't have that ecosystem around them? What happens when they're going in and they don't have a son to be like talking to them about how is this really the man that you want to be?

What happens when it's just they're the staff members or they're the individuals who are trying to work for someone else and they have to, like it just doesn't, you know, it doesn't work all the time.

You go into some place and you have this sort of like cruel way that you treat people and this massive ego and people are gonna be like, what the hell are you doing? You know, it just doesn't work.

And I saw that happen all the time too. Yeah, and it's that ecosystem that I really want to drive towards, but before we go there, you mentioned the database and I want to talk to you that because I don't think you and I, we were close enough to the upper tiers, we understand this and once you escape, you kind of know how all this works, right?

But to the rank and fall members, they have no idea. Like I get into interesting conversations with my wife because she and her family don't have any scoundrels in them. So whenever I talk about things that people might do that are underhanded, she's like blown away.

She can't imagine that somebody would even think like this. Yeah. I unfortunately came from a long line of people who think like this. No, I'm not gonna go much further than that. But I can think like these people and that helps me in my research because half the time I don't know that they actually did something, but I will suspect, I would put myself in their shoes if I was a villain and I was given this exact scenario, what would I do and I would go forward with it?

But the database thing, not many people think through this. So picture, you're in an age where there is no technology and you have this divine healing game that you're playing the crowds with. Which is raking in large sums of money and I have evidence you can go look it up It's in the newspapers these guys made a killing off of this divine healing gig So they go in and they've got a crowd of people and they're going from town to town to town targeting rural areas usually After the after this grew it obviously went into big cities

But they they all start out with rural areas. They have men working with them and And there is no database. There is no electronics. You don't have a cell phone or a tablet But you have people who are in on the game who are praying You know showing themselves to be humble with people who are sick and afflicted They're not the divine healer But they're working with him and so they're praying with brother so and so for his back or they're in a group of people saying Oh look we just brought our mother she's suffering and she just came from somewhere

I'm so glad the healers here. Well this guy is standing there and he's he's on he's in the game right all these guys are in the game The people themselves become the database. Yeah, and those old gimmicks right right now take this a step further Whenever the post-World War II healing Revival movement exploded The guys who were at the top realized the volume of money that can flow through these things and it needed a corporate strategy and if you understand that what they were doing was a crime Even though it's in this gray area because it's religion it became organized crime

So Gordon Lindsay who Later became the head of Christ for the nations He works with William Brannum and they create this magazine voice of healing Yeah, and everybody gets in on the game. You want to you want to be a healer join our joint our movement get in our magazine We will get subscriptions to people and there were actually advertisements. I don't know if I can find one for this podcast. I'll try but You can go to my website and you can type in voice of healing and you can read through them you can see these things

But they would send We would like for you to gift a subscription to somebody are they sick to send us their name and address and their condition Give me your name your address. You can we want your testimonies. We want all of so they're collecting They actually had a database, but it was a paper database from all the mail that was coming in So you can route that to I'm not saying they did I wasn't there But knowing how these con artists think if I've got a stack of papers for a specific region And I've got a faith healer going to that region and I'm

Fairly I can say with probably 90% accuracy that if they wrote into my magazine And I'm sending one of the people from my magazine to their city Most likely these people who wrote in are going to come to this meeting And I've got exactly what's wrong with them, their names, their addresses.

All you've got to do is identify a human being in the meeting with the piece of paper that they sent in the mail. And that's a database. That's how this, honestly, I think, if I have, if I were to give an opinion, I'd say that's how they did a majority of it, not all.

But that's just one of many cons that you can do as a carn artist. So when you have this elaborate scheme, this is a big deal. These guys, you have to have a level of narcissism to remove the empathy from the people who are actually literally suffering so that you can take their money away from them.

Right. And, oh man, I can't believe I didn't put this together

before of like, it makes so much sense too, because like, the era that my dad, became, launched his sort of perfect ministry was before the internet age. I mean, it was starting, it was kind of 90s, 2000s, 2010s, so I mean, obviously, internet was very up and running by the 2010s.

But like, you know, he wasn't, he didn't build his ministry off of doing what like Sean Bulls does now, where it's get the name, Google the name, and it's like the internet is your database.

Like, you don't have to have your rolodex of information because like the internet has that for you. All you have to do is have the name and like maybe one or two associations to like know that you got the right person.

But with my dad, you know, I think I've said this to you before, but like, I remember when I was, I probably six or seven. I mean, maybe I was a little bit older, but I remember we went to a ministry, like we went to a church to minister, and I was with him and, you know, back in the day, they used to have the paper church,

what is it called, church registry, where it had the information of the people in the church because that, you know, back in the day, that's like if you wanted to contact someone in the church, you just grabbed a little pamphlet and it has the names and it has their phone numbers.

And I don't think it had addresses, but I think it just kind of had the names and the names and the phone numbers of the people who were like church regulars. And my dad had me like go and sneak and grab one of those pamphlets and bring it back to him.

And I like remember doing that, and I remember it being fun, and I didn't realize why I was like sneaking, and I don't even know if he told me to sneak, but I knew internally, you know, I picked up on something that I was, like I was supposed to grab that and bring it back to him.

And I mean that picture is like a very like old school picture of a con artist of like having their son like running get information and bring it back to them. And anyway, so what my dad would do, and for anyone who knew my dad, or knows him, I'm sure he still does this, but he would have like I mean, he had hundreds of of three ring notebook binders, and he would have all of these prints out, printouts that he would do, and then he would write in them.

And he would just continually write and write and write and write. And like, so say we were going to a

go minister at a church, we would go and stay with a host family, and he would bring out one of those notebooks, and he would already have a list of names that he had procured somehow, either from the pastor or for someone else.

And he would talk to people who are in the church, and he would ask the people information about like, okay, I have this name, you know, John Collins, tell me about him and his boat, you know, or something like that, and get specific information.

And then he would just write it down on paper, but like he was very disorganized. So he would lose a lot of his papers, and he would lose a lot of his writing. And so I now see it totally makes sense, because I'm telling you, John, I like until today, I'd never really put it together, but he, because it was like a five year thing, where every single month, he would be talking about how he needs his database, he needs his database, and everyone was like, I don't know what you're talking about.

We have like a list of emails, and if you want, because that was the sort of thing of like, okay, well, if you want to sell your product, because that is what he always was talking about, is like, we need to be able to like sell our product.

And it's like, well, the emails are sufficient for it. Like if you have the name and the email, that's totally sufficient for it, and it's like people will answer, subscribe, or whatever, but like you have, I mean, he probably had something like 10,000 names, if not more, like 15, 20,000 names on an email list, and it was like, there you go, there's your database, and people would work on having like more organized databases, where like, oh, we could see, here's the engagement that people were clicking on, and versus not.

Here are your people that you really want to sell to, and here are people who don't. But it wasn't enough, because he needed what church they were affiliated with. He needed their phone numbers, he needed their address, like, he needed more information.

I can't believe I didn't put... this together. But like, and I, it was just like really confusing because you would have these people, like he was, he was saying that he wanted it for his, the purpose of selling his product. And like, there were people who were experienced in selling product who did a good job of establishing a database and giving it to him. And he would be so angry and upset with them because they didn't give him what he wanted. And now it makes total sense.

Because what he wanted is he needed that rolodex that if he was to go a minister to places, he needed to be able to have that sort of like all of the information that he had collected.

And he probably, what he probably wanted is people to go through his notebooks and take his writing that he wrote about all of these specific individuals and put it in a digitized format and organize it for him so that like next time he goes, the ministers at, you know, the church in Oregon that he once went there, he now has all of the hard work that he already did because as he got older, his memory was worse. And he couldn't remember these people and what names were associated with what. And man, it's just, it's blowing my mind that like,

that makes so much sense that that's what he was going for. And, you know, that was also the profits before him. I especially, oh shoot, what's his name? Paul Cain. Paul Cain had a rolodex, like he had physical copies of people's information. And I totally understand that my dad was trying to sort of emulate that of having like all of the physical papers that he had used throughout his entire life. He wanted that sort of consolidate and digitize, but he couldn't just outright say it because it was wrong. And he couldn't just tell people, hey, help me with my con, you know,

he had to keep up the illusion of it. I don't think he ever once out loud said anything

that would have recognized the con. Like I don't think you ever described any of his con artist behaviors or anything like that because like it wasn't even just about not getting caught. He just could not, he would do actions that he couldn't verbalize himself because like he didn't want to be that person. He didn't want to be a con artist. And so if he spoke it out loud, it sometimes, you know, it suddenly becomes real. But man, that's blowing my mind. I can't believe, I want to call my sister right now and be like, this

is what it was about. And it would be like, oh wow, yeah. Or maybe they would be like, duh. I can't believe you didn't figure that out already, but yeah. So many arguments. So many arguments were about that database and just he would get, I mean, he fired probably half a dozen people because they wouldn't get the database for him.

And he always would, he would always send them to me. Oh man, and this makes sense too. Sorry John, this is probably terrible. Podcasts, but this just me figuring out my own fathers procedures.

But he would, he would send them to me a lot of times and would be like, shed, help these individuals get the database. And I was always like, I have no idea what you're talking about.

I don't know how I can help you. And it makes sense because like, he knew out of everyone, he knew out of everyone. I was the one who like understood his gift the best.

And like, because I had like confronted him about it in the past, but like also helped him in the past with certain stuff. I mean, when I was really young. So he probably was like, if anyone could kind of like figure it out, it would be dead.

And like, that's probably true. I of course did not figure it out. And I did not help those people and they all got fired. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top.

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Not everybody thinks like a con artist. I unfortunately have the gene because it runs through the family. I'll just say it like that. And sadly, I would make a good cult leader if I was just a little bit evil, but I don't have enough evil in me to do it.

But people who don't have this, people who, and especially in a religious setting, you go and you shut off all your critical thinking when you're a church. You have no idea that the guy is conning you.

And so you don't even want to believe that he is, even if you suspect it. turn off your critical thinking and you don't pick up on the things. But then when somebody escapes after having been conned, like I get countless emails, how did William Brandham do this in the healing arrival?

How did he know their names and their addresses and their whatever it was, you know? And they're looking for a one size fits all answer. But that's not how con artists work, man. If he's in one building and there's a certain setup or scenario, he's going to apply his con to that building.

If he's in a city, it could be regional, whatever it is, they're going to take the con and make it fit the situation. And I came across a book, I mentioned this in the pop cast with Bob, but James Randy, who was a magician, he discovered that all these faith healers were just conning the people.

And he devoted his life to exposing the con artist, which was kind of funny. And I bought his book, The Faith Healers. And he goes through, he says, I was a magician. Here's how they did this.

Here's how they did this other thing. And he's walking you through and I'm reading it like, oh my gosh, man, why didn't I pick up on that? We're in a modern age. I'm smart enough to figure this out, but I had shut off all critical thinking.

But his book kind of exposed that he exposed Brandham among others and he walks you through from the ancient, well, not ancient, but from the early faith revival leaders that he was in contact with up until the modern age when they're using the electronics.

And so he's taking you there. What it made me do is it made me pick up one thing. So I mentioned the people who are working the crowds. So these men who are, I mean, legitimately praying with the people.

Yes, we're praying with you and we'll take you, we'll give you a prayer card so you can go up and see the healer. Well, then the healer, William Brandham, would say the oddest things.

You in the red sweater with the pink polka dot top, you with the yellow sweater, with the odd looking, what you call it? You with this. I mean, he is literally using visual cues.

But that was just one of many techniques. There were several techniques. James Randy went through these techniques, but he took you all the way up to, I think it was Peter Popoff that had the little device in his ear, right?

That book was published before the late 90s in the early 2000s. So there was a technology shift that, see, I'm a software guy and I have the unfortunate brain. So I understand that all you have to do is pay some developers the moment in which flat screens technology came out.

You can even device pull pits that had a flat screen in it back then. And speech to text technology. I want to say it came out, maybe it was the early 90s, maybe mid 90s.

But there came a point in time in which you could talk into a microphone and the microphones were only about the size of your thumb Talking to a microphone. It could go into a computer that could be mounted anywhere in the pulpit and as you talk You're talking became the typing so picture in a Google search. I'm talking. Well, my words go in there Yeah, hit enter In today's world we have these AI tools and Siri on your iPhone and all of these people understand how this technology works now Back in the 90s man late 90s early 2000 nobody knew how that worked

They didn't know you could do it. Yeah, take it a step further probably about I want to say it was after the flat screens came out it might have been five years but Software developers realized the power of this and they were building the early prototypes of what would become Siri And it was some really cool technology. I wish I could remember the name of the software, but you could install these software so if you had a phone call for example or you had a business meeting and You started talking and the other person's talking to both feeds went into the microphone both feeds

Started to access a database and it would pull up visual cues as they're talking so you could understand better what they were saying Yeah, if you take a devious mind minister who has the funding to pay for a development team Who can take that technology and apply it to a database of people that he has in his congregation?

Think of that you've got a flat screen monitor on your pulpit and I'm not saying anybody did this right I'm just saying that as a con artist these are the things type of things that you can do But you can talk and you can literally have it such that As you and they are talking you can pop up visual cues on your database and see it So that technology hit probably 2000s. I'm not aware of any single faith healer that did that But where I'm headed with this is now Now that we have a yeah, we have all these other tools

The the power to take over the minds of people and hijack them with these kind of tricks now is so far amplified and undetectable because now everybody has the same technology Who's to say he's not setting his tablet on the you know right there on the pulpit and he's preaching from the Bible and his notes are in his tablet Well in that same tablet you can have multitasking and you can have a whole array of things that are your database People have no idea that he's doing it because he's reading the Bible from that same tablet

Yeah, or don't do the tablet like have the earpiece because like the tablet is that you know is

I think that I really think that it's good Obviously that you and I and others are talking about these things now because like in 10 23 years It might be really hard to catch people.

If you and I wanted to create a profit and pick somebody and we train them to be a profit, we could easily do it in a way where they wouldn't be recognized because you can make it more of a magic show.

Just like magic, if you go to, I live in Los Angeles and I go to the magic shows here and I'm like, I legitimately have no idea how people do it because they think it really good and they aren't hiding what they are to themselves.

This is another thing that like my dad's narcissism was his own worst enemy is like he never was able to just like outright tell people what he wanted in his database because he was not able to come to terms with that's who he was.

It's like if I play chess and I'm pretty good at chess, but I'm not anywhere the level of being some of the best in the world and grandmaster stuff. If I like, there's technology now where the computer is far better than anybody, these like chess bots are far better than Magnus Carlson or any of the best like chess players in the world and it would be like if I started cheating and using that, you know, had an earpiece or something like that, but yet I couldn't even come to terms with the fact that I was cheating.

So like in my own head, I still thought I was a brilliant chess player, even though I was getting all the moves from here, it just like that's the sort of narcissism of believing you're so grand.

That's definitely what my dad was doing is he was cheating. He had the ear, you know, he didn't, it wasn't earpiece, but he had all of these like really shady ways that he was getting the information, but he still believed that he was this grand profit.

And I think that's what kept him from being actually very good at it because he could have had a database. He could, I mean, he was a good performer. He could have gotten people to really believe him, you know, and he could have had information like what he did better than what these Sean Bowles and Chris Reed don't do is like he didn't have technology and that's like a huge red flag for people.

Like if you see iPads, people are going to be like, this isn't something's up here, but if you just have paper or if you have, you know, your Bible and you have it scrawled in the little notes in your Bible, you know, that's people won't know and it will be convincing and I think, you know, now like if you set me on like finding out a bunch of information and filling out the roll of decks.

I could do it because there's so much information online that people don't even realize that they have information online. As long as you're able to violate ethics, there's so much technology as omnipresent. We literally have access to a near omnipresent god. It's not god. It's omniscient, not omnipresent. It's kind of omnipresent too, but an omniscient god that just knows everything about us, and it's not god in the heavens that we're talking to. It's Chatchy PT, and it's the internet in general, and finding out so much of people's lives are on the internet, and they don't

even realize it. It's so important that we're talking and identifying all of the tactics that they're doing now, because if the group decides if it continues to evolve, it's going to be a lot harder to pick it out in the next 10, 20 years. It's kind of funny because I've toyed with Chatchy PT a little bit. Some of these different AI tools in the technology I do.

And it's funny because many of the ministers who are in the research that I have on my pages have zero percent knowledge of what is truth theology, but now they've got tools like Chatchy PT that can write their sermons for them, and I'm not saying it produces the perfect theology, but it's far better than what they had before. Right, right. So like you said, it's going to make it eventually it'll be very difficult to detect people who are conning you, but one of the other things you mentioned, so technology. They're people who are using the technology and they're very

obvious that that's a con, but there are body hacks and there are body things that you're born with that can make it even more possible. I think this is common knowledge, so I'm going to say this with caution for anybody who's taking what I say verbatim and quoting me. I have heard from multiple sources that Paul Keane was using stacks of phone books, and this is a guy who's doing the I know your name and address kind of gimmick, right, in his faith healing. For multiple people, and I believe somewhere I read it online, but I've looked and I can't find it again, but if that's true,

if what the people have told me is true, and some of them were in his inner circle, that he had these stacks of phone books, and before he'd go into a revival convention, he would get phone books from the city, and he would be the cotton reading them basically, and ask him, why are you doing this? And I think the quote was something to the effect that God has given me the gift, but sometimes you need a little bit of help with you to help or to help or something like this, right? So what this tells me, knowing that, because if I were to give you a stack of

phone books, books would that help you? You have to have a photographic memory for that to work. So what tells me is that one of the cons by one or more of the people, Paul Kane must have been one, had a photographic memory.

And so this is a way you can con people. If you have this gift and they don't, you have an edge. But here's an interesting part as it relates to IHOP KC. Whenever I learned that that was a possibility, I started studying Brannum Sermon's heavily on techniques for memorization.

So the colors is a technique, right? Here's a person who's got a polka dot sweater and it looks all at whatever it is. But there are other techniques as well. One of them to improve your memory is fasting.

If you fast and when you're in the fast, your memory is, I've experienced. I've done fasting. I law, I think I told you this. I lost 45 pounds and 45 days fasting. You're, all of your senses are heightened.

Your memory is better during the fast. Even though your body's weak from the fasting, I had more energy. I was able to work out harder during my fast. It was kind of crazy. If it didn't kill me, if I did it long term, it probably would help me.

But it did help my memory. And then when I went off of the fast and started just eating regularly, my memory was depleted. So during the fast, and so I started looking when I recognized this, William Brandham says, now every time before I go into a healing revival series, I'll do a fast for, I think he said seven days, something like this.

And I'm starting to piece it together. And what I really found odd is, as he traveled from town to town, he only had like five sermons and he would just repeat the five over and over again.

Everything that he had was copied from somebody else, basically. But he would say things, and then he would pretend not to remember, and he would have the audience help him, you know, with his memory.

And then he would go to the next city for the same exact subject, same topic, and say, I can't remember, forget the same thing, have the audience help him. This is a con. If the audience is helping you, you're training them to believe that I can't remember anything.

And then I'm going to do this faith healing gimmick where I'm going to tell your name's address as phone numbers, whatever. So there's many different cons, a variety of cons, but the body hacking thing is real.

People can do it. There are, I can't do it, but my wife knows she was a school teacher, so she knows these memorization techniques. You can do little mind, mind memory mapping things. She has the name for it, I don't, but people can do this, and people are actually, some people are really, really good at it.

I'm not. to take notes everywhere I go. But that's one of the techniques. And this is, I think I've listed 10 techniques at this point, but there's probably 1,000 different techniques these guys use.

Yeah, well, yeah, no, I mean, everything that you're saying. Yeah, that's exactly what my dad would do. I mean, my dad had a really incredible memory for numbers. Like he could remember phone numbers super well.

And he would like show off this in non prophetic context. Like he would pick, if you have a four digit number, you 1742 or something, he would try to associate that with biblical passages.

Like the Psalm 1742, man, and he would read that passage and it makes it way easier to remember because it's about a subject, but it's also way easier to the performance of it feels way more impactful because it doesn't feel like you're just straight reading numbers to it.

There's way more of an art to it. So the body hack, every way that you can use any advantage to make it more powerful, they really, I mean, my dad learned from several other individuals, including Paul Kay and others, to like how to do these things and was good at it.

Like that was his job. His job was to find every little edge to make his message work. And you know, just to go back to something that you were saying at the beginning, using having ministers who like use JTBT to make their nonsense words make sense, is like, obviously people are going to be doing that.

But something that was really eerie that happened is I a few days ago, or maybe like a week ago, my dad released a podcast. And it was the first attempt to like do public ministry that he's done since I spoke out against him and since like he's been banned from Bethel and I hop and so he released this podcast.

And I listened to it and I'm like, who are these people talking? It was like a young, you know, 20s, 30s, something male and female talking about the yellow house and talking about what Bob Hartley had this prophetic dream and it's really powerful, and I'm listening to it.

And I'm like, who are these people? Like who did he rope into his world? And about, it took me like three or four minutes to be like, oh, this is AI. Like this is a chat, and I was shocked that I got, you know, the cadence of it, like they would be like, um, well, and, you know, very slow in the sort of way they delivered things and then they would talk over each other too.

And I was like, it was just a really, really good chat GBT or, I mean, AI thing. It was super, super eerie. It was, it didn't make any sense, you know, it, it, the sentence, the sentences did, but the content didn't, like the content was just, you know, it's like if you had an AI, explain your dream, you know, and you had, you had talked into the recording at 1 a.m. when you're like half asleep, and then chat GBT was like trying to make that something real.

It's just like, yeah, they're using proper sentence structure, but the content is just bizarre and an AI does this horrible thing of being so affirmative to anybody who talked like you were like, oh, you, you put in something and it's like, wow, that's a great, interesting idea.

So it's the way that this is, this could be a whole other thing I'm saying right at the end of the episode, but the way that AI feeds into narcissism is like going to be a problem because you have these narcissists who have these like grand delusional ideas, and then you have AI a very intelligent, you know, resourceful, somewhat seeming sentient being, repeating back to you.

It's like, wow, this is so profound. This is really great. Yeah, you're really onto something here because it's like program to be the most like affirmational thing you've ever met in your entire life, and yeah, you're 100% going to get these delusional profits creating delusional content with their narcissistic sort of narratives, and they're going to get better at it because Jatchy BD is going to be really good at helping them.

Absolutely. It's some scary stuff. I've toyed with it for a variety of different things that I've got going on technology-wise, and it's basically, it's a birthday cake with a hand grenade in it, that's the best way I can describe it.

I started using it. I have trouble because I multitask heavily, and so I'll type out this big article and sometimes I'll have it proofread it. It does a good job at getting the grammar correct, but if you don't read what it has given you back, there's a hand grenade right there that's going to explode when people write it.

It's some scary stuff and to think that that is our future. Ministers are going to be using that and not hand grenade. but theological nightmares are going to be embedded in their sermons now.

This is a very scary thing. So much more what we talk about, I think we've got an hour now, and I've only covered just the skimming, the surface of all of the cons that I am aware of that these guys can do, but I think it's enough that people get the picture.

Whenever these guys want to toy with your head, they can do it, so yeah. And the resources are only becoming more plentiful to do so. Yeah. Absolutely, man. Well, this was incredible fun. Like I said, I have the unfortunate gift of thinking like this, but it helps in the research because I can put myself into their shoes as I'm researching these guys and think, okay, if I was a bad guy, what would I do as a bad guy?

And sure enough, half the time I figured out just by reading their environment and their scene and their setting and their scenario in their city. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for doing this.

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-Branum.org. From 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.