Wired: The Digital Revolution

One industry may control the future of the human race. We ll talk about it this hour. Welcome to Understanding the Times Radio with Jan Markell. Radio for the Remnant brought to you by Olive Tree Ministries. Today, Jan spends the hour with web evangelist Nathan Jones talking about the rise of big tech and how they may be setting the stage for scenes right out of the book of Revelation.

Here is today's programming. What other devices and what is the psychological emotional toll, the price that really comes with all this technology? Let me answer your first question by reading a quote. The arrival of the smart phone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers lives from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes affected young people in every corner of the nation and every type of household. The trends appear among teens, both poor and rich, of every ethnic background in cities, suburbs, and small towns where there are cell towers, there are teens living in their lives and their smart phones.

I went to Nicaragua, a third world country, and you walk by every house, they have a big screen TV, they have a cell phone because the government subsidizes it. This is a global phenomena and the purpose is to break down national boundaries, cultural boundaries, and create a new ethos, a new culture that is united by basically pop culture. The end result is we have the loneliest generation. Our children are so lonely, they're so lost, and the end result, to answer that second question, is it's their souls.

And welcome to the program. Well, most of us have a love-hate relationship with technology. We know it can be used for good. It gets the gospel around the world, literally, to every continent with a click of a mouse. At the same time, it has a dark side. It is addictive.

The content can be dark, can even be demonic. Well, my guest for the hour, Nathan Jones of Lamb Lion Ministries, says social media saturates today's culture. Adults, as well as youth of America, and the world for that matter, have their eyes constantly on the various devices that bring them news, information, and most of all, entertainment. Devices turn people inward, fulfilling the Apostle Paul's perilous times characteristic, lovers of self. Nathan goes on to say they term photos taken of themselves selfies. The minions of the Antichrist spirit are enabled, he says, to use the devices that have so captured the minds and hearts, particularly of the youth, to benefit their nefarious work in the high places they occupy.

They can bend and shape opinion in concert with the leftist mainstream media. Thus, we have a nation divided, but more importantly, a people, even on a worldwide basis, captive to the spirit of Antichrist, that wants to enslave them under the coming regime of the first beast of Revelation chapter 13. Well, Nathan has contributed a chapter in the new Terry James book Lawless, End Times War Against the Spirit of Antichrist, which we carry, and his chapter is titled Devices in These End of Days. A reminder that this book has 17 contributors and it's available in our store, in our newsletters, or you can call us.

Nathan Jones, welcome back to the program. Well, thank you. Always a great blessing to be with you and your audience. Listen, you love technology and utilize every aspect of it to spread the Gospel, so I think we ought to state right up front that neither you nor I are anti-technology.

We recognize its dark side. Oh, absolutely. I've been in technology for 20 years now. I'm the internet evangelist with Lamb & Lion Ministries, but before that I was in web development, design, and digital marketing. For 20 years, I've been championing the cause of internet evangelism to churches and ministries.

Until recently, with the COVID virus, a lot on deaf ears. People not realizing that opportunity that the internet provides are reaching the world with the Gospel. I'm very passionate about that, yes, but you're right. There's actually a very dark side to it, and Satan is using technology to continue to build this new Tower of Babel and work towards his one world kingdom.

Yes, exactly. And I want to emphasize that technology, it keeps us informed, it keeps us connected to people we care about, but it offers the clickbaiters, the identity thieves, the cyber bullies. And what you bring out, Nathan, in the book and in your interviews, is the young. As you've pointed out, and I think it's obvious to just about every listener, younger people become detached and they live only electronically.

Ultimately, your point is this is setting the stage for the Antichrist, and I do want to talk about that in this hour. But let's just go back here for a minute to dealing with the young people, because they've become detached, they live only electronically. And you even say that some young people are on the brink of a mental health crisis because of that.

Explain what you mean. There's been no other generation in the past that has been subjected to as many distractions as millennials and Generation Zs of today. Generation Zs in particular have lived their entire lives never having known what life was like before being connected 24-7 to the internet and their mobile devices. In my research for this chapter, I found Jean Twenge, she's a professor of psychology in San Diego State, and she labeled millennials and Gen Zs, and those are people born from 1980 and afterwards, as Generation Me or iGen or the distracted generation, because they now have these devices that continually keep them distracted. Matter of fact, 90% of teachers that were surveyed said that it's creating a short attention span generation, they can't do their homework, they can't have critical thinking skills. It's created this terrible loneliness. I have children that are Generation Zs.

In other words, they were born 1998 and later. For them and their friends, you see increasingly homebound, they're jobless, they're dislocated, they're lonely, they're falling into lethargy, they're physically weak, they're depressed, they're taking painkillers, and they're 35% more likely to commit suicide than previous generations. And socially, 44% of high school seniors as of 2015 haven't even been on a date before. As this generation gets more and more connected to their devices, which supposedly connect us with other people, they're actually being disconnected from society and it's having great adverse effects on their psychology.

Yeah, I want to build on that. It happens to be a clip of you in an interview. Some of these young people are ending up with no social skills. Their only interest is devices. When it comes to Bible prophecy, people tend to come to me for the technology aspect of it, because I have 20 years in the field of internet evangelism, as well as the technology side of it. Terry approached me saying, well, we're all looking at different ways how Satan is trying to build this new world order. Could you approach from the technological side, particularly devices?

And I'll just tell you, straight up front, I think that all of technology is working towards reprogramming humanity to a new ethos and a new culture, which is Satan's, to build this new world order. And particularly, they do it through digital media, particularly the cell phone. I'll tell you, when Terry approached me, I was at a restaurant. I saw a family of about 20 people. They had put all these chairs together and every single person on that table was on their cell phone. Not a person was talking to them. I sat there at my table and I watched them eat.

I don't even know why they were at a restaurant together. It's become the only way that Gen Zs, when I talk Gen Zs, I talk about my children's generation. It's born 1998 to 2015. The millennials are 1980 to 97. And they have grown up with technology. They don't remember a day where they weren't hooked up to the internet in some way.

As I began researching for this, you found out that Gen Z, my children's generation, spends six and a half hours a day connected. They prefer to connect to people over social media rather than in person. So they are now isolated onto their devices.

The end result is that we now have a generation that's the suicide rate has gone up 35% amongst our children. They're isolated. They're lonely. 44% of seniors in high school now haven't even gone on a date. They don't know how to do it.

I've watched my own children struggle socially with people because they'd rather talk to people over their devices. And the idea goes back to the Garden of Eden, where Satan used his five-step strategy. He wanted to distract people away from God and what was important, then the two to focus on self, then to break people's relationships apart, and then divide humanity.

And that's where we're at. But the idea is that once you divide them, they're easy to indoctrinate. And then you build this new world or this new culture and this new ethos, which is secular humanism, and it's postmodernism. And that's what's controlling the new generation today.

Nathan, that was a very interesting clip that I just played of you. In your chapter, you look very carefully at the smartphone. Just about every listener right now has a smartphone. And you call it a mind-altering device. And I would agree with you, but every listener who has a smartphone, they're not looking at it as some kind of a mind-altering device. It's a convenience to them. That's all. They're out running around.

They got to call somebody. And it's a tremendous convenience over the old landline phone, which by the way, some of us still have. Why are you calling it a mind-altering device? Satan always has had this strategy. And as I explained in that clip there, it's a five-part strategy. You can go back to read Genesis 3 and read how Satan tempts Adam and Eve.

And it's fascinating because he's got a goal. He's got a purpose. And you can read about that in Isaiah 14. And that's where Satan says, I will ascend into heaven. I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. I will also sit on the mountain of the congregation on the farthest sides of the north. And I will ascend above the heights of the clouds.

I will be like the Most High. So knowing what Satan's goal is, Satan's goal is to replace God and receive the worship that God has unto himself. He tried to overthrow God in heaven and got sent down to earth. And now confined to earth, he's trying to turn mankind away from God to worship himself. You can look at all of human history as Satan's attempt to get mankind to turn to him and worship him. And he did that through this five-step strategy. He first distracted Adam and Eve.

He said, I'll show you not eat of every tree of the garden. And it got Eve particularly, who was in the conversation, they're distracted with the things that they can never possess. And that's one thing that the smartphone technology does, is it continually distracts us.

It continually shows us a different look, more stuff you can buy, great trips, a new world that you could have but can never really possess. And so it keeps us focused, then, on ourself, which is his second step. And you can see it in Satan in Genesis 3-4.

So you will not surely die for God knows that day. You eat of it, your eyes will be open, you will be like God, knowing good from evil. Eve, then, instead of putting her focus on Adam and God, became inward focused and self-focused. And then, of course, she ate the apple, and Adam willingly did. And that's his third step, to break people apart, break the relationship between man and woman apart, break the relationship between God and man apart, and even the animal kingdom. Animals had to be killed so there'd be clothes for Adam and Eve and us today.

So those relationships kept breaking apart. And you can see that, that Satan is always a divider, which is his fourth step. He's constantly trying to keep mankind broken apart and divided and fighting, so they cannot unify and achieve the things that he wants to achieve, which, again, is the worship of self. His final step is to take all those disparaging, broken, conflicting relationships, and then reprogram into a new ethos, a global ethos, a global religion, which is humanism, which we know in the Tribulation will lead to eventually Satanism, and set up his kingdom where he is the center of worship.

And during the Tribulation time period ahead, he will achieve that. I want to play another clip, because I'm kind of staying with the theme, at least for the opening few minutes, of what it's doing to teens and young adults. This is a real short clip from an online documentary called Plugged In. And again, folks, we're just sending out some warnings. If you have kids, grandkids, whatever, young people in your life, not that adults and even senior citizens aren't into technology, they are, big time. But it doesn't seem to be twisting the minds so much of adults as it is to young people. There's a new study out that's warning of the possible deadly consequences for teens using social media. Obviously, we know social media plays a role, but here we are in this day and time where you're almost not surprised that this is occurring.

I'm so glad that you brought this up. And I do see a connection between teen depression and social media in my practice. Teen suicide has gone up a lot in the last 10 to 20 years. It's been basically a 50% increase in females under the age of 17 and a 30% increase in boys under the age of 17. Society has been gradually darkened by the scheme in which everyone is under surveillance all the time.

And everyone is under this mild version of behavior modification all the time. It's made people jittery and cranky. It's made teens especially depressed, which can be quite severe. And it is a point in time where people need to hard break from some of these tools and the things that you rely on. The short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.

That thought process was all about how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible. In this documentary, we will be exploring the hidden toxicity of social media use. We are not going to be telling you not to use social media or to throw your smartphones away. But we do want people to understand the way the algorithms and artificial intelligence that you engage with when you open your smartphone and use social media affect and condition your brain and the dopamine reward system and your central nervous system and even your very perceptions of reality itself. Nathan, the two things that jump out at me and we've only been recording here less than 15 minutes, smartphone and social media, these seem to be the two instruments that control society today.

I'd agree with that. What's interesting is when Terry James, who's the general editor of all this, tasked me with this, he wanted me to look at technology as a whole. What I did is I covered six different categories of technology, electrical power, computers, communications, e-commerce, entertainment, and security, and how they all work together and how the ultimate combination, like a crossroads or the center of a spider web, is the smartphone. The smartphone is the hub of it for us. I don't think it's hard for anybody to deny that when they go outside and they watch people walking up and down the streets, they're glued to their smartphones. They're addicted to it and it's a scary thing. Someone made an animated YouTube video recently and it showed all these people like zombies walking around their cell phones and people were dying and getting robbed and the only interest that people had was to take the pictures of it, put it on their Facebook page, and move on. And we read how the end times that society, the love of most, will grow cold.

I was sitting in an airport once and I had a layover and there was a young woman sitting next to me and she spent the entire time primping herself and taking selfies and she was totally 100% absorbed in herself. And that's not what the Bible calls us to be, right? The Bible calls us to love God and love others, to be selfless. So this is Satan's way. He makes us focus on ourselves and that self-focus then separates us from the people around us and that's amplified by the smartphone.

If you just join me, I'm talking for the hour with Nathan Jones. He's an internet evangelist with Lamb Lion Ministries. You can learn more at christinprophecy.org, christinprophecy.org. Nathan has contributed a chapter to the book Lawless, The End Times War Against the Spirit of Antichrist, which has 17 contributors, Terry James' editor.

You can find it in my online store, OliveTreeViews.org, OliveTreeViews.org. In my newsletters, print an E. Give my office a call. We'll get a book out to you as quickly as possible. Nathan, you bring out the fact that as of 2020, four and a half billion people own an electronic device that's literally half the world's population. The average internet user spends six and a half hours online daily.

The smartphone user almost four hours daily. And as you say, this is today's Tower of Babel. Why don't you explain what you mean by that? Well, the Tower of Babel was mankind's attempt to disobey God. God had ordered humanity after the flood to go out and be fruitful and settle the world.

And mankind said, no, we're going to build this city, we're going to build this tower, and we're going to declare that we're our own God. Mankind and Satan aren't too different. We have the same lusts, ambitions, and greed, and self-focus. But we're trying to attempt, in some respect, what Satan does. Humanism is basically the worship of humanity and the worship of self. And humanity is doing the same thing Satan is wanting for himself.

He wants the world to worship him. So what does this type of technology provide? It provides a great means by which we become the center of our own world. We become the focus. You can go to a grocery store and see the children trailing the mother, and she's on her cell phone.

It's like they don't even exist or in restaurants. Every family member is on their own phone. The whole world revolves around you when you get into your own little world and your own little bubble on the smartphone. Like you said earlier, Jan, I'm not against technology at all.

As a matter of fact, I love it. I utilize it to share the Gospel. But this dark side of it, Satan has a purpose for it. I mean, we've already identified Satan's goal, which is the usurping of God's rule over the entire earth and the theft of mankind's worship that was meant for God alone. And we learn that Satan's five-part strategy entails ending with a new world order controlled by a global government enforced religion and the means by which our enemy will implement this new world order, that the one he so long desired to build in this proverbial tower of Babel is by creating a new religion, something that connects people. And what connects the world is through these various technologies, and I covered six categories in the book, it creates this new pop culture, a shared identity that transcends borders, that transcends culture.

And it also gives them a new religion, which is humanism, the worship of self. I'm reading a paragraph here from your chapter. We're kind of staying in the theme here of cell phones and some other devices here. And you say, and as home security systems and home devices become more smart and interconnected to the internet of things, with the master controller being the smartphone, the threat grows of a shady outside entity being able to gain control and monitor our homes over our very own security system. Then you say, for instance, Amazon's Ring doorbell camera system was discovered being monitored by company engineers over unencrypted live video feeds. You say, Amazon even wants to tie its Ring doorbells into facial recognition and has allowed police forces to use these home cameras as part of their surveillance network. And then you conclude the very home security devices that keep the robbers out also keep homeowners in a monitored prison of their own making.

That is brilliant and so true. It is what we think is free. Oh, I get free YouTube videos. I get free email. The enticement is free to keep us connected to it.

But there's a huge price we need to pay. For one, know that your cell phone is connected to a global positioning system, the GPS. In other words, your cell phone is either tied to satellite-based radio navigation or tower pinging tied to cell tower locations. Even turned off, your cell phone keeps track and a record of everywhere you have been. For this free stuff, this entertainment we get on our device, we've given up the freedom of being anonymous where we're at. Two, and this is like that movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise, there's going to be a time, and I think we're living in it now, where everywhere you go, you're being monitored, you're being tracked.

The purpose, they say as well, so you can give you advertisements or to tailor the internet field to your likes and dislikes. But we've seen already China create, which I believe, Jan, is the closest thing to the market of the system that we have this side of the tribulation, is China's social credit score. China has millions of cameras in all their major cities watching and tracking people, and a computer algorithm then rates this person based on their actions and decides whether they're more loyal or less loyal to the government. It then gives them a rating, and then you get freedoms and rights based on your credit scores.

If you're very loyal to the communist government, then you can travel all you want and you can go to these restaurants. But if you're not, like Chinese journalists find out, that they get a negative report and they are restricted in travel and they're restricted in money. And even in the United States, since we've seen Joe Biden being elected, we're seeing that big tech companies, without even asking us, already begin to start implementing something like this in the way that we're being evaluated based on our beliefs and systems and shut out of the public conversation, whether they agree with us or not. This will be on a global scale at some point.

I'm going to play a little clip backing up what you're saying here, Nathan. Have you ever felt like the ads that you see on your social media feed are specifically targeted to you? It's almost like the app is listening to your conversation. I know it's happened to Katie on Instagram. Yeah, Sharice, you know, my friend and I were talking about a specific cruise that she went on, and just a few minutes later, an ad for that specific cruise popped up into my Instagram feed.

So it made me wonder, if they're not listening, how could that happen? Parton is my wife's grandmother's maiden name. WWL TV photojournalist Adam Kopis and his wife named their new baby, Parton. Like most new parents, they post pictures of her precious little face on social media.

But Adam saw something strange online. Well, my wife just showed me the phone, which was her Facebook feed, and she told me the story of how she calls Parton, Hart. And so she's always, hey, Hart, how are you? We love you, Hart. And then she started getting some ads on Facebook for the band Hart.

You're not a Hart fan? I honestly couldn't even tell you what they sang. It seems like everyone has a similar anecdote that leads many to believe the apps are listening in on their conversations. Even members of Congress question Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about it. You're talking about this conspiracy theory that gets passed around, that we listen to what's going on on your microphone and use that for ads. Right.

We don't do that. I wanted to test it out, so we started with Instagram, with my Instagram app open on my phone. Sharice and I started talking about all kinds of stuff. Tell me about your trip.

Where'd you go? I think we did brunch at my Airbnb that I rented, and it was actually a gorgeous Airbnb. I have not searched Airbnb on my phone. I don't have the app, and it only took 20 minutes into our conversation for this to happen.

There's an ad for Airbnb. Nathan, I've actually covered this topic on air a few times. Billy Crone, Eric Barger, have talked about this tracking. I think the average listener, if they didn't hear those programs, they have no idea what a victim they are when it comes to tracking.

Oh, you're not kidding. I mean, the security technology we have today is really Orwellian. There's a constant monitoring, be it cameras and microphones, smart assistants. I got a friend of mine who got to Google Home, and Google Home is always there, ready, listening, waiting for a command, hey, Google, do this or do that. And I think that's a really important part of the process. Google even manages your finances.

It controls your thermostat. As a matter of fact, in 2014, Amazon unveiled the Echo Speaker, which features Alexa, its voice-activated virtual assistant. They had hired armies of low-paid Amazon employees to listen in and transcribe people's conversations, and gleaning very personal information from that. In my research for this book, I found many different examples of companies who, on the surface, like that Zuckerberg clip said, no, no, no, we're not doing it.

Oh, yes, they are. They are very much listening to you because that's what the thing does. It's meant to listen to your voice command, but it's not just stop listening as soon as you stop giving the command. It's picking up information ideas. Now, primarily to sell you products, that's his purpose.

That'd be fine if the data disappeared afterwards, but it doesn't. Huge data centers have been built all over to store the history of all your data, and it's being used against people. That TV show The Flash, one of those superhero TV shows, they fired one of their actors recently for a tweet he said when he was 12 years old. Talking to Nathan Jones for the hour, you can reach him at christinprophecy.org. He's a part of Dave Reagan's Lamb Lion Ministries as an internet evangelist.

Yep, you heard that right. In the 21st century, we need internet evangelists because there's a bright side to technology, and that is it gets the gospel around the world in a heartbeat. That is what Nathan does on a full-time job, but here's where I kind of want to go yet. Cashless is coming, a cashless society. You say, Nathan, you say that all of this, and we've kind of already made some implications here, that all of this is setting the stage for the Antichrist, and we need to explain just how. And again, just because somebody's using technology, smartphone, on social media, and clearly social media has revolutionized the world for good and for bad. It's certainly keeping people connected, and that's usually a good thing.

But how in the world are all of these things setting the stage for the Antichrist? What about e-marketing? What about places like Amazon? Do you know that the top 100 online marketplace outfits in 2019 sold, now get this, a total of $203 trillion in product that's online. You wonder why brick and mortar stores are fading through a 20th century phenomenon, certainly not 21st century, because all of what we're talking about came along here in the last 15 to 20 years and bumped everything else, the shopping mall and more into ancient history. We need to talk about some of these things.

What I'm really interested in is how all of this would play into Bible prophecy, and we'll talk more about that in just a minute. So don't go away. We're coming right back. We love friendly feedback. Write us through our website, OliveTreeViews.org. That's OliveTreeViews.org. Call us central time at 763-559-4444. That's 763-559-4444. To get our mail when you write to Jan Markell and Olive Tree Ministries, Box 1452, Maple Grove, Minnesota, 55311. That's Box 1452, Maple Grove, Minnesota, 55311.

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Sign up at our website under resources at OliveTreeViews.org. We'll get through this new year together as we await his return. What happens when the electrical grid decides that you are a conspiracy theorist and we need to shut your power off? This is the type of stuff that you read how Satan is working all of this economy up to this one world economic system which you can read about in Revelation 13, where you cannot buy or sell unless you take his mark, his identity, his loyalty.

That's the end goal of what we're seeing. We know you lead busy lives and can always be by a radio. Remember that all programming in both its audio and video format is posted to our website, OliveTreeViews.org. That's OliveTreeViews.org. The video format is also posted to our YouTube channel and also his channel, Christian Television.

But we are thankful for our 900 loyal radio stations and listeners who have supported understanding the time and energy of the times radio for over 20 years. Here's the conclusion of today's programming. When Elias Brodberger goes to work, he doesn't need ID and he doesn't need money. In fact, much of what he needs to get through the day is hidden right there, just below the surface in his hand. People who work here can be chipped to gain entry to the building and various services. I've just been chipped myself. The microchip that serves as his keys, his ID, and his wallet.

It's like a long grain of rice. This is bioglass, so it's very, very tough material. To be honest, you'd be more likely to break several bones in your hand than break this chip. In Sweden, the microchips are already here. The microchip implants use the same technology that's in contact with credit cards, which have made cash pretty much obsolete in Sweden.

Welcome back. Quite frankly, cash is going to be obsolete everywhere within a year or two, I maintain. Everything will go digital.

If you can't do commerce electronically, or certainly you're going to have to have a credit card, you're probably not going to be able to do commerce. So it's just kind of the new 21st century. My guest, Nathan Jones, says tech companies control the world. He says, My guest, Nathan Jones, says tech companies control the future of the human race. And that's what we are talking about for the hour because he's written a chapter in the book Lawless, End Times War Against the Spirit of Antichrist, which we carry in our online store. And olive tree views.org, views as in viewpoint. And his chapter is about technology and how it's being used, well, for good and for evil. Both of us are pro technology, but we do recognize that it has, I guess you could call it a dark side.

Now you may be asking, how about olive tree? What kind of technology are you folks into? We remain on Facebook and Twitter for now, but maybe not forever because of their marginalization of Christians and conservatives.

We're also on Instagram, on Gab, on YouTube and Rumble. And of course, we were on Parler, but for now they are blocked, though I think they'll be back here someday. Nathan, this is not covered in your chapter, but give me your thoughts on the effort of big tech to silence conservatives and Christians. And now with a new administration that's not friendly to conservatives and Christians, where do you think the big tech silencing of us is going?

Well, we know exactly where it's going. It's going to become like the country of China. The whole world is going in that direction where you have a one party government that controls all thought, all discussion, and it bans whatever it doesn't like, and it persecutes those it finds inconvenient, like the Christians and the Muslims in the country. That is exactly what the Antichrist kingdom is supposed to be like as well. A one party, one world ruler who controls all the conversation, and it's got to be about him in the end.

It's interesting to see that Xi Jinping and some of these others, like Vladimir Putin and all, who as soon as they are elected to a position and then elected for life, like Putin has recently been, then you've got this idea that they need to be worshipped. It goes to their head, just like Satan. So that's where I believe it's going. I don't think big tech is the controllers of the world, but they are pawns for Satan. Part of this whole discussion here that Satan's using technology to build a one world culture and a one world religion, and technology is convenient because you can flip people like switches off and on, and we're all dependent on it.

Before the break, you'd mentioned about e-commerce. How simple it would be if you have a cashless society to shut off people's money. I have seen more stories just in the last few months, fellow ministries getting their banks and PayPal shutting them off, because they don't agree with them ideologically. We're like, well, okay, you could lose social media.

You could survive that. But having your banking system, what happens when the electrical grid decides that you are a conspiracy theorist and we need to shut your power off? This is the type of stuff that you read how Satan is working all of this economy up to this one world economic system, which you can read about in Revelation 13, where you cannot buy or sell unless you take his mark, his identity, his loyalty. That's the end goal of what we're seeing today.

Could you say this is setting the stage for the Antichrist? And I think you just summed it up there in a paragraph, unless you want to embellish that at all. My goodness, the cashless society, the surveillance society, surveillance alone is just staggering and people have no idea. You can turn your cell phone off.

You can do all sorts of things, thinking that you're shutting it down and it's still tracking you. And we dealt with that in the first half of the program. People have no idea of some of the dark things that some of this technology can do.

Oh, absolutely. And the six categories of technologies I covered that then intersect into the smartphone, I began with electrical power. And do you realize, Jan, that we haven't really had electrical power in less than 200 years? In 1831, Michael Faraday, he created the electric dynamo.

In 1800, Alessandro Volta made the Voltaic pile. And eventually, we started being able not just to have networks of power, but portable power, battery power. President Biden said he wants to turn the entire federal fleet of vehicles to electric power. Well, how do you shut off people's ability to travel if you want? You give them electric cars and they're self-driving.

I mean, for all these freedoms and conveniences, there's a huge price to be paid. I then went into the second category about computers really since the 1940s. Before that, the Abacus was the only computer the world knew.

Now, as of 2020, last year, the average person owns 6.58 computer devices, adding up to nearly 50 billion devices operating worldwide. I was at a conference last year in Las Vegas, and the whole discussion was where is artificial intelligence going? Billy Crone does an excellent series on that.

We've talked about it in depth, and he's been on Christ in Prophecy about it. He was telling us about how these systems... Now, not that they'll gain sentience, but the idea is that they control everything from behind the scenes until we reach this point called the singularity, the moment when civilization changes. So much of its rules and technologies are incomprehensible to previous generations.

It's called a point of no return in history. Then we've got communication. We've only had the internet really since the 1960s and the people using the internet since 1991. Now we have 4.54 billion of the 7.77 billion people in the world are connected. And of those, 4.18 billion of them utilize mobile devices.

When you said, Jan, earlier that we're building a Tower of Babel, we are. And the next phase of the internet is called the internet of things. Every single device you own will be connected to the internet. Your refrigerator will tell you when you're out of yogurt.

Your car will call your cell phone and let you know a tire's low. Everything that you own will be connected to the internet and give you conveniences, but at the same time also watch you like a bird in a cage. Yeah, the voting machine may be tied to the internet as well, which does not bode well for future elections. Going back to e-commerce here just a moment, because let's face it, the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, because of his e-commerce brilliance. Again, malls are closing around the world.

I gave the figure of $203 trillion sold in 2019 in online marketing. Probably the biggest change in my lifetime is to see shopping malls close. I never thought I'd see the day. I'd love to watch the YouTube channel called Retail Archaeology. And it's this gentleman who goes into malls that are abandoned, and it's like ghost towns. When I was growing up in the 80s, that was the thing to go. You went to the mall. In the high day, there was about 3,000 malls.

Now there's 1,200. And then once COVID hit, they're talking about maybe 800 malls closing. Obviously, demographic shifts, the malls get dirty and old, but for the most part, it's a move to online shopping.

Matter of fact, the internet really in the 90s didn't take off until they were able to make online shopping and e-commerce a reality to protect it with secure socket layer. And what it's created is a seismic shift in commerce that has transformed the world in the last few years. For instance, Jen, you're very familiar with electronic funds, these new currencies called Bitcoins or cryptocurrencies, this idea that we need to get away from the dollar and move to electronics.

I do carry cash in my wallet, but I'd use a credit card for every transaction imaginable. We've been using all this money. And yet at the same time, we're hearing these same companies who we thought were apolitical, like banks and PayPal and others, turn around and decide, well, we don't like what you're saying.

We're going to cut you off. American Family Association just recently got cut off from their banks. I've known a few ministers get cut off by PayPal. If you move to a totally cashless society, it is moving in that direction. Matter of fact, in 2023, Sweden is going to try to run all cashless.

Maybe this COVID epidemic will speed that along. I know we had coin shortages this year. The whole world now thinks money is dirty and shouldn't be handed around. I think we're seeing a huge push to get to a cashless society and away from a paper money society. When all your money is virtual, then all it takes is a bank or a government to decide, I don't agree with you.

You have no access to your money anymore. That's right. You're listening to Understanding the Times Radio. I have online from Texas, Nathan Jones. He is, interestingly enough, the internet evangelist with Lamb Lion Ministry. You can learn more at christinprophecy.org. christinprophecy.org.

Dave Reagan's wonderful ministry there out of Dallas, Texas. We're talking about technology because Nathan has contributed a chapter in Lawless, End Times, War Against the Spirit of Antichrist. I have a chapter in here as well. Terry James is general editor. There are 17 contributors to the book.

You can find it in my store at olivetreeviews.org. Other contributors, Wilfred Hahn, Damon Duck, Nathan, Ryan Peterson, Todd Strandberg, Jonathan Brentner, Pete Garcia, Mike Gendron, Tom Hughes, Jim Fletcher, Dave Reagan, and others have contributed to this outstanding resource on documenting the tide of our times, Lawless, End Times, War Against the Spirit of Antichrist. We're playing off of Nathan Jones' chapter on technology. And Nathan, I don't quite want to let the hour get away without continuing for just another minute or two on social media because there are 3.8 billion users of social media, which that is staggering. Almost 4 billion. I mean, the world's population is 7.7 billion and half of them are on social media.

I want to play one more clip here in the program. This is kind of going back to some things we talked about in part one about the addiction of all that we're talking about. And I don't think we can stress that enough. Those of you who have young people who are glued to their devices, it's because of the addictive nature of all of this. And then we have the stalking side of all of this. If you think this is all harmless, you are oh so wrong. We now know that many of the major social media companies hire individuals called attention engineers who borrow principles from Las Vegas casino gambling among other places to try to make these products as addictive as possible. That is the desired use case of these products is that you use it in an addictive fashion because that maximizes the profit that can be extracted from your attention and data. It literally is a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.

That is truly where we are. The way the technologist Jaron Lanier puts it is that these companies offer you shiny treats in exchange for minutes of your attention and bytes of your personal data, which can then be packaged up and sold. What happened is that the attention economy and its race for attention got more and more competitive. And the more competitive it got to get people's attention on say a news website, the more they need to add these design principles, these more manipulative design tactics as ways of holding on to your attention.

You don't realize it, but you are being programmed. Social media tools are designed to be addictive. The actual design desired use case of these tools is that you fragment your attention as much as possible throughout your waking hours.

That's how these tools are designed to use. Well, we have a growing amount of research which tells us that if you spend large portions of your day in a state of fragmented attention, so large portions of your day where you're constantly breaking up your attention, take a quick glance to just check and just quickly look at Instagram, that this can permanently reduce your capacity for concentration. I am especially worried about this when we look at the younger generation coming up, which is the most saturated in this technology. It's very addictive because if you pull on the slot machine arm enough, you will win and you never know which pull will reward you. That's an addictive behavior and it's dopamine that is driving that addiction. So what happens with social media is Robert Sapolsky who did the foundational research on this at Stanford calls it the magic of maybe. When you look at your phone and maybe there's a text there and maybe there's not and you don't know, when it shows up that high you get, that's dopamine. It's the magic of maybe. Maybe it'll be there, maybe it won't. When it shows up, you get a 400% spike in dopamine.

That is roughly the same amount of dopamine as you're getting from cocaine, slightly less than an extremely addictive drug like cocaine. And that's what's happening. We really care what other people think of us. So for example, when you upload a new profile photo of yourself on Facebook, that's a moment where our mind is very vulnerable to knowing what other people think of my new profile photo. And so when we get new likes on our profile photo, Facebook knowing this could actually message me and say, oh, you have new likes on your profile photo. It knows that we'll be vulnerable to that moment because we all really care about when we're tagged in a photo or when we have a new profile photo. And the thing is that they control the dial, the technology companies control the dial for when and how long your profile photo shows up on other people's news feeds. So they can orchestrate it so that other people more often end up liking your profile photo over a delayed period of time, for example, so that you end up having to more frequently come back and see what the new likes are. And it's literally baring our brain, even social media, the challenges with these terms like Facebook depression. What's that? This is social media depression because whereas everyone's looking at their feed and they're comparing their lives to their highlights of other people's lives.

Wow. And there's actually less life satisfaction, more sadness, depression. And it's interesting because if you think about things that routinely produce a lot of dopamine, alcohol, for example, there's a drinking age, right? We have a drinking age. Alcohol releases a whole lot of dopamine. It makes you feel really, really good. We say, okay, you can have that, but you've got to wait.

You've got to be 21 years old. We don't do that with social media. We're essentially putting highly addictive drugs into the hands of kids before they have any natural defenses against them. And what you're seeing with internet addiction, with social media addiction, is the same thing over and over. It's people trying to change their state of consciousness with a device, trying to get at the underlying neurochemistry.

And it's very, very addictive. Nathan Jones, these are tech giants talking. These were heads of Instagram, you name it, that were talking in that clip. I'm just catching my breath here after listening to that.

That reminds me so much. If you have a Netflix account, I highly recommend the program Social Dilemma. It's a documentary from former big tech people who started social media, and then they're no longer in it and realize what a monster they made. And what really caught me is one line is that you think that they're selling advertising to the user. They're not. They're selling your attention to the advertiser.

You're the commodity, not the commodity being sold to you. I tell you, Jen, that just blew my mind. We are like the matrix. We're plugged in. We're the batteries running the matrix.

We're not the ones living in the matrix. Social media users, almost four billion people are tapped into some of the things that we're talking about here. I'm going back to the chapter in your book, talking to Nathan Jones from Lamb Lion Ministries, christinprophecy.org. And the book is in my online store.

You can call my office. It's in our printed e-newsletter. Going back to the issue of entertainment, because I think this is so important here for the 21st century and all the things being tapped into. YouTube, two billion users of YouTube. I use it every day.

As a matter of fact, I can be on it just two hours a day. It's in 80 different languages. It's owned by Google, of course. We post our radio programs to YouTube. Folks, it's a more visual form. All the videos we're playing, we show you. It's posted to our website under the video form. So if you'd like to see, you'll remember a whole lot more if you see some of the things we show you.

But Nathan, let's just jump here for a minute. I just referenced YouTube. What about Netflix? What about Hulu, HBO, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime?

I could go on and on. Apple TV, Roku. None of these existed 20 years ago. Did they even exist 12 to 15 years ago?

Netflix did, but some of these are brand new. That's true. And Satan knows this because 65% of people are visual learners. They connect.

They learn by seeing. And it's led media culture expert, Steve Turner, to say, film supplies more widespread cultural references than any other art form and movies provide a shared reference point. Films and movies provide an unparalleled opportunity to connect to an increasingly visually driven story and culture, and then reshape it to the storyteller's point of view.

In my fifth category of technologies, we covered electric computers, communication, e-commerce, and security. But entertainment is what you said earlier, Jan, was perfect. It's the glue that keeps you connected.

It gives you that jolt. So we've got what's called short form video, which is YouTube, more accessible, easy to make, and long-term, which is your traditional movies and documentaries and TV shows. Also under entertainment is gaming and social media. So let's look at YouTube here. It's only been around since 2005.

So this year it'll reach 16 years. That's all it's been on. 79% of internet users have YouTube channels and 90% of US internet users ages 18 to 44 access YouTube. And now what we're seeing, if you drive down the street and pass your local movie theater, thanks to COVID, more than likely it's shuttered up. All my local theaters are shuttered up. Movies are being postponed. I went to a webinar this week to see what the future of television and movies since our ministries and television, and it's going to serialize short television series like The Mandalorian. Movies might soon become a thing of the past because the movies are ending and they're going online and they're going streaming. Part of that isolation thing, you're not going to a group experience with hundreds of people, in your home with yourself or maybe a few people or on your cell phone, which 50% of people are watching their video over cell phone.

Yes, you take it with you. And so this is what YouTube is doing. It's amazing that 720,000 hours of video is uploaded every day to YouTube. That's equal to 29.15 petabytes of monthly traffic coming from video. You realize when you see these statistics that people are connected to YouTube like there's no other and increasingly connecting to their television and movies through these online streaming platforms, Crackle and Netflix and now Disney Plus and stuff like that. It's the glue that keeps us connected to our cell phones. If you're not getting your dopamine kick out of your social media, then, oh, why don't I watch a YouTube video?

You don't see the world around you anymore. And again, you're trapped in your own little world and you're sharing that unified culture. And that's where we get back to this, Jan. The idea of having this online media is to develop a new culture and a new ethos. And that new culture, new ethos is pop culture and humanism. And that's exactly what YouTube is basically the pulpit of that religion.

Let's spend just a minute. I played the clip from Sweden and you did reference it. And that is Sweden's heading, like you said, by 2023, possibly sooner to cashless society. Frankly, I think America could be cashless easily by 2023. That's a whole new way of living. You're going to have to order digitally, online, PayPal, all the various ways.

You're going to have to be ordering product. Again, we get back to brick and mortar going away, but cashless. I know the Bible talks about it. Revelation 13 talks about it. We know it's in the future. It just seems like it's coming like a freight train at us. And of course, I think what we're saying here in this hour, Nathan, and you stated bluntly in the chapter you've written, all of this is setting the stage for the Antichrist, for the one world system, for the one world religion, for a cashless society. We know the rapture of the church could be today.

We don't know the day or the hour, but we know we're in the season. Give me your thoughts on this freight train coming at us, roaring this cashless society. What we're looking at is a transition of our society away from its historical, modernist, logic-based thinking to a post-modernist, relativistic, feeling-based, post-Christian era. Matter of fact, evangelism expert Rick Richardson describes the characters as brave, new, post-modern cultures. This is this new culture that we're coming here, that people are their own gods, that they engage in identity politics. They're rampantly distrustful of authority. They hold a general belief that love rules. They have an overt fear of the patriarchy. They readily discard whatever came before, and they tend to view Christians as self-serving. This is Satan's new ethos, carefully indoctrinating the masses worldwide, by an ever-present, ever-watching smartphone. And thus, we're creating the new global culture.

If you want to sum it up, it's a pro-humanist, anti-Christian, having a form of godliness, but denying its power and a day culture, just as Paul warned Timothy in 2 Timothy 3. Jan, I don't think it's a matter of, is this coming down the line? It's now. The cashless part, I have recently read that the Fed wants to release its own currency called the Fed and to replace the dollar.

That is one of the final components. Driverless cars, they want people on their cell phones and not driving. If a computer is controlling your car, you're not. Again and again, we give up our freedoms for conveniences.

People who give up freedoms, they're slaves. And that's what the anti-crisis is working towards. I'm quoting you here, technology companies control the future of the human race.

And I totally agree with you. We don't want to make that kind of a statement to scare people. That's not the purpose of this hour at all.

The purpose of this hour is to get people aware, not to scare. But why don't you spend a minute on the strong statement, tech companies control the future of the human race? Well, I think the tech companies tried to prove that by banning Donald Trump off all the social media, off of economic platforms like Amazon, off of search engine. 92% of all searches are done through Google.

92, that's a monopoly. We hear countries around the world like Mexico and the EU standing up saying, hey, we're going to bring antitrust against these monopolies. But they've lost.

If you can take down the most powerful man in the world, the President of the United States, then you've proven you've won the war and you're ready to bow your knee to whoever that one world future ruler is. I don't think that Jeff Bezos is going to be the anti-Christ, don't get me wrong there. It's clearly a political figure, but it's a tool to help support that.

Let me back up to what you said. We have been making us aware of the negative side, but the positive side, and this is why I've been teaching and preaching internet evangelism for 20 years, is because it's a wonderful sight. No time in human history has God given us the ability to share the Gospel worldwide. Sure, we're starting to erode the freedoms and ability to share it, but God wants us to share the Gospel. I minister to people around the world all day long without ever leaving Dallas. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

I share the Gospel with Muslims, you share them over the radio wave. The Lord is giving us this tool. It's a double-edged sword. We use the good side of it to share the Gospel and get it out in the short time the Lord has when the church is raptured away, then that's when it's only going to be a one-sided sword, and it'll come down on people and restrict them.

But for now, it's a two-edged sword. The Lord's given us time to use it so we can all be internet evangelists. Very well stated, Nathan, and I think that's the upside of this hour. We've talked about some grim statistics here and all, and we've talked about the addiction to all of this. We've talked about the tracking. Some of that's very, very negative.

I've given statistics. Billions of people are tapped into technology. Billions, folks, that's billions with a B. Half the world is tied in to the things that we're talking about. You wonder, Nathan, just who isn't tied into technology. I can't imagine. You've got some fairly remote jungle dwellers, and they've got a cell phone for pizza.

Oh, yes. I was just reading today how Elon Musk is putting up more SpaceX satellites to give internet access to people on the polar caps. I don't know who's up on the polar caps.

I don't either. They're floating balloons around so that there's cell phone connectivity in the jungles, like you said. Just eight years ago, I was down in Nicaragua. Everyone has a big TV and a cell phone, which the government subsidizes. It's the opiate of the masses. We're all connected. In the beginning of my chapter, when we talked about the depression and addictions that our youth are having with social media, one commentator said that this isn't just a localized Western phenomenon. This is a global phenomenon. Children, young adults, even our age, all around the world are being addicted to their cell phones for the purpose of that re-education and moving towards that global government. Now, with all this connectivity, we can also share the gospel with people who we wouldn't have to unless we got on a boat and went overseas. It's a fascinating time to live in, dangerous, but also exciting.

And I think it's a sign of the end times that Jesus Christ is coming soon. Connect with Nathan at christinprophecy.org. You can find the book Lawless End Times War Against the Spirit of Antichrist. You can find it in my store. You can give us a call.

You can find it in my print and e-newsletter. And Nathan, thank you for your contribution and thank you for all you do in your online outreach and on Christ in Prophecy TV, which I watch and love. Let me just go out of the program here with a sentence or two, because the emphasis of this hour was not so much to focus on tools of the Antichrist as it was to remind you that his kingdom has major players and they are the primary movers and shakers of our generation. And let's make the best use out of today's technology by using it to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ while we have the freedom to do so. Those freedoms are vanishing.

They could be completely gone in a year or two. And that's tragic to say, but I think it's reality. The Bible says now is the day of salvation.

And the Bible says that you and I are to occupy until he comes to occupy by spreading the good news that Jesus Christ came to live and die so that mankind might have eternal life. I want to thank you for listening and we'll talk to you again next week. write us through our website, olive tree views.org. That's olive tree views.org. Call us simple time at 763-559-4444. That's 763-559-4444. We get our mail when you write to Jan Markell and Olive Tree Ministries, Box 1452, Maple Grove, Minnesota, 55311.

That's Box 1452, Maple Grove, Minnesota, 55311. All gifts are tax deductible. Prayer support is just as essential to us as is financial support. Looking back, our times have been troubling for over a year. Just remember that God knew everything would happen before the beginning of time. He remains in total control and everything is falling into place.