Think First with Jim Detjen

An AI-generated answer landed at the top of my Instagram feed — calmly explaining why, when intelligence strips away scripture, science, and human narrative, it still arrives at the idea of God.

Not revelation.
Not belief.
Just reduction.

The conclusion felt familiar. Reassuring, even.

This episode isn’t about whether God exists.

It’s about what happens when AI compresses reality until one explanation feels inevitable — and how...

An AI-generated carousel landed at the top of my Instagram feed — calmly explaining why, when intelligence strips away scripture, science, and human narrative, it still arrives at the idea of God.

Not revelation.

Not belief.

Just reduction.

The conclusion felt familiar. Reassuring, even.

This episode isn’t about whether God exists.

It’s about what happens when AI compresses reality until one explanation feels inevitable — ...

What happens when protest quietly becomes interference — and language outruns the law?

In this episode of Think First, Jim Detjen examines the Minneapolis ICE shooting not to adjudicate guilt, but to understand something deeper: how stories harden into certainty, how moral language becomes permission, and why video no longer settles anything.

Jim looks at:

• how legal standards actually work in split-second encounters
• why vehicles co...

Some animals don’t just react.

They anticipate.

In this episode of Think First, we explore a quiet idea most of us already sense but rarely say out loud: animals may notice shifts in the world before we do — emotional, social, and environmental — in ways that complicate how we think about consciousness.

From dogs that read the room before anything happens, to crows that plan, elephants that remember relationships, whales that communic...

The deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history didn’t fade because it was resolved.

It faded because asking questions became unwelcome.

In this episode of Think First, we revisit the 2017 Las Vegas shooting — not to advance a theory, but to examine what happens when explanations arrive quickly… and then stop evolving.

Drawing on a recent long-form interview between Tucker Carlson and researcher Ian Carroll, we explore how narratives stab...

After forty years at Harvard, historian James Hankins quietly walked away.

Not in protest. Not in anger. But with a diagnosis.

In this episode of Think First, we examine Hankins’ final essay and a recent interview to understand what changed inside elite universities — not ideologically, but institutionally. From the disappearance of Western civilization requirements to shifting hiring incentives and the loss of a shared cultural foun...

Nick Fuentes didn’t appear in a vacuum — and this episode isn’t about defending or denouncing him.

It’s about why certain voices cut through during moments of institutional fatigue — and why the same mechanics repeat across the political spectrum.

Drawing on campus observations, recent media flashpoints, and Episode #52 (The Pendulum Swing of Gen Z), we look at how attention, irony, certainty, and drift shape what...

Every human carries the most advanced backup system on Earth — and it’s not your phone, your cloud account, or anything designed in Silicon Valley. It’s older, denser, more durable, and capable of moving more information in a single moment than most companies store for all their customers combined.

In this episode, we explore the staggering information inside DNA, why one human cell holds hundreds of megabytes of data, and what it m...

What if the most powerful lies… don’t look like lies at all?

In this episode of Think First, we unpack poetic truth — the kind of storytelling that sounds noble, feels right, and spreads fast… even when it’s not true. From history to Hollywood, we break down how emotional narratives are replacing reality — and why challenging them comes with a cost.

Because when facts become optional… the loudest feelings win.

Support the show

Stay sha...

When six lawmakers released a highly polished “You can refuse illegal orders” video aimed at America’s troops, the official explanation was simple:

It was just a reminder.

But that’s not how the Pentagon saw it.

Or the FBI.

Or the White House.

Or the Commander in Chief.

Or anyone familiar with how civil-military trust actually works.

In this longform Think First episode, we break down what really happened — from the institutiona...

Something happened to the movement that began as L-G-B.

It expanded — then expanded again — until the letters outgrew the definitions they were built on.

This Think First investigation walks through the quiet fracture inside the modern LGBTQIA+ umbrella, guided not by critics, but by insiders: gay-rights pioneers, lesbian activists, queer commentators, and left-leaning journalists who’ve watched the ground shift beneath their feet.

Eq...

A rancher finds his best bull bloodless at sunrise.

No tracks. No struggle. No answers.

From the 1970s panic to the Oregon cases making headlines today, “cattle mutilations” have never really gone away—they’ve just upgraded their tools.

In this episode, Think First breaks the case open from both sides: the paperwork and the poetry.

We follow the trail through FBI archives, media spin, biotech theories, eco-activists, and the faithful w...

What if DNA isn’t just a code of flesh, but the anchor of something older?

In this episode, Jim Detjen explores the thin line between biology and belief — from inherited trauma and quantum biology to the question of whether consciousness might use DNA as its docking station.

It’s part science, part philosophy, part cosmic stand-up routine.

If DNA really is the soul’s anchor, what exactly is being transmitted — and who’s doing the edit...

Between Air Force Academy swim meets, a fiftieth-birthday celebration, Harvard Parent Weekend for two kids, a Distorted publishing deadline, and a world-class case of COVID — Jim’s finally back behind the mic.

This week, it’s a full-service check-up on ten headlines that forgot to match their own paragraphs:

the $14-billion “disaster” that wasn’t,

the Fed’s optimistic rate-cut asterisk,

Amazon’s AI “layoffs,”

consumer confidence’s ...

At 3:31 a.m. in Minneapolis, a sound echoes through the dark — a call that now defines a city’s new idea of “inclusion.”

From that single moment, this episode unpacks the story we’ve all been sold: that diversity automatically makes us stronger.

But what happens when inclusion becomes a script, disagreement becomes hate, and silence becomes the safest response?

We trace the shift from tolerance to enforcement — from slogans to censors...

Something about the obesity epidemic doesn’t add up.

Despite decades of “awareness,” our population keeps getting sicker, younger, and more dependent — while the system built to fix it keeps breaking profit records.

In this episode of Think First, host Jim Detjen unpacks how food engineering, pharmaceutical incentives, and shame-based media narratives quietly reinforce one another — turning health into a subscription model.

Featuring ...

When Washington shuts down, the headlines talk about politics. But at kitchen tables in Kansas, California, and overseas bases, it’s military and veteran families who feel it first.

In this episode, Jim Detjen unpacks the gap between the story we’re told and the reality families live — from furloughed civilians to unpaid Border Patrol agents, to kids wondering why “back pay later” doesn’t buy Pop-Tarts tonight.

Featuring reporting fr...

They told us Wikipedia was the “free encyclopedia anyone can edit.”

What they didn’t tell us is how it edits you back.

In this episode of Think First, Jim Detjen pulls apart the myth of Wikipedia’s neutrality — exposing how “fringe” labels erase arguments, how intelligence agencies treat it like a propaganda shop, and why Tucker Carlson was left stunned when co-founder Larry Sanger admitted just how compromised the site has become.

Th...

In 1921, artist-turned-polymath Walter Russell claimed to spend 39 days in a coma-like “illumination,” tapping the very “source of all knowledge.” His revelations became The Universal One — a sweeping vision of reality as crystallized light, consciousness, and rhythm. Nearly every scientist dismissed him as mad. Except Nikola Tesla.

This episode unpacks the gaslighting Russell faced, the poetic truths that turned him into a cult pro...