Jeff Dornik
- Apr 4, 2019
- 3 min read

My First Conversation

The very first guest for my podcast Conversations with Jeff was Carl Crew. Carl is an actor, a screenwriter and he’s also the owner of a venue, nightclub, or you could even call it a freak show club in North Hollywood called the California Institute of Abnormalarts, or better known as the CIA.

Now, the reason why I wanted Carl to be my very first guest is because of the controversy that surrounds my relationship to him. He is family. He is my wife’s uncle. But here’s the thing: He’s also a Christian. Now, you could think: he’s an actor, he’s been in a bunch of horror comedy movies, he owns a freakshow nightclub, he’s got a dead clown at his place. He’s a very interesting person. But he’s also a follower of Christ. He’s also a Christian, and a lot of the people around him have seen the tremendous growth in his spiritual life. God has worked immensely in his life.

So what I wanted to do was bring him on. I wanted to ask him some questions. I wanted to ask him how does being in Hollywood and how does being in this entertainment world that is very anti-Christian, how do you correlate that with being a believer, in the midst of all this chaos and craziness and unbiblical ways of life? How do you correlate the two worlds where you can be in the world but not of it? So I’m going to be having that conversation.

But the other thing that I wanted to address before going into this Conversation was how many Christian have attacked him and have attacked me for not denouncing him as a believer. Because what ends up happening is you have a group of people. They all look the same, they all act the same, they all believe the same, they all talk the same, and because he doesn’t fit those molds, they want to condemn him. They tried to destroy me, they tried to destroy the network I was on originally for my podcast. They tried to do whatever they could, and they were using him and trying to destroy him. So what I wanted to do was I wanted to bring him on as my very first guest and talk through some of these issues and discuss it.

Now, I went up there. I went to the California Institute of Abnormalarts. We sat down and we had about a 45 minute conversation, and that’s what you guys can watch or listen to. Unedited and straight through.

Here's the point: I’m not trying to justify him, I’m not trying to justify anything that he says or does. I’m not trying to put him up on a pedestal to say that he’s an amazing Bible teacher or that we should all follow him. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m just trying to sit down with a guy that’s a believer, who’s following after Christ, and just have a conversation and hear his story and hear his background. And you guys can come along for the ride!

If you guys like what he says, great! If you don’t, great! Either way, that’s fine. But what I’d like to do is have a rational conversation about the issues. So that’s what Carl and I are going to do. We’re going to sit down, and we’re going to have a fun conversation.

This is adapted from the transcription of Conversations with Jeff with Carl Crew. You can watch or listen to the full episode below.