If you’ve been following the trashcan fire that is the Islamic State (ISIS) these past few years, you’ll know this: their leader is about as gregarious as a burlap sack of nuclear waste.

He’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. And he’s not a cool cat. At all (he’s a rapist, a murderer, a monster).

And, if he hadn’t duped a bunch of uneducated, virgin-thirsty, gullible young men in Iraq and Syria (in the immediate aftermath of both Saddam’s and bin Laden deaths) into having them eventually believe him to a “caliph” — after he conjured up a Keyser Soze-like backstory that’s mostly bogus and mythologized — he’d still be in some little room reading religious texts, as “insignificant”, alone and invisible as one former Islamist fighter, Ahmed al-Dabash, remembers him. Just a boring, monotheistic mongrel, nerding out and going over old material.

Instead, you currently get $25 million if you kill or capture him. The demise of the “Invisible Sheikh”, as he’s sometimes called, is worth that much dough. If the New York Yankees caught or shot him in the head, they wouldn’t have to worry about paying A-Rod next season.

For the most part Baghdadi’s been silent, especially these past few months. That is until Saturday, when a 24-minute audio recording of him voicing his hot takes got published on Twitter. The following are the most piping/broiling of his tired bombast.

On the coalition’s airstrikes aimed to destroy his terrorist organization:

“Be confident that God will grant victory to those who worship him, and hear the good news that our state is doing well. The more intense the war against it, the purer it becomes and the tougher it gets,” he said, according to Reuters.

On the coalition’s (i.e. the West) refusal to send an all-out surge of ground troops to both Iraq and Syria:

“Each country is pushing in another to get it trapped … but they do not dare come here because their hearts are filled with terror of confronting the Mujahideen … and because they learned their lesson in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

On a 1,400-year-old prophecy that is clearly baloney but that he (of course) takes seriously about a magical city called “Dabiq” that will host a final battle of their jihadi crusade where they’ll come out victorious then overtake Rome (because Rome is still the most powerful city in the world according to Professor Baghdadi — this is what happens when you read the same book over and over again) to rule the world which, by the way, will then abruptly end! Ha!

“They know what await them in Dabiq and Ghouta … it’s defeat and destruction. They know it’s the final battle, and subsequently we will conquer them when they no longer could conquer us … and Islam anew prevails over the world until the end of time.”

He mentions something about how they still hate Israel. “We’re getting closer to you”, he says to them in the recording. He also ridicules the Saudi-led terror force. He then — whoa! get this! — admits some defeat, but then tries to paint over it with more religious propaganda (an argument that explains everything explains nothing, someone text him this immediately, he’s clearly never read Dawkins):

“Then we were struck by hardship and strife … and God’s trial intensified … so much so that the Islamic State was driven out from areas it conquered and controlled … and the land has narrowed down on us … to the point where the Islamic State enemies thought they defeated and exterminated it.”

This from CBS News:

Research firm IHS, which has been monitoring the conflicts in Iraq and Syria,recently published an analysis suggesting that ISIS has consistently lost territory month-over-month throughout 2015. Using open source intelligence, including social media and sources inside the countries, the team at IHS estimated that ISIS’ “caliphate” shrunk by 14 percent since the beginning of 2015.

Baghdadi did not explicitly threaten retaliation in the West against the airstrikes that target his men on an almost daily basis now, but he did say that those attacking ISIS will pay for their aggression.