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March 22, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:40
A LIVING CONSTITUTION? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep294
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I'm going to talk today about Biden's nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, and the whole idea of a living constitution, which strikes me as a contradiction in terms.
The New York Times has confirmed that Hunter Biden's laptop is authentic.
So how could dozens, I mean 51 top intelligence officials, publicly asserted it was Russian disinformation?
I want to contrast some of the shallow propositions of critical race theory with the important empirical work of the black economist Thomas Sowell.
And I'm going to join Dante in one of the deepest circles of hell, inhabited by a self-described fox named Guido da Montefeltro.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Biden's nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Katonji Brown-Jackson, is before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
And I haven't been following this testimony very closely.
I'll talk a little bit more about some of the specifics of it tomorrow.
But I wanted here to frame the broad issue that is under consideration here.
And the broad issue is, does the Constitution matter at all?
In other words, Do we have a judge here that is going to make decisions according to and in conformity with the Constitution?
Yes or no? Now, there's been some talk on the part of the Biden administration and the left about a living Constitution.
Part of what I want to argue here is that there's no such thing as a living Constitution.
All constitutions are inherently dead.
Just like all laws are dead.
Now, by dead, I don't mean that you can't change the law.
The Constitution, in fact, can be amended.
It's not easy to do it, but there is a process of amendment and it's been done more than 20 times.
But... Apart from the amendment process, the Constitution remains, you may say, inert, lifeless, and dead in the same way that all laws need to be in order for them not only to be predictable, but also to mean something.
I mean, think about it. What if somebody were to say, well, you know, we don't really have a speed limit.
We have a living speed limit.
What does that mean? Either there's a speed limit or there isn't.
And if there is a speed limit, it's a specified number, and in this particular jurisdiction, at least while the law holds, you can't go over 65 or you can't go over 75, and that's what it is.
And a judge can't say, well, in this particular situation, I thought it okay for this guy to go 90 because, in my opinion, there was no real danger being posed on the highway.
No, that's the law.
And the Constitution isn't just a law, it is the supreme law.
So, the point I think here, the problem with Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson is we're not having some argument over how to read the Constitution.
There are legitimate debates about how to read the Constitution.
There were arguments, for example, Over whether or not the Constitution sanctions a national bank.
Jefferson and Hamilton disagreed about it.
But what they didn't disagree about is that they had to consult the Constitution and its both explicit and implicit meanings in order to resolve their dispute.
No one thought, well, this is just a living document.
Well, you know what? It's obsolete the moment it was written.
There's new knowledge that comes in that enables us to make decisions.
We don't have to really rely on this antiquated document.
So that's really where the problem is.
The problem is whether Judge Kentanji Brown Jackson is bound by the Constitution or not.
And if she's not, she's not a judge.
Because a judge whose decisions are not based upon the text and the principles of the Constitution is not a judge, but an activist masquerading as a judge.
Now, I think this is actually why she got the nomination.
The left is actually very kind of clear-eyed and ruthless about it.
They just say, listen, when we want to judge, we want somebody who's going to vote our way all the time, at least on all critical issues.
Republicans often will say, no, we want to judge if we can do this and who can do that and who loves learning and who's, you know, went to one of the top law schools and believes in the original meaning of the text and so on.
The left doesn't care about any of that.
They want votes on their side, and they've picked some.
They were a little unsure about Michelle Childs.
This is the other woman that both Lindsey Graham as well as Jim Clyburn were pushing from South Carolina.
But the problem with Michelle Childs was that they felt she might be too moderate.
She may not side with them on some important issues.
And so the progressives, who put a lot of money into these court fights, essentially vetoed her.
And Biden, of course, mumblingly went along with that.
That's how we got Judge Jackson.
Now, interestingly, from the little I've seen of the hearings so far, it doesn't look to me that the Republicans have the appetite to really go after this woman, to really attack her in the same way that the left attacked Kavanaugh.
And I think that as long as Republicans have this approach where sort of, you sucker punch our nominees and we'll take the high road, the left is gonna keep doing it.
In other words, we're gonna be getting more Kavanaughs because the left is able to bruise our nominees, even with fabricated allegations, And get away with it, at least get away with not having the kind of retaliation that they deserve.
Now, this business about judicial activism, of just sort of leapfrogging over the Constitution, I think a lot of that was sanctified by the Brown decision going back to 1954.
Essentially, the judges in the Brown decision, this was a decision, by the way, that overturned segregation, and so it's one of those kind of iconic decisions, But the judges made the mistake in that decision of basically saying that there's new social science evidence that shows that it's stigmatizing to blacks to be in segregated schools.
And so we're going to make a decision not really based on the Constitution per se, but rather just based upon this kind of new pragmatic evidence that's come in, this new empirical data that's come in, and in that they essentially cleared the way For future judges to start ignoring the Constitution, of course, the most grotesque example of ignoring the Constitution, Roe v.
Wade, a right to privacy that is nowhere specified in the Constitution.
Well, yes, there's a Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure, but I think nobody would reasonably say that this right to unreasonable search and seizure applies to the womb.
You can't unreasonably search and seize my womb.
No. There was a kind of generic right to privacy that the judges themselves admitted came out of nowhere, or in their words, came out of, quote, penumbras in the Constitution.
It's kind of sort of the idea that it's in there somewhere.
We can't really find it, but...
So this is the issue.
Do we want judges who are impartial?
Do we want judges who are bound by the law?
Do we want judges who play the role of, say, an umpire in a baseball game?
Or do we want judges who are activists, judges who are playing on one team instead of the other?
And in that sense, what we find is that these people, although they wear judicial robes and they have the name judge in front of their name, they're not real judges.
They're Essentially, impersonators who are pretending to be judges.
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The only thing you've got to do is make sure you use promo code DINESH. The New York Times has confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop.
Now, we didn't need the New York Times to do that.
Simple truth of it is everyone knew that this laptop was authentic.
Why? Because when the New York Post first published its article about the laptop—this was in October, by the way, before the election— A bunch of news outlets went rushing to the computer repair guy who had provided the laptop, where Hunter Biden had left the laptop.
And he said, yeah, it's authentic.
It's his laptop.
And then comes Hunter Biden's business partner, Bobby Ulinski, to confirm the information on the laptop.
And yet the left did everything it could to kill that story.
The media, in a sense, coordinated to not report on it.
Twitter, of course, shut down the New York Post article.
Facebook said that they would not feature the article until they fact-checked it, which had never happened.
And so, in effect, they killed it also.
And then, very interestingly, 51 senior intelligence officials.
These are former retired directors of the CIA. People like that.
People like... Like John Brennan, former CIA director.
Mike Hayden, former CIA director.
Leon Panetta, former defense secretary.
John McLaughlin, former acting CIA director.
All these top guys come out and go, this laptop is Russian disinformation.
Now, we know that all these guys were lying.
Either they were lying or they were incompetent.
And, of course, their statement that this was Russian disinformation provided then a basis for Democrats to say, there's nothing to this, to provide a justification for not covering the story, dismissing the laptop.
I mean, think about it. This laptop and the It's an expose of the crimes of the Biden family.
By the way, it exposed the fact that Biden was lying when he said he knew nothing about his son's business.
The laptop showed he was actually actively present.
And so this would probably have sunk Biden.
And the left knew it.
That's why it was so important for them to shut this down.
That's why they essentially got this group of 51, the gang of 51, let's call them, to make this claim.
Based on supposed intelligence that was available to them.
Now, it's possible, of course, that these 51 guys are just 51 fools, 51 idiots.
And if that's the case, I guess it would explain a little bit about why we were so unprepared for 9-11, why we couldn't find bin Laden, why we were wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, why nobody seemed to predict how an Afghan withdrawal would go.
I mean, it could be that we just have low IQ guys in the field of, ironically called, intelligence.
Very unintelligent intelligence officials.
But I don't think that's what it is.
I think what it is is that you basically have People who are fundamentally dishonest, dishonest to their core, ideological partisans who are using their title in order to state something that they know to be false.
They kind of knew the laptop was right.
They knew it was authentic. The New York Times' confirmation is just, in a sense, saying what everybody already knows.
But they went to bat for Biden because they wanted to pull him over the finish line.
They wanted to make sure that Trump was defeated.
And so what the New York Post does now is they contact all these guys.
And they ask them, hey, do you take back your earlier statement where you said it was Russian disinformation?
I think what's really fascinating is that all of them won't respond.
And so, Michael Morell, former CIA acting director, now at George Mason University.
No response. Doug Wise, former Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director, now at the University of New Mexico.
No response. Nick Rasmussen, former National Counterterrorism Center director, now head of some global internet center.
No response. Mike Hayden, no response.
Jim Clapper, no response.
Leon Panetta, no response.
John Brennan, no response.
John McLaughlin, no response.
So all of these guys are now hiding under their desk and refusing to call back.
Why? It's kind of like they've been caught out in a lie, but they know that the media even now is going to protect them.
They're not going to find gangs of reporters and people taking their photo as they come out of their homes.
And so what they say is, let's just ride it out.
Let's just basically say nothing.
We'll let the storm pass.
It will all go away. And essentially, we will have gotten away with the lie.
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I'm reading a very interesting book about the economist Thomas Sowell, by the way my former colleague at the Hoover Institution, someone I got to know fairly well, not extremely well, but fairly well over the years. And the book is called Maverick, a biography of It's by the Wall Street Journal writer Jason Reilly.
An excellent book so far.
And I'll talk more about the book as I get further through it.
But I thought as I'm reading through this, it really strikes me the contrast between Sowell's Just kind of limpid and limpian and empirical work.
The soundness of it and the thoroughness of it compared with the preposterous assertions of these pundits of critical race theory.
I just saw something today on social media and I retweeted it.
Nicole... Hannah Jones.
And she goes, tipping. Tipping is a practice that goes back to slavery.
And then she goes on to say, you know, have you ever wondered why tipping is only in America and nowhere else around the world?
That's because it goes back to the slave plantation.
This is basically Nicole Hannah-Jones.
I'm thinking, this is one of the stupidest statements I've ever read.
First of all, tipping is universal.
I grew up in India. People tip in restaurants all the time.
I've been all over Europe.
Tipping is very common in Europe.
So first of all, the idea that tipping is only American is nonsense.
Number two, What is Nicole Hannah-Jones implying?
I mean, slavery is a form of forced and unpaid labor.
Is she saying that on the plantations it was normal practice for masters to tip their slaves?
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What? I think historians worldwide are waiting with bated breath for Nicola Hannah-Jones to explain, and she's not going to explain, because these are people who essentially say stupid things and expect never to be called on it.
By the way, this topic of critical race theory is also going to come up with Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Marsha Blackburn was setting the stage for it in the little bit I saw of the hearings.
She was raising the issue, and as I say, I'll delve a little bit more into it tomorrow.
By the way, speaking of Nicole Hannah-Jones, she's really upset at all these laws that are being passed around the country outlawing critical race theory.
Here's what she goes. Our New York Times journalism is being banned from being taught by name in state law.
Let me repeat, our New York Times journalism.
As though it's inherently scandalous that New York Times journalism is being banned.
I mean, this to me is like, and this is my tweet about it, I say, this is like a golden apple, once ripe, but now rotten and crawling with maggots, protesting, no one wants me, but I'm a golden apple.
Well, yeah, you used to be a golden apple.
Now you're crawling with maggots.
Well, back to Thomas Sowell, because here's a guy of true distinction.
By the way, a guy who grew up poor, and I guess he was born in Charlotte, but then was raised in New York City.
He worked a variety of jobs.
He was a Western Union messenger.
He was a helper in machine shops.
He was a civil service clerk.
Until he was drafted into the Korean War.
And then here's a guy who produced this kind of immense body of scholarly work.
I believe more than 30 books.
He's way ahead of me.
And books that have a philosophical trust and books that have an empirical trust.
Probably the work that has the most The philosophical thrust was a book called A Conflict of Visions, 1987, which talked about the two kind of rival visions of the left and the right, and how they're based upon two different understandings of human nature.
One, the more, as Sowell calls it, constrained view, and the other, the more expansive view of human nature.
I want to tell a couple of funny stories about Sol because they kind of get to his personality.
Sol once told me that when he wrote his first book, I forget if it was Markets and Minorities or Race and Economics, in any event, Sol said, I sent my book in to, I think it was Oxford University Press.
It was 300 pages with all these footnotes.
And he says it I didn't hear from them for a year.
And then I got back my manuscript and it was marked on every single page with questions and changes and notations and changes of the punctuation and the grammar.
And basically, I guess what he says, what I thought they were saying is that if you want the book published, you have to make all these changes.
And Sol said, I basically sent the manuscript exactly the way it is without even going through it back to them and said, listen, either you publish the book exactly as is the way I sent it to you or don't publish it at all.
And he goes, I didn't hear from them for another year.
And then he says, finally, I got a package in the mail.
I opened it and it was my book published by them.
So they decided to go back to the original, drop all their silly questions and punctuations and all their changes and publish his book the way he wrote it.
And this was Saul. He was in some ways imperious in that he felt, this is the way you do things and I don't want to be trifled with.
He was, in that sense, a person who knew what he wanted.
But he was a careful researcher and he was someone who...
Had ideas, but always tested them against the validity of experience.
And I think that's what distinguishes Thomas Sowell and his magnificent career versus the shallow assertions of critical race theory.
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So guys, we've talked often on the podcast about the importance of culture.
And by culture here, we mean art and we mean music and painting and movies.
And but it's one thing to talk about.
It's another thing to do it and to make a career or make a living at it.
Debbie and I are delighted to welcome to the podcast.
Well, an old friend of yours, honey, Wayne Kerr.
He's an internationally acclaimed Christian songwriter and musician.
recording artist. He's toured the U.S. and also Asia extensively over the last quarter century.
He currently serves as worship leader of Grace Fellowship Church in Katy, Texas.
He's also an award-winning painter.
And he has a new book.
It's called Braving.
And in the book, Wayne interviews a number of creative entrepreneurs.
The subtitle is The Art of Pursuing What Makes You Come Alive.
And honey, I'm meeting Wayne for the first time, but you've told me a lot about him, and he's been kind of a mentor to you.
Yes, definitely.
We go back about 25 years, and he really was an inspiration to me actually doing a CD. Wayne has like 14 or 15 CDs, but at the time, I think he was coming out with the first one, and it really motivated me.
And of course, I didn't understand what worship was or any of that.
And I learned a lot from him.
So super thrilled to have him on the podcast today.
I mean, Wayne, one of the cool things is Debbie often talks to me about how, you know, there's the reputation of the starving artist and we can add to it the starving musician.
You've made a really successful career with both.
And so you are in that sense, a creative entrepreneur.
And that's also what your book is about.
Let's talk about you first.
When did you sort of discover the creative streak and then when did you learn to combine it with the entrepreneurial element?
Yeah, well, what's funny is, so even when I was a kid, it was just in my bones, I guess.
I would go to school and I would draw little mazes in the shape of like a guitar or in the shape of a dog.
And other kids would pay me a quarter.
And so I'm making mazes when I should be working on math, you know, and I'm like, I just got a few more mazes to make one second, you know.
So I was just having fun and seeing that it was fun for other kids.
And so I was the art kid growing up, you know, and always loved music, but I never thought to play an instrument or anything like that.
And so I talked my parents into that I could go to college to study art, but I was the first one in my family to even go to college.
So my sister wasn't able to go to college.
Neither of my parents had. And so for them to say to support, hey, you can do it.
But it was art. My dad was a little bit like people are going to pay you to do art work, you know, and I was like, I don't know.
So I talked him into it.
And then I go to school, and about a year into being at college, I discovered the piano, and I could hear something on the radio, like a Chicago song or Toto or whatever, and I could find it, and it made sense somehow in my brain to play along.
I wasn't really great, technically, but it made sense to play along.
And I remember I came home about halfway through my college time and I said, Dad, Mom, I'm ready to drop out of school and be a musician now, which is a worse option than the artist, you know?
And my parents were like, what?
But they always supported me along those little choices.
And I think part of it was just seeing that each time if I took a baby step, seeing that the ceiling didn't fall and that it was okay, but then I learned new things and pursue it.
The next baby step to learn more and be a lifelong learner.
Yeah. I mean, Wayne, you know that there are people who sing beautifully who have never been able to make it big.
And then there are famous singers who are, you can say, only mediocre in terms of talent, but they must have something.
And maybe it's marketing.
So talk about how you kind of discovered the business of music.
And by the business, I don't mean starting a business.
I just mean the fact that you have to market your stuff.
Yeah. And I tell you, with the fact that it was ministry as well, it was always a strange balance.
And I remember in the early stages, I went to a deal that Rich Mullins, producer, was putting on a little conference.
And he talked about this artist, Rich Mullins, who was an amazing, amazing man, right, who would do ministry and was selling lots and lots of records.
But he didn't want to know how much he was selling.
He told the label to pay him whatever the average American was receiving, right?
And that's what he wanted to receive because he didn't want to mix the oil and water of your financial goals or dreams, which aren't bad things.
There's normal life things, but also with going to share with the gospel of Jesus with people, right?
So that just first put that seed in my mind to go, okay, those are two separate things.
And You know, through the years of traveling to begin to do music, there may be things that, events that I did that looked great on a resume to say, there are 4,000 people at this or 12,000 people.
But the very next weekend, I'd be at something with 18 kids and I'd be like, scoot in kids, come children.
You know, and it's like, but that was just as impactful to me and just as powerful.
And so I think just baby steps along the way learning, well, there is a certain business part that needs to happen because you might create great music in your room, but you've got to take the step to go to share it with people.
And that's the scary part when it interacts with the world, right?
And when you take the faith step to say, I'm going to put it out there and see what happens.
Yeah. How would you, Debbie mentions, you know, you've done these tours in the U.S. and Asia.
Now, was your strategy to sort of either take a CD and send it out to these pastors and say, hey guys, this is basically what I can do.
Is this something that you might be interested in doing?
In other words, how do you put yourself out there so that they become aware of your work?
Because some people think, well, let me just rely on word of mouth.
But word of mouth is often not sufficient, is it?
Yeah. Well, and funny, like, again, 20 years ago, when I was beginning all of this journey, there was no, like, the social media and the YouTube options that we're using right now.
For me, and it's still the most important to me, it's relationships.
So I could look back and trace just relationships with people and how...
If someone's saying, can you come to our camp?
And there's 20 kids there.
And I would go and do my very best and try and encourage these kiddos.
But there may be someone there who was like, hey, we're putting this event on over here that has 300 people.
It's in six months. Could you come?
And I'd say, I guess. Or can you come to this thing?
And it really began to be like a tree, trusting God to see like, wow, where this leads.
Where it's out of my control actually like because you can't crown micromanage only so many things But you can't control what happens once it gets out there into people's ears people will receive it or not receive it Yeah, but the relationships I still treasure Today, yeah, you know, so that's been a key thing and I think a lot of people think well, I'll not worry about relationships I'll trample on people just so that I can get ahead. Well, guess what? You know, there's not a lot of fruit in that Yeah, I remember Wayne when we every every new well every Christmas Eve
we would sing Oh Holy Night.
And every Christmas, I'd be like, well, I wonder if Wayne can do it, because he might be off touring, and he may not be able to do it.
And people would always, are you guys going to do O Holy Night?
Are you going to be able to do O Holy Night?
And boy, we did O Holy Night for how many years?
I mean, lots. Yeah.
Yes. But anyway, it's just super cool.
And I tell Dinesh, it's like, you know, not only is he talented, you should hear him on the piano, you should hear him singing, but he's able to make a really nice living out of it.
And not only that, but also spread the gospel, which is super important.
Wayne, talk about your painting.
You said that you started this out when you were really young.
Did you kind of pivot career-wise into music and are now kind of circling back to painting?
Or did you keep both paths kind of full steam all through?
Yeah, it was, I really hit the pause button pretty big on the art stuff because it was really like so many things were, the doors were opening with music and it was, it was the creative part of me was coming alive, creating, you know, music and, you know, just seeing that impact people.
And so that became a snowball.
And so I did put the pause button.
I did some graphic design things for like album covers or stuff, but I didn't paint at all.
So literally for probably 20 years, I put it down.
And about five years ago, I was like, I kind of miss this stuff.
And I did some work.
And then I did a little pop-up show in Simonson, Texas.
And I didn't tell anyone because I didn't want people who are my friends to come and say, we like your music, so that's an ugly cow, but we'll buy one for our house or whatever.
But going to that, and I didn't know anyone there.
And just really neat to see, wow, art has an impact on people.
And it was stirring something up in me again.
And so then, again, it's a different little snowball now where I started doing some things with some different shows and then a few out-of-state things and a few galleries here and there.
And Bucky's is like a company that does stuff here in Texas and different states.
And I'm like, oh, what's this about now?
You know, so just trying to do my best and enjoy the ride.
So. Let's take a pause, Wayne.
When we come back, let's talk more about you and also about your book Braving and your conversations with other creative entrepreneurs.
Great. Awesome.
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Debbie and I are back with songwriter and recording artist and painter and author, Wayne Kerr.
And we want to talk about Wayne's book, which is called Braving, The Art of Pursuing What Makes You Come Alive.
Yeah, Wayne, this is an awesome book.
And I read it several months ago.
Really, really liked it.
I especially liked your story, your personal story about planting the trees.
I thought that was super, super cool.
But the other chapter that I really liked was get good at failing.
Because so many of us...
We don't like to fail.
And we really do think of, I mean, we think of the failure as a failure.
And I think that you point out that it's actually not.
Can you talk a little bit about failing?
Yes, for sure. And really, you know, the backdrop on the whole thing of why to do this book was to talk to other people.
And find out the things that I don't know.
Like, I don't know all there is to know about these subjects.
I just wanted to reach out and be inspired and hear other people's stories.
And so hearing other people like Johnny Caraba and Grammy-winning artists talk about the times that they had ups and downs and the times that...
That other people might think, well, this is what success means to you.
But then when you sit and have a conversation with them, you realize, oh, wow, okay, they're just a person.
And if they fell and failed at something, that didn't mean that they were a failure.
It meant, okay, well, what do I learn from this?
And then move on. My two little girls, I try and share with them all the time.
It's not about trying to do things perfectly, because how are we going to grow?
If you instantly get on a bike, you're not just going to go ride your bike.
At six years old, you have to fall over, and then you go, oh, that's why, because I was wiggling this, or I wasn't pedaling.
You just learn new things.
And then as it goes along, you say, hey, okay, the sky didn't fall, and it was okay.
I learned some things from this, and I'm going to Keep on going.
And I'm going to grow from that.
Wayne, would you say, you know, for you and also for the people that you talk to, I mean, for those of us who are on the outside, we listen to a song or we look at a piece of art and it almost seems magical.
In other words, where did this person figure out how to do this, right?
Do you think that art is...
Kind of an inspiration that sort of comes from outside of you?
Or is it some sort of a craft that you can learn, kind of like the carpentry, making a table?
What category does it fall into?
How does it come to you to, let's just say, to do a painting or even to compose a song?
Yeah. And I think the answer is both.
You know, it's one of these things like I heard the story of when the guys who formed the Eagles band when they moved to California, they were in this apartment.
And then the apartment below them was Jackson Brown.
And every day at 8am, they would hear his tea pot go off.
And they're like, what's that guy doing?
And he was getting up working on songwriting.
And at noon, his teapot would go off and he's working on songwriting.
And they were just sleeping in from partying and doing whatever.
But every day he got up and he worked on his songwriting every day, every day.
And he's won Grammys, you know.
But there's the inspirational part where you need to put your full self into it.
Like one of the chapters is called Merakai, where it's a Greek word that means I'm literally going to put part of myself.
I'm going to leave part of myself into this work because I'm so passionate about it.
And that's the part I think that when people, they people can sense when something is someone is just faking it, or they really cared about what they're saying, their care about what they're putting forward.
And that's true. And like what you guys are doing, sharing The message of hope and truth, you know, or if we're like sharing the truth of the gospel or making a piece of art or working, being with my little children and saying, I have these 10 minutes, I want to put myself into this.
I think it's a little of both.
You want to have the inspiration, but also you can't just say, I'm going to wait around for a great idea and I'll be on my couch.
Until that comes, it's like, keep working.
And when you're, there's plenty of times I'll take a painting and just start over, paint it white again.
It's like, that one is not to be seen by the public.
We're going to start over. It's okay.
Yeah. It's really cool how you interviewed people that are just in different, different stages of life, different careers.
Yeah. You know, you interviewed, as you mentioned, Johnny Caraba.
Now, that's Caraba's, you know?
So, obviously, he had a different way of doing things than, say, you know, one of the other people that you interviewed.
I can't remember the name of the guy, the musician that was...
That was your mentor.
But I thought that that was really, really a cool story too.
Yeah. And again, just hearing different people's, no one has the same story.
That's like one of the most cool things that really, like I can say, if someone is watching this right now, I just hope that you would get encouraged and remember that there's not another you.
Like the world needs you to be you.
And that's what I would tell kids at youth camps.
Like, look at your fingers. No one else at this camp has your fingerprint.
No one else in this country has your fingerprint.
You can be a twin and have the same DNA, but you'll have different fingerprints.
Like, you're unique.
You know what, Wayne? I think, Wayne, you're making a point here, which I'd like to make more explicit, and that is you're saying that I think?
And I remember, you know, there was a preacher who used to say to me, you know, your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.
And so the idea here is to, by giving significance and importance to who you are, you end up living a better and more fulfilled life, right?
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
Because, I mean, at the end of the day, is it like just creating the piece of work that I created in 2001, like that album that I loved at that point?
Right? But life continues on.
I continue on. We all continue on.
You grow from that.
And, but our heart is on a journey.
And that's really one, that's why the title is like, what makes your heart come alive?
It's, it may be tied with your vocation in some ways, but it's really deeper than that.
It's not just what we do. It's really who you are, you know, like dig beneath the soil a little bit.
And with those conversations, that's, that's what surprised me that the journey of the book was, I just wanted to make a journal for myself talking to some of these people.
I was at sabbatical and I was having a couple months off.
And then I was getting all these nuggets from people and I thought, well, I want to share this.
I don't have a huge audience, but if I can share some of these truths about people's lives, it's not just about, hey, here's a way to work to get ahead.
It's more like what really matters and what makes your heart come alive.
Because in the overflow of that, it will impact other people.
Well, Wayne, you frame it also nicely as a workbook.
I like the fact that at the end of the chapters, you have sort of questions.
So the audience becomes a participant in the book itself.
Hey, Wayne Kurt, thank you so much for joining Debbie and me on the podcast.
We really appreciate it.
Amazing, y'all. Thank you so much.
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A friend of mine sent me an article that I find very interesting and somewhat startling.
And the article is called, New Experiment Could Confirm the Fifth State of Matter in the Universe.
Now, at first class, I'm going to ask, Dinesh, why do you read such articles?
What does this have to do with anything?
Well, here's what it has to do with.
Our universe is complex, and...
The question that people have asked really for centuries is, is our universe the product of some kind of intelligent design?
Now, when we talk about intelligent design, we're talking about indications of knowledge or information or planning that are somehow implanted in the universe itself.
Now, we know that life...
DNA is encoded by DNA. And DNA is, you can say, the intelligence, the information that drives all of life.
And DNA, by the way, is not limited to human beings or mammals or even all animals.
Even plants have DNA. All living creatures have the DNA molecule, which is known to be unbelievably complex and functions almost like a computer program.
I mean, even atheists like Richard Dawkins marvel at the intricacy.
An ingenuity of the DNA molecule and of the living cell.
And by the way, no one can say that the living cell evolved.
Evolution is about how some forms of life transmute into others.
It's not about how we got life in the first place.
So the cell, which is the bedrock of life, was there already.
And the cell is a product of, it seems, enormous and intricate design.
But what about the rest of matter?
It was believed for centuries, I think it's believed to now, that the rest of matter has no information in it.
The rest of matter is, you can say, inert.
Take a stone, and a stone is made up, in fact, of atoms, and the atoms themselves are made up of quarks and electrons.
But the idea is that matter By itself, it has four possible states.
Matter can be in the solid state, it can be in the liquid state, it can be in the gaseous or gas state, and it can be in the plasma state.
And that's it. Those are the four states of matter.
End of story. That's physics until 2022.
But, as it turns out, a physicist named Melvin Vobson From the University of Portsmouth has just released a study in which he says, he offers the theory, and it's a theory, but it's a theory that he believes that he can test and prove one way or the other.
The theory is that matter has a fifth state, and this fifth state is the information state of matter.
What? What this would mean is that there is not just information in a DNA or living cell, but there's information in, quote, dead matter also.
Now, basically what Watson is saying is that this information itself has mass.
So this is fascinating. The information isn't just abstract, it actually has physical mass.
And he's arguing that elementary particles, which are the smallest building blocks of the universe, can store information about themselves in exactly the way that human beings have DNA. Now, this is Bobson.
He says, listen, this would be a eureka moment.
It would change physics as we know it.
It wouldn't conflict with any existing laws of physics.
He says, all it does is complement physics with something new.
I think if Vopsin's theory holds up, it shows that information is the building block of the whole universe, of life and non-life alike.
And Vopsin even says that information, this information, could be the elusive, quote, dark matter.
That makes up almost one-third of our universe.
By the way, about 71% of our universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy.
And what we can say about dark matter is not a lot because it's dark.
People don't know anything about it.
And what we can say about dark energy is dark because people don't know anything about it.
That's why it's called dark matter, dark energy.
So if those mysteries could somehow be illuminated, this would be Fascinating.
So, Vopsin now has apparently a technique, and the idea is that you blast this matter with particles of what is sometimes called antimatter.
Normally, the two annihilate each other.
But Vopsin's point is, when the two annihilate each other, matter and antimatter, particles colliding, he goes, the information's got to go somewhere.
And he goes, we can catch it.
We can trap the information.
Why? Because that information basically becomes...
He says low-energy infrared protons.
So by measuring the protons, he believes that you can measure the exact amount of informational energy that is in the mass.
I think all of this is really fascinating.
It's very exciting. It really opens a new door for physics.
And so... Obviously, we need experimental confirmation of what this physicist is saying, but I think if it turns out to be true, it is further evidence, if more is needed, of the idea that our universe, not just living creatures, but the universe as a whole, is intelligently designed.
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We're now deep in the circles of hell in Dante's Inferno.
In fact, we're talking about, we talked last time about Inferno 26, which is the In which we focused on the classical hero Odysseus, whom Dante calls Ulysses.
And now we're going to talk about Canto 27 and a contemporary figure, a contemporary of Dante's, someone who lived in the previous generation, a northern Italian Ghibelline politician, a very skillful man, a very cunning man.
He calls himself a fox.
And his name is Guido da Montefeltro.
Now, before we get to Guido, I want to talk for a moment about Ulysses, because we kind of have to read Ulysses and Guido side by side.
And as I mentioned the last time, with Ulysses, it's not obvious what his...
This is the circle of fraud, but what the fraud is.
And we discover that the fraud is implicit.
Ulysses is not a kind of open fraudster.
Well, he was a little more open in the sense that he...
When he devised the fraud of the golden...
Of the Trojan horse.
That was a fraud.
But Dante doesn't fault him for that because that's a military tactic.
And what Dante does is fault him for an implicit fraud, namely leading a bunch of old men to their deaths.
Not for their sake, but for his own sake.
Ulysses wants to make one final voyage.
He's driven by his restless ambition, and he sacrifices his men and himself, as it turns out, to pursue this kind of knowledge of all human things, including all human vices.
And we see here a clue, not only to Guido and Amonti Feltro, because when you find two guys in the same circle, we always need to relate them one to the other.
But we also see the temptation here for Dante, because Dante, like Ulysses, is a very capable guy.
And Dante, like Ulysses, knows that.
And Dante, like Ulysses, knows that he has a power over other people.
He has the power of persuasion, of communication, and so the temptation is to misuse that power, to abuse it.
And so one of the lessons for Dante in these circles is don't be a fraudster.
Recognize that with great talent comes great responsibility.
And I think this is why Dante devotes, really, two whole cantos to a single vice, a single sin, the sin of fraud, that we see both in its ancient form, Ulysses, and now in its more contemporary, which is to say 13th century or 14th century form, Guido de Montefeltro.
Now, Ulysses and Guido are encased in a flame, so they're kind of tortured by this...
They're singed by the flames and they are writhing in torment or in pain.
And yet, Guido kind of comes up to Dante and he says something very interesting.
He says that he wants to tell Dante his story.
And he says,"...if I thought I were speaking to a soul who might someday return to the world..." Most certainly this flame would cease to flicker.
So what Guido is saying is, hey, you know, hey fellow, I want to tell you my story.
Now listen, if I thought that you were going to take it back to the world, I wouldn't tell you.
He goes, continuing Guido, but since no one, if I have heard the truth, ever returns alive from this deep pit with no fear of dishonor, I answer you.
So Guido's saying, but since everybody here is dead, I mean, obviously no one is going back to Earth.
Now, Guido couldn't be more wrong.
Dante is, in fact, going back to Earth, but Guido doesn't know that.
So Guido is sort of deceived here by what Dante is doing deep in this circle of hell.
And Guido feels comfortable since he thinks that we're sort of among the dead.
Let me tell you my story.
And then says Guido, he goes, tell me, are there Romania at war or at peace?
He's asking about the people in his own neighborhood, the northern part.
Of Rome, the northern part of Italy.
He goes, how are my people doing, basically?
And then Dante says, I was bending forward, listening when my master, this is Virgil, touched my side and said to me, you speak to him.
This one's Italian. So let's back up.
Remember that when we were dealing with Ulysses, Dante didn't speak to Ulysses at all.
It was Virgil.
Virgil and Ulysses were sort of contemporaries from the ancient world.
They talked. And now Virgil is saying, hey, listen, this is kind of one of your guys.
He's Italian, like you.
He's from your part of Italy.
And you two have this conversation.
You go. You talk to him.
And Guido now begins to tell a remarkable story, which I'll only begin the first couple of lines, and we'll pick it up tomorrow.
Here's Guido."'I was a man of arms, a warrior.' And then a friar.
So here's a guy who started out as a warrior and then became a monk, became a friar.
Believing with the cord to make amends.
Believing with the cord. The cord is the rope that the friars tie around their robe.
To make amends.
In other words, he goes, at some point in life I realized I needed to make some penance for the crimes and sins of my earlier life.
So I thought, let me do that by becoming a friar.
And he goes, Quote, were it not for that high priest his soul be damned, who put me back among my early sins, I want to tell you why and how it happened.
So basically, Guido's saying, I almost made it to heaven.
I was kind of getting there when this damnable high priest, who's he talking about?
The Pope? Boniface VIII. In fact, somebody I skipped over it, but Boniface is in Canto XIX among people who have corrupted and sold church offices.
In other words, a corrupt cleric.
Dante has no patience for this.
And I could do a whole talk on Boniface, but here I just want to say that this guy Guido says that Boniface, the Pope, And so, again, let's remember, we're getting these stories always from the point of view of the sinner.
And notice that Dante doesn't dispute with them or argue with them.
The sinner is able to sort of spin the story.
And Guido, as we'll see, is a major spinmeister, a major spin doctor.
And just as Francesca said, love made me do it, and the book made me do it, And just as Pierre Delavigne said, envy made me do it.
Here we have Guido saying, the Pope made me do it.
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