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April 14, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:22
SITTING DUCKS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep558
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
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Coming up, I'll argue that guns no more kill people than pens make spelling mistakes.
Debbie's going to join me for the Friday roundup.
We're going to talk about curtailing illegal immigration through the Darien Gap, the political aftermath of the Tennessee expulsion, And also the Daniel Perry self-defense case.
New developments there.
I'll also make the case for the reasonableness of faith by focusing on Pascal's famous wager.
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Also, if you're watching on Rumble, this is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
How do we think about this issue of mass shootings?
I confess, and Debbie and I have talked about this, we both kind of feel the same way.
There's something a little unsatisfactory about the nature of this debate.
Now, just recently, last week or a couple of weeks, we've had two mass shootings in the United States.
One in Nashville, that was the transgender domestic terrorist Audrey Hale or Aidan Hale.
And the shooting was at a Christian school, which happens to be also affiliated with a church.
And the victims included the principal, apparently the daughter of the pastor who was counseling Audrey Hale and some other kids.
I mean, just a very terrible and tragic situation.
And then shortly thereafter in Louisville, Kentucky, a guy who was employed in a bank basically goes berserk and goes up to the bank and does the shooting and apparently he was about to be fired.
He was also, we know, being treated for depression.
And so you got two incidents.
In both cases, by the way, let's look for some commonalities here.
And there are some. First of all, even though it's commonly said that these mass shootings are somehow done by right-wingers or white supremacists or Republicans, the reality is the opposite.
There have been a number of transgender shootings.
In fact, I shared a thread on Twitter with four or five of them.
And by and large, when you find these shooters, they tend to be leftists.
They tend to be Democrats.
The bank employee certainly was.
If you look at his social media, he's got rants against Trump.
He was apparently a big COVID mask and vaccine guy, posting all kinds of COVID content.
So this is certainly not any right-winger or any kind of Republican.
He also, by the way, listed his pronouns as he and him, which is something that by and large you do if you're a progressive or on the left.
Second, you notice that these shootings tend to take place in gun-free zones.
Now... Someone may say, well, wait a minute, Nashville, Tennessee, Louisville, Kentucky, these are red states.
But wait, we're talking about gun-free zones that exist in red states because there are certain areas where you're not allowed to take a gun.
You typically can't take a gun into a bank.
So a bank is a gun-free zone.
You can't take a gun into a school.
So a school is a gun-free zone.
And you notice that these shooters tend to pick those kinds of locations.
As Debbie and I were having coffee, Debbie goes, When's the last time you heard about a mass shooting at a shooting range?
Not often. In fact, I've never heard of it.
I bet you haven't either.
And we don't need to really...
It doesn't take a lot of head-scratching to figure out why that is the case.
Now... We have this kind of fruitless debate in which, by and large, the left says, it's the gun.
And the right says, no, it's the lunatic who used the gun.
And in some sense, both sides have a point because it's the gun is just a way of saying that this couldn't have happened in this way whatsoever.
Without a gun, and certainly without a destructive gun, an AR, a gun that has the capacity to do a lot of damage.
Sure, the person could have done it some other way, but at least this way was facilitated by the gun.
But on the other hand, there seems to be a point on the other side, which is that, listen, would this have happened?
The guns don't act by themselves.
I mean, a gun is a tool.
It's an instrument. It's kind of like a pen.
Here's a pen. I use this pen to write.
If there's a spelling mistake, Well, you can't blame the pen.
Well, the pen did it. Pen didn't do it.
I did it using the pen.
I made the spelling mistake.
This pen was merely the vehicle for me to cause the error.
But the error, the responsibility for the error falls squarely on me.
And the same is true with the gun.
How is taking guns away from law-abiding people going to solve this problem?
This is the absurd part of it to me.
In fact, if anything, taking guns away from law-abiding people has the effect of making America into a gun-free zone.
So it's now, in a sense, much easier for the kind of crazy people who can get their hands on a gun or on an AR-15 to go out there thinking, no matter where I go, I'm not gonna get return fire because law-abiding citizens don't have guns.
So this liberal kind of fantasy is actually kind of a nightmare.
Seems to me that the real question is, how do we keep guns away from lunatics?
And second, this is actually a point Debbie raised, how do we keep the lunatics away from the rest of society?
Because you've apparently got these people who are deeply mentally disturbed.
They're not just suicidal in the sense that they wanna take their own life, but they wanna take a whole bunch of other people with them.
So their suicide spills over into a kind of genocide.
Let me kind of make a massacre out of it.
And I don't know if there's a secret craving for news.
I want to have my name recorded even if it's in infamy and not for anything good.
But nevertheless, this is the craziness that is afoot in our society.
Keeping guns away from those people and keeping those people away from the rest of us seems to me to be our urgent challenge.
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Debbie and I are here for our Friday weekly roundup and I thought we'd start off with the topic of gun control.
I was just Watching some guy posting on social media, and he was saying, in effect, hey, look, you've got these European countries and Australia, and they have mentally ill people, but they have gun control, and they don't have as many mass shootings as we do.
So he's like, you conservatives keep saying it's the lunatic, it's not the gun, but if you restrict the availability of guns, the lunatics...
Are also disarmed.
This seems to be the premise.
The lunatics will find something else to kill with, such as knives, such as vehicles.
So that is so not true.
I mean, they will find something else.
But I just want to point people to a couple of really good websites to go to just to kind of look at the debate of the gun violence.
And one of them, can you read that?
Yeah, it's just crimeresearch.org.
And then the other one is usconcealedcarry.com.
And they just pull like fact fiction, you know, all kinds of articles.
But But to your point, I want to talk about the fact that every time there's a mass shooting, liberals immediately start with, oh, we need to take away the guns.
We need to limit the assault weapons.
Weapons of war. Right.
So we need to ban assault rifles.
We need to ban high-capacity magazines, all those things.
But this particular website, the crimeresearch.org website, Actually says that the vast majority, 56% of mass shootings, are done with a handgun only.
Not a high-capacity magazine or an assault rifle.
So anyway, so to that, it also has that the fighting suggests with laws that are very strict on gun control.
It says laws which regulate the what, meaning...
What guns products are allowed do not have much of an impact on overall population homicide.
In contrast, laws that regulate the WHO, WHO has legal access to firearms, may have an appreciative impact on firearm homicide, especially if access is restricted specifically to So, crazy people, essentially.
Well, I think it's a key distinction and it's one I hadn't really quite thought of.
The what as opposed to the who.
So the what is the object.
Let's say, for example, I used the analogy earlier of pens.
Let's just say that there were certain people who were martial arts experts or whatever who were using pens to stab people.
You have two choices here.
And let's say this was a serious societal problem.
You could say, all right, well, we're going to outlaw pens.
Nobody can use a pen. And then every law-abiding person would have to turn in their pens.
Or you could say, well, listen, there's a certain type of homicidal maniac in our society that uses these pens as a weapon.
Is there a way to identify who those people are?
And if there is, Don't let them have access to pens.
So that's basically what you're saying.
It's the who instead of the what.
It seems to me to be a much better way to think about it.
And there are laws in place right now today in America and states and most states that ban these kinds of people from having these weapons.
The problem is, and we know it just like anybody else knows it, criminals don't care.
Crazy people don't care.
Maybe crazy people don't even have the ability to care, right?
They don't have the cognitive, like, oh, this is wrong.
I shouldn't be doing this.
No, they don't have that.
But it's one of those things where...
The law itself is not going to prevent these mass shootings.
And the fact of the matter is a lot of these people will find other ways to find guns and weapons and whatnot.
Even if their name comes up, you know, let's say they go to a gun store and the store owner or worker or whatever says, oh, you know, I can't sell you a gun.
And it doesn't sell them a gun.
Do you really think that person is going to go, oh, I guess I'm on that list.
Too bad. You know, I'm just going to go home and think of something else to do.
No. So, I mean, to sum up, would you agree that if there are two things that can be done here, one would be focusing on making sure that people who are dangerous or psychotic or schizophrenic, homicidal in that way, restrict their access to guns? That's the first thing. And the second thing is in areas that have vulnerability, particularly places
like, well, we know this already about airplanes, but certainly schools, you do have certain armed people, not necessarily teachers.
Maybe it's security guards who are equipped to deal with mass shootings.
And that's going to not only be a good response tool, but a deterrent.
The mass shooter is going to be like, wait a minute, I might be facing some fire myself before I even get to do my mass shooting.
I think that's important. But like I told you, you mentioned earlier, I do think keeping people away from the general population is probably the best thing to do because those crazy people are going to find ways to kill people.
They're going to either do it with guns or they're going to do it with knives or trucks or whatever.
And so if we identify who those people are, put them in an institution, lock them up for as long as it takes, maybe we wouldn't be talking about all these mass shootings.
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Some new developments in the Daniel Perry case.
Daniel Perry, you might recall, is the sergeant, the Uber driver, former military guy.
Who was accosted at one of these George Floyd riots.
He was surrounded. His vehicle was surrounded.
And a fellow, an activist named Garrett Foster, approaches him with a gun, maybe an AR, I believe, pointed directly at him.
AK-47. An AK-47.
And fearing for his life, at least this is what the case was about, Daniel Perry shoots this guy dead, pleads self-defense, and yet is found guilty of murder.
In Travis County, the Austin area.
Now, last we heard, the governor was in the process of figuring out the process of pardoning Daniel Perry, but there's a new development.
The new development is that Perry's attorneys have filed a motion for a new trial, And they basically say the jury was tampered with.
The jury was not presented with full information.
Important evidence was withheld.
And moreover, one of the jurors was going home, doing research on the computer, and then bringing his, I don't know if it's a man or woman, findings to the rest of the jury.
I think you know this is completely not allowed.
You've served on juries. Yeah, that is so not allowed.
You cannot do that.
That's crazy. That definitely would be- Well, explain the deliberation process.
Right. So you are not allowed to talk about the case at all.
And you're not allowed- Outside of the- Outside of- The jury room.
The jury room. You're only allowed to discuss- The evidence shown to you in the courtroom.
You cannot go home and go, you know, I don't think that the defense proved their case.
I'm going to go and I'm going to see what else I can find.
You print it out.
You bring it to the jury room.
Hey, guys, guess what?
They didn't talk about this.
Well, I mean, think of the reason this is...
Judges spend a lot of time at the beginning of trials deciding what evidence is and is not admissible.
There might be evidence.
Let's say, for example, a guy is accused of shoplifting.
Take a minor case.
And let's just say the guy did it before when he was in college.
The judge has to decide, is that too prejudicial?
Because, I mean, think about it. Because he did it in college doesn't mean he did this one.
But think about this. What if a juror knew the guy in college and knew he did it?
Then he tells all the other jurors, hey, guess what?
He did it before. He obviously did this one.
He obviously did it again. I remember when he did it back in college, right?
You can't do that either.
So if this is true, it would seem to be almost an easy case for a retrial.
Yeah, I hope so. You might be asking, well, wait a minute, if the guy is going to be pardoned, what's the point of why are we trying to have a retrial?
Let's remember that, in theory, a pardon is not a full vindication.
A pardon is kind of like a... Not only that, but the governor can't really issue a pardon without the pardons and parole board.
Right. There's a Texas process.
The Pardons and Parole Board has to review the case, look at all the facts.
And by the way, they're in the process of doing this.
And evidently the prosecutor, which is the Travis County DA, he's written a letter, Jose Garza, to the Pardons and he wants to show up and basically make his case.
With a little, you know.
He also wants the board to hear from the victim's family.
Now, no one denies that there's going to be a grieving family here.
There's obviously a death.
This fellow, Garrett Foster, was killed.
So his family is going to be out for blood, so to speak.
But it doesn't mean that Daniel Perry didn't shoot in self-defense.
I mean, when you look at the ambiance, the circumstances around it.
Yeah, so there's a really interesting article about, it says, Texas gun laws on trial in protest or Garrett Foster's murder case.
And that is because in Texas, as you know, it is an open carry state.
I got my concealed carry license four years before this happened, right?
Right. But this means that technically you can carry your weapon and you don't have to conceal it.
You can have it on a holster.
Now this guy, Foster, was carrying it, carrying the AK-47.
And he was basically blocking traffic with it.
Well, he was not being a good law-abiding citizen because just because you can carry a weapon doesn't mean you should, right?
Especially when things are kind of going out of hand.
And you remember all those protests with BLM back in the summer of 2020.
There were a lot of things that happened, including but not limited to the case with Kyle Rittenhouse, you know, when he defended himself as well.
And so a lot of things were happening back then.
And so this guy, this Uber driver, We don't know what occurred that made him feel threatened.
But let me just tell you, I would have felt threatened as well if I saw someone standing, hovering over me with an AK-47.
Well, this gets to the facts that were excluded because according to Perry's attorneys, there was clear evidence that this guy, Garrett Foster, was the intimidator and was the aggressor.
There's a transcript of an interview done with him and there's also photographs that show what he was doing with his gun and apparently even without his gun he was using his girlfriend's wheelchair to Push in front of traffic and block traffic.
So this is the kind of aggressive action that could easily have caused Daniel Perry to feel trapped, to feel up against the wall, to feel in fear for his life.
So those are the facts on which this turns.
And if those facts were withheld from the jury, the guy didn't get a fair trial.
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It appears that both the Tennessee Democrats who were kicked out of the legislature for disrupting an official proceeding and leading a, well, a mini-insurrection, I don't know what else to call it, at least using the terminology of January 6th, but they have now been voted back by the councils in their local areas.
Let's remember that Tennessee is a red state, but there are Democratic blue areas inside of Red Tennessee.
And so these Democrats are representing democratic areas.
But the media is portraying this as a glorious victory for democracy and, you know, the enemies of democracy.
Think of it, who are the enemies of democracy?
The Tennessee legislature, the elected members who punished these guys for not following rules.
So isn't it ironic, the kind of flipping of the script?
Yeah, so they were defending democracy.
And what were we doing on January 6th?
The January 6th defendants were enemies of democracy.
Enemies of democracy. But these guys were friends of democracy.
Same action. Different...
Except interpreted in a completely different way.
So here's a case where the left uses basically their propaganda outlets.
And then, of course, these guys, the two Democrats, play their role on the script.
One guy, of course, it's kind of funny.
You see him on social media, and there's an earlier video, and he's talking in a perfectly normal way, clipped, obviously an educated guy.
But then, in the wake of all this, the guy's sounding like he's some sort of street preacher.
Completely different accent, completely different tone.
So these guys are all, it's theater at some level.
Well, they're playing to the Marxist playbook because that's how Marxists behave.
It's a theatrical performance.
Even AOC, if you look at earlier interviews with AOC, she's talking in a normal way.
And then you see her out on the street.
And it's a street performance produced by an actress.
Now I gotta say, I think that the Republican legislature is partly to blame for this because they supplied these guys with a race card.
You have three Democrats involved, a woman and two black guys.
Instead of throwing all three out, they throw out the two black guys and they keep intact the woman.
And far from the woman being grateful and going, well, listen, you know what?
I wasn't as bad as those guys and I did apologize for what I did.
No, she goes on television and goes, well, guess what?
The main difference between me and them is I'm 60 years old and white and those guys are young and black.
So she played the race cards. She played the race card as well.
So the Tennessee legislature now has like a gun in its face.
They allow the media a chance to run with this narrative and it was completely unnecessary.
Now, you know, it seems like we just don't know.
We don't know how to create a good narrative.
We're always playing defense.
You know, always. These guys, like, they know how to play the media.
They know, of course, the media's on their side, so that helps.
It's easier. It's easier. But, you know, they know how to play it up.
And we never do.
It's almost like, you know, you've said before that we're the stupid party and they're the evil party.
But boy, you know, it's like every day they prove that to be the case.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, what was initially, I think when this first happened, I was completely in favor of it because I thought, look, it's really important for Republicans to show force, to take action, to teach the Democrats a lesson.
If the Democrats are going to go after us on January 6th, hey, listen, you want an official building?
Well, you're in an official building.
You're disrupting a proceeding?
Well, you're disrupting a proceeding.
Yeah. And it's an official proceeding.
So it's important to have a uniform standard of accountability.
That's really what this is all about.
But the moment they do it, it's like, I haven't heard a word from these Republican legislators.
It's almost like they're now in hiding.
And meanwhile, you see these young Black Democrats are standing on top of a truck with a victory sign, a Black Power sign.
They say that they have always been a target since they got elected by the so-called white Republicans.
Well, listen, I mean, look, it is a fact of life in any legislature, and I can testify to this in the House, which is to say in the national legislature.
We talk to Republican congressmen all the time, people like Mary Miller.
And she goes, Nancy Pelosi treated us as complete pariahs.
She didn't give us the time of day.
She made rules that were specifically aimed at making our lives miserable.
So the idea that somehow, because you're elected, nevertheless, if you are and the other party is the majority, they're going to torment you.
And so I suspect there's nothing these guys are saying that's unique as to what's happened to them.
They're a minority in a red state.
Yeah. So they feel uncomfortable.
It's not racist. But the interesting thing about the so-called commission that put them back in, that reinstated them, they're Democrat.
Like nine to four, I believe.
Right. So, you know, this is how they work.
If the Republicans really wanted to play it tough, they'd be like, listen, when we kick somebody out, yes, you can appoint someone to the interim position until kind of somebody else takes their place, but it can't be the same guy.
It's kind of like saying, imagine if there's a committee that, you know, you expel someone from school and they get together and they get to pick the person who comes as an interim replacement and takes that person's seat.
But they go, you know what? It's the same guy you just expelled.
It's like, guess what? We're going to expel him again.
We're not seating this guy.
He broke the rules. End of story.
So it takes Republicans with spine and backbone.
We're not afraid of the media.
And there's frankly nothing to be afraid of to take this kind of action.
I can only think of one person that is not afraid of the media.
Trump?
Yeah.
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The border crisis continues, and I sometimes say to myself, I should be talking more about this on the podcast.
There's, of course, a lot of other stuff going on.
But you were telling me about a recent report that involves the Darien Gap.
Let's start by talking about what the Darien Gap is.
So there's a jungle called the Darien Jungle between, I believe it's Panama and Colombia, or maybe Venezuela.
Yeah, Venezuela, Colombia.
No. No, it is Panama and Colombia, that's right.
Okay. So anyway, so Venezuelans and Colombians and other people go through this jungle We're good to go.
Right? And so my cousin sent me a video a few months ago, telling, you know, showing me this woman that was yanked out of a bus, going through the Darien jungle, and apparently she was raped.
And the people that she was with couldn't do anything about it, because these cartels pretty much own the- The territory. The territory.
And so that is dangerous for that reason, but not counting the other reasons.
So the US, Panama, and Colombia, they basically announced last week that they're gonna launch a 60-day campaign aimed at halting illegal immigration through the treacherous Darien Gap, where the flow of migrants has multiplied this year.
Apparently over 90,000 the first three months of the year have gone through this.
Well, when you look to see what these guys are doing about it, it doesn't look to me like it's going to really do much because they say that they're, well, number one, they say, we're going to look at some lawful pathways for eligible people from those countries to come here.
And as you know, with your cousin and others, they have created a sort of a system that In which you can apply for asylum and you can apply for temporary asylum.
I think it's a two-year period.
But that process, we can tell you, is very glacial.
You apply and basically you just sit around waiting for months and months.
Nothing happens. Nobody contacts you.
So that looks to me like it's...
See, and a lot of them get frustrated.
I told my cousin, do not get frustrated.
Do not come illegally.
I will not help you if you do that.
Right. The other is, supposedly, these three countries have a, quote, anti-poverty and job creation strategy to create jobs in the Colombian and Panamanian border communities.
Well, let's think about it. First of all, not all the people going through the Darren Gap are coming right from those communities.
So just by creating, okay, you can be a rickshaw driver, you can run a grocery store.
This is not going to deal with the problem, but this is how these people think.
So the simple way to stop the problem, it seems to me, is if you were to close the border at the United States, all of this would stop.
Because all of this is a...
Ultimately, that's their destination.
That's where they're coming. That's where they're wanting to come.
And I've gone further by saying that I do believe that we need to stop the cartels.
We need to just go after them.
And we need to make it to where people don't want to leave these countries.
Now, Venezuela is a totally different story because that is a land of misery.
People have lost.
In fact, I often say that when Hugo Chavez went in and he basically kicked all the people with money out of the country, he left it with all of the people that were going to be subservient to his government.
But what happened is that those people are now not able to even make it in Venezuela.
Even the Chavistas are leaving. So the people that were like, hey, yeah, you know, this is my party.
I love Hugo Chavez. Now they don't love Venezuela all that much anymore and they're leaving Venezuela.
So again, that's a completely different animal.
Mexico, where little girls are being kidnapped and sold for sex.
And so these families are fleeing Mexico in large numbers in order to flee these cartels.
I mean, to your point about going after these cartels and gangs, for a long time people thought, you can't do it.
There's too much of a web and it's across the border.
But look at what the president of El Salvador is doing.
He just declared a national campaign against the gangs.
and unleashed the full force of the government and the military against the gangs and basically apparently has completely wiped them out. In fact, the New York Times had this preposterous story. President of El Salvador has wiped out the gangs quote but at what cost?
At what cost?
At the cost of getting rid of the gangs and at the cost, apparently, of triggering the New York Times.
Kind of funny, I made that comment and Bukele, the president of El Salvador, retweeted me because he was like, yeah, Dinesh has it right and the dumb New York Times has it wrong.
So the point being here that these campaigns, if well executed...
Executed ruthlessly enough.
Because remember, the gangs are ruthless.
So they're not going to root them out with kid-love treatment.
You have to root them out the way you root out gangs.
But it can be done. It can be done and it should be done.
And I guarantee you a lot, you know, this whole notion that, you know, you can't go to Mexico because you're afraid to get kidnapped.
I told you that we went to San Francisco a couple weeks ago and I was more afraid to go to San Francisco than I was afraid to go to Mexico, if that tells you anything.
But nevertheless, it is dangerous to go into Mexico, but only because of these cartels.
And if we can do something about it, if we can help curb this, you know, end this type of violence in Mexico, I think we're going to see a real decline in illegal immigration in our country.
I really do.
But we're just not addressing it.
And I'm not sure that we want to, really.
The government just doesn't want to.
Well, right now the government is relying, think about what the cartels are doing.
The cartels are the transmission belt for taking people all over, not just Latin and South America, even further away, and bringing them to the border.
So the Biden administration, I would argue, wants needs, and even though they'll never say it, is in favor of the cartels at least carrying out this task.
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We're going to close out today, at least close out our roundup section on a kind of a feel-good story that Debbie brought to my attention.
What's this one about?
It involves lotteries. Yeah, so a Florida mom wins $2 million, a $2 million lottery prize, the day after her daughter has her last cancer treatment.
And I was just like, oh, it made me cry because apparently her name is Geraldine Gimblett.
$2 million prize last Friday at the lottery headquarters in Tallahassee.
She purchased her winning ticket at a Pipkin Road beverage castle, according to the release.
And then it says, at first, the gas station clerk thought there were no tickets left, but I asked him to double check because I like the crossword games the best, the lucky He found the last one.
And so her stroke of luck came the day after a major milestone for her daughter who was battling breast cancer.
And so, you know, the girl, the daughter said, the day before my mom brought this ticket, I rang the bell and walked out of the hospital after completing my last treatment for breast cancer.
So she said...
It's so sad. Let me read it.
My mom had taken out her life savings to take care of me when I was sick.
Anyway. So the point here, I mean, this is a case where, you know, you...
A lot of lotteries, it's interesting because there have been some studies on this.
And for many people, the lottery is kind of a mixed blessing, even if you win.
Because suddenly you, first of all...
And notice over here, it's a $2 million payment, but she took it as a lump sum of $1.645,000.
So $1,600,000.
So you don't get the full $2 million.
You get most of it, but not all of it.
A lot of times people say, I want $5 million.
I'm going to go buy a $5 million house.
So I'm going to go now buy a boat and I'm going to...
So suddenly people don't have a good perspective on money and they don't realize that there's a difference between a one-time lump sum payment and annual payments.
So if you win a $5 million payment, a single lump sum, that's going to deliver about $250,000 a year in annual payments.
Income. That's all that you have.
That's the only change in your circumstances.
You now have a decent chunk of money annually.
But the idea that you can just go blow the five million, well, you're going to be left with nothing.
And you know, the interesting, because you know how every year I... For like 20 years now, I've entered the HGTV Beautiful Home giveaway, right?
The Dreamhouse giveaway.
And it turns out that most of the people that win that house giveaway end up selling that house.
Really?
Because they can't afford it.
They cannot afford to live in that house because of the taxes and the upkeep.
And so they choose to just, you know, sell it for cash.
Yeah, sell it for cash.
But, you know, and I've seen these shows where people win, like you say, you know, they win $5 million and they go like, they go off the rails and they like buy a boat and buy a house and buy cars.
Well, the other thing that happens is that everybody else knows you have money.
And because, of course, you've been on local TV showing the check and so on.
Suddenly your relatives show up.
They want money. Yeah. People start suing you because they figure that there's money to be had.
And so, I mean, I've seen interviews with lottery winners who basically go, I wish I never won.
Which is a little bit of a shocking thing to hear.
It is. It is. I hope that this woman, Geraldine, is able to put some of that money away so that she can get her life savings back.
I mean, that's why this story is so touching, right?
Yeah, it is. Because it's an appropriate allegation.
Exactly. I'm glad that someone like her won it and not, you know, like somebody that...
You know, again, if you don't know how to...
My advice to people that win the lottery is to get a financial advisor immediately.
For sure. And I think that what makes the story also powerful is that the idea of a lottery is completely random.
You know, it's like, we got all these tickets, let's pick one, that's the winner.
And so you don't expect the lottery to serve any kind of purpose other than it's just pure luck.
But in this case, you've got somebody who was down on their luck in the sense that they have dealing with this family tragedy.
It's exhausting all your resources and then yours is the number that comes up.
And so you can now take your winnings and it'll help to compensate you for your losses.
I think it teaches us also a spirit of gratitude that is appropriate in this situation.
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Feel the difference. Yesterday, I raised the question about how we should think about things that seem to fall beyond the bounds of our human experience.
Things like The existence of God, a transcendent realm, life after death, heaven and hell, the fate of the soul.
How do we think about those things?
There's no practical test, no scientific experiment, no form of verification that we can apply in this life anyway to be able to test out those things.
And yet, either they're true or they're false.
It's going to be one or it's going to be the other.
Now, we know of course of a certain type of person that likes to call themselves an agnostic.
And the agnostic position is, I don't know and I'm not going to pretend like I do.
Some agnostics go even further and say, I don't know and therefore I don't care.
Why should I care about things that I can't possibly know about?
But think about it.
Let's say that there is something that you don't know about.
Is there or is there not a tiger in the next room?
Well, the fact of it is that could really matter.
If you find yourself in the next room, the tiger is going to eat you.
So similarly, the fate of your soul after death, even if you have no rational way, no experiential way to find out, it doesn't mean it's insignificant.
It doesn't mean that you shouldn't worry about it because this is something that could actually determine your ultimate and eternal course of things.
So the agnostic position, while it seems rational in a certain way because it confines itself to what we can know, nevertheless creates a kind of incuriosity about basic questions of life.
And these aren't just questions about the future because they have a great deal to say even about the present.
Consider questions like, why are we here?
Is this life all there is?
What happens when we die?
Will we be reunited with our loved ones?
These are questions that have pressed themselves on the minds of all thinking people, really almost from the dawn of time.
And yet we have certain people today who willfully refuse to even think about those kinds of questions, or they demand evidence of a kind that is simply not available in this sort of a domain.
It's like, wait, I demand to see someone who has already been to the afterlife come back and tell me what it's really like.
Well, how likely is that to happen?
You've got to think about the subject without that kind of foolish expectation.
I think the problem that the agnostics have is that they don't recognize, or they don't seem to recognize, the clear limits of reason.
Empirical evidence is unavailable on these issues because our senses cannot go beyond experience.
Now, when reason has reached its limit, there are really two possibilities.
One possibility is that you just stop right there, and you say nothing, and you refuse to go on.
And the other option is that you do go on, but you do go on using, let's call it, different resources or different tools.
It's kind of like you're taking a hike.
Your hiking boots have worn out.
So you basically go, well, that's the end of my hike.
I don't have any more hiking boots.
The hiking boots here are reflecting reason.
Or you say, well, you know, I don't have the hiking boots anymore.
Or I've reached a stream which I cannot cross in my hiking boots.
But that doesn't mean the stream is uncrossable.
It just has to be crossed a different way.
Now, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of those guys who fully understood the limits of reason and basically came to the conclusion that because reason stops here, I should too, or philosophy should too.
He says, beyond what we can assert by reason, we should assert nothing.
He goes, we don't get to the bottom of things.
This is Wittgenstein kind of talking to the rationalists in modern philosophy and saying, we're not going to get the ultimate answers.
We reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions.
And so if people would come to Wittgenstein and say, well, what comes after death?
He would essentially look at you and he would not open his mouth.
His point is, I don't know, so I won't say.
And this is different, by the way, than the atheist, because the atheist goes, well, there's nothing.
There's nothing comes after death, Tanesh.
You're going to disintegrate.
You're going to be in the ground. That's the end of it.
No, Bittgenstein would say, you don't know that either.
So the atheist is asserting something that they can't possibly know.
Now, the agnostic who says, I don't know, I'm not sure, I can't say, is kind of superior to the atheist because the agnostic at least has a grasp on what it is that you don't know.
The atheist is pretending that you know things.
There's no heaven, there's no hell, there's no afterlife, there's no God.
The atheist doesn't know any of this.
These are, in fact, assertions of a certain kind of faith.
You could put it slightly differently.
The atheist is saying, I wish there was no God.
I wish there was no. It's wishful thinking on the part of the very accusation that the atheist launches against the believer.
It's wishful thinking to believe in heaven.
Well, my answer is it's wishful thinking for you to believe there's no hell.
It's wishful thinking to believe that there's a God.
It's wishful thinking for you to believe that there's no God and there will be no accountability for anything that you do in this life that is not in a sense where you don't have a reckoning here and now.
So the point here is that we need to find a path and I'm going to argue in subsequent days, in fact starting next week, that there is a path that To push forward from this seeming impasse where you've reached the limit of reason.
There are important questions that just by virtue of being human, we can't fail to consider.
And yet our reason doesn't seem to deliver the answers.
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