On today's show, Glenn Beck is joined by his daughter and son-in-law to discuss a variety of topics, including the latest corruption case against former Illinois House Speaker Rahm Emanuel, and the ongoing case against Michael Madigan.
00:05:06.040The long-serving Illinois House Speaker, he was convicted on Wednesday on 10 federal charges after running an influence-peddling trial that exposed corruption and greed.
00:05:19.340He stood there as the jury rendered a mixed verdict, which include deadlocking on overarching racketeering conspiracy.
00:05:29.280You know, I told you yesterday, the number one thing, five times higher than any other place, the Google search in Washington, D.C., number one is legal defense attorney, criminal attorney.
00:11:23.120Government, if it has to spend on things other than, let's say, the common defense, which is what it should be spending on.
00:11:29.660But if it has to, if it's going to spend on something, maybe you could find something that is culturally important that won't happen unless the government spends on it.
00:13:17.300I mean, I know I'm an old-timey kind of, you know, let me talk to you about country time lemonade here.
00:13:23.620But when I was growing up, my grandparents, my dad, my mom, not so much my grandparents, but my mom and dad were very supportive of me wanting to go into radio.
00:13:36.640My grandfather thought I was out of my mind.
00:14:31.580And when somebody reported that she had a brand new BMW, she went online and said, I can't believe you, what, in America, you can't have a nice car?
00:15:21.980It might just be, Glenn, that if you want to be an opera singer, your lot in life is you go and have a normal job and then sing opera on the side.
00:17:55.220But I'm not going to pay for your passion on doing something that nobody wants to consume at this time.
00:18:03.860People are going to pay, well, not you, but somebody an awful lot of money for your paintings if you happen to be one of those guys that was just ahead of their time.
00:18:13.180He said, guys, he didn't even include women.
00:21:20.220It's amazing to me how California wants the federal government to take care of their education.
00:21:26.620But when it comes to the border, the federal government has nothing to say here.
00:21:31.760How dare the federal government tell us how to run our border?
00:21:34.500Well, the border is constitutionally defined as a federal operation.
00:21:43.620And we have been saying that should go back to the states if the federal government isn't going to fulfill its constitutional duty.
00:21:51.140But that is a enumerated power of the federal government.
00:21:56.120Now they're saying, no, the federal government, they argued that the states don't have the right to, you know, Texas didn't have a right to protect its own border.
00:22:05.380OK, but now California is arguing, no, no, no, federal government has doesn't have a right to tell us what to do with the border and immigration.
00:22:20.640I mean, they filed, what, two days ago, four days ago in Chicago, going after the city of Chicago for their obstruction of ICE and Department of Homeland Security.
00:22:34.300Now he's going after Letitia James, Hochul, the governor, the governor of of New York.
00:22:44.800And everyone is saying this is because they went after him.
00:22:47.980No, this is because they're out of control.
00:22:50.280He also went after the head of the DNs, the DMV, because the DMV is breaking the law.
00:22:56.760And Pam Bondi saw it and she said, you know what, if you are if you are trying to thwart the United States government on immigration, it's our constitutional duty.
00:29:34.800It's why tariffs are being, you know, brought in.
00:29:39.580It's to force others to start to see the sorry situation they're in.
00:29:49.000I mean, Europe, if this deal with Ukraine goes through, which, by the way, yesterday had a great, a perfect phone call with Putin, and it did go really, really well.
00:30:02.700And Donald Trump is saying, yeah, you know, we might have to have the resources from you.
00:30:09.860We might, we want your rare earth minerals because of what we've already given you.
00:31:01.400It will punish the average person because of tariffs and everything else.
00:31:05.280If they're not done exactly right, it'll punish with higher prices.
00:31:12.280However, he's betting that wages will also rise because he's forcing people to keep their profits here and make jobs here.
00:31:24.340If everything goes right, what the trade on gold is showing us is that we may be going towards a gold-backed financial system
00:31:39.460or a gold-backed currency of some sort, the Fed could even be shut down.
00:31:45.200There is something big in the wind, and nobody knows what it is for sure.
00:31:52.640So if what do you do as a regular person?
00:31:56.760You need to understand that the dollar could be by design being collapsed.
00:32:02.800That's exactly what the Biden administration was doing, collapsing the dollar.
00:32:07.380But they didn't have a plan to replace it other than a digital dollar and global slavery.
00:32:14.580I'm not sure what the plan is here, but it seems much more American-centric, good for America, and eventually good for the rest of the world.
00:32:24.960And it doesn't look like it is taking freedom away from people, but we have to watch it.
00:32:31.780And the situation with the economy is really dire.
00:32:57.620We don't know what direction, but a huge sign that something big is coming is the amount of gold that is being purchased.
00:33:07.780And the key here that you have to understand, shortages in London, gold flowing into the U.S. at record levels, somebody with deep pockets, this is what Matt Smith, is scooping up gold.
00:33:22.160They're reshoring gold that might have been leased out.
00:34:18.280So that's how dire this is, is we're beginning to enter the world of rehypothecation, which means no one owns anything because your house, you say, well, I got my loan through Citibank.
00:34:37.540But Citibank has used rehypothecation to put that on their balance sheet as that's their house.
00:34:49.520But they sold it in a package to eight different banks, and they're all counting that house, yours, as an asset.
00:34:58.780So when they all start to go down, they all say, well, we've got all of these assets.
00:39:11.100In the first 30 days, you're going to see a shinier coat and you're going to see an increase in energy.
00:39:15.800You're going to be, at least I was, blown away by the increase in energy.
00:39:20.160Um, by 60 days, your dog's going to have a stronger immune system, less shedding, improved joint function, all thanks to the live nutrients that's been added to his or her diet.
00:41:04.200You know, it's just forging signatures.
00:41:05.980Like a lot of it kind of sounds like old school crime.
00:41:08.440Like, you know, it could be a Leonardo DiCaprio movie from back in the day.
00:41:12.140But it's advanced and they do it online and then they take out loans against your equity.
00:41:16.280And if you don't protect yourself, you could be dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars of money you didn't spend and your home in real jeopardy.
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00:41:30.320And if the worst stuff happens, well, they got U.S.-based customer service people ready to help you out and make sure it doesn't go any farther than that.
00:42:41.260But I would also think and I get I'm sure he if there is someone who actually did stuff with Jeffrey Epstein, I'm sure he'd want that exposed.
00:42:50.260Just on the other on the other hand, you know, just releasing a large list of names of people who are going to be tied into and accused of pedophilia.
00:47:11.300If so, I want every single name released.
00:47:14.440Or is this just a black book and your name could be in there because you had business dealings with Jeffrey Epstein?
00:47:22.580Might have been that you were gaining services, but it might have been that you were just, you know, you were the guy who, you know, washed the plane.
00:49:38.160I want every photograph because they will prove that I had nothing to do with anything.
00:49:43.100Indeed, the woman who accused me has now admitted publicly, withdrawn her lawsuit, admitted publicly that she may have confused me with somebody else, misidentified me.
00:49:53.220I wanted to show that, yes, I was on the island once with my wife and my 10-year-old daughter when Jeffrey Epstein, who I was his lawyer, had just bought the island and he wanted to show me the island.
00:50:04.380There was nobody on the island except for me, Epstein and his workers, and a professor at Harvard named Michael Porter and his wife.
00:50:13.880We had an intellectual dinner, left the next day, and so if my name is just on the list, oh, somebody who was on the island.
00:50:51.260And the only woman who accused me has now admitted that she may have confused me with someone else, misidentified me, and caused me over a million dollars in legal fees, expenses, and all kinds of difficulties.
00:58:42.140The question is what the tapes were of.
00:58:44.260We know, it's a matter of record, that there was somebody who worked for him who stole things.
00:58:50.060And so the police in Palm Beach installed tapes to try to catch the robber.
00:58:55.880Now, whether they installed them in bedrooms as well as in living areas, I don't know the answer to that question.
00:59:02.340I hope there were tapes with every single second.
00:59:05.140And let's remember among who were accused.
00:59:07.380And not only was I falsely accused, but the former majority leader of the Senate, Mitchell, he was accused of having sex.
00:59:17.180And by the way, they were all accused of having unprotected sex with somebody who allegedly had sex with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people.
00:59:25.780Imagine any reasonable person having unprotected sex.
00:59:29.100So it was Mitchell, it was Senator Richardson was accused, the Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak was accused.
00:59:39.100Prince Andrew, David Copperfield, Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, Richard Branson, Stephen Hawking, which that one I believe, Michael Jackson.
00:59:50.140They had a story of me and this man in a wheelchair together attending an orgy.
00:59:59.860I mean, I just imagine the idea of me trying to jump over the wheelchair to get at some young, you know, some of it is the most bizarre, preposterous thing.
01:00:07.920And, you know, some of the some of the allegations themselves, you know, prove questions about the credibility.
01:00:17.440But the important point is all should come out, everything.
01:00:22.040There shouldn't be anything withheld right now.
01:00:24.520The courts are withholding certain of the information because they don't want information out there that could cast doubts on the credibility of the accusers.
01:00:38.920I have to tell you, I am for radical transparency.
01:00:41.940I'm concerned about witch hunts, but I am for radical transparency because these names held in secret and having some things held in secret, not everything out.
01:00:51.040It just provides the opportunity for blackmail and everything else.
01:00:55.700It's too much information for any one agency or or any government or anybody to hold and have over the heads of people, because when you don't know what's in there and you don't know, you know, there might be exonerating things for you in this information, but they can hold it back.
01:01:16.200Look, I was subject to blackmail as a result of all this.
01:01:19.800I was canceled as a speaker at the 92nd Street Y, canceled as a speaker at Temple Emanuel in New York, the largest reformed temple in the United States, canceled all over the country as a speaker, canceled basically by the New York Times, just as a result of an accusation, which has now been legally withdrawn.
01:01:42.920And the woman admitted that, you know, she may have confused me with somebody else.
01:01:46.520But just as a result of the accusation, that's why I wrote a book called Guilt by Accusation.
01:01:52.020Now, I don't stand by everything in the book because a lot of things have changed since that book was published seven or eight years ago.
01:01:58.800But again, who would publish a book laying it all out if they had anything to hide?
01:02:04.320I have nothing to hide about my sex life.
01:02:07.540And, you know, you talk about perfect attendance.
01:02:10.480Use the word perfect in terms of attendance.
01:02:12.340You would say I had perfect attendance.
01:02:14.600I've had a perfect sex life in the sense that since the day I met Jeffrey Epstein, I never, ever, ever violated any vows or did anything improper.
01:02:27.180And yet half the world believes that I was guilty of charges, even though they've been essentially the woman admitted.
01:02:35.260She may have confused me with somebody else.
01:02:36.900Alan, I know I'm going to get heat from some members of this audience for having you on, because I do every time, because they're like, they're convinced.
01:03:21.460I was upset the FBI didn't investigate me, because if they did, obviously they would have concluded, as now, I think any reasonable person concluded, that I was either the victim of a false identification, the woman admitted she may have confused me with somebody else, or a deliberate plot.
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01:05:40.160I think Alan is a little too close to this to be able to get a broader picture on this because he just wants it to come out because it'll exonerate him, he feels, with everybody who is still kind of hanging on to that.
01:05:56.720So I didn't think we got a really witch hunt kind of thing.
01:06:00.600Yeah, I'm concerned a little bit listening to him because obviously he keeps all these records.
01:06:09.300You know, who knows who's going to be lumped into this thing.
01:06:11.960That being said, the crimes are so horrific that the people who are guilty really do need to figure out who they are and they need to be punished.
01:08:18.500So last Wednesday, the first batch of court files that included the names of victims and friends and associates of Jeffrey Epstein was released.
01:08:36.820And it doesn't mean that these are people that, you know, were having sex with underage kids, but they were part of the investigation one way or the other.
01:08:50.560Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, which Donald Trump was friends with Epstein or was, you know, his business friend, I guess, for a while.
01:09:02.740But cut that off when in the early 2000s, right?
01:09:12.100And he cut that off because he cut that off because Epstein was harassing one of the women that was working with Donald Trump, I think, at Mar-a-Lago.
01:10:22.000When you have a lot of money, like Jeffrey Epstein did, and you go and you throw it around, and you get a couple of powerful friends,
01:10:28.900you wind up then getting access to all sorts of things.
01:10:32.680A lot of people who are in these circles say, oh, well, he just – I just saw him at a party with this guy that I know who's really rich and powerful, and therefore, I guess he's okay.
01:10:42.920And, you know, like, a lot of that stuff happens.
01:10:44.660I think after – it's really, to me, strange, and there's a lot of people on the list who fit this description.
01:10:50.800Once he was, like, convicted of this and went to, quote, unquote, jail, which wasn't really a jail for him.
01:11:00.480It was kind of, like, more like an office he had to show up to every day.
01:11:03.660But, like, once this all came out about what he was doing, anybody who's after that is, like, well, what are you getting involved with this guy then?
01:11:13.460At that point, it should be darn clear who this guy was.
01:11:35.900And there's, frankly, even another layer of this, which very well might be – because, you know, you go back to the early days of him.
01:11:44.120Nepstine was known as, like, a playboy with, I don't know, of-age women, right?
01:11:50.400And so, there are plenty of rich, powerful people who want to hang out with of-age attractive women and have ridiculous parties with them and don't qualify for the later stage stuff that Nepstine was into.
01:13:22.060And Hollywood names, you never know what the heck they're involved in.
01:13:24.440But, like, these circles are these circles.
01:13:27.460You know, these parties are built around big celebrities, athletes, things like that that get invited to these parties at the same parties where there's just high-powered executives who think it's cool to hang out with them.
01:13:40.840And so there's a lot of cross-pollination here.
01:13:43.300We just have to be – we have to just be aware going in.
01:13:45.700I think most people on this list, it's going to be clear – Heidi Klum, I don't think, is in any danger of having these accusations against her and then building up to things.
01:13:54.400People like RFK Jr., especially now with his association with Trump, will likely be targeted in a serious way.
01:14:00.960And they'll try to make a case that he did horrible, horrible things.
01:14:03.940Now, he has done horrible things, just not to that level as far as I know.
01:14:06.740A lot of these people on this list are going to have to deal with stuff that, you know, unlike an Alan Dershowitz, who may have the, you know, meticulous records going back to the 60s, you know, I mean, that's not everybody.
01:14:18.920Would you be willing to give – what's her name?
01:16:40.980So, would you give immunity – because I would think, if you're in Washington, D.C. right now, you might be thinking to yourself, gee, they're going to come and get me.
01:16:52.840I might try to become a whistleblower.
01:16:55.320If I'm a bad guy, I might try to become a whistleblower and hope for immunity if I turn some big names in.
01:17:08.080There has to be a few people in Washington that had the evidence, had known what was going on and just like, just as a safety, I'm going to keep this in a safety deposit box.
01:17:27.200Maybe there is incredible evidence in here and we can really point to – maybe there's 10% of that list that is really provable by this information.
01:17:36.440And if so, I want to know why it was held so long.
01:17:38.400But, you know, also it could just be the stuff that we already have and just, you know, and then I think we're in a position where just like we were all very sensitive at the time about the Me Too accusations where everyone – every name was getting thrown out there and a lot of these people denied.
01:17:53.260I mean, Trump is absolutely a victim of this, right?
01:17:56.260Like he has been accused by a ton of women for all sorts of terrible things.
01:18:01.940And we all, I think, look at it fairly and say, okay, he's the president of the United States.
01:18:06.640He's being targeted likely for political reasons.
01:18:08.920But if there's evidence out there, all of us, everybody in this audience would want Trump in prison.
01:18:21.140And so I just don't think he was doing that stuff, and I have not seen any evidence that he was doing that stuff that's believable in any way.
01:18:37.920Even though I think a lot of Democrats might be caught up in it, they still get that protection.
01:18:42.480Well, we're going to get a press conference today where Donald Trump is going to be naming names and organizations that have just, you know, in his view, and I believe him, built the United States of billions of dollars.
01:18:59.800I mean, he was in a press conference yesterday or, you know, speaking to the press, and he was saying, you know, they were asking, what do you think about, you know, USAID and all the good that they do?
01:19:08.560And he's like, look, we're talking billions of dollars that have just been taken from the American people and used for all sorts of crazy things.
01:19:18.460He said, tomorrow, I'm going to name names.
01:19:20.980I'm going to show you what people were doing with your money.
01:19:25.840And he said, Pam Bondi is already on it.
01:19:28.780He said, there's no way, I believe, there's no way this money was allocated to some of these NGOs and kickbacks didn't come back.
01:19:39.480That's why you're also hearing, and I love this, Elon Musk saying, we've got to investigate every member of Congress.
01:20:24.000Next Wednesday, we're doing a special.
01:20:28.800We're going to show you some names and things and connections that you haven't seen yet.
01:20:35.660We've been working on it for a few weeks.
01:20:38.020Money went from our tax dollars, went from the U.S. government to the Tides Foundation.
01:20:45.560And the Tides Foundation is really, in my opinion, it's a money laundering situation.
01:20:50.760It's just you can give anonymously, and then it goes into this big pool of money, and you can't trace it past there.
01:20:58.160Because it's a left-wing organization that, you know, you can give to, and you can say, oh, no, I was trying to feed the children in Africa.
01:21:05.640When actually, wink, wink, nod, nod, I want this to go to stop Donald Trump, or whatever the cause is, and nobody can trace it to you.
01:21:16.000Why is the government giving money to the George Soros Open Society Fund?
01:26:30.040You know, the one thing that I learned when I became active in faith, I think I always had faith, but I didn't really do anything about it.
01:26:43.620And then I became active and I made it the center of my life.
01:26:47.380And my life, shockingly, became so much easier.
01:26:51.080And I really thought it would be the opposite.
01:27:21.620Imagine every time your phone rings, you put it up to your ear and you think, gee, I'm paying to use this thing.
01:27:26.820And some of that money is going to like Planned Parenthood.
01:27:29.240Not a pleasant thought, but if you're with some of the big mobile companies like Verizon, it's true.
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01:28:35.780I find your book and your premise here to be so true just right off the bat that it is easier to live with faith than to live without it.
01:28:49.760And when you really start to question and engage your mind on faith, you have to reject so much science, I think, and common sense if you dismiss God.
01:29:08.800Yeah, obviously, I think that's right.
01:29:12.740I think we're in a moment right now in our culture where it's kind of an inflection point.
01:29:28.520You know, there's been scandal, sex abuse, politics, all of these things.
01:29:32.460And right now it seems to me that you've got a kind of a reconsideration where a lot of people, especially younger people, are taking a new look at religion or sort of interested in it again.
01:29:44.440But there's this hurdle that it gets to what you're saying, Glenn, that people feel like they need to get over where people are like, well, it'd be nice to be religious, but I feel like I have to leave my reason at the door.
01:29:56.840I have to, you know, leave science behind.
01:29:59.220I have to take this leap into the dark.
01:30:01.840And a big part of what I'm doing in this book is saying, no, in fact, that's not true.
01:30:07.040In fact, the world, the universe, the human place in the cosmos actually makes much more sense under religious premises than it does if you start out with the assumption that, you know, it's all random, accidental and so on.
01:30:22.580And in fact, most of what science has suggested, physics, especially in the last 50 or 100 years, is that we are, in fact, here for a reason.
01:30:32.260The universe is, in fact, made and not accidental.
01:30:36.220And that, I think, should lay a stronger foundation for people who are, you know, who would like to believe, right, but struggle to get across the threshold.
01:30:46.300It's amazing to me because I think if God exists, which I believe he does, he has to be the greatest scientist because he created all this.
01:30:54.660And the math on the universe is exact and universal.
01:30:59.760It just doesn't seem to be something that could randomly just appear because it is so incredibly exact.
01:31:08.580I don't know if you've ever heard Thomas Jefferson's quote.
01:31:11.600He was writing his nephew, Peter Carr, and he said, you know, explaining different things.
01:31:17.820And he said, when it comes to religion, above all things, fix reason firmly in her seat, because if there is a God, he must surely rather honest questioning over blindfolded fear.
01:31:28.840And that changed my life, you know, you should be asking these hard questions because you can find a lot of the answers.
01:31:40.460There's a lot you're never going to know, but science plays a real role in the discovery of God, right?
01:31:48.240Yeah, yeah. And there's I mean, one and one thing that has has shifted in the last few generations is it was always the case, I think, that science suggested that the universe was made by someone with, let's say, a very mathematical mind.
01:32:06.020Right. But, you know, and just the fact that human beings in our limited reason could understand these universal laws and figure out how calculus works,
01:32:16.560figure out theoretical physics, all of these things, all of those things, I think, already pointed towards some kind of divine architect.
01:32:23.960But then you get into this is just the fascinating reality that we've only recently figured out, which is that all of these values that sort of keep the universe together, the cosmological constant, the strong nuclear force,
01:32:39.580these sort of very particular aspects of physics are set in these really precise ways that if and we're talking not like one in a hundred, we're talking, you know, one, you know, one in a hundred billion to produce stars, planets, life itself.
01:32:58.080And if you tweak those in one direction or another in just a tiny way, you would have an empty, dead cosmos, a cosmos that flies apart, a cosmos that collapses in on itself.
01:33:09.820And our universe really is in this kind of Goldilocks jackpot zone for making us possible.
01:33:16.400And what's fascinating is that even atheistic, non-believing scientists basically acknowledge this, and they've sort of taken refuge in the idea of, you know, the multiverse, right?
01:33:27.740Like one reason that every superhero movie now has this idea of the multiverse is it has actually become really important for the atheist to believe, well, we can't, we can't, we seem special, but in fact, there must be, you know,
01:33:41.520a gazillion other universes we can't see. And the motto of modern atheism is basically better, a gazillion universes we can't see than one God.
01:33:51.020That's sort of where atheism has ended up.
01:33:53.340So how would you deal with quantum physics or, you know, quantum computing even? How do you deal with?
01:34:01.600Well, the quantum revolution is also, that's another really fascinating case, right?
01:34:06.220Where quantum physics is sort of the place where our reason, our ability to fully understand the world hits a kind of limit, at least so far, right?
01:34:15.940You end up with these really weird things where, you know, something, is something a wave or a particle, is something there or in a different place?
01:34:24.660It all, you know, depending on, it all depends on observation, right?
01:34:28.760Like whether, you know, basically to really oversimplify, it seems like at the deepest level of reality, there's a kind of possibility that only collapses into reality when we ourselves are looking at it and measuring it and studying it.
01:34:46.640It gives it, it gives the quote, you know, or the old saying, you know, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody's there to hear it, did it actually happen?
01:34:54.060It actually gives teeth to that, in a way.
01:34:57.220Right. Quantum physics said, maybe it did or maybe it didn't.
01:35:01.620It depends on whether we were there to see it.
01:35:05.220But the implication, the implication of that is, in fact, a religious implication, because it says, look, mind actually precedes matter, right?
01:35:14.880And the human mind participates every time you're looking around at the world, we are, you know, in a bizarre but fascinating way, participating in the literal creation or an existence of the world.
01:35:28.360And obviously, this has implications for creation itself, right?
01:35:32.080Because there was a very long period of, you know, cosmological history where human beings weren't around as observers.
01:35:39.660But the religious perspective has always been that it's the mind of God that holds reality together in total, right?
01:35:48.720And that, I think, is something that is deeply consonant with what quantum physics has figured out about how our own minds relate to reality.
01:35:56.540We are, in fact, made in the image of God in the sense that we, like God, participate in taking possibilities and turning them into physical realities,
01:36:19.920Give me your explanation on why you think that it is easier to live life with than without faith.
01:36:26.900Well, I mean, there's two levels, right?
01:36:30.720Like, there's a sort of practical case for religion that a lot of people who aren't deeply religious can still get behind, right?
01:36:39.220Which is to say, you know, it's good to have a sense of meaning and purpose, a sense of your own cosmic significance.
01:36:47.520And I think, you know, a lot of one reason among many that you see a lot of depression and anxiety and even suicidality among younger people these days is that they're the first generation in American history where large numbers of them have been raised, you know, not even with like a weak form of faith, but with no exposure to religion at all.
01:37:06.860No basic Sunday school, you know, nothing, nothing like that.
01:37:09.620Right. And there's a way in which religious belief just offers you a basic grounding in your own life.
01:37:17.260You have a place. You're here for a reason. It's not an accident.
01:37:20.980You know, human civilization is not just like a candle that's about to be snuffed out by climate change or something.
01:37:27.000And then related to that, there's, you know, faith as a form of community.
01:37:34.700All of the kind of things that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about in American life.
01:37:38.320Right. So the role that religious institutions play in building social capital, all of that is real.
01:37:44.580So that's that's step one. But in in the book, I'm trying to push a little bit beyond that, because I think I have a lot of readers.
01:37:51.820I write for The New York Times obviously has, you know, a fairly secular readership.
01:37:55.400I have a lot of readers who, yeah, it's an understatement.
01:37:59.120Yeah, fine. Yeah. But but a lot of religious readers as well, I can assure you.
01:38:03.580And but there's a lot of people who will go that far with you.
01:38:06.660They'll say, yeah, religion, it's good for you.
01:38:09.260It's good for you to it's good to take your kids to church, gives them a moral grounding.
01:38:13.080It's good to, you know, have some faith and purpose in the universe.
01:38:16.560But in the end, isn't it still kind of unreasonable?
01:38:21.980And the case I'm making in the book is, no, in fact, the practical benefits of religion are there because religion is, in fact, a better description of reality than secularism and atheism.
01:38:35.000And in fact, you know, there's a line attributed to the scientist John von Neumann, right?
01:38:42.840This is actually something he supposedly said to his mother.
01:38:45.160So there's some debate about whether he said it or not.
01:38:48.380But the line goes, you know, there probably is a God.
01:38:51.920A lot of things make a lot more sense if there is one.
01:38:55.580And that's what I'm trying to persuade people of here, that, in fact, it's not just that religion is good for you in an immediate day-to-day sense.
01:39:04.740It's that it's good for you because there probably is a God.
01:39:10.200You're probably going to meet him when you die.
01:39:11.980You probably should be organizing your life to some degree around that reality.
01:39:17.520And that is, in fact, the reasonable thing for people to do.
01:39:21.780But wait, but wait, you know, that's like I've always joked, you know, if I'm an atheist, I'm just going to hedge my bet a little bit.
01:39:36.320So that's—but that's not what you're saying, is it?
01:39:40.920Well, I am saying—so there's a kind of bet hedging where you're like, okay, you know, maybe there's a one in a thousand chance that there's a God.
01:39:49.480And if there is that chance, I should pay attention to it because, you know, even a one in a thousand chance of entering eternity is a pretty big deal.
01:39:59.740I'm saying there is a very, very strong probability that there is a God.
01:40:03.640And that strong probability is the starting place for going out there, going to church, reading books, praying, and seeing if you can have a relationship with this God, right?
01:40:17.660So in the end, you can't—look, you can't think your way to a relationship with God because it's a relationship.
01:40:23.580But you can think and reason your way to the point where you can say, this is something I should be looking for.
01:40:32.020It makes sense to seek, to knock, and see if the door is opened unto you.
01:40:37.740All right, I've got a couple of questions left, but I need to take a one-minute break, and then I want to come back and have you just explore just one facet of what you just said.
01:40:48.060There's a very, very, very good chance it's most likely that there is a God.
01:40:52.280You say that with such conviction, and I can say that from my own personal experience, but how do you make that case to somebody who is an agnostic?
01:41:02.260We'll get that answer here in just a second.
01:41:04.000First, let me tell you about Lear Capital.
01:41:06.120If you missed hour number one, you should go back and listen to it today on the podcast.
01:41:12.340I talked about rehypothecation, which is so sexy.
01:41:15.400I mean, everybody's like—everybody wants to talk about it.
01:41:17.920I told you there's something happening with gold right now.
01:41:22.460The amount of gold—there's shortages of it in London.
01:41:26.680Somebody's buying an enormous amount of gold, and speculation is it might be us this time, which means something's happening and being planned for our currency and our finances and the way we run things.
01:41:44.840As I told you yesterday, they're talking about repricing gold.
01:41:51.260The United States has it on our books as $45 an ounce.
01:42:41.640So, in the book, you talk about being at a Christmas party in the mid-2000s, and you found yourself trapped in a kitchen with Christopher Hitchens.
01:43:02.560And you tell an interesting story here that is kind of the genesis, if you will, of what you were putting together in the book.
01:43:21.980How do you say that to somebody who doesn't believe there is a God or is completely agnostic that, no, no, no, there's a very, very, very good chance that there is God?
01:43:36.340So, what Hitchens, who is, of course, one of the most famous atheists in the world at that point, said to me was something like, you know, suppose it was a bad English accent.
01:43:49.580And I apologize, but suppose it was established that Jesus of Nazareth really did rise from the dead.
01:45:15.920Then you add the evidence that our consciousness has its own kind of supernatural capacities.
01:45:22.900We were talking about, you know, quantum physics earlier, the relationship between mind and matter.
01:45:27.400But there's also just the fact that the mind can do things that a purely material sort of, you know, things shouldn't be able to do, like penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos.
01:45:37.300Okay, so the universe seems designed with us in mind.
01:45:40.300Our minds seem designed to understand the universe.
01:45:43.800And then, and this is important, and this is also where some secular people get off the bus, but it's important to make the argument.
01:45:50.400You also have religious experience as a fundamental feature of human life that just doesn't go away if you declare the world to be secular, right?
01:46:01.160There's this whole idea that the world is disenchanted, that, you know, we used to have fairies and ghosts and all these things, and now we're men of science and we don't.
01:47:11.800All right, let me talk to you about real estate agents I trust.
01:47:14.700A recent report from the Consumer Federation of America showed many real estate companies
01:47:19.480and their agencies hire indiscriminately than they fail to adequately train and supervise their new agents.
01:47:25.520So through lax hiring and training, many companies sponsor agents that have too little knowledge and experience to adequately serve their customers.
01:55:45.800Because he didn't hire any paranoid, bipolar obsessives to deal with.
01:55:50.840What you understand about this is any time that these things have escaped a lab, it's because of a disgruntled, crazy person, or sloppiness by somebody at the lab.
01:56:03.300So, when you have, these things should be at the highest level security, because there's no cure for some of this stuff, highest level of security.
01:56:13.460And there should be maybe one or two labs, because you can control those, and the world can watch and make sure everything is handled right.
01:56:22.500But every time one of these things has happened, it's escaped, because somebody was like the, was it the bird flu?
01:57:26.960Pretty clear that Ukraine was in the side eye of Russia there for a while.
01:57:32.040Did you hear about the relative of J.D. Vance, distant relative, but she's 12 years old.
01:57:38.980She had to have a heart transplant, and Cincinnati Children's Hospital wouldn't give her the heart transplant because she hadn't had the COVID vaccine.
01:57:48.460And the parents are like, no, we don't believe in the vaccine.
01:57:58.340I don't know if anybody, even maybe the family, knew they were directly related to J.D. Vance, but this is going to turn into a nightmare for this hospital, as it should.
01:58:10.160Yeah, that's not a good reason for it.
01:58:42.100He will be, I think, have a laser focus on.
01:58:44.980I won't agree with him on probably some of the stuff that he does, but I will be very much behind him on efforts like that.
01:58:50.620But certainly shouldn't be taking children off of heart transplant lists because they didn't get the COVID vaccine, which, again, there's no evidence that they would need it.
01:59:00.600I have to, I really am anxious for you to watch this because I don't think you've ever thought Fauci was a good guy, but I don't know if you ever thought that he was really, really dark and nefarious.
01:59:13.080Yeah, I mean, I don't like a lot of the stuff that he did.
01:59:15.260I think he quite clearly was lying about all of this.
01:59:18.980So, I mean, I think nefarious is a fair description as to how he handled this situation.
01:59:23.420I don't know that I think of him as, like, the, you know, the source of all genocide, as some do on the right.
02:00:01.560And he said the difference between America and the Soviet Union is we were making disease worse and we were trying to make it kill more people and be more, you know, the transmission, human to human transmission to be, you know, as close to 100 as we could get.
02:00:19.240He said, but America, they only worked on diseases to try to find the antidote in case it was used.
02:00:39.120But it's not pragmatically justifiable.
02:00:41.940Like, in theory, I can understand why you'd want to see what the worst nature has to offer is, and we should really look at that, because that could happen, and we better have something to fight back against it.
02:00:53.280I can understand that line of thought.