Jimmy Akin Debate Report

I think it is recording. This dividing line is short, so no fancy openings, closings, no 4K cameras, all the rest of that kind of fun stuff. Just me back here at the back with regular lighting. And because I've just got so much going on, we had the two debates last two evenings here at First Baptist Church in Livingston.

Brian Gunter is the pastor here. Brian's a great guy. He worked very closely with EAN in the Louisiana abortion bill. That's how we sort of got connected up. But has a real heart to reach out to Roman Catholics.

There's a lot of Roman Catholics to reach out to in southern Louisiana. I can assure you of that. Anyway, we had the two debates with Jimmy Akin. And then the next two evenings, I'm going to be speaking on reaching out to Roman Catholics for the church and then preaching Sunday morning.

So lots of stuff going on. Excited to announce that we are real close to finalizing two more debates already, one during the summer and one during the fall. So good topics, exciting topics, useful. And so looking forward to those.

We'll obviously be letting you know once we have everything firmed up and official and things like that. And so good stuff there. And then for those of you in the Oklahoma area, I'll be back at Grace Life Church and Prior next week, 1st and 2nd of May, speaking on the atonement.

So we'll be doing a deep dive into passages like Romans 8 and Hebrews 7 through 10 and the whole nine yards there. Looking forward to that. So what I want to do here briefly, as I've got a bunch of stuff I've got to do, would love to do a dividing line.

We don't have the internet connection here. The park internet, I think, is about 2 ,400 baud. Sometimes I think I can hear that wonderful nyeh-nyeh-nyeh sound that I lived with in the 1980s. I remember being so excited going from a 1 ,200 baud modem to a 2 ,400 baud modem, then to a 4 ,800 and a 9 ,600.

Then we stopped using baud after that, I think. Or was it? No, we had 19 eights. Yeah, anyway. So only the old people understand this. And we old people like talking about this.

Because everything's so fast now.

Anyway, what were we talking about? Yes, Rich has ordered all the stuff in. We'll have an upgraded Starlink system. And we're actually going to have wiring put in right where I'm sitting right now, actually, so that we can have hard wiring rather than trying to connect up wirelessly.

That really does help with a lot of things and have multiple ways of connecting to the internet. I need to remind myself on the program here in case Rich listens to this. I was talking to a pastor across the river over there at the church in Appaloosas.

And they had, I think that's where it was. Anyway, they were having connection problems. And they found a service that was relatively inexpensive that completely solved all their problems. And so we're going to have to look into that because I think it might be worth doing that because doing these programs live is the way to do it.

But anyway, so we're working on all that. And we'll be upgraded for the next trip, which will be in July, up into Colorado. So lots of stuff going on. And I wanted to give you a report on the debates.

I think people who really wanted to watch could watch. It was a Facebook live type feed type thing. I don't know what quality that is. To be honest, we have never watched anything like that on Facebook, or at least I don't remember having watched anything like that on Facebook.

And I just posted the link on Twitter to the high quality video. I don't know how high quality is, 1080 something.

I don't know.

That has the slides. Now, there are going to be lots of slides to look at, only a few from me, and many, many, many from Jimmy Akin. How do you even start on this? As most of you know, I had listened to and watched things from Jimmy Akin in preparation for these debates.

But it was mostly online stuff. It wasn't in-person stuff. And I actually have, I'm going to try to remember to go look to see what Jimmy Akin wore when he debated Bart Ehrman. Because I would like to have a picture of Bart Ehrman's face when Jimmy Akin walked into the room, because he wore both nights this white denim jean jacket and white denim jeans, cowboy boots, and a cowboy hat.

And he didn't just wear the cowboy hat to and from the church. He wore it during the debate, which I find very, very strange, very, very, very strange. But it's his thing. And I don't know if he just doesn't realize this, but a lot of people said to me after the debates and then in between the two debates, I couldn't see his eyes.

And the getup, he's got this big, long red beard. And they said the getup just made it really hard to take him seriously. It doesn't look like he's taking it seriously. So why should I take it seriously?

And it is very distracting. That's why I don't wear a coogee sweater in a debate. So but anyway, so I'm going to have to go and look and see if he did the same thing with Bart Ehrman. That would be very, very interesting.

So anyways, just remember the background here real quickly. I debated Catholic apologist Trent Horne of Catholic Answers just a few months ago in Houston. And we debated sola scriptura. And then we debated purgatory.

And the Monday, that was the sola scriptura debate was on a Friday. And the Monday thereafter, Jimmy Akin, because we had been trying for months to arrange this stuff and just it was very frustrating.

Jimmy Akin said, I'll do the debate that you want to do, which is how do you have peace with God, but only if you do two debates. And the other debate would be sola scriptura. This was three days after debating Trent Horne on sola scriptura.

I don't know what that means. I'm sure Jimmy Akin and Trent Horne know what that means. And probably people at Catholic Answers know what that means.

But I got no idea.

It makes no sense to me.

It really doesn't. But we're like, oh, OK. And I had miscounted. This was actually the sixth sola scriptura debate that we've done. It's hopefully the last, to be honest with you. I mean, what more is there to say?

Especially because what I did is I knew what his presentation was going to be. I mentioned on the dividing line what it was going to be. It's the apostolic paradigm of scripture, tradition, and magisterium, even though the term magisterium, first time it's used in Denzinger.

I was going to bring this up. It never came up in the conversation. Partly because we had much less cross-examination than I'd have with Trent Horne, unfortunately. I'm not sure why they insisted on that.

Dale Tuggy insisted on that as well. But there you go. But the term magisterium, the first time it appears in Denzinger and Denzinger's collection of official Roman Catholic documents down through the ages.

The first time it appears in Denzinger is at Vatican I in 1870. So this is a very modern term. But his idea is that the apostles ordained elders slash bishops. And that makes up the magisterium. When the apostles passed away, it continues with the bishops all the way to the modern Roman Catholic Church.

That's the idea, anyways. So I knew what I was going to be. And so I addressed it in my opening statement. I argued against it in my opening statement. I basically said, if it is said, or and I think once I did directly quote Aiken making one of the statements in my opening.

But I had asked Pastor Gunter, I said, so is he going to be using a digital presentation? And he checked, said, yes, he is. And so I was like, OK. I prefer not to. I realize we live in a day where there's some people that literally can't listen to a 15-minute presentation and have enough focus and attention span to actually stick with you.

I realize that's the day we live in. But I would prefer not to. But so I put together slides for my opening. The day of the debate, what I discovered is that Jimmy Aiken has slides for his opening and slides for the first rebuttal and slides for the second rebuttal and slides for the closing.

And I'm like, what?

I don't remember. I didn't go back and look. But when I debated Joe Ventilacion of Iglesia Ni Cristo in 2017, I'm not sure if he did or didn't.

Do that.

He might have. If anybody did, it was him. And we all remember that Leighton Flowers had his laminated notes for everything, for all the rebuttals and closing the whole nine yards. I think he had similar stuff just on his laptop for the last debate we did.

But more than one person, again, between the debates, after the debates, came up to me and it's like, how do you have slides for rebuttals? That doesn't make any sense. And I'm like, I know. It doesn't.

I've never done anything like that, never even thought about doing it. And it's like, all you're doing is you're making a presentation and the other guy is interrupting it, and then you're going back to your presentation.

It did remind me a lot of Harold Camping. I don't know if any of you remember, but it seems like a lifetime ago, I debated Harold Camping about his prophecy about when the world was going to end. What was that, 2011, something like that?

And the first day went so poorly for him that the second day, this was on Iron Sharpens Iron, but the second day, he just ignored me. He wouldn't respond to what I said. He just had his presentation, and when his time came back, he just kept going and kept doing his thing.

And it was really obvious, and everybody recognized why, everybody understood he had gotten destroyed the first day, so let's just not even bother the second day. But it still just leaves you going, how do you call this a debate when all you're doing is you have a presentation?

And his presentation included quoting from my books and stuff, but whether that was a part of what I was saying in response to his points or not, he just, and it wasn't as far as I could tell. It's not like I was looking really super closely.

I couldn't even see the slides, but it wasn't like he had a bunch of stuff he could choose from. If he says this, this, this, this, no, it was still in order. He's just hitting the down button and going in order.

And the worst part about it was, aside from the fact that, again, a lot of people saw that, and they're like, that's really weird. It's like he's not really here to interact. He's just here to preach to us and present his views and get interrupted once in a while.

What he did in both debates was made a number of accusations. I'm bringing stuff up that I said I would never bring up, which I never said. I never once. I mean, last night when he made his presentation on how someone has peace with God, he did not present 85 to 90 of the Roman Catholic doctrine of soteriology.

I don't even remember, honestly, if in his opening he even mentioned baptism. But he was just trying to say that, you know,.

We've got a lot in common.

We sort of do things in the same way. And, you know, it's all this. And he'd be, I've got good news.

And then he'd lead everybody in clapping.

And by the second debate, when he started doing the clapping stuff, isn't that great? And stuff, I'm just sitting there going, really?

OK.

It was very strange. But what he would do is, it was last night, for example, he quotes from Second Timothy and says, don't argue over words. So I get up, I do my first rebuttal. And the first night what he did was, when I did my rebuttal, he gets up and says, what you just heard is a debate tactic called overload.

You're still, it's much stuff out there. The other person can never respond to it. And I'm just not going to respond to that. I'm just going to go back to what I was talking about. And I was responding to the points that he had raised in his presentation.

But he wouldn't respond. That's overload. Have you ever listened to Jerry Matic's debate? How about Patrick Madrid? How about any Catholic answers apologist down through the decades? They throw stuff out there all the time.

Always throwing the cannon out there, just for the fun of it. Doesn't matter what the topic of the debate was. We're going to throw the can out there. And then last night, he quotes in Second Timothy 2, don't argue over words.

Well, I'm not going to argue over words. I'm just going to stick with the subject. And then he's using words. And he's arguing about, for example, the nature of faith. And is it intellectual only? Or is it a formed faith?

And all the rest of this kind of stuff, which is really important stuff. But it's arguments over words. So he gets to do it. But nobody else gets to do it. It was just so amazingly inconsistent and incoherent.

And the first night, I'm just sort of like, what is going on here? And then by last night, it's like, OK. Literally, as he got up for the first rebuttal. So for some reason, Catholic answers said I had to go first both times.

All right. And so I had the first rebuttal. And I had seven minutes. And basically, what I had to say was, you weren't told everything that Rome teaches on the subject of how you have peace with God. You weren't told about purgatory and indulgences.

And you weren't told about the mass, the perpetuatory sacrifice. And you weren't told about Mary as Mediatrix of Graces. And any of this stuff. It was all, look how similar we are. And so I sit down. He gets up and says, I'm not going to argue over words.

And he just goes back to his slides. And I'm sitting there at my table. And I just go, I just put my hands up. Like, why are we here? And I'm looking at the audience. And the involved folks who know what this is all about are sitting there going, why is this guy in a cowboy hat even here?

What's going on? I thought there was supposed to be a debate. And yeah. So it was interesting. So we discovered the first night that everything's apostolic tradition. Everything's apostolic tradition.

It would be fascinating if someone were to take everything that Jimmy Akin said the first debate where he used the term apostolic tradition. It'd be interesting to know how many times he used it. And then to look at how much stuff did he identify as apostolic tradition?

Now, what's really interesting is what he does is he, and this is what Catholic Ancestors has always done. What you try to do is you take two positions and you try to get them as close as possible. So it's easier for people to jump over from one to the other.

That's the whole idea. And so what he does is when he wants to defend the idea of apostolic tradition, he's not gonna defend the last formal dogma, bodily assumption of Mary, or the one before that, papal infallibility, or the one before that, Immaculate Conception, 1853.

He's not gonna defend these formal dogmas as apostolic tradition. He will conceptually or technically, but he doesn't wanna talk about things like that because it's just so painfully obvious that these are things the apostles never even dreamed of.

So what he does is he'll take other topics, easy pickings topics. Well, it's apostolic tradition. There'll be no more apostles and stuff like this rather than actually give a full-throated, that's the one thing I've gotta say for Bob St. Genesis.

He is the only Catholic apologist that has had the guts, use other terms. He's had the guts to actually in public debate the bodily assumption of Mary. And I say this, Catholic apologists who are not nuts, because everybody has their Lulu's, we've got Lulu's and the Catholics have Lulu's and the Orthodox have Lulu's.

And there's no sense investing time with Lulu's because you're not gonna accomplish anything. You're not gonna produce anything that's gonna have lasting value to it. And we don't want to have Lulu's.

So anyways, Bob St. Genesis, at least he was willing to do that. These other guys just say won't because Trenholm said it after his debate with Ortlund on Sola Scriptura. The only topics we should debate are Sola Scriptura because everything else is dependent upon that.

Why would you debate Marian dogmas with someone? Because the Marian dogmas are believed on the basis of our view of authority. And that involves the denial of Sola Scriptura. And I would say it's just simply the positive statement of Sola Ecclesia.

Once the church is your ultimate authority, the church says you believe this, you believe it, that's it. You don't have to worry about history. You don't have to worry about doctrinal development. You don't have to slap a bunch of Newman on it.

You just, you believe it because the church tells you. And that's really where they are if they were just gonna be honest about it. So anyway, the apostolic tradition phrase was used over and over and over and over and over again.

And everything just became apostolic tradition. Even if you couldn't document it through history or something like that, it's still, it must be apostolic tradition. But of the two, I think at least the Sola Scriptura debate was a little bit more useful.

There was a little bit more engagement on Jimmy Akin's part than there was last night where it was just this, well, look, and I had heard him do this and I find it astonishing. In 1999, there was a Lutheran Catholic Accord.

This was with the liberal Lutherans, the leftist Lutherans, the Lutherans that don't really believe almost anything. It's not dogmatic. It does not have binding authority within Roman Catholicism, but there's all sorts of ecumenical stuff that Rome does with the Eastern Orthodox and stuff like that, that can have a certain level of authority or another level of authority.

And again, in Roman Catholicism, what really, really has authority? You get all sorts of different theories. Nobody really knows. I mean, Jimmy pretends that he's sort of the expert on what all that is.

This is how you should view that and that's how you should view that, but anyway. And so he's talking about that and how the Methodists got into that. Seen what's happened with the Methodists recently.

And was then a reformed federation. And of course, that's the ultra leftist, nowhere near John Calvin reformed folks and stuff like that. And so he's trying to do all this. We can say faith alone. All Trent was saying, Council of Trent was saying is it's intellectual faith.

I didn't have time to get into all of it. When your cross-examination time is only 10 minutes, you even take the time to read two or three canons.

You're done.

That's it.

You never get to anything else. And obviously I wanted to get to the gospel. I wanted to get to key issues. So during my cross-ex, I'm taking you through Romans four. I'm really pressing on him. Are you really the blessed man of Romans 4, 8?

And it's really frustrating. But at the same time, I also recognized in the back of my mind, there's this voice saying, this is Southern Louisiana. The Roman Catholics in this area are not liberals. They are conservatives.

They know what their parents and grandparents believed. They know what they believed about purgatory. And we did get into some discussion of purgatory last night. And since it wasn't the specific topic, I didn't want to press him on his stuff about Paul being an error about the day of the Lord and stuff like that, though it would have been useful.

But these are conservatives and they know what their grandparents believed about purgatory. And Jimmy again was sort of doing the instant purgatory's boom, like that thing again, like Trent was doing, which is not, I'm sorry, you have to stand on your head.

You have to engage in the most amazing amount of historical revisionism to believe that the Roman Catholic Church was actually teaching that purgatory could be instantaneous. It was not. There's time.

That is not even questionable. And when I brought up F .X. Shoup, he said it was Shoupay. When I brought up F .X. Shoup's book on purgatory, which is representative of what Bellarmine said, what everybody back then said, and he knows this.

He knows this is true. I'm not trying to, I don't have to misrepresent anything here. He knows they talked about fire and he knows they talked about punishments and the legal aspects, and it was just part of what was taught by everybody, including the popes.

But he's going with the modern, sanitized, oh, Benedict XVI said this about purgatory and isn't that nice and la, la, la, la. And so when we got into all that stuff on purgatory, the people in the audience, they know.

I just knew that not only at that time, but in the future, when this gets posted, and it'll get posted in just a few days. I mean, they post the first one right away. It doesn't happen really quickly.

It's already up. When they watch this, there are gonna be a lot of Roman Catholics. And I talked to a couple. I talked to a Roman Catholic guy. He was carrying Ludwig Ott's Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma.

He says, I'm more in this kind of Catholicism. I'm like, that's because that's the historic Catholicism. That's Trent through up until Vatican II Catholicism. And it is. And they're gonna go, that guy wasn't representing the Roman Catholicism.

I know.

And I had imagined that there's gonna be a bunch of people sitting there going, well, my priest certainly wouldn't have dressed it that way. And I pointed out during the debate, I said, go listen to the other debates I've done on justification with Mitch Pacwa, with Robertson Jennis, listen to what they said.

And it's not what Jimmy Akin is saying. And it's not how Jimmy Akin is saying. So was there somebody right and somebody wrong? Who knows? But it was frustrating to only have seven minutes to have to try to bring out these vitally important dogmatically defined elements of Roman Catholic theology as to how a person has peace with God because the other side didn't do it.

And it had to be dragged out.

And even when I do that,.

Well, I'm not gonna argue about words. And it's like, what do you mean argue about words? We're here to do a debate.

I don't know.

I don't know.

It was very, very, very strange. The canon came up a lot. There were places that he said stuff that I'm like, well, I'm glad he didn't dispute the meaning of God breathed and he actually used the term God breathed.

So he didn't go where Trent Horn went with that, with the life-giving stuff. That's good. In every debate that I've done on justification of my faith, Roman Catholic has brought up James 2 .24. Jimmy Akin said, James is saying that the faith he's talking about is intellectual only.

Read my book on justification, starting verse 15. Can that faith, that's an empty faith. They said faith, a faith that only exists in words and not in deeds, not in reality. Can that faith save him? The answer is no.

And so I was like, well, okay, I agree. And I'll chalk that one up, try to keep that one in the old memory banks that are getting smaller and smaller. For the next time I'm debating with a Roman Catholic and they run off to James 2 .24, well, Jimmy Akin says, might as well.

So there were a number of things like that. And there were a couple of times there were some laughs. Jimmy is a showman. I think that's part of the getup. He could dress normally if he wanted to. I mean, a tie would be irrelevant when you've got a beard that long.

I mean, you can put anything down there. So there were some lighthearted moments, mainly the first night. But there were a couple of times like during Q &A where Brian was reading a audience question and he's like, I don't get this one.

And he'd read it. And then I'd sort of look at Jimmy and Jimmy would look at me and we're sort of like, maybe it's this or maybe it's that, or maybe they mean this or maybe they mean that. So it wasn't all just nastiness at all.

But it was, I think, revealing in many ways. I mean, they're definitely gonna stand out when, and I'm not sure if we've kept up with this. I hope we have. But we have playlists on our YouTube channel and there's a Roman Catholic playlist.

And you add these in to especially the older debates and it will be fascinating because what you'll hear is a very different perspective and a very different approach from the Roman Catholics. But you'll hear me saying the same things.

I'll be emphasizing the same points, presenting the same gospel. I may, if time allows and if it would be of sufficient benefit, I may pull up some of the screenshots because I was looking at the YouTube posting.

It was just posted within the past couple of hours from the church on the first night. And that's the first time I saw any of his slides. And I made some notes, but he was trying to allege contradictions between what I had said.

On the last one.

And I was looking on the website or in a book or something like that. And there weren't any contradictions, but it might be worthwhile to look at a few of those and go, okay, here was what the context of this one was.

Here's what the context of that one was. They're not contradictory. In fact, that helps to illustrate this point here. So we might do something like that. We'll see. Again, just lots of stuff going on, more debates coming up and there's another area of study that I need to try to get into for debates either late in the year or into next year.

Though again, I'm personally very concerned about the functionality of my nation after November of this year. I could see, I know history and there are forces entrenched in the government of the United States that will not allow certain things to happen.

And like right now. So I don't know if I wanna go to the direction right now. Let me just say about the debates that, Jimmy's an entertaining fellow, but I don't think he thought through where he was, who he was talking to, not me, but to an audience of Louisianans.

And there were plenty of Catholics there. And that Louisiana Catholic, I mean, lives in Arkansas.

He should know.

If you're in the deep South, the Catholics in these areas are not a bunch of ecumenical people. And so it just sort of went over like a lead balloon. And I'm very thankful to have had the opportunity to challenge his paradigm theory, I think very successfully.

And then I'm thankful to have had the opportunity of preaching the gospel and explaining to Roman Catholics how they can have true peace with God. To the Roman Catholics who recognize purgatory, indulgences, the mass, the purgatory sacrifice, the sacramental system, the endless cycle of confession and penances and everything else that goes along with that.

And they don't recognize Jimmy Akin's Presby Catholicism because Jimmy Akin was a former Presbyterian. Scott Hahn is a former Presbyterian. They both will take the language of their past Protestant lives and utilize it in their presentation of Roman Catholicism.

And Roman Catholics who are raised as Roman Catholics have no idea what they're talking about, that they didn't recognize it. And I just don't think he thought that through. I really, really don't. So in God's providence, each one of these debates has a place.

I spoke to a number of people after both debates who had left Roman Catholicism, had said that this ministry was central and they're having done so. And so those debates will be added to all the others that we've done.

Roman Catholicism is back in the number one place as far as the number of debates done with Roman Catholics for a while. And I can't go back and necessarily document this, but I had sort of run through them once a number of years ago and had come to the conclusion that I had now done like one or two more Muslim debates than I had done debates with Roman Catholics.

Because we were doing a lot of them there for a while, especially when I was going to South Africa all the time. I think we're back to the direction. I think Roman Catholicism is now in the lead and Islam has fallen in the second place as far as the number of debates are concerned.

So there will be one more Roman Catholic debate this year, Lord willing, that's one of the ones that hasn't been totally ironed out yet, but hopefully that will be happening in late October. And so we'll keep pressing on that.

And let me just comment what I was saying earlier. I'll be going back out pretty much in two months after I get home, well, maybe two and a half months after I get home on another trip. This one will be primarily focused ministry-wise in Colorado Springs and Denver.

Not a real long trip, but Colorado Springs and Denver. And so then the Fight, Laugh, Feast thing in Fort Worth around Reformation Day, and then I'll be in, I think it's Mobile where the debate's gonna be before that.

And it's a lot of traveling. I feel a strong sense that we need to get as much work done now as we can in the sense of face-to-face stuff. Because as I mentioned earlier, I truly have to wonder where my nation will be after November.

I can see a lot of scenarios of great civil unrest and I think that's exactly what's wanted by the left. It may get more out of control than they'd like it to go. But I just, it's really hard for me to make investment in planning past January of this year without knowing what we're gonna be facing and what's gonna be possible and what's not gonna be possible, what's the wisest way of doing things.

It's really hard to say, it's really hard to say. And that's true about everything, not just traveling and ministry, but in the church, what we're gonna be facing, what we're gonna be dealing with. It's time for the saints to be praying and to be active.

And when I say active, we need to say to our nation, even if we can tell the next generation does not care and has had stolen from them any kind of worldview foundation for them to even understand, we have to trust the spirit of God and we have to be prophetic, we have to be clear, we have to live consistently, ouch, with what we're saying to the world.

But we need to tell them, you are on the path of destruction. We can look back at the prophetic witness to Israel and they had a specific covenant with God and they had broken that covenant, but God's still dealing with nations and we are a nation that has demonstrated its hatred, its deep and abiding hatred of God's ways.

And He brings nations to their knees and that's what's gonna happen to us and is happening to us in many ways. So that's why I say, I would like to be able to be working toward things in February, March, April, so on and so forth, but I'm just hesitant to invest the time when I don't know what possibilities are actually gonna be there.

So anyway, so I'm gonna put this, I'm gonna mark this as one of the DL shorts, I don't even know how long we've been going, but I just wanted to give you a quick update and I hope that on the trip up to prior from here, the first leg is the longest leg of this trip, it's many hours of driving.

So I just don't know that I'm gonna be able to sneak anything in that evening. And I've never been to the RV park I'm staying at, so I don't know. And I don't remember, and I don't think we tried to do, we didn't try to do anything when I was in prior last time, but we'll be staying at the same RV park I stayed at before.

So I don't know what their internet's like, but we'll take a shot, we'll see what we can do. And like I said, next trip should have more options to be able to make stuff like that work and do more live stuff.

So pray for travel. Physically, I'm doing great right now. So I'm not asking along those lines so much, well, I'm not my age anyways, but safety and traveling, and dealing with any of the little issues that come up with the RV that are due to the fact that it's never been pulled long distances before.

It's literally brand new along those lines. Even though it was built in September of 2019, this is the first time it's been bounced over roads in Louisiana. And so things happen and you gotta deal with stuff.

So pray that I'll be observant. I'll always tell you, I stopped at a rest stop. These restrooms, beautiful, it was in text, most beautiful rest stop I've ever been at. I mean, the building and the art, and it was like, wow, this is really nice.

I mean, not every rest stop you stop at is really all that nice, if you know what I mean. This place is incredible. I'm walking out and my RV is second in the truck parking. And I can see under the truck between me and my RV, I can see my spare tire that's on a winch thing underneath the unit.

And it's down like this. And I'm like, what? So I have to go over there and I've never had to winch this thing up before. It's a brand new unit, but I get some pliers and I get it back up there. And at first we're wondering, did someone try to steal it?

It's a brand new spare. These are tractor trailer tires. They're very expensive. And it stays up there. And then two days later, I'm walking toward it and I go, and it's now gone down this way. I mean, can you imagine if the tire goes all the way down and hits the ground, hits a bump or something like that?

Probably just rip the whole unit apart, destroy it. And so I'm cranking it back up there. And so I've still got the scars on my knuckles where I was trying to open a ratchet strap and my hand slipped and it's right across.