The Glenn Beck Program - Welcome to the Best of Glenn Beck & Happy Thanksgiving! | 11/22/18

Episode Date: November 22, 2018

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The Blaze Radio Network. On Demand. This is the best of Glenn Beck. Courage. Truth. Glenn Beck. Well, we have to start the show with a California update brought to you by our sponsor, New Puparoni. Oh, Rony on San Francisco Streets.

Yes, California's crappy policies now yielding some literal crappy results. In one week, the city of San Francisco logged over 16,000 complaints of human poop on the streets. Let me say that again. 16,000 people called the city and went, there, somebody's crapping in the street in front of my house. In seven days, the mounds of vagrant-generated poop

actually forced the closure of a convention being held downtown. You know, didn't they just, didn't somebody just pull a convention because of a bathroom issue in some other state? I mean, this is a bigger bathroom issue. If you live in San Francisco, I want you to know, help is on the way. Mayor London Breed was absolutely, I'm quoting, absolutely shocked after walking around town and seeing not only all of the poop, but all of the used drug needles. Now, how many needles are they giving out in San Francisco? every month and it's like 500,000. There's hundreds of thousands.

It's hundreds of thousands of needles they're giving out. Well. And some of those come back to be recycled too. I mean, certainly not all of them. Well, they're supposed to return them, but you can't expect. When you, you know, heroin users, they're not always dependable. Well, the mayor has decided she's mad as hell and she's not going to take it anymore. So she's bringing out the big guns.

It's a new really breed of a new hero. I think we're going to be seeing this action hero on the big big screen soon. It is the San Francisco version of Delta Force or the Navy SEALs, and they may already be patrolling your streets in San Francisco, dressed in hazmat suits and patrolling neighborhoods with the state-of-the-art patrol vehicle equipped with a steam cleaner and disinfectant. They are the men and women of the San Francisco Poop Patrol. Yep, this is our country.

Now keep in mind, this story is not a parody. This is true. San Francisco has now allocated over $100 million to combat the poop and needle problem. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, holy crap, $100 million? That sounds like a colossal waste of a ton of money. Really? you can't get it done for cheaper than $100 million?

Well, remember, it's California and San Francisco. I mean, the Bay Area, 100 million, you know, San Francisco residents. You remember when $100 million, you know, was a lot of money? It doesn't go as far, you know, as it used to in that hellhole of San Francisco. $100 million in San Francisco, I think, can get you maybe 175 square feet, you know, of a beautiful apartment. Probably, I think somewhere between five and eight gallons of gas or the poop patrol. So which would you spend it on?

The new San Francisco Public Works budget includes $72.5 million for street cleaning. Get this one, $12 million for housekeepers to get this, clean, clean, homeless encampments. Well, first of all, I got one problem. They're not really housekeepers. If there is no home, they're homeless. So let me see if I have this straight. If I'm working in San Francisco, I'm just working at a deli,

and I'm paying taxes to San Francisco, and I have to go home and clean my house, I'm paying taxes so the people who come and poop in front of my store. I'm paying taxes so they have a housekeeper? Oh my gosh. Also $2.8 million for

washing down the camps and removing any biohazard. 2.3 million to steam the poop infested streets. 3.1 million for portable toilets. $700,000 for a 10-member needle cleanup squad

and of course nearly 900,000 for the poop patrol. Each member of the poop patrol takes over, you ready, takes home over $184,000 in salary and benefits. Now, I don't know, I don't know what it would cost to get me to pick up human poop. It would be, it would probably be a little more expensive than that. But are you telling me that you can't find, oh, I don't know, group of teenagers, college students, anybody? How about, how about, all of those progressives that just love people so much? And they just want to do good. And you're telling me that you can't get them for, I don't know, a bag of weed and, you know, and a hemp

dress. You can't get them to go clean the streets of the human feces. Really, $184,000 is what you're paying people to pick up poop? If I may, I'd like to give some advice to the new unit patrolling California streets. If you would like to clean up all the crap in your cities, I would suggest that you start removing the human poop that you strangely in California call politicians, the ones that are throwing all this money at a failed city and a failed policy, one right after another. You can't really get rid of the scent of poop by simply spraying something on it to cover up the scent. You have to shovel it out. May I suggest that you start shoveling out the Capitol building in Sacramento and then work

your way down to every city government from there? Wait a minute. I got a name. Poop Patrol for progressive politicians and policy or the PPPPP. And I think there would be. some funding from, you know, rich people all over the country. I mean, I would make a donation right now to the PPP, PPP, you know, if we could get one in Washington, who's with me?

Keep an eye out and look for them coming soon to movie theaters near you, patrolling the streets of D.C. and San Francisco, the Human Poop Patrol. Stude just looked at me, and he said, could we discuss this a little? Why not? So, $184,000 a year for the poop patrol. Of course. Now, there are services in this service economy we now have. Yes, yes.

Which will come to your home and pick up the dog poop from your lawn for like, you know, you come over once a week and it's like maybe $50 a month. Now, I appreciate capitalism, but there is also another service. that comes over and picks up the poop in your lawn from your dogs. Okay. It's called 12-year-old children. Well, I don't have one of those. As I explained to my kids, that's what I had you for.

But first of all, that seems like a really high rate. No. To go pick up poop. A $184,000 a year gig to pick up poop. That's a great gig. I would think that there's... Let me ask you this. How much would it take for me to get you into the poop industry

right now. I mean, how much does it take to get you into the I mean, $184 easily gets me into that gig, right? Easily. Easily. I mean, 100K gets you into that gig, probably too. If this isn't the perfect example

of job creation in a progressive world, I don't know what is. Hey, we can hire more housekeepers because every homeless camp is going to now have housekeepers. They can't be expected to, you know,

clean up their sleeping bag. We've got to lay that out. Maybe we can leave a little mint on their pillow too. We're creating jobs. Okay, so they're pooping all over the street. This is a job creator. It's important.

That's why I don't live in California. It's basically Paul Krugman's theory, right? You know, if an alien was threatening the earth, we would increase our economy because we would all go together and go crazy to build up our society. It's the broken windows theory, right? Well, what if we just, no, no, we just break the windows and then we can have people replace the windows. That's good for the economy. The broken windows thing. That, that, that's a conservative idea. Broken windows. Yeah, you see people pick up windows and they, there are rocks and they break a window on an empty street.

Okay. We're not talking about broken windows anymore. We're talking about people crapping on the street. Well, if we just pick up the crap, maybe they won't crap on the street. We've turned into animals. We're entering a new time and everything has, everything's being redesigned right now. And people aren't really talking about the issues. People aren't really talking about big fundamental things that are changing. For instance, America was based on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Nobody's talking about pursuit of happiness right now.

Pursuit of happiness is defined by our founders as ownership that you could own. You could forge your own way in life. and ownership is a big part of capitalism and a big part of America. However, ownership is quickly going away. When you buy a book on Kindle, do you own the book? When you buy a movie from iTunes, do you own the movie? The answer is no. The end of ownership.

Aaron, and I want to get this right, Paris, say it for me. Just ask him. Tell me. How you say how's name? It's Persanoski. Persanoski. Okay. How?

It was a lot easier than it's, than it looks. We can't pronounce easy words, so that was going to be difficult. Yeah, this, it's got more than one syllable. There's a lot of, there's a lot of consonants there. I know. How you doing, Aaron? I'm doing well. How are you?

Good. I'm, I'm, I'm really fascinated by how we make the turns in our society for the future. And ownership is a big part of this, because in the future, I don't know how many people will even own cars. I mean, it's just all changing. But do we really own things when we buy them online? So I think there's a real concern here that consumers go into transactions when they're buying things, digital goods, especially digital books, movies, music.

They go into those transactions assuming they work the same way as they do in the world of tangible goods, where if you buy a book, you can give it away to a friend, you can lend it to someone. You can leave it in your will in the future and leave your book collection to your loved ones. And the rules that control these digital transactions when you buy something on your Kindle or from iTunes are very different from the rules that we expect in the physical world. And consumers don't really understand that distinction. And I think that causes a real disconnect between what we all expect to happen and what happens in fact. So to give you a quick example, just a couple of weeks ago, a consumer, a customer,

the Apple iTunes movie store found that three movies that he had purchased had been deleted from his account. They were no longer accessible. And I think that shocked a lot of people. those of us who have been following these issues closely for years would remember 10 years ago when Amazon remotely deleted books off of people's Kindles, including, ironically, George Orwell's 1984. So these issues have been happening for a long time, but I think people are now starting to

really sit up and take notice of it. Okay, so I remember, because this, it's easier for me to read everything on Kindle, and I have a large collection in my library of hardcover books. And I read so much. I read it all on Kindle, but I have recently really been concerned, not just because I don't actually own it and I can't have it in my library and I can't pass it on, but also because you watch things like it's happening in China. If you're in China, I mean, at first they wouldn't sell the book, but if they did sell

the book, the government can just deem that that book is, you don't need to burn books. You could just overnight just take all of that, every copy of that book out of circulation if it's only digital. That's really disturbing to me. It's a concern from the perspective of censorship, as you've just described it. It's also a real concern from the perspective of preservation and sort of archiving our cultural history. If these books are stored on the centralized servers and only the hands of, you know, the two or three companies that dominate these markets, then there's a real risk that we aren't going to be able to ensure kind of the widespread distribution of copies that will allow us to archive and preserve these works. And Aaron, with the movie, it wasn't because they found an objectionable or anything else. It's because that particular provider, they lost the rights to that movie, right?

And so they had to pull it from people's libraries because their rights had expired. Ways that this can happen, this most recent example, I don't know that the facts are totally clear on exactly what went on. So one way this can happen is that, as you described, the deal between the, digital retailer, Apple, or Amazon, and the copyright holder expires, and they no longer have the rights to sell that product. It can also happen when a record label or a movie studio decides that they want to put out the new, updated, remastered, directors cut edition of a movie. And when they do that, they pull the old version to help drive the new. Oh, my gosh. So they almost force you to, I mean, because they've always done this where,

you know, it's the masterpiece collection and it's, you know, additional footage and, you know, fully restored, but you still had the old copy. Now you can't, I mean, even for, I mean, think of this, even just for comparison, you can't, if they change something in a movie, imagine when, remember when George Lucas changed Star Wars? Well, I want to see what it was like when it originally came out. You wouldn't be able to do that, would you? Unless the movie company decided to allow you to do that. most recent case in part was that the consumer didn't have a local copy stored on their computer or their device. And this is just a practical tip for people. You should always try to store as much as you can locally. Now, these services are often trying to encourage consumers to rely on their own, on the company's own sort of cloud storage solution. And sometimes, with the Apple TV, for example, the Apple TV doesn't allow you to permanently download a copy of a movie. You have to access it through Apple's servers.

Exactly. So I think that makes a big difference in your relationship. If I downloaded something on Kindle, could I download it to another cloud and still be able to read it on Kindle? So the Kindle allows you to, because the Kindle is tethered through software and network connections to Amazon, Amazon has the ability, as they showed 10 years ago, to remove those files.

It's unbelievable. Yeah, you talk about, go ahead. Real quick, Apple, Apple has the same sort of control. We saw this several years ago, too, in a very different way. I'm sure some of your listeners may remember when they woke up and found a U-2 album on their iPhone. Yes. They put it the other way. They forced everybody to have it.

Exactly. That's bizarre. You write about this a little bit, and it's an interesting change in the way we think about commerce. There is, in the past, you had a transaction where you'd go into a store and you'd buy something. With these digital purchases that we're making from iTunes or Amazon, we're actually like entering a ongoing relationship with them. It's sort of an open-ended thing where they're constantly knowing, what you do with that product and you have that ongoing relationship where they can cancel that at any time without your knowledge. Can you talk a little bit about the change there? Because that is a,

that's a real change. I don't think people have considered. And Aaron, before you answer that, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll come back and get you to answer that question. And just the change in in capitalism, change. What does it mean to enter a world where there's really no ownership of anything? The best of the Glenn Beck program. talking to Aaron Peronoski. He is a professor of law. And also, you can find him at the end of ownership.com. Aaron, you're right. The switch to the digital platform offers convenience, but also makes consumer access more contingent. Unlike a purchase at a broke bookstore,

a digital media transaction is continuous linking buyer and seller and giving the seller a post-transaction power impossible in physical markets. Why is that important? A number of reasons. It leads, to these scenarios that we were talking about earlier where the seller of the good has the ability not only to sort of reclaim or recall the good, but they also have some ability to control how and when and under what circumstances you make use of that product after the sale. That's just not something that you could do in the tangible world. Your local bookstore, put aside the publisher, your local bookstore can't tell you what country you're allowed to read a book in.

They can't tell you how many times you get to read it. They can't tell you who you get to lend that book to. They certainly can't keep records of all of those interactions. And the digital world allows for that form of control. And importantly, it's not limited just to digital media. We have all these smart devices in our homes, on our bodies, You know, we've got our voice assistants and our fitness trackers and, you know, even our home appliances and cars. They all have software.

They all have network connections. And all of these sort of problems that I've been describing are going to play out in that space as well, where device makers are not only going to be able to track your behavior, but they're also going to be able to limit the ways in which you can use. the products that you think you have purchased. So let me interrupt here and just ask you this. I see when I go to iTunes, I see a movie I want to watch. It says rent or own. I'm not owning it. I'm just renting it in a different way.

Isn't this false advertising? It's a really good case to be made here that companies like Amazon and Apple that use language like own and buy. words that have real meaning for people in their everyday lives are misstating the nature of those transactions. So my co-author, Chris Huffinago and I wrote a paper a few years ago, a couple years ago now, called What We Buy When We Buy Now, that did a survey of about 1,500 consumers to figure out what people think this language means. And it turns out that a significant percentage of consumers incorrectly believe that they do have true ownership rights. They get to keep these goods.

They can lend them, that they can give them away. And we think that there is an opportunity here to correct this misinformation in the marketplace. But think about the company that we're talking about. You know, Apple and Amazon are two of the biggest corporations the world has ever seen and getting them to convincing them to communicate in a more clear and fair way is a real challenge. Class action lawsuit? A possibility for class action litigation here.

There are a bunch of legal and practical hurdles to making that happen. I think it's something worth pursuing. I think the Federal Trade Commission has a role to play here. this is squarely within their, within their area of expertise and obligation to police the market to make sure that consumers have accurate information. Aaron, go ahead. Yeah. I just want, go ahead.

The way the market works depends on consumers being informed. People can't make rational choices. People can't decide where to spend their money if they're being miscelled. led about the products that they're getting. So I think it's crucial for the functioning of the market to have that information be correct. Have you done any look into what a society without real ownership? I mean, we're down to renting clothes and everything else. And that's only going to get stronger as we move forward. Have you looked into what that means for a capitalist society and for America in particular that has always been about ownership?

perception of ourselves and the way we think about ourselves as individuals in a society. Okay, so stop there for a second. If I can hold you for just a couple more minutes after the break, I'd like you to finish that thought. Because I think this is important. The world is being redesigned and it's being redesigned without any of us really understanding it. And we should go in open-eyed. We are a country that is founded on base. individual rights and some of those rights property rights you have a right to own things right to

ownership you know possession is nine-tenths of the law well not in the future in fact in many cases not even now you buy things online sometimes you're not actually buying them you're just renting them you're entering an ongoing relationship what does this mean for um society how is this going to change us will it even change change the way we view things and change some fundamental concepts of what it means here in America of individual rights. We have Aaron Peresnowski on with us, Professor of Law, and the author of the book, What We Buy, When We Buy, Now, and you can find more information at the end of ownership.com. Aaron, so tell me how you've been looking at this. So I think in the short term, what we're likely to see are more changes in the way our commercial interactions occur.

In the way that commercial transactions are structured, we're going to start to see people become more and more accustomed to paying for temporary access to resources rather than owning them. And in some ways, I think that makes some degree of sense. There are some people for whom owning a car isn't necessary. They'd rather be able to take a lift or use some sort of car share application. And I think that makes a lot of sense. What I'm worried about is the long-term set of implications for a shift away from ownership and towards temporary access, a shift away from independent control of resources to one where we have to rely on permission or the sort of goodwill of the, companies that control access these goods.

Maybe I give you an example and see if I'm on the right track. I buy a car and I love this car and I want to keep it and it's a classic car, but I don't own the software that runs the car and if at any time the software company says, no, I'm not going to, we're not going to support that or we want to discontinue or whatever. I have a heap of junk. I can't do anything with it because I, I'm not going to support that. don't own the software that runs it. I think the car is a great example.

We see this issue come up in the motor vehicle context. The way it's come up most recently and most often is actually not with cars but with tractors. John Deere, the long-running American farm equipment company, makes exactly this argument, that they own the software in the tractors that they sell to American. farmers. And that means that farmers can only get their tractors repaired by authorized John Deere dealers. They can't do it themselves. They can't go to their local mom and pop, you know, farmland repair shop. I think those kinds of changes are really troubling because they go to this

sense of independence and this sense of autonomy that we're all independent actors in the world who can make our own decisions, who can. can decide what's best for us. Do we want to keep this tractor as it is? Do we want to modify it? Do we want to repair it? Those decisions are being taken away from individual consumers and you're being forced to play by a set of rules dictated by the companies who quote unquote sell you these products. And doesn't that also stop innovation? I mean, sometimes the guy who takes something and then tinkers with it comes up with a better system. But if I'm if I'm locked out, out of tinkering on my own property, it almost creates this feeling of, oh, well, that's just the way it is and

that's the way it always is going to be. It just runs that way. And it stops innovation, doesn't it? The real risk of doing that. It discourages people from, as you say, tinkering with the things that they own. We have a lot of incredible innovations that have been made over the centuries in this country that didn't come from giant corporate R&D departments. They came from individuals messing around with things that they own in their garage. And there is a risk that we're foreclosing those kinds of opportunities. But even more broadly than that, if we're discouraged from thinking of ourselves as independent actors in the world, you know, I worry that that creates a sort of complacency in our population,

in our country. And, you know, not to zoom out to too wide of a level here, but for a democracy to function, people have to feel and they have to be in charge of their own lives. They have to be invested in, I worry that, you know, this lack of control over the everyday decisions might play into a much broader set of problems when it comes to people feeling like active participants in society and democracy. I couldn't agree with you. I couldn't agree with you more. I just don't think this is the way society is thinking anymore.

Everything is about the collective, and very little is about the individual. So let me ask you one more question, and I'll let you go. I know you've spent twice the amount of time here that you probably planned on. But let me ask you one more question. I am really concerned about copyrights, patents, trademarks. We seem to be entering a world where people don't take some. somebody's intellectual property seriously on the on the other side of this they just feel that well I can download it I can just take it and it we shouldn't have intellectual property rights that

that is frightening because again that was the second piece of the American experiment was you have a right to that intellectual property for a period of time so you can make money on it which encourages other people to come up with their own ideas. Do you see this fading? And is this trouble on the horizon as well? So I write and teach about intellectual property, and it's something that I take very seriously. And one of the things that I always try to communicate to my students

is that intellectual property system functions best when there is a balance between the interests of the public and the interests of creators. And the history of intellectual property, copyright in particular, is a history of a struggle to find and maintain that appropriate balance. And I think we're going through and have been going through kind of since the widespread adoption of the Internet, a period where we're struggling with how to answer some of those questions. There are certainly areas in which copyright holders have about their works being exploited without compensation. And on the other hand, we live in a culture in which copyrighted works are sort of increasingly being distributed within these environments. like Apple and Amazon, for example, where consumers can't do the things that they think they're entitled or should be entitled to do with them.

So I think that part of the solution here is providing consumers a strong incentive. That's one of the things that streaming services, I think, have gotten right, which is that they offer a really attractive deal to consumers. So people learn that if they're going to access the world's library of music, they have to pay for, the privilege of doing that. Figuring out how that money gets distributed and what the right price point is, I think is one of the sticking point. So it's an important set of questions

and one that I probably can't do justice to... You know, with a couple of minutes. Yeah. Exactly. All right. Aaron, thank you so much. I appreciate it, and I appreciate your thoughtfulness on this, and we'll keep watching for updates. Thank you so much. Aaron Peronowski.

I appreciate it. You bet. He is he's found at the website the end of ownership.com. I had him on for a couple of reasons. One, you have to know the books that you buy, the videos that you buy, everything that you buy, says rent or buy. When you buy,

you're not really buying it. You don't own it. And in a world where opinions and thoughts and ideas are under siege, you don't have to burn books anymore. All you have to do is get one of the providers or a couple of the providers just to delete them from everyone's library and they are gone forever. Think about that. Next time

you want to download what are the books you want to download and what are the books you want to own? By the way, so you know, I don't get any more money if I sell a book or I sell a digital download. It's not about that at all. So it is is about preserving information. Glenn Beck. I'm thrilled to have Malcolm Gladwell on with us. I'm a big fan of his. His writing also Revisionist History is fantastic.

I think I started listening to the last season on a Friday. I consumed, everybody was like, you know, hey, the kids are throwing up. They're sick. They're on fire. And I'm like, shut up. I'm listening to Malcolm. It's unbelievable. His latest, his latest season on Revisionus,

history, you don't really know until kind of, you know, towards the end of it that, oh, wow, this is all about memory. And I've learned that everything I thought about memory is probably wrong. I'd like to tell you what it was, but I don't trust my memory anymore. So Malcolm Gladwell is here. Hello, Malcolm. How are you? Hey, Glenn.

I'm doing very well. I, uh, thank you for your podcast. There's just so great. Oh, thank you. It's very kind of you. I wanted to, I've been thinking about you a lot. lately because of the Kavanaugh hearings and everything else. And I don't want to get into the Kavanaugh hearings. What I do want to talk about is our memory and how it can be changed,

manipulated, how it's natural for these things to happen. I mean, you explained the Brian Williams story in such a different way because you didn't condemn him and you didn't exonerate him. and you didn't exonerate him. You just said, let's look at the facts on memory. Yeah. Can you take us through it? Yeah. So memory is something that in the last generation, psychologists have spent an enormous

and neurologists have spent an enormous time, the amount of work and effort trying to understand how it works. And the more we learn about memory, the more we realize how fallible it is. and when we systematically go back and we test our memories, we find they don't do very well. So there's a famous set of studies that are called flashbulb studies where a famous event happened, 9-11, the Challenger, explosion. And you go to a large group of people, the incident happens, and you say, tell me everything you were doing, thinking on the moment, when you heard that news. Where were you? Who did you talk to first? How did you feel? You know, what happened that day? And then they go back to the same group of people a year later, five years later, 10 years later,

and they ask them the same set of questions. And they compare their answers. And lo and behold, what you discover is that not everyone, but many of the people substantially alter their memories of the event without realizing it. In other words, they are the first time they'll say when I heard, when I saw the towers fall, I was standing in the streets of Manhattan with my best friend Jim, tears streaming down my face. And then 10 years later, they'll say, when I first heard the towers fall, I was watching it on television in my dorm room. And I ran out, you know, and then I ran and called my friend Jim who was in Boston. And they're as convinced 10 years later that's what their memory was, as they, as they were the first time they, they relitored their memories on the day of 9-11. And so that kind of stuff, my point in doing with Brian Williams thing was when you understand how fallible memory is, you are a lot more forgiving of what he did.

He did something which turns out a lot of us do all the time, which is we make what's called a time slice error. We confuse the timeline in our minds and we think we're one place when something happened and we're in another place. or some, we've heard a story been told so many times that we slowly incorporate ourselves into the story without realizing that we're doing it. And my point was that these are not sins of character.

These are just facts of human memory. And we so often want to make someone's faulty memory into a test of their character. And I think that's a mistake. There are people who deliberately lie, absolutely. But a lot of what we think might be deliberate lying is just a manifestation of the frailty of human memory.

When you were talking about the 9-11 study, there were people who came back 10 years later. They wrote out, you know, within a few days, if I'm not mistaken, was it a few days or was it a year after 9-11? The original writing, well, the original time, they went to the next day. Okay, so the next day, they asked them to. write out exactly where they were, what happened. Ten years later, some of them said, I don't know why I even wrote that. This is a lie. This is not what happened.

I don't know why I was lying then. And they were convinced somehow or another they made something up that was different than what they knew to be true now. Yeah. People, one of the most important things that memory of researchers will tell you is you cannot confuse confidence with accuracy. In other words, the fact that I am absolutely certain that what happened happened is not a reliable guide to its accuracy. So you can't – so I am convinced I met my friend Bruce on the first day. That should – that does not mean it's more likely to be true than if I said, you know, if I expressed it with more doubt. So I think what it – a lot of what this – the lesson of all this is is that we just need to,

approach our memories and not just our memories, our entire lives, with a lot more humility. You can't, we're not, our brains are not Superman. They don't, they're not, we're not, we're not, we don't have a video recorder up there taking down everything perfectly, you know, and we need to, when I say, I remember something one way, I need to be, I need to check it, I need to talk to others. I need to be open to the possibility. I might be wrong. I need to, that's why we have legal systems and investigators and right to compensate for the fact that our memories are not what we would like them to be. Everyone outside, let's take it outside of this political nightmare. This Me Too movement, I think, has been very good. On whole, it's been very good.

I am concerned about the women need to be believed. I don't care if it's a man or a woman. No, they need to be heard and taken seriously. But we can't just believe what someone says for a myriad of reasons. And I fear it's dangerous, this road that we're going down, because we need more than just your word. your memory, because you might believe that's true, but it might not be. Yeah.

Well, so it's funny, this is exactly the point that Ronan Farrell, you know, the, the journalist who has been responsible, more so than anyone else for breaking these Me Too stories, I went to see him give a public interview, and he was interviewing the actress, who was source, I forgot her name, of course, because my memory is very faulty. It was the source of many of the Me Too allegation. And they were talking about this very point. And he very explicitly said, my job as a journalist is not to believe the women. It is to listen to them and then try and corroborate through careful reporting those aspects of their stories that are corroborate their stories through careful reporting.

And if I can't corroborate them, then I can't write the story. Right. My job as a reporter is to compensate for the frailty of human memory. And that is a beautiful way of expressing what the responsibility of media investigators is in these cases. Is, okay, someone has gone, clearly believed they've gone through something very traumatic. Let's systematically try and figure out, did it happen that way? And if it didn't happen that way, let us not then judge the person and say there are a lot. fire, right? That's the crucial part.

And it's like, it is, we can't lose our humanity over this. We have to say, we have to say if we do an investigation and it's not the way that person says, we have to very respectfully say, you have, you like all of us, have a memory that is imperfect. That would be wonderful if we lived in that world. But Malcolm, I am so concerned that, and you, You've said it now twice. And it is, it's what made me successful in the first place. And I am so glad that I have discovered how dangerous it is.

Certitude. We are a population that is certain about everything. And it's good to have a core set of beliefs and principles. But you must be open to hear new information and other information, that doesn't give you, what is it, cognitive dissidence is good. It's good. That's a sign that something in you isn't quite right. Don't shout your way through it.

Stop back, step back and go, okay, which one of these two don't fit with the principle, I believe? Do I need to change the principle, or do I need to throw out that information that I'm now acting on? right? Yeah. But that's scary. People don't want to do that. Yeah. I thought, you know, it's funny.

I had a conversation last night with a friend of mine who was a Mormon and who was talking about the tradition among Mormons of keeping journals, which I had not known about. And she had years and years and years of journals. And she was talking about what that means for when you have a contemporaneous account of your life, your feelings, your actions, your interpretations of what you've done, you can go back and it obviously serves a function far greater than simply checking your memory. Yeah. But it's a way of keeping yourself honest. What I loved about that was that notion of if we live in such a kind of difficult and flawed world,

then we have to take responsibility for our own stories. And that, to me, is what that tradition of keeping a journal is about. It says as a human being, you have a responsibility to yourself and to others to understand the road that you have taken. Right. And write it down so that when you, 20 years later, you can look back and you say, I had forgotten. I did this then. You know, maybe I regret it now or maybe I've learned from it. But that, that to me, I just thought that was lovely.

I really did. I thought that was as an example of a kind of a practice. And you obviously know much more about this than I do. But the idea that that is part of what it means to be a righteous actor in the world is to take your history seriously. Have you heard from Brian Williams since your podcast? No, no. I have, I sure one day I already run into him. And I mean, he can't be, he can't publicly say, that's true.

That's great. You know, poor man. I think he was like, part of him, I'm sure, was like, I can't believe he's bringing this up again. Malcolm, thank you so much for being on the program. I really appreciate it. You bet. Malcolm Gladwell. You'll follow him on Twitter at Gladwell.

And also, if you have not heard this podcast, it is so relevant for what we're going through right now. It especially listened to, which I would have asked him about the German, the spies. Oh my gosh, this is a great story. But listen to the one. It's a two part about the German spies. Listen, just even start with the Brian Williams. And you will see, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. No, do not believe people on their memory alone.

Take them seriously. Season three, episode three and four are the two that you're talking about. It really is. And the Brian Williams thing was incredible because I 100% just thought he was just trying to lie to make himself look better. and when you look at like the way he did it and all the details around it, it will at least make you uneasy about that conclusion. Yeah, he will, you know what? I always say, do something this week that makes you uncomfortable.

Listen to this because it will, especially if you think that Brian Williams, absolutely he's just a pig, listen to this, because it will challenge you and you, if you're honest with yourself, will go, well, wait a minute, I'm not quite sure. And if you're really honest, you'll go, gee, I wonder how much of that has happened with me. You know, over our time that we have spent together, we have seen a lot of crazy stuff. Star relationship for many people started on 9-12, 9-11. Some people heard that news with my voice at the end of the day. But if I were national, you might have heard the warning about Osama bin Laden in, I think it was 1999 or 1997.

where I said, this guy's coming in New York on WABC. And if you don't pay attention now, there will be blood, body, and buildings in the streets of Manhattan within 10 years. It happened. Came to you about 2006 and said, don't buy into any of this housing stuff. Don't do it. Don't do it. There's a massive bubble, which then I started to see was actually a banking crisis was on the way. way. Everyone denied it. 2008 happened. But if you were listening, you actually saved your money.

I've come to you with problems, but I've tried to come to you with solutions. Best-selling book I ever wrote was common sense. And I'll never forget. I wrote a lot of that on vacation. I wrote the most important chapters while I was on vacation. And I was on vacation. I remember it was late at night and I called my family into the living room and I said, I want to read something to you because I think this is right, but I also don't know if I'm willing to publish it under my name because it's, I don't know if people are going to want to hear this and I think it's trouble. And I was calling out both parties and I was calling out the games that were played in Washington and the trouble that we were headed for.

you went out and bought it in droves two million copies later people knew what was going on we started the the tea party in the 9-12 project and played a big part in in that with you we followed you on a lot of that and then 2010 happened and then 2012 we saw that the tea party had been just dismantled and we had been lied to by our own party and I started to get discouraged. I left Fox and decided because people were asking me, so now what? And I didn't have an answer. I decided to break it down to smaller problems. And we printed conform about education and Common Core and what the problem was in universities,

long before anybody else. Gun control in the book Control. When the caliphate came, something that I warned you about and everybody mocked, I wrote, it is about Islam to prepare you. With the Nazarene Fund, I couldn't solve a war. I still didn't have any answers. I don't know, but I know these people are in trouble and I don't know how to do it,

but together we can figure it out. $30 million later and tens of thousands, tens of thousands of Christians moved and saved and rescued from slavery, 16,000 Christians and religious minorities hopefully will be moved out of this region before Christmas because of you. But people continue to ask me, how do we save the country? How do we save the Constitution?

And I didn't have an answer. And it bothered me. And I felt pretty worthless because I was like, what am I bringing to you? I don't know what I'm even to say to you. How do we fix this? I don't know. It's bigger than the country.

Now it's the Western way of life. After four years of searching, after two years of really intense study, after a year of writing, and then taking the book and rewriting it entirely again, I can proudly come to you and say, I know what the problem is, and I have a way to win. Where we all win, where half the country doesn't lose. there is something happening right now, and I can diagnose and point right directly to the cancer that's eating us, and I can point you right directly to the solutions. You want a way out? You want to understand what's happening and you want a way out? I invite you to join me on the path that I'm

laying out now in Addicted to Outrage. We're also going out to traveling the country, find out about that tour at glenbeck.com, and order your book. if you've trusted me before to say this direction and you've noticed that I have been wrong when I was frustrated and angry and and I wasn't listening. I am not frustrated, I'm not angry and I have been listening for the last couple of years

more than I have talked and I talk a lot. Join me. Join me on the search to save the Western way of life addicted to outrage is where we begin. This is the best of Glenn Beck. America is at a crossroads. We have to decide, or it will be decided for us. My father taught me when I was very young.

The most powerful words in any language are these. I am. And the reason why they're so powerful is because whatever it is that you say after that, you begin to believe and you create. What is America saying it is right now? We are being told over and over again, we are worthless. The Western way of life is worthless. That America is not good, never has been.

In fact, it's a force for bad. And unless we actively replace those things in our heads and the heads of those around us, we will be worthless. And we will be a force for bad. We are arguing about some of the dumbest things I've ever seen. And we are missing what's really going on. The world is being redesigned right now. and so many of us are worried about the future. Today we'll see in the New York Times and elsewhere that the world only has 10 years

and you have to be a hero in the next 10 years if you don't stop global warming why we are all going to die. So you must be a hero today and you have to take action. The question is, what does that action look like? Do any of the things that the environmentalists are actually proposing, do they help or hurt? What the world looks like in 2030 depends on how we answer questions that we're supposedly arguing about right now. We can try to avoid it. We cannot listen.

We cannot pay attention. But, as Bonhofer said, not to speak is to speak. not to stand is to stand. No answer will count as our answer. Will we all be remembered as winter soldiers and complicit with what I believe will be remembered as the greatest failure and crime in humanity's history?

Just standing by waving your finger or waving the flag as the Western world burns. I do not want to be part of the problem in America. And I fail on that all the time. We all do. But what counts is the effort. What counts is are you trying? Are you trying?

And are you better today than you were yesterday? Have you found any answers? Or are you only shouting things down? Are you just out in the street directing traffic? Because you feel it's your right. Well, have you even looked at what your rights mean? Where do your rights even come from? Today, I saw Think Progress write a whole article about how the Constitution has failed.

That was the headline. Constitution has failed. And then it goes on to explain how it is really a slavery document. And the three-fifths in the Constitution, all lies. All lies. Now you can argue that. Or we can begin to teach our children. You can argue that. And you can throw it back in their face with some sort of epitette.

or name calling of some sort. Here's the question that we all have to answer. Is America a force for good or a force for bad? That requires real thought and discussion. Because it is neither, in my opinion. It is both. It has been a force for bad. And I warn you, if we,

leave the bill of rights, we will become the darkest force ever on earth. With our technology, we will make the Nazis look like rookies. Make no mistake. We have been bad. We have rounded up the Japanese. We've rounded up the Germans and the Italians. We rounded up the blacks. We told people they couldn't vote, including women. But we are also the people that freed people. We freed blacks, and we fought for it. We fought and died. We fought to free the Japanese. We fought to free the Germans and all of Europe and the world. We fought to free Russia from the tyranny of communism and we failed in the time of peace. Are we good or are we bad? Is the Declaration of Independence still a viable mission statement? Because that's all that is. The Declaration

of Independence is a mission statement, period. Do we still hold these truths to be self-evident? Forget about the past. Let's talk about the future. We have never, ever reached the heights demanded by our mission statement. But have we gotten better? Is it still worth striving for? We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. That means we're born equal. We all have an equal chance. Don't judge somebody by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Do you have, do you have everything the baby laying next to you has when you're born as far as human rights and dignity? Do you still believe that? And I'm not talking about, well, that's not the way. I'm asking you as an aspirational

mission statement. That is the mission statement of our country. Do you want to live in a country that strives and falls short but picks itself back up again. Do you want to live in a country that says all men are created equal? And they are endowed by their creator. Why would you have to throw God into it? I don't care what you put there. It just must be bigger than man. The reason why the creator is important is if you don't have something bigger than man then man will print and take away rights. So if you want to see the moon, the eternities,

the great cosmos, whatever, but it endows each of us with certain unchanging, rights and those rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now, there's a lot more, and that's where the Bill of Rights comes in. Do we still believe in this? As an aspirational statement, we are only talking about the past. We're talking about the mistakes of the past. You cannot fix the mistakes of the past without saying where we're going. So where are we going, Antifa? you want to tear us down. Now I read your website.

I read your mission statement. I strongly disagree. Capitalism is not the problem. Capitalism that has no moral sentiment is. But you don't fix that by a state-run economy. By co-ops. It always fails. Now, you and your allies in the press refuse to point out that that is exactly what you're looking for.

It's a failed system. This one has been, this one has failed us because it has been usurped. The Constitution no longer means anything. The Bill of Rights no longer means anything. Why? Because it's not taught anymore. Anybody who takes the oath of office in Washington, 90% of them are liars. Not even intentional liars.

They don't know it. They don't believe in it. They will tell you they do. As was told to me by a very powerful individual once, look, Glenn, we all believe in the Constitution. But, you know, you got to do what you got to do. No. No. You do not do what you have to do. That ends justify the means. We either believe in this or we do not. And that is the question, America. Do you believe? Neutral, half-assed, not thought out, sitting on the sidelines? All of those answers mean nothing in the end. Only those who know it. who understand it, who have done their homework,

who can intellectually defend it. Those are the winter soldiers. Those will be the ones that restore freedom for all mankind. Everything else is lip service, a game, and actually a tool in the hands of those who wish to create chaos and destroy all we have. That monologue and so much more is actually the beginning of part three of my book, Addicted to Outrage, Finding Our Unum. What is our purpose anymore?

We're going to talk about that with you and those who have read the book. If you have read the book, 888727, B-E-C-K. Let me take Don in Indiana. Hello, Don. Welcome to the program. Good morning. Hey. You go ahead no go ahead sir you wanted me to look at page new 294 of the book addicted outrage what's what's your question oh no I'm just stating that I'm on page 294 oh you are

and yes okay and you're talking about recovery steps of alcoholism yeah and I'm trying to tie this into the nation and where is the nation rock bottom in your opinion and how do we recover from it. I am beginning to think that it is civil war. I'm beginning to think that our rock bottom is too far down. However, I can't live in that world. And it depends on how many people will stand and not go over the cliff. How many people are there?

Are there enough of us? Republicans and Democrats in our own neighborhoods that will say, I don't want anything to do with that. I won't do that. That's not who we are as a people. That's not who my neighbors are. And I am not going to be pushed over the cliff by Antifar Nazis. I'm not doing it. Do we hit that, Don? We do not ever hit that. But I think you could be hitting on something as a civil war in our nation. may not be physical like our last Civil War, but it could be on the social media platform.

Oh, we're already in that. And the Anthropos, of course. We're already in that. I am very concerned about violence. And, you know, you have an assassination. You have any of these kinds of things, and it could spiral the country out of control. And I would hope that we would,

blessed be the peacemakers blessed be the peacemakers and it's going to be harder and harder to be those people and that does not mean as I point out in the book over and over again does not mean surrender your principles it just it just means stand in what you've always believed stand in what you know is true

and encourage others to stand with you Glenn back. Taking phone calls today for people who have read addicted to outrage and want to make a, to illustrate one of the points in the book or have questions, want to further the dialogue. 8-8-7-27-B-E-C-K if you have read the book. Let me go to Greg. Greg is a contributor for the Federalist. Wow. Hi, Greg.

How are you? Good morning, Glenn. Good to hear from you. I need to talk to you. I understand that five years ago, you may not have been my biggest fan. No, no, not at all, actually. I'm with you, Greg, on that one. No, wait.

He has different reasons. You were on the left? Oh, yeah, very much so. Tell me about it. Well, I was raised by far left kind of ex-hippie parents. and, you know, that was just kind of pushed into me from a young age. And it was just the, it was how I saw everything. It was like a filter over the entire world.

And I walked around looking suspiciously at everybody, thinking that, you know, there's something deeply broken within them, that they're out to get somebody, that they don't understand what I do, even though I didn't understand very much at all. It was pure emotion and it was raw and ill-informed. So what happened? Well, one of my close friends, we were having a discussion and he actually mentioned Fox News and just kind of said that that was his news source and I was appalled and I was furious. And I went home from that, you know, just thinking, what, what I thought I knew this guy?

Well, you know, all along, I had no idea. He's some kind of monster. Like, how could this be? And I got curious as to how this could happen. And I went home and I started watching and listening to some people on the other side. And it was quite a slap in the face. This was prior to Trump and the whole situation now and all this flame throwing. And what I saw were, you know, people who celebrate what we've overcome instead of what we've had to overcome.

And it was really powerful and very restorative to me. And, you know, looking at your book through the lens of addiction, looking at the way that we approach our politics and the way we regard one another, through that lens I think is so important. I've gone through addiction myself. And, you know, as an addict, you learn about real humility. And you find help, you find comfort in some of the most unlikely places. and, you know, it really kind of becomes clear to you that, you know, you can say that diversity is our greatest strength, but, you know, it's more than that. It's it's the cooperation between, you know, diverse people.

It's the humility of diverse people, I think. One of my favorite quotes is, absolutely. Where there is doubt, there is freedom. And we, we flip that up on its head. We are now so, I mean, look at Antiphot, directing traffic. They are so convinced that they are right. They will bludgeon you if you disagree with them. There's no freedom there.

Where there is doubt, there is freedom, where there is humility, there is freedom. Absolutely. And, you know, when intellectual exploration, when curiosity going against the grain in any way, when that becomes punishable, You, I think they really risk, you know, driving good people down some unsavory roads. And there's no good in that. Great. Thank you.

And tradition. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you so much for reading the book. And I'm going to send you a signed copy. But thank you for reading and calling in. Daryl in Kentucky. You're on the Glenn Beck program.

Hi, Daryl. Hey, Glenn. How's it going? I'm good. How are you? Doing great. I just wanted to say that I really love the book, and I think that my favorite part of it is that even though we can't surrender, like you've said several times, we have to remain civil because maybe I'm naive in thinking this, but I think that eventually the left will realize they have gone too far. They will step back from the ledge, and if we're civil, if we're there standing strong on our principles, we'll be able to bring them back in. in the fold and bringing the country back together. But if we give in, we do the same thing we're doing.

We just help tear the country apart. You were on the left as well at one point? I was. It's in southern West Virginia. My family were very deep blue Democrats, and we believe that Republicans were just people who took money away from the poor to give to the rich. And, you know, I was a pretty progressive guy in college.

And I didn't really start looking at the other side until after 2014. I went to war. I was a soldier in the military. I spent all of 2014 in Afghanistan leading some of the best men and women I've ever met in my life. And when I came back, my country was completely different. I couldn't figure out what happened. I was no longer welcome unless there's a straight white male veteran. So I had to figure out what happened.

I started looking at people that I had mocked, including yourself in the past, and I actually started reading Roy H. Williams and Michael R. Drew's pendulum, which you noted in the book. And that really, you know, maybe I'm buying into their theory a little bit too much, but I've seen firsthand, and I do believe that we have another five years of this getting worse before it gets better, but I still believe the dawn is coming. so do I it's whether or not we can pull enough people away from the cliff before I think the year is 2025 where it starts to come back the other direction um so how can we help people like you because I I think we need to start defining um Democrats when we say oh the Democrats I think we need to start saying the people in the leadership of the party um because I don't think like you, there are Democrats who are good, who love the country, and are finding themselves going, wait a minute, I don't have any place to go. And we have to, and I'm not saying it's in the

Republican Party. I'm just saying people need to start being more welcoming to people who are finding themselves on the outs. What should we be aware of that you went through? Even though policy and is an area that we may know is something that we can agree on, that things like individual freedom, things like, you know, not having a government that can control you from, you know, several hundred miles away that can control every little aspect of your life. So something I talk to my wife and my niece about all the time is that, you know, You know, before President Obama, even though I voted for the guy and I kind of liked what he was selling, the president's name didn't get mentioned at the dinner table every single night at my home when I was growing up.

The power that we have given to Washington over the past 10, 20 years is too much. And I'm not really sure what the end state, what the solution for that is. But I think just talking about the things you talked about in the book, the principles. that make us all united, our Unum, the Bill of Rights, the things that make us all American are what we can unify behind. So the section of, because I, man, I've really struggled with what it is that brought us together, and it's really, or can bring us back together, and it's really so simple when you finally get down to it,

it is the Bill of Rights, don't you think? I agree. In the other country that I've been in, I've been several, Africa, Germany, Afghanistan, Romania, you will never find a country that beats itself up over its past as much as America does. We realize that we've done some horrible things, like you said, in your reading and your monologue, but we've also, you know, I think it's something that Dinesh D'Souza said. By recognizing our faults, by admitting to our faults, you have to kind of, in a way, admit to America's moral superiority because we realize that we've made mistakes. and we're trying to fix them. Darrell, thank you so much for your phone call.

I appreciate it. God bless. He brought up a great point about how before Obama, the president's name didn't come up every day at the dinner table. Obviously, that's getting even worse now with Trump. I mean, people are obsessed about talking about them all the time. There's a story today in Axios about how they are, the networks have recognized this and they're doubling down. They've enjoyed high ratings and engagement from Trump coverage

and for the networks at a relatively low cost. now that a precedent has been set around these high returns, its unlikely news outlets will cut back, meaning the barrage of political content being created and absorbed during the Trump presidency will likely outlive this administration. They want to make... I mean, like, Trump is a celebrity, right?

So an American. And he's a polarizing guy, and people love him and hate him. But they want to change... They want this to be the norm. They want you to be obsessed with this all the time at the expense of the rest of your life. It is in a totalitarian regime. It is the norm.

You have to know what Derfuer or the leader is saying and doing and wants you to do. It is the norm. Anything that normalizes this, any intention of saying, you know what, that's good for America, is mistaken.

It's wrong. And this is, it's driven, I think, at this point by clicks and viewers. And, you know, it's one of those things

that just is going to continue, it's going to be hard to reverse that addiction as well. They, you know, when they can get, you know, the Rachel Maddow audience,

is addicted to outrage maybe more than any other, right? Their ratings have gone through the roof because of it, and you think MSNBC's return, you know, is going to reverse that path now? No. They're not going to say, oh, well, you know what, maybe we went to. I don't know. I mean, I'd like to be optimistic about it, but I don't see it happening. All right.

We're going to take a quick break back to your phone calls 8-8-727-B-E-C-K. Glenn Beck. This is the Glenn Beck program. Do you have any outrage-addicted people in your life? Oh, you know what pisses me off about that? want to help them, but you're constantly dodging things that are being thrown, and you don't know how.

Try giving them a copy of Glenn Beck's latest book, Addicted to Outreach. It's much cheaper than therapy, and hurts less than a book to your head. And it's more fun. Addicted to Outrage, the new book from Glenback,

available everywhere books are sold. Let's go to Kelly in Oregon. I wanted to say thank you for your book. I'm listening to it on audio, so it's a lot of fun. You did a great job. Thank you. I wanted to say thank you for your references in the food section. That's a little misleading because I think I talk about food a lot. Okay. Well, let me tell you what it is. Where you take it, the McDonald's one and the 31 flavors with Baskin-Robbins, explaining President Trump.

I have been able to use those references in saying that there are some good things about him to my liberal friends. You don't have to like everything about him, but there are some good things. I mean, you like McDonald's. I mean, you like the French fries. So you don't hate everything about McDonald's. You like the fries, right? And so I've been able to kind of use that in a joking way and kind of to get them to maybe see a little bit of I like him a little bit. You don't have to like him personally.

So anyways, I just really enjoyed that part about your book and being able to use that because I can laugh about it. Yeah. We can laugh about food. And so anyway. Kelly, thank you. Thank you very much. Stay strong in Oregon.

We'll send you a copy of the book signed to you. Listen, the point I make in the book about McDonald's is it's one way you can tell if people are being disingenuous. If you have nothing good to say about someone, I mean, nothing. Everything is bad. Really? I mean, even people who were trying to say something good about Adolf Hitler, the Audubon. The Audubon?

Okay, doesn't really outbalance our way the other, but okay. You can't find anything, and I compared the news coverage to a bunch of people who are just telling, you that everything about McDonald's sucks. Everything. If they don't mention that they, okay, but I got to tell you, the fries are the best fries ever. If they can't admit that McDonald's fry is superior, even if they hate everything else, they're not an honest broker.

They're not an honest broker. It's called an egg McMuffin, too, by the way. And a McGrittle. I could go on and I could have, but I didn't. Sean, you've read Addicted to Outrage. Welcome to the program. Hey, Glenn. Hey, Red. How are you?

Very good. Good. Yeah, one of the things that really surprised me as I was going to reading it, and it was, I went back to school at 40, you know, disabled vet, you know, so I end up going back to college, and I end up becoming friends with a really, really, really liberal professor. You know, I mean, head of the LBGT, you know, I mean, really, really liberal, and I'm really, really not, right? And I can never understand why nobody on campus could understand how we could be front. You know, well, after reading addicted outrage, no, I get it.

You know, because we could sit there and we could discuss problems, right? we could agree on the problem. Now, we couldn't agree on how to fix the problem, but we could have a civil conversation between the two of us and agree that it was a problem. Now, nobody else could sit there and even agree that it was a problem. So is your, did you read the section yet about the Unum? I'm about halfway through. Okay.

Yeah, Glenn, you got to forgive me. I'm in a little bit of a brain frog. No, no, no, that's fine. That's fine. Pre-concussions through my military service. Thank you for that. And that's right now. Are we taking care of you as a country?

Yeah. Actually, I'm one of the fortunate ones, but, you know, I mean, I'm also a jerk about it and fight to make sure that they do the right thing. Good. Sean, when you get to the Unum part, you will, I think, possibly, and I would love for you to call back and tell me if this is right, you will possibly understand why the two of you can get along. If it's not because of that, I really want to know. Because my thesis is that we can fix this and we can come together, but only if we can. only if we can unite around the things that brought us together in the first place. And that's the Bill of Rights.

That allows people to disagree and walk away from each other without hating. Because you understand, you have a right to believe that. And if you have the same unum of the Judeo-Western culture, which is, you know, don't steal, don't lie, don't cheat, don't kill, well, those things are what brought us together, our Judeo-Christian culture and our Bill of Rights. If we have those things in common, we can unite. Unfortunately, the people in Antiphot do not have those things. The Nazis do not have those things.

I think the parties are disavowing those things because, well, it takes everything we have to win. the people, if they're reminded, I believe they do have those things. We just don't believe the other person has it as well. When we can find that in the other person. Ten commandments, man. Forget about the God stuff. That's not kill.

We shouldn't sleep with, you know, the neighbor's wife. I shouldn't covet what you have. You know, all those things. lie, cheat, steal and the Bill of Rights. You have those? We can fix it. Find those people. Arthur Herman is the author of Gandhi and Churchill,

a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but he's also the author of one of my favorite books, Freedom's Forge. It came out a few years ago. And I've wanted to have him on the show for quite some time, but he's here with us today. Arthur, welcome to the program. How are you? Yeah, I'm doing very well. It's a pleasure to be on. Hey, are you going to send me a copy of your new book? Yes, I will. If you'd send me a copy of, you know, Freedom's Forge signed, I would, I would cherish it.

Delighted to do that. Yeah. Freedom's Forge, and we'll get into it a little while, Freedom's Forge is just a tremendous, tremendous history book that I think everybody should have. I appreciate that. Let me go back to Churchill and Gandhi. Sure. If you were from India, you see Gandhi completely different, not Gandhi, Churchill, completely differently than those in the West do. Yeah, I think that's probably true, especially today. I would say less so during the wartime period when you saw that there was a lot of respect, including by Gandhi for Churchill, for his defiant stand against the Nazis and his ability to,

really rally Britain, which a lot of Indians thought, hey, you know, Britain, it's on the decline, it's losing its credibility around the world, it's imperialist power. And they were, I think, quite shocked and surprised with the way in which Churchill was able to rally the British people and then basically rally the free world to fight against Nazism. But you're right, today, a lot of the focuses is on Churchill, you know, as a white supremacist, as supposedly the guy who triggered the great Bengal famine during the course of the war in 43, 44. You don't think so? No, I don't think so at all. I think what you come to realize is about the great Bengal famine is it was a concatenation of bad circumstances, the loss of Burma, which had been India's main source for rice imports and a lot of mishandling on the ground by the British

bureaucracy, the civil service bureaucracy basically failed to deal with the problem that for 30 years they had been assuring Indians they could deal with. I mean, it's big government in action, Glenn, and they failed utterly until Churchill appointed Archibald Wable as viceroy and he managed to turn the situation around. with Churchill's encouragement. So, you know, Churchill, if I may speak on this subject, people talk about the similarities between Churchill and Donald Trump. And I don't think sometimes that's a bit overblown.

But Churchill had his own version of tweets, which was his outbursts, especially in front of the War Council, in which he would denounce India for, you know, bothering him about the food shipments about the need to divert food supplies to India when they were needed for the armed forces. And he was capable of saying some quite shocking things. And so just as people focus on Trump's Twitter feed and think that that's a clue to understanding his mind and his policies, there's been a tendency to look at Churchill's kind of irritated outbursts.

He had a lot in his mind in 1943. Yeah, a little bit. A little bit. Yeah, a little bit. And having to deal with a crisis far, far away in a country, which was already plunged into chaos because of civil disobedience, kind of strained his patience. And so he said things, let off steam that historians today, particularly certain Indian historians, capitalize on, as a way to promote the idea that Churchill was somehow either responsible. responsible for or even the architect of the great Bengal famine. It was a terrible famine.

One and a half million people died. But Churchill's responsibility for this shrinks away when you look at what the real situation was and understand it in the course of the history of India under British rule. Talking to one of my favorite authors and historians, senior fellow Hudson Institute, Arthur Herman, author of Freedom's Forge, also Gandhi and Churchill. Wouldn't you say that all great men are both good and bad when you look back through the eyes of today's history, that there is no perfect man. Gandhi was a racist as well. He didn't see the plight of the Africans, which was very similar to his own in India.

He didn't want to be seated on the same train car with a with a. with an African. Yes, or as the derogatory term of the day, the equivalent of N-word for us, Kafers. And Gandhi was fairly contemptuous of the blacks in South Africa. But that doesn't explain in the book. And he began his civil disobedience campaigns in South Africa to call attention to the plight of Indians living there who he believed, I think correctly, should be treated with the same

rights as any other British subjects. But his big complaint was that they had been relegated on the other side of the color line away from white inhabitants and citizens in South Africa, but relegated to the same side as South Africa's blacks. He wanted Indians pushed to the correct side, the upper side. with nothing to say about the blacks. Very little to say about that. It was not his concern, and it was not an issue that really motivated his multiple visits with the British regard to the Indian presence in Africa generally.

He was a nationalist. I mean, and this is one of the things that I think both he is explaining the book. Both he and Churchill were both very strong nationalists. Gandhi has come to be given a kind of this universalist, globalist kind of agenda because of his pacifism and his belief in passive resistance. But he was an Indian nationalist from beginning to end. And that's what drove him and that was his legacy. So do you walk away feeling the same way about Gandhi and Churchill that you could just concentrate? What I'm driving towards is we're asking now if America is a good place or a bad place.

It's both. It's both. It's what are we, are we getting better or are we getting worse? I think we're getting better in the long term. We're getting much better as a people. But we've done horrible things. We've done really amazing, great things. We're neither bad nor good. We're both. And that's what the proper study of history should bring, Glenn, and also of the study of historical figures. I think you're absolutely on the mark here. And you know, and I've written about, good about, I look at my record of biographies, the Gandhian Churchill book, my book on Douglas MacArthur, reaching back almost 20 years my book on Joseph McCarthy. You know, I did a book on McCarthy. And what I explained in there was is that, yeah, there was a lot of bad about McCarthy. He was a lot of good, too. He was onto a real issue, namely the communist conspiracy to subvert the U.S. government

and the way in which it had infiltrated into the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s. But people were outraged because in many cases, people want, you know, they want saints and villains. Yeah. And it's really hard to do. It's really hard with a handful of characters in history. I think you know who they are. It's really hard to find ones in democratic Western societies who fit either one of those bills. So let me break here.

And then I want to pick it up because I think McCarthy is a really great. example. I first started reading about McCarthy and realizing, wait a minute, wait a minute, he's not this, this, you know, black-cloaked Darth Vader, you know, villain every step of the way. He really did have some things right. But if we can't recognize that nuance, because we're now in a society where you're either 100% in the boat or on the train or you're 100% off the train. and that's not where a healthy society should be. We'll pick it up there when we come back. Arthur Herman, you must read his work.

Especially start with Freedom's Forge. It's just remarkable. We'll talk about it here in just a second. Historian and just fantastic, fantastic author. Arthur Herman is with his senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He has written the idea of decline in the West, MacArthur, uh 1917 i mean it's about wilson you had me at hello uh and uh and uh one of my favorite books uh freedoms forge welcome back to the program uh thanks pleasure you know better than uh most

the one thing we haven't injected into this is real fear like a war i mean you know you wonder how anyone could believe that aliens were attacking, you know, when Orson Wells did War of the Worlds. It wasn't that the medium was, it wasn't just that the medium was new. They were used to hearing all about this foreign enemy that was going to be invading. And the fear lived, they were living it daily. Plus, you add into that any kind of economic collapse, we don't have the infrastructure anymore. I mean, the personal infrastructure anymore to be the people that we were, that our grandparents were. No, we face some enormous challenges, Glenn, and I've been talking about this. You know,

The Freedom's Forge is a book which is now really beginning to grab the attention of policymakers at the Pentagon and elsewhere. And two weeks ago, in fact, I was at a meeting at the National Defense University organized by the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, which is the one that looks, that's the office that looks ahead, what's coming up on the horizon. And the discussion was, would the United States be able to mobilize in the event of a protracted conflict with a near-peer competitor? And they brought me there to talk about it. Freedom's Forge has become very much sort of one of the key texts for discussing these

issues about mobilization at the Pentagon. also with the White House. And it's very gratifying to see that happen and know that your words can have an impact, you know, on where policy is going. But what I stress to them is I said, look, from the point of view of mobilization, we've got two issues. One is on the technical and the industrial side. And there's a host of reasons why this is going to become a challenge. You know, our traditional defense industrial base has decayed.

There's no doubt about that. We're going to have to look in World War II. We had the industrial base that was necessary and sufficient to mobilize. Today, we're going to have to have a global supply chain and look to our allies to help. With the new technologies that underpin weapon systems of the future, AI and quantum technology and 3D printing and robotics, that we're going to have to – this is a whole different way of thinking about what an industrial base says, we'll have to look at commercial companies. But Glenn, the other thing that I stress to them was the real obstacle we're going to face is not in the industrial economic areas in the cultural area.

In World War II, when Bill Newton, as I described in my book, went to meet his fellow colleagues in the auto industry and their suppliers and said, we need you to help build planes, to build parts for planes, to build tanks. They said, Bill, we'll do it. Our country calls and we'll answer. I don't think we have that kind of response from our leading industrial and economic powers today, especially in Silicon Valley. If you look at what Google did with 3,000 employees protesting, the Google's contract to work with the Pentagon on Project Maven and saying, we don't want to go in that way. And then on the other side, you've got Google building in China. Yes. And AI Research Center hiring Chinese research scientists who are developing AI, they're going to be using for their military.

We have a problem. Arthur, I have to tell you something. You're going to love my new book. You and I should be best friends. I don't know why. You are concerned with exactly the same things I'm concerned about. I know this has taken a long time for some reason. maybe it's our fault of getting you on the air.

But I would love to, A, I'd love to invite you back just to talk about Freedom's Forge. And if we could do that soon, that'd be great if you have time. And I'd also like to do that. I'd like to bring you down and just spend a few hours with you on air because you are, your voice needs to be heard. You have the history to back it up. And we are facing things. I mean, when you start talking about future wars and,

and tech in Silicon Valley, you are right on the money. And I don't know what to do about it. Well, I think we should really talk about this and get your audience involved with this, too, because we are facing a high-tech STEM crisis, you know, science, technology, engineering, and math crisis that is really going to affect how we're able to handle national security issues in the next decade. Arthur. This is something that needs to be addressed now.

Pentagon is getting its mind around it. that we need to get the American public behind a goal. I've been talking about a Manhattan project for this very thing. We'll hang on the phone. I want to get some information from you. Let's book you to spend some more time with us. Arthur Herman. The Hudson Institute, author and historian,

read Feed Freedom's Forge. It's fantastic. Read it. Nice. Get a room. He's awesome. He's awesome. Yeah, I mean, it's like it knows everything.

Yeah. It's like talking to a smart me. I have no experience with that. That's so weird. I know. Well, you just heard it. He's a smart me. He's got the facts.

You know. Glenn, back. Mercury.