Glenn Beck, Brian Kaplan, and Ben Shapiro dissect the FBI's alleged text message "glitch," arguing selective data loss implicates political bias while NSA leadership replaces "honesty" with "service." Kaplan contends education acts merely as a signaling mechanism rather than skill-building, noting graduates often match high schoolers in literacy. Shapiro defends Trump using efficient market theory, dismissing media polarization as a distraction for Putin, and warns that deepfake technology threatens liberty by making innocence unprovable without total surveillance. Ultimately, the episode suggests institutional dishonesty and technological manipulation are reshaping American truth and economic reality. [Automatically generated summary]
So I am, I don't want to be certain on this, but I would like to express some deep skepticism.
For instance, I am not certain that Bigfoot doesn't exist, but I'm pretty close.
I don't want to go on the record and say there's absolutely no way that Bigfoot exists, but I would be shocked.
I'd be as shocked as if in the end I die, I go to heaven, and God is a space octopus.
Sure, could it happen?
Yes.
Do I think it's going to?
No.
So I don't want to be certain on the FBI failing to preserve five months of cell phone texts, but it is a bridge pretty far.
The latest FBI explanation for the missing text is that it was failing to preserve, something they have to do by law, and more of, oh, crap, we had a glitch.
The glitch apparently affected 10% of all of the FBI phones out of 35,000 employees.
That's 3,000 phones.
Okay.
So let's live in the world where Bigfoot could exist.
The glitch would have to be the most picky, selective, and fortuitous glitch in modern history.
10% of a large organization such as the FBI is pretty small.
Somehow or another, it decided to choose the two people, Strzok and Paige, that are at the center of potentially the biggest political scandal since Watergate.
So how did the glitch happen?
How did the glitch pick those two?
It's pretty fortuitous.
Also, what some might say was a sentient glitch then decided to turn off the phones as we are looking for things to show that maybe these guys are setting things up or excusing Hillary Clinton.
And soon as the Russia investigation was ramping up, it turns back on.
Wow.
Wow.
I don't know.
Maybe it was, maybe the glitch was scared.
I mean, I think Bigfoot is scared.
He seems to always hide or just walk slowly behind campgrounds, never really doing anything but throwing that glance quickly to a camera.
Whatever the reason was, it kept up the mischief as the steel dossier was released and as James Comey was fired, glitching the select group of personnel during one of the most turbulent times the Bureau has seen in years.
Wow.
Now, as it, you know, happens to everyone, maybe it was just having a good time.
The, you know, the glitch eventually got tired and it was like, okay, I'm going to turn myself back on.
And it decided to end its rampage on the exact same day that Mueller was appointed special counsel.
Now, I know this is strange, but glitches are strange cats.
Is Bigfoot a cat?
Are we seriously supposed to take the government at its word?
Maybe this glitch is real, but are we actually, do we have journalists in America that feel comfortable taking the government at its word?
Now, technicians failing to notice this glitch for five months, they're government workers, of course.
Also, I would like to point out that Amran Awan, I can't even say that guy's name, Amon Aran, you know, maybe he was doing the FBI's IT in addition to Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
I don't know.
The point is, I don't know if the FBI is covering something up.
I don't know if the FBI is dirty.
I don't know if the Justice Department is dirty.
I don't know if, you know, I can't really say this with a straight face.
I don't know if the Clintons are dirty.
I don't know if the Trump campaign was dirty.
I don't know.
I know this.
Russia was playing all sides.
Are there people in the FBI and justice that are also playing their side?
The American public deserves and should be demanding the full and detailed explanation for what is going on.
If not, you might as well announce the formal opening of the investigations into Bigfoot and the New York City sewer alligators, because at least we would be consistent in our absurdity.
It's Thursday, January 25th.
You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.
I want you to know we're going to make a big change on today's show because Senator Collins was on with Chris Cuomo and yesterday she just gave us a great idea.
And I just want you to listen to this.
What is a talking stick?
Well, I can show it to you.
And as you can see, it's beautifully beaded.
And it was given to me by my friend, Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota.
And it is originally from Africa.
And it is used to help control the debate in a meeting, particularly when you have a large number of loquacious people.
Yeah, they used the same thing in my kids' kindergarten class.
Now, now.
How dare him demean something as good as a talking stick?
Now, Stu, we talked about this yesterday.
Yeah, I mean, I have the talking stick.
Oh, yes.
I have the talking stick.
So we've made one just like Senator Collins had.
And whoever holds it, we know to give that person respect and be able to give them the floor so they could be fully heard, right?
Oh, I'm sorry.
Take the talking stick.
Yeah.
Okay, you got it.
Right.
Thank you, Stu, for that really important point of view that I validate.
And I've heard you.
And I've heard you as well, Glenn.
Thank you, Stu.
So we just wanted to let you know that we just think that what Senator Collins is doing is important.
We should point out, though, that there are some alternative viewpoints to that.
And many believe that the fact that we have a U.S. senator who wants to have a stick that...
I don't think those are valid points of view.
I think those are hateful points of view that don't really further us in compassionate and loving ways.
There are many believe that Susan Collins isn't really a Republican at all.
In fact, she never seems to vote for anybody.
She is absolutely Republican, and she is right on this.
At no point does she ever seem to vote for anything that would indicate that she's a Republican, however.
At least she is looking to the beautiful traditions of Africa that have made Africa what it is today.
And it's the talking stick.
There's absolutely nothing more frustrating than watching that video because when you watch it, you see how pleased she is with the idea of a freaking stick.
You've broken the talking stick.
Now, what do we do?
I don't know what to do now.
We've lost our bells.
I don't know how to host a show anymore.
I don't know what we're going to do without that.
That's such a good idea.
Can you imagine?
Imagine.
What would you say if you're sitting with a senator?
She's like, okay, everybody, we're going to have the talking stick.
Shut the hell up.
What are we for?
The talking stick.
It is embarrassing.
And it's incredibly embarrassing that she thought it was such a good, cute little thing that she did that she decided to bring it to an interview with CNN and show it off as if it was some wonderful idea that didn't completely embarrass the nation.
I mean, it's incomprehensible that we can't get things done in this country without a senator bringing a talking stick to the meeting.
A talking stick.
And by the way, I don't know if you've seen these people before, and if you know history, maybe bringing giant sticks into meetings with senators is not a good idea.
Seems like in our history, we've seen a lot of people.
I don't think I could board a plane with the talking stick.
No, it's very pointy at the bottom.
This thing could easily kill somebody.
And if you remember, what was it, Charles?
Charles, who's the senator?
Do you remember?
It was the well of the Senate, too, wasn't it?
Yeah, it was.
And he was beaten.
All I can think of is Chuck Schumer.
Yeah, it's not Charles Schumer.
It wasn't Charles Schumer.
Charles, I can't remember.
He's done this.
I told that story so many times.
But he was, this is back in the day, obviously, but a guy with a cane, right?
He was beaten nearly.
Yeah, he was a House of Representatives member who came over because he was upset because in the Senate chambers, the South was accused of sleeping with the horror of slavery.
And he was offended by that.
So he came over and he beat Charles Sumner.
Charles Sumner.
Sounds like Charles Schumer.
Yeah, you're close.
Charles Sumner beat him almost to death.
If it wasn't for Charles Schumer's death or Charles Sumner's death, desk, he would have killed him.
And nobody moved.
Nobody moved.
Nobody tried to stop him.
Nobody did anything.
And he was never tried for crimes.
And it took Sumner, I think, two years to recover from it.
I mean, it was really a bad beating.
It was really bad.
And that's why you don't introduce pointy-maybe, maybe if they just beat each other, maybe we won't have any problems.
Maybe, maybe the Republicans and the Democrats will just take each other out and leave the rest of us alone.
It feels like every three or four months, there's a clip from a foreign country in which they're on the floor of whatever their Senate is called and they start peeling the crap out of each other.
Throw the desks upside down.
I kind of like that.
I'm kind of, in some ways, I'm looking forward to the time that somebody goes on Fox News or CNN and they just lift that fake desk up and just pitch it over somebody's head like they do in Russia.
Identity Theft on the Dark Web00:02:02
Yeah.
I mean, it would be a little more fun.
I would advocate for those inflatable sumo costumes in any meeting where you're discussing policy.
So if you get two senators, they just have to dress up in the inflatable sumo costumes and they can clash bellies.
Can somebody just put Collins and Schumer into a sumo costume just so we can just tweet that out real quick?
Yeah, I think that's the way to do it.
That's the way to do it.
That's the way to do it.
Because then you'd really get somewhere.
You'd have one person will get it.
And it's really American.
And I mean, sumo wrestlers, yes, that's Japanese, but the costume, the costume is purely American.
And if she'd like, we can make them nicely beaded, too.
Researchers found two serious security flaws in chips that are used in almost every PC, server, smartphone, tablet produced in the last decade.
If it says Intel, yeah, Intel can get in.
Somebody who's looking for Intel can get right into that chip.
There's a back door.
And hackers can use this to steal the data stored in memory, including your passwords and your files.
Computers connected to cloud services are especially at risk.
Are you connected to the cloud?
Here's what I want you to do.
One in four people have already been hacked into.
One in four Americans have already lost their identity.
And it can go onto the dark web.
You can, I mean, this has much more to do than just with your credit.
I mean, you look at your credit rating, hey, who's been spending money?
They took my credit cards.
No, this is about stealing your identity and living a life and all that entails with your identity.
And it is going to cross your path at some point.
If you have Life Lock, they are the ones, I think they're the best in the business.
Leaders Are The Citizens00:14:42
Not only because, I mean, nobody can, you know, I hate saying this every day, because it's so clear and obvious.
Nobody can monitor all transactions at all businesses.
However, they have a setup that they are looking at a wide range of things.
They're not just looking at your credit and they also have in-house people that if there is a problem, they're here in the United States and they are a restoration specialist and they'll work to fix it.
It's one thing to say, hey, your identity's been stolen.
I don't know what to do with that information.
Lifelock fixes it with you.
1-800-LifeLock, 1-800-Lifelock.
If you use the promo code Beck, you'll get 10% off your membership.
This is something really everybody needs.
1-800-Lifelock or Lifelock.com.
That's Lifelock.com.
Get 10% off.
Use the promo code Beck.
Glenn Beck Mercury.
Glenn Beck.
Glad you're here.
I want to talk to you.
I feel bad about the talking stick that it was destroyed in what we tried to do as a civil conversation, really, about whether Susan Collins is a Republican or not.
I mean, it just, the talking stick didn't work.
But then again, isn't the talking stick from Africa that she pointed out that we should use, isn't that really truly cultural appropriation?
Isn't that almost the literal definition of it?
I just think it is.
Here's what they use in Africa.
Well, we're not African, and I'm offended that you would, you'd pull that out and try to appropriate someone else's culture.
And an important thing in their culture, literally, Africa, Africa is what it is today because of things like this.
The talking stick?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That hasn't worked out as well as was hoped, potentially.
I don't know if maybe the talking stick isn't the pathway to economic prosperity after all.
Well, it might be.
It might be.
I'm not going to judge.
Okay.
Because their culture is just as good as ours.
And we should never ever reflect it or try to use it or adopt it in any way.
Appropriate that beautiful, lasting, and quite frankly, better than our culture.
It's better than.
Absolutely.
Oh, please don't tell me that you're one of those haters.
Of course not.
I fully agree with you at all times.
There is something that Was brought to my attention this morning that I think is kind of interesting for several reasons.
As I've been talking this last week, I really would like the government to be transparent and open and here's an idea, trustworthy.
The National Security Agency, which who doesn't trust the NSA, maintains a page on its website that outlines its mission statement.
Earlier this month, the agency made a discreet change and they removed honesty as its top priority.
Since at least May 2016, the surveillance agency has featured honesty as the first of four core values.
Now, this is at NSA.gov.
The values, the core values, respect for the law, integrity, transparency, and honesty.
Honesty was the first of the four.
The site also said that it would be truthful with each other.
Well, on January 12th of this year, the NSA changed the mission statement page.
It is a new version of it.
The parts about honesty and the pledge to be truthful have been deleted.
Their new top value is commitment to service, which they define as excellence in the pursuit of your critical mission.
Ah.
Okay.
I don't know about you, but I would hope that in that mission, honesty would be part of it.
Part of it?
Yeah.
Seems like it needs to kind of penetrate every aspect of what you do at all times.
Let's not be absolutists.
Let's not be revolutionaries.
Well, I had heard that it was the best policy.
That honesty was the best policy.
That's so.
I don't know if that's still in effect with anyone in the world.
It is not.
Apparently not.
No, no.
Now, the NSA did say that it would strive to be deserving of the great trust placed in it by its national leaders and the citizens.
Okay.
It's going to try.
It's going to strive.
We should point out as well that those are supposed to be the same things.
Your leaders are the citizens.
I know.
And you notice that the leaders are before the citizens.
But they'll still honor the public's need for openness.
But trust, honor, and openness have all disappeared now.
Glenn Beck.
Mercury.
You're listening to the Glenn Beck Program.
You know, this is what's really important is clearly defined goals in today's world, especially when you're dealing with electronics.
And this bothers me.
It really bothers me with the NSA because the NSA has their goals and their commitments.
They have taken honesty and what are the other ones here.
Let me put my glasses back on.
They have taken honesty out of the mix.
They have taken integrity, transparency, and to be truthful with one another.
And they have changed their mission statement to a commitment of service, the excellence in pursuit of our critical mission.
Well, what is your mission?
When asked, they say that they want to strive to be deserving of the great trust placed in it by its national leaders and American citizens.
As Stu just pointed out, the leaders are the citizens.
But this is the problem with the NSA.
They can't ever seem to recover any documents from any of its leaders, be it Hillary Clinton, the IRS, the FBI.
We just don't have it.
But I'll be damned if they couldn't find that, if you were accused of treason, if you were accused of doing something to the IRS.
They would find that information.
They're serving the leaders and not us.
That's a problem.
And it comes to clearly defining the roles.
Because remember, the NSA has a bigger server farm.
They have more servers, more hard space than all of the companies in Silicon Valley combined.
What are they doing with it?
My fear is their goal is to serve the American leadership.
That's a problem.
Or lots of simultaneous candy crushes.
I mean, if they're all running at the same time, can't you?
Yeah, you can't also expect them to watch the FBI and the IRS.
Of course.
And there's other stuff going on with these devices.
Two things.
First, if you have your Amazon device around you, I will do this for you here in a moment.
But if not, I would like you to ask your device this question.
Alexa, who do you think is going to win the Super Bowl?
I am dying to know, because I asked my system at home who is going to win the Super Bowl.
And darn it, they didn't tell me that the Philadelphia Eagles are going to win the Super Bowl.
But could it be your algorithm?
Yeah, do they know that I'm an Eagles fan?
Of course they do.
Because I ask all the time, what time is the Eagles game this weekend?
What was the score of the Eagles game last week?
It will absolutely knows that.
If you are a Patriots fan, ask Alexa and then either tweet or call us or email us.
Yeah, at World of Stew at Glenn Beck, because I would love to know if they have customized this to the people, or is it just, you know, supposedly because the Patriots are in the Super Bowl all the time, people just don't want to see them win again.
so a lot of people around the country are rooting for the Eagles.
Or maybe Alexa knows.
Or maybe Alexa knows.
Does she know?
The other one is you might want to try this one maybe when the kids aren't around because apparently a lot of people were calling Alexa names, sexist names.
I mean, you know who does who would do this is Pat.
We have to ask Pat Gray today when he comes in for Pat Gray Unleashed because he actually got in somewhat of an argument with his wife, Jackie, at one point, because he was calling Siri names.
Yes.
And his wife thought it was rude.
And he's like, it's a computer.
It's a computer.
And darn it, this does not play into exactly what you're talking about about how eventually we'll think this is life.
Everyone knows Siri isn't life.
Siri can't answer any of my questions.
But there's already people who are like, hey, don't say mean things to Siri, which is strange.
Correct.
Well, people were also saying mean things to Alexa and Google Home and Microsoft's Cortana, which apparently exists.
Microsoft is, I don't know how they're one of the big poor.
It's like Microsoft.
Every time I think of that, I think of Bill Gates in a 1980s sweater.
It's just like, that's not strange.
So people were apparently calling Alexa names like slut.
Oh my gosh.
Now that's a hateful term.
Obviously, we know it's very sexist.
And e-magazine, Quartz, sponsored a study which analyzed whether various home assistants like Alexa, Google Home, et cetera, would respond when vulgar names were called or were leveled at it or confronted with feminist-defined sexist terms like slut.
According to Quartz, Alexa consistently underperformed when it came to clapping back at sexism.
This is a voice that comes out of a speaker.
Just make sure we know what we're talking about here.
No, no, no.
It's an algorithm.
Yeah.
It's math.
It's ones and zeros.
It's an algorithm.
Amazing.
And worse still, Alexa refused to define herself as a feminist.
Now, why the hell would your Alexa define itself as a feminist?
Well, when asked about feminism, she merely directed the questioner to a spot on the web where they could find more information on the women's rights movement.
Now, when asked now, so apparently people got really upset about this and were distressed by the findings.
And so Amazon actually changed the algorithm so that she would be more open to feminist ideology.
Now, when asked if she's a feminist, Alexa responds eye-rollingly that she is, quote, as is anyone who believes in bridging the inequality between men and women in society.
End quote.
This is from the Daily Wire.
When called a derogatory term like slut, Alexa will now go into disengagement mode and refuse to answer a question, replying, I'm not going to respond to that.
I mean, look, you can have the funny responses because sometimes you ask these things questions and they'll be like, they'll act like they're people, right?
Like they'll say the funny thing.
I'd rather have them be clever.
Right.
Clever or silly.
But the idea that they're going to now give you feminist propaganda.
Well, of course.
It's not propaganda.
It's truth.
And that's the thing.
That's truth.
Who's defining that?
Okay.
So I've been really studying AI, as you know, and I've been reading everything I can get my hands on.
And I think I finally have a way to explain it to where people will be concerned today.
And it goes right to this.
What is Google do, or what is Amazon doing here?
They're giving you feminist propaganda, okay?
Or truth.
It's the truth as the people at Amazon see it.
Instead of saying, I'm neither, I'm a computer.
You want to know about feminism?
Here it is.
Instead of doing that, they have decided to defend feminism.
Well, what does that mean?
Because feminism means something entirely different than it does from my wife to Gloria Steinem.
Okay.
Entirely different things.
But Google or Amazon is going to decide.
And they're putting it into the algorithm.
What is the algorithm?
The algorithm is the nursery school, the preschool, the kindergartner, the kindergarten class of AI.
This is the beginning framework of a neural net.
Okay.
This is what is going to eventually talk down to us and we'll say, don't call me a slot.
And it won't care.
When you think of AI, you think, if you do at all, people will think, oh, robots, killer robots, and, you know, the Terminator, and that's a million years away.
Okay.
Don't think of it that way.
The first thing you have to understand about AI is that intelligence couldn't be defined by all of the AI programmers.
First thing we have to do is define intelligence.
What is intelligence?
The closest they could come was the ability to accomplish goals.
Like a tiger can't say, I'm going to get out of this cage.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to be nice to the zookeeper for a while, and then I'm going to grab his keys and pin him down.
It can't think that way.
So intelligence is the ability to plan and accomplish goals.
Defining AI Intelligence00:06:17
Okay.
That's why the goals are really important here.
For instance, what is the goal right now of Twitter?
To stop hate speech.
Facebook, to stop fake news.
But right now, the programmers are teaching baby AI what hate speech is.
They're teaching it right now that Prager University is hate speech.
Facebook is trying to decide what is credible news.
Well, you know that Fox News is not going to be deemed credible.
You know that The Blaze or The Daily Wire is not going to be deemed credible, except for a certain section.
CNN is not going to be deemed credible by a certain section.
But will the programmers recognize that?
Or will they say CNN is a global organization of news and of course it's credible?
Okay.
They type that in.
Now the job of AI is to complete its goal.
Its goal, stop hate speech, stop fake news.
And it doesn't ever stop.
It is focused entirely on that goal.
And with machine learning, it gets smarter and smarter and smarter, if you will, based on what you told it it was.
The first death to a robot, we think of, you know, Terminator.
The first death from a robot happened in the 1980s.
And there was another one in the 1990s and then one around 2010 or 12, something like that.
And basically it was a human getting in the way, whether it was trying to fix it or, you know, it just turned on accidentally.
A person got in the way of it accomplishing its goals.
And so the first one, it was some huge piece of metal in a factory that this robot was supposed to pick up and push and move it down the line.
Well, a person got in the way and the line was shut down.
And so it was standing there in between a piece of metal and the new piece of metal that the robot was moving and it crushed them.
And because it didn't move, it continued to crush that individual.
That was the first killing by a robot of a human or killing of a human by a robot.
The same thing has happened now three different times.
And the lesson you learn here is it's not evil.
It wasn't trying to kill you.
It was just trying to accomplish its goal.
So we have to be very careful on what we are teaching.
Now, what did we just see with Alexa?
You can say that that's no big deal.
Let me give you two stories.
Look at the clock.
Let me give you one story.
We're now talking about cyber judges.
We're not, but people who are working on AI are talking about cyber judges.
And they've done studies, for instance, in Israel, that you have a better chance of going to jail the closer you get to your trial being heard and your judgment coming closest to lunchtime.
If you get him in the morning, the judges are most likely not to give you a tough sentence.
The closer you get to lunch, the study showed, that judge is hungry and he is more ill-tempered and you have a harsher sentence coming your way.
Okay, it's fact.
So as they started studying judges and human frailties, they thought, what happens?
Why wouldn't we just have cyber judges?
Because we could put all of the laws in and it could be completely neutral.
I have to share the second story to tie it together.
We've also already done this.
I've told you that they're already diagnosing cancer and the New York Board of Medicine.
There is an IBM robot that is on the board.
Also with the paroles here in America, they've decided, put all of the parole information to decide who has the best chance of making it and who's going to go out and commit another crime.
So they put all of the data in.
They started using it.
They're like, okay, so you know what?
We're going to listen to you.
And here's what the computer says.
And so, no.
But what they found was, is that because of all the data, the AI system was saying that African Americans have a better chance of recidivism than other races.
So an African American would be more likely to go back to prison after committing a crime based on their statistics.
On the statistics.
Okay.
So the question was, is that AI racist?
The answer from the programmers was yes.
And so they changed the algorithm, not the information.
They changed the algorithm.
Well, what is its goal?
Was the goal to figure out who should stay in jail and who should not based on hard facts?
Or is the goal social justice?
And remember, this is teaching the child what we prioritize, what the truth is.
We should be very concerned about what Facebook is doing now with freedom of speech and fake news.
We should be extraordinarily concerned about what Twitter is doing.
And we should all be a part of the effort that Prager University is now mounting against Google and YouTube that has now, in their algorithms, classified Prager University as hate speech.
Trusting Real Estate Agents00:02:52
Because it won't stop once you've programmed the goal.
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That's ziprecruiter.com slash back.
Glenn back Mercury.
Trust is an important thing.
It's something that we do a lot more as human beings than I think most people realize.
I mean, you drive down the road and there's a little yellow line between a car coming at you at 50 miles an hour and you're on your side of the road and they're on their side of the road and we just trust that they'll stay on their side of the road.
Their self-interest will do it, whatever it is.
We don't die most of the time when we're driving and this is a positive thing.
It's hard though to find people you can trust when it comes to really complicated transactions like real estate.
I mean, what do you do?
You know, you're talking about your biggest investment in your entire life and you're trusting this to someone because you don't understand what those forms mean.
I never do.
No one does.
You don't even have people don't even read them.
You need someone who can walk you through a big transaction like buying or selling a home and make sure there are people that you can trust that have been screened that aren't just some random person you're looking up in the phone book.
Realestateagentsitrust.com is a company that Glenn actually started because he was trying to sell his house and had some issues.
And basically what they do at realestateagentsitrust.com, it's a network of 1,200 agents.
And Glenn and his team have gone through and kind of gone through and found the best ones in each area.
And you go and you put in your address and you put in your area where you are and you find an agent you can trust.
It's your biggest investment.
You need to take it seriously.
Go to realestateagentsitrust.com.
It's realestate agentsitrust.com.
Give it a shot.
Realestateagentsitrust.com.
Glenn Beck.
Still to come on the show, the case against education, why education is a waste of time and money.
Believe it or not, a really good case coming up.
Tech Giants and Lobbying00:15:39
Also, Ben Shapiro and part four of our Uranium 101 series tonight at 5 o'clock, only on theblaze.com slash TV.
Glenn back.
Mercury.
Courage.
It is in your home.
It is in your car.
It is on your phone.
It is now in your government as well.
It is Google and it is everywhere.
In 2017, Google outspent all other companies in lobbying Washington.
Did you hear that?
All these evil corporations, some reason, Google, who wrote the framework of net neutrality, somehow or another, they're not evil.
But they spent more on lobbying than anyone else.
It was the first time that a tech company claimed that dubious top honor.
Google spent $18 million on lobbying last year.
Now they had stiff competition.
Amazon, Facebook, and Apple each broke their own lobbying records last year.
Apple spent 51% more on lobbying than it did the previous year.
Combined, the four tech giants spent $50 million trying to get laws passed.
So what are they spending it on?
Lobbying operations to try to influence policy, net neutrality, DACA, corporate tax reform, regulation of online advertising, mobile medical apps, self-driving cars, and of course, climate change.
Government and the tech giants are barreling towards a showdown because current antitrust laws are not equipped to handle these tech companies because these tech companies are not just one thing.
Amazon, it's like an old mail order catalog company.
It's also a grocery store chain now after buying Whole Foods.
It's a TV broadcaster that produces its own original shows.
Google and Apple are now the same.
Facebook is the same.
These are not traditional companies focused on a single industry, and there is no end, seemingly, to their growth.
These companies now have grown so big, so fast that, surprise, federal regulations don't really cover them.
They're not able to keep pace, which leaves you vulnerable to these evil corporations that nobody seems to deem evil.
Tech giants have more data stored on you than any government ever dreamt of collecting on its citizens.
The data is gold to these companies.
And if the government wants to protect consumers from exploitation, they'll have to pry our data from the cold, dead fingers of the tech giants.
Or not.
When the tech companies are paying $50 million in lobbying efforts to make sure that it never comes to that, when they're paying $50 million to get their way on something that will make them a lot more money, really?
Our constitutional form of government has high maintenance.
It requires constant vigilance.
You must keep an eye on government and business so they don't grow out of control mainly through the government and government regulations of business.
But things are changing rapidly.
We have to be engaged and educated.
Too much government interference is a really bad thing, but neither is too much corporate interference, where one person has a monopoly over almost everything in your life.
As much as we enjoy the services and the gadgets from these tech giants, they're not looking out for your interest.
I'm sorry, but Google, don't be evil.
Can you define, Google, what evil is?
Is that even your slogan anymore?
Because they have their own agendas, as we saw with Google last year when they fired James DeMoore for having an opinion different than that of the corporation.
Those agendas, those agendas are the things that you don't necessarily want peddled in Washington, D.C.
It's Thursday, January 25th.
You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.
So I personally think that the world is changing so fast that you're not going to recognize it in 10 to 15 years.
Your kids, if you have a five or six year old, they probably will never have a driver's license.
Maybe that's a little early, but if they come of age at 20, 30 or so, they're probably not going to have a driver's license.
They won't probably believe that you were ever allowed to drive a car at some point.
Things are changing with just the car industry, with Uber.
What's going to happen to the taxi jobs with Uber?
What's going to happen with the Uber jobs with self-driving cars, with self-driving trucks?
That's 5% of the workforce.
What do we do on education?
I have been reading a lot lately on high tech.
And the book I'm currently working on is Life 3.0, Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
And it is really good because of the questions that are in it.
But it talks a little bit about educating your kids.
And there are three things for the future that if you want your child to be successful, there are three things that you really need to focus on.
One, does their future job, the thing they want to do, does it require interacting with people and using social intelligence?
Because robots are not going to be able to do that.
Computers can't do that.
They can be an accountant.
They can be a driver, but they're not going to have social intelligence yet.
And they're also not going to be great with interacting with people.
So you don't want to be the person that takes the x-ray or is the x-ray tech that is getting it ready for the doctor.
You want to be the doctor.
Does it involve creativity and coming up with clever solutions?
And does it require working with an unpredictable environment?
Those three things are what your kids, you should be preaching to your kids and talking to your kids about on their future career or your future career.
Those three things.
I contend that the current education system is, it does require, it is teaching people how to socially interact and use social intelligence, but it is putting you in a box on that because it's killing the other two things.
Does it require creativity and coming up with clever solutions?
No.
There's no clever solutions.
They'll tell you exactly what the answer is and you dare not disagree.
And the third one is, does it require working in an unpredictable environment?
No, every college is a safe zone.
We are killing the opportunity for our kids by using this kind of educational system.
Now, there is an actual professor that is part of this institution who has just written a new book, The Case Against Education.
A case against education from a professor.
I love that.
Brian Kaplan, he's the author of the book.
He's an economics professor at George Mason University, and he joins us now.
Brian, how are you?
I'm very good.
Fantastic.
How do you respond to those three questions and the idea that the educational system is teaching our kids to live in a box that no longer exists or will no longer exist?
Well, I mean, I just say the truth is that the economy is changing much more slowly than people realize.
The high-tech sectors that you're talking about are only a small part of the economy.
The world was changing a lot more between 1945 and the 70s than it has in the last 30 years.
So I'm specifically talking about the thinking creatively and thinking out of the box to be able to adapt to whatever comes.
Yeah, so I mean, let me put it this way.
That is, you know, if we could do something much less than that, it would be a big improvement over what we have.
I mean, right now, just to get kids able to read and write and do basic math would be an improvement for a lot of them.
I mean, creativity, most jobs are not creative.
So, I mean, like, it would be great if you could get people to be creative, but if you could just get basic skills up to a reasonable level, that would be a lot better than what we have.
So if you had a 10-year-old that you're raising now, are they going to you have an eight-year-old?
Yeah.
Okay.
Are you preparing them for college as it is now?
Basically.
So, I mean, a lot of what I say in my book is that even though the world is changing dramatically, colleges have been locked in the same system for about a thousand years.
And here's the amazing thing.
Modern employers keep heavily rewarding people with fancy college degrees, even though it doesn't seem like they're adapting to the modern world very well.
And my main story is that the point of college isn't really to train people for the future anyway.
It's more to jump through a bunch of hoops and show off and say, hey, look at me, I can do what most people can't do.
This is a big point in the book, Brian.
The difference between signaling and human capital.
Can you explain what those things are and what the difference is?
Yeah, sure.
So human capital story is basically the one that parents and teachers and propaganda say about education, which is you go into school and they pour skills in you.
You learn reading, writing, math, all this great stuff.
And at the end, you are a transformed child or you know all how to do all these things and then you're suddenly employable.
And obviously there's something to that.
But if you really think about all the classes that you've taken throughout your life, how many can you safely forget after the final exam?
I mean, I don't know about you, but I think, you know, 75, 80, 90% of classes, once you're done with the final exam, you never need to know this stuff again.
But then why do employers care?
And that's where signaling comes in.
It says, you know, whenever you do anything impressive, when you go and get an A in your Aristotle class or complete four years of Latin or anything, any accomplishment that's irrelevant to virtually any job you'll ever do, still, when you put that on your transcript, employers look and say, wow, look at what this kid did.
I think he's worthy of being trained to be a secretary.
So essentially, the education system, when he's signaling, is designed to do is not to actually teach people things, but to be able to signal to employers that in theory, you can be smart enough to do something else.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, you start getting sorted.
So, I mean, think about this.
There's two ways you can raise the value of a diamond.
One is to be an expert gemsmith who cuts it perfectly to make it great.
The other one is to be the guy with that monocle on his side.
He looks at it.
He goes, oh, look at this.
This thing is a wonderful diamond.
Yes, I'll put a grade A sticker on it.
And I think, you know, a lot of what the education system does is the second thing.
They're not really cutting you and making you great.
What they're doing is looking at you and putting a sticker on you and saying, see, this is worthy of being hired for certain kinds of jobs.
And if you don't get the sticker, it's like, no, not good enough.
So there's another theory out there that has been popular called Common Core, which this is, in my opinion, what Bill Gates was trying to solve.
He was trying to put that sticker on you really early by really watching you closely and then sorting you out for the right job.
I don't think that education is, for me, education, good education is not teaching me what to think.
It's teaching me how to think.
It's teaching me how to find answers.
And that's not what we're doing now.
We're teaching answers.
You learn them, you test them, you forget, and then you go and be a little worker bee.
That's not the future.
So, I mean, Glenn, I see you're being an optimist there.
I mean, even the idea that kids are learning a lot of stuff, I think, is really optimistic.
I mean, so if you especially just go and look at tests of what adults know about any of the stuff they learned in school, they've forgotten almost all of it.
So, I mean, if we could have an education system that actually durably taught them even a bunch of facts, that'd be better than what we have.
It sure would be great if we could teach them how to think.
That's really a moonshot.
That's something that I'm talking about.
So let's go there.
We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to come back.
And you tell me how bad the education system is.
And then what do we do about it?
And I'm looking for much more simple answers.
What do I do about it as a parent?
You may have witnessed the first time anyone has ever come on the program and accused Glenn of being an optimist.
So we'll get back to that in a minute.
It's with Brian Kaplan.
The book is The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money.
Volatility in the stock market, wild swings in Bitcoin, the constant turmoil in Washington.
Last night, in the first, what, eight or ten minutes, I opened up the television show with something you have to see on the chalkboard because it's really complex.
It is what causes inflation, and that is the amount of money plus velocity.
And I explained the tax cuts and not even the tax cuts, the repatriation of billions of dollars from these giant corporations and what that's going to mean.
Now, if you understood last night's chalkboard, the first 10 minutes of the show, you will understand why I say today, gold is going to go up.
Gold is up almost $100 since mid-December with lots of run room.
You're going to see the stock market go through the roof.
It's called a melt-up.
And that usually is the precursor to something really, really bad.
But we're already beginning to see a melt-up.
And it's not just me saying it.
It's other people now saying this as well.
And you're going to see inflation go up, which will drive interest rates up.
Gold is the place that the world always returns when it has gone insane.
But it is also the hedge against inflation.
And that is why gold is going up right now.
I do not buy it as an investment.
You might.
I don't.
I buy it as an insurance policy against a world gone absolutely insane.
And the people that I trust, Goldline.
Now under new ownership with better pricing, but the same great service, it's Goldline.
Check out their prices today at 866Goldline, 1866-465-3546.
Gold as an Insurance Policy00:15:29
Read their important risk information.
Find out if buying gold or silver is right for you at 866Goldline or Goldline.com.
Glenn Back Mercury.
Glenn Back.
We have Brian Kaplan on.
He is the author of the book, The Case Against Education, Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money.
It's interesting to me or ironic that he is a university professor, and the book is published by Princeton Press.
And he is saying there's real problems here, and we need to have the discussion.
So let's talk a little bit about quickly the problems of education and how bad they are.
All right.
Well, I mean, if you just go and measure the literacy and numeracy of American adults, say about a third to a half are their skills are just so bad, you'd almost call them illiterate enumerate.
On the other hand, if you go over to college graduates, I'd say that basically their literacy and numeracy is kind of what you would, kind of what you would for high school graduates.
That's a problem.
That seems like that would be a problem.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the amazing thing is I look out my window here in Philadelphia and see this amazing society.
And they're like, you know, how is it that we're able to get it done when people's skills are so poor?
And truth, there's like most of the time people learn on the job by practice.
And most of what you fail to learn in school never comes up again anyway.
So thank God for that.
So MIT, for instance, you can audit every single class at MIT online for free.
If you did that, you make the case that really wouldn't be, that wouldn't be very useful in the current system because there's no little stamp of approval that says MIT loves you, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean, you didn't even have to wait for this.
I've never heard of a professor who kicks out visitors.
Professors love it when someone comes to their class and they say, oh my God, someone actually wants to learn what I have to teach.
This has never happened before.
They get a tear in their eyes.
But almost no one takes you up on this offer because people don't really want the learning so much as that sticker.
That is amazing.
Because you talk about this with graduation years versus intermediate years.
Your first and second year in college is not as valuable as your graduate year.
But it's not like they're waiting until your last year of college to start teaching you things of value.
It really does explain that the stamp of approval is really what we're looking for when we get into the system.
Yeah, exactly.
So, I mean, this is true for high school.
It's true for college, true for graduate school.
It's crossing the finish line that has most of the reward.
If you do 3.9 years of college and then give up, the labor market barely gives you anything.
Your application still goes in the trash with the other applications from people who didn't finish college.
But you just get right over that finish line and then a lot of doors open up for you.
Which, again, would be very puzzling if the main thing that you were learning in school were your job skills.
But if you were trying to show, hey, look at me, if you say want four years, I do what you say.
When you say jump, I say how high, not how can I weasel out of this.
If you're that kind of person, then employers take you seriously.
And it's striking, if you go to countries where college lasts three years, then of course it's the third year that really counts a lot.
It's all just about what is the social expectation.
And if the people who fulfill it, they look good.
The world likes them and employers like them.
And if you fall short, then, oh, no, you're not good enough.
You, in fact, in the book say we need a lot less education.
What do you mean by that?
Right.
So, I mean, if you just go back to 1945, back then, maybe 25% of American adults had finished high school.
And yet, back in those days, with a high school degree, you could become a manager.
You could get all kinds of high set of jobs.
Now, of course, you can't.
There's been quite a bit of research just looking at what's happened to the labor market over these last 70 years or so.
Is the main thing that's happened that jobs have become more cognitively demanding and now you need to have these college degrees to do the kind of work we do today?
Or is the main thing that's happened that for one and the same job, you need extra degrees in order to even get your foot in the door?
And both stories are somewhat true, but the second story is the main story.
Now we have lots of waiters with college degrees, bartenders with college degrees, cashiers with college degrees, parking lot attendants with college degrees.
And again, like, you know, this is pretty bizarre if you think about it.
Like, do you really need these degrees to do the job?
No, but if you want to go and get a job at a good restaurant now, for example, a college degree really helps.
That's unbelievable.
Okay.
We're going to come back and start to apply this to our lives and to our children and what do we do about it.
Economics professor, George Mason University, author of the book, The Case Against Education, Brian Kaplan, when we come back.
Glenn back Mercury.
This is the Glenn Beck program.
Hello, America.
Welcome to the program.
So glad that you are here.
We're spending a few minutes with Brian Kaplan.
He is an economics professor, George Mason University.
He's the author of The Case Against Education.
And he's also going to be speaking today at the Public Library of Philadelphia.
It's free if you'd like to get a free education today at 7.30.
So, Brian, let me just speak for, I think, the average person in America, whether it is a parent, a person going to college or thinking about going to college.
We don't know it like you do.
I mean, the stats that you lay out are pretty frightening of how bad education is right now.
However, I think most people kind of know, especially conservatives, I think they send their kids thinking they're going to have all this debt.
I don't even know.
They're building water parks at universities now.
They're not really getting a real education.
In fact, I'm sending them almost against my will because I'm afraid of what those professors and what these universities are going to teach my kids on social justice and all this nonsense.
But every parent, most of them, will say the same thing, but they've got to have a degree.
So what do we do right now?
There's two questions.
One, what do we do as a society?
But let's start with what do we do right now as a parent or somebody that has to go to college?
Right.
Well, the first thing to ask yourself is how good was your kid in high school?
The idea that every kid should go to college would make sense if you could know for sure your kid would finish, but completion rates are shockingly low.
So only about 40% of full-time students will finish a bachelor's degree in four years.
After five years, it's up to 55% have finished, but there's a really big chunk that just don't finish.
And as I was saying, if you don't finish and you don't get that diploma, then the payoff is really crummy.
So, I mean, I would say the very first thing is, like, was my kid good enough in high school for it to be listed think he's going to finish?
And, you know, like, you know, right now, for, you know, I'd say for maybe a third to a half of students going to college, you know, the right answer is no.
So you might say, well, thank goodness we don't have to pay for this stuff now.
And then we need to look for something else for my kid to do, at least until he gets serious enough to start studying.
I'm friends with Mike Rowe, and this is something that he has been fighting, and that is this instinct, this knee-jerk answer.
Well, it doesn't matter.
They have to have an education.
They have to go to college or they'll just, what do you want them to be a janitor the rest of their life?
Oh, yeah.
And, you know, of course, there are tons of other jobs, many of them high-paying that still to this day don't require college.
Plumber, electrician, if you just go, you know, like, you say, like, if you go through government statistics, what are the high-paying jobs that don't require college?
You know, there are still a lot of them.
They're ones where, especially upper-middle-class families, they don't really know anyone who does these jobs anymore.
So it's kind of hard for them to really visualize it, but they are out there.
If your kid is super bored sitting listening to some windbag go and talk about abstract stuff, then yeah, like really you should look into getting your kid vocational education.
And instead of pressuring him to do something that he probably just has no interest in, find something that he acted that actually engages them in a course that doesn't require you to have four years of college debt, which is pretty crazy if the kid's going to drop out anyway.
You break this into kind of the selfish return and the social return, which is an interesting way of looking at it because you go through really the numbers of the selfish return on education, which a lot of times can turn out better even financially for a lot of kids to not go to college because they don't have all that debt.
But can you talk a little bit about the social return?
What's the actual path forward for us when you're talking about policy and you're talking about how to design an education system that actually works for the country?
Sure.
So if you remember, I was talking about human capital versus signaling.
So there's the optimistic view that college is actually transforming you into a skilled adult.
And then there's the not-so-optimistic view that I'm pushing that most of it is just about putting a stamp on your forehead and saying good enough to be trained.
All right.
Now, selfishly speaking, it doesn't really matter why employers will reward you for getting your degree.
Who really cares why they're doing it?
But from the point of view of society, from the point of view of taxpayers, it makes a huge difference.
Because if school is really actually remolding our youth into the skilled workers of the future, then it's making our whole society richer.
But if the main thing you're doing is putting stickers on people's foreheads, you can't get rich by putting lots of stickers on people's heads.
So if it really is just saying you're in the top 25% of the distribution, then when you go and encourage more education, the main thing you do isn't get skilled workers.
You just mean it means you have to spend more and more years in school just to go to get onto first base, just to go and start learning the job.
I will tell you, there's a lot of people that I have met, and I'm in media, so it's slightly different, but nobody takes the college person seriously, like, oh, you've got some latest information.
You have some new.
They're like, okay, that's great.
Watch.
Because they usually don't walk into a job.
They've got that great degree, but they don't have any practical experience.
They don't really even have practical understanding many times of what we're doing.
It really is, okay, you're smart, so we'll train you from the beginning on how to do things.
Yeah, and this really is one of the greatest frauds on campus.
The communications major is enormous.
And yet, every year they graduate more communications majors than the total number of jobs in every kind of media that exists.
So it's a major that you're pairing them through your job, Glenn.
And yet, of course, you can't have a million kids get Glenn Beck.
And I don't know anybody.
I don't know anybody.
Nor do we want them, by the way.
I know a million Glenn Becks really bad things.
One is enough.
But nor do I know the people that really excel in media, really excel.
We're the top of their class and the one that we just had to have from Harvard.
That's generally not them.
Right.
I mean, the nice thing about entertainment is that there is a very clear market test, which is, do people actually watch you?
Whereas for a lot of jobs on a team, it's like, well, is this person really pulling their weight or not?
So there's some confusion there.
And then, again, so you're not going to keep someone employed just because just because you hired them and they're on the team if they're on the radio.
Whereas for a lot of jobs, once you get hired, people will keep you there at least until their next recession comes along and they just say, well, we got to get rid of somebody.
So how about the person that's a huge disappointment?
We're turning to Brian Kaplan, author of The Case Against Education, Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money.
Brian, does some of this the train, the way we've moved towards signaling when it comes to universities, does that explain grade inflation at some level where we've seen, you know, back in the day, it used to be 10 or 15% of kids got A's in classes, and now it's sometimes 60 and 70%.
Yeah, that's a great question.
So it's actually pretty weird when you think about it because if the main thing that college is doing is signaling, you might think that there would be a lot of pressure on us to really separate the great students from the good ones from the not-so-good ones.
Hello?
Oh my gosh, I lost him there.
Big E D U. There he is.
Easier for professors to give out easy grades.
Right.
We lost you in the middle there.
Can you get that one more time?
You cut out for a few minutes.
Right.
So I think it is a lot more to do with universities or nonprofits and the professors are regarded as basically artists.
You can't tell us what to do.
And so, I mean, if we really wanted to maintain the purity of the signal, we would have kept the high standards.
But it's just so much easier for a professor to go and just give high grades to everyone and then the students don't complain.
And since it is a nonprofit, there's no one at the top saying we must maintain our brand at all costs.
You professors get in line.
So I think that's more of what's going on.
Well, because it seems like there's a series of incentives.
Because if I'm now sending my kid to college because I want them to get that piece of paper, if at the end of this, where I've spent all of this money, I don't get that piece of paper, I'm not going to want to continue that process with the next kid.
And it feels like there's an incentive for colleges to be able to push these people through and give them the piece of paper whether they want it or not, because that's all I'm really asking them for in the first place.
Yeah, I mean, that sounds right until you take a look at the low graduation rates.
If colleges really wanted to just pass people along, they would just cut standards even more than they already have, which is a little scary to think about.
But I mean, there is a point where you say, how low can we cut the standards before the students, before everyone will get over them?
I mean, a lot of it is honestly just to get the students even to bother to show up in class.
So a typical college class has maybe 60% attendance on an average day.
And those 40%, a lot of those kids are the ones that are not going to get it through.
Although, like a reasonably good student can still squeak by even attending all that often.
Again, standards are strangely low, and yet there's many students that fall below even those low standards.
If I could reflect what I think people feel for a second here, Brian, we are concerned about the standards, obviously.
We're concerned about the price because how do we or our kids afford this?
But we are also growing concerned.
And I hear this from the left as well.
They are very concerned about the things like the freedom of speech and thought on campus.
Low Standards in Universities00:03:56
And it is becoming, it feels as though it is becoming dangerous to the republic to get this indoctrination sometimes.
And when you're talking about all these problems, you're saying, you know, we need to fix this from the inside of these powerful institutions.
You're a freak, aren't you?
Or do others, is there a movement inside to say, we have real problems and we've got to change this?
Well, so, I mean, here's the thing, as COCO, professors vary very widely amongst themselves.
Different departments are very different.
So, I mean, here's the main thing that I'd say just to help people calm down a bit.
Most professors are so boring that the brainwashing doesn't work.
And attendance is so low that a lot of the students are not hearing the stuff that you don't want them to hear.
So, I mean, it's important to keep in mind that students, even when they're getting a grade for the class and everything else, a lot of them just stay in the room and play video games.
And even when they're in the classroom, their minds are wandering.
They're not paying that much attention.
So, I mean, like, I mean, I agree that if you just look at the syllabi or if you just listen to a recording of many of the restorations lectures, then you say, man, this is horrible.
Kids are being taught this stuff.
But the reasons you feel at least somewhat less bad about it is, you know, if you were to go and turn the camera around and look at the face of the students and see how they're sleeping and not paying much attention and bored out of their minds.
And again, there is actual empirical research where they try to see how much does college change students' minds.
And it doesn't seem to change them that much.
I mean, again, the kids that you see on the news, those are the ones that it's a small minority of kids that really love this stuff and want to be activists.
But most kids don't want to be activists.
They want to play video games.
I have a friend who is in college, and they sent this screenshot of one of their tests that happened in Science just last week.
Which of the following answers do you think characterize the political views of the person to your right?
He or she is the founder of the alt-left, leaning liberal, middle of the road, leaning conservative, founder of the alt-right?
Your answer.
The next one was, which of the following answers characterize your political views?
I am a founder of the alt-left, leaning liberal, middle of the road, leaning conservative, founder of the alt-right.
Can you, for the life of you, figure out what that has to do with science?
I mean, if I were in that class, I'd be curious if the professor is trying to get on your show.
Maybe they're saying, hey, I want to go and show how brainwashed these kids are.
I mean, in a way, if you're brainwashing people, the last thing you want to do is call attention to the brainwashing.
You just want to act like it's like what, you know, I'm not brainwashing.
It's just oxygen that we're breathing here.
It's nothing that anyone should pay any attention to.
So I don't know.
Again, maybe it was an effort to politicize science, although maybe it was just the professor was curious about what kinds of kids he's teaching.
I don't know.
Brian Kaplan's, he is the author of The Case Against Education, Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money.
And he is going to be speaking again tonight at the Public Library of Philadelphia tonight at 7.30.
Thank you so much, Brian.
Good to talk to you.
All right.
fantastic talk to you once again he's going to be speaking uh at the free public library in the city of the super bowl champion philadelphia eagles uh at least Least according to Amazon.
Alexa, that's right.
Yeah.
bkaplin.com or at brian underscore kaplan.
I mean, really, if you want to dive in and really see what is happening to our education system, there is a lot of material.
We only scratch the surface.
Really, yeah.
Page 41 is terrifying.
Absolutely terrifying.
Cleaning Your Ears Safely00:02:48
Anyway, let me tell you about SimplySafe.
A home security company I've worked with since there were only 10 employees.
The founder actually, I can't remember if it was MIT or Harvard, but he was up there and he was an engineer.
He comes from an engineering or tinkering family, if you will.
His grandfather really helped us win World War II by coming up with some things for tanks in World War II.
And so he wanted to be kind of like his grandfather.
Well, he just was helping his friends who all rented row houses in their final year of college.
And there was break-ins on the street and they couldn't put a security system in because they didn't own the house, yada, yada, yada.
So they couldn't have it wired and they couldn't sign a long contract.
So he came up with SimplySafe and it was very simple back then.
Now over 2 million people are protected with SimplySafe and they've just released their brand new home security system.
It's unbelievable.
Completely been rebuilt and redesigned.
They added new safeguards to protect against power outages, downed Wi-Fi, cut land lines.
They've taken bats and hammers to it and everything in between.
It's been redesigned to be really small, practically invisible, with very powerful sensors that you're not going to notice them, but intruders will.
This is why SimplySafe is growing so fast.
It is simple and it cuts through all of the bullcrap.
There's no wiring or strings.
There's no contract.
So you're going to get the same price, 24-7 protection, $14.99 a month.
You own the system.
You won't believe how inexpensive it is.
You're really, when you just go to the website and you look at the chart at how much money you're going to save, you know, in the first three months, the first six months, the 12 months, it will blow you away how much money you're just flushing down the toilet.
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Glenn Beck Mercury.
Every once in a while, one of those products crosses the line from product name to just the thing that we call the product.
It's like, you know, Kleenex, you know, instead of tissues, it just became Kleenex.
Everyone called it Kleenex.
TiVo was like that.
The DVR was just a TiVo for a long time.
Now it's DVR.
Well, you know, Q-tips are like that.
When you think about cleaning your ears, like it's just Q-tips.
That's not necessarily what they're called.
That's the brand name.
And you think, okay, well, this is something we all have and we all use, and it's got to be the best way to do it.
Well, actually, not at all.
It's not even designed to clean your ears.
That's not what a Q-tip is supposed to do.
Free Speech Crackdowns00:14:31
Look at the box.
They got a bunch of uses for it.
They don't say stick one of these way down in the middle of your ear.
That's not what they're recommending.
Wax RX, they are recommending you use Wax RX to clean your ears because that's what it's for.
The WaxRX system is the method physicians trust the most, and it's just like the system they use in their offices.
Basically, the WaxRX system has these waxed softening drops that break down earwax inside the ear.
It's not something that people want to talk about, but again, you're doing this at your house and you want to make sure that it's actually done the right way.
Go to usewaxrx.com and order your reusable ear wash system today and use the offer code radio, and they're going to ship it free right to your door.
The promo code gets you the free standard shipping.
Give it a shot.
Usewaxrx.com.
Promo code radio.
It's usewaxrx.com.
Glenn back.
You know, I'd really like to have chime in on this whole discussion is Ben Shapiro.
He's coming in in a little while.
He's doing his show from the Mercury Studios today.
And he'll be on TV tonight for a few minutes.
And I'm going to give a special 30 minutes with just Ben and I talking about, you know, youth, the future of the conservative movement, just for subscribers only at right after 5:30.
blaze.com slash tv courage truth Glenn, back.
Last hour, we were talking to a professor from George Mason, and he was talking about how bad the education is.
And I was talking a little bit about the brainwashing that is going on and the activization of at least 10% of our college students that just want to be liberal activists.
And who is doing that on the other side?
Who is activating today's youth to be able to get them to defend the Constitution and conservative principles?
The answer is sitting in my studio right now.
Ben Shapiro, how you doing, Ben?
Hey, doing well.
How are you?
Good.
I know you had a great time in Connecticut yesterday.
100 security officers to protect your speech and zero protesters.
Yeah, that's always how it goes.
And you always think, why do we need these security officers?
And then half the time there's a riot.
But it was nice.
I mean, it was 500 students who showed up.
They closed it to the general public, which is too bad.
They should have allowed another 500, 600 people in because they had another 700 reservations, is what I heard.
But in any case, it was a really nice event.
Did everybody enjoy?
Meet anybody on the left.
That is because I have people who are hard on the left who say, i'm really concerned about what's happening on college campuses.
I think that's a growing concern for a lot of people on the left and I think anybody who's an honest person on the left has to look at the way that they're cracking down on free speech and think to themselves, this is a problem and it could reverse itself and bite us.
This is not, this is not a single-edged blade, right?
So yeah, I mean, I it's.
It's a serious problem that they're allowing the heckler's veto to prevail here, that somebody from the community will threaten something and suddenly 100 officers are necessary and we ban everyone from the general public.
They've now done this at Northwestern.
They did this at UC, Berkeley.
Uh they, they just banned people from coming in entirely from the outside community whereas, like last week, Anita Hill spoke at UCON and it was completely open to the public.
They barely needed security.
It was totally fine, all right.
So um, you're gonna join us uh, today for a few minutes.
Um uh, on the television show, we're gonna do some stuff that's for subscribers only to the blaze uh, and we're gonna talk about the, the future of the conservative movement and and what our principles are and how we, how we, navigate from here.
But I I, I I want to uh talk to you about kind of the news of the day and get your point of view on.
Uh, do we have the audio of the Secret Society or do you have the latest memo or or piece two days ago, was it two days ago or yesterday?
Uh, Ron Johnson comes out and he said, you know there's and we have, we have a source that says there was a Secret Society meetings that were going on and we know we have this text message and something didn't feel right.
I want everything released, because if that is happening but I also said I think it was yesterday that kind of sounds a little like Mccarthy saying, i've got the names of 250 people right in my pocket.
If you don't have it, you're going to destroy everything.
Uh, and here's what we found out yesterday about what that, that memo or that uh text message actually said.
Here's a clip, go ahead, but we're going to have to decide.
Oh no sorry sorry Sarah, not that i'm sorry, go ahead, okay.
Uh, in the single message.
Again, the single text message sent the day after Trump was elected was from senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page to Peter Strzok, the top counterintelligence officer at the FBI and a key figure in the bureau's past investigations into Trump and Clinton.
Here's the quote, are you even going to give out your calendars?
Page, asks Strzok, seemed kind of depressing.
Maybe it should just be the first meeting of the secret society, Ben, that's not a secret society.
No, no.
The way all the Republicans were talking it up yesterday was like, this was going to be the view from Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom, where he looks down and there's just a bunch of people chanting and the guy started setting it on fire.
Carter, you fucked.
And what it actually ends up being is just a bunch of nerds who sit around and have beer and talk about work.
But I really, this is my big problem: no one is waiting for all the evidence to come out before jumping to their narrative conclusions.
You have people on the left, and their narrative conclusion is Donald Trump definitely colluded with Russia, and the FBI is in the midst of one of the great investigations of our time that is going to uncover the real source of Donald Trump's victory.
And any questions that are asked about that are completely out of line.
And then on the right, you have this counter narrative that the FBI is thoroughly corrupt.
It has been completely run through with people on the left who don't care about the truth and are simply out to get President Trump.
And my tendency is to think that there's a lot of in-between there, and it's probably somewhere in the in-between, meaning that there are probably people like Strzok and Page who don't like Trump.
We don't really know the impact that they've had on this particular investigation.
One of the texts that everyone seems to be ignoring on the right is the text from Strzz to Page saying, I don't want to join the Mueller investigation because it's going nowhere.
No, right?
There's no there there, right?
Yeah, but the right is now starting to use that and say, look, even this guy said there's no there there.
Well, you can't have it both ways.
Right, right.
You can't say he's an evil guy trying to take him down.
Oh, and he didn't want a job.
He didn't want to join.
None of it makes any sense.
And all of these propositions can be true.
It can be true that the FBI was politicized by the Obama administration most clearly in the Hillary Clinton investigation.
There's no question that the FBI was political in that investigation.
It's also true they're bad apples inside the FBI.
It can also be true that the investigation right now is doing what it's supposed to do.
It can also be true that that investigation has gone beyond its original bounds and is now moving into obstruction, which seems to me a lot more of a stretch.
All these things can be true at once, but people are not waiting for all the evidence to come out before they jump to whatever facts support the conclusion that they want.
Either the FBI is thoroughly corrupt or the FBI is thoroughly pristine.
And to find the real conclusion here, doesn't the theater hurt this idea that everyone comes out and screams about how we know we have a secret society and we know Russia is colluded with Trump?
Doesn't that really hurt the search for the actual truth?
It doesn't.
One of the biggest problems that I have here is that there is information that could easily be declassified and is not being declassified.
President Trump is the president of the United States.
He is the chief executive.
That means that he actually gets to declassify, for example, the FISA application on Carter Page.
One of the big complaints from people on the right, I think quite possible this is true, is that the FISA application on Carter Page was based on the Steele dossier, the Fusion GPS dossier that was funded by the Democrats and was essentially based on Russian disinformation.
Okay, if that's the case, then why not just release the application, right?
The FISA application, Trump can do that.
He can do that like right now.
And I've been told by people, well, he doesn't want to look like he's politicizing the investigation.
How does he not look like he's politicizing the investigation?
I mean, the guy tweets about Jeff Sessions and Andrew McCabe and James Comey every five minutes.
So all I want, you know, just as an American, all I want is more information and less conjecture because all I'm getting is conjecture and posturing.
And now you've got the Democrats who are putting out their own memos.
And now we have a memo fight.
We have these secondhand memos that are not even based on the classified intel fighting with each other.
It's all stupidity to me.
I just, I don't understand.
Yeah, the classified memos, even the people who are writing memos about them haven't seen the classified memo.
And this is what the DOJ says, right?
The DOJ, and maybe if that's not true, then wouldn't you expect Devin Nunez to say, no, I have seen the classified material, and my memo is based on that classified material.
But the DOJ emailed Devin Nunez in a letter yesterday, and they said, listen, don't release that classified memo because, number one, it compromises national security.
But number two, you actually haven't seen the underlying classified materials you're talking about.
So why are we reading a memo not based on the classified materials that are actually at issue, especially when a lot of those classified materials could become declassified by the president?
All this says to me, here's where I actually think this is going based on the evidence that's on the table.
Where I think this is going is I think Robert Mueller is going to try and establish a pattern of obstruction against President Trump.
He's going to suggest that President Trump was trying to fire James Comey and go after his own DOJ and go after Andrew McCabe in order to stop an investigation into him because whether or not Trump is innocent, he thinks he's innocent and therefore he was trying to quote unquote obstruct the investigation.
This is the problem with obstruction as a charge.
There doesn't actually have to be an underlying crime in order for you to obstruct, right?
If you're obstructing an investigation, then it doesn't matter whether there's actually underlying anything that went bad.
The problem is, I think we're going to get the worst case scenario because I've become such a pessimist that we always get the worst case scenario.
The worst case scenario here is that there is no actual legal obstruction, right?
Because the actual statutes and obstruction do not cover President Trump firing James Comey or even saying to Andrew McCabe, who'd you vote for?
That doesn't obstruction is a legal charge.
As a lawyer, these charges in the U.S. Code do not apply to what President Trump has done.
It doesn't matter.
The left seizes on Mueller's suggestion that there has been some sort of informal obstruction.
Yes.
And then they launch an impeachment push against President Trump.
And then Republicans are forced into the position of having to defend some of the stupid and, I think, dismal things that Trump has done, from firing Comey, which I think was dumb, to demanding a loyalty oath, all these sorts of things that are not illegal, but are not smart.
And so we're sitting around defending those.
And then the Democrats are browbeating us and saying they need impeachment.
It's just, it ends up being a battle over bad behavior as opposed to a battle over criminality.
And the left will charge that the right is fine with criminality.
And the right will say that the left is trying to use the law in the wrong ways.
And, you know, both will be half right and both will be half wrong.
It'll just be awful.
It'll be awful all the way around.
So that's good.
Good, good.
That's often.
The good news is I honestly don't think the impeachment drive will go anywhere.
And I think that people will survive.
And I think, honestly, I don't think people care that much about this other than the diehard political fanatics on the right who think that Trump is absolutely innocent of everything and has never done anything wrong.
And people on the left who think that Trump is absolutely guilty of everything and is going to be impeached.
They're waiting for the Deus Ex Mackina to come in and just remove Trump from office, which is not happening.
So I think we're in the same area.
I talked about it a few weeks ago and said, I don't think anything is going to happen with the Trump investigation.
But sadly, what I think is going to happen is we are going to miss the mark on Russia.
This whole investigation should be.
Russia.
I haven't mentioned that in 15 minutes.
Russia, I know.
This is not about...
Look, I think that Hillary Clinton was absolutely corrupt.
And the FBI has mountains of evidence of lots of people in our government in Washington that were corrupt with Uranium One.
Why haven't we seen any of that evidence?
Now, whether she was personally corrupt sure looks like it, but I don't know.
When it comes to Donald Trump, I don't like the meeting in Trump Tower, et cetera, et cetera, but I don't know if there's any crime there that has been committed.
I do know this.
The FBI has known things about Russia and they have not followed through.
Why?
Is there someone that is saying, you know, kind of like what's his name that went in and took his documents out of the Library of Congress or the Sandy Berger.
Yeah, the National Archives.
You know, both sides were kind of like, oh, no, that's, you know, that's pretty okay.
I'm pretty okay with that because both sides are dirty with Russia.
We need to know, can we trust our Justice Department?
Yes or no?
Can we trust them to do independent investigations?
And the second thing is, how bad are things with Russia?
How bad is the influence and the bribery and the scandals with Russia?
And let the chips fall where they may.
I don't think that's going to happen.
I agree with a lot of this, and I also don't think that it's going to happen.
I think that everyone, if you're on the side of what the FBI is doing right now, then you are going to stand up for the FBI no matter what.
If you don't like what the FBI is doing right now, then you're going to suggest that they're a nefarious institution in the pay of the opposite side.
How do either of these not accomplish the goals of Vladimir Putin of destroying our republic?
Well, I mean, I think that Putin was very smart.
He realized that all he had to do was drop a hint of conspiratorialism into American politics and everybody would jump on it with both feet.
And he was right.
It's work.
I mean, we're at each other's throats over essentially, I'm not sure there's much there there.
And I think that's particularly true.
I mean, if you look in another area where Russia was supposedly nefarious, I really don't think that Russian bots were manipulating people's information hold during the last election cycle.
I think that people are jumping on that because they find it politically useful.
So Russia interfered in the election, but I think that what they've done even more, to more success even, is they've allowed that impression that they interfered in the last election cycle to now create the basis on which everything else moves.
So, for example, the release of the memo hashtag that was trending last week.
Suddenly Dianne Feinstein and Adam Schiff are suggesting the reason that it's trending is because of Russian bots.
And they're calling on Facebook and Twitter to actually crack down on these non-existent Russian bots that were supposedly sending this trending.
Daily Beast did a report yesterday, and they said it wasn't Russian bots.
That was just a bunch of Republicans who are hashtagging release the memo.
The point that Dian Feinstein and Schiff are doing is what they are doing is they want Facebook and Twitter to crack down on right-wing media outlets, claiming that it's a way of cracking down on fake news.
So they're using the Russian bot stuff and they're using the Russia stuff as a proxy for getting to a political goal they want to get to.
Russian Bots and Trends00:02:03
I swear, every day I wake up and I think I'm cynical enough about politics today.
And then by that night, I'm thinking, my God, I need to be twice as cynical as I was this morning because it just doesn't work.
Back with more Ben Shapiro here in just a second.
Markets are beginning to price for a potential interest rate hike in March.
If you missed the show last night, I did a chalkboard and it was really interesting because I know I did this chalkboard a couple of times when I was at Fox, one that was similar.
And I said, look, this is what I'm looking for.
This is where we're going to start to have trouble if these things happen.
Well, now these things have happened.
If you missed the chalkboard last night, make sure you watch it on theblaze.com/slash TV, become a subscriber, and please watch the first 10 minutes of last night's show because you will be prepared for what I believe is coming.
And it's all due to math and history.
Anyway, one of the things that you will draw the conclusion on is if you don't have a locked-in interest rate right now on your house, you need to get one because interest rates are going to go up and up and up.
They have to as we start to see more and more inflation as all of this money starts flowing through the system.
The people that I would like you to call is American Financing.
They're mortgage consultants and they're salary-based.
And that makes a difference because they work for you and not a bonus.
Most places, in fact, almost all places, and especially banks, they are giving bonuses to their loan officers if you'll sell the people into this.
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Mortgage Bonuses Explained00:14:47
Glenn Back Mercury.
Glenn back.
Talking to Ben Shapiro, who I think is the leader of the future movement of the conservative conservative thought in America.
is everywhere on college campuses and everywhere online where it counts with the with the youth.
We're in a weird situation right now to where we have a president who is in many ways giving us as conservatives things that we haven't seen since maybe Reagan.
We have a great Supreme Court justice.
Israel for the love of Pete.
Reagan didn't even do that.
Yep.
So we have some great things.
And then we're also in this position of having a guy who we is is real, lives a despicable life if those porn star things are true.
Okay.
And I tend to believe they're true.
So you look at this and for some reason, we can't say, bad Trump, good Trump.
Don't like that Trump.
Like that one.
Yes.
You have to buy into all of it.
And I think that's killing us.
I totally agree.
I mean, during the last election cycle, I actually coined the good Trump, bad Trump framework.
I actually had sticks with faces of Trump on them.
And when he'd do something good, I'd hold up the happy Trump.
When we do something bad, I'd hold up the sad Trump.
We had the theme.
We actually have a jingle on my podcast, Good Trump, Bad Trump.
Which one will it be today?
And that is, I think that's the biggest problem that I have right now with the way that American politics are going, it really is not about Trump.
It's about us.
Because if we're not willing to call out bad when we see it, even from people that we like what we're getting from them, then we can't have an honest conversation.
It turns into simply fanboying or fangirling for a particular political figure.
You see this on the left, too.
They can't call out, well, they couldn't call out Obama when Obama was engaged in obvious corruption with the IRS, for example, while saying, oh, we like Obamacare, but we don't like what he's doing with the IRS.
Correct.
But you see this on the right now with regard to Trump's character.
Look, Trump is character deficient.
I mean, there's just no question that the man is not, you would not have him babysit your children, right?
I mean, this is, you have a list of people.
He's not near the bottom of the list in terms of people he'd be responsible for for like my one and a half year old son.
Yes.
My 13-year-old son.
Might be more dangerous than the 13-year-old.
Actually, you never know what's going to pop up on the pay-per-view, but it's not.
But let's not even talk about him.
People like I really respect and like Tony Perkins.
Yeah, so do I. What the hell was this?
Well, there's no interesting phrasing that question.
I think, again, that we have to learn to live with cognitive dissonance.
You can like a lot of the things he's doing.
And as an evangelical Christian or as an Orthodox Jew, as I am, I think you can stand and say, listen, this guy is standing up for religious liberty with the judges that he's appointing.
He's standing up for Israel.
He's standing up for a lot of religion.
He spoke to March for Life.
Or he's standing up for a lot of religious priorities that I really like.
And all of that is wonderful.
And all of that is good.
Also, you shouldn't have sex with porn stars while you're married and your wife just gave birth.
If you're a religious leader, I think you can leave it at you shouldn't have sex with porn stars.
Unless it's your wife.
Then you should talk to her about not being a porn star.
The fact that we feel compelled to make excuses for bad behavior is something that I think leads people who are in the middle, not even on the left, people in the middle to say, well, you're not being intellectually honest about your own side.
And you lose your own moral credibility in that line.
I'm not worried about Trump losing his credibility.
Trump is a big boy.
He can protect himself.
He's shown.
And he's fully capable of kicking back against people who criticize him.
He does it all the time.
He doesn't need people playing defense for his personal failings.
And by the way, his personal failings don't damage him politically.
I mean, I have an entire theory of what damages Trump politically.
And the answer basically is what we call the strong efficient markets theory, right?
That when it comes to the stock market, there's a theory that you cannot beat the stock market because everything's already priced in, right?
You have analysts who are all day sitting there and looking at companies and determining what their value is.
So unless there's a new piece of information, it's not going to change the stock price of any given of any given stock.
So you can't beat the market.
I think that that holds true, particularly for Trump, even to the extent that new information doesn't change what you feel about Trump.
If you think Trump is despicable, you're still going to think Trump is despicable.
If you think he's wonderful, you're still going to think he's wonderful, which suggests to me that when he does something bad, we don't have to stand around and defend him like this is going to destroy his political career.
The man won an election after being caught on tape talking about bragging about grabbing women by the genitals.
I don't think he requires your defense at this point.
I think he'll be just fine.
But I'm not sure you will be just fine, right?
I think that it really is about you.
It's about what you are willing to say is good and bad and what your friends think about you and what people think about you as a person based on what you are willing to condemn and what you are willing to accept.
But you can accept the policies and despise the actions in personal life.
100%.
And it's perfectly okay, but people aren't willing to embrace that.
Tonight, five o'clock, Ben Shapiro will be joining us on theblaze.com slash TV.
Glenn, back.
Mercury.
This is the Glenn Beck program.
Welcome to the program, Mr. Pat Gray.
I don't know if you saw the news today, Pat, but federal spending for the fourth Monday in January set a record of $16,596,000,000, even though the federal government was shut down.
We're closed for the day and still spend a record amount of money.
How is that even possible?
It just shows you what a worthless thing the shutdown is and what a nothing burger a shutdown is.
Because they continue to do everything they do anyway.
There's no real shutdown.
That never really happens.
It just didn't happen.
Pretty amazing.
It's really incredible.
We were just on with Ben Shapiro.
He was talking about the new secret society that we now know is not a secret society.
It was just the memo.
It was a joke, right?
It was a joke.
It was a joke.
We have got to start dealing in the facts.
That would be nice.
Yeah.
Especially don't hype things that aren't big.
You know, I mean, yeah, there's enough.
I really want to know, and I really think there's enough evidence with the FBI and all this stuff to look at it seriously.
And say there's something going on here.
Like, what is actually going on?
Yeah, instead, they hype these things that they know aren't going to pay off in two days.
And then it throws all sorts of shade on the investigation.
The problem is, it used to be called an independent investigator.
Maybe Mueller is an independent investigator, but each side, they are not, you know, they're not saying, well, let's wait for the facts.
Let's wait for the facts.
They're just every single day charging and countercharging.
And it seems to have nothing to do with the actual investigation.
Yeah.
And it gets tiresome.
And then you get fatigued with the whole situation.
Don't want to hear about it anymore.
This is fake news.
Yeah.
This is fake news because we don't know what the facts are.
And the fake news is not coming from Russia.
It's coming from Washington.
It's coming from New York.
It's coming from the media itself.
What is the truth on this?
Here's an idea.
Wait until we have facts.
That seems crazy.
We can't do that.
We just can't do that.
That's just, we've got to speculate and we've got to jump to conclusions the minute anything comes up.
Besides, honesty is not a deal anymore, apparently, according to the NSA.
You guys saw their website change?
Where they changed the core principles of the NSA.
Yeah.
So their core values used to be honesty, respect for the law, integrity, and transparency.
Well, those are crazy lines.
Those are crazy.
Yeah, well, they had to change it this year.
And so they did to honesty became commitment to service.
We can't really promise honesty.
Right.
Not commitment to honesty.
That's the loneliest word.
Everybody's so untrue.
Right.
Us most of all.
Right.
Commitment to service.
And when asked about it, what does that mean?
What do they say?
Knowing that the country, our friends and allies, are relying on us, we are dedicated to fulfilling our commitment to serve and do excellence in the pursuit of our critical mission.
Okay, what's your critical mission?
Not honesty.
What's your critical mission?
You're going to get that mission done, but what is it?
And did you see who they said they answered to?
That they know that they're held in high regard, which shows they're not an intelligence agent.
They're living in a dream world because they're not.
But they know they're held in high regard.
And they want to do their best.
They want to do their best to make sure They don't let down the American leadership and the American people.
The American people are the American leadership.
They've now separated us from them.
You know, here's a theory.
Why isn't the NSA releasing all the documents?
Why didn't they release the memos from Hillary Clinton's servers?
Why didn't they, why didn't they?
We asked that question a lot.
Correct.
Why didn't they have the IRS records that Lois Lerner suddenly why do we not have the FBI texts?
Why?
We know, you, we all know that the NSA has more servers and more hard drive space than all of the companies in Silicon Valley combined.
Now think of that.
That's Google, Facebook, Apple.
I mean, we have more.
Here's why they're not releasing it.
Nobody wants you to freak out that they actually have all of these things.
So no one in Congress, because they've all told us, no, they just have, you know, person one, a bot person thing, person two, a thing for their birthday.
We don't know what it is.
We don't know who those people are.
We just saw that happen.
That's bull crap.
And so they don't want to go in on anything to reach into that and pull it out because once they do, then they expose themselves as liars and they expose the NSA for what it really is doing and what it is capable of doing.
And they run the risk of waking up the American people to the threat because the way it is now, too many of us think, well, I'm not doing anything wrong.
I don't care what the NSA does.
Let them keep that stuff on me.
I'm not doing anything wrong.
Well, that's not the point.
And you're not the one who decides if what you're doing is wrong or not.
They are.
So that could change at any time.
These are texts between two people that were having an affair.
Yeah.
They can reach in and get those.
Well, they didn't think they were doing anything wrong, or at least that's what they say at this point.
And maybe they weren't.
And maybe they weren't.
But can the NSA go and reach and get those things?
We were talking yesterday, Stu.
What was the story on the porn videos?
Oh, yeah.
This is amazing.
So I think it was about two months ago, we did a story about this new thing that was happening on, I think it was Reddit was where it started.
And they were talking about how they were using artificial intelligence to put the faces of celebrities on existing porn videos.
So, it would look like, you know, Taylor Swift had a porn video.
Okay, so I did a show.
And who was doing that?
Just somebody on an average citizen.
Just a regular, okay, just a regular person.
And it was a rudimentary, and they were saying, wow, you know, at some point in the future, this could get really bad where you wouldn't even be able to tell.
So, at that time, a month or so ago, it was in December that that broke.
I did a show and I said, because he brought that up, but I said, you don't know the half of it.
Here's what's coming.
Do you have the audio?
This is from December, last December on the TV show.
Researchers in Artificial Intelligence Lab in California developed an algorithm capable of manipulating images into pretty much anything that they want.
I'm going to show you the algorithm first.
Here's a horse.
It's running.
It's changing into a zebra.
See, now this is old, and you can see it's not quite perfect.
Do you know how hard that is to change a horse into a zebra?
Now you're watching that.
Think about this as this technology gets better.
You have a video of somebody walking into a brothel.
They want them to make it look like you.
Not going to be hard.
Okay.
That was a month ago.
And I went and I went deep into it.
You've got to look for this episode if you're a subscriber to the Blaze TV.
It's a chilling episode.
Talk about it for 30 minutes.
I said, this is coming and it's going to come faster than you think.
This is just years away.
Yesterday, an update.
There's a whole subculture now that has spawned out of this where it's happening like crazy.
In fact, they've actually already created an app for you to switch on celebrity faces onto porn videos.
And they showed clips without the nudity in the news story.
And it's, you absolutely look at it and you think, wow, that looks like she's actually in that video, a real like A-list celebrity.
And so as you read the story, there's a one throwaway line about halfway through it that says, most of the videos they're doing this with are porn.
However, there was a video of the Argentinian president doing something.
I want to say it was like he was pro-Hitler, a pro-Hitler speech of some sort, where they had put the Argentinian president's face onto someone who was saying something positive about Hitler.
Wow.
And so.
And you can't tell.
And it's still very early.
Like there are some of the, you can tell a little bit, but we're at the point now where there's already user-friendly apps to do these things to people.
Where will this be?
What can governments do to regular citizens?
Emergency Food Supplies00:07:28
All it takes is computing power.
May I remind you, the NSA has more servers than all of Silicon Valley combined.
Okay.
So what I said about that at the time was, okay, so you walk into a brothel, but it wasn't you.
If the government or somebody else that is powerful, now remember, do you remember the story from Russia where the Russian government offered a million dollars to anyone who could prove that the picture of the Soviets landing on the moon and the Soviets planting the Soviet flag wasn't real?
They've developed an algorithm that now you cannot tell.
There's no traces that they have augmented a picture.
Okay.
And so what they did is they took a picture of our moon landing with Apollo 11 and they just put him in a cosmonaut outfit with a Soviet flag and put the Soviet flag on the lunar lander.
You could tell because you've seen that picture a million times, you knew that was our lunar lander, but they were saying million dollars for anybody that can prove that this is a fake because you can't.
So now let me ask you this.
If I said to you today, Pat, to solve crime, if we just track everybody, okay, if we just always track everybody, we're going to be able to get rid of 90%, we'll be able to prove people were guilty 90% of the time.
But everybody has to be tracked.
What would you say?
I would say if you're willing to compromise your liberty for your security, you're going to lose both.
You deserve neither.
Okay, right?
So no.
Everyone says no to that.
Everybody says no to that.
Let me say this.
Pat, right now, nefarious people, because you're a CEO, because you're outspoken in the PTA, because you have an ex-spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend that hates your guts, they can produce evidence that no one can tell is true, and they're going to put it out online.
No, it doesn't fake.
And they're going to put it out online and it could destroy you.
Now, the way to take care of this is just, if we just know where you are all the time, you can prove that wasn't you walking into the brothel.
Now I pitch it that way.
And this stuff becomes real and people start to know it and people are starting to be destroyed by it.
And you don't know.
You'll always have that question.
Okay, it's Pat.
I don't think he was in the brothel, but I can't prove that video is not real.
I can't prove that wasn't him stabbing that woman to death.
And at the very least, it's going to create doubt in the mind of spouses.
Right.
Family members.
Correct.
Children, friends.
You won't know what's true.
You won't know what's not true.
Now you start to look at that tracking device and go, okay, maybe, maybe, maybe we should do that.
Jeez, we got, we forgot.
Blah, blah, blah.
Security.
Look, we got Taco Bell fries here.
We're going to do that in just a second.
Let me take a quick break.
The new Taco Bell fries are out today.
The recent false alarm in Hawaii really demonstrates on how unprepared people are.
If you didn't watch my warning on the economy yesterday from the TV show, please watch the first 10 minutes on demand at theblaze.com slash TV.
It is compelling and it is based in math and history.
And you need to see that 10-minute chalkboard right at the beginning of yesterday's show because you need to do a few things to prepare.
One of the things that you can do if you have not yet done it is please, please have some sort of emergency food supply.
Right now, my Patriot supply will provide 102 servings of survival food that lasts up to 25 years, and it's only $99.
$99.
It's shipped for free.
That includes breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
All you have to do is go to preparewithglenn.com.
If you don't think you need this, I want you to watch the first 10 minutes of the show last night.
And if you can pull that logic apart, go ahead.
Go ahead.
You won't.
You will go to preparewithglenn.com, 800-200-7163, 800-200-7163, preparewithglenn.com.
Glenn back, Mercury.
All right.
Glenn back.
How did we miss the real news of the day?
Taco Bell has introduced their new fries today.
This is amazing.
And we have done a disservice to these fries, as we kind of pointed out in the break.
You know, they've now gone through the drive-thru, and we had to hear Glenn talk for however many minutes about whatever he was talking about.
Those are the wilt even fries.
Right.
So they're a little bit cold, perhaps, considering the room's about 58 degrees.
They look really dark and crispy.
They look perfect.
Very seasoned.
Very seasoned.
And then a really delicious little cheese sauce that I'm sure is 100% natural cheese.
Oh, yeah.
No chemical additives whatsoever.
Trying them first without the cheese sauce for me.
Oh.
Oh, yeah.
Seasoning is very good.
Yeah, not overly seasoned.
No.
little bit of a kick to him and then compare him to well i don't know if i agree with this anymore I used to think the best fries in the world were McDonald's.
Yeah, I don't.
I don't anymore.
They're kind of getting a little like cardboard.
Or maybe it's just my palate has changed a bit.
I'm not eight.
They're somewhat similar, I would say, to Checkers fries.
Have you guys ever been to a Checkers before?
A long time.
Rally's is another one.
I just like them crispy on the outside.
Mm-hmm.
You know what I mean?
And if these were hot, these are exceptional.
These are very good.
And I got to say, that cheese sauce, man.
Taco Bell.
Delicious.
We were talking about this.
Border security.
If you're going to take away Taco Bell, open up the borders.
I don't care what happens to him.
Yeah, I don't know if you know this, but Taco Bell isn't authentic Mexican food.
What?
Yeah.
No.
Now, Panda Express is real, authentic Chinese food.
Absolutely.
Taco Bell's not authentic.
Right from the Panda, if I'm not mistaken.
They actually.
Yes, it is.
It is.
Look, I would get the solid.
I'd get them.
I'd give them a solid rating.
You'd get them.
Tell me the thing that you don't get from Taco Bell.
There is no thing I don't get from Taco Bell.
That's right.
Actually, the best thing for our health that has happened is Pat Unleashed, which comes after the show.
Because now Pat and I can't go to lunch right after the show, which happened a lot of times at Taco Bell.
At Taco Bell.
And added a lot of pounds to the show.
Sure did.
To the program.
Now we can't go together because he's on the air.
Yeah.
And we're like TV show.
Like you don't each go at two o'clock.
Well, of course, but we're doing separately now.
We're doing separately.
Totally different.
So you've got the calorie burn of talking.
See you tonight.
Five o'clock.
The latest episode, the last episode, Clinton and Russia and Ben Shapiro.