The Glenn Beck Program - Best of the Program | 8/30/18
Aired: 2018-08-30
Duration: 01:03:09


=== The Monkey It Up Controversy (03:06) ===

[00:00:00]  The Blaze Radio Network.
[00:00:05]  On demand.
[00:00:06]  Hi, it's Stu, along with Jeffy.
[00:00:07]  Coming up on the podcast today, myself, Jeffy, and Pat talked about the new controversy in Florida.
[00:00:15]  Does the phrase monkey it up mean you're a racist?
[00:00:18]  Apparently so.
[00:00:19]  Apparently so.
[00:00:20]  That's what we're supposed to believe.
[00:00:21]  I don't think even the media believes so.
[00:00:23]  It's even become more than the dog whistle.
[00:00:27]  It's even more than that now.
[00:00:29]  It's amazing.
[00:00:30]  We have great clips from the debate between Governor Cuomo and Cynthia Nixon, which was pretty wild.
[00:00:38]  If you consider bad wild.
[00:00:41]  Yes.
[00:00:41]  That's so funny.
[00:00:42]  We talk a little bit about the evolution of Kanye West, which has been shocking, dramatic.
[00:00:48]  But he makes an interesting observation about Trump in an interview for a local radio station.
[00:00:54]  And I wonder if you agree with, and I think it's pretty fair as the way he's looking at this.
[00:00:59]  Yeah, it does explain how he looks at it.
[00:01:01]  That's for sure.
[00:01:02]  And I hope he's not giving a roadmap to the left because I think if they adopted this, it would be dangerous.
[00:01:08]  And then finally, we have a great interview with Aaron E. Carroll.
[00:01:12]  He's a writer.
[00:01:13]  He wrote a book called The Bad Food Bible.
[00:01:16]  And the idea is you hear these reports on social media and they scare the hell out of you.
[00:01:20]  You're not supposed to eat these things or you're going to die.
[00:01:23]  And when you actually look at the scientific data behind the study, what you find is something completely different.
[00:01:28]  Not so bad in the picture.
[00:01:30]  Not so bad.
[00:01:31]  And I feel like it's an interesting thing to know about because it could be something that actually changes your life.
[00:01:35]  If you are afraid of eating certain types of food or drinking certain types of drinks, and then you actually understand the science behind it, you can make a rational choice of, hey, you know, maybe there is a slight amount of risk, but the risk is so minor, I'm going to enjoy myself instead.
[00:01:50]  I'm not going to be afraid to eat anymore.
[00:01:52]  Stu's glasses out.
[00:01:53]  Thanks for that interview.
[00:01:54]  So it's helped me.
[00:01:55]  This is you being afraid to eat so far that I've seen?
[00:01:59]  Oh, yeah.
[00:02:01]  Oh, my gosh.
[00:02:02]  I'm buying some stock in restaurant corporations.
[00:02:04]  all of this today on the podcast you're listening to the best of the blend back program It's Thursday, August 30th.
[00:02:21]  Glenn back.
[00:02:23]  I was out way past my bedtime.
[00:02:26]  Pat's doing.
[00:02:27]  Did I say Glenn?
[00:02:28]  Yeah.
[00:02:28]  Pat Stew and Jeffy for Glenn.
[00:02:30]  I was out so late last night.
[00:02:32]  That's right.
[00:02:32]  You were out partying.
[00:02:33]  Way past my bedtime, so I could be dingy today.
[00:02:36]  Yeah, Def Leopard and Journey.
[00:02:39]  We definitely need to get into this at some point today.
[00:02:41]  I would love to hear how this evening went.
[00:02:43]  Uh-huh.
[00:02:43]  It was good.
[00:02:44]  It was a great concert.
[00:02:45]  It's great stuff.
[00:02:46]  Do you even know those bands, Stu?
[00:02:49]  Yeah, oh, yeah.
[00:02:49]  I mean, they were out in the, I mean, you know, my formative years of music were the 80s.
[00:02:54]  So, I mean, you got lots of journey and lots of deaf leopards.
[00:02:56]  Yeah, that's when they thrived, pretty much.
[00:02:58]  So, yeah, I definitely.
[00:02:59]  They were never, you know, two of my, I would say, my favorite bands, uh, but uh, you know, they were certainly a big part of that era.
[00:03:05]  All right, well, we'll get into that later on.

=== DeSantis and the Dumb Narrative (06:05) ===

[00:03:06]  We've got this Ron DeSantis racism situation.
[00:03:11]  I mean, the guy's clearly a racist.
[00:03:13]  He used the word monkey, and you, I mean, obviously, I don't have to tell people when you say monkey.
[00:03:18]  That's a dog whistle.
[00:03:20]  Yeah, it's code.
[00:03:21]  Just like apartment, if you say apartment, you know what you're talking about.
[00:03:25]  If you say Chicago, you know what that's all about.
[00:03:29]  Oh, no.
[00:03:30]  I know what you're saying there, you racist bastard.
[00:03:33]  If you say Antifa, we all know almost exclusively black organization, except for not.
[00:03:39]  But yes, we still know what you're talking about.
[00:03:41]  We still know what you're talking about.
[00:03:42]  Yeah.
[00:03:43]  If you say LeBron James, you can't be a criticism about just LeBron James.
[00:03:48]  It's you not liking all black people.
[00:03:51]  If you say Maxine Waters is dumb, that's absolutely, that's because you think all black people are dumb.
[00:03:57]  That's one of my favorites because what a sign of the person who, of their own racism, that they would even make that claim, that they would even, and so many people are leveling that claim at the president for saying that Maxine Waters was dumb and Don Lemon was dumb.
[00:04:18]  Okay, because he said two black people were dumb, you think that all black people should be included in that?
[00:04:24]  Yeah.
[00:04:24]  Why?
[00:04:25]  Nobody's saying that.
[00:04:26]  No one's saying that.
[00:04:27]  That's what he means, though.
[00:04:28]  No, it's really not.
[00:04:30]  I don't read between the lines.
[00:04:31]  That's what he said.
[00:04:32]  And when he's called, didn't he call Glenn the dumbest?
[00:04:37]  Oh, yeah, he called Glenn all sorts of names.
[00:04:38]  Failure, dumbest.
[00:04:41]  And, you know, a lot of them echo what we call him when he's not around.
[00:04:44]  But it's interesting that during that period, he, for some reason, I guess, believed almost exclusively white people were dumb.
[00:04:55]  Because in that era, he called almost no black people dumb whatsoever.
[00:04:58]  It was like 98% white people he called dumb.
[00:05:02]  At that point, no one said, why does he think all white people are dumb?
[00:05:06]  Because that would be a really stupid point.
[00:05:08]  And the fact that now they're like, oh, well, yeah, but he's called two people black, dumb that are black now.
[00:05:13]  That means that, of course, Trump thinks all black people are dumb.
[00:05:17]  And you know, in reality, and they go home at night and they're about to put their head on the pillow, they all know what they're doing is lying.
[00:05:26]  They know that does not indicate at all that he thinks all black people are dumb.
[00:05:31]  But they think if they go on TV and they yell about it enough, they'll convince enough people to dislike the president or dislike tax cuts or dislike whatever it is because racism is something we all think is so horrible, we don't want to be anywhere near it or touching it.
[00:05:45]  Of course, that disproves their point.
[00:05:47]  If we all think it's so bad, then why isn't there anybody outside of Richard Spencer defending it?
[00:05:55]  You know, I mean, look, we all think, you know, we think abortion is really bad.
[00:06:00]  There's no problem.
[00:06:01]  You have no problem finding advocates for a pro-life viewpoint.
[00:06:05]  There's tons of them.
[00:06:06]  We think tax cuts are really good.
[00:06:08]  You have no problem finding advocates for tax cuts.
[00:06:10]  Why can't you find any advocates for racism?
[00:06:13]  It's because everyone agrees it's terrible.
[00:06:16]  But I mean, that destroys your entire programming schedule on MSNBC if you come to that conclusion.
[00:06:22]  So you have to sit there and lie about it night after night after night.
[00:06:25]  And let's get to the actual comment of what Ron DeSantis said.
[00:06:30]  And when you hear it, it is so clear it has nothing to do with calling his black opponent a monkey.
[00:06:37]  It has nothing.
[00:06:38]  It's not even close.
[00:06:39]  Listen to this.
[00:06:40]  He is an articulate spokesman for those far-left views, and he's a charismatic candidate.
[00:06:45]  And, you know, I watched those Democrat debates.
[00:06:47]  None of that was my cup of tea.
[00:06:48]  But I mean, he performed better than the other people there.
[00:06:51]  So we've got to work hard to make sure that we continue Florida going in a good direction.
[00:06:56]  Let's build off the success we've had on Governor Scott.
[00:06:59]  The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state.
[00:07:08]  That is not going to work.
[00:07:10]  That's not going to be good for Florida.
[00:07:12]  Any reasonable human being with a brain would see that he's talking about the socialist agenda.
[00:07:18]  You don't want to monkey up their system with a socialist agenda.
[00:07:21]  Right.
[00:07:21]  And of course, you know, they used to say socialism, calling someone a socialist was racist too.
[00:07:26]  And now that they've embraced it, they're not going to say that anymore.
[00:07:29]  But when you think of socialist leaders, you think almost exclusively white people.
[00:07:35]  You go back in history, you're thinking socialism.
[00:07:37]  It's usually white people that you're thinking of.
[00:07:40]  That's an amazing one.
[00:07:41]  Now, the idea that he meant that as trying to call his opponent a monkey is so completely absurd.
[00:07:49]  Likely what happened is he got in between monkey around and muck it up.
[00:07:54]  Yeah.
[00:07:55]  And he kind of combined the two phrases and said monkey it up.
[00:07:58]  Now, if he said monkey around, do you think people would have said the same thing?
[00:08:02]  Is it just the words?
[00:08:03]  It's just the word monkey.
[00:08:05]  It's interesting.
[00:08:06]  Many, many years ago, I had a producer conversation with our friend Glenn Beck about this particular topic because he called his kids, you know, in terms of endearment, his own children, you know, monkeys.
[00:08:18]  That's a very common thing to call your kids.
[00:08:21]  If you watch The Office, Dwight Schroot called Angela his little monkey.
[00:08:26]  Like that, you know, that is what that's a very common phrase to be used among white people about white people.
[00:08:32]  Like it's, you know, it's, it has nothing to do with black people.
[00:08:36]  So, but I told, he would use it as such a phrase of, you know, endearment.
[00:08:43]  I mean, it really, really was.
[00:08:44]  It was something silly or something funny or some, you know, someone, you know, you know, kids jumping off the walls and going crazy and being too excited.
[00:08:52]  And I said to him, I'm like, look, I know what you mean by this, but at some point, you're going to say something that when you mean it one way completely, and people on the left are going to come out and say you meant it the other way, and you're going to wind up sitting on television or radio having to defend yourself.
[00:09:08]  What I meant by the word monkey was not what you were saying.

=== Trump's Ego and Political Rhetoric (03:30) ===

[00:09:11]  I mean, that's a winning position.
[00:09:13]  We have evidence of that.
[00:09:14]  I mean, how many years ago did the great Howard Kosell get the boot from television for using that very phrase?
[00:09:21]  Right.
[00:09:21]  And again, like.
[00:09:22]  And that was his excuse.
[00:09:23]  He called his, you know, the grandkids and the kids little monkeys all the time.
[00:09:27]  Yeah.
[00:09:27]  And the quote, you know, he was gone, man.
[00:09:29]  Plus, he had people like Mohammed Ali defending him.
[00:09:32]  Yeah.
[00:09:32]  And that still didn't matter.
[00:09:34]  Still didn't matter.
[00:09:34]  It still didn't matter.
[00:09:35]  So it's like you just say, okay, well, we won't say the word anymore.
[00:09:38]  Now, of course, obviously Glenn never listens to any of my advice, so I have no idea if he said it since.
[00:09:42]  But the point is, you know, it's a way to shut down language because now all you're doing is you're walking on pins and needles, trying to make sure you don't say something that you yourself know has nothing to do with racism.
[00:09:56]  And everyone around you knows has nothing to do with racism, but you're trying to stop from saying something they can use to fake the audience out into believing that you did mean racism.
[00:10:07]  It's the fake outrage.
[00:10:09]  Yeah, totally.
[00:10:09]  It's the addicted to outrage.
[00:10:11]  I mean, like you said yesterday, this book couldn't be any more relevant.
[00:10:16]  This book couldn't be better timed than it is.
[00:10:19]  For that to come out in what, three weeks or so on September 18th.
[00:10:24]  And we see evidence of it every single day, how people are addicted to just being outraged.
[00:10:31]  Yeah.
[00:10:31]  It's so manufactured.
[00:10:33]  It's so plastic and unreal that hopefully the American people are going to see through it.
[00:10:42]  I hope.
[00:10:42]  That'd be nice.
[00:10:43]  I hope so too.
[00:10:44]  I don't even, I don't even like Ron DeSantis.
[00:10:47]  And you know that that's not what he meant.
[00:10:49]  I mean, he turned me off so much with that ad he did where he seemed like a cult member for like he's in a Donald Trump cult or something.
[00:10:59]  That's why she's so weird.
[00:11:00]  That's what got him the endorsement too from the president, man.
[00:11:04]  Well, he should get the endorsement for Trump when you do an ad like this.
[00:11:07]  Everyone knows my husband, Ron DeSantis, is endorsed by President Trump, but he's also an amazing dad.
[00:11:13]  Ron loves playing with the kids.
[00:11:15]  Build the wall.
[00:11:16]  He reads stories.
[00:11:18]  Then Mr. Trump said, You're fired.
[00:11:21]  I love that part.
[00:11:22]  He's teaching Madison to talk.
[00:11:24]  Make America great again.
[00:11:27]  People say Ron's all Trump, but he is so much more.
[00:11:31]  Big league.
[00:11:32]  So good.
[00:11:33]  I just thought you should know.
[00:11:35]  I mean, that's embarrassing.
[00:11:36]  It is.
[00:11:38]  Absolutely.
[00:11:39]  No matter what you think about Donald Trump, and I think he's done some great things.
[00:11:43]  That's embarrassing.
[00:11:44]  For anyone, you should never be.
[00:11:46]  That's a like near-religious association with a person.
[00:11:51]  That's what I felt like.
[00:11:51]  Yeah.
[00:11:52]  Yeah, and you know, look there used to be a time in the United States where politicians talked about policies and not just argued about who liked Trump more or who liked Trump less.
[00:12:01]  That seems to be the only standard of our politics at this point.
[00:12:04]  You know, Democrats all argue, just like this guy in Tallahassee.
[00:12:08]  He won largely because he was saying he hated Trump more than the other candidates.
[00:12:13]  And DeSantis won because he's saying that he likes Trump more than the other candidates.
[00:12:16]  It's just like, is there any other standard?
[00:12:19]  I mean, you know, Donald Trump was beat up for a long time in his pre-politics career for just having this gigantic ego and thinking everything was about him.
[00:12:31]  Well, he, I guess, he was right the entire time.
[00:12:34]  I guess the whole world is just about this one person.
[00:12:37]  You know, both parties seem completely obsessed with him all the time.
[00:12:41]  Yeah.

=== Phone Algorithms vs Human Choice (04:06) ===

[00:12:42]  It really is amazing.
[00:12:43]  And of course, they don't look back to previous situations when we come to these controversies, like when Barack Obama in 2008 was talking about politicians and made a very similar comment.
[00:12:58]  Listen.
[00:12:59]  I come from Chicago.
[00:13:01]  Racist.
[00:13:02]  So I want to be honest.
[00:13:04]  It's not as if it's just Republicans who have monkeyed around with elections in the past.
[00:13:09]  Sometimes Democrats have to.
[00:13:10]  Oh, my God.
[00:13:11]  Racist.
[00:13:11]  Double racist.
[00:13:12]  He said Chicago and Bolkon.
[00:13:15]  Wow.
[00:13:16]  I mean, look, we all know it's a common phrase.
[00:13:19]  And to go on television and pretend that this is some big controversy is completely absurd.
[00:13:25]  They all know it's not true.
[00:13:27]  And it's just feeding the addiction to outrage from the audience.
[00:13:31]  And I don't know.
[00:13:32]  At some point, it'd be nice if we could get past this.
[00:13:34]  I don't know that we can.
[00:13:35]  I don't know that society in general can.
[00:13:38]  Yeah, I don't know.
[00:13:38]  I don't know.
[00:13:40]  Glenn's book goes through some ideas for solutions, but man, I don't know if they're going to work.
[00:13:46]  I think they have to work or we're screwed.
[00:13:49]  I mean, we've lost, we've come to the point where.
[00:13:51]  Give me one because I can't think of any.
[00:13:53]  What?
[00:13:54]  Give me one solution.
[00:13:55]  Oh, you've got proposals.
[00:13:56]  I'm not giving away his book.
[00:13:57]  All right.
[00:13:58]  But if you available pre-order at Amazon.com.
[00:14:02]  Yes, September 18th, really state.
[00:14:04]  It is one of those.
[00:14:06]  Just give me two of them.
[00:14:07]  Two of them?
[00:14:08]  Okay, I'll give you two of them.
[00:14:09]  We just need one.
[00:14:09]  I mean, really, I mean, Pat was getting greedy now, but I just like there one.
[00:14:13]  Yeah, I know.
[00:14:14]  I don't know that there is going to be one that works.
[00:14:16]  I mean, because I just don't, I think it's easy.
[00:14:19]  You know, I mean, I think it's easy.
[00:14:20]  You get in these little, you get in these little, like, you get on these railroad tracks that lead you to outrage every day.
[00:14:27]  And, you know, it's so easy to stay on them.
[00:14:29]  Yeah.
[00:14:29]  You know, it's like, it's like with your phone.
[00:14:30]  Every day you wake up and you look at your phone.
[00:14:32]  And I don't know, Pat, you're not a big phone guy, but I mean, I think a lot of America now is just basically addicted to their phone.
[00:14:37]  So you get up and you look at your phone and you read the news and you read emails and you tweet and you respond to people on Instagram and you do all the things that you're supposed to do on social media every day.
[00:14:44]  And then you realize, wow, I just wasted like 40% of my day on this phone.
[00:14:50]  There's an app that they have out there we've talked about before where it monitors how long you're looking at the phone, basically.
[00:14:57]  And they give you a report every day.
[00:14:58]  And good God, it's terrifying.
[00:15:01]  I mean, it's, you know, seven hours.
[00:15:02]  Eight hours.
[00:15:03]  Yeah.
[00:15:03]  It's on mine.
[00:15:04]  Mine's a little weird because when I have like, I have a GPS on my phone or I have a, you know, a podcast app that'll listen on the way home and it'll add, you know, large portions of time, but it's still way too much.
[00:15:14]  I mean, it's still hours and hours.
[00:15:16]  I need to get that because I think I'd be pretty proud at the end of most weeks.
[00:15:19]  It would be zero minutes on the phone today.
[00:15:22]  Zero minutes on the phone this week.
[00:15:25]  Zero minutes.
[00:15:26]  You don't use your phone so much to listen to podcasts and listen to my iPad a lot, but the phone, not that much.
[00:15:33]  Well, I mean, the iPad would be your version.
[00:15:34]  It would be your version.
[00:15:36]  And it's not bad to go on these things, but it controls us.
[00:15:40]  It's like the phone is making the decision for you rather than you making the decision for you.
[00:15:45]  You know, there's some people who do these, like, there's a big thing on podcasts now are these sort of people who do these life reorganization type of, you know, I guess self-help type of things where you think about what you're doing and make decisions every day rather than letting the decisions of the day make you do things.
[00:16:02]  And one of the big suggestions is before you go to bed, write a list out of the three or four things you want to get accomplished the next day.
[00:16:10]  And when you get up, don't get on the phone and start answering emails and get yourself into that wormhole where you're just reading tweets and you're doing all those things.
[00:16:17]  Instead, start the day with looking at that list you made the night before when it seems so sensible that you're going to get them done.
[00:16:25]  You know, and then look at them and get those done first before you start diving into any of the frivolous things you do on the phone.
[00:16:31]  And I think the same thing happens with outrage.
[00:16:34]  Like we, you know, we, I think every night we would go to bed and say, you know what, tomorrow I'm not going to react to these stupid things the way I did today.
[00:16:40]  But then you get to turn the phone on and everyone's pissed off and then some liberal says something stupid.
[00:16:45]  And by the end of the day, you're outraged.
[00:16:47]  Yeah.

=== Marijuana Legalization and Arrests (10:21) ===

[00:16:48]  And it is like an addiction.
[00:16:49]  It's just like how Glenn used to describe drinking.
[00:16:51]  He'd start the day saying, I didn't want to drink.
[00:16:53]  And by the end of the day, he'd be drinking.
[00:16:55]  And every day he'd say, before he went to bed, say, the next day, I'm not going to drink.
[00:16:58]  And the whole cycle repeats itself.
[00:17:00]  It really, I think calling it an addiction, I don't know.
[00:17:03]  I mean, he has a lot of science in the book about why it actually is a physical addiction and why it fits that description.
[00:17:10]  But even if you don't believe that it's a physical medical, you know, addiction, it's something really freaking similar.
[00:17:16]  And it's not healthy.
[00:17:17]  It really isn't healthy.
[00:17:20]  Yeah.
[00:17:20]  And it really isn't racism.
[00:17:21]  No.
[00:17:22]  What Ron DeSantis said yesterday.
[00:17:25]  Ron DeSantis' opponent has spoken out about what he said yesterday.
[00:17:30]  And we were kind of hoping, okay, well, maybe he'll take the high road here.
[00:17:34]  Maybe he'll defuse this whole thing and say, look, that's clearly not what he was not calling me a monkey.
[00:17:42]  Let's see how he responded.
[00:17:44]  And do you want an apology from Congressman DeSantis?
[00:17:47]  Do you think you're owed one?
[00:17:49]  You know, let me be articulate and clear here, which is we're better than this in Florida.
[00:17:56]  Good enough.
[00:17:56]  I believe the congressman can be stopped for one second.
[00:17:59]  You don't need to announce that you're going to be articulate and clear.
[00:18:02]  Just be articulate.
[00:18:03]  Just do it.
[00:18:04]  Let other people judge whether you're being articulate and clear.
[00:18:07]  That's not for you to say.
[00:18:08]  You don't need to.
[00:18:09]  By the way, I'm not going to just say stupid things in this next and I'm not going to be really convoluted.
[00:18:15]  Let me just monkey up my language right here.
[00:18:18]  No, I've done it.
[00:18:19]  Now I've done it.
[00:18:19]  I'm a racist too.
[00:18:21]  So just completely.
[00:18:24]  Everyone does that.
[00:18:24]  And that's just a delay tactic to get your thoughts together, but you really don't need to announce it.
[00:18:28]  Okay, I'm sorry.
[00:18:29]  Start me.
[00:18:30]  I regret that his mentor in politics is Donald Trump, but I do believe that the voters of the state of Florida are going to reject the politics of division.
[00:18:40]  What about the politics?
[00:18:42]  Which is why I'm going to spend my time over the next two plus months getting around this state talking about the issues that matter to everyday voters in this state.
[00:18:49]  Kitchen table issues, healthcare, education, making sure we clean up our environment, which our governor has been derelict with the Republican legislature to do.
[00:18:58]  And I think that's how we're going to win in November.
[00:19:01]  But it's clear that the congressman is going to join Donald Trump in the swamp.
[00:19:07]  We're going to leave them there and we're going to continue to press toward a higher mark.
[00:19:11]  It's unfortunate.
[00:19:12]  We've got to go down the politics of division.
[00:19:15]  I think we should go down the politics of dancing.
[00:19:18]  The politics of feeling good.
[00:19:21]  The politics of moving.
[00:19:24]  And make your message understood.
[00:19:26]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:19:27]  Okay.
[00:19:27]  If I could be clear, if I could be articulate when I'm stating these things.
[00:19:31]  That was funny too, because I think in his statement, he actually called DeSantis called him articulate, right?
[00:19:39]  Yeah, he's an articulate advocate for his values.
[00:19:41]  Yeah, he did.
[00:19:41]  He did.
[00:19:42]  You know, he has an articulate.
[00:19:44]  Okay, this is where he's actually speaking about Gillum directly.
[00:19:49]  You know, he is an articulate spokesman for those far-left views, and he's a charismatic candidate.
[00:19:56]  Then he says, the last thing we need to do is monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state.
[00:20:06]  Okay.
[00:20:07]  So Gillum obviously, unfortunately, did not take the high road.
[00:20:11]  But it's just simple English.
[00:20:14]  Can we pay attention to the sentence structure here?
[00:20:18]  If you're looking to what monkey this up is talking about, the subject is not Gillam, it's socialist agenda.
[00:20:28]  Can we at least speak English here and look at it as normal thinking, feeling adults?
[00:20:39]  No, we can't.
[00:20:40]  No, quite clearly the answer is no.
[00:20:42]  No.
[00:20:53]  You missed the real entertainment of the evening.
[00:20:56]  That's what I heard.
[00:20:56]  Which was the Cynthia Nixon-Andrew Cuomo debate.
[00:21:00]  Uh-huh.
[00:21:01]  Which, again, I mean, they're both sort of nuts, right?
[00:21:05]  Like, they're both, you know, meaning, but that's what makes it fun.
[00:21:09]  Yeah.
[00:21:09]  These hardcore leftists are eating their own.
[00:21:11]  I love it when that happens.
[00:21:13]  It is entertaining.
[00:21:13]  It's entertaining.
[00:21:14]  It is entertaining.
[00:21:15]  And they were very, very upset at each other.
[00:21:17]  There was a lot of fighting that went on.
[00:21:19]  It's a weird race because you have a guy who is a legacy name in that state.
[00:21:23]  You know, his dad, Mario Cuomo, of course, was governor.
[00:21:26]  He's currently governor.
[00:21:27]  His brother is Chris Cuomo, who's on CNN every night.
[00:21:31]  And then Cynthia Nixon, of course, well known for Sex in the City.
[00:21:35]  She was like the one that people didn't really like that much on that show.
[00:21:39]  She's also essentially socialist, isn't she?
[00:21:42]  Yeah, she's like a Democrat.
[00:21:43]  She's like an Alexandria Casio-Cortez policy-wise.
[00:21:46]  So she's attacking from the left, Andrew Cuomo and saying, you know, Andrew Cuomo, who has launched how many investigations against the Trump administration, who has, you know, trashed him at every turn, is too pro-Trump for New York.
[00:22:02]  That's basically her case.
[00:22:04]  Wow.
[00:22:04]  Let's listen to some of the clips from this.
[00:22:06]  First of all, I mean, this is the back and forth.
[00:22:10]  This is about lying.
[00:22:11]  Listen.
[00:22:13]  He used the MTA like an ATM, and we see the result.
[00:22:17]  He has had seven and a half years to avoid this very avoidable crisis in our New York City subway, and he has done next to nothing.
[00:22:26]  Why would the next four years be any different?
[00:22:28]  Governor Williams.
[00:22:30]  My opponent lives in the world of fiction.
[00:22:32]  I live in the world of fact.
[00:22:36]  Let's just do a few facts, okay?
[00:22:38]  The subway system is owned by New York City.
[00:22:42]  The subway is a lot of people.
[00:22:43]  It's been controlled by the state since 1965.
[00:22:46]  Can you stop interrupting?
[00:22:48]  Can you stop interrupting?
[00:22:49]  Can you stop lying?
[00:22:51]  Yeah.
[00:22:52]  As soon as you do it.
[00:22:55]  So he is admitting that he's lying there, apparently.
[00:22:58]  He will stop lying as soon as she stops lying is his premise here.
[00:23:02]  It's amazing because, first of all, you hear all the little pre-made catchphrases that are built in there.
[00:23:08]  You use the MTA like it's an ATM.
[00:23:11]  And you live in a world of fiction, and I live in a world of fact.
[00:23:15]  You know, the back and forth is somewhat uninteresting to me.
[00:23:19]  I don't care really what happens with the New York City subways.
[00:23:22]  I don't have to deal with them anymore.
[00:23:24]  So, you know, if they exist, if they don't exist, if they turn them into a museum, if they never get used again, they're really a huge factor in my life.
[00:23:35]  However, it's interesting to see them go back and forth because, again, She's, of course, arguing for more centralized control, which is what you do when you're a Democratic socialist, right?
[00:23:47]  And I don't know the ins and outs of the subway debate there, but it's kind of a it's amazing that like you could tell she's tried to read up and tried to inject herself into this race as someone who's credible rather than just a celebrity.
[00:24:03]  You know, whether this is going to work or not, I don't know.
[00:24:06]  She's a huge underdog.
[00:24:07]  She did go on to, we always talk about bringing everything to race.
[00:24:10]  It's kind of a thing you have to do as a Democratic candidate.
[00:24:14]  And certainly if you're a Democratic socialist, every issue is really a race issue.
[00:24:17]  And Cynthia Nixon found a new one.
[00:24:19]  Listen.
[00:24:20]  You even ran a campaign contest giving away a bong to lucky supporters.
[00:24:25]  What do you say to a parent who's trying to teach their children to stay away from drugs?
[00:24:30]  So I think it's very important that we legalize marijuana here in New York State.
[00:24:36]  Eight other states have done it, plus the District of Columbia.
[00:24:39]  There are a lot of reasons to do it, but first and foremost, because it's a racial justice issue.
[00:24:44]  Because people across all ethnic and racial lines use marijuana at roughly the same rates, but the arrests for marijuana are 80% black and Latino.
[00:24:55]  Marijuana in New York State has been legal for white people for a long time, and it's time to make it legal for everybody else.
[00:25:02]  What do you say to parents who don't want their kids starting to use drugs?
[00:25:06]  That's great.
[00:25:08]  I would say that people now don't choose to use marijuana because of its legality or illegality.
[00:25:17]  But what we need to stop is we need to stop the very uneven arrests of people of color for marijuana.
[00:25:25]  The way I would teach your kids to not do drugs is to completely avoid your question.
[00:25:29]  That's what I would like to do.
[00:25:32]  I mean, you know, look, the issue, if marijuana, if these numbers are correct, which they may be, I mean, I would assume largely a lot of that has to do with the way cities are going to be policed as opposed to rural areas, right?
[00:25:48]  I mean, you're going to have larger minority populations and cities.
[00:25:50]  There's going to be more police officers in cities.
[00:25:53]  There's going to be largely more arrests of people in cities than someone who's on their farm in the middle of upstate New York smoking pot.
[00:26:02]  If those numbers are right, I mean, there's probably very logical reasons for them.
[00:26:06]  But beyond that, if you think there's a problem with racial prejudice in the police department, the excuse isn't to make everything legal.
[00:26:15]  Like, you don't say, well, black people get arrested at higher rates for murder, therefore murder is legal.
[00:26:21]  That's a really stupid solution to the problem you're trying to attack.
[00:26:26]  So, I mean, there are many reasons and arguments to be made about whether drugs should be legal.
[00:26:32]  Jeffy can give them to you if you want them.
[00:26:34]  I mean, geez, there's a lot of them.
[00:26:36]  But still, There's no reason to make something illegal because of the fact you think it's a racial issue.
[00:26:43]  That's a totally different issue.
[00:26:45]  If you believe police are racist and they're just racing, you know, looking for reasons to arrest black people, they're going to find other reasons to arrest black people.
[00:26:51]  Right.
[00:26:52]  Right.
[00:26:52]  If you could make pot not a crime, they'll find another reason to arrest them because your premise is they're all racist and they want to arrest black people for no reason.
[00:27:02]  So why on earth would this make any difference in the problem you're trying to solve?
[00:27:06]  I guess the answer would be it's not.
[00:27:08]  That's not.

=== Payroll Taxes and Job Creation (05:02) ===

[00:27:09]  Cynthia Nixon also wants Medicare for all, just like so many on the left now.
[00:27:15]  We talked about this yesterday on the TV show.
[00:27:17]  If you get a chance to go back and watch it, talking about how there's a list of the top five candidates for the Democratic nomination in 2020.
[00:27:27]  And four of the five, I think, really fairly could be called Democratic socialists, or at least at this point running as Democratic socialists.
[00:27:37]  I mean, Bernie Sanders has already admitted it, right?
[00:27:39]  Now, in 2013, Bernie Sanders introduced Medicare for all for the country.
[00:27:44]  In 2013, he got exactly zero co-sponsors on that bill.
[00:27:48]  Zero.
[00:27:50]  When he re-announced it this time, he got Kirsten Gillibrand, who was there.
[00:27:55]  She's in the top five.
[00:27:57]  He got Elizabeth Warren showed up for that one.
[00:28:01]  She's in the top five.
[00:28:03]  And there's one other one.
[00:28:05]  Oh, Kamala Harris, who's also in the top five, and she showed up.
[00:28:09]  Four of the top five supported that.
[00:28:11]  You know, Joe Biden is just like, I think, at home in a hammock at this point, but he was actually number one on the list, I think, most likely, which is an amazing statement.
[00:28:21]  But I mean, you could argue Biden isn't a Democratic socialist.
[00:28:24]  I think he's a super liberal guy.
[00:28:26]  And I think when he gets in the middle of this campaign, he's going to start sounding a lot like a Democratic socialist because he's going to have to defend his left flank to win that primary.
[00:28:35]  So you're going to get a Democratic socialist as the Democratic nominee under most situations we can consider right now.
[00:28:43]  Now, someone else jumps in, it could change the race completely.
[00:28:47]  But it's kind of interesting.
[00:28:48]  Here's Cynthia Nixon talking about Medicare for all.
[00:28:51]  Ms. Nixon, you are proposing that New York State move to a single-payer health care system, also known as Medicare for All.
[00:28:58]  Everybody would be covered.
[00:29:00]  A Rand Corporation study found this would cost $139 billion.
[00:29:04]  That's almost the size of the state budget.
[00:29:06]  It would double it.
[00:29:07]  How do you plan to make this happen?
[00:29:09]  So the RAND Corporation also said that it would be a tremendous savings for New York State.
[00:29:17]  We can ensure all of our people here by a single-payer Medicare for all system.
[00:29:21]  We can do it better.
[00:29:23]  We can do it cheaper.
[00:29:24]  We can do it with no copays, with no deductibles.
[00:29:27]  And 98% of New Yorkers would pay less for their health care than they do now.
[00:29:33]  The same study also found this would nearly triple the state tax rate for an average family from 6% to 18%.
[00:29:40]  That's a family making roughly $100,000 to $150,000.
[00:29:44]  If you look at, say, what a family now who earns, let's say, $49,000, the cost of health care for that family is $17,500.
[00:29:56]  The cost between the individual and the employer would be a sixth of that.
[00:30:03]  What we would have is a payroll tax in order to pay for it.
[00:30:06]  It would be taken out of people's payrolls the same way that Social Security is taken out.
[00:30:11]  It would be an overall savings for 98% of New Yorkers, and it would be an enormous savings for employers here.
[00:30:19]  It is seen that it could create 200,000 jobs because employers would no longer be responsible for providing health care for their employees.
[00:30:30]  Wow.
[00:30:30]  I mean, that is.
[00:30:31]  I mean, none of what she said made sense.
[00:30:33]  No.
[00:30:33]  No.
[00:30:34]  It's going to double the budget, but it would also provide savings.
[00:30:37]  It's going to save us lots of money.
[00:30:38]  It's going to create 200,000 jobs.
[00:30:40]  Who's paying the 200,000 people?
[00:30:43]  Right?
[00:30:43]  Like, these are all, you know, I mean, as we all know, when you start a gigantic government program, there is always some report you can cite that it's going to be a savings.
[00:30:55]  And all they have to do is take it out of their payroll.
[00:30:57]  That's all they have to do.
[00:30:58]  That's it.
[00:30:58]  It's just take it out of your payroll.
[00:31:00]  Well, is that, I mean, that's what he's saying.
[00:31:03]  Yeah.
[00:31:04]  It just, it's a payroll tax is better than any other tax?
[00:31:09]  Well, it's a savings.
[00:31:10]  Well, it's a savings in that it comes out of my paycheck before I get my paycheck.
[00:31:13]  So that's a good thing.
[00:31:15]  I don't see how.
[00:31:16]  It's the same money.
[00:31:18]  It's still coming out of my slides.
[00:31:20]  It's less money, though.
[00:31:21]  It's really not.
[00:31:22]  No.
[00:31:23]  You just say it's cheaper.
[00:31:24]  And then, I mean, we all know, obviously, the problems that go along with this.
[00:31:26]  I mean, we had this story of, there's an NHS story here that I've been holding on to.
[00:31:30]  A woman, mother, dies after failing to raise the 200,000 pounds.
[00:31:39]  So, you know, about 250,000, 250,000, $300,000.
[00:31:43]  She needed to get a cancer drug that was actually covered by NHS, but only covered for a different type of cancer.
[00:31:51]  So they have really promising results on her type of cancer as well.
[00:31:56]  And she wanted to try to get it covered.
[00:31:58]  They wouldn't cover it.
[00:31:59]  And they let her die because she couldn't raise the money in time.
[00:32:04]  And we've seen that, you know, stories like that over and over and over again from these systems.
[00:32:08]  Now, what she's arguing for is not quite all the way to Great Britain, but it's not far away either.

=== Relative Risk and Public Panic (15:21) ===

[00:32:12]  It's certainly a nice big step in that direction.
[00:32:14]  And because it will go bankrupt and because it will fail, they will eventually have to go to a more NHS type system.
[00:32:20]  Yeah, they'll say they didn't go far enough.
[00:32:22]  Yep.
[00:32:22]  It's always the answer.
[00:32:23]  We didn't charge enough, not enough taxes, not enough money from rich people.
[00:32:27]  We didn't get enough government control.
[00:32:28]  If we only can get that this time, it will work until next time when we have to do it again.
[00:32:37]  You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
[00:32:49]  Like listening to this podcast?
[00:32:51]  If you're not a subscriber, become one now on iTunes.
[00:32:54]  And while you're there, do us a favor and rate the show.
[00:32:57]  You know what's been fun to see over the years is the evolution of Kanye West.
[00:33:02]  Is it an evolution or is it just, I mean, it's a complete change.
[00:33:06]  Yeah.
[00:33:07]  It's 180 degrees the opposite direction.
[00:33:10]  Do you remember right after Hurricane Katrina, they had that big fundraiser and all the celebrities got together and they went on TV and Kanye was one of them.
[00:33:18]  And he and Michael Myers were sharing the stage and talking about how bad things were and how you needed to donate and here's this happened.
[00:33:27]  The destruction of the spirit of the people of southern Louisiana and Mississippi may end up being the most tragic loss of all.
[00:33:33]  George Bush doesn't care about black people.
[00:33:37]  Okay, so Kanye going off script just a tad and Michael Myers was like, I don't want to be here for this.
[00:33:46]  No.
[00:33:46]  Yeah, I don't.
[00:33:47]  That's not on the teleprompter.
[00:33:49]  Why are you saying that, Kanye?
[00:33:50]  Legitimately incredible.
[00:33:51]  And his delivery is so good of it.
[00:33:53]  George Bush doesn't like black.
[00:33:56]  He doesn't even try to make a transition.
[00:33:58]  He's not southern Louisiana and Mississippi may end up being the most tragic loss of all.
[00:34:02]  George Bush doesn't care about black people.
[00:34:08]  So not caring about black people is funny, is it?
[00:34:11]  No, it isn't.
[00:34:11]  No, just the way he presents it is funny.
[00:34:15]  Fantastic.
[00:34:16]  It's a little different now.
[00:34:17]  Yeah, it's changed quite a bit with Donald Trump.
[00:34:19]  He's a big fan of Trump.
[00:34:21]  And he was doing an interview on 107.5 WGCI about apparently Donald Trump, or at least that came up in the interview.
[00:34:31]  Here's what he said.
[00:34:33]  I feel that he cares about the way black people feel about him.
[00:34:42]  That's true, I would say.
[00:34:43]  Yeah, I'd say that's true.
[00:34:44]  And he would like for black people to like him.
[00:34:50]  Yes.
[00:34:50]  Like they did when he was cool and the rap songs and all this and stuff.
[00:34:55]  Yeah, and he will do the things that are necessary to make that happen because he's got an ego like all the rest of us.
[00:35:08]  And he doesn't, he wants to be the greatest president.
[00:35:12]  And he knows that he can't be the greatest president without the acceptance of the black community.
[00:35:19]  So it's something that he's going to work towards.
[00:35:23]  But we're going to have to speak to him.
[00:35:25]  Well, that That was actually a decent case that he lays out.
[00:35:32]  Yeah, we all know that President Trump likes to be liked, wants to be liked, and will try to please people.
[00:35:39]  He's a pleaser.
[00:35:40]  And so that's kind of what he's playing into there.
[00:35:44]  He likes the people who like him, and he doesn't like the people who don't like him.
[00:35:47]  Exactly.
[00:35:47]  And, you know, if the black community, again, one of these groups eventually is going to learn this.
[00:35:54]  And I think, you know, Kanye and Kardashian and Kim Kardashian are two of the probably, I guess, the leaders in this because they know that if they take it.
[00:36:04]  If they take the hit of going out and backing Donald Trump, he'll give you what you want.
[00:36:08]  And was there any doubt that when Kim Kardashian presented the woman who was in prison for 20 years for the first-time drug offense, was there any doubt in anybody's mind that the way she presented that to the president then showed up and was respectful and never said anything bad about him?
[00:36:26]  Was there any doubt in anybody's mind he was going to pardon her?
[00:36:28]  No way.
[00:36:29]  No doubt in my mind.
[00:36:30]  And he did.
[00:36:31]  It didn't matter whether he should have or not.
[00:36:32]  It was doubtful.
[00:36:33]  It worked.
[00:36:34]  He knew it was going to happen.
[00:36:35]  They did it right.
[00:36:36]  They did it the way it was going to affect Trump positively.
[00:36:41]  And I think Kanye's playing that same game now.
[00:36:45]  That's interesting because that's a different explanation than I would have thought he gave here.
[00:36:49]  Yeah, because until I heard this, I was kind of under the impression that he just likes to be a contrarian from time to time, that he just likes to stir things up once in a while.
[00:37:00]  And so he just took the opposite stance of most of his peers and just said, I like Trump.
[00:37:07]  Because he's never really outlined that I've heard.
[00:37:12]  Maybe I've missed.
[00:37:13]  I try to stay as current on Kanye Affairs as I possibly can, but it's possible I may have missed an interview where he outlined exactly what policies he likes about Trump.
[00:37:23]  But when I've seen him interviewed, he hasn't been able to articulate anything he particularly likes about him or why he's not.
[00:37:30]  And he doesn't there.
[00:37:32]  And he doesn't really there.
[00:37:33]  He just kind of, well, he wants to be liked by us, so he's going to try to do the things that we like so we like him.
[00:37:41]  Right.
[00:37:41]  And I think, look, that effect is exaggerated with Trump, obviously.
[00:37:45]  But, you know, I think that it's a good approach for everybody.
[00:37:48]  Right.
[00:37:48]  I mean, if you don't come out and be a constant jerk to somebody, you have a better chance of getting something that helps you.
[00:37:54]  You know, we certainly all understand that when it comes to our business lives.
[00:37:57]  We certainly all understand that when it comes to our family lives.
[00:38:00]  Yet when it comes to politics, all we do is, and this is not just us, it's the other side as well.
[00:38:06]  All we do is just rip each other constantly.
[00:38:08]  And, you know, people always say, well, you're never going to change, you know, Democrats' minds.
[00:38:13]  You're never going to change that.
[00:38:14]  Well, I mean, I don't know.
[00:38:16]  Look at, I mean, Trump does not get elected without Democrats.
[00:38:20]  He has absolutely no chance.
[00:38:22]  I mean, he does not win that race without, what is it, you know, 10 or 20% of people who voted for Barack Obama twice and then voted for Trump.
[00:38:32]  You know, so, you know, if you go there and you can win over people that are, you know, that are winnable.
[00:38:41]  Some aren't.
[00:38:41]  You're not going to win Michael Moore over to your case.
[00:38:44]  But if you focus on actually trying to persuade people rather than, you know, just trying to kind of have your views.
[00:38:51]  you know, echoed back to you, I think that's a good approach.
[00:38:54]  And it's probably a smart approach by Kanye here, right?
[00:38:58]  I mean, you're.
[00:38:59]  I think to turn your thing around, is there any chance that this woman gets pardoned without Kanye and Kim Kardashian?
[00:39:05]  No, I think the chance is very low.
[00:39:07]  I know Jared Kushner's big on the criminal justice reform thing.
[00:39:11]  So maybe he would have found this particular case.
[00:39:14]  I doubt so.
[00:39:14]  I doubt it.
[00:39:15]  Because we've heard from other people who are for criminal reform since then that wouldn't be for letting her go.
[00:39:25]  They weren't for that release of her.
[00:39:27]  Which is weird.
[00:39:28]  So they had some other problem with why she was in jail, how it was portrayed.
[00:39:36]  It was portrayed that she was the first-time offender and that she was a mother.
[00:39:40]  And that necessarily, I don't think, was 100% true.
[00:39:44]  I've definitely heard the case that the idea, you know, when you say a first-time offender and she wasn't, you know, doing drugs or selling drugs, she was transporting them.
[00:39:53]  And you think of that, and you're like, all right, well, she's bringing them across town.
[00:39:57]  But I guess it was a very large amount of drugs that affected a community very negatively for a long period of time.
[00:40:03]  So it wasn't quite as simple as it was portrayed by, you know, do we really expect the nuance out of Kim Kardashian?
[00:40:11]  Is that, you know, not at all.
[00:40:13]  But again, does she get out without them?
[00:40:16]  No way.
[00:40:16]  I don't think so.
[00:40:17]  No.
[00:40:17]  Right?
[00:40:17]  No way.
[00:40:18]  And we hadn't been told when that happened that they had dozens of other cases like this that they were planning on moving on, and we haven't seen any really since.
[00:40:26]  So I don't know if they've just halted that program or, I mean, maybe they need, you know, I mean, this is something, you know, maybe Trump, I think Trump likes the idea that, you know, a celebrity comes in there and says, hey, you know, here's a sensible thing, and please please do it.
[00:40:39]  And then you've got, you know, Kim Kardashian has, what, 100 million followers on social network, probably.
[00:40:46]  The fact that she's coming out and saying positive things, Kanye West the same.
[00:40:49]  That doesn't hurt.
[00:40:50]  That doesn't hurt.
[00:40:50]  And, you know, while, again, there is a Rasmussen poll out there that has Trump's approval rating among African Americans very high, I think in the 30s, most polls have shown an improvement, not quite as drastic as Rasmussen, but in the mid-teens, which is high for a Republican president, at least in recent memory, going back at least a couple of presidents.
[00:41:11]  And there's probably a couple factors.
[00:41:12]  One, black unemployment is at record low levels.
[00:41:17]  And the other factor is probably Kanye West and Kim Kardashian saying good things about him.
[00:41:21]  I mean, really, the black unemployment level really should be a lot more important than what Kim Kardashian says.
[00:41:27]  But I don't know that it is.
[00:41:28]  I don't know.
[00:41:28]  That's right.
[00:41:28]  I think, you know, politics is so much emotion and so much feeling and so much perception that the Kanye West, Kim Kardashian thing might actually be more important than the low unemployment rate, which is ridiculous.
[00:41:41]  But I mean, because really that should be, it falls fair here, just that difference.
[00:41:46]  You know, the African Americans having such a high unemployment rate for such a long time, the fact that he's the first president who's really overseen a large decrease in that to the lowest levels that we've seen in a long time, you know, should be enough to win over 30 or 40 percent, you'd think of the population.
[00:42:01]  Because that's such a big issue.
[00:42:02]  Again, it's the economy stupid.
[00:42:04]  We've been told that for decades.
[00:42:05]  And the fact that that one has really been improved, you know, really hasn't had the fanfare that you would expect if we weren't all in our tribes and all partisan all the time.
[00:42:22]  This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and we really want to thank you for listening.
[00:42:34]  One of the interesting things we're dealing with in kind of the social media world is people like to take a real scientific study, which might be really conclusive or maybe not, pull out one kind of scary thing out of it.
[00:42:47]  and blow it up into a very scary-sounding article or tweet or Pinterest post.
[00:42:52]  That, of course, scares the hell out of everyone and gets shared wildly because you're trying to protect your friends' lives.
[00:42:59]  And this phenomenon is building upon itself.
[00:43:02]  And I actually think it's worse than what we say.
[00:43:05]  We complain about fake news and politics or something like that.
[00:43:07]  You hear those complaints all the time.
[00:43:08]  I think it's much worse when it comes to health stuff because it's not partisan.
[00:43:12]  And there's not really anyone on the other side pushing back.
[00:43:14]  At least when Democrats and Republicans go back and forth at each other, there's at least an argument there.
[00:43:21]  So you can at least look at, I don't know, two sides of the issue, no matter how nonsensical they are.
[00:43:26]  With health stuff, it's just scary or nothing for the most part.
[00:43:30]  One person who actually does push back on that is Aaron E. Carroll.
[00:43:34]  He's a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine.
[00:43:38]  He's got the incidentaleconomist.com is also has a great YouTube channel called Healthcare Triage, and he joins us now.
[00:43:46]  Aaron, how are you?
[00:43:47]  I'm good.
[00:43:48]  How are you?
[00:43:48]  Really good, really good.
[00:43:50]  Really appreciated your story about the latest scary, scary study about the risks of alcohol.
[00:43:59]  Seemingly, everywhere that I saw it reported, it meant that the only safe level of alcohol was none.
[00:44:06]  And if you have any, you're really putting yourself in danger.
[00:44:10]  What does the study actually say?
[00:44:12]  So, I mean, that absolutely was the take-home message, and that's what the news said.
[00:44:16]  And I think that if you read the study, I think that there are authors of the study that might actually vocalize that and say it.
[00:44:22]  But that is not what the study actually showed.
[00:44:25]  So, first of all, it's important to understand this was not a new trial.
[00:44:28]  This is not like they did some randomized controlled child study where they gave some people alcohol and some people not and saw what happened.
[00:44:35]  This is just what we call meta-analysis, which means that once again, they sort of gather up all the research that's already out there and just put it in a big pile and analyze it again and again and again to see if they can get anything new out of it.
[00:44:48]  And when you do that, you get statistical significance because you keep adding data, but it doesn't necessarily change the outcome or how bad things are.
[00:44:58]  And so, what they found was that they can say, Okay, look, we're looking at 23 different harms that might come from alcohol, and we're looking at 28 million people in studies.
[00:45:09]  And we could detect that even at one drink a day, there's a statistically significant risk.
[00:45:15]  And of course, then they say, Well, then anything greater than zero is bad.
[00:45:18]  But the first thing to understand is: one, this is observational data.
[00:45:22]  They can't control for things, and that's important because people who drink tend to sometimes be different than people who don't drink.
[00:45:29]  People who drink often smoke.
[00:45:31]  Smoking is terrible for you.
[00:45:32]  People who drink are often poorer than other people, especially when they drink a lot.
[00:45:36]  And that, of course, has health implications.
[00:45:37]  And people who drink might live in different areas or drive differently or all kinds of things can be related, and they can't control for any of that.
[00:45:45]  But even if we accept all of it, the actual numbers are much less scary than the headlines would have you believe.
[00:45:52]  So even they in the study say that for every 100,000 people who have one drink a day, 918 might experience one of these 23 health effects in a year.
[00:46:04]  So right off the bat, 918 out of 100,000 is not that much.
[00:46:07]  But then they have to acknowledge that of 100,000 people who don't drink, 914 of them are going to have a significant outcome, a significant health problem.
[00:46:16]  So that means that of the 100,000 people who might drink, 99,082 of them are unaffected.
[00:46:23]  914 of them are going to have a health problem no matter what they do.
[00:46:26]  Only 4 out of 100,000 people might have a health-related problem that's related to alcohol.
[00:46:33]  And that's a might.
[00:46:34]  That's not a definite they've proved it's causal.
[00:46:36]  That's a maybe.
[00:46:37]  4 out of 100,000 is unbelievably small compared to almost anything else you might do every day.
[00:46:44]  And even at two drinks per day, that 914 only goes up to 977.
[00:46:48]  Even at five drinks per day, it's still less than 1,300, which means still that 99% of people almost who drink five drinks a day, which I think all of us can agree is probably too much, still don't have a health-related effect.
[00:47:03]  So getting people all panicked about this is sort of done by sleight of hand or by arguing that The relative risk or how much your risk might increase is much more important than the absolute risk, which is really what we should care about.
[00:47:18]  Yeah, because I mean, I thought looking at the study and the way you explained it, which is great, four out of 100,000, that gives you a cost-benefit analysis in a way, where you could say, I would have honestly guessed that drinking alcohol was worse for my health than that level.

=== The Harm of Gluten-Free Fads (05:00) ===

[00:47:34]  It was almost encouraging me to go to the bar, which I know is not what you intended.
[00:47:38]  But it's interesting, and you brought a number to a term to my attention that I think would be a great thing to become a lot more popular, which is the number needed to harm.
[00:47:48]  Can you kind of explain what that means and how it applies here?
[00:47:51]  Well, there's two sides of that coin.
[00:47:52]  So, one of the things we always talk about is number needed to treat and number needed to harm.
[00:47:56]  And they're both sides of that.
[00:47:57]  But we can absolutely focus on the harm.
[00:47:59]  So, this is what's important: that people don't get, is that harms happen often whether or not you get the actual thing that we're worried about.
[00:48:09]  So, that's what I was trying to talk about when I say, look, 918 people who drink a drink a day have a harm, but 914 people who don't drink every day have a harm.
[00:48:19]  So, you can't just look at the people of harm.
[00:48:21]  What we have to care about is the people who would change based upon whether or not they get the alcohol.
[00:48:27]  And so, if only four out of 100,000 people get the harm because of the alcohol, in other words, not just that they got a harm, but we can absolutely say it's because of the alcohol, then that means that the number needed to harm is 25,000 people, which means that we have to give a drink a day to 25,000 people to get one of them to experience a harm because of the alcohol.
[00:48:52]  Too often, when we talk about health stuff, we only focus on the harm and how many people are harmed, but it's how much people are harmed because of the alcohol.
[00:48:59]  One out of 25,000 is unbelievably small.
[00:49:02]  Really small.
[00:49:03]  And I feel like this stuff really is happening so often.
[00:49:09]  People just don't understand risk.
[00:49:12]  They take everything in absolutes.
[00:49:14]  And I feel like with social media in particular, it really scares the hell out of people to live a life that they want to live.
[00:49:20]  And I feel like that's a really bad outcome.
[00:49:23]  Do you see that?
[00:49:24]  Absolutely.
[00:49:25]  I mean, absolutely.
[00:49:27]  I think that we're trying to scare people with food, but I think there's another side of that coin is, you know, you get people who will swear on the benefits of certain diets and food, too, when those benefits are almost just as small as the harms I'm talking about here.
[00:49:41]  You know, people swear by else you go gluten-free or if you avoid genealogy.
[00:49:45]  There's like no evidence for any of that stuff.
[00:49:47]  And even if there is a benefit, it is, again, so small that it's inconsequential in most people's lives.
[00:49:53]  And with the harm, I think what also people seem to forget is that, you know, one, there's sometimes a cost to these, there's an economic cost to these kinds of avoidance or these kinds of seeking out certain kinds of food, but there's also a quality of life lost.
[00:50:10]  Some people like to have a drink every day, and it is perfectly rational to accept, even if it is true, a four in 100,000 chance if the quality of life that they are gaining from eating or having that drink is greater than whatever harm they might be having.
[00:50:25]  That is rational.
[00:50:26]  But too often, I think when it comes to health studies, we think that we're all supposed to live forever and that there's some magic to this, that we should avoid all harms no matter what, even if we're sacrificing happiness or money or quality of life.
[00:50:42]  We have to be able to judge whether or not these kinds of risk avoidances are worth it.
[00:50:47]  Aaron, you brought up gluten a minute ago.
[00:50:50]  That is one of the fads that is so prevalent now.
[00:50:55]  So many people I know and have seen and talked to are on gluten-free diets, and a lot of them aren't even allergic to gluten.
[00:51:03]  In fact, very few people are actually gluten-intolerant, and yet everybody's on this bandwagon now.
[00:51:11]  How did this start?
[00:51:13]  Well, so, first of all, we should acknowledge, like, you know, some people who have celiac disease, which is an immunological absolutely avoid gluten, but that's maybe 1% of the population in the United States.
[00:51:25]  If that people who have a wheat allergy and therefore avoiding gluten because they're allergic to wheat, yeah, might benefit from avoiding gluten because it'll never do that.
[00:51:33]  That's less than 1% of the population.
[00:51:35]  It's the other 23, 24% of the population who don't have either of those two things but are avoiding gluten for whatever reason that are doing it again in a way that actually might be providing more harm to their lives than good.
[00:51:49]  So, you know, a lot of them will claim that they're gluten intolerant or there's some vague clinical syndrome that's doing this, but there have been really good randomized controlled trials trying to find these people, trying to test whether, you know, secretly eliminating gluten from their diet makes them better.
[00:52:03]  And those studies show that it doesn't.
[00:52:05]  One, the people who think they're gluten intolerant don't meet the clinical criteria for it.
[00:52:10]  And even when they do, being secretly put on gluten-free diets doesn't make a difference in their health.
[00:52:15]  In which case, why are you doing this?
[00:52:17]  Gluten-free foods cost more.
[00:52:18]  Gluten-free foods often are less nutritionally good by whatever sort of people would measure.
[00:52:24]  We spent like in the United States, like I think it's like a billion or two on gluten-free dog food or pet food in the last year or two.
[00:52:31]  I mean, we just gone too far.
[00:52:33]  Oh my gosh.

=== Truthiness in the Digital Age (09:47) ===

[00:52:34]  It's the panic du jour.
[00:52:36]  It's, you know, what we've decided to focus on and say it's a problem.
[00:52:39]  We've been eating gluten for tens of thousands of years, and the human race is doing just fine.
[00:52:47]  It's not some magic thing that people have all of a sudden figured out.
[00:52:51]  Now, I will say, if by going gluten-free, people, you know, eat less processed food, stop eating so much bread, or somehow, you know, change their diets in such a way that they lose weight and they feel better, great.
[00:53:02]  But don't think it's gluten and don't sort of proselytize and tell everyone else that they have to eat like you eat.
[00:53:08]  There's nothing really to fear from gluten in that respect.
[00:53:11]  You know, I just read an article a couple of weeks ago that the headline was, there is no safe amount of bacon you can eat, including one piece.
[00:53:25]  Not one a day.
[00:53:26]  One piece of bacon.
[00:53:31]  This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.
[00:53:44]  The effort to silence people did not start this year.
[00:53:50]  It.
[00:53:51]  They were talking about doing this.
[00:53:53]  They were talking about the process by which you would begin to, I don't know, curb the internet and the expression of people's freedom of speech on the internet.
[00:54:04]  That started a while ago.
[00:54:06]  Yeah, this is pretty interesting.
[00:54:08]  Listen to this clip.
[00:54:09]  It's from Barack Obama several years ago.
[00:54:12]  I want to say it's 2011, but it does not say it in this article.
[00:54:15]  I looked it up earlier, and we've been kind of sitting on this for a few days from when sort of the Alex Jones thing was really going crazy.
[00:54:23]  Again, put Alex Jones back.
[00:54:25]  Put him back where he was.
[00:54:26]  Thank you.
[00:54:27]  Is he crazy?
[00:54:29]  Yes.
[00:54:30]  Does he like transporn?
[00:54:32]  Yes.
[00:54:33]  It does seem like he likes it.
[00:54:34]  It does seem like he does.
[00:54:35]  He's a fan.
[00:54:39]  But to Jeffy, that makes him even more appealing.
[00:54:43]  Am I right?
[00:54:44]  So, but we can decide for ourselves if the guy is telling the truth, if he's making stuff up out of whole cloth, give us a little credit.
[00:54:52]  Put him back on.
[00:54:53]  Yeah.
[00:54:54]  Stop silencing people.
[00:54:55]  Yeah, just let him speak and let him make an idiot of himself in front of everyone.
[00:54:58]  I mean, that's one of the best things about our society is that we have free speech enough so that you can make a moron out of yourself in front of people.
[00:55:05]  There's nothing wrong with that.
[00:55:06]  And I think we need to get over it.
[00:55:07]  The idea that you're going to be able to control things like that is, I think.
[00:55:11]  But they desperately want to.
[00:55:13]  They're showing us that right now.
[00:55:14]  They want to.
[00:55:15]  And we've been seeing that, I think, for a long time.
[00:55:17]  So listen to this.
[00:55:18]  I mean, I think you can look at this and say, let me put it by you guys.
[00:55:22]  Is this innocuous?
[00:55:23]  Is this just Barack Obama saying, hey, we got to get people to be more accurate?
[00:55:28]  Or is this foreshadowing?
[00:55:29]  It's sort of a foreshadowing of what we've seen recently with these big companies kind of cracking down on speech that they don't like.
[00:55:38]  Here it is, Barack Obama talking about truth on the internet.
[00:55:42]  Look, this takes us a little bit far afield, but I do think that it's relevant to the scientific community.
[00:55:53]  It's relevant to our democracy, citizenship.
[00:55:55]  We don't have a democracy.
[00:55:58]  We're going to have to rebuild within this wild, wild west of information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to.
[00:56:08]  Oh, what people?
[00:56:10]  Huh.
[00:56:11]  I use the analogy in politics.
[00:56:13]  It used to be there were three television stations and Walter Cronkite's on there, and not everybody agreed, and there were always outliers who thought that it was all propaganda, and we didn't really land on the moon, and Elvis is still alive, and so forth.
[00:56:29]  But generally, that was in the papers that you bought at the supermarket, right, as you were checking out.
[00:56:38]  And generally, people trusted a basic body of information.
[00:56:44]  It wasn't always as democratic as it should have been.
[00:56:47]  And it's always exactly right that, for example, on something like climate change, we've actually been doing some interesting initiatives where we're essentially deputizing citizens with handheld technologies to start recording information that then gets pooled.
[00:57:03]  They're becoming scientists without getting the PhD.
[00:57:06]  And we can do that in a lot of other fields as well.
[00:57:08]  But there has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests.
[00:57:24]  Truthiness.
[00:57:26]  Truthiness.
[00:57:27]  And those that we have to discard because they just don't have any basis in anything that's actually happening in the world.
[00:57:35]  And that's hard to do.
[00:57:38]  But I think it's going to be necessary.
[00:57:40]  It's going to be possible.
[00:57:41]  I think the answer is obviously not censorship, but it's creating places where people can say this is reliable.
[00:57:53]  And I'm still able to argue about safely about facts and what we should do about it while still not just making stuff up.
[00:58:07]  And who is it that is the arbiter of truth then?
[00:58:11]  Well, the truthiness lord.
[00:58:13]  Okay.
[00:58:14]  Have we appointed a truthiness czar yet?
[00:58:16]  That's possible.
[00:58:17]  It's possible.
[00:58:18]  It's coming soon to a country near you.
[00:58:19]  That's absolutely foreshadowing what's going on right now.
[00:58:24]  It took them a while to get to it, but they're doing it now.
[00:58:26]  Because it is, again, it's not coming through the government, as he kind of points out there.
[00:58:30]  He's not talking about government censorship.
[00:58:32]  Right.
[00:58:33]  But the censorship is sort of coming at other levels from large companies.
[00:58:38]  Many people from the administration are on the boards of it.
[00:58:41]  They've picked people to go out and record and find truthiness.
[00:58:46]  That's the weird part of that, too.
[00:58:47]  We're deputizing citizens to go record things on climate change.
[00:58:50]  Look at chilling.
[00:58:52]  And look, I think you can look at that and say, he's correct that this problem exists, right?
[00:58:56]  There is a problem with people.
[00:58:58]  We just talked about it with health information where that stuff gets completely massacred when it goes through the media cycle.
[00:59:07]  It's not even close to what this study actually says.
[00:59:10]  And we've seen so many examples of that.
[00:59:13]  That's up to us to figure out.
[00:59:14]  Yeah.
[00:59:15]  I mean, that's kind of unrealistic.
[00:59:16]  I'm really hesitant to get to get, I don't know, the government involved in that stuff.
[00:59:21]  I think our founders were too.
[00:59:23]  They really kind of made a big deal about government staying out of speech matters.
[00:59:28]  Yeah.
[00:59:28]  I mean, that was the big deal, right, when the printing press.
[00:59:31]  You know, we had the printing press and people were just printing whatever the heck they wanted to print.
[00:59:35]  I mean, that was the first set of lies, right?
[00:59:37]  I mean, they could print.
[00:59:38]  You just print whatever you want.
[00:59:39]  Yeah, Glenda was.
[00:59:40]  It's okay.
[00:59:40]  There's one, I can't remember which one it is.
[00:59:42]  There's some founding father that wrote about the freedom of speech and how far it goes.
[00:59:48]  And he defended it to the point that the press could print things that they maliciously know are false and are using only to hurt the person.
[00:59:58]  And it's still protected by that's how far they wanted it to go.
[01:00:02]  Good.
[01:00:02]  Wow.
[01:00:03]  And, you know, so government has, to me, zero role when it comes to free speech.
[01:00:10]  But, you know, they don't believe that.
[01:00:12]  Yeah, they don't.
[01:00:13]  And it's interesting because what you have is a bunch of people, and this, you know, probably goes both ways, but I, you know, certainly does on the left, where you have people who, if they had their drothers, would use the government to suppress certain types of speech.
[01:00:27]  And then they leave the government and they go serve on the board of Google.
[01:00:31]  Right.
[01:00:31]  And the thing Trump tweeted the other day about Google censoring him does not seem to be accurate.
[01:00:38]  But still, there is, certainly with the Alex Joneses of the world, you see real censorship of somebody on these platforms.
[01:00:46]  And it's a big part of his business.
[01:00:47]  I want his business to fail, but for other reasons.
[01:00:50]  I don't want it to be because other businesses have decided to target the guy.
[01:00:53]  And since we call it something else, since it's not, we're not calling it censorship.
[01:00:57]  We're just, well, that's the algorithm change.
[01:01:00]  Sorry.
[01:01:01]  Sorry.
[01:01:02]  Yeah.
[01:01:03]  And we've given these private businesses a pass on squelching freedom of speech because they're private businesses.
[01:01:11]  It's not being done by the government.
[01:01:13]  However, right or wrong, they made an agreement with the government that they will not be held liable for certain things that happen on their platform.
[01:01:23]  Like if there's terrorist threats on Facebook or Twitter, you're not going to go to Facebook and Twitter and charge them with a terrorist threat.
[01:01:32]  But in order to have that protection, they have to remain impartial.
[01:01:38]  They can't be biased.
[01:01:39]  They can't take a side and be this political arm.
[01:01:44]  And yet they have.
[01:01:46]  So they're kind of violating that sort of arrangement with the government protections.
[01:01:54]  So you either take away the government protection and say, okay, you're going to be held liable because you're not playing by the rules that were set up for this.
[01:02:01]  Yeah, and I think.
[01:02:02]  Or you stop taking people off who you disagree with.
[01:02:06]  And this is why they've been careful when they've taken Alex Jones off to talk about his harassing behavior, to talk about other things he's done, not about his political views, which currently target largely, well, really anybody but Trump, right?

=== Social Media Impartiality Crisis (00:47) ===

[01:02:21]  I mean, he still targets Republicans all the time.
[01:02:25]  The guy's not a conservative.
[01:02:26]  No, of course not.
[01:02:27]  I mean, if you go back to the idea, you know, back in 2003 and 2004, and when this guy was becoming well-known as the father of the 9-11 conspiracy theory, you remember that he started that conspiracy theory against George W. Bush.
[01:02:42]  And he still to this day, we were just talking about the other day when he was trying to give a eulogy to John McCain and was like, I got to take the high road here.
[01:02:50]  But, you know, McCain was a traitor with the Bushes.
[01:02:53]  Should have been court-martialed.
[01:02:55]  But, you know, at some level, I guess he was courageous or, you know, I guess you could put a quote hero tag on him or whatever.
[01:03:01]  But yeah, he should have gone to prison.
[01:03:02]  All right, back in a minute.
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