The Glenn Beck Program - Best of the Program | 2/26/26
Aired: 2026-02-26
Duration: 42:36


=== Why You Should Stop Saving for Retirement (03:42) ===

[00:00:00]  So on today's podcast, India takes a step away from helping support Russia and China.
[00:00:04]  This huge shift, massive shift towards the West.
[00:00:08]  Why is this happening?
[00:00:10]  Also, admitting the worst thing a man can emit, I was wrong.
[00:00:13]  I say those words and explain what I was wrong about and correct it on today's podcast.
[00:00:19]  And Elon Musk on AGI, artificial general intelligence, he says it's coming at maybe the end of this year.
[00:00:26]  And you shouldn't save for retirement anymore because it will become unnecessary soon.
[00:00:32]  Crazy look into the future.
[00:00:35]  All on today's podcast.
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[00:01:43]  Hello, America.
[00:01:44]  You know, we've been fighting every single day.
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[00:02:36]  You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
[00:02:42]  I want to play something that Elon Musk just said on some podcast just a couple of days ago that is shocking, shocking.
[00:02:53]  I want you to listen to this.
[00:02:54]  Let me take you through it.
[00:02:56]  Yeah.
[00:02:58]  Well, one like side recommendation I have is like, don't worry about like squirreling money away for retirement in like 10 or 20 years.
[00:03:04]  It won't matter.
[00:03:07]  Okay.
[00:03:08]  Either we're not going to be here or it just like you want to.
[00:03:14]  Stop, stop.
[00:03:15]  Only, only Elon Musk can just say something like that and then just move on.
[00:03:20]  Yeah, don't say for retirement.
[00:03:21]  You know, it's not going to matter.
[00:03:23]  Okay.
[00:03:24]  Okay.
[00:03:24]  Now listen to the rest.
[00:03:25]  Go ahead.
[00:03:27]  To save for retirement.
[00:03:29]  If any of the things that we've said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.
[00:03:35]  Services will be there to support you.
[00:03:37]  You'll have the home.
[00:03:39]  You'll have the healthcare.
[00:03:40]  You'll have the entertainment.

=== Why Retirement Won't Matter by 2028 (02:46) ===

[00:03:42]  The way this unfolds is fundamentally impossible to predict because of self-improvement of the AI and the accelerating timeline.
[00:03:49]  It's called singularity for a reason.
[00:03:51]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:03:51]  I don't know what goes happening.
[00:03:53]  What happens after the event arising?
[00:03:55]  Exactly.
[00:03:56]  Can never see past the black hole or the event horizon, the light gun.
[00:03:59]  I mean, Ray has a singularity out way too far.
[00:04:02]  I mean, this is like the next, what, what's your timeline for this?
[00:04:07]  We're in the singularity.
[00:04:08]  Well, we are in the singularity for sure.
[00:04:09]  We're in the midst of it right now, for sure.
[00:04:11]  And we're in this beautiful sweet spot, which is, you know, the roller coasters were just, yeah, exactly.
[00:04:18]  That's a great analogy.
[00:04:18]  It's like that feeling.
[00:04:20]  You're at the top of the roller coaster and you're about to go.
[00:04:21]  Yeah, but you know, it's going to be a lot of G's when you hit it.
[00:04:24]  Yeah, a lot of G.
[00:04:26]  It's like feel like, I don't have to just have courtside seats.
[00:04:28]  I'm on the court.
[00:04:29]  Exactly.
[00:04:30]  And it blows my, and still blows my mind sometimes, multiple times a week.
[00:04:35]  Yeah.
[00:04:36]  And so just when I think, I'm like, wow.
[00:04:41]  And then it's like two days later, more wow.
[00:04:44]  Yeah.
[00:04:46]  Exponential wow.
[00:04:48]  Yeah.
[00:04:48]  I think we'll hit AGI next year in 27.
[00:04:54]  You got that?
[00:04:55]  Let me just say, you hear that?
[00:04:58]  I think we're going to hit AGI next year in 27.
[00:05:05]  AGI is artificial general intelligence.
[00:05:09]  That means the computer, the AI system, is smarter at everything than any human is.
[00:05:20]  It is better at, name the topic, than the best human you can find.
[00:05:25]  And it can do everything that a human can do better than a human.
[00:05:29]  It's not super intelligence.
[00:05:31]  It's just better than humans on everything.
[00:05:35]  He thinks we're going to hit that.
[00:05:37]  Some people said we were not going to even, there was not a chance.
[00:05:40]  10 years ago, people said we'd never even get to there.
[00:05:42]  We'll never get there.
[00:05:42]  We'll never get there.
[00:05:43]  He's saying we're going to hit it next year.
[00:05:45]  I believe we are going to hit it.
[00:05:47]  I think there's a chance we hit, the world is going to be different by 2028.
[00:05:51]  It's just going to be different by 2028.
[00:05:54]  And we have got to prepare for this.
[00:05:58]  So our last caller was saying, you know, well, you know, Smoot Holly, you know, you can use tariffs to protect.
[00:06:07]  There is a conversation that we have to have right now.
[00:06:11]  We have to have because of artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, you know, entire categories of work dissolving quickly, you know, not in a generation, maybe not even in a decade, maybe in the next few years.

=== Milton Freeman's Radical UBI (08:22) ===

[00:06:28]  Factory workers first.
[00:06:30]  You know, I reached out to Elon Musk and said, for my museum, I want one of the first Tesla robots for the museum.
[00:06:38]  I want to keep it in the box and keep it in the museum, the first mainstream robot.
[00:06:43]  You know what he said?
[00:06:45]  All of the robots for the first, I think he said two years.
[00:06:48]  He may have said one.
[00:06:50]  All of the robots that Tesla will be making for the first two years will be for Tesla.
[00:06:57]  Think of how many robots he's going to be making in a two-year period, and all of them are going to be for Tesla.
[00:07:08]  That is a workforce army, army.
[00:07:13]  So, and that's coming quickly, really, really fast.
[00:07:17]  So, it'll go the factory worker, then the truck driver, then the coder, then the accountant, you know, the analyst who thought they were immune from everything because, you know, I work with ideas.
[00:07:28]  The ground is shifting quickly.
[00:07:31]  So, what is it we should talk about?
[00:07:36]  Well, the world is going to talk about universal basic income, and I am dead set against that.
[00:07:41]  But that's the only thing anybody is talking about.
[00:07:44]  I went back and I did my homework the last couple of days on Milton Freeman.
[00:07:48]  Milton Freeman was kind of for UBI, but a different kind of UBI.
[00:07:54]  And he may have the answer that is a bridge at least.
[00:07:59]  When the world is in a panic, that's not the time to discuss things.
[00:08:02]  You discuss things before you're in a panic.
[00:08:05]  You make decisions before there's an emergency.
[00:08:07]  And now is that time.
[00:08:09]  Because once there's an emergency, the loudest voice comes in and they have usually the simplest answer and everybody's like, yeah, yeah, go with that.
[00:08:17]  And that answer is going to be universal basic income.
[00:08:20]  That is the modern version of bread and circuses.
[00:08:23]  And make no mistakes, the communists, the social planners, the Davos crowd, they're going to offer it all as not as a temporary bridge, but as a permanent arrangement with you.
[00:08:38]  A managed society, a population that is pacified, production centralized, dependency normalized.
[00:08:46]  They're already talking about it.
[00:08:47]  Read Yuval Noah Yuval Harari.
[00:08:53]  Read his work.
[00:08:54]  He is one of the main thinkers on the left and with all of the elites.
[00:08:59]  And he talks about, you know, there's just a useless class of people.
[00:09:02]  We cannot look at it that way.
[00:09:05]  And people are going to go for this, not because they, you know, love collectivism, but because nobody offered them another path.
[00:09:13]  I have been talking about this and trying to get people to talk about this for a while.
[00:09:18]  And there's a guy that we have to revisit.
[00:09:21]  And he's honestly a guy who surprised me that he's in this debate.
[00:09:26]  And it's Milton Friedman.
[00:09:27]  It at least surprised me that he's on the side that he's on.
[00:09:31]  I mean, here's the free market economist, the man being a defender.
[00:09:35]  He's accused of being a defender of the coldest kind of capitalism where they just don't care about babies and children and food.
[00:09:43]  He's the godfather of deregulation.
[00:09:46]  He actually supports or supported a version of basic income, but not the kind that's being sold today.
[00:09:54]  He calls it the negative income tax.
[00:09:58]  Listen to what he actually proposed.
[00:10:00]  His idea, the negative income tax, works like this.
[00:10:04]  You eliminate the sprawling welfare state.
[00:10:07]  Okay, really important we do all of these things.
[00:10:09]  Eliminate the welfare state.
[00:10:11]  That's food stamps, housing subsidies, overlapping programs, bureaucracy.
[00:10:15]  Replace all of that with a simple income floor that everybody gets.
[00:10:20]  If you earn below a certain threshold, the government will send you supplemental income.
[00:10:26]  But as you earn more, the support will phase out very gradually.
[00:10:31]  That way you're not being punished for working.
[00:10:33]  And that last part is really critical because under the welfare system, if you earn a dollar, you lose a dollar in benefits.
[00:10:39]  And so the rational response is, well, why would I earn a dollar?
[00:10:43]  Because I'm never going to make enough to really be happy.
[00:10:45]  So why just I'm just going to be, I'm going to live here, I live off the government.
[00:10:49]  Friedman's system preserves incentive.
[00:10:53]  You always gain more by working more because he knows that you just can't make people comfortable in the lack of work.
[00:11:06]  And the system that we have now is honestly designed to get people destitute and destroy productivity.
[00:11:21]  This is the opposite.
[00:11:24]  And I'm shocked that Milton Freeman is thinking this way, but he understood something.
[00:11:28]  Freeman understood something fundamental.
[00:11:30]  Markets require stability.
[00:11:33]  Free societies require order.
[00:11:37]  So when we're talking AI, technological advancement is going to become so severe at some point that AI could create pockets of severe displacement.
[00:11:50]  And with that, you'll either get violent populism, authoritarian redistribution of wealth, or a market-compatible safety valve.
[00:12:00]  And that's what his negative income tax was, a pressure release without central planning.
[00:12:06]  This is absolutely critical to keep the choice decentralized.
[00:12:13]  The individual, you still get to choose how you spend the money.
[00:12:17]  The federal government doesn't decide on which apartment you can rent, what food you can buy, which training program you have to attend, none of that.
[00:12:25]  Shrink down the state as you create a floor for everybody.
[00:12:30]  This is very different from modern UBI.
[00:12:34]  That's tied to digital IDs, programmable currency, behavioral compliance.
[00:12:40]  I mean, all of that is the new world order and one world government.
[00:12:43]  I mean, but it is coming.
[00:12:46]  If AI eliminates 15 to 25% of current job categories over the next decade, you're going to see sudden income collapse in certain sectors.
[00:12:55]  Huge geographic economic deserts.
[00:13:00]  Most importantly, political radicalization.
[00:13:02]  Okay.
[00:13:04]  There is a piece.
[00:13:05]  There's only two copies of this book that I have.
[00:13:07]  One is in the National Archives because it was all handwritten and hand.
[00:13:11]  The charts are all made by hand.
[00:13:13]  And it was made for President Roosevelt in World War II.
[00:13:20]  It was, I think it was the election of 1936 or 38.
[00:13:24]  And it's called Radicalism, Revolution, or Recovery.
[00:13:32]  And they're making the case to FDR radicalism, revolution, or recovery.
[00:13:42]  That's what really enhanced the New Deal.
[00:13:45]  They chose incorrectly.
[00:13:48]  Will we choose the right thing?
[00:13:53]  You ever feel like you just need a moment to take a breath?
[00:13:56]  I mean, not a vacation, not a week off, just a little space, a little room in your chest that isn't filled with numbers and due dates and interest rates that never seem to sleep.
[00:14:05]  For a lot of people, that pressure isn't coming from one big disaster.
[00:14:08]  It's just coming from a stack of high interest debt that just sits there month after month, quietly draining your paycheck before you even get a chance to use it for something that actually matters.
[00:14:17]  Credit cards at 20-something percent, personal loans that looked helpful at the time.
[00:14:23]  That's where American Financing can step in and help you.
[00:14:26]  They are salaried, employee-owned company, which means their mortgage consultants aren't paid to push you into something that doesn't make sense.
[00:14:34]  They'll take the time to look at your full financial picture and see whether consolidating high-interest debt into your mortgage could lower your monthly payments, reduce your interest that you're paying overall.
[00:14:43]  No upfront fees.
[00:14:44]  They'll shoot straight with you.
[00:14:46]  I've done business with these people for, gosh, over 20 years now.

=== India's Maritime Shift (11:57) ===

[00:14:50]  It's American Financing, 800-906-2440, 800-906-2440.
[00:14:56]  It's AmericanFinancing.net.
[00:14:58]  Now back to the podcast.
[00:15:00]  This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.
[00:15:02]  And don't forget, rate us on iTunes.
[00:15:06]  While we were all talking about the state of the union yesterday, two big stories happened.
[00:15:11]  And it's been unfolding for the last couple of days.
[00:15:16]  And both of these stories are treated as no biggie.
[00:15:19]  And I found them yesterday and I'm like, oh my gosh, these are earth shattering.
[00:15:25]  So let me tell you the first one.
[00:15:26]  Prime Minister of India, Prime Minister Modi, landed in Israel yesterday and then he addressed the Knesset.
[00:15:35]  Then they signed defense agreements or they discussed these defense agreements that are going way beyond commerce.
[00:15:47]  It's deep integration of Israel's layer air defense systems, including the Iron Dome and the laser layer known as the Iron Beam.
[00:15:58]  Okay?
[00:16:01]  Not a sale, not a sale of those things to India.
[00:16:05]  Integration, okay?
[00:16:07]  Technology transfer discussions happened yesterday.
[00:16:12]  This is joint production and institutional entanglement.
[00:16:18]  Even if half of what is being reported about the Iron Beam, the cost per interception is accurate, it's game-changing.
[00:16:29]  I don't know if you know about the Iron Beam.
[00:16:31]  You've heard about the Iron Dome.
[00:16:32]  What is the Iron Beam?
[00:16:34]  Right now, if you have an interceptor missile, an interceptor missile is anywhere between $2 million and $110 million.
[00:16:45]  Why do third-rate countries love new technology so much?
[00:16:50]  Because they could take a million dollars and pour it all into drones and they could just wipe an aircraft carrier out, okay?
[00:16:59]  Because we have to fire really expensive weapons to take those things down.
[00:17:04]  And so you just bankrupt us.
[00:17:06]  What the iron laser is doing is it's single-digit dollars of electricity.
[00:17:13]  So you turn it on, boom, boom.
[00:17:16]  It's the electricity that fast, and that's all you're paying for.
[00:17:19]  And it's single-digit dollars instead of $110 million as an interceptor.
[00:17:25]  That changes the game.
[00:17:27]  The economics of attrition warfare completely out the window.
[00:17:33]  The old model has been overwhelm your enemy with cheap drones and rockets until he runs out of the expensive interceptors.
[00:17:42]  That math collapses if defense becomes cheaper than offense.
[00:17:48]  Now that's one shift.
[00:17:50]  That went over to India.
[00:17:53]  Now here's the second.
[00:17:55]  India's Ministry of Defense briefly posted and then deleted that the Indian Navy had begun intercepting and seizing the Shadow Fleet oil tankers.
[00:18:10]  Wait a minute.
[00:18:11]  What?
[00:18:13]  The Shadow Fleet, these are ships wildly understood to be part of Russia's sanctions evasion system.
[00:18:21]  This is going from Russia to other countries and from Iran to Russia, etc., etc.
[00:18:28]  He posted that they were now going after the Shadow Fleet, and then the tweet disappeared.
[00:18:33]  But the operations didn't.
[00:18:36]  So let me translate this.
[00:18:39]  India has been kind of a frenemy, if you will.
[00:18:43]  They're kind of, they just, they always play the edges, you know?
[00:18:48]  Their national identity for 80 years has been non-aligned.
[00:18:53]  We're not going to align with anybody.
[00:18:56]  And they're the founder of BRICS.
[00:18:58]  Okay.
[00:19:00]  Historic customer of Moscow for defense.
[00:19:04]  They bought a ton of discounted Russian oil, even during the Ukraine war.
[00:19:10]  India has built its post-independence mythology around strategic autonomy.
[00:19:19]  It doesn't bow to anyone.
[00:19:22]  It's not part of a block.
[00:19:25]  Until this week, India is now policing maritime law against the financial lifeline of Vladimir Putin.
[00:19:35]  That's not a policy tweak.
[00:19:37]  That is a tectonic shift.
[00:19:40]  The shadow fleet is not a detail.
[00:19:43]  It's how Russia sells oil outside of the sanctions regime.
[00:19:48]  It's the way Russia gets around us and the rest of the West.
[00:19:51]  It's how Moscow finances drones.
[00:19:55]  It's how they finance artillery shells and spare parts and political loyalty.
[00:20:01]  If you take down the shadow fleet, you constrict the war.
[00:20:06]  And what India is doing is not stopping there.
[00:20:09]  Iran is also using the same kind of network to move sanctioned oil.
[00:20:14]  China buys enormous quantities of discounted Russian and Iranian crude, cheap energy that subsidizes Beijing's manufacturing edge and their ambitions to rule the world.
[00:20:26]  Now, imagine India taking their navy and saying, yeah, we're going to choke that off.
[00:20:34]  Not just by America, but now joined by India, a non-aligned BRICS founder, the country that for decades used Moscow as leverage against Washington.
[00:20:47]  That's what India does.
[00:20:48]  They play both sides, but something changed.
[00:20:53]  Hmm.
[00:20:54]  What has changed?
[00:20:58]  Over the last, what, two decades, the narrative coming out of Washington itself, coming out of the United States, is America is over.
[00:21:08]  America is declining.
[00:21:09]  We're managing the decline.
[00:21:11]  We're spending ourself into oblivion.
[00:21:13]  We're not doing any of the things that you and I know we should have been doing for a very long time.
[00:21:19]  So, BRICS, the dollar is going to fall.
[00:21:22]  BRICS will replace the West.
[00:21:25]  China's century is inevitable.
[00:21:28]  That's been the narrative for the last 20 years because we hollowed out our industrial base.
[00:21:34]  We financialized absolutely everything.
[00:21:37]  And we were sitting here arguing about pronouns while China and everybody else was building factories and missiles.
[00:21:45]  And what was happening was our politicians, unbeknownst to you, I mean, they would say it, but they didn't ask you to vote on this.
[00:21:53]  They were managing America's decline.
[00:21:58]  Then Donald Trump came in 2016, but he didn't have it.
[00:22:03]  He didn't really have his arms around what everything was and how to manage everything.
[00:22:10]  Then came 2024.
[00:22:13]  When Donald Trump came in, the strategy now is not subtle.
[00:22:20]  The moves he's making are all transactional and unapologetic.
[00:22:25]  Carrot and stick and mean both of them.
[00:22:30]  But India continued buying Russian oil.
[00:22:32]  So tariffs followed.
[00:22:34]  Trade leverage followed.
[00:22:36]  Energy dominance returned as a strategic tool here in the United States.
[00:22:40]  Sanctions enforcement tightened.
[00:22:43]  U.S. naval seizures of the shadow fleet vessels off of Venezuela sent a very clear message.
[00:22:50]  We are now going to enforce maritime law.
[00:22:54]  We are not screwing around.
[00:22:56]  Carrot and stick and mean both.
[00:23:01]  Here in America, our press said that's reckless.
[00:23:04]  It's going to alienate India and the rest of the world.
[00:23:06]  It's only going to strengthen BRICS.
[00:23:10]  Except look what just happened.
[00:23:13]  We now have a sweeping trade framework that is reducing tariffs, conditional on India curbing Russian energy purchases.
[00:23:23]  First they said no, then they said yes.
[00:23:27]  Now they're in Israel partnering on the Iron Dome.
[00:23:34]  And then they begin maritime enforcement against the shadow fleet tankers.
[00:23:39]  Modi standing in Jerusalem discussing the integrated defense architecture while F-22s are sitting on the Israeli tarmac.
[00:23:47]  China is negotiating for supersonic anti-ship missiles with Iran.
[00:23:52]  India is tightening the alignment with the West's security ecosystem.
[00:23:57]  This is not chaos.
[00:23:59]  This is fundamental transformation of the way the world is working.
[00:24:06]  We have pursued cautiously India for a very long time.
[00:24:11]  Then their Silicon Valley section, Banglador, I think, it realized, wait, I've got to do things differently.
[00:24:21]  Then after the tidal wave, what was that in Japan?
[00:24:27]  Remember the big tidal wave?
[00:24:28]  I can't remember what that was called.
[00:24:29]  But anyway, something formed called the Quad.
[00:24:34]  Banglador grew.
[00:24:36]  The quad was formed.
[00:24:38]  Relations start to thaw.
[00:24:40]  Suspicion still lingered.
[00:24:42]  India still balancing their relationship between Moscow and the United States, not choosing side.
[00:24:48]  What you're witnessing now is different.
[00:24:51]  The U.S.-India relationship has been thawing because of India's Silicon Valley.
[00:24:58]  What they realized is that we need to integrate with the U.S. and the West on tech.
[00:25:06]  U.S.-India tech integration has to happen.
[00:25:09]  Massive Indian migration to the United States.
[00:25:12]  We're closer.
[00:25:13]  Shared software, AI, semiconductor, defense innovation, ecosystems, and then a detox in India from the Cold War socialism that they were going through.
[00:25:26]  Let me explain this in plain terms.
[00:25:28]  India began tying its future to the West and Western capital, Western markets, Western technology.
[00:25:36]  And it was the first slow shift from Moscow.
[00:25:39]  Now, I think India is looking at who's going to win AI, who's actually playing for the world, who actually has a solution that will work and that will want partners.
[00:25:52]  And I think they're picking us.
[00:25:54]  Then, like I said, the quad.
[00:25:56]  That's the United States, India, Japan, and Australia.
[00:25:59]  After the tsunami in 2004, they joined this thing, and then it kind of went dormant.
[00:26:05]  And then it was revised as a balancing coalition against China because China was, everybody knew China was growing in maritime power and aggression.
[00:26:15]  So India agreed to sit at the security table with America and the Indo-Pacific.
[00:26:21]  India acknowledged China as a structural threat.
[00:26:26]  That's a pretty big deal.
[00:26:28]  India began stepping into the coalition, you know, instead of strict non-alignment, it was cautious.
[00:26:36]  It was quiet.
[00:26:37]  It was incomplete.
[00:26:38]  But it was the first visible crack in India's 80-year-old posture.
[00:26:43]  Okay.
[00:26:46]  Donald Trump comes in.
[00:26:47]  He sees all of this.

=== Tariffs as Nation Building Tools (15:48) ===

[00:26:48]  He sees what's happening and he sees the opportunity.
[00:26:52]  What just happened with the shadow fleet enforcement and deeper defense integration is not incremental.
[00:27:01]  It is massive acceleration.
[00:27:03]  For 30 years, India leaned towards the West economically.
[00:27:09]  For 15 years, they leaned to the West strategically.
[00:27:13]  But now, this is a structural move.
[00:27:16]  So why does this all matter?
[00:27:18]  You're listening to the best of Glenn Beck.
[00:27:20]  Need a little more?
[00:27:21]  Check out the full show podcasts anywhere you download podcasts.
[00:27:25]  There are moments in a man's life when he has to say three words and it does not come easily.
[00:27:30]  I was wrong.
[00:27:33]  On this one, I want you to understand, I want you to listen to the whole explanation here because I don't believe I was wrong in principle.
[00:27:42]  I was wrong in understanding and possibly timing.
[00:27:48]  I've been thinking about this and playing with this for a while now, but I think I am ready to say what I once opposed, tariffs, I now think I support.
[00:28:05]  In fact, I know I support.
[00:28:07]  I believed, and I believe sincerely, that free markets are not just efficient, but they're moral.
[00:28:15]  And I still believe that free markets are moral.
[00:28:19]  That voluntary exchange between borders lifts all boats.
[00:28:23]  That protectionism is a relic of fear.
[00:28:26]  And I hate that.
[00:28:27]  And I still believe those things because historically there is truth in that.
[00:28:34]  But historically, there is also proof in the other way.
[00:28:38]  And let me explain.
[00:28:39]  After World War II, the United States stood alone.
[00:28:43]  We had everybody's gold.
[00:28:44]  From World War I and then World War II, we had everyone's gold, everybody's gold.
[00:28:50]  Our factories, we didn't lose anything to a bombing here.
[00:28:54]  Our factories were untouched.
[00:28:55]  Our industry was unmatched.
[00:28:57]  Our dollar unquestioned.
[00:28:59]  Free trade worked.
[00:29:01]  Why?
[00:29:03]  Because we were the apex predator.
[00:29:07]  In a world of economic rubble, we were Tyrannosaurus wrecks.
[00:29:11]  And in that environment, tariffs would have been stupid for us.
[00:29:16]  Why would we impose tariffs?
[00:29:18]  We wanted the world to buy our stuff.
[00:29:20]  We're an engine.
[00:29:21]  We're just churning stuff up.
[00:29:24]  Okay.
[00:29:26]  But that's not the only chapter in American history.
[00:29:29]  Let's go back further before we had everybody's gold.
[00:29:33]  The founders, and there's a great George AI on income tax, unrelated to this.
[00:29:39]  It's so funny because the George AI came up and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is exactly, I mean, this is tied directly to what I'm talking about today.
[00:29:47]  The founders did not like income tax.
[00:29:49]  They didn't want any direct tax on people.
[00:29:52]  Okay.
[00:29:52]  The founders used tariffs as the primary funding mechanism of the federal government.
[00:29:57]  They did not have an IRS.
[00:29:59]  They did not believe in income tax.
[00:30:02]  They funded the entire government on tariffs, excise tax, and duties on imports.
[00:30:07]  That's it.
[00:30:09]  It was simple.
[00:30:10]  It was transparent.
[00:30:12]  And it tied government revenue to trade rather than the confiscation of labor.
[00:30:20]  That's how we set it up at first.
[00:30:22]  Then came Abraham Lincoln and the early Republican Party.
[00:30:26]  Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans were unapologetically pro-tariff.
[00:30:30]  Why?
[00:30:31]  Ever wonder why the Republicans had for such a long time, oh, they're just for big business.
[00:30:36]  They're for big business.
[00:30:38]  It kind of comes from this in a way.
[00:30:42]  America was industrializing at the time.
[00:30:46]  We were a nothing country back in the 1800s.
[00:30:49]  We were still kind of a joke to the rest of the world.
[00:30:51]  We were a neat little experiment, let's put it that way.
[00:30:55]  And we needed to protect our infant industries from European dominance because they had all of it.
[00:31:01]  We had nothing.
[00:31:03]  So we enacted tariffs, and tariffs allowed us to make our own steel, our railroads, our manufacturing.
[00:31:10]  It helped turn a fractured farming nation into an industrial powerhouse.
[00:31:18]  Tariffs are not a sin.
[00:31:20]  They weren't then.
[00:31:21]  They aren't now.
[00:31:23]  Tariffs are a strategy.
[00:31:27]  So what happened?
[00:31:27]  Because tariffs were very, very popular from the founding of the country up until 1913.
[00:31:35]  This is when tariffs start to get a bad name.
[00:31:39]  Tariffs, what happened in 1913?
[00:31:42]  Oh, Woodrow Wilson, the Federal Reserve, and the income tax.
[00:31:48]  Okay.
[00:31:50]  Tariffs and income tax.
[00:31:54]  The federal government untethered itself from trade and tethered itself to your paycheck instead.
[00:31:59]  However, it didn't fully untether itself from trade.
[00:32:04]  And this changed everything because by 1930, Smoot-Hawley come in, and they're rightly or wrongly blamed for worsening the Great Depression because tariffs were imposed, and that's protectionism, and it's become politically toxic, okay?
[00:32:21]  I believed they were toxic.
[00:32:24]  And one reason why they were toxic that I now understand is because they were coupled with high taxes.
[00:32:32]  You cannot have both tariffs and high taxes.
[00:32:37]  I'll explain that in a minute.
[00:32:38]  So after World War II, America dominates the global economy.
[00:32:44]  Free trade is not just workable, it's to our advantage.
[00:32:50]  You got to start thinking, you know, we think all idealistically.
[00:32:54]  Well, that was the principle, free trade.
[00:32:56]  And they weren't thinking that way.
[00:32:58]  Okay, they don't think that way now.
[00:33:00]  Why?
[00:33:00]  All of a sudden they were pure and like the driven snow back in 1940 or 1950.
[00:33:05]  No.
[00:33:06]  They knew this was advantageous.
[00:33:08]  We had all the gold.
[00:33:10]  We had all of the industry.
[00:33:11]  We needed to sell stuff to the rest of the world.
[00:33:14]  So we opened our markets because we owned the markets.
[00:33:20]  And conservatives, including myself, inherited that worldview and we never asked beyond that worldview.
[00:33:28]  Free trade just became synonymous with prosperity because there are times when it is.
[00:33:37]  Tariffs become synonymous with stagnation because when you have all of the cards, why would you block your own market?
[00:33:45]  If you're trying to sell to the rest of the world, don't do that.
[00:33:48]  Okay.
[00:33:50]  Inflation became the argument enter because that's what I always argue.
[00:33:55]  Well, tariffs are going to raise prices.
[00:33:56]  Case close.
[00:33:58]  Okay.
[00:33:58]  But here's what I failed to see.
[00:34:00]  Free trade works when all of the players are playing free.
[00:34:04]  We all know that, right?
[00:34:06]  It works when your trading partners are not subsidizing industries, manipulating currencies, stealing intellectual property, weaponizing supply chains, using slave labor.
[00:34:17]  We've said those things, but it never gets you over the hill.
[00:34:21]  Okay.
[00:34:23]  Here's what got me over the hill.
[00:34:26]  Tariffs or free trade works when you own the markets.
[00:34:32]  But there comes a time when you then have to look at it and say, okay, wait a minute, wait a minute.
[00:34:37]  Now we own the markets, but everybody else has weaponized trade against us.
[00:34:42]  And now we're hollowing out our own industrial base.
[00:34:47]  You know, we're financing our adversaries' rise.
[00:34:51]  We see China, we're funding that.
[00:34:53]  What are we doing?
[00:34:55]  We're hollowing ourselves out and we're funding them.
[00:34:58]  This is insanity.
[00:35:00]  Okay.
[00:35:01]  It works when trade is reciprocal, but when it's not, free trade becomes unilateral surrender.
[00:35:09]  And for decades, we told ourselves that cheap goods were proof of wisdom.
[00:35:13]  No, it was just proof of cheap goods.
[00:35:17]  Because while we were getting the cheap goods, our factories closed.
[00:35:20]  Our communities were collapsing.
[00:35:22]  Our strategic supply chains were all moved overseas.
[00:35:26]  We financialized our entire economy while others were industrializing theirs.
[00:35:34]  And we confused low prices with national strength.
[00:35:42]  I didn't get this.
[00:35:44]  I mean, I've slowly been getting it, but I didn't really understand it until I started to see the world, the bigger picture that Donald Trump is doing with tariffs, okay?
[00:35:56]  Because I believe 2024 was our last call.
[00:35:59]  We were at last call.
[00:36:01]  You either have to change your ways or you're going to die as a nation, okay?
[00:36:05]  Structurally, we have to change.
[00:36:09]  The era of effortlessness, American dominance, is over, okay?
[00:36:14]  Unless we rebuild, unless we retool, unless we think out of the box, unless we start new strategies, unless we start saying, wait a minute, this doesn't work.
[00:36:25]  What about we try this?
[00:36:27]  Okay.
[00:36:28]  The lights will slowly and then quickly go out.
[00:36:33]  I have had very long conversations with the president about tariffs.
[00:36:37]  He has been remarkable in his conversations, only because he's been honest.
[00:36:42]  He'll listen to me go on and on and on.
[00:36:43]  He'd be like, well, Glenn, I've already thought of all those things.
[00:36:46]  I think you're wrong.
[00:36:46]  I'm going to do tariffs.
[00:36:48]  It's been refreshing to have a guy who will listen to you, actually take you seriously, listen, and then say, thought about that, thought about that, thought about that.
[00:36:55]  You haven't changed my mind.
[00:36:58]  But I didn't understand his vision.
[00:37:04]  I believe because he has the vision to see the world economically as it truly is, but also the vision to see economically, business-wise, how it can be, he understood tariffs are not just punishment and higher prices.
[00:37:26]  You use tariffs strategically as leverage, as negotiation, tariffs as industrial policy without the bureaucracy.
[00:37:36]  Tariffs used strategically, not universally.
[00:37:39]  Tariffs used as a tool to bring trading partners to the table.
[00:37:44]  Tariffs being used to build domestic capacity.
[00:37:47]  When he keeps saying about these $18 trillion, everybody just, they blow it off like it's no big deal.
[00:37:53]  That's $18 trillion.
[00:37:56]  That's just about half of our entire national debt.
[00:38:01]  That $18 trillion is not being given to us.
[00:38:04]  That's foreign countries saying, I'm going to invest and build factories in your country, and I'm going to build about $18 trillion worth of factories.
[00:38:17]  What does that mean?
[00:38:18]  That means jobs, $18 trillion worth of factories.
[00:38:24]  Let's say half of that is true.
[00:38:28]  That's pretty remarkable.
[00:38:30]  You know what that will do?
[00:38:31]  That will rebuild our industrial base, which we hollowed out because we didn't have tariffs.
[00:38:38]  I had never seen them deployed in the way he's deploying them.
[00:38:42]  You know, I didn't understand the full history of it.
[00:38:46]  The founders did.
[00:38:47]  The founders did.
[00:38:48]  Lincoln did.
[00:38:49]  Early Republicans did.
[00:38:53]  I think we as a nation understood the other side in the 1940s and 50s, how they could be strategically removed and worked to our advantage, but for a limited time.
[00:39:03]  Instead, we married into them and said, universal principle.
[00:39:06]  It's not.
[00:39:07]  It's not.
[00:39:09]  Tariffs are not isolationism.
[00:39:13]  Tariffs, now listen to this, because, man, when I thought of this, I thought, oh my gosh, I've always hated two words.
[00:39:20]  Nation building.
[00:39:22]  We're nation building.
[00:39:24]  Oh, my gosh.
[00:39:26]  My eyes start to hemorrhage when I hear nation building, right?
[00:39:34]  I've always hated that.
[00:39:36]  You know why?
[00:39:37]  Because those two words always meant we were building someone else's nation at our expense.
[00:39:43]  How many times have you or heard people say on the left and the right, why are we nation building?
[00:39:49]  Our schools are failing.
[00:39:50]  Our factories are closing.
[00:39:52]  Our streets, our airports are falling apart.
[00:39:54]  Why are we building somebody else's nation?
[00:39:55]  Let's use the money here.
[00:39:59]  To everything there is a season.
[00:40:03]  We were nation building.
[00:40:05]  That's what we were doing in the 1940s through the 1960s.
[00:40:09]  We were building other nations that had been completely destroyed.
[00:40:13]  So we allowed them to put tariffs.
[00:40:17]  We bought their goods.
[00:40:18]  They did it.
[00:40:19]  We were just open.
[00:40:20]  We sold them our stuff.
[00:40:21]  It was good for us and good for them for a while.
[00:40:25]  But to everything there is a season.
[00:40:27]  After a while, they caught up.
[00:40:30]  They rebuilt their nations.
[00:40:32]  And we helped them do that.
[00:40:33]  But then we just kept this in place.
[00:40:34]  And by the time we hit the year 2000, China is rising.
[00:40:38]  Russia is weaponizing energy.
[00:40:40]  Our factories, our treasuries, our institutions, all hollowed out.
[00:40:45]  Okay.
[00:40:47]  No tariffs, not noble at some point.
[00:40:51]  They become negligent.
[00:40:54]  So this is why I'm reversing myself.
[00:40:56]  Not because I have been in free market.
[00:40:58]  I believe in the free market.
[00:41:00]  But I think I've misunderstood the free market and to everything there is a season.
[00:41:05]  Okay.
[00:41:06]  A true free market cannot exist if your industrial base is gone.
[00:41:12]  And what no tariffs did to us, we did it intentionally, was nation build someone else at our expense.
[00:41:22]  After a while, it hollowed us out.
[00:41:25]  Okay.
[00:41:26]  You cannot have a free market if supply chains are controlled by China adversaries.
[00:41:32]  A free market doesn't exist if your middle class has been hollowed out all in the name of theoretical efficiency.
[00:41:39]  Tariffs, properly understood, properly used, are not anti-market.
[00:41:45]  They are a defensive tool to restore market sovereignty and to rebuild our nation now.
[00:41:52]  When these tariffs are nation building, our nation.
[00:41:57]  You know, and I bought the inflation argument as the strongest valid point.
[00:42:02]  Tariffs raise prices.
[00:42:04]  Yeah.
[00:42:05]  Yeah.
[00:42:06]  Yeah, they can.
[00:42:09]  And if you let them stand with high income tax alongside the tariffs, you've got the worst of all worlds.
[00:42:17]  So here's where I want to go further.
[00:42:20]  Tariffs and income tax cannot coexist.
[00:42:26]  Okay.
[00:42:26]  They cannot coexist.
[00:42:29]  Donald Trump talked about this.
[00:42:31]  This is what got me thinking on this part.
[00:42:32]  This is what finally pushed me over the edge.
[00:42:34]  He started to talk about getting rid of the income tax.