Best of the Program | 1/9/25

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California Wildfire, compassionate message that needs to be heard if we're going to change things in California.

Look back to what happened to the San Francisco earthquake, the fire of 1906, and how will it compare to what is happening in California, not only during the fire, but the response and the rebuilding of California and the death of the internet.

What will 2025 have in store for us on the internet?

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You're listening to the best of the blend back program.

So let's talk about what's happening in California.

And my heart is truly heavy for those people

who have families in California, the people in California that have lost their homes or still fearing that they might lose their home.

You know,

this is a rate.

If you've never seen a forest fire, you can't really describe it.

It's almost like a tornado.

Unless you've been in a tornado or seen the damage afterwards, you really don't know what you're talking about with a tornado.

It is unlike anything I've ever seen.

Same thing with a forest fire.

We had a small forest fire here

up in the mountains of Idaho.

Last summer, it was just about, I don't know, two miles down the street from me.

Luckily, the winds weren't there.

But if the winds had kicked up, it probably would have burned my house down.

I mean, it is,

you cannot describe a forest fire.

It is, when it's out of control, you have no chance.

Just get out of there.

And my heart breaks for people who are going through this right now and breaks for the people of California.

Let me address that person right now.

If you happen to be in California, know that you're not alone.

You may feel like the flames have stolen everything from you, but, and I was thinking about this, well, this summer when I came back from that forest fire and thought all of this could be gone.

The things that you have in your house, they are just things, but

there are certain things, memories, pictures, things that you have collected over the years with your family that can't be replaced.

And I know what that must feel like,

but

two things.

One, you're alive, you have your family,

and help is on the way.

My charity, Mercury One, is along with the Red Cross and everybody else,

is working tirelessly to bring relief and comfort and assistance to those who are affected right now.

We are doing what our government is asking us to do.

We don't want to get into the way of forest or firefighters.

They have enough trouble.

But

I want to talk to you first with compassion about why this keeps happening and what California needs to do about it this is not my state this is their state but if you're asking for our help you know

one of the hardest things I've ever had to do is

I had a friend I went to church with,

and he called me one time and he said, Glenn, I really need, I don't remember what it was, let's just say $1,000

because

I got to get home, some family stuff.

And

I was about to say yes, but

in my faith,

it's the largest

welfare program, I think, in the world.

And we take care of, you know, not just our own, but anybody who lives in the district of that particular church.

The bishop is responsible for them, and we have to take care of our neighbors.

And so with that, it's very orderly.

You know, when you have a problem, or if there is a problem with a neighbor or something, you go to the church and say, hey, my neighbor who's not a member of the church is really in trouble.

Can you help?

And they usually will.

But with that, there are certain things that you have to do.

You just don't get free money.

You know,

you have to change your life.

You'll take classes on how to, you know, manage money or whatever the thing is.

And

so I said to this person, I was just about to say yes.

And I said, hey, have you talked to the bishop yet?

And he said, no, no, I haven't.

Now, that's unusual

in my faith.

If you have a big problem, especially with money, you normally would go to the bishop.

And

I said,

okay, let me call you back.

And I called the bishop and I said, hey, so-and-so just called me and I can do this.

You know, is there anything I'm missing here?

And he said, Glenn, I'm so glad you called me.

He said, yes.

He said, this particular individual is struggling and

we've been helping him for a while, but he won't

connect with the problem and correct the problems.

And he said, he's doing this from time to time.

He'll call people and they'll just give him money, and then that hurts it.

He said, so I'm going to ask you to do the thing that is probably going to be the hardest thing you've ever done.

I know you have the money to help.

Please don't, because it will set him back

and not let him feel the full ramifications.

And I said, oh,

okay, so I had to call my friend back and say, I can't right now.

And I felt awful.

I felt absolutely awful about it.

But if we don't talk and face

the problem,

you're never going to solve it.

Now, this again is not my problem.

California,

you're not my problem.

Okay.

I mean, I want to help.

And as a citizen of America, you're another citizen.

You are my neighbor.

I want to help.

I want to help people all around the world.

But first, you have to help yourself.

You know, natural disasters most times are out of our control.

The extent of the destruction in California, you know, could be mitigated if we made smarter choices about how, you know, Californians manage their land and their resources and their votes.

California has been playing with fire, literally, for a long time.

Their forests are full of underbrush, dead trees, dried vegetation, which is kindling for those flames.

The material builds up on the forest floor.

It's a perfect condition for fire.

If you're going to start a fire, go to California because that's perfect condition.

I'm not saying that literally, by the way.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

You know, you go to places like Sweden or Finland or Austria, countries that have large, vulnerable forests, they understand the importance of forest management and they prioritize the clearing out of the underbrush and the dead trees.

And they, because they're a little socialist in nature, they do it in a sustainable way.

They partner with local industries that will take that material from the forest floor and they use it as biomass energy for other products.

So it doesn't just reduce the fire risk, it creates jobs and a healthier ecosystem.

Here in America, some states do it right.

I mean, Florida has fires, but not like California.

Why?

Because they do controlled burns, forest thinning, routine practices.

You know what?

Honestly, God does this.

Lightning.

Before we would put forest fires out or could,

lightning would strike.

and that would burn the forest down and it replenishes the soil and everything else.

Well, we don't want to do that because our houses are now surrounded in, you know, by trees and forest and everything else.

so we have to either do a control burn or we have to go in and take all of that stuff that lightning would have taken out to replenish everything but californians won't do that

why

the answer lies in bureaucracy and priorities um and and really honestly, eggheads.

You know, these people from the cities that want to manage our forest have no idea.

It's common sense.

The environmental regulations, the lawsuits that block or delay any kind of forest management, ideology has gotten in the way of the practical, the life-saving solutions.

And this has to change, California.

It has to.

You see devastation every year.

And, you know, honestly,

I really don't like insurance companies.

But insurance companies, what they do, it's honestly, it's legal gambling.

They are gambling that you are going to pay them more money than they have to pay out as a collective.

Somebody's house might burn down.

You might have something catastrophic, cancer, or something that costs a buttload of money, but they're betting that all of the people in their community, they're sharing the risk and not everybody's going to get cancer at the same time.

That way they can make money.

It's legalized gambling.

Honestly, it is.

Well, that's the way insurance works.

And I don't like insurance companies because many times they're, you know, scamming people or hurting people.

However, let's not blame the insurance companies for getting out.

If I'm a company, and I have to make a bet, I'm pulling out of California.

It's landslides, it's fires, it's floods, it's every year whole swaths of the state are

burning down to the ground.

What kind of bet is that?

How do you keep a country?

Now, what they'll say is they'll do what they did when you couldn't get flood insurance on the coastlines.

We used to say, well, then don't live there.

Or if you live there, accept the risk yourself.

Okay.

Instead, we didn't think that was fair, so we came up with government funding.

If you couldn't get flood insurance, no longer was it don't live in a flood zone.

Build your house somewhere.

I don't know if you've seen the country, but there's lots of open space.

Don't build in a flood zone.

Instead,

we wanted to help everybody live their dreams.

So now we pay as a federal government for insurance for the coastlines.

Why?

The other issue is water.

And let me tell you what the problem is in California.

Now, we know what the immediate problem is.

They don't have firefighters don't have water coming through the fire hydrants.

Why is that?

You're listening to the best of the Glen Beck program.

Ever utter the phrase,

Will they ever learn?

Will they ever learn?

You might say that about your kids from time to time.

Are you ever going to learn this lesson?

We learn from disaster, usually, our own usually created disaster, or something terrible happens to you.

Somebody dies tragically, something happens, your life turns, you know, on one moment.

And you can either take that and learn from it, or you can wallow in what's happened to you.

And that leads to your own destruction.

And that's where I think God says, will they ever learn?

Will they ever learn?

This isn't bad.

This, yes, changed their course, but it's not bad, it doesn't have to be.

Take the bad, and now find out what you want to do with that.

How do you grow from that?

Let me tell you a great story about this.

It relates to the fires in California.

It was early, early in the

morning, it was April 18th,

and

people were jolted out of bed.

They were on their feet.

They could feel

the earth beneath them trembling.

Not a shudder.

It was a violent, relentless earthquake.

Tore through buildings, streets, lives, merciless power.

But it only lasted 42 seconds.

But in 42 seconds, everything changed.

The ground rippled like waves.

It split open streets.

It swallowed homes entirely.

Buildings crumbled as if they were made of paper.

The Great Palace Hotel, which was a symbol of the city's wealth and prestige, collapsed, smoldering ruin.

People were screaming in terror

for those 42 seconds.

But they scream and ran in terror in the minutes and hours that followed.

The earthquake was only the beginning in 1906 in San Francisco.

What followed there was an inferno unlike anybody had ever really seen.

It reduced the entire city to ash.

Firefighters back then with the steam-powered pumps,

they were brave, they were desperate, they tried to battle the flames, but just like today, no water.

The water lines back then were severed because of the quake.

No way to stop the blaze.

Last-ditch effort,

they decided to dynamite the buildings.

Can you imagine this?

They decided that they had to take dynamite and blow up all of the buildings, everything, to create some sort of a fire break.

And so they did.

It didn't work.

By the time the fires burnt out, 80% of San Francisco was gone.

80% of the city nearly 500 city blocks 28,000 buildings were destroyed 3,000 people were dead

half of the population of the city 250,000 men women and children homeless now what we're looking at is bad but it's not this

they were living for weeks and weeks and weeks in makeshift tents.

They were living in parks, on the beaches, in the streets.

And for a long time, the air that they were breathing was filled with smoke and ash.

And it wasn't just the city that burned.

It was the livelihoods, the futures, the dreams.

People came to San Francisco at that time because it was a new fresh start.

Well, when you're faced with those times,

you have a decision.

I'm not living here.

I mean, I don't know if you saw the TV show 1882, is it 82, 83?

And it's about the beginning of Yellowstone and what it took for the pioneers just to cross over to get to a place like Montana.

It was insane.

Insane.

Anybody who tried to do that, I mean, we don't give our pioneers enough respect.

What they faced to get across the mountains and the west was

nuts.

well that's the kind of people that were out in california at the time in san francisco

they didn't just rebuild first of all they didn't wait for the government the federal government to come in they didn't wait for everybody to tell them what to do they weren't

i mean it was bad it was really bad

And they did have people that came in and help, but they had to do it themselves.

Now, think about this.

They decided that they were going to rebuild.

They refused to give up.

There was such devastation that it would have broken the spirit of most people.

But the city did something extraordinary.

All of the citizens refused to give up.

Almost immediately they began to rebuild, not just their homes and their businesses, but their entire way of life.

There was nothing.

So the first thing that had to happen was all the citizens of San Francisco needed to clear the rubble, brick by brick.

They had to get all of it out.

Then they began laying the foundations for a new San Francisco.

Engineers, architects all came together to create plans for a stronger,

safer city, and one that they hoped could withstand future earthquakes, but it didn't.

But they tried.

And they didn't just rebuild.

They reimagined.

Now, this happened in 1906.

How long do you think it's going to take before you're going to be able to go in the Pacific Palisades?

You're going to be able to go into California and you won't see anything from the fire.

How long before that's a new and just magical thriving area again?

That place is different because of all of the money that is there.

Think about Appalachia.

Think about what's happening in the Carolinas.

Think about what's happening in Hawaii right now, where they're still trying to rebuild.

How long, they don't, they're not building houses there yet.

How long is that going to take?

So

within nine years

in San Francisco in 1906, by 1915,

San Francisco had completely rebuilt.

They stood ready to show the world what determination and hard work could accomplish.

They were part, they had already been signed up for the Panama Pacific International Exposition.

This is like a world's fair, but

it was in honor of the completion of the Panama Canal, and it was to show what the American spirit could do.

And so San Francisco raised their hand.

Remember, there's nothing left.

They raised their hand that we want to host that.

We want to host that.

Now, think of this: where ashes nine years before covered the ground, there was new breathtaking architecture.

The Palace of Fine Arts, it's still standing in San Francisco.

It is a landmark.

It is stunning to see in person.

It was the symbol.

They built it as the symbol of the triumph of the soul.

They said, we're going to create beauty out of this, out of these ashes.

And it wasn't a fair.

The Panama exhibition of 1915 was not just a fair.

It was a declaration.

It was saying to the world, we're not only still here, we're strong, and we're going to lead into the future.

This is the thing that really is exciting me about what Donald Trump has been doing lately.

We're not talking about just survival anymore.

Have you noticed that?

I said to my wife last night, I'm beginning to love my job again.

She said, really?

And I said, yeah, because I'm not, not, I don't have to just give people bad news all the day.

I don't have to just say, Here, put your hole in this or put your finger in this hole because that's going to help hold the dike together just a little longer, knowing that we're all going to be wiped out.

We're actually talking about building a new future that is exciting.

That's what happened in 1906.

California, once again, is

facing challenges, and it's going to feel overwhelming.

But

the question is:

does California have the leadership to have vision?

Do the people have it in them anymore, like the people in San Francisco did, that they're not going to be wiped out, they're not going to sit down, they're not going to wait for somebody else.

Does the city and its citizens have it in themselves to create something better?

I come at times like this and I look at tragedies and I know how dark things can seem,

but I always pull out of this and I'm watching California for this.

And I think you're beginning to see it to some degree.

But I know I saw it in North Carolina.

The human spirit is stronger than any disaster.

When you come together,

we can rebuild the cities.

We can rebuild the lives, the communities, the futures for our children.

May the people in California have the courage and determination

that their forebears did in San Francisco and rise as a phoenix from the ashes.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and don't forget, rate us on iTunes.

Stu, you said a minute ago that there is a story about the death of the internet, because that's,

I mean, it's cleverly worded here, but that's what I predicted

on last night's show.

And you said two stories came up about that last night?

Yeah, I saw a couple.

I kind of went into a little bit of a rabbit hole on this last night because I think it's fascinating.

But I hadn't really heard that much conversation about it until hearing your prediction from

the show last night.

And it's basically, you were talking about the death of the Internet, that basically we're going to lose whatever we had in the Internet.

And while that might sound appealing,

I'll give you the whole prediction here in a minute.

Let's hear what they were saying.

Oh, okay.

Let's hear what you were saying.

Got it, got it.

So the news story is from The Guardian.

AI-generated slop is slowly killing the Internet.

Why is no one trying to stop it?

And it goes into the fact that

you start going through social media, you start going through

searching and Google, and you wind up finding basically nonsense.

I find this all the time when I'm reading stories.

Like, I'm reading stories.

I'm like, there's no way a human wrote this.

It's just terrible.

It's like, you know, people can tell it's bad.

And it's like written in a format that is really familiar with from AI stories, like these short paragraphs with new headlines a lot that are kind of,

it doesn't really give you any information.

And I started going down a sort of a rabbit hole in that.

And they're now people who are basically mastering the skills of almost taking the internet into a time machine to 2023 and

figuring out ways to search on Google to exclude everything from 2024 on.

Because the second AI started, the internet results get worse and worse and worse and worse.

You look for pictures of things.

You can't tell if the pictures are real pictures or not.

And AI is now improving to a level

that,

like, for example, like if you, they have these stories that kind of pop up every once in a while of like, you know, AI model is making millions of dollars on OnlyFans or something.

And like, it's this some completely ridiculous, over-the-top looking, buxom

AI figure.

Then the new generation of these, apparently, are AI

people made

that look

kind of, I don't want to say

frumpy in comparison, but like

real.

Like the type of picture that like an actual woman would look like, you know what I mean?

Right.

And they're doing this now and just funneling this to people.

And they're taking in a world that doesn't, you know, even exist.

So you have to now kind of retroactively go into a time capsule and say, hey, I want to search Google, but only give me your results from 2023 and previous,

because that way I'll know it's actually at least somewhat real.

So that kind of touches on some of the things that I was predicting last night.

And ChatGPT,

Jason ran all my predictions through ChatGPT and said, what are the odds of this happening?

This one came back with 90%.

Okay.

Listen to what I was talking about last night.

The internet will be, whoops, the internet will be destroyed and reborn in 2025.

I know that sounds absolutely nuts,

but it's actually not.

It's something that we have talked about

and people like Elon Musk have talked about it.

It's just,

it's not as bad as you think it is.

It's actually something that has to be done.

It's a little

understood reality that you don't really

have access to the internet.

What you get is access to a little sliver of the internet

that

it kind of brokers it's an index and it brokers what the internet will give to all of us the internet has been dying a slow death for a while now and everybody's been aware of it and what the problem is is that have you ever done have you ever gone on the internet and you're reading some great article and then you're like oh it says click here and watch the video or click here and see this study And you click there and you get a 404.

You get, you know, there's nothing.

It's just been removed.

And you're like, oh, crap.

Well, that's because

about,

let me look in here.

What is it?

A recent study found a thousand peer-reviewed research papers published as recently as 2015.

More than 35% of those are now dead links.

So 35% of what you're clicking on from those things that have been published since 2015, now dead because somebody moved them, somebody took them down,

they weren't valid, whatever is, it's no longer linked there.

So what happens?

If we don't,

well, let me put it this way.

Do you want the internet to appear like California appears today?

The reason why California keeps catching on fire is because they refuse to clear the underbrush.

all of the dead stuff and that dead stuff catches on fire and then burns down all the good stuff.

What this would do if we don't start cleaning it out is it will

make it impossible.

You'll spend so much time just going to dead links.

So we have to do this.

The problem is, is that the reason why we haven't done it before is because it requires individuals to do it.

And

that just is time consuming.

But now AI can go and find all of those things

and remove all of the dead stuff or the stuff that's not relevant.

So as we give the internet kind of a digital enema, if you will,

you're going to the good people at Google to clear it out, scour the active web, to let AI find and store what it determines to be relevant

content and live links.

I don't trust Google, nor do I trust AI to do this.

It's a little frightening to think that

the record of history, you know, this is like going into a library and having, you know, one person who has been trained by a group of people that you don't know or you don't necessarily trust go in and go, you know what?

Let's go into the library.

There's some few pages and a few books that we just got to rip out.

I'm not comfortable with that.

So you're kind of in this situation where

it's necessary, but also a little terrifying because of the power we are now giving to AI

to

be our memory.

Not necessarily good.

With our research, I always tell the guy who

prints all of our stories every day that puts it together for a morning newsletter that you can get in your email box.

I tell him, I want you to take and get those stories stories and download them and burn them on a disk because I know they're going to disappear at some point.

They'll become irrelevant.

And we want the original stories, not just the story of us quoting the story, but the actual story.

That's going to become harder and harder now.

But we can just trust AI,

right?

So what does ChatGPT say about this?

From ChatGPT, the probability of this happening, Glenn's prediction,

90% probability.

They say specifically, AI-driven tools will continue to restructure the internet.

Dead links, outdated content, and paywalls will give way to AI-curated summaries and dynamic updates.

The internet, as we know it.

Ooh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Wait, AI

curated summaries?

Yes.

That doesn't sound good.

No.

They go on.

The internet, as we know it, will feel more like a centralized, streamlined knowledge platform controlled by a few gatekeepers, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI.

This change will be seamless to users, but will raise concerns about censorship and bias.

You think, Glenn?

Wow.

Wow.

That's terrifying.

I'm not freaked out by mine.

I'm freaked out by ChatGPT.

So that's, you know, that kind of plays into what you're talking about, of letting AI

come in and generate things.

You know, what was the story we were talking about the other day, Stu?

And I said,

get that from ChatGPT.

See if you can verify that through ChatGPT.

And remember that the story came back and part of it, it was very, very accurate, except parts of it were like starting to say, you know, like, well, but that's really kind of Donald Trump.

Do you remember this?

It was so skewed to the left,

but it was subtle enough to where the average person may not catch it.

All they have to do is delete all of the things that are no longer relevant

and you can't find it anymore.

I don't know.

I want to find the work of the people who said, no, it's a flat earth.

I think those are important things to have.

It's not relevant, flat earthers, but you know what?

If you don't know it, you're going to come around to it.

And we're going back around to flat earthers again.

Well, first of all, I'm looking at the window right now.

It looks pretty flat to me, so I don't know what you're talking about.

I know.

Well,

you can't see the curve when you're up in an airplane.

That's right.

Thank you.

No, but I think that's true.

And I don't remember that particular story, but that's going to be a massive problem.

We talked about an example of that with CNN

the other day, where CNN started a story with

one of the most amazing political comeback ever has started with Donald Trump.

And by the end, it was like, how did Donald Trump get power when his people invaded the Capitol?

And it was the same story with just a different headline every few hours.

None of those were archived, by the way.

You know, there's no archive of what those were.

They're only archived because we took screenshots of them as the day went on.

And

this is a massive story.

I mean, a lot of people would say, like, well, I'm not sure, I don't want to use AI.

I don't want to use Chat GPT.

I'm not going to do it.

Well,

you know, all this stuff is built into these systems.

I mean, Google, for example, and you you search Google, and now the first thing that pops up every time is an AI summary of what you're looking for.

Right or wrong, it's just AI is the first thing you see, and they put it right at the top for you to take in.

And then under that, there are some, you know, the little question section and then the actual links that we're all kind of used to when it comes to using Google.

What does that mean?

Well, they're now instead of, it's not like, and we've always talked about like how Google can deprioritize links, put them on page three instead of page one.

And that affects people.

Imagine when they're writing

with their own AI,

the same company that was, you know, when you tried to make a knight from the medieval times would have a black and an Asian and LGBTQ character pop up in their photo generating software, that same company is now writing the summaries of everything you search for.

I will tell you, I considered putting on the list this year, but it's far too early.

But it will be coming, you know, probably in the next five years.

And that will be, this is the year that historians will look back and say, that was the beginning of the end of free will.

But we are approaching that because of things like that.

You won't be able to access the information.

And

the information that is being given to you is all curated to shape you.

one way or another.

And if you add advertising budgets into that, you're not going to know what you know and what you don't know, what you chose, if it was your idea or somebody else's idea or AI's idea.

And you will eventually end up with a death of free will.

You'll still have a choice, but they've nudged you exactly where you need to be for them.

And so you'll still feel like it, but you won't have it.

It's coming soon to a theater near you.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.