Best of the Program | Guests: Sen. JD Vance & Rep. Jim Jordan | 9/19/23

What a day.

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You don't want to miss a second of today's show.

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You're listening to the best of the Blenbeck program.

I'm going to tell you the truth here on something.

You know, J.D.

Vance, I've always thought was a good guy, liked him, but my opinion changed on him when I found out that Mitt Romney said he was one of the worst people in the world.

He's become a god to me.

JD Vance, welcome to the program.

How are you?

Good, Glenn.

How are you doing?

Very good.

Okay.

So first things first, we have to ask you,

this spokesperson for the Ukrainian military,

I mean,

if we didn't live in the world where nothing makes sense, I would say that's completely bogus.

But I don't know what's true anymore.

Oh, Glenn, I mean, if you just played a video of this person, I would think it was an SNL skit or something.

I can't actually believe that this is the real world, but it is, and it shows how farcical it is.

Let's sort of focus on the substance here, because I think it's very important to sort of nail down what exactly this person said.

So, number one,

they said any and it's a man, by the way, it's sort of a transgendered man

saying that we're going to

hunt down Russian propagandists.

Okay.

Russian propagandists are anybody from, if you judge by the standards of the American media, anybody from Tucker Carlson to yours truly.

Many friends of mine in the American media have been accused of being Russian propagandists.

So is that an explicit threat to anybody who challenges the party line in Ukraine?

Because that's what it sounds like.

Now, the other thing we have to remember is this is not some random Yahoo who went over to Ukraine.

This is the official English language spokesman for the Ukrainian military.

We know that to be true, right?

We know that to be true.

We know that to be true.

Now, here is the crazy thing, Glynn.

I don't want to get too much in the weeds because we're still learning a lot.

There was a Daily Beast story reported two years ago about this individual where they claim to be a member of the Ukrainian military.

Sorry, sorry, excuse me.

They claim to be a member of the U.S.

intelligence services.

This is two years ago.

So are we actually dealing with a person who used to be employed by the U.S.

government, went over to Ukraine, and now is threatening to kill people for exercising their First Amendment rights?

Because that's what it looks a lot like to me.

And we need to get to the bottom of this.

This, in my view, I'm selfish about this, Glenn, should be the biggest story in American media.

This guy,

I guess pretending to be a woman, or

I don't know which direction this runs.

I never do.

Pretending to speak and threaten people for exercising their First Amendment rights.

It is crazy.

If this is an official spokesperson, why are we sending a dime to Ukraine?

They are threatening American citizens.

And by the way,

I don't understand because,

you know, the left, well, no, the left has always traditionally hated anti-war people, haven't they?

Oh, no, they didn't.

We should not be sending a dime to them.

Well, that's exactly right in fact our tax dollars are being used to threaten american citizens with violence for exercising their rights right now now this sort of gets to the heart of the lie at the ukraine russia war glenn and i i don't know where you are on this but i've sort of been a skeptic of this from the very beginning oh yeah if you sort of if you listen to what people say they say it's a war for freedom that's not well we know zelensky's arresting christian priests and now his spokesperson is threatening american citizens with violence for exercising their right we're told it's a war for democracy, and yet they've suspended elections indefinitely.

At what point do we look around and say, we're not funding a war for democracy, we're funding something else entirely?

Let's have an honest conversation about what that is.

We're funding the Great Reset.

That's what's happening.

We are funding BlackRock and Goldman Sachs and everybody else going in to rebuild.

We've already sent

over half the amount adjusted for inflation that we sent for the Marshall Plan.

That rebuilt a lot of Europe with the Marshall Plan.

We've already sent half of that money over there, and we're talking about rebuilding while the war is still going on.

And he's opened up the stock market.

He's, Zelensky has, he, our stock market, he keeps talking about invest in Ukraine because the business is going to be good.

We are funneling all this money to God only knows who.

Yeah, it may very well be the biggest racket in the history of the last century.

I certainly am open to that.

But whatever we're funding,

here's what I'm sure about, Glenn.

We're certainly funding a very deadly war with no insight.

We're funding a war that is destroying one of the most

important culturally nations in Eastern Europe.

We're funding a war that is enriching a lot of Americans and a lot of defense contractors in the United States of America.

And I still am not clear on what our actual interest is.

On top of that, we're exhausting weapons supplies that we may need, God forbid, if there's a war in another part of the world, like, for example, East Asia.

So this has just gotten completely out of control.

Zelensky is going to be in D.C.

on Thursday.

We'll see if anybody lets me get close to him because I've sort of gone back and forth on what I would actually ask him.

And I think what I would ask him is, the last time you were in town, we were told that the counteroffensive would be a major inflection point, and now we're being told we need to buckle in for the long haul.

Is that another $100 billion, another $500 billion?

How much are American taxpayers expected to fund this thing?

When, to your point, Glenn, we know that a lot of this is ultimately going to get fundled to the American, or I should say the international corporate class that seems to actually rule the world.

All right, let me change subjects.

I haven't talked about the UAW strike.

Because I don't understand

what they're they're thinking, they're asking for a doubling in salary.

And you know what?

Everybody's hurting right now.

So if you can get, you know, but this is a doubling of salary.

It is a rest, the restoration of

things that were not financially feasible and taken off during another.

They're asking for the world.

Meanwhile, because of this administration, Ford loses, what, 30, 35 grand per electric vehicle.

They're $2 billion

in the hole every year now because of the electric vehicle.

They can't even build enough trucks now.

You have to wait for a Ford truck.

And China, we just found out, is the leader in 19

higher tech fields, including

battery operations and the production of batteries and the production of EVs where they're already dominant.

What are the unions and everybody else doing to our factories?

Well, look, first of all, we're subsidizing industry to your point, that the Chinese dominate.

And it's not just the batteries, it's the components, it's the minerals, it's the mining, it's the entire supply chain from when you start digging stuff out of the ground to when you actually start driving these cars.

The Chinese dominate it.

So every time we subsidize an EV, what we're really doing is subsidizing the destruction of a gas-powered automobile job with a Chinese EV job.

We need to be honest about that.

Now, Glenn, I'm sympathetic to the factory workers because, like you said, everybody's getting screwed with Biden's inflation.

Everybody's trying to struggle.

And yeah, look, a lot of their demands are excessive, but we have to remember this is a negotiation.

And what I'd encourage all of my fellow conservatives out there is to remember the real lesson of the last 40 years.

In my view, that lesson is when we ship our industrial base to China, American consumers lose, American workers lose, and the American people become weaker.

We become weaker as a nation.

And that's what we're doing here.

So we have to keep our eye on the prize here and say the Biden administration is doubling down on 40 years of failed policy.

Let's ship all of our industrial jobs overseas and pretend and hope that workers are going to somehow benefit.

They're not going to benefit.

Consumers aren't going to benefit.

These car companies aren't going to benefit in the end.

It's a lose-lose proposition for everybody.

So, look, I think the workers, some of their demands are reasonable.

I think some of the demands are the things that you do when you go into a negotiation.

You sometimes ask more than what you think you're going to get.

But the core issue here is, look, when you ask who has been the biggest advocate of EVs and the transition to EVs, Glenn, it has been the big three automakers themselves, the corporate leadership, and also the union leadership that we screwed the union membership and the consumers.

I know a lot of auto workers, they are not on board with this transition to EVs.

So the leadership needs to better reflect the views of the membership here and save this industry.

And that's what I say about the unions.

I'm not talking about the workers.

The unions.

The unions are in bed with the government.

They're in line with the Green New Deal.

They're in line with all of this stuff.

I don't know how they benefit in the end, but there's clearly some way the union heads actually benefit.

But the people are being screwed.

You are going to lose everyone's job by going to EVs.

It's going to happen.

Just like, you know, no, we're just going to go ahead and, you know, we're going to make parts globally.

And that, and how did that work out for us?

This is the same thing.

It's the same thing replayed over again and again, Glenn, and we know who's going to get screwed.

It's going to be all of us and it's going to be our workers.

Now, here's a crazy statistic on this strike, Glenn.

Just focus on Ford.

If Ford gave the UAW everything they asked for, everything they asked for, it would cost about $5 billion in 2023.

Goldman Sachs estimates that Ford is going to lose, guess, $5 billion on EVs in 2023.

It is a direct transfer.

from working people and from consumers, of course, because the EVs are more expensive.

They have a lot of other issues as well.

Direct transfer from those folks to the people who have been getting rich for the past generation of this country, it's a real problem.

We have fundamentally an economy that has been rigged by different people.

And right now, the people trying to rig the economy are the climate cult.

They're going to get rich from this.

I guarantee you.

They're going to find a way to get rich from this.

But we're paying more for cars.

We're paying more for used cars.

We're paying more for gas.

And that is by design.

And most importantly, we are destroying our ability.

We go to war.

We need those workers and those Ford factories and those GM factories.

We've got to have those, or we're not going to be able to do anything.

It's the reason why we could go from training with broomsticks in 1938 to outmaneuvering the German war machine by 43

because of those factories and those workers.

This is insanity.

We are cutting ourselves off at the knees every single day in every way and every place.

Yeah, and Glenn, we have an economy that's way too built around debt and way too built around financial services and globalization, not enough around making real things.

This is, I think, the fundamental inside of the last 40 years.

We don't make enough of our own stuff.

So go back to Russia-Ukraine.

Guess how many artillery shells the Russians are making per day?

Okay.

And again, set to the side your foreign policy views.

It highlights their economic power.

20,000 artillery shells a day is what they're doing.

Oh, my gosh.

We're the biggest economy in the world.

We make 20,000 in a month.

I know.

We cannot win the next war if we don't have our own industrial power, and that's what we have to regain.

Oh, my gosh.

One last question, and that is the national debt just hit 33 trillion.

Do we even know what we're spending this money on?

We are now, we're still spending at the COVID levels.

We're $2 trillion

over the budget.

What are we even spending this on?

And are we going to, is Congress going to stand and say enough is enough?

Or are we going to buckle again?

Well, we have no idea what we're spending on.

I think the COVID point is the important one, Glenn.

You hear a lot of people talk about entitlements and these conversations.

And look, we can have that conversation, but let's focus on the immediate problem.

In 2020, our government, excuse me, 2019, we spent about $4.5 trillion.

If we spent just that amount of money this year, we'd have close to a balanced budget in this country in 2023, but we're going to spend north of $6 trillion.

We allowed COVID to blow up the federal budget, and there's really been no sustained effort from Republicans to try to put that genie back in the bottle.

You asked the question, are we going to buckle?

Obviously, you know, this is a House question more than a Senate question because Chuck Schumer runs the chamber on our side.

I hope that they don't.

I think that there's an opportunity here.

Look, at the very least, to get something, right?

I'm a realist.

I don't think that they're going to balance the budget in the next two years, but we need to get something out of this, right?

If we're going to give the Democrats something, whether it's defunding the weaponized DOJ, whether it's doing something on all these ridiculous mask mandates that they're talking about bringing back,

my personal, you know, I think the most important issue in the country is actually not the debt.

It's the immigration.

It's the border.

If we don't get control of our own border, we don't have sovereignty.

We don't have a real nation.

Maybe we can get something there.

But

if we fold as a Republican Party and we get nothing in response for it, then I think our voters are going to be pissed and they have every right to be so.

Oh, yeah, they are.

They're going to be more than that.

They're just, you're done.

As a party, it's going to be done.

Senator J.D.

Vance from Ohio.

Thank you so much, Senator.

Appreciate it.

Thanks, Lord.

You better go back.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and we really want to thank you for listening.

So the Justice Department announced a new rule to amend ATF regulations.

Now,

oh, what a scene is coming.

They have expanded the definition of a firearms dealer to include now those, anyone who sells even a single firearm.

So, if I don't sell anything except the one and I sell it to Stew, I'm now a firearms dealer?

What?

Why would they do that?

Well, because if you sell one gun and you're profiting on it,

you need to conduct a background check, and those records are going to be possessed by the ATF, and then they're going to be digitized and put into a searchable database, which, gosh, that sounds like gun registry, doesn't it?

A little bit?

I mean, maybe a lot?

Aiden Johnston is here with us.

He's with Gun Owners of America.

He's the Federal Affairs Director, and he's up on this.

Aiden, that sounds like something that's illegal.

Well, this is a total infringement on your Second Amendment rights.

The law does not give Biden the authority to implement backdoor universal background checks or backdoor registration checks, but he's sure doing it anyway.

So

what is the recourse on this?

Well, the Biden administration is going through the rulemaking process.

So we have the Congressional Review Act where Congress can strike down this rule.

And we already have a Congressman, Andrew Clyde, who's preparing to use that process to strike down this rule.

But of course, Gun Owners of America also plans to file a lawsuit and

take this

rule change down in court, but we have to wait until the final rule is published.

Right now, it's the proposed rulemaking phase, and it's time for the public to comment and tell the ATF why they shouldn't implement that final rule.

So just so people understand

that there's no such thing as

a coincidence, what made this rule change possible?

Well, last summer, folks might remember that a bunch of Republicans got together with every Democrat and passed the biggest gun control in decades.

It was called the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

And there were a dozen things wrong with that gun control bill.

And Gun Owners of America, we opposed it.

We told Congress what was wrong with each thing.

And one of the things we mentioned was: if you change the definition of what it means to be a gun dealer, they're going to weaponize it against us.

And we knew Obama tried to do this on his last day in office with an executive order, and Trump reversed it.

So as soon as they touched that definition, of course, Biden was going to do the exact same thing.

And gee, isn't this Senator Cornyn's compromise?

Yes, and in fact, this definitional changes.

His little baby, his personal mission when he went to the negotiating table, was to make this change as if what we really needed was more government regulating your private business.

It is remarkable to me that this guy is from the great state of Texas.

It's truly remarkable.

I don't know how that happens.

Okay, so what do Americans need to do?

Well, right now, like I said, we're in the proposed rulemaking phase.

So you have to go to regulations.gov or to the Federal Register and submit a public comment and tell the ATF, no, don't do this.

Now, if you don't want to do all that, you can also GOA or we'll help you.

If you become a member, we're going to be sending out

an action alert.

It'll help you comment.

It'll give you a model.

to submit to the ATF.

And that will help us down the road when we file a lawsuit.

We'll be able to say, 100,000 gun owners, 200,000 gun owners said that this is unconstitutional for X, Y, and Z, and the judge will take that into consideration.

So that's the next step.

Then, like I said, we're also going to be fighting this in Congress.

But unfortunately, the way things are, Biden's issued a rule.

He's abusing his executive authority, and it's a bit of a waiting game until this becomes finalized in a few months.

And for those who don't know, why is this such a bad deal to have them have a registry?

Well, so

universal background checks might sound nice in theory, right?

Who wants a criminal to get a hold of a gun?

But there are a million ways that criminals always circumvent their the background check system.

And less than 10% of criminals in jail actually obtained a gun legally.

But universal background checks are only enforceable with a gun registry.

To know who did and didn't run a background check, you have to know who owns what gun.

And if you own a gun and it wasn't registered to you, then it must have been transferred without a background check so this

all plays in to something else that joe biden has also been doing which is turning the forms 4473 which you filled out if you bought a gun at a gun store into permanent gun registration forms and then sending those to a database in west virginia

how is he doing that that's illegal

Well, in part, it's been going on for a long time.

When a gun store goes out of business, all of their records are supposed to be sent to the ATF.

And using that statute, which has been around for decades, the ATF has compiled over 900 million records in this database in West Virginia.

So almost 1 billion records of gun owners, the guns they own, their serial numbers.

And now the Biden administration last August changed another rule.

and said those records can no longer be destroyed by a gun store once they become 20 years old, old, which was the previous way of ensuring that most gun records didn't end up in this database and a permanent complete gun registry was never created.

But now that means

there is a record of every single firearms transaction going back to August of 2002.

Every gun that was ever sold at a gun store with a background check has a 4473 with the name, the social security number, and the serial number of the gun that that person bought.

Okay.

Again, talk to the people who don't know anything about guns, that are listening, and they go, well, that's not so bad.

We should know

who has what guns.

Why is this?

How can this go wrong with the American people?

Of course.

Well, now the federal government has a list of everyone who owns a gun and what guns they own.

That's a prerequisite for gun confiscation.

Gun registration always leads to gun confiscation.

We've seen it time and time again, whether it's Australia or Nazi Germany,

when the government knows what guns people own, that is a list of guns to take.

And the people in the Weimar Republic did it under the Weimar Republic, trusting their government and just didn't think about, oh, wait a minute, what happens if bad guys take over the country?

And they did.

And you had to turn in your gun.

And some people.

waited.

You know, they were still within the rules, but they waited.

But the law at the time became, if you have a gun, we shoot before we ask questions.

So now people were trying to get their gun to the police station, but if they take it to the police station, they'll be shot and killed because they're holding a gun.

And it didn't work out well.

Didn't work out well.

For the German people,

you know, when they were turning their guns in, also didn't work out a little later when they had no guns.

No, of course not.

Our founding fathers, when they wrote the Second Amendment, recognized that it was necessary to the security of our free state.

Our freedoms are able to be retained by the people because we have this check on the government.

But if the government has the ability to take your firearms in a moment because they have a billion records in a gun registry that needs to be destroyed, well,

That is a threat on your Second Amendment, and that undermines the security of our free state.

Aiden, thank you so much.

I really appreciate what you guys do.

It's gunowners.org, isn't it?

That is correct.

Yeah, gunowners.org.

Gunowners.org.

Thank you so much, Aiden.

I appreciate it.

You know,

our Constitution isn't worth the paper it's printed on if you don't stand up for those rights.

Now, somebody, you know, they're trampling.

All right, I got it right.

What are they doing?

They're taking away my right.

Yeah, well, you can say that all you want.

But until you put into action by standing up, letting your voice be heard,

telling all your friends, all the gun owners that you know, this is what's happening.

Because did you know this was happening?

This happened last week.

Did you know this was happening?

They have overwhelmed the system far more than Barack Obama.

You know, what really pisses me off, I can guarantee you, I can guarantee you that the GOP has not sat down and had a group of constitutionalists sit down and say, okay,

what is it that they've just done that we need to undo?

What is it?

What's our plan of attack?

They plan for years while they're out of office, for years.

All four years of Trump, all they did was war game.

When we get power back, what are we going to do?

And they make all of these tweaks.

And before you know it, you don't have any rights left.

You know, it's one thing to say,

well, we're not going to, you know, what are we going to fight the government with pistols?

They got tanks and planes.

Yeah, yeah, that's weird.

They do.

Yet it seemed to do pretty well for the people in

Afghanistan.

Like, I don't want to fight that.

But don't tell me that small arms don't make a difference.

And I don't ever want to fight the United States government, ever.

But if

they go rotten, if they go, I mean, if we're in the Weimar Republic years and all of a sudden we go into what comes next,

yeah, I would say we shouldn't probably turn in our guns.

It would probably be a bad thing because history may not repeat itself exactly, but it does rhyme.

The Constitution, the more we go down this road and you haven't learned the Constitution, I haven't learned the Constitution, we don't understand the Bill of Rights, the more we're going to lose.

It really is amazing, too, that I don't, I think because we've been so blessed in this country to have a Constitution that has lasted this long and been taken seriously for most of the time the country's existed, we don't realize how rare that is.

And I think recently a lot of us have had to wake up to the fact that, you know they're doing stuff like this student loan thing is a great example of it just doing it just doing it and you're just like wait a minute what about the constitution and you realize their answer to that is so what

that's basically their their comeback

and

and when they say and a bunch of times you realize that how you know you realize how quickly this gets all slip away right yeah

there's it is just a piece of paper right and the republicans many of them say look i yeah I know, I know, Constitution, I love the Constitution, but we have things to do.

Once they say, but, I love the Constitution, but no, no, there is no but.

We follow the Constitution.

All of our problems, all of our problems, every story we should do this show.

Every story, I could connect it to one of the things in the Bill of Rights or the Constitution that is being violated.

Every story that comes out, I can show it to you.

Show it you.

That is who we are.

And we cannot lose that.

And

it's close.

I mean, I always thought the Constitution was hanging by a thread in the past.

I don't know.

It's like one thread and it may have already been cut.

Time is running out to stand.

Good, decent, honorable, honest people

that just want a future for their children.

They want freedom for everybody, but that means tolerance in a sane way.

The best of the Glenbeck program.

All right, I'm going to tell you the story of somebody who is an overachiever.

Okay, somebody who

I think exists to make the rest of us look bad.

He's the number one New York Times bestseller and USA Today best-selling author of more than 40 novels.

Who does except a show-off?

There are currently more than 35 million copies of his books in print worldwide, translated into more than 24 languages.

Uh-huh.

Richard is also the recipient, but he's not 80, and that's how many countries there are.

So there's got to be at least 80 languages.

Richard is the recipient of numerous awards, including two first-place storytelling world awards, the Romantic Times Best Women's Novel of the Year Award, and five-time recipient of the Wilbur Award.

Seven of Richard's books have been produced as television movies, but not eight.

His first feature film, The Noel Diary, starring Justin Hartley from This Is Us, is debuting,

well, debuted last year.

In 2011, he began writing Michael Vay, a number one New York Times best-selling young adult series, which has won more than a dozen awards.

There's nine number one sellers in that one.

Richard is now the founder of the Christmas Box International, an organization devoted to maintaining emergency children's centers and providing services and resources for abused, neglected, and homeless children and young adults.

To date, more than 125,000 youths have been helped by the charity for his humanitarian work.

Richard has received the Washington Times,

not the Humanitarian of the Year.

Oh no, that's too small for Richard.

He won the

Humanitarian of the Century Award

and the Volunteers of American National Empathy Award.

He's a show off, and he's here.

Hello.

How are you, Richard?

That was a very generous introduction.

Well, I'm a slacker.

You are really?

Yeah, right.

You make me feel like I've done nothing in my life.

Richard Paul Evans is with us.

You have Michael Vay 9

coming out.

Congratulations, Congratulations, Richard.

It's a great series.

Thank you.

This one is called The Traitor.

Yes.

Tell me about it.

Well, the last book, Michael Vay 8, ended on a cliffhanger because Michael's best friend went to the other side.

And if you like politics inside books, you'll love this one because

he makes a very compelling argument about where America is today and why Jack leaves.

Give me a bit of the argument.

Well, he just says it's a crumbling culture, and some things, ideologies endure.

And the Chasky had been around, so we've been around for hundreds and hundreds of years.

We're just waiting our turn.

Okay.

So

tell me, where did you get this idea?

Because you, I mean, you,

I mean, this is the one thing I love about really great authors is they go different places, they see different things, write them down, and then just churn on it for a while.

Yeah, this one,

I was in a hotel room right, and I called my watch.

She goes, you're coming home.

I said, honey, I've got to go to the Amazon.

It's like, what?

It's like, I need to go in the Amazon.

And I go, I've already booked my flight.

I go deep in the Amazon.

It wasn't fun, lots of mosquitoes.

But like, I'm just kind of putting the story together.

I go, are there any airstrips?

And I go, well, there's a drug cartel house one about 30 miles.

I go, let's go see it.

And he goes, are you stupid?

No.

It's like, well, they're not going to be using it right now.

It's like, how do you know that?

It's like, okay, I'll give that to you.

We won't go to the airstrip.

Yeah, that's probably a pretty good idea.

Probably a pretty good idea.

Richard, tell me the...

You know, we have so many people that have been reading this series, and I just, I know you do, and I do as well, just think this would make the the greatest TV series ever.

And it is changing the lives of kids.

And it started really with your son, right?

It did.

My son, Michael, has Tourette syndrome.

And by the way, he adores you, Glenn.

He's a good

kid.

He is a good kid.

But he struggles with

his Tourette's.

And I wanted to kind of normalize Tourette's syndrome.

I was hoping kids would read it.

What I have found is is that the whole series has really appealed to kids with any disability, especially autism.

I have a grandson with autism, and it's like, it's just really,

I mean, I'm at signings, and I remember one time six, the first six kids had autism and lying, and one of the parents said, you've never come out for anything.

And I go, I love it because they feel empowered, they feel strong, they feel normalized.

And because my main character

has Tourette's.

I don't want to call it a disability because I have Tourette's, and it's like, I think it's opened many doors for me.

So I love that.

I love that about Veg, but Michael's a good kid.

In a world of swagger and trying to be mean, it's like Michael loves his mother.

So

he's a good kid.

And I got a letter from a young woman in Paris a few years ago, and she goes,

Mr.

Evans,

You probably even wondering where I am.

And I said to my sister, who is she?

She goes, keep reading.

And she goes, I'm in the hospital.

I tried to take my life.

I only have one friend in this world, and it's Michael Vay.

And he's here in bed with me.

Just I'm

holding the book.

And thank you so much for giving me someone I can believe in.

And it's like, that is the kind of experience I'm having around the world.

And it is a global bestseller.

There's more than three and a half million copies in print.

And,

you know, if you haven't started Michael Vay, it's...

you know, it gets kids to read.

It's like,

do it.

Trust me, they'll like it.

They'll like it.

So I will tell you that my son, Rafe, is a voracious reader.

He was reading, oh my gosh, I think he read The Hunger Games by the time he was eight.

And I'm like, dude, dude, maybe not The Hunger Games.

And he's like, dad, really good.

Well written.

I'm like, okay.

And every summer, we would read

the Michael Vay, the new Michael Vay.

And we did it year after year.

My son has gone to college, and I'm bummed that we're not going to be reading the next one together, but he loved them, and he read them every single summer.

We would read, I mean, it was a tradition of ours, and it is a great memory for both of us.

So thank you for that, Richard.

Oh, I love that.

I love that.

So when does it come out?

Is it out today?

It comes out today.

Today is May Day.

So number nine comes out today.

Okay.

And I mean, you remember, Glenn, a few years ago, I had finished this series at number seven.

And people are saying, well, why did you start it up again?

You know, part of it was COVID.

It was just, I mean, I'm getting thousands of letters from kids saying, please continue.

And they're giving me plot ideas.

And I just missed the kids.

I mean, my last signing for number seven, we had 4,000 kids came to the book signing.

I'm not exaggerating.

Unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

Richard, thank you so much.

If you want to get a copy of this, it's on stores now.

If you haven't read the series, you should start at number one.

But number nine is out now, and it is just a great series.

You know how we were talking just the other day?

All of our kids and our families, we sit down.

We were just talking about football.

And,

you know, that exorcist commercial came on over the weekend.

You're like,

can we just have anything that we can do together as a family?

Is there anything that's not going to insult us or assault us?

And this is it.

The Richard Paul Evans

electrifying series, Michael Vay.

It is back, Michael Vay 9, The Traitor.

Get it now.

Read it with your family.

You will have a blast.

Thank you so much, Richard.

Thank you, Glenn.

You bet.

Bye-bye.