Best of the Program | Guests: Neil Howe & J.P. Decker | 8/28/23

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Hey, a lot on today's program.

We have an update on the trial for the January 6th charges against Donald Trump.

Don't worry, they're not trying to interfere with an election.

They just set the trial date

the day before Super Tuesday.

We'll talk a little bit about that.

We have Neil Howe on today,

the author of The Fourth Turning is Here and the original Fourth Turning.

He is fantastic.

A lot of real hope on how our country will survive.

All on today's podcast.

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

There's a couple of things going on that we should report.

First of all,

the power company, the Hawaiian Electric Company, has removed all of the

transformers and the poles and the wires.

Some would call it evidence.

But they've removed all of that from the scene.

And they said they only did that because, well, they don't own any of the land.

just beyond the power substation.

So they wanted to clean it up, make sure that everything was good.

They said they took pictures, though.

So that's good.

That's good.

Yeah.

You know, pictures worth a thousand words, Glenn.

Yeah, it really is.

What a surprise.

This is a public-private partnership with the government, too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm really surprised.

It didn't work out really well.

It never does.

Never does.

They never seem to do their job.

By the way, they only released, what was it, 300 names of the missing

on Friday.

There's 1,100 people still missing.

And

I mean, I don't know why they're saying it that way.

It's, I mean, it's not that big of an island.

I hate to be, I don't mean to be callous on this, but it's not that big of an island.

It's not like somebody, you know, is wandering off and is lost or whatever.

I mean, it's not that big.

And, you know,

what would it be?

Somebody with Alzheimer's, maybe.

Okay.

Yeah, that's a possibility, right?

A kid, maybe.

Maybe, but I doubt it.

I mean, but it's possible.

Theoretically possible.

It's possible.

Because, yeah, why would you be missing?

Or somebody who's just trying to disappear.

Right, yeah.

You know, faking their death.

I mean,

out of

that many missing,

I don't understand.

Certainly not 5%, right?

No.

Like, what is the number here?

I mean, God, and you think about this, if all these people that are missing are gone, I mean, you know, this is a horrifying.

Horrible.

I mean, and this might be why they're holding it back.

Like, they don't want people to

really, you know, come to the point where they recognize what's happened here.

This is maybe, I don't know.

I don't know what it is.

JP Decker, he is Mercury One's executive director.

He was an executive producer for me and a producer for a very long time.

He's now over at Mercury One.

And I believe you leave Hawaii today, do you not, JP?

Yes, sir.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I leave tonight.

So is there any explanation why they are still holding these names?

Glenn, I have,

you know, we've been been here almost five days, and

that is one thing that every single local is confused on.

That we've spoken with.

I've spoken with a lot of people, and they said, we don't trust anyone.

We do not trust what's coming out of the government.

We don't trust what's coming out of not just the state of Hawaii, but the county, and then also our federal government.

How do they not?

I mean, that is terrifying that they don't even believe the county.

And

no, no, go ahead.

Well, it's just one word, though, about the locals

that's come up while we're talking with some of these stories are just, again, horrific.

But these are some of the most resilient people I've ever met in my life.

They, yesterday,

just a quick story.

Yesterday,

we connected with this surfer.

He's a pretty famous surfer on the island.

And they said, hey, you know, we're getting a shipment from one of the other islands of surfboards and fishing equipment and i

i said well

one we went and helped we were in the water we were pulling surfboards off the boat we were doing you know getting fishing supplies and i said what what is going on here and they said most of these kids lost their surfboards and the mental health crisis that is here right now from seeing people burning in cars from seeing their family members in their homes this is the only thing that's going to bring this community back to what we we know and we love and so this guy is going to take take kids, surfboards that were donated from other islands, and then the fishing supplies is just going to go to these local fishermen who lost literally everything.

These are the guys who go out and buy the fish for all the tourists.

And

speaking with these people, and for me, yesterday we were at church, Harvest Church, which is one of our partners.

And I was standing next to one of the worship leaders' wives who lost everything in this fire.

She's just bawling and crying out, and they're singing this, one of these songs, and it's about how God is still in control in this disaster.

And

it was a powerful moment for me.

I think this is the first time that I finally broke down from seeing the damage and seeing what this city is going through.

And the one thing that really hits close to home is these, these are Americans.

These are our brothers and sisters.

This isn't just

another story in the news cycle that's going to disappear.

These are our people.

And the fact that the government has

just decided to, one, block everyone from going back in still.

There's a few people that have been able to go back in and look at their homes.

But two,

I mean, we've gone past, we have to drive through part of Lahaina every single day if we want to get to another part of the island.

And you see the destruction and you smell the smoke still.

You smell the ashes And, you know, those black walls that are going up on the road that everyone says the government's covering up the ashes, all this.

And it's what we've learned, what we've seen across the whole island, are those black walls are so that ashes in the teeth of whatever is left of any of those human remains don't go into the street and don't get lost.

It's just, it's devastating, Glenn.

Devastating.

I know, you know, people ran into the water.

And how many people, I mean,

how far in the water did they go I hear some of them were in the water for eight or ten hours just treading water is that true oh yeah yeah Glenn we we were with a couple people yesterday and there's a story of this teacher and the fire is coming down towards the ocean and she had to run to jump in the ocean with a group a big group of people she doesn't know how many but a big group of people and they all jump in they treaded water and swam for up to eight hours,

and everyone around her drowned.

Oh my gosh.

She's trying to rescue these people, these kids, these dads, these moms, these grandparents.

But

she couldn't do anything.

And so she just

tried to tread and swim, but everyone around her drowned.

They ended up finding her eight hours later alive, this lady, a mile off the coast.

This shouldn't have happened this way.

How did they know?

Where were the people?

Yeah,

where were the Coast Guard boats or whatever boats?

Why?

What happened?

Every single local that I have spoken to are asking the same question.

They're asking, you know, we've got installments all around this area on all these islands.

Where was the military?

And, you know, we've heard stories of some Navy SEALs coming in and, you know, just helping.

And then some Chinooks that came in and helped try to rescue.

And the Coast Guard came in later on to try to help but we we did confirm with a couple locals who ran out that the police were so scared of the power lines that fell through the wind that people were not allowed to get out of Lahina

and

during these fires because the police were blocking off because they didn't want them to run into the power lines that were still alive which

which is the job of the power company that always happens a power line goes down and you shut everything off.

Why didn't they shut it off?

They don't want to, they haven't come out yet and said anything.

They don't want to incriminate.

I mean, they don't want to say.

The other day, we were eating at a local restaurant and we smelled a fire.

This was the one that kind of you probably might have heard about, but there was a there's a pretty large grass fire that was going towards Lahaina.

And so we smelled it.

And then what's interesting though, we're at this restaurant and there's a FEMA person, there's a Red Cross person, there's a guy who lost everything,

and then there's a former Doctors Without Borders

person, and she was here volunteering.

And

the power goes out and all of our phones, emergency phone,

you know what that's like.

Everybody's phone goes off and it says evacuate.

One,

most of the people that were in that room didn't know quite what to do, which was interesting.

I mean, and then the guy who lost his home, he's just, there's, there's tears because what do you do on this island?

There is no escape route.

Lahayana is the escape route.

You go through that street.

There is no medical team on this side.

There's no hospital on this side of the island.

And I mean, you have to go 45 minutes if something were to happen.

And we've heard stories of of some of the burn victims who ended up up getting in those, the two ambulances on this side of the island and died

in the ambulance trying to get to a hospital.

So, I mean, with what we're doing with Mercury One is incredible because within the first 48 hours, we sent

a tech team, one of our incredible partners, the name is ITDRC, and they showed up with Starlinks to provide internet for the community because for three or four days, most of these people had no way of communicating to the outside world that we're still alive to their families and friends in the mainland and one

why was it a non-profit that came in and provide internet and the government did nothing they ended up providing internet for the government and the community because they they told us the other day we can cut the red tape we have no red tape but the government has the red tape.

So that's why they come to us.

And, you know, we were one of the first ones, Asparians first, to send in a cargo plane of supplies, food, water.

And right now, this island doesn't need the food and water.

What they need is the mental health.

There's already been about five or six suicides.

And that's just when you lose everything.

Including your family.

Including your family.

But the mental health side is something that we're going to be focused on.

And we spoke with a local restaurant owner the other day.

And he just, again, Glenn, you know, we brought cameras to help tell the story of what Mercury One and our partners have been doing on the ground, what we're going to do, because we're not here just for a small amount of time.

We're here for the long haul.

We don't just, I mean, when you started this, you said we're the first ones in, last one's out.

That's what we do.

And so we, you know, I was talking with the restaurant owner, and he just breaks down.

And, you know, we didn't have the cameras with us.

And he said, you know, all these people have been coming in with cameras.

They've just been coming in and just want to take our story.

And then we just leave again.

And we've had business guys.

this is what this guy said, businessmen come in with logs of cash, drop it on our table, and say, I'll buy you out.

And I will, you know, just buy you out.

This guy has put up 20 of his staff in his restaurant.

He's been providing hundreds of meals a day to people.

I tried to offer some help, and he said, I don't want help.

He goes, what I want is for you to help other people, you to help my neighbors.

And when we say 100% goes,

and that's usually what I would would tell these people, hey, we're not your normal nonprofit.

We're not a prophet who takes overhead.

We want to give 100% to this island.

And that's what we do.

That's the most powerful thing that, and they're shocked at it.

They say, no, no, no, I know you take overhead, all this.

No, we don't.

But I think, you know, anyways, I know I'm telling so many different stories, but this is one for me personally.

It's changed my life on what community looks like.

These people are exactly what community is.

They're the definition of Ohana, which means family.

And that is community.

JP, thank you so much.

Mercury One executive director coming home today.

But as he said,

our people and all of the charities we support will be the last ones out.

So please, if you'd like to help us,

all you have to do is go to mercury1.org and donate to our disaster relief fund.

It's mercury1.org.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

And don't forget, rate us on iTunes.

Neil, welcome to the program.

I am a huge fan.

Your book, The Fourth Turning,

made a huge impact in my life.

Well, thank you, Glenn.

It's great to be on your show.

Thank you.

So the fourth turning is here.

I have been reading,

and I,

before we get to the fourth turning is here, can you explain the turnings, if you will?

Yeah, this was

something that Bill and I developed.

Actually, we did an earlier book back in 1991 called Generations, and it was really looking at generations as the source of a historical change, meaning, you know, generations are shaped differently.

You know, each generation is uniquely shaped by its childhood experiences.

and as it comes of age, right, it experiences coming of age.

And then about 30 or 40 years later, as parents and leaders, they in turn shape history, right?

And

we, Generations was the first collective biography of America that anyone had ever written.

That is to say, retelling the entire story of America as a sequence of generational biographies, right?

In other words, following the same group of people throughout their entire life, and then starting with the the next group of people.

And what we found was that generations are very different.

This has always been true.

It's not just, you know, Xers and boomers or millennials and Xers that we're accustomed to today or boomers and their World War II parents, right?

These differences have been with us since the founding, since the 17th century.

And

what occurred to us as we were writing that book is that this is the source of some of the

otherwise unexplainable regularities in the rhythms of American history.

I mean, for example, the fact that we have these enormous periods of civic creative destruction when the entire country goes through an upheaval of

politics and economics.

We really redefine what our republic is.

And this happens about the length of a long human life apart, right?

We had this period of revolution and rebellion in the late 17th century,

kind of coinciding with the Glorious Revolution, and then about a lifetime later we had the American Revolution, then we had the Civil War, then we had World War II and the Great Depression, and here we are again, Glenn.

You know what I mean?

This is like the ticking of a talk, you know, or a clock.

And roughly halfway in between these upheavals in the outer world, when we redefine politics and economics and infrastructure and all that, we have these upheavals in the inner world, which very conveniently in American history, we number.

So we called them the First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, and so forth.

And this struck us as having very interesting generational roots, generational continuity, right?

Because it's generations that come of age during an awakening that later in old age usually take America into the next crisis.

And generations which

come of age during a crisis usually preside over the next awakening later in life.

And this has been true since

Ralph Waldo Emerson and

Walt Whitman, a generation of prophets and religion founders and

commune leaders

who took us into the Civil War.

And it was true for the generation born just after the Civil War, who took us really were the wise old men and women of the World War II era.

But it suggests

a rhythm.

And that's what we wanted to write about.

Now, this rhythm has four phases.

It's kind of like seasons of the year.

If you look at

the spring season, this is the period in which institutions are strong, individualism is weak,

and this is what we,

recently in American history,

we all recall the American high.

This was after World War II, right?

This was the presidencies of Truman and Eisenhower and John Kennedy.

Society had a very definite idea of where it wanted to go collectively.

But as individuals, we were very modest, right, about what we wanted.

It was, as William White wrote in the organization, man, people had a strong social ethic.

The duty of each individual was to fit in.

I mean, that's what you were supposed to do, right?

Each person had a job to do based on gender, based on, you know,

your aptitude for a different kind of profession.

And that was it.

You didn't have much aspirations beyond that.

We were modest individually, but the nation did incredible things collectively.

I mean, everything from interstate highways to launching the Apollo moon launch program.

And

we managed to balance the budget every year, right,

while feeding the world and

presiding over that period of growing global order and prosperity.

The second turning was the awakening, and that was the period that many listeners probably remember, maybe as kids, this was the, you know, 60s, 70s, early 80s, and this was a period when all of America wanted to throw off all that social obligation, all that conformity, all those rules.

And this started really with,

started more on the left.

There's no question about that, mainly in the culture, throwing off, you know, patriarchy and military

conscription and all the rest.

And it ended, I think, a little bit more on the conservative side, you know, throwing out regulations, cutting taxes and all the rest.

And so,

but the one theme was We wanted to be a less ordered society.

We wanted individuals to kind of go more their own way.

And the biggest nightmare for boomers at that time was the oppressive middle class, right?

Pleasant Valley Sunday, that was their worst nightmare.

And

you talk to millennials today, it's like middle class.

Sounds like a great idea.

Where do we sign up?

You see the difference, right?

And

then you have the third turning, which is we call an unraveling, and that's in many ways the opposite of a high.

Individualism is strong and flourishing, institutions are weak and discredited.

And when we think of paradigmatic decades of an unraveling, we think of the roaring 90s and the 1990s.

We also think of the roaring 20s, the 1850s, the 1760s.

These were all decades of cynicism and bad manners, acting out in the culture, disrespecting authority.

And in general,

the key book of the 1990s to me was Francis Fukuyama.

You remember the end of history.

We were all

government was going to fade away.

We would all be

individuals living wherever in the world we wanted.

I guess, you know, on our laptops in a Starbucks somewhere, just contracting with each other and enjoying infinite possibilities, right?

We wouldn't have families.

We wouldn't have roots.

We wouldn't have, right?

That was the image, right, of

a world of individuals that wouldn't need anything.

And so individualism totally triumphant, no institution or community left.

But history shows us that third turnings inevitably lead to fourth turnings.

And that's when instead of wanting to

rebel against order,

Society wants more order.

And that's what we're living into today.

And the cutting-edge generation for the awakening was boomers, but the cutting-edge generation now is millennials, and they want a more ordered life.

I mean, you see it.

They want more community.

Their greatest fear is loneliness.

It's FOMO.

You know what I mean?

And the way they invest is crowd investing.

I mean, they're all in these huge, you know,

everything ETFs, right?

So the market goes up or down.

They all go down, up and down together.

And the entire world is being buffeted by this.

And we see this in these new populist movements around the world, often overtly authoritarian because people want authority back again.

It's as simple as that.

And we've seen this before, and we're seeing it again.

And so the purpose of, as you know, the purpose of my writing the book is

to take this up to date, to bring it up to today.

Right.

And

to hypothesize a little bit on where we're going and what the schedule is and

what expect.

Okay, so

there's three theories out there that I have kind of melded into one.

Yours, and I don't know if you've read Michael Drew's work, Pendulum, How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future.

He describes it as a pendulum and describes much of what you guys worked out.

But he shows it's an 80-year cycle.

You're showing it's an 80-year cycle.

And then the third theory that I've always found interesting is the Kondraky of wave, which is also an 80-year cycle.

And it's all spring,

summer, the arrogance of summer, it's never going to end into

fall.

You know, hey, let's deny this, deny this, deny this.

Oh, it looks like everything is dying to winter.

And then the green shoots again

of spring.

And we are,

if I understand, we are now heading into winter, correct?

Yeah,

we're well into winter.

Well into winter.

Yeah, I mean, we started,

I think we entered this era.

I mean, these are eras.

These are generation-long eras.

So these are, you know, 22 years or so.

Right.

And we entered it with 2008, the global financial crisis, when we saw so many things begin to change.

We saw democracies decline at the expense of authoritarian governments.

We saw global trade begin to decline as a share of global product.

I mean, in many ways, it was analogous to 1929, right?

Which is also a great global, you know, financial collapse, right?

So

we've seen that, but we still have a ways to go.

Right.

And, you know, when Kondrakiev, who was Stalin's economic advisor, when he was asked what's better capitalism, communism, he said

it's seasonal and you look at things and capitalism is better because communism, when it starts to go cold into winter, the system props everything up.

And so the system falls apart in the end.

It can't prop up life.

It's got to go in through these cycles.

And we're doing that since 2008.

We're propping everything up so it doesn't go into a hard freeze, but we've bastardized everything.

And I'm wondering, do they always have to end in

like war?

Well, typically they have.

You know,

every total war in American history has occurred during a fourth turning.

And every fourth turning has had a total war.

That's a pretty close correspondence.

I would say it, it, you know, I don't like to be a pessimist, so I like to say

what it precisely requires is not so much war.

What it requires is

collective mobilization

on a mass scale.

And it's really hard to see how you do that other than sort of organized conflict.

But what happens typically is that as society begins to reseek order, it begins to collectivize again.

Today we see in America blue zone, red zone, right?

I mean, this new tribal mentality.

This is what we saw during the 1930s.

Half of America thought that the 1930s was the Red Decade.

The other half thought it was the fascist decade.

You know what I'm talking about?

These are the people who said that, you know, Franklin Stalino Roosevelt, right?

Well, and we have the new movie Oppenheimer out.

So we now realize how many of the greatest generation as young men and women in the early 20s were communists.

So one thing before we go on to where we're headed, it is interesting to me that America has had these turnings along with all of the West, for instance, American Revolution, the French Revolution.

World War II was the same,

you know, same thing that was happening over at Germany, was happening over here.

We had different results, but

there's the we generation and the me generation.

And these things generally happen, do they not, in the we generation?

When

we're all collective.

We generations

are made, not born, right?

Yes.

I mean, and that's the important part.

So

how do we avoid going in when we have a collective mindset, going into something very un-American?

You know, this has been a struggle since the beginning.

Every time, because America is, by its culture and by its heritage, an individualist kind of

society.

And

war has been difficult for that reason.

It was difficult for the revolutionaries.

You know, George Washington

implored

again and again, you know, that Congress should

authorize him for this great continental army he needed to fight the British.

And of course, there were a lot of foot draggers and people that didn't want to do that, similarly in the Civil War, similarly

in World War II.

Roosevelt was very slow to be able to actually enact conscription.

Correct.

And we came very late to the table to

the fight against fascism.

And so it is a problem.

And forced turnings, by their very nature, of collective mobilization, put democracy to the test.

We're already seeing it today in America.

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

You know, I don't know how I feel

about

this story.

Israel TV's Channel 12 News released an investigative report about the five red heifers that were just brought to the Jewish state last September and the supposed funneling of government funds to construct the third temple.

Now, for those of you who know how the story ends,

this could be a very exciting time.

It could also be a very terrifying time.

Last month, a journalist tweeted about an experiment conducted

by Bar-Ilan University professor Amar, who attempted to determine how many people could be ritually purified by one red heifer.

Apparently, one has enough to purify 660 billion

people, which, you know, there's not that many.

So I don't know why they got the other three red heifers.

But apparently, there's...

reports now on Israeli TV claiming that there are plans and everything is in place to rebuild the third temple, which means, if I understand it correctly, that that building there on the Temple Mountain now, it's got a gold dome, I don't remember what it is exactly, would have to be deconstructed in some way or another.

I just, I just

not sure, I think that's a big stumbling block.

Really?

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think it's one that's coming.

I don't know when, but, you know, you could be prepared.

But, you know, it's like

I'm going to marry, I'm going to marry Stu's wife someday.

I've already got the tuxedo.

I've got everything ready.

Except you haven't really talked to Lisa about it yet.

She's still married to Stu and happily married.

Yeah.

I mean, let's not go crazy for the analogy here.

We exaggerate things for the audience.

I know.

I know what you mean.

Yeah.

I know what you're trying to say there.

I will say that having the extra three heifers, it's good to be prepared.

It is.

You know, it is.

It's always good to have a little bit extra.

I'd like to see the number of how many purifications it can perform a little bit farther away from 660.

You know, just a little bit farther away.

I mean, is that

could it be maybe

six more?

I mean, I'd prefer six less,

but I'm just, uh, I'm just saying.

I'm just saying.

So

Joe Biden

is now talking about everybody getting the new COVID-19 vaccine.

And he's requested more funding from Congress.

How is this a story?

How is it happening?

I don't understand.

We have this system in the United States.

This is my understanding of the system.

You tell me where I have it wrong because I definitely have it wrong.

Yeah, yeah, I do.

Like,

there are things.

The federal government.

There's a federal government.

That's how you get it.

That's how you got it.

Okay, good.

There are things things that happen in life, right?

They're called illnesses, disease, ailments, all sorts of things.

And companies make things that they believe will

help alleviate the symptoms, cure them, make all sorts of medicines for all sorts of things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I understand that.

They release them.

You go and buy them.

You get prescribed these medications.

You decide.

You make the choice as to what you want to do with them, right?

That's how it's always worked.

Now, I understand that a pandemic and what we dealt with with COVID was a little bit different than that.

And there was a sort of a rush to, hey, we, the government needs to pay for this because you know, we all like it's an emergency and blah, blah, blah.

Okay, all right.

We were there, we kind of remember that going on, but like

it's 2023 now.

Yeah, why would why would Joe Biden have anything to do with them releasing a new vaccine?

Why, if they want to release a new vaccine, wait a minute, wait a minute, you're saying, if I may paraphrase, Glenn, where is the pharmaceutical arm of the government in the Constitution?

Yes.

Is that what you're saying?

Where is that?

Yeah.

Because, like, if Pfizer or Moderna or Johnson ⁇ Johnson

or any company wants to make a COVID vaccine and put it on the market and

let people decide whether they want to take it or not, that's a process I understand.

The process I don't understand is how we now infinitely pay

for all of these vaccines.

Like,

why?

Why are we?

Why?

Like, but why?

Come to me as a child.

And a child always asks why.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, doctor, and I'm going to butcher the name, Dr.

Jay Bhattachara.

Bhattacharya.

Yeah, yeah.

We've had him on the show, haven't we?

I think we have.

You probably butchered his name when he was on the show, too.

I'm sure I did.

He's just a professor of medicine at Stanford, one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.

he said

the president's comments that all Americans will likely be advised to get a new COVID vaccine as new variants spread is, quote, irresponsible.

He said

the president said, I signed off this morning on a proposal we have to present to Congress a request for additional funding.

Again, why?

Why?

Why?

We don't need any more funding.

Tentatively, not decided finally yet.

Tentatively, it is recommended and it would likely be recommended that everybody everybody get it no matter whether they got it before.

The good doctor said,

you know,

it's never occurred to me that an American president would be the number one spokesperson for a pharmaceutical company, but here we are.

It's irresponsible to make this kind of public health advice for the entire American public in the absence of excellent

randomized trial evidence.

We don't even have there.

We're not even done with this vaccine yet?

No.

Let alone have it tested.

Like, I don't even think they're done with it yet.

Yeah.

I think they just are getting to the point where they're, you know, like

putting it into these tests.

Again, that's that's the problem that I pointed out on Friday's program when I played the commercial for Ozempic.

Yeah.

The very long series of disclaimers associated with which it was 50 seconds of disclaimer.

Of the one minute.

5-0.

Yeah.

5-0.

50 seconds.

Oh, oh, Ozempic

could cause death.

I mean, that's really pretty much what it is.

Despite the fact that these studies, what they're talking about, are incredibly rare side effects that affect almost no one who actually takes the medication, but they still have to jam it into every commercial they do for the product.

Correct.

Because

the federal government requires it.

This one doesn't even need a study.

We're like, we're fine.

You're going to be fine.

Shut up.

Stop your belly aching or I'll give you something to belly ache about.

That's what the government has become.

It's such a weird, like, it doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't make any sense.

And, you know, you want to, like, luckily, I think we're at a place at this point where we can do with the government's advice what we do with all of their other advice when it comes to what we put in our body.

Ignore it completely.

Like, when's the last time you looked at the food pyramid?

I think they even changed it a few years ago under Obama, didn't they?

And there's something else.

I don't know.

I don't care.

They can recommend whatever they want.

That is not, you know, at least it's not them saying they're going to mandate it or anything like that.

But even the recommendation is sort of silly at this point.

Like, I don't know, if you happen to be in a certain circumstance and you are like, you're like, you know what?

This seems like it's the right thing for me.

Then you do it.

You do it.

Joe doesn't do it for you.

Yeah.

Cut down in the prime of his life.

Bob Barker.

We lost him from the price is right.

You could have broken that to us a little bit easier.

Hey, Bob Barker's up on the roof.

What?

I don't know.

Why is he on a roof?

Why would he be

why?

Why are we?

You don't know that joke.

Barb Barker passed away 99 years old.

Yes.

Complete shock.

So sometime, you know, shortly after, he heard, Bob Barker, come on down.

What is happening?

Did we just insert a segment from a different show?

What is going on?

Also,

also, lost

also,

we lost Joe the plumber this weekend.

That was really sad, really sad.

Bob lived a very full life, sure did.

He was 99 years old.

But Joe, I mean, what a terrible thing.

He was what, only 49 years old.

Yeah, 49.

This audience, by the way, made a huge difference in the last days of his life.

I got, in fact, do I have that email?

I got a couple of emails

after it happened, and

they wanted me to honor you and tell you, I don't have it, but tell you that

when he was on the show a month ago?

Wasn't that long ago?

Yeah.

He was on the program.

We talked to him and

he said he was worried about his family's stability and he's 49 years old.

And

so we asked you to give and you gave a lot.

And

his family reached out and wanted you to know how much of a difference that you made in his last few weeks of life.

Man, I understand why he was able to move back closer to his extended family with

it just

he had a good few weeks.

Man, geez.

His story is such an American story, right?

Like

you think about other countries with kings and queens.

there's not like a story where one guy has a conversation with the king as they're walking down the street and changes the dynamic, you know, and changes the conversation in the entire country.

He was able to do that.

And then once again, at the end of his life, like there's very few countries where I think that would happen, where a person who's very sick,

you know, has so many people who don't know him reach out and change the last few days of his life.

I mean, you know,

it's this really sad story, but has a lot of,

there's something to take from it as well.

By the way, those stories do happen in other countries.

They usually end in beheadings, but

a lot of people that they don't know reach out and behead them.

And behead them.

And it usually comes after walking down the street with the king saying, you know what?

You know what your problem is?

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