Best of the Program | Guest: Bayard Winthrop | 12/7/22

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

So I want to bring in Bayard Winthrop.

This is a really interesting conversation.

I can't wait to talk to you, Bayard.

Thanks so much for coming in, by the way.

Thanks for having me.

You flew in from San Francisco.

Last night.

Did they make you?

Do you have to have a passport now to get to Detroit?

No, no, it's still free flight.

Good.

That's good to hear.

You run American Giant.

This is a company we've talked about for a while here on the show, and we've

been really impressed.

I, as just a selfish person, just really like your hoodies.

So that's something totally separate from what you do.

But you run a company and

you manufacture clothing.

And this used to be sort of a foundational part of America.

It was something that,

I don't know, it's how the country was built.

And more and more, as we go on, we hear all the time, you can't do it anymore.

It's impossible.

You can't have,

you can't make your clothes and source everything in America and all those difficult steps.

You can't have Americans make the clothes, certainly, because it's impossible.

Yet you seem to do it.

First of all, how do you do it?

And secondly, why did you think that was important?

Yeah.

Well, you know, it's easy to forget now, but 40 years ago, about 95%, more than 95% of the clothes that we bought were made

in America, which is hard to believe today because those numbers almost flipped.

Yeah.

And in some ways, as you're sort of mentioning, that's the trajectory of manufacturing generally, that we have deprioritized the making of things in the U.S.

over the last 40 years.

I've been involved in manufacturing consumer products for most of my career.

And if you spend enough time doing that, and I too sort of participated in a lot of the offshoring stuff, and you do it, and eventually, I think two things begin to become really clear.

One is you get really disconnected from the product you make.

And that, I think, particularly for me, translated into

a lack of

proximity to it, stewardship about it, intimacy about the product that we were making, and that was super important to me.

But just as importantly, you see the the factories and the towns that you're leaving.

And my point of view is that that's happened too much over the last 40 years, that there's a lot of communities, urban and rural, that need good, viable, dignified jobs.

And we've made a decision to shift too much of that stuff overseas.

And I felt we could do something about it in apparel.

It was a relatively easy thing to reshore and to make domestically.

And so I decided it's something I wanted to do.

I didn't know if it would be a big business or not, but I knew it was the kind of business that I wanted to run.

So I made that decision about 10 years ago and started the company.

It's interesting because I think over the last couple of years, we have learned way too much about your business.

I don't want to know.

I don't want to know that much about your business.

I want other people to do that.

I've gotten enough to worry about in my life, but we've learned so much about supply chains.

Somewhat infamously, I bought a car in August 2021 that just showed up a few weeks ago, right?

It was over 14 months waiting for a car to show up.

I think one of the interesting parts about trying to manufacture something here in America is not just what might happen to your employees.

It goes down the line.

This sort of stuff affects people all over the country in all sorts of different lines of work.

When you step back, how do you think about that?

Well, what's interesting about what you just said is that I think as we've become disconnected from the people and the places that make things, you really do begin to take for granted

all the skill and talent and complexity that goes into the making of the things that we consume.

And

my feeling is that we have gotten to a place where we order something online, it arrives on our doorstep a couple of days later, and when that breaks, that highly complicated supply chain breaks, bad things happen.

And I think that there is the, to me, there is a real importance with reconnecting us back to how we make things and what goes into making a car or a sweatshirt for that matter.

They're complicated things.

And the symphony of activity that has to come together to make that happen is remarkable.

And to me, there's there's an importance of having a lot of that back and closer to consumers so they understand what goes into making those things and the position we've gotten ourselves in with this highly complicated, really fragile supply chain that's got us dependent on, you know, borders and tankers and oceans

and international relationships that all get pretty difficult when things don't go precisely as planned.

Yeah, you know, we were just talking about the Tubble Twins books a second ago, and they have one about iPencil, the famous

essay.

And

it's basically the story of how a pencil gets made.

And it sounds like the most boring pencil.

Who cares?

But so many people have to be able to do so many things to make that happen.

The symphony is a really good word to describe it.

Yeah.

I mean, the pencil, the paint, the metal,

the wood, the graphite, all the things that are required to go into that, right?

And, you know, we've got a privilege as a company to be around that all the time.

And it does, I don't know.

I just, there's something very satisfying about reconnecting with the fact that the American workforce and capability is alive and well.

We've just sort of abandoned it in a lot of ways by just chasing what we call internally cheap and cheapest means of production, lowest regulations wherever we possibly can.

And in some ways that's the great irony, right?

That we,

as a country, we've put in place so many fantastic principles about human rights and worker safety and minimum wage laws and all these things that protect workers and celebrate workers, and yet we let our largest brands skirt those and go overseas and chase the cheapest means of production with the lowest regulations.

And

that balance has got to get corrected, I think.

Yeah.

And it not only affects Americans, it affects people overseas as well.

I mean, China is a good example of this, right?

We've seen, you know, from a geopolitical sense, all the effects that have gone on with China over the past few years and

with COVID and all of these other things that have gone on.

But the manufacturing piece of this is really important, right?

We are sending almost all of our manufacturing to China and India, and they don't have standards for their workers.

We see how they treat their own people.

Is there a part that we should really be rethinking here, not even just from a global competition sense, but just from a humanitarian sense?

I think so.

It kind of comes down to

whether we believe our values are truly universal values or not.

And I think there is an inconsistency with holding domestic manufacturing businesses to very high standards, but then allowing all the work for those factories chase the means of production elsewhere.

And I think

the case for globalization is a pretty obvious and elegant one if your optimization is around growing shareholder value and hitting quarterly earnings reports.

It's a lot less clear if you think about constituents beyond just your quarterly earnings statements.

And if you think about brands that live through their values, that employ Americans, that transfer good skills down throughout their workforce.

So I think there's a big conversation to have there.

I think that we, you know, there's a fascinating thing happening now with textiles in Xinjiang, which is the far western province in China that grows almost all of the Chinese cotton.

There's awful things going on there with minority Muslims and forced labor.

And it's just a good example of Apple's in the middle of this with their things that are going on with Foxconn.

A good example of businesses that are trying to strike this uncomfortable balance with what they're Instagramming about versus the way that they're actually making the things that they sell.

And I think

that is an uncomfortable place to be.

And I think that we've all got a role to play, right?

I mean, consumers have a role to play, brands have a role to play, policymakers have a role to play, but I do think we need to come together a little bit and have the conversation around what do we care about.

And to the extent that we care about it a lot, do we want to apply those standards universally, both to

our supply chain decisions, our trade agreements,

what our consumers have access to and understand.

So I do think it's something that we need to start to think about more thoroughly.

Aaron Powell, we are sort of told that this supply chain thing is not over, that we're going to be facing delays, and this is just kind of our new normal.

This is how it's going to be in America.

Now, maybe we should learn to be more like Europe and just expect delays all the time.

First of all, I mean, is that what you're seeing out there?

And is that the right way to look at this?

Should we just be accepting this new normal?

Yeah, I hope not.

I mean, you know,

that's a good pitch for American manufacturing, right?

I mean, we've actually been lucky enough to navigate.

So we make most of the stuff we make are t-shirts and sweatshirts.

That's the bulk of our line.

We make blue jeans, we make flannel shirts, make other things.

Almost all of that comes through a southeastern supply chain, Carolinas and that area, from cotton all the way through.

So for almost all of the pandemic, we've been able to navigate our supply chain stuff without a hitch.

And that's not just proximity and not having to deal with challenges of overseas COVID restrictions and other things.

It's also that we've got deep relationships with the supply chain that we work with.

And so we were able to work in real concert with our yarn providers and our knitters and our spinners and our dyers.

And so it's been, you know, I think that's a good example of some of the importance of having an onshored capability across the manufacturing sector so that you're not so exposed internationally to

the breaks that are inevitably going to continue to come, in my opinion.

Yeah,

it's understandable.

And I think

there's that weird line that I think we all have to walk here because, you know, look, I have some sympathy for these companies when they say, hey, like, we can't pay American workers

what the new, you know, minimum wage is even here in the United States.

We can go over there.

We can save 80%.

People need cheap clothing and they need to be able to, and I understand, some of that I have sympathy for at some level.

But like, you can't just abandon the American way of doing things.

How do you get to a point where you can pay, I mean, you guys pay your employees a good wage.

And, you know, we're told that that's just not possible.

How do you do that and still make a company work?

Yeah, so it's sort of an incomplete conversation, right?

So I get asked a lot about minimum wage jobs and how I think about minimum wage.

And my response to that basically is it's an incomplete question.

We all want to pay American workers as much as we possibly can, right?

I mean, that's the objective.

We all want people to be living good, dignified lives with good incomes.

But if at one point we are enacting minimum wage laws and raising minimum wages at the the same time that we're saying let's all the manufacturers, the customers of that manufacturing jobs go overseas and avoid those minimum wage jobs, all we're doing is penalizing a domestic workforce ultimately.

And so I think the way you do it is that you begin to think about trading partners through the lens of people that share our values.

You know, there's the current administration talking a little bit about this concept of friends shoring, which is in some ways a carry forward from the Trump administration, about

doing business with countries that share our values and not doing businesses with countries that don't.

If you think about the American marketplace,

it's the biggest, most valuable marketplace on earth, and yet the cost of entry to it is basically zero.

We allow everybody to participate in our in our marketplace.

And I think that we ought to ask the question whether that's the right thing to do.

And if you make it so that it is a bit more difficult to avoid what I think are basic American values in your manufacturing choices,

you're going to encourage reshoring in a way that is going to address the labor question that you're getting at, I think, really effectively.

Talking to Bayard Winthrop, he is the big, the big wig.

What's your official title of it there?

It's owner,

founder, I guess.

Ah, you got the big one.

The big founder is the best one to have.

I think that's the best one to have.

Of American Giant, a great clothing company if you don't know them, if you've never had one of them.

I mean, look, it's around Christmas, a great time to pick up something from American Giant.

And I think, as you kind of hear, as we talk,

you have a different perspective on the country than I think a lot of these big companies do.

Is it

how much of this has to be?

Because

we come in here every day and we talk about issues and things that really matter to us.

And what I think a lot of people engage with is, you know, you have these beliefs about the country, the foundations,

that this is a special place.

It's an exceptional place.

But putting that into practice,

really living that life is really hard.

What do you say to a company that's on the fence here, that's thinking like, hey, maybe I'll pull some of my manufacturing back to the United States?

You're the one who's experienced this.

What do you say to them?

Well, yeah.

So I think a couple of sort of just sort of framing reactions to that.

One is for public companies, it's really hard because public companies are in the cycle, like a lot of our elected officials, where they're thinking very short term.

They're thinking quarter to quarter to quarter.

And quarter to quarter to quarter, increases in labor rates or the cost of thread matters a ton.

And so it's a tall ask for public companies.

Private companies, it's a different matter.

And I think to those companies, I think

to the extent that they can start and begin to use American labor for small parts of their offerings across the manufacturing sector, it has a huge impact.

We had the benefit in some ways that 10 years ago when I started American Giant, I made a decision that we were going to make it all domestically.

And that was kind of that was the framework that I lived within.

And so that made every decision that followed pretty easy.

It became about how do we do that as well and as effectively as we can.

For companies that have, that used to be domestically made, like basically basically all apparel companies, and that now have offshore, to reshore again, I think

there's a perception that the American workforce and manufacturing capability is not there.

That's wrong.

There's a tremendous amount, even in textiles, which has been hit the hardest about offshoring, there's a tremendous amount of viability within textiles.

And it's a big part of what that industry is lacking are customers that commit to it.

And so if you had big brands that said, look, we're going to be here, we're going to order our line of t-shirts or our line of V-neck t-shirts, some small piece, but we're going to stick to it for a while.

That would be a huge boon to manufacturers because these businesses need that reliability.

So I think that's what I would say: try it.

Try it with socks.

Try it with T-shirts.

Try it with something.

Give the supply chain a shot.

Be a part of the solution.

Your customers will give you credit for it.

They'll appreciate it.

But it's a more complicated question for the public companies, I think.

And that's not to say that I think a lot of them are interested in being a force for good, but it's just we've created a system that makes it harder to do that.

And so I think we've got to look at other ways to create space for those businesses to make better decisions.

We've got about a minute and a half left here.

What's your level of optimism for America?

I'm pretty optimistic.

Really?

I have trouble with this.

I am.

So I hear what you're saying, but here's why I'm optimistic.

I think that there is a growing sense among just the average Americans that are feeling frustrated with what's going on in DC.

I feel like they're frustrated with what's going on with tech.

They're frustrated with what's going on with a lot of the big, in our case, big apparel brands, that are making decisions that seem to be self-serving and they're less about the country and less about the average Americans.

And I think as people gather their voice and they make decisions about directing their dollars towards things that they care about, they get more active during the election cycles, I think you're going to see a change.

And I share some of your pessimism, but it's short-term pessimism for me.

It's long-term optimism.

I just believe in the country and I believe in our ability when we're seeing something that we think is nonsense, we eventually throw it out and start fresh.

And so I think it's going to take a bit of patience, but I'm feeling optimistic about it.

Yeah, you know,

I think, you know, when I really think about it from a

grand scheme here, like, I think

at the end of the day, it's a great country.

It's still a lot of the great things happen.

We've, you know, changed the world, right?

That's right.

So it's a lot to be optimistic about, but then I read the news.

And so I need to stop doing that.

No more news for me.

And maybe keep some context around it.

Remember that, remember history, remember the Civil War, remember JFK, remember all the things we've been through that have been so difficult.

And this one seems pretty rough, but I do believe that average Americans eventually get fed up enough to act.

And I think that's what is required.

I think it's happening right now.

I think there's just increasing activity going on that I'm I'm excited about.

And

I think in in a weird way, COVID has kind of jarred us all out of our slumber a little bit and got us thinking about more complex issues that are relevant to Americans.

And I think people are getting conscious about it.

It's very true.

Mark Winthrop, he's the American Giant founder and CEO.

You can go check out all their stuff at American-Giant.com.

If people are looking for like the the last minute holiday

last minute holiday gift here, what's what's what's the go-to?

Well, Well, we're known for a sweatshirt, so it was called the greatest hoodie ever made, and that's probably the easiest one.

So it is too.

I have one, it's awesome.

I appreciate that.

Yeah, no, it's great, and it's made by Americans in America.

Like, this is actually

not like a new avatar sequel.

This is real.

This is actually happening.

North and South Carolina.

Very, very cool.

Very cool.

Byrd Winthrop, it's American-Giant.com.

Thanks so much for coming in.

Really appreciate it.

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

Patton Stew for Glenn today, who's not feeling well.

Hopefully, he'll be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, he's to get his rough greens in.

Apparently, he's not taking it right.

Yeah, he should get all some probiotics and antioxidants and all that.

I don't know why he's not, he's just not eating enough, apparently, when it comes to the rough greens.

We'll get him his nutrients to

get back tomorrow.

Got to fix that.

Amidst all the rightful focus on government censorship and election interference, another big story is brewing at the Supreme Court.

The justices heard oral arguments the other day in a case centering on

a web designer who has religious objections to making websites for same-sex couples.

This comes up over and over again in Colorado because essentially they're trying to persecute Christians for their beliefs.

And

this is all about an agenda, not about actually designing a website.

Of course not.

Because there's a million people you can turn to and they'll design your website.

No problem at all.

Is it controversial to say, to step back a minute from even that point and say, you don't need a website for your wedding?

I know you think you do.

You don't.

This is, it doesn't matter if you're gay or straight.

You don't need a website for your wedding.

I could get married.

Yes.

And in fact, I did.

Right.

Did you have a website?

In 1985, I did not have a website.

Really?

Yeah.

Isn't that weird?

Yeah, that is a little weird.

In 85, I think it was much more normal to have websites for your wedding.

But now it just seems a little bit over.

Look, post some pictures on your Facebook page or whatever.

I got it.

You know, you got Instagram, throw them on there.

You don't need anbrobly not the point they're making at the Supreme Court, but I just want people to know they don't need

a website for their wedding.

You should have have told these guys that along

solved the whole thing.

Yeah.

And we just wouldn't have this issue with the Supreme Court right now.

Right.

Like, and I do think there is part of that point that is really germane to this case, which is you can make an argument, like, you need food, right?

So if you want to have these conversations about a lunch counter, we've obviously talked about this before in the past.

Shouldn't be able to say, well, I'm not going to serve eggs to you because you're black.

And we all understand that that is a completely ridiculous position.

No place should ever do that.

But like, when we're talking about

a service that honestly,

can you even make an argument that you need it?

I can't come up with an argument that it's a necessary.

To me, there's a better argument to go to the Supreme Court and say, we shouldn't allow people to make wedding websites.

I think we, I think we should delete the entire industry if there is one.

So, like, I mean, it is, though, I think, important when you talk about this, when you're talking about art, when you're talking about something like a cupcake, when you're talking about a wedding cake, when you're talking about a wedding venue, these are not life or death matters.

This is not whether you can get water into your home.

Right.

Right.

Like, these are totally different things, and there should be a completely different standard for them.

And by the way, with the cake maker,

Jack Phillips.

Yeah, he's been persecuted almost out of business since, what, I don't know, it's been probably 10 years.

It's been a long time.

First of all, he had this same-sex couple that wanted the cake, and he didn't want to make it, and they tried to force him to.

And then they came along, and it was another one.

It was a, I don't know, a trans issue, I think, the second time.

And they knew full well that the guy had these religious convictions, but they specifically went after him.

They targeted him.

Yeah, they targeted him, and they're just persecuting him now.

And that's the part of this.

The process is the punishment.

And the sad thing is the Supreme Court has not yet made a broad enough ruling that will prevent the religious persecution of this poor guy.

Yeah.

We were just talking off the air and I was like, you know, I'm pretty confident in this because Roberts,

he's terrible, but actually in this one, it's one of his better issues.

I think that is true.

However, he is responsible as well for making these rulings so narrow.

Stop it.

The Jack Phillips thing is a great example of that.

Phillips won.

Yeah, he won.

He won.

But it should be over already.

It was not enough.

But they made it super narrow so that they could continue to bring these cases forward and continue to ruin people's businesses and lives over and over and over and over again.

And that's what's going on now in the Supreme Court with this woman who wants to design wedding websites for some unknown reason.

Like it's just one of these things where they are,

same situation.

They know, obviously, what they're they're doing.

They're targeting someone with Christian values that they know won't want to do this.

So they can harass them and harass them and harass them and ruin their lives.

Because even if she wins, her life is largely destroyed.

Her business is on the edge

if it's not completely destroyed.

And

even if the end result is not a good one for the left, they get to run someone through the ringer.

And this, though, I think is going to be the time, I hope, where they come with a really broad ruling that shows that this this stuff is ridiculous and should not continue.

These laws should be thrown out.

And it's like, we're all against discrimination.

I'm against a company who would say, you know, who would discriminate against someone and not sell them something.

But, like, part of this is just recognizing that sometimes the country sort of sucks.

It's a great country.

Sometimes people don't do the things you want them to do.

I know it's surprising to hear.

It is shocking.

It is shocking.

A lot of people are shocked by it.

And Colorado has a law now that protects same-sex couples or trans people because of their status.

What isn't protected, according to the lawyers for Colorado, for the state of Colorado, is religious liberty because it doesn't have status.

Wait, what?

I mean, you're going against the U.S.

Constitution there.

Yeah.

So I think this time they really need to rule on the merits of the Constitution and the First Amendment and

end this torment.

Make this religious people.

Shoot this down.

It's got to stop.

You know, the

because there's really double protection here.

You can't compel someone to say something that they don't believe.

You can't compel.

I was thinking about this example with the Kanye West thing that's going on right now.

Let's say Kanye West gets to the point in his career, very, maybe very, very soon, where his entire business is customizing raps for birthday parties and events.

Like, you go to Kanye's BirthdayRaps.com and Kanye will work your name into a rap because, given his career arc, that's probably where this ends up pretty soon.

And let's just say that's going on.

And then a Jewish person comes to him and says, Hey, can you do my bar mitzvah?

You know, can you give me a song for that?

Should Kanye West have to do that?

We all agree that his views are terrible on this and

abhorrent.

No, but you should be able to pick and choose what you do in your business.

He shouldn't have to say something praising Jewish ceremony.

The free market worked that out.

Exactly.

And you know what?

You go to somebody else.

Right.

And everyone realizes if they, there's,

you could go on, what's that site?

Fiverr.com, which has a, you know, like a bunch of people who are independent doing things all around the world, you know, for as little as $5.

That's how they started.

And so you could have them build you a website.

You can get someone to voice over your podcast.

You can get someone to design, you know, to do audio editing for you, video editing, whatever it is.

All this is available to everybody.

They will never ask a question about your

marriage situation.

They won't take a stance.

There's thousands to choose from, and that's just one website.

You go to a bunch of other freelancer sites, you can go to another local.

Everyone knows this has nothing to do with the website.

It's about targeting religious views for destruction.

That's what it is.

How do we destroy people's closely held views on religion?

And you don't even have to agree with those views.

As I said with Kanye West,

he is protected by the Constitution to not have to

issue compelled speech.

You can't force him to say something he doesn't agree with.

You can abandon, you can make him, you can destroy his career by not frequenting his business.

You can complain about it loudly.

You can say all these things about Kanye West that are really bad.

You can use your freedom of speech to criticize him, but you can't make him say he hurts Jews because he doesn't.

And maybe,

well, he says he does, I guess, on that one.

He does say, I love the Jews and I love the Nazis.

Not a great point.

But the point is that you can't, even there, right, Pat, that is not necessarily a religious view, though maybe he believes it is.

But like, even if you're just like, you know what, you shouldn't have to be able to go to a conservative and force them to say that they like liberals, the same way the opposite side.

That's nothing to do with religion.

And you're protected by the Constitution there.

Add on the religious aspect, which is also protected by the Constitution.

Two separate

areas of the Constitution that specifically protect this sort of behavior.

And this is what, the 10th time we've gone through this charade?

At least.

It's insane.

At least.

And, you know, it's

just

the practical application of the free market should deal with this.

If, if you don't want to serve somebody in your restaurant, you shouldn't have to.

And it used to be you didn't have to.

The signs that used to say no shirt, no shoes, no service.

Okay.

And then a lot of times underneath, parenthetically, it was like, we reserve the right to refuse service to anybody.

Yeah.

Well, you certainly can't do that now.

Right.

You can't refuse service to anybody,

apparently.

But if you did, let's say you just, you had a thing where no minority could come and eat at your restaurant.

Well, let the free market run them out of business.

By, you know, when that gets around in the community, I'm guessing there's going to be a lot of people who object to that.

and don't go frequent that restaurant.

That's how you take care of it, right?

If you're a libertarian, that's how you take care of it.

And that's how you just let the market work.

And you don't need to be a libertarian.

That's just American.

Yeah, it is.

Right?

You know, and but it's not anymore.

None of it.

They want to change that.

They want to change the foundations of our country, but those countries, those foundations exist.

That's the brilliance of capitalism.

Yep.

It solved these problems.

This all started, you know, a million years ago almost

with tribes that were trying to figure out how to not kill each other every time they needed something.

If one tribe had one resource and the other tribe didn't, they needed to get that resource.

And the way human beings dealt with that problem for a long, long time was to attack.

They would take their weapons and they would go attack the other tribe and take the stuff they needed.

That's how it worked for a long time.

Right.

And then trade bubbled up.

And trade became the way that both parties could get what they wanted.

One party had one resource, one party had the other.

They would swap.

And everybody was happy.

And then currency came along to make that exchange much, much more smooth.

And capitalism bloomed from there.

And it created a situation.

I mean, you can really argue that the basis of capitalism, why it exists completely, is for you to do business with people you don't like.

Everyone can do business with their friends.

That's easy, right?

It's easy to be able to find your political allies and the people you hang out with.

You could trade something that you have to a relative fairly easily.

The reason why capitalism exists is so you can go into a restaurant and you have some hardcore Biden supporter who's behind the grill who makes you a good meal anyway.

That's the entire system.

It's the brilliance of the system.

And

we are now at the point where the left, this shouldn't surprise anybody, the left is trying to overturn that.

They're trying to make it known, like, no, actually, you have to agree with all my political viewpoints for you to even have a business.

They're trying to fundamentally chip away at what built this country.

That should surprise none of us, but it is going on all the time.

And

if we allow this to continue, especially when you're attacking religion, it's another fundamental value here.

Multiple, multiple pillars of this country under attack at the same time.

It's a really important case in the Supreme Court right now.

The best of the Glen Bank program.

Representative Catherine Clark, incoming House Minority Whip, claimed on Sunday that one of her kids awakened from nightmares over climate change.

Do we have that?

I think we have that.

But they've also given us a model to become our own leaders.

And let me tell you what it means to me coming in as a different generation.

I remember my middle child waking up with nightmares over concern around climate change.

I mean, if that's true, whose fault is that?

Right?

Hers, probably.

The school she was sending him to, the fact that they get that propaganda at school every day of their lives.

And the fear-mongering that has been done by the left has freaked children out.

I mean, if that's true, that she actually had nightmares about climate.

I think it

probably in her case, of course.

I don't know.

It's probably true for a lot of kids.

Michael Schellenberger talked about this.

You know, he wrote a book called Apocalypse Never, which is a great book.

I know you've talked to him about it as well.

I love it.

Awesome book.

And he, you know, he's a big-time environmentalist.

He was

very liberal, won all sorts of awards for his environmental leadership and activism.

And, you know, kept looking at this and eventually got to the point where he said, wait a minute, a lot of this stuff isn't true.

Here's what is true.

And he has great, like, if you care about the climate at all, I can't recommend that book enough.

But I asked him, like, well, why did you write it?

Like, it's got to be hard, right?

To go through, you have this reputation built as an environmentalist.

You have all these friends on that side of the aisle.

Why write a book that tells the truth about climate change and puts things in perspective?

Why would you do that?

And his answer was that

his daughter's friends, he saw what was going on with his daughter's friends.

And his daughter's friends were literally, as he pointed out, terrified of climate change.

They were convinced.

They'd been told

the earth is going to last for 10 years.

They were convinced that's how they would die.

Oh, man.

And so, like, imagine what that is doing to a teenage girl who's already dealing with God only knows what.

Right.

You know, he's like, you know, I, of course, talked to my daughter about it.

And so she was not down that road, but a lot of her friends were.

And if you think about just the life of a, you know, the teenage

life of a teenage girl is not,

there's a lot going on there, right?

Like, you know, high school and

boys and, you know, all the other stuff that goes on trying to make it through that era for every kid, boy or girl, is difficult.

You know,

add on the Greta Thunberg

approach.

We're all going to die from climate change.

We should all be acting right now.

This is the most terrible thing that could ever happen.

Oh my God, people are dying all over the place.

And then the media not only takes Greta Thunberg and

takes her claims seriously, but promotes her.

So that she is influencing generations of other kids to be able to do that.

As if she's some kind of expert.

Right.

She knows nothing.

There's nothing about this.

And she's a kid with lots of issues.

The family has tons of issues.

It's like, you know,

you put someone like that in the spotlight, and

you're risking all sorts of things.

And she's done real damage

to kids.

Kids believe this stuff now.

Well, the damage was originally done to her, and now she's doing it to others.

Yep.

Because it was her parents who got her off on this freak train to begin with.

Oh, yeah.

I think it was the second show I did on Studios America.

The show's been going on for three years now, by the way.

Three years of Studios America.

And I think it was the second episode of the show was about Greta's parents.

And she went through.

First of all, there's some really funny stuff.

And it's a weird cast of characters.

That's what I'll bet.

But I mean, they did.

They put their kids.

We put her, you know, who's she obviously has emotional problems, right?

Like,

she has emotional and plus, isn't she?

She's

all sorts of of struggles yeah, you know when it comes to just day-to-day life autistic maybe possibly yeah, I don't I don't remember all the details of it, but I you know, she's dealing with a lot and to put her in this to to to praise this idiocy that she's talking about and bringing to the public and now there's kind of been this movement okay, all right, we're all we're all set.

I guess we're all set now with the Greta thing.

You know, she hasn't been getting all the press lately.

I don't know if you've noticed this.

She seems to be too old away.

She's getting too old.

She's no longer the cute little kid.

Now she's like, you know,

a teenager they want to ignore.

She's been critical of some of the wrong people, right?

Like, you know, she, look, she legitimately believes she's going to die from this.

This is real to her.

Yes.

And so

when, when...

The power players in the Democratic Party and on the left use her, they use her to win elections, to get control of the economy, for all of these other reasons.

She really believes it.

Of course, she was a child, so she probably believed lots of other things that weren't true, but she believes it.

So now she's started to criticize people on the left, and now they don't want to promote her anymore, and they don't want her in

front of the cameras as much.

But they're not doing what she thinks needs to be done, and that's stopping all

CO2, legitimately, and just stopping the economy.

And stop industry.

And when people say, like, hey,

we can build solar panels and that will grow our economy.

And she correctly calls that out as nonsense.

No, you can't.

No, you can't.

If you want to do this,

we got to shut down the economy completely.

And yeah, there's going to be lots of economic pain, but we need to or else I'm going to die.

Right.

Is her point.

Now, she's not correct about the conclusion there, but she's correct that you can't do it the way this happy-go-lucky way that left promotes.

Ah, we'll just create some new jobs.

We'll just make solar panels here.

Everyone will have clean energy.

Go out and buy an electric car.

It's no big deal.

And what's amazing is that sometimes they admit that.

Sometimes they say, yeah, the Paris Accords, but it's just all symbolic.

Wait, what?

You want everybody to abide by the Paris Accords, but it was all symbolic?

Yeah, that won't be enough.

Oh,

okay.

Well, what will be enough?

Shutting down our society.

That's what the end goal is of this, just to bring the United States of America to its knees so that everybody else in the world can catch up to it.

That's the only way they'll catch up to us is if we shut everything down.

Right.

Because we're too far ahead of them.

It's legitimately what they want to happen.

I mean, look at this.

This is a bigger movement than, as everybody on earth freaking knows.

This is not about

the climate.

Elon Musk is the...

ultimate example of this.

They said forever we have to go to electric cars.

They said we must go to electric cars.

We have to.

It's the greatest existential threat we've ever seen in our entire lives.

This is, we absolutely must do this at any cost.

We are all going to die.

Millions of people are going to die in Bangladesh if we don't do something about this.

And then he said, you know, maybe we should have free speech.

You're like, this guy's the devil.

Yeah, sure, he built an electric car company

and he's building spaceships to escape the

escape the planet in case global warming really hits us and he's building uh you know a technology that can help

ai that would help scrub the atmosphere of carbon and all of these incredible projects he's working on but he said conservatives should be able to tweet that they like low taxes so he's satan i mean has there ever been a more clear example they don't care about the climate at all.

None of this means anything to them.

It's all BS.

And especially since they know full good and well, just like we do, that the electric car, by the way, is not an answer for our problems.

The electric car, with all the mining you have to do, with all of the preparation to build the car, with everything that comes together and that stinking battery that's in the car, worse for the environment than carbon-oriented cars.

I mean, it is not the answer.

No, I mean, at all.

I should tweet this at Studios America if you want to follow it.

I'll tweet it later on today.

But there's a,

I watched a TED talk from an environmentalist, and you know, TED Talks are, you can always get into them.

You know, I don't care what the topic is.

So I clicked on it, and the guy's talking about electric cars.

And I'm like, oh, this will be interesting.

Let's see what he has to say.

I think I saw this too.

Yeah, I like watching sometimes the other.

You want to watch the other side.

You understand what their arguments are.

Are they good?

Are they bad?

What's the evidence they have?

And he was surprised and went the other way.

Yeah.

He was like, you know what?

Actually, it's not time for electric cars.

We're not ready for them.

And he goes through harmful to the environment.

He shows the details on it.

And I, depending on, you know, there's a bunch of different variables he outlines, but it's something like over a hundred thousand miles of driving an electric car before you even break even.

And that's if

you have, if you're fine driving an electric car that only goes, you know, 120 miles, which most people aren't.

I mean, most people don't want that.

They want a longer range one, like some of the cool cars that Elon Musk has built can go a lot farther than that and certainly very fast.

Yep.

And you go down that road and you're, you, you never, you never make it up.

And the electric, the, the, the regular, his point eventually he gets to is like, I think for the environment, hybrids are a good answer.

He's like, I think hybrids are much better for our amount of technology we have right now because you can save some, but still make it, you know, useful for people.

And you don't have the cost of all the batteries.

You have a much smaller amount of battery.

Those two technologies are a big deal.

That's a big deal.

It's a big problem.

Yeah.

But like, you know, it is true.

There has been tons of research on this at this point.

And

it's kind of a joke, right?

It's kind of a joke, honestly.

And if you believe this,

seriously, they've been telling us this is the most important thing in the world for decades.

And the guy comes along with his own money and builds a company that

does 30, 40 years of advancement in this field

without them really having to touch it, other than some generous government subsidies that were involved.

We should know, but still, he did most of this work himself.

And

he said, I want to keep my company open during COVID, and I don't really like masks.

And they're like, holy crap, this guy's Satan.

We should excommunicate him from society.

They're trying to.

They're trying to.

They really are.

It's amazing to watch.

And to this representative who talks about the nightmares of her middle child, I love the Joe Bastardi response on Twitter.

If this is true, then it's because someone is guilty of child abuse.

Given life has never been better on planet Earth, tell your middle child we're in a climate optimum with 1 112th the amount of death per capita from climate as 1930.

I love that.

I mean, people don't, people have no idea about these statistics.

They just buy what is sold to them all the time by the left.

Thank God and fossil fuels, he said.

And that is, I mean, so true and so accurate.

And we've talked about it.

You know, people don't,

people aren't starving on this planet the way they once were when it was a little bit colder on this planet because it's warm enough to grow more food,

which seems kind of like a good thing to some people.